The Aloha Bowl
I looked through my mom's old stuff a lot as a kid. I enjoyed it, digging through her boxes, finding relics of the past. I'd look through piles of old cassettes, 8-Tracks, and records that she'd packed away, just to see the pictures and words of their packaging. I'd find journals and photo albums and collections of old sunglasses; they were secrets, aspects of my mother that'd been hidden away. As far back as I can remember I've been a compulsive looker. I've always learned more about people through their things than from their speech or from their actions.
***
It was the beginning of fall, and I'd come from halfway across the country-- Phoenix, Arizona to the small town of Judsonia, Arkansas-- to spend some time sifting through her collected history. It was my intention to find some fuel for my writing, and her collection had grown inexorably since I was 7 years old. In fact, it had grown so much that with a dedicated hand I could lay its contents across the whole state of Arkansas and back. Don't misunderstand; it wasn't like my mother was hoarding or harboring any ill-natured neuroses that I can think of. It was just that she'd had three children, and more stepchildren, and honored their achievements in the form of storage space. I said that I was looking for something, but more fundamentally I was there to weed out less important items, to reduce her wealth to bare essentials. It would be a sensitive process; every piece of neon clothing, every messy finger painting was of exceptional importance in its own right, but we both knew it was time to let go of a few things.
"Pat, where did you move the box of my Army stuff?" Mom was stepping between boxes on the other side of the living room which had been converted to an archive after my arrival. I dragged every box out of storage, stacked and spread them out in a haphazard grid on the dusty carpet. There were three boxes that I labeled "ARMY", filled to the top with papers, letters, notebooks, uniforms, badges and pins, detailing her time working as a linguist in the United States military. "I want to find my Russian courses," she said. I've written about it before. My parents were both language experts for the Army when they were in their 20's, and Mom was at the top of her class. Digging through the second of those containers, would reveal that she earned the highest possible score on each of her military entrance exams, and was given her choice of several demanding jobs in military intelligence. She told me once that she was sold on being a linguist because the job involved spy work. "Pat," She said, "I was flying all over Russia. We were listening to phones and radios, and it was my job to translate whatever was being said. Isn't that cool?" She'd balk at her own self-importance, but I knew it was true: she was a real-world spy. I'd been impressed by that story, even into teenage years; I joined the Army at the same age that she did, with the same scores, and hopes were high for a glimpse of the spy life myself. "In the corner," I said with a right-handed gesture, the left still digging through a container of old binders and files. "I'm putting all the important boxes over there. I might write about that stuff."
It was a tougher job than I'd anticipated; the house was big and dusty, and dimly lit. Mom would come and go, not particularly interested in the process. "I don't see why we have to dig through everything," she said, unpacking a box containing the second half of my Harvard Classics. She'd bought the collection when she was 19, she told me, and sent half of them to me as a care package while I was in college. I don't remember it, but she used to read them to me when I was a kid. She read them all, and on occasion I would talk to her about the stories and their critics. That was something people couldn't know about her by looking. She worked as a manager in a cigarette store in Arkansas. People didn't read books other than the Bible around those parts, and she wasn't exactly used to educated company; nobody in her town would think to ask her if she'd read Tennyson to Whitman or what she'd thought if it. They couldn't know that Christina Georgina Rosetti's Song had been a favorite, or that she'd leave notes between the pages.
Arkansas is an educational desert, and Judsonia is its Death Valley. Not a single institution of higher education for 20 miles around, and so she never pursued a degree. We bonded nonetheless, talking about books, and music, and poetry. She was the creative type, and I've never questioned that my sentimentality was a gift from her side of the family. She deserved time and space to be creative, with other creative people. Year after year I would go through the same selfish process of trying to convince her to move out of Arkansas, get a degree, and get a job that was worth her time, but it was too late to upend what she had built. She'd become structurally incapable of change.
