I found this clear and powerful Ken.
- Peter Ciccariello
On 5/28/07, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> A return to an earlier style and, oddly, to writing the draft in
> longhand, a practice I'd all but renounced.
>
>
> IN THE SUMMER OF MY MOTHER'S WIDOWHOOD
>
> Loss compounded loss, even to the clothes.
> So one August morning my mother took me
> with her to a house on Bronx Park East
> to surrender my father's clothes, even the suits
> that still smelled of aftershave or cologne,
> and the wide ties--this was 1954--that would
> return to fashion in the late Sixties
> when I almost wished I'd kept them.
>
> Loss was not only loss, it was often surrender.
> My mother had been widowed by a man
> who took whatever he saw: an unaffordable Hermes tie,
> a first wife cast off for my mother cast off for others
> that culminated in the woman whose love killed him.
> With my mother, not so strangely perhaps,
> and though everything else was all about her,
> her grieving was reactive.
> She'd cry not for herself but for me,
> with me, when I cried for the father I'd feared.
> She did not drink more than usual, or
> go out with men, or do much at all
> but skim Readers' Digest and go for walks.
>
> Perhaps she missed the space my father
> had taken in her life: even if it was a dark star,
> at least it was fixed in the skies.
> She'd go for walks with her sister to determine
> what to do next, until she settled
> on working again for the first time in years,
> wearing this time the new identity of Widow,
> a faux-mourner for her secret relief at her release,
> because purple was her color, and unlike
> my father's florid ties, it never was too far from Style.
>
> KTW/5-26-07
>
> --
> ------------------
> Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
>
> "It takes a big man to cry. It takes a really big man to
> laugh at that man."
>
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