Gondor the Grey

A rumination.

My mother was the type of person who thrived on fostering creativity in others. When I was young she was looking for the next “big thing” coming out of my head, taking notes, saving drawings, and even going so far as to trace the entire collection of a bogus trading card game I had invented into some ancient drawing software with a stylus and tablet. She would say to me, “When you get famous one day, you’re going to buy me a mansion.”

She said this to me countless times during my high school years when I was deep into the local concert scene. I had played in cities and venues all across California joined by much older friends who were much better at their respective instruments that I was with the guitar my mom had purchased for me as a birthday present a few years prior. Really, most of what I had was purchased by her—the Orange TH30 tube amplifier, most of my instruments, the lessons that had taught me to use all of it, even my first car (and my second, and my third).

She would say that all these objects were investments, because “One day, you’ll make it big and you’re going to take care of me and your dad. Justin Bieber takes care of his mom, ya know.”

I would laugh at her, tell her to keep dreaming because I would never share anything with her. When I grew a bit more and developed my sense of empathy, I would express that I would never be able to return her investment, because the simple fact was that being a musician wasn’t exactly a profitable venture. She knew I wasn’t a pop star in the making, and she knew that the money she put into my interests would never come back.

It took a lot of time for me to realize how financially fortunate my upbringing was. My childhood friends were always in awe of even the little things that I took for granted when I’d bring them home to hang out after school. In high school, I knew a kid who had only seen hardship his whole life. He and his mother were from Los Angeles, and moved to Stockton, California before his senior year. He would tell me that the street they lived on was patrolled by gangsters armed with rifles at night and he had to take the bus any time he needed to go anywhere. They lived in a duplex that was split in half, effectively becoming a quadplex with a shared kitchen. He preferred the word, “shit hole”.

He never treated me the same way after the first time I drove him over to the home my mother had built. I was complaining the whole way about the onslaught of chickens and how annoying it was to pick up all the eggs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his stomach grumbled as I raved.

It’s easy to be an ass when you’re seventeen, before you’ve went out into the world and figured out that nothing was actually paved for you and that you were nothing special. Figuring out that being the “smartest” kid in your freshman class doesn’t mean that you know shit when you get to college. Before you’ve been without somewhere to live for four months while hundreds of applicants pile onto every rental that goes up on Zillow. And before you’ve maxed out all of your credit cards, got help paying them off that you didn’t deserve, and then ramped them right back up again. Twice.

My mother was the type of person who never stopped working. With five daughters ranging from teenager to third grader and a young son, she worked nights and went to school online so that she could make something of herself and do better than just getting by. She worked hard, and so she never had time. I don’t remember spending time with my mother before my own teenage years aside from awful road trips so in step to the tune of screaming and arguing that it was a sick joke to call them vacations. But there is one memory, that sticks out in the fog of a smoky rebellious phase and the blockage of an unstable childhood.

I must have been five or six years old, back when American Idol was still topping the charts, YouTube had just hit the net, and Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Jennifer Anniston were all the tabloids could talk about. I couldn’t be sure that any of those things were actually relevant—I mean come on, I’m six! Thanks Jonah Hill—but a quick Google search sets the scene nicely. I was digging through the collection of VHS tapes and came across a peculiar green cassette that peaked my interest. Observing the battered dust cover, I asked my mother why the woman on the cover was so angry. She carefully lowered herself onto her knees behind me. Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal was playing on the stereo as it often did on the Saturdays that were dedicated to torturous cleaning.

“That’s not a woman, he’s a Hobbit,” she said in her signature dry tone. Of course, I followed up by asking her what a Hobbit was, and she went on to say that they were like me because they walked everywhere barefoot (Later on she would say the same because of the ungodly matte of hair that would come to cover my feet).

