The house I grew up in had a huge backyard. In the front of the yard, just outside my bedroom window, was a large oak tree. The kind of tree that you could imagine a kid or teenager climbing out of the window on to, if I had the kind of parents that required sneaking out of. Or, if I had been the kind of kid to climb a tree. Behind the tree was an old jungle gym, and beyond that, a dogwood tree and honeysuckle bushes. In the middle were two small rose bushes and when I was older my dog’s ashes were buried in between them. The back part of the yard, hidden from site by the oak tree, was allowed to grow wild. Our backyard butted up against other people’s backyards and at one point I discovered that you could go from our backyard to other people’s backyards and wind up a block or two away without ever seeing anyone else.
Next to an old, unused carport was a small patch of wild daisies. In my mind, it was an entire field of daisies. I don’t know if they were always there, or if they just sprung up one year, but I loved them. I was a dreamy child, raised on Neverland, Narnia, and the Hundred Acre Woods, I was always looking for a place of my own. A place where magic might happen, or at least, I might be special. Sometimes it was a yellow shelf in my walk-in closet that I was just small enough to sit underneath and read. Sometimes it was a puddle in the yard at school that lasted for weeks after a rain. It was a deep puddle with rocks and grass trapped underneath. A friend and I convinced ourselves that the bobby pins we stole from our mothers were actually magic keys to the kingdom trapped underneath. For a whole school year, every time it rained we rushed to the field at recess to try and enter.
There were also wild strawberries in our yard and I would pick the strawberries and the honeysuckle and sit on the jungle gym looking into the wild daisies, creating worlds in my mind.
My father was an inconsistent gardener. He claimed that his parents, immigrants who had been wealthy in the old country, disapproved of anything hinting at manual labor for their sons. Gardening was an act of rebellion for him, but not something he knew a lot about, or stuck to. Some years, he planted vegetables and flowers, some years, he barely mowed the lawn. One year, after we had seen formal gardens on a trip, he promised me that he would help me plant my own hedge maze. And one year, not knowing about the fantasy world I had created in the wild daisy patch, he mowed them down.
I cried when I saw the patch of grass where my daisies had been. When my father learned how upset I was, he promised to replant them. He bought seeds of some sort, but the daisies never came back. For years, this was where the story ended.
The other day, on a family Father’s Day hike my daughter and I saw wild daisies in a field. I told my daughter that I loved wild daisies and she told me that daisies are her favorite flower. I told her the story about the patch of wild daisies in my childhood backyard. Telling her the story, I could taste the tiny, gritty, strawberries and the honeysuckle. I could smell the dogwood trees.
My father is not well. He is not 100% himself these days. But when I told my daughter the story of the wild daisies I could see him as well. I could see his collection of inconsistent hobbies, the way he threw himself into things like woodworking and gardening, never quite mastering them. I could hear his lectures on subjects he knew and didn’t know. I could hear the way he swore when upset, and see the smirk he gave when amused. I could see his love in the fact that after mowing down some weeds, he tried to replant them just to make me happy. The important thing isn’t that my father mowed down the daisies, it’s that he tried to replant them.
For years, somewhere in the back of my mind, I have regretted the loss of the wild daisies. But the other day, I realized that if the daisies hadn’t been lost, I wouldn’t have found them again decades later, in a different place. Not everything that is lost can be found, but not everything that is lost is truly lost either.
Once, when my grandfather was a little boy, he walked with his grandfather, the exquisitely named Shlomo Zalman, from one shtetl to the next. On the way there, Shlomo Zalman gave my grandfather half a banana and then carefully wrapped up the other half. On the way back, he gave him the other half.
Eighty years later, sitting in a condo in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, my grandfather still remembered this story. He didn’t remember where they were going, or why, but he remembered the sweetness of the fruit and his grandfather’s gift and so he told me the story. I do not know what color hair Shlomo Zalman had. I do not know what he thought about any political issues of the day, or even what his wife’s name was, but I know that he was the kind of man who, living in an Eastern European shtetl, would give his favorite grandchild an entire, rare banana.
I think about Shlomo Zalman as I mindlessly toss banana slices and blueberries into my oatmeal. I offer my daughter half a banana and she refuses, she doesn’t like bananas. I would offer her blueberries, but I know that she is bothered by the “inconsistency of berries.” She told me this several months ago, maybe even a year ago, and I have kept the phrase ever since. “The inconsistency of berries.” It rolls around in my head like the name Shlomo Zalman. My daughter does not like how sometimes you buy berries and they are great, and sometimes you buy them and they are not. She does not like how you can reach into a box of berries and you might pull out a sweet one, but also, you might pull out a sour one – in the same box.
