The other day I was listening to “Temporarily Blind” by Built to Spill on Spotify and it brought me back to senior year of college.

My mother bought me that Built to Spill album Keep It Like a Secret for my twenty-second birthday. She also got me Breathing Tornados by Ben Lee. I had to explicitly ask for those albums. She didn’t know my music taste that well, or frankly, any music that wasn’t Barabara Streisand, Peter, Paul, and Mary, or a show tune.

The drive from Rochester to Ithaca where I was at school is only an hour and a half, so, they came down for my birthday that year. Ithaca had two restaurants called Joe’s, I’m not sure if they still do. The one in Collegetown was called Little Joe’s and the one downtown was called Big Joe’s. I had my parents take me to Big Joe’s that year.

We had a great dinner together. At one point I went to use the restroom. When I got back, my parents were both laughing.

“What’s so funny.”

“You’ll see,” my mother said.

They kept laughing.

“No, really, what’s funny?”

“You’ll understand in a minute,” she said again.

Weird behavior from my mother was always a trigger for me. It made me worry that she was drunk. Growing up with an alcoholic parent, you always live with this undercurrent of unease. Something’s wrong and why won’t anyone tell me? So, the weird laughter got me a little tense.

But then, I got it. The waiters came out singing Happy Birthday, which they had apparently just done minutes before. My seat wasn’t visible from the kitchen, so, they had come out singing to an empty chair while I was in the bathroom. The sight of waiters exuberantly singing to an empty chair had cracked my parents up.

I’m obviously talking about this because it’s Mother’s Day. I usually dwell on the difficulty I had with my mom but that was a nice moment. Mother’s Days are getting easier. I check in with my surrogate moms and that feels good. And I still think about my mom but I think about her all the time, so, Mother’s Day isn’t particularly special in that regard.

I remember another nice memory from senior year. Actually, it was graduation.

I graduated on Memorial Day weekend 1999. Mom and Dad came up for the day. Much like everything at Cornell, the ceremony was huge and impersonal. Then we went to my smaller chemical engineering ceremony where I got my diploma. After that, we took some pictures, and then just walked around campus, just the three of us.

We ended up walking from my frat house to the Chapter House. The Chapter House was the preferred bar of seniors or anyone who was actually 21. It was an old bar with lots of taps, a popcorn machine, and wooden tables and benches filled with decades of carvings. We were joined by my friend Prince and a friend of his to have a couple of beers and just talk.

In retrospect, it’s kind of a precarious move to take an alcoholic to a bar in the middle of the day but my mom kept it together. She was charming and it was cool to just hang out with her.

Parents spend so much of their lives taking care of us and then, later, the dynamic flips and we have to take care of them. But somewhere in the middle, you and your parents are almost like equals. I mean, I was twenty-two, I was hardly an adult and we were hardly equals but we were able to sit with each other and talk like friends.

That was one of those times in life where I feel best, during a transition. I was done with college and about to start my life in New York and it was great to just take a breath and hang out with my parents for an afternoon. The health problems that they would hide from me were still so far away then.

This Memorial Day will mark nineteen years since then. I still listen to tracks from Keep It Like a Secret and Breathing Tornados every now and then. I’m still in New York. My parents are gone. And in a detail that is either very heavy handed or oddly appropriate, the Chapter House is gone too, having burned down a couple of years ago.

I don’t need to remember her on Mother’s Day because it’s not like I’ve forgotten but maybe this is what Mother’s Day should be for from now on, remembering something good about her, some mundane moment, or some time when she said something funny.

Thanks for that birthday, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day.