postcard from CA

Mom's been staying with me for a couple of weeks now, and as we sit here in her sunny blue and white bedroom ~ reminiscing, kvetching, and singing silly old songs together ~ I talk her into composing our very first joint blog entry. Mom searches for something to say.

"Aloha!"

I read back what we've written so far.

"You're going too fast. You wrote the comma, but you didn't act the comma."

I reread the scintillating prose.

"What should I say now?" I prompt.

"I don't know. Nothing's coming to me."

My 92 year-old Mom's looking very jaunty in my baseball cap from 'Turks'; a saloon in Dana Point where we celebrated my birthday a while back.

"I'm older than that," she says. "I think I'm...102."

"No, you're not. You'll be 93 in April."

"I was born in 1913. This is 2006."

"Exactly. Do the math."

We stare at each other for a few seconds, frowning slightly, attempting to wrap our minds around the simple arithmetic ~ Mom slowly because she is 92; me, slowly because I'm just slow. And I even already know the answer. Math is hard.

"Tell them about how cold and rainy it is in sunny California," she says. Mom's a native New Yorker who's currently on the lam from Texas, where last time I visited they were evacuating the state in anticipation of a hurricane. She's been complaining since she got here ~ about the weather, the altitude, how cold my house is and, for some strange reason, how tiny my toilets are.

"Sorry, Mom, but I am the mayor of Tiny Toilet Town, and you're my prisoner. You'll just have to deal." Mom is pretty tiny herself, all 4' 7"and 87 pounds of her, so I'm not quite sure what the problem is. Mom likes to complain.

On the other hand, whenever we go out she keeps wanting to buy me things. Like leather jackets, steak knives, a 150 year-old bronze Buddha statue; a microwave.

"Tell them about how I want to buy you a microwave and you don't want one because you have no room in the kitchen. Put it in your bedroom."

"I just don't need one. I raise my own cattle, grow my own vegetables and prepare everything from scratch. And I don't cook in the bedroom."

"Maybe you would if you had a microwave." That's what I need; less distance between me and food prep.

"But then where would I put the Buddha statue?"

"On top of the microwave." You have to hand it to her. Mom is nothing if not persistent.

We've been doing all the things we love to do together ~ cooking, shopping for clothes, browsing for furniture; watching old movies, entertaining friends and haunting antique stores. Especially haunting antique stores. I walk behind her, amiably pushing her wheelchair into walls as she calls out for me to slow down. Shopkeepers look on anxiously as I misjudge yet another corner.

"We're making them nervous," says Mom, as we head for a shelf containing antique glassware.

"We make me nervous," I reply. She giggles.

In between, we've been living on Entenmann's Cheese Filled Coffee Cake, Hershey's Kisses and Russell Stover's chocolates ~ which means by the time Mom leaves, I'll have gained another 27 pounds, and Mom will still be...tiny. We are nothing if not consistent.

"What do you think, Ma? Can I post it?"

"Email. So he can read it," she says, referring to my brother.

"No, Mom. On the internet. Anyone can read it." She frowns.

"Oh, no. I don't like that. It's private."

"Not really," I say. "It's just a tiny piece of our lives; it's as if we were writing a little slice of life - type story for a magazine or a newspaper column. And no one knows who we are. It's us, but it's everyone really."

She looks tired and a little wan. I've been overachieving as activities director ever since she got here. In my zeal to make every moment a memorable one, I sometimes forget to stop and let her smell the roses of her own choosing ~ like lingering over coffee in the morning, or dozing off in the noonday sun.

"Okay, you do what you want." She shrugs.

I post.