A Woman for a Few Seasons: The Way I Am

By Luminita M. Schleser

They die, even without wisdom. /The old lion perishes for lack of prey, /And the cubs of the lioness are scattered. (Jon 4)This book was meant to be a short review of things that happened to me over the years. It is an honest attempt to show my children how I became me, with my many faults and my few accomplishments. It is a travel into my mind and my soul. I hope that one day somebody will be curious enough to read my words and look at me. The way I see myself. That person might be one of my daughters

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469164656

Luminita M. Schleser

The author is proud to have given birth to three wonderful women. She lives alone in a New York neighborhood that adopted her with care and love. Her family is made up of a curious hamster, Kickey, an elegant cat, Rickey and three Mane angels. Defiant Maria. Miraculous Ramon. And Pali. Convincing, supportive, powerful. A woman for all seasons.

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Copyright © 2012 by Luminita M. Schleser.

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CONTENTS

December Light

November Haze

October Darkness

Spring Fresh Brightness

The Little Light at the End

December Light

It is a beautiful October day. The sun is embracing the world with mellow light and soothing colors. Autumn has fallen once again, and the Indian touch of the New York version adds rich warmth to the most glamorous season. Watching the vibrant blue sky from the sad comfort of my couch, which I share with a cool cat and a strange hamster, I decide to start writing in October, hoping that November will not take it personally and would still encourage me. Since I have been immobilized to a bed, or a wheelchair at best, I spend a lot of time travelling into my past. I have always enjoyed grammar; verb tenses both fascinated and puzzled me—past, present, and future. I can fully grasp the meaning of the past, and I rely on the hopeful power of the future. And what exactly is the present? When the moment in time arrives, over and over again, future dissolves into past. There is no present. Life is a series of memories of subjective interpretations of whatever we perceive as reality. An event, a scene, a flicker of life is viewed in as many ways as the number of the participants to an event, the witnesses of a scene, the partakers to life. Reality is hope for the forthcoming based on the memory of the already experienced and carefully stored past.

Reminiscing gives me an infinite possibility to recreate myself and my entire life. I acquire assurance, confidence, and pleasure. I am able to meet my family, to appreciate my few real friends, to defeat my numerous enemies, and to caress the cats and dogs that have left me without their loyalty and their companionship.

After lengthy searches through my recollections, I discover that I am unable to remember a lot of names, dates, simple facts, or important parts of my life. I would like to leave behind information and data about some of the factors that made me who I am. If this quest comes to a conclusion, my gratitude will be addressed to the spectacular leaves of the calm mountains of Vermont, to the cold, rainy, gray aloofness of Manhattan’s elegant avenues, and to the timeworn memories of my hometown.

My parents lived in a small, old-fashioned country called Romania. After trying to avoid the harsh responsibility of raising children in a communist dominion, they brought home from the neighborhood maternity ward a girl that my mother named in gratitude of the little light of the inaccessible stars that kept her company in the dark December night before my birth. And I became Luminita—light, little light. The following years brought along my embarrassment with not being Jane or Mary or even Lucille. The boy called Sue must have had similar feelings, so I always sympathized with Johnny Cash song. Americans’ reaction to the oddity of a strange word finally made me feel different yet special—not my mother’s choice, not my classmates’ reference to the most popular Romanian kid magazine, and not my friends’ funny and endearing smiles. Even today or more so today, I still feel awkward to introduce myself as a mature woman with a diminutive name. Thank God, my present compatriots do not understand my native tongue because they cannot associate an old person with a flickering light. When my time came to find names for my daughters, I spent hours to discover phonetically pleasant nouns that would match both their background and last name. My youngest daughters ended up with Sue-like nicknames, so Kris produced Bimbi and Kate turned into Bobo. Bimbi is intelligent with her mind and talented with her hands, bright, beautifully wild, powerful beyond conventions and limits, and frail within boundaries of unbearable tolerance and selflessness. Bobo is selfishly smart, caringly beautiful, gracefully sophisticated, and surviving the adversity of her illness that she turns into self-controlled discipline. Cat is another story. Her nicknames are far from being familiar and will never be close to me, and her strength and weakness will be preserved in the dark, far and remote, unknown and enigmatic, and uninviting and resentful—a child that I lost because I did not live with her and two children that I lost because I lived with them. And I cannot tell who I hurt the most… .

