Such a great Mother's Day!

I went to my in-law's yesterday for Mother's Day. My husband gave me a beautiful gift. Not beautiful in looks or fit or smell or anything normal, boring and easy like that. No, his gift took thought. Thought about what my interests are and what I just might really like.

He got me books. Two of them.

The first one is Tolkien's "The Silmarillion".

This is Tolkien's first book and his last. He started it in 1917 and worked on it, changed it and let it grow throughout his life. In fact, it was edited by his son and was finally published four years after his death. This is the story of the First Age of Tolkien's world that he so lovingly depicted in "The Hobbit" and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The story of Middle Earth before the coming of humans. For those of you who don't know it, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Tolkien's Middle Earth books as well as his contemporaries, C.S. Lewis', works of Narnia. I am a Narnia freak! But that's a story for a different day. This book is the first Tolkien book I have actually owned, and that makes it all the more special to me.

The second book is the best of all! Voices and Poetry of Ireland.

In this book, the poems range from such lauded notables as Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and Seamus Heaney to contemporaries such as Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Peter Sirr, and Dennis O'Driscoll. The voices on the CD that accompanies the book are a varied group, including the "voice of Dublin" Ronnie Drew, the late Richard Harris with a poem of his own, Bono, Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor, James Galway, Pierce Brosnan, Patrick Bergen, Colin Farrell, Maeve Binchy Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem. One of the best things about this book is that all royalties go to Focus Ireland, one of the leading charities in Ireland working with and for the homeless.

If I close my eyes while listening to the voices, I can make believe that I'm in a centuries old pub somewhere in the glorious country of Ireland, hearing the words from master storytellers. This book gives me a bit of a chance to use my imagination and dream of journeying to a place that I long to go to, but in reality will probably never get the chance to go there.

These simple books mean more to me than any bouquet of flowers, favorite purfume, a piece of jewelry, b/c while those are nice and traditional gestures of love, these books signify to me that my husband knows what I like. We have our serious issues and problems, true. We are trying to work on putting this marriage back together. What these books mean to me is that he thought about what I would like most. What would mean the most to the heart of me. What I would treasure. It means to me that he's been listening to my thoughts and knows my dreams and that is worth more than any showy, expensive, tasteful - read ordinary and traditional - gift that I could have gotten instead. It was simple and from the heart. It gives me good feelings about us. It gives me hope for our marriage.

I love you, Matt. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making it a wonderful Mother's Day. (And for cooking the steak! The man knows what I like to eat!)