I couldn’t ask her if she registered. I didn’t want to embarrass her. But what would they do to her—to us—if she hadn’t? To prepare myself, I pictured the situation. We’d be going up the escalator in Lytton’s department store in downtown Evanston—a usual haunt. We always used the ladies room at Lytton’s on our once or twice weekly visits to the allergist. After making our contribution in the long row of stalls, we’d look at the rounders of ladies wear. The ladies room was gray and white. The store was gray and white. We were gray and white. The PSA was gray and white. Maybe I just remember everything from the early 1960’s as a grayscale image. We were light years from the rainbow streaked 1960s that would arrive when we moved to California at the end of the decade.

The PSA voice would come over the store’s loudspeakers. We were trapped on the escalator—we’d have to go to the top to get off and come back towards the exit. That would be too obvious. We’d better run up the mechanized stairs and hide in the rounders. I pictured the uniformed men—much like the NAZI’s my Mother had fled less than 25 years before—pushing aside the clothes and finding me hidden in the center, knocked down by their guns. What had they done with my Mother? Where had they taken her? And where would I go?

I could probably get back home by myself on the bus. Or would they find Daddy? Daddy traveled for work; he was never in town when anything happened. I would just have to learn to get on the downward escalator faster and lessen the time for escape.

I’ve never told this to anyone else who remembered the PSA’s, including my Mother, years later.

Speak the smallest grains of truth

Boulders will follow

I’d have to get used to it, so I’d take a little breath and squeeze it out. It finally stopped clattering as it fell off my lips. It modulated into the rest of the sentence. It didn’t have to be capitalized. It’s just a word, after all. Just another bay filling up along the rocky coastline of my life.

What a relief.

Suddenly everyone was doing it. All those nice stable couples I knew where splattering all over the windshield of happily-ever-after-ness: a midlife no-rest stop.

Stop saying we, start saying me. I’m owning my life once again, or is it the first time? Who remembers. Make some decisions: who do I consult? Will I ever sleep with a man again? Who needs them anyway?

Geez it feels great. I should have gotten out years ago.

I’m so tired of figuring out all these little details. How can I make decisions that will affect the rest of my life and my daughter’s life when I’m so off-balance? When I don’t know whether to love or hate? When I don’t even know what this word means. D I V O R C E. What am I? Some country western singer with big hair?

Yeah, who kicked my dog

I don’t have a dog

Right, I’m busy taking care of myself

And my kid.

And I don’t have to take care of a so-called grown man.

God I have great friends. This is a great town. I’m so comfortable here. And my shoulders feel like I’ve just put down my trenching tool. I have energy: myself; my anger; my stereo, silence; blood running in my veins.

Looking back on that banquet of opportunity and permission—my undergraduate years—I would occasionally walk down the steps of the intercampus bus and enter the inglorious West Bank complex—a sea of blue plastic chairs—thinking “if I got married and pregnant I wouldn’t have to do this.” As if that would save me from that rewrite or research. As if that would save me from working hard without knowing if I was good enough, or any other kind of enough. Nice thing about the Minnesota skies: once I left the protective tunnel, the frozen air would slash such nonsense right out of my lungs. Once again I was a strange little coed working far too hard to get too little done—familiar frustrations of method.

So today, when “run away” flashes though my mind, it’s not just fear of the creative, it’s not just the special vulnerability of having to create art and knowing it just might be shit. No, I’ve always hoped someone would save me from the moment, the task, the possibility of foolishness, uselessness or failure. Let’s be specific—some man. I hoped he’d take the mostly benevolent reigns from my Father, tell me what to do, believe in my gifts, and push me in the right direction. Yet I’ve found over and over that I don’t much like taking that direction when it’s actually offered. I didn’t even think to listen to my Father. I’ve regretted listening to the other men long and hard more than once.

I have definite ideas about most things—just not about that simple-sounding matter of what I want. The ideas are in there, somewhere, in an unlabeled file, floating through my capillaries and cells, bouncing against the edges of my heart but never landing squarely in the light. My male advisors have had their own agendas or imaginations too limited. Maybe it boils down to the inability to really understand the other.

I can start to chuckle at “run away.” It’s a reflex as involuntary as a sneeze and like a sneeze, it’s just an interruption in the moment. But I would relish someone with some good ideas, occasionally.

You’ve been standing in this rich sculpture garden for years. Ruth–what do you have you to say for yourself? You’re just now noticing? Just getting the idea? Well of course, Sister, daughter, Mother, come along then. I don’t know what we’ve been waiting for but now is always the right time.

Yes I am magnificent! We are. It’s the sky we carry, shining through her rain drops, sunbeams and petals. It’s the wind shaking loose the lessons of the universe. It’s the life we birth out of our centers and the food we create in our breasts. It’s how we make the planet sing, and write it down, tuck it in, and begin again in the morning.

Your story never had time for doubt: can I do it? will it be right? enough? You dove in and made things happen. That’s how it sounds all these years later, at least. Your hedge? Don’t expect too much. Don’t expose too much.

