Come September

Like many other women, my personal relationship with my mother was very ambivalent. She was not an average mother at all, even though when the mood struck her, she could be very nurturing and fun to be with.

My mother was, as they used to say back in the day, a "law unto herself." She was truly drop dead gorgeous, turn around for a second look, movie star beautiful. I cannot count all the men who, upon learning that I was "Lee's daughter," made it a point to tell me that my mother was the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. One of her last requests before her death was that there should be a trumpeter at her funeral to play When The Saints Go Marching In, "just like they do in New Orleans." My uncle, her brother, called the local musician's union and hired a trumpet player for her just as she wished. He played at her graveside, and when he was finished, he looked around at the tombstones, and seeing the family name asked if my mother was "Shorty Saffer's sister?" My uncle "Shorty" was a musician too, a drummer, and as it turned out, he and the trumpeter had played in the same bands back in the Glory Days of the 1930s. The trumpeter recounted to me that he could still remember my mother and father dancing together to the sounds of the big bands, and sure enough, his last comment was, "Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw." Mom would have loved that epitaph.

What does all this have to do with "Come September?" Well, in addition to being beautiful, my mother was a free spirit who was gifted creatively and intellectually, and was also struck with a large dose of the wanderlust. Her closest friends all acknowledged that she was "kin to the wild goose." She could generally manage to stay in one place through the summer, but as the days began to grow shorter, she would yield to the lure of the open road. On the first day of each September (even when I was an adult), I could count on her to call me on the phone and announce, "Daughter, it has Come September. Let us go for a little ride, you and I." Our rides lasted in duration from most of a single day, to trips up-state, to cross country jaunts ... sometimes by auto (she loved to drive), sometimes by train - she loved dining cars and Pullman sleepers - and always included a little "box lunch" of things to eat along the way. In later years, our automobile trips began with a stop at whatever McDonald's was on the way out of town, because she said they made the best cup of coffee anywhere. It was not possible to begin or sustain any journey without a succession of stops along the way to reheat her McDonald's coffee.

My Mom has been gone for twenty years and more now, and as each year passes I regret a bit more that I didn't follow her advice to "leave this damn town, and find a better place to live." I've stayed all these years for what seemed to be good reasons at the time, but the longer I'm here, the less I want to remain. So much has changed, my family has all passed on, and like so many towns which thrived on manufacturing, the jobs have vanished and the people who depended on them have moved away looking for opportunity in other parts of the state or the country. Looking around at the shrinking, dying town, I realize that I feel "left behind," very much the way Johnny Appleseed felt left behind in the opening frames of the Walt Disney animation about his life. "Get on a wagon rollin' West, or you'll be left alone!," the pioneers sang to Johnny. Apparently I'm struck with the same migratory urges as my mother, because I've always had the strongest feeling of being "left behind" especially around the first of September - a sensation which only increases as the summer dies into autumn and and the trees begin to change color. But, here I've stayed, for one reason and another - an aging family who seemed to need me, a daughter who seemed to need me, a job, which I seemed to need, and a house bought and paid for. I guess the situation could be described as "inertia due to a sense of being needed and feeling secure." I almost made it out a couple of times - once to Colorado, and again just after 9/11, but got stopped both times by failing health. Once by fading eye-sight, and once by a serious heart attack.

The First of September arrived today. Shortly after noon, I went through McDonald's and bought a small cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and drove the fifteen miles north-east to the old country cemetery where my mother, and most of her family are buried. I sat the McDonald's cup down by my mother's headstone, and I sat myself down there too. It is a beautiful late summer day - the azure blue sky, cloudless, reminds me of Colorado. I talked with my Mom about lots of things - places we'd been together, my antique shop (she taught me about antiques and to love reading, art and poetry) and I told her about places my daughter and I have traveled together. It was a pure country day - near-by a girder bridge with a wooden plank floor rattled each time a car drove over it, and crows called overhead to sound an alarm for marauding hawks.

I talked with my Mom some more, waiting for some sort of sign, and got none. I walked a bit further back into the cemetery to say "hello" to my great aunt, who is buried beside my cousin, her grandson Looking at the dates on their headstones, I realized that he was born the same year as I, and he's been gone these past nine years. I got no message or sign there either, so I wandered slowly back to the family plot to say my good-byes. I left the coffee with my Mom half hoping for some words of wisdom, from the family assembled.

At first, I thought there was nothing, but then it came to me ..... "Why are you still here? Can't you leave? Find a place and go, while you still can."

Maybe I'll give it a try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IASrP1-DulU&NR=1