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What does love look like? There’s no one right answer to that question, but just in the last week, several people have shown me a few of the small, sweet, personal expressions of love — and I mean expressions, gestures and acts that might as well be smiles or gently furrowed brows. Here are two of them. This is the very face of love.
1. I’m scheduled for oral surgery, and I idly mentioned to my mother that the recovery period will make me wish we had cable “so I could just plop down and watch ‘Columbo’ for a few hours.”
Yesterday, she presented me with a bubble-mailer containing nine hours of “Columbo.” Mom, who is not yet confident in online ordering or particularly savvy at online searches, tracked down and ordered me a gift (and, from her perspective, a reasonable obscure gift) just to give me some comfort and distraction.
2. A few nights ago, I got three hours of sleep before I woke up hiccuping — and the hiccups lasted more than two hours. Silly? Yes. Funny? Yes. Harmless? Yes. Annoying and exhausting and, eventually, painful? Yes.
When The Fella left for work, I had stopped hiccuping. A few hours later, he called me to check in, “to see how you’re doing.”
I never miss a chance for self-mockery: “Because I was hiccuping?”
He was so gentle: “Because I know you had a hard morning.”
And that is how love can look: even in the face of the silliest affliction, he made sure I was okay before unleashing any jokes.
Grief follows hard on the heels of joy. Our family has gained a member and lost one, in quick succession. It’s a maelstrom of emotion, mixing up love and loss and celebration and sorrow — and that’s just this week. Who knows what next week will bring? Whatever it is, we’ll face it together. That’s what counts.
We cannot escape grief, nor should we wish to, because grief gives gravity to our happiness; it shows us the depth of our love by showing us how we would (and how we will) cry for our loved ones when they pass out of our ken.
But for the moment, I am not interested in philosophy or rationalizations or the graceful balance of grief and joy: I only want to love my family, old and new, and offer love and support, to take comfort in our shared laughter and tears and stories and remembrances, to supply gelato cones and handkerchiefs and hugs and a soft shoulder, should anyone need it.
At a gathering of The Fella’s family — and let’s just call them The Beardface Family! — we had occasion to introduce a friend to The Fella’s mother. (For the sake of his privacy, here I’ll dub our friend Mike Smallbaker. That’s not quite right, but it’s the same construction: first name, and a last name composed of a common adjective and old-timey occupation.)
Later, The Fella’s Mother asked about his unusual surname, and The Fella told her that it was a hybrid: when they married, M. and his wife R. decided to combine their two last names into one.
The Fella’s Mother turned to me and, not for the first time, asked me, “So, Elsa, when you’re married, will you be a [Beardface]?”
Now, listen.
I am not changing my name, and The Fella’s Mother knows that, because she’s already asked me. We’ve had this conversation a coupla times already, and I’ve answered sweetly and earnestly. Twice.
So.
This time, I said, absolutely deadpan, “No, actually, we’re doing what M. and R. did.”
TFM, game as always, said, “Oh?”
“Yup. We’re both changing our names to Smallbaker.”
My future brother-in-law, sitting nearby, laughed until he tipped off the edge of his chair. The Fella’s Mother, um, did not.
note: Though I’m razzing her a little here, The Fella’s Mother is a lot of fun, and she — like the entire Beardface family — has gone out of her way to welcome me from the first day I met them, and to shower us with love and affection as we approach the wedding day. I’m stunned and grateful to have such loving in-laws, and even more grateful that they can take a joke.
I recently wrote about a friend’s potluck wedding reception, where family and friends fed each other, sharing their joy and love with the happy couple. The Fella and I aren’t having a potluck wedding, but for the past few months, I’ve been musing that our DIY wedding feels like a barnraising: our loved ones keep enthusiastically pitching in, lending their strength and talents to help us build something of value.
If you browse wedding forums or advice columns, you’ll soon bump into shrill warnings against this approach. Naysayers dismiss the handmade, homemade, shared nature of the event. It’s tacky, it’s rude, it’s cheap. It’s inconsiderate to expect guests to contribute to Your Special Day.
Of course guests don’t want to do your dirty work, but you can accept loving assistance (and even ask for it) without being rude or demanding. Some thoughts guiding our own requests:
- Our friends miiiiight enjoy showcasing their talents. They would not enjoy predictable drudgery; we’ll pay people for that.
- Any guest’s wedding-day contribution should be brief. Everyone wants to have fun!
- Things will go wrong. It doesn’t matter. If the cake falls over, if the photos don’t come out, if the iPod freezes… we’ll still be married at the end of the day.
-If anyone seems hesitant, for any reason or for no reason at all, we’ll withdraw our request.
If we ask you to consider helping out, it’s because we value your talent and we trust your judgment. That includes the judgment that leads you to say, “No, I’d rather not.”
In fact, we’ve made few requests so far; our family and friends keep amazing us with their offers of help, offers far more generous, creative, and serendipitous than we could have imagined.
