REMEMBERING MOM

My mother is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and interesting persons I have known. She was acquainted with me before anyone else and had greater responsibility and influence over me in the earliest moments of my existence.

The earliest moments I do not recall in ways we understand as conscious and communicable, but there is no doubt that those several years established what occurred after I slipped into the stream of sentience I continue to confuse with what and who I actually am.

Although her intense sociability seems to have been her most salient personality trait, my mom was also a resource for arcane knowledge. I could ask her why Easter moves around on the calendar and other quirky religious lore in the Eurocentric tradition.

She also knew who was who in the family and the world, which is very important to newbies suddenly plunked into life. A child’s first job seems to be figuring out relationships and the rules of hierarchies in the different fusion-fission groupings.

My mom was great at this. She seemed to know instantly what was going on and could slip right into scene. I must have picked up a lot of subtle cues just from watching and listening to her. She never seemed at a loss for how to enjoin others in one direction or other to get things done or head off trouble.

I recall one time when I was likely eight or nine riding in the car with two of my sisters. We were sitting in the back seat, my mom driving, heading down Pacific Coast Highway, the hill just after Malibu Canyon Road and right before the civic center in Malibu.

A sheriff’s deputy was driving behind us. We kids were bouncing around. My mom’s hair was down, not in the bun she most often wore in those days. Her long ponytail was flipping about as she tried to get us all to settle down.

Next thing, Johnny Law turned on his lights and pulled us over. We kids were instantly interested as was mom. I cannot recall if she gave us any instruction on how to act. I do recall she did not seem the least bit upset or flustered.

When the officer walked up and she rolled down her window, I looked at him smiling. He was young and seemed a bit confused. He did not ask my mother for her license or any of that.

“You were driving pretty close to the car in front of you,” he said. “Do you always drive like that?”

“Yes, always,” mom answered with an almost musically pleasant tone.

“You must get in a lot of accidents.” The cop was clearly out of his element.

“No, I have never been in an accident,” mom answered without hesitation, and it was true. It was also true she was a tailgater. She claimed it was because she had a Type A Personality but because she had great reflexes, she could stop quickly if needed.

To her credit, I never ever saw her drive distracted. She focused on the road as if it was the most serious thing, especially in the days when we kids were little.

The police officer ended the interaction by telling her to be more careful. “Oh, yes I will!” She even got the last word.

I asked her why we got pulled over. She inferred that this young man had seen bodies bouncing around and her long ponytail. He probably thought it was a car full of teenagers, not a mom with three young children, she said.

“He was probably thinking it was an opportunity to flirt,” she said or something to that effect.

Before moving to California from Ohio, my family lived for several years in a suburb of Boston. It was the late sixties, and court-ordered school busing was causing conniptions as mom might have put it.

I have shared this previously. It still stands out to me as one the smartest things my mother ever did. When the first African-American family moved into a house just down the block from us, she and another woman arranged for a party to introduce them to the neighborhood.

It was kind of common, as I recollect, in that time and place for neighbors to do things like knock on each other’s doors and introduce themselves, to throw backyard parties, and everyone to get acquainted. But this meet-and-greet party was a bit more elaborate.

I was too young to know how this came about in detail. The other woman, Mrs. Varrows was her name, was older. She and her husband split time between the burbs of Wellesley Hills and the Big Apple. She smoked cigarettes in one of those long filters and had, at least at the time of the party, a Cleopatra hairstyle.

Regardless of who initiated the thing, though I suspect it was my mom, there was no trouble in the neighborhood, at least that I know of, after that party.

My mom may not have been a saint as some claimed at one time or other. She was a good swimmer if not a mermaid, as my dad claimed she was. But she knew how to manage social relations and make people feel at home.

I remember when I first introduced her to a friend of mine. She immediately asked him, “Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?” He told me later that instantly let him know what kind of people he was dealing with, more than anything else.

That was a great part of who my mother was. The sandwiches she made on that occasion were the same big sandwiches she suddenly started to make for me one year in high school. She went out of her way to make my lunches again for me every day.

I don’t know what triggered this. I speculated at the time she wanted to feel maternal. Maybe she worried I was too skinny. I was old enough to make my own lunches but she just asked one day if it would be alright if she did it for me.

She used to take such care, spreading the mayonnaise or the peanut butter thinly and evenly to cover the entire surface of the bread. I still make my sandwiches the same way, although I do use more mayonnaise.

When we first moved to So Cal, my mother was tickled by the abbreviation for Canyon as Cyn. She thought it funny since it rhymed with sin in her mind. She and my dad both found a lot of the street and other place-naming conventions funny.

Another thing my mother said was about money. The household money was both hers and my father’s. Her share of it went to all the good things like education. When she took a job as a church secretary it was the same. That money was the good income.

There’s a lot I remember and a lot I don’t. Likely a lot of what I make of it now is recollected anew and not always accurate. I think about many things my mom did every day. In a thousand moments I find myself slipping into the past, remembering.

Every day something pops back into my mind because of something I do because she did it like that, or because she gave something to me. When someone asks where I got something, I still like to joke and say I’m not sure.

“Like most good things, probably a woman gave it to me,” I say. “Everything good I ever had came from a woman, you know.”

That was my mother.