A Tasting Menu of Little Loves

Welcome to another Love Thursday!  I have to confess:  I am overwhelmed with love right now.  I have it, see it, feel it everywhere.  I am too distracted by my own embarrassment of riches to focus on one thing, one truth large or small.  So instead, I shall offer you some small observations, some little tastes of little things that happen because of love in my life.

Appetizer: Fresh and Juicy Palm Fruit

I am a grandmother.  Sort of.  A grandgardener?  A grandpotter?  I am not sure.  All I know is that I bought some kind of palm plant at Whole Foods for four dollars two years ago, and now it is bearing fruit.

I don't know what the fruiting means for the future of this plant.  I don't even know what species it is, and it came with no tag.  Still, I see these fruits as gifts, as proof of this plant's intent to stay with me and have a future at all.

I tend this plant rather carefully, but don't really know what I am doing.  I did re-pot it immediately upon bringing it home, which has allowed it (really they, a cluster of four or five individual plants that were all shoved together once upon a time in a little four-inch pot) to spread and flourish into something that looks the way trees and other plants often look to me, like a complex of grateful hands reaching out to caress light.

Now, why on earth would I include this little plant in a discussion of love?  It's a plant, ornamental vegetation.  But you know, I do think I love it.  I talk to it.  I feed, water, and pet it.  I explain to it my strategy for its future, such as it is, even openly admitting that I have no idea whether what I plan will be good for it or not, that it will have to tell me what it likes by how it responds, that I hope I don't hurt it.  I apologize for failing it, for not watering it on time or for accidentally watering it too much.  I do not know if it understands my speech.  I do not know if it fears me.  I don't know if it loves me back.

Sitting across from it one day, noticing the contrast between its lushness and the stark bareness of the native trees outside bracing themselves against cutting winds on a particularly frigid day, and then noticing with joy the indoor palm's little branches of bright yellow fruit, I felt a version of what I have felt for every life which has ever fallen into my care.  I felt protective, and grateful that this life seemed to be accepting my only semi-competent protection enough to seem to flourish.  I felt love, a big fat rush of love.  A lot of that is bound up in hope, even though I have loved lives that were dying, too.  It's not the same kind of love I feel for my true love, nor is it the same kind of devouring love I feel for ripe fruit.  It's smaller, lighter, simpler.  But it's real.  It's really love.

Call it an aperitif.

Entrée, Savory Balanced with Sweet:  The Kindness Urge

During my morning surf, I was delighted with an entry on Lymphopo's blog in which she details how suddenly, now that she's done with chemo and her hair is growing back as tiny fuzz she bleached blonde on a whim, strangers in the grocery store have begun greeting her spontaneously and inquiring after her health.  Speculating about why that might be, I was taken back to my job at Whole Foods.

I believe I have written of this elsewhere before, but one of the surprising benefits for me of working in a grocery store was the opportunity to offer kindness to strangers and not have my offers reflexively rebuffed.  New England is a foreign country to me, still, even after living here nearly 12 years.  There is a culture of distrustful reticence here which is like a wall for someone like me, a cold, isolating wall.  Where I come from out west, people aren't better people, and they aren't more sincere or reliable in the long run, but we have a friendlier, more open way of interacting.  Strangers talk to each other on the street, saying "hello" and smiling at each other simply because they are sharing space for a moment in time, and no normal person feels threatened by this unless a threat is overtly stated, or unless someone in the conversation has specific prejudices which might impair his or her personal friendliness quotient. 

I used to amuse myself while commuting to Boston by train by complimenting strangers on their outfits or their shoes.  Unless the person receiving the compliment was from somewhere else, s/he would invariably get very nervous at being spoken to, sometimes even moving away from me.  This was long before I had a fake leg.  I was 32, plump, blonde, moderately dressed for generic, middle-class office work, somewhat pretty, and fairly nonthreatening in every aspect, except tall for this region of the country, and wide for those little molded plastic train seats.  The only terrifying thing about me was that I was speaking. 

The only people I made friends with at work were people who were not from New England, either.  It took five years living in the same place for me to get my first trick-or-treaters on Hallowe'en.  We rarely spoke to our closest neighbors of nearly ten years, even though we experienced their goodwill and offered them our own, and more.   We barely know the names of the people who live downstairs from us now even though I leave baked goods in their mailbox.

When I went to work at Whole Foods, a funny thing happened.  Suddenly, behind my cash register, and behind the protective rules of commerce, I could talk to strangers.  I could talk to them about anything.  I met their children.  I complimented their clothes.  I gave them advice on how to treat minor medical conditions, what foods to eat to avoid certain reactions, where to buy things, sometimes very personal things, we didn't carry, where to find things we did carry for less money or better quality.  I commiserated with them over their struggles to raise autistic children, in their grief for deceased spouses, in their reactions to mosquito bites, and yes, in their struggles to survive cancer.

