The Nutcracker

Hey, readers.

Yes, we do have a blog. Unfortunately, it's been insanely hard to write lately with my impending thesis defense.

Hopefully we'll be able to pick back up now that my defense is on the horizon.

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Our theme for this week: Joy



Christmas has always been a big deal in my immediate family. When we were younger my father had the most amazing ability to pick the coldest, snowiest day of December to go for the Christmas tree, which was always a family affair. We'd ride around together looking for the tallest, thickest fraiser fir we could find and then would hall the behemoth back home to put it up in the living room and decorate it. Mom always hung popcorn strings on her Christmas tree as a kid, so we would start stringing in November. Pa loves lights and would do justice to Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Thankfully, I've always been afraid of heights and a klutz, so I've been excused from the treacherous rooftop decorating duties.

Christmas always brought cookies and fudge. Hot chocolate and brandy. Christmas hats and off-key sing-a-longs in the kitchen. Christmas day brought a mountain of presents in the living room in the morning and all of my Prosen family cousins in the afternoon. Grandma in her Christmas sweaters. Good things to eat and Trivial Pursuit or Taboo after dinner. When I was much, much younger, Christmas brought a new dress from my Grandmother.

My favorite Christmas tradition, however, began on a whim. My aunt (a physical therapist/athletic trainer, I think) was working with the Milwaukee Ballet Company and they offered her two tickets to annual performance of The Nutcracker. For some reason unknown to me, Kathy gave them to my mom. Because ballet was a girl thing, Mom took me to it rather than my brothers.

We went for many years after that first one. I loved it. I loved getting dressed up and the ballerinas. I loved the music (and still do.) I loved the fantastical story line and the belief that my toys really could come to life. I loved the ginger ale and the cookies we shared at intermission. I loved the the brief pause my mother and I both treasured from constant talk of football and hunting and whatever other manly conversations were happening at home.

What I loved most, though, was the time with my mom. I miss it tremendously now that we've stopped going. What I want for Christmas this year is the chance to get dressed up together in our fancy clothes and spend an evening watching the dance progress and sharing a ginger ale in the lobby.

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The Nutcracker

When I was small, my mother took me to watch the Milwaukee ballet company dance The Nutcracker. I had a new Christmas dress, an early gift from my grandmother. It was taffeta and rustled when I walked and when I shifted in my seat. Mom wore a second-hand velvet dress and my great-grandmother's fur coat. I thought she was the prettiest lady there. During the intermission she bought me a ginger ale and we shared an ice cream sundae. She told me she was proud of how I was behaving myself--I barely fidgeted at all. Then she gave me the cherry on the top of the sundae. When she asked me what I liked best about the show I told her it was dresses and the way the ballerinas twirled. We kept going for years, and she always asked the same question over the same sundae. Some years I liked the Nutcracker Prince best. Other years it dressing up, or people watching at intermission, the Christmas decorations in the lobby or the music. Now, at twenty-six I still love all of those things. But this year, when she asks me, I'll tell her it's her second-hand velvet, inherited fur, and the cherry she still saves for me.

Ain't Misbehavin'

Before the beginning of this week's post, a brief aside.

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects about this blog is the way the themes bring to the surface topics about which I've always wanted to write, but have never been able to find the words. On a personal level, it has helped me sift through the debris of everyday life and focus on those things which are important to me. Most notably, my family and the impact they've had on me. It is very difficult to be removed from their daily lives. The writing I have posted here has helped me realize that.

It has also served as a connection to my scattered, extended family. When I post an updated link about one of the family posts I've done, I can count on comments from cousins and siblings from New York to Denver to Milwaukee. This connection--however tenuous and dependent on virtual communication--is one I cherish.

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Our theme for this week: Jazz.

Grandmother Prosen is a force to be reckoned with. When my mother, her daughter-in-law, is feeling sassy she refers to Gram as Rose Kennedy--the matriarch of the family. It makes my grandmother crazy, but I think is an apt description. She keeps the family together: she stuffs the turkeys at Thanksgiving; makes us all laugh over Christmas; catches and fries all of the fish for the Good Friday fish fry at my auntie's; cares for her great-grandbabies. Most of the family still takes part of their summer vacation with her at the family cabin.

The stories from my grandmother's childhood are complicated, full of relatives and sort-of relatives. She was raised by extended family after her mother died in childbirth, so I had myriad great-uncles, great-aunts, and an truly daunting network of second-cousins-twice removed populating family stories and family gatherings when I was growing up. I loved to listen to her tell stories about my Aunt Dorothy, who made beer in her basement during Prohibition or how she met my grandfather though her family ties to the railroad.

There are two aspects of my grandmother's early life that stick with me most. The first is her love of prize-fighting. It was a strange revelation, one that Dad told me when I was still in high school. Apparently Gram's adopted mother ("Ma") loved boxing, and would take grandma to neighborhood fights when she was a little girl. I love the image of my grandmother in a dressed up and sitting ringside at a fight.

