Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

I Know the Number

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 15

"A youngster's heart is filled with rebellion,

but punishment will drive it out of him."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I have to imagine that, just considering probability and my smart mouth, I was at least occasionally punished as a child.  If I was, though, I don't remember it, and it's not because I was concussed by my father's closed fist.  No, that never happened in our house.  There was awful blue carpeting on the stairs and the word "fuck" was said with greater frequency than the word "salt" or "and", but there was never any hitting.

At least, not of me.

He gave my sister a few good smacks, though, though he claims, conveniently, to not remember.  We tell these stories, laughing, in the living room.  He laughs too, which, (I guess?) is good.  There was the time where we were all placing our ice cream orders and he asked her what she wanted and she answered, "Vanilla".  He said, "What?"  And she made the mistake of uttering, "I said 'vanilla', what are you, deaf?"  That earned her a thick Israeli palm straight across her face.  Another time, he threw a full cup of water ice in her face, though I don't know what crass remark of hers prompted that frozen projectile.  Maybe I would have gotten smacked around if I had been more into cold desserts.

There was a decent amount of verbal "abuse", if you want to call it that.  Of course, I'm sure any child born to an Israeli father could claim at least the same, if not far worse.  He screamed at us as if we were privates in his regiment.  Eating our Cinnamon Toast Crunch too loudly the breakfast table on Sunday received an emphatic, "JEEE-SUS CHRIST!  ENOUGH WITH DA FACKING CRUNCHING, ALREADY!"  I never fully considered the irony until this moment of a man whose native tongue is Hebrew using "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.  Classic.  Breaking something on the kitchen floor-- a plate or what have you-- resulted in him asking, rhetorically, I learned, "WHAT ARE YOU, FACKING KEE-DEEING ME?"  Making fun of him and his accent, we quickly learned, was enough to make the man almost completely implode.  One day he took us on an ill-fated trip to visit the Pepperidge Farm factory.  He got hopelessly lost.  He stopped by the side of the road at some movie set-looking old gas station where the pumps still said "Esso" and asked some toothless hump in a pair of overalls, "Excuse me-- how do I get to, uh-- Pappen-dridge Farm?"  The farmer cocked his head and stared at him.  My sister and I almost passed out in the back seat of the Buick from holding in our piss as we exploded in a torrent of laughter.  He turned to us with a virulence I had never seen before and screamed, "SHAT DEE FUCK UP, YOU TWO ASSHOLES!  I AM TRYING TO DO SOMETHING FACKIN' NICE FOR YOU FUCKS!"

This, of course, made us laugh harder until my neck almost burst.  He drove us home in silence and said nothing to either of us for two days.    

In spite of all this, and more, I don't ever recall being sent to my room-- I always ended up running there myself before anyone could send me there.  He yelled and screamed at me, but I don't ever remember an explicit "punishment" per say.  Once he poked me in the stomach with his index finger, I don't remember what the hell that was about.  And I remember crying and, you know, running to my room.  Fortunately, I liked my room.  I think I even liked crying in it.  I am relieved, of course, that it was just yelling.  His father used to chase him around the house and, once he caught him, he'd beat the shit out of my father with his shoe.  And you know how they made shoes back then.

My mother, of course, was a different story.  Once I did something bad-- who the hell knows what it was now-- and she told me she was disappointed in me, and I considered wearing black for a year.  Maybe it was the time that I took an axe to the basement wall-- that one's still kind of hard to explain, even now, with almost four years' experience in psych.  I told my parents, when they asked why I'd done it, that I was bored.  They came down a lot harder on my sister, who was supposed to be babysitting me but who was watching "The Hard Way" (James Woods, Michael J. Fox-- great flick) in the basement at full volume and I could have been building an atomic bomb on the sofa next to her and she'd never have known.  I don't know what her punishment was, if anything, but at least she didn't get a frozen custard or something slammed into her face.  Was I punished?  No.  Would a normal parent have taken money out of my allowance until I was 27 to pay for the damage I did to the wall?  Yes.  I guess they're not normal.

Remember how I told you earlier that I liked my room?  Well, once I called my mother a "witch" and she chased me around the house, which was quite an athletic feat for a woman like her.  I was stunned that she was up to it, and that scared me.  She almost got ahold of my arm but I broke free and I was terrified about what she was capable of doing to me if she'd caught me-- I'd never seen her like that.  I ran into my room and I slammed the door shut, and shoved my bureau up against it.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" I screamed, "I KNOW THE NUMBER!!!!"

