Want to hear me read that thing about my mom? Want to watch me not know what to do with my hands? BEHOLD!
My Mom Once Dressed Up as Cyndi Lauper, AMA
So this week I got to nurture my inner narcissist by standing up in front of a roomful of strangers and telling them what I think about my mom.
The venue was Listen to Your Mother's Little Rock show. I met a bunch of very brave people who carved off big chunks of themselves and dragged them out under stagelights.
It's the first public reading I've done in years, which had my pulse around 120. But it sounds as if I didn't suck, if audience reaction is to be believed.
Video will go up sometime this summer, if you're interested in watching a dude who looks like Voldemort wearing a summer blazer publicly work through his mommy issues. Meantime, here's the screed.
Oh, credit: One of the best lines of the piece (the one about changing the world) was shamelessly stolen from Jessamyn West with her permission. Jessamyn's pretty damned amazing, as is fitting for famous librarians. I'm proud to call her a friend and steal her bons mots.
Also, credit to my mom, who is also amazing. When she is not calling me "numbnuts".
Anyway. Here you go.
She will put Chaos into fourteen bullet points
Came the day my dad was drafted. He managed to get leave from Officer Candidate School long enough to come home and marry my mom before he flew out to war.
It was a hasty wedding in a small and indelibly Christian town, so the rumor was of course that he'd knocked her up. One family friend gave them a case of RC Cola for a wedding gift with a note: "I'll get you a real present if it lasts."
She showed me a photo of them at the reception, holding the case of soda between them. I asked if she ever got the real gift. "I did," she said, "but I didn't want it." I imagine she smiled and said thank you.
Dad's renal cancer happened 25 years ago. There were Mayo Clinic visits. Surgeries. Radiation. Walkers. Wheelchairs. Somehow he beat it.
A doctor had told her Dad would be dead in two years. She suggested to the doctor that, if he was having trouble locating his optimism, perhaps he could try looking places other than up his own ass. She didn't use those words, but I have little doubt that they lurked in her meaning. Midwestern farm girls are easily the equal of Southern women when it comes to feathering a thick layer of unassailable manners atop a sheetcake of disdain.
There were our teenage years. The time our dog ate Dad's face. My near inability to finish my first college degree. The rumors that sprang up when we shut down one of the family stores, including, remarkably, that she had died. She kept her back straight through that and more.
She has a Buddhist's understanding of the inevitability of suffering, if not their practiced detachment. She is a mother, not a Buddhist. Detachment is not an option.
So she makes lists of everything. She checks her calendar. She makes phone calls. She makes more lists.
It was those lists that got her married in record time before dad went off to war, that got him through his cancer treatment. Those lists changed Missouri law to allow deaf children into public schools. Those lists brought her to the deathbed of a woman she knew only through the window of a McDonald's drive-thru.
The lists are her handle on the world. They are her clarity and focus. The next action item. The next job. The next person who needs someone.
Those lists mean that she's going to show up. She's going to be present. And that can mean happy things, but it's almost certainly going to mean work.
As for me, I am an aficionado of sitting. Withering sarcasm is fun, too. Being pushy while a holding a checklist sounds like a special kind of hell to me. But she knows what I don't want to know, that being pushy with checklist is the only damn thing that can change the world.
It was only when she called last Thanksgiving, when she was in the middle of comforting her dying father-in-law while protecting his estate from vultures and trying to contain the pain of her bad feet, her failing digestive system, and her own recently-dead mother. It was when I suggested that I not bring the family up for the holidays, when she sobbed and thanked me for offering what she couldn't bring herself to ask, that I heard it.
Her voice shook like a newborn after a bath, and I heard more of mortality in that than in the three funerals I would attend that season. I learned another thing that I didn't want to know: that there are limits to what even she can bear.
But within a day her voice was perpendicular and smiling again. She was calling me on the phone. She was making lists for when we'd do Christmas in January.
And her joy shamed me. There was no sermon, no reminder that "life for me ain't been no crystal stair". She just let me know that she was still climbing, and that if I needed it, she could probably carry me for a bit.
