In mid-January I drove to the US to visit my mother at her home in Eastern Tennessee. It’s a roughly 1000-mile trip, 18 hours or so one way; once or twice I’ve driven the entire distance in one very long day, but usually I break the trip in northern Virginia. I grew up in rural Tennessee, which like all of rural America is car country (pick-up, SUV country) and I still feel very much at home behind the wheel. So I drive because I enjoy driving and dislike airports, which are too loud, CNN and ESPN blaring constantly, teaching Americans to be contentious.
Driving offers quieter pleasures. Heading west across pre-dawn Canada, a lovely quarter moon hangs low over icy fields, and the sun blazes to life just as I turn south to cross the Thousand Island Bridge. Daybreak is just as spectacular the next morning. I wake before dawn on most days, but cities blind us to how long it takes for the day to actually “break,” how many different colors and hues and textures there are.
I don’t think deep thoughts while driving – I listen to audiobooks, another quiet pleasure – and what thoughts I do have are often driving-related. Who for example are these people who camp out in the left lane, making everyone pass them on the right? Are they normal people when they are not driving, or do they force their opinions on their neighbors? Why have we not widened our highways as part of our endless investments in infrastructure? I-81 through Virginia is a major thoroughfare for the movement of goods up and down the East coast and is packed back-to-back with 18-wheelers, yet for the most part has only two lanes, which slows everything down. Maybe we should make Amazon fix this if it wants to keep its monopoly.
On this trip I also think about the number of elderly people – particularly elderly women – working in fast food, because that’s what you eat on a long drive. When I was a kid these jobs were for teenagers, but McJobs became just jobs as the economy hollowed out, and now the labor shortage and the number of people who get to retirement age without any savings means that old people need to work and fast food is where the jobs are.
Or grocery stores. As I cross from Virginia into Tennessee, I find myself thinking about one cashier at the store where my mother shops. “She went to school with Mattie,” my mother said, referring to her elder sister, born in the early 1930s and dead for some twenty years now. And yet there was Aunt Mattie’s friend, not just elderly but very old, on her feet scanning groceries for hours a day at Food City in 2020. I mentioned her to my mother this time, thinking about the old women who had taken my orders on the drive south. Turns out Mattie’s friend had finally died.
Of course, I’m driving south to see my own old woman, my mother, born in 1936, turning 88 later this month. She lives in a big house with a lovely view of the Smoky Mountains in the little town where she grew up, although she lived elsewhere between the ages of 20 and 60. Her parents were born at the turn of the 20th century and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee, settling in the nearby foothills when President Roosevelt created the National Park Service in the 1930s. They had nine children over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, of whom four are still alive.
My mother married at 18 and my father soon joined the Air Force and was posted to Texas, where I was born. She went back to school in her mid-30s when my brother and I were maybe 10 and 12, got her degree in Elementary Education and then taught kindergarten in the public school system in Tennessee for twenty years. Then she retired, my father died in 2011, and she’s lived alone ever since.
If she’s declining I can’t see it. She’s had cataract surgery and uses a hearing aid but takes no regular medications and walks for an hour early each morning with a friend. She eats sparingly and is slim and lithe, although beginning to stoop a little. She reads constantly, keeping a dictionary handy to look up new words, and remains competitive at Scrabble (at least with me – my brother is more serious about the game and regularly beats us both). She refuses to update her cell phone or her computers – who can blame her? – but otherwise seems fully functional. She drives herself once a week to Knoxville – maybe an hour away – to visit a 90 year-old cousin who is losing her eyesight.
I always enjoy seeing my mother, although there’s little to do where she lives. Deer graze on her lawn and raccoons and even bears prowl the outbuildings and garbage cans after sundown, but there is no place to take a walk in her neighborhood other than on the roads paved to serve the houses, because all of the land is private and no trespassing is allowed (and people have guns here).
There are parks within driving distance, and very nice hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But traffic is often as bad or worse than in big cities, as hordes of tourists flock year-round to nearby Pigeon Forge, Tennessee’s Las Vegas, full of shopping malls, dinner clubs, mini-golf, and other attractions. The success of Pigeon Forge creates enough jobs to keep my mother’s town afloat and to provide a tax base that sustains a hospital in the area, but I’m too snobby to mingle with the tourists, and the very nice hikes are not worth doing every time, so we tend to play a lot of Scrabble, an excellent pastime that stimulates our kind of conversation.
Even Scrabble loses its charm after a few days, especially when the winter cold keeps us inside, and before long I start counting the days before I can leave. I try to stifle my impatience, but even if she’s 87 and I’m 65 and we’re both retired and I enjoy spending time with her, at some point I really just want to go. I feel bad about it but not bad enough to stay longer than a week.
