At (Long, Long) Last

I can't remember the last time I watched TV before noon.

Except for that exercise show when I'm making my daughter's bag lunch in the morning, just before "Curious George." Sometimes it helps to have a TV in the kitchen. Not that I exercise at such an ungodly hour, it just wakes me up to watch somebody else do it.

I like CG much better than that imbecile Calliou, who was cancelled a few months back, thank the gods at PBS. The voiceover of Calliou's wise and understanding grandmother at said ungodly hour made me want to heave a cereal bowl at the screen. Of course I refrained, being a role model for my daughter. The exercise show features a rather meaty broad who favors Seventies Top 40 and looks like she belongs behind the bar at some roadhouse in Green Bay.

Of course all this is moot because the television in the kitchen is on the blink. It hasn't blinked since the bailout. And no, I didn't heave a cereal bowl at it, it succumbed one morning of natural causes. I don't even know if the meaty broad is still on, or CG for that matter. I'm feeling meaty myself lately, time to get back on the old GI ball. Does anybody say that any more? My mother used to.

The last time I watched TV before noon might've been the first Clinton inauguration. We were living in the woods, on the river, I was trying to disappear. If you're trying to disappear, the woods is your ticket. Also, a river helps. Whatever you do, if you're trying to disappear, do not become a parent. Apparently I was naive. What parent isn't? By the time reality hits you between the kidneys, it's too late. You're cooking mac&cheese forty-seven times a week and Curious George has replaced George Clooney in your wet dreams.

I can't remember the last time I had a wet dream.

I do remember sitting meatily on the red carpet in our bedroom in the woods, watching Bill take the oath, feeling mightily good about it. Talk about naive. Still, it felt like a step in the right direction. Like, into the future, stupid. I'd give anything if once, just once, someone would use that epithet on that idiot Calliou. For instance his grandmother, who no doubt knows how stupid he is, having done the play-by-play on his every move lo these past few years, not to mention her shame at his head being the size and shape of a beach ball.

It's 2 p.m. and I just checked in again. They're leaving the luncheon in Statuary Hall, heading for the parade route. It'll take them awhile to get there. I may miss the denouement, their arrival at their new digs. With any luck they'll be there for the next eight years.

I can't remember the last time I felt lucky.

We lived in the woods for eight years, exactly, long enough to take root. But apparently we were spruce, not jackpine, our root systems shallow and widespread. We toppled over at the first big wind and blew back into town. So much for the disappearing act.

I'm having trouble believing he's going to disappear, that it's finally over. I watched him get on that helicopter this morning, but it felt like maybe, just maybe, this was actually some cruel new experiment in virtual reality. Or maybe some morning soap I wasn't aware of, not being a before-noon TV person. Mostly I'm an order-every-season-of-Six-Feet-Under-and-a-case-of-Pinot-Grigio-and-hang-a-Don't-Fuck-With-Me!-sign-on-the-bedroom-door kind of TV person.

I wanted to heave a cereal bowl at the helicopter but I refrained, largely because I wasn't in the kitchen. Sometimes it helps to have a TV in the bedroom.

Like now. It's evening. I took a short commercial break to do my life, and I'm back on the tube. The singer is singing her heart out -- that old Etta James tune -- and they're dancing. It's making me want to dance. Sometimes you just have to dance. Sometimes you just have to reappear. Sometimes you just have to wake up and turn on the TV to realize you're not dreaming.

Sometimes nightmares end.

Who needs an exercise show? I can't remember the last time I felt this awake.

Wish I'd Said That Redux

After watching President Bush's farewell speech, I'd like to give my farewell to the 43rd President of the United States: Just go away. Go far away. Go very, very far away. And when you've gone as very, very far away as you think you can, dig down deep and go even farther away.

Pat Proft

Star Tribune

"Letters to the Editor"

Fallout

My mother blamed the rugs in K-Mart. Toxic fumes, she said. She said she had to leave the store. My aunt found her standing in the sun in the parking lot, gazing at the sky. Three days later she was dead.

Sometimes I wonder if things would've gone differently if I'd stayed. For three more days, say. But that would be giving myself too much power. Something I sadly lacked in my mother's presence.

I'd been visiting for the weekend. Sneaking beers in the basement with my dog, smokes in the garage with my father. I always brought my dog when I visited my parents. A familiar, a go-between. My mother and I had had a falling out on the phone, the air needed clearing. Not unlike the air in the garage, which wafted thick as fog.

The evening I left -- the evening I didn't stay -- my mother and I sat in the family room after my father had gone to bed. Having gypsied about for a number of years, my parents had moved back to the old hometown, to a white clapboard house on a busy street, where on Saturdays you could watch the old Italian ladies promenade past in their black dresses on their way to mass.

That evening -- the evening I left -- my mother did most of the talking. Backlit by the sunset, her hair was on fire. She might've been speaking in tongues. Nothing out of the ordinary for us, who often struggled to find a common language. Except that evening something was different. My mother was using a different voice. Or maybe it was the other way around. Some voice was using her.

Do I really believe that? No. It just sounds good. What I remember is her voice not being the voice I'd always heard. This was a quieter voice, a slower voice. A voice minus the movie-star, the exclamation-point, the tie-it-up-pretty-with-a-bow.

