Mom, Part One
It is troublesome to describe my mother's childhood. I have a few facts, and some general suppositions, and a certain mood has been conveyed to me, but the truth is that there are some very big gaps. There is some design to this; my grandmother will often refuse point-blank to answer simple questions. It is not that there is some family secret that anyone is hiding; or rather, I know the secret already. My mother and her sister and their mother just do not like talking about it.
My mother's father was a faulknerian evil bastard.
This despite being Canadian. Who says everything but the weather is nicer in the great white north?
Grandma- I will go ahead and tell you, her name is Shirley- Shirley did not start the family until she and Lionel (the faulknerian evil bastard) moved from Saskatchewan to Chicago for his work. Lionel was some sort of a bottom-rung architect, and an entrepreneur on the side. A very unsuccessful one. Shirley had my aunt- let us call her 'Joan'- she had my aunt Joan there in Chicago. Two and a half years later they had moved their residence to the Lake Geneva area in rural southeastern Wisconsin. There Shirley gave birth to Robert, and two and a half years after that, on March twenty-first, 1958, she had my mother.
In my limited experience, rural southeastern Wisconsin is just about the friendliest, most beautiful, freshest smelling place on earth. But according to my mother, the children there are just as mean to eachother as they are everywhere else, and the neighbors that are not waving hello and inviting you over for lunch are cleaning guns in their bathroom and thinking rotten thoughts. So I guess it is a lot like everywhere else, if only with a starker chiaroscuro, and cleaner air.
I am not supposed to tell you even what I
do know about what went on there. Lionel did some terrible things. They are very sensitive about it.
I can tell you that Lionel kept stealing the family savings: Shirley kept saving up money to fix the roof of their house, which leaked very badly, and Lionel kept finding it and blowing it all on something. Mom slept with an umbrella some nights. No joke.
Oh, and Lionel kept a mistress, too, of course.
Shirley was a teacher, the only socially acceptable decently paying thing other than a secretary that a woman born in nineteen twenty-six could be. When my mother was near the age of thirteen, Shirley became determined to divorce Lionel, and went to night school to get her master's degree, for the salary increase, which she needed to support the family. The day she graduated, she divorced him.
My mother tells me- and I do not doubt this- that Grandma was not much of a mother during these years. Altogether, I gather it was not much of a family at all. The kids did not want to be at home; they spent as much time as possible with friends. My mother was the youngest and the least independent, and was by herself a lot. Her brother Robert was the closest one to her.
Robert is dead now. When he was about nineteen, three years younger than I am now, he was struck by a freight train at night on a trestle bridge and killed. What Robert was doing on a trestle bridge at night when a freight train was coming is a matter of some family debate. When I was young, I was told that he was running away from home.
My mother and her sister Joan became somewhat closer after Robert died. When my mother was twenty, in the summer of 1978, she and Joan each wanted to go backpacking in Europe, and since their friends were all too chicken, they went together. My mother sold her car to get money for the trip.
Mom and Joan bought summer rail passes in Europe that let them ride on any train in any country for four months. They would spend the day in a town, then get on an almost empty train at night and sleep their way to wherever they were when they woke up. They saw the sites, and the sights. There were hijinks. They got groped a lot because they were blonde. Sometimes they slept on park benches. Sometimes they got robbed. They met and traveled with unusual people, some of which they kept in touch with for years.
At the end of the summer of 1978 Joan got tired of traveling and went back to the United States. But Mom had heard about the
kibbutzim, the commune farms that were flourishing all over Israel at the time, and wanted to see them. They parted ways; Mom headed southeast with some of her new friends.
My mother saw
Israel during a very violent period. That seems a silly and redundant thing to say, as if I was saying she saw the ocean during a very wet period; but the
PLO was very active in
Lebanon in the late seventies, and very aggressive. Though it was not virtual wartime, like it was while my dad was serving in the
Golani Brigade during the '
War of Attrition', it was still pretty bad: the PLO did not use suicide soldiers with backpack bombs then; they used land mines, artillery, and rocket launchers.
Also, it did not help that Mom spent most of her time on the Lebanese border.
My mother found room and board in exchange for work at
Rosh Hanikra, which is the name of both a white chalk cliff face on the Mediterranean coast which opens into spectacular grottos, and of the kibbutz that sprawls immediately southeast of it. Rosh Hanikra is the very substance of the northern Israeli border (the border with Lebanon) in that area; the barbed-wire fence runs down a ridge and right to the edge of the cliff, where the land drops off into the sea. Somehow the grottos keep up a tourist trade in spite of this. The main road runs north along the beach until the cliff rises out of it; then the road turns east and into the Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra Compound. The compound is at the foot of the ridge, and it is encircled by its own barbed-wire fence, and guard towers are spaced along the perimeter.
When my mother first got to Rosh Hanikra with her current traveling companion, they intended to sleep on the beach. Some soldiers from the kibbutz driving a tractor north on the beach road came across them, and gave the two girls a ride the rest of the way into the kibbutz. The soldiers informed them that people found on the beach at night were assumed to be PLO members swimming in from Lebanon to plant land mines, and were shot on sight.
Later, she found they had been joking about the 'on sight' part. The rest of it was true.
(
Rosh Hanikra's Offical Website is apparently down, and the
Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra Volunteer's Website is suffering from some sort of a Java seizure. Wikipedia had never heard of the place before, and could only tell me about
Rosh Hashana; I wasted some time and it has a stub there now.
Luker the Running Man has some great photos of the area on his personal travel photos website, but I felt like I would be a scab to link to just the Rosh Hanikra page. Root around in there.)
My mother was in Israel for one year, from the end of the summer of 1978 to the end of the summer of 1979. For most of that time she was at Rosh Hanikra; there she tended chickens, washed laundry, and did dishes. I am sure she did other things as well. She learned Hebrew. She dated a soldier- not my dad- who lived there; she slept in his bunk in the soldiers' house, instead of in the women's dormitory.
Mom saw almost the entire country, tiny as it is, before she went back to America. At one point she went to see the
Bedouins in the Sinai desert. She told me that she had been so excited to see people living as they had for thousands of years, a hundred miles from any sort of modern civilization, in an era before wireless communication; and then, as she was adoring the camels and the grass houses, she saw a little Bedouin kid wearing a 'Million Dollar Man' t-shirt.
Mom got caught in a sandstorm there in the Sinai; she sat in her plastic tent as it filled with sand up to her armpits and tried to calmly read a romance novel. She was being buried alive until some bedouins rescued her; when she came back after the storm someone had stolen most of her stuff.
My mother was hitchhiking back to Rosh Hanikra late in the spring of 1979 when my father picked her up on his way to visit his mother in Haifa.
Dad was a charmer. Mom moved in with him until the end of the summer.
According to my mother, she left Israel at the end of that summer for two reasons: The first was that she needed to finish her college education; the second was that her mother, Shirley, called her long distance and begged her to come home, because she had been gone so very long, and Shirley was worried sick about her.
