MOM, 1938

This framed picture sits atop my desk at my San Gabriel apartment.  My printer is there to the left.  But the first time that I'd ever seen this photo of Mom was at her mother's apartment on Detroit Street in Denver way back in 1969.  Grammie used to live in a basement apartment at 1620 Detroit Street.  

Will never forget our last visit to see Grammie in 1967 or 1971 on Detroit Street in Denver.  We entered the building, no security in those days, stepped down one floor to the basement, turned the corner and made our way to the boiler, the machinery matrix of pipes that wrapped around a tank yet heated the entire building quite effectively.  

Standing between her door and the boiler, Dad knocked on her door.  He knocked, she answered, and we stepped into her space, her one-room flat.  I immediately was absorbed by such a place.  Pa's apartment in Temple City was on the second floor, airy, sunny, comfortable.  Grammie's subterranean unit had windows high on the wall that looked out onto the sidewalk where you had to raise up on your tiptoes just to look out onto the street.  Treetops and the heavens were out of view.   Fascinating but also degrading and pitiful.  Reminds me of how Mom was mesmerized by the view from her front window of the sunlight shining on the San Gabriel Foothills in Duarte.  Something about Denver made her life in Duarte feel like she was living in paradise.  

I tried to make sense of her sofa, a table, and furnishings as Dad and Grammie stepped into her kitchen and out of our view.  I scanned her place.  The windows were at the top of the wall in her basement studio.  She had a kitchen, a living room, and one bedroom.  Her means were survival level.  Growing up under parents who survived the 1930's Depression and its survival mindset, the war, and the war chest that came with it meant that you were sentenced to a spartan existence.  

We were always on Depression era measurements of wealth and well-being.  Back in the 1960s, our Aunt Helen would visit occasionally but always stepped into our Duarte home with a single loaf of bread tucked in the crook of her arm.  A loaf of bread.  The gesture was symbolic of abundance, sharing, and that your host might never know hunger.  During the Depression, food often meant "May your table always be full."  And will never forget the last year that Grammie visited us in Duarte.  All the adults were out of the house except for Grammie.  It was lunch, the sunlight beautifully warming us.  Grammie reached for an item from the refrigerator that she thought would satisfy us: Farmer John's "Eastern" pork sausage.  That'd do the trick.  So she spent a few minutes turning the sausage in the skillet and served it to us.  She ordered us to "sit down," which we did.  And she served us.  The white Corelle plates held three burnt sausage links.  I studied it a second or two before realizing, "Wow, we really are poor."  Grammie may have considered meat of any kind a symbol of wealth.  One man's treasure is another man's . . . 

Returning to Grammie's man cave, I saw a few framed photos on a corner console, nothing high-Victorian or that fancy; probably closer to this William & Mary table.  

From the center of the room near her sofa, I could see the framed pictures in the distance but not the subjects.  So I stepped closer, slowly to the pics and I began to make out the eyes and the smile of some one very familiar and realized that one photo was of my mother as a young woman.  [See that photo above.]  I'd never seen pictures of my mother as a young woman, but only as mother to me and my siblings.  I could not believe how beautiful she was.  I was never more proud of her.  I loved the photo so much.

Will never forget a few details of Grammie's studio apartment.  I remember her Bakelite 500 rotary phone [still cheaper than an iPhone] on the stand next to her sofa.  I picked the phone up off the receiver and examined the 1940s phone.  I started toward the kitchen area, but then Dad and Grammie were making their way back out to the front room and so I gave up that excursion.

The framed picture below of Mom is dated 1938.