Like this Christmas card a friend sent, a photo of Robert Johnson, lips around a cigarette, fingers splayed across the frets, eyes locked on the camera. My daughter turns it over whenever she sees it, it makes her uneasy. Not Santa-y enough. Too much black and white. Where's the red and green?

That's it. After a lifetime of red and green, my mother's voice that last evening was black and white. Like she suddenly knew something, something simple and plain, something that came from the same place as the new voice. When she told me about the rugs, that they'd made her sick, that she'd had to leave the store, she didn't put a spin on it. She just offered it up. A reason, not an excuse.

A reason for what?

Afterward she was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, it had grown dark in the room. The sun had gone down, the lamps remained unlit. She said,

"The best thing you can do is to keep telling the truth."

I almost fell off my rocker. My obsession with finding the hard reality behind things was in direct contrast to what I'd always called my mother's rose-colored-glasses syndrome. Oil and water, apples and oranges. Though my mother would never admit it, ours was a conflicted relationship. And then -- at what turns out to be the eleventh hour -- she gives me her blessing. After a lifetime.

When I drove away, the moon was rising. My mother was waving good-bye beneath the porchlight, her hand as white as the moon.

All this happened in October. Peak color.

The week of my mother's funeral, I walked my dog around the old hometown each evening, through a tsunami of fallen leaves, vivid even in the shadows of dusk. Each night I drank wine. Each morning I woke hungover, shellshocked, disbelieving. Repeating an endless loop of lost conversations with her in my foggy mind, until it felt as though she was living inside my head, housed inside my skull, trapped there. Like a fetus.

When your mother dies, it's a crossroads. A bomb drops, into the middle of your life, the middle of you. There is you before, and you after. Ten years -- a lifetime! -- passes in a heartbeat. And then, somehow, here you are. Your heart still beating. Your lungs still breathing. Your head still filled with her sound.

Resolution Road

I believe in signs.

Sometime back in the last millenium, when I was a wee college student, my dad was driving me across the wilderness of northern Wisconsin late one night to his home in northern Michigan. I say "his home," because I never officially lived there. After the kids were gone, he and my mother left town and built their Dream McMansion in another state. The state of relief, no doubt.

Those were the days when kids left home after high school. Before they started living in the rec room until their 40th birthdays.

There we were, cruising between the pines down Highway 2, headlights slicing the darkness, when I looked up through the passenger window at the staggering universe overhead and asked for a sign. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You know, dark windswept night, lonely highway, dashboard lights aglow. No sooner had I made this silent request, than it appeared: there in the clouds scudding across the moon, the face of God. I figured it was God, who else would it be? I was in college, God was still a possibility.

For years I held this "vision" close to my heart, believing I had been revealed in the very heavens. It beat seeing the face of Jesus in a zucchini.

Now I think it might have been my own face I saw. Or maybe my husband's, who I wouldn't meet for another lifetime or so. Or maybe it was the face of the guy I rear-ended a couple weeks ago out on Central Entrance, when I momentarily lost focus trying to deflect the cloud of Nuclear Attitude wafting my way from my daughter's side of the vehicle. I blinked one nanosecond too long, Ka-Bam! My second Traffic Incident in less than three months. This guy gets out of the car with his head folded over to one side, and I'm thinking, Fuckenay, there goes the flat-screen television.

Ain't nobody's fault but my own.

That, and injuring my rotator cuff shoveling a tunnel to the outhouse. And losing the diamond out of my engagement ring. Not to mention a plethora of other mini disasters. Well, the writing was on the wall: Change Your Life.

How appropriate that it's also the start of a New Year.

So. In honor of an Old Friend, whose New Year's mantra for decades was always the same -- Tomorrow I'm going to quit smoking and quit drinking and lose fifty pounds!! -- I offer my list. The people who know about such things caution us to keep our lists manageable, case in point being Old Friend, whose annual resolve wavered in tandem with her hangover. Be that as it may, here's mine:

1. Quit smoking (I already did! Twenty-five years ago! Score one!)
2. Quit drinking (er, as much)
3. Lose fifty pounds (I lost ten times that amount in English currency to the guy with the folded-over head)
4. Attain Enlightenment

I have my work cut out with #2. Regarding #4...

When I looked down at my left hand and discovered the diamond was missing from my engagement ring, I went into a swoon. I was sure I was dreaming. I'd had the same feeling when the front bumper of my car connected rather abruptly with the rear bumper of that car in front of me out on Central Entrance. And I've occasionally felt something similar when I've looked up from some task to find my daughter scowling at me from across the room.

What was it my mother used to say? Land o'gosh, this can't be I!

But here's the thing: I found my diamond. I actually found it!! On the carpet below my computer, when it could have been anywhere. And then, when I raced downstairs to show my husband, there were two fat deer standing in our backyard -- our fenced backyard -- snow up to their haunches, breath like tiny clouds swirling. And not only that, when my daughter came home from gym one night last week and found me reading on the couch beside the fire, she picked up her own book and walked over and curled up beside me and folded her head onto my shoulder.

Let me repeat: my thirteen-year-old daughter leaned up against me and began to read.

Like I said, I believe in signs.