This photo represents what I awakened to last Sunday as I began my morning shift with "V". An all too accurate depiction of a truly dreary day.
I almost hated to wake her up. We had stayed up a little later than usual laughing loudly at already seen repeats of "Everybody Loves Raymond" on TV Land. (By the way, I am now one hundred percent positive that "V" and I can relate to the crazy characters in that sit-com far too easily!).
Our other viewing choice was a movie called "The Women" on Turner Classic Movies. About five minutes into the old film, during which time we witnessed four famous female actresses from Hollywood's heyday portraying chatty, catty, wealthy women with nothing better to do than gossip about each other, "V" grunted and asked if she could change the channel. "I'm tired of these women!" she declared. "Where are the men?"
After an hour and a half of raucously relating to Raymond's meddling, middle-class, Mother-rules-the-roost, suburban New York City family, "V" said, "It's always better to end the day with a smile."
"I couldn't agree more," I told her as we began our by now familiar bedtime routine.
But it was extremely difficult to smile as I looked out the window the following morning only to see a thick, dense, dark gray mist hovering in the air, completely hiding the late Autumn landscape. No look at what was left of the field of beans today. No view of anything! Just the sickening sound of gunshots shattering the peaceful valley, a painful reminder that deer hunting season had officially begun the day before.
Thinking back, that sound is about the only thing that "V" and I didn't agree upon as we spent a truly delightful hour enjoying our breakfast. It turns out their her family is full of deer hunters, which makes sense given the geography of where they live.
"When my husband and I first moved here from the Bronx in 1947," she told me, "Everyone we knew thought we were in the Boondocks!"
Having grown up in the Northeastern suburbs of New York City, where my family had settled after leaving the Bronx, I always considered myself fairly familiar with the "boondocks" of the Hudson Valley. But this quaint and isolated Northwestern town where "V" resides definitely puts a capital "B" in the phrase! It still seems isolated, and I could only imagine what people thought of it seventy some-odd years ago!
"V" continued, "My husband and the boys quickly became hunters, and one of my sons, "R", still is." Having heard that, I made a mental note to not eat any of the meet in the refrigerator until I knew for certain exactly what it was. "V"s son tends to bring over dinner once a week, and although I've heard that venison is quite tasty, I am still not adventuresome enough to indulge in that particular delicacy.
The conversational door now wide open, "V" began to tell me about a dog they had when her boys were younger. Although the dog desperately wanted to join the men of the family, he was too much of a distraction while they were on their hunting trips, and it was "V"s job to keep him safely inside.
"One time," "V" told me with a far-away smile, "I spent the entire day holding the dog down on the bed while the boys were out hunting!" I got the impression from the misty expression on her face that she had not minded the role of snuggling with the dog one tiny bit!
Speaking of mist, I pointed to the dreariness outside, as though "V" hadn't yet noticed the weather conditions. She turned her head to look, but said nothing. I imagined she had spent many a day like this during her lifetime, and since she had nowhere to go other than the inside of her home today, the gloominess that hung in the air had no impact on her whatsoever.
"V" confirmed my suspicions by shrugging her shoulders and simply stating, "Oh well. There's nothing we can do about the weather, so why worry about it."
Wow! It was like someone slapped me in the face and woke me from some kind of terrible trance! I had already spent the previous hour worrying about how I was going to drive home over the mountain roads through this thick, dense, dark, gray mist! What a complete waste of time!
I suddenly, and thankfully, realized that I was missing out on something extremely valuable. The present moment with "V"! She was full of cheer this morning, happily talking about only a few of the many experiences she had lived through during the last ninety-five years. "V" is alive, as are her warm and wonderful memories, and that is something to be celebrated, no matter what Mother Nature has planned for the rest of the day!
In fact, breakfast with "V" this past Sunday morning turned out to be more enjoyable than any we've had thus far in our relationship.
"Maybe it's because she had ended her day with a smile," I mused, giving into a smile myself.
I learned sooooo many things from "V" that morning, some that I imagined my own family in the Bronx had experienced, only I never bothered to take the time to ask them about it. Especially my Grandmother, Rose. She would have known everything! It dawned on me that not only did "V" remind me very much of my Grandma, but Raymond's ever-meddling, but deep-down-inside always loving mother also reminded me of her!
