Summer Was Sacred

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Coming East

My brother and I (with ice cream cone) and our cousins

When I grew up in Connecticut in the ’50’s and ’60’s, my father made a good salary, and when school was out for the summer, we could have traveled to California or Florida, seen the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone.  But our summer vacations were more fabulous than that.  Every summer we drove to Ohio to visit my grandparents and cousins.  My brother and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Summer was sacred.  It was not a time to pack in more “stuff” to do.  It was a time to play with the neighborhood kids and build relationships that lasted into the classroom and beyond.  It was a time to use our imagination and creativity because no one was going to entertain us.  It was a time to sleep late and stay out until you were dragged inside in the dark.  You had time to read, time to make up little plays with your friends and perform them for your neighborhood.  You volunteered your mom to make Kool-Ade for the occasion.  There was plenty to do, and if you were bored, it was because you were boring, and you knew it, so you found things to do.

Your big adventure for the summer was going to visit family, especially grandparents if they didn’t live close by.  When you got older, you even were shipped to your grandparents for a week or two before your parents joined you.  No, you didn’t dread going.  You loved sleeping in the attic with the drone of the attic fan running all night, or sleeping in the basement, the coolest spot in the house.  You loved hearing stories about your mother or father or great grandparents you never had a chance to meet.  This time with your grandparents and cousins was a time of bonding that would keep you when you returned home and had to deal with your parents when you messed up or they messed up.  It was a time to get to know who you were and where you came from.  It grounded you, gave you a sense of continuity, not of floating around in space without anchors to the earth.  That time with your grandparents was as important as anything you learned in school.  Even more important.

My grandparents

Would your parents have enjoyed taking a vacation more exotic?  Of course.  But it was unthinkable if it was a choice between visiting family or skipping seeing them for another year.

I am in my 60’s now, and I still look back on those Ohio summers and see them clearly.  They were some of the best summers of my life.  Yes, times certainly have changed.  Summers now are times to cram in every available activity:  soccer, gymnastics, swim camp, theater camp, band camp, and more.  No wonder parents are worn out!  No, I’m not really making a judgment here.  You put your child at a disadvantage if you don’t give your children these summer opportunities when most of their friends and peers are experiencing them.  If we had had those opportunities, our parents would have pursued them, too.  But my heart tells me I’m glad we didn’t.

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Look Ma, No Wrinkles!

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Coming East

You know you just might need a facelift if you bend over to dry your hair and you nearly suffocate when your nose is stifled by your sagging cheeks swinging forward to meet and greet each other.  Recently, I saw an article in my Prevention magazine about alternatives to surgical facelifts.  The only kind of facelift I’ve been able to afford is to lie across the bed on my back with my head hanging slightly over the edge.  Yes, it does make my cheeks fall back into position, but it also makes my husband think I’m always ready for him.

Anyway, this article mentioned an invisible tape that you put on your eyelids and it gives you an instant eye lift.  I’ve never heard of such a thing.  The article didn’t mention where you can purchase this tape, but it did say that it cost $30.00.  Quite pricy, especially if you can only wear it once.  I’m wondering if the double-sided tape my daughter uses for scrapbooking would work as well.  Certainly much cheaper.  How do you blink with it on?  Are your eyes always wide open?  Uh oh, creepy zombie image just came to mind!  Clearly, I’m not getting the concept of this product.

Now I’m wondering if there is a tape strong enough to smooth out this chicken neck of mine.  I tried pulling all that extra skin around to the back and holding it there with a potato chip bag clip, but besides being rather painful, if I wanted to look side to side, I had to turn my whole body.  I think this tape idea might work better.  And getting back to the original cheek problem, I wonder if my sagging cheeks could be held up with tape as well.  Perhaps I could anchor them to my ears.  Would have to be something strong, though, like electrical tape, and it would take an awful lot of foundation to disguise it.  No, I think the weight of my cheeks would bend my ears in half.  I need to study this a little more.  I’ll get back to you.

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The YMCA—More than a Gym

Posted on August 17, 2010 by Coming East

I joined the YMCA when I retired and moved to Virginia Beach, and it has been a tremendous blessing.  Over the years I have belonged to several gyms, some of them large chains with good reputations.  The last gym I belonged to was definitely top of the line with beautiful facilities, two pools, one inside and one out, the most up-to-date equipment, free towel service, even that little spinner that wrings out your swimsuit.  Yet none of them measure up to the YMCA in my book.

The YMCA is not simply a gym.  It is a community of people who care about each other.  I am always greeted with a smile and acknowledged by name.  None of the other gyms I belonged to ever knew my name without looking on their computer screens.  The group exercise instructors know all of their regular participants and are concerned about them when they don’t show up for awhile.  Even the class participants get to know each other.  People who were strangers quickly become friends.  After yoga we sit down in the lobby and swap life over tea.

“Did you find the right dress for your son’s wedding?”

“Congratulations on your grandson’s diving trophy!”

“I’m so sorry to hear about your mother.

“Why don’t you come dancing with us Friday night?  Bring your husband along so we’ll have somebody to dance with.”

Recently I heard that the YMCA is changing its name to simply the Y.  At our little after-yoga tea party we commiserated about the difficulty of singing the YMCA song when it’s reduced to one letter, but I can assure you that those three letters will be the only  thing that’s missing.  If you are looking for a place that revives your spirit as well as your body, run, don’t walk, to your nearest YMCA and join up.  And tell them Susan sent you.

