Honest to golly, my folks rushed us out of town a couple of days before Mother’s Day. “You haven’t been here for the last twenty,” my mom said, “why bother for this one?”
“This could be the last time we see each other alive,” I told my father, “I could go before you do.”
“I’ll manage,” my father said.
Just as we’re leaving. “You don’t have to call so often,” Mom says. “Just drop us a note once in a while.”
Called the folks to wish my Dad a happy seventy-fifth birthday. He’s a day older than JFK would’ve been. First person in his family to graduate from high school. First man in recorded family annals to live past thirty-eight. Of course, it shows to go you, he’s the first male of the clan to retire.
He has come a long way.
At age twelve, he became a professional truck driver. Eighteen, he was taking care of two baby sisters. Grandfather, who meant as little to me as Adam since he was long gone before my birth, dropped dead one day at Brady & Standard Chevrolet/Oldsmobile where he was bull goose mechanic.
Grandma was institutionalized for taking the Great Depression too personally. I visited her once at Wingdale Asylum when I was maybe eight. It was the biggest building I had ever seen made out of bricks. Big as a school or a hospital or a prison. There was wire on all the windows, a tight weave of metal strands the size of her frail wrists.
It was a Sunday and we had taken a drive on a sunny afternoon after church. Another Mother’s Day. I remember now we almost drove right past the massive brick pillars at the entrance. The car skidded in the gravel. My brother and I, both bug-eyed at this development, slowly turned. We looked at each other, some unspoken agreement – this was not going to be just another Sunday drive in the country – passed between us in that moment.
Then we pasted our little faces to opposing back seat windows.
Place could’ve been a small liberal arts college from the outside. With a very strange student body.
It was a regular nest of cuckoos. Totally loony tunes. Immediately, I saw Tyrone was trying to get really small. I myself was shooting for something invisible. I realize now the difference in modus operandi said much about the kind of men we would become.
Grandmother wasn’t in her room which was a monochromatic amalgam of a number of layers of different shades of white paint and the dust of the dying and doomed. It smelled sour like crazy people had lived here forever.
She seemed as sane certainly as the doctor who greeted us by telling my parents they’d have to come up with another twelve dollars a month.
The woman glowed I remember, not a wrinkle on her face. I looked into her eyes cause I had read American Indians said you could tell if a person was crazy just by looking in their eyes. Her crystal blue light eyes almost worked like mirrors. I couldn’t see into her, but I could see a little of myself.
I appeared older with a mustache. A romantic leading man look on my face, set into an old woman’s vision.
Grandmother smiled out of her entire face at me and said, “Junior, you know I’m not crazy, don’t you.”
“No, ma’m. I don’t know that.”
“That’s right, young man, you don’t know that,” she said. Then she laughed.
Like a crazy woman might laugh in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Tyrone was mouthing words. At first I thought, hopefully, he had been possessed by some lunatic spirit. The second mime around, I could read his silent lips. The Indians were right.
The next time I saw Grandma, she was laid out at Jimmy Ryder’s Funeral Home in a fancier-than-I-expected box not much bigger than she was. Black silk dress. Face dusted and painted. Her eyes were darker, like the light had gone out inside her head.
There was a smile on her face.
My father had worked here as a younger man. It was a small town and he was a hard worker, so by this time in his life he had pretty much worked for everybody for miles around. Jimmy Ryder gave Dad a good deal on the coffin and some prime real estate at the Mount Pisgah Cemetery.
When we went to get the double string of pearls and the diamond ring from Grandma’s nearly departed body, they were gone.
“Follow me,” Dad said to Mom. “Bring the boys. There’s something I want them to see.”
Jimmy Ryder had to get the jewels out of a box in his own desk. “They seemed safer with me,” Jimmy Ryder told my Dad. Laid them on the table in a manila envelope.
Dad didn’t move to pick up the envelope. He just looked at the fat face of Jimmy Ryder, wondering I guess, what the fit and just punishment might be for a wealthy man who would betray an old friend by stealing from the friend’s dead crazy old mother.
Who didn’t have anything else in the whole world worth stealing.
Jimmy Ryder was sweating like a high mountain in sudden springtime. With a nervous smile, he shook open the contents and my Grandma’s jewels spilled onto the desk top. A sparkle of gold rolled across the oiled wood surface. With a motion I couldn’t see, Dad’s hand shot out and he caught the sparkle as it was beginning its descent to the floor. He opened his fist, out flat, palm up, waist high, like he was a waiter with one bonbon on his tray.
It was Grandma’s wedding ring, a plain little band of fourteen karat gold. I could clearly see the simple narrow circle. Dad had already told us how innocent folks often leave jewelry on a loved one’s corpse, thinking the sentimental baubles are going in the ground with them. Like the Pharaohs or Indian Chiefs. The jewelry never gets there, plucked from the nattily attired bones, it’s like stealing from dead babies.
