Watching scattering snowflakes from the passenger window, they swirled and looped, taking their own time to land. The dance they performed was a gleeful dance of teasing the brown dried husks of corn, bending down to touch them, then letting the wind carry them back up and around, a bait and switch that nature plays with itself. When they landed, we are already further down the state route, onto the next corn field, the next barn emblazoned with fading Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, another trailer park on the road from the parsonage I lived in, mostly by myself that final school year of 1985-86 to my mother’s new house with her boyfriend in Galion, Ohio.
I was in that difficult space between childhood and manhood, where I was not quite ready to be on my own but so close I could taste the freedom that eighteen brings but still dependent on people I was still angry with. This predicament made me angrier, more resentful as I most did whatever I wanted to do but when there were times I couldn’t, when my mother would wave her wand of matronly responsibility, I would seethe inside. A blend of anger mixed with a yet-unknown silent hurt of her abandoning me once more. She had picked me up in Catawba, my stepfather back in the psychiatric hospital 50 miles away from home, she wanted me to see her new house. A condo she was renting with Steve whom she had met at Maryhaven a rehab center in Columbus. She an administrator and he an alcoholic/drug user who was trying for what felt like the hundredth time to quit. I had never met him and was none too pleased to be meeting him this weekend.
She talked to me from her side of the car while I stared outside the window at all the things that make an Ohio winter something that is as desolate and terrifying as the dead-end future can be for kid that only wanted out of everything that small town Ohio could offer. All of which was basically fuel to want something different. My eyes burned, there wasn’t a catch in my throat but more of a fireball that I kept inside lest it erupt into the front seat of that blue Chevy Cavalier and turn my mother into a stammering, crying puddle. I knew her limits. I just listened and looked. We arrived in the small town of Galion, in the center a small courthouse, gas stations, hardware store, a feed store at the edge of town my thoughts drifted to my girlfriend who I would have to wait to see in a few days. I pined for her. My mother brought up me moving up for the rest of the school year, “no way,” I replied, “I’m not living in this shithole of a town. I’m almost done with school, so I’ll just finish it out.” Sighing in a way that she perfected, she put her hand on the back of my left hand. I flinched, taking her hand away she softly asked me “think about it. I think you will like Steve.” I rested my head against the window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, “Jesus Christ mom, you are still fucking married” in a whisper she would be able to hear. We drove the final few minutes in silence.
Steve opened the door to their new condo, it had new furniture and Native-American art on the walls, and Steve had a small stereo in the corner next to it was a large wooden cassette holder and a stack of worn LP’s underneath it. This caught my attention and Steve came out of the kitchen and shook my hand, “I’ve heard a lot about you, your mom says you are pretty funny and like music.” “Sure” I headed towards the bathroom with my lungs in my throat and heat rising in my cheeks. The bathroom was decorated with a candle, sea shell molded soap and new hand towels. This was nothing I had ever grown up with. It smelled like cherry blossoms. As I splashed water on my face, I noticed my hands were shaking, I wanted a beer but they wouldn’t have any. Steve was sober.
That night we went out to eat in nearby Mansfield, to a chain casual dining place—maybe it was Applebee’s, TGIF or something like that, it was the sort of place I had never really ate at as we were poor, going out to eat was only done if we drove to Columbus to see my grandparents and uncles. It was small talk, Steve mostly remaining quiet while my mother asked me about school, my girlfriend and filling out college applications. “I dunno mom, maybe I’ll go to someplace near Columbus.” “I thought you were going to go to OU, that is what you have always said, to go home to Athens. You could live with the Zudak’s” The Zudak’s were my middle school best friend, Eric, his older brother and sisters and his mother. Eric’s father had moved out of the house a few years before and I would go down to Athens on most of my spring breaks throughout high school, wander around town, hitting the bars and drinking in shitty cars. “I’m not sure”, I wanted to near Jennifer who was going to Ohio State. “You could move up here with me and Steve and go to a community college?” “Mom, stop I’m not going to live with you.” The rest of the dinner was quiet and when we got home, I went to bed. Over pancakes as we went out to eat (again!), Steve talked about music not really asking me what I liked but sharing how much music meant to him. “When I moved to Columbus, I probably spent more time going to concerts than I did in class.” “Oh, who did you see?” This was a test, in retrospect it was really a test by Steve to try to understand me, not win me over—he never tried to do that. His goal was to identify with me, he understood I was deeply wounded in my childhood, much of it by my mother even though I had very little insight into this hurt which at this time in my life mostly manifested itself as anger, frustration, and quiet rage. “I saw Lou Reed at the Agora, he had bleached hair and wrapped the microphone cord around his wrist like he was going to shoot up some dope. I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever seen.” “Steve, he doesn’t need to hear that” my mother piped in. Rolling my eyes, “mom I know what dope is, and Lou Reed is one of my favorites. Who else did you see?” I was impressed. “I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland on Mick Jagger’s birthday and they played so long they cut the power on them, I thought there would be a riot. There was a giant inflatable penis that went over the crowd.” Many years later he told me he was on acid at that Stones concert. We talked a little bit more, he had seen The New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Kiss opening for the New York Dolls, Neil Young, Dylan; so many artists that I had discovered during high school. That day we went for a small walk around the town, I begrudgingly realized I liked my mom’s new boyfriend.
On the way back from walking my mother and I argued, “just take me home.” Feeling like a dog in a cage, trapped and annoyed that I was helpless and at her mercy. “I don’t want to be here no matter how much you think I will like your new life, I don’t give a shit. Take me back.” In her bedroom I heard my mother cry, mournful wails and I felt no pity for her, no remorse. Eventually she came out of her room, face flushed, eyes reddened from crying. “Steve is going to drive you back, I don’t feel well enough to make the drive.” A part of me felt a tinge of being abandoned yet again, “Ok.” But what I was thinking was, “fuck, you are going to have your boyfriend drive me back to the empty house I share with YOUR husband? You are kidding me?” I swallowed that thought and fetched my clothes from the spare bedroom. Steve had a small pick-up truck, we rode in silence except for the tapes he let me feed into the dashboard, John Prine’s first record, David Allen Coe’s greatest hits, Dire Straits, and Lou Reed. He dropped me off in the alley next to the parsonage, snow gentling falling around me as I got out of the truck. Steve leaned over, “Nice to meet you Bela, your mom really loves you.” He drove off as I turned towards the house, darkened and empty, a place that was home but never really felt like it.
Over the years as we all worked our way into time as if it were a field of sawgrass, cutting our ankles, a slog into middle age for me and a slow sunken decline towards death for the generation before me and my siblings. There were break-ups, fuck-ups, children and my own struggles with misty sorrow that has seemed to follow me like a sick-feral cat. A walking disappointment was what I felt like much of the time, even though I had enough confidence in myself to live the kind of life I desired (mostly consisting of music, drinking and laughter). But when it came to my family, I would have sooner not have to let them into my world. The fact that I didn’t really attend college but opted to work in a record store, which didn’t seem like work at all—either to myself or to my family. My mother, father and my brother would pine for me to try college again, Steve never did, just encouraged me to do what I liked to do, “Susan, he will figure it out for himself and if he needs you, he will ask you.” This was as true a statement as has ever been said about me, Steve was the wisdom of our family. A solid towering tree that stood tall in the middle of our brushfires, he felt the wind at the top of his branches and the cold of the winter in our lives, I was gifted to come and sit among the wooden limbs without ever feeling judged. I never heard him raise his voice and living with my mother was a way to practice dealing with frustration on a daily basis.
Time is tracked in various ways, tracking the stars in the universe their flickering light coming from billions of miles and billions of years from the past and as their lights land upon the eyes of stargazers many will have ceased being billions of years ago. Their sparkles a sort of gravestone etched in the sky for us to gaze up. We mark time through the books we read, a collective history made from the drawing in caves, on stone walls, through the ancient Egyptians utilizing papyrus over 5000 years ago, to the development of papermaking by the Chinese to the present where digital pixels contain the entirety of humankind at the touch of fingertips. I tracked the age of my children by pencil, every six months they would stand still against their bedroom wall or against the door in my bedroom apartment while I drew a straight line at the top of their head. These inch increments showed them how age can be measured, they quit doing it a few years ago and my son, aged 15 is now taller than me—it is as if the tracking is no longer needed; he has won the contest. Boxes of photographs fill my basement and in corners of my house, shoeboxes, wooden boxes and cardboard boxes carry the information of my past, the past of my ancestors stacked upon one another as if they were ping-pong balls in a lottery machine. Black and white, Polaroid and faded colored photos from the early 1970’s that have grown their own age spots, blotted with fuzzy white and yellow globs that may overtake my siblings, myself and Santa. My whiskers are mostly white now, if I don’t shave then I will look my age so I run the razor over my skin, the skin that is not as tight as it once was and with that razor I make myself younger, anyway this is what I believe. So many ways of tracking time although in my mind I see the universe swirling like a giant whirlpool swallowing up everything all at once, and in this grand whirlpool people are smaller than a droplet of water rushing over Niagara Falls and then become mist. And when I die, my memories die with me and perhaps for one or two generations I will be remembered for a few things in my life but not for the mundane or what my daily interactions were like, not the cuddling of my dog nor the pride in my children or the laughter I was a part of, so much laughter that it caused people’s head’s to turn. I track the days of Steve’s death by my memories of him, there are moments when I breath in and at the bottom of my breath in the tiny flicker where it stops before turning inside on my out breath, it is in that speck of time where I feel a panic and I yearn for him, for my mother the most.
I have a dream, a recurring one that sometimes comes in different scenarios, always weird because dreams are strange, baffling, and weird, it is the very nature of dreams. As if reality is witnessed through a cracked kaleidoscope. In the dream I am leaping into the ocean, sometimes I’m wading in with the sun hot on my face, other times I am heaving myself into the water from a dock or a boat both and sometimes it is from a cliff like the Mexican divers who hurtle themselves over the rocks below to split the waves in half. The split is spitting into death’s face, “take that mother fucker.” I leap into the water and break the waves and then the waves break me, so they think but I’m already broken. Not whole. Not half, but a million shards of me, each one reflecting something else and in the ocean, they look like diamonds scattering in every direction, carried away.
