Conversations with my Mother
I think a lot lately of the notion of missed opportunity, lost promise, or perhaps, promise lost is more apt. I could have taken the road of many, or none. But if I look to the stars, to the outliers of the potential, the true limit of possibility is staggering.
Two intelligent, interesting hippies. Both broken. Colliding on a one way track towards solitude amongst the palm trees. My mother, the tiny imagination from the safe suburb, educated in 6 foot snows about merlin, dropped off in a van by a sailor with a gun, to land as a karate chopping wife and mother in the bosom of the hare krsna cult of the mid 80s in west LA. How I ask does the daughter of a prominent lawyer, the sister of a born again twice married liberal Baptist minister in the coastal nook of Connecticut, find herself being imagined in a conversation with a 29 year old coloring book nestled into the corner of an uncomfortable couch in a 4 bedroom house, complete with dog and yards, explaining herself into the keyboard of a bright shiny MacBook Pro, oddly enough, the replacement for a black one destroyed by a fart gone errant, along with a cup of tea, a mad Englishman, and a ladder too big for anyone to run with a few years back during the second to last, but by far most successful attempt at a higher and formal education on the dime of that lawyer from a few segues back, not that the first or second art schools in California, the Midwest liberal arts enclave of frat antics and nightmares, or the Jesuit adventures in medieval concepts were any less successful in learning a thing or two to the author.
Well. I suppose this is how.
One day on a stage somewhere in Detroit, a boy fell in love with the crackle of the speakers and the mystery behind the curtain. He knew that his psychic mother and long working hours alcoholic father living in a trailer on the wrong side of the tracks in Motown weren’t going to provide the paint to make the dreams on the insides of his eyelids a mural across the underpass any more than shitting in his shoe would make him taller. There must have been other moments, other epiphanies, but this rock and roll show in the basement of a warehouse off Gratiot was the beginning of the end.
On the other side of the buildings still filled with children and gardens, with Fords and Chevrolets, before the drugs and the guns and the rest of the urban sprawl came and burned out those dreams and brought the nightmares of true poverty and desperation to the unlit streets that no one walks anymore, there was a series of 5 small neighborhoods, all tied to one another but fiercely devoted to maintaining their independence. John Cusack made a film there once, in my mother’s high school. White smiles as far as the eye can see, there was a house in the middle of the block with enough money and unspoken conflict to fill it to the attic steps. Four people, all wonderfully intelligent, and all bent for broken hearts and walks alone somewhere along the path to the corners of the kingdom, looking at the photographs it seems a lovely place to grow up.
I’m not sure how, without there ever having been a dialogue in my life that I can recall, not that there wasn’t, but I’ve lost too many of the words from a side of the writing on the wall, the abuses were too heavy to sift through, but I am not sure the details of the meeting except that I assume chanting and incense was involved. Because all stories about the hare krsnas must start with a John Lennon sitar solo playing softly in the background of an apartment covered in silks and pillows piled on the floor while young affluent and disaffected white kids smoked joints and talked about philosophy and why the modern struggle was the worst both truly and with relation to concepts of centrality and focus. It seems a heady mix of concepts and sensations, like taking mushrooms in a hot room and seeing the jungle grow around you from the shadows and the textures of the walls. The truth lost in physicality, known and rejected in favor of the simplicity of surrender.
