Carole Moses

I remember my grandfather laying linoleum to run in the hallway from the front of the house to the back door leading to the yard. The gray glutinous adhesive was applied first; then would come the linoleum. But I want to go in the yard and play. How to get across the gray layer of slime? My beloved aunt offers to carry me since she plans to sunbathe on the lawn. I just need to wait a minute. l don’t know how she will navigate this gray river but her glamour makes her invincible to me. Dressed in very short shorts, with a tube top, and her hair upswept in a bandana, wearing the high heels she always wears, she seems the epitome of sophistication. But I decide I can’t wait. One step, and I am floundering in gray ooze. The odd thing is that I am not bothered. I keep trying to get up and every time I fall into more of this engulfing stickiness. Finally, I just give into it. (In later years, when I am pregnant with twins, I will have a similar experience. At...

After a hard day at work, feeling sick and enervated, I nevertheless tell myself that I am duty-bound to meditate. But fatigue overtakes me as I sit on the couch with our dogs while my husband reads. Between the page-turning, we make desultory conversation about our respective childhoods and hopes for the future. Will our children marry? What joy and pains await them? And I suddenly feel very at peace and secure in my family. The roles are subtly shifting. Last night one of our sons called us to see whether we were safe and secure as a sizable storm moved up the East coast. This was the baby I nursed, now nurturing me. This change does not feel frightening. It feels blessed. Maybe there is more than one way to meditate.

When my mother-in-law and I discussed religion and the possibility of belief in the midst of earthly disorder and chaos, she sneered at my naïveté: “Well, God isn’t Santa Claus, you know.” I thought this a shame. During my childhood, Christmas held an inner joy for me, not because of tree trimming. cookie making, ridiculous numbers of presents, or trips with my mother to 5th Ave. to admire the decorated shop windows. It was a sacred and joyous time as people awaited the birth of a child with unconditional love and delight. How I yearned to be that child, watched over by a loving family and universe. But I now see that Santa Claus would make a pretty poor God—manipulated by boys and girls who have been nice in order to avoid the coal that naughty children get. At 65, and having Parkinson’s for 8 years, I find more joy and delight than I have ever experienced before. And I don’t have to be nice to be granted these gifts. I can skip a meditation, do a poor meditat...

When I was growing up, I was acquainted with both her mother, Mildred, and her Aunt Bernice, but I'm sorry to say we never had one of these close intergenerational relationships.  I just always found it very, very had to relate to them, especially as I got older, and I think they had similar issues with me (and my brothers).  I wish I'd tried harder, but you do have to make allowances for kids.  Their hearts were definitely in the right place, and Aunt Bernice in particular used to make these stuffed animals for us (not to mention really ugly Christmas tree ornaments).  A lot of these are lost to time, but I've held on to the wiener dog below, which was always my favorite thing that she made me. My mother’s sister—my Aunt Bernice—was everything a mother should be, I thought. When I received games and toys for holidays, she was never too busy to play with me, leaving the other older folk to their own concerns. When I could not learn to tell time at school an...

This replicates the previous entry to an extent, but it's different enough to be worth including. I never knew my mother although we lived in the same house, ate at the same table, went on the same family vacations. She, a young widow with a baby, needs love and security. This I cannot provide. As she cries and questions me—“You love me, don’t you?”— I begin the descent into emotional numbness. Who is this stranger? And how can my small shoulders carry her burdens? I recall things she did for me: The homemade éclairs for my confirmation party (the cream filling turning rancid because she forgot to refrigerate them). The night she walked for hours in a pelting rainstorm, drawing a neighborhood map for a school assignment. But the dark moments seem to predominate, turning my memories into accusations. There was the time we went to buy my first bra, although my body did not correspond to my chronological age and I didn’t really need one. In the m...

My mother was big-breasted, enormously endowed: like one of the fertility figurines found in Middle Eastern archaeology. I, on the other hand, take after my father. As I was growing up, my mother used to joke about this, saying, “Are you sure you’re my daughter?” Now, I realize that my mother was probably embarrassed by her enormous breasts and tried to use humor to come to terms with them. But a 12-year-old girl cannot make this connection and I always felt unfeminine and physically grotesque. Then we are in A & S Department Store in the teen-age lingerie section, and I am getting my first training bra, more out of conformity than need. We don’t know about sizes--I really have nothing to fill the small cups—and my mother starts opening boxes and forcing me to try them on over my clothes. I see a father walking through the department with his daughter and, embarrassed, ask if we can’t go in a fitting room. My mother responds, “Who would be interested in you?” N...

