The UnTexan

CHRISTMAS IN JULY: JESSE HELMS FINALLY DIED

Jesse Helms died July 4 -- and not a minute too soon. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died July 4, 1826, and some obit writer tried to put Helms in their company. Jefferson, Adams and Helms? I had to laugh. It seems far more appropriate that Jesse Helms and Bozo the Clown died within hours of each other. But that's not fair to Bozo. There are Bozos and there are bozos. Losing Bozo made me a little sad; losing Jesse didn't. In fact, a Fourth of July without Jesse Helms was a July 4th worth celebrating.

A few of us held a bit of an email celebration.

One old North Carolina friend recalled returning to work "seething" after hearing lunch-hour Jesse Helms "editorial" diatribes on television "...against:communists, liberal higher education, hippies, disrespect for the American flag and anything pro civil rights" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before he was a senator Helms was just another redneck bozo, a sort of infuriating television joke for most of the people I knew, nothing more than a target for our jeering laughter. When he was elected to the senate in 1973 (as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise! Surprise") it wasn't funny, and I am sure some of my friends who had remained in North Carolina after I left were more than a little uncomfortable when they realized the joke was on them and they were actually living among people who had elected the old bigot. What probably made things even creepier was knowing that their neighbors, relatives, co-workers and other fellow Tar Heels kept re-electing the sorry son of a bitch.

The same friend who remembered "seething," said his sister had called him July 4 "troubled because she could not find in her heart one shred of regret at his passing." He let her know she shouldn't fret about it. "I assured her that her feelings are natural, and healthy and show that she IS a good person." I agree. There is nothing to regret.

I did not leave North Carolina because of Jesse Helms - he was still the infuriating joke on television when I left in the late 1960s - but I did leave because I suspected I was surrounded by -- or related to -- far too many people who thought the same way Jesse did: hateful, small-minded, racist, white-trashy, Dixie-whistling, etc., and even worse, proud of it. They didn't talk about it on tv like Jesse did, but I knew it was there. So, I didn't trust them. And I never wanted to be mistaken for one of them. I left. A few years later, when they elected Jesse Helms, I knew I had been right all along: Jesse was the ugly thing that had been living inside them all that time. After he was elected in 1973, he became the walking, talking manifestation and confimation of my suspicions about too many of my fellow North Carolinians (lots of them my closest  relatives) before I left N.C. for good in 1969. Jesse Helms made it embarrassing to be from North Carolina, and he made it feel good to be living someplace else, no matter where that might be. And I have spent my adult life being someplace else.

The only good news I ever heard about Jesse Helms was that he had died.

MY MOTHER IS A FISH or WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A WANDERING EYE?

The day before my mother died, there were a few minutes when she appeared to wake up. At least her eyes were open above the plastic mask that covered her mouth and nose; it was attached to a machine that noisily helped force oxygen into her lungs. We were standing outside her room waiting while nurses tended to her. One of them opened the door and said, "She's awake." And one by one, we stepped into her room to say our good-byes, tell her we loved her and to assure her that it was fine for her to stop living and rest. At least that is what I remember saying as I leaned over and stared down into her eyes. I have not asked my father, brothers or sister about what they said to her the last time her eyes were wide open. It is her left eye I remember more than what I said; it was wide, wild and seeming to focus or trying to focus (or was I imagining the effort to focus?) as I stared down into her face. Did she see me? Or hear me? Or any of us? We don't know. But she seemed to breathe easier when she closed her eyes and appeared to be sleeping. She even snored a little. We all noticed that. She died calmly 24 hours later without ever opening her eyes again.

That wide, wild eye is the last piece of my dying mother that I haul around with me. Sometimes I hear it. It clatters in there like a smooth pebble in a tin box. Sometimes it thumps and thuds like a tangled wad of soggy clothes in the dryer. Sometimes I see it as I stare at the blank wall above my desk, sometimes just before I sleep or just after I wake up. I have packed the other pieces of my dying mother in words and shoved them onto a high dark shelf almost out of reach. But I have never known what to do with her left eye, never figured out a place to put it. It is never quiet and it is always open.

