To Papa and Grandma

Tomorrow, July 1st, is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I’m making Papa’s gnocchi and meatballs and Grandma’s chocolate cream pie for my parents and brothers. As at all of our family dinners, there will be much laughter and teasing and no small amount of love. At tomorrow’s dinner, we thank Papa and Grandma for setting the example.

One Sunday afternoon while we were all visiting at their house when I was a kid, Grandma started talking about her and Papa’s wedding day. They had dated for a year and a half and were 28 and 29 when they got married; Grandma was a year older. When she mentioned how “jittery” she’d been that day, I interrupted, “Why were you nervous?!? It was just Papa!” She, Papa, and the rest of the family laughed and laughed, but it was many years before I understood that they hadn’t always been “Papa and Grandma,” let alone that they weren’t “Papa and Grandma” to each other. I laugh now, too, thinking about it, but a part of me wishes I could sit them both down tonight and say, “Really, in all honesty, you guys didn’t know that it would work out like this? You truly didn’t know that this would be your story? You really didn’t see all of this?” Forget space: just as I was as a child, I am still at least as taken aback at the thought of “Papa and Grandma” having a beginning or an end.

Had I had the foresight, I would have been sure to ask my grandparents all kinds of things about their courtship and marriage, but I didn’t have what could be considered my first date until after they both had died, so by the time I cared enough to know the answers, it was too late to ask the questions. Once when I was in college, Papa delved into the topic, but I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to discuss it in any real way. “You’re not interested in the boys yet, are you?” were the words he found, and it was more of a statement than a question. Assuming he wouldn’t understand, I simply answered, “I haven’t found any yet who interest me. I’m—I’m picky.” Feeling stupid, I half-expected him to laugh, but he didn’t, of course. He just nodded his head slowly and, squeezing the back of my neck, responded, “That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being picky.” Had I been braver, I’d have admitted to him and Grandma that I doubted I’d ever find a man I loved as much as I loved him—and that I didn’t think, dateless all my life as I’d been, that even if I did someday find such a man, that he would love me in return. Papa had set the bar. The summer after I graduated from college, I’d started writing a poem about him, but seven years later, I still haven’t finished it. I get as far as “You were my first hero, Papa, and the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to,” and I again set it aside to work on another time. It has always just seemed too much to hope for: a husband as fine as my grandfather, a marriage as blessed as my grandparents’.  This is a conversation I now wish the three of us had had.

 When Grandma called one afternoon to let us know that Papa died, a few months before what would have been my grandparents’ 62nd wedding anniversary, my parents and brothers and I left our jobs for the day and raced to gather to be with her. As we sat around her in chairs and at her feet, Grandma handed me a book of her favorite poems and asked me to read “Should You Go First” by Albert Kennedy "Rosey" Rowswell. She had been reading it to herself just before we’d arrived, she explained. The last stanza buoyed her but further broke my heart; She was imagining their reunion--only five weeks away, not that any of us knew that then--and I was just aching for the past.  

“Should you go first and I remain,
One thing I'd have you do:
Walk slowly down that long, lone path,
For soon I'll follow you.
I'll want to know each step you take
That I may walk the same,
For some day down that lonely road
You'll hear me call your name.”
 

At Papa’s viewing, Grandma joined me at his casket and tried to get me to stop crying, but it was quite awhile before I collected myself enough to see and speak, and when I did, Papa’s hands were what caught my attention. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band. I asked my grandmother if she had kept his ring, and she replied that Papa had never worn one. I had never even noticed. He just never wanted one, Grandma explained, and the extra expense at the time they got married didn’t seem worth it. I nodded in understanding, and Grandma pulled me closer and said, “He always said that we were his jewels, our children and I--and later on, you kids, of course.” That set me off again, and Grandma rubbed the small of my back as I wept.
 

