two unrelated thoughts
Nov. 8th, 2004 03:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady71) my mother, recently given a perfectly clean bill of health including a kidney ultrasound, is consistently experiencing a totally inexplicable terrible salty taste in her mouth, unrelated to anything she has eaten or drunk. she cannot imagine what it is. neither can any of her doctors.
but she doesn't have diabetes or kidney failure or high blood pressure or anything else at all. so i suppose that part's good. maybe i'll buy her some gum... i can't think of anything more helpful.
2) a friend of the family, one of the other moms in my mother's little group of friends when i was a kid, a woman who was over at our house all the time when i was little but whom i haven't seen in person in five or ten years or so, died a couple of days ago. her name was Maveret Daigle. she had bone marrow cancer and was doing well but took ill suddenly and just died the other night. i hadn't seen her in forever; i don't remember what she did for a living, i know her husband is the EMT who responded first when my sister Ann rolled the black jeep onto the Goodmans' lawn over at Pinewoods & Gutbrodt.
all i remember of Maveret is that she was the only person we knew who smoked. i also remember that she was the first person i ever heard utter the expression "colder than a witch's tit", in regards to the weather. she was nothing if not colorful.
but i was sorry to hear she had died. mom recently went to a lunch where all the moms of her contemporary group got together-- mrs. bayly, mrs. desorrento, mrs. buonnanno, mrs. hegarty, and mrs. daigle (sorry if i forgot anybody. maybe mrs. broderick was there too?)-- and remembered what it was like back when the kids were all underfoot and none of them had any money. i guess they were the melrose moms-- i think all of them lived in our little hamlet of melrose, or close to it. i'm not sure what made them into a group, in particular. except that they all had children between 1977 and 1987. to remember those times is to remember the baylys' 4th of july parties and the bi-directional parade down Ave. A (a central street in Melrose; there is no Avenue B) that always preceded it, to remember barefoot summers and best friends you didn't like very much but shared your whole life with and even took baths with, to remember being occasionally utterly bewildered by the exceedingly wicked things the moms said, and the delightedly awful laughter that followed. (i guess they joked about setting up a prostitution ring out of their houses to make money on the side. i mean, who would ever expect it? nobody!)
i was sorry to hear about maveret. i always loved her name. i wish her son had turned out better. but i didn't expect much else-- he taught me all the dirty words i knew until about high school. (she used to joke that she had contemplated tattooing the telephone number of the poison control center onto his forehead, but it wasn't really a joke. she just used magic marker. perhaps that's a joke instead, but i'm not telling.)
and now i remember-- it was at her house that i tripped and fell chin-first onto a chair when i was 2, and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. at the hospital they put a blue plastic cloth over my face so that i wouldn't see the doctor hurting me and become afraid of doctors, so i shrieked and shrieked because this blue thing was hurting me and i didn't know why, and they had taken away my stuffed animal du jour for no good reason at all (which traumatized my mother more than me). still, that damn blue thing, and sitting on maveret's knee as she looked at the cut, are probably among my earliest memories.
there was a couch in maveret's living room with a bearskin rug on it, that still had its head and claws. i used to pet it, and the hair was very coarse and cool. the house had no carpets and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. i could probably draw the layout for you. i think i was baby-sat there often when i was very small, but i don't remember the circumstances, only the layout of the house. and something involving legos and the piano bench. and the fact that it all needed a coat of paint or varnish, including the outside of the house, but it never got it.
i couldn't tell you why i'm not using capital letters in this post except for some of the proper names, but at some point i decided that's what i was going to do. i apologize; i've no real reason except for feeling a little bit flattened at the moment.
two of the moms from my mother's circle of friends are dead; two others of the moms have dead sons. mom is 52; most of the other moms are around 5 years of her age. mrs. bayly's son was 17 when he died, for no reason, god no reason at all-- that was awful and the whole county went into shock because everyone loves the baylys. i remember calling him john-john when he must've been about 4 (so me and tara were 7 or 8 i think) and was running around naked, blond, gleeful, curly-headed and hyperactive and hitting his sister tara with an aluminum baseball bat. mrs. broderick's son was 29, i think, and he also died for no reason to the shock of everyone-- but at least without violence, as he had lived. i remember him less well because he was much older but he taught my older sister to play the drums.
i remember an increasing number of people who are dead now. thank God none of them are my immediate family (and i frequently do). and death still perplexes me, because i don't entirely understand it. but the number of people i remember who are now dead is only going to increase. i suppose the only solution is to view it as a positive thing-- i will only know more people as i go on in life, and whether they are live or dead doesn't affect my ability to remember them.
but she doesn't have diabetes or kidney failure or high blood pressure or anything else at all. so i suppose that part's good. maybe i'll buy her some gum... i can't think of anything more helpful.
