Today
“Today we will run away.”
My mother had said
this every day as far back as I had memory. It was the period between the World
Wars, Chicago of the early 1930s, in the Italian neighborhood, a place of
poverty where gangsters like Capone held sway.
My mother was German,
a war bride from the first World War, the war to end all wars. Speaking little
English, the fresh faced 16 year old was pushed by her family into marriage
with an American G.I. that had come over with the U.S. cavalry, a stocky young
blacksmith of Italian decent, the first in his family to be born on American
soil. On my father’s part, it was love at first sight when my aunt brought home
the handsome G.I. she had met at the weekly market where she sold eggs and
produce from the family farm.
My mother was a
worshiper of the Old Gods in secret, and Catholic in the public eye. I knew
that when she was at mass kneeling in the pews with her head bowed and her eyes
closed, she wasn’t praying to Jesus and Mary, but to Odin and Freya. That is
why her parents pushed her to accept the proposal of the young soldier, the
penalties at that time in Europe for being Pagan were harsh, and my
grandparents wanted my mother out of harm’s way, safely across the sea in a
country that believed in religious freedom. What they didn’t know was how the
culture shock was going to affect my mother, going from rural Germany to inner
city Chicago. My poor mother lived in a state of perpetual depression, unable
to understand much of what was going on around her, and no family to help her
though the transition. My father was a strict and sometimes harsh patriarch,
which my mother, a pampered younger daughter, wasn’t used to, being treated in
such a manner. Pa’s family tried, but
they were too strange, too alien.
Sometimes Mother took
me to the park, the only real nature I saw growing up. Mother often brought
offerings to the Gods, which she couldn’t leave at home, because my father
thought she was a good Catholic woman. He really didn’t know her at all. She
usually tucked her offering in the crook of a tree, because it could be done
quickly. Kneeling to bury something tended to draw attention, placing the bits
of food and handmade charms up in the tree went without notice, and Mother
never used the same tree twice in a row. After she placed her offering,
explaining why she offered what she did, she would look down on me with a sad
look on her face, stroke my hair, and say the words: “Today we will run away.”, but we never did. She would resume her Catholic façade that was all
she allowed to show publicly, take my hand, and we would walk slowly home.
