April 1st

Of course yes, it's April Fool's Day. It's also the birthday of Gil Scott-Heron (b. 1949), and the anniversary of the day that Singapore became a British crown colony (in 1867), and the date that then-President Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law (in 1970), and when Google launched gmail (2004). And in 2009, my mother died. Fifteen years ago.

She sits beside me - in the books on my shelves, the objects hanging on the dining room walls, the roll top desk in the next room. Her plants are in my garden, a bottle of her perfume is on my dresser.

Last fall, my husband and I visited our daughter in the south of France. Shortly before our trip, my sister unearthed a small spiral bound notebook, with the notes my mother had taken when she took my siblings to the same general area in 1985. I scanned the whole thing and took it with us. It's a gem, and we are still quoting aloud from it. Taking that notebook with us was like having her along.

Cavaillon - the Hempstead of France

Here she is, hiding behind an urn, in 1985:

Moky as Gorey character

I miss her. But I am glad to have her around in the ways that I do.

The Annual #FuckCancer/Happy Birthday Post

83, she would’ve been, today. I think of her every day. I think she would’ve been delighted that we went to visit the island from which her father‘s family had come, off the coast of Germany (and I can’t believe she never went there). I think she’d be horrified and dismayed by the revelations of bad behavior at the New York City Ballet. I know she would be angry and sad at the political state of this country right now. She would love my beautiful daughter, with her big heart and burning desire to succeed and her grandmother’s love of riding - which skipped a generation. (I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been on a horse, and one of those was a mule.) She’d be tickled that I planted a New Dawn rose that scrambles up my back deck, and wholly supportive of my repair & recycle sewing projects.

[Remember the external fixator?]

I miss her.

#fuckcancer

---

If you are inclined to remember Moky, perhaps you’d support my walk-a-thon effort. My sister - who also has lung cancer - has again put together a team for a Lungevity event next month. Join us IRL (!), or by making a contribution. Lungevity does good work funding scientific research, educating on early detection, and providing patient support to help "people live better with lung cancer and dramatically improve on the current 18% five-year survival rate". And, they have a 4 star rating from Charity Navigator.
​

Click the Donate button below, or use this link to Lungevity.



Thank you.

Birthdays Are Hard

A couple of weeks ago, my sister gave me a bag of ephemera: my baby book, a box of our grandfather's letters & schoolwork in German, a folder of congratulations on the 1925 birth of a baby girl whose mother once upon a time lived across the street from my mother, and an envelope of photos. This here picture is my mother, in about 1995, with my cat Yoyo. I think it was taken in the crazy days leading up to my wedding, because it was in with some outtakes from that event.

Today would have been my mother's 82nd birthday, but that she hadn't died 8+ years ago, of lung cancer.

In her memory, and because cancer sucks, and because my sister has lung cancer, I'm doing something I have never ever ever done before: I'm participating in a walk-a-thon, raising money for Lungevity.

If you know someone who has had, or who has, or who has died from lung cancer - and you surely do - please help. Lungevity funds scientific research, educates on early detection, provides patient support - helping "people live better with lung cancer and dramatically improve on the current 18% five-year survival rate", and they have a four-star rating from Charity Navigator.



Click the Donate button above, or use this link: https://lungevity.donordrive.com/participant/36990

When you've done that, treat yourself to a popsicle. Red. In memory of Moky.

And thank you.

Splatter Painting In New York

I go days without thinking of my mother. But the spring, with all of the outdoor plant activity? That makes me think of her. Yes, those were her irises, her hosta. Her double-file viburnum bloomed with abandon this year.

And then sometimes I'll be at someone's house and the blue spatterware bowl reminds me of her, or I'll want to share the witty/goofy sets and costumes that enliven the ABT production of Whipped Cream (which I got to see at a dress rehearsal last week), or I'll turn over an index card and there'll be her handwriting, correcting someone's address.

Yesterday, I was sitting around drinking coffee and reading the Times, and it was one of those Sundays with an extra Times magazine, perfect bound and 90% ads. But I flipped through because you never know and there was a story about splatter-painted floors.

The Times made it sound like splatter-painted floors are a thing only ever found in "no-nonsense summer bungalows in Massachusetts." My mother would have begged to differ. Hell, I beg to differ. The first house I remember - the one we lived in from when I was 3 to when I was 11 - was a little suburban house on Long Island, probably built in the 1920s. My parents had no money, but my mother was crafty. She did all of the painting in the house, she made curtains, she even made a hooked rag rug for the hall runner. And when she painted my brother's room, she painted the floor white, and spattered it with red, yellow, blue and black. A splatter-painted floor, not in Massachusetts.

