all of the selves we Have ever been
Dear Friends, I have written about the loss of my Sita’s raisin bread recipe. Some of you have asked about the other foods she prepared in her kitchen. Many of those recipes were collected by one of Sita’s daughters, my Aunt Addie. Initially, Addie published the recipes as a small, spiral-bound cookbook titled Feast from Famine which was distributed to members of the extended family. Aunt Addie was a remarkable cook in her own right, and after her death, her son, another of Sita’s grandchildren, Michael Shaheen, created a beautiful cookbook and food memoir titled Addie’s Way. In addition to the recipes, Addie’s Way displays the gorgeous professional photography of another of Sita’s grandchildren, my cousin Nannette Bedway. Food has never looked so good! Addie’s Way by Michael Shaheen is available for purchase on Amazon.com. Now, I ask that you please bear with me as I pen a quick note to my Sita: Dear Sita Your recipes are going out into the world, to places far from the small village where you knew everyone’s name and every crack in the sidewalk between your house and the church. Your food provided sustenance for our bodies and your example, nourishment for our lives. We can never know the extent of the suffering that brought you to this country. We know that the journey was not easy, that you suffered more on route and in the years that followed. And still, you were a model of faith, determination, kindness, generosity, and gratitude. I hope that you can see us now. You did well! May all of our lives reflect the hope that was in your heart that momentous day when you bravely set sail for a brand new world. With love and gratitude, Lilli-ann
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. “DON’T DO IT!” “Don’t do it, Buffin!” my friend yells at me like a rescue worker talking a person off the ledge. Except we’re on the phone. And this is not a life-threatening situation. We are talking about ironing. Yes, ironing. You remember, the act of smoothing out wrinkles using a hot, flat metal device. My friend is appalled that I still iron "in this day and age.” Of course, I saw the Ironing Age coming to a close long ago. Some years back, a friend bemoaned the fact that her son had outgrown several items while waiting for them to be ironed. In more recent years, I’ve had phone conversations cut short by my long-distance friend, Joyce. Hearing the dryer buzz that the cycle was ending, Joyce dropped the phone and made a sprint for the laundry room to retrieve the clothes while they were still warm in order to avoid having to iron a single piece. Back at the peak of the Ironing Age, we had an “ironing pile” in our home. Eventually, it grew to more than a pile. It became several piles. Soon baskets full of wrinkled clothing occupied half of our basement. With six people in the house in the days before permanent press, this mountain of wrinkled fabric did not take long to develop. Toward adolescence, I realized that once an item made its way into the ironing pile, it was as good as gone—outgrown or out of style before it was ever seen again. Venturing down to those overflowing baskets, I felt like the family archaeologist resurrecting ancient and mysterious artifacts. My mother, an early pioneer in the whole working-mother movement, had very little time for housework. Mom tried various maneuvers to deal with the ironing chore. One example was the mangle that appeared in our home as a hand-me-down from my grandmother’s house. The darn thing was HUGE and looked menacing. “Mangle” seemed like an appropriate name, and maybe that is why the device sat untouched despite the effort of moving the monster 100 miles. Then there was the freezer period. Mom read a time-saving hint that if you rolled up your laundry while it was still damp, put it in a plastic bag, and placed it in the freezer, it would be easier to iron. Years passed with rolls of frozen laundry taking up our freezer space. It is not that we forgot about those frozen bundles, we peered around them daily when we went to the freezer to pull something out for dinner. Now don’t get me wrong, some ironing did get done. Clothes were selected on a priority basis—whatever had to be worn that day became the priority. By the time I got heavily into ironing, my dad was wearing dress shirts to work every day, and my sisters and I had school uniforms with blouses and cotton gym suits. Each morning, I trudged downstairs ahead of the others to iron the day’s priority items. It was in the summers that I really got into ironing. There wasn’t much else to do, and the ironing was a little easier in the summer since we didn’t have the daily priority school attire. Sheets, pillowcases, and tablecloths needed to be ironed back then if you planned to use them. No reliable permanent press existed that was worthy of the label. Sometimes I would set up the ironing board in front of the television and watch soap operas for hours. Tame by today’s entertainment standards, those old soaps were still pretty provocative for a teenager who spent her summers