Today is my mother's birthday; she would be 65. It's strange how a birthday keeps going on without you. Of all the ways we could measure a life, why did we decide on time? That makes time matter so much more than it should, to have a lot of it, a length of time instead of a depth of it. It makes for an inaccurate and arbitrary system of measurement, lacking the fullness of a multi-dimensional experience.
Like printing a baby's weight in a birth announcement. I always thought it read more like a fishing contest than an arrival. Why not put their little handprints? Recordings of their tender heartbeats? The exact shade of their newborn eyes? I would rather know that, I'm not taking your baby on the Tour De France where I'm scaling back ounces so their EXACT weight matters or I'll never make it through the Alps. It just seems weird to give a starting number and no follow up. What if I don't meet them in person for a few years? "Wow, you've really packed on the poundage, what are you like 52, 53 pounds now? Better start chilling on the Capri Suns, kiddo."
My mother died unexpectedly, in a horrible way, but the truth is, everybody dies. The garden has taught me that death isn't the dramatic last chapter, the FIN. Death is woven into the fiber of the ether; it hangs in the air, curls under a leaf. The ordinary miracle of another turn round the old compost heap.
The gift of these 16 years without her has been that I can turn each slide over in my hand, place it under the microscope, put it away for another day, if need be. I can examine qualities of her mother-ness that I was too close to to be able to see clearly before. For example, I'm very grateful my mother was a reader and she never censored what I read. She always had a paperback book to unwind with. She loved Stephen King and always let me read them after she was done. In 5th grade, I brought Pet Cemetery to school as my silent reading book and a nosy substitute picked it up off the corner of my desk. She turned it over in her hands with a disgusted look on her face,
"Does your MOTHER know that you have this book?" she asked.
"My mother GAVE me the book," I told her.
She read every book Stephen King published up to 2008 and she was even savvy enough to know what he wrote under his pen name, Richard Bachman. Mom went through a regrettable V.C. Andrews phase (yuck) and also read a lot of Dean Koontz and the type of pulp fiction where some grizzled detective falls for some ballbuster lady cop meanwhile some albino freak is sending people doll heads in the mail or whatever.
I found a musty paperback with the cover torn off in the attic of a place we lived for a while. I was finally reading chapter books and this was a real challenge! It was called the Flame and the Flower and instead of being a pyromaniacs guide to gardening, it was what my mother called, "A Bodice Riper." I had to look up every tenth word in the thick green dictionary I boosted from school, tedious and thankless work. There was a lot of "loins" and "pining" and "bosoms" I thought the only bosom was the Bosom of Abraham from a church hymnal song. I didn't really know what I was reading, but I knew this type of reading material was not just something to have hanging around, or worse yet, extracted from your back pack from the kid on the bus who wore the same grubby t-shirt every day and drew all over himself with markers.
I hid the smut under my mattress then lost interest. The neighbor's teenage brother had found himself in a real pickle when his mother discovered the J.C. Penny catalogue lingerie section jammed under his mattress earlier that summer. I couldn't see the fuss, it was a bunch of women that looked like Pat Nixon standing around in putty colored slips. His mother beat him with the magazine, told him what a disgusting pig he was, and shook his room down like a warden.
When my mother found the Flame and the Flower under my mattress after I had forgotten about it, she just asked me if I was done reading it. I said yes and told her she could read it if she wanted to, she said she didn't really like that kind of book and that was the end of it. Years later, I saw the Flame and the Flower on a used bookstore shelf, with the cover intact, a puffy shirted white couple clung to each other desperately. I cracked it open and it was every bit as terrible as I remembered. Apparently, it was the first "full length" (yikes) historical romance. It kind of made me sad that the previous owner had to rip off the cover and hide the book in the attic to read and that the neighbor boy had to hide a magazine under his mattress.
My mother's laizzez faire attitude towards reading was that all reading is good reading. I always liked that we could be quiet together, each with our own book; it was really the only time she was ever still, the only time she allowed herself to rest. Her husband would brag that he only read the sports page but he couldn't even finish the easy level crossword puzzles he left folded in the bathroom. I took deliberate joy filling in the ones he left blank with black ink so he couldn't erase it. It's how I learned the word ennui.
