May 27, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend

     It will always be three days of rain at the Golden Dolphin Motel in Brigantine, New Jersey. I think they played cards, or perhaps a board game. Perhaps Scrabble, although I would have remembered that because of my love of words.
     My mother's pack of Viceroys, perhaps by then cozily tucked in its Robin's egg blue vinyl holder with the tiny kangaroo pouch on one side for her lighter, purred at her elbow with her cocktail, sweating on a lazy square of paper towel. The ashtrays were marbeled plastic cups the color of dog's droppings—never the wonderful tartan sand bags of an earlier period, which my mother conscripted into duty when the ball bearings in her car ashtray shot out at her one day, as if the dashboard were spitting them. Her lucklessness with spray cans and folding chairs and cars was the greatest source of her story-telling, and she collected and curated each episode, embellishing it in the retelling with genuine good humor and a kind of grace that made her—even as the butt of the joke—seem more attractive.