"Not with that attitude, you won't."*

   Mother’s Day is a great holiday. Mothers have a really shitty job…okay that sounds mean, and I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot. They have a really hard job, we’ll say, and even if you’re adopted and your particular mom didn’t carry you around for 9 months and push you out the hard way, she’s busted her butt (if not her vaginal canal or abdominal wall or bladder or all three) trying to feed you and make sure you have semi-decent hygiene and some kind of ability to take care of yourself. Having been a childcare provider for a number of years I can assure you that you were a huge pain in the ass and your mother’s love was the only thing keeping you from dying in the streets and all you ever wanted to do was not eat your dinner and whine like a spoiled brat about every mundane thing you could possibly imagine. Maybe you were an easy child, but when people say their child is “easy” what they mean is “compared to other children, my kid is less suicide-inducing.” They love you, those moms. And they deserve a day (or 100 days) of attention and hugs and presents and trips to Europe.

   I didn’t get to see my mom today, but it should be said that she was and is a great mom.

   And so anyway. 

   My most vivid memory of Mother’s Day was when I was about 15 (one of my most asshole-ish periods). Like she always does, Mom spent the better part of the day preparing a feast for us and for our grandparents. She made all the food and cleaned the house and decorated the table and probably bought her own floral arrangements. We probably whined about sweeping or folding laundry and watched movies in the den while she roasted a lamb or some other ridiculously delicious and difficult meal.

   I remember it was a beautiful day and very sunny and my mom was making a point to fix Arnold Palmers, as she always did when Grandma Millie was coming over, because that was Grandma's favorite. And my mom was always very good to her mom. Moms!

   Grandma and Grandpa arrived for “dinner” around 2 in the afternoon along with my Aunt Mel, who most likely contributed to the eats as well. Everyone was gathered, Grandpa had a beer, and we were all about ready to sit down and eat.

   The tea was finished boiling on the stove and Mom had only to add it to the fresh batch of lemonade. She first dumped a pile of ice into the pitcher and then poured the tea on top. I mean, these Arnie Palmers weren't going to cool themselves. And, in a moment that I still can't quite see without everything going into slo-mo, the pitcher promptly exploded, dousing my mom in scalding tea and shooting shards of the glass pitcher into her leg and all over the room. 

Bloody Arnold Palmer horror.

   Despite the fact that she had a glass shard shoved into one of her perpetually bare feet (a hippie preference I’ve inherited from her) and was gushing jets of blood all over the floor, Mom remained remarkably calm. This was a bit of a miracle as the site or suggestion of blood makes her faint.

   I think she just sort of sat down on the floor in a state of bemused shock. (In retrospect, I think maybe she did faint. Hmmm...)

   Luckily Dad and Aunt Mel, both medical professionals, didn’t seem as completely frozen with ineptitude as the rest of us and managed to figure out that she would need stitches pretty soon and they wrapped her foot in a kitchen towel and drove her to the ER.

   I think they’d been gone for a full 5 minutes before my grandparents and my sisters and I moved at all. We’d all been put to the test and we’d all failed miserably. We were straight useless in a crisis, and apparently incapable of even reacting to the situation. So we stood in a line around the kitchen counter and stared at the pool of blood on the floor. Huh. Blood. 

Blood. Glass. Huh.

   Finally, slowly, while making small talk with our Grandma and Grandpa and keeping some sort of tabs on Penelope, Ouisa and I started cleaning the blood. I guess we decided it would be nice if, on Mother’s Day, my mom didn’t have to clean her own blood off the kitchen floor when she arrived home from the ER. Surprise! Happy Mother’s Day! Your gift is to spend a full day NOT cleaning your blood off the floor! You’re welcome! We even did the soap thing, the way Dad had taught us, so the floor wouldn't be sticky. It seemed doubly important since we'd all know that it was sticky because of blood. And that's just gross.

   They came back from the ER an hour or so later and we sat down to our meal. And I’m sure it was delicious. I think Grandma and I had even managed to make a second batch of Arnie Palmers without incident while they were out. But I learned a valuable lesson that day: don’t put boiling fluids into a glass container filled with ice.**

   Just kidding.

   I didn’t really learn anything.