She'd have had something to say about the Times article, I tell you.

Imperfect

The problem with used book sales is the sieve of a brain that completely forgets that one already owns that book.

Case in point:

I, buying the book for the cover, picked up a pristine paperback copy of Margaret of the Imperfections not so long ago. When I got home, it went in the stack of books to be read. It was duly read. [It was okay - a couple of the stories were excellent, one needs to be turned into a play, and the rest were unmemorable.] I took it downstairs to shelve it, in alphabetical order with all* of the other fiction in the house, and discovered that I ALREADY OWNED A COPY. Clearly I am imperfect, or my memory is.

Figuring that, given a choice, one should always keep the hardcover in lieu of the paperback**, I plucked the hardcover off the shelf just to see if it rang any bells. I certainly hadn't remembered reading it ever before, but opening it up, I found an inscription on the flyleaf.

Sigh.

I bought the book for my mother, for Christmas, in 1991. When we packed out her house, I took it home and shelved it. I wonder if she ever read it. Probably, it would have been unlike her not to, but I can't know anymore. But our books tell the stories that we've forgotten.



* Well, most. There are books in other rooms.
** And now that I have the hardcover, who wants the paperback? Raise your hand. I'm mailing the paperback to a friend named Margaret.

Patterns

Heaven is an empty house. The other members of the household left me home alone yesterday, for a couple of blissful hours, while the girlie went and tried out for the swim team. Other people might use the time to take a nap, or catch up on Desperate Housewives. I embraced the chance for a bit of time to putter around my cellar.

There was a box in a corner, a box of odds and ends that I'd brought home from my mother's house a month or more ago. I emptied it, and put away the odd bits of fabric and paper, a jar full of paper fasteners, a small bone crochet hook. I was about to take the box upstairs, for the recycling bin, when I noticed that it wasn't just a plain white box that 10 reams of copier paper had come in. No, she'd decorated the side of the box, with a collage of paint chips, purples and teals and blues. A bit of matte board, cut to a small rectangle, labeled it "Patterns".

These are the things that rend the heart. This, this box, is a microcosm of her time, her sensibility. Someone else would have scribbled "patterns" with a black Sharpie. Who else would have used the paint chips for découpage?

Now I have a 9" x 17" piece of corrugated cardboard, propped up against the wall by my desk. I can't keep everything. Where do I stop?

Or, where do I start?

Cultural Icon

Back in the day, junior high school that is, we had to wear gym suits - at least the girls did. I'd forgotten all about my gym suit, until - of course - it turned up in a box at my mother's house. Of course, I brought it home for the girlie.



She put it right on, and I'll be damned but the thing fits her perfectly which just doesn't make any sense given that she's in third grade and I wore it in seventh, eighth and ninth grades. Great mysteries of life. She then threatened to wear it to school; I dissuaded her. [She also pointed out that it doesn't really fit her; it's got boob darts and she's got no boobs.]

It looks a little like Rosie the Riveter's jumpsuit, it's made out of some unfaded perma-magic everlasting fabric, and my name is tidily embroidered in script - needlework by Moky.

Is there a gym suit museum somewhere?

My Mother In My Garden

I spent a good chunk of time in the garden on Sunday. I had flowers to pot up for the front steps, and plants gotten at the garden club sale to put in the ground. There was a bleeding heart that was eating a corner of the perennial bed, a bleeding heart so big it had collapsed of its own sheer exuberance (abetted by a heavy rain). Even though it was still kind of in full bloom, I heartlessly dug it up and divided it in half. Here's hoping it survives. I impaled myself trying to prune the flowering quince, getting intractable thorns stuck in both hands. By the time I was done, I was filthy and sore, and oh so very pleased with myself.

It's impossible for me to work in the garden without thinking of my mother. Hers was her joy. A chore, to be sure, but a joy. She was ever shuffling hosta; I do the same. Her plants are scattered through my yard - hosta, astilbe, sedum - and solomon's seal running up along the front steps.



The sign was hers, bought in France, brought home and mounted on a bit of plywood. It faded terribly, its white letters all chalked off a few years after she got it. But she loved it so, and so painstakingly repainted all the little letters. You can't tell from a distance, but up close? It bears her brushmarks. And I think that's a bit of her standard issue hosta in the lower right hand corner.



