When I was growing up in the 1950s, no one bought a box of candy from a supermarket. Every neighborhood had a candy store that sold handmade chocolates by the box or by the piece. You could pick out your favorite chocolates which were displayed in a large glass case trimmed in wood or brass. The store owner would wrap up your selections in pretty papers appropriate to the particular season of the year, and off you would go with this precious box of delicious chocolates.
My dad loved Whitman's Chocolate, and their most popular box was their "Sampler," which gave about two dozen pieces of chocolate-covered nuts, caramel, fruit creams, and coconut clusters. In the center of the box was the Whitman's "Messenger Boy" which was a thin brick of chocolate molded in the shape of a little boy delivering a box of Whitman's Chocolates.
Whitman's was my dad's chocolate of choice, and he bought countless sampler boxes over the years... for the family, for the nuns at school, for friends at Christmas-time. "You can't go wrong with Whitman's, and who doesn't like good chocolate?" he would say.
My grandmother and my Aunt Dolly would save the sampler boxes when all the chocolate was gone. Grandma used the boxes for sewing supplies, and Aunt Dolly filled her share of the Whitman's boxes with card-making supplies and pretty ribbons. On a rainy day when I told my aunt that I had nothing to do, Aunt Dolly would hand me one or two of her "busy work" boxes and tell me "Go sit down and make me something." Inside those yellow Whitman's boxes would be the fronts of pretty cards, scraps of ribbons, bits of silk flowers, tiny little charms from Cracker Jack.... and I'd sit there and make a unique paper creation that my aunt would cherish for years. I've had my own boxes of card-making supplies for years now, and spend many hours making cards, invitations, and place cards for family and friends.
When my dad walked into my grandmother's house with a box of Whitman's, he would open the box in front of my grandmother and say "Look at that... all perfect.... and doesn't it smell like good chocolate should?" Daddy would let grandma take the first piece, which was almost always the little rectangular-shaped brick with the Messenger Boy imprinted on it. Grandma would eat it slowly, letting the chocolate melt in her mouth. "Buono, buono," she'd say when she was finished. "Good, good." Daddy would ask her to take another and my grandmother's answer would always be the same. "One is enough for now."
Aunt Dolly always took one of the chocolate covered peanuts or a cashew cluster. Nuts covered in chocolate were her favorites. She would take a small knife and cut one of the clusters in half, savoring one half right then, saving the other half for after dinner. We all knew that if we saw half of a nut cluster in the Whitman's box, that half was my aunt's and not to be touched.
Uncle Mino was the chocolate gourmet of the house. He worked in Manhattan and had access to all sorts of private chocolate shops who made the chocolates on site and sold them for exorbitant prices. My uncle would go into one of those shops during his lunch-time walk around The City and buy one or two pieces at a time, only buying an entire box's worth of selections at Christmas-time. Being that Uncle Mino had tasted chocolate "from all over the world," he thought that the box of Whitman's was too mundane. "Fine," said my dad, "That leaves more Whitman's for the rest of us."
Sooner or later, though, the box of Whitman's would tempt Uncle Mino. He would open the box and peer into it, and then take a very thin fruit knife with an ivory handle so he could slice off an end of whichever chocolate he chose to try. The blade on that knife was very sharp, and he could make these tiny slices of chocolate that were less than one-quarter-of-an-inch thick. "Just enough to taste," my uncle would say. The problem was that my uncle and his knife-slicing would result in two of three of the Whitman's chocolates missing their chocolate-covered ends.
My dad would open the Whitman's box and say "My brother the chocolate surgeon must have been here! Just look at what he did to the Whitman's!" More often than not, daddy would take the pieces that had already been cut by my uncle, so when the box was next opened, one wouldn't see cut-off ends on the selections.
In the mid 1960s after I'd started high school, a chocolate shop opened up right on the corner where Uncle Mino caught his bus for the ride to the train station. The shop sold Russell Stover's chocolates. During their first couple of weeks, the shop gave out free samples, and my uncle helped himself to more than a few of the chocolate-covered caramels and creams. When the store discontinued their free samples, Uncle Mino bought a box of his hand-selected favorites and brought them home for the family to taste.
And so began the Whitman/Stover competition in my grandmother's house. My dad swore by Whtiman's, "hands down," as he said. Uncle Mino said that Russell Stover's caramels were thicker and better than the Whitman's. My dad's answer to that was "The caramel is so thick that it could pull a filling out of your tooth." Both my grandmother and my Aunt Dolly refused to take sides. "They're both good," Aunt Dolly would say. Grandma would just look at her two sons and shake her head, telling them they should be grateful that they had extra money in their pockets to buy boxes of chocolate.
The Whitman/Stover battle went on for years... my Uncle Mino bringing home a box of Russell Stover's chocolate a day or two after my dad walked in with a box of Whitman's. Uncle Mino would open both boxes and put them side by side, comparing the shapes and the selections. My dad would tell his brother "Keep that knife of yours away from my Whitman's... if you want to slice into chocolate, then do it to the Stover's."
My husband and I have traveled quite a lot over the past twenty-some years. We've tasted chocolates in countless US cities we've visited, and we've also had gourmet chocolates in Germany, The Netherlands, London, Canada, and Australia. Each of the private chocolate shops were beautifully decorated and their glass-covered display counters held enticing selections of chocolates. A few years ago, one of the Houston museums hosted a World Chocolate Exhibit, and we got to taste and buy chocolates from all over the globe without leaving the state of Texas.
However.... when I give a box of chocolates as a gift, I always pick up a Sampler Box of Whitman's. That familiar yellow box just says 'family' to me, and brings back all those memories of Grandma choosing the little Messenger Boy piece, Uncle Mino slicing the ends off the caramels and creams, Aunt Dolly saving the nut clusters for herself, and daddy saying "You can't go wrong with Whitman's."
A few days ago, my husband surprised me with a box of Whitman's. He didn't tell me that he'd bought it.... he just left it on a table in the TV room where I had made a small Christmas display of a few Santa figurines and an empty tin box of a vintage Whitman's Christmas Sampler. When my eye caught sight of the yellow Whitman's box, my heart skipped half a beat because I immediately thought of my dad, and then of course realized that my husband had put the box of Whitman's there for me to find.
My dad passed away in 2008, but when I opened that box of Whitman's from my husband and took a bite of the little Messenger Boy piece, my eyes puddled up with tears because I could actually hear daddy's voice in my mind saying "You can't go wrong with Whitman's."
As I type this, there are just ten more days till Christmas. I tend to get sad and sappy around this time of the year. I have to remind myself to concentrate on the good memories and just breeze through the not-so-good memories of years past. That box of Whitman's sitting downstairs on the table... a very thoughtful surprise from my husband which has given me the gift of hearing daddy's voice in my mind once again. I hope the day never comes when I no longer remember the sound of my father's voice.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Dance, Ballerina, Dance...
The first time my dad brought me to Radio City Music Hall to see a movie and the Rockettes, I was enthralled with the huge theater, the larger-than-life movie screen, and the live stage show starring the Rockettes. I don't even remember which movie was playing, but I do remember looking around the theater at all the seats, the lights, the plush wall-coverings, the huge balcony, and the perfectly spectacular sensation of just sitting there like a tiny bug in the middle of that huge and beautiful Music Hall.
After the movie was over, a gigantic organ floated up through the floor in the left-hand corner of the stage.... lights on the organ would change color as the music played... the organist flipped keys and pounded pedals and once in a while he would turn around towards the audience as if to say "How about that?! Did you like that?!"
And then the Rockettes.... dancing and stepping in unison, entering from both sides of the stage till they met in the middle into one long line of legs and sparkling costumes. How could you not love them? How could you not want to be one of them, especially if you were a little girl who was taking tap-dance and ballet lessons at the time?
I remember my dad asking me "Would you want to be one of the Rockettes when you're older? I could come here and watch you dance up on that stage." The thought frightened me... dance up there in front of everyone in Radio City Music Hall? What if I made a mistake? What if I kicked the wrong foot or raised the wrong arm? My dad told me that if I practiced enough, I wouldn't make mistakes... and even if I did...... "So what? Do you think those girls up on that stage have never made a mistake?"
When the stage show was over, my dad and I went downstairs to the gift shop in the Music Hall..... dolls and games, dance shoes and porcelain figurines... all sorts of New York City souvenirs were lined up on glass shelves. "Let's get you something," said my dad.... "Pick something out."
I looked at all the possibilities.... my dad was pointing out a beautiful doll with a ballerina costume and dancing shoes..... there were stuffed animals and books and tea sets. He was telling me to take my time, to not miss anything on the shelves, to make a good choice.
And that's when I saw the teapot.... not a child-sized teapot, but a 'real' teapot that an adult would use. It was ivory porcelain with gold trim and in the middle of the teapot's front, the porcelain formed a little stage where a tiny ballerina stood with her toes pointed and her arms raised. The teapot sat on a porcelain music box...... when you put the teapot down on its pedestal and turned the key, the song that played was "Dance, Ballerina, Dance" which was the song my grandmother would sing to me when I showed her the new steps I had learned at dance class. And as the song played, the little ballerina on the teapot would twirl as the music-box key turned to play the music.
"That's what I want..... the ballerina teapot," I told my dad. He told me that the teapot wasn't meant for a little girl..... "That's a lady's teapot," he told me..... "Why don't you pick out one of the smaller ones on the next shelf?"
"But I don't want the teapot for me..... that teapot is for Grandma, and she's a lady!"
Daddy insisted that I pick out something for myself... his suggestions were the large ballerina doll or one of the little girl tea sets. In my five-year-old mind, I knew that the ballerina teapot was the only thing to bring home from Radio City Music Hall. Grandma had tea every afternoon.... her teapot was old and cracked... and this teapot had a tiny ballerina on top of it, and it played the song that Grandma always sang to me. And I stood there in that gift shop and told my dad all of those things and again told him that I didn't want anything for me because "Grandma needs that teapot."
We bought the teapot. Before we walked out of Radio City that day, my dad asked me if I was sure I wanted the teapot for Grandma instead of the ballerina doll for myself. I was positive I had chosen the right thing and didn't want to change my mind. My dad carried the package home on the subway and when we got to Grandma's house, he let me carry it into the house and give it to my grandmother.
"Did you have your tea yet, Mama?" my dad asked my grandmother.
"Over an hour ago," said Grandma.
"Well, put the water on..... you're about to have more."
My grandmother unwrapped that teapot and she started to cry when my dad turned the little key and "Dance, Ballerina, Dance" started playing and the little ballerina twirled and twirled on the front of her new teapot. When she dried her tears with the hankie she always seemed to have in her apron pocket, Grandma said she would keep the teapot in the china cabinet so it wouldn't get cracked like her old one. I knew what that meant--- anything that went into the china cabinet came out only twice a year, on Easter Sunday and on Christmas.
I begged my grandmother to keep the teapot in the kitchen, right on the counter near the stove, so she would always use it...... "The teapot is for every day when you have your tea!"
"But it's so beautiful!" said my grandmother..... "What if something happens to it?"
"Then daddy will buy you another one!" I told her. My father didn't say a word, but I remember him rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, and then he rubbed his thumb and his first two fingers together, silently telling my grandmother that I had no idea how expensive that teapot was at the Music Hall.
It was decided that the ballerina teapot would sit on the counter in the kitchen.... and my grandmother did indeed use it every day, every day. On the days that I was there for her tea time, we would both have our cups of tea (with milk and sugar and tiny spoons and very small cookies or slices of cake)... and the teapot would play its song, the ballerina would twirl, and when I finished my tea, I would get up and twirl myself around Grandma's kitchen while she sang "Dance, Ballerina, Dance."
I think of it now and get tears in my eyes... but I don't have a hankie in my apron, nor do I even have an apron. I do, however, have the ballerina teapot. The pedestal long ago fell onto my grandmother's kitchen floor and shattered... so there is no music box to play the song. That doesn't mean that the song no longer plays, because I can still hear it in my mind..... and I can hear Grandma singing it with her Italian accent. And if I try hard enough, I can imagine a little girl in a pink tulle dance outfit twirling around on a green tiled kitchen floor.
The little ballerina in the teapot is still intact, but she wears a new silk ribbon dress which replaced the white tulle outfit she was wearing from Radio City. She no longer twirls, but just stands quietly on her toes waiting for the day when she will be released from behind the glass doors of my china cabinet. I have to admit that I keep that ballerina teapot in my china cabinet.... what if something happened to it? It could never be replaced.
I don't use that teapot for tea, and actually, no one has made tea in that Radio City teapot since my grandmother passed away in the early 1970s. It was Grandma's teapot, after all.... bought for her afternoon tea, and without a doubt, even if I did make tea in that teapot, I know for certain that it wouldn't be as delicious as my memory of hearing Grandma singing Dance, ballerina, dance.....
After the movie was over, a gigantic organ floated up through the floor in the left-hand corner of the stage.... lights on the organ would change color as the music played... the organist flipped keys and pounded pedals and once in a while he would turn around towards the audience as if to say "How about that?! Did you like that?!"
And then the Rockettes.... dancing and stepping in unison, entering from both sides of the stage till they met in the middle into one long line of legs and sparkling costumes. How could you not love them? How could you not want to be one of them, especially if you were a little girl who was taking tap-dance and ballet lessons at the time?
I remember my dad asking me "Would you want to be one of the Rockettes when you're older? I could come here and watch you dance up on that stage." The thought frightened me... dance up there in front of everyone in Radio City Music Hall? What if I made a mistake? What if I kicked the wrong foot or raised the wrong arm? My dad told me that if I practiced enough, I wouldn't make mistakes... and even if I did...... "So what? Do you think those girls up on that stage have never made a mistake?"
When the stage show was over, my dad and I went downstairs to the gift shop in the Music Hall..... dolls and games, dance shoes and porcelain figurines... all sorts of New York City souvenirs were lined up on glass shelves. "Let's get you something," said my dad.... "Pick something out."
I looked at all the possibilities.... my dad was pointing out a beautiful doll with a ballerina costume and dancing shoes..... there were stuffed animals and books and tea sets. He was telling me to take my time, to not miss anything on the shelves, to make a good choice.
And that's when I saw the teapot.... not a child-sized teapot, but a 'real' teapot that an adult would use. It was ivory porcelain with gold trim and in the middle of the teapot's front, the porcelain formed a little stage where a tiny ballerina stood with her toes pointed and her arms raised. The teapot sat on a porcelain music box...... when you put the teapot down on its pedestal and turned the key, the song that played was "Dance, Ballerina, Dance" which was the song my grandmother would sing to me when I showed her the new steps I had learned at dance class. And as the song played, the little ballerina on the teapot would twirl as the music-box key turned to play the music.
"That's what I want..... the ballerina teapot," I told my dad. He told me that the teapot wasn't meant for a little girl..... "That's a lady's teapot," he told me..... "Why don't you pick out one of the smaller ones on the next shelf?"
"But I don't want the teapot for me..... that teapot is for Grandma, and she's a lady!"
Daddy insisted that I pick out something for myself... his suggestions were the large ballerina doll or one of the little girl tea sets. In my five-year-old mind, I knew that the ballerina teapot was the only thing to bring home from Radio City Music Hall. Grandma had tea every afternoon.... her teapot was old and cracked... and this teapot had a tiny ballerina on top of it, and it played the song that Grandma always sang to me. And I stood there in that gift shop and told my dad all of those things and again told him that I didn't want anything for me because "Grandma needs that teapot."
