The “wedding pants” turned out to be khaki cotton chinos! I do not attribute his choice to rebellion—not that day. Perhaps he was merely ignorant of wedding garb outside his circle of friends who were marrying on the beach, in the woods or on a mountaintop and to whom a new pair of khaki chinos would have been akin to formal attire.
“I see you want to be comfortable, but since this is a dress-up affair, chinos are inappropriate. The choice is yours of course; think about it.”
Having incorporated the walking-on-eggs philosophy, that is what I could have said, what I should have said, what I didn’t say.
Instead, I roared, “You can’t wear those pants to a wedding.”
“I can wear whatever I wish,” he roared back. “You are trying to give me a guilt trip.” The ensuing battle of wills and words was not a tribute to either his maturity or mine. He declined subsequent black-tie invitations from friends and family alike.
When it was his turn to walk down the aisle, acceding to his fiancé’s wishes, he prepared himself for an extravaganza crammed with preceremony rehearsals, luncheons and dinners, which relegated black-tie optional to the insignificant. Searching through flea markets and used clothing stores, he found a frayed but dashing Victorian cutaway that assuaged his need for nonconformity. Nevertheless, his marriage began to disintegrate, even before he chimed “I do,” during those days preceding the huge gala, as his resentments against pomp and tradition mounted. I believe the wedding gestalt contributed to his divorce not many years afterward.
“Love is nature’s second sun,” so it was not surprising when, after five years of bachelorhood, his cutaway hanging expectantly in the closet, David declared his intention to marry again.
“The wedding will be small, it will take place outdoors, and the guest list will include intimate friends and immediate relatives only,” he informed me. He wanted the most “harmonious vibes.” I nodded my head to everything, in total blissful agreement. What occasion in life is more joyful than a child’s marriage?
I then learned that a street minister, colorfully attired and barefooted, would conduct the ceremony. David was bored with ritual ceremony, a ceremony with religious and spiritual significance to me. I was distressed, but having at long last mastered the technique of addressing sensitive subjects, I quietly told him how I felt.
“Distressed?” he bellowed. “You cannot feel distressed. It is my wedding and my choice as to who performs the ceremony.”
“Distressed?” he repeated. “You can feel distressed if I have a terminal illness. You can feel distressed if I do drugs or sell drugs. You can feel distressed if I rob a bank. You are trying to give me a guilt trip.”
Two weeks later, David called and announced that if I could produce a female rabbi, with acceptable vibes, willing to go along with his concept of a meaningful ceremony, he would bow to my wishes. I never knew his motivation. Did he really want to please me? Was he influenced by his somewhat more traditional fiancé? Was he acknowledging his heritage? It didn’t matter.
Heavy rainfall and storm warnings were predicted for that memorable day in mid-October. Instead, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, then appeared in its full regalia, glorious and warming. The groom, heeding his own wedding invitation dress-code suggestions—colorful, casual and comfortable—wore a purple and black striped knit shirt with his old cutaway. From her closet, his bride had selected purple dotted tights and a print blouse that she topped with a white blazer. Together they greeted their baby-boomer guests, some of them attired in T-shirts and denim shorts. Under a grand old copper beech tree, which doubled as a chuppah, the young blonde rabbi with “acceptable vibes” and the elderly black barefoot minister presided over a two-hour ceremony, accompanied by a trio of friends on guitar, bass and drum.
Amid uproarious laughter and buckets of tears, the customary seven blessings were presented in the context of a puppet show, a flute solo, an original prayer, poetry readings, group chanting, a dramatic performance and a love story told in rap. The young couple, reciting a long scroll of wedding vows, was united in the presence of God, the glare of the sun, the scent of marigold, cooing babies and nursing mothers. I probably laughed the loudest and cried the most. No guilt trips have been exchanged since.
Ruth Lehrer
Off the mark www.offtftemark.com by Mark Parisi
Reprinted by permission of Mark Parisi ©1996.
Recipe for Life
I stood at the departure gate in Boston, preparing to cross the Atlantic. Although I had made the journey countless times before, it never really got much easier to leave my home and family, and this time was no different. I looked at my mother, our eyes full of emotion, and as we wondered when we would see each other again she handed me a package, saying it might help me feel better. Typical Mom. Little did I know that it would not only help me feel better, but would also teach me one of life’s greatest lessons.
Through the airplane window I watched the last lonely lights slowly disappear off the North American coast and thought about the fateful day years before that had changed my life forever. I had wanted to see Britain, the land of my family’s ancestors, and there I was fatally smitten with a young Swiss girl, whom I later married and with whom I had started a family. Now, back in Switzerland after visiting my parents in Massachusetts, I opened my mother’s package. It was a book of recipes; I laughed out loud as I thumbed through it. All the sections like vegetables, soups and breads were empty but the one section on desserts was chock full. Typical Mom. Here were handwritten cards bearing names like “Seven Layer Squares” or “Double Chocolate Fudge,” many of which my mother had created or named. Then my heart skipped as I noticed that she had written this on the inside front cover:
To my dear son: Make some fudge. Think about us. Remember all the wonderful times we have had together, and have them now with your family.
