mum
just walks through the fire, courageously it seems, without drawing attention to herself. alone except for a couple of friends and her cat and her evening vodka tonics. i recall the pot vision i had at Yale when, listening to Horowitz play Chopin, i ‘saw’ her: head flung abnormally back, chin high, staggering on a cracked deserted Dali landscape. one determined step after another. in her arms my father, wrapped in a towel, his arms and legs like burnt wooden match sticks. Chopin’s funeral drone underlying it all. but for the most part she seems independent of the maelstrom of her long draining years with the old man and relatively independent of her bizarre children who seem only to provide unusual, abnormal, odd problems. so there she sits in my apartment, in her gray and white, rather masculine and stylish seersucker bathrobe, newly purchased in Portland because ‘sometimes they wake you up in the middle of night to see the animals’. (her trip to Africa.) her white hair is fleecy and shining after a short shower and she bends over the Globe’s crossword puzzle and the remains of her coffee, seemingly at ease in these atypical surroundings. we sit in silence, comfortably together after my twenty-four hour effort to keep her happy and proud of me somehow, and respectful, if not loving, towards whomever i’m ‘seeing’. i know that i love her. i definitely do. i know that she knows it. she is not naive or blind, and even though she rarely volunteers her deeper feelings, i think i know what they are. that she loves us completely, with a nearly unequivocal support and she chooses to never get in our way. i imagine her life to be mostly solitary and lonely, without sexual or emotional adventure, but she never complains if that’s the case. she appears to be sustained buy some simple act of will, of self-ethic which tells her to be strong and fair and to help out where she can. to buy an Horizon instead of a Rabbit because she wants to be ‘patriotic’. she likes to watch people walking about and is appalled by the fatties who wear too tight clothes and laughs about them even as she doesn’t approve her own judgmental self. she lives for us kids but tries to never be controlling unless she thinks we are behaving unfairly towards anyone. (a Libra.) she follows me in my borrowed MG to Brookline Village for gas, and i send her on her way to New Haven to visit Janie. i don’t remember telling her i loved her. i was in a rush. i hope we don’t run out of time. i hope I get rich quick in order to give her a modicum of financial security in her old age (fat chance). i would hate to let her down. i hope we can have some longer space together some day. when she can lean on me for a change. none of this of course is spoken out loud. i cowardly assume it is ‘understood’ between us. mother and son, an ancient conundrum.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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