The Wheel in the Sky, Man

Beginnings, endings, and family secrets

Before I begin this week’s edition of Message from the Underworld, I want to express my gratitude for all the notes, messages, comments, and condolences I received with regards to my mother’s passing. Please know they meant a great deal and have helped me get through this difficult time. Thank you.

“We were somewhere around Buttonwillow in the middle of farm country when my bladder became dangerously full…”

Okay, that’s not quite how the opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas goes but did Hunter S. Thompson ever drive his daughter 500 miles to college with a giant thermos of coffee between his legs?

Less than forty-eight hours after flying home from Virginia, Annie and I packed up the station wagon and hauled ass to Sacramento. It took us less than two hours to get to LA and it seemed like we were tearing through the Grapevine in no time at all. At that point we had about five hours of open road to go. I-5 cuts through the heart of California and follows the slant of the state in a pitilessly straight line. Dusty fields stretch in all directions as far as the eye can see, which isn’t very far at all. At one point, the temperature reached triple digits.

Ordinarily, the drive would be a slog, but the hours slipped away as Annie and I talked about the past, present, and future. After a brutal year-and-a-half of pandemic schooling, Annie had a near-perfect summer, dividing her time between her new boyfriend and her new job at Plant Power, a vegan fast food restaurant, all while preparing for her freshman year at UC Davis. We talked about the courses she’s enrolled in, a trip we’re taking at the end of the year, new relationships, my mom.

After gassing up (and getting more coffee) in Buttonwillow—a little more than halfway to Sacramento—we continued our journey north. We had a 10 AM check-in at Annie’s dorm at UC Davis the following day. Rather than get up super early, we took a leisurely drive the day before. After checking into our hotel in downtown Sacramento, we had dinner at a Thai restaurant, and then took a stroll around the state capitol, a place neither one of us had seen before. Annie is entering UC Davis as a political science major, so perhaps it won’t be her last visit.

The next morning we drove to the historical district, which is home to the newest Plant Power franchise. We planned out our order with an insider’s obsessive attention to detail.

“Are you going to tell them you’re a Plant Power employee?” I asked.

“They’ll be able to tell by my order,” she replied.

And they did.

The next few hours slipped by in an anxious haze of efficiency. We reached the campus at UC Davis—cows!—before we finished our breakfast. After a quick Covid test, Annie was able to check in at her dorm and we ferried her possessions up to her room on the second floor. It took a lot less time than I thought it would. Several dads had warned me that dropping off their daughter at college was an unexpectedly intense emotional experience. (Hi, dads!) Seeing as I’d just gone through one of the most intense emotional experiences a son can have, I felt like I was going to be all right, but we were both nervous.

After expressing my envy over Annie’s single dorm room and built-in bookshelves (!) we headed to the student store to drop some money on some UC Davis gear and stall for time before I had to say goodbye. While we waited in line did I tell her the story (for the ten thousandth time) that when I was in the Navy I had forty “roommates” in my berthing compartment? You know I did.

When it was finally time to go, I gave Annie a long hug, told her how proud I was of her, and hit the road. But I didn’t head home. I had another mission to make.

After emptying the wagon of Annie’s stuff, there was one item left: a Serger sewing machine that belonged to my mother. My mother had a lot of sewing machines. Someday, I will write about my mom’s relationship to stuff, but not today. When we started going through my mom’s things, we found five or six sewing machines, including one used exclusively for Japanese stitching. (Apologies in advance for my ignorance here.)

My mom was a quilter and had a passion for sewing. She’d been making her own clothes since she was a teenager. She had a mania for fabric that was difficult to understand. Over her lifetime she accumulated many roomfuls of fabric and while it’s true she made lots of things for lots of people, she had the equipment and materials to make a great deal more.

I can kind of relate. I have many more books than I’ll ever be able to read and yet I keep buying more books. Books, however, take up a lot less room than bolts of fabric, and if you ignore a book for five, ten, twenty years you can still enjoy it when you finally get around to it. Not so fabric.

Anyway, my cousin Noreen (Hi Ning!) wanted to get one of the machines to Aunt Gen, who isn’t my aunt, but my mom’s oldest friend and who lives in Pleasanton, California, east of the east bay and an hour south of Davis. So off I went to Pleasanton to see Gen.

Gen has known my mother since the first grade. The photo above is from their eighth grade class picture at Saint Anselm. In fact, Gen accompanied my mother when she moved to Hermosa Beach after graduating from nursing school, which I wrote about last week. These days I typically only see Gen at weddings and funerals so it was nice to pay her a visit. My mother lost her Brooklyn accent when she was still young, but after talking with Gen for two minutes there’s no doubt about where she’s from, and she loves to talk.

While I brought in the well-traveling sewing machine and helped find a home for the fabric that it displaced on her sewing table, Gen told me all kinds of stories about my mom and my mom’s older sister Peg.

