"When Mother Ventured Forth Alone"

    Most of what passes for bravery consists of responding decently to indecent circumstances. Rarely do we put ourselves at true risk. Consider, for example, the way most people travel: in the safety of groups, with spouses or friends, or - at the very least - alone but with a fixed destination and someone waiting for them at the far end. Now consider my mother who decided last summer to spend an indefinite period of time "somewhere in the south of France." 

    More specific than that she could not be. My mother, who is 68, had never set foot outside the United States, knew nobody in Europe, let alone the Provence region of France and - give or take a few trips East on the arm of my father, now deceased - she has spent her entire adult life within a 300 mile radius of San Francisco. The last seven years she has lived in Mendocino County, in a cottage with a wood stove and everything Plotinus ever wrote. 

    This is not to imply that my mother lacks life experience. Far from it. She has raised six children, endured the breakup of a marriage, on-going financial insecurity and several serious illnesses. At one particularly dodgy moment in my life she counseled me by saying "When you take a step toward life, life will support you." On the highest level she is extraordinarily astute. But on every other level, my mother gazes at the world and its more sophisticated citizens with befuddled wonder. She has never hailed a cab, much less in French. 

    As her plans progressed, I smelled smoke. She was going to give up the lease on her Mendocino cottage, store her furniture in a garage and decide, when she returned home, where she wanted home to be. With that bridge burning, she was blithely moving toward a bridge obscured. It was explained to her that Provence was not a town but an area, like Marin County. Well,she reasoned, she would obviously have to get to the south of France before she would know where she was going to be. Her logic, like my mother, was frighteningly pure. 

    "Have you looked into making plane reservations?" I asked her several weeks before her projected departure. 

    "Oh, thank Heaven you reminded me," she exclaimed. "I certainly must look into that - today!" 

    My mother's practical lapses could have serious repercussions were it not for other people (who don't know Plotinus from Dolly Parton) who jog her memory. Which is not to imply that she is a dependent person. In fact, I sensed that a prime reason for her decision to make the trip was to learn a little of the world's ways and become even less dependent. Then too, there was all that beauty. My mother, who can get more out of a patch of fog rolling over the Mendocino headlands than anyone I know, didn't want to miss seeing it all. Beauty was the carrot, enforced experience the stick. 

    Looking back over the week she spent with me before she left for Europe, I realized she was not eager for any dry runs in a new environment. When I suggested that she try our new subway system by going to an art gallery, she demurred. It was clear she did not want to undergo an operation before the operation, so to speak. 

    One morning she came into the kitchen and reported a mocking bird outside her bedroom window. "I feel so sorry for mocking birds," she said. "They are doomed to sing every other bird's song but their own." 

    My mother, who almost never alludes to feeling fearful was taking this trip, I saw, in an attempt to clear her own throat. "Won't it be wonderful," she said happily on another occasion, 'when this trip is over and I am no as shy as I am now.' 

    The morning of our shuttle flight to New York, my mother must have checked her purse a dozen times to make sure her passport, visa and traveler's checks were where she thought they were. Once airborne, I discussed with her the possibility of taking a bus (cheaper) instead of a cab between la Guardia and Kennedy International Airport. When we arrived at La Guardia, the issue was still undecided. As she watched the luggage come through the curtain of rubber strips onto the conveyor belt, my mother asked "Do you have more than one chance to get your bags?" 

    I was beginning to see the world as my mother saw it - a series of ramps, mazes and conveyor belts where one had to act fast or all would be lost. Gathering up her suitcases, I moved us toward the curb outside and told her to wait while I spoke to a cabdriver about fares to Kennedy. 

    Thirty seconds at the most elapsed. When I returned to where I had left her, my mother was not there. Glancing around, I saw her just closing the door of a police car!

    "Mother, what are you doing in that police car?" I demanded. 

    "Oh," she exclaimed, hanging her head, "I can't believe what I just did. It didn't seem right to me for you to always be asking all the questions and so I saw this cab and I went over and opened the door and asked 'How much do you charge to go to JFK?' and he yelled, 'Lady, look at the outside of the door,' and so I thought maybe the fares were written on the outside…' She had apologized profusely, and was just slamming the door and looking at the police department isnignia when I apprehended her. 

    I had caught her at the zenith of her own embarrassment. Her face was crimson, her cheeks wet with tears. "I can't believe it," she murmured. "And I'm not even out of the country yet!" The two of us stood on the edge of the curb and laughed until we thought we could laugh no more. 

    I have always thought that the greatest deterrent to courage was the fear of looking like a fool. Standing there in her new green parka, with brimming eyes and an involuntary grin on her face, my mother never looked more vulnerable. Everything in me wanted to take her home right away. 

    There were other incidents before she boarded the plane: Asking the Barclays Bank teller, a pasty-faced fat man with dead black eyes, to change a $l00 traveler's check for "uh, one 50 and two 25's." ("Mother ,they aren't making $25 bills anymore," I whispered. "Oh," she gasped over a giggle. "And I was thinking how smart I was for making it add up right." ) 

    Thoroughly demoralized now, my mother stared overlong at various turnstiles in the airport cafeteria. "Coffee and tea only," read a sign above one of them. But was that sign meant to encourage you to enter or to stay out? The embarrassment of pushing against an immobile exit stile, in full view of strangers, made her draw back. 

    Then, inevitably, I had to let her go beyond the checkpoint toward her plane ramp. I embraced her and settled back to wait for the telephone call that she promised she would make. Having had a week with her, it was difficult to give up the experience of watching (and watching over) my mother as she saw what she had never seen before. The wait was almost unendurable. Finally, a day before I intended to call the State Department to put a tracer on her, my mother touched base. 

    Her letter, postmarked Menton on the Riviera, was subdued but positive in tone. She had found an apartment with a park full of olive trees behind it across the street from the ocean. En route, she had decided to see Venice. My mother in Venice! Venice now in my mother! It seemed like too spectacular an interface. She had wept in the "vaporetto" over how beautiful it was. 

    I wrote her back, enclosing a snippet of wisdom from Thucydides: "The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out and meet it." (I closed my letter with "Think, dearest mother, of yourself.") 


    Published in The New York Times
    2/17/85