Silver

When the silver can’t be saved

I’ve lost my mother’s silverware. We just moved into a new house. We have an awful lot of stuff, even though we have pared down and pared down for almost a year. I gave away 25 boxes of books last summer, and I can still barely fit what I’ve got into my new garage-turned story shed. My daughter is a fiendish collector and I am too: snow globes -- action figures (particularly Star Trek). And cards. Cards from my friends and lovers, cards from my daughter and husband. Cards from my mother.

My mother was a collector too. Handbags, perfume, theater books, gloves, costume jewelry. She was something of a low-level hoarder. She held on to things hard, because she was often very afraid.

Troubled by constant and paralyzing anxiety that manifested itself most visibly as a fear of both people and machines, my mother was a genius in hiding: a woman afraid to talk to anyone but me and my father about her amazing ideas and insights. She hid in the hotel bathroom when I was 13, because she was terrified at the thought of speaking French to the maid (we were in Montreal for Expo 67). Yet her French was impeccable. She feared the telephone, and hated going to the doctor. Other than her family, she had no friends.

Yet, for all her fear my mother was no political conservative; she was fervently pro-choice, a card-carrying atheist, and a lover of rock and roll. When the Bill Clinton sex scandal erupted, she asked what remains my most favorite of her no-nonsense questions; “If oral sex isn’t sex, then what the heck is it?” A remote person who came off as snobbish when she was really just plain old frightened, she braved the subway to she take me to see the Beatles, and a few years later, went with me to Carnegie Hall where we heard Tim Buckley sing in a marijuana filled room.

My best adult memory of my mother is that whenever she boarded the bus after an afternoon tea or a cup of coffee, she would take a seat and wave continually til she disappeared over the hump that occurs from time to time on Manhattan’s 3rd Avenue.

I really knew that my mother loved me at those times. She felt most at ease, I think, saying goodbye. In the distance she could safely express what close proximity made her too scared to say.

So I wept when I realized that my mother’s silverware had gotten lost in the move. I don’t know this catastrophe happened. We’d had our stuff packed up in boxes for so long, it’s possible the box got given away by accident, got transported to the wrong storage facility or who knows what.

My mother clung to objects with a palpable terror. So I felt terror too, when I realized her silverware was gone. I had lost another piece of her. My scared brilliant mother, who died a little over 10 years ago. I think about her every day. I have never stopped missing her.

I went on line, and after looking at forks and knives til I went cross-eyed, I finally found the pattern. It’s buyable, if expensive. We can gradually replace the set, I think. And how lucky that my husband is willing to do that. How lucky that we are in decent health in a new house. How lucky that we have jobs. How lucky that I get to be a writer. Although I am no genius, my ideas are rarely secret. I tell them, and write them, and have often gotten to publish them. I am surrounded by wonderful friends.

Maybe you can’t save the silver. But if you have everything else, that’s ok. I love you Mom. Don’t ever stop waving.