My mother and grandmothers favorite Opera.
"Tosca" one they heard often in Vienna.
This New Year’s Day morning is terribly
cold. My car shudders and barely wants to start. The engine clatters
reluctantly and I wonder if it will make it. I dash off because Josh is being
released today after a week in Cardio Renal. On Christmas night I called the
ambulance because he had shortness of breath…kind of another wild week…but we
held on …Now insights pave the path ahead and I trust he can find some
stability for his health for a while.
The moment I turn on the reluctant car New
Year’s Day music from Vienna fills the cold sunny air. A soft German voice
tells the selection and I hear my mother’s voice with her ever present Viennese
inflection. Her youth in Vienna shaped her life and she brought to the pedantic
Midwest her European culture, love of music and grace in entertaining.
As I
near the hospital a particularly beautiful piece lingers. I park and listen. Amid the harsh pragmatic
buildings delicate music all the way from Vienna fills the air coloring it with
nuance, feeling and ethereal emotions.
I ride the elevator with a woman in a
wheelchair wearing a beautiful scarf. These 20 seconds with a stranger reveal
so much. She frustrated with not getting in the door. Still elated from the
music I bend low and comfort her for a moment. My mothers empathy in my DNA
making the moment easy.
Josh is sleeping and on oxygen when I
arrive. His room mate moans. All of a sudden I realize I forgot to bring the
green pants he wanted to wear home. I know he will be irritated and he is when
he awakes. For a moment I look down at my brown velvet pants thinking they “might”fit.
He is impatient and frustrated. I decide to go home and get the green pants. I
am mad at myself and then I am not…as a silver lining glints in the harsh
winter sunlight. I realize that driving back and forth will allow me to hear
this special Viennese New Year’s Day concert.
Driving south on ordinary Hwy 55 the music
from Vienna lifts me. Then January 1st
2011 comes into view. I have hurried over to see my parents. My mother has been
visibly and slowly declining for a while. Everything feels tenuous and anxious
as we sit on the couch. I can tell it’s time to change her diaper. Life has
been fraught for a while and I feel a deep foreboding. Old friends come by and
we have a kind of sort of New Years Day party. So unlike other years when the
old table from Vienna would be pushed against the wall and my mother would have
the silverware laid out in that particular way of hers. She would have made a
yellow box cake and proud of her efforts it would be front and center on the
table. Her lack of cooking plainly evident. There would be those funny little
round boxes of cheese with cows faces on them. Emily presided and we were all
welcomed in. But January 1, 2011 was
bleak. Death sat sulking in a corner…waiting. I wept as I drove recalling that
last New Years for her with the silvery Viennese music weaving a net of memory
in the air.
I got home, found the green pants and the
fuzzy brown ones too. I drove back to the hospital on the same ordinary Hwy 55.
But now my mothers youth opened up before me as I heard Strauss’s “Artist Life”.
She led a full life of painting, poetry, and Jungian insights. Somehow I could
see my mother walking to school in Vienna past magnificent marble statues of
composers. It was easy to imagine her at the Opera with her parents and then
playing the piano with ease. Her Viennese life opened up as I drove along. She
grew up surrounded by music, art and
culture as my father picked cotton on an East Texas farm listening to his sister
tell stories of Scarlet O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind.”
I drove along in my old 1995 purple Saturn car filled with the
flotsam and jetsam of my busy life. But my car and that little radio took me on
a journey past the sad memory of my mother’s death to wander the streets of
Vienna with my mother in her youth.. before life changed. before the Anschluss
happened. Just waltzing in the carefree life of her youth in Vienna.
I lingered with the music when I got to the
hospital. Once again the silvery notes held me. I did not see the metal and
stone structure before me but looked up to see my mother in her heavenly realm
gazing down at me as the waltz played reminding me that beauty, music and
harmony endure despite the hardships that life brings.
I brought Josh home. We resumed our complex life together as the temperature
hovered about zero. The radiator thumped to life and we were warmed.
