Lunch Plans

One of my quirks that makes Mike shake his head is my habit of eating a variety of snacks over a period of a few hours--sharp cheddar, some almonds, something leftover from supper, carrots with hummus, cucumber salad, a hard-boiled egg, whatever sounds good--as breakfasts and lunches on my days off instead of taking the time to "eat something real."  I don't think one way is better than the other, but it occurred to me this past week as I brainstormed ways to make this winter better for myself that taking the time on one of my days off every week to cook a "proper" dish that has some fondly-remembered significance to me would be a sweet habit to get into this winter.  Similarly, a friend from high school who is a marathoner mentally dedicates every mile of a race to a different loved one to get her through the hardest stretches and to refocus the endeavor for herself in that way.  Yes, yes, yes.  I've long thought the finest thing about my life is the beautiful people who have been in it, so why not honor them in the days ahead by measuring out the same ingredients and performing the same steps of measuring and boiling and baking that they did or do.  Yesterday I kicked off the project by cooking my grandfather's gnocchi and my grandmother's meatballs.  I cried once as I smelled the potato-flour dough and then again when I tasted my first bite.  I make the meatballs often, and I used to cook the gnocchi a few times a year, but neither Mike nor I should have the extra potato or white flour anymore, and I'm not interested in the healthier versions out there--I want Papa's heavy gnocchi or none at all--so it had been at least five years since I'd made these foods together.  I will modestly but honestly say I hadn't lost my touch:  My grandparents would have proudly recognized both their beloved dishes.  :)  Here's to the best of grandparents, here's to memories of Sunday dinners at their house the first 24 years of my life, and here's to all the LOVE.  How blessed am I.   

♥

Sweet Vickie

This past weekend marked five years since a most-precious reunion.  In July 2011, Vickie of the Red Hair and Sweet Smile traveled from New York to attend my younger brother's wedding, and her visit marked the first time we had seen each other since I was a baby. 

I'd heard about sweet Vickie all my life because she is Mom's best friend from high school, and she and Aunt Laurie have long been dear friends, as well.  Vickie's husband Mark was best friends with my uncle Warren, Aunt Laurie's husband, and my aunt and uncle would eventually name their son after him.  These are bonds that began in the 1960s for them all, and I grew up hearing stories of their friendships.  Mom and Vickie used to ice skate behind Vickie's parents' house, and "Ohhhh, of course, Vickie had this gorgeous ice skating outfit," Mom would remember, laughing.  "She was just darling, a little snow bunny!  And there I was, probably in one of my dad's old sweatshirts. . . !"  Mom always loved Vickie's name too.  "Victoria!  Victoria!!  And I was just 'Chris.'  She always seemed so glamorous!"    I would look through Mom's old pictures and yearbooks and think they were all glamorous, these classic beauties with their sweet smiles and 1960s hairdos. 

"If we can't at least live near each other, we'll keep in touch by writing," Vickie had signed Mom's high school yearbook, knowing my parents were soon getting married.  And it was a promise they kept.  Mom and Vickie have been exchanging letters and cards since 1970.  One winter while I was in college, Mom mentioned to me that Vickie's mom had died, and I asked her for Vickie's address.  My friend Sommer had died the year before, and I had a newly-formed, and already permanent, soft spot for people feeling the particular hell of fresh grief.  I mailed a letter to Vickie, a card back from her soon appeared in my dorm's mailbox, and so began our own correspondence.  Until 2011, though, we all hadn't seen each other since I was a newborn, and Aunt Laurie and Vickie hadn't seen each other since sometime in the 1980s.  Summer 2011, then, what a sweet moment to see, finally, these three high school friends together. 

And I finally got to meet this kind and funny person I'd been keeping in touch with since 1996!  We all spent a wonderful afternoon together the day after the wedding too, visiting some more back at my parents' house.  So much laughter between everyone, and as Vickie, Mom, and Aunt Laurie all noted, it was as if no time had passed.  They just picked up where they'd left off in-person all those years ago.  ♥ 

A few months later, I framed my favorite photo from that weekend's visit and sent it to Vickie with a card.  Could Mom have possibly guessed as she passed her newborn daughter into her best friend's eager arms in 1977 that they, too, would become friends?  But life is sweet, and such things do happen.  And that is the Vickie story, one of promises kept and of love expanded.  

To friendship!  ♥

I Fell in Love Last Wednesday

First there was the mid-1980s fascination with the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry, then the learning about Boston in the late 1980s because the members of New Kids on the Block all hail from there and so much was written about their hometown in the articles I tacked to my walls and pasted into scrapbooks in junior high, and then my crush on fictional former-Boston-Red Sox-pitcher-turned-"Cheers"-bartender Sam Malone, and on and on over the years, but last week, I finally got to visit for the first time what I've always somehow known would someday become my beloved Boston, and I've been so giddy ever since, it almost feels like I've fallen in love with a person and not a place.  Seconds after landing in Boston and walking from the plane into the terminal, I saw the heart below and knew that any trip that began this way would be as beautiful as I expecting, and I was right.