Steve lives through my body, my thoughts, this is what I like to believe and when I play the music, he so cherished I feel him in the notes, the yelps of the singers and the bubbles of sound that carry me to a place where I usually feel safe. I know he listened for the same reasons I did, for comfort, for connection. Nobody dies instantly, we all die and live by degrees. Some are just closer than others, some can taste the bitter richness of whatever that unknown darkness carries. I miss you Steve, perhaps more than ever.
It was time to get a tree, the weather was telling me in the language that it spoke, in the form of wind, snow flurries and of clouds that had morphed during the last week of November to the first week of December, from one cloud into a giant mass of grey. The stores that I warily walk into were telling me, raining songs of a Holly Jolly Christmas and Jingle Bells that rock. My coffee shop was telling me by pushing Peppermint Chocolate Latte’s when I all I wanted was a black coffee (or a Pepsi). My girlfriend’s house was telling me, with decorations and baking commencing the week after Halloween. When my children were young, their mother and I would pack them into the gray Jetta Wagon and we would drive 45 minutes outside of Columbus, playing Christmas songs—always the sad ones (a harbinger to come?) to a Christmas Tree farm, climb aboard a wagon full of hay bales, track through the mud and cut down our tress. This was followed by watery hot chocolate as the workers bundled up the Christmas tree, then we strapped it on the roof and drove back home to set the tree up. The apartment I live in is small, it’s not lonely even though I basically live alone every other week, but these floors have no history of little feet scampering across the floor towards a tree that has seemed to have birthed presents overnight. Of the sound of giggling little children eating cookies while their father recounts his own insane childhood Christmases that were packed with oversized characters such a The Hungarian Grandmother, The Drunken Uncles and the Impatient Mom. The apartment had heard the sounds of laughter but not from tiny children but of teenagers and adults, whose jokes were no longer watered down, the walls also knew the sound of spinning records and of Christmas Choral music played for a single person and a dog.
Memory isn’t like a fog, it is more like a chunk of wood tossed into the ocean, floating and sinking and floating some more over the years as the salt from the sea wears its way through, slowly burnishing it until all the sharpness is gone and it is a light and smooth as a seagulls feather. As a middle-aged man I can no longer remember all of the details of my own children’s Christmases, they probably recall them more than I can but I do recall the feeling of Christmas when the air was magical for them. Their parents and grandparents the magicians who filled the dinner table with stories of Sinter Klass, and as Christmas rolled closer and closer of Santa Claus, oh, they were the lucky Dutch kids who got presents from both. Culture and tradition are part of their lives, just as mine was with that Hungarian grandmother who said it was the angles and the baby Jesus who brought our presents to her house on Christmas Eve. Apparently Santa flies over Budapest every December 24th to let that other guy do it. My children would pass out the presents on Christmas morning, while their mother and I drank our coffee and everybody would open one up in order. Unpacking the presents was very much packing future memories in their minds, to be opened and shared for years to come.
After having a few years of buying a freshly cut tree from the local garden center, and the kids having dwindling interest in decorating it, I purchased an artificial tree—plastic but with very little clean-up and no death except for the environment. It worked, and I bought a scented candle, which is something I never thought I would do and the little apartment seemed to have had a “cozy” switch installed when I plugged in the tree. Not bad, Bela, not bad (keep telling yourself that, the ghost of Christmas past whispers.)
This marks the first year of Christmas without my mother and my stepfather, and in some ways some more traditions will fall away. The Impatient Mother who stammered, “Damn it!” from the kitchen while she made her cranberry dish and swear, “this is the last time I’m going to make eggs Benedict, it’s too messy, someone else needs to do it.” I should write a song called “Guilty Eggs Benedict (for mom).” My daughter lives in Amsterdam and my son lives up the street most days, spending a few days with me every week, he’s fifteen and is more interested in his friends than sitting at home with a houseful of books and records, as I was at 15 and for many years until the need for making new memories has decreased as that driftwood becomes smoother and smoother. I have the opportunity to see the magic of Christmas in the lives of my partner’s children, although the youngest found out who the real magician was last year, another crest of a wave. My brother and sister will celebrate with their adult children, the first Christmas in over thirty years where all of us are residents of Ohio, my sister will reopen her memories from Christmas with her grandchildren, I will think about my mom, the different houses we lived in growing up all along the east coast and Ohio. I will also think of my father, someone I never really knew, only as a child—years whittling away at those memories. Sometimes family feels like a snowball dropped on the pavement, and other times it feels like the safety of twinkling lights and a scented candle.
So many puzzle pieces were scattered on the floor, on the dining room table, stacked on shelves haphazardly against dusty compact disks & half read books, in cardboard boxes that smelled of age and dampness, in plastic tubs filled to the top with even more pieces. They came in the form of conversations with siblings, with partners and family members that were disappearing like steam from a coffee cup. A photo taken from the front yard of a red clapboard house in Newport News, Virginia. Three children ranging from a smallish kid all of eight years old in a red tee-shirt, multi-stripped Brady Bunch Jeans complete with worn out knee, his brother, just one year older wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers the number 32 adorning the front as he would play pick up football pretending, he would be Franco Harris mouth jutting out for the quick and then the old sister. She stork-like, all skinny arms and legs with cut off shorts, long brown hair to her shoulders, she would have been in 7th grade. Behind them, the mother, short red hair, a yellow tank-top sans bra and reddish jeans, her fingers extended, face serious laying out the ground rules of the soon commencing Easter Egg hunt that was going to be, by all appearances, a throw-down. And finally, next to the mother, standing just inches behind her, but clearly behind her, the stepfather, short but compact and bear of a man whose strength was evident underneath the jean jacket he wore, the one with motorcycle patches sewn on. Eyes on his wife and a small grin on his face, a quiet man who loved intensely. But who took the photo? They were not very friendly with the neighbors who thought that these northerners were interlopers, to be met with guarded suspicion. The neighbor on one side was a gossip who called the mother, Susie, which she hated and dropped the n-word nonchalantly as did most of the neighbors. “The neighborhood has gone to hell since they moved in ten years ago” she had told the mother who promptly asked her to leave, making an excuse that she had somewhere to go. The neighbor on the other side of their house had four children, the oldest child, a girl went to school with the dark-haired daughter and would baby-sit that youngest child and at times make him take off his clothes and tie him up, telling him they were playing doctor as she took her bra off and rubbing her teenage breasts against him. He never told anyone, he wasn’t scared when it happened just perplexed and wondered what was happening. “Shhh, don’t tell anyone we do this, we will get in trouble.” Who took this picture so long ago? The photo is faded, the edges growing lighter with age, a time when most photos seemed other worldly as if every photo ever taken from 1966-1982 was taken on a soundstage, somewhat out of focus, the colors blurred and in the memory of those who were there, perhaps too, their memories were blurred, the photos directing the past. A soft and faded focus that dulled the pain behind some of these old photographs.
Stretch Armstrong with only moments to live.
Another photo, three boys almost all teenagers dressed in white blouses, pleated knee length shorts with close cropped hair all parted to the side. In the middle of them, their mother looking over her shoulder and smiling at her middle child, who is beaming a grin back to his mother. To her right, her eldest son, black haired, tall, and handsome, he too is smiling. Leading the front is her youngest son, probably thirteen or fourteen a bit of baby fat on his face, something that he would never quite shed even when he died at the age of seventy-five, a toothy grin looking straight at the camera. They are walking, feet raised and arms swinging. They are on a hill, behind them large parked heavy cars that look like they were props in an ancient noir movie. Palm trees, out of focus in the background informs the viewer of the tropical nature and a large looming mountain sits over it all, lending even more mystery to the locale. The mother’s hair is shoulder length, with artificial curls around her dangling earrings, and a small pearl necklace dips just below her neck. Sober jewelry but showing the importance of looking good, of proper manners. Her dress cut just below the knee, it’s white but it may be yellow, or a light blue—one will never know as the photo is black and white mostly likely taken in 1959 or 1960. Three of them are now dead, all lived to be old; half of them past the age of sixty, and all witnessed the transformation from a black and white world, to the bleached out nineteen sixties and seventies and finally to bright digital world of the 21st Century. Who took the photo, was it the father, the husband that was not around very often. The head of the household who lived nearly two hours away in a mountain top city near the sea, where he kept a small apartment and worked as an engineer. In his fridge he kept eggs, bread, jam and butter. A case of warm beer on the floor, Nero Wolff books next to his bed. Did he keep other things in this apartment? Other secrets? Did he take this photo of his family who were all smiling, an idyllic nuclear family who just fifteen years prior nearly died from both American and German bombs, making it to an Austrian refugee camp where they barely survived for nearly two years, until getting passage to this small South American country where this photo was taken? He may have, but most likely the mother hired a photographer as she would throughout her life, her growing family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren a testament to survival and, in the haze of chaos some stability. Just who took the photo, what were the color of their clothes? The colors of the bulky automobiles in the background?
A letter, typed on crispy fragile typewriter paper that feels like brittle parchment paper, if it was near a flame, it would immediately be engulfed in flames like a top secret note in a James Bond film, “this message will self-destruct in ten seconds.” Poof. Words uneven on the page, maybe the “t” and “o” keys were a bit off, as they look like jagged teeth in the middle of the sentences, hiccupping across the fragile page. The letter typed from that oldest son from that black and white photo taken so many years ago to his now youngest son, who was only six or seven years old at the time, living four hundred miles away on the far end of an island. A world away from the quietness of where this letter was typed, in a Benedictine monastery nestled in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is brief, the words simple but constructed of love and gentleness, where the father tells his son about the beauty and simplicity of picking plums, the brothers in Christ helping one another and laughing. A short description of seeing deer eat from the garden the monks grow, how the father abhors the killing of animals. At the end he asks his son to draw him a picture of flowers, how much he enjoys getting letters from his son. The letter sat silent for nearly fifty years until it was unearthed and given to the son, now middle-aged and over sixteen years had separated son and father since the last time they saw one another. What prompted the letter so many years ago? It was forgotten, a faint scent of the love the father once held closely for his young son who must have been thrilled to get the letter and its accompanying photograph of two young monks pulling plums from a tree.