Suddenly, I had the gift I'd been craving, the true soul food that had been missing from my diet for so many years.  I suddenly was permitted to offer kindness to strangers again.  It was like being taken out from under a rock.

I learned some things.  I learned that there are kindnesses we can only offer each other when they are requested, such as talking about illness.  I learned this partly through my own journey, experiencing the bubble bursting that happens when people come up and start talking about grim things I wasn't even thinking about because I was too busy getting on with my life.  But I was overflowing with all this backed up good will.  I had so much I wanted to give.  I was spilling over with unclaimed, nay, refused gifts of years gone by.

So sometimes I would have a female customer with no hair, far, far less common than a male customer with no hair, and maybe she had that grey transparency to her skin people in chemo have, and maybe she didn't.  Maybe she wore a kerchief, because she was okay with the baldness, or a wig, because she felt she had to hide it.  And I would never know the truth of this person's life unless she chose to volunteer it.  But I had all this -- yes -- love, and this newly sprung hole in the wall of reticence through which it all just wanted to leak over everyone.  Yet there was nothing I could do except smile.

Sometimes I would think I knew the truth, and I would smile extra big.  And sometimes I would ask people how they were in a voice that I tried to make thick with extra meaning, like some kind of metaphorical secret handshake.  And sometimes they would beam back at me or smile sadly back at me in ways that hinted "handshake received and returned."  And sometimes they wouldn't.

No matter what, I always had to try.  I had to try to connect.  I wanted to tell everyone life can be good even when you're sick; I know; I live this.  I wanted to tell everyone that I knew their pain, even if I didn't know their pain, not specifically, just my own, and just that they suffered, and just that I knew and felt it with them a little bit, and that I hoped that made their burden lighter, just a little bit.  And most of the time, even with the wall pierced, I still couldn't, not deeply.  But sometimes, sometimes shallowly and sometimes very deeply indeed, I could.  And that was the best thing that ever happened to me at Whole Foods.  And it happened over and over again, in different flavors, like a fugue.  And it has bled out into the rest of my life.

Working in a grocery store, I got to offer strangers kindness openly, yeah, in New England and everything.  They became not strangers anymore.  They offer me kindness still whenever I meet them, in their own stores, on the streets of my community.

And I ignore the wall.  I walk down streets of my neighborhood and I smile at everyone, and I speak to them about the greatness of the day, and sometimes they respond, and sometimes they reject my warmth.  But I no longer care.  I have seen through the wall, and it was never my wall, anyway.

Loving kindness:  if I in all my crankiness can't live without it, who can?  Without being able to give it, I starve from my deepest inside places and shrink.  Strewing it liberally, even if sometimes misguidedly, I am hungry and full at the same time, all the time, and I grow.

Dessert, Overwhelmingly Sweet With Sharp Notes:  Holiday Leftovers

I don't really like getting presents.   I really hate getting presents that people only give me because they think they must.  For example, I hate valentines.  However, once I received one that I absolutely adored.

For me to like a present, it has to be something that shows that the person who gave it to me was actually thinking about me when he bought or made it.  Every year, for years, I ranted to my true love about Valentine's Day, about what a stupid, painful holiday it is, how it was manufactured as a commercial event to generate sales in a slow economic season and at the same time has ever since managed to make at least half the denizens of the Valentine's Day-celebrating world feel bad about themselves, one way or another.  (My true love is kind of sick of this rant, among many others, but he stays with me, in spite of the ranting, because he somehow loves me anyway.  Go figure.)  When I went to work at Whole Foods, I reported with ridicule the number of poor, pathetic, well-heeled, suburban men for whom I felt little sympathy, very little loving kindness, rushing at the last minute to get their obligatory valentine bouquets -- from the grocery store.  I absolutely forbade my love to ever buy me a gift for Valentine's Day.

My love is, or frequently wants to be, a romantic.  He wants to buy me presents.  He wants me to love the presents and be grateful.  I fail him because I only do under certain conditions, and they are complex, difficult to keep straight, and not usually what conventionally would be considered romantic conditions.  I love, for example, that he spent way too much of the big fat bonus he got for being an innovative genius at work buying me a new computer and all the trimmings.  I am incredibly grateful for that, even though it was not spontaneous nor was it for any holiday.  I will be incredibly grateful if he doesn't buy me a birthday present later this month.  I was incredibly grateful that we both ignored Valentine's Day this year.

