What Else Don’t I Know?

I had a conversation today with an old friend of my mother’s. I am not sure where Annie is from, but her accent is thick – possibly Germanic. Though she’s been in this country for most of her life, I often have difficulty understanding her, but today, when we were speaking, I understood every word.

My mother passed away on October 6^th, and Annie misses my mother and thinks about her all the time. She left a teary message on my mother’s phone a few weeks ago that I had a hard time understanding. To me, this is utterly perplexing. These women hardly spoke over the last few years, but Annie is so genuinely moved by my mother’s passing that I hate to even imagine what the reciprocal would have been if Annie had died first. The woman I know would not have cared very much. Or at least I don’t think she would have. But maybe I don’t know her like I think I do.

I spoke with another of her friends who is also a cousin by marriage. Bernice misses my mother terribly as well, and I’m glad she can’t see me shaking my head. My mother used to yell at Bernice, at least during the last year or so. Bernice called all the time, and would send my mother lots of cards, especially when she found out that my mom was ill again. The cards were fun, and heartfelt, and nice.

When my mother got the cards she would say nasty things and belittle the gesture. Her frequent calls were not welcome, and Mom sometimes yelled at her on the phone and told her to stop sending the cards.

Bernice called my sister and told her what had transpired, and that there was already a card in the mail that could not be retrieved. My sister called me, and I confiscated it when it arrived so that my mother wouldn’t see it and get angry. Now I wonder if the receiving of the cards was to my mother a harbinger of bad tidings. One more indication that she was sick, that life was no longer good, that life just might be coming to an end.

Mom sent cards, lots of them, to lots of people. She sent many cards to Bernice’s daughter who was going through really hard times physically and emotionally. She was willing to be kind to others, but didn’t want that same kindness returned, at least not from Bernice. She did want that from her daughters and would freak out if we didn’t call daily, or even if we called at ‘the wrong time.’

I made a final call to a friend of my mother’s. As Mom is no longer around, I seem to want to call her friends – this call was to Joyce who lives in New Jersey. She and Mom had been good friends since their young motherhood days. Joyce is also still having a hard time with the fact that my mother is gone.

Both of my sisters are also having a hard time, but I guess that makes more sense, unless my mother’s passing portends to her aged friends their own mortality. When one’s peers start dying, perhaps the inner child begins screaming, “Shit, does this mean I’m next??!?”

It seems that I am the only one who is not completely broken up by my mother’s passing. I must assume I did not know this woman at all.

Paulette, our banker told me that almost every time my father sat at her desk he told her: “Marrying Sherry was the best thing I ever did.”

Who was this woman and why wasn’t I allowed to know her the way all these other people did?

I knew her angry critical self quite well, but today, when I was speaking to Annie I heard a story that actually made me cry.

When Ronald Regan signed the bill closing Agnews State Hospital, many people with various mental and emotional illnesses were released from their incarceration. My mother went down to Agnews to see what was happening. She saw many people, now displaced, setting up housekeeping under the Dumbarton Bridge near the hospital. My mother called Annie, who was a caterer, and said that they needed to make food and bring it to these people. She and Annie made sandwiches and other easy-to-eat foods and took it to the camp. I am curious about this incident. I am curious to know if she did anything more to help, not that feeding them this one time wasn’t enough. I am now in complete and unreserved cognitive dissonance about my mother. I wish I could talk to her about this and ask what other ‘crazy and kind’ things she did. This is not the woman I know.

Annie also talked about their larger group of friends and described these bridge playing mavens as highly opinionated. Apparently, another of their group who never would have gone out of her way because she thought it had nothing to do with her, declared my mother and Annie crazy.

I knew that my mother had done a lot of volunteer work in her life, but this spontaneous desire to help threw me off kilter. This is not the woman I know, but it is definitely part, and a large part, of the person that others seem to remember. Perhaps my memories will need to be reshaped by the stories of others. Perhaps that is much healthier than remembering an angry, bitter, woman with whom I thought I had very little in common.

