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I love listening to songs from my youth.
Songs from the 80’s make me want to dance.
Songs from the 70’s make me remember my mom.
I don’t miss her at the conscious level.
My mom and dad were not what you might call traditional.
They didn’t impart wisdom or share advice.
Turns out, they were just a couple of kids trying to make it in what amounted to a third world country at the time.
Parts of Mississippi and Arkansas in the summer of love was not a hippie haven.
Long haired freaky people who married right out of high school were few and far between.
Especially one who aspired to be a rock and roll songwriter.
I’m not sure what my mom’s dream was.
Older me thinks it was a family.
She didn’t have one.
When she was seven or eight, her mom died from lung cancer.
She and her three sisters were shipped off to an aunt and uncle while her Dad finished his tour in the Army.
He was coming home on leave to see his girls, when the Greyhound he was riding on crashed and he was killed.
The legend was because he was so excited to see his daughters, he was sitting up front.
Only the three people in the front died in the crash, along with the bus driver.
The daughters were shuffled among the relatives, always staying together, but with a sense of loss.
So maybe that’s a story I made up in my mind.
Her wanting a family.
Or that might have been my wish.
I feel like I’ve been on my own for just about forever.
Babysitting my younger brother at the age of five. He was three. Cooking. Cleaning.
Working for my grandfather at eight.
A sense of independence from an early age.
No wonder I am an anti-authority figure. I spend a lot of time reminding myself to listen to experts because I do not always know better!
I don’t think my mom was good at family.
There were too many drugs, too much booze, too many moves from town to town.
Always hunting for something. A better job. A better life.
I inherited that sense of restlessness and turned it into a desire to explore.
To learn and discover and uncover.
She died at 42. Too young by far. I was 22, no more than a kid.
Back from overseas, ready to share stories about what I saw on a Christmas break that turned tragic.
She’s been gone longer now than I knew her alive.
Her children left with memories and each other, but we are scattered too.
California, New Mexico and me, between Arkansas and Florida.
I don’t “miss” her because we didn’t have that type of relationship.
I didn’t just call her up to talk, back when long distance cost .10 a minute or more.
We had a system. Call and let the phone ring twice to say you’re on your way or that you arrived.
If someone answered, just say you made it and hang up.
Except when a song comes on from the 70’s.
The haints come then, a cascade of smells and flashes of memory that rise up like a tsunami of emotion that threatens to overwhelm.
The smell of rain through the screen door, vacuuming on a Saturday morning after cartoons.
Ghosts, I call them, and their power is paramount. Ghosts that tighten the throat and make the eyes swim, and I wonder if the sadness is because of missing her or because of all of what might have been.
The years of knowing her as an adult. Me, not her.
I love old music, and sometimes it feels like torture, but I think, maybe I have to live with that torture.
Because I don’t want to forget to remember her.
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