We bought the teapot. Before we walked out of Radio City that day, my dad asked me if I was sure I wanted the teapot for Grandma instead of the ballerina doll for myself. I was positive I had chosen the right thing and didn't want to change my mind. My dad carried the package home on the subway and when we got to Grandma's house, he let me carry it into the house and give it to my grandmother.
"Did you have your tea yet, Mama?" my dad asked my grandmother.
"Over an hour ago," said Grandma.
"Well, put the water on..... you're about to have more."
My grandmother unwrapped that teapot and she started to cry when my dad turned the little key and "Dance, Ballerina, Dance" started playing and the little ballerina twirled and twirled on the front of her new teapot. When she dried her tears with the hankie she always seemed to have in her apron pocket, Grandma said she would keep the teapot in the china cabinet so it wouldn't get cracked like her old one. I knew what that meant--- anything that went into the china cabinet came out only twice a year, on Easter Sunday and on Christmas.
I begged my grandmother to keep the teapot in the kitchen, right on the counter near the stove, so she would always use it...... "The teapot is for every day when you have your tea!"
"But it's so beautiful!" said my grandmother..... "What if something happens to it?"
"Then daddy will buy you another one!" I told her. My father didn't say a word, but I remember him rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, and then he rubbed his thumb and his first two fingers together, silently telling my grandmother that I had no idea how expensive that teapot was at the Music Hall.
It was decided that the ballerina teapot would sit on the counter in the kitchen.... and my grandmother did indeed use it every day, every day. On the days that I was there for her tea time, we would both have our cups of tea (with milk and sugar and tiny spoons and very small cookies or slices of cake)... and the teapot would play its song, the ballerina would twirl, and when I finished my tea, I would get up and twirl myself around Grandma's kitchen while she sang "Dance, Ballerina, Dance."
I think of it now and get tears in my eyes... but I don't have a hankie in my apron, nor do I even have an apron. I do, however, have the ballerina teapot. The pedestal long ago fell onto my grandmother's kitchen floor and shattered... so there is no music box to play the song. That doesn't mean that the song no longer plays, because I can still hear it in my mind..... and I can hear Grandma singing it with her Italian accent. And if I try hard enough, I can imagine a little girl in a pink tulle dance outfit twirling around on a green tiled kitchen floor.
The little ballerina in the teapot is still intact, but she wears a new silk ribbon dress which replaced the white tulle outfit she was wearing from Radio City. She no longer twirls, but just stands quietly on her toes waiting for the day when she will be released from behind the glass doors of my china cabinet. I have to admit that I keep that ballerina teapot in my china cabinet.... what if something happened to it? It could never be replaced.
I don't use that teapot for tea, and actually, no one has made tea in that Radio City teapot since my grandmother passed away in the early 1970s. It was Grandma's teapot, after all.... bought for her afternoon tea, and without a doubt, even if I did make tea in that teapot, I know for certain that it wouldn't be as delicious as my memory of hearing Grandma singing Dance, ballerina, dance.....
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Amazing Gracie
Every few months, both my husband and I look at the web-sites that feature puppies and dogs for adoption. There have also been puppies being offered for sale right here in town, either at the Walmart shopping center or in the old downtown area. We came so very close last year to adopting a tiny puppy... so close that we even gave the puppy a name--- Winnie The Poohdle.
Close, but no cigar. And no puppy, either. Every time we get that close, my husband is usually the one who calls a halt to the procedure. "Do we really want another dog?" he will ask me. (Regarding Winnie the Poohdle, my answer was yes.) "Are we really ready to commit another 15 years to taking care of a dog?" (That's about the time when I give him the look that says "Just which part of 'we' do you think will be taking care of the dog?")
At the end of the debates and discussions, the answer to the dilemma is always the same. "We had a dog. We had the best dog. We had Gracie." And that about ends the discussion for my husband.
We adopted Gracie in October of 1996, shortly after buying our house in Clear Lake. We were barely settled for a month in that house when my husband wanted to 'take a look' at the local SPCA. The look-see found us face-to-face with this little black and white puppy who followed my husband all around the grounds of the SPCA. She sat down when he stopped walking and looked up at him with bright eyes and an honest-to-goodness smile on her little puppy face. As soon as my husband started walking again, that puppy was at his heels, following his every step.
They told us that she was part Border Collie, part Black Lab. The puppy's face turned side to side, from the SPCA worker to my husband, as we all chatted about the puppy. They didn't think she'd get very big... no more than 50 pounds was their best guess. My husband thought 50 pounds was a small dog. I disagreed... my idea of a small dog was less than 15 pounds, like the fluffy lap-dogs that I'd had years ago. "Fifty pounds is nothing," said my husband. In my mind, 50 pounds was a lot of dog, but how could I argue with that puppy-face who wouldn't take her eyes off of my husband.
The Border Collie/Black Lab puppy came home with us that day. We stopped at a local pet shop to buy bowls and a bed, a blanket and a leash, and a training crate. The crate had to be large enough to hold the puppy at her adult weight, so it was a good size. Not the smallest crate in the store, but not the largest, either. The puppy sat on my lap during the drive home, but she never took her eyes away from my husband. They had bonded in the SPCA yard, as if they'd been together forever.
Puppy needed a name. We tried names based on her coloring, which didn't seem to work (too common). Then we tried the usual dog-type names, which again, seemed too common. My husband suggested a people-name, and we tried a few of those, which didn't seem to fit her. At the time, I was reading a book by George Burns, titled "Gracie," a book about the love and marriage of George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen. It was a beautifully written book.
I suggested the name "Gracie." My husband liked the name, and the puppy seemed to like the name as well because she smiled up at my husband and sat by his feet when he said the name to her. So Gracie it was. The name was cute, the name fit somehow, and over the years, we would also call her Princess Grace, and Gracie Boo-Boo....... but officially, her name was Gracie.
I quickly realized just how energetic a puppy can be when it has the genes of a Border Collie and a Black Lab. There were many days when my husband came home from work and I told him "This dog has got to go back! I can't control her, and you're gone more than you're home and I'm stuck with this crazy puppy!"
As always, in questionable situations, my husband checked the Internet. He looked under dog trainers and found a local young man just setting up a puppy and dog training business. We signed Gracie up for obedience classes. At first, both my husband and I took Gracie to the lessons. Then my husband's job got in the way of the classes, so it was just me and Gracie with the dog-trainer, and then me showing my husband what 'we' had learned.
The obedience classes were the best idea.... Gracie became the best-trained dog in the neighborhood. She could be stubborn at times, especially if we had to do those lessons after it had just rained. (Princess Grace did not like walking through puddles.) As Gracie grew up through her puppy-hood, and entered into her own little dog-world, she was indeed an obedient and well-trained dog. My husband always walked her without a leash, and just one word from him (as in "Gracie!") would have her immediately at his side and looking up at him with love and loyalty.
The dog-training classes were instrumental in teaching Gracie not to chase our cats. We asked the trainer to come to our house for those lessons, and young-puppy Gracie quickly caught on that chasing our cats was not allowed. In all the years we had Gracie, she never once hurt or even ran after one of 'her' cats. Actually, our cats just loved her and would curl up next to her as she slept. Gracie only drew the doggie-line in the sand if the cats tried to take one of her chew-toys.... Gracie would just walk slowly towards the stolen chew-toy and take it away from the cat-thief.
My husband taught Gracie to sit and wait when she got to the corner of a street. Both Gracie and my husband would look both ways before crossing, but Gracie wouldn't move off the curb until my husband said "Let's go, Gracie!" My husband also taught Gracie to play "Hide and Seek," telling her to sit in the kitchen of our Clear Lake house while he went to another part of the house to hide. I would stand there with Gracie, counting to 20.... and then I'd tell Gracie "Go find Daddy!"... and off she would go, looking behind doors, in closets, behind furniture and curtains. She would have such a serious look on her face as she searched, and then as soon as she found him, she would break into that big doggie-smile of hers and literally jump for joy.
After countless times of Gracie 'finding' my husband, we decided to see what would happen if my husband and I changed places. He stood there with Gracie and counted to 20, and I went to hide. From the other side of the house, I could hear my husband saying "Go find Mommy!" Then I heard it again... and again... and yet again. Turned out that when my husband said that to Gracie, she just sat there in the kitchen, looking up at him and smiling, not at all interested in 'finding Mommy.' My husband felt so badly for me, but I just laughed. Gracie was his dog, and had been from Day One. I was just there to walk Gracie when he wasn't home, and I was the one who made sure she had food and water and chew-toys. In Gracie's mind, I could be replaced by a robot. But my husband was her Daddy.
When Gracie was about two years old, I was walking in the neighborhood park with a friend and we saw a man walking a dog that looked just like Gracie. I stopped to talk to the man, and I asked him about his dog.... he had adopted the dog (a male) from the same SPCA, in the same month and year as we had adopted Gracie. When we had first seen Gracie, they told us that she'd come to the SPCA with a male puppy from the same litter, so that man in the park that day was walking with our Gracie's brother. I told the man our Gracie's story, and asked him what he had named his dog..... his dog's name was George. I asked him why he chose that name, and he said the dog had the personality of his Uncle George, and they couldn't think of a better name for him, and the name George just seemed to be the best fit. We were both stunned..... George and Gracie! (Honestly, you just couldn't make this stuff up!) Later on that week, my husband and I walked Gracie across the park to meet her brother George, but they didn't remember one another at all. They sniffed each other, and then just sat there, content to chew on the dog biscuits that we had brought along for George.
When you don't have children, your pets become your children, and that's what happened with Gracie. When she was a small puppy, I took her to yard sales with me every Saturday morning. She would wait for me in the car and sniff and inspect everything I bought at the sales. If I bought a small stuffed animal for her, she would hold on to it during the rest of the car ride, then drop it at my husband's feet when we got home.
We took her to Galveston with us when we went to the beach... she would watch my husband swimming out in the Gulf, but wouldn't follow him out into the surf. Princess Grace didn't like getting her paws wet, but she wouldn't leave the water's edge as long as my husband was swimming. Gracie would sit there on the damp sand, waiting for her hero to come back from the sea.
When we traveled, we found an excellent pet-sitter for Gracie and our cats. The first time we went away, poor Gracie must have thought we had abandoned her. Our pet-sitter took a photo of Gracie after we'd gone, and the sad look on her face was heart-breaking. By the second trip, however, Gracie was smiling in the pet-sitter's photos.... she quickly learned that we'd be coming back, plus she truly trusted and loved the awesome man who took care of our 'gang' when we were gone. The pet-sitter always told us that he felt like "The Mayor of Clear Lake" when he was out walking Gracie because everyone knew her by name, everyone petted her, and Gracie even sat still when small children tugged on her fur, as if she knew they didn't know any better.
Gracie was 13 years old when we moved from the ranch-style house in Clear Lake to this three-story Victorian in the Hill Country. Not having grown up with steps and staircases, Gracie couldn't get past the first floor of this house. The main staircases are wood, and not carpeted, and Gracie's legs kept sliding as she tried to follow my husband up the stairs. More than once, Gracie slid back down the first three or four steps that she tried to conquer. We finally decided that to keep her safe, we had to keep her on the first floor only. Every night, we would say goodnight to Gracie, and tell her to stay in the kitchen. I put her blanket in a warm corner, and we got an area rug for the center of the room. She was comfortable, but I'm sure she wasn't too happy about not sleeping by my husband's side of the bed. Every morning when my husband came down the stairs, he would say "Gracie Boo-Boo! Good morning, Gracie!" And she would watch him walking down those stairs, smiling her big doggie-smile, and then rub herself against his legs like a cat.
Gracie seemed to like this house and the property. When we first moved here, she would lay in the grass under the pecan trees, just watching the country-world go by.... horses and cows and goats across the road, ducks in the pond, dozens and dozens of birds. There was one special day that my husband and I still talk about...... Gracie and the cats were in the shade under the trees, our chickens were pecking the grass near the flowerbeds, and my husband and I were picking the pecans that had fallen from the trees. It was a Norman Rockwell painting... with gentle Gracie knowing that the cats and the chickens belonged to us, that they were not for chasing or hurting... it was a painting come to life out here in the Hill Country.
In her 14th year, Gracie started to slow down. She didn't want to walk much, and would go into the yard and stay out there only if my husband was outside. With me, she would go out into the grass to 'take care of her business,' but then come back up on the porch, wanting to be back in the house and either on her blanket or in the middle of the kitchen rug. I was constantly tripping over her..... I would tell her "We have 23 acres here and you're always right under my feet, Gracie!" And she would look at me with sad eyes. (The doggie-smiles were only for my husband.)
On a hot summer morning in mid-July of 2010, I walked into the kitchen and found Gracie stretched out on the kitchen tiles. There was a puddle of blood underneath her, and she tried to wag her tail as I talked to her. I quickly called upstairs to my husband, we telephoned the vet, and within ten minutes we were out of the house and driving towards the main road with Gracie on a blanket in the back seat of the car.
The vet was gentle and kind, but the look on his face spoke volumes. A tumor had been growing inside of Gracie.... we had no idea. The bleeding meant that the tumor had burst, and its position made it totally inoperable, especially in a dog of her age. We didn't wake up that morning with the intention of having to make such a monumental decision about this once-tiny puppy who grew into a 48-pound dog who was exceptionally beyond measure in character, intelligence, and loyalty.
It was my husband's decision in 1996 to adopt Gracie, and it was his decision in 2010 to have Gracie put to sleep. My husband stayed with Gracie till the very end, but I waited outside the examining room. I think the hardest thing we had to do was leave her behind when it was all over. My husband walked back to the car holding Gracie's leash, and I was holding the receipt for the procedure. I remember getting into the car and looking at that piece of paper and thinking "This is how Gracie's life ends? With a piece of paper?"
The house without Gracie seemed too quiet and too empty. We weren't missing just a dog, we were missing a true member of our family. Cats are cats, and if you're lucky, you have cats that are social and interactive and interested in their humans, which our cats have always been. But a dog.... a dog is just different somehow. Your dog truly becomes part of your family; your cat believes it owns the family. And therein lies the difference.
We have been dog-less for four years now. Every once in a while, we look at Pet-Finders, or my husband looks at the sites for Border Collie rescues, and last year, we met a lady selling that tiny puppy that we would have named Winnie The Poohdle. (How we walked away from that one, I'll never know.)
I keep saying that I don't want another Border Collie, or even a Border Collie mix. Gracie didn't exceed the SPCA's estimate of 50 pounds, but still, at 48 pounds, she was a lot of dog to handle at times. (For me, anyway... for my husband, she was a piece of cake.)
If we had bought Winnie The Poohdle, I would have been dressing up that tiny dog in cute little outfits that would have embarrassed my husband. I know that he wants a bigger dog than one of the miniature or toy breeds, if we ever do get another dog. The bottom line is, my husband would really like another Gracie.
In my mind, there was only one Gracie. We were lucky enough to have her for 14 years, and my husband was lucky enough to have been adored by such a loyal and loving dog. I can still see Gracie's bright eyes when she was looking at my husband... her expression of love for him came from deep within her doggie-heart... her 'daddy' was her hero, her soul-mate, her god. Without a doubt, if Gracie could have put her 48-pound self into my husband's pocket, she would have. It's surprising to me that she never found a way to do just that.
Looking back now, maybe Gracie was smart enough to realize that she didn't have to put herself into my husband's pocket... all she had to do, and she most certainly did, was put herself into his heart.
And Gracie, truly amazing Gracie, is still there.
