A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last.
Onwards it goes, resuming its diagonal cuts once more as they round the bend and go out of sight through the late November afternoon mist.
This happy spectacle played out as I’d been walking along absorbed in thought about my sister Edie, who died the previous evening, right about the time I was finishing up the newly released PBS documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. As the closing credits rolled, I started fiddling with the remote rewind button, trying to snag a few bits of particularly poetic and insightful commentary on Leonardo’s deep veneration for the human body and its microcosmic reflection of the creation at large, in all the majesty he saw in it through all his days.
It felt important to hear and note those comments again, right then, given the knowledge, humming right on the edge of my consciousness these past days, that Edie’s depleted body, its careful chemical balances askew with disease, would soon be breathing its last.
And that’s when the call came from her middle son, and I dropped the remote onto the table.
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“He has a love of the world. Nothing was dull or boring or quotidian to him. It was all a marvel. That’s the blessed state I feel he was sort of in, because the world IS that abundant. It IS that rich.”
That’s theater and opera director/producer Mary Zimmerman, one of multiple smart talking heads who offer rhapsodic descriptions of the singular brilliance that percolated through Leonardo’s life, as exhaustively chronicled in Ken Burns’s two-part documentary.
Others referred to the polymath Leonardo, who couldn’t seem to decide whether to be a painter, scientist, engineer, philosopher, sculptor, anatomist, astronomer, architect or mathematician. So he did them all.
Multiple art historians and culture mavens populate the documentary, speaking of Leonardo in almost god-like terms of veneration. For my money, no compliment could top the 20th century art historian Kenneth Clark’s homage to him as “the most curious man in history.”
His was a curiosity that matched a child’s natural predilection to turn over every rock looking for bugs, to gape at every passing plane and butterfly, and to parrot my 2-year-old grandson’s most persistent question about his world: “Waz dat?”
Leonardo never lost that two-year-old’s sense of wonder. The wonder of that is that he never stopped voraciously following up on his own question. He seemed incapable of resisting turning up every rock that crossed his path, examining it closely, most always drawing it, putting it through experiments to determine its exact function and its connections to other rocks. Because there are always connections—if one looks hard and persistently and openly enough—to all the other rocks one ever encounters.
Nothing “dull or boring or quotidian.” Every upturned rock in every field, every star and cloud and person and muscle and bug and amoeba, “a marvel.”
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Edie was six months in utero when our parents got loaded into a cattle car in Budapest at 11:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1944. The occupying Germans were on the run as their war effort was coming to ruin, and the invading Russians were not kindly disposed to Hungarians.
Packing a small suitcase with all their earthly belongings, my parents joined a dozen other people hunkered down amidst a small stove in the middle of the car, straw for bedding and no toilet. “We stopped whenever the conductor had to go to the bathroom,” my mother told me many years later.
They would eventually disembark in Weimar, Germany, which was relatively combat-free as the resident Germans anxiously awaited war’s end. Edie was born there in March, 1945, five weeks before Adolf Hitler’s suicide with Eva Braun signaled the definitive beginning of the end for the dreams of German empire.
Life wasn’t easy for anyone in post-war Germany. Over the course of the next five years, my parents were separated for various periods as they endured the rigors of relocation, scratching out a living, my father trying to relaunch his track career, and awaiting (and waiting and waiting…), the possibility of emigration. Several years on, my brother Pete had come into the world, I was on the way, and a marital breakdown saw Edie sent to live with my father while Pete remained with Mom.
It was Christmas Day, 1950, and Edie was three months short of six years old.
Edie forgave but never completely got over the sense of abandonment she felt as the days without her mamika dragged on into weeks and months. Earlier this year, she told me that in her teen years she had asked Mom, “How could you leave me?” The answer was that shuttling three children between two residences in separate German cities in 1951 wasn’t feasible, and the infant and toddler boys would need a mom more than she would.
Ultimately, my parents reconciled in Germany, our immigration lottery spin came up on “United States” rather than the “Ecuador” that was also in play, and the five of us crossed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Harry Taylor, disembarking at Ellis Island in March, 1952 with not a penny in my parents’ pockets. Three more girls, now my surviving siblings (my brother passed in 2010), were born over the next decade.
Although the reason for sending Edie along with my father was rational enough, it engendered in her not only the intense desire to have a large intact family (four children, grandkids & great-grands galore), but also a not entirely rational but certainly understandable drive to so suffuse the positive Christmas spirit in her home through the rest of her life that it resembled nothing so much as a miniature Santa’s workshop and holiday emporium, every square inch of available wall, counter and tabletop festooned with Christmas items of every imaginable type.
The sheer visual spectacle of it all became one of those charming holiday traditions, the knowing nods, winks and smiles of visiting family members and friends welcoming the utterly harmless, thoroughly engaging obsession it reflected. Edie’s desire to both acknowledge and salve an ancient wound came to represent, one year upon the next, the very healing and joy that Christmas is meant to provide.
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“God writes straight on crooked lines,” goes the ancient proverb. The crooked lines are our own lives, not one of those lives, for anyone, ever proceeding in a straight line of unbridled joy and contentment, or even behavior we’d be proud to have reflected in our obituaries. We fall, we rise, we tend our bruises, we try to heal.
But that healing most always comes with a choice. We can either crouch and brace ourselves so the injury doesn’t recur, or we can go the route of the young hound, bounding and free, open to all that is.
My sister Edie gathered up all that she was, arms wide as the world she saw in front of her, into one concentrated goal: to become the best, most open-hearted mother—and ultimately, clan matriarch—she could possibly be. It shaped her every life decision and defined her very identity through the end of her life. Nothing more mattered, but nothing less ever intruded to undermine the heart she nurtured in pursuit of that goal.
One of the key principles of Leonardo’s thought sprung from his intuition, borne from his ceaseless observation of the natural world, that the microcosm of any given system or organism reflects the larger macrocosm of which it is a part. He famously compared the branching of human arteries to river tributaries, one of countless analogies that to him demonstrated the magnificent design of the creation and every creature and phenomenon within it.
It’s not much of a leap from there to a sense that every individual life is bathed in the magnificence of the whole, a magnificence that Leonardo saw so clearly wherever he looked. And that an appreciation of that magnificence beckons us to a larger purpose, each individual’s particular purpose not pre-ordained but instead forged from the depths of genetics, experience, instinct, and the intentions that lie within every person to do what they can, what they feel they must, through the course of their lives.
In that sense, Edie was—and remains—a chip off the old macro block, that block helping her exude all the love that she lived for and made haste to share with all who crossed her path.
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Welcoming three-day-old great-granddaughter River into the world, early September…
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A potpourri of visuals here depicts barely a fraction of the creative output with which Leonardo graced and glorified the world…
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Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.
Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Hound dog by Joel Bradford https://www.flickr.com/photos/guitarcast/
Grandson Kai and Edie with River photos by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Edie, Pete and parents in Germany from Hidas Family archive
Edie bedecked in Christmas regalia by her son at his “Wish Upon a Toy” fundraiser at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, California. Instagram: r_russek@instagram.com
What a remarkable tribute to your sister. Thank you for sharing a slice of her life with us. I am very sad for your loss of her.
Wow! This was a tour d’ force entry, my friend. My deepest condolences. There’s no more to say.