Two nights ago I dreamed that "we" had agreed to keep a bit of my mother alive "in case we ever needed her again." We agreed to store some of her DNA in a tiny fish in case we ever needed it again. I know it was "we" but do not know precisely who "we" are, but it was my wife and my sister who went with me to the fish market to find out what happened to her after we found out something had gone wrong. A larger fish had eaten the minnow that my mother had become and we were there to see if anything could be done. The market had a glass-fronted case. There were live turtles at one end. "Cooters," I said (though turtles were called turtles where I grew up and I did not learn the word "cooter" until much later in my life). Just past the cooters there were fish on ice, all kinds of fish, and we walked along looking for the right one. Finally the man behind the counter pointed to the very end of the case with his knife and that is where we found the fish we were looking for. It was apart from the rest. I think it was a bass 8 or 10 inches long. It was on its left side and its tail was toward the glass, its large mouth wide open, facing away from us. The fish seemed rigid, dead. We looked at it through the glass. I leaned forward for a closer look and saw the fish's eye move. It was looking at me, like someone glancing over their shoulder as they walk away. And it appeared to be trying to focus, to see me more clearly. I was awake for a while before I recognized the eye -- it was my mother's left eye. It was a troubling dream.

"My mother is a fish." That is what Vardaman Bundren says as he tries to understand his mother's death in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. He ends up drilling holes in the lid of his dead mother's coffin to help her breathe, but she is still dead. There are no holes I can drill in the coffin lid to save my mother either. Besides, the dead do not ask to be rescued any more than dreams ask to be understood, no matter what we might want or need from them. But we cannot stop ourselves from trying.

See Mom, Death and Family all the way back to April 2006.

MOTHER ISSUES: APRIL 6, 2008

A few weeks ago one of my cousins from back in North Carolina sent me an email to let me know he reads my blog from time to time. He wrote: "...seems to me you have 'Mother' issues...guess if I thought about it, I might as well...am I missing something?" I had to chuckle because if there is one thing I am confident of, it is that most of my male cousins and I share mother issues of one sort or another. We are the sons of seven sisters who raised us lopsided in one way or another for one reason or another then launched us on the world (actually most of us had to launch ourselves because our mothers didn't really know how to do that right). Now most of us have arrived at middle age with marriages, relationships and various men, women and children sloshing in our wakes like so much debris. Some of our sisters haven't fared much better, but in general our mothers did a better job with girls than with boys. Five of the seven sisters are dead. My mother died April 6, 2006. My cousin's mother died a few years earlier. But they are still among us and I am sure my cousins and I have things to talk about; but we were raised around people who preferred to leave things (usually the most important things) un-talked about, so I don't know if we ever will.

GOOD BOY SCOUT/BAD BOY SCOUT

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is 58 years old today. He is a real Boy Scout. He wants everyone to know it. And that is scary. It is primary election day too. And good old Rick is nothing if not available (he sure isn't much of anything as a governor; Texas wouldn't miss him). He wants people to know that too, just in case they might need someone to run for vice president, someone to troll for that true believer vote now that Huckabee is gone.

Perry has written a book extolling the values of the Boy Scouts (to be trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent, mentally awake and morally straight, obnoxious, self-righteous etc.), and running down the ACLU for making the Scouts look inside their own closet and deal with the stuff they found there (Perry personally redefined the word "homosexual" in an interview to mean "focused on sex" -- and declared it has no place in Scouting). I was a Boy Scout, too (Troop 225 down at the Presbyterian Church, if I remember the number correctly); but I was an ACLU sort of Scout. Rick Perry would have hated me.

Being a Scout combined two things I did not enjoy as a boy and actually grew to hate as I grew older: 1) guys in bunches, and 2) uniforms. I remain suspicious of anything involving those two things (I was a crappy little-leaguer too), but I am sure it started with the Boy Scouts. I loved camping and I could tie knots with the best of them, but I was a bad Boy Scout. I liked to do the things Boy Scouts did, but I did not like doing them with other Boy Scouts. It always involved too many guys all dressed alike for my taste (and guys in bunches can be uniformly mean; for instance, an overly well-coiffed, scrubbed and tidy fellow like Gov. Perry would have been labeled "queer-bait" in the cruel confines of my troop). I never rose very far in the ranks and I was the only guy in my troop to win the reading merit badge. I have to wonder why there was any such thing as a reading merit badge. Reading and Scouting don't mix well. Scouts live in a smallish closet of oaths, rules, expectations, adventures in wholesome living and denial of certain realities (Gov. Perry no doubt earned the closet building merit badge). I was looking for something bigger than that and reading can lead a curious boy like me off in what the Scouts would see as unwholesome directions often better pursued without a uniform; eventually I ended up in the loving arms of a beautiful curly haired woman I could not wait to introduce to my parents. She was love at first sight for me and I figured my parents would naturally feel the same way. They didn't.

