Mrs Mary Ann Hermann

Mary Ann Hermann, June 17, 1934 - July 5, 2025 Her final months did not stop my mom from seeking adventure. She would push herself up in her chair, clutch her purse and ask, "So, where are we going?" As recently as October, the answer was Europe. The house where my father grew up in Switzerland. The Dinner Boat. The Pilatus. The familiar streets of Lucerne, where she had lived after getting married. The options gradually narrowed from there: I'd point the car in a random direction and drive. Didn't matter where. There was always a restaurant at the end of the line, places she remembered not by name but by food: Alonso's for baby-back ribs; Captain Larry's for crab cakes; Ale Mary's for onion soup, Long Horns for the Flos Filet, Verde for Margherita Pizza. And always Pinot Noir, french fries -- no ketchup required -- and ice cream. A double espresso, three sugars. She thrived around people. She took after her mother who raised five children in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., blocks from the race track, while baking pies for the posh hotels filled with the August horse racing crowd. Her mom Mary worked as a bookkeeper for a water bottling company, helped out at the family pharmacy and lived to 104. Mom went to college and became a visiting nurse in New York City, Boston and Cuba, forced out when Fidel Castro arrived. Mom met my dad Max when she was working at Mass General Hospital in Boston. The precise details remain a bit murky depending on who is telling the story. Best we can piece together is that mom was set up with Keith, who for some reason brought his roommate along to the meeting. And of course it was Max, the roommate, who dated Mary Ann. At their wedding, best man Keith met the maid of honor -- my mother's sister -- and that is how I got an Uncle Keith. The matches worked. Mary Ann and Max were together nearly 60 years. They lived in Switzerland, then New Hampshire, and finally Baltimore, and at one time split years here and abroad. When my parents moved to Baltimore more than a decade ago, my mom had one request: a front door that opened on New York's 5th Avenue and a backdoor that opened on the coast of Maine. I did my best. Boston Street on one side, the Northwest Harbor on the other. It was my mom with the midlife crisis. Her last car was a bright red two-seat Honda Del Sol, which she proudly sped around town with the top down, and drove from New Hampshire to Charm City. Over the years, she saw her mother's homestead in Ireland, her father's in Czechoslovakia. Attended Easter Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, ate dinner at the highest point in Europe and floated in the Dead Sea at the lowest point on Earth. She strolled the Cape with Candy and Bob; dined at Sergio's with Luigi, watched fireworks on the rooftop deck with Jack and Deb. Dinners with Fred at Round Oak. Laughter with Elaine at Alonso's. When I was a little, she used me as a decoy to smuggle a fur coat from Spain into France. The devout Catholic saw popes at the Vatican and questioned wannabee presidents in New Hampshire. Beer and brats under the Eiger. Halloween on Fort Avenue. Cookouts on the deck in Canton Cove timed to the summer concerts in the park next door She never stopped telling stories. When I was a child, I crawled under a cabinet in a department store in Switzerland, emerging head to toe in dust. The clerk sternly warned my mother to control her child. Undeterred, my mom told the clerk that in no uncertain she would never again shop in a store so dirty. She regaled anyone in earshot about the "ugly American" she met at the top the Pilatus in Lucerne who proclaimed in disdainful English, "Imagine, bringing a baby up here," perhaps thinking my mom couldn’t understand. Again, mom rose to my defense, telling the startled tourist, "He loves it up here." She was a survivor. Deaf in one ear since birth. Legally blind as she entered her 90s. Her life nearly taken a decade ago by an aneurism. Heart issues led to risky surgeries. She survived three previous cancers, and the doctors who treated them, until the fourth, esophageal, took her, cruelly stealing her last remaining pleasure: food, a little more than two weeks after her 91st birthday. To her, this last cancer was just another challenge to overcome. Treatment brought a brief reprieve, and a three-month restaurant-a-day bing across Maryland. During one of her stays at Johns Hopkins, a nurse asked how long my parents had been married. Six decades, I told her. The nurse smiled and said she needed to teach her husband how to love that long. "That's how," I said, pointing to my parents, hand in hand on the bed. So, mom, where we going next?