(eulogy for my mother 1947-2013)
When music played, she would look out a window,
see tree branches swaying, or people walking, and note the choreography. I
would send her recordings of my music, and she would listen to them, again and
again and again, and she would treasure them as if they were her grandchildren,
and play them with pride for friends, and memorize their every vibration, and
know them as though she herself had written them - and hadn't she? with her own
body and her own soul, thirty-six years ago - and tell me that she heard great choirs
singing my work, she would orchestrate greater versions of it than I could
imagine, in the time it took for a bar of a piece to play, she would
orchestrate lavish versions of the music and the production and the publicity, she
would describe the immense productions, already clear in her mind, the dancers,
the elaborate set designs, the lighting plans, the colors swirling and telling
stories within stories in their intermingling. And her orchestration would
extend to the accolades and success it would bring to her son, because hard
work and risk-taking will always bring great rewards, how it would permit me to
travel and buy a home and raise a family, and how that family would thrive and
honor the toiling and risks and sacrifices of her dear parents, parents whose
adventures she memorialized with such reverence that their very kisses to each
other became legends as sacred as any other to the ears of her children. She
would hear a note and it would extend from a fine, small molecule of air that
she would capture gently between her thumb and one of her long, brightly painted
fingernails, out in a flourish full of grace, to the heavens, the stars, through
whole solar systems, to the furthest reaches of being itself, and with a wave
of her head and an "ah" or two clicks of her tongue, she would catch
herself, remembering something, the corporeal, the belly, she would ask "is
it lunchtime?" and always, always, always, before she would eat she would
offer you up the world to fill your own belly, and if the world didn't satisfy
you she would offer you another, or another, and if three whole worlds would
not satisfy you she would find another again, anything, and what else, and you
would have ice cream covered in hot fudge and whipped cream for dinner, or a
spectacular meal of many courses made from scratch, or your choice, anything
you wanted, of the town’s finest dining, there is no modesty in matters of the
belly, but she would teach you how to grow in the garden, how to grow fruits and
vegetables and herbs that nourished you, and how to grow flowers that delighted
you, with strange names she would always know, as though these were names she
herself had chosen for them, and she would always know their season, their
particulars, like a mother knows what foods her babies like to eat, there were
whole taxonomies of flowers and plants in her head, and everything was a
sprawling taxonomy, mountains of beads and jewelry and ribbons and fabric and
paint and glue pouring out from makeshift workspaces, arranged into families
and groups as precariously and with as much poetry as any really living life, and
the ups and downs of the stock market and the ins and outs of real estate were
arrayed in her mind and upon the slightest slivers of paper, the backs of
receipts and envelopes and matchbooks, mysterious ciphers in her careful,
lovely scrawl, populating reams of scratch paper that curled around her house
like vines, full of lives of their own, flowing from every surface, and each
calculation coming with a mathematics and a lesson on self-sufficiency embedded
in it, and recipes, oh recipes, as though recipes were a kingdom unto
themselves, and tuna salad begat egg salad, and egg salad begat devilled eggs, the
kitchen at once a sacred shrine and a restless artist’s tangled workplace, and back
out in the garden she would teach you how to pull up the weeds, not just which
ones to pull, but how to do it as a discipline, as an aesthetic, as the sun
rose, when the rest of the world was asleep, with a good dog at her side, and a
cup of too-sweet coffee in one hand, and the new day full of possibility, full
of opportunity, the early bird does not catch worms, she opens up her own restaurant,
she teaches you how to eat, how to cook, how to present food elegantly, because
the table is a canvas, the good spirits of her many guests are canvases to
paint upon, generosity is a thing to paint with, everything is adorned,
everything is arrayed, every thing is part of a collection of things, and
because her bright green eyes were prisms, and her long hands were factories, every
thing can be made to be some other thing, turned around, painted, put in a new
context, given to a school or a church for children to make new art with, or sell
it and sell it and sell it until you can buy a house and sell a house and save
enough to give away so her grandchildren will never be cold or hungry or sick
and the things she labored greatest over, the pains she suffered most for, the
love that just flowed and flowed and flowed out of her because she had no
beginning and no end as long as she loved, and her love was out in the world, here
we are, with names she gave us, doing her proud, seeing, hearing, feeling this
immeasurable limitless potential of a world she dreamt up for us, to travel
over, to sing to, to entertain, to build upon, to find love on, always to find
love, to find someone to sing to, to travel with, to entertain, to build with,
to dance with, to laugh with, to cry with, to cook with, to fill the belly and
the heart with, to dream dreams with, to breathe with
and I was there with her as she breathed her
last breath, her hand in mine, her no-longer seeing eyes looking through me to a
new world, her sweet face young again, poised, mischievously to the end, in the
vaguest suggestion of a smile, with the lines of life and care and her prodigious,
idiosyncratic folk wisdom smoothed over in her departure from this place, that
last breath pure and calm and full of peace, even in her last instant of life a
lesson to hand down to me, her son, her friend, and a hope that this world,
this world without her, would be like this world with her, a place where to
wake up and breath is to dream without limitation
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