Complicating this plan was that we don’t belong to a temple.* Luckily, I was able to arrange for my son to study with someone I’d met on a writing assignment. I’d just covered what was believed to be the first bat mitzvah in an American women’s prison. It was the only time I’d been in temple where the person sitting next to me had the words SUICIDAL FREAK tattooed on her neck. There’s a saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” but it should be amended to add “. . . or in penitentiaries.”* If I am ever incarcerated you can bet I’ll be signing up for every form of religious education offered. They have the best snacks; they observe holidays and often meet in air-conditioned halls. I figured if that rabbi could handle lifers, he could do just fine with my teenager.
But where to hold the event? Our home, with its temperamental seventy-year-old plumbing, is not ideal. As the rabbi’s congregation meets in a double-wide trailer on the grounds of the California Institution for Women in Chino, his place wasn’t an option. Ultimately, we were offered a meeting room at my son’s Episcopal elementary school. It was their first and I believe only bar mitzvah to date.
Being an atheist had never stopped me from enjoying the ritual, community singing, gay friendly and general do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you sentiment of the school’s chapel services, plus, the school had amazing camping trips. A camping trip that includes margaritas? What’s not to like? My son and I had also spent numerous Friday nights volunteering in the church’s soup kitchen, so to have the ceremony in that space seemed ideal.
The administration apparently wasn’t holding it against us that Ezra held the distinction of being the only kid to ever refuse participation in the annual kindergarten Christmas pageant. It wasn’t the message of the play he objected to, it was his role that he took issue with. He was assigned to be an angel while he envisioned himself a shepherd. If you saw my round-faced, golden-locked cherub at that age, you would have cast him as an angel. People used to stop us on the street and say, “Your kid would have gotten a lot of work in Michelangelo’s time.” He looked like he’d floated down from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Normally, I wouldn’t have indulged this kind of behavior, but before I had a chance to intervene, his teacher had brokered a deal with him. As long as he agreed not to recruit other recalcitrant angels into his boycott and faithfully (as it were) attend rehearsals, he could recuse himself from the performance. That he kept his end of the bargain exhibited a certain maturity that I had to admire. Even during the play, when I whispered, “Don’t you miss singing with your friends?” he remained firm and stated, “I’m singing along in my head.” I had to give it to him.
The bar mitzvah went off with just a few minor glitches. The only accommodation the rabbi had requested was that any crucifixes be removed or covered during the ceremony, something the church officials were kind enough to agree to. It wasn’t until the service was under way that my husband and I noticed our goof. We’d inadvertently placed him and our son in front of glass windows perfectly framing them between the two life-sized statues of Jesus in the courtyard garden. Thankfully, no one pointed it out to him, and I thought it made an unusually ecumenical triptych.
Nevertheless, our parents were all in attendance. Jewish celebrations entail a rigorous coordination of meals that typically follows this progression: just a nibble of something light, breakfast, brunch, afternoon snack, something to hold you over until later, early dinner, low-blood-sugar pick-me-up, dinner, supper, something to tide you over until breakfast, and a midnight snack. Repeat until completely satiated, exhausted or bloated. We’d barely seen everyone off to their respective time zones when I got the news that my parents urgently needed to sell their home and needed assistance.
As I travel over the causeway spanning Biscayne Bay connecting Miami to my parent’s home on Sunset Island II, I look out over the water at this view that was captured in the final frames of Midnight Cowboy. When Dustin Hoffman takes his last breath, you can see the island where my parents have resided for forty years in the background. No one is dying, but my parents are taking this move hard. My sister and I have urged them for at least the last fifteen years to sell this house. The roof tiles are cracked and leaky, the kitchen woefully outdated, property taxes exorbitant and the landscaping expensive to keep up, especially when hurricanes regularly fell trees. But for my parents, the island itself had become part of their identity. It was an address that conferred status. Our neighbors once included William Paley, Howard Hughes and deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua. Current residents count Anna Kournikova, Enrique Iglesias and Lenny Kravitz among their illustrious ranks. I am convinced a move will be good for our parents. The equity from the sale of the house should provide money to live on, plus they’ve grown isolated on the island. Many of the newer islanders come for only brief visits and the absence of other year-rounders is palpable. Entire blocks of houses are dark for months at a time. My parents have also taken to keeping their cumbersome storm shutters up all year round. It’s making their home seem like a mausoleum. A change of scenery might do them good, but this move will mark their entry into the next and probably last chapter of their lives. My parents have been supportive grandparents, showing up for baseball games and music recitals, making valiant attempts to keep current with newfangled distractions. “What’s this about Ezra and his Vines? He’s into horticulture now?” It’s heartbreaking to witness this passage.*
I arrive to find my mother in a state of high anxiety. The house sold within weeks of listing it on the market and they are completely unprepared. My mother is intent on getting rid of everything she owns; if I’d shown up any later, my parents might be sleeping on tatami mats. She’s always had an eye for bargains and has already had an auction house cart away the items she acquired at thrift shops and estate sales that are now worth much more than she paid. Lamps, silk oriental rugs, a silver-plated tea service, a piano, and even the majority of their tables and chairs. The house has been eerily emptied out. Luckily, the time has passed when her possessions held an appeal for me, as it’s come to my attention that my own furniture is aging me. Having a house full of antiques can seem winningly eccentric when you’re young, but just the other day I caught sight of myself in a mirror sitting in a rocker from the 1930s and wondered what Grandma Moses was doing hanging out in my living room. Wearing vintage clothes when you are vintage is a double negative. The last thing I need is more old-timey ephemera, but I feel something I might even call grief in the pit of my stomach.
