Parity
Somehow it seemed right that a modicum of parity should prevail in what was left of our relationship so I suppressed the word mom and addressed her by her given name. Among other things, except politics, we had never seen eye to eye on the topic of my “prospects,” which I think she considered a stain on her legacy. In her world number one sons had jobs and families and were engaged lifelong in “meaningful work.” We obviously enjoyed different ideas of the meaning of meaningful.
She must have known that I thought she had done a fine job rearing me. Otherwise, why did I always cheerfully visit? It’s true that I wasn’t about to move home to keep her company in her old age, which she would have liked, and it’s also true that my one week rule, a modification of Ben Franklin’s three day maxim, “Friends and relatives like fish stink after three days,” prevailed for all loved ones, related or not. Life moves on and gathers no moss. Staying one step ahead of it is the only real security. Settling into a safe routine to keep anxiety at bay is not my idea of living.
I had a dream during that visit. I was standing inside a brand new wooden single seater outhouse somewhere in a pristine mountain forest, bright sunlight spraying through the cracks between the boards. “I wonder if someone has already done their business,” I thought. “I’ll take a peek.” I lifted the lid.
If it’s your destiny to sit on a cozy seat affixed to an immaculate white porcelain base, squeeze #2 carefully into fresh water to avoid the backsplash and flush the embarrassing detritus out of sight with nary a thought, you’re not showing proper respect for the flow of life. Nothing beneficial or detrimental disappears once and for all, no matter what you think. Everything is always present in the foreground or the background, expressing itself in real time for better or worse. If you want to be happy you should cherish this fact for reasons you will hopefully come to appreciate as my story unfolds. You may be a proper Einstein but you’re not that clever if you flush, put the lid down and wash your hands with nary a thought about your pile of smelly karma hurtling down the pipes toward the public domain. As they used to say back in the day, “What goes around comes around.”
As you surely know, toilet habits vary worldwide. Well into my misspent youth, thirty years before my trek home for the dutiful visit in question, shortly after I dropped out of university much to mom’s horror, I visited an outhouse on the Indian subcontinent perched on the edge of a precipitous cliff in the Western state of Goa. It was a poor rural area and water seal toilets had yet to make an appearance; perhaps they haven’t arrived to this day, trickle-down economics and global warming being what they are.
Before I parked my royal butt on the well-worn seat, I took a gander down the hole. I’m not a professional scatologist by any matter of means, although there is perhaps no better way to correct an unhealthy diet than to analyze one’s poos daily. People rich and poor, educated and uneducated, good and evil invariably show a complete lack of interest in the fate of their lustily consumed meals once their taste buds have had their way with them. To their detriment they seem ever-reluctant to consider the fate of that cheezy pizza, juicy hamburger or dish of chocolate ice cream greedily scarfed down the day before. Little do they know there’s a world of knowledge there waiting to be uncovered or that shit is always a good teacher.
Anyway, much to my surprise, my gaze was eagerly returned by three cheerful pigs twenty feet below waiting for their morning breakfast. I hated to deny them God’s bounty, but sadly my bourgeois conditioning overwrote my stated desire to go native while abroad and I hightailed it back my guesthouse for a proper conversation with my bowels.
This memory flashed as I looked through the fragrant freshly-milled pine seat of my radiant dream outhouse, which had yet to encounter a single waking state butt. The whole hole metaphor wasn’t obvious at the time to the dreaming me but it’s clear now. Why would I look down a shithole if I didn’t expect to see a shitty world?
But I was pleasantly surprised when the dream revealed a perennial stream of pristine sparkling water flowing below. Mesmerized, I observed a large snake with vibrant iridescent colored markings…golds, reds, blacks and oranges…more real than any real snake, languidly emerging from the depths next to a fragrant pink lotus. It meandered to the middle of the stream, looked up, smiled, morphed into a huge tiger or maybe a leopard, which also looked up, winked, smiled knowingly and disappeared into the depths.
I didn’t mind visiting mom at all. In fact I looked forward to the visits and looked forward to ending them. When I leave any event I don’t go back to my before self because it is no longer there. If you pay attention even to small happenings and take instructions you will not be the same person you were before. Actually, you aren’t the same even if you don’t learn anything. In the interval between your arrival and departure you become someone else.
