Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I was three years old—it seems a world away, now—sitting in the front room, looking out the big window.

Our house on Oak Drive was a two-story affair on the uphill side of the street, and from my vantage I could look down on the massive junipers that bordered our small yard. When I played beneath them, they would tower over me, reach for me with scented claws, and dust me with clouds of pollen so that, when Mother called, I would come inside covered in red weals, begrimed with a patina of yellow, and redolent of resin.

Beyond the junipers was the street and the Pennington’s tall dark house with its big back garden where Lee and I would build worlds in our minds and wage wars in the sandbox. Behind that was The Marsh, a saltwater fen laced with hidden pathways, a mysterious place filled with birdsong and dangers that would, in a year’s time, take Cricket, my beloved cat, and teach me an early lesson about death.

If the day had been clear, I might have I looked past the salty reeds and seen the glinting waters of San Rafael Bay, blue as indigo from afar, but jade green when we waded out to tide pools searching for crabs to bother and anemones to poke. Out farther, I might have seen the forest of masts at the marina, and beyond, a dark mass of land that rose from the waters, lifting up to form the sleeping lady of Mount Tamalpais.

But I did not, for the sky was grey that day, and the morning fog filled the streets and made my world small and manageable.

Mother was in the kitchen. I did not know that she was sick. I wouldn’t for a couple of years, when she would go into the hospital where, like Cricket in The Marsh, she would disappear and never return. All I knew was that Mother tired easily and sometimes fainted, lying on the floor like a cast-off doll while I sat next to her, hoping that she might wake.

On that day, though, she was well, washing up the breakfast dishes while I sat in the front room and stared at the grey and green world of my hometown street.

“Momma,” I called. “Someone is here.”

A truck had pulled into our driveway. It was an old pickup, faded blue, with a ladder tied to a rack atop its bed. It wasn’t a truck I had seen before, but Oak Drive was a quiet street and any car that came down our end was, for me anyway, a notable event.

Mother came up behind me, drying her hands with a dishtowel, and peered out the window just as the truck backed out of our driveway in a three-point turn.

“He’s just turning around,” she said, and then explained that he had used our driveway because the street was too narrow. Mother always took the time to explain things I didn’t understand, whether it was why a stranger would pull into our driveway and then leave, or later, why Cricket had not come home from her nightly prowls.

I do not know why this moment has stayed with me for so long. It is an unremarkable moment, an innocuous scene of blithe domesticity, and yet it is precious. Within a year of that memory, Cricket would be gone, and we would be moving to a new home. Within two years, Mother would be gone as well, and the new house would be a cold, empty place, a cloister of grief.

My memories of Mother are limited—scenes at preschool, at the neighbor’s, the time I got spanked in the middle of J.C.Penney’s. From my three-to-five-year old vantage, Mother was tall, statuesque, dark-eyed, and soft-spoken, with a no-nonsense attitude that usually kept me in line. She was also tender and loving, quick with a touch or caress, and usually patient with answers to my incessant questions.

For nearly sixty years the image of that pale blue truck pulling into our drive has endured, as has the sound of Mother’s quiet voice over my shoulder. I learned a lot from her in the short time we had together—empathy for others, a love of the written word, an appreciation of dignity and grace—lessons I have held onto tightly, partly in honor and abiding love, but also because of the connection they represent.

Those lessons, in me, are her, living still.

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