DIED 2008
ANYONE WHO WAS AT Camp Nawita in the late 1930s can tell you, she was queen of the baseball diamond. The tennis court, the hockey field, the horseshoe pitch, and the lake. Too bad she beat Title IX by forty years. It wasn’t exactly the heyday of female business majors, either, nor women in the workplace, and for a really bad idea, try sending a young woman on a business trip by herself, wedding ring or no. Enough already. She got pregnant, moved to the Shore, took up golf and gin. She won her first club championship in 1966, just as I began my poetry career. I raced into the dining room where she was drinking her martini, ode in hand. She had a bad lie in the weeds of sixteen / Ere she lofted and landed her ball on the green.
Everyone’s mother is mythological: her body the origin of existence and consciousness, her house the pimped-out crib of Zeus, her mistakes the cause of everything. Holy her rosebushes, holy her blackjack system, her London broil holy. My mother, the godhead of 7 Dwight Drive, rose daily from her bed to quaff her Tropicana orange juice and to slay the New York Times crossword puzzle. She survived a difficult childhood, my father’s high jinks, two heart attacks, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, surgery for diverticulosis, and the many poor decisions and inappropriate outfits of her daughters. She certainly did not believe a clot in her lung could bring her down, that smoking for sixty-five years would actually cause lung cancer, or that lung cancer was definitely fatal. The last thing she did before she took to her bed was win a golf tournament. Clearly the subprime crisis, the market crash, Hurricane Sandy, and even Donald Trump were biding their time until she was out of the way.
And then she was. Imagine Persephone coming up from hell and Demeter not there. Strange cars in the driveway, the rosebushes skeletons. You stand there at first, uncomprehending, your poem in your hand. Then you go somewhere, call it home. Call it spring.