Found: Writing ideas? Dreams? Observations?

Today would have been my mother's 77th birthday. Each year on her birthday, I go through her collection of photos or her boxes of things, her writing. I have so many that I will likely never run out of material; she was a writer, after all, and a saver, collector of significant bits and pieces.

Today, I opened a box labeled in her hand "Personal NYer Notes." Among a collection of postcards of New York, art works, newspaper clippings, various things that spoke to her (the postcards are unused, blank), I found these two yellowing pages dated 1972 and numbered 25 and 26. I don't know if they are story ideas, dreams or observations. They are mysterious bits and pieces, "NYer Notes."

I wonder if I will find pages 1-24, or pages 27+ as I keep looking. 

Sending love into the ether for my mum. I am forever grateful she was mine. I do not claim she was perfect, and I was certainly not always a good, dutiful daughter (understatement...), but she was brilliant, quirky, loving, awkward, open-minded, kind, thoughtful. She was beloved by many, missed by them all, and none more than by me. We were quite the pair (single mother, only child), and I will always carry her memory and cherish the bits of her that are a part of me. Love you, mum.

The photos for today? Two from 1940, when she was three months old and her brother Graham (my dear uncle) was three years old.

And one from 2006, in the Sydney, Australia at the Royal Botanic Gardens, with her pixie hair cut, growing back from the chemo of the previous year, taken less than a year before she died. 

The Tempest of Clemenza, personal meaning

The first paragraph of the short prologue:

“Ludlow, Vermont. August. If I had known it was to be the last day of Clemenza's life, I would not have returned to The Haunted Mansion with the diaries. I would not have driven in that cursed rain searching for a beautiful notebook, as she had requested, so that she could begin writing the story of her life. I would have stayed by the fire, at her side, the two of us warming ourselves after our ordeal on the lake in the storm. But she had urged me to go. The diaries had to be returned to their author. And Clemenza was eager to embark on her own account of her life in the notebook that very night. She had just turned thirteen and felt that such an achievement warranted commemoration.”

An even shorter epilogue ends the book, and you can imagine the event that it relays. The pair frame the novel. 

The Tempest of Clemenza is the closest to my heart of all that my mother wrote and is the last of her completed novels. It is beautiful and surreal. My mother plays with the gothic novel form so deftly: stories framing stories, darkness, death, unexpected visitors, peril, and, O, the stormy Vermont holiday and the stormy painting at the Brooklyn Museum that Clemenza gazes at. 

"A Storm in the Rocky Mountains," Albert Bierstadt, at the Brooklyn Museum

The greatest personal bit: my mother and I are in it. The mother and daughter--Abel and Clemenza--stay in a Vermont house that my mother and I stayed at. They visit the Haunted Mansion antiquarian bookshop, as we did. Clemenza wears impractical gold vintage sandals on a hike, as I did.

Of course, they are not us, but my mother loaned them so much of us, even the geese chasing us when we were out on a rowboat boating once in Australia somewhere. My terrible, too-short haircut is there, which my mother thought looked “so French.” I look at old photos and still hate that haircut. I wore hats, as Clemenza does. Of course, Clemenza dies in end of an unnamed long-term illness, and I clearly did not, but even this event makes me shiver. Not only is it an affecting, emotional story, but her death also place marks all those mother-daughter memories for me: how close we could be and the stories that only the two of us experienced. Obviously, Tempest holds powerful personal meaning for me, .

The meaning of life doesn’t concern me much. (I don't think it has any.) I am likely too much in my own head; ruminating on smaller things is my style. I have been told many times I think or worry too much. I do. I can find strong meaning in events, people, even things--an object, song word or phrase, so much so that I have a physical reaction, a shiver, a heart flutter, a wave of slight dizziness. But a greater truth or meaning does not exist. This is personal. 

At this moment, I am typing at an antique spool-legged table with drop leaves that feels like home, because it was in my New York City apartment from my birth. My mother is signified, as is my childhood. I would sit cross-legged or with knees up during dinner, and my mother would bemoan the fact that she never taught me proper table manners. My mother and father bought it at some antique auction before I was born, so it even signifies that they once were a couple. I will hold on to this rickety table until it falls apart. Stories are in this table.

