Mother's Day with David Fitzsimmons

Billy “Nose Picker” Dominguez, the 9-year old emcee, stood on a crate behind the cardboard podium with “I love mom” written in crayon on the front.

“Ladies and Germs. Welcome to our first annual Mother’s Day Roast of Mom. I’m your host, Billy. Just a little note here. Ticket sale proceeds for this Mother’s Day Roast of Mom will go to taking mom out for a decent breakfast Sunday morning at the Jerry Bob’s of her choice.”

Billy acknowledged the special guests in the audience with them today.

“Sanchez, our Chihuahua, and Gomez, the hamster. Also I want to thank our sponsor, Dad, for all his help with this Mother’s Day Roast. Before we get started, I just want you to know we have some silent auction items for you to bid on. Tell them what we have, Dad.”

“Well, Billy, we’ve got a report card from 1989 autographed by our guest of honor, a vintage box of macaroni and cheese, a Macayo’s sombrero mug, a Kachina that’s missing a head and a baby shower invitation from 1983. All priceless items!”

“Thank you, Dad! Hey, Pop, how is it you and Mom have stayed together all these years?”

“I haven’t been inside the house since 1963. I’m either changing cooler pads on the roof or raking gravel in the driveway. I’m heading for the roof now.”

“All right, Dad! To get things started, I’d like to welcome my big sister, Carmen, up to the podium. When she’s not dating felons, she’s writing her number on porta-potty walls at the Pima County Fair. Please welcome the only woman I know with her own historical marker at the end of Swan, my horrible sister, Carmen.”

“You are such a liar. I hate you. Stay out of my room.

“Mom, for all the times you nursed me, fed me and changed my diapers, I just want to say ‘thank you.’ And for all those nights I kept you up late, wondering where I was and making you sick with worry — I made this beer coaster for you, out of an actual beer coaster.”

Carmen hugged her mom. She was weeping like the Fountains of Bellagio. “Mija! Thank you, sweetheart. It’s wonderful.”

“I got to go now.”

“So soon? Can’t you stay for the rest of the banquet? I made macaroni and cheese burritos.”

“Thank you, sis. Next up is Mom’s mom. All the way from Three Points, it’s Grandma Higgins!”

“Thank you, Billy. I would like to say something about all of my kids. You never know how beautiful and amazing life can be until you have kids. And then it’s too damned late.”

“Who’d you steal that joke from, Grandma? Moses? And now it’s my turn to say a few words on this Mother’s Day about our guest of honor.

“Mom, thanks for nursing us through measles, chicken pox, runny noses, skinned knees and the occasional broken heart. You are so tough and tender, God must have crossed Delilah and Mrs. Doubtfire with Thelma and Louise. And thank you, Mom, for sparing my life on countless occasions that may have involved fire crackers, BB guns, slingshots, graffiti, plumbing issues, pack rats, wardrobe malfunctions, jalapeños, bows and arrows, pop flies, rubber cement, incontinence, ladder-related injuries, rattlers, water balloons, Tiki torches, bobcats, hot sauce or rabid skunks.

“You always taught us right from wrong, and you weren’t afraid to use unconventional methods. And last, but not least, thank you for all the amazing mac and cheese.

“Mom, you get the final word.”

Wiping the tears away with a beach towel, Mom took to the cardboard podium.

“Well, thank you for this. This is so much nicer than breakfast in bed or jewelry or flowers. When you and your sister would make breakfast I thought the cast of ‘Stomp’ was in my kitchen. You’d trigger the smoke alarm, a salmonella outbreak and a warning from the Pima County Health Department. But nothing says love like a barely thawed frozen burrito, cold coffee and a Dixie cup full of desert marigolds from Mr. Wong’s yard. Seriously, this is the best Mother’s Day Roast I have ever had. I can’t wait to see what you come up with tomorrow morning.

“Carmen, wherever you are, and Billy — and Sanchez and Gomez — this was a great roast. Now who’s going to clean up this mess? Who’s ready to help? Hey, where did everybody go? Hey! You know I can hear you on the roof with your father. ”

It was Mother’s Day, 1962. While Mom and Dad were sleeping in, I was on my Stingray bicycle pedaling in a panic to the Sprouse-Reitz Variety Store on Craycroft, my pockets stuffed with pennies and nickels liberated from my piggy bank with the help of the Master Sergeant’s prized ball-peen hammer. I ran into the dime store, past the comic-book racks and past the soda fountain to the back of the store where I saw that the 99-cent necklace that she would love was still there. I bought it and flew home on my bike.

On Rosemont, an ice cream truck pulled in front of me. I clinched my brakes so hard I left my banana seat and tumbled over my handlebars, ending up on my back, slamming into the asphalt. The driver looked at me and said, “Nice stop, kid.” Palms bloodied, and hair full of gravel, I hopped back on my bike and continued my journey until I skidded into our driveway, grabbed the morning paper, tiptoed inside, wrapped mom’s necklace poorly, plucked a flower, fried up wet scrambled eggs, made some weak coffee with too much sugar and drew “HAPPY MOTHERS DAY” on a sheet of notebook paper.

I knocked and they said come in. Dad called me “Rugrat room service.” I gave her the present with the card. She sobbed. Dad grinned and rolled his eyes. She clutched the cheap costume jewelry to her chest. For a moment I was embarrassed how cheap it is because my mom deserved gold and diamonds for the quality of her mac and cheese alone.

As I was sharing this ancient story with my yawning teenage son, my phone rang. No caller ID. I answered.

“That necklace was as good as gold to me, you nitwit. I’ve been watching since the day I left the world. I cannot believe that you still don’t believe in heaven. Your loss, Mr. Know-It-All. What is wrong with you?”

“Mom?”

“Yes.”

“Mom! Is Dad there?”

“The Master Sergeant is visiting his mother. She lives a cloud over. I wish you were like your father. He remembers his mother. ”

“I think about you all the time.”

“Really? I hear everything up here. It’s been years since you’ve said my name aloud to anyone. Would it kill you to tell your children more stories about me? When you think of me I brag to the other mothers up here. ‘See? My baby boy still cares.’”

I whispered into my phone. “It breaks my heart you never got to meet my wife or see the kids or your great grandkids for that matter.”

“I see everything, Mister Self-Pity. I have the best seat in the house. Your poor wife. Sweet girl. I spoiled you rotten. I’m amazed any girl could put up with you. As for my beautiful grandchildren, and my great grandchildren, who do you think their guardian angel is, for Pete’s sake?”

I thought I must be hallucinating. My son asked me who was calling. “I thought grandma died in ’79.” I shook my head, suggesting I was talking to a crazy person.

“Your father and I are so glad you found work. He just knew you were going end up a bum living in cardboard box on Speedway.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Well, that’s all behind you. Now that you’re an old man, you’re thinking about me again. The memories are popping up out of nowhere like microwaved popcorn aren’t they!? I just wanted to thank you for thinking of me. For once in your life.”

“I think about you every day.”

“Remember when you got the measles Christmas Eve and I held you on my lap and sang you to sleep?”

“I remembered that moment every time I held my own kids when they got sick. How could I forget, ma?”

“Remember that ice cream truck driver? That’s why I’m calling. When he showed up here I tracked him down and gave him a piece of my mind. He still can’t find his halo.”

My son wondered what was so funny.

“Oh, listen, kiddo, I hear the Master Sergeant’s wings. It’s time for me to go. We’re going to listen to the heavenly choir sing a Mother’s Day tribute. You wouldn’t like it. It’s good music. Not that garbage you listen to. One more thing. That ‘cheap’ necklace was worth all the gold and diamonds on earth to me. I love you, boy.”

I watched my phone go dark. “I love you, too.”

My incredulous son asked, “Who was that?”

“An amazing, wonderful old woman I knew long ago.” As my boy was about to leave I stopped him. “Hey, want to hear some amazing stories about your grandmother?”

Trapped, he sighed. “Sure, pop. Sure.”

“Furr’s Cafeteria? Every Sunday? You guys are so boring.”

Mom clutched her wounded heart and feigned a fatal blow. I was being a “real wise guy” at the dinner table, according to the retired Master Sergeant.

“Your mother had a life before you were born.” Not possible. The ancient silver-haired woman sitting across from me whose idea of a thrilling time was falling asleep watching “Perry Mason”?

Enlightenment struck with memorable clarity the day I came home early from Myers Elementary to see and hear, through our screen door, the same oh-so-boring golden girl singing and slow-dancing in our living room as Ella Fitzgerald sang “Ten Cents a Dance” on the Zenith.

“I work at the Palace Ballroom, but gee that palace is cheap.

When I get back to my chilly hall room, I’m much too tired to sleep.”

Mesmerized, I watched her through the gauzy screen as she floated around the ballroom of her imagination, like she was Ginger Rogers or something. Here before me was shocking evidence that she indeed had a life long before I was born, a life she would reveal to me, little by little, “when I was old enough to understand.”

“Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me,

Gosh how they weigh me down.”

Much to my surprise, Artha Jean had once been a beautiful 16-year old girl. Not possible. And she had been a bad girl who loved to dance so much that she fled Rockaway Beach, hitching rides in Model Ts all the way to California, to join a girlfriend in San Francisco who promised her a job dancing on a chorus line on the vaudeville circuit.

Not possible. My mom was Aunt Bea, not Ruby Keeler. She couldn’t be the same depression-era dame who competed in dance marathons, claiming, “I could dance forever. We’d sleep standing up. People would throw coins at us! Ha. I didn’t care.”

People threw coins at the woman who made me empty my pockets into every poor box and open hand she saw. Not possible.

“The chorus line and the marathons weren’t bringing in enough so I become a taxi dancer.” What? A dance hall dime-a-dance girl?

Every Mother’s Day, after I made a miserable breakfast and gave her a hand-scrawled card, the Master Sergeant, a man cursed with two left feet, would move the celebration to our living room, where he had set Glenn Miller loose wailing on the hi-fi. “Ask your mother to dance.” I’d recoil in awkward horror and then we’d all go to Furr’s. Happy Mother’s Day.

I remember doing homework at the dining table one evening, watching Mom do the dishes, when “Tea for Two” came on the radio.

“Picture you upon my knee,

Just tea for two and two for tea.”

She sprinkled a shaker full salt on the linoleum and began spinning and sliding gracefully across the salt like she was doing the shim-sham-shimmy at the Savoy Ballroom. I was seeing things. Not possible.

“Come here.” She stood me up next to her and slowly demonstrated the step.

“It’s the old soft shoe. Fred Astaire did it in ‘Top Hat’.” She adored Fred. “He used sand.” The only Fred I adored was named Flintstone. “Can I go now?”

“Find the beat. Try it. One and two and—”

After a few minutes of me frantically hopping about like Gabby Hayes being told to dance by a gunslinger, Mom stopped and sighed.“Just like your father. Well, at least you can draw. We all have our gifts.”

“What’s dad’s?”

“Raking gravel.”

The instant Mom heard my senior prom was days away, she asked me what the theme was.

“They’re going to have a big swing band and we’re —”

“Come here. You’re going to learn the Lindy hop. You’ll like it.” She cued up “In the Mood” and spun me around like we were at the Avalon Ballroom.

I stepped on her toes. I fell twice. And I didn’t like it. Mom was a natural dancer and I was simply a maladroit disappointment. Sigh.

In her 65th year, Artha Jean became bedridden and it became my responsibility to help her to the bathroom and back. Three or four times a day I would lift her into a standing position, drape her arms around my shoulders and rock her gently from side to side, as we shuffle-danced across the room.

Days before she left the world, I was waltzing her to her bathroom when she rested her head on my shoulder, like an exhausted marathon dancer, and just stood there, swaying in my arms. I followed her lead, as I had done my whole life, and danced her gently around the ballroom of her imagination. “I love to dance,” she whispered. “Me, too, Mom. Me, too.”

The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.

