Forgiveness, quiet as it’s kept, is for the forgiver, not for the forgiven. Forgiveness enables us to move on with and enjoy our lives in ways that we otherwise couldn’t. It keeps us sane, ready to receive love and forgiveness from others, even when we think that we don’t deserve it. Forgiveness allows us to appreciate the good in people, not to mention the good in ourselves. Still, it’s something that we have to do regularly, if not every day, than many a day. Especially when it comes to family.

My mother turns sixty-two on Wednesday. And I love her very much. But over the years, I’ve learned about my mother past, ticks and behaviors that have convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should’ve never given birth to any of us. Of all of the parents I’ve ever met or known, few have been more unhappy or miserable as my mother. That fact and two abysmal marriages have left her in some state of depression for the better part of the past three decades. She often said, “I like children when they’re [between] babies and two . . . it’s all downhill from there” while I was growing up, a sign that becoming the eventual mother of six children was perhaps not the best life choice.

For me, what made statements like that worse was when I learned that my mother grew up as the oldest of twelve — yes, twelve — siblings in the Red River valley area of southwest Arkansas, in a town called Bradley, just five miles from the Louisiana border. Growing up as the child of tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South in the ’50s was hardly easy. Especially with cotton on the decline as a commodity. The poverty that my mother grew up with was balanced by the reality that poverty was all around, especially if you were Black. After all of that, and then finding the opportunity to move to New York with one of her cousins in the summer of ’66, why would my mother fling herself into the heartache of marriage and kids that became her life in Mount Vernon starting at the end of ’67?

She must’ve asked herself the same question some sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded (even though he wasn’t), a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The “I love you, Donald” faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

It would be awful enough if I could say with certainty that our hellish lives occurred because my mother made awful decisions. But the reality was, my mother often made no decisions at all. That allowed people in her life who had no interest in her interests to make decisions for her. Like when my two-sheets-to-the-wind father took my older brother Darren to Clearview in ’74 and forced him into the battery of tests that would determine that his severe shyness was really mental retardation, even though Darren had taught himself and me to read. She allowed him to go to school there for six years before she made any attempt to remove him, and by then, it was way too late.

Or when she took her spiritual confusion and channeled it into becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in order to hang on to her dead-beat, no-account second husband, dragging Darren and me into it in the process. Or when my mother just kept going to work at Mount Vernon Hospital in the summer of ’82, even when her friends and co-workers begged her to take part. Her non-decisions, as it turned out, were really decisions of the worst sort, the path-of-least-resistance type of decisions. Ones that didn’t require much forethought, self-reflection, assistance from others, or wisdom.

These things take their toll, and they did for my mother and for the rest of us. By the time I moved from Pittsburgh to the DC area in ’99, I had tired of listening to my mother’s weekly gripes about “the kids,” my four younger siblings from her second marriage. She’d been calling them “Judah babies” for nearly a decade by then. It referred to my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name, Judah ben Israel, and the fact that she saw them as burdens that God had given her, because “no one else would want them.”

I had been a mama’s boy for years, first by nature and because I’d been the younger brother for nearly a decade. Then by virtue of witnessing the full rage that my stepfather vented upon my mother on Memorial Day ’82. For years, I saw it as my duty to help her and my younger siblings survive those terrible, terrible days. But after ten years of higher education, academia, and finding myself, I no longer had the energy to provide the optimism and sense of success that my mother drew out of me time and time again.

Once I did my version of a family intervention in ’02, confronting my mother and younger siblings with this and much more than I could mention here, I knew that my relationship with my mother would stayed strained, maybe for good. The fact was, I was never so mad or resentful that I had stopped loving her. I decided long before ’02 to forgive, because I couldn’t have met anyone, much less gotten married or become a father, walking around with the kind of hatred a person could generate from learning so many horrible things about his family or mother. Yet I also understood that if my siblings were to ever leave 616, or Mount Vernon, or learn to see a world beyond their narrow version of it, I needed to perform a version of seppuku. I had to end my mixed friendship, boyfriend-girlfriend, husband/father-wife relationship with my mother. Just so that I could be her adult son, period.

That’s been tough, so tough, over the past eight years. Even now, I know that I can’t have a conversation with my mother about work, writing, teaching, finances or family without inviting stories about how “them Spanish people” took some job away from her or about how “fags are ruinin‘” this country. I stick to basic family stuff, nothing more, nothing less. I do love her, very, very much. I just hope that she can find her out of her own misery and enjoy life before there’s no more life left for her to enjoy.

Of all the songs I listened to back in ’89, few made me think more about my future than Mike + The Mechanics’ “The Living Years.” It’s not a great song, not one that I’d recommend everyone I know to listen to. But it’s a contemplative piece, one that I’ve thought about off and on over the past two decades as my relationship with my father has improved, while the one with my mother has declined and remains somewhat strained. Luckily, both have spent time with my son Noah over the past six years.

