Life’s Little Misdirections 🥀🦋

Mom: Passion For Everyone

Apparently
I was a little Dickens
according to one of the church ladies.
A boy, wire the wrong way?
My mom wasn't having it.
Learned what reading the riot act
was all about, eventually.
The woman who 'was for everyone'
set the moral edge I followed,
too literally. A life of adjustments
would follow. A bit like her,
I wear a smile like a frown.
Passion like hers, an obsession
to create, she wielded a shuttle
to tat a 15 square foot display
of the Last Supper
that now sits atop grandmother-
in-law's old China cabinet,
greeting through a bay window,
if a rising sun should appear,
peak through the guarding crabs
stationed outside my house.
It helps me remember why I write
and how surprised she was to see
the slew of teenage manifestos
compiling, provoking her to ask
'Where do all these words come from?'
The apple doesn't fall far,
perhaps in a different form, because
she didn't understand why I needed to write --
to make sense of a world that confused me.
I was 'different' and handled as such.
Maybe, pity and sympathy replaced love,
but not from her. But, she wouldn't
treat me like I was broken, and I
didn't know the difference, except
I was embarrassed and afraid to reveal
I was confused. But words, showy,
rich, technical words that I should not
have dabbled in, helped me learn.
So, when I have time to think
and remember the woman who received
wildflowers and water in her good glasses
or gave my art and words passing glances
I'm happy to share memories of her
and woman devoted and undeterred.
In a nursing home, her fingers frozen,
her tongue long since Parkinson's
no longer engaged, spat out food
from a spoon I employed one day.
I worried she forget me, who I was.
My wife played the hall piano,
as I tried to engage, but leaned too hard
on the exit door and an alarm engaged.
Flustered, nurses arrived, I survived
and then heard a low, familiar growl
from a rising head in her wheelchair,
"Brrr-iiiiii-aaaaa-nnnn," sounded
a silly scolding, her humor in tact.
My mom was alive inside a slump torso
and could still see me, feel me and know
I'm still her little man. And it wouldn't be long
before the day she passed. Her eulogy
I was tasked to write, I read. I feel tears,
emotions and an uncommon strength
loaned, flow through me that day.
My brothers wept, hugged me
for a woman memorialized right.
It would take more than two weeks
of nights, before the dreams of her
began to fade. She talked to me,
walked with me, resurrected like
some Jesus from a tomb, sharp
wit and words, full of life like
a whistling bird on the old porch
of my old home and the sun so bright
made me realize I need not fright
I have her with me, day and night
the woman who taught me right.
She let me know passion like ours
will serve somehow one day, even if
to console through another to kin
that her life was not a  waste, purposed
to give love and comfort to any
who came her way. I hope, I will
relocate that glow that last time
I felt her dream presence, and
pay it forward it some meaningful way.


5.13.23