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The blade of the knife should face the plate. This is something my grandmother, my Emily Post, told me many times as we set the table for a Thanksgiving meal.
For all the years of my childhood and most of my young adulthood, setting the table has been our mutual Thanksgiving job. Thanksgiving is the one meal of the year for which we take out the good silver, my great-grandmother’s silver, from its hiding place under the spare bed. My grandmother used to polish that silver until she could see her face in the soup spoons (although we did not actually use the soup spoons), and then we would set the table together, 10 places or 12. My grandmother would follow after me and straighten the occasional wayward utensil.
This year, I do the straightening. My grandmother’s hands aren’t as steady as they used to be. When I find a knife with the blade facing out, I know my grandmother has finally gotten old.
This isn’t really news. Her short-term memory has been fading gradually for years; at a few months shy of 93, it now seems pretty much shot to hell. She repeats the same questions three times in the span of a five-minute conversation; where I live (London), when she saw me last (August), what my mother is doing upstairs (peeing, I think)—we go round and round. My grandmother, reader of mystery novels and doer of crosswords, purveyor of family history, can no longer follow a dinner conversation without getting a muddled look on her face.
Her long-term memory has fared better. Just when I think she doesn’t remember anything, this, in conversation with my aunt and uncle, who are vacationing in Rome:
“When are you coming home?” Gram asks.
“December 7.”
“Ohhh.” She turns to me with a pinched face. “I don’t like that at all.”
“Why?” I wrack my mental history bank. “Pearl Harbor?” I ask.
Grandma nods solemnly.
We say goodbye to my aunt and uncle, and then, for the fifth time in 20 minutes: “Where’s your mother?”
My grandmother doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, nor any other kind of dementia that we know of. She’s just old. She’s never had cancer or heart disease or a stroke; she’s got what she describes as her “bum knee,” high blood pressure, and a sensitive stomach. Not bad for 92 and three-quarters.
She also still insists on living by herself, to our perpetual frustration and worry. As much as I wish she would give in just a little, I suspect this lifelong independence (and stubbornness) has allowed her to get to this age in such relatively good condition. My grandmother raised three children on her own after my grandfather left her and never dated again. My mother once commented that she hoped Gram had a decent vibrator in her hey-day. She might have: My grandmother worked for Planned Parenthood and fought quietly for women’s reproductive rights long before they were fashionable or legal; she’s never been prudish about sexuality.
But now that she sometimes forgets her pills and is shaky on solid ground, let alone the icy sidewalks of winter in Rochester, we’ve all been pressing her to move to closer to her children. If only she lived just around the corner, rather than seven hours down the turnpike—we’d all feel a bit more secure.
We would, but perhaps not Grandma. She may not remember the conversation of the past five minutes, but that her children and grandchildren continually nudge her to move from her apartment of the last 50-odd years, an apartment overrun with old pictures, with a desk still bearing my mother’s elementary school pencil holder: This she remembers. And she’s not giving an inch.
One day, my father sensed an opening. She commented how helpful he was as he got something out of the fridge, or went downstairs to iron the tablecloth. He mentioned that maybe she’d like to be down the street, so she could reap the benefits of his helpfulness more often. She conceded that yes, that would be nice.
The next day, my father brought up this conversation.
“What?” Gram said, an incredulous look on her face. “I never said that.”
It feels to me, on the plane over from Heathrow, that I am really coming home to set the table with Grandma. As much as I love my mother’s turkey, I will be with my family again in three weeks for Christmas, and the flight from London is neither very short nor very cheap.
But my grandmother doesn’t spend Christmas with us. It’s too much traveling, she says, after Thanksgiving—and anyway, she’s a Jew. She prefers to spend the day in her robe, eating the candy we send. So if I miss Thanksgiving, I miss Grandma; I miss setting the table with her. For a decade she’s been warning us that she might not be around next year. At some point, she’ll be right.
It would put us, her family, all at ease if she would spend the last years of her life closer to us. We think she’d be happier in Massachusetts, with more to do, more people to talk to.
