I remember being a kid in Santa Monica and being on the yellow couch on my knees looking out the window because my mom was late. I remember thinking what if she doesn't come home. What if she never comes home.
I pictured all these tragic things happening to her. I thought about never seeing her again.
A mom is like the clock of your life, you can't not have the mom. Your life would be a watch dropped into the toilet. A watch, because there were no cell phones back then, in the 70's.
I thought about this the other day when I was still here, taking care of my mom. If I had known then that I would be here, almost 50 years later, my mom is still here, still ticking. She never disappeared. She never got hit by a car or ran off or was trampled by ostriches or threw herself off a 10 story building or drowned in a swimming pool. She never wasn't, in my life.
She slowly isn't, right now, because of her brain eating disease. She isn't the nurturer or the back scratcher or the lofty laugher, or the busy nurse, or the maker of creamed chipped beef or Cream of Wheat. She's filed all those situations for me to remember and recreate for my own kids or grandkids eventually.
So even though my hair is getting see through from stress, I do what she would do which is think about palm readers, or take the callouses off my feet, or investigate a baby chicken, or contemplate travel. I do what she programmed me to do, which is care for others, and eat pizza. Don't wear shoes. Go to the beach.
I might've added the beach. We lived near the beach when I was small, I suppose I am still gathering it. It's only an hour away now. My dad took us to the beach. He was good at imagining sandcastles and patient enough to handle it when the sides would slide off. He was good at holding all the stuff and our hands, and picking us up. Getting sand off tiny legs before getting into a station wagon, in the 1970's.
I think what I'm saying is, lucky.
I still have them.
