A Stirring Memory

My mother took cream and sugar in her coffee, and she had a way of stirring her coffee that was unique to her. As she would rotate the spoon circularly through the cup, she would clink the spoon against the side of the cup three times, in a triangular fashion, for each rotation of the spoon around the inside of the cup. It was as if she didn't feel the coffee was being truly and properly stirred unless that spoon clinked against the inside of the cup in just the right way. I can hear the music of her coffee-stirring right now, as I write this.

It's funny how a person lives on in such inconsequential memories, ones that can be prompted by the simple act of making myself a cup of tea in the middle of my work day.

The Blizzard of 2009

There’s something about a heavy snowfall that puts you in the realm of the eternal. Today in Washington, we experienced a record-breaking snowfall, and the snow is now, at 11 PM on Saturday evening, hip deep in many places. I went out and shoveled at around 10 AM, figuring it’s easier to shovel seven inches at a time than 25 or so all at once, but didn’t get out again until about an hour ago. I’ve been holed up in my den, working on a power-point presentation I’ll have to give at work on Tuesday. Work has been very tough lately (I’ll spare you the details, but will instead refer you to a single line of voiceover narration describing the life of George Bailey: “Potter was bearing down hard.”), and it’s been a season of sadness for me. Between bouts of power-pointing, I’ve spent time on the phone with my sweetheart and two of my sibs, and of course communing with my favorite boy, Murphy.

But then I went outside. It’s quiet and peaceful, and everything is still. The snow is sparkly, and I saw only a few people walking down the middle of the street. I pushed the snow off my car, did a little more shoveling (my 20-something neighbor did our whole section of the block around dinnertime, bless him), and then just stopped. What a gift it is to be outside at night in the snow. I looked back at my house, and it looked like a place of light and warmth and safety.

3326
One year during the Christmas season, when I was a teenager, we experienced a heavy, sparkly snow in Parma not unlike this one. Unlike now, I lived in a house full of people, with my brothers, sister and mother. There was always a lot going on and, more often than not, the TV was blaring. This particular night, as the family sat around the living room and the kitchen, kvetching, talking, doing whatever it was we normally did, I put on my coat and went outside. Like now, the ground was covered with snow, which was still falling. I walked down the driveway away from the house and sat on the back fender of Mom’s car. Though when I looked over my shoulder, the Christmas tree and the life within the living room were visible in the picture window, not a sound could be heard from inside the house. Outside it was silent, save for one thing: up on the hill, some family was piping Christmas music out into the night. It was played with bells, a pure and simple arrangement—no chords, just the simple one-note-at-a-time melodies of one wonder-filled contemplative song of the season after another. No one was outside on the street but me.

That moment sealed itself in my heart forevermore. I was out in the night, feeling the presence of God herself, helped by the soft Christmas music that in the happiest of times sets up a vague sense of longing in one’s soul, and behind me, in that house, were my people-- those with whom I shared my daily life and without whom, despite the seemingly unmitigated fractiousness of the relationships, I would have been lost. Right there inside that little glowing box known as 3326, stood the Christmas tree and all I knew or had of family, at least in a day-in and day-out sense. They were so solid, so real, such a pain in the ass, and so essential to my being. Of course, what I felt most consciously at the time was that I was apart from them, and the kind of person who spiritually belonged outside in the dark, sitting in the cold and beautiful snow, having God’s music piped into my soul—or maybe it was coming from inside me, and I just thought it was coming from up the hill….

But what I know now is that I was blessed to have them, and although we’re all outside in the dark within ourselves, experiencing the wonder of being, knowing there’s a warm, bright place wherein our people reside and are ready to welcome us back in-- indeed, may not have even noticed we were gone—is a gift that I for one treasure, and try to remember especially in these difficult times.

Tonight, when I looked back at my house, I was pleased to see that I had created for myself, my kitty, and all my loved ones who enter, a place of warmth and light and shelter from various kinds of storms, however pretty (or petty) some of them may be. And though this night there is no Christmas tree and I am here alone with the Murphster, I know all those loved ones, wherever they are, living or dead, are with me here.

I went back into the house and got my camera. When there’s a good snowfall, I always get the idea to take a really nice shot of the house with the intention of maybe creating a photo Christmas card the following year. I have yet to do that, but I did take a shot or two. I want to post one here, but Blogger's photo upload doesn't seem to be working for me right now. Oh, well, I'll try again tomorrow....

