Category Archives: Birthdays & Anniversaries

May 18 2018
25 Comments
Birthdays & Anniversaries, Pentecost, Transitions

The Pinky Ring Club

Sunday brings Pentecost, a day that I associate with a most fleeting thing: air. Invisible life force, we breathe in, breathe out: respiration. A word so close to “inspiration” and indeed they share the same Latin root, spirare: breath. Pentecost has to do with the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Earth and it is this that brings about my airy thoughts each year for this day, as one word links to another: spirit to ghost, ghost to gust, gust to wind, wind to breath, breath to respiration, and breath to inspiration, too.

With Pentecost, we are 50 days past Easter, and with it, we transition further beyond spring and closer to summer. Though red is the color of Pentecost in the Church, the day in some places is known as White Sunday: Whitsunday. Special Whitsun Ales are brewed at this time of year, in some places drunk on Whitsunday, in other places brewed on Whitsunday.

Ah, but that is Sunday. Today, the 18th of May, it’s another celebration, one of my family’s own. My dad would have been 92 today. Approaching his birthday this year is not as bad as it was last year. Some of the sadness over his passing has been replaced by something different. I still miss him something awful, but more often when we talk about him or when he pops into my head the feelings are bathed in warmth, which is a slight change from last year. I still sigh a lot, but I smile a lot, too.

Mom does not want to do anything in particular for Dad’s birthday and so we are honoring her wishes. I’m not sure what Seth and I will do. It’s not like we can just make Dad’s favorite meal in honor of his birthday. He didn’t really have a favorite meal. He would sometimes say how much he loved a good Porterhouse steak… but once you put one on a plate for him, he would eat it and when he was done, always proclaim that he’d rather have a nice dish of pasta. And there was the custard-filled crumb cake he would talk about, too––the one that came from a bakery in Brooklyn called Hummel’s when he was younger. When you got right down to it, though, Dad was always just plain happy to eat whatever was put in front of him.

Honoring Dad’s memory with a favorite meal may be out, but I will wear his ring for his birthday. It was his pinky ring, one that he had from the time I was a boy. His initials, which happen to be the same as mine, in diamonds. It is so not something I would wear, but I do wear it when I want to keep him closer in spirit. It’s too big for my pinky so I wear it on my ring finger. It’s flashy, sparkly, a bit like my Dad, who, though he did not like to call attention to himself, did love himself some bling on his fingers. When he bought himself that pinky ring, Dad drove a 1960s Cadillac and he liked the finer things in life, as he always did––things he worked hard to attain. He was of the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra age, and he would have fit in nicely shooting pool with them wearing this ring. I wore it at his funeral last year. I wish I could remember which New York cousin it was of mine who I think was wearing his own dad’s pinky ring then, too, and who said we were all members of the Pinky Ring Club now. I’ll take that as inspiration, too, in this time of holy spirit, ghost, gust, and breath. Happy birthday, Dad.

 

Image: Dad’s JC ring. Dad would sometimes try to teach me boxing moves when I was a kid. He’d have both dukes up and tell me, “Watch the left,” and then surprise me with the right. I was too busy trying to figure out which left he meant: mine or his. Needless to say, I didn’t do very well at boxing. Things like that always made me think we were very different, until we were both older, and I realized how much we are the same. That, too, is something that I can smile about now. If I am wearing my dad’s pinky ring, though, watch out: That ring can do some serious damage to your kisser.

 

May 29 2017
4 Comments
Birthdays & Anniversaries, Memorial Day, Transitions

Memorial Day

One of my favorite things about the Convivio Book of Days is when a reader shares with the rest of us their own traditions or memories in the comments section. To get any comments at all is a wonderful thing, as comments help us writers see that folks are actually reading and engaging. But I learn so much from you when you share what you do in your family or what you remember doing when you were a kid. And last year, in the comments section of the blog chapter for Memorial Day, Convivio pal Marilyn Pancoast wrote her memory of the day:

When I was young it was called Decoration Day and all the family’s and friend’s graves were cleaned and then decorated with flowers. Then in the late afternoon there was a parade and a ceremony after dusk. Someone, many times me, would play taps and small candlelit flower boats were released into the river. There was one for each soldier and sometimes more for others. The ceremonies and activities were quite moving and a way to involve and teach each new generation.

I think Marilyn sums up this day beautifully and I hope that someone on some river is still doing what she did when she was young. This is the day we remember our fallen heroes, those who gave their lives in service to their country. Memorial Day (or some version of it) is celebrated not just here in the United States, but in other countries, as well, and usually at this time of year, a tradition that harkens back to Ancient Rome. Our own Memorial/Decoration Day traditions in this country go back to the Civil War era. The original date, May 30, was chosen for it was believed that flowers for decorating graves would be in bloom in every state of the Union on that date. It’s since been moved to the last Monday of May. This year it falls on the 29th, which happens to be the same date as my mom and dad’s wedding anniversary. Those two good looking kids from Brooklyn tied the knot at St. Blaise Church on May 29, 1949––the Sunday, that year, of Memorial Day weekend. Today would have been their 68th wedding anniversary, but it’s the first time we honor the day without Dad’s physical presence. That will make for a bittersweet day, I know, but Memorial Day is kind of like this. It is our unofficial start of summer here in the US, but a somber one if we honor the day in its proper tradition. And so we decorate, and we remember. Flowers for remembrance, and flowers beckoning summer and the gentle time of year.

