My Mother as a Five-Pointed Star

The holidays bring out the dead like dust on Christmas ornaments.  Here is the knitted green and white stocking embroidered BECKY in red block letters pinned to the sofa every Christmas morning of my childhood and stuffed with gifts. Here are the hand-painted red candelabra that Mom brought back from Sweden after her divorce, braving her fear of flying to visit a dying man she had loved as a teenager. Here is the Christmas-cookie-thin five-pointed gold star etched NANCY RICE above birth and death dates.

“Mom as a Christmas-tree ornament, that is beyond tacky,” I complained when first retrieving the star from its plastic baggie inside the Christmas-tree-edged mailer from the funeral home.

But my soon-to-be-ex husband said it was “kind of festive,” and proceeded to attach it to a branch of the tabletop tree that Mom had bought years ago in Florida. Since I didn’t know whether he was being sincere or sarcastic and since the holidays tended to manufacture more marital discord than elves made toys—fights had erupted over broken glass ornaments and a shortage of wrapping paper--I decided not to object. The ornament stayed right where he had placed it, on an upper branch of the fake forest-green tree with its tiny, phallic-shaped lights and Lilliputian Santas.   

When we divorced six years later and divided up our stuff, I got the tabletop tree and the ornament, along with the Swedish candlesticks and my childhood stocking. The first holiday season, heady with the mulled-wine independence of keeping Christmas any way I chose, I considered leaving the tree and its creepy star in the basement of the rental unit where I had moved.

But I had a lot of time on my hands during that first post-divorce Christmas—my son lived mostly with his father and I had only brief filial sightings. To avoid feeling sorry for myself, a female Scrooge supping alone on grog and gruel, I fled not further away from Christmas but deeper into it, like a driver in a winter storm steering into the skid.    

After inventorying of my remaining Christmas-themed items—a tin full of reindeer cookie cutters, a couple of stained red felt tablecloths, my mother’s gargantuan Christmas tree stand that some wag at The Christmas Tree Shops had dubbed “The Last Stand”—I made an executive decision: time to restock.

Money was tight that year—I got my tree at Ace Hardware, when they went on sale for $10 a pop—but fortunately my redeemer was at hand: in the aisles of The Fisher Home of the Hospice Shop in Amherst, where Christmas could be had for a song, or, to be more precise, a Halleluiah chorus, recorded on a gently used Mormon Tabernacle Choir CD. At this elegant thrift store on University Drive, staffed by a platoon of welcoming, elderly ladies, I filled up shopping basket after shopping basket: I scored Santa tea towels, gold-tipped ceramic angels, Reindeer pillows, Frosty the Snowman candles, garlands of colored Christmas lights, boxes of antique Christmas ornaments.

Coming home with my Christmas booty, I spent afternoons descending into the twilight and obsessing: three Christmas pillows on the couch or two? Two strands of chili lights on the bookcases or one? Christmas wreath or antique horn above the pellet stove? One afternoon, with the thrilling strains of the Messiah urging me on, I clumped down to the basement, hauled my mother’s tiny tree from its cardboard box, smoothed out its arthritic branches, set it on an antique end table, plugged it in, and pondered: Star? Or no star?

In the end, I let the star stay on the tree, where it remains on the same end table in yet another rental unit. When my son comes home from college this year, we will bake Christmas cookies and play Handel’s Messiah and talk about his grandmother in the days before she became a five-pointed star and I will tell him, as she told me over and over again: “Your presence is the best Christmas present I could ever have.”

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Late Afternoon on Onota Lake

I wake with it in the morning as I swallow fish oil pills. I meet it while filling out financial aid forms for my college-aged son. It follows me driving to the post office to mail the electric bill or waiting in line to buy Greek yogurt at Whole Foods. It is there in the rear view mirror of my heart, as I rise at three in the morning, padding to the bathroom to down a fistful of homeopathic sleeping pills, as I pull the covers over my head, hoping they will rock me to sleep. I imagine placing it under the bed, letting it remain with the box of old yearbooks and yellowing obituaries.  

But the mind refuses to be cajoled. The image will not let me go. It starts gently, with nearly inaudible softness, like the opening bars of Fur Elise. It moves outward toward a nearly still body of water, a lake named Onota. It pools wider to include a moment in time, four o’clock on an early June afternoon when the din from the motor boats and jet skis has died down, when the sun is lower above the trees on the far shore, but there is still plenty of warmth and daylight. This is the hour when he might have hauled out the scull to row it to Appletree Point or settled in one of the paint-chipped Adirondack chairs, bare feet resting against pine needles, and finished the Times’ crossword puzzle, nursing a cup of black coffee and waiting until five when he might replace it with a glass of Chardonnay.

But the mind is nothing but a master of legerdemain because these images are buried deep in the past like arrowheads, and on this late afternoon in June in two thousand and fourteen, he is no longer anything resembling the man in the photographs on the memorial table beneath the white tent, he is a collection of bone and ash, and I am not his twice-married sixty-year-old daughter, to whom he once said kind or cruel things, I am a solitary figure among others, sister, brother, nephews, grandchildren, each of us taking a handful of ashes and walking silently to the water’s edge and flinging it among the muddy leaves and mating dragonflies…  

My hands are dusty, clay-y with him as I rub them together, brush them off while walking back up the steep, root-thick path to the cabin and parking lot. I have let him go, consigned him to the waters of Onota Lake, where he will travel southeastward to mingle with the Housatonic River and southward again 149 miles to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean.

