New Years Day in Vienna…then and now 1/1/19 for my mother Emily

                                                                                               My mother and grandmothers favorite Opera.

                                                                                                     "Tosca" one they heard often in Vienna.

       This New Year’s Day morning is terribly cold. My car shudders and barely wants to start. The engine clatters reluctantly and I wonder if it will make it. I dash off because Josh is being released today after a week in Cardio Renal. On Christmas night I called the ambulance because he had shortness of breath…kind of another wild week…but we held on …Now insights pave the path ahead and I trust he can find some stability for his health for a while.

     The moment I turn on the reluctant car New Year’s Day music from Vienna fills the cold sunny air. A soft German voice tells the selection and I hear my mother’s voice with her ever present Viennese inflection. Her youth in Vienna shaped her life and she brought to the pedantic Midwest her European culture, love of music and grace in entertaining.

    As I near the hospital a particularly beautiful piece lingers.  I park and listen. Amid the harsh pragmatic buildings delicate music all the way from Vienna fills the air coloring it with nuance, feeling and ethereal emotions.

     I ride the elevator with a woman in a wheelchair wearing a beautiful scarf. These 20 seconds with a stranger reveal so much. She frustrated with not getting in the door. Still elated from the music I bend low and comfort her for a moment. My mothers empathy in my DNA making the moment easy.

     Josh is sleeping and on oxygen when I arrive. His room mate moans. All of a sudden I realize I forgot to bring the green pants he wanted to wear home. I know he will be irritated and he is when he awakes. For a moment I look down at my brown velvet pants thinking they “might”fit. He is impatient and frustrated. I decide to go home and get the green pants. I am mad at myself and then I am not…as a silver lining glints in the harsh winter sunlight. I realize that driving back and forth will allow me to hear this special Viennese New Year’s Day concert.

   Driving south on ordinary Hwy 55 the music from Vienna lifts me.   Then January 1^st 2011 comes into view. I have hurried over to see my parents. My mother has been visibly and slowly declining for a while. Everything feels tenuous and anxious as we sit on the couch. I can tell it’s time to change her diaper. Life has been fraught for a while and I feel a deep foreboding. Old friends come by and we have a kind of sort of New Years Day party. So unlike other years when the old table from Vienna would be pushed against the wall and my mother would have the silverware laid out in that particular way of hers. She would have made a yellow box cake and proud of her efforts it would be front and center on the table. Her lack of cooking plainly evident. There would be those funny little round boxes of cheese with cows faces on them. Emily presided and we were all welcomed in.  But January 1, 2011 was bleak. Death sat sulking in a corner…waiting. I wept as I drove recalling that last New Years for her with the silvery Viennese music weaving a net of memory in the air.

      I got home, found the green pants and the fuzzy brown ones too. I drove back to the hospital on the same ordinary Hwy 55. But now my mothers youth opened up before me as I heard Strauss’s “Artist Life”. She led a full life of painting, poetry, and Jungian insights. Somehow I could see my mother walking to school in Vienna past magnificent marble statues of composers. It was easy to imagine her at the Opera with her parents and then playing the piano with ease. Her Viennese life opened up as I drove along. She grew up  surrounded by music, art and culture as my father picked cotton on an East Texas farm listening to his sister tell stories of Scarlet O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind.”

    I drove along  in my old 1995 purple Saturn car filled with the flotsam and jetsam of my busy life. But my car and that little radio took me on a journey past the sad memory of my mother’s death to wander the streets of Vienna with my mother in her youth.. before life changed. before the Anschluss happened. Just waltzing in the carefree life of her youth in Vienna.

    I lingered with the music when I got to the hospital. Once again the silvery notes held me. I did not see the metal and stone structure before me but looked up to see my mother in her heavenly realm gazing down at me as the waltz played reminding me that beauty, music and harmony endure despite the hardships that life brings.

I brought Josh home. We resumed our complex life together as the temperature hovered about zero. The radiator thumped to life and we were warmed.