The worthiest Scrabble opponent I know

My mom is not 42. Today, in fact, she turns 60. (That's her natural hair color! She doesn't dye it, I swear!) But, for whatever reason, 42 is the go-to number my brain spits out when I think of how old she is. I was 10 when she was 42, probably just around when I would have been trying to figure out who my mom was in relation to the world I was beginning to know. And who are we at that age, but our numbers of years on earth?

My context has since grown broader. Rather than being a number whom I compare to others’ numbers, I assess her on a different scale, as I realize now (writing this), I do other women. What is her story? Who was she as a girl? Who is she as a woman? What did she give up? What did she keep? How did the roads of career and motherhood intersect on the map of her life? What has she learned? What can I learn from her?

Mostly, I don’t compare women anymore-- snowflakes and all that. But sometimes, when thinking of my mom, the numbers and the comparisons come back.

How old was she when she married my dad?

22.

How many kids did she have at my age?

3.

How old was she when she had her last child?

32.

Our numbers don’t match up. They never will and that’s okay. There are many things that my mother is that I will never be and vice versa. This is the stuff of individuality and my mom, more than most women I have met to this day, is the embodiment of be yourselfedness. (Perhaps one area where I wish I could measure up…)

I was reading an article recently in which Meryl Streep spoke about how while playing the effervescent Julia Child in this summer’s “Julie & Julia,” she thought more about her own mother than of the cooking icon on which the movie is based.

"...it was a way of paying homage to my mother, who was born with a joie de vivre…I envied my mother that great quality of having a good time in any room she entered. I’m much more of down-head.”

I feel you, Meryl. My mom--whose laugh is inimitable and which has been her defining feature since high school when she was named “girl with the best laugh”--always found a good time wherever one was hiding, and made one where there wasn’t.

I have a friend who once noticed my mom out on her back deck staring off as she often does (you know you were smoking a butt, ma) who said, “Your mom seems to get the big picture about life. Look at her out there, taking in the river and flowers and birds. She doesn’t miss any of it.”

She doesn’t. She’s had it hard enough to know when it’s easy and bad enough to know when it’s good. And she still laughs more than anyone I know.

She draws laughter out of others, too. One time we went to a wedding shower together which was attended by a woman who, though very nice, had always been extremely quiet over the five years in which we had been acquainted. I barely knew the sound of her voice.

Looking around for my mom, I saw her and this woman, whom she had never met before, chatting away in a corner. They talked for most of the party. When I see this woman now, we often talk ourselves. On parting she always says, “Say hi to your mom for me.”

This is my mom.

This past Christmas, per My Oprah’s suggestion, I decided to make my mom a “gratitude box.” The idea came to me less than a week before Christmas day so I scrambled to get an e-mail out to all the women---cousins, friends, aunts---who know and love my mom, asking them to jot down and e-mail me a sentence or two about their feelings for her. I apologized for being so last-minute about this (and noted that I am my mother’s daughter after all) but that I would appreciate any time they could give me.

Despite the fact that this was one week before Christmas---the busiest time I know for any woman---the responses flew in and I was able to fill the box.

In my letter to everyone, I included the following example to give people an idea of what to write:

I’m grateful to Gigi because even though her arms were filled with 50 bags and towels and toys, she always brought enough water to share with everyone at the beach.

The notes I got back included very different sentiments:

“She taught me love.”

“She was the only person I could talk to when my mother died.”

“You always took care of everybody” wrote her brother (whose wife, after writing her own note, had passed the assignment on to him). He also thanked her for buying the family’s first color TV with the money she earned starting off as a nurse. (“The house was always happy when she came home” another sibling wrote of my mom’s visits from nursing school.)

This is my mom.

We gave her a surprise party for her birthday, of course. She was mostly surprised (when none of us called her all week, her suspicions were aroused) and completely delighted. She spent the day chatting and, of course, laughing with her daughters, friends and family at an intimate party (she was glad it was intimate, she said) in my sister’s backyard. Another of her brothers and his family drove up from New York just for the day. When I thanked my aunt for doing so, she said, “I’d do anything for your mom.”

I really get the sense that people mean it when they say that about her.

She, of course, does everything for everyone, too. She’s nursed family members through cancer, got my grandmother through a recent hip replacement surgery, provided steady childcare for two of my sisters’ children, talked the masses through their deepest sorrows, put a roof over the head of many a wayward family friend, stood up for those who needed a voice (in issues of morality, she does not flinch, never mind bend, to social pressure…it’s not in her DNA), doled out medical advice when she could offer an answer, researched the topic when she couldn’t. And she’s a damn fine cook, too.

My mom is a giver. Not all who give are givers, though this doesn’t take away from what they do. (I give when and where I can but I would not characterize myself as a giver.) With my mom, it’s not just something she does, it is part of who she is. (Sometimes I wonder if it makes up more of her being than it should or maybe I just wish she would give to herself as she does others.)

