4.3.07

I wend my way via NYC, walking from Port Authority to Penn Station, pulling a back muscle navigating rush hour pedestrian traffic in mid-town to train it down to Trenton, NJ where I find Mary Morris, 85 and her huge, bright red lipsticked smile awaiting me in a run-down part of the city. She’s no end to the stories and old photographs, memories pouring out of her like her beloved Pepsi from a can. I came down for one piece of family history which she dispelles and I’m reminded of the power of myths. I had always thought she had cared for me and my sister when my parents divorced, my mother having supposed succumbed to an alcoholic depression when he left. Turns out, she just went shopping. Mary giggles as she remembers telling her to do so when my mother informed her of the divorce, having gone through her own husband’s betrayal. “You go buy whatever you want, Mrs. Byfield, he’ll be paying!” I love this comiserating between boss and employee, both suffering the wandering hearts of their men. Class, race, age and beauty mattered not.

She has many more stories to tell and I sit there marveling at the desire to share and how some of us do and some of us don’t. The afternoon gets warm as her head turns from side to side with laughter and thought. The taxi arrives too soon to take me back to the train station and my homeward trip and I leave her sun and plant filled apartment with a sense of calm. Her memories of my sister and me and her time with my family are not my own, as I have few, but they are a version of the truth (as Jack Nicholson says in “As Good as It Gets”) and maybe it’s time to look at the past differently. Or just leave it behind as I move forward. The next half-century awaits.