Up to this point, although my problem with presents has been difficult for him and even caused fights and hurt feelings, he's done pretty well, ignoring the right holidays the right years, celebrating them in years when I have announced that I felt like celebrating them, giving me nothing when I begged him to give me nothing, giving me things I liked when I've announced that I wanted to exchange presents and have feasts, after all, for no good reason, just because I just felt like it.  The best thing he ever did along these lines was the year we ignored Valentine's Day, per my usual rant, but he surprised me the day after with a box of very expensive, routinely overpriced chocolates -- which he had purchased half off at the Harvard Coop, just on an impulse.

I hate Valentine's Day.  I hate the commercially driven artificiality of it all.  I hate the stress when it's supposed to be about celebrating love, and the obligations, and the expectations, and even the freakin' commercials for mass-produced jewelry.  But I love chocolate.  And I love getting yummy things without having to pay mark-up for branding or stupid holiday tie-ins.  And my true love figured all that out, and we feasted merrily on half-off chocolate together, chocolate I knew he only bought because he was thinking of me, in detail, with all my odd, prickly particularities.

Nowadays my own tradition every year is to check out the day-old Valentine's chocolate at local stores.   It's not just about the chocolate; it's about the boxes.  This is the one I bought last year. 

It contained Nirvana chocolates, which I don't particularly like; I find them palate-numbingly ordinary.  This particular box when filled with its original contents was overpriced in all its satin-trimmed velvet glory because the box itself was made in China probably for pennies even though the boring, sickeningly sweet confections inside were Belgian.  I bought it at Whole Foods for half its original holiday marketing gimmick price, plus I saved another 20% because of the employee discount.  And now I have a sweet little place to put my pins and needles, and thread.

This is what I bought half-off this year, at CVS:

Satiny.  Poofy.  Shiny.   Made in China (the box).  Only slightly overpriced after being marked down by half just because one very specific day had passed on the Western calendar, not a freshness date, just a silly marketing date.

The chocolates inside (made in Ohio from ingredients of unknown origin) were pretty tasty, too.

Every year I do this now.  I never used to do this.  Every year since my true love bought me half-off Valentine's Day candy the day after Valentine's Day because he knew I'd love it, specifically because he'd gotten it for half-off, specifically because I love chocolate and hate Valentine's Day, which he only knew because he was listening when I was ranting, and which he thought about because he was thinking of me even though I wasn't with him at the moment and he didn't have to, every year since I have bought myself a present just to commemorate that present.  It's my own little tradition.  It's not obligatory.  It makes me happy, though, and it gives me pretty, useful boxes.

It may seem strange to you that I would tell you about this more than two weeks after Valentine's Day.  On the other hand, a lot of this post probably seems strange to you, maybe a little crazy, maybe even unintelligible.  But if you're still reading, well, it obviously isn't bothering you too much. 

I meant to post the valentine bit sooner.  I was busy, though, and my computer was very old, still running Windows '98 and falling apart.  The reason this affected anything is that it meant I couldn't pop a USB hub on it and upload my own photos from my little cast-off digital camera that I fished out of my true love's trash and nursed back to health.  I had to wait until my true love had time to do it on his computer, but he's busy, working a full-time, high-level job while also attending Harvard Extension at night, and tired. 

Okay, so that explains why I didn't write about this two weeks ago.  But why now?  Well, didn't I mention that my true love, not for Valentine's Day or my upcoming birthday or anything, just because he knew I needed one in order to do my silly little projects like pick away at a novel I mean to write or post about love on Love Thursday with pictures, spent a whopping portion of his big fat merit-based bonus buying me a new computer with all the trimmings, just because he loves me and wants me to be successful and not because some greeting card company or jewelry manufacturer said it was time?  Well, he did.  And that means I can finally show you the pictures of my day after Valentine's Day spoils, and what happened to last year's, and explain how I came to have these things in the first place even though I hate Valentine's Day and don't like getting presents.

My true love spoils me, and it's not easy.  He bothers, though, because he loves me.  I just need to make sure he knows that I love him back even without the presents.  He makes it harder for me to do that when he keeps buying me things.

We are complicated.  We have been in love for twelve years this month.  It's working out okay.

And Now a Toast to the Ending Day

It's midnight, and I've stuffed you with my mad ramblings.  It's not even really Love Thursday anymore, even though this post will look like I finished it then.  I could go on and on, drunkenly, like an old companion in cups after a heavy meal, but this was not supposed to be a heavy meal, just an array of three little tastes of some of the love in my life.  I hope you found them palatable, and I hope your own plate stays full.

Cheers!

