(C)Copyright 2023, Jonathan Clarke, All rights reservedĪ friend messaged me yesterday to say how overwhelmed they were becoming with the current state of affairs. If I had her here today, I’d simply say, “Thank you, Mom.” Given another chance, I might even have brought her house slippers and hugged her around the neck with an embrace of gratitude. Looking back, I wish I would’ve rushed more often into her arms to welcome her home. By then I was older and could appreciate better her efforts, her long hours of overtime, of arriving home near or after our bedtime. Mom called that “sacrificing.” And what I see of me today is the product of years of her sacrifice, a word I only could truly comprehend dozens of years later when I too joined the ranks of parental types.įrom Oppenheimer, my mother went on to work and retire from Salomon Brothers where she also worked in data entry as a CRT operator. A stress-free existence for June and me, but, looking back, a gargantuan undertaking for my mom and dad who were intent on seeing their children have everything they needed and some handfuls of the things they wanted. Her salary and Dad’s made life for my sister and me comfortable. In our working-class Brooklyn community, mothers like Mom worked. Laborious days of unflinching, consistent, mundane work which helped put food on our table. And long after I’d go off with Dad to catch the IRT return trip home, she’d be there toiling away, a bit player in the machinery of American capitalism. And the best part was leaving with a stack of spent punchcards to later mold and shape into things.īut what I considered fun Mom called work. Watching stacks of punch cards drop and whiz from here to there was no less electrifying then as is binge-watching Netflix now. And I found the churn of 70s business technology mesmerizing. Industry can be intoxicating for a small boy. Those field trips to Mom’s job were great fun for me. And they’d give folks like my mother a fraction, of a fraction, of a small fraction of those millions to punch away and tally receipts and such.ĭutifully, Mom would peck away, her fingers dancing along her console’s gray and blue keys, day in and day out just one in an army of unsung masses that made Wall Street hum along. Once upon a time, that’s how brokerage houses and corporations kept track of the millions of dollars in transactions that passed their way. Some of my most persistent and cheerful memories are of outings to visit Mom at Oppenheimer where she and a roomful of other women clicked away mechanically on those now ancient IBM keypunch machines. With my eyes shut, she appears now sitting at a computer, behind her desk, in one of those generic office spaces within one of those superstructures that loomed over the canyons of lower Manhattan back in the early 1970s and even today.
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