Dear Cuz:
How I loved your mother. She was everything mine was not. She was gentle, soft-spoken and loving, while my mother, her sister, was abrupt, loudly accusative and never offered her children the emotional suppor they craved. Sisters: how odd.Your mother was older than mine. Strange, the incredible difference in temperaments. Just to be in your mother's presence was to feel cared for, a valued loved one. I would just bask in her attention and obvious regard for me, a tentative child. Her manner was so at odds with that of her sister.
I loved watching her do things around the house. Most particularly in the kitchen. I was in awe of the magic she would perform in her well appointed kitchen. Everything she did, including the food she prepared for her family was done with love and concern for their well being. She had a calming effect on everyone. On occasion your second-older brother would tease me, and I would weep with frustration, for I adored him. She would take him to task for upsetting me.
I was older than you by one year. Your mother used to joke in a manner I did not then quite understand; something about my being brought into the world a year earlier had provided the inspiration for your birth, a year later. I was my mother's first child, and I take it she was fearful about the experience of giving birth. She had travelled from Toronto to Hamilton where your mother and father lived with their two small boys, so she might have the comfort of her sister's presence during my birth.
I always thought that odd. That my no-nonsense mother should have felt so vulnerable about doing something so natural as giving birth to a child. When it became my turn to carry and give birth to my first child, I harboured no fears at all, but felt completely comfortable about what I considered to be the most natural thing in the world. Obviously, since every human on earth was introduced in just such a biological sequence, it was.
I did envy you. The neat little house you lived in, on Mary Street in Hamilton was nothing like the flat my parents lived in on Manning Avenue in Toronto. You had the luxury of a house all to yourselves, a proper home. You never had to share a sole bathroom with another family, along with another tenant; nine people sharing that utility.
That house, with its clean white exterior, red roses in bloom in front of the verandah, its closed-in backyard, all your own. The milkman knocked at the back door of the house, inside the backyard, with his daily milk delivery. That was the door to the kitchen, located at the back of the house. The kitchen, with its pantry holding, among other things, the electric mixer that your mother used to whip up cakes, pastries and other goodies my mother never had any success with.
Your father was a silent, strict man. I don't recall seeing him smile. Your parents were observant Jews, mine were secular. I used to feel so uncomfortable when other children were absent from school during the High Holidays, and my parents sent me to school. I felt defensive, ashamed, as though I were somehow less a Jew than they. Occasionally my family would take the train to Hamilton to stay over for a day or two, to share Passover with your family.
I recall how unbelievingly desolate I felt at first, when I was informed by my parents that your family was planning to move permanently to Atlanta, Georgia. I knew I would miss you, my little boy-cousin, but the complete removal of my beloved aunt to another country was more than I could envisage. I remember before you finally left that I spoke with you about the plight of the Black population in the States, that I engineered a promise from you to never become a racist.
While my parents were secular, they were also religiously socialist in orientation, and I knew, from the time I was a small child, of the many injustices in the world, including the sad history of Blacks in the United States. Well, you and your family moved to Atlanta. That was 60 years ago. My parents would go for extended trips on occasion when their children were older, and it seemed like an exotic place to me.
I lived there myself, with my husband, some fifty years later, for several years. The Atlanta I had been introduced to, with its red soil, Civil War memorials, Stone Mountain, shambling black population, and socially removed whites were still there among the modern buildings and throughways, the palatially gracious homes, golf courses and obvious wealth. Then, there was also a black aristocracy, politicians, preachers of note and a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr.
The racial divide is still there, flourishing mightily. I met it twice, dear Cuz.
Living for that period in your city I became intimately re-acquainted with my distant cousins, my now-widowed and still-dear aunt. She lived well, and she lived long. She reaped what she had sown; the love and care she lavished upon her children were bestowed on her in turn and without stint.
A life well lived.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 13, 2006
<< Home