I love my mother. Arguably, she’s the person who knows me most because she’s
seen the arch of my life choices from my beginning to now, from a perspective of
outside looking in…unconditional love and worry assuring her focus. Having said
that, she’s appropriated the right to a certain level of criticism not
acceptable coming from my husband or children. They know better. Simply put, as
the old adage goes, if mom isn’t happy, no one is happy—my husband and
children quite rightly pick their battles. Whereas my mother has nothing to lose
when she tells me something I don’t want to hear, so she’s free with whatever is
on her mind. (I mentioned I love her, right?) We talk a lot, reminisce, beat
dead horses, and struggle to find the good in the bad, and over the years I’ve
noticed a phenomenon unique to talking with her.
We remember things differently.
We have shared memories, but remember them as if filmed by different directors,
cut by different editors, written in different genres by different authors. What
I credit to be a personal moment of transformation in my past, never happened
for my mother. Did. Not. Happen. This disconnect challenges events I’ve long
credited for creating who I am, and my mother’s denial of these events boggle my
mind. How could this happen? Was this simply a situation where two people, with
different perspectives, different priorities, different developmental stages in
life saw the world and its microcosm-level events differently? And like a
Polaroid, as it developed before our eyes, was set in her mind and mine as two
different snapshots of an event? Then we filed it away, never to challenge it
until mom and I had one of our conversations?
I don’t know. But…
I was surfing the web and tripped over Forbes Magazine’s online “Ask Ethan: How
Many Stars In The Night Sky Still Exist?” August 20, 2016. Being a science nerd,
I couldn’t not read it. Spoiler alert. Most of them…but that still
means some aren’t there! The article goes on to explain that it requires
amplification of human eyesight (lenses) to see the light from these dead
stars…these stars that don’t exist…and the farther away we look, the more likely
we are to see them.
Wow.
Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is less impressed with this than I. He
writes, “But even on average, if we were to consider all 200-400 billion stars
in our galaxy, a mean distance of perhaps 40,000 light years away, there are
perhaps only a few hundred thousand that are already dead — one in a million —
and they’re heavily skewed towards being on the far side of the galaxy from
where we are.” Yet if you believe no two snowflakes are alike, I think one in a
million is an incredibly mind blowing ratio when you consider there are between
200-400 Billion stars. So, yeah…I’m impressed.
So there you have it. The closer you look toward the stars, the more likely you
will see stars that aren’t there. So why would it be any different with me and
my mom? The closer we study our mutual past, the more likely we see things that
aren’t there. It then behooves us to accept that two people with two different
realities can still be correct. We see the star, yet it doesn’t exist, fighting
that conclusion is to fight scientific data that took over tens of thousands of
man hours, millions, if not billions of dollars, countless theorems created,
equipment invented and built, rockets launched, space stations, and of course
government bureaucracies created to make it all possible. Is anyone surprised to
discover it would take that much time, money and effort to explain the
relationship between a mother and a daughter? Thank you, NASA. Well done.
Marnie Somerville is sure Dane MacLain is just another bad guy. Her job as
resident investigator at Whitman Enterprises is to track down the owners of
delinquent accounts, but something about Dane’s case is off, and Marnie can’t
resist a good mystery. The secret files and cover-up she finds after hacking her
boss’s computer are more than she expected, and now she’s fleeing her former
employer...right into Dane’s arms.
Former detective Dane MacLain has spent the last year gathering intel against
Whitman Enterprises, the company he believes responsible for his wife’s death.
When a beautiful and intense woman shows up with information, Dane is willing to
accept all she has to offer, especially when the help comes in such a sexy
package. Caught in a deadly cat and mouse chase, Dane must do everything he can
to protect Marnie as they run for their lives.
Romance Suspense
[Entangled Select, On Sale: August 29, 2016,
e-Book, ISBN: 9781633757349 / eISBN: 9781633757349]
Kris Rafferty was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After earning a
Bachelor’s in Arts from the University of Massachusetts/ Boston, she married her
college sweetheart, traveled the country and wrote books. Three children and a
Pomeranian/Shih Tzu mutt later, she spends her days devoting her life to her
family and her craft.
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy