Artifacts of life – my favorite coffee cup

I found the cup under the sink in my classroom. All sorts of junk had been left behind from the teachers who previously occupied this space. I put the cup up on the counter, assuming someone would come by to claim it. After a few weeks, I put it back under the sink, still believing that no one would leave it behind, that they would come back and claim this lovely gift.

For gift it was; must have been. The perfect size: not too big that your coffee would get cold before you drank to the bottom; not too small that you were constantly revisiting the pot.  The bottom is wide enough so you don’t worry about it toppling unbalanced each time you put it down. The brim is just the right thickness to avoid unsightly dribbles down your chin when you take a quick gulp. I hate those mugs that are so think all you taste is ceramic on your tongue.

Not a mass-produced Disney souvenir, but hand-made in Poland, according to the stamp on the bottom. Brush marks show on the blue painted handle. The pattern around the outside is unevenly stamped. The blue reminds me of the English imitation Canton China we had at every New England museum I’ve ever worked with. The green is mossy in artful contrast.

When I left that school, I packed the mug with my things.

Drinking coffee from this mug on my porch or at the kitchen table makes me happy. Not deliriously, laugh out loud happy, but short sigh, slight smile, ready to face the day happy. Coffee tastes better. Words come easier. Laundry is less burdensome.

There is a danger to placing too much value on the stuff of our lives. There are a few things, though, that are brought to us to add joy or peace or to bring energy. I’m grateful to the forgetful teacher who left such a treasure behind. I like to think that she wasn’t actually forgetful at all but consciously bestowed a gift to an unknown soul who was continuing the work she had started.

And, I am grateful to this coffee mug, for starting my day off well. 

Artifacts of life - empty cous cous container

An empty cous cous salad container

         
The evidence of a poor diet and a poorly organized day. No time for preparing even a simple meal, I grab a prepared side dish from the grocery store deli and call it lunch. Is this an artifact of a dedicated writer’s life, not taking precious creative time for something as mundane as a meal? That does sound better than what it is. Makes me a romantic outcast, dealing with only the most basic artifices of my suburban life and stealing time for rebellion. I like the picture. But the picture is crap.

       
 Here’s my day. Woke up a few minutes after my 12 year old daughter and pulled some pants on. I checked in with her, let the dog out, made coffee and fed the dog. It took me a few minutes to calculate the time I had left and the tasks that had to be completed before I could write up a schedule in my head. Make the kids lunches, gather all my stuff for the day in my bag, get dressed, then go pick up my friend’s son and drive him and my own daughter to school for their early band practice. Calculations made clear that the shower would have to wait, but that I should have just enough time to wash my hair before I needed to get daughter number two to her chorus rehearsal. Having to drive a forgotten lunch box to the middle school threw a wrench into the works, but an unexpectedly available husband got the gears untangled again. I made it to the office 10 minutes before my first student was scheduled to arrive.

After a morning of giving writing advice to 18 year olds, I headed to the grocery store, eating into my planned writing day. Still, I went aisle by aisle and got the fixings for a healthy family and even remembered to stock up on the soft tissues since everyone has been sniffling for a week. I put the refrigerated items away, left the rest on the kitchen table and came out to the porch with my plastic tub of cous cous and started writing in response to prompts by John Dufresne. Now, near time for Thea to come off the bus and my mind is back on family track – have to walk the dog and get my exercise, do a few loads of laundry, put the rest of the groceries away, wash dishes, sweep the family room, send a card to the newlyweds, wrap a present for Greg’s co-worker’s new baby, make dinner for the family, and do some prep work for Friday’s class. But I have a few minutes before Thea arrives, so I’ll just write about it, instead. 

Lent and spring

Thinking today about Lent and faith.

It’s been years since I attended mass or gave something up for Lent. As a child in Catholic school, I always gave up something, usually cookies. My Dad, patient man that he was, always let us indulge on Sundays, so I would eat as many cookies that one day a week as I could get away with.  When I was a kid, Lent meant only this giving up of something and the countdown to Easter chocolate. We did go to church a little more often: Ash Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday plus a few extra visits to go through the Stations of the Cross or to make confession. Still, the season wasn’t overly spiritual for me.

