Mama’s Visit

We took Mama to the airport this afternoon. We left at 1:45 for her 4:45 flight, giving ample room for delays. It started to rain. She mentioned that it was sunny in California, she always checks the weather. That’s my mother.

When it was time to leave for the airport, she stood at the base of the staircase in our old house while the children hugged her effusively. I heard her voice catch, the way it does when she would really like to cry, but won’t.

All the way to Logan Airport, we kept the conversation light. We hate goodbyes in this family. Goodbye has meant dire things in the past. It meant, I won’t see you for years. Or, I don’t know when we will be together again. Or I will never see you again in this world.

Now our goodbyes are full of promise.  We have travel plans. We have Skype,  we have Facetime. We have all-you-can-talk phone plans. Airline prices will go down and California is on every airlines destination. We chatted, talking about the upcoming graduation of my niece.

The conversation turned to manual typewriters. I have a new hobby, I am collecting manual typewriters. I feel that the sound of writing is the sound of a typewriter, and they aren’t being made anymore. After the successful repair of a very dusty and grimy German typewriter, I have suddenly become typewriter rescuer, and have several waiting in the wings on eBay.

I pulled up picture of the manual typewriter I was chasing on eBay. It is the kind Ernest Hemingway used, a Royal Quiet De Luxe. Mama started talking about learning to type during the war.

They fled to Itogon, a village some stretch from Baguio. The family was living with Fr. Alfonso, a Belgian priest who was one of my grandfather’s best friends. While they waited with the interminable wait for the next thing, my grandfather wanted them to keep busy.  So she and my aunt both learned to type from a book. Then they would have typing contests. It was a happy, encapsulated memory of childhood during a terrible time. I asked her what kind of typewriter it was, she said it was a Royal. Of course, dear readers, you know what is next, the typewriter was the very one that I bid on and won today.

All during this very busy and over-scheduled month, when we had visitors and commitments, graduation preparations, end of school year rushes – I would observe Mama’s breakfast ritual.

She only ate twice a day, and came downstairs close to noon. Her daily breakfast was an egg, garlic fried rice, and Spam, or longaniza. She liked to cook her fried rice in a non stick pan and toss in a good shake of fried garlic. Then she would take a cup and put all the rice in it, and turn out a perfect Filipino breakfast plate. “It looks nicer,” she said. This made me smile.

I noticed this morning when I checked her room that she had taken the sheets of the bed and folded the quilt neatly. The room smelled like her perfume.

This trip, she didn’t need a television, but would come down the stairs, one step at a time to watch her line up of “Dancing with the Stars”, “Revenge”, and “Hawaii Five-O”. When her shows weren’t on, she kept busy with her Kindle Fire (a very nice gift from my brother), and her music on her iPhone. She’s on Facebook and keeps up with her large extended family. She doesn’t understand techno-phobia in her generation.

In 1988, when I was the mother of two very small children, I graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree. I remember that is was a big deal for Mama, and we all went to dinner at the Harvard Club. I was exhausted from my schedule, and opted not to go to the diploma ceremony, thus failing to find out that I graduated cum laude. In those days, I was just ten years from the time I left the Philippines. As a young mother with babies in the wings, I rushed through commencement more preoccupied with my husband’s career than my own achievements. It was a great day for Mama, and for my family who didn’t know I was an intellectual.

This time, decades later, I was fully aware of the importance of graduation. I spent six years commuting to Cambridge, family in tow, in all kinds of weather. I juggled research, interviews and deadlines and took care of my family.

I looked at the looming commencement day with an odd sort of disbelief. Was it really going to happen? Then I found out that Harvard only gave two tickets to the morning ceremonies, and four to the diploma ceremony. I worried, begged, and prayed for four more tickets so all my children could see me walk. I got them.

Mama was a trooper that Thursday morning. She looked like a million bucks in her black coat and long string of pearls. Glamorous and poised, she walked with her cane with a grandchild at her elbow.

Our daughter who works in Boston came home on the late bus last night to see her grandmother off. It warms my heart to see the easy affection my children have for their grandmother.

At the airport today there was curbside check-in, and a chatty attendant complimented Mama on her youthful beauty. I said, “She’s eighty-one.”

