Lighting Up for Christmas

“Katie, this is your mother.  I’m at home, finally out of jail.”  It’s Christmas Day and while I stand at the stove whipping egg whites for my grandmother’s egg nog recipe, Mom calls my sister.  The time flies.  She makes calls, smokes cigarettes, visits with her next-door neighbor, downs her egg nog and runs her fingers around the inside of the glass to get all the cream, eats a huge plate of food followed by espresso ice cream and chocolate cookies.  When it’s time to leave, she confidently heads down the porch steps in the dark with her walker.  When settled back in “jail” (really the rehab side of a nursing home called The Pines on Warren Street in Glens Falls), she says, “Thank you, Mary Jo, you don’t know how much good this did me.”  Although I didn’t say so, I could see what going home did for her:  the color came back into her face.  When we’d arrived, she was frail-looking, pale and unsure: “do you think this is a good idea?”  “I’m not sure I can manage church,” “Who gives us permission?”  But the staff was laid back and supportive and many people were leaving with their families.  “It’s so easy,” she marvels as we wheel her past the front door.  We’ve opted for the wheelchair, “just to be on the safe side,” as she says, but that was the only time we would need to use it during our three-day visit.  Her confidence returned quickly, but even I was surprised by the way her spunk would express itself.

Christmas Day, sitting around the kitchen table, she laughed about the easy time she’d had birthing each of us.  “But when I was in labor with one of you, I lit up a cigarette in the delivery room and the nurses came rushing in and said, ‘there’s oxygen in here, do you want to blow us all up?’”  That story floats around my mind, as I rummage through the remains of past lives.  On a slip of paper is a quote from my grandmother, “I’d rather be having a baby right now than sitting here doing this” [she was probably trying to have a bowel movement]; my grandmother, Lillian, was old and senile but witty, and we grew up along with her, given the strange way in which the very old do become young again—almost newborns.  “Hey, look at these!” my husband calls.  He is sorting old photos in the darkness of the dusty dining room.  There are three black and white pictures of my mother (taken by a professional photographer).  She is thirty-something with cigarette in hand, looking very drunk and very happy, with three young guys flirting with her, ogling her, and almost cradling her in their arms.  “I can’t wait to ask her about these,” I say.  “Oh no, she’ll be embarrassed,” says Paul.  “No she won’t,” I say emphatically, hoping Paul catches my implicit defense of the desire Mom glows with in the vivid photo.  

Later at The Pines, when I ask her about the pictures, she is clearly happy to see evidence of this past self, “Oh, that was at Ridings.”  The bar is in North Creek, where she hung out in the years when, after recently moving to Glens Falls from South Jersey, she was skiing and getting loads of male attention.  Even at The Pines, she is still something of a flirt.  For instance, Ike, the Nigerian male nurse, is her special friend.  “The night I fell, Ike rescued me, and we sat on the floor and laughed and laughed.”  When Mom introduced me to Ike, I noticed that he bowed slightly to my mother and called her “Miss Catherine.”  I’m impressed by her ability to get the love she needs to thrive wherever she happens to fall.

We arrive late morning.  Mom did two sessions of physical therapy while we hauled trash into the dumpster she does and doesn’t know is sitting in her driveway, filling up quickly.  The plan is to take her out for a drive and go to a restaurant.  “Well, I just had a pain-in-the-ass call from Kim.”  I ask her what’s up, and I learn that last night, after we’d brought her back, she’d lit up a cigarette in the room!  “Really?  Why?”  She doesn’t know.  She just felt like it, I guess.  The nurses came rushing in, and Jill explains that she was surprised Mom would lie to her.  “The residents across the hall smelled it, and I found ashes in your water cup.”  We sit through another lecture after she has had several from various family members.  The punitive words, I suspect, go in one ear and out the other because it’s full steam ahead on our plan for the day.  She enjoys the old photos.  She laughs at her own misdemeanor but moves on quickly to important business:  “I need to get a check cashed so I have some money.”  I watch her shakily form the letters that spell four-hundred dollars and sign her name more confidently.  Empowered by her spirit, perhaps, I make a split second decision to include in our afternoon itinerary a trip to the tattoo and piercing studio so Katya can get her “snake bites”—a dual lip piercing she’s been obsessing about for years, and Mom had sent her money for Christmas. 

