It is September 4, 2021 and I’ve decided that I’m taking a break today.
I’m at Riverview Campground and I’m missing my mom.
This is the hardest hitting day because the memories are Little Jason’s; our mother wasn’t perfect… but she had graceful, beautiful, quiet, unrecorded moments, which are all I am remembering today… 1 day after what would have been their 39th anniversary.
At times, our mother seemed psychic.
She begged me not to take Jamie to the theater to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show; she told me that something terrible was happening and though Jamie never forgave me, I knew that our mother believed what she was saying and I broke my promise and left Jamie at home…
Later, Paul (who I had seen Rocky with the previous year) called to say that he had been raped across the street from Oz. She knew. Somehow she knew.
And she knew about Katie. And she knew about other things…
Back in my memories and my mother is looking out across the low green field, storm rolling in toward our backyard –
I’m a small boy child, clinging to her mysterious silence, her wary hypnotized gaze is exhilarating in its graceful stillness…
The emerald sky sparks and forms tear drops over Janet Lynn forest years before that tragic coupling will leave me forever scarred and always haunted; a dark harbinger of things to come.
Could she see all of that then? I’ve never imagined that she could… but who is to say what stirred within her?
And the words and the drugs… they drowned out our laughter… Though he still exists in the shrugs of disaster.
He certainly hates the women he loved.
He treats them like shit.
He hates them because… because they are women who don’t hate themselves so he can’t relate… so he can’t compel them to stay as confused as he was on his drugs.