Close, but no cigar. And no puppy, either. Every time we get that close, my husband is usually the one who calls a halt to the procedure. "Do we really want another dog?" he will ask me. (Regarding Winnie the Poohdle, my answer was yes.) "Are we really ready to commit another 15 years to taking care of a dog?" (That's about the time when I give him the look that says "Just which part of 'we' do you think will be taking care of the dog?")
At the end of the debates and discussions, the answer to the dilemma is always the same. "We had a dog. We had the best dog. We had Gracie." And that about ends the discussion for my husband.
We adopted Gracie in October of 1996, shortly after buying our house in Clear Lake. We were barely settled for a month in that house when my husband wanted to 'take a look' at the local SPCA. The look-see found us face-to-face with this little black and white puppy who followed my husband all around the grounds of the SPCA. She sat down when he stopped walking and looked up at him with bright eyes and an honest-to-goodness smile on her little puppy face. As soon as my husband started walking again, that puppy was at his heels, following his every step.
They told us that she was part Border Collie, part Black Lab. The puppy's face turned side to side, from the SPCA worker to my husband, as we all chatted about the puppy. They didn't think she'd get very big... no more than 50 pounds was their best guess. My husband thought 50 pounds was a small dog. I disagreed... my idea of a small dog was less than 15 pounds, like the fluffy lap-dogs that I'd had years ago. "Fifty pounds is nothing," said my husband. In my mind, 50 pounds was a lot of dog, but how could I argue with that puppy-face who wouldn't take her eyes off of my husband.
The Border Collie/Black Lab puppy came home with us that day. We stopped at a local pet shop to buy bowls and a bed, a blanket and a leash, and a training crate. The crate had to be large enough to hold the puppy at her adult weight, so it was a good size. Not the smallest crate in the store, but not the largest, either. The puppy sat on my lap during the drive home, but she never took her eyes away from my husband. They had bonded in the SPCA yard, as if they'd been together forever.
Puppy needed a name. We tried names based on her coloring, which didn't seem to work (too common). Then we tried the usual dog-type names, which again, seemed too common. My husband suggested a people-name, and we tried a few of those, which didn't seem to fit her. At the time, I was reading a book by George Burns, titled "Gracie," a book about the love and marriage of George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen. It was a beautifully written book.
I suggested the name "Gracie." My husband liked the name, and the puppy seemed to like the name as well because she smiled up at my husband and sat by his feet when he said the name to her. So Gracie it was. The name was cute, the name fit somehow, and over the years, we would also call her Princess Grace, and Gracie Boo-Boo....... but officially, her name was Gracie.
I quickly realized just how energetic a puppy can be when it has the genes of a Border Collie and a Black Lab. There were many days when my husband came home from work and I told him "This dog has got to go back! I can't control her, and you're gone more than you're home and I'm stuck with this crazy puppy!"
As always, in questionable situations, my husband checked the Internet. He looked under dog trainers and found a local young man just setting up a puppy and dog training business. We signed Gracie up for obedience classes. At first, both my husband and I took Gracie to the lessons. Then my husband's job got in the way of the classes, so it was just me and Gracie with the dog-trainer, and then me showing my husband what 'we' had learned.
The obedience classes were the best idea.... Gracie became the best-trained dog in the neighborhood. She could be stubborn at times, especially if we had to do those lessons after it had just rained. (Princess Grace did not like walking through puddles.) As Gracie grew up through her puppy-hood, and entered into her own little dog-world, she was indeed an obedient and well-trained dog. My husband always walked her without a leash, and just one word from him (as in "Gracie!") would have her immediately at his side and looking up at him with love and loyalty.
The dog-training classes were instrumental in teaching Gracie not to chase our cats. We asked the trainer to come to our house for those lessons, and young-puppy Gracie quickly caught on that chasing our cats was not allowed. In all the years we had Gracie, she never once hurt or even ran after one of 'her' cats. Actually, our cats just loved her and would curl up next to her as she slept. Gracie only drew the doggie-line in the sand if the cats tried to take one of her chew-toys.... Gracie would just walk slowly towards the stolen chew-toy and take it away from the cat-thief.
My husband taught Gracie to sit and wait when she got to the corner of a street. Both Gracie and my husband would look both ways before crossing, but Gracie wouldn't move off the curb until my husband said "Let's go, Gracie!" My husband also taught Gracie to play "Hide and Seek," telling her to sit in the kitchen of our Clear Lake house while he went to another part of the house to hide. I would stand there with Gracie, counting to 20.... and then I'd tell Gracie "Go find Daddy!"... and off she would go, looking behind doors, in closets, behind furniture and curtains. She would have such a serious look on her face as she searched, and then as soon as she found him, she would break into that big doggie-smile of hers and literally jump for joy.
After countless times of Gracie 'finding' my husband, we decided to see what would happen if my husband and I changed places. He stood there with Gracie and counted to 20, and I went to hide. From the other side of the house, I could hear my husband saying "Go find Mommy!" Then I heard it again... and again... and yet again. Turned out that when my husband said that to Gracie, she just sat there in the kitchen, looking up at him and smiling, not at all interested in 'finding Mommy.' My husband felt so badly for me, but I just laughed. Gracie was his dog, and had been from Day One. I was just there to walk Gracie when he wasn't home, and I was the one who made sure she had food and water and chew-toys. In Gracie's mind, I could be replaced by a robot. But my husband was her Daddy.
When Gracie was about two years old, I was walking in the neighborhood park with a friend and we saw a man walking a dog that looked just like Gracie. I stopped to talk to the man, and I asked him about his dog.... he had adopted the dog (a male) from the same SPCA, in the same month and year as we had adopted Gracie. When we had first seen Gracie, they told us that she'd come to the SPCA with a male puppy from the same litter, so that man in the park that day was walking with our Gracie's brother. I told the man our Gracie's story, and asked him what he had named his dog..... his dog's name was George. I asked him why he chose that name, and he said the dog had the personality of his Uncle George, and they couldn't think of a better name for him, and the name George just seemed to be the best fit. We were both stunned..... George and Gracie! (Honestly, you just couldn't make this stuff up!) Later on that week, my husband and I walked Gracie across the park to meet her brother George, but they didn't remember one another at all. They sniffed each other, and then just sat there, content to chew on the dog biscuits that we had brought along for George.
When you don't have children, your pets become your children, and that's what happened with Gracie. When she was a small puppy, I took her to yard sales with me every Saturday morning. She would wait for me in the car and sniff and inspect everything I bought at the sales. If I bought a small stuffed animal for her, she would hold on to it during the rest of the car ride, then drop it at my husband's feet when we got home.
We took her to Galveston with us when we went to the beach... she would watch my husband swimming out in the Gulf, but wouldn't follow him out into the surf. Princess Grace didn't like getting her paws wet, but she wouldn't leave the water's edge as long as my husband was swimming. Gracie would sit there on the damp sand, waiting for her hero to come back from the sea.
When we traveled, we found an excellent pet-sitter for Gracie and our cats. The first time we went away, poor Gracie must have thought we had abandoned her. Our pet-sitter took a photo of Gracie after we'd gone, and the sad look on her face was heart-breaking. By the second trip, however, Gracie was smiling in the pet-sitter's photos.... she quickly learned that we'd be coming back, plus she truly trusted and loved the awesome man who took care of our 'gang' when we were gone. The pet-sitter always told us that he felt like "The Mayor of Clear Lake" when he was out walking Gracie because everyone knew her by name, everyone petted her, and Gracie even sat still when small children tugged on her fur, as if she knew they didn't know any better.
Gracie was 13 years old when we moved from the ranch-style house in Clear Lake to this three-story Victorian in the Hill Country. Not having grown up with steps and staircases, Gracie couldn't get past the first floor of this house. The main staircases are wood, and not carpeted, and Gracie's legs kept sliding as she tried to follow my husband up the stairs. More than once, Gracie slid back down the first three or four steps that she tried to conquer. We finally decided that to keep her safe, we had to keep her on the first floor only. Every night, we would say goodnight to Gracie, and tell her to stay in the kitchen. I put her blanket in a warm corner, and we got an area rug for the center of the room. She was comfortable, but I'm sure she wasn't too happy about not sleeping by my husband's side of the bed. Every morning when my husband came down the stairs, he would say "Gracie Boo-Boo! Good morning, Gracie!" And she would watch him walking down those stairs, smiling her big doggie-smile, and then rub herself against his legs like a cat.
Gracie seemed to like this house and the property. When we first moved here, she would lay in the grass under the pecan trees, just watching the country-world go by.... horses and cows and goats across the road, ducks in the pond, dozens and dozens of birds. There was one special day that my husband and I still talk about...... Gracie and the cats were in the shade under the trees, our chickens were pecking the grass near the flowerbeds, and my husband and I were picking the pecans that had fallen from the trees. It was a Norman Rockwell painting... with gentle Gracie knowing that the cats and the chickens belonged to us, that they were not for chasing or hurting... it was a painting come to life out here in the Hill Country.
In her 14th year, Gracie started to slow down. She didn't want to walk much, and would go into the yard and stay out there only if my husband was outside. With me, she would go out into the grass to 'take care of her business,' but then come back up on the porch, wanting to be back in the house and either on her blanket or in the middle of the kitchen rug. I was constantly tripping over her..... I would tell her "We have 23 acres here and you're always right under my feet, Gracie!" And she would look at me with sad eyes. (The doggie-smiles were only for my husband.)
On a hot summer morning in mid-July of 2010, I walked into the kitchen and found Gracie stretched out on the kitchen tiles. There was a puddle of blood underneath her, and she tried to wag her tail as I talked to her. I quickly called upstairs to my husband, we telephoned the vet, and within ten minutes we were out of the house and driving towards the main road with Gracie on a blanket in the back seat of the car.
The vet was gentle and kind, but the look on his face spoke volumes. A tumor had been growing inside of Gracie.... we had no idea. The bleeding meant that the tumor had burst, and its position made it totally inoperable, especially in a dog of her age. We didn't wake up that morning with the intention of having to make such a monumental decision about this once-tiny puppy who grew into a 48-pound dog who was exceptionally beyond measure in character, intelligence, and loyalty.
It was my husband's decision in 1996 to adopt Gracie, and it was his decision in 2010 to have Gracie put to sleep. My husband stayed with Gracie till the very end, but I waited outside the examining room. I think the hardest thing we had to do was leave her behind when it was all over. My husband walked back to the car holding Gracie's leash, and I was holding the receipt for the procedure. I remember getting into the car and looking at that piece of paper and thinking "This is how Gracie's life ends? With a piece of paper?"
The house without Gracie seemed too quiet and too empty. We weren't missing just a dog, we were missing a true member of our family. Cats are cats, and if you're lucky, you have cats that are social and interactive and interested in their humans, which our cats have always been. But a dog.... a dog is just different somehow. Your dog truly becomes part of your family; your cat believes it owns the family. And therein lies the difference.
We have been dog-less for four years now. Every once in a while, we look at Pet-Finders, or my husband looks at the sites for Border Collie rescues, and last year, we met a lady selling that tiny puppy that we would have named Winnie The Poohdle. (How we walked away from that one, I'll never know.)
I keep saying that I don't want another Border Collie, or even a Border Collie mix. Gracie didn't exceed the SPCA's estimate of 50 pounds, but still, at 48 pounds, she was a lot of dog to handle at times. (For me, anyway... for my husband, she was a piece of cake.)
If we had bought Winnie The Poohdle, I would have been dressing up that tiny dog in cute little outfits that would have embarrassed my husband. I know that he wants a bigger dog than one of the miniature or toy breeds, if we ever do get another dog. The bottom line is, my husband would really like another Gracie.
In my mind, there was only one Gracie. We were lucky enough to have her for 14 years, and my husband was lucky enough to have been adored by such a loyal and loving dog. I can still see Gracie's bright eyes when she was looking at my husband... her expression of love for him came from deep within her doggie-heart... her 'daddy' was her hero, her soul-mate, her god. Without a doubt, if Gracie could have put her 48-pound self into my husband's pocket, she would have. It's surprising to me that she never found a way to do just that.
Looking back now, maybe Gracie was smart enough to realize that she didn't have to put herself into my husband's pocket... all she had to do, and she most certainly did, was put herself into his heart.
And Gracie, truly amazing Gracie, is still there.
Friday, March 14, 2014
This Big Old House.
We found this house just because we decided to drive down this particular road.... we liked the name on the street sign and on a whim, we made that turn to have a look-see. All that week, we had been up here in the Hill Country, looking at houses and trying to find one that would make it 'worth our while' to leave the Clear Lake area. We had gone through two hurricanes...... two evacuations...... and thankfully, our Gulf area house had not been damaged, but we didn't want to wait and see if we could get away with that kind of miracle during the next hurricane season.
So my husband searched the real estate listings on the Internet.... looking for houses which had years of character and acres of property... a house that said 'home' to both of us. We didn't even bother looking at subdivisions... my husband said that if we did indeed move, he didn't want another backyard surrounded by a six-foot-tall wooden fence. He wanted land, and lots of it. If we were going to move, I wanted vintage charm and original details.
Down this road we came that day.... it was the 17th of March in 2009. The road was a typical country lane that was shared by two lanes of traffic but the width of the road was about a lane-and-a-half. You had to drive slowly, in case another car was coming the opposite way... and plus all the properties along this road were spread out and there were horses and cows to look at, and wildflowers popping up along the fence lines. And the trees.... mostly all of the road was under a canopy of tree limbs that shaded your car as you drove along.... live oaks and pecans and pines... and even some flowering trees alongside the creek that we didn't even realize was there till we were driving over it.
We got to the end of that road and discovered that a big old Victorian house was sitting by itself up on a hill, surrounded by pastures filled with green grass and a large pond and the promises of wildflower blooms. "Now there's a house," said my husband..... "Why couldn't we find something like that for sale?"
He had stopped the car in the middle of the road and we just looked up at that house... a wrap-around porch that went all around the house... three floors of vintage windows, some of them stained glass... a gazebo in the side yard... a guest cottage in the backyard.... a barn on the back pasture.... wherever you looked, it seemed to be just perfect. I suggested that we drive further up the hill leading to the house, so we could have a look from the other side of the property.... and my husband did just that.
That's when we saw the "For Sale" sign... right by the mailbox. I told my husband to pull into the driveway... we could see if anyone was home, maybe they'd let us look at the inside. "We'll just take the phone number from the sign and call the agent," was my husband's answer. Not good enough for me... we were right there!
"Don't get your hopes up," my husband told me as he pulled into the driveway. (Hopes? I was already thinking of places to get packing boxes for everything in our Clear Lake house.) Before he had turned off the engine, I was out of the car and walking up the back steps of the porch. No one answered the doorbell when I rang it, but I didn't see that being much of a problem. I started looking into every window that wasn't fully covered with a curtain..... I saw part of the kitchen, all of the foyer, most of the living room, part of the dining room..... and I told my husband "This is our house."
"We don't even know the price," my husband told me. Details.... details.... men get caught up in such non-emotional details. I was already picturing our living room furniture in that living room... and I knew that our dining room table could be opened up with all its extensions and there would still be room to dance in that spectacular dining room.
My husband insisted we take down the number from the sign, check out the listing on the Internet, see how long it had been on the market, and then make an appointment with the agent to come back and see this house. Fine. Let him have his manly way. I was already making up a floor plan in my mind and deciding where I would place the sofa and the chairs.... the paintings and the mirrors... and our antique French telephone table would of course be put in the foyer near the stairs. In my mind, we were already 'home' and all I had to do was start packing.
