The day I was forgotten

April first is the anniversary of my mom’s death. The day always makes me mopey.

This year I was trying to sift through my brain and find a memory I could focus upon that would best honor her. The one that kept coming to mind seemed so negative that I kept pushing it aside. I’ve learned the hard way, though, that ignoring my bossy brain only causes me trouble later down the road, so here it is:

After the sex education scandal that caused the great Cathy Smiley carpool debacle early in the second grade, I started taking the bus home from school. My dad would drive me to Brook Hill Elementary in the mornings, but when school would let out I’d board the smelly yellow school bus and take the half-hour ride back to my neighborhood. The bus stop was a good walk from my house for someone with little legs. By myself I’d take the sidewalk south, turn the corner, and then travel a very very long half-block east until I was across the street from my house.

Now, I lived on a busy thoroughfare. It was stately and green and lined with trees and crepe myrtle, yes, but it was essentially a four-lane artery that cars and trucks would take to cut between major roads. In the middle lay a broad median covered with grass and more crepe myrtle. To a second-grader who was still only six years old, that street was intimidatingly broad. More to the point, I wasn’t allowed to cross it by myself.

When I reached the spot across the street from my house, afternoons, I was supposed to stand on the sidewalk and wait for my mother. She would have been watching from the front windows, waiting for me. When I’d appear between the banks of shrubbery, she’d dash out, cross the street, take my hand, and lead me home. Day after day we followed this routine without fail.

Until one day in winter, that is. It had been snowing, I remember. As was typical in Richmond, it wasn’t really enough snow to cause a problem, but enough to give the air a certain winter crispness. As I did every day, I followed the sidewalk, turned the corner, and walked the long half-block to the spot where I always stood. Then I waited.

And waited. And waited.

I don’t know exactly what it was that kept my mom that afternoon—whether she was reading a book and got wrapped up in the plot, or whether she’d become absorbed in a crossword puzzle or a phone call or some task around the house—but she simply forgot to look out for me. I stood on the sidewalk, getting colder by the minute, waiting and waiting, but she never came. I was too good a boy to disobey the parental command that I was never to cross the street by myself. So I stood there, more and more impatient by the second, waiting for her to emerge, while the cars and trucks roared by.

The snow continued to fall. To me it seemed to get colder and colder. I began to contemplate crossing the road by myself, but couldn’t bring myself to attempt it. There were rules to it I hadn’t learned. I remember wondering what would happen if no one ever remembered me. Would it get dark? Would anyone be able to see me in the dark? Would I have to stand there forever?

It’s at this point in the story that I can hear my mother’s voice, wry and annoyed, saying, Oh, great, you came up a story of my failure. Thanks very much. But I suppose that the reason my brain kept forcing this story up to the surface is because of what happened afterward.

By the time my mother finally remembered me, I’d been standing there for perhaps forty minutes (though it seemed like hours to me). Hot tears were streaming down my face. I had to pee. My mother, appalled at herself, rushed out of the front door in nothing more than her housecoat and slippers, dashed through the mild late-afternoon traffic, knelt down in the snow next to me, and gave me an enormous hug. Then, half-carrying and half-guiding me, she rushed me back across the parkway, up the sidewalk, and into the warm house. All the way she uttered reproaches to herself and comforting words for me. Once she’d unbundled me from my wet clothing, she began boiling water. When I returned from the bathroom, my bladder emptied, I had a steaming cup of Swiss Miss in front of me, studded with miniature marshmallows. The television was on to whatever show I liked watching in the afternoons, and she wrapped me in my grandmother’s crocheted afghan. While she dried my hair with a dish towel, she promised over and over that she’d never forget me again.

I remember clearly feeling more badly for my mother that afternoon than I really did for myself. I never truly believed that I would’ve been stranded across the street in the dark, much less forever. That specter had been created only by my dramatic brain in overdrive. For the first time ever, though, I’d seen my mother as a fallible creature instead of the all-powerful, eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head omniscience she’d always been. The new knowledge that she had her failings and oversights didn’t frighten me, or make me feel as if I had an upper hand. For a fearful six-year-old who was too acutely aware of his faults, it merely comforted me to know that my mother made her own missteps as well.

And the very next day, once I was safely home, she and I walked down to the nearest busy street corner so that I could learn how to cross the street on my own, if something similar ever happened again. She still came out to meet me for the rest of the school year, but by the end of the week, I could perform the drill of looking both ways and crossing at the light to her total satisfaction.

It was my first baby step toward independence. Though it came at the price of a few tears on a snowy day, I don’t think there are many better memories to honor my mother than that.