A Life in Fifteen Lines or Less

From time to time I read the obituaries. Like just in case someone I know has actually passed away and I didn't know, or because I'm a writer and I read between the lines - looking at the birth and death dates, the life histories, the old people whose obituaries are accompanied by their picture from World War II. And sometimes I read them because we just need to pay attention. They're there and they memorialize someone's life and I can give them my time.

So I was really surprised when pricing obituaries yesterday, how much it costs to run one. Two hundred dollars for one day and fifteen lines. More for extra days and lines, and even more for a photograph. Somewhere in my naive little mind I thought these ran as community announcements, as community service. Not as ads.

If you read this blog back in 2009 and 2010 you may remember the madcap adventures of the elderly in my life - my Holocaust Survivor Jewish mother and my Ohio Farmer Methodist Stepfather. Her yelling and his deafness, which actually made an ideal combination; his constant puttering, gluing and winching, involved in dozens of mystifying projects around the house, like gluing together ice cube trays and winching broken laundry baskets, because nothing ever needed to be replaced, yet the house was still falling down around their heads. And my mother sat in her place on the couch in the family room, phones and remote controls in front of her - her command center - the living switchboard of our seven daughter family. Who knew those were the good old days?

But then there was decline and a decision that our mother needed to live with one of us due to her need for twenty-four hour a day care. Stepfather did not want to make the same move. He continued puttering about the empty house, still busy with projects, with ham radio, with driving his truck fifteen miles an hour down the road seeking garage sale finds. I saw him often, brought soup. But still I thought, he's 87. He can't live there alone forever.

There were a lot of options available to him, one of which was to move to be close to one of his daughters. And I swear he was alive and well this past January as he shuffled off with his kids, the yard sale items with which the house had been filled compressed finally into six suitcases and a mobile mini.

Who knows what it is that keeps a person in one piece, that keeps a person going? Who knows what strange collection of circumstances and location and relationships - and maybe glue and winches - keep a person going? Because by the end of March, and his 88th birthday, Stepfather was hospitalized, and on May 6th he passed away.

And on May 9th I was on a website trying to figure out how to condense the life of one man into fifteen lines and one day and found that it is impossible.

Rest in peace, Bob Milburn.

From the Sick Bed

Okay, so I'll admit it, I've been sick. Like really sick. Right when I'm supposed to be full of energy, launching my newly published book into the stratosphere, promoting it, signing it, mailing it off to editors and columnists, what am I doing? I'm laying in a heap on my bed, my eyes replaced by Xs, like a cartoon.

And what's worse is that I have a mysterious type of ailment. Part asthma. Part exhaustion. Part massive  throbbing headache. Could it be the years upon years that I've spent staying up till two in the morning writing the darn book? Could it be all the years of getting four to five hours of sleep per night, all catching up with me at once?

Gone are the days of me waking up like a robot, showing up at my exercise class, magically appearing everywhere I'm supposed to be. Now I'm lucky if I can lift my head from my pillow. I crawl out of the house just in time to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla from high school at 2:20 each day and then I creak over to Daughter's school to get her at 3:15. And that's the total of my big daily activity. I walk back in the house and fall back on my bed exhausted. I can feel my muscles atrophying.

Yet, somehow, when Husband hauled me off to the ER, I wasn't sick enough for them. They triaged me right to the bottom of the list, making me wait six hours and talking to me about the "impression of not being able to breath." Although with all the tests they did I guess I know it's not fatal.

You know you're really sick when, instead of the daughter taking care of the elderly mother - like I normally do - the eighty-year-old mother has to call me ten times a day worried sick about whether I'm dying. Today she even had my nearly deaf eighty-six-year-old stepfather call. I could hear her yelling at him in the background as he fumbled with the phone, "WHAT BOB? YOU CAN'T ASK HER HOW SHE IS?"

And, because of the hearing thing, because of the eighty-six-year-old thing, when he asked how I was, it was just simpler to say, "Fine, I'm fine."

And maybe I will be. Tomorrow.

Ever had illness get in the way of your plans? Ever had to become the patient when you've been the caretaker?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

My book is available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and on Kindle!
http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Up-Memoir-Sisters-Survivors/dp/145647068X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305613872&sr=8-1

Remember Your Coat

I was at our school's yard sale yesterday.  I'd just taken off my coat and put it inside my car.  Just then I noticed Stepfather walking toward me, having just gotten out of his car. 

He was carrying a coat.

"Hi, Bob. I'm glad you made it over here," I said.

"Here, Linda."  He handed me the coat.

"What's this?"

"Your mother told me to bring you a coat.  She said you wouldn't be wearing one."

He continued on past me while I stood there holding the coat.  How did she know when I took off my coat?

I could be on the top of the Himalayas with a team of other climbers on a six-month climb, but the minute I'd slip off my coat, well, look over there!  Who is that climbing rapidly up the slope toward us?  Why, it's my mother, bringing me a coat.  She has a sixth sense, a cosmic ability, or maybe she's embedded a microchip in me somewhere, to sense my coat-wearing status.

I put the coat in my car.  Later she showed up at the yard sale bundled up in a wool jacket and scarf even though by then it was a sunny 75 degrees.  Obviously, her radar works well.  She spotted me across the field, then yelled at me, "Linda, why aren't you wearing the coat I sent with Bob?"

