My weekend adventure to The
Country was a roller coaster ride of emotions.
First, excitement—the airport in New Orleans has undergone a quasi-mid-60s
face lift—it looks a bit like a “Mad Men” set, done on the cheap. I love mid-century modern furnishings, subpar materials notwithstanding. Then
frustration—torrential rain, really bad drivers who don’t use signals, clearly
impaired drivers weaving from side to side, and Baton Rouge traffic.
Finally, I arrived at my
father’s house, which was the mid-point in my journey. By then, the sky had cleared, but I knew it
would be awhile before the traffic followed suit. I visited with him and my step-mother for a while,
catching up on the latest news and events, before starting the final leg of the
trip.
As my father walked me out,
he gave me some of his usual cautions.
If there’s even the slightest (and by slightest I mean one in a billion
chance) potential for a disaster of some kind lurking, he’s sure to point it
out. My mother also veered strongly
toward pessimism, so it’s a wonder their kids made it to adulthood without
being totally impaired by anxiety. Usually I just nod and play along, but this
time, he said the most obvious thing one could say post-monsoon that it took my
breath away.
“Be careful now. The roads are really wet and it’ll be
slippery.” I think my jaw went slack
from sheer astonishment that he’d felt the need to vocalize this statement.
“Dddaaaddd-dddyyy! I’ve been driving for a really, really long
time,” I responded, probably rolling my eyes in the process. He gave me a shy little grin.
“I know--but you’re still my
baby.” That’s one of the sweetest things
he’s ever said to me, even if he was just BSing me to cover his tracks. I’ve said before
that my dad is quite Spock-like: all logic, rare emotion. My mother was just the opposite—she wore her
heart on her sleeve. I was totally taken
aback by this unexpected infusion of tenderness. I was immediately reminded of the commercial
where the dad is giving his daughter the car keys: viewers see a teenager and
he sees a little girl. I’m sure I do the
same thing to Joey, I just hadn’t realized it so clearly before.
Soon enough, I was on the
upswing and having fun with my friends from high school. I’ll write about the fun parts of the weekend
in another post, but I do want to take a point from an early part of the
discussion we classmates had: how hard it is to lose our parents and to see
them getting older. Some of us had lost
at least one parent, but all of us had stories to tell about how our remaining
loved ones were slowing down.
Sometimes I feel that I
haven’t fully grieved my mother’s loss. I think it’s because she died so soon (27
days) after Bunny did. If you asked me
most days, I’d say that losing my husband has been so much harder than losing
my mother that it’s not even a close call.
Yesterday, though, was different.
My mother and I weren’t
always close, but in the past 15 years or so, we had grown closer than we’d
ever been. Even though she couldn’t
travel during the last few years of her life, we talked at least weekly, and
when she finally learned to Skype, we saw a lot more of each other. She
was always full of wry (or snarky) observations.
In the past, whenever I’d
come to my hometown and attended an
event, I’d go to my mother’s house the morning after (usually a Sunday) and
fill her in on all the details: who I’d seen, what we’d done, what was said—no piece
of information was too small to mention.
She loved to interject tidbits of gossip she’d heard about the various
players or places and ask questions to wring even more information from me.
This year, I saw so many
people that I’d have had hours of stories to tell her—we could have revisited
the tales for weeks to come. When I
drove up to her house on Sunday morning to visit my step-father (Donald) and my
visiting sister (Julie) and her family, I was fairly bursting with stories. Telling them to Donald would have been largely
useless, because he wouldn’t have known many of the people I was talking
about. I had to scale down the stories
to the people he knew. On the plus side,
he’d been with me for part of the day, so he had his own observations to share about
the people and events. Julie had been
with me for the better part of the day and night, and we’d caught up
on-the-fly, so retelling the stories would have been repetitious for her.
The first thing I saw as I drove
up to house was my mother’s dog, Honey.
My mother felt as strongly about her pets as I do about mine: they’re
like children--absolute members of the family.
Honey is a 13 year old, honey-colored Pomeranian—she looks like a little
fox. Except now, she looks like a lion,
because Donald took her to the groomer recently.
Mama used to have Honey
groomed like a lion for the summer: a big mane of hair around her face, buzz-cut
body hair, and a poofy tail. During her
last hospitalization, my mother had joked to a neighbor that she wanted to go
home--not because she missed Donald, but because she missed Honey. I thought of that story as I reached down to
pet her. When she’s excited—like when
visitors come--she usually runs around in a circle until she gets dizzy, but
she wasn’t doing that now.
A bit later, as we sat on
the patio catching up, I caught sight of my mother’s humming bird feeder. Then the squirrel feeders that Donald had
built for her. I hadn’t even gone inside
the house yet, and I was surrounded by reminders her. Going inside was worse—the house is virtually
identical to the way it was before she died.
Alone for a minute, Julie and
I talked about a conversation with our former neighbor, Michael, whom we’d seen
the night before. Michael was telling
one of his co-workers stories about the old days, when his family moved down
the road from ours; our parents were freshly divorced. His family had seven kids altogether, but the
three eldest were much older than the rest of us. The remaining four were either our ages or
close enough to them, so we all grew up together. Football, baseball, basketball—you name the team
sport, and we played it, usually in their back yard. When it was cold or raining, we gathered at
our house to play board games indoors. Michael’s
youngest sibling, Lisa, was one of my bridesmaids when I married Bunny.
Eventually, Michael’s account
turned to Mama, and how she’d raised the three of us as a single mother until
Donald came along. Everything Michael
said was complimentary of her, and very true, but I think it had the same
effect on Julie and me—it was a bit of a downer on Mother’s Day Eve. Still, it’s sweet that he thinks so highly
of her, even to this day.
As I got ready to leave, I
went to powder my nose. In the bathroom,
in the middle of the floor, was a shiny penny.
I picked it up and brought it outside to show Julie.
“So?” she said as I
presented it with great flourish.
“It’s Mama! She’s telling me hello!” I said. Julie gave me her trademark cocked-eyebrow,
half-smirking look of skepticism. It’s the same look she gave me when I told
her what Daddy said when I was leaving--I told her she was just jealous.
“No, no. It’s true—she used to tell me about letters to Dear Abby she’d read about
pennies from heaven—they’re a sign from the departed.” (See Signs, 2/21/12 for the whole story—which
my sister has apparently forgotten.) Then Julie told me her story about her
signs from Mama over the weekend.
Shortly after that, we all headed out.
As I backed my car away, I caught sight of Donald and Honey waiving us
off. Now Honey was doing her
dizzy-spinning. Immediately, some primal
instinct overtook me and I burst into tears: I missed my mom so much—more than
I ever had before. I didn’t stay sad for
long—like on a Florida summer afternoon, this little outburst was just a sudden
shower on an otherwise gorgeous day. The
forecast for rain on Mother’s Day was probably pretty high anyway.
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