Baby Steps Read Online Free Page B

appear richer than she was: elegant and upper class. My grandfather, an immigrant of Italian descent, gave her the surname Loverde, but my grandmother told everyone it was a French name. She pronounced it loo-VERD, adding her own little inflection to suggest what she believed a French accent would be.
    My mother always felt like a fish out of water in the South. When she discovered the hippie movement in the 1970s, she was relieved and finally at home. All she ever wanted was to live a creative life as a writer, a simple life without societal pressures. Unfortunately, my father had the exact opposite desire.
    My father is German, and his father was a POW in World War II. After the hardship that comes with all of that, my father wanted to live the American dream: success, money, achievement. When he met my mother, he was in New York on a short visa where he was working for a bank, and he passed by a transcendental meditation lecture my mother was guiding on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She had traveled the world with Maharishi since she was eighteen. My father saw her inside and immediately went in and joined the lecture. They started dating and he started meditating. Soon, she accompanied him back to Germany, where I was born.
    But although they had that immediate connection, their long-term goals weren’t the same. My father, like so many Europeans who grew up during the war, has considered earning a good living an immense priority. There was always that underlying sense of foreboding, like if you didn’t work hard enough, you would starve. He has also always been a seeker and a romantic soul who has a mystical, philosophical nature. He loves poetry and opera and the fine arts, and he still meditates, but because he grew up poor and came to the United States to pursue his dream, his outer needs outweighed his inner needs. I sometimes wonder if he would have been someone entirely different if he had not been from Germany and not grown up during the war, but this is who he is. It explains why he was attracted to my mother, and ultimately, it explains why it didn’t work. But before it all fell apart, they moved to Westchester County in New York to live the life my father wanted.
    Westchester is horse country, with white clapboard houses on rolling green hills, horses grazing in the front yard, and dirt roads along which cars drive at a snail’s pace because the most important thing in Westchester is the horses, and a speeding car could spook them. People carve their own pumpkins in Westchester. They use hand-knit napkins for their afternoon tea parties on the terrace or in the rose garden. There is a certain expectation and a certain prestige to Westchester. It’s an antiquated place, where those who can afford to live there, who don’t want to live in the city and are willing to commute, can live in paradise. It is high-end country living at its best. It is the pages of Martha Stewart Living come to life.
    My mother identified with some parts of it: the country life, the animals, and especially the flowers. She was a talented gardener, and she made our home beautiful as she struggled to maintain a certain decorum and sense of achievement my father required in order to rise in his profession. They both wanted me to have every advantage as well, and my father believed this was the best place to raise a child. My mother must have agreed, but for her, it was an uncomfortable place, despite the flowers. Her flower-child sensibilities just couldn’t relate to the materialism of that life, nor to the sense of achievement so seemingly required. It wasn’t her way. She was never a career woman and had no desire to be one. She wasn’t interested in status. Her way was to putter in her beautiful garden and live in the moment.
    Still, she gave it everything she had. My father needed an ambassador to throw elegant parties for his colleagues when he was a young lawyer, and she did her best, but it was