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By Laura Simon
Rashi
Rashi said, “All your life you’re trying to reach a goal – it’s a losing battle,” as I learned back in the days when studying Talmud on a Friday morning at a Chicago J.C.C. with some old bearded men who allowed a woman to listen to their commentaries and drink hot tea with them, bringing my education home to Mannie, hoping that it would help lift him. He wasn’t the only one not to reach his goal in life.
My Rashi study stopped suddenly when one old man, the leader, went quietly up the mountain, so I was told. It is midnight. I go to bed.
My Father at the Window
Some branches tapped at my window one night and dreamlike, it’s my father, pleading with me, “Laura, let’s be friends.”
“It’s too late to be friends,” I say. Just as I had told him 50 years earlier when he was insisting over the phone to see me and my children, then about 12 and 9.
Yet, as he drove up then, that old hatred came over me. What was I going to say to him? It’s pouring cats and dogs? Hope you didn’t get wet? It wasn’t just a day before yesterday. You’ve been gone over 25 years. I didn’t want his forced smile to touch me.
He’s driving us for ice cream. The rain is coming down in torrents. We can’t get out of the car.
He’s under the umbrella. He goes in himself for the ice cream cones and brings them out hardly able to carry the four cones and handing them to me and the children in the car and we eat the ice cream.
Protected from the rain by this big umbrella and that was the last time I ever saw him.
It took a lot of living to understand how he must have suffered in being separated from his family. When he came tapping at my window that night it was raining. He wants to enter my life again. “When you dream of a dead person,” a friend said, “It means that he wants to talk to you.”
And why didn’t I let him?
Seeds: Reliving Childhood Memory
Kids copy seeds of unhappiness. I remember when our immigrant neighbors came into our house one morning to roll cigars for a factory. “I got a job! I got a job!” A man at the table was saying. “How long would it last, God only knows.” Somebody else says, “We plan and God laughs at us,” as he folded some tobacco leaves.
All of nine years old, my hands busy, too, as I sat on the kitchen floor working at my job growing a wheat field – “and put it in Kansas” my teacher had said – using match sticks and twigs, some flour and water to paste on the paper that I carried off to school to join the sugar plantations and rice fields already on her desk.
My seeds came out of a box that I kept hidden under my bed – on a square piece of paper covered with twigs that I managed to paste down with a little flour and water. The walk to school was endless as I carried my wheat field face-up so it would get enough fresh air and blue sky to grow far and wide as it does in Kansas as my teacher said – as I placed the wheat I cultivated on paper smelling of cod liver oil as if all of the tablespoons my mother pushed into my mouth would seep through the top of rice fields and perfumed sugar cane. Sugar cubes and rice already spilled onto the desk just as the teacher entered the room, the rumbling and scraping of feet shutting off very fast.
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 “And seeds grow in our breadbox, too,” I was going to tell my teacher, other kids afraid to say “boo.” She held up a creation and asked of a kid, “What is it? No fooling around in fourth grade geography.” Then holding mine close up to her face, she let out a howl, “Fish oil! Is this what you bring up from your home? The nurse has to come every day to pick through your hair.”
Shaking her hands wildly, she ran out of the room, leaving me with thoughts of the cod-liver oil, one touch of that makes you healthy and grows you up in a hurry. The other kids were having fun dipping their fingers into the ink wells on their desks, shaking their fingers, “Sticky! Smelly!” touching their noses as the teacher entered the room.
“Geography can be fun,” she said, holding up a square of plowed-up field with blobs ofanimals on it. A colorful triangle got a kid a pat on the hand instead of the ruler and that worried me. Twigs and home-made paste. She’s holding up my mish-mash.
“Laura? What is this?”
I was afraid to say wheat for bread. I had already sown the seeds of her unhappiness.
The Ghost
We’re looking for new doctors who understand deafness and poverty. With that I have a terrible nightmare -- a ghost with a black cloak over his head is flying around me with a knife in his hand, a story I tried to show off to my teacher one day.
“You’re in seventh grade now, Laura, sit down. It’s time you grew up. The war is over. If you listen and pay attention, you'll be going into eighth grade.”
In school one day the teacher is waving a letter at me, “Laura, don’t you want your letter?”
For me? I just couldn’t believe it. Who would want to write to me? I hadn’t heard from my father in years. “How many times do I have to call you?” And how bewildered I was when I went up to get it.
My father had written, I was assuming, to tell me about his star now all gleaming as he shows it to some new people to give him honor.
I let my transcriber take the old letter out of its cellophane cover, yellowed, brittle with age,
waiting over eighty years to be transcribed into this book. It is dated the 8th of May, 1919, on stationery from the American Expeditionary Forces, Young Men’s Christian Association, Army of Occupation from Private Wm. A. Austin Jr. Hdq., 8th
Inf. Brigade, 4th Div., A. E. F.
Laura Walchok,
Room #6, La Fayette School,
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Madame:
I have just had the pleasure of looking at a scrap book with your name, and school written on the back page.
The Fourth Division is here in the A of O, and our Brigade Headquarters are here in a little town named Kripp on the Rhine river. We are about ‘steen kilometers up the river from Cologne, which is held by the British. All of the fruit trees are in bloom now, and the town is very pretty.
I have enjoyed looking at your book “tres Beaucoup”. And thank you for sending it. And as I thought that perhaps you would like a souvenir of the Rheinland, could think of nothing better than an autographed letter from one of the members of the A. of O. This will be suitable for framing, and when you grow up you can exhibit it to your children, and your grand children etc. And when I am sent home, which I hope will be toot sweet (as the Chicago Tribune says), if I pass through Chicago, you can easily recognize me in the crowds, for I will be wearing an Overseas cap, and a smile. Will probably be on my way home by the time you receive this.
Well, my dear madame, I thank you for sending us something to read over here, and hope that you receive the highest honors in your school work.
(signature: as is)
Pvt. Wm. A. Austin Jr.
Hdq., 8th Inf. Brigade,
4th Div., A.E.F.
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Editor's Note: Today San Diego Jewish World continues the-weekly serialization of I'm Still Here by Laura Simon, a San Diego resident who is still going strong at 103. She wrote this book to mark her 100th birthday. 