Tag Archives: Childhood Memories

Braking Tradition

08 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care

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No traditional Easter luncheon for us this year.

No baked ham.  Deviled eggs.  Nor scalloped potatoes or pineapple.

No family gatherings around the dining table.  Which is fitting, I suppose, since I’ve no dining chairs to gather around the table.  A case of poor timing on my part, they’re off being re-upholstered —  and my three married children are off celebrating elsewhere.  Kara and Kate are at their father’s place in Chandler and I think Bryan and new daughter-in-law Amy are in Tulsa with her family.

Today, we are a trinity of diners  — father, son and an unholy ghost of a mother, who once would have ensured she had at least touched based with all her chicks to know their plans, to perhaps let them know they were loved, if not with exact words, at least with action, as in an invitation to dine.  Or to drop by for dessert and a visit — perhaps, the perennial pink-swirled sugar cookies, called “Sweeties,” that became, without thought of tradition-making, my signature grandmother cookie.  Or maybe, if I had a few kinds souls to help me eat it, my very favorite coconut cream pie.

Alas, it’s chocolate cream pie for us today.  My sacrifice for the two I live with, since husband and son prefer chocolate to coconut.  But that’s okay since it’s becoming a day for breaking traditions — it will be my husband, instead of me, cooking in front of the stove today.  He offered to cook Cashew Chicken over steamed rice.  And I accepted.  It’s one of my favorite dishes he makes that — as luck would have it — he no longer enjoys.  So making it will become his sacrifice for me.

Perhaps all this off-with-the-old traditional meal and ways of celebrating is a good thing to do at Easter — and other holy days, too — at least on occasion.  Who knows but maybe the little sacrificial acts won’t bleed into everyday life.  But, even if they don’t, it’s good to take breaks from tradition.  Because, I confess, tradition blinds me.  It makes me deaf.  So much that it takes something new to wake me up — to stir me back to life — to the who and what which lies beyond and beneath the traditions of celebration.

So today, having no need to work heart out in the kitchen — for a feast consumed in thirty minutes or less — I’ve been contemplating the what’s and who’s of my life.   I’ve thought of the past, about parents and marvelous Easter dinners I’ve been blessed to enjoy.  I’ve thought of past egg hunts at my Granny’s house, when the egg-hiders —  my mother and her sister Jo and sister-in-law Georgia, who then seemed old beyond years, but — I see far more clearly, now, even with failing eyesight, — were oh so young — as they told us kids to close our eyes and not to peek.  As they’d wander off together laughing, toward the front yard with real boiled eggs dyed all the colors of the rainbow.  I’ve thought of other hunts that had nothing to do with boiled eggs, the one all the way back to that first Resurrection Sunday, to that young trinity of visitors to Jesus’ tomb — Mary, Peter and John — and how frightened they were to find no body home.

Funny how I’ve yet to think of the future.  But, thinking there now, I can’t imagine the thought of breaking the tradition of ham and hunts and family gatherings forever.  I cannot bear the thought of never again hosting all of my children and their families  to future grand Easter feasts and egg hunts.

Instead, I hope today is only a slowing down, a braking rather than a breaking of Easter traditions.   That I’ll soon recover my motherly mojo — not that I ever had a full cup of this, but at least whatever portion I once enjoyed — enough, to gather my chicks home, to a place that celebrates our joined and imperfect past as it builds bridges to some shared imperfect future.

Because no body, but nobody, like Jesus, lives here at this house.  Though sometimes, even in the smallest sacrifice, I catch a glimpse of him or two.  Maybe a ghost of his holiness.  A taste of him on my tongue.  If not in the breaking of bread, then in the braking of tradition.

Cashew Chicken, anyone?

Cashew Chicken for Three

1/2 lb boneless chicken breasts, cut in thin strips
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
1 Tbsp canola oil
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 small onion, diced
1/4 lb mushrooms, trimmed, sliced thin through stems
1 Tbsp canola oil
3 cups cabbage, shredded
1/2 tsp sugar
3 oz cashew nuts, salt rinsed off, dried
1/2 tsp cornstarch

1/8 cup soy sauce

In small bowl, blend soy sauce and corn starch and add chicken.  Let stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.