A hole that doesn’t fit anywhere but fills in the large gaps that connect all the pieces, the holes that fill in the memories that are there but that aren’t there. They are not his memories, the boy who is now a man with children of his own on the cusp of their own adulthood, they are all filed away somewhere in the ground, in the ashes of the participants. I arrive in these boxes with my spelunker’s equipment: a light fixed on my forehead, rope, air, magnifying glass and DNA that can’t be read. Searching amongst these clues for an answer to these holes. So many god-damn holes.
A green cover that had the look of a well-played record, the ring of the round discs on the outside of it looked like the small scars of age, the two enclosed vinyl records sounded as if they had been stored in a coal mine, the songs crackly, skippy and almost faded from too many plays, a sound version of Black Lung disease. The songs sounded different from what was usually on our turntable; Jim Croce, Roberta Flack, Stevie Wonder, and various K-Tel compilation records that were so stuffed with current hits one could say these quick sell records were the forebears to streaming. Twenty-plus songs usually packed each side, it was easy to drop the needle to a favorite like Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From” or “Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss and K-Tel was the only way I could sneak one of a Kiss song into the house as an eager third grader. The record we were playing was a record bought over the television, from one of the companies that would flood after school television hawking collections of minor artists like Slim Whitman, Engelbart Humperdinck and Boxcar Willie who were mostly doing spot on covers of older named songs by more popular artists like Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, and Frank Sinatra. These companies churned out these collections at a quick pace, usually with the songs playing in the background while the track listing scrolled up the screen like movie credits, the artist usually singing on a darked stage with red or blue lights surrounding them. One could usually buy a two record set for 6.99 or 7.99 including postage on a double record or twin 8-track tapes, the song list would go on and on as the announcer pulled on the nostalgic heart-strings of folks who were pining for the ”good old” days that, at the time were only fifteen or twenty years in the past. For my siblings and I the music on this green covered double LP collection sounded from a long-lost time, a soundscape time-capsule of a period where the world was black & white, where clothes looked different, the world filled with short hair, the only men with beards were cowboys or villains from the movies and all the women and girls wore dresses. We had borrowed the record from a friend in the neighborhood. My mother bounded down the stairs, jumped off the last few stairs and immediately began to sway her hips from one direction to the other, with two rocks to the right, then two rocks to the left as she inched her way forward. Her lips pursed, a crackle in her eye she started mouthing all the words to “The Book of Love” we, her children sat both horrified and perplexed by our mother knowing the words to this old song that was a foreign to us as a horse and buggy.
Her eyes raised again, as she twirled around to the sounds of the inherently great “Sh-Boom” by The Chords, we were floored as she even knew the gobbly-gook of the second bridge scat that sounds something like “heylongleedingdongdelangdelanghohodippohdopeydopeydip” that then flows into the chorus, our brains nearly exploded when she sang the deep baritone solo of “every time I look at you…” This person who was dancing in odd steps, a few steps forward, a few steps backwards but always, somehow moving forward, with twirls and dressed in faded jeans, a yellowed tank top sans bra and large hooped earrings knew this Fred Flintstone caveman-like music. We started the record over while my mother encouraged us, and gasped as she put her lips together and made the burbling-spittle sounds of the revving motorcycle in “Leader of the Pack” and then we completely lost our shit, laying on the ground giggling at the ceiling as she in a womanly-deep voice, in hindsight sounding a bit like Bea Arthur the lyrics to “Chantilly Lace” and held a make-believe telephone to her ear.
“Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers floated out of the stereo speakers, lifted and carried my mother back to 1957 when she would have been 14 years old, shuffling around the room she took the hands of my step-father David, a shy man who was reticent to show his emotions but beneath his thick beard he took her hand and twirled her, brought her close where she pinged backwards still holding his hands and he twirled her again. She was laughing like the schoolgirl that she was transformed in, I watched every move as they laughed, storing away their dance moves deep in my mind to pull them out in four more years as I attended my first 7th grade dance and surprised all of my classmates by knowing how to dance, albeit in a 1950’s style but none of us knew better. We pulled out the other record from the sleeve, put it on the turntable and the sounds of Dion & the Belmonts covered the living room. Released during my mother’s senior year of high school, the song is pretty self-explanatory, “here’s my story, it’s sad but true, it’s about a girl I once knew who took my love and then ran around with every single guy in town.” She knew all the hey-heys and wam-bi0le-le, hey-hey as she slung her shoulders down, rocking back and forth, snapping her fingers and twirling her long red hair. I thought she was the most beautiful and carefree woman in the world at that point, to see her joyous was a very precious moment, even at the age of eight I knew this was special. “My friends used to sing this song and ‘wake up little Susie’ to me all the time” she gushed to us, pulling the curtains of her past ever so slightly. She never talked about high school just that she pushed her parents to the limits. Later, she would go more in depth about her high school experience, how her school Lincoln McKinnley was one of the very first integrated schools in Columbus, that she had black boyfriends with the approval of her mother and that she was known as the most dramatic girl in high school. Later, the lyrics to those songs would tell me a bit more about my mother.
She died 11 miles from her house, the week before she said she wanted to stay home as her children visited, her husband tending to her every need. Exhausted, Steve wasn’t sleeping much as he watched his wife slowly sink into her bed, her body twisting into itself as if were parchment paper tossed into a fire. Just a month before her death, Steve was diagnosed with liver cancer something he had somewhat expected due to a long-term IV drug habit that he kicked over 35 years ago with the help of my mother. They met in treatment; she was an administrator who chipped in running groups and he was a patient. They fell in love quickly, something that was not supposed to happen and married a few years later. She had helped him recover from a life of alcohol, drugs and being as wayward as a person could be without going prison, jail—yes, but nothing more. He told us, his somewhat adopted adult children through tears shortly before her death—“your mother gave me a family I thought I would never have, a family I never thought I deserved.” His devotion to my mother was immense, a true bodhisattva whose purpose was to provide comfort for his wife. Unlike her children, Steve was hopeful until that last week when his exhaustion caught up with him, when the Hospice worker told him that there was really nothing more to do, and like the exhaustion Steve felt within his body, his emotional and spiritual self, they had exhausted everything that was possible to extend her life. Her life had been a slow drip into oblivion, at times due to the lack of oxygen her brain was getting. She was childlike, pointing at things outside her window, on her walls, remembering memories that one would have thought had long dissipated with the rolling of the years. Then when the internal bleeding she had been suffering from got under control and her oxygen level returned she would be a woman in pain, in sporadic moments able to ask her grandchildren questions in a weakened voice and then yelling at Steve to give her some pain medication, water or any sort of comfort.
Her body grew more limp, she was accumulating bed sores and rashes, it took two of us to roll her over, to change her into comfortable clothing, the mother who was morphing into an infant before her children’s eyes. When hospice came with their transport, she realized she was leaving, “don’t let them take me, Steve.” We reassured her, told her we would try to bring her home soon and she nodded, gently trying to hold onto her hands. I sang her “Go Tell Aunt Rhoady” and she smiled and squeezed my hand, “you were always her favorite” my sister joked while my mom smiled a mischievous grin. “Not true” she breathed, a wisp of voice escaping her oh-so-dry mouth. She could no longer swallow, so Steve and my sister would insert water with a small thin dropper or put a little crushed ice below her tongue. She has sores in her mouth and her teeth were hurting, the body that had carried her for so many years was shutting off the lights.
Steve had taught himself to use a lift and pully to put her in a wheelchair, rolling her out into the living room or the patio so she could watch the birds they both loved so much. “They are better than TV” Steve joked to me, he had become more enamored with nature as he grew older, at times watching the small cameras various research groups had attached to Bald Eagles, Hawks and Owls nests in the wild, he would show these to my son who would call me and tell me about his grandfather’s fascination with watching these winged animals tend to their young. He taught my sister who was spending hours at the house to help roll her over, wash her and administer her oxygen. When I was there, I helped with these things, and just talking with my mother who was resisting death every step of the way, including a refusal to discuss what was happening with her. “I don’t want to talk about bad things” she would murmur. All the while Steve was struggling with his own health, at first, the prognosis for his cancer was good. The tumor was (thought to be) small and operable. And if not, he would be eligible for a liver transplant by summer if the tumor would shrink. He was hopeful as we all were, and after my mother passed away, he turned back into some of the things that she would get upset about. Mostly playing music incredibly loud, he listened to the music of his younger years, The Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground—especially the noisy “White Light White Heat” album, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith as well as the raggedy blues of Blind Willie McTell, Lighting Hopkins. The dissonant sounds of Alfred Schnittke and Dimitri Shostakovich shook the house, no doubt there were days when he was playing these classical composers louder than anybody else in the United States at that moment.
Steve died in March, all of the treatment we had been holding onto were either not possible or failed, it was not unexpected but the gravity of his death has been—while he was my stepfather he was a centering force in the lives of our family. More than my mother I struggle with expecting him to pick up the phone, or to send me a link to a new favorite piece of music he discovered or knowing if I needed anything I could just reach out. I miss his wisdom, I miss his smile and even the way he ordered pizza, always going overboard to make sure everybody was satisfied.