There was silence on the other side of the door.

"What number?" she asked breathlessly from the hallway.

"THE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE!  I KNOW THE NUMBER!"

Truthfully, I didn't know the number.  I did, however, know the slogan "In case of child abuse: know the number" courtesy of the commercials that played endlessly during episodes of "Rescue: 911" that any child psychologist worth his salt would have known I shouldn't have been watching.  I also, not that it mattered, didn't have a phone in my bedroom.

I don't know if I'm going to punish my children.  I didn't really know what grounding was, other than ordering an airplane to land, until I was in high school, though I'd heard it said enough on "Diff'rent Strokes".  I don't know that not getting punished spoiled me, I think it just made me weird and fucked up, and I suppose that's punishment enough.  Still, all things being equal, I'm learning to be okay with it.        

She and I

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 20

"A rebellious son saddens his mother."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

We all stared at the cake.  Her grandson had just blown out the candles for her-- four year olds are so considerate that way, always looking to assist with life's more mundane chores-- and she had silently made her wish, which was more of a prayer, I expect.

No more dying, she probably said to herself, inside her 64-year-old head.  Not this year.  I know that's what she wished for because she's my mother, and she and I are one.  

"So, Ma," I said, "how many Teletubbies did you have to kill and grind up to make that icing?"  

She'd made her own birthday cake, the first birthday cake she'd made in years-- probably since I was a boy, and the icing was the color of Cindy Lauper's hair, circa 1986-1988 (the "True Colors" years).  I don't know quite why she chose that insane color for the icing, but it did match the plastic birthday table cloth, which matched the paper cups and plates, and streamers, and party horns and perhaps I just answered my own question.

My mother likes it when things match.  For years and years and years, in a spiral-bound notebook, on Sunday nights she would make a clothing chart for the week, coordinating blouses with pants, sandals-- everything, down to the earrings.  Or, I guess, up to the earrings.  And I get it: matching = order.  And she and I are one.     

I didn't get my mother anything for her birthday, and I didn't write her a card or a letter as I've done in years past.  I don't think she cares.  She doesn't care about things like that.  Neither does my father.  It might be the only thing they have in common-- except for their love for their children and their grandchildren.  Oh, and they like to go to the movies.  I think they even like going together.  

My son is head-over-heels crazypants in love with my mother, and I think that's pretty amazing.  I love watching it.  He gets delirious when he sees her-- sometimes he falls on the floor and makes the most insane, gleeful noises while his eyes sparkle.  It's like he's on baby PCP.  It's a hoot.  My mother's mother died six years before I was born, and I didn't meet my father's mother until I was fifteen-- and it was just that one time.  I wonder if I would have been obsessed with my grandmothers if I'd known them when I was two.  I don't know.  As it was, there was only room in my life for my mother.

So maybe it's just as well.  It would have been hard to compete.

When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I realized that my mother responded positively towards "bad" humor.  Not cruelness, necessarily, but being, well, bad.  Naughty.  Saying what shouldn't be said.  Making fun.  Scandal.  Adolescence is, of course, a time when a lot of boys seek out scandal and cruelty, badness and meanness, and it often comes out in the form of rebellion against one's parents, sometimes against the mother.  For me, that didn't happen.  I didn't rebel.  How could I?  Why would I?  I just used that urge and used it to feed my blossoming sense-of-humor, I infused naughtiness into my jokes and imitations and dinner table conversation and I watched with sparkling, PCP-glazed eyes as my mother laughed and, knowingly or not, encouraged me.  And that became my sense-of-humor.  

Being bad.  

It got laughs-- it got results, from the only audience member who mattered a damn.  She even laughed when I made fun of her stupid fucking Cindy Lauper cake.  Because, I guess, there's something in her that wants to be bad, too.  She's a librarian, perfectly nice and kind and helpful to every irascible prat and dusty old lady and obnoxious little kid who comes her way, and after work she's typically in the company of my nephew, so she has to behave even when she's off-the-clock.  But every now-and-then, over the phone or in a murmured remark in her ear as we're saying good-bye after a visit, I can still let an off-color remark fly and pull back just in time to see her weathered grin spread, or hear her shriek and laugh on the other end of the phone, just a mile or so away, and my anxieties will be quelled for another day as I am reassured that, in spite of how much the world and our world has changed, she and I, still, are one.   

