Remembering Mom: Anecdotes

For more years than I care to remember, my mother was the center of my universe. With a few interruptions (business trips, family emergencies, rare vacations, and one study-abroad stint), we lived together in two countries on two continents for 52 years, four months, and 16 days. We got along amazingly well and shared similar tastes in books, movies, and TV shows. We also had the same temperament; Mom was easy-going and friendly, and it took a lot to get her to lose her temper. I'm pretty much like that; I probably differ in that where she was gregarious and had more patience with the foibles of others, I'm more introverted and don't suffer fools lightly. 

There were times when I got restless and told Mom that I wanted to move out on my own and live in my own place. In fact, we discussed this issue several times, but she was never too enthusiastic about the thought of my departure from our townhouse in the Fountainbleau Park area of Miami-Dade County. Her objections to my leaving the nest boiled down to three basic points:

1. Miami and its surrounding metro areas are expensive to live in. Without a steady, well-paying job, Mom said, I would probably have to get a tiny efficiency-type apartment or become a friend's roommate in someone else's house or apartment. 
2. Mom loved my older half-sister Vicky, but every attempt to live with her in Miami had ended badly; as a teenager, Vicky was so rebellious that Mom sent her away to an all-girls' Catholic school in Parkersburg, WV. She rejoined the family in 1969 when we lived in Bogota. Things went well there because Vicky had a busy social life that kept her entertained and busy. Mom also was busy running the restaurant (La Rueda) that she co-owned with my Uncle Octavio. If there was any conflict between mother and daughter, I never saw it, except for the usual arguments that arose over unmade beds or messy rooms. But after we moved to the States in '72, we tried sharing two houses with Vicky on two separate occasions: 1972-1975 and 1978-1980.  This is not the time or place to get into that subject, but Mom was adamant that I not leave home so that Vicky would not have to move in with her in Mom's twilight years.
3. Mom lost my father, Jerry Diaz-Granados, in a tragic plane crash shortly before my second birthday. I don't think she ever got over it totally; my dad was the love of my mom's life and their marriage was a happy and sound one. I think that Mom saw me as the biggest link to my late dad and was reluctant to let me go into the wider world and live on my own. 

So, yeah. For most of my life, Mom was as constant as the North Star, the red-haired Sun around which Planet Alex orbited. There were, as I said earlier, separations in which either one or the other would go off somewhere. Some were just a few days long. Sometimes we were apart for as long as three weeks, most recently between 2001 and 2004, when I used to commute from Miami to Tampa because I was in a long-distance relationship with a slightly older woman. The longest time that Mom and I were separated in her lifetime was 88 days between September 21 and December 18, 1988, when I went to Seville as a participant in the CCIS Semester in Spain program. 

Mom and I shared many adventures, including going to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in the summer of 1974; a last Christmastime visit to see Aunt Martha Restrepo de Cajiao and my recently widowed Aunt Maruja Martinez de Restrepo in the winter of 1993-1994; excursions to Disney World, Zoo Miami (then called Miami Metrozoo), the occasional mom-son moviegoing experience: Mom loved The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Beauty and the Beast, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy (we saw all three movies on their respective opening days), The Lion King, and most of the Jack Ryan movies. 

We also went to the beach a lot when I was a kid; my father loved the West Coast, especially Sarasota and Marco Island. We made a few day trips with Dad before he died; the picture you see in this post was taken by him on a beach near Sarasota, which is 50 miles from the Tampa Metro area.  Later, Mom and I would often go with my older half-sister or with other relatives and/or friends. I sort of stopped tagging along on those trips as I got older; the last time that we did the "beach thing" was in 1997, when my Aunt Martha went to Miami and stayed with us for eight months. We went to Bill Baggs State Park on Key Biscayne and stayed for a few hours. 

Although we sometimes argued and had serious disagreements, Mom and I got along exceedingly well. While we were not "best friends" when I was a kid - she was old-fashioned in the sense that until children become adults, the relationship between parent and offspring should be a clear "chain-of-command" kind of thing where parents set rules and kids follow them. But when I entered college at the age of 21 and got my first part-time job at Miami-Dade Community College, the dynamic changed, and Mom started taking me into her confidence and being more of a friend and less of an authority figure. 

It was Mom who encouraged me to try the "college thing" even though my math-related learning disability proved to be the unmovable object against which my plans to earn a degree crashed and burned.  

It was Mom who said, "I think you should apply for a spot on that Semester in Spain program you are thinking about going on. I'll find a way to get you there. Fill out the application and go to the campus tomorrow and turn it in before the deadline expires."

It was Mom who said, shortly before her fateful surgery to repair her spine,  "You are the best son any mother could have hoped to have. I know you are doing your best to take care of me. Don't worry about Vicky. I've made sure that you will be all right if anything happens during the operation."