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Literary Mama

| February 2007

The Things She Gave Me, The Things I Took Away

By Ericka Lutz

  1. Her desk.
  2. Two straight-back antique oak chairs with wicker backs and navy velvet seats.
  3. Three cherry wood bookcases — two narrow, one wide.
  4. One round glass table with bent chrome legs — available free to anybody who hauls it away (contact me at ericka@literarymama.com).
  5. One Sealy-Simmons queen-sized mattress set, slept in for eight years by her and Grandpa Jack, slept in for fifteen years by me and Bill, taken away by European Sleepworks when they delivered our new bed.
  6. One monoprint, flowers in a glass jar, dedicated “To Tillie, with love,” rescued from a pile of posters in her apartment and framed, in the 1980’s, when I worked as a picture framer.
  7. Bookends made from sliced geodes, rough on the curved end, smooth and crystalline on the inside.
  8. A pair of white doves from the family Christmas tree.
  9. Milkweed pods, a dried baby starfish, polished rocks saved since childhood in a cigar box.
  10. A letter to me, age 6, explaining why she’d left me to go to MacDowell Colony to write.
  11. Cards, letters, old postcards, photographs.
  12. My first journal. My second and third journals.
  13. A love of lists.
  14. The tendency to overuse — and I mean overuse — em dashes.
  15. A love of things orange — nasturtiums and navel oranges.
  16. The memory of Madame Rochas perfume, and hiding in her bathroom during family parties feeling the lush dark blue terry towels and bathmat, staring at myself in her three-way mirror, wondering who I looked like, wondering what I looked like.
  17. The knowledge of how to wash your face, steaming open the pores every night with a washcloth — and how to take care of your hands, with lotion and gently pushing back the cuticle with an orange stick. Not that I do it. But the knowledge.
  18. Time on her lap.
  19. Tillie Toys: kaleidoscopes, bubbles, toys that glitter, toys that spin.
  20. A heart-shaped orange lacquer box from Kashmir containing a few smooth stones and a basket carved from a peach pit.
  21. A round Russian lacquer box lined with a photo of Tillie and Jack and a strip of paper inscribed: “With love, pride, esteem — joy in you — always our dearest Ericka. May the best be. Keep On!”
  22. A recipe for oxtails.
  23. A recipe for chicken soup made from chicken feet.
  24. Constellations, empty snail shells, sea palms in the surf, wind in the trees.
  25. Belief in my creativity.
  26. The songs “Nellie Gray” and “Red River Valley.”
  27. The songs “Tumbalalaika” and “The Cossacks Lullaby,” music sounding of Belarus and my grandmother’s mother’s mother, tonalities that wrung sobs from me when I visited Russia in 2002 and heard three musicians singing folk songs in our hotel’s Caviar Bar.
  28. A discomfort with wealth, or even middle-class privilege.
  29. A social conscience. The desire to teach.
  30. Feminism, innate and not-so-innate.
  31. Mad money. For anything I wanted. Folded into a tiny square, snapped in a tiny Japanese change purse, pressed into my palm.
  32. Money for dance lessons. Money for drama lessons. Money towards college. Money towards buying a house.
  33. French dictionaries.
  34. Six weeks of Spanish lessons, with her, when I was 18, because she so wanted me to have another language (and I was so embarrassed by her lousy pronunciation).
  35. An occasional stutter.
  36. Theater jaunts. The Nutcracker. The musical “Hair.” (“Grandma, I’m tired,” I said as I yawned and lay my head on her shoulder during the naked scene, embarrassed that she would think I was looking.)
  37. A pair of earrings, antique gold and opal, my birthstone, for my thirteenth birthday, kept in my Dad’s wooden tool cabinet so I wouldn’t lose them, until I was forty and asked for them back.
  38. A tiny gold locket with her picture in it. I think it’s still in my dad’s tool cabinet.
  39. My grandfather’s wall clock. After he died, she asked if there was one thing I wanted, and I said the clock. But a couple of months later she called and, in an escalating tone, asked for “…that old broken clock back so that XX can have it because she loves it a lot and will take the time and money to make it work,” and I said, “My dad already fixed it, it works really well now, and I love it a lot too, it means a lot to me.” And she said, “Well then, that’s alright, Dear,” in a voice that meant it was not alright, that she didn’t want me to have it, but I kept it anyway, and it’s still on my wall, and it works beautifully, though I don’t always wind it.
  40. My messed up intestinal system. Not the colitis that incapacitated her when my mother was first in college and kept my mom home caring for her; just my IBS: uncomfortable, ugly, humiliating.
  41. My scattered brain, passed through her to my mother, passed through me to my daughter; the brain that has me driving down the freeway, missing my exit, suddenly wondering where I’m going, and why — that brain that had her, several times, years before the dementia, pulling over to the side of the road to check her driver’s license to remember her name.
  42. Our semi-rare B-negative blood type (found in only one person out of 67).
  43. My cheekbones.
  44. The love of reading, the love of books, the smell of books, old and new.
  45. Copies of her books, bought by me, signed by her, because I had none, and made her sit down and do it one day when Annie was a toddler. And her only leather-bound copy of Tell Me A Riddle inscribed to — and saved by me for — Annie when she is grown.
  46. Stubbornness. Regret.
  47. Pride, justified and foolish. Narcissism, high expectations for self and others, fierce self-judgment.
  48. The overarching need to find expression for what bubbles and brews inside.
  49. A flair for the dramatic.
  50. Her ironing board. Her iron.

5 replies on “The Things She Gave Me, The Things I Took Away”

What a funny little box of personal effects, I can almost picture Ericka examining each item quizzically, each touching a different old nerve.

It’s weird to think about what we might leave behind. The precious items given ceremoniously in decorative boxes mixed in with cast-offs and stolen goods. From all I’ve heard Tillie had a powerful will, but there was nothing she could do about the fact that what she left contained her essence.

I hope that someone distills my remainders as lovingly as you have hers.

Ericka, Your list is beautiful, a testament to family ties – the tender, mundane and unpredictable. The magic of moments spent exploring the world together or the comfort of her clock’s rhythm on your wall. There is a Lakota proverb that says something about our life holding seven generations before us and then rippling beyond us for seven generations after…you have captured part of Tillie’s legacy, part of your own, and how your motherline vibrates and shimmers in this world. Thank you for sharing.

How strange that this list reminded me of my grandmother, and yet the 2 women had so little in common. It proves that my college writing teacher was right when he said, “The more specific you can be, the more universal you will be.”

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