Happy Birthday.

To Mock a Killingbird

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 1, Verse 26

"Some day you'll be in trouble, and I'll laugh!  Mock me, will you?  I'll mock you!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Terry Gross did a "Late Night Week" thing on her show all of last week.  She interviewed Letterman and whathisname with the chin already-- Conan and Jimmy Fallon, too.  It started on Monday when she played an older recording of an interview she did with Fred de Cordova, the Executive Producer of "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.  This guy, as far as I can tell, was a legend, from a time where legends knew how to tie a Windsor knot and they all smoked and somehow lived to be 90, their skin was tanned and leathery as a handbag and they could get away with white socks and dress pants.  

de Cordova lorded over "The Tonight Show" and the legend of whether a comic made it or not being determined by receiving a wink from Johnny turns out to be not so much-- it was really getting "the wave over" from de Cordova, as Jay Leno himself spoke of when he got the wave over in 1977, while wearing a suit that looked like it was made from a skinned lizard.  That's how you knew your act killed and it was time to take a seat next to Johnny Carson.  Kings were made, empires fell, who knows how many useless schmucks killed themselves after not getting that de Cordova wave over, but that's show business.

There was a lot of introspective navel-gazing (the technical term for this is: "omphaloskepsis", in case you were wondering-- and, hey-- save some dirty lint for me, okay?  Bloggers gotta eat too, you know.) during these interviews about comedy-- what is it and how do you find it?  Is it under a rock or inside your navel or does it grow in Brooklyn?  

Jimmy Fallon was talking about how most of his humor is "nice", that he's "not too mean".  

I like that.  I respect that.  But I don't particularly understand it.  I don't know, I don't think, how to be funny without being mean.  Dirty.  Cruel.  Harsh.  

My meanness was honed at our family's dining room table.  They say good things happen when families eat dinner together, and maybe that's so, but, when my family ate together, it was show time.  There was no need for a tv or a radio, I was Johnny and the guests all rolled into one.  Impressions, sarcasm, voices, songs, faces-- it was all there.  Passover was the high point of the year for me, because it meant that

a.) I got a MUCH bigger house and,

b.) I got to dress up (Windsor knot and everything) and,

c.) My lines were already WRITTEN DOWN!

(You know, in the haggadah.)

In our house, the 4 Questions were done in Indian, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Irish accents, depending on the year and what films I had seen recently.  Sometimes, they were done in the voice and manner of people our family knew-- friends, and doctors, mostly.  Sometimes, I improvised a little.  Sometimes, I got in trouble a little.  But, for me, it was like being on tv, and I loved it.  

But being funny at the dinner table as I got older got a little bit harder.  It's easy to be precocious and get a laugh or two when you're impersonating your rheumatologist (yes, unfortunately, I had one of those, and he was Indian, and he was hiLARious) as a younger kid, and it's another to still be funny when you're a smarmy little fifteen-year-old that nobody likes, not even you.  But I found that something usually worked, and that was meanness.  

Being offensive, which I was sometimes inadvertently as a younger child and which was severely frowned upon (especially at Seder), was somehow not only okay when I was a burgeoning teenager, but something that was rewarded with a prize all boys, no matter how old, endlessly seek: their mothers' smile.  Whether it was a cutting remark about someone we all knew, or some outrageous comment about something going on in the news or the family, the darker and more sinister it was, the louder the maternal laugh.  And I didn't think too terribly much about trends I might be setting for myself or the family, I just knew what was working and, like any comic with half a brain, I kept at it.  

Look, at dinner, I killed.  Who could ask for anything more?

Of course, I sometimes wonder what I would have been like had I been encouraged to "be nice", or at least "nice-er".  What would my personality have been like?  Who might I have attracted, or turned away?  What would my omphaloskepsis on comedy yield?  I'll never know, and I suspect, unfortunately or not, that the kind of children I am going to rear are going to realize that what gets daddy going, what will win them the wave over, is raucous and unrefined, imitations of an unflattering nature and a heavy dose of envelope-pushing.  

And I guess they'll roll with what works.  And maybe, hopefully, they won't get quite as addicted to the results as I did.     