This always gets a grand reaction. I enjoyed it for a moment, then added,” Can you believe she had eight children?”.

To which the gentleman said, “Oh, children keep you young!”.

It was a merry send off, the wheelchair man appeared and took her tiger patterned carry-on bag. Settled in her chariot, we kissed her goodbye and waved her off.

Save for the storm that blew outside the walls of our castle, all was well. To borrow a line from Downton Abbey, “You’re a storm braver if ever I saw one.” That’s my mother.

At the beginning of her visit, we were treated to dinner by an old classmate of mine. We sat around the table talking about old Baguio. We ordered drinks and oysters and anything we wanted off the menu. Mama ordered lobster. She also ordered a margarita, which is what she has always ordered as long as I can remember.

She toasted in Spanish. “Salud, amor, pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlo” (Health, love, money and time to spend it). This was an old family toast – it came down through the generations from my Spanish-speaking grandparents. It’s a vestige of the old days, like her little ceremonies of neatness.

She is a lady without servants, and she slowly keeps everything around her beautiful. She has been a widow for almost twenty years, and longer contends with my Daddy’s chaotic bedside. (Which looks like mine – a jumble of books and small things). I know she would rather have him and his mess, but this is her life now.  I see my grandmother in her and her convent school breeding is so apparent.

I’m very proud of my genteel and strong mother.

I raise my glass of wine tonight with the same toast. Long may she live, and may all her descendants prosper.

Thoughts about darkness a beautiful June day

I’m thinking about a lot of things this afternoon. It’s a gorgeous day, cotton ball clouds float across the blue sky. It’s breezy and sunny. The maple trees are very lush and dense. My Mother’s Day geraniums are in bloom in their terra-cotta pots.

My mother is leaving tomorrow. Mama is eighty-one and moves slowly because of arthritis in her knees. I can remember when she could dance the Charleston. When we were children in far away Baguio, she would tell us stories about how my grandparents would roll up the rugs and dance.  We had a recording of old songs, like, “Has Anybody Seen My Girl?” and other World War I classics.

My overarching wish is that all my family and friends be given great expanses of time so that we can all be together in reunions over and over again.

I spoke to my three brothers around my graduation day. Three brothers. All so different. I love them and miss them. I’m glad they were around when my children were small.

Yesterday, we moved two of our children from their regular apartment to their summer sublet. We rented a U-Haul, took time off of our various engagements and did the enormous chore. All day long yesterday I thought of how very blessed I am with this life, with my husband and children.

When I was younger, I didn’t yet know that there is a certain amount of life that, barring catastrophic events, could be predictably good. My sister Lizzie used to say that prudence was the most important and most overlooked virtue. I would add another rule to life. Avoid any people who disrespect you and denigrate you. None of us has to put up with anyone’s bad behavior.

On my beautiful graduation day, one of my relatives had an angry rant focused on my mother and me on Facebook. For the first time in my life, I simply turned away from it. I closed that door and will keep it closed until she gets some help.

On the way home, I sat between my husband and my oldest son in the front seat of the truck. On one side of the road the ocean breeze was blowing, on the other, the sunlit forests slowly dimmed  the lights. A plane flew overhead. I thought, “What a beautiful evening.” I could see the connected experiences of good things that led to that moment. The lucky breaks and the answered prayers are a map of connected dots.

I was talking to one of my dear friends a while ago. Out of the blue she broke her knee and had to have surgery. She walks everywhere fast, and now she is healing and her knee is in a brace. I thought of the times in life that I was moving merrily along and then suddenly something awful happened. That is just life. Sometimes there are accidents. We just have to buck up and be noble about things. We have to keep prevailing.

Before I became a mother, I would read about genocides. When looking at the human condition there is sometimes an idea that we can all improve. But no matter how huge the improvements in technology, the human heart, the human soul and the qualities of kindness and love need to be quietly nurtured.

People are complicated beings, subject to whims and passions and huge mistakes. I believe that evil exists.  That is one of the reasons I pray all the time, and always say, “Deliver Us From Evil”.

My sister Lizzie had different closings to her long and interesting letters. One of them was, “Under the Protection”. I think of that when I get scared by darkness I think of that and hang on to hope. No matter what, we will prevail.

