Fall Again

Ever since my trip to the beach last January, where the dolphins appeared with their frolicking ) offering of forgiveness, it seems all that squishiness just sucked the mad (and my stories) right out of me. I know there are more stories about growing up in the Viet Nam Era with a Mom who partied hard and a Step Father who laughed off her dangerous antics. Yet, maintaining my bitterness and a good story to accompany it, doesn't make any sense after that pivotal one-year anniversary trip to the sea to say goodbye. Now the question is, can I tell a good story while feeling all warm and fuzzy with forgiveness?

I doubt it, but I want to try. I want to try because there is something achingly healing about remembering. I want to keep writing because I think I have more to say, and because I certainly have more to feel, and because I think they are good stories worth telling.

It is tempting to write about what's happening now, post Go-Go, in the lives of my siblings and my father/step-father, Roger. Those might be good stories, too, but I'm guessing that's just another way to stray from digging up the ghosts of my past for the sake of exorcism and entertainment.

Stay tuned....I think there will be more to come.

"FHB"

I've been trying to write about Go-Go's ease and skill in the kitchen, which were substantial. She was confident, arrogant, even, in her insistence that two shakes was a teaspoon, and a handful, a cup. She refused to measure. I suppose she measured when she baked, but she didn't do much of that by the time I came along, the seventh of eight.

When I was hired as a cook, at twenty years old, in a small restaurant in Seattle, the owner was really impressed that I could make a pot of soup without reading a recipe, or by merely giving it a glance. "You have to cook to taste, she insisted" and Go-Go was in complete agreement.

She liked to throw a party and usually did it by cooking up some big feast to go along with the booze. If more people showed up than she planned for, she would announce "FHB!" which stood for "family hold back." I reminded her of it a year or so before she died and, like so many of my memories, she adamantly denied ever saying it. That's one of those things that used to drive me crazy. I wanted our memories to line up, for her to say "wow, I remember that too," or "that must have sucked." But that would not have been her way, and now I know that just because she didn't remember it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Recently Roger called to tell me had given away her baking pans to a friend of his. "What was I going to do with them?" he wondered out loud in our conversation. His nonchalance at one of the things she was good at, sent a searing pain through my heart. It was one more reminder that she, and her beloved tiny baking pans, have passed.

One Year

By the end of last year I was plagued by memories of Go-Go, especially of her final illness and the process of her dying. Every significant date beginning in August, was intensely punctuated by what was happening the previous year during that time.

I made it through the holidays distinctly aware of how weird and sad and peculiar I felt. I undercooked the turkey and burned the squash at Thanksgiving. I invited people for Christmas and then uninvited them – I just didn’t know what I wanted. In the end, we held a simple brunch – cooked by Trish in an effort to ensure the guests would be unharmed.

January came and I announced to Trish that I wanted to go to the beach to do a ritual to acknowledge the one year anniversary of Go-Go’s death. I had no idea what kind of ritual I would do, nor how I would do it, but I brought along some paper, a book of matches, and some shells from her beach in Naples, trusting that I would find inspiration, once there. We drove down the coast and when I saw what looked like a good beach, I pointed and declared, “here”, and Trish pulled into the rutty parking lot and we headed down the trail to Montera Beach.

The weather was gorgeous – a crisp, sunny winter day, warm enough to discard our jackets and feel splashes of sun heating up our turtle necks. We rested on a muddy embankment and while sitting, I asked Trish: “do you think we could see whales in this part of the Pacific?” “No” she said, “I don’t think they would be this close to shore”. With our eyes fixed on the sea we both saw it at the same time; what was unmistakably the fin of a dolphin surfacing and vanishing, and she said, “but you can see dolphins!” We shot up from our perch and right in front of us, we discovered first two, then four, and finally six dolphins frolicking and surfing in the stormy Pacific. I burst into tears, instantly struck by the magic of the dolphins appearing on the one year anniversary of Go-Go’s death.

She loved dolphins! Her child-like excitement was incessant – she watched them for decades, from her balcony in Florida, looking over the Gulf of Mexico. She would begin her mediation early in the morning with a cigarette and a cup of coffee – she insisted morning was the best time to see them, and I usually missed out since the time change often caused me to sleep until noon. Now, a year after her death, it was so clear, this was it, my ritual. At first I murmured through my tears “she doesn’t deserve to come back as a higher life form.” It stung even as I said it, so I was relieved when Trish said, “yes she does, she suffered a lot in her life. And in that moment, and ever since, I knew it to be true - I understood on a very different level, that she suffered as deeply as she partied. My heart broke open and I understood that the things that she did to me, just happened. She didn’t do them to me, she did her life, and I just happened to be there. The shift may seem small, but for me it opened up an ocean of forgiveness.

We followed the dolphins the entire length of Montera Beach, and when the rocky cliffs of the coast obstructed our view, we took our time returning to our perch. Before we left, I ran down into freshly wetted sand and wrote “bye mom” as big as a whale, with my boot prints. The exact moment that I finished the final "M", the tide rushed in so fast I had to race to avoid getting wet, and washed my words away. As we made our way back up the coast toward home, I felt healed, and comforted, and knew everything was going to be okay.

To see more photos from the day: bit.ly/byemom

Vegas

Trish and Dee and I spent a few days in Vegas last month, and I, without planning to or thinking about it, channeled Go-Go at the Black Jack tables. If a player was doing stupid things like staying on fourteen when the dealer had a face card showing, I would start to mumble insults under my breath, just loud enough for the dealer and my pal to hear me.

Go-Go hated unskilled card players, she hated them. And the drunker she was, the more likely she was to let them know it. To her credit, she was usually playing two hands - often for A LOT of money per hand, and when a player stays on fourteen or fifteen, it screws up the whole table. She would not hesitate to tell them, "you have to hit that", if you don't the dealer stands a better chance of not breaking". I don't know the odds exactly, but I do know that it takes time to grow the courage to hit fourteen or fifteen, or even sixteen, knowing that much of the time you are going to lose your money - there are just more high cards in a deck. But if you don't hit, you lose, too. And Go-Go was not afraid to say "why don't you just stay home and mail your money to the casino" if she felt like a person was not being a smart player.

So we went to Vegas to celebrate my friend Dee's graduation from nursing school and both Dee and I had gambled with Go-Go when she was alive so she knew when we were playing that I was channeling Go-Go. I even had the raspy cigarette voice to accompany my rants, because I am completely allergic to smoke and my voice turned gravely the first day. Plus, the more tired I became, the less likely I was able to control myself. It was a lot of fun to bring out Go-Go and talk crap about the lousy players, and embarrass my pal a little while I was at it.

When you were gambling with Go-Go and she wanted you to stay up and play with her, she would toss you a hundred bucks to finance your playing. She taught me how to play black jack and she did it long before I had any business knowing how. We went to the Bahama's when I was sixteen and she dressed me up and off we would go to the casino, knowing I could easily pass for eighteen, or twenty-one. If she was winning, she thought nothing of tossing me a black chip or two, or three. If she was down, she would "borrow" money until there wasn't any left, but those weren't the stories I focused on last month. I felt like the trip softened me toward her.

I was not happy about Go-Go's gambling habits when she was alive. Because of it, she died completely broke, leaving behind oppressive debt. But for those few days in Vegas last month, I got to remember how much she LOVED Vegas, and how sassy and fun she was to play cards with. And, I got to remember the good times I had gambling with her.