By Charlotte K. Jarmy

There are yellow marks all over the May calendar, and I must pay them some attention. I think of roses as symbols of Mother’s Day, when all the florists hug themselves with glee. We will join my son Ron for brunch up the highway at Kincaid’s - where mothers congregate by the dozens. On this sweet holiday I spend time remembering my own mother. She would be out among our gorgeous pink and coral roses, exclaiming over each one. I can see her quite clearly.

Because Ron’s birthday comes shortly after, I save him another long drive by celebrating with him on Mother’s Day. After all, there is no one who remembers his birth better than I. He’s not into counting the years anymore, and I fully understand that.

Howard and I will also celebrate 11 years of marriage in two weeks. It amazes us because the years fly by as we hold on to each one, feeling lucky all over again that we found each other. We do a lot of “if only” wishing that our paths had crossed a few years earlier.

Sometimes events happen that do not fit my writing calendar. My literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, left us behind in April. Where that darkly comic author is now will be a mystery. His deep anguish about World War II created what I consider his masterpiece, “Slaughterhouse Five.” I wonder if our present-day horror in Iraq may have hastened his demise. His personal experience as a prisoner of war when the Allies firebombed Dresden, a lovely center of art and culture that bombs destroyed along with thousands of innocent civilians, became Vonnegut’s metaphor for humankind’s madness.

His novel offered no caustic polemics. Instead he created a weird world, Tralfamador, where his main character, Billy Pilgrim, a World War II infantryman, was spirited away by strange creatures that resembled bathroom plungers. These aliens were totally interested in Billy to the point of kidnapping a beautiful girl to keep him company in his huge plastic dome. They watched him and asked, “Have you mated yet, Mr. Pilgrim?” I’ll always laugh remembering that scene.

The wonder of Vonnegut’s genius is that hundreds of high school students discovered him and remember him despite the difficulty of figuring out what all his symbols meant. Vonnegut, traumatized by the horror of Dresden, made death one of his many themes. Each death was met with his casual “So it goes,” which quickly became a pet phrase among my English students.

What stays with me most was that Billy was no hero. The author pictures him as a rather ordinary but innocent young man. Vonnegut lives through Billy as events during the 1960s presented tragic deaths in America, including our president’s and Martin Luther King’s. Vietnam and its devastating death toll found its way into the author’s despair and absurdly comic prose.

He and Joseph Heller portrayed war in all its cruelty, mostly in their damnation of the carnage wrought in the slaughter of our nation’s youngest. Will Iraq bring about another literary classic? The carnage is there as well.

I would like to put one of my beautiful roses on the gravesite of Kurt Vonnegut. I will miss his voice. So it goes.