during yesterday's drive it came to my mind how little i really ever knew about my parents as people.  i grew up in a very traditional post-war family in europe.  i do not know if the time, the culture ( germanic) or the people themselves had something to do with it.  my sense is that not just for me but also my peers the parental role overshadowed the personal features to a great degree. and in that sense, i knew my parents primarily in their role, but not as personalities.

i think it became clear to me some time after my father died and my mother sent me and all of my sisters a booklet of handwritten poems in swiss german that she had composed.  my first thought was that they would be poems of mourning or poems recalling her history and marriage to my father.  but they were poems of a lost love before she met my father: the love of her life.  they were dropped into my lap and that was the end.  as a little girl my sister and i knew that in my mother's night table next to her bed in the parental bedroom there were letters from heinz. who was heinz? he was a ghostlike presence, on and off in my childhood.  i know that he was a famous organist, actually the church organist at the cathedral in bern.  i knew that my mother had been his girlfriend, that there had been talk or intimations of marriage, and that his mother had disapproved of her because she was just a poor girl from an honest but not fancy family.  that his mother won, and that my mother had lost.  the contrast of heinz to my father could not escape me: heinz so musical, refined, cultured; my father tone deaf, practical, indulgent to my mother's forays into culture and intellectual pursuits, but uninterested in such matters;  the money man, the economist, a simple guy.  later, when i had already emigrated i heard that he used to drive her to concerts ( for example in gstaad to the yehudi menuhin concerts) and while she listened he would wait in the local inn.  she was the one who met dan rubinstein, the artist in zurich; he drove and ate macaroni at his house cooked by his wife.

of course, since i left in my very early 20s i never really had a chance to get to know my parents when i was an adult.  but i think that even my sisters never really knew my mother. who to this day remains in my mind a mysterious, withholding and crippled person who contained treasures that at rare times i caught a glimpse of.

so, it is clear that this blog to some degree is an attempt to make sure that my sons get to know me and that not later in their lives a left over booklet is all that is left of their mother.  of course, in every life there are hidden things, secrets if you will, and those i mean to keep.

just around the time that i wrote my last blog entry i took a trip with yossi to new jersey to visit my oldest son, his wife and my grandson.  on the way there, in nowhere land my motor blew  .... and the rest is history.
i have a new car now, another subaru forester, but white. actually it is pearl white so be exact.  a few days ago i finally found a persona for this car: it is a big white wolf.  my old blue subaru ( pacific pearl blue to be exact) was baby girl.  so from a baby girl to a white wolf.
today on the way to the north hills' goodwill in cranberry i sat in the car listening to yossi going on with some song or another.  it is not really singing in any regular way, but it is a sort of song song talk with sounds and words.  i am so used to him that i do not even hear it any more.  i looked at him and he was so content sitting there singing.  he likes to go on "trips" as he calls it, but never looks out the window.  the landscape, objects along the road, be they cars or animals are of no interest to him.  on occasion he will comment on a cloud.  but that is all.  i have come to the conclusion that the car is a sort of additional room for him: actually it is a music room where he listens to his cds on his portable player. he takes with him two heavy books of cds which he keeps on his lap.  he sits on the seat in a lotus position. he also likes to take a nap.  he is very disturbed if i do not play the radio.  i must not sing, but i can tap or move rhythmically to the beat.  he does not like classical music, but prefers a distinct beat.  on the way to his day program we listen to billy joel.  before that it was leonard cohen until the cd broke.  there were some heavy and bad lyrics on his first track. the music plays fairly loud on the way to his"work".  oh yes, i forgot to mention, going to work is not a "trip" but an "outing" and for that he does not take his music with him.
i thought about all of this today as i drove up in the later morning:  i live within a network of rules that are not of my own making but i know them well and i am so used to them that i follow the automatically.  i do not resent them; i am so used to them sprouting up and growing around me, climbing on me and enveloping me, that i mostly feel that this is what i also want and need.  taking care of yossi seems to have resulted for me in a sort of bounded abnegation of what i would do or like. but like an old servant to a precious princeling i do not mind and simply do.  i thought about this today as i was listening for probably the uncountable time to billy joel's music man and the guy in the bar who "makes love to his tonic and gin"