Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim (7 page)

Mother Mary learns to love the outdoors … for a few minutes.

Mother Mary takes Peach and Little Tony for a spin.

Later, we clean up the dishes and she tells me that she misses our old cat Smoochie, who passed way.

“I have his ashes upstairs,” I say, and she lifts a sparse gray eyebrow.

“Really?”

“Sure.” I keep the ashes from all of my pets, for the past thirty years, in my office. The dogs Bear, Rosie, Bertie, Lucy, and Angie. Smoochie is the only cat, and I even have a chest of ashes from Francesca’s horse, Joy. In case you were wondering, a chest of horse ashes is roughly the size of a footlocker, and now you know why I work in the kitchen.

So I tell her all of this, then add, “I want to be cremated, too. Put me in a little cedar chest and stick me on the shelf in my office.”

“I don’t want to be cremated.”

“No?” I ask her, which is when I see her expression darken and realize that the conversation just took a serious turn. So I twist off the faucet and ask gently, “What do you want?”

“I want a mausoleum.” She starts to smile, and so do I.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. At the food store, you said I have a house in Florida and a house in Pennsylvania. Well, I want another house. In Holy Cross.”

I laugh. “You’re not going out cheap, are you, Ma?”

“Hell, no,” she answers, with a wink.

Happy Birthday

By Lisa

It’s my birthday, and I’m spending it with Mother Mary, which I know is a gift.

But unfortunately, you can’t return it.

Just kidding.

I’ve said that aging isn’t for the fainthearted, but I was talking about turning fifty-five. Now that I’m fifty-six, I realize how right I was.

Older and wiser, that’s me.

And living with Mother Mary, who’s eighty-seven, I’m beginning to see what strength is all about.

No kidding.

Strength is trying to walk forward when you can barely see.

Strength is trying to change a channel when you can’t find a button on the remote.

Strength is trying to open a jar when you can’t grasp it properly.

Strength is trying to speak when you’ve been robbed of your abilities.

Strength is remembering how things used to be, but knowing they aren’t that way anymore. And going ahead anyway.

She is strongest, though her body is weakest.

I’m not trying to be a downer. I know that many older people lead full, active lives, and I hope to be one of them. But I’m living with one older person in particular, who has survived two strokes, throat cancer, and the cancellation of
Law & Order.

Being with Mother Mary has opened my eyes to the fact that life isn’t easy if you’re a senior, especially a
senior
senior.

Microwave buttons are hard to read. The stairs in a movie theater are tough in dim light. Large print books are hard to find. Menus, cans, and bottles are unreadable.

Why can’t there be an earphone on a TV, so we don’t have to TURN UP THE VOLUME?

And there are salespeople in the world who are patient with older people, but some who aren’t. If anybody’s going to be nasty to my mother, it better be me.

Can we accommodate seniors better? I’m not the only baby boomer to be asking this question, and I bet we all become very interested in the issue, the older we get. Or as more of us take in our relatives and see how very strong they have to be, in their own special way.

Living with her makes me realize that we worry about all the wrong things. I see women every day on TV, and in the market, whose lips look suspiciously plump, and I wish them luck. But when I see what Mother Mary is worrying about, it isn’t her looks. I know this because I just replaced her thirty-year-old bra and had to wrestle her into a new one. Two women and four breasts, flailing about in a dressing room. It gives a new meaning to girl-on-girl action.

It’s not about her wrinkles, it’s about the very senses that enrich our lives and keep us in contact with the world around us. We discuss this over lunch, which she agrees to have outside, even though she hates bugs, because it’s my birthday.

Francesca, Lisa, Mother Mary, Laura, and Franca celebrate Lisa’s birthday with a girls’ night out.

“Happy birthday, honey!” she says, with a smile. Then, “Wanna see the scar?”

I laugh, though I’ve heard it before. I was delivered by Caesarean section, and for a joke, she would flash me her scar. That’s the walking lesson that is Mother Mary.

She gave birth, and it left a mark.

She bears the marks of all of her days, good and bad, and so do we all, ultimately. We go forward with our failing eyes and ears, our steps slowed and speech sometimes a little funky. But if we’re lucky, we go on, knowing that life isn’t what it was, but it’s something new, and after all, it’s life.

That alone is precious, and enough.

In the end, she’s the Birthday Girl.

Aftershocked

By Francesca

Italian women are stereotypically over reactors. My mother, for example, makes nuclear reactors seem reasonable. But I pride myself on being the cool-headed one. I can win any argument, or at least whip my mom into a frenzy, simply by remaining calm. So I always imagined I’d perform well in an emergency. I finally got my test case in an East Coast earthquake

I was writing on my laptop, when all of a sudden I felt as if the floor was swinging. I thought it was in my head, maybe a migraine or caffeine overdose. But then I saw the ripples in my water glass, and if
Jurassic Park
taught me anything, it’s that when that happens, it’s time to get out of the jeep.

