Purple Crown

I like to fill the house with flowers. To come down in the morning and see my world exploding in blooms-- Big Van Gogh sunflowers bursting gold from a dark blue pitcher. Mason jars lazy with the scent of tuberoses. My favorite brown vase wearing a purple crown. It’s nice to know somebody cares enough to make my surroundings so beautiful and that that somebody is me. 

I got it from my mother, this need to please the eye. She showed me that what we see all day has a deep effect on how we feel. That a home is a canvas, not just a dwelling. A chance to be both artist and audience. 

I dig the living arts. Cooking, decorating, conversation, sex. I treat them with the same care and concentration I do my so-called work. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, but I like making a nice caprese salad and eating it surrounded by flowers while listening to Ella Fitzgerald even more. To channel the old kaftan-wearing queen inside. You wouldn't suspect it, ‘cause I'm a pirate, a marauder. Part Russian circus bear and part ogre, I don't own a shirt that isn't stained. Dude energy. That’s what it is, and I got lots. But inside I am different. Thoughtful. Feminine. In tune and intuitive. My inner-life much more Eve than Adam.

But enough about me, let’s get back to my mom. What an extraordinary and accomplished woman she was. I wish I could just enjoy her without the asterisk. Just revel in her huge 20th century life; at the spear tip of two of the great causes of her time, the peace movement and the women's movement. Adding a few new wrinkles to the social protest playbook. She and her sisters changing America in the process.

A mother of four, she entered academia at forty-seven, teaching women's history only few years after making it. A close friend of congresswoman Bella Abzug, she was Bella's war time consigliere, a fifty-year bond through good times and bad.

But she also had wonderful taste, coming of age in that unique world of left-wing politics and art, each informing the other. She was onto the good stuff early, buying furniture that time has now turned timeless and art work that the years have deemed museum worthy.  She dressed with style and panache and everywhere she lived was beautiful, your eye always happy wherever it wandered.

And now that I have passionately sung her praises, part of me wants to tear her down. Remind her that she hurt me, that she “could have been a little nicer” as my father so eloquently put it. But most of all, I just want her to walk into my home and see my flowers. To know that I am taking good care and that there is nothing left to feud over. 

My mom, Amy Swerdlow, in profile behind Bella