sweetheart redux

IN keeping with the more than usual focus on my mom, who passed away almost a year ago now,  here is a book she made me for my 14th birthday.  

South Pasadena It’s always the same. Well, more or less. I always – Almost always – Envy the healthy older men – Clear retirees – So secure, And the smooth-haired younger Women exiting their Well-washed Volvos etc Whenever I make my brief sojourn from The parking lot to the ATM In the nearby rich neighborhood That Mom and I always – Almost always – Admired through the bus window when I Was a kid. I will almost always Think of her When I hear Prince on the radio Because she texted me last year “Did you know Prince died?  Only 57, how sad.” And then she died the next month. On the radio I’ll hear the song about his wary Admiration of a loose woman or the one where He just wants to party his sadness away And I’ll think of how surprising and sweet it was that Mom cared about his death –  she of the Beatles And Vivaldi. ...

this was an easter card mom made me when i was a teenager.  

Mom had me on a rain-soaked and rosy-fingered dawn in March, in Beverly Hills, of all places.   Good, bad or melodramatically worse, she loved being a mom, and so do I. My son has my bad habit of only wanting everything or nothing and my bad heart. Yesterday when I told him it was time to take his heart medication,  I forgot to use our magical language, I just said "It's time for your heart medicine." "That's not what it is." "Oh?" "It's watermelon juice."

Sometimes I start to describe a sad detail about my mother here but then change my mind because I am self-conscious about sounding like I think I have the market cornered on tragedy.  Or on a certain type of misery, I should say -- the type of misery that so clearly interests me -- mother/daughter sadness and things that concern addiction.  Also, I'm trying to save my details for the larger piece I'm working on these days.  Last night I had a very vivid dream though, that a friend trained peacocks to leap impossibly high in the air and dance around on the spot where, in the dream, my Mom had died, a park that looked like Huntington Gardens, where we sometimes went.   It was a beautiful dream that had me thinking extra-hard about her this morning and I remembered something that gave me an acute pang of sadness (and then a dull acceptance of how fucked up real life can be).  I remembered how towards the end of her life, when I'd stopped picking on her al...

I Hardly Ever Did I watched TV Through birth, death and taxes When I was the addendum Or when it was my own mother Or my own uterus An organ saddled with far-reaching expectations And sickness I watched TV. People came and people went and still I watched TV. In the hospital, a woman named Holly and I watched Hours of this thing called Special Victims Unit Every day Even though a Vietnam Vet with delusions of grandeur Begged us to change the station. I watched TV every day of Summer Vacation for pretty much My entire childhood but I vowed that the next day I Would stop, That I would take a walk or something, But I hardly ever did. Special Victims Unit