After the party, while on my way out of town, I stopped by my parents’ house to give my mom her birthday gift. Not exactly a new car, I gave her something she’s had for over 50 years; the violin she got when she was eight-years-old. Fixed and playable.

My mom took up the violin in third grade and played all the way through her high school years. Though she never told me so, I hear she was pretty great. She made the All-County Orchestra in Westchester County, NY where she grew up. Westchester County is home to towns and cities such as Scarsdale and Rye just to name a couple of the notably affluent ones. My mom grew up in Pelham, a modest town, the second of eight children. Pelham is no Scarsdale and affluent they were not.

My dad is the one who told me what a big deal it is that she made All-County.

“Some of the best violinists in the world at that time were Jewish kids from Westchester County so it was a really big accomplishment. To make All-County in New York at that time!” he’s said.

(I don’t know much about the musical history of Westchester County, but I do know that Itzhak Perlman is the Artistic Director for The Westchester Philharmonic if that says anything of the caliber of music there today.)

I’ve never heard her play. I’ve always wanted to.

Because she is my mom (a sometimes identity-coating role in a child’s eyes) and because so much of what defines her involves others, I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t see my mother as a woman---independent of her roles as mother and wife--- until well into my twenties.

Only now do I think about what it must have been like for her to leave home at age 18 for nursing school in New York City. Only now do I think about what in her drew her to my dad. Only now do I think about what it must have been like for her to move to Alabama with one baby and another on the way when my dad was drafted or how it felt to have five children under the age of 10 when she was only 32, with my dad working irregular (sometimes overnight) hospital shifts.

There are so many moments in my mom’s life to which I would journey as a time traveler. This is partly why I want to hear her play the violin. I want to hear my mom, the artist.

Not that this is her only medium.

She would never admit it---and probably doesn’t even know it--- but my mom is a gifted writer and gardener. As far as I know she never allowed herself a long-term journal but the letters she’s written me along the years---from my summer camp days to the present--- are beautiful. She writes to me from her back deck and tells me of the sounds she hears---the wind and water. And then she tells me of the sounds she almost hears---sisters readying for a wedding, little girls running in the sun. (“Mom’s letters always make me cry,” my sisters and I have all said.) But she would never call herself a writer. Instead, when I expressed an interest in writing in elementary school, she set me up at a small wooden table with my own working typewriter and a stack of blank paper.

As a kid whose job it was to water all the plants when my parents went away, I never appreciated my mom’s gift for gardening. A couple of summers ago she and I spent a wonderful few months together, planting and readying the backyard for my wedding. Only then did I realize how each flowerbed, each lovingly tended to hydrangea is a product of her artistic vision. I would see her stare off at a bare area of land like she was waiting for the colors and textures of specific plants and flowers to deliver themselves to her. And then her glazed look would suddenly snap to alertness and she would almost laugh as she said, “I know what we’ll put there!” an image fully formed in her head. I would see her search her brain for a flower the way I sometimes search my brain for a word.

Seeing her innate skills in these areas, I am so curious about this avid violin player. But she doesn’t want to play anymore. At least that’s what she said when I brought the topic up a couple of months ago. (Of course she didn’t know I had already snuck the violin out of her house and had it fixed by this point.)

“Do you ever wish you could play again?” I asked.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Not at all?” I persisted.

“No.”

“But what if your violin was here right now all fixed up, would you play it for us?”

“No,” she said (over the sound of my sinking heart). “I feel like that chapter is closed. It was a special thing then but I wouldn’t want to play anything other than my best and it’s been so long…It’s a chapter closed.”

Who was this woman? I was sure her ever-present sentimentality would make her want to try it, but my mom was revealing to me that not only was her violin a sacred passion, but that she was a perfectionist when it came to her craft. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to---and have---quit pieces of work, including this one, because I wasn’t meeting my own expectations. Now I know where that comes from.)

So I told her during that conversation about having it fixed. I didn’t want to spring it on her as it was clearly something she held close and had thought about a great deal.

“Maybe Ben (my nephew) will play it,” I said.

“Or Molly,” she added.

So, bringing it over to her house after the party I didn’t feel like I was presenting her with a gift as much as I was dropping something off. This is why I was caught off guard to hear her draw such a large breath upon opening the case at the kitchen table.

“He fixed the bridge,” she said, her face tender as she ran her eyes over her old friend. “And the fingerboard.”

“The guy at the music shop said it was a really nice violin,” I said.

“Did he?”

“Yeah, and he said the bow was fine as it is.”

“Really?” she said with what I heard to be pride in her voice.

