honeymoon

This past month we went on a honeymoon. It wasn’t the first time (that happened over 40 years ago) and it’s not going to be the last because from now on we’re going to go on a honeymoon at least twice a year. And why not? It seems to me that honeymoons are far too important to be wasted on newlyweds who have yet to catch on to what’s really involved in being married – let alone why it’s so important to do everything possible to stay that way. And honeymoons can help. That’s because the whole idea of a honeymoon is to give husbands and wives a chance to get away for a little while and spend their time paying attention to each other….paying lots of attention to each other. Unfortunately that’s something that married people often stop doing after a while. Years ago (when I was a much younger married woman) I began watching older married couples in restaurants. You could generally spot them by how bored they looked. They seemed completely disinterested in the other person…as if they had nothing at all to say to one another. And I used to wonder if being married a long time meant that eventually people simply run out of things to talk about. I hoped not. I hoped that I would never end up sitting across from Denny in a restaurant – or any other place - with a bored look on my face because there was nothing else going on between us that was worth talking about. But 40 years of being married has taught me a thing or two about how easy it can be for life to get in the way of the things that matter the most. Unless we're careful. And now that we've both been retired for a while it's clear we need to be real careful. I think honeymoons are one way to do that. So we spent a couple of days hidden away in a secluded cabin nestled in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin -- only 60 miles away from home! And we're going to do it again, because in addition to being every bit as romantic as our first honeymoon, this time we found that because we know each other so much better than we did before it was even nicer being alone together!

Dishcloths (Trisha)

For the past week I have been trying to break down the steps that are involved in wringing out a dishcloth the way my Grandma taught me to do it. I only have a few more days to come up with a description of what’s involved if I’m going to make the Sept. 1 deadline for participating in a project I heard about recently in honor of the special relationship between President Obama and his grandmother. The idea is for Americans of all ages to submit personal reflections, poems, photographs, memories, etc, about their grandmas to be included in a special book to be presented to the president later this year. Never mind that he won’t have time to read it. I still think it’s a lovely idea. (http://www.peaceabbey.org/confcenter/grandmother_love.htm)

Which brings me around to what’s involved in wringing out a dishcloth. It’s because it reminds me of my Grandma. We used to do the dishes together every night after teatime. Teatime was a nightly ritual during my summer vacations at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Grandma would put the black tea kettle on the stove and get out the teacups and saucers. It was my job to spread the tablecloth on the dinette table and set each of our places with silverware and paper napkins. Next came the cream pitcher, sugar bowl, and dessert plates - because “tea” wasn’t just something we drank. Like every other woman who had lived all her life in the small German community where she had grown up, Grandma was an excellent baker and she always made sure she had something on hand to serve whoever happened to stop by for a visit. If no one stopped by, so much the better as far as I was concerned because it meant there would be more for us at teatime. In addition to sandwiches made with dried beef from the butchers shop and served between thick slices of bread that had been liberally slathered with real butter, there was always a platter of homemade cookies along with generous slices of whatever pie, cake or bar happened to be in the cupboard that day. As soon as the kettle whistled, Grandma poured the boiling water into the teapot where the loose tea waited in its little ball to steep. Once everything was ready and Grandma had poured the tea, she’d call Grandpa to come in join us. We’d bow our heads and listen while he said grace in his gentle way, “come Lord Jesus be our guest and may this food to us be blessed.” (His soft German brogue always turned Jesus into Yeesus.) But it was the washing up afterwards that got me going on this particular trek down memory lane. One night, after Grandpa had gone upstairs to bed, Grandma and I were at the kitchen sink tidying up the tea things. I was washing and Grandma was drying (usually it was the other way around) and at one point, after I had squished the soapy dishcloth together the way I always did at home, Grandma put down her tea towel, looked at me and said “Oh my dear, let me show you how to wring out a dish cloth!” It had never occurred to me that there was actually a technique one had to learn in order to wring out a dishcloth. But apparently there was and Grandma was shocked that I had never learned about it. Taking the soggy dishcloth from my hands, Grandma demonstrated the procedure I have been using every since. But like so many other ordinary little things we do each day that become second nature to us (try writing out the directions for how to tie a shoelace, or brush your teeth!), grandma’s technique for wringing out a dishcloth is so simple that I can’t figure out how to write out directions for doing it. It has something to do with folding a sopping wet dishcloth in half, grasping one side firmly with the right hand and reaching over to grab the other half with the left hand. Then you squeeze tightly, while rotating the right hand forward and the left hand backward. Obviously it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Which is a good thing because otherwise I’m sure I would have quickly reverted to my earlier, much sloppier, approach to dishcloths and never given another thought to what she showed me that night. As it turns out, I have been following Grandma’s procedure ever since she taught it to me. And the best thing about it is that every time I do the dishes I think of her.