The problem was that my shirt got in the way. It was a Boy Scout shirt complete with shoulder patches, chest patches, a patrol patch, troop numbers and an Order of the Arrow patch on the flap of the right front pocket. I bought it for 25-cents at a Goodwill store. It wasn't the first oddball shirt I had bought at Goodwill. I had bowling shirts, repairmen's shirts, baseball shirts, shirts with names over the pockets and company names on the back, lots of shirts I figured were once worn by long-dead guys whose widows finally decided to get on with their lives, clean out the drawers and closets and donate their stuff to Goodwill (for years I shopped for suits among the same racks of dead-guy clothes). I hated new stuff (I hated suits). I loved other people's clothes. Goodwill worked for me. The Boy Scout shirt had badges for stuff on it that I never came close to achieving as a Boy Scout (Order of the Arrow! No way!). That was part of the fun. Besides, I never wanted to be confused with a Boy Scout. And I never intended to be. And that shirt said so. It was a defiant and defining shirt; it was witty, subversive (irony was still cheap and easy in those days). Besides, it looked good with jeans.

By that time I had spent years stuffing myself with other people's sentences and trying to build a man out of them (reading merit badge winner that I was, and Scouting builds men, right?). And I looked like a man when I was naked. But the truth is that I was a 40-ish ex-hippie-beatnik-bookworm in a Boy Scout shirt, a divorced guy with a cute kid; I was teaching English (non-tenure track, but I didn't care) to the mostly mediocre middle children of Midwestern Catholics at a sternly tidy, stone-faced Catholic college in Minnesota. I had parlayed that old reading merit badge into pretty good jobs in several states for nearly 20 years and the teaching job was only the most recent. But I didn't have a savings account or a retirement plan. I had never even thought about owning a house. So whether the Boy Scout shirt was perceived as defiant or pathetic by that time in my life was debatable. But I didn't care. It isn't easy building a man out of other people's sentences. It is easier to wear other people's clothes.

I am sure the Boy Scout shirt came from a novel I read in the 1960s. The main character is a beatnik proto-hippie named Gnossos Pappadopoulis, who defiantly and subversively wears a Boy Scout shirt. But Gnossos was no Boy Scout. That appealed to me. Gnossos and his shirt lodged somewhere among all the other names and sentences accummulating in my brain (I wasn't brave enought to take them out of storage for a long time). Twenty years later I resurrected the book and taught it to the muddling-middling young Catholics. Sometimes I wore the Boy Scout shirt to class for effect. They didn't get it. They didn't laugh at the funny parts of the book (even the turd funeral).They didn't get Gnossos. They wondered why Gnossos didn't get a job. They did not understand how fiction could become a fact of life. But it can. Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a man who never existed, made me buy that shirt and ran me slam up against the Boy Scouts.

The problem of course is that my parents believed in the Boy Scouts and the shirt was an affront to everything they claimed to stand for (it took years for me to understand how offensive the shirt was to them). It turned out that my parents had the same faith in the power of Scouting that Gov. Rick Perry does. They believed in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They worked with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They organized Pinewood derbies for Cub Scouts. The organized Girl Scout cookie sales. They had God and country and Order of the Arrow faith. Oaths, laws and closets faith. Eagle Scout faith. Faith in uniforms and ceremonies involving flags. Blind faith. Maybe they believed that if I had been a better Scout, I would never have found my way to the woman with the naturally curly hair. Whatever it was, my Boy Scout shirt set them off. The problem is that generally I have no more faith in the Boy Scouts than I do in anything else. My parents looked at me in that shirt and finally saw the anti-Scout I had become.

