Mom.

Surface Intentions

My mother spread her presents at the feet
of those poor saints hewn of heartwood.
Mute, unmoving, and amazed, they stood
behind the pews, so straight and complete.

They neglected to thank her, too,
for her fervently offered gift.
The little dark her candles lift
was all of her faith they knew

Still my Mother gave, in a paper roll
these flowers with their fragile blooms,
which she took from a bowl in our modest rooms,
in the sight and longing of my soul.

                                       ~Rainer Maria Rilke

The boy would stand and watch the clothes washer perform its mysterious mission, fascinated by the furious water and the inner workings of the machine.  It was an old-fashioned wringer washer, a vintage last seen standing next to the dodo bird and waiting for Time’s wrecking ball.  I would patiently wait for the wash cycle to complete so I could feed the wet clothes into two counter-rotating cylinders which would “wring” out the water.  With practice I could make the clothes proceed continuously from basin through the wringers to the waiting laundry basket below; pants, shirts, socks and underwear stuck together like a flat textile ribbon. For a “dryer” we used the Spring wind filled with honeysuckle promise.  I remember Mom and I outside hanging out the clothes, the raw smell of wet sheets; clothespins scattered about like the bones of some forgotten beast.

Once I dropped a thermometer on the kitchen floor and watched as the mercury scattered silvery balls across the linoleum surface. How did each little ball know when to stop expanding?  Why did they become so large and no larger?  If I combined the little balls into a bigger puddle it became wider but no deeper.  Spilled water did not behave in this way; liquid adhesion corrupting purity like a student over-thinking a math problem.  There exists an effect where surfaces meet, surface tension, which seeks to reduce the total surface area of the fluid. Forces in balance result in a puddle of uniform depth.  THIS deep but no deeper.

The US Forest Service Research Center out on Maryland 197 is isolated, home only to the researchers and their families.  If God had been given an 8th day, she might have perfected this place for three boys to romp – here among the forests, streams, and back roads of the compound.  It seemed my early years were were spent outside in the sun, sometimes with my brothers but equally by myself.  My hobbies were tied to the land and included searching for and catching snakes.  As summer grew hot and the days long I would go on my ‘snake rounds’; checking all the places I knew they would hide.  I learned to stay away from those snakes with slit pupils, signifying danger, although getting close enough to see their eyes was incredibly stupid.  I once told my classmates I wanted to be a Herpetologist when I grew up and they looked at me blankly, as if I had not spoken at all.  

My fascination only increased the day a six-foot black snake dropped on my brother from the branches of an oak tree, wrapped around his neck and tried to bring him down like a water buffalo.  I brought a garter snake to 2nd grade one day for Show’n’Tell, but it died shortly after lunch.  I cried uncontrollably over this loss because garter snakes are supposed to only “play” dead as protective mimicry, not BE dead.  Once you cry in school over your dead snake you have established your reputation as Class Weirdo.

I would keep my snakes in the window wells of our house, not at all worried that my misuse of window wells would bring down swift vengeance from the gods of building design.  Locusts; how cool would that be?

Around the lakes and ponds near our house water bugs would skate across the surface, performing what seemed to us to be a magic trick without equal.  If we thought about it at all, we assumed that they just had some knowledge lacking in lesser insects; yet the truth was far more beautiful and elegant than we could have ever imagined.  The curved pads on their feet depress the water just enough to balance their weight against the tension of the water.

Liquid cannot exist in a perfect vacuum. Surface tension is not a property of a liquid alone, but a property of the liquid’s interface with another medium. The top surface of a pond, for example, is an interface between the pond water and the air above. The forces push and pull until an uneasy truce is reached.

My family moved from Maryland to New Jersey as I entered the 7th grade, and it was there that I began my on-again off-again relationship with school.  It was not the work I found hard but the requirement to interact with a new set of non-reptilian creatures.  My thoughts were consumed with fear of being different and, equally, the fear of being the same.  I started well enough, but the combination of puberty and the worsening home situation slowly brought me down, like a balloon with a slow leak.  Increasingly driven by fear and doubt, I decided that it was best to locate myself precisely in the middle, because the middle was where the invisible people stay, hunkered down against the social wind.  I succeeded in getting straight C’s for the first two years of high school, with the exception of Algebra which I simply did not get. Yet what I lacked in academic achievement I balanced with a certain animal cunning.  When my name was announced at assembly as a National Merit Scholar, I slouched in my seat whilst my juvenile delinquent pals snickered.  I never received the award; fading from view; seeking my lowest point — down in the window well of my soul.

Baseball becomes my savior, a result of endless hours playing with my brothers and then on organized teams.  I was never athletic, but had unusual hand-eye coordination.  My ability to hit offset my lack of foot speed and laughably weak throwing arm.  My teams played on dusty sandlots in front of a few tired spectators, but the players in the field didn’t care.  We were playing ball, man; get your glove.  Heaven for me would be standing forever under a dazzling sun waiting to judge the arc of the ball off the bat, tracking it against the sheltered sky.