Recipe Box (Trisha)

Stuck on the top of one of our kitchen cupboard shelves is an old discolored box that’s been there for years, accumulating an odd assortment of rarely used recipes. It’s just an ordinary hard plastic recipe box and I have often thought about pitching it because for one thing I don’t cook. So why on earth am I keeping all those handwritten note cards – some of them so faded with age that I could barely read them even if I did cook! But I can’t bring myself to toss into the trash that beat up old box with its smudge prints left behind by the sticky fingers of whichever grandma it was who used it so regularly before she died. Denny and I simply can’t remember if we acquired the box from his side of the family or from mine, and it’s ended up turning into a kind of family culinary archive containing the likes of Grandma Maude’s recipe for trinkle cake, Aunt Marie’s porcupine meatballs, Grandma Miller’s Sugar cookies, Denny’s mom’s Cherry Pink salad and even my own mother’s Hungry Boy Casserole- a recipe I remember asking her to give me when my two sons were little boys even though I don’t recall ever using it. To be honest, I’ve never used the majority of the other recipes in that box either, including all those I clipped out of magazines in the early days of my marriage (back when I aspired to being a happy little Suzy Homemaker). But from time to time I get them all out and go through them one by one, carefully replacing them behind their dog-eared cardboard index tabs to make sure that the cookie recipes don’t get lost amidst the salads, the casseroles don’t mingle with the beverages, and so forth. Why bother? Why not just ditch the whole kit and caboodle and open up a little more cupboard space? It’s because stuck at the very back – which is where I inevitably end up putting it – is a tattered piece of brittle newspaper, yellowed with age and practically falling apart from being unfolded and refolded so many times. It’s a clipping from a newspaper with recipes for how to cook wild game – pan fried rabbit, squirrel, pheasant, wild goose. It’s from my Grandpa Ray who had numbered the recipes and asked Grandma to enclose them in one of her letters to me. I don’t remember that Grandpa ever sent me a letter and I don’t have a single piece of paper with his handwriting on it – except for those numbers he’d printed on that faded print of newsprint. It probably goes without saying that not once in my life have I ever cooked a rabbit, squirrel, pheasant or wild goose. But I cannot imagine getting rid of those recipes because it would be like letting go of my Grandpa all over again. Though he’s been dead now for nearly 40 years, I’ve still got that fragile piece of newsprint that opens up so many memories of him every time I unfold it. I guess that’s why I can’t get rid of the plastic recipe box either. It’s too full of links to other people I can’t let go of.

Some thoughts on genealogy (Denny)...

A number of years ago, I renewed my interest in genealogy. What sparked that interest was discovering my grandmother's bible in which she had written the names of her ancestors stretching back to the time when they lived in New York. Some of those people had lived through the Revolutionary War. Only a very little research led to a whole "fan" of relatives reaching back into the early days of this country--in two cases, reaching right back to the May Flower. It was great fun--something akin to being a detective confronted with an ever expanding mystery, lots and lots of clues, and, if persistent, solutions.

My mother re-married after my father was killed in World War II. That meant that, unlike my childhood friends, I had three sets of grandparents. And because my step-father had been my father's first cousin, this meant that I had five grandparents, rather than the normal four, to trace.

