My mother had -- and I'm going to qualify this -- good taste. She and I did not necessarily have the same taste, but I recognized that her taste was not, per se, bad.Her colors were not generally my colors; I lean towards black, gray, and of course, denim, but she was completely smitten by the autumn colors. Not yellow, orange, brown, but harvest, rust .. whatever those people call brown. And avocado, not green. Her most favorite of all colors was rust. She had many clothes in this color, not to mention upholstery, and for a long period of years, carpeting.
She also fell prey to some fashion foolishness, most notably the eighties sweatshirts and tops with the padded shoulders and all kinds of glittery handpainting on the front, including tiny mirrors glued on. Oh, she loved that crap.
My mother looked a lot like this:
and this:
although in reality, she looked just like this:
Anyway, we were roughly the same size, although at her peak, she was an inch or two taller than I am (or than I was at my peak.) When she died, which will be four years ago this coming May, we looked into her closet, which was her total pride and joy, and decided what to keep. There were the five of us: my sister, her daughter, my two daughters, and myself, and all of us were more or less, in one way or another, her size.
Her closet was her pride and joy because when they moved into the apartment in the senior citizens building eight or nine years before she died, it offered her, for the first time ever in her life, a walk-in closet roughly the size of a small bedroom, and she had shelving installed, and kept all her shoes on the shelves in marked boxes and all her clothes on the rack with clear dry-cleaner's bags over them. It was like a little showroom.
So we went through it. R took several pairs of shoes and boots, because the two of them shared a shoe-size. She also somehow ended up with a plum-colored wool suit that fits her perfectly, a skirt and a blazer. I'm not sure what K, or Niece, or the Sibs took.
I took sweaters. It was the sweaters that fit me just right.
I think I took a half-dozen, but I may have more. They turn up from time to time when I'm looking for something to wear to school. I don't have anything with shoulder pads -- okay, one -- and only one cardigan. One of them is spectacular; it was hand-made for her, possibly by her elderly cousin, I'm not sure, and is beautifully knit with perfect stitches, in a variegated lightweight yarn with just a hint of a sheen to it. Its colors are, as you might guess, harvest, rust, and avocado. I wear it when I feel like I need to have some of Shirl with me for the day. Like armor.
Anyway, within the last couple of weeks I guess I've worn a few of her sweaters, as I have in the past, and I can't help but notice that whenever I wear one, all day people are complimenting me on what I'm wearing. It's very weird.
"Hey, I really like that sweater!"
"Oh, thanks. It was my mother's."
From the All the Other Kids Are Doing It Department:
I have two memories that I think of as my earliest. The earlier one is more of an image than an actual memory.
When I was about two and a half, we moved out of the Bronx and into a garden apartment in Ridgefield, NJ. There were about 20 apartments, all circled around a common backyard. A few days after we moved in, I was sent out to play in the yard, which was relatively empty, as I recall. I was playing in the sandbox, which was right in the center of it. A bigger kid -- maybe a four year old, I'm not sure -- came out and started playing with me, and then made me eat dirt. I remember the kid forcing the dirt into my mouth, and screaming, and Shirl running downstairs from our apartment like an avenging angel.
My parents confirmed for years that this was indeed my earliest memory, but at some point, I described to them the apartment in the Bronx that we had moved from, so I guess that was earlier. They seemed to think that I thought I knew the layout because my grandparents lived in the same building until I was nine or ten, and that I was describing their apartment, but then I said that when I stood up in my crib and looked down, there was linoleum on the floor that looked like children's blocks with Mother Goose figures on them, and that the window was to the right of my crib. So they had to admit that I was right. I guess that's my real earliest memory.
