Mommy and Sparkle

One week before Christmas Eve 2005, I received a call from a nursing home. My adoptive mother had been hospitalized after suffering several grand mal seizures. She was scheduled to come move in with my wife and I in two days. In the meantime, we got the call from the animal hospital that we had to come and pick up her parrot, Sparkle. My mother had owned Sparkle for 57 years, and the bird was part of her day to day life. I was not looking forward to caring for this bird, partly because I didn’t know the first thing about caring for this old bird. Mostly, I didn’t want the bird because my mom, Mary, needed my help, to hell with Sparkle. 

She arrived with a nurse and care plan.

1. Every morning, check her adult diaper.
2. Give her medicines(she had 14 in total)
3. Check her legs for blood clots, i.e. big veins
4. Make sure she exercises at least 20 minutes, twice a day.
5. Check her toenails for fungus.
6. Check her blood sugar levels.
7. Give her insulin three times a day.

This was an everyday list, plus the natural feed, cloth and house her. My wife and I were addicted to crack and heroin.

When my mother, Mary, turned 20 she got the bird as a housewarming gift from her best friend, Grace, who knew my mother, and knew she needed something to care for, something that she could love for many, many years. You see, Mary had been pregnant with what would have been my older brother, She unfortunately had a stillbirth, and it hit her hard. After that, Sparkle became her child.  Sparkle became her reason to wake up in the morning. My father Joseph was a hard working laborer with a hard drinking habit. When he was sober, he spoke very little. Mostly to ask if his lunch was packed or where he had left his cigarettes. He was a strong, angular faced Italian man, with blue-grey eyes. He never had a beard or moustache, and always went to work. When he was drinking, he would rant and rave about Sparkle, and threaten to kill the “damned blue bird” when mom wasn’t looking. He would then suddenly start to sing old war songs, to remind himself of a time when he was young and had dreams. My mother would clean and make food not so much to distract herself of this drunken man she had married, and could never divorce, thanks to the threat of excommunication, but because she saw a need and went to work. She was a survivor and caregiver, almost from birth.

Mary's life was filled with love and joy, shared for the people in her life that mattered the most, which for Mary was everyone. There was never not enough food at Thanksgiving or any Thursday for that matter. My friends and their friends were always welcome to eat, sleep and even get a beer, without even so much as my having to ask her. But time, which seemed to stop as she aged, had suddenly awoke and caught up to her age, and even seemed to to take an extra lap for good measure. Where she was 67 going on 38 last year, now was 85 going on to the ICU. It wasn’t fair. For all this woman had done for everyone else, she nowed seemed in a perpetual gloom. It was as if she had been holding back all the tiny mean spirited comments that should have been released as needed, in small amounts, for her whole life, and they glopped up into a foul and butter ball of madness and severe curmudgeon. With all her money spent on hospitals and nursing homes with a never ending tax on dying, she was glazed over with the stare of "this could be her last day"; one eye looking forever forward and the other off center looking down with a single perpetual tear. Her only love left, in her heart was Sparkle the bird. 

When I had married, the purpose of her, shifted off from me. I was her light and her reason to do anything she had to, to make it. My marriage was a knife in her heart. Even though she loved my wife dearly, and truly, her left brain was betrayed. I had taken away her joy and replaced it with a darkening light. She sat in her comfort chair, overlooking Long Island sound in the condo we had bought for her to live in. My wife had grabbed her from being held hostage at the state institution my mother’s brother put her in “for her own good.” My wife was a perfect fit for me. We fit together like two jagged edges of heavy metal. She had an iron will and fuck all, ride or die, solidity. In her I saw everything that I wanted in a woman: a tough exterior to take on the world, and a codependent woman, whose vulnerability kept me on my toes, I loved her more than I could ever express. But the codependency went both ways.  When the time of day was right, and my mind was in a cloudy comfort, I saw her as she was, my other side, my always there, my goddess. Without her, there could be no condo with my mother back in a home environment.

 All that aside, was Sparkle the bird. The bird that had seen the sad mother who lost her first born. The bird that watched the hope return in her eyes, when I was brought home from the adoption home. The bird that rarely spoke, but could weave tales of junkie life, about police raids and homeless desire. When Sparkle did speak it was usually some mixture of Italian-American swears and curses, or the odd preposition or two. Mostly, though Sparkle sang this haunting song. The song was, Let The Rest of The World Go By.

With someone like you, a pal good and true

I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find

A place that's known to God alone

Just a spot we could call our own

We'll find perfect peace where joys never cease

Somewhere beneath the starry skies

We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere in the west

And let the rest of the world go by

With someone like you, a pal good and true

I'd like to leave it all behind and go and find

A place that's known to God alone

Just a spot we can call our own

And we'll find perfect peace where joys never cease

Out there beneath the starry skies

We'll build a sweet little nest somewhere in the west

And let the rest of the world go by

And let the rest of the world go by

It was written during the first world war in 1919. The sullen, life-reflecting lyrics were countered by a eeringly uplifting melody. It summed up my mother’s life though, and the life of Sparkle the bird.  

