So what does it feel like, last one? Are you a weathered post supporting more weight than any trespasser has a right to expect? What is the last feeling of the bygone era, the last first-person blessing or curse to be landed against a too well-known opponent? Mom, does the emptiness of loss cast a sidelong knowing-sort-of glance, a nod of recognition even, before he pulls away yet another rug? Is it like an agreement to disagree? Another speech from the loyal opposition?

The catalogue of loss: You lost your country first—a loss I will not know and cannot imagine. You lost any sense of controlling events, long before you got that grown-up notion that you could be in control. I suppose it wasn’t such a shock then to find out in middle-age that control was an illusion and not really that important anyway. You almost always knew that, didn’t you?

You knew that things don’t happen for a reason, life isn’t fair, it might not be OK and the best man doesn’t win–tough lessons to master before the age of twenty. You learned that the human animal can dream up horrors beyond comprehension and there’s nothing you can do about it. You learned to act now—tomorrow may be too late.

And then you learned that your Mother and little sister were strong, smart and lucky beyond measure—each element was required for their survival. And you knew you’d always have to wonder if you could have made it through—and that you were so lucky not to have learned that.

Family is so important. It’s where you come from. It’s who will care about you, no matter what. We all need that. We are lucky when we have that and now, my own daughter to be torn away from me by these terrible times. Why should she suffer and be called names and have stones thrown at her. But why should she have to leave to have a decent life.

I thought we would never get to our home. I don’t know if I would have tried to go back home even, but Ilsa said that is what we must do. We must first live through those first weeks when she is so sick with the other ladies and I take care of them all. I don’t know what happens to the others, but I know Ilsa finally gets rid of the fever and then she can eat the little bit of food they give me to cook. I have to go very slow, giving her little bits of soup.

Then she is also right—we must get away from the Russian soldiers. They save us but they would also take us and then maybe we will never find Carole. Ilsa is so weak but still she tells them we have to go home, to Germany, to see if anyone else survived from our family. Then Ilsa says to me, we try and find Carole and we apply to go to America.

She is right, people don’t stay in the same place all that time, especially in New York. It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train; the tracks are broken and torn up. How do we get anywhere? It wears me out when I think about how we did it, even though now I have a bed and we have food and little coal for heat. I used to think all these things are normal; now I don’t take them for granted. I know they are very important and I am lucky to have lived to have them again. Some are not so lucky.

Each missing member suffered immeasurably: torture; starvation; disease; violence; humiliation; hatred; and desperation. They died apart from community, family, eulogy and comfort, without grave, shiva, grief, or sympathy. Fifty-nine died; a tiny island in the horrific testament of six million. But possibly, a number to imagine, to care about, to save, celebrate and mourn. But if I took the time to know that loss, could I even go on?

When I was a child in Sunday school I thought this must mean bowing and scraping. I couldn’t relate to that. I was precocious in my sense of not being understood, putting up, shutting up, complaining and resenting. It didn’t have to wait until I was a teen ager. I wasn’t so big on the respecting part. I knew this commandment must mean something, but I assumed it would come clear at some future time. After all, I knew even then that these bold strokes of literature were meant for all ages: a large tale told against the tiny facts of my life.

Today I have memories and hand-me-downs from Mom and Dad. I find the bit of learning—the fond memory and the noble act—and I embrace it in the tale told. It can be a quiet, private thing. Sometimes I’ve made it a public thing, splashing it across my website and my stages. Is this what the commandment means? Rediscover, tell-the-world and perpetuate?

When my parents were still here for me, I asked and avoided, I listened and ignored. When I became a parent, all that programming poured from my firmware and wanted control. Would I live the legacy or change it? Blindly, consciously, fearfully and carelessly I retraced those steps right down to the words and deeds that had made me shudder a few short decades before. “Take them back, that’s not me speaking.” Oh, but it was. Those words oozed from lymph and bile.

Now my baby is grown and my mother and father are shadows. I have a little reflective distance on parenting from both ends. To honor my father and my mother I am commanded from becoming them, either blindly or slavishly, even if that’s what it might seem that they wanted. They didn’t; I know that. Instead I must live into the opportunities my parents provided for me. And when parents are rattling through my brain and my blood particularly loudly, which they still do on occasion, I have to give them a time out.

We are each marked by the hard knocks that have come our way. Some of those gashes are passed down to us and from us genetically, emotionally and experientially. We yearn to leave the damage and the fear behind; nobody wants to further those legacies. But our desire to protect our children recycles fear into anxiety.

To honor, I would like to purge the scold machine, take the love and put aside the nagging. I won’t become you, Mother or Father, but I’ll be my best self. I will look at the difficulties of parenting and offer a bit of compassion. I will look into my heart to touch the memories you placed there. I will live now, both a part and apart.

Both of my parents were quite devoted to butterfat. My father, from the dairy Midwest, was born of Hungarian stock; butterfat was next to godliness. My Mother had already lived through the worst her gluttony could offer, so no low-fat incantation was tolerated.

Little Laura’s fondness for ice cream made her the special target of a prosperous Jewish family in her small German town in the mid-thirties. In preparation for their eventual flight to Holland, these people would pick her up and take her across the Dutch border for ice cream, hiding their valuables on her small person. In hindsight, she resented them for using her to smuggle their gold out of NAZI Germany, putting her at risk of being bayoneted on the spot. But she never regretted a smack of the ice cream.

