I found myself telling this story on Facebook earlier, and not only is it delightful to me, but it also may be true -- so I thought that I should write it down here for the internet.
After my mother graduated from high school and did some secretarial school, she decided that she loved to travel. For a few years, in her early 20s, she was living in Los Angeles -- it was the early 1960s. At some point, my grandparents, aunt, and uncle came out to visit her, and as part of their travels, they went down to Tijuana.
The Tijuana trip is something of a family legend. Part of the story that I heard involved my uncle (who was maybe 10 or 11 years old) trying to practice haggling with street vendors. Another part of the story involved the whole family going to the restaurant where the Caesar salad was invented. But the story always ended with the part where my mother saw a beautiful velvet painting of a handsome long-haired man. She decided she had to have it -- and went back to buy it on their way out of town.
It was, after all, the 1960s.
My mother hung the painting up in her apartment in California, and then when she moved back to New York, she hung the picture up in her apartment there too. She might have even moved apartments a few times after that -- I always think of her as something of a nomad when she was young.
Eventually, she was living somewhere on the Upper East Side, with the picture hanging on the wall, when one of her childhood friends came to visit. Her friend was Catholic, and asked my mother why a nice Jewish girl would have a picture of Jesus hanging up in her apartment.
My mother had absolutely NO IDEA.
And then, the story ended with my mother giving her friend the painting of Jesus and it hanging in her friend's house for many years. My mother often told the story after we left that friend's house, and I never remembered to look for the painting or ask her friend if it was true. One of these days, maybe I will remember. Or maybe it's just better as a legend.