My mother was married three times officially, and two more times in common-law. The first was to my father, after the birth of my older brother, Michael. Following my brother's entry into the world, Mom had to cut the spy life short, resolving herself to be a homemaker-- an Army wife. Anyone who has met an Army wife before could tell you that there's something peculiar in their manners. Usually these women are dependents: homemakers living on a single military salary, keeping the bed warm while their husbands are sniffing out landmines in Iraq, or firing million dollar surface to air missiles in Afghanistan. They're inordinately proud. They talk and talk about their husbands and about supporting the troops, and how great it is to be married to a man that could be killed any day; it's annoying at times, intensely neurotic at others. My mother never wanted to be an Army wife, and she resisted gloriously, only until the reality of three children had set in. It's a shame really, since I'm not an advocate of having children in the first place, and it seems that now is as good a place as any to mention it. While I would love to tell the story of how my mother might have continued a military career, working the linguistical spy game until a promotion and early retirement, eventually becoming an executive administrator for the CIA (as would fit her nature perfectly), that version of things would unfortunately be a fiction. Instead, the laborsome process of carrying and birthing a child had gotten in the way, rendering her useless to the world of war and international subversion.
As they say, one thing dies, and another emerges: three children in exchange for an opportunity cost, the potential of her military career. People tend to contest each other in matters of the heart, weighing the scales of love and ambition to make their soundest judgments, but as I looked over the boxes of stuff that she'd collected, I could only imagine what grand contents might have been packed away if things could have been different for her. Could she have fully lived her life, unfettered and free from the duties of motherhood? Unduly exalted as they are.
Thumbing through a bundle of notes, a thin stack of photos slipped from the bottom of what looked to be a high school composition course, scattering across the floor. They were all old polaroids with descriptions written on the back. "What are these?" I said, straightening the pile. Mom was in the kitchen, humming along with the radio-- it was playing Steely Dan. She looked at the stack of photos in my hands and I witnessed a subtle excitement rushing to her cheeks. "Wow, where'd you find those?" She smiled, "I haven't seen those pictures in years." There was one in particular that stood out: a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with long brown hair dressed in a chorale outfit, black pants with a white blouse, holding a microphone in both hands, almost like a prayer. She stood on green grass, surrounded by orange and pink, people in bleachers. It was my mother when she was in high school, singing the national anthem.
"Do you know where that was?" She said, sitting down on the living room step. "When I was a little girl, my class went to Hawaii to sing at a choir conference. Well Pat, we did really well, and I was chosen, from like, hundreds of singers, to sing the national anthem at the Aloha Bowl. Can you believe that? You may not know it, but your momma was once a pretty good singer." She was proud, and I couldn't blame her. I was amazed, and I told her so myself. She gave a reminiscent sigh, "You should have seen it, Pat. It was so beautiful, the whole thing. That was the happiest moment of my life."
I'd found what I was looking for. I told her I'd go back to my hotel, that we could continue in the morning. "Ok, sweetheart, I think I'm gonna make some food and watch TV." She was still going through boxes. "OH! Do you remember these?" she picked up a painting of a turkey from when my sister and I were toddlers. "You two were so cute." I was already on my way out the door. "Ok," she said after me. "I'll see you tomorrow. I love you." Those last few words were always sung, ever since I was a kid. She'd put a sweetened inflection at the end, drawing it out, making it personal. "I love you too, Mom." I was out the door to the car park, and I locked it behind me.
***
The sun was going down, and the sky turned orange and green on the horizon. On my way out of town, I stopped at the Safeway. I picked up pink oleander and gardenias from the garden section. It was a special request, and they had to be pulled from the other bouquets. The cashier asked if they were a favorite of my wife or a special gift. I said, "They're Hawaiian flowers. They make leis out of them." I bought my dinner and headed out. I watched the sun go down from Evergreen Cemetery across from the elementary school on Judson Ave. She was in the back, away from the road, a two-minute walk from the parking lot. When I arrived there were pink clouds stretching out, just above the trees-- the flowers matched them perfectly. The bouquet was set down at the marble stone, between two tea lights that I'd lit the night before. I'd brought her flowers every day since the funeral, but today I had a gift. I unfolded the photo from my back pocket. In the light of the sunset I could see her smiling, singing to the world in the most beautiful place on earth. On the back of the polaroid, it read: "Polly, National Anthem, Aloha Bowl 1987." I placed it neatly between the flowers, and called my brother to tell him what I'd found.