We came back to see the inside of the house on a glorious day... birds were singing, goats and cows and horses were grazing in the property across the road, barn swallows were building nests on 'our' property, wildflowers were starting to bloom with sincere promises to transform the green pastures into Impressionist paintings. The inside of the house was more than I could have asked for... original wood floors, original stained glass windows, original built-in cabinets in both the kitchen and the dining room, French doors connecting the breakfast room to the dining room, the main staircase had two landings and a leaded glass window, and there was a second stairway coming up from the kitchen that met with the second landing of the front stairway. All of the bedrooms had their own bathrooms.... the second floor hallway was a room in and of itself... the third floor would be the library of my dreams. This was it. We were home.
"What will we do with all of those bedrooms?" my husband wanted to know. Details... details. I told him we'd do the same thing we did with "all" the bedrooms in our other house... the largest would be the master bedroom, the next largest would be his office, the other two would be my sitting room and my dressing room. "And what about the master bedroom that's on the first floor?" he wanted to know. Well, that was easy..... that would be the TV room, and I could keep the cats in there as well, to keep them from going all over the rest of the house. It all sounded so simple to me.
We moved into this house on Memorial Day weekend, 2009. The moving men were astounded that they never had to move a piece of furniture twice. I followed them around this house as they carried each piece inside..... "That goes over there.... that goes in the corner in this room.... that goes right near the window in that room...." I knew the furniture plan by heart.... as I spent all those weeks in Clear Lake packing up decorative and fragile treasures, my mind was back here in the Hill Country, picturing our furniture in this house.... I knew where everything would be placed even before the movers had taken our furniture out of the old house.
Even before we signed the papers at the closing, this big old Victorian felt like the house where I was born, in Woodhaven, Queens. The same three landings on the main staircase.... the same narrow slats on the vintage wood floors, nearly the same parquet designs on the dining room floor.... even the leaded glass windows. Not only did this house match up with that Woodhaven house, but it also reminded me of Grandma and Grandpa's home in Queens.... the same archway between the living room and the dining room, the French doors, the old windows, the history of the house itself. The only difference was that this house had been fully renovated.... central air-conditioning, a pantry converted to a laundry room, a second pantry converted to a first floor half-bath.... and the kitchen tiles were identical to those in Grandma's house. A little miracle there, one that I hadn't noticed that day I was on the porch and peeking through the windows because no one was at home.
It took some time getting used to.... this house was larger than our Clear Lake house, plus it had three floors instead of one.... the garage was bigger, and then there was the guest cottage and the guest rooms above the barn. And then the property.... 23 acres was indeed more property than the quarter-acre we had in Clear Lake. But wasn't this what we wanted? A larger home with vintage charm, far far away from The Gulf and out of hurricane range.
I walk around this house and see all of our furniture sitting in their just-so places.... our furniture that we bought during the past 20 years, plus furniture that had belonged to my husband's mother and both of my grandmothers. Everything is in just the right place here, and everything looks as if it has all been right here since the day the house was built in 1907. It's like living in a three-story Victorian doll-house.
Tucked out here in the Hill Country, I never gave a thought about the wildlife that surrounds this house... all of those night-time animals living in the woods at the perimeter of our property. It seems that once the sun sets and darkness falls, the woods come alive with all those creatures. Coyotes, armadillos, possums, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, snakes, and heaven only knows what else is out there during the night that I don't see. And who knew that scorpions by the millions were up here in The Hill Country, along with some of the largest spiders I've ever seen in my entire life.
During the day, the horses and cows and goats on the neighboring properties look serene and beautiful as they graze and roam around the fields. But then there are days when the baby goats are crying out for their mamas and they sound like human babies who have been abandoned. On other days, I can hear the mama cows crying for their calves who were taken to market. When I hear those poignant cries, I can't even sit outside on the porch... I come into the house and close the doors and either sit here and type or go up to the third-floor library and read.
When we had finished settling into this house, my husband turned an existing dog kennel into a chicken coop. Fresh eggs! What could be better? We bought six pretty hens, discovered they each had their own personalities and I named them all and they would come running across the yard when I called out to them. And the eggs every morning... those beautiful little miracles left in the nesting boxes for us. And then came the hawks, and the coyotes, and the snakes. One by one, my beautiful hens were 'lost' to the wildlife around us. We tried again, buying six new hens, each with their own personalities, and I gave them names. They all ran across the yard when I called them. And then... the coyotes... the snakes... it all happened again. When the last (and my favorite) hen was killed by a snake, we turned the chicken coop into a screen-porch for our outside cats. I went back to buying eggs at the store like the rest of the world.
When we first moved here, we had a lawn service come out to take care of the grass around the house and the cottage and the barn. Before too long, my husband bought a riding mower and now he does all that landscaping, and I help with a smaller mower that gets into the tight spaces. I'm probably the only woman out here in the hills who's wearing makeup and earrings while walking behind a lawn mower. I've weeded and mulched flowerbeds, watered a vegetable garden, and I don't even scream anymore when I find a green and black ribbon snake behind the azaleas. And when the gardening gloves come off, I have to stifle a little scream when I see a broken nail and a ruined manicure.
In the long summer that stretches on for months and months in the state of Texas, we have gone through countless weeks of over 100-degree days that have scorched the pastures and turned green grass into something that sounds like cornflakes when you walk across it. Our beautiful pond is filled with swimming ducks and croaking frogs in the spring-time, but a long hot summer will dry up every bit of water from one end to the other, making the pond look like just a big hole in the ground.
And then the short winter months have turned into frigid stupidity up here in the Hill Country these past five years. We watch the daily weather broadcasts and when the temperatures drop anywhere near the freezing point, we drip all the faucets and turn on heaters in the barn and the cottage, in the hopes that no pipes will freeze when the winds come whipping through these hills. Everyone's property is so large that there are no buffers for the wind.... a 40-degree dot on the thermometer can turn into 29 degrees with the blessed wind-chill factor that the weather wizards on TV are always talking about. The first time we had such weather, pipes froze by the water-well in the barn..... the water coming into the house was non-existent. We called a plumber for a quick fix, but half of the County had the same problem..... totally unexpected weather conditions.... it was a nightmare for the Hill Country. As a result, my husband taught himself to be a plumber and he re-plumbed every blessed pipe that had frozen.
There are days when I truly love every square inch of this big old historic house. And then there are other days when I wish I could snap my fingers and have this house reappear on a quiet street within thirty minutes of the Houston theater and museum district and within a ten-minute drive to a SteinMart and a really good shoe store.
We left very good friends back in Clear Lake, and we have made very good friends here in the Hill Country. We left a perfectly good house on a Clear Lake cul de sac, and bought a perfectly grand house on 23 acres in the Hill Country. Our Clear Lake house was too small for the big parties that we hosted for every holiday and occasion imaginable, and this vintage Victorian house is too big for the small parties that we have hosted here. No one has yet danced in our spectacular dining room and large living room in this house, but I can still remember the Conga Line that weaved through our small Clear Lake house when the steel drum band played at our Christmas party one year.
I sometimes wonder if our 'old' house had too many memories that we still keep so close to heart, and maybe this 'new' house just hasn't had enough opportunities to create more memories that we can add to our hearts.
I could live without the threatening wildlife, especially the snakes. I would miss the deer and the barn swallows and the wildflowers. I could live without the water-well and the pumping system, and would give anything at all if 'city water' was available out here in these hills. I would miss the sunsets and the zillions of wildflowers and the full moon shining through our pecan trees, but I could easily give up the scorpions.
If we hadn't bought this house, where would we be now? We were determined to move out of the hurricane zone near the Gulf. We were determined to have property not surrounded by subdivision fences. We now have everything we wished for, and then some.
Maybe it's the "and then some" that gets to me from time to time.
So my husband searched the real estate listings on the Internet.... looking for houses which had years of character and acres of property... a house that said 'home' to both of us. We didn't even bother looking at subdivisions... my husband said that if we did indeed move, he didn't want another backyard surrounded by a six-foot-tall wooden fence. He wanted land, and lots of it. If we were going to move, I wanted vintage charm and original details.
Down this road we came that day.... it was the 17th of March in 2009. The road was a typical country lane that was shared by two lanes of traffic but the width of the road was about a lane-and-a-half. You had to drive slowly, in case another car was coming the opposite way... and plus all the properties along this road were spread out and there were horses and cows to look at, and wildflowers popping up along the fence lines. And the trees.... mostly all of the road was under a canopy of tree limbs that shaded your car as you drove along.... live oaks and pecans and pines... and even some flowering trees alongside the creek that we didn't even realize was there till we were driving over it.
We got to the end of that road and discovered that a big old Victorian house was sitting by itself up on a hill, surrounded by pastures filled with green grass and a large pond and the promises of wildflower blooms. "Now there's a house," said my husband..... "Why couldn't we find something like that for sale?"
He had stopped the car in the middle of the road and we just looked up at that house... a wrap-around porch that went all around the house... three floors of vintage windows, some of them stained glass... a gazebo in the side yard... a guest cottage in the backyard.... a barn on the back pasture.... wherever you looked, it seemed to be just perfect. I suggested that we drive further up the hill leading to the house, so we could have a look from the other side of the property.... and my husband did just that.
That's when we saw the "For Sale" sign... right by the mailbox. I told my husband to pull into the driveway... we could see if anyone was home, maybe they'd let us look at the inside. "We'll just take the phone number from the sign and call the agent," was my husband's answer. Not good enough for me... we were right there!
"Don't get your hopes up," my husband told me as he pulled into the driveway. (Hopes? I was already thinking of places to get packing boxes for everything in our Clear Lake house.) Before he had turned off the engine, I was out of the car and walking up the back steps of the porch. No one answered the doorbell when I rang it, but I didn't see that being much of a problem. I started looking into every window that wasn't fully covered with a curtain..... I saw part of the kitchen, all of the foyer, most of the living room, part of the dining room..... and I told my husband "This is our house."
"We don't even know the price," my husband told me. Details.... details.... men get caught up in such non-emotional details. I was already picturing our living room furniture in that living room... and I knew that our dining room table could be opened up with all its extensions and there would still be room to dance in that spectacular dining room.
My husband insisted we take down the number from the sign, check out the listing on the Internet, see how long it had been on the market, and then make an appointment with the agent to come back and see this house. Fine. Let him have his manly way. I was already making up a floor plan in my mind and deciding where I would place the sofa and the chairs.... the paintings and the mirrors... and our antique French telephone table would of course be put in the foyer near the stairs. In my mind, we were already 'home' and all I had to do was start packing.
We came back to see the inside of the house on a glorious day... birds were singing, goats and cows and horses were grazing in the property across the road, barn swallows were building nests on 'our' property, wildflowers were starting to bloom with sincere promises to transform the green pastures into Impressionist paintings. The inside of the house was more than I could have asked for... original wood floors, original stained glass windows, original built-in cabinets in both the kitchen and the dining room, French doors connecting the breakfast room to the dining room, the main staircase had two landings and a leaded glass window, and there was a second stairway coming up from the kitchen that met with the second landing of the front stairway. All of the bedrooms had their own bathrooms.... the second floor hallway was a room in and of itself... the third floor would be the library of my dreams. This was it. We were home.
"What will we do with all of those bedrooms?" my husband wanted to know. Details... details. I told him we'd do the same thing we did with "all" the bedrooms in our other house... the largest would be the master bedroom, the next largest would be his office, the other two would be my sitting room and my dressing room. "And what about the master bedroom that's on the first floor?" he wanted to know. Well, that was easy..... that would be the TV room, and I could keep the cats in there as well, to keep them from going all over the rest of the house. It all sounded so simple to me.
We moved into this house on Memorial Day weekend, 2009. The moving men were astounded that they never had to move a piece of furniture twice. I followed them around this house as they carried each piece inside..... "That goes over there.... that goes in the corner in this room.... that goes right near the window in that room...." I knew the furniture plan by heart.... as I spent all those weeks in Clear Lake packing up decorative and fragile treasures, my mind was back here in the Hill Country, picturing our furniture in this house.... I knew where everything would be placed even before the movers had taken our furniture out of the old house.
Even before we signed the papers at the closing, this big old Victorian felt like the house where I was born, in Woodhaven, Queens. The same three landings on the main staircase.... the same narrow slats on the vintage wood floors, nearly the same parquet designs on the dining room floor.... even the leaded glass windows. Not only did this house match up with that Woodhaven house, but it also reminded me of Grandma and Grandpa's home in Queens.... the same archway between the living room and the dining room, the French doors, the old windows, the history of the house itself. The only difference was that this house had been fully renovated.... central air-conditioning, a pantry converted to a laundry room, a second pantry converted to a first floor half-bath.... and the kitchen tiles were identical to those in Grandma's house. A little miracle there, one that I hadn't noticed that day I was on the porch and peeking through the windows because no one was at home.
It took some time getting used to.... this house was larger than our Clear Lake house, plus it had three floors instead of one.... the garage was bigger, and then there was the guest cottage and the guest rooms above the barn. And then the property.... 23 acres was indeed more property than the quarter-acre we had in Clear Lake. But wasn't this what we wanted? A larger home with vintage charm, far far away from The Gulf and out of hurricane range.
I walk around this house and see all of our furniture sitting in their just-so places.... our furniture that we bought during the past 20 years, plus furniture that had belonged to my husband's mother and both of my grandmothers. Everything is in just the right place here, and everything looks as if it has all been right here since the day the house was built in 1907. It's like living in a three-story Victorian doll-house.
Tucked out here in the Hill Country, I never gave a thought about the wildlife that surrounds this house... all of those night-time animals living in the woods at the perimeter of our property. It seems that once the sun sets and darkness falls, the woods come alive with all those creatures. Coyotes, armadillos, possums, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, snakes, and heaven only knows what else is out there during the night that I don't see. And who knew that scorpions by the millions were up here in The Hill Country, along with some of the largest spiders I've ever seen in my entire life.
During the day, the horses and cows and goats on the neighboring properties look serene and beautiful as they graze and roam around the fields. But then there are days when the baby goats are crying out for their mamas and they sound like human babies who have been abandoned. On other days, I can hear the mama cows crying for their calves who were taken to market. When I hear those poignant cries, I can't even sit outside on the porch... I come into the house and close the doors and either sit here and type or go up to the third-floor library and read.
When we had finished settling into this house, my husband turned an existing dog kennel into a chicken coop. Fresh eggs! What could be better? We bought six pretty hens, discovered they each had their own personalities and I named them all and they would come running across the yard when I called out to them. And the eggs every morning... those beautiful little miracles left in the nesting boxes for us. And then came the hawks, and the coyotes, and the snakes. One by one, my beautiful hens were 'lost' to the wildlife around us. We tried again, buying six new hens, each with their own personalities, and I gave them names. They all ran across the yard when I called them. And then... the coyotes... the snakes... it all happened again. When the last (and my favorite) hen was killed by a snake, we turned the chicken coop into a screen-porch for our outside cats. I went back to buying eggs at the store like the rest of the world.
When we first moved here, we had a lawn service come out to take care of the grass around the house and the cottage and the barn. Before too long, my husband bought a riding mower and now he does all that landscaping, and I help with a smaller mower that gets into the tight spaces. I'm probably the only woman out here in the hills who's wearing makeup and earrings while walking behind a lawn mower. I've weeded and mulched flowerbeds, watered a vegetable garden, and I don't even scream anymore when I find a green and black ribbon snake behind the azaleas. And when the gardening gloves come off, I have to stifle a little scream when I see a broken nail and a ruined manicure.