After the small uproar a cigarette caused and all chastisement, Mom is surprisingly nonplussed.  I sign her out with the estimated return time of 3:30.  But the girl at the nurses station looks at us slyly and says, “Why don’t I put you down for 5:30 in case you’re having a really great time.”  “Great,” I say, and we head down the elevator and move toward the door.  I walk slowly behind Mom with my hands lightly on her hips—just in case.  A woman who passes us in a wheelchair says, “you two look like twins,” and, although I don’t quite know what to make of that observation, I say simply “thank you.”  We pass the sign advertising this place as “Your Passport Home,” and Mom declares to the girl at the desk that she is “going out” with “my family.”  The girl smiles, and I suspect they all think this is about cigs, but it really is about so much more.  We’re crossing the border and entering some strange new country feeling the glee of shedding our old roles.  Even getting in the car each time is a new experience.  Mom doesn’t have a system but does what feels right at the moment.  “Good foot in; no bad one in first,” she says aloud, talking herself through it.  “Swivel your butt, Mom,” I suggest, and she lands perfectly, reaching to lift her bad leg into the car manually.  I pull the seat belt across her puffy down coat (she bought two—one for her and one for me) and hand her the pack of Kools.  “Now where is that lighter?”  Paul reaches over to light Miss Catherine’s cigarette, and we’re off on our adventure.

First stop is Glens Falls National Bank where we wait at the drive-thru and hope the teller doesn’t need Mom’s driver’s license.  Apprehension gives way to smiles when the envelope shoots back up the space-age tube filled with bills.  Mom spreads them on her lap to count.  She’s still trying to count out four hundred dollars when we’re parked in the lot of her laundromat on Broad Street.  I go in the tattoo studio with Kat while Mom and Paul smoke in the car.  We tell an actual bearded lady (“I liked her make-up”) that we (or she) want(s) “snake bites,” and Kat asks me to get off my phone (role reversal) and hold her hand because she’s scared.  Her hand is cold and clammy.  Ushered into a back room, I watch as the young guy with the tattooed head, mark the spots on her lip where the needle will be pulled through.  “I think you want them lower, don’t you honey?”  “Yes.”  It looks painful and I see her wince once, but my fifteen-year-old is a trooper, and she knows what she wants.  After it’s done, we bounce out to the car, and Mom thinks they look “adorable” and “unobtrusive.”  She totally approves with not a jot of judgement in her voice.  Somebody brings up the subject of Mom’s illicit before-bed smoke, and Kat yells, “because we’re rebels!”  Laughter lights up the car.

“Where to now?” asks my husband, and we head west, passing the kitchen showroom where we stop to inquire about contractors, who could renovate a pantry into a stacked washer-dryer, which is Mom’s vision for making what had become a hoarder house livable again.  Later Mom will tell me how nice and patient and interested Katya was when they sat in the car together and talked.  We drive out toward West Mountain in the late afternoon.  At Pumpkin Hill farm, the sun is descending toward the mountain and its rays light up the snow blowing in the air, making it sparkle.  We turn left toward Lake Luzerne, and I think how long it has been that I have been out with my mother.  Year after year, visit after visit, I’ve felt so trapped by the stuff in the house that has seemed to immobilize us all.  We are free now.  Katya notices a group of turkeys in the woods, walking uphill through deep snow.  I love the bareness of the mountains in winter.  You can see right down to the ground how the leafless trees stand “with their pants down,” as Mom used to say.  At home, I clean, I sort, I throw out junk, I feel down to the ground of good memories, and I even cook.  But by far, my single proudest accomplishment is that I let Mom stand her ground.

