Heart Openings For the Eclipse
Reflections On Age, Youth and New Beginnings
Tomorrow is the Solar Eclipse. When Uranus and Taurus conjunct, I turn 65. My mother is also getting older. Funny how that works.
While we were amid eclipse season, the lunar in March, and the solar on our April doorsteps, my brother Daniel informed me that our 93 1/2-year-old mother, Penny Sadownick, had to be taken to the hospital for some issue. His remarkable family, my sister-in-law, Leslie, and their ten-year-old daughter, Hannah, provide the glue and foundation for many a life. They take care of my mother. My mother is entering her Old Wise Woman stage; very little seems to bother her. She also forgot how to speak the "mother tongue": Yiddish. She speaks a more universal language, which does not pertain to words but to her soft and watery eyes. I guess that’s a different form of Yiddish.
I had to hop on the plane because Daniel, the musician, had a gig to play in Europe.
Sadly, it is just as we start to calm down that life also ends its time. But I guess there is some rhyme or reason for that little irony. Penny Sadownick came into her own after her stroke. This was ten years ago. Leslie helped my mother find The Bristol Assisted Living in Lynbrook, Long Island. Thank the goddess for Leslie. My mother flourished in Bristol, being a very social person. "Did you hear the joke about....?" This last week was stressful because Daniel was off to play a gig in France. With Leslie's help, I saw I had to go. Once there, I sprang into Super Son and dealt with the doctors. You know how it goes; the medical doctors don't know what's wrong with her, so they keep her, and the longer they keep her, the more she descends into hospital sleepiness. The symptoms cleared up. They saw the tests returning without conclusive news. The doctor said she would have to stay two weeks because she had lost the ability to walk.
I know my mother, and she did not lose her ability to walk. I asked a PT person to come and get her on her feet. I loved this PT person; she was an athlete, maybe a lesbian, and we grabbed my mother's walker, and I said, really LOUD, because my mother doesn't wear her hearing aid, MOM, MOM.
"Why are you yelling," she said, laughing.
"Can you walk for this nice lady?"
"Of course, I can walk for this nice lady."
And then, a moment of triumph. She walked down a long corridor, with the nurses clapping in awe. My mother, a Leo from head to toe, received a literal standing ovation. It was a moment of joy and relief, a testament to her moral strength and wry resilience.
And we arranged an ambulette to take her home.
She grabbed my hands in the ambulette. She has few words but often uses these two: "Thank you!" One can spend one's entire life as the elder Jewish son chasing after his mother's acceptance, and when she finally gives it, it's too much. She had been giving it all along, of course.
Rather than stay in a hotel, I took up Leslie's offer to stay with her and Hannah when Daniel was gone. I was given the honor to sleep in Hannah’s room, an honor I’d live to regret. Hannah is ten years old, going on ten million. Every word out of her mouth, and there are a lot of words, expresses a pointed observation about one thing or another. Just keeping up with her numerous dolls' names and personalities could exhaust one's already-tested mental capacities. She can sniff out contradictions in one's speech with a frightening alacrity. How can one so young and seemingly naive be so savvy? Her energy and curiosity are infectious, and spending time with her always makes me smile.
It was one of those days when the weather in NYC insists on being so cold, dreary, and wet that there was very little for a precocious little miss person to do but cause her uncle to have a nervous breakdown. While I was getting my mother up and walking, little Miss Hannah and a neighborhood girlfriend spent several hours in her Uncle’s Guest Room creating a tableau vivant with her dolls in various stages of duress, threatening gazes. What had once been my bedroom would resemble a set of murder and mayhem: a cross between Carrie and Rosemary's Baby. It's a good thing Leslie warned me, that Uncle Dougie's room had been invaded by the world of a brilliant child's imagination on a cold and rainy Long Island Sunday afternoon. I didn't sleep well that night in that room. No, siree Bob. I kept one eye out. Home Sweet Home.
Every time I leave, I feel sad. Who knows what will be? My brother reported the other day that Penny (or Pearl or Peninnah—she has a variety of names) was sitting in the Temple when he went to see her. It was Friday night. About five people in the Assisted Living Space attend Friday night services. It was a good sign to everyone, especially me that my mother had gotten herself to services. She's up, and Adam. We live to fight another day. Or to love another day.
So tonight, as I write this, we are on the Eve of a Big Solar Eclipse. Isn't it odd that it took me till I was 63 to get "aware" of astrology? We live in astrology. Do you realize that we live in the Universe? No? I didn't look up enough. Maybe a leftover from riding the subways in the first half of my life. About 45 years ago, I left my paper on Marx written for Columbia College's Core Curriculum on the subway because I had fallen asleep and ran out too fast to get home to the 11th floor in Building 19 in Co-Op City. Pearl stayed up with me all night, typing the paper as I dictated what I could remember about class struggle on the 11th floor of one of the ugliest eye sores of capitalism. "Marx," she said over Sanka as the sun rose. "Live and Learn." We got through that crisis smelling like a rose, just like the last one.
So, as a present from me to you, here’s a sweet video of that remarkable moment as we enter the New Year of this astrological sign. May this year bring us all remarkable moments that make our eyes water with joy.
Thank you for being a subscriber and a supporter. It would mean so much to me, and to support my transformation from therapist-writer to writer-therapist to be a paid subscriber for $5 per month or $50 per year.