This current class was a far different affair. Someone uncorked a bottle of white wine, which the class thought was a great idea, and in this noisy, loud, festive environment, Mom took on our Venice Beach enclave.
“We will start with a basic upright arrangement,” she said, staring at the curious group. “Fill the container with two to three inches of water. Place the kenzan in the container, slightly off-center, Asian-style.”
We did.
“Snip the ends of all the branches and flowers underwater so the suction pulls the water up inside the stem. Set them aside.”
We did.
“Measure the shin, also known as ‘heaven.’ It will naturally be the highest point of the arrangement. The shin is the first piece of line material.” She was using pyracantha. “Measure it to one and a half times the diameter and depth of the container. Snip it underwater, and place it in the kenzan leaning ten degrees away from the imaginary center line.”
We did. Because math was involved, it was a bit more complicated, but Mom was patient.
“Good. Now measure the second point of the triangle, the soe, also known as ‘earth,’ to three-quarters the size of the first line.”
We did.
“Place it in the kenzan at a forty-five-degree angle on the same side of the imaginary line as the first branch.”
We did, with Mom gently circling the class and helping each student adjust their branch.
“Maarvelous. Now take your spider mum”—and here Mom dramatically pulled off the netting holding the mum in place, and we oohed and aahed as it sprang forth its creamy butter center and bright white tips—“this is the last line of the triangle, cut the stem underwater to three-quarters or one-half—you decide using your creative eye—of the length of the second branch. This last piece is called the hikae. It is known as ‘man,’ place it at a seventy-five-degree angle on the opposite side of the imaginary line.”
We did.
Someone hollered, “Bevverrrlyyy—HEEELLP!,” and the class broke up into loud laughter as we all tried to nudge our arrangement into place.
“Finally, use your grasses or azaleas as filler. This is the designer’s choice. The filler should complement the texture and color of the flowers and should help to hide the kenzan. Again, use your creative eye.”
More wine was poured. The tiny room was buzzing with noise and laughter. It was definitely not a meditation, but it was fantastic. Mom showed how to use the driftwood in a second arrangement. She drank some wine—cold Chardonnay was her favorite—and I sat fat and pregnant and pleased as punch to see my mom so relaxed and so creative, sharing with my dear friends this art that she so deeply loved. Her talent was flawless. Her ability to caress a stiff branch into a gentle curve, her eye for balance, her knack for simplicity as she cut off the unnecessary leaves from a flower so that the form of the flower was exposed; these skills were due to years of study and craft, and it was clear to me—and clear to our group—what an incredible artist my mom was. When the class was over, she bowed, and we cheered and cheered and laughed and shouted, “Beevverrlyy . . . Heeelllppp!” She showed us how to wrap our flowers in wet paper towels so we could re-create the arrangements at home. Each student trooped off with their bundles, and a new kenzan to boot.
When did the Alzheimer’s tau weed plant itself in the fertile mind of my mother? When did this weed first begin to grow? Quietly it crept along the rows of carefully planted shin, soe, and hikae. It grew like a vine around the pyracantha and hydrangea, rising slowly with the moon-spun tide, and drowning out the years and years of lessons and knowledge and talent that had been so carefully planted, so lovingly attended, so proudly demonstrated. And why my mother? She was the poster child of what to do to keep a healthy brain. She was always active, she ate well, drank rarely, brushed her teeth, and kept her brain sharp with teaching and creating and learning new languages and travel. Why, only seven years later, was Mom showing signs of mild dementia? Why—when we gathered with her Fort Worth ikebana club just fourteen years later, in 2012, as they awarded my mother a lifetime membership for her career accomplishments—was she already foggy on the names of her dear friends? She smiled and elegantly accepted her award, sometimes forgetting what it meant, and in that moment, forgetting as well what she meant. At the ceremony during lunch her children were always at her elbow helping to navigate the inevitable slips and embarrassment of memory loss. We tried to pull at the vine, to tug it off the kenzan where it had tangled itself among the black steel spikes, to rip it from the roses and driftwood and flowering forsythia of her memory, and we prayed that we could stay the weed, we prayed that science would successfully pull this Alzheimer’s tau weed up from the roots, and the garden would spring forth again, bees and hummingbirds landing on bottlebrush and fruited trees, butterflies in the purple allium.
