you are my sunshine

My youngest son thought it strange to see his mother stopped in her tracks outside the produce section of the local market, near the bananas, staring at little stuffed bears and unicorns and dogs and rabbits, pressing the stuffed animals' stomachs, listening to the tiny digital music. "Go now, let's go," he said, tugging me towards the checkstand.

"Your grandma used to sing that," I said. But Gabe could care less, and even if he'd liked the song, or had some emotional connection to it, he has better musical taste.

We went to the checkstand, detouring for a chocolate bar and a bunch of roses--cream colored roses with pink and coral edges. No, they weren't in the budget, but I was still enthralled by my mother's song, and remembering one of her frequent homilies: Always Leave Room In Your Life For Beautiful Unexpected Things.

Yes, thanks mom.

My mother was born on the same day, in the same year, as Marilyn Monroe. Like Marilyn she was ravishing, and given to pleasing those she loved. The youngest child and only daughter in her family, she was coddled and loved and admired. I grew up with stories of her mother, whom I never met, the daring and talented and lovely woman who'd come on her own from Finland to the States, who died not long before my conception, who never met my father.

My conception hurried the marriage. And possibly my mother's grief hurried the conception; I don't know. I do know my mother dressed in black for most of my childhood, a stylish black that set off her pale hair and brilliant eyes and red, red lips very well. She smelled of Tigress perfume, cigarettes, and sweet cosmetics. And at night, on good nights, she'd come to tuck me in and sing to me: you are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray...

For years I thought she'd made the song up herself, my beautiful mother who could do anything. It is amongst my earliest memories, those memories that predate the birth of my first brother when I was 3.

I learned a great deal from my mother about persistance and flexibility. We moved constantly, since my father was in the military, but wherever we went it was my mother's flair that made the temporary housing of the moment into a home. She planted and left dozens and dozens of gardens, made and left dozens of friends.

When I was ten she was diagnosed with cancer that had spread to her brain and told she had six months to live. I remember her crying and poring out her fears before her first operation. I remember most of all how helpless I felt, how incapable of keeping a household together, of caring for my brothers--by now there was another, almost two years old. It was then I had some of the more intense hallucinatory experiences of my life--perhaps my frightened spirit making up magic for comforting; perhaps, who knows, a gift of the universe.

I took it as a gift, this reassuring and splendid figure, crowned with roses, smiling so beautifully as I prayed and waited for my dad to return from the hospital.

My mother taught me stubbornness. She surprised her doctors, and survived. They told her her lovely face would be paralyzed. She sought out physical therapy and proved them wrong.

Over the years she'd survive three bouts of cancer, finally being defeated by the fourth, fighting till the end. My brothers were with her in that distant hospital. My flight got me there well after her death--but not too late; in fact I was just in time. Having been with my father through his dying, this six months later it was good that my brothers--who had felt shut out then--had their time. My heart was with my mother always; there was nothing to settle, nothing we needed to tell each other in last whispers as the machines shut down.

In one of our last conversations I spoke to her about her grandchildren, about various political and community efforts. It was hard for her to talk then, physically difficult. But she rallied enough over the phone to sternly say "Your children are fine, but for you the important thing is that you are a poet. Don't ever forget that."

From my mother, who in our turbulent times, my teen years, had shouted "I gave up my art for you kids and what thanks do I get?" (to which I had meanly replied "I didn't ask to be born, you know") it was a characteristic reminder. It made me smile. I found many of my poems carefully tucked in one of her drawers, and a draft of a letter to a friend in which she crowed over a prize I'd won one year.

Oh, and the naked polaroid photos! I quickly hid those from my dear born-again Christian brothers. They would never have understood mother's wild side.

I think it was that wildness I loved best in her, and which I continue to cherish. But that song, that sense of a world that was right, everything tucked in.

It's a sad song, you know: the other night dear/as I lay sleeping/I dreamt I held you /in my arms...but then I woke, dear/I was mistaken...

please don't take your sunshine away.

To my three year old mind it was a song of great peace. For some reason I called it the bird song--"please, sing the bird song again". It hasn't a bird in it, except in my memories, in which there is a fountain, and sunlight, and lovely birds flying round in a peaceful world.