My daughter just walked into the living room and told me about twins at her school named Libba and Elan. “Oh”, I asked, “are they identical?” “No Mom”, Polly replied in that voice that screams You’re So Dumb!, “he has brown hair and she has blond.”

I didn’t even ask which was which.

Mom’s return from her Ireland trip.
We talked for hours and she told us about the places she went, the food she ate, and the people she met.
One of my favorites took place when she took the bus to the airport from Dublin.
A man gets on the bus and asks the driver, “How long does it take you to get to the airport?”
The driver asks the man, “Do you have a watch?”
“Yes”, the man replies, looking at his wrist.
“Well”, the driver says, “time me.”

Like most people, I’m assuming, I grew up listening to the story of how my parents met. Unlike most people, I am once again assuming, this story changed many times in the retelling. My father never mentioned the matter to me, so I know only what I’ve heard from my Mom. One of my parents, and I can’t ask my dad which one because he’s 21 years dead, placed an advertisement in the back of some sort of publication looking for international pen pals. My Dad was working as an electrical engineer in Pasadena, California. They started writing each other and their correspondence continued for at least two years. I have found pieces of these letters from my Dad over the years as I have taken on the horrifically difficult task of sorting through my Mom’s things. They are never together in one long letter, it will be page six from some letter and page two from some other letter but I have read them hungrily anyway, trying to get to know the man who was my Father; the man who left me at age twelve, the man I never got a chance to know, not really. Whenever I have shown my Mom the letters her eyes filled up with tears and she shook her head NO, so I instead started a folder of the pieces of letters hoping that one day I could put them all together, like a puzzle. I once asked my Mom where the letters from her had gone, for I never came across them after my Dad died .His possessions at death consisted of his clothes, shoes, and books, his framed degrees from The University of Kansas and a shoe box full of assorted things, including a bible, his wallet and his wedding ring, which I never saw him wear. I know this because I snuck into his room two days after he died, looking for a suicide note. There was none. My Mom told me that once in a fit of anger against her he built a fire and burned all of the letters she had written. I can imagine him doing that.

What I do know to be true is this; my Mom was working as a manicurist in Sydney, Australia in her early 20s. She saved her money and bought five acres of land outside of Sydney. She saved her tips, sold the land at a profit and bought a plane ticket to travel around the world for six months. She wrote to my Dad to tell him of her trip and mentioned that she would be stopping over in San Francisco after she went to Hawaii.

As she tells the story, without her prior knowledge, he drove from Pasadena to San Francisco and was there when she departed the plane. Although she claims they never exchanged photos during those two years of writing she said she knew who he was as soon as she saw him standing there. She walked up to him and said, “Mr.—– I presume” and he smiled. She said that it was love at first sight. When I was very young she told me that they spent two weeks together in San Francisco, fell deeper in love, and got married. As a child I thought that was nutty, to marry someone you’d only known for two weeks. I had a hard time comparing the raging, abusive, alcoholic father I knew with a man she could fall in love with at first site.

She gave up her remaining tickets to Canada, to Europe, to wherever else it was she had planned to go and married him. As I aged and my Mom retold the story of their meeting in person days started to get shaved off the time between the airport and the wedding. It went from fourteen to eleven to seven to six. Finally, as a frustrated teen I asked her why she kept changing that part of the story and she said, “OK. It was four days”

“How the hell”, I asked, “could you marry someone you had only known for four days?”

Her answer was and is that she had already fallen in love with him through his letters; she knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, to have him be the father of the four children she planned for and eventually had.

The past two days I have spoken on the phone with my three siblings more than I have in the whole of 2006. As we tried to coordinate airfare, money deposited into her checking account, rides from the airport and I rushed around and cleaned and vacuumed her house and watered her plants and placed fresh milk in her fridge and bought bread and cereal and canned soup so she would at least have something to eat when she returned I talked to my siblings.

Maria, the sister I am closest to and the one who has been my rock in this life and also the one who can calm me down when I am panicking and make me laugh when I am at my lowest, and I were speaking last night. My thoughts were on other things, Nate’s illness and mood, getting Polly ready for Outdoor school, envisioning helping my Mom move now that the house is sold and it looks as if it’s really going through, my Mom sleeping in an airport and the tremendous quantity of laundry that has built up over the past week. I was trying to breathe slowly, I have a tendency to be a shallow rapid breather and it doesn’t lend itself to calming me down, when Maria said, “I’ve figured it out”. I had no idea what she was talking about, thinking it pertained to the here and now and not the early 60s. “I now know why Mom married Dad four days after meeting him at the airport! She had run out of money and had no other choice.”

We laughed. We laughed until our sides hurt. It doesn’t even sound like a nice thing to do, to laugh over my Mom’s obvious current misfortune of sleeping on a bench in the Dublin airport, but there was something so necessary in the laughter. I have shed more than a few tears in the past few days as I struggled with the sale of my Mom’s house, her dilemma, Nathan’s manic episodes, doctor’s appointments, calls from Nathan’s teachers, and also trying to find time for my husband and Polly, my daughter, who doesn’t get as much attention as she deserves because her brother often takes more than I even know how to give. I have slipped off into the bathroom and cried, snuck off into the basement to cry, and even cried all the way on the bus to pick up Polly from school the other day, drying my eyes as I arrived. To be able to laugh once more, that coupled with the great sleep I had last night has left me feeling a lot better, and ready to face whatever next week brings.

After some tumultuous teen years my Mother and I have become close friends. Over the course of the last sixteen months I have been going to her house five times a week to help her prepare it for sale. This has involved painting, cleaning, and sorting through almost forty years worth of stuff. Now that her house has been listed and it looks like she has a sale pending the need for me to be there so frequently has been eliminated.

I find that I miss the almost daily contact with her.

We do talk on the phone frequently, and today the topic of our respective gardens came up. She asked me if I had any ripe tomatoes yet, and I responded that I had, as well as peppers of various types and zucchini. She said that her tomatoes were still green and she had discussed the subject with my brother, himself an avid gardener with an enviable garden. After telling him that her tomatoes had yet to ripen he let her in on his little secret for beautiful, red, vine ripened tomatoes. According to him, he hangs red glass ball Christmas ornaments in his tomato plants and the green ones ripen because they want to keep up with the other “tomatoes” in the bush. He claimed it was a scientific fact that he had read somewhere and that it never fails him.

My first response was to laugh, certain that he was pulling our legs. My second response was to do a Google search on it to see if it was in fact true.

I ultimately decided that it was harmless to let my Mom believe this. I like the vision of her pulling out the packed away ornaments, digging through them for the red balls, and carefully hooking them onto her plants in hopes that it will cause a jealous rush in her green fruits to keep up with their brilliant competition.

I sincerely hope her tomatoes start to turn color now. After all, don’t we all need something to believe in?