Mom in her denim: the original Dungaree Doll

Excuse me while I put my stream of consciousness together. After I spoke briefly to my mother Thursday morning my day began to sink. I needed comfort and I didn’t know where to get it. I needed to lose myself in something. I decided to cook. I would make meatballs and sauce and the house would smell warm and inviting. As for myself, there is nothing warm and inviting about me. I am no fun to be around. I walk around in a stupor. I am in mourning.

I opened cans of tomatoes and tomato paste. I sautéed onions and garlic in a beautiful aqua Le Creuset pot. I kneaded and mixed meat with eggs and spices and crumbs and plopped meatballs into the bubbling sauce to cook slowly for several hours. The house smelled wonderful.

Then, I was nine years old in fourth grade at P.S. 61 on East 12th Street off Avenue B. For my ninth birthday my mother made a luncheon party and invited all the girls in my class.That was the year I was sickly and absent fifty-three days with childhood illnesses. That was the year I read Humpty Dumpty Magazines under the cover with a flashlight. That was the year I had a crush on Pat Boone.

My mother made five pounds of meatballs; the odor was wonderful, much more wonderful than the ones I made yesterday. (I used chicken, hers were beef). The odor was wonderful because my mother made them. Frannie Gaynor came late after a dental appointment. When she arrived her face was puffed up on one side, but she packed away the spaghetti and meatballs along with everyone else.  

The party even had a theme: Dungaree Doll. Everyone came in their jeans.

After lunch we went into the bedroom I shared with my sister and played Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I won and insisted on taking the party favor while my mother felt I should give it to a guest. I refused. That was the year I got my Barbie doll.  One of the gifts, from my friend Ping, was a Barbie outfit, a red cape with a hood in a taffeta-like material. It cost three dollars and came from Jo-Jo’s toy store on East 14th Street near First Avenue. And it is most likely that every gift came from the same place. It was a wonderful store that was packed with anything and everything a 1950’s kid could want.

Excuse me, I flashed back to my childhood. I’ve talked about meat balls and dungarees: I’ve been hiding in 1957 refusing to admit the year, my age, what is happening. Right, this is about my mother.

When I tried to talk to her  she was barely  able to raise her voice to say, emphatically, “I can’t eat! Everything tastes like poison! I just want to be left alone!” She made it very clear that she did not want to go to her doctor’s appointment scheduled for Friday morning with the orthopedist. And frankly, does it matter if a woman enter heaven with or without a fractured arm? I cancelled the ambulette. I called Hospice. I told the gentleman that my mother was in bad shape. That she was throwing up gunk from her lungs. That she will hopefully make it to Friday morning to go home. “Please bring her home as early as possible on Friday.”

I told him that I hoped she would make it.

By 7:00 pm when the aide was to leave to go home last night after working about twelve hours, she called to say she didn’t feel comfortable leaving my mother. “She needs someone to stay with her over night to help her.” I agreed. The aide stayed until 9:00 pm, long after she should have, until someone could relieve her. I worry about that exceptional, humble, loving woman who has to deal with such sadness, sickness and discomfort. She’s a strong woman whose work is extremely important and she is southern-underpaid. She brings her meals with her and eats in that hospital room, God help us. God bless her.

Friday, my mother will go home.

I wish I could send her home to 1957.

[This series is linked: see “continued here.” Also, below the line there will be links for the previous post and the next.]

continued here

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