Appreciating Barbara Ginsberg
My mom passed away on Thursday April 2nd; she went quickly at home in bed. She was 89 with various ailments and, amid this global pandemic, I should note that she did not die of covid-19; the paramedics said it was likely a cardiac event. (We will not know the exact cause of death. Due to the pandemic, medical examiners are opting to sign off on some deaths remotely, and that is what happened here.)
I want to write a few words in appreciation of my mom. She was born Barbara Ann Ferguson in New Orleans in 1930, a different era from today to put it mildly; as one example, she grew up without air conditioning (imagine!). She came from a family with deep roots in New Orleans — she was the first 4th-generation graduate of Tulane — and she is known as Bunkie to 5 generations now of her New Orleans family.
As a young woman, she wanted to escape the confines of New Orleans, and so migrated to New York City to get her Masters at Columbia University. Shortly thereafter she met my father, and in the summer of 1956 they got married in a civil ceremony at City Hall, with two witnesses. They then packed up and drove across the country, to move to the very different climate of San Francisco.
I remember her New Orleans roots in her genteel southern belle manner — she was polite and decorous, almost to a fault — but I most remember those roots in her cooking. We grew up having red beans and rice as a weekly dish, I always savored the nights she would make gumbo, and I could not begin to count the days I came home from school to smell freshly baked cornbread, which I adored. And when we would go back to visit New Orleans, I would be treated to an incredible variety and depth of cooking (I never came to appreciate soft-shelled crabs, but I think that was her favorite).
People invariably describe my mother as kind, which she truly was. She did not have a mean bone in her body, and she was as thoughtful as anyone you will ever meet. People who met her would always come away leaning toward me to confide that she was “just so nice”. I have gotten innumerable condolence notes in the last days, all leading with how kind she was.
But she also had a wicked sense of humor. She would only rarely make a biting comment herself, but I fondly remember her delight at someone else’s biting quip, where she would chuckle and look away and then look back with an “oh you should NOT have said that” look. I suspect this was all part of her southern belle training — absolutely proper on the surface, but with a tacit critique of society always understood and flourishing beneath the surface.
She was also staggeringly intelligent, but so soft-spoken and self-deprecating that many would never notice. As one (literally) trivial example, in the 1980s we brought home Trivial Pursuits, then a huge fad. She exclaimed, and no doubt believed, that she was terrible at trivia games. In Trivial Pursuits, you need to fill a circle with 6 pie-shaped pieces and then complete a final challenge. She filled her circle and won the game before the second place person had 2 pieces. She said she got such lucky questions that she just happened to know the answer to. Knowing her, she believed that.
More seriously, she was extraordinarily well-read, like her mother before her, and as suits the granddaughter of a Tulane philologist. Her reading pleasures were very classical (“I just can’t read any novel written in the present tense”), and she could comfortably speak to any writer from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf. The downside to all this is she had no knowledge whatsoever of any form of pop culture (though she loved the Style section of the paper, so she might not know any Lady Gaga songs, but she had probably seen her latest brush with the news). Her most relaxing reads were Anthony Trollope, whom I confess I have never gotten around to reading.
She was also an incredibly talented pianist, before her arthritis caught up with her in her 70s and she had to stop playing. I remember her taking an hour in the afternoon where we kids were not to bother her, and I would listen to her playing, in awe at what I was hearing. I would peek at her music books after and see pages dense with musical notes. As I recall, she played a lot of Chopin and Schubert. I also remember her sadness when she could no longer play — I think piano truly transported her, and afforded her moments when she was fully immersed in a world apart from the exigencies of day-to-day life.
Every conversation I had with her in recent years, she mostly asked after her two beloved grandkids. I think one of her last regrets was that she lived in a different city, and so she could not see them growing day by day. I can’t find it right now, but one picture of her that I just love is when she was a young mother throwing me up in the air. I am out of the picture frame, but it’s a beautiful picture. And what the picture most captures is just her joy. That’s how I choose to remember her, immersed in a moment of pure joy. Rest in peace, mom.
