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.

It was hard to ask for things—it was better to wait. I was shy, scared. I tried not to presume or predict or take things for granted. She was flashing, passionate. She would walk long distances, attaching us to various bus schedules even though there was a perfectly good Chrysler Imperial parked in front of the apartment building. She didn’t drive. She had a license, but she was afraid to drive, afraid that she’d hurt the car and inconvenience my father. She never did anything that she wasn’t going to be good at.

I was kept by her side until I went to nursery school and there I encountered the world of other children—I world where I wasn’t at all sure of getting the rules right and relegated myself to a subordinate tier in some popularity system that I sensed and continued to apply to all situations in my life. As uncomfortable as I might have been at school, I treasured my time away from home. Mom wasn’t surprised by my non-popularity nor did she sympathize. I liked boys and wanted attention from them. I always had a crush on a boy—even in nursery school.

At age 4 I realized that her edicts were senseless and rigid and that I simply had to swallow myself and make do until I could leave home at 18. The subject of the conflict was a tangerine. But I abstracted easily. After that it was largely a waiting game with some recipes for allowable escape. She seemed extremely protective so I didn’t try much.

Once I broke away there were no issues of control—just visits—always punctuated by that teen aged nasty bitchy self-defended sort of attitude. Infrequent visits where I wanted so much to get a story, a connection and failed over and over.

Until my Dad was dying

Then there were moments of breakthrough. Real life happening in front of us was too sad and scary. This gave us—me—an entrée into the past. I got some good stories, some good times, I saw that even though Mom’s talk always sounded like a pessimistic give-up, she believed the most positive and acted on that. When it came to my Dad’s illness she would not admit death into her consciousness. We never talked about these things but that’s what I see looking back. We lost him. Me: a-blaze, a-busy, with my life not well reconciled or integrated away from here and her: a dream-scape of freedom and suddenly, he was gone leaving here alone. I didn’t get it nor did I respond to it particularly well, except to invite her to think about a move to my city. Just as she was getting to think about that her sister was diagnosed with cancer.

Here was the time to play out all that tension between them, the bossy older sister, the sister who was cheated by life yet again–this time on the other end of life. Her sister—the smarter, harder, softer and more hidden one–resented this.

She cranked along down and depressed by the endless 9 years of death and destruction. I stayed isolated in my little world.

But I never did the interview, the taping. I was busy—too busy to get to Mother, who had always just been there and who would always be there, right? I should have learned from my father’s death that that wasn’t true. But his death also made it seem maybe too late. 1990? Too late? Not really. But too preoccupied with a baby and the demise of my legal career and a marriage and life that seemed to impose an awful lot of rules. Rules that I made up–yes. Only now can I see how I might have said NO to the lot of that.

There were many stages of deterioration, but the mother across from me in the restaurant can still tell me stories that are more alive for her than a report of the day. They can move her, me, strangers. They have remarkable detail and remarkable holes. Every cut is jagged.

I feel a commitment to those stories, to that younger woman, to that sense of legacy, to all she went through to craft herself a life that paved the way for me. I am grateful that she made herself a life, a family, rebuilt her family and that I received the benefit of that. It becomes mine to hold, mine to comprehend, mine to share and mine to perpetuate. I feel almost a panic, as if I may already have waited too long, too nice, too respectfully, too remotely. She did her life in real time with no directions and without the luxury of planning or self-help. Hopefully my sons and I will never know the extremities that buffeted her and her generation. The strength and resilience that forged her life as an American—I want to get it down because it is my legacy and my strength.

I knew she had to be so convenient to everything that rain simply couldn’t be an excuse to stay home. She walked to university classes and lectures, enjoyed the symphony season, looked forward to monthly breakfasts at the art museum, tutored in a neighborhood high school, baby sat for her granddaughter, read countless spy novels and became a part of my normal life and the lives of my friends, who would give her a lift home after gatherings at my house.

She knew lots of faces in her building and had lobby, pool and elevator chats. But she didn’t make real friends. Maybe that wasn’t odd–Mom wasn’t the girlfriend-type. If she needed to talk to someone, she struck up a conversation with whoever sat next to her. And boy, could she talk.

The talking had become more intense and less attached to subject. It was as if someone inserted a random tape and pushed play. There was no pause button, no chance to get a word, thought or prompt in edgewise. Her stories took over. Not the interesting stories people might have wanted to hear say, about New York during the war, or reuniting her family or moving them all to Texas. She gave lots of reports about my childhood and the wonderful produce men at the Safeway. My friends kindly took their turns being waylaid by her at a party.

