On My Mother's Side

Disclaimer:  My facts are iffy at best, but in this case it's the sentiment that counts.

I never knew my mom's grandmother.  Fanny Goldstein came to America from what her daughter would later describe to me as either Poland or Russia.  My mother said, "Bubby used to say 'some days Poland - some days Russia.  It doesn't matter, they all hated the Jews.'" Like the changeable weather in New England, land possession wasn't a stable thing.  This is the stuff that Fiddler on the Roof is about.  The villages her family  - my family - came from were subject to Czarist pogroms and are part of the long story of the Jewish diaspora.  Fanny came - by herself - to America as a teenager, one among millions who arrived by crowded ships at Ellis Island.

Fanny moved to where people spoke her language, Yiddish. For her that meant Brooklyn.  Sometime in the late 1910s, she met and later married Samuel Goldstein, another first generation immigrant Ashkenazi Jew  (and as wasn't uncommon then, he was also her cousin). The two would have several children, but only three daughters survived infancy:  Martha, Nettie and Mildred.   Mildred was called "Mashie" and she later decided to change her name to Marcia.   Marcia would become my grandmother.  I've heard many stories celebrating Fanny; nearly all of them come from my mom.  My mother called her Bubby, the traditional Yiddish name used for grandmother.  As happens as generations come and go, traditions fade.  For whatever reason, I never called my grandmother, Bubby.  I called her Grandma.  My sister's kids knew her as GiGi  - for great grandma.

(Left to right:  Cyd Weldon, Marcia Weldon, Susan Weldon)

Today, June 2nd, would have been Marcia's 89th birthday had she not died somewhat suddenly a few years ago, in 2007.  It's only as I've grown older and more contemplative that I've begun to consider the complexities of a person's life.  Long before I gave thought to the variegated lives of my older relatives, they were simply these loving people that swept into my life for weekends or perhaps a few weeks at a time at somewhat regular intervals. (Much the way I now drop in on the lives of my young nephew, cousin, and/or nieces.)  They were there to entertain me.  They took me to Disney World, the zoo, and the beach.  They had no depth of character for I had little ability to discern any.  I didn't give a moment's thought about how they came to be who they were.  Hell, I didn't even really know what kind of people they were other than they seemed to love me an awful lot.  Back then that was enough.  Now, however, I like to imagine them in full, have to imagine it for the truth is now buried and colored by time.  After all,  how they got to where they were literally precipitated me.  We all like good stories and our presence alone signifies a pretty unique and sometimes compelling set of what some call coincidences.

My grandmother was born in Brooklyn in 1921.  Though I don't remember her ever telling me much about her parents,  I sensed how she felt about them.  She loved them.  It might be fair to say she adored them.  My grandmother didn't tend to elaborate when answering questions.  As an early teen on a summer stay in Florida, I might have sat at the white linoleum veneer kitchen table, a bialy with cream cheese in front of me, and asked her about her parents. As I recall it, she held special praise for her dad.  "He was a wonderful man," she might have said and left it at that.  Now that I think about it, the manner in which she spoke of him is the same as my mom does.  I don't know enough about him, but wish he'd kept a journal that I could devour now that I'm ready for it.  And from the way all that knew her speak of her, it's beyond apparent that Bubby was as beloved as one could be.

(bialys)

Marcia Goldstein met my grandfather, Hyman Weldon, sometime around 1940 or '41 when they both were in different Brooklyn high schools.  Hyman was dating a girl named Bertha and Marcia a boy named Harold.  In the end, Harold and Bertha became a couple and luckily for me Hy and Marcia did, too.

The Weldons tend to dominate my mother's side of the family story  - and to be sure there is ample reason.  My grandfather, the late Hy Weldon came from fertile parents and was the youngest of 9 children, and the youngest of the 7 Weldon brothers (The others:  Ruby, Nathan, Harry, Frank, Martin, and Morris.)  Hy's parents, William and Sarah Weldowsky (that's the best guess at what their last name was before it was changed to Weldon), were Ashkenazi, too; they also emigrated to Brooklyn and it was there that Hyman and Marcia fell in love and were married.  There are a few old photos that my mom and aunt have of them in their courting days.  They always looked so young, so thin, and so happy.  Things were simpler for them then.  They hadn't had children yet and the first order of business for Hy was finding a place for him and Marcia to live so that they didn't have to stay under his in-laws' roof and sleep in the same bed with her sister.