I am no longer a Catholic and most would not even consider me a Christian, but Lent means more to me now than it ever did. I appreciate this time set aside each year to encourage reflection and devote time to prayer. Every religion seems to have this time in the calendar.

Because I don’t go to church, my Lenten reflection almost never coincides completely with the actual season. Seeing folks around town with ashes smeared on their foreheads reminds me that time is coming, but I’m usually still off. I’m inspired by the signs of spring to begin my reflections. The dirty snow, the mud, the gray days. After a long season of leafless trees and rock hard soil, I see the messy transition where things start softening up as the time to pause. William Carlos William’s poem “spring and all” is my chant. I like to look deep into the messiness, the chaos, the darkness of the early spring, before the tulips bring color back into the world. Lent in the Northeast United States is at this perfect muddy time where there is promise of pink and green to come if we can just get through the brown and gray.

When I walk through the newly moist earth, still littered with dirt covered ice in spots, I am inspired to pause, to see the coming of goodness, the coming of joy, the coming of spring. And I am grateful for this sloppy walk and would not wish to skip over it straight to the tulips. We need to have our shoes sink in. We need to feel the rough bark on the fallen branches littering the backyard. We have to walk through this wind and icy rain.

That is Lent to me. The late winter, early spring mess that signals rebirth is on the way. It is amid this seeming waste that we take the time to see the slow quickening of earth. 

missing kisses

I am deeply in love with my husband; the ache of his absence is tangible this week. When he travels, my lips miss him. The urge to kiss is nearly overwhelming. So far I’ve been able to resist the need to feel my lips against someone else’s, for which the random folks in line with me at CVS should be grateful. Ultimately, I remember that it is not just anyone’s lips that need to be on mine, it is Greg’s. I feel my love for him in my skin, not just in my heart. When we don’t touch for a few days my skin tingles, like when your foot falls asleep, not a pleasant tingle. I feel a physical absence when he is not near.

 I think of my mother a lot during Greg’s travel weeks. I know that my husband, the rest of myself, will return. My mother’s other self is gone forever. That tingle in her skin will never be soothed. The ache is more than just in the heart, it is on the lips, the skin. Your voice begins to ache, waiting to talk to him. You begin to go deaf, waiting to hear from him. The loss of your mate is a physical loss. How long before your lips adjust, until they stop longing for the kiss?

I am counting the days until Gregory returns, while my mother is counting the days since she last held my father's hand. There are no words to describe the difference. I want never to truly know the difference.

surprised smiles

I saw my Dad everywhere today. Brushing aside his thin white hair. Zipping up his light-weight, powder blue spring jacket. Driving in the slow lane with his seat pulled up close to the steering wheel. Grabbing a shopping cart at DeMoulas.

Each time I saw him my breath hiccupped in my throat and I thought “I want to cry” but I didn’t cry. I smiled. I smiled remembering my Dad and all the love between us. I smiled thinking someone else still had their Dad in the world.

A little more than a month after he died, I went on a short vacation with my family to Florida. On the shuttle returning to the hotel after an exhausting evening in the crowds at Downtown Disney, an older couple boarded. And I spent the remainder of the ride trying to hide my tears. I have been crying ever since.

At home, tears accompanied a chance encounter with a picture or a card. At my Mom’s house – because that’s what we call it now  - I cried putting a bagel in the toaster, getting Christmas decorations from the cellar, planting marigolds in the flower box, pulling the grill out of the shed. I would cry at the sight of any old man’s hands, at the passing of an ambulance, at the sight of navy blue dickies.

When did my tears turn into these surprised smiles?

Mom

This month my family has been celebrating my mother’s 80^th birthday. As you might expect, the milestone has occasioned a festival of storytelling and the ritual of reflecting on the importance of Mom in each of our lives.