In the long summer that stretches on for months and months in the state of Texas, we have gone through countless weeks of over 100-degree days that have scorched the pastures and turned green grass into something that sounds like cornflakes when you walk across it. Our beautiful pond is filled with swimming ducks and croaking frogs in the spring-time, but a long hot summer will dry up every bit of water from one end to the other, making the pond look like just a big hole in the ground.
And then the short winter months have turned into frigid stupidity up here in the Hill Country these past five years. We watch the daily weather broadcasts and when the temperatures drop anywhere near the freezing point, we drip all the faucets and turn on heaters in the barn and the cottage, in the hopes that no pipes will freeze when the winds come whipping through these hills. Everyone's property is so large that there are no buffers for the wind.... a 40-degree dot on the thermometer can turn into 29 degrees with the blessed wind-chill factor that the weather wizards on TV are always talking about. The first time we had such weather, pipes froze by the water-well in the barn..... the water coming into the house was non-existent. We called a plumber for a quick fix, but half of the County had the same problem..... totally unexpected weather conditions.... it was a nightmare for the Hill Country. As a result, my husband taught himself to be a plumber and he re-plumbed every blessed pipe that had frozen.
There are days when I truly love every square inch of this big old historic house. And then there are other days when I wish I could snap my fingers and have this house reappear on a quiet street within thirty minutes of the Houston theater and museum district and within a ten-minute drive to a SteinMart and a really good shoe store.
We left very good friends back in Clear Lake, and we have made very good friends here in the Hill Country. We left a perfectly good house on a Clear Lake cul de sac, and bought a perfectly grand house on 23 acres in the Hill Country. Our Clear Lake house was too small for the big parties that we hosted for every holiday and occasion imaginable, and this vintage Victorian house is too big for the small parties that we have hosted here. No one has yet danced in our spectacular dining room and large living room in this house, but I can still remember the Conga Line that weaved through our small Clear Lake house when the steel drum band played at our Christmas party one year.
I sometimes wonder if our 'old' house had too many memories that we still keep so close to heart, and maybe this 'new' house just hasn't had enough opportunities to create more memories that we can add to our hearts.
I could live without the threatening wildlife, especially the snakes. I would miss the deer and the barn swallows and the wildflowers. I could live without the water-well and the pumping system, and would give anything at all if 'city water' was available out here in these hills. I would miss the sunsets and the zillions of wildflowers and the full moon shining through our pecan trees, but I could easily give up the scorpions.
If we hadn't bought this house, where would we be now? We were determined to move out of the hurricane zone near the Gulf. We were determined to have property not surrounded by subdivision fences. We now have everything we wished for, and then some.
Maybe it's the "and then some" that gets to me from time to time.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
The Best Seat In the House.
In the kitchen of my grandparents' house (my dad's parents), a blue and white tiled chimney rose up from the basement, through the kitchen, and up through the second and third floors of the house. There wasn't a fireplace in that house, but the chimney was somehow connected to the oil-burning furnace (originally heated by chunks of coal which were delivered through a little trap-door in the basement).
During cold winter days in New York, that chimney was a source of heat that warmed up the kitchen even more than Grandma's oven. My grandfather's German Shepherd dog Major would lay next to the chimney on the coldest of days, leaving the cold floor of his sleeping spot in the back pantry in favor of the warm floor next to the chimney. Major somehow knew not to leave that space by the side of the warm chimney... if he did, he would be banished back to the pantry and would have to make do with the cold air coming in from around the back door.
In front of that chimney sat a step-stool. In the 1940s, it was brand-new, the best that the local hardware store had to offer. The stool's two steps folded up underneath a square-shaped seat that was covered in a white pattern of vinyl. If someone had to change a light-bulb or hang up curtains, the stool would be moved from its spot, the steps folded out and ready for the chore at hand. When the work was done, the stool was put back in front of the chimney. There were two pantries adjacent to that kitchen, both of which were about the size of a 9' x 12' room. Plenty of space in either pantry to store that step-stool, but Grandma preferred to have it by the chimney, which was right next to the oven.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all of the grandchildren would use that stool as a desk... folding down the two steps, sitting on the top step with their legs underneath the seat of the stool. It was perfect as a child-sized writing desk. Great for small games or coloring books, a private table for a snack. As each child grew too tall to sit on the steps of that stool, the next grandchild in line would have it all to themselves most of the time, having to share it with only one other cousin at a time.
Every aunt and uncle would sit on top of the stool, talking to Grandma as she cooked. No matter what was cooking on the stove-top or in the oven, whoever was sitting on that stool had the best view of the process, and the first taste of whatever Grandma was cooking. If Grandma had tomato sauce cooking (we called it 'gravy' then) whoever was sitting on the stool got the heel of the Italian bread dipped into the gravy and sprinkled with grated cheese. Grandma would watch us tasting the gravy-covered bread and she would say "Good, eh?"
When I was three years old, I sat at that little stool while Grandma was making dough for homemade ravioli. To keep me out of her way, Grandma gave me a round circle of dough and a small rolling pin, telling me to "Make something." I remember rolling out the dough, trying to get it to cover the entire top square of that stool. I watched Grandma rolling out her own massive rectangle of dough on the kitchen table, cutting it into squares for the ravioli, and I wanted to do the same thing. I asked Grandma for a knife, so I could make straight lines in the dough, as she was doing. Busy with the ravioli, Grandma gave me what she thought was a butter knife, but I found out quickly that the knife had sharp teeth at one end....... and I had sliced through the vinyl cover of the stool within seconds.
As I looked at the seat cover, the small split opened up like an eye.... when it finally stopped moving, the scar was about two inches long and half an inch wide. I put the knife down on the stool and called my grandmother. She was not happy... not because of the cut in the vinyl, but because she had been careless in handing me a knife that could have cut my fingers. Grandma made 'the sign of the cross' and thanked God that I hadn't cut off my finger. "The stool, she can be replaced... but there's only one of you, and you still have ten fingers, thank God." Grandma would repeat that story to all of my aunts and uncles over the years.
My Aunt Dolly had bought that stool for Grandma's kitchen..... they needed a step-stool for reaching the higher cabinets, for changing light-bulbs, changing curtains. Aunt Dolly had no idea that the little stool would become such a beloved icon in Grandma's kitchen. We all called it "the best seat in the house" because it was near the oven, near Grandma, and it was the warmest place to sit on cold winter days.
Everyone in the family, at one time or another, used that stool as their favorite spot to sit while in the kitchen. My grandfather would sit on the stool waiting for the coffee to perk in the morning... he would get up an hour before Grandma and the coffee would be ready and waiting for her when she came down the stairs. When my dad took a hair-cutting course in the 1960s, nearly everyone in the family sat on that stool so he could get extra practice by trimming our hair. Uncle Mino would sit there and read The Daily News while my grandmother made his lunch. When I was a teenager, I sat on that stool reading library books or studying for a test at school. Aunt Dolly used the stool when she wrote out a grocery list. Aunt Edie sat there countless times after she had polished her fingernails, letting her hands rest on her lap as she waited for the nail polish to dry. And Aunt Jaye would sit on that little stool, take one long look at my dad, and tell him that if he came within two feet of her hair with the scissors, she would take a bread knife and cut off his arm.
In the 1970s, the legs of the stool became loose from all the folding and un-folding of the two little steps. My dad found new screw-type bolts with larger nuts to make it more secure. It was harder to fold and un-fold the steps, but at least the stool was sturdy enough for yet another generation of grandchildren. During the decade of the '70s, Aunt Dolly had Grandma's kitchen chairs re-covered with new green vinyl. When all the chairs were covered and there was vinyl left over, she decided to cover the top of the little stool. The cut I had made with the knife was always there for everyone to see, and now it had disappeared under the new vinyl. Without exception, as the rest of the family came into the house and noticed the green vinyl on the kitchen chairs, they would look towards the chimney at the stool. "Look at the stool... the sliced spot that Larrie made is covered up now."
In the 1980s, the legs of the kitchen stool were still sturdy enough to hold an adult, but the fold-up steps just didn't work correctly anymore. New screws and bolts couldn't fix the steps because the metal holes had spread wider over so many years of adjusting and tightening and no one trusted the steps as a seat for a grandchild or as a step-up for an adult to reach the top shelf of the cabinets. My dad used heavy wire to tie the fold-up steps to the four legs of the stool, making sure that the stool could only be used as a seat.
The 1990s came, and Grandma's kitchen stool still sat in front of the chimney. Grandma and Grandpa had passed away in the 1970s.... the dog Major had long since died...... all of the cousins I grew up with in the 1950s were adults then, with children of their own. We still gathered at Grandma's house, where Aunt Dolly did all of the cooking and baking.... and whoever happened to be sitting on the little stool got the first taste of the gravy-soaked bread sprinkled with grated cheese.
As we got into the early 2000s, the family decided that Aunt Dolly shouldn't be living alone in that great big house. The neighborhood had changed, the neighbors that she had known for decades had all moved away... everyone agreed that before she got 'too old,' she needed to be in a safer place. Aunt Dolly was about 92 at that time. Before one of my cousins moved her to Florida, Aunt Dolly called everyone in the family to ask them what they would like to have from Grandma's house. She had already decided what she would need in her new rooms in cousin S's home, and the rest would be sold. But before anything was "sold to strangers," she wanted everyone in the family to pick what they would like for their own homes.
We had a lake house at the time... a small cottage-type house sitting next to Lake Livingston in Texas. My husband and I would drive up there on weekends, taking the cats and our dog Gracie with us. I furnished that little house by shopping at estate and yard sales, flea markets and resale shops, and I was happy with the shabby-chic/casual decor of our little get-away-from-Houston home. When Aunt Dolly called to ask me what I wanted from Grandma's house, I told her that I could use the rattan porch set at the lake house..... a sofa and two chairs that had been purchased in the 1930s and looked as new as the day it was first delivered to Grandma's enclosed front porch.
I called a NY moving company to arrange having the porch furniture picked up in NY and delivered to Texas. When the movers got there, Aunt Dolly called me and said the men were wrapping up the set with "yards and yards of bubble-wrap and brown paper." She seemed pleased with the careful packing of the old furniture. Before we ended the phone call, my aunt asked me if I wanted the kitchen stool. (I didn't even ask for that because I was certain that it had already been claimed.) Aunt Dolly said that no one had asked for the stool, no one wanted it.... "Everyone loved that stool when they were little.... now they're all grown up and they don't even talk about it anymore." Before I could give Aunt Dolly my answer, she was talking to the movers, asking them if they had room on their truck for one more thing. When she came back to the phone, I told my aunt that I would love to have the stool.... and the movers wrapped it up in bubble-wrap and brown paper, and I could hear Aunt Dolly telling them "Be careful with that... there's sixty years' worth of memories in that little stool."
I kept Grandma's step-stool in the kitchen of the lake house... it seemed to "go" there, along with the shabby-chic look of everything else. I put Grandma's sofa in one of the guest rooms, and the two rattan chairs sat by the fireplace in the living room. When we sold the lake house, in preparation for moving from Houston to the Hill Country, Grandma's porch furniture went into the TV room of our Houston house, and the little stool was put on the screened-in back porch. My cat AngelBoy would sit on the seat of that stool for hours, looking out at the birds and squirrels in the yard. When he got tired of the view, he would curl up on the seat and go to sleep.
As I type this story, that little stool is downstairs in my kitchen. When we moved to this house, the green vinyl on the seat of the stool matched the green tiles on the kitchen floor.... the same pattern in my kitchen tiles can be found on the kitchen floor of my grandmother's house. (We didn't install the kitchen tiles here... they were chosen by the previous owners.... just another happy little coincidence with this house.)
I was talking to Aunt Dolly one day after we had settled into this home, and she asked me where I had placed Grandma's porch furniture... I told her that the sofa was in the guest cottage and the chairs were in our TV room for now, but I had plans to move the two chairs to the third floor when we turned that space into a library. Aunt Dolly seemed pleased with that, but not pleased that I had removed the plastic slip-covers from all of the cushions. I told her that the plastic slip-covers were too city-ish for this part of Texas. I resisted the urge to tell my aunt that plastic slip-covers had gone out of style after Eisenhower.
"And where did you put the stool?" my aunt wanted to know. I told her it was in the kitchen, right at the end of the island which sat in the center of the room. I told her that I sit on Grandma's stool sometimes when I have breakfast, and when I'm looking through a cookbook. When I told her that the green vinyl matched the tiles on the floor, she said that the stool was meant to be right where it is. Aunt Dolly asked me if I remembered making the little slit on the top of the stool's original white vinyl.... and I told her that yes, I did remember. Aunt Dolly said that for years and years, everyone in the family would run their fingers along that cut in the vinyl and remind Grandma that "Larrie did that when she was about two or three years old."
When I got off the phone that day, I turned the stool upside down and found that there were rusty staples holding the green vinyl in place.... I got a screwdriver to pry up the middle of the staples, and then used a pair of pliers to pull up the old staples. When I took away the square of green vinyl, the white vinyl was underneath, and there was the two-inch slit on the right-hand side of the stool. After all those years, with everyone sitting on top of that stool, the slit in that vinyl never opened up any more than its original length and width.
I cleaned the white vinyl, and tried to polish up the silver metal of the legs on that stool. The heavy wire that my dad used to secure the two little steps was still there, holding firmly to the legs. I ran my fingers over the slit in the white vinyl, hoping that I would feel the essence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins... everyone in my family had touched that same cut in the white vinyl over the years.
I keep a small embroidered tablecloth over the seat of that step-stool now.... not to cover the white vinyl but to hide the silver legs of the stool which, after all these years, have darkened with age. In my mind's eye, I can see a snow-white vinyl-topped stool with mirror-bright chrome legs... and there's a dark-haired little girl sitting on the fold-down steps, rolling out dough and trying to make ravioli like Grandma.
During cold winter days in New York, that chimney was a source of heat that warmed up the kitchen even more than Grandma's oven. My grandfather's German Shepherd dog Major would lay next to the chimney on the coldest of days, leaving the cold floor of his sleeping spot in the back pantry in favor of the warm floor next to the chimney. Major somehow knew not to leave that space by the side of the warm chimney... if he did, he would be banished back to the pantry and would have to make do with the cold air coming in from around the back door.
In front of that chimney sat a step-stool. In the 1940s, it was brand-new, the best that the local hardware store had to offer. The stool's two steps folded up underneath a square-shaped seat that was covered in a white pattern of vinyl. If someone had to change a light-bulb or hang up curtains, the stool would be moved from its spot, the steps folded out and ready for the chore at hand. When the work was done, the stool was put back in front of the chimney. There were two pantries adjacent to that kitchen, both of which were about the size of a 9' x 12' room. Plenty of space in either pantry to store that step-stool, but Grandma preferred to have it by the chimney, which was right next to the oven.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all of the grandchildren would use that stool as a desk... folding down the two steps, sitting on the top step with their legs underneath the seat of the stool. It was perfect as a child-sized writing desk. Great for small games or coloring books, a private table for a snack. As each child grew too tall to sit on the steps of that stool, the next grandchild in line would have it all to themselves most of the time, having to share it with only one other cousin at a time.
Every aunt and uncle would sit on top of the stool, talking to Grandma as she cooked. No matter what was cooking on the stove-top or in the oven, whoever was sitting on that stool had the best view of the process, and the first taste of whatever Grandma was cooking. If Grandma had tomato sauce cooking (we called it 'gravy' then) whoever was sitting on the stool got the heel of the Italian bread dipped into the gravy and sprinkled with grated cheese. Grandma would watch us tasting the gravy-covered bread and she would say "Good, eh?"
