This past Sunday night I walked into my mother’s room at the assisted living center in Concord—and went straight to the refrigerator. It’s the same ghostlike motion I’ve made every day that I’ve walked into her kitchen since I could put one foot in front of the other. I don’t even know what it is I m looking for. It’s like some Pavlovian response to my mother’s presence and the coolness of coiled condensers. Maybe I am still hungry to know that my mother will still feed me. The refrigerator from my childhood—bursting with an unending gaggle of epicurean delight to feed six ravenous kids and a steady stream of friends—is now an obscenely small countertop square in the corner of an uncluttered kitchenette. I open it and stare at the small bottle of ginger-ale, the pint of milk, the dainty plate of cookies and the half a sandwich and drift into the memories that persist and gnaw and flow out of that small space. I still expect to see gobs of grapes, oranges, and apples; chocolate pudding, leftover tuna casseroles and Shepard’s pie, Appian way pizza, kool-aid, custard, baloney; and eggs: pickled, deviled, scrambled, and boiled; and potatoes fried, mashed, hashed and rehashed in the unending evolution of necessity. But sometimes, when times were harder—times that were never actually mentioned—we made potato buds: dry flakes mixed with carnation instant milk and two tablespoons of butter and mixed into a pudding like potato whose greatest benefit to childhood was to hide the peas, beets, boiled onions and other scourges of an Irish Catholic childhood that kept us at the table long after dinner poking and dabbing at the utterly unpalatable goulash of tyranny until some one relented in their stubbornness and the cold remains were either scraped into garbage bin or or forced down an unwilling gullet. And there was always the whole milk with cream tops in glass bottles with paper caps; and there was always my father pawing the top shut and shaking the heavy cream back into the milk itself, exhorting us to imitate his practiced perfection--which none of us could do--and we always spilled the milk on the cracked formica table and vinyl chairs, and he always screamed, “Every night! Somebody has to spill the milk every single night!” And then, after the mopping rags and sullen face, dinner resumed in the chaotic recollections of the day: fights about whose night it was to do the dishes and who didn’t mow around the trees; who got seconds last night, and who got a C in penmanship, and who shouldn’t get two hydrox cookies for dessert because they weren’t smart enough to hide their peas in the potato buds! And I sat in the same seat with annoying little sister Annie on my right and annoying little brother Tommy on my left and my big sisters staring across from me: Eileen with her studious perfection; Mary Ellen with her jocky, untempered cockiness, and Patty, so old I hardly knew her, until she died so young that I can’t forget her; and in the overstuffed kitchen dad’s back crunched against the basement door, and mom was pressed against the dining room wall—the room with the walnut table and eight matching chairs that we never used—a museum stuffed with bone china and silverware we polished every Christmas, bought, I’m sure with green stamps and coupons. We would avoid the dining room; but we lived and grew and gathered in the kitchen like chattering birds drawn to a stubbled and time-worn field—and out of that space we were reborn each day.
Every morning mom poured the wheaties, boiled the oatmeal and cut the grapefruit while we listened to Joe Green in the BZ copter mumbling unintelligible warnings about tie-ups at the Alewife circle, and we'd sang along to “Watch me wallabies feed, mates, watch me wallabies feed," and dad would grab his briefcase and we’d all try to be the first one to scream “Bye dad!” in a cacophony of competition, and, as if on cue, mom would sneak behind me and hold my head while I jerked convulsively, and she’d rub a warm wet cloth across my face and straighten my clip on tie and try to force down my cowlick and pick at my ears until I was fit to be presented to Sister Jean Beatrice—and, by some sort of convoluted math, to God. And then she’d sit in her chair, quietly, and write her own mother a letter.
Every single day she’d write grandma a letter: one of us could get the letter paper; and one of could get the envelope; one of us would get to lick the stamp; one of us could put it on the letter; one of us could carry it to the mailbox, and the last one could lift up the metal flag. I never knew it was a ritual of perfection—a continual journey into the heart of the mystic love of family.
You never know, but still, you remember.
I never know exactly who I’ll see when I visit my mom. Over the past two years, Alzheimer’s disease has slowly chipped away at the edges of her memory. One day she’ll remind me that it’s my childhood friend Danny Gannon’s birthday, and on the next day she’ll ask me who all my pretty children are…and like polite grandkids, my seven children will dutifully tell her their names once again, except for Tommy, who screams. “You know me Grandma, I’m Tommy!” who then jumps on her lap and asks for a kiss—“Not that kind of kiss—a chocolate kiss.” And she smiles and says, “Of course, I know you. You’re Tommy.” I wonder if she thinks my Tommy is her Tommy
When I went to see her last night, we looked at ads for cars in the Boston Globe. She wants a Toyota. “Your father loved his Toyota.” I smile to her, “That’s because Toyotas were cheap, and dad loved cheap.” It doesn’t matter that she will never drive again. It doesn’t matter that we will have the same conversation tomorrow. It doesn’t matter that soon she will slip into a cloud of unknowing. It only matters that she is here, and in the magic and mysterious majesty of memory, she will always be here.
Your memories will grow from different soil in a different garden. We live through memory. Nurture those memories. Hold them. Cherish them. Don't let go.
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