Viva Lofton (eBook)

Memoir of a Beginner Dad

Lonnie Lazar (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
308 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-8020-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Set mainly in the opening years of the new millennium, 'Viva Lofton' shares the story of a man who wanted to be a better father to his son than his own father was to him. This unforgettable autobiography includes real-time musings from the author to his then-unborn child, along with background information essential for his son to understand who his father is, amid a raft of story-telling and topical musings on world events transpiring in the first years of the 21st century.

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Set mainly in the opening years of the new millennium, "e;Viva Lofton"e; shares the story of a man who wanted to be a better father to his son than his own father was to him. This unforgettable autobiography includes real-time musings from the author to his then-unborn child, along with background information essential for his son to understand who his father is, amid a raft of story-telling and topical musings on world events transpiring in the first years of the 21st century. The story begins in the Catskill Mountains of New York in 1960. At least that's how it seems from the author's perspective. It really began long before that, encompassing the lives and hopes and dreams of people but a few of whom are written about here. If you're ready to go from Memphis to New Orleans, to San Francisco to China and Tibet, and back again; to visit sauna baths and police stations, backstage VIP lounges, hospital ICUs, and some of the most beautiful, desolate, pristine places nature has to offer, buy the ticket and take the ride. Of course, there's also the story of the title character, of how he came to be, the author's hopes and dreams for him, and the ineffable search for understanding why we are here and what the heck is going on.

Textauszug

My Mother’s Tale – Part 1

My mother was a smart, beautiful, Jewish gal from Brooklyn. She met my father in 1958 in Miami, when he had his personal assistant—in those days called a house man—deliver a note to the stunning little brunette who lived across the street and drove the red MG-TD, saying he’d like her to join him for dinner.

She was eleven years his junior but every bit his equal in almost every other way, and they quickly fell in love. They were married in my grandfather’s Brooklyn living room the next year, and in 1960—the year I was born—they moved from Miami to Memphis, Tennessee, two East Coast Jews who knew almost nothing about the culture of the Dixie South, aside from the fact that everyone worth knowing had at least one maid and a yard man.

My parents were not rich, yet, but in the South at that time, even decidedly middle-class whites employed Black help. Elsewhere, I was born in the summertime, in Monticello, NY, in the Catskills, where my mother’s family wrote insurance on the harness-racing horses and other livestock prevalent in the area. My mother’s cousin had adopted two children in recent years and when I was born, the Sullivan County hospital doctor who delivered me called Joan and told her a healthy Jewish boy was available, and was she interested?

Joan’s brood was sufficient, but she knew my mother was looking to adopt and she put in the call to Memphis. Within a week, arrangements had been made. My parents flew to New York to pick me up. I slept in a wicker laundry basket on the plane ride back to Memphis, and from every story I heard over the years, my parents were very happy. Years later, I saw some Super 8 footage of a trip they’d taken back to Miami in ’62 or ’63, clips of them both holding me and showing me off in front of the cabana at the pool of the apartment they kept there until around 1972. They looked very happy.

My father was a businessman, my mother a homemaker. She was quite involved with the Temple Sisterhood and for a while, when I was younger, she was a troop leader for the Girl Scouts, or maybe it was Brownies, I’m not sure. She was elegant and sophisticated, and seemed forever trying to raise the level of culture and discourse around her. She was an avid reader and had a wonderful sense of style: She wore beautiful clothes and decorated our home in a way I can only describe as hip.

Jackie Kennedy was destined for the White House when I came along and though I never confirmed it specifically with my mother, I believe she took inspiration in her sense of personal style from the elegant First Lady—they were similarly petite and brunette, though my mother had a fuller figure and a more ethnic look, which would serve her well later, in the 70s, when she adopted an Afro hairstyle and wore brightly-colored jumpsuits and tribal-patterned dresses.

Two things my mother loved above all were cooking and gardening. As a child, I spent hours in the kitchen with her and Minnie, our housekeeper. My mother never referred to Minnie as our maid, and when I did so once, when I was about 8, saying in a fit of pique and defiance, "I don’t have to listen to you, you’re just the maid…" my mother read me the riot act—and gave me my first glimpse into the ineffable mysteries of the human heart and the nature of compassion. In many ways, Minnie was my mother’s best friend and together they cooked up wondrous things in the kitchen, cuisine that melded my mother’s Jewish heritage (briskets and kugels and potato knishes), her love for all things Italian (linguini with white clam sauce, lasagne, chicken cacciatore) and Minnie’s Alabama roots (fried chicken, BBQ pork, all kinds of greens, and the best lemon meringue pie, ever).

