MABMAC 83
I.
Today is the last day of The Fierce March, the 27th — It would also be my mother’s 83rd birthday. It is also the 39th anniversary of her father’s death. Let that sink in.
My god, but do I have stories about this month.
This afternoon, I posted up for lunch at a local burger and beer joint at noon for a burger and beer. Shocker. The plan was to have lunch, enjoy some reading, and go to work. I’ve been slowly trying to get into rereading “On The Road”, that’s in one hand. I’ve got a hefty, high ABV stout in front of me, waiting for whatever baroque hamburger Rodeo Goat offered and I read this:
“Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadside stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe. I had a twinge of hard joy as I ran after the car. But she was a middle-aged woman, actually the mother of sons my age, and wanted somebody to help her drive to Iowa. I was all for it. Iowa! Not so far from Denver, and once I got to Denver I could relax. She drove the first few hours, at one point insisted on visiting an old church somewhere, as if we were tourists, and then I took over the wheel and, though I’m not much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.”
And I started crying.
I couldn’t help it. My mother was profoundly from Iowa. I’ve made the drive from Fort Worth to Anthon, Iowa more times than I could count. Stoned, on the back of a bar napkin, I could give you a Fermi Number, but in reality I have not a clue. I’ve probably driven to Iowa as many times as I’ve made out with girls.
You don’t cry in the Jianghu. You don’t cry in public. You don’t cry as a man. Not because it’s unmanly or undignified, but because crying in public has turned into this manipulative sissy thing, playing on the hearts of the TV watchers, the comunicofagos devouring other people’s emotions. Crying in public is not trust worthy.
But I am a Bernard. And unfortunately we do cry. In public.
And I forgot that On The Road is basically a story about a a vagabond French Canadian who tries to solve his mommy issues with alcohol.
So, I cried in public. On the bar top. With a Founder’s Breakfast stout. And I didn’t just up and leave because, dammit, I like that beer and I had half of it left. I sat there, crying from old nostalgia and the plexus punch of bodies and memory, my face covered with a hand and the other trying to close out the tab, fast as possible.
II.
Today would be my mother’s 83rd birthday.
I’ve maintained my emotional distance for the past year and not written much simply because grief needs to age in the bottle. The lees settle, leaving less tannic bitterness and astringency, producing a more floral, brighter experience.
But over the past week, I’ve had two experiences that are M80s from the Ghost Kingdom. One was the On The Founder’s Crying Road as mentioned above. The other follows:
Several nights ago, I waited on a three top of white women in their late 60s/early 70s. I was a little worried about them because that demographic, when drunk, can get oddly difficult for a waiter. They turned out to be fine and lovely and we got along. Vibing as The Younglings say. At that gap between entrees and dessert, they were talking about death, legal arrangements, obligations and the like. I realized that I was basically waiting on my own mother and her friends.
My mother passed away at 81 years old in September of 2023 after a 9 year fistfight with Parkinson’s Disease. The realization that I was waiting on the ghosts of my own mother and her friends struck me right in the fucking solar plexus with a wave of grief so hard, I had to immediately walk away from the table. I went back into one of our dark banquet rooms and let the grief roll over me. It was like getting caught in shore break in the Pacific Ocean. You can never cry on the floor.
But my God, did I want to go find some of the other waiters and just talk about all this. But we never do. You don’t cry in the Jianghu. Waiters just bitch. It’s the Jianghu. They never work together. It’s the Jianghu. We just suck it up and keep going. Because the food has to be served. The show has to go on. The guests have to provide five star reviews.
Folks, fine dining is far harder than you realize.
We are tanks. Cuz Jianghu.
III.
Today would be my mother’s 83rd birthday.
In classic Mary McNally style, the first two stories that I told were about myself and my emotional relationship to the supposed celebrated. My mom was an absolutely fascinating women, but Goddamn could she be a narcissist. But if you spent your entire childhood fighting for attention as one of 12 children on a farm in rural Iowa, narcissism is a beneficial trait, not maladaptive. As she moved into adulthood, only later did the “did they say anything about me”ness become negative.
