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.

When I got the job with Bartons in 1940 I had to rent a room on my own. I remember thinking that was great—now I can live however I want. Only I had to pay most of my money on the room. I was finally in Manhattan, and I had the smallest room and 3 flights to walk up with just a hot plate to cook on. I didn’t mind not cooking. I ate from the automat mostly. Some of them were actually pretty good. A lot of people ate that way. The one near my house wasn’t so good but it also wasn’t as expensive as some of the good ones.

I learned how to run a shop working for Bartons. They were very demanding but then there was a lot of time when I was completely in charge, and I liked that. Sometimes I’d get too busy—especially around holidays. Then I was finally allowed to hire a part-time girl. That was better and someone to supervise. Sometimes it wasn’t worth the headache. Once I had a girl who stole. I cut that right out.

When I went to work at Macy’s I thought I’d really made it. The first job was way out in New Jersey. That was awful. I spent all my money and time on carfare. But within a month I was working in Manhattan. It was busy, fun, everything I wanted.

I was so young, so energetic and so repressed by my environment, you know, that I couldn’t imagine anything bad happening to me here or that there might be things I wouldn’t know or couldn’t figure out. I thought the hard part would be learning English. I took my family for granted—I think most children do that. I didn’t realize how important it is to have a safe place with a family. I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t have that anymore—a place where I’d always be accepted, where they’d love me and tolerate me, they’d take care of me as best they could. I think maybe I had already lost some of that because outside my home in Germany, things were dangerous. But I was going to be rid of all those dangers. I didn’t think about the dangers anyone would encounter living in New York.

When I lived in New York I had friends who were protected by their family. I saw how nice that was, how it was easier in so many ways, but then I got to really live in New York and that was what I wanted. Then I thought the girls who lived at home in their little neighborhoods were a little simple and that I was really living.

I did well with the few English lessons I had with the Catholic Priest before I left Dorsten. I had learned some French in school. It didn’t seem to me that learning a language was all that hard and everyone says German is a hard language and I already knew that. But it was different trying to do everything in English, especially when everything else was new too.

New York is so impersonal. That was good and bad. I could hide my problems because no one on the street really cared about me and my problems. But then that’s also very lonely. I was lucky I was so young and resilient.

I lived with Katy and Charlie. I could speak German at home with them—they spoke German a lot of the time and there were always a lot of people in New York who spoke German, if I was really frustrated. But at work, at the Israel’s house, I had to understand everything in English. These weren’t difficult things—things like what to make for dinner, how many people, arrangements for the baby. But when I knew all of that I was so bored. I’d take the baby to the park and all the other girls who took care of babies were immigrant girls too. They spoke Polish or Russian or some such thing or Spanish. They had no education, usually, and it wasn’t any good for me to practice my English. I didn’t want people like that for friends. I wanted to get on with it.

Then I worked for the Feldman’s. I kept house for them; they were an elderly German Jewish couple in Brooklyn. They were very nice to me. They loaned me money that I sent off to Uruguay to someone who was supposed to get a visa for Mama and Daddy and Ilsa to go to Uruguay. I can’t remember all about it. It was a lot of money. It took me a long time to work and pay back that loan and of course it was a scam, a con. We never got visas for them. It was impossible. When the war finally came in Germany, in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, then it was impossible for anyone to leave.

The letters stopped and anything that did get through was practically all blacked out by the censors. I just had to think about having the money for when and if I could ever get them out. I wanted to be ready. That’s what I learned: you always have to be ready and act fast. I guess I did that with everything that ever happened to me after that time. That’s how I married your father too.

I thought all these girls must have that same core of loneliness I did, buried under the layers of wool and nylon. I could see it in the smudges of black liner gathered in on that little bulge beneath the outer corner of each eye on the ride home. Most of us were young; we didn’t have lines yet. Some did, the gals in their 30s who moved home to Mama after their husbands left for overseas. But we all had that little smudge, we all had a little outline of caked powder around the outside of our noses. Our cheeks had run out of any real color and the little circles of rouge stood out under the harsh lights. As the train jerked toward home our cheeks would flush again from wearing our coats in the train. Then we threw them back against the dark windy streets walking home.

We were beautiful, we were ripe, we were well put-together. We were hopelessly single, unhappy mistresses, or waiting for boyfriends who were far from home being shot at or playing around. We had mastered that New York style of invisibility. And we were lonely, buried in newspapers, cheap paperback books or fervent invisibility. Sometimes a girl let a sigh escape. It jolted the rest of us back on our guard.

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.

After a noisy ride we crossed the clattering tracks, scurried across a platform, and pushed onto a second car—this more modern than the first. This one fairly glided into a sleek urban oasis that had collected a spiderweb of train lines, filling each passenger with a croissant and spitting her into a new world of the up-above. Sun spat in my mole-eyes.

