Perhaps I’m being more egocentric than usual, but I think being stuck with a teenaged me was a major reason she annually donated money to Planned Parenthood later in life, hoping to spare other women the heartbreak of seeing their unplanned bundles from heaven turn into surly teenagers from hell. I was, as the kids say today, a whole lot of not fun.
Yet an early memory of mine uncaps a well of positive ones that override the Dark Ages of my teenaged years. It’s about a green cake. When I was five years old, I asked her to make a green cake. I don’t know why or where I got that idea. Green cakes, or even pictures of green cakes, were not common in Bethel, Alaska, where we lived at the time and where my dad was a bush pilot. He often took me on his twice-weekly mail flights to villages along the lower Kuskokwim River and on the coast of the Bering Sea.
I made my request for a green cake prior to one such flight. When we returned, there it was on the dining room table, a triple layer cake with snowy swirls of pale green frosting, my mother seated beside the table and smiling in anticipation of my reaction, which I imagine was one of wide-eyed delight. I did not know it then, but my visible joy was her payoff.
I got the same look that year when she brought home a bakery box and told me to open it. Inside was a little gray kitten looking up at me and wondering if I was its mama. My own mama’s delight at my delight was later nullified when she caught me trying to teach the cat how to fly. Cats do land on their feet, you know.
Every year my dad would ask, “Well, stinkpot, what should we get mom for her birthday?” Every year I’d say the same thing, so every year she acted pleased at getting another bottle of Yardley’s April Violets perfume and a box of Yardley soap. Later she switched to White Shoulders. I would eventually intuit that giving a woman, any woman, anything along with a box of soap for her birthday is not one of the great ideas of modern man.
Fast forward a decade. I’m in the back seat of the family car. Mom and dad are driving me to buddy’s house for a party. No self-respecting sullen teenager wants to be seen in a car full of parents. Even two parents makes a car full of parents. So does one parent, come to think of it. I ask to be dropped off a block away. “Why suuuurrrre!” my mother brightly chirrups. “We’ll just go on ahead and tell your friends you’re on your way!” I can’t help but laugh and ruin a perfectly good teenage sulk.
1961: JFK is president. Regular gasoline costs 27 cents a gallon. The minimum wage is a $1.15 an hour; average annual income is $5315. In April, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space with American Alan Shepard following in May. The Cold War gets colder when the Soviet Union and East Germany build the Berlin Wall. In Florida, the CIA and Cuban exiles plan an amphibious assault on Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, and American newspapers take note of an increasing U.S. military presence in a little known place called Viet Nam. A very small part of that buildup is a 17-year-old seaman apprentice name Mike Browne.
“How long will you be gone?” my mother asked when I was home on leave just prior to shipping out.
I repeated what I’d been told: We would be home-ported in the Philippines for one to three years. (It was 28 months.) Mom put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. “That’s like the days when your grandfather sailed,” she finally said in a broken voice. Her father had been a quartermaster on one of the last of the sailing packets at the turn of the century.
Mom had gone through WW2 with one brother in the Navy and another in the Merchant Marine. Another brother would serve in the Navy during the Korean War. My older half-brother, who was raised by his father’s family, had been in Army during the late 1950s. He had literally guarded New York City from aerial attack as the Army’s top rated radar operator at a surface-to-air missile site, and mom well knew the value of letters and goodies from home.
So I would get parcels of newly published paperback books, such as Catch-22, Nine Stories and The Adventures of Augie March, along with enough cookies and candies to share with my buddies, plus news from the home front, like dad’s on-going efforts to evict a skunk with an attitude from under the house. It was more of a hit and run campaign of harassment rather than a foolish frontal assault, but it worked. The skunk finally got fed up and moved to someplace where the landlord was not so crabby.
Home on leave in 1964. The mailman gave me hell one morning. “You’re mother is down here every day waiting for a letter from you. Now you start writing her more often. She worries about you, so get on the ball.” Okay okay okay. I could take a hint, and did.
I was out of the Navy the following year and briefly tried living at home, but I was also 21 and had become accustomed the seamier benefits of being an adult overseas, which would not make for a Norman Rockwell motíf of familial harmony in my parents’ house. Like the huffy skunk and Huckleberry Finn, I lit out for territory.
My parents moved to New Mexico for the last years of my father’s life. They bought a mobile home in Santa Fé. Mom took a part time job in a hotel gift shop and got involved in state politics when the mobile home park management jacked up fees with no prior notice. She joined the American Mobile Home Association for muscle and lobbied the state legislature on behalf of tenants’ rights. And won.
A man who’d been watching her bang on the doors of closed meetings in the capitol and had heard her testify before committees approached her one day. “I’ve picked the last three lieutenant governors of this state,” he said. “Would you be interested?”
She declined, saying she had a husband at home who was very ill. She later asked a friend, whose venerable family name is attached to an entire county, who the man was. Turns out he was the heir to the Phillips 66 petroleum empire and played political kingmaker with the enlightened self interest of resident royalty.
My father died in 1979. He didn’t “pass away,” a euphemism my mother hated. “He died,” she said. She scattered his ashes among the little piñon trees and the flowering jack oaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and quietly mourned for the next seven years.
Part of her grief recovery was moving back to her native northwest, enrolling in a college literature program at Western Washington State University that mixed older adults with young undergrads, academically and socially. She lived in campus housing and often hosted buffet lunches for classmates and faculty in her apartment, everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor, nibbling from paper plates and arguing about phallocentric metaphors or maybe Hemingway’s placement of commas.