My ice cream adventures were much safer. Childhood summer nights were often graced by a square dip from a local Evanston shop—I’ve forgotten the name. Today I cannot imagine how I could begin to manage a square of ice cream. Those corners would impair the experience for me. As a kid the square scoops were nicely weird.
Non-ice cream frozen treats (“quiescently frozen” as opposed to churned) were frowned upon in my household and thereby exoticized. In my Mother’s courtroom these treats could be exonerated by chocolate; my weakness for fudge-sicles was tolerated. I didn’t get to try a rocket pop until I was grown.

At nineteen, a double-dip cone of maple nut ice cream from Bridgeman’s took me to my summer graveyard factory job each night in Minneapolis. Occasionally I flirted with other flavors, but I always came back to maple nut. This was one of my few devotions to a non-chocolate dessert. Bridgeman’s chocolate just wasn’t chocolate-y enough.

In my child-raising days, ice cream was the third level of emergency treatment for childhood injuries. Step one was “kiss the owie.” Step 2—put a band-aid on it. When my daughter grabbed the searing beam of a metal jungle gym I initiated step three; “let’s go get ice cream.” Step 4 would have been a trip to the emergency room. Fortunately I never got to step four.

From an early age, I gave my daughter expert coaching in ice-cream cone management. I knew iced cream would be an important part of her future, so I approached this as a valuable skill to be handed down and practiced. You circle the cone, working the meeting of cone and ice cream, picking up the meltiest outside layer to get the “ready” ice cream and prevent drips. Watch the tongue pressure—you can easily undermine the stability of the scoop on the cone. Yes I had a tragedy once as a child. No need to reproduce that trauma. Practice makes perfect and how sweet it is.

Ice cream still works quite well on those injuries that transcend age and maturity, such as wounded pride, disappointment, fatigue … just about anything short of a broken bone. It’s so easy, so elegant, so well-disseminated. Even the worst retail muck or the hyper-precious versions transport the eater directly to the magic of a very cold thing on a hot day, summer’s best punctuation mark.

Laura the free spirit: I had never thought of her this way. I knew she was beautiful, smart and determined to have the life others wanted to deprive her of. She was determined to speak English without an accent, to be a super American. But I saw her as protective, fearful, worried, judgmental, opinionated, harsh. As I list those words I feel them all describe me at times—I think it’s a Mom-thing.

I was always told I was like my Father’s side of the family. I looked to my Dad for protection from my Mother’s temper and her irrational attachment to whatever she had just said. I had my Father’s coloring, his wit, his unwillingness to be bound in small steps along the known path. Maybe this is what they found in each other—Laura and Sylvan. This free spiritedness-within the comfort and predictability of making it the suburban middle class way: the family that wants all for its children and exacts only modestly for itself. They were the “greatest generation” writ small into my own history.

My Mother met Sylvan, a sophisticated man—well rounded both physically and intellectually—just over a dozen years after she came to America, after she had reunited her family in New York and moved them to Fort Worth Texas. She was full of tenacity and life. He was glib, bemused, and independent. They both came from extremely traditional backgrounds, families and cultures. They were educated in those ways and reverent of them.

Both of them came of age during the war and were “marked” by the journey. It was the forge for their life together and the heritage they gave me, that mark upon their whole generation. As I watched my Mother fade away in her hospital bed I felt that generation let go the fierce history it had slogged through. I became an orphan, hopeful of keeping one ear open to the transition before me.

In this year since her death, my mind very willingly let go of that woman I saw robbed of her wit and sensibility over a period of nine years. Instead the swirl of other memories, some encapsulated in writings here, have bounced back to fill in the spaces where love and memory fill in the landscape. It’s a lovely process to mark on a Mother’s Day.

Some folks still share the sidewalks with family members and people they grew up with. Not me, although I’ve found a few of them on Facebook. There are the school people: friends; enemies; others; teachers. The work-related people layer up from early work life, having young children, charitable boards and the current rafters. Then there are spouses, ex-spouses and hanger’s on. Sometimes there are old lovers and the people you get to know through them. It’s a creamy rich stewpot on charitable days. Those days, I’m grateful to have them all out there connecting me to the far distant frame of this picture.

Now that everyone knows our Portland secrets I suppose it’s not a surprise that I almost never going out in public without running into someone I know. For me, it started when I’d been here for six months. I love it. I start to panic when I don’t run into a huggable person before a performance starts. That stress will no doubt be alleviated at intermission, whether I’m at a movie, opera, rock concert, mainstage or weird scene production.

And now a lot of those people reach a certain status. There are the twenty and thirty year folks; that’s really something. What kind of a something? Something like mirrors and measuring sticks, inching out my life connection by connection.

I thought the utility room was room was creepy. It was almost scary, but not really that interesting. I knew my path; I didn’t really need the light. But sometimes, just as I stepped inside, I’d get it right across the face—a stiff, cold, wet, stinky tail—a herring tail. My mom was soaking the brine out of a herring before she pickled it. It would be in a ceramic bowl on top of Dad’s dresser with the tail sticking out.

This would be real herring, the good kind, not the kind that comes in jars so it has to be boiled until it’s soft and the slimy skin falls off. My Mother’s herring would stay stiff and a little crunchy, with slick skin hugging the meat. The whole utility room smelled like brine, fish and then the vinegar.

All I wanted was a warning that I might get hit in the face with a herring. It’s pretty gross. But it’s what you have to go through for good herring. It was a hopeful sign of family Sunday mornings to come: mornings filled with many kinds of stinky fish; mornings of love.