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 15

"When a man is gloomy, everything seems to go wrong; when he is cheerful, everything seems right!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm a happy-on-the-inside kind of clown, I guess.

Inside, my heart is a rainbow.  My eyes, kaleidoscopes.  My colon's a disco ball.  I fart unicorns.

I am a happy man.  

I'm told, though, that I have dysthymia, which, incidentally, SpellCheck tried to correct to "hysteria".

(I have that, too.)

Dysthymia comes from the ancient Greek word "melancholy" and, even if you don't speak Greek, or DSM, I'm sure you can pretty much guess what it means.  It's not so good.  Of course, it's not a hole in the heart or the brain or an extra one in the nose, so it's not so bad either.  People live with it.  They deal.  The smart ones take meds.  The dumb ones, like me, hand over $50 every other week and slide around aimlessly on a pillowy leather couch in a climate-controlled office and vainly complain, whine, and refuse to take meds.  

"This has been going on for a long, long time," my therapist said, like he knew, "I mean, you were telling your mother you needed to see a therapist when you were, what, eight?  Nine?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to remember dates.  It was the eighties.  We were all high on Tab and Cosby sweaters."

I'm funny in therapy.  You know, for a dysthymic guy.

I meant what I said earlier, though-- inside, I am happy.  I'm desperately in love with my family, I am loved and supported at work.  What few friends I have left are straight and strong and true.  Well, they're not all straight.  I have my (physical) health, aside from asthma, and I can run and jump and prance and mince, and, trust me, that comes in handy when your hobby is Gilbert & Sullivan.  I can even sing a little, too.  I love folk music and the Love Bug and falling down and getting up and the whole stupid thing.  

I love it.

My basset hound has a hundred thousand wrinkles.

I love it.

Life is good and fun and sweet, even when it's terrible and a kick in the balls and a hole in the body and a wreck of a mess of a sham of two mockeries of a sham.

It's good.  I love it and it's good.  

Still, when I see certain people bound enthusiastically into a room grinning like Garfield in a lasagna advertisement, I want to kick them in the teeth and never stop.

Happiness as an outward expression fills me with anger.  

Who the fuck are you to smile so?  What gives you the right?  Don't you know there's a patient in that room strapped to his bed?  Don't you know that the ceiling's falling down?  Don't you know?

Or don't you care.

I mean, look at these assholes.  Teeth.  Crinkled eyes.  Laugh lines.  And, what the fuck-- is she his wife or his daughter or his schtuppenfrau or what?  And what does the caption say?

AUTO ACCIDENT CLIENT

What the hell, exactly, are you so happy about?  Like you're watching "When Harry Met Sally" together.  No.  You wrecked your Kia because you were texting your cat and lolz you got a big settlement because you blamed Nokia because if the @ button on your phone hadn't stuck you wouldn't have had to take your kaleidoscopes off the road and I hope you die.  You're an ad for a shill shyster slapped onto the ass of a bus, I get it.  

Still, die.

I wonder how much shill shyster bus ad models get paid.

In college, when I took Acting II, my professor regarded me silently one day and, when she broke her silence, it was, as usual, a doozy:

"You know, my dear, you'll never be a model or a leading man, but that face of yours was made for character roles."

And I was tempted to spit in her eye, but she was right, of course.  I have never, and will never, play the romantic lead in a show.  You'll never see me grinning like Rock Hudson on the back of a SEPTA bus, because, when I smile, my lips stay closed to hide my teeth, not just because they're misaligned, but because I prefer to keep my happiness, my true pulsating insatiable glow, beneath my olive skin and my unseemly amount of body hair.  Because, for some reason, there's some piece of me, and I don't know what it is, that tells me every moment of every day that that's where it belongs.  

So down it goes.  

I have my grandfather's smile.

I have my mother's smile.  

But I have it.  It's mine.  And, dysthymia be damned; I love it.

Everything's Alright

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 13

"Laughter cannot mask a heavy heart.  When the laughter ends, the grief remains."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

I admit that I picked this proverb to start tonight with some trepidation.  After all, much has been said about humor as a coping skill, and how so much comedy and so called "light entertainment" comes from a place of darkness and pain.  You don't have to look very far for comedians and performers who light up a stage, command an audience and enthrall even the most hardened cynic, only to return to a dank motel room or cold home to brood and mutter despondently into a highball.  I decided that I didn't want to write about comedians or actors that I know of and respect and admire. 