The Weldowskys and the Goldsteins were poor - hard working but poor.  I later heard my grandfather describe it something like this, "Sure we were poor, but everyone was poor so you didn't really notice or pay attention."  He paid attention to Marcia and in 1942 they were married.  My mother was born in April of 1943, my Uncle Norman in July 1946, and my Aunt Cyd (she legally changed her name from her given Cindy, which she never felt suited her) in April of 1953.

(Hyman and Marcia Weldon)

These were some heady times.  My grandfather was medically ineligible to serve during WWII.  I seem to recall it was flat feet (or was that from a movie?).  It could have been his colored blindness - he and at least two of his brothers were colorblind.  Hy worked and Marcia was a homemaker.  My grandfather had many odd jobs in his youth, but eventually found a profession that sustained him and his family for a lifetime.  He was a paper hanger.  In August of 1953, he moved his family from Brooklyn to what Wikipedia considers the "father of the modern suburbia," Levittown, Long Island.


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My mother is an Aries, a fire sign.  It is fair to say that she might not have been an easy teen to govern.  My uncle, as I understand it, endured great teen hardships to live up to his father's high expectations for him, his only son.  And my aunt was the youngest, the baby.  Ten years my mother's junior, Cindy wasn't even 10 before her older sister moved out.  Uncle Norman joined the United States Coast Guard after he graduated high school and then slowly but surely drifted away from his parents and his siblings.

I've only a handful of remembrances of Uncle Norman.  I last saw him about seven years ago when I was living in Southern California.  He was - and maybe still is - living in La Brea.  We met in Long Beach and drove together to LA for a Dodger game.  My uncle loved the Brooklyn Dodgers as a kid and it was a long held family myth that he moved to LA shortly after the Dodgers did to be closer to them.

(1955 Brooklyn Dodgers)

When I was at the Dodger game with him, I gently probed about what it was like to grow up in that house, the Weldon house.  He didn't reveal much, was consciously vague about those years.  When he told me that he was fairly certain he wouldn't be seeing his mother before she died, I let that thought linger and then we watched the rest of the game.  Sadly, his instincts proved correct.  Though they had communicated regularly, if but infrequently by telephone, Norman did not travel east either before or after his mother passed away.

The lion's share of my limited knowledge about the Weldon years in Levittown come from my mom and my aunt.  Ten years apart they had appropriately different slants on it.  My aunt remembers a house more removed of her siblings while my mother recalls the one filled with them.  My mom was  (and still is) - an ahead of the curve kind of woman.  Innately and instinctively, she sniffed out prejudice and iniquity.  She cared and cares little for any kind of discrimination or abuse.  She is not one to conform for conformity's sake.  I think it fair to say that she questioned authority and there's no reason to suspect that parental authority was any different than any other.  When she got pregnant and married her first husband in 1964 she certainly knew that marrying a black man in the early 60s was unusual and controversial.  While today most of us give little thought to interracial couples, back then a lot of people did.  Including one Hyman Weldon.   My grandfather essentially disowned my mother.  The reasons are far too unknown to me to do justice to the circumstances by speculating further.

In 1964, Marcia Weldon would have been 43 years old.  This was a woman I'd never met, never knew.  I wouldn't know her, really know her for twenty more years.  In 1964 Marcia's oldest daughter was ostracized, her son was soon to leave the nest after what I have been told were some tumultuous teen years and Cindy was just 11, what we'd call a tween today!  My grandmother must have had a lot on her mind.  Though Hy was the master of the house, Marcia had her ways of working behind the scenes.  I am told that she often spoke with the wives of her husband's many brothers to smooth over what have been described as many family squabbles.  And when Marcia's oldest daughter was living in Manhattan with her newborn daughter - Marcia's one and only grandchild, she was going to be damned if she wasn't going to see them.  My aunt tells of traveling from Levittown to Riverside Drive on the upper west side of Manhattan to visit her sister and niece.  My mother shared the apartment with three other young women with whose help she tended to the colicky infant .  My mom's husband, Tony, was in the army and stationed elsewhere, thus leaving my mom much to her own devices.