Most people live a microsecond behind the time curve in a parallel unreality called memory, which is to say that you are always only your parent’s darling bundle of joy…or not…but somehow they never see the now you; it is too subtle to grasp but it’s there, the substance of all your thoughts. Memory is a heuristic that keeps things conveniently simple, which invariably means Momma knows best and her darling bundle of joy is eternally a dummy in need of frequent advice and close supervision.
The love of a parent for a child is perhaps life’s most enduring, if not endearing, archetype. It may be full of knowledge and joy, but it is hopelessly undemocratic. Parity is in short supply. It has to be that way in the post womb world because what does a child know? Yes, it knows what it feels, but it doesn’t know what it means to feel what it feels in light of the menacing big world of otherness with which it will eventually be forced to transact. It needs preparation in the form of an appreciation of its limits, which is not conducive to peace in the short run because its idea of happiness is? You guessed it: immediate self-gratification regardless of the context. Nothing new here.
Red alert to would-be-parents needy for love: show the new arrival who’s boss before you turn on the love tap or the little brat will know you’re a wuss and turn the tables on you. (Proverbs 13:24). Your life will quickly become a living hell and a tidal wave of guilt will engulf you.
Eighty years ago from now clock time, I was sitting in my highchair angrily banging my spoon on the wooden tray because my peas spilled on the floor. I must have spilled and banged hundreds of times without understanding what was actually going on in our dynamic, but this time the lights went on as mom, a familiar worried look on her pretty patrician face, rushed in from the utility room eager to do my bidding. “Aha,” I thought. “That’s how you control big people. She’s a sucker that can’t stand unhappiness.”
It’s a wonder that the conscious force that gifts life in this difficult binary reality also gifts survival skills into the bargain. My M.O. mercifully delivered at such a tender age! It worked well long after I left home, more or less, but it took more than twenty years to figure out that getting what I wanted, when I wanted it, the way I wanted it, was a surefire recipe for disaster, however.
Be that as it may, along with the obligatory small talk, this meaningful visit began with a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice and a cup of Folgers coffee as only a Fifties blue-haired mom can conjure. And the usual conversation. “How did you sleep? It’s going to be hot today. Don’t forget your appointment with… Did you hear about the Republicans?” And the best for last…my prospects! It had been a couple of years since that topic reared its ugly head because I’d been abroad finding myself and exorcising demons. Once in a while I’d mail a wish-you-were-here-love-James postcard, so not a lot of actual soul stuff made it home.
Dad had the prospects idea too, although prospects was mom’s word. In 1973 when America was apparently still great, he drove all the way from Northern Idaho to meet me in San Francisco and take me to the World Series in Oakland. A trip down memory lane. We enjoyed the series, which Oakland won, I believe, but he waited till the seventh inning stretch when, hot dog in hand, he informed me that the Post Office was offering jobs at $1500 a month with benefits, which wasn’t that bad in those days. I thanked him for the info and said I’d look into it, after which I showed him a huge roll of hundreds I’d made in a quick deal a couple of days before. He was working class and finagled his way through the Great Depression by the seat of his pants so, being familiar with hand to mouth living, he was happy that I was doing well and died three weeks later watering the tomatoes. Mom was a well-meaning aristocrat with socialist inclinations who looked down on the almighty dollar, so the big wad of cash wouldn’t have been her cup of tea. The words vulgar and crass come to mind.
OK, enough context, cut to the chase. She finished her speech about meaningful work and waited for my reaction, which heretofore had always been an insincere reply delivered in a remarkably sincere voice meant to display shame, contrition and the perception of honesty, “Good idea, mom, I’ll look into it right away. You’re right. I really am wasting my life. I can do better.” But this time there was no reaction, nary a thought. Nada. Just silence, which often has the power to rope the unsuspecting into the present.
After a long minute, her real face peeked out from behind the genteel mask and rhetorically asked, “You really don’t care, do you James.” And my real face, which by this time was my only face thanks to a lot of soul searching, said matter-of-factly, “Nope, Marion, I don’t.” The unachievable achieved! I’m James and she’s just Marion. Two simple human beings minus the mother/son overlay. Parity! Relief at last! In mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
Then the icing on the cake, “You know we’ve never seen eye-to-eye, James, but I think you’ve done a good job of getting yourself together.” Classy that. How could I not love her. The next day I packed up and headed down the road to see what lay in store.