When I was three years old, I sat at that little stool while Grandma was making dough for homemade ravioli. To keep me out of her way, Grandma gave me a round circle of dough and a small rolling pin, telling me to "Make something." I remember rolling out the dough, trying to get it to cover the entire top square of that stool. I watched Grandma rolling out her own massive rectangle of dough on the kitchen table, cutting it into squares for the ravioli, and I wanted to do the same thing. I asked Grandma for a knife, so I could make straight lines in the dough, as she was doing. Busy with the ravioli, Grandma gave me what she thought was a butter knife, but I found out quickly that the knife had sharp teeth at one end....... and I had sliced through the vinyl cover of the stool within seconds.
As I looked at the seat cover, the small split opened up like an eye.... when it finally stopped moving, the scar was about two inches long and half an inch wide. I put the knife down on the stool and called my grandmother. She was not happy... not because of the cut in the vinyl, but because she had been careless in handing me a knife that could have cut my fingers. Grandma made 'the sign of the cross' and thanked God that I hadn't cut off my finger. "The stool, she can be replaced... but there's only one of you, and you still have ten fingers, thank God." Grandma would repeat that story to all of my aunts and uncles over the years.
My Aunt Dolly had bought that stool for Grandma's kitchen..... they needed a step-stool for reaching the higher cabinets, for changing light-bulbs, changing curtains. Aunt Dolly had no idea that the little stool would become such a beloved icon in Grandma's kitchen. We all called it "the best seat in the house" because it was near the oven, near Grandma, and it was the warmest place to sit on cold winter days.
Everyone in the family, at one time or another, used that stool as their favorite spot to sit while in the kitchen. My grandfather would sit on the stool waiting for the coffee to perk in the morning... he would get up an hour before Grandma and the coffee would be ready and waiting for her when she came down the stairs. When my dad took a hair-cutting course in the 1960s, nearly everyone in the family sat on that stool so he could get extra practice by trimming our hair. Uncle Mino would sit there and read The Daily News while my grandmother made his lunch. When I was a teenager, I sat on that stool reading library books or studying for a test at school. Aunt Dolly used the stool when she wrote out a grocery list. Aunt Edie sat there countless times after she had polished her fingernails, letting her hands rest on her lap as she waited for the nail polish to dry. And Aunt Jaye would sit on that little stool, take one long look at my dad, and tell him that if he came within two feet of her hair with the scissors, she would take a bread knife and cut off his arm.
In the 1970s, the legs of the stool became loose from all the folding and un-folding of the two little steps. My dad found new screw-type bolts with larger nuts to make it more secure. It was harder to fold and un-fold the steps, but at least the stool was sturdy enough for yet another generation of grandchildren. During the decade of the '70s, Aunt Dolly had Grandma's kitchen chairs re-covered with new green vinyl. When all the chairs were covered and there was vinyl left over, she decided to cover the top of the little stool. The cut I had made with the knife was always there for everyone to see, and now it had disappeared under the new vinyl. Without exception, as the rest of the family came into the house and noticed the green vinyl on the kitchen chairs, they would look towards the chimney at the stool. "Look at the stool... the sliced spot that Larrie made is covered up now."
In the 1980s, the legs of the kitchen stool were still sturdy enough to hold an adult, but the fold-up steps just didn't work correctly anymore. New screws and bolts couldn't fix the steps because the metal holes had spread wider over so many years of adjusting and tightening and no one trusted the steps as a seat for a grandchild or as a step-up for an adult to reach the top shelf of the cabinets. My dad used heavy wire to tie the fold-up steps to the four legs of the stool, making sure that the stool could only be used as a seat.
The 1990s came, and Grandma's kitchen stool still sat in front of the chimney. Grandma and Grandpa had passed away in the 1970s.... the dog Major had long since died...... all of the cousins I grew up with in the 1950s were adults then, with children of their own. We still gathered at Grandma's house, where Aunt Dolly did all of the cooking and baking.... and whoever happened to be sitting on the little stool got the first taste of the gravy-soaked bread sprinkled with grated cheese.
As we got into the early 2000s, the family decided that Aunt Dolly shouldn't be living alone in that great big house. The neighborhood had changed, the neighbors that she had known for decades had all moved away... everyone agreed that before she got 'too old,' she needed to be in a safer place. Aunt Dolly was about 92 at that time. Before one of my cousins moved her to Florida, Aunt Dolly called everyone in the family to ask them what they would like to have from Grandma's house. She had already decided what she would need in her new rooms in cousin S's home, and the rest would be sold. But before anything was "sold to strangers," she wanted everyone in the family to pick what they would like for their own homes.
We had a lake house at the time... a small cottage-type house sitting next to Lake Livingston in Texas. My husband and I would drive up there on weekends, taking the cats and our dog Gracie with us. I furnished that little house by shopping at estate and yard sales, flea markets and resale shops, and I was happy with the shabby-chic/casual decor of our little get-away-from-Houston home. When Aunt Dolly called to ask me what I wanted from Grandma's house, I told her that I could use the rattan porch set at the lake house..... a sofa and two chairs that had been purchased in the 1930s and looked as new as the day it was first delivered to Grandma's enclosed front porch.
I called a NY moving company to arrange having the porch furniture picked up in NY and delivered to Texas. When the movers got there, Aunt Dolly called me and said the men were wrapping up the set with "yards and yards of bubble-wrap and brown paper." She seemed pleased with the careful packing of the old furniture. Before we ended the phone call, my aunt asked me if I wanted the kitchen stool. (I didn't even ask for that because I was certain that it had already been claimed.) Aunt Dolly said that no one had asked for the stool, no one wanted it.... "Everyone loved that stool when they were little.... now they're all grown up and they don't even talk about it anymore." Before I could give Aunt Dolly my answer, she was talking to the movers, asking them if they had room on their truck for one more thing. When she came back to the phone, I told my aunt that I would love to have the stool.... and the movers wrapped it up in bubble-wrap and brown paper, and I could hear Aunt Dolly telling them "Be careful with that... there's sixty years' worth of memories in that little stool."
I kept Grandma's step-stool in the kitchen of the lake house... it seemed to "go" there, along with the shabby-chic look of everything else. I put Grandma's sofa in one of the guest rooms, and the two rattan chairs sat by the fireplace in the living room. When we sold the lake house, in preparation for moving from Houston to the Hill Country, Grandma's porch furniture went into the TV room of our Houston house, and the little stool was put on the screened-in back porch. My cat AngelBoy would sit on the seat of that stool for hours, looking out at the birds and squirrels in the yard. When he got tired of the view, he would curl up on the seat and go to sleep.
As I type this story, that little stool is downstairs in my kitchen. When we moved to this house, the green vinyl on the seat of the stool matched the green tiles on the kitchen floor.... the same pattern in my kitchen tiles can be found on the kitchen floor of my grandmother's house. (We didn't install the kitchen tiles here... they were chosen by the previous owners.... just another happy little coincidence with this house.)
I was talking to Aunt Dolly one day after we had settled into this home, and she asked me where I had placed Grandma's porch furniture... I told her that the sofa was in the guest cottage and the chairs were in our TV room for now, but I had plans to move the two chairs to the third floor when we turned that space into a library. Aunt Dolly seemed pleased with that, but not pleased that I had removed the plastic slip-covers from all of the cushions. I told her that the plastic slip-covers were too city-ish for this part of Texas. I resisted the urge to tell my aunt that plastic slip-covers had gone out of style after Eisenhower.
"And where did you put the stool?" my aunt wanted to know. I told her it was in the kitchen, right at the end of the island which sat in the center of the room. I told her that I sit on Grandma's stool sometimes when I have breakfast, and when I'm looking through a cookbook. When I told her that the green vinyl matched the tiles on the floor, she said that the stool was meant to be right where it is. Aunt Dolly asked me if I remembered making the little slit on the top of the stool's original white vinyl.... and I told her that yes, I did remember. Aunt Dolly said that for years and years, everyone in the family would run their fingers along that cut in the vinyl and remind Grandma that "Larrie did that when she was about two or three years old."
When I got off the phone that day, I turned the stool upside down and found that there were rusty staples holding the green vinyl in place.... I got a screwdriver to pry up the middle of the staples, and then used a pair of pliers to pull up the old staples. When I took away the square of green vinyl, the white vinyl was underneath, and there was the two-inch slit on the right-hand side of the stool. After all those years, with everyone sitting on top of that stool, the slit in that vinyl never opened up any more than its original length and width.
I cleaned the white vinyl, and tried to polish up the silver metal of the legs on that stool. The heavy wire that my dad used to secure the two little steps was still there, holding firmly to the legs. I ran my fingers over the slit in the white vinyl, hoping that I would feel the essence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins... everyone in my family had touched that same cut in the white vinyl over the years.
I keep a small embroidered tablecloth over the seat of that step-stool now.... not to cover the white vinyl but to hide the silver legs of the stool which, after all these years, have darkened with age. In my mind's eye, I can see a snow-white vinyl-topped stool with mirror-bright chrome legs... and there's a dark-haired little girl sitting on the fold-down steps, rolling out dough and trying to make ravioli like Grandma.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Grandma Irma
My grandmother on my mother's side.... such an odd-sounding phrase, but that's how my dad's family referred to her..... "your grandmother on your mother's side." Grandma Irma had pride of place, pride of family, pride of heart and home. She grew up in Rome, very near the Vatican, and her family was one of means. They didn't advertise their affluence, but quietly went their way knowing that their lives were easier than most, which only meant they had more responsibility to help those with less.
I don't know what prompted Grandma Irma to get on a ship and sail across the Atlantic, but when she arrived at Ellis Island she wasn't very happy. Her family had told her that the streets of America were filled with opportunity and paved with golden stones. When Irma got to New York City, she found narrow streets paved with cobblestones and hundreds of dirty-faced children who were either trying to sell newspapers or steal apples and oranges. "I cried when I saw the Statue of Liberty, but I cried harder when I saw the streets of New York."--- that's what Grandma Irma told me when I was a little girl, and she was still saying the same thing in the 1980s.
Grandma Irma's house was always as quiet as a church, as compared to the house of my grandparents on my dad's side which was always filled with family. My mother's mother had three children, my dad's mother had nine (12, actually, but three died very young).....my dad's family provided many more aunts and uncles and cousins, so that house was very rarely quiet.
I don't know how many family members were left in Rome when Irma decided to come to the United States. She didn't talk all that much about her family "on the other side" (as she called Italy). And when I was young, I never got into the habit of asking a lot of questions. I listened to any and all stories concerning both sides of the family.... I paid attention to whatever was talked about at the kitchen and dining room tables of my childhood, but I didn't ask for details or embellishments. One of my cousins (on my mother's side) went to Rome in the 1980s and met cousins of Grandma Irma's.... they welcomed her with open arms and she stayed in their villa as if they'd known her all their lives. When my cousin unpacked and brought out photographs of Irma and her children and grandchildren, the family in the villa cried for hours, literally getting tear-stains on the pictures.
When I was little, I would stay at Grandma Irma's for an over-night, or a weekend, and sometimes even a week in the summer. I would watch my grandmother wash clothes by hand (she didn't get a washing machine until the late 1960s), and then I would hand her the clothespins as she hung the wash out on the line to dry in the sun. I remember summer days when it was so hot that by the time we got the last of the clothes on the line, the pieces that were hung up first were already dry and ready to be taken down.
My grandmother made all of her own clothes, and I would sit and watch her cut patterns and sew dresses with matching jackets on the sewing machine that was in a bright corner of her dining room. Grandma would take me to Gertz and Macy's to look at ladies' dresses....... she would study the styles, touch the fabrics, look at the seams on the insides of the clothes, and then she would tell me "I can make this.... and it won't be so expensive." We would then walk to the fabric store where Grandma would look through countless bolts of fabric...... she would feel each one with her fingertips, then fold a bit of the edge over to see what sort of crease it would make. I remember her telling me that even if you sewed the most beautiful dress in the world, it wouldn't be comfortable if the fabric wasn't right. Grandma would find the perfect fabric, pick out the zipper and the buttons and the thread... and then she would go home and cut out the pattern, free-hand, just by remembering the dress she had seen in the store.
Grandma Irma paid all of her utility bills in cash, by walking from her house to the telephone company, the electric company, and the gas company. The telephone was in the downstairs hallway, on a little wooden bench that had a tiny desk on one side and a seat on the other. Two floors and a basement in that house, and just one phone.... those old bakelite phones rang very loudly, so you could hear it all over the house and out in the yard...... getting to it before it stopped ringing was the tricky part. When I got to be a teenager, and started running towards the phone when it rang, Grandma would tell me "Don't run in my house.... it's only the phone, not a fire."
The electric company was Grandma's biggest challenge. My grandmother didn't like to pay the electric company one penny more than she had to. She did all of her cleaning and cooking in the early morning hours (she got up at 5:30 every day). Sewing was done between noon and three, because the sun was best in the dining room during those hours. If I went upstairs for any reason during the day, the first thing Grandma would say to me when I got back downstairs was "Did you turn off the electric upstairs?" I couldn't tell her I did if I had left lights on because somehow she would know....... and she would send me back upstairs to turn out the light. As I went back up the stairs, I would hear Grandma saying: "Do you have a friend working at the electric company who's going to pay the bill for me?" To this day, leaving lights on during daylight in empty rooms just drives me nuts. I don't turn on lights until I really need them, and in rooms where I keep a small lamp on at night, it's always a very low-wattage bulb. (The reason is that I still don't have a friend at the electric company....)
At four o'clock every afternoon, Grandma Irma would have a cup of tea. She drank two cups of coffee every morning, but the late afternoon was reserved for tea. Her kitchen cabinets were filled with the most delicate and beautiful tea cups and saucers... nearly all of them were mis-matched. Grandma Irma loved pretty china, but she didn't want to spend a lot of money on them. Her reason: "They break in the sink. If you pay ten dollars for a cup and it breaks, you're throwing away ten dollars. But if you pay one dollar for a cup, you're saving nine dollars when it breaks."
Grandma would take me to Gertz and Macy's, and we would go up to the second floor of those department stores and she would show me the expensive sets of fine china. She would look at the patterns and tell me which were her favorites, but she wouldn't buy anything from those displays. We would get back on the escalator and go down to the basement of those stores, where the sale items were kept. Each store had tables filled with discounted and discontinued china patterns, and Grandma would look for her favorites, or find something similar. Sometimes the tea cups and saucers would be in sets, and sometimes there would be just a cup without a saucer, or a saucer without a cup. Grandma would match a cup to a saucer..... not an exact match, but she would always find two pieces that did indeed 'go together.' Every day when it was time for tea, she would look into her cabinet and choose a different cup and saucer... and when I was there, she would let me pick out my own. If I picked the same set two days in a row, she would tell me to "Look again.... this way another cup and saucer gets to the table."
One of my grandmother's favorite things to do, especially on a rainy day, was to take out all those cups and saucers, wash them all in the sink, dry them carefully with soft towels, and then re-arrange them in her kitchen cabinets. When I was little, she let me help with the drying. As I got older, she would let me wash the cups and saucers, and then as Grandma dried the sets, I would get up on the step-stool and re-arrange them on the shelves. She would always say the same thing when I was done: "Bella.... bellisima.... that looks better than it did the last time." And we would close the glass doors of the cabinet and admire the cups and saucers, and then at tea time, we would pick out our favorites.
