Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (34 page)
Read Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
And swim we did! Dad peddled caramelized almonds, which we made each evening and packed into cellophane bags, up and down Broadway. Mother went to school in the morning to learn to be a masseuse and did housework for various families several afternoons a week. I attended school at PS-51. My sister, Lotte, went to the Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, where she worked in an exchange program to learn English. Nights, Dad worked as a night watchman, Mother sewed leather gloves for a manufacturing firm, and I strung beaded necklaces for the Woolworth store for one cent apiece.
The fifth-floor walk-up apartment we shared on 150th and Riverside Drive was hardly what my parents had been used to in their native country, Germany. It really wasn’t a walk-up—it had an elevator—but the man who ran it held out his hand for tips each time anyone wanted a ride. Who could afford donations? We walked upstairs.
The place consisted of a kitchen, bathroom, living room and one bedroom. My sister and I shared the double bed in the living room, until she went off to school. When we first viewed the apartment, my mom blanched at the filth of the place. But with determination and elbow grease we made it habitable.
During one of our nightly chats while working together, Mutti told me about the candlesticks.
“Let’s see if we can manage to buy them. I think they could look good once we clean and polish them.”
Together we schemed how to save enough money to purchase them for Daddy’s birthday. Thinking back, it was not the gift my father would have chosen to receive. He was more interested in the war, what of his property he could salvage, and how we would eat and pay the rent. But Mom was desperate to have something of beauty in our dingy flat.
The candlesticks cost three dollars. We conceived our plan in March and discussed money-saving strategies.
“I’ll see if I can talk our three elderly neighbors into letting me carry their trash down to the basement,” I offered. “Plus, I could make money stringing necklaces.”
“I’ll buy large eggs for Daddy, and we’ll eat the smaller and cheaper ones,” said Mom.
In addition, she purchased three-day-old bread, instead of day-old, saving seven cents a loaf. A friend told her that wrapping a damp cloth around the bread and heating it in the oven would make it taste fresh again. It worked!
We turned saving pennies into a game. At the end of April, we made a fifty-cent down payment on our treasure. By September 23, 1940, we proudly “paid them off,” and the proprietor even threw in some used candles.
We rubbed and polished the silver. Mother cut the used candles and scraped the outside until they looked almost like new ones. I will never forget the first Sabbath Eve when we lit the tapers. Tears ran down my mother’s face as she recited the blessings. Despite the hardships, we were grateful to be together and, most of all, to be safe and sound.
When I married and moved to Wyoming, my mother gave me the candlesticks as a wedding gift, so that I might always share in their beauty. “You helped to buy them. You know how much they mean to me. I want you to have them and to someday pass them on to your daughter,” she said.
The candlesticks now stand on top of the piano in my living room. We have used them at every memorable occasion of our family’s life, both happy and sad. One day, I will pass them on to my daughter, as they were passed along to me. The Sabbath candlesticks are, and always will be, much more than candlesticks. They are symbols of faith, courage and love.
Liesel Shineberg
T
he hardest lesson in life we have to learn is
which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn.
Ann Landers
It happens in every family: angry words between parent and child, heated arguments between brother and sister, somebody walking off into the night.
And the family tie is broken.
It happened in my family without an argument.
I still don’t know what triggered it. I just know my oldest son married, moved to Hawaii, and stopped calling or returning phone calls.
It took a child to break the silence.
So proud he could burst, my son had to call and tell me about Travis Hannelai Haas, born a year ago. Gradually, hesitantly, we started talking again. Photographs arrived of a chubby, blond, blue-eyed baby with Asian eyes. What a hunk!
“Come to Travis’s first birthday,” my son said in a telephone call. “Please come.”
Baby steps could close the family circle once again.
“Go,” my aunt said. “Life’s too short.”
Even my neighbor offered advice. “Go,” he said. “I wish I were so lucky,” he added, referring to a similar unfathomable rift in his own family.
“Go,” said my husband, pulling the suitcase from the closet.
Tom was late meeting me at the airport in Maui. We both were nervous. After five years of silence, neither of us knew where to start. We had to find neutral ground somewhere. The baby became safe territory.
At the restaurant, Travis sat beside his mother, eyeing me from a safe distance. He slapped the table. I slapped the table. He slapped the table again and caught my eye. One, two, three times we played the game. Then he looked away, made a pout just like his dad’s, turned and slapped both hands on the table, trying to catch Grandma napping.
That was the moment when I finally understood what being a grandma is all about. Travis was no longer a photograph. He was a wonderful, bright and beautiful boy.
I brought a toy piano to the birthday party two days later. Sure, it was a grandma gift. I wasn’t going to be around to hear Travis pound away at two some morning.
He loved it. It makes lots of noise.
Guests at the party all talked about family. Most had left relatives on the mainland. “I don’t like L.A.,” one guest said. “I hate to go there, but I sure do miss my family at birthdays and Christmas.”
The next day, Tom drove me to the Haleakala Crater for sunrise and along the fifty-three-mile Hana Highway, past waterfalls and sacred pools. He made a point of helping me down the moss-covered stairs leading to the ocean. It was comforting to have a guide who is 6 feet 5 inches tall and built like a rock.
The water is crystal clear. It’s impossible to hide here. We healed somewhere among the 617 turns and 56 single-lane bridges on the Hana Highway that day. We healed without talking about the past. Instead, we talked about the future, his plans and dreams and ambitions for himself and his family.
Travis is walking now, circling the backyard in Makawao.
At the art gallery in the Grand Hotel, I got into a conversation with the saleswoman. She moved to Hawaii a few years ago from Laguna Beach. “Maui is a wonderful place to raise children,” she said. “They are safe here.”