My grandparents didn’t exchange birthday or anniversary or Christmas presents with each other, and neither had grown up in a time or family that encouraged demonstrativeness or sentimentality. I never saw them kiss or hug. But Grandma would cook and bake Papa’s favorite foods, and Papa never returned from a walk in the woods without a bouquet of wildflowers for Grandma. He teasingly called her his “little Napoleon” because she was French—her family had come here from France years before Papa’s had arrived from Italy—and she would begin all of her retorts to him with a combination “Shhhhh!” and clucking sound. In 1993, my mom bought Grandma a book to fill out for me and my brothers in which she was to record her anecdotes and memories. A line in the book asks for a description of how she and Papa spent their days. She stayed busy with the “usual household chores,” Grandma dryly reported, and Papa spent his days “working, gardening, and picking at me.” I laugh as I reread that now, and I’m also remembering that my grandfather would often tell her, “You know what? You’re a good kid, Mum!” It would make us all smile, Papa working his charm this way on a now-blushing-but-still-pretending-to-be-annoyed Grandma. You’re a good kid, Mum!
As the final guests left the viewing, I asked my mom if she was sure that Grandma understood that she wouldn’t get to see Papa again after that night—it would be closed casket for the next morning’s funeral—and she said she thought so but went over to Grandma to see if she wanted to go up to the casket one last time before we took her home. Grandma did, and exhausted by the past few days, was gently led by some of the family to the front of the room. After a few moments, she collapsed onto Papa’s chest and whimpered, “Goodnight, my buddy.” My mom and just about everyone else in earshot completely dissolved then and hurried to help her, but I stood by momentarily too stunned to cry or move. It had just dawned on me that above everything else, my grandparents were each other’s friends. The very last thing she ever said to him taught me what I had most needed to know about marriage—and what I most wanted out of my own. After 62 years--more than six decades! more than half a century!--the very last time she looked at him, she was seeing “my buddy.” My buddy. “Papa and Grandma” was a friendship. Papa and Grandma were friends.


As a swift kick when we were already down, the morning we received the florist’s bill for Papa’s funeral arrangements, we also got the phone call letting us know that Grandma died. The only peace there was to be had that day was in the hope that they were finally (out of pain and) together again. Even in those short five weeks after Papa had died and we would speak of going to visit Grandma, it had been “going down to Papa and Grandma’s.” Before Papa had died, the only nights they had ever spent apart were those of my grandmother’s three maternity stays. Grandma had been ill the last six months of her life and had lived just as long as her doctors had predicted, but the fact that Papa passed on one month and Grandma the next still struck us as a detail most-fitting to their story. One of my second cousins told me at Grandma’s funeral that my grandparents “could have been a TV show!” As we sat beside each other waiting for the service to begin, she turned in her chair to face me and laughed in half-whispers, “Ohhhhhh, when they would start in on each other! You know, [your grandmother] didn’t have his sense of humor--she was so dry and quiet about things--but she still gave it right back to him! When we were kids, we’d look forward to their visits just to hear them together!”

Had I ever put any thought into it while my grandparents were alive, I’d have been able to figure most of this out, of course. That they were people before they were grandparents and each other’s friends above and beyond “Papa and Grandma” should have been no mystery. And I suppose I did understand these things on some level. While I was staying with them one summer week as a kid, the song “Friends and Lovers” came on the radio during lunch. Grandma liked it and asked why they didn’t make more nice songs like that. I was mortified--the song was about lovers!--and tried to change the subject. If 30-year-old Val could have a do-over of that moment, she would leave the blushing 10-year-old to her pancakes and listen more closely to the tale her grandparents were telling, for however long they had to tell it. Was Papa always your buddy, Grandma, or did he gradually become that to you? I am interested in the boys now, Papa, if you want to talk? There are no do-overs, though, so after saying thanks tomorrow for the gathering of family over gnocchi and pie, I will pray to Papa and Grandma that I paid enough attention to their story to shape a sweet one of my own.

