Shades of Gray

My old gray mère, she ain't what she used to be, but then again, who is?

I have learned a lot from mom over the years (some good, some not so much), but one thing she has shown me in recent years is that not everything -- even in her mind -- is black and white. Ironic, I suppose, since she is a woman who has often been unable to see the gray, to smudge the strict demarcations in her view of the world and get a glimpse of some middle ground. For her, it's been a lifelong refrain, a simple, bifurcated definition of good and evil, right and wrong: us and them (translation: Jews and everybody else, or, to be more specific, goyim); fat and thin (take a wild guess which one's right); expensive and cheap; New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers (almost as bad as the goyim, with a narrow exception carved out for New Jerseyites).

She's pretty strict on certain things. Like purses. With her delicately healed broken bones from last year's accident and her rapidly compressing spine, she tirelessly shops for a purse that will be light yet functional enough to carry all her, um, stuff -- including the threadbare piece of toilet paper on which she has written all the phone numbers of her loved ones and physicians, just in case. She is stymied, unable to find such an item. Well, at least not one made by an appropriate designer and ostentatiously emblazoned with that particular designer's initials. Pain and discomfort would have pushed a lesser woman into the bargain basement years ago, but not ma mère. She'd rather throw everything into a little shopping bag -- as long as it's from Saks -- than be caught dead carrying a purse that costs less than your average car. Don't even get me started on the shoes. 

Though still rather predictable, her behavior has become increasingly anomalous. Take her taste in restaurants, for example. In general, she only frequents overpriced joints that boast a regular clientele of either celebrities or just regular beautiful and thin people. There is but a handful of acceptable  establishments remaining in New York, none, as far as I know, anywhere else. (Okay, once, about eight years ago, she ate a pasta dish in Florence that she deemed the best ever, but that restaurant has since closed, so it doesn't count). But her absolute favorite dining spot is the greasy Chinese stand in the LaGuardia airport food court. Anticipating her greasy though bland lo mein calms her on the days she's flying home from a visit to Chicago. And she could not wait to pick me up at the airport last night, but I am fairly certain it was the egg roll, not my charm. Odd.

As we sat enjoying (or, in my case, choking down) our meal, I studied my mother. She is as vain as they come, about her hair, her make-up, her clothing. her physique. Though she has never exercised a day in her life, she has always monitored every morsel entering her mouth (our airport meal notwithstanding, although she had probably starved herself all day). She generally wears fitted suits to show off her painful thinness. But this time, she had left the St. John at home, and was wearing something loose fitting and not immediately recognizable as "designer." Her compressing spine, which has squeezed her midsection into kind of a box, has caused her to relent, just a bit. She will now be seen in public in old designer clothes. Her make-up was the same as it has been for the fifty-two years I have known her, but I am absolutely certain not a millimeter of botox or, god forbid, a scalpel, has touched that skin.

What strikes me most about her, though, is the gray hair. More of a white now. Her hair has never seen any kind of dye or highlight; it has aged as naturally as her still impeccable skin. With a small touch of color, she'd look far younger than her eighty-one years, but she has chosen not to go that route. I admire that about her, and have long hoped I would make the same choice, although I have already succumbed to highlights, and as the grays sprouting at the top of my own head continue to multiply, I might not make it. But I know I will pause if I ever get to the colorist's chair, and I will think about my mother's helmet of gray. It's sprayed, it's teased, it doesn't even look like hair, but it's touchingly humanizing. It stops me in my tracks every time.

My old gray mère is a study in contradictions, and her behavior continues to take me by surprise. She bought me a present, she told me, as we entered her apartment. I expected something designer, or at least overpriced. She handed me a white paper bag in the kitchen, with grease stains spreading across the bottom. I was puzzled. Food?

I guessed what it was before I even opened the bag. A black and white cookie. A New York concoction, one of my favorites, something that cannot be replicated anywhere no matter how hard those "non-New Yorkers" try. My mother, the woman who hid food from me for years, had bought me an oversized black and white cookie. Now that's what I call shades of gray.