Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (31 page)
Read Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
My grandmother went all out for my weekly visits. Shortly after Mom and Dad dropped me off, dinner would be served. I loved her carrots. Sliced thick and never mushy, they swam in a sea of butter and melted in my mouth like candy. “Orange wheels,” I called them, which always made her laugh.
Grandma’s other specialty was a steaming platter heaped with succulent chicken and rice. Being a five-year-old boy, I was too young to know that this was the only meal of the week Grandma actually cooked anymore. With her arthritis, it was hard just to open the can of Campbell’s mushroom soup, which she stirred in the rice to give it that special “oomph.” And skinning and deboning the chicken breasts (they were cheaper that way) was a nearly Herculean effort for the little old lady who spent the rest of the week zapping Lean Cuisine dinners and sipping tea with blueberry muffins for dessert.
Grandma had a special set of dishes she’d purchased, one dish a week, at the local grocery store. They were white and covered with blue windmills and little wooden shoes. Grandma told me that she had bought them just for our special dinners, and that I was the only person she ever used them for. This always made me feel ten feet tall. (It was years later before she finally confessed that the real reason she only used them with me was that she’d skipped a few weeks down at the grocery store, and the set was incomplete.)
Dinner was usually over by the time “The Lawrence Welk Show” came on, and even though it was her favorite show, Grandma said she preferred spending time with her “little man.” So we’d retire to the wooden porch swing.
Grandma’s husband, my grandfather, had died years earlier. The two of them had spent countless hours in this very porch swing, rocking back and forth and admiring the Florida sunset while the neighbor children played, dogs barked and flowers bloomed. Now it was my turn to sit next to Grandma and help her while away her lonely Saturday evenings. It never felt creepy, taking my grandfather’s place in that creaky, old porch swing. To me, it just felt right.
While champagne music bubbled through the screen door from the TV, Grandma and I would sit and swing, swing and sit. Sometimes I’d draw, and she would sew. Other times, we’d just talk about the neighbors or what each of us had done that day. She’d share stories about growing up in the Great Depression until the closing strains of champagne music were corked for yet another week. Then it was time for dessert, which, in the best of all grandmotherly traditions, was something Mom would never give me at home: a bottle of Coca-Cola, the short kind that fit perfectly into a young boy’s hand, and a can of fancy mixed nuts. Grandma showed me how to drop the salty Spanish peanuts inside the bottle and watch the soda foam, then take a sip, chomping the slimy nuts and tasting the salty sweetness of the fizzy soda.
Grandma called this concoction our “porch-swing cocktails,” and not only were they delicious, but they made me feel grown up. Imagine a five-year-old drinking a cocktail!
When the Cokes were gone, we’d chomp on cashews and almonds and listen to dogs bark in the distance. Grandma would light a citronella candle to ward off the mosquitoes, so big and plentiful that she called them “Florida’s State Bird”!
As the night got darker, the tempo of our rocking would gradually slow down, until our feet just dangled in the warm air. We hardly moved at all, simply enjoying the smooth ocean breeze from the beach flowing over us. Living half a block from the Atlantic Ocean, there wasn’t a night of her life that Grandma didn’t enjoy falling asleep to the sound of ocean breakers crashing against the sandy beach. She said she wouldn’t trade that sound for anything in the world. . . .
So you see, this is not a “boy, I miss my grandmother” story. It’s a story about good times past, but still possible today. I think I’ll call Grandma and tell her it’s time for some porch-swing cocktails. And even though I’m old enough now to enjoy an alcoholic drink, I’ll go buy some Cokes and nuts—and get ready for my favorite Saturday-night date.
Rusty Fischer
O
ne generation plants the trees; another gets
the shade.
Chinese Proverb
When my mother, hospitalized for a simple flu, died of a heart attack at sixty-five, I would have given the world to have her survive so I could care for her in my home. But she was suddenly, irreparably, devastatingly gone.
That was twenty years ago. Since then I have heard the many woes and worries of friends with aged parents. I feel some relief that this task will never be mine (as my father has married a much younger woman who will assume this responsibility), and yet I also experience wistfulness, even envy. To have my mother—or an older version of her— back with me for just a day!