Storybook Blooms and Little Girl Rouge

Although I didn’t start gardening until I was twenty-seven, my interest in it was sparked as a kid both by my grandparents’ wonderland of a yard and by a book my Mom bought me when I was maybe five or six, The Care Bears’ Garden.  My grandmother, for all the many flowers she had, never had Hollyhocks or Foxgloves while I was growing up, so when I saw them in the book’s illustrations, I thought of them as magical storybook kind of flowers--much like the giggling posies in the Chuckle Patch on "The Magic Garden," one of my favorite childhood TV shows and probably another inspiration. I didn’t know the cute drawings were based on real flowers. Hollyhocks and Foxgloves still delight me. This week, my own Foxgloves began to bloom.

My so-far-favorite rose, Louise Odier, also opened up this week. When I was little, the neighborhood girls and I would rub onto our faces the fallen petals of our neighbor Gracie’s roses, feeling quite womanly as we did so, of course. I’m transported back to those summer moments spent crouched in front of Gracie’s plastic picket fence every time I smell this flower.




All in all, I'm a happy five-year-old while in my garden this week, even if I've stopped rouging my cheeks with rose petals. 

Thinking About Miss Melly

For my birthday this year, my parents bought me prints of one of my favorite movie characters, Melanie from Gone with the Wind. I have loved these photos for years and think Olivia de Havilland is in this film the most beautiful woman ever to grace the screen. It has been an every-other-year-or-so tradition since I was thirteen for my mom and I to camp out on the couch with pillows and blankets and watch the movie together, and my parents have laughed at me every single time because I never fail to exclaim “Really! Why does everyone make such a fuss about Scarlett?! Melanie is beautiful! Look at her!” The film’s costume designers kept “Melly” in what they considered dowdy clothing and necessarily bland mourning clothes so as to contrast her with flounced-up Scarlett, but Melanie’s beauty, like all true beauty, wasn’t dependent on flashy makeup or fancy clothing anyway. (And I’d happily wear any of her Gone with the Wind costumes. Oh, for the opportunity to wear such gorgeous dresses every day! I’ll say it again: I was born in the wrong century.) Today ninety years old, Olivia de Havilland is still beautiful, but she herself has stated in interviews that out of her entire career, there was just something special about the role of Melanie and that ever since portraying her, she has found herself trying to live up to the character’s goodness. I think that goodness is precisely what sets Melanie apart from countless other pretty movie characters. Here is a woman who understands the wisdom of kindness--And you can see it in her face.

It struck me the last time I watched the movie that I’ve never heard anyone discuss Melanie and Rhett’s friendship. Delicate and modest, Melanie has more strength and smarts than maybe anyone else in the film, and Rhett himself is savvy enough to see and appreciate that. It is Melanie who listens to Rhett when he breaks down over his failings as a husband to Scarlett, it is from Melanie that an ecstatic Rhett comes up with the name for his newborn daughter, and when the little girl dies and Rhett refuses to see anyone or let the girl be buried, Melanie is the only one respected enough by him to be allowed in. When, after hours of being locked in the grief-stricken man’s room with him and his daughter’s body, an exhausted Melanie appears at the door and lets Mammy know that Rhett’s agreed to bury the girl and that she should bring him coffee and sandwiches, we know just what this woman and her friendship with Rhett is made of. On her deathbed, she implores Scarlett to be kind to him. “He loves you so.” Rhett and Melanie are unlikely friends but friends just the same. And even at thirteen, I only had to see how gentlemanly this playboy of a man was to her to know that he was ultimately good. Most women swoon over the handsome character as soon as they see him—my mom always says her “Ooh, Baby!” the first second he appears on-screen—but I couldn’t really like him until I trusted him. He passed that “Val-test.”

So now I get to see my beloved “Miss Melly” every day, and so I am reminded every time I look at her of the kind of person and lady and friend I want to be. In a line that stops me in my tracks, Melanie’s husband, Ashley, describes her as “the only dream I ever had that didn't die in the face of reality.”  Beautiful.

A Page from the Book of Good Things

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!  ♥

3 Pictures: 2007's Pink & White Garden Begins

♥

A Heap o' Livin'

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. ♥

His Eye Is on the Sparrow

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.

The Book of Good Things

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. 

Concurring with Wordsworth

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.

Buster, Rowlf, and Buckingham

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.