A Barnacle With the Wind in Her Hair

A few weeks ago, I pried my little barnacle self off my rock here in the woods by the water, and flew to Colorado to visit my mom and stepdad. Then I jet-setted back home for a couple of days before flying with my son to Austin to see my sister, Suzanne, and her family.

We are a close family, but our pinpoints on the map are spread far and wide, and we don't see each other as often as we'd like. Maybe that's why when we do get together, I feel the passage of time whipping through my hair, suddenly aware of the earth spinning 900 miles per hour, orbiting at its 18.5 miles per second around the sun. I want to grab each member of my family and hold on for this dear, sweet, short life.

Images flash through my head like an erratic and random slide show. Remember when, Mom? You were twenty-seven and I was four? Remember when, Suzannie? You were five and I was eight? Remember when? My kids were five and eight? And your kids were seven and four? The soundtrack of my mind flits around from eight-tracks pumping out Kentucky Woman and Monday, Monday to cassettes playing everything from The Indigo Girls to Raffi, to CDs blasting Modest Mouse when I took the boys to school, to the silence of everyone hooked up to their own iPods. The irony is that now our three different generations of family like a lot of the same music, and much of that music links us to our past, to each other.

There are the stories we repeat, telling each other again and again in an effort to keep moments alive. Like the time I came home from seventh grade and announced to my mom, while she worked on a painting at an easel in our kitchen, that I had volunteered her to make potica, a Slovenian sweet bread,  for Ethnic Day. She reacted as if I'd invited The President and First Lady to join us for an eight course dinner. In an hour. What I didn't know is that although my grandmother made potica regularly, my mom had never made it. Nor did she have a desire to make it. It was a complicated recipe. She wanted to paint. Instead, she figured out how to make potica for a hundred or so seventh graders.

We laugh about it now, and as I've mentioned here before, she now sends us potica every Christmas. We've talked about making it together for years, of her teaching me how, but we never have. This trip, we made potica together. The good thing about feeling the passage of time whipping through your graying hair, is that you stop putting things off. You get busy doing the important stuff.

Making potica at my mama's.

And so I also stood in a field and painted a picture of the mountains with my mom because she loves to paint and I've always wanted to try it but never have -- at least not since I stopped carrying my paintings home folded up in my lunch box. We set up easels and she gave me some pointers. Then we fell into a deep, concentrated silence that hushed my flitting soundtrack and stilled my random slide show so that I became aware of nothing other than the mountains before me and my mother beside me. And I discovered that I, too, love to squish paint onto a canvas.

Flash forward a couple of days when I sat on a plane with my 20-year-old son Michael and thought about how I wouldn't fly with him when he was two because I was afraid he might break out into his fingernail-curling scream, causing the other passengers to join forces and open the emergency escape hatch in order to throw us off the plane. I realize it is not possible to open the emergency escape hatch at 35,000 feet without sucking everyone into oblivion. But I also fully understand the desperation that would cause them to ignore this fact and try it anyway.

Now I looked over at Michael, a handsome, calm young man working the crossword puzzle, who will be leaving in January to study for a semester in Florence. And I remembered the feel of his silky baby hair on my cheek, as if his two-year-old self had just climbed into my lap, anchoring me to this world like a paperweight in footsie pajamas.

Suzanne picked us up at the airport and we joined her kids at a restaurant for dinner. Another story we like to retell: The first time they visited us, Michael, who is a year older than my niece Nicole, would push Nicole down when she'd get anywhere within three yards of me and say, "No, baby, no! My mommy!"

Nicole sharing a moment with her school mascot at UT.
Michael refraining from pushing. Such cooperative cousins.

I am happy to report that Michael no longer screams or pushes Nicole or teases her mercilessly as he did when they were growing up. But the two of them, along with my 16-year-old nephew Chris, made us laugh so hard all through dinner that my abdominal muscles actually ached. Considering the fact that I don't really have abdominal muscles, this is truly amazing. Either our kids should have their own show on Comedy Central or we share a genetic predisposition that makes us think the same ridiculous jokes are utterly hilarious.

But, wait. For some reason, the kids don't think my ridiculous jokes are utterly hilarious. Hmm. I'll have to rethink that one.