After that the weekend did not go well. My mother swung between being rude, confrontational and non-communicative. My father backed her up (they always backed each other up, a habit among the long-married) and never hinted she might be drinking a bit on the sly. My sister turned overly polite, but it was a grim and accusatory politeness and she wasn't nice about it. Nobody mentioned that shirt to me the whole weekend. They took it out on the curly haired woman of my dreams instead. Perhaps they blamed her for turning me into the anti-Boy Scout (she didn't). Perhaps they blamed her for the fact that they finally saw me for what I had grown up to be. But that shirt was so powerful it even made my mother believe the woman of my dreams' naturally curly hair was really unnaturally curly (something she pointed out to me with a purse-lipped puff of distinctly southern thoroughgoing womanly disdain that Yankee women cannot even approximate much less fathom; in fact, my mother took advantage of my love's Yankee-ness; the South is a game with more rules than any Yankee girl can ever learn -- and my curly haired love didn't even know she was playing). The hair in question was and is naturally curly, of course, and I have never yet figured out where my mother's accusation came from or why it was so important. My only guess is that my mother thought I was being deceived by unnaturally curly hair and if I would fall for that, no telling how this woman was deceiving me otherwise and what sort of ruin I was in for. It was a sort of fake curls = real danger equation that I never figured out (my mother had an irrational and unexplained hatred of country singer Loretta Lynn that I never understood either), but that I have sometimes witnessed in bars. And it could be that my mother's secret relationship with the beer in my brother-in-law's well-stocked refrigerator for several days contributed to the problem. The problem of the offending shirt came up much later, years later, when they all thought everything had been forgiven and forgotten. It never really was. I am not much of a forgiver or forgetter. I never laughed about it and none of them came to my wedding to the curly haired woman of my dreams. I considered it a fair trade.

Gov. Rick Perry is a 58-year-old Boy Scout. A grownup Boy Scout is a frightening thing. A boy is a terrible thing to waste.

The Boy Scout monument in Washington, D.C. What were they thinking? The Boy Scouts say. "Be prepared." Good advice. But Satchel Paige said: "Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you." Even better advice. What Texas Gov. Rick Perry says doesn't really matter.

MY MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY: SEPT. 17, 1925

Today is my mother's birthday. I have always remembered my mother's birthday. I realized this morning that I have both the first and last photographs I ever took of her. The first one is of her ironing and she told me not to take it. I was in elementary school. Third grade? Fourth?  I don't remember which. I do remember she spanked me for ignoring what she told me and snapping the picture with my Brownie Hawkeye. In another photograph from that same period, she stands in the same doorway, clearly posing for me. She is wearing a sweater and pearls. The last photograph I took of her was on the day of our final real conversation in the spring of 2003. By then her ability to speak was failing her and we were running out of things to say. She died less than three years later. The first and last photographs were painful, each in its own way.

She died April 6, 2006, when she was 80. I was born when she was 19 years old. I was more than 60 years old when she died. So, we knew each other for a long time. We had some good years together and we had some not-so-good years after that. The not-so-good years probably outnumbered the good ones. We disappointed each other, let each other down, and eventually did not really know each other. Love was part of it. She was a hard person to love because she would not allow herself to be loved. She kept those who should have been closest to her at arm's length. For much of my life, I was like her and it nearly killed me. The only reason I outlived her is that I realized I could not go on living that way. For a long time I thought I was saving myself from my mother but I wasn't. After I understood that, I finally saved myself by allowing myself to be loved and go on being loved. I was in my 40s when that happened and it has not stopped. My mother would not save herself. Even after asking for help and being offered help, she would not save herself. So, we kept our distance for the rest of her life, loving each other in the only way we knew. Well before the end we had said everything we needed to say to each other about love and disappointment and salvation. That was a couple of years before she died. The only thing left to say after that was that I loved her. And I said it as she was dying. I stood beside hospital her bed and held her hand. My sister stood on the other side of the bed, holding her other hand. We told her we loved her and that we were with her, repeating and repeating as her breathing slowed and stopped. I still miss her. I miss talking to her. Even in the not-so-good years I would always call her on her birthday.

MCJOBS AND MONDEGREENS

I was a precocious reader. My mother read to me, but she never made an active effort to teach me to read. She never pointed at the words and had me sound them out (she was NOT hooked on phonics), so I suppose I picked it up by watching the words and their sentences as she read to me. But I do not hear words when I read them or write them, not in her voice or any other voice. Words happen to me silently. I write them down; I speak them. Sometimes I even see words in my dreams, whole sentences marching across the darkness letter by letter, like news across a ticker. But I do not hear them. It is as if my mother tossed me into a deep pool of words from which I am still trying to save myself. I am under words the way a drowning man is under water. It is quiet down here.

And here is another word, as if I need one more word. This is one I did not know until today: mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric in a song, what someone described as an "aural malapropism." It is a word that dates back to an article written for the Atlantic in 1954 by a woman named Sylvia Wright. The first mondegreen I remember hearing was as a child when on of my younger siblings set out to sing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" and sang "Oh come all be hateful" instead. There are mondegreens and mondegreens. Allegedly the most famous is, "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear," which should be, "Gladly the Cross I'd bear." The Center for the Humane Study of Mondegreens -- which is San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll's longterm project -- has some real doozies.

