didaink

My Safe Place To Stand

Clockwise: Mom & Me, Carm, Greg, Rick & Roz

May 1:  May Day, a day to pick Spring flowers and deliver them to neighbor's front doors. I'd ring the doorbells, run and hide, then watch for the look of surprise when they discovered a bundle of wildflowers on their doorstep. It brought a smile to my face every time.

May Day was also a day to give my mother a special bouquet of roses, not just because I loved her with all my heart and soul but because she was my safe place to stand.

Her skin was soft and velvety, much like the flowers I picked for her. She smelled like vanilla and cinnamon and looked like a beauty queen. I'd rest my confused heart and body against hers, and everything felt better. Her bare arms were silk handkerchiefs for my face, and she'd give me long hugs and let me twirl the doughy creases of her elbows between my fingertips. She tucked me in at night and never failed to climb the stairs again when I'd call out for her.

"Mahhh-mah! I neeeed one more huhhh-uhg!"

She brushed and cut my hair and made my new clothes from scratch, though they were mostly fancy dresses I hated wearing, attempting to make my older sister and I look like twins. Other than our matching outfits, we had nothing in common, with the exception of fear.

May Day was also my chance to thank my mother the way I wanted to thank her, with lots of roses. At age 8 and 9, I couldn't afford to buy roses so I'd pick them from our neighbors' yards, carefully pluck all the thorns off the stems, then run back down our hidden street to the dead end where our house sat. We didn’t have any rose bushes in our yard, because they were likely too expensive and my father was always trying to save money. I’d get up early so no one would know I was gone and dine on honeysuckle for breakfast. The only other souls up that early were the mourning doves, cooing on the branches of the Pepper Tree that sat on the empty lot. I'd climb up to my favorite branch, hear a flutter of wings scatter, and reach for the wad of honeysuckle I'd shoved into my pockets from the bush that nobody owned near the fire hydrant in the cul-de-sac. From my pepper branch, I'd scope out which rose bushes on the street were the ripest for my bouquet for Mama.

During those days, there were many things happening in my house that I didn’t understand: Why did my father get so angry? Why did he beat up my brothers? Make them scream so bad? Why did I barely see or know my older sisters? Why did I have to clean my closet and take “inventory” on Saturdays, the way they did in the army barracks where my father once lived? I'd dream of one day riding my bike all the way down to the beach on Saturday mornings to ride the waves.

My mother tried to protect us -- I know she did -- but there were many times when she couldn’t, days when she was teaching, doing errands, or at the grocery store, and my father would switch to the other man. I'd lock the door to my room so that man couldn’t get in, and I'd pray that he’d be too tired after he finished with my brothers to climb the stairs to my room. My “twin” sister, four years older, would disappear, hidden I suspected, in one of the many closets in our old house against the hills of Southern California. I’d listen to my father hitting my brothers and look at the phone in the connecting spare room, desperately wishing I could call my mother to come back home. When she eventually came through the door, no one ever wanted to tell her what had really happened while she was out, least of all, my father.

Seven years ago, when I'd written another draft of this piece, my mother was still alive. She would leave this world three days later, on May 4, the bouquet pictured below near her bedside.

[From May 1, 2015]

On May Day, I'll call the Japanese florist I always turn to in California to pick the colors and shapes for my bouquet. The owner will put them in a clear vase and deliver them for me. I will ask her if she has any honeysuckle this year, but I already know the answer.

“No,” she’ll say, “Just roses. Yes, many roses.”

It will never be enough, but it's all I have on May Day.

 

The Aqueduct of You

I’m still looking for ways to find you, honor you, and bring you back to life.

When I see your picture or your handwriting in cards that were once freshly peeled from their crisp envelopes, you are near me again, and I can almost feel you in the room. You're going to enter any moment but tears arrive instead. And helplessness rings the bell like a restless delivery man.

I can’t hold your hand or inhale your perfume, that familiar swirl of vanilla and laurel spices will never splash my cheeks again, and though I try, I can't fully hear your spontaneous giggles, but I remember you stalling for more time like an embarrassed child with her hand in the cookie jar, thanks to a stray gray hair on your elegant chin.