No I didn’t have to do battle with Hitler, with a crazed nation following a madman to the destruction of millions of innocents, including my family and my freedom. I have had it easy. But he took my family before I knew. He tore it from a long-feathered roost in a civilized nation, a nest that should have stood more generations well, providing steady improvement for those who followed. Only thing is, war marches backward over civilization.

Yet I must honor the storm and flight. I’m the child of two people who never would have met but for the uprooting and destruction–that crazy sequence of coincidences that bring people together.

My Mother was tempered in a brutal forge. She passes along the burnt-blue blade and the well turned sheath. She dies.

Here I was, socializing with those people I wasn’t supposed to socialize with—the female secretaries and administrators so excited about my huge belly and impending status-change. The lunch table was buried in wrapping paper, ribbons and excitement. One of those pastel packages held a small misshapen yellow bear.

My “lovies”—important friends, confidants and mentors—were stuffed dogs and cats. What did this presage for the little allergic-to-be child that was me? These were the only kitties and puppies I nuzzled and nuzzle them I did—to the extinction of their “fur” and through many replacement eyes and noses. I only learned latter that you were “supposed” to have a teddy bear. Ah, my child would be a normal kid—that elusive goal of mine. Here was her bear.

But this bear didn’t even look like a bear. The ladies explained—this is a bear for very little babies who are too small for scary-faced, limbed bears with choking-hazard eyes. Yellow Bear was soft, gently be-rattled, washable and gender neutral.

He carefully minded the empty crib for a couple of weeks and came with us to the hospital on labor day. He became the star of parties, a favorite of the paparazzi and gave rise to a song. And his disappearance became the cause célèbre of letter-writing between me and the Gund company.

Of course it’s the favorite stuffed animal that takes the most journeys and therefore increases the odds of disappearance. And face it, how long will a kid cry when she loses the toy she didn’t really care about? I don’t think my four year old lost the bear. And while I tend to misplace things, I always find them. The disappearance of Yellow Bear still mystifies me. Yes, I blame myself.

Finally, I wrote a long impassioned letter to the Gund Company, complete with a recording of the song I’d written a year or so earlier about Yellow (co-starring a few other choice bears.) I was pretty sure they must get lots of these letters and figured they probably had a procedure for handling them.

The concerned-and-corporate-toned response asked for a photograph of the bear. I sent the picture complete with the adorable infant who had grown to love it so much. Their next letter apologized; this bear had been discontinued quite some time ago and while they searched arduously, they could not locate the model in yellow. However they found one in pink. There would be no charge for this bear as it was damaged by a permanent smudge on its nose. Did I want the slightly-defective non-replacement bear?

Of course. I washed the little nose a few times and hung onto the bear, wondering how to best introduce it. It lacked Yellow Bear’s charm completely and was no substitute. Still, it wasn’t a bad bear. One afternoon during nap time, I tried to slip it in her bed, excited by the prospect of her reaction when she woke to see it. But the tiny infant-appropriate-rattle woke my hard-sleeping child to the query “Yellow Bear?” The nap was lost and the loss refreshed. But this closed the replacement quest.

Many months later Gund sent another lengthy corporate missive. During a semi-annual inventory, they located a replacement yellow bear. If I would enclose a check for the retail price with my answer they would send it. “Yes! Yes!” pulsed through my temples as I raced to my checkbook.

Another couple of weeks and the bear arrived: brand new; absolutely perfect; charming and never to leave the house again—at least not without all the other household possessions in tow. He got along well with the other animals and was accepted as a substitute. He’s right downstairs—in a house my daughter has never lived in. And to this day, if I should happen to start a sentence with the phrase “What do you think I found?” in conversation with my adult daughter, she’ll answer “Yellow Bear.”

One group savages another, strips them of their rights, their livelihoods, their safety and sometimes arbitrarily their lives. These things are so basic and their deprivation so unimaginable. It stretches from the beginning of time to tomorrow–what torment and what injustice. It makes me feel sick and powerless. How can a civilized people slip into the abyss and take the world through it with them?

Don’t we have to scream, and kick and rage at this outrage? It’s wrong to be reasonable and rational in the face of horror and cruelty, even when it’s an old pain, an old murder.

Mother, did you scream? Did you cry? Did you pound and hate and squeeze? Did it infect everything you ever did? Where is that line? When does the blood stop roiling?

When I decided to thumb through Ireland, I got busy putting all the fear-laced warnings about hitch-hiking out of my head. I hadn’t contemplated the also-fearful-and-more-likely reality that I’d be expected to converse with perfect strangers for hours. Before I could get too nervous, the view, the comfort and the repetition of the road helped open up my travel-mind and loosen my ear and shy-tongue.

In Swansea I filled my few days easily. I traipsed the castle, shopped for old watches, and sat still for a lengthy rant on the crown and the dole from an articulate resident squatter. The next day I played in the surf, getting horribly muddy in my new travel sandals. It didn’t occur to me to give them more than a cursory wipe and leave them outside. My elderly hostess scrubbed them to a clean and broken–in state, to my embarrassment. Over my cold beans, cold toast, cold egg and fabulous marmalade the next morning, she informed me that she and her husband strongly disapproved of my travel plans—the ferry to Ireland. “Why just last week several of our Welsh boys were killed”—soldiers serving in Northern Ireland. I knew tensions were high, but I was shocked at the hostility for the land and people across the small channel of water. I listened politely, promised not to go to Northern Ireland and set out for the ferry terminal.

