Nothing Horrible Happened

My mother says “lovely” when she compliments something she doesn’t approve of. Suburban McMansions, grocery store birthday cakes, and Hummel figurines are all lovely to her. Strangers hear praise. I know better.

I was worried she might say “lovely” when visiting our home in San Diego for the first time. Southern California just isn’t her thing. I think it might feel a little frivolous to someone who grew up the way she did.

I didn’t want her to think I’d traded depth for sunshine and succulents. Like asthma, heart disease, and other childhood ailments, the need for parental approval never goes away. On some level, we’re all still waiting for a report card from our parents.

“Oh look, palm trees,” she said as we pulled into my driveway. Was that sarcasm? I couldn’t tell. But whatever she was feeling before we entered the house evaporated when I opened the door.

“Oh my God, Mark, the art!” She pointed around the living room. “Look at these pieces. I’m speechless!”

I beamed. “I know, Mom. I live here.”

“Stunning,” she said, looking at the Alex Katz portrait near the entry. “Wow oh wow!”

She seemed genuinely happy, which wasn’t her usual measure of a good day. She often says, only half joking, “When I go to bed at night and realize that nothing horrible happened during the day, that’s happiness.”

Mom grew up in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district during World War II. Her father was arrested for sabotaging a Nazi munitions factory. Their apartment was bombed. One morning, she woke up thrilled to see a giraffe in the courtyard, only to learn the circus down the street had been shelled the night before.

I can see why nothing horrible happening during the day was happiness enough for my mother.

When I was a kid, our living room walls were filled with pop-art posters borrowed from the public library. We didn’t have much money, but she hung up those posters like we lived in a gallery. When I was twelve, Mom landed a job at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in downtown Detroit, and suddenly our library posters were traded for Motherwells and Gustons.

Mom didn’t just hang art; she made it part of our daily lives, as if beauty was something you were responsible for, like paying the electric bill. She’d take me to meet artists at gallery openings the way other mothers took their kids to a McDonalds Playplace.

Mom and I talk about art in ways we don’t discuss anything else. When I was a teenager and we had nothing to say to each other that wasn’t awful, we could talk about art like old pals. She once grounded me when she found a glass Pepsi bottle bong that I had made but later complimented its funky aesthetics. Even today at ninety, she can talk about a de Kooning we saw at a museum years ago as if she was still standing in front of it. Her hearing may be shot, but her art appreciation is in full swing.

After dinner we walked through the house again. We stood in front of Carrie Schneider’s massive photograph called Las Bebidas, with Schneider herself staring at the viewer. I said, “She’s questioning the relationship between the artist and subject.” Mom punched me in the shoulder, smiled and nodded, her way of saying “I’m impressed.”

She cried when she saw a small bronze horse she’d given me years earlier. She had never been sentimental, but art always got past her defenses. “Your father and I got this in Mexico,” she said through tears. That undid me. I hadn’t cried at my dad’s funeral, but here I was, wrecked. We stood in silence as she cradled the sculpture in her hand. For a moment, it felt like she was holding my father too. The small sculpture wasn’t just art; it was their life together. Memory travels through objects like that. They hold what we don’t always say out loud.

“And look at our backyard at night.” I boasted as I opened the sliding glass door. The succulents and the pool were magnificently lit and the hot tub gurgled. I took her past the new chaise lounges, the outdoor kitchen, and the tiled dining area. I grinned, “What do you think?”

She shivered. “Lovely. Let’s go inside, I’m freezing.”

We spent the next morning exploring my neighborhood. At Philz Coffee, she stared at the barista’s slow-motion drip pour while we stood in a frozen line. “This is närrischkeit,” she scoffed. She had survived bombings, hunger, and displacement, but waiting for artisanal coffee tested her patience.

I asked if she wanted to go to the beach. “No, I saw it from the car.” The Pacific Ocean had made its case and been rejected.

When a young couple holding beers and wearing flip-flops waved and smiled at us on the sandy sidewalks of Solana Beach, she rolled her eyes. “Lovely.”

I was about to defend them when it hit me. She wasn’t being judgy. I think she was marveling that this couple could walk around the world so unguarded, so relaxed. She wasn’t wired that way.

Mom arrived here from Europe as an 18-year-old war survivor and has lived her life by the German concept of Mann Muss or “one must.” With Mann Muss, you do what’s required, whether you feel like it or not. She appears at 6:55pm for a 7pm dinner party because that’s what one does. She never missed Friday night dinners with her in-laws because that was expected too.

I live as Mann Kann, or “one can,” believing the day belongs to me. I decide how much seriousness it requires and what rules I’ll choose to follow. I live my life freely because she made that possible.

I understand now that I only get to live Mann Kann because she lived Mann Muss. Every easy life is built on someone else’s harder one. My freedom isn’t accidental. It’s inherited.

Mom taught me that what matters in art isn’t what the artist intended, but how you feel in conversation with it. So when she talks about my house, I don’t hear the words. I hear the feeling.

“Oh my God, Mark, look at the art!” (I’m proud of you)
“I’m speechless!” (You’re a good son)

The morning that she was headed back to Chicago, her bags were at the front door hours before we needed to leave. “We can go to the airport early, no need to rush.” She touched my hand as I reached for the car keys. “Thank you, sweetie, this was such a lovely visit.”

She said “lovely.”

It sounded like love.