My mother ushers me into the garage, where card tables are piled with items she wants to pass on to me. It’s the kind of clutter the Grey Gardens set designer might have culled to re-create the dilapidated home of Big and Little Edie.
Of the objects I can identify, there are chipped dishes and bowls, moldy books and a miniature scales of justice, something everyone’s dad had on his desk in the seventies.
Then there is the memorabilia from my father’s many businesses. As a serial entrepreneur, his career spanned a wide range of industries. There’s a six-foot-long historical drawing of St. Louis Union Station in Saint Louis, from his noble but unrealized attempt to restore the historic landmark. I’m tempted to rescue it, but it’s been neglected for so long the print is yellowed, frayed and covered in watermarks. There’s a poster for a film called The Silent Partner, which I’m surprised to see because it dates from the foray into soft-core porn distribution that ended disastrously. His company released such classics as Poor White Trash, also known as Scum of the Earth and The Naked Rider. One of my fondest childhood memories is reciting Naked Rider’s radio ads: In the house she was a lady, but in the stable, she was—horse neighing sound—an animal. The one film that had some artistic value, The Silent Partner, starring Christopher Plummer, tanked, sending the company into the Chapter Eleven that marked the end of my college education. There are a few lithographs, also very degraded, that might be from his gallery. Yes, there was an art gallery as well. Ther
e was a travel agency, a silver mine and a door factory. A high point was the period during which he and a partner owned The Embers, a much-beloved classic steak house that had fallen into disrepair. The restaurant was a Miami Beach institution, famous for its fire pit, thick-cut steaks, potatoes au gratin and baked apples. Ever the ham, I was thrilled to perform a few songs for his reopening of the restaurant. When your business partner goes by the single nickname “Blackie,” you might suspect mob connections. During those years, I was my father’s confidante. I was a senior in high school when he was offered a brown paper bag containing $50K in return for laundering money. “Do it,” I advised, calculating the cost of the double perm I was longing to ruin my already frizzy hair with. He declined, but it was not uncommon to hear that business associates or close friends were heading off to serve time in white-collar prisons. The restaurant closed its doors within eighteen months. Not long after, I was cast as a hooker who was being harassed by her pimp, Choo Choo, in Miami Vice. Wouldn’t you know it, my character operated her business out of The Embers, which was now a Euro-trash hotspot. Dad has no emotional attachment to any of this stuff, as he bequeathed his “legacy gift” to us years ago. During a visit to Florida, I found my father and five-year-old son sitting together on the floor. “Grandpa is teaching me how to play craps,” my son told me excitedly, holding up my father’s set of ivory dice, though his “never say die” resiliency is without a doubt the most valuable gift he’s passed on to us.
That feeling in my stomach is growing into something I might call despair, but what can I do with this stuff? The tradition of preserving family heirlooms, such as they are, is something likely to disappear in the coming years. I can’t imagine my son, a citizen of the digital age, will either have room for or want to keep the photographs of relatives whose names have been forgotten, not to mention the other crap I’ve acquired over the years. Must do a major purge when I get home, I tell myself as my mother and I pack up boxes for either Goodwill or the large dumpster we’ve rented.*
The object I feel the most affection for turns out to be a brass ashtray from the seventies. It still has ashes in it. Either they’ve never cleaned it or someone is still smoking. I don’t ask. I shove the ashtray, ashes and all, into a brown paper bag to take home with me.
I spend several heated hours convincing my mother not to get rid of her dining room furniture. Even though we’ve yet to determine where they’ll be heading, I tell her it’s safe to assume that they won’t be living in a yurt and will still need a surface to eat off of and something to sit on.
My parents are completely flummoxed by small details. How do we get the gas turned off? How will we get electricity turned on when we find a new place? How do we get new phone numbers and how will our Social Security checks find us when we get to wherever it is that we’re going? It frightens me to think of them continuing to live on their own. If they don’t know these things, how have they been managing their day-to-day affairs and what else are they unsure of that I don’t know about?
While I’m there, we learn that a condo located nearby has become available for a short-term rental. Even though we still don’t know what they can actually afford as none of their finances are in order, they must vacate the house, so my sister and I advise them to take it. My parents react as though we’re shipping them off to a senior internment camp. Mom suggests it might be easier if we just leave them on the side of a mountaintop.
