When I was a kid, I didn't find it easy to talk with Margo. In fact, I felt a bit uncomfortable around her. My mom's only sister, she seemed more serious and more strict than my mom. I didn't know the rules, and we needed to be good around Margo. We needed to be good around Gram (our grandmother, mom of her and my mom), too, but Gram's affection for us was so obvious that we knew that she'd always forgive us anything anyway. She loved the very existence of us. Margo was single and adventurous and serious, or at least that's how I saw her when we were kids. She was a special education teacher and traveled every summer; she took cooking and baking and photography classes; she had lots of friends; she practiced her tests on me before she administered them for real; she read the newspaper and disagreed with my dad about politics and education the way my mom didn't. We knew she loved us and paid attention to us, too: she made our birthday cakes every year, each one decorated differently and especially for the birthday kid. Incredible cakes. Before our birthdays we'd discuss what she might make for the upcoming birthday. I remember a yellow phone -- two pieces because that's what they looked like back in the 1980s, receiver and base; Cookie Monster; softball Snoopy; tennis Snoopy; Miss Piggy; a book; Huey Lewis and the News; golf Snoopy; soccer Snoopy. One year for Halloween she showed up at our house dressed as Miss Piggy. She took us to every Muppet movie and to the Fogg Museum and to Swensen's. And we loved her and admired and appreciated her.
But I wouldn't just sit down and chat with her as I did with my grandmother.
At twenty-three, I moved to San Francisco. The night before I left, Margo and Gram came over for dinner at my parents'. When I walked them out to their car, Margo gave me a hug and said, "We'll miss you. She'll miss you." She was referring to Gram, besides my mom, my favorite person in the world. Margo would miss me. She knew that Gram would miss me. Somehow this was revelatory to me. You don't say these types of things in Irish Catholic households, or at least you didn't in 1996. Margo liked me and appreciated me: I could feel it and was so surprised and pleased by this.
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It's almost twenty-fve years later. Gram has passed, and Mom has passed, but Margo is here. And over the years we have talked about love and teaching and working and parenting and friends and travel and family. We talk often. We laugh. My kids are more comfortable with her than I was at their age. She takes them for ice cream or to movies as she did for us. She sits and chats. She drives them when I'm in a bind. She comes to their plays and games and performances, and she adores them. She gets the girls their Christmas dresses and Easter dresses as she did for my sisters and me when we were kids. She still reads the newspaper and can tell you every detail of Trump misconduct. (Yesterday it was his insistence on being at the West Point graduation.) Our teenagers say, "You know, it's really easy to talk to Margo. It's like she's interested in what we're saying. She really listens. And she asks questions, and it makes it easy to talk with her. It's nice." (Maybe they're more mature than I was at their age? or more confident? or maybe Margo seems less serious to them than she did to me?)
We stand in the parking lot at Wegman's, and we put the bags into the back of her RAV4 (she's had Toyotas for the last thirty years). She hands me a bag of cookies for the kids and me, cookies she knows I'll eat some of us the minute I get in the car. Somehow I go into Wegman's for her, but she gets to a store and bakery to get cookies or chocolates or fudge for us. Every time. She pulls out cash, and we do that exchange.
And then we stand in the parking lot for another hour and talk. Just talk. We talk about whether people can change and we talk about her friends and we talk about my kids and about me. And the news. Aways the news and whichever of her electronics are not working -- tv or phone or computer. She has an unspoken rule that she won't give advice, but today she gives her opinion in little bits, and if I pay attention, I catch them.
Italians are visiting with family all the time. It's not just for big holiday gatherings: it's a way of life, being with family all the time -- parents, kids, siblings, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles. It's a Saturday, and we're not sitting at a bar with a cappuccino, but we're standing here in a parking lot, just the two of us (and a car every twenty minutes or so moving in or out of the parking space beside us), visiting, talking, being.
