Happy birthday, Mom. Day 9

Today is my mom's birthday. Would have been my mom's birthday. Her 81st. Happy Birthday, Mom. We threw her a bangin' 80th birthday party last year, for which I'm grateful, but this year .... it's been a tough day in that regard.

I was talking with a friend who also lost her mom recently, just a few weeks ago, about how hard it is to find time to grieve. About how we have to go on as if we didn't just pass one of the biggest, most painful, milestones of our lives. It's like standing on a speeding escalator watching those days and weeks that surrounded my mom's death recede behind me way before I'm ready to let go. Long before I've had a chance to sit quietly for long spells and come to terms with the loss. I guess that's why we call it loss though. Life moves on at its own pace.

Which got me to thinking about a couple of special times that did help me through it. The times when I felt some space open up around me where I found peace and felt cared for and comforted.

Of course I spent a lot of time with family and friends over the 3 weeks I was in Iowa, and we spent a lot of time reminiscing and laughing and crying.  The viewing the day before the funeral was seven hours long. I saw people I hadn't seen since I left home when I was 17. And those people took care of us, my sisters and brother and me. They brought food -- mostly beef and cookie bars. I had forgotten how people do death in a small town. Food is a remarkable gift to give a grieving family. I was so grateful it was almost painful to be cared for in such a way while I was there staying in my mom's house. I miss that in my life. I digress though.

The Saturday afternoon between Mom's death and her funeral my cousin, who was one of my best friends when we were growing up, drove over from Madison County to hang out with us. We talked about how Mom loved to color in adult coloring books with her colored pencils, and how precise her coloring was in spite of the stroke she suffered 18 years ago that greatly reduced her small motor skills in her right hand. My cousin said she loved to color too, and I told about the coloring party I'd had one evening for 11 women.

Pretty soon we were sitting at Mom's kitchen table coloring in her coloring books with her pencils. laughing and talking. And it was like a space opened up in time where we could step away from the world and just sit together in our grief, coloring like we did when we were kids. My cousin's dad, my mom's middle brother, had also passed away not that long before and I hadn't been able to come home for his funeral, so we were double grieving. That afternoon was a bubble that brings me comfort even today. It was healing.

The next day my cousin, who is a gorgeous quilter, brought 7 quilts so we could choose one to bury with Mom. After we chose, she gave each of us one of our own -- five in all. Mine is shown in the photo above. Her generosity of both the quilt and her time made such precious memories during a time of sadness and loss.

When I got back home I felt like I was trying to keep up on a runaway treadmill. Getting back to work, getting Coraline back to school, picking up the pieces I'd dropped when I had to leave so suddenly. Two weeks is a long time to leave a life untended. I felt like I'd been through so much, and then I had to just go back to normal as if ... as if normal existed.

I'd only been home a couple of days when a friend I'll call Piano Man commented on my Facebook that we should get together and play some music. We're always saying that, but we never do. Seven or eight years ago we played a show together, but he's way out of my league and plays professionally. This time though he persisted. 

How about Wednesday? Does that work for you?  he wrote. It did. I told him to come over around 8:00 and I'd have Coraline in bed. 

When he got here, we didn't get right down to the music. We sat on the couch and the cats came over to investigate and crawl around on him. Piano Man is a cat guy. He was digging it. We talked, and he asked me about my time in Iowa, what had happened.

I told him some of the story, and then I said, "I'm sorry. I don't mean to go on about this. You didn't come here to listen to me talk about my stuff. We should play some music."

"No," he said. "You're wrong. I did come here to hear this story. I want to hear it. Tell me what happened. It's important."

I still get teary remembering those words. Listening is a gift, but asking for the story, especially a story of a mother's death and a daughter's grief .... not many people ask for that.

So I told him what it was like to take my mom off the ventilator and to wait for her body to shut down over those days. And what her death was like as I sat beside her bed with her. And how she gave me a sign when I told her I loved her some time after she took her last breath. He listened to all of it as he calmly petted one of the cats.

And then we played music for almost three hours, and during that time I just focused on the music. Nothing else. Sure we talked and laughed. And we don't have a common book of music, so mostly we ran through some of the songs I like to play by myself. He's a talented, skilled jazz piano player and I'm mediocre at best, but it brought me home, grounded me. He even sang some harmony while I sang melody, which never happens.

It was exactly what I needed. Like maybe the Universe said, "She's had enough for a minute. Let's give her a break." And for a few hours, I was in a bubble of music and harmony and the kindness of a friend asking to hear my story.

Words are my life, and yet I don't have sufficient words for how powerful those bubbles of time were -- the music and the coloring. The telling and the patient listening. And these are not the only times. Just the ones I've chosen to write about tonight.

