My mother taught me many important things, including the value of nurturing cherished fantasies which should remain fantasies. Among my Mom’s top three daydreams were the following:
1. Opening a bookstore. My mother had no interest in the actual nuts-and-bolts business of running a store, but she loved to read, and she’d always admired Sylvia Beach, the woman who ran Shakespeare & Company, a legendary bookshop in Paris, which had first published James Joyce’s Ulysses.
2. Opening a yarn shop with her best friend Ann. My mother’s sisters were avid knitters, and so every few years my Mom would buy a lot of pretty yarn and attempt something. If I remember correctly, it took her about five years to finish a somewhat ungainly sweater for my Dad, and even then, she’d had to rely on her sisters to attach the sleeves. My mother secretly hated knitting, which she felt guilty about. What she really wanted to do was to hang out with Ann and look at pictures of beautiful Irish sweaters in catalogues.
3. Living in a lighthouse or on a houseboat. Both of these ideas struck my Mom as romantic and somehow literary. But she also knew that living in a lighthouse would be cramped, chilly and lonely, and that living on a houseboat would be damp, smelly and might require dramamine. What my Mom really liked to do was to read novels about people who lived in eccentric homes, and to visit the gift shops attached to restored New England lighthouses.
