When I was 11 years old, my life was a sparse mismatch of love. I hadn’t had my mother since I was a tiny toddler, and even though my grandmother took care of me, my dad was harsh and a mixed bag. Some days he was kind, and some days he’d whip that belt right out of the loops and beat my tail for whatever I’d said or done that day, depending on his mood. It was easier to stay quiet and holed up in my room, or if my brother wasn’t at his mom’s house, in his room playing with him.
That summer, my mom had sort of gotten herself together, and got a steady job as a bartender at a place called Fantasy World in Jacksonville, Florida, and she’d even finally been able to afford a brand-new car. It was small by today’s standards, a light blue Toyota Tercel, but when she came to pick me up in June, I was so excited to go with her she could have taken me in an alien spaceship or a prairie wagon for all I cared. My mother had always been, since she had left, a mystery for me to solve. I barely knew her, and so in many ways, I barely knew myself.
On the drive to Jacksonville in her new car, we listed to The Police in her tape deck, because the route we took was through small-town Georgia and radio stations had little to offer. She did her best to drive a respectable speed, and slowed down considerably through Baxley, Georgia, which she had decided was a speed-trap and a legitimate thorn in her side. She smoked cigarettes, turned the music up so loud it hurt my ears, and talked a lot about herself, while she peppered me with questions about my life with my father. She tried to make it clear she’d ran away from him, not me, but that wasn’t the story he’d always told me. “She left you,” he’d say, when he spoke of her. He hated her guts for leaving him, so he convinced me that really, she’d left ME.
The real fun began when we got to Jacksonville and she took me to a McDonald’s to get a Happy Meal. To this day, I’ll never forget my first Happy Meal, or at least the first one I remember. It was true serendipity, because in that box was a tiny blue Stomper truck with yellow stripes. On its hood was the word Tercel. I’d received not only a warm meal in my gut, but a tiny little car that had the same name as my mom’s new car.
That week was magical. My mom’s roommate Cookie was a seamstress for the girls who danced in the bar mom worked at, and she was nice to me. She and mom took me to the beach that week, and we took her boom-box and mom’s Synchronicity cassette. I learned all the words to Every Breath You Take and decided that was exactly how I felt about my mother. I watched her every move. She taught me how to shave my legs and use a tampon, because she didn’t know when she would see me again and wanted me to know these things. It was fascinating and heart-breaking. She even took me to Disney World for the first time, where Space Mountain unceremoniously scared the shit out of me. I also talked her into a few more Happy Meals. Right before she delivered me back home, we had to pull over on the side of the road to cry in each other’s arms. I was a little, uncultured girl from the red-clay country of Georgia, and I felt like I’d just seen the whole world, and my mother, in a week.
In short, I’d spent one glorious week with my mom and fell madly in love, only to be heart-broken the next year when I didn’t get to visit her. My life was a long list of days spent waiting for her to find the time to call me or write me or care about me. I never stopped waiting for her love. I did have that tiny happy meal car though, until one day I realized my little brother must have taken it to his mom’s house to play with. I’d carried it for months and months and then it was gone.
Decades later, not long after mom had died, I find myself telling Jennifer (now my wife) this story. I pulled up Ebay on my phone and typed in 1980’s happy meal truck toys. Seconds later, there it was, in all its blue glory. A tiny little truck exactly like the one I’d had, still brand new in the package. I had simply wanted to see it to check my own memory, and illustrate the story I’d told about the short time I’d had with mom that year. Along with the stuffed Mickey Mouse she’d bought me at the Magic Kingdom, the little truck had been something I could hold onto, to have a little piece of that experience stay with me. Jen is a softie, and of course she took my story to heart. A couple weeks later she held out a tiny package for me. I had forgotten all about it by then – my brain is relatively flighty – comes with the psychic territory as I’ve learned – but she was grinning ear to ear and waiting. I opened the package to the tiny brand new blue truck, just like the one I’d had so long ago.
As I was pondering today what I was truly thankful for, I saw that little truck in my mind’s eye and decided that you all needed to hear this story, because ultimately it is about love. The love I had for my imperfect mother, the love that I poured into the forgiveness of her for all the time we missed, and the love of my beautiful wife, who has always sought to use her energy to cover me in love, and bind up the wounds of the past.
Thank you to my mother in Heaven for helping me learn some of life’s most important lessons, to my Sweet Granny for dutifully filling in as mom as best she could, and to my Jennifer who rescued me from the storm.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! #GiveThanks #Thanksgiving
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