6/16/16

Today's date, and also the date 100 years ago, when my Nana was born. I think of her every June, and of her pearl birthstone, which she would send me every year for my own birthday. It was the perfect birthstone for her. Not the showiest, flashiest gem, but a subtle gleam, the reflective result of grit under duress.

My Nana did not have an Ozzie and Harriet marriage, and she learned to be an entirely independent woman when such things were still largely unheard of. She lived on her own with two daughters, worked in a school cafeteria, and went to college alongside my own mom and all the other kids twenty+ years her junior.  

I wish I knew more about her younger years, but my Nana was a stoic woman. She had experienced her share of personal pain, but primarily chose to sequester her feelings behind clamped jaw, at least where we grandkids were involved. She grew up through tough times, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants by way of Ellis Island. Perhaps that's why I never heard discussion of the Depression from her. Maybe it was child's play in comparison with the conditions from which they came. 

She wasn't a wealthy woman, but a handful of treasures survive her memory- paintings that she began making in her retired years, the smell of the leather wallets and gloves she would bring for us from Gloversville, New York, and the Gebachte cookies, made from a recipe older than she was, from egg and oil dough, damson plum and apricot jams, and cinnamon sugar. She would package up these rolled cookies in sheets of wax paper and send them in the mail to us, wherever we were, for special occasions. (Thankfully the recipe survived her passing with the foresight of the Edelstein cousins, who insisted she make a batch with them watching so they could write it all down!) 

One of my favorite memories occurred on one of her last visits. I listened with dropped jaw as Nana told us about her solo cross-country trip from Maryland to California. (How had we never heard about this before?!) My parents were moving here with the three of us all under the age of 6, and she offered to drive the family station wagon for them as we flew. Said it was something she had always wanted to do, and at 65, all by herself, she did it. (Sadly, I inherited NONE of her sense of direction!) I keep this memory in my pocket whenever I want to talk myself into doing something largely less brave than that, by myself.

Ross and I have been plugging away at his permit driving hours, and in addition to the rules of the road, I am attempting to flesh out other helpful habits of responsibility. In the spirit of such things, we have discussed having one place where he always puts his keys and his wallet so he can always find them. But of course, Ross can't find his wallet to put it there!! So, last night I thought, "I know! I'll have him drive us to Target so he can pick out a new wallet and get this ritual underway." I had planned on making him use his allowance to pay for it, since he lost the last one.  But standing in the check-out line it dawned on me what today is. Of COURSE! 

"Ross, you're in luck. My Nana wants you to have this wallet for her birthday." 

By now, he is used to hearing crazy things like this out of my mouth (as are the rest of you!) Frankly, he didn't care what the reason was, so long as it meant he got to keep his allowance. And frankly, I don't care if it actually happened or if it was just a figment of my imagination, but I felt Nana's satisfied endorsement of the arrangement. 

Happy 100 years since your birth, Nana! Perhaps we'll make some jelly cookies in your honor. 

In Tempo

Today, life sent me this poem. Maybe it was in honor of my late grandfather's 100th birthday. Or of my grandmother's passing, also sharing this date. Anyhow, I had seen this poem before.

It is one that my dad wrote, many years ago, while listening to Barber's Adagio for Strings, on an airplane. As he struggled to contemplate his existence, and his place in all other existence.

It had resurfaced a few years ago, when he was ill and contemplating the end to his existence, or at least the existence he knew.

I have been reading The Road, by Cormack McCarthy, and the story of a man and his boy clinging tenuously to the last morsels of post-apocalyptic survival on a destroyed earth is enough to make anyone contemplate the true nature of existence at its core. 

So, today I sat, stubbornly banging my head against questions that leave me at an impasse. Answerable only with other questions that seem to have no answers. And then a distant, but significant voice from the past manifested, as if on cue, and strategically plunked these familiar words before my eyes.

In Tempo Adagio
by Alan Miller

Subtle, rich harmonic changes;
their lyrical form framing the view
of tortuous, ribboned paths, etched
along the mountainous divide

which keenly separates
chaos from order
virtue from abandon
treachery from expedience;
one gentle step on the other side of which
brings the quivering, raw, vulnerable beat to a halt.

Images appear deliberately; stop-time irony
as the fleeting shadow of wings inquisitively
searches every incline, crevasse and flood plain
for meaning, and finding none, moves on.

I walk on that path, straddling comfort and anguish,
sometimes thoughtlessly and urgently
like the searching darting shadow;
sometimes almost motionlessly, 
as the perspective onto which the reckless vision is cast,
in tempo adagio
as I sift through collective treasures
of memories and aspirations.

Passing awarely through thick layers
of turbulence and obscurity,
I reach the defined edge of light,
bordered by the melodic tones
and the deepening blueness of the final breadth of our world.

Cast above the clouds, I stare awkwardly
at the gift bestowed upon me.
The last chord finds me
suspended, at peace, outstretched,
leaning towards enlightened times.

And the quandary became a little more clear. The answers have always been there. It is the questioner that continually changes.

In Tempo Adagio
by Lauren Valantine

The portal is wide open tonight, 
like the stretched light of a full moon,
fleeting illumination on the elusive.

Life and death in perpetual motion,
through the orbit of day following night.

Communications encrypted, drawn out
repeated as needed
to make their meanings whole.

First round, a revelation
Second, new understanding of the very same
Third, time steeped with the experience of past tense, of after. Of before.

Messengers weaving, leaping
through a convolution of time and minds.
The answers in tempo adagio.