- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 9
-
Sparkle (0)
My computer died in my recent move. So I've been offline for about two weeks as the universe seemed to conspire to make this a long process. No need to go into torturous detail. Suffice to say that getting back online took a long time and seemed fraught with obstacles. So it is taking me a while to tell to tell you the tale of my laughter with the dead people in my life.
I have almost no living relatives -- except an 85 year old cousin, Ida, with whom I am very close. We talk a lot about family times, as each is the others sole repository of memories. I notice she has been careful to impart her recipe secrets, formerly held close to the vest. It makes me think that she is planning for her glide into the next life, leaving no stones unturned, parting with the family jewels, which in her case are recipes. We Polish folk, much in the way Italian folk do, observe a big traditional meal on Christmas Eve, which is a non-meat meal called Wielia ("vigil"), a banquet of fish and other non meat items. There are many rituals attached to this event, and it is the keystone in many observant Polish family's year, much as Passover is a big linchpin in the life of a Jewish family.
This year, with my move happening on December 20th, there was not going to be a Wielia. Ida was too weary and I was surrounded by boxes. I started thinking about Christmas Eves past and all the dead family members, all the beloved people with whom I used to spend Christmas Eve through my life. Mom, Dad, Auntie Stella, Uncle Felix, cousins Jania, Zosia, Emilia, Joey, my great-aunt ad great-uncle, Auntie Jo, Uncle Gene, Aunts Flo and Sophie and their husbands Chet and Cyril. I bought some fish to cook at least one traditional dish, and headed for my new home. My heart felt heavy, laden, sad. On the way I had to drive by the cemetery in which most of these folks are buried.
On a whim, I turned in.
I expected to feel blue, maybe despondent, perhaps, at best, overtaken with a sort of Eastern European melancholia which seems endemic to my tribe. But, no.
I felt elated. I was in the bright and snow-covered bone-yard of my ancestors. Aunts and uncles, parents, and even two of the four grandparents that I had never met were buried here. I was with the assembled family. The problem was, they were all asleep.
"Wake up, family!" I found myself shouting from inside my car. There was no one else in the cemetary, and my car windows were shut tight against the freezing cold. "Hey everybody -- I moved back to town!" I started feeling giddy. Who was I to yell at the dead? On the other hand, why not? They were "my" dead, after al.
I drove from headstone to headstone, imagining waking up everyone, family, old neighbors, friends of the family. "hey folks, hey Mr S, Mrs R, hey everybody --- I just wanted to thank you! Thanks you for loving me! Thank you for giving me this fine tradition! Thank you for giving me a history worthy of missing!'
I started to feel like the luckiest woman in town. There were so many people to thank. Every thank you cam attached to an armload of memories.
"Shake those bones, Mom, Dad, Aunts and Uncles -- we are gonna dance tonight," I shouted. I saw them in my mind's dim eye, shaking their bones and grinning as they spun around my car, wraith-like but full of joy that I had finally "gotten the message".
In the distance I heard the strains of all of our voices singing Polish Christmas carols, especially one that tells the shepherds to hurry, hurry, hurry to Bethlehem to see the miracle. I imagined them singing and floating, rising high in the sky above the little cemetery to form a bright star. Not anything as corny as Bethlehem's star, just a bright little star of my family, nestled in amongst all the bright little starts of everybody's families - your family, and yours, and yours.
Now, I thought, I am either in the throes of a spiritual highpoint or a lunatic, but since it beat melancholia by a yard and a half, I chose that G-d (or the Universe, if you prefer) had given me a new way to image my life, and my history, and that suddenly what I
