The following love story is true.
This is a transcribed and edited version of a story I first told at the FLAME story event in Kyoto.
You can view the video of the live presentation at:<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bgetD8QSHs >
A LOVE STORY
I wasn’t yet five years old when my Mother and father separated. After that, our nuclear family was my Mother, elder brother, sister, and myself.
We were the four that celebrated birthdays together and decorated the Christmas tree together. And we were the four that shared meals around our tiny kitchen table.
My favorite meal was Sunday breakfast. In those years, the word brunch had yet to make its way across the borders into the Bronx. We didn’t have crepes nor chilled fruit cups, and we had never heard of Eggs Benedict…who was he anyway. But we did have warm crumb buns and jelly donuts from the German bakery down the street; we had my Mother’s ten-cup percolator pot on the stove filling the kitchen with the comforting smell of freshly brewed coffee. And most importantly, we had each other.
During these long, lazy breakfasts, we would ask our Mother to tell us stories about the “Olden Days.” To qualify as the olden day story, it had to be about something that happened during those sepia years before we kids were born. My Mother always obliged. She told the same stories again and again, and we never got tired of them.
The goat cart circa 1920
There was the story of the goat that mom and her brothers and sister would hitch to a cart and ride around the garden. (a goat in the Bronx…unimaginable.) She also told us of the country cousins who slaughtered and salted a pig one year and sent it down to the city kin in a barrel as a holiday gift. My Mother grimaced when she recalled her father prying open the barrel and seeing the pig’s head staring up at her. She told us that at sixteen and a half, she had to leave high school and work to help support the family during the Depression, and that was when she Anglicized her name from Elvira Ciaramella to the less ethnically identifiable Vera Carmel to avoid the prejudice that Italian Americans experienced in those years. And she told us about Mike.
Mike was my Mother’s boyfriend. But, of course, I never met Mike; I never saw his photograph. I don’t even know his last name. But when mom spoke about him, her eyes became distant, and her voice soft and whimsical, but at the end of every story, her voice trailed off into somber hollow tones of what-might-have-been.
Mike taught my mom to fly in a plane similar to this.
Mike flew an airplane. He taught my Mother the basics of piloting. They went horseback riding, on picnics, and laughed about most everything. My Mother was in love with Mike, and Mike was in love with my Mother enough to propose marriage.
Mom in her horseback riding clothes posing with her Dad. Circa 1937
My Mother asked for her parent’s blessing – they said “no.”
They said no for one simple reason. You won’t like it, you won’t agree, but you will probably understand. My Mother was – as I said – Italian, but more to the point, she was Roman Catholic, and Mike was a Jew; end of conversation, case closed. Marrying outside the religion in 1937 was almost unheard of. So my Mother had to say goodbye to Mike.
If you have ever said goodbye to someone you love, you know how difficult it was for her. She gave few details, but it certainly was a tearful time. Mom did tell us about the last time they met. They went for a drive. Behind the wheel, Mike was silent. Finally, my Mother asked, “Where are we going?” Mike’s answer was flat, “We’re going to elope.”
Mike’s car 1937 Ford
My Mother, barely twenty-one years old, the youngest of seven siblings, could not defy a strict sister, five brothers, and a very domineering mother. “Mike,” she said, “Turn the car around.” Mike refused, saying, “I love you, and you love me; we belong together.” They argued, my Mother grew hysterical and finally took hold of the door handle, “If you don’t turn the car around now,” she said, “I’ll jump!”
Listening to this as a kid, I was amazed. Galloping horses, flying airplanes, and now speeding cars… super cool, Mommy!
I embellished this story so that Mom was not sitting in the car. Instead, she was standing on the running board of a canary yellow Duesenberg, with her arm locked around the window post, her hair and scarf blowing in the wind while screaming her protests over the roaring engine.
Canary Yellow Duesenberg
Ultimately, Mike turned the Ford coupe around and brought Vera home, and that was the end of that. This incident took place in about 1937.
In 1994, my wife, our daughter, and our son visited the U.S. On the second evening, my sister mentioned that our grown children were going out and suggested the three of us – my sister, my Mother, and I stay home and chat. My brother had passed away some years before, so we three were what remained of the original four of four. I whipped up a pitcher of margaritas, we sat and sipped and reminisced about the “olden days.”
Since the generation train had moved down the track quite a way, my and my sister’s childhood stories now qualified as olden-day stories. The talk came easy. We were gliding wingtip to wingtip over a familiar landscape. We knew every detail of the terrain. We floated on warm currents. We rode the cold down drafts with rushes of laughter and some tears and, together, knew when to turn under the silent, healing sunshine. That is the sumptuousness and simplicity of family.
I asked my Mother, “Do you ever wonder what became of Mike?” My sudden question surprised even me. But Mike was, in a very real way, part of our family. Unflustered, my Mother gave us Mike’s thirty-second mini-bio. “After the war, Mike married and had two sons. He started an airfreight company, had six planes, and did quite well for himself. Now he is retired and lives in Westchester County.”
I was stunned, “You know where Mike is?
”
“Well,” she said, “You know … you have mutual friends, and you hear little bits and pieces about people.”
And then Mommy, who was well into her seventies, dropped a Mommy Bomb. She casually said, “Sometimes I call Mike.”
KABOOM.
Before I could recover from that shock, she dropped a second bomb,” I called him six months ago.”
KABLAM.
I was stunned, “You called Mike! God, what did you say?”
And here Mom’s eyes glazed, and her voice went soft, and she quietly said, “Oh, I didn’t say anything ––– I never say anything ––– I just wanted to hear his voice.”
It was a while before the silence broke, “Did he say anything?” I asked.
“He said hello; I pressed the phone to my ear and listened. For a while, I held him there. I knew where he was and what he was doing. And after a long silence, he said, “Vera….is that you?
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