JOYRIDE III

There may be 3,000 miles between them, but they share a common name, and strands of DNA. They both honor my mother by sharing her name. Madeline Libby Forrest and Libby May Forrest are first cousins on different coasts.
They’ve met only twice, but had one of those friends-forever-even-though-we-just-met experiences each time. They are my mother’s grand daughters, even though she never met either of them, before she passed away.
The photographic texts spawned by those two moments are a tribute to their grandmother. With arms around each other, they have the look of two friends who have had such a magical day together that they couldn’t and wouldn’t describe it to anyone else. And it’s not just because Madeline is four years old and Libby is three.
Madeline’s Victorian complexion and straight hair blend nicely with Libby’s curls and more olive-colored tones. It’s almost as if my mother has been split into two in the form of these two little girls.
When I see them together, I feel I can look back in time, and forward. I’m sure that each is a portal into what my mother must have been like when she was a little girl. A view I’ve never been able to see before.
Madeline and Libby both radiate that “dive into life” attitude that my mother had. They are both take charge and tender. Each has been known to have a meltdown or two.
The photo tells the tale. There they are together sitting on the steps of the house of my mother’s older sister, Aunt Yonia. Only about 20 blocks away from the West Philadelphia row home where my mother was a little girl.
Gleefully they cling onto one another, but different from the usual child with a pal. There is something more mature about it, something almost knowing.
Maybe my mom had a hand in it. Maybe she’s there with them in the photo, unseen.
DNA is the least of what they have in common. Somehow it’s as though my mother’s personality was preserved, parsed out and remixed a bit.
There is no doubt some pride and chuckling going on in the afterlife, as my mother watches my brother and I raise our own little girls. Something my mom never did since she had two boys.
My mother relished parenting, perhaps in part because of (and despite of) the fact that my brother Craig and I were not the standard personalities. Far from it.
Like their fathers, the two daughters are unique too, which is creating a new generational set of joys…and challenges. And their grandmother, I’m sure, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Keith Forrest is a tenured assistant professor of communication at Atlantic Cape Community College. His late mother Libby Demp Forrest Moore wrote the Joyride column for this newspaper for 20 years.