Mom
December 2000
It was 1943
when my dad went to
In a leaky
little house about a mile south of the cemetery where she now lays mother
taught us kids to sing Christmas carols. There in the place the Algonquians
called ‘land of the great pine’ the wind and snow rattling the window beside
the old Motorola the four of us sang together. We were too young for pretension
and mother, knowing it, had none either. Each had their favorite. Fifty-five
years have passed and I can still hear mine as if it were yesterday: Silent
Night. Holy Night. All is calm. All is bright.
My father
did not return from the war. No. Divorce. He stayed in
Once later
in life when I was a man I asked him a question that haunted me; what happened,
Dad, between you and mom? There was a long pause and he said. “Oh I don’t know.
The war I guess.” The truth was in his voice not his words. He had issued a
man’s lie and not to protect himself. My
father was very brave and a gentleman. But it was mother I loved. And he knew
it.
Back in
Newbury her life had became hard and then even brutal. It was tough in those
days, a divorced woman in a small town with three little kids. She worked hard.
She tried to be a father too. And mostly failed. We
never had a car and it was a one-store town. But mostly it was the loneliness.
Too many New Year’s Eve’s alone. Too many things that broke
that she didn’t know how to fix. There were men in her life and one
especially (a farmer bachelor just south of the village) I was routing for. But
none of them took.
And no one
ever stayed over. And I never went hungry. And she was always there. In my
younger wild days when the selfishness and arrogance of early manhood trumped
compassion and understanding my recurring memory was of her sitting at the
kitchen at night playing solitaire and smoking cigarettes. The sadness of a
single woman left by her children to face age and bygone dreams alone was
beyond me. No one with which to share the terror, no one to dry her tears, no
one to understand.
I don’t know
exactly when the booze took over. But by high school I was on the look out for
hidden bottles to try to preserve some order at Christmas. And I do remember
the day when as a young man I drove her to
I dropped
her off at home and went down to Charlie’s to help with chores. By the time I
got home she was dead drunk in bed. But she left a note on the kitchen table.
“No one is going to tell me what I can and can’t do.” What a woman.
Mom bottomed
out in
So she came
back to Newbury and lived out the rest of her life. Mostly sober. As her mind
slipped away Dave and I slowly took over trying desperately to keep her in the
old house she loved so much. But you know the story. I could feed her and did.
I could not change her diapers.
It was the
Christmas of 1993. I had picked her up from the nursing home to spend Christmas
with us. She would recognize almost no one. It had been a year since she had
called me by name. There would be no reasoned conversation. Only mutterings and
random sentences wrapped in confusion and even fear. The presents would be
meaningless. The mother I knew had been gone for years.
As we sat in
the car waiting for my daughter’s return to her place in Shelburne where were to have Christmas a light snow
fell sending long tears melting down the windshield in the dusk of an early
evening. Over the mummer of the engine a local station was playing Christmas
music. There we sat. Alone. It had been a long haul
since mom had moved to Newbury a half century earlier.
Then from
the radio came the song. “Silent night.”
“Holy Night.” and in strong, clear tones and in perfect tune my mother
began to sing along: “All is calm. All is bright.” She needed no
prompting so clear her memory. “Round yon virgin, mother
and child. Then she
turned to me and said. “You sing too Bootsie. This is
your favorite.”
And I did.
The circle was complete; I the mother and she the child, nothing to confuse the
bond. “Holy infant so tender and mild.”
I suppose it
came from some random mix of brain waves or quirk of biology whereby the
avenues of memory in her tired old mind were triggered to respond to tissue not
yet quite dead. The explanation was simply physiological the scientists would
tell us. Nothing more. It was an odd juxtaposition of
happenstances but clearly no big deal.
Maybe.
But perhaps
there is another explanation. Perhaps what happened is explained by the
existence of a distant paradise called Newbury. There in the sweet melancholy
of an August afternoon only the locust cry and from the backyard is heard the
laughter of children at their play. A
breeze touches the cheek of someone young and beautiful, someone whose spirit
is free of demons and whose heart is filled with love.
She looks
down the road that winds through the village. First as
but a longing but then with joyous certitude an incandescent truth emerges.
Toward her through the dance of shadows cast by a canopy of ancient elms –
there comes a soldier.
“Sleep in
heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace ”