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Here now I’m telling about the most important person in this whole story and the best. I’ve noticed how most of my fellow writers all seem to “hate” their mothers and make big Freudian or sociological philosophies around that, in fact using it as the straight theme of their fantasies, or at least saying as much—I often wonder if they’ve ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle— And not with martyred pose of resentment, either, but actually seriously bemused over mending, the mending of torture and folly and all loss, mending the very days of your life with almost glad purposeful gravity— And when it’s cold she puts on that shawl, and mends on, and on the stove potatoes are burbling forever— Making some neurotics go mad to see such sanity in a room— Making me mad sometimes because I’d been so foolish tearing shirts and losing shoes and losing and taring hope to tatters in that silly thing called wild— “You’ve got to have an escape valve!” Julien’d often yelled at me, “let out that steam or go mad!” tearing my shirt, only to have Mamère two days later sitting in her chair mending that very shirt just because it was a shirt and it was mine, her son’s— Not to make me feel guilty but to fix the shirt— Though it always made me feel guilty to hear her say: “It was such a nice shirt, I paid $3.25 for it in Woolworth’s, why do you let those nuts tear at your shirt like that. Ça pas d’bon sens.” And if the shirt was beyond repair she’d always wash it and put it away “for patching” or to make a rag rug with. In one of her rag rugs I recognized three decades of tortured life not only by myself but herself, my father, my sister. She’d have sewn up the grave and used it if possible. As for food, nothing went wasted: an odd potato half eaten ends up delightfully tidbit fried by a piece of later meat, or a quarter of an onion finds its way into a jar of home-pickled onions, or old corners of roastbeef into a delicious homey burbling fricassee. Even a torn old handkerchief is washed and mended and better to blow your nose in than ten thousand crinkly new Brooks Brothers Handkerchiefs with idle monogram. Any stray toy I bought for her “doodad” shelf (little Mexican burros in plastic, or piggy banks or vaselets) remained on that shelf for years, duly dusted and arranged according to her taste esthetically. A minor cigarette hole in old jeans is suddenly patched with pieces of 1940 jean. Her sewing basket contains a wooden darner (like a small bowling duckpin) older than I am. Her needles some of them come from Nashua 1910. As the years go by her family write her increasingly loving letters realizing what they lost when they took her orphan money and spent it. At the TV which I bought her with my pitiful 1950 money she stares believingly, only a battered old 1949 Motorola set. She watches the commercials where the women primp or the men boast and doesnt even know I’m in the room. It’s all a show for her eyes. I have nightmares of her and I finding pastrami slabs in old junkyards of New jersey on a Saturday morning, or of the top drawer of her dresser open in the road of America showing silk bloomers, rosaries, tin cans full of buttons, rolls of ribbon, needle hassocks, powder pouffes, old berets and boxes of cotton saved from old medicine bottles. Who could put down a woman like that? Whenever I need something she has it somewhere:—an aspirin, an ice bag, a bandage, a can of cheap spaghetti in the cupboard (cheap but good). Even a candle when the big civilized power blows out.
For the bathtub, the toilet and the sink she has big cans of deterring powder and disinfectants. She has a dry mop and twice a week is reaching under my bed for gobs of dust which are rapped out the window sill, “Tiens! Your room is clean!” Wrapped somewhere in moving carton is a big basket of clothespins to hang out the wash wherever she goes—I see her with basket of wet wash going out with clothespin in mouth, and when we have no yard, right in the kitchen! Duck under the wash and get your beer in the icebox. Like the mother of Hui Neng, I’d bet, enough to enlighten anybody with the actual true “Zen” of how to live in any time and just right.
Tao say, in more words than one, that a woman who takes care of her home has equalized Heaven and Earth.
Then on Saturday nights she’s ironing on the battered ironing board bought by her a lifetime ago, the cloth all brown with burns, the creaky wooden legs, but all the wash comes out ironed and white and to be folded away in perfect paper-lined cupboards for use.
At night when she sleeps I bow my head in shame. And I know that in the morning when I wake up (maybe noon) she’ll already have walked to the store on her strong “peasant” legs and brought back all the food towering in bags with the lettuce at the top, my cigarettes at the top, the hotdogs and hamburgs and tomatos and grocery slips to “show me,” the pitiful nylon stockings on the bottom apologetically admitted to my sight—Ah me, and all the girls I’d known in America who dabbled at blue cheese and let it harden on the sill! Who’d wanted taxis for their milk! Who’d groaned on Sunday without roasts! Who’d left me because I complained!
The trend nowadays is to say that mothers stand in the way of your sex life, as tho my sex life in the apartments of girls in New York or San Francisco had anything to do with my quiet Sunday nights reading or writing in the privacy of my clean homey bed room, when breezes riffle the curtain and cars shirsh by— When the cat meows at the icebox and already there’s a can of Nine Lives for my baby, bought by Ma on Saturday morning (writing her lists) — As tho sex was the be-all of my love for the woman.
–– Jack Kerouac from Desolation Angels p 334-336
