Everyone Else Pays Cash

“Trust In God; Everyone Else Pays Cash”

Every Friday I post a copy of the column that is just then appearing in papers all over. I do this in case anyone here would like to see how the blog-writing lens and the newspaper-writing lens come together in a columnist's life. This week I’m a day late in doing it though on account of how I was very busy yesterday tending a 14-month-old who was himself very busy staggering around sucking on his little sucky thing while making wispy marks on index cards with his big brother’s pointy new crayons.

The column describes what it’s like to be a really trusting and open person and how far that whole way of living can work for you before it starts working against you. The Somerville Journal has titled it  “Dummy Up Or Just Let It Go And Be Friendly?” and if you go here you can read about the most open and trusting family in all of America - and about how, lucky for them, the person they were so open WITH was the most open and trusting individual in the country and yes I am that person.

I just trust people. I can't help it. When I was 19 a slimy old rich guy asked me to come to a conference with him and for $500 be his ‘assistant’ for the weekend. I actually believed that’s what I would be - and I almost went, innocent lamb that I was.

Way later in my late 30s, I walked through a night-time alley in Times Square, back in the days when the place was filled with pimps and prostitutes and skinnied-out AIDS sufferers and I had my 11-year-old child with me God help us. Annie and I were also attended by Roberto, a South Bronx boy and ABC scholar of 17 who was like a son in our family in those days. Rob feared no one and seemed to trust everyone. Together with Chris, his best pal and fellow ABC scholar, we had all just looked on as Annie had her portrait done by a street artist. Now, along toward midnight, Chris had gone along and Rob was leading Annie and me on his shortcut, the canvas in my hands. Sure enough, as we walked deeper into the alley here were two men and a woman, lounging on the hood of a busted-looking car.

Roberto smiled at them so I did too. “Look!” I said. “Annie has had her portrait painted!” And they slid off the hood of the car and sauntered over to examine it.  “A beautiful portrait for a beautiful girl!” they said kindly. Then Rob led us back to our hotel and went home to his mama on Beekman Ave.

So Trust and Openness won the day, that day anyway. It’s a day I've thought about many times since.

I haven’t seen Rob in a good long while now but I think of him often. He has children himself these days and I wonder if he and their mother are raising them too to begin with people in an open friendly way and just kind of take things from there.....Anyway here we are in that long-ago time, when my hair was blacker than black and Rob, with his big smile and his wrestling trophies, was one day out of high school, and college-bound, with everything before him.

Mothers Day Post-Mortem

When my sister and I were kids, Mothers Day meant sneaking outside at dawn in our pjs, picking blossoms, glomming them together with electrician’s tape, wrapping them in tinfoil because tinfoil was of course so pretty, then impaling the whole top-heavy thing on a hat-pin and presenting it to our mom. She’d pretend to be surprised and would never get mad about the grass satins on our pajama-bottoms or the tree-bark clinging to the great lifting cloud of my curly black hair (talk about biscuit head, which even today my spouse calls “The Net”.)

I got one card for Mothers Day, from the dazzling couple shown here. That’s our Favorite Oldest Son (as he calls himself) Dodson, the first-in honorary kid in our big shambling family, Dodson who came to us back in ‘86 as a barely five-foot-tall freshman in the ABC Program and that’s his bride Veronica. They sent me flowers AND a card AND called yesterday. And I heard from three of our other honorary children too, darling Susie and handsome Gary and Deanna whom I met when she was 18 and now seems like a lovely pale lily of a younger sister to me.

So they got in touch. And I got to actually see all my girls because I invited them over and made salmon and swordfish and roast beef, rice and a salad of Boston lettuce, strawberries and goat cheese in walnut oil. Carrie's my oldest girl. She and her partner Chris brought their two shorties who got right to work dismantling the place. And my younger daughter Annie came straight from the airport and four days in Chicago. Our youngest, Michael, living above a dry cleaners in East Harlem I did not hear from but poor Mike: him I will hunt down in a hour to proof my column which has to go out this morning. Michael edits everything I write and has done so since his Junior year in high school and if you ever find a typo here you’ll know he didn’t see it first. Each week he takes my column, a mere 620 words long and he sits with it for a good 15 minutes, finding the stray grammatical goof-up or the logical lapse, pointing out the turn of phrase that is awkward or that repeats or that has become in his mind an annoying verbal tic of mine and who knows more about those than a person’s own kids? Annie looks at my work too I should say and Carrie as well and these poor kids: when I die they’ll say, “Thank God! Silence at last!”

So anyway the baby and I patted the cat and his pre-school brother and I went out to my car and pushed buttons to make the doors and windows open and close so many times the things began to resemble a big gilled sea-creature breathing hard. Then with supper we drank a Frei Brothers Chardonnay and a Hess Select Merlot. Chris, who is Carrie’s partner and as dear to me now as my own child started with wine, but then switched to beer. We talked about doing childcare for them in two weeks when they go to an out-of-town wedding and Annie told about eating at the finest restaurant in Chicago. Carrie and I also spent some time studying pictures of our family from over 100 years ago and she again said how she wanted to go out to the Berkshires and see that old old house where our family story started.

They say Michael looks just like me. Annie looks like her own gorgeous self and is her own bold and funny self too. But the more I look at this first child Carrie, the more she looks to me in moments like my own mom and also like the pictures of Mom’s mom who died as a girl barely 30. If it were now instead of 1910 she might not have even been pregnant by that age. As it was she’d been pregnant five times and the fifth pregnancy killed her. Here they are now, the daughter I know so well and the grandmother we none of us knew, Carrie Maloney, married in 1903, and Carrie Marotta, married 100 years later, almost to the day. You tell me they don’t look alike.

I think of that young dead woman. I picture her often lying there just a few feet down below the grave I visit. Alas and alas I now also picture my mom, who lies there too at the feet of the mother she could never remember.

It got late fast last night and I was too sleepy to write. So let me just say this morning thanks, guys, for making me a mom. And thank you, husband of mine, for doing all the dishes and drying them; for putting them away and wiping the counter-tops same as you do every time. And finally thanks to you, Mom, and here you are as a newlywed of 38, pregnant with her first child before the troubles came that rendered you single again, but even then this is what I remember: you with your big smile, telling it like it was and making everyone laugh.