“Well, what do you want?” My mother spread her arms out, surveying the general disarray of the room. We were standing in the middle of my grandparent’s house in Seaside Park and together we were going to sort through 90 years worth of stuff.
I tried to think of just one thing that would embody the feeling and the memories of a childhood spent in this tiny cottage. How do you capture the taste of corn-on-the-cob summers with sliced Jersey tomatoes? The endless games of horseshoes in the sandy weed lot we called the backyard? Naps with your cousins all piled up like puppies on that old porch glider? The dim cool damp of the garage jumble of fishing tackle and sandy beach chairs?
My earliest memories of our planet grew from this place, woven into the cells of my sensory organs. Sometimes when the tide is just right and the wind blows a certain way, I smell the ocean of my infancy and I breathe more deeply.
“I’d really love the giant wall mirror,” I said, hesitant. Hopeful.
“That’s staying with the house. Pick something else. Besides, you’re the fifth kid asking for it, so forget it.”
I tried desperately to think of something that would fill me up with this place, wasn’t already spoken for and that nobody else would want. “How about the juice glasses?” They weren’t anything special, but I loved them. I knew I couldn’t buy another set like them anywhere. They were ancient; probably as old as the house. And I knew they had been used over decades, intimately, daily, through all the joys and the tears, the nor’easters and the quiet dawns alike, by people I loved.
“What in the world would you possibly want those for?” She was dumbfounded and I was pissed. All day she tried to foist other more valuable, less desirable items on me, but I remained steadfast. In the end, she grudgingly let me have them and it felt like a triumph of sorts.
Over the course of the next six months, I broke all but one.
With the first shattering, I wept piteously. By the fifth one, I was resigned. Grandpa was trying to tell me something, but I was damned if I knew what. At first, I thought he just didn’t want me to have his juice glasses. After awhile I made a joke out of it. With each lost glass, I’d shout out, “Grandpa’s here!” I guessed it beat standing there crying about it. Eventually it became a sort of ritual at our house. Any time something broke, one of us would call out, conjuring the dead.
Years later, the day after my mother died, my family gathered at the kitchen table to sort out the arrangements for the mass and burial. In the course of the arm waving, somewhat heated discussion, several wine glasses were upended and fell to the floor. Without thinking, I shouted out, “Mom’s here!” There was stunned silence as five faces turned to me with raised eyebrows. I tried to explain, but they all seemed to think I was making a weird and tasteless joke.
Quietly, as I cleaned up the broken glass, I noticed something: no one was shouting anymore. The room had a stillness. A kind of peace.
Slowly, I began to pay attention. I started to think maybe the message from Grandpa - and now my mother- was something else. Something important.
I noticed that any time something in the house broke – a plate knocked against the granite countertop, a cracked bowl in the dishwasher, a slippery vase – it was usually preceded by some sort of chaos.
An argument. Or a hurried good-bye. The kids squabbling.
And afterward, some other energy. A re-focus. A deep breath. A slower pace. A reconciliation.
That was it! I shared my theory with my husband and my children. Do you think they want us to slow down? Take time for each other? Not get so crazy with our daily pressures? Yes! We all agreed. We all embraced the message. I even contemplated picking up a stack of dishes at the secondhand store. Just for that very purpose. Chaos in the house? Hey, just throw one of these!
The solution we finally settled on was a bell. A deeply resonating Tibetan prayer bell. It hangs over the doorway, to be rung by anyone who needs a different kind of energy. A renewed spirit. A sense of peace.
The other day, I gave it a tap as I walked into the room and my daughter looked up at me and smiled. “I think of grandma a lot too,” she said.
