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The final lines of "The Livesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" are both dear and moving to me on several levels, not the least of which is that they have always reminded me of my mother. On this rainy morning I can vividly recall the first time I read this poem, tripping through its meter and being bounced by its images; and I remember the devastating, crushing weight of its final lines.
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
My mother is on my mind this morning, partly because of various comments that have sprinkled this week's MOTs and partly because of a gift my sister sent me this week. Leaning against the wall in my study is a horrendously kitsch mixed media work in a hand-painted frame. Broken glass, small stones, glitter, and paint come together in a ill-proportioned 12" x 22" picture of a mermaid offering up a prayer, perhaps, to sun and cloud above. Below her float in two dimension a small seahorse and three stiff angelfish.
The piece, which hung in my sister's sun room in Florida for many years, was given to my mother during her short stay in a resident facility following her Katrina evacuation. The nurse who made if for my mother was taken with her and, whether he made it specifically for her or had made it previously we were never able to determine, but he presented it to her on the day she left the facility for the arduous trip back to her home in Louisiana.
My mother, like most I suspect, was a study in contradictions. She was kind and loving and warm like a familiar blanket; and she was cold, calculating, and cutting as well. She grew up in an age where women were expected to cook and keep house and be otherwise presentable. Yet she couldn't cook to save her children's lives, was singularly indifferent to housework, and struggled mightily with mental illness her entire life.
In a whirlwind, she once cleared out the living room of our home, pushing the furniture into other rooms, leaning the couch against the wall, busting the leg of our only table in the process. Once cleared she announced that as I would soon be a teenager she was going to teach me to dance, putting on the Phillips to the local "rock and roll" station in New Orleans, catching such gems as "These Boots Are Made for Walking," something by the Hollies, and others I don't recall. While my sisters rolled eyes and laughed and eventually joined in, she swung me around that beautifully-wrecked room until we were all pulled into a world devoid of the want and depression and sadness and chaos that defined a child's life.
By the time I was a young man, I had a collection of un-fired clay ashtrays, macraméd matchbook holders, and assorted objects that physically marked her extended stays in hospitals for most of her adult life. After my father passed away and after years of medication adjustments, she eventually retreated into herself and presented to the world a quite and studied affect. But while a quieted mind was achieved, I understood even then that with it was lost the pure sense of abandonment and joy of that moment in time where the sight of swirling skirts and the sound of hard shoes stepping clumsily across a battered wooden floor was my entire life scored in simple songs.
Is there no hope for us mere mortals? I know, somehow, that there are only a chosen few who can survive the siren's song. Yet the price of hearing the call is the reality of being tied, fast and forever, to the mast while this ship sails on in blissful ignorance.
Grab your coffee and join us. What's on your mind this morning?