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MM: But anyway, so my only child was from my first marriage, and that was his gift to me, because I consider him a real important gift to my life.

VY: What's his name and when was he born?

MM: Jim? He was born in 1964 on Thanksgiving day, November 26th was Thanksgiving. And I thought I was going to have the first Thanksgiving baby, but no, I was in labor for, like, hours and hours and hours, so somebody else had it first. But he was a good baby. I wasn't such a great mother, but he was a great baby.

VY: And I think you had mentioned earlier that you sort of passed along your love for music to him, he has an appreciation?

MM: Yes. I think we could hear it. It's hard not to get influenced by it, because it's so compelling, the music is so compelling. And it's not like he heard awful sounds, and he heard me teach, so he's a teacher. He's a great teacher, he's still teaching. He has some really fabulous students, and he'll never give it up, I think. We did talk about this, how it was great that grandma, his grandma, my mom, got us started on this, because otherwise we wouldn't have this, and we would be missing out on this huge treasure of music that he would otherwise not even know is there or appreciate. Because when he was twelve, he could sing the theme of Beethoven's Opus 18 No. 4 quartet, string quartet, and not very many twelve-year-olds could do that. But we were having rehearsals at my house with Irv Eisenberg coaching us, and so he knows that, because he'd be in bed, and he'd be hearing it.

VY: That's amazing.

MM: But then the thing is that he doesn't know all the popular stuff. He's getting to know more of it now because Holly knows more of it, and he like some of it. I mean, he's very eclectic in his music taste, but classical music is his big thing. He plays violin, he's really, really good at it, and he's a fabulous teacher, knows more than I do about teaching now than I ever did. And he was a conductor for about twelve years. He wants to get back to it, but I don't know, that's kind of a hard thing to get back to.

VY: Wow, so that's amazing. He really did sort of follow in your footsteps, you really passed along your amazing appreciation for music and your musical abilities.

MM: I tried not to get him to do that. Actually, I wanted him to just have fun with it, because I knew he wouldn't make very much money doing it. But he was at Marrowstone music camp, and his teacher and I kind of forced him to go, and Mr. Sokol's eldest son, who's just the most amazing person, who has died now, but he, Mark Sokol, was there with his quartet, and he had such an influence. He was really charismatic and he sat me down one time and he says, "You know, Jim wants to go into music, and he needs all the support he can get." And I said, well, no, I didn't really want him to do that. And he said, "Well, he really wants to. If you make him stop now, it's hard to get back into it once you stop. So guess what?" [Laughs]

VY: So I'm curious, during the time... let's see. So you were married and you had a child and you got divorced, so for a period of time, you were probably a single parent?

MM: Yes. I was a single parent twice for a period of, like, nine years or something like that in between each of the husbands. So Jim was very, learned to be very independent. That's one of the regrets of my life is that he was so young when he had to go off, when he was in grade school. He was four or five when his dad and I got divorced, and he had to go off to school. I would drop him off, but it was before they had things like before school things to help those kids who had to be dropped off earlier or something. So he was what you call, I think, a "turnkey child" or something like that? Latchkey.

VY: Latchkey.

MM: Latchkey child. So he had to close up the house, I mean, lock the door if I couldn't drive him, and if I had to get school early. And so he just learned to be very independent from a very early age. He didn't mind, though, he said. I apologized to him once, and he said, "Oh, no, you shouldn't feel guilty." So his wife, Holly, says, "I wish my mom would have let me alone, left me alone." [Laughs]

VY: Yeah, that's kind of a nice independence that kids appreciate sometimes.

MM: I guess. But as a parent, you just worry that you might have not been there enough for them.

VY: Well, what about your parents? Were they around during this time? Did they help...

MM: No, because they were both working. I mean, they were never really well-off, because they scrabbled for their livelihood, right? And they lived too far away. It wasn't like my mom, she quit driving when she was sixty five, which she shouldn't have, she always later said that she wished that she hadn't quit driving so soon, but that's the way it was. It's too bad, because she would have loved to take care of Jim, I think. She had to work. And my dad was too frail to work, to take care of Jim. Wouldn't know the first thing about what to do with Jim. [Laughs] Although they used to have little conversations, but that's about it.

VY: So it was mostly just you and Jim for a while?

MM: Yeah, mostly.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.