It amuses me no end to have her sign living in my own garden. Little children are particularly perplexed, because (as yet) none of them speak French. If you come visit, you're not allowed pick the mushrooms (we've only toadstools), but I might send you home with a piece of hosta.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care…

It started with three stockings. One for my mother, one for my father, one for me. Mine was white, with an angel in a blue dress. Yellow yarn hair, a gold halo, stars at her feet, organdy wings. My mother’s was white too, an assortment of pastel ornaments appliqued on. My father’s was red; his was the Christmas tree, complete with tiny real glass ornaments, the size of a marble. She’d made them all, my mother did. Crafted of love and felt, they had stars and paillettes sewn on with tiny glass beads at the center, bits of lace and ribbon, an occasional jingle bell.

When my brother was born, she made him a stocking: red felt with a snowman. The snowman was gently padded underneath, and he wore a miniature hand knit blue and white Yale scarf. My sister completed the family, and her stocking was green with a red dressed Santa, fat belly encircled by a tiny vinyl belt.

For years, those five stockings were the ones carefully hung from the mantel each year. One year, I made a tiny inept stocking for a cat, blanket stitched ‘round the perimeter; when my parents divorced, the Christmas tree stocking was put away, not to be spoken of.

Gradually, more stockings were added to the mix – one for my husband, that I made, patchworked from old silk ties. My mother made stockings for my sister’s husband, her two older children, my daughter, my brother’s husband WIFE. We ran out of cup hooks on the mantel and started doubling up. My mother made a stocking for my sister’s youngest child – but didn't realize it was backwards, its toe pointing southwest, until she brought it down to the dining room where it hung in merry opposition to each and every other stocking. A couple of store bought stockings could be rotated in for house guests, like David, our brother from another planet, who came for Christmas Eve one year, and left two days later (and came back every year thereafter).

There were rules about the stockings: nothing was to be put into them until Christmas morning, nothing too heavy, contents were to be gently dumped onto the table and stockings returned immediately to their cuphooks, there must be no handling of the felt with sticky fingers. But, you see, they were worthy of rules, needing of protection. They're art, you see, art shot through with love and magic.

After we’d moved into our house, with our very own mantel, we had stand-in stockings – attractive enough Hable stockings I’d bought on sale – because the “real” stockings still resided at my mother’s house. It was only this year that I brought home the angel, and the ties, and the stars, and hung them with care on our very own cup hooks.



Now, our house is really a home.

Wrapping

My mother loved doing Christmas. Her Christmas was an exuberant but tasteful echt-Victorian tree and ornaments and swags and lights and candles and ribbons and cookies and stockings hung by the chimney with care. She was an expert wrapper, with a deep frugal streak – wrapping paper was carefully recycled (really, you’d never have known), ribbons were put away for use another year, and tags were sorted by name, a shoebox per child. She made the tags, of ends of ribbon, bits cut from Christmas cards, a mylar floof, a flocked holly leaf. Sometimes, even, the tags stayed attached to frilly gold elastic “ribbons”, to be slipped around just the right sized package the next year.

I have a box of her tags. A gold gift box from Lord & Taylor, from the days when department stores put scarves and blouses in real boxes, it’s a jumble of tags, new and old. Some have been around since I was a child (or so it seems). Others are more recent; there are tags that my mother made for my husband and daughter.

My wrapping tends to the more pedestrian. I hate the waste of buying paper, preferring to salvage crinkly brown paper and newsprint and ivory tissue and even a seed catalog with an old-fashioned feel. And I’ve given up on ribbons, in favor of Japanese masking tape, patterns of red and green – loving its duality as both decoration and adhesive.

[A digression: Santa doesn’t use kraft paper and fancy tape. Santa uses real wrapping paper and bows. But, Santa is only responsible for the presents for the one eight year old girl. It is a line in the sand, as it were.]

A couple of weeks ago, I read a book review of a book I just had to have. I mean, I was drooling over the excerpt I downloaded to my Kindle (well, the Kindle app on my iPad if you want to split hairs), but it was the kind of book that I wanted to have and to hold, to dog-ear and splatter-stain. So in a little fit of I-deserve-this, I bought it for myself for Christmas. I figured I’d wrap it up and stuff it under the Christmas tree, to me, love me.

Last night was wrapping night. I sequestered myself in the cellar and set to work. Wrap, wrap, wrap. Check it off the list. Put it in the box. Wrap, wrap, wrap some more. I came to the book I’d bought myself. I wrapped it in Santa paper. My eye fell on the gold box of my mother’s tags. Half wistfully, half mischievously, I fished out a tag and snapped it round the book. Done.

It is truly one of the most peculiar things I’ve ever done, and yet, it was just right. I can’t wait to open it.

Things Found In The Front Hall Chest

My siblings and I spent a few hours cleaning out some cabinets on the third floor of our mother's house, as well as a chest in the front lobby. Most of the contents were either Christmas, Easter, or Halloween related.