Anyway, it was a good trip. And now I'm back home, missing everyone. But I am here, with our dog, Stuart, and our cat, Bob, both stretched out across our bed. Stan makes breakfast, the fire in the wood stove pops. One day this quiet, simple morning may flash in my memory like a slide. One day Stan and I might shout to each other in ears stuffed with hearing aids, "Remember, Sweetie? Remember that little place by the river? Remember Stuart and Bob? And how they would hog the bed? And how much we loved them anyway?"

And yet for now I am right here, tucked back into this little home, back to my barnacle ways, scrawling words down in some kind of effort to slow this world's spinning -- slowing it enough, at least, to touch and feel the moments as they fly by.

The Gift My Mother Gave Me

Today is my mom's birthday. I have so many good Mom Stories, I'm going to have to narrow them down to a few. But first you'll need a little background.

Way back when, my mom was an A student, president of her high school class, then president of her college sorority. She graduated with honors with a degree in pharmacy.

I proudly ran to claim her whenever she picked me up from school; she was the prettiest mom, the smartest mom, the mom who had a real career with the men in the 1960s and still came home and finger-painted with the kids.

The woman had it all going on.

But in the mid-1970s, a cross-country move away from a job she loved, the deaths of her parents, her disintegrating marriage, and a family history of alcoholism all got together and sucker punched her. Hard. We lost her for a few years and we almost lost her for good. But in the last round, she got up and she fought back, and she came out of it stronger and more fully alive than she'd ever been.

I could leave that part out but I won't, because out of all the gifts she's given my sister and me over the years, we both agree that the most significant has been the gift of her sobriety. The bravery of her sobriety. It shaped both our lives and directed many of the choices we've made.

Now don't get me wrong. My mom still gets high. I don't want to sound cliché and say she gets high on life, so I'll put it this way: She gets high on cilantro.

This is how it goes: We're seated at a Mexican restaurant when she starts moaning, as if she might be starting in on an impression of the famous When Harry Met Sally scene of Sally in the diner. But my mother isn't faking anything. She's genuinely excited about how fresh the cilantro tastes.

"Honey, isn't this the best cilantro you've ever tasted?" She opens her eyes and waits for my answer.

"You said that the last time we had Mexican."

"I did? I did?" She knits her eyebrows together then shrugs. "Well. That was really wonderful, too. But this is even better, don't you think?" She looks at me expectantly.

I've learned to say, "Yes. Absolutely." But my sister and I roll our eyes whenever she goes into her spiels about the best cilantro, the best eggplant, the best mocha almond fudge ice cream, the best friggin' french fries she's ever had in her entire life. 

The best. Ever.

Then there was the time when we were in another restaurant, waiting to be seated. My mom sat down at a Pac Man game. Remember Pac Man?

"Ohhh. I've been wanting to try this!" she said. She started playing, whooping and hollering, slapping her knee, stomping her feet, having a grand old time of it. "What a hoot!" she said, beaming.

That's when my brother-in-law pulled a quarter out of his pocket, handed it to her, and said, "You'll need this to start the game."

She looked up at him, then down at the moving pac men on the screen. And she started laughing. My mother always laughs harder at herself than any of us do, and we all laugh pretty hard at her, with her. She laughs until tears roll down her cheeks. She eventually catches her breath, calms herself. Then the laughing starts back up again.

She approaches her life with the deepest sense of enthusiasm and appreciation. She lives with her kind and gentle husband, Bill, on acreage along the Western Slope in Colorado with a break-your-heart-open view of the mountains.

This is a woman who has had three hip replacements over the years along with a badly broken leg and wrist. But, the hell with it, she set down her knitting needles at 70 and took up kayaking anyway. She dons overalls and a big straw hat and grows a thriving organic garden from seeds. At Christmas, she sends us braids of five different kinds of her garlic. And homemade potica, which is a delicious walnut and cinnamon bread from a recipe her grandmother brought over from Yugoslavia. She paints gorgeous landscapes and wins blue ribbons. She used to have chickens and llamas. Now she has cats. And Yaks.

Yep. Yaks.

So today she is 72.

I hope I'm like her when I grow up.

I love you, Mom.

Happy Birthday, pretty lady.