Greetings, friends. (LII)

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about Mom’s words to live by, and a silver ring.

My mother died while I was en route to New Hampshire. Adah had called me on Friday to tell me that she was fading fast, and that I had better book a flight out. I left the next morning.

My flight landed at Logan airport in the afternoon. I turned my phone on when the aircraft landed. It buzzed immediately with a text from Adah, sent while I was in the air. I knew instantly what happened.

“Hey - I know you are in the air but I need you to know upon landing that she’s really taken a turn for the worse,” she had written. “Please call me upon landing. Love you.”

I called my sister while standing cheek-by-jowl in the aisle with other passengers as they jostled one another to assemble their luggage while the plane doors opened. Adah told me that Mom had passed away a little after noon, when my flight was still in the air. I thanked her for giving me the news, told her that I would rent a car and call her back, that I loved her.

I put my phone back in my pocket, and started very quietly sobbing in the midst of all these strangers, all while still wearing my N95 mask. A woman in the row behind me reached out and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned and nodded. I couldn’t say anything. The rest was a blur.

When I got to Epsom, Adah had already started working on the details of the funeral. Once that was squared away, we thought about what items to give as keepsakes, since the ganze mispachah, the whole family, or many of them at least, would be present all in one place. Mom’s landscape oils from the school of Bob Ross, and her perplexingly large collection of brass menorahot were among the obvious candidates.

But the most obvious items to give to family were in Mom’s jewelry box, the one she had used regularly. Neither of the more precious rings Adah expected to find were in there, but there were quite a few other items, rings and earrings and pendants, mostly in silver, some with semi-precious stones. Some had belonged to her mother or father or grandmothers. Some of it was just costume jewelry she favored. We agreed to divide between us the items we most wanted, and bring the rest to the funeral reception to share.

Most of the jewelry were women’s fashions, and anyway I have never been the ornamental type. Adah offered me earrings to give to Besha to wear to the funeral, if she wanted them. My sister is a mensch.

Then my eye lit on a simple handworked silver ring with a geometric design. I remembered from my earliest years Mom wearing it often. I asked Adah if she minded if I kept it. She had no objection.

I dimly recalled that the ring was a Navajo design, presumably made by a Native artisan. She had probably had it for a good 50 years. The ring was exactly as I recalled it. Later on, I tried it on each finger in turn. My mother had much smaller hands than I did. Once my inevitable air-travel-induced edema subsided, the ring fit only on my left pinky, and that snugly.

The next day I went to get Besha from the airport, and the day after that we met with Adah and Keith for lunch to finalize the funeral plans. Adah saw the ring on my little finger and laughed.

“You know what Mom told me?” she said. “Never date a man with longer hair than you, and never trust a man with a pinky ring.”

This was funny for a couple reasons, because 25 years ago, the hair on my head reached halfway down my back. My mother actually wrote a poem about my hair when it was long, the one she sent to Grandma Lenore. I found Mom’s notebook of handwritten verse today. That poem is not good, but some of the others are not bad. Mom’s poetry is another story for another day.

We also recently found “Mom’s Book of Words to Live By” as transcribed verbatim by Adah from Mom’s lips in her own youth. Quite as Adah had recalled it, the admonishments against suitors with long hair or pinky rings were right there on the first page.

“Mom’s Book of Words to Live By” then continues on in that vein for many more handwritten pages. Adah had numbered them point by point, recording quite a few aphorisms that our mother dispensed and re-dispensed at seemingly every opportunity. Some are trite, some are funny, many are both. I had wanted to write more about it, but Adah rightly insists that it is her story to tell. I hope she will share the manuscript and its wisdom with the world someday.

So I wore Mom’s Navajo ring to her funeral, and delivered her eulogy while wearing it, and I have worn it most days since then. In spite of my profoundly ambivalent feelings about my mother, particularly in her final years, wearing her ring gives me a subtle sense of peace and satisfaction. I am grateful to be able to carry a tangible bit of my mother’s memory with me wherever I go.

Twice now I have misplaced the ring in the chaos of organizing her house. I am unused to wearing rings, still, and I often forget to take it off when I am doing things that are better off without, like working the forge. But, at least, at home I have a proper place to put it when I take it off, so that I know where to find it. Here I do not. Both times the ring was hiding in a clothing pocket, but I have put it somewhere safe for now, because I would hate to wonder what had become of it after the final dregs of this house are swept away. I will wear it again when I head home.

As I mentioned before, I went down to North Carolina in January to see my father and stepmother, and get Dad’s help in buying a pickup truck to drive back up here. As he and I were cruising around rural north central North Carolina, hopping from one dealership to the next, I happened to glance at his right hand as it was resting on the shifter.

My father was wearing the same ring I was. I mean, it wasn’t the identical ring, and it was obviously larger, but it was clearly in the exact same style, presumably made by the same Navajo artisan.

Given her penchant for silver and turquoise, I assumed that Mom had obtained both rings during the summer she spent in Arizona, and given one to my father. I asked him later and it turned out that I was mistaken. Grandma Lenore and Grandpa George, her second husband, the grandfather I grew up with, had bought them on a Grand Canyon sightseeing holiday, and brought back the pair for my (then still-married) parents.

There are very few strands connecting my biological parents to one another across the years. Aside from me, I mean. But it warmed my heart to see that my father still wears the mate to her ring all this time later. We keep these things because they connect us to who we are. I hope it is still many, many years off, but it seems possible that someday I will wear both.

How my mother came to spend a summer in Arizona, and get to know and work with a few Navajo people, and what she did while she was there, is a story for another time.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. More tomorrow.