jeannebirdblog

Daddy watches me as I imagine he sits on the brick front porch of my house.  His clear, blue-green gemstone eyes twinkle as he joyfully chuckles to see me.  I know his laugh.  He wears a Mom-iron-pressed white shirt, sleeves rolled up, collar unbuttoned, white t-shirt peeps out, beige trousers, neatly cuffed at the ankles, all 1950s vintage clothing now.

Silly, I think, I know, I dream.  Silly, old me.  He’s gone over thirty years, yet I feel his presence still, in wistful moments, as I pass by the porch to throw the trash to the curb in the early morning light, or walk up the drive to the kitchen door in the twilight of the soft sky at the end of the day, when night is just beginning.  Daddy is in twilight, a state of my childhood cloudiness, waning in my mind.

His gemstone eyes will never see my children, one with eyes the color of a cloudless blue summer sky, one with eyes the color of the deep, ocean blue.  They are the gems of my eye.  They would have been his, too.

“Hello, Daddy,”  I say, waving to the porch to resurrect him.

Wistful moments wondering what could have been, what should have been, what wasted wishes got rollered over by his phantom alcoholic twists-and-turns that made him abandon me and my sisters.  A spiritual resurrection comes late in life as pain lets go of wondering what to say about Daddy, how to tell about Daddy, how not to be embarrassed and hurt over Daddy, of letting go of the crumpled cursed tears of what I imagine are a daddy’s moments with my first date, high school report cards, college maneuvers, wedding aisle, father-and-daughter dance, first house, first baby, first, first, first.

With my spiritual resurrection and after Mom’s gone, I reunite my parents on my front porch.  They don’t fight as in the old days.  She sits close to him as in their early days of lustful love.

Those were ugly, the old days of fighting that fell between blessed spells.

Hateful, shuddering screams over just about anything fill our house.  Mom’s yell to Daddy to get the hell out often ends fights, as he goes his way, to Tony’s liquor store, to the Colony Bar and Grill, his brother’s house, or to god only knows where else.

“He’s an alcoholic,” said Mom, her only explanation, as if I know what that means.

Many fights are about money.  No, all fights are about money.  I think money is more valuable than me.  It is scary when they fight.  Why don’t they know how I feel and why don’t they just shut the hell up?

With one fight, the remains of Daddy’s business, a jewelry-making shop, are on the kitchen table.  In the gem-polishing business, friction is key.  In madness, Daddy grabs a box filled with aquamarine, garnet, opal, ruby, emerald, and amethyst gemstones, throws open the kitchen’s back door, and out on the porch, slings the box to the backyard.  The gems sail, skitter-scatter, settle in the grass.  As in so many of his starts-and-stops, Daddy abandons Joseph’s Jewelers, then cuts and runs from the house.

Mom orders Donna and me to collect the gems.  I use my eagle eyes to find them in the summer-green grass, turn it into a game, guess how many feet the distance is from where Daddy stood on the porch, to how far he could throw, and how much flexed muscle force is needed to make gems fly.  I think of hunting for Easter eggs, Jesus’ candy jewels in the grass.  I find a lot more gems than Donna does and tell her so.

Instead of doing this, instead of wondering what is so important about these shimmering gems to make my parents act the way they do, instead of trying to figure things out, I want to push my dolly in her carriage, ride a tricycle, pet the cat, jump rope, roll about and watch ants, pluck-and-suck sweet blossoms from the honey suckle bush, all things a six-year-old girl should do, not shudder-shake a scare in my stomach.

“Did you get all of them, Jeanne?” asks Mom.  We dump the precious gems into her cupped hands.

I silently nod yes.

“Can’t we leave Daddy and go and live with Nanny?” hiccups Donna, out of a blue dream.

Mom hands my sister a napkin to dry her tears.

“No, that’s just silly,” said Mom.

“Let’s go pick some forsythia, Jeanne,” said Mom.  She grabs the kitchen scissors and heads to the backyard.  I follow her outside, into a sunshiny April day.

The wildly overgrown forsythia bush, bursting with yellow-popcorn flowers, yields to Mom’s hand as she cuts a bunch of branches and gives them to me.  Mom rooted this bush from cuttings of a bush in Aunt Matheline’s yard, years ago.  It is so large that we are hidden from view by drivers in cars stopped at the red traffic light at the street intersection.  I become part of the bush as I close into the flowers, in their promise of a hopeful spring.  The bush is part of Mom’s crooked path to grasp some type of privacy in the corner lot of our yard and life.

“A-tisket, A-tasket, I lost my yellow basket.  Won’t someone help me find my basket and make me happy again?  Was it green?” sings Mom.

