Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

Upon the waters

Four years ago my father, the man I always called "The Master Chief" in this place, died.

My mother, his wife, lingered on another three years until she, too, died in the spring of the year, just a little over a year ago.

I sat beside them both in their final days, as their bodies followed where their...souls? Spirits? Minds? The part of them that made them who they were, the person that they had been, had already gone.

Both passed from that which I called "...the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead." to unlife full of years and - although no more ready for that passage than any of us is, or will ever be - full of lives well-lived.

Today a small group of their family - son and daughter, cousins, niece and nephew - and those relatives' beloveds gathered in a nondescript little rented room in a small town on the east end of Fourth Lake, the largest of the "Fulton Chain of Lakes" in the Adirondak Mountains of New York state.

The remnants of Jack and Carol - father and mother, aunt and uncle - stood as they had in life beside one another, only just as small rectangular boxes set on a table scattered with books of photographs and memories of the lives of the ashes within.

It was the sort of barely-comfortable gathering you'd find anywhere a group of virtual strangers met to spend one last time with dead people.

Hardly anyone knew what to say, and only my sister had the courage to openly weep for the loss of our father and mother. Several of us told stories of Carol McMillan and Jack Lawes as we remembered them, or through memories of our times with them.

My cousin's (and her wife's) happy little Westie helped lighten the mood by being, well, a happy small dog. I had a flight to catch tomorrow morning so I left early, with the others still talking amongst themselves in the rustic room lit with the filtered sun of early afternoon.

I wandered down to the shore of the lake, the clear water bright with wavelets.

This place was particular to my father, who was born and grew up not far away and whose relatives had owned one of the many "summer resorts" along the north shore, although much more modest than the luxurious Gilded Age hotel my sister had booked for our parents' memorial.

I sat and drank a draft to their memory, to the place that my father had loved and had brought his bride to and she had, in turn, come to love.

When I wrote about my father's death four years ago I spoke of how adrift I felt that he was gone:

"As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone."

I won't pretend that I was gracious or cheerful about traveling cross-continent to stand beside the silent ashes of my father and mother. I won't be polite and say it was a pleasure, or that I wanted to make the journey. I was a right bastard, sis, and I made a difficult time more difficult for you. I'm sorry, that's the damnedest part of who I am.

But for all my bitching and moaning in the end I'm glad I came over those mountains and seas and spoke, in vain, to their silent ashes.

For, as I've mentioned before in this place; as children and parents we make an unspoken bargain.

As parents we will see our children into the world.

We will help them grow straight and strong, honest and truthful, kind and loving. We will set the path before them, the path into the world and through it, as best we can.

And then we, as children, will see our parents out of the world.

Love and care for them, listen to and treasure them, and, finally, see them laid down in death as peaceful and beloved as we can make them.

As they set us forth upon the waters we fulfill the promise that will see them home safe to harbor. And then be the quay where they came to rest; to bear witness of their voyage and the doings thereof, great and small, fine and coarse, large and little. That, in us, their memory will live as long as we do.

And so we have. So I have. I am no longer adrift, no longer bereft. I am without them, the people who helped make me who I am, but I will never be without them. I am their logbook, their testament, their living memory. I, my sister, those we love and tell of our parents and their lives.

It is ours now to take forward from here; mine, and all of us who knew them and loved them.

So I stand, at rest, by the waters of the deep cold lake where my father and mother have themselves come to rest. Their journey together, and their journey together with me and all their beloveds, is ended, and their great works, the works of their lives, are done.

Now they are ours to carry on.

Happy Day, you Mothers

Funny how it never really occurred to me until afterwards.

But you were always there for us, even when we - well, I - were rotten little bastards. You loved us, cared for us, corrected us when we were wrong and praised us when we did right.

You were a classic Fifties corporate wife and mother, but at the same time you were your own self; amateur actress, teacher, social liberal, mentor, confidant. Cubs fan - my childhood summers will forever be narrated by the sound of Jack Brickhouse drifting out of the big windows on the sunporch where you knit and listened and cursed the Amazin' Mets.

You did all that a worthy person does; you lived an upright and honorable life, you raised your children to do and be the best they could do and be, and you died full of years and honor.

I love and miss you, mom.

