Momma

Surprisingly little comes to mind as I sit down to write about my mother. Our participation in each others lives was very simple. For a very long time the focus of her life was my happiness and well-being. Her unconditional love gave me security and self-esteem. The latter became arrogance that I've spent half my life unlearning.

Elizabeth Gwen Anderson grew up in Glennville Georgia. She never met her father a full-blooded Cherokee drunkard.  I think she learned where he was living, in a mobile home in Florida and wrote to him. He never wrote back.

She was raised by her very strict maternal grandmother whose memory she always revered and loved. They were dirt poor. As a little girl she picked tobacco for money and food from friendly neighbor's farms. She never complained of her early poverty and always spoke of her childhood as a happy time.

Of her brief first marriage she never said anything except that her husband was shiftless. Like many people who struggled out of poverty few things disgusted her more than laziness (excepting mine).

Savannah was comparatively the Big City offering better prospects for husbands and jobs. The pool hall & hot dog shop she waited tables in still existed the last time I was in Savannah. I always smile when I think of the big neon dachshund in the window.

That is where she met my daddy. He was the quintessential tough guy hunk. She was pretty. She was passive, Mack was assertive. They were slightly more intelligent, literate than most people from their backgrounds. I don't know what bonded them. Lust? Controllable and controlling naturally falling together?

My own romantic entanglement that seemed the most sensible ended in disaster. I've seen happy marriages that elude understanding. It is usually pretty easy to discern why love affairs fail. But the happy ones are often beyond insight. Too much is hidden in invisible things and nuance.

By the time I came along she was working at Liberty National Bank where she'd be a clerk for about forty years. I'd visit her their often. Everybody liked her, she did her job well and it was a much happier place to be than home. Sometimes when at the end of the day I'd wait while she called other banks to find one that wanted an overnight loan of the extra $10,000,000 they had that day. Clearly banking made no sense.

On Saturday mornings I'd go to the grocery store with her. I'd pick out cereal favoring the one with the best free gimmick inside. For the same reason I was a Crackerjack addict. And she'd always buy me a bottle of maraschino cherries that I'd wolf down as soon as we got home.

During the first few years I was in elementary school we lived in an apartment in downtown Savannah. It only had one bedroom so I slept near them, sometimes with them. I sometimes wonder what warm and happy memories may have eroded through the years.

Our landlords were a married couple and the husband's brother-in-law. Many years later I'd learn that that Henry had known my father in Chicago and had a violent crush on him. Henry was the only person who'd tell me that he'd always known I was gay. But that was after I came out to him. I think it gave Henry some a sick satisfaction that a man he couldn't have had a queer for a son. He knew how that'd affect daddy.

Henry had been a friend of my Uncle Carlyle, my father's gay brother. I have a dim memory of a handsome blond man. I'd eventually learn that for many years he'd been a kept boy in Florida and that the reason he'd spent the last half of his life in a mental hospital was he'd picked up a couple of hustlers who hurt him so badly that he escaped into insanity.

I'd eventually work for Henry as a night auditor in the local Holiday Inn. He was a bitter, bitchy old queen. After demanding that I cut my hair because an elderly woman complained the Holiday Inn let me go.

My first elementary school is now Savannah's Art School. That racket has been a boon to the town from what I hear. When I lived there the population decreased by about 1,000 people a year. The town's major employer was the world's largest paper plant, Union Bag as it was called then. The plant made Savannah smell like the world's largest assemblage of rotten eggs. Not that I could smell it until I'd been away for many years.

I have a false memory of the first day of school. Everybody came in wearing military uniforms. I know it isn't true but the image is as vivid as anything from real life.

Years later I'd realize one of the guys in first and second grade was gay. He was much older than the rest of us having been held back year after year. A dozen years later wearing women's shoes with the gait and gestures of a very femme gay guy. I've wondered if sexual confusion had anything to do with his inability to do schoolwork.  Forty-one years later I still remember his name, Gilbert.

From downtown we went on to Savannah Gardens where I met Victor. He was the first person I knew that shoplifted. I'd already started to detach from social norms and he was my friend. So it surprised me but I didn't care. Not that unusual I know but I was a kid who never littered and would never walk against the traffic light even if the street was empty.  I was foolish enough to tell my parents. 

Victor left a bag of dog shit on his neighbor's door. We turned on the lawn sprinkler of a family we hated while they were on vacation. They'd left a window open, so goodbye carpet. We were as heartless as only children could be. We explored the neighborhood marshes and dug a club house under his house. My chipped tooth is a permanent reminder of his carelessness with a baseball bat.