Sometime after that visit, Marcia must have made her one and only marital ultimatum.  One day, sometime around my sister's first birthday, Hy and Marcia drove to Manhattan.  My grandfather entered the apartment crisply, as I imagine it.  He asked to know in which room he could find the baby.  Getting his answer, he walked to the room.  My mother and grandmother waited in the hall for about ten minutes.  Finally he came into the hallway with Elise in his arms and said "Pack.  I'll wait in the car with the baby" They complied and packed Elise's things into the car and brought her back to Levittown.  For several months, maybe as much as a year, Elise lived with Cyd, Hy, Marcia and Fanny.  My mother worked in Manhattan and made the trek to Long Island often.

(From left to right:  my sister Elise, my mother Susan, my grandmother Marcia and my great grandmother, Fanny.)

My grandmother made that happen.  It wasn't something that she wanted to talk about.  My grandfather certainly didn't want to discuss it.  It happened and as far as they were concerned it was history.  My mother wasn't as inclined to gloss it over.  It took them years to figure out how to be together and not have that sad part of their mutual history, my grandfather's casting my mom out - hanging in the air like pungent cigar smoke. I am certain had my grandmother not orchestrated that maneuver those many years ago, I would never experienced the loving relationship with my grandparents that I did.

When I was still a toddler, my grandparents made a familiar shift to Weldons -  moving from New York to South Florida.  By the time I began to have my own memories of my grandparents, they were well ensconced in Pembroke Pines.  While they were still able to brave the effort, they made trips north to see us upon occasion, but mostly it's my trips to their retirement condo complex (complete with par 3 golf that wove between the buildings) that I recall more vividly.

The late 60s were a tumultuous time.  Things were changing rapidly and so, too, did they for my mother.  She and Tony split up.  Shortly afterward she met a charming young academic at the wedding of a mutual friend.  She said, "Don't marry me Kenneth, I'm a lousy housekeeper."  But Ken Ring is nothing if not a romantic, rarely heeding better judgement in matters of the heart.  Ken was a recently divorced single father - and primary caretaker - of his daughter, Kathryn.  As Susan made regular visits from New York to Connecticut, the two young girls became loving playmates and then sisters when Ken and Susan were married in 1969.  I was born in December of that year.  I like to think of myself as 'the missing link.," the genetic glue of our family.  But back to those Weldons....

When we were old enough to travel alone, my two sisters and I went to see our grandparents in Florida, but as my sisters - both several years older than me - began to have other summer plans, I made the two week sojourn alone.  Truth be told, I liked having my grandparents all to myself.  My grandfather would show me his closets full of camera equipment, he'd take me to the billiard room or occasionally to one of his job sites.  Later at night I'd lie in their bed falling asleep to Johnny Carson until they'd kick me out to the pull out couch (a Castro Convertible) in the den.  In the morning, after bialys and often after my grandfather went to work, I'd hang out with my grandma.  While she cleaned up after breakfast I rested in their air conditioned bedroom, watching mindless television.  Grandma would soon come in and sit down and I'd squirm into a position where she could gently scratch my back with her sharp nails.  Then she'd ask me if I had a BM yet.  The grandma I remember was very concerned with bowel regularity.

(Hollybrook, Pembroke Pines, FL)

Later in the day, she'd take me down to the pool to show me off to friends.  Or we'd go next door to Sylvia's and she'd have a chit chat while I tried to discern how two condos shaped exactly the same could be furnished so differently.  (Remember, my grandfather was a paperhanger; there was a lot of wall paper in my grandparents' condo.)  Sometimes she'd drive me around town to my great uncles and aunts.  Many times it was both my grandparents with whom I made the rounds.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Ruth.  Frank was cool with a great head of hair (grandpa used to insist that he dyed it) and he often slipped me a few bucks.  Aunt Ruth was as evervescent a woman as I'd ever met.  With a shock of bright, curly red hair, she treated me so kindly and lovingly I often thought out of all her great nephews and nieces, I was her favorite.  We all thought that.