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Lesson from a Clamshell

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Coming East

When my sister, Karen, heard I was going to Nags Head on the Outer Banks, she said, “Bring me some seashells!”  Karen loved seashells, and I was looking forward to gathering a ton of them for her.  Unfortunately, none were to be found; the beach was nearly washed clean.  However, I did find a very small piece of something that looked like a stone.  I was attracted to it because of its smoothness.  It was just a fragment, but in it I could see a myriad of colors and patterns, deep grey merging into taupe, a creamy cloud of ecru on the underside which echoed the overcast sky.  I took the fragment to my brother, the marine ecologist, who had accompanied my husband and me on the trip along with my sister-in-law.

“Is this a rock or a shell?” I asked him.  Without hesitation, he said, “It’s a shell, a clam shell actually.”  “How do you know?” I asked, astonished at his certainty.  “You can tell by its distinctive patterns,” he said.  “Even though the ocean has polished it smooth, it maintains its shell-like characteristics.”

I thought about that as I rubbed the shell over and over with my thumb, how the sea changed its feel but left its characteristic pattern in tact so it could still be recognized for what it was.  I also marveled that my brother had no trouble knowing what it was, when to my untrained eye, it looked so much like a stone.

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my sister’s death and I thought about that day on the beach at Nags Head.  I thought also of a line from one of my grandfather’s favorite hymns, “When sorrows like sea billows roll…”  The image of the billowing sea bringing sorrow after sorrow as it had with the death of my mother, then my father, and now my little sister, was mixed with the image of the sea polishing a shell into something stronger and even more beautiful made me wonder if there weren’t some lesson here.

Sorrow can weaken you, make you crumble, as perhaps the ocean destroyed the rest of my little clam shell.  Or it can take what’s best about you and make you stronger.  Yes, maybe a part of you will be gone, but what is left is the part that is distinctly you, your essential element that makes you recognizable.  And that makes me think of the last line of my grandfather’s hymn.  Yes, “it is well with my soul.”

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Coming East—Coming Home

Posted on August 15, 2010 by Coming East

My daughter recently wrote an entry on her wonderful blog (mypajamadays.com) about how difficult it was for her when her dad and I sold the home in San Antonio she grew up in and moved to Virginia Beach.  Mind you, she hadn’t lived there in ages, has been happily married and living in Michigan for many years with a terrific husband and two beautiful daughters in a house ten times grander than the one she grew up in, yet the loss of her house in Texas made her a little sad and homesick.

Ironically, I’ve been thinking about that sense of home for quite a few years now, so I understand where my daughter is coming from.  I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, for me the sweetest little town in America.  I pictured raising a family there one day.  Life, of course, takes you on quite a ride and leads you far from home sometimes, and there is not much you can do but hold on tight.  After six years of marriage, my husband and I moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania with two small children in tow and another one on the way.  After two years there, we moved to Texas, and there we stayed and raised our children through elementary, middle, high school, and college.

Since then all three of our children moved far away from us, our daughter to Michigan, our sons to Boston.  I began to think more and more about Fairfield, how much I missed it, how much I wanted to move back, to move home, even though I haven’t lived there in nearly forty years.  If my children had stayed in Texas…if even one had stayed in Texas…we wouldn’t have moved.  We loved San Antonio and Austin and had many dear friends there.  But without the children, it felt so lonely.  We desperately wanted to move back east.  I became my husband’s headhunter and after a year of searching, I found a great job for him in Virginia Beach, two hours from my brother and his family.  The East Coast again!  One day’s drive to Connecticut and Boston.  One day’s drive to my husband’s family and our dearest friends we’ve kept in touch with during all these long years away.  One day’s drive from our children.

Fairfield isn’t the same, obviously, as when I lived there.  The Fairfield Department Store, Trudy’s, and the stationery store, among others, have been replaced with chain stores.  My elementary school is now a public parking lot.  The last house I lived in was knocked down and a 2.2 million dollar home was built on our lot, and none of my family is still there.  My parents and little sister are all dead, and my brother lives in Virginia.

But when we go to Fairfield, I picture things the way they were.  I see myself hanging onto my dad’s neck as he swims laps at the beach with me on his back, I drive by the Congregational church where my mother was president of the Women’s Fellowship, I picture myself marching down the Old Post Road on Memorial Day in my white pleated skirt and bright red shirt, playing the bell lyre in the school band.  I always eat at Rawley’s, still the best hot dog joint on the planet and the place my dad would take us every Friday night when he came home with his paycheck.  I feel home.

A few days before my mother died, I sat and listened to her talk.  It was our last conversation.  Did she talk about her life with my dad, whom she adored, or how much she had loved being our mother?  No, though we understood those things to be true.  Her last thoughts were about growing up in Irvine, Kentucky with her mother and father and brother.  Playing silly children’s games, swimming in the river, going to school, the only responsibilities to keep her room picked up and the table set.  She pictured her little family whole again.  She pictured home.

Yes, I realize that you can’t ever really go home again because nothing stays the same and you don’t want to live in the past.  But I think we tend to sift out all the painful moments we had growing up and see a place where we felt safe, where we felt loved, where the stresses of life hadn’t fully reached us yet.  It was one idyllic instant that still shines in our heart.  Home is not a physical place.  It is a memory.  Close your eyes and go home.

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