Quiet as a church.... I just remember Grandma Irma's house being like a church...... you could hear every little thing that went on inside and outside that house. She didn't get a television until the late 1960s, and I don't even remember that house having a radio. If my grandmother wanted music, she would sing.... words in Italian that always had different melodies. I don't know if she was singing a real song, or just adding a melody to everyday words. During the Spring and Summer, when all the windows were open, we could hear the birds singing in the yard, kids playing on the street behind her house, and the sounds of the buses and the elevated trains going by on The Avenue. On the days when the traffic patterns were changed at the airports, we would hear the jets flying over her house and my grandmother would make the 'sign of the cross' and then close her eyes for a few seconds. When I first saw her do that, I thought she was saying a prayer that the plane would fly safely. When I got older, she told me all those little prayers weren't exactly for the passengers.... she had been asking God not to let the plane crash on her house. For all of her life, my grandmother never got on a plane. Her theory was that if God wanted her to fly, she would have been born with wings.
Grandma Irma lived a simple life..... with simple rules: Don't take what doesn't belong to you, and don't be jealous of what other people have. Don't leave lights on if you're not in the room, and don't even turn lights on if the sun is shining. Pay your bills on time, don't borrow money, don't buy what you can't afford. Don't disrespect any person because you're no better than anyone else. Take care of yourself, your home, your children, your soul. She saved every penny that she could, bringing dollars and coins to the bank every Monday and watching the balance in her savings passbook grow with deposits and interest. I once asked my grandmother if she was saving up for something special. Her answer was "Life is special. I'm saving for my life." When my grandmother died, she had money in the bank, she didn't owe a penny to anyone, all her bills were paid, and there was 'life money' saved and invested for her family.
For a simple woman whose English language was scattered with Italian phrases, Grandma Irma seemed to have a good grasp of what really mattered in this world. Her needs were simple, but her expectations were high. She expected everyone to be nice, be kind, be respectful, to be grateful. She would see a person in a wheelchair on The Avenue, and she would smile at them, and then later tell me to "Say a prayer to God that you have two healthy legs to walk on." When Grandma saw a blind person waiting for a bus or trying to cross a street, she would go over and ask if she could help. Later on, her words to me were: "Say a prayer to God that you have two good eyes."
Grandma Irma passed away in her own home, about 25 years ago. She was nearly 94 years old, and she had been up on a step-stool because it was a rainy day. She had taken down all of her tea cups and saucers, washed them and dried them, and she was re-arranging the sets in her kitchen cabinet when she had a stroke. She was brought to the hospital but she never re-gained consciousness, and for that, the family was grateful. The stroke was massive, and had she lived, she would have been helpless. Grandma had never been in a hospital before.... she gave birth to her three children in her own home, with a midwife, and she was never sick enough to be hospitalized. One of her rules was to "Take care of yourself... if you get sick, it costs money... unless you have a friend who's a doctor."
In one of my own glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, I have a mis-matched tea cup and saucer from Grandma Irma's collection. The cup has a delicate pedestal, which lifts it up from the base of the saucer. I remember the very day we bought those pieces.... the cost of the cup was one dollar, the price of the saucer was just fifty cents. They were purchased in the Gertz department store on The Avenue.... I chose the cup, my grandmother found the saucer. Grandma didn't usually pay as much as one dollar for a tea cup, but because of the unusual pedestal on its base, she made an exception. (In the 1950s and 1960s, one dollar and fifty cents could buy a big bag of groceries.) After she paid for that set, I told my grandmother that maybe I would grow up and have a friend who made pretty china tea cups.
Sometimes on rainy days, I take Grandma's cup and saucer out of the cabinet, wash it and dry it, and put it back.... always in the same place. I have tea every day, but I only use my grandmother's tea cup and saucer if I'm sitting at the dining room table. I'm very careful with it because if it breaks in the sink, it cannot be replaced. In today's world, one dollar and fifty cents isn't expensive at all for a china tea cup and saucer, but the memories those pieces hold are priceless.
I have lots of tea cups, all of which could be re-arranged in the cabinets on rainy days, but it was more fun playing with the tea cups when Grandma was around to help.... "Bella.... bellisima...."
I don't know what prompted Grandma Irma to get on a ship and sail across the Atlantic, but when she arrived at Ellis Island she wasn't very happy. Her family had told her that the streets of America were filled with opportunity and paved with golden stones. When Irma got to New York City, she found narrow streets paved with cobblestones and hundreds of dirty-faced children who were either trying to sell newspapers or steal apples and oranges. "I cried when I saw the Statue of Liberty, but I cried harder when I saw the streets of New York."--- that's what Grandma Irma told me when I was a little girl, and she was still saying the same thing in the 1980s.
Grandma Irma's house was always as quiet as a church, as compared to the house of my grandparents on my dad's side which was always filled with family. My mother's mother had three children, my dad's mother had nine (12, actually, but three died very young).....my dad's family provided many more aunts and uncles and cousins, so that house was very rarely quiet.
I don't know how many family members were left in Rome when Irma decided to come to the United States. She didn't talk all that much about her family "on the other side" (as she called Italy). And when I was young, I never got into the habit of asking a lot of questions. I listened to any and all stories concerning both sides of the family.... I paid attention to whatever was talked about at the kitchen and dining room tables of my childhood, but I didn't ask for details or embellishments. One of my cousins (on my mother's side) went to Rome in the 1980s and met cousins of Grandma Irma's.... they welcomed her with open arms and she stayed in their villa as if they'd known her all their lives. When my cousin unpacked and brought out photographs of Irma and her children and grandchildren, the family in the villa cried for hours, literally getting tear-stains on the pictures.
When I was little, I would stay at Grandma Irma's for an over-night, or a weekend, and sometimes even a week in the summer. I would watch my grandmother wash clothes by hand (she didn't get a washing machine until the late 1960s), and then I would hand her the clothespins as she hung the wash out on the line to dry in the sun. I remember summer days when it was so hot that by the time we got the last of the clothes on the line, the pieces that were hung up first were already dry and ready to be taken down.
My grandmother made all of her own clothes, and I would sit and watch her cut patterns and sew dresses with matching jackets on the sewing machine that was in a bright corner of her dining room. Grandma would take me to Gertz and Macy's to look at ladies' dresses....... she would study the styles, touch the fabrics, look at the seams on the insides of the clothes, and then she would tell me "I can make this.... and it won't be so expensive." We would then walk to the fabric store where Grandma would look through countless bolts of fabric...... she would feel each one with her fingertips, then fold a bit of the edge over to see what sort of crease it would make. I remember her telling me that even if you sewed the most beautiful dress in the world, it wouldn't be comfortable if the fabric wasn't right. Grandma would find the perfect fabric, pick out the zipper and the buttons and the thread... and then she would go home and cut out the pattern, free-hand, just by remembering the dress she had seen in the store.
Grandma Irma paid all of her utility bills in cash, by walking from her house to the telephone company, the electric company, and the gas company. The telephone was in the downstairs hallway, on a little wooden bench that had a tiny desk on one side and a seat on the other. Two floors and a basement in that house, and just one phone.... those old bakelite phones rang very loudly, so you could hear it all over the house and out in the yard...... getting to it before it stopped ringing was the tricky part. When I got to be a teenager, and started running towards the phone when it rang, Grandma would tell me "Don't run in my house.... it's only the phone, not a fire."
The electric company was Grandma's biggest challenge. My grandmother didn't like to pay the electric company one penny more than she had to. She did all of her cleaning and cooking in the early morning hours (she got up at 5:30 every day). Sewing was done between noon and three, because the sun was best in the dining room during those hours. If I went upstairs for any reason during the day, the first thing Grandma would say to me when I got back downstairs was "Did you turn off the electric upstairs?" I couldn't tell her I did if I had left lights on because somehow she would know....... and she would send me back upstairs to turn out the light. As I went back up the stairs, I would hear Grandma saying: "Do you have a friend working at the electric company who's going to pay the bill for me?" To this day, leaving lights on during daylight in empty rooms just drives me nuts. I don't turn on lights until I really need them, and in rooms where I keep a small lamp on at night, it's always a very low-wattage bulb. (The reason is that I still don't have a friend at the electric company....)
At four o'clock every afternoon, Grandma Irma would have a cup of tea. She drank two cups of coffee every morning, but the late afternoon was reserved for tea. Her kitchen cabinets were filled with the most delicate and beautiful tea cups and saucers... nearly all of them were mis-matched. Grandma Irma loved pretty china, but she didn't want to spend a lot of money on them. Her reason: "They break in the sink. If you pay ten dollars for a cup and it breaks, you're throwing away ten dollars. But if you pay one dollar for a cup, you're saving nine dollars when it breaks."
Grandma would take me to Gertz and Macy's, and we would go up to the second floor of those department stores and she would show me the expensive sets of fine china. She would look at the patterns and tell me which were her favorites, but she wouldn't buy anything from those displays. We would get back on the escalator and go down to the basement of those stores, where the sale items were kept. Each store had tables filled with discounted and discontinued china patterns, and Grandma would look for her favorites, or find something similar. Sometimes the tea cups and saucers would be in sets, and sometimes there would be just a cup without a saucer, or a saucer without a cup. Grandma would match a cup to a saucer..... not an exact match, but she would always find two pieces that did indeed 'go together.' Every day when it was time for tea, she would look into her cabinet and choose a different cup and saucer... and when I was there, she would let me pick out my own. If I picked the same set two days in a row, she would tell me to "Look again.... this way another cup and saucer gets to the table."
One of my grandmother's favorite things to do, especially on a rainy day, was to take out all those cups and saucers, wash them all in the sink, dry them carefully with soft towels, and then re-arrange them in her kitchen cabinets. When I was little, she let me help with the drying. As I got older, she would let me wash the cups and saucers, and then as Grandma dried the sets, I would get up on the step-stool and re-arrange them on the shelves. She would always say the same thing when I was done: "Bella.... bellisima.... that looks better than it did the last time." And we would close the glass doors of the cabinet and admire the cups and saucers, and then at tea time, we would pick out our favorites.
Quiet as a church.... I just remember Grandma Irma's house being like a church...... you could hear every little thing that went on inside and outside that house. She didn't get a television until the late 1960s, and I don't even remember that house having a radio. If my grandmother wanted music, she would sing.... words in Italian that always had different melodies. I don't know if she was singing a real song, or just adding a melody to everyday words. During the Spring and Summer, when all the windows were open, we could hear the birds singing in the yard, kids playing on the street behind her house, and the sounds of the buses and the elevated trains going by on The Avenue. On the days when the traffic patterns were changed at the airports, we would hear the jets flying over her house and my grandmother would make the 'sign of the cross' and then close her eyes for a few seconds. When I first saw her do that, I thought she was saying a prayer that the plane would fly safely. When I got older, she told me all those little prayers weren't exactly for the passengers.... she had been asking God not to let the plane crash on her house. For all of her life, my grandmother never got on a plane. Her theory was that if God wanted her to fly, she would have been born with wings.
Grandma Irma lived a simple life..... with simple rules: Don't take what doesn't belong to you, and don't be jealous of what other people have. Don't leave lights on if you're not in the room, and don't even turn lights on if the sun is shining. Pay your bills on time, don't borrow money, don't buy what you can't afford. Don't disrespect any person because you're no better than anyone else. Take care of yourself, your home, your children, your soul. She saved every penny that she could, bringing dollars and coins to the bank every Monday and watching the balance in her savings passbook grow with deposits and interest. I once asked my grandmother if she was saving up for something special. Her answer was "Life is special. I'm saving for my life." When my grandmother died, she had money in the bank, she didn't owe a penny to anyone, all her bills were paid, and there was 'life money' saved and invested for her family.
For a simple woman whose English language was scattered with Italian phrases, Grandma Irma seemed to have a good grasp of what really mattered in this world. Her needs were simple, but her expectations were high. She expected everyone to be nice, be kind, be respectful, to be grateful. She would see a person in a wheelchair on The Avenue, and she would smile at them, and then later tell me to "Say a prayer to God that you have two healthy legs to walk on." When Grandma saw a blind person waiting for a bus or trying to cross a street, she would go over and ask if she could help. Later on, her words to me were: "Say a prayer to God that you have two good eyes."
Grandma Irma passed away in her own home, about 25 years ago. She was nearly 94 years old, and she had been up on a step-stool because it was a rainy day. She had taken down all of her tea cups and saucers, washed them and dried them, and she was re-arranging the sets in her kitchen cabinet when she had a stroke. She was brought to the hospital but she never re-gained consciousness, and for that, the family was grateful. The stroke was massive, and had she lived, she would have been helpless. Grandma had never been in a hospital before.... she gave birth to her three children in her own home, with a midwife, and she was never sick enough to be hospitalized. One of her rules was to "Take care of yourself... if you get sick, it costs money... unless you have a friend who's a doctor."
In one of my own glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, I have a mis-matched tea cup and saucer from Grandma Irma's collection. The cup has a delicate pedestal, which lifts it up from the base of the saucer. I remember the very day we bought those pieces.... the cost of the cup was one dollar, the price of the saucer was just fifty cents. They were purchased in the Gertz department store on The Avenue.... I chose the cup, my grandmother found the saucer. Grandma didn't usually pay as much as one dollar for a tea cup, but because of the unusual pedestal on its base, she made an exception. (In the 1950s and 1960s, one dollar and fifty cents could buy a big bag of groceries.) After she paid for that set, I told my grandmother that maybe I would grow up and have a friend who made pretty china tea cups.
Sometimes on rainy days, I take Grandma's cup and saucer out of the cabinet, wash it and dry it, and put it back.... always in the same place. I have tea every day, but I only use my grandmother's tea cup and saucer if I'm sitting at the dining room table. I'm very careful with it because if it breaks in the sink, it cannot be replaced. In today's world, one dollar and fifty cents isn't expensive at all for a china tea cup and saucer, but the memories those pieces hold are priceless.
I have lots of tea cups, all of which could be re-arranged in the cabinets on rainy days, but it was more fun playing with the tea cups when Grandma was around to help.... "Bella.... bellisima...."
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The Family's Senior Moments.... Angelina and Frank
Angelina and Frank were my grandparents, on my dad's side. If memory serves me correctly, my grandmother was just 16 years old when she married my grandfather, who was just a year or two older than his young bride. As was the custom in those days with Italian-Catholic families, my grandparents had lots of children. Twelve to be exact, with nine of the twelve surviving into adulthood. Those nine have been chronicled here in other "Senior Moments" entries.
Grandpa was the undisputed boss of his household, but it was Grandma who was the heart of my grandparents' home. Grandpa may have built that big old house with his own two hands, but it was Grandma who kept the house alive with her heart.... alive with generations of children and their children, alive with memories, alive with love. Grandpa was indeed the boss of his home, but my grandmother had her own theory about that. She would tell us that "The husband is the engine of the family, but the wife is the gasoline."
Not being perfectly fluent in English, my grandparents spoke to all of my generation with sentences that were half in Italian, half in English. Somehow, we knew exactly what they were saying, and we all managed to learn some Italian along the way. My generation was not taught to speak in fluent Italian, as was my dad's generation. All of my cousins agreed that our parents didn't teach us Italian because they wanted to have that language all to themselves so they could speak to one another without us knowing every word that was being said at the dinner table.
In a corner of the basement in my grandparents' house was a little door leading to "la guandine," the wine cellar. In this room were shelves of glass jars holding Grandma's tomato sauce, summer fruits, winter vegetables. On the other side of la guandine was the wine press for Grandpa's wine. My grandfather would pick the finest grapes he could find, and press those through a wooden machine with a wrought iron handle that somehow magically made a deep red wine that he would pour into tall bottles. My cousins and I would laugh because the wine bottle would be so large, but the wine glasses themselves would be very small.