The lesson is, I think, that we can't know how such simple acts can bring great comfort and healing to someone who is sad and grieving, but we should be open to the opportunity to step into that bubble where time stops and the coloring or the music or the eating or the sharing of memories is all that matters. In the end, these connections are what I call God, the Divine, the Mystery. Or it's just what makes us feel better. Either way.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.

Throwback Thursday: Proust's Madeleine: Day 8

Today for NaBloPoMo I'm doing a throwback Thursday and sharing my most popular post. Not necessarily the one most popular with my regular readers, but the one that has received by far the most views, partly because it's one of my earliest posts (January 1, 2009) and partly because it comes up on a Google search for "Proust's madeleine." With no further ado, my first cookie post.

I wish I could remember where I recently ran across a reference to Proust’s madeleine. Intrigued, I googled it, and then I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before. Maybe I had and I wasn’t paying attention. Who knows? It’s not as if I sit around reading Proust, although if you’d like to think I do, I’m fine with that. If only I were that high-browed. I’m never even sure if I’ve pronounced his name correctly—not that it comes up often in my conversations.

Every writer must dream of writing such a deep and enduring metaphor, one that has coined a phrase used in psychology, “involuntary memory.” Proust writes that he was having a bad day, so his mother gave him a snack. He took a spoonful of tea with some crumbs of madeleine floating in it, and suddenly he felt much better. He spends a significant number of words describing his internal search for the memory that tiny sip of tea must have evoked. Eventually he ties it to his aunt having given him bites of her madeleine years before when he was a boy.

Who hasn’t experienced tasting something that transported you back, in both memory and feeling, to another time and place? Often these are fleeting, whispy moments; we barely pause in that place out of present time and space, that place where we are the ghost watching like Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas Past. Since I learned about Proust’s Madeleine, I’ve been on the prowl for such an experience, but they’ve been like that lone fly that buzzes and buzzes around your head until you finally get up and find a flyswatter or a section of newspaper, only to have the fly mysteriously disappear until you turn your light off to go to sleep and then just as you’re about to drift off you hear that buzzzzz….you get the idea. I was getting discouraged, thinking maybe my madeleine would never come. And then on Christmas Day, a peanut did the trick.

I invited my usual “family” of friends over for Christmas Dinner. We were eating at 3:00 and I didn’t want people to starve while they waited, and yet I didn’t want them to spoil their dinners, so I put out a basket of peanuts in the shell so they’d have to work for their snack. Phil and Joe were the first ones here. They poured coffee and eggnog for themselves and started shelling peanuts. Phil commented that I’d bought unsalted—totally unintentional on my part—but they still ate them until it was time to make the gravy.

After everyone had gone home and the dishes were done, I grabbed a peanut on my way out of the kitchen, thinking as I did that I might as well just put them out for the squirrels. Who likes unsalted peanuts? I cracked the shell, pulled it apart with my fingernails, slipped the peanuts out, popped them in my mouth and chewed.

All of a sudden I was standing outside a three-sided tent in the yard of the courthouse, which stood in the middle of the square in the small Iowa town where I grew up. Packed snow crunched under my boots as I waited in line behind what seemed like hundreds of other kids. It was probably only five. In the tent, sitting on a big chair, straw covering the ground around him, sat Santa, and soon I would sit on his lap and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.

Winn Geeseman played Santa every year. His daughter, Valerie, was a year younger than me, and even though by the time I was seven I recognized him, he was magical once he put on that red suit. (I certainly wouldn’t have sat on his lap if he hadn’t been wearing that costume!)

I wasn’t one of those kids who asked for big impossible things like ponies or red sports cars or bringing people back to life. I always asked for what I knew was possible—clothes, go go boots (never got those), a crying baby doll (she gave me away several times after I was supposed to be in bed asleep), a Barbie with bendable legs. (I was the first girl in first grade to get one. I took it to school for show and tell and Sherry Ryan broke one of the knees so it flopped instead of bending. I was devastated. I still haven’t forgiven her.)

After we had taken our turn on Santa’s lap, his helper would hand us each a small brown-paper bag half-full of hard candy—ribbons, raspberry-filled, a couple of small candy canes--and some unshelled, unsalted peanuts. We got the same bag of candy and peanuts at the church on Christmas Eve, after the annual nativity play. I wonder if they were the leftovers.

