New Year's Soup (and one resolution)
I promised my cousin I would blog about the New Year's soup. So, Lia, for you, I just have to say that the soup on New Year's day was phenomenal--maybe the best ever.
Our family is Greek, which means that we eat and sing a lot over the holidays and that all of our celebrations reach into the late night--to leave a home at 11 is considered early. My favorite tradition of all is singing the Greek new year's song--partly because it is something we have been doing on New Year's day for as long as I can remember, partly because it's one of the only true "old-time" traditions we still follow that's stayed the same since I was a kid, and partly because the song itself is so beautiful.
The song starts out simply, praising the beginning of a new month and a new year and the closing of the old. But later, the song becomes a dialogue between the singer and St. Basili, who is the "Santa Claus" of Greece and comes on New Year's Day. The song asks St. Basili to come in, sit, drink, eat, tell us his troubles, and sing with us. This is such a different image than the Santa Clause who comes in the middle of the night and leaves gifts. This is a man we can get to know, one whom we'd like to actually dialogue with. It seems to me to be a reminder about the importance of keeping doors open, of welcoming strangers and newcomers, as Jesus told us to do. It also places the center of the holiday season in imagery that has nothing to do with gifts or consumption, but rather, with relationship.
But what we eat on New Year's Day isn't traditional Greek fare. We eat black eyed pea soup and sour kraut. The story goes that my grandfather, who once owned a grocery in Akron, Ohio at a time when the neighborhood was full of people of all cultures and backgrounds, including recent immigrants from all over Europe and African-Americans, somehow learned of this food from one of the customers as a traditional New Year's food, and our family has been eating it ever since. This is akin to the story of the time my grandmother learned about this crazy dish called "pizza" and tried to make it--only she didn't understand that the dish was supposed to be made on a flat bread and put sauce and melted cheese on a big, square loaf of bread. Or the story of my grandfather learning how to say "welcome" or "good day" in every customer's language.
My childhood was not easy by any means, but I do have a connection to past generations, an understanding of who I am in relation to these generations. I have a model for how things both stay the same, for rootedness, and for change, for being open to new ideas. I have a model for deep relationships based on welcome, even if some of the relationships in actuality were more flawed than the one we sing about each New Year's. S. has none of these things, so participating in the holidays was important for her.
There are traditions, though, that I'd like to do away with. Probably because we didn't have a mother for part of our childhood and lots of people loved us, we were always showered with more gifts than we knew what to do with. I remember even as a kid feeling depressed, thinking, this can't be all there is to Christmas--this can't bring my mother back, and I don't even know what to do with all this stuff. I remember wishing that the women in the family, who were always so busy cooking, wrapping, running around, shopping, etc., would instead spend some time together and with me, really talking, really listening.
There are, of course, a few gifts that I still cherish--the teddy bear my aunt gave me as a kid, some beautiful Pegasus ornaments I've received over the years when one of my aunts sort of assigned this flying horse to me as something I'd collect--before I even understood that Pegasus was the bringer of song to the muses when they were silenced by their father. But, overall, I could have done without the gifts, and with more time together over the holidays. My aunt who raised me is having a hard year financially and wept because she couldn't give enough. This was strange to S., who had more gifts this year than she's ever had before and, later, confessed she felt a little dizzy and overwhelmed by how much she received. I talked to my aunt later, on the phone after returning home, about how little I remember or care about gifts and also about how she'd gone way overboard, again, as usual, and that I wasn't sure why she was upset--but she remembers Christmas mornings of total dizziness, and somehow in her mind they are good memories where in mine they feel chaotic and crazy, and what I cherished was time to sit and talk to people, and, again, the singing.
I tried to work on holiday traditions that weren't totally focused on consumption. We lit advent candles each Sunday of advent and did some readings, sang, talked about what the holiday meant to us. On these Sundays, we also gave each other one gift, so that there was time to focus on each gift. Because we'd be away from home, we had our own pre-Christmas, with a few gifts each but not so many that we'd feel dizzy. We spent a lot of pre-Xmas time preparing for our trip, too, talking about how to handle the stress of being among so many people for two weeks away from home, without her beloved animals.
Overall, especially considering my father was back in the hospital and we were there every day, she handled the trip exceptionally well. There was one bad flashback on New Year's day that resulted in a blow up, but we were able to talk afterwards about the bad memories that the holidays hold for her, how even though we're building new traditions it is hard, so hard, to let go of all of that pain.
