Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky
The first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square by the fountain after shopping at the outdoor greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up my grandmother so she’d be ready to push the stroller—a sort of walker on wheels—in time to meet up for lunch.
A man was walking along the path in front of us, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids connote Norman Rockwell, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him stop and take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.
"Is this four generations?" he asked, slowly, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those precise words to explain or define us. It was, remains, what we are, and I sought to see the scene through his eyes: My nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child, a literal bridge from the past to the future, three women, one girl, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love. A moment: so ordinary for us that we'd forgotten it actually wasn't. Together, our lives span nearly a century.
"Yes," my mother finally said, and I knew the question had taken her, too, by surprise, this recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.
"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.
I do now. Since that afternoon, four years ago, there have been many more such moments, and we are five now: my second daughter was born in September. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachusetts, where my parents and grandmother still live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, most often walking down the street. Often, the observation is followed by a wistful explanation of personal loss--a new baby who will never know his grandmother, the parent who died too young. Most of the time my grandmother doesn’t realize what’s being said until the stranger departs, and we fill her in. Her hearing is going, but she refuses to consider hearing aids; they’re for “old people.” When we tell her, she smiles. A small smile, but a satisfied one.
We call my grandmother Mormor, which means “mother’s mother” in Swedish. She was born in 1917 to immigrant parents who spoke Swedish at home. Amazingly, I knew my great-grandmother, her mother, who worked as a cook and a maid in rich people’s homes and raised seven children. I remember her, just barely—white hair braided and pinned up like Mormor’s, her standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the smell of the nursing home she died in. From what I understand, she was a forceful, determined person, extraordinarily capable, with a streak of humor and irreverence she passed on to almost all of her children. She taught my grandmother to cook, and my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught us, and now—although she is just four—I am teaching Lily. The ability to roll piecrust, the gift of creating a meal for people you love, is one of the few constants in a world that has transformed itself overnight, or at least it seems that way to my grandmother.
Mormor tells stories, if you push her a little. The same stories I heard growing up I now beg her to tell Lily; I don't know if my mother heard them as a child or if life was then being lived in the present. When Mormor was four, ice was delivered by horse and buggy, and milk in glass bottles was left on the porch. Chickens were kept in the yard. My great-grandfather, who died young, built weapons at the Watertown arsenal. The world at large was changing, in ways apparent and with still hidden ramifications. World War I ended, and Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Women had—just—won the right to vote, and the world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. Betty Friedan was born, but the Feminine Mystique was still more than forty years from publication--the women whose life traps Friedan mourned were my grandmother's children, not her. Mormor was the most academically gifted of all of her siblings, but there was no question of her going to college. She put herself through secretarial school and later—after raising three children—went to work at the local high school assisting the principal, although she would scoff at the notion that this was a career.
My mother, the oldest of these three children, was born in 1942. As a girl, in defiance of a bigoted uncle-by-marriage, she drank from a water fountain marked “colored” on a visit to his home in Alabama. Later, she went to college, marched with Martin Luther King, moved into her own apartment in Cambridge, and began working as a teacher in her own hometown—farther afield was not a real choice. From the moment my mother was born, according to my grandmother, she was “the image of her father,” not just in looks but in temperament: unfailingly reliable, hardworking, moral, self-contained. As soon as she could afford it, my mother bought herself—in what strikes me now as an emblem of freedom--the first of many racing-green MG convertibles.
Even as a child, I always knew my grandmother and mother were different from each other. In fact, over the course of my childhood, I saw up close the dramatic trajectory of my mother’s life from one like my grandmother’s, centered on home and family, to her reentrance into the workforce when we were small, to her return to school for the advanced degree she should have earned twenty years previous, and her eventual role—and finally the fulfillment of her destiny—as an educator and leader of a community. This message was not lost on me. I remember my grandmother showing me her own high school year book in which she was the only girl in the entire class not in the “homemaker” track—this due to the fact that her grades were too high, not to her own ambition or any sense of real possibility. My grandmother still begins sentences with the words, “I would have loved to….” and I wince, feel the weight of my mother’s choices behind the words. But my mother does not regret the years she spent in a life that didn't quite fit--she has us, and as the world changed around her, she was ready and waiting to meet it. Too often I have worried that my grandmother did have regrets, primarily about the era she’d been born into. But now, instead, she has Lily.
