What Are We Going to Do About Mama? By Cappy Hall Rearick

 

Dr. Frank Crane (1861–1928) penned a set of ten volumes of "Four Minute Essays." One of them touched my heart.

“She is my mother, said the young man, but I call her my baby. She is 85 years old. Old people are very much like babies, and we ought to love them, for such is the kingdom of heaven. 

I have an idea that life evens things up. When I was young and helpless she took care of me; now I take care of her. I am paying my debt.

She never left me alone when I was an infant. Now, I do not leave her alone. She was patient with me then; now I am patient with her. 

She fed me; now I feed her. I clothe and keep her. “She sacrificed her young life for me; now I am glad of every chance I have to sacrifice for her. She loved me when I was ignorant, awkward, needing constant care and all because I was hers, born of her body and part of her soul. Now every feebleness and trait of childishness in her endears her to me for no other reason except that she is my mother. 

By so much as she is a tax on my time, attention and money, I love her. She shall not triumph over me on the day of judgment for my tenderness shall equal hers.

She watched with me until I grew up; I shall watch with her until she steps into heaven.”

 

Not so long ago, it was normal for Mama to live out her golden years with her grown children. Her role would be that of looking after small children or helping out around the house. Family responsibility was shared back in the day.

But times they are a’changing. For many reasons, Mama’s option to live out her last years surrounded by a devoted daughter or son may be a thing of the past, her presence more of a tempest in a teapot than a calm transition. Factor in her potential for stroke, broken bones, or God forbid dementia, Mama’s tempest has the makings of a perfect storm. 

While she may be happy living with her son or daughter, it is a huge adjustment for everyone. In the beginning, Mama is self-reliant and capable of taking care of minor aches and pains. In time, however, her small issues will become large problems. 

One of my friends told me that her eighty-seven-year-old mother took a bus to a barbershop and told the barber to shave off all of her hair. I asked if she was on chemo. My friend said, “She doesn’t have cancer. She just wanted to look like Sinead O’Connor.”

Another friend complained that her mother-in-law wanted to cook her son’s favorite meal but ended up catching the kitchen on fire. When she was subsequently banned from cooking, she became belligerent and blamed my friend for the accident— in four-letter words, no less. 

My friend confessed that living with her husband’s mother was a nightmare, that everything revolved around her quirks and mood swings. “I love her,” she said, “but she makes my life so hard. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I resent my husband because he’s an extension of her. We argue over the things we dismissed as trivial in the past. The stress is killing our relationship.”

Sharing one’s home with another woman is tough duty. It’s even more difficult feeling helpless as your other relationships disintegrate before your eyes. 

The question remains: What are we going to do about Mama?

Do we hire a qualified caregiver to live with her in her own home, or in our home? 

Back in the day, Mama would have lived with one of her grown children until she died. That may still be a possibility if Mama’s growing needs do not tear apart the fragile fabric of the Twenty-first Century family.

Do we ship Mama off to a reliable facility with the promise to visit every Sunday afternoon? If so, who pays for it?

Mama ain’t getting no younger. Let’s encourage her to maintain some independence by planning her own future. If she wants to remain in her home with a caregiver, tell her to carve it in stone. 

If she prefers to live with her grown children, they need to have conversations about what her role in the family structure should be. 

If Mama chooses to live out the rest of her life in a graduated living facility, the choice needs to be made early enough so that when the time comes, it’s a done deal and she can make the move knowing she has the support of her loving family.

“She watched with me until I grew up; I shall watch with her until she steps into heaven.”

 

 

 

The Beat Goes On

I was having babies and pretending to be Donna Reed during the provocative 60’s, so I pretty much slept through those years. Chasing two rambunctious boys left me too worn out to focus on anything more serious than Pablum. For all I knew, the Beat Generation could have been a group of tired wives and mothers like me. Hippies? They were people born with unfortunate hips.

Ken Kesey. Jack Kerouac. Neal Cassady. Allan Ginsburg. William Burroughs.

While I was changing diapers and making formula, Jack Kerouac, in a multi-colored, psychedelic bus loaded up his friends and took his first cross-country trip. He called it Further, but Tom Wolfe later named it, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I didn’t know squat about any of that. Longhaired hippies lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, not in my little corner of the world. By the time I was in a position to boogie with the Grateful Dead, I was too old to dance.

A few years after Kerouac’s Further, I awoke from my civic narcolepsy and did something completely foreign to the “me” I had been, I protest marched against the war. My rebellion, however, did little more than guarantee my name and photograph to be forever embedded inside a folder at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Nonetheless, I was proud of myself for having done something. After recovering from the initial shock of breaking with tradition, my one act of defiance helped me to understand that it was okay to think outside of the Pablum Package.

About that same time, Ken Kesey took me on a journey inside his head ~ not one of his psychedelic road trips, but a much shorter one than he ever took. His movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius for me — my Aha Moment. 

