Notes From The Road

My friends...sad news by telephone as the sun was rising.

My mom, Dorothy Welbourne, passed away this morning, quietly, peacefully...at my sisters house in Shreveport, where she had been hospicing the past several days.

Since her most recent and severe stroke earlier this month left her comatose, it is a blessing to all that she is now at rest.

I will be in Shreveport sometime this week for her service, though I'm not yet sure when. I was there with my daughter Layla for a few days last week and returned to Austin, only when it was clear that there was nothing more we could do.

I am thankful that she had so many good years and hopeful that her, my dad and my grandparents, all deceased, are now reunited somehow.

Until a few weeks ago she was regularly driving herself to go swimming at the gym and to play bridge and visit with a group of women, dear friends that she has known since they were all kids - how many octogenerians can say that? Her social calender was always full and she liked it that way. 

As recently as last summer she drove herself and a friend (her age) to Austin for a visit. I was worried about them negotiating the highways, two elderly women on the road.

"Don't be silly..." she said. "I have Mapquest."

Typically, she was thorough, responsible and considerate. And even in death, she had all of her affairs in order. She started by vacating the house she had shared with my dad for many years and tossing all the unwanted stuff they had accumulated. She divided family heirlooms and photos as she saw fit - while she was still alive to tell us why we she wanted us to have them - and spent the better part of her last year at my sisters house, with whom she was always very close. Her cremation and very modest memorial service are already planned and paid for - she even wrote her own obituary.

The only factor that threatened her dignified escape plan was an unforeseen and unpredictable malady - one exactly like the debilitating stroke she suffered.

But, fortunately she thought of that, too - her living will was mailed to me, my siblings and her physician long ago and specifically called for all life support systems to be removed once her normal, cohesive brain activity ceased to function as it always had - sharply, lovingly and logically.

She did not wish to ever be a burden on others in life or beyond, and she succeeded.

I sat alone in her favorite easy chair a few nights ago, after visiting her in the hospital. My sister, Donna and her husband Dicky had spared no expense in remodelling their two story house to make her feel more at home. In fact they had turned the entire upstairs into an lovely apartment that was like a smaller version of her house, furnished with her belongings and complete with kitchenette, den (with cable & internet), seperate comfy bedroom and full bath with all the amenities that a senior might appreciate - walk-in shower with a bench and safety rails - they even had a elevator chair installed on their staircase, even though mom was fairly mobile for someone her age.

Mom had a computer and was online several years before I took the plunge into the 21st century and acquired a laptop in the spring of 2000. It was something she had encouraged me to do for a long time. I had never been a post office frequenter or a dutiful long distance caller, but suddenly, with email my mother and I had a relationship, once again.

I was amused to learn that her online handle was 'Deejay Dot' - the 'Dot' from her lifelong nickname, 'Dotty' and the 'Deeejay' from the fact that she has been making mixtapes for her friends and family since the sixties - long before the phrase 'mixtape' was coined.

I know because I used to help her make them. In 1963 it was no easy task - we would experiment with the placement of the little microphone on her reel-to-reel tape recorder, placing it the right distance from her console hi-fi record player speaker until the playback sounded, to her ear, the way it was supposed to. I suppose you could say it was my first producer/engineer gig. It was fun.

She would spend days making the playlists (culled from her huge record collection), which often had themes and usually included personal, insider/wink-wink references to the intended recipients. Of course not everyone had a reel-to-reel player, but she would host get-togethers where she would serve sherry, dessert and play her tapes. As a result, she was asked to do this on occasion for larger social events - class and sorority reunions, P.E.O. conventions, church suppers and her beloved bridge club, which spanned decades and at one point included about a dozen or more couples.

In the seventies, when commercial 8-track and then casette player/recorders came along she was one of the first to buy one and the mixtapes became more involved and came more often. And by the time I got my computer a few years ago, she already had a small, but worldwide network of friends in cyberspace that were enjoying her musical tastes on mp3 playlists - a mixture of mostly nostalgia and classics - big band, swing, showtunes, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, opera, Andy Williams, Tony Bennet, Elvis, Jim Reeves, Roy Orbison, Chet Atkins, Beatles, Willie Nelson, Ray Price and so many more - occasionally interspersed with a few modern artists that she happened upon and liked.  

I sat there in her easy chair, looking around the room, which was decorated in a style that can only be referred to as 'Tasteful and Comprehensive Shrine to Family and Friends' - framed photos of everyone she loved, every grandchild, all their awards, oil paintings by her late father (and my namesake, Malcolm Helm) and watercolors by her lifelong friend, Marie Butler (or 'Sista Wolf' as she was called by their increasingly small circle of eighty-something-year-old 'Gals From the 'Hood').

And as I sat there, surrounded by the mementos of a life well-lived, my eyes drifted toward a pad of paper and pen sitting on the small table under the lamp...it was definitely her handwriting, still neat and graceful, with perfect spelling and punctuation, as always. Could it be something she was working on just before she had to be taken to the hospital... perhaps her last written words?

It was a playlist. I had to smile.

And not suprisingly, there alongside her nostalgic choices for what would have been her final mixtape,  'Deejay Dot's Swan Song', was a selection by a slightly more recent artist who she loved enough to include with her all-time favorites.

It was track #3 off of my Thunder Chicken CD, 'Man of Many Words'.

 I love you too, Mom.

And there are no words that can express just how much I always have and always will.