Storied Mind» mother

Looking Out for Life

john — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:23:31 +0000

Some Rights Reserved by macropoulos at Flickr

When I was growing up, no one ever talked about depression. I didn’t know what it was, and the moods I went through didn’t get much reaction from my parents. Yet I spent a lot of time isolating myself, not feeling like playing with my friends or going anywhere, not interested in much of anything. I went through many spells of anxiety as well.

That was something I did recognize because it was like fear, and there wasn’t a boy who wanted to let fear stop him from doing anything. Yet I had to walk a fine line between the fear of what might happen outside my home and what might happen within it. There was a lot of depression in that small space.

One summer when I was about 9, I became convinced that it was too dangerous to go outside. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things, great and small, that could hurt me. For one thing, I could be stung by a bee. Or I might get beaten up, especially by that terror, Del Halstrom, who lived diagonally across the street from us. Or I could run into a car while riding my bike. These and many other possibilities obsessed me.

Staying inside was the thing to do. There I could keep an eye on the neighborhood while leaning on the wooden cover of the big living room radiator and staring out the wide casement windows. That was my lookout post.

I could spend hours at a time mesmerized by the late-day summer light on abundant red rose bushes right under my window. The roses themselves had gone limp in the July sun and had lost their wild density of color and fragrance. The humid heat smothered them to the ground, and the loose petals carpeted the lawn with deep but wilted red.

Our house was set back about fifty feet from the road and built on a slight rise. That gave me a sweeping view of everything that happened in this part of the neighborhood. Sometimes, I felt I was in an audience. The street was like a stage, and I watched the action carefully, ducking down if glances turned my way. I wanted to be invisible.

One evening I was at my post waiting for Del Halstrom to appear. He and my brother had made a fearful date to fight it out, and I wanted to keep track of his movements. There wasn’t anything I could do, of course, and I was nervous that Del might spot me at the window and come after me too.

He was a force that had pushed into our neighborhood when people started moving up from the City. He wasn’t like rest of us. He was a street fighter who dared you with his eyes to step anywhere in a ten foot zone around him when he walked the streets. And when he grabbed you, it was to land a rock in your face, a sharp boot in the groin or a fierce punch in your solar plexus to blast the air right of you. He didn’t fool around with fighting, he went in for a quick kill, got a terrifying scream out of his victim then ran like a cheetah to get as far out of sight as he could.

I don’t know why my brother decided to take him on. Maybe he’d just had enough of this one-man gang. I was afraid of the outcome of this fight and didn’t think Jimmy had much of a chance.

Behind me in the cathedral living room, I could hear my father dragging his arm chair and ottoman into position, settling down with a cigarette, patting his beanbag ashtray onto one arm of his thickly upholstered chair and setting a beer coaster on the other. I heard him popping the can open, catching the quick gush of foam in his mouth, clicking on the TV, and settling in for the Friday night fights.

My mother was stretched out on the couch, an arm flung over her forehead, the fingers of that hand limp by her cheek until lifted to peel back a page of her Ellery Queen mystery magazine. My father made lots of noise, loudly clearing his throat, creaking the chair springs with a one-arm push-up to clear a bubble from his gut as he groaned about gas. But then, at the referee’s signal from the center ring huddle with the fighters, Dad started his action-packed commentary. It wasn’t so much commentary as groans and get-em’s while his favorite took or struck a punch. His own fists followed the action, shooting a jab, an uppercut, a body blow or just shoving away when the fighters leaned on each other in exhaustion, weakly glove-slapping a kidney punch to make it seem like they weren’t playing for time.

Mom suddenly sat up on the couch, wiping her forehead with her handkerchief. “Where’s Jimmy? It’s 9, and I haven’t even seen him tonight.”

I shrugged and muttered that I didn’t know but I didn’t turn around to face her. She hadn’t directed the question at me so much as at the room in general. Her voice had that angry, hurt edge to it that I knew well. It always cut through whatever she was talking about and warned of trouble. I had no idea why – my mother and father were just sitting there – but something must have happened to cause that fearsome and intense quiet of hers. My father looked preoccupied with his boxing, but I knew that when my brother walked in – especially if he’d been in a fight with Halstrom, the balance might be tipped. This fight would begin.

“Why didn’t he say something?”