I threw Mom the best eightieth birthday party I could dream up. I invited all the people she knew in the buildings and most of my friends. I decorated the party room and we had elegant flowers, champagne, lots of shrimp and a beautiful chocolate cake. When she blew out her candles, half her brain cells left her. At least it seemed like that’s when it all began.

Maybe the incessant and random way she talked was a hint things weren’t quite normal. That, and the dressing incident. Just days before her party, I had Thanksgiving at my house. Mom was in charge of the dressing—a specialty of hers. When I came to pick her up, the apartment didn’t smell like cooking. Mom had a plate of little stuffing squares ready. I was horrified. She showed me the box and affirmed they really were that easy to make and delicious.

I assumed something must have gone very wrong with her initial batch of dressing, although there was no burnt dressing in the garbage and no smell of it in the air. My head was squeezed between my expectations for my holiday table and this indicator of my Mom’s well-being. I helped her pack up the squares and her various bags and we went to my house for a dressing-less Thanksgiving.

The next major incident happened when we went to our accountant during tax season. Mom didn’t like the financial record keeping that fell to her as a widow, but she understood money and investing and accomplished it all with routine complaining. I took those complaints as a sign that things were normal.

The morning of the appointment, I called to say I’d be a little early so we could do an errand on the way to the accountant’s. She sounded distant and shaken.

“I can’t find the stuff for the accountant. “

Not to worry, I’ll come right over. I was sure it would just take some fresh eyes. She had probably set the stuff down in an odd place, or maybe draped her coat over it by accident.

“What are we looking for, Mom? An envelope? A brick file? A shoebox?”

She didn’t know.

Her financial records were shoved into the usual accumulators, but they hadn’t been opened, summarized or organized. I couldn’t tell if the quarterly tax payments had been made. She’d done nothing to get ready for this appointment. There was no pile under a coat or anywhere else.

The next alarming incident happened later on that spring, when I noticed that she had some new decorative items in her apartment one day. There was a plastic table and chairs for her patio, a large ugly tapestry for me, and some really tacky vases. Mom had collected fine bone china for years.

“Mom, where did these come from? “

“Oh, that lady was having a sale—she was moving with her boyfriend.”

Mom made it sound like she had bought one item but then the sellers kept bringing stuff over that they couldn’t get rid of. I discovered objects in other rooms; items with crosses on them were especially suspect. I checked on her jewelry and silver—they were there. How much cash could she have had?

Suddenly Mom was missing our dates, even if I called to remind her a couple of hours before. The first time it happened, I drove right to the nearby “psycho” Safeway. My blood pressure soared as I wove through the druggies and winos in the parking lot. There she was, in her produce temple, where the nice men kept the neighborhood ladies in trim, along with the fruit and vegetables. My Mother appreciated their care and now, so did I.

Mom and I talked on and off about memory and forgetfulness. She would say, “We all have that. It’s annoying, but it’s not a problem yet. I’d let you know.”

She had her answers down pat.

The symphony season turned into a challenge. All her dates were written on her calendar but what reminds you to look at the calendar? What reminds you to look at the note to remind you to look at the calendar? I took on that job. Once I started, the bottom dropped out and the symphony was the least of my concerns.

Meds: some of them have to be taken in the morning; some in the evening, some both. Fortunately, Mom didn’t have any really brittle conditions. I started with one of those day by day pill boxes. We got it all set up and made a special place for it—where she couldn’t help but notice it first thing every morning. Great, that was fixed.

Not so fast. If you don’t remember whether you took your meds, you also might not remember it’s Monday. So the fact that Monday’s pills were gone didn’t faze Mom—she’d take another day’s pills.

Ok—we can talk pills on the phone each day. That meets some social needs and takes care of the meds all at once. But again—five minutes after the phone call, she might go back to that pill box and decide she hadn’t taken her pills that day, whatever the name of it might be. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember a half-hour phone conversation that featured pill taking as its major theme at least three different times. I also couldn’t believe I couldn’t get her to follow along with me on the phone.

“OK Mom, get a glass of water. Get the pills out from today’s section. You got them? Great. Now swallow them, right now, ok? I’ll wait. Did you take them all? Great, now put the box back on the sideboard and you’re done with that.”

Who knew what she was really doing. Taking them? Not taking them? Taking them again? Or not again? Yes. But the real problem was always getting bigger and more significant as I was chasing the last symptom.

I could go over there and bring her pills each day. Then she couldn’t double down. Would I have to go back in the evening for the eye drops? She seemed to be pretty good about those. She’d taken them for years. But again—what did I really know?

