Happy Birthday To My Mom

Today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 72. She died 9 years ago. Her given name was Barbara. She went by the nickname Holli. We have always said that she went out of this life as she lived–in a blaze of glory. She had breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones, so she didn’t have much longer to live. Then, on the way to work one day (she worked all through her several rounds of treatment), she had a heart attack, swerved, hit a semi, and flew off into a ditch. The accident closed the highway for several hours. Throughout much of the next week, whenever I had to make arrangements for something, the clerk would say, “oh…wow…that was your mom?” At her memorial, several people mentioned seeing a rainbow in the direction of that highway at the time of her death (before they new that she had died).

She went to an alternative church (Religious Science). It wasn’t a cult, but it was clearly off the beaten path. We spent our childhoods in Sunday school learning things like how to develop our ESP powers. And we were treated with such reverence as budding beings who meant something to the adults in the church. On the other hand, because the church wasn’t traditional in any sense, there were no “church ladies” to arrange for a buffet after the memorial. Us kids were debilitated with grief and couldn’t quite pull it together to arrange for a full spread. A family friend had been sending us gift certificates for See’s Candies every year for Christmas. None of us used them, so we pooled our certificates and bought lots and lots of boxes of See’s candy and coffee for the memorial. It was perfect for my mom–she would have loved it.

At the end of the memorial as we were packing up to leave, the church custodian, Bob, came up in tears and told me that my mom was a “pretty special lady.” He wandered off before I could get his mailing address. It was probably a lost cause, because Bob was usually homeless. He had spent many nights camped out in my mom’s yard. You see, my mother was one of those people who did everything and helped everyone. When a friend’s son ended up on the hospital in a coma after a motorcycle accident, my mom went to the hospital every week to read and talk to him. She did this faithfully until he died. When our across-the-street neighbors kicked out their 18 year old daughter for no other reason than she had just graduated from high school, my mother took her in. She lived in the garage for a year or two. I think it was the garage because it would have been weird to have her in the house. Wouldn’t do for neighborly relations, I guess.

She was a speech and language therapist who worked primarily with the kids of migrant farm workers. This meant she drove a lot every day. She learned Spanish in order to communicate with the kids. They all loved her. She took a nap every day in her car somewhere in the fields of the Central Valley of California. She even got to know the farm animals that roamed the area. They loved her too (I think this was because she fed them pasta).

My mom was the kind of person who spoke to spirits and plant and animal devas on a regular basis. One of the first presents I remember getting from her was a deck of tarot cards. It wasn’t unusual for me to come home from college at Christmas and be told that she had an arrangement with, for example, the ant deva. We wouldn’t kill any of their people (ants) who accidentally ended up in the house on the condition that they would leave the house. So, no killing of bugs in the house.

She used the Ouija board for things like finding lost items in the house. I would often come home after a night with friends and be told that she found out that the watch I had lost several years ago (for example) was between the cushions on the couch–at least that’s what the Ouija board said. I can’t remember what happened when I looked through the cushions.

She also went to parties were she met people like Gnome. “Norm?” I asked. No, Gnome. Apparently, every year the gnomes pick one of their kind to be a “big person” for a year to see what it’s like. Apparently, it was a hassle. Gnome didn’t have any money and he didn’t have a driver’s license. He thought it was too hard to live as a big person and was considering going back to being a gnome. “I had no reason to doubt him,” my mom said, “so I told him if he needed any help I would be there for him.” On the other hand, if someone came out with, say, a wacky diet book, she would dismiss them as “crazy.” “Way to extreme,” she would say.

She loved to garden–but didn’t do a whole lot of follow-through. She would hang flower pots all the way across the ceiling of the deck, get tired of watering them, and string a soaker hose from one pot to the next. It looked like hell, but at least she didn’t have to water. She loved artichokes, so she planted an artichoke plant right in the middle of the front yard. She forgot about it, so it turned into a big thistle bush that looked magnificent every summer. When I was much younger, she got the idea to plant a vegetable garden. We all went out and planted seeds. She then forgot about it and throughout my childhood we would pull up carrots in various parts of the yard. It was a nice snack in the middle of playing out there.

Our house slowly fell apart as I grew up. Whenever the roof began to leak, she would go up there and cover the weak spot with some tarp or something. Her best friend said that the first time he met her was when he came over to see her and she was up on the roof, in her yellow rain poncho, hat and boots, wrestling with a tarp. She then came down and they had coffee and cookies and chatted and cemented what would be a lasting friendship.

Duct tape was my mom’s repair material of choice. Duct tape was on everything–furniture, ceramics, purses, coats. When I went out on my own, I found duct tape to be a little too sticky and hard to work with. I switched to clear mailing tape–which I think works much better.

My mom was a hoarder of everything. Animals, too. At any given time she would have dogs, cats, birds and maybe some fish. The dogs and cats had the run of the place. The birds were allowed to fly around every so often. One of our dogs, Sissy, was an Australian shepherd dog. She served as our mom when my mom was gone. If the kids were fighting, Sissy would get into the middle of the pack and bark us into separate corners of the room. I think she was exasperated with us. When we got older, she would wait up on the couch until everyone was home before she went to sleep.

When I was in college, my mom began taking vacations at the beach house of a friend of a friend. I visited once or twice. The house was like a fun house. It had fallen into the water at some time in its past, and all the floors were warped. The furniture legs had been cut in all sorts of weird angles in order to sit strait on the floor. When you walked around, it was like walking on a tilt-a-whirl floor. My mom developed a tradition where she would bring a pair of underwear to the vacation and have all the people who were there that year sign them. That way, she would have a neat souvenir of her summer.

My mom was highly educated. She had two master’s degrees–one in audiology and one in speech and language therapy. She was well regarded in he professional community. She had been married and divorced twice. She decided after the second divorce that marriage wasn’t for her. She was always quite busy and us kids were the proverbial latch key kids. We knew she loved us, but she always had things to do. And so many other people needed her.

My mom was truly a Renaissance woman. She lived large. She had a tough but interesting life. She accepted each person for who they were. And she died too soon.

Happy birthday, Mom.