As silly as those memories seem, when I plucked at those unwanted whiskers like you were my very own little hen, they are the same images that slice and cut me now, and I am the airborne flip and flap of a carp gasping for air, desperate for the flow of water to revive me. Then I'm the embarrassed child, longing for her mama, going room to room, searching for you inside a big house with old, worn-out clichés.

After four years, you’d think I might’ve learned to accept it and embrace how long we had one another. You were after all almost 90, an incredibly long life and legacy of children and grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, holding your place in this unyielding world. And yet, it felt too soon--will always feel too soon. I wanted our time to go on without interruption, without age, without illness or frailty or pain. I wanted the comfort of your voice just in the next room or in the phone call across the miles, but still I wonder why you haven’t found me like you did before.

Will Clair de Lune ever play again in a garden shop that I wandered into looking for white cyclamen? Will I see a Monte Cristo on the menu and watch as you walk back to our table, shaking your head because I’m inhaling it with powdered-sugar fingers instead of a clean fork and knife? Will I hear Shakespeare’s voice inside the velvet treasure trove as I stand holding its soft red binding in that grim hallway with cheap green carpet that made my eyes and stomach ache? You inscribed it to Dad in 1982 but I found it on a throw-away shelf inside a building that was never your home. And Voltaire’s optimistic girl, not boy, whose arms reached for me and tucked a thin blue book inside my jittery hand in the East Village while strangers passed and looked on? It was you who turned my head that day in time to see the irony and reflection written in gold near the dusty glass case.

But I haven’t heard from you in so long, though I believed you’d keep trying to reach me somehow ~ now it’s as if you’ve forgotten me. Then I shake my head, knowing you could never do that. You wouldn’t know how. That’s Death’s dirty work, not yours. You would never abandon me.

So I will call you back, try you again and again, until I can hold your hand in mine, admire your glittering umber, put my cheek to yours and construct myself again in the folds of your unmistakable skin that grew me from seed. And I will make myself into the bark of your Ceylon tree. I’ll become your attar, an essential oil, the salve that heals a grown woman's heart. And I will flow and swim and drink from the aqueduct of you.

Calling Her Back Now (and always)

“Can you call me back?” she asked that afternoon.

“Sure, Mom. I’ll call you back,” I said.

I never spoke to her again.

Six days later, Mother’s Day arrived. We were going to spend it together because that’s what we’d done almost every year of my life. Of course, it was too late to call her back – it will always be too late, but it wasn’t too late to write her another poem. I’d written her some type of poem or prose for Mother’s Day since I was old enough to hold a crayon and spell my name, and I’m proud that I never once gave her a store-bought card. I have my father to thank for that. He always said homemade cards are the best and this I truly believed from him, though I didn’t trust him for most of our short time together. When he died suddenly, I was nineteen. He and I had finally begun a respectful relationship and one that I could trust. I was devastated and in shock. He was gone in a flash and just as we were getting started. All the pieces of the puzzle were flying around in the air and landing in obscure places, but it was my mother who held my hand and helped me find the strength to pick them up. I helped her pick up her jagged shards too.

We moved out of my childhood home that she and my father shared for over thirty years, and I helped her begin a new life in a town nearer to the majority of her children. That’s when she became my closest friend, though I didn’t know it at the time. My siblings and I rarely saw one another or spent time together. I felt they hardly knew me, and it was like this for most of my youth. They were so much older and successful, and I was way down at the bottom, overlooked and unimportant, yet my mother made sure I knew I was valued and remembered.

When I would visit, I’d find my poems displayed on her piano, her coffee table, her dresser. This gave me hope that my words were making a difference in her new home and in her life. There was always competition between me and my siblings in one form or another, there were just so many of us, and I was painfully aware that I needed to set myself apart or I’d get lost in my family’s collective, noisy voice. Writing became a way for me to find my own voice in a loud cast of Italian characters, and it also gave me a way to thank my mother for the confidence she’d instilled in me throughout my youth. Her love and support, and her belief that one could achieve anything if they worked hard enough at it, gave me hope and the reason to keep going with my writing. I’d lost faith in life after my father died, and I know she did too but immeasurably more. Then, less than a year after my father was gone, she too was diagnosed with advanced cancer and chemotherapy began. She lost all of her hair and all of her strength. I continued to write poems so she’d keep reading how important she was to me and to everyone else, and I hoped and prayed she’d keep fighting. She was weak and beaten by life, but she kept reading and kept going.

