Sarah's Tree

Coming from my houseTo Sarah’s houseWith a weary heartOn my walk in Griffith Park this morning, puzzling over a dilemma, I thought to ask myself what my mother would say. An answer readily came, and it made sense, as my mother's suggestions often did.I should consult my mother more often.My friends often sought her advice. She was wise.“A gifted teacher, she loved all children,” is inscribed on Anne Steinman’s plaque in the Beth Olam cemetery in the heart of Hollywood. She loved her work as an early childhood learning specialist, Head Start teacher and advocate for children. She maintained a youthful exuberance her entire life. Her handwritten letters included many exclamation points. She was a wildly creative and unpredictable cook. (who else would make red snapper, green chiles, with slivovitz and dill?) She loved being a mother.She met my father when she was fifteen. They married when she was just shy of twenty and they were together fifty-one years. They raised four kids, treasured their grandchildren. They were together through wartime and peacetime, thick and thin. They argued, they loved, they lived.My parents both died in 1990. A heart attack felled my father in January. My mother’s pancreatic cancer returned in April, after a three-year remission. By October, after months of terrible suffering, she was gone. Too young, Too soon.It's difficult to comprehend that it's been nearly twenty-two years since they left us.My mother had always wanted to write a childrens’ book. She satisfied that goal just days before she died. Morphine eased the cancer’s pain; perhaps it also eased the story from her imagination. "I’m ready," she told me one afternoon, without warning. “It’s called ‘Sarah’s Tree.’” I scrambled to write it down as she fluidly narrated her tale. I promised to illustrate it and I finally did, though to my sorrow, she never got to see the finished little book.In “Sarah’s Tree,” my mother uses the simple metaphor of her frequent drives across L.A. to visit Sarah Rebecca, her then-youngest grandchild, firstborn of my brother Ken and his wife Rhonda. Tiny blond Sarah Rebecca (born a premie) with her huge soulful blue eyes was my mother’s great comfort during that annus horribilis.Recently Sarah Rebecca, now 23, drove to her old house in the Valley to see if she could find the tree. She wasn’t sure which one it was. Perhaps we’ll go look for it together someday soon. What matters is that my mother saw it, that it's possible to find such inspiration in a scraggly tree on a traffic median in the middle of the city.excerpt:the limbs of Sarah's treeare arms and legs,buoys, guiding stars,lighthouseesThey direct meto where light and love exist.That's what Sarah's tree's limbs do.There is so much to say about my mother.Here is Anne in a dreamy moment, sitting at the yin/yang table in my kitchen in Portland, Oregon in the seventies...