2) a friend of the family, one of the other moms in my mother's little group of friends when i was a kid, a woman who was over at our house all the time when i was little but whom i haven't seen in person in five or ten years or so, died a couple of days ago. her name was Maveret Daigle. she had bone marrow cancer and was doing well but took ill suddenly and just died the other night. i hadn't seen her in forever; i don't remember what she did for a living, i know her husband is the EMT who responded first when my sister Ann rolled the black jeep onto the Goodmans' lawn over at Pinewoods & Gutbrodt.
all i remember of Maveret is that she was the only person we knew who smoked. i also remember that she was the first person i ever heard utter the expression "colder than a witch's tit", in regards to the weather. she was nothing if not colorful.
but i was sorry to hear she had died. mom recently went to a lunch where all the moms of her contemporary group got together-- mrs. bayly, mrs. desorrento, mrs. buonnanno, mrs. hegarty, and mrs. daigle (sorry if i forgot anybody. maybe mrs. broderick was there too?)-- and remembered what it was like back when the kids were all underfoot and none of them had any money. i guess they were the melrose moms-- i think all of them lived in our little hamlet of melrose, or close to it. i'm not sure what made them into a group, in particular. except that they all had children between 1977 and 1987. to remember those times is to remember the baylys' 4th of july parties and the bi-directional parade down Ave. A (a central street in Melrose; there is no Avenue B) that always preceded it, to remember barefoot summers and best friends you didn't like very much but shared your whole life with and even took baths with, to remember being occasionally utterly bewildered by the exceedingly wicked things the moms said, and the delightedly awful laughter that followed. (i guess they joked about setting up a prostitution ring out of their houses to make money on the side. i mean, who would ever expect it? nobody!)
i was sorry to hear about maveret. i always loved her name. i wish her son had turned out better. but i didn't expect much else-- he taught me all the dirty words i knew until about high school. (she used to joke that she had contemplated tattooing the telephone number of the poison control center onto his forehead, but it wasn't really a joke. she just used magic marker. perhaps that's a joke instead, but i'm not telling.)
and now i remember-- it was at her house that i tripped and fell chin-first onto a chair when i was 2, and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. at the hospital they put a blue plastic cloth over my face so that i wouldn't see the doctor hurting me and become afraid of doctors, so i shrieked and shrieked because this blue thing was hurting me and i didn't know why, and they had taken away my stuffed animal du jour for no good reason at all (which traumatized my mother more than me). still, that damn blue thing, and sitting on maveret's knee as she looked at the cut, are probably among my earliest memories.
there was a couch in maveret's living room with a bearskin rug on it, that still had its head and claws. i used to pet it, and the hair was very coarse and cool. the house had no carpets and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. i could probably draw the layout for you. i think i was baby-sat there often when i was very small, but i don't remember the circumstances, only the layout of the house. and something involving legos and the piano bench. and the fact that it all needed a coat of paint or varnish, including the outside of the house, but it never got it.
i couldn't tell you why i'm not using capital letters in this post except for some of the proper names, but at some point i decided that's what i was going to do. i apologize; i've no real reason except for feeling a little bit flattened at the moment.
two of the moms from my mother's circle of friends are dead; two others of the moms have dead sons. mom is 52; most of the other moms are around 5 years of her age. mrs. bayly's son was 17 when he died, for no reason, god no reason at all-- that was awful and the whole county went into shock because everyone loves the baylys. i remember calling him john-john when he must've been about 4 (so me and tara were 7 or 8 i think) and was running around naked, blond, gleeful, curly-headed and hyperactive and hitting his sister tara with an aluminum baseball bat. mrs. broderick's son was 29, i think, and he also died for no reason to the shock of everyone-- but at least without violence, as he had lived. i remember him less well because he was much older but he taught my older sister to play the drums.
i remember an increasing number of people who are dead now. thank God none of them are my immediate family (and i frequently do). and death still perplexes me, because i don't entirely understand it. but the number of people i remember who are now dead is only going to increase. i suppose the only solution is to view it as a positive thing-- i will only know more people as i go on in life, and whether they are live or dead doesn't affect my ability to remember them.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 06:24 am (UTC)So, sadly, that's not it. I mean, I know, eew, it'd be gross, but it'd be better than ceaseless mystery. one never really likes medical mysteries, particularly not when they happen in one's mom. Maybe on TV shows or something, but not in Mom.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 05:26 pm (UTC)