My mom is just about the most non-nostalgic person you could ever meet. When asked for details about her past she just shrugs and says, "I live for the future, what can the past do for me now?"

While some people wallow in their past glory and never climb above it, forgetting can be just as debilitating.

A mother and a daughter need to have a common ground, a place where understanding comes from shared experiences, however scandalous. My mother never dusts off any skeletons from her closet, but whenever I unearth any yellowed bones, I feel all that much closer to her.

When I was younger I was a troublemaker and I was constantly slapped with detentions for excessive talking. Whenever a note was sent home about my behavior my mom would just exhale loudly and act disgusted.

"Didn't you ever get caught talking in class?" I'd protest.

"When I went to school you sat in class and listened -- no one caused problems," she'd reply.

One day after digging around in a trunk I found my mom's high school yearbook, and after flipping through it I found the senior class hall of fame. There in the middle was a picture of my mom holding a huge megaphone with the legend "Most Talkative" written on it. Ha! I knew it. She really is my birth mother!

When my mom came home I questioned her about her dubious honor.

"Oh that," she said. "It was just a joke, I got it because I was really quiet." Yeah, right. I know the truth.

Little by little I tried to get into my mother's past. I envied Michael J. Fox's ability to get all of his answers via a silver DeLorean in Back to the Future. And every time I found something new, my vision of my mother became more complete.

Once I found a picture of her at a party surrounded by gifts. I asked her how old she was at her birthday party. She told me it wasn't a birthday party at all, but an engagement party. Hey wait, she got engaged to my dad when she was 26, and she looked about 18 in this photo. Something was fishy here.

After some well-aimed questions I got the truth. She was engaged to some guy named Sammy who was her high school sweetheart, but she wrote him a "Dear John" letter when he was in the service. Who could guess Mom could have been so heartless and cruel.

"Why'd ya do it?"

"He was a Mama's boy, I just decided it wasn't right," she told me. And yes, she had to mail all those gifts back.

One great resource in my search to put Mom's past into perspective is Mary Anne. Mary Anne and my mom left their boring jobs in New Jersey and moved to New York's East Side when they were 23. They shared a cramped apartment, but for three years they also shared probably the wildest times of their lives.

If you asked my mom about that time, she'd describe working at Mt. Sinai Hospital and the cancer research she did. Ask Mary Anne and you'll get tales of edible Christmas trees and Halloween parties where they'd wake up in the morning to find all the guests still there, passed out in their costumes.

As I got older the stories got better, and when Mary Anne came to stay with us over last Christmas break she told us the most fascinating one ever.

It seems my mom was going out with a guy in their apartment building who was a real character. He was a doctor, wore ascots and had a lot stored in the ego department.

One night Mary Anne and my mom were awakened by what sounded like firecrackers. When they got up the next morning they found out my mom's boyfriend had been shot by his ex-girlfriend.

He lived, but he has a bullet permanently stuck in his heart. Is this a soap opera or what! When Mary Anne was telling this story Mom was trying to shut her up, but the last thing I heard was something about a bedside vigil.

And so I still dig, looking for interesting tidbits about my mom, looking for pieces of myself. While the search is time consuming, sometimes I think it isn't so bad to have to work for my information -- that way each little nugget is a brick of gold.