Free-form Writing

Tonight I’ll do an exercise in free-form writing. I could come up with many different subjects to write about, but I want to just open the conduits. On Sunday an obituary caught my eye. It was about a 45-year-old woman who died of a brain aneurysm, and who recently had an essay published in the literary magazine Shenandoah. The obituary also made mention of Gettysburg Review. So I looked them up on the internet and discovered, or rediscovered, the world of small-press literary magazines. I remember them from college, or particularly well-stocked newsstands, and have looked through them on occasion, but never really picked one up and read it carefully. Reading the submission requirements on some of them, you can tell that tons of people are hopefully submitting their most heartfelt writings, and the people who read the submissions have had to slog through what they have felt was a lot of crap. Reading that none of them accept anything that’s been published in any medium made me feel like, oh shit, I’ve already put my best stuff on my blog, and used up some of the subjects that I feel the impulse to write about most strongly, and now I’ll have to scrape up other stuff if I have any hope of being published in a literary magazine. What if my well is about to run dry? The obituary said this woman’s essay in Shenandoah, titled "Ugly", about her having felt unattractive her whole life, garnered calls from a couple of literary agents wanting her to write a book. Wow, I thought.

But the thing is, this is kind of what I envisioned happening when I started my blog. I figured somewhere in the back of my head, and maybe not so far in the back-- but it was never the main thing-- that my blog was going to get attention from someone who would want to publish my writing in some more permanent form. But the doing the blog is itself the act of publishing it in a pretty permanent form. It could be that only seven people have read it—other than myself—but the impetus for writing it is the act of testifying to what it means to be human in the world-- one person’s experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. To say, I was here, I lived, and I experienced these things. If anyone at all reads them and is moved to laugh or cry (a lot more crying, I am guessing and have been told, than laughing—at this point, anyway), then it has been worth doing and I can die knowing I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. The sense of satisfaction I get when I feel I’ve expressed myself well is real and profound.

But it would be nice to get some sort of offer from the larger world, wouldn’t it? On days when work is particularly hairy and unpleasant, like the past couple of days (not coincidentally, right after getting the literary magazine idea), I walk around the office thinking how great it would be for all the people on my floor, including all those who are in the wordsmithing and publishing business to hear, oh, did you know that Cher Stepanek, who works over there in that department, has a book coming out? Wow, she writes? Why, The Big Boss asks, isn’t she working for me in some literary capacity? Why have we not recognized her talents; why have we been letting her languish in Department X?

It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? We are all walking around knowing deep in our bones we’re special, we have something wonderful about ourselves that none of the people we see and interact with every day knows about. Wouldn’t it be great, we think, if one day they realized who we really are? Wouldn’t it be great if they found out, too, that we have this secret life in which our talents are well developed, well realized, and recognized by this whole huge group of others, yet somehow they, the people we see and interact with every day, have missed it? To be recognized as special: it’s what we all want, and I want it too. That is aside from the impulse, and I want to call it a purer impulse, to say what I want and need to say, to put it out there for (theoretically) all the world to see on the internet, and then go about my life not really tracking who is actually seeing it. I'm thinking that maybe it’s kind of an adolescent wish, that need to be recognized as special. It’s the wish of someone who has not yet learned or realized their own best way of making their mark in the world. Or maybe it's one of the stigmata borne by children of divorced parents. Or maybe it’s universal, but people just stop admitting it, or get too beaten down to remember they felt it.

I have set my self this evening the task of writing for fifteen minutes nonstop, and am almost finished. There, it’s done.

3326

What the Light Would Do, Part III
Kitchen, Late Afternoon/Early Evening
The kitchen in the house I grew up in had two windows. One faced north and the other faced west. Although the house was built as a part of a 1950s post-war tract housing development, each of the nearly identical houses was set a little forward or back of the house next to it. Because of this, the kitchen was directly exposed to the setting sun, and in the late afternoon or early evening, strong western light would enter in through the window over the sink and fill the kitchen with a red-gold glow. The sun shone directly onto the kitchen table, and unless your back was to the window, it would be in your eyes. My mother would often draw the shade on that window in the evening, but I always liked the kitchen best when it was ablaze with evening sun, even if blinded me and made it uncomfortable to see and interact with other people at the table. Somehow the western sky and the golden glow made the kitchen feel a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It signaled, too, that a large part of the day’s activities had been completed (successfully, satisfyingly), yet the greater part of the evening was yet to come, and there was still time to drink deeply of this day.

