It is June 28. I got a package today with my younger brother's name and address as the return. It contained the last tidbits of my mother's Christmas gifts for me that David couldn't stuff in his duffel bag when he came to visit in March.
I have received this package before from my mom. Not this particular one, but I've gotten it many times since I moved out of my childhood home. Every one is just as dismal as the last.
**
When I was a kid, we went on a total of three family vacations that I can recall. Two of the three vacations were trips to visit my father's side of the family in upstate New York. The first was my grandfather's funeral when I was in second grade or so. The second was a couple years later, to visit my dad's mom, his sister and my cousins.
The remaining vacation was the only one that had nothing to do with extended family and was solely for sightseeing and novelty reasons. When I was somewhere around 11, the immediate family of four drove from Houston to New Mexico. It doesn't sound so bad initially, but this anecdote has become the punchline of a lot of my adult jokes that revolve around my family, particularly, my father. Actually, I was just sharing this story with classmates earlier this week.
The reason New Mexico was chosen as the destination of our only non-family related trip ever, was because of the place of business at 114 North Main Street in Roswell: the International UFO Museum And Research Center.
I was brought up watching The X Files and Unsolved Mysteries and my father was what you might call a total crack pot. I still have vivid memories of being terrified as a small child when he relayed some conspiracy garbage to me about impending global flooding and the potential end of the world coming very soon. That narrative did not sit well in my six year old brain.
I could relate fleshed out stories about the Loch Ness Monster, or Champ, or Chupacabras that were far more extensive than my knowledge of the Disney canon. (Sleeping Beauty excluded- we had to buy it twice after I wore out the first VHS.) I weirded out my peers with stories about who Edgar Cayce and Aleister Crowley were. I battered my classmates and teachers with this crap the way some kids trumpet around regurgitated political views from their parents to anyone who'll listen.
This was my father's influence. My mother feigned some interest, but I think mostly she is just very environmentally susceptible. You could get her enthusiastic about door knobs if you were really fired up about it.
So we drove to Roswell. The UFO Museum isn't really the most interesting place to two young kids, a lot of boring placards to read and old grainy photographs, yawn. Despite this, my father spent as much time as he could in that place, reading every last piece of information and carefully studying every alien autopsy photo and UFO sighting diagram. I remember being very impatient about leaving as we waited for him to finish being in awe at everything. Sometimes, I feel a little guilty about rushing him back then. The guy doesn't have much to be excited or happy about anymore, and it's one of my few memories of him being so enthralled and maybe even nearly gleeful.
Aside from how boring it was at the time, the only other things I remember about Roswell were the streetlamps on main street:
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| courtesy of flickr user wallace.dan |
and the fact that the local McDonald's had an "alien milkshake" that was green.
On the way back, however, we got to stop at Carlsbad Caverns. That was far more cool to us kids. There was some easy desert hiking on the surface level of the park, so we got to check out the foreign (to us) desert landscape. It was beautiful and in no way like the coastal, humid landscape back home. We were blown away by how much more bearable heat was in the arid climate. Then there were a few trail options of varying difficulty downward, into the caves. We took the easier one, since we were a family with kids in tow, and it was pretty amazing. David and I were way more interested in rock formations and desert lizard hunting than all that reading in the museum. It turned out to be a good trip for everybody.
**
So today I'm rifling through a USPS box full of stuff from my mom, including a Christmas stocking and a winter knit hat heavy with trinkets. Without fail, she always sends incredibly belated holiday gifts that are a saddening mish mash of random effluvia. Appropriately chaotic, they are never one singular thing or a cohesive set. Perhaps in an effort to make her gifts look more plentiful than she really has the means for, she mails little nests of well-meant junk to Tennessee every now and then.
They are always comprised of several categories of items: clothing that I, or anyone within ten years of my age, would never wear. Often bad, unflattering imitations of "young" trends, the original versions of which I find tacky, the pieces culled from clearance racks at discount department stores and sometimes her own closet.