Similarly, holding a copy of The Tempest of Clemenza comforts me. The object and the stories told are significant, but just to me.   

an entry for her 73rd birthday

Out running on this blustery winter day, I considered how to honor my mother on what would have been her 73^rd birthday. But where to start? Back at home, clean and in comfy clothes, I have dug out her journals and found a birthday entry from around when she turned the age I am now, 41: December 30, 1980, the very day of her 41^st birthday.

Overall in her journals, she does not write about me constantly, or even often, despite our closeness, but I seem to pop up as a topic on her birthday entries. Perhaps this is because it was always the holiday break, and we were spending day after day together (and I know how challenging that can be with my two kids).

In this birthday entry, she worries that her friends, with whom we were on holiday, were disapproving of my suddenly immature behavior (the usual: bathroom and sex humor) and new use of the word “homosexual.” (She does not describe how.) Though she thought I was being immature and inappropriate, she wanted to defend me.

“As I write this, it sounds as if I am the child. This sitting apart and writing is something I did, too, as a child.” She didn’t know how to confront the issue, so she got it out in blue ink on paper in her lovely (but hard to read) cursive. I understand this disappearing, finding a space to express and create alone. I am doing it right now, as my husband and kids play with Legos in the next room.

I want to remember her, celebrate her and connect with her today. That requires quiet moments and writing. I am the apple to her tree in so many ways. Despite our likenesses, I have been thinking about where we differ: She disliked much of the music I like (“All I can hear is the pounding.”), she would disapprove of my dark purple hair (“Oh, Caity, it looks so harsh.”), and she wondered at my dedication to running (“I am just so impressed!”). I can hear her in our dis-connections, too, and feel close to her.

My favorite line from this journal entry? “My new awareness and acceptance of the tadpole qualities of men.” I don’t (necessarily) agree, but I laughed out loud. A great line, if a tad, um, sexist. Then I think of my house, in which I am the only female (even the dog is male), and I wonder if she might have a point. Sometimes. Maybe. “Tadpole qualities.” *Giggle*

"Lies"

I am Glenda Adams' daughter (her only child) and damn proud of it. She died in 2007, and I miss her more than I can explain. I think of her every day.

So, I am re-reading her work, starting with her first book, Lies and Stories, a collection of nine short stories, published in 1976.

The first story, "Lies," is an iconic one for me. I remember reading it way back, probably in the 1980s, when I was a teenager.

To me, the story is about writing and imagination. (And about how adults respond to a quirky, imaginative child in ways of which my mother probably disapproved.) "Sometimes I tell lies, and sometimes I only tell stories, but never with intent to harm. I only want to please people and make them happy." I can hear my mother's voice through the words she gives her 10-year-old narrator, Josephine.

In "Lies," Josephine describes her family, inspired by a school assignment to "write the story of our family."

Adams (I'll write "Adams" because I feel strange writing "my mother" repeatedly) captures how a 10-year-old absorbs and repeats the words of the surrounding adults accurately. But Josephine both lacks mature understanding (though she understands -- or imagines -- much) and reveals so much about the particular characters in her life -- and their possible dysfunctions. I write "possible" because the reader cannot be sure that the whole story is not a lie. I don't know if Adams ever decided whether Josephine's story were "true" or not. I lean toward thinking her story is "true" based on two pieces of evidence in the story:

1) Her mother responds negatively to Josephine saying, "But I like Uncle Roger. I don't want him to go." Josephine backpedals, "I was kidding. I don't like him. And I want him to go away." But the "truth" was probably her first statement.

2) Her teacher asks her, "This isn't the real story of your family, is it? You made it up, didn't you?" Josephine pauses before answering, "Yes, I made it all up. I thought you meant us to."

So this is a girl who tells the truth, unless it displeases, in which case she says what people want to hear.

Then again... Josephine is a very imaginative, creative child. She could be enjoying making up things, such as her best friend actually being her half sister and her mother and Uncle Roger moved far away to Vancouver. And then she backs off when she realizes her "lies" are not entertaining.

The story feels young to me. Is this the immature narrator? Or the young writer that Adams was (more than two years younger that I am now)? Or is it that I read it as a young woman, and I know when my mother wrote it?