As a ten year old, my best friend Missy’s mother was just so, well, tall. She was tall and comforting in the way that you would appreciate a red wood - there for a long time, showing the world where she stood in a strong, quiet, admirable way. She also knitted and wore glasses. And taught five year olds. Not liking to even babysit, I could not imagine what would possess someone to teach five year olds, but that is what she did. And she liked them. They liked her.
We liked her because she was Missy’s mom. She sort of passed by us as we sat all over the house, playing with our Barbie dolls, endlessly dressing them for different major social events of which we had absolutely no knowledge or reference points at all. Evening gowns with mink stoles were regular style choices, as I recall. Mrs. Boland never commented on our outfits. She would occasionally knit an outfit for Barbie.
For a break from our wardrobe work, Missy and I would then go and utterly mess up her mother’s perfectly clean kitchen. We would make this appalling “treat” of Wonder Bread, layered with thick butter (certainly margarine) and then ladle sugar all over the bread. I recall we ate this gourmet delight cold, but I could be wrong. Still, warm does not sound better. Her mother would pass by, and just smile and nod. She never was annoyed that grains of sugar, like sand, crunched under her feet or dusted her counter. Her nature always seemed to be like the Regal Redwood—tall, strong, always there, dependable, forever. But just like the Redwood forest, it would be decades before I found out the things she had seen and done, what had passed before her, but mostly what she had done as a young Redwood.
Despite having two families, I found myself at Thanksgiving a year ago, divorced, with nowhere to go. I had two children, but they preferred to be with their father. I had a mother and brother, but they had left town without telling me. To my rescue came Missy and her family, with a welcome invitation for Thanksgiving dinner with one of Missy’s twin daughters, Charlie, Missy’s husband, and Missy’s mom, who by now was over ninety. But you could not tell. Her hair was still glossy brown, lustrous, full, and swept back in an elegant but understated way, just like it always had been. Whenever my children and I had popped in, I had a sense that I had walked into “Goodnight, Moon”, which was like coming home. Things did not change much at their house, which was part of the charm.
I offered to bring something and I brought Brussels sprouts from the best Brussels sprout maker in New York. It would turn out that both Missy and her mother despised them. Still, hoping to convert them to “the real thing” I told them, like you do a toddler, they had to take a “no thank you” bite.
Mrs. Boland, wrinkled her nose, and in went the smallest bite, which made her nose wrinkle more. She also had a very deep voice, reminiscent of Lauren Bacall. With her characteristic resonance, she looked at me and said “Alright. I did it and no thank you.” With that, her oxygen tank heaved a sigh. She had been hooked up to it for such a long time, but wore it well, as well as Barbie’s wore their outfits, when you think of plastic meeting something pliable. I don’t ever recall her smoking, but that seemed to be the disease with which she had lived, steadily and happily even, for twenty years. Like a Redwood, unbending and uncomplaining. Just settling her unseen roots in the depths of the earth, as she always had.
As dinner unfolded, the very snowy weather became the topic, and in her Bacall voice she talked about how she loved to ski and wished she still could. I thought I had misheard. Here I was, decades later, looking at this lovely kindergarten teacher, who I had never even seen ride a bike, mention that she would like to ski.
