Part II, Day 12: Our Descendants

My sister and I used to joke that we were raised by wolves.  I guess that made us wolf pups, and gives us license now to masticate our food for our own young, and to howl a lot, as we do, in our own ways.

from a blog on endangered Oregon wolves, http://howlingforjustice.wordpress.com/tag/endangered-species-act/

Last week in Boston, when we attended Cheryl Strayed's reading from her new memoir, Wild, I was touched by something she said in the Q and A about parenting.

She had just done a reading in Seattle, and a young man in the first row, who was only 22, the same age she was when she lost her mother, asked her for some advice on how to live now that his mother was gone.  He was going down a bad path, he confessed.  His grief was making him self-destructive.  She was walking a dangerous path herself at his age until she took a 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest trail, a journey that broke her down and built her up again.  But when you read her memoir you understand that the hike was influential, but in the long haul her apprenticeship to art, and to love, and eventually, to family life were what saved her.  These experiences didn't change her so much as reacquaint her with her best self, the self she'd been as a child that had been there all along and had never really deserted her: that bright and loving person her mother had nurtured and believed in.

"I told him something my mother always said," she told the audience.  (This is not an exact quote, gentle reader.  I wasn't taking notes.)  "My mother always said the best thing she made in her life was her children.  She gave up a lot to be a good mother to us.  And I felt that I owed it to her memory to become the person she thought I could be.  I would be letting her down, letting down all she lived for, if I didn't take a good path."

I'm sure I'm not the only one in that audience who was on the verge of tears when she said this.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought about her own mother too.

It was a miracle that I was able to reconcile with my mother before she died.  I owe this incredible gift to my sister, who never completely broke the ties between them.  The day before our mother died, my mother told me that my sister and I were her most beautiful creations, and giving birth to us was the best thing she ever did.

Even when we ran from her in terror, she hung onto this vision of us as beautiful, talented, and good.

I think again about the quote I discussed yesterday, on inheritance, from Thich Nhat Hanh:

We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors, and also the painful qualities.  Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations.  We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of all our descendants.

If I'm lucky, and I've inherited the longevity genes from some of my ancestors, I'm in the autumn of my life.  It's not December yet, and bright leaves are still on the trees.  But still, that's not a lot of time to practice peace, and to continue cultivating all that is good and beautiful that I culled from my ancestors.  I've been trying lately to catch up.

My family tree ends with my sister and me, at least when it comes to our genetic makeup.  My sister has helped raise her husband's two talented, lovely, loving girls, and I helped raise my husband's two talented, lovely, charismatic and fascinating boys.  But we won't be birthin' no babies.

I can brag about my step-descendants here because they didn't inherit their talents and intelligence from me.

Science Boy just won a prestigious grant that nearly a hundred people around the world applied for.  I wish I could explain what he's cooking up in the lab in Cambridge, England on his post-doc, but I didn't get past Bio for Poets, which I took pass/fail.

Art Boy has a solo show, his first, in the Midwest next week.  His paintings are too gorgeous for me to find words for-- the way he uses color, the way his canvases contain optical illusions and expand and contract depending on where you stand--so I'll have to cobble together something for you from the program and his craft talk after I head to the show.

I don't know what aspects of me they will remember, what they will wish to keep alive in their own stories and habits.  I've never really thought about this until I started writing this post.

Just as I don't know what my students will remember from our classes together: I hope there will be something useful in the mix about literature, and not just odd aspects of my personality, like how I tend to accidentally steal people's pens, and how I never wear a watch to class, and how I like to drink a scary health drink (Kombucha, usually) while I teach and that I usually learn names quickly, but there's always one person who gets called by his or her friend's name, and vice versa, and the two of them, like my sister and me when we were with our aging grandmother, have to learn to answer to both names.

