Mom

My mother used to tell people, “I grew up right along with my kids.” Which makes sense when you consider she began having babies at 22. Mom was born in Staten Island, New York at the tail end of the winter of 1935 -- right smack in the middle of The Great Depression.  The economy might have been depressed, but Mom had a happy childhood, except for that one incident with Lucky, a curly-haired black dog. Some said Mom bit the dog and the dog bit her back. Regardless of the cause, Lucky the unlucky was disappeared, and Mom carried a scar on her lip ‘til her dying day, which was ________.

Her birth name was Lydia Christine Samuelson. Her mother was Anna (Johnsen) Samuelson, and her father was Sten Hilding Alexius Samuelson. Everyone knew him as Hilding or Sammy. Within a week of Mom’s birth, Anna died of what was then called childbed fever.

Hilding was utterly unequipped to care for a toddler and two infants (Mom had an older brother, Larry and a twin brother, Teddy). His first instinct was to wire his parents in Sweden to ask if he could send the kids there. Since his mother was already ill with the disease that would soon kill her, taking on three little ones was out of the question. His only alternative was to ask his friends for help.

Each of the children was taken in by a different family – each one part of the close-knit Scandinavian community on Staten Island. Mom was adopted by Borghild and Rudolph “Duffy” Olsen. Duffy was a New York City cop and Borghild was a short order cook. They had a son Erik, who was 13 when Mom came along. No one liked the named Lydia, so Lydia Christine Samuelson became Annette Christine Olsen.

Mom did not learn she was adopted until she was 17 years old. She grew up, played in the streets, went to church and all through school with her two brothers, not knowing they were related. She even knew her father as Uncle Hilding. When she found out, her biggest surprise was discovering she was a Swede and not Norwegian.

Coming of age in the early 50s, Mom was a bobby-soxer, an obedient Lutheran who always sang in the choir and made friends everywhere she went. Either she liked you or she didn’t. She had no use for Sinatra, but she swooned over Frankie Laine.

She was good at everything she tried. When she danced, she was Ginger Rogers; when she skated, she was Sonja Henie; when she swam, she was Esther Williams, and when she dreamed, I think she was Amelia Erhardt.

After graduating from Port Richmond High School in 1953, Mom took her formidable typing and steno skills to a secretarial job with Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (Mobil) at 26 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. She met Norm Anderson (Dad) on their daily commute riding the Staten Island Ferry. Dad worked for Cunard Lines and his office was right across the street at 25 Broadway. Annette and Norm planned a wedding for the summer of 1956, but Dad got a promotion to sales manager which came with a transfer to Cleveland, Ohio. The couple rushed together a wedding in the first week of the new year and set off in a snowstorm for The Great Midwest.

As luck would have it, Norm, an unapologetic New Yorker and no-nonesense combat veteran who was the embodiment of homo-economicus and called ‘em like he saw ‘em, did not mix well with the pathologically nice people of the Midwest. After a little more than a year, he was able to engineer a transfer back to NYC. Mom came home from the Cleveland adventure with two souvenirs -- a stuffed panda named Paynesville that Dad won for her at a county fair, and a gestating little girl (Lauren) to be born the following September.  Bruce (that’s me) came along at Christmas time in 1958. Mom always said I was the best Christmas present she ever got. Allan popped into the scene near the end of the summer of ’61, and so the family was complete.

Annette was a fun mother. Dad had no interest in athletics and worked all the time. Mom taught us to play softball, stickball and Ringolevio, a street game that, if you aren’t from New York City, you probably never heard of.  She loved table games, too -- board games like Careers and Monopoly. If it was cards, it was Canasta. She always played for blood and never hesitated to bankrupt her own kids in Monopoly. If you aren’t trying to win, what’s the point of playing?

She loved us but did not coddle. If we got out of line, she wacked us with the hairbrush or the wooden spoon. She always let us lick the cake batter off the mixers, and baking Krumkake and Christmas cookies was an annual ritual. She wrote our late notes and sick notes in perfect penmanship with a Parker fountain pen in her signature green ink.

Mom always loved to read, and she passed that lust on to at least two of her kids. Each year before we set off on our summer vacation to Vermont, she’d take us to the county library, and we’d check out piles of books that we consumed at the lake house. Mom preferred mysteries and crime stories. I remember way back then, one of her favorite authors was Erle Stanley Gardner. She loved films, too, but only schmaltzy love stories, Disney, and other G-rated stuff, nothing with any sex, violence, or foul language – although she did like George C. Scott as Patton. 