Comments

[Pastormac's Ann]

Boy, I'm full. Filled up with love. What a meal. Thanks for sharing! Happy LT.

[Sara]

As long as I didn't make you barf, right? (Although they do say "[l]ove is lovelier the second time around..." heh)

[leslee]

You're so cute. And lucky. When you have a lot of love in your life, of course even your plants get some of it! Love's like that.

I only remember how unfriendly people generally are here when I travel elsewhere. It's like, oh, right, people in other parts of the country actually talk to strangers, in a friendly way. People are sometimes friendly here, but it still tends to be a lot more reserved, or the friendliness has a rougher edge to it. People in my small town are moderately friendly, in the way of smiling when you cross paths on the road, but not in the midwestern way of, say, asking personal questions! I did have a long conversation with a young woman on the train into Boston last year (I was going in for a job interview). She asked me if I always took the train, told me she was starting a new job, told me all about her old job, etc. And she was from Framingham I think. So I guess it does happen, but it's far from the rule. Many people appreciate it so you go right on being friendly, girl!

[Sara]

Thank you, Leslee! I will. And thanks for the train story. Very encouraging. :)

[Aprilbmoore]

Got here via your link to my blog, though I feel as if I've been here before. Thanks for the inspiration in this post--I'm from the south, and things are different down here, but that doesn't make friendliness any less appreciated when you get it.

[Sara]

Welcome, Teen Sleuth! Yes, your site is in my list of "good reads" because I found it during one of my many excursions through the NaBloPoMo link list and was quite taken by the way you think and the way you write about it. You may have run across this site the first time during the same mad exercise.

My true love originates from your neck of the woods, so he suffers from the cold here, too, both the physical cold and that cold, cold wall of reticence. He's found or made his own small chinks in that wall, but not enough, not nearly enough, and still openly looks forward to living somewhere else someday. He says he dreams of living somewhere where snow does not exist, where he can tell stories to the local children all about the white icy feathers falling from the sky in the place where he used to dwell, of having the children run home for dinner and tell their parents only to have their parents call him "a big fat liar."

Heh.

[Kay]

Interesting that you put conversation in context of being at a grocery checkout counter. I find that part of the whole money exchange ritual, and thus, less intrusive than someone just wandering up and starting in. There's a different flavor to it altogether.

[Sara]

Yes. However, even as a cashier, it is still impolite -- especially in New England -- to say something like, "Well what's wrong with you, then?" or "Did you shave your head, are you having chemo, or is that just female pattern baldness?" You know, there are limits to everything. And there are differences between routine, impersonal cheerfulness (which is what many people, especially people in some kind of crisis, need and want when they go to the grocery store), daring to ask questions just to satisfy one's own idle curiosity without thought for the person whose apparent condition piques it, and really getting a window into someone else's life because s/he offers it, because s/he's invited you in. The thing that was remarkable to me about my experience working the register was having people who would never talk to me if we sat next to each other on a train or bus or even at the Symphony quite comfortably and often spontaneously confessing and confiding all nature of things to me as a cashier, or asking for my advice as if I were suddenly both reliably knowledgeable (at $8.50 an hour) and inexplicably safe. I hadn't changed into a different person; I had just been transformed for them by my position.

Long ago, on my other, even more neglected blog, I wrote out in roughly poem form some examples of the difference between what I could and could not do as a grocery store cashier, questions I couldn't ask, help I could and could not offer. You can read that here, if you're interested.

[MB]

Sara, this was a marvelous post. I really appreciated the entree, having always found the New England reticence bit difficult, frustrating, and sad. Never got used to it.

[Sara]

The weirdest thing for me is how contagious it is. Most of the people I meet here are not from here, yet all seem to adopt the local way fairly quickly. I think it's because it can be very intimidating. After awhile, you just stop trying to connect to strangers, and then before you know it you start thinking the same way yourself, that strangers who attempt to connect with you are either crazy or after something that doesn't or shouldn't belong to them.

I often wonder how much of it is rightfully attributed to the Puritan tradition and how much of it is a function of the weather. I've been noticing lately when the weather is particularly rotten -- cold, wet, 60 mph winds, etc. -- how tunneled people get. No one looks both ways when crossing the street in bad weather, when you'd think people would be particularly inclined to do so, because lifting your face into the yuck is so misery-inducing, especially if you still have some ways to walk with a freezing wet face and neck. We have a lot of weather this bad, though not so much this year, and the season can last from October through May sometimes. So I wonder if the habit of walking around closed and bent in bad weather just seeps into the rest of life, so that we don't even lift our heads anymore to see if the weather has changed, let alone if there might be other people around, people who won't just inconvenience and intrude upon us, people we might even like.