“Marty” - the nickname my mother chose - is now my way of introducing her as a real person. She did not always resemble the ogre who will show up in the Salt Lake City post-accident narrative.

As I grew up in the standard nuclear family, with an absentee commuting father, and a more-or-less housewife mother, she taught me. She taught me what she knew of the scholarship on biblical literature; she taught me what she knew of politics, as a keen reader of the daily New York Herald Tribune, and also of Newsday. She took me to libraries–both in Connecticut, before I was nine, and on Long Island, later. She evinced determination that my mind would not be wasted, as she considered hers had been.

When I was eleven and my brother was nine, she enrolled in an algebra course at a Community College, aiming to complete her college degree, cut short by the Depression. She also loved math, and had gotten three 100% grades in the New York State Regents Exams in High School math.

My brother got nephritis, which threatened his life and required constant care. She didn’t finish the algebra course. Another time she tried to go back to school and another one of the three of us–I have a sister five years younger–got sick. Also, at the same time my brother had nephritis, I had mumps, which traveled to my left ear and destroyed the nerve. I don’t know which she felt; guilt and resentment because of the demands of her children, or frustration and anger at not being able to complete her degree. Both, I think.

She taught me Greek letters, and helped me with Latin homework when I was in High School. She taught me to notice the differences in the bible texts I brought home from Sunday School, and taught me the — Hypothesis, that texts were often detectably composite. She loved mystery stories; Agatha Christie and her detective Hercule Poirot presented her with puzzles she often solved. We did get the Sunday New York Times, and she did the crossword in ink–occasionally with words crossed out, but not too often. Beyond that, she drove each of us to lessons and doctor visits every week; when I needed–as then current thinking went–to have nasal polyps shrunk to prevent any more ear-nose-throat infections that would threaten my hearing, she drove me across the county to the hospital where a radiologist could apply treatments.

Every once in awhile I would discover her scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. At one point she told me the reason for that behavior. “I won’t leave your father with a dirty house.” She didn’t add, “on top of the three kids.”

My father had died in 1971, before he was fifty, of heart disease. That left her bereft, I later learned. She tended to construct narratives, quite imaginative narratives, after the fact. I think that in her mind, after my father died, theirs was one of the great loves of the century. Mourning that great love sufficed to allow her to drink rather more than less, for a number of years.

Before The Accident she had begun to travel–to see the mountains of the Canadian Northwest, and British Columbia. To visit my brother, who then as now lived in Australia. I think the Alzheimer’s and later death of her sister Edie may have been the wake-up call. To stop drinking. To stop hoarding her legacy from my father. Not to stop mourning him, in truth or fantasy, but at least to live out that fantasy love.

By living out that fantasy love, I mean this. Marty, my mother, often told us stories of their courtship and marriage. One of the stories, told particularly to me, was that after they married, in 1937, they both worked. They dreamed of travel. Then in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland; they knew that war in Europe was inevitable, and that travel would be impossible for some time. So they decided to have children–as a way of fighting Hitler? as an expression of hope against disaster? I don’t know; for whatever reason babies came into existence during the war years and immediately afterwards.

In any case, nine months after Hitler invaded Poland, I was born. My birth coincided with the Fall of Paris in June.

My father worked at jobs he increasingly did not like, in positions of responsibility in aerospace engineering research and development. He loved planes; he loved to fly.

His father, a furniture maker and woodworker, had helped Sikorsky by making mockups or models of helicopters during World War I. During World War II my father worked with Sikorsky in designing helicopters and putting into them into production, in Slidell, Louisiana–just across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. We lived there just a year, though–probably there is little record of his contribution. My mother really really hated New Orleans. She had two children under three, the climate was damp and buggy, and it was hot. Demand for aircraft engineers peaked during this period, so my mother’s difficulties with New Orleans meant that we could easily move North again, which we did, within a year. [I think he then worked at Hamilton Standard Propellers for a while.]

Beyond that time period, when he had begun to work in Mt. Vernon, New York, and we lived on Long Island, a very long commute, we ate family dinners every night when he got home. He would often pose an imaginary problem, or describe a bit of science. Sometimes he told us about meeting Chuck Yeager at Wright Field in Ohio, where he traveled to supervise the testing of a plane — or a titanium wing — he and his team had designed. That led to a story about the breaking of the sound barrier, which made seeing the film of that name all the more exciting.

In particular, he described going to the University of Pennsylvania to see [name] the first computer. That machine enchanted him, we could tell. We found it exciting to hear him tell about counting in binary numbers; he taught us how that worked. I mastered binary numbers, but hex, the system of encoding computer instructions in a base-twelve number system, eluded me. He told us “Someday these `computers’ will design airplanes, and make my job obsolete.” He sounded happy about that.

Both my mother and father beamed with pride when I got the Science prize at Eighth Grade Graduation. Shortly after that, my father took me aside and said. “You should probably go to college, withyour interests. I think you should; but there’s only enough money to send either you or David to college. Because he’s the man, and will have to make a living, we’ll have to send him. You make good grades. You could get a scholarship, and then you could go.” This sort of thing I kept in my heart, until the Women’s Liberation Movement set it free.

Yes, I did get a scholarship, and went to a top-flight women’s college that was completely wrong for me–but, paradoxically, one that my father thought I should attend. While there, the early training in bible led me to take a two-semester course in bible. I discovered the Song of Deborah, on the occasion of a professor’s lecture. It was the college of the “uncommon woman,” and Deborah was one of the few uncommon women of the bible. I wrote a term paper, and researched it over the Christmas holiday by commuting every day to the New York Public Library, the 42d street branch, the one with the lions. I researched the paper in the Judaica room of the library–that was where the call system delivered the books that I wanted. Years later, I told the story to Harris Lenowitz, my Hebrew/Semitic languages professor, and he said “With all those Hasids?” It is true; the Judaica room consisted of a population of scholars that was heavily Hasidic, with sidecurls and broadbrimmed (Borsalinos, I later learned) hats. Later reading Chaim Potok’s novels brought that experience to life once more. To an 18-year-old from Long Island, they were exotic, and knew the language of Deborah, which I did not.

At that point I knew: what I wanted to do with my life was to learn the language of Deborah and translate her poem, the oldest material in the Hebrew bible–the first woman, so to speak. And certainly the first woman who did speak.

I didn’t make it at that college; the second year I kept complaining to the student health service that my right flank hurt. They kept not doing anything, and apparently wrote in my record that I was suffering from a psychosomatic illness. I then felt worse and worse, and also got crazier and crazier, until I couldn’t do my course work. At the end of the fourth semester, they didn’t want me back. Three weeks later I was in the hospital having an operation on my right kidney that followed by a day the diagnostic procedure that should have been done a year earlier. I had a greatly enlarged kidney due to a blocked ureter. As one doctor later commented “All that — , no wonder you were crazy.” Not to mention having been told “There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s all in your head. Your right flank doesn’t really hurt, of course.”

Of course eventually I finished college somewhere else. And of course I never had the prerequisite respect for administrative authority at a college. Now I knew that they did not know what’s best. That has made for a bumpy course, of course.