I remember it so well. Mrs. McCloskey would get out her finest linens and china and when the big copper tea kettle in the kitchen began to whistle, a
hush fell on the house and Mrs. McCloskey said, "Tea time."
It was always such an elegant moment - the assorted teas, the jellies, the tea biscuits - but the occasion seemed a bust when Kendall and I were invited to the table.
He would sneak into the kitchen and return with a fresh loaf of French bread and slice it and butter it up and then dunk it in the tea. And so would I, moving Mrs. McCloskey to near tears.
"Oh, boys, please," she would say, shaking her head.
Mrs. McCloskey is gone now. She died a few years ago at 85, but I have been thinking about her and her passion for high tea of late because Sunday is Mother's Day and, before she died, Meredith McCloskey played a showcase role of what a mother really is.
Her son Kendall had settled in Louisville, where he prospered in an advertising and graphics business. But his marriage collapsed, ending in divorce, and then he lost his sight - lost it completely and suddenly to a virus that attacked the optic nerves and destroyed the retina.
Totally blind and with no one to care for him, he went home to his mother in New Orleans. "Where else when you're blind but home to mother?" he said the other day.
For 29 long months Mrs. McCloskey, then in her late 70s, cared for her stricken son. She fed him, did his laundry, took him on long walks in the neighborhood - and prayed for him.
She had a spiritual attraction to Pope John Paul II and prayed to him that her son would regain his sight. And she had Kendall pray to the Pope, too.
"I didn't even know what he looked like," Kendall McCloskey said, "but that goes with the territory when you're blind."