ironing. My friend, Joyce, with the built-in sensor for the end of the dryer cycle, got her sex education while ironing—or pretending to be ironing. After she discovered one of her older sister’s college textbooks on human sexuality, Joyce would go downstairs under the pretense of ironing and spend hours looking at pictures of naked people in various sexual positions. Joyce was so fast at ironing that she could make up for lost time, and her parents never knew the difference. Perhaps, the trauma showed itself later in her obsession with the dryer cycle. Ironing was never that exciting for me. Most often, throughout the year, I used that ironing time to daydream and reflect on my own life. I could count on those ironing hours as quiet time in our household. No one wanted any closer to the ironing board than they did to that old mangle. I got a lot of free therapy standing there pressing in pleats and ironing out wrinkles. I still get a little nostalgic every time I smell the heat and hear the sizzle of the hot iron touching the dampened cloth. I taught my children to iron when they were young. But they have little need for it, and they are too busy, anyway. I wonder how they find time to reflect and iron out the wrinkles in their own lives. We learn a lot about life as we grow up in our families. For me, hidden among the bushels of wrinkled artifacts was the lesson that all of our lives have wrinkles and embarrassing piles. All we can do is cope resourcefully, stick with our priorities, and keep on ironing, piece by piece. War is hell. And so can be the long aftermath. Several years ago I was asked to comfort a dying World War II veteran. I sat at the bedside as the veteran told me of his youth that was marked by the Great Depression and then the war. All the young men in this veteran’s small town enlisted. It was the right thing to do. The veteran was deployed to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese. He and his comrades were warned not to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat given the enemy’s exceptional skill. “Shoot, and shoot to kill,” was the order. While the young solder lay sprawled in the dense jungle foliage, the enemy came at him like waves on the ocean shore. "There were so many. They just kept coming. Wave after wave." The young soldier was terrified. And he shot. And he shot. And he killed. And he killed. And he survived the war. Returning home, he and the others gathered nightly in the local saloon dousing their flaming memories with alcohol. After a time, this returning soldier realized the road to the bar was neither a path from the past nor one to the future. He began keeping company with a local preacher. The Great Depression and the war had taken a toll on his family. While he desperately wanted to go to college, the family needed his income, and so he worked. A wise mentor told him that the education he sought could be obtained for free at the local library, and so he took refuge in books and ideas. Through church, the library, and hard work, the veteran built a good, successful life and a happy family. He could speak of those things with joy and with satisfaction, but now, as his life was drawing to a close, he wept, not for the impending loss of his own life, but for all of the lives he had taken when he was a terrified teenage boy in the jungles of the South Pacific. The question he had kept at bay for so many years now taunted him—“How will I answer to God for what I have done?” As he lay on his bed with tears running down his neck, I could see that he was every bit as terrified as the teenager he had been when facing an ocean of enemy soldiers. Trite accolades about doing his duty and being a war hero would be not only inadequate, but for him, an outright lie. Sharing a common faith tradition with this man, I searched my mind for all I could remember about God and the afterlife. My thoughts lacked the certainty that this veteran urgently needed. “We cannot know,” I began hesitantly, “but, perhaps, this is a time for faith and not fear,” I said. “The same God that was with you in the jungle is with you now. The same God who directed your steps from the bar to the library is with you now. The same God who heard your pleas in the jungle hears you now, and I believe He feels your sorrow and accepts your apology—both the one spoken and the one that was your lived life. I have faith that He forgives that terrified teenage boy in the jungle.” I reflected on what other survivors of World War II had told me, other veterans, Holocaust survivors, civilians. “Don’t talk about it and get on with your life”—that was believed to be the best medicine at the time. And so they did not speak, and they tried to move on. Perhaps the old folks had a point in saying, “Get on with your life.” Maybe we all answer to God long before we reach the pearly gates by the way we have lived our lives. I have a sign on the wall across from my bed now. It says, “Arise, and do not be afraid.” It is from Matthew 17:7. I assume that the “Live and get on with it,” is implied. I have learned from