It’s been a long time since I’ve sent anyone to school, but seeing all the young students passing by with their backpacks, I am reminded of what it was like in those hectic days. This is something I wrote looking back long ago. It’s from my book The Myth of the Yellow Kitchen.
I often think about those days long-ago of mothering. I want to capture it all again, tie a shoe, cuddle a child, kiss a cheek. When they were young, they used to complain, “You’re not listening.” And I try to listen all the time, to who they are, human, loving, complex.
For me, there is always something of a mystery about the children and how they turned out. How come they are all such good cooks with different styles of cooking? Why did all three intermarry? How did these products of the 60s, flower children, the experimenters with drugs, with sex, with lifestyles, learn to be such wonderful parents? They ended up liking themselves, liking each other, and liking me.
I feast my eyes on my children, grown beautiful, building an order to their lives, having their own children. I feast my eyes on the richness of the harvest and the miracle of it all.
Suddenly, at least it seems suddenly, I am a member of a new generation, an older generation who is living longer, longer than my grandparents, longer than my mother and father, longer than anyone I ever knew, even longer than my younger siblings.
I don’t really feel old, whatever feeling old means. To me it is a great big mystery. Before this time of life, I had many roles, a wife, a career, a parent, a friend. There doesn’t seem to be any rules or roles for this stage of life. Some people believe older people have wisdom. But what is wisdom? Is it simply living longer that makes one wise?
I have more questions than answers.
What is ageism? It is the descriptor that chronological age is what it is all about and that this stage of life is about decline and loss. It is not the truth, it is a stereotype because people of any age are different from one another. Like sexism and racism, ageism is prejudice.
Am I Growing Old?
Now, I am walking seventy laps rather than one hundred. I swim thirty laps when I used to swim seventy. Should I keep trying to keep up with the earlier days? Growing older means thinking about mortality, my mortality, and that is so difficult.
I decided to make a Rosh Hashanah dinner again. So many people are not here, Kay and Don, Hy and Sheila and we will miss them. I have done it for at least forty years. This year Rosh Hashanah was a bit different because some of the people who came every year did not and people who had never joined us before came. It was wonderful, the feelings of community, of different generations talking together. We talked about hope and the problems of our country. I know I won’t be here in ten years so I might as well do it now. Everyone loved being here together but we missed the ones who were not.
Two grandchildren are getting married next year. Will I make it? Will I dance at their weddings?
A New Horizon
What is ageism? It is the descriptor that chronological age is what it is all about and that this stage of life is about decline and loss. It is not the truth, it is a stereotype because people of any age are different from one another. Like sexism and racism, ageism is prejudice.
Each morning I get up and think, “well what will it be today?” What new adventure? What part of my body will echo the years gone past, the running, swimming, and long hikes?
At this stage of life, there is so much freedom—to do whatever I want to do and can afford, to go to the movies, meet friends for dinner, join a club, a group, a class, teach a class. My options are infinite; I just have to imagine what I want to do. what I can do. This is the last phase, I will try to do my best.
This poem, Who Am I, appears in The House Loved Us…A Collection of Poems about Life and Loss.How do you define yourself? Can you? What if it changes day by day?
I am tough, strong, fierce, powerful, bright,
achieving, that is, I’m that way today.
I work hard, believe in the work ethic, have lots to do, children, grandchildren, bills, worry, writing, and work.
Sometimes I think I’m a writer. I had two rejections. Does that make me a writer?
I am a successful mother, a failure with men.
I am in perpetual motion, but often feel as if I’m standing still.
I’m someone who always worries about money. My worry has nothing to do with how much or how little I have in the bank.
I love ideas, ideas about anything, gardening, meaning, the future of the planet, how to cook asparagus.
I started out being conventional, but somehow it didn’t work for me.
I love newness and hope each day will bring something different.
I’m a professional, believe in professionalism, and try to be professional, even if it kills me.
I’m bright, dull, insecure, confident, smart, not knowing, passionate, distant, anxious, brave, generous, mean, conventional, and daring.
I am a mother, daughter, sister, aunt, grandmother, niece, friend, lover, woman, professor, feminist, humanist.
I’m constantly changing my mind about who I am and where I’m going.
On April 15th, 2021, Boston celebrated the 73rd anniversary of the Israeli Independence Day by lighting up a bridge in Boston with blue and white lights, the national colors of Israel. Hundreds turn out every year for the celebration.
After this generation dies, who will remember the atrocities of the period in history that led up to the Independence? Or will the impact of these atrocities remain forever? Have we learned anything about avoiding such horrors? Who knows?
Here, I share some of what I remember about the 1940s when America was at war.
America was at war. Terrible things were happening in the 1940’s. Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. Young men were drafted and many died. Jews were being killed by the thousands, really millions, in Europe. Gays and lesbians were also incarcerated. The Japanese were storming the South Pacific. There was rationing of some foods, I don’t remember which ones. Gas was also rationed. In schools, children were practicing what to do in case of an air-raid. Nazis from Germany invaded Russia, then called the Soviet Union, and many were killed in combat. They did not anticipate what a Russian winter was like.
I was fourteen when the war started, but it went on for several years. At that time, I belonged to a group of young men and women, we called ourselves The Debites, after Eugene Debs, a famous socialist. All the boys were drafted into a branch of the American military. I still remember our anguish when we found out that Robert had been killed. He was our leader and so handsome. How could a young man who had a life of such promise be killed in his twenties.
