In working through a backlog of my mom bills, accounts and payments, I notice that in recent days her FICA score (in other words her credit worthiness) has shot up to way over 800. In other words -- exceptional! In death, she is finally a terrific credit risk. She would be proud.
This is my day then -- not an emotional catch up, but a realistic one, where I do the math, tick off lists, leaf through papers.
I'm a broken record here, but it really is another beautiful day!
Morning walk...
And then I go straight to the downtown market...
... where I pick up flowers (they are having a great run this late summer -- for those growers who have the ability to irrigate their fields. It's been beastly dry!), arugula, and more corn (several farmers have late season corn).
And bakery treats from Madison Sourdough.
On the way home, I listen to a story about immigrants on NPRadio. Read it here, why don't you -- it's even better online, because there are photos appended to it. And it is beautiful.
My family on my mother's side is one big immigrant mess (Like A swallow describes it well, I think), even as my mother liked to talk about it as a straight line ascent: she very much saw herself as part of another, older generation of immigrants, glorified now in the retelling, as if they paused no threats to the "American fabric" and worked their way up without the opposition of other low income groups. I always thought my own immigrant story was so weirdly out of step with what you read about in the press (about Poles coming to America) that I sometimes hesitate to even call myself an immigrant, because, well, I came here to finish my studies and then stayed and married and applied for citizenship, and got my green card and then lo, it turned out that I need not continue with my paperwork because as it happened, I already was an American (due to my mom's ancient citizenship status)! Who knew... I certainly didn't.
Still, I've always had an eye out for that word -- immigrant. And immigrant communities. I track their stories attentively and listen to the current immigration debates with a mix of horror and sympathy. And I ask Ed at breakfast today -- when did things become this bad? Why have we lost stories such as the one on NPR (read it, above!) and focused on some mythical dog eating whatever?
He gives me one of those sympathetic gazes, the one that means -- you are so not from here, you don't know anything, you poor dear, about who we really are... And he launches into his recount of American history. One he's told me many times before. About the fighting between the newcomers and the ones already here. About internment camps and McCarthy trials. About southern Italians and the Irish in New York. About the Mexicans and El Salvadorians now. It's always been like this! It's how we work out the tensions between people of different backgrounds.
Oh, you mean we throw the new arrivals into a den of angry wolves and see who survives? Says you from your white privileged position?
He reminds me that his family -- Jews from Europe, lower east side of Manhattan -- weren't exactly the white and privileged of New York. Still, he for one doesn't see any significant change in this country -- for the better or for worse. People fighting among themselves over whose culture defines this moment. We're always fighting here, pointing fingers at others -- he says, and this time with a note of exasperated resignation.
Nonetheless, the morning story stays with me, because guess what, I am still in the throes of processing my mother's death. The last time I had any semblance of a sensible conversation with her was Sunday -- less than a week ago. And I know that my mother in her own articulation of where she fit in here, saw herself very much as a young immigrant from Poland, who went back to Poland as an adult in part because she fell in love with this Polish guy (my father), but also because she was afraid of being persecuted here for her political beliefs at the time (which were then, like her father's and her future husband's, some version of Bernie Sanders type democratic-socialist).
I think about immigrants like me -- those who didn't speak the language when they came here, those who are questioned by kids in school about their awful home countries (is it true that in Poland...) and I think about Ed's words now as he tells me -- those communities that have made room for new immigrants? They will be the places of the greatest amount of growth in America. Just wait and see ten years from now.
We go back to look at the pictures in the NPR piece -- Flushing Meadows Park. Both he and I were there in 1964, at the time of the World's Fair. And at the end of the day he would go back to his home on 68th and I to mine on 46th. Mine is a life of coincidences and lucky breaks. (My mother's too, only she didn't see it that way.)
We go for a bike ride, pausing as we always do, along Lake Waubesa, where an immigrant family speaking no English, spreads out a picnic. Sharing a weekend afternoon with close ones, feeling safe, I hope...
And here's a novel way to end a September Saturday: after the ride, I go to Kopke's Greenhouses. I'd seen their truck at the market and I've been thinking for a while now that my winter plantings (for the windowsill) ought to include succulents. Kopke's had tiny ones that I thought would be far more perfect than what I usually strive to overwinter from the usual annual collection of spindly flowers.
Of course, no one shops at a greenhouse at 4 pm on a September Saturday. Their cash-cow now is the mum plant -- people love them, I don't. They remind me of the perfect green lawn: they seem somehow fake. And when they wilt or lose their blooms, it's one big throwaway. At the greenhouse, I see few people but lots of mums. What else... Oh! A few left over pansies. These little guys began my own growing season back in spring. They can fill a pot left bare after the spring ones finished their thing. So I add those to the cart. And of course the small pots of succulents.
And as I walk the deserted aisles, I think how quickly everything changed since my visit here in late April when I filled my car twith a plethora of annuals for the tubs. The store was crowded and people were so excited, so happy about all that would happen as spring exploded on us. April. The season was changing fast. Oh yeah. That was when my mom changed as well -- from unhappy but maybe somewhat happy, and definitely independent (sort of kind of), to... well, this: her rapid decline in September. Loss of vision one day, loss of life the next.
But, even though I am only five days past her death, the shock elements have receded (and why was I shocked anyway -- everyone expected her to die, me most of all!) and I am thinking increasingly about the months ahead, stripped of responsibility now for her care, which, honestly, is a big exhale. Because, you know, she was a handful. Connected to me more than to anyone else in her final decade. Good thing she decided to like me again (most of the time). "Beloved angel of a child" is a good spot to inhabit when you have to track, fix, make good, every step and mistep your mom makes in the last years of her life. Much better than "cruel despicable human being" -- words she'd used on me just a few years before I moved her here so that I could look after her. What can I say, I learned to live with her drama. But it was never, ever easy.
Here are my succulents:
Pretty, no?
with love...