“He no consideration for anyone!” said my father pausing a moment between swings in his TV fight.

“I didn’t ask you,” my mother shot back as she swung herself down on the couch again, pushed her arm over her forehead and lifted the magazine before her eyes. She couldn’t have really been reading.

Then I heard it, a brief outcry from the Halstrom house, booming sounds of slamming doors, as if sucked shut by a vacuum within emptying rooms, another shout pulled from deep within a male throat and chest, a physical tearing out of a pent-up hurt, far below words, below feelings even, some primitive roar of pain. Del was getting another beating from his dad.

A side door at the top of a flight of steps flew open and shut in a single action. Del stood there for a second, slightly crouched as if ready to spring at anything of danger nearby. He was a tall, lean 14 year-old boy, all wired muscle, taut beneath the denim jacket and pants that pulled back slightly from his rapid frame, as if always a moment or two behind his quick steps.

His small intense eyes scanned across the yards and street below him, as if taking in possible traps or prey. In a clatter of action I could hardly take in, he was suddenly at the bottom of those steps, out the driveway, onto the street, lurching forward in his straining way, his head and eyes yanking the rest of him along. His thin legs reached ahead in big strides, his torso in tense hunching posture, his eyes daring anything to move into his path. Halstrom was out stalking the neighborhood and on his way to beat up my brother.

I heard my father loudly battling through the fight, and then, as he sensed the impending knock-out win, shouting his man on to flatten the bloodied opponent with that magical left hook that came out of nowhere, then finish him off with an uppercut of awesome force. My mother kept silent with her Ellery Queen.

She hated Dad’s antics but couldn’t shut him out. I could imagine the familiar look of disdain, even disgust on her face. I sensed the tension as she scuffed through more pages than she could possibly be reading. That scuff, scuff sounded like a warning signal. Something was about to happen, though I didn’t know what or why.

I focused out the window again and waited for my brother’s fight to be done. took place about a block off stage. They’d agreed to meet down where the brook flowed under Argyle St. – it was out of sight below the street level and shielded by trees from the neighboring yards. Hallstrom had warned everybody else to stay away, and nobody would dare defy him.

The whole thing was over in a couple of minutes, just as I had feared.

There was a quick shriek. I knew it was my brother, though I’d never heard such a voice of pain from him before. And sure enough, a couple of minutes later there went the streak of Halstrom back toward his house. That was that. My brother had lost and would soon come back, hopefully with no more than a welt or bruise. But that shriek – I couldn’t it out of my head.

Behind me the TV fight was over, the television clicked off. My parents just sat there, waiting for Jimmy to walk in the door.

I couldn’t make a move.

Family Fury in a Small Space

john — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:57:29 +0000

Some Rights Reserved by _marmota at Flickr

This is a story I had to get out of my head onto paper purely for healing. It’s still hard, though, and I may not be getting it right – best I can do for now. A name has been changed, but otherwise this is the way I can remember it.

This seemed to happen at first without sound, as if I were watching a silent film with the words blown up on screens.

My brother and my father had their fights – I was used to those. But this was different. I had been in my room upstairs and started down when I heard the heavy shut of the solid oak front door. That meant my father had just come in, and usually I could count off the seconds before the clash between them began. There would be a cautious, almost polite questioning in my father’s baritone, a hoarse, tuneless challenge from my mother, then my brother’s raging tenor. That twisted music of a family fight had begun.

As I came downstairs this time, though, I heard no voices. But then at the foot of the stairs I stood completely still as I looked dumbly into the small foyer at the front door. Dad and my brother stood face to face, but I could hardly see them as my eyes fixed on the 16 gauge shotgun in my brother’s hands. It was aiming right at my father’s chest, the end of the barrel no more than a foot away.

I could almost hear a switch flipping off. I felt and heard nothing but just floated there in my own distance. Anything could have happened.

There were the two determined, tense faces, barely concealing the rage and hurt that each felt, the man and his teenage son locked in combat but perfectly still except for threatening words that finally rolled around me. I remember my mother, as usual, trying to be in between them, and me, not moving, gritting out some words to Tom about having to put the gun down. I was somewhere beyond fear, and realized that my words did not reach into the foyer.