The storytelling is my favorite part. One of my sisters reminded us how Mom would insist on pulling out rows and rows of crocheted blanket once a mistake was discovered near the beginning. Frustrating as a child, a welcome memory now for the lessons in doing a job right. My brother likes to tell how, when he was a teenager Mom always told him he was not too big to go over her knee. He would laugh at her and Mom would reach up and tap him on the side of the head. None of us has a memory of Mom putting anyone over her knee.

Mom started telling stories too. She told about meeting my Dad at the Rex Roller Skating Rink. And how they broke up when Dad wanted to see if the grass was greener in another girl’s yard. It took him about three weeks to discover it wasn’t. She told affectionate stories about her father, even though he was so mad at her for marrying a man against his wishes she didn’t know until the wedding march started whether he would walk her down the aisle. I learned that the night they moved into the brick house where I grew up there was a snow storm so my Dad had to spend the night plowing, leaving her in a new place with four children, the youngest of them only three months old.

At her birthday party, we left out paper and pen for guests to write birthday wishes or memories of time spent with my mother. My cousin thanked her for always welcoming him to her house, providing an escape from his less-than-perfect living conditions.   My nephew told her she was the best roommate he ever had. I wrote the word “Mom” on my paper then stopped. I could not find words to express the value of having her as my mother. I could not find the one memory that summed up her importance in my life.

 I have memories of my mother beating me at cards, advising me about marriage, sitting by my hospital bed, laughing at the kitchen table with her brother, holding my father’s hand, dancing with her great-grandchild, telling me my Nana had died, yelling at me to pick up my shoes, bragging about her grandson in the Navy, working on a sewing pattern strewn across the kitchen table, beaming when I named my daughter for her. Lessons can be attached to every memory; the morals at the end of the stories are there, if I want to parse them out. But I find that I don’t, not now anyway. I left that paper with that one simple word, “Mom.” I think that is enough.

My father was a bricklayer

“Your father was a bricklayer, not a glass maker.” That’s the smart aleck line my brothers and sisters used on each other when one of us was blocking the TV.  And our father was a bricklayer. That fact of his profession shaped us as a family.

            By the time I was old enough for school, Dad had gone to work for the state to earn a more steady income. He left every weekday in coat and tie. But on Saturdays, he left the house in his navy blue work pants, white T-shirt, and cement encrusted boots. On Saturdays, he was still a bricklayer. And somehow, it was Saturdays that defined him, and so defined our family.

            Growing up in the brick house that he built, we were surrounded by evidence of his profession. The pickup truck in the driveway filled with trowels, buckets, and levels; the pile of bricks stacked in the side of the yard, leftover from one job and waiting for the next. For years there was a small cement mixer at the end of the driveway. When I was in 4^th grade I was fooling around with it and managed to get my thumb stuck in the gears. I lost my thumbnail on that little stunt, but broke neither bones nor the mixer.

Sometimes I went with him on a small job, like when he put in a retaining wall at my Catholic elementary school. He let me smooth out the cement on the side of the wall that would be covered by soil.

Being a bricklayer was important to my Dad. His father was a bricklayer, as was his father before him; so were his brothers. I don’t know how far back the profession goes, but I have a feeling that our family tree is made of cement.  Telling people that my Dad was a bricklayer is important to me. I take pride in the physical labor, in the tradition of it. I like to pass by buildings I know he or some other Lamarre had a hand in. My oldest brother was a bricklayer too, and I guess he was pretty good, like my Dad. People tell me that they’d put them on the most difficult work, or on the facades that had to look the best. They were that good.

I’m not a bricklayer. And, since my brother and my father died, no one else in my immediate family is a bricklayer either. I still have a few cousins in the field, but the days of the Lamarre bricklayers seems to have passed. It makes me sad sometimes. But, even if no Lamarre ever picks up a trowel again, we are still a bricklaying family. I have a jointer and chisel on the mantel next to a photo of my Dad on a job site. The tools remind me of the lessons I learned from him about work and art (my mother taught me a lot in these areas too, but that’s another story).  I am a bricklayer’s daughter.