I’m sure that many of you have noticed a recent slowdown in my posts over the past two weeks. I’ve been busy with other writing projects, attempting to keep my fledgling writing process going, for Boy @ The Window and writings related to it. I’ve also been catching up on my TV entertainment. Thank goodness for the power of Netflix. I’ve been catching up on Ugly Betty of late, finding it a stomach-churning show to watch in the process. I guess naivete does have its advantages.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the New York Mets winning their first World Series. They took out the powerhouse Baltimore Orioles of Palmer and McNally in five games. Even as an ex-baseball fan who didn’t actually watch the series, I know the story all too well. My mother spent my baseball-crazed teenage years telling me the story of the Miracle Mets of ’69 over and over again. Cleon Jones wasn’t an unsung hero in our chaotic corner of the world!

Those were the years I began to get to know the city immediately south of Mount Vernon. Especially Manhattan. Between hunting down my father Jimme almost every weekend between the end of ’82 and the summer of ’87 at watering holes in the Bronx and in Midtown Manhattan in order to buy clothes, buy books, wash clothes and eat. And working for Jimme in spurts in the fall of ’84 and the summer of ’85. It was an interesting time working and milling about in what I’d eventually nickname the “Third Armpit of Hell.”

It was the Koch years, of graffiti and dangerous Subway rides, with puddles of piss on the floor and people dressed for a Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force) video. There were plenty of weekends I looked forward to that kind of disarray. It easily beat the hum-drum of watching after four younger siblings, avoiding my idiot stepfather and a town with all of the excitement a bedroom suburb in search of an identity could muster on a Friday evening or late Saturday morning.

I didn’t come to fully understand the gnawing sensation I’d feel when walking through the diverse socioeconomic and ethnic sections of Mount Vernon until I started working for my father in September ’84. Jimme thought it’d be better for us to work for his money rather than us just coming over every week to get a few dollars. So off and on during that fall, Darren and me spent part of our weekends working for Jimme on various cleaning jobs on the Upper East Side going into Spanish Harlem, or on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center and the West 72nd Street Subway station.

Whenever anyone asked me what Jimme did, I usually said, “Oh, my dad’s a carpet cleaner.” I didn’t see him as a simple janitor, although it was true that he cleaned stuff. But Jimme didn’t clean toilets or latrines or bathroom sinks and tubs. He cleaned the floors of office buildings — carpeted, wooden, or otherwise — thoroughly treating any surface he encountered with industrial cleaning machines. He cleaned high-rise co-ops and condos where the mortgage or rent payment per month was more than our rent at 616 for a year. It was an important job in his eyes, and I wasn’t going to diminish it because other folks couldn’t understand or wouldn’t have a clue as to the amount of labor involved in Jimme’s work.

I didn’t have much of an idea until I started working for him. Spending a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday morning working with Jimme was no easy task. We’d have to walk over to Jimme’s — or catch the 7 and get off in downtown Mount Vernon and then walk over — and get him, then get on the 2 at East 241st and get off at 72nd Street. If we were lucky Jimme might’ve had the cleaning machines at home with him and would take them on the Subway to the job. If we weren’t, we’d have to walk over to Jimme’s job at 20 East 64th to get them, all the while dealing with the mafioso-like Levi brothers Glen and Bruce (pronounced Lee-vy, not like the Levi’s Jeans). They often treated us like we had severe mental retardation.

The work was hot, hard, and boring, and with my imagination, I’d sometimes forgot that I was buffing a floor, drawing anger from Jimme. “Bo’, don’ be messin’ around with them machines,” Jimme would say. Sometimes he would mumble in anger, so much so that I thought that we were about to fight. So one thing we did to help us pass the time was to buy a standard AM/FM radio with an antenna. It kept us from getting lost in thought. This was the way I could keep up with music, with my Mets, Giants, Knicks, and Rangers, and pass the time while concentrating on the work.

Jimme decided after a couple of weeks to treat us by taking us to a Mets game. Not only was this our first time at Shea. It was the first time we’d been to any sporting event, unless you count the Ice Capades with ’76 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill at Madison Square Garden in March ’78 as one. It was a Tuesday night game near mid-September, the Mets desperately trying to catch up with the Cubs and first place in the division. It didn’t happen that cold night, as it dropped into the thirties. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals 9-5. Keith Hernandez and George Foster hit home runs, and Darryl Strawberry got one little hit. We left after the Cardinals rallied late in the game, playing the role of spoiler and keeping a permanent underdog team like the Mets from making the postseason. As disappointed as I was, it was a wonderful experience going to see a game in person for the first time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that today also marks the fortieth birthday of my crush #2. It’s significant only in the sense that it reminds me that my perceptions of where I’ve lived and of my times has been shaped as much by the personalities that have populated my life as it has been by geography and circumstance. Seasons do change, crushes go away, and sports that were once faves become distant memories. But the fact that I got to see more than one side of New York and Mount Vernon has helped me understand more about the inevitability of change than I otherwise would’ve if my world had been limited to 616 and my family.