Building A Road

by Susan Cameron

Back in 1993, I wrote about how I made my living in 1981...wow, I've been alive a long time! Whoo-hoo!

In the old days, before I worked on a road crew, I never gave a thought to the streets I drove upon. Streets were simply there, like smog and palm trees. My perspective changed, however, when I became an apprentice operating engineer and went to work building roads.

I discovered that there are good road crews and bad road crews, and you don't want to work on a bad one. A bad road crew looks like an anthill that just got stepped on -- there's mass confusion, people getting in each other's way and on each other's nerves. On the other hand, watching a good road crew is like watching a good sports team or ballet company -- the workers have strong individual skills combined with excellent teamwork. Each worker has to perform the right task in the right place at the right time and then get out of the way. A good crew works smoothly and -- dare I use this word when referring to construction work? -- gracefully, with a minimum of wasted time and effort.

Actually, the creation of a street begins long before the construction crews arrive. The street is designed in accordance with local regulations, blueprints are made, and the land is staked out by a survey crew working from the blueprints and existing benchmarks (points of reference). Next, any water pipes or sewer lines that will run under the street have to be installed. If the pipe crew loses or destroys too many stakes, the survey crew will have to return to restake the job site for the concrete curb and gutter and for the grading crew.

Ah yes, the grading crew, the road crew. These are the people you curse under your breath as they block your car's path with their orange cones and delineators, the people who screw up your commute by tearing up what seems to be a perfectly good street on just the day you're running late for work. Let's take a closer look at the members of this rogue's gallery while the traffic backs up.

You see quite a few laborers. They do the hand work, the pick-and-shovel work, and they assist the heavy equipment operators. There's a person sitting in a little tractor with a bucket on the front and a row of metal teeth on the back. This machine is called a skiploader, and it is adept at getting into corners and tight places that bigger equipment can't reach. There's a water truck and driver. You spot a steamroller, but they're simply called rollers now since they're powered by diesel fuel, not steam. And is that a woman operating it? Yes, and her title is roller man -- gender be damned. You can't tell by looking at her, but she is also the grade checker. The grade checker reads the blueprints and survey stakes, then pounds markers called hubs into the ground with a sledgehammer to show the operators how much to cut or how much to fill in order to reach grade. A mathematical miscalculation could cost the construction company thousands of dollars. (Grade checkers are very careful people who become addicted to Mylanta as they age).

There is one more piece of equipment, the biggest on this job site. Its tires are as tall as a man, and it stretches out like a long, yellow grasshopper clutching an 8-foot-long stick under its body. That stick is a cutting tool called a mowboard, the entire piece of equipment is called a blade, and it is operated by the blade man. On this type of job, the blade man is God. The rest of the road crew assists and supports the blade man's work like an operating room team supports the surgeon's work. A good blade man can wield that mowboard like a surgeon does a scalpel, delicately peeling off a layer of compacted soil or rock less than half an inch thick, just like peeling an apple with a half-ton knife. That same mowboard can lay down tons of roadbed base rock in minutes.

Okay, back to work. The roller compacts the soil subgrade, the grade checker stakes it, the blade and skiploader bring it to grade. It passes compaction tests administered by an independent soils-testing laboratory, and it passes city inspection. Now it' s time to add the layers of compacted rock that make up the roadbed underneath the asphalt layer we see on top. The belly-dump trucks roll in, dropping their loads of mixed rock and "fines," tiny particles of crushed rock and sand that will lend cohesion to the roadbed. The blade knocks down the rockpiles into flat layers; each layer is sprayed with water by the water truck, then compacted by the roller, then another layer is added until rock grade is reached. The grade checker stakes it, blade and skip grade it, soils man and city inspector pass it, and then comes the asphalt.