She began to warehouse chicken breasts. The psycho Safeway was her recreation center. Each time she went, she must have bought the same things. But she wasn’t really eating. She was losing weight and the freezer was filling up. When we came for dinner, we saw her forget that the fish was broiling. Was she distracted by company? Or was this usual? The whole situation needed to be changed, and pretty quickly.

She was undergoing testing with a geriatric psychologist. “Alzheimer’s,” he said. Not mild mind you. She was already experiencing what he described as some middle-level of dementia. Mom talked her way right through the diagnosis session with the psychologist. She let nothing in. He was quiet and careful, bringing her back around to discuss the disease and the future and her needs but she avoided it.

I knew I would have to break through by raising the housing issue. I wasn’t afraid to pose the idea of Assisted Living and I was lucky, Mom was quite receptive. She had been interested in the rise of these new facilities and levels of care; she had friends who had moved into places.

I would scout the places first, sample the administration, the smells, the opportunities and the official reports. “Yes, the vaulted ceiling over the dining room creates lovely light and space. But the morning bacon grease just hangs there.” Bathrooms—yuch. Managers with polyester ties—it shouldn’t matter, but it does. I brought Mom to see the best choice.

Everything was lovely—light and airy. Happy old people worked at clay and conversation. Meals could be flexible. The food was pretty real, the dining rooms lovely, smells in check, meds administered and ties were made of silk. Everything about it seemed quite good, and they had a place available.

“This studio won’t last, you know. Are you ready to make a decision?” Into the pressure cooker.

“Yes, we’ll take it.”

I got boxes and told Mom I’ll come pack. I didn’t want her to aggravate her back. I wanted her to have the things she enjoyed: her china beauties and photo albums and her special pieces of furniture. But I couldn’t get her to leave the stuff alone. I unpacked her packing and repacked. I made boxes inaccessible so she wouldn’t unpack them. Together we made her hallway practically impassible. Finally, the two bedroom, two bath apartment that was too, too full of her things was shoehorned into a spacious studio. Her new home was really very nice.

I hadn’t anticipated that with the move, another huge chunk of brain cells would be left behind completely, including my Mother’s sense of order. She would look for underwear in a bathroom drawer or a kitchen cabinet just as soon as she would look in her dresser drawer, even though it was the same dresser she used in the apartment. She could meander around the facility and chance into meals and companionship. I could find her. But she couldn’t seem to get to the nice classes or to the laundry right across the hall from her studio.

Her ability to function had been a moth-eaten veil and when she stepped out of her apartment building–poof–a tiny gust of air blew it to bits. It was gone forever with nothing to replace it, nothing to cover her confusion and nothing to stabilize the continuing erosion.

After a bit, she couldn’t stay in her room at night. Calls came. “Your mother wants to call a cab. She says she wants to leave. Your mother is arguing. Your mother is agitated. Would you talk to your mother about this? “

The administration found her agitation very inconvenient, a sign that her condition was worsening. I finally had to tell the manager “That passive nice-little-old-lady who sits around the dining room all spaced out—that’s someone I never met before. That difficult woman you call me about—that’s the last shred of my Mother.”

0ne call told me that Mom apparently fell in her room and turned her china cabinet over. Fortunately she hadn’t hurt herself. Her fragile treasures lay in mountains of treacherous shards. By the time I got there, the huge volume of tiny pieces had been swept away. I combed through the larger chunks to see what remained; I set up the odd cup, the spared saucer, here and there.

Mom was suitably relieved that she wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t despondent about losing her well-tended collection of china and memories. She had left people and things before. She knew what was important. But her new frame of no-mind added too much distance. The memories linked to those pieces were simply gone, not mourned at all, not even with her usual tough wistfulness.

I began to brace myself before answering my phone. “What trouble is she in now?” It turns out plenty. One day she walked out the front door and I was told to move her within the week.

I scrambled to move her into yet a smaller place with more care: a lockdown. It sounded terrible, but once I had her surrounded by other dementia patients, the hole suited the peg. She was no longer a staff problem but, rather, a staff favorite. She turned her annoying judgments based on people’s looks and clothes into a non-stop stream of compliments to the female staff. This helped her. Repetitive compliments were easier to take than the abuse and belligerency some patients dished out.

All through the declining years I was amazed at what stayed, what went, and when. I had heard about short term and long term memory but that didn’t mean much after the diagnosis came. At first, it troubled me that she’d forget that my father, her mate of thirty-nine years, was dead. She seemed to think he went off someplace and callously neglected to write. I didn’t want her to feel abandoned. I didn’t want her to live with resentment that his dead sisters never called because they really never liked her. But I couldn’t get through.

