“Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we

thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?”

—Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

My mother was a foundling. Her name was Rita. A young woman presumably of English descent left her on the doorsteps of a French Canadian couple living in the New England immigrant city of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the year 1920. This Canadian-French-speaking-only couple occupied the top two floors of a three-story tenement house in the Centralville section of the city. Across the street from this house flowed the mighty 110-mile-long Merrimack River, which rises in the Central New Hampshire White Mountains city of Franklin and flows south into Massachusetts before eventually turning northeast and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport.

The Merrimack River is famous in the history of industrial America for supplying water power to textile mills in the New Hampshire cities of Concord, Manchester, and Nashua, as well as the Massachusetts cities of Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill. Henry David Thoreau paid tribute to the river in his book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which is based upon a boat trip he took with his brother, John, in 1839, and which he later self-published in 1849, after working on it while living at Walden Pond, about which he claimed:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise [sic] resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

The cruel family that raised my mother nearly succeeded in sucking the marrow out of her life. After she was discovered as a foundling, much in the manner of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo of Notre-Dame of Paris (alternately known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Mom grew up in the fear that accompanies being raised as a child slave, not unlike the manner of another Hugo character, the notoriously mistreated young girl, Cosette, of Les Miserables. My mother’s primary responsibilities in this household were waiting hand and foot on the men of the house, men who were hardened drinkers, drunkards that drank themselves into a stupor, left their cigarettes burning dangerously unattended, and passed out in bed where they often peed during the night.

Keeping the house warm against the harsh New England winter cold was no mean task for a young, scared, skinny girl, as Mother hauled heavy bucketfuls of stove coal all the way up long sets of stairways to the second floor of the tenement house from the dark, damp, cobwebbed, creepy cellar where the coal was piled in a huge, black, dusty mound after being delivered by truck and offloaded into the cellar through the window chute.

The fear of living as mother did as a young girl was not limited to that caused by humans, or by the possibility of freezing to death due to lack of providing fuel for fire; another kind of blackness penetrated the nights. The open raw-sewage pipes that emptied from the tenement houses directly into the Merrimack River presented a double threat: On the one hand they contributed to the pollution of the river from the dyes and other chemicals piped into it from the mills and factories that lined its banks; on the other hand these pipes served as convenient passageways for entering the tenements themselves.

One night when needing to use the one and only commode in her apartment, Mom raised the seat cover only to come face to face with a huge, scraggly, long-whiskered black river rat which had crawled out of the river, into and through a sewage pipe, and wiggled its way right into the toilet bowl, where it now stared open-jawed, teeth bared, and eye-to-eye with Mom. All night long Mom sat shivering from cold and fear on the seat cover which in shock she had slammed shut, afraid to leave the room lest the rat force open the lid with its whiskered snout and scamper out of the bowl and into the apartment proper. In the morning the varmint was gone, but after this nightmarish experience, Mom would never calmly frequent the bathroom again.

Somehow Mom was able to attend public school through the eighth grade. Most likely she went to the Varnum School, the first school built in Centralville, which served the students of Lowell from 1857 into the 2000s. Perhaps this was where she learned to speak English. She always proudly claimed that it was in trade school that she learned skills that she practiced for the rest of her life: sewing, knitting, and crocheting. Later in life she would own two sewing machines: a portable one and a desk model. She used these machines, as well as simple thread and needle in her bare hands, to mend, alter, and create clothes, the latter based upon her collection of patterns as well as her own ideas.

She maintained paper shopping bags full of woolen yarns and varieties of threads, as well as shoe boxes full of knitting and crocheting needles. Like Michelangelo peering into a block of marble in order to envision the statue of David that lay within and awaited release by the sculptor’s hands, from ball after ball of yarn Mom’s nimble fingers fashioned countless numbers of scarves, mittens, gloves, slippers, sweaters, and afghans for family and friends.

One of her greatest skills was knitting into her sweaters elaborate multicolored scenes, such as skiers in down-slope action. Another great skill Mom had was the ability to stay up all night long in order to complete whatever project she was working on. Many a scarf or pair of mittens miraculously took shape overnight from a ball of yarn into a perfect neck warmer or pair of hand warmers with which her three children wore to meet a morning winter snowstorm. Quite a few of Mom’s creations are still in use by family members to this day.

Early spring of 1936, when Mom was almost 16 years old, was one of the most devastating springs on record for some one half of the Eastern United States. Some fourteen days of nonstop downpours, which eventually developed into what became known as the Great Northeast Flood, swelled rivers beyond their banks and inundated practically everything in their reach from Maine to Maryland. The flood began right about the time of Jack Kerouac’s fourteenth birthday. Kerouac was also born in Centralville, less than a mile away from where Mom grew up. He would later record an image of the flood in his book, Dr. Sax. For Kerouac, the flooding Merrimack 
River represented “an unforgettable flow of evil and of wrath and of Satan barging thru [sic] my hometown.”

