In the winter, when the weather is cold and nasty, and I’m indoors a lot, I think about getting a pet to keep me company. The children are all grown and moved out, the house is quiet, and I long for a friendly face and a wagging tail to greet me when I come home at night.
My husband pooh-poohs the idea and promises to smile more often and waggle his tail when he greets me at night, and when that doesn’t work he reminds me... “Remember the expense?... Remember what a hassle it was when the dog was sick?... Cleaning up the mess?...Remember when she would roll around in that muck outside and prance through the house smelling like sh..”
I raise my hand to stop him. The urge to have a pet has passed. We have had a few pets through the years – it was never a very good experience, I’ll admit. We just aren’t good pet people. Or maybe we chose the wrong pets.
We went to a shelter to adopt our first pet - a cute little tabby cat that they assured us was a female. I insisted on a female because I didn’t want to deal with a male cat spraying my furniture to mark his territory. I saw one flea on her the night we brought her home, but I caught it, and killed it, and thought that was the end of it.
Within a week, my house was flea infested, and on the first visit to the vet I was informed that my she-tabby was a he. Tabby grew into a huge monster that we all feared. Cuddly was not a word that I would use to describe this cat: nasty, snippy, lazy and fat were more like it – a demonic Garfield.
We had the cat spayed in the hope of sweetening his disposition and to avoid that awful spraying that males will do. This only made him meaner and fatter. The vet suggested having him declawed to stop the vicious scratching. But after his claws were removed, he came after us with his front paws, swinging like a prize fighter, perched up on his two hind legs, running after us.
I packed the cat in a cardboard box in my trunk one hot summer day and headed back to the shelter. From the moment I shut the trunk lid, he began to wail a high pitched screaming howl that sounded like some supernatural demonic beast. I caught the driver next to me looking over at my car when I stopped for a red light, but I looked straight ahead as if all was normal in my world. What sound? Coming from my trunk? Can’t be!
When I got to the shelter, I lifted the box out of the trunk and gently placed it on the ground. The cat was silent, but I knew he was still alive because I felt him pressing against the top of the box, trying to get out. I was so frightened to open the box with my bare hands, so I found a stick to gently pry the folded box top open. Crouching down a few feet away from the box, I gingerly lifted the top flap and the cat sprung out like an electrocuted jack-in-the-box and bolted out of sight. Good riddance!
I told the kids he ran away from home on his own free will, but they still searched the neighborhood for weeks. I hid behind the living room curtains, chewing my nails off and listening to their plaintive calls: “Tabby?” around the front bushes, then “Tabby?” in the neighbors’ yards.
The more they searched, the more fervently I prayed to God that this cat would never find its way home. I knew the cat would find a way to kill me if he did return, just for putting him through the ride from hell in that cardboard box in my trunk.
It took two years of sad eyed begging from the kids before we were convinced to try another pet – a dog this time. We went to a breeder, spending a small fortune, and came home with Bailey, the Springer Spaniel. True to his name, he kept jumping over the fences we built to contain him in the yard. When he was indoors, he was a streak of light blazing through the house like the Road Runner cartoon character, knocking things off of tables and leaving behind a cloud of dust and broken pieces. When we left him alone at home, he broke through all the gates and barricades we set up, ignored the doggie toys and rawhide teething bones, and had a grand time chewing our door jambs and wooden furniture. We sold him after six months.
Soon after Bailey, the children were begging for another cat, so we went to another shelter in a different – more upscale – neighborhood. At this shelter, you had to pay for your pet, so we were convinced that we would be coming home with a better – more upscale – cat. What we weren’t prepared for was the intensive screening process.
First we had to complete a four page questionnaire and list three personal references (not family members) that could vouch for our character, disposition and moral fiber. Then we were split up from each other and taken into separate rooms to be interviewed – like they do in those police shows when they interview multiple felons involved in the same crime. My husband went into one room for an interview and I took the kids into the room with me, rather than leave them alone to wander among the animals. Big mistake.
When my interviewer asked how we would discipline the animal, my son butts in and says, “Remember when you chased Bailey through the yard with a hairbrush after he chewed up the dining room chairs?” He ignored my scornful look. “Don’t you remember, mom?” he laughs, turning to the interviewer who asked him to please continue.
