Kid Wilma

I didn’t get a chance to know my father. He died when I was nine, and in my first memory, of him or of anything else, my mother is holding my tiny crying self as she and my dad argued in the family room (now my mother’s office) on the day my dad moved out of our house. I saw him fairly regularly after their divorce, on weekends, and he died of a brain tumor four years later.
In the years following his death, I became weirdly attached to objects—gifts he had given me: a purple-and-white candle from Hawaii, its twisted form a cross between an erupting volcano and an iris unfurling in slow, suspended waxen motion; a necklace, also from Hawaii, made of tiny coral birds carved from seashells, linked together by irregular pearly bits. The non-Hawaiian portion of my collection featured a glass tumbler with a picture of Kid Wilma Flintstone on it. Kid Wilma looked pretty much the same as grown-up Wilma—same white dress and dino-pearls, same outsized orange updo; just a smaller body and slightly softened features. Although the glass may have been available in Hawaii, mine was purchased from Ann Arbor’s Burger King during a special promotion, the glass of your choice with any regular meal. Originally, our kitchen cupboard housed two Wilma glasses—one for me and one for my sister. At some point, however, one of the Wilmas disappeared.
My memories of my dad faded steadily over time, and I often thought about him only when a new acquaintance asked about my “parents,” or if I met a stranger who looked like him, or smelled something that reminded me of him. Oysters still do it; on his weekends with us, my dad often took my sister and me to The Spaghetti Factory, a tiny, deserted, dimly-lit restaurant in another restaurant’s basement. The place always smelled like oysters, and I think it eventually closed because our biweekly business was its only regular source of income.
In college, I took Abnormal Psychology and diagnosed my attachment to objects as a mild symptom of a nonspecified personality disorder. Identifying the problem was as good as a cure, and I banished the exploding lily candle to the back of the linen closet, and tucked the necklace away in a drawer filled with tacky costume jewelry in my nightstand. The Wilma glass survived, and maintained its place in the regular rotation of glasses in everyday use.
The January of my junior year, my mom was scheduled to play a concert in Detroit and my grandmother was visiting from Ohio for the occasion. Grandma displaced mom from her bedroom, so she was forced to get ready for her concert in the den. Mom packed her music into her briefcase and swung the long black leather strap onto her shoulder. It connected with the Wilma glass, which sat on the edge of a bookcase, and it shattered on the hardwood floor. Out of habit, my sister and I ran down the hall to see which glass had broken, and when I saw the telltale orange paint of Kid Wilma’s bun, I collapsed into tears. My sister, the more stoic of the sisters, pursed her lips and turned back down the hall. It was just a glass—I knew that. It didn’t make me feel closer to him, or make his memory more real. But it—that two dollar glass from Burger King—was all I had left of him, and it was gone.
I volunteered to clean up the mess, but before I tossed the broken pieces into the trash can I fished out the largest fragment. I keep it in a jewelry box, nestled in velvet next to a pin I never wear. You can just make out Kid Wilma’s smiling face, and a bit of orange bun.

Thoughts on the Cardigan

I just finished reading “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” by Anne Lamott. I believe that I am about five to ten years late in adding my hearty endorsement to the chorus of praise for that book, but add it I must. For the uninitiated (like myself, until recently), “Traveling Mercies” is a collection of vignettes from the author’s life, focusing on her journey from agnostic childhood to drug-hazed early adulthood to single parenthood to discovering Jesus crouching in a corner of her bedroom. A sort of partial memoir, I guess. Or maybe that’s redundant. Anyway, many of the stories of Lamott’s life struck a chord with me, but the one that has stuck with me described, in hilarious and poignant fashion, a trip to the beach with her mother, younger brother, and son. Lamott writes about how she couldn’t stop herself from dwelling throughout the day on the little things about her mother that annoyed her, even while she appreciated the blessing of spending the day with three generations of Lamotts. In particular, it was the elder Lamott’s insistence on wearing a cardigan, on a warm day, to the beach, that her daughter found personally offensive.
As a born curmudgeon, whose crotchety ways have only gotten more aggravated with age, I fully embraced the attitude that allows one to object to one’s mother’s clothing choices. I, too, nag my mother about the small things: buying too many (yes, in my opinion) long, denim, linen, corduroy, fill-in-the-blank skirts; asking me how to upload an attachment to an e-mail for the two hundredth time, calling me at work to ask about something she’s perfectly capable of figuring out herself—and she would, if I weren’t readily available. My mother is an incredibly strong, smart, savvy person. She raised two children by herself and has successfully run her own business for over 30 years. Does she really need my help to determine the proper length of time to warm up her leftovers in the microwave? But it struck me, as Lamott explained, without explaining, that the cardigan/microwave-related frustration was code for all of the big stuff that is wrapped up in the mother-daughter relationship: the fear of losing her, the outrage over her intervention in our lives, the desperate desire for her involvement in our lives, the harsh perceptions and projections that we volley back and forth as soon as we are old enough to form them.
We don’t want our mothers to need to wear cardigans on warm days, to be reminded that they, too, are vulnerable, finite. It’s terrible to think of our mothers growing old and cold and fragile, so terrible that it makes us angry at the world, and who embodies the world moreso than our mothers?