Behind the click is a loooooong list of the help being offered, and a few requests we plan to make.
Having memorialized my late father, I must confess the dread, sorry truth that I kept from him as he lay on his deathbed. It was too horrible for him to face.
The dark secret is revealed at last: the door to their mailbox had come ever so slightly off its hinge, leaving the mail just barely exposed to the elements. When I walked down the long driveway and out the private road to the mailbox to collect Mom and Dad’s mail, I brushed a faint dusting of snow (or, sometimes — oh, god! — droplets of rain!) from the pile of envelopes and magazines before carrying them back to the house.
I never told Dad that the mail sometimes got damp. Knowing that would have been too great a strain on his mind.*
Shortly after Dad’s death, my brother-in-law J, a cheerful, practical fellow, rolled up his sleeves, yanked the old mailbox out of place, and screwed into place the shiny new mailbox from the hardware store! Yay!
Yay!
Hey… yay, right?
Not, as it turns out, yay. At least, not according to my mother, whose disapproval of the new mailbox came out in sighs and gusts of faint dismay. The new mailbox, you see, was a bit larger than the old one, and it somehow violated the, I dunno, dimensional balance of the previous arrangement. And this was bad.
How bad?
In my mother’s words, “Thank God your father’s dead. He would have hated to see that.”
My mother, whose words were in earnest, was understandably puzzled when sister Gaoo and I dissolved into (equally understandable) frantic hoots of laughter. For months after (and still occasionally, three years later), our conversations were laced with the phrase “Thank God your father’s dead!”
*And if you think I’m kidding about that, you never knew Dad, never saw him get agitated about a scratch on a tableleg, or coasterless glasses, or spots on a book jacket. A mailbox door hanging ajar, and his infuriating inability to do anything about it, would have made him wring his hands in futile worry.
My father died three years ago today.
Oddly enough, Elli is the one who reminded me of the date’s significance earlier this week, with a loving email from the other side of the world. But, of course, it was creeping in around the corners of my consciousness even before I read her email.
While the sunny-side of my brain was busy writing about John Donne and researching colonial foodways, renewing library books and organizing bills, thinking up dinners and planning Christmas lists, it was also fielding quiet messages from my mind’s shadowy side… messages that seemed to be obscure and insignificant memories… but when I look closer, I see that they all point to one day.
I miss you, Dad. I always will. I’m still finding jokes I want to tell you, goofy Christmas presents to make you laugh, people I want you to meet, stories I hope would make you proud.
I wish you’d met The Fella. He and I had planned to visit on that day, this day three years ago, bringing a Christmas tree for Mom… because he’d asked if he could do something, anything, to help her, to help you. I wish you could have known him, his fierce quiet intelligence, his wit, his impossibly good heart. I wish you could have seen how happy he makes me.
I wish… I wish a lot of things. But really, there’s not so much to wish for as there might be. You had a good life, even at the end of it. And you’re remembered with love and (never underestimate this) with laughter. I haven’t had a BLT since this one, but I think it’s time.
Fill our hearts with thankfulness;
Fill our hearts with grace,
Smile on our celebrations
And then bless us on our way.
HDS, November 24th, 2005
At a post-Thanksgiving family gathering, my almost-18-year-old niece A and I are watching 3-year-old K play tirelessly with her blanket. K lays the blanket on the floor, lies full-length in it, and rolls herself up like a little burrito. She sits in the center and folds the corners up around her, over her head. Standing, she rolls herself in it head to toe and jumps with all her wobbly might. She lays it out on the floor, climbs onto a chair, and launches herself out into space, landing with a striking thump in the center of her blanket.
I turn to A and say speculatively, “I just want to sit her in the blanket, wrap it up over her, grab it by all four corners, and swing it around over my head.”
A nods sagely and says, in a considering tone, “We learned about that in my psychology class. It’s called giving voice to the id.”
Three high points in my weekend:
I finished my Renaissance lit paper 90 minutes before my (self-imposed) deadline of 10 p.m. Saturday night! (I have a second unrelated paper due this week in an unrelated class, so I needed to leave myself time for both.)
During a family lunch Sunday, The Fella’s three-year-old niece P. started getting restless, so she and I went on walkabout. We romped in the puddles on the restaurant’s empty deck, we sang the Veruca Salt song, and we sat on the bench thoughtfully placed before the theatrically large woodburning pizza oven, at which point P. snuggled into my side and murmured “I just want it to be Auntie Elsa and P. all the time forever, okay?”
Upon returning home and before turning back to my studies, I climbed up on the kitchen counter with a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and all the foul language I could muster, and rethreaded the counter-weights in the kitchen window, which has been jammed open for a couple of days now. A couple of rainy days.
So. Yeah. I’m feeling pretty awesome.
At the risk of bringing down the Sandwich Party with a sobering tale, I want to tell you the story of my father’s last BLT. It’s a story I promised long ago, and though it’s a tearjerker, it’s also full of love and joy. I promise.
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Elli
Elsa