My mother would prefer to be working. She was forcibly retired at seventy-four from a job she’d gotten ten years prior, despite stellar job reviews, to make way for younger employees. You’re living longer, so you want to work longer, but that just edges out younger people from the workforce, so the only thing that makes sense is that we need to extend childhood. I suck at math, but if you take all the metrics into account, my son should still be in diapers.*
Each day I make phone calls to utility companies, but if I leave the house for even an hour, I return to find my parents have undone the work I’ve just completed. It’s impossible to convince my parents that they can retain their email addresses. “Dad, your email address has nothing to do with your modem,” I tell him. Even my father, who has always been an early adopter, is stumped. “Email comes in through the computer, which is connected to the modem, which farms it out to your phone.”
“How can it possibly work that way? What if you’re not near the modem when you get your emails? What about people who don’t own a computer and only have smartphones?” But it’s no use. I arrange new phone numbers for them as well, but by the time I arrive back in Los Angeles I learn they’ve jettisoned them even though I’d already distributed the new ones to our family members and all of their medical providers. And these are the same people some politicians claim would benefit from privatized retirement accounts and a health-care voucher system. If I wasn’t convinced of this already, I know these things are all code for “more things my sister and I will need to do for our parents.”
I can only hope that my son, who already programs my iPod, will have more patience when he has to do something similar for me. “Mom, the chip embedded in your thumb doesn’t need to be reprogrammed when you move!” Where will I be headed when that day comes? With my lackluster savings, it will probably be an elder hostel in Costa Rica.
It’s only as I am packing to leave Miami that I fully take in that this is the last time I’ll be in my childhood home. I too had relished this fancy address, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach has turned to anguish. I frantically call the real estate agent to ask if I can keep the brass knocker on the front door. This fixture, a realistically carved, delicate woman’s hand whose nails I once painted black, had always been vaguely disturbing to me in the way that a disembodied limb can seem to a child, but now I want to hold that hand. Alas, I am told the new owners find the knocker endearingly kitsch, and so I shake that hand good-bye forever. I’ve got my dirty ashtray in my purse as I roll my overnight bag over the pale coral stone walkway and I can still make out the red wax candle drippings from my Rocky Horror Picture Show party that even repeated steam cleanings couldn’t erase. But there’s no time to mourn because my son’s heading toward his first day of his last year in middle school and I’ve got back-to-school shopping to do.
My list of back-to-school supplies includes wipe boards and corkboards. These “organizational tools” continue to pile up and go unused in our house, but every year I convince myself that this new chart of chores, fresh calendars hung in every room, and homework or musical instrument practice check-off sheets will finally make our household run smoothly. No matter what kind of new system I try to implement, my son makes last-minute plans and mixes up important dates, but I can’t resist, and so I’m loading bigger corkboards and brighter dry-erase markers into a shopping cart, as if a reminder in lime green of Write down dates of upcoming tests! will make a deeper impression than the ones I’ve previously written in black, when the phone rings. It’s my older sister with news. This is how the communication chain works. Even though I’m nearing fifty, I’m still the younger sibling. She gets the important news from our parents and is called upon to break it to me.
There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that my mother has breast cancer again. The (relatively) good news is that she’s so old the cells aren’t growing quickly and her oncologist is confident that a radical mastectomy should take care of it.
The news about her breast cancer shouldn’t be shocking. In the last hundred years, we’ve doubled our life span as Americans, but our “lengthening morbidity,” as it’s been called, is both enervating and expensive, with many of us outliving the money it costs to treat these diseases.* She’s had breast cancer once already and made it through with only a short course of radiation, but she’s had thyroid cancer and had her thyroid removed as well. She had a benign brain tumor removed with no lasting repercussions other than her sticking with the Rod Stewart circa 1982 haircut she adopted in preparati
on for that surgery. We’ve nicknamed my mother the Energizer Bunny because she just keeps going and going, but how long can she last?
I volunteer to go back down for the surgery and spend the night in the hospital with my mother, like I did when she had the brain tumor. Ever since the birth of my son with a congenital birth defect necessitating years of surgical repair—all successful, I am happy to report—I am the go-to person in the family when it comes to health care. My executive-decision-making older sister handles financial, legal and much of their emotional support—she’s a rock—but health crisis management has become my domain.* I really have no expertise, but I have learned a few simple tricks. Write down everything your doctor says. Write down every medication you are already taking, every medication you will need during your recovery and every question you can think of. Keep an extra pen on you; yours will run out of ink when you need it the most. And whenever possible, find someone to stay with you overnight. Anyone will do. Pay someone if necessary. You won’t regret it. The night shift is hard, nurses are overworked and often the medications and orders are confusing, so be nice to them. And BYO pillow, bathrobe, socks and blanket for both patient and caregiver.
My mother finds it comforting that her oncologist is someone I went to high school with, whom I may or may not have dated. I actually can’t remember. Since her retirement, her life has compressed to the point that her relationships with her doctors are primary and deeply personal. She’s sounding more and more like my grandmother Rebecca, who sent cards to her doctors on their birthdays and regularly hand-delivered homemade banana bread and stuffed cabbage to their offices. This must be another milestone that lies ahead for me: the day when you speak to and of your doctors more frequently than your friends. All of this is made even more surreal by the fact that the person my mother now wants to send pastries to (store-bought, but still) is someone my age.
I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 Page 16