Ordinary People

I’ve been thinking about this weekend for almost a year.

It’s funny, because I’ve never been big on holidays or anniversaries or dates marking major milestones. I can’t tell you when Tenzin and I had our first kiss. I have to pause to recall the kids’ dates of birth. And if we have to celebrate a holiday on a day that’s different than the one it actually falls on, well, so be it. But this weekend — this day — has been stuck in my brain for months.

Mother’s Day. Not just because my mother died last summer. That’s too easy. The thing is, Mother’s Day 2009 was the last great, “normal” memory I ever made with my mom. She and my dad came over to my house to just hang out with the kids and me. Suddenly Mom said, “I want to go shopping. I need some new clothes — nothing fits me anymore.” She had old girlfriends coming in from out-of-town, but she’d lost so much weight that her clothes hung off of her (and unlike the rest of us who regularly proclaim that we have “nothing to wear,” she actually didn’t). She hadn’t felt good enough to go shopping in at least a year, but for some reason, that day was the day. So we ditched the kids with my dad, and off we went.

We spent an hour or so in Coldwater Creek, grabbing different types of pants, hemming and hawing over different colored shirts, exchanging one size for another. It was a routine we’d perfected over 30-ish years. When I was eleven, I remember trying on what seemed like a thousand pairs of pants and practically having a nervous breakdown because I couldn’t fit into anything (I was shaped like a boy — no waist, no butt). And then I remember her calming me down — for what was probably the thousandth time — before buying me the first of many pairs of Chemin de Fer jeans (for which you needed neither a waist nor a butt).

My mom found two pairs of pants and three shirts on that last shopping day. And in typical fashion, she grabbed something for me at the last minute — a white shirt with embroidery on the front of it. We looked at jewelry while the saleswoman rang us up. We planned her visit with her friends. We gossiped. It was a perfect, ordinary day.

She never ended up wearing any of the clothes. Her visit with the girls got canceled because she felt too sick. And the shirts and pants hung in her closet.

I made sure to keep all three of the shirts — two green and one blue. And then, of course, there’s the white one — the last present my mom ever bought for me. Mementos of our Mother’s Day. Our last, perfect, ordinary day.