No mothers day

There's a well-meaning, if misguided, campaign by that title, asking mothers to disappear on Mothers Day to bring attention to the preventable deaths of mothers in childbirth.  Look it up.  But this is not what this is about.

Mothers Day last year was the last day I spent with my son.  He had come to NY to meet with a casting agent, who had seen his photos on FB.  When he told me he was coming I reminded him it was also Mothers Day that week.  He rebuked me for reminding him and said that's why he was coming then. 

The night before he quarreled with his father.  He almost left then and there, but I convinced him to stay.  We went out on Sunday.  First I took photos of him, because the casting agent wanted to see natural light ones.  They were terrible.  I probably cost him the job.  If he had gotten it he might have moved back to NY instead of going to California, where he died.

There is also a photo of us taken by me - the worst photo ever, actually, two of them - the second one is worse, but they are the last photos of us together.

We went to brunch at one of the neighborhood restaurants.  Waiters were handing out roses to the obvious mothers in the room.  He looked at me, not getting a rose, and said - you know it's because you look too young to be my mother.  That much was true - we could have been a mismatched couple.  We got that a lot on a cruise we went on several years earlier.  I was neither flattered, nor upset. 

Then we went to the park where I took the photos of us.  On the way back he got hungry again, so we stopped at an Asian restaurant.  I had undertipped in the morning, just because I couldn't calculate after the Bloody Mary, and he was upset with me.  Here I overcompensated and he asked me sarcastically whether I liked Asians better than Mexicans.  I admitted I was bad at tipping.

That's all I remember of that day.  Next day he left and four months later he was dead and I never got to see him again.