But of course, the woman isn’t senile. She’s almost 93; she struggles to remember what she’s doing with the onion she’s in the middle of chopping for the stuffing, but she remembers the important things, and she knows what she wants. I suppose—though it pains me to admit it, should her safety be compromised—that having gotten this far, she probably deserves to live the rest of her life exactly how and where she wants.
She plunks the silver down on the table, slightly askew, and I adjust it when she looks away. Turning back, my grandmother admires our handiwork and reminds me that the blade should face the plate.
Photograph of family by Comstock/Getty Images.
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Milan Kundera wrote that happiness is the longing for repetition, and there’s nothing more repetitive that brings more happiness than holiday traditions. For me, each year my parents would take both me and my sister to a small farm in upstate New York where Dad would somehow expertly wield a handsaw and chop down our tree. We would decorate it with colored lights and bright gold garlands because Mom (who loved Christmas more than anyone) appreciated the childhood whimsy it provoked. On Christmas Eve, we would dress up in our holiday best to attend church, and then come home to prepare the sugar cookies we’d made (slightly burnt and smothered with red and green sprinkles) for Santa’s highly anticipated arrival.
However, what I remember most of all is that every Christmas Eve the four of us would sit on the couch in our pajamas by the light of our multicolored tree and watch the 1983 recording of the Boston Pops holiday concert.
Dad, always the man to videotape just about everything, had randomly recorded the broadcast on WGBH from the year of my birth. Ever since, we watched the recording with John Williams as he led the Pops through the typical holiday favorites. At one point the audience (and we) would join in on a sing-a-long and Lorne Greene would read 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. At the end, Santa Claus (who my sister and I always insisted was the real Santa) would come through the back doors of Symphony Hall and give out candy canes on his way up to the podium, before brandishing at Maestro Williams a miniature E.T. (the film had just come out) in black tie holding a conductors baton.
Every year it was the same. The same performance with audience members whose clothes and hairstyles began to look more and more dated as the years progressed.
This was our repetition. This was our happiness.
As fate would have it, I ended up going to college at Northeastern, right down the street from Symphony Hall. When each season’s concert schedule was announced my parents would suggest we get tickets to see the real thing. But every year we didn’t get around to it, always saying, “We’ll do it next year.”
By the time I graduated in 2005, my sister and I began to feel too old to be bothered with sitting on the couch through yet another predictable performance. We muttered that singing along was lame, while busy texting friends. We watched distractedly for only a few minutes until our frustrated parents gave up and turned it off.
The following year, when we yet again went to put in the tape, we realized with horror that it had somehow been accidently taped over. All that was left now was a blank screen staring back at us. That would be our last Christmas together as a whole family, for a few months later Mom died in a car accident.
Just like that, everything was gone.
As the next holiday season approached, we dreaded what the day would bring without her. I couldn’t help but think about all the chances we’d had to go to the performance live, something I know would have made her happy. Why had we waited so long? And, more importantly, why had it stopped meaning something to me?
Feeling overwhelmed by everything I’d lost, I felt compelled to try to reclaim something. I searched online, made calls, and e-mailed the site contact at Symphony Hall detailing my situation. Finally, just five days before Christmas, a woman in the offices on Massachusetts Avenue wrote me back.
She apologized for the delay and told me they had several strict musician union rules preventing them from sharing archival copies of their performances. However, my letter touched all of the people involved, and everyone there wanted me to have a copy of the concert. They were so touched that the Holiday Pops meant as much to others as it did to them that all I had to do was sign a letter of agreement and she would overnight me the tape.
It arrived just in time. On Christmas Eve, in the quiet sadness of our living room (there would be no tree, there would be no cookies), I told my dad and sister that I had a surprise. I watched as their confused faces turned to shock, and then came great heaves of tears as the familiar sounds and images on the television showed us the one thing we had taken for granted the most—time.