In that western window, the proverbial window over the sink, my mother had a few potted plants. The window sills were not very deep, so they were of necessity small plants in small containers. The cast of characters on that window sill changed a little over the years, but there were three or four plants that made their home on that window sill for a long, long time. The younger of my two brothers was born in 1957, and as a new baby gift, a friend had given my parents a cute little ceramic planter shaped like a telephone, containing a small, short-variety sansevieria. The volume of this planter had to be no larger than that of your average bone-china teacup—but that snake plant sat on that window sill in that planter for 48 years, growing the entire time. The planter did not even have a drainage hole, and at some point after the first decade or so, I’m sure the soil, or what was left of it, became completely depleted. But there it grew. At the time my mother moved, in 2005, there were two other snake plants, of the taller variety, that had probably inhabited that sunny window sill for a couple of decades at least, along with a tired-looking purple tradescantia.

A month or two after my mother passed away earlier this year, I took a deep breath and repotted those four plants. I selected beautiful purple, periwinkle, aqua and green planters, shocked the heck out of the plants by removing them from their too-tight but very broken-in shoes, and potted them up with fresh soil and plenty of room to grow. Having no properly sunny window sills that would accommodate them at home, I’ve taken them to my office. I have a northern exposure there, but the building is skewed to the west just enough so that at this time of year, the setting western sun comes streaming in. After a few weeks of confusion, the plants have begun to get used to their new home and green up. There are new leaves on all of them (the contents of the little telephone planter having been split into three separate but color-coordinated pots), and sometimes they seem to be smiling as they bask in the deep golden setting sun. I love looking at them, because they remind me of that kitchen, and because they speak of longevity and survival. At the close of the work day, when the sun is filling the back of my office with strong, golden light, I remember what the late afternoon and early evening was like in Parma Ohio, in a kitchen that seemed a part of something large and dramatic and expansive. It feels good to know it’s the same sun, shining on the same plants. I wonder how long they’ll be in this set of pots.

Winter in August

Summer has finally kicked in in earnest here in Washington, but today I’m thinking about a moment in time deep in the middle of a Cleveland winter in my very early childhood. We had recently moved to 3326. Although I don’t remember the year, or exactly how old I was, it must have been sometime during the winter spanning 1956/57. The snow was heavy on the ground, and it was after dark. Our family had a sled with a removable upright back and sides, so that small children could sit supported in the sled and be pulled with the long loop of rope that was affixed to the sled’s front. The younger of my two younger siblings, both brothers, had not yet been born or was too young to participate, and so it came to pass on this particular snowy evening that my parents piled my sister (the oldest, and heading up the back of the sled), me (in the middle, acting out in real time and space the role of middle child), and then my brother (in front of me, smaller and nestled against the front of my puffy gray and navy snowsuit) into the sled for a ride around the neighborhood.

It was cold and dark, but only as dark as it can be with the ground completely white and streetlamps shining their light on the soft sparkly snow. My father, wearing a formal man’s overcoat, thick leather gloves and no hat, pulled the sled out into the driveway and down the apron to the street. I marveled at how big and strong he was—it seemed unfathomable that he could pull a sled with three people in it. He was my father. He was big and strong and capable. He would take care of me as I felt my sister hug me and as I hugged my brother, snugly tucked into our warm clothes and the safety of the guard-railed sled. The world was cold and icy, but a place of wonder nonetheless. The street was quiet, and there were no cars on the road this evening—the snow must have been so heavy that day that it drove everyone inside and kept them there. My father pulled the sled into the street, where passing cars had earlier packed the snow into slicker, smoother, and icier tracks on which to pull the sled. Keep your hands inside, kids, he said, we’re going for a ride! He began to run, pulling the sled behind him. He seemed very far away, since he was so tall and far from the ground, compared to my small huddled nearness to all that snow and ice, close enough to touch if I had not heeded my father’s warning to keep my hands tucked in and safe. The windows in the houses we passed on either side of the street glowed from within. Whatever sounds there might have been in the larger world were muffled, as they are in a heavy snow, and all I heard was the smooth sound of our sled runners moving over the packed snow and my father’s crunchy steps as he ran. He would slow to a brisk walk from time to time, both to catch his breath and to see how we were faring in our sled. I could see his breath escaping in cloudy puffs as he looked back at us. Before long, he’d run again. He pulled us all around the block, running most of the way to make sure we had the most fun possible. I hoped it would never end.

