10. Coffee with Ma Cheney

I’m remembering Cheney’s Mom lately.  Her name was Mary Ellen – but I never heard anyone call her that.  Cheney and I would visit her weekly for coffee.  She lived in a big three-story house on Northline Ave with her daughter Pat and her big noisy family. Ma Cheney had a small bedroom off the dining room on the first floor and that’s where she usually was – watching television.  She always wore a cotton house-dress that snapped up the front and had big pockets on each side.  She kept her cigarettes and lighter in one pocket and Kleenex and a rosary in the other.   Cheney would head back to the kitchen and make the coffee and we’d all sit at the yellow Formica table.  I’d usually sit quietly and listen to the two of them talk.  I enjoyed listening.  At first glance people might mistake Ma Cheney for one of those very pious elderly Catholic ladies, a babushka we called them.  She was not.  One look in her eyes and you knew that not much got past her.  But her eyes weren’t the cold cynical eyes of someone who had seen too much pain in one lifetime – though she certainly could claim that.  She had buried husbands and children, seen brutality and poverty.  But she was no cynic. Instead her eyes were full of a gentle knowing and acceptance of the humanity in us. 

I’d sip coffee and listen to the two of then banter.  She was not taken in by her son’s shenanigans but he was compelled to try.  Then with a look she’d stop him in his tracks and he’d grin at her.   He loved her more because she didn’t love him any less for his failings.  He always said, “She knew too much to argue or to judge.”  There was a genuine affection that radiated between these two.  Not the phony kind that you put on for company – neither of them was much for pretense.  And being in the same room with them was a pleasure. 

Cheney had one of those Irish fathers who was fond of boxing your ears.  He hit Cheney once to often and left him deaf in one ear.  I always say that Cheney taught me music and he did.  He hears more out of his one good ear than most of us will ever hear with two good ones.  And he taught me how to listen.  I only heard lyrics and melody.  I was an AM radio station.  Cheney was FM underground and he made me listen with both ears and all my brain parts.  He made me hear the bass and the piano, the flute and horns and drums.  He taught me to love music.  To listen with my soul and it has been my refuge ever since.  But Cheney taught me something much more important. 

When I met him, he was working at something called Avenue 4 love.  It was a suicide prevention hotline sponsored by the local Catholic Church.  That was so long ago that the first two numbers of the phone numbers were letters and Avenue 4 love was a phone number.  He counseled people on the telephone.  He talked straight to people and it worked.  He taught me to see the naked emperor.  He was the first person I ever met who would see someone being cruel or stupid and tell them.  Ours is a culture that looks away from what is ugly and by doing so we encourage it.  Cheney never looked away and he wouldn’t let me.  I was extraordinarily naïve and idealistic.  He made me look at people with all the ugliness and brutality.  I thought it would kill me – having all my illusions burst.  But he didn’t leave me empty handed.  He gave me tools to fight.  He gave me a voice.  With him, I heard myself for the first time.  I learned to listen to my own sense of right and wrong, to trust my instincts and not to be ashamed to call someone out.  Not to be afraid to say “NO!

Cheney gave me music.  I had always loved lyrics but Cheney taught me to listen to the sounds – the harmony – not just the drum solo but the piano and the horn.  He taught me about rock and roll and jazz and blues.  He taught me to love the sound of music.  A man who had lost the hearing in one ear taught me to love sound. And while he was busy teaching me the beautiful diversity of sound, he was also showing me the ugly perversity of human beings.  I was the proverbial flower child at nineteen.  Blissfully ignorant.  It was easy to love everyone when you’re living in an illusion.  The real test came when I tried to hang on to those values after seeing through Cheney’s eyes.  He used to say “It’s a mother fucker to be right all the time.”  It meant that every now and then, he would have liked to have been surprised.  But he never was.  Except maybe for me.  I think I was a surprise.

It was the summer of 1969 and I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco.  I had gone out to be with my illusive husband and Marine, Lee Whitlock.  Lee was stationed in San Diego but managed to have me safely settled in San Francisco and then forgot I was there.  When I came home I stayed with my sister and her new boyfriend in an apartment on Jefferson in River Rouge. 

One day we walked into a shop in Wyandotte called the Shake Shop.  In the fifties it had been an ice cream parlor with checkered table clothes and a jukebox full of Buddy Holly songs.  In the sixties it became a coffee house and a used bookstore.  Phil, the owner, never let go of anything, so now he had the shakes, the coffee, the used books, the juke box but he also had papers and pipes and posters and waterbeds too.  The back room had been converted to hold a pool table and that’s where my sister and I ended up.  My sister looked like a teenybopper – but she was a shark and she hustled on the pool table. 

We never spoke much.  I was not the first wife.   But I never felt condemned for that.  And when we lost our only child a few days after he was born, it was Mary Ellen who understood my pain.  She quietly took my hands and placed a prayer card inside them and held them closed.  Our eyes met and I knew.  The card wasn’t the typical Catholic prayer card; it was a picture of a sunrise with a quote about it being darkest before the dawn.  I kept the card for 30 years an only gave it up when my son’s girlfriend had a miscarriage.  I figured Mary Ann would approve. 

I never told her how much I adored her.  How much I looked forward to having coffee in that kitchen.  I hope she knew.  She lived for years in the short walk between her bedroom and the yellow kitchen.  But for those of us who knew her, she lives inside our hearts.  And whenever it gets really dark, I can feel her hands on mine and I’m just waiting for the dawn. 

I wonder where I can find one of those house-dresses.  I’ve got the rosary and the cigarettes. But that’s not enough.  I need to find that forgiveness in my own heart.   I need to learn how not to argue or to judge.  It’s a whole lot harder than it sounds – but I’m trying.