Requiem for my Aunt Olga Bloom

           

           My friend Orel called me last night and told me I’d been omitted from my Aunt Olga Bloom’s obituary in The New York Times.

            It upset me. She was the most influential person in my life, and I was the same in hers. She'd said it many times.

            But Aunt Olga would say, “Let it go, love. What does it matter? We hold the truth in our hearts.”

            She would be right, of course.

            She was always right.

            It was maddening, sometimes.

            But oh so comforting, as well.

            In my dark childhood Aunt Olga would arrive outside my house, shouting, "Hello, Old Chum!" She'd whisk me away in her battered Volkswagen Beetle, riding shotgun in a seat with no back. She’d removed it to carry planks of wood for her barge. Off we roared! On expeditions. It didn’t matter where. It only mattered that it was the two of us. She was the only person in my life who made me feel special. I would be locked in a mental institution right now pounding my head on the padded walls if not for her.

            We did not agree musically. She loved classical music, obviously. I adored rock & roll. But I did like Chopin, I admitted grudgingly – for teenagers hate to enjoy anything adults treasure. I also came to look forward to “The Four Seasons,” which they performed on the barge every Easter. And, at Christmas and New Year’s, The Brandenburg’s were pretty okay, too.

            I guess it was all pretty okay. It just took me a while to appreciate it – like many things in life. Rarely do we comprehend the beauty of what is right in front of us.

            I did appreciate Aunt Olga, though. We loved each other madly. She tried so hard to get me to play the violin – she even bribed me, paying me ten cents per line – but all I wanted was to write. It took her so many years to accept that. It wasn’t until she read my manuscript Evolution that she embraced me as a writer – a real writer. “My God, child,” she said, “I stayed up all night reading. I couldn’t put it down. You’ve written something worthy of Shakespeare. And the insights into humanity...You are so young for them...”

            That was one of the happiest days of my life: When Aunt Olga approved of my work. I don’t know if I could’ve found the strength to write such a gut-wrenching thing, if not for her love.

            Then there was the book I wrote about us: Saved by the Music. She couldn’t get past the opening at first, saying “I can’t bear to think of the sadness in your life.”

            But I told her she was the one who got me through, and she was able to read the rest. And she was proud – of me, and this tribute to her.

            Because she was proud of me, I was proud of me, too.

            My aunt taught me that there was no such thing as "no." There was only “not yet.”

            When people laughed at her dream, she laughed louder, agreeing that it was indeed a funny thing – but knowing that all great accomplishments started out with something humorous, or even ludicrous.

            When she brought me to her barge – the barge she was inspired to buy because of me, to give me a safe, creative haven – she stretched out her arms and declared, “Welcome home, love!”

            It was a disgusting, grey place – but it was home because she said so.

            My aunt was my home.

            And then, because I wanted so badly for her vision to come true, I helped her. I didn't love doing it, but I did it anyway. With me by her side, Aunt Olga turned that atrocious barge into Bargemusic.   

             Aunt Olga and I did share the same romantic tendencies. I read a love letter she wrote to her second husband, Toby: “I worship you,” she wrote. “You are God.”

            I so could have written that.

            She was a free spirit who truly lived the life she wanted, and she didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought about it. She was a floating, Russian Auntie Mame.

            She was Aunt Olga.

            Thank God, she was Aunt Olga.

            My old chum.

Tightrope Tuesday: A Week With Mom

I could be happy here...as long as laptops are allowed.

This Tightrope Tuesday is a bit different in that it focuses on the time I've spent parenting my mother.

How can a child parent a mother? You may ask.

The answer is, not well.

It seems to happen with the children of alcoholics. I remember identifying with David Hasselhoff’s daughter as she pleaded for him to get up off the floor and go to his acting job, which he would lose if he didn’t show up that day.

Sometimes children have to hold the world up, like Atlas.

My mother is not an alcoholic, but she is mentally ill. I don’t know exactly what she is¸ because she never went to therapy. But I’ve spent much couch time diagnosing her in absentia.

