Sent to my sons in 2013, a lifetime ago, as I was waiting for a train to a job interview, looking up from a poem by Paulo Coelho and thinking about my mother, Fannye Freda, as Coelho’s words played on me: “I will look on the members of my family with surprise and amazement…”
The Sweet Round of Her Thumb
I was just another just-laid-off 50-something ad guy walking to another job interview. With barely a numbing care of the burning cold wind and relentless conveyor belt of humanity that is every Manhattan avenue in mid-day of the winter holiday season.
It was in this daydreaming, vulnerable state that I noticed her. And had to step out of formation just to be still and to gaze into the giant glass storefront window, quietly alone among the city’s throngs in her singular presence.
It was my mother, Fannye Freda, 53 years ago. Young, fit, playfully lifting me to the sky on a beach, probably Ocean City, Maryland or could be Coney Island in Brooklyn. My sister laughing, waiting for her turn. My father, unseen, but I felt, manning the camera.
The scene clicked forward to my mother with her hair pulled back in a triangle cotton headscarf. She was relaxing, leaning sideways on the living room sofa where I’d take afternoon naps with her. The shaft of sunlight through the loosely drawn curtains fascinating and hypnotizing me to sleep with its cosmic river of dancing air particles.
Then, we were in the kitchen. My mother's sugar-and-flour-dusted hands. She is smiling mischievously at me as she dons the mittens I handed her for taking from the hot oven the pie we made together, whose sweet-singed aroma filled the house. Melting apple slices bubbling through the fork-pierced vent holes of the browning, puffy top, making sugary rivulets across the lunar-like surface to the hilly crusted edges. I follow her as she carefully sets it to cool on the open-window's faintly paint-cracking sill.
I would, over the years in that first home of ours, catch her looking out that window to see me playing in our small, narrow rectangular backyard, the exact same dimension of our neighbors’ yards on either side of us. There was an alleyway at the upper vertical end of the yard, where proprietors of open-back trucks would ring out their calls to the neighborhood of customers: “CRAN-berries! BLUE-berries! STRAW-berrieeees...”
Fannye Freda’s own melodic call out to the yard for her son extended my one-sylable name to an operatic vibrato, Jayyy-ahhhn! I’d run happily to her and she’d say, “Come in for a bit and sit with me." Which I did at our red- and yellow-speckled Formica table in the tiny kitchen where she poured a glass of cold milk for me and on a small plate, would gently slide a generous piece of pie.
She showed me on a cutting board how to bend my left fingers at the first knuckle and hold steady one end of a string bean or radish from our backyard garden patch, so as to cut it with a real knife, leaving us the eating part. She would talk to me of family and of the world that was before I was born and even, more mysteriously to me, before she and my father were born. Pictures in my head I would draw over and over in Crayola colors to take me from Russia and eastern Europe, to across heaving oceans to Ellis Island and safely back to the kitchen of our 1950's post-war Washington, D.C. red-brick row house on Oglethorpe Street.
A sudden prolonged New York chorus of honking horns and a cop’s whistle broke the spell. The storefront’s reflection was now of a female model and two child models on a beach in a “Must Be The Sunshine” Florida tourism ad on the side of a bus stopped behind me to pick up passengers on Madison Avenue.
When the bus moved on, the ad’s image vanished from the glass. But my mom was still there, for a few seconds more, reaching out to me to catch a tear with the sweet round of her thumb. To let me know that it was ok, that it all was going to be ok. I wanted to tell her where I was headed. What I was doing. How her grandchildren were, whose own children would some day perhaps, in their own reflective moments, see and think of their PopZ and GiGi before their next appointments. And to take a moment for a nice piece of pie and stories that would keep us laughing and young and alive
###