A Lesson Too Well Learned

Dear Mom,

I wonder if this will ever find you. Perhaps if I go outside one evening after it has rained and the forest fire season is behind us, although that day seems far off right now, and set the pages of this letter alight and pray that its essence will reach out to you it might. Maybe. You’ve been gone from my life and this world for nearly twenty years now, but I still find my thoughts slipping down side paths that lead you.

Just the other day, I was turning ribs on the grill and was using the tongs you used to use to lift jars out of pots of boiling water when you were canning. We were at Monet’s junk store when you bought them for a dime. I was five years old, and it was on the day the Pueblo Indian met me at the front door and said, “Hmmm, this is a nice little white boy, I think I should take him home.” I didn’t know he was one of the men who posed for Dad’s paintings and was just being friendly when he put his big hand on my shoulder. You made me apologize for kicking him in the shins and screaming. Then you bought the tongs, and we went home.

My dinner guest on the night I was using the tongs to turn the ribs was Mary, a friend of mine who was the maid of honor at my wedding 18 years after the morning when you bought the tongs. You were also at the wedding, which is now 45 years in the past, and it is odd to think that Mary and I are probably the only two people who were there that night who are still alive to remember it.

It is funny, but I have never really quite known how to begin a letter to you. “Dear Virginia” seems too much like the beginning words of a son wanting to distance himself from a parent he has somehow found wanting. That was never true or right. “Dear Mother” seems so formal, so English drawing room or “preppie .”It seems to me that while it acknowledges the parental relationship, it also seems to erect a wall of formality. Then there is the “Dear Mom” that I began this letter with. I think I most often used that when I wrote the few letters, I sent while I was in college. I like making phone calls because I could begin them with a simple “Hi”. “Dear Mom” seems to violate your ever-present sense of dignity and intrudes into the reserve you maintained. I remember I once tried to explain and probably didn’t do any better at it than I am doing now, but if I knew then what I have since learned, the thing to have done was to have asked you what salutation would have most pleased you. But now you have been dead these nearly twenty years, and therein lies the curse of a dead parent: the child may never ask any of the questions that come to mind when it is too late for the asking and expect an answer. So, here we are, and I begin with “Dear Mom” because that is all that is left me.

As I was thinking about what I would most like to write to you, I remembered a conversation with my half sister-your daughter. It happened after you died, perhaps half a year later. She was so angry at you for not having raised her or been able to stand up to the crooked Catholic priests and their lawyer who took her way and illegally adopted her into a family who did their best for her but only received her hostility and resentment in return for their investment. Of course, there were things you did that upset me or made me angry; that is true in any relationship. there was the time I came home to find that you had pulled down all of the Mad Magazine political posters in my room and burned them. Of course, I was furious at your censorship of my nascent political beliefs. In your brand of patriotism, you thought it was wrong to mock the President of the United States, but time proved my instincts and beliefs were spot on. Richard Nixon was not someone deserving anything like respect. Still, I knew then, just as I know now, that you did the best you could, and you always hung in there even when the going got tough. That was a good lesson.

Another good lesson was your oft-repeated: Spit in one hand, and wish in the other. See which one gets full first. Dad was a man of dreams and plans, but you were the practical one. The ant to his grasshopper. The winter comes, and when it does, it is good to have supplies laid in from the summer. We always had cases of toilet paper and hundreds of jars of preserves, and dozens of cases of canned vegetables so that when Dad’s picture sales were off because skiers come to Taos to ski and not to buy art in the winter, we always had something on the table for dinner. I don’t think I ever told you how much I hated pancakes made with canned corn. There was a lesson in that as well. Several of them, in fact.

One was not to make someone feel bad when they are doing the best they can with what they have when they have very little. That is bad manners, and I knew the truth of that when I was five.

Second, you can’t count on prayers or luck to see you through, but you can count on planning and preparing.

Third, take each day as it comes with good grace. Tomorrow might be better or worse, but you don’t know yet. Even so, I hope I will be able to go to my own grave without ever having to eat pancakes with canned corn again.

That brings me to another lesson that I fear that I learned too well, and while I do not think of the shame it has brought me every day, I do think of it often enough, and every time I wish I had said what I should have said and not kept silent because it was the polite thing to do.

In my memory, I can see the day clearly. It is late afternoon on Thanksgiving day. The table has been set with your prized Royal Dalton white bone china. The gold flatware with the fancy handles has been set by every place. There are gold napkin rings holding fancy white on white embroidered cloth napkins at each place setting. The table is a little jiggly. It is a huge octagonal table you made yourself. When it is not being used to serve a fancy meal, you often use it for a layout table for some project.

My Dad and half-brother, your other son, are there. They are talking, and as you are busy bringing in platters of food for the feast, we are about to have, the two of them are having some misogynistic back and forth about the evils of women. What they are saying is not quite biblical sin in nature but still couched in the general evils of women. They were ignoring me because, as one of the other men in the room, they probably thought that I would agree with them. They did not think about you and what you might think about what they were saying because you were a woman and, in their world views, probably had no thoughts about such things.

Even as I write down these words, fifty-some years after that Thanksgiving day, I cringe with the shame of not having told them they were idiots. My Dad could not have lived his artist life in Taos without my mother at his side, helping to make it happen. She stuck by him through thick and thin, and he was devoted to her in every way that counts. However, still, there was that stupid, vile misogyny that lived somewhere in his guts. My half-brother saw his failed marriage as entirely his ex-wife’s fault because, at some point, she could no longer live with his selfish, self-centered “I’m the only one who gets to breathe in this room” attitudes.

And I said nothing. I thought the words; I wanted to tell them that they were being jerks even as you had been cooking all day to make a special dinner for them. I said nothing because that would not have been polite, and it would have created discord on a day when you were trying so hard to make it a special family day.

That was a lesson you had learned and one that you passed along to me, and while it has sometimes served me well, I do wish I had known when not to abide by it. That was one time when I should have done more than just leave the room to go and help you with bringing out the food.

I love you, Mom. I wish I could have done more.

Jim