I was having lunch with a friend of mine whose marriage is on the rocks. This is not surprising since her marriage has been on the rocks since 1987; the only surprise is that she and her husband are still together at all. On this day, however, Liz had a couple of glasses of wine and she shared some marital details that I really wish she had not, knowing that the next time I saw her husband it was going to be very hard to look him in the eye and not giggle.
Everyone has a secret life, I mused on the way home, wishing Liz’s had remained secret. I sighed, wondering if everyone has memories and experiences buried deep inside that they plan on taking to their grave unless they are well lubricated with pinot noir over a long, holiday lunch. Then I thought of my parents’ generation and how simple life must have been back in the good old days.
But my fantasy of my parents living the simple life was shown to be just that — a fantasy– the next day. I was having lunch with my mom who had received a digital picture frame for Christmas. As my gift to her I sorted through 90 years of photographs and put together a slide show of over 1000 photographs from all stages of her life.
The old photos both stirred her memory and loosened her tongue and I soon learned that all was not as simple as it seemed. For the better part of an afternoon I listened, alternately fascinated and appalled, to the stories she told as the old photographs brought memories back in a rush.
A photo of my parents at the Statler hotel in New York City in 1958 reminded my mother that that was the night that she and my father had way too much to drink at a wedding reception. “What a party!” she said, adding as an afterthought, “that’s the night you were conceived.”
Before I had the chance to process that a picture of her own wedding party appeared, and she mentioned that her best friend and maid of honor, Francis, died very young, which I knew. Then she mentioned that Francis died as the result of a botched, back room abortion in 1944, and my head began to spin.
I learned that Mom’s father, Grandpa Ignatz, caused a scandal in 1939 when he married his neighbor, whom I loved as Grandma Katy, just six weeks after his first wife died. “He had 6 kids and needed a wife,” said my mom. “Grandma Katy was a widow with 2 girls and she needed an income. But how people talked!”
Mom shared with me that the cause of a family feud that persists to this day was a scandal over a contested inheritance in 1952. The disputed amount? Fifteen hundred dollars. “That was a lot of money in 1952,” Mom said.
I never knew why there was a coolness between my parents and my mom’s oldest sister, a wild child with a really creepy husband. Then I learned that my Aunt and Uncle belonged to a wife swapping club in the early 1960s, and the coolness was the result of my parents’ unequivocal refusal to join.
The stories kept coming but I’m not sure I heard anything else or if I just erased it, but eventually Mom got tired and it was time for her nap. As I turned the picture frame off Mom yawned sleepily and stretched. “That was fun,” she said. “It’s nice to reminisce about the Good Old Days.”