Mother's Day approached, and I found myself suffering something like phantom leg syndrome.
The eternal conundrum still haunted me. Like the itching foot of an amputee. As if she were still up there in West Virginia.
This year, same as always, I've been wondering what to buy a mother who professed no wants. I'd ask. And she'd insist: ``Nothing!''
I never dared believe her. Not after spending a half-century seeking rapprochement with a woman who fit Churchill's description of enigmatic Russia better than Russia itself: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside -- the cashmere sweater my more resourceful brother (damn him) bought her for Christmas.
You think I'd risk world peace trying to muddle through Mother's Day with a Hallmark card and a Whitman's Sampler?
Roses no longer did the trick, leaving me with a vague suspicion that breathing difficulties she attributed to flowers were a ploy to stymie her oldest son. So I was doomed to wander aimlessly through the malls like a lost explorer in an Arctic snowstorm.
The old syndrome was back again this year. The fact that my mother died in February hardly mattered.
Each time one of those infernal sappy Mother's Day ads popped up, my reaction was not -- as I might have supposed -- a jolt of grief. Instead, it was that familiar pang of worry. What on earth can I get her?
It figures that her death wouldn't alleviate my eternal Mother's Day syndrome. It didn't affect the you've-got-to-call-your-mother Sunday dreads that have hung over my adult life like the butter knife of Damocles. Still there. Every Sunday. Like an amputee's sore toe.
I always worried what we could talk about, safely, when I summoned the courage to call. Still do. Except that now, I know. She'd get a kick hearing about the funeral. How her not-very-pious son, squirming, discussed the arrangements with an old-time preacher who, if he had his druthers, would have smited me clean back to Florida.
Or about that deeply solemn moment when the cemetery worker knelt to place her urn in the ground. It slipped. And the grave diggers's voice broke the very grave silence, ``Goddammit!''
Someone -- not me, Mom, I swear -- ordered up the deluxe funeral package that included, at the end of the service, the funeral director herding us out in the freezing rain. He said something about my mother's soul flying off to heaven as he opened a wooden box. Out flew a white dove.
The bird flapped its wings for about 30 yards and plopped down. Just sat there, looking back at the shivering crowd, utterly ignoring its metaphoric duties. My mother would have figured that was a wise strategy in gun-toting West Virginia. Else one of my cousins might have blasted it out of the air.
My relatives maintained a polite reverential air, as if a sluggard bird was the usual fare at such occasions. My ever-suspicious mother, on the other hand, would have figured the funeral director trained a white homing pigeon to hang around, so her flying soul could be repackaged for the next round of grieving suckers.
Finally, I had a topic to get me through our Sunday phone call. Her funeral. She'd be sorry she missed it.
The dove triggered another random thought, divorced from the uncomfortable reality that my 60-year childhood was finally over. She liked birds, didn't she? Bet she'd like one of those fancy hand-crafted bird feeders hanging on the back porch?
I'll give it serious consideration. Next Mother's Day.