“Mom was so mad. She was yelling, I’m going to kill you! while she was running after Bailey, but she couldn’t catch him. Bailey was such a fast runner. So she reached into her pocketbook and grabbed her brush and threw it at him and the brush landed on his back and broke in half! But Bailey just kept on running around the yard like he didn’t even feel a thing! It was so funny!”
We did not go home with a cat that day, but, a few months later, we went to another breeder and came home with the most loving, adorable, sweet tempered West Highland Terrier. We had the best of both worlds with this dog because she thought she was a cat. She was so affectionate and gentle and loved to cuddle.
I was welcomed home every night with so much enthusiasm. She greeted me with a big doggie smile and ran circles around my feet, wagging her tail and leaving a trail of pee in her wake. She peed in her cage every night, too, and liked to pee on the rugs from time to time. As she got older, she peed wherever and whenever she liked. She was a lady, however, and was discreet with her bowel movements, leaving them out of view and neatly piled at the top of the stairs.
As much as I would sometimes like to get a pet now, I know I’m not ready to make that commitment again. I would much rather rent my neighbor’s cat, Max, when I’m in the mood for some purring.
Max thinks my yard is his territory and I’m happy when he strolls over for a visit. I rub his belly and call him sweet names in a sing-song voice. He purrs as he slinks in between my legs and rubs his cat hair all over my pants. In the summertime I let him into my screened-in back porch and he sits there with me - just chillin’ – while I sip a drink or read a magazine.
With Max there’s no commitment, no responsibility. I don’t have to offer him a snack, I don’t have to pay for his vet bills or clean out his litter box. We just have fun together – like a date. And when I’ve had enough of him, I send him home.
Sometimes I feel bad leaving Max outdoors in the dead of winter. I think I would like to open the front door and let him come into my house, but I know that will be the end of our beautiful relationship. The next thing you know, he will be looking at me funny if I don’t clean out his litter box, or turning up his nose at the cheap cat food I bought in the discount pet store.
You know how that is. When you’re dating, it’s all fun and laughs and money is no object. And then you get married and, well, let’s just say things change. It’s always better to keep it casual. Everyone stays happy that way.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Simple and Cheap: Broccoli Soup
There wasn’t much meat at our table when I was growing up. If we had a piece of meat for dinner it was a small chop or a thin cutlet served as a second course. The first course was usually a soup made of pasta and beans or pasta with broccoli or cauliflower. This was my mother’s strategy for filling your belly a little so you wouldn’t want much meat. She would pull out some of the vegetable that was in the soup and that would be served with the cutlet as part of the second course.
I learned to cook by watching my mother and my grandmother cook. At a young age, I was fascinated with the creative process in the kitchen. The kitchen was a symphony of sound and motion, smell and taste, and all things wonderful came out of my mother’s kitchen. I never saw her use a recipe to cook dinner. Dinner was simple. Ingredients were cheap. There were no cooking shows or fancy cookbooks, or blogs with pictures to show you step-by-step preparations. My grandmother, an Italian immigrant, once told me this story about how she learned to cook back in the early 1900’s.
When I married your grandfather, I didn’t know how to cook. My mother never taught me anything. All she cared about was work. ‘Work and give me your pay,’ she said. I gave her some of my pay and kept the rest. She never knew what I made. My sisters, Mary and Sadie, gave her everything – all their pay. Stupid!
Your grandfather tried to eat the meat I cooked for him one night, but it was so tough he couldn’t chew it. He spit it out, grabbed his hat and went to the door. He said to me, ‘Why did I marry you if you can’t cook?’ and he went out. Can you imagine that? He stayed out all night and came back in the morning.
When he came back, I told him, ‘If you ever do that again - stay out all night - don’t come back here.’ What does he think he can make a fool of me? So he didn’t go out at night anymore and I learned to cook.
I watched the woman in the next apartment. She thinks I’m there to talk and drink coffee, but I watch her clean the broccoli, chop the garlic, fry the chicken cutlets… Soon, I cook better than her.
