She loved jewelry, especially diamonds. She loved opera. She loved nice clothes and good food and fine china and crystal. She should have been born with a silver spoon but she had to buy it instead, and it was only plate. That perennially disappointed her.
In her later years, almost everything did. Me. Dad. Her own life. No matter what she had or was able to do or where she was able to go, it wasn't enough. When she died, she had two closets full of clothes, three dozen pairs of shoes, cupboards full of china both antique and hand painted, crystal, dishes and collectibles by Wedgewood, Limoges, Royal Doulton, Waterford, Hummel. She was fully equipped to entertain a small army of royalty at a moment's notice. What makes that so absurd is that she lived in the middle of Northern Michigan's outback.
How do you sum up another person's life? What's the essence we all boil down to? Is it the objects we leave behind, or the things we've done?
When she died, one of her friends told me that Mom's job was to spread culture amongst the heathen. She would play opera for almost anyone who'd sit still long enough to listen, even the woman who came to clean for her when she couldn't do it herself anymore. When I was in high school she woke me up every morning one summer with Wagner's "Flying Dutchman." All I can say now is thank God it wasn't the "Ring" Cycle. Like most opera lovers, Mom was thoroughly convinced that if only you'd really listen to just one more aria, you'd grow to love it as much as she did. Sadly, this wasn't the case with me.
That disappointed her, too.
She did teach me to love the arts, though not the same things she loved. She exposed me to as much of it as she could find, from dance lessons at home to theatre and museums when we traveled. What she managed to instill in me was a love of talent and ideas and beauty. Our tastes in all of them were almost utterly divergent by the time I reached high school, though I sometimes managed to drag her along with me, as far as a Dire Straits concert, once. From her, I knew about Bach, Van Gogh, and the American Ballet Theatre. That launched me into Early Music, Art Deco prints, and Mark Morris.
The arts she practiced herself were of the more genteel, ladylike sort, the kind relegated generally to the category of crafts, though I've often thought that was a bogus and totally artificial distinction. She often mockingly acknowledged this herself, especially when she read the history of the college I was going to, which had started as a finishing school. She learned several types of needlework from her own mother, who'd gone to finishing school in Canada for it, and our house was filled with needlepoint cushions and pictures, our antique linen sheets and pillow cases trimmed with ladder lace and tatting, our beds covered with handmade quilts covered with embroidery and crewel work. When I was in junior high, she made a brief stab at oil painting on canvas, and took up ceramics. Hers were of the poured variety, and she didn't make her own glazes or throw on the wheel, but she got me interested in both of those forms. I still have a deep love of handmade pottery of all kinds for that reason. One of the most amazing ceramic pieces she made was an oversized chess set for one of my cousins, the face of each pawn and king and queen and bishop given an individual character: the pawns fearful, the bishops shifty-eyed, the kings a bit dull, the queens crafty.
Her great love, however, was porcelain, and eventually she took up china painting. Her teacher was a lovely woman named, somehow appropriately, Genevieve. It wasn't long before the student surpassed the teacher. Mom bought a small craft kiln of her own, something we hadn't had when pouring ceramics, and started firing her own porcelain. Dad got her a small army-surplus table and a cabinet for her vials of powdered paint. She had a couple of covered palettes, dozens of brushes, and a box of silk rags wrapped around cotton batting for dabbing in backgrounds. I loved the names of the colors she used: green copper silicate, vermillion mercuric sulfide and cinnabar, alizarin, purpurin, titanium white, Roman gold. She bought "blanks"—white glazed china made by Limoges, Meissen, Rosenthal, Hutschenreuther and lesser makers—plates, cups and saucers, odd boxes, trivets and tiles, candy dishes, vases, tea sets, salt and pepper shakers, jam jars, tea sets, whole table settings, clocks. She painted and painted and painted, mostly flowers and fruit, but sometimes birds or scenes. Both of us loved the goofy pieces she bought most: the garlic squisher with its little wooden baseball bat-shaped pestle, the strawberries and cream plate shaped like a strawberry leaf with a separate dipping bowl, the talcum shaker, the Limoges box shaped like a bellows.
One corner of our utility room became her painting corner, where she'd sit for hours while I was in school. In the winter, with the kiln going, it was one of the warmest spots in the house, though it was one of the coldest rooms. Both my friend Paul and I sat there at one time or another, trying to learn to china paint, but it didn't interest me as much as pottery did, and Paul didn't have the patience. So Mom kept at it alone. Pieces went to friends and relatives, sometimes to strangers for gifts. It was all as beautiful as anything you'd buy in a store. I think that was one of the reasons she liked to visit the porcelain collections at the Metropolitan Museum. If other china painters could have their work in a museum, that legitimized what she did.
When she'd come to New York City, where I live now, we'd scrutinize the listings in Time Out and the Times and go to a variety of them: a Broadway show—"Cats" on her first trip, then "An Inspector Calls" and "Medea" with Diana Rigg on later trips; Flamenco at BAM; the Mingus Big Band at Fez Under Time. We usually went to the Metropolitan Museum or MoMA to visit the Impressionists, the Chinese art, the Assyrian gates, or to the Cloisters. Every good restaurant I went to went down on the list of places to take her: The Blue Water Grill, Zoe, Baltazar.