As we draw nearer and nearer to the holiday season (the multitude of television advertisements, the only downside of the Raymond repeats, being a constant reminder of this!), it's no wonder that "V"'s mind drifted back to her childhood. My spirits brightened as she joyfully described the Halloween and Thanksgiving traditions that she grew up with in the 1920's and 1930's.
"What do you mean you did not trick or treat on Halloween?" I asked in sheer astonishment, imagining the mountains of candy that could be had living in an urban apartment setting.
"We did not," "V" explained to me, matter-of-factly. I mentioned the giant bowl of candy sitting on her kitchen counter, which was leftover from a rainy Halloween several weeks ago, and "V" replied, "We only started trick-or-treating when we moved here and the kids were small."
"What did you do?" I asked, still trying to overcome my astonishment.
"Well..." she began slowly. "We all wore our clothes inside out."
My expression must have clearly conveyed my utter confusion, even though the word "Huh?" never came out of my mouth, so "V" continued her explanation of the Halloween tradition.
"All the kids wore their clothes inside out because they knew they were going to be hit by other kids with stockings full of flour or chalk!"
How odd, I thought. And rather violent (but then again, I'm a bit over-sensitive, as evidenced by my reaction to the start of deer hunting season earlier in the blog.)
"Ohhhhhh," I said, a visual picture finally forming in my foggy head. "If you all hit each other with stockings full of flour or chalk, you'd really look like ghosts!" I was a little too proud of myself as I declared this last statement, as if I'd just figured out the meaning of life.
"I guess so," "V" responded, as if she hadn't really thought about the ghostly part of the sacking. "We were all kids and just having fun," her smile widened at the memory of events she enjoyed eight decades ago.
Suddenly, "V" unexpectedly added, "Thanksgiving was when we went around asking for things!"
"What?" I asked, completely befuddled.
"Anything for Thanksgiving? That's what all us kids would go around asking," "V" told me, still smiling, but this time I think more because of my obvious befuddlement than anything else.
"Anything for Thanksgiving?" she repeated, adding that "people would usually give us pennies, but sometimes we'd find a nickel!"
"Amazing!" I responded. "I remember finding pennies, and sometimes nickels, in my trick-or-treating bag on Halloween, too, and I would be thrilled with the money. My son was, too, and that was only ten years ago!" I marveled to myself that despite the eighty year time difference, the thrill of money to a child was always a wonder to behold!
"We were thrilled," "V" continued. "It was right around the Great Depression," she reminded me, which made me realize just how valuable those coins were at that time.
"After that," "V" summed up, "We'd all go home to our families and have a big dinner."
"You didn't shoot your own turkeys in the Bronx, I'll bet?" I said with a smirk, and she laughed at my clever little hunting reference.
"Nooooo," she added, "But we could get fresh killed ones from the butcher down the street."
The butcher down the street... Now there was an image that I was rather unfamiliar with. During my formative years, the video store down the street (which, of course, you needed a car to get to way out in the suburbs) was a much more popular destination.
I thought of my Grandmother again. I could vaguely remember going with her and my Great-Grandmother to the closest butcher store when I was a little girl... In her big Cadillac, the one whose steering wheel she could barely see over because she was so short! I laughed to myself. I was beginning to remember a lot of things that had been tucked away in my brain for quite some time.
"V" and I continued to chat happily for a while over our coffee, until the young woman who was to take the next shift arrived. Upon seeing "V" and I casually conversing at the dining room table, overlooking the thick, dense, dark mist that completely obscured the field of beans, she cheerily sat down and joined us. "That's odd," I thought. She didn't even mention the weather, which she had just driven through in order to get to "V"s house.
As I got ready to leave yet another enjoyable weekend shift with my new friend "V", I stopped worrying about the dreariness outside, and was instead filled with a feeling of warmth and companionship. And cheer. Definitely cheer.
And you know what? The drive home over the foggy mountain roads wasn't that difficult at all. All I had to do was slow down. Stay in the present. There was nothing I could do about the weather, anyway, so why worry about it?
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