For all the years before there was texting, I was the one who said it first, phoning her at the crack of dawn every Aug. 1, blurting out, “HappyTopOfTheFerrisWheel!” before she could even say hello. Now my friend Beth beats me. “HAPPY TOP OF THE FERRIS WHEEL” she texts in all capital letters the second her iPhone clicks to Aug. 1. The two of us have been celebrating this non-holiday since our adult children were in middle school…

I flew to California the day before her birthday. It was a big birthday, her 16th. And I was sad leaving her.

“I already miss you,” I moaned when I kissed her goodbye. Lucy looked at me and smiled, cocked one eyebrow and said, “Save it for Farley,” which is Lucy teasing, Lucy pretending to like Farley (a favorite teacher) more than she likes me. It’s a game she invented, something she says when she wants to get a rise out of me, her words a joke. Lucy makes jokes. She sees the humor in things. The doctor who told us she had Down syndrome didn’t tell us that she might be funny. She might not walk, talk, see, hear, read, write, he said. Funny never came up…

‘What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence,” is a book propped up on a table under “New Releases” at Barnes & Noble. I pick it up. And can’t put it down. So I buy it. I’ve read only four of the essays so far. I want to absorb each. Maybe even more than absorb, I want to reflect, to think about these writers and their mothers, and to think about my mother, too, and all the things we never got a chance to talk about. Except that we did have a chance…

I had never heard of Bryan Stevenson.

I heard his name for the first time in Montgomery, Ala., just last month. There, on top of a hill, sits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the “lynching memorial,” locals call it. It opened last spring. It’s a somber site. Some 800 rust-colored steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, bear the names of more than 4,000 African-American men, women, and children who were lynched from 1877 all the way up to 1950 simply because of the color of their skin. The monuments hang lynched, too, suspended from a ceiling. They are the history I was never taught in school.

The letters remain this morning. The tide hasn’t erased them. They’re not as sharp as they were yesterday, not as perfectly defined. The wind has blurred their lines. But the words are still readable. HAPPY 60 DAYS OF MARGARET, they say, a billboard in the sand. I watched yesterday from a balcony 11 stories above the ocean as a man using his sandaled feet as tools created these block letters. It seemed easy for him, as if…