Continuity

The picture above was taken in the 1950s and I didn't even know it existed until my friend Carol Bessey sent it to me a year or two ago. From left to right, that's me, in a rather magnificent skirt, a boy whose name I have forgotten, and my dear familiar Carol in a stylish plaid outfit. We are unusually dressed up, and I imagine we were going to a party, but receiving this picture in the mail was like getting back a completely forgotten fragment of my childhood randomly withdrawn from someone else's memory bank.

That's a little how I felt last week when Carol sent me a handwritten note upon hearing of my mother's passing. "I don't remember too much of her," she wrote, "only that she was thin and pretty. I mostly remember how you would borrow her clothes so we could play dress up and parade up and down Coney Island Avenue. What sights we must have been!"

Really? I "borrowed" clothes from my mother's closet? Bold girl...it was surely not something I was authorized to do. But how wonderful it is to see my mother as my childhood friend saw her, young and attractive and the wearer of high-heeled shoes and dresses we coveted. It prompted many other memories of my youthful mother in those long-ago days: buying milk in glass bottles from the corner grocery store, having coffee with our neighbor Helen Wittner, taking me places on the subway and the trolley or walking through the neighborhood now known as Ditmas Park and pointing out the houses she would most love to live in.

I'm fond of advising people not to be tyrannized by chronological time or let the sad parts of a person's life overshadow the moments that were good. It's easy advice to dispense but not to follow, and I'm afraid I've been so haunted lately by the miseries that visited upon my mother in her old age that I've forgotten all her earlier incarnations. I feel so fortunate to have a lifelong friend to help me to recall other aspects of my mother's long and complex life and uncover images more pleasant to hold onto.

And I feel so fortunate to have a lifelong friend, period. Carol was my first friend in the world beyond my siblings. She was a great pretender, a feeder of stray animals, a co-conspirator in many shenanigans, and a good-hearted true blue buddy in the Brooklyn we once knew. It's been forty or fifty years since I last saw her, but we exchange cards and letters with every birthday, Christmas, and milestone. I know that she's a grandmother now and lives in upstate New York, in a small town called Cairo. Maybe someday I'll visit her.

"She'll be a stranger," someone told me when I mentioned this once. "You might find you can't even relate to her."

But I don't think that's true. I know who Carol is: my continuity.