Uncle Morris and Aunt Ronnie were a hoot to me.  Uncle Morris was the second youngest of the Weldon brothers and displayed the kind of youthful vigor that belied his sometimes troubled health.  Unlike Frank who wasn't nearly as tactile with me, Uncle Morris was the guy who would lift you off your feet in spite of how his back would feel later.  Aunt Ronnie, Morris' wife, had a thick Hungarian (I think) accent and long before ebay, was making a few extra dollars by going to every rummage sale in S. Florida and then reselling her finds.

I'd visit the children of my grandfather's siblings, and hang out with their children, my second cousins.  And always, always there was time with my great aunt Claire, my grandfather's eldest sister.  Her voice was raspy and her eyes deep set in that eastern european way.  She claimed never to be hungry but was constantly nibbling, often from your plate.  She controlled the room and she was as much an idol to my mom as she was a thorn in the sides of her younger brothers.  I loved to watch the family dynamics.  Though I had - and have still - little knowledge of whatever dynamics were in play in their lives, I discerned through the loud discussions and their talking over each other that their intertwined relationships were long in the making and at times contentious.

They were siblings born of the early 20th century, now living in South Florida in the 1980s.  How strange it must have seemed to them.  They grew up in the shadow of World War I, were children of working class Jewish immigrants, came of age during the Second World War as Jews - the lucky Jews whose families had the forethought to abandon Europe decades before the Holocaust.  They saw the miraculous invention of television, were witnesses to conflicts that divided the country - Korea and Vietnam; they watched a man land on the moon (an event that preceded my birth by six months), and they lived through too many assassinations.  How complicated their lives must have been?  How very little did I know.

After I turned 16 and got a summer job, I stopped going to Florida for summer vacations.  I saw my grandparents somewhat less.  I wrote letters to them and it was often my grandmother who wrote me back on behalf of them both.  I sent them letters from Germany on a high school exchange trip.  I sent them letters from college.  My sisters did, too.  I know this because after my grandmother died, when we went through my grandparents belongings, we found a box with all of our letters, all of our postcards.

As far back as I can remember, my grandmother was never in great health or without discomfort.  Afflicted with untreated scoliosis, she stooped over from the waist.  The older she got, the more she stooped until she was nearly bent at a right angle over her walker.  When we went to Disney World, we rented her a wheelchair so that she wouldn't have to do all that walking.  (Grandpa loved the wheelchair because it often allowed us to get to the front of the long lines.) Though she would have only been in her late 50's when I began to have memories of her, I never recall her seeming or acting young or youthful.  The closest thing to spirt she could evince was when we cajoled her to sing a few bars of Bing Crosby's "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."  Singing, stooped over, my Jewish grandmother wouldn't exactly belt out the lyrics of White Christmas but it was about as much mirth as she could muster.



My father was visiting just the other day and I asked him how he remembered his mother-in-law.  My dad said that he had always gotten along with Hy, but that Marcia was a bit of a tough nut for him to crack.  He said, mostly in jest, but with a hint of truth, that he saw her as a joyless woman who had a good sense of humor.  I can see this.  I see it in some pictures. My grandmother's smile in photographs was flat and even.  But when something did hit her funny bone, she couldn't help but chuckle.  More than once, I saw a twinkle in her eye - the twinkle usually reserved, I thought, for her eldest grandson or perhaps for anyone else who was swift enough to glimpse it.

(Marcia at right with Elise and me)

My grandmother was more opinionated than strangers could initially perceive.  She didn't keep her thoughts to herself, but let them drip out of her like a slowly leaking faucet.  One would be hard pressed to miss the signals.  Like many a mother, she worried.  She worried about her grown children and her grandchildren.  She worried about the health of her physically deteriorating husband, too.  Years of physical labor combined with as many years of smoking (filterless Camels for a long period of time) left my grandfather weakened.  When his health began to fail and it looked like the slow decline was ahead, my grandparents left Florida and moved to Connecticut - just down the road from my mom.  After years and miles of separation the family was coming back into each other's daily orbit (My aunt and cousin moved to Connecticut shortly after Grandpa died).  Now when I came home to Connecticut from Boston or Europe or wherever I was living, I could see everyone.  No stop to Mansfield was complete without a visit to my grandparents.

