I love your hair!

A poem by Alison Luterman that I wish I'd written:

I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a
great silver clip,
her erect bearing radiating tenderness,
the way she placed yogurt and avocadoes
in her basket,
beaming peace like the North Star.
I wanted to ask "what aisle did you
find your serenity in, do you know
how to be married for fifty years,
or how to live alone,
excuse me for interrupting, but
you seem to possess
some knowledge that makes the
earth burn and turn on its axis" -
but we don't request such things
from strangers
nowadays. So I said
"I love your hair!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I lived in my mom's house, in my mom's town, just after she died, I used to see this woman at what would have been my mom's Fred Meyer, had she lived long enough to have seen it open and long enough to have seen Roth's close, where she had shopped every week since we moved here in 1982 and where she and one other woman in town bought L&M cigarettes, which is the only reason Roth's still carried them. So this woman at Fred Meyer, who I saw every Sunday evening when I did my shopping, looked exactly like my mother with her long grey hair pinned up with a clip, with her broad sloping shoulders, big butt and labored walk, made difficult by the probably 200 extra pounds she carried on her bones.

I asked my mother once--when I was little and she was probably only about a 100 pounds overweight, but it seemed like more because of the way Dad called her a fat, lazy slob all the time--"Mom? Are fat people really, really strong because they hafta carry around all that fat? Or...?" She said that no, fat people were not strong, they were tired.

So here was this woman who looked just like my mom that I saw every Sunday night at Fred Meyer. And every week I'd forget and be shocked to see my mom shopping. I wanted my mom to be alive so much that I imagined that she hadn't really died, but had just needed a break from her life and so had faked her death and was really living in Arizona somewhere, but came up to Canby, Oregon to buy groceries late on Sunday nights and somehow didn't think that I'd see her. I'd walk up to this woman every week to tell her that it was okay, that it was hard, unbelievably hard to lose her, but that it was okay if she just needed a break and that I was not mad, that she could come back. But then she'd turn toward me just enough and I'd see that this wasn't my mother after all and I'd have to pretend I'd mistaken her for someone else or was looking beyond her at a sale sign or something.

For a couple of years, actually, and even now sometimes, I fantasize that she's really not dead but living in Arizona somewhere, taking a break. But then I remember her cold body on her bedroom floor, which I insisted was cold from the air conditioner, and how I cried to Todd, "She's not here. Whatever made her her isn't here anymore." And that I have a box of ashes in the basement that used to be her pink, fat, warm body that meant Mom to me and I realize that there's no way around it. My mom is dead and she's not coming back and I hate that.