It’s hard being the friend of a writer, harder still being a family member. Sooner or later, you will end up in print. In the realm of family, I have, in the course of what is now a rather lengthy writing career used my words to wound, but later-hopefully-to heal.
Anyone who knows anything about the Reagan family knows that this mother-daughter dance has been a delicate, complicated affair. But last weekend, a velvety sun, warm and gold, flowed down through the trees on us as we sat outside and ate lunch from trays. The parrot from a neighbor’s house whistled the way construction workers whistle at women, and we laughed at the sound. My father smiled when our laughter folded around him. He was clothed in layers he would never have worn in younger days; my mother brought out two hats-one for herself and one for me, which she sent home with me at the end of the day-to shield us from the sun we used to bake under in long ago summers.
My mother pulled up memories from her past: My grade-school math teacher whom I had such a crush on; I deliberately flunked math so I could go to summer school with him. And the night my mother and I put my grandmother to bed after my grandfather’s funeral. “Do you think he’s dancing tonight?” my grandmother asked. Later in the afternoon, under the shade of arching trees beside a pool that no one swims in anymore, my mother said, “I’m not sure it’s good to have so many memories. It just makes you miss everything so much more.” I told her that memories are the riches of a life. “Without them, you’d wonder what you did with your time,” I said. But the truth is, I didn’t know what to tell her.
At some point, the past becomes a deck of cards and the memories you choose to recall-the sweeter ones-are the ones you pull out. Not the ones you once used as artillery. Because in some year, some season, some sailing across of the moon, you finally got it. You got that a young woman carried you in her body and nine months later gave birth to you, and you are alive because of that. And in the years that tumbled down like dice after that, the two of you fought, and cried, and hurt each other … and then healed, and fought again. But you couldn’t get away from the fact that you were once as joined as any two human beings can be-connected by blood flow. Your lungs, your heart, your limbs formed in that warm, watery world that belonged to the woman you would come to know as your mother. You would fight her, rail against her, but you could never leave her. No matter what she did. No matter what you did.
I followed my mother down stepping stones onto a lower level of the garden where lemon trees provide shade for a soft green covering of baby’s tears around the base of camellias and ferns. And then out into bright sun where rose bushes were exploding with blooms. I remembered, more than 40 years ago, at our house in Pacific Palisades, seeing my mother bending over rose bushes along our driveway with her basket, and her gardening gloves, and her clippers. She tended to roses, clipped the fresh blooms, brought them into the house and put them in vases.
A gardener tends to the rose bushes now. We are all so much older. I should have said this to her about memories: They are like patches on a quilt. Stitched together, they keep you warm. You pull them across you on chilly evenings and fold them at the foot of the bed in summer. They are never far away. They remind you that life is messy, stained with tears, opened wide with laughter. On a good quilt, there are empty spaces between the stitching.
We stitched up a day last weekend. It was just Sunday, but it was called Mother’s Day. And I will remember the thick butterscotch sun, and my father laughing at our laughter, and my mother looking so tiny beside the tall rose bushes….
