Mother's Day

On the day after our maternal parents have been celebrated, kissed, given potted plants and cards drawn with crayon and plaster handprints of small children, we are left to wonder what it's all about. Motherhood is one of many themes in A Book of Ages. No surprise, really. It's a book about life's changes, the relationships we nurture and endure, and there is no relationship more profound than that of mother and child.

Famous people have mothers too. Mothers who died young, like Lincoln's, Somerset Maugham's, Poe's, Orson Welles's and Mary McCarthy's. Allen Ginsberg's mother was institutionalized when he was six, Cary Grant's when he was nine. Marilyn Monroe's mother was unable to raise her. Hitler's smothered him with affection. Buster Keaton's and Judy Garland's parents took them into the family business, which happened to be show business. Eudora Welty surrendered her New York writing career to care for her mother back in Mississippi. Child monarchs receive a legacy as heavy as any family curse. Most parents do the best they know how in the circumstances they are given, and their children muddle through. I found this again and again in the lives I describe in the book.

When P. G. Wodehouse was two his parents returned to British Hong Kong, leaving the youngster in the care of assorted maternal aunts. The adult Wodehouse didn't bear a grudge. Dickens's mother allowed him to be removed from school and put to work in a shoe polish factory at the age of twelve, and he never forgave her. In both cases, these events became part of their fiction. In an important sense we are children all of our lives, and as parents we re-enact what we learned.

Bicycle Day & Paul Revere

On this day in 1943 in Basel, Switzerland, a 37 year-old research scientist named Albert Hofmann ingested an experimental alkaloid called lycergic acid and went for a ride on his bicycle, thus experiencing the very first acid trip. April 19 has been remembered as "bicycle day" by druggies ever since.

Lycergic acid, better known as LSD, became the plaything of an adventurous elite for several decades before becoming illegal. Henry Luce and his Republican congresswoman wife enjoyed it in the privacy of their Republican home. Cary Grant tried it for the first time when he was filming Houseboat; he was 54. Aldous Huxley wrapped it in philosophy. Dr. Timothy Leary, age 46, wrote a slogan for it. Albert Hofmann, its inventor, lived to a ripe old age. His is the last entry in A Book of Ages, at age 100, fit as a fiddle, in full command of his faculties and making no mention at all of flashbacks.

On the night of April 19, 1775 Paul Revere, age 40, took a very different trip, on horseback, from Boston to Lexington. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a famous poem about the event in 1863 when he was 56. Myth is more memorable when it rhymes. Revere appears four times in A Book of Ages, most memorably at age 38 when he dresses up like an Indian and helps dump East India Company tea into Boston harbor. That was more of a consumer protest over prices than a tax rebellion, but again mythology is what people remember.