I have not made a list of the happiest moments of my life—I’m not the kind of person who makes lists like that, and I would hate to rank those moments. Nevertheless, even though I was no more than four years old when it happened, that ride around the block is right up there with the top ten.

The Rainbow Ballroom

I took the day off from work last Monday, the day after my birthday. It was partly to give myself a day away from the grind, and partly to spend the day handling some paperwork regarding my mother’s estate, Monday’s bit being the most complicated piece thus far. On my way to visit with the financial advisor who’d be helping me with the documents, I found myself thinking again of my mother’s last months, and running through the decisions that were made along the way. I know that what was done was done, and all was exactly as it needed to be for whatever mysterious karmic reasons there may be for these things, but in my worse moments I find myself second-guessing decisions I made or participated in. Did I absolutely do everything I could? Did I ask the right questions; hold enough of the right medical personnel accountable? Would she still be here if I had not recommended and advocated a move to a safer environment, closer to me? As the internal torture session began, I came to a moment when I thought, no, you can’t go through this again. This must stop at some point. That’s when I made a decision.

Lately I’ve had occasion to think about the Rainbow Bridge, since both my sister and cousin have mentioned it in relation to Murphy’s condition. It’s a place we can imagine our departed companion animals, whole and happy again. So right then and there while walking down the street, I founded the Rainbow Ballroom. It’s a place where my mother is young and dancing, where the room is full of dance partners, and every one is a man who knows how to dance, and who is imbued with the qualities of tenderness, light-heartedness, constancy and loyalty, who means what he says, doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean, and keeps his promises. Each one vies for her hand, and her heart is open to them. Every evening there is a dance, and every evening she’s there, dancing the tango, the rumba, and all those other dances she used to try to teach me in our kitchen when I was a kid. When she’s not at the Rainbow Ballroom, she may be in the Rainbow Rehearsal Room, working out the steps to a new routine or teaching the hopelessly klutzy to be as graceful as she. Or she may be on stage at the Rainbow Theatre, in the world’s most precise chorus line, kicking high or doing the soft shoe with hat and cane. Other times, she’s at the Rainbow Folk Festival, in full Ukrainian regalia, her thick and shiny brown hair bouncing softly and loosely as she dances. She is smiling. She’s the greatest among all the great dancers there, and she’s laughing with delight. Some evenings at the Rainbow Theatre, she’s the featured singer, and her most famous numbers are Besame Mucho and I Wish I Knew, the A and B sides of a record she cut in a penny arcade as a young woman, full of hope and promise. Roses are thrown at her feet, thousands cheer, and she owns the town.

So as of today, no more will I see her in her bed in Room #65 at the rehab center. From now on, she’ll be dancing at the Rainbow Ballroom.

Keeping On

This afternoon I came upon check registers from a bank account my mother had from 1988 until she moved from Parma to Maryland, in 2005. In 1988 she would have been 66 or 67 years old, and still six or seven years from retirement. I see her paycheck deposits from that time, and I note the progression of her income in the raises she received over the years as the amount of these deposits steadily rose. I wonder what these paychecks would be worth in today’s dollars. I find out for the first time that The Cutting Room is name of the salon at which she’d get her hair done every week with religious regularity. I track the mergers and acquisitions of the supermarket chain she patronized, as the name she wrote on her checks for groceries changed at least twice during that time. I note with a smile that the spouses of children received the same amount of Christmas money in their checks as the actual biological children, but long-time unmarried life partners, such as Alex, were discounted some 40%. No surprise there—despite being divorced, my mother proclaimed wholeheartedly her belief in marriage. I fast forward to the later years, and I see the handwriting grow tiny and shaky, a terrible graphic testament to the Parkinson’s that robbed her of her vigor and eventually her life.

She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004, but she had confided to me a year earlier that she suspected she had it. It took her almost two years of doctor visits before any doctor was willing to make that diagnosis. These check registers show that she had it as early as 2001, and possibly sooner. I wonder if any of her doctors at the time had asked to see her handwriting. I wonder that I did not notice it on the random birthday card or Christmas card and hear an alarm bell—not that early detection would have cured the condition or even slowed its progression. The small, shaky script has been very hard for me to look at without a stab of pain since I first noticed it. Nevertheless, these check registers also give testimony to the fact that she soldiered on, despite all. I think I’ll keep them for now.