My Mother's Birthday

Yesterday was Mom's birthday. She's with the Lord now, so it will be a while before I see her again. My earliest memory is when I was less than a year old. I remember being carried by her, wrapped in a pink bunting, and having a sense of awakening, of "Oh, here I am, this is ME!" She was the archetype for iron fist in velvet glove, but so subtle, gentle and skillful, few ever saw the iron, and she only exercised it for a high principal, not whims. For example, one of her highest principals was, "Don't make others uncomfortable or even inconvenience them, if possible." She would sit smilingly through public insults from a close family member and never respond, to such a degree an acquaintance began to wonder if she was simple minded. Hardly.

She graduated from IU Phi Beta Kappa, one of her proudest accomplishments. That gentle English major never let my grammatical errors slip by, and accompanied corrections with an explanation of why it had to be THIS way, not THAT way.

But the greatest legacy she left me was a broad education in the arts: I had poetry and classic children's stories memorized from much hearing, before I could read. She borrowed a whole series of books called "My Book House" from a neighbor and we read the 6 volumes over and over. I learned about Picasso's "blue period" in the Chicago Art Institute when I was seven and asked her why the whole picture was blue.

I don't know how old I was when she took me to see a very great mime, by then quite elderly, and I still remember the eerie, chilling gesture when he imitated Satan, in the moment he decided HE would be God, and slowly mimed setting a crown slowly on his own head.

I was taken to hear Arthur Rubenstein play the piano when I was four. Can you imagine spending money like that on a four year old? Wilhelm Bachaus when I was 11, and from about that time on, frequent performances of the greatest dancers and companies in the world, including Alicia Markova, Alicia Alonso, Igor Youskevitch, Carmen Amaya, Nureyev, Maria Tallchief, many. many others.

Dance and music remained our favorite, deepest activity. As a toddler, I would watch her put old records on to play, and hypnotize myself watching the heads of Mozart, or Beethoven go round, n' round, n' round......before kindergarten she explained Rigoletto to me, and the irony of Gilda's aria "Cara Nome" as she sings rapturously about the (false) name the duke gave her to seduce her. That was a recording of Lily Pons. She would teach me about the voices, what a "coloratura" was, who the "three B's" were. Most of it stuck.

When she was getting ready to leave her 87 year old body and move on, my daughter and I played Mozart all that night. (We were caring for her in my home.) And when she died, we put on Bach's Mass in B minor FULL VOLUME, and felt her great and beautiful spirit fly to Heaven, on wings of glorious music.

Mom, you told me not to cry, to be glad for you, but I told YOU, "I darn well will cry, you're worth it!" Still miss you, look forward to seeing you again.