There isn’t a trip that I take where I don’t learn something – about stuff and, too, people -- even those whom I thought I had figured out. And just getting that different perspective, on the world, on others, adds years to my life. (Or at least it adds greater complexity which, in reality, is the same thing, since a more intricate and detailed life seems longer, even if it is not really so.)
It’s amazing how much you can learn, too, if you just spend a day or two listening to someone. It may be that I learned more about my mom on this trip than perhaps in all the years when she lived in Madison, where my interaction with her, though daily, was about such things as kid events and the terrible weather out there.
In the years before she moved to Madison, meaning, before my kids were born, I was her go to person. The one she’d call to express sorrow. There were many such calls.
It became a pattern with my first family (of mother, father, sister) – to review the past and how it affected us before and affects us still. It is so not in my nature to review the past, that I have grown accustomed to giving myself a pep talk before engaging in these conversations, in much the same way that I give myself a pep talk before I enter a class when I’m not feeling well. Come on, Nina: it’s important. Take a breath and give it a go! You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine...
Early this morning, I take my usual solo walk. It is glorious day and I think even Berkeley people are surprised by it because I hear a bit of that from people I pass – isn’t it an incredible day! It’s such a beautiful day, no?
Of course, I am more focused on flowers than on the blue sky. One thing I get plenty of back home is blue sky. Flowers in early March? Not so much.
Shattuck Avenue is buzzing and it’s fun to see how it all conforms to the images one has of Shattuck and of Berkeley. My mother would say that Berkeley has changed – more militant on the streets, more conservative on campus. Maybe. But here on Shattuck, I’m seeing an awful lot of women my age with long gray hair tied back in pony tails. They sit in cafes with large rimmed hats to keep the sun from the skin. They eat yogurt with organic this and that. Everything in Berkeley is organic. My B&B is on the inexpensive side, if you compare it to prices in the Bay area, but even there, the shampoo is organic. It’s just the way Berkeley is.
My mother meets me for brunch at a local café. Neither of us is hungry – we ate breakfast at our respective places – but we want this last chance to sit across the table from each other. I want to ask her a burning question – one that I have carried with me for years. (Don’t we all have one burning question for our parents that we wish we could get an answer to?)
I don’t ask it. I don’t know that it was the right call. My mom is older. Older people think they will not survive 'til the next year. Their children think they’ve got at least another ten years ahead. My grandma lived until her nineties, why shouldn’t my mom – the person who has tracked Prevention Magazine and all other preventives for such a long time live even longer?!
We ride the BART together. No, really – this is my mother: she will take the one and a half hour trip with me to the airport, even knowing that once there, I will check in and go through and that will be that.
My flight takes off. We pass mountains and lakes and all great land formations.
I’ll forever remember this visit. Time has passed. The future – our future, hers and mine – is pretty much set. So we are where we are, with all our imperfections and for once they seem irrelevant.