And there is news of another word: mcjob (McJob if you supersize it), which the Oxford English Dictionary has included in the language with the definition: "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector." As someone who has had a few of those in his life, and whose children and wife have too, I think that definition pretty much covers it. Now, McDonald's in the United Kingdom (that's where the OED is published too) is starting a petition drive to have the definition changed to something more positive. In fact, they would like to have the definition of McJob (they ALWAYS capitalize it) "changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime." That is likely to be skills that will at least last long enough for a worker to make the move from the mcjob to Wal-Mart greeter. They can petition all they want to, but my guess is that mcjob will go on meaning what mcjob means right now. If you say you have a mcjob, people know what you are saying. Mcjob will keep on grimly meaning what it means until the people who have mcjobs find the need to make it mean something different. Words change through people using them, not by petition. And even McDonald's is not likely to change the OED.

IT'S 2007

Saddam Hussein never saw the New Year. He went “up the long ladder and down the short rope,” as the old Irish ditty says. There is a tidy video version of Hussein’s hanging (government approved, as those tidy things tend to be) and there is an untidy video version with sound, which has created some problems for the Iraqi government. No one should be surprised. Tidiness and truth often have very little to do with each other (remember George W. Bush primly declaring victory in Iraq on the deck of that aircraft carrier?). Which brings us to Gerald Ford, who didn’t make it to 2007 either. He did enough tidying up after Richard Nixon to qualify as the tidy-bowl man. His funeral seems to go on and on, but no matter. His will always be “The Pardoner’s Tale,” and some of us will never really trust it. We will probably never know for sure how much of Nixon’s crap he agreed to shove under the rug, and some of us feel cheated. My mother didn't make it to 2007 either. She died in April and there are those in the family who want to tidy that up some too. But the truth is that my mother had an untidy life and it was her untidiness that finally made us what we are. We are part – perhaps the best part – of the mess she made. Tidying up is nothing more than trying to close the door on the untidy truth. Geopolitics, national politics, family politics. We cannot afford to let the door close and tidiness happen. The untidiness will always come back like a secret video made at the foot of the gallows. And it will have sound. Happy New Year.

THANKSGIVING, HEARTBURN, CHEST PAINS

Thanksgiving came and went. My heartburn seemed to linger. The guests and relatives came and went. The new stove came and stayed and cooked everything up just right. Then a pain and a weight like something very heavy sitting on the left side of my chest came along and stayed too; sometimes they were joined by a sort of clammy sweat. Saturday, Sunday, Monday morning. The weight would not lift; I kept sweating. I called my doctor; she wasn’t working, but her nurse said I should go to the emergency room. I didn’t, because that is not the sort of thing I do and, besides, what does a guy who is a nurse know about anything? Instead, I called my cardiologist’s office. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised when his nurse said, “Go to the emergency room. Any time you have chest pain you should go to the emergency room. Do you want me to call an ambulance?” I said that wouldn’t be necessary, that I would be glad to drive myself. “When you get there, tell them you are having chest pains,” the nurse said. “They will admit you immediately.” And when I arrived at the emergency room, they did.

I am not much of an emergency room-goer. I have been in an emergency room only four times in my life.

Once was after I was in a minor automobile accident and had a terrific headache from bouncing around inside a tiny, rear-ended Austin America sedan. I remember waiting in the waiting room for a  long time before they called me in, gave me a prescription for Darvon and sent me home. I liked the Darvon just fine and it really helped with the headache, but that was back in the hippie days and some people living in the house where I lived liked the Darvon too. They liked it so much they stole just about all of it, then asked me when I was going to get a refill. “Can you get this refilled?” probably ranked right up there with “Spare change?” among questions hippies asked.