I kept asking questions; why was the tape green? What were the monsters on the back? What was this mystical artifact I had discovered? She just smiled at me; she had a better idea. Instead of answering my questions, we cuddled up on the horribly ugly tan sectional, the crevices filled with crumbs and the discarded wrappers of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks and watched a film that—unbeknown to either of us—would become my obsession for years to come. So far as to be the basis behind pivotal educational and career decisions in my early adulthood. I was star struck, horrified, and enamored all at once. The action, the strange voices, the shrieks of the ring wraiths, the ageless elven face of Liv Tyler echoing the words of the ancients.

Needless to say, when the tape came to an end and I realized that the story wouldn’t be finished so easily, I was frustrated. How, I would ask, could such a long movie not be over. She just shrugged her shoulders and told me to be patient. It wasn’t long before she came home from Wal-Mart one day with a set of three HD DVD’s, one green, one red, one blue, and presented them to me. “You and I are doing a marathon,” she said, in that unreadable tone of hers, it wasn’t a question.

And so, a tradition was born, we would go on to complete the epic through Middle Earth, romps through the Galaxy, and even car chases through simulations. But we always returned to the Shire, it was our favorite. She would tell me how much she loved “Gondor the Grey”; she was always getting names wrong. I would scoff at her and tell her that wasn’t his name, and he was a white wizard now besides. I’d turn up my nose, knowing that I had caught her in a mistake and then myself go on to refer to the last of the Dúnedain as “Eragon” for years to come.

I wouldn't be surprised if other folks judged her for allowing her youngest child to watch such violent and disturbing content. She was odd that way; sometimes she cared and sometimes she didn’t. For example, Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix was previewed by my parents and deemed too dark for my gentle mind and Grand Theft Auto was a video game strictly prohibited; yet I had rented Saints Row and terrorized the innocent computer people of Steelport. It depended on what she knew about and had the time and energy to police. She wasn’t around often and by the time I was starting my ninth-grade year, I had already pirated all that was available of Game of Thrones.

My mother was the type of person who thrived on fostering creativity in others. In that tiny investment of three DVD’s and the dozens of hours she’d spent with me watching them over and over, she opened my mind up to the world. To the possibilities of imagination, to the fires of dragons and to the passions that would fuel my own fire and one day save my life.

As a twelve-year-old learning how to play the bass guitar, I would sit in my room making my fingers bleed playing the same botched riffs over and over or messing about with the Boss DD-3 Delay she gave to me one Christmas making strange noises on the Stratocaster I should have never gotten rid of. Not once did she ever come in to stop me, though sometimes she would scream bloody murder to draw me downstairs, just to tell me in the sweetest and strangest of voices how much she loves me and how my creations were music to her ears. In response, I would grumble and complain about being interrupted.

Once she took it on herself to developmentally edit an apocalyptic screenplay that I had written and fully intended on turning into a film of my own. She told me that if I could give her a good proof of concept, she’d pay for more cameras and mics to make it happen. I don’t remember if I ever read her notes, and I don’t have that script anymore. The next time I’d want her feedback would be much later in her life, when I sent her the first few chapters of my first attempt at a novel.

It’s so easy to be an ass when you’re a child. Before you’ve realized that your time is so tragically limited.

I was sitting next to her hospital bed. I had just found out that she was an avid fan of superhero movies. We were casually discussing her favorites, and she would childishly recount the adventures of “Tony Shark” and “Doctor Weird”. Finally I realized my mother had a sense of humor, so I laughed and told her that the same actor that played the Doctor was the voice behind Smaug. “Let’s watch that one,” she said wistfully, “when the dragon gets covered in gold.”

“Of course,” I say, not realizing yet that it’s a lie, “we’ll have a movie night, have popcorn and make a whole thing about it like we used to.”

About two weeks after when our movie night should have taken place, I asked my sister if our mother ever got around to reading those chapters. I was thinking hard on her edits on my script from years ago that I never bothered to look at.

My sister nodded.

I asked if mom had left any thoughts about them. She thought for a moment, unsure. “I think she was just happy to have read something of yours.”