Jaci Dawn

She was my very best friend.

I wonder what she would think of my life now, were she alive. Her death sent me into a tail spin that took years to come out of. Oh, I looked all right, but I was spiraling out of control emotionally.I didn’t know how broken I was until my baby sister died five years later and I had to revisit grief that didn’t make sense.

Mom was all or nothing. She could go from the funniest person alive to something so scary you didn’t want to be on the same planet with her. No, she wasn’t bipolar. She was passionate. It took a lot to make her angry, but if you pushed her over that edge, you long regretted it.

We were part of a club that did sand dune racing in the Nevada deserts. There are a lot of pristine sand dunes in Nevada, dunes that go for miles and miles and remind one of National Geographic photos of the Sahara. Sand dunes with no ocean, no lake, no water. We learned how to “sled” on sand dunes with cardboard boxes. we learned to check our tennis shoes for scorpions before we put them back on. We sunburned and picnicked on sand dunes.

Our parents raced dune buggies and modified Jeeps, Land Rovers, and Broncos. All rigs sported flags on ten foot tall poles so one could see them coming across the dunes. There were designated places to drive. There was always alcohol involved. They even had a school bus converted into a food truck and the wives took turns working in the unshaded bus, doling out cheap treats like hot dogs and cokes. (“Coke” in those days and that place referred to any soda, even the non-cola variety.)

Drivers had to be careful of dunes that suddenly dropped off: looked good and easy from one side, but when you reached the top, the dune curved inward like a wave and you were suddenly in the air at a high speed with nothing below your tires but air and gravity. Roll bars were essential as were seat belts. No one used seat belts off track, but on track: you wore a seat belt, maybe even a harness.

There were tons of kids, too. Free range kids who wandered off into the dunes to explore or who built roads and forts on a designated hillside where no off-roader was allowed. There were consequences.

I remember being down at the bus with my best friend. Mom was working in the bus. One of our mutual family friends had gotten fairly soused and was riding around in a dune buggy with some braggart. They went sideways across the designated kid hill and stalled just above the kids playing. Maybe my little sister was playing there. Maybe the children of the woman in the passenger seat were there. Or the daughters of the woman working with mom. The clear thing was this: the rig could roll sideways down the hill, over the children.

All five-foot-two and ninety-eight pounds of my mother burst out of the bus and raced, arms pumping, in the heat, and up that hill. Little kids split left and right. The drunks were still laughing at their predicament.

They weren’t laughing after my mother met them on that hill and read them the riot act. They slunk away with their tails tucked. Everyone who witnessed, stood up and clapped (okay, I made up that part. We were so in awe of the anger this tiny person could drum up in a single heartbeat when she felt children – hers and others – were being threatened by stupidity.

You didn’t cross my mother.

On the flip side, she was hysterically funny.  She was a punster. An actress. Shout, “Alert!” and she would take a pose. “I’m a Lert!”

Things too high one the grocery shelf? She’d look around to make sure noone was looking and she’d climb the shelves.

She chaperoned one Rainbow Girls convention in Reno. We stopped at a light on the Drag and she shouted, “CHINESE FIRE DRILL!”. When we didn’t move, she looked at us and said, “That means get out of the car and run around it and get back in as quickly as you can. Before the light changes.” We ran like our lives depended on it.

She’s call me about three times a month and I knew by the ring of the phone it was her (no caller ID in those days). I’d likewise call her about as often and she’d always answer, “Hi Jaci.” We just knew.

She wanted to spell my name Jaci. She wrote it that way in all of her early writings before I was three. My father and every other conservative convinced her that wouldn’t fly. She was thrilled when I started using that spelling in 1972.

I miss my mom. I miss calling her up about everything. I miss that kind of friendship. I miss her passion. I miss her laughter. I miss her wicked sense of humor.

But more than that: I am my mother. I taught a group of girls how to do a Chinese Fire Drill. I climb grocery shelves when noone is looking. I sip wine late into the night and try to solve the world’s problems. I worry about “waking up bludgeoned to death”. I strike a pose and shot, “LOOK! A LERT!”

And you really don’t want to make me angry. I try to reserve that for incredibly stupid shit people do. And I try, like my mother, to quickly forgive those idiots.

Happy Mother’s Day.