Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My mother had some really interesting foibles. For someone so considerate, she was a
terrible tipper; I think I learned my first lessons about the virtues of generosity chasing
the pizza delivery man back to his car with an extra couple of bucks after my mother
had stiffed him.
She held long grudges—against Richard Nixon, for example, and against the move
to Tucson, a place she didn't like from the moment she got there, but also against people
she knew and whom, after her illness, she felt dismissed by. I could name names. The
fury she could muster at low volume was impressive.
In her tiny voice, she could be profane at surprising, inopportune moments; she took
pleasure in cursing though she deployed that part of her vocabulary prudently—so you'd
remember it. The last thing she said to me before I went off to college was a dirty aphor-
ism about sex (this was before I'd ever had any), a caution to employ my good judgment
instead of my, well, you know.
She could be stubborn to the point of lunacy; ask my father, who hated to shop with
her, for clothes, for furniture, for anything—the last instance I know about was a light-
ing fixture for the new house in Atlanta—because she would never accede to the pur-
chase unless it matched perfectly the aesthetic vision she had in her head.
And she could be tenacious—ridiculously, foolhardily, hopefully tenacious. She never
accepted her disease, not even after forty years, and dealt with it by fighting it. She pre-
ferred always to help herself rather than be helped, preferred to spend the day struggling
to take a shower instead of cultivating a hobby. It made me crazy that in the basket of
her electric wheelchair she would carry the same book for months. She didn't have time
to read; she was too busy trying to put on her shoes by herself.
For years, against all good sense, she insisted on driving lessons, and my father du-
tifully, or perhaps to escape the pestering, had hand controls installed on the old Dodge.
But she was incapable, it was clear. Her instructor in Teaneck, a nice guy who really
liked her, told me he was always a little nervous in the car with her. But even years later,
in Tucson, she believed that if she could only get behind the wheel she would somehow
be free of the entrapment she felt.
I found this a particularly painful quality to observe in her; I think it cost her a great
deal, in terms of her ability to extract enjoyment out of the life her illness left her. But
that's me, and maybe it's a selfish sentiment. Because I also understand that that un-
yieldingness was also a kind of optimism that kept her going. In the end, when she was
bedridden and truly helpless, she apologized for putting us all out, not to me but to Pearl
Kinnard, the wonderful woman who was her last home caretaker. And when Pearl told
me that, I recalled what may be the most vivid memory I have of my mother.
It was in the early eighties, not long before my parents left New Jersey. I was living
in the city, and my father had to leave town on business so I went home on a Friday af-
