Finding The Wave Again

 

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back.  ~William D. Tammeus

I don’t recall waving to my parents from a merry-go-round, but I do recall, every single time I left home as a child, whether to go to school or to play at a friend’s house, one or the other (sometimes both) standing at the front door waving goodbye.  Then as an adult, leaving each other’s houses, still waving from the doorway.     

Without a doubt, I’d come to take that gesture for granted, as evidenced by how terribly much I’ve missed in the three years since they both passed away.  This past month, I’ve been surprised and fortunate to be blessed with a little ease to the ache of missing that particular gesture.      

Mom & Dad's bands

Along with waves from the doorway, I grew up hearing the story of how my parents had not taken their wedding bands off since the day they placed them on each other’s hands, May 20, 1949.  Refused to remove them for surgeries, job related hazards or during troubled times in their marriage.  That story, that gesture of love and devotion, resonated so deeply with me that I have not taken mine off since March 19, 1983, when Steven placed mine on my hand (and barring a hand soaping incident or two for Steve, neither has he).    



In 1990, my mother had a bicycle accident and broke her left wrist.  The emergency room doctor gave her the choice of cutting the band off or losing her finger. After much discussion with my father, she did finally allow them to cut it off, and replaced it as soon as she could with her second band which didn’t leave her finger until the day she died. 

Early in their marriage, my dad worked for Addressograph Multigraph and during a service call, had his hand caught in a machine.  It did serious damage to his thumb and bent his band considerably, but he never removed his either. 

So of all the many possessions that came and went in my parents’ lives, their rings were what I viewed as their constant.  When they passed three years ago, and us five kids sorted their possessions, their rings were what I most desired and was graciously granted. 



I always knew that I wouldn’t wear either band or my mother’s engagement ring as stand-alone pieces, but also did not want them to simply sit in my jewelry box to be looked at every now and again. They’d meant too much to sit unused, collecting dust.

Yet for three years, they did just that.  And then I took them out of my jewelry box and rings in hand, went to my jeweler friend, Reg Shopp of deSignet International.    I explained the history of the pieces and what I wanted to do. 



“I have this thing with the number three,” I told him.  “It’s been three years since my parents died.  And I have their wedding bands and my mom’s engagement ring which has three diamonds in it.  There’s the relationship of myself and my parents as a group of three.  And then there’s the group of three that is myself, my husband and our son.  I’m envisioning melting it all down, making a braid of three strands of gold and making three pieces, a ring and a pair of earrings, to represent all those symbolic groups of three, intertwined.”

New ring and earrings

A few months later, when I picked up the finished pieces, I was overcome by the intense connection I felt to my mom and dad as I slid on the ring.  The beauty of it took my breath away, but the significance behind what I now wore on my hand, the near 60 years of my parent’s marriage, their love and commitment woven together, was overwhelming.

Any doubt I had about changing the pieces vanished as I thought of what they’d worn separately all those years, being melted down and brought together.  

I wear the three pieces every day now.  And every once in a while, I walk past a mirror and glimpse the earrings, or glance down as a ray of light dances across the face of the ring, and feel the warm caress of a gentle wave from the doorway. 

Breathings of Your Heart

Her pencil stroked across the journal paper, slow and deliberate, each word chosen with care.  It was a eulogy after all, and none the less important because it was her own.  Odd to have been inspired to do so by her father, a man reluctant for many years to make a will superstitiously believing that when he did, he would pass.  A man, more often heard to say IF I die, than WHEN I die.

In his later years, he took to calling her at work to mention that he and Mom had been to a wake that day and they liked this feature or that about the wake, and would she mind making note of it for theirs?  She humored him and faithfully took the yellow sticky notes or scraps of paper home and put them in a manila folder labeled “funerals”.  When the days unexpectedly came to make arrangements, she was never so glad to have the knowledge of their wishes to draw upon.

 

She wrote both their eulogies, just ten short months apart – each a testament to the good life they lived and what they meant to family, friends and each other.  And she wrote them with honesty, like she was doing with hers now.  Not all selfless devotion, faith and goodness – but including a smattering of their human flaws as well.  For surely everyone carries some degree of ballast to balance their life.  And everyone is loved because of, and even sometimes in spite of, their load.