   But doing something that was actually useful for my mom was a nice feeling. And I wish I could do it more often. But she hasn’t bled on the floor in a while. Kidding! (Not about the blood part...she really hasn't had a bloody accident. But about the doing nice things for her part. Ugh. Too much back-peddling here. Let's move on.)

   It’s important to do the things that help your Momma, is what I think you can take away from this, if you are greedy and feel that you need to take something away from this heart-warming post. My mom always wants me to fold laundry before her dinner parties and I never understood why: the guests don’t see the laundry! But over the years I’ve realized that the laundry is just one of the 47 other things she has to finish before she can go to sleep tonight, so doing it does help, even if no one can tell it’s been done. So I try to do that whenever I’m home. And empty the dishwasher. Take out the garbage. You know, stuff like that. Maybe it’s because now that I’m an adult and maybe ever so slightly less of a jackass, I appreciate the value of having clean clothes and a place to put my newly dirtied dishes. I’m grateful to my mom for having always done it for me.

   Along with a billion other things she's done for me. 

   Say thanks to your Mom and fold her laundry and clean up her blood. It's the least you can do. 

   And flowers are nice, too.

Happy Mother's Day, Maman!

*I'm not sure if my mom invented this quote, but it has long been her response to any statement of negativity. ("I won't get into that college." "Not with that attitude, you won't." "I will never find those shorts!" "Not with that attitude you won't.") I find myself using it all the time nowadays. My mom is the Queen of The Positive Attitude.

**To this day I'm afraid to add ice to anything hot. But I think it's more about a glass container + ice + boiling fluids. I think. But I always shield my face when making iced coffee from hot.

"I'll be seeing you, in every lovely summer's day; in everything that's bright and gay; I'll always think of you that way; I'll find you in the morning sun and when the night is new; I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you."*

   Grandma was angry at the state of Colorado.

   Aunt Dudie had gone to reheat Grandma’s soup so we were alone for a minute at our little booth inside Panera.

   “People are uncouth here,” she said. She was mad. “When I was trying to fill my drink, those people acted like I was invisible.”

   “Well, if it makes you feel any better, they didn’t let me in there, either,” I offered. “Even those big, burly men pretended I wasn’t there so they could refill their Mountain Dews. Not very chivalrous!”

   “That’s the word! They aren’t chivalrous! I think it’s just the way people are in Denver,” Grandma decided.

   Now, Grandma and I both spent a fair number of years living in Omaha, Nebraska, a smallish city, where people will regularly turn themselves into human doormats before they offend or inconvenience someone, so I don’t know that our perspectives are very accurate as a basis of comparison to the fine people of Denver.

   “You seem pissed off,” I suggested.

   “I am pissed off!”

   My Grandma is so funny.

   “Don’t get too mad, Grandma! People are much more polite here than they are in Los Angeles.”

   “Well, I’m sure that’s true,” she harrumphed.

   “Maybe it’s a big city thing? The bigger the city, the less patience and manners people have?”

   “Oh, poor Julie,” Grandma sighed, referring to Aunt Dudie, my Grandma’s fourth of five daughters, my Godmother, and my hostess for the weekend. “She must get so tired of taking care of me.”

   “She does not! She likes it. And Julie’s boys are chivalrous, so it can’t be Colorado that’s doing it. It’s not where you are, it’s who you are, and some people are just nicer and better bred than others.”

   “Well, none of my grandchildren are uncouth, that’s for sure.” She was very proud of this fact and, as a way of proving it, took a huge bite out of her roll.

I wrote this nearly a year ago. Apparently Grandma and I had all our conversations in exclamation points!!!!

   I’d just spent a weekend in Parker, CO, with my family: Aunt Julie and Uncle Rick, my cousins, Connor and Trevor, and my Grandma. Grandma had just moved out there from Omaha and I was lonesome for her, as I was used to seeing her every day growing up and, later, every time I was home to visit. And this year she wasn’t in town for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

   But by January she was fully ensconced in the Leahy’s ENORMOUS basement, and it was as though her entire house had been replicated into an apartment in the suburbs of Denver. All her pictures and tchotchkes were there, along with her voluptuous cat Lucy/Alice, and the best of her beautiful furniture. She was super excited about all the deer she could see in her backyard (and spying on deer seemed to be almost as interesting as her old hobby, which was spying on the neighbors). We spent two days talking and watching movies and running errands all over town.

