On Her 100th Birthday: Memories of My Mother

I don’t know if I dreamed this, or if it really happened, but I remember a slide show in the living room of my childhood home. There was a whirring sound, a celluloid smell, a triangle of dust-flecked light, and wondrous images projected on the wall. In one instant, the room was transformed into a jungle with brightly colored parrots, and, after a click, a salmon-pink flamingo posed on one leg in shallow water, and then, inexplicably, a flag snapped in the breeze above a white building, suspended for all time in the blue sky of an unknown city that I wished I might one day visit. My family and I were encircled by light and color, transfixed and transported, utterly enchanted. Even my own hand was painted if I held it into the stream of light, and I understood why this was called a magic lantern show.

This memory-dream came back to me this morning when I noticed a bowl of oranges illuminated in sunlight, and that’s the way memory works for me. Cues of color, angles of light, a passing hint of song or fragrance, and who knows what image the limitless vault will release? There’s an entertaining randomness to it, and I like to ride the currents. But I have also been primed for nostalgia this month because it would have been my mother’s 100th birthday, and I’ve been trying to manage the memories I have of her. There’s a long stretch of slides that would only make me sad, but now and then, an image glimmers with sufficient gleam to push away the darkness.

And I’ve written about her too much in this blog already, but for her hundredth birthday, she deserves a nod. I see her now, as she was in her final years, walking in front of me down the corridor of the assisted living residence, swinging her cane, counting the doors, her long white hair in a single braid or a pony tail twisted into a curl. She was chipper, she was game, she was giving it her best. She appreciated a good-looking cloud and an ice cream cone. She was pleased to see a cat asleep on a doorstep or blackbirds on a green lawn. In this last chapter of her life, I tried to look in on her and sort of oversee her care, but she was on her own brave journey, and I suppose that’s true of us all.

But wasn’t she also the beautiful young woman who traversed the city in high heel shoes, pushing my sister in a stroller, with me by her side? I picture her now on the Coney Island boardwalk, or in her big-shouldered winter coat on a bench in Prospect Park. And isn’t she the one who showed me how to make coffee in a percolator, watching as the glass knob began to gurgle with brown liquid, waiting for the friendly sound of its readiness? I watched her pat her lipstick, leaving a perfect kiss mark on the tissue. She loved sentimental movies and she sang old songs, and one day I walked in and saw her on the couch crying. But wait. There are too many slides I don’t want to see.

I have interviewed many people for oral histories over the years, but of course I neglected to harvest the stories of my own grandparents and parents. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered an audiotape I made of a conversation I had with my mother decades ago. It’s a poor quality recording with a distracting background hum, but it’s startling to hear her voice again, loud and clear as it used to be, with its almost comical New York accent.

Even then, she had obviously forgotten many details, and my own prompts and responses during the recording are unfortunately intrusive, despite my good intentions, but at times she did launch into lucid little narratives, and they are fascinating and touching. I wonder now why these fragments of her long life lingered in memory with such clarity while others blurred and vanished entirely, and I'd like to share a few.

She talks about her ill-fated musical aspirations:

I had a piano in Corona in the room in back of the store. We had the store, remember. It was an old upright, a nice piano, and I wasn’t playing it yet. I just had a couple of lessons. And you know, my mother, she chopped it up for firewood. I cried. I says, “Why, Mother?” She said, “We need the wood for fire.” I lived in a cold flat. It was a cold flat in back of the store. She had someone come and chop it up...Oh, I felt so bad. But we were poor, you know. And we needed the firewood. It was a cold flat."

When I remind her that she used to be a good singer, she recounts a story I remember her telling me when I was a little girl:

"Yeah. I went to a studio to test my voice. My mother took me. We went on the train. We had to go to Brooklyn. We went to the studio and they told me to sing a song. Do you know that I wouldn’t open up my mouth?! I was so shy. The man told my mother. 'She’s not ready yet. Take her home.'”

It must have been a terrible disappointment for both of them. A lost voice, a lost opportunity. I wondered how her mother reacted:

"She wasn’t mad. She was a good mother. May she rest in peace. She was a good mother, my adoptive mother.

There are lots of memories about the candy store her parents ran when she was a child in Corona, Queens:

"We had candies for a penny, and we had candies for a nickel. My favorite candy bar was the Wow. It was a nickel. It was a big bar with marshmallow. I loved it….Besides candy, they sold nuts, salty seeds, Indian nuts, and what do you call the other seeds? Pumpkin seeds. We had big jars and you scooped them out. I think it was like a penny a cup or two cents a cup. Yeah, we had that candy store for a while. I lived in back of the store. We had four rooms in the back and we lived there. We lived upstairs too for awhile. But we moved down. The janitors were the Picklers."

 "And I had a friend there that used to come. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She used to come for her Coke. She loved her Coca Cola. And cigarettes. We sold cigarettes, you know. And she would sit and talk with me. Her name was Mildred Piantanida. She passed away a long time ago. She was quite young. She had two sons, two boys, and her husband was Italian. Piantanida. Oh, she was a nice lady. She was my friend. She gave me a lot of business, you know. Yeah, she was older than me. And I moved away. And then I heard when she had passed away. She was sick. I never forget her. She was very nice."

Speaking of a job she held in Manhattan’s Garment District in the 1940s, my mother seems proud:  

"I worked for Kolmer Marcus in New York. One day George Raft came in for his coat. I filled out the slip. They sold men’s suits and coats. Expensive…Daddy couldn’t afford a suit there." 

But speaking of my father:

"You know where I met Daddy? At a dance. With my girlfriend Sylvia. That’s where I met him. I met him at The Manhattan Center. It was a dance hall...he came over, and he swept me off my feet."

"Then I got married and I moved into the house where he was living. His mother was a sick lady. She had that illness. Multiple sclerosis. I met her, she met me. She took a liking to me. They used to have a lady come in and take care of her. She passed away in the hospital. She was young too. I remember. I didn’t go to the funeral. And then when Daddy came back I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” I felt bad. He handled it fine. He was strong."

These memories are glimmers from a different era, but they shaped my mother’s life, and thus they still shape mine. There are more meanderings on the tape, mostly bits and pieces prompted by my specific questions and hints, and I recognize that there are mistakes and points of confusion, but I am so glad I made this effort to record her when I did, because it is all I have now of my mother’s voice, which would otherwise be lost forever.

But I do have wonderful photos of her, taken at different ages, and that endless slide show in my head.

My mother died eight years ago, and what surprises me most is that I had her as long as did. Her era was so remote, but she spilled over into the present. And there she was, the living embodiment of my history, but at the same time someone I was only beginning to know. She suffered more than her share of loneliness, loss, and disappointment. She needed more, she wanted something different, and I can better understand now how she felt. Much was expected of her that she did not know how to give. And it feels cruel to admit that she was crazy in some ways, but she struggled with her emotions and compulsions, and so did we all.

Her final story, though, is one of resilience and transcendence. It’s about meaning well. It’s about forgiveness. It’s about love, in all its incarnations.

I am learning from my mother now, and I miss her so much more than I ever imagined I would.

And I wonder, was it a dream, or did my family ever sit together watching a slide show in the living room? I like to think we did, all of us present and briefly enchanted, the messy mundane details of our chaotic household blanketed in comforting darkness, with only the yearned-for and hoped-for and barely-imagined in front of us. In such moments, we have everything—and doesn’t that count?