A street sign shows the way

The intellect arches its eyebrows, denies it, demeans it. The intellect says, What? Are you serious? The dead do not speak. The dead are dead.

But the intellect is wrong.

I am driving to Bridgewater State University, a sprawling Massachusetts school, which was a small college when I went there. I am meeting my bonus grandson, my youngest daughter’s partner’s son, who is a sophomore majoring in criminal justice. The last time I saw Matt in person, at Christmas, he offered to show me around the now sprawling campus. We made plans to meet at two o’clock in the parking lot near his dorm on the last Friday in January. The morning of our meeting, he texted, “Message me when you get here.”

I am thinking about all this as I’m driving to a school I commuted to for four consecutive years, and then even more years, because I got my Masters degree at Bridgewater, too. How many round trip drives does this make, I wonder, and do the math in my head.

At least 1,000.

But the drive this time is different. Waze directs me, not through Stoughton Center, down Route 27, onto Route 24 to exit 106, the way I always went, but down roads and off exits I never took. “Best route, Typical traffic” Waze says. So I follow.

My mother is not on my mind. Not even in the back of my mind. I am not thinking of her and me and the years we had together. I am thinking about Bridgewater State and my days there with Linda Fredericks and Marie Morreale, about buying lunch from a food truck that appeared every day at 11:30, about taking an art appreciation course that I should have appreciated, but didn’t. About enduring two semesters, but maybe it was only one, with Mrs J who taught creative writing and red-marked everything I wrote, and about another English teacher whose name I don’t remember - how can I not remember? - who introduced me to the best writers, who made me love what Mrs. J insisted I would never be able to do.

My head is full of these memories when my mother whispers, “Why aren’t you singing anymore?”

The question jolts me. Why are you asking me this now, I think, say. The radio is off, so a song didn’t invite my mother into the car. But there she is, next to me, not her physical body, but what it held.

Before Covid, I sang the songs she sang, Rosemary Clooney songs, Doris Day, Patti Page. I had to practice to sing her songs. I took singing lessons and then I wrote a show and at the age of 65 I took the show on the road.

I did 24 shows. My mother was with me at every one. That was the portal. That’s how I got her back.

“Don’t you miss singing,” she is saying to me now. And I think no. But I miss you.” And right then, exactly then, there is a sign, on my right: Prospect Street.

How often when you’re driving do you notice street signs? If Waze doesn’t say take a left or a right, or if you’re not stopped at a red light, you buzz right past them. I buzz past dozens, maybe hundreds of signs every day. So why did this one stand out?

Because, when I was five and six years old, my mother and I walked down a different Prospect Street, in Cambridge, at least once a week. I took dance lessons at Miss Bates, in Central Square. My mother walked me there. There was a dress shop underneath the dance studio. My mother shopped there. Sometimes, when it wasn’t too cold or too hot or too wet, we would walk down Prospect Street just to go to the five-and-ten and then we would stop and say hello to the florist on the corner. He had a crush on my Aunt Lorraine, my mother told me, which is why he always gave me a fresh, red carnation for free.

The things a child remembers.

Prospect Street brought us from tiny Inman Square to sprawling Central Square. It was a magic route to the child I was. I was Dorothy Gale on her way to visit Oz every time we made the trip.

This moment feels like magic, too. But magic is an illusion and though my mother’s question is heard only by me, Illusion! Invention! the intellect scoffs, the sign is reflective aluminum and visible for all to see.

“Why am I not singing anymore?” my mother asked.

Because it’s not easy to stand up in front of people and sing. Because I’m not good enough. Because I’m not you.

But I got my mother back when I sang. Not for the entire show. Sometimes for just a few notes. Sometimes for just a phrase. But always, always, she was there. And that made me want to sing more.

What I never considered until now, until Prospect Street, is that the portal that brings her to me, also brings me to her. Like Prospect Street, it runs two ways. And that when I sing my mother’s songs, not only does she come back to me; wherever she is, she gets me back, too.