The consensus is: bipolar. Maybe medication would’ve helped. Maybe my childhood could’ve been rescued by a little pill. We’ll never know.

I’m not going to get into all that “David Copperfield” crap – as Holden Caulfield calls it. If you want to know about my lousy childhood, read my novel Saved by the Music. You’ll get the gist. There were newspapers. Lots of newspapers, everywhere. The New York Times gives me the chills.

Mom was (is) a hoarder. Now her stuff is not only piled – it’s decaying. The house stinks.

(I couldn't find a Google image as bad as her house interior looks.)

If you read my Facebook updates you’ll know that my mom arrived on my doorstep last Monday evening. That fateful morning, the electric company shut down her lights – the culmination to years of warnings that she needed to have her circuit box repaired.

Like a little girl she phoned me, “Selene, something terrible has happened. The house just went dark.”

She was at a neighbor’s, because she’d lost yet another cell phone a month ago, and had neglected to replace it. But frankly I think she likes asking for help. She gets attention from it. Oh, help me, help me. She's like Blanche DuBois: "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers."

Naturally I thought she hadn’t paid the bill (which has happened.) It took a while to ascertain the real problem.

I called an electrician and arranged for them to come. I thanked the neighbor. I told my mother to go home and leave the neighbor alone (she stayed there for three hours, and he'd never even met her before!) Then I hung up and went about my life – which means I sat down to write.

But the work on her house never got done that day. The electrician came, and my mother refused to let him do the work because she had to “think about it.”

That’s how she wound up here.

The week has been a series of unfortunate events. She’s lost her car keys twice (they are gone at the moment) and also the new cell phone she purchased on Wednesday. The lights are still not on, though the work was finally done and the electric company claims to have restored her service. She paid some handy man the hardware store clerk recommended $75 to come and flip her breaker switch because she didn’t think she was strong enough to do it herself, even though a neighbor had tried. (Her poor neighbors!)

Through this all I have been nice –mostly. Sometimes she pushes me too far. How many times can I answer the same questions? She asks how to use the microwave repeatedly (for years, she’s been asking how many minutes for tea, and what buttons to push.)

She sure knows what buttons of mine to push!

She forgets the things she asked me a moment ago¸ and when I answer again, she forgets again. You may call it dementia, but she’s always been demented. It’s just worse now.

People ask me, “Don’t you feel bad for her?”

I say, “No. I feel bad for me. I don’t want to be her parent anymore. She never learns.”

Last night I left her by her car waiting for AAA to come give her a jump¸ even though I knew they couldn’t do it without the real key (she found some skeleton emergency key, but she has a short circuit in her alarm that has to be clicked off.) I told her this, but she didn’t listen. I had to go home to my kids. So I called road service and I told her, “Good luck.”

About an hour later she called me from another neighbor’s. (At this point I think she must’ve hit every house on the block.) “Selene, they couldn’t jump the car without the regular key.”

“I know, Mom. I told you that would happen.”

“The driver was very nasty. I think he was drunk.”

“I doubt that.”

Earlier she’d called the pharmacist “a jerk” when he didn’t want to renew her prescriptions sooner than authorized. “I can’t help it if I lost my pills,” she’d grumbled.

“What should I do?” she asked now.

What else? “Take a cab here,” I told her.

“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding relieved.

The only people having a good week are the cab drivers. They are making a mint.

So my challenge this week has been not as a true parent, but as an unwilling surrogate to my mom.

Incidentally, I left out the parts where she turns into a raging lunatic. That’s her other persona. Her whole voice changes. It’s a scary tone, but I always preferred it because at least it was authoritative. No child wants to be responsible for their mother.

It’s been a helluva week. My son Michael says this is an endurance test. The thing that helps the most is that I’m not alone in this experience. My kids see that my mom is nuts. Before, no one believed me. She can put on a good short-term act, and she’s real good at playing the wounded victim in front of people.

Most of all, this week has been a lesson in appreciating the life I have.

I worried that I’d be like her. I’m not.

So there.