(A memory is intruding here, not letting me stay too solemn for too long.  I'm thinking of my high school physics class with Carl Locke.  I don't remember what we did on the bunsen burners, but I remember when he said, "Don't touch those rubbers!  You don't know where they've been!"  He was speaking about rain shoes, not contraception, but that line lived on in our teen parlance for years.  It was up there as the thing to say that was applicable to almost any situation, along with what our art teacher said about the color magenta, "Some people like it, some people think it's kind of wild!")

Which brings me back to the subject of wolves and wolf pups.

My dog, Zoe should be in her autumn too, but now, I suppose, it's her winter, and hence the name, "Winter with Zoe."

Her mother was an Australian shepherd mix, her father a golden retriever mix, but the guy who was working at the pound that day said, "She's also part wolf."

How I wish Zoe could have had the chance to breed.  I understand why the humane society sterilizes its dogs, but I dream sometimes at night that I'm surrounded by a pack of mini-Zoes.

I wish I could have met her mother.  The story I heard from the volunteers at the humane society was that the bitch's people refused to get her fixed.  That they let her have litter after litter, then dropped her latest descendants at the pound.

photo by Lettie Stratton; I love the wolfy look Lettie captured here

Since I can't locate the dogs that share Zoe's DNA, I just take a lot of pictures and write these posts, hoping to get the most out of every day we have together.

Maybe the stories we tell about our lives and each other and our ancestors are our true descendants.

When I think of life and time that way, I hope every day I can find the right words to make a certain little wolf pup live on.

Not everyone likes to write.  Some people like it, and some people think it's kind of wild.

My wish for all of you, gentle readers, is that the stories you choose to tell will be among your finest descendants, and that sharing them will give you and the ones who will come after you peace.

Part II, Day 11: On Inheritance

From today's reading from Your True Home, the Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh:

Our Inheritance.

We contain all the beautiful qualities and actions of our ancestors, and also the painful qualities.  Knowing this, we can try our best to continue what is good and beautiful in our ancestors, and we will practice to transform the violence and pain passed down to us from so many generations.  We know that we practice peace not only for ourselves, but for the benefit of all our descendants.

I used to say to people that my sister, Mira Bartok, and I are lucky because we got some of the best traits in the family gene pool, and none of the worst.  There are writers and painters and pianists and skilled gardeners and farmers and bishops and rabbis and tailors in our ancestry, but in that mix, often from the same people, are afflictions like paranoid schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, alcoholism, arrogance, and cruelty.

Hans Herr: Do I have this man's DNA?

Lately I've been reconsidering our inherited ratio of violence and pain to beauty and goodness.  I know now that the generations of people who came before us also had a lot to teach us about endurance and strength and faith, and I'm grateful for what they gave us.

Take Hans Herr, for example.  He's the patriarch on our father's side.  Born in Zurich in 1639 and persecuted for his religion, he came to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in the early 18th century and founded the first Mennonite Church in North America.  He was 70 when he and his fellow bishops and church members and family fled Europe. They sought the help of William Penn when they looked for land, and when they arrived in the New World they had to leave behind all their worldly possessions and many of the people they loved.

Seventy must have been old in 1710.  Imagine starting over in a new country at that age, having enough faith in your beliefs to go to jail for them, to risk death for them, to leave your country for them, and then finally to travel by sea to a place where no one speaks your language, or truly wants you there, or comprehends your fondness for excessive facial hair.

Our father, his great-great-great-great-great (give or take a few) grandson, tried to disavow his ancestry and become a new man.  He told our mother that he was the descendant of Hungarian gypsies, and well into our thirties my sister and I believed that we were half-gypsy.  We would probably still believe this were it not for our half-brother from our father's first marriage, who hired a detective and came looking for us and gave us a peak at the family tree.

We had to wonder: why had our father created a more romantic story for himself?  What was he running from, and why?  His novel, Journey not to End, opens with the narrator being liberated from the camps in Belsen. What drew him to that story instead?

What's not to like about theologians and, as it turned out, Indiana chicken farmers?  In a way, Mennonites and poultry seemed as exotic to me, when I heard all this, as Hungarian gypsies.