So the decision we made that afternoon three weeks ago wasn’t difficult. My husband and I live in Sweden. That afternoon we had stopped by his mother’s fifth-floor apartment in Old Town Stockholm to check on her before enjoying a movie and dinner out. At eighty-eight, she was gradually weakening, and for years has longed to join her husband in death. Her 1600s-era home has no elevator, and the steep, winding flights of stone steps had become Mt. Everest. That day she seemed, as the Swedes say,
svagg
or very weak. “Come home with us,” I heard myself saying.
And surprisingly, this very independent woman did. While I quickly ransacked drawers for nightgowns and necessities, she went into her husband’s long-empty bedroom and closed the door. Only his large picture propped on the bed knows what she said. Then, clutching a grown grandson’s arm with one arthritic hand and with the other a plastic bag of underwear and medicine bottles, she shuffled slowly down the steps in her slippers and robe.
Life for all of us changed.
We gave her our ground-floor bedroom with its adjacent bath and set up dining-room chairs to lean on for the few steps it would take to reach her walker. Upstairs in the guest room, my husband and I, mature but still enthusiastic newlyweds, shoved two single beds together and reconciled ourselves to a crack that seemed like a chasm. We learned to use the toilet quietly and to brush our teeth in the kitchen sink.
I discovered that once a mother, always a mother— even if one’s “child” is a nearly ninety-year-old mother-in-law. Once on the alert for babies, I’m now attuned to her. I also learned that even my perfect doctor-husband—like the average man—hears
nothing
in the night.
The days now unfold in slow motion; my self-directed days no longer are. I’m sometimes summoned awake before I’m ready, and just-for-me moments don’t come until my husband arrives home, and I can consciously clock out. Mealtimes are regular and seldom vary: butter-thick bread and tea for breakfast, soured yogurt with lingonberry and a few cereal flakes for lunch, and please, a potato for dinner? And don’t forget the small pitcher of water for the too-warm tea, heating the bowl for the too-cold yogurt, the small white pillow for the chair back, the light blue blanket for her shoulders, the lamb-skin rug wrapped around her feet. Remembering each item before she does becomes a game.
Yet Eivor is easy. Grateful. Sweet.
Often we talk as women over tea. She tells me, “There were supposed to be two more babies, but I had trouble, so I have just the one child.” “Was I a good mother?” she wonders. Look at how your son turned out, I assure her. “And now a professor. His father would be so proud,” she says. “I think I spent too much time cleaning,” she says of what seems to me the Swedish indoor sport. “People are more important,” she adds. I nod, and resolve to sit until she has finished her tea before I pop up to load the dishwasher.
Other days, conversation is scant. I prod her with questions and choices, but her only answer is “I don’t know. I am a wreck. This is so terrible. Why can’t I die? Each night I pray to God I can be gone.”
But when tomorrow comes, she is still here. And I am glad. For Eivor is teaching me much.
For the first time, I know the intimacy of helping to bathe an adult. Standing naked as she lowers herself into the lawn chair I have wrestled into our small shower, she is as unselfconscious as I am slightly embarrassed. I test the temperature of the water before handing her the nozzle. I shampoo her newly permed white hair. As she stands dripping at her walker, I towel her dry then apply gardenia-scented lotion, warming it first between my palms.
How many times have I bathed my babies, my grand-babies? It’s not so different, only one doesn’t grab the rubber duck or camera. And it is every bit as tender. But time has replaced soft, sweet curves and dimples. The hips which conceived and bore and lost babies are wide, the years have lichened her body with the thickened brown spots of old age. No airbrushed, magazine advertisement this, yet there is beauty here. And history: the playing child running free, the young mother cradling the babe who will become the man I love, the passionate wife, the outstanding cook and hostess, the old woman bent over her sick husband.
As a woman well into middle age, I look at my mother-in-law and acknowledge the preview of my own body, should the movie of my life last as long as hers.
