I've officially been an orphan since October of 2012 when my mother passed away. As I've detailed here, her death was not a tragedy. The tragedy — if you can call it that with a woman who lived far longer than any doctor would have expected — was how her health deteriorated the last ten years or so. Inability to walk much or see much or eat anything she liked or go three months without being carted off to an emergency room had left her wishing it would end. She just wanted it to end. If there had been a legal, painless way to make that happen, she would have eaten three chili dogs, then pushed the button.
(Actually, in her condition, if she'd eaten the three chili dogs, she might not have lived long enough to push the button.)
On March 3 of that year, one day after I turned 60, I held a big birthday party for my little ol' self and invited 120 of my friends. If you felt you should have been among them, I apologize…but I have way more than 120 friends and that's about all the restaurant could hold. I chose that particular one because of her — because she liked it and it was close to her home. As if all the other problems I mentioned in the first paragraph didn't restrict her ability to enjoy life, there was this: She sometimes and without much warning got incredibly tired and had an urgent need to go to bed and stay there for 8-10 hours. One day, I took her on a day trip to a place she'd always wanted to go that was about a two-hour drive from her bedroom. The fatigue hit her there and it was quite an ordeal to get her home and safely under the covers.
After that, she was unwilling to ever be in a situation where she was more than about twenty minutes from that bed. She wouldn't let me take her to the theater or to a show because, as she put it, "What if we get there and the show is just starting and I suddenly need to be home?" She agreed to come to the party because I assured her that (a) if she suddenly needed to go to sleep, someone would immediately take her home and (b) it would not be me. I convinced her to let me take her to the party since we would be getting there before it started but she made me swear I wouldn't leave my own birthday party in progress to chauffeur her back to her abode.
With all that agreed-upon, she agreed she'd attend my 60th birthday party. She said, "I guess I should since I was there for your last one, fifty years ago." Actually, she was there for all of them but the previous one was, indeed, fifty years before.
I don't recall my first few. My earliest memory would be of one that was around age five or six. I remember a lot of neighborhood children and their mothers, we kids dressed up nicer than we wanted to be. I remember sandwiches and cake and presents and paper hats. That's really all that stayed with me about the next few and about all I recall about going to the birthday parties of friends of mine unless they were cruel enough, as some were, to hire a clown.
Clowns do not belong at kids' birthday parties. They belong at circuses and in cartoons and Red Skelton paintings and nowhere else.
Mostly, I had tiny, family-only parties at ages seven, eight and nine…and then when I turned ten, my mother insisted on throwing a big gala birthday celebration for me. I had not asked for one. She just felt it was something a parent was supposed to do for a child and she seemed way more excited about it than I was. It was only in ostensible adulthood that I began to not hate being the center of attention of anything. Still, I somehow felt obligated to go along with this party thing so at her request, I specified twelve friends I would like to have attend. She contacted their parents and arranged the kids' presence and the assistance of a few moms.
It was all planned as an afternoon of events. The first was that with the aid of some other parents and their autos, we all caravaned to a miniature golf course on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica and played a round of miniature golf. Then we drove to our house and there was food — hamburgers, hot dogs, lemonade and (of course) cake — and then a Badminton tournament in the backyard. Somewhere in there, I unwrapped a lot of presents.
Fun? Not one bit. I hated the entire day. Could not wait for it to be over.
The miniature golf course part of it just seemed so awkward — getting thirteen kids there and dividing that prime number into smaller groups since thirteen kids cannot all play golf at the same time. The golf course was a ramshackle slum that was torn down a few years later. It might have imploded on its own on my tenth birthday if I'd had a better backswing on my niblick.
There were all these parents around taking pictures of us and…well, there were a lot of things I didn't like about being a kid and one of them was being thought of as "cute" in the same tone of voice you'd use to describe a "cute" trained dog act. It also didn't help my disposition that I finished dead last in the tournament. None of my friends were classy enough to throw a few putts and let the Birthday Boy win.
Then it was back to the house for chow with all these adults taking photos and also now 8mm movies of how cute we all looked wearing our party hats and eating cake. I made a wish and blew out all the candles with one breath but I didn't get my wish: The party continued. Some of my friends embarrassed me with spillage and mess-making and there was my poor mother running around, trying to wait on all these kids and making a special lunch for one girl who didn't want to eat a hot dog or a hamburger.
Not one of the presents was something I wanted or could use. I've rarely enjoyed getting gifts because I'm terribly hard to shop for. I'm larger than people think, I have all those food allergies and I don't drink…so probably a good 70% of all the presents I've received in my lifetime, unless I told the person what to give me, have been items of clothing that didn't fit me, food I couldn't eat or wine I wouldn't drink. I also buy or receive review copies of every DVD or book I want so there's not much chance of giving me one of those I don't have. It's always made me feel bad when someone goes to the trouble and expense to buy (or worse, make) something I can't wear, eat, drink or use. Friends have succeeded in giving me wanted gifts but not often.
That day at my tenth birthday party, I did my best to smile and thank the givers but I was as bad an actor then as I am now and I'm pretty lousy now. Then the Badminton game was chaotic with the net falling down and no one knowing how to keep score or even play…and again, I lost. The whole afternoon just felt so wrong to me in every way.
