Things Forever Unknown

My mother was an enigma. I have written that before, here, and elsewhere. I don't remember that we ever had a conversation about anything that connected us, emotionally. There was always talk of my grades, the ones I must receive, all A's of course, and the ones I did receive, mostly A's, except in handwriting and mathematics. There was talk of shopping, things she needed to buy at the A and P; talk of the laundry that needed to be done at the mat down the street and to be hung on the line on the tar covered roof at the top of our building. There was evasive talk of modelling her hands, though whoever she might have worked with were referred to with first names only.

My father said she wrote poetry; she sent him her efforts when he was in Georgia on assignment with the army back in the early 1950s. I have a book of poems written in pencil. I have had them since she died in 1974, but rarely read them closely, afraid that they might merely be the copying down of other, more famous, writers. You see, though my mother read voraciously, in my time with her, lots of modern, and not particularly academic, fiction, she never seemed to speak of anything substantive, not even her hopes and wishes. My father and I had a sense of what she wanted merely by virtue of her dissatisfaction, which was expressed non-verbally. I admit, all these years later, as I pick up the poems again, and read them, for the first time, closely, I didn't think her capable of writing prose or poetry, so I have had suspicions of these penciled relics, other than a book of the medication she took before she died, the only things I have left of her 43 plus years after her death.

I know little of poetry--notwithstanding having hosted, for years, a college radio program on the works of the famous ones. As I read the poems and a tiny bit of prose, now, seeing some, or feeling some imperfections of the novice, perhaps even a gifted one, I think these are her creations, not those of others. I even went on line and put in some of the phrases to see if anything popped up. It occurred to me she might have used the works of others as templates, but these may well have been all hers.

I am going to with my mother's far fewer works what I have done with some of my father's prolific writing. I am going to put some of them on this blog. My reveries about her, and these pieces are all that the world will ever have of her. She doesn't pop up in Google. She died long before Google was even an idea in anyone's head, at least any of us in the Bronx.

That she was a dreamer, that we all knew. She saw herself in a different life than the one in a lower middle class one (for many years till my father got his last job with the City) which was hers till the day she died. She really wanted to live in a place with a doorman. She got a nicer apartment four years before she died. But she never got the doorman.

Let me start with this poem. I see her writing on one of the stained glass cocktail tables that were a pride and joy of our place near Mt. Eden Avenue. She liked to sit on the floor. She could easily have written this and the other poems while sitting on the floor in one of her Chinese inspired lounge outfits, aware that her life was restricted to the back of a tenement in the Bronx that faced an alley.

So here's the poem:

Some say that I am
But a dreamer
And that I
Shall never be
Of use to a world
Geared to reality.
Let them speak
That profess to know
Of true philosophy,
For they are but
Slaves of time,
While my heart and I are free.


I wish that she and her heart had been free when she was well and healthy. I don't think they were, until she became aware that time was very short, and she was looking death in the eye. Then all the desires of this world fell away, and she was free--no longer dreaming with expectation.