I’ve come to enjoy our physical contact as much as she does. Such simple pleasures: the warmth of the blow-dryer on pink scalp, the feel of my fingers in her still-heavy hair. The slipperiness of her perpetually cold hands as I smooth lotion into the gnarled knuckles, willing warmth into them. Her satisfaction at a fresh nightgown and clean robe. Her white head against my chest—suddenly, surprisingly, as precious as the soft downy heads of my babies.
She may not know it, but Eivor bears many gifts. Oh, not her nightly, “Thank you for today, Jann,” nor her instruction on the proper folding of used plastic bags, nor her lesson on the Swedish custom of welcoming spring by wiring colored feathers to birch branches and placing them in water until the “mouse ear” green leaves appear.
No, she’s also teaching me the importance of patience: the grace of eating and drinking and moving more slowly, the importance of expressing gratitude regularly, the delight in a snowy day or the sight of a vase full of tulips close-up or the enjoyment of children at play in a nearby yard.
Eivor is teaching me that my own body—which looks to me so unattractive at nearly fifty-nine—is really quite young and agile in comparison. She’s teaching me that death needn’t be feared if life has been savored. But most of all she’s teaching me that it’s never too late to learn more, to love more.
Eivor’s blue-veined hand in mine is not my mother’s. And yet it is. It is my mother’s hand and my mother’s mother’s hand—and her mother’s before that. It is the hand of Eivor’s mother and her grandmother. Just as someday, it will be my hand. Or your hand.
May the universe provide us all with another hand to hold.
Jann Mitchell
My husband, John, loaded parcels into our van while I brushed off a half-inch of new snow from the windshield. John’s usual patience was wearing thin as we headed to yet another shopping mall.
We had made our list and checked it twice, so we knew exactly what to shop for. But as the day wore on, we felt increasingly frustrated. Our teenage and young-adult children had made very specific requests. Now we were taking a grand tour of half the malls in the city to fulfill them.
As John searched for a parking space, he thought of the time we ordered a coaster wagon with our hoard of Green Stamps. “They sent that red pedal-car instead, which was worth several more books. The kids played with that car for years.”
“Remember Angel and KimSue?” I asked. “We gave those dolls to the girls when they were almost too old for dolls. But they became the most treasured dolls of all. There was something special about those Christmases, John—more excitement, more uncertainty. I liked them better.”
“Yes,” my husband replied, “a lot more uncertainty. Twenty years ago a teacher’s salary hardly paid for a decent Christmas.”
Laughing at our shared memories, John and I headed into the mall. We hunted for a sweater for Marjorie, our oldest, who was twenty at the time. Kristin, nineteen, wanted a coffeemaker for her dorm room. We probably would buy the ever-popular jeans for Tim, our fourteen-year-old son. Melissa, eighteen, needed lamps for her first apartment.
Lights, tinsel, music. The stores were sparkling with holiday cheer. But I noticed none of it. I was thinking about the surprise and joy on my kids’ faces when they were small as they ran to the tree on Christmas mornings. No one was ever surprised now. Suddenly, John said, “This is no fun. I want to buy toys!” He had read my mind.
Of course,
I thought as I stuffed the list in my purse,
That’s
the magic we’re longing for. Toys!
We talked a mile a minute about what to buy for the kids. “What about Melissa’s boyfriend?” asked John. “He’ll think we’re crazy if everyone gets toys.”
“Let’s just do it!” I said.
We erupted into laughter as we made our choices. Tim would like something mechanical. We put a robot-type toy in the cart. We hoped Melissa’s boyfriend wouldn’t be embarrassed with the truck we picked out for him. A Dressy Bessy doll would be just right for Kristin. Melissa would get a pull-toy telephone. We remembered how much Marjorie loved jack-in-the-boxes and bought her one.
Without being quite aware of it, we also purchased the sweater, the lamps and all the other everyday gifts.
As soon as we returned home with arms full of bags, everyone knew something was afoot. The secrecy and smiles seemed like those wonderful Christmases years ago when our kids were little. John and I just grinned when questioned. Everyone, no matter how blasé their attitudes had been, began to be very enthusiastic about Christmas. The tree lights burned a little brighter. The twenty-year-old crèche figures seemed less shabby. The growing pile of wrapped packages was intriguing after all.