Honoring a Steady, Honest Life That Was Lived Without Fanfare
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Michael Gold
My mother lived by values that are often considered unfashionable these days, as we suffer the daily bombardments of slick models, actors and pop stars who constantly post pictures of themselves sunning on yachts or pitching their newest beauty products all over the internet.
Helen Gold lived a life that might be considered quite ordinary. But I suspect there are many people with parents who may have lived similarly quiet lives yet demonstrated courage and strength in carrying out their daily tasks, helping their families survive, sometimes under quite difficult circumstances.
My mother was born in Columbia, S.C., two days after the stock market crashed in 1929. She was the baby of the family, with two older brothers and two older sisters.
Only much later in life did she tell me, “I was nobody’s child.” To get through the Depression, her mother was out of the house a great deal of the time, helping her husband with his work. Mom said men would often come to the door asking for a meal in return for doing jobs in the family’s small yard.
Her father, a tough Russian immigrant, was “closed,” she told me. He didn’t speak to her much, except one time, when she visited the local prison. Helen’s best friend growing up in the 1930s was a boy who lived down the street. His father was a prison guard. The father got a job as the warden of the city jail, so this boy moved with his family to an apartment in the prison.
Mom was not deterred by this problem. She walked from her house to the prison to visit her friend. The route she took was through what was considered a rough section of town. Upon hearing about what my mother did, my grandfather told her she couldn’t do that again.
Helen’s own mother died when she was 12 years old, in childbirth at a hospital in Columbia. The baby died too. Mom didn’t talk about it much, but this had to be a terrible blow for a young girl.
Then, when she was 18, her father wanted to move to Miami to retire, with her Army veteran brother who had severe mental health issues. He wanted my mom to keep house for him and her brother.
Helen figured out that working as a maid for her father was no kind of life. So, she ran off to New York.
Mom moved in with her older, married sister, who had just started a family. She enrolled in college on Long Island.
She cared about people’s health, particularly as it related to the nutrition they got. I once saw a picture of her receiving her college diploma and she was smiling broadly in her cap and gown, so proud.
She had no idea what was about to hit her. She met my father, got married, then had four sons in a span of seven years. Even for the baby boom years, this was beyond the spectrum of expectations.
My brothers and I often played football on our knees in our living room, with the family dog, a little dachshund my dad had gotten for free, tackling her with great enthusiasm. This was just one of our little domestic crimes that made the dog understandably neurotic.
Dad’s construction business was never a huge moneymaker, and our mother worked as a dietitian at Hempstead General Hospital for many years to help out with the bills. That meant her sons were pretty much on their own for hours on end after school, enabling us to beat the stuffing out of each other in a way that would put World Wrestling Entertainment to shame.
But when Mom came home, we were all business. She quickly assigned us jobs to help with dinner – making the salad, setting the table, folding napkins, filling the water pitcher.
When I quit Binghamton in the middle of junior year, she told me I had to get a job. I knew she was right, so I worked at several jobs in factories on Long Island, including building automotive transmission repair kits and loading sandbags. That was enough to persuade me to go back to college.
That was just one of the times she saved my life. She saved the whole family too, by being the steady presence who guided us through the various perils of childhood.
Mom made these amazing cookies that stunned our relatives and friends with their rich flavor. When somebody tried to persuade her to turn her cookies into a business, she laughed. This wasn’t real to her. She was content to make the people she knew happy. She didn’t want to be celebrated.
The only things she really wanted were family, friends and chocolate. And she got all of that.
Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, The Virginian-Pilot, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.
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