And Annika, of course, who is only five months old, but really it is Lily, Lily, in my eyes, who has changed the way I see my grandmother, and—I hope—the way my grandmother sees herself. I was never a girl who fantasized about marriage and children. To be honest, I sort of figured they would probably happen eventually and that this would be for the better—I would not regret having missed out on them in my own old age. And predictably, having Lily caused an inner tumult that is unlikely to ever subside; rather, I am learning to reconcile it with who I am now, now that I am who I always have been but also—and that “also” looks and sounds so inappropriately insignificant—a mother of two who loves her two children more than she ever imagined was humanly possible. Technically, I am of the post-feminist generation, benefiting from the battles my mother and her peers fought on my behalf. Although not one of my four grandparents went to college, by the time I was born, my parents, thanks to their own hard work, had reached the upper middle class, and the question for me was not if, but where and with what advanced degrees.
When Lily was born, I was 34, and I think my grandmother had given up on me in this regard. Although they could not be more different—where Mormor is shy, Lily is exuberant, where Mormor is passive, Lily is assertive—they were fast friends. From her earliest days, Lily was calm in Mormor’s arms, soothed, perhaps, by the constant beam of worship illuminating her tiny face. My mother watches out for Mormor, mothers her, and I try, relentlessly, to push her out of her complacency, but Lily—88 years her junior--treats her like a peer. It turns out to be just what she needs.
Showing posts with label Four Generations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Four Generations. Show all posts
Monday, February 4, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Closer still....
Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky
The first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square by the fountain after shopping at the outdoor greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up Mormor so she’d be ready to push the stroller—which serves as a sort of walker on wheels for her—in time to meet up for lunch.
A man walked by, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids give her a Norman Rockwell appearance, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice him standing there. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.
"Is this four generations?" he asked, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those words before to explain or define it. I took it in through his eyes, the group that we made: My nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child, three women, one girl, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love. A moment: so ordinary for us that we'd forgotten it actually wasn't. Together, our lives span nearly a century.
"Yes," my mother finally answered the man, and I knew it had taken her, too, by surprise, this recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.
"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.
I do now. Since that afternoon, four years ago, there have been many more incidents like this one, so many that I am no longer surprised by how observant people actually are. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachusetts, where my parents and grandmother live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, walking down the street. Often, the observation is followed by a wistful explanation of loss--the new baby who will never know his grandmother, the parent who died too young.
We call my grandmother Mormor, which means “mother’s mother” in Swedish. She was born in 1917 to immigrant parents who spoke Swedish at home. Amazingly, I knew my great-grandmother, her mother, who worked as a cook and a maid in rich people’s homes and raised seven children. I remember her, just barely—white hair braided and pinned up like Mormor’s, her standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the smell of the nursing home she lived in for the last few years of her life. From what I understand, she was a forceful, determined person, extraordinarily capable, with a streak of humor and irreverence she passed on to almost all of her children. She taught my grandmother to cook, and my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught us, and now—although she is just four—I am teaching Lily. The ability to roll piecrust, the gift of creating a meal for people you love, is one of the few constants in a world that has transformed itself overnight, or at least it seems that way to my grandmother.
She tells stories, if you push her a little. The same stories I heard as a child I now beg her to tell Lily; I don't know if my mother heard them too or if life was then being lived in the present. When Mormor was four, ice was delivered by horse and buggy and milk in glass bottles left on the porch. Auntie Gustava gave my mother her first doll, and my mother took her first steps to get it--a story we have all decided is indicative of my mother's determination and will. The world at large was changing, in ways apparent and with still hidden ramifications. World War I ended, and Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Women had—just—won the right to vote, and the world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. Betty Friedan was born, but the Feminine Mystique was still more than forty years from publication--the women whose life traps Friedan mourned were my grandmother's children, not her. Mormor was the most academically gifted of all of her siblings, but there was no question of her going to college. She put herself through secretarial school and later—after raising three children—went to work at the local high school, although she never considered herself to have a career.