She lifted it gently from its case. A violin is precious as a newborn child. It is not stately like a cello or friendly like a guitar. It is delicate and dainty and one almost feels like it needs protecting. Hers is so tiny, a child’s violin. She said it was particularly small, too small for her even.

“I could never give it up,” she said about her choice to stick with her original violin rather than graduating to a larger one as she moved through her school years. “I was so connected to it, to its sound.”

She began taking lessons in third grade and it was at these lessons that she met Leslie, her best friend for all the years that followed.

She put her chin to the instrument’s chin plate like it had never left there; like it hadn’t been 40 years since their faces touched.

“You always rosin your bow first,” she said, taking the rosin from its compartment at the case’s tail end.

(Upon lifting the flap and seeing it she had said, “He left my rosin,” and I realize now that maybe when she heard I had taken it in she worried that her rosin and her pitch pipe---whose presence in the box she also excitedly noted---would be removed from the case. These were the original accessories from her days of playing in high school.)

There was a mixture of confidence and timidness in her as she handled the violin that I had never seen before. A seemingly strange combination of emotions, I can think of only one period of life when one dwells in such a state: childhood. That was what it was. Holding her violin, looking over every piece, my mom seemed young. Like a schoolgirl uncovering a cherished treasure, she wanted to show it off, but she wanted to keep it for herself. She was positively youthful.

Leslie had played next to her in the orchestra from grade school on. The girls had been nicknamed “Double Trouble” after an incidence of scolding from a teacher.

The teacher had asked the small girls, sitting side-by-side in their chairs, “Do you know how much trouble you’re in?”

And one had answered, “Double.”

While the other followed with, “Trouble.”

She ran the wax bar down the long, soft hairs of the bow. With her pitch pipe in her mouth---a small Willy Wonkaesque looking device used for tuning---she blew a note and then (after what I might have noticed as only the slightest of hesitations), she firmly ran the bow across the corresponding string. The note which came out sounded something like truth. It was deliberate and fearless as was she, and just that one note was music.

She blew the pipe again, this time on a different tube. Running her bow across the next string, the sounds matched.

“This one’s good,” she said. “That’s an E.”

She continued to go string by string, teaching me as she went to hear the difference between one that was in tune and one that was not. As she moved through the strings, her familiarity with the instrument and her confidence seemed to grow. I could see her other hand, the one on the finger board, coming alive with the memory of how it used to work---how it used to lift and place its fingertips in a rhythmic dance with the sliding bow.

She started to build and reached for a more complex piece but when it didn’t sound as she wanted it to, she stopped abruptly.

Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t even want to play it like that.”

My mom and Leslie sat next to each other all through their years in the high school orchestra, too. When I was a kid the only story I had ever heard from my mom about playing the violin was how as she grew older she was embarrassed to walk home with the cumbersome case. A pal of hers (was it Hank Schoeller?) had carried it for her, pretending, for the duration of the walk, that it was a machine gun.

Tonight she told us about playing next to Leslie. How sometimes the pieces were so fast that they couldn’t keep up with turning the pages of their sheet music.

“Sometimes one of us would play while the other would change the page and then we switched. There were rips all over our music books,” she said, smiling with the memory.

“Then we got really cocky and we would turn the page, throw our bows up in the air, catch them, and continue playing.”

She was fully laughing now.

“It was so much fun. Can you imagine how much fun it was to play all those years next to your best friend?”

We laughed with her and then were silent.

Leslie and my mom had been friends from the time they were eight-years-old until early adulthood when my mom had two little babies and Leslie, pregnant with her first, was murdered.

I grew up knowing about this murder---the man who had killed both Leslie and her mother had been caught--- but I never really understood anything about my mom’s loss. Sometimes when parents tell stories to a kid, it’s like fiction; the stories of characters, these younger selves of theirs.

But when we talk about it now; when I hear how my mom was questioned by the police, how it changed her, how she always held a piece of herself back in friendships after that, I now see the terrible sadness. The truth of loss---of one of the worst losses a heart can endure. (How did she endure?)

After backing away from the more complex piece, my mom said again that she didn’t want to play unless she could play well.

This time there was determination in her voice, not resignation as there had been during the first conversation months ago.

“This makes me want to work at it,” she said.

Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. I heard the notes I needed to hear. Even those notes were those of a musician. Of music. Real. Truth. Painful truth.

“So this was the actual violin that you had since you first started playing?” Dan asked.

“This is it,” she said.

Then, tapping its box he said, “This case holds a lot of memories.”

More than I even realized.

Perhaps, more than I’ll ever know.

Even as she turns 60, I’m still meeting my mom. In moments like this, watching how she handles a violin with the same familiarity with which she handles a sauce pan, I know there is another person in there. Maybe by the time she turns 70, I’ll know that person too.

My mom, on every level, is worth knowing.

Happy Birthday, Mama.

Love, Laura