“Oh, mein kinderlach!” she would exclaim, her eyes filling with tears. “Come, come closer!”
We would inch towards the side of the bed, and my grandmother would slowly raise one finger, grimacing with pain as she reached to stroke our hands. Even at our young ages, we somehow knew that it was worth it to her, that no amount of pain could stop her from touching us.
In the living room, my mother would be arguing vociferously with my grandfather over a political candidate or a social issue. But after a while, they would just stop. My grandfather went into the kitchen to prepare my grandmother’s meal. I watched as he fed her lovingly with a spoon, gently wiping the food from her chin and bending the straw so she could drink.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood why my mother had insisted on those seemingly endless visits to my grandparents. I realized that, under the cover of those intense political debates, my mother believed in the value of a family, the invisible bonds that hold people together. I learned that politics and money and egos and everything else that family members disagree about were just on the surface, and that underneath this rough exterior were the things that really mattered: Devotion. Faithfulness. Love. Even when those family members were stubborn and argumentative. Even when they were opinionated and rude. Even when they did something stupid and dangerous and almost killed a sleeping baby. Even if they did all of these things, they were still family—still important and still loved.
Phyllis Nutkis
Baked with Loving Hands
Our son, Tobey, has always had a generous spirit, as well as a very independent nature. Like many small boys, he liked to show his affection for someone by doing a kind or helpful thing.
“I’m going to make Vanessa’s cake,” he announced proudly at age nine when his sister’s birthday was just a few days away. Somewhat surprised, I was eager to encourage this decision, as well as his interest in cooking. He was tremendously fond of his big sister and wanted to do something very grown-up in honor of her special day.
At the same time, I was a little worried about how he would accomplish this while also accommodating the demands of his twelve-year-old sister’s very specific taste. She had big plans for how her birthday would be celebrated with her sixth-grade classmates that year, and was quite specific about exactly what kind of cake she hoped to have for the big day.
Tobey’s food-preparation experience was limited to peanut butter sandwiches and microwave popcorn. However, he insisted that this first baking effort, his gift to Vanessa, was something he wanted to do entirely by himself, “With no help from you, Mom.” (I would, of course, be allowed to drive him to the store and help him find the necessary baking supplies.)
My confidence in this project was a bit shaky not only because of the limits of Tobey’s experience and the size of his sister’s expectations, but because my own cakes are not usually the prettiest things to behold. Fortunately for Tobey—and for me—the cake his sister most desired was available as a boxed cake mix. It included brightly colored sprinkles that baked right into the cake and the instructions certainly didn’t sound too difficult.
Tobey and I made a trip to the store to buy the mix along with the other things we needed for the birthday party. On the eve of Vanessa’s birthday, he raced through his homework and then excitedly began assembling an assortment of bowls and utensils for his project. As if to reassure me, he sat down first and read and reread the instructions on that package until I’m sure he had them memorized. Then he opened the box and got started.
In a game of parental stealth, I tried to monitor the activities of this young chef without appearing to hover over him. I found a dozen reasons to rummage in the kitchen for things as he went about his task.
Brows knit together, lips pursed in concentration, he carried out the list of instructions carefully. He broke eggs into a bowl for the first time and measured out the other ingredients as though he were handling priceless objects. I was impressed by the fact that he made virtually no mess at all. His eyes darted back and forth to check the instructions constantly.
When it came time to use the electric mixer, he granted me permission only to check that all the parts and pieces were connected properly, then thanked and dismissed me as the beaters began to whir away. He mixed the ingredients into a rich, golden batter. He had only to add the sprinkles and then it could all be poured into the baking pan he’d greased laboriously. Soon the smell of baking cake would scent the house.
Encouraged by his progress, I went to answer a phone call and was horrified to return a few minutes later and find him wrist-deep in cake batter, working his hands in the bowl. I wanted to shout, “What in the world are you doing? Are you crazy?” but thankfully, sheer astonishment kept these words tangled up in my throat unable to escape. I’m so glad I choked on my surprise rather than blurt out something I’d have regretted later.
When he saw my contorted expression, he immediately assured me that he’d washed his hands thoroughly—very thoroughly—before taking this highly unusual step.
Then he gestured with his head toward the empty sprinkles packet on the counter beside him and said, “Can you believe it? I thought it seemed kind of goofy myself, but it’s exactly what the instructions said: ‘Add sprinkles and mix by hand’!”
I had to agree with him, as I explained the role of spoons in this process, that it might have been helpful for the instructions to mention them. I’m sure that cake tasted even better for the laughter that followed as we waited for it to bake.
The cake—which turned out beautifully—was a smash! Vanessa, who was as surprised as she was thrilled by Tobey’s loving gesture, gave him a big hug, right in front of all her “Eew—boys are yucky” friends.
