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Saturday, May 9, 2009
Happy Mother's Day
posted by Rick Blue at 17h12
me mum
So I have traded in a pile of Aeroplan points.
(I don’t call them “air-miles” any more because they are not, if they were “miles” I could go around the world with the “miles’ I traded in for this flight. Some might call them “air-kilometres” but they don’t even add up to that.)
I will arrive on Mother’s Day afternoon.
My mother is 90 years old; still bright and sharp. She has lived most of her life in the United States and she is an American citizen, but still claims she will never really become “a bloody yank.”
Born and raised in the Liverpool area of England, she was a young model when the Second World War broke out. She married my father who was a flying officer in the Royal Air Force during the battle of Britain. They were a golden couple: the war hero and his beautiful wife. I was born there, too, and they brought me this side of the pond when I was 2.
She will still talk about “the war” as if it happened yesterday. I remind her that it happened 70 years ago, but it’s still fresh in her mind. All it takes is someone to say that it was the Americans who won the war and she’s off. All it takes is a new biography of Winston Churchill and she will go back in time.
Yes, she is English, in the best sense of the word. And she has affected me in ways that still surprise me. When I was young, she would walk around the house singing Frank Sinatra songs (her favourite singer). When I wrote a play about Sinatra produced two years ago at The Brome Theatre, she was overjoyed, although she could not make it to the show.
(She can no longer stand up to the brutal obstacle course they put you through in airports these days. They have successfully taken the option of flying away from old people like her.)
But next week I will drive her to Palm Springs to visit Sinatra’s grave.
Music had always been part of her life. Her younger sister was a nightclub singer in Portland, Me., in the '50s and '60s. If I have any musical talent, it is thanks to her. And I am sure I inherited my love of British music hall and Vaudeville from her. This was a form of entertainment that flourished in Liverpool during her youth. In fact, if you didn’t have a northern accent, you simply couldn’t be a comedian in England.
She still loves to play with words. She will say someone committed “sewer pipe” if they committed suicide. She will use arcane expressions like “skew-whiff.” This means off kilter. And, of course, she will never let a good innuendo go by without adding: “As the actress said to the Bishop.”
It is thanks to her that I understand the subtleties of the dialogue on Coronation Street.
The last time I visited her, the family gathered round and we all played a word game. The idea was that you had to guess a word in a given time as you were given various clues. The players were my sister, her kids – ages 16 to 27 – and me.
Guess who won the game?
That she is still so lucid at the age of 90 is due to the fact that she still remains engaged in this world. Because of a lack of mobility, she doesn’t get out as much as she used to but she watches news programs on television and is always reading a book. She followed the last U.S. Presidential election with absolute relish.
There is not much you can buy for a person who is 90. Their needs are small. But I had a brainwave. I went to the Bramble House in Pointe Claire and bought her a tea cup emblazoned with a Union Jack, and some of the finest imported English tea and shortbread. (This will last a couple of weeks. She drinks three cups of tea a day.)
But at least it’s something she can’t get in California.