A strange gift

It’s turned into a hot summer after all, catching up after a long, slow, cold spring.

I’ve found the days slipping away from me once again, as I turned my attention to other responsibilities, and I’ve scarcely entered a new post here since my birthday.

But now it’s nearly September, and as I find myself longing for the cooler weather to come, I am led to thoughts of my mother, who always loved the summer as much as I have always hated it, and who loved and chose this city that I have always sought to leave; my mother, whose birthday, August 29, is today.

My mother would have been 100 years old today. That does make me feel kind of old, or perhaps more accurately, makes me feel as if I belong to an older world, a sensibility I would sometimes feel even as a child in the seventies, growing up with older parents.

My mother grew up in Toronto, a very different kind of town from New York (and a very different town even from the Toronto of today). She first came to New York as a young woman in the late forties, fleeing the sorrow of her mother’s prolonged and irremediable decline, to work at the brand-spanking new United Nations, still under construction, a shining beacon of hope for a world still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War. A hopeful time, and so different from the cynical age in which I grew up. New York was enchantment for my mother, a world of art and beauty and music, especially music, even with the dull daily grind of work as a legal secretary, for which she was vastly overqualified; even with the inevitable loneliness of the obligatory women’s residential hotel and its pretensions to fashion and elegance.

I can’t imagine what she would make of this world in which I live today. She lived to see a man walk on the moon and much, much more but could not have dreamt of living all day with one’s head in the electronic ether, such as is the texture of daily life in these very post-modern times.

I wonder what she would think of the super-skyscrapers, dwarfing in their hubris the graceful-spired old beauties of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State building and their kind. I’m quite certain she would have found these newer towers to be fundamentally off, or wrong, an inharmonious offense against the communal aesthetics of a great city. She always hated excess.

I suppose it is in large part due to her that I have always had a love-hate relationship with New York, as opposed to merely a hate relationship. The seventies New York in which I grew up always seemed to have a dull, gray, weary presence to me, but her stories of her younger years in the city carried a sort of magic, a shimmer of enchantment, from misadventures with her landlady to a sort of dream of art and beauty and above all, music, stories that could have only have happened in New York, and in that time and place, an enchantment that she knew and remembered to me, enchantment that made me long for a more beautiful time than my own. A strange gift that, now at the age of fifty-eight, I am still only beginning to understand.

So this one’s for you Mom, and for all the millions of dreamers who have come here and those yet to come, those who found their dream in this hard, aching, bitter, beautiful city, and all those who walked away. May you all be remembered in at least someone’s heart.