Every year it’s the same. Every year we buy presents and spend too much money and lose our minds while losing sight of what really matters. We grow up and grow bitter and let ourselves forget that at the end of the day we’re all packing and traveling and gift-giving because of the people in our lives that we love. We’re driven by the hopeful idea that something small, like an old recording of a concert, can bring a family together. We say “as soon as,” and “next time,” and “maybe next year,” when we know we shouldn’t be wasting another minute. We stop believing—in people and the innocence of youth—and become accustomed to coming home to certain things that once are gone leave holes in our hearts nothing can ever repair.
They say you can’t go home again, but we all keep going home every year to a place that constantly changes, a place that means different things to each of us in different parts of our lives. There is a lot we can’t control, but it is those repetitive things that we cling to that mean so much more than we oftentimes allow ourselves to admit.
The holidays and my life will never be the same without my mother. However, now that I can’t have her here in the present I can at least have the tape as a reminder of her and the way things once were. That way, during this season of expectation and hope I can believe, for a little while anyway, that not everything has to become lost.
Photograph of family by Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images.
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Anyone who is figuring out which New Year's resolution to adopt should take heart from today's piece by Dr. Maria Johnson. If you yearn to do something more ambitious than losing 10 pounds or stop biting your nails, how about taking up a musical instrument? Dr. Johnson recently swapped the mysteries of God for the mystery of guitar chords and found it enriching, rewarding—even uplifting.
I have told myself for years that, come my next sabbatical from teaching college theology, I was going to learn guitar. I don’t know why I would tell myself something so patently untrue; I didn’t even pretend to believe myself. I had plinked my way miserably through a lonely decade of youthful piano lessons without stumbling across the merest sliver of musical talent and besides, guitars are for cool young people, and I’m neither. The entire idea was absurd and nobody is more surprised than I that now, less than halfway through the sabbatical, I own a guitar, know 12 chords, and can play more than 20 songs, a couple of them almost decently.
It began with Robby and Paul, who met among the group of students that meets at our house on Thursday nights to watch movies. They discovered they shared a taste for folk music. For reasons I don’t fully understand, they decided to take up residence here; they started appearing on the doorstep several night a week with their instruments. Other musicians soon congregated around them, and before our eyes, our rather staid movie group mutated into a gang of rough-edged chain-smoking hipsters with guitars and banjos and harmonicas and even a washboard, who would hold late-night backyard bonfire jam sessions three or four nights a week.
This was fine with us—our general policy is to keep the doors open and welcome whatever shows up. But for me, the turning point came when Robby and Paul appeared one evening and announced, “We’ve bought you a guitar—what’s with not having a guitar?” It instantly became one of my favorite things. It is not a high-end instrument: It is banged up and has a patch of duct-tape on it, and cost $25 in a pawn shop. This suits me perfectly: I’m not very good about taking care of objects, and am much happier around those that don’t demand tender solicitude. My guitar has been around the block a few times, and isn’t going to balk or whimper at being left on the porch or experimented on by my children. We deserve each other.
So, I had the guitar that I would never have got around to buying for myself. The next thing that I wouldn’t have got around to was learning to play. Again, Robby and Paul took the problem out of my hands; “Right, you need three chords to get started. This is G, and this is C—no, look, this way—and this is D. That’ll do you for most things.” This, apparently, is how it works for guitar. If you want to learn viola or bassoon you find a teacher and book lessons. If you want to learn guitar, the rule is that you find a teenager and ask him to teach you a chord—a rule that seemingly applies even to theologians in their 40s.
Initially it was baffling and downright painful—you have to push metal wires up against bars, hard, with fingers accustomed to computer keyboards. And you have to bend your fingers into odd configurations, and then into others, really quickly, while meanwhile, your right hand is doing something totally different that looks easier but actually isn’t; all in all, it’s a quite a lot for a middle-aged brain to take in at once. I’m no good at all, and never expect to be. But my fingers have callouses, and my middle-aged brain, tired of puttering around the same tiny patch of scholarship for years, has been surprisingly cooperative about trying something new. After four decades of gloomy acceptance that I am utterly unmusical, discovering that I could actually get through a whole song was slightly less surprising and exhilarating than suddenly discovering that I could fly.