Musings on Harvard and Happiness

This is the week after graduation, and I have to admit reality is slightly less extraordinary than it was last week. On graduation day, the sun shone, the flags flew, I walked down my beloved Cambridge streets feeling full of love and wonder and gratitude. In the afternoon during the diploma ceremony I saw my mother, husband and six children clap for me. At 55, I truly feel that life is full of exciting possibilities.

I have been very blessed to have a close and loving family, a happy marriage and in spite of difficult hands dealt by fate, a positive outlook and resilient spirit.

When I went back to the Philippines after an absence of thirty-four years earlier this year, I found my missing piece. Everything I really love has flourished. There were no burned bridges, no goodbyes unsaid. I have been blessed.

Today I was thinking about the various courses I took and thought of this one, Positive Psychology. Shawn Achor was my TA. This meant that every week he spoke to us on the telephone about the things we learned. The course had a profound effect on me. Happiness is easier to achieve for most people than they know.

However, there has to be a willingness to give up negative thought patterns and habits.

Since being Shawn’s student, he has gone on to launch his consulting firm Good Think Inc. and he has written a book, “The Happiness Advantage”. If you listen to this TED talk, you will see the magic formula which will work for most people (people who are basically mentally sound). Most people I know struggle with something in their lives. I often think that a tweak would help. Here is Shawn’s tweak.

You will see it in the TED talk, but if you need it now, here it is!

Small Changes Ripple Outwards

1. Three Gratitudes

2. Journaling

3.Exercise

4.Meditation

5. Random Acts of Kindness

Two minutes a day, for twenty-one days. Rewire your brain.

OK! I hope you are intrigued. Watch the video. It only takes twelve minutes!

I pray as well. Enjoy my teacher. His class was a favorite part of my Harvard experience.

Graduation and Lizzie’s birthday

Tomorrow will be Lizzie’s birthday. If she were still alive, I would call her on the telephone and hear that voice bursting with “ganas”. Lizzie was my best friend. She was, more importantly, my sister. Fourth in a lineup of eight children, she developed a very strong and positive personality. She loved people and had a huge collection of people whose confidences she kept.

Perhaps that most distinctly defined Lizzie was her Catholicism. She had a deep and joyful faith. Contrary to the stereotypes some people put on her, she had a deep theological understanding of Truth, and a very compassionate heart.

That being said, she was fearless and unflinchingly charitable. We would talk about the various members of our motley universe and she would always have hope that everyone would find their way home.

Lizzie was funny and a real intellectual. She loved reading, computers, software, crafts, sewing, quilting, cooking. She loved her husband and her children. The only time she ever left them was to have treatment in a hospital, and once to take a trip to the Philippines (although she brought her baby on that short journey).

Perhaps I am failing completely in trying to explain what my sister was like. She was beautiful – with an exotic beauty and a bubbling vivacious spirit. For her, everything was an adventure. One year she had a summer job in La Jolla answering the phones for an answering service. Before long, she knew everyone’s business. That summer she had a route down Girard Ave. She’d stop at the stationery store, the book store, the watch shop to see what was in the window. She made friends with Mr. Woo, who owned a gift shop that sold beaded sweaters. She always bought two of everything. Then she would call me and tell me what she bought.

She called me Kate.

She loved C.S. Lewis and the whole Oxford gang. She loved Oxford, and wrote me many letters and postcards – signed with a flourish,  ”Unfailingly yours from first to last” , and ” Under the Mercy”.

Lizzie loved our parents. She built a strong bond of affection with them, as an adult. When people are children, they can sometimes be lost in the crowd. But Lizzie had a unique and special relationship with our parents – forged on her own. She called them and made them laugh and did special things for them. When we lived in San Francisco, she sent a ticket to our mother to come up for a week of shopping. Together they haunted the fabric stores and bought patterns. In the evenings they would come to our apartment and play with the babies.

My father called her, “Our Lizzie”. He was delighted with her sense of humor. He named a pot after her, ever after called, “The pot of Lizzie.” I still have it.

