Seeing
a Mother Through Depression
A friend of mine, Peter Trombi, was at UCLA in the middle 70s not long
after I decided to leave my tenured position at Stony Brook for one
more attempt at a marriage with my first wife. She had left me with the
children in New York City to make a further try as a choreographer in
the Los Angeles area.
Southern California was never an appropriate place for me, and it
reminded me of nothing from Buffalo or New York City, and certainly
seemed far away from anyone or anything related to my growing up.
Still, at the beginning, Beverly Hills – just as Rodeo Drive was
wrapping itself in a reputation for glamour, and housing prices had not
yet gone skyward – was seductive. I gave it a shot, and also at
first there were some contacts that helped.
Peter asked me to give a colloquium on a topic he had heard me lecture
on previously, though I guessed the audience at UCLA – with some in
attendence having come over from Cal Tech – had inappropriate
background for it. So, I wasn't surprised, despite trying to keep up my
enthusiasm throughout, the talk wasn't working, When I got to the end,
I expected few of those telling items of a successful talk, questions.
Thankfully, Peter played a role. Starting with the phrase, "Your
handwriting is interesting, " he proceeded with, "Did you grow up in a
convent?"
"No," said I, "But my mother did. Why do you ask?"
Peter, of Catholic background, was perspicacious – certainly a
rare quality in mathematicians, and he had a telling answer. "I've
never seen anyone write their r's like that except those who were
trained by nuns."
Sure enough, Peter had hit upon the source of my poor penmanship –
significant in grade school for those my age, though it disappeared
from the curriculum over 45 years ago – starting from 2nd grade on. I
had completely forgotten that my mother had taught me to write before I
went to school. Those strange r's still punctuated my handwritten
works, just as they did hers.
No one in the middle 70s wrote their papers on a computer, and few
typed them directly. So, when you received communication – say, as I
did then, often from Europe – you could see that different cultures had
decidedly different penmanship. Yet, I had never seen any one else who
used such r's as did I and my mother.
And there were other distinctions, too. My eclectic reading –
again, so different than that of other mathematicians, was certainly
the result of books lying around read by my mother. This gave a jolt to
what was a growing-up half-truth, that my mother had never cared for us
children. She had at one time, and then, upon the death of a fifth
child, just lost any desire to interact with us. Alas, that was much of
my childhood, and awfully close to all of it for my two youngest
siblings.
Still, before alcohol, and her inner battles with her mother took over
completely, there were signs of a person who influenced us, strongly
enough you cannot easily erase its effects to this very day.
Her official obituary appeared as LifeStory&PersonID=99394433 in the Buffalo evening new, the day after she died. It named her (four) children, and her grandchildren (seven total, five of
them my kids), and said nothing else. My brother Robin and Sister Drina did not consult with me on the obituary, though they knew I was available by e-mail in Ontario, Canada – a few hours from Buffalo – when she died.