these veterans and from my own life that when we suffer, the only way through is to arise and live. Live in moments. Live in inches. Do the best we can, but keep at it, and if there is someone willing to walk with you and hold your hand, grab on. A beautiful, very wise, young Air Force chaplain once asked a crowd of mourners, “Is it the answers we seek, or the Answerer?” I felt relieved and comforted by his words. It was no longer on me to have all of the answers. It is the human condition to wonder and to ponder, to ask “Why?” and to worry. We do not have all of the answers. Trying to eat the fruit of that knowledge got Adam and Eve in a whole lot of trouble. We must live and find something to believe in so that we can arise, and not be afraid. My daughter carries a wristlet. Seriously. A wristlet! Have I failed as a mother? A wristlet is not a small revolver. It’s a “purse,” or a purse substitute. It must have been invented by some subversive who thrives on human failure and starving children. Real moms carry purses. Big purses. They are packin’ heat! Real moms with big purses come to the showdown to win! The most epic purse-toting mom of all time was portrayed in the film One Fine Day starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a single working mother named Melanie Parker. Now that woman had the heat! She once arrived at her son’s child care center to find that it was a special occasion and all of the children were in costume. Melanie Parker rifled through her bag and BAM! She put together a full costume for her son. You go, girl! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! A friend of mine with an aching shoulder paid a visit to her family doctor. He criticized the size and weight of her purse and suggested that she not carry such a heavy bag. As I see it, the purse is weight training. A mom never knows when she might have to throw a small human being over her shoulder in a life-saving rescue. I’ve always said that men don’t carry purses because women do. Have you ever noticed that those who travel light are always asking purse-carrying mamas, “Can you put this in your purse?” or asking “Do you happen to have_____? You can fill in the blank. Do you really believe that Amazon invented same day delivery? Give me a break! Purse-toting moms can deliver in minutes. Hungry? Thirsty? Forgot your soccer socks? Is there a bill that needs paid? Dry cleaning to pick up? Just look in mom’s bag. My mom was an Olympian in the big, heavy purse game. One year for Mother’s Day, my sister found the perfect card. Right on the front it said, “The bigger the purse, the better the mother!” Mom hung that up right next to the framed quote that said, “Most of the world’s important work was done by tired people.” You got it all covered, Mom! I can hear that old jump rope rhyme in my head right now-- “In came the doctor, in came the nurse, in came the lady with the alligator purse.” Clearly, purses are important and vital to our health. They may weigh us down, but they hold our worlds up! My motto is—More purses, less guns. Yesterday, the earth shook. No one felt the tectonic plates shift except for me. My son, Sam, my youngest child, left on his first business trip. We prepared just as we have for so many other first days. There was shopping for the right clothes. Sam handled that himself, but he stopped by for help getting out the wrinkles. Then we shared a ride to the office supply store. No crayons or notebooks this trip. We were looking for techie travel gadgets and business card holders. Then we searched our respective closets for the right backpack. The shoes got polished. After he returned to my home, Sam shared his travel itinerary. I noted that his return flight was scheduled to arrive at 1:30 AM. “How do you plan to get home at that hour?” I asked. “I’ll grab a cab or call a Lyft,” he said. I thought back to the shy, reserved little boy that he once was, and relived all of those firsts: first day of preschool, kindergarten, the start of each school year, summer camp, college, apartment…I thought of all those mornings when I had wrapped my arms around him, my body a superhero cape, and said, "Don’t worry, Sam. It will be okay.” While I was reflecting, Sam detected my emotions. He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me. A power lifter, the breadth of his shoulders is half my height. Each of his upper arms is the size of one of my thighs. I was completely surrounded by his embrace. “Don’t worry, mom,” he said. “It will be okay.” And, just like that, the tables turned. No more pages left in the baby book. Sam wears the superhero cape now. Perhaps he will wrap it around a child of his own on some first day in the future. All of those other first days have added up to something. They have prepared him for this. The world belongs to my children now. They understand it so much better than me—e-commerce, video games, streaming, telecommuting, ride-sharing…They are smart, capable and independent. They both have superhero capes in their closets. I know, I gave them each one. Everything will be okay.
