"She asks 'Are you cursed?'
He says 'I think that I'm cured.'
Then he kissed her and hoped
That she'd forget that question."
"The Curse" - Josh Ritter
My mother walked slowly up the driveway, a patch covering her right eye. I sat in a lawn chair, next to the great love of my second life, one of my hands holding one of hers, and the other holding a glass of cold beer. The smell of hickory wood smoke wafted around us as the kettle grill burned, readying for a chicken barbecue. My three children and their two cousins who live upstairs ran around in front of us.
Saturday, September 11th. Late afternoon. My mother plops down into an empty chair next to me. She strikes me as tired. She had surgery on that patched eye a couple of days prior; she came over to see us and say hello, to see her grandchildren. She missed them after not seeing them for a few days.
She tells my girlfriend and I about the surgery, about how she feels now: some itchiness and discomfort in the eye, a little tired at time, but better than she expected. The doctor said it went well. In six to eight weeks we'll know if it worked, if she'll regain something resembling useful vision in that eye. At worst, the advance of damage will have stopped.
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She had gone to see my Nana in the nursing home earlier that day. Nana celebrated her hundredth birthday this past winter, not long before I had my first outing with my new love. Nana suffers from senile dementia now, a woman of deep strength now laid low by the indignities of so many years of life. She wants nothing more than to die. For awhile, in the months after my wife died at the tender age of thirty-eight, she would lament to my mother: all I want is for the Good Lord to take me, all I want, and here this poor woman with babies goes instead, I wish I could have given her some of my years.
I asked my mother how Nana was that day.
Not bad, came the reply. Apparently Nana had told the staff in the nursing home that she needed to leave to go help her daughter who had just undergone eye surgery. Nana talked to my mother for a bit and then told her to go home and rest; usually, she begs her to stay with her, begs her to take her home with her, for she hates the home, the loss of freedom, the knowledge, even in her state of severe decline, that she lives there now just waiting for the inevitable end.
I think she knows, my mother said, her voice drifting off.
Knows what, asks my love.
Well, it's September, my mother explains. She knows.
September has been cruel to this family, to the people who have lived in the flat in which I now live. In September of 1946 my Papa, Nana's husband, my mother's father, died of a heart attack in the very bedroom where I'll lie down to sleep in a little while, leaving behind my thirty-four year old Nana and their five children, including my three year old mother.
And September 11th, an anniversary of loss and suffering burned into the national consciousness now, is an anniversary in our family, too. Fifty years ago on Saturday, my mother's brother, who at the time lived in the flat in which I now live, died suddenly in his early twenties, leaving behind a young child and a wife seven months pregnant.
She knows, my mother says.
You never forget, my mother says, and I think, but don't say, that I know, too; I know that no matter how long I live I'll never forget the night of November 20th, 2007, I'll never forget the shock and horror of watching helplessly as my wife, the mother of my three children, died in front of my eyes in a hospital bed.
My mother recounts that day, a Sunday: she went to mass and then walked over to Feo's, a place where people congregated on weekend mornings to drink coffee and eat breakfast and talk about whatever, she sat there with her friend Linda. She left, she says, and started walking home. She noticed a policeman behind her, Mope they called him. He followed her for blocks and she turned around, near home, and asked him, jokingly, are you following me? He laughed, she says, but she later learned the true story: he knew, and he wanted to make sure no one told her before she got home.
When she did get home, she walked upstairs and saw my Aunt Marie sitting at the kitchen table, ashen-faced. Sit down, Aunt Marie told her. Sit down. And then she told my mother that her brother was dead.
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The next morning I stood out in the back yard and hung laundry out on the line to dry. I thought of my Nana, and of how she stood out in that very spot doing the same thing on so many mornings so many years ago. By the time I got to know her, as a child, so much time had passed since she lost her husband and then her son, but through the stories passed down by her and my mother and my aunts and uncles, I gained an appreciation of the fact that those losses had taken an immense toll on her.
I thought of going to see her at the home a few weeks after my wife had died. They brought me into a room to wait for her. I sat on a couch and stared at a small Christmas tree stood on an end table, and then I saw her enter the doorway. My mother and father walked her toward me. She saw me sitting there and reached out for me and cried out, oh my boy, oh my boy, and she collapsed into me and we wept.
As I finished hanging the laundry I thought of the joy she brought to my life, of how she managed, in spite of her pain, to bless me and all of her grandchildren with her love and laughter. I thought of how the example of her courage had given me strength during hours of my own suffering. I thought of the day she taught me to can tomatoes, I thought of the day she taught me and a bunch of friends how to make pasta by hand. I thought, in honor of an anniversary of her suffering, I would try to honor her by making some pasta for my children, for my brother and his wife and their children, and for my love.
