A voice from the past resonates in the present
In my life, 2009 was a year of milestones. I sent my last child off to college, started over again with a new puppy and became eligible for the senior citizen specials at Denny’s.
I expect 2010 to be the year when time speeds up, when I finally come to understand what the old folks meant when they used to tell me, “Time just goes by so fast.”
It didn’t seem fast when I was in the midst of it all, juggling children, career, friends and romance. The days and weeks seemed interminable, filled with tasks that never got done.
But it feels different looking back. And yes, now I’m asking: How did 20 years fly by so fast?
This Christmas brought it home to me. I am the mother of women, not children anymore.
Instead of scouring the malls for Tickle Me Elmo, I was searching for that last pair of black, size 8, Steve Madden lace-up pumps. I bought a leather jacket for one daughter -- needs no assembly and is cheaper than a Barbie Jeep. And I got a pass from another, who dropped her shopping bag on my gift wrap table and announced “Here’s the sweater you bought for me.”
My holiday was inexpensive and stress-free. And my favorite gift was unexpected and heartbreakingly sweet.
It was a letter from my mother.
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It has no date, no envelope or address. It is eight pages -- numbered 1 to 16, front and back -- handwritten in pencil on unlined paper. My cousin Ray discovered it last month in Alabama in a box of photos at the home of an elderly aunt. It took him a while to figure out who wrote it.
I would have recognized that handwriting anywhere, from my baby book, scraps of recipes and the notes she sent when I was in college.
But the voice was one I hadn’t heard before.
My mother, Ruth, died 35 years ago. At age 53, she left four children; I was the oldest. She had written this letter at 19 to her younger sister, Hattie Rose.
Just got to thinking, she wrote, and thought I’d drop you a few lines.
It was a Sunday night, around 1941. My mother had just moved north from the family farm in Alabama to live in Cleveland with her older brother.
There’s plenty of work here, her letter said. I’m not working yet, but will be soon, I’m hoping. She wanted to land a job in a defense plant. That’s where you make the most money, she wrote.
She had been part of the Great Migration of rural Southern blacks to the urban North. The city was a wonder to the country girl.
I went to a dance on Friday night. It was quite exciting and amusing to see how those white girls and colored boys, and white boys and colored girls, dance together . . . .
People are very congenial here. I think I’m going to like it ok. Even if I don’t, I’ll stay here and make some of this good money.
I could have written that myself in 1979, when I was 25 and migrated from Cleveland to Los Angeles. The people were congenial, the ethnic mix exciting and good money was waiting to be made.
Like my mother, I liked it OK and I stayed here. And I wrote to everyone I knew and told them about it.
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There was no big news in my mother’s letter. She spent most of it rambling about boy trouble -- she was trying to dump one suitor and encourage another -- and offering sisterly advice:
Don’t ever fool around with a guy you don’t like. . . . Just tell him you don’t like him and don’t come back to see you. . . . Tell him you’re sorry, but he isn’t your type.
My daughters laughed when I read the letter to them. The grandmother they never knew sounded very much like the mother they have spent a lifetime listening to.
You know I’m popular around here already, my mother wrote. But I’m being careful because most of these guys are ‘hep,’ you know.
My mother’s musings gave my daughters a sort of context for their lives -- one they can’t see when they’re rolling their eyes at their mother’s confessions and advice.
The boys with “swag” that my daughter likes were my mother’s teenage “jitterbugs.” The basics of a 19-year-old’s social life, then and now, are a good job and a lively dance on Friday night. And there are few things more comforting than pouring your heart out to your sister, whether by Facebook, phone or pencil and paper.
I’d like to tell you about it but it’s such a long story, my mother’s letter began. I know you will be tired before you finish, she finally wrote on Page 14.
The letter was, for me, a familial link, a bridge between my mother’s life and mine.
I have spent too much time mourning the loss of a guide as I navigate life. Listening to her 19-year-old self is like watching a Polaroid snapshot develop, three generations merging into one over time. I was 19 when she died. And that’s the age now of my youngest daughter.
She’s a child who records every heartbreak and triumph in her journal. I’m a mother whose purse is stuffed with scraps of paper scribbled with ideas I want to share. And then there’s my mother, Ruth, who kept the family connected with her letters.
I wish you and Ora could see the big town. . . . I wrote Mother yesterday but didn’t have time to write you. I am going to write Glenn tomorrow I think. Tell all the rest I will write them sometime. Next time I write, I will tell you more about the big city and not a newspaper about my personal affairs.
And finally, a personal message, from my mother’s letter to my readers:
If you don’t want to bother about reading all this it’s alright; I’ll never know the difference. But it was on my mind so strong, I couldn’t help writing it.