Family Matters, Past and Present

A favorite memory of my late mother, gone 22 years next month, is her fierce financial correspondence with her older sister Charlotte, in Tyler, Texas. Their weekly letters traded news about their investments and the gyrations of Wall Street; Mom groused a lot about a company called Overhead Door. Charlotte was a steel-nerved stock-market ace, creating her own price-trend charts and knowing to the second when to turn on the radio in her kitchen to catch the mid-day market report on KRLD in Dallas. When Charlotte attended my 1980 graduation from Princeton, she reached stock-picker nirvana by meeting Professor Burton Malkiel, who wrote the book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." She even had Malkiel autograph her copy of his book.

My mother lacked Aunt Charlotte's zest for trading, but she did OK. When she died in January 1984, she left equal amounts of her portfolio to me and my brother, Mission2Houston, 100 shares of each stock to each of us.

During my marriage, the unrelenting pressures of repairs to Hell House on Hickory Drive and bouts of unemployment pried 95 percent of the bequest from my fingers. But I succeeded in retaining a handful of shares of almost everything, to keep the legacy alive in even a diminished form.

These thoughts came to me with force last week when I had a letter from one of the companies, TXU, formerly Texas Utilities, informing me of a stock split. My 50-plus shares magically became -- through no active effort on my part -- 102 shares. More than a financial bonus, the split returned one more part of my life to where it stood before so much went grievously haywire, turmoil resulting in the another split.

My mother died 10 years before my son Shmoikel was born. To think of her makes me think of him in certain ways. Today on my walk through long northern exit of Grand Central Terminal I saw a suburban mother with two daughters. One, about 10, proudly swung her own fuzzy-pink purse. The other, maybe 7, held her mother's hand as they embarked on a holiday adventure in the city.

I looked on the family bouncing along, then realized the days of needing to hold Shmoikel's hand are gone. He's 11 now and can negotiate between the cars of a parking lot, and look both ways before crossing a street. How often I used to say, "Now hold daddy's hand while we cross the street." That toddler is now the video game playing, sci-fi DVD watching, Frisbee tossing adolescent. His mother and I have successfully nurtured him past the crossing-the-street stage, so now we are moving daily into new stages.

And I like to think my mother's lessons and support are right there with us. Her legacy, in many ways, will be Shmoikel's.