I am in love with a doctor. For years he has entertained me and taught me about kindness and generosity. When I doubted myself, he reassured me, "Oh, the places you'll go!" What I love most about him is that he taught me to read--"One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” But a few months ago, I had occasion to look deeper into my relationship with the good Dr. Seuss. I was having dinner with a colleague and her two beautiful little girls--B One and B Two. As we waited for our food to arrive, mom attended to the infant, B Two. I offered to read to B One, a curious and busy preschooler. I pulled a copy of The Cat in the Hat from my bag. B One advised me that she had several copies of this book at home. While B One drew on her paper place mat, I started into the story. When the Cat in the Hat arrived on the scene, B One said, “He’s mean.” “Mean? Or is he playful?” I asked. “Oh, he’s mean!” B One said with certainty. I was taken aback and needed to quickly revise my own point of view. I have learned not to doubt the profound wisdom and insight of preschoolers. As an adult, I still love the rhymes that fill me with joy, the bright primary colors, all of the action in the story, the suspense. When I am overwhelmed, I still recite to myself “…this mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” And then I remember that the Cat in the Hat had no fear at all. The mess did get cleaned up—and in the nick of time. B One’s words prompted me to consider the experience of a preschooler who is busy trying to grow a conscience. The Cat in the Hat was not merely playful; he was mean. I stand corrected. Imposing yourself and temptation on the vulnerable is mean. Rules matter… because they do…and for our safety. I began to think about the book as a moral tale--a couple of bored kids at home alone on a rainy day-- definite potential for trouble. Then, of course, trouble arrives with a BUMP, and the Cat in the Hat steps in on the mat. He reminds the children that they can have fun even when it is not sunny. Now that seems like some good cognitive restructuring—at least on the surface. The children don’t know what to do, and there is a stranger in the house! The fish in the dish serves in loco parentis—the voice of the parent IS the voice of conscience at that age. The fish reminds the children they should not get involved with the Cat in the Hat. Then the Cat in the Hat brings some friends to this impromptu party. Things get out of hand and the house is trashed. The boy worries what his mother will say and what she will do to them if she finds them this way. So the boy gathers courage and takes control. He tells the Cat in the Hat “Now do as I say.” The Cat in the Hat gets rid of his friends and returns to help clean up the mess. The story ends with another moral dilemma—“Do we tell our mother the truth about what went on there that day?” Wow! That’s some heavy reading! It is hard work growing a conscience. Some people never do. So lessons learned:
Thanks, B One, for making me wiser! And thanks, Dr. Seuss, for making me a reader! We were young together. Fresh and indestructible, we met on the cusp of adulthood at that time in life when heartaches heal and leave no scars. We worked in the same office building. We knew each other’s bosses. We shared office gossip, and with our rolling eyes, we silently talked dirt about people in the crowded elevator. We made pots of coffee in the break room and shared stale pretzels from the vending machine. We sipped gin and tonic at night clubs on Friday nights. Weeknights, we went to home interior parties as we each set up housekeeping. We lay over at someone’s mom’s house waiting for the parties to begin. The moms offered us the best chairs or cool drinks while hot pots simmered on the stove. Brothers and sisters wandered in and out of the house. We were bridesmaids and house guests. We attended baby showers. We went on road trips together. We were fearless on the highway. What were ten or eleven hours behind the wheel after a week of work? Nothing! We sat on hotel balconies facing the ocean. With our slender legs up on the railing, our bare feet warmed by the sun and the hems of our shorts billowing from the ocean breeze, we wrote silly poems on postcards to our families: “Dear Mom and Dadio, we’re sitting on the patio…” We howled with laughter at our cleverness and because we were relaxed and free and happy. A lifetime of years passed. Occasional phone calls and emails formed a dotted line connecting the then with the now. Disasters did strike—cancers, hospitalizations, deaths, divorces, job losses. It has been 25 years since we last met in person, but there is no anxiety or self-consciousness, only joyful anticipation. We all agree to meet halfway at a restaurant off a busy highway exit. The three hour drive between Columbus and Pittsburgh is too much for a day trip now. We travel only in the day light. Our new friends say, “Isn’t that too far to go alone? What will you talk about all day?” Our cars arrive in the restaurant parking lot at exactly the same time. We each peer out of our car windows, squinting through our bifocals, each wondering, “Is that her?” The youth is gone from our faces. There is silver in our hair, wrinkles around our necks. We carry heartaches that did not heal, scars that did not fade. But that is not what we talk about when we are together. We howl with laughter at the same old jokes. We rehash the same stories. We remember together the people we have loved who are gone from our lives, the ones our new friends never knew or even met. No explanations are needed. We knew each other when. We know each other still. We are connected at a mysterious core. They know my entire story and I theirs. There is no threat of judgment here. They have known my naiveté and my stupidity, my accomplishments and my courage. We are back on the balcony. We are clever, relaxed, free, and happy. There is a truth between us that we do not need to speak. We know that we have moved to the head of the line, the front of the class. The time ahead is no longer endless. We are no longer indestructible save for the bonds of friendship formed when we were young together. An earlier version of this post appeared as "We Were Young Together" in the Senior Beacon, May, 2018. |
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