But then, right before I answered, she saw a new problem - one involving her descendants.  Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter standing there.  No coats.

Just the Fax, Ma'am

My mother and Stepfather are going on a month-long cruise to China.  Ignoring the question of how they will live in a windowless cabin -  they never pay for windows - the size of a closet for a month without killing each other, this trip requires some modern technology that my mother doesn't have.  It seems that nowadays, booking major travel requires two things:  a credit card and email.

So she calls me up in a panic to tell me that she and Stepfather need my help.  My mind courses through the type of help they normally need from me:  house-watching, mail-getting, pill-sorting, doctor-arguing?

But no, it's something much more insurmountable for my mother.  She tells me that Holland America wants to send her a fax.

"A fax, Ma?  Are you sure they said a fax?"  My mom stopped learning about technology after fax machines were invented.  After all, the fax machine was the world's perfect office machine.  Imagine being able to transmit documents over a phone line by pressing a button!  There was a time in the early 80's when that fax machine of hers was screeching day and night in her busiest days in real estate.  How could anything ever supplant that?

But there have been a few inventions since then.  Like the Internet.  I figure out that she needs me to get an email from the cruise line.

I say, "Sure, is that it?"

"You'll print everything they send?"

"Yes.  We have a printer, Mom.  And paper in it."

The next day I call her.  I tell her I still haven't gotten the email.

She says, "Well, they probably haven't gotten my payment."

"How long could it take to get your payment?  Didn't you pay with a credit card?"

"Oh no.  I sent a check."  What, by carrier pigeon?  "Bob and I don't use any credit cards." 

Well at least she's not going nuts out there with her consumer debt.

"Okay, Ma. After they cash your check I'm sure they'll send the information."

"And then you'll give me the fax?"

"Right.  Then I'll give you the fax."

Give Me All Your Pop

I go to a party at my sister's house.  My mother is planted like a tree in a chair at the head of the table.  She is not going to move an inch all night. 

It is true that at our family parties, a chair is hard to come by.  Once you get one, you need to stake it out, make it your own.  You leave it at your peril.  Sometimes, annoyingly, the two skinniest sisters will show up and insist on sharing the chair with you. 

So, since my mother is ensconced on her throne, she needs to be waited on hand and foot.  Someone who doesn't have a chair to maintain and occupy needs to get my mom's food.  Later, another chairless person needs to get my mom's dessert.  Suddenly, she eyes me up.

"Linda, give me some of your pop!"  She pushes a coffee cup across the table at me.

Of course she's using a coffee cup because, to my mother, anything is a drinking vessel.  In Skokie we never had a matched glass in our house.  We had drinking glasses that were one of two things:  either they were yahrzeit candles - memorial candles - after the wax had been burned off, morbidly being used by the living, or they were from the S&H green stamp catalogue and we had broken most of the set.

I dutifully pour her some pop.  Suddenly, she screeches, "Stop!  That's too much!" after I pour an inch.

Then a minute later.  "Linda!  More pop!"  She thrusts the coffee cup at me.  I give her a baleful glare.  I only have the one can of pop and I also can't leave my chair.  I'm guarding it.  But, she's my mom so I pour.  Again she shrieks for me to stop.

And then a minute later she does it again.  "Linda!  More p-"

My head whips around.  This is worse than taking care of a two-year-old.  I take my can and put it in front of her.  Finally!  She got the whole thing away from me.  She happily empties it into the coffee cup.

Amateur Doctor

I'm on the phone with my mother - do I ever see her in person? - and she starts coughing. It's a disrupt-the-phone-call cough. Finally she gets back to me. I say, suspiciously, "Are you okay?"

"Sure I'm okay. Why?"

"You were coughing."

"That wasn't coughing."

"It was coughing. I heard it. You nearly made me deaf."

"It was nothing. A little mess up on my inhaler. I'm supposed to take two puffs twice a day but I decided to take one puff three times a day and then I forgot the second puff so I went back on it and decided to do two puffs in the middle of the day and none at the start or end of the day. Once I straighten it out, I'll be better."

While I'm trying to do this inhaler math in my head, she starts coughing again, right into the phone, enough to bring over a nebulizer, or a ventilator. It ends with the sound of running water. I'm thinking, where is she talking on the phone? In the bathroom?

She comes back on. I say, "You're sick."

"Sick? I'm not sick."

"Ma, you're sick." I know this because, despite the fact that I'm nearly thirty years younger than her, we both have eighty-year-old bodies. We're health twins, asthma twins. We not only have asthma in common but now that I'm getting older we also have arthritis, osteoporosis and cataracts in common. Actually, with some of these things, I'm worse off than her.

And anyway, I'm an amateur doctor. I could have been a great doctor and could have gone to med school if not for that cadaver thing, and my grades in college, and the fact that it took me five and a half years to get my BA, and that even when I got my BA it was in History. But other than all that, I'm a pretty good amateur doctor. Just by the sound of that cough through the phone, I've mentally prescribed an antibiotic for my mother: Ceftin, 500 milligrams, twice a day.