Margot Carol McMillan Lawes, 1926-2018

Filius est pars patris

Well, my father died in...well, it'd be wrong to call it "his sleep"; it was the "sleep" of the hinterlands of life, that gray taiga where the living world meets the dead. He was alive only in the sense that his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath.

Early on the morning of Sunday May 3, 2015, however, that ended.

He died hard, my father, his body refusing to cease its function days after his mind had ceased to direct it. It was...painful...to watch. As a living man he was inordinately proud of his intellect. He was an engineer, a Cornell Chem-E from the postwar crop, and if there ever was a term that described him "engineer" was a good one. He was convinced that there was no problem that he couldn't out-think or solution that he couldn't design, whether to physical or personal matters.

He was in several ways a difficult man, but for all his cussedness he was also a decent, honorable man in a fashion that made his stubborn irreconcilability as much a quirk as a curse.

So to see his husk a mindless, twitching thing lying helpless in a bed was very hard. My mother and sister both told him that they were content with him, that he had finished his time here and they were willing to release him. I sat with him, talked to him, told him that he had done his job, raised his family and cared for his wife, and now that great work was ended.

But in his contrary fashion he refused to die until he was ready. And then, in the half-light of predawn, he was gone.

I don't want to be maudlin about his death. In many, many ways it was a great mercy. His mind was failing, the intellectual acuity that defined him in life leaving him apace. I believe that the part of him that was still lucid hated and raged against that decerebration, that loss of self, and both hated and feared what he was becoming, the gormless vacancy of mindless existence, the parody of his life that would have been not life but un-death. The death of his body spared him that, at least.

But that mercy is only for the dead. As his living remainder I still feel as if I'm floating, weightlessly untethered, beside him. As if our conversation simply halted, forever unfinished, as he stood up and left without a word. He is no longer and yet will always be my father, the man who raised me, whose manhood was my measure as I grew to manhood myself. I find myself turning to talk of some daily commonplace with him only to find emptiness there, and the understanding that the emptiness will be there until I find myself where he has gone.

I am in several senses my father's son. One of those is that I, too, am vain of my intelligence. As such I understand that it is the nature of life and death that sons are born to bury their fathers, that a man who dies before his children is in that way a blessed man and that the child who buries his father will find nepenthe for the grief and loss of that parting.

But that does not make me feel particularly blessed or peaceful today.

The son is a part of the father, and now that part of me is dust and ashes.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

The Master Chief says good-night

My father - the "Master Chief" for those of you longtime readers - is in his late eighties and has been slowly fading into the sort of twilight lands that we often wander into late in our lives. Forgetful, querulous, diffused...all the early signs of a mind that is dwindling towards that last goodnight.

But he was, as he has always been, physically sound. So it was a bit of a shock to get a phone call from my sister - who of the two of us is the geographically close one - last week informing me that my father was in the local hospital have suffered some sort of brain trauma, and the medical tests had revealed that the insult was bleeding inside his head, a sort of stroke, if you will.

He had lost much of his coherence and almost all of his intellectual function. Over the past weekend into Monday he appeared weak but physically healthier than mentally; the medical opinion was that whatever had happened inside his head had suddenly moved him into the "late stage" of Alzheimer's Syndrome. Monday he was moved into the Alzheimer/hospice care wing of the place where he and my mother now live out the ends of their lives. I and my sister were preparing for a part of our lives that now included the body but not the mind or soul of the man who was our father.

But Nature or my father, who was ever a masterful man, intended otherwise. My sister called again last evening to tell me that my father had fallen yet further into the wilderlands of brain death. He was lingering now like a cat in a doorway, motionless, at the very furthest borderlands of death. My sister called this morning to inform me that our father is still sleeping if you consider the consciousless twilight at the edge of life "sleep".

But the blades of the scissors are very near his thread. The hospice nurse told her "Hours. Days. But not weeks."

So I'm taking the wretched day-long cross country flight this afternoon not knowing whether I will arrive before he departs.

But in a very real sense he has already gone on ahead of me. The shell that breathes in the bed in the anonymous room in the industrial warehouse for the old is not my father, not the man who raised me or stood beside me through my childhood and young adulthood and manhood, who helped me become who I am and what I am.

That man is already gone. What remains for me is to honor the bargain that we all make, parent and child, father and son, mother and daughter, from the moment we begin our lives together; that we as parents will bring our children into the world and we as children will see our parents out of it.

