" A tiny soliloquy for Annie"

My mother,
Annie Dodge Oakes
Nov. 15, 1920 - Feb. 23, 1992
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There are not really ANY words I can usefully come up with to tell you or otherwise convey how it's the weirdest feeling in the world to lose the person that brought you into it. Funeral parlors ought to have a bar serving straight shots to keep you "likkered right up" to get you through it; because it's such a shock to the system experience as it is -- to "go orphaned" in the world. It's even weirder still when they've been gone for longer than you even knew 'em for. Gets ya where you live, sometimes. God love 'em, too, there are days that come around where the feeling comes over you unbidden where you'd do just about anything to hear their voice again. Or just to sit and have a talk. . the talk could be about anything, "the weather, even" it doesn't matter. So today, my mother's been gone 15 whole years, which is more or less the "half-way" point of the time we had together mother and soning it over in Port Clyde. Amazing. Thoroughly, amazing. These little anniversaries are called euphemistically... "mile stones". My father, "Old Cony", has been gone since 1971. He died in the wee hours of the mornin' on the day after my mother's birthday -- like he just hung on those few extra friggen hours by the skin of his teeth, so he wouldn't have to stand accused of givin' up the ghost for her birthday. I'm just kiddin' -- but you know, I do kind-a secretly wonder -- in the "what WAS THAT ALL ABOUT" way -- the one when you put your hand up to cover most of your face, all the while peering out through your fingers. Although "being on the outside lookin' in" is a whole different story than being on the "inside lookin' out" -- son of Annie and Cony, or no son of Annie and Cony; I'm pretty sure their love affair had grown cold as a dock plank in January, or in this case, February, by then. They passed each other on the street like they were "over it" those couple of times I saw them on the main street going about doing whatever it was they were doing at the time. My mother going to the the "Port Clyde General", "Old Cony" to the post office. What-ever. By then Cony's fish house on the cove where we lived along what is now the "co-op" road was in pretty sad shape; holes in the roof and windows busted out of it. "Old Cony" was in kind of a similar state of being, himself, stiverin' around the Port Clyde streets. By then he was roomin' at the "Ocean House" and my mother and I were living beside the Baptist church in one of the Balano tenements. At any rate he didn't seem to come around so much anymore and sing "Turkey in the straw", like he used to. No-sir-ree. I was just about 15 years old when ''Old Cony'' died, and in my 36th year when my mother did. Of course "Old Cony" was born in 1900, and my mother in 1920; so there was a little "discrepancy" to begin with, since "Old Cony" would have been 56 and my mother would have been 36 when they had me. I'll be 51 when this August rolls around, which is about 5 years short of how old "Old Cony" when he became a proud pappy. Makes you wonder the twists and turns of one's fate, and how it doesn't matter what condition your condition is at the time. If they hadn't have by destiny met and been lead, I wouldn't have been here to tell the story. And that would have kind-a sucked, since all told it's been a pretty damn good life in spite of how I can be my own worst enemy sometimes. All I can say in this introspective moment I'm having today, is as I look back, I often was blind that another's passing isn't the end of a relationship, but in a greater sense, the beginning of a more enduring one; one that's got some real substance and power to it, if we let it in.



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