Since the fall of 2021 I have been living In between the gears of a watch that is scrapping and tracking time in the increments of moments, with a worry that I thought only happened to some but would not fling itself at my door and into the mechanisms of my mind. There are days when I feel as if I am living life behind a screen door, fingers gently touching the small metal windows that form both an opening and a barrier to the world. If I lean in close, I can see through one, breath in the outside world and feel I can be a part of it. When I got sober, I wondered if I would ever laugh again, that one of the benefits of alcohol was the ability to laugh outrageously, the idea of sobriety meant that the world would turn from Techni-color to grays, blacks and whites. Of course, I was mistaken and soon I was laughing more than ever, never having to force a laugh—I became more comfortable with myself. When I met my partner, we laugh and we continue to do so, she is one of the funniest people I know, a wit that comedy writers would be envious of—I have counted on her to lift be through the screen but I have a guilt that my wit has been subdued, dulled by the fact that I have continued to feel so much loss and the continual worry that has settled in. I do the things I have always done, the things that have worked, meditate, exercise, walk, music and of course, write although the writing is darker—trying to make that screen made up of hundreds of wired windows into something else, of cutting the screen out. My mother has been dead over a year, on this day, my second birthday without my mother and the first Father’s Day without Steve I am thinking of them. Thinking how my mother would write me a $50 check every birthday, and the last one she wrote for me she giggled and said, “sorry I write like an old woman now. I guess I am one.” Imma going to make sure I laugh today.
Light. Everything was light that wasn’t coming from anywhere it was just everywhere, nothing could be seen except the light. Nothing could be felt except the light. She felt him there in the light, not physically she had nothing to physically touch him with, only the sense that he was there with her, behind her. She had waited for him, here wandering in the light as if she were made of water and the light was made of water and her thoughts were made of water. Moving from one end of this sea of light to the next, she was water and so she was everywhere but nowhere distinctly just a feeling of something. The wait was longer than she thought but every time she would think about him, about the wait she would remember the light she was submerged in and all the worry that crept upon her like silent vines would disappear, vanished as soon as she allowed herself to notice the light. There was nothing but being swallowed as well as swallowing in everything that was.
Formless but also naked, which she wondered how that could be and there was no shame, there was no anger, there was only purity the engulfed her. There was his voice but there was no voice, his presence behind her and beside her, below her, above her but not in front of her. Something pulled her deeper into the light, a current both propelling and guiding her. She twirled, danced. Frolicked. She exploded and came back together in a moment that wasn’t a moment, everything, and nothing. It made no sense, but it didn’t have. If she was breathing, she would be breathless. She heard him although she had no ears. She could feel him and she waited, she encouraged him although she had no voice and she smiled, she laughed although she had no mouth. She spun in circles, the arms she didn’t have were raised high, higher than high, boundless, she danced, and the joy was consuming, and she felt the giddy panic of love as it grew closer. She was an orgasm. She was music. She was the sky and the sun and the ocean. All of something and nothing of everything. “I hear you” she called out, she stretched outwards as if she were a cloud rolling backwards, rolling sideways, rolling below her and rolling above her, to capture him, to pull him in close. To guide him. He walked into her and they clasped the hands they didn’t know. They wore nothing. They had no bodies but felt as if they did, they laughed, touching all and touching nothing as they became the current, they dissolved into the light. Here, they were together, something more than they ever wondered- they were connected completely. There was no pain, no ache in their bones, in their hearts or in their soul. Although they would soon be pulled into something else, this did not matter, it was nothing. Some answer of a question that they didn’t know existed, providing something more than comfort, more than even language could ever describe.
Music poured out of both of them, through them, all the notes that had ever been played bounded around them, tying it all together like the greatest melody ever written. They were a symphony of laughter, a song of lust, the drum beat of the most perfect moment which was every moment that they had existed together. She looked at him, he smiled back-a grin that wrapped around her, tying her to him and unraveling her into the light that dissolved them, she saw him as a boy, as little league baseball player pitching a perfect game, as a child hiding under his bed while his father stood in the doorway massaging a leather belt, as a stoned twenty-year old staring at the cover of “Sticky Fingers.” As a fractured man, with holes in his arms, a coat that needed washing as the county sheriff stood over him, red lights blinding his eyes. Saw him as their limbs intertwined, as she licked his neck, and the world became small and exploded. Saw him as he kissed her forehead and opened the curtains to see the crowd of colors fighting for food, feathers falling to the ground. As he held her brittle hands when she hovered over him from the ceiling, when his tears fell on her cold face. He saw her as a girl pulling weeds by a tractor, wearing a Poodle Skirt and shimmering to “Sh-Boom” across the gymnasium floor, this was supposed to be in black and white like the picture that hung on their bedroom window but her she was, head tossed backwards as she giggled, her toes turning in and out as a line of boys and other teenage girls followed her lead. Her red hair swimming in the lights. He saw her giving birth, the smiling relief, the tears of exhaustion that fell from her eyes as she pulled her newborn daughter to her chest, breathing in the smell of new life. He saw her panicked as fists came down upon her as she scrambled across her bed. He saw her looking at him, a smile that spoke of things to come, eyebrows raised. Her comforting him, holding his hand, instilling hope. He saw her in bed, struggling for breath, all her children holding her. Her laughter that filled the room. Her blue-green eyes. They saw all of this, felt everything. They hovered, collapsed, and hovered again.
This is from a collection of short stories I have been writing on and off for a few years, I am currently working on a book about my mother–so I have not posted very much new writing over the past year–since she got sick and passed away. The “Chair” portion of the title stems from a chair that is in every story–all of them take place in the same furnished apartment. Any feedback is appreciated. -Bela
It was as dented as his head, except the scars that crawled over his scalp were covered by long hair that he sometimes stretched back into a ponytail, usually under a well-worn Red Man baseball cap, but his truck on the other hand wore her dents for the entire world to see—proudly. Every blemish, scratch and nick a story of mistakes, ill-choices and just plain bad luck. He would sometimes remark, “I ain’t got much but luck, mostly bad luck” this was always followed by a laugh that was as disheartening as a laugh could be. If one started from the front of the truck to the tailgate that was fastened to the bed with an old dog chain on one side, one could write a story. From the knarled front fender that had a least fifteen confrontations with trees, fences, dumpsters and at least one deer, to the duct-taped passenger side mirror that once house a mirror but was now only a hollow rusting crater, first the mirror was cracked when he clipped the side of bulldozer in his father’s front yard, and then only a few weeks later when he punched the glass out in a fit of rage that he no longer remembered why. Probably because he was upset with his girlfriend, “better to hit my truck than her face, although she probably needs a good walloping” he said to his on again, off again best friend, Jake. Almost all of these metallic scars were due to alcohol, maybe a few were helped along by marijuana but for the most part his driving and daily life was infused or perhaps, fueled with alcohol. “That’s why I buy trucks, they can handle my drinking” he told Jake one afternoon, this was followed by a belch, the crushing of a beer can and then the cracking of the opening of the next beer. And a swallow. There were always more swallows. Every swallow a scratch towards death.
A tall can of Budweiser sat between his legs, growing warm as he yanked the steering wheel and passed a slow moving blue minivan, he glanced at the mother of the van and whistled, nobody heard him, and he grabbed the beer, the can half-finished his fingers making mini-impressions in the beer as he accelerated past. The speedometer didn’t work, it bounced back and forth between zero and ninety, as if on a trampoline and googly-eyed, the engine was a brave roar as he sped forward, crushing the can in his hand before tossing it out of the window. He belched in the cab, felt in his right pants pocket and pulled out a crushed pack of Marlboro cigarettes, he was determined to slowly kill himself by small degrees every waking moment, he had lived with anxiety so much of his life that he would not recognize calm if suddenly appeared. Even his dreams were busy, he dreamed of tornadoes, sinking boats, wild dogs and fire. Lots of fire. House fires. Truck fires. Forest fires. Once he even had a dream his shoes were on fire and he couldn’t get them off. He woke up wild-eyed, his legs twitching, reaching down and touching the toes that poked out of the ends of his ruddy white athletic socks. No fire. He eyed himself in the mirror, the five-day growth on his chin filled with gray, the lines around his eyes cut into his face, he yawned. The image didn’t match what he felt, which was tired rage although he looked just tired, like the bottom of a worn-out boot, he was scuffed and busted, bruised to the core. Although he didn’t stop his mind long enough to even contemplate this, he shrugged at the whiskers and took another swallow. The life he led was teeming with swallows, boundless searching for the most perfect drink in the world, the next one might be better than the last. Maybe. The hills were spent as well, collapsing into themselves, they appeared to be slouching their shoulders, bent trees lined the ridges, they had dreamed of being mountains but were only foothills—the hills knew this much about themselves. An entire region born in despair, even the landscape was forgotten, remembered only by those that lived there, the way the sun cast the sky pink at 7 pm or the way the flies would explode during the humid August heat, and then there was the mosquitoes, who governed the land with their needle faces from May to September. He pulled off the State Route into a small two-lane road that twisted like a serpent between a cluster of hills. Waving at a woman hanging laundry on a yellowed rubber wire fastened to a water tank and an abandoned pick-up truck, she waved back, her smile crossing her face as if were a curtain rising on a Broadway play. A magical world lay just beyond her lips. An old lover’s memory, she always thought him handsome despite his violence, maybe because of it, she never knew. She watched him drive past until he disappeared around a bend, reached down into the blue basket at her feet and fastened a pair of pants to the laundry line. She felt like a flower when she knew him and he felt like a razor, cutting her leaf by leaf but she never noticed until there was nothing left of her. “It’s o.k., mom, he means well” she spoke to her mother one day, staring out the sooty window of her mother’s trailer, “Mean is the imperative word there, honey. You can’t trust a man who shows his love with a balled fist and knives of teeth” her mother sniffed back.