I don’t know why I didn’t call her back that day. I had always called her back. Always. It was our norm.

“I’m watching a really good Jeapardy! right now. Call me back?” she’d say, and I’d call her twenty minutes later when I knew Jeapardy! was over.

Then it was my turn.

 “Mom, I’m about to get my hair done. Can you call me back?”

An hour later we’d be talking again, picking up where we’d left off, telling each other stories about our day. We’d never gone even a week without hearing each other's voice.

By the time she reached her late '80s, I knew the end was closing in, though there had been many false alarms and triumphs over her failing body throughout the years. The afternoon before her last day I called to remind her I’d be with her for Mother’s Day, but one of my brothers answered. The inside of my stomach tore open, terrified she was already gone. My brother told me her voice wasn’t strong enough and she was too weak to pick up the phone. I wanted to get on a plane that night after hearing him shout, “She SAYS she LOVES YOU!!”

It was the first time anyone had ever expressed my feelings for me and at that volume.

I called her back the following afternoon, regretful that I hadn’t taken the red eye out to California, and there she was again just like she’d always been, in the middle of something but wanting to talk. Her voice wasn’t shaky or slurred and she’d picked up the phone after just one ring. I almost expected her to say she was watching Jeapardy! or 60 Minutes or Hardball with Chris Matthews.

“Hi, Doll,” her voice strong and steady -- she seemed ready to talk but just unable to in that moment. And then: Can you call me back?

Five fickle words that play on repeat.

Though she never saw me become a professional writer and she never read my essay about death that landed in the Washington Post, she did, however, see me give out my first business card, the word “Writer” printed below my name; she was the only person that didn’t laugh or think I was full of crap when I handed it out long before I’d published anything.

It’s been exactly three years since she left, and my heart still aches for my closest friend. Each time I sit to write a new sentence or tell a new story I suppose I’m calling her back, recalling the amazing woman who believed in me, the same person who listened to all my stories, read them, embraced them, and helped me make them better.

She is my mother and with all my heart, I love her. Happy early Mother’s Day, Mom.

Dear Mom,

How's the weather in Heaven? And the food? By all reports, it must be heavenly.

It's raining again in Pennsylvania. Yep, Pennsylvania. This is finally home, but it's the kind of "home" that feels like a houseboat drifting out to sea, trying to find its way back to the life we shared. The ocean also resides in another state and I am landlocked in green. The rain makes it exceptionally green here, but there are days when the green can be so intense, it's like I'm trapped in a field of Irish clover and I'm desperately searching for the magical 4-leafed one that'll return you to my side. If only I could meet you in the middle, see your arms pop through that bright green fence surrounding your heaven.

When I was in grade school I used to read about this historic farming state where people called "Amish" refused to keep step with time. It was exotic compared to bell-bottoms in dry, brown Southern California. It might as well be on the moon, I thought. I'd never step inside that flat, narrow rectangle stamped on the classroom map. I pictured that distant parallelogram covered in endless rows of corn and wheat, Amish farmers dressed in black with suspenders, holding the reins of their horses plowing through lush green fields. It's less like a parallelogram now and more like a parallel universe -- and I'm living this "other" life in a place where you never existed.

Remember when you used canned mushrooms for your sauce in California because there were no fresh ones at the commissary? And if there were, they were too expensive? Well, they grow mushrooms in this flat Pennsylvanian town by the millions. I'd bring you wheelbarrows full, and maybe you could finally can your lasagna sauce? We'd make a fortune, and I'd get you a cottage across the road on the hay farm, just down the way from our very own mushroom garden.

* * *

I'm talking to myself again. Looping through a one-way conversation with a ghost who once sat beside me on Sunday nights, laughing her way through a dinner she could hardly taste.

"See you next Sunday, Mom," I'd say to her, after letting go of her velvety arms. "Okay, sweetheart," she'd say, her voice fading behind me as I walked away. "I'll see you then."