   My grandmother was born Mildred Rose Wilson in 1925 in Washington, Indiana (pronounced “Warshington,” which, as my cousin Connor pointed out, is the only thing Hoosiers pronounce funny. I’m not entirely sure that’s true). And when she was growing up in Washington, she was so beautiful it makes my face ache to look at pictures of her. It makes me proud that her DNA is floating around in me. She had brown, wavy hair and high cheekbones, big eyes, big boobs, narrow hips, and long, long legs. What’s even more interesting about Millie Wilson is that she was an amazing dancer, something that seems to have eluded most of her progeny. She used to go out jitterbugging with her friends every day after school, taking breaks only for a soda (pop) or a hamburger. And then they’d all run home for dinner and homework. Ah, the “good old days”. It all sounds like a scene from Back To The Future to me (funny...'cuz that movie was made in the 80's).

   Sadly, her kids are helpless fools when it comes to dancing: her daughters do lots of weird disco-era thumbing and pathetic gyrations along with the occasional Prince in “Dirty Mind” imitations (picture middle-aged women doing the splits and bouncing off a mock-velveteen couch. Yeah, that’s what I grew up watching. It's one of my earliest memories of Aunt Krissy who, for some reason, I always thought was "the cool one." Kids are stupid. And it’s a miracle I didn’t run away from home. Or stab my own eyes out).

   Her grandkids, of which I am the oldest (sigh), are a mixed bag. My youngest sister, Penelope, is a very gifted dancer, as are my cousins Ellie and Kate. Hell, Ellie and Kate are acrobats—they can do flips and Russians and all that crazy stuff. Connor and Trevor are natural athletes, but I doubt they’re dancers. Elizabeth, my other sister, could easily twirl her way through ballet lessons, but when is that appropriate at a club or school dance? I’m not sure how she handled it, but given her era in high school, there was no way it made her popular.

   I’m a total lost cause. My generation grew up in the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Offspring era with flannel shirts and greasy hair and “dance” started to take on a sort of quality that made it look as though one were a drunk puppet randomly swinging his or her arms and pelvis around to no particular beat. I took classical ballet for a couple of years as a young child and it left me feeling as though I couldn’t get my rear end in the right position. It turns out, I just have a really sizable backseat and there was no way it was ever going to stop sticking out, no matter how many times my teacher told me to reign it in.            

   While I was in Denver, Grandma told me that Grandpa Charlie (who I’ve mentioned here and also here) once took Arthur Murray dance lessons, so he could take Grandma out stepping. This was around 1960, and my grandparents already had three of their eventual five children (Mom, Aunt Mel, and Aunt Mary). He went to the studio, without my grandma’s knowledge, and tried to learn to dance so he could keep up with her and take her to, as my grandma and her generation called it, “trip the light fantastic.” But, according to Grandma, he had no rhythm. I guess the majority of us must have inherited his dance moves.

   But when I was a tiny child, she used to pull up her skirts when no one else was looking and dance a little jig for me, and she still had a pair of the most beautiful Ginger Rogers-style legs. And the fact that Grandpa tried to fight his natural inability to dance so he could take my grandma dancing makes my heart heavy and happy all at once.

   Millie Wilson was a carefree dancing queen, but Millie Lett was a mother and a wife and a homemaker. Her husband, my Grandpa Charlie, tried to let her be all four. And that’s kind of what love is all about, right?

   My Grammy died yesterday at home, in Denver, with all her daughters around her. I think she would’ve liked that they were all there and I hope she knew they were. When I think of her, I think of good smells and stylish clothes and The BeeGees. And I think of gardens and picture frames and mac and cheese and small animals. But most of all, I think of dancing.

           

Mildred (right) with her friend Betty, 1946.

            

Mildred Rose Wilson Lett

February 20th, 1925 - December 10th, 2012

*I initially had a quote here from "Moon River," but Grandma really loved "I'll Be Seeing You" by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain, because it was a song that reminded her of the 40's, when all her friends (and her brother) were off in WWII and all the kids would hear this song and think about the people they were missing. Seems more appropriate, somehow.