Thursday, July 30, 2009

Legacy

Legacy

I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess; it has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.

In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. Her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk, though it did not make her Justice of the Peace.

The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. Sometimes she married constant purpose to episodic eccentricity. At sixty, long widowed, she would walk in a field near the house, looking for flowers she could place on the table where everyone else was already eating her serviceable cooking. She objected to the timely departure of trains she had only narrowly missed. For years she watched herons stalking goldfish or frogs and wanted them all to be well. Also crows foraging in the snow; the ocean and trees and rivers; another generation of people in search of work.

So her dreams remained catholic with a very small c. As she aged and yielded independence, she tracked them through television news and also looked beyond. She rejoiced in every ride we took to the coast, breathed her delight when the sea came into view, even when it was gray--the ocean's multi-colored openness, its changing hues following the light, its freshening wind on her own changing face. In her nineties she looked into the mirror and chuckled ruefully at her ubiquitous lines and wrinkles.

All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad economies and ethnicities, a crowd as protean as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.