As soon as I had learned this January that the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia (Lisa, don't read past the synopsis or it'll be ruined for you) was going to be performed in Boston this spring, I booked a flight--I studied this play in college in the fall of 1997 and have wanted to see a production of it ever since--and emailed Lisa and Cheryl to see if it would be possible for them to make the trip up from their homes a few hours away for a visit.   "That will be great!" wrote back Lisa.  "That would be wonderful to meet you in person!!!" wrote Cheryl.   :)  Minutes after running into these guys--

 --outside my subway stop at Boston's Old State House Wednesday, then, I found myself hugging Lisa and Cheryl and telling them that having had this trip to look forward to this spring had made the last few months of winter so much easier. 

I love that picture.  ♥  We had lunch in the North End, where I chose the menu's hardest thing to eat while trying to carry on a conversation meatball sandwich, toured Paul Revere's house, walked around Faneuil Hall and the Harbor--the salt water!  the sea gulls!--found desserts (and my first tiramisu and first cannoli, neither of which thrilled me but I has happy to have saved them for Boston), admired the architecture--ahhhhhh, the architecture!--and explored the neighborhood. 

After Lisa and Cheryl headed back to Haymarket Station to catch their train around 3:30 that afternoon, I walked--and I mean walked, until about 6:30 pm, only stopping to take a few pictures, since I became spectacularly--but blissfully--turned-around on my walk to my hotel.  It was the prettiest walk.  I don't know if the city workers were just out in full-force during my visit or if the wind blew it away right before I turned every corner, but the only litter I ever saw on the ground there was cigarette butts and hardened gum.  It was so CLEAN, I was so impressed.  I pick up more trash in a fifteen-minute walk here in my own city than I saw in Boston in two and a half days.  

Gorgeous. 

A friend from high school has completed the Boston Marathon three times so far--Go, Michelle!--so finally seeing Boylston Street, the last leg of the race, and imagining her joy upon reaching its finish line each time, made that part of my visit even sweeter.  

Boston, like any new love--or any love worth its salt, I suppose--makes me want to be an even better version of myself:  Smarter and stronger and more athletic and kinder and more helpful to tourists here at home.  I came back wanting to be a better woman, and maybe it is the effect of the city or maybe it is more "me," but I've lived in New York City, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and outside Milwaukee and didn't walk away from any of those places as inspired as I felt while in Boston.  I connected with something in this place, and I'm still on a high from it.  

A sweet moment from inside Fenway Park Thursday:  Before the game began, a guy probably my younger brother's age in the next section over held the seat beside him steady so his maybe-four-year-old son could climb up onto it.  Once they got settled, an older man leaned forward and said to the young dad--all in endearing stereotypical Boston accent--"If this is yuh son's fuhst time heeuh and he can't see past that bah, I'll switch seats with him so he can see bettuh."  The dad thanked him but declined his kind offer, since his son was too young to pay much attention to the game anyway and likely wouldn't care at all about the obstructed view the "bah" (i.e. bar [i.e. one of the poles that support the upper-deck seats above our grandstand section seats]) caused.  The kindness, though!  ♥

And another sweet Fenway Park moment that continues to make me laugh:  Two guys my age or a little older who were sitting together were talking, and one of them suddenly said to the other, "Don't cuss here."  :)  Except it sounded like "Don't cuss heeuh," making it even more charming.  :)  Love!  

And as I reported to my parents and brothers immediately upon checking in with them: Everyone was SO over-the-top nice and helpful while I was there.  I encountered this kind of I'll-give-up-my-seat-for-your-kid/Don't-cuss-here goodness so many times in my two days there.  I asked someone on Beacon Street the quickest way to such-and-such, and she not only answered, but also pulled out her phone, looked up the destination on a map, then--over my thanks and protests, since she'd helped so much already--patiently read me street-by-street directions too.  Another woman took the extra time to explain which local bus was heading toward my destination and how often it would pass along a certain street, and she pointed out the nearest stop for it too.  When I called the theater needing to switch something with my ticket-order for the play, I told the man on the phone I had my card ready and could read off the numbers to pay the fee as soon as he was ready, and he laughed and waived the fee, saying, "I'm not charging you five dollars after you traveled six-hundred miles to see this."  My soft-spoken cab driver kindly answered a bunch of my questions about Fenway Park on the way back to the airport at the end of my visit.  So many kindnesses.  And Cheryl gifted me with a rainbow-striped pen for my writing.  :)  And Lisa paid my admission to the Paul Revere House.  :)  It felt like the entire city--all the people in it, all the pretty and well-kept grounds, and even the perfect weather--knew what this trip meant to me and sweetly conspired to make my visit as beautiful as possible.  

And just when one would think I couldn't be more charmed--and before the Red Sox game had even begun Thursday afternoon--the sweet "Cheers" theme song was played in the stadium, leading me to text my younger brother and simultaneously catch it on video. 