The other story our father told, but not to us as small children, was that he may have been the product of his mother's illicit affair with a Jewish man, a traveling salesman.  He liked to tell his friends he was half-Jewish, perhaps to distance himself from the heavy Protestantism.

But maybe he really was the love child of the wandering Jew?  I'll never know.  If he is, I guess I don't get to keep the top Mennonite as my patriarch.  I live among the Amish, and it would be nice to have something in common with them.  Either way, I still get chickens.  By all accounts, our father grew up on a farm.

My father's life itself, like the novel's title, was a journey not to end: it took him from Indiana to Chicago to Los Angeles via somewhere in the European war fields, and then it ended with him dying alone, at age 60, in an apartment in New Orleans, with nothing in his possession but his VA card, five suits, and maybe (we'll never knew for sure) his upright typewriter, unfinished manuscripts, and passport.  It's highly likely that Hurricane Katrina carried his bones from the unmarked pauper's grave where he was buried off to sea.

I found out about Hans Herr, and the half-brother's family tree, just before I got tenure, when I was looking to make a life for myself up here in the North Country, a poor farming county in the far north of the empire state.  To go from thinking of myself as someone with a genetic predisposition for wandering to someone with deep roots in this land, from before it was even a nation . . . It was a marvelous thing to chew on, and I haven't finished yet.

That's me as a baby with my mother pointing to my favorite painting of my father's.  My mother and I called it "The Schmoes"

Philip Smith, master tailor.  Now: What was his surname before Ellis Island?

My young parents

On my mother's side in Belarus, there were rabbis and tailors.  My second-cousin's son Michael just sent us this picture of our great-great grandfather in his atelier.  Maybe I've added an extra "great," I don't know.

My grandmother, who was born to the Smiths, worked as the credit manager at a chemical company in Cleveland--probably one of the companies who opened their effluence straight into the Cuyahoga River and caused it to set fire.

She was good with numbers, good with bookkeeping, both of which are skills I lack.  She also played the piano, like her father had played the violin, and that gift was passed on to our mother, who would have been a concert pianist if she hadn't been stricken with mental illness and lost everything she had. 

Mira Bartok, Norma Herr, and me

But now, when I look back on our mother as a young woman trying to balance motherhood with being a wife to a writer and painter--a man who also had a serious drinking problem and who had made up a romantic life for himself to run from what he saw as drudgery, Middle American drudgery--I can't help but admire her for fostering in us, her daughters, a passion for the arts.  And while I resented our father for abandoning us to pursue his dream--wandering and writing and painting--it gave me a map for a radical way to live that wasn't readily found in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1970s.

Who else, but from our parents, did my sister and I inherit the crazy belief that literature and art were more important than wealth and security?

Among all the crimes I accused my parents of in my worst hours, back when my mode of being was to define myself against the family I had come from, was never that they told me not to have dreams, to just go settle for something, anything, rather than pursue a life that challenges me to try and fail and pick myself up and risk failure again day after day. 

One of the ironies in our story is that my sister thinks, now, that there actually were gypsies in our ancestry.  Our mother's father, who always told us he was the youngest of 13, and was born in Macedonia, and dropped out of school in third grade to go to work, may have been from a family of Roma.  The brothers and sisters all set sail from different ports around the Mediterranean.  They all have different stories on their passports about their origin: that they are Turkish, or Bulgarian, or Greek, or Macedonian, the last of which is hybridy anyway.  I don't know if we'll ever know who these people really were.

Our grandmother married our grandfather because she was pregnant, not because she loved him.  She lived in fear of this crude, angry man who kept a rifle in the attic that we all thought he might use on us.

Chickens from Deep Root Farm

But now, when I think of him, I remember how he confessed to me once that he had a lifelong fear of chickens.  He said that when he was a child working on a farm, a chicken tried to pluck his eyes out.  I picture him now as a young boy cowering in the chicken coop, and I want to go into that coop and protect him.