My mother, the oldest of those three children, was born in 1942 and came of age in the 60s. In defiance of a bigoted uncle, she drank from a water fountain marked “colored” on a trip to Alabama. Later, she went to college, marched with Martin Luther King, moved into her own apartment in Cambridge, and began working as a teacher in her own hometown--far afield was never a choice. From the moment my mother was born, according to my grandmother, she was “the image of her father,” not just in looks but in temperament. My grandmother still says this with a hint of confusion--how could she have birthed this creature so unlike herself? The year of my mother's first job, with her own hard-earned salary, my mother bought herself—in what strikes me now as a statement of freedom--the first of many racing-green colored MG convertibles.
As a child, I always knew my grandmother and mother were different from each other. In fact, over the course of my childhood, I saw up close the dramatic trajectory of my mother’s life from one like my grandmother’s, centered on home and family, to her reentrance into the workforce when we were small, to her return to school for the advanced degree she should have earned twenty years previous, and her eventual role—and finally the fulfillment of her destiny—as an educator and leader of a community. This message was not lost on me. I remember my grandmother showing me her own high school year book in which she was the only girl in the class not in the “homemaker” track—this due to the fact that her grades were too high, not to any sense of real possibility. My grandmother still begins sentences with the words, “I would have loved to….” and I wince, feel the weight of my mother’s choices behind the words. But my mother does not regret the years she spent in a life that didn't quite fit--she has us, and as the world changed around her, she was ready and waiting to meet it.
By Amy Wilensky
The first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square by the fountain after shopping at the outdoor greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up Mormor so she’d be ready to push the stroller—which serves as a sort of walker on wheels for her—in time to meet up for lunch.
A man walked by, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids give her a Norman Rockwell appearance, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice him standing there. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.
"Is this four generations?" he asked, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those words before to explain or define it. I took it in through his eyes, the group that we made: My nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child, three women, one girl, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love. A moment: so ordinary for us that we'd forgotten it actually wasn't. Together, our lives span nearly a century.
"Yes," my mother finally answered the man, and I knew it had taken her, too, by surprise, this recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.
"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.
I do now. Since that afternoon, four years ago, there have been many more incidents like this one, so many that I am no longer surprised by how observant people actually are. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachusetts, where my parents and grandmother live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, walking down the street. Often, the observation is followed by a wistful explanation of loss--the new baby who will never know his grandmother, the parent who died too young.
We call my grandmother Mormor, which means “mother’s mother” in Swedish. She was born in 1917 to immigrant parents who spoke Swedish at home. Amazingly, I knew my great-grandmother, her mother, who worked as a cook and a maid in rich people’s homes and raised seven children. I remember her, just barely—white hair braided and pinned up like Mormor’s, her standing in a lobby somewhere with a black-and-white tiled floor, the smell of the nursing home she lived in for the last few years of her life. From what I understand, she was a forceful, determined person, extraordinarily capable, with a streak of humor and irreverence she passed on to almost all of her children. She taught my grandmother to cook, and my grandmother taught my mother, and my mother taught us, and now—although she is just four—I am teaching Lily. The ability to roll piecrust, the gift of creating a meal for people you love, is one of the few constants in a world that has transformed itself overnight, or at least it seems that way to my grandmother.
She tells stories, if you push her a little. The same stories I heard as a child I now beg her to tell Lily; I don't know if my mother heard them too or if life was then being lived in the present. When Mormor was four, ice was delivered by horse and buggy and milk in glass bottles left on the porch. Auntie Gustava gave my mother her first doll, and my mother took her first steps to get it--a story we have all decided is indicative of my mother's determination and will. The world at large was changing, in ways apparent and with still hidden ramifications. World War I ended, and Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. Women had—just—won the right to vote, and the world’s first birth control clinic opened in London—seven children in one family was still commonplace but not for long. Betty Friedan was born, but the Feminine Mystique was still more than forty years from publication--the women whose life traps Friedan mourned were my grandmother's children, not her. Mormor was the most academically gifted of all of her siblings, but there was no question of her going to college. She put herself through secretarial school and later—after raising three children—went to work at the local high school, although she never considered herself to have a career.