During the Depression, my grandmother had to return to work all day in a sweat shop so, at the young age of ten, my mother became the “little mother” in the household and was responsible for taking her younger brother to a babysitter before school, cleaning the apartment and preparing dinner every night for the family. She developed her own strategies for precooking and partial cooking so that she could start dinner early and sneak out for an hour to play handball or run down to the beach at Coney Island and still have dinner on the table on time.
One of the soups that we ate a lot, when I was growing up, was a simple broccoli soup with macaroni. It was delicious and cheap and I often make it to this day. It can be partially prepared ahead of time and sit on the stove until the last step, when you are ready to add the pasta – leaving you plenty of time to go out for a few sets of handball or a quick swim at the beach.
Broccoli Soup with Macaroni
Wash a bunch of broccoli. Chop off the bottom two inches of the hard stem and discard. Peel the hard skin off the stems and discard. (It comes off easily if you place your paring knife at the base of the stem, make a tiny cut and just peel it back.) Slice the stems down in halves or
quarters to cook the broccoli evenly in water.
To judge how much water to use, place the raw broccoli to a 2 qt. pan and add enough cold water to cover the broccoli completely, plus about another inch or two over.
When you have the adequate
amount of water, remove the raw broccoli and bring the water to a boil.
Cook the broccoli a few minutes in the simmering water until the stems are softened enough to break easily with a fork.
Mash the broccoli in the pot with a potato masher or a large fork, leaving some pieces whole. You can stop at this point and when you are ready for dinner bring the water with the cooked broccoli to a boil, again, and add some pasta.
My grandmother gave me a good guide for measuring how much pasta to use. She would break off the edges of spaghetti or linguini into ½ inch pieces and place them in a bowl. Then she would measure one palm full for each person.
My grandmother and my mother did
not own measuring cups, so I still measure the pasta this way. Just cup your hand to form a small “vessel” in your palm and use that to measure: for a medium sized head of broccoli I would use about 4 palms full of pasta. You may like your soup thicker, so experiment and use your own judgment.
When the pasta is cooked the soup is ready. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the pot and stir before serving. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You may also make this soup using cauliflower.
Photos by Tom Vanderberg
I learned to cook by watching my mother and my grandmother cook. At a young age, I was fascinated with the creative process in the kitchen. The kitchen was a symphony of sound and motion, smell and taste, and all things wonderful came out of my mother’s kitchen. I never saw her use a recipe to cook dinner. Dinner was simple. Ingredients were cheap. There were no cooking shows or fancy cookbooks, or blogs with pictures to show you step-by-step preparations. My grandmother, an Italian immigrant, once told me this story about how she learned to cook back in the early 1900’s.
When I married your grandfather, I didn’t know how to cook. My mother never taught me anything. All she cared about was work. ‘Work and give me your pay,’ she said. I gave her some of my pay and kept the rest. She never knew what I made. My sisters, Mary and Sadie, gave her everything – all their pay. Stupid!
Your grandfather tried to eat the meat I cooked for him one night, but it was so tough he couldn’t chew it. He spit it out, grabbed his hat and went to the door. He said to me, ‘Why did I marry you if you can’t cook?’ and he went out. Can you imagine that? He stayed out all night and came back in the morning.
When he came back, I told him, ‘If you ever do that again - stay out all night - don’t come back here.’ What does he think he can make a fool of me? So he didn’t go out at night anymore and I learned to cook.
I watched the woman in the next apartment. She thinks I’m there to talk and drink coffee, but I watch her clean the broccoli, chop the garlic, fry the chicken cutlets… Soon, I cook better than her.
During the Depression, my grandmother had to return to work all day in a sweat shop so, at the young age of ten, my mother became the “little mother” in the household and was responsible for taking her younger brother to a babysitter before school, cleaning the apartment and preparing dinner every night for the family. She developed her own strategies for precooking and partial cooking so that she could start dinner early and sneak out for an hour to play handball or run down to the beach at Coney Island and still have dinner on the table on time.
One of the soups that we ate a lot, when I was growing up, was a simple broccoli soup with macaroni. It was delicious and cheap and I often make it to this day. It can be partially prepared ahead of time and sit on the stove until the last step, when you are ready to add the pasta – leaving you plenty of time to go out for a few sets of handball or a quick swim at the beach.
