Mumsy's Big Move

credit: Jack Unruh

A family joke suggests that you’ll need three of our elders to change a lightbulb: one to screw in the bulb, one to mix the drinks, and one to say how good the old one was. Never mind that the old bulb did not work. Never mind that it has left them in the dark. Some of our people will take the old and dark over the new and bright any day.

Grandmother Frances, for certain. I can see her sitting there in the dark room, saying how good the old bulb was, waiting on her drink. The drink will come, too. Because that’s my great-uncle Dan across the room mixing the drinks, and he does not have to see to pour a bourbon. He hardly has to be awake. Isn’t that the truth, Frances? he’s saying.

It was a fine bulb. A fine one. Now he’s bringing the two drinks and yes, everything is as it should be. Dark, but as it should be. He’ll locate Frances by way of her talking about the old bulb and they will sit and talk about the old bulb while somebody else goes about trying to replace it. That would be my paternal grandmother, Mumsy. She cradles the new bulb in her palm and delicately turns it. Uncle Dan offers her a drink, but Mumsy swore off liquor long ago. Uncle Dan knows this, but always he offers — to be polite, usually, but this time perhaps to give Mumsy something else to do besides change the bulb. He and Grandmother Frances do not tell Mumsy to quit fooling with the new bulb: they simply explain to each other how good the old one was. When at last Mumsy has the new bulb in, the sudden blare of light stuns Uncle Dan and Grandmother Frances. They see that they are both much older than they had thought. Mumsy does not notice. Kicked alive by the light, she says good-bye and is gone. She’s got things to do.

She did have things to do. We’d always known Mumsy to have more spunk than most of her peers, but we did not know just how much spunk until my grandfather Big Daddy passed. When he did, Mumsy packed all her heirloom antiques and silver sets into a mini-storage facility, painted her fingernails hot pink, and sped off to a trailer resort in Phoenix in a bright white V8 Thunderbird. She went with such haste and gusto you would have thought she had been waiting all her life. Perhaps she had. My grandfather was a difficult man, and I don’t doubt the marriage would have ended in divorce were it born of a more liberal time or place. At any rate, Mumsy was one of those rare Southern elders who could not afford nostalgia, and even if she could have, she would not have bought it. She had too much she wanted to forget.

In Phoenix, Mumsy found forgetting. I know because I spent a month there with her. I was sent as a sort of spy, I think, the folks back home concerned that the woman had completely lost her mind. Pedigreed natives simply did not abandon the old town, not for trailer parks in the distant desert. Would a sane person move to Phoenix, Arizona? Was this not perhaps an early symptom of dementia? I wondered, myself. I remember flying in, the swath of city below looking like some sudden space colony burned into the flank of a barren planet. Civilization here in the desert, where before only the deadliest creatures had survived. The spined, the venomed, the ugly. Cacti, scorpions, rattlers. And now—well, people. Millions of them. That made sense enough. We’re a capable species. But the place did not make sense. Not to me. Not at all.

Phoenix could not have been more foreign to me. So entirely new, so decidedly untropical. Back home, settlers had pumped the water out to make it habitable; here, developers had had to pump it in. This place had scarcely existed before air-conditioning, while back East some determined old mossbacks still had not rigged their antebellum homes for air-conditioning, on principle. At home, there were few strangers; here, nothing but strangers: Californians, Nebraskans, Canadians, thousands upon thousands of nomads looking to start their lives over in a land of forgetting. I learned that some had come seeking relief from the allergens of their more vegetated homes: the problem is, so much water has been channeled in to accommodate the contemporary human, so many fairways, lawns, and gardens have been brought to life here in the desert, that allergies are now a very real problem. The valiant Phoenician firebird of lore rises from the desert dust — and sneezes.

Most striking of all, the air. Back home it settled, like memory, thick and heavy on my skin. I tended to trudge under the weight of it. Here the air was as light as space, expansive. I floated along. It was as if a tether had been loosed and yes, I was free to float. There could be something unsettling in that freedom. Floating along, I could sometimes forget who I was, where I was, when.

Which is, of course, what Mumsy intended to do. She intended to forget. Her friends back home could while away the latter years on their respective wraparound porches; they could sit and talk and talk about the gone days; but not Mumsy. In the new world she found bingo clubs, square dances, even boyfriends. Afternoons, she liked to send me off to the pool to make room for one of her many admirers. The first time she asked, Won’t you have a swim, dear? I said thanks, but no, then watched as, later in the afternoon, a portly older man wearing an enormous baseball cap that read I LUV MY GRANPA dropped by and talked with Mumsy in giggles and tones I’d never heard her exchange with my grandfather. The suitor maintained a certain distance from me; I could see he was restraining himself on my account. The next time Mumsy asked if I would have a swim, I went and had a swim.