My mother, the oldest of those three children, was born in 1942 and came of age in the 60s. In defiance of a bigoted uncle, she drank from a water fountain marked “colored” on a trip to Alabama. Later, she went to college, marched with Martin Luther King, moved into her own apartment in Cambridge, and began working as a teacher in her own hometown--far afield was never a choice. From the moment my mother was born, according to my grandmother, she was “the image of her father,” not just in looks but in temperament. My grandmother still says this with a hint of confusion--how could she have birthed this creature so unlike herself? The year of my mother's first job, with her own hard-earned salary, my mother bought herself—in what strikes me now as a statement of freedom--the first of many racing-green colored MG convertibles.
As a child, I always knew my grandmother and mother were different from each other. In fact, over the course of my childhood, I saw up close the dramatic trajectory of my mother’s life from one like my grandmother’s, centered on home and family, to her reentrance into the workforce when we were small, to her return to school for the advanced degree she should have earned twenty years previous, and her eventual role—and finally the fulfillment of her destiny—as an educator and leader of a community. This message was not lost on me. I remember my grandmother showing me her own high school year book in which she was the only girl in the class not in the “homemaker” track—this due to the fact that her grades were too high, not to any sense of real possibility. My grandmother still begins sentences with the words, “I would have loved to….” and I wince, feel the weight of my mother’s choices behind the words. But my mother does not regret the years she spent in a life that didn't quite fit--she has us, and as the world changed around her, she was ready and waiting to meet it.
Getting There, Somewhere
Incorporating your suggestions, which were so incredibly helpful, I am moving forward with this and have rewritten the beginning. Tomorrow I hope to complete a draft of the whole piece. I would so appreciate any and all feedback, but if you can, send it to the blog so I will have it all in one place. Many of you sent super helpful comments to my e-mail account, which I cut and pasted onto the original document for easy access, but it's easier for me if they're here. I changed the blog so you can now post as anonymous, if that helps. I have noticed, and find it endearing, that a few of you "anonymous" commenters out there seem keen on leaving tips as to your identity. I love this, for some reason.
And tonight, I am especially proud to be a democrat.
Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky
This first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square after shopping at the greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up Mormor so she’d be ready to push the stroller—which serves as a sort of walker on wheels for her—in time to meet up for lunch.
A man walked by, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids give her a Norman Rockwell appearance, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice him standing there. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.
"Is this four generations?" he asked, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those words before to explain it. I took it in, then, the group we made: my nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child. Together, our lives spanned nearly a century.
"Yes," my mother finally answered the man, and I knew it had taken her, too, by surprise, the recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.
"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.
Since that afternoon four years ago, there have been many more incidents like this one, so many that I am no longer surprised by how observant people actually are. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachuetts, where my parents and grandmother live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, walking down the street.
It has made me aware that the situation is, well, unusual.
And tonight, I am especially proud to be a democrat.
Four Generations
By Amy Wilensky
This first time it happened Lily was just a few months old. We were sitting on a bench in New York’s Union Square after shopping at the greenmarket: my grandmother, mother, daughter and me. My father had gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar as soon as it opened. Our plan was to rest up Mormor so she’d be ready to push the stroller—which serves as a sort of walker on wheels for her—in time to meet up for lunch.
A man walked by, middle-aged, polished in camelhair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiled at my grandmother, whose rosy cheeks and coronet braids give her a Norman Rockwell appearance, but she was so focused on Lily she didn’t notice him standing there. I smiled back on her behalf, as I find myself doing these days, and watched him take in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing bags of produce and cartons of eggs, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under a daunting bunch of pussywillows.
"Is this four generations?" he asked, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me, and for an instant I thought he meant was that the name of the park. Then, it hit me, so obvious, although I’d never used those words before to explain it. I took it in, then, the group we made: my nearly-90-year-old grandmother’s finger being grasped by my four-month-old child. Together, our lives spanned nearly a century.
