The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest

Sol LeWitt died on Sunday. Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.

And as I write those two sentences and think about the first time I read Vonnegut (Bluebeard, not Cat's Cradle, something like 10th grade) and the first time I saw Sol LeWitt (yummy art candy, probably my junior or senior year of high school on one of those many occasions when my sister made me choose art stumping over my biology final--and thank you, by the way), I question my own tact in mourning two relative strangers on my mother's 70th birthday.

What's up with that?

I could pretend to know. I could even write some stuff and maybe figure it out. But that's not going to happen. Instead I share this, by way of remuneration (a word I was doomed to misspell had I not just looked it up):

My mother lives in unassuming landmarks.

The high chair by the telephone, where she smokes her cigarettes, talks on the phone, drinks her orange juice, coffee, iced tea, coffee, water (in that order) and makes her holiday lists in stitchy, small and now nearly illegible letters. The chair used to be fashionable avocado vinyl, once upon a time, when my dad used to sneak up on her and plant raspberries in her neck, to crescent-scrunched, close-eyed giggles (my most treasured inheritance). She traded up for a tall wood chair, often caressed by small hands begging for a piece of her Hershey bar. The kind with almonds.

The left cushion of her plaid couch. Always the left one, always plaid, with tissues tucked in the cracks. Me or my sisters would sit on the right cushion and drape our short and then very long legs across the gap between us and my mother's lap. She'd tickle our feet with her long nails, until we tucked them, like her tissues, in the space between her back and the sofa's.

The chair on the right side of our oval kitchen table. My sisters would sit at the heads of the table. My dad and I shared a bench opposite my mother. It was probably covered in plaid. Or roosters. My mom has a thing for roosters. We'd inhale her pork chops with rice or her enchilada casserole or my dad's overcooked hamburgers, reaching for seconds, dropping scraps for the resident dog, reluctantly taking the dishes to the counter, fighting over who had to wash them, and rushing to watch Love Boat or Dukes of Hazzard, leaving my mother still eating, bite by excruciatingly and seemingly inhuman, slow bite.

The right side of the bed she shared with my father, accompanied by a pile of John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell books on the bedside table and one, open and face down on her chest as she sleeps, gently snoring. (She never could compete with the bear rattle of my dad, although she seemed to unconsciously try.) This is where I'd come for comfort, after pushing out of a nightmare , and this is where I found her, sitting up, her head in her hands, the night my dad died.

The porch. Or the sidewalk. Or the driveway. And for some reason, always in her slippers and robe. She's one of those people who believes a nightgown by itself is too immodest. Anywhere. Even in the house. She doesn't take more than two steps from bed without being more suitably, if not fully, dressed. And yet, she'll stand almost in the street and wave goodbye in her robe and slippers as, over the years, we have driven farther and farther away, to Austin and now to Kansas City. And as we pull out of the driveway and onto the street, she keeps waving, never leaving her post until we turn the corner and disappear.