Our father told our mother that his parents expected him to become a stockbroker or a minister, and that he worked his way through college plucking chickens.

Actually, we later found out, he served in World War II, and he went to college on the GI bill.

When I re-read Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on inheritance, I think of all the different people and qualities that have come through my blood.  Story-telling in many forms.  A love of music and literature and painting.  Fear.  Religiosity.  Stubbornness.  And a love/hate relationship with poultry.

Sometimes I wish I could channel some of these people and their talents on command.

My sister plays fiddle and piano and harp and ukelele and my claim to fame, musically, is that when I dance around the house by myself, I seldom miss the beat.

In home ec, when we switched from cooking to sewing, I got a D.

Zoe and me, photo by Tara Freeman

In my family line there is also sweetness and generosity and tenderness.  My maternal grandmother's mother, I was reminded again recently by family friends, was the most kind and loving woman that anyone in their circle knew.  I only met her when I was a baby and I'm glad our lives intersected, however briefly.

And from my grandmother to my mother to both my sister and me is a straight line, a great passion that hasn't weakened with each generation and if anything, has grown stronger.

A mad love for dogs.

Day 35: Rebekah's Dogs Teach us About Family and Caring

It's Wednesday, January 11.  Today my husband and I are taking Zoe to Ottawa for another chemotherapy appointment.  Tomorrow I'll post on how it went.

Now and then, in this corner, I invite a guest blogger to share a story.  Today's post is by a talented student at St. Lawrence University, Rebekah White.  She's from the Adirondacks and spent some time studying in New York City, but ended up transferring to SLU because of our Environmental Studies/English combined major and our proximity to the things she loves most: rivers, forests, mountains, and quiet.

When she sent me this story about the two dogs she grew up with, I was moved by the disarming candor of her voice.  It's just a dog's eyelash longer than the usual post here, and I hope you will not only read it but share it on Facebook and beyond.

First, two pictures of Rebekah with the rest of the students I taught in Contemporary Literature and the Environment.  This picture was taken on October 18, 2011, when we went on a hike through Harper's Falls. 
That's me hugging Zoe, and to the left is Erin Siracusa, who posted for me on Day 21.  Rebekah is immediately to the left of Erin in a pale blue jacket.  This group was an absolute joy to work with.  Zoe loved them too.  Some of the students in this group have known her for all their four years of college.

Rebekah is in the blue jacket in the front row

To read or re-read Erin Siracusa's post, go to Day 14: Waking up in the Dark.

Abiding Company

Rebekah White

I am sitting in the sand because I know that it will not be long before winter intrudes with its cold, icy hands and, brusquely, authoritatively, forces me back inside. I run my fingers through the white dirt, tossing it between my palms, all too aware that the passing of time will soon transform this dirt into snow.

The sky is overcast, as it has been for much of this weekend. I am on vacation from school, and enjoying the surplus time that is allowing me to laze in such ways in the dirt. I zip up my jacket and recline back against my favorite tree, the white pine that has been in our front yard for as long as I can remember.

I yawn and survey our yard which, to be honest, is not that expansive. My parents own quite a bit of acreage, but most of it is in swamp or woodland. We are not the type of family that finds it necessary to devote a large portion of our property to swimming pools or decorations. As a child, I never had a trampoline or a tree house. My father prefers to keep things looking natural, so that’s why, spare a dilapidated swing set, a pair of Adirondack chairs and a gone-by vegetable garden, we don’t have anything on our lawn.

I realize in that list, of course, that I forgot the old dog house. It is behind our house, so I often forget that it’s there. It is conveniently located next to the doggie door that leads in to the back, placed so strategically for the convenience of quick warmth in the winter. My father likes to recount the argument he had with my mother one winter over whether they should put a small space heater inside the doghouse for “his boys.”

My father won, and the dogs were cozy.

The dogs joined our family around thirteen years ago. My younger sister, at the time obsessed with Toy Story, christened the dogs likewise. Buzz and Woody. The brothers. Our dogs were born of the same litter, both mixed black lab; Buzz had some terrier in him, Woody was definitely part beagle. The two were inseparable until Buzz passed away five years ago.