Another time I was taken to the hospital because I started weeping over just how screwed up my life was and couldn’t stop. Of course, I was the one who had screwed it up so badly, but I couldn’t see that through the tears (Hell, I couldn't see it tears or no tears). After a few hours, concerned friends became a little frightened and embarrassed and called my parents. They took me to the emergency room, where a helpful doctor had me pumped full of Demerol (two big shots if I remember correctly) to take the edge off of the crying jag. I cried right on through the Demerol, so they pumped more into me. After a few hours, I calmed down to the sniffling heaves and my parents took me to their house, where my mother blamed the crying jag on an improper diet -- which meant I had been eating food she didn't cook -- and bad friends (they were pretty much the same bunch that stole the Darvon, but they were the only friends I had). She fed me for a few days, washed my clothes and seemed to think I would never need to cry again after that. I think it really surprised her when it happened again a few years later. I didn’t go back to the emergency room that time, and by then even Demerol could not brighten up the hole I was in. That time I had to talk my way out of it. My psychiatrist was named Gomez. He looked like a Latin American dictator and spoke with an accent. He helped me talk. I think my mother always worried about what I said.

It was nearly 40 years before I saw the inside of an emergency room again. That was about three years ago. Apparently having kidney stones or chest pains is like having a key to the emergency room. They are magic, door-opening words. When you show up at the emergency room with kidney stones they let you right in, lay you right down and offer you all kinds of pain killers including Demerol and morphine. I picked morphine. “On a scale of 1-to-10, how would you describe your pain?” they asked. I could only laugh through clenched teeth. Kidney stones are a sure way to find out what it feels like when you venture into the world of the pain that exists way past 10. If they could find a way to give those captured jihadists in Guantanamo Bay kidney stones, they would not have to torture them to get answers. They would simply have to withhold relief and those guys would tell them anything they wanted to know. When they admitted me to the hospital that night, it was not for kidney stones (they don’t put you in the hospital for kidney stones), it was for pain. They gave me a morphine drip with a button I could push every few minutes for more. I loved my morphine drip as much as any jihadist ever loved Mohammed or any Christ-hugging Fundamentalist ever loved Pat Robertson, maybe more. Kidney stones are a revelation in pain, pain elevated to the level of a religious experience, the excruciating pain suffered by true believers forced to live in a world of sin. It is a pain in search of a blast of relief. After morphine there was lithotripsy. After that, there was blessed relief.

And then there was Monday. And Tuesday. Chest pains. Blood pressure. Blood thinner. Baby aspirin (four). An IV. Nitroglycerine under the tongue (it helped and that was a bad sign). Oxygen up my nose. Blood tests. Shots in the arm (I chose that over shots in the stomach). And hours and hours in the emergency room. So many hours that I sent my wife and son shopping because, even if I was scared about what was happening to me, I felt uncomfortable with them just sitting there watching. They went shopping. I stayed put in the emergency room, reading and rereading the poster that said blood test results usually took one hour, CT scan results several hours, etc. I watched the time pass on a clock that claimed to be linked to the atomic clock for accuracy. I wondered how many people had died on the narrow bed where I was. Eventually, they admitted me to the hospital. My wife and son sat with me. I watched television. There were blood tests through the night. My chest hurt and the pressure returned. More nitroglycerine. More oxygen. I watched my blood pressure drop below 100, down to 91 over 40-something. The pain went away. The pressure went away. But the nitroglycerine gave me a terrible headache. The nurse gave me Darvocet (it triggered memories of the wreck, the Darvon, the thieving hippies, the weeping, the Demerol). I slept, waking only for blood tests through the night. In the morning, I had a stress test. My cardiologist (I hate it that I am even old enough to say the words “my cardiologist”) said my heart was strong, even stronger under stress. He sent me home with a prescription to kill the acidity in my stomach. He told me to take it easy and come back to see him in six months. I have a hard time taking it easy. I went home and slept for several hours in the afternoon, and for nearly 10 hours through the night. I returned to the office today, but I think I will take the doctor’s advice and take it easy tomorrow.

I feel better, but I still do not know what caused the pain and the pressure in my chest. It was a good Thanksgiving. We enjoyed the relatives. We enjoyed the guests. The food. The wine. We love the new stove. But the holiday is not over yet. I have another appointment with a doctor today.

MOTHER LOVE AND MAYONNAISE

It took me years to figure out my mother’s potato salad, and I almost did it. My potato salad is tasty. My children like it. My wife likes it. Friends who come over to eat like it. I like my potato salad, but there has always been something the tiniest bit disappointing about it. One guy said, “That’s great potato salad, but it needs to sit out in the sun on a picnic table for about half a day to  develop that edge.” He grew up in North Carolina like I did and I knew that beginning-to-spoil edge he was talking about. And while there has always been something missing from the taste of my potato salad, it wasn’t letting it sit in the hot sun and spoil a little before we ate it. I couldn’t quite figure it out. What was missing? A woman’s touch? Motherly love? Was I paying a price for losing faith in those things (sometimes it was easier to love my mother’s potato salad than it was to love my mother)? Or was I paying the price for simply not paying attention to her back when I had the chance? I had watched my mother make potato salad hundreds of times, but I still couldn’t quite get it right.