T. S. Eliot noted that "What we know of other people/ Is only our memory of the moments/ During which we knew them" (from the Cocktail Party). When I was a child, I had a sense of being a member of a rather large set of people, the family, and that among these people there was a feeling of natural camaraderie, ease, and good humor. Unlike the strangers who came into my life, I experienced relatives (even the ones I had never met) as diverse, sometimes quirky, but basically good people who knew who I was (without me having to explain the multiple relational paths I had to most of them) and who accepted me into their circle with nary a question. However, I never met any of my relatives as strangers--that is, unlike meeting the father of my friend who was an adult and a person I had never met before, meeting relatives for the first time did not entail any shyness or uncertainty or even any period of "getting to know" one another. The reason was because I was a child. Had I been unable to meet my relatives until I had become an adult, my reaction to them would have been much different. Whereas the distant strictness of my step-grandfather would have been off-putting as an adult, as a child I simply accepted him as still another mysterious manifestation of that set of people called relatives.

My mother's father died when I was quite young. I do not have a great number of memories of him, nor did I as a child spend a lot of time in his company. I remember him laughing a lot (he was a great practical joker), being gone a lot (he and my grandmother traveled the country extensively hauling their trailer behind them), and being "an old man." My mother once sent me uptown with a message for him. I found him in the "card room" on the south side of the square. It was a smoky place with a wooden floor and a number of tables with "old men playing at cards with a twinkling of ancient hands" (Yeats). Whatever the message was, he laughed out loud, made a comment to his card partners (who also laughed) and told me to pick up a candy bar on my way out (which he would pay for).

My step-father's father was a stern and a strict man who loved to sit in his easy chair (I dared not sit in it when he was around) with his family arrayed before him and telling stories. My aunts and uncles would good-humoredly prod him into telling the same stories over and over which, at each telling, became more and more detailed and complex. And at Christmas, there was always the "extra" party (without grandpa) where the aunts and uncles would have a drink and would give each other bottles of whiskey as presents.

But the grandfather I knew best was my father's father. Perhaps because he had been killed in the war, my grandfather was especially attentive to me and allowed me to spend hours and hours with him, tagging after him while he did the chores out on the farm, teaching me to collect the eggs from the hens that pecked painfully at my hands, protecting me against an old sow with a 2 x 4 as we walked across the lot, giving me a tin cup of water from the tank below the wind mill, showing me the hay mow where I could go to play if I wanted, and letting me fire that old two-barreled shotgun that had been his father's.

Herwig Arts, a Jesuit theologian, once said language is an "attempt to encapsulate the 'not yet' of the future and the 'no more' of the past" (Faith and Unbelief, p. 120). And perhaps that is what genealogy is: an attempt to capture the "no more", especially when confronted with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the "not yet." However, it must always be tempered with the realization that the memories I have were those that I made when a child and when living in a safe environment with a group of people who I knew (by instinct) were integrally a part of me and I a part of them. As Eliot says (to continue the quotation from above), "And they have changed since then./ To pretend that they and we are the same/ Is a useful and convenient social convention/ Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember/ That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Genealogy is like that. The further back into history we go, the less we know of people. True, we have "the facts" like birth dates, marriage dates, death dates, dates of children's births. But we do not have the intimate connection with those strangers in the dusk that we did with the family we knew. And so genealogy is a two-tiered process. The first is that of historian--the dates and events that one can find documented in the record. The second is that of family member--the memories of real people at times in my life, or the stories of other family members of times in their lives. Is it any surprise to find that the latter is always of more interest than the former?

A Garden Story (Trisha)

When we moved into our home in 1990, the house next to us had yet to be built. There was nothing there except an empty lot. But there was a beautiful garden on ours – or at least we thought it was on our lot. The people from whom we bought our house were a little hazy about where exactly the lot line was located but they assured us that if any of the garden had spilled over onto the other lot, it couldn’t have been more than a few inches. So I happily tended to the garden, adding new plants from time to time, carefully keeping the weeds in check, enjoying the fun of watching beautiful things grow and bloom.

When the lot was sold and the new house was built, we explained to the first owners about the garden and they could see no reason not to keep it that way – especially since from their new house they had a better view of it than we did. When they moved away and the second family moved in we went through the same explanation and received the same response. No problem, they said, the garden is gorgeous, why would we want you to move it? Which brings me to the present owners.

