It happens
so rarely, or maybe it happens and then I forget, but this morning Jack was
overseeing a seminar of super-powerful, rich (they tend to go together)
people—all of whom (sorry, but here it is) wanted to meet me—held at 4341
Bagley Parkway, Madison, Wisconsin.
Not heard
of it? Well, it was the family home, the house I grew up in, and it had had a
remarkable transformation—terraces, pools, waterfalls, men smoking expensive
cigars and bejeweled women sipping champagne. It also had my mother, who was in
a hospital bed in a snow bank out in the front yard. I went out to talk to her,
since my brother Johnny had given her a toy bunny, and told her it was from me.
Somehow,
she was still in her hospital bed but in the driveway, which was up a steep
hill. I saw the bunny and chatted briefly with my mother, who decided to get
out of bed. At this point, I had my legs tangled in the side rails, and
Franny—my mother—was crawling over the head of the bed. Desperate to get free
and to help her, I could not; and my mother fell to the pavement and rocked on
her hands and knees on the concrete.
Lady
comes in, just now, to the café where I am writing this.
“Marc,
don’t disappear on me! I gotta talk to you!”
“Oh my God,
I’m in trouble.”
The two
Russians at the table next to me laugh.
“OK, guys,
you gotta protect me…” I tell them.
“Don’t
vorry, ve vill protect you!”
Ah, central
casting came through!
Lady sits
in front of me.
“Treat me
right,” I tell her, “’cause I got the Russian mafia on my side….”
The guys
speak some Russian to her—obviously warning her to go light.
Maybe I’m
thinking of my mother because my brother had sent me a Kindle, since he prefers
to go low tech, and isn’t vexed by the termites that have attacked and in many
cases destroyed my books. And why is it, by the way, that the termites have
exactly the same taste I do, which means that they happily munch away at
precisely and only the same books that I will later want to return and devour?
Lady comes
back, after having gone off to do some business, and we sit to talk for a few
moments. I ask her about Angelou, and Lady tells me: she never met her, but she
did meet her nephew, who bought one of Lady’s books, and then asked her to
dedicate it to Angelou.
“My hands
were shaking,” reports Lady.
We talk for
a bit, about how many people didn’t like Angelou, how some felt that she had an
artificial, almost pompous way of speaking.
“That was
just the way black ladies spoke, in those days,” says Lady. “My aunt still
speaks that way, and my mother did as well.” Lady’s mother was one shade
lighter than Angelou.
So we talk,
Lady and I, and she tells me—there’s no one out there to take Angelou’s place,
no one waiting in the wings.
“It’s not
the loss of the person, it’s the loss of the thought, the way she thought.
Everything was a poem, even her last tweet on Twitter.
And she spoke for everybody. She was the reason I went into poetry, the reason
a lot of people went into poetry. All of a sudden, a black woman could write
poetry.”
Or a white
woman, in the case of my mother, who turned to poetry several months before my
father died, and whose last poem—falling down the rabbit’s hole—was so unbearably
sad that no one has been able to read it since.
She kept
studying trees in winter, wanting to know how trees exploded in golds, russets,
browns, at the end of autumn, before willingly shedding them, getting schooled
in loss, welcoming each leaf as it floats off in the crisp fall air. It settles
on the grass like the feather on the voice of God; the tree now ever so
slightly freer than it was a moment ago.
“She was
never able to use the Kindle I bought for her,” I told Jeanne, my sister-in-law
yesterday. “And she felt so guilty that it had cost almost $500, and I wouldn’t
let her pay me back, and so she tried and tried, and her eyes were so bad, and
she couldn’t see, and anyway, the device was a nightmare. Every button was too
small, and you couldn’t adjust the size of the text, and oh God, at the end she
couldn’t even get the toaster to make toast for her, those last days.
Everything got too complicated, and she was just sitting in her chair, as the
leaves fell from her limbs, and she got free enough to crawl, at long last, to
crawl out from over the head of her bed, and join my father, in the house with
the fountains and the terraces and the rich men and the bejeweled women and the
men with their cigars.”
We’re
trapped, always, in the side rails when we attend the deathbed of a loved one.
Others can come or go, bring trays of food or toy bunnies, but we who love are
trapped in and not in that bed, as we watch without hope of movement or rescue
the one, last, desperate journey, and the fall that inevitably accompanies it,
and the crash, and the splintering of bones, and then the last leaf has fallen
and…
…we get up,
again, and confront a bunny who may not stay in a box, but may, some spring
day, decide to leap in a garden, or into a book, which will be read by
grandmothers to little girls.
I know
that, now….
My
question?
Will I join
them—Maya and Lady and my mother and Jack—in the house with the overflowing
terraces, amid the light and warmth and comfort?
“We got to
find a reason to celebrate with that champagne you bought, after we finally got
the air conditioning fixed,” said Lady, a few days ago.
Lady—we
just have!