When we brought that to Grandpa's attention, he would tell us that if you drank the best wine and ate the best food, you only needed a little bit to be satisfied. "Eat junk and you will eat too much. Eat well and you will feast on very little." As always, when Grandpa told us one of his beliefs, he would punctuate his thought with a firm upward tilt of his chin, as if daring us to question his truth. We never did.
In my grandparents' kitchen, there was a wooden plate hung up on the wall.... on it were hand-painted letters saying "No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best." My generation of cousins all learned how to read letters and words from that plate, and it hung in the same spot for over 50 years. I think it was my cousin R who gave Grandma that plate, and it never went un-noticed or un-appreciated in all those years.
Grandma's kitchen was the shining star of that house.... always something cooking on top of the stove or in the oven, with food so delicious that just the thought of eating out in a restaurant would get everyone saying "Eat out? What for? Who can cook better than Mama?" I do believe that the only time dinners were eaten out were at family weddings in large Italian catering halls.
When my Aunt Angela got married, my grandmother didn't trust the catering facility to make the cream puffs as well, or as beautiful, as she could. Not a problem... Grandma spent days and days making 300 cream puffs in the shapes of little swans, filled with a sweet cream that had the chef at the catering hall asking for her recipe. My grandmother declined: "I should give my recipe to you? You, Mr. Big Chef with your fancy hat, should know how to make a cream puff without help from Angelina."
My grandparents watched very little television, but there were a few programs that they wouldn't think of missing. Ted Mack's Amateur Hour was a favorite, as well as The Ed Sullivan Show, and Grandma would never miss "Queen For a Day." Grandpa liked wrestling, and he would move his chair up close to the television for those shows because he didn't want to miss anything.
I remember that Grandma would have tears in her eyes every time she heard Nat King Cole singing.... she said that "The angels in heaven must have voices like this man." And one of Grandpa's favorites was Louis Armstrong..... whenever he was on television, Grandpa would take his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his forehead and make believe he was singing along with Louis...... it was just so funny. Grandpa hardly ever did something as whimsical as that, but he just thought Louis Armstrong was the King of television. Hearing Grandpa's Italian versions of Louis Armstrong's songs is one of my best memories of my grandfather.
In the afternoons, both my grandparents would take some leisure time. Not that they sat in a chair and did nothing, but they sat at the kitchen table and did what they loved to do...... for Grandpa, it was playing Solitaire..... for Grandma, it was either knitting or crocheting. Grandpa loved playing cards, and he and his sons would play poker after Sunday dinners and on the holidays. They never played for money..... they used poker chips and hard-shelled nuts for betting. "I'll see your two pecans, and raise you three walnuts."
But Solitaire was Grandpa's way of relaxing.... and whichever of the grandchildren happened to be in the house at the time, they learned not only the numbers, the card suits, the rules of the game... they learned patience and honesty as well. "Never cheat," Grandpa would tell us. "No one likes a cheater, no matter what. You cheat once, you're done. No one will trust you again. And then what?" (And up would go his chin, in that tilt towards heaven, and you knew not to question his theory.)
My grandparents loved their family, loved their home, and the unique simplicity of their lives is testament that one didn't need to be rolling in money in order to be on top of the world. Sunday dinners and holiday dinners were important family gatherings.... adults ate in the dining room at the 'big table,' and the kids would be in the kitchen, at the 'children's table.' I don't remember the family saying "Grace" before those big meals, but I do remember Grandpa raising his wine glass, looking all around the table, and saying "My family.... my family."
When those big meals were cooked in that house, you could smell the aromas of the sauce and the lasagna, the roasted chicken and sausage.... it seemed like the house was just surrounded by these delicious cooking smells that lingered in the air. The house to the left of my grandparents' home was owned by an Italian family, but the house on the right had an Irish family with three boys. Every time Grandma started cooking, those three boys would sit in the driveway, right near Grandma's kitchen windows, and they would just sit there and enjoy the cooking odors coming from those windows. Without fail, each and every time, Grandma would fix three plates for those three boys, and call them from the back door to "come and get some good Italian food." I can still remember those boys, carefully holding the hot plates filled with my grandmother's cooking, and they would walk back to their house as if they were carrying precious gold. The next morning, they would bring back the plates, all washed and dried and ready for the next meals. As Grandma put the plates back into the cabinet, she would say the same thing each time: "Those Irish girls... they don't know how to cook for their children."
I think my grandparents were disappointed and disenchanted when their children's marriages began falling apart, one by one. Divorce was an "American thing," definitely not Italian. My grandparents expected their married children to stay married, to work out their problems, to keep their families together, no matter what. It just didn't happen that way. Except for my Uncle Tony and Aunt Margie, who were married forever, and except for my Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Mary, whose marriage ended when Jimmy was killed at Pearl Harbor, all of the other family marriages ended in divorce.
It saddened my grandparents, especially at the Sunday and holiday dinners, to have parts of their family "missing" from the celebrations. When divorces came between the parents, the children were sometimes absent from the family for years. Then, as those children got older and started returning to my grandparents' house, they were welcomed with wide-open arms, no questions asked, as if they'd never left. And it was comforting to walk into that big old house and see that nothing had changed.... the furniture was not only the same, but in the same places. The dishes in the kitchen were the same, the kitchen chairs were in the same places, even little things like the salt and pepper shakers and the napkins--- everything was exactly the same. That was just so important, especially to a kid whose life had been turned upside-down through divorce.
My grandfather passed away in the early 1970s.... they found him in the upstairs hallway early one morning. He had walked out of the bedroom, on his way down the hall to the bathroom, and he had collapsed on the floor. He never regained consciousness. My grandmother was crushed beyond words. After the funeral and the burial, Grandma stayed in their room, in their bed, not wanting to go downstairs. My Aunt Dolly brought up her meals, brushed and braided Grandma's hair, and told her that Papa would have wanted her to go on living. Grandma didn't agree. She felt her place was with her husband, and that's where she wanted to be. Grandma passed away less than a year later, and everyone, including the doctor, said that she died of a broken heart.
My grandparents were unmistakably the glue that held the family together. They came to the United States on a ship that brought them from Naples to New York City, and they never looked back. They were Italian through and through, and they kept their heritage alive and intact, but they came here to become Americans, and that's exactly what they did. Their sons fought in World War II, their daughters worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Grandpa bought land in Queens and built his house three stories high.... built it with his own hands and his own heart. When my grandparents passed away, the house was never the same without them in it. We all still called it "Grandma's house," but without Grandma and Grandpa in it, the heart of the house just never beat as strongly.
The family's house is empty now. All of my aunts and uncles have passed away, except for Aunt Jaye who's in an assisted living facility, and 100-yr-old Aunt Dolly who lives in Florida with my cousin. It would be Aunt Dolly's greatest wish-come-true if someone in the family would want to live in "Papa's house." I can't see that happening. The house stands in the middle of a once-proud neighborhood of European immigrants that has lost every ounce of its pride over the years. The European immigrants are all gone... Aunt Dolly being the last to move.
My grandfather built his home to last forever, and it has. My grandmother loved her children and their children, and their children.... and there are now six generations of the family that started with Angelina and Frank and their dream to cross the Atlantic and begin a new life in America.
Grandpa was the undisputed boss of his household, but it was Grandma who was the heart of my grandparents' home. Grandpa may have built that big old house with his own two hands, but it was Grandma who kept the house alive with her heart.... alive with generations of children and their children, alive with memories, alive with love. Grandpa was indeed the boss of his home, but my grandmother had her own theory about that. She would tell us that "The husband is the engine of the family, but the wife is the gasoline."
Not being perfectly fluent in English, my grandparents spoke to all of my generation with sentences that were half in Italian, half in English. Somehow, we knew exactly what they were saying, and we all managed to learn some Italian along the way. My generation was not taught to speak in fluent Italian, as was my dad's generation. All of my cousins agreed that our parents didn't teach us Italian because they wanted to have that language all to themselves so they could speak to one another without us knowing every word that was being said at the dinner table.
In a corner of the basement in my grandparents' house was a little door leading to "la guandine," the wine cellar. In this room were shelves of glass jars holding Grandma's tomato sauce, summer fruits, winter vegetables. On the other side of la guandine was the wine press for Grandpa's wine. My grandfather would pick the finest grapes he could find, and press those through a wooden machine with a wrought iron handle that somehow magically made a deep red wine that he would pour into tall bottles. My cousins and I would laugh because the wine bottle would be so large, but the wine glasses themselves would be very small.
When we brought that to Grandpa's attention, he would tell us that if you drank the best wine and ate the best food, you only needed a little bit to be satisfied. "Eat junk and you will eat too much. Eat well and you will feast on very little." As always, when Grandpa told us one of his beliefs, he would punctuate his thought with a firm upward tilt of his chin, as if daring us to question his truth. We never did.
In my grandparents' kitchen, there was a wooden plate hung up on the wall.... on it were hand-painted letters saying "No matter where I serve my guests, it seems they like my kitchen best." My generation of cousins all learned how to read letters and words from that plate, and it hung in the same spot for over 50 years. I think it was my cousin R who gave Grandma that plate, and it never went un-noticed or un-appreciated in all those years.
Grandma's kitchen was the shining star of that house.... always something cooking on top of the stove or in the oven, with food so delicious that just the thought of eating out in a restaurant would get everyone saying "Eat out? What for? Who can cook better than Mama?" I do believe that the only time dinners were eaten out were at family weddings in large Italian catering halls.
When my Aunt Angela got married, my grandmother didn't trust the catering facility to make the cream puffs as well, or as beautiful, as she could. Not a problem... Grandma spent days and days making 300 cream puffs in the shapes of little swans, filled with a sweet cream that had the chef at the catering hall asking for her recipe. My grandmother declined: "I should give my recipe to you? You, Mr. Big Chef with your fancy hat, should know how to make a cream puff without help from Angelina."
My grandparents watched very little television, but there were a few programs that they wouldn't think of missing. Ted Mack's Amateur Hour was a favorite, as well as The Ed Sullivan Show, and Grandma would never miss "Queen For a Day." Grandpa liked wrestling, and he would move his chair up close to the television for those shows because he didn't want to miss anything.
I remember that Grandma would have tears in her eyes every time she heard Nat King Cole singing.... she said that "The angels in heaven must have voices like this man." And one of Grandpa's favorites was Louis Armstrong..... whenever he was on television, Grandpa would take his handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his forehead and make believe he was singing along with Louis...... it was just so funny. Grandpa hardly ever did something as whimsical as that, but he just thought Louis Armstrong was the King of television. Hearing Grandpa's Italian versions of Louis Armstrong's songs is one of my best memories of my grandfather.
In the afternoons, both my grandparents would take some leisure time. Not that they sat in a chair and did nothing, but they sat at the kitchen table and did what they loved to do...... for Grandpa, it was playing Solitaire..... for Grandma, it was either knitting or crocheting. Grandpa loved playing cards, and he and his sons would play poker after Sunday dinners and on the holidays. They never played for money..... they used poker chips and hard-shelled nuts for betting. "I'll see your two pecans, and raise you three walnuts."
But Solitaire was Grandpa's way of relaxing.... and whichever of the grandchildren happened to be in the house at the time, they learned not only the numbers, the card suits, the rules of the game... they learned patience and honesty as well. "Never cheat," Grandpa would tell us. "No one likes a cheater, no matter what. You cheat once, you're done. No one will trust you again. And then what?" (And up would go his chin, in that tilt towards heaven, and you knew not to question his theory.)
My grandparents loved their family, loved their home, and the unique simplicity of their lives is testament that one didn't need to be rolling in money in order to be on top of the world. Sunday dinners and holiday dinners were important family gatherings.... adults ate in the dining room at the 'big table,' and the kids would be in the kitchen, at the 'children's table.' I don't remember the family saying "Grace" before those big meals, but I do remember Grandpa raising his wine glass, looking all around the table, and saying "My family.... my family."
When those big meals were cooked in that house, you could smell the aromas of the sauce and the lasagna, the roasted chicken and sausage.... it seemed like the house was just surrounded by these delicious cooking smells that lingered in the air. The house to the left of my grandparents' home was owned by an Italian family, but the house on the right had an Irish family with three boys. Every time Grandma started cooking, those three boys would sit in the driveway, right near Grandma's kitchen windows, and they would just sit there and enjoy the cooking odors coming from those windows. Without fail, each and every time, Grandma would fix three plates for those three boys, and call them from the back door to "come and get some good Italian food." I can still remember those boys, carefully holding the hot plates filled with my grandmother's cooking, and they would walk back to their house as if they were carrying precious gold. The next morning, they would bring back the plates, all washed and dried and ready for the next meals. As Grandma put the plates back into the cabinet, she would say the same thing each time: "Those Irish girls... they don't know how to cook for their children."
I think my grandparents were disappointed and disenchanted when their children's marriages began falling apart, one by one. Divorce was an "American thing," definitely not Italian. My grandparents expected their married children to stay married, to work out their problems, to keep their families together, no matter what. It just didn't happen that way. Except for my Uncle Tony and Aunt Margie, who were married forever, and except for my Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Mary, whose marriage ended when Jimmy was killed at Pearl Harbor, all of the other family marriages ended in divorce.
It saddened my grandparents, especially at the Sunday and holiday dinners, to have parts of their family "missing" from the celebrations. When divorces came between the parents, the children were sometimes absent from the family for years. Then, as those children got older and started returning to my grandparents' house, they were welcomed with wide-open arms, no questions asked, as if they'd never left. And it was comforting to walk into that big old house and see that nothing had changed.... the furniture was not only the same, but in the same places. The dishes in the kitchen were the same, the kitchen chairs were in the same places, even little things like the salt and pepper shakers and the napkins--- everything was exactly the same. That was just so important, especially to a kid whose life had been turned upside-down through divorce.
My grandfather passed away in the early 1970s.... they found him in the upstairs hallway early one morning. He had walked out of the bedroom, on his way down the hall to the bathroom, and he had collapsed on the floor. He never regained consciousness. My grandmother was crushed beyond words. After the funeral and the burial, Grandma stayed in their room, in their bed, not wanting to go downstairs. My Aunt Dolly brought up her meals, brushed and braided Grandma's hair, and told her that Papa would have wanted her to go on living. Grandma didn't agree. She felt her place was with her husband, and that's where she wanted to be. Grandma passed away less than a year later, and everyone, including the doctor, said that she died of a broken heart.
My grandparents were unmistakably the glue that held the family together. They came to the United States on a ship that brought them from Naples to New York City, and they never looked back. They were Italian through and through, and they kept their heritage alive and intact, but they came here to become Americans, and that's exactly what they did. Their sons fought in World War II, their daughters worked in the garment district of Manhattan. Grandpa bought land in Queens and built his house three stories high.... built it with his own hands and his own heart. When my grandparents passed away, the house was never the same without them in it. We all still called it "Grandma's house," but without Grandma and Grandpa in it, the heart of the house just never beat as strongly.
The family's house is empty now. All of my aunts and uncles have passed away, except for Aunt Jaye who's in an assisted living facility, and 100-yr-old Aunt Dolly who lives in Florida with my cousin. It would be Aunt Dolly's greatest wish-come-true if someone in the family would want to live in "Papa's house." I can't see that happening. The house stands in the middle of a once-proud neighborhood of European immigrants that has lost every ounce of its pride over the years. The European immigrants are all gone... Aunt Dolly being the last to move.
My grandfather built his home to last forever, and it has. My grandmother loved her children and their children, and their children.... and there are now six generations of the family that started with Angelina and Frank and their dream to cross the Atlantic and begin a new life in America.
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