I celebrate every Mother’s Day by constructing a shrine to Artha Jean, assembling a Day of the Dead memorial homage of beat up Polaroids, candles, desert flowers, a costume jewelry necklace I gave her in 1962 and a card she gave me when I graduated from university in 1977, which I display open so I can glory in her handwritten words: “From your very proud and happy mother.” With no recording of her voice, Artha Jean’s blue cursive words, spoken with a ballpoint, suffice.

In a picture central to my shrine, my short butterball of a mother has her arm around me and it is evident I am an obnoxious, wriggling teenager embarrassed to be touched by his mom. Ignoring my protestations, her gleeful persistence is preserved by Polaroid.

How would I know she was making up for the lost warmth of a cold childhood?

“We’re all untouchables.” I adjust my mask as I kneel at Holy Hope and touch her name engraved in the stone: 1915-1979. Every visit I surrender to the tenacious yearning to feel the dead. Just one phantom touch.

I count my blessings. She sleeps beneath stone and sod rather than staring out at me from behind the window of assisted living in the age of distance. Memories of touch bubble up.

Artha Jean’s hands were rough, perfumed fists with pudgy short fingers and thick nails, fire engine red. I studied her scarlet talons when she grabbed my thieving little hand and held it tight all the way up to the surprised manager of the grocery store. A sharp fingernail silently nudged me to confess and return the pack of gum. I close my eyes and recall her stroking my shivering head and cooing as I sobbed in shame in the front seat of our aqua blue Pontiac.

Hugging, ribbing, elbowing, tapping, backslapping, nudging, and hair mussing, her repertoire of touch, is understandably on hold in the age of corona.

She would approach you for a hug like a condor coming in for a landing, her endless wing span of outstretched arms enveloping you, pressing you against her soft roundness, rocking you in her maternal refuge where you were safe from all monsters, beasts and things unknown.

Her repertoire of touch was extensive.

The Muss. If your hair was perfect, and you displayed a hint of vanity, you were a target for mussing.

The Jab. An elbow to the ribs was a command to join her in laughing uproariously. It’s been eclipsed by the 2020 elbow tap, followed by very nervous laughter.

The Pat. My fantasy of Artha Jean, the Encouraging Phantom, patting cashiers, national guardsmen, cops, doctors and nurses on the back amuses me. “Did you feel something a moment ago?”

The “Come here, you!” hug. This was the anaconda hug you got when you were inconsolable. People who never got the “Come here, you!” hug grow up to be sociopaths. Or worse, politicians.

The Soothe. In a December, a lifetime ago , mom and dad’s window offered a view of falling snow. Sick with fever, I watched the snow swirl as Artha Jean sang “You Are My Sunshine” ever so slowly, her hand tracing soothing patterns on my burning forehead until I drifted into healing sleep.

I whine to her headstone I have not held her great-granddaughter since Chloe was born in early March. This lament would mystify the woman who’d warn her grandchildren, “I am going to eat you up,” and then proceed to waddle after them until the squirmers were subdued with tickling, followed by a frenzy of arm nibbling, giggle inducing back-of-the-neck gobbling, chin gnawing, with a chorus of “Num, num, num” punctuated with tummy raspberries.

Where is this world where unconditional touch was the norm? Where’s your mask, Mom?

When I saw her rough, chapped, meaty hands, the hands of a gardener, a laundress, a custodian, a cook, and a dishwasher lain across her heart in 1979 I remember with shame and regret the snotty teenager who recoiled at her warm touch.

The old man kneeling at Holy Hope, in 2020, the time of 6 feet apart, or 6 feet under, remembers the moment and the boy too well. And the hands that would examine a Mother’s Day gift of dime store costume jewelry like it was the Hope Diamond, the hands that would clap a lively rhythm to “Amazing Grace,” the hands that would clap us by the shoulders and assure us everything would be alright.

I stood and promised her etched name everything will be alright, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that I will stay safe, and well, for I am counting the seasons until I can take off this mask and safely tell Chloe, Emma and Cassius, “I’m going to eat you up,” and begin the chase.