Fear and furniture

I had a dream about Mom and Dad and furniture from the house of my childhood last night. The furniture was the most meaningful part, though (as often happens in my dreams), I reminded myself while dreaming that there was something amiss, that Mom was dead and it didn’t make sense for her to be IN the dream.

I figure the meaning has something to do with my desire for a home, for sanctuary. But there is no sanctuary these days. A terrorist cell was discovered in BUSTO this past week. And the fear of anthrax is apparently palpable everywhere in the US, especially urban areas.

Fear on a macro level is one thing; fear on a micro-let’s-talk-about-me level is another. We watched part of a television show about facelifts this week. After five minutes my head was light and I wanted to puke. Maybe I will wind up doing one but I definitely do NOT want to know what is being done.

Moving morass

People are always losing things in moves. They break, get misplaced, left behind, stolen. It’s part of the price of Having Stuff. I realized, looking at the list of contents in my storage unit that something I value is not mentioned. That is the framed print called "Bookworm". I had rescued it from the surprise attic as a child and it hung in my bedroom on Perry Drive during my teen years. Don’t remember if I had it or not as a young married -- isn’t that dreadful? But I am pretty sure it hung in the house in Fort Lee, along with that portrait of some woman who looked like my Aunt Bess. And I do recall deciding not to bring it with me to Europe but to leave it with Mom and Dad in Columbia, MD. And I recall wrapping it, or maybe unwrapping it, at some point in their garage.

But it is not on the list of items I’d stored. Grandma’s portrait is, but not that. Nor the costly prints Nando had brought back from Europe. Those I DO remember packing in a carton and storing in Columbia. Is it that all of them went the way of my doll collection (Poor Pitiful Pearl! Why didn’t I think to save her?), my horse collection, Dad’s prized theater scrapbook and half-century collection of homemade Christmas cards?

Emergency

An emergency family situation, a complication resulting from my mother’s death,  necessitates my presence in the U.S. next week. I won’t be attending the business conference in Monaco so I called today to cancel my appointment in Marseille, explaining that I didn’t know exactly when I would be back but would call "soon" to reschedule. Annick seemed to be very understanding about this, not haughty or indignant as I might have expected from a Frenchie.

Well, well

A new month, another season, 'er long. New start. New diet. Regular exercise (but how, she screams. How? I am a prisoner to my dog). Nando has been following his diet seriously. He asked me to help him shave his head again today. I hate doing that. I didn’t like the fact that he went bald and I don’t like him shaven. And I certainly don’t like DOING the shaving. Oh well. Hmm, my mom’s response to that would have been immediate: "A well is a hole in the ground," she would have reminded me with a tight little smile and a sarcastic sigh. Oh WELL, Mom. Yes, yes, a well is a hole in the ground. Yes, yes, how WELL we know.

August ghost town

In addition, I could tell that the doctor was a little thrown by my tumor-ridden family history so maybe she was being unusually aggressive. My mom had fought off breast cancer successfully but her mother had not, my older sister had died of thyroid cancer, and two aunts had also died of cancer. Nando’s diabetes has nothing genetically to do with me but it loomed in the background as well.

The upshot: I went to the hospital to schedule my tests last week, and that was easier than expected. It’s the height of summer, so few people were around. In Northern Italy, people exit by the millions in July and August. It is normal to have four weeks of vacation and by god everyone wants to take it at the same time, so they can be just as crowded at the beach in summer as they are in the city in winter. Shops close in August and bustling cities take on the appearance of ghost towns. I went to the hospital at 1:30 pm, just before they opened for the afternoon. Consequently I didn’t have to wait long in the appointment line, and there weren’t many people to make appointments anyway.

Dreams and death

I went to my mother and she opened her arms and I hugged her (direct, with open heart, uncomplicated, as I had when I was a child). She sounded real and she smelled real and she felt real. I don’t recall her saying anything meaningful; I mean, she didn’t say "I love you" and she didn’t call me by my childhood nickname or anything like that. But I was so happy to see her again, the mom I hadn’t seen in more than 40 years. I woke up feeling good about that. Then I wondered if there had been a shard of symbolism in the timing of the dream. It was three months since Mom had died and it will be my older sister Mary’s birthday tomorrow. (Mary had died of thyroid cancer in 1996, at the age of 53, just barely).

Dream magic

The incongruity (of my mom's being dead and alive at the same time) didn’t bother me because I accepted the logic of her appearance. I knew she wasn’t "real" but she wasn’t a ghost either. Within the dream I thought about the scene near the end of Half Magic (my favorite childhood storybook), when Jane has a dream about her long-dead "real" father and he gives his approval for her mother’s remarriage to Mr. Smith. Within the context of MY dream, I thought that Mom’s appearance was a little like the dream within that story.

