“I love you too...I think.” The doubt was probably not about the love, but about the “you.” Virginia realized I was someone close, but by this time she just wasn’t sure. And now, a few years later, I have ceased calling her and wonder every day if she is still alive, and if so what possible reason her life could have. You are still alive…I think. The expression,“no one knows you like your mother,” no longer applies here. But can a son do any better? Do I love her without thinking? Do I want her to live? I struggle to say “yes,” and can only say so because living with Paola has taught me that life rewards life. I try to convince myself that the few moments of unconscious well-being achieved during Virginia’s past few years may have been worth the drudgery of survival. But I have serious doubts. I keep hoping she will let go, move on to some other form of life, and free herself from the limits of this one. She was known as the “general”, a moniker that rang true one day when we had gone together to San Francisco to visit a museum. We left the car in a garage near Chinatown, and while I was walking toward the exit she ordered: “Ricky, get over here!” I was about 30 at the time and the inappropriateness of bossing around a grown man seemed quite drole. And I did get over there, immediately. Thus “sweet” is not the first adjective that comes to mind when describing my mother. Yet she had her soft side, and I may have been the only one in the family to really be aware of it. When I was about 10, I used to find the greatest pleasure in “dressing” her hair. It was a little game between us, something that I resumed instinctively the few times I visited her in Edmonds during these last few years. I would spend hours, at least it seemed like hours to me, standing behind her as she watched television, running my fingers through her hair, massaging her gently, and rearranging the curls with a bit of art. This was our Oedipal affair, which one night was brought to an abrupt halt by my father. I don’t think he felt so much jealous, as a fear that such behavior might encourage me toward the unmanly vocation of a hair dresser! Virginia’s hair dresser at the time was also named Richard! During those brief visits to Seattle it felt so nice to resume the massages on her aged head, but perhaps in her mind my identity and that of the erstwhile Richard had been fused, who knows? Our other secret concerned art. Since an early age, perhaps 8, she taught me the rudiments of watercoloring, how to wet the paper, mix the colors, create stain effects. She often took me on painting trips with other ladies, who were all amused by my perspicacity with a brush. While so much of my mother’s personality tended toward the masculine--her love of sports, her regimented housekeeping style, her Spartan attitudes to clothes--she let the feminine emerge in her paintings, indulging in color and form, in excess, in wild expression, even rebellion. Through her art she entered another world, and I was often her accomplice. I doubt she could have made a career of it, but it did boost her sense of independence, and through art she carried out all sorts of experiments and explorations that in the real world of her daily life she would never think of doing. That is the energy that I often feel privileged to have shared. -Richard Ingersoll