A young man now, Tobey has become an accomplished cook who still likes to show his generosity by feeding others good food. But now he knows to approach at least some of life’s instructions with just a grain or two of salt, along with all the other ingredients.
Phyllis Ring
The Intent of the Heart
My grandmother loved her kitchen and hated her house. As a young woman, she and her new husband lived in an old farmhouse near a small town in the Kentucky hills. What fed her unhappiness with the house was the narrow doorways and small windows. Even though the house had been built in that way to conserve heat she felt constrained by the halls and doorways through which she had to constantly move every day doing her work. And because she was a woman who loved light, the awful, tiny windows that made the rooms so dark, distressed her.
She tried not to complain about the house too much because my grandfather had been lucky to find anything livable for them to begin their lives together. It was poor country and people who had houses kept them for their entire lives. My grandfather was a country doctor and had to have enough land to graze his two horses as well as raise enough food for his family.
But although she understood their circumstances, my grandmother began to complain. Eventually, my grandfather would leave the house when she began to vent her feelings. And, as a result, over the next year and a half they began to grow apart. She tended the house she hated, and he did the work he loved as best he could.
Often he would disappear in the evenings with his rifle. He would tell her that he was going to hunt raccoons, but he had only one dog, and she knew it was not good for much except sleeping and begging for food.
He began to be tired quite a lot of the time, and at first she was worried about his health, and then she began to be convinced he was up to something, and no good could come of whatever that might be.
She began to try to stay up until he came home, but after doing her sewing and reading for a time, she would inevitably fall asleep. When she woke she would find him in bed. She looked for the signs of guilt on his face and saw only peace.
So, uncertain of what to do, she tried to stop complaining about the house. But that produced the most peculiar result. If she did not bring up her unhappiness for a week or so, he wo
uld bring it up.
My grandfather would ask if she had gotten comfortable with the house or say that she must have grown used to it. That would always provoke what she called a mean face from her and the small noise of disgust that communicated itself so well. To her considerable consternation this often made him smile. And she decided that whatever it was he was doing away from her gave him unacceptable pleasure.
Finally, she could contain her growing anger no longer. At dinner one night she told him that he could not leave her alone in the evenings. She said that she was frightened to stay in that terrible house by herself, that she knew he was up to no good, that she expected him to keep his marriage vows and that she would not put up with his treatment of her any longer.
My grandfather looked at his young bride and said, “Tomorrow will be the end of it. I promise you.”
She went to bed that night inconsolable, certain that her husband had been unfaithful to her. He was telling her as much. She imagined the woman he’d been seeing, she imagined him telling her that he’d decided not to break his marriage, she imagined the tears and the parting. She was not able to sleep that night.
She did not speak to him at breakfast the next morning. The first cool weather had settled in on the mountain valley. The leaves had begun to turn, and she watched from her kitchen window as he saddled his horse and strapped on his two black satchels in which he carried medicine and instruments.
Then he turned back to the house and told her to come with him. When she asked him why, he told her that he expected to have to deliver a baby at the Wakin’s place, and he expected it to be a difficult birth. “I need you,” he said and smiled that wide disarming smile that had won her heart in the first place.
He helped her up on the saddle behind him and she put her arms around his waist. She had not touched him so intimately in quite a while and was surprised by the strength she felt in his body. They rode about four miles though the autumn woods, through the leaf-filtered light. He hummed a song he liked called “In the Gloaming.” She wondered what made him so happy about going to deliver a baby. But he loved children, and she attributed it to that.
At Sandy Creek he pushed his horse into a trot, and as they came to the crest of a gentle rise of land she saw, directly in front of them, the most beautiful house she’d ever seen.
“Oh my,” she said. “Have the Wakin’s built them this place?”
“No,” he said, “my darlin’. I built it. Me and a couple of men from Ashland. We built it. It’s for you.”
He helped her down from the horse, and as she walked she said, “It’s as if I weigh no more than a milkweed seed.”
He led her through her house with its many windows, its light-filled rooms, its lovely veranda and its wide, wide parlor doors. It was in that house they lived all their lives, raised their four children. And it was that house to which the entire family always came for celebrations, partly out of respect, but mostly because everyone had a better time there than any place they’d ever been.
My mother, to whom my grandmother confided this story once, asked her why the house felt so blessed. And my grandmother said, “It’s because he loved me. And because I loved him all of my life. Even when I thought I didn’t.”
My mother never forgot that, and neither have I.
Walker Meade
Mother’s Silver Candlesticks
My mother saw the candlesticks displayed on a shelf in the rear of a secondhand store in the tenement district of New York City. They were approximately ten inches tall and heavily tarnished, but a surreptitious rub revealed their possibility, and a glance at the base showed the magic word “sterling.” How did they get there? What poor soul had hocked them to survive? Mother ached to buy them, but we had come to exchange the shoes I was wearing for another pair to fit my growing feet. First things came first.