The asphalt is usually laid down by an asphalt crew with a special paving machine and finishing tools. However, if the asphalt crew is unavailable, the grading crew can do the job with its own equipment, though everybody hates it very much. (Asphalt is hot, sticky, stinky, and difficult to remove from equipment and boots). Asphalt is usually laid in two layers, base and finish; rolling finish asphalt is an art form learned after much practice.

The new road has to pass final inspection and get striped by the painters, if necessary. Then the road barricades are removed, and the traffic is waved in. The commuters are happy again -- at least until they run across the next road crew.

copyright 1993, Susan Cameron

Leaving Home

Cassie shares a little bit about where she came from.

Last Sunday morning at work Sarah was telling me how heartbroken she was to leave her eighteen-year-old daughter at college two thousand miles from home.

“I keep going into her room, expecting to find her sprawled on the bed talking on the phone to her boyfriend,” Sarah said. “It’s funny. I didn’t realize what energy she sparked in the house until she wasn’t there anymore.”

Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes, and I couldn’t help wondering if my mother’s heart was broken when I left home for good at eighteen. I can still see her face right before I backed out the kitchen door. Her eyes were dull, her green and white gingham apron tied double around her waist. A wisp of dingy hair threatened to obscure her vision. She was cooking dinner – oxtail soup. One hand held the wooden spoon she used to stir the onions, celery and peppers that were frying in Crisco before getting thrown into the soup pot. The other hand held her glass of Coke, which I knew also had a good slug of rum in it. The soup would have a bottle of beer in it, but only after she had taken a long gulp from the bottle. Her cigarette burned down to the filter in the brown glass ashtray next to the sink.

I don’t think she believed me when I said I was going to Chicago with Billy. I don’t think she understood that I wasn’t coming back. She stared at me with her head cocked toward the rum and Coke, midway to her next sip, the wooden spoon poised above the frying pan.

“Do you understand me, Mama?” I asked her. “Do you understand that I’m leaving town?”

“Will you be home for dinner?” she asked.

“No, Mama. I won’t be here for dinner anymore,” I answered.

“Do you want me to make you a nice sandwich for the road?” she asked me, as if I were a child going on a field trip.

“No, Mama. I don’t need any food. I’m leaving now,” I said. I shifted my suitcase from one hand to the other. It felt heavier than when I packed it.

“Goodbye,” I said, taking a step toward her instead of away.

She put her drink down on the counter next to the ashtray, picked up her cigarette and took a long drag, blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth away from the food. She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and picked up her drink again. Turning back to the stove, she said, “Well, goodbye then. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

I would have expected that comment from my father, but from my mother? Stunned, I backed up, suitcase in hand, until I stood with my back against the screen. I took one last look at my mother in her kitchen, stirring and drinking and smoking, her back to me, fixing dinner for her lost family. I pushed the door open and fled down the back steps of the farmhouse toward freedom, emancipation.

Was my mother’s heart broken? Not that I could tell.

Copyright by Liz Zuercher 2010

The Artichoke

The artichoke has no fashion sense.
It dresses in olive drab splotched with brown
like a raw recruit in jungle fatigues.

Camouflage is second nature to the artichoke.
It hides its tender heart and sophisticated tastes
under a tough-guy exterior of thick waxy petals
and thorn-tipped leaves in overlapping layers
like rows of sharks' teeth.

Overly sensitive to criticism,
the artichoke has a prickly personality.
It's given to barbed responses
from its sharp-tongued thistles,
stiletto-like bayonets fixed to the tips
of its concentric leaves.

The artichoke is sturdy.
A hefty compact globe,
it looks like the accidental offspring
of an amorous adventure
between a cactus plant and a pinecone.

Intensely private, the artichoke is hard to get to know.
It demands patience and pampering,
prefers a thorough manicure
to prune its sharp nails
and luxuriant lemon-juice massages.

A steam bath eases its defensive posture;
its uptight petals relax and recline
like sunworshippers in pool-side lounges.
The artichoke shows its softer side then,
becomes vulnerable to touch,
secure in offering up its secret self,
its tender-hearted core.