This is a little bit of a switch for us since when I was a kid, my mother was the amateur doctor, but she wasn't a very good one. She only had one thing to cure us with: a whiskey compress. No matter the injury - from psychosomatic ones to broken bones, she puttered around in the kitchen, pulled out a schmatta (a rag), found some whiskey and Saran Wrap, and wrapped up the offending part in a stinking liquor tourniquet. Then she left us to steep in this cocktail on the couch alone, protecting us from further injury by isolating us from our six sisters.

This time, my mom's fighting off my diagnosis. She outlines her own plan, involving an elaborate dance with her inhaler - one puff here and one puff there, like perfume.

Or maybe she'll just make a really gigantic compress and wrap it around her lungs.

Moving Hanukkah

My mother is very happy because my cousin from Chicago is coming to visit. I'm happy too because when my daughter and my cousin's daughter met two and a half years ago, they had an almost surreal connection. They were instant best friends. And, from the second they met, my daughter could not rest knowing that my cousin's daughter was somewhere in the world and not with her, so she stalked her all over Phoenix - when they stayed with my mother, when they stayed with my sister, when they did anything that wasn't with us. Finally, exhausted from all this stalking, I drove over to my sister's house and picked them up. This time it's mandatory. They'll be staying with us.

So my mother's happy. Cousin and her daughter are coming. Cousin's staying with me. My house is a mile from her house. She has the gate opener for my neighborhood gate and a key to my house so she can barge in any time. Everything is perfect.

But then she says, "I told your cousin that you'll be having a big Hanukkah party for the family."

Okay, this is true. I'm in charge of Hanukkah for our family, probably because, after 36 years in Arizona, I'm just about the only one in the family who doesn't have a Christmas tree. Admittedly, I'm the big Jewish fanatic in the family. I own about 100 menorahs, have quite a dreidel collection. What other people do for Christmas, I do for Hanukkah.

But I smell a rat. Hanukkah is a little early this year. I believe Cousin's coming after it ends.

I say, "Ma, when's she coming?"

"I don't know. I think December 19th. The week before Christmas."

My mother, the Holocaust Survivor, dates everything by Christmas.

"But Ma, the last day of Hanukkah is the 19th, so the last candle is the 18th."

"Who cares how many days Hanukkah has? Eight shmeight! Why can't it be closer to Christmas this year?"

Does she think I can find a ten-armed menorah?

"Ma, I'm not moving Hanukkah."

"You think you're so Orthodox! I'll tell you what's so Orthodox - when the Nazis killed everyone in my town."

Since I grew up with my mother throwing the Holocaust at my head every morning, noon, and night, this certainly isn't going to sway me. We've been through this before in my family, with everyone in my family wanting to move Hanukkah onto the more convenient Christmas - everyone has the day off anyway! - or moving Passover to Easter, or combining the two.

I ignore her invocation of the Holocaust. I say, "Look, I'll have the party on the last day if you want, but I'm not moving the holiday."

And, faced with my implacable will - I'm the Jewish mother, she's the reluctant daughter - she gives in, pulls out the calendar and makes note of the date.

Eat, Talk, Cough

Here's what happens when I'm on the phone with my mother. First, since she's multi-tasking, cooking and talking (one chicken breast, boiled), then eating and talking, then coughing and talking, she drops the phone repeatedly. When this happens, this is what I hear: first a horrible clunking sound as the phone slips out of her hand and hits the ground, and then her voice from far away, yelling at the phone - as if I'm inside of it - where it now lays on the floor, "Linda! I dropped the phone! Are you okay? I'm coming!"

This happens several times. It happens so many times that I finally start yelling back from my position inside the dropped phone, "Are you there, Ma? Pick me up!"

Our conversations are interrupted by these drops. Or the coughing - my mother only coughs and hacks into the receiver, never around it. I have caught colds from her coughing on me through the phone.

Now there's a new horror that's been introduced to interrupt our regular calls: my mother's cell phone. She actually only got the cell phone so she could go up to her summer home in Flagstaff and have phone service. Normally once she gets back to Phoenix, she turns it off permanently. To her a phone is still something attached to a house and once she's back in her house, that's it, she doesn't need a cell.

But this year, everything has changed. She has her cell phone on all the time. She even remembers to charge it and has it sitting right next to her house phone. My mother is finally experiencing true bliss - she can get calls simultaneously from two people at the same time all through the day and night. A perfect situation!

So I'm on the house phone with her when I hear her cell phone ring with a ring tone of "Lara," the theme from Doctor Zhivago, her favorite song ever. It's like calling a teenager, the fact that she knows how to program a ring tone. I hear her answer.

I get to listen.

"Hello?" There's a little delay. Then, "Wendy!"

It's my cousin Wendy from Chicago.

My mom comes back on with me. "Linda, it's Wendy from Chicago!"

Right. I heard her because I'm actually inside the telephone sitting in her hand. Anyway, the minute I hear my cousin's name, I know it's the end of my phone call. Local daughter versus out-of-state orphaned niece - I don't stand a chance.

Then my mom says, "You want to ask Wendy if she's coming here in December?"

I have to actually think about this for a second. How exactly would I do this? We're on my mother's two different phones. What does my mom think, that she's a switchboard operator? Is she planning to smash the cell phone on top of the house phone and tell us to yell to each other really loudly?