New York, where we settled upon entering the United States, and the area where we lived bore little resemblance to the Goldene Medina, the golden land that many immigrants had envisioned in their dreams. However, it was a land of opportunities, where all might achieve their aspirations if they worked hard toward their goals.
“We can swim, or we can sink,” declared Mutti, as I called my mother, “and I have always been a strong swimmer.”
And swim we did! Dad peddled caramelized almonds, which we made each evening and packed into cellophane bags, up and down Broadway. Mother went to school in the morning to learn to be a masseuse and did housework for various families several afternoons a week. I attended school at PS-51. My sister, Lotte, went to the Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, where she worked in an exchange program to learn English. Nights, Dad worked as a night watchman, Mother sewed leather gloves for a manufacturing firm, and I strung beaded necklaces for the Woolworth store for one cent apiece.
The fifth-floor walk-up apartment we shared on 150th and Riverside Drive was hardly what my parents had been used to in their native country, Germany. It really wasn’t a walk-up—it had an elevator—but the man who ran it held out his hand for tips each time anyone wanted a ride. Who could afford donations? We walked upstairs.
The place consisted of a kitchen, bathroom, living room and one bedroom. My sister and I shared the double bed in the living room, until she went off to school. When we first viewed the apartment, my mom blanched at the filth of the place. But with determination and elbow grease we made it habitable.
During one of our nightly chats while working together, Mutti told me about the candlesticks.
“Let’s see if we can manage to buy them. I think they could look good once we clean and polish them.”
Together we schemed how to save enough money to purchase them for Daddy’s birthday. Thinking back, it was not the gift my father would have chosen to receive. He was more interested in the war, what of his property he could salvage, and how we would eat and pay the rent. But Mom was desperate to have something of beauty in our dingy flat.
The candlesticks cost three dollars. We conceived our plan in March and discussed money-saving strategies.
“I’ll see if I can talk our three elderly neighbors into letting me carry their trash down to the basement,” I offered. “Plus, I could make money stringing necklaces.”
“I’ll buy large eggs for Daddy, and we’ll eat the smaller and cheaper ones,” said Mom.
In addition, she purchased three-day-old bread, instead of day-old, saving seven cents a loaf. A friend told her that wrapping a damp cloth around the bread and heating it in the oven would make it taste fresh again. It worked!
We turned saving pennies into a game. At the end of April, we made a fifty-cent down payment on our treasure. By September 23, 1940, we proudly “paid them off,” and the proprietor even threw in some used candles.
We rubbed and polished the silver. Mother cut the used candles and scraped the outside until they looked almost like new ones. I will never forget the first Sabbath Eve when we lit the tapers. Tears ran down my mother’s face as she recited the blessings. Despite the hardships, we were grateful to be together and, most of all, to be safe and sound.
When I married and moved to Wyoming, my mother gave me the candlesticks as a wedding gift, so that I might always share in their beauty. “You helped to buy them. You know how much they mean to me. I want you to have them and to someday pass them on to your daughter,” she said.
The candlesticks now stand on top of the piano in my living room. We have used them at every memorable occasion of our family’s life, both happy and sad. One day, I will pass them on to my daughter, as they were passed along to me. The Sabbath candlesticks are, and always will be, much more than candlesticks. They are symbols of faith, courage and love.
Liesel Shineberg
Baby Steps
The hardest lesson in life we have to learn is which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn.
Ann Landers
It happens in every family: angry words between parent and child, heated arguments between brother and sister, s
omebody walking off into the night.
And the family tie is broken.
It happened in my family without an argument.
I still don’t know what triggered it. I just know my oldest son married, moved to Hawaii, and stopped calling or returning phone calls.
It took a child to break the silence.
So proud he could burst, my son had to call and tell me about Travis Hannelai Haas, born a year ago. Gradually, hesitantly, we started talking again. Photographs arrived of a chubby, blond, blue-eyed baby with Asian eyes. What a hunk!
“Come to Travis’s first birthday,” my son said in a telephone call. “Please come.”
Baby steps could close the family circle once again.
“Go,” my aunt said. “Life’s too short.”
Even my neighbor offered advice. “Go,” he said. “I wish I were so lucky,” he added, referring to a similar unfathomable rift in his own family.
“Go,” said my husband, pulling the suitcase from the closet.
Tom was late meeting me at the airport in Maui. We both were nervous. After five years of silence, neither of us knew where to start. We had to find neutral ground somewhere. The baby became safe territory.
At the restaurant, Travis sat beside his mother, eyeing me from a safe distance. He slapped the table. I slapped the table. He slapped the table again and caught my eye. One, two, three times we played the game. Then he looked away, made a pout just like his dad’s, turned and slapped both hands on the table, trying to catch Grandma napping.