So it’s a morning or two before my departure, and I wake up early, at 4:00 or 4:30, as I often do. It’s very cold, so my mother has canceled her morning walk the night before. I get up to make tea, being as quiet as I can. The kitchen is not far from my mother’s bedroom, and she keeps her door open a crack. A security measure, I guess. It might feel strange to close yourself up in a room in a big house on a hill with no neighbors within earshot.
Tea-making is a quiet affair; I use an electric kettle and avoid the clatter of pots on burners. Still, by 6:30 I’ve been at work for a couple of hours and have gone back to the kitchen three or four times to boil more water and top up my tea, and I begin to wonder about my mother. She usually gets up at 5:15 for her 6:00 walk, and here it is 6:30 and I haven’t heard a peep. Not even the rustle of her covers as she rolls over in bed. I would hear that, right? It’s a quiet house.
By 7:00 I’m starting to wonder: “What if my mother has died in her sleep?”
The idea has perhaps been on my mind because a colleague had died that way over the Christmas holidays. He was 63, in seemingly good health until his heart just stopped. I remember thinking that this is not a bad way to go, all things considered, although it might leave certain things undone. I have of course thought before about my mother dying. On one visit, she had a bad cold and slept all day long for two days, a disturbing imitation of death.
At first, the idea has a sort of roguish irreverence, as in “really, David, you are such a cad to think about your mother dying like that.” But there is also an undercurrent of genuine panic. I don’t know if I am on the long list of people who believe that only their mother truly loved them, but the fact that I don’t know says something. Whenever I think of my mother’s death it brings tears to my eyes and I have to stop what I’m doing and settle my breath. “If she has died at 87 in the next room, it might be a good death for her, but it will not be a trivial death for me,” I think.
At a certain point I decide to make a little more noise. There may be families where adult children shake their aging mothers awake and say, “Sorry Mom, just wanted to make sure you’re not dead,” but ours is not one of them. I get the cupcake pans out to make muffins, which makes a certain clatter, accidentally on purpose.
Still no sound from the next room. The panic remains no more than an undercurrent, but the idea starts to settle in, uncomfortably. My mind races in different directions.
One is that for her this would mean dying before the indignities of old age incapacitate her, before cancer, hospital stays, hospice care, before failing vision and hearing, before assisted living. She knows this is coming and has accepted the recent deaths of her brothers with equanimity. She has shown my brother and me where she keeps her important papers, so we’ll have some idea what to do once she’s gone. She has lived a full life and will have left less undone than my 63 year-old colleague, but reading books, doing puzzles, and visiting friends and relatives are not nothing, and she enjoys them. If she is lying dead in the next room, her family and church would find a way to call it a “blessing,” but she would not have chosen this moment to be so blessed.
A second thought is that I don’t want this blessing either. There is no part of me that would feel relieved. I was in my father’s hospital room when he died after a long and painful battle with COPD. I did feel relief then: he had suffered for years and his illness took over my parents’ lives. Also my father and I were not close. He was an insecure soul who covered up his insecurity with a self-centered bluster. My mother’s side of the family is playful and self-deprecating, traits I like to see in myself and which come out when my mother and I play Scrabble. I’m not yet ready to stop playing.
A third is even more selfish: Would I want to be the one to be there when my mother passed away in her sleep? A fleeting image has me packing my bags and hitting the road – right then, I could be gone in 10 minutes – just so that I would be somewhere else and not have to deal with it. “I could pretend to have left the night before,” I reason, “and my mother’s sister would call later that morning, and eventually come over to check if there was no answer.”
But this is impossible, because driving off like that only makes sense if she is truly dead, which would mean I would have to go into her room and shake her to see. Even the most selfish version of me could not sneak away once I had touched my dead mother, and I couldn’t just bolt without checking, because then what would she think if she wasn’t dead and woke up and found me gone. No, I would have to play the responsible son and make the phone calls and wait for someone to come and haul my dead mother away. There is none of me that wants to be that responsible son. I would rather be somewhere else and “come as soon as I can” once I got the phone call.
At 7:45 I hear my mother yawn and get out of bed. I heave a sigh of relief and wipe my eyes. We eat muffins and play Scrabble. I say nothing about my thoughts, and she will never know, unless of course she reads this. But at some point over the next decade, the call will come, and I won’t be ready. No matter how much I pretend to think about it.
A new addition to the blog
Books read or listened to since my last update, in order of my personal appreciation:
- Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires, a recent novel by a Mexican author living in the US, the 4th or 5th of his quite successful novels, none of which I have read. This one is a reimagination of the fraught moment when Hernando Cortés met the Aztec emperor Montezuma in the early 16th century, launching the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America, a world-historical event if ever there was one. However, Enrigue does not focus on the war and withholds larger political thoughts until the very end. Most of the book tries to imagine what the main characters involved were actually thinking, what they might have seen and done in the days or weeks between Cortés’s entry into the city of Tenochtitlán – on Montezuma’s invitation – and the outbreak of war. I listened to this as an audiobook, and the reader (Gabriel Porras, an actor famous from Mexican telenovelas) has a lovely, mellifluous Mexican accent, which was just perfect, not because Spanish matters necessarily to the narrative (an Aztec accent would have been more historically appropriate), but because it made me pay close attention and enhanced my enjoyment of this excellent book.
