FIELD NOTES: Terrifyingly beautiful...

A perfect 10 day...no one available...or awake!...so jumped in the car myself...went to my favorite nearby beach...Silver Sands State Park...80 degrees on sand/in surf...low tide...full sandbar out to Charles Island...treasure hunters on a Sunday afternoon...all before the opening of a new school year...teachers, coaches, grandparents surround me...a coconut-scented breeze swirls their memoirs and hopes around me...anniversary of strong woman names Katrina/Irene/Victoria(my mother's death)...the summer day I have been wanting?...and...the last?...or...full circle...

A Story of Thanksgiving for Christmas...or The 1st Thanksgiving:

Navigating new territory with no device on the dash...

             It is not until I come up to that familiar hill that the idea of it all strikes me; I am going to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving, as usual…but, there will be no parents there. I have an inkling that perhaps a professional colleague was right: maybe don’t go there…order a package deal from the grocery store…or go out? “Or hop a cruise ship and eat Spam?” I replied with tongue in cheek. But my youngest brother had suggested “the house” (which now legally belongs to my oldest brother) and so I took great pains for the day, trying to think of everything my mother would have thought of…and the men would not…and then some:

            I had started with what I knew best: pies. There was Mom’s “secret” piecrust recipe for my homemade mince that my oldest brother anticipates yearly, and my crumb-topped French apple and the pumpkin adorned with shiny hand-cut leaves. They turned out to be works of art this year – inspiration from heaven. The second thing I knew best: ambiance (my brothers told me it was all mine!). I inherited the family silver, but all the china remained at the house. Tablecloth? Centerpiece? Candles? Napkins? Condiments? Servers and potholders and pots and pans? A mixer, a masher, a gravy boat? My list was sounding like an old-fashioned nursery rhyme and I packed it all up like a Conestoga wagon with cloth carry bags and baskets and Rubbermaid containers.  Like moving up a company ladder - ready or not - I found my usually relaxed pace of a holiday morning transfigured and I would not know until I got there if I had packed too little…or too much…

            I arrive at the house; my brother says he spent the entire day yesterday vacuuming and dusting. The dining table is out; its brown table pads are lying naked like a patient waiting to be attended to. My tablecloths are too short for the table leaves - my brother doesn’t know where Mom’s tablecloths are – but like experienced stagehands, my elder son and I make scenery appear. I go to my mother’s kitchen, her cabinets still familiar to me even after all these years, albeit my brother has had the fortitude to throw out the burnt, the broken, and the hopelessly obsolete. I discover that somehow, as the only daughter of an only daughter, instincts and tradition suddenly kick in on automatic pilot. And without much compunction, I ease in some changes. I stand at my mother’s sink peeling organic yellow potatoes, smiling about how hers were lumpy and ordinary because they were too-much-work-why-else-would-they-have-figured-out-how-to-put-them-in-a-box? She also puzzled annually about how to keep food warm at the table, but eschewed my idea of purchasing warming dishes like she was going to come up with an easier way for an easier way without buying something new. As if to tease my critiquing, a little gray mouse motored across the floor but I chided him in return by informing him I used coupons to buy the warming dishes…so there!

            What’s more, I tell the mouse, I have been kindly ushered in by strangers to this new way of celebrating holidays. At Bed, Bath and Beyond, I had circled around the island display of serving dishes, electric and candle-powered, setting my sights on a white ceramic set that matched my French White Corning ware at home. They would be perfect – and practical enough for Mom – but the shelf was empty. A store worker came by and seemed only too glad to help. He searched around the stock shelves, wheeled two over and gave me the cart. My face must have lit up; I thanked him and he added cheerfully “It was my pleasure! I hope you enjoy your holiday!” which is what I expect store workers are trained to do, but he appeared much more sincere than that. Then, at the grocery store, as close to Thanksgiving as I dared, the path to the deli was gridlocked, an elderly woman was proceeding like a slow-moving vehicle in a passing lane because another pair of women were chatting obliviously on the shoulders; the man that had entered the store about the same time I did joined in this bumper car venue along with me. He edged his way to the number dispenser, pulled out a tag, turned around and handed it to me with a smile. I was taken aback, not by his action, but by the doubt that perhaps I had not appeared as outwardly phlegmatic as I had thought. With straightened shoulders, I put in my deli order expediently. Later, while looking over the squash, the man touched me on the shoulder and with his well-padded cheeks up to his eyebrows, said “You have a nice holiday now.” Two men, two different skin colors, neither one with mien that would turn a lady’s head, perhaps appearing like Clarence Oddbodies to remind me of something lost.

            At the end of the day, nothing important is lost. After a cooperative (if not disquieting) search it is my oldest son who triumphantly holds up the yellow gravy boat from where my mother had put it last. I remember to check the high cabinet in the stairwell for the tablecloths. And like new heirs we sit in our parents’ chairs: one brother in my father’s, I in my mother’s.  We say grace and most heartily thank our parents for being our parents. My grandmother would promise every year to do something in the next, God-willing, and with a collective, not-evolved-yet groan, we would push her crystallizing words away like a snowball down a hill, not cognizant that she was (in her very Polish way) molding a handle for us to take with natural grace. We start passing plates; I am here by inertia, like a vending product filling the empty slot up front.