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For awhile, a few years back, I used to make pasta by hand, the way Nana taught me, on an almost weekly basis. Then we moved up here, on a temporary basis we thought, so we didn't unpack everything, and then Lauren died, and then the pasta machine and a lot of other things just sat in boxes, unused, for years.
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I ran into her in a coffee shop late on a Sunday afternoon in December. I had dropped my son off at a basketball game and had decided, on the spur of the moment, to go get a cup of coffee in a doomed attempt at warding off my exhaustion.
I knew her vaguely, she had lived with a friend of mine from work for two or three years. She approached as I ordered an extra-large organic for the road and we got to talking. I had only just emerged from an absolutely debilitating funk that had lasted from August until the end of November. The pain was different from the hair-on-fire, screaming craziness that had consumed me in the immediate aftermath, but in some ways it was worse, in some ways it was the lowest point of all: for awhile there, I had given up, given in to utter despair. I had forgotten about any courage my Nana might have shown and had given up on life. I had resigned myself to a small life of muted misery. Despair had taken control of me.
After a few months of living this way my sister showed up unannounced one morning. She told me that I deserved better, that my children deserved better, and that my departed wife would be heartbroken to see me in such a state. I knew she was right. I resolved to change things. I needed help to do so, and my sister made sure I got it. I started to turn things around.
In the coffee shop, we talked for fifteen or twenty minutes and I felt something within me stir. I felt the dry fig of my heart start to beating. I mentioned the encounter to our mutual friend at a party a couple of weeks later. I had refused date requests and offers of set-ups for more than two years, I had given up on ever loving again, but something about this woman had gotten to me. I couldn't put my finger on it. I continued to work on recovering. Our mutual friend offered to facilitate a meeting. I finally agreed.
We started to see each other, to talk to each other. I felt myself falling for her. She talked openly about the disappointments love had brought to her, one after another, for the past twenty years. She had given up, too, in her own way. I suppose a more rational man might have thought of her as a lost cause, but I could not help myself: I wanted her.
Eventually, after stops and starts and mix-ups and miscommunication and doubt and wonder, we both wound up landing on the same spot. We broke down. We fell in love.
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We stood in my kitchen, the kitchen that was once my Nana's, and we made the dough, just like my Nana taught me years ago. Measured out the flour, cupped out a reservoir into it, emptied the beaten eggs into the reservoir, salted the flour a bit, mixed it together, our hands working together to meld it into what Nana had taught me it should be. We drank red Italian wine while my brother and his wife sat nearby and the five children ran around like banshees. We kneaded the ball of dough and then let it rest and then rolled it through the machine and laid it out on the dining room table and then cut it into noodles. It felt perfect in my hands.
Then we tossed it into a pot of boiling water. I told her how Nana had told me that it only needed to be boiled for two minutes or so. She took out a piece and said, I think it's done. I said no. We got talking. A few minutes passed. I realized that I had probably overdone it. Tossed it from the pot of water into a calender. I could see it was a disaster. I pressed ahead, laid it out into the serving dish and sauced it. Served it to the kids first. My daughter called out from the dining room: Dad! I don't like homemade spaghetti!
The adults tried in vain to eat it. We couldn't; it was so saturated that it just disintegrated on our forks. I wound up tossing the noodles into the garbage can, in abject defeat. Everyone ate the meatballs I'd made and complemented me on them, but I didn't care. Some way to honor my Nana, I thought. Fuck up some homemade fettuccine beyond all recognition. I felt utterly disgusted with myself.
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Try again soon, my love told me. Make some more soon, maybe a smaller batch. That's what Nana would want you to do. I told her that there was no possible way that Nana had ever botched a pot of pasta to this degree. No way.
I told my mother about it when she called later that night to see how it came out.
Well, she said. I could not make pie crust or pizza dough when I first stated, but your Nana always said, if you screw it up, make it again right away. The first time I made pizza dough it was so bad your father said please don't do this again, but I did, and...
...and she perfected it, of course. I know. I saw it, tasted it. I laughed to myself: how did my love know that I should turn right around and make it again?
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The curse, perhaps, is that extraordinary circumstances, the passed-on stories of tragedies, have taken the bliss of ignorance from us. We know. The joy will not hold, it will be taken from us, against our will, and we know not the hour when this will happen. The joy will not hold, and we will leave and miss out on what comes next, or we will be left to live on and miss those who have left against our will.
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I sulked for hours after the pasta debacle. I felt like I'd wasted some sort of precious knowledge that I had been gifted.
At some point, my love said to me, let it go: you know you've lived through worse.
I have.
I thought about that, and then I decided to let go of my mistake.
It was late, nearing midnight. The children slept. I decided to focus on something else. I've lived through worse, yes. I forgot about the pasta and I took her beautiful face into my hands. And then I threw my arms around her, closed my eyes, and kissed her, and for a moment at least, I beat back the curse and held onto the gift of the present with all of my might.