In the next moment, my TV started wobbling and my picture frames fell off the shelves. I had no idea what was happening, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out. I leashed Pip, grabbed the keys, phone, snatched a pair of flip-flops, and flew down six flights of stairs barefoot, like a monkey down a tree.

I skidded outside on the sidewalk, bewildered and out of breath, only to find everyone else going on his or her merry way, oblivious. Excess adrenaline coursed through me, but there were no opportunities to be heroic—no child trapped beneath a car, no unconscious adult in need of a fireman’s carry, not even a kitten in a tree. In fact, no one seemed concerned at all.

Fear made room for embarrassment, as I became aware that a) I was apparently the only person who had almost wet herself in the last minute, and b) I was not wearing a bra.

I’d like to say I was raised better than this, but the last time my mom went to the ER, she wasn’t wearing a bra either. It’s practically family tradition.

Pip, also unconcerned, pulled at the leash, so I crossed my arms and walked him around the block. The dog looked for spots in need of pee while I looked for anyone whose look of panic matched mine; Pip found several lucky lampposts before I found a single comrade-in-alarm.

There’s a new restaurant under construction on the ground floor of the building next door. The head contractor always tries to chat me up when I walk by, so normally I avoid the corner, but when he greeted me today, I didn’t let him get a word in.

“Hey, hey, hey. Guillermo, hey, it’s Francesca, hi, c’mere.” I tried to slow my speech, but after being struck dumb with fear, my tongue decided it was its turn to freak out. “Did you just feel anything, like, shaking?” I realized my hands were shaking, which I hoped he took as active storytelling. “Did you guys just bust out a wall, or drop anything heavy, or something?”

He shook his head.

“Oh, okay, because, well, this is gonna sound crazy—” I tried to toss off a laugh, but it missed casual by an octave and came out at loony-bin pitch. “But I swear the walls of my apartment just shook.”

He frowned, looking a bit skeptical, so I threw in my trump card:

“A picture fell off the shelf!” The gravity of the statement diminished when I said it aloud.

“Well thanks for letting me know, I’ll ask my guys,” Guillermo said. “In case I find out anything, how about you give me your phone number?”

“Good thing one of us keeps calm in emergencies.”

“Okay, good idea.”

Yes, if you catch me in an emergency, I am this naive.

I had just handed the pen back to him, when my cellular service returned and a text message from my mom chimed in:

“U heard about earthquake in VA/DC? Aftershocks on E coast. Turn on TV. Love you!”

Finally, an explanation! But my next thought was for the victims in Virginia and D.C. Surely any earthquake whose aftershocks scared me so must have unleashed utter devastation at its center. Is the White House a pile of rubble?

Oh no? It’s totally still there, really? Everybody pretty much a-okay, huh? Well, thank God! Glad to hear it.

So maybe I over-reacted a little. But it’s not my fault.

I am the granddaughter of Mother Mary, once dubbed “Earthquake Mary” by
The Miami Herald,
because she was the only person in Miami to feel an earthquake that occurred four hundred miles away in Tampa.

You can’t fight genetics.

Stroke, Stroke, Bail, Bail

By Lisa

I don’t know how to swim but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

Let me explain.

I never learned how to swim, because it involves putting your head underwater, which is a problem for me, as I require oxygen to live.

Also I’m terribly nearsighted, so if I take my glasses off, which is the kind of thing people expect when you swim, I can’t see the Atlantic.

When I was little, I would go stand at the water’s edge and jump waves with my brother. I have recurrent nightmares of being drowned, which is either a residual memory of those days or a flashback to my second marriage.

You won’t be surprised to know that Mother Mary can’t swim, either. She always says that she has a deal with the sharks. She won’t go in the water if they won’t go on the land.

When we were little, she would go to the water’s edge to watch us and make sure we were safe. That she couldn’t swim didn’t seem to matter.

We lived, so it must have worked.

I’m lucky enough to have a pool and I’ve been known to float around on an inflatable raft and fall asleep. I also do a lot of clinging to the side, like a girl barnacle. I hang on tight and walk myself around the pool, hand over hand, which is kind of like swimming on land.

But last week, when the temperature hit 100 degrees, I eyed my pool and told myself it was time to conquer my fear.

Putting on a bathing suit.

Just kidding.

I have no problem putting on a bathing suit. After all, no one else is around, and the dogs think I look superhot. They have great taste, even if they think cat poop is a meal.

So I went into the pool, stood in the shallow end, and decided to swim a lap. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, as I lack gills, but I’d seen Penny do it a bunch of times. So I started paddling, my head above water, and all four paws flailing wildly.

Dear reader, I made it to the side. Gasping. Panting. Exhausted. But alive. Which only encouraged me to get Mother Mary into the act. Yes, she’s still here, and no, I didn’t use her for a raft.