I have in my possession a translucent yellow envelope. It is the kind you fasten shut by closing a flap and winding a string around a couple of plastic discs. Inside of it is a transparent plastic folder with pockets and brads for fastening hole-punched paper in the center like a binder. The center section is a crisp, three-quarter-inch-thick stack of paper interleaved with multicolored tabs.
It is unadorned but bears the mark of a string of careful choices. The whole package is assembled simply, clearly, with an eye for aesthetics and user experience. It is meant to be durable, dependable, serious but not somber, and both easy and pleasing to use.
The center tabs are carefully labeled in black gel ink in her hand, which is, like the folder, like her, a balance of professional competence and reliability against a deadpan but lighthearted flair. The feminine rise and fall of the bottom stroke of her capital L's, like a small sledding hill. The Marlo Thomas hair flip at the end of her lowercase N's.
General Information for Trustee. Joint Revocable Trust Agreement. General Durable Power of Attorney. Bills of Sale/Assignment. Warranty Deed. Health Care Directive. Last Will & Testament.
Things to Remember.
It is her final set of lists, the ones she will never be able to finish. The ones she's putting into my hands to see all the way to completion. I try to tell myself that I will see it done on my own, but I suspect my back won't bear up like hers. I suspect that my wife, who is also a mother, who knows what it is to lose a mother, will see before I can that I am broken, and she will scrape me up off the floor and help me to check off those last few boxes.
The Cost
Love a thing, carry a thing, that thing has power. I don't think talismans get much more complicated than that.
Got a couple recently. My parents came down to visit, which they only get to do once or twice a year. Brought magic stuff. Gifts. History.
First was this:
New workbench
The top's made from a door my dad salvaged out of my grandmother's neighbor's house. Solid doors, if you do not know, make good workbench tops. The corners are square, the surfaces level and true. So he took that door, filled the voids in it, built a finished edge around it, added a tool tray and a vise, and made a replaceable work surface out of hardboard. Boom, new bench top.
My parents and I spent the weekend building the legs and shelf together. We made a hinged contraption that allows the bench to roll on wheels if you want to move it. We added adjustable feet to level the thing out. And then they went home, leaving this piece of themselves behind.
I love it almost too much to use it. Silly, I know, but I dread marking it up. Worst thing you can do with your tools is revere them.
Then there was this:
Pocket watch
There was a woman named Molly McGee. Molly wasn't her real name, but everyone called her Molly and her husband Fibber. Molly took care of me during those times when my parents couldn't. She was an octogenarian babysitter, and she kept up.
I have only the faintest memories. Her helping me color. Playing hide-and-seek. In those last days, me begging her to come tuck me in at nap time and her telling me that no, I'm sorry, my legs (knees? feet?) just can't take that staircase.
It's curious how the love grows in inverse proportion to the memories, that she can loom so large in me despite my inability to conjure her face. I remember that goddamn staircase, though. How unfair it was that she couldn't come up to pull the blankets over me and kiss me. That part's Technicolor.
And so she died and so her watch came into my father's care and one day I mentioned wanting a pocket watch and he handed me hers and I just...stopped. And turned the thing over and over. The way you would a dinosaur bone or a moon rock.
He took pains to restore it. He wanted me to rely on it as I once relied on her. And now I have it, this small gold heartbeat in my pocket. And I get to take it out and wind it. And I get to think of her. That's a talisman. It keeps her alive. That's its power.
So it is with the workbench. I look at it and that thing that lives at the center of me shudders. It knows that one day I will no longer have a father. It knows that when that day comes I'll go out to the garage to grab my drill or pullsaw or a box of screws, and I'll see that bench. And I'll have to scrape myself off the floor.
That's the cost, though. Anyone who writes stories in which magic doesn't have a cost is a hack and a liar. Keeping my dad alive after he's dead will demand payment. As does time traveling to 1980 every time I reach into my pocket to see when I can go home. As did Molly's love.
As for the bench, I gotta mark that bastard up. It's not a tombstone. It's not an altar. It is a place for becoming. A place for the future, not the past. The future requires that you make a mess. That's its cost.