I remember

A week ago, death lifted its bony finger and placed it squarely on my mother’s forehead. After I got the news, sketchy as the details were, I did what I do best: I found a project that would require enough mental concentration that I wouldn’t have to play the inevitable video in my mind. When someone dies, we remember the good and are prone to overlook everything else. My thoughts, to be honest, were running as randomly as a Vegas card shuffler. But that’s what love is. If we are honest with ourselves, we can comingle the good with the not-so-good and still feel we have something rarified in the end.

My mother had always been my best friend, and I had nothing but admiration for her. She was Russian and survived the ravages of a world war and internment in a concentration camp in Germany. Once she dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, but dreams and nations were shattered by the time World War II ended. A tenuous relationship with my dad was born in broken German, and she eventually made her way to the United States as a displaced person and war bride.

The war had ripped her from her own family. Years later, she would find out that many of her sisters and brothers had been killed in one of Mosow’s most serious rail accidents. She would eventually be reunited via telephone and letter with her youngest sister, whom she had helped raise. Ludmila was the spitting image of my mother when she was younger.

Mom was always such a combination of old world and brave new world. She had a real knack for reinventing herself, and sometimes I wish I had a magical spoonful of her talent. As a teenager, she used to pester me about wearing lipstick, as in “Why aren’t you wearing any?” Lipstick was the tool of trade and status symbol for post-war femme fatales, signifying something I could never quite grasp. Personally, I gravitated toward lip gloss, something mom felt was a waste of time.

Then there was the emerging American pastime: shopping. It was actually the excuse she used to work her way toward forbidden fruit. And that was going to McDonald’s – which hadn’t even sold a million burgers at that time – and buying an order of French fries. Mom was a frenchfryaholic and didn’t care who knew it. It was her first distinctly American vice.

I also recall her first motherly advice to me: “A woman of mystery never reveals her secrets.”

If you know anyone who’s Russian, you know that story telling and a proclivity for drama are in their DNA. With a country as large as the former Soviet Union, you can’t help but getting swept up on the tumultuous landscape. After all, this is the geography that brought you Doctor Zhivago and Sputnik. Mom was raised on a collective farm, and I recall her telling me about the day she brought home a wolf cub which she thought had been abandoned. My grandmother, who by my mom’s accounts was a tall stern woman who didn’t mess around, gave mom one of her first lessons in wildlife management and probably a good thump on the head. It is common practice for wild moms to leave their young at a little distance as a way to teach them how to survive.

Mom told me the story of this daring animal rescue and eventual return with a straight face. She used to play poker with the boys, and had one of the best poker faces around. Upon seeing me squint my eyes or roll in disbelief at this or some other story, her response was always the same: “No, it’s true,” she would insist. What I could never really figure out, however, was whether the wolf was really at the door, or whether the moral of the story (mama wolf has eyes in the back of her head and knows where you live and every move you make) was really the aim of the tale.

Mom could charm the pants off everyone she met. Part of it was, undoubtedly, her melodious Russian accent. Hearing her speak was like listening to rain and smelling the ozone, and it had a way of lulling you into submission. Despite the fact that English was her second language, she commanded word and phrase as a sovereign commands its subjects: from on high and with great purpose. Sometimes she spoke each word with its full intention, rolling out the syllables like notes in a song and pausing between the words to reinforce everything that stayed unspoken. She knew what she was doing.

One of the few words she could never master was “magpie.” We have loads of the birds here in my mountain perch, with magpies and ravens taking charge of the avian landscape. The first time my mother ever saw a magpie was in my yard, she innocently asked what the hell that bird was. I told she, and she began to vocalize the word. But her face began to contort. Turning her head sideways didn’t help string the consonants and vowels together. The word that came out was something of a gurgle based upon a groan with a dash of giggle thrown in for good measure. As a kid, I recall my dad lovingly torturing her with the word “vivisection,” another tang-tungler. Roughly translated from European roots, the letter “v” is vocalized as a “w,” giving us all a good laugh. But like any good promoter, however, mom knew how to use that linguistic slip to her advantage. I secretly suspected she could pronounce the word just fine.

She’s the only person I know who turned eating limburger into an event. She would announce her intention to ritually consume the odiferous cheese a half a day ahead of time to give the rest of us time to scurry out of Dodge.

Our return revenge was root beer floats. She hated root beer.