I'm back in Italy on a Saturday morning. This time I'm not in awe of the Italians and nostalgic for people I know. I'm just with Margo, talking, listening, present (though a little worried about the strawberrries and blueberries and spinach that might be wilting in the heat of her car on this June day).
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Starbucks is across the street. Masked, I order a chai tea latte. "What size?" the barista at the table at the door asks. "Big," I say. I can never remember the Starbucks sizes, but I know that I want the biggest one they have.
I take my iced chai tea latte (courtesy of our letter carrier's gift cards, which she received one Christmas; she doesn't go to Starbucks, so I've lucked out), sit on a bench nearby, and read my book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. (I heard an interview last year with the author, and then two friends told me that they had read the book. So I gifted it to two other friends, who loved it. So this copy belongs to one of these friends who then sent it back to me so I could read it.) I sit there in the sun, reading, sipping, laughing out loud. (Friend who sent it warns me that other parts are not laugh-out-loud but cry-cry-cry.)
An hour of sitting. Reading. Sipping a drink.
I used to do this in Italy with no concern about what was coming next or what was on a to-do list.
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I drive ten minutes to Blue Hills. Blue Hills is a reservation with trails. I drive by every day when I commute to work. It's only twenty-five minutes from our house, but I've never come hiking here. We have Prospect Hill and Paine Estate, two wooded areas minutes from our house, so I don't often drive to go for a walk or hike.
But today I need the change. We've been social distancing for three months, and I need occasional change. I park on the side of the road and start up a trail. I have no map, no direction, no plan. I just walk higher. I call my friend Christa (roommate in California), and we talk for two hours as I walk, and then sit on a rock. The sun, the woods, a talk with a girlfriend. I want for nothing else for these two hours.
In Italy, we walked the Via Francigena sometimes on Saturdays. We had no house projects or people to see, so it was easy to motivate the kids to take an excursion. Blue Hills by myself today -- and with Christa.
Tomorrow, I'll bring some kids.
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Waltham is a city. It's not a cute town with a quaint center. It's a wonderfully diverse city with great restaurants and woods and a mix of families, singles, and older folks. There is the Waltham Common, green grass with benches and concrete walkways, and there is a main drag of restaurants nearby, Moody Street. So it has the Common, and it has restaurants and ice cream and even a cafe. But it's not cute.
However, for restaurants to open back up during phase 2 (of opening the economy), the City decided to shut down Moody Street to cars and allow restaurants to place tables and serve food right in the street. Dining al fresco. I walk up and down Moody Street debating what to eat and where to sit. I choose nothing. Instead, I walk up and down, staring at people and restaurants, checking out menus, mostly admiring how cute the street looks, how quaint.
Quarantine has actually made Moody Street look pretty. People are outside talking and laughing and eating. I'm not sitting down, but the scene beautiful. I belong here, just looking, the way I would do if I were walking through Rome, watching people eat outside.
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Moody Street, with all its good restaurants and outside tables, didn't call to me. I got back in my car and headed to Chipotle. There are some tables out there, too, where I can sit with my chicken burrito and chips and read my book and write.
A family I know walks by on their way home from a Black Lives Matter march. We talk. The husband and daughter move on. The mom, a woman my age (40s), and her neighbor, who seems our age, too, stay and we talk at a distance -- they stand about fifteen feet away and I keep sitting, not wanting to make the neighbor I don't know nervous. I'm not wearing a mask, and I don't want to make them anxious, so I sit and they stand, and we keep talking -- kids, parenting, education, life. I also don't move because I don't want to shift the dynamic. The three of us are not just talking: we are connecting and understanding each other and laughing. My computer is open, but I don't want to get back to it. I just want to stay in this conversation.
Last year we had some friends in Italy, but we didn't often just stop on the street to chat with someone we knew. We were the Americans in our walled city. I envied the Italians as they bumped into people they knew at the bar, on the street, in a piazza. I'm outside Chipotle, not some cute Italian bar, but it doesn't matter. I feel connected.
I am home.
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