Once, I showed her that you can generally judge a berry. The darker and plumper they are, the sweeter they are. But still, she avoids them. She leaves for college in two weeks. I find myself telling her odd little “life tips” in the hopes that when she needs to know how to introduce two strangers, or to revive stale bread, or get a wine stain out, she will remember them. I am pouring as much information into her as I can.
But the inconsistency of berries is real. You never know what you will pull out of a box or what you will need. In the end, all you can hope for, is that one small act will reverberate across generations and geographies, that something will bear fruit.
The other day my dentist asked me if I had plans for the summer. I told him I’d be driving my daughter to college in upstate New York, by myself. He told me that his daughter went to college in DC. They shipped her stuff ahead of time and dropped her off at Midway Airport. He described the experience as surreal. “We just went to the airport, and then she didn’t live with us anymore.” As I was leaving the office he said, “Listen, if she starts being difficult, even mean, don’t worry about it. She might need to pull away a little before she leaves, so it doesn’t hurt so much.”
I think about the “fight” we had a few weeks ago.
She was cleaning her room. In her view, she keeps her room clean. In my view, not so much, but she keeps the door to her room shut and so we rarely discuss it. On this day, she went deep. She pulled the trundle bed out and vacuumed not just underneath the bed, but the trundle mattress itself. She asked to get rid of the trundle. She declared the trundle the reason she is congested. Because she can’t see the dust trapped by the trundle, it sits there and makes her nose stuffy. She isn’t wrong about that, but we have a difference of opinion on the reasonable solution. My solution is to clean her room more often. Her solution is to get rid of the trundle because when she needs to clean, she has to move things around to pull it out and that is ridiculous.
I pointed out that she might also want to do something about the very visible dust on top of her headboard, the dust that doesn’t require her to move furniture. I pointed out that her light fixture was also kind of gross. I pointed out that we had no place else to store a trundle and mattress, and no way to give away or sell a trundle and mattress without a bed, and that she was moving in 6 months and could probably deal with it. She pointed out that I was in her room and should leave. When I think about the fights I had with my own mother, the fights I hear that my friends have with their teenagers, I know I am lucky. This is what passes for a fight with us.
Later on the same day as the dentist appointment I too was coincidentally at Midway airport waiting to go to DC. A young man sat near me and asked me questions about boarding. “I’ve never traveled without my parents,” he said. “I just want to make sure I don’t miss anything. I already had to throw out my toothpaste because I didn’t know you couldn’t bring a full-size one.” He was a college student going to a conference. I walk him through the boarding process and make sure he knows how he’s getting to his hotel once he arrives in DC. I tell him my daughter will be going to college in the Fall. Although I don’t say anything else about her he says, “From March to May is SOOO hard. Just tell her to push through, she’ll be so much happier once high school is over.”
Waiting in line to board the plane an older man makes small talk with me. He is wearing a large belt buckle with four turquoise stones in it. It is the kind of thing my father used to wear. My father had a serious fall recently and is not wearing pants with belts much these days. He wears sweatpants and pajama bottoms. The last time I was home I reorganized his dresser so that everything he can put on easily was easy to reach. He fell again last week. I tell the man that I like his belt. “Did you buy it in New Mexico?” I ask. “No, a little store in Pittsburgh. You know, I saw it one day and liked it, but I noticed it had this spot on one of the stones, so I didn’t buy it. Then I saw it again a few weeks later, but I still didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy it until the third time I saw it and I’ve been wearing it for 30 years now.”
He asks me if I’m going home and I tell him I live here and am going to DC for a meeting. He tells me that he grew up in walking distance from Midway. He met his wife when they were sixteen years old and he used to ride his bike to her house through the neighborhood. They got married when they were 21. They live in Maryland now. He has a son in the Chicago suburbs and when he’s in town he likes to go back to their houses and make sure they’re still standing. The way he talks about his wife, I’m not sure if she is still alive. I’m relieved when we board and the flight attendant says “It’s open seating you can sit anywhere,” and the man replies “Can I sit by my wife?” “Well, if she’ll have you,” the attendant replies. “That might be an issue,” he replies. His wife is waiting for him a few rows back and I am unexpectedly happy to see her.
After my daughter and I fought about her room I told her that when you are ready to go, ready to move, ready to change, it is painful not to do so. I told her that the bed was not the problem. I told her the dust was not the problem. I told her that I am not the problem and she is not the problem. The problem is that she is ready to go. She cannot shed her skin fast enough and so it grows tighter and tighter around her feeling more and more uncomfortable. She said yes, but she should have gotten a full-size bed from the beginning. I told her she didn’t know that when she was 10 and also, I lived in a room with rainbow wallpaper until I left home at 17. My bedroom is now my mother’s study. She has re-wallpapered it, but a rainbow decal still clings to one window.
What I did not tell my daughter is that leaving doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in stages. There are only two stories in the world, someone is arriving and someone is leaving.
