by Rusty Van Reeves

Mam-ma made homemade cakes and pies in the morning that we’d tote to the local truck stop out on the highway. From three until midnight she sewed chair skirts at the La-Z-Boy factory by the tracks. When she left for work, we’d crank up the Skynyrd and put the tall speakers in the windows facing the shady oaks. The antebellum house would rock as slivers of flaky paint gyrated off the boards.

In the early 70s, we were the shirtless longhaired kids you’d see on dirt bikes doing wheelies in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. We loved Mam-ma and tried to keep our shit to a minimum. I was 11 and Tim was seven in 1971.

On the south edge of Newton heading toward Bay Springs and Laurel there is a nursing home. It was there in the early 70s and it remains today. I can’t remember what they called it.

From time to time, my Mam-ma visited friends of hers there. Sometimes I would tag along. The people she stopped in to see were familiar faces. Most of them had sipped coffee, smoked cigarettes and sat around Mam-ma’s diner table just months and years prior. They would eat fresh pie, puff their smokes and in hushed voices gossip about the locals.

These little blue haired ladies would sit in the cool of the kitchen as gray smoke curled through the indirect light and recount stories of their children and their grandchildren. They would erupt in laughter and whisper the curse words with their hand partially covering their mouth. Fresh cut hydrangea blooms adorned the center of the linoleum table and sticky plastic place mats from Sunflower sat beneath the saucers and mismatched coffee cups.

Mrs. Walls from next door, ConLilly from up the street and others would drop in to linger. Their conversations and recollections transported them to another place and time. Their voices often cracking slightly with emotion. You could hear the long pauses and a few sniffles between stories.

One by one as the years progressed these sweet souls were the women Mam-ma visited at the hospital or out at the nursing home. Her visits were bittersweet since many of these women at that point were often simply beyond recognizing their visitors. Tears would trail the joules of her face as we left there to sit in the car to regroup.

I often wondered why Mam-ma did it if it made her so sad.

Many years later, we would visit my Mam-ma there at that same Nursing Home. She outlived so many of her friends. Her mind eventually clouded and on certain days, we were even strangers to her.

As I rolled my wheelchair into those corridors my mind kept going back to those visits we made together to see her friends. Now, decades later I understand her tears much better. Something inside her knew those friends would one day be her. As age and time ebbed away at Mam-ma, taking her smile and her memories it was hard to see her in that state. It was damn hard to visit her. I can see now how much courage she had in visiting her old friends. I can see how painful that long slow goodbye can be.

In years gone by my buddies and I have gathered to drink a few beers and reminisce at my table. We tell the same old stories and reel back in time. Not so much different from those older gals. My paralysis is always the unspoken elephant in the room. Lately political differences and my self-imposed isolation have kept us apart. Life can change you. Family, jobs, religion, etc. can twist us into some pretty odd shapes. I must resemble a pretzel to many by now. I can be loyal to a fault. The only problem with that is I demand it in return.

So yes, my stubbornness and my misguided sense of loyalty have further alienated me from many of my old friends. I know their reluctance to come and visit me is based in pain and in their own sense of mortality. My hope for relief from stem cells one day probably sounds like a desperate man grasping at straws to them.

Seeing me this way kills them, I know that. At times, it kills me, too. I am not the man I was. It is hard to blame them for not taking the time to include me in their lives.

I could have visited Mam-ma more but I didn’t. I let my own pain outweigh hers. I did not live up to her example. I now have that to live with. I know my friends are not rejecting me so much as they are rejecting my condition. Still, it stings with the same tenacity as betrayal. My practical nature says forgive them-but my heart holds them accountable. I am as human as they are, complete with faults that I can clearly see but am powerless to change.

I thought those trips with Mam-ma to the nursing home were just a convenient way to put off mowing the grass. It never occurred to me how much will and fortitude it took for her to make those visits-to sit in the presence of old friends who are cradled in the hands of death-to bring them fresh Folgers coffee in a thermos and yard cut roses wrapped in damp paper towels-to sit there, smile, and prod them for simple conversation-to dig into familiar memories that now only you possess.

To think of all the phone calls I dodged in her later years because we always had the same conversation-it bothers me. I realize now the
conversation wasn’t that important. It was hearing her voice and connecting on another level entirely that mattered. I confess I miss her voice and her bruised hands. I miss that cowlick in her shuffled hair and that schoolgirl giggle.

Mam-ma was maybe five feet tall. Maybe a hundred pounds and most of that coffee and teacakes. She spent her entire life doing for others. She’s gone now.

Like the lyrics of the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Tuesday’s gone”, that would drift from those open windows from her old house. We’d sit in the shade of her open carport as the afternoon thunderstorms rolled off the flimsy roof topping off beans and shucking white corn. The distant train would howl as it passed the Cheese Plant on School Street, Ronnie van Zant would make his way through “Free Bird”, and we’d rock the swing barefooted. Our dog barked as we cut up.

We were just longhaired country boys in cutoff Levi’s, skin tanned a golden brown, killing time and learning what it feels like to be alone. Screaming out the lyrics to our air guitar-lyrics only the angels whisper now from my CD player minus the pops and scratches. Words that cut you to the quick and make you want to be a better person. Words that make you 11 again. Soaking wet in the summer rain.
Train roll on, many miles from my home
See I’m riding my blues, baby, blues away
Tuesday, you see, she had to be free
But somehow I’ve got to, to carry on
My baby’s gone
Tuesday’s gone with the wind
Tuesday’s gone with the wind
Tuesday’s gone with the wind
My baby’s gone with the wind
Train roll on

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