So right after promising that I’d update this thing once a day or so, I lapse for five days. Typical me, eh? Sorry about that. Quite a few things happened in those five days, so I’ll just jump right in.
On Friday, 12/11, I played my tuba with a small group from the brass band to help out the Salvation Army’s “Red Kettle” deal that they do every December. You know the drill. You go into a grocery store (or department store or mall or hardware store or automotive store or massage parlor) and, in doing so, you pass a woman dressed in a Salvation Army uniform and ringing a bell so furiously that you’re tempted to knock it out of her hand and tell her that you need 6 more minutes of sleep. Suspended next to her, by a chain attached to a red tripod, is a red plastic pail with a hole in the cover. After you’ve done your shopping or gotten your massage, you emerge from the store and you guiltily stare at the ground while walking past her as quickly as possible, hoping that some other decent person will put money in her bucket, thereby drawing attention away from the fact that you’re not putting money in said bucket because you used a debit card to pay for everything and you don’t have any change.
At least that’s what I do.
For the last several years, however, the GBB has allowed me to feel a bit less guilty by grabbing a tuba or euphonium or trombone or alto horn, standing right next to the bucket lady, and playing Christmas music with 4 or 5 of my closest brass-playing friends. The idea being, of course, that we can guilt more people into putting money into the bucket. From what I’ve been told, it actually works.
So that’s what I did on Friday evening outside of one of the Sam’s Warehouse stores in Dekalb County. Our little ensemble was comprised of cornet, alto horn, trombone, euphonium and, as I mentioned, my tuba and me. We played until about 8 O’Clock. Although it was quite nippy, I had a great time.
Doing these gigs in the cold never fails to remind me of caroling with my trombone in Middlebury or Shoreham in the 1970s, invariably having to go inside a store or house at some point in order to unfreeze my slide, and finishing things up by quaffing hot chocolate at someone’s house. I always enjoyed those relatively impromptu performances, and I still do.
Betsy Jones was the euphoniumist for the Red Kettle gig. She’s from Warner-Robins, south of Macon, GA, and she was also playing a couple of church services with me on Sunday – with a rehearsal on Saturday morning – so she spent Friday and Saturday at my house. After the Saturday rehearsal, we’d been planning to maybe walk around historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta or go to the zoo or maybe even just take our horns and a Tuba Christmas book and hang out by a mall and play for change; but because the weather was so dreary (rainy and about 30 degrees), we opted instead to watch movies, make stuffed pasta shells and pumpkin bread, and play Scrabble for most of the day.
She kicked my ass in the Scrabble portion of those activities.
The Sunday services went fairly well, and we collected our checks and spent the rest of the afternoon (still dreary) eating the aforementioned pasta shells and listening to a very cool modern mass called “The Armed Man,” composed by Karl Jenkins.
Now I’m going to jump back to Friday evening. Hate to confuse everyone by getting things all out of order here, but I didn’t want to plug what follows into the middle of an ongoing ramble as it’s kind of significant.
A few weeks ago, I got a text from Greg informing me that a doctor had found a growth on Mom’s pancreas and some spots on her liver. I called Mom to get more details about this and she told me that she’d be getting a biopsy done last Monday (the 7th) and would have some results on Thursday (the 10th). So while driving home from the Red Kettle gig, I called her to find out what was going on.
The news is not good. She tells me that she’s in the final stages of incurable pancreatic cancer and she’s got somewhere between 6 months and a year in which to correct my manners, pass on bits of republican indoctrination, give me cooking tips and the like.
Our conversation on Friday night was quite naturally not a short one and I am, also I think quite naturally, a bit weirded out by the news. That doesn’t sound quite right, but “devastated” isn’t the right word. It’s hard to internalize the fact of your only mother’s ultimate demise after she’s very calmly laid everything out for you and when she sounds healthy enough and when your brain rarely attempts to deal with anything that is more than a day removed from right now. Add to that that I’m a naturally hopeful person (I really am), and you’ll understand why I just don’t know how to feel. Nostalgia, I guess, is my primary emotion right now. I’ve been continually tripping over memories of Mom that had, for the most part, been stored on the cobweb-covered shelves in the basement of my brain. I thought I’d try to put some of those down in this blog over the next several weeks – partly to help myself cope and partly because, if Mom still reads this, she might be made aware of some of the little things that she’s done or said over the last 44 years that had effects on me.
I’d have to say that the strongest memory at this point is of a phone call that I made to her at about midnight on a December night in 2004. I’d broken up with Audrey a couple of weeks earlier, had done everything I could to repair the damage – without success – and I was inconsolable. I’m quite certain that mothers aren’t trained in how to take phones calls from their sobbing, unintelligible, 38-year-old sons; but my Mom did an admirable job of just listening to me cry, giving me a number of much-needed hugs from 150 miles away, and convincing me that – in spite of my certainty that it was – the world was not ending. I’m sure that she had much better things to be doing (like sleeping) for the hour or two that it took for me to calm down, but she hung with me and made me understand that I could get past things and that, someday, I’d be able to smile again.
She was right, of course. Except for her crazy political ideas, she has usually been right.
TWD