She also volunteered at a Native American bookstore in Seattle and would send me cases of remaindered books, including a coffee table edition of George Orwell’s 1984, a facsimile of Orwell’s original handwritten manuscript, corrections, marginalia and all. Orwell was not a doodler and the pastoral sex scene between Winston and Julia was not broken by a penciled memo to pick up “2 lbs sugar, get shirts at cleaners.” Pity.
Mom’s health declined after two strokes a year apart. I was summoned to Seattle to help relocate her to an assisted living facility in 1999, and again the following year to place her in a hospice where she died. During the move from the assisted living place to the hospice, I discovered that a maid had been systemically stealing mom’s jewelry, clothes, and even a little stoneware bear that my brother and I were using as a doorstop when moving mom’s possessions into storage.
I had a quiet chat with the facility manager, mentioning that one of mom’s nephews was an attorney and past president of the state bar association whose acquaintances included a prosecutor two, and that my own range of acquaintances encompassed an investigative reporter for the Seattle Times. Overkill, maybe, but as my brother told me when I myself was having mom trouble, “You only get one mother,” and ours was being looted. By the time my brother and I returned for the next load of stuff, mom’s jewelry, clothes and the stoneware bear had magically reappeared.
But mama drama was not over, even in the hospice, where a giant black orderly sensing that she may have a fortune in buried coffee cans somewhere, persuaded her to let him take her to Costa Rica -- which has a non-extradition policy with the United States. If the guy had not been black, my brother would have been more amused than unhinged. Another intervention with a facility manager, and no Costa Rica. What a wet blanket. Children are the strictest guardians of their parents’ morality.
Toward the last she could not speak or move without assistance. I would sit beside her bed, reading, her hand reflexively holding one of my fingers. I would look up to see her looking at me with clouded eyes that had faded from hazel green. She reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s comment, that optimism “is an elderly parent looking at her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”
I was not present when she died, and she had left a living will specifying no extraordinary measures would be taken to keep her alive. She remembered how miserable her own mother was at a similar time, holding up her wrists and pleading with her eyes to have mom remove the IV needles that were keeping her alive beyond her allotted time. “Please honor my wishes," mom had written to my brother and me when she sent us copies of her living will.
And so we did. Among those wishes was a desire to be cremated and have her ashes scattered at sea, which my brother accomplished off the Oregon coast. I know that coast. It’s green, greener than a green cake and a mother's hazel eyes when looking at her five-year-old with love. Or even her middle-aged one for signs of improvement.
Comments and critiques are welcome, especially flattering ones. Reply via 3-mail, tomatomike@aol.com
Terrific, 'mataman.... I can see the James Dean you, and the mom who took matters into her own hands and loved life. Loved it...thank you. -- Charrie
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Your memoriam is a touching reminder of her birthday. We all, sooner or later, have that 20/20 hindsight and our appreciation is expressed in many ways. -- Beverley
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Damn, I cried over this. Lovely, lovely story. Such a wonderful way to honor your mom. You do write so well...publish, dammit! -- Brix
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Wonderful story Mike...had to smile about the Planned Parenthood donation, you teenaged rascal!! -- Soy
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This was a wonderful declaration of that love, and a glimpse into the storied life your mother lived. Very well done, Mike. Well done, indeed. -- Shan
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Awwwwww, mater, what a sweet loving tribute, you old marshmallow you! -- Canids
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“Why suuuurrrre!” my mother brightly chirrups. “We’ll just go on ahead and tell your friends you’re on your way!” Your mom rocked!!!!!!! -- Pirate
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"There's no crying in e-mails!" Well, maybe just a few sniffles. I love your mother. Thank you for sharing. -- Beatysr
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I enjoyed the honest look at your life and parents. I hope that your time in the military was valuable in some way. -- Ken
Oh yes, in more ways than one. -- MB
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This one in particular touched my foolish mom heart. -- Amanda
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I'm special. The only thing I want is soap. And socks, if it isn't asking too much. -- Shag.
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Oh Mike, thank you so much for introducing me to your green-eyed mother -- Fay
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This piece truly shines. It brings me to the many pieces of a life with my father whom I loved as much as I love my own kid. Damn, I miss him every day. I remember his speaking voice, his laugh, his facial expressions, his hands, his walk, his way of handling things, his politics in all situations. It comes to us at a certain age, I think, these pieces of who a parent was in the round, and we acknowledge the impact he or she has made on our lives.
I trust in this piece you know as I do that there is a kind of grace and gift in such things as green cakes. My father made me stainless steel necklaces, different styles through the years, and did the same thing for my daughter whose first one was so small that it looks like a bracelet. Beautiful, handmade circles of love for "his girls". Not a green cake, but just as memorable.
Your piece this time brought me to tears - the good kind that remind one of the luck, or some divine plan that handed our tiny bodies into the hands of someone quite grand, though to others, may have appeared to be ordinary. Fools. -- Zoey
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That was lovely.-- Mary Pat
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Keep on writing, buddy! There is "a little something" that makes your texts sound great! Probably humanity? -- Gerard
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Very nice, Mike. I actually got choked up a little. Oh, how your mother would have loved to read that. -- Eoaken
She would have proofread it for errors and ordered a rewrite. -- MB
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That was a really good one. Also, I loved your statement that you were "rehearsing your James Dean act." Clever way to put it -- Eve
It didn't win any Oscars. -- MB
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I loved the story of your mom !!! -- Pinky
