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.

The Letter . November 2, 1946

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 The Letter…November 2, 1946 from my Dad to his his mother in Texas.

   This morning as usual I went out to get the paper..reluctant to read todays bad news about incendiary speech and devices…. I brought the paper back to read in bed and noticed a letter on the floor…dated 1946 it was a letter written by my father James White to his mother back in Waco,Texas…describing what he saw in Olympia, Washington as he was in military training…(later stationed in Japan)

“at sunset I was alone on top of their Capitol building and never saw a more beautiful outlay of forms in my life..Mt Rainier could be seen to the east just a pinnacle of sow and mist..the moon with its half orb of soft tints and glows to the South and the Sun settling down into its bed of rosy hues in the west..their legislative building was of streaked granite and white limestone-with a touch of white marble as cornices..Such beauty-by man and the Architect of the Universe is not understandable to me.It is an unfinished desire which seems to have no answer: a mere long for which I must ever conjure up faulty reasons as final answers”…..later on in the letter he speaks of trips planned to Seattle and Vancouver…”I get so saturated with the present that I forget too much of the past Good Life I shared with family, friends and those whose aspirations I shared. This world was not made just to to be probed into and ogled at: Friendship and Home Life are the true aim. I will not cheat myself by passing lightly over these things: they are everthing!”Love JC

Ps This leaf is an elm whose descendents George Washington stood under and took command of US Army July 3, 1775) (actual leaf long crumbled and gone now)

So thank you Dad for reaching out to me over 72 years. Once again I know where I got my search for beauty and connection to others…I got it from you. Thanks for  reminding me to always affirm beauty in this world and to build rich relationships with others. Thanks Dad

Once again...Memory

      That day 9/11 so long ago.... now 17 years ago.
I remember I was on my way to work and stopped at the Post Office to mail a birthday package to my brother. The postal clerk told me a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I felt slightly off balance hearing that news and had not heard about the first plane. Our electricity was off that morning as the huge tree (probably dating back to the mid 1800's) was being cut down that morning. It was all eerie and strange and upsetting.
    I made it to work at the Jewish school where I taught and wondered about our vulnerability. The day was thick with questions, fear and uncertainties.
    The day got worse and later I watched those people jumping from the buildings.
    Today as I write it is a brilliant sunny day. It was sunny back then too, but soon clouded by smoke and heartbreak. I came home that day to a wide open expanse of sky that was oddly eerie and symbolic of what had happened in NYC that day.

      Years pass. Memory remains. I recall how the NYT carefully and compassionately printed obituaries pairing maintenance people with high executives. Death had been a level ground after all. Grief saturated those months going into fall and winter. I lit candles on that tree stump for months even as the snow began to fall. Grief remained...

The Jewish Peddler and The Baptist Preacher

   

And so I row my leaky boat ...there on the vast and rocky seas of memory...I row and row...

hoping to set anchor

this densely packed holiday weekend began with opening a box of clay pieces made by me

and my students long ago at the Jewish Day School I worked at...

oh the labors....the sweat....the tears...

 the kiln opened when it was cool enough to reveal treasures that would

grace numerous Seder tables including my own

for decades....

the salt water dishes, the haroset dishes, the Seder plate, and Elijahs cup.

and always the Chaise Lounge Charoset Dish that occupies a place of honor.

I set out the dishes and the memories...

I carefully take the photo of my Jewish ancestors off the wall and prop it on boxes of matzah 

on a chair adjacent to the place setting for Elijahs Cup

for all these moments are mysteries.

years pass, but the ancestors remain..

I remember what I do not remember and know that my great great grandfather was

a seltzer water in nothern Romania.

I could not find a trace of him when I visited the graveyard in 1998

but allowed the mystical light flowing in the window in the middle of the night

to direct my gaze of wonder..

He appeared in dreams and in my imagination as I began the long road backwards and forwards

to this moment of holding a small Seder with friends..

******

when I take the train of memory back to Texas it is hot and almost summer.

I am arriving with my family after 3 days on the train. The salami sandwiches are now tasteless

and we are weary.

My grandfather C.H. White is there to pick us up and

we head to the small house in Waco where we will spend the week.

He was once a farmer who got the call to preach and so he rallied forth from his pulpit

and later circled round and round about Jacob.

On Easter Sunday we drive out to hear him preach with fury and brimstone in the 

small church 

so simple with just a wooden cross.

so simple it is hard to recall the Greek Orthodox majestry and mystery that  holds me 

up north.

where we are not Greek, but we fit in...almost

after church the family gathers

and I feel my sense of tribe

the South held and fascinated me...it was a part of me

just as part of me never gets used to these long northern winters

as I yearn for the sun and warmth

we had Fried chicken, beans, mashed potatoes and iced tea

if you look at the family picture of us all standing outside the old house

you'd see me in my homemade dress and specially curled hair.

*******

yesterday I went to Easter with my neighbors and remembered

my long ago Baptist past 

the service could not have been more different

but the ardent faith remained.

the fried chicken for lunch took me all the way back to Texas

*****

sometimes it is easy to dwell in the house of memory.

when I lived on that small island I wove belt for a living.

the warp and the weft holding each other 

to make a long weaving of color and strength

 the weft and warp of memory hold me now.

**

i row and row

finally landing on the small island of memory

there I weave in my old stone cottage

creating

my warp and weft of moments

from the past and future

of ancestors known and unknown 

on my simple square loom

remembered and mused upon

**