Driving further into the hills that crammed the sky, pushing it out of view while his truck heaved up the narrow road, climbing towards another ridge—a broken fence, trailers and more trailers, yards filled with old appliances, tires, old cars, and decrepit shacks–this was home, this was what was familiar. Pulling off into a dirt road that was more of a trail than a road, the axle groaned and the tires slipped in the mud before catching and rocking the truck forward, the back end swung wide as he pressed the accelerator down, “C’mon” he coached, the words slipping between his yellowed teeth. He could have said this to the truck or for himself. He drank the last of the beer and tossed the can out the side of the window. Ahead, across a small field his small white house sat, trees stood behind it, like a choir of background singers standing on an otherwise empty stage. Pulling up to a patch of red dirt blotted with black patches of oil and pockets of weeds, he sighed and reached for another beer as he turned the truck off. As he stood by the truck, undid his pants he took a long piss while drinking the can to half empty, thinking about what still needed to do before tomorrow. Unload the truck, make a few phone calls, other than that there were no other plans, this was the way he had lived his life for years, and when lovers and bosses complained they were reminded that they knew they were signing up for when they got involved with him, an assumption they should have known. He wore all the signs of his lifestyle like a walking Las Vegas neon sign.
He pulled the boards from the back of the truck, had “found” them on an unattended construction site early that morning after driving back from his cousin’s house after a long day of drinking, he lined them next to his house, kicking some spider webs out of the way while droplets of sweat trickled down his back. Lifted out an old rocking chair that was left in front of another house, some gnarled pieces of gutter and, finally, the groceries. Two twelve packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, one box of frozen chicken patties, two frozen pizzas, a pack of cigarettes and a bag of cheese puffs. The night was set.
Sometimes a person doesn’t know they are lonely, it only comes upon in odd feelings, a clutch in the gut or like some eerie background music in their lives. Tom never thought he was lonely, he preferred to be alone until he wasn’t alone, then he would seek out something to keep him occupied until it got too hot then, he would need to leave, it was easier living alone—no hassles except for his own which were best ignored. Tom put away the groceries, leaving one twelve pack on the floor next to the couch, shut the refrigerator door with his backside as he balanced a cigarette in his left hand while holding a frozen pizza and a beer in his right hand, the pizza box being clutched with his ring and pinky fingers. Carefully laid it on the small linoleum table top in his kitchen, putting the lit cigarette on the end of the table, if it burned all the way down it didn’t really matter, the table was not only covered in small thin blue and silver stars that looked like 1950’s Christmas decorations but also with dozens of cigarette burns, the long suffering table could say nothing but stay silent and take the almost daily abuse of Tom. He stuck the pizza in the over, walked over to the boom box he kept by the television which only got three and a half channels, the local Fox station came in as fuzzy and full of rolling static and put a Joe Walsh CD in, making air guitar motions to “Life’s Been Good” as he walked back in the kitchen to retrieve the last drags of the cigarette. “Close call” he spoke to himself plucking it off the edge of table, an inch of ash dangling for the end, and pulled a long drag and took another swallow off his beer.
He had grown up not fifteen miles from this small house, his father a part-time truck driver and part time inmate. His mother worked at the local IGA and sold Avon until she decided that she could make more extra money selling black beauties and then, later, Tom’s Adderall and Ritalin on the side. When she was finally busted by the police, she found Jesus and started attending church groups nearly every night. Tom had one older brother, Tim who had died on the railroad tracks when Tom was twenty-one, “it could have been an accident” he would say when he talked about Tim who had his own share of run-in’s with the police, “then again maybe it wasn’t.” He would add, a pregnant pause with raised eyebrows. Tom’s younger sister, Tammy, still lived in the small town they grew up in with her two bi-racial kids and her girlfriend who was always begging them to leave. “It’s all fine with me” Tom would say, “as long as they are happy I don’t give a fuck. To each his own.” He got along well with Tammy who sometimes would bail him out of jail, or loan him gas money, drop off a bag of groceries when he was struggling and he was always struggling—“Tom, why don’t you come by the house—the kids would love to see you. So would Marsha and me, you make the kids laugh. Just don’t come by drunk.” This was a problem and was the biggest reason why Tom didn’t stop to see his sister, she was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, so was Marsha and he had too much respect for them and didn’t want to disrupt their lives, even if was just for dinner. The last time Tom showed up drunk at Tammy’s he had been on a five-day bender, one that started on a Monday and would continue for nearly ten days by a trip to the county jail. Over dinner he leaned over to his six-year-old nephew, “hey Timmy, you know you were named after your Uncle Tim, he died just a few miles from here. He was a funny man, your Uncle Tim.” Tammy held her fork and eyed Tom over her plate, “Don’t start talking about Tim, not now.” Tom grinned, stabbed his pork chop, lifted the entire piece sideways into his mouth, “anyway, your uncle was one crazy son-of-a-bitch, he used to talk to the devil.” He chewed with his mouth open, the smell of charred meat mixed with whiskey burned from his lips. “Tommy, stop” Tammy set her fork down. Smiliing, he continued while staring straight at his sister, her eyes blew through him like the chill in January, “Anyway, Tim told me one night that the devil, who he sometimes called Mr. Pete, don’t ask me why but when he would say, Mr. Pete came last night we all knew he meant Satan. So, he says to me, this is right before he died, he said—Mr. Pete crawled up under the covers with me last night, he snuggled real close and his breath felt like charcoal on my face and told me he was gonna grab my soul real soon and make me a bed to rest in forever. That we’d be bunkmates. But I wouldn’t need no pillow.” Marsha muttered, “please Tommy stop, you are gonna scare the kids.” He tore off another piece of meat with his teeth, “well, just a few days later he come across that train and the train won that battle. Tore his head clean off, it laid on one side of the tracks while his body laid on the other. Yup.” Tammy slammed her fist down, little Tim stared up at his uncle, wide-eyed, mouth agape, and said nothing. “You can leave now” Tammy scooted her chair back and walked to the front door, “out!” Tom took a long drink of water, “Twats wrong Tammy, ignoring facts don’t make them go away Tammy, a boy should know who he is named after.” He mussed Timmy’s hair and shouted his good nights. He wasn’t invited back for nearly six months and then only under the condition of not drinking.
The smell of dust and cracked corn husks floated through the window beckoning Tom outside, turning the boom box towards the door, sliding three cigarettes out of the pack onto the table he put one behind each ear and lit the other one and went outside on the porch while his cardboard pizza baked in the oven. He wiped some dirt off his jeans that were so thin his kneecaps nearly poked through the stretched denim, the dirt just smudged his fingers and fabric from the grease that had built up for wearing them for the past three days. He watched a small stream of ants migrate from under the porch to an apple core he had discarded earlier in the day, he wiped his nose on the back of his arm and squinted as the sun reminded him who the boss was. A thought popped up, a recurring one that came whenever the ache of regret pinged inside of him, an alarm that seemed to be perpetually on snooze—it came on every fifteen minutes. This was involved when he had moved to the city when he was twenty-two, although he was only there for five months it loomed large in his life and was something he never talked about very much. He immigrated to the city to look for work, a new life that would pull him from the drudgery of the sticky poverty he had grown up in. His best friend Aaron told him, “there ain’t nothin’ up there that you can’t get here, plus you’ll get robbed.” Tom answered, “well the nothin’ there will be my nothin’ and you gotta own something to get robbed and I ain’t got nothing except my truck and boredom. I’m going to get a job, a pretty woman and not have to drive from one end of the hills to the other looking at the same ugly shit, like your face.” Aaron smiled and said, “but you will miss this ugly face” and got up to fetch another beer.
The bar was wedged between an alley and a store-front “antique” shop that was, in reality a narrow space stuffed with items that had been discarded by others because they had worn out their usefulness: singed skillets, threadbare clothes, broken toys and an assortment of gold- & silver-plated jewelry that was crammed into a glass encased countertop. And the dust. Dust that fell off some of the clothing and items like snow, even the old woman who ran the shop appeared to be coated in dust, she was perpetually rubbing her glasses on the sleeves of her blouse telling every customer who held something out to her to “hold on honey, I need to fix my glasses” before telling them the price of whatever they were wanting to purchase. Nothing had a price tag. The bar was only a few blocks from the apartment he had rented, it was an affordable one bedroom, came furnished except for a bed but he decided he could just as well sleep on the frayed blue couch. After paying his rent and obtaining his keys he trudged up the stairs, opened the door, put the 12-pack of Busch beer on the kitchen counter, tossed his Hefty bag of laundry into the bedroom and opened a window to let the air in. “Smells like old woman and cats up in here” he said to no one as he cracked a beer. He pulled the lone chair out from under the small Formica table and put it beside the window where he gazed out at the people walking on the sidewalk below, blowing cigarette smoke towards the traffic. After three beers he locked the door, went down the stairs two steps at a time and went looking for the bar he noticed on the way towards his apartment. Taking note of the antique store next to the bar, “I can get my pots and pans there” he ducked into the bar, the sunlight closed behind him as he sat at the bar and ordered a shot and a beer. This became his home away from home during the next six months.
He got a job at a warehouse where he unloaded hardware goods off wooden pallets into massive steel shelves that resembled girders and stretched several stories high. He became adept at using a forklift and, at first enjoyed the job, it was tedious but the pay was more than he made working at the convivence store back home and he made a few friends who he could smoke pot with on their lunch breaks. His first paycheck he splurged and bought a steak dinner at Ponderosa, goring himself on the salad bar and the most expensive steak on the menu. After that, he would pay his rent, gas up his truck and spend the rest of his money on beer and weed. In his third month on the job his supervisor called him into his office and explained that the company had recently been sold and there would be mandatory drug screens starting at the end of the month. “Plenty of time to get any substances out of your system” he leveled his eyes at him from across his desk, “not saying you like a little of the devil’s salad but I know some of the men around here like to relax in a certain way.” He knew his days were numbered.
