Another year around the sun
Today is the Bastille Day celebration over on Ponce de Leon and all the merchants are putting on the dog. But for me this is a somber occasion, because last year, on July 11th on Saturday’s Bastille Day celebration Tatjana and I were enjoying ourselves to the max, having margaritas and dancing to the sound of the Creole String Beans while T’s mother sat in Fortier Park speaking to a neighbor. On our way home around midnight, I got a call from my mother that she needed to go to the emergency room because she was having heart palpitations.
I jumped in my truck and got there as she was literally crawling out of her skin and I got her stuff together and had to literally carry her down to the truck past the Hondurans who hung out on the steps drinking their cheap whiskey. One of them, trying to help me, was actually blocking my way and I screamed for him to leave me alone, but he followed us to the truck and in his drunken slurred Spanish said, “No te mueres Patsy, no te mueres!”
But mom did die, several months later.
And if I had known then what I know now, I’d have tried to hold onto those moments in the emergency room where we were till 8 the next morning trying to get her heart stabilized, where I could have said more than, “It’s going to be all right, mom.”
I’ll never forget being half curled up in a ball in that metal chair with a curtain around the bed as a makeshift room, listening to the woman in the next room speaking to her mother who was dying of cancer and couldn’t speak, while my own mother just looked at me with wide open eyes, smiling, and saying, “thank you” repeatedly. I think a lot about her at that moment because the last time we had been in a life or death situation like that, where she had tubes going in and out of her was about eight years earlier, and she had called me over to say something, but she couldn’t hardly speak, and I leaned in real close and she whispered, “I thank god every day for you.”
And now I say the same thing to Tin. And I miss my mom more than ever today as I think back to what seemed like just yesterday when she was a phone call away.