"You ask, Ma. I don't think she'll be able to hear me."

"Okay, I'll call you back."

She drops the phone as she's hanging it up. As I hang mine up I hear her yelling, "Sorry."

One Potato, Two Potato

I call my mom and I have enough time to talk - I'm not really rushed - but I kind of have to triage topics. We have to move quickly along, not hover too long on topics that get her ire up. Like the Holocaust. Or the Nazis.

But there are other, less obvious topics on which she can wax and wane, topics that are not always so obvious. Like food. My mother would like nothing better than to regale me for hours with an unending litany of all the food she and Stepfather eat each day - no detail is ever too small. If I could just remember not to ask her what she's eating, to stay clear of that trap, everything would be fine.

We're on the phone and it's 5:00, which in the time zone pulsating around my mother's house means it's really ten o'clock PM. I've called too late. She and Stepfather need to eat and rush off to bed. I realize my error.

"Oh, sorry, Ma. Do you need to go eat?"

"Eat? Bob and I don't eat."

"You don't?"

"For dinner tonight we're sharing a potato."

"One potato?"

"Between the two of us."

"You can't have two potatoes?"

"Oy! We could never eat so much."

"Well, okay, Ma, I'll talk to you tomor-"

But she's just warming to the topic.

"Do you know what we ate for breakfast?"

"No, what?"

"A boiled egg."

"One boiled egg?"

"For the both of us."

"You couldn't each have your own egg?"

"We can't eat so much. We're not young like you."

It's good to hear that I'm young, especially since I'm turning fifty in five months.

"Well, Ma, I've got to go-"

"And lunch. Do you want to know what we had for lunch?"

"Well - "

"One small salad. For both of us."

Then I realize that if I just give the right answer, it will give her recognition for being the least hungry, most meagerly eating woman on the planet. So I express amazement.

"You don't say?"

"Yes. One small salad."

"One small salad?"

"One small salad."

"Well, I've got to go now, Ma."

"Good. Bob's got our potato on the table."

"Don't eat too much."

And there's a click.

Mr. Fixit

My mom's phone broke the other day. This can cause some real havoc around Phoenix, with all seven of us calling her, not getting through, calling her cell phone (which she apparently turns off when she's not using it), then calling each other to see where mom was - is she okay? who spoke to her last? when? - yet trying to seem cool about it, like we actually don't call her every day.

Finally, something changed. The phone, instead of ringing and ringing, kept getting answered by some kind of phantom fax machine. As I held my phone to my ear, there was the ear-splitting sound of a fax going off. Of course, I did that about three times before I remembered not to do it.

Finally, she called me.

She said, "Why haven't you called me?"

I said, "Ma! I've been calling! There's a fax picking up the line."

"No..."

"What then?"

"Something's broken. I hear something screaming in there. Bob's going to fix it."

Oh, well, this inspires confidence in me. Stepfather is going to fix her Princess phone from 1980.

Stepfather loves a project. Nothing inspires him more than a good challenge - propping up a 200 pound cactus with a flimsy piece of rope, fixing the roof with some duct tape. This one's the kind of problem he loves to tackle. He takes the broken telephone with him as he travels from one end of the valley to the other, looking for a good deal on a princess phone. He comes home frustrated. The salesman tried to talk him into a phone with no cord! What does he think, that Stepfather was born yesterday?

When I called my mother last night, she answered.

I said, "Your phone's working!"

She said, "Yeah, it's fixed."

"Bob bought a new one?"

"No. It fixed itself."

I'm kind of quiet for a minute thinking about this, when she says, "You know, it just needed to be unplugged for awhile. Rested."

I'm about to tell her that phones don't just fix themselves, when I think, what am I, nuts? In the world my mom lives in, things do fix themselves.

So I say, "Great!" and we talk till suddenly the line goes dead. And the fax machine comes back on.

No One's Home

This is what my 79-year-old mother does when she wants to reach me. First she calls my home phone and leaves me a message. Then she calls my cell phone and leaves a message. Then she calls back my home phone and leaves a somewhat meaner message, telling me off for not answering the phone. And sometimes -yes - she will call my cell phone again and do the same thing.

My mother hasn't exactly embraced technology. She doesn't know how to use any type of speed dial, so she has painstakingly committed all the home, work, and cell numbers of all seven of her daughters to her memory. That's about 21 numbers for seven daughters. Throw in the numbers for her grown-up nieces and nephews and the few sons-in-law she believes are permanent (female-centric, she thinks all of our husbands are transient, even after decades of marriage), and the other random numbers rattling around inside of her head - the Social Security office, Holland America Cruise Lines - and that's a lot of numbers.

Except for a daily walk in the mall with all the other mall walkers bundled up against the mall air-conditioning, she sits in her house, falling into her concave sofa, laughing and crying along with the old Westerns blasting out of her TV set, her phone carefully placed next to her so she can answer it on the first ring or to call us anytime a new topic for nagging comes to her mind. It must be hard for her to conceive of a world in which I am not doing the same: sitting on my couch patiently waiting for phone calls.

The messages she leaves lead me to think that she believes I'm screening out her calls. She yells into the phone, "So, Linda! You can't pick up the phone? You're too good to answer the phone? I should call over and over again and you can't answer?"

