Remembering Things Broken

Teresa, JoAnne’s mother, was a very pure soul.  Upon meeting her a friend of ours exclaimed, “Edith Bunker!”  Teresa was a first generation Italian, and her stories were involved, intricate, and exasperating.  Any interruption, request for clarification, or even affirmation would require starting over.  You could be maddeningly close to the conclusion of a tale about why Aunt Emma never married, and someone walking by on their way to the kitchen would make a comment about Uncle Rudy and it was back to square one.  The art of conversation with my mother-in-law was a game of Chutes and Ladders. 

Teresa saw the best in others.  This is a familiar cliche applied to many, particularly those no longer living.  She could find a kernel of beauty and humanity in a surly and incompetent super market checker.  Teresa would ignore the lip piercings and coo admiringly to the woman about her hands.  Soon, I am left to bag the groceries as they are holding hands and earnestly discussing how regal this young woman’s fingers are.  I leave with beer and goat cheese, Teresa with a new friend, and the clerk has a new view of herself.  If I wasn’t married to her daughter, Teresa would have made a great wing man.

This is a bit of a long way around describing an incident that happened about two years before Teresa’s death.  She would have been in her early 80s and her wiftiness had dovetailed nicely into a generally benign dementia.  One day, cutting through the haze, she declared, “Tom, I need to make a list of everything I have broken.”   Even then I knew she didn’t mean hearts or promises.  She was referring to china, glassware, and perhaps a few porcelain figurines from her younger, wilder days.  Clumsily breaking a few nicknacks while dusting is not listed in the Seven Deadly Sins.  Still it was the worst thing she could remember doing.

JoAnne and I talked her through the feeling and laughed about it later.   Irreverently we wondered if she wished to have the inventory read at her memorial. “May 12, 1929: butter dish cover; October 3, 1947: salt shaker; November 7, 1964: crock pot lid” 

Now, years later, I understand her impulse. 

My transgressions are of a different sort, but of late I find myself thinking of mistakes I have made and feelings I may have hurt.  Paul was a neighbor when I was nine.  We were both baseball card collectors. I remember us chatting happily and trading cards in his living room while his mother busied herself in the kitchen.  I picture her as joyously content that a kid who lived six houses away was playing with her developmentally delayed son. 

Paul had a Duke Snider card.  He called him Duck and had no idea of its playground value at Roosevelt Elementary. Feigning ignorance, I also called him Duck although I knew the Dodger’s center fielder’s batting average to the third decimal point.  When Paul was in the kitchen with his mom I took “The Duke” and hid him under a carpet.  We searched futilely for the card that somehow found its way into my collection.  I am sure Paul’s mom figured out what happened.  She never told my parents, but I was too guilty to return or ever see Paul again.  Lately I find myself imagining what she told her son.

I have had better moments, acts of charity, humanity, and occasional selflessness.  Why don’t they come to me in the middle of the night? 

Tom H. Cook is a no longer local writer.  His dogs must have eaten his January column.