 

Instead, I decided to write about my mother. 

 

Since my brother-in-law died of cancer last year, my mother has lived in the shadows.  Well, existed.  To say that she has lived wouldn't quite be so accurate.  She has been seen at work, and at birthdays and dinners and such.  She has been seen.  Seen.  Not heard.  This has been sort of the story of her life.  My mother, before she lived in the shadows since my brother-in-law's death, has lived in the shadow of my father for just about thirty-nine years.  His shadow is enormous.  He is larger than life, Israeli, effusive, profane, impulsive, uprorarious, gregarious and hairy.  My mother is none of those things.  Maybe she was once, (not hairy) but I doubt it.  She's said as much.

 

"I used to pretend that my name was 'Cynthia' and I told my teacher on the first day of elementary school that that was my name, and she'd call on me and I'd never answer." 

 

When old friends from school see me and we catch up, the question I'm invariably asked is, "How's your dad?" as if my mother had died when I was a child, or perhaps she never existed anyway.  And I get it-- he's memorable.  He makes sure you remember him.  He doesn't exactly slide beneath the radar.  She's the stealth bomber.

 

Back in college, I wrote a short play about me and my parents, and, at the urging of the chair of the theatre department, it became a trilogy.  After reading the first play, his big complaint was, "You know there's a lot of your father in this play-- and he's a great character-- but I think the real gem here is your mom.  There's a real quiet intensity to her, and a dry wit, that I'd like to hear more from."  So the last play was just me and her, talking in the kitchen.  And it was good.  I might not think that anymore if I went back and read it, but I remember it being good, and that's the way I like to remember it.

 

Those nights in the kitchen, waiting for my father to get home, "at 6:37", were good, too.

 

I've never known my mother not grieving.  She lost her mom to lymphoma when she was maybe nineteen or twenty. You're never not grieving after that.  My mother's humor is as dry and wry as the coarse desert my father comes from, and her jokes are tinged with the smell of death.  She's always told me, during my anxious, crisis moments, that everything will be alright "in the end" and she gives a smile, because she knows that I know that she knows she's talking about when we die, and that she's really saying that nothing will be alright, because how can it be?  How can things be alright?  I love how, when my son falls and bonks his head, I scoop him up and tuck him close to me and say, "It's alright-- everything's alright," and if that poor schlep could talk in sentences he'd say, "What are you, fucking dumb?  Of course everything isn't alright, my fucking head is pounding and it happened because you're a negligent asshole."

 

One day last month, I was taking the babies out in the stroller, and this spindly old bat stopped me on the sidewalk and engaged in some polite banter, which I hate. 

 

I know your mother from the libary, she says. 

 

Wonderful, I say.

 

Your babies are thus and so, she says.

 

Yes, thank you, I say, they are.

 

Your mother's starting to come back, she says.

 

Who the fuck are you to say something like that to me, you don't even know me, or her, I want to say.

 

Is she, I say.

 

She is, she says, she's really very funny, your mother.

 

She is, I say.

 

She says, did you know that about your mother?

 

I want to rip out all of your veins and make a spider web out of them, I want to say.

 

Yes, I say, I do.  I know that.

 

I can only make my mother laugh when I'm being bad.  That's the kind of humor I learned from her.  Pushing the envelope, being slightly uncomfortable, surprising, desperate and true.  I don't know what she finds funny in movies and television, but that's what she laughs at in person.  When I make my mother laugh, and it's never very hard for for very long, I feel powerful.  Like the playwright I thought I could be in college.  Like the man I pretend to be when I fix some dumb thing in our falling down around our ankles house.  Like the father of twins who changes diapers and feeds and calms and plays.  Like the man who's going to be alright in the end. 

Partners

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 4, Verse 23

"Above all else, guard your affections."

---

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!

---

Her: You're my best boy.

Me: Mommy!  But I'm your ONLY boy!

---

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.    

It's Alright, Honey

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 13

"Before every man there lies a wide and pleasant road that seems right but ends in death."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've been married since 2006, but, when the shit really gets caught up in the blades of the fan, I call my mother.  Jewish boys are like that-- maybe you've heard.  And when venting about this conundrum or that, oftentimes there is silence on the other end of the line.  

I'm trapped in my current job.

We can't afford to pay the nanny.

