Time no longer moves linearly. It’s a collage with moments, memories, images, flashes of light, sound, colour.
And thinking of my mother it’s filled with colour. Such colour.
Fire engine red. Her beloved red Acadian convertible driven even beyond the point where the passenger door could close and needed to be held shut… by 10-year-old me or my big brother Ralph. Its body ended up as a sculpture in our backyard. Painted blue.
But Holiday Inn blue would not be the colour of our swimming pool painted black for the maximum reflection of leaves and branches in its waters. My mother had to sign a waiver relieving the builder of any responsibility should we crack our heads open by not seeing the bottom clearly. After complaining about never having painted a pool black before they would later bring clients to advertise how amazing it was.
My Ellen Henderson indigo blue dress with white bib. I got to wear it on the runway at one of my mother’s fashion shows at the Park Plaza Hotel. I was about 5 or 6. white hat and gloves to match. I met her at the end of the runway where she took my hand and together, we walked up the runway. What a thrill to share the limelight with my beautiful mother.
Antique white. Our first upright piano. Stained and painted by my mother with distressed splotches to look weathered and old. Yamaha shiny black didn’t go with the antique furniture in the living room. My mother started taking lessons with Mrs. Poole when I was 8 and she’d practice when I went to bed. It was the only year of my life I looked forward to going to sleep just so I could hear her play. By the time I started studying with Mrs. Poole a year later, I had every piece in the grade one book memorized.
Bright shiny high-gloss navy blue. the colour of the 3rd floor bedroom I got to move into as a teen. We’re talking walls, ceiling…It was unworldly out of this worldly. you could almost swim in it. and it was so entirely Rose. Incidentally, New York abstract expressionist artist Larry Poons slept there when he visited years earlier. I still remember meeting him and cherish the times my mother took me to the David Mirvish Gallery. How I loved that place. The art, the artists, New York culture, books. The building itself felt like a temple.
The art of colour. And oh, how my mother understood it, and all its magic. It was how she made sense of the world. Her world. so private in so many ways. Her explorations of mythology, Minoan civilization, ancient Greek art, Gods, mortals, tombs, treasures. These were her portals into her very personal creative universe. Her paintings are layerings: civilizations piled on top of each other- peeking through. Layers of paint, collage. ancient, modern, classical. history, archeology.
On her hands and knees on the floor of her studio, painting to her was as much a physical process as a visceral one. She literally put herself into her work.
colour. colour. colour.
And it was colour that saved her life. Fleeing Poland in the spring of 1939 the Canadian border patrol told my grandparents- if it wasn’t for the two blondies- my 8-year-old mother and her younger sister Gena- they never would have let them stay in Canada. My grandfather was clearly not a farmer, which was required of Jewish refugees. Nevertheless, they lived on a farm in Barrie for a year and left for Toronto as soon as they were able to.
And it was that blond hair which launched her highly successful career in television commercials and print ads. At one point she was so overexposed as the blond suburban housewife that she showed up at an audition calling for “a Rose Lindzon- type”
And, yes, I was teased relentlessly by that Natural Gas commercial where she ended up in the lap of some guy who was clearly not my father! But I must confess that whenever I was in a store with boxes of Fact toothpaste, I’d turn them all to the side of the box with my mom’s beautiful smile.
Living colour. You see my mother was a gardener. She could rhyme off the growing times of every single one of her plants, planning colour schemes, heights, depths, textures… tame and wild. On any drive to the country there would always be a trowel in the car for wildflower sightings or rare specimens that would fit in just that place in her ravine. It’s a good thing my dad loved to weed!
Mom would be out there with the sun rising – pruning, trimming, transplanting. Her garden was always one of the stops on the Toronto Garden Club tours.
And when she collected orchids, the Orchid Society came to call. Her studio was lined with rows of orchids on special trays filled with beautiful stones. She was passionate about them.
But Rose was no sentimentalist. When it was time to move on, she moved on. No looking back. No dwelling on the past…unless it was Etruscan! When she sold the house on Crescent she simply left her gardening world and her orchids behind. No looking back. Except the time when we walked by the house recently when she told me she was upset that the new inhabitants dug up her prize-winning rose garden and put in some banal geraniums.
But nothing inspired her more than travel. Spending time on archeological digs, studying ancient cultures, the light in Giverny, rice paper in Japan, waterfalls in South Africa, India, the middle East, Egypt. She adored Southern Italy and made several pilgrimages a year to New York City. ballet, opera, the Met, MOMA, Soho. Margaret played opera excerpts for her on Spotify as she lay dying. It was the last thing she probably heard. She studied illuminated manuscripts, went to museums the world over…Galapagos. Antarctica.
Everything my mother was interested in became a serious study. She was an avid learner her entire life. She often told me that she knew more than the guides leading trips and I’m sure was not shy letting them know! and we’re talking about the Museum of Natural History. the Smithsonian.
And she loved the New York Times. Last month she told me that doing the Sunday crossword puzzle was her way to relax!
Concrete, steel, glass, wood, bronze pillars, mom transformed every home she lived in and had several featured in magazines.
There was nothing mundane or ordinary about my mother. She was challenging, temperamental, had strong opinions and was never shy about expressing them. She had strong convictions, a clear eye for beauty and up until very recently was in extraordinary shape- before Covid you could find her at daily exercise classes at Equinox. She took daily 2-hour walks until a year ago. She lived by her own ideals and illusions and believed age had nothing to do with numbers…. after all, she kinda stopped counting after 39.
But when I look at her tremendous output, her beautiful drawings, her breathtaking intimate sketches and amazing books of water colours, mythology, flowers…I see how she lived all of her life in the most creative way possible.
Mom you are and always will be my biggest inspiration.
I want to thank my brother Andrew and my wonderful sister-in-law Margaret for their incredible support of my mother since my father left us 25 years ago. Over the past few years, they have truly sacrificed everything to look after her. And over the last couple of months, Andrew you have been truly amazing- arranging mom’s care, trying to keep her comfortable, being available at all hours of day and night. Thank you.
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