Sparkle was always there for my mom. More than her father, who had divorced his first wife when she was just a girl. Mary was then ordered to raise her younger brother, keep the house and go to school from the age of eight. Hers was a life of necessity and not that the small world of a little girl. It was the depression era, it was all a necessity, for everyone. For an eight year girl, it was a tough start. Fast forward to 14 years later, she gets married to my father, who for all intents and purposes, lied to her. He didn’t cheat on her, nor hide money from her, or skip town to get out of working. She never knew his soul, and he never knew he was lying. His demon in the bottom of a rye whiskey bottle, did the majority of the lying. Captain Joseph and Bad Old Joe, if you can picture a two sided spirit in a body. Captain Joseph awoke at 5 a.m. sharp, showered, shit and shaved, and made his way to the union hall for the work a day life. By everyone’s admission, he was the best carpenter they had ever met. He would lose sleep trying to figure out tomorrow’s job in his head. When the whistle blew, Bad Old Joe woke up. The drink I knew to make him as he walked in the door, was a tumbler full of Imperial Whiskey, and a shot glass full of water. Three a night, minimum. The levels of drunkenness moved very quickly. Sometimes my grandfather, mom’s dad, would come over for dinner. My mother would immediately go into service mode; at once, reliving her young childhood and providing all the love and comfort for her father after a hard day, and also being the subservient wife, taking off my father’s shoes, getting his supper ready, and spit shining the linoleum kitchen floor. Sparkle would whistle while mommy worked. She would return the tune with the smile of a woman grateful to be alive. In love with God, her husband, her father and of course, myself. But that bird, Sparkle, well, that was her alter ego. She primped and puffed the feathers of Sparkle as if to show her at a show. Sparkle would respond in kind by lovingly bobbing, beak agape and whistling, forever whistling. Sparkle's love was unconditional, as was Mary's. 

    On Christmas eve, I awoke to the sound of Sparkle singing that old familiar tune, "With someone like you…" From her bedroom, my mother chimed in, "...a pal through and through." Mom walked out into our condo kitchenette.

"Good morning my baby!!"

"Good morning mom," I answered. 

She blinked the slow blink of a medicated mind, and walked right by me to Sparkle's cage. Her hair now gray and seemingly charged with static electricity, wafted an odor of dispiritedness. She opened Sparkle's cage and furrowed her brow.

"Your cage is a perfect mess. And look at your feathers, you old dishevelled bird. We must do something about the way you look."

    My day began in much the same way as every other: follow the care plan, but more importantly, scrape, hustle and steal enough money to feed our drug habit. Every penny we got, we smoked. Our lives exuded poverty and indigence. Using everyday, trying to take care of the habit, the habit replicating our use, three times for each hit. Did my mother get her meds? Probably. I’m sure my wife did it, she wouldn’t forget. But our addiction, our joy was fleeting, and dependent upon that first hit. There is no feeling that could ever consume your soul, like the first hit. In the inhale, you felt God in his glory. All power and knowledge, in that first hit. It became what no user ever wants, the drug was in control. The joy was in the hands of the substance. We spent our days avoiding my mother and her needs, in the one bedroom apartment. Hours in the bathroom, lighters flicking, flicking, flicking...concoctions burning, and the crackle of a myopic life choice. If there was a hell, this was it. Heaven was one flame hitting one rock away.  

Sparkle knew what was going on. We would smoke, and walk, and talk and smoke. All around the small dwelling. The eyes of Sparkle would follow us and judge with certainty. My mother would not know what was happening, to the extent she knew something was not right, but none of her business.

At about eleven thirty, on Christmas eve, Sparkle squelched out a tone of despair, one I had never heard and woke my mother out of her phenobarbital coma.

“Oh, my baby, what’s wrong. Are you ok?”

I looked up from the corner, holding in a giant hit. I was able to huff out,

“Mom, are you ok?” And exhaled. The smell of crack smoke tainting the atmosphere.

“There is something wrong with Sparkle. She very...oh, what’s the word..”

“Listless,” I mumbled.

“Listless. Yes, listless. Come over here boy, and help ,my baby”

I hid my white hot pipe in my torn gray sweats, and slump shuffled over to the rusted, gilded cage. I looked into Sparkle’s eyes and saw the look. The same look I saw in my mother’s eyes.

“What do you see, what’s wrong?” My mother slurred, opening one eyelid and then the other in a rhythmic pattern.

“I don’t know, ma. Sparkle looks injured or sad,” My mind was searching for the right word, but in my crack haze, I was reinventing definitions to fit my situation.

“She is sad? Why is she sad? Did you do something to her?”

“Ma, I haven’t even been over there all morning.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re just like your father. You never liked my Sparkle.”

“I’m nothing like him,” I lied to myself, as I stole and looted to support a crack habit, abandoning the working life forever. My mother’s diaper was full and she was singing, “A place that’s known, to God alone, just a place to call my own.” She sang her version. She needed her place to call her own.

Sometime in the morning of another hazy day, my mother seemed to be shaking. She needed her insulin. I asked my wife, but she didn’t hear me. The dealer was calling, he was downstairs.

“I’ll be right back,” I hollered.

Sparkle began singing, “And we’ll find perfect peace, where joys never cease.”

Mary mumbled in the corner, “Out there beneath the starry skies, we’ll build a sweet little nest, and let the rest of the world go by.”

When I came back upstairs, my wife was fumbling with the needle to administer insulin to my mother. Sparkle looked on, as if overseeing the process. My mother opened one eye and whispered,

“With someone like you, a pal through and through…”

Sparkle whistled out, “I’d like to leave it all behind and go and find…”

We sent my mother back to the nursing home the day after Christmas. Sparkle passed away on Christmas night. My mother just kept singing that same old familiar tune, for hours and hours. We couldn’t do anything more. In the shape we were in, it was better. She missed the bird singing with her, She missed my father ordering her around. She missed her father’s lessons and demands. She missed raising me and teaching me. But mostly, and I truly believe this, she missed Sparkle. The one thing in this world that saw eye to eye with her. The one connection she always knew would be there for her. When that stupid bird died, my mother died with it. Shame on that bird for leaving my mother alone. Shame on me, for leaving her alone with Sparkle. Shame on me. My God help my soul.