When I was a kid in Skokie, my mother had the same phone problem. She was always easy to find. I'd walk in the house, look at our wall phone, see that it was missing its handset, and then follow the cord through the house to find my mother. Our original cord had been stretched and stretched till it had lost all of its loops and was miles long due to the need of this one phone to handle the whole household's calls in privacy. So I'd follow the phone cord across the kitchen, across the foyer, down the steps to the basement, and into our laundry room, where my mother would be hooked up to the phone like it was her ventilator, sewing.

Things change when your parent's older. Back then I would stand by her side, waiting for her to take a breath from her conversation, shifting from one foot to the other and watching my life pass by, just to ask her a simple question. Now she has to do the same with me, but she can't wait. She can't find my phone cord. I'm never sitting in one place sewing. So she hedges her bets, getting increasingly hysterical with each subsequent message left.

Of course, I call her back, mainly to put a stop to the harassment. I say, "Ma! Okay already! Whatever you want, the answer's yes!" And then she's happy. We chat awhile but I can tell her attention's not on me. The TV's blasting in the background with an old Gunsmoke episode. My mom tells me she can't miss this episode, she hasn't seen it since 1962. She has to go.

Missing Persons

My mother's decided she wants to write a blog.

Ignoring the fact that she has no idea how to even turn on a computer and still refers to emails as "faxes," she tells me she wants to do this. I don't know why, but I always treat these type of pronouncements as if they're really going to happen. I start trying to problem solve.

I ask her, "What do you want the blog to be about?"

She says, "I want to find my missing cousin." She nods. "That's what I'm going to write about. My missing cousin."

I've been down a few roads on this missing cousin issue. Basically, before the war, one of her cousins went off into Russia, adopted by a childless aunt, and was never heard from again. I've worked on this for my mom before. I've gotten so tangled up in Survivor websites that I thought I'd never get out. I've researched genealogy, I've written to the Holocaust Museum. She's not going to trick me this time. I'm not going to get into a big discussion about the missing cousin. I stick to the topic: the alleged blog.

"Ma, a blog can't be too narrow. You can't just write about your missing cousin over and over. Your topic should be a little bigger."

She mulls this over.

"Then it'll be about the Holocaust."

Okay then. That's a bigger topic.

Of course I know exactly what will happen. Each time I take my mother seriously about this writing thing, she sits down at her desk, ready to write. It's going to be the worlds greatest book. It will be better than anything I've ever written. This is because she's already written the book in her mind, she knows exactly how it will start and how it will end; she knows all the dialogue she'll put in it. All the sons-in-law spend weeks at her house setting up top-notch computer equipment, clearing out memories, setting up a printer, and making everything easy to use. She's officially ready to write. She sits down and puts her hands on the keyboard.

Then she writes one sentence.

Unfortunately, it turns out she doesn't like the sentence. It doesn't sound the way that she imagined it would in her head. Then she gets frustrated because of that sentence and because she doesn't know how to erase it - apparently, she's looking for some White Out to dab on the computer screen. She doesn't want that sentence sitting there forever.

Finally she turns the computer off - by unplugging it.

If she seems serious again, I'll probably do the same thing all over again. We'll get her set up with a computer. I'll buy her some books, like "Blogging for Dummies." Then she'll start writing.

This time I'll teach her how to delete.

Wired

I'm on my way home one night and since my mother lives only a mile from me - about as far as the umbilical cord will stretch - I call her to see if I can swing by with some magazines.

I stay on the phone with her till I'm standing in her driveway. Then I hang up and start walking towards the door, when something catches my eye. I look up. Really far up - like up to the top of her 30 foot skinny palm tree, and I see a long orange wire hanging down from the top to the ground, where the excess is coiled on the ground, like a lasso. Then I look back up to the top of the tree and I see that the orange cord is strung from the other side of the palm tree to the house. There I see a much more troubling sight: huge antennas mounted on top of my mother's house and strung up in the air over and around it. My Stepfather's ham radio antennas. Nothing like bringing down the neighborhood.

As I approach the door, my mother starts unlocking the inside locks while I start on the outside locks. There are a lot of locks. To make sure it's me, she turns on the flashing motion detector. Finally we're face to face. I say, "Ma, look what's in your tree!"

She cranes her head around the door. She doesn't like leaving the house. In the summer it's too hot and in the winter too cold. Any opening of the door and exiting from the house is seen with much skepticism - is it absolutely necessary? Does it require a coat?

She sees the cord hanging, then she looks up, up, up, and sees the other side strung to the house. She's not surprised. She says, "That's Bob's antenna."

"How'd he get it up there?"

"He has an arrow that he shoots out."

I try to get a mental image of this for a second: my 84-year-old stepfather, who looks a little like the farmer in American Gothic, sitting in the backyard surrounded by his World War II-era ham radio equipment, suddenly leaping up with a bow and arrow and shooting a line out with pure aim, his shot true, straight through the heart of the palm fronds. Then he gets back to the ham radio and marvels as a call comes in from Russia. Imagine that! Speaking to a person on the other side of the world! What will they think of next?

I give my mom the magazines. I leave before lightning strikes and burns the place down.

