Christmas Day.
I pulled away from all the excitement — Hazy building little robotic things, Evaline, trying on pants, Molly donning new chicken earrings — to find a quiet part of the house and call my mom, who, likely, was having a very different Christmas. A lonely one, which was painful to willingly become a part of, if only through a phone line.
“Hey, Mom. Merry Christmas. It’s Cliff. Your son.”
“Oh, how wonderful.”
It always starts off that way, which I suppose I should be grateful for. She’s happy to hear from me. She’s pleased with her life. She’s more joyful than she used to be.
But then she starts forgetting stuff…
“Wait, you said you’re Paul, right?”
“No. Cliff. You’re son. The youngest.”
And then she starts running in her usual circles…
“I have the best view of all the apartments. Gramma and Grampa knew what they were doing when they bought this unit. It has the best view.”
I wish we could talk about other things, like how she once slammed a microwave-safe dish on my friend’s head when he talked back to her. Or how we used to watch gymnastics and Olympic figure skating together.
Somehow, I’ve not yet resorted to doing other things while she rambles on about the same old stuff in the same old order, with the same damn inflection. She speaks as if coming around to these topics naturally, every time.
“The other units don’t have views like this one…”
I sat on the couch with one leg folded up under me and immediately felt like a child, alone in my thoughts… like when I was little, and I’d come home from school, shrug off my backpack, and know, without a shadow of doubt, that no one was home. Sometimes, I’d stand and listen to the silence that came after the thud of my backpack, just stand there, like one of my action figures, unmoving, waiting for something to move me.
“When daddy bought this unit, he knew exactly what he was doing. It’s the best unit in the building.”
“That’s amazing, Mom!”
I still put an exclamation point on it.
But then something wonderful happened. The record skipped, and my mom got on a new track, one I’d not heard before. As if Ol’ Saint Nick came out of hiding, finally, to give a boy and his mom a real Christmas Miracle.
Instead of swinging from Grampa’s genius idea of buying th ehouse to the view of the restaurant parking lot across the street, she rope-swung in another direction, grabbed a differnet vine.
“Grampa hated watching the Indians get discriminated against.”
Wait. “Indians?”
“Yes, that’s why he didn’t hesitate to let me go East. That’s how I got my job as a Public Health Nurse. Because no nurses in Connecticut would walk into a black person’s house.”
“So they called in a nice, white farm girl from North Dakota.”
“Yup.”
And just like that we were having a conversation.
It was like being on the perfectly smooth surface of an iced-over lake, not a scratch out there.
“Grampa worked for the railroad, so he got them to take all my boxes. We had so many boxes,” and she laughed, which is a wonderful thing: to hear a person who’s losing their memory laugh at a very specific nearly forgotten memory, like it’s really there in her head: an image of towering boxes at the train station, a mom and a dad laughing forcedly with their daughter, before saying goodbye.
I’d never heard this story, or maybe I have heard it and forgot, or maybe she’d told me but I wasn’t listening.
I was listening now.
“Grampa and Gramma invited the indians to come on our property. They said, ‘ if you got no where to go and you have a good tent, come over this way.’ And she laughed again.
I didn’t know what to do, but I felt the need to do something to keep this going, scared that at any moment, there’d be a crack in the ice and we’d fall through.
“You took a train to Connecticut?”
“Dad worked for the train. Great Northern Railroad.”
“So you didn’t fly?” For some reason, I always imagined her taking a plane (not a train) with suitcases (not boxes).
“It took a few days.”
“I’ll bet.”
I pictured my mom leaning her head against the glass window of the train as it bumped along, feeling scared, excited, lonely, curious. Did she make friends with the passenger next to her? Did she get up and walk to the dining car? What kind of person was my mom as a recent graduate, a pre-marriage, pre-kids, twenty-something traversing the country for job she’d never done before.
“What was it like? Going to Connecticut?”
“I thought the principal wasn’t going to like me, but he completely supported me. I told him we needed to get these black children tested or they couldn’t go to school. And he said ‘Then test them. Let’s get these kids tested and back in school!’ And that’s what we did. We got them back into the school.”
“How many?”
She went quiet.
Shit. Cracks.
“So the principal liked you?”
“Yes. He was very appreciative of what I was doing. And it was because Grampa was so good to the Indians that I was willing to walk into black people’s homes. Gramps was the kind of person that didn’t care. And so I didn’t care.”
Phew.
“What year was it?”
Shit.
“I mean, around what time? It was the mid-sixties right?”
“Must have been. I’m not sure.”
We went around and around like this for nearly an hour. She repeated herself sometimes, but the content was so fresh and interesting I didn’t care. I ate it up, sitting by the Christmas tree, this Christmas Miracle happening right in the middle of my morning, no one else knowing, the world just going on around me.
So many moments like that for me and Mom. Just me and her, and the world going on around us. Just me and her.
On the family room rug.
At the kitchen table.
In the station wagon.
We skated around our perfect little ice rink, just the two of us, until it had beautiful swooping, overlapping tracks all over it. And sometimes those tracks (during the very best of moments) ran in parallel to each other.
No cracks. We got to the end of our routine without falling.
“Well, this has been a real gift,” she said.
“Agreed,” I said in as tender a voice as I could offer.
“I’m so glad you called.”
“Me too. I love you, mom.”
It was the perfect thing to say, and the perfect time to say it, but for some reason, she didn’t say it back, which is strange because she’s said it to me a thousand times.
I was usually the one who didn’t say it back.
“Okay. Bye, son.”
And, poof, I was no longer on that skating rink. I was on the couch, my leg still pinned up underneath me.
I looked out at the crumpled wrapping paper scattered across my living room , and my kids, laying on their elbows, completely consumed by what’s in their hands, unaware of the depth of this phone call, and the ache of regret that will one day reach them too.
I reflected on her words, the back-and-forth of a real conversation, our beautiful dance on the ice. No judges, no Olympics, just me and mom making it up as we go.
Like we used to do.