Although we didn't live in a little house on the prairie, Christmas was the only time we got nuts, except the little black walnuts we picked up in the fall. Somebody would give Dad a fruit basket with big, shiny red Delicious apples and basketball sized navel oranges — not like those nameless little sour apples Mom bought in three-pound bags or the wormy green ones we stole from the neighbors’ trees — and nuts in the shell — pecans, fancy English walnuts, almonds. They were so fun to crack open with the silver nutcracker and they tasted so exotic, coming as they did just that one time a year, probably from very faraway — New York, maybe, or even California. And they weren’t selfish with their meats, like our home-grown black walnuts.

Oh, and then there was Grandma’s peanut brittle, shards of hard, amber candy impregnated with Spanish peanuts. I didn’t like it as well as the chocolate-covered cherries and fluffy white and pink divinity she made. And two kinds of fudge — regular chocolate cut into squares and the maple fudge that she put into tiny fluted paper cups. And caramels, creamy and chewy at the same time. One year when I was helping her make candy she told me about how her mother had to invite several friends over to make divinity. Because they had to beat it by hand, one woman couldn’t beat long enough for it to set up so they took turns beating the egg whites, sugar and corn syrup into divinity. If the weather was too humid, sometimes they never could get it to peak, and so they’d just make sticky disks of candy, failed divinity they called it. (I only remember one year when my grandma’s divinity failed in spite of her electric mixer. It was never mentioned.)

It’s surprising how the taste of one unsalted peanut can bring back so many memories. I still want to write a Proust’s Madeleine poem, like the one below, written by the late Kenneth Rexroth.

Have you ever experienced your own madeleine? Would you be willing to channel your inner Proust and share it here?

Proust’s Madeleine

Somebody has given my

Baby daughter a box of

Old poker chips to play with.

Today she hands me one while

I am sitting with my tired

Brain at my desk. It is red.

On it is a picture of

An elk’s head and the letters

B.P.O.E.—a chip from

A small town Elks’ Club. I flip

It idly in the air and

Catch it and do a coin trick

To amuse my little girl.

Suddenly everything slips aside.

I see my father

Doing the very same thing,

Whistling “Beautiful Dreamer,”

His breath smelling richly

Of whiskey and cigars. I can

Hear him coming home drunk

From the Elks’ Club in Elkhart

Indiana, bumping the

Chairs in the dark. I can see

Him dying of cirrhosis

Of the liver and stomach

Ulcers and pneumonia,

    Or, as he said on his deathbed, of

    Crooked cards and straight whiskey,

    Slow horses and fast women.

~Kenneth Rexroth ~

Voting for a dead pimp: Day 7

Photo credit: MSN News (see link to article below)

Way to go Nevada? It's not enough a significant number of people voted for a notorious reality-TV pimp, but they also voted for an old dead pimp who partied himself to death. Proving once again all it takes for some people is that the candidate is male, old and white -- not necessarily in that order and not necessarily still breathing.

These are the people who are electing our federal legislators too. Scary stupid. Scary obtuse. Scary and I don't want these voters to decide who runs this country, but I don't know how we're going to stop it without a complete overhaul of a corrupt system that those in power certainly don't want and won't let happen.

I saw some graffiti today on my way home that said, "Eat the rich." How about some Nevada voters for dessert?

What the hell was I thinking? Day 6

I'm sitting here trying to think of something to write about tonight. It's after 1:30. It's my fault I'm in this situation. I went to an election watch party for a couple of hours earlier. It was a roller coaster. I don't want to talk about politics. Then I came home and talked to Elvira for a while, sorted some laundry and threw a load in the washer, puttered around in the kitchen, and played solitaire on my Kindle for 45 minutes I will never get back. I blame my mom for the solitaire. She loved playing solitaire on her Kindle, and so I started playing on her Kindle while I sat with her in hospice. Now I'm addicted and I'm not happy about it. Thanks a lot, Mom.

When I finally dragged myself away from being pathetic Solitaire, I realized I had neither the time nor the energy to write the post I'd been composing in my head all day. No problem, I thought. I've got all those ideas in my drafts that I gathered for just such an occasion. Lots of good ideas. Probably a whole month's worth.

I opened the first one.

Fried bologna sandwich. That's all it says. Fried bologna sandwich.

I'm sure I had something brilliant to say about fried bologna sandwiches, because I even took a photo of fried bologna. It's not a good photo, but it is fried bologna. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I figure I could stop here.

But no. I was prepared and I was going to use my great material that was waiting in my drafts. I opened the next one.

Write your own damn porno.

That's it. I'm not sure if I was talking to myself or if I planned to ask you, my loyal readers, to write your own damn porno. I have no idea. I did not take a photo to remind myself this time.

Moving on ...

Look for mangina.

