Friday, December 22, 2023
In bed @ 10, awake at 3:37 and up at 4:01. Let Lilly out. 40°, high of 44°, cloudy, rainy evening ahead, AQI of 87, wind SSE at 5 mph, 3-6/10. Sunrise at 7:20, sunset at 4:19, 8+59.
Treadmill; pain. Woke up with midback pain and I'm having some RP this morning. I'm thinking of taking a day off with the treadmill, not enough sleep, and risk of falling on or off the contraption. 0:00 & 0.00
I'm grateful for my mother.
Mildred Pierce. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." King Lear, Act I, scene 4. The novel and this HBO miniseries seem like a Great Depression-era amalgamation of Shakespeare's King Lear and Balzac's Le Pere Goriot. Veda Pierce is the daughter of Mildred Pierce. Even as a child, she dreamed of that form of the American Dream in which she, though the child of a middle-class divorceé forced to work as a waitress in a 'hash house.' would achieve fame, fortune, and social status through her classical music talents. She hated living in Glendale, California, in LA's San Fernando Valley, hated the house the family lived in, and even hated Mildred when she was forced to take a job as a waitress to feed and house Veda and her little sister Ray. Ray dies from influenza and a concurrent infection, leaving Mildren feeling guilty because she was off with a rich lover when Ray became sick and was hospitalized. Ray's death also makes Mildred more solicitous of her relationship with Veda, who takes advantage of Mildred's love and yearning for her daughter's respect, just as Veda takes advantage of everyone to advance her own cause. She reminds me of a young Donald Trump, selfish, narcissistic, sociopathic. The storyline portrays Mildred's rise and fall as a businesswoman and her relationship with the thankless Veda whom she finally 'kisses off' as she realizes what a snake Veda is.
My mother was the steady (if low income) wage earner in the family as my father bounced from job to job. I have a fuzzy but I think accurate) memory of her taking in laundry and ironing in our basement apartment when I was very young, probably at the end of and immediately after the war. During most of my childhood, however, my mother worked as a waitress. She started working days at a luncheonette owned by Greeks at the southeast corner of 74th and Halsted Street. Kitty and I would go from St. Leo Grammar School to “the Greeks” to have lunch, usually PB&J, each day during the school year. I’m sure her income from that job was extremely paltry. Her tips would have been nickels and dimes. When she had enough experience to get a better paying job, she worked at a small restaurant called “Kilty’s” at 1111 W. 79th Street, not far from where my Uncle Bud and Aunt Mary lived. She moved up from there to an Italian restaurant called “Louis George’s” and finally to a very fancy supper club at 81st and Central Avenue in Burbank called (a bit perversely) “The Old Barn.” The other restaurants ‘bit the dust’ as the South Side lost virtually all its white residents, but the Barn is still operating as an elegant eatery.
The job at ‘the Greeks’ was a daytime job; all the others involved evening and night work. My mother didn’t drive until later in life and, until I got my driver’s license at 16 or so, my father would drive her to work and pick her up. Once I could drive, I would bring her to and from work. I remember her meticulously preparing her uniforms and polishing her white ‘nurse’s shoes’ each afternoon. At Louis George’s, she wore what was supposed to be some sort of Italian provincial outfit, with a colorful full skirt and a white blouse with big starched puffy short sleeves.
At The Old Barn, she wore a plain nylon black uniform with bleached and starched white collar and apron. Each evening, she would walk into work looking energetic and professional; each night, or at least on the busy nights, when I picked her up she would drag herself out of the restaurant bone tired and often exhausted. Her arms and shoulders hurt from lifting and carrying the heavy food trays. Her legs hurt from all the standing and walking. Mostly though, it was her feet that ached until the following morning. The waitresses wore nylon stockings in their ‘nurses shoes’, not cushioning cotton socks. Often my mother could hardly wait to get her shoes untied and off her feet as she settled into the passenger seat of the car and started rubbing her overtaxed feet. Then we would drive home where she could get some rest on the sleeper sofa that was her bed all the years we lived in the basement apartment.
I state the obvious: waiting on tables in a restaurant is very hard work. The waitress is the interface between the customer and the other workers at the restaurant. She is in one sense in charge of the tables at her station, but she has no real authority. She must depend on bus boys and bartenders and the kitchen staff to make things go smoothly. If there is a shortage of bus boys, the waitress has to bus the tables as well as take orders and serve drinks and food. If the bartenders screw up the drink orders, or take too long to fill drink orders, the waitress gets the heat. If the kitchen staff is slow or uncoordinated or unskilled in food preparation, again it’s the waitress who hears about it from the customers, both verbally and by diminished or missing tips. At The Old Barn, my mother worked only for tips, no wages. If there were problems at the bar or in the kitchen, she was the one to suffer the consequences.
As she worked her way up to ‘classier’ establishments, she encountered fewer and fewer customers who were cheap or jerks, but she did occasionally get one. I would hear about it on the drive home.
