#BY CANDLELIGHT AND CONJURE MOVED FULL#
#BY CANDLELIGHT AND CONJURE MOVED TORRENT#

When they set foot inside these homes they grew up in and are suddenly surrounded by the paraphernalia of their pasts, many adults unconsciously lapse into their childhood roles - they re-become the ultra-responsible sibling, the “black sheep.” No wonder practitioners of psychometry finger an object a person owns: they know it lives and breathes the memories of their past.īut without such mementos (the word is derived from the Latin “remember”) to release the flood of memories to remind you where you came from, it’s as if the past doesn’t exist. The china, glassware, jewelry, and wedding dresses inherited from their mothers are weighted down with generations of history, and fraught with family expectations. The dining room table and chairs passed down from their parental homes harbor the ghosts of past meals and arguments in every molecule. Time and again, adults say they are going “home” to visit their parents for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holidays - even though they already rent or own their own homes or may have started their own families. I always thought Thomas Wolfe, author of You Can’t Go Home Again, was wrong.

#BY CANDLELIGHT AND CONJURE MOVED TORRENT#

Unlike the madeleines, whose aroma sent Marcel Proust reeling back to the joys of his childhood, there is no single thing I possess - no furniture, toys, family photo albums or old clothing - that might, by its very history, conjure such a torrent of memories. But I feel curiously disconnected from my past. That flooded back because m y landlord gave me eviction papers, Christmas week 2019, because she wanted to move into my apartment, sending me into a panic. She would say, “I’m a married woman, I’m not supposed to work.” And when I noted she was divorced, she would reply, “Your father’s divorced - I was the divorcer.”įorty-three years later, sitting in my apartment in San Francisco, I recall that first eviction. She had mental problems combined with very traditional attitudes. My mother refused to work or accept any kind of government assistance, even food stamps. She’s your mother, she’s your problem.” She sure was. I want you to know, I’ll pay it but under extreme duress. He snorted in contempt: “Girls don’t need to go to college. Since I’d read the divorce papers and learned he was supposed to keep paying it if I went off to college (which I was planning to do) until I was 22, I set up a meeting to tell him it was difficult for two people to live on $30 a week and insist we needed the financial help. I usually saw him twice a year, for Christmas and my birthday - sometimes a bit more - even though he lived just four blocks away. The day I turned 18, he stopped paying child support, which accounted for half that amount. My mother received $60 a week in child support and alimony from my father but he never quite grasped the concept of sending checks on a regular weekly basis. I welcomed the luxury of supporting a single person for a change.

#BY CANDLELIGHT AND CONJURE MOVED FULL#

I had graduated from college on a full scholarship and I was tired of paying rent and bills for two people since age 17. Luckily, I had moved out a few months earlier. I never saw our furniture, photographs, clothing, piano, or pets again. My mother had been evicted from our rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights, NY, for not paying the rent. It was very sad.” This neighbor had no idea where my mother had gone. “After the marshals moved everything out, she refused to leave. “The police came to take your mother away,” she said flatly. I buzzed the next-door neighbor to ask what had happened. I noticed the lock on the door had been removed. When the gas had been cut off for over a year, we simply ate cold food or my mother cooked dinner on a hot plate she plugged into an outlet down the hall. I had been raised to do my homework by candlelight. But since her telephone service - as well as the electricity and gas - was often cut off because she couldn’t pay the bill this was nothing new. I had gone home that day in 1977 because when I called my mother on the phone there was no answer. Our dog, Apricot, didn’t bark, and our cat, Muffin, didn’t scratch at the door. Odd, I thought: my mother never went anywhere.Įven odder, the apartment was eerily silent. I rang my mother’s doorbell over and over.

By candlelight and conjure moved