Shortly after they moved in, we repeated the story about how part of our garden had ended up on their property and asked them if it would be a problem. Oh no, not at all was their reply. But that was last fall when they moved in. In the meantime something must have happened to change their minds. Because by the spring it suddenly had become a problem. A very big problem. The first hint came when we looked out the window and noticed our neighbor was having his property surveyed to establish the exact location of the lot line. And as it turned out, there were more than just a few inches of our garden on his property. Almost half of it was. We had been misinformed 20 years ago when we bought our home. And our new neighbor was of the opinion that we had deliberately misinformed him when he bought his. Overnight he became belligerent and confrontational, accusing us of deliberately misleading him, letting us know that we were guilty of trespassing and he wasn’t going to stand for it. In fact he was giving us one week to move our garden to a new spot. At the end of that week, he would personally dig out by the roots and destroy anything that remained on his property.

One week to contact a landscaper who could help us prepare another spot on our property to use for a new garden. One week to carefully transplant the many shrubs and perennials I had nurtured over the years. Meanwhile our neighbor had pounded metal boundary markers along the property line and strung a long length of bright orange cord between them, lest anyone be in doubt about which side belonged to whom.



Now it must be mentioned that we are not the kind of people who immediately shout “Sue the bastard” when something like this comes up. Nonetheless I have to admit that we did contact a lawyer and were told that if we chose to fight, most likely we would win. But by the time we considered the cost of legal fees and the tremendous amount of negative energy that would be spent in the process it just didn’t seem worth it. Far better to spend the money on something positive – like a brand new garden and so that’s what we did. Our not-so-nice neighbor calmed down a bit when we informed him that we had contracted a landscaper who was willing to begin work immediately. And so to make a long story short, within a month the old garden was gone and our back yard had been transformed. We planted a row of arbor vitae just inside the property line leaving no doubt about which side is ours, and creating a sense of privacy (since our neighbor has turned out to be someone from whom we prefer to keep our distance.) Thanks to the landscaper the ground has been shaped and contoured so that the garden no longer is confined to a flat and rather boring rectangular area. Instead it curves and climbs and meanders along almost the whole length of our back yard. It’s a good example of the fact that what often seems like a disaster at the time can turn out to be just the opposite. Or as Garrison Keillor once said “Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”

Why I go to monasteries (Trisha)

Busy, frazzled people sometimes go to monasteries to get away from the craziness of the world for a little while. It gives them a chance to pull out of the fast lane, and slow down so they can emerge feeling refreshed, rejuvenated and ready to face the rat race again. But I go for a different reason. It’s not to escape the burdens and pressures of life, but rather to look for insights into how to deal with them. It’s not to expect to be given the answers to questions that will probably always perplex and bewilder me, but rather to be touched and inspired by what happens when I ponder the immense moreness of life and what it means to live in a world filled with so many mysteries to ponder. A monastery isn’t a place to hide from reality. It’s where I go to find out more about it. And as far as I’m concerned the most important thing about going to a monastery is leaving it to go home again – because that’s where I’m can put into practice what the monastic tradition has to teach me about approaching life with reverence and authenticity.

I’ve spent years searching for something I can believe in about God. I haven’t found it in the churches I’ve attended or in what doctrines and dogmas insist I believe and do in order to be a person of faith. But the wisdom, insights and experiences that flow from Benedictine and Cistercian monasticism has had a profound impact on me. Monks and nuns don’t just talk about what they believe, they show us how to live as if it really matters. They’ve found that a rich interior life guides the way they live exteriorly and so they make it a practice to look closely at what’s going on around and inside them. They get to know the truth of who they really are - as opposed to who they might like to fool everyone else into thinking they are. So they’re comfortable being themselves – prepared to confront their demons, able to accept their imperfections as well as their strengths, mindful of the consequences of their actions and willing to work at trying to change behaviors that ought to be changed. They tend to be emotionally literate people who recognize that feelings are messages that tell us about ourselves.

The wisdom of their life is reflected in values and behaviors that are dramatically different from those of our culture. For one thing, monastic people recognize the importance of slowing down and paying attention to what their lived experiences can tell them instead of darting about on the surface of life. They pay attention to the clues their ordinary lives reveal about what’s sacred and they respond with gratitude and mindfulness. They pay attention to the dignity and worth of others and they respond with respect, compassion and love. They pay attention to the blessed gift of creation and they respond by using resources wisely and in moderation. They are good people living good lives. And they can teach us how to be good people so we can live good lives too, which is why I go to monasteries. It’s because I have so much to learn there.