Hallowe'en and Dia de los Muertos

November 1

I see photos of people who with bare hands claw through a mixture of sand and debris in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, and I think of precious personal items retrieved yesterday.

Sixteen months after the death of his wife, my daughter Laura, Dan Morefield, my son-in-law, is still combing through the detritus of her life. Like her mother, Laura kept everything, including the things I gave her because I no longer had room for them when I downsized. Her house had copious storage spaces, and she put all I gave her -- my overflowing file folders and photo albums -- into big plastic tubs and put them up on shelves in the garage.

 In one of the straggler file folders Dan gave  me yesterday, I found a poem Laura must have written when she was around 16. I believe I first kept it, and then she inherited it, along with other precious things I’d forgotten just as surely as if they were buried in the sand.

The box I brought home contains my mother’s high school yearbook, June 1913, John Marshall High School, Chicago. Each time I saw this yearbook in the past, and even now, I turned the pages eagerly to find mother’s graduation photo under Thelma Good. Time and again I’m surprised to find that someone has torn her photo from the yearbook. All that remains are the accompanying words: “Her face is fair, her heart is true.” I know that. I always knew that.

I also found a snapshot of Laura’s father, Samuel Costales, who died when she was 2. He promised me a girl and was so delighted with our infant that he carried her around in his arms, singing and dancing with her. She never knew his warmth and how much he loved her. I am comforted that if what I believe is true she knows now.

                     A Poem for Mother

By Laura Jeanne Costales

Circa 1976

Sometimes I feel as if

                  I’m all “grown up”

And I think that I’m free to do what I want    

                  Without needing help.

But then something will happen

                  And I’ll hurt so bad inside

It’s like falling into a pit

                  And landing very hard on the bottom.

I’ll stay in my room,

                  Lost and hurt

And then there will be

                  A knock on the door.

Her head will pop around the corner

                  And her eyes will sadden.    

She’ll come and put her arms around me

                  And all of a sudden,

I’m not all “grown up”

                  I’m just her little girl again.

She asks what is wrong

                  I’ll tell her and cry.

She comforts me when I need it most   

                  And so

My gift to her this mother’s day

                  Is

All the love I can give her

         For all the times

                  She understood.

Note to Laura

Oh, my girl, I hope I never disappointed you

when you needed my love.

I’d give anything to knock on your door,

pop my head around the corner,

and take you into my arms right now.

Thanks for saving all my stuff.

November 2, Old Town

Dia de los Muertos

Celebrate Small Victories is engraved on Laura's silver bracelet, the talisman that was supposed to restore her health. I read the inscription at my table in Old Town. Next to me is a lamp of brass, with a lavender shade encircled with pink teardrops, each tipped with red. 

It is the Mexican Dia de los Muertos. Trollops and matrons alike dress as if it were still Hallowe'en, odd little knots and combs atop their heads, flip-flops or impossibly steep platforms upon their feet.

The Catholic church is right across the street from my window. People carry roses and candles in their hands. Earlier, I observed a teen nervously eating her rose outside the tour ticket booth on Twiggs Street.

A mother comes into the coffee shop with two children, identically dressed in skeleton tees, the boy around 3, the girl, 1-1/2 or so with pacifier. She is intent on carrying off the wine display bottle by bottle, while he, all menacing arms, hands and aarghs, wants only to scare the other children as they enter.

Outside, on my way to the theatre, I find myself caught up in the Dia del los Muertos procession, and I am overwhelmed by grief, sit on a bench and shed tears for the communion of saints so recently joined by my longtime friend George, who was certain that Laura awaited him.

Small victories are good. They allow us to put one foot in front of the other as we plod along the road to our own epiphanies.

A poet's love

A poet’s love

By Charlene Baldridge

My friend says you can’t

write love, even if you’re a poet.

Does that mean I have

wasted my entire life?

That I am not a poet?

Or merely that I’ve spent

an eon writing the lack of love

or the unrequited love?

Love itself is too precious

and unspeakable for mere

words and, like joy, cannot

be told, only experienced,

like grace, like the deep

wordlessness one feels

when kneeling before the

unsparing Gift.

Human love is mere

reflection and pales

with time, unlike Jesus’

love for me and for her

who went before, uttering thanks.

I wandered Kent and Canterbury

with her, my daughter, my sister,

my love, pondering the assassination

of Thomas Becket, unaware that

one of us would soon be struck

down out of time,

leaving the other powerless to

write about such a love,

we who have so many words

and so few bases of comparison.

