A Christmas Card to My Mother

The First 80 Years

Mom

Earlier this year, a dear friend of the family lost her mother to illness. Although she was by no means young at 75 years old (and I guarantee I will change my tune when I’m 74), her health declined rapidly, such that her passing was quite sudden. In the aftermath, among the countless tasks that had to be handled by our friend, she had to write up a summary of her mother’s life. For some reason, Greek Orthodox funerals do not include family eulogies as part of the service, so in this case, the short biography was prepared as a cheat sheet, something that could be used by the priest as a reference as he spoke about the life of the newly departed.

The priest prefaced his words by saying that every person, every life, is unique, that every person has their own story, and that every life story is meaningful. It goes to the foundational belief that each person’s life is sacred. As I heard the priest recount the life of our friend’s mother, as beautifully expressed on the page, I was thinking two things. First, wouldn’t it have been nice for her mother to have heard these things, to listen to some version of her own story lovingly told by her children? The other was this: my own mother is 80 years old.

With that in mind, including the fact that I’m late on my Christmas shopping this year, here we go. Merry Christmas, Mom!

My mother, Sonia Rapacevich, later Sonia Howard, grew up in the neighborhood known as Maspeth, Queens, one of the outer boroughs of New York City. She grew up in a two-family house on Maspeth Avenue with her parents, both of whom were born in New York City, but both having spent a considerable portion of their lives in Eastern Europe in an area that today is part of Belarus. Her father was a carpenter and her mother a cleaning lady in an office building. They both spoke Russian at home and their English was tinged with a Russian accent. My mother grew up speaking Russian at home, and was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, she’s been going to the same church all her life, the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a short ride away on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (just kidding, there’s no such thing as a short ride on the BQE). Until recently, for almost 80 years, she almost never missed a Sunday liturgy.

When my mother was nine years old, she discovered her grandfather’s dead body. Her uncles and their families lived in the attached house next door, and their father—my mother’s grandfather—had a room in the basement. My mother’s job was to check in on Grandpa (“Djed”) every day to see if he was awake. If he was, they would prepare his daily tea. One day she went to check up on him and he didn’t wake up. My mother recounts this without a hint of trauma or sadness, just a sense of pride that she performed the task she was supposed to be doing. This is not surprising, as I’ve never heard my mother tell any story about anything with the notion of eliciting a negative emotion. If she were to relate a story about a grizzly car crash, she would describe with great admiration the nicely-ironed uniform of the policeman. She wouldn’t even notice the body bags.

My mother in front of the family home on Maspeth Avenue

My mother’s life, like most of ours, can be organized into distinct identifiable periods. She lived in the same house on Maspeth Avenue until she got married to my father, Michael, at age 27. The next phase was the thirty years of marriage, which lasted until my father died at age 59. My dad never got to meet any of his grandchildren, just as my mother’s father sadly never got to meet most of his (he also died at age 59). To this day, my mother still refers to herself in the return address on envelopes as Mrs. Michael Howard. She must have ordered those labels in bulk because she’s been using them in correspondence for well over fifty years.

The last quarter century or so can be defined by her time being Grandma, which constitutes the third and current phase of her life. These last two phases have taken place almost entirely in the same house—a two story home in Middle Village, Queens, one town over from Maspeth. This means that, other than a rental house she and my father lived in when they first got married, she has had exactly two mailing addresses in the 80 years she’s been on Earth.

When viewed as a whole, there was only one person who was with her during each and every phase of her life: her sister, Florence, a/k/a Aunt Florence. Florence, my mother’s only sibling, was eight years older and was already married by the time my mother was 11. Florence and her husband Walter, a/k/a Uncle Walter, lived on the first floor of the family home on Maspeth Avenue. As impressive as it is that my mother has had only two addresses over the course of 80 years, Aunt Florence had her squarely beat. Other than a brief interlude while Uncle Walter was in the Navy, she lived in the same house for 87 years. It was decorated almost entirely in turquoise the entire time.

The sisters of Maspeth Avenue: Sonia/Mom (L) and Florence (R)

Growing up on Maspeth Avenue in the 1950s defined and shaped my mother’s sense of the world. She had aunts, uncles, and cousins next door, aunts, uncles and cousins down the street, and a slew of friends and classmates that she still stays in touch with to this day. These were her family, and, to her, family was something that was just as tangible as the table. They ate together. They vacationed together. They went to church together. Interestingly, half of these cousins went to the Russian Orthodox church, which included my mother and grandmother, and the other half went to Saint Stanislaus (Saint Stan’s), the Roman Catholic church down the block, which somehow included her sister, Florence. My mother suspects they didn’t know or didn’t care that these were different denominations altogether. The older generation was religious, but not particularly parochial. It was a good thing that everybody went to church, and a Polish Catholic church was close enough.