 * * *

I open up my notebook and you fall out. We are in California and it's Sunday night. You're wearing a velvety teal-green top and in the middle of an unfinished laugh. I'm smiling Dad's smile, my jowls and chin locked inside his face. We both have short hair which is rare. Yours is sprayed with extra hold, mine is frizzy and twisting around my ears. I have cleaned my plate, but yours is half finished. There are red streaks across the dishes, and I think it's your lasagna we've been eating. Your champagne flute looks like it's filled with Martinelli's Sparkling Cider. The sweetness of it, you could still taste. You've barely taken a sip, though, and I know it's because you've been talking while the rest of us are inhaling your lasagna. Food is getting harder and harder for you to chew, and you've left the salad behind to focus on the lasagna. It's less work and it goes down easily. 

Your "front bridge," because you hated the word dentures, is bright white and your wide smile reminds me of the keys on your baby grand piano. It lives with me in Pennsylvania now. You traveled all over the globe but never back in time to see an Amish mother lift her daughter from the carriage of their horse-drawn buggy -- a site that still mesmerizes me because they are both in bonnets like the ones Laura Ingalls Wilder wore on the prairie.

Can you imagine your baby grand facing an Amish farm and not the Pacific Ocean? The little topiary trees you bought for your dining table are now perched on your baby grand's shoulders, the tags from the store where you found them, still attached. They look brand new, as if fresh moss was just added to their roots. I couldn't bring myself to take the tags off. After more than 20 years, what right did I have to change them? I touch the little trees sprayed with faux gold gracing each side of your piano and reach down to pick that 4-leaf clover. I'm inside the picture, next to you again, only this time we're sitting together on the piano bench. I reach for the soft creases of your elbow and watch your hands settle around Middle C. Your velvety top smells like your French Toast. I saw it there in your closet countless times but ignored it. It was just another thing you liked to wear. Now? It's a cherished heirloom, though I can only touch it, and you, while living inside this picture.

What were you laughing about that night? I mean, I know that someone snapped the photo during a joyful moment, but what was it that allowed you to be your most relaxed self, so at ease? Like a young woman in love with life instead of a heartbroken widow and cancer survivor, facing her late seventies.

In the blink of that camera's eye, did you remember the taste of your lasagna sauce on a typical Sunday night dinner, though your taste buds had stopped working?

I thought those Sunday nights in California would last forever, but now it's me who can hardly taste them in Pennsylvania on the other side of the moon, adrift from the past and wanting, like the Amish, to ride in a carriage frozen in time.

 

Bowie and (wannabe) Me

The first time I heard Under Pressure I was a sophomore in high school. 1981. The bass line. The scat. The lyrics -- a love letter to the world, written just for my generation, and for me. This, I still believe.

David Bowie found his creative match made in Heaven with Freddie Mercury, but I read that Queen’s own drummer and guitarist revealed to biographer Mark Blake in Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Freddie Mercury and Queen that it was Bowie who suggested they write their own song that night in Switzerland by improvising, and he fought to make sure there were no artistic compromises when their legendary duet was released.

Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you
No man ask for

Under pressure that brings a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Under Pressure was my seat at the empty glass dining table. My mother’s chair would remain unused for the majority of 1981. Normally, she was the one who sat with me the most there, especially before school. She’d poor milk over her Cream of Wheat, spoon out sections from her half grapefruit, and feed me stories about her childhood on the fruit ranch and her college years at Stanford where she met my father. But that year she was too depressed and tired to make it out of bed most days, and the only stories she wanted to tell me were ones about how her life had lost all meaning. 1981 was also the only year my father would ask me, his sixteen-year-old daughter, barely passing Algebra, for help.

“Can you go in, talk to her? She says she’s not hungry, that she’s got nothing to get out of bed for. Tell her about school, about the musical you’re in.”

I was the finale, the eighth, and as one of my high school friends would write to me years later, “the last in a long line of narcissists.”