Falling Cactus

My mother has returned from spending the summer in Northern Arizona. After calling me all summer and making fun of Phoenix for being too hot all summer - which was her way of inviting me up to visit - it finally got too cold up there and she returned home.

Because I live the closest to her of her seven daughters, my mother calls upon me for general house maintenance and run of the mill slavery while she's in Flagstaff. There's the dead and dying arboretum in her front yard that she calls landscaping and which must be tended to. I don't take care of it, I just call to tell her when, finally, her last living cactus has keeled over and whether it's hit the house. Also, for some reason, my mother and stepfather don't fully understand the idea of stopping the paper when they leave for three months, so I have to swing by, pick up the papers that have accumulated on the driveway, and throw them behind her front pillar. After a long, hot summer, the shade behind the pillar and her leaky hose, it turns out I've pretty much started a mulch pile.

Since my mother is elderly, there's no imposition that she won't foist upon me to make her life easier and my life harder. The newest one, just invented this summer, is that now, when she's driving down from Flagstaff, she wants me to pop over to her house and turn on her air conditioning so it will be cool for them when they get there. I need to do this at exactly 9:00 in the morning. They've timed this exactly. They'll be there at 11, which will give the house two hours to cool off from a summer with the air conditioning off. So she wants to know - is there a problem? Can't the kids go to school at a different time? And what do I mean, I need to be at exercise at 9:15?

The next thing I knew, she was back in town but there was dead silence, unusual for someone who usually announces her presence with, "What, you can't come over to see me? You're so busy?" Both her home phone and cell phone were malfunctioning. I left a message on the cell even though I know she's never figured out how to retrieve them.

By the time I got to her house, another sister was already there. She greeted me with cries of, "Oy, Linda! You're so skinny! A size four?" This is actually her standard greeting or farewell comment. When we were leaving she said the same thing as a goodbye to my sister. "Oy, Eileen! You're so skinny! A size four?"

She's back home. Her ringer's back on. Her house is cooled off. The TV's turned on to something that keeps her up at night, like a Holocaust special. Things are back to normal.

Carrying Baggage

Since neither my husband nor I ever went to overnight camp as kids, we kind of botched up a few things as we sent our kids off last Thursday.

First of all we sent the kids with real luggage, like the rolling king of luggage you would take on an airplane. We got to the the synagogue rendezvous point and, trust me, there was no baggage like this besides our kids'. Their bags stood there - green, bulky and square, with roller wheels on the bottom - while every other bag was a soft-side duffel. When they head off on their camping trips into the forest, my children will need a valet.

I can't help it that I was raised like a wolf. My mother's idea of summer camp in Skokie was to shoo me and my six sisters out of the house into the garage to play all day. We'd wait for the milkman; then we'd wait for the pop man. Or maybe some boys would ride by from the other school district and we would chase them - that one activity could occupy us until school started in September. That was a typical summer.

Since my parents were Holocaust Survivors, they didn't quite understand the concept of summer camp. First of all, the word "camp?" Not good. Concentration Camp, Displaced Persons Camp, Labor Camp - those were camps. After all, they had both come out of the DP camps after the war. Were they expected to send their own children there on purpose? Of course not. Also, it cost money. My parents only spent money on food and shelter. If there was any money left over, my dad bought a new station wagon.

My parents also couldn't understand why we'd be interested in the deprivations of camp. Why would I want to give up living in the lap of luxury in Skokie in a three-bedroom house with nine people, sharing a bedroom with four sisters and sharing the bathroom with seven? How could I give up the authentic immigrant feistiness of my family - the fistfights over a salami, murder over a matzo ball - to go live among American strangers?

But on camp drop-off day, my kids are oblivious. Even paranoid Bar Mitzvahzilla, who will micromanage his underwear, doesn't care about having baggage that clearly shows not only is he a novice at this, but his parents? Novices too.

Their bags get on the bus, they get on the bus, and they're gone.

My Mother's Forest

My mother called me up recently to tell me she had heard about a movie about the Jews who had hidden from the Nazis in the forest during World War II, just like she had. Have I heard of it?

She runs all these things past me because I'm the Super Jew in the family. Of course, there's a very low bar on Jewish adherence in my family. In this family, just subscribing to the Jewish newspaper means I'm some kind of Jewish fanatic.

But I do keep on top of the Jewish world, so I say, "Sure, Mom. It's called Defiance. It came out awhile ago - over six months. I just bought it on DVD."

This gets her very excited because if my mother can combine her two favorite things in the world, the Holocaust and television, this is a good thing indeed.

She says, "Can I borrow it?" And I say yes even though I haven't watched it yet. I bought it because of my family's history and because I know I should watch it, but, really, I have no intention of watching it. Having been raised in my mother's Holocaust immersion school of child-rearing, I can't stand to purposely subject myself to it. But to my mother? Pure unadulterated pleasure. Nothing can be better than two hours of complete abject misery - watching and crying, crying and watching.

I bring it over to her house and she says, "Oh, good! I'm going to watch it right now! Can you put it in the machine? You want to stay and watch with me?" I swear part of her thinks that maybe she'll see someone she knows.

Of course this wasn't even tempting to me. I say, "No thanks. Two hours of Jews being chased through the forest by Nazis who are trying to kill them? That sounds like my childhood."