Broccoli Soup with Macaroni
Wash a bunch of broccoli. Chop off the bottom two inches of the hard stem and discard. Peel the hard skin off the stems and discard. (It comes off easily if you place your paring knife at the base of the stem, make a tiny cut and just peel it back.) Slice the stems down in halves or
quarters to cook the broccoli evenly in water.
To judge how much water to use, place the raw broccoli to a 2 qt. pan and add enough cold water to cover the broccoli completely, plus about another inch or two over.
When you have the adequate
amount of water, remove the raw broccoli and bring the water to a boil.
Cook the broccoli a few minutes in the simmering water until the stems are softened enough to break easily with a fork.
Mash the broccoli in the pot with a potato masher or a large fork, leaving some pieces whole. You can stop at this point and when you are ready for dinner bring the water with the cooked broccoli to a boil, again, and add some pasta.
My grandmother gave me a good guide for measuring how much pasta to use. She would break off the edges of spaghetti or linguini into ½ inch pieces and place them in a bowl. Then she would measure one palm full for each person.
My grandmother and my mother did
not own measuring cups, so I still measure the pasta this way. Just cup your hand to form a small “vessel” in your palm and use that to measure: for a medium sized head of broccoli I would use about 4 palms full of pasta. You may like your soup thicker, so experiment and use your own judgment.
When the pasta is cooked the soup is ready. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the pot and stir before serving. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You may also make this soup using cauliflower.
Photos by Tom Vanderberg
Friday, January 8, 2010
Searching For My Roots
Why is it so important to know where we came from? This search for one's roots is a national preoccupation with us in America. We are a lost nation, a people with no unified cultural history, in search of something that will link us together with unknown relatives in foreign lands. It is a basic human need to know where you came from.
Back when my ancestors first came to this country in the early 1900's they were searching for something better - escaping hardships I can't even imagine. I say "first came" because the man in our family tree went back and forth a few times, finally deciding to return to Sicily for good, leaving behind his wife and 5 children to fend for themselves in America.
This story, as told to me in bits and pieces through the years, has become a haunting tale that consists only of a few dots on a page in random order. My family was robbed of their personal history because my great grandmother wiped her husband's memory away along with all the history of the life she left behind. She murdered him in her mind because she was so angry at him for abandoning their family and starting another family when he returned to Italy.
My great grandmother may have tried to erase the memory of her past by not allowing her husband's name to come into a conversation, but I doubt she ever forgot the hurt and the loneliness he left behind.
This story of a strong woman surviving against all the odds of a foreign land, the Great Depression, World War II and raising five children by herself has been a salient force in my own personal life.
As I get older, I feel the need to find the beginning of the story so that I may connect all the dots and complete the line that will lead me back to where I began. So I posed a question to myself the other day: If my great grandparents were never divorced, shouldn't the land my great grandfather owned in Italy be transferred to my great grandmother in America, and, subsequently to her offspring?
I remember stories my grandmother told me of acres of property that her father had, in addition to a villa with tile floors and a factory where he made men's shoes. She picked lemons off of trees that were so sweet she ate them like we eat oranges in this country.
Just on a lark, I contacted an Italian search engine site that traces property owned in Italy and had a very pleasant conversation with a lawyer in San Francisco who does title searches for Italian-Americans.
"You would be amazed," he told me, "at how much people own in Italy that they aren't aware of." I told him my story and he said I could very well be one of those people who have land ownership rites in Sicily. "The second marriage in Italy is null," he writes in an e-mail back to me, "and the property may still be there and no update to the title ever having taken place (very common)...we should check the title to the property..."
Then he tells me about someone who became the property owner of 360 acres of abandoned property in the Province of Genova in the town of Varese Ligure.
I have begun searching fervently now for my ancestors in Sicily - specifically around the Catania area. Today I viewed antique maps on line, in search for a little town called Militello di Colania, Sicily. It probably doesn't exist anymore. Click on the link to see what I did find. (I'm not sure I want to go there!) I need the birth year and town where my great grandfather was born to begin a title search. It would be great to trace my lineage for my family history and nostalgia, but, hey! - now there also might be the possibility of land ownership over there too!
