Faces

When I was little, I used to watch my father' s face when he read the newspaper. I wondered what he was thinking, how he could sometimes become angry at what he read. I used to think that I would never be able to form an opinion, having no idea how to relate what I read to how I would feel. And I felt the same about my mother's face when she was in church. She listened, tall and remote from us kids,who looking up at her, saw on her face an expression removed from anything to do with us. I knew I was hearing the same words spoken from the altar, but I couldn't feel any emotion from hearing them. I felt left out at those times, as if I were missing something I should be able to understand. Years later, after childhood was over with, I would go to my mother's house. As the years passed, there would be more of the times I would find her sitting in her chair in the front room, looking out the window. I wondered what she thought about at those times, but I never asked her, feeling the same sense of separation as in those long-ago years in church. Maybe I felt it would be an invasion of her private thoughts, or maybe I thought I'd be unable to understand. Now I wish I had asked her more about how she felt or what she thought. Possibly she would have wanted to talk about what was going through her mind; she was a stronger person than I am.