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My breaks on this weekend of working and resume-revamping have been spent on long walks and quick peeks at my garden. (And late at night before fatigue overtook me, finally reading Nick Hornby's About a Boy. There's a line in it that's so funny to me, I giggle every single time I think of it.) On my walk home yesterday, I stopped at an antique shop to ask about a couple of old metal chairs I've oohed and ahhed over the past couple of weeks. Amazingly--especially for this shop, and most especially for the small "treat budget" I allow myself--the price was right. The many decorating and gardening scrapbooks I've kept since age thirteen are filled with pictures of chairs and gliders like these, so yesterday marked the rare instance in which I practically jigged as I parted with money. One chair is rusted on its seat and needs to be sanded, and someday both these babies will be Val-ed up in glossy pink paint, but they were certainly worth the seventeen-year wait.
And ohhh, how the Bleeding Hearts continue to enchant me! ♥
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I turn thirty on Monday. Never have I been so excited to kiss a decade goodbye! see a birthday. I just returned from my morning walk to find this note from my dad tacked on to the bottom of the note I'd left for him. . . . My birthday gift was two bags of manure. Dad initially didn't see the humor in it--What? You're a gardener! It's good for your flowers! What?!--but really, this is the best saying-goodbye-to-my-twenties gift he could have given me. I am still smiling. Here's to spreading it around for a bumper crop. ♥
I was living in New York City as a first-time grad student in the fall of 2000. It was a discouraging semester, and times only got tougher as the weeks went on. On the way back to my apartment one afternoon, I decided to pop into a sandwich shop for a takeout lunch. I can’t remember now why I (ever) chose that place. It consisted of the counter and a narrow galley space with an exit at either end, it was always raucous and jam-packed with people pushing their way toward the counter and then to the exit, and I always emerged from it feeling annoyed and disheveled, like I’d just survived a skirmish. It was close to my apartment, though, and on some days, maybe that was enough.
That afternoon, after minutes of being pushed and shoved to the middle of the shop where the counter was, I was suddenly stopped by a huge black man in a business suit. He was built like a linebacker and was easily 6’8”. How I hadn’t noticed him in this crush of people was beyond me. I’m 5’2," and to be approached by anyone in this city of strangers was so unexpected, I could only stare.
Not put off by my mute staring, The Linebacker in a Business Suit bent his head down toward me and smiled. ”I just want to tell you it’ll be okay.”
“What?”
He kept smiling and nodded as if to acknowledge that he understood my startled and rude response to him. “I know things are hard right now,” he told me, “but it’s going to be okay.”
Before I could reply, I got jostled by the hordes of students packed around me. When I looked up—maybe two seconds later--he was gone. The man who had been standing at least a foot above the head of even the next-tallest person in this tiny space was nowhere to be seen. That familiar tingly feeling that always marks these kinds of moments for me was already setting in, but I maneuvered myself enough to turn around and look for him anyway. When the place was that crowded, even a paper-thin man would have had to push his way through the mobs of students and book bags-thrown-over-shoulders for a full minute before finally reaching one of the two doors at either end of the shop. The man was just gone.
When I got back to my apartment and shared the story with my roommate, she shivered and crowed, “You have the weirdest experiences!” And I do, I suppose, but I had walked away from The Lunch-Hour Skirmish Sandwich Shop that afternoon believing all the more something I’ve really needed to hold on to ever since: The Universe is aware of Little Old Me and is sending me a sign here. I believe in holding on to hope, I don’t think we’re ever alone or unloved, no matter how lonely or unlovable we may feel, and I trust that the Universe is always somehow aware of us as we plod our way through it. It's going to be okay.
Before she graduated from the university we were both attending in December of 1998, my friend Marylou gifted me with a personalized blank book. It stayed in its place on one of my apartment’s bookshelves for a few months before I decided on its purpose: The fabric-covered book would be my Book of Good Things. I would record in it every night those things that made me laugh, that made me feel comforted, that brought me joy, that showed me I was loved, and that renewed my faith in the world for another day. From the moment I decided to start the book, I found myself approaching my life—and the people and events in it—more optimistically: Of course today will be filled with goodness--because I have to come up with The List tonight! Determination to look for the good made finding it much easier.
I quickly learned that a great day was made great by “little” things, those moments that before would have been forgotten or that would have become vague memory blobs along the lines of “I enjoyed college” or “I love my family and friends.” As every student of creative writings knows, “Show, don’t tell.” So I soon saw the significance of documenting details: Funny lines from phone conversations, scenes from movies I wanted to remember, the look on someone’s face during a conversation or a moment of shared silence, the way a certain hug felt, songs and scents that would forever remind me of that day, what came in the mail, what a friend said when we ran into each other between classes. . . . Such small things, but by nightfall they became big enough to make me see that it had been a pretty good day. On some level, I knew all these things before I started the Book of Good Things, but of course, you don’t really learn something until it’s changed you in some way. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the wise and wonderful film critic Roger Ebert: “They used to tell us in writing class that if we wanted to know what a story was really about, we should look for what changed between the beginning and the end.” In that regard, my college-era Book of Good Things is the story of how I learned to see. Writing it helped me figure out what mattered.
And the things that make for good days haven’t really changed much for me since childhood, I know now. Give me someone to love and someone who loves me, a comfy corner to sit in, fresh air, good music and good books, pen and paper to write with, something to think about, something to laugh over, and something good to eat. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. The trick is seeing it.
Daffodils could challenge Daisies as The Girls Next Door of the flower world. They know they're not flashy and that people will never ooh and ahh over them as they do with the Roses and the other more exotic beauties out there-- Daffodils have a perfect star of petals few people even notice, thank you--but they're secure in themselves anyway. Consider them a Litmus test of sorts, perhaps: Is their color "just yellow" or “sunshine on a stem"? They are voluptuous and girly with their curved trumpets and rings of frills, but also sturdy and surprisingly strong: How can such slender and nondescript stalks hold up such spectacular blooms? Quicksilver girls, Daffodils' moods change with each flutter of the wind, sometimes shy and reserved, with trumpets bowed and bobbing toward the ground, other times standing tall and in!-your!-face! with their gold stars looking at you head-on, and then wallflowers again, huddled up against each other as if deep in conversation and only half-hoping you're not paying them too much attention. And the scent! Like my favorite “perfume,” Just-Stepped-Out-of-the-Shower-Clean, Daffodils smell indescribably good. Like springtime. Or soil. Fresh air and fresh starts. They simply make me happy.
I have dreamed of having an Old English Sheepdog since I was a kid. I have cycled through stages of hoping to have children someday and then of not caring if I’m ever anyone’s mom, but I have had three dog names picked out for ages: Buster, Rowlf, and Buckingham--“Buck” for Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac fame. Just thinking about the dog makes me happy. And when I say that I dream of him, I mean it literally: My dog appears in my dreams every few months. Sometimes the dream (or what I remember of it) is simply that he was sitting beside me on the couch or that we were out walking together, and sometimes the dream is about something else entirely but my shaggy gray and white bear of a dog was there during it, plodding alongside me.
In last night’s dream, a bunch of friends, family, coworkers, and I were sleeping over at my grandparents’—camped out on the couch, in the upstairs bedrooms, and on the floor all through the house. I was curled up with a blanket on the living room floor in front of the TV, but I soon decided to get up and find my dog—I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep without him. So, I stood up and tip-toed my way through the room, trying not to step on anyone as I made my way over to the staircase. I was giddy in the dream, somehow thinking “Ooh! I hope there’s a sheepdog in this dream!” and already happy because I knew I was about to see him again. I finally found him—Buster, Rowlf, or Buckingham, I never know which one I'm seeing in the dreams—upstairs in my grandparents’ bedroom. My dog! There was just enough light in the room to make him out on the floor beside their bed. I called out to him in an excited whisper and snuggled up with him there on the floor, his fluffy side as my pillow. That was all there was to the latest dream, my most recent visit with my sheepdog.
I always wake up from these dreams missing my dog but happy—even if it was “just” a dream—to have spent time with him again. And say what you will, but it’s a nice way to start the day. Buster/Rowlf/Buckingham is out there, and someday he will still be there when I awake.
The summer between fifth and sixth grade, I spent a day crying because I hadn’t gotten the teacher I’d wanted for the upcoming school year. I had wanted—everyone had wanted—Mr. S, aka The Cool Teacher, a man in his thirties who sometimes gave out candy for correct answers and showed movies in class. My best friends would all be with him, but I had been assigned to Mr. G. Mr. G! He was ancient, at least sixty years old! He wore a suit jacket and a bow tie! I cried all day, begging my mom to have me switched to Mr. S’s class. The night before the first day of school, I cried some more, called my friends so I could wallow in their pity for me, and wrote my woes in my diary.
