Proverbs 4, Verse 23
"Above all else, guard your affections."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
Mothers and sons have scripts. They are steady scene partners, and they can read each other's rhythms and faces and pauses like old vaudeville performers. When Larry Fine was in his seventies and nearing his death, he and Moe Howard were still performing together, even at the nursing home where Larry was recovering, or trying to, from his latest stroke. The story goes that Moe was running late and Larry had to go on without him. He was terrified. It was the first time he had gone out on stage without his beloved friend and comedy partner by his side in over fifty years.
In middle school, I filmed a few episodes of a mock news program that was set in the late 1700s. A friend of mine and I were co-anchors of a show called "A Bit of History", and we read phony news dressed in silk stockings (okay, they were very long gym socks) and white perriwigs bought from the local Halloween Adventure store. My father steadfastly filmed these episodes which were originally done for school projects, and were slated to run on the local cable access channel, but we never could get our act together. Now, Greg, my comic partner, is a successful alt/folk singersongwriter out west and I'm, well, here. He and I, fully clothed and submerged in water, pretended my family bathtub was a colonial warship, we tramped through local creeks, frightened neighbors, and destroyed my parents' dining room with huge custard pies that we threw at each other and, you know, missed. I cajoled other hapless schmucks to join me in comedic misadventures, sometimes for a camera, sometimes for a live audience since then, but Greg was always my favorite comic partner.
My first comic partner, though, was my mother. We did scenes together.
Me: Mommy, I love you.
Her: That's very sweet, honey.
Me: Mommy, don't you love me, too?
Her: Of course I do!
Me: Then SAY it!
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Her: You're my best boy.
Me: Mommy! But I'm your ONLY boy!
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This was the first bit of rehearsed dialogue I ever did with anyone. I thought we were hilarious. What did I know-- this was before I discovered Moe and Larry on my Bubba's enormous wood-encased television, and long before I discovered Greg in 7th grade formaldehyde biology class. The lines my mother and I spouted back and forth to each other were always delivered with the same pitch, pace, rhythm and I liked the rehearsals because they differed in no way from the performances. I enjoyed the predictability of the script, and we never deviated or improv'd.
She was a good scene partner.
Nowadays our dialogue isn't rehearsed, and it's more spontaneous and more dangerous, and less satisfying and less happy. While she lives less than half-a-mile from my house, I feel like she's off somewhere very far away. Our pauses aren't Pinter-esque, they're just heavy, and hard. And, some days, I feel just as lost and frightened as Larry staring out into the house with no Moe beside him.
We were very vocal about our love for each other, that family of mine and I. I will never forget how my father, a hardened sabra who fought in two wars and who has taken the lives of others on this earth, taught me about how to show love. He didn't always know what to say or do, and he didn't always know how to respond to me, definitely his most eccentric and perhaps his most needy child, but he never ever failed to show his love. The man let me eat bacon on Shabbat and he let me drink coffee at age 8. He nurtured every crazy thing I was into-- nevermind if it was antique Volkswagen Beetles or Bach harpsichord concertos, navy blue three-piece suits from Mennonite-run thrift shops, the Civil War or 1970s British comedy. He even indulged my desire to become a police officer.
That one didn't come easy, though.
We went out to dinner as a family-- maybe the last time, actually, now that I think about it-- to a restaurant in New Jersey shortly after I had graduated from college. All five of us in one car. We were on Route 73 and a New Jersey State Trooper lit up his overhead lights and pulled over a dark green Mitsubishi with heavily tinted windows.
"He probably pulled that guy over cuz he's black," my middle sister said authoritatively.
"What the fuck makes you the expert on traffic stops? You can't even see if he's black-- his windows are tinted so dark you can't see shit."
"Fuck you! What do you give a shit?" she spat back at me. What was she, stupid? I had just written and published a book on cops as an undergraduate in college.
"I give a shit because you don't know anything about what they go through and you sit back and make fun and criticize and you don't care and that cop could die tonight shot by that asshole in that car and he'd never see it coming and you think it's all a big fucking joke!"
My sister and I fought like animals the whole way home. Late that night, in the living room, I told my father I was enrolling in the academy. And he and I sobbed hysterically together on our knees, pressed up against each other so tight I could barely breathe, clutching onto each other's shirts for dear life. A few weeks later, he was running alongside me on the track of my old high school to help me prepare for the mile-and-a-half run, which I blew the doors off of.
The weight-lifting test... not so much. And that's the way that one went.
In the salty heat of our embrace on the living room floor, I felt his love forever-- his terror, too. My mother and I still have our scripts, we just don't rehearse as often as we should. She has two grandsons now, and a granddaughter, too. I'm no longer her only boy, but that's okay. I know. I'd have to be a real lamebrain not to.
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