There was all the news about Jews in Europe being sent to concentration camps. In my family, it was a constant topic of conversation. We are Jewish, and lived in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx.
I remember my father signing some document so a particular family could come to America. He signed many of them. Someone asked him, “Can you really take care of all these people?”
“They can take care of themselves, they just need to get out of Germany,” he said. “But, if they need help, I will find a way.”
This was another side of my father that I never knew before. He was in the sausage casings business and together, he and I, sent fourteen small salamis to men we knew overseas. We did not know if they would get them. And my father assured me they would be edible even though they travelled so many miles, by ship, overseas. All the years of the war, we did the same thing, wrapping and sending a salami to every address we could find.
When a friend of our family, Gene Schneider, came home, he thanked us for the salamis, and said “everyone loved them, we were so tired of military food, and they were always eaten in fifteen minutes. We were so far away from home, but the salami, more than just food, reminded us that there was still such a place as the United States with good things to eat.” Gene was eighteen when he went to New Guinea, he was stationed there for four years. We never heard of New Guinea until the war.
Many of the Jewish people I knew came to the U.S. in the early years of the 19th century. I don’t know why all my grandparents came, but my mother’s father came because he was going to be conscripted into the Russian army where Jews never knew how long they would be forced to serve. For my grandfather, it meant forever. He left Russia with a different name to avoid arrest.
All these Jewish people, some I knew, and some I didn’t, were in anguish about what was happening to the Jewish people in Europe. They came from different countries and for different reasons, but they understood anti-Semitism no matter the country or the form it took.
Franklin Roosevelt was almost a God in the Jewish community in which we lived. The question of why Roosevelt did not accept the Jews and the ship, the St. Louis, has always been an open question and much has been written about it. They were not accepted in any country, returned to Europe, where they were all killed.
We lived in a two-family house. One day, a few years later, there was this loud wail on the stairs coming from the second floor. Mrs. Alexander was coming down the stairs to tell my mother “Roosevelt just died.” Our community was in mourning. There are no answers to some things that happen in life.
This was written a year ago. A lot has changed, but not as much as we had hoped, I think.
Today is April 1st. April fools day. Where did that come from? Is this a joke?
No, it’s not a joke. What’s funny about hundreds of thousands of people in hospitals, thousands dead? What’s funny about that? More people have died in the last few weeks than all the people who died in the World Trade Center bombing.
I have been holed up in my apartment now for nineteen days, alone, not seeing anyone, except when I go to the lobby to get food that was delivered and sometimes my mail. My mail has decreased in size and content–one or two envelopes, one with an advertisement and one, a bill. I haven’t gone out now for nineteen days, except for an occasional walk, so I don’t spend any money. And the doctors and dentists are all holed up in their own homes too so I don’t buy anything and I don’t see any doctors or dentists and I don’t have as many bills. That’s another joke.
What do I worry about? I am alone and that is not easy. But what is it like for couples or families locked up all together for who knows how long. One daughter’s business has gone crash. How will she and her husband deal with it? How can they help themselves? My grandson, Michael, lives and worked in Philadelphia. Now the business has folded, he is alone in Pennsylvania with no work and no family. Megan and Joe were to be married June 16th. That will be canceled, until next year. And they live in the hotbed of the crisis, Brooklyn, New York. She told me one thousand people live in their building when I asked about New York density.
And the same for Todd and Marissa my oldest grandson and his fiancée. They are all working at home and they never go out for anything.
Just for fun tonight Marian, Beth, John, and I had a four-way conference call. Marian and Beth are my daughters and John is Beth’s husband. We talked about everything, how we are, what we laugh at, what we see on television, what are we worried about. I have three children. They married and among them had six grandchildren, and we became a family of thirteen, including me. Three of them are now a couple, Justin is married to Jason, Megan is engaged to Joe, and Todd is engaged to Marissa. What started out as three plus me is now sixteen.
Isn’t that wonderful! We are a force, a group, a loving group and when the grandchildren have children we will be even more. More to be joyous and to think about during this “pandemic.”
What happened to me that is new? I talk more on the phone with my family, with people I have known for a long time, and with my brother. My home has become more than a home. It is a protective nest, a nest to bury my head in, to watch the news on a daily basis—or almost every hour. Sometimes I feel safe here. I hardly eat, I miss my ice-cream and I am losing weight. Why I am losing weight, I have no idea and I have to try and eat more, even without the ice-cream.
Some mornings I get up with extreme anxiety and I don’t know how to deal with it. Today I went out, I drove to the drugstore and waited outside for Monica to bring out my prescriptions. I never met Monica, but I couldn’t recognize her even if I knew her, she was wearing a mask, a gown, and gloves. How nice she was to leave her job, even for a few minutes, to do this for me. She said, “The pharmacy is very busy, I’ve never seen it so busy and I don’t know if we can do everything.”
This is the pandemic as they call it. It is also April Fool. When I grew up this first day in April was the day to plan and carry out all kinds of crazy jokes on family and friends. What a joke. Today, even April Fool is not funny.
I’ve been working on my ethical will lately. This is something that has nothing to do with money. It’s far more important.
An ethical will is your legacy. It incorporates what you’ve learned over your life and the values that you’ve cultivated that you want to pass on to your children and their children. Basically, it’s to bequeath an account of the values and ideas closest to one’s heart.
Rhoada Wald 