My diary entry for the first day of sixth grade doesn’t include a word about Mr. G or any “torcher” from the day at all. I very clearly remember the last day of that school year, however, because I ended it by crying to Mr. G that I would miss him and that I didn’t want to go to junior high. In the "last will and testament" section of our sixth grade graduation booklet the PTA always produced, my own entry didn't bequest prized possessions to friends still at the school or to classmates with whom I would soon be starting middle school. I had instead left "lots of laughs and a big smile to Mr. G." He had, of course, become one of my favorite teachers.
Mr. G appeared much older than he was, and he was quite frail, but he didn’t sleep through his classes as had been rumored. He kept a bell on his desk and would ring it to get our attention, to announce the end of our test-taking time, to get us quiet, and to keep us on-task in general. He always seemed genuinely puzzled when he would try to ring it and find it stuffed with wadded-up paper towels. Despite our hijinks, Mr. G believed that we were all good kids, and he wanted us to believe it, too, and to live up to it. He valued good manners, good posture, and good penmanship. He lamented disorganized desks and deducted points for messy work. When we would draw maps in Geography, our grades suffered if the blue crayon-strokes that marked the lakes and oceans had obviously been applied in different directions. “Of course it matters!” he would say, astonished that we felt otherwise, when we argued with him. He taught us how to diagram sentences, although none of the other teachers at the school were doing that with their classes. When the visiting music teacher punished me for something by making me stand against the bulletin board with my arms in the air, it was Mr. G who, returning early to his class room to find me standing in front of the wall with aching arms above my head, instantly cried out to the music teacher, “Valerie would never do anything to deserve that!” and told me I could take my seat. When another teacher lined us up to paddle us because a couple of students had behaved badly for a substitute, Mr. G. stepped into the hallway and talked him out of it. In times of corporal punishment, Mr. G never paddled us, and he rarely rose his voice to us either, and still we all somehow knew that he was the strictest teacher in the building.
Old-school and demanding, Mr. G was not quite grandfatherly toward his eleven-year-old charges, but he was a kind and gentle man. He would begin each day by writing a quotation on the chalkboard. A cross-stitch sampler was tacked to the bulletin board beside his desk that read, “Live your life one day at a time and make it a masterpiece.” Next to it was a black and white photograph of a young man in a suit and tie writing a letter. I asked him once if it was him in the photograph and he only smiled. When a boy in class made an off-color remark to a girl who’d asked to go to the restroom, Mr. G was outraged and gave him a lecture about the acceptable way to speak to—and about—young ladies. I walked over to his desk once with my assignment in-hand and got as far as saying, “I know this is a stupid question, but—“ before he cut me off by responding, in the sharpest tone he would ever use with me, “Valerie, no question is stupid if you don’t know the answer.”
And he learned from us, as well. The other sixth grade class—and probably every other class in the whole school—was participating in the book order program, but because Mr. G refused to get involved, we could only look on enviously as our friends in Mr. S’s class selected books and posters and calendars from the colorful brochures every few weeks. Mr. G had been burned by the book order once years before, he told us: Something had gone wrong with the shipment and he hadn’t been pleased with the service, so he never bothered with it again. We grumbled about this for awhile before hitting upon the words that would change his mind. “You have to give them a second chance!” we told him indignantly. “You don’t give up just because something doesn’t work the first time!” He told us we were absolutely right, and soon we were all looking through the little catalogs. When a girl picked an almost-dead housefly off of the classroom windowsill to see if she could revive it, Mr. G launched into a tirade about germs and hygiene and only stopped when he saw that the girl was crying. “You didn’t need to YELL at me!” she choked out as he led her over to the sink beside the coat rack. “I was TRYING to be NICE!” We all watched and waited for Mr. G’s reaction. When it came, it was so quiet, we had to strain to hear it. “You’re right, Jennifer. There was no need for me to yell at you. I’m sorry.” The fly couldn’t be saved, but the moment could be—and was.