“No, no, no, no,” I sing back the refrain of an old song that Mom learned as a young girl.

“Was it red?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Was it blue?”

“No, no, no, no.”

Back in the kitchen, Mom loops eggs, birds, rabbits, and floral decorations onto the bright branches in a vase, to make an Easter tree centerpiece for our dinner table.  Easter is here, in the colors of yellow, green, red, blue, and, most of all, in the pink, of my very own Easter basket.

I remember, remember, remember.

This week, an Irish priest told me that when you hold rosary beads, you are holding hands with Mary.  I imagine holding hands with my Mother Mary and comfort fills me.  The priest smiles and nods, agrees with me that it’s a beautiful image, the holding of hands.  My heavenly Mother helps me to remember Mom, in the moment that she handed me her rosary beads.

“Here, Jeanne, I want you to have these,” said Mom, as she hands me the red, rosy-garland of glass beads with a silver crucifix.  In the midst of the beads is linked an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the same image that hung in my Polish grandparents’ livingroom, long ago.  As I look at the Jesus of my youth, I feel the same horror, and the sorrow of his bleeding heart, that I felt as a little girl.  I do the same thing as I did back then, cover that image in my head with one of Baby Jesus being held by Mother Mary, and think of the Hail Mary prayer, a powerful weapon against evil that will bring me to true peace.

Mom sets a black pocketbook, where she kept her rosary beads, on the side of her nursing home bed.  She lets go of holding hands with Mother Mary so I can have a turn.  Perhaps Mom knows better than me for once.  Perhaps she knows that in a few months, she will lose her sense of speech, on the downhill slide to death.  Perhaps she thinks the rosary will serve me better than her, and sees in my eyes, the sorrow, the uselessness, the bleeding struggles, the things that I remember, that just won’t go away and leave me alone.

“Lower your voice,” said Mom.

Mom yells when I argue with her, when I suck my thumb, bite nails, twirl hair, pinch sisters, eat too many cookies, stare at her, or not look at her, talk too softly, or not talk at all.  I can’t do anything right by her.

“These girls will drive me to drink,” said Mom to Aunt Mae.

If Mom drinks as much as Daddy did, what will my sisters and I do then?  I am kicked to the kidneys as I wonder what I do that is so bad that Mom has to talk like this.

“Take the glass, turn it in the dough, put a spoonful of ricotta cheese and parsley on the cut-out circles.  Not too much, or they’ll break when cooking,” said Aunt LaLa.  Smiling, she places her hand on my hand, and shows me how to do it.  Like a mother bird, she flits, from sink, table, stove, washes the dishes, chops the parsley, cooks the gravy.

Turning an ordinary drinking glass upside-down into the dough, I cut circles, spoon the cheese, place another circle on top, and pinch it all together with a fork.  I learn the pattern of the ravioli, the steady routine needed to process and turn them out by the hundreds to feed our extended army of a family at a Christmas dinner at Nanny’s house.

On that day, the ravioli pillows will melt in my mouth, the soft dough gently break apart, the creamy, delicious, ricotta cheese, with the slight, sharp tingle of parmesan, create a taste of Italian heaven.  Thank you Dear, Sweet, Jesus, for ravioli, the memory food that makes my soul.

Re-posting, from December, 2014.

Mom knows that I have ravioli hands.

“Are you going to make ravioli for Christmas, Jeanne?  You make them so good.  Mmm, Mmm,” said Mom.  She has asked me this every year, for the past twenty  years.  I expect the same question every year.  She smiles at me.

I make ravioli because Christmas wishes do come true.  Merry Christmas, Mom.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, goes the clock.

            “We gotta’ hurry up and finish decorating the tree.  I have to get supper on the table, it’s almost five o’clock,” said Mom.  She tinsels the Christmas tree, hands over a blue-glass ornament that whirls me around the globe as Mom says this one looks like blue earth.  I hook it to the tree in the midst of tinsel shimmers and Christmastime wishes.

            Mom bought an angel with golden hair, a candle in her hand, and silver stitches around a gown, at Woolworth’s the other day, and, last night, Daddy put the smiling beauty at the top of the tree that’s in a corner of the livingroom.  He set a yellow lightbulb under her wings, her sheer rank hailing her importance, and then placed wooden angel ornaments that trumpet Jesus’s arrival, on the crown moulding above their bedroom door, way up high.

“I don’t want you girls breaking these angels,” said Mom.