When I was a boy, I was happy in my mother’s kitchen. Sometimes I would sit at the kitchen table and chat with her while she cooked a few feet away. She almost always smoked while she cooked (she smoked while she did almost everything except sleep), but she never dangled an ash over a pot or a bowl she was stirring; she would put the lit cigarette in an ashtray on the end of the kitchen counter closest to the stove while she worked. The smoke rose in a thin stalk between us. I do not remember anything we talked about in particular, but I know we did not talk about cooking.

In the world where I grew up, women cooked and men didn’t. My mother raised me to live in that world and, besides, she just knew there had to be someone I would meet and marry someday who was willing to cook my meals (and clean my house and do my laundry); she did not raise me to do what was thought of as “women’s work.” What kind of mother would do that to her oldest boy? So, after years of sitting and chatting with my mother while she cooked, I still did not know how to rice, dice, slice, parboil, bake, roast, fry, sear, stir, dredge, chop, pare, peel or do much of anything else with food except eat it. She never asked me to help. And I never paid that much attention to what she was doing. Why should I? It was not something I would ever need to know how to do. Sitting there while my mother smoked and cooked was as close to cooking as I ever came.

We ate well at our house, but without much sense of adventure. When my mother told me what we were having for dinner, I knew precisely how it would taste, how it would look, what its texture would be, and what the side dishes would be -- because it was always something I had eaten before.  My father liked the food he grew up eating and we never drifted far from that. That is how he liked it and that is how we ate it. My father did not like spicy food and we didn’t have it.  He didn’t like “foreign” food (especially Italian food; he was in Italy in World War II and took it personally), so we didn’t have that either. We ate our chicken fried, our fish fried (but we never ate catfish because my father and mother believed only black people and white trash ate catfish and we surely didn’t want anyone mistaking us for something we weren’t); our vegetables were tastily overcooked (usually with salt pork or fatback); our roast beef was never rare; and our cakes were most often chocolate. My mother was a good cook, so even if the food was usually predictable it was never tiresome. It was food we could count on.

I didn’t find anyone to cook for me, not even anyone my mother could teach how to cook for me. I met a woman who preferred the taste of food out of a can or a box to home cooking. My mother was disappointed; I was disappointed. I left. After that I lived on my own for years, eating in restaurants (expanding to a diet that included Italian, catfish and beyond, but once gaining 50 pounds in a few  months, eating away at my loneliness at the Burger King across the street), getting my tastily overcooked vegetables among the hungry hippies at the American Lunch in Atlanta. When I was a couple of years shy of 30 and tired of the adventure of always eating out, it finally dawned on me that I could learn to cook for myself. So I did. I bought a cookbook. It was as simple as that. I cooked. After a while, I began to miss some of that old predictable food I could count on, but it wasn't in the cookbook and I had wandered so far from my mother’s kitchen that I could not ask for the recipes. I did finally get the potato salad figured out. All but that one little thing.

My mother died in April and after her funeral I learned about what was missing from my potato salad. My niece and my sister sat at the same kitchen table where I would sit and watch my mother cook. They talked about how my mother had taught them to cook. They talked about making sweet tea; they talked about potato salad. They talked about ingredients and cooking and chopping and how everything had to be just so. Finally, my niece said, “And Duke’s mayonnaise. Only Duke’s mayonnaise.” And they laughed at my mother’s insistence on using Duke’s mayonnaise and nothing but Duke's mayonnaise. And that was it. It was nothing as exotic and mysterious as a woman’s touch or a mother’s tender love (no need to rethink my apostasy); it was not even a secret and unexpected ingredient: It was the mayonnaise. Duke’s is a southern thing and I left the south long ago, long before I began to cook. How could I have known? There was no need for me to pay attention when she cooked. Girls learned to cook in that kitchen; boys just sat there. My mother never taught me the recipe and once I walked out of her kitchen, I never again felt like I was close enough to ask.