Once Allan was into first grade, Mom went back to work. She loved being Mom but missed having an office job. By then we lived in Morris County, NJ and she got a 9-3 as secretary to the Hanover Township Recreation Commission. Dad moved up the corporate ladder at Bell Labs and we moved to Bridgewater, where Mom worked for the Somerset County Probation Department. When I got in trouble, she did not try to fix it. I told them to give you what you deserved. At least that’s what she told me.

Dad did not encourage the county government job. He told her she could do a lot better at a big corporation. Everyone in the area worked for Bell Telephone or Big Pharma and when AT&T announced they were moving their headquarters from NYC to Basking Ridge, Mom got to work applying. She was hired pretty much right away by their Long Lines Division and commuted to the World Trade Center for a year or so before the Long Lines HQ in Bedminster was complete.

In the last half of the 70’s, Lauren and I were off making our lives, and as the ‘70s turned into the ‘80s, Annette and Norm split up. Remember, Mom grew up with her kids, and as we went off to spread our wings, she needed to do likewise.

 It was at AT&T Long Lines that Mom peaked her corporate career. While she loved being an executive secretary, that was a profession phasing out in the ’80s, so she moved into management and stepped into a job as administrator of the Cable Records Group, which also involved administration related to the cable ship, CS Long Lines.

Later in the ‘80s, Borghild fell and broke her hip. Since Grandma’s bowling and dancing days were over, Mom took her in, and they moved into a nice ranch house in Whitehouse Station. Grandma died of a sudden stroke in the house on an April morning in 1990 at the ripe old age of 87.

Around that same time, Mom was seeing a guy she ended up marrying. Too bad he was an irredeemable drunk. She did everything she could think of to try to redeem him, right up to leaving AT&T and moving west so he could get a fresh start working for his homebuilder brother in Colorado. Mom fell in love with Colorado Springs on a family road trip back in the early ‘70s and thought this would be an opportunity to live that dream.

The only problem is that the brother did not live in The Springs. He lived in a miserable, dirty little place where the desert and scrublands meet the prairie – a run-down steel, rail and mafia town called Pueblo. At one time, it was the mail-order scam and magazine subscription capital of the United States. Send your check or money order with a stamped self-addressed envelope to Rip Me Off, PO Box 999, Pueblo, CO 81005.

Mom and the irredeemable didn’t actually live in the City of Pueblo. They lived in a brutally ugly treeless dustbowl suburb called Pueblo-West, where the hand of man is an abomination on the landscape and the distant views are beautiful but distant. The only outpost of civilization was a deli called Dave’s, run by a guy from New Jersey who came west for college and stayed for some reason. Finally, after trying for 20 years, Deli Dave reportedly couldn’t take it anymore either and fled to Phoenix.

They built a nice stucco ranch house in Pueblo West at about 5,000 feet of elevation where there’s little precipitation or vegetation, plenty of sun, and almost constant breeze or wind. Mom had to keep the doors and windows shut all the time because if you left one open for 20 minutes, everything in the place would be sporting a film of dust.

Within a few years, Mom got tired of trying to redeem the unredeemable, so she booted him out and planned to live happily ever after with her dogs. She rescued a small pack of barkless Shelties (retired show dogs) and a homely Australian cattle dog called Pepper.  Pepper had sloppy black and brown markings that were completely asymmetrical and undefined. He was leggy with poor conformation and completely devoted to Mom. Pepper disappeared from the driveway one day and returned more than a year later, none the worse for wear. If he was a talking dog, I’m sure he’d tell a hell of a tale.

The good that came of Annette’s time with the irredeemable is that she established a connection with the folks at Crossroads Detox Center who offered her a job as the office administrator. She worked there for several years, made plenty of friends, and was well regarded and appreciated.

By the summer of 2006, Mom had been in Colorado for sixteen years. The pack of Shelties was down to one. The irredeemable had been found dead on a frosty morning a couple of winters ago behind the local Albertsons, and Pepper passed peacefully over the rainbow bridge. That was the summer Dad died after a years-long battle with the Big C. Mom got to thinking Colorado was a long way from her kids and her roots. She wasn’t getting any younger and felt the call to come home.

Never a dawdler, when Annette made a decision she didn’t procrastinate. She got the Colorado house on the market, sold it and moved. It took a few weeks to close on the purchase of her Glen Gardner condo, so she lived for a short while at Club Metaxas. Why not? Everyone else lived with Scott while they were transitioning from one life to another. I sure did. So did Allan. Scott’s another brother anyway. All in the family.