"Yes," my mother finally answered the man, and I knew it had taken her, too, by surprise, the recognition by a total stranger of a bond, a privilege, we had never overtly acknowledged.
"That's just terrific," the man said, shaking his head in amazement. "Just wonderful. I hope you know how lucky you are.
Since that afternoon four years ago, there have been many more incidents like this one, so many that I am no longer surprised by how observant people actually are. Our unique situation has been noted, and commented on, and even celebrated here in New York, where I live, dozens of times, but also in my hometown in Massachuetts, where my parents and grandmother live, on every vacation we’ve taken as a group, at weddings, in airports, walking down the street.
It has made me aware that the situation is, well, unusual.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Fatigue Sets In
It's 11:57. Before anyone who knows me thinks to himself: So typical, posting by the skin of her teeth, let me just say for the record that I pledged to write 750 words a day, seven days a week, with a day by definition being a 24-hour cycle. I never said I'd be done before midnight. (It's nice to know that one's weaseling out of deadline skills don't dry up after a lengthy drought.)
No, in the words of, I think, Stephen Sondheim in one of his less good songs, "I'm still here." I actually can't believe it myself. That might be a bad song lyric too--yes! I actually remembered lyrics under duress--it's from the Greatest American Hero. I think the song goes, "I still can't believe it myself." So pretend I wrote that. Okay. Too tired for much tonight, it's clear, and still a little fired up from watching the republican debate. Although they're still a whole lot of crazy, the candidates seemed a little more sober somehow, as though they sensed that their usual tactics (barely suppressed rage, starched condescension, and so on) would not play well on this stage. Some of the questions and responses were even a little boring, unusual for this creationism-crazy crew of Mormons and Holocaust deniers. I almost longed for the now burnished, shopworn schticks of the Black! Woman! Populist! candidates across the aisle.
This is the problem with a blog, and maybe I will allow myself this slip-up because I am so tired: It's way too tempting to just talk about whatever you want to talk about, imaging an audience that has any interest in your thoughts on the most random or tedious of subjects. There are so many things I want SO BADLY to write about now: Huckabee's planted Easter eggs, my deep and abiding love for Hugh Laurie, the 140 word I scored in a recent Scrabulous game against a fellow blogger who shall remain anonymous, the unexpected and fascinating reemergence in my life online of a number of people from my third and fifth grade classes and the unexpected and fascinating things some of them are doing, more thoughts on princesses, including the highly relevant comment by a reader that really threw me for a loop about boys liking princess stuff, why American don't eat treacle toffee, the omnipotence of Boston sports, and more.
Actually, I don't really want to write about any of those things. It's a highly contrived list, and with the exception of Scrabulous, which I do really want to write about as part of a larger project, and the new princess angle, I had to strain to come up with the rest of the items. Don't get me wrong, I do love Hugh Laurie, but that's all I have to say on the subject. What I will make myself do is write an anecdote for the beginning of the Four Generations piece, which I increasingly feel will have to be about five generations by the time I ever write the thing. Here goes:
We are sitting on a bench in Union Square by the fountain: my grandmother, mother, daughters and me. Actually only three of us are sitting; Lily is standing as close as she can to the fountain without falling in, and Annika is asleep in her stroller. My father has gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar when it opens. My grandmother is sitting next to the stroller, which she pushes like a wheelchair when we go out in the city, where I live and where they come to visit from Massachusetts as often as they can throughout the year. We have been to the greenmarket, and the stroller contains not just the baby but winter produce: root vegetables, apples, and kale.
A man walks by, middle-aged, polished in camel hair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiles at my grandmother, who wears coronet braids and is watching Lily with a furrowed brow, nervous about her proximity to the fountain. I see him smile at her and smile back on her behalf, as she hasn't noticed, and he takes in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing the food we have bought, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under some pussywillows.
"Is that four generations?" he asks, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me. I stare at him for an instant, uncomprehending. Generations? What is he talking about? I look at my 92-year-old grandmother watching my four-year-old daughter. My mother is looking at the man now too.
