Kitchen Confessions

Kitchen Confessions

Noel Laflin

4-20-15

My mother was washing our kitchen floor when her water broke – or so she always told it - and I was on my way.  My father was called from the other room, my brother was left in the care of neighbors, and I made my appearance at a hospital within the hour.  It was the winter of 1952.

 

Eight summers later my mother found me, panic stricken, trying my best to clean up the brown shoe dye I’d spilled on our kitchen floor – probably not far from where her water had broken the previous decade.  I remember her asking me, ‘just-what-in-tarnation’ did I think I was doing with the shoe dye here in the middle of the kitchen floor.  I showed her the two-headed penny that I had created by gluing together two regular old pennies back-to-back.  The brown dye would camouflage the white glue along the edge, I had reasoned. I wanted to always win at a coin toss, I further confessed.  There would forever be a faded dark stain upon that old patch of linoleum honoring my sleight of clumsy hand.

In the spring of 1971 I stood near the faded stain, still stubbornly residing upon our old kitchen floor, trying to explain to my mom why I no longer wished to attend church.  I had discovered that I was an agnostic and hoped she would not be disappointed in my sudden lack of faith.  She dried a dish, placed it in the old cupboard and told me that neither she nor God was disappointed.  ‘Why else would he have given us free will?’ she concluded.

 

It’s the autumn of 1979 and I am in our old kitchen telling my mother that I am gay.  She said she’d always known.  And, she added, 'I've always liked your friends.'  With that kind observation now put to rest, she asked if I would like to stay for lunch.

Eleven winters later, I stood in our old kitchen and nervously broke the news to my mother that I had just tested HIV positive.  It was a time of little hope for diagnoses such as this back then.  She said I’d beat this thing.  Her hope was contagious.

It’s been a quarter of a century since that last conversation in our family’s kitchen. The folks left the old East Anaheim neighborhood long ago.  And although my mother has also been gone for nearly fifteen years, I bet she’d smile at the scene in my own kitchen just now.

 

A middle-aged man is lost in thought as he absently flips a heavy penny - the one recently uncovered in an old childhood box of treasures - over and over again.

   

It comes up heads every time.