I particularly remembered Lizzie last Thursday, when I graduated from Harvard at long last. I remembered her when I put on the academic regalia and stepped into the clear sunny day. Harvard Square, the neighborhood surrounding the university was in full bloom that day. Flowers were being sold on every corner, the atmosphere was so festive.

I started to walk to my school and as I passed people they smiled and said, “Congratulations!”. The square was filled with graduates in academic robes and very proud and happy families. I thought of how Lizzie would have been there, smiling, waving, voice bubbling over with glee.

As I walked I felt the breeze fill my winged sleeves. I felt so thankful, so grateful for this day. I felt so rich -rich in love of family and friends. I felt such a sense of accomplishment. And I thought of how Lizzie was watching me and with me.

I thought of her when I sat in Harvard Yard under the elm trees. I looked up in the sky and said, “Oh, Lizzie.” Drew Faust, Harvard’s president was speaking. Faust was my professor at the University of Pennsylvania a long time ago. She taught me how to to primary source research.

Her distinct voice rent the fabric of time, and the decades compressed. I was a young student with a whole life ahead of me and a whole pile of books to read. I was a young mother. I was a 55-year-old mother and wife sitting under the elms thinking of her sister. Time expanded and compressed like an accordion.

Happy Birthday dear sister. We miss you down here. We’ll see you again someday.

Mother’s Day

It was all about mothers, all weekend. Yesterday we went to Acushnet River Antiques. Ever since it opened, Bud has taken me there to treasure hunt. This year, my mother was with us. I looked and looked and fell into the lovely trance of being in the atmosphere of old things and the smell of old books, leather, furniture polish and the slight hint of moth balls.

Somewhere towards the end – we had our treasures all chosen, Mama called to me from down an aisle. “Kathleen! Come here! Look!” She was pointing to a plate, a piece of hand painted china.

“Before the war, your grandmother had an entire set of plates like this,” she said. “The bowls are like egg shells.”

And they were. We held them up to the light. Mama told me one of her rare memories of life before the war. When the house, Casa Blanca, was built my grandfather had large china cabinets made for the dining room. The china was in there. Stacks of it.

All lost and gone forever. Crashed, smashed, stolen during the Japanese invasion. How much loss can a family go through? How much can the world lose to pain and war? The things we remember from deep in the past are clues to who we were.

We were a family that sat at table with china plates. We ate looking out over a vista of blue mountains, cloaked with pine forests. At sundown the fog would roll in. The country was a colony of the United States. My grandparents spoke Spanish to each other, and English to their children. There was a Chinese cook, a pet pig named Linda Puerca. At night my grandparents would roll up the rugs and my grandfather would dance the Charleston.

They thought it would last forever, but it didn’t. I grew up in the tumble-down eccentricity of that house. A few weeks ago I came upon the house at dusk and cried on its stairs like my heart was being broken for the first time.

I am constantly amazed at the resilience of the human heart. I went to sleep that night, and woke up ready to wander through the ruin and bring home bits of it to keep as proof that the journey had been made. Then yesterday, at the antique store, another piece was delivered to me.

The plates are called “Famille Rose Medallion Pattern”. They are from the 19th century. For my grandmother to have had such a collection at such a young age was something wonderful. Of course the lesson here is that things and stuff get broken and they don’t ultimately matter.

But they do in this way. My mother’s memory of her mother’s plates, from a time of a happy childhood are precious. Soon after they were children in the midst of war.  They saw too much, heard too much, were too frightened, lost too much. Their brains were mapped by fear.

But the plate, the Famille Rose plate, purchased in New Bedford on Mother’s Day Eve joins the other treasures I have from my grandmother, the cloisonné pot from her island of Marinduque and the Depression glass swan bowl. These things link me to my past, and the past I did not see because I was not born yet.

So on the wall it went, where it sits opposite from a blue plate depicting Bud’s ancestors John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. The Famille Rose plate is the first of my collection of my grandmother’s china.

Days like this with my mother, who is now 81, will not go on forever. But while she and her siblings are still with us, I hope to get all the stories I can, because the stories are a part of me and all the people in the family.

May First

Today is the twenty-ninth anniversary of my first date with Bud.

A series of coincidental meetings  brought us to that moment. He asked me to dance at the Latin Fiesta, he didn’t salsa but he did his best. The next day, I ran into him as he exited a building. He took my hand and kissed it. “I’m smitten,” he said.

