Living a Year of Kaddish by Ari L. Goldman

Author:Ari L. Goldman [Goldman, Ari L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48758-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Even before she married Jack, my mother had a taste for the finer things. She’d buy only the best kosher cuts of meat and fresh breads, fish, and vegetables. Canned or frozen foods were not her thing. As a single mother, she couldn’t afford personal luxuries, but sometimes she would indulge herself. She was always handsomely dressed and never in synthetics; in the Dacron polyester 1960s, she wore cottons and wools. She was a voracious reader, a true lover of literature, who hated paperbacks; she read only clothbound books. (Luckily she was a high school librarian, so she could get almost any title she wanted for free—and in hardcover.) Most of all, she had a love for classical music. She bought records and went to the symphony or opera whenever she could. She would drop everything to see Leonard Bernstein conduct. I remember one winter Saturday when I was fourteen years old. She was reading the Times arts page and saw that Bernstein was conducting that night at Lincoln Center. Beethoven’s Ninth was on the program. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Mom, I’m sure it’s sold out,” I said.

“I’m sure it is,” she said, “but let’s go anyway.”

As soon as the Sabbath was over, we rushed down to Lincoln Center. Sure enough, the box office had a big sold out sign on the window. My mother spotted a small crowd around a man holding two tickets. There was a negotiation going on. Mom plowed into the crowd, grabbed the tickets, and thrust $20 into his hands. This was in 1964, when the best Philharmonic seats went for $4.50. Twenty dollars was our food budget for the week. (No steaks that week.) But Mom couldn’t be happier. We sat in the orchestra.

My mother married Jack in 1970, and our lives began to change. He was a corporate executive, and we enjoyed the perks. We flew to the Caribbean on the corporate jet. We stayed at fancy hotels. We had a country house and a city apartment. Mom was Cinderella and we, her sons, were the mice who were suddenly transformed into handsome steeds. We benefited from being in her orbit.

Years later, when Shira first met my mother, she sized her up this way: “Your mother is someone who knows that luxuries are sometimes necessities.” In the early years of our marriage, as Shira and I struggled with the necessities, my mother showered us with the extras. She took us to the theater, the ballet, the opera. She’d bestow Broadway tickets on us and take the children to The Nutcracker. When Adam developed an interest in Mozart, she took him to a performance of Don Giovanni at the Met. We paid our own grocery bill, of course, but for years my mother picked up our bill at the kosher butcher (first cuts only). We paid our children’s considerable day-school tuition, but she picked up the cost of their music and ballet lessons. She took us (and later our children) shopping at stores we would never go into, like Saks and Bloomingdale’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.