Two high-achieving academic parents, three older sisters and one brother with college degrees, good jobs secured, and three more hopefuls at Catholic university, while I tried not to flunk out of Algebra, sitting at that cold desk near the clock trying hard not to picture the brains of my best friend’s cousin all over his bedroom walls. A gun went off during a ‘pretend’ game of Russian roulette, though his friends told the police none of them knew the gun was loaded.

It's the terror of knowing
What the world is about
Watching some good friends
Screaming "Let me out!"
Pray tomorrow gets me higher higher

I thought about getting high to escape it, but I was too clumsy and old-fashioned to go through with it, even when a college guy offered me some of his private stash of cocaine during a party one night. I wanted to call myself a “rock and roll chick” but that would have been a grotesque lie, nothing that I was above telling, mind you, but I was nowhere near that level of cool. I’d grown up mostly eating up what my seven siblings were having: James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Carol King, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Croce -- all folk artists born from The Sixties, the decade from which I also came into the world.

My oldest brother played acoustic guitar and taught himself to play all their songs in high school. I would sit on the floor in his room and turn the pages of his songbooks as he played and sang, a job that also bought me time with him, and he didn’t seem to mind if I sang along. There were the Beatles, of course, Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull even, Van Morrison, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Peter Frampton, The Police, U2, but I was also drawn to jazz standards, the music that played in the background of the black and white movies I gobbled up before the age of ten, music from my parents’ generation, what they listened to while they were studying at Stanford after WWII.

Betty Davis and Henry Fonda, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Katherine Hepburn and Clark Cable, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth. Leading women and men, leading men and women, kissing, dancing, singing in black and white and color. My siblings had a name for these movies and musicals: "beautiful lady movies," their inside joke for the little sister who liked to sing and dance, the artsy-fartsy last hope who'd sneak time in front of the television when she should have been studying.

I must have been nine or ten when I first saw him on the Dinah Shore Show. Dinah was on in the afternoons usually before my parents got home. By that time, the glass table was growing more and more vacant and fragile, just one or two brothers and a sister left who were barely at home. And when they were home, they never wanted to sit with me for long.

His flaming red hair was streaked with gold, his pale high-cut cheekbones powdered with orange blush. His silky blue shirt with the flowing wide sleeves and wide-legged pants looked like a gown as he moved effortlessly around on a little stage like a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies. When he flashed a smile endless rows of big jagged teeth popped out. They looked like they could cut straight through the belly of an apple. He talked softly to Dinah for a long while with the most sophisticated voice of any rock star I’d ever heard. He said he started out as a painter and was very shy but that he wanted to overcome his shyness and learn how to defend himself in the world. Then he found out he liked being a ham. I was transfixed. I couldn’t look away. He was exotic, a beautiful freak. Through my young years, I clung to his lyrics ~ lyrics I didn’t understand but they fueled my imagination, took me places I wanted to go, far away from that empty glass dining table.

When I first heard Young American I thought he was talking about one of my boyfriends. They were young, about ten, and American. I had already had my first kiss in fourth grade during folk dancing. I knew a lot about president Nixon, and the hotel where he didn’t pay the bill and got fired. I knew what a falsetto was, sort of, and the ghetto was a place where the Harlem Globetrotters played basketball. I had lots of idols I wanted to sing like, no songs about leather, I don’t think, but the part about how he laid her down and kissed her all night behind the bridge? That image still gives me goose bumps. Not exactly a tune my Catechism teacher would have sung in The Seventies, but I noticed that every time I saw David Bowie on television he was usually wearing a big gold cross. My Catechism teacher wore the same one.

Ain't there one damn song that can make me
break down and cry?

That was it. In one perfect line. He was gorgeous – a leading man, but also a leading woman, and to me, the consummate "beautiful lady movie" rolled into one elegant body with the legs of Fred Astaire, his low, crisp, smoky vibrato so much better than Frank Sinatra's, because he delivered it with the eloquence of Lawrence Olivier, a full rock and roll orchestra behind him. His wild black pupil seemed to look right at me when he sung Heroes. “It’s all right to stare,” it said, “You’ve never seen someone like me before, have you?”