I would take her to the nearby grocery to walk and see how life still operated around her. One spring day, the store had an end-cap display of Passover products. She stared blankly. Then she reached for a tin of Matzo meal. Neither of us had seen Matzo meal in a tin before. She held it aloft admiringly and said “This is great. Why didn’t we have this years ago.” I saw Laura for a moment–something was still working in there.

We had occasional crises, usually over lost teeth and glasses. But mostly it was one long downward slide after she fell off those first two cliffs: the birthday and moving out of her apartment. When people would ask about her I always reported that she was good from the neck down.

Finally in March of last year the end came. She was sent into the emergency room after a caregiver noticed she was less responsive than usual. Her body unwound for three days of gentle hospice care. I chose not to move her back to her home–it seemed unnecessarily disruptive. I sat with her and we waited. I think it was reasonably good for us both.

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.

About a year after safety—her own and that of her fellow apartment dwellers—prompted me to move her into an assisted facility, I noticed that nouns eluded her conversation with peers. She spoke at length with other women, their bodies performing the conversation dance. Inflections called the tune. The subject was absent, not merely unspoken. But these rather charming encounters seemed to soothe the social itch.

Then, even with me, her familiar expressions floated, untethered by subject. I would strenuously try to form and turn conversation. Stumbling through my own midlife tangles, I still needed nouns. She would respond with the tired phrases that suited most any question, lifted by the tones I’d heard all my life and punctuated by familiar physical mien. So like her; so changed.

When this form of interaction evaporated, I longed for the good old days of no nouns. She became increasingly silent or simply repeated syllables. Chuckles, Laura was generous with her chuckles. And still there were occasional glimmers of the all-too-familiar judgments—now without the verdict. “This one’s too…” or “She’s not enough…” Laura was still keeping score in the maze of tangled plaques, somewhere, sometimes. After long months of this type of silence, I could not mistake such a radical turn. One morning, my Mother looked into my eyes and said to me: “You are beautiful.”

The small sentence was buoyant and penetrating. I looked for evidence of lucidity. Truly the old saw should be coherence is golden—especially when it’s filled with loveliness rather than complaints so common on the tongues of old women. Was it an accident? A flash? No matter. I was there, for once, when she put it together.

“Sax isn’t on the list. What? It’s not offered at my school?” The teacher tells me that students from my school can apply to go to Nichols Junior High for lessons on instruments we don’t offer here. But not girls; girls don’t play the saxophone.

“Oh.”

This is so unfair. I want to shout and tell them this is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of—just like my Father says about most things. My parents roll their eyes and tell me to choose another instrument.

“You can’t get to Nichols for lessons, anyway.”

OK. My second choice is bassoon. The Bassoon is also very beautiful and very exotic (“exotic” is big—I am not going to play the violin like everyone else.) Bassoon is so exotic that nobody else even knows what it is. Well not kids; not even my teacher. That’s what makes it so right. I know it’s the long, skinny wooden tube you blow through a reed.

There’s the fatal flaw of the bassoon. I’m not allowed to play anything that goes in my mouth, because of my teeth! Ethel next door—my favorite babysitter—has worn braces for four years apparently because she plays the clarinet. It pushes her teeth out while the dentist is trying to push them in. I’m not so sure I believe that’s why she’s had braces for so long. And my teeth need to be pushed out. But as usual, there’s no arguing with my Mother’s edict.

“How about flute? “

“No—nothing in the mouth.”

“But the flute doesn’t go in the mouth. It just leans against the lip.”

Facts are no match for my Mother’s pronouncements. I’ve run into this before. You can’t predict things with her and you can’t make sense of them. It drives my Dad crazy, too.

OK, I’m studying the list. I have to have an answer by next week. Exotic and beautiful.

“I’m thinking about the cello?”

They seem to like this. They discuss how expensive cellos are—in case they need to buy one in a couple of years. But we all agree the cello is very beautiful and doesn’t go in the mouth.

I’m barely taller than my half-sized cello. School lessons and orchestra begin in a week. It’s not so heavy, really, but it’s kind of hard to carry, especially since I live at the end of the school boundary. I walk it a mile to school and then back again. When the wind blows a lot I have to stop walking and throw my weight over the top to hold it down.

Mrs. G, our conductor and teacher, is supposed to be mean. She is very tall—I’ve never seen such a tall strong woman. She wears old lady shoes that tie and nylon dresses with belts and little prints. Her gray hair is swept around into swirls and held together with combs. She’s always nice to me; she laughs at my jokes.

