In two days it will be my mother’s 92nd birthday - from me she will receive no card, no call no notice · yet somehow she will know that i am thinking about her deeply. She is in a locked ward, hopefully safe from the virus, but unprotected from my siblings. When i told her many months ago that i would not fight my way through my siblings to her bedside as i had for my father, she replied with typical wryness, “thanks a lot.” Nothing would be accomplished by my presence except the continued rancor of brothers and a sister she had trained from birth to regard me as _______fill in the blank. She knows that i love her and that my love comes from a deep forgiveness for behaviors of hers toward me i doubt she is any closer to understanding than the day we parted. She is a “Moon child” in every connotation that expression can have; the eldest brother is on the cusp Leo/Cancer and by her own accounting, suffered the most from her parental learning curve. She met, married and bore my brother within 10 months of meeting my father - with 3 more children quickly @ 2 year intervals ·
I was named after her father who married her mother - 20 years his junior in the silver fields of Nevada · he died 20 some years later in the front room of the house on 116th St in Los Angeles my maternal great grandfather; a doctor in the Confederacy had built somewhere around the turn of the century. Shit gets a little hazy trying to line up a Medical professional from the Civil War building a house in the early 1900s of Los Angeles, but that is how it was conveyed to me, or at best how i remember it. Ma took pains to show me places in Nevada where she was a kid/blossoming ingenue righteously fending off the advances of WWII soldiers passing through on their way to glory. Whichever the case, ma gained enough confidence to remain chaste to the extent she proudly described an event to me when she shamed my grandfather for his “dirty mind” when he had cautioned her one too many times about soldiers wandering through the desert towns of WWII ‘merica.
I doubt only-son pop had any clue about what he was walking into having been barely relieved of duty as a bomber pilot in post WWII ‘merica; she was 4 years his junior and a ravishing young woman by all accounts. No one told him how smart she was and i’m sure he barely saw past her radiant smile enough to look. They did what all post war couples do and made a family - 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956 · bada bing, bada boom. Within 18 months of marriage ma had one child, one on the way with two more to follow in close succession. Ma is an inordinately ambitious woman and entertained modeling and acting along with her scholarly ambitions, so to find herself up to her earholes with screaming babies was not part of the bargain. Pop was a gallant enough guy and made from rugged stock, but making a “killing” didn’t figure high in his concept of fun. His father was a happy-go-lucky hard drinking tile-setter, chewing-gum selling orphan from an equally dysfunctional household where bathtub beer was more important than keeping up with the Jones’s.
It wasn’t a match made in heaven and when the 60’s lurched into view the exhaustion of tracking 4 uber-humans overtook any love they may have retrieved from their early years. Ma kicked pop to the curb in my 2nd year of High School, and someone had to pay - i was loud rebellious and angry for having been saddled with vain disinterested elder siblings lacking any empathy for what it meant to grow up as a cyclops in ‘merica’s heyday of pretty things and ugly truths no one wanted to face · the perfect “identified patient.” Now nearly 40 years later the chickens have come home to roost; ‘merica is aflame with an entirely containable contaminant attended to by a corporate buffoon bent on goosing the Dow Jones bottom line by assassinating as many Americans of Color as can be accomplished without international intervention.
I have to see beyond the brutal accusations levied against me by self-serving siblings whose only demonstrated interest in family, is to gain the greatest possible return from any death in the family that does not include their own. I wish them well and am ambivalent to beat the band. My sister’s jocular email to me while absconding with a family heirloom for her eldest child who didn’t posses gumption enough to ask for it himself, included the bullshit expression of “what a caper”, forgetting entirely it was i she was stealing from and traveling 2,000 miles to aid her in the process - that is on me, and no one else, but g_d help me if i can forget how my blood feels about my place in the family. Why ma encouraged this pathology eludes me, but does not prevent me from facing it full front in order better understand how the family of man has done itself in, and to try and advocate for a more generous distribution of what is all of our world - planet earth · mama gaia.
jts 17/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
No comments:
Post a Comment