By Anne Lorimer
I wish there were a dirty gym sock on your floor or at least those old Army fatigues I threatened to give to Good Will. The clutter that is you is spewed about your dormitory room now. That is, if you ever get around to unpacking.
Let’s fact it, these are the first kind words I have said about your room in the last 18 years. I called it a disaster area, an urban-renewal project when I was feeling hopeful, and a slum when I had given up.
I screeched when you propped your six baseball bats in the scrap basket and scrunched your paper on the floor. I stopped coming in when you filled the second basket with fishing rods.
Why did I think you would use your bureau for clothes? Its drawers sagged beneath the weight of 3,000 baseball trading cards, all the Hot wheels cars ever made and a shoe box crammed with horse chestnuts, birds nests, dried mud and all the candy wrapper you didn’t throw on the floor.
You stacked your clothes on the extra bed unless there was somebody on it. Then they went on the floor.
We adjusted to each other, although it wasn’t always easy. You forgave me when I cleaned the oven with your best tie-dyed shirt.
It was more difficult when I paid the milkman with your silver money collection and threw out the sports page on the day the Flyers won the Stanley cup.
I forgave you for toppling your leopard frog into the heating duct and sledding down the only hill that ended in a stone wall.
It was harder when you wipped wood stain on your school shirt, motor oil on your pants and threaded pencil through your sweater sleeves.
You learned to ignore me when I quibbled about your table manners. Did you have to see-saw on your chair, inhale your food and debate in depth the consistency of the mashed potatoes? You did. And did you have to stop going to bed at all? You did.
I tried to ignore your closet. Yes, you do have mice, and now that you’re gone, I am afraid they may relocate.
Your bedroom walls were something else again. Neither Raquel Welch, wearing the American flag nor Brigitte Bardot, wearing a motorcycle, were my choice. I belong with Smokey the Bear and Piglet.
I had to ignore your homework habits. How did you concentrate on the problems of the papacy in 13th-centurty Europe, Avagadro’s number and all the irregular French verbs while listening to the radio, the television and breaking in your catcher’s mitt at the same time.
Sports were your thing. The only words you ever spoke in your sleep were “kill the ump”. I watched you compete athletically with all the emotions a psychiatrist tries to cure.
When you wrestled, I was sure your opponent had broken both arms and your nose. The day you were swacked in the face, glasses, capped teeth and all, by a lacrosse stick, I knew that I was clinically dead.
Who could forget your 16th year? I never valued my independence until you got yours. There were girls and proms and staying out too late, and having to come home too early and being grounded, althought I never figured out if that was my punishment or yours.
There were gardenia corsages, and “Mom, nobody wears a white shirts anymore with a tux. It has to be blue with ruffles,” and remembering the little boy who always forgot to wash his hands for dinner, and to brush his teeth if he wanted to see what was on TV.
Well, we both know that you ate your way through senior high and fed half the senior class in my kitchen as well. I’m glad. Milk and cookies and hundreds of brownies filled th gap between mother and son until it became friend and griend.
There isn’t a dirty gym sock and Raquel and Bridgette and The Rolling Stone are gone, along with some of your father’s neckties and two-dozen brownies. The telephone has been silent all evening.
I close my eyes and see you loping through the house, promising to write, still jumping to touch the top of each door frame. I look at the pencil inches on the bedroom door – in stocking feet of course, no cheating – and remember the beginnings.
A shiny set of cowboy pistols strapped to your belt; the first 90 on a spelling paper proudly pasted on the refrigerator dorr, and the day that buried a bird, and needed to know all about heaven.
I remember the first smudged Mother’s day card, the wilted bunches of dandelions, the questions I was too busy to answer and the ones I didn’t know how to answer.
It seems only yesterday that you were dribbling your basketball in the living room, fielding your baseball in the hall and fracturing your bed.
Today, you have a future of your own and a boyhood tucked away in your back pocket. You are leaving as I always wanted you to, but there is an ache in my heart for yesterday
Wow.
Now the story.
Mom put that on my pillow in August of 1984, the day I packed my room to go to college.
Happy Mothers Day,
Love your Son.