What was the cause of this weed? And where, now, is the pesticide? In anger I mourn that the grandchild she helped to birth on September 23, 1998, will only briefly get to know my mother. Six years later, at the birth of my twins Hudson and Julitta, she was already murmuring, “Something is wrong.” She was already forgetting where she had just put her passport, and she was dreading with a wash of fear and bile what these seemingly innocuous moments might portend.
In the brightly lit hospital room on the day of my labor, we are full of laughter. My cute travel bag lies open on the bed, stargazers arranged in a vase filling the room with heavy, pungent aroma. Mom has her camera ready, vowing to Annie Leibovitz the moment of birth, and convincing herself that she will be as stalwart as a veteran field photographer. In truth I suspect Mom will probably get squeamish and need to sit down . . . I don’t quite see her as Annie Leibovitz. However, it seems Eulala is not ready for her close-up—she is still content to sleep happily in the warm womb, and as a bit of encouragement, my water is broken with help from the doctor. We celebrate and wait, but no contractions are felt, so several hours later the doctor begins to deliver Pitocin, and the contractions start to build with the beauty and fervor of a beach drum circle. They hurt, but we are laughing through it all, Mom and Thaddaeus and me, we are so excited to actually be IN the moment, and we anticipate hearing “PUSH! NOW PUSH HARDER” in just a short while.
Yoga music fills the room from my portable speakers, which later becomes the acoustic guitar of my neighbor Nancy Hower, who visits for several hours and plucks out tunes while I sweat the contractions. My doctor seems worried. I’m not dilating, and this is taking more time that he anticipated. Uncomfortable, and in pain, I sit on the edge of the bed, breathing through my mouth, with my hair now plastered on my forehead, damp and sticky. I feel Mom’s gentle hands hold a wet cold rag to my forehead. My eyes are closed. I’m trying to be elegant and brave and funny, but the pain has robbed me of any humor, and I am just bearing it. Mom begins to braid my hair. As if I were still her small child, which I was and perhaps will always be, she braids my hair. It instantly calms me down. She parts the hair down the middle in the back, and brushes it again and again, and separates each side into three equal parts. Her soft hands soothe and caress my neck as she braids my hair, and she loops the elastic over the ends and asks, “There now, sweetheart, that’s better, isn’t it?” It was. Salty tears fall into my lap. Hours pass. Fast and steady, the contractions beat on, keeping time like the pendulum of a metronome. The entire medical team is now worried, it seems the umbilical cord is wrapped around Eulala’s neck as she is trying to make her way down the passage, and the cord keeps tugging her back. Eulala is holding the cord in her hand, trying to keep it away from her throat. The doctor shows us the image, and he tells me I will have to have a C-section. I cry and cry all the way to the delivery room, because I will not get to be like my mother, I will not get to hear PUSH and PUSH, and I feel like a failure. Thaddaeus holds my hand with the rolling gurney, and Mom—true to her word—troops along the side of us, getting her camera ready.
Soon I wake up in the recovery room. Thad is there holding Eulala and gazing with a
doration at her little pink face, her ruby bow lips. Mom is there, too, with wet tears on her face. They place Eulala on my breast and—I can word it no other way—she voraciously begins to slurp. I am tired, drugged, and Mom, with her camera still at her side, eventually takes her grandchild away from my drowsy arms, and coos and coos into Eulala’s lovely face, and as my eyes waver shut, I smile, having just witnessed Eulala’s first snuggle with her grandmother. But not just any grandmother. We have graphic and beautiful photos to bear witness to another first, to the first moments of my daughter’s life; indeed, her first breath, her first wail, her first tear . . . all thanks to my mom.
My mother is a silver-wrapped piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum
SPECIAL OCCASION DAYS.