Dead Sample: small jar containing one Christmas tree light bulb

?Found in this drawer. From What?: screws in a plastic bag

Xmas tree piece - steel cylinder, copper tube: Envelope, with paper clip. Contents not viewed.

An index card with the specifics of the refinishing of that piece of furniture (color of miniwax, number of coats, application of paste wax): Left in the chest, and not photographed.

Wordless Wednesday: Birthday

Today would have been my mother's 76th birthday. She dearly loved the beach, the ocean, and when we were up at the Cape, I gathered pebbles and wrote her name on an unsullied stretch of smoothly packed sand. I imagine that it pleased her.

Moky Ephemera

Every time I set foot in my mother's house, to clean up and clean out, we find things.

1) A fragile yellow ceramic bowl, up on a shelf, with an index card tucked inside:

Do Not
Use. Please.

2) The first time we ever went on an airplane was a trip to Bermuda, sometime after my parents had gotten divorced. How this card survived the past 35 years, I don't know. Why there was outdoor carpeting, I also do not know.

3) The label on a file cabinet in the cellar:

Metal Junk

4) She was exceedingly fond of ripping bits out of the newspaper, especially when there were good typos involved.

Yellow Hair, Yellowed Paper

My mother's house is finally on the market, and my siblings and I have been slowly trying to make some headway with the contents. There is an enormous amount of stuff: furniture, tchotckes, toys, pots, buttons, towels, and endless stacks of paper.

Moky kept files on all manner of things - local history, friends, nuts and cranks. The files are full of letters, ephemera, gritty xeroxes, clippings, and photos.

Later today, I'm having lunch with an old friend of my mother's, the kind of friend who had her own folder. They'd actually gone to college together, but hadn't really known one another until years later when, by coincidence, they ended up living in the same town, and my mother's friend's daughter was my elementary school (and junior high and high school) classmate. After a time, the friend moved away, to California, and they kept up by writing letters back and forth, often with clippings involved.

When I see her, I'm handing over her folder, but I skimmed through it first, I had to. It's full of letters and birthday cards and newspaper clippings about the friend's husband, but it's the letters that fascinate me - for how they reflect upon events in my mother's life, and necessarily mine. In one letter, there's a whole Yeats poem about blonde women typed out, with this comment:

I always think of that poem in pondering Pinky and Magpie and their beautiful flaxen hair, and of course yours too-- when I first knew you, yours was just like theirs.

There's some delicious semi-catty chatter about the guests at my wedding in another letter, but my favorite bit might be this tantalizing post script:

P S 2 A___ tells me that M___ T___ has broken up with the fabled panty-hose woman. She wanted to have a baby so he decided enough was enough. We had a mimeographed account from him of the fabled lawsuit, but no personal word in a long time.

Is that not the makings of a short story?

C and D

Every drawer opened,
every book moved,
every box perused,
every piece of paper overturned,

results in some small moment of

nostalgia,
aimless archeology,
reflection,
bemusement,
amusement,

or regret.



If she'd sketched out an M, I'd frame it in a heartbeat.

Your ring? Said the Piggy, I will.

Finally, we've started cleaning out my mother's house and making it ready for sale. I spent 24 hours there over the weekend, and came back with a carload of oddments and nostalgia, including (but by no means limited to):

• A shilling.
• The blue chenille bathrobe I took to college with me.
• My junior high school, high school and college yearbooks.
• A green glass vase, 5' tall.
• The Mar 3, 1980 cover of the New Yorker, framed, because my mother (rightly) thought it looked just like my college dorm common room.
• A cashmere hat, pale blue, that my mother bought new at a thrift shop.
• A koa wood box that I gave my mother for Christmas once, bought in the town I went to college in (I know this because the tag was in the box).
• An unopened package of 50 envelopes.
• The ticket stub from an inadvertently hysterical concert we attended in 1991, where the audience was instructed to "make the noise you need to make" to "raise the cone of power".
• Three flower arranging devices.
• An army green can of saddle soap, from when my father was in the Marine Corps, labeled

