It Was Just Like That

My husband’s mother was named Romance and her mother was named BonBon. They were easily colorful enough to deserve these names, beautiful and brilliant, alcoholic. It was inherited color—BonBon´s father was one of the Ringling Brothers, the circus entrepreneurs, but by some dark twist the only one not posed in the photos, the only one not rich and successful. BonBon never got over it.

I knew my mother-in-law well. I met her before her decline and I helped to care for her after the drinking and a benign tumor which compressed her brain had taken almost all her senses and faculties.

I knew BonBon, too. True, she was dead by the time I met her grandson, but her daughter Rome, as she was always called, made her live for me. Each Christmas for fifteen years or so Rome had written a story about her family’s adventures with BonBon, the queen of the house, all prerogative and no responsibility, or about tiny Baraboo, Wisconsin, where Ringling sisters-in-law lived in mutual distrust while the brothers took the circus on the road. Rome gave these stories as gifts to her children, her sisters and their children. When I joined the family these gifts were waiting for me.

What a fine writer Rome was. She made her living at it—screenplays, books—but these stories, ten or twelve pages each, were especially brilliant gems. She did have great material. BonBon was a colossal eccentric, as charming and difficult a human being as ever lived. And, of course, the circus. You can’t make this stuff up, as they say, and Rome embellished it with love and humor, originality and punch.

Years later, when we had put Rome in a nursing home, Jonathan and I visited her, explained who we were again and again, brought her ice cream and fed it to her, and searched for topics of conversation suitable for her tiny bit of consciousness. Then I hit upon the idea of reading her stories to her. One a visit and then start over. She was transformed. She came alive, laughing, shaking her head in wonderment, her eyes suddenly alert.

“How did they know?” she´d say every time. “It was just like that.”

What do you think, friends, San Pancho Writers? Shall we tuck away our Mexico stories in a folder labeled: Open in Case of Dementia? For a day when we no longer know we wrote them but perhaps can still marvel:

“Yes! It was just like that.”