We also got away a lot, which was important--we promised each other some time alone each day to reflect and to heal from any wounds. We managed to go to the science center, to see a great film about the Great Lakes, to go on a nighttime holiday "Lantern tour" of a great old-fashioned homestead that I hadn't visited since I was in Girl Scouts, and to spend a little time browsing in shops in a part of Cleveland that I'd loved as a teenager but hadn't seen in years. In the process, she heard bits of stories from my life, and we made new memories. We talked a lot after lying down for the night.
On New Year's Eve, we went to a dance at the church I grew up in. I used to go to this dance every year as a kid with my family, and it was strange to be back. There was literally nothing different about the dance except that the kids I'd gone to Greek and Sunday School with were adults now with their own kids. Even the band had the same name (though the men looked different). There was a lot of repetition of how S. and I came to be together--the shortened version--because I saw many people I literally hadn't seen in 20 years.
S. was nervous at first, but she ended up loving it. She tried to Greek dance. She bravely introduced herself to some kids her age and danced with them when the band played American music (as we used to call anything not Greek). All in all, the dance was fun, but also odd--I realized how different S's life is from mine, and how some of what I had has been lost, of course, because of my decision to leave the church and to move so far away. But I also realized what I'd learned from stories of my grandparents--that is it possible to be rooted and to welcome change.
We got to stay at my 84-year-old aunt's house, and it was wonderful. She was gone for the beginning of our trip, but at the end, we were able to share stories and photos, narrated by the person who knows our family history best, the elder. S. loves her and said, "Everybody else seems a little crazy and in a hurry, but Thea K is calm and takes the time to talk to me and look me in the eye." I felt my eyes well up with tears, because I remembered how, on the day my mother died, I arrived at the house after church and got the news, and after some weeping, after lying on my bed with my little cousin, then 4 (the one who insisted I blog about the soup), I went downstairs and Thea K knelt beside me and talked to me, really listening to what I had to say. I told her I wished my mom had died when I was a baby so I wouldn't feel the pain I was feeling. She said, "You will be happy later that you have all the memories you have."
She is so right. At one point, S. said, "I'll bet if Yiayia E were alive, she would get on my eye level and talk to me the way Thea K does, and I would feel like she was paying attention." That is true, too. I don't remember my mother ever seeming manic or distracted. She had a deep calm about her, a way of being totally present in whatever she was doing. Sometimes what she was doing had nothing to do with me--singing old songs, washing dishes, picking veggies in the garden--but she always seemed calm and present, and yet she got things done very efficiently. I have unfortunately inherited some of the manic busyness of the rest of the family--though of course this is also just a part of our culture, the idea being that the person who is most over-committed and manic is somehow the most productive, which of course is rarely true.
Of course, I was 13 when she died, and I know my mother had moments when she felt out of control because everyone on earth does. She was better at keeping those moments out of sight than I am with S., but she did let me, on a few occasions, see her anger and sadness, her deep sense of the world's injustice. Those are memories for another blog, but they are indelible and have shaped me profoundly.
Still, this brings me to something I wanted to do, which was to make a New Year's resolution public on this blog, so this is it: I want to be more present in each moment, to feel what I'm feeling and know what I'm thinking and know what I need to do, whether that is noticing how the light is hitting the roof of my garage or knowing what to say to someone who is hurting or simply getting the next chore done mindfully and without irritation. I want to work toward a lot of things, and they are in my mind and in my journal but I don't think they need to be here, because in a way, I feel like this resolution would take care of all of them.
My daughter, over the holidays, came up with a dream: to open a place called Healing Ranch where abused animals and people could come to live for awhile to find hope. I can't remember how we thought of it, but somewhere in our conversations, it just began to come together as the clear goal for which we should be striving. As crazy as this sounds, I've begun to dream this place, to really believe it can happen--never mind that I'm in debt, that the small home we have is the biggest home I can afford, etc. Somehow I really believe that someday this place will happen in some form, and that everything we're doing now--learning about horses, learning about how to be responsible to each other and to others, learning how to support each other in our mundane work, learning how to be in relationship with others as a mother/daughter duo, helping my father during this difficult time when his age is leading to more than single episodes but to an acceptance that life will slow down, and eventually, end for him--is preparation for that far-away goal. It is, at the very least, motivation to work on being present--because I feel like being present is the antidote to everything from over-consumption to procrastination to depression. It also seems the key to finding a balance between rootedness and change. Maybe that's too simple, but for now, it seems right.