We stop at the base of West Mountain and watch the skiers glide down, and Mom has time to remember the feeling of flying down a snowy slope (she was a skier once upon a time), and as our ride winds through the late afternoon like a festive ribbon, we follow her directions and end up at O’Toole’s sports bar on Quaker Road.  My mother walks right in the bar and parks her walker at a booth despite it looking difficult for her to negotiate.  She glides with ease into a spot along the wall and confidently orders a Coors Light.  We toast to her full recovery.  I look around at the four of us, and it seems to me that our faces are shining, and I think of the blessing, “The Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”  What made Moses’ face glow in the presence of the Lord, and what transfigures ordinary faces is, it seems to me, the gift of recognition.  Someone (God or a human other) sees us for who we are and sees that we are here for a purpose.  To live out our purpose we need others to give us the encouragement and space to express our selves.  I have no trouble making eye contact with my mother now.  In the past, I looked away from her gaze because I felt judged rather than recognized.  Now the self-consciousness is gone, melted away with the old roles. 

Mom has very few teeth but talks and laughs unselfconsciously.  I slip off my hiking boots and wet socks, and squeeze my cold bare feet between Katya’s thighs under the table.  “With me, you do not have to pretend.  I know you.  I knew you before you were born.  I know you because I made you, and I made you because I need you—or more precisely, because the world needs you.  There is a task only you can do.  Now, therefore, be strong and do it.”  This is what I imagine making eye contact with God feels like.  Sitting in the bar with my born-again mother, it feels like I am seeing her and she is seeing me for the first time.  It’s magical.  What people sometimes forget is that Reality is double, made up of both the actual and the possible; and the divine spirit that inspires each of us dwells in the realm of the possible, the kingdom of metaphor, the home of how dare I.  Children are born into families because families promote and preserve life.  But fostering life is about so much more than the provision of necessities—food, clothes, I-Phones, and shelter.  It really depends on how generously and graciously we make use of the stock of poetic resources every family group possesses:  do we remember the stories?  Do we share the songs?  Do we cry and laugh about the way things were?  Do we remind one another of who we used to be and who we hoped to be and who we still can be?  It is our serious responsibility as family members to give back what we’ve been given.  My mother gave me her curiosity, her love of learning, and her adventurous spirit.  “What do I have to give back?  What can I bring to the manger?”  

Weeks ago during a phone conversation I realized that the best gift I could give Mom was myself—the woman she’d raised.  I’d just finished watching a YouTube documentary on the famous English travel writer, Freya Stark, who rode a pony on a trek through the Himalayas up to 30,000 feet when she was 88 years old.  The doctors in Kathmandu told her that she shouldn’t go, that it wasn’t safe, but she went.  At 24,000 feet, the young man filming the trek asked her if she was glad she didn’t take the doctor’s advice.  Freya said, “If I live till 90, I might make a list of all the people whose advice I didn’t take.”  She lived 100 years.  After seeing that film, I thought of Mom’s plight in a new way.  With a new feeling of excitement, I phoned her at The Pines and told her about it.  “Listen to what Freya says, Mom: ‘If you knew yourself to be a part of something very immense it would be more satisfactory than to be a rather small little pinpoint of being.  That’s why we come back to our adventure because even the smallest adventure is a step, an experience, and that in itself is magic isn’t it?”  That very night, Mom tried to walk to the bathroom on her own and had a little fall.  But she laughed with her friend, Ike, picked herself up, and kept going.  The magic of adventure is the feeling of not knowing what’s around the next corner, but taking the step because we trust that somehow we are in good hands.  My mother gave me that trust when I was a little child.  If my return of her gift strengthens her faith, hallelujah! From my limited vantage point, I imagine I’ll be watching in wonder as Catherine Alice Walker walks with or without walker from one adventure to another further and further into that undiscovered country.