The second is Gram's love for jazz. I've written here before about Grandma Baker's love of bluegrass, country, and hymns. Grandma Prosen loved jazz equally, and was responsible for my first exposure to it. She tended more toward the vocal/lounge variety of music, perhaps not what most people would consider jazz. But through her, I was introduced to Billie Holliday, Etta James, Dinah Washington, and Ella Fitgerald. I first fell in love with the the song "Ain't Misbehavin'" on a rainy afternoon in high school. Pirating music was easier then, and I had made a CD for the two of us to listen to in the kitchen. She was drinking coffee and keeping and eye on the meatloaf. I was probably reading or doing homework. I still remember Ella's smooth voice giving me pause, drawing my attention from parsing sentences or Fitzgerald's short stories.

Gram didn't say much, aside from small comments of approval when one of her favorite songs came on. She said nothing during this song. When the CD restarted, she pulled the meatloaf from the oven, wiped her hands on a towel, and hugged me goodbye.

"Thanks for the walk down memory lane, kid."

To this day "Ain't Misbehavin'" is a song I have to hear from beginning to end. It makes the breath catch in my throat and makes my chest tighten. I can't hear it without remembering that rainy afternoon and the smell of my grandmother's cooking.

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Ain't Misbehavin'

When I hear Ella Fiztgerald's smooth voice

I do not think of falling into love;

slow-dancing in the arms of some well-dressed man;

or even the bar, where, while in graduate school

I would drink Scotch and listen to a jazz on Mondays.

I think instead of my grandmother

in the kitchen in the house where I grew up.

Casually making a meatloaf and boiled potatoes,

helping me understand the meaning of a gerund,

or translate my school edition of Virgil.

I remember her little sigh of pleasure

when I had finished with my questions,

when it was time to put dinner in the oven

and sit down to a cup of coffee and songs she loved.

How it Begins

Our theme for this week: Home

Weeds with shallow roots are the easiest to pull.

I learned this at a very young age, pulling weeds in my mother’s garden. She taught me how to dig around the long, deep-searching central spike of a dandelion plant, and that pulling up the small shallow roots of plants that haven’t grown very far down into the soil was easier than letting them go for another hour, another day, another week. She also taught me that sometimes the frailest looking plants are the most resilient. Field bindweed was her favorite example. A delicate, clinging vine with white blossoms that looked like morning glories, it was harder than hell to pull out of the garden. It was deceptively frail looking, but had a network of shallow, webbed roots underground that drove us crazy.

Whenever someone commented on how quickly my mother’s children were growing she would reply “they’re growing like weeds.” It was her way of acknowledging the rapidity of our change. And, I think, her hope that like the dandelions we were forever tearing up, we were putting down good strong roots.

These days, I’m feeling a little like the small weeds that keep getting turned over and pulled out before they have a chance to take hold. I’m packing my house to move for the 15^th time in seven years. I still have boxes I haven’t unpacked from my move last summer. After all, it seemed stupid to settle into something I knew was only temporary. Despite my Bohemian gypsy roots, I’m tired of packing up my possessions at the end of every nine months and shipping off to a different apartment.

Two weekends ago I went to Milwaukee. Ostensibly, I was there to retrieve a friend and bring her back to Minnesota for a wedding. I was happy to be of help to her, but I was even happier to be able to return to Wisconsin and see my family. I don't make it back to their house very often, and it was good to see them there. We spent a lot of time on their deck, watching the birds on the feeders, drinking beer, water, or coffee, and talking.

I went home because I desperately needed to see my parents, to feel some semblance of normality again. I went to be reminded of the fact that I am not rootless. If nothing else, I come from a definite place, and have definite people.

I am tired of living out of boxes, of packing and unpacking my entire life every twelve months. I'm rethinking my decision to re-apply to Ph.D. programs this year and am suddenly cognizant of a number of other things I want to do with my life. Many of these things (buying a house, becoming an Oblate, spending more time in Wisconsin, becoming a major gifts officer in a non-profit) are in direct conflict with spending the next five years pursuing a Ph.D. These realizations have put me more than a little off-balance and I needed to get some perspective on things.




One of the best and simultaneously most infuriating things about my parents is their uncanny ability to provide perspective. They are the most rooted people I know, both living just a few miles from their siblings and a few more from the houses where they grew up. They have a house and a dog. Three adult children making their own way in the world. Their roots run deep--less like the dandelion and more like those of the maple trees in their back yard. They are sturdy and pragmatic. Utterly and unexpectedly beautiful but able to take what nature throws at them. This was one of the occasions in which their rootedness was welcome. They asked me a number of questions about exactly what I want in the next few years, didn't contribute their own opinions, and encouraged many of the decisions I made. They commiserated about low-paying jobs and a poor economy and talked about the small pleasures of their own lives: 30,000 pounds of landscape block converted into a terraced garden; two of their three children at home for dinner; the hot weather finally breaking. Together we sat in the warm twilight and laughed about childhood antics, complained about our baseball team's losing streak, and slapped mosquitoes.