Love!  ♥

And the play was beautiful, and I cried watching it as I do while reading it.  I eventually mailed my former English professor a postcard from the airport to let him know I'd finally seen it.  :)

Much too soon, I was again flying over ocean and islands on my way home.  I don't know what part Boston is destined to play in my life, but it's captured my heart.  I'd only been home about twenty-six hours before I'd booked a flight to return this fall.  ♥  (Most of this trip's budget was still unspent when I got home and thus went to the start of visit #2's.)  Until October, Boston, my love! 

♥

With Lisa and Cheryl in Boston Wednesday

Until I have time to write a proper love letter to Boston, let me just say how sweet it was to meet Lisa and Cheryl there this week.  After years of reading each other's blogs and emails and exchanging Christmas cards and handmade gloves and fudge and care packages, to meet "for real" and enjoy lunch, dessert(s), and a walk around a beautiful city together was such fun.  ♥

Aunt Cathy

One of my friend Sommer's aunts died on Thursday, I learned Friday afternoon.  Aunt Cathy used to work at the little café inside our local Walmart store--back in the early 1990s when the hometown Walmart was not a "supercenter" and still had a tiny café near the entrance--and Sommer and I would always stop in to visit her while out running around in high school, gabbing with her between her serving other customers and really gabbing with her on slower evenings when she had more free time. The first of their family reunions that I went to, this sweet lady offered me a chair in her backyard and I sat down only to have it crash and splinter into pieces underneath me.  After various relatives helped me up off the ground, I don't know whom amongst all of us laughed the most.  Even though I had just met some of the family for the very first time, it was almost too funny to be embarrassing.  :)   When Sommer died during our last few months of high school, it was one of Cathy's daughters who was the first family member to come out to my parents' house the day it happened to talk with us, and it became my mom and I who would visit Cathy at Walmart, the three of us catching up on family news and helping each other through those horrible first weeks and months.  I last saw her in 2010--randomly bumping into her a hundred miles from her home, which made it even funnier and sweeter to us.  A huge hug, then, at our last meeting, and more laughter and family news shared before we parted.  My heart has been with her family this weekend, and I send them all so much love.  

Patricia/Balisha

I took this picture two weeks ago today in the hopes of finding articulate--and ideally, beautiful--words to accompany it in honor of sweet Patricia of the blog "Simply Balisha" (and another blog for years before that one).  Only a month after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Pat has entered a hospice facility and has posted her goodbye in her final blog post.  She has found words, and I still have not.  Clergyman Phillips Brooks once shared his belief that none of us can be good without the world somehow being benefited by that person's goodness, and since I can't seem to find my own words this month, I'll simply agree with his as I nod toward Pat.  ♥

October: Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Thoreau wrote that in winter, but it never fails to come to my mind in the fall.  Glory, glory, this beautiful season!  And may I just say how tickled I am by that photo!  It looks like my shadow is holding a bouquet of flowers in its left arm.  ♥

Oh, fall!  I just love it so much. 

After a couple months of collecting books and book character toys and dolls for the school, I finally walked over to the post office this afternoon to mail everything out.  As I arrived, I ran into my former fellow cook, Warren, from my last job.  Mike and I had just been talking about him last night, as something reminded me of the time a little girl, maybe four years old, came into the restaurant with her parents with a realistic-looking, almost taxidermy-like stuffed frog in her arms.  "She carries that everywhere," her mom explained as Warren and I smiled at the girl and her odd stuffed animal.  Warren asked the girl what the frog's name was, and she replied, "Tony."  :)  He and I made it back into the kitchen before we started laughing, but the more we kept repeating it to each other--"Tony!  Tony the Frog!"--the funnier it became.  Another laugh together on the sidewalk today, then, now seven years later.  ♥  Getting more books and characters to the kids made me happy.  Having a sweet conservation with the post office clerk as she weighed my first box made me happy.  ("You didn't CARRY this here, did you?"  ~  "Oh, yes.  I don't have a car, so I walk everything over here."  [This clerk always comments on how she sees me out on my walks all the time, but she didn't know until today that I walk my packages over too.]  ~  "Well, you GO, Girl!  You'll be building up those arm muscles!  And exercising your legs!  Well, it's all good!"  She makes me laugh, and it's always a treat to see her.)   On my second walk to the post office, a kind man raced to get ahead of me so he could hold the door as I juggled box number two.  That also made me happy. 

I treated myself to a chocolate almond bar on my way home.  As I stopped to snap a picture of the pumpkin display outside the store, another customer asked me if I knew of a good place where she could buy a milkshake.  That I actually had the answer to her question made me laugh--Hey!  Here's someone leaving the store with a chocolate bar and taking pictures of pumpkins!  She must know where good ice cream can be found!  And bingo!  She does!--and the woman seemed to see the humor in it too, which made it even better.  There are days when everyone seems to be on the same pages--the sky is a deep blue, the trees and sidewalks are autumn-awesome, it is seventy-five degrees outside, so let's all just be good to each other and enjoy this life--and today was one of those days.  And this was one of this fall's sweetest walks so far.  ♥

♥