This I Believe

Mother doesn’t call anymore. Yet I think of her each time the phone rings, even though she died in 1981 after a series of strokes and operations.

Before she was ill, Catherine (a name I never called her), would ring up once or twice a week, usually at night. I knew she was lonely. We lived on one side of town with our children, and she lived on the other, by herself, a block from my sister.

Mother always began the conversation by saying she didn’t want to bother us; she only wanted to know how we were doing. “Fine,” I’d say. And we’d pirouette back and forth like that for a minute.

I knew what she wanted. Mother needed to hear her son talk to her, know again that he was real, saying anything, important or not, which would reinforce a connnection in life which, although I didn’t know it, was flickering and about to give out. So I would talk, overcoming my aggravation with the ring of a phone after a long day at work and helping get the kids ready for bed.

It shouldn’t be hard to be kind to one’s mother. But sometimes it is. Repeating the obvious again and again with patience to anyone who needs reassurance is tedious. I am embarrassed to admit it took effort on my part. We visited her almost every week. She spoke less and less, because of her illness. She came to our house for dinner often, with her sister doing the driving. Mother observed our children and their accomplishssments with a silent delight as she sat at the dinner table.

Mother wasn’t always ill and passive. I remember her during the Second World War as a lively little woman with reddish hair and big eyes that showed wonder. Single-handedly she kept our family together while my father was away in Germany. In her youth she was tireless. She had a hearty laugh and loved gossip.

Catherine took different jobs to support us. One of her jobs was an ambulance driver. During the day, she left us in the company of an elderly aunt, a woman who needed more watching than my younger sisters and I put together.

But I recall my mother best in old age, barely speaking on the phone. By then she was ill and couldn’t manage much more than a “Hello”. She slurred her words because of repeated small strokes. “How are you?” she’d say. “Fine,” I’d say. She called, it seemed to me now, as much for the familiar sound of my voice or nostalgia for the old times as anything else.

So I’d tell again the story of how, at age eight, I let the spaghetti sauce hit the ceiling because I didn’t seal the pressure cooker. I can hear her throaty laugh as I’d tell it. And then, to her delight and for what seemed the hundredth time, I’d tell how I tried to paint the kitchen over, in bright yellow, to cover up the spaghetti sauce. How proud she was of me for that, and wasn’t I her little man, she’d say.

Mother didn’t say much befor eshe died. But her piercing blue eyes in the hospital said everything. She had an understanding of what the poet John Montague meant when he wrote: “Secret, lonely messages along the aiar, older than humming telephone wires, blood talk, neglected affinities of family, antennae of instinct reaching through space, first intelligene.”

I regret I didn’t keep her on the line longer. Now when the phone rings, I think for an instant that it is Catherine. She is about to say, “Hello.” Then I realize that mother never calls anymore.