When I returned to Minnesota on Monday, I had no more answers than I had when I left. But those few hours we spent together nourished my own roots, reminded me that sometimes, even plants with shallow roots are tough enough to survive.

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How It Begins

Here you are, twenty-two and waiting for your life to begin. And this is how it begins. You have no money and make stupid decisions with your credit card. You date and have sex and get your heart broken. Maybe break a few yourself. You might meet the person who makes you think that maybe bars and late nights aren't all they're cracked up to be. You might not. You'll pay down student loans and wonder if all that education was really worth it, if maybe you wouldn't be happier making copies and answering phones or fixing motors and wiping grease from your hands. And then you're thirty and perhaps you start to save for a house, hopefully you've started saving for retirement already. You could have a kid or two. Adopt a dog. Stop moving every twelve months. Plant a garden, even if it's just in a window box. You'll fight with your love about money and bills, whether or not to buy that new car. Get a promotion. Lose your job. And then your kids are growing and adolescent and hate you for reasons neither of you can explain. You buy a car, a motorcycle, maybe find an affair. Maybe just wake up at night next to the one you've always loved. Then the kids are gone, the dog has died and your hair is gray. You've stopped working one day, and then the next it's grandkids, and sleepless nights for no reason and suddenly jaw pain and a tingling in your left arm. But that's all still far away, almost light-years in fact. For now, it's just about a job and bills and sex and moving. Waiting for your life to begin.

Color

Our theme for this week: Color

My mother loves to garden. Her father loved to garden. When I went back to her house over the weekend the very first thing my mother did was take me on a garden tour.

I was glad to take it. I'm most often home during the winter months, when her gardens are covered by several inches of snow. The front, side, and very back gardens are exclusively for flowers. The garden that my father has recently redone for her is exclusively vegetables that she and Dad freeze for the winter.

My mother's gardens are lovely, striking, unique things. I love them because they are beautiful, certainly, but even more because they are extensions of my mother's personality. Anyone who looks at them can see her love of things beautiful and natural, her appreciation for things both tame and wild. Her practicality and thriftiness are apparent in her love for helping things grow.

An ode (of sorts) to my mother and her gardens.

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My Mother's Garden

My mother's garden is a riot of color. Pink roses and white poppies. Orange tiger lilies growing next to green chili peppers and purple beets. The pink-cream flowers of late pea blossoms wind their way around the grey stone fountain. A yellow goldfinch splashes in the rusty water. My mother, a white bandanna over her wild brown hair, pulls up weeds and talks a blue streak. I worry about her hands, sliced open by weeds and stuck by brambles. Oh, Kelly she says, wiping them on her khaki shorts. We all bleed red.

For My Mother

This week's theme: Gratitude.

Did you know that phrase "spittin' image" means more than doppleganger?

Spittin' image is a good Southern phrase and it means that you are the "spirit and image" of another person. It means that you not only look like the other person, but you also embody a part of the other person's personality.

I am the spittin' image of my mother.

For a long time, I wasn't proud of the fact that we resembled one another so closely. I hated my curly hair and short legs; that I loved bluegrass and country music; that I am eternally disposed to keep on the sunny side (about ten years ago I equated sadness with depth); that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Our relationship from the time I was eleven until the time I was seventeen was awful, and we both admit it. I was a terrible teenager--smart, but incapable of applying myself to subjects I didn't like (everything aside from English classes); grouchy; uncomfortable in my own skin; and obstinate as all get-out. To this day, I'm still not sure how she found the grace to put up with my many and varied mood swings, or how she managed to know that drawing a flower in marker on my lunch bag every morning was something that would get through to me and remind me that she loved me.

The older I get, the more grateful I am that I so closely resemble Mother Prosen. We have the same sense of humor; the same choices in food and smells; the same habits for dealing with stress; the same taste in old movies; the same laugh. Moreover, I am grateful that I still get to have my mother in my life as a close friend.

I often worry that I don't tell her how important she is, or how grateful I am that she didn't give up on me when it would have been so easy.

I love you, Mom.

***

For My Mother

My mother brings me warm ginger ale,
takes another blanket from the cedar chest,
heats me chicken soup and adds saltines.
She gets The Philadelphia Story from Blockbuster
and checks to make sure my cell phone is charged.
"Call me at work if you need anything." she says,
kissing my forehead goodbye.
I am twenty-four. Fiercely independent
and living hundreds of miles away for years now.
Today, however, I am on her couch,
sick with the flu during my yearly visit,
and so weak I can't stand without her arm.
Drifting to sleep, I worry about the day
when I will do this for her. The blankets and broth.
The Philadelphia Story and ginger ale.
The pharmacy visits and late night temperature readings.
That day will come too soon. For now,
I'm happy to sleep on her couch. Eat her soup.
Let her love me.