- Elena Medel, Las maravillas, a first novel by a young Spanish poet. I am reading this book in Spanish, in one of my Spanish classes. This is a challenge for me, as Medel writes as much as poet as a novelist, and my Spanish is not that good. But parts of the book are extraordinary, if strikingly bleak. The book is about what poverty does to Spanish women, or women in general, and is insightful rather than preachy and political. Apparently, poverty can make people quite cynical, who knew? The book has been translated into English, and there is an audiobook version of the English translation, which to my mind does not do justice to the original.
- Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, a journalist’s account of how American evangelicals wound up backing Donald Trump. Alberta is an excellent journalist who writes frequently for The Atlantic, and is himself an evangelical Christian, the son of a born-again preacher (I might add that I was raised as a Southern Baptist). His background gives him access to the major players in the movement as well as an inside understanding of how evangelicals have framed these issues over time. To my mind, the strength of the book is its demonstration of how evangelicals have come to see themselves as genuinely persecuted by mainstream liberal elite culture, so that White nationalism comes to resonate with the religious messages they hear, less from the pulpit than from their Facebook feeds. Alberta also shows that the driving force behind this story has not been evangelical pastors, most of whom are thoughtful people who would like to avoid politics, but rather entrepreneurs like Ralph Reed and the Falwells, who fuse religion, politics, and money into a toxic package.
- Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall, meant to be a revisionist history of East Germany. This book is the product of a good idea – to tell the story of East Germany as something other than the history of the Cold War – but I found the book a bit disappointing, because despite her best intentions, the author kept slipping back into a fairly standard political history, with social and cultural history add-ons.
- Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo, about the Tokyo war trials. The first chapter of this book sort of screams “I wanna be a blockbuster,” which is annoying, but then it slows down and is very interesting. I am constantly amazed about how little I know even about important things close to my area of specialization.
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, known as one of the great novels of the American West, and which won a Pulitzer when it was published in 1971. I confess that I found it tedious and over-written, although I listened to all 20 hours of it.
Recent source of delight: the music and personality of Rosalíta, the Spanish pop star. I have been vaguely aware of Rosalíta’s music for some time – songs like Malamente are real ear worms – but had not seen her music as anything more than catchy club songs, great for working out or cooking. And I think this is how most people listen to her; there are playlists of her hits on Spotify that sound like pop music for dance parties.
But Rosalíta is much more than a pop star. First, her musical roots are in Flamenco, which she honors over and over in her music. Second, her break-out second album, El mal querer, was, I believe, a project for her honor’s degree in music, and is based on an anonymous 13th century Spanish novel about an abusive marriage, a theme that Rosalíta updates in her songs and videos for the album. Third, her voice is effortlessly expressive in any register she chooses, and there are many such registers, because: Fourth, she has a vast musical knowledge.
To appreciate Rosalíta and her music, you have to ignore the Spotify dance-music playlists, and listen to the albums, of which there are three: Los Angeles, a reflection on death, which pretty much highlights just her voice and guitar, El mal querer, which I just discussed, and where she starts to blend Flamenco, Reggaeton, hip-hop, jazz, etc., and her most recent record, Motomami, which continues in the same vein as El mal querer, but in a lighter, freer, more minimalist fashion.
Rosalíta is basically nude on the album cover because she is revealing herself to the world for the first time, and there are stunning songs about sex (Hentai), about missing a young relative’s birthday (Como un G) (which contains the lovely lyric “solo amor con amor se paga” – “you can only repay love with love”) along with nonsense songs (Chicken Teriyaki), songs about fame and the pop star life (La fama, Sakura), and much else. Of course, all of this is in Spanish, and even native speakers won’t be able to follow much of what Rosalíta sings, because she can be just as poetic as Elena Medel, mentioned above, and she speaks in the codes that define her life, often having to do with fashion and celebrity.
To get a sense of why Rosalíta is worth paying attention to, you should start with an amazing analysis of her second album the by Spanish musician and music producer Jaime Altozono, entitled “Lo que nadie está diciendo sobre El mal querer” [What no one is saying about El mal querer]. There are English subtitles, and Altozono is mesmerizing. On the strength of this YouTube video, Altozono earned an hour-length interview with Rosalíta herself, where they talk about her life, her music, and the album Motomami, so that you can understand that project as well. Again, there are English subtitles, and the interview is both joyful for Rosalíta and Altozono and a source of delight for anyone who watches it.
Rosalíta is a genius, something we cannot all be, but she spends her life in intelligent play, something we can all aspire to do.
The Red-Eye to Bogotá 