Once again, no idea. I had to goggle the definition, I suspect I had planned a rant,because it's a misogynist concept,  but if I did, it's flown out of my mind like the air escaping from a balloon.

The next one was a pretty complete thought. Have you ever noticed how any time a man is getting schooled about any feminist issue that he refused to understand, and continues to mansplain the hell out of, there will be that one woman who comes in and pats him on the head and tells him she understands what he's trying to say and we should all play nice? What the fuck is up with that? Let him take his spanking like the bad boy he is and maybe he'll learn something. Apparently his mommy protected him too, and now he's an obnoxious, obtuse skin bag of X/Y's who steps on his weenie every time someone posts something that makes him uncomfortable.

In fact, I do have notes for a post about this very topic. Maybe tomorrow will be the time for a big, old reticulated rant.

Next useless idea: The weight of being nice.

Hmmm. Anybody know what that might mean? Anybody? Bueller?

I have about a dozen more brilliant ideas and none of them are worth writing about. Pods? Dunno. Scrotum beauty contest? Don't want to look. Things my dick does (NSFW). OK, that one's hilarious, but I have nothing to add to it. A guy takes creative photos of his penis in various costumes and poses. I wish I'd thought of it myself, except one, I don't have a penis. And two, it's remarkably hard to dress up a vagina, which I do have.

Moving on. Introducing my boyfriend, Simon. That would be my imaginary boyfriend. We broke up and I don't want to talk about it.

Did you ever feel stupid? I mean really stupid? So stupid you knew you were going to be the joke at somebody's dinner table? Sounds like there's a story there. No idea what it is.

The year of square dancing and my first three-way. That one I do remember. I was ten. I'm not sure anybody wants to read about that.

I suspect I've made my point. Any preparation I may have made for this month is worthless. Yes, there were a few more possibilities there, but they were even worse than the ones I shared. Humiliating. I guess I'll have to depend on my muse Dolores to get me through.  Not that she's been a very good muse lately. She comes to work late and takes too many bathroom breaks and she's probably the one who wrote those stupid meaningless notes in the first place. I should fire her. Fried bologna sandwich? Really?

That's all I've got tonight. Think of it this way: I could have written about today's elections, and nobody wants to hear any more about that shit show tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the next day.

Memories in cars: Day 5

The #NaBloPoMo18 prompt for today is "What is your earliest memory?"

In my earliest memory I was a month away from my third birthday, and we were bringing my baby brother Ryan, who was born about nine months after my mom and dad got married, home from the hospital.* We stopped by my aunt and uncle's house to show them the baby. Mom and Dad took the baby inside and I had to stay in the car and wait. It was June, and I remember looking out the open back window and watching them walk away.

Two things I have to explain about this memory. First, I'm not sure it really happened the day we brought Ryan home from the hospital. I've always remembered it that way, but I was so young I  might have mixed that day up with another day, although I'm sure I was alone in the car, so the baby probably was Ryan. We didn't have car seats back then, so they couldn't leave a baby in the car regardless of when it happened.

Second, the car was often our babysitter back then. I grew up in a safe, small town in Iowa, and nobody thought twice about kids left in cars. The winter my grandma broke her hip and was in the hospital for several weeks  (this was before hip replacements), my mom would leave us kids (three or four of us by then) in the car in the hospital parking lot with the engine running every night while she visited Grandma in her room on the second floor. Kids weren't allowed in the hospital back then, and my dad didn't babysit. We sat in the car and stared out the fogged-up window, and she'd look out every so often and wave at us.

Another time when we were older and we were visiting the same aunt and uncle, Ryan was left in the car, and he was pretending he was driving the car (which was running because people often left their cars running while they ran errands or stopped for short visits). Somehow he kicked the car into drive (or so he claimed) and the car ran up over the sidewalk and hit my cousins' swing set. It toppled end over end across their back yard. Fortunately nobody was playing on it at the time. I'm not sure why I was outside of the car watching. Just lucky, I guess.

So that's my first memory, and I wasn't going to write this, but here's the rest of the story. In my mind it's the first time I realized I was the odd one in my family. That they were a family now, and I was a peripheral part of that, not a fully wanted member. That's a feeling that has never left me. My friend Chicken Grrrrl hates it when I call myself a red-headed bastard stepchild, but for me it's a succinct way of describing my feeling of never quite belonging, never quite being as wanted as the four other kids in our family. My feeling of being that two-year-old sitting alone in the car while the new baby goes inside with our parents to be shown off has never left me.

I don't have any other specific memories until I was five and went to school. Do any of you care to share your first memory? I'd love to read about them.

*My dad was technically my step-father. My parents married when I was two.