On the recent trip to visit my 93 year old mom, I asked her, “Let’s make a list of your 10 happiest memories.” She scrunched up her face like I’d informed her of a tooth extraction. I scaled back the question. “How about any 10 good memories, they don’t have to be the best.” She still looks annoyed. “Ok, just tell me one little itty bitty thing that made you happy somewhere along the line.” Her face was less annoyed, but still blank. If you asked me, the things I’ve seen my mom smile about are; her dog(s), pizza, tomato plants.
“I know,” she says as her face comes alive. She refers back to her childhood when they owned a bakery in Brandenburg, Germany. “Most of the (bakers) apprentices used to get whipped with a leather strap if they did something wrong.”
She’s lived through a war and has seen some seriously horrible stuff, it’s given her a macabre frame of reference. I need her to connect those dots for me. “How is that a good memory,” I ask.
“Well,” she paused. “The one apprentice Heinz never got hit. I bet that made him pretty happy.”
“I was looking for something happier than the absence of a beating.”
“How about the reasons why Hitler came into power,” she counter offers.
“No, mom, not a depressing history lesson. You remember the question, right? One happy memory from your life.”
The longer she racks her brain, the more I’m baffled, and kinda sad.
Then she mumbles, “Well, the day you get married and the birth of your kids should be happy days.”
“Were they?”
“Not really.” Never a sugar-coater, that one. Like when I was 3 and she called Santa a pile of nonsense. Or when I was 20 and told her I missed Paul who was going to school a few states away, and her saying to stop my complaining because it’s not like he’s off at war getting his legs blown off or being shipped off to the front to die a miserable death in some trench. Never knew what she was going to say. Still don’t.
As we are sitting there in silence I’m reminded how not everyone strives for happy. This whole notion of the pursuit of happiness is very much an affluent culture’s luxury. Since most of us aren’t struggling for the basics of life, like so many in the world are, we struggle for the elusive happiness. You ask someone what they wish for their kids or what they want out of life and they’ll often answer, “to be happy.” It’s part of our North American culture from our inception, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s one of our top three as a collective people, and it shows. Look at the culture we’ve created, always striving to be pampered and having adventures, anything that will make us feel good.
For my mom, who was deeply shaped by living through WWII in Germany, it’s different for her. Happiness is the absence of the heinous. Full stop. Happy wasn’t on the life radar. She just wanted quiet, uneventful, non-tragic.
Somehow I still can’t let my little exercise go, I need to squeeze a few good memories from her life, like water from a boulder. And I find these tiny, rare, little morsels of light and goodness by asking her to focus on food. That got her started. These are all childhood memories in Germany except for the last.
- Brandenburg. Making cookies with cookie cutter at Christmas on the weekends when the bakers weren’t using the ovens.
- Getting treated to an ice cream cone from the (actual) ice box in their bakery store.
- In college, walking 6 miles with her friends to an apple tree a farmer had designated for the students. Apples were a rare treat during food rations during the war.
- When one of the ministers told the students they could go and eat anything they wanted out of his garden except for the hazelnuts.
- In the Spring her parents would put the mini kitchen away so that at Christmas they would bring it out again as a present. They would often have a new doll dish in the kitchen.
- When her Bavarian grandma would sent a package. Once my mom got six books in one package.
- When she could play the organ in a church in Brandenburg.
- When as part of the Christian Union Federation of Students, they went around Wurzburg singing hymns.
- After immigrating to the States, she liked how there was freedom of speech without going to jail or disappearing.
- She also liked how much food there was here.
Whew, we did it and she eeked out ten. I do my best to add to her tiny trove of happy memories. This trip we planted tomatoes in her garden, put her dog at her feet, and pizza in her mouth. Look at this extremely rare smile. Now that, makes me incredibly happy.