After my diagnosis, I slept badly the first night, got up the next day, dressed for work, and then passed out in my bedroom. My “serious neurological disease,” the term I had jokingly used before my diagnosis—in an obvious attempt to neutralize the symptoms and keep the goddess Nemesis at bay—had finally come true. Even hypochondriacs occasionally develop incurable diseases. My doctor told me that most of his Parkinson’s patients tend to glory over what they can still do, not regret their limitations. Slowly, over time I am finding that to be the case. Since serious symptoms are delayed several years, I have had time to adjust and make my own peace with this condition. Nevertheless, I am embarrassed when friends tell me I am “courageous” and “inspiring,” when they tell me my acceptance is a sign of “spiritual grace” or that I am confronting this disease with “grace and dignity.” Nice words. But they seem to be making a plaster saint of me, and therefore diminishing the...

When I was young, the trees seemed to assume their autumnal hues uniformly. Now, at 65, I watch the trees in my neighborhood and I seem aware of large swaths of yellow and red leaves right next to large patches of green all in the same tree, as though parts of it are reluctant to give into its winter decline. Has nature changed over the years? Am I reading my own reluctance to decline into my personal autumn in the larger nature around me? Yet nature goes on. Will I?

When I think of my grandmother, I remember a stern person, with little aptitude for taking care of children. How ironic, then, when she was saddled with me when mother had to go back to work after my father’s death. Yet she is lovely in her wedding picture and shows no trace of the person I will remember as I grow up. She raised three children—and lost a fourth to a miscarriage—and then, when she was probably expecting rest, she had a lively young girl to take care of. Did they not have daycare back then, or was my family simply insistent on presenting a self-sufficient unit? But I still ponder over her ways with children. As an adult, I talked to my Aunt Bernice, my mother’s sister, who told me that when she was young my grandmother told her that she had caused the miscarriage by falling and hurting her head. The sight of blood, the story goes, caused the premature labor. I am aghast at laying this guilt on a child. But my aunt, always wanting to uphold the rightn...

I have always been obsessed with the perfect home. When I was young, for unfathomable reasons, I was convinced that a home with a porch would bring everlasting happiness. The family next door had a porch to their backyard and I looked longingly at it every day and wished that I could be so fortunate. Now, of course, I see it was in disrepair and, had there been housing codes at the time, it would have violated many of them. But I still could not understand my neighbors’ indifference to this treasure. I liked to play house in what I considered my private home. The entrance to our backyard was through a small shed and it was fixed up as a room, with bunk beds for my dolls and a play stove. I loved feeling grounded in a place that was all mine. Kindergarten brought one of my happiest memories. A big room contained a hinged house, a miniature ironing board and iron, play stove and sink--even a baby carriage one could put one’s dolls in. I loved this pseudo-domesticity. The...

Jane Austen’s nephew lovingly imprisoned “dear aunt Jane” in a fortress that he called a memoir, guarding her “sweet temper,” “loving heart,” “humble mind,” and “modest simplicity” from the rapidly changing world. The sketch accompanying the memoir shows an Austen with large lustrous eyes, a half-smile on her lips, and rows of feminine lace on her cap and gown, a far cry from its prototype, a sketch done by her favorite sister, Cassandra, showing a thin-lipped, beady-eyed woman in austere clothing. But what of Austen’s own voice? She praises disagreeable people because “it saves me the trouble of liking them.” Commenting on the carnage of the Peninsular War she calls it a “blessing that one cares for none of them.” Most shocking is her report about the premature birth of a stillborn child. She conjectures that the child’s mother went into labor “some weeks before she was expected, owing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.” Was Ja...

The photograph that she mentions below. My young mouth cannot say my grandfather’s name (Gus, short for August); the closest it can come is Guk. I have been regaled with family stories that when I wanted to find him to sit on his lap, I would say “I want my Guk.” He was a saint, uncanonized by any organized church. Leaving school at six to help support his family, he kept up a reading habit throughout his life, mostly inspirational books. Refusing to be angry with people, when some co-workers try to sabotage a promotion, my grandmother, ever quick to want vindication—if not retribution--wants him to act defensively. He merely says, “They can’t enjoy something they got wrongfully. It will all work out.” Once the young boys next door, their heads full of toy guns and make-believe war, asked him how many people he killed during the war. He replied, “I hope I didn’t kill anyone.” Even at my young age I knew this was the correct answer and was proud of him. He enjoyed ordinary hobbies: pain...