Her Dream

Talked with my mother on the phone the other night.
She's nearly 86
and much of her conversation is about her arthritis
all the pills she has to take
and what it's like to be old.
"It's no picnic growing old," is her refrain.
She knows her time is short.
She's healthier than most
at her age
but still
she's almost 86.
Last time we spoke she said,
"I can't believe I'm this old already.
My whole life..all those years...it's like it wasn't even real.
It passed like a dream."
Yes.
A long dream.
In which she grew up hungry, in a country town in Depression Germany.
Then Hitler came, and her father took a job in Munich
and her family lived in a cold water flat.
Still poor, but no longer hungry.
And her mother, short-changed and angry at life, beat her and her brothers
and screamed at her father while he read his paper.
That silent man who cut his own Christmas trees
spending long hours trimming them to perfection.
When he got fed up he stood
and belted the old woman
and that shut her up for a while.
But then he was taken by the war
an old man before his time, aged by toil and sorrow
sent to fight the Russians.
My mother said goodbye to him
and he never came back.
He froze to death in Siberia.
And by that time
my mother was a waitress
at the American airbase in Munich
ladling gravy over mashed potatoes
for the officers and NCOs
and reading American magazines
to learn English.
She came home one day and her mother knocked her across the room
for wearing lipstick.
I would like to know what she did when my mother came home pregnant
by one of the NCOs.
She followed him
with her young daughter
to the U.S.A. on an ancient ocean liner
where they were seasick for a week.
And he skipped out on the both of them
leaving her no choice but to try to make it here.
She was a typist for some years
at an insane asylum
where the smell of the food they cooked for the patients
hung thick and foul in the air
sickening her.  She could never eat her lunch there.
At night she sold dresses at a department store.
She knew how to survive
But she didn't know how to love
and so she had endless troubles
with her daughter.
There were some men
but they didn't stick around
and while my mother blames them
she's no picnic, to be honest
with her bad temper and
always criticizing
and always negative
so she may have driven them away.
I wasn't there, but my sister was.
She can tell you.
Then she met my father at the Roseland ballroom
he was eighteen years older than she
charming, handsome
a New York City Jew
flat broke
and completely without ambition.
He was looking for a woman to take care of him.
A man from another time.
A madman, really;
delusional, and with an explosive temper
that matched hers.
It wouldn't have lasted but then I came along
an accident, I'm sure.
So she stayed
and like most women
hoped she could change him.
But she couldn't.
Nor could she change herself.
Fifteen years of hell followed
until she finally left him.
We lived in two small rooms for a while after that.
My sister was in and out of our lives like an infrequent tide.
My mother found a steady job
at a major corporation
just office work
but it paid enough
for her to continue to return to Germany
every few years.
Not for vacation
but to mourn
what she left behind
and to look for it
even though
it was no longer there.
She stayed at the company
surviving waves of layoffs and pay cuts
until they finally let her go
at age 79.
Over the years, grandchildren came.
One by my sister.
Two by me.
She and I had our own troubles
and both of us
have failed at life
at least as far as making a living is concerned.
And at relationships, too.
My mother is mad at me
for leaving them too soon
and at my sister
for staying in them when she ought to leave.
And as such, we are great disappointments.
And now, at nearly 86,
my mother lives in a one bedroom apartment
in a low-income apartment building
open only to senior citizens.
It's a nice place, though.  Fairly new, and clean
and in a nice neighborhood.
She drives a seventeen year old car
with less than sixty thousand miles on it.
She doesn't go places.
She has a little money
in a retirement account.  All that's left
after helping to support me
through several years of being unemployed.
And that is the sum total of her life.
Her life
that passed like a dream.
She didn't tell me, though,
whether she thought it was a good dream
or a bad dream.
I'm not going to ask her.
But I do hope
that her Eternal Dream
is kinder.