The sound of Mother's Day

Can you hear it?

Some of you will be fortunate to hear your mother’s voice on this Mother’s Day.

Her nagging voice. Her imploring voice. Her guilt-tripping voice. Her cajoling, encouraging, welcoming, sometimes passive aggressive and occasionally beguiling voice.

I will not.

Because I have forgotten the sound of her voice.

I have no recordings. No video. No audiotapes. She is a ghost frozen in the yellow amber of Polaroids and fading Kodak prints. And I am an old man who can no longer retrieve the sound of my mother’s voice from the childhood memories floating farther into the distance every day, carrying with them the range, timbre and distinctive sound of the voice that captivated me with sing song nursery rhymes, chastised me with theatricality or cooed soothing comfort into my fevered head when I was a sick child on her lap.

In the nearly half century since her voice was stilled, I find myself lost in longing to hear her voice.

If only I could dial the number I did when I went off the school and heard her voice in the tinny speaker of our old rotary dial phone answering with her version of “who’s calling?”, a friendly lilting “uh-huh?”

On dusk walks, in the hoo-ing of the neighborhood owls, I hear the haunting echo of her voice gently singing her errant boy home to dinner at twilight.

I hear hints of her irritated raspy voice in the exasperated harangue of a young mother at the grocery store echoing my mother, chastising me for being a brat.

I hear the smoky flavor of my mother‘s plaintive voice whenever I hear a wounded woman recount an alcoholic father, loves lost, or children’s lives grown tragic. “Oh, my,” Artha Jean would say, with the word “my-y-y” drifting off into the dark ether of shared grief.

I can imagine the sarcastic tone of my mother’s voice when my wife asks me, “Are you going out dressed like that?” or “Do you really think that’s smart?”

I have often heard the familiar bossy pitch of her voice emerge from my own throat as when I asked my son if I could take a picture of the poor kid with his prom date and directed the shoot like it was for Vanity Fair.

When the neighbor’s dog yaps, I hear my mother’s voice barking at me to straighten up and pull myself together.

In the cemetery I can conjure her words but not her voice among the quiet dead. The name on her grave marker fills the blue sky and asks me what is new and who do I love and who loves me and what are the names of my children and on the car ride back home I talk with her, hearing a voice that is but a poor imitation of a once living woman’s rich voice.

One night I looked up from our bed after Ellen and I reminisced about our dead mothers and as I turned off the light I glanced at the ancient sepia toned picture of my young mother on a horse above my bureau among the family pictures. I imagined her voice in the distance chiming “sleep tight” as she rode away, vanishing into the dark. When Ellen and I exchanged good nights I folded the sound of Ellen’s tender voice into my memory and slept tight in the good life I’d been given by the woman eternally riding off somewhere and sometime unknown.

Where did your entire canon of melodious and discordant music go? The discordant hollering, reverberating down the hall into my bedroom, the melodious beckoning, the commanding, the operatic lamenting, the crescendo of cackling laughter that defied the power of life’s suffering to defeat you, the teary-eyed roaring guffaws that always ended with, “Oh, me,” and the three note tongue wag at your man, my father, that was always a succinct, “Oh, Larry.”

Ellen and I are an old couple and I search for Artha Jean’s voice every few months when we do the dishes. Above our soapy clatter I conjure the sound of you scat singing in your own aqua-blue-colored Betty Crocker dream kitchen as you sponge the ashes of your perpetually lit cigarette off the sink and scrub the fried pork chop grease off your own mother’s frying pans. Only then can I hear the voice that would quiz me about my homework, my day and “What’s with the attitude?” through the long dramatic draws and puffs on her Virginia Slim cigarettes, which always ended with when I was your age life instructions, which I ignored, as every child does, and, which I now desperately search for in the attic of my beleaguered brain where millions of forgotten daily life moments collect dust among forgotten lock combinations, books loaned, passwords and papers to organize which I never will.

Sometimes in the roar of traffic, I hear the steady harangue of my mother, her voice encouraging me to do better, to “honor your father and your mother.”

Each honk is the voice of my mother squawking “We don’t ask much of you.”

And from the back seat of her clunker I want to tell her “asking much of me” was always present in the stories of her rough childhood. Told with that world weary voice, and today I cannot hear that world weary voice but I wish I could tell you now how much I love you. For powering through. And what became of me. And how you inspired me.

My memories of your rambling lectures are a montage of mute silent film clips, with captioning, in which you list the lessons you learned “the hard way believe me, escaping a hands-y stepfather, and don’t think it didn’t happen, and I came up the hard way hitchhiking to San Francisco, in the Depression, ask your father about the Depression, he’ll tell you, to meet my high school girlfriend who got the Hell out, too, who told me there would be a job at the dance hall for a pretty girl like me and what did I know back then…” and then the old woman would go silent on the details of that period in her life, taking that history into her deathbed, giving no voice to those missing years of gin running men, working ten cents a dance ballrooms, and raising her sons in flophouses, my brothers born to no good husbands who fled back into the shadows of the Depression from which they came asking for just one dance with a pretty girl who learned the hard way.

I miss her cursing, her inheritance from the rough life which in my memory sounded somewhat like a duet performed with crashing cymbals and a thundering kettledrum.

“Jesus! So-help-me-God I’ll kill you, you little bastard,” was my favorite epithet to provoke.

When I hear my grandbaby reach out her hand and tell me, “It’s time for us to go for a walk, grandpa,” I wish I could hear the voice of my mother cooing over her. But, this is the life you’ve been given she’d say.

Such moments can evoke a plunge into the past where I hear my mother inviting me to hold her hand, walking down the street I grew up on, in search of a lost kickball in the dark surrounded by chirping crickets, telling me, “We’ll find it.” Why such mundane jewels lodge in the psyche is a mystery.

She died when I was young. For years her voice inhabited my head, remaining a fresh looping soundtrack of soundbites of instruction, advice, praise, laughter, and pet phrases. Today that looping soundtrack is a valueless muffled hum on tapes lost among the synapses, degraded by the din of time.

When my children and grandchildren gather for holidays and their chatter fills our home I will inevitably grow maudlin for an instant, caught in a brief dream of hearing among the joyful cacophony the voice of the woman who never met them joining in with the joyful sharing of stories and laughing. “Oh, me.”

Memorize your mother’s voice, her intonations, accent, quirks, idioms, inflections, chiding and chortles. When she lectures, harangues, praises, insults, taunts, and tells you she loves you, “dear, of course, I do”, listen to her song, the music of her voice, the first voice you ever heard.

The voice you may always long to hear.