I smile as I think about Buzz, and run another handful of sand through my hands. Buzz was aggressive, always defensive, always on the move. He fiercely protected our family and went after any suspected intruders. Squirrels were the usual target, but occasionally he got into a fight he couldn’t win. Once, he ate three bottles of my mother’s perfume, glass, liquid, and all. To this day, we’re not sure what inspired that gastronomical feat.

On another day, he and Woody decided to chase after my aunt’s ugly Jack Russell terrier. None of us particularly liked the dog, so it was with reluctance that we tried to call the boys back. They did not listen to us but instead rapidly overcame the smaller, yipping creature. We were surprised when they got to her, however, because they simply licked her face and playfully nibbled her stubby tail.

Yet not all of the battles ended so peacefully. Buzz and Woody were fond of chasing after porcupines, and usually they escaped with only one or two quills. On one instance, however, when Buzz must have tried to eat the creature, he ended up with an entire faceful of the spines. My father took him to Sue, our veterinarian, who thought she had managed to pull most of them out. Buzz was expected to make a full recovery.

Several weeks later, though, his odd behavior had us worried.  He had become increasingly aggressive, growling several times at my mother, and frequently attacking Woody. This latter development was especially troubling. As male dogs, it was to be expected that the two would tussle occasionally, and they did, but it was almost always over food. Now, Buzz would go after his brother when he least expected it, and with Buzz being considerably larger, it never ended well.

It wasn’t long before I stepped off the bus one day to the news that he had passed away. Sue confirmed that one of the tips of the quills had probably passed into his brain. We were saddened by the news but even more saddened that he may have suffered in the few weeks between the incident and his death.

Woody was solemn for months. I don’t tend to anthropomorphize, but I also don’t deny the fact that animals can feel sadness. He moped around the house, refusing to eat and sleeping only in restful fits. It broke our hearts to watch him in such despair. Buzz was part of our family, but he was also Woody’s best friend.

However, Woody’s cycle of grief was similar to that of humans, and, like most of us, was able to move on. It wasn’t long before he was back chasing turkeys and rabbits across the lawn, and barking ecstatically when my father arrived home. He became increasingly clingy, following us everywhere we went. If I was in my bedroom and happened to go into the kitchen to get a glass of water, he would trot along behind me. I tried to slip him a piece of food whenever I could. I still felt bad for him. It was as if he were making sure that none of the rest of us got out of his sight and slipped away like Buzz.

When I was seventeen, I took up the hobby of running on the old log roads that ran between my house and the swamp. Woody wore a collar that kept him within the invisible boundaries around our lawn, and he would whine when I stepped over the underground fence. Many times, he simply stepped over the line and bore the electrical shock so that he could join me on my run.

In all the years Woody accompanied me on various runs or walks, he never wore a leash. He stayed by my side. He never left our property, either, unless he was looking for us. Once, on our way home, we found him wandering on the side of the road two miles from our house. After that, we started to keep him inside whenever we had to leave.

I lean back against the rough, cool bark. It is slightly soggy to the touch. I’m sitting where my mother’s flower bed used to be, where Woody used to try to scare out snakes from under the plants. I peer beyond the former flower bed, into the garage, and smile. It is on the shelves of my dad’s wood shop where we keep Woody’s old toys. He only ever liked to chew things when he was a puppy, not like some dogs who like to gnaw bones and rubber playthings their entire lives.

I remember spending one summer afternoon trying to teach him, as a seven year old dog, how to fetch. At that time, I had never heard the phrase, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I was persistent in my efforts, yet every time I threw that stick, he just stared contemplatively at me and laid down on the grass. He was grateful for my company, I’m sure, but he probably thought I was a nut for a throwing a stick and then running after it myself.