The tiny assisted living apartment they moved to became stuffed with a lot of the Florida decor.  White vinyl bench in front of the couch; white ceramic cat next to the sliding glass door; glass candy dishes and paper weights.  The painting of the old man looking over his glasses, fixing a watch (or maybe he was building a model ship?) and smoking a pipe hung above the same desk that had been in the den in which I'd slept more than a decade before.  Years passed, and eventually so did my grandfather in the winter of 1994.

My grandmother was 73 and for the first time in her life she was going to be living alone.  I was in graduate school at the time, in my mid-twenties, trying to figure out how and where to spend my own life.  Wherever I was, I made sure to check in with grandma from time to time.  I liked the way she bluntly asked me things like what was I going to do for money and did I have a girlfriend.  I liked the way she confided in me about her concern for her own children, but then would shrug off those worries with a dismissive sigh.  She denied it to her death, but instead of saying "Oy" or "Oy vey" she'd say "Oysh," often when siting down, getting up, or when I said something intentionally absurd.

In the the first years after my grandfather died, my grandmother was noticeably sad.  Without his health to manage, time passed more slowly.  She read a lot, religiously watched As the World Turns (I think it was) and became a huge fan of the UCONN Husky Basketball teams.  She spoke to my mom and aunt almost daily and had the opportunity to get to know my one and only first cousin, Sam - Cyd's son, who was about 13 when she died.  For years when I would go visit, at first alone, but later with my wife, my grandmother would be sitting on the couch with her legs stretched out.  "Come in," she would call when I knocked on the door.  By now it was a lot of effort for her to get up, so Linda and I would go to her couch and greet her.  Next to her couch, on that white vinyl bench, were scores of medications and a notebook in which she diligently recorded her blood sugar (or was it her blood pressure).  Shortly after arriving, I'd go into her bedroom to rotate her mattress for her and Linda would adjust her walker to a proper height.  There were usually a few jobs she had for me, taking out the trash or reaching something on a tall shelf.  I know she relished our visits, though they rarely lasted more than an hour (she'd dismiss us summarily when the conversation lagged or she was tired).

When I got married in 2004, it was a major concern how to accommodate my grandmother at the outdoor ceremony and reception.  She was limited in terms of being able to walk and greatly concerned about where the bathroom was.  Rolling the wheelchair around the uneven grounds proved difficult and my brother-in-law is likely still scarred from being her bathroom attendee designate, but she had a wonderful, wonderful time. She told everyone how much fun she had.  I hadn't seen her gleaming that much since my sister married in 1991, back when her beloved Hy was still by her side.

Just weeks before she died, Linda and I came to Mansfield and celebrated her 86th birthday with her.  We took her out to the local Chinese food restaurant and were joined by my mom, aunt, cousin, and some friends.  As was usually the case, it took a lot of convincing to get her out of the house.  It wasn't a small undertaking for her.  She came and enjoyed the meal - she was social in her own inimitable way.  When the bill came and it was time for figuring out people's tabs, there came the kind of cacophonous eruption of Brooklyn accents reminiscent of all those family meals in South Florida.  My grandmother leaned over to me and asked if my cell phone had a calculator on it.  When I confirmed to her that it did, she didn't miss a beat, "Then use it!"


It's been nearly three years since my grandmother died.  Hard to both believe that it's only and already been three years.  When Linda and I would visit, she would - as only an octogenarian can - bluntly inquire as to the state of our baby making efforts.  She worried about us, about the troubles we were having starting a family.  I knew that she hoped she'd live to see us have children, but more than that, I knew she wanted it for us, whether she lived to see it or not.  She died five months before Linda and I adopted Max and just as I never knew Fanny, Max will only know his great grandmother on his father's mother's side from pictures and stories.   I know how much joy seeing Max would have brought her just as I know how much sadness would have filled her heart if she'd lived to the day Leo was stillborn.  In some ways I am glad she passed before I had to share that news with her.  I am not sure I could have spoken the words.

Happy Birthday, Grandma.  We miss you.