            There is one more thing to do. The dishwasher conked out long ago, my parents believing a new one at that point in their lives unnecessary, and I ceremoniously wash the china and silverware in the sink, distracting my brother with small-talk. My mother shooed away would-be assistants, and I remember seeing her back as she faced the yellow-flowered wallpaper under the fluorescent light in an almost meditative glow. What did she think about?

            I am warm with satisfaction on the drive home. I think about doing a good thing for my brothers. I think about getting this first holiday “just right”. I think about my parents giving us the thumbs up.

            I can’t think any farther than that…

10 Minute Poem

Museum of Sorrows

(on being Polish)

Some show

hearts on sleeves,

unashamed

public displays,

everyone knows,

even those who don't

need

(or want)

to know:

but

not Polish.

Polish are like statues

- beautiful statues -

marble,

mute,

and statuesque,

that viewers want to touch

but can't

go

beyond

the velvet ropes,

the cordoned rooms,

the carefully crafted

chambers

in a long museum

of sorrows

end to end.

 Henryk Gorecki, Polish Composer

 

FIELD NOTES: I have been to another world...

THE EULOGY I COULD NOT DELIVER

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas

March 22, 1922-August 27, 2010

Donald Kucinskas

January 1, 1921-January 6, 2009

          I am not sure how a daughter actually delivers a eulogy about a mother, how her voice can hold still if her mind is actually aware of what her mouth is saying, how her eyes can remain a dam against the release of thoughts that are not yet fully translatable even to herself, and to be articulated intelligibly before a gathering of people who surely knew her mother in different ways, their vibrations filling the atmosphere around the speaker; it does not seem possible…or adequate. But I will write it now…at least some of it…

          In the folder from her 60^th High School Reunion, there are pages of “Fun Type Questionnaires for the Graduates of the Class of 1940”.  To the question “After you graduated were you doing what you always thought you would be doing the rest of your life?” my mother wrote: “Yes – being a wife, a mother and a grandmother.” She added a note to the bottom of the questionnaire: “I just want to thank God for all the blessings he’s bestowed upon our lives.”

          As children of immigrant parents in the Great Depression, she and my father were taught not to throw away anything that might be reincarnated into an alternative use or buy anything new unless something had truly worn out (read: disintegrated). She could sew, cook and nurture plants; he could wire, plumb and construct. Therefore, we children grew up not a house of “treats” but a house of resourcefulness, ingenuity, integrity and respect for stewardship. If my parents couldn’t repair something, it truly was broken…and you didn’t necessarily get another…

          My mother’s world was very small; she was proud of saying she lived in Terryville all her life in a great big triangle. She remembered moving from their first rent by walking down the street carrying her little celluloid duck under her arm. As she grew up at the second rent, she made a point of going out to the icebox in the hallway when she heard a certain young man coming down the stairs, a certain young man whose father owned the White Eagle Bakery and whom had delivered bread, for a time, by horse and cart. She was third in her class of thirty-six and was voted Best-Looking. She wanted to be a nurse, and volunteered as a Candy-Striper at the Bristol Hospital, but on her mother’s insistence, she became a secretary and found a place at the Phoenix Insurance Company because it was handy to ride the trolley into Hartford. There she made more life-long friendships with a group of women who called themselves the Gabby Girls until, one day, she said yes to a tipsy baker-turned-sailor on the phone from California; she and her mother planned a wedding in two weeks. After the war, the three-family house on the hill that her father had always greatly admired was for sale. She and my dad and my grandparents never left it. Her world was small, but the space she leaves is large.

          I did not know my mother as the beautiful, young woman with the great legs in the black and white photographs that showed off her inherited skill for sewing fashionable outfits, but I do know that friendship and family were very important to her as evidenced by all the little pieces of writing and drawing and cards in piles around her house. Visually, I knew her mostly in the teased hair of the 60’s and 70’s and enjoyed playing with her pointy, shiny high-heels. I characterize her personality as the good sport at family picnics and the “nice lady” around the town when we went on errands or shopped. Later, I admired her as a “business lady” in my dad’s new adventure called Cheshire Wayside Furniture, her grace to withstand local politics when my dad was mayor and her humbleness at drawing the attention of Polish customers at the bank when they discovered a teller who could speak their native language. She married a sailor, but she never liked to make waves.

          All I wanted to say was this:  “I had good parents.”

          If you can read between these four simple words, then you know how much weight they carry, how little else needs to be said in our complex, grownup world. Now, as a teacher of other people’s children and having had to learn the language of educational standards, I am struck by the idea that my parents somehow supported all the best practices of parenting without even knowing what they were called.

                                                        

Thanks and Ja Cie Kocham

(that’s “I Love You” in Polish, pronounced Yacha kocham)

Victoria Rose Embros Kucinskas obituary