The best moment of the summer was when I inserted myself into the group around the bonfire. Even five years ago I would probably have been deterred by the inherent foolishness of my dorky, soccer-mom self flailing helplessly half a measure behind a gang of hipsters half my age, singing songs about young love and hitchhiking and cocaine; I was delighted to discover I care not a whit.
I have even been an inspiration to others. The impressively nerdy Pat started out watching us from the shadows. Then one day he requested his favorite song, then eventually joined in, and finally astonished the assembled company by singing it, all by himself, all the way through, in front of all the real musicians. It was pretty bad, but he did it. Emboldened, he bought himself a guitar, I passed on the mysteries of G, C, and D, and we spent many a happy hour ploughing our tuneless way through "Hey Mr Tambourine Man."
All good things come to an end. The weather turned cold and wet, Robby and Paul acquired girlfriends, Pat moved away to grad school, and the Thursday night movie group morphed back into a group that meets on Thursday nights to watch movies. I haven’t abandoned my guitar (current project, "It Ain’t Me Babe") but it’s less fun by myself, and anyway, one doesn’t get sabbaticals for learning to butcher Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen.
But they can’t take my 12 chords from me. Nor can they take the discovery that there is infinite, innocent fun to be had when one no longer cares whether one looks like a big dork. I’ve hustled my way shamelessly into an onstage role as a parent in my daughters’ ballet school’s Nutcracker, and have been spending Sunday afternoons at the studio, dahling, surrounded by lithe 12-year-olds in leotards, happily miming cocktail conversation with a cluster of air-kissy grown-ups. I think I’m having even more fun than my kids. In a couple of weeks I’ll don a outlandish dress to do it all in front of an audience in a real theater. Robby and Paul, benignly curious about the monster they have helped to create, are coming to watch.
Dr. Maria Poggi Johnson is the Director of the Graduate Program in Theology at the University of Scranton.
Photograph of woman with guitar by Digital Vision/Getty Images
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The first of our pieces about marriage counseling comes from J., who sent in the following about why she and her husband went to seek help.
It was 1986. We'd been married seven years (yeah yeah, what a cliché—the Seven Year Itch) and had two small children. My husband is a professional musician and has always traveled for a living. Back then he was playing lead alto for Frank Sinatra, flying first class all over the world, staying in fabulous hotels, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, living the high life. Meanwhile, I was home, alone with our daughter and son, 1,000 miles away from my own family. We lived close to my in-laws, but they had a very active social/work life, and didn't have time for much baby-sitting. I had grown increasingly resentful, disenchanted with my marriage. Mike came home from weeks on the road, exhausted, ready to catch up on his sleep, have home-cooked meals. I longed to have him step in and share child-rearing responsibilities and take me out to dinner. No such luck. The watershed moment I remember is when, in the middle of us having words, I said, “Listen, pal, when you come home, you're HOME. This isn't your celebrity life—the limos, hotels, fancy dinners. You carry out the garbage, help with the kids, be a partner to me—this is your REAL life.” And Mike said, “How do you know? Maybe that other life—the limos and glamour and celebrity—maybe THAT'S my real life.”
He couldn't understand that his being happy and successful wasn't enough for me, that I had desires and dreams of my own, a career of my own, which had been put on hold so that he could have the life he wanted while I assumed all responsibility for our home and family.
I was devastated, and my feelings of aloneness and my anger were overwhelming. I ignited a relationship with someone who was a friend to both me and my husband. It was an intensely emotional affair—he was a sweet, available, quiet, and domestic man. He wanted me to leave my husband and marry him. He was ready to take on my children, too.
When my husband found out, he was completely freaked out. After years of me asking him to go to counseling and him saying, “What for? I'm perfectly happy with things the way they are,” things changed. He begged me to go to counseling with him, even went so far as to find a therapist and make an appointment. And we went.
