A Mother's Day Story

At Mom’s funeral, Stan told a story in which Mom told him that any girl would be proud to go to prom with him right before he asked a girl who said she wouldn’t go to prom with him.  My story was about how I couldn’t tell if she was messing with me or not. I never talked to her about a girl. She would have laughed at me. 

I told her funeral gathering a story about our last time together before she lost her faculties, there at the assisted living center in Greentown. When I think back on that it’s funny to me that those visits there were always the same and in the moment felt like they were permanent. The drive down, walking from the car to the front door, this would now be where she would always be. The last place. 

Mom wouldn’t answer the phone when I called. Somehow she knew it was me. “I don’t always hear it ring,” she told me. It could ring 20 times and she would not answer. Like Vern, back home, except for the fact I know that she liked to talk on the phone. On those occasions when I was with her in the assisted living one bedroom apartment and the phone would ring I could see that she heard it and she would answer. It was odd. 

On my last visit I stood as I always stood, in the little glass booth area between the outer door and the locked inner door, wondering how I would get in. There was a phone on the wall there with instructions to call the person you wish to see and request them to buzz you in. 

The idea was, “Hi Mom. It’s Sid. Can you buzz me in?”

And Mom would say, “Sid! Yes, of course.”

That would presuppose though, that Mom hears the phone, or acknowledges the phone, or that she doesn’t know in her weird supernatural way that it’s me, and answers it and hits the right button to let me in. 

The phone would ring and ring and ring and I’d stand in the glassed-in area between the outer door and the inner door berating myself for falling for the same sick joke every time I come down here. ‘How am I gonna get in?” 

So, as I told the people at the funeral that February day in Converse, 2014, my story concerns the last time this happened, a cold sunny day in January.

Linda had called me for a meeting because Mom had fallen and Century Field Retirement Community administrators wanted to move her into the Century Villa Health and Rehabilitation center. 

“When’s a good time for me to come?” I said. 

So there I stood like an American journalist on Russian trial berating myself for even trying to get Mom on the phone when at that moment I see Mom on her little red old person scooter scooting down the hallway from the cafeteria area on my left toward me on the way to her room on my right. I began to yell “Mom, Mom, Mom!”  and wave at her on her way by.  I know she glanced at me, but she did not stop. A kindly resident stranger a few moments later smiled as he violated the door-lock policy the Century Field Retirement Community enforces at the Department of Homeland Security’s behest by opening the door.

“Thank you. I’m here to see my Mom,” I told him in anticipation of a visit from the Inspector General. Really, just tell them I deviously convinced you that I’m not a terrorist. 

Thirty minutes later, in her room with Linda and me, after some discussion about her situation and the recommendation from two of her children that she not move to the Century Villa Health and Rehabilitation Center, Mom turned to me suddenly and said, “Was that you standing in the doorway when I came by on my scooter?”

“Yes, Mom. That was me.”

“I thought so,” Mom said. 

Mom was hospitalized not long after I was born and I’m told I stayed with Mary and Burnell for a few weeks. I couldn’t understand who Patty was when it was time to go home, I’m pretty sure, and Patty probably thought, ‘Well, you know little buddy, I don’t much feel like hanging out with you either. I’ve got two kids already and the noisy one seems to like me.’ 

Is it possible that stayed with Mom and me all the way through? There was a lot of time when I was a kid when I wished Mary and Burnell were my parents. But I always thought that was because they lived in a town and had a red single-piece phone with the dial on the bottom.