My Portuguese Mother: Birthday Parking

March's days match February's this year, a curious alignment. My mother's days seem no longer to align with anything sensical, but perhaps that's me being tired and cynical. On this, her 65th birthday, aniversário natalício in her mother tongue, she drives herself to the dentist to get clearance, as she must from all her doctors, before stem cell therapy can begin. She drives herself because all of us are working and she won't impose on friends. She drives herself because she says she "can't lay around in bed all day." She says she must journey into the world, even if only in the short bursts her energy allows. She travels in the small orbit of her life, whatever life now means with cancer. Concretely, it means applying for and eventually getting a handicap license plate, to join the legions of those plates parked on nearly every street in Ironbound, the curbsides radiating blue parking lines. Knowing those I grew up among, there's probably a few who shouldn't be in the blue, but their friends, neighbors and relatives told them what they needed to do, who they needed to talk to or send someone to talk to at Motor Vehicles. And anyway, even if it's not quite the truth, it makes life a little easier, and what's the harm in that?

I don't necessarily disagree.

As for the rest of those blue horizon lines on neighborhood streets I long ago left but cannot leave, they demarcate the distance between here and there, the horizons of now and then, in ponto pequeno, DNA markers of a disappearing generation. I curse them and laugh whenever I cruise in to ruminate in my favorite bars and can't find an open parking space. Small ironies make perfect sense on days when everything aligns.