“I think about your Daddy every night,” she said as we were closing out a 42-minute phone call this morning.
We had talked about the weather and Antiques Roadshow and her homemade biscuit-with-crisp-bacon breakfast and the honey my Aunt Susan sent to her to celebrate the upcoming Jewish New Year. We had talked about her long hair and my hair color, what she had read recently (her own two novels, Annie’s October Sky and Don’t I Know You) and what she was reading now, The Provincials, a faded blue-ish book that I remember moving from the basement bookshelves at 102 Stargell to her shutter table catch all in her apartment at 2100 John D Odom Road. “I think your Uncle Carl gave me this book,” she said. “I’ve had it for a long time, and I don’t think I ever read it.”
We were just about to hang up when she said, “I sort of chuckle at night when I think about it.” She went on to tell me that Daddy fixed something on her bedside lamp, the same one she had in our house on Huntington Place that she switched off last night, the same way she switched it off the night before he drove out of our lives.
“I don’t have to reach up to the switch to turn off the light,” she started. “Your Daddy did something to the cord and I just turn it off there. He did a good thing.”
I had to take a slow inhale through my nose and exhale through pursed lips to hold back the tears that were filling my eyes. Then she said it again, “He did a good thing. It’s funny how I think about him every night.”
Over the 31 years since my dad left, Mama has mostly been the Steel Magnolia we think about when we think of Southern women done wrong – polite, particular, persevering. But this morning as we hung up, I felt another emotion. Mama was pleased. She appreciated that little thing that Daddy had done, that good thing.
And for me, memories of what had been and what was choked my airway and flooded my heart. I managed to get out a few I Love Yous and hung up.
What do we do when we are left with these feelings?
Maybe the next time the good thing brings up the hard stuff for you, it’s just ok to let the good be good.