"Yes," she says, as the realization hits me. That is what we are: four generations of women, women and girls, spanning nearly a century, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love.
"Yes," I add, unnecessarily, echoing, as always, my mom.
"That's just terrific," the man says. "Just wonderful." He would have tipped his hat, had he been wearing one, but instead he slightly bowed, in the direction of Mormor, and my mother and I, the only two members of this motley crew who'd heard the exchange, stood to gather our brood.
No, in the words of, I think, Stephen Sondheim in one of his less good songs, "I'm still here." I actually can't believe it myself. That might be a bad song lyric too--yes! I actually remembered lyrics under duress--it's from the Greatest American Hero. I think the song goes, "I still can't believe it myself." So pretend I wrote that. Okay. Too tired for much tonight, it's clear, and still a little fired up from watching the republican debate. Although they're still a whole lot of crazy, the candidates seemed a little more sober somehow, as though they sensed that their usual tactics (barely suppressed rage, starched condescension, and so on) would not play well on this stage. Some of the questions and responses were even a little boring, unusual for this creationism-crazy crew of Mormons and Holocaust deniers. I almost longed for the now burnished, shopworn schticks of the Black! Woman! Populist! candidates across the aisle.
This is the problem with a blog, and maybe I will allow myself this slip-up because I am so tired: It's way too tempting to just talk about whatever you want to talk about, imaging an audience that has any interest in your thoughts on the most random or tedious of subjects. There are so many things I want SO BADLY to write about now: Huckabee's planted Easter eggs, my deep and abiding love for Hugh Laurie, the 140 word I scored in a recent Scrabulous game against a fellow blogger who shall remain anonymous, the unexpected and fascinating reemergence in my life online of a number of people from my third and fifth grade classes and the unexpected and fascinating things some of them are doing, more thoughts on princesses, including the highly relevant comment by a reader that really threw me for a loop about boys liking princess stuff, why American don't eat treacle toffee, the omnipotence of Boston sports, and more.
Actually, I don't really want to write about any of those things. It's a highly contrived list, and with the exception of Scrabulous, which I do really want to write about as part of a larger project, and the new princess angle, I had to strain to come up with the rest of the items. Don't get me wrong, I do love Hugh Laurie, but that's all I have to say on the subject. What I will make myself do is write an anecdote for the beginning of the Four Generations piece, which I increasingly feel will have to be about five generations by the time I ever write the thing. Here goes:
We are sitting on a bench in Union Square by the fountain: my grandmother, mother, daughters and me. Actually only three of us are sitting; Lily is standing as close as she can to the fountain without falling in, and Annika is asleep in her stroller. My father has gone ahead to our favorite restaurant to wait by the door and stake our claim at the bar when it opens. My grandmother is sitting next to the stroller, which she pushes like a wheelchair when we go out in the city, where I live and where they come to visit from Massachusetts as often as they can throughout the year. We have been to the greenmarket, and the stroller contains not just the baby but winter produce: root vegetables, apples, and kale.
A man walks by, middle-aged, polished in camel hair coat and cashmere scarf. He smiles at my grandmother, who wears coronet braids and is watching Lily with a furrowed brow, nervous about her proximity to the fountain. I see him smile at her and smile back on her behalf, as she hasn't noticed, and he takes in the rest of us: my mother, reorganizing the food we have bought, me, slunk down on the bench like a 30-something teenager, the intimations of a baby under some pussywillows.
"Is that four generations?" he asks, stopping for a moment, addressing the question at me. I stare at him for an instant, uncomprehending. Generations? What is he talking about? I look at my 92-year-old grandmother watching my four-year-old daughter. My mother is looking at the man now too.
"Yes," she says, as the realization hits me. That is what we are: four generations of women, women and girls, spanning nearly a century, related by blood, divided by experience, bound by both habit and love.
"Yes," I add, unnecessarily, echoing, as always, my mom.
"That's just terrific," the man says. "Just wonderful." He would have tipped his hat, had he been wearing one, but instead he slightly bowed, in the direction of Mormor, and my mother and I, the only two members of this motley crew who'd heard the exchange, stood to gather our brood.
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