My mother didn’t hold on to many things from my childhood. Maybe that’s just how it goes with families—complicated as a church potluck with five kinds of jello and not one lid on tight. Things get lost in the shuffle of life, misplaced during a move, or quietly donated during a cleaning spree powered by late-night coffee and a vague sense of betrayal.
But somehow—by grace or by grit—she managed to save these little treasures: a stack of Look-‘n-See cards. Not baseball cards. Not movie stars or athletes with square jaws and greased hair. No, these were cards for a different kind of child. A quieter one. The kind who spent more time in the library than on the baseball field. The kind who thought “fun” and “Franklin D. Roosevelt” could be used in the same sentence.
My mom was a nerd, long before the internet made it fashionable. She had a brain like a well-organized card catalog, and she treated history like some folks treat gossip—something to savor, pass around, and quietly judge. So these Look-‘n-See cards—they weren’t just trivia. They were a little passport to the big world beyond her small dineing room table.
Each card featured a different titan of history—Cleopatra in all her eyeliner’d glory, Harry Truman with his “The Buck Stops Here” stare, Queen Elizabeth II looking like she could both knit a sweater and launch a battleship. The corners of the cards are worn now, soft as an old hymnbook, creased from being shuffled by a thousand small fingers and studied by the watchful eyes of a curious kid trying to figure out the world and his place in it.
I’ve got about 40 of those cards, and every one of them hangs on my wall now—lined up like a peculiar little parade of greatness and memory. They’re not just paper rectangles. They’re reminders. Of who my mom was. Of who I was. Of what we shared, even if we didn’t always say it out loud.
They hang in a place of honor, right where they belong—because if you’re going to make a shrine to anything, let it be to a mother’s love and a nerd’s curiosity. And maybe, just maybe, to the notion that family, while complicated, is still the best story we ever get to tell.
