(1937) I know Katy has made sponsor of others and now she brings in her brother Fritz. He is a nice fellow and Carole knows him. I feel better about this with him there. We will tell Carole she can write but also tell her not to assume too much. It is a huge responsibility to bring in a girl and she must know a little what her life will be. It is not so easy, without a Mother or Father there, a home. Berta didn’t have to do like that. I had to leave to go to war.

I’m afraid Carole will want to leave. She is impatient waiting for things to get better and frankly, they get worse. Bertha and I have talked about trying to go to America as a family and Katy tells us this is hard. So I must tell Carole to ask Katy with her own letter, and hope for the best.

Now Katy comes back to us and says she will take Carole when she can come and not to wait too long. She will be able to have a job for her. Maybe she can take care of a baby or clean house for a family–something a young girl who does not speak so much English can do. She says there a many people who speak German in New York and Carole will learn fast.

Things are bad in America too, but not the inflation like we have where our money is worth nothing. Katy says it is not so easy to make money, like when she came—15 years ago. Her husband is a butcher so at least they will always have food. Also, New York is such a big city—there are all kinds of people. We will talk about this with Carole tonight.

I am filled with sadness to think I must send my child away so she can live the life every father dreams of for his child. I feel so defeated. A Father should be able to give his family all the things they need. Not to be wealthy but to be a family together. Now, just when we should be talking about boys and school, we send her off to a strange place. That is wrong. She already does an apprenticeship because they were so mean to her in school she asked to leave. The world here is closing in on us very tightly. This is no time to be a young person here. Not even my kind of person. Even older people are shocked at what happens to their country and they are not comfortable. Things are so bad and worse every day.

(1938) Berta’s family goes to Berlin and I think we might have to send Eva to school there. How can we send both girls away. Our hearts are tearing in two.

What identifies a person with a country? Is it the culture, the language, the neighbors or the neighborhood? Fighting in the war for my country, as a young man, that made me realize that this country was very important. I could die for my country: so many young men did—even friends of mine. It was terrible war. We lived in trenches, cold, dreary, filthy, endless. Fortunately the war ended before I was sent to the Eastern Front—that would only have been worse still. But I really knew I was a German—people wanted to kill me for it. I saw the very best in my countrymen and the very worst.

You know, we are not even citizens anymore. It’s bad enough to have to carry papers with the Swastika all over them and to see all those arm bands everywhere. But I am not even considered German. Such an insult. It’s unimaginable.

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.

It’s so easy to button your coat and walk away from the average hateful fool you meet on the street. But not when he’s sunk his hooks into you and you’re part of the system. Not when he’s your Father. You loved him. But then came rejection after rejection, accusation and incompetence, and the countless stupidities, missed opportunities, childish snits and antagonism. Always, always he keeps clawing after you for more.

It’s a sickness with him, I’m sure of it. You have to pull away from the system, take yourself out of the game. Scramble up the side of the pool and watch that vile liquid spiral down. It’s a Mickey Finn of tears and anxious sweat, judgment and manipulation, claustrophobia and drowning. If you dare to exit it will be held against you. All who leave the club are judged guilty. That’s his legacy of paranoia, father to sons.

Oh, I know this system, honey. Remember, I loved him too and I gave it all away. Now, don’t you do that. Don’t you let him follow you here. This is your place, a new start, a garden plot ready to plant. Steal yourself away. Find the door to slam, the switch to flick. Can’t you find it? It’s there on every machine. Pull the plug, if you have to.

You don’t have to be a purist, mind you. You needn’t banish him. Just don’t take each wicked dare he dangles. Make it easy for yourself, but keep to your rules. You can’t make him happy; you can’t fix him, no matter what you do. There’s no winning these battles. You’ve seen that over and over. He’s only for himself. He chose the cinch of Chaillot’s mad mistress. He danced the angry white man’s jive into a frenzy. It’s not your fault he got lost there. You can’t be blamed but you can protect yourself. You can’t afford to let him pull you down and down and down again to his crazy vantage.

You are smart, beautiful, responsible, and full of good dreams and desires. You are the best daughter you can be. You owe him nothing: not some crazy contract; no explanation; not a shred of your precious energy; sanity, anger, resentment; not to mention your goodwill, sympathy or kindness. Keep those precious gifts for those who deserve them.

I know, it seems easier to make nice and get on the good side. Why take a stand and stir up the hornets? But then, when you are dreading the next breath, who’s hurting then?

You can expect the occasional flash of charm. It’s hard to say no, to police the boundaries, but that’s part of his system. It’s the part he does so very, very well. He’ll suck you into the vortex he keeps spinning around him. Hover the ax at the edge of the lifeboat, ready for the fingers of the drowning, who would pull you in.

You’re right, there may be a time he’ll be sorry he wasted your love. But that’s not today’s worry. Preserve the gain this distance affords you. Drink the new and luscious life before you. Exhale those deadly toxins: the fear, the apprehension, the anxiety. Here in your new life, soak in the experiences that await you—good and bad. They’re new and they’re all your own. Time to take care of yourself.

Go-Go boots were my big dream. Aunt Bess would have bought them for me. She understood craving fashion. But they only brought sneers and disapproval from Mom, so I learned to hide my Go-Go boot lust. It marked me with shame and disappointment. Forty some years later it still burns in my nostrils.

My father insisted “When shoes fit you should buy them.” He died with a gallery of fine Italian 10 triple As that were barely worn. He bought me the beautiful soft cream suede shoes, too fragile for Chicago’s messy streets.