She pulled up next to him on the barstool, she did not belong in this bar, he was surprised she wandered in. He looked at her from above his bottle of beer, she wore her hair in a long ponytail, had tight leather pants, a band tee-shirt with the sleeves cut off, her black bra straps speaking to the world that she was her own woman. “Can I get a shot of Jager and a gin and tonic” she motioned to the bartender. “Hey” she said sideways to him. “Hey, back at you” he answered, “first time here?” She swallowed her shot, “yeah, I was seeing a show with my friends but my asshole ex-boyfriend showed up so I ducked out and saw this place, I pass it all the time, and figured what the hell, why not?” Lighting a cigarette, he nudged the box toward her and she said thanks, picked up the box and tapped a cigarette out, he leaned over and lit it for her. Nodding her head in thanks as she exhaled a plume of smoke she asked him what his name was and what he did. “Tom, I work at the ACE warehouse—it pays pretty well, at least better than the shitburg where I’m from. I just moved up here a few months ago but, it’s cool. I like the city life.” The bartender put another beer in front of him, another nod of thanks and he pointed to her gin and tonic, she in turn nodded thanks. It was a dance of nods through the smoke. “What do you like about it? The city, I mean” she asked him. Pausing, “well there is more to do than where I’m from where the only thing going on is getting drunk, driving around the hills looking for the same old pussy and getting high. There aren’t very many jobs unless you want to work at a gas station…. Sorry about the pussy remark.” “No worries, I understand. I get it—but what do you do for fun?” She sipped her drink, made more smoke and looked at him. He had to think about her question, tapping the ashes from his cigarette, pausing—“I guess I come here, I dunno—sometimes smoke a bowl and listen to the radio. I’ve never really thought about it….what about you?” The question was posed as an invitation, his side grin giving him away—“she’s out of my league” he thought to himself. “I read books, I listen to music. Loudly. And I get high. Fuck. All the things everybody does for fun. And sleep, that’s the most fun.” She accepted his invite and for the next three weeks they did all of those things until one morning she woke up on the mattress on the floor that he had pulled out of the empty apartment next to his, their piles of clothes next to the bed, bottles of beer next to the bed-empty except for the cigarette butts, and looked around the room. There was a tacked-up photo of James Dean next to his closet that was half way open because it wouldn’t close from the pile of laundry jutting out from the bottom, his dusty boombox with cassette tapes strewn around it in the rush they were discarded next to it. Lynard Skynard. AC/DC. Def Leppard. Billy Squier. Heart. The music of a dullard she thought to herself. She rolled over and looked at him, his breath making a small whistling noise as it exited his mouth, she could see the ends of his front teeth and smell his breath.
She got up, pulled her clothes on, boiled water for the instant coffee he had and she shook her head as she unscrewed the top of the canister, there was a pile of sugar and instant creamer he had grabbed by the handful from the Burger King up the street. She stirred the coffee with a plastic spoon she had to wash off in the sink and sat down on the wooden chair, she smoked a cigarette. Then another one and by the fourth one he walked out of his room wearing only a tight pair of jeans, there was a grimy shine to them at she felt repulsed and attracted to him in that moment. “You have no books” was all she said. “Huh?” waving his hand across his greasy matt of hair, “what do you mean? Did you make any coffee for me?” he asked as he walked towards the kitchen. “It’s instant, just put the water in the microwave. You don’t own any books.” She pressed her fingers into her eyes. “Yeah, so? Who cares, I watch tee-vee, it saves me time.” On the other side of the room sat his black and white television, a VCR sat next to it with a small stack of used VHS tapes: “The Terminator”, “A Rebel Without a Cause”, “Smokey and the Bandit” and three pornos. “I need to leave, this isn’t going to work out” under her breath she muttered, “you have no books.” She scooted her chair back, carried her empty coffee cup to the kitchen where he stopped her, grabbed her by the elbows, “you are leaving because I don’t own any books?” “Yes, and please let go of me. Your breath stinks.” She felt disgusted by him but more by herself. Grabbing her harder, his hands moved up her arms, he was much stronger than her. “You can’t just leave; we need to talk about this.” “Stop. You are hurting me. There is nothing to talk about, we don’t have anything in common except we like smoking and getting drunk. Most people I know like those things, but it doesn’t mean I have to fuck them! I need to leave before I disappear in my own life.” In a flash he threw her against the counter, “fuck you bitch! Nobody is leaving here until I say so!” His eyes dark, his cheeks full of anger and hurt as he stepped towards her his hands raised. She turned towards him, in a quick movement she smacked him on the side of the face with her coffee cup knocking him against the cabinet, the cup fell to the floor, a hundred tiny slivers of ceramic exploded on the linoleum. “Don’t you ever touch me again!” she hissed as she rushed past him, grabbing her purse from the back of the chair, and rushed out. He tried to follow her out, left hand against his right temple that was gushing blood, it was cascading down his face onto the floor. Bright red droplets bursting across the floor, he yelled towards her, “come back here! Fucking bitch!” and as he stepped forward, he cut his foot on a large chunk of the broken cup. Moving to the chair, he sat down and folded his hands around his face and wept. On the floor blood pooled around his feet.
A few months later Tom arrived back in Southeastern Ohio , he called up his uncle Henry, “hey, I’m back—do you need any work done?” There was shame in his voice, the boldness that had once been present had vanished, to be replaced by a shadow, one of humiliation and resignation. He was flat broke and staying with his sister. “The big city finally had enough of you and kicked you out, huh?” Henry chuckled into the phone, “I told you that nothing good came from up there, just a bunch of busy idiots.” A pause, Henry’s voice softened, “well, I suppose you are staying with your sister or one of those drunken hillbilly friends of yours, I have that trailer up on the ridge. I got that cocksucker Holmes to finally move out and you can stay up there. I have some fence work that I need help with and that’ll keep you busy until you find out what you wanna do. Come by tomorrow and we will work it out.” Henry was his mother’s brother, he had a troubled childhood like most in the area, eventually got arrested for t-boning his car into the side of a postal truck and going to prison for a year after the postman died a few days later. After getting out of prison he never drank again, went to church every Sunday and went to work, owning rental properties and building fences and small repairs for the farmers and widows of the area. He wasn’t rich but he wasn’t poor either. “Thank you, Uncle Henry.” When Henry died, nearly ten years ago Tom had burned up the relationship like it was on of his packs of Doral cigarettes, he had to admit the his Uncle offered him many opportunities, gifting him many chances to prove himself of his kindness but Tom was never able to be up to the task of getting over the hump and doing the right thing. There was the first time he stole from his uncle, nearly a year after working for him—he needed some cocaine and sold the tools he was given by his uncle, and he told himself that he wasn’t technically stealing them but he knew that Henry would buy him new ones, “a man can’t build a good fence with just his bare hands” he had told Tom when he was informed that the tools were “stolen” out of Tom’s truck, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a wad of money, peeled off 3 hundred dollar bills and handed them to Tom. Next it was stealing a generator from a job, and not showing up for work, getting a DUI while driving his cousin Tammy home from high school. “You can drink and drive all you want but not with my daughter in the car, for God’s sake Tom-it was three in the afternoon, and you were supposed to go back to work.” That was the first time Henry fired him. And he would go on to hire and rehire him many times, like cards being shuffled in and out of each other, over the next seven years until Tom cursed Henry out at a Thanksgiving dinner while in a black-out. Since then, Tom was hustling, finding odd jobs, trying to sell weed, make half-hearted attempts at getting sober. “Close call” he whispered to himself as he smelled the pizza burning from inside the small house. He pushed the cigarette butt in the ground, turning his boot into it several more times than necessary and headed back inside while Joe Walsh played in the background.
For many years, the downtown skyline of Columbus, Ohio had one lone solitary skyscraper, the Leveque Tower stood high and bold and a sort of middle finger to the rest of the Midwest, announcing that Columbus indeed had a skyline, damnit. When my immigrant uncles arrived from sprawling Caracas, with its immense buildings rising towards the ever-present fog that sat on the mountains around it, they laughed and for years referred to the Leveque Tower as an erection in the middle of Ohio. “Dat is not a building, it’s a boner in da middle of Cowtown” my Uncle Pedro would laugh every time we passed underneath it. But near the base of the Laveque Tower, just a block away sat one of the very first large department stores in the Midwest, the Lazarus Building was for many years the destination for all Central Ohio shoppers, until the suburban mall craze of the late sixties slowly stole all their customers, until finally in the early aughts the store finally shook, wailed and finally shuttered its doors for good.
Lazarus was not only the place to buy school clothes, business suits, furniture, appliances, but it also included fine dining as well as a cafeteria that overlooked a large courtyard in the center of the department store—all seven stories of it, but perhaps the largest attraction of the store was its annual Christmas showpiece which stretched almost a city block. A massive display of elves, Santa, his workshop as well as hundreds of shiny and glittery presents with giant ribbons, cotton-y snow, and the most fascinating attraction of all aan enormous miniature train that ran the entire block, through Santa’s North Pole village, mountain ranges that echoed the great Alps of Europe and eventually to the small towns that dotted Ohio. This was Christmas for many of us.
Bela’s living room 2022
My grandparents lived just a few miles north of downtown in the sprawling Linden neighborhood that crawled up the east side of Columbus to the far northern end of the city. Their smallish cap-cod was much larger when I was five years old than the broken down house, in the broken down section that my grandparents lived when I drive by it forty-five years later, but I recall the fireplace that was always crackling and popping along with the Christmas muzak the continuously played from the clunky 1960’s stereo console that stood next to my grandmother’s leather back chair sitting opposite of her husband’s Laz-E-Boy. After arriving at my grandparents, sitting in front of the fireplace, drinking hot chocolate while my grandparents slid into their nightly haze of Johnny Walker Red. All the while the Christmas tree flickered, blinked, and amazed me.