I could be curious, lonely, and it seemed to be perfectly all right with him if I broke down and cried. I could dance how I wanted and dream about life on Mars. He was from another era or planet, and it looked like he wasn’t even trying to be great, please anyone except himself. I watched him light a cigarette on stage one time, and during the song, he smoked it slowly and lovingly, singing about becoming a hero, even if it was just for a day.

He was a singer, a dancer, a storyteller, an artist -- everything I wanted to be but couldn’t in a family that thought artists were not what you grew up to be. That was just in the movies.

* * *

My son is 10, the same age I was when I first heard the name David Bowie. This week, just the two of us sitting at the dining table, I told him what I remembered most about him.

"Well, sometimes he wore makeup because he felt like it. He had two different colored eyes," I said.

"Like that Karma Chameleon guy?"

"Boy George?" I asked.

"Yeah, Yeah. That guy."

"Boy George has amazing eyes too, but David Bowie, well, he kind of started a trend, so if you felt like wearing makeup, and you were a born a guy, it was totally okay and cool, especially if you were a rock and roll singer."

"Who do you like better, Mom? Mick Jagger or David Bowie?"

"Oh, Bowie, hands down. Jagger is cool and all, but Bowie, honey... he was, and still is, the coolest. And his songs were stories, stories that made you think."

A few minutes later from another room I heard my son belt it out.

Pressure!

Pushing down on me, pushing down on you

Um ba ba be

Da ba ba be

Choices

I chose to drive his car fast in the rain so I'd be there when he woke.
I chose honesty because of all the lies I breathed and spoke.
I chose dogs and cats and mice and Latino men in hats.
I chose Pepper Trees and Eucalyptus in summer, a Magnolia for my winter blues.
I chose Dickinson over Whitman indoors near a fire.
I chose traveling without a clock.
I chose baths and bubbles.

I chose waterfalls and somersaults.
I chose orange and green.
I chose ice-cold cantaloupes, though the menu read ripe Honeydews.
I chose songs.
I chose forgiveness over blame and hope to remember this when asked to name names.
I chose my parent's reputation.
I chose Ella then Billie then Etta on Sunday Kind of Love.

I chose Cullum then Debussy then Mozart on lazy Saturday afternoons.

I chose No when asked to say Yes.
I chose equal inheritance.
I chose contact with aliens because borders don't belong to people in clothes.
I chose marriage equality after just six months but couldn't say "wife" for well over a year.
I chose peonies and counted petals listening to his pretty talk.
I chose to lay like a flying squirrel when the water filled my borrowed wet suit.
I chose mystery over comedy and comedy over tragedy.
I chose dark hair, though I'm curious about the silver ones.
I chose an older taller man who cut hair too short.

I chose to turn my back on the younger, curly-haired Kinsley who could play anything.

I chose to keep the antique earrings.
I chose 525 miles on a bike from San Francisco to LA.
I chose pedaling with just the one good leg.
I chose to rock with babies.
I chose to kiss her forehead and caress her elegant fingers, though I avoided her rosary.
I chose nothing when she offered me everything.
I chose 6 but now know it's code for 9.
I chose sound over sight.
I chose my 17th year to rewrite.
I chose pickles and pepperoncini.
I chose admitting I was wrong.
I chose accepting I was right.
I chose listening and learning over pleasing.
I chose love in the end and love at the beginning.

 
© didaink 2015 All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Your Moonlight Muse, Clair de Lune

I listen to the melody and pretend I am playing your piano as I write this. My fingers move across the keyboard the way yours once did over the keys of your baby grand, the span of your fingers reaching all of the octaves, your arms at times lifting up like wings, giving height and depth to the notes as you rock forward and back and press your whole body into the complexities of Debussy's melody. It pours over me now like a sad waterfall.

 

There I am again standing in my old room late on a Saturday afternoon, looking out to the garden, the ocean, imagining my life ahead, what I’d grow up to become, as you were finding time to take a break from all the things you did to keep the house and our life in order. When I heard Claire de Lune down below the floorboards, I knew you were becoming yourself again, not my mother anymore, but a girl and a young woman all over again, finding your center, your beginnings, your passion for life in those notes. Did you imagine your life ahead as someone else played the piano, a lilting melody below your floorboards as you stood in front of your own bedroom window wondering where life would take you?

I see friends and strangers functioning around me, smiling, cooking, laughing, treating life so effortlessly as it comes to them while they walk their dogs, drive their cars and go about their normal day at sunrise, at mid-day, at sunset, and my brain can’t get past the fact that I’ll never see you again. I want to tell them, my mother died… stop… my mother died. I’ll never kiss her forehead, her cheeks again, or hold her hand in mine and feel her warmth against my skin. I’ll never smell her perfume or her fragrant skin creams, intoxicating and permeating the air I breathe.

I am listening to your Claire de Lune over and over now and I am drifting to you again. I am crying but we are together and I can almost feel you and smell you again. I want to think that you are in a better place but I still selfishly want you here with me. I want to go back to those Saturday afternoons, just you and me in the house together, Dad coming through the kitchen door, finding me getting dinner started, you seated at the piano just beginning your practice.

I know I can never go back and neither can you, none of us can, but if I could relive some of the days of my childhood, I’d pick a Saturday, late in the afternoon... the end of daylight fading but clinging to your piano’s caramel glow, illuminating the expression in your face, your winged arms moving across that black and white palette, watching you paint Clair de Lune with everything you had, your hands full of life, full of compassion for that lonely moonlight your fingers knew so well.

Rainy Day Comforts

It's raining and I'm listening to my cat, Big Lini, nap behind the armoire in my office. She goes in and out of snoring just like anyone would, old or young. I know when she stops snoring that she’s heard something, a gust of wind or my fingers tap-tapping across the keyboard. The Noodle Monster dog is curled up by the door, and her tummy is making wide-mouth yawning sounds. I am transported back to my childhood bedroom. 

“When I grow up I’m going to have as many animals in the house as I want!” I scream at my mother who is downstairs and out of earshot. She has just discovered that I snuck my cat, Fluff, up to my room, and she has confiscated Fluff and banished her to the backyard. I am crying, shaking my head sitting on my bed alone, wondering how my mother could have been raised on a fruit ranch and never allowed an indoor pet.

 

“The dogs were Grandpa’s,” she tells me, “They were only for hunting and they stayed outside. We didn’t know what kind of diseases they might be carrying.”

“But, didn’t you ever play with them?” I begged.

“No... I didn’t like the way their hair felt on my skin,” she answered.

How could this woman be my mother? How could I possibly be related to a person who didn’t love animals? A person who didn't want to touch or play with them? At eight, I didn’t understand. In many ways, I still don’t.

The nice white carpet behind the armoire is covered with Big Lini’s calicoed hair, and I couldn’t care less. She is still asleep in her safe place, her secret getaway, and I would like to squeeze in back there with her and nap, too. She lets out a few more snores and settles into her breathing pattern, curled up and at rest, while her nose sings a low, soft rhythm to the rain that hits the windowpane. A cat’s internal clock knows nothing of time and tolls or rules and schedules. How I wish my mother had a cat to keep her company, to sleep alongside her, as she counts the days down in her weakened bodily form. 

How I wish I could bring her old Big Lini, my calico, or the young, dashing Great Gatsby, our tuxedo, or even my eleven year-old puppy-dog, Noodle Monster, and have them each lay beside her in quiet slumber as they do near me. Their bodily sounds self-soothing them deeper into the world they are visiting, out of their failing bodies, and into a place of dreams. What would she say if I did bring one of my pets to her room to nestle with her? If my Noodle Monster was there at her feet, her sweet, shaggy face warming the blankets that cover my mother’s immobile legs? 

Would she still say that she didn’t like the way their fur felt? Maybe so... But, then I see my mother, a woman who gave birth to eight children, holding that newborn puppy-dog eleven years ago in the passenger seat of my car on the way to Tiburon, her 'once lost' wedding ring diamond in a small brass box covered in jade, sitting in her purse in the backseat, patiently awaiting appraisal by an antique jeweler overlooking the San Francisco Bay. 

That day she held my baby puppy-dog just like a newborn. She cradled her in the nook of her arms and maybe realized for the first time in her life that a pet's fur could bring comfort on a rainy day, because it had softened a long bumper-to-bumper ride across the Golden Gate Bridge.