Bonnie's Eulogy of Ruth

Truths about Ruth

Bonnie Auslander

June 25, 2014
(Read at Ruth Auslander's Memorial Service)

I’m so glad we’re remembering my mother today with a rabbi who is not only is a secular humanist but who also advises the atheists on campus. He would have struck my mother as supplying the perfect degree of Jewishness. She would have adored Ben, and I regret that she never got to meet him, though it’s typical of my mother that even while dead she is helping bring new friends together.
She would also have been pleased that we are here where I work at American University—not just because it is a place of higher learning but because she would have found it convenient.  Convenient for me, I mean--Just think, I’m only a few feet from my office in case I need to step out during the service to take a conference call. My mother’s vein of pragmatism ran very deep, and the funniest manifestation of it was our winter holiday. When Mark and I were kids, we didn’t celebrate Hanukah at all, and we celebrated Christmas in early January. When we finally noticed that all the other little children in our neighborhood unwrapped their presents on the morning December 25th and not January 1st or 3rd, we demanded an explanation. She told us it made sense to postpone. Why? So she could take advantage of the after-Christmas sales.

Ruth was also, as most of you here know, extremely warm-hearted. Often I saw her hug people she’d met only moments before—people whose crossed arms and stern faces clearly communicated their need for vast personal distance. At those moments, as she reached out towards them with her arms open wide, I would cringe and look for the nearest exit, but inevitably the faces of those grim types would be transformed by smiles. Sometimes they’d even return her hugs! Looking back,  I can’t imagine why I ever bothered worrying. She could have charmed an injured bird from the paws of a cat.

Ruth’s pragmatism and warmth belied an intense need for privacy. This sense of privacy ran so deep that it bordered on secretiveness. Perhaps she had to be so reserved to balance out that tremendous warmth. But whatever the reason, she definitely had an enigmatic side. Take, for example, what you would assume to be the straightforward question of her birthplace and birthdate. She was born in Reading but always gave her birthplace as Philadelphia, where she’d moved to when she was six. In the same way, she gave her birthday as February 22, when in fact she was a Leapyear baby, just like Frederick in the Pirates of Penzance. Thus when she died twelve days ago she was not yet 21.

This tendency towards fictionalizing came to her as naturally as breathing. She didn’t tell me her true birthdate till I was a teenager, which is about the age she found her birth certificate and confronted her mother, whom Ruth always described as a superstitious Russian peasant. It seems my grandmother told her oldest daughter that her birthday was a full week earlier, February 22, since to my grandmother to be born on Leap Year was unlucky and would attract the evil eye.

And it was not just about her birthdate and birthplace that my mom was known to freely embellish the truth, especially when authority figures were involved. We visited Rome when Mark and I were teenagers, and I remember how she put her one word of Italian to good use while we looking at the beautiful art of the Vatican. Because of the tremendous crowds there, tourists are required o walk through the museum one-way. You can’t loop back. Mark and I were perfectly safe and ahead of her, which she well knew, but she wanted to see a particular painting a second time. So she found a guard, adopted a worried expression, pointed to the room behind her, and said “Bambini!” Of course the guard let her through.

Thus far I’ve told you about my mother’s pragmatism, her warmth and her secrecy. I’ll wrap up by telling you about two more characteristics: her abiding belief in provisionality and her teaching abilities.

First, provionsality. My mother was a great shopper, and she loved the stores of Rockville Pike because of the easy access it affords to its many great temples of consumerism. But though she was a great shopper, she was an even greater returner. The trunk of her car was always full of shopping bags with clothes and objects that hadn’t quite worked out. I guess this was because she didn’t like to be tied down. For those of you who know the Myers-Briggs, when it came to shopping, she was firmly rooted in the P or perceiving end of the great Perceiving-Judging divide. Indeed, much as some people with terminal illnesses will themselves to stay alive until a certain holiday or wedding has passed, Ruth did not succumb to the last stages of her cancer until she had dragooned Mark into taking her to return several unwanted items to the Container Store and what now strikes me as the mystically named Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

I’ll conclude by telling you about her teaching. First, I must admit that although my mother was a great, if somewhat overbearing, teacher, I was not always a great student. Among the many things she tried to teach me and failed were these: how to fold the towels in the linen closet with the rounded part facing out; how to keep your macrobiotic seaweeds alphabetized (A is for arame!)—oh, and I’m told when she was first married she kept the iron under the “Is”  in the filing cabinet ”; how to put on lipstick perfectly without looking in mirror; how to keep your hair neat; how to keep your kitchen neat; how to keep any-part-of-the-house neat; and being eternally patient and loving with your children. Mark and I can hardly recall her directing a single angry word at us. I’m afraid Milo and Nina cannot say the same about me.

In other areas I have earned passing grades in the School of Mother Ruth: I am good at spying out better seats in a theatre and then moving up to occupy them with an air of total authority and entitlement; clever at navigating an unhelpful clerk on the phone (hang up and try again if you don’t get the answer you want); consistent at making the bed in a motel room even on the morning of check-out (this helps you find things you might have left behind), knowledgeable at interpreting nutrition labels; and an ace at comforting a sick child.

But the biggest teaching of all, and one which we would all do well to try to put into practice, was to assume the best of everyone. She had a way of looking for the good in people, even in ones who come across as crabby or difficult, and under her affectionate gaze it turned out she was right—they weren’t half bad--they actually became better people.

So I hope I’ve given you a sense of my mom: a warm, practical, bossy person who spent a lot of time at the customer service desk returning things and who was also something of a mystery. She really did embody  more than one thing at a time: she was both an elder of 82 and a young adult of 20. This contradiction continues even after her death: Mark and I couldn’t decide what birth date to put on the program. And we intentionally chose a photo for the cover that makes her forever girlish. Mark your calendars now for Feb. 29, 2016. On that day, raise a glass to Ruth—she’ll be 21 at last.