I only need to organize it

The in-box is never empty

She is in my dreams again, as you know, whipping up healthy meals and storyboarding our book. Life and what we’ve already written keep getting in my way of this next assignment.

Can’t you cut me a little slack now? It’s all there; I need only to organize it.

Laura J. Morefield and Daniel Morefield

It took more than a year for Dan to clear up what you had yet to organize. The week before you died you put bunches of trip photos into a plastic tub so you could make a book out of them – a photo journal of sorts.

How I wish I could paste all our days into a book, savor each moment, each laugh and caress, the bells in Gubbio, watching you sleep at night, breathing your breath.

Laura, I feel like I’m running out of steam now, and just now, when I’m running out of steam, life keeps coming on – requests for me, my brains, my words.

Write Out Loud is reading “Dancing Out of Time” October 8, your birthday, and I won’t even be there, but on a plane returning from my 60th high school reunion in Chicago.

A USC grad student is singing Winter Roses on her American Composers-themed recital December 2. I plan to be there. How I wish you could go, too.

All this transpires amid production meetings in regard to our theatre piece, The Warriors’ Duet. The director/producer asked me in our recent meeting why I wrote Warriors and what purpose I hoped it would fulfill.

Laura J. Morefield and Mom
heading for St. Petersburd and the White Nights
2008

I wrote it for us – so that we could be together again, for the first time on a stage; so people could hear your faith-filled celebrations of life and love and adoration; so they could know you and your diction of courage; so they could know it is possible to go on despite the ache that never goes away.

What I hope it does is to imbue them with courage for their own battles; allow them to mourn the loss of those they loved; and most of all to allow them to know you as I did – obstinate, intelligent, warm, scornful (were you ever that?), caring and most of all funny.

Our relationship was not always easy, but it was always worth fighting for; we never stopped admiring one another. So here I am, challenged by all these assignments and recognitions, and with no you to urge me on.

Miss Mommy, you know you can do it.

Thelma, Chuck and Charlene Stube
1952

I've had a few requests for "Motherwit," which I wrote at midlife regarding my own mother, Thelma Marie Stube.

So here it is:

Motherwit

If I could bring her back,

Now that I've matured;

If we could really talk...

Perhaps I'd be reassured

her disapproval was imagined;

the pattern she had in mind

was not perfection.

I do not discard

Nor do I hate

The what-I've-beens.

They are part of me.

Instead I begin

Reassembling

Fragments I found

After I forgave.

Luminous creatures

Ever since my daughter Laura Jeanne Morefield, also a poet and writer, died at 50 in July 2011, I have devoted myself to several "assignments" she gave me. The first was made during the final weeks of her life.

"Mom, do me a favor. Please read through my post-diagnosis poems, select the best and edit them. Make a chapbook. I think they're my best work."

The Warrior by Charlene Baldridge

I made the collection and titled it The Warrior's Stance after an image in one of her poems. It received gratifying response on its maiden voyage, named a finalist in the nationwide chapbook contest to which I sent it. I'm in the throes of having it published now. 

The second project involves a dramatic interchange between mother and daughter titled The Warriors' Duet, which was read at ion in May 2012 and is to be produced next spring. Details are yet to be announced. 

The third project has to do with the revision of my memoir titled Wilmette 223, something Laura had long urged me to do. I haven’t done this exactly as she wanted, but it is, after all, my work, and I am Taurus. The first chapter is with a small press publisher now (hard to get anyone to even look these days; impossible to get an agent). I am hopeful.

And next, I plan to write the book Laura and I always wanted to write, about the healing and maintenance of the mother/daughter relationship. We knew how we did it -- lots of hard work and difficult discussions and travel together each year -- but we were both so busy we never got around to writing it. Now it falls to me. This book is tentatively titled What Next, Miss Mommy? I'm just now figuring out the content. 

Laura and mom, December 2008

Working with Laura's wondrous words over the past year plus and receiving dark, "unfinished," never--to-be-shared poems from her journals (sent to me by her husband, Dan) has been a privilege. I'm not sure I've mourned "properly" because I've been so engaged, and I am still looking for Laura in my dreams, where I receive encouragement from shining others who do not appear to be Laura. The raiment of these entities is silver. They are perhaps -- as she wrote -- "myself as God sees me." That is a comforting thought. Last night I was encouraged to "storyboard" the new book. It sprawled all over the place.