Dreaming

I had a dream about my mother today. In it, I was visiting the house in New Jersey where we grew up. While I was talking to a neighbor (long dead but very natural and alive in the dream), I heard a familiar voice in the background. The voice was talking to me, sort of echoing what I was saying to the neighbor, and after a few seconds I realized it was Mom’s voice. It wasn’t Mom’s voice of recent years (fading in the last two, and pretty manic-depressive, alternating saccherin and psychosis, for the previous 10 or so), but Mom’s voice of THAT time, of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The voice was very close, so I looked around. Mom was on the lawn. She was wearing a long flowing bathrobe, the kind she always favored, and she looked as she had looked back then, pretty, happy, relaxed, with long dark wavy hair and smooth, soft, good-smelling skin. Not bitter or phobic or defensive as she became (or as I later saw her to be), but simple (as a child sees a mother), smiling, and radiating love. In the dream I said to myself, calmly and matter-of-factly, "But Mom is dead. This is only a vision of Mom, probably the result of my being here where I spent my childhood." I wasn’t aware that I was dreaming (as I am sometimes in my dreams) but I did know that Mom’s appearance was dreamlike.

Gold links

When I took out a gold bracelet that had been Mom’s to polish in preparation for packing, I saw that it had broken. One of the pins holding two links together had come undone. This bracelet had been my dad's wedding gift to my mother, and it bore an inscription in the secret code they had used when communicating with each other before their wedding. There is a lot of emotional content in those golden links. So I asked my sister-in-law if she could recommend a jeweler who would fix it on short notice, i.e., the same day. She gave me the names of two jewelers who specialized in gold work, but cautioned, “No one in Busto does a job in a day. You have to leave it at least a week.”

Finalities?

As for Homer (my beloved Weimaraner), if something were to happen to me I hope my family wouldn’t abandon him. Homer is eight years old but looks and acts less than half his age; he still has a long loving life ahead of him and I would not want him to spend the rest of it caged in a kennel somewhere, unloved, unaccompanied. I would die without having had the facelift meant to ease my way through middle age, the fulfillment of my mother’s dream. It wouldn’t matter much though, would it, if today were my final day?

Wondering

On June 18, 2001, I wondered to myself, "What if today were the last day of my life? Would I do anything differently?" I am thinking this because tomorrow I fly to the States for my mother's memorial service. Although she died seven weeks ago, we decided to hold her memorial service this month, to give me time to arrange things from afar. Dad isn’t in condition to do it, and things take longer because of the six-hour time difference. I am an optimistic person by nature but . . . things happen. These days, people think about it more, but I was living in Italy when the plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1989, so the uncertainty has been with me for a long time. Therefore, being blunt and brutal: if my plane were to blow up tomorrow by the will of God or an act of man, my sons are all right. That’s the most important thing.

The prune

My mother's chatter about a facelift always remained chatter, since my father didn’t have the money for one and my mother was in and out of hospitals for more important reasons much of her adult life. A frivolous facelift was never a serious consideration. But that didn’t stop her from talking about one, well into her 80s.

I should point out that my family has a healthy dose of longevity genes. Not only did my paternal grandmother live till almost 99, but her sister ALSO lived to 98 (in spite of diabetes and an amputated leg), and another sister to 94. This record of nonagenarians on my father's side of the family meant that the likelihood of my living to a ripe old Rose Kennedy-kind-of-age was high. And what's the point of looking like a prune for the last 40 years of your life?

Model mom

In the end, it all began with my my dead mother. She actually wound up making the decision about my facelift. I made the phone call that set things in motion a few months after she died, but her imprint was unmistakable.

My mother had died on May 1, 2001, at the age of 91. Silvia had been beautiful as a young woman, an occasional model in her native Manhattan, tall and slender with a "horsey" build and fabulous cheekbones. She loved wearing expensive clothes and elaborate hats and striking jewelry. She CARED about the way she looked.

From the time she had hit her 50s, she had talked about getting a facelift. She wasn't blessed with good skin, she had always been an outdoors girl and to hell with the sunscreen, and it all caught up with her. She wrinkled early and deeply, her skin lost its elasticity, and the flesh above one eye drooped so much on one side that it looked like she was perpetually squinting. Sometimes she would ask me, "If you had to choose, which would you preserve after 40, your face or your figure?" I didn’t think about it much, having neither an exceptional face or figure to preserve. My mother didn’t have to make a choice: her figure remained lean and model-like until the day she died.