"What? You were safe in Skokie!"

"Ma! You told us about it everyday in Skokie!"

"Oh."

Later she tells me she watched but she didn't like it very much so she stopped before the end. It wasn't exactly what she thought it would be like. It wasn't exactly about the part of the forest she had lived in; the family portrayed wasn't exactly like her family; they didn't live through exactly the same experiences she had lived through. So when another of my sisters came over to her house, my mom loaned my movie to her.

Then she turned on Schindler's List instead.

Underwear Trauma

The packing list for camp says that we should send 10 pairs of underwear, but I know my boy. In 24 days of camp he will change his underwear once. Still, I'll be optimistic and send 8 pairs, one for every three days. Bar Mitzvahzilla was specific on one thing, though. I needed to buy him real boxers, not boxer/briefs and not, for goodness sakes, briefs. Boys are apparently standing by, ready to sound the alert if he's wearing the wrong underwear.

My daughter, on the other hand, was planning to go to camp wearing her size 4 Toddler underwear from 5 years ago which still fits because she is a Skinny Stick. Everyone tells me she gets this from my husband's side of the family since I'm obviously some kind of hippopotamus who could never have provided genes to such a skinny child. All of her good genes are assumed to have come from Who Knows Where? But not from me. So Daughter was oblivious, planning to pack these Dora The Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, even Monsters, Inc., underwear and go off to camp with kids who, yes, would be watching her underwear too.

Underwear is a topic I understand because I have traumatic underwear memories. I may have grown up in Skokie with Jewish parents, which should mean that I was coddled somewhat, but my parents were Holocaust Survivors. Holocaust Survivors don't coddle their children. They know children are resilient - mine both lived through the war as children - so they coddle other things, like briskets and the living room couch, which they carefully cover in plastic. In our household, money was spent on food. If there was anything left over, it was spent on decorating. Not underwear.

Because of this, I'm a little underwear-sensitive.

In 6th grade we had to change for gym class every day in the locker rooms in my junior high in Evanston. Little did I know it, but my underwear were being monitored very closely by some of my classmates. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - yes - each day of the week, the same pair of underwear, until they hooted and hollered about it. Luckily, someone even poorer than me came to my defense. She said, "Linda probably just has a bunch of underwear that all looks the same." I looked over to see if they believed her because, of course, it was a lie, and they did. But I knew that it was the only free pass I was ever going to get.

I can't have my daughter live through any underwear trauma, and also, at the rate she gains weight, she could just possibly go off to college still wearing her Care Bears. I have to put a stop to it. So I take her to Gap and show her what real 9-year-olds wear for underwear (well, she actually wears the size for 6-7 year-olds). Then I show her the underwear with the days of the week on them. Her mouth hangs open. We buy a lot of underwear. When we get home, she empties all the Toddler ones out of her drawer.

Now that I've got the underwear issue handled, I can move onto the next item on the list. Socks. Certainly socks can't cause me as much trouble as underwear. Can they?

Nailed

The other night I asked my mother to give Bar Mitzvahzilla a ride home from a restaurant where he'd gone to dinner with my sister's family and my mother and stepfather since it was on their way home. Hours later he finally got home.

You know on Christmas Eve when the TV stations run those updates showing the Santa Claus radar tracking maps, with frequent news reports on Rudolph and Santa's progress throughout the world, the radar blipping as they go? That's what it was like trying to get Bar Mitzvahzilla home that night.

We had assumed my 79-year-old mother would be driving. With her lead foot, we expected him home fast. But it turned out that my 84-year-old stepfather was driving the car, which meant that it would take at least a half hour to back out of the parking spot at the restaurant. The left turn out of the parking lot, with cars whizzing by, that could take another hour, until he was sure it was safe to proceed. Sometimes the best driver in the car is the 13-year-old, and he doesn't even know how to drive.

Then my stepfather decided he needed to make a quick stop at Home Depot for some nails. Right before closing on a Sunday night.

Putting my 84-year-old stepfather in a 50,000 square foot Home Depot looking for nails is kind of a multi-year task. He gets distracted easily. He walks slowly. Proud, he won't ask for help. The combination of my stepfather plus Home Depot can result in only one possible outcome: Lost Forever. Send out the search and rescue teams, issue the emergency response system bulletin. Grandpa is heading into Home Depot and he may never be seen again.

Bar Mitzvahzilla, meanwhile, was enjoying sitting in a car in the 111 degree Arizona heat with his grandmother, listening to her mutter darkly about grandpa's whereabouts. The text messages I received reflect that he may have been kidnapped - there was one "Help" and one "S.O.S." But then my mother decided to take some action. She was going in the store to find my stepfather.

By that time, I was seriously considering whether Husband and I should do a swoop-in mission to rescue Bar Mitzvahzilla. After all, he was heading into the black hole of Home Depot with my mother to look for my stepfather. I could find him in there ten years from now, living happily with a wife and children in a garden shed. But there was no chance to consider this. His call crackled as he entered the store yanked along by my mother on the warpath. I could hear her yelling at me next to him, "You tell your mother that I lived in the forest during the war. I can find your grandfather!"

