Remember Dave Barry? What?? Are you sure?? Well, that Dave, the real one, wrote a novel. A funny sort of Elmore Leonard type thing, called Big Trouble. It’s funny, you should read it. Well, I just found out, they’ve gone and made a movie out of it. The same dude who made Get Shorty, another Elmore Leonard type novel, this time actually written by Elmore Leonard. Big Trouble, the movie, is coming out in April, 2002. Great, I could use a good laugh.
Remind me of Battle Mountain, NV the next time I bitch about where I live.
I’ve been writing this thing about mom all morning, but I’m not sure if I should post it.
I suppose I will anyway.
It seems that, no, I haven’t quite let go of the immediate grief of my mother’s loss. I think that it is one of the things that is keeping me awake nights (like now, almost 6am on the night before my first job interview in three months), and quite possibly the prevailing factor urging me to escape the world for just a few more hours by sleeping in into the early hours of the afternoon. I hurt over this in entirely new ways. This is an unprecedented experience both in depth and complexity — I have no basis for comparison, and nothing has really prepared me for dealing with this. Mom was my one and only absolute in this world — she was steadier than gravity, to me. Like the rising of the sun, she was. Just as constant, and just as welcome. Losing her has really thrown me off-balance: I have no one to turn to when I’m perplexed, or broken-hearted, or just needing something to restore my hope in the world. I based a lot of my character on her — she was my fulcrum, my point of reference, my moral compass. I have stayed clean and sober to this day solely because of her. I couldn’t stand the thought of causing her pain or worry over me being drunk or doing drugs, and so the thought of trying them never entered my mind. I mean, never. Mother didn’t control me through guilt, but through love: she loved me in word and in deed, and every act she performed around me was motivated so. How could I in good conscience reciprocate in any other way? True, my attempts were often feeble or clumsy, but I tried. Now and always, I wished I would have sent flowers more often, visited longer, talked more deeply, asked more questions. I wish I had painted a few more pretty pictures for her walls. I wish I had practiced the guitar more so that I could have been proficient enough to serenade her every time I went over for the holidays. I fantasized of one day being ‘good enough’ to write songs in her name. Something, anything that would say “thanks, mom: this is because I remember every gesture of love in your face, from the moment you held me in your arms after giving me birth, until the moment you held me in your arms just before I boarded the plane that took me away from you for the last time. And because I want you to know that I remember, and I have felt your love radiate over me like sunshine, and I just want to reflect some of it back to you.”
Christmas reminds me of her. Not only because this was traditionally the time when I would make an extra effort to try to visit (when I could afford it, which wasn’t every Christmas) but because of the little things: mom liked to decorate, especially while we still lived in NYC and I was a really little kid. She also had a particular fondness for those bags of assorted nuts that seem to sprout up at Christmastime for some reason, and would while away many a Sunday afternoon shelling nuts while watching TV. And nougat: she had a thing for Christmas nougat. Well, there’s this confection from Spain, I think… it’s a hard candy, chockful of — you guessed it — nuts, embedded in some form of caramelized sugar that ends up being hard as a rock., and formed into bricklets about the size of a Zagat’s restaurant guide. The Spaniards call it turrón. Well, she just loved gnawing into a piece of that and, for some reason, there was more of it available for sale around Christmastime so I’ve come to associate it with this season. Of course, there was mom’s own outstanding cooking to look forward to with every visit, also. (An aside: Christmas among puerto ricans truly is a communal celebration. People are always throwing dinner parties and making every excuse to exchange food gifts — paellas, pasteles, roast pork, candied rice desserts being typical– with each other in a fluid, continuous sort of way.)
Like I said, little things… my mother was extraordinary in her subtlety. It was all too easy to be overwhelmed with her grand gestures and miss the details but, you get raised by someone and soon enough you start noticing stuff. Her quiet, unassuming character was punctuated with delicious morsels of verve: The tone of her voice was musical and its every note was laden with meaning. Mom didn’t have to raise her voice in a crowd to make herself heard: the fact that she addressed the room at all was sufficient to cause everyone to quiet down and listen. She didn’t have to raise her voice to rebuke me: just her meaningful split-second pause before beginning to speak told me everything I needed to know. The words were simply there to mark the end of the message and to serve as all the exclamation points that came after!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Those words would pound into me like the beat of the drummer urging the slaves below-deck to row. But that was much better than the alternative: If I ever had done or said something that deeply hurt or affected her, she wouldn’t say anything at all, and that was really tortuous. Be assured, she was a deeply emotional person, and gifted with some of the deepest conviction and resolve I have ever witnessed in a human, besides. It’s just that, her face was a study in grace and nuance. Mom wasn’t rubber-faced like me: she had a few choice expressions — right now I can only recall two, her “regular” face and her smiling one — and the rest was delivered very quietly, so quietly that if you so much as uttered a whisper you might miss it. I suppose this is where I got my attention to detail from. It’s the small things, the quiet things, the almost imperceptible transition between day and night at sunset, that I have learned to find truly beautiful.
An interview, finally!
Update: The Good News – Yes, interview went fine. The Bad News – It wasn’t for a job, but rather, to be added to a pool of talent for possible freelance work in the future. *sigh*
