Jeff Hamilton
Apropos of Something, a Flourish
“Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing”
—Stephen Crane
When she died, as her only son it may have been assumed that at a ceremony I would say something on my mother’s behalf – at any rate, I was asked by more than one person. I demurred. Her last five years were hard. When calamity crashed upon her in waves, as her only near child we’d both of us be in the boat. Now, having survived her, I wouldn’t need an audience to address my memory. The poem stuck in my head was like one of the black-and-white TCM gems that drop in their rotation whenever I seem to have a moment to kill as I fold laundry of a Sunday morning. Nonetheless, the minister, in particular, seemed to look at me wondering what my relationship with my mother might be, so I dashed off this note to him the morning of the funeral at which I declined to speak.
“My mom was subject to flourishes, and she needed no more than a slow morning in her bathrobe alone with her crossword puzzles to have one. Alzheimers took that away, such that often by afternoon she’d completely lost the thread, and feel she was on vacation, waiting for me to come pick her up. The trick was to visit her on Saturday mornings, when she could make out who I was and what I planned to do.
“However, six times in the last year she’d taken to (some longish) hospital stays. That last one, a week ago, Saturday, she fell from her apartment bedside early in the morning, badly scraping her leg, so she was rushed to the ER and while her caretaker brought her home by 8 am, I couldn’t arrive until an hour or so after that, and took the afternoon shift, with the goal of keeping her bleeding leg above her heart. To our luck, South Pacific dropped in the TCM rotation, Mary Martin and Mario Lanza, which kept us for a while amused. Since I was a boy, I have never been able to listen to Lanza’s ‘once you have found her, never let her go,’ without doing my impression; and mom, I noticed, upon the upstroke of the subsequent number, ‘Happy Talk,’ was singing along: ‘happy talking happy talk, | talk about what you like to do |You’ll always have a dream | If you don’t have a dream | How you gonna have a dream come true?’”
Jeff Hamilton writes poems and is an independent scholar in St. Louis.