When I was home over the summer, I ran every morning before work. Woody, at thirteen, was too old to accompany me, especially since I was running on the road and not in the woods. He was completely blind in one eye and losing vision in the other. He could not hear well, and he had hip dysplasia. His legs frequently gave out. He was becoming a member of the elderly canine society, and as much as he pretended this wasn’t true, I knew it wasn’t wise to take him, unleashed, with me on a four mile run.

As I left the driveway, I heard him whining before the invisible fence. It was beeping a warning to him. He looked sadly at me. “Stay here,” I commanded. I was mildly irritated. I would be right back.

When I got to the end of our two-tenths of a mile driveway, I felt something soft brush my leg, and there he was. He looked up at me, and I noticed the milky blending of color in his eyes. With immense guilt, I commanded him once more to stay and gently nudged him back towards the house. He trotted back, but kept peering reluctantly over his shoulder. When I returned from my run, I expected him to be back inside the house, as an hour had passed and it had begun to drizzle. Instead, he was still sitting next to the mailbox, his fur matted with rain.

I stand up from beneath the tree and brush my dirty hands on my pants. This experience is depressing me because I don’t want to think about where my mind has gone. This was supposed to be a simple nature writing activity, one in which I would write about how the fall colors are so pretty, and the birds are so sweet, and I miss the flowers of summer, and blah blah blah. Instead, I’m thinking about my dog, and how much I miss him, and how much I regret that I was never able to say good bye to him.

He passed away while I was at school, less than a week before I was supposed to come home again. As I meander over to his dog house, I shove my hands in my pockets and sigh. I half expect him to come barreling out of there, panting happily and running in circles as I search for a spare hot dog or biscuit to give him. It is silent. I peer inside the dog house, and somehow manage to smile when I notice that the space heater and his bed are still inside. I’m not going to remind my dad to take them out.

As I continue my journey around the lawn, I console myself with the memories Woody and I have on this ground. He was the horse when my sister and I would play cowboys and princesses. He was the pillow when we grew fatigued and needed a nap. He was a great friend and an even better guardian. I always felt secure with him sleeping by my bed at night.  

My dad drives up then, and I wave to him before walking over. I think about how Woody would have reacted. He would have barked fanatically, his yips making him sound more like a seal than a dog. He would have rushed over to my father, jumping up and slapping him with his paws. My dad would have snapped at him, “Down, boy!” but would then take him inside and pet him and feed him his dinner.

As my father and I walk inside, I take one look back at the lawn and can imagine Woody lying in his favorite spot, underneath the pine. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him there. He’s there with Buzz, waiting patiently for us to come home.

Woody

Rebekah and Woody

Day 30: Two Weddings, a Book Launch, and a Funeral

Today is January 6 and it's my wedding anniversary.

Today also happens to be, for Christians, the day of the feast of the epiphany.  It celebrates the "shining forth" of God to humankind in the person of Jesus, as well as the visit of the three Magi, and Jesus's childhood events leading up to his baptism.  I only just read today that the feast was once based on the Jewish Feast of Lights.

My husband and I did not pick this date because of its religious significance.  Although he was raised in the Anglican church tradition in England, he's not a believer.  I was raised by wolves.  Although I was born an agnostic Jew, a cultural heritage I'm happy to claim, and am drawn to Buddhism, if I had to describe my spirituality in a phrase I'd say God = Love = Dog.  I believe in love and compassion and nature and animals and the forces that connect the dots, and my husband is a loving, compassionate atheist.  This combination works for us.

We had been together for almost 10 years when we got married.  Our friends gave us gag cards that said "Don't you kids think you're rushing into things?"  He was a widower with two sons and I had decided long ago that I was "not the marrying kind."  But in August of 2000, I was in Cochin, in the Indian state of Kerala, and I came down with a wicked case of motion sickness. Outside, some kind of parade was going on, an elephant marched past, firecrackers went off, and I called Kerry up and said, "I have the worst case of motion sickness and I think we should get married soon."  He said, "Funny, my father was just saying he'd like to see us get married before he dies." 

