Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Well loved is better...

I’m not a collector. I’m also not a saver-of-new-things. About the only thing I collect or save up is dust, and I’m told that’s not in demand on the resale market. While I enjoy other people’s collections, I don’t want any of my own. (In a disclaiming aside here, I will admit to having more fabric than I’ll ever get sewn and two more laptops than I actually need, but I’m not collecting them. Exactly.)

To try put my shattered focus into semi-one-place, let me try this again. I don’t save things for “good.” I don’t have Sunday dishes or company towels or candles that have never been lit. The quilts I have from previous generations are on beds, not put away to be passed on. I’ve learned not to maintain a three-size wardrobe, because even if I lose enough weight to wear the smallest size, I don’t like the clothes anymore.

My grandkids’ drawings are not kept neatly in scrapbooks for them to have and laugh over when they are grown; they hang on the refrigerator until the paper is yellow and curled and has footprints on it from hitting the floor too many times. Sometimes they hang there even longer. My first granddaughter’s drawing of a lion is held in place by a business card magnet. Mari was probably five when she drew the lion and she’s now in her third year at Ball State. I might take it down if she drew me another, but then again I might not. I like it where it is, the way it is.

The drawing would probably look much better if it had been kept clean and flat for fifteen years, but I would not have enjoyed it every day. I wouldn’t have taken a fresh mental snapshot of our own little red-haired girl each time I looked at it. I wouldn’t remember the day of her birth so often.

A few years ago, my daughter-in-law Tahne gave us a set of Christmas dishes. My first thought was to use them just during the holidays, and then only when we had a sit-down meal. This way they would not get broken and sometime in the future, the aforementioned granddaughter would inherit them and look at her mother and say, “What am I supposed to do with these? I don’t think Grandma’s washed them since 2005.”

Instead, we use the dishes all the way through the holidays and whenever else we feel like it. That none of them are broken yet is both miraculous and maybe a clue that they are meant to be used and enjoyed whenever the mood strikes, not just at Christmas.

Christmas, by the way, is the reason I’m writing this. I know I’m not saying anything original here. I’m pretty sure there are Lifetime movies based on this very premise. But we’ll get and give gifts at Christmas, which is going to be here in about fifteen minutes, as quickly as time’s going these days. Some of those gifts will be complete failures, some will be okay, some will be fun, and some will be keepers. Ones you put up to use at the perfect time and the perfect place.

I hope you don’t—keep them and put them up, I mean. Use them. Wear them out. My other daughter-in-law, Laura, made me a quilt as a reward for quitting smoking nine years ago. It’s queen-size, beautiful, and never gets too far from my bed, but I told my son I thought maybe I should put it away so it wouldn’t be worn out when it came time for Laura’s and his son to inherit it. He said he thought something well loved might be a better gift than something well preserved. I didn’t put it away.

Collecting isn’t bad, by any means, but I’m kind of glad I don’t. I’d rather wear the things in my life out by enjoying them. I don’t want the gifts I give or the ones I receive to be keepers. I’d rather they were things remembered than things passed on to the next generation in good shape.

As another side note (remember my little problem with focus), remember what my son said about well loved being better than well preserved? I think that goes for people, too. Even though I’d like to be a whole lot better preserved than what I am, well loved is better. I wish it for all of you. Till next time.

Labels: collecting, Jock Flaherty, Laura Flaherty, Mari Flaherty, saving, Tahne Flaherty

posted by Liz Flaherty # 4:10 PM 2 Comments

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday that kind of gets lost in the hoopla that is pre-Christmas. We enjoy the day, the food, and the football, but then it’s on to Black Friday and the 20-some shopping days till Christmas. I am not, you understand, really complaining about this. The truth is that I like it. The other truth is that I miss the way Thanksgiving used to be. This is one of the ways I know I’m getting old, and that’s okay with me. I like old.

We used to go to my aunt’s house in Goshen, Indiana on Thanksgiving. I thought Aunt Nellie was rich because she had a whole second kitchen in her basement, complete with comfortable furniture and a wind-up Victrola with a whole stack of thick records. In the afternoon, after we’d eaten dinner, the men would sneak upstairs and smoke and watch television while the rest of us stayed in the basement with board games and old records until it was time to eat again. I don’t remember anything that was said, or even a lot of the people who were there, but I remember laughter flowing like music through the big basement, filling the concrete-walled expanse with warmth and comfort.

“What are you grateful for this year?” was always asked right before we started eating. We only had turkey once or twice a year and I’d have preferred my enjoyment of it not be interrupted, but the grownups didn’t really buy into that.

“Try this,” Mom would say as I filled my plate, forking a slice of the cranberry stuff that slides out of the can whole. “It’s good.”

“No, it’s not,” I’d say. And I wouldn’t have to try it. Ever. I could eat what I wanted.

No one went shopping on Thanksgiving afternoon because the stores were closed; if you ran out of something, you did without. If there was football on TV, I don’t remember it, because after watching Macy’s parade, I was off to the basement and the Victrola. And the food.

The food probably wasn’t all that healthy by today’s standards, but that was never mentioned. We just ate and at the end of the day, we took containers of leftovers home with us. As the youngest, I always sat in the middle of the back seat, where I would promptly fall asleep and tip over on the brothers who had the window seats. If they pushed me back and forth, I slept through it.

In retrospect—the older you get, the more retrospect there is floating around—I’m grateful for the warmth, the comfort, the laughter that still slips along my nerve endings as I remember Thanksgivings past. I’m grateful for memories of tinny music and tables groaningly full of succulent food. I’m thankful for the memory of Aunt Nellie, who served as the unwitting model for the heroine in Home to Singing Trees. She buried two men she loved and still continued to live every minute as though it were a precious gift.

Which all of our minutes are, and maybe that’s where our gratitude should begin.

Aunt Nellie wasn’t rich. Her house—and its most excellent basement—were small by today’s standards. But the moments spent and the memories generated there are the stuff of Hallmark commercials.

Thanksgivings in my family aren’t like they were then. There are too many of us, for one thing. For another, the demands of life, jobs, and school often make a full day of celebration an unreasonable expectation. For yet another, I don’t believe anything was as good in real time as it is in memory, which is yet another gift.

But I’ll be cooking this Thanksgiving, for whoever shows up. I’m taking two hours off work on Wednesday because there isn’t time to do it all on Thursday. That extra time has become a tradition all its own: making sure there are dollars in my pockets for the Salvation Army buckets when I do a last run-through at the grocery store, buying turkey bags because I’m not positive I have any—I always do, several boxes at the back of the cupboard. At home, I’ll make pies and brownies and not cook supper.

On Thursday, we’ll have turkey, mashed potatoes with tons of real butter and not a drop of two percent milk, and dressing I may or may not make from the box. No can of cranberry sauce will cross the threshold, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I asked my grandkids what they’re grateful for.

As often happens, I have reached the end of what I'm writing only to discover the beginning is wrong. Normally this means I mutter a lot, delete the first two paragraphs and with gusting sighs, start over again. Not this time.

All I was really wrong about was when I said I missed the way Thanksgivings used to be. I don’t. I am oh-so-grateful for the minutes and the memories those days were. But I’m just as thankful for all the blessed minutes we have now, and the memories that are made in those joyous pieces of time when laughter flows like music.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Till next time.

Labels: Happy Thanksgiving, Home to Singing Trees

posted by Liz Flaherty # 4:23 PM 0 Comments