Lazarus Christmas Display circa 1950’s—from The Columbus Dispatch
The next morning, always a Saturday, my mother would shepherded us in the orange four-door Datsun and drive us to Lazarus where she would bitch and complain about the lack of parking, hustle out of the car and there was snow, always the thick, grimy snow of cities that caked itself against rubber boots, rubber tires and the bottom of the heavy metal car doors of the nineteen sixties and seventies. We would go into that large department store full of mystery and awe and head towards the real Santa and the tiny shed that sat in the middle of courtyard, I would cry and bray as we stood in line, triggered by my older brother’s crying as well—because, hey-if he was crying Santa must be an intense dude. My mother would set us on Santa’s knee, a knee what was probably as soiled with pee as the downtown alleys that many of the homeless drunks would duck into. After the bawling on Santa’s lap my mother would buy a bag of popcorn from the Woolworth’s next door and we would walk the block, mesmerized by the display of Christmas that stretched longer than a child’s imagination could travel, farther than the moon and back, much father in fact—into the space dust of the universe. This was something to behold, the elves, Santa’s North Pole village, the longest (by far) miniature train set that looped and climbed snow caped mountains, multiple tunnels and bridges that went over frozen rivers. And the presents, soooo many presents—what were in those shiny perfectly wrapped packages?
Lazarus circa 1980’s photo from The Ohio History Connection
In a few years we landed in Springs, Long Island, a village just a breath away from East Hampton and our house sat near the end of long road—the back yard woods filled with ticks, box turtles and poison ivy that kept us occupied for the one glorious year we lived there. Being from Ohio means that whenever you are near a mountain you have to climb it and whenever you are near a ocean you have to either swim in it or stand next to it and think about swimming in the mystery. Thanksgiving of nineteen-seventy-four, after filling ourselves on Turkey, oyster stuffing and mounds of mashed potatoes my mother packed us into that Datsun and we drove the two miles to the beach, which was empty of course with a bitter wind blowing in from the Atlantic. The only people who would be on the beach on this fridgid November would be some idiots from Ohio. We picked up as many shells as we could and when we got home, my mother washed them out, popped popcorn over the stove top, poured out a few bags of cranberries and opened up several packages of contruction paper. There, on the floor around our Christmas tree she weaved string through the shells, cranberries, and popcorn and strung them on the pine tree branches. She helped our little hands glue the construction paper together, making a multi-colored and no doubt adorable pathetic chain that most like stood like an open little boy’s zipper on that tree, but it was our homemade chain.
At night after tucking me in, she would sing in her Joan Baez-y affected voice and trill out Silent Night as she tucked the covers in around me. “Honey, right now Santa is flying over the ocean, he will be delivering presents soon, but you need to sleep.” I thought about how cold the old elf must be, “Mom, he’s going to be cold when he gets here.” “We will have hot chocolate for him, I promise, and carrots for the reindeer.” In my head a visions of Santa peering down into the swirling waves as snow pelted him and I drifted off to sleep. In the morning there were presents, even though we were poor there were plenty of them under that cranberry and shell covered tree and it was magical, in the seams of my life as I fold into my memories I realize that only a mother can unwrap a child’s imagination.
Stretch Armstrong with only moments to live.
As I got older, and many of things that I believed in as a child morphed into the logic of a man, one that watched people live and, of course die, of having my own children watching the amazing world that beams from their smiles, and eyes, always their eyes—I realize that it is easy to dismiss the wonderment of life I may feel. This past spring, the last spring of my mother’s life as her mind flickered and words escaped from her throat before she could voice them she sat in her favorite chair looking out at the bluebirds, cardinals and woodpeckers that flew in front of the large picture window to feed on an endless supply of nuts and seed. My mother gazed over at me, as I tried to coax memories from her—the same way that she opened my imagination so many years ago, in the way that only a mother can do-she smiled at me and asked, “Do you remember the Christmas tree we decorated on Long Island, we put the shells in the tree and popcorn? I loved that Christmas, that was my favorite tree ever.” I didn’t remember but I told her I did, because of course I did.
Two Thousand-Twenty-Two was one of those years that approach as a rolling clouds in the distance, when a storm is beautiful as gray, black and smoky clouds tumble over one another, letting the wind be the guide in their mutual dance. The sky playing peek-a-boo behind all the darkness, winking in pinks, purples and blue—a reassurance that the weather is so small in the scheme of things, just the movement of elements. As they year unfolded, already there was a the sprinkles of cold rain from two-thousand twenty-one but the wind picked up, as lightning crackled, cawed and taunted the ground—the year grew more fearsome and soon I was looking for shelter as it battered everything around me. Being stuck in a storm can feel helpless and then there is a resignation, after running in the pouring rain of just giving up trying not to get wet, just accept it and walk slowly home. When my mother went to the doctor’s office in late February of the year it was a formality, just checking on why she wasn’t feeling well and she called me that night and said they would change her medication and monitor her the next few months. She ate dinner that night with Steve, and in the meantime, 90 miles away in Columbus another part of my world was cratering, and I was discovering that there is no way to glue a piece of beautiful ceramic back together as it is in the process of being smashed to pieces on the floor—that in some cases you just have to let it break before picking up and gluing the pieces back together.
Grief starts before somebody has died, before a relationship ends, before a child reaches adulthood—and it continues forever after as if it is buried deep within us like foxglove that arrives every year and it can turn into beauty but like a garden it needs to be nurtured and cleaned-respected. My mother was a hectic cook, she was frazzled and grumpy at times, and while she was a lovely exceptional cook her manner in the kitchen bended towards the idea that she actually hated cooking. The pleasure of doing multiple things may have enveloped her, much like it does for me—a middle aged man who has wrestled with Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity-Disorder as if it were the tightest knot on the shortest shoestring in the world. Daily. She would bark out profanities from the kitchen, “Shit!”, “God-Damnit!”, and “well, Fuck!”. Nobody was allowed in the kitchen when she cooked, which was a good thing for certain but when she felt overwhelmed she would bellow from what every steaming pot of whatever it was, “I need help damnit!” and in that moment all of us children and her husband would all eye each other as if choosing who was going to climb aboard the small dingy to go slay the giant shark. After a pause someone, usually Steve or my sister would say they were coming and get out of their chair and as soon as they got in the doorway of the kitchen my mother would shoo them away, “forget it, I got it. It’s this damn stove, it gets too hot and burns everything” or some other obtuse comment on why things weren’t working out, it was never the cook. It was the pan, the stove, the light blinding her, the rush of time that cooking seems to do, it accelerates it by the nature of it—forcing all attention on what is in front of the chef, dicing onions, stirring the roux, poking the bread, etcetera and so forth—it requires multi-tasking and quick thinking. Some of the best chefs in the world have ADHD.
On Holidays my mother would wake early and make Eggs Benedict, with rich hollandaise sauce over poached eggs, oddly I sort of forced myself to like it—even though as an adult I realize I don’t really care for hollandaise sauce but when my mother made it, just twice a year, on Thanksgiving and Christmas morning—this was an occasion. She would make biscuits with it and lather the eggs with the yellow rich sauce and ask who wanted extra and everybodywanted extra. She never lost her cool when she made it, she worked diligently and quietly when she made eggs benedict, and we all sat around the table, eyes wide and eager for this specialness. Even when we were poor, and we were money poor a lot in my childhood, there were years when we lived on rice and beans, frozen burritos, spaghetti (which I still don’t like very much because of how much we ate it) and hot dogs. But my mother would splurge and get the expensive ham for the eggs and heavy cream even both costs more, at the time even a $.75 increase from regular milk to heavy cream was something to pause and consider while standing in front of a grocery cart.
It was on Thanksgiving that my mom would periodically lose her shit while cooking, as an adult my brother and I would retreat to the other room and drink the beer she would ask us not to bring in the house or I would duck out to what-ever bar I could find, always and only a dive-bar because nothing else is open on Thanksgiving afternoon, then drop back an hour or two later—a bit more relaxed and cheery. When we were children in Ohio, we would go to my grandmother Rosemary’s house and she would make a glorious spread, in my mind it is the perfect turkey, the perfect mashed potatoes and gravy but I am also guessing my mother’s mother was also a cranky cook for we stayed far away from the kitchen and watched the fire crackle and burst in small sparks. When dinner was served on Thanksgiving or Christmas it felt like a long sigh had permeated the house, a bit of calm that hung over the table and we never prayed, digging in and eating furiously, lost in the food.
At the end of the meal, it was usually my sister, my mother and the daughter-in-law’s who cleaned up, not that my mother’s house was one where women did all the chores it was as if the adult women wanted to get it all done as quickly as possible with friendly banter and conversation bringing them together. My brother and I would bring in the dishes and get the kids into the other room, leading them to games, or a brisk walk outdoors or, hopefully the yearly tradition of watching the hapless Detroit Lions lose in front of the entire gorged nation.
My mother is dead, that is a fact that I realize every time I get in my car and reach for my phone to check in on her, to fill her in on some of the mundane tasks of my life or to hear her voice when I feel like I am, like the Detroit Lions, a hapless parent and need her just to listen (and interrupt) to keep me from collapsing in tears at my steering wheel. I have taken to meditating in my car, at times I park in the back of my small apartment, my car surrounded by recycling dumpsters, potholes and the bareness of the brick row house I live in, with its failing roof, crooked doorways
Mom started dying, real dying not the dying that people tend to nonchalantly mention in conversation, “well, we all start dying the minute we start breathing”, not that kind, but the dying dying kind when the mind tends to go, and muscles tremble from the weariness of age. Age that stalks us like an oak tree that finally overcomes a house, dwarfing it under its shadow, bearish and spindly limbs scratching the windows like fingertips. “I am here” is whispers when the wind shows its might, pushing even the mighty oak into submission. I am here, indeed. Death seems to start with an event, sometimes they are obvious like a car crash, a stroke and other times they are so small they appear insignificant, perhaps a fall in the bathtub, or in my mother’s case a very minor traffic accident that broke a small bone in the top of her leg. She was in her mid-seventies when it happened, sitting in the passenger seat of my sister’s car. In fact, I was talking to my mother when the accident happened, they were rear-ended by a distracted driver—my sister’s car, a thinly made Toyota Yaris, was damaged but not too terribly and my mother complained about her leg, her back which was injured way back in the 1970’s when a New York City bus hit her car. Back pain plagued her for years, much like the depression and auto-immune diseases that draped over her life like a shawl. After the car accident she had trouble walking, and it wasn’t very long after she had her first fall that sent her to the hospital and soon to an assisted living center to rehabilitate all of these tiny chips and dents in her body, and as we would find out in the coming years, her psyche.
