TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS

摘要

In June, a few days after her 84th birthday, my mother received a certified letter from the State of Oregon. It wasn't a birthday greeting, but it is likely to change the way she celebrates every birthday from now on. It almost certainly will change her way of life. My mother lives now, as she has for many years, alone and independently in a house on the edge of a small Willamette Valley town. Every spring she plants a garden. Every Saturday from spring until fall she circles her yard clipping flowers to fill two bouquets for her church. She moved to this corner in 1952, two years after my father died. My mother was 38 when my father slipped from a construction scaffold in an accidental fell. I was 7, my brother 5. After his discharge from wartime service in the shipyards of Bremerton, Wash., my father had barely established himself as an electrician. He left $2,100 in death benefits. My mother updated her teaching credentials and found work in a rural school. Then, with $1,500 in hand, she went to the local bank. She wanted a loan to construct a small commercial building on the downtown lot where we then lived. The building, she said, would be her security. It would offer what my father now couldn't—a source of support in her old age.