Love, Mom.
It’s okay, she was telling me; we must grow up and lead our own lives, even when it sometimes hurts. But there was more. Recipes in hand, I remembered snowy winter mornings with no school and hot chocolate; Christmases of joy and special homemade treats; afternoons when my mother was always there, consoling me after a rough time with the school bullies by saying, “Let’s make cookies!” Now, years later, Mom was telling me about what really matters in life: the only real gifts we can leave behind for our children or loved ones are the appreciation of a full life and the beautiful memories of our time together. Other things will rust or decay or get lost. The things that really matter never will. It is never too late or too early to create beautiful memories and it is now my job to give them to my children.
I sincerely hope that my Swiss-American girls will not do what I did; with luck they will marry the boy next door and stay on this side of the Atlantic. But wherever they may be, I hope that they, too, will one day open my mother’s recipes and read her words. And like me, they will find a recipe for life. Typical Mom.
Arthur Bowler
6
SPECIAL
MOMENTS
The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.
Storm Jameson
Snow at Twilight
Your day goes the way the corners of your mouth turn.
Anonymous
The sky had been gray all day, and now it was getting darker. Four feet of fresh snow lay over our town, a small city in a southern state that usually doesn’t see a foot of snow all at one time, all winter long.
This was an unusual snow, a big snow, to which we had awakened that morning, and which had taken all day to accumulate. Anticipating it, the city had closed schools, and CJ and I had watched through the morning as showers of small grainy flakes were interrupted by windy swirls of large ones. By late afternoon, our mailbox was nearly drifted under and neither foot nor tire tracks disturbed the plane of snow we could see out the front window.
We decided to go sledding. Twili
ght was falling, but the snowfall had stopped, and the air was perfectly still. Bundled and booted, CJ and I skidded his new red plastic snow saucer behind us down the unplowed streets toward the sledding hill at the neighborhood park.
Slow work it was. Each boot fall cut a fresh break in the snow. We were the only ones out there.
But our snow hill is worth it. A nearly vertical drop that terminates in an open soccer field, it’s about fifteen feet from the top of the hill to the wide flat below. The next day would surely see it crawling with kids, while moms in minivans drank coffee from carry-mugs and visited along the residential street at its crest.
“We’re gonna have fun,” I encouraged my six-year-old as he did his best to power himself through snow that reached, at times, to his thighs. We had to move with as much determination as the snow would allow, or dusk would overcome us before we got there.
But we never got to the snow hill. At least, not both of us.
Children’s voices came to us as we approached a side street where a friend of CJ’s lives. “Hey Mom, it’s Kyle,” CJ said. “I want to play with him.”
Naturally, a friend one’s own age is far more fun than the mom with whom you’ve been cooped up all day. And Kyle’s driveway slopes; that was hill enough for a couple of little boys and Kyle’s plastic toboggan. Kyle’s mom said she was happy to have CJ come play for an hour before dinner.
So there I was, halfway to the sledding hill, but without my companion. I could have turned around and gone home to a house made quiet for the first time all day. But I didn’t want to stop. And that’s when I realized that taking CJ to the big hill was my excuse for going there myself.
So I continued.
Four teenage boys were the only ones at the park when I arrived. No other moms, no other kids. Mostly the boys were hanging around and jiving each other. But every so often, three boys watched as a fourth took a snowboard run down the side of the hill.
I might as well have been from another time zone, as little in common as I had with these boys in their neon fleece vests, tasseled knit caps and nylon ski suits. My old sweats and ancient peacoat were no match for fashion, and CJ’s unadorned red saucer was a paltry counterpart to the logo-adorned snowboards they carried.
Together, the boys had dragged a tractor tire halfway up the hill, from the playground below where it usually functions as a climbing toy for children. Together, they had packed snow over and around it, to create a mogul for their snowboard runs. And individually, they tried to outdo each other as their snowboards hit the jump and went airborne.
Slyly, they eyed me. What could a mother possibly be doing at the snow hill without a child? I began to wonder about this myself as I folded my forty-one-year-old frame into a first-grader’s snow saucer to push off. I hadn’t bent my body into these angles in a dozen years or more.
If I end up spraining something, it serves me right, I thought.
But the saucer hadn’t yet cut a gully into the snow, so my unhurried first run really required pushing my way down the hill. I hadn’t injured any body parts when I reached bottom, but I hadn’t really gone very fast. It was going to take another run or two before the saucer would gain any speed.
I picked up the saucer, trudged back to the top of the hill and learned afresh that no step routine at the gym matches the effect of taking oneself up a deeply snow-banked slope. But the second saucer run was more like it.
On the third run, my saucer sped down the hill and went a distance across the soccer field before stopping.
Snow spray against my face refreshed it better than any fancy water spritzer at the cosmetics counter. My lungs filled with air that felt absolutely clean.
On the fourth run, the saucer’s lip caught some snow on the way down and flipped me upside down into the soft powder. This is it, I thought, the moment I will have to explain to everyone from my neck brace. But instead, I found myself laughing out loud, sprawled on my back in the snow. My own victory whoops accompanied runs five and six.
