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.