wind cry, snow whine
tired and toneless winter tune
waiting for the pitch-pipe sun
and the soft direction
of a distant child
river stone 1-22-11
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Category Archives: nostalgia
too soon old, too late smart?
Under his white cassock, the good-looking young priest is wearing sneakers and jeans. I can see them peeking out from underneath the garment’s neat hem. The inside of the 110 year-old ornate church of my childhood is colder than this winter morning in the urban outside. The seat of the wooden pew is freezing my butt.
The church’s boiler has stopped working, and all through the service periodic clangings continue to irreverently punctuate the “words of the Lord.”
I am sitting in the exact spot in which I sat almost exactly a month ago. That was for my mother’s funeral service. This time it’s for my aunt’s (the wife of my father’s brother). They say that death comes in threes. I wonder if my 87 year-old aunt sitting to my left will be the third. I hope, instead, what will count is my dead desktop computer, which, at the moment is awaiting a possible resurrection on the repair desk of my most trusted geek. These are things over which I have no control.
I only go back to my home town for weddings and funerals, all of which include rituals celebrated in this spectacularly vaulted nave that is bordered by detailed mosaic depictions of the Stations of the Cross, above which large elaborate stained glass windows tell the rest of the story. The aesthetics of the church inspires awe, even without the faith that sustains it.
Neither my cousin nor I join in the line to receive Holy Communion. It has been decades since either one of us believed and practiced what we had been so carefully taught during our 13 years of Catholic schooling. When we sit around the table hours after her mother’s burial, my cousin and I and dredge up shared memories of some of our more innocent times — the May processions in which we tossed rose petals as we walked down the aisle (“one, two, three, this is for you, Baby Jesus…”) My mind slips away to the less innocent scenes from the movie “The Polish Wedding.”
We spend hours sitting around that table — my cousin and I and our remaining paternal aunt and uncle — sharing family stories and attitudes that had somehow eluded me during the 17 years I lived in the bosom of a clan that had, apparently, quickly separated into two camps — the “laws” and the “in-laws,” although which was which depended on whose perspective one adopted.
The story that surprises me most is one associated with the version my mother told of a seminal event in my life about which I once wrote a poem. In my mother’s version, her mother saved my young life; in the “in-law” version, my other grandmother believed that my mother was withholding medical treatment for me in favor of “leeches.” I see now that it became a stand-off between two matriarchs, and family relationships through the generations suffered as a result.
While it was my mother’s side of the family that I came to know best, it was an aunt on my father’s side who most impressed me, even though I only knew her for a very short while in my pre-teens.
Eleanor married my Uncle John, to the chagrin of my paternal grandmother. Eleanor was a free spirit, odd and artsy and strikingly beautiful. She had her kitchen ceiling painted red, she started to teach me how to sketch faces, and she sewed me a lavish ruffled robe that I wore until I could no longer button it across my chest. Suddenly (or so it seemed to me) she and my uncle were gone — moved out of state, out of touch.
And, in our post-funeral table conversation with my relatives from that side of the family, I learn just how strict my paternal grandmother was, refusing to accept her non-conformist daughter-in-law and leaving the couple with little alternative but to create a life for themselves apart from family expectations. I begin to understand the difficulties that my mother had in fulfilling her daughter-in-law role.
Eleanor and John had children — five, I think. I have never met them or been in touch with them. My cousin has but lost track of their lives long ago.
We have been a family burdened with expectations, and both my cousin and I acknowledge (with some private pride) that we opted not to meet a select number of them.
We are the matriarchs, now — much different in attitudes and expectations from our foremothers.
At least we hope so.
happy belated blogaversary to me:
9 years and counting
I started blogging on November 29, 2001, and the old bloghome is still here, reminding me why I started and how I grew as a “personal blogger.” I still keep in touch with many of the bloggers who were around at that early time in blogging history, only now it’s mainly through Facebook.
In reading some of my old posts, I realize that I still write about the same things: politics, injustice, being a woman, ordinary magic, getting older, being me. Things change. Things stay the same.
Let’s see if I can make it to year 10.
Remembering Bronislawa
My mother’s name was really Bronislawa, which doesn’t have an English equivalent. So they called her Blanche.
Her dementia took over all of our lives for the past decade. Now that she is gone, my mind has cleared enough to remember her as she was before.