The babies are sick.

I'm terrified I'll never make more than $30,000 a year.

The house is falling apart.

The family is falling apart.

We have too much stuff.

I'm anxious/depressed/scared/sad.

This.  That.  The other.

She's heard it all before.  Christ, she's been a mother to some neurotic, clinging idiot or other since 1967.  You think she hasn't heard it all before?

So, yeah.  Sometimes there's silence.  What is there to say sometimes?  There are no comforting words, sometimes.  There are no pearls or gems, sometimes.  So she listens.  Eventually, she sighs.  Oddly enough, her sighs are comforting.  Her exhalations, to me, have wisdom.  At the very least, even if they don't have wisdom, I know that, if she's sighing, I've been heard.  Finally, she'll conclude by saying:

"It's alright, honey.  It'll all work out in the end."

The first time I heard her say this, maybe three years ago, I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it quizzically  with my brow furrowed in-- I don't know-- surprise?  Alarm? 

"You mean-- in the end end?  As in, what I'm worrying about won't matter cuz we're all going to die?"

(Beat.)

"Well, yeah," my mother replied, laughing a little laugh of-- I don't know-- surprise?  Alarm?

I laughed too.  Because, shit: she's right.

Since that conversation, when I call her, sometimes I wait for that line-- sometimes I don't even wait and I give it to her.  

"Well, I suppose it doesn't matter because it'll all work out in the end, right, Ma?"

And she'll laugh.  I like when my mother laughs-- especially about death.  Or maybe she's laughing about life.  The futility of it, the silliness of it.  What we put ourselves through.  All the hand-wringing and the envelope-licking, the potty-training and the gutter-cleaning.  Maintenance.  Pluck the unibrow (I told you you'd learn all my secrets if you stayed here long enough), replace the washing machine, upgrade the cellphone, fill the tank, scrub the pan, go on vacation, come home.

Laundry

Laundry 

Laundry

Laundry

Laundry

Laundry

It's funny, if you think about it.  Most of the time we're too deep in it to step away and look at ourselves, tottering around, being funny.  I like to step outside myself and watch what's going on.  If I'm ever sitting around at the table sort of staring off at nothing, I'm not psychotic, I'm kind of just watching the show.  I'm trying to enjoy it for what it is.  Because I get so caught up in the terror of the moment, the choking fury of my little problems and struggles that I sometimes forget that this whole stupid thing is about being nice to people and paying your bills and bringing up children who aren't sociopaths, polluting as little as possible, making enough money so you can dither around the halls of your retirement home in non-thrift shop pants, leave some non-embarrassing amount to your offspring, and dying quietly in your Stryker bed.  

When my mother's mother was wasting away from lymphoma, her husband bought her a Basset Hound.  That's exactly the kind of well-meaning, though completely inept thing my emotionally retarded grandfather would do.  As if to more clearly demonstrate the inappropriateness of the gesture, the poor Basset Hound died shortly after being acquired.  "When that dog died," my eldest sister told me recently, "Bubbe said she stopped believing in God."  Then, of course, Bubbe died.  My mom was 25, and had already been a mother herself for 7 years.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened to me if my mother had died when I was twenty-five.  When I was twenty-five, I was working on an ambulance as an EMT and I was making $11.33 an hour.  I had gotten engaged that year, and I had decided to pursue a Master of Education degree.  I have no idea how it would have changed me.  I don't know if it would have put the brakes on everything.  I don't know if I'd have gone back to school, if I would have gone through with getting married.  Would I have turned to drugs or alcohol, attempted suicide, become severely depressed-- I don't know.  I don't know how she made it out of that hole herself.  Her relationship with her mother was very different than the relationship she and I have-- still, I don't know.  I'm often disappointed in myself because of the relatively poor and disordered way in which I cope with stress and anger and frustration in my life, and I cannot imagine how much worse off I would be today if I'd known real, true tragedy growing up the way my mother did.  

I know tragedy now-- I've seen it in the lives of countless people who come through the crippled gates of the place where I work, and I've finally seen it in my own family, too.  I know what it smells like and tastes like, I feel it in my skin and my hair and my eyes are so tired and dry and there's still laundry to fold and it really doesn't matter matter matter because it's alright, honey.  It'll all work out in the end.

My mother's laughing.  I can hear her.  I hope yours is, too.