When I was a little girl, we lived in Tanzania. I was only four when we went to Tanzania and so the house in Tanzania and the house in Louisville that we lived in before merge together in my memories. Both houses had two bathrooms, but in Tanzania I avoided one of them because it frequently had lizards on the wall. In both houses, I shared a room with my older sister. In the house in Tanzania our room included a small table under the window. On the table I displayed and played with my various small animal figures. Some carved, some plastic, some stuffed. Elephants (or tembos in Swahili) were the majority and many of them became the start of a collection I still have. I also have an aluminum and Formica table from my childhood in my basement. I know it is not the same table as the one in Tanzania, but in my memory it is.
My sister went to school, but I was too young. I went to a pre-school/daycare situation, where I had one friend, a boy named John who gave me my first kiss. But for the most part, I had my animals and my books. In Tanzania, I learned how to read. According to my parents, one day they came into the room I shared with my sister and found me reading, maybe to the animals, maybe to myself. I also learned to swim in Tanzania, in what I think was an indoor pool connected to the university, but maybe not.
One day, we were on our way to swim and I did not want to go. I don’t know why, maybe I was tired, maybe I had something else I wanted to do. Maybe the heat made even going to the pool unattractive. My mother closed the door to the house and realized that she had locked the keys inside the house. We stood outside in the heat while mother debated what to do. Eventually it was decided that I, as the smallest, should climb through the window in my bedroom and on to my animal table. Then, go open the door. I was promised a new book for my efforts.
I remember standing on my table of animals, careful to avoid stepping on any of my friends. I remember wondering what it would be like not to open the door, to just stay there in my kingdom alone, forever. My mother banged on the window and I jumped down and went to open the door. I was soaked in sweat and my mother asked if I was sure I didn’t want to go swimming. I did, but I could not figure out a way to go back on my previous insistence that I did not want to go swimming, and so I said no. The hero of the day, I sat miserably by the pool while the rest of my family swam.
The next day we went to the bookstore. The children’s books they had were imported from England and were color coded for reading level. Supply was spotty and when we went, there were no books in my level. So, I chose this book a level up and from then on, that was the level I read.
I thought of the story of me climbing through the window because yesterday in a parking lot a man was stuck outside his car. The car next to it was parked too close and he couldn’t fit in and was too large to climb over the passenger seat. So, I climbed over the passenger seat and backed his car out for him. It took some doing. The car was so large I had trouble getting in. I was reminded of a boy I knew in high school who drove a red pickup truck and how I would try to gracefully climb into his truck in my late-80s miniskirt. Thankfully yesterday I was wearing leggings.
But I was also reminded of me at five, climbing through a window in a different world. So much is different, so much is the same. I am small, and I can go places others can’t. My pride still gets in my way and often makes me miserable. I have a tendency to want to retreat into fantasy worlds of my own and others’ designs.
All the memories pile up on each other because in the end, we are all just people in the stories we tell.
This week brought news of the impending death of Tab. If you have never enjoyed a Tab it is hard to explain the cold, bubbly taste, at once both sweet and acrid. Imagine a Coke, with a tablespoon of vinegar thrown in. Take a pink packet of Sweet & Low, mix it with some actual sugar. That is the taste of my childhood.
Today’s “diet” and “lite” drinks all put the sweetness up front. If there is any bitterness it’s in the aftertaste. There was no aftertaste with Tab, the aftertaste WAS the taste. You could sense the saccharine from the first satisfying pop of the pull tab. The appeal wasn’t in the taste, the appeal was that when you drank Tab, you knew you were having an adult drink, and you knew you looked beautiful drinking it.
Tab enjoyed a rare place of honor in my house. My mother did not generally allow junk food. We were a house with carob chips and peanut butter from the “Health Food” store, long before Whole Foods was a glimmer in Jeff Bezos’ eye. At the “Health Food” store you could buy peanut butter ground while you waited, yogurt (still a novelty in 1970s Kentucky), granola, sugarless raisin cookies, and those little Chinese candies wrapped in rice paper that you can also eat. I’m not sure why my mother allowed these candies, my guess is because they were Chinese they counted as a cultural exchange. It’s also possible she believed the rice paper counted as fiber. You could probably also buy some other “herbs” at the “health food” store, but I’m not sure.
As health conscious as she was, my mother was always just a little more weight conscious. Believe me when I tell you that at 80 years old, she has a better figure than you. Hence, the incongruous appearance of those pink cans of Tab under the counter in our kitchen.
Today, I’m not much of a soda drinker. Occasionally on a road trip I’ll have a Diet Dr. Pepper. At Passover I like a Dr. Brown’s Diet Cream Soda. It’s been hard to find Tab in the stores for years and I can’t honestly say I miss drinking it. But somehow, I still miss the idea of it being around. Rest in peace Tab
