Gary Schoichet

I have a photograph of my mother on a horse. It’s 4 ½ inches wide by 2 ¾ inches tall.  It is either slightly sepia or has browned a little with age. Two men on horses are on her left and two on her right. My mother on a horse? Who were those guys?  Where was my father? What do I know? It was before I was born. She looked happy.

My mother on a horse! What was my mother doing on a horse?

The rest of this is surmise. At a resort. My father off playing tennis.

It’s the horse, her being on a horse that interests me. She, my mother, Goldie, was never in any way athletic. She didn’t drive a car (her mother was killed in an automobile accident when my mother was a young girl and in the car) or ride a bike. But up there high off the ground she looked happy.

It wasn’t that she was unhappy, but she was married to a man, my father, Irving, who didn’t always leave her enough room to be herself. When she was angry with him, she stopped talking to him, sometimes for two or three days. Couples therapy might have helped, but in those days, it wasn’t really an option, especially for Communists who would have demanded a Marxist interpretation.

They met in a deli where my father was a waiter. On their first date in Times Square, they had their picture taken by a photographer who gave them a claim ticket. I have that photo somewhere. Somewhere could be anywhere.

When we lived in Brooklyn, Goldie worked as a bookkeeper in Maxie’s Gas Station on Empire Boulevard in walking distance of Ebbets Field. The policeman on the beat stopped in for coffee most days. One night she went to a waterfront rally called by the Communist Party that might have turned violent. She looked around and saw her policeman, and every time she snuck a look, he was near, silently protecting her. The next day he was at Maxie’s having his coffee. Neither of them ever said a word about the rally.

My mother on a horse? My family didn’t do horses. We never talked about horses. Yet, I saw a photo of me leading a horse in a field sometime in the ‘60s. Don’t remember it. Must have been someone else.

Maybe it wasn’t my mother on the horse. Sure looks like her.