After a summer-soaker rainfall, the silver-flash of the black asphalt driveway sparkles.  I leave the threshold of Nanny’s driveway as the sun shines upon it, step away to start, run, find order, at eighteen-years-old.  I leave Darien High School behind, the little town of Darien, take a deep breath, leave Mom and her lack of order behind, to look for the meaning of my life.

Three teachers’ words follow me as I leave high school.

“Simplify your art,” said Mrs. Light, a jewelry and ceramics teacher.

“Why don’t high school students protest and stand up for something important today?  Why, when I was in school, we protested the Vietnam War!” said Mr. McCarthy, an English teacher, who looked at my class in disgust.

What am I going to protest?  Maybe I should protest that Mom has to sit in a car line at a station for gas, due to the gasoline crisis, which makes her late for her factory job.  Maybe I should protest about Mom’s stress that infiltrates my bones, as she hurries out the door and bitches, “I have to get to work.  I have five mouths to feed,” and leaves my sisters and me to fend for breakfasts, bag lunches, and getting to school ourselves.  Maybe I should protest how, deep down in my bones, I worry over Mom’s burden to support us, how I hate that she sits in a car line, how I hate St. Mary’s Thanksgiving donation of a basket of food that sits on the kitchen table, and of how I hate the person that I am, terrorized by my parents’ battles.  No, none of this is like the Vietnam War.  Someday, please, Dear, Sweet, Jesus, give me something important to protest about.

I sit at my desk in Mr. McCarthy’s class and stare at him, torturous, wiry anger in my throat.  I want to tell him everything, this young teacher with the beard and wide tie, who takes extra time to help me structure a writing assignment, and who writes in my yearbook that he hopes good things happen in my life.  Yet, I can’t do it.  Besides being disgustingly shy, I’d never let the snobby, rich, Darien teens, my classmates, know any more than what they presume about my rent-subsidized life in an Allen O’Neill home.

“Keep writing, Jean, you have something special in you,” wrote Mrs. Marshall, another English teacher, on one of my many stories.

I leave Nanny’s driveway.  I leave the sun-covered sunflowers that surround Uncle Pippi’s garden by summer’s end.  No longer do the flowers tower over my head, as years ago, when Mom paraded my sisters and me around the garden in her divorce march.  I leave this beautiful, simple place that God has given me the gift of knowing.

Note:  Eight years later, with a college degree under my workhorse thumb, a career that circles from New Haven, New York City, to Stamford, I marry, and raise my children, in a very different way from Mom’s way, learning how to love.  Even later in life, lack of order follows Mom, who suffers from Ataxia, meaning “lack of order.”  This is the complete opposite of me, one who wants order.

There is something to be said when a person gives me food for nothing in return.  Gives me nourishment, not only for my body, but for my mind.  The giving rests easy on my soul.  I am thankful for Uncle Pippi giving Mom, my sisters, and me, the vegetables from his garden in our Darien.  Do you know how giving that is, a gift from the dirt?

The tires of my truck roll over Darien roads.  I drive through town with my eyes practically shut, from Stamford, where I live, to Norwalk, where Mom has lived for the past eighteen years.  She is a part of my daily life.

We run errands in our Darien – to the pharmacy, where I get her medication prescriptions, a thrift store, where we check out bargain deals for knick-knacks, a consignment shop, to buy clothes for my children, to Post Corner Pizza, where I lunch with Mom.  Mom, the aging mother that I love, me, the Italian dutiful daughter, parading out our simple lives.

Back at her house, she wraps foil over a tin pie plate of my favorite Italian dish, eggplant parmigiana, and gives it to me as I sit at the kitchen table, fidget with a pill cutter to halve medications and sort them in a pill box for the week.  I go through her mail, take the bills to pay later, wash the dishes in the sink.

“Heat the eggplant up for supper,” said Mom, as I ready to head home.  She is thankful with her food.

“Thanks, Mom.”

I take her gift, knowing that I will not gobble it down, but throw it in the garbage when I get home because it won’t taste good.  She can’t cook like she used to, thinks she can, wants to, because it is who she is.

My stomach, full of dirt-fear for my aging mother, shudders as I gather dirt-courage for the unknown future that I worry about.  With my weaknesses, I try to firmly believe that God has chosen me for this role.  I can take the past’s beatings and betrayals, because Dear, Sweet, Jesus is in me.  I am thankful for that.  I am thankful for my words.

Barb draws a happy face on a faded-yellow autumn leaf and makes a figure out of leaves and sticks that we’ve collected in our backyard on Seaside Avenue.  Maria draws a green outline around a red maple leaf glued to light blue paper.  My little sisters can be sweet at times, especially now, as they listen to me as I instruct them how to make art out of nature, paper, and crayons.  Art is in me.  Not the type of art that Vincent, a boy in my fourth grade class has, as Sister Ann coos over his drawings.  I’m not as good as he is at drawing, however, I quietly convince myself that the art world is waiting for me.

Years later, in a fit of dangerous fury, when in the down-and-outs, financially and emotionally, I throw away the rolls of film that capture Daddy’s technical drawings as a tool-and-die maker.  He was a machinist who designed jigs, dies, and machine and cutting tools used in manufacturing processes.  Uncle Eddie gave the film to me, as a keepsake of Daddy.  I suppose he didn’t need it to remember Daddy’s art.  I wonder what he thought as he made the decision to give the film to me after saving it for many years.

“The jig is up, Jeanne,” Mom would say, meaning a jig, as in a trick.

I don’t have to wonder about any of it anymore.

With regrets of throwing away the film, I shove the film in my imaginary back pocket, along with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Mom’s patch of Uncle Pippi’s garden.  I can take them out whenever I want to and thank Dear, Sweet, Jesus for that and for loving me.  I thank Him for giving me the gift of forgiveness and that I am no longer the judge, the jury, the decision-maker, of Mom’s life.  I am no longer a jig, as in Daddy’s trade, a custom-made tool used to control the motion of another tool.  I thank Him for making me an artisan of peace.