I wish that I could put my stuff way up high where my sisters can’t reach.  Last week, after a stay in the hospital, Aunt Matheline gave me a ceramic pink-flowered tea set as a get-well present.  Barb and Maria can’t keep their hands off of it.  Maria already broke a teacup’s handle, and the white bits, like candy cane chips, shimmer-shattered to the floor.  When I complain, Mom tells me to put the tea set away in the bottom drawer of my dresser.  That I do, with dread, knowing all too well it isn’t safe for long from my dumb sisters.  Mom knows that, which pisses me off.  When I complain again, I have to listen to her tell me, for the millionth time, to always be friends with my sisters.

“When you’re old, like me, you’ll want your sisters for friends,” said Mom.

Dear, Sweet, Jesus.

Mom knows decorating is done when the last tinsel ribbon joins a green-needled branch.  She ties the loose strings of her holly-berry patterned apron, smoothes the top at the neck, and takes a red-striped candy cane out of the apron pocket.

“Here, Jeanne, this is for you.  Don’t let your sisters see it,” said Mom.  She hands it over, heads to the kitchen, her sheer rank, the leader of Christmas.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, goes the clock.

            “We gotta’ hurry up and finish decorating the tree.  I have to get supper on the table, it’s almost five o’clock,” said Mom.  She tinsels the Christmas tree, hands over a blue-glass ornament that whirls me around the globe as Mom says this one looks like blue earth.  I hook it to the tree in the midst of tinsel shimmers and Christmastime wishes.

            Mom bought an angel with golden hair, a candle in her hand, and silver stitches around a gown, at Woolworth’s the other day, and, last night, Daddy put the smiling beauty at the top of the tree that’s in a corner of the livingroom.  He set a yellow lightbulb under her wings, her sheer rank hailing her importance, and then placed wooden angel ornaments that trumpet Jesus’s arrival, on the crown moulding above their bedroom door, way up high.

“I don’t want you girls breaking these angels,” said Mom.

I wish that I could put my stuff way up high where my sisters can’t reach.  Last week, after a stay in the hospital, Aunt Matheline gave me a ceramic pink-flowered tea set as a get-well present.  Barb and Maria can’t keep their hands off of it.  Maria already broke a teacup’s handle, and the white bits, like candy cane chips, shimmer-shattered to the floor.  When I complain, Mom tells me to put the tea set away in the bottom drawer of my dresser.  That I do, with dread, knowing all too well it isn’t safe for long from my dumb sisters.  Mom knows that, which pisses me off.  When I complain again, I have to listen to her tell me for the millionth time to always be friends with my sisters.

“When you’re old, like me, you’ll want your sisters for friends,” said Mom.

Dear, Sweet, Jesus.

Mom knows decorating is done when the last tinsel ribbon joins a green-needled branch.  She ties the loose strings of her holly-berry patterned apron, smoothes the top at the neck, and takes a red-striped candy cane out of the apron pocket.

“Here, Jeanne, this is for you.  Don’t let your sisters see it,” said Mom.  She hands it over, heads to the kitchen, her sheer rank, the leader of Christmastime.

Nothing is impossible when I see Jesus on the cross at Daddy’s church, the Holy Name of Jesus, on Washington Boulevard. Daddy takes my sisters and me along when he wants to light a candle for Babcia, who’s very sick at home in bed, or, when he’s stuck, like an unoiled wheel, and mulls over altar boy days.

Mom never goes to Holy Name. She goes to mass at St. Mary’s and we go to St. Mary’s school with the Italian kids of the neighborhood. The Polish immigrants of Holy Name are too strange for Mom, and too much, too much, too much.

God of joy fills my heart at Daddy’s church. Daddy lights a red candle with a long stick match, makes the sign of the cross and bows his head in silent prayer. I make the sign of the cross, too, then take in the shimmers of foiled gold, glaze of marble, and the vaulted heaven ceiling where I wish I could be floating with the sweet angels.

Out on the street, in the bright Christmas sunshine, pink tissue paper hearts litter the steps, sidewalk, and gutter of the street.

“Daddy, what are these for?” I grab a handful and stuff the pink hearts into my jacket pocket.

“You know how people throw rice at a bride and groom as they leave the church? Well, at a wedding this morning, someone used these hearts instead of rice,” said Daddy.

“I’m going to do that when I get married,” I said, with hearts, in my Christmas pocket.

I visit LaLa. She’s old. I’m old. Godlight, sunlight, joylight, flies from my Aunt LaLa. I give her a gift of a wooden birdhouse, florally decorated, with a fake bird and silk, yellow flowers. This old lady smiles at me as she directs me to put the birdhouse on the fireplace mantel.

“I’m going to call it my Jeannebird,” she said.