Heavy then light.

  In 1996 not everyone had a cell phone. I don't think I knew anyone who did. I used to call my mom from a pay phone at school sometimes. I remember calling her one day and she told me she wanted to try an alternative treatment. I said okay. She was relieved I didn't have any objections.  She had been doing some research on line. The Internet was still sort of a novelty then. Email was the only thing I used it for. In the computer lab at school. Was there a computer lab? Why does that phrase come to mind. Were they in the library? I don't remember. At home we had a dial up connection with all the sound effects. It was still pretty slow. I did not yet depend on Google as my external brain. I suppose I would have been googling like crazy trying to find a cure for her if it had happened today.
  A couple of times I have Googled an alternative treatment for breast cancer. Sometimes I think I should do all the research ahead of time so that if I get it, I won't have to waste time searching for answers. Then I think if I get it 5 years from now, there will be new treatments so I shouldn't bother. If I get it at all. If I ever do find I have breast cancer, both boobs go.
  I hate breast cancer awareness month. I'm aware, thanks. And donating or raising money for breast cancer research is nonsense. As long as treating illness is more profitable than curing it, they'll keep us sick. Keep carcinogens in all our food, soap, makeup, clothing, furniture, medication etc. Medication for our side effects from our medication. Genius. Sorry, I digress....

   On my 21st birthday, my mom was in Texas for her second visit at Burzynski's clinic. I could not go with her because I had to be in school. She went with a friend, Jody. It was the first time she was not with me on my birthday. Every year she would make the same cake for me. She made it when I turned one and then every year after. It was a pink lemonade cake. Yellow cake layers with pink lemonade icecream made with Hagen Daz and pink lemonade concentrate. Whipped, pink and frozen. Even one year in college when my birthday fell on a week day, my first year there I think, I could not come home so she drove to me with the cake in a cooler in the car. It made the trip.
   That last year, there was no cake. I don't think she made one when she got home. I probably told her she didn't have to and that she could wait till next year. I hated not being with her and hated to think it could be the first of many birthdays without her.
   I made that cake only once since that I can remember. When I first started dating Joseph, he made what he imagined was a pink lemonade ice cream cake. It was ice cream frozen in a sheet cake pan. He's a good guy. I wonder what his relationship would have been with my mom. I wonder how well they would have gotten along. She never really loved my boyfriends. Maybe she was just being protective. There were only 2 anyway, before she died.

   We used to make wishes when the clock was all one number. Like 1:11 or 2:22 and so on. The one we saw most often together was 5:55, I guess because that was around dinner time and we would be in the kitchen together. The rule was we had to say out loud, "five fifty five, five five five, five fifty five," or some variation until it changed to 5:56 in order for our wish to come true. She told me that if she died, when I saw the clock with numbers in a row, she'd be there. Sometimes I swear every hour I see a clock with it's row of identical numbers or look down at my cd player in the car or my odometer and there are a row of numbers the same and  I think of her.  Today I was in the kitchen with Desmond, playing with home made play dough and  I heard a beeping. I went to the bottom of the stairs and knew it must be coming from a clock or a watch upstairs and let it go, guessing it would turn itself off in a minute. I came back to kitchen and noticed it was 4:44 when the alarm went off. It didn't stop so I went upstairs to turn it off. It was the clock in Desmond's room that we use as his sound machine when he goes to bed. We don't even keep it set at the right time since we take it with us whenever we go someplace overnight. We hadn't set an alarm on it. When I brought him up to bed tonight at 7:00 it said 2:22.
   Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and look at the clock and there it is again.
   She had a thing for numbers that she passed on to me. Everyone in my mom's family and then my dad and I all have a birth date that is sequential. Except for my aunt and my sister, who are adopted. She was born in 47 and I was born in 74 so when she was 30, I was 03, when I was 14, she was 41 and we figured the next one would have been when I was 25, she would be 52. We decided we would have a big party that year. She didn't make it. I had a big party anyway.

   She had a lot of funny rituals. One was singing whenever we drove over the George Washington Bridge. When her brother Jonathan was little (she was 16 years his senior) she was sitting with him in the back seat of her parents car, holding him in her lap. She started to sing as they went over the bridge, "George Washington Bridge, George Washington, Washington Bridge, George Washington Bridggggge!!!" When she stopped singing, he complained so she kept singing. Somehow this turned into us having to sing this song for the duration of the drive across the bridge when we crossed it. Thank God I don't remember sitting in traffic with her on that bridge. We laughed a lot. We were very energetic singers.
   We used to sing along to the country western radio station to songs we didn't know.

   One of my favorite memories of my mom that still makes me laugh was coming out of my bedroom, seeing her in her room through her doorway, holding her pillow in both hands out in front of her, raising her arms up and down like she was fanning a fire, doing a sort of dance around her room. I walked to her doorway and asked what she was doing. She said there was a fly in her room  and she wanted to show it that this was a hostile environment so that it would leave. She had a little bit of the ditsy blond thing going on.
  
   We were on vacation once and she got a bad sunburn and fainted the next day. I was a teenager and I thought she had dropped dead. She came to, I ran to the office of the hotel and they called the paramedics. They gave her some gatorade and told her to stay out of the sun. She called her boyfriend at home and left him a very serious message on his machine that "all her organs collapsed." We laughed about that for a long time.
  
   I found her in the back yard once spraying the dog's poop with Windex. I asked her what she was doing. She said that one dog had been eating the other dog's poop so she wanted to make it taste bad. I don't know what would taste worse than poop. I'd rather eat windex than poop.