Despite the laissez faire approach to religion, the ecclesiastical calendars in the family didn’t always line up. The only time I ever saw my mother and Aunt Florence fight was when we went over Aunt Florence’s house one year for the Catholic Easter. The issue we faced was that it was still only Palm Sunday for the Orthodox, which meant Easter was still a week away. So, when my aunt said, “Christos Voskrese!,” “Christ is Risen!” in Church Russian, my mother refused to provide the traditional response (“Voistinu Voskrese!” or “Indeed He is Risen!”). My aunt was insulted, but my mother didn’t apologize, and steadfastly refused to say Christ is Risen, because Easter for her was still a week away. They didn’t talk to each other for about an hour before a few bottles of wine helped thaw the tension. Historians refer to this as the Infinitesimally Small Schism. Save for that incident, as far as I could tell, my mom and her sister were always blissfully comfortable in each other’s company.

Grover Cleveland High School - Class of 1962

My mother graduated Grover Cleveland High School in 1962. She met my father about eight years later, but I’ve recently come to appreciate the period in between—this adult period in my mother’s life—as being a fascinating interlude. She had a boyfriend or two, she traveled all over Europe, including the Soviet Union. Her most vivid memory from this trip was being tailed by the KGB while in Moscow. I suppose Khruschev was keen on getting his hands on those Ivan Rebroff records she probably had in her possession. At one point, she decided to move to Seattle and become a flight attendant, even buying a one-way plane ticket and bidding her family goodbye. She moved back home a few weeks later without ever taking any discernible steps to apply for a job. This decision was a very good thing for my brother and me. Upon returning home, she applied for an office job in Manhattan and was identified as a promising recruit, in her telling due to some combination of her well-regarded Grover Cleveland diploma (“at the time”) and the fact that she and her friends were wearing white gloves during the interview.

I’ve been part of enough conversations with contemporaries of my mother to suspect that she was something of a social butterfly in her 20’s, quite the reveler, in fact. My father used to complain, only half-seriously, that he was “duped” into marrying my mother, because she portrayed herself as being much more fun at the beginning than she ended up being later in life. This tells me less about what he thought of the middle-aged version of my mother and more about what the 25-year-old version was like. She sure seemed like a hell of a lot of fun to be around.

Grandma and Mom outside of church

My white-gloved mother ended up getting a job as a secretary at Irving Trust, an old-timey financial institution in midtown Manhattan, where she worked for almost a decade. She still remembers and reveres her old boss, and also remembers and reveres the most famous bank customer whom she proudly serviced during her tenure, Mildred Schroeder, also known as Mrs. Bert Lahr, her husband being most famous for playing the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. My mother claims she only messed up at work once, on November 22, 1963. She was so distraught over the assassination of President Kennedy that she forgot to cancel a meeting her boss was scheduled to have that afternoon. This seems a bit unfair, but don’t worry, as I’m sure she messed up for real a bunch of other times. No one has ever accused my mother of being “hard-working” or “ambitious,” and I mean that in the best possible way. She was raised in a happy middle-class household with a deep and genuine contentment for the world and her place in it. Some people have everything and are always restless. My mother has always had just enough and that was plenty.

My parents were married in 1971. They were very different people, my father having overcome a lifetime of challenges to arrive at the same point, but they were of one mind when it came to enjoying their modest lives together. They didn’t struggle to climb society’s ladder. My father had already climbed enough, and my mother was already there. Plus, she was my mother, and she was going to be at peace as long as the sun continued to rise.

Mom and Dad

My brother and I were born less than two years apart. My mother didn’t work while we were kids, happily choosing to stay at home with us, likely due to the fact that we were such great company. We spent all family vacations and holidays with some contingent of my mother’s Maspeth Avenue family circle, which always started with Aunt Florence and Uncle Walter.

By the time we were teenagers, my brother and I were already spending the bulk of our time outside of the house, this being the outer-boroughs of New York City in the 1980s. Everyone’s childhood is dense, every day so disproportionately impactful in shaping one’s personality and world view. When you’re young, each one of those years seems to last a lifetime. From the standpoint of the parents, zooming out, you realize how incredibly short that time really is, those slow-turning years living as a family. They actually go by in a blink.