We sailed overnight. I woke early stretched out in the ferry’s public lounge with the TV blaring the state funeral for Éamon de Valera, the former prime minister and partial architect of modern Ireland, whom I had never heard of. My heart sank a bit as I glimpsed something of my ignorance. Why was I traveling to Ireland? I certainly didn’t know anything much about the place. I wasn’t seeking my heritage, as so many Americans do. I read John Osborne and Brendan Behan. I loved the language. I liked the Guinness and the whiskey. So now I walked into a country somewhat in mourning, with it’s inconsistencies and controversies freshly stirred, as if that weren’t always the case in the mid-70s.

Customs gave me pause, unexpectedly. They searched me ever so thoroughly, not for the guns and bombs the London police had been checking for in my purse in theatre lobbies, but rather, for condoms. Clean on all fronts, I entered the City of Cork, thumb aloft.

My first ride, gave me the bit of political history I needed. I understood parts of each of his sentences about the devotion and infamy of de Valera. Mostly, I secured a little grounding in the dialect and the ways of the road. Those hours of ear-training were essential and the luncheon pint a nice surprise.

This middle aged man who stopped for me in his tiny well-worn car with no radio would be typical of my rides over the week. Our gab was entertainment for a long drive. In this green and friendly place a long drive was any distance between towns.

One driver left me in a pub while he made a business call in a small town. He came back for me and toured me all over the county. We wandered around small stone huts, stone circles and stone fences. A truck driver on holiday and his passenger, a young runaway, took me to the cliffs of Moher, where we crawled along our bellies to the edge. (I understand the people are fenced away, these days. Too bad; it was thrilling and a great lesson in how a gulls leg is fastened into it’s body.) I was just an oddity in the day’s drive for these folks. They became a part of my trip, my travel ethic and my thirty plus years of memory.

No driver ever asked my name and I was too green in the art of conversation to properly introduce myself. But before I quite sat down in any car the driver asked my religion—Catholic or Protestant. I was taken aback at first. The ride didn’t seem to be conditioned on a particular answer. After the second time, I came to relax. I wouldn’t be scorned when I answered “Jew.” Quite the contrary, my exotic pedigree gave the driver license to deliver his views most candidly.

I didn’t realize how odd it was to spend the day with someone still nameless until, awaiting the next lift, I had rejoined the ubiquitous sheep at the side of the road . Although we hadn’t gotten to names, each driver spoke fearlessly about all the important things, especially politics, religion and sex. I followed suit, of course. It was a replete with wonderful twists of gab that roamed through history, family, the crystalline logic against reuniting with the Northern counties and the inexorable heart that craved it, all delivered with a kind-hearted glum sense of fate, wear and tear, as befitted the year and the dismal economy.

I barely touched Ireland but I learned maybe her greatest lesson, talking to people. My meanderings along her fuschia-lined roads trained my ears and my traveler’s quest for serendipity. I still love Osbourne, Behan, the whiskey and stout.

That secret life that came before, that vital, dangerous, struggling life you set out upon when you left your home in Germany, I’ve run across that too, in your snap judgments, reminders not to care too deeply or expect too much, and pushes out the door–past my “comfort zone” as we would call it today. You were so quick to move on to plan B, never mind even beginning to understand whatever happened to plan A, and never, never daring to cry over it. All those events in New York, in Hartford, with your family, with your work and the people you found made you the woman who stroked and pushed and shushed and worried me.

Early on I judged you, when your rules didn’t make sense to me. I was angry, resentful, and rebellious and I knew you were unreasonable. Most likely I was also unreasonable, but I liked the feel of bitchy and callous, selfish and superior. That behavior is only “supposed” to last from age 12 to 21. But I performed that tedious repertoire from about 10 to 45. I didn’t know about Mother-as-friend. You steadfastly opposed that recent American notion. Anyway, I was devoted to my habit of annoyance.

Now that you’re failing, flailing, I want to protect you from the horrible traps of gravity, memory and speed, the uncomfortable visitations made by curbs, glass and silence. I want to offer you places for an eye, an ear, a nod or a notion to land safely, comfortably. And I want to know, Mom.

I want to understand that young woman who became my mother, Mom. I want to know the situations that formed you. I need to know, how did it go for you? How did you do it? How did you negotiate all the unknowns? How did you discover and tame your feelings? How did you learn to live with sadness and fear? How did you take care of yourself? I want to know with all the intimacy we’ve never had, that I never knew was possible, that you never allowed maybe anyone. Make it fresh in this moment and take me inside back to the time each armor plate was forged, pounded, cooled, and hung along the perimeter. What soft moment did it defend? What strong barb of laughter did it unleash?

You are slipping away from life and I’m just finally appreciating what you have—your legacy of story and experience. Our legacy. Tell me. Tell me about your fears, your worries. I will carry this story to my daughter. They are our stories and we must have them.