Intrusive, Yes, but Memories Can Be Poignant Too

You don’t have to study for it. You don’t have to work for it in any way. You simply have to live long enough to achieve that occasionally lonely and precarious position known as the older generation.

I made it officially last week when my mother died at age 86. I am now the end of the line, the last surviving issue of my late mother and father.

I am an old dog now, with, fortunately, lots of vigorous wobble left in my legs. I’ve much to be grateful for.

Yet the rite of passage I speak of does give solemn pause. It is pause filled with kaleidoscopic memories that intrude unexpectedly, day and night.

The telephone is one memory. Mother had been a champion telephoner. As far back as I can remember Mother seemed to be talking on the phone. She and her sister conversed at least daily between Long Beach and Ventura. She called me far more than I called her. She kept in contact at least weekly by phone with her longtime friends.

Toward the end of her life, she had taken it as a personal affront that a dear, old lady friend who lived in Idyllwild had become too deaf to hear Mother on the phone.

“Imagine,” Mother had sputtered resentfully, “Hudkins getting that way.” Hudkins was 97.

I had phoned my mother’s apartment after she had died, hoping to reach a half-sister who might be there. As I listened to the ringing, my back tingled. What if Mother answered the phone?

I think I would have been only mildly surprised if Mother’s voice had come on the line. Mother had conditioned that response in me with one of her classic remarks after my first wife had died.

I’ve never been a lover of telephones. I regard them as primary invaders of privacy. So I conducted an experiment. I canceled phone service, and lived quite happily without one in the house, until I remarried.

Mother was incensed by my lack of a phone. It was during that period she uttered her most telling argument for my having a phone.

“When I wake up dead some morning, how can I call you?”

Idyllwild is another memory. As a child I spent many happy summers with my parents at that mountain resort. Then Idyllwild was approached by a steep, single-lane, controlled road, permitting one line of cars to ascend or descend at a time. We would travel up the grade with an icebox, boxes of food and luggage strapped to the running boards and luggage rack. While boiling our way upward (all cars boiled on mountain grades then), a bird flew into our windshield and was killed. I felt so saddened by the little bird’s death, I wept. Mother comforted me in her arms and attempted to explain death to me. I don’t recall what she told me, but I remember how much better I felt.

The memory of that poignant experience came out of nowhere the other morning. And then it melded sweetly with the strains of songs being played by a dance orchestra at the rustic lodge filled with furniture made of manzanita wood and a great fireplace of rounded boulders. My parents were there dancing. The lodge burned down many years ago. Yet the other morning I could hear the music clearly. I was a boy again, lying in bed at night in our cabin, the music wafting to me through the woodland.

And I began to hum the songs, “Paradise” and “Good Night, Sweetheart,” softly to myself, and it seemed only yesterday that Mother was embracing me and those songs were popular. It’ll require getting used to, but I suspect we members of the older generation learn to become accustomed to memories that intrude like that.