She was born in America but spent 8 years in Poland with her mother and siblings between the World Wars, when she was a pre-teen. Her father stayed behind to keep earning money, and the rest of the family went to live on the family farm in Poland. She was bi-lingual. She was the oldest of three sisters. She never graduated from high school. She had two brothers. None of her siblings is alive.
This is her and her mother and sisters when they returned from Poland to live in Yonkers.
At the age of 16, she went to work in the Alexander Smith and Sons carpet factory. Her family struggled financially, so they all had jobs. She often recalled that her father had to wrap her arms with ace-type bandages because they would be so sore after a day of work. Until the day she died, she had an indentation in her right forefinger, which she said was caused by the thread she had to wind around her finger day after day.
She was always slim and petite. And pretty. Not beautiful or striking. Pretty. He was handsome. “All the girls were after him,” she often said, “but he picked me.”
This is her and my dad when they got engaged.
She also was a great social dancer and, of course, loved to polka. For many years she danced in a local Polish dance troupe. That’s her, on the left, and one of her best friends, who is still alive and who attended her funeral.
Even toward the end of her life, when she pretty much stopped speaking and walking, my mom would follow my lead in the fox trot and waltz if I held her close to me. She loved music. Loved to dance.
She also liked to sew. When I was a child, before every Christmas, all of my dolls would disappear for a day or two and then show up on Christmas Day all decked out in new dresses that my mother made for them. She liked her clothes to fit well, and she was always sewing them in, letting them out, hemming and correcting. I have that same tendency. She taught me to knit, crochet, and embroider, although she never really spent much time doing those things. Mostly, she was the full-time wife and mother and much-loved member of a group of Polish/American women who played Canasta once a week and socialized, family-style, other times.
I lost count of the visitors at her wake who said to me “She was a real lady.” Proper behavior and stylish clothes were important, and she bought the most fashionable shoes, which for many years had very pointy toes. She liked pumps and bought them narrow so that they would stay on her feet. Her toes suffered for that vanity, and when she got older, it was hard to find shoes that were comfortable.
She chose the suit and blouse that she wanted to be buried in more than a decade before the event — and with pearls around her neck and in her ears, she looked like a VIP, which, to many, she was.
Her portrait, for which she posed to have painted in the 1950s at my father’s request, still hangs in my brother’s house.
my poem, in print
It’s been a long while since I’ve published any of my poetry. It’s been a long time since I’ve written any poetry.
Early last spring I ran across a request for submissions from the Ballard Street Poetry Journal, and I took a chance and submitted one, which was published in the current Summer 2010 issue.
I find the poetry in many journals rather inaccessible, either for reasons of language or subject. But I loved all of the poems in the Ballard Street Poetry Journal. Here’s mine, which appears on Page 21:
The Gravity of Gardens
They gave me a garden the size of a grave,
so I filled it with raucous reminders of sense:
riots of marigold, lavender, sage
rosemary, basil dianthus, rue.
And waving madly above them all
spears of brazen Jerusalem artichoke
that perplexing garden gypsy
that blossoms and burrows,
grows up to nine feet tall, and
in the harsh summer storm
dances her defiance
to the grim arrogance
of gravity.
I need to plant that garden again.
sweetgrass coolie hat
It’s somewhere in the mid 1940s and I am somewhere around 7 years old. It’s somewhere on a summer-crowded Long Island beach, onto which a caravan of my relatives descend every weekend.
Under the striped beach umbrella on a sand-dusted threadbare blanket, I lie on my side, my face buried in the mown-hay smell of a sweetgrass coolie hat. I am lulled by the soughing surf, the surround of soft talkings, the salt-stung breeze, and the brain-sticking smells of sun lotion, sweat, and sweetgrass. I want the moment to last forever.
It is a hot yesterday, and I am sitting in the dappled shade at a pond where we take my grandson to play. I close my eyes and conjure the senses of childhood from the splashes and chatters that drift my way across the busy sand. And I yearn for the smell of a sweetgrass coolie hat.
Where Goes Wonder Woman??
I am a year older than Wonder Woman, and she was my favorite comic book character beginning on the day I first walked into Mr. Wellman’s candy store and discovered her on the shelves.
But today’s comic publisher is going to turn her into something she was never meant to be, and I, personally resent the insulting “updating.”
My Wonder Woman had a past, a “backstory” worthy of her mythic and iconic stature. From here:
From her inception, Wonder Woman was not out to just stop criminals, but to reform them. On a small island off Paradise Island was Transformation Island, a rehabilitation complex created by the Amazons to house and reform criminals.