Our school children lives were marked by special days of the month, holidays that broke up the boring sameness of classrooms. These “occasion days” provided a glimmer of color in an otherwise dull school year, and they spurred us to get through the drudgery of homework. They began with the new year, the air crisp and cold over ponytails and cowlicks as we stood in line waiting for the yellow school bus, lunch boxes clutched in our brightly mittened hands and each of us dressed in our brand-new clothes, which still smelled of pine and Christmas.
Sporting our fresh finery, we would gleefully pile off the bus into the schoolyard in January. Then, as the sameness of days began, we would trudge to our lockers and wait for the occasion days, which were like bright balloon markers along a dull biege path. First came Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Then classes classes classes Groundhog Day! Then Valentine’s Day! Classes classes classes Presidents Day! St. Patrick’s Day and green somewhere on your body or God Forbid you got pinched. Classes classes report cards classes Easter! Spring Break! Rich kids return with tans to school and we stare, then April Fool’s Day! May Day! Mother’s Day! Memorial Day! Classes classes classes and report cards again, and then . . . wait for it . . . summer!!!
We five kids would plan for these holiday oases in the otherwise mundane desert of monthly educational routines. On Valentine’s Day, we discussed what flowers we would get for Mom, or on the night before Easter, we would try to figure out where the eggs would be hidden, and what special card we would make for our parents. On these nights, as the evening settled in and teeth were brushed, Crest squeezed like icing on different-colored plastic toothbrushes, after “Now I lay me down” prayers were said and “LIGHTS OUT” was hollered, the hallway that separated our rooms was still alive with the chatter of five children. The hallway always had family pictures arranged on the wall, school pictures and grandparents, and on these “occasion nights,” it was as if the pictures were actually talking to each other, disembodied voices reverberating in the emptiness. Snuggled in our quilted covers and white pillow single beds we whispered from our room to the siblings’ room across the hall, peering through the darkness, and it was as if our voices gathered under the hallway light, bouncing off the family picture frames, lingering on the mouths in the pictures, then drifting, floating through the hallway, into our rooms, and down to our pillows.
Saint Patrick’s Day:
I whisper, “What are you wearing that’s green tomorrow, Leslie?”
“Socks.”
“How ’bout you, Sheryl?”
“My sweater.”
“Okay, I am wearing my plaid skirt, which has a little green in the pattern.”
Sheryl calls down the hall: “Mom, is green underwear fair?”
She responds delicately: “It certainly is, but you’ll get in trouble for showing it!”
Leslie whispers: “Mark can wear his green shorts, and Stephanie has a green hair bow.”
Stephanie peeps: “Mom, what are you wearing?”
“Quiet. It’s bedtime,” she says firmly, but we hear her smiling.
Thaddeus Mark calls out to Mom: “Are you wearing green?”
“Well, if I’m not, you get to pinch me. Now quiet!” Still smiling.
In the morning she would rise well ahead of us all and make green pancakes in her green blouse with the gold buttons, or fry eggs in her olive green skirt, or stir oatmeal, sporting a scarf with a paisley pattern and green accents. We would each come into the kitchen, also sporting green somewhere on our bodies, and we would gloat at our well-paid-off efforts.
A month before the green pancakes of St. Patricks Day, we had been delighted by red pancakes on Valentine’s Day. February was never my mom’s favorite month. Drab and gray, cold and wet, flowerless February seemed to have very little to distinguish it—other than the love and sugar festival, which occurred on February 14 every year.
Yellow roses of Texas. Those are the flowers Dad usually brought home for Mom, but on Valentine’s Day he honored the rich blood-red of tradition and Mom filled vases around the house with combinations of crimson rose and deep green aromatic pine. The pine provided the line material, and it was a prize to find a perfect pine bough that still had a little pine cone on it, sitting like a wee round treasure among the roses and green needles. Red roses, and a box of rounded chocolates filled with cherries and some kind of liquor—these were the usual Valentine’s gifts Dad brought home for Mom. I didn’t like the liquor chocolates much, the way the sticky sweet slurped around in your mouth as it melted. I was partial to chocolate-covered caramel, sticky in my cavities. Valentine’s cards and doilies, chocolates and cinnamon red-hot hearts burning my tongue.
