With Mother’s Day around the corner, I’ll write about a great lady, my mother, Frieda, who contributed one of my first two names.  She was the eldest daughter of the Swiss watch manufacturer, Alfred Kurth, a jovial grandfather who sent her to London, England, to learn English for his business.  English was becoming the international language, and when she had me after her marriage to Emil, she taught me English.  It was lonely.  I could only talk with my mother, so when I got out into the several acres of garden to play with my cousins, I learned the Swiss dialect quickly.

She had three boys for my father.  (He came back to Switzerland for visits from the U.S.)  She took care of her ailing mother before launching, with three young boys, the youngest a toddler, across occupied France to Lisbon, where she barely got aboard one of the last, in 1942, ships to the U.S. with U-boats rampant.

She was a literate personality and saw to it that I got plenty of books.  She worked part time in my father’s office in the Empire State Building.  She enjoyed the women’s club in one of the Strathmores in Manhasset, but lost a good friend when we moved up to the Vanderbilt section.  She took it sadly, but was always willing to accept human peculiarities.

She suffered eight years from Altzheimer’s disease.  I visited her daily after school, but she didn’t recognize me.  I know there’s a cozy spot by a large bay window in heaven for her, with a view of the Alps.

The filigree spring leaf of the mighty oak, so tender and fragile, makes you wonder if you, too, can rally your thoughts so you can help a sensitive woman.  I don’t mean the spawn of feminism, I mean a real woman.

In the world I know there is none more powerful than the Mother of God.  Yet according to the biblical record, the most forward thing she did was hint to Jesus that “They have no wine.”  You’d never want to crush a flower like that.

But she has the word, and the Word is what came to free us from bad habits, from unfaithfulness, from a faux pas, from a glitch, from a mistake that would sink us forever in the never-found waters of infinity.  Oh, for a woman with intelligence and connections like that, and the sensitivity of the oak leaf in mid-spring.

Every day we see protesters, some peaceful, some wild.  The TV News has videos of them marching and shouting.

Granted we are going through difficult times now.  We are going through this somewhat deservedly as a people, (like the people who are not reading this) and we must work towards being a great people.   Petty criminals have made the police look bad, an ironic situation we must stop.

How do we do that?  By not becoming a petty criminal to begin with.  And if arrested, not acting crazy the way some of them do.  It’s time to wake up to the fact that laws are not made to satisfy protesters – if you have time to protest, what are your dependents doing?  And what sort of man has no dependents?

The  Nobility of Poverty

There was a time in my life where I was an omnivorous reader.  I read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney.  I must have been about ten or twelve years old, and it was not my regular fare, like Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle, or Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  But Margaret Sidney had a style that made me wish to be poor like the children in the story.

When I told this to my mother, she must have looked at me and written it off as a childish fantasy.  It wasn’t like St. Francis did with the creche, made children appreciate poverty.  Margaret Sidney saw the romance of poverty, the nobility of it, what Christ did by example.

I thank God for those lessons, for not all of my friends grew up in abundance.  They had tough childhoods, and Margaret Sidney made me appreciate the variety of backgrounds of people I know.  Now a parsimonious childhood is no longer romantic.

We are living in times so difficult that my wife, who is predominantly practical, said the other day, “It must be the end times.”  Well, I agree with her.  But I knew now was the time to look at the bright side.  We had just passed beds of tulips (these bulbous perennials have never been as bright as this year) and she said what she never says, “Let’s eat lunch at Ben’s, there behind the tulips.”

Seating was at every other table, a pandemic precaution, but we were seated right away.  It’s a Jewish restaurant, but the head waiter was Asian, the waitress Hispanic, and the bus girl Hispanic, too.  We felt right a home on Long Island.  My betrothed ordered chicken soup with carrots and a big matzo ball in the middle, and a seven-layer cake with a Coke, her favorite.  I ordered a hot pastrami sandwich and a Sprite drink.  We don’t really overdo it.

It might be the end times, but we know how to keep depression away.  The bill was only forty dollars, and we got home safely, despite nice-day pandemic traffic.