MY MOTHER DIDN'T WEAR MAKE-UP . . . or did she?

           My mother, who passed away a month ago, was a beautiful woman.  Here is a photo of her looking Ingrid Bergman-esque in her 1949 passport photo, when she was 29.   

    

 (For any young folks reading this -  if the name Ingrid Bergman doesn’t ring a bell, run, don’t walk, to rent or stream one of the greatest movies of all time, Casa Blanca.)

        Of course, the bloom was off the rose by the time she passed at nearly 94, but I remember her as still pretty all the way through her 60s, and holding her own after that. 

         Something that I also remember is admiring the fact that she didn’t wear, and didn’t need to wear, much makeup.  During the years when I still lived at home, I don’t remember her using anything more than lipstick. So, why, when she died, did I find drawers full of makeup?  Not just lipstick, but face powder and eyeliner, too.  Seriously, I threw away a couple of bags of the stuff.   

         I am left asking:  Was the no-makeup thing all in my mind?  Sure I knew that she tried to put on lipstick up until a couple of years before she died – frequently to comic effect, as her eyesight was failing.  But dozens of lipsticks?  And the face powder?  And eyeliner? Who was this woman?

         I think that is a question that we all wind up asking when we are left with the remnants of a parent’s life.

         I did my best to tell my mom’s story at her memorial service, but what do any of us know really about our parents’ early lives?*  Sure I remember stories that my parents told, but I can’t really picture their lives before I came along when they were 29 and 37.  In fact, I have no clear memories of them until I was probably 12 years old, when my mom was in her early 40s and my dad was pushing 50.  So what am I to make of the very early photos of them that I am currently sifting through?

         Like this one, for instance . . .        

        

My mother never even had a driver’s license.  What is she doing on this motorcycle?  I know that my dad had motorcycles in his youth.  Is she posing for him?  Or did she have a life as a motorcycle driver that I know nothing about?

         And how about this picture of my dad, which I suspect was taken when he and my mother were preparing to hike in the highlands, as they often did in their youth?

Can this impossibly young man really be my father?

         So this is what I am thinking about today:  We really have no access to our parents' early lives in any three-dimensional kind of way.  We don't have the cultural reference points, except as dusty history.  What can I really know about what it was like to grow up in Scotland and experience a world war?  (Two for my father, if you count his early childhood.)  What can I know about what it felt like to leave family and friends behind and immigrate to another country?  And then another?  What do I know about their passions and their fears?  

         And the same will be true for our children. There is the stuff that we don't want to share and the stuff that we are afraid will bore them.  And even the stuff they want to hear about will be one-dimensional for them as well.  My daughters didn't know me as a skinny, awkward elementary school student.  They never knew a world where nearly all mothers stayed at home and kids played freely on the street until called in for dinner.  They can't know what it was like to be a teenager in the '60s.  (Awesome.)  They can't know what it felt like to scream my lungs out at a Beatles concert or to go "down the  shore" with my friends in New Jersey.  They weren't there (thank God) for my early marriage at 23-going-on-17, when someone should have mentioned that I did not have the emotional maturity to even be thinking about marriage.  And so much more.

        Each generation is a mystery to the next.  And why shouldn't it be?  Where would we put all of those feelings if we could really experience what our parents experienced? 

        And still, as I sort through my mother's photograph collection, I am so grateful to have a window -- however one-dimensional -- on her world.  

*  I shared a bit of my parents’ story in an earlier post:  ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)

YOU HAD TO BE THERE (and you had to be young).

            I have read a couple of articles in the last few days about the baby boomer “fixation” on the death of John Kennedy.  I have read that we have highjacked the media and the public discourse for purposes of our annoying navel gazing.  It would seem that there are those who are ready for us to quit the scene.  Or to at least shut up and quit hogging the stage.  

            Fair enough.   If you are one of those who has had enough of boomers, this is your chance to turn away.  

            Here’s how I see it.    

            I don’t think that we are any more fixated on the Kennedy assassination than the “Greatest Generation” is on Pearl Harbor.  Speaking for myself, months, even years, go by when I barely give it a thought.  But this is a big anniversary, one that not only brings back memories but that reminds us that we are no longer young.    

            I admit that we baby boomers are a very large group, and that, by virtue of the size of our cohort, our interests and concerns dominated the public conversation for decades.  That focus, however, is a thing of the past.  I don’t even recognize many of the figures who turn up in the “news.”  Kim Kardashian – her wedding and then her divorce – showed up for weeks as the number-one headline in my Google news feed before I finally asked someone who she was.  The answer was not illuminating.  As near as I can tell, she is famous for being famous.  (So what generation cares about her and is subjecting me to these headlines?)  

            But, I digress.  

            I’m not going to bore you with a long description of where I was when I learned that Kennedy had been shot.  (9^th grade algebra class).  I am not going to assess his presidency or weigh in on conspiracy theories.  And I’m not going to belabor what everyone already knows:  The “60s” actually began in 1963 with the assassination, and ended with Nixon’s re-election in 1972.  

            Here’s what I want to talk about:  We were young, those of us who remember where we were and what we were doing on that terrifying day.  I was ten when John Kennedy was elected and just three days past my 14^th birthday when he died.  He was the first president I was conscious of.  

            We had grown up in the shadow of “The War” (WWII), but we had not yet become accustomed to watching wars being fought from our living rooms.  (That would come a very few years later with the Vietnam war).  The only people we had seen shot before our eyes were cowboys, and we knew that the blood wasn’t real.

            We had spent a week terrified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then we had gone back to our lives and the background dread of nuclear war and Nikita Krushchev.

            So, one minute we were watching Leave it to Beaver and being the kids that we were, and, the next minute the president was dead.  We all sat in front of our TV sets and watched the same news coverage for three days.  We didn’t go to school and many of our parents didn’t go to work.  We watched the shooting over and over again.  And then we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald.  Over and over again.  We watched Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office on Air Force One. We watched the very tall Charles DeGaulle walk down Pennsylvania Avenue next to the very short Haile Selassie. We watched Jackie hold herself together, and we watched John John salute the casket.    

            Did I mention that we were young?  And that Kennedy was young? And that Jackie was even younger?  She was 34 when he died.  They had little children -- younger than my friends and I.  We had seen pictures of them in the Sunday supplements frolicking on the White House lawn.    

            The world was an orderly place.  And then it was not.    

            And then five years later, there were more deaths.—two more young men.  Men younger than most of our fathers  -- Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.    

            I think that the emotions come back on an anniversary like this, not because we were the only generation to ever face fear and confusion—we were not-- but because there is something about the combination of youth and traumatic events that imprints those events on the memory.  

            For Americans of my parents' generation, the traumatic event was Pearl Harbor.  For my mother, who grew up in Scotland, the traumatic memory is of being 20 years old and learning that Hitler had invaded Poland, and Great Britain was entering the war.  

            9/11 will likely be the traumatic event that stays with our children.  We adults will remember it in a different way – a way not tinged with the heightened emotions of youth.  

            So, we can imagine, sort of, what it was like to hear about Pearl Harbor, and those who are now younger than, say, 55 can imagine, kind of, what it must have felt like to live through the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination, but none of can us really know what the previous generation experienced.  

            So, bear with us boomers as we relive the events of 50 years ago.  The week will pass quickly, and there are tragedies enough to break the hearts of every generation.