We picked January 6 because it was convenient for all of us.  The date fell close enough to the holidays to ensure our boys could be home.  We had the week off from work.  It was a convenient time for Kerry's father, his brother, and sister-in-law to fly over from England: not that any of them relished coming to the North Country at the height of winter.

So we got married in our house in a small ceremony.  There were 70 of us altogether.  I've already told the story of the shopping blitz in which we bought our wedding garb and rings on a frenzied afternoon in the city (see Day 13: Lucky 13, or the Story of the Wedding China).  All I knew about the Feast of the Epiphany was that three wise kings were involved.  As I looked around the room, the wisest man in sight was my father-in-law, Ian Grant, whom I still miss dearly.  (He died three years later and this trip, for our marriage, was his last trans-Atlantic crossing.)  He was always kind and generous to me: the best father I ever had.

2.  Not long ago, my sister found out that our parents were also married on January 6.  This came to me as a shock.  Here I'd spent my whole life trying to re-invent myself and prove I was free of my family and its terrible burdens and I had to go and pick the one day of the year that my parents had already nabbed for themselves.

Suffice it to say, their marriage did not go well.  How could it have?  When they stood before the justice of the peace, my mother had already been hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia, and my father's alcoholism was fairly advanced.  She was a beautiful, talented pianist who seemed destined, until the breakdowns began, for a life as a concert musician, and my father was a gifted painter and novelist, but art could not save them.  They had two daughters: I was born a few years into their marriage, and then 16 months later, my sister arrived.   After the divorce, when I was in kindergarten, we never saw our father again.  He stopped sending support checks a few years later, stopping writing letters, and although we were still very young when he died--22 and 21--we didn't find out about his death until years after the fact.

3.  My sister, Mira Bartok, wrote a  beautiful, heartbreaking, and ultimately affirming memoir about her relationship with our gifted, tormented mother: The Memory Palace.  I had thought it came out on January 6, 2011, but actually, my sister just informed me, it came out on January 11.  So the book's anniversary is this Wednesday.

In researching the book, she revisited the city where we spent our childhoods: Cleveland, Ohio.  She made other visits afterward to attend her high school reunion and to do book promotion for the memoir, and more.  That city was haunted for both of us, haunted with the most anguished kinds of memories, but in the process of doing this work my sister reacquainted us with the friends and family of our youth.  Even with our mother's friends.  And cousins, and second-cousins, and third-cousins, and their babies.  And we are all connected again. Cleveland, instead of being the mythic place of hell in my nightmares, as it was for so long, is now a place we can go to be with loved ones.  Our dear friends from school days: Stephanie and Sandy and Herta and Cathy and Eileen and Patty and Mary Beth and others who are now facebook friends that we plan to see this summer in June.

Writing a book can teach us that sometimes we can go home again. 

Part of the tremendous sorrow and anguish we carried had to do with our decision, when we were both very young women, to divorce our mother.  That's a very long story we've both written about elsewhere, but believe me when I tell you that the decision was heartbreaking and terrifying but without doing it, we might not have lived.  Our mother's illness made her violent in later years, and although violence is not the thing we want to remember about our mother because she was also loving and self-sacrificing and gentle when she was well, she almost killed her mother, and could have killed my sister too.  Watching that almost happen was what made me decide we had to live another way.  Without her: the woman who had given us life and given us art and who still loved us, in her way, as we still loved her.

At the end of 2006, we were reunited with our mother again.  This story is told well in my sister's memoir.  I have also written about it at length in my diaries and will one day tell that story in a public way, from my own older daughter's point of view.  In those weeks we were reunited with our mother in Cleveland, all kinds of amazing things happened.  We became a family again: not just a family of three, but an extended family with all our old friends, and new ones too.

