Meet The Parents

“What’s your dad’s name again?” I ask Basil.

We were driving down Broadway yesterday in Denver, on our way to run errands. It was a sunny 70 degree afternoon, but with freezing rain and snow forecast for the next several days thereafter, we were focused on getting some things done in order to avoid going out in the impending crummy weather.

“Randi. With an ‘i’. I think my grandmother was confused about the spelling when she named him.”

Someone I knew in New Jersey, the first place I lived that had a real winter, called these kind of shopping trips “french toast shopping”: in advance of snow, people are stocking up on milk, eggs, and bread. Any time someone tells me about these patterns of behavior, things that people will just go and do just like everyone else does, like buy the same stuff before a snow storm, it seems improbable to me. Even if I am eventually standing at the store, looking at empty shelves where the bread used to be.

“At least I can’t forget your mother’s name,” I say.

It is the same as my mother’s name: Carole. Including an “e” at the end is not the usual spelling of the name. It turns out both of our mothers independently insisted on adding the “e” to the end of their given “Carol” at some point during their teens. Basil and I think of this as one of the many strange little coincidences/overlaps from our lives, things that happened years before we met that imply our paths were destined to cross.

I am meeting Basil’s parents for the first time this upcoming week, nearly five years into our relationship. We are going to San Francisco to spread Octavian’s ashes at Fisherman’s Wharf and they are going to meet us there for the memorial.

I don’t know how long it has been since Basil has seen his parents. There was a lot of strain put on their relationship as a result of his parents not supporting Basil as a single parent, not being supportive of his transition or Octavian’s transition, and a number of other things. But since Octavian died, Basil has been reconnecting with them.

So Basil will have met my only surviving biological parent at a funeral and I will have met his parents at a memorial, both years into our marriage.

This is why I can’t believe people all drive to the store to buy the same thing the day before it snows: most things in my life seem to happen in a different order altogether, leaving me without a pattern or precedent to lean on.

##

I had a dream two weeks ago that I got a call informing me my mother was dead.

I never thought much about getting calls from people telling me someone I knew was dead, until I got a call in 2003 saying my father was dead. Since then, I have thought about these types of calls regularly. Fifteen years later, I can say having received a few more of these types of calls does not make me think about them any less. And as I get older, inevitably these calls will continue to happen, should I have the good fortune to live a long life.

Basil and I are both of the opinion dreams can be meaningful, particularly when communicating ideas with the dead or people who may be about to die. When I woke up from the dream, I thought a while. If my mother died, would someone be able to get a hold of me? Of my brother? Who would find her?

My anxiety made me consider the scenario with my usual gusto for problem solving: I decided whatever authorities were responsible for contacting someone at the event of my mother’s untimely death would look through her phone for frequent contacts. Would these authorities see a common last name and dial my or Max’s number, even though we were not in her recent call/text history? Is Aunt Terry’s number still in her phone? My mother still calls my father’s parents on occasion, but as she was never good at making friends without my father there to temper her borderline personality disorder, I can’t imagine who else she talks to these days.

Who called me in the dream? A cop, I think: classic state trooper type, straight out of an old episode of CSI.

As my consciousness continued to stream in upon waking, I decided I couldn’t be certain someone would call me if my mother did die. So I turned to the engine of modern day problem solving: Google. I googled her name and what I believed to be her current whereabouts. How long would it take to show up on a search engine result if she died? At least a few days. I was certain no one was going to write an obituary for her if I didn’t do it.

So if no obituary, then what? It would not be beyond my mother to go out with a bang, so there could be a page six headline somewhere in a regional Northern California newspaper (“Local Woman Punches Cop, Drives Car into Liquor Store”). But she could have just as easily drank too much and fallen down, which would likely preclude any news coverage. Even after a few tweaks to my key words, I continued to come up empty handed, pausing any additional searches until I talked to Basil about it.

If I was really concerned, why not just call her to make sure she picked up the phone? Or, on a level of even less commitment/interaction, send her a text message. (“You alive?”)

But I couldn’t imagine making a call or sending a text message without explaining why I was texting/calling: “Hey it’s me–just making sure you weren’t dead–dreamed that you were.”

This is the problem with communicating with my mother: even a small gesture grounded in kindness could result in an unwarranted, violent show of emotional force. Instead of thinking of it as bringing a knife to a gun fight, think of it as bringing a gift to a baby shower and getting knifed by the mother-to-be.

After talking to Basil about it, he offered to reach out to my mother to see if she was still okay. He asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted him to ask or say, and I said no. He said no problem-he would take care of it. And about 24 hours later, he had confirmed my mother was still alive.

Unsure what my dream was trying to tell me, I discussed the possibility of going to see her when we went to San Francisco for Octavian’s memorial.

“Do you want to go see her?” Basil asked.

“No.”

He asked me why I thought I should go. I said I felt sorry for her: she was getting older, she was likely living alone, likely with minimal social interaction.

After making it clear he would go with me and do whatever I needed to support me, Basil said when he had communicated with my mother she had said everything was fine. She didn’t ask how we were. She didn’t say she missed me.

“She seems like she is doing okay,” Basil said.

##

“I hope I make a good impression with your parents,” I say to Basil. Despite everything I have learned, despite all of my personal growth in the last several years, my impulse to be a people pleaser first and other things second has been tough to shake.

Basil tells me not to be silly. If they don’t appreciate me, that’s their problem.

I try to imagine how it will go. We are planning to take the ferry to Sausalito after the memorial and have a meal with Randi and Carole. We are going somewhere that has good clam chowder, which Octavian loved to eat out of bread bowls when Basil used to bring him to Sausalito. I hope we can share our favorite memories of Octavian.

Maybe we will get to know more about each other. Maybe we will not. The loss of Octavian has reminded me how senseless and bleak life can be. If we can even find a little bit of light, a little bit of comfort on the day of the memorial as a result of the time we spend together, it will be like having woven straw into a thick blanket, a blanket we can draw around the four of us for some brief warmth in this cold plane of existence.