Yesterday was both Mom’s birthday & not really so. Mother lived in a more flexible day as a young woman, one where you could live “undocumented” & reinvent inconvenient facts to suit.

We always celebrated her birthday on April 7^th. As children, my brother Joe & I drew pictures, bought cards, sang that song, I’m sure, pulling faces & antics. I don’t remember cakes for her – she would have not admitted to one & we were too kid-dish to know how to get one. At least I was. Joe, now, he knew, but he was too much of a guy to celebrate Mom.

Besides, Mom was a tyrant figure to us – a fiercely organized woman with a penchant for wanting everything back the way it had been before use. Now you tell me, what self-righteous kid wants that? Kids use & have that use show. This was not Mom’s way.

She came in as an Aries, so elemental power & force were 2^nd nature. Dad was a Libra about whom I know next to nothing – maybe the edges of facts, but no whole one to finger & weigh or hug. I don’t know his shoe size, for example. I didn’t know his birthday until seeing his death certificate. To this day, I do not know his middle name tho he had to have a Confirmation Name. Once divorced, Mother never spoke of him: not a reminiscence, not a memory, not a favorite color nor a preference in cars or sports, tho a lack of support checks often went topical.

To remember Dad would be less than a paragraph. Mom is not much more & yet no one held such influence & sway in my life since, albeit unconscious. She preferred Chevrolets. She bought & sold cars & houses in a time when the only approved purchases for women were groceries at the A&P & children’s clothes mail-ordered from Sears Roebuck. She wielded power & independence, which Aries underscores. She was likely a Manifesting Generator: when Dad was caught out cheating with the town’s Loose Woman (already with a love child), she did not hesitate in grabbing the kids & heading for the hills – in this case in the form of sand dunes.

She took a taxi. From Marcus Hook, PA to Wildwood, NJ where she knew the sisters Icanangelo. They put her up, fed her wine & set her to cook in a restaurant on the Boardwalk where the excellence of her meatballs had tourists lined up for a block outside at sundown. She worked her other two daughters – my older sisters – unmercifully. They worked their way back to ‘Hook to their high schools & graduations & our Dad.

I have a fact-free Family Mythology as heritage.

Mom was born April 13, but 13 is an unlucky number, so she adopted the 7^th instead. She was born in 1913, so put out she was born in 1917. We kids all looked askance at her death certificate, muttering, it says WHAT? But that wasn’t… I’m sure Mom was just the other side of the veil, giggling as she never really did in life.

She was a “typical Italian” woman of maybe just under 5’ tall, with red wine in a gallon jar in the kitchen bottom cabinet, red wine vinegar in a quart-size jar & olive oil in one those silvery, glugging cans. She made pasta – using a juice glass to cut the Ricotta ravioli, balancing a collection of scrubbed & flour-rubbed broomsticks from kitchen cabinet to Formica table, draped in noodles. I don’t remember lasagna, but I do remember lots of succulent strings & strands of pasta drifting flour onto the floor. When not making her own, she preferred Buitoni #9.

I remember asking her once in the car, what happened when you hit the brake & the gas at the same time, which piqued her, I guess, as she said, “I don’t know, let’s try it” & I hit the dashboard  hard, catching myself with both hands, screeching. MOOOOmmmm!!

She had a mischievous sense of humor,  wore black-rimmed glasses, dated a farmer from named Domenic from
Cape May Court House, who brought us fresh eggs. She eschewed the beach & boardwalk tho her restaurant “The Blue Room” was somewhere on it. She always wore an apron in the kitchen. She once sneaked into Doctor Zhivago when picking me up from the late-running movie – that was such a long one. I was properly scandalized, but she reasoned it had been hot outside waiting for me & the doors weren’t locked & she liked seeing the snow. I do not recall her every attending a movie, tho I think there were drive-ins involved…

I’ve written elsewhere of her fire & ire as a woman alone, sneered upon by the church she pushed us into every Sunday morning; ripped from any supportive Sacraments or churchly approval because of The Divorce. (But they sure liked the tuition money!)

She had brothers, but I have no name list there, except Uncle Tony. She had sisters who died before her, Elvira (our Aunt Tiny) & Viola (whom we called 5by5). It was Aunt Vi & who bought me my first bra. Mom wasn’t one for explanations & perhaps was easily embarrassed, but I remember no birds/bees conversations, so my life as a developing female was a series of on-my-own-what’s happening whispers in the back of the cloakroom at school. I recall long-sleeved undershirts & Buster Brown shoes, a Christmas dress featuring brocade & she had the most eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head sense of surveillance over all us kids. No wonder my sisters went back to Dad!

What is it about changing my life during a memory season bringing this on? The veils thin more around anniversaries, I have heard. Does Mother check on me from the Other Side? Perhaps she wants to see if my life is in order.

Mom, you said all the time, “Don’t grow up to be a Gypsy!” and here I am on my 5^th jaunt across America to find myself once again. Thanks, Mom, for everything! I just wish you had written down the recipe for your Italian Wedding Soup.