My dad had not yet taken off his fedora and overcoat, and he stood with his hands on his lapels as if he had just been about to take off the coat but held his hands there, clenching them into the heavy woolen cloth.

“Don’t point that at me. You think I’m afraid of a gun?”

“Just get out of here.” Tom in his uncertain fury was barely audible. “Go back where you belong!”

“This is my house. What the Hell do you mean telling me I can’t come into my own house!” His normally resonant voice was clenching like his hands, and mingled fear and rage cut into it. I thought he would lose his speech and be left with nothing but a scrambled tongue and his fists.

“Tom, put the gun down, now!” My mother was ordering him the way she ordered the dog – do this, you bad thing, come here, now! But I could see the fear kept the command out of her voice, and it was only hoarse and irrelevant to the male rage she was witnessing. I could see fear surrounding them all.

“Go back to your goddamn girl friends and your card games at your goddamn club!” Tom planted his feet squarely apart as he kept the gun pointed right at Dad’s chest. He looked like the defender of all good that he felt himself to be, but I knew he was scared too. He was seventeen and needed his father but hated him too much even to think that. The power of his rage destroyed all thinking.

“Tom, you have to put it down.” I said this, thinking I was pushing a new force of reason into the scene, that Tom would listen to me, but it seemed no one even heard my voice. I realized then, as I watched them through the frame of the doorway, that I hadn’t moved one inch from the foot of the stairs. I was standing at least ten feet from where they were, and that seemed such a huge distance to cover with legs that didn’t want to move. But I forced myself to step slowly into the dark of their tension, into the small space of that foyer. So there we were, the four of us, far closer together than usual, in a room the size of a big closet. Only the words made a move.

“Tom!” I forced the sound out loudly at last, right at him, but felt it bounce off the isolating shell of determination he had steeled himself in. “He’s your father – whatever else – he’s your father!” I was staring at Tom but saw my mother’s grim face sharpen in my direction.

“You don’t belong here!” He raged again at Dad.

“How can you say that I don’t belong in my…MY house?” My father was stuck on that theme – he couldn’t get beyond it because he knew he was in the wrong. Yes, he had girlfriends, he gambled at cards, he paraded about his country club like a bachelor. I had taken a call once from a club friend of his whose deep voice laughed out loud when he realized his poker partner had a family. Who would have thought? Sorry to bother you.

Then the most incriminating evidence of all had come to “MY house,” a card from a girlfriend, a woman who was famous as a pop astrologist at the time. It was an open picture postcard with something about a new nightgown she had bought with him in mind. My brother had seen it, torn it in pieces, then taped them back together and left the ripped card for Dad to find. He had taken it away without a word. So here he stood, knowing he wasn’t really a family man, caught between his pride and his shame, and all he could sputter out was his disbelief that his own son was demanding that he leave the house.

“Stop, Tom, – NOW – this is not the way to do it.” Her voice was still hoarse and full of her depthless hurt as she fought back the tears she would never let show. This time she had caught Tom’s attention – I could see wavering in his eyes. It was getting through to him that there were better ways to get the man than this. She hated that man as much as Tom did, and she was supporting him in his hate, just criticizing his tactics. That made him think. He relaxed his grip on the gun just a bit. I breathed.

I heard myself talking again. “Come on, Tom,” appealing to whatever bond of common sense we shared, “Come on, give me that thing.”

And he backed off, his eyes still fixed on Dad, lowered the shotgun, and let me take it from him. I turned my back on them to replace it in the wall-rack and felt drawn for a moment to its polished oak stock and well-oiled gun-blue barrel. My brother took such great care of it.

Dad didn’t move, not quite having any fight left, realizing that all he faced here in his own house was humiliation, at least for this night. He pulled his lapels together and stared blankly at my brother and mother as they left the room together, glaring back at Dad with accusing, reddened eyes.

Mom brushed past me, as I was still staring at Dad, and I heard one word – Traitor! – hissed in my ear.

Family, Forgiveness & Peace

john — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:51:01 +0000

Some Rights Reserved by carulmare at Flickr

I always had a hard time linking forgiveness and peace with my early family life. In fact, it was hard for me to understand what forgiveness itself was all about. I thought of it as a remote dream, a utopian feeling. There were many people I had struggled with, and I often let go the anger and blame I had felt, restoring my own sense of balance. If that was forgiveness, it seemed too one-sided to work on the bonds between people. On my rational side, I couldn’t quite get it.