When I was around 11, I discovered MAD magazine and it was love at first site. I specifically remember that it was #180 published in 1976 with the iconic Jaws cover art. It was already banged up when I got my hands on it, but I wore that magazine out from cover to cover. I loved the wordless Spy Vs. Spy comics and the tiny illustrations that dotted secret page corners. Years later I would shame myself by bringing up MAD Magazine while seeing the Book of Kells for the first time. I meant it as a compliment, the illuminated manuscripts sparked the same joyous wonder in me. When I finished the magazine, all of it, then I would give myself permission to do the famous Al Joffrie MAD fold in on the back cover. The fastest way to end a friendship with me in middle school was do my MAD fold in before me.
I saved my birthday and report card money to buy a subscription and my mother bought me the special editions for Christmas. She didn't think they were as funny or interesting as I did, but she never made snarky comments or judged me for enjoying a "low brow" magazine. When Bill Gaines (the publisher) died in 1992, she sent me a clipping of his obit from the New York Times. He had held to the principle that no cow was too sacred. I didn't realize at the time that MAD magazine had been considered subversive, that Gaines had to testify in front of the Senate in 1954 to defend free speech. I've read his testimony and although she was in no way political, I think my mother would agree with his statement from that day:
"What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?"
So I'm grateful that my mother gave me that freedom to decide for myself what to read and I sincerely feel sorry for those who can not lose themselves in the reliable pleasure of a book. It's not anything we ever talked about when she was alive. I never sat across from her and asked, "Mom, what are your feelings about censorship and American attitudes towards contemporary literature?"
I think she would have just laughed at me, as well she should have. She was not one to ruminate or overthink; she was tremendously social, I never saw her wallow in self pity or worry about things beyond her control. Oh, she worried, and nagged, and mommed with the best of them, but most of the time she really was right. I'm grateful I had a mom that told me "no" most of the time, but "yes" when it really mattered. When I started getting good at poker, I identified this tactic as "tight, aggressive" You should be folding most of the time in poker and pushing after the flop, not before. Only about 20% of your hands will be worth playing, so don't get sentimental about it. Or do get sentimental, but be prepared to lose your money.
One May I asked if I could put the big Coleman tent up and sleep out. Amazingly, she said yes, and she let me keep the tent up all summer. I felt like I had my own personal apartment, it was a decadence unmeasured. I slept in the tent until it got too cold and the ground started frosting at night and she worried I would get a chill in my lungs. In the heat of the day, the blue from the tent cast a watery light on my blankets and pillows. At night, I let the outside swallow me whole and it was wonderful.
I'm grateful I had a mother that let me get dirty. I had school clothes and play clothes and play clothes were fine for mud pies, and building secret snow forts, for poking around empty construction sites in the city, and for all manner of other engaging and worthwhile pursuits. My mother taught me to gather colorful leaves and press them between wax paper with an iron, she showed me how to preserve flowers between heavy books. When we lived in New Jersey, she let me walk to the beach and collect shells by myself. She let me go to the big public pool in the city with my cousins and we lived like royalty for just a few dollars, feasting on snow cones and sharing bags of salty crushed chips, chipping in for a cab ride if we were really flush. She taught me to make sure the cabbie zeroed the meter. The most generous thing my mother did was keep her fears to herself, so that I could explore a larger world.
I had a good friend in high school and her mother grounded her for not styling the back of her hair. She bought her daughter the much coveted Jordache jeans, but two sizes too small as "motivation" to lose weight. I had another friend and her mother called her butch all the time, threw away her favorite T-shirts, painted her room "dusty mauve" while we were at school. I'm glad my mother wasn't like that. She pretty much thought everything I produced was great. She kept drawings I did as a toddler and talked about how advanced I was and I was like "Mom, this is three squiggles and a mutant spider." To hear my mom tell it, I was a child prodigy and she would gloss over the parts where I was so bad at the recorder that she made me practice outside down the street or that I was the last person in kindergarten to learn how to tie my shoes. She conveniently forgets that I had to go so speech therapy because I had an asshole of a lisp. Or that I TALKED HER into letting me get a wire chain for my Sally Jessie Raphael glasses because I thought it was cool. Even though the chains were specifically in the elderly person part of the store beside the hearing aids. I thought looking like a librarian was chic. I know she knew I looked absurd because YEARS later I found those glasses, with chain!, in my mother's jewelry box and when I asked her about it she just started laughing.
She was forever bragging about me as an adult, too. I would meet her friends and they would already by in six chapters deep into "Brandi: Genius of her Generation; Sagas of an Eldest Daughter." I just thought all moms believed in their kids, so I'm grateful she did that for me, too.