Catullus said it better than I ever can, and so I will depart and leave him speak for me:

"Traveling through many lands and over many seas I have come, brother, for these wretched funeral rites, to give you the last dues of the dead and to speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes."

PTSO Bazaar

Back when I was a bold, bad paratrooper hanging out the door and kicking the ramp plates of a USAF C-130 over Panama I have to admit I would never in my maddest fantasy have pictured myself as a "PTA Dad". And, yet, here I am.

What's worse - or better, or at least different - is that I am also now the Astor Elementary PTSO (which stands for "parent-teacher-student organization" for those of you not hep to the latest public school slang) Volunteer Coordinator, a booby prize of exceptional ridiculosity earned because at the last meeting I felt bad that none of the more experienced, wiser PTA parents was willing to die on that particular hill.

Whatever happened to the "don't ever volunteer for nuthin'" paratroop sergeant I haven't the faintest fucking idea.

The latest manifestation of this madness was our participation in the annual PTA/PTSO Christmas bazaar. For two weeks we went crafty-mad making schwag to sell at this magilla; Mojo used her incredibly Mad Serger Skilz to sew up napkins, hankies, and little snack bags. She also repeated the terrific gift box idea she got last year, where she took old 33 1/3 LP covers and hot glue and made boxes. The Liberace one was pure over-the-top post-ironic hipster gold

The kiddos made gift tags.

My contribution were these:

Ornaments for the obsessed Portland Timbers fan, the perfect decoration for that Hanukkah bush or Holiday Tree. Mind you, I had to lean pretty heavily on the Cascadia Cup seeing as how that was the one pleasant memory of the past disastrous season...

And, for the record, the hankies and gift boxes were boss. Of the fifty-odd dollars we ended up making probably $40 came from Deb's crafty goodness. It says something about my future as a Christmas kitsch-crafter that the portion of my collection of Timbers scarves I used as part of the selling strategy drew as much or more interest than the actual bling.

But the whole idea wasn't to make money for the family (tho that was how my kids saw it, unsurprisingly...) but for the school, and I believe that the PTSO cleared several hundred dollars.

And that's the reality of "public education" in my city and country circa 2012. No, we don't get a lavish budget for Astor school while the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Instead we get some portion of the basic sort of wherewithal to give our kids a post-industrial-revolution education from the public purse but the dadoes and finials - everything beyond the building and the people in it and the supplies they need to teach the little mongers to read and cypher - has to come from this constant drumfire of fund-raising.

Music classes, field trips, drawing materials, athletic gear...all must be paid for somehow, and the Portland taxpayer buys into Grover Norquist's dream of a tax-free world like every other taxpayer. Price of Civilization be damned.

So the smaller aspects of my children's school days are dependent on little groups of giggling girls racing about an echoing gymnasium on a sunny Saturday afternoon and the parents behind them who are asked, again, and again, to reach into their lives and find something extra for their children.

Infamy

So I called my parents today, just because I was thinking that it was the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day and I happened to know two people who actually remembered it.

Well, sort of.

My pop freely admitted that he didn't remember what he was doing that Sunday. He was 15 and in high school, so he thought he might have been hanging around with his pals. But he didn't remember being very excited, or even particularly worried. "We were a long way from the West Coast," the Master Chief recalled, "...and it didn't seem likely that Tojo would be coming ashore that day." and that it wasn't really a big fat hairy deal.

But the Master Chief is an engineer and he's always been that way, I think.

My mother was on the West Coast, though, and remembers that at 13 she thought it was a big deal - she was worried that the Japanese would invade San Francisco. She didn't remember many specifics, either, and perhaps after seventy years that's not surprising.

At any rate, that's their Pearl Harbor Day stories.

Four years later the Master Chief was an Ensign in the U.S. Navy and in the last stages of primary flight training on the way to the Fleet as an aviator.

(I don't know why I've always assumed that he would have been a dive bomber pilot; he doesn't seem the sort of cocky sort that fly in fighters but he has a sort of bounce that seems a little too impatient for a low, slow torpedo-bomber driver. But he and I will never know; the bombs of August 1945 ended his trajectory to the deck of a carrier and ensured my arrival twelve years later.)Meanwhile my mother spent a good part of her war in California; long enough to see her parents' Japanese-American friends and fellow Salvation Army officers the Kobiyashis off to Manzanar, anyway. In the Sixties and Seventies I recall her telling me about working with her father, who was the West Coast Salvation Army commander, at railroad stations and embarkation ports and the long trains full of tired soldiers spilling onto the platforms hopeful for a last treat and a friendly face before the long journey resumed that would end, for some at least, in a grave on some crappy little island or in some southwest Pacific jungle.