If a tube is sufficiently narrow and the liquid adhesion to its walls sufficiently strong, liquid will be drawn into the tube entirely by the hidden tension between the inner surface of the tube and the liquid itself.

One of my father’s colleagues lived not far from us in a crisp white house.  His wife was a thin, tired looked woman with a quiet manner and kind eyes.  I noticed on our infrequent visits that she would often place a protective hand on my shoulder.  I thought nothing of this gesture at the time but much later was told that my father had asked her to take care of me for a six month period; a time whilst Mom was away at the sanatorium.  I imagine that being asked to raise an 18-month old child for such an extended period created an inevitable bond; a bond I was too young to remember, but one she was too old to forget.  To this day I do not know what happened at our house to send Mom to that terrible and misbegotten place, but I do know the world goes round on the kindness of strangers.

Mom was diagnosed schizophrenic, an illness which meant “we’re not sure what’s wrong with you”.  I imagined her head filled with bursts of color and sound which would build to a kind of rage.  Her angry and sudden actions against Pop were terrifying to us and incredibly draining to him.  He would try and read the paper only to have it snatched from his hands.  She would stand inches from him — perfectly still — smiling and crying simultaneously.  Once I heard him say, anger visceral on his face, that she had killed my sister Margaret with neglect, using words as the cruelest of weapons.  At these times we prayed he would explode and leave because if he stayed he would start telling us how crazy she was.  Once he told our visiting friends this very thing and I remember feeling the brutal shame of failure as a great palpable weight. I wanted to tell them we were just playing a game in our house; none of it real—the crazy Mom game ha-ha!  Let’s go play ball guys, ride down to the field and hit it deep and far into the high grass, brown and dry and brittle.   Hit it so far it would never be found.

Mom was second generation Irish and maintained a lilting brogue her whole life.  “If it t’were a snake it woulda bit ya”! “, she would say when we couldn’t find something under our noses.  The poorest of the poor Irish immigrants, the Shanty occupied Shanty Town, a place of fear and indignity, a vortex of unending poverty.

If a liquid is contained, then besides the liquid/air interface at its top surface, there is also an interface between the liquid and the walls of the container. Where the two surfaces meet, their geometry must be such that all forces balance forming a contact angle.

Horace and Geneva had two sons; my father Richard and Uncle Charles.  Both would eventually go to the Naval Academy and serve with honor in WWII. Upper crust Episcopalian, Geneva must have felt that Richard had married well beneath him when he fell in love with Mary Dunphy, a poor Irish Catholic from Providence Rhode Island. And while I was too young to know this sad history, I imagine the pressure between Mary and Geneva must have been palpable, especially when Pop was away at war.  Even armed with the knowledge that this separation between economic and social classes is capricious and arbitrary, it is nevertheless very real; a surface glimmering and terrible and one that separates, divides and destroys.  While Pop was away at war I wonder if Mom was as well, struggling to breathe in the toxic atmosphere of misery.

My two brothers and I grew up and made it out of there, leaving that house as soon we legally could.  I hung around the longest, moving from Jersey to West Virginia and staying right up to Pop’s death.  A very strange thing happened after Pop died.  Mom became “normal”; apparently suffering all those years from a chemical imbalance.  She would take her pills and become, for the first time, Mom. Irony can be a terrible thing.

Many years later I am living in Hawaii, working for the Army Corps of Engineers.  My brother Bill calls and tells me that Mom has been diagnosed with cancer.  The three boys who ran around those Maryland woods decide to bring her to Hawaii for the trip of a lifetime.  We have a wonderful time on Oahu and the Big Island of Hawai’i; a chance to share something for the first time that we had spent our lives missing.  When she leaves Hawaii I don’t say goodbye. I say see you soon.  Three months later I fly back to West Virginia; this time to say goodbye.

Sometimes I look at old photographs of Mom and Pop, yellowing monograms of long ago.  I think of these people as waiting patiently, greeting us as we emerge from the shadows of time.  Look at Mom I think, see how young she looks here! It is tempting to say that those times were somehow better, purer; but I myself have grown too old to judge the past. In these photos I have no perspective but sweet memory and who can trust such an aging and whimsical thing?   But I know something has been captured in the frame and something certainly has been lost.  My mother and my father look back at me; so happy, so young and so free; and so they shall remain.

A fine spring morning is upon us and my mother stands across the clothesline, a twinkle in her green eyes.  Between us the damp sheets billow in the whispering wind.  Now you see me; now you don’t.  I know we are about to begin our private game she and I.   I will run and she will chase me.  I do not wish to be caught yet hope so very much to be caught, held in the arms of my mother, now and forever.  Here in the shimmering air of winter’s leaving we run to keep the forces in balance, forces in the world and in ourselves that we sense but cannot see.  I hear her laugh, my mom, this Irish lady nearly lost yet finally found.

I will catch you, Mike! I will catch you!

And we run.