Our family is Greek, which means that we eat and sing a lot over the holidays and that all of our celebrations reach into the late night--to leave a home at 11 is considered early. My favorite tradition of all is singing the Greek new year's song--partly because it is something we have been doing on New Year's day for as long as I can remember, partly because it's one of the only true "old-time" traditions we still follow that's stayed the same since I was a kid, and partly because the song itself is so beautiful.
The song starts out simply, praising the beginning of a new month and a new year and the closing of the old. But later, the song becomes a dialogue between the singer and St. Basili, who is the "Santa Claus" of Greece and comes on New Year's Day. The song asks St. Basili to come in, sit, drink, eat, tell us his troubles, and sing with us. This is such a different image than the Santa Clause who comes in the middle of the night and leaves gifts. This is a man we can get to know, one whom we'd like to actually dialogue with. It seems to me to be a reminder about the importance of keeping doors open, of welcoming strangers and newcomers, as Jesus told us to do. It also places the center of the holiday season in imagery that has nothing to do with gifts or consumption, but rather, with relationship.
But what we eat on New Year's Day isn't traditional Greek fare. We eat black eyed pea soup and sour kraut. The story goes that my grandfather, who once owned a grocery in Akron, Ohio at a time when the neighborhood was full of people of all cultures and backgrounds, including recent immigrants from all over Europe and African-Americans, somehow learned of this food from one of the customers as a traditional New Year's food, and our family has been eating it ever since. This is akin to the story of the time my grandmother learned about this crazy dish called "pizza" and tried to make it--only she didn't understand that the dish was supposed to be made on a flat bread and put sauce and melted cheese on a big, square loaf of bread. Or the story of my grandfather learning how to say "welcome" or "good day" in every customer's language.
My childhood was not easy by any means, but I do have a connection to past generations, an understanding of who I am in relation to these generations. I have a model for how things both stay the same, for rootedness, and for change, for being open to new ideas. I have a model for deep relationships based on welcome, even if some of the relationships in actuality were more flawed than the one we sing about each New Year's. S. has none of these things, so participating in the holidays was important for her.
There are traditions, though, that I'd like to do away with. Probably because we didn't have a mother for part of our childhood and lots of people loved us, we were always showered with more gifts than we knew what to do with. I remember even as a kid feeling depressed, thinking, this can't be all there is to Christmas--this can't bring my mother back, and I don't even know what to do with all this stuff. I remember wishing that the women in the family, who were always so busy cooking, wrapping, running around, shopping, etc., would instead spend some time together and with me, really talking, really listening.
There are, of course, a few gifts that I still cherish--the teddy bear my aunt gave me as a kid, some beautiful Pegasus ornaments I've received over the years when one of my aunts sort of assigned this flying horse to me as something I'd collect--before I even understood that Pegasus was the bringer of song to the muses when they were silenced by their father. But, overall, I could have done without the gifts, and with more time together over the holidays. My aunt who raised me is having a hard year financially and wept because she couldn't give enough. This was strange to S., who had more gifts this year than she's ever had before and, later, confessed she felt a little dizzy and overwhelmed by how much she received. I talked to my aunt later, on the phone after returning home, about how little I remember or care about gifts and also about how she'd gone way overboard, again, as usual, and that I wasn't sure why she was upset--but she remembers Christmas mornings of total dizziness, and somehow in her mind they are good memories where in mine they feel chaotic and crazy, and what I cherished was time to sit and talk to people, and, again, the singing.
I tried to work on holiday traditions that weren't totally focused on consumption. We lit advent candles each Sunday of advent and did some readings, sang, talked about what the holiday meant to us. On these Sundays, we also gave each other one gift, so that there was time to focus on each gift. Because we'd be away from home, we had our own pre-Christmas, with a few gifts each but not so many that we'd feel dizzy. We spent a lot of pre-Xmas time preparing for our trip, too, talking about how to handle the stress of being among so many people for two weeks away from home, without her beloved animals.
Overall, especially considering my father was back in the hospital and we were there every day, she handled the trip exceptionally well. There was one bad flashback on New Year's day that resulted in a blow up, but we were able to talk afterwards about the bad memories that the holidays hold for her, how even though we're building new traditions it is hard, so hard, to let go of all of that pain.