Armed with her bulletproof bracelets, magic lasso, and her amazonian training, Princess Diana was the archetype of the perfect woman from the mind of her creator, William Moulton Marston. She was beautiful, intelligent, strong, but still possessed a soft side. At that time, her powers came from ‘Amazon Concentration,’ not as a gift from the gods.
Wonder Woman’s magic lasso was supposedly forged from the Magic Girdle of Aphrodite, which Queen Hippolyta (Wonder Woman’s) mother was bequeathed by the Goddess. Hephastateus borrowed the belt, removed links from it, and that is where the magic lasso came from. It was unbreakable, infinitely stretchable, and could make all who are encircled in it tell the truth.
I first become interested in Greek and Roman mythology because of that original Wonder Woman story.
But now “they” are going to change all that — make her a Superman Clone.
They are taking the awesome “wonder” out of Wonder Woman, and I don’t like it at all.
missing my past
I google their names, the people I knew in my past — poets, painters, psychologists who kept my psyche stirred, my shadows swirling through radiant darkness; dancers who swept me across ballrooms and turned my nights starry, my limbs light and fair. Do they ever google me and remember?
a Mother’s Day repost
On Mother’s Day for the past several years, I have reposted the following message to my two, now grown, offspring. I wouldn’t be a mother without them, after all, and I wish I had been a better one, after all.
Some women take to mothering naturally. I had to work at it. And so I wasn’t the best mother in the world. I would have worked outside the home whether I had become a single mom or not. And because I did, mine were latchkey kids, with my daughter, beginning at age 12, taking care of her younger brother, age 5, after school. I left them some evenings to go out on dates. Oh, I did cook them healthy meals, and even cookies sometimes. I made their Halloween costumes and went to all parent events at their schools. My daughter took ballet lessons, belonged to 4H (but I got kicked out as Assistant Leader because I wouldn’t salute the flag during the Vietnam War). I made my son a Dr. Who scarf and took him to Dr. Who fan events. I bought him lots of comic books, invited friends over to play, and taught him how to throw a ball.
But most of all, I think/hope I did for them what my mother was never able to do for me, — give them the freedom and encouragement to become who they wanted to be — to explore, make mistakes, and search for their bliss. I think/hope that I always let them know that, as far as I was concerned, I loved them just the way they were/are.
Not having had that affirmation from my mother still affects my relationship with her. I hope that my doing that right for them neutralizes all the wrong things I did as they were growing up.
So, you two (now adult) kids, here’s to you both. You keep me thinking, you keep me informed, you keep me honest, and, in many ways, you keep me vital. I’m so glad that I’m your mother.
So, in memory of those not-always-good ol’ days that you two somehow managed to survive with style, here you are, playing “air guitar and drums” — enjoying each other’s company sometime in the late 70s and bringing so much delight into my life.
so, I won this book
The book, which contains free verse and reprints of prayers and bits of prose, features lots of Corita’s collage art, which contains lots of cut-up words from ads and headlines, sometimes reconfigured, sometimes not.
The description above is from a post on the site from which I won the book — Killing the Buddha. It’s a site that I find always stimulating.
I never win anything. I mean it. I think that this is the first thing I every won. Well, I came in second in a Swing Dance contest once. Even got a trophy. Usually I don’t even make an effort to enter any kind of contest. Never play the lottery. Because I never win anything.
But this time I did. And I did because I remember the 60s. I didn’t remember Sister Corita, who created the book, published in 1967. But I did remember the Berrigan Brothers, and I remembered that Daniel Berrigan was a Jesuit.
I recently read online somewhere (can’t find it again) that the story was that Daniel Berrigan kept a photo of Sister Corita in his shower with a note that said “no one should shower alone.”
Thinking of Berrigan, I am remembering another activist ex-priest who was a good friend at one point in my life. He has grown immensely as an artist in those past 25 years, although he was good even back then. His paintings, as he is, are larger than life. I just love his new stuff.
I have been fortunate in my life to have had some closeness with some truly unique men, who have inspired me and moved on and left me with the kinds of memories that will keep me smiling someday as I retire to a rocking chair in the sun.
(And I’ve been just as fortunate to continue to have a group of close women friends whose constancy and candor, humor and heart, help to keep me smiling — well, most of the time.)
So, now I wait for my prize, a book by a creative woman, to arrive.
It’s a good day.