 

Reading about her parents to the crowd gathered at the church wasn’t easy to do.  But she was their daughter and a writer after all and the courtesy of her craft, exemplifying their lives, was her final gift.

 

She’d never envisioned herself as being the “last one standing”, yet here she was, alone, with no family left to write hers.  The arrangements had been made a while ago with her lawyer.  There would be no visiting hours or service.  Hence, no opportunity for it to be read.  Was it necessary then after all?

  

What mattered, the love she gave, the family she nurtured or the self she struggled with?   The accomplishments achieved, the depression overcome or the passion for writing?  Was it significant that she avoided committees like the plague but carried within, her own version of belief in a higher good?  That her taste in poetry was eclectic, that she had a mean controlling streak or that she indulged in a piece of chocolate every day?

Necessary? No.  She underlined the quote by William Wordsworth she’d started with in the beginning… 

Yes, the written word validates a life lived – even if it’s never read out loud.  And so, her pencil strokes continued on, slow and deliberate, in the fading light of the autumn afternoon.

Love is…a Whitman’s box of chocolates.

Bought these today. A cup of tea and a chocolate sounds heavenly.

Year after year as I grew up it appeared on Valentine’s Day like clockwork – the small Whitman’s heart shaped box, with six prized chocolates nestled inside.  My passion for (and daily fix of) chocolate in some form on a daily basis most likely finds its roots in the significance of that box for me. The front was usually adorned with a Peanuts caricature with a valentine’s message about love or hugs or the coveted “Be Mine?”   Who could resist such a loving ritual from a dad?

My dad was a softie.  I mean the big teddy bear heart kind of guy who loved his family more than himself.  I didn’t doubt my dad loved me, but didn’t give it any conscious thought through my younger daughter years – I really grew into the knowledge more as an adult, but the signs were there, just waiting for me to see them.  Valentine’s Day was my first clue. 

My dad was a quiet man.  He believed his actions spoke louder than words (written or spoken) and so “I love you” didn’t cross his lips a lot in those early childhood years.  Maybe it was the generation, maybe growing up as an only child with a gruff father, maybe it was our family dynamics.  Whatever the reason, he felt the proof of his love was in the showing, not the telling.     

Dad and I - long before Whitman's.

He worked hard to support his wife and five children.  He was involved in his community and volunteered his whole life to help others.  I don’t remember him ever reading me a story, or sitting down to play a game.  But I remember him at the father/daughter dinners for Girl Scouts, at the head of the dining room table at nightly family meals and when he walked me down the aisle to marry a man who would also love me for the rest of my life.  Dad was the only one I thought to call when I had what can only be deemed as an emotional breakdown in my freshman year of high school.  He picked a hysterical me up at the flag pole in front of the school, took me home, hugged me but didn’t question me, tucked me in on the couch after giving me an orange juice (heavily laden with Vodka) and sat with me as I slept until my mom got home from work later that day to handle whatever it was that had pushed me to my breaking point. 

Oh, how I wish I still had one of those valentine boxes.  I kept many of them for years, keepers of mementos, trinkets and whatever else a young girl squirrels away.  I’m sure at some point during an emotional “rite of passage” time when I was shedding my childhood and embracing my adulthood (hear the violins? I was probably around the oh so grown up age of 14 or so) I threw out my boxes.  And sometime around then they stopped coming.  Maybe he felt they wouldn’t be appreciated anymore – maybe I inadvertently gave off some sign that I was beyond that type of expression from him. 

My Dad. William P. Wood.

In his later years, he became much more demonstrative.  He told me he loved me each time I saw him. His arms would wrap around me, pull me close and hug me with a love I felt deep into my bones.  It was like receiving a Whitman’s heart shaped box every time.  A few years before he passed, I got the courage to ask him if it was him or my mom who had bought the boxes for us girls year after year.  His answer was clear.  “Of course it was me honey, your mother didn’t know what I wanted to say to you”. 

Thanks dad. I love you too.