Tommy was our first yard man, who was always referred to as Minnie’s husband, but I think that’s because he sometimes slept with her in her apartment over our carport. He was jealous of Minnie’s life with our family and was not always nice to her, but he worked hard with my mother in our yard, which backed up to a couple hundred acres of cornfield that was eventually turned into a subdivision sometime around ’69 or ’70.

My father ran Tommy off one day when I was about 7 or 8 after he left Minnie with an eye swollen shut from a fight they had. Soon we had Earl, who was "promoted" from his job as a warehouseman and truck driver at my father’s business. Earl became our new yard man, my father’s masseur and personal driver, the guy who drove school carpools (and years later taught me to drive a car), someone who worked for and was considered almost a member of our family for nearly twenty years. He would one day lead my father’s funeral procession, driving The Chief’s big white Mercedes-Benz at the head of a line of some 300 cars.

Before all that though, Earl worked like a mule with my mother, first in the yard on Chickasaw, then later when we moved into the old Crump place on Galloway, with its two-and-a-half acres of rolling landscaped yard, studded by towering, hundred year-old oak trees in the middle of Memphis. My mother was a fanatic for keeping the leaves raked, and the driveways swept, and she had dozens of flower beds to be kept weeded. She loved spending time in her custom-built greenhouse the size of a New York efficiency apartment, which she filled with exotic plants and flowers that couldn’t stand the brutal Memphis summer heat or its bitter winter cold.

She and Earl had a tempestuous relationship due to his feeling he was more my father’s man, having come from the business and all—and my father kept him busy enough with duties around the pool, with giving him a rubdown after his morning swim, or with driving him to this or that appointment—but to my mother, Earl was responsible for all the heavy lifting she needed in a man around the house, and she was never shy about having a list of chores for him to work at each day. Much to his dismay, she was willing to work as hard as any man with a rake or a broom or a hedge trimmer, and he sometimes struggled to keep up with her.

Years later, when I was old enough to be useful, my mother would press me into duty as well, having me rake leaves at the farthest edges of the property, or sweep dirt out at the ends of the circular drive. I would complain, "No one is ever going to see this. No one ever comes out here." She’d look at me with a mixture of pity and disdain and say, "I know what’s out here. I know what it looks like, and I want it clean and clear, got it?”

Mother’s Day was a special day in our household, in part because my mother had a force of personality that demanded recognition on the day set aside for all mothers, but also because of my father’s great love for her, and the sense we all had (I was the oldest of four, with a brother–also adopted–two years behind me, and two younger sisters my parents conceived together) of how much she gave to creating and nurturing her loving family and a loving home throughout the year.

When I was little, I gave her my own handmade Mother’s Day cards, which she always thought were the most beautiful works of art she’d ever seen. A bit older, I’d go with my father to the florist to help him devise an arrangement of suitable grandeur or pick out something special for the yard or the greenhouse.

In my adolescence and early teen years, my facility with kitchen protocols began to emerge and she would thrill to the breakfasts of fresh fruit, omelets, pancakes or homemade waffles I would bring her in bed, with fresh juice and coffee (black, with one packet of Sweet n’ Low).

I think I remember most, though, the last Mother’s Day gift I gave her.

The summer I turned 17, I spent six weeks in the South of France with a family whose father was a business associate of my father’s. They had two boys, 18 and 16 years old. We boys became fast friends and I learned a lot that summer, the least of which was twenty or thirty words of French. I hadn’t wanted to leave at all, but when I returned home through New York, I was stunned to see my father there to greet me at the airport.

I had been expecting my grandfather to pick me up and planned to spend a couple of days with him before going home to Memphis. My father took little time cutting to the chase: while I was away, my mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She was recovering from surgery performed just days prior at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. One of her doctors was the same oncologist who had treated Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back who had died of lung cancer some years before, who made James Caan famous for playing him in the movie, "Brian’s Song."

Treatment and understanding of lung cancer had progressed a lot since then, however, and we had reason to hope my mother’s condition might be treatable. She came home before the start of school that fall and that winter we took a family trip, in January, to Monticello, NY. It was my first time back there since my birth. I got to meet my mother’s cousin Joan and her adopted children, who were just a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.6.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-8020-7 / 1098380207
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-8020-5 / 9781098380205