Jewelry of the same age-inappropriate and low brow taste level: beads! glass beads, wooden beads, plastic beads! turquoise! Faux "gold" bracelets with charms! Necklaces and pendants set with cheapie knock-offs of my birth stone. Garish earrings, the sort you might find on a grade school teacher who dons them with a matching denim jumper. Aside from completely missing the mark on my tastes, I've told mom for years that I haven't worn earrings since I was a child. If I remember to remind her of this in advance, she sends clip-ons instead.
Makeup from dollar stores and sale racks that I can't use. I don't believe I've ever worn lipstick in front of my mother, because I don't wear it ever. I was mailed several tubes in dark, dramatic shades today. I don't often mess with nail polish either, but I received plenty, in a jarring bi-polar arrangement of overly "sophisticated' dark plums and burgundies alongside child-like glittery pale pinks and blues. One of the polish bottles I got today I recognized from my childhood as a purchase my mother ordered from an Avon-hawking neighbor sometime around 1995. The lone eyeshadow palette included seems to be her own, as it is clearly used and in the light pink shades she favors. A zippered makeup pouch emblazoned with a counterfeit version of a Coach bag print. (Again, I would never covet the source material, let alone be interested in a forgery.)
The strangest assortment of bath products ever. The mix of cheap perfumes nearly gave me a headache as I sorted through the bizarre menagerie. Today's package included a lot of individually wrapped hotel soaps (the condition of their paper wrappers makes me wonder exactly how long she's been holding onto them.) Off-brand bath cosmetics- a bar molded to the shape of a female antique cameo portrait and then covered in glitter, an "exotic lands" body spray that smells like tropical glade. A sealed bar soap, also of questionable age, with (I KID YOU NOT) a licensed Thomas Kinkade painting somehow imaged into the milky glycerin. The package boasts that the image has a lifespan of the product. It is, assuredly, not just printed on the front's exterior. Several perfume samplers (for scents that likely no longer exist and were originally marketed to my mom's age group.) Another childhood memory: a gold purse-sized atomizer containing a Mary Kay scent my mom bought for herself when I was in middle school was, in fact, included.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, my mother really doesn't have much money, and I know that she really is trying. I guess it's partially my fault, earrings aside, I never really tell her I can't use or have interest in most of this stuff anymore. When I was a pissed off 19 year old, I made sure to let her know what I thought of the sad bedlam in these semi-annual assortments, but I just don't have the heart these days. She does what she can, and I tell her thank you. To be fair, just based on sheer statistics and the quantity of crap she sends, I usually wind up with at least a scarf or a bath soak or a necklace that I like and hold on to. And were she just to send the one thing I do use, it would make a fine gift on its own, so it's not all a total loss.
The other small, meaningful component of these packages that makes me appreciative, is that amidst all the clearance items, dollar store goods, and thrift store finds, there is usually one or two sentimental remnants of my past. In the past, she's mixed in a pin my grandmother gave her, or my baby ring, or other things of similar emotional value. (And I do mean mix in, as in, nothing is separated, today it was all loosely thrown together in the Christmas stocking and knit cap.)
So as I'm sorting through all this stuff, I find a medal I won for a theater competition in middle school. That was sweet. Then I came across something I had forgotten all about.
The story I was telling school friends just a couple days ago about going to New Mexico with my crazy family? I'd forgotten this, but I had picked out some trinket from the gift shop at Carlsbad Caverns. It was a little mini diorama of the caves, a small clay sculpture of rock formations inside a box with three sides. The front was open, framing the diorama, and the top had a thin piece of green plastic in it, open to the light, so that when light shone through the top, a green glow was cast into the dark little cave inside.
My mother is pretty unstable, and emotionally toxic for me to be around (and often, even speak to), but she does mean well. And she used to have a little girl. And a lot of the memories of the time period when she had a little girl are a lot of meaningless junk that sucks, but there are still a few worth hanging onto, and I'm glad that she did.