He, of course, felt that he had the upper hand—the moral high ground—because I'd betrayed the marriage by having an affair. I really didn't know what to expect from our therapy; frankly, I didn't care. I was already emotionally checking out of the relationship. The going rate for therapy back then was $70 an hour, about half what it is now. At our first session, when Margaret asked us to talk about our issues, my husband immediately talked about how I'd betrayed him and our marriage, while he'd been out on the road, always faithful, focused only on his career. And then she asked me how I perceived our marriage. Out poured all my heartache and loneliness, my terrible unhappiness. I talked about my deferred dreams, what it was like to be alone, how angry I'd been for so long.
And Margaret looked at my husband and said, “What an ass. Of course she had an affair. She had to get something from someone. She should have left your sorry ass.”
My husband's jaw dropped. He expected to hear that I was the bad guy, and that's not what our therapist saw or told him.
Long story short, this woman kept our marriage together, helped us to remember how we'd adored each other as newlyweds. She made us recognize that we had a good foundation for marriage—physical attraction, two children, a basic appreciation of each other. My husband made huge changes, his eyes opened up to what it was like to be the one left behind while the other flew. It didn't change the nature of his job, but he came home a different man.
We've now been married for 30 years, solidly, happily. We have, in our own estimation, a very successful, close relationship. I believe our therapy made all the difference in the world. We both got words of real empathy and wisdom when we needed it. So when people say that affairs saved their marriages—it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. Sometimes a big catalyst is necessary to move a relationship forward.
J. is a writer and musician in Chicago
Photograph of couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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As Hanna has already pointed out, this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine deals with the issue of marriage counseling (and marriage in general). The author, Elizabeth Weil, decided that although her marriage was fine, it could be better. She thought she and her husband should pay their marriage the same kind of attention they paid their careers, their kids, their health, and their friendships. “I decided to apply myself to my marriage," Weil writes, "to work at improving ours now, while it felt strong.”
The way she did this, she tells us, was by working her way through the books and the assessment tests into the therapist’s office. Off the couple went to a “reed-thin psychoanalyst” who was given to pronouncements like, “On the first count, you find Dan unavailable because he’s not relating to you. He’s just using you as a sounding board. But on the other hand he feels he can’t reach you either. He wants you to accept his affection and praise, but those attentions make you feel smothered, and that makes him feel alone.”
It’s hard to tell at the end of the piece what Weil and her husband gained from their efforts. It’s impossible to know what goes on inside anyone else’s marriage at any time or why two people choose to marry in the first place. Yet while her story isn’t as riveting as some of the better episodes of In Treatment or Tell Me You Love Me, it piqued my interest because I’d like to know how many of you have tried marriage or couples counseling in any form. Did you go—like Weil—to strengthen an already strong union? Or did a crisis force you to seek help? How did you agree on this course of action? What form did your sessions take? How much did they cost? And the most important question of all, what did you gain from going?
Send me your stories at emma@thecomebackbook.com and I’ll run them.
Photograph of unhappy couple by Getty Creative Images.
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One thing I wish I could bring home from Italy but cannot: the gonging of church bells. Here in Perugia, they mark the quarter hour with a primeval sound intended long ago for people who couldn’t read, people who had no access to clocks, serfs who needed to get up in the morning and pray. Now the bells serve a different purpose: I do need to get up and make breakfast for recalcitrant schoolchildren, go to work, return home, check e-mail, make dinner. I don’t need these bells to tell me the hour—I have a BlackBerry, a cellphone, and watch—but they clang out a larger, deeper measure of time, the mortal one.
We are culturally Christian, atheist Americans in Italy. We celebrate Christmas with a tree. The most church time our children had before Italy was once when I had the quaint fantasy of exposing my toddler son to a country church in upstate New York, pushed his stroller through the wooden doors only to spy stacks of anti-abortion leaflets, and backed quietly out. We all went together one Sunday to St. John the Divine in Manhattan, on the day when they bless the animals and dogs and camels walk down the aisle. They were too bored to sit through the sermon, so we went outside and petted the reindeer.