I’ve always been intimidated by my Aunt Peg. Even though she was short and petite, she had an imperious glare and a famously ferocious temper. The woman had the sharpest cheekbones I’ve ever seen. She took my brother and I out fishing and our boat kept drifting into the shallows. That was the day I learned all the curse words.

My Aunt Peg was my mother’s only sibling and she was twelve years older and lived a very different life. There are stories about how she threw a TV set out the window of her Brooklyn apartment. I was in the passenger seat of her car when she swerved to hit a puddle, showering the people sitting at the bus stop with dirty water. While I was learning to drive that same car, my aunt took me to my school parking lot that was completely empty except for us and a bus. I shit you not, I hit the bus. Aunt Peg glared at me from the passenger seat, took the unfiltered Pall Mall from her lips, and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

She was a character, which was what they used to say about people who had brain health issues. To be honest, I’m still intimidated by her even though she’s been gone many years. The stories Gen told me were about my aunt’s fondness for packing a gun. I don’t know what kind of gun it was but it was small and could fit in her tiny purse. She brought it with her to work when she tended bar. She brought it to Coney Island when she applied for housing. She even brought it Virginia when she was babysitting me and my siblings.

According to Gen, she only used it once when she killed a guy who had been stalking her. There was a creepy-looking customer who’d been lingering after last call and following her home at night. After a couple weeks of this she saw him hiding behind her car and she decided she’d had enough. “Hey you!” she said and when the guy stood up, she shot him. She didn’t wait until he made his move to attack her or profess his undying love. Whatever was in his heart bled out on the sidewalk and he died—according to Gen at least. I’ll need to do some fact-checking.

Gen is a night owl and we stayed up late talking about my mom and my aunt and my grandparents, filling in bits of family history over an enormous bowl of clams and fettuccini. After a few hours of sleep, I got up early and drove back to San Diego, driving ninety miles an hour down the interstate while listening to Ned’s Atomic Dustbin’s God Fodder, an album released thirty years ago, to see if it still jams. It does, but a fucking Pumpkin Spice Latte is a poor excuse for LSD and HST would be ashamed.

When I got home, Nuvia and I went for a walk on the beach, a place where we’ve had so many conversations about our life together, and were treated to a spectacular sunset. The next day, I felt like the sadness of the last few days and weeks and months had lifted. I felt like maybe I was ready to turn the page. 

I made fish tacos for dinner, cooking the mahi mahi in the air fryer. The tacos came out really well. Nicely seasoned, tasted great. I was very pleased with myself because I haven’t had much luck at preparing fish at home, and I resolved some time ago to change that.

I was cleaning up after dinner and thought about calling my mom. Even though a successful fish dinner wasn’t the kind of thing I’d typically share with my mom it dawned on me that I was never going to be able to call her again. I went to find Nuvia and put my arms around her and cried like I did the day my mother died. The following morning the emotions were still there, waiting for me like a taunt. Thought you were done with me, did you? So much for turning the page. So much for getting on with things.

Intellectually, I know this is how grief works. It can spring out of nowhere, blindside you, derail your senses, all that. But I thought I had a handle on my grief. I thought I’d dealt with it. After all, I was with her when she passed and I had mourned appropriately. That about covers it, right? Well, no.

I have lost friends to sudden, tragic, and violent deaths and the pain was so acute I never felt more alive than I did in the wake of their passing. I held on to that grief, nurtured it even, because I never wanted to let them go.

This is different. I don’t want this pain. My mother suffered through a long illness. She was ready to go, but it feels awful to admit that her passing was something of a relief. She was nearing the limit of what she could take. Is that what this grief is, guilt in disguise?

We are not our bodies. No disease can define us. My mother’s illness has temporarily hijacked my sense of her. It will take some time for the illness to recede and a truer picture of who she was to assert itself in my memories. But it will. It’s just going to take a little time.

The HermanCainAwards

Last night I read this article about the subreddit dedicated to antivaxxers who die from the coronavirus. Each “award” consists of a collection of posts from various social media accounts. They typically begin with a handful of anti-vaxxer proclamations and concludes when the account is taken over by a sibling or one of their children to announce the anti-vaxxer’s death. From rant to vent in a half-dozen posts.

Reading the r/HermanCainAwards is brutal experience, but I don’t think it’s a morally dubious one. So much of the suffering of COVID patients is kept out of the news, but these posts on the HCA subreddit bring the suffering to light and it is terrifying. Feeling pandemic fatigue? Reading a few entries of the HCA will change that. Also, people are angry:

“This sub Reddit is a consequence of the anger and frustration [the] rest of us feel by repeatedly suffering because of your hatred, your ignorance, your irresponsibility, your lack of compassion and empathy and your childish defiance that you all wear like badges of honor. At least until you end up in the ICU on a ventilator, then suddenly it’s all “COVID IS NO JOKE!” and begging for Prayer Warriors to save them and for people to donate to their GoFundMe to pay for their hospital bills.”

Like I said, brutal, but instructive.

Thanks for reading Message from the Underworld. Hopefully, I’m back on a regular weekly schedule. See you next Wednesday and stay safe out there.