Entire buildings, people’s possessions, and animals were washed downstream in the raging torrents. The flood caused millions of dollars worth of damage to Lowell, thousands of people received shelter by the Red Cross, and several people drowned. Many people throughout the city were rescued from their flooded dwellings by watercraft of various sorts. Mom was one of these fortunate people as she escaped through an upper story window into a canoe that delivered her to safety.

Mom’s deliverance from the harsh life that she was enduring in Lowell came at the hands of World War II. In 1942 Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Lowell introduced legislation that led to the establishment of the women’s branch of the U.S. Army known as the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) for which active duty began in 1943. This action came after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when War Department officials finally realized that the war could not be won without the enlistment of women in its military ranks.

Despite the persistent “No Place for Women” campaigns against the WAC that were prevalent throughout the country at the time, Mom did what she had to do in order to better her life by joining the 150,000 American women who volunteered to serve their country during World War II for one reason or another. “WACs,” as these female Army soldiers were called, were trained to serve in such non-combat roles as cryptographers, radio operators, and air-traffic controllers (qualified to handle classified information) photographers, electricians, lab technicians, clerks, and secretaries.

Mom became a clerk-typist who served in the secretarial pool. She began her overseas duties in London, England, as a result of quite a different boat ride than her canoe rescue in Lowell—this time being a military convoy. In London she survived Nazi Germany Luftwaffe bombing attacks that would eventually amount to thousands of bombs being exploded and some 30,000 people killed from 1939 to 1945. Mom’s tour of duties was not limited to England, and she was fortunate to be able to travel elsewhere and serve in Scotland as well as in Paris, France. She was always proud of having served under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who she claimed to have met once, and, who in 1953, became the 34^th President of the United States.

Following her military tours of duty, Mother returned to Lowell and to the house in which she had grown up. Only now she was liberated, beyond being exploited in the ways she had been in her earlier life. After all, she had succeeded in tackling major non-traditional female roles of her times, including surviving Nazi military bombings as a World War II veteran and having seen the world as a single woman. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

It was now time for Mom to have some fun. She did this with her girlfriends, some of whom were military veterans themselves. Together in Lowell they went to movies, out dancing to Big Band and Swing music at the Commodore Ballroom, took trips by trolley-car from downtown Lowell out to Lakeview (amusement) Park on Lake Mascuppic at the Dracut-Tyngsboro border, and went on adventure outings to Boston.

It was on one of these trips to Boston that in the commuter rail facility of North Station, which was also the location of the upstairs arena then known as Boston Garden, she met a young Army soldier in uniform who was traveling to where he was stationed as a cook at Fort Devens, in nearby Ayer. However, their subsequent romance and marriage, his advancement to the non-commissioned officer rank of Master Sergeant, and their long lives together is another story for another time.

It was my inclination to travel that led to the uncovering of the secret behind my mother having been a foundling. I had decided to get a passport for the first time in my life and, needing an official birth certificate, which I had never had, procured one by mail from the Registry of Vital Records and Statistics in Boston. Upon obtaining my new birth certificate, I noticed that, curiously, my mother’s maiden name was listed as a different name than she had always told us it was.

At that time, I was living in Kansas, where I had been studying philosophy and working as a reporter and photographer for a small-town weekly newspaper. I had decided to make a trip back East to visit Mom and Dad before heading West to Colorado in order to work as a seasonal employee on an engineering crew for the U.S. Forest Service.

The night I arrived at my parents’ house, I confronted Mom about the conflicting maiden name issue as the two of us were sitting alone at the kitchen table. She immediately broke into tears, and for a long time into the night, the two of us discussed the many issues surrounding her early life in Lowell. The details that Mom revealed to me that night were surely eye openers, and I later shared some of them with my two sisters, who were equally surprised.

Am I angry with the young woman who abandoned Mom yet occasionally visited her as she was growing up, leading Mom to believe that perhaps this person was her real mother? Absolutely not. I want no part of that negative emotion. That young woman did what she did, and that’s all there is to it. Who knows what her reasons were? As the Cherokee tribe of American Indians maintained: “Don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

The best that can be said about Mom’s situation are the words of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: “This is like this because that is like that.” Worse yet would be to experience such anger and to maintain it, for as the Buddha, himself, so wisely taught: “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison expecting the other person to die.”

I thank you, Mom, for the wise sayings that you left me, and, like you used to do, I use them often. However, when I use them, I embellish them by prefacing them with the phrase, “My mother always said:” “Rome wasn’t built in a day;” “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it;” and, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”