thisnewday

As the summer winds down, and thoughts of school loom larger ahead instead of shrinking farther and farther behind us, as they once did earlier in the season, my grandson and I have renewed our custom of shared, late summer reading. It's something that I wasn't sure we'd do this year, given the school's relentless promotion of hands-off parenting and sink-or-swim method of teaching, during the past school year.

But then, one day, just "out of the blue," the subject came up and we decided to go ahead with it. And I think it's still a good strategy, a conscious turning toward what lies ahead, a timely exercise, perhaps, in preparing for the coming seasons of a year and of a life.

So, shortly after this "meeting of minds," we made a trip to Barnes & Noble, walked to the kids' section all the way in the back, and perused the familiar volumes of history and biography long since left, it turns out, in the dust of now-surpassed reading levels. Still, in an apparent homage to those seasons of the past, Jason finally picked out a thin little volume on the life of Marie Curie which then spent the weeks that followed on the dining room table, unopened and unread.

Well, not completely so, since I did pick it up and read a few pages and wondered that we'd come so far that its text seemed so absurdly thin and childish and its narrative of an exemplary life so incomplete.

So we went back, a few weeks later, with a summer reading list from the Fairfax County (VA) Schools which I'd found on line. And found that none of the titles, which had seemed of interest, were available in the store. And so, returning home, we bought the online version of one of them, Candace Fleming's Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

We have it on both the Kindle, for portability, and on the computer, for ease of reading when we sit down together. And it's truly been an education for him, and a vivid reminder to me, in terms of what it says about the role of women at the turn of the last century.

So much so that I said to him, at one point, you know this is not so much about a plane lost at sea or even a female aviation pioneer but about a woman who defied every conventional belief, concerning what a woman was supposed to do and be, so that, even in the aftermath of tragedy, she endures as a role model for young women.

And thinking back to how things had been, in Earhart's time and my parents' time and my own, I thought about my mother and a childhood scrapbook she'd kept of the heros and heroines of the day, and about her own life burdened by convention. And how, at mid-life, she'd finally found an open space, drew a momentary breath of freedom, and sighted a possible landing place, before she and her vision of it suddenly, and completely, disappeared...

LPK
LiveJournal
7.31.2015 (a)

She had worked behind the counter of the small grocery store which her parents once had in the front of their house. I remembered having seen a large, white butcher's scale stored in their basement and that she'd once said how they'd sold assorted candies and attributed to that the early loss of her own teeth.

She'd once had a black and white Boston Terrier named Max, which had died unexpectedly. She never said if she was sad about it, though I now think that she surely must have been. But I was too young, back then, or too self-absorbed, maybe, to have asked.

She had a portfolio of drawings that she'd put together when she was younger, probably in high school, but never added to it as long as I knew her. She had also submitted a sketch to an art correspondence school that advertised in the popular magazines of the day. Her drawing was accepted, and she kept the letter that said so, but she never took the course, such dreams perhaps the victim of choices driven by the Great Depression.

She said that after high school she'd attended "beauty school," where she learned hair cutting and other skills of the beautician's trade. There, she also met a girl named Marion who lived down the road from my father's family and who eventually introduced the two of them. Although she occasionally cut and styled my sisters' hair, she was never employed in the beauty trade, or anyplace else outside the home.

She occasionally received boxes of lightly-worn but expensively-labeled clothes, sent to her by a cousin who was employed at a Pittsburgh law firm and was required to periodically update her wardrobe.

She suffered from life-long, chronic depression and even after we'd moved from Erie's densely-built west side to the newly-constructed and more open neighborhood on East 35th, our house was often dark because the blinds were drawn.

She was never truly comfortable behind the wheel of a car, even though my father encouraged her to practice driving and seemed more patient, with her nervous efforts at this, than he was with most other things.

She enjoyed visiting with one of her nieces who sometimes walked up Station Road to practice archery at the house which my parents, in their middle years, had built on a hill above the town of Wesleyville.

She was on a newly-prescribed regimen of anti-depressants and had been attending art classes when she died in a car accident at the age of forty-eight. She was alone in the family car, on her way to pick up my father after work, and was attempting to cross a busy six-lane highway at an intersection unprotected by any signal lights.

On the day of her funeral, attorneys from my father's company filed notice of intent to sue the county, if appropriate signals were not installed. A temporary system was in place the next day and, although my father soon sold the house that they had planned and built together, he still passed under "my mother's lights" for several more years on his way to work.

She and her mother and her mother's mother read to me from the time I was old enough to listen and it's to this that I owe my lifelong fascination with words and my love of books.

And that is what I knew about my mother.

LPK

LiveJournal

10.17.2014

She'd posted a picture on LiveJournal of her mother's old sewing machine, in the corner of a room, in the light of a window, with a few other furnishings. And what I wish I'd said was that I liked the picture, the composition of it. The way in which her mother’s old machine so perfectly fit, with the other pieces placed around it.

That I especially liked the color of the wood, the richness of it. That it had a certain warmth and looked comfortably aged, in the way of a pleasant wine. Which is why they worked together in the picture, the sewing machine, the chest of drawers, and the straight back chair.

That afterwards I'd thought about my mother’s old machine and its beautiful cabinet. How it really was so beautifully made, but with a very dark finish, a deep mahogany I think. Which is also a warm color, with its red pigmentation, but intensely dark.

That it then occurred to me that even warm colors, when mixed too dark, may allow the darkness to prevail over their warmth. Which is how I think my mother was.

That is what I wish I'd said, and then apologized for the darkness of it. And said that what I truly think of, after seeing the picture that she'd posted there, is the light coming through the window, by her mother‘s old machine, making the rich wood warm and very much alive…

LPK
LiveJournal
3.5.2012

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Entries tagged with my mother

Amelia Earhart and the Turning of a Season

What I Knew About Her

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