For middleclass Americans brought up in or before the 50’s, Jack Nicholson’s role in the film was seen as nothing more than the character he portrayed. Although for all of my previous adult years I had behaved more like June Cleaver than June Cleaver, I somehow saw Mac McMurphy as something else. He was the kid on the playground brave enough to stand up to the school bully. I saw the wretched nurse Ratched as the bully — McMurphy’s antithesis. God only knows how I did it, but it seemed clear to me that Kesey illustrated just how often powerful politicians try to silence the counterculture and anti-establishment groups. 

We all take freedom for granted. We are no different from kids at Christmas who are given so many toys that none of them are special. Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters hoped that their message, drug-induced though they were, would resuscitate an apathetic people. For sure, the arrested childhood of the counterculture was a backward way to move forward, but they made some waves and ultimately made a difference. They opened up Pandora’s Box and forced cans of political worms to wriggle out. NFL players have earned the hero title for doing less.

These days I don’t march or hold up protest placards, but as an American citizen, I insist on my right to do so. I want to get back to the freedom of speech I used to know but too often take for granted, especially today. I need to trust that my right of peaceful assembly written in the First Amendment to the Constitution will always allow me to dissent against wrongdoing, no matter who commits it. I am not willing to forfeit my privileges and neither should you. The Constitution of the United States says we don’t have to. At least, today it does. Who knows how long before that gets changed too?

We have been charged with a provocative edict: to uphold the visions set in motion when early Americans defied England over two hundred years ago. If we are to make our dissenting forefathers proud, we cannot sleep through times when gluttonous games are being played by corrupt officials and we cannot remain silent when our Supreme Court fails to do the right thing. 

The freedom of speech is my right. It is your right. The freedom to rebel is our heritage and given our proud history, how can we do less? 

The Beat Goes On.

 

Writing the Memoir

EVERYBODY HAS A STORY TO TELL

Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart. ~ Nick Flynn

Last Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day, my brother and I went with our spouses over to Tryon for lunch. Later we spent the afternoon doing what the four of us love: antiquing. Quite by accident, we discovered an enormous antique mall hidden away off Hwy 176, so we wore ourselves out looking at things, picking up things and trying not to break any of it.

We had planned to continue the hunt in Landrum, but we needed a shot of caffeine first. Once again quite by accident, we found The Open Road, a dear little coffee place where all four of us concluded that Starbucks should be worried. Not only did The Open Road have everything our sagging body required for a caffeinated perk up they also had Susan, the resident pianist.

She grew up during WW2 and played one song after another from the war years, ones she had always loved. As it happened, they were the same songs my brother and I had heard growing up because they were also our mother’s favorite tunes.

As soon as we sat down in the cozy alcove to sip our specialty coffees, Susan played, Sentimental Journey. It was as if Mama had requested it. I glanced over at my brother when my eyes began to fill. I thought: Mama is with us right now, happy that her two children are together. She wanted us to know that she was there too.

We lingered over our coffee listening to those old beloved tunes, and just before we left, Susan played, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” another of Mama’s favorites, and one that never fails to fill my heart with memories of her.

This story is not how I planned to begin my talk today, but the events of last Saturday perfectly illustrate what I want you to do as you gather material for writing memoir. Fleeting moments, meaningful at the time but too often forgotten over time, can trigger long forgotten memories that you want to include as you recount the days of your life. 

Recollection is the first step you take when writing memoir. This is what happened for me on Saturday when I heard a certain song:

 

MY SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

by Cappy Hall Rearick

“You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, 

but never the one with whom you have wept.”~ Kahlil Gibran

Laughter can be cathartic, but a good cry is how I cleanse the clutter from my soul.

My penchant for sad movies where heroines die an untimely death began the day Mama took me with her to see the movie, Sentimental Journey. She was crazy about John Payne and I guess because she was Irish, she believed Maureen O’Hara was her distant cousin. Mama apparently kissed the Blarney Stone at a very early age.

I was six-years-old but I clearly remember that day in the theater. Mama started to sob about five minutes into the film and I, lacking the capacity to understand her tears, cried along with her. She would pull out two tissues at a time from her pocketbook, hand one to me and then blow her nose with the other. 

Mama loved going to the picture show and it didn’t much matter if it was a drama, comedy or musical. Whatever was showing at the Carolina Theater (with the exception of Roy Rogers and Trigger) was the movie she stood in line and paid a quarter to see. For years, I went with her. 

Together we saw Pinky, Johnny Belinda, Imitation of Life and Little Women, of course. Tearjerkers, every one of them. Occasionally, she took me with her to see a murder mystery. After seeing Edward G. Robinson stab a woman with scissors in The Woman in the Window, I woke up screaming for weeks.

