Columbarium

Not until my father walked into the post office—or perhaps it was a few days earlier at the bastardized crematorium—did I understand how much he despised my mother’s constant reminders. For at least fifteen years she substituted “No,” “Okay,” or “I’ll do it if I have to,” with “I could’ve gone to the Rhode Island School of Design” or “For this I gave up the chance to attend Pratt” or “When did God decide that I would be better off stuck with a man who sold rocks for a living, than continuing my education at Cooper Union?” I figured out later that my parents weren’t married but five months when I came out all healthy and above-average in weight, length, and lung capacity. To me she said things like, “I should’ve matriculated to the Kansas City Arts Institute, graduated, and begun my life working in an art studio of my own, but here I am driving you twenty miles to the closest Little League game,” or “I had a chance to go to the Chicago Art Institute on a full scholarship, but here I am trying to figure out why the hell x and y are so important in a math class,” or “Believe you me, I wouldn’t be adding pineapple chunks, green chiles, and tuna to a box of macaroni and cheese for supper had I gotten my wish and gone to the Ringling School of Art.”

I went through all the times my mother offered up those blanket statements about her wonderful artistic talents—usually by the fireplace while she carved fake fossils into flat rocks dug out of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River—there at the post office while my dad and I waited in line. She sold these forgeries down at the Dixie Rock and Gem Shop, or to tourist traps at the foot of Caesar’s Head, way up near Clingman’s Dome, or on the outskirts of Helen, Georgia. My mother’s life could’ve been worthwhile and meaningful had she not been burdened with motherhood; had she not been forced to work as a bookkeeper/receptionist/part-time homemade dredge operator at the family river rock business; had she not met my father when her own family got forced to move from Worcester, Massachusetts, because her daddy was in the textile business and got transferred right before my mother’s senior year in high school. There were no art classes in the schools here; she could only take advanced home ec and learn how to make fabric and dye it, just as her father knew how to do at the cotton mill, more than likely.

“I could’ve gone to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had I not been forced to take an English class that I’d already taken up in Massachusetts, and sit next to your father who cheated off my paper every time we took a multiple choice test on The Scarlet Letter. I blame all of this on The Scarlet Letter, and how your dad had to come over on more than one occasion for tutoring,” my mother said about once a week.

I didn’t get the chance to ever point out to her how Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Massachusetts. A year after her death I figured out the math of their wedding date and my birth, and didn’t get to offer up anything about symbolism, or life mirroring art, et cetera.

My mother died of flat-out boredom, disdain, crankiness, ennui, tendonitis from etching fake fossil ferns and fish bones into rocks, and a giant handful of sleeping pills. Her daily allotment of hemlock leaves boiled into a tea probably led to her demise, too, if not physiologically, at least spiritually.

According to my father, the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association didn’t require normal embalming and/or crematorial procedures should the deceased have no brothers or sisters, and should said dead person’s parents both be dead. Looking back, I understand now that my father made all this up. At the time...