My mother laughs when I tell her this. She doesn't remember those stories. And she doubts there is anything left of his property, if he had property to begin with.
"They sold all their property when they came to this country. They needed the money for the passage," she tells me.
"No!" I disagree. "The ship's manifest, according to the Ellis Island website, documents him coming into this country with only $12 on his person."
She is laughing. "Do you think they told the government how much money they had? They sewed their money into their hems and lined their coats with it. The government is the last person they would admit to having money."
So, I'm a little naive. But I'm still searching. If anyone reading this has any information of the birth town of a Mario Riccioli, born around the year 1869 - give or take a year or two...because my mother says they also lied about their age, let me know. She also says that no one in his native town would know his name as Mario. Everyone in those little Italian towns had a nickname that was given to them when they were a child. No one would ever admit to knowing a Mario Riccioli. Maybe his town name was Frankie Soup or Mangia Bona.
So I'm searching for property somewhere, owned by someone, born at sometime.
Back when my ancestors first came to this country in the early 1900's they were searching for something better - escaping hardships I can't even imagine. I say "first came" because the man in our family tree went back and forth a few times, finally deciding to return to Sicily for good, leaving behind his wife and 5 children to fend for themselves in America.
This story, as told to me in bits and pieces through the years, has become a haunting tale that consists only of a few dots on a page in random order. My family was robbed of their personal history because my great grandmother wiped her husband's memory away along with all the history of the life she left behind. She murdered him in her mind because she was so angry at him for abandoning their family and starting another family when he returned to Italy.
My great grandmother may have tried to erase the memory of her past by not allowing her husband's name to come into a conversation, but I doubt she ever forgot the hurt and the loneliness he left behind.
This story of a strong woman surviving against all the odds of a foreign land, the Great Depression, World War II and raising five children by herself has been a salient force in my own personal life.
As I get older, I feel the need to find the beginning of the story so that I may connect all the dots and complete the line that will lead me back to where I began. So I posed a question to myself the other day: If my great grandparents were never divorced, shouldn't the land my great grandfather owned in Italy be transferred to my great grandmother in America, and, subsequently to her offspring?
I remember stories my grandmother told me of acres of property that her father had, in addition to a villa with tile floors and a factory where he made men's shoes. She picked lemons off of trees that were so sweet she ate them like we eat oranges in this country.
Just on a lark, I contacted an Italian search engine site that traces property owned in Italy and had a very pleasant conversation with a lawyer in San Francisco who does title searches for Italian-Americans.
"You would be amazed," he told me, "at how much people own in Italy that they aren't aware of." I told him my story and he said I could very well be one of those people who have land ownership rites in Sicily. "The second marriage in Italy is null," he writes in an e-mail back to me, "and the property may still be there and no update to the title ever having taken place (very common)...we should check the title to the property..."
Then he tells me about someone who became the property owner of 360 acres of abandoned property in the Province of Genova in the town of Varese Ligure.
I have begun searching fervently now for my ancestors in Sicily - specifically around the Catania area. Today I viewed antique maps on line, in search for a little town called Militello di Colania, Sicily. It probably doesn't exist anymore. Click on the link to see what I did find. (I'm not sure I want to go there!) I need the birth year and town where my great grandfather was born to begin a title search. It would be great to trace my lineage for my family history and nostalgia, but, hey! - now there also might be the possibility of land ownership over there too!
My mother laughs when I tell her this. She doesn't remember those stories. And she doubts there is anything left of his property, if he had property to begin with.
"They sold all their property when they came to this country. They needed the money for the passage," she tells me.
"No!" I disagree. "The ship's manifest, according to the Ellis Island website, documents him coming into this country with only $12 on his person."
She is laughing. "Do you think they told the government how much money they had? They sewed their money into their hems and lined their coats with it. The government is the last person they would admit to having money."
So, I'm a little naive. But I'm still searching. If anyone reading this has any information of the birth town of a Mario Riccioli, born around the year 1869 - give or take a year or two...because my mother says they also lied about their age, let me know. She also says that no one in his native town would know his name as Mario. Everyone in those little Italian towns had a nickname that was given to them when they were a child. No one would ever admit to knowing a Mario Riccioli. Maybe his town name was Frankie Soup or Mangia Bona.
