This is the Mom, who like so many moms, sheltered her kid from the realities of life. The Mom who left me frolic in kid-hood, for she knew that too soon life would teach harshness and tears. When I wanted to go to my dream high school, Cleveland's expensive St. Ignatius, she went out and took a clerk's job at a discount store. As I romped through life, I thought she liked the added experience of working and raising two kids, and a dad. When I came home and asked, "Ma, the other kids at school have lettuce and tomato and stuff on their sandwiches. Can't I have lettuce on mine? "
I got the lettuce. Years later I learned how the lettuce grew. Ma, who on paydays immediately shred her and dad's paychecks into white envelopes hidden in her dresser drawer and floor furnace venting, said, "I didn't have the money to buy lettuce for your sandwich, but I said to myself, 'If it means not eating, my kid's going to have what the other kids have.'"
This is the Mom who wanted to see me and missed me -- but encouraged me to travel with my friends during college breaks, who worried when I hitchhiked and jumped freight trains, who was scared when I traveled and worked thousands of miles away after the Peace Corps. "Travel. See the world. You won't get a better education. Once you have responsibilities, you won't be able to ..."
When I pushed to get a paper route to earn some money, she asked, "You want to be a grown man with a job already? Do you like playing baseball, football, swimming, riding your bike, going on trips, getting your homework done? With a paper route, will you have as much time to still be a kid? Be a kid for as long as you can..."
When I had a chance to buy my first fixer-upper in pricey Marin County, she volunteered, "Dad and I can give you some money to help." Mom, like her Mother, never stopped turning small change into miracle lettuce that she'd pull from that little white envelope marked "Kids."
On
the inside, the weakened lady laying on the couch in her little "coucha" (Croatian home) in Ohio had never
changed. The vibrant, gorgeous young
woman, who on the dance floor with my dad in her twirling days was slick enough
to have had Hollywood producers offer to squire her to Tinsel Town, wasn't
going to raise her little kids in the alley house on Cleveland's East 25th
where she and dad started. She found a
safer, suburban Parma house that dad, the small-time sometimes bookie, was
afraid to gamble all their savings on. "I didn't bring these kids into the
world to raise them in an alley...
They're getting a better life.
I'm buying that house and taking the kids. You can come, or stay, but we're going."
Dad may have been scared, but he wasn't stupid.
Not yet ten, I fought, cried and argued about leaving that alley, about leaving my best friend, Frankie Boris, and the adventures and tussles he meant. In the end, Mama knew best not only because I found other Parma friends and adventures, but because Mama needed a better home to take care of Marlene. It wasn't long after we moved that my sister got sick, stopped eating, and seemed to this little boy to be sleeping and shrinking to death on our couch. Finally, Dr. Hall and Cleveland's infamous Dr. Sam Shepherd and his brother diagnosed Marlene and started the long and often repeated hospital process of fighting to save her from a diabetic death. Over the years, my parents spent hundreds of nights at Bay Village Hospital with Marlene on the critical list. My mind's eye can still see the hospital corridor hall and this little boy often sitting with his baseball and glove. Understanding little of what Ma and Dad and Marlene were going through, I would often feel sad for my sister and then find my thoughts turning to tomorrow's games.
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