In Memory of a Twentieth-Century Matriarch

Fortunately, common sense quickly reasserted itself: I might as well have asked myself, why was I looking back to another age? What's the matter with our own? Here we have history just as much as anywhere else: a firm-featured woman for whom her sons built a memorial the likes of which most of us will never have. We all pass into history eventually, and in fact this was built a few years before I was born. The concrete, though blackened by the soot of passing cars, is pretty good and doesn't seem to be spalling or cracking: I hope her monument survives many centuries.