“What if someone steps on me and marks them? Don’t they make my feet look big ?”

A girl was supposed to be small, look small, she can’t be too small—even a shrimp like me wanted to crawl in a corner and be smaller still.

My first heels were silver to match my fine-fitting sparkly blue dress for my cousin’s Goodbye-Columbus-wedding. By the next year I’d discovered platform sandals with three inch heels. I was the first girl in my class to wear heels to school. I still grasp my moment of cobbled redemption. By then I was officially short, but no more. I was glamorous and showy. And if my feet were wet in the constant rains, I consoled myself that they would dry out quickly.

The last time bowling shoes were fashionable mine were red and blue suede. They were fun and daring at a time when jeans were the only pants. My other shoes were black knee high boots perfect for long India-print dresses, until I involuntarily wore them into Jill’s  swimming pool. They never dried quite right.

I’ve had lots of red shoes, probably as many as six pair at a time: fine Italian reds; athletic reds; sandal reds; shiny red fuck-me pumps; red clogs; red keens. Red shoes go with everything– they don’t make my feet look big. These days I’m down to four pair of red shoes.

A favorite college score was a pair of green leather Flamenco-styled laced shoes with bold high heels. But soon I entered the years of Birkenstocks and earth shoes, as if someone my height needed a negative heel. After conservative pumps with mannish suits I swore off heels, increasingly immersing my feet in supportive training shoes of one kind or another. Yes, I’m a woman of sensible, terribly sensible shoes. I still own lots of them. After a ten-pair purge I’m down to just over thirty…pair. I buy shoes prophylactically, restoratively, because they are there and occasionally even because I need them.  But No, I never had Go-Go boots.  Did you?

And my Father too. Finally I understand some of those strange things he knew were true, things he tried to tell me, but how could someone under fifty possibly understand those convoluted lessons? And how could he have resisted trying to share them with me? They were lessons I never wanted at the time—eyeballs rolling. Now I’m rummaging through dog-eared brain cells and time-warped tapes to find them again.

Honor your Mother and your Father; that’s one of the big ten. Because you will become them; was that the tag line? That sort of goes with whole Vengeful God of the Old Testament thing now, doesn’t it?

Of course our parents were saints, when we choose to romanticize them: the greatest generation. I begin to comprehend the difficulties they faced, the challenges and uncertainties they met and played through without transition, therapy, Prozac, chevre, or good American wine. Sometimes I even understand the well-meaning if imperfect solutions they foisted upon our lives.

And our parents are a pain. I listen to the frustrations of my friends dealing with frail parents. We swear to pinch each other out of such behaviors when we are older, frailer, more fearful and increasingly dependent. We will tell someone when we fall, feel ill, depressed, or lonely. We’ll make sure several people have ALL the keys they may need to our houses, cars and caravans. We won’t wait for people to call us. We will initiate contact in whatever the favored medium of the day may be.

We will clean stuff out, give and throw it away and keep the important stuff where it can be found. We will tell our doctors EVERYTHING. We will not cast people out for their choices in lip color, hosiery, language, religion, or the lack thereof. We will try to be “with it,” but not too with it—if you know what I mean.

I’m curious to see how we do with that. Will I really tell Julie that she’s crazy-making? Or will I be too nice? Will I cause my daughter to nag at me endlessly and yet remain deaf to the things that could make my life easier? Some of my people have already become rather rigid. I’m still busy discovering the rules I adopted unwittingly forty and more years ago and breaking them over my knee. I’m a grown-up; I don’t need no stinkin’ rules. But what makes us think we’ll age more gracefully? After all—we are our Mothers and our Fathers.

Geography offered me five choices. I picked canopy. Apples, dust and guano challenged my arrival, but skin leathered and I rose. I passed familiar robins and crows. Shy new neighbors hopped away, surprised to see skin.It’s such a loud neighborhood, especially in the mornings. As dirt caked, broke and caked again, I fit in. Steamy winds pushed my rags away and left me sparrow-suited. Grabbers, flappers and buzzers friended me—arboreal facebook.

Capuchins laugh, squirrels nag and macaws complain loudly—the usual. My towering shade-home transports me—climbing, clawing and hanging around.

A Trip to the Zoo

Mike the polar bear loved his crowds as much as the marshmallows and nuts they pelted at him. High atop his haunches he was stronger than all and a master showman. My little peanuts didn’t make it across the moat.

On the way to the cat house, Daddy showed me again how to crack the peanut, rub the red husk away and toss both nuts into my mouth, all with one hand.

I loved the warm salty nuts, his thick red fingers, his bulging eyes. He was just like Mike—larger than life and a little intimidating.

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. Not so much respecting. I knew this commandment must mean something, but I’d have to assume 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 mostly take care of my memories of Dad and Mom. 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? Remember, rediscover 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 it 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. 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.

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 pass those legacies. But our desire to protect our children recycles fear unto 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 into my heart to touch the memories you placed there and I will live now, both a part and apart

My mother’s hands were strong and rough.
They smelled from onions and chicken gizzards
just tossed in the soup pot.
They peeled band-aid wrappers impatiently,
And slapped them on hard and hasty.

She knew the world would smack me.
For a few years she’d hold it back,
glossed with half-forgotten songs.
I miss those strong, hasty hands now that they can’t comfort me,
hurt me, embarrass me or love me anymore.