My Mother Dated Mickey Rooney?

The day after my mother's memorial service in June of 2016, I hosted a picnic and invited my family and a few extended folks. There were several reasons for the picnic: to honor my mother one more time, to celebrate my brother's birthday and to give the family an opportunity to go through some of the things my mother had kept in storage.

Image by Teece Aronin

There were photos and dishes and tissue-thin letters, a portrait of me in a little smocked dress and one of each brother taken at the same time as mine, both of them wearing blazers, dress shirts and ties. 

One of us sitting among the piles of pictures held up a framed photo of my father and asked, "Do you mind if I slip the photo out and see if there's anything behind it? You know how people used to do that - slip one picture in on top of another?"

She slid my father's picture out and lo and behold, reposing beneath was a publicity shot of a youngish Mickey Rooney. The room erupted in surprised laughter and those of us of a certain age recalled how, in the golden age of Hollywood, picture frames and wallets were sold holding pictures of popular film stars instead of the fake, paper flower versions of loved ones we see on store shelves today.

Silently I mused how wild it would be if the photo was stashed back there because my mother dated Mickey Rooney before she met my father. How close might I have come to being even shorter than I am? What if my mother, as faithful a mate as any swan, had married Mickey and through no fault of her own found herself Ex-Mrs. Rooney Number Umpty-ump?

What else didn't I know about my mother? Maybe she'd been a studio starlet and met Mickey that way. Maybe she was a cigarette girl at the Biltmore Bowl in Hollywood and caught his eye one night as he wined and dined Ava Gardner. 

I know my mother's past didn't really include Mickey Rooney or even a stint as a cigarette girl at the Biltmore Bowl. She was a kind-hearted, pretty Clarkston girl who met my father before her twenty-first birthday and they were married soon after. And besides, she was allergic to cigarette smoke.   

But for a few minutes, imagining my mother's secret life with Mickey Rooney, I almost forgot how much I miss her. 

Defending Facebook: My "Charmed" Life

If Facebook gets you down, makes you feel your relationships, your family, your furniture, your holidays don't quite measure up, or if you think everyone on there is a shallow bunch of fakers, please understand: You aren't privy to everybody's backstory. 

On one of many road trips back to see my mother. 
Photo copyright, Teece Aronin

I post pictures of my kids baking cookies as the dog watches with flour on her face. I make sure you wake to photos of my cat, stretched in feline repose across my bed. I choose pictures that show most cheerfully or poignantly or humorously how well my kids and I get along.

What you don't see is everything that came before, like a tsunami crushing our lives. Life fell apart, and what you see on Facebook is the repair work, the reassembly, the cleanup - with me, the mother, who never knew a damned thing about how to do any of this - as team captain by default.

There was the end of a marriage to the man who fathered these children, who helped build a home only the most tangled of crossed stars could destroy and did. There was me scrambling to find a better job before our house sold out from under us. There was me networking in two different states, first the kids' home state and next mine, to find that job. 

There was the kids having to leave their father. There was the kids having to leave their grandmother. There was me having to leave my mother when I'd always planned to be there as she aged. There was the night before we left when she broke the "no open flame" rule at her assisted living facility, lit a votive, and joined hands with us around the flame. Then she spoke with a smile of how grateful she was that we had been near her all those years and how she would pray for our trip to be safe.

Then there was the 500-mile move away from every warm thing my kids had ever known.

There were the months on end where I swore I was piloting the kids through hell only to learn that they were guiding me. There were the endless kindnesses of family and friends who took us in, shored us up, and gave us hope.

There was Facebook, which became a way to document the restoration. The place I laid our trips to cider mills and pickle festivals and county fairs as though they were flowers and Facebook was an altar. 

It was a place where the Facebook friends who truly knew me tracked our progress and supported the effort, and where those whose newsfeed I clogged, viewed the work, neither knowing nor caring that there was any work in it.

It was the place I showed off my new sofa with framed Rothko prints hung perfectly level right above - and where at least five nail holes hid behind each print even though I measured. It was a place where few knew it took five years to save the money for that sofa because I was terrified of credit card debt. It was somewhere just a handful of people were aware that the sofa's predecessor had belonged to my aunt, was chewed up by our dog, and that the prints came from a thrift shop and cost $12 each.

I, who loved to write and aspired to be a blogger, developed my "voice" on Facebook, found rhythms for my words, and learned how good it felt when my posts made people laugh. It was a place where my friends nurtured the writer sapling until it was strong enough to launch that blog. 

Anyone who didn't know me well might have thought: 'What a great little family; I wonder what happened to the marriage.'

For the record, the marriage was lost in the tsunami.

But I had Facebook where I documented our trips to see my mother and my ex-husband, where friends could see how well he and I worked together for the sake of our children, and everyone could wonder just how much was exactly as it seemed.