The last day of school, after hours of playing Bingo in the gym, laughing at each other’s responses to questions posed to us by the PTA for the “Class of ’89 Yearbook,” winning candy at the end-of-year carnival out on the blacktop, and trying to blend into the cafeteria walls during the dance, we were herded back to our homerooms for dismissal. Walking back to Mr. G’s room for the very last time, it all hit me and I began to cry. Mr. G didn’t know what to do with me. “Valerie, Valerie!” he kept saying, looking baffled and rather embarrassed. It was younger, hipper Mr. S who knew to hug me and tell me I’d love junior high and could visit anytime.
I sent Mr. G a long letter soon after I started the seventh grade. He called me on the phone to thank me. When I teasingly asked him if he’d found any grammatical errors in my letter, he laughed and explained that concerns about grammar were always outweighed by the joy of having been remembered by a friend. He also told me that he’d vote for me if I ever ran for President. We talked for quite awhile, but those two moments of laughter are all I remember now. He had a few heart surgeries in the months following our conversation, I learned, and he retired soon after. We, the neon spandex-clad “Class of ‘89” had been his last group of kids and his last full year of teaching.
My junior year of high school, my English teacher started class by asking, “Now, how many of you had Mr. G in the sixth grade? It helps me figure out who’s learned what, and how well.” Instead of simply raising our hands, we School of Mr. G alum spontaneously burst into cheers and applause.
Three things have occupied my thoughts lately: I'll soon be thirty, the latest stage of my life to feel like "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" seems to be passing, and I miss my grandparents.
The framed four-leaf clover in the drawing above is my rendition of the real one that has a place here on my desk. I look at it every day and think about luck and its place in my life. My grandfather used to search his backyard for four-leaf clovers for me. He would sit at the base of his thinking tree and study the grass until he spotted one. There was always a lucky clover from Papa being pressed in a book, waiting for me to claim upon my next visit. I would take each one home and carefully tape it into my Bible, the only place that seemed right for such a collection. When I had a falling-out with God while in college, I threw out the Bible--and seemingly, all the good luck it contained. If my thirties see fewer moments of such reckless stupidity than my twenties did, we should all be glad.
I have gotten through the six years without my grandparents, of course, but I can't help but think that they all would have been easier had my grandparents been here for them. When I returned home from a failed grad school venture, it was Papa's spin on the events that most helped me. "A nice girl like you, you move to a big city and they treat you like that! But you tried! People who don't make mistakes don't make anything." He died four months later, so I never got to hear his take on any of the many twists and turns that followed. I never got to ask him what he thought of luck or if he considered himself lucky. He and his family had come to America from northern Italy when he was a boy--"America! Where the streets are paved in gold!"--and his mother died a few years later. He was always sure after that that he, too, would die young. A decade later, he and my grandmother met, somehow strangers to each other in a mining village of a few hundred people. Early in their marriage, Papa contracted Black Lung and was told to put his affairs in order and make arrangements for his family. He lived to almost-90 and celebrated more than six decades of marriage. As Joe says in Force of Evil, "You can't tell about your life 'til you're all through living it." By 2001, Papa had lived long enough to know that he never could have guessed how his life would unfold or what the "better or worse" that he had vowed to be there for would actually entail. Six years and countless highs and lows later, when I think of Papa and his lucky clovers, I ache to tell him that--even if the collection is gone--I'm beginning to get it.
After Papa died, I flipped through the pages of a book I'd taken from his and Grandma's house and found a four-leaf clover pressed inside. I promptly framed it and set it next to my favorite photo of us and promised not to be as careless as before. Maybe that wasn't necessary. Maybe luck, like love, never really leaves us. But still and all, maybe Papa knew that his granddaughter would sometimes need to be reminded that, regardless of what life held for her, she would always be one of the luckiest people in the world.
