A Cake for my Mother
Pity she didn't live longer. The opera "Rigoletta" was on last night and she would have been listening right along. Opening her thick Opera book and noting it again. Remembering when she had listened to it last in Vienna and the last time she had heard it on a Saturday day afternoon straight from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
I can see her now laying on the couch on a Saturday afternoon. Stretched out somewhere between Minneapolis and Vienna, the cares of the week, the day and the moment vanished for a few short hours. My dad would be off to a movie or typing upstairs. She sighed thinking of the emotional terrain she navigated daily with this temperamental brilliant Texan who didn't like opera. Sighing she remembered her days at the Opera House in Vienna and how she went to Demel's afterwards for a Viennese pastry delight topped with whipped cream. Sighing perhaps she sketched one of her enigmatic mystical faces in the back of her Opera book.
Sighing I open the old Opera book. The cover is falling off, but the sentiments remain. If I open it at just the right spot the music swells out lapping out over the pages and those last desperate moments of La Boehme ring out as Rudolpho cries out "Mimi! Mimi!" over her dead body... or I turn the page and Tosca jumps over the parapet. Drama, turbulence, passion and drama. Nothing sedate or politely midwestern about this. And thus my parents dramas matched these operatic ones as well.
What a couple. My mother Emily with her European manners, education and warm Viennese empathy. Her psychological insights remain and no matter what her own inner challenges were she always saw through to the core of a problem revealed in intimate conversation. Saying to me as we sat in the backyard on that hot August day precisely six months before she died. "Have the expectation of Goodness!" And there was my father from east Texas. The rambuctious intellectual who left the south, who loved Japan, who flourished in Kyoto, who read 1000's of books. Poetry bonded them, but it was a tempestuous union. They were so different. It took me years to realize that we were not midwestern. I popped my head up from within the family, looked around and realized we had no farm ties after all and not a bit of Scandinavian blood. We flourished none the less and my parents gift of entertaining kept their friendship circle warm and nourishing as dad tossed another log into the fireplace as he read another poem to a rapt audience gathered in the living room
The opera remains. My dads books are piled up in the back room. I open at least one a week and share the poems he loved in my weekly poetry group. Their deaths have been just a blip after all as they float above me...somewhere in the ether...supporting me..nurturing me...commanding me to do this or that and most of all to remember them and hold on to their values.
In two days my mother would have been 97. I can see how she would have popped up after that long illness that almost took her out...and how we would have celebrated despite her ensuing frailty with a cake, a handmade card and a small puppet show made at the last minute. Laughing she would have opened her presents and we would eat cake amid the bouquets she had been given..... but she's gone.
Now I peruse the recipe for gugglehopf cake. It needs time. Yeast must be dissolved, almonds chopped, flour sifted and there are two risings. I anticipate making it just the right way and serving it with lots of whipped cream. Perhaps a side of jello would complete the honoring and the offering.
Happy birthday Emily. Your memory remains a blessing.
