I waited at the school bus stop, my 16-year-old body shivering. The stinging winds seared my face and my lungs burned from inhaling the frigid air. I hated the cold of Pennsylvania.
After six years of being transplanted from South Texas, I still yearned for the hot sun beating down on the back of my neck, the feeling of my bare feet against the brown earth like warm baked bread.
Dad’s work had transferred him to the Philadelphia area and I felt like an alien who had been abandoned to the Antarctica. I longed to fly out the door with nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. But if I was going to survive here, I needed gloves, hat, boots, a scarf — and a winter coat.
*****
When we were children, dad was big on taking photos of us and turning them into slides. Many evenings, mom pinned a white sheet against the living room wall and dad hauled out the carousel projector. Mom darkened the area and dad started the show. The projector whirred and clickety-clacked, casting a harsh light onto the sheet. Then stalled.
My brothers groaned, shaping silhouette figures with their hands and fingers against the sheet, laughing and shoving against each other as to who had made the best rabbit or bird.
After dad settled us down, we soaked in the memories through pieces of celluloid. Photos of us on vacation in the hills of Tennessee, at the World’s Fair in New York, of us when we first arrived in the suburbs of Philly.
In one black-and-white snapshot, newly arrived from Texas, we looked like refugees who had escaped a Communist country. We huddled together in the knee-deep snow in front of the Levittown house, dressed in over-sized coats, boots and hats. We were all grim-faced.
*******
One winter when I was 16, I asked my mother for a new coat. A winter dress coat. I can’t remember why this idea possessed me. Perhaps I felt a fashionable coat would help me overcome my loathing of the season, of surviving in this part of the country.
Mom agreed. She handed me $75. In the mid-1960s, that was a huge sum of money. I don’t think I realized how much. Where did she get it? We were a large family and resources were scarce.
I went to the Septa bus stop and road into Center City Philadelphia by myself, first to Wanamaker’s. Then, in the racks at Lit Brothers, I discovered a knee-length camel hair coat with a real fox collar. At that time, people weren’t aware of animal rights. In my teen-aged mind, the collar looked warm — and elegant. I couldn’t wait to wear my winter coat.
*****
In the last days of his illness and dying process, dad was bed-bound. Mom and I cared for him in his infantile state. He needed diapers changed, had to be spoon fed, drooled and babbled. In children, these traits are often cute and precious. They were painful to see in my father — once a powerful and charismatic man.
Dad is gone, almost six months now. And everywhere I go, people ask how mom is doing. She is 90, uses a walker, a strong pioneer woman from the hills of Tennessee, from that “greatest generation” who pushes ahead, no matter what. She misses dad, but is accepting and knows that dad is with God.
I took her to church the other day and as we stepped into the numbing winter wind, I noticed her coat was worn and aging.
The next day we trekked off to the store. The Lit Brothers and Wanamaker’s of my youth are gone, replaced by chain stores in strip malls. We found an outlet place, and mom trudged in with her walker. Browsing through the aisles, she found a coat she liked, a camel hair coat — with a plaid scarf.
“An early Christmas gift,” I whispered. “Remember the coat you bought me when you couldn’t afford it? How did you do it?”
“Your dad had a good job. He worked hard. We managed.”
****
Life always takes us by the hand, full circle. Our parents become children again, and we become their parents.
And love often leads us to places that stretch our hearts — prompts us to give no matter how challenging — to a father who worked hard to support his family, to a mother who scrounged up dollars to clothe us, to caring for a dying father, to taking an aging mom shopping.
To finding warmth in the cold of life. To a winter coat.