I wrote earlier that there were times when paying the $1.50/month tuition at St. Leo Grammar School or $15.00/month tuition at Leo High School was a source of friction between my mother and my father. My mother would not hear of Kitty and me attending a public school. I have often thought of how hard she worked to ensure that we got what she saw as the only proper education. I have always attributed my obtaining a scholarship to college and eventually being able to attend law school and to be appointed to a university faculty to her work as a waitress all those years. I am usually a generous tipper.
I treasure the memory of those rides with my mother to and from work. They provided a great opportunity to talk and we did a lot of talking. I have to pause as I write these words and think back on those rides, especially the long rides to and from The Old Barn. It was a blessing that we had only one car. In a modern two or more car family, there would not be the need or the forced opportunity for sharing the vehicle and for the riding and schmoozing together. Efficiency would be enhanced; togetherness would be sacrificed. I treasure too the shared time with my mother on the long drive over pre-interstate roads from the south side of Chicago to visit Uncle Jim in ‘the loony bin’ in Elgin.
I should state what is perhaps clear from the story of my mother’s ‘career path’ as a waitress, i.e., that she was a very good waitress. She had regular customers who asked to be seated at her station and waited until one of her tables became available. It wasn’t only that she was a professional at serving diners that brought the customers back, it was her personality. She was friendly and upbeat and very easy to like. The customers liked her, the other waitresses and staff at the restaurants liked her and, of course, the bosses liked her both because she was so likable and because she was very good for business.
Eventually, the nighttime and weekend hours and the wear and tear on her body made her want to get out of the waitress business. Sometime during my college years, when she would have been about 40 years old and when the family was living in an apartment in the Marquette Park neighborhood, my mother took a job at a General Foods plant at 74th and Rockwell Avenue, walking distance from the family’s apartment. The plant was built in 1949 and shut down in the summer of 2003. It was quite huge, 350,000 square feet. Originally it manufactured only Kool-Aid, but after it was bought by General Foods (now Kraft) in 1953, it also made Good Seasonings salad dressings, Shake ‘N Bake, Open Pit BarBQ Sauce and some other products. My mother worked in the main plant, but I can’t remember what her job was. Eventually, however, there was an opening in the Quality Control Laboratory and she applied for it and got the job. She had to pass a mathematics test to get the job, which made this Depression era high school dropout more than a little nervous. Nonetheless, she worked hard at getting ready for the test, passed it, and moved off the assembly line into the Lab. We were all proud of her. That was the job she held until she died.
As I read these words that I wrote about 20 years ago, I pause as I remember those days with my mother, grateful for her love and sacrifices for me and my sister, and rueful that I wasn't a better son. Yeats' Vacillation haunts me, "my conscience or my vanity appalled." My mother was a much finer person than Mildred Pierce and I was a much better son than Veda was as a daughter, but still, I could have and should have been better.
Why keep a journal? I've wondered about this many times and I've written about it a few times. In this morning's NYT, Frank Bruni has an essay titled "Our Semicolons, Ourselves. Excerpts:
Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.
Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.
Bruni's comments remind me of the Flannery O'Connor quote in a letter she wrote, a comment that I believe to be true of me: ". . . . I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." I don't expect anyone but me to read my blog/journal and so far I haven't been disappointed nor do I expect to be. That being the case, I often tolerate my run-on and otherwise awkward sentences to remain uncorrected. I'm also a fan of non-sentences, part sentences. It seems to me that we often, maybe usually, think in non-sentences and talk that way so why not when the occasion permits write that way too. My biggest fault is wordiness, way too many unnecessary words which my good friend, now deceased, David Branch would line through ruthlessly with his red editing ballpoint. Often I would follow his writing advice and often I wouldn't. Sometimes I would like the words too much to excise them, even if they were a bit redundant and unnecessary. David was a graduate of Yale undergraduate school and Harvard law, a very bright and well-educated guy. I always took his editing advice seriously, even when I eschewed it. He would probably advise me to eschew the word eschew. I daresay he would also find troubling my frequent use of hyphenated words and occasionally random use of capitalized initial letters in words that oughtn't be capitalized, yes in German but not in English. Nonetheless, one of the advantages of writing that has no readers other than the author is that you can do stuff like that. Dear David Branch would run out of red ink going over my writing in this journal. How I wish he were still with us.
On these days last year we were under a blizzard watch (12/21), and a storm watch (12/22), and on the 23rd, the temperature never rose above zero.
Geri tests negative for covid but has a nasty cold and cough, but she's still planning on hosting David, Sharon, Ellis, and Mary Beth for dinner on Christmas Eve.
Throne room reading is the current print issue of The Atlantic devoted entirely to Reconstruction. Also watching and listening to the Fisk Jubilee Singers at the Kennedy Center, having read the choral group's history in this issue. My friend, now deceased, Father Matthew Gottschalk at the House of Peace, attended Fisk University.
Vi and Joey Officer came over with the kringle I ordered to support George and Henry's scout programs.
Trevor Noah has some stand-up shows on YouTube and we watched one before bedtime. Talented man.
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