My grandmother and I were pen pals. We lived near each other until I left for college, but we both loved writing—and receiving—letters, so our correspondence was more a way to tuck some extra love into each other’s days than it was to bridge long distances or stretches of time between visits. My letters were always addressed to “Papa and Grandma,” but it was Grandma who would write back for the both of them. (Sometimes, though, she would add a postscript from my grandfather, and reading them delights me still. P.S. Papa says not to take any wooden nickels.) When I was a little girl, my “letters” were drawings and pictures made of magazine clippings. Grandma’s letters usually included comic strips from the Sunday paper and a dollar bill. My grandfather died in the spring of 2001 and Grandma died five weeks later. I didn't know until I helped clean out their house that year that they had saved all of their mail from me. For years I had been saving most of my mail, too, so maybe I should have suspected that I’d gotten this sentimental tendency from someone. Still, it is really quite something to be organizing into stacks everyday items stored in shoe-boxes and hat-boxes—Things That Can Go to Goodwill, Things Aunt Sophie Might Like to Have Now—and happen upon luggage filled with a lifetime’s worth of your own letters. And when, seemingly hours later, you come to and look up from the now-disheveled heaps of envelopes and note cards spread out on the floor all around you, you want to run downstairs to Grandma and giggle, “You saved this!? Oh my goodness! I sound so silly! Do you remember this one?” And it hits you all over again, and you realize as you push them back into a neater pile—Things That I Will Keep for Myself—that your letters and memories are yours alone now.
Grandma once sent me a photo of her and Papa with an inscription on the back that read “So you don’t forget what we look like.” I laughed when I first read that, and it still reminds me of her dry and quiet humor, but I read it now and realize that she knew countless things about time and memory that I was then too young to. Sometimes, for example, you have a hard time really seeing people until they’re not there to look at anymore.
Six years after my grandparents died, it is still a greater shock to me every night when I climb into bed that I went yet another day without having seen them than it would be if I were to walk into them on the street tomorrow.
By the time I was a teenager, Grandma needed a hearing aid and even with it couldn’t keep up with conversation as she had before. And I made it harder for her: I didn’t like drawing attention to myself by speaking loudly, so instead of managing my shyness, I simply talked with her less. I never told anyone that, so maybe my grandmother simply chalked up my even-quieter-than-usual nature to teen awkwardness or some-such. Or maybe she knew me well enough to understand. But maybe not, and my regret is only relieved by an antique suitcase filled with our correspondence.
All through college and even after, when I had graduated and moved farther away, Grandma and I wrote back and forth. She mentioned in all of her letters that she had nothing much to say, but she regularly filled the sheets of stationery anyway, always my most devoted correspondent. There’s a ballgame today, but we’re not going to it, of course; We stayed home from church today on account of my having a cold; We canned the last of the tomatoes today and will give you a few jars when we next see you. Papa would walk down to the post office and show off the colorful envelopes waiting for him to anyone there at the time, Grandma told me. “That girl!” he always exclaimed when he saw my drawings and stickers. While I often read their letters while still standing in front of my mailbox, other mail in my arms, my grandparents would wait to open my letters together, my grandfather carrying them back up the hill to their house and my grandmother reading them aloud. Grandma would write back after the Sunday dinner guests had gone home, Papa would walk her letter back down to the post office Monday morning, and I would soon be working on my reply again. This was our routine.
A few days before Christmas 2000, Grandma was diagnosed with Leukemia, and she and Papa, whose health was also failing him, were moved into a rest home. I wrote to them every other day, even as I was visiting at least once a week, wanting what Grandma called “our pen and paper visits” to continue as usual. Grandma never replied to these letters, though, and I heard of only one more “That girl!” from Papa. The day he died, one of the first things my grandmother managed to say to me was, “We read your new letter just this morning.” She asked me to be her “little secretary” and send letters breaking the news to far-away friends and family. Later she asked me to write the thank you notes for the sympathy cards. When she told me to take her address book and box of stationery home with me, I knew our days of being pen pals were over. I continued to write both for her and to her, however, sometimes sending her books and poems I thought she would like, as well. When she was transferred to the city hospital and it was explained to us that it could be days or weeks, I still wrote. I sent letters to her although she could no longer stay awake long enough to listen as someone else read them to her, and later still, when she was simply too close to death to care. One of my aunts gently told my mother that I didn’t need to write anymore, but I wasn't ready to stop.
A few months after Grandma died, I dreamed that I was standing across the road from her and Papa’s house and seeing her as she stood on the front porch opening the day’s mail. I was giddy with excitement in the dream, knowing she was about to get to the last letter I had sent, and I could barely keep my presence a secret as I watched. When she came to my envelope, her face burst into an expression of joy like none I have ever seen in this life. As she read, I crossed the road and greeted her quietly so as not to startle her. We stood on the front porch laughing and crying and hugging each other—Grandma! My grandma!—and when my alarm clock began to bleat, I woke up in tears, still feeling her soft cheek against mine. She had read my last letter. Ever-faithful, she'd gotten everything I’d been saying all along.
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