The 2003 Land Rover Discovery sitting in the driveway has nearly 300,000 miles on it. My mother and I accumulated most of these as we traveled around the country to fencing tournaments… and to Bob Dylan concerts, and to the Canadian Rockies… but mostly to fencing tournaments. If you add those 300,000 miles to all the airline miles racked up going to World Cups in places like Cuba, France, and Slovakia, and the road trips that followed… like that one from Prague to Barcelona… then we’ve probably traveled about 1 Million miles together.
That’s a lot of miles.
The good news is, that after all this time spent together in close quarters, we not only still love each other, we really LIKE each other.
She’s pretty clever.
I’ve learned lots of things from my mother starting with a simple outlook:
Life is a grand adventure.
AND if you can do it in a 4-star way, do it, because money only has value while you’re alive to spend it.
And do it in good shoes.
She showed me that real education doesn’t come from a book. Real education is in the experiences you get to have when you open your eyes and to the world. Every tournament became an excuse to see something new. In 3 years, I visited over 70 museums — an set of sites I take with me every day to work.
In 2011, I started working and my mother and I officially switched roles as athletes — she because the world class fencer and I became the sporting parent. She’s made 8 Veteran World Championship teams… and that’s after having 2 full hip replacements.
Last year, two weeks before National Championships and the final qualifying tournament for the World team, my mother broke her hand at practice. She was told not to fence. But my mother is a charmer, when she wants to be, so she convinced her doctor to give her a clean bill of health and convinced the cast-maker to develop something she could wear while competing.
The day before the tournament, she walked around the venue with her team jacket draped over her hand to hide the full cast so no one would know she was injured.
Let me tell you — those Veteran fencers are like sharks. If they smell blood in the water, you’re lunchmeat.
She fenced. Medalled. And qualified for the team.
My mother taught me that broken bones and broken hearts heal. A dead end, a “no,” an injury, those aren’t ends. Those are just excuses to find another, a better way to get where you’re going. We’ve been lost a lot — in Italy, in New Foundland, in Bulgaria, in the Bronx. But in life, so far, I’ve never been really lost because she’s given me, and keeps giving me, a road map to follow through it all.
Happy Mother’s Day to the greatest Mother there is!
They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband 