It's four twenty six in the morning. I went to bed about exactly four hours ago... and I woke up about forty five minutes ago unable to sleep. I read for awhile, the last of Anne Lamott's non-fiction books that I've yet to completely devour. I am currently sitting upright in bed having just finished a bowl of red velvet frozen yogurt. Yes, I said frozen yogurt. Don't judge me, any time is a good time for fro-yo.
I was visiting my mom at her home in Port Townsend where after a few years of renting (really fabulous, charming places) she bought a small little bungalow directly behind one of her good friends' house. It was the first and only time I would visit this house while she was still alive. It was summer and warm out as summer tends to be and as I was there for several days she decided to put me to work helping her re-paint her kitchen cabinets. I can't even remember what color they were now before we got our hands on them, probably a horrible member of the hideous family known as beige. We pulled them all down and sanded them and then wiped them clean with some sort of chemical who's name now escapes me but is designed to get all the dust and grease off and who's gasoline like smell is all together delightful. And then we put Kate Campbell in the CD player, a lovely middle aged southern folk singer I had met in college who grew up in the south during the civil rights movement with a white, southern Baptist minister father who marched along side Dr. King. In any event, it was one of the few CDs I had that we both enjoyed so we perched my mom's small stereo atop an open kitchen window sill facing out into the backyard where we were hunched in the grass on our knees and we sang about growing corn in a box and Joe Lewis' furniture as we painted each cabinet in a random variety in an eggplant purple, fuscia pink, sunshine-y yellow, and turquoise; all of my mom's favorite colors. I imagine in the few months after that day and before she died, that kitchen gave people quite a shock as they came around the corner from her dining room but she loved it. It made her happy. It made her house home.
In any event, one of those nights during my visit she decided to take me out to dinner, a place she really loved in Port Townsend, a slightly fancy, sit-down restaurant if such a thing really exists in that funky little seashore town. But it was unexpectedly busy and the service was really slow, really really slow. We ordered and then sat and sat and sat looking alternately at our watches and getting nervous we would miss the movie. Well, really only I was getting nervous. My mom was never as uptight and nervous in general as I am, I take more after my grandmother and her mother in that respect, but ever since moving to Port Townsend time had seemed to become superfluous to her. She drove slowly, down the middle of roads I might add, wherever she went (as do a lot of people there) and she was never worried or hurried or stressed about much of anything anymore it seemed. It alternately drove me absolutely bonkers and I would have to grit my teeth a lot when I visited her, or it would rub off on me and I would find myself also sinking deeply and into this lackadaisical sort of life wherein in not being so rushed about always you are suddenly able to see all the startling beauty around you and be thankful and at peace. Must be something about living by the sea, about waking up everyday with water as far as the eye can see that calms the inner unrest of a soul, or at least some of it's nervousness and anxiety.
In any event, seeing as how I was so anxious and nervous about making the movie (at the one theatre in town, which was located almost across the street) she told me to go on ahead and she would ask for the food to go. She instructed me to sit in the balcony because that would be the easiest place for her to sneak the food in. To sneak food in?! What where we, twelve again?? It's not like we were going to sneak in our own plastic sandwich baggie of homemade popcorn or a box of candy bought at the corner store for a quarter of the price it cost at the theatre; we were sneaking in full dinners complete with meat, starch and vegetables. But I was feeling obedient at the moment and so followed directions and rose to stroll down the hill half a block to the theatre and found us a seat in the balcony. I can't say for sure because the movie was already starting when I got there and it was almost completely pitch black in theatre, but the balcony seemed to consist of only two or three rows, five or six rows across and a had ceiling so low it's a miracle I didn't have to squat like when I stand up from a middle or window seat after the airplane lands. Some time went by and then there emerging from the dark came my mom, complete with two to-go boxes smuggled under her arm. She handed me one and we dug in. It was the only time in my life I can recall ever having had a meal I couldn't see at all. We groped around with our fingers and plastic picnic-ware in the dark trying somewhat successfully to get a scoop of food or hunk of meat onto our forks and into our mouths without dropping too much of it down the front of ourselves. Physically navigating around in the world must be hard for blind folks but trying to eat blind earned me a whole new level of respect. I'm sure if we had been the movie that night, we would have looked utterly ridiculous sitting there hunched over our to-go boxes shoveling mystery food into our mouths that only made it there about half of the time.
And so we shoveled and the movie played, a charming tale about a Maori girl in New Zealand wanting to ride the whales like the boys were trained to do. Deep inside of herself she knew she was called to do this ancient practice of her people but because she was female, her grandfather didn't believe that she could have such a calling. In the end she does of course demand to be able to follow that little voice within her and she rides the whale and they become one. I had just graduated college not even a few months earlier with a liberal studies degree with a focus in women's studies at the time and was still in, what I think of looking back now, as my angry feminist days (whereas now I like to think I am in my post-angry feminist days and into my peaceful, spiritual feminist days, lol). I'm a sucker for the idea of a woman, or a girl as in the case of the main character in Whale Rider overcoming odds and bucking the system and following her calling... or for any person to do this for that matter. And I really loved the whole, 'girl shows 'em who's boss' theme the movie had going on at the time. I loved too that I was watching such an empowering tale with my mom who had divorced her husband of twenty some odd years and not too long after packed up and moved to a town by the sea in where she would make a whole new cadre of friends and followers. Where she would join a community choir and teach troubled youth how to sail and make and share art and dance with wild abandon and bake cookies for all the kids in the neighborhood and plant breathtaking gardens and spend her mornings baking pies for free at a friend's new bakery. When I think about what a happy life really looks like, my mom's last few years are what I see; someone giving up on being anything or anyone other than who they really are and shining almost blindingly bright in the process. Let's face it, the world can be a harsh and shitty place not just for Maori girls who aren't given the benefit of the doubt simply because of the chromosomes they have or graying middle aged women with cellulite who some think outrageous and unrealistic for dreaming so vividly and stubbornly of making the world a better place. As a character in the movie Another Year, that I saw the other night, said when chatting with a friend whilst they looked at an old friend who had fallen on hard times, "life isn't always kind." The longest war in US history rages endlessely on and there are social problems and stigmas and unhappiness and sorrow going on as far as the eye can see. And when most of us think about these things, we think we are only one small person and what in the hell can we do about any of that, about solving any of these big problems that exist in the world anyways?? Well, I'm young and I'm naive and I don't know much, but what I do know is that when something feels much too big to tackle, start small. Start in your own backyard because here's the thing, goodness spreads. Love begets love just as hate begets hate. If we pass on as much as we can to the folks we see every day or every week, most likely they will past that on and the cycle will continue. Who's to say all this goodness spreading around might not cause a million or ten million people to feel so much love that they get together and rise up against all the hate? I have faith and I have hope and I believe in miracles and the enormous power of goodness and love. And I think in Port Towsend, where my mom finally and at long last, fit for the first time in her life perfectly in her shoes and the shape of her being, this is what she did. She started small and she took every opportunity given her and spread goodness and love and the ripples of this can still be seen and heard today. When she died the wooden boat school, famous across the nation, wanted to start a scholarship in her name to continue teaching young people how to sail and build boats. For as much as she could loathe and quickly loose her wits with a surly teenage boy, she still saw the worth and value in all of their tattered souls and so took some of them under her wing and taught them to get in a vessel of wood and fly across water.
When I sat down to write tonight, or this morning I guess I should say, even though I had my mom on my mind really what I was wanting, intending to write about was my dad and brother. I have written a lot about my mom in the past few years you see, more than I would like to admit. More than most probably want to read at this point but somehow she always manages to become the heroine in the small stories that i tell of my life. I suppose her life is the tale that weaves together the biggest lessons of my own thus far and so here we are again, with Jan. Sometimes I get almost angry with myself for how much I write about her but I suppose I don't hardly talk about her at all so here on the page is where her she and her story come gushing out of me. This is one of the things I was going to tell about the other two members of my family who remain, about how when we're together we don't talk about her at all; about the unspoken things that happen in families. And also I someday want to tell their stories too, the lessons I have learned from their own lives' stories. Alas, other stories to tell on other days. Today I suppose it will just have to be another story about mom, one more for the books. I am going to try to get another precious hour of shut eye and will pray as my eyelids fall that you may also have at least one someone in your life who is as equally worthy of having their story told.
Namaste.
No comments:
Post a Comment