Dad just stared at the draining Jimmy Ryder and I thought maybe Dad had some strange power whereby he could just open up little holes on the outside of a person’s body. And all the juice would pour out, like it was streaming out of Jimmy Ryder.
Jimmy Ryder would be today a desiccated shell, a dry seed pod of a crooked undertaker, if my mother had not said, “I think I’ll put those trinkets in my purse.”
With that, she picked up the envelope and started to mother goose Tyrone and I toward the door. I was leaning backwards as much as I could to hear my father’s parting words.
“A large donation to the Salvation Army in my mother’s name might buy you some tornado insurance.”
I remember thinking at the time that seemed silly. We never had tornadoes in upstate New York. And Dad never told us what he wanted us to see.
That was a long time ago.
In the present, my parents had returned from a week of gambling in Reno and Tahoe just before Mother’s Day. Smother was ill with laryngitis, so that was one good reason not to host her only surviving child. On the phone, she offhandedly apologized for tossing us out three weeks ago. No problem, I told her. What else could I say? She’s still sick three weeks later and we didn’t want to stay anyway.
Dad answered the phone, but put Norma on as soon as I could say, “Happy Birthday.” And before “I love you.”
Sometime, since May of last year, my parents have changed in their behavior toward me. It was not an improvement, to say the least. I may be homeless, penniless, carless, grandchildless – with a history of self-defeating behavior, canoodling with yet another woman. Jewish, too, if you can believe that. Overheard something like, ‘just another woman in a long series of wonderful girls who you just start to love like one of your own, then they’re gone.’
That may be true, but, I’ve changed. I’ve hardly had a bad thought in six months, and I have treated my parents with honor and respect and love.
So, they kick me in the eye. I can understand the cumulative effect of a lifetime (mine) of disappointment (theirs). They have some valid concerns. But why now? What made them give up on me? Now?
Especially when there’s no better time to be forgiving than NOW.
I could use their support. I have turned my life around – albeit without apparent positive result – and I’d like to be judged by my current behavior. Oh well, let’s not dwell on it. Gave my folks my best shot. I’ll continue to do my best, I’ll be patient, and I’ll hope for something better than The Psycho Bunkers. Archie & Edith.
Absorbing what little I intuit about adult psychology, I am beginning to puzzle the reasons behind my metamorphose at the age of nine or ten. I went from skinny to fat. I went from a lifetime of A+ grades to a C in Fifth grade Math. Mr. Nussbaum. Eventually I weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds and flunked out of college.
I never really gave much my best shot.
Less than a decade later, I was a skinny marathon runner and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in law school.
Not wanting to conjure up a pattern… later I became a drug user, alcoholic, impoverished, depressed, promiscuous. Loutish, lethargic couch-potato.
Also big-time PR Director, AT LARGE columnist, “best running magazine in history,” quixotic genius. Good guy.
Some highs, many lows. One step up, three steps down. My thinking is that I’ve been, shall we say, unbalanced. Either since Nike (when I was a success in social terms). Or since age nine or ten, the last time I remember being a PERFECT BEING.
Something must have happened when I was just a little boy.
Something that changed the way I have lived this life.
I wonder what it was.
Do I ask my parents? Do I expect straight answers from alien lifeforms?
Hiawatha suggests I might have been sexually abused at The County Farm by a ne’er-do-well named Harry, who was a big favorite of mine and my little brother. Harry taught us how to fish for bluegills in the ponds on the property. I don’t remember much fondling of my covfefe when I was a boy.
Unless I was doing it myself.
Snappy dresser, style leader. With sprinkling of freckles.
I have my school photos. Year after year, I’m this dapper, happy-go-lucky, skinny charmer. Then one year, like I said, I was nine or so, I turned into this sullen load who dressed funny. And started to “score below his potential.”
Something must have happened. I changed schools. Changed neighborhoods. Discovered rock and roll. I remember all the other kids suddenly became bigger than I was. Especially the girls. So I stuffed myself with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonderbread and drank gallons of whole milk in an effort to build strong bones and healthy teeth.
My plan worked too well. I remember I weighed one hundred and sixty pounds when I was ten years old. I was five foot five inches tall, and the only kid bigger in Kent Elementary K-5 was the baker’s son, Michael “Ox” Occipinti. Who started practicing with our high school’s championship varsity football team when he was twelve. A year after he started shaving.
Maybe the weight gain was self-inflicted. Maybe not. That’s my recollection.
Certainly a little boy without money in a small village in 1955 isn’t going to become obese without some help.