Image: Decoration Day. Photographic print from glass negative, 1917. From the George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

May 18 2017
10 Comments
Birthdays & Anniversaries, Transitions

Wind Telephone (Kaze No Denwa)

In 1997, I printed a broadside especially for my dad. It was his birthday, his 71st. Today, in fact, would have been his 91st. It is our first of Dad’s birthdays without him, but we have this thing in my family, by my prodding, I suppose. We celebrate birthdays, even of those who have passed. I’ve told you about it before; it’s a custom I read about in a book called Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. I liked this idea of remembering and celebrating, and so sometimes we will do as the Delany Sisters did: celebrate birthdays of those who have come and gone by making their favorite meals, or sometimes it will be simple, like a favorite dessert, or sometimes we will simply raise our glasses in tribute. For Dad’s birthday today, we are going to lunch, as many of us as can gather together, at a restaurant he loved to go to, Cosa Duci, a little Italian place in Boca Raton where Silvia and Giovanna come up with a menu each day and what they make is what they bring you, if you order the special, at least. It always tastes like home and the folks there are always wonderful to us. I don’t know exactly how it will go, but the goal is to remember my father and to celebrate him and to bring a little joy of life to this day.

But back to 1997 and the broadside. It’s called “Dad’s Apple.” In it, I describe a dinner table trick that Dad loved to perform, a trick that his Uncle Jack taught him, probably when my dad was a kid. One portion of the text for the broadside was my first attempt at technical writing: not an easy task, let me tell you. In fact, at the end of my instructions, I provide the following disclaimer: If your apple doesn’t pull into 2 equal crazy halves, try another one. Apples are good for you!

So yes, after dinner sometimes, especially in the fall, Dad would pick up a knife in one hand and an apple in the other and he would make four cuts: one from the top, one from the bottom, then two along the middle of the apple. And then he would ask if you wanted to split an apple. He’d hold out the apple, offer it to you, and you’d grab it and pull it away and there in your hand would be this jigsaw puzzle piece of apple, one end going up, one end going sideways, that was, indeed, one half an apple. It is a pretty wonderful trick, the kind that makes kids go, “Whoa!” And that, my friends, is Dad’s Apple.

Last fall, on one of our haircut nights, Seth began as he always does, by tuning into the podcast of This American Life. No doubt the wooden bowl on the kitchen counter was filled with fresh apples as we listened to Episode No. 597: One Last Thing Before I Go. My haircut is always first, and during Act One of this episode, Seth cut my hair as Miki Meek told the story of man in Japan who installed a telephone booth in his garden. There’s a wooden shelf in the phone booth, and on the shelf, a phone, the old-fashioned kind, with a rotary dial. It’s connected to nothing, this phone, but the gardener placed it there so he could sit in the phone booth and talk to his cousin, who had recently died. It just seemed, to him, the natural thing to do. As the years passed, other people began using the gardener’s phone booth to speak to their dead friends and relatives, especially after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the gardener’s town in 2011. The episode was full of conversations that folks who used the phone booth had had with those who have passed. They gave their permission to be recorded, and they typically start out quite rational, as if they are aware of the recording, talking about what’s new in their lives. Work, school, that kind of stuff. Almost always, though, they let down their guard. The conversations become more emotionally charged.

The haircut turned out just fine; it always does. But I was a blubbering mess through the whole thing. And this was months before I had experienced my own loss. Miki Meek, who led us through the story, gave a name to the gardener’s telephone: kaze no denwa, wind telephone. If the wind telephone was here, I would use it, because I am like that. I celebrate birthdays, like Dad’s birthday today, out of love and out of a wish to keep the channels open. I think Dad was doing the same a few days back when I found the Mother’s Day card that was the subject of the previous Convivio Book of Days chapter. We are all learning and wending our way through uncharted territory, and part of the process, I suppose––of keeping the circle unbroken in our book of days––is being receptive, being open, and learning to communicate in new ways, be it an old card that bubbles up out of a pile of junk, or an apple, or a meal, or a telephone that transmits its signal into the wind.

 

I printed an edition of 95 copies of Dad’s Apple, and gave Dad copy no. 1 for his 71st birthday. It’s in the family kitchen, framed, right above the cabinet where the napkins are kept. The broadside is printed from handset Van Dijck and Franklin Gothic types. I carved the illustration in linoleum and printed it as a monoprint, applying the inks in a painterly fashion with a brush onto the linoleum, so each one is different from all the others. The print hangs in the kitchens of many people I know. It would probably look great in your kitchen, too!

 

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