May 11th

I have the memory of a birthday cake.  I’m pretty sure my mother made it.  Her chocolate cake.  Maybe it was chocolate frosting.  It may have had some words on it, as her cakes often spelled out in the ruffles of another layer of frosting from her cookie press.  I was young - enough that I was near the cake and the person blowing out his wish… because, when you are little you want to steal that magic of blowing out birthday candles.  And it was my grandfather’s wish, so obviously that magic was pretty powerful.

I found out a few years ago my grandfather had a tough time with his birthday.  Something that would escape a six or seven year old delighted by the luster of a row of birthday candles and cake.  And maybe that's why all my fuzzy memory recalls is a cake.

His birthday always came around … or every once in a while ON… Mother’s Day.  So there was already an excuse for the Brennans to gather together.  As years went on there were other May birthdays – even one he shared with a cousin.  But I never knew until years after his death that it wasn’t necessarily a happy anniversary.

In 1965, my great-grandmother was at her brother’s house (now the house in which my parents live) playing cards.  She had a heart attack from which she subsequently died.  It was on May 11^th, the birthday of her youngest son.

 

A few months ago I was looking up draft records in WWI to figure out something for my book.  It led me down the rabbit hole of internet genealogical records… and a trial membership on ancestry.com.  I found a lot of random information – mostly dates and addresses.  But knowing the few things I know about Worcester and Worcester history, I found them kind of fascinating.  There was a census record from 1930, where she is listed as living at 90 Oliver Street.  Age 35.  A salesgirl in a dry goods store.  Two sons, George age 13 and Vincent age 10.  Living with her parents.  Because (what isn’t in the city document but my memory) she was a divorcee.

I never met Rose Alba.  My grandmother had stories of love and appreciation, as well as the perspective of a daughter-in-law who had to live with her husband’s mother for so many years.  My favorite story of Rose is how she would bake pies.  Two pies every week.  One for the house of seven children and four adults (who didn’t get pie, I wonder).  And one for my grandmother’s widower father.  I have some of her cookbooks.  I know they are hers because the pages with pie recipes are crinkled with grease and water stains and a few ancient grains of flour embedded in the paper fiber.  

She married a jerk.  Maybe that’s putting it lightly.  We found out 70 some years later that he impregnated a teenager while they were married.  She divorced him.  In the 1920s.  Then, apparently, moved back in with her parents with her two sons.  That’s… well, even if it is just a detail on a yellowed piece of paper… that’s pretty brave.

My grandfather sent her the money he earned in the military, a detail my grandmother shared with me as we went through pictures of the cellar parties a couple years ago.  Money that went into buying a multi-family house where my grandparents started their family… and had those parties.  I went by that house last night on my way to a theater that is two streets over.  There is an accountant’s office on the first floor, where they lived with Rose, her sister, and five children in three bedrooms and one bathroom.  Someday I am going to go in that office and see the walls and rooms… and maybe tell them about how my great-grandmother would have to bring coffee and sandwiches down to the cellar so everyone could get home and find some sleep in order to get up and go to church the next morning.

I think about that house, those pies, that May afternoon the year my mother graduated from high school… and think about a mother child relationship that was so strong, so determined, and so full of love… it seems a cruel twist of fate it ended on a birthday that often fell on the day when so much of the world celebrates mothers.

I would have loved to sit at the ping pong table with Rose Alba with her coffee pot (which may be the one that sits on a shelf in my kitchen).  I don’t know if she would have approved of the fact I am not married or a mother… or considering her sister (who was herself secretly divorced), maybe that wouldn’t matter.  My grandmother once told me that my mother had the ticks of her grandmother… her Nana, as my mother is now called by my nieces.  I wonder if I, too, have them.  I don’t know what they are… but I see the physical features in my mother… and then in me.  So maybe I do have a bit of that French Canadian Rivers genetics without any effort at all.

My mother is named after her daughter, her second child, who died before the age of two.  It makes me appreciate Rose’s strength more… but also adds some poetry to the inheritance of those physical traits.

Tomorrow is my grandfather’s 95^th birthday.  It falls on Mother’s Day this year.  It’s supposed to be a beautiful May afternoon.  And, I think, the perfect day for a birthday cake.