So I don't get anything from my family other than the long-dimmed sense of duty done and done well.

And I don't see any real reason to write up today's battle. It's been discussed, analyzed, hashed and re-hashed to death. I certainly don't have anything new to add to what smarter and better historians than I have written.

But I do have some thoughts on the events of the Sunday seventy years gone by, as general observations and for what it can tell us about ourselves and the lessons we have learned - or not - from the day that lived in infamy.First, I think the single salient fact of Pearl Harbor is how it shows how individual military success can be - and often is - meaningless in securing political victory.

Which is something we seem to have a hard time comprehending.

By the military calculus of 1941 Japan beat hell out of the U.S. Navy that day. Mind you, there will always be the open question of why Nagumo Chūichi didn't rearm his aircraft and return to finish the job, which would have included destroying the sub docks, the fuel tank farm, and the drydocks and other repair facilities as well as hunting for the U.S. carriers. But the battleship was still considered the naval arm of decision in '41, and Nagumo's force had pretty well hammered the Battleship Divisions of the U.S. Fleet. The USN of '41 was crafted like most of the other navies of its day, to bring its enemies within the big-gun range of its battleships and destroy them, and Pearl Harbor meant that wasn't going to happen.

But...

As we all know, the Pearl attack forced the brown-shoe Navy to lead the counterattack over the next year. And the battles of '42 - Coral Sea and Midway - proved that naval war had moved into a new era and that the Japanese Navy wasn't ready for it. Technically, yes; it had good aircraft, good pilots, and a solid carrier force. But many of the officers who lead it were, like Nagumo, cruiser and battleship guys. They were outguessed and outplanned by their USN counterparts who also had considerable access to the Japanese codes - the tremendous success of Allied decryption was the great secret of WW2 - and the IJN also proved fatally unable to adapt to the rapid changes of modern war.

Which brings us to my next observation; if you think you can design your military for the "next war" you're kidding yourself.

The combatants of Pearl Harbor couldn't even design their armed forces in 1941 for the war they were fighting three years later. And the Japanese industrial capacities of the Forties were completely inadequate, a fact Japan had no clue about until they dragged the U.S. into their war.

Look at the Japanese aircraft in the sky that day; A6M "Zero" fighter, D3A "Val" divebombers, and B5N "Kate" torpedo bombers. Good aircraft, well employed. But in the hangers of the U.S. carriers that Sunday you'd have found F3F "Wildcat" fighters, SBD "Dauntless" divebombers, and TBD "Devastator" torpedo bombers. The Grumman fighter and Douglas bombers were comparable to their Japanese counterparts

(the poor reputation of the Devastator seems to have developed after the massacre of the torpedo squadrons at Midway, an event caused largely by misfortune (the torpedo squadrons got separated from rest of the USN stroke force, arrived alone and were swarmed by the Japanese fighter cover) and the problems inherent in torpedo-bombing tactics (flying low, slow, and straight - the way you had to to deliver an aerial torpedo - turned out to be - surprise! - fatal when your enemy had decent AAA and fighter protection. Go figure)

but had been completely replaced three years later.By 1944 the F6F and F4U were better than the A6M, the SB2C at least no worse than the D3A (though the American aviators called it the "Sonuvabitch 2nd Class" and generally disliked it) and the TBF faster and more maneuverable than the B5N.

And the IJN?

Well, the real problem for the Japanese at this point was death.

Seriously.

The Japanese pilot training system was never efficient and by 1944 it was completely broken. The IJN never developed the equivalent of the USN V-12 program that took in the Master Chief back in his day. Combat losses and the inevitable attrition of a high-risk profession combined with slow training meant that experienced pilots were irreplaceable. So when their fleet air arm guys started coming down with a bad case of death it didn't matter so much that poor industrial capacity meant that the D4Y "Judy" divebomber couldn't fully replace the Val or the B6N "Jill" torpedo bomber the Kate.