When all my friends had finally left, my mother came up to me and asked if I had another wish for my birthday. I yelled, "Yes! I would like to never have another birthday party as long as I live!" Then I ran to my room, slammed the door and stayed in there for about five minutes, crying and sulking.
It took the full five minutes for my ten-year-old brain to realize that my parents — my mother, mainly — had gone to a lot of trouble to give me a wonderful day and it wasn't their fault that it hadn't turned out that way. I went out into the living room. My father had gone out somewhere but my mother was sitting in her chair, crying.
It was the worst moment of the day, maybe the worst moment of my admittedly-brief life until then. I had taken a bad situation and made it worse and I had hurt my mother.
"I'm sorry," I said to her. "I'm very, very sorry."
She said she was sorry I hadn't liked my day. I told her I was sorry that she was sorry and that I really liked what she tried to do. She looked at me hard and said, "I should have known. You don't like Halloween either!"
I nodded yes. To me, Halloween was and still is a day when you disfigure yourself, go around and extort candy you probably won't eat and — again — do things adults think are "cute." Never liked it. I've just never been big on holidays. I figure if you can live life so you're reasonably happy on non-holidays, you don't need the holidays. They become less important. A friend of mine later would tell me, "I lived all year for Christmas because it was the only time there was no screaming in our house." There was almost never screaming in the house where I grew up.
That afternoon, my mother and I continued to apologize to each other for about the next ten minutes. I was sorry I hadn't enjoyed my party. She was sorry she hadn't realized I wouldn't enjoy a party…and indeed, I didn't have another one for an entire half a century.
In those fifty years, I don't think I ever had another harsh word or moment of unpleasantness with my mother. She was smart and understanding and she just accepted that her kid was not like other kids. Actually, I'm not sure there are any kids who are like other kids but if there are, I'm not one of them. So after the debacle of my tenth birthday, we had an unspoken pact…
She never did anything just because it was something other parents did. And I, because I knew just how exceptional she was and how everything she did was at least intended to be for my own good, never faulted her for anything. There was really nothing to fault but I had a good imagination. I could have made up something if I'd wanted to. Years later, I stood by as my then-girlfriend — one who was not out of my life rapidly enough — screamed at her mother. What the mother had done was immaterial. It was wrong but not destructive and certainly not malicious. Still, my lady friend yelled, over and over, "Mom, you ruin everything!"
And I just stood there, cringing at the scene and thinking, "Gee…my mother never ruined anything!"
She certainly didn't ruin my 60th birthday party. Quite the opposite. She was the star attraction, getting way more attention than I did — which was fine because I intended it to be less about me and more about her getting to meet a whole lot of my friends she had not met and vice-versa. I knew she wouldn't be in any condition to do that by #61 so I had the party and I planted her at the first table by the door. It didn't matter if guests congratulated me on entering my seventh decade but they all had to talk with my mother. As it turned out, I had a good time because she had a great time.
Biggest thrill of that evening for her? Talking with so many of my friends and especially Stan Freberg. Stan was not only there but though I'd admonished all there were to be no gifts and no performing, he wrote and insisted on reciting a poem about me. And then since he'd broken the rules, someone else insisted they all sing guess-which-song.
She didn't get exhausted. She wound up staying for the entire evening and then Carolyn and I drove her home. After she passed, I realized it was the last time she'd left her house for non-medical reasons.
The morning after the party, she called me up to thank me for, as she put it, "wheeling me there." I made like I was annoyed she'd upstaged me at my own party and she laughed, then said, "Well, I'm more important than you are!"
She said, "People kept saying to me, 'Oh, I can see where Mark got his sense of humor.' I told them, 'No, I got my sense of humor from him.'" That's something we both believed. She explained to them, "Mark started picking up all these funny things from comic books and books he read and TV shows he watched. I had to start talking like him so we could communicate. It was like if your child suddenly began speaking Swedish, you'd have to learn Swedish." At one point, Freberg asked her where I got my sense of humor and she said, "I think he stole some of it from you."
Today, as you're probably well aware, is Mother's Day. My mother never wanted to do anything on Mother's Day. The restaurants were always too crowded, she said, and she preferred to get flowers and gifts from me when she didn't expect them and they didn't seem like an obligation. It was pretty much the same attitude I have about all holidays. If you always treat your mother like it's Mother's Day, there's really nothing out of the ordinary you can do for her on the second Sunday in May except wish her a happy Mother's Day. So I'd do that and then I'd take her out to dinner the next time she felt like leaving the house.
The last Mother's Day she was around, she didn't want to go out. She didn't want to go out the next day or the next day or any day for weeks after…and then she was in the hospital for a week. Finally in late June, I gave her an ultimatum: Redeem your Mother's Day "coupon" now or forfeit it. She said, "Okay, if you insist, you can bring over some El Pollo Loco this evening and we'll eat together here."
I said, "That's not a Mother's Day dinner. I brought you El Pollo Loco last week…and I think, the week before."
She said, "Yeah, but it wasn't Mother's Day then."
I said, "It's not Mother's Day today."
She said, "Hey, I'm your mother and if I say it's Mother's Day today, it's Mother's Day today. I want four drumsticks and a couple of thighs — enough to have some for tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to be Mother's Day tomorrow, too."
How could you ever find a reason to get mad at someone like that? How?