Today is the birthday of the writers Muriel Spark, Langston Hughes and Galway Kinnell. It is also the birthday of my mom, a writer who is less well known, whose pad and paper were often put aside to tend to a child or pay a bill or wait until the world was calmer before picking them up again.

But she read Shakespeare to us and talked to us of worlds beyond the one we knew. And now we are out in those worlds and she is encouraging us still.

We encourage her, too. It’s calm enough to write now, Mom. You can pick up that pad and pen. The coast is clear.