New York was always a treat for her and it's probably where she would have preferred to live, given the choice. She'd been there once in the late 50's and gotten a taste of the cool of hanging in Manhattan bars and weighing the merits of flying to Cuba for the weekend. I wonder sometimes if that's not why I wound up here, finally, though I like to think it was my own dreams and ambitions that drove me.
At the age of 29, she left home to marry my father in Germany. That was the first time she'd been on a plane, or traveled by herself. It must have left a bad taste in her mouth because she never liked to go anywhere alone. I think she was too afraid to travel alone, except in extraordinary circumstances. She'd been taught by her parents that if she left home, she'd be raped, robbed, and murdered. Once, when she was walking down the street in New York with me, she said to me in a tone of surprise, "People really do just leave you alone, don't they?" Despite her own fears, she managed not to pass them on to me. Quite the contrary.
We traveled a lot when I was a kid, usually out of state to one of the big district assemblies in a city: Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland. We went to visit my cousins in Canada and Pittsburgh, or just went off for the day or weekend across the state to roadside tourist attractions. At 16, I decided I wanted to fly to Columbus to see some friends of mine who had moved there the year before, and she let me go. The next year I went to Detroit for a weekend with the drama club. By 18, I could hardly wait to get out of the house and went out of state to college. Three years later I was off to England by myself, and again, two years later. Next year, I'm going to Japan.
Then there's the books. Books and what books mean. One of Mom's friends from the Hall said the other day, proudly, that she'd only read two books in her life. Of course, that was about all you could find in the library up here anyway, so that's no surprise. There was one bookstore in town and the wall of paperbacks was like heaven to me when I was a kid. There were always books. Everybody in my house read, voraciously and widely, from mysteries to history.
We didn't just read though, we studied. That's one of the things that being a Witness involves. You study, a lot. It's like going to school double time, only you never graduate. And the love of learning and hunger for knowledge were two characteristics Mom instilled in me early. It was almost a self-defense mechanism, because the worst insult in my house was "You don't know anything." Because of that, I loved school and was well on my way to being an academic before I realized I was really a writer. I also finally realized that nobody knows everything, and nobody can. One of the hardest phrases I learned to say was "I don't know," and I didn't learn that from Mom.
For all her own love of learning, and for all I tried to share what I was discovering with her, there was a time when she just turned inward and stopped growing, when my world became so different from hers that she couldn't or wouldn't follow. I suspect it was also that I became so different, too, and that she got sick. When you're in constant pain, it tends to turn you inward, which is understandable. Pain soaks up a lot of energy and I've always thought that it strips people down to their essential natures, as well. Mom's personality changed after her bypass and cancer surgery and the small strokes she had, exacerbating her negativity and making her cry more easily. I don't think I'd ever seen her cry more than a couple of times in my entire life up until that point. For years, in fact, she'd called herself the Ice Queen. Pain and suffering has a way of melting that. Whether it makes you more selfish or more empathetic, though, is a crap shoot. By the last couple of years of her life, she wasn't reading much but religious literature and a few mysteries, and all of it seemed to make her angry, mostly at the injustice of the world, and at the injustices visited on her.
Maybe it's what we knew that defines us, or how we saw the world. Or maybe it's how the world saw us. That's all that's left, in the end.
No matter how bad your life is, somewhere, somebody else has got it worse.
I'm up at my folks again at a time of year I'm not usually here. My mom just died and I'm straightening up her affairs and getting my dad set up so he function without her, which is a pretty tall order. They've been together for 47 years, so I'm not really sure how well he's going to manage. It's been pretty hard on both of us, needless to say. Mom had just been out to visit me in October and wasn't feeling well then, and though we expected either a stroke or a heart attack to be the end of her and have been steeling ourselves for the eventuality, it's still a shock when it happens. Thankfully, it was fairly quick, and she didn't suffer, and she managed to hang on long enough for me to get to see her, though she never regained consciousness. In some ways that's good and in others it's bad. I know she would have hated to have been as helpless as she was, and I don't know what you can say to someone in that situation. She knew Dad and I loved her, as much as she would let herself believe it, and that's what matters.
Something of urgency has come up so I'm going to be offline for a while. Check back frequently, please. I'm not abandoning ship.
Back when he was living in Detroit, Rob was also in an early music group out of Ann Arbor called Vox, which now has a new CD (
Like lots of people in the city, I get all excited when the red-and-white striped booths go up in Union Square every year after Thanksgiving. Even though I don't celebrate the holidays, I love the shopping, especially this kind. I've always been a sucker for crafty stuff and bright-and-shiny gimcracks, so even if I don't buy anything, I love just wandering around in the frosty air and looking at things. I've gotten some cool stuff in past years: recycled silk "yarn" mittens and gloves, some amazing jewelry, great tea. 
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