Wednesday, September 18, 2024. My Mother’s birthday. She would have liked this weather, no longer the hot hot New England days of Summer but with the warmth still in the air.
Matilda, always known as Tillie, the second eldest of six (five girls), born in 1906. At the tender age of 9 her 33-year-old mother died of pneumonia. Her father put all the girls in a Catholic orphanage where they were eventually farmed out, adopted as it were, and began a life out of Dickens, 20th-century style. Tillie was one of those girls who was always frightened and always brave all her life. She also read to me at night before I could read.
I was the last child (with two older sisters) in the house, which was a long domestic battlefield for Tillie and my father Frank. It looked like it was his fault and she was the sufferer. But industrious; worked a full time job in a restaurant kitchen, shopped, cooked, same with the laundry and the housework and the massive vegetable garden along with a beautiful flower garden; as well as “decorated” her humble house and gave it some fashion.
Their domestic drama was too raffish to describe here, but it was active and actively upsetting for them and as well as the little guy, last in the house who was witnessing the drama.
However, aside from that weight for the little guy to bear, both Tillie and Frank were always kind and accommodating with me growing up. When there were quiet times, breaks in the domestic war that defined their lives, they were interested in the world around them.
It was that interest that sparked my curiosity. I got the curiosity from my mother but the source of my interest was my father, who when as a young man in his 20s and 30s, in New York, his hometown, worked as a chauffeur. It was a job he loved because in those decades, automobiles were new, and those who employed drivers had the biggest and the best of this new phenomenon that changed the world – and personally driving these monstrously beautiful inventions were still a thrill that never quit.
Frank rarely talked about his life with the car although sometimes my mother, always the curious one, would bring it up asking about the people, the families he drove. What impressed this little listener was his descriptions of the cars back then, which were luxury wagons, and the dramas of the bosses who sat in the back seats — who were often the ladies of the family.
The entire subject came to mind because I had been briefly reading up on the partial Lunar Eclipse of the harvest moon this past evening. I know little about eclipses except that they are cosmically powerful and affect all of us including the planet, in ways too subtle for us to know.
It reminded me about the subject of Astrology. I am not knowledgeable about Astrology although when I was a young man, college age, my “best friend” in high school and onwards, and the smartest kid in the class as well as a talented actor and artist, brought it up one day.
My friend, being the valedictorian, went to Dartmouth while I was up in Central Maine at Colby College. It was in our sophomore year (1962) during vacation, that he told me about his studying astrology on the side at Dartmouth. Not part of the curriculum.
I knew nothing about the subject and wasn’t particularly interested except he recounted some details of what he had learned in his studies – and studies I’m sure they were because he was a sharp student in life. His astrological knowledge all these years later is enormous although he is not a professional who gives readings; he’s more an historian on the subject. Therefore his words were always reliable and knowledgeable.
This was in 1962. Recounting some of the moments he’d discovered in his studying astrology that I recall (or have never forgotten):
“Beginning in the 1990s” (which was 30 years ahead of where we were at the time), “Privacy as we know it is going to go away, we are going into a world where there will be no privacy.”
I found that impossible to even conceive. Now it seems ordinary.
“And then beginning in the early part of the new century (2000s) the fashion will change. It will become more casual, less formal.”
BUT “Beginning in 2020, the wars in the world are going to be about Religion because it’s the end of the religious epoch in human history …. “And,” he added, “we may not make it.”
All of this was weird and shocking. I’m not one to believe or disbelieve in something I don’t understand, but somehow his read on things were never presumptuous because he has a serious student’s sensibility. Because of that he’s a brilliant cook, a brilliant carpenter, sculptor, as well as an active reader in the vast area of Learning.
Back then, after college, my friend went on Yale’s school of art and then to New York where he rented a loft downtown on the corner of Broadway and Canal and got himself a part time job painting for a major modern artist/painter,
Back then my friend also married a girl we both knew from school. After very few years, the marriage didn’t work out and he was a bachelor in his extraordinary loft as SoHo was coming into fashion (including the new name – before it used to be simply downtown). I once asked him during our discussions about Astrology if he ever remarried what would be the perfect wife astrologically, and he recounted the conditions: Sun in … Moon in … etc.
I wrote it down because another friend of mine had set me up in an appointment with a professional astrologer, a woman who was said to be “very good.” After her reading about me, the aspiring writer, I asked her what her “signs” were. When she told me, I wrote them down. Comparing them with my friend’s perfect combination, I saw they were one in the same.
I told her about my friend who studied astrology. I didn’t tell her anything about his research because I wasn’t sure how I could bring them together. But July of that year I had a birthday party for myself with a number of friends at a house I’d rented in Connecticut. I invited my old friend (the new astrologer) of course; and without telling her why, I also invited the woman astrologer who had recently given me a reading. Nor did I tell my friend about her coming.
It was a beautiful summer day. My friend and the lady astrologer met. I can still see them in my memory’s eye seated outside on the terrace overlooking the woods beyond and rapt in conversation. For the whole evening. That was more than forty years ago, and they are still together; devoted.