But things can change.

I promised my mother I would do one last thing for her after she was gone. So, about a month after her death, C_, my wife, and I drove to Mill Valley, not far north of San Francisco, and met my cousin M_ at a local cafe. We were then to drive on to Bolinas Ridge, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where we would scatter my mother’s ashes.

At lunch, I asked my cousin, who’s 15 years older than I, about his early memories of my mother. He told me a few things I hadn’t known. His father had lost his job on Wall Street in 1930 and then went to San Francisco to attend law school. During that time, M_ and his mother, Mom’s oldest sister, lived at home in Manhattan with his grandparents. By that time, my mother had long since broken free, bought her first car – a black Ford coupe – and driven across the country on her own to visit a few friends in Los Angeles, as well as her brother-in-law in San Francisco. That would have been in the late 1920s, and after that she made several trips back and forth to the west coast, always impatient to be on the move.

From his earliest years, M_ experienced my mother as a strong dominating presence, someone who immediately expressed her thoughts with no censorship or concern about others’ feelings. Her independence impressed him – she was a fearless adventurer to a boy growing up in Manhattan. During that period of his youth in the 1930’s, his impression of Mom was that she came and went a lot but never stayed long.

As he grew older, he appreciated her as talented, smart and ambitious about succeeding in business, but unable to advance very far because she was a woman. She managed the office of a wealthy dermatologist, and later did the same for a famous song-writer – even organizing and running the production of a Broadway musical he had written. M_ thought she could have run anything.

By the time my brother and I came along, she was a very different person. Frustrated, even embittered by confinement in a marriage that wasn’t going well, she was in turn prostrate in depression, quietly furious or stonily silent, the mood I dreaded most. When we had visitors, though, she was bright, sociable and funny – and so vivid, especially when sweeping into a dinner party in her bright red, satin evening dress.

But the daily and nightly routines among the four of us at home were anything but bright. The understated fury between my parents, the bitter arguments, the knife-point words, the moments of overt violence, the impassivity of my mother’s face – that was the dangerous flack of boyhood. It’s not that there wasn’t love as well – it was just buried so deep we hardly ever noticed. Every now and then, though, my irrepressible brother would pull Mom and me into a “chain kiss,” and round the tight circle we’d go, kissing cheek to cheek, arm in arm, as close as we would ever be.

For dispersing Mom’s ashes, my cousin had found an area along Bolinas Ridge – well-known to my mother for its windswept, rounded hills and vast-horizon views of the Pacific. We made a couple of stops, each time walking a hundred yards or so from the road to small groves of trees sculpted by relentless winds. We took turns scattering ashes from atop boulders among the cypress and redwoods. C_ felt the location was just right, close to the ocean my mother loved but not in it. (Mom couldn’t bear the thought of her ashes being eaten by the fish at sea.) The second spot was right above Stinson Beach – a favorite walking place of hers. It was a warm, clear day, with only a gentle sea breeze, but all around us the bent-back trees had captured the violence of storm after storm.

After we’d scattered the last of the ashes, M_ said perhaps she’ll rest in peace. I said peace was not her thing. Yet at the moment, I could feel nothing but peace, and a simple love for her that finally pushed aside the tension and simmering anger that usually filled me. She really had let go of her own hurt and frustration in her last months and had reached a sense of acceptance I had never seen in her before. I could begin to feel what that letting go was like. I wanted just then to leave behind the inner violence of all that had happened so many years before, stop thinking about whatever hurt had shaped her as a kid, what she had passed on to me, and the fears I had about leaving a similar legacy to my children. Let the breezes carry that away just as they carried off the ashes.

Somewhere it all had to stop, the cycle of hurt and self-hate broken, and the love that bonded even a screaming family together – however weak or lost that force of gentleness might have seemed – had to come through as the only memory and feeling worth keeping. I tried to put the broken parts of her life back together again and see her as the complicated, rich being she had been – and as the adventurer in her soul, driving across country in her latest car, heading west just to be heading somewhere.

That’s when forgiveness finally meant something to me – the love emerging from its hiding place, the past let go in whispers, and the best of that shared life vivid again in my feelings and memory.