The teenagers may have thought I had lost my mind. But no, instead I had found something else I had misplaced through my years of career advancement, motherhood and the advent of my forties: the freedom of going really fast through thin air.
It was nearly dark when I left the hill and made it back to Kyle’s house for CJ. My son looked me over: my snow encrusted pants, wet gloves and flushed face. “What were you doing, Mom?” he asked.
“Me?” I answered. “I took myself sledding.”
Maggie Wolff Peterson
Picture Day
It was Picture Day at my daughter’s preschool, and Nicolle was in tears.
“I’m going to wear my Easter dress for my picture,” Nicolle had announced earlier that morning: the one with the frilly, puffy collar, which I secretly thought made her look like a clown. Naturally I already had her photograph fixed firmly in my mind, framed and displayed proudly on the piano. In it, she had adorable pigtail braids, and was wearing the navy blue sailor dress. She was definitely not in the Easter clown dress.
She cried, she pleaded, but although I offered a measure of sympathy, I was unwilling to surrender the image in my mind’s eye.
“If I can’t wear my Easter dress, then I’ll look like this in my school picture,” she announced, pouting dramatically, her lower lip puffed out like a little strawberry.
Luckily, Nicolle attends afternoon preschool, so I had several hours to pull as many tricks as possible from the proverbial mommy hat. Finally, after deftly maneuvering a little creative compromising, threatening and (okay, I admit it) bribery, Nicolle was ready for Picture Day. In a small triumph for the mommy camp, she was wearing the darling navy blue sailor dress. However, as a compromise, she was also wearing her hair down, unbraided—prone to be flyaway and quickly tangled, mind you—but the way she wanted it. I prayed for a photographer who was handy with a comb, and we set off on our carpool rounds.
Usually Lindsey was stationed at the front door, ready to be taken to school, but today when I rang the doorbell, it took a few moments before her mother opened the door. She was trying to anchor an enormous pink bow to Lindsey’s hair. I noted Lindsey’s pretty pink fingernails and wondered if I should have painted Nicolle’s nails too.
After her mother’s fussing, Lindsey was adorable in a frilly pink jumpsuit. She also looked like she was ready to burst into tears. “She wanted to wear a dress,” her mother confided in a stage whisper. She made a few more subtle adjustments to Lindsey’s ensemble, instructed me to make sure the collar on her jumpsuit was straight after she took off her coat, gave Lindsey a kiss, and sent us on our way. As we pulled out of the driveway, I could see Lindsey’s mother peering anxiously from the window after us. The drive to Lauren’s house was uncharacteristically quiet. Lindsey pouted silently out the window at the passing scenery.
Lauren and her mother were waiting for us on their front porch. As I got out of the car, I could see that Lauren’s bangs had been carefully curled and fluffed. Darn it, I thought. I should have curled Nicolle’s hair too.
Lauren scurried toward the car, then slipped and fell to her knees in her shiny black patent leather shoes. Her mother’s mouth froze in displeasure, and her eyes rolled heavenward.
“Lauren, come here,” she demanded in a stern tone. She kneeled in front of Lauren, took her by the shoulders and spoke into her face.
“Remember what I said. Be careful.” Lauren approached my car with her eyes glued to her patent leather shoes.
I found myself struggling to make conversation with the four-year-olds in the back of the car, just to break the unusual silence. In the rearview mirror, I realized Nicolle’s hair had picked up static from her jacket, and was clinging to her face. I wondered if she’d let me put her hair in pigtails once we got to school. I wished I’d brought a curling iron with me, and maybe some fingernail polish.
At school, mothers were lingering, adjusting headbands, tucking in shirts and straightening ties. The children allowed the adults to fu
ss over them, but as soon as they were released, bolted into the classroom.
I made sure Lindsey’s collar was straight, that Lauren’s bangs were properly fluffed, tried to smooth the static from Nicolle’s hair, then left, trying not to worry.
Later, when I returned to pick up the three girls, I was nearly mowed down by children erupting from the school. Catapulted by pent-up energy, the children were running, jumping, laughing and shouting. Hair was breaking free from ponytails and bows, neckties were merrily askew, collars were crooked and shirttails flapped in the breeze. Nicolle, Lindsey and Lauren were among them, pink-cheeked, uncombed, happy and beautiful.
I wished I had my camera.
Carolyn C. Armistead
Sharing a Bowl of Happiness
My mother’s mixer is sturdy and heavy. As I carry it into her kitchen from the pantry where it stays hidden in a closet, I marvel that the frail woman she has become can carry it at all. After placing it on the tiny counter between the sink and the stove, I find I have no room for the flour, chocolate chips and eggs. Efficiency has replaced spaciousness in her retirement cottage. So, for lack of a better solution, I put my cache of ingredients in the sink until I need them and search for a spatula.
Looking into the next room, I see my mother sitting at the table with her head pillowed in her arms. For these past ten years, severe asthma has taken its toll and movement is often a chore, taxing breathing already choked with congestion. She sighs and closes her eyes, spent from a night of coughing. Also, although cooking has never been her passion, I know it pains her to see me puttering in her kitchen, and she is hurting for the days when she could mother me with tasty treats. So am I.