Writer in the Forest

Part of Mom’s divorce settlement with Bob included keeping her military dependent identification card. The Naval base was within walking distance of our apartment in the old Charleston section of town, where Mom was born and we still lived. She’d don a hat and a dress she borrowed from her sister, slip into the shiny black high heels she wore to the dime store everyday, and head for the Officer’s Club in hopes of meeting a really good man.

I stood behind Grandma and watched her shoulders bunch up and down as her fingers flew over the keys on the ragtime songs, and the elegant fingering on the slow ones.  Decades later I inherited her entire lifetime of sheet music and the 8×10 photograph of Liberace she’d always had on her piano like it was an autographed picture. It was a stock photo, Grandma. It came with the frame. Then the Destroyer and the lemon candy sticks, like we did every week.

Mom had lots of dates because she was 1940s-glamorous with her black hair, olive skin, and a huge smile that radiated elegance in spite of her poverty and pain. She said many times, with pride, that her father had coal black hair (although as a child I thought she said “cold black hair”), as if she didn’t realize that she did, too. Her captivating smile crinkled up her eyes and stopped everyone in their tracks.

It was this beauty that caught the attention of my next stepfather.