It was December 4, 1954. My hometown was covered with snow and struggled to cope with the freezing temperatures. At night, people went to bed under cozy duvets and on clean crisp bedsheets. They were not worried about keeping their house warm. They did not have to wait in line a whole night so they could buy the Easter eggs. They did not have to look at their colleagues, including the minister, running to the basement shop where they could buy the eggs… . This all came later, not late enough for me because I still remember the cold flats, the cold water, and the cold eyes of my people when Romania enjoyed the prestige of a multilaterally developed socialist country. In the 1950s, life was not making Romanians rich, but it kept them relaxed, well fed, and funny. Most of them were old enough to remember the 1930s and the 1940s. Comparing those good old times with the socialist glory of Gheorghiu-Dej’s government was a source of bringing back melancholic memories of stability and comfort and of covering the future in a dim uncertainty of fear and anxiety.

At that time, my father had been fired from his job on account of having been a translator for the German invaders. He was cutting wood in a small enterprise managed by a comrade that could not read the letters sent by his officials. Quite ingenious, the boss kept stacking the mail in a drawer, waiting for someone who could understand the messages sent to him. The general director discovered that one of his workers was a lawyer, so he brought him to his office to test his reading abilities. My father walked in with shy confidence and resolute conviction that he could do the job. In order to be able to work, he had to be outside, in the open air, and he was supposed to protect himself against torrid heat and icy winters. Every morning he would put on a dark suit, a white shirt, and a neutral tie. He would polish his shoes at night, in an attempt to erase sticky dust and sultry humiliation. My mother tried to persuade him to wear the all-accepted overalls. She was afraid that an ill-tempered comrade might overreact to a symbol of capitalist fashion. Communism did not encourage style or individuality. Later, when I used to live in the United States, my father was still wearing suits, long-sleeved shirts, and ties, even in the humid heat of American summers. It took my stubborn husband a long policy of persuasion to convince him to find relief in a cotton T-shirt and coziness in a down jacket. I still do not know whether I was pleased or sad… .

Upon reading and interpreting the written memorandums to their addressee, the translator was promoted to an office job with no increase in pay.

After their marriage, my parents lived in the house that had belonged to my father’s family. The government decided that their living quarters did not respect the Soviet standards of sharing a bathroom with your relatives. So they were all cramped to one floor where they had to accommodate their need of privacy with the strictness of the Marxist—Leninist guidelines.

My mother was never happy with being so intimate with my father’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law. She wanted to be alone when she cooked in her own kitchen without being overseen, guided, or controlled. She was very pretty, very smart, and very independent. She had lost her father when she was fourteen, and she got used to having no rigid limits to her space. Her mother was a conservative lady with high consideration for tradition, customs, and style. When my grandfather died, she was left with four children and a small pension to cover the family expenses. She was busy putting food on the table, paying the bills, and fitting into a strange community where she was pushed by her husband’s job.

As a child, my granny was brought up in a French-oriented family, a common influence in the northeastern Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of her mother’s sisters was quite well-off and used to travel to Paris on a regular basis, bringing back gifts for her favorite niece—chic French garments and French books that made my granny proud of her aunt and set her forever in awe of everything French. My passion for languages was started by the long hours I spent in her company admiring her fluency in French, her ability to quote Lamartine, her elegance, and her snobbishness. She was proud of her roots and her family, loyal to her beliefs and her trusts, patriotic, daring, spirited, and funny. At an advanced age, in a society that tried to make its people forget Western poetry and embrace Soviet prose, my granny was never afraid to express herself the way she considered fit and proper. She openly showed her disdain for one of our guests who used the bathroom and had a hard time spotting the flushing system of our bidet. My grandmother labeled him a communist and got upset that we had to accept people like him in our house.

Granny was a golden girl who always wore stockings and gloves when she left the house, who spoke in an indoor voice, and who admired old-fashioned values. But when one of my school bullies verbally attacked me, she turned into a lioness protecting her cub with harsh curses and threats. The whole block was in the street, but she was not afraid or ashamed. Neither was I. Granny was also present when I had my first encounter with the police.

My father’s youngest brother was a real good-looking guy—tall, blond, blue eyes, soft spoken, mellow, and dressed to kill! He was married to a special lady—beautiful, successful, and most popular. I liked her a lot, and one of my best treats was to visit her at her office or at home in Cotroceni, one of the most elegant areas