From the grocery store Mom would buy five separate boxes of Valentine’s cards. There was no SpongeBob SquarePants then, no Pokémon, but instead the images were of Tweety Bird and Sylvester the Cat. Or Casper the Friendly Ghost. Or butterflies, or trucks. On the little card with the butterfly, the butterfly would be rising off of a wildflower, and a little thought bubble would say, YOU MAKE MY HEART FLY. Or on the truck card, the truck would be looking with its headlight eyes at another more female truck with headlight eyelash eyes, and the thought bubble would say, I’D TRAVEL THE WORLD FOR YOU.
Mom would buy these boxes, and the five of us children would gather around our round table and pick the perfect cards for the perfect students and handwrite their names and lick the sticky sweet closure of each envelope. Each child in class was supposed to get a Valentine’s card. So we would go through a list of names and carefully pick the boy Valentine’s cards and the girl cards. We would write a note on each one, and hope that the boy we liked would know that his card had extra special attention paid to it, that we had chosen it because it was one of two cards that actually said BE MINE, VALENTINE. We hoped he would know that the only other card that said BE MINE, VALENTINE had been given to the teacher. But whereas hers had had an apple with a worm wearing glasses saying BE MINE in the thought bubble, his card had two goldfish ogling each other, the boy goldfish having the thought bubble BE MINE rising with the other sea bubbles to the surface of the water. In one of the female goldfish bubbles, we hoped he would notice the childish scrawl, a handwritten YOU’RE THE BEST. We would put the cards in a big paper bag to be distributed along with little candied hearts that also said BE MINE and YOU’RE THE TOPS and we would put the bag on our mats, waiting for us to take to school the next morning. That night from our single beds we called across the hall from our rooms again, and the hallway was full of discussions of what red or pink sweater we might wear, what boy we might like, or if we had ever held hands or even been kissed yet.
Lacy socks and red bows on Valentine’s morning. A little yellow box of Whitman’s chocolate holding four pieces of chocolate sat on each of our mats. Mom never put a plate directly on the table. That was not how it was done in her elegant Dallas home, so we had a variety of mats and tablecloths that were always used. February 14 called for red mats to highlight the yellow Whitman’s chocolate boxes, white plate with red heart-shaped pancakes and orange juice and milk. A small brown paper bag with our names written in cursive held our lunches, and inside was a nickel for lunch milk. Mom didn’t want to leave the nickel loose and bouncing around in the bag, so she wrapp
ed it up tight in a white paper napkin, tied it in a knot, and let it settle between the sandwich and the snack and the secrets of our daily lunch.
She packed braunschweiger or bologna, peanut butter or egg salad sandwiches, celery sticks in plastic bags, carrots or a tangerine. On Valentine’s Day, we might discover a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie with creamy icing smiling from the bottom of the bag, along with potatoes chips and the standard apple.
But deep inside the brown bag would be a red, heart-shaped construction paper card with a note from Mom, a note declaring her love for us. She loved puns, and usually would figure out how to include a small sweet treat with each one on the card. My all-time favorite Valentine from Mom was a red folded heart card, with a silver-wrapped piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum glued to the front of it. When I opened the card, Mom had written I’M STUCK ON YOU. After lunch in the schoolyard when I snuck the piece of gum in my mouth, I chewed and chewed the love of my mom, swallowing the sugary sweet saliva like a magic potion and imagining her stuck on me. I didn’t spit the gum out later that night after I brushed my teeth. Because I didn’t brush my teeth. I chewed and chewed the gum, and went to sleep with my dreams on my white pillow. In the morning, there was a sticky hard mass of chewing gum matted in my hair. Mom had to cut it out. Turns out, she was no longer stuck on me.
The Seasons of My Mother Page 14