Father, Son, and Holy Toast

My mother was searching for a word, but it refused to be found. At last night's dinner table she told M and me how she often fainted at Mass as a girl. The word she couldn't quite muster was "Communion," or perhaps "host." Her eyes flutter at these moments, as if the blinking might cause the word to materialize, writ in front of her. But, no. This word, like others, had somehow sifted itself into the dustbin of her 88-year-old brain. "You know," she said, "when they put the toast in your mouth." We knew exactly what she meant--and she went on to tell us that she fainted every Sunday at Communion time. Too many people milling around, she theorized. Too much heat.

It seems, sometimes, that my mother has reached a point where her first and only language is becoming, by small increments, foreign to her. After her pre-dinner martini, she often speaks English the way I speak French. Creatively. Through a roundabout back door, where you are forced to explain the more sophisticated concepts or ideas with words that you know compensating for the words you don't know.

I also wonder if these teen-age fainting spells prefigured her mid-life diagnosis of narcolepsy and sleep apnea. These days if the conversation lulls at dinner, her eyes close, and she sometimes lists to one side.  "Mom," I say, "You're falling asleep." Or, "Mom, don't fall off your chair." Her eyes might flutter open then, or she might speak to me with them still closed.

"I'm awake," she'll say. "Awake, but far away." She never says where she's been exactly. But maybe she's in church, fainting--there in the company of her long-dead mother. There with her sisters, smelling the incense, feeling the heat, and falling to the ground.

iPads and Ass Hats

I've been showing my mom how to read the L.A. Times on the iPad. She gets it.

She's been telling me about things that happened long ago. Tonight as I prepared our mushroom and broccoli quiche for dinner, she told me about St. Anthony's school where she went until 5th grade "when the nuns kicked us out." Her parents could no longer pay the tuition. But, showing a more generous side, the nuns also took my mom and her siblings into the convent kitchen and fed them when their mother had nothing to pack them for lunch. "Two of the richest kids in Dubuque went to that school," she said. "They were delivered by a  chauffeur." She told me how another rich girl often wanted to trade lunches with her and her twin. Jelly sandwiches for sausage--which must have seemed like caviar. But I'll bet my grandmother's jelly was homemade and pretty damn fabulous.

My mom told me how her first grade nun was a terror. I'd heard some of these stories before. How she caught your tears in a bowl to humiliate you if you cried. How she'd put you under her desk and kick you. She put my mom over her knee and spanked her once, but my mom says she doesn't remember what she did to deserve it. Her older sister ran home to tell their mother, and their mother came running. "Our mom showed that nun where her hat was at!" my mom said. I'd never heard that expression before, and the Google gods have not revealed its origins. It could be that it was martini-inspired. Or maybe one of my currently favorite pejoratives,"ass hat," bears some relationship to it. But I guess if you're an ass hat, you know where your hat is.

A Whale of a Week, A Whale of a Love Affair, A Whale of a Visit, A Whale of a Trip, and Just Plain Whales

The last excursion of the "granddaughter week" was a whale watching trip. "I can't promise you we'll see whales," I told the girl who's been to Sea World twice. Ha. We were mugged by Humpbacks, which is whale watching boat parlance for being so surrounded that the boat can't move. Take that, Sea World. We saw Blue Whales, too. It's not a small event---seeing the world's largest animal--but it was the breathing of the Humpbacks, so close to us, so like immense human sighs, that surprised me.

And the dolphins again--this time a nursery pod with babies, hundreds of them the size of footballs. I love the things the guides tell us on these boat rides. The Common Dolphin cannot survive in captivity, they said. Without their family group, they perish in five days, they said. They loose their ability to echolocate.

Location can be everything in a love affair. The Man Who Loves Me, who I thought for a few days might not weather my change of location, was at the train station when the kid and I got off the boat. Immense human sigh.

Instead of driving halfway to Phoenix to hand off the granddaughter, her mom and her auntie came with the other kids to stay for three days and then take her home. They were good sports and did their own thing while I hung out waiting for plumbers and contractors to do this or that in my final push to finish up jobs at the house before I bring my mom to live with me.

Who am I when I'm with you? Are all of us changing our spots, doing the chameleon thing? The little girl/deep thinking budding psychologist turned into a less-than-charming martinet once the little brother and sister were back on the scene. Ah, well. Little human sigh. This just reinforces my plan to take those kids one at a time.

And so, with barely time to pack, I was back in the arms of The Man Who Loves Me. Echolocation working fine, thank you. Then onto a plane 12 hours later, and into a rental car, and driving for five hours, and then into my home town, which cannot be visited without a plunge into the past. See other blog, and peruse while thinking about the Common Dolphin. And imagine these steeples rising above the cornfields, rising above everything, visible from five miles or so away as you drive down the highway. And weird, how the photo won't load properly. But there it is--the fractured picture of a particular church that I thought might crumple and crush me, like Samson in the temple in the movie "The Ten Commandments," as I sat through dozens of masses as a secretly pregnant 16/17-year-old.

And so here I am, struggling a bit with my echolocation, in my hometown. But my mother is here, and next week, after a thirty-hour drive spread over an as yet undetermined number of days, I will return with her  to the land of the whales where I will listen for their sighs.