But they didn't, and even if the IJN had managed to produce enough decent pilots the USA/USN would have just shot them down as well. It just would have taken a little more work but the Hellcats and Corsairs (and Lightnings and Mustangs) were just that much better; in three years the military situations had changed that much.

Within three years the strike force, and entire the Japanese Naval Air Service, that had been so violently successful over Pearl Harbor was dead, maimed, and destroyed.

Anyone who thinks they can outguess war is an utter fool.

My other thought is that Petroleum will Fuck You Up.

Pearl Harbor and the Great Pacific War in general was as much about Blood for Oil as it was about anything. The Japanese wanted the petroleum then being produced in the South China Sea area, particularly in the then-Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). But the Dutch had cut a deal; Japan had to buy Dutch oil from us. And after the Dutch took their cut and we took ours the Japanese were paying a pretty steep price to kill all those Chinese they were killing.Because the real objective of Japan's foreign policy in 1941 had nothing to do with the U.S.; it wanted pieces of China and the Asian mainland. We were just in the way.

But we WERE in the way. The U.S. forces in the Philippines were a constant threat to the Japanese moves to the southwest into south China and French Indochina. In September 1940 Japanese forces attacked Vichy troops around the northern province of Indochina, Tonkin. In return the U.S. froze Japanese assets and - more devastating - on 26 JUL 1941 we embargoed all that lovely Indonesian and West Texas crude.

Without petroleum the Japanese conquest of China was going to grind to a stop.

And you know the rest: the military men who ran the Japanese government needed that fuel. They were going to get it from Indonesia. And to get it they were going to have to take a slap at the United States.

So the slapping commenced.
And we're still in the slapping business today.

Not slapping the Japanese, though. They came looking for trouble that Sunday morning and found all they could handle. After the millions they killed, and the million of their own people who died the nation of Japan now sits quietly as the western edge of the Pacific still mired in their second decade of economic depression.

So that leads me to my final thought on the anniversary just past; that war makes you do stupid things.

Not because it makes you stupid, but because you don't have the time or the inclination to look your options over, because war demands you make decisions NOW regardless of how much you know, or what you think you know that's wrong, or whether you really know anything at all.

So you make dumb choices. If you're Japan in 1941, you attack the Americans instead of taking that Dutch oil and then making them decide to fight you. You fight them in the mid-Pacific instead of making them come all the way to you at the end of a 3,000-mile supply chain. You risk everything on a throw of the iron dice...and then you fail, because of little stupidities like not returning to destroy the submarine pens, or the drydocks, or the fuel tanks outside Pearl City.

The Japanese appear to have learned the lesson of December 7th and are unwilling to revisit their dumb choices...but we seem to be demanding to be everything they were in 1941.

We're throwing the iron dice all over the world but especially in the Middle East, because petroleum and our craving for it.

We're powerful enough to take on the world, without wondering if taking on the world is the smartest thing to do, the enduring lesson of Pearl Harbor.We seem to still collectively remember December 7th, 1941, and one would think we'd remember these lessons as well.

But one has to wonder if we understand what they are.

Unexpected Largesse

Remember how I told you that Birthday Week was over?

Well, okay. Sorta. But yesterday morning we shared a delightful surprise left over from Birthday Week: Grandma and Grandpa Chief's box of prezzies arrived for both little peeps.We all liked the books, though I suspect I know where "The Seven Wonderful Cats" comes from, Mom...But the big successes were different for each child.Big Peeper loved his Christmassy nightcap, twirling the tassel-end around like a vaudeville villian's moustaches, and even wearing it to bed that night, as shown on TV.Little girl, however, spurned her snowboarder hat and went for the little wooden duck, to the point of insisting on taking it with her to daycare where sister-diva-rival Baby Ryan and young Bubba were to be overawed by Missy's largesse. And here she is! Looking appropriately mysterous and alluring.So thanks, Grandma and Grandpa Chief!

When I Am Five

We've had a week of birthdays.Last weekend was Missy's Terrible Two, of course. And this weekend was the "official" Big Five for Mister Pea. Mind you, he was very clear on the actual timing of the Event: before he blew out his candles he was still four. After the Cake, he was five...kind of like thoroughbreds all getting a year older at the stroke of New Year's.