I spent most of my childhood wondering why she didn’t clean up the damn house. Then, I spent my adult life absolutely furious with her for dumping The Hoard into my lap to fix.
But I knew the etiology of the disease — she had gone through The Five Griefs. And that started 39 years ago today when my grandfather, Wilfred Bernard, passed away. He had had a stroke following the train wreck death of his oldest son, Bob. It wasn’t immediate, but anybody who can sniff Qi can see the obvious spiritual linkage between the two events. That stroke absolutely felled him. Left lateral with aphasia. In Q3/Q4 2020, I got to experience the caregiving aspect of that first hand with a former girlfriend. Strokes ain’t fucking around.
What were the The Five Griefs? I’ll tell you:
Grief The One: Wilfred died on 1986/03/27 on my mom’s 44th birthday. I remember absolutely weeping at his funeral “that was my grandpa”. I used to sit in his wheel chair at the Big House outside of Anthon, watching Dukes of Hazzard. You can’t get from Fort Worth to Anthon unless you drive.
Grief The Two: Then we moved into what would become The Hoard on 1986/08/5omething 5omething 5omething Ghost Month
Grief The Three: Then Mary was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986/10/??. — That was a whole assed thing which will be discussed later in a Very Special Episode of The McNallys because this is when The 浣熊精 nested up in the attic of my mom’s psyche. This later allowed actual fucking raccoons to nest up in the attic of The Hoard.
Grief The Four: Then in the spring of 1988, my mothers sister Kay died, smack dab in the hot prime of her forties, leaving three kids and the first of our sept to do maladaptive shit in East Asia, Tom Peterson. Give you three guesses as to what took Kay out and if they all rhyme with breast cancer, you get a guest appearance in this Very Special Episode of The Bernards.
Grief The Five: Then finally, Boppa died. My rattlesnake of a grandfather, Richard John McNally, Sr, broke his hip after a fall while mowing the lawn at his house on Chesterton in 1988/07/??. He got transferred to a nursing home in South Fort Worth so ARMAC could look over him. In 1988/08/??., he passed of those nosocomial infections that health care folks call “pneumonia”. The day he died was the first and only time I remember seeing my father cry. Ever. McNallys do not cry. We mock and fight.
So, you could imagine that after going through that ear-ringing crash out of an 18 month emotional bang-up in your mid forties, you too might be a little fucking crazy.
IV.
Today would be my mother’s 83rd birthday.
“On Causal Determinism”
I will never be able to know to what extent my mother was simply an innocent victim simpleton. Or an absolute mastermind of community organizing. Probably something in between. She would cry about society’s responsibility to the widows and orphans, but then brag about doing her widow and orphan jag to get out of a car crash insurance claim. She would feign complete and total helplessness with the hoard, but then sign a moderately complex mineral rights deal for $10k or set up an annuity that covered the gap between her Social Security income and her living expense outflow.
And I think that’s the point. She shrouded herself in the 玄 so successfully that we will never know. As opposed to my father, she kept no diary. She said she could not sit and write. She kept a calendar. She was absolutely amazing for keeping straight birthdays, anniversaries, dates, people’s faces, things they had done, who to send a beach towel to, who to forget to send beach towel too. I donated a fuck load of beach towels during Operation Greenghis Khan.
Was this because she clearly had undiagnosed ADD? Or was her lack of writing on purpose? I will never know. I know my father down to the numbers. But my mother is a semitransparent Raccoon Spirit.
V. Opening Day
Today would be my mother’s 83rd birthday
Rangers vs Red Sox
March 27, 2025.
On my Mother’s Birthday.
The spiritual resonance is heavy with this one.
I wish I had planned better,
but then I console myself
I know
I’d just be deep out in Arlington,
With my running pardners,
having spent $285 on Miller Light cans
an occasional shot of Jack
drunk
crying through the seventh inning stretch
which would be as much fun as doing
the logistics to get my mom in a wheelchair to the stadium,
Me living in Dallas and her in Fort Worth.
Heh.
Sometimes you take a strike.
“How to Grieve in the XXI Century”
