The Highball

My mother loved to host parties.  She collected glasses, plates, flatware, and people.  She loved interesting people.  On the last hospital visit before she died, she charmed a young hospital chaplain, who learned to play organ at his prep school and shared her love of Charles Ives.  From her hospital bed she declared that she would host a summer garden party for him to meet some of her university friends.  When she "held court" like that the illness took a back seat.  She was in charge again.  She was lecturing.  She was teaching.  She was the hostess.

She went back home after that hospitalization.  We were officially in hospice.  One Saturday when I was at her house, I started to sort a collection of high ball glasses.  They seemed to be mismatched but were all from the early 1960s or late 1950s and shared a silver rim theme.  (I think she had collected them but never used them.)  You might say my mother had an obsession with glassware -- it was in every corner of her house.  Looking at the collection of glasses, I thought about Mad Men.  A time when drinking in the office was acceptable.  The drink of the highball was originally just a scotch and soda, which was what my mother drank in the winter when she was younger, but later lots of other drinks were served in the same glass -- even the tacky rum and coke.  Nick and Nora drank real highballs in the Thin Man series.  The highball glass is fatter than the Collins glass, which are fancied these days by modern restaurants and taller than a old fashioned glass, which is what you would have something "on the rocks" in.  Growing up in the 1960s you learn these sort of things. 

When my mom came home from that hospitalization the pain was horrible.  Pain management is really how do you balance between being coherent with unbelievable pain levels.  By this point my mom was sleepy a lot and sometimes loopy on pain medication.  In the highball glass collection I  found four glasses with the Notre Dame logo on them.  I was making small talk with my mom, as you do when someone is dying, and told her that my new mentor had two kids at Notre Dame and had become a total Notre Dame fan.  She told me to take the four glasses and give them to my mentor but that we needed a story about the glasses --- buying them in a tag sale would not do.  So she told me a story about how her college boyfriend, an architecture student from Notre Dame, gave them to her as a gift -- an apology for not coming back to Bridgeport during a school break.  I reminded her that her college boyfriend who was an architecture student at Yale not Notre Dame.  She informed me that she knew she was off on her details because of the pain meds but it didn't matter.  It was the story that mattered. 

This past Sunday, I sorted the rest of the collection of highball glasses. There were some singles with no mates but mostly they were three sets (if 7 is a set).  I carefully packed them in separate boxes and posted them on Craig's List.  I listed them as  "Mad Men" style highball glasses and put them on "Curb Alert."  As with most of my Craig's Lists posts they were gone in a day.

This blog entry may sound nostalgic.  But honestly, I'm not nostalgic (in general) for my mom's "stuff."  My mom had so much "stuff," there is no way I could make that much room in my life (or my house) for all of her "stuff" -- not the least of which is 43 delicate highball glass from the 1960s.  The people who take my curb alert "stuff" are so happy.  They tell me their stories and I tell them mine. I also feel like my mother's "stuff" masks what is really gone -- my mom.  My mom was a larger than life person.  She filled a room with ideas, opinions, emotions, drama and "stuff."  I'm not sure I ever want to be nostalgic about my mother.  Being nostalgic includes being excessively sentimental.  I hope I can always remember my mother honestly without a glaze of wistfulness.  I want to remember the good and the bad.  I want to remember the happiness and the pain.  I want to remember the banter and the tirades.

Afterall it is the story that matters.