When I think of magic, I think of word processors and love
Living happy
Everything in my mom’s world started changing when she was a little younger than me, but it all changed again and again a million times.
Once, when she thinks she might be dying, got a bit obsessed with it, she leaves yellow Post-It sticky notes all around the house saying, This child-sized school desk I bequeath to my daughter, Carrie. This steel trash can I bequeath to my son who lives in Georgia. This martini glass I bequeath to my best friend, Rosie. And so on.
She gave birth to another boy, Allan, but he is dead.
She yanks some eggs out of the plastic container in the refrigerator. The carton announces these eggs are cage free and high in Omega 3. I insist that if she is going to buy eggs that she buy these eggs. She insists they are a waste of money that you’ll get cancer no matter how much Omega is inside of you and that the birds are still miserable dropping eggs in a field full of poop as they are in a cage. She cracks three of the eggs against the side of the skillet. Their brown shells shatter. She plops them down on a paper towel. There’s no need for shells. They can only protect those eggs for so long.
She yells to me, “You need to believe in magic.”
I yell back from my bedroom, “You are so weird.”
Mom is not talking about pulling rabbits out of the hats magic either, not the magic with sequined assistants. Nor is she talking about some little boy wizard turning cats into toads with his magic phallic wand. What she’s talking about is the look on a woman’s face when she falls in love, the smell of a baby when she just had her diaper changed, the way an oak tree will let you lean against it and take away all of your sorrows, if only for just a minute. She’s talking about angels who pull us into their chests and smother our face with kisses. She’s talking about life and goodness and badness and all of it mixed all up together. She’s talking about the taste of really good vodka as it stings and then eases your throat.
Magic.
It comes in a flash, in a surprise look, in a hand that gestures silently into your own. It does not come gradually even if it is always there. She should know this. How? How should she know this, Betty Morse, who calls herself an ugly, old woman who lives on Southgate Drive, in Bedford, New Hampshire? What makes her the expert on magic?
She’ll tell you, and think you are a jerk for asking. She knows because she has lived. People look at her and they see either my mom or they see a widow, a lonely woman with too-thin hair dyed too-red for her pale skin. She is not a beautiful woman. Once, she was beautiful, now she is not, and this too is a kind of magic, the transformation of beauty to plainness, from youth to age. She has cast aside her shallow.
All magic isn’t always happy, you know. Most times it isn’t.
I’m her youngest child by fourteen years, her second love child, she teases me just to watch the embarrassment play across my face, the uncertainty twist my fingers into nervous knots.
So, I come back out to the kitchen where Mom is scrambling eggs and I say, “Do you think I’d be a better writer if I used a typewriter?”
“No,” she says. “Do you see these eggs?”
“Yeah.” I lean against the counter, cross my arms beneath my breasts. My pajama top rides up and bares my stomach, where there is still no piercing though I want one. Every time Mom sees my stomach she says, Thank God for that. I am too old for that.
For now, Mom keeps moving her wrist to make the whisk keep scrambling the eggs, which are slowly joining each other. “These eggs are like a story.”
“Mom, it is way too early for this.”
“Wait. This is brilliant. These eggs are like a story. They are loose, liquid, but then you stir it up and stir it up, you add a slow heat, you flick your wrist back and forth, maybe you add a little milk, a little cheese. But you keep at it. It doesn’t matter if you use a Teflon pan so it doesn’t stick, or if you use a cast iron one, because eventually you’re going to get scrambled eggs, perfect, connected scrambled eggs. Tah-dah.”
She holds the pan up for my inspection. The eggs are yellow, creamy but not runny, fluffy and not sparse. They are perfect eggs, damn it.
“Oh. My. God.” I run a hand through my hair and turn away from her, grab a glass out of the cabinet and puts ice in it. “So, no typewriter?”
“The word processor is fine.”
“It’s not romantic,” I say, pouring juice. “I mean, it’s not a computer so it’s not super functional and if it’s not going to be super functional, it should be romantic.”
“Romance?” she says. Really, she scoffs. “Romance! What’s the point of romance? You want some eggs?”
I sip my juice. I swallow. I start plodding out of the kitchen. My bare feet smack against the wood floor. “I’m not hungry.”
“You need to eat!” she yells after me.
“I’m not hungry.”
The eggs wait in the pan. She thinks about throwing them in the garbage. She’s not hungry either. Her medication makes her stomach twitch. She rips off a yellow Post-it Note from the pad, writes on it with her favorite green felt tip pen, and sticks it on the cabinet with all the pots and pans. It says: I HEREBY BEQUEATH ALL POTS AND PANS, TO MY OLDEST SON, WHO LIKES EGGS EVEN IF HE DOES LIVE IN GEORGIA.
So there.
The word processor waits for me, stashed in a corner by the kitchen table. Her hands linger above the keyboard and ache, just from whipping those eggs around. She thinks about magic and eggs, stories and children. She is an old woman and she is allowed a minute in her kitchen to think about such things.
So there.
When I think about my mom now, I think about magic. About how proud she was to get me that word processor instead of a typewriter even though everyone else was getting computers. When I think about my mom now, I think about how amazing she was at the tiniest of things like believing in magic in the simple. When I think of my mom now, I realize that magic is just being alive, being human, wanting and hoping and creating and connecting in big and little ways.
When I think of magic, I think of love and word processors.
You are lucky to have memories of your mom like the ones you shared here...and who doesn't need a bit of magic in their life?
Thanks for sharing your memories - they were a pleasure to read!