Our mother had spent many years in a homeless shelter and the women who passed through there called our mother, "Mother."  She was, to them, a sage.  A wise woman.  A maternal figure who shone with something like grace.  Her suffering, in the end, had cleansed something dark in her.  She still had demons, but she believed, in the end, even in the torment of her illness, in the beauty of nature and animals.  She painted trees.  She loved owls and dogs.  And I don't think she ever stopped believing in love.  As we sat with our mother each day in the nursing home my sister had found for her, as hospice workers came and went, women from the shelter came to pay their respects.

These women all shared their heartbreaking life stories with us.  I wrote some of them down.  They had lived through loss and hurt and sorrow, their dreams broken or on hold, yet they came to our mother's bedside to show their love and respect.

It was like we suddenly had a dozen new sisters.

A few years later, the shelter was named for our mother.  Who does that?  Who names their shelter for the oldest recipient of its care, not its donors?  Cleveland is really a remarkable place full of wise, compassionate people, and my sister and I were at the ribbon-cutting ceremony when the Norma Herr Women's Shelter was dedicated two autumns ago.

My sister started a fund, My Words are my Shelter, in which donors can give money to help the shelter buy a journal for every woman who spends time in the Norma Herr shelter in Cleveland.  You too, gentle reader, can help buy a journal for one of these women if you choose.  The hyperlink above gets you to Mira's List, the blog Mira writes for artists to find grants and space to create, and details are posted.

You can also read more about the shelter and see a picture of our mother when she was young on this web site:http://www.mhs-inc.org/CWS.asp  Some people think I look like her, and some people think my sister does.  We haven't decided ourselves.

Our mother kept a diary.  My sister and I have our journals and our stories and essays and memoirs.  Writing saved our lives.  Art saved our lives.

The transcendent power of art is also my religion.  Literature's epiphanies, its revelations, are the bread that feeds me.

4.  Our mother died on January 6, 2007.  Of all the days in the year, her body gave out on her wedding anniversary--and mine.  My sister and I were in the room with her, and we both told her we loved her before she died, and she told us she loved us.  The forgiveness between us was the most powerful kind of healing I've ever experienced in my life.

My husband arrived the next day with Zoe, and I was sad that my mother never met my husband or our dog.  But I was glad they were there.
 
The title of today's post promises that you'll also hear about a funeral, but instead we had a memorial service at the shelter two weeks later.  All of the women who had visited our mother in hospice were present, along with some friends we'd once thought were lost forever.

That year my husband and I did not celebrate our wedding anniversary.  There was just too much going on.

But tonight, we will.  It's just going to be simple.  We'll eat in our kitchen that overlooks the Grasse River.  Light candles.  And eat comfort food.  Roast chicken from 8 o'clock Ranch.  Roast potatoes and kale.  Some nice wine.  Simple food, but enough for a feast.

That chicken is one big motha and we'll be eating leftovers for days.

from the first session of taking pictures using manual settings on my new camera, under Tara Freeman's ace tutelage

 Our mother, Norma Herr, as a young bride

8 o'clock ranch farm

Mira and I have rules about posting pictures of each other without permission, as we always have extra chins in our photos that the person posting doesn't notice, but I think she'll be okay about this one from our vacation in Paris this May.  If you see her, please tell her how thin and beautiful she looks here.

Me posing as The Thinker beneath Rodin's The Thinker at the Cleveland Art Museum, July, 2011

The view of the Grasse River from our kitchen window--a fine backdrop for a feast, I think.

Day 17: A (Converted) Carnivore's Christmas, Part One

A how-to guide:

1.  Go to one of your nearby favorite farms with your family.

2.  While serious decisions need to be made, visit the pigs.

3.  Tell Farmer Kassandra what you are craving.  She will lead you to her lair, the meat locker.

4.  While your foodie son decides on a lamb shoulder, visit Christmas Eve Dinner's extended family and their pals, the goats.

5.  Urge Foodie Son and his father to point out their choices on film

6.  Write a check, gather your husband, son, and sister, and drive home.

7.  While unloading the food onto the kitchen counter, smile with the memory of your two decades as a quasi-vegetarian, and remind yourself that sometimes change is good, especially when you have a foodie in the family.