So I'm searching for property somewhere, owned by someone, born at sometime.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Lost and Found
I lost my keys last week. For four days I searched everywhere - under every bed in the house, under every chair, sofa and recliner. I pulled out all the seat cushions, felt around in dark places - under bureaus and behind desks, even in some garbage bags. I worked myself up to a frenzy – jumping out of bed at night when I had a vision of where my keys might be, only to return to the cold mattress, empty handed.
In my frustration, I finally offered up a reward of $20 to anyone who found my keys. Before the reward was posted, no one bothered to help me. Now, with the promise of a mere $20 bill, everyone was getting into the search effort. Suddenly they were scurrying about as I heard the opening and closing of drawers and closet doors, rustling of papers, lifting and pushing things off of table tops.
Then the courtroom interrogation began:
"When did you see them last?" If I knew the answer to that, they wouldn't be lost.
"When did you last use them?" On December 23rd. I remember I drove home that day, so I had to have them to get into the house.
"Where did you put them after you walked into the house?" If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!
They were legitimate questions, and ones I had asked myself already, but my brain was not making the connection between when I last had the keys and when I realized that I didn’t.
When so much of a day is routine, you don’t pay attention to details. Our repetitive actions form little ruts that grow into paths and, over time, become trails that we follow day in and day out. Sometimes I’ll be driving - working out a problem in my head or thinking about a report that I was working on - and I will pull into my driveway and I don’t even remember the drive home. I don’t remember a single song that was playing on the ride home. Did I have the radio on?
I asked for a whistling tea pot for Christmas this year, because often I’ll put up a pot of water for tea, walk upstairs for something, start working on my computer, get distracted and lose track of time. When I finally go back downstairs, the kitchen has become a steam bath and I think, Oh, right; the tea!
A holiday like Christmas can throw a life of routines into chaos. Furniture is rearranged to make room for a tree, so my mindless path through the house is disrupted and I'm bumping into walls and tripping over wooden soldiers in my way. There’s a basket holding Christmas cards where the key plate used to be, and a tin of cookies is sitting on top of two days worth of mail, so the mindless act of placing your keys down where they usually go becomes an exercise in mental acuity for four days. Where is the Cablevision bill? Was the mortgage paid yet?
The interesting thing that happened, and what eventually led me to find my keys, was that I was forced to rewind the events of the past four days and examine every detail. What I found most distressing was that, in trying to remember the details of a day, I realized that most of the time I was not paying attention. I was moving on auto-pilot, following my trail, going through the motions of a day and not remembering anything about it.
Losing my keys forced me to wake up and pay attention. At first, I couldn’t remember anything about the past four days. What did I cook for dinner last night? Then, slowly, I began to remember some details – bits of conversation; what people were wearing on Christmas day; the seating arrangement at Christmas dinner; the smell of my son’s cologne when I kissed his cheek in mass on Christmas Eve . I went back another day and began to remember seeing the keys somewhere in the kitchen, but where? I saw myself opening a drawer, cleaning off the counter, moving things off a table to make room for some Christmas decorations.
Reviewing my life over the past four days was like seeing myself floating through a misty dream sequence. I stopped physically searching for the keys and spent my time mentally searching, working my mind harder, trying to see the details in action, as if I was viewing myself in a movie.
Then, finally, one evening while I was lying in bed in that twilight state between the real world and the world of dreams, when the mind is perfectly clear and empty of all thought, I sensed where the keys were. I didn’t bother to jump out of bed to verify my vision because I knew they would be there.
“Ah!” I said the next morning, as I grabbed the keys in my hand and held them up in the air like a prize. Suddenly, all the details that were missing came flooding into my brain and all the empty synapses were ignited and the paths were connected with the memories that were temporarily lost.
This mental exercise of trying to remember a mindless action taken out of a repetitive routine was a wake up call for me. I began to think about all the lost memories that accumulate in a lifetime and how much richer a life would be if we just paid more attention to the details.