SMOKE

A day before my mother died, two of her sisters came to visit at the hospital: Mildred, her oldest surviving sister; and Rebecca, the next youngest to my mother, the sister she shared a bed with until the day she married my father. We all knew my mother was dying. She had an oxygen mask and gasped for breath after unconscious breath in the sunny hospital room. We stood around her talking. My aunts do not look as old as they are, but they have become old women in the years I have been away. Still, I am at ease around them. I can talk to them. We have known each other for 60 years. I like talking to them.

I prefer the company of women; I learned that from my mother. But I have a difficult time trusting women; it took time, but I learned that from my mother too. Those two lessons eventually confused and complicated my life, but the years before the confusion set in were good years. My mother had six sisters, two older, four younger. I grew up surrounded by aunts. They did the kind of stuff that boys always need and men are not very good at doing. I was dandled, fussed over, fed, babysat, hugged, kissed, pampered and coddled. They bought me things, fed me things, took me places. My mother had two brothers too, and some of her sisters had husbands, but who needed uncles? Why mess up a young boy’s life with a bunch of men? I didn’t particularly like the smell of men, but I liked the smell of my mother and her sisters. They were young women and I loved to breathe them: their skin, their perfume, makeup, lipstick, powder, lotion, soap and shampoo, all usually wrapped up snug in the smell of cigarette smoke (most of them smoked). It smelled like love to me.

I have never smoked a cigarette. Not even one. I grew up in North Carolina. I was raised with smokers, lived around smokers, socialized with smokers, worked with smokers. The people I grew up around started smoking as children. I had one grandfather who started smoking as a boy, eventually suffered from emphysema  from smoking, but wheezed his way into his mid-80s (he chewed tobacco to the very end); had another grandfather who smoked unfiltered cigarettes despite his history of heart attacks and only made it to his mid-60s (when one last heart attack knocked him dead in a discount store); I had an aunt and uncle (my mother’s brother and sister) who died a few years apart as a direct result of lung cancer (they didn’t get anywhere near 80; one died slowly, the other much more quickly) and my mother only quit smoking after the second one died. My mother began smoking as a child and kept smoking until she was in her late 70s, more than a pack a day for years. When I was a child, I sat in the back seat of the car behind my mother when we went anywhere. My mother smoked in the front seat; it didn’t matter whether she was the passenger or the driver, she smoked. Her smoke blew back on me. I grew to hate the smell of cigarette smoke, but I always loved the smell of my mother.

I suppose not smoking cigarettes was a way of rebelling against the world I grew up in. When other boys were out smoking, I was out not smoking. I shied away from girls and later women who smoked. Then, when I was middle-aged and had given up on love for one reason or another, I fell in love with a smoker. I married her, have been married to her for nearly 20 years, never intend not to be married to her, and figure that no matter how long we are married it will never be long enough. I have always loved her smell.

Does the smell of smoke on my wife’s clothes and hair have anything to do with the sense of permanence and comfort I feel when I am with her? Is there a bit of Oedipal puffery going on? Probably not. My only childhood memory of my mother naked is a bad one that involved little more than a glimpse of her dressing for bed after her bath, and was followed by being hit repeatedly with some hard, flat object. I never knew why she hit me, but I never saw her naked again until she was old and incapable of raising her hand or her voice. I never wanted to, never tried to. I stifled my boyish curiosity. I feared what might happen if I did see her naked again. As I grew older, I lived more and more cautiously around her until I could not live around her at all.

I do not live cautiously with my wife. Even after all of these years together, I like seeing her naked. I have years of memories of seeing her and they are all good and none of them involve being hit with anything. When she is naked and I am with her I am fearless (and I look forward to the consequences). Sometimes, she wants a cigarette. She doesn't smoke much, she needs to quit smoking, she tries to quit smoking, I encourage her to quit smoking, but I don’t mind if she has just one.

My mother and cigarettes. My wife and cigarettes. The pain of seeing my mother. The pleasure of looking at my wife. Freudians might believe they smell smoke, but I figure Oedipus for the kind of guy who always had to light one up after a romp in the sack. I have never been that guy. Me and cigarettes. It's complicated.

My Aunt Rebecca did not smoke until she was an adult and had a job in an office. Everyone in the office smoked. She said she was uncomfortable, maybe even embarrassed. So, one day she bought a pack of cigarettes. She went back to the office, went into the bathroom, taught herself to smoke and smoked for years after that. It was one of the stories she told as we stood there and we laughed a little. We went on talking. We laughed sometimes. We knew death was coming, but it was not here yet. We could hear my mother breathing. We spoke freely, almost as if we were young.