It was the first Easter after his mother had passed. He was wondering how he was going to make it through Easter without her. On the week leading up to that first Easter without his mother, he was in the grocery store on a very long check out line. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and it was an elderly woman handing him a coupon as she said to him, “Young man, I noticed the cereal you are buying. I have a coupon for it.”
No one had ever done that for him in all of his years of grocery shopping. And when he reached out to get the coupon from her, he looked into her eyes. He really felt like his mother was present. The woman did not look like his mother, but he felt his mother’s presence. It was so real, so palpable, so undeniable….
His mother was a child of Italian immigrants from the Great Depression, so she really loved saving money. Every Sunday she would take the newspaper and she would cut all of the coupons. She would even cut coupons for items she herself did not buy. She would leave them on the grocery store shelves next to the items for other people to find and to use.
His mother was not a reader, she did not do puzzles, she did not knit. What his mother did for fun was cut coupons. She was the coupon queen!
