Scrappy

ONE

     The phone rang.  It was my brother.  Just as he was about to talk, I already knew.  Mom was dead.

She came to me in a dream about 4 a.m.  She wasn’t very happy then, nor was she much of her life.

     “I am going now.  You will be okay.”

That was it.  That was consummate Mom.  One liners. Never an explanation.  Words spitted out.

I knew better than to ask from more.

     I had three mothers.  The mother before her divorce, the mother after her divorce and the mother after her accident.

My earliest memory was of wanting to be tethered to be big red balloon.  Balloons can go anywhere and I wanted to get as far away from here as I could.  

I didn’t want to be home.  No one was ever there.

For years I wished I had a warm and loving mother.  My earliest memories of her was that she was always absent.  Of course, it wasn’t just her body that was gone, she wasn’t there even when her body was present. 

She was always reading. Anything Agatha Christie.  George Bernard Shaw.  The Pink Panther. There were academic books, too. She even read when she cooked.

That is how we knew when dinner was ready.  My brother and I could see the smoke coming from around the corner.

“Dinner’s ready” she would say.

Maybe that is why I was always such a skinny kid.  Food was never appetizing in our home.  It was plain, English food.  No seasonings.  

Her cooking didn’t seem to embarrass her.  But she made a scrumptious pineapple upside down cake.  It was the only dessert she made except for birthday cakes.  My favorite birthday cake was angel food cake.  She iced it with chocolate and it just melted in my mouth.