Fresh Kills _ Arizona - Day 28

Arizona - Day 28

Where was I? Oh yes. Arizona. Another version of hell.

I guess whatever I learned in eastcoast-ese about the way things worked, I saw the world turned upside down in Arizona.

Going out there for a few months to catch up on the family duty thing, caused us to fall into an economic pit.  In other words, for many reasons, non-important here in retrospect, financially, we got stuck there for several years.

Not to say it is not a pleasant enough place, but you can’t drink the water and you cannot get a decent slice of pizza parlor pizza anywhere.  Whatever.

Against that background, I was dealing on my few visits with mom with a woman that had grown “organically retarded” as a medical term I believe because of some brain infection and her allergies to antibiotics.  Something I did not inherit.

Well, in many ways a child grows up and in many ways the growth in body mind and spirit is a learning curve.  And somewhere along that learning curve there is an intersecting line on a curve of your life and learning curve going upward and an aging parent’s life curve descending, coming down for a landing at death.

At that intersecting point of the live of parent and child there is I think for the majority of humanity, a realization, reconciliation, a closure of sorts between the past and the present.  That never happened between me and mom.

Somewhere along my timeline is a ten or so year gap when they west out west, my mother and my siblings and they fell off the edge of the earth, when letters and or Christmas cards are marked – “return to sender – no forwarding address” etc.  That and disconnected phone numbers and a blank.

Somewhere along the timeline I took time off from being a workaholic to trace them down and they were willing to be found, a listed phone number etc.

In that gap of time, mom had had her brain infection and the result was talking to someone being ten or twelve in focus and less so in memory.

That being said, I could complete the puzzle thing about the why of my being, after time with shrink and reassemble the past to better understand it through talking to mom on a normal adult, parent, child level.

It is here where she needed to be in adult care and lived for many years in some Jewish home that she got put into by the state.

It was a wonderfully clean, professional and polite place with its staff and inmates.  It was here that I would sometimes come to sign her out and take her to lunch or shopping and not be able to communicate beyond the basic thing that many parents in a politically correct way of saying it, have to deal with in a relationship with a special needs child/adult.

My mind wanders. 

Wanders away from Arizona and the heat and frustration to me of non-communication.

It was along the timeline, now I can remember, that I have a wife and a son.

The thing about Arizona for all its simplicity in lifestyle and economies, it is a place in a desert.  It is a place where that religion thing got born in a desert thing too.  It was here that we wanted our child to be in a better school than a public school.  There’s that old dad’s prejudice against public school thing.

We found a church school of a mainstream sect that we could afford.

One thing led to another and I joined that church and eventually ended up being an elder or more like elder in training.

It is amazing, looking back from death, how unsophisticated I was in my social skills especially in dealing with people.  And I was dealing too with an older crowd of people who I was supposed to be available to in terms as a go between with a member and a pastor.

I was irritated that I could not be as kind, intelligent, patient as I thought I was, and to strangers.  In a way, even if mom were of normal body and mind at that stage, I probably would have done or settled with a half-assed reconciliation or closure with the past – just gone through the motions, like so many others in the rat race of life.

Here, in retrospect and in anticipation to maybe make some afterlife reconciliation with a wife and child once I get out of this limbo, it will not be real, only imagined I fear.  Kind of like watching the whole thing through glass – a TV program.

The whole universe at times seems to be poetry and beauty and light. And at other times the whole universe seems like just a soap opera with a side order of Madison Avenue commercial break in total value.

Must be getting depressed.  The subject is mom.  Well over the years since dad’s death I have had the occasional dream about dad when in life.

Mom seemed to be tuned out in death the same way she tuned out later in life. Life is not fair.

Let’s leave Arizona.  Let’s travel back to Staten Island. And a Jewish New Year.