I know, I know. Why do I remember things that most of us dutifully forget? How come I discuss details that so many prefer to and do commit to the memory deletion bin? These are good questions, often ones I ask of myself regularly. The answer is, I just do, I just do.

Such is the case with my applications for college some twenty-three years ago, the wonderful fall of ’86. I’ve already commented on my wonderful relations with Sylvia Fasulo, my chain-smoking guidance counselor from my MVHS years. But I neglected to discuss what it was like to get letters of recommendation from my MVHS teachers. Because I trusted almost no one in authority, I ended up with only two letters of recommendation, one out of this world, one the equivalent of used toilet paper. For those of you who either are applying to college this year or are parents whose kids are applying to college this year, here’s a lesson in critical discernment.

Of all the former teachers I decided to ask for a letter of recommendation from, I went to Andy Butler. My Pre-Calc (or Higher Math) class the year before might as well have been a study hall with function formulas. Around the end of October ’85, I began to notice what I thought was a strange everyday occurrence. Andy Butler brought a can of the new Diet Coke to class every morning without fail. We met for class during third or fourth period, around eleven o’clock. Well, he never seemed like he was awake considering he was drinking Diet Coke in front of us at a particularly high energy point of the day. The other thing I noticed was that his can seemed to have the same dents in it day after day.

I spent about a week in Butler’s class just figuring out the dents in his can. If his can had been a map, the dents would’ve been in the southeast corner, down and to the right of the red-brown Diet Coke logo (in the white area) and just above the aluminum gray bottom. When I mentioned what I’d seen to the seniors in my class, Adam, Anthony and Richard all thought that I was crazy at first. By mid-November, though, we’d figured out the dents and the truth.

On one of my after-school runs to C-Town in Pelham I stopped at the deli down the street from 616. Butler was there buying three cases of beer for home. It was about 4:30, just ninety minutes after school had ended, and it wasn’t even Friday.

“I’m going through a rough divorce,” he said, before I could say anything. As if I really wanted to know. “I’m sorry,” I said.

As far as my nose was concerned, Butler was getting refills. I’d solved the mystery, which included Butler’s long disappearances from class for no apparent reason.

This is the teacher whom I asked to write one of the most important letters in my then young life. What the inebriated Butler wrote was eighty-four words of qualified support of my pursuit of postsecondary education. I was “a good student” when I “worked hard,” but I could also become “distracted sometimes.”

Not that I felt I had other places to turn, but there were other and better possibilities. I just didn’t allow myself to realize it at the time. I knew I probably should’ve asked someone else — almost anyone else — for a letter. Cuglietto, Flanagan and Warns may well have been better choices. Even some of my senior-year teachers would’ve done better by me. I just didn’t trust anyone who practiced “tough love” like Cuglietto, put on airs like Flanagan, or compared me to Sam or any other student like Warns did. So I went with Butler’s lousy letter, figuring that Meltzer’s would at least tip the balance.

I didn’t get much help from my teachers other than Meltzer. And Meltzer did help out in numerous ways. He helped me get over some of my embarrassment as I wrote my college essays about my life as the adult teenager at 616. I needed to write this type of essay, since I had some explaining to do about my lack of extracurricular activities. Meltzer helped me interpret the multi-page green-and-white financial sheet that I picked up from the local welfare office outlining my mother’s income between ’83 and ’86, figuring out that my mother’s average income was $16,600 per year as a welfare recipient.

He also set up an interview with a Columbia University alum living in the Wykagyl section of New Rochelle, a rich neighborhood full of small mansions and near a professional-level golf course and country club. The pompous fool seemed as interested in intimidating me with his soliloquy about Columbia’s great traditions as he was in helping me get in. He never asked why someone like me would want to attend. I guess he thought that of course this Black boy would want to go to an Ivy League school like Columbia. “Why do I have to go through this to get into college?,” I thought. I tried to not hold it against Meltzer that I had to witness opulence and arrogance in my college quest.

What Meltzer did that probably helped me most was to bolster my confidence in the college application process. His letter of recommendation was six pages of unrestrained praise. He used so many superlatives to describe my academic success and college potential that I thought that I was the great Dwight Gooden by the time I finished reading it. I was “a great kid,” a “diamond in the rough,” hard-working,” a “critical thinker,” the “best student [he] ever had,” an “intellectual,” smart “beyond belief,” and, well, you get the picture. It made me laugh and blush over and over again after I first read it. I said to Meltzer the next day in the Social Studies Department’s faculty lounge, that “you know more about me than I know about myself.” He just laughed and laughed about that.

It did all work out. Meltzer’s letter — more like a six-page paper on every positive quality I had at the time — more than made up for my lackluster letter from Butler. I should’ve been wise enough to get two letters like Meltzer’s instead of the one. But then again, given where I went to school, I’m not completely sure I had a better alternative.