While our father went to work, our mother stayed at home. She never aspired to be the perfect homemaker, and it was always a running joke to point out the gaping gulf between her performance level as a housewife versus the ideal American housewife whose specter she grew up ignoring, or avoiding, or outright mocking. She brought a simple faith and a rosy outlook to each day, and was more than happy to recreate some version of her childhood home into her own household. Lo and behold, I was able to reach adulthood with minimal scars, trauma, resentment, baggage, or misgivings of any kind. I’ve looked deep for those repressed memories and so far I haven’t found any.

When I was in third grade, I guilted my parents into keeping a dog that someone was giving away. Buddy was a German Shepard mix, more mix than shepherd. I promised through my tears that I would take care of Buddy, that I would feed him and walk him every day, and I’m sure I meant it at the time. But it was my parents who ended up walking him around the block every night. They always went together, moving together slowly. In the summers, after their nightly walk, they would sit together on the porch as the sun was setting. Karma being what it is, today it is me who walks our dog Ouzo every day.

My father had once laid down the law – no pets – but Buddy seemed to open the floodgates. It started with the first cat, Moonshine, then Buddy, then the fish, then Zoe, then Mookie, then Morris, then Cody, then Jake, then Chi-Chi, then Bentley, and some other cats here and there. There was a twenty-year period where, if you lived in Queens and wanted to get rid of a ratty, unwanted, likely unwell animal, you would simply ask my mother to watch it overnight. The magic words were always the same: “One night, Sonia. Please.”

The Grandma years have been longer than her initial parenting years. Having not experienced them yet myself, I don’t know at what speed they pass. She eventually went back to work and retired as a school secretary in the New York City public school system. When our oldest children were still babies, she used to take the long subway ride across the city to babysit them. She doesn’t take the subway anymore, and has since sold her car, but if you look at any photos from the 20-plus years of our kids’ lives, Grandma’s face shows up time and again at every school play, award ceremony, music recital, birthday party, holiday, and graduation. Today, our older kids make sure to FaceTime her from college.

Growing old is not without its challenges, and the stresses and anxieties of living through those years can punch holes in even the rosiest of outlooks. For my mother, the biggest blow was when her sister Florence died earlier this year at age 87. She was bedridden for the last half decade, and Uncle Walter had already been deceased for 25 years, but she and my mother still spoke on the phone multiple times each day. Every day’s meeting agenda followed a similar format:

Agenda Item 1: The View. Discuss.

Agenda Item 2: The Show that Used to be Regis, but now has entirely different people. Discuss.

Agenda Item 3: Jeopardy. Discuss.

They apparently compared notes on each of these shows every day, and I regard it as a minor miracle that they both survived the Disney-ABC cable blackout last year. Despite her sister’s death, my mother takes great pride in the fact that Florence was able to live out the entirety of her days in the family home on Maspeth Avenue. It was an incredible 87-year-run, but nothing in life lasts forever. A few months ago, the house was sold to a new family.

My mother has aged much in the last year. Either stoic or in outright denial, or just always optimistic to a fault, it never fully registered for her that she was grieving. We all worry about her, though. May we all be fortunate enough to have someone in our lives who is so close, that the bearings of life start to unravel once they’re gone. That’s a blessing in my book, but that’s just one way of looking at it. I am Sonia’s son, after all.

When Florence was in her final days, my mother asked her to send her a sign once she arrived in heaven. Nothing happened for months, and this only compounded the sadness.

Last month, on a cold late fall afternoon, my mother noticed a small cardinal in the bird feeder in her yard. It lingered for a moment, and then flew away. The lateness of the season and the fact that it was such a young bird made my mother take note. My mother has never been shy about regarding random events as signs from beyond. I’m pretty sure every sparrow who ever landed on her window sill over the last twenty years has been my father. This particular cardinal might have been a little too much, though, too on-the-nose, so much so that my mother immediately started to question whether it could have been a cardinal at all.

The reason is that my mother once spoke about a plaque she saw inside the Saint Stanislaus church, of all places. It’s even on the church website today. The sign said Cardinals Appear When Angels are Near, which apparently reflects a traditional and commonly-held belief that the presence of cardinal means that a departed loved one is nearby in spirit. Of course, it just so happened that my mother first encountered this sentiment at the very church that her sister walked to virtually every day of her adult life.

My mother probably noticed the phrase because you would never find so bubbly and sentimental (and non-biblical) a message posted in a Russian Orthodox Church, but there it was in Florence’s Roman Catholic church, located right at the end of Maspeth Avenue. To the Rapacevich sisters, two of the bubbliest and most sentimental souls you are ever going to find, who had once briefly sparred over a minor discrepancy in their respective religious calendars, this was a most fitting way to enjoy a last laugh together.

Mom/Grandma in Greece with the family - 2010