I have let him go. I do not want to let him go.

Weeks later, I learn that Onota is a Mohican word that means deep blue.

It is a small thing, a clue in one of his crossword puzzles, but for now it is enough.  

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How to Live to 90: In Memory of John Hamilton Rice

Published in “The Hampshire Gazette”

Father’s Day--June 20, 2009 

Read at Memorial Service at Onota Lake Camp 

Berkshire Natural Resources Council 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts June 7, 2014

My father, who turned 90 recently at his assisted living facility in Maine, would just as soon have let the day go by without blowing out one birthday candle, but we three children, who are getting on in years ourselves, needed some fanfare.

After much e-mailing, Dad and Janet, his companion of many decades, agreed to attend a dinner party at my sister's in New Hampshire. There were 16, including in-laws, grandchildren and various significant others. A Civil War-era cannon was fired; meat was roasted on a grill; tributes were read. This is my tribute - I am his younger daughter from his second marriage - which I wrote as a half-mocking, half-serious self-help treatise about how to become a nonagenarian based on what I learned from him.

Run. Get up every morning and run two miles before breakfast, when others in the household are still sleeping; run in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in summer heat that ripples the blacktop, run so hard so that your face drips with sweat, soaks your faded tee-shirt, darkens your gray athletic socks, makes your daughters hold their noses and cry "Pee-you" when they hug you. Run every day for 30 years, Sundays and holidays, on business trips and vacations, until your hips will no longer carry you, and then walk.

Read. The New York Times, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Savage God. The Lives of a Cell. A Brief History of Time. Read everywhere -riding the chairlift at Bousquet's with The Brothers Karamozov in your parka pocket; it's only a 10 minute ride, but after you've pulled down the safety bar, settled your skis on the painted rung, slipped your poles along your wrist, you can telemark into another world larger than all the blue hills of the Berkshires, the world of the Grand Inquisitor that poses the only questions worth asking: Is there a God? And why does He permit some to be happy and others to suffer?

Play. Play the piano because you always wanted to and were never allowed to as a child because your parents said it was for sissies, for girls. Play Chopin the Prelude in C, the Nocturne in E Flat Major --late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. Play even though it's hard to stretch your arthritic fingers across those octaves, hard to capture all the subtle crescendos and diminuendos, play even though you ll never sound like your concert-pianist teacher with her nimble, fairy fingers, play because it moves you, because it holds you in the moment, because it makes you forget about everything you have lost.

Laugh. Don t take anything, especially yourself, too seriously, because it's all passing, the tragic and the comic, and nothing endures, even the wittiest remarks, the family dinner years ago when you said to your 38-year-old younger daughter, when she couldn t seem to settle on an occupation or a boyfriend, much less a husband, "You know, Becky, life isn't for everyone." You laughed. She laughed, even though the joke was on her. The fool, you often pointed out, is the wisest man in Shakespeare, and he who laughs lasts, as your favorite bumper sticker says.

Eat. Fill your plate. Take seconds. Take thirds. Steak, scalloped potatoes, Cole slaw, Stickie buns, anything chocolate brownies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate turtles nestled in gold paper and tucked in gold boxes from the candy store that the smiling salesperson saves just for you, that you squirrel away in the top right hand drawer of your desk and munch on to sweeten all those nasty chores like staying up late to finish your taxes.

Drink. Raise your glass. Make a toast. Chardonnay. Sauvignon Blanc. Pinot Grigio. You're no oenophile, you don t really get terms like nose and palette. You'd be just as happy with a $10 bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay as with a $200 dollar bottle of Chateau Margeaux. But you drink because you love the taste of the sweet-sharp, oak-like bouquet swilling down your throat, love the altered state that makes death and taxes fly away, the buzz that fills the world with oxytocin, makes everything worthy of your attention.

Change. Stop drinking. Eat less. Travel to the North Pole. Take a dip in the frigid, 40-degree waters. Leave the western Massachusetts city you were born and raised in, the county where you have lived nearly all your 85 years and move to an assisted living facility, Piper Shores, on the coast of Maine. Join a weekly men's doubles group, even though you hate doubles. Walk four miles a day. Walk the flat hard sand of Higgins beach at low tide, in summer and in winter, in rain and in snow.

Break your hip a week before Christmas, recover in Holbrook, the acute care wing which you wouldn't enter when first touring Piper Shores. Stay there for three weeks, even though the food is terrible and the demented old folks give you the willies. Learn to use a walker, learn to get around with a cane. Return to your condo. Take up all the scatter rugs so you don t break the other hip. Walk the paved lanes near Higgins Beach, enjoy the spectacle of dogs off their leashes chasing seagulls, even though you ve always hated dogs. Vote for Barack Obama, even though you ve voted the Republican ticket for most of your life.

End every telephone conversation with your partner, your children and grandchildren with the words, I love you, even though you come from a generation that isn t comfortable expressing sentiment. Hug your friends and family at the beginning and end of every visit. Say, Thank you for coming, say I love you, say I love you.

Copyright 2009, Daily Hampshire Gazette, All Rights Reserved.