My son says he will never let the family tie break again.
“I missed you, Mom,” he said.
I wanted to ask, “Why didn’t you call months ago?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.
Life’s too short.
Jane Glenn Haas
It was a beautiful spring day in early May when I picked up my two little daughters from my mother’s house. I was a single working mother and Mom was kind enough to babysit for me. Putting a roof over my children’s heads and food on the table were major expenses and ones I worked very hard to cover. The bare essentials were the focus of my paycheck.
Clothes, gas money and an occasional repair of our car left little for discretionary spending. Thankfully, I had a wonderful mother who was always there for us.
As we were driving home Debbie, my six-year-old kindergartner, asked if we could go shopping for a Mother’s Day present for Grandma. I was tired and had many things to do at home, so I told her I’d think about it, and maybe in the morning we would. Both Debbie and her four-year-old sister, Cindy, decided that was a definite plan, and they were very excited about it.
After putting the girls to bed that night, I sat down and went over my budget. Putting money aside for the rent, gas for the car and new shoes Cindy needed, I had fifteen dollars for food till the next payday in two weeks. Grandma’s present would have to come out of the food money.
The girls were up bright and early the next morning and willingly helped me clean and dust—the usual Saturday chores. The talk centered on what gift we should get for Gram. I tried to explain that we didn’t have much money to spend, so we would have to shop carefully, but Cindy was so excited she had a list a mile long.
After lunch we drove to town. I had decided that the only place we might find something I could afford was at the five-and-dime. Of course, this being Debbie and Cindy’s favorite store, I immediately made a hit with them. We walked through the store, carefully going up each aisle looking at anything that might be appropriate. Cindy thought Grandma might like a pair of shoes too, (we’d found her a pair of blue tennies for $1.99) but Debbie saw a white straw handbag she said would be, “Just perfect for Grandma to take to church!” Again I explained that we only had a few dollars to spend, so we would have to look further.
After going past most of the counters, we came to the back of the store and were ready to turn down the last aisle when Debbie stopped and pulled me over to a display of small potted plants. “Mom,” she said, tugging on my arm. “Look, we could get Grandma a plant!” Cindy started to jump up and down with excitement. “Can we?” she asked. “Grandma loves flowers!” They were right. Mom had a beautiful flower garden and had vases of cut flowers in the house all summer. There was a large selection of plants in 2” pots for fifty cents. We could even pick out a pretty, little pot and some potting soil and plant it for her. That decision made, we now had to select just the right one. They finally settled on one with shiny green leaves with white variegations—a philodendron.
That was a special Mother’s Day. Both the girls helped repot the little plant and eagerly told their grandmother all about it. Grandma was pleased and placed it on her kitchen windowsill over her sink, “Where I can watch it grow while I do the dishes!” she told them.
The little plant thrived under Mom’s caring hands, and my sister and I got many a cutting from it over the years. Time sped by, and the girls grew up to be lovely young women, married and had babies of their own.
One day when Debbie and Cindy stopped by to visit, Deb spotted my philodendron that was hanging and twining all around my kitchen window. “Mom, is that plant new?” she asked. Both girls wanted to know what kind of plant it was and where I bought it. I explained that you just had to break off a short stem from one and place it in a glass of water and let it root. Grandma always had several glasses with philodendron rooting in them, sitting on her kitchen windowsill. Didn’t they remember that they had given Grandma that philodendron for Mother’s Day all those years ago?
“You’re kidding,” they both said in wide-eyed wonder. “You mean this is all from that same little plant?” I assured them it was and suggested they go ask Grandma for some cuttings and start their own plants.
Later that day, Cindy called to let me know she and Debbie had gone to visit Grandma, and both of them now had several pots with philodendron planted in them. “Grandma had loads of them, most of them with real long roots,” she said. “And Mom, did you know that she still has the original plant Debbie and I gave her for that Mother’s Day when we were little?”
It was just a little Mother’s Day gift—a very inexpensive gift at that—but now forty years later, we see the beauty of it. A philodendron is like a human family. You break off a little stem from the mother plant and reroot it somewhere else. And it grows and spreads in its own unique pattern that still somehow resembles the plant from which it came. As our family goes its different ways, the philodendron we all have has become a symbol for us of how connected we all are. Through its silent daily reminders, the philodendron has brought us closer together as a family.
Mom and dad presently live in a Care Center close to me. The largest remnant of that philodendron plant now graces my front entry, and yes it is still giving of itself. I always have a vase with snippets of its rooting in my kitchen for the homes of my granddaughters. These plant snips are the descendants of that one little plant bought from the Five and Dime by two children for a long-ago Mother’s Day gift.
Joan Sutula
Every seaside cottage and summer cabin should have indestructible leather couches and a quilt. Only the former will do for wet bathing suits, sandy bottoms and little feet with pine needles stuck to them. Only the latter will do for the goose-bumped and almost blue little bodies that duck into the house for a breather late in the day, shivering and shaking because the sun has dipped behind a cloud, but not quite ready to give up the idea of one last round of cannonballs off the pier.
For years, the hunched little forms of my children would line up on the old leather couch at our summer home on those late afternoons, wrapped in damp beach towels, catching a quick cartoon while they took a warm-up break from the endless outdoor activities that all seemed to center around cold water. In the evenings, the same band of four would drag blankets from nearby beds and share a huddle on the couch as the North Woods night chill crept through the wooden cabin. When it was time for lights-out, beds and blankets always ended up in tumbles as damp as the children’s suits.