We also got away a lot, which was important--we promised each other some time alone each day to reflect and to heal from any wounds. We managed to go to the science center, to see a great film about the Great Lakes, to go on a nighttime holiday "Lantern tour" of a great old-fashioned homestead that I hadn't visited since I was in Girl Scouts, and to spend a little time browsing in shops in a part of Cleveland that I'd loved as a teenager but hadn't seen in years. In the process, she heard bits of stories from my life, and we made new memories. We talked a lot after lying down for the night.
On New Year's Eve, we went to a dance at the church I grew up in. I used to go to this dance every year as a kid with my family, and it was strange to be back. There was literally nothing different about the dance except that the kids I'd gone to Greek and Sunday School with were adults now with their own kids. Even the band had the same name (though the men looked different). There was a lot of repetition of how S. and I came to be together--the shortened version--because I saw many people I literally hadn't seen in 20 years.
S. was nervous at first, but she ended up loving it. She tried to Greek dance. She bravely introduced herself to some kids her age and danced with them when the band played American music (as we used to call anything not Greek). All in all, the dance was fun, but also odd--I realized how different S's life is from mine, and how some of what I had has been lost, of course, because of my decision to leave the church and to move so far away. But I also realized what I'd learned from stories of my grandparents--that is it possible to be rooted and to welcome change.
We got to stay at my 84-year-old aunt's house, and it was wonderful. She was gone for the beginning of our trip, but at the end, we were able to share stories and photos, narrated by the person who knows our family history best, the elder. S. loves her and said, "Everybody else seems a little crazy and in a hurry, but Thea K is calm and takes the time to talk to me and look me in the eye." I felt my eyes well up with tears, because I remembered how, on the day my mother died, I arrived at the house after church and got the news, and after some weeping, after lying on my bed with my little cousin, then 4 (the one who insisted I blog about the soup), I went downstairs and Thea K knelt beside me and talked to me, really listening to what I had to say. I told her I wished my mom had died when I was a baby so I wouldn't feel the pain I was feeling. She said, "You will be happy later that you have all the memories you have."
She is so right. At one point, S. said, "I'll bet if Yiayia E were alive, she would get on my eye level and talk to me the way Thea K does, and I would feel like she was paying attention." That is true, too. I don't remember my mother ever seeming manic or distracted. She had a deep calm about her, a way of being totally present in whatever she was doing. Sometimes what she was doing had nothing to do with me--singing old songs, washing dishes, picking veggies in the garden--but she always seemed calm and present, and yet she got things done very efficiently. I have unfortunately inherited some of the manic busyness of the rest of the family--though of course this is also just a part of our culture, the idea being that the person who is most over-committed and manic is somehow the most productive, which of course is rarely true.
Of course, I was 13 when she died, and I know my mother had moments when she felt out of control because everyone on earth does. She was better at keeping those moments out of sight than I am with S., but she did let me, on a few occasions, see her anger and sadness, her deep sense of the world's injustice. Those are memories for another blog, but they are indelible and have shaped me profoundly.
Still, this brings me to something I wanted to do, which was to make a New Year's resolution public on this blog, so this is it: I want to be more present in each moment, to feel what I'm feeling and know what I'm thinking and know what I need to do, whether that is noticing how the light is hitting the roof of my garage or knowing what to say to someone who is hurting or simply getting the next chore done mindfully and without irritation. I want to work toward a lot of things, and they are in my mind and in my journal but I don't think they need to be here, because in a way, I feel like this resolution would take care of all of them.
My daughter, over the holidays, came up with a dream: to open a place called Healing Ranch where abused animals and people could come to live for awhile to find hope. I can't remember how we thought of it, but somewhere in our conversations, it just began to come together as the clear goal for which we should be striving. As crazy as this sounds, I've begun to dream this place, to really believe it can happen--never mind that I'm in debt, that the small home we have is the biggest home I can afford, etc. Somehow I really believe that someday this place will happen in some form, and that everything we're doing now--learning about horses, learning about how to be responsible to each other and to others, learning how to support each other in our mundane work, learning how to be in relationship with others as a mother/daughter duo, helping my father during this difficult time when his age is leading to more than single episodes but to an acceptance that life will slow down, and eventually, end for him--is preparation for that far-away goal. It is, at the very least, motivation to work on being present--because I feel like being present is the antidote to everything from over-consumption to procrastination to depression. It also seems the key to finding a balance between rootedness and change. Maybe that's too simple, but for now, it seems right.
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