[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published November 7, 2018]
©2018
I’ve mentioned before that the problem with living in the same house
for 45 years is that one has a tendency not to clean out files in a timely
manner. One advantage of this, however, is that in my efforts to finally
tackle this task, I came upon a folder of several hundred pages of letters
written by my mother to me from the time I went to college until she died when
I was 25. Over the last few months I have slowly savored them.
What is unusual about this correspondence is that it represents much of
our interaction since it was well before email, and during a time that long
distance calls were reserved for dire emergencies. What’s especially nice is
that my mother was a wonderful writer.
A disadvantage is that I don’t have my letters to her, just hers
responding to me. And while I remember myself as a dutiful daughter who
brought nothing but joy to her parents, I was obviously at times a total pain.
And sometimes genuinely mean. But there it all is, in writing.
If she were alive today, I’d be doing some serious apologizing.
My mother was a third-generation feminist (I’m a proud fourth). Both
her mother and grandmother had been rabid suffragists and proponents of women’s
rights. The 19th amendment (giving women the right to vote) passed
when she was a toddler.
Maybe this background is why “home arts” were not her strong suit. In
one of her letters, she recounts her efforts to make new curtains for the
common room of our small vacation home: “When I started to cut the thirty yards
of patterned cloth, I discovered that the reason it was such a bargain was that
the pattern hadn’t been printed straight. I finished a sample drape and it was
beautiful except that the pattern was upside down. So I made the second one
upside down also. If anybody notices, I will say that I thought they looked too
suburban right side up. Then I did the kitchen side and they weren’t crooked,
they were merely three inches too short. I solved this with a different kind of
hanging unit. After that I took the rest of the week off curtains.”
While she may not have been a domestic goddess, she was a dedicated
horticulturalist. When I was in college, my parents moved to New Jersey to a newly-built
home on a hilly overgrown wooded lot which provided challenges even to as
talented a gardener as my mother. Many of her letters chronicle her efforts to
tame this jungle while preserving its natural charm. She referred to its
different problem areas as the Slough of Despond, the Bosky Dell, and the
Panama Canal. My first marriage was, in fact, at a tree stump altar in those
very woods.
I’ve written before that my sum total writing training is a life time
of letter writing – which is really what my columns are: letters I’m writing to
a wider audience. But also, from the time I was around eight years old, I
started writing little stories and poems. My mother always had nothing but
praise for them no matter how awful they were (and believe me, they were),
wanting me to experience the joy of writing for itself. But if there was one
she particularly liked, she’d ask if she could buy it from me for a nickel (the
rate ultimately went up to a dime), obviously subtly encouraging my better
work. “Better” would be a relative term, as I found a whole folder of these
after she died. I’m truly impressed with her faith in me.
My older granddaughter is eight, and she and I were talking about this
during a visit earlier this year. I was telling her in earshot of her parents
about writing stories that my mother then purchased if she particularly liked
them. Writing should be fun, I said. You can make things happen any way you
want them to. She wanted to know if she could write stories about how the mean
girls get theirs. I said “absolutely.”
When we visited L.A. in May my son Henry showed me a story that my granddaughter
wrote that he had purchased for $20. (Definite inflation.) It was
utterly charming (and not about mean girls), and gorgeously illustrated in
vibrant colors. With a twinkle in his eye, Henry picked up the story off the
counter where he’d placed it and said to her, “Now in Daddy’s job [private
equity], I would let Mormor have this for $40." Alas, the counter
top was damp and all the colors had run on the illustrations. My
granddaughter turned to me and said, “Offer him ten, Mormor. It got wet."
Jury is still out on which direction this young lady is headed. Or
maybe not.
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