Mrs. G’s main instrument is the trumpet. A woman who plays the trumpet! I announce this important information at dinner. I’m sure girls can play the saxophone! But it’s too late now. I need to reaffix my loyalties to the cello.

Mrs. G gets really angry during orchestra when the boys haven’t practiced and they won’t shut up. Our trumpet players are the wild boys. She waves her stick at them. When they jump up, she chases them around the section and out the door and down the hall.

Harold Hwang is our brilliant first violinist who shows off all the time because the rest of us bore him to death squeaking and blatting away. When he plays it really sounds like somthing, so he gets all the solos. All together, the orchestra has that slow sour school wheeze.

Getting the cello to school becomes harder when the snow starts. Robin’s mom drives her bass to school. A VW bug can’t hold a girl and a bass, so Robin still walks. My Mom doesn’t drive, though. I try to make it to the middle of each block before I set the cello down and change hands. As I get close to school though, I have to change hands a couple of times a block, so when I get to school the canvas case is soaking wet.

Of course, with the cello, I don’t walk on the snow piles that line Dodge. But it’s harder to avoid the ice balls that fly across the street. Once we cross Oakton, I can barely walk with the cello. It’s crowded and pushy and the top of the ice layer is wet and slick. It’s so crowded, I have to hug the cello to me, so I can’t keep kids from sliding into it. But it’s a good shield.

One day the cello takes a critical ice-ball hit to the bridge. I’m terrified during the wait for orchestra, but fortunately, Mrs. G can get the bridge back in. My parents don’t even have to know about this near disaster.

When I start sixth grade at the new junior high, even though my walk is two blocks shorter, it’s the new theatre that wins my heart. I drop orchestra and start learning about the apron and the battons.

As hard as it is to push my way through the wind and sludge on Sheridan Drive for piano lessons each week, I’m very relieved I’m not carrying a cello.

It was a mixed blessing. I hated the milk, but the sandwich was an exotic delight. Between perfect identical white spongey layers, I’d find a thin strip of something pink. It didn’t look anything like a sandwich at my house.

When we became big kids in middle school, we ate in a cafeteria. Suddenly, even lunch could be a source of embarrassment. I was measured against what “everybody else” had in their lunchbox. Yet again, I did not measure up.

Everybody else’s lunch had a perfect white square that floated out of a small individual sandwich bag. The popular girls in my class had waxed paper bags.

The white square would be cut in half, to reveal two perfect bands, one violet and one creamy brown. I admired how evenly the grape jelly would saturate the white sponge, moistening it just enough to make it edible. The creamy peanut butter was applied with expert strokes that stretched it all the way to the corners, just like on TV. Most admirably, this sandwich remained stable when bitten.

How could I get my Mother to reproduce this? She grew up across the Atlantic in a land bereft of peanut butter, white bread and grape jelly. For her, assimilation had already turned out to be a cruel trick. What could she possibly know about fitting in?

I’d inhale deeply before venturing into my disheveled paper bag. First, the sandwich bag was all wrong. It could be any plastic bag that found its way into the house, usually cradling my Dad’s stiff shirt or the Tribune. These bags were huge, unwieldy and, by the time they reached the cafeteria, sticky inside and out. The sandwich didn’t float out— often the bag would have to be removed from the sandwich. After this surgery, my hands, sometimes up to the forearms, would be sticky and dangerous, attracting napkins and transferring permanent purple ooze. (Finally my mother did discover Baggies—a great relief for both of us. I could sacrifice the finer point of waxed paper.)

But then the really embarrassing part emerged—the sandwich. This was made of two irregular slices of hard, seed-laden, black bread. They received uneven applications of chunky peanut butter, and slid against each other like restless tectonic plates. Moments into the bite, the bread released its magma: a writhing core of European fruit preserves. Black current seeds would spill over the rubbery crusts onto the tray. The odd strawberry or rind oozed and slithered across brown mountains and valleys, sometimes shooting right out onto the table: suburban failure.

This sandwich reconciled my mother’s struggle perfectly. I pleaded for peanut butter sandwiches. But my immigrant Mother feared that serving peanut butter to her only child was a sign of laziness, or worse, cheapness. However, fruit preserves! Now here was something a European could take pride in, embellish, indulge. She could atone for her peanut butter neglect.

I ate it. Of course I ate it; it was delicious.The nutty mixture of grains and seeds augmented the peanut butter, worthy ally to the large, carefully selected fruits.

I ate it and struggled to control it. I stole glances at the popular kids eating their cool, calm amethyst beauties.

I’d give Mom more instruction tonight. Tomorrow I might have one less thing to be self-conscious about. Or not.