Don’t the others even notice or care that we just came from the earth’s core, pick and chisel of modern long-ago, secret connections stained with creosote. Why don’t they slow down a bit to take in the miracle of our reappearance, or at least to allow us to merge onto the crowded streets while our eyes adjust, while our ears replace the screeching of the train with the horns and engines of surface traffic.

But they don’t seem to notice or care. With only the slightest hesitation, we are swept up in the lockstep, self-important, busy, dirty, sweaty life above. It’s a block and a half before I dare to give voice to my sneaking suspicion: ”We’re headed in the wrong direction.”

We pull to the buildings’ side, a careful parking ballet—even on foot—to peek again at that much sought-after map. No help for the surface world. Oh well.

Slowed down to the pace of my understanding and smaller-city sort of digestion, I could see there were islands of moments, spaces, commerce and friendliness in that unrelenting march forward. These islands might permit a question. They might yield an answer, and we might correct course, relax a bit, even smile—foreign as that may seem. Once we had that map, we knew how to ask. We were lost with purpose.

“Tomorrow you can see Diana’s new piece.” Diana lives next door to my hostess and she’s a Liturgical Choreographer, whatever that means. Delightful—a free dance performance in Manhatten.

On Sunday morning I head off on foot through Central Park to the Church where the performance will start at ten. Ten a.m. seems an odd time for a dance performance.

The wind is especially wicked, whipping my unsuspecting flesh through my gloves and past my lungs. Although I’m in my twenties, I’m gasping and teary-eyed. Mind you, I’m no winter wimp. In college, I walked that evil bridge across the Mississippi many many January Minnesota nights. My Chicago mile-to-school-up-hill-both-ways stories are in mothballs for future grandchildren. Cold weather in Manhattan is different, though—it’s windier and lonelier.

I’m wearing just about everything I brought to New York. The duck-hunter’s ugly down vest is poochyand brown long before either were fashionable. The black wool coat weighs me down and twists around my legs in the wind. I might as well have left my jeans and long underwear at home for all the good they do me.

Central Park is empty. I endure it and don’t see a person until I’m heading south on Park Avenue. He’s a mid fifties sort of guy in a black-diamond mink coat walking a well-dressed Airdale. Steam rises from both of them; I am invisible. That’s ok, I’m relieved to be walking measurable blocks alongside buildings. I can think about my destination rather than Jack London endings.

Oh I noticed that mink coat, all right. And the gracious buildings and classy cars. Sexy ladies from the eighties, hunh? I wonder if this might not be a fancier affair than I contemplated?

It’s Sunday morning, two weeks before Christmas. Am I heading toward a church service? Is this some special sort of day? I bet it is. Suddenly I notice a swarm of limousines at a large building in the next block.

I’d never go to my own religious services dressed anything like this, even if it wasn’t a special holiday season-sort of day. But here I am and it’s too cold to walk away. Besides, it’s all about the dance.

The limos and taxis discharge snow white winter suits, ermine collars, cashmere, sparkling hats, and pearls. The rabble wears mink. What was I thinking?

I get caught in the swirl of entry into the gracious old church building and head toward the front. I haven’t come this far not to see the choreography. I skip the first couple of rows in case there is some special obligation. I get a good view from a third-row seat.

My ermine-trimmed neighbor and I exchange greetings. Everything matches. It’s warm.

Oh to be one of those people who sit wrapped-up in her coat. But in my world it was rude and unwise to stay coated indoors. Too bad, I almost could have passed. The panels of black Forstmann wool are by far the best part of my outfit and my raggy jeaned legs would be mostly hidden. But now that I’ve stopped throwing my body against the wind my cheeks sting hot, hands turn red and I might pass out. The coat comes off and I stuff the vest under a pew.

I am the lost last-decade hippy chick, au too naturelle. Maybe there is something remotely charming in the ragamuffin’s  struggle through the cold to worship. And, for all its ermine, a congregation that has half-nude modern dancers and a string quartet on its alter in 1978 must be fairly enlightened.

Enlightened perhaps, but my neighbor is also intent on seeing that I sing my way through the service. Her pointer thrusts into my hymnal for the many follow-on verses of O Little Town of Bethlehem.

“Gratitude.”  Yes, I’m grateful for the heat and that there’s no confusing kneeler or footrest. “Collection plate.” If I could have parted with money, I would have taken a cab. But smiles abound and I’ve settled into my role as the Crampet’s older headstrong girl.

Finally it’s time for the dance—my excuse for exposing these lovely people to me. I recall nothing.  Some thirty years later, it’s my sense of ignorance and surprise, the warmth of the space and the tolerance of my neighbors—the true spirit of Christmas all around me—that I remember.

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is giv’n
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heav’n.