Barbara didrichsen
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A Leap of Faith

5/28/2016

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My son in Phuket, Thailand, over the December holidays when he and his dad came to China to visit me

It was finally time to board the plane that was taking me far away from my family for the next six months. Time for that last kiss with my husband, one more chance to hold 9-year old Jamie in my arms and try to remember the smell and feel of him that would have to last me for two months.
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At that moment it got real for him and he began sobbing, “Mommy, don’t go!” My husband extricated him from my arms, but he kept trying to cling on to me. The last sight I had was of the two of them watching me walk down the ramp into the plane, his face contorted and red, crying “Mommy, don’t go!”
 
I sat down in my seat and completely lost it. Nose running…deep gasps as I tried to stifle the sobs that would not be contained.
 
A kindly flight attendant came over to me.  She knelt beside me and, holding my hand, said, “That broke all of our hearts. I just went out to check on your little boy and I thought you’d want to know that he’s doing fine now. He and his daddy are standing at the window trying to pick out your seat and talking about where you’re going and when they’ll see you again. He’s going to be OK. ”
 
It remains one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. Smiling through my tears, tightly grasping her hand, I began to breathe again. The wracking sobs finally subsided.
 
And then I buckled up and got ready to begin this new adventure on the other side of the world.
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The worst daughter in the world

5/16/2016

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It took my mother's death for me to acknowledge the truth others could see so clearly and I only grudgingly: my mother was an extraordinary woman.

I knew my  mother as a daughter, but it has not been until this long period of sorting through her belongings, writings, pictures, letters and detritus that I have come to know her as a person, not defined by our relationship. And that breaks my heart.

It's not that she tried to hide herself from me, but more because I wasn't really interested. We had a complicated relationship and very different temperaments. For too much of my adult life, I felt impatient with her, and even in the final days of her life allowed that frustration to show.

Does that mean she'd agree I was a terrible daughter? Not at all; my mother loved me, and I loved her. As a mother myself, I know there's nothing my son could do to that would make me stop loving him. I also know that I was a more patient and loving daughter in the last decade or more of my mother's life than I was before -- and I'm certain she felt that, too.

Still, I wish I'd done more. I wish I'd spent more time with her, going through the cluttered rooms of her condo and trying to sort through all these things while they could have spurred conversations between us. I say that knowing that she really didn't want my help with this; she turned down every attempt I made to order the mess before it was too late. But still...

I start this as a project, a place to absorb the memories that arise as I polish silver, filter through photographs, and figure out what to keep and what to toss. Part memoir, part chronicle of my mother's life, I'm not sure what I'm getting into. A place to capture my feelings and a place to write -- something my  mother deeply appreciated in me, and something else I didn't give enough of to her.​
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A place to work through my grief. 

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This Old Piano

5/3/2016

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My mother was groomed to be a singer from early childhood. She first appeared on the radio at age three, graduated from high school just before she turned 16, and was off to the University of Texas in Austin the autumn of 1943 to study voice.

​The summer after her college graduation, her voice teacher sent her to Denver, where he hoped the drier climate would help tame her asthma before her audition with the NY Metropolitan Opera. Instead, she met my dad in the payroll line at the department store where they both worked, waiting to cash their paychecks. By the time her audition came around, she was engaged and planning a very different life than the one her mother set out for her. 

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Yet music remained a huge part of her life. As a young bride, her pride and joy was this piano. I’m not sure how she managed to buy it; in the early days of her marriage, she worked as a teacher while my dad finished college on the G.I. Bill at the University of Denver. After graduation, with jobs scarce in Denver and parental disapproval over the marriage still simmering in Houston, my parents relocated to Cincinnati, where my dad’s brother and his family lived.

My dad eventually got a job at Procter & Gamble, with an annual salary of $2,000. My mother worked, too, as an editor for the employee magazine of the Fernald Nuclear facility outside Hamilton, Ohio. Her letters home are full of the challenges of managing a household on so little money, and hopes of a raise or a new job for my dad that would boost their income.

She must have pinched pennies to buy the piano, which happened sometime before my birth in 1954. I think her father may have helped; I have a letter from my mother to him with the picture above, dated February 1953, as if to day, “See, Daddy? I’ve not given up my dreams, not entirely.”


And she didn’t. My mother always kept music alive in our house. She sang in the choirs of the churches we attended, performed in musical theater productions all over town, and taught the basics of manners and decency to her kindergarten students through music.  

This was the piano that accompanied my mother as she warmed up her voice with vocalization exercises. She banged out chords while she sang, ever higher (and louder), “Mee-ee—MAY-eee-meee. Mee-ee-MAY-ee-me,” rudely awakening me when I would have rather slept in on Sunday mornings. It’s the piano I played “Autumn Leaves” on, over and over, until my brother and sister would scream, and worked out the complexities of Chopin’s Etude in E-Major, a beautiful piece my mother had selected for her wedding.

I hit my head on this piano bench at age 4. My parents allowed me to stay up late for a grown-up party in our Westwood apartment to serve cookies. I spilled a few and as I bent down to pick them up, one of the adults, who was using the stool as a table, pushed it out to get up. I got a nasty cut on my forehead, and the party ended so my parents could take me to the hospital for stitches. I can still remember my daddy telling me that if I didn’t cry, they’d buy me a chocolate ice cream cone on the way home. That’s all it took: I was stoic, earning praise from both the doctor and my parents (and the promised chocolate cone).

This piano nurtured the budding compositions of my brother, who went on to become a talented songwriter and librettist, winning a Jonathan Larson award for his work on a musical that has not yet been produced. He then became a teacher himself, who – like our mother – uses the arts to help design curriculum for 4th graders in NYC.  

It also nurtured the talents of my sister, another accomplished NYC musician and singer. She makes her living singing her own and others’ songs, and has performed with a number of famous musicians, past and present – people like Wilson Pickett, Jennifer Hudson and Spyro Gyra.

My mother died last November, unexpectedly and far from home. I wasn’t prepared for dealing with the disposal of the many treasured possessions that document her life – and my own. I scan old photos, read old letters, and wish she were here so we could talk about them. I wasn’t ready to lose her. No child ever is, even those who live to become grandmothers themselves, like me.

This old piano bears the scars of the rambunctious household it was such a big part of. Giving it away is hard, but as I sift through everything left behind, I know it’s time that it go out into the world to make new memories. And I know my mother would be thrilled that it will have a new life teaching children to find meaning in music.
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The Didrichsen family dedicates this piano in loving memory of Anne Elkins Didrichsen. May it help spread the joy she found in music to all who play or listen to it.

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    I was a writer searching for an organizing theme. Then my mother died.

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