Heat 1 Tbsp oil with salt in wok over high heat.  Add chicken and stir-fry until white and firm.  Add onion and mushrooms, continuing to stir-fry until vegetables are soft.  Transfer wok contents to bowl.  Add remaining oil to wok with cabbage and sugar.  Stir-fry about 3-4 minutes until cabbage is crisp-tender.  Return chicken-vegetable mixture to wok, add cashews and toss to combine.  Sir in final cornstarch and soy sauce.  Cover and steam for a minute.  Uncover and stir until sauce is thickened.

Serve over steamed rice.

To One Turning One

08 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care

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Dear Reese,

There’s much I wish to tell you today, though you’re not old enough to hear it, or better to say, not old enough to remember it.  I wish you could remember the big party your parents are throwing that celebrates your great love of dogs — what you call DA — I wish you could remember the hot dogs and corn dogs and the ‘PUP-peroni’ pizza and what I know will be the sweetest little doggie cupcakes anyone could bake.  I wish you could remember the forty or so people who have paused their own lives to show up today in yours.  And not to forget the gifts they’ll tote with them – the toys and the books and the clothes — most of which you’ll outgrow, too quick to remember.

But as much as I wish you could remember every delicious detail about today, there are other things I wish you to remember more — things about your first year of life that no one knows because they concern just you and me.  They grew out of that special six weeks we spent together last April and May when your mother returned to work after her maternity leave was over.  Knowing that I won’t always be here to help you remember these — I’m taking time today, to write them down just for you.  Because I wish you to know, in grown-up words, how special you are to me — and most of all — how special you’ve made me feel this year.

Let me begin by backing up, to the summer before you were born, when your mother asked if I’d be willing to babysit so she could return to her kindergarten class to finish the school year.  While I was quick to say ‘yes,’ you should know that the thought of caring for you really scared me.  Not because I thought I’d drop you or anything.  It was more complicated than that, though less substantial too, since my fear rested on a false self-image of myself.  You see, I’ve never regarded myself as particularly maternal — I’ve never considered myself a good mother or, for that matter, a good grandmother either — I use to often joke how no one would ever think of nominating me for a ‘mother of the year’ award.  Maybe it was those standard sixty-hour weeks I worked for years that had me writing this bit of fiction.  But writing this now makes me wonder whether they even have these kinds of awards anymore — and for that matter, what a ‘good’ mother looks like?  Today I’d say that I couldn’t have been too bad to have ended up with four great children — one of which is your lovely mother.

But how it happened, that all those long-held fears and insecurities evaporated in days, I can’t really say.  As I look back on that time, it’s funny that I began our six weeks together believing I was doing your mother a big favor but ended the six weeks realizing how it was you and she that had favored me.  And it wasn’t long after I began watching you before I forgot all my shortcomings and even forgot myself.  As proof, I share with you a note I wrote to a friend last April 19th:

My saving grace these days is time spent with new granddaughter Reese. Already two weeks into my six-week stint, time is chipping away at my front-row seat which allows me to observe Reese awaken to the marvelous world around her; Reaching clumsy hands towards rattles, cooing along with Baby Einstein’s version of Mozart, and studying her own wiggling fingers with intensity and wonder, I am reminded all over again how I too often sleep-walk through life.

I won’t ever forget those days when I cradled you in my lap as we’d sit in your mother’s rocker — how the rest of the busy world would retreat as I read stories to you or sang songs to you and feed you your bottle.  Even now, I can recall how you’d always look up to my face and study it intently — enough so that I sensed that unwavering gaze deep within my soul.  And somehow, you doing this simple thing — this natural thing, really — made me feel both worthy and loved.  By May 9th, I wrote these words to the same friend:

I find myself letting a few fat tear drops fall down my face fairly often these days as my daily time with Reese is drawing to a close. We’ve only eight school days left, and then my daughter Kara will be officially on leave. I tell myself it will the good to resume my own life again, to have more time to paint, to maybe get a head start to garden puttering — but somehow, my heart’s not buying what my mind is rationalizing away.