POISON
Do not use as food container

• My Stieff teddy bear, all four paws patched with new felt because the moths had once gotten to him and exposed his excelsior stuffing.
• The birthday cake plate of my youth, flat, Italian.
• A salad spinner, the twin of the one we already have, but not cracked.
• The Karinska book I once gave my mother.
• The gaudy yellow, red, blue and kelly green quilt that my mother and I made in 1975. It lived on my bed in my kelly green room, until my mother redecorated that room in more soothing shades of blue.
• My paternal uncle's French "verb wheel", from prep school?
• A small rake.
• An ancient green glass jar of fuller's earth dusting powder.
• A baseball cap from a Harvard-Yale game, emblazoned "Impale Yale". I've boxed it up to send it to my college boyfriend, who went to Harvard, and whose son now goes to Yale.
• The brass key fob from room 28 of the Hotel d'Albe in Fountainebleau.
• One of THE two copies of Fantastic Mr. Fox - which leads me to wonder, if there were two copies, why have I never read it?
• An autograph book, with signatures dated between 1899 and 1905. I've no idea whose it was. My great-grandmother, perhaps. Maybe I'll send it to the historical society in Athens.
• More index cards.
• Some sedum to tuck into my stone wall, and some bamboo to plant down at the way bottom of my garden (where it can ramble without prejudice). [Digging things out of the garden was not strictly necessary.]
• A jump rope.
• The tassel from my mortarboard.
• A baton (for conducting, not for baton twirling).
• A tidily folded bit of tissue paper, marked "my tooth is in here".

And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

A Year

I was on the train home yesterday, when the Neville Brothers shuffled into position on my iPod:

I was standing by my window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse wheel rolling
It was taking my mother away

Undertaker, undertaker
Won't you please drive real slow?
That's my mother, my dear old mother
I sure hate to see her go

My heart stopped a little. I remember watching the hearse take my mother away, a year ago today.

And then, when I got to my house, there was a little white stone sitting in the gutter, right at the top of my driveway, about the size of a lima bean. It's not a piece of gravel, it's not a native rock. It's like the rocks my mother loved to pick up on the beach at Fire Island - perfect little surf tumbled stones, pure white shot through with tiny grey veins, flat and smooth in the hand.

She hasn't a headstone, she wasn't buried, so I can't mark my visits by putting pebbles on her tombstone. Instead, it's like she came to me, in the form of that little rock sitting in front of my house.

I can't believe it's been a year. It feels like just yesterday.

Wordless Wednesday: Red

My mother, in 1956. Her lipstick matches her apple.

Things Learned From My Mother: Thrift

When I was a little girl, sleeping in the wrought iron bed with brass finial balls that is now my daughter's, I slept under a quilt that my mother had made. It wasn't anything complicated, just 4" patchwork squares. She quilted a lot, my mother. She made pillows, and clothes, and blanket-like quilts out of old wool suiting backed with fleece. The summer before I went to college, we made a quilt together. Mostly, I made it, with her guidance, but I think of it as something we did together. Again, it was nothing fancy, a rail fence pattern made with 2" x 6" rectangles, shades of blue anchoring each patch. It's not even quilted, but merely tied with white wool - a tie at each four square meeting.


That quilt is now on my daughter's bed, that self-same iron bed I'd slept on when I was her age. Because it was made from fabric scraps of many vintages, including fabric from my childhood, and from my mother's, some of the pieces are failing. Every so often, I cut a handful more patches, iron the edges, and contemplatively appliqué them into place. If I'm feeling fancy, I'll do a little crazy quilt embroidery in a contrasting color, but mostly I'm just trying to fix the holes and keep the decay at bay.


Over the weekend, I realized it was beyond hand-sewing - there were far too many holes, split seams, frayed patches. Someone else might have thrown in the towel and headed for a department store for a cozy new comforter; I headed for the sewing machine. Casting tradition to the winds, I machine-appliquéd new rectangles, and machine-darned some of the seams, sewing all the way through to the backing.

Even as I was doing it, I questioned my sanity. But I have to keep fixing that quilt. My initials are on the corner, and my initials are the same as my child's (though I see some broken stitching in the "M" which I ought to address). It's her quilt and mine, and my mother's too, and it wraps us in memory and thrift.

The Nightgown

She went off to the undertaker in a nightgown. A soft cotton-knit nightgown from Lands' End. Heather grey, with a henley neck and a handful of buttons and long sleeves. It hung to below the knee, and had side slits at the hem.

I'd bought it for her around the time she started sleeping in the living room. All of her other nightgowns were cotton flannel, and harder to get on and off; the stretchy knit was easier. Over time, though, both side slits tore farther up the seam. All of that pulling and rolling and tugging - to change the diaper, change the bedding, get her positioned in her bed just so - took its toll on the fragile seams, already weakened by the slit running up from the hem.

She went off to the undertaker in a nightgown with ripped seams. I wonder, did they take it off, that nightgown? Did the funeral home send it off to St. Vincent de Paul? Or did she go to the crematorium in that nightgown?

It was one of the last things that I bought her.