For her, a woman whose depression and anxiety had at times kept her in bed for days and isolated her from life until she was able to shake it off with the help with life partner, the trip to the nursing home brought on more anxiety, and more fear that she had ever known. For those of us who loved her we pleaded with her to finish the rehab, we could see the writing of the future every day she didn’t complete her exercises, the frustration we felt came off as annoyance, judgement—we wanted more for her but perhaps, we did not fully understand the depths of her depression—who wants to acknowledge that our parents are depressed, have mental health issues. It might rub off on us. Her room at the assisted living felt like a department store display for a nursing home, sea scape painting (check), mounted television (check), wide bathroom door with handicap friendly safety measures (check), white walls (check), Bible next to the bed (check), smell of feces and urine from the hallway (check). It felt more like assisted dying than assisted living. She hated it, she wept, cried out and made a nuisance of herself to the nurses who responded in kind. She wanted to go home and had giant temper tantrums, she threatened suicide if she couldn’t leave and after a week of exasperation my stepfather took her home against medical advice. We all held our breath, we passed judgement, we gossiped but my mother got better, at least mentally—her mood picked up and she engaged in physical rehab at home and was soon standing up, walking with a walker and cooking dinner. “Come down and see us” she would say into the phone during my daily phone calls, and we would pack the kids into the car, drive the 100 miles to Cincinnati, jump into their pool, eat barbeque or burgers on the grill, chat on the patio and head home, relaxed and sunburned. Soon though, her physical therapy took a step back, the water rehab remained unfinished and her depression, that came and went like a bell that rang at the top of every hour returned.
My stepfather, Steve worked hard on the garden–both he and mother loved to watch birds and he constructed bird feeders all over their yard, in each one there would be different types of food for the variety of birds that would visit, some feeders were elongated screens filled with peanuts and others were more traditional, filled with small pellets and seeds—in the morning it was busy, sort of a rush hour of feathers and busy squawks, chirps and songs- with wings fluttering and chests puffing for the food. My mother enjoyed nothing more than to sit in her chair and look at these beautiful animals eat breakfast every morning. The back yard was filled with plants and flowers that Steve tended too, my mother would sit on patio and point out flowers she wanted him to cut, or a hummingbird or a chipmunk that had scurried out from the small red shed, its hesitant nose sniffing the air for danger. Theirs’s was a far cry from the life that they had led when they met over thirty years prior to her death, he was in drug rehab trying to beat a deadly taste for methamphetamines, heroin and alcohol while my mother was trying to coax recovery out of him. They fell in love, and while I was living forty miles away, a senior in high school they quietly moved into a small basement apartment near The Ohio State University campus. She had a chair sort of a throne-ish recliner that sat next to Steve’s although he very seldom ventured into it, a whirl of completed chores in his wake. She would look out the window at the birds while she devoured books and magazine, a stack nearby that she was working on or completed, she ate words like a vacuum.
The last month as she slowly seemed to melt, every day she slunk towards death ,her life seeming to pool around her, first her legs went—after a few weeks into her decline she could no longer walk or pull herself up, shortly thereafter most of the basic self-care was out of reach for her—like she was trying to catch a cloud in her hand. Every day brought another humiliation from the universe about the fragility of our bodies, they are are destined to be destroyed. Mom knew this, she realized what was happening but she did not want to talk about it, she did not want to embrace death although it was obvious that she could no longer embrace life, at least the things about life that brought her great joy, her ability to even converse with what made her happy, her husband, her children and grandchildren was being whittled by the great woodcarver in the sky, with his sharpened pocket knife, stroking the life out of her in thin shards that fell around her, we were trying to pick them up. Small slips of her scattered around us.
Steve had put her in the sling, wheeled her carefully out into the living room and gently placed her in her yellow chair, she could see out into the front yard to the birdfeeders. A brown plush blanket covered her legs which were at this point, only causing her pain, swollen and sensitive to the touch, even moving them sideways brought stabs of pain the moved up into her lower back, and the blanket stretched up to her chest. Her long gray hair framed her head, her sparkling green eyes were translucent at this point, they struggled to focus, and she would stare into something, trying to make sense of an environment hat was changing around her as if she were gazing at the world from underwater, even though the water was crystal clear everything was washed out, blurry, slow moving—too far to touch. She was not getting enough oxygen to her brain, and her heart was overworking as was everything else in her body, her feet suffered and her ankles would swell up and painful to the touch but not as much as her mind which would slip into a haze, losing all sense of time and space. She began hallucinating.
We talked, although she was confused, she wanted to tell me things and she enjoyed hearing my voice. “Mom, what do you want to talk about?” I asked, as she sat quietly. “I don’t know….I’m not sure but I want you to talk with me.” I sat on the other side of the room, on the far end of their brown leather couch, the pillows bulky and soft, next to me another endless cup of coffee that helped me through my days, my afternoons, my evenings. “Why don’t we talk about Long Island” she asked me. She knew I loved Long Island, perhaps my favorite place where we lived when I grew up, I went to ten schools scattered around Ohio, New York and Virginia. I have written a great deal about my love of Long Island and the life we had there and even though we lived there for just under two years, it made such an impression that every day when I look up into the sky, I think of the vastness of the ocean I saw so much of in Springs, New York. “Yes, of course. You know that was my favorite place where we lived growing up.” She smiled, her eyes beaming, “Yes, I know—and guess what, it was mine as well. I want to tell you how much I liked it…..” and she lost her train of thought. The birdfeeder shook with a cardinal trying to scare away a wren, the hum of the air-conditioner was a soundtrack. “Mom, what were you going to tell me about Springs?” “I don’t know.” The cold air blew out of the vents. “Why don’t you tell me, Bela. What you remember.” I got up and fetched another cup of coffee and sat down. “Well, I don’t remember much of the house, I shared a room with Z. I think Erica’s was across the hall and you and David slept downstairs. I remember having a very high fever, 104 or something, and you called the doctor asking what to do. You and David put me in the tub with cold water, and I remember you stroking my hair in bed while I went in and out of sleep. You kissed my forehead; your hair was long, and it draped over me like a red-haired canopy. I remember all of that and how close the ocean was and the forest in the back of our house, and you could cut through and be at a small harbor. Mom, you told us to never go there but we did anyways.” My mother was smiling as I told her this. And I waited. Feeling the space between us, small moments fell to the side. After a while I asked her if she wanted me to tell her more. “No, it’s ok. Maybe we can play a game?” she asked me. A game? “Sure, what would you like to play?” At that moment my mother transformed into a six year old girl, she was innocent, devoid of pain but filled with wonderment, trying to use her brain she looked around the room, eyes wide—you could feel her mind working on finding a game to play, her answer was sweet and when she mentioned it—I too was transformed to a six year old boy but with the knowledge that I was a middle aged man, a parent and in what happens to only the lucky, a son who was given the opportunity to parent their own parent.
“I know Bela, why don’t we count the pictures on the walls? That could be fun.” Moving he head slowly she scanned the walls of the living rooms, where she spent most of her days the last ten years of her life, reading her books, sewing, scanning her iPad, drinking coffee, tea, eating the sweets that she loved so much and of course, looking outside at the circus of birds that visited at all hours. This yard in southwestern Ohio was an oasis of food. As she moved her head, looking around it was as if her eyes were like the sun light moving across the walls, the floor as the day rolled by. “That sounds like a fun game” I replied. Smiling she asked me, “who should go first? Why don’t you start Bela?” On the wall across from me, above her head was a painting by a Native-American artist that Steve and she bought many years ago when they went out west, next to that above Steve’s chair was a Charlie Harper print, this she loved. Harper a native of Cincinnati made colorful paintings of birds and animals, she loved his work and I had always wanted to buy her one of his paintings, but they were too much for my social worker salary. So, she had prints, jigsaw puzzles, coffee mugs and clothing of Charlie Harper’s work, they were not the original, but they were, perhaps better because they were everywhere, reminders of nature—and the playfulness that it brings into our lives. And really, if one can drink out of a coffee mug of something you adore, what could be better? Above the fireplace there were photos of our family, a grand picture of my sister and mother, noses nuzzling each other, a mother transferring generational beauty to her daughter, middle aged both women with long gray hair touching, their smiles stretching past time as only love can do. They are smiling. Across the top of the picture window, Steve and Erica hung photographs by laundry clips so my mother could see her children and grandchildren, it is nearly impossible to feel lonely when in the present of children. By the front door next to a closet with large folding doors hung another painting, bought in a moment of shared interest and love by mother and Steve, across the floor and walls the sun made shadows, moving pictures. I started first, there were seven pictures hanging on the walls, I went slowly and gazed over the room, intentionally moving my head towards each item on the wall so my mother could see where they were. She was looking at me, staring intently but with a soft smile, her wide eyes swallowing up my gaze. “Ok, I have counted seven moms, see how many you can count.” There was a pause from her as if she were psyching herself up, “o.k. Bela, I am going to start” turning her head towards the east wall, the picture above the fireplace, “there is one” she moved to the next wall and quickly counted another one and then waited a moment, turned her head to her left, “I know there is one above me and that one,” which hung over Steve’s chair, she moved to another one above my head, “I think that is five or six” her eyes roamed the room and then they settled down, her face went blank—she turned quiet. Silence. “How many mom?” Looking up, she sighed, “I don’t know. What?” “How many picture are left on the walls?” She was lost. “I don’t know, what were we doing?” “Are you tired mom, do you want to stop and just sit?” She was childlike, still my mother, “yes, I think so.”
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