So my one and only New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to be more mindful - to pay attention, to wake up! and walk through my day aware of my surroundings, to use all my senses and see my world anew. At the end of the day, I want to remember the details.
I also found a clip that I can attach to a ring on my purse handle so I’ll never misplace my keys, and, yes, I did get the whistling tea pot.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
In my frustration, I finally offered up a reward of $20 to anyone who found my keys. Before the reward was posted, no one bothered to help me. Now, with the promise of a mere $20 bill, everyone was getting into the search effort. Suddenly they were scurrying about as I heard the opening and closing of drawers and closet doors, rustling of papers, lifting and pushing things off of table tops.
Then the courtroom interrogation began:
"When did you see them last?" If I knew the answer to that, they wouldn't be lost.
"When did you last use them?" On December 23rd. I remember I drove home that day, so I had to have them to get into the house.
"Where did you put them after you walked into the house?" If I knew that, they wouldn’t be lost!
They were legitimate questions, and ones I had asked myself already, but my brain was not making the connection between when I last had the keys and when I realized that I didn’t.
When so much of a day is routine, you don’t pay attention to details. Our repetitive actions form little ruts that grow into paths and, over time, become trails that we follow day in and day out. Sometimes I’ll be driving - working out a problem in my head or thinking about a report that I was working on - and I will pull into my driveway and I don’t even remember the drive home. I don’t remember a single song that was playing on the ride home. Did I have the radio on?
I asked for a whistling tea pot for Christmas this year, because often I’ll put up a pot of water for tea, walk upstairs for something, start working on my computer, get distracted and lose track of time. When I finally go back downstairs, the kitchen has become a steam bath and I think, Oh, right; the tea!
A holiday like Christmas can throw a life of routines into chaos. Furniture is rearranged to make room for a tree, so my mindless path through the house is disrupted and I'm bumping into walls and tripping over wooden soldiers in my way. There’s a basket holding Christmas cards where the key plate used to be, and a tin of cookies is sitting on top of two days worth of mail, so the mindless act of placing your keys down where they usually go becomes an exercise in mental acuity for four days. Where is the Cablevision bill? Was the mortgage paid yet?
The interesting thing that happened, and what eventually led me to find my keys, was that I was forced to rewind the events of the past four days and examine every detail. What I found most distressing was that, in trying to remember the details of a day, I realized that most of the time I was not paying attention. I was moving on auto-pilot, following my trail, going through the motions of a day and not remembering anything about it.
Losing my keys forced me to wake up and pay attention. At first, I couldn’t remember anything about the past four days. What did I cook for dinner last night? Then, slowly, I began to remember some details – bits of conversation; what people were wearing on Christmas day; the seating arrangement at Christmas dinner; the smell of my son’s cologne when I kissed his cheek in mass on Christmas Eve . I went back another day and began to remember seeing the keys somewhere in the kitchen, but where? I saw myself opening a drawer, cleaning off the counter, moving things off a table to make room for some Christmas decorations.
Reviewing my life over the past four days was like seeing myself floating through a misty dream sequence. I stopped physically searching for the keys and spent my time mentally searching, working my mind harder, trying to see the details in action, as if I was viewing myself in a movie.
Then, finally, one evening while I was lying in bed in that twilight state between the real world and the world of dreams, when the mind is perfectly clear and empty of all thought, I sensed where the keys were. I didn’t bother to jump out of bed to verify my vision because I knew they would be there.
“Ah!” I said the next morning, as I grabbed the keys in my hand and held them up in the air like a prize. Suddenly, all the details that were missing came flooding into my brain and all the empty synapses were ignited and the paths were connected with the memories that were temporarily lost.
This mental exercise of trying to remember a mindless action taken out of a repetitive routine was a wake up call for me. I began to think about all the lost memories that accumulate in a lifetime and how much richer a life would be if we just paid more attention to the details.
So my one and only New Year’s resolution for 2010 is to be more mindful - to pay attention, to wake up! and walk through my day aware of my surroundings, to use all my senses and see my world anew. At the end of the day, I want to remember the details.
I also found a clip that I can attach to a ring on my purse handle so I’ll never misplace my keys, and, yes, I did get the whistling tea pot.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
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