Of course, even after our six weeks was over, your Mom invited me to babysit or drop in for a visit.  You were sick when I watched you one afternoon, the week before Christmas — it may have been a combination of teething and allergies and maybe even a virus — but that didn’t stop you from playing with your many toys.  I watched you crawl from one to other — and whenever you encountered something soft — what your Mom calls one of your ‘loveys’ — you would pick it up with one hand to cuddle it close to your face while sticking the thumb of your other hand in your mouth for a little suck.   I watched you do this over and over that day, with first your stuffed animals and then your soft animal-shaped reading chairs and even most of your mother’s A-Z teaching puppets.  More than once you cuddled into me and began sucking your thumb — though it took me a few times to notice that your other hand held tight to part of my shirt — your way of letting me know that I was one of your inner circle of “loveys” too.  That you did this to me almost undid me — but then, true love always does undo us — and redeem us — and remake us — when we give it a free hand in our lives.

On this day for making wishes, I wish you to know you’re my lovey too. But without need of these grown-up words, I know you know.  Because you’ve read it in my eyes.

Your NaNaNa

Habits to Dreams

16 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Life at Home, Writing

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The patterns of our lives reveal us.  Our habits measure us.  Our battles with our habits speak of dreams yet to become real.”                    — Mary Oliver
 

I enjoy Mary’s Oliver’s prose — as much or more than her Pulitzer-prize winning poetry.

Even when the full meaning of a particular passage is beyond me — like that last line about habits and dreams — I take pleasure in what I do understand.  Like a small child at a Disney Pixar film, I don’t worry that others — with wider experience and better minds — will receive more than me.  And who knows but that maybe, in some mystical way, my spirit absorbs what mind fails to grasp, since Oliver’s words fill me with hope of a better world.  And a better me.

Sometimes it’s good to tarry over words, to not speed-read through life.  Sometimes I linger over language with little choice — as I do every time I encounter a sentence that unites any form of the words ‘dream’ and ‘reality.’  Who knows why I wonder.  What is it about these words — that their combined weight stops me in my tracks, at least within my interior world?  And this, no matter how used and arranged to convey thought.  Yet, I take comfort that in the exterior world, a blinking yellow traffic light cautioning me to slow down works to similar effect.

This hasn’t always been so.  A reminder of a different reality sits on my desk, near my computer — an old photograph of Cousin Deb and me, taken by my Aunt Carol.   As most old images do, this one bears a date stamp in the white frame surrounding it telling its age.   It reads September 1957.   Deb was three.   I wasn’t yet two.  And poor Deb’s doll, probably younger than both of us, looked older than its years.

This wasn’t the photo Aunt Carol wished to give me last August, the one Sis and she and I spent hours looking for.  But I suppose she gave it to me anyway, to serve as an icon of remembrance — to help me remember myself as a young child.  Perhaps even to help me remember her.  But most of all, to help me remember her favorite, oft-told story of me that  —  though she tells it better  — goes something like this:

One day, when I was not much older than that pictured child above,  I turned up at her front door unexpected.  She opened the door.  Stepped outside to see who had brought me.  To find no one.  When she focused her attention back on me, I told her what had brought me. “I’ve come to play with my cousin.”  As if running away from my young father  — who was busy visiting with the shopkeeper of the local fruit stand a couple of blocks away — was no cause for alarm.

Strange how Aunt’s Carol’s recounting her memory of that day stirred my own to life, for I now remember walking down the street from the market, then crossing a bridge, wondering if I was on the right track. But too young to fear — too young to know I was throwing caution to the wind — I plowed on, knowing all would work out.  Because the line between dreams and reality is all but invisible in a young child’s life.

Running away to chase a dream was something I did more than once as a child; it wasn’t difficult with Daddy left in charge.  Unlike Carol, who was always immersed in reality, Daddy lived in a dream world of his own making. But no matter how different, they were close in other ways that mattered more.  Surviving a tough childhood, they had learned to watch after one another.  And in some ways, that never stopped — as I learned a few months after Daddy’s death —  when Carol shared how Daddy was always after her to give up smoking.  If not for her sake, then his, he told her.  He didn’t wish to be left behind.

It took years.  But Daddy’s hopes and dreams waited for Carol to catch up.  Only later did I learn she quit smoking the day Daddy quit life.  She went cold turkey, as they say, without special aids.  Without much rhetoric.  Without thought of consequences.  Why the way she let go of that habit — to allow her reality to converge with Daddy’s old dream — was almost childlike.

Maybe this scrapes at the reality of Oliver’s dreamy last sentence.  But if not, those words with their weighty meanings will wait for me to catch up.