It was the late shift, at the hospital where my mother was working. Ideal, if you want to get out of doing work, but the most boring shift of the day, with all the patients sleeping, all the visitors gone for the day. The nurses sat around with little to do. They began to draw labs from each other, honing their skills, they may have convinced themselves, but merely fighting boredom is closer to the truth. Each lab came back negative for this and that, as expected.
One of the nurses handed my mother the results to her test. They all looked at each other in disbelief. The labs were for fun only; just to keep their hands busy and their minds entertained with impossible ideas. This is why my mother could not believe that she was pregnant.
“You’re joking,” she said over and over. Having only been married for a year, she hadn’t planned for anything like this, until things had settled down and there was enough time, not to mention money, to bring another life into the mix. “You’re joking.”
My mother signed out of the hospital, terrified and trembling as she walked across the parking lot to her car. She unlocked the car, opened the door, and sat staring at the steering wheel. It took a few minutes to get her head, to begin to comprehend the immenseness of what had just taken place, before she turned on the ignition. As soon as she turned the key, the radio clicked on and “Tupelo Honey,” by Van Morrison, began to play. “She’s as sweet as tupelo honey,” he sang to her, reassuringly. She says that this was the moment that my name was spoken to her, “by an angel,” she tells me
When my mother would put me to sleep at night, or when I would crawl into her lap crying, she would sing the lyrics to me. Even now, as I live away from her in my own world, living my own life, she reminds me every now and then:
“You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a brown bag for me
Sail right around all the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
She’s an angel of the first degree
She’s as sweet, she’s as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee”