I talked to him at length on the evening of the traditional Walnut Walk. I could feel something mysterious and wonderful around the corner. The possibility of simple happiness frightened me.  I was in my second year of widowhood. The simple stakes of everyday life were so high. I decided to pray.

I made a novena to St. Therese of Liseux to ask her help. The traditional answer to this prayer in my family was the gift of white flowers. I was praying for courage to be happy, to step into the future. My previous life plan had been ripped away from me. I wanted a normal life, a family, children. But first I needed to meet the right person. I asked St. Therese if he was the one.

On the last day of the novena, at five in the afternoon, my boss asked me to follow her. My office was in an old mansion with an inner courtyard at the University of Pennsylvania.  My boss, a cranky woman with a smoker’s voice and a long history of being a terror handed me a pair of scissors. “Cut some, Kathleen, and bring them home.”

At my feet were hundreds of lilies-of-the-valley. White flowers. Bells. I smiled the biggest, deepest smile of recent years. Here was my sign.

I invited Bud to a concert at the Academy of Music. He countered with an invitation to dinner. We dined at a dignified restaurant, now closed, called The Fish House in Philadelphia. Afterwards we went to listen to Jean Pierre Rampal play the flute.

Bud wore a white shirt with a tiny blue stripe, bow tie, linen pants and carried his great-great grandfather’s tobacco pouch as a wallet. I wore a dress of royal blue and violet paisley.

The evening went beautifully. Bud was so measured in cadence, and so proper. He was very handsome and so kind. While at the concert hall, he had a supernatural experience where he saw me with a golden glow and knew that we were to be married, and happily so. At the end of the evening, when he dropped me off at home, he stood under a cherry tree in full bloom and told me he was an agnostic who was open to the truth. That didn’t bother me, what bothered me was that he was leaving for ten days. He said he would call me upon his return. It seemed to me that the cherry blossoms were smiling at him. He wasn’t agnostic for long.

A few months later, we hit one of those cross cultural communication walls. I couldn’t understand his occasional reserve.  That, coupled with my skittishness and scars made me nervous indeed. So off to mass I went again. This time, I went to pray for a really clear signal to go forward or not. I slid into the pew, knelt, and said my prayer. I finished the sign of the cross and I saw a piece of newspaper down the gleaming wooden bench. Curiosity always gets to me and I slid over and picked it up. It was newspaper picture of two workmen up on a billboard. The sign said, “This Bud’s for you.”

God was smiling at me.

Six children and an old house were around the corner.

Lilacs

Lilacs are one of the wonders of New England. There is a short lilac season, around this time, in the spring. All the lilacs blossom and one can walk along hedges and backyards and inhale.

We ordered this lilac bush and its companion from Smith and Hawken before Rosie was born, in the first year we lived in this house. When we planted them, we had an idea of replicating our California garden. Of course it didn’t work. The rose bushes, all twenty of them died. We didn’t know about the nature of maple tree roots, or the necessity of sunlight.

Our house and postage stamp yard are in the shade. Which is great during the summer because everything stays cool. However, to grow flowers and vegtables, there must be sunshine.

The lilacs have become symbols of resilience. They have weathered a hurricane, two immense blizzards, and the ongoing ambush of the insidious and beautiful poison hemlock.

The previous owner of the house, the ones who restored it painstakingly to its original glory (and which we have be unable to sustain), was a great transplanter of flowers.

Across the street from us is the Reed Estate. It is now known as the Dog Park and is owned by the Department of Mental Health. Once upon a time it had a grand house and gardens, but it burned down in the 1960′s. The gardens went wild, then were mowed under. But the former lady of the house dug up things she thought were lovely – including patches of what she thought was Queen Anne’s Lace.

Years later a dear friend of ours who makes dyes from natural sources like bugs and flowers said, “That isn’t Queen Anne’s Lace, that’s poison hemlock!”. And so it was.

We tried pulling it up, choking it back. But it never gave up, it always came back. Since we do not have little children anymore, we’ve just accepted it.

So the lilacs thrive in spite of the poison. They are sort of like optimists in the midst of toxic people.

And that is sort of like real life.