I had to change elementary schools.  I'd discover later that a couple classmates from that school were gay. Twins, Larry and Barry. Blond, slim, very nelly.  For wholly carnal reasons I'd wish I'd somehow managed to bring up my own sexuality when I met them later. The missed opportunities of youth.

This was when my father started spending more time at home. And when I'd met the kid who'd talk me into going to the Bible Baptist Church where I'd get saved. My only association with Christianity was my paternal grandmother who raised me in my earliest years. She was the stereotypical saintly Christian woman. Grandma Lucille had a bun like Aunt Bea in Mayberry. I'd never had a metaphysical thought. I'd escape it but not before sucking my father into it.

Naturally my mother was caught in the undertow. I'm sure she believed in God but was never zealous, never went to church again after she left daddy. Daddy would point out what he imagined her shortcomings to folks in neighboring pews.

Staci was born. The other day I bought a collection of the For Better or Worse newspaper strip. Flipping through it I saw the boy recalling the jealousy he felt when his baby sister was born. Is this really how people feel at the birth of a younger sibling? I admit an egomaniacal bent but my universe didn't alter a particle.

We we moved on to a more suburban neighborhood my life began to get bad. This was when my father was home most weekends. I began to understand how brutish he was. My mother never complained. If she cried it was where no one could see it.

They'd live here until I left home. I passed through Junior and High School. Becoming more and more disenchanted with everybody. Coming to hate my father for his treatment of my mother and his meddling in my life.

A few years after I left home my mother called to let me know that she was "taking a vacation" from my father. She and Staci had moved back to Savannah Gardens. Later she'd move back to the same apartment in downtown Savannah. Everybody else was dead and Henry was sole owner. She'd live there until he died.

Daddy couldn't deal with the vacation. Being alone in the house completely freaked him out. So as soon as possible he'd divorce momma and remarry his ex-wife.

My mother still felt love for him but wasn't too upset. Sadly enough he'd after getting Vivien back he'd tell momma that she was the one he really loved. Perhaps he regretted saddling himself with a dithering woman incapable of making the smallest personal decision. (She'd spent the years away from him under the thumb of her mother.) Thankfully for both women he never said anything like that to Vivien. If he'd been selfish enough to re-divorce Vivien and re-married my mother he'd have most likely been just as tyrannical as ever.

Once Staci was off and married my mother's lifestyle changed dramatically. She started going to bars with women friends. Coming back home with men.

When Siobhan and I were staying with her I was pretty startled the night she came back with a handsome guy at least a couple of decades her junior. One of her friends told me this was pretty ordinary.

It must have been her affability and gentleness. Like most children I can't visualize a parent as an object of lust. A number of these guys proposed to her but she'd had enough of marriage. The woman I'd always though a perpetually naive small-town girl had adopted a wham-bang-thank-you-sir policy.

I was delighted. It was so healthy and she was so happy. I think my sister wanted momma to settle down. But I knew the years of sleeping separately from daddy must've been frustrating.

Sanely she had her fill and retired from honky-tonk life. She spoiled her grandchild, watched CNN, read trashy novels, relaxed.

Liberty National was been absorbed by Trust Company of Georgia. She became unhappy with work and  took early retirement. Her retirement benefits were terribly ungenerous. She continued to work at the bank on an occasional basis. She needed the money. It was the only worry of her later years.

After Henry's death had forced her to move she bought a mobile home. At first I was appalled. She was happy which was all that mattered. Hurricane Floyd made a mess of it but FEMA money fixed everything.

Since she'd been raised to scrimp and save and always had to during her years with my father I shouldn't have been surprised that she left an estate of several thousand dollars. When the bank notified me they asked if I'd pay half of her debt (my sister taking care of the other half) when I got the money they held in trust. Sure thing, I said. Ha! Not a chance, she'd worked for them for decades and they gave her next to nothing. Let the damned shareholder's dividends be a hundredth of a penny less.

I haven't really said much about momma. In many ways she was always the same to me. Unconditionally supportive. Nothing I did could break her faith in me. No matter what I did, like try to defraud a bank, I was merely misguided or foolish. 

That warped me a little. But I learned from her stoicism. Bad things are always with us. You learn to accept them or you give them the power to destroy you.

She must've been disappointed when I didn't stay in college but I think opening my own business left her feeling that I was secure and had found safe harbor.