For Big Boy Peeper, his birthday got a real jump start at my fave breakfast spot, the Beaterville Cafe, when the lovely waitstaff, hearing that it was his big day, came up with a treat to tempt any preschooler: strawberries and whipped cream!The Peep barely waited to blow out his candles before digging in, his pancake forgotten...While we were heading back out to Bob the Subaru who should we encounter but our co-adoptive-parent Kelli (with a charmin' Aussie bloke - Kelli, you minx!). We talked of this and that but mostly about new mommy H, whose little man I mentioned just the other day - we are all very excited for her! But also frustrated at the slow pace of referrals and other body blows such as the closing of Vietnam's US-IA program. So nice to see Kelli - I know that it can't be possible, but it seems like she never has an unhappy day. Every time we see her her smile lights up her face like a good deed in a tawdry world. You're gonna be such a great mommy, Kelli...

There was more Peeperness after that - Mojo stayed home to try and nap Missy while Peep and I went to little Columbia Park Annex to play on the slide. After the crush got too much - there was a softball game in progress nearby with attendant kids on the playset - we went across Lombard to Columbia Park where we played until we couldn't play any more. Then it was Arby's for lunch and Peep's favorite curly fries and then home to play some more. By three everyone was napped (OK, Missy was, anyway...) and ready for birthday fun.We tried to keep things relatively sane. No clowns, no games, no bouncy houses (the kids across the back alley had one for what must have been someone's birthday last week and I swear, it looked like someone was cooking JiffyKidPop in a giant purple plastic pan. Every five seconds a kid would fly up in the air...). We had stuff to eat and drink, lots of trucks and other toys to play with, a yard to run in and a sandbox to dig in.

[Shite. As I type this I recall that I didn't check to see if we put the covers back on the sandbox. Dammit. OH well, the sandbox may have become the catbox. Wretched cats.]

The big moment arrived; Peep blew out the twelve (?) candles and is officially five.And, of course, there were presents.

When the last sugar-activated little guest pogoed down the front steps we slumped amid the wreckage secure that most everyone had had a good time.Of course, the evening ended with a hyper Missy spilling her water all over her crib, crying herself to sleep and a gooned-out Peeper having a huge meltdown and fight with his mom over a video. But, hey, it's one, two, three strikes you're out at the ol' childrearing game, right?

So - that was that - a very Happy Birthday, indeed. If you want to stop at the happy children stories you should stop here.

Because there is one more thing I need to talk about. Although the very thought and mention of it is cruelly hard for me.

My parents were here to enjoy their grandchildren's birthdays (and to meet their little granddaughter for the first time). They seemed to enjoy Missy's happy laughter and the Peeper's liveliness, although I have to say that he was pretty grumpy and unpromising about interacting with Pop-pop and Gramma. But that's five - at least he didn't tell me, as I once told MY father, that he didn't want to kiss his grandma because she made him think of Death...!

(In my defense, my paternal Grandma WAS a fairly dessicated old bombazine vulture at that point. Still, I was a wretched child...)

So I think they enjoyed their trip. But for me it was...I'm not sure what it was. Painful? Saddening? Enraging? It was not all that enjoyable and in many ways disturbing.

The thing is...I think we all have in our heads an image of our parents as they were when we first recognized them as people and not just food-dispensers and bottom-washers. I would guess for most of us - for me, at least - it comes somewhere between first speech and puberty. So I suspect that most of us mentally see our parents as the young adults they were when we were little. Strong. Big. The living embodiment of why growing up was something to be desired. Powerful.

But here was my mother, hunched in the glider, a weak, hesitant, infirm old lady. There's more that I don't want to speak of - age is indignity enough without public exposure, and her story is not mine to tell. But in the two years since we last saw her she seems to have dwindled a decade's worth of age. She is visibly uncomfortable at best, in pain at worst, and in the cold ashes of her disability I watched my memory of the tall, buxom redhead with the loud confidence char down to clinker. That woman is gone, gone as if she had never been. I feel like someone crept into my head and stole my mother, my memory of the straight young woman who almost sparked with energy, who comforted me when I was scared and hugged me when I was sad and gave me her strength and love so I could love and be strong.

At least her mind is still clear. Thank God.

But for the first time I looked at my parents and can picture myself standing before their graves. And not far in the future. Perhaps not tomorrow, or next week. But soon, soon enough.

I know that it is the way of the world for sons to bury their parents. I know that we are born into the world owing life a death. But right now I feel like I'm grieving twice: once for the loss of the mother I knew, and once for the sorrow to come.