But Sentimental Journey set the emotional bar for Mama and me. For the rest of her life, anytime that movie was mentioned either in conversation, a recorded version of the song, or even if the movie was replayed on television, Mama would look over at me with a knowing smile. That long ago day in the theater with her when I was just a child continued to be our shared moment in time, one that lingered between us for nearly fifty years. 

Once when I was living in Los Angeles, she sent me a newspaper article about the movie. It was a tiny thing, not much more than a blurb, but I still have it. It’s tucked away in my memory box, yellow now with age. The day I got it, I opened the envelope and lifted out the two-inch square newspaper clipping and thought, “What in the world is this?” Then I read the heading: SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. It said that TMC was running the movie again at such and such a time. 

I skimmed it and then read the note Mama attached which said: “I saw this in today’s paper and thought of you. How could I not?”

Oscar Wilde said, “Memory really is the diary we carry around with us.”

  

Ben Franklin Slept Around

By Cappy Hall Rearick

 

My 11-year-old grandson and I flew to Philadelphia during the worst heat wave in over a decade. Okay, so I didn’t think things through.

 

After breezing through baggage check-in, we approached the next checkpoint (the one preceding the 50-mile trek to Gate A-5), and that's when our troubles began. I yelled at Parker to quit leapfrogging the crowd control barriers before handing over my picture I.D. to a stoic Security Agent named Charleeka Chakendra. 

 

“Your driver’s license is expired,” she deadpanned.

 

“I wasn’t reminded,” I argued.

 

“Are you from Saluda?” As sure as I am of my birth date, that woman was thinking: ‘Gawd help us.’

 

Homeland Security thought my senior moment deserved special attention, so the contents of my purse were scrutinized by a machine resembling a blowtorch. After that, they shoved me into a stall the size of a phone booth filled with small torpedo-shaped projectiles.

 

“Don’t move,” commanded Checkpoint Charleeka, who sounded too much like my mother-in-law.

 

Warm air poofed out of the midget torpedoes and poofed until the poofs covered my body. It was kind of a turn-on. 

 

“What is the purpose of this humiliation,” I bellowed.

 

“Explosives,” Checkpoint Charleeka said, staring at me with narrowed eyes.

 

“Seriously? Seriously? You think I’ve got a bomb in my Wonderbra? I’m not a bra-bomber. I’m just a freaked-out grandmother.”

 

She rolled her eyes and waved us through.

 

We arrived in Philadelphia, but the hotel shuttle did not. I finally had to fork over the equivalent of Parker’s college tuition for an uber ride into town. The City of Brotherly Love was making me feel like a stepsister.

 

Parker threatened to lapse into chocolate withdrawal and my stomach craved something more than airline pretzels. Clutching a handful of “Kids Eat Free” vouchers, we high-tailed it to the Holiday Inn dining room. The “Kids Eat Free” program was the reason I booked the $200 a day room.

 

The kid’s menu is the biggest farce since Homeland Security poofed me for explosives. Parker took one look, visibly shuddered, then ordered fettuccini for thirty bucks.

 

Our plans for a morning tour didn’t pan out, either. We were wiped out and didn’t get to Independence Hall until noon where we bought tickets and hoped to stay awake while riding through history.

 

I hate to whine but sitting atop a double-decker bus in 200-degree heat while an actor/tour guide dropped Ben Franklin’s name every other sentence, screams equal whine time.

 

Next we rode the Duck, an amphibious vehicle promising a one-of-a-kind 70-minute ride around Philly. It concluded with a dunk in the Delaware River where the tour guide dropped Franklin’s name fifty more times. I don’t want to hear it again unless it’s linked to a hundred-dollar bill.

 

“Let’s ask him if Ben Franklin was with General Washington when he crossed the Delaware, Mammy,” Parker said. 

 

I snatched his hand in mid-wave. “Say that name aloud again, I’ll rip your lips off.”

 

Since our early flight home the next day held the possibility of more jet-poofing, we returned to the hotel and left a pre-dawn wake-up call.

 

We should have known a fire alarm would go off in the middle of the night that included evacuation orders. I thought Parker was going to wet his boxers. “We’re on FIRE, Mammy! Suuu-weeeeet!”

 

I grabbed my laptop, iPhone and the purse containing my expired driver’s license. It’s all about priorities. As it turned out, nothing was fired up except disgruntled hotel guests standing in the street sweating like packhorses at midnight.

 

At the airport, no torpedo poofers searched for grandmothers packing heat. I was treated instead to a personal pat down. Discovering no incendiary devices inside my bra or shoes, Homeland Security patted down Parker to make sure Granny wasn’t planning to blast him and everybody else into the middle of next week.

 

Parker grinned wildly during his body search, his mind busy embellishing his Philly adventure stories for when he wrote an account of, “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.”

 

Genes don’t lie. Gawd help us.