Since we’ve been in Italy, though, we’ve entered dozens of beautiful churches together, from Rome to Bari. Besides the endless walls of Renaissance art, the virgins suckling babes, the hanging statues of bleeding Christ, we’ve seen the macabre stacked skulls of Otranto, the shriveled but well-dressed 11th century corpse of St. Ubaldo in his glass coffin in Gubbio, the reliquary of St. Nicholas (yes, that’s Santa Claus to us) in Bari. We’ve watched men, women, and children enter, make the sign of the cross, and kneel, while we, atheist tourists and never more outsider than when in these places of worship, wander around the margins of their sacred ceremony, agog at the paintings, at the mind-boggling beauty of the jewel-box ceilings.
The quotidian bells are but one way in which religion—in the material form of churches—has regulated life in Italy for so many centuries. For us these churches are museums; for the Italians, something else entirely. And the harder I try to understand what that something else is, the more baffled I am.
Does the church, for example, exert some kind of moral sway? Not really.
At school, the Italian fifth graders say “Oh mio dio” and “Madonna!” as mild oaths. They have all been confirmed in the Catholic Church but they also swear and fight a lot, so all that regular churching hasn’t made them any less like our kids in that sense.
In the hours between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., all the shops shut down. People go home for lunch, and, I am reliably told, many of them are using that free time to have sex with their lovers. Their “nooners" last for hours. Italy is home of the slow-sex movement.
Furthermore, the nation’s very Catholic leaders are lascivious old men, openly consorting with boobalicious babes not their wives, even prostitutes (Berlusconi), and acknowledging relationships with transvestites (Google the governor of the province of Rome). No one seems to mind.
Does the church provide comfort to the aged, to those who have lost loved ones?
Perhaps. Whenever we enter one of them, we see the occasional older man or woman, sitting alone, or on knees, head down in prayer. But they never seem crowded.
Religion exerts an undeniable pull, though.
Our children are fascinated by the votive candle tables. They always beg us for a euro to drop in and light one, after which they, too, have acquired the habit of kneeling at the bar and putting their hands up, praying to a divine being whose existence we have never acknowledged in our household.
At the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, they watched other children and parents lining up to be blessed by an actual priest in a brown wooden box, and they wanted to do that. I gave them two euro coins and they joined the line, only to be sent away with a mere nod, rather then having their hands actually held. A small sign at the window indicated the blessing required a $10 euro donation.
We went to Mass on a Sunday morning at San Pietro Church here in Perugia, a stunning, gloomily lit antique with black marble pillars, walls are decorated with dark Renaissance paintings depicting Biblical scenes we will never understand without a guidebook. I made the children sit quietly through the entire service, from the hymns to the Italian sermon. When the worshippers lined up to receive the eucharist at the end, my son Felix wanted to see what they were doing. I told him to get in line.
We lost sight of his low head in the line of adults moving toward the altar. After an unusually long time, I began to panic. I got up and crept to the side, from where I saw him behind one of the great pillars, being talked to by a man in black. I waved, and the officiant relinquished our chastened child, who returned to report that something he had done—probably taking the host and then taking it out of his mouth—had caused alarm. “He asked me if it was my first time, and I said yes, and he told me not to tell anyone,” he said.
I left the Mass in a state of mortal embarrassment rather than grace. By letting Felix enter the line uninstructed, I had displayed the heedlessness many Italians associate with Americans. I have since come to understand that since our son never made a First Communion, we may be technically guilty of host desecration, a charge commonly hurled at Jews and witches in the Middle Ages. I assume that since he is a child, he is forgiven.
I, on the other hand, am another story.
We have since returned to San Pietro’s grounds, because the Benedictine monks operate a medieval garden behind it, but Felix gives the actual church door a wide berth. He is always worried that he will run into “that man in the cassock.”
Thus, perhaps the first and greatest religious mystery of all, fear of the man in the black cassock, has been revealed to us.
Photograph of the Duomo in Milan, Italy by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.
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