Turns out they found him easily. Bar Mitzvahzilla said he was heading to the self-checkout with a package of nails in his hand when my mother cornered him, her voice ringing out across the store, "What's the matter? You forgot about us?" Of course, being just about deaf, he couldn't hear her, but everyone else could.

He proceeded calmly to use the self-checkout, which meant he soon disabled the register, and then, when an employee came over to help, my mother got some real enjoyment. She told the employee that she knew she'd find her husband in there because she had lived in the forest during the war and you don't know lost until you're running from the Nazis in the forest. And on top of it, she's the mother of seven daughters and you don't know how many things seven daughters can lose.

My son said that the employee didn't exactly know what to say to this. He thanked them for their purchase and they left, the manager locking the door behind them.

Gefilte Fishless

I went to my mother's house today, which, by itself, makes her very happy. After all, I came carting the 9-year-old granddaughter. Any grandchild, anytime, is a very good thing.

I also brought her a care package of a type. I kind of gathered this stuff from around my house knowing she'd want it all. My mother, now 78, lives very frugally in the house we moved into as a family in Scottsdale in 1973. What was once an amazingly new, beautifully-maintained house is now a crumbling ruin. Well, it's still standing. My Mom can't see the flaws, she only sees the inside of the house, lovingly decorated with antiques. She doesn't see the listing pillars on the outside, the dying cacti about to fall on cars parked in the gravel drive in front, or the criss-crossing ham radio antennas strung up in the trees over the house by my stepfather.

Here's what I brought her: three magazines - Architectural Digest, Traditional Home and More Magazine; the memoir A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal, a Holocaust survivor, which I ordered for her from Amazon.com. I had mentioned the interview I heard on NPR a few weeks ago with the author and my mother wanted the book badly; much worse than I did. It's just one of our weird little facts that my mother, who is a Holocaust survivor, just can't get enough of the Holocaust, and I, who was only just inundated with the Holocaust by her, can't stand to read about the Holocaust. Go figure.

I also brought her the horseradish root that I used for my seder plate on Passover. I use real root because I think it makes the seder plate look so cool, to have a jumble of root among the other symbolic foods, but we don't actually pick up the big hunk of gnarled root during the seder and gnaw on it or anything. It's just for show. So off it goes to my mother's house for her to gnaw on it.

The final thing I brought my mother was two jars of Gefilte Fish which I found today at the grocery store for about two bucks each. So, being compulsive, I bought six. This brought tears to her eyes. She grabbed me and got kind of weepy, like somehow in the country in which she lives (that would be one mile south of me, so still in the United States) she isn't allowed to go to the grocery store and buy gefilte fish. I am the bringer of the gefilte fish, and if I don't do it she will go gefilte fishless for years.

Soon after that I had to go. My daughter and I had to go shopping for a Mother's Day present for this same mother who sat crying over the gefilte fish. She was surprised by this. Another present? she said. The fish wasn't the present? No mom, the fish wasn't actually the present.

Interrupting My Mother

My mother takes me to lunch at a Jewish deli for my birthday. My hopes for the lunch are pretty minimal: I'm hoping we won't fight and I'm hoping she won't eat off my plate.

There's a lot to fight about between my mom and I for some reason. Even though she's proud of me for being so committed to being Jewish (except for that meat and cheese thing - oops), she also seems to feel like she has to cut me down to size a little; to remind me that I'm just a little pisher - the number 6 daughter out of 7 so why don't I shut up anyway?

Since she's a Holocaust survivor and was Orthodox until the Nazis came and killed all the Jews of her town when she lost her belief in God, she automatically knows more than me, as she loves to tell me. I don't know anything because the only thing that has validity is the way they did it in the Old Country before 1941.

So I'm sitting there and things are going pretty well. She is not eating off my plate. Because I know she wants to, I don't finish my soup and hand it over to her so she can finish it. I save a small plate and hand her things from my dish. I don't mean to be a germ-o-phobe, but my mom is normally picking at things with just-licked fingers and then coughing a phlegmy cough.

Then she stops the hostess to chat with her. My mom has two purposes to every conversation she starts with strangers: she's going to tell them that she has seven daughters and she's going to tell them that she's a Holocaust survivor. This is kind of funny because she's never been the type to go speak to schools or join a Holocaust survivor organization, but strangers? She loves to tell strangers.

So she says, "Do you have any children?"
The hostess says, "Yes! I have a wonderful boy. He's 16."
"Only one child?" my mom asks. "Why only one? Didn't you want a girl?"
"Well, I got divorced when he was young and so I never had another."
And here it comes. "I have seven daughters." She looks at me. "This is number six." I'm a number, not a person.
"No! Seven daughters!"
"Yes. I guess I was trying to have a lot of kids because of the war. I'm a Holocaust Survivor, you know."
"I didn't know."
"I saw my whole town wiped out. My family was the only one that came out intact."

By now there are people teaming over at the hostess stand. The hostess needs to go back to work. It's a Saturday at this popular deli at lunchtime, and my mother has brought up just a little, teeny, tiny topic: THE HOLOCAUST.

How do you change the subject when the subject is the Holocaust?

I help the hostess since I've lived with this my whole life. I transition the topic back to her 16-year-old son, back to easier ground, back to children, which is what we had been discussing in the first place.

How do I interrupt my mother when she's talking about the Holocaust? I don't know.