I hope that all of y’all are doing something special with your OLD EARTH today. When I say OLD EARTH you understand that I am referring to DUKES a/k/a ‘NANNA a/k/a MURR a/k/a _______________ [you fill in name]. I owe so many mothers some love today that I think the rest of May should have me bringing someone flowers. Without these loving mothers and women I wouldn’t be here today talking my talk. So if you don’t mind I would like to put something in the atmosphere for the ears of the great GOD. Thank you…
Mom(first and foremost), Mrs. SHERIE GOLD-BROWN, Mrs. RENEE BANKS, Mrs. VIOLA BROWN, Mrs. BERYL O’LOUHGLIN, Mrs.MARY EDMONDS, Mrs. FRANCIS GRIFFITH, REVEREND BENNETT, Mrs. PAT RICHARDSON, Mrs. WILLIAMS, Mrs. WASHINGTON, Mrs. SIFONTES, Mrs HARRIS, Mrs. RICHARDS, Mrs. CORTES, Mrs. DECARAVA
I love you…
I love all of the women that I know that aren’t mothers too. You will be one day and you will have the responsibility of teaching some rascally ne’er-do-well like myself that the world is mine. Not to be abused or manhandled, but to be cherished and respected. You will teach me to appreciate my life and the lives of others. The biggest responsibility that you future mothers will hold is to teach the children to love. In the end, love is all that we have to give.
A True Life Love Story…
My biological dad died when I was four years old and that was the last time that I would see his mother, my grandmother. I couldn’t remember her face if you gave me a picture of her, but I remembered where she lived. Her Manhattan apartment building had a playground in front of it. There were monkey bars and a see saw. Call me crazy but I also remember my dad playing with me in the playground. The apartment building was that 1960’s tan industrial brickface. It must have been pretty and shiny when it was first constructed. Time and New York City traffic have sooted the bricks into an almost graphite hue. I remember this building like it was yesterday.
Except it wasn’t yesterday, it was 15 years later and I hadn’t seen my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles or my cousins in all of that time. Even though we lived in the same city. Then one day I was with T.C. sneaker shopping on Essex Street. We crossed over to the south side of Delancey Street. We were looking for that exclusive sneaker crack that the Delancey Street strip was world famous for. The thing about Manhattan today, and forever, is that it is this place of infinitely imaginable possibilities. If you can think about it then it prah’lee exists in Manhattan. If not Harlem, then surely Chinatown, but it exists and you can find it. As we walked down Essex Street I recognized the apartment building on the corner of Grand Street. I told T.C. that was the building that my dad’s mother lived in. I told him that I had not seen her since I was four and here I was going on 21yrs old. T.C. in his matter of factly attitude said I should go see her. I didn’t think too much of it but I looked back at the building one last time just to confirm all the memories that it was invoking.
After T.C.’s death there were a few promises that I wanted to keep to him. One of them was to go visit my dad’s mother on the Lower East Side. She had the same phone number after all of those years. I introduced myself, “Hello, good afternoon is this Mrs. MARY EDMONDS?” She replied a little curtly as if she were annoyed, “Yeah, who’s this?” My answer was, “This is DALLAS, your son DALLAS’ son, DALLAS.” The line went quiet for a few seconds. When she spoke again her voice was trembly and unsure. “H-h-how are you?” she asked me. “I’m okay,” was my reply, “and I’m downstairs around the corner on Delancey”. She paused for a moment and then decided to invite me upstairs to her apartment.
She had the apartment of a grandmother. It was neat but it was filled with so many interesting artifacts. Thousands if not millions of pictures seemed to occupy the bookshelves and cabinets that were in her living room. There were all kinds of fixtures and trinkets that had their heydays in another generation. My grandmother wasn’t too tall and she wasn’t too short. She had all of her teeth in her mouth so that allowed me understand her clearly. She didn’t seem too old to me. Not grandma old. But she was old, and she was sick. My grandmother had been discharged from Beth Israel hospital just the day before. She had been in the hospital for more than a month receiving treatment for her liver condition. Grandma didn’t expect to leave the hospital standing up, and neither did her doctors.
She quietly stared at me for so long as I told her about my life up to that point. I was a little confused about why I never heard from her or saw her for all of these years. My grandma explained to me that my father was the eldest of her thirteen children. He wasn’t the first to die. She would bury five of her own children. She had spent the last twenty years in a manner similiar to the twenty years previous to that. She was an alcoholic and by now her body was ravaged and on the cusp of a total shutdown. Grandma had actually slipped into a coma during her stay in the hospital. She apologized to me for never writing to me for Christmas or my birthday.
My grandma went into her bedroom and when she came back out into the living room she had a hand drawn portrait of me that she said my father did. True story is that I didn’t have a moustache on that day and the drawing looked just like me. Round Charlie Brown head and all. She didn’t have any other picture of me and she said she kept that to remind her of me. My grandma was funny and frank. I like when you hear old people talk with profanity. I spent the evening at her apartment while she called all of my fathers’ siblings that lived in New York. I felt a little weirded out because I couldn’t remember a single one of these people, and they all looked at me as if they had seen me before. I went back to my apartment that night with a strange sense of completion. In my mind I believe that T.C. was in the sky with DALLAS making sure that everything popped off right.
I visited my grandma after that night and we even went out a couple of times. We went to the circus because she said he had never been before and we went to see that play at the Beacon Theater called “God’s Trying To Tell You Something”. The Beacon Theater hosts all those chitlin circuit prouction that have made TYLER ‘Teh Ghey’ PERRY so nigger-rich and ‘hood famous. I can’t remember what the play was about, but my grandma liked it and I liked the fact that I could do something for her. As sassy as the characters in those plays are is how sassy my grandma was. She chided me for being fat and that made me feel a kind of way. I felt like giving her a snappy retort about alcohol, but for once in my life my mouth didn’t engage. So I spent the rest of the night stewing because I had been ‘ethered’ by my grandma.
My birthday was coming up and my grandma asked me what I would like. Since she didn’t have a dough like that I told her that I didn’t want anything at all, but she wouldn’t have that answer. Sha asked me what cake I liked to eat, since I obviously liked to eat. Dohh! Ethered again by a senior citizen. I told her that I only liked one cake and that was strawberry shortcake. My grandma said she would make me one for my birthday. When my birthday came grandma called me up and told me to come and get my cake. I was a little nervous about the whole thing, but my mom told me that when she was married to DALLAS it was Mrs.EDMONDS that taught her how to cook. That had been her profession when she had worked and she was more ‘hood famous than that cross-dressing cupcake.
I don’t know what to tell y’all other than the fact this cake was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The puffy, soft angel food layers were tripled stacked and each layer was covered in strawberries and hand made whipped cream. The way she had cut the strawberries, and the hand made whipped cream… If you ever have hand made whipped cream that is doubled or tripled whipped then you can imagine what my grandma’s cake tasted like. I normally bull doze through my food but I took my time with this cake. It took me about two weeks to finish. The last pieces I would enjoy only having one bite per day. As I can remember my grandma’s present right now think I just got a piece of dust in my eye.
I called my grandma to thank her for the cake and to just say hi. My aunt DONNA picked up the phone and when I asked to speak to my grandma she told me that MARY EDMONDS had died two days ago.
That present was what was left of my grandma’s life essence. She gave that to me as her gift for not seeing me for all of those years. I honestly don’t fault her because the memory that I keep in my mind is the playground in front of her building and her hand made triple layer strawberry shortcake. True story.
