I’m in Edinburgh as I write this, inspired by all the writers who have written here or nearby, from Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott to Muriel Spark and JK Rowling. I’ve finally gotten back on the writing/revising/rocking horse after traveling for the past two months without writing much more than an occasional post; however I’ve kept up with my journal and personal email.
In an email to a newly acquired writer friend from Bath today, Peter Please (courtesy of Servas), I realized I have never shared this story (which won an award last year at the Pasadena Literary Festival’s Open Book contest). So as I roam the streets of this beautiful old city and gaze in shops at antique jewelry I offer you this glimpse into my ancestral past, plus one untranslatable word from Turkish, with delight:
Silver Spoons Speaking
Take away the silver spoons and my memories of Grandma Lillian might also disappear— her faded floral apron catching the light as she sat cleaning a bowl of ripe strawberries. Her teary eyes gazing up at me through thick lenses when I’d just arrived home from high school, choosing the fattest berry to pop in my mouth.
I don’t eat them until after supper, she said.
I plucked another from her bowl, strawberry juice overflowing my impertinent lips.
That young girl knew nothing of life’s impermanence, nor did she care.
I knew Lillian would say, These are not my glasses, when she took them off for the umpteenth time. But I didn’t know enough to keep my eyes from rolling when she asked why hair grew on the walls.
Fifty years later though, I wonder if she saw things I didn’t. When I sit and stare at the walls long enough, the dark wood paneling, like the tree it once was, begins to grow again.
If I could be with her now I’d know enough to ask about the spoons. But in the early 70s I was in a hurry to grow older, too impatient to sit with my grandmother. I couldn’t even wait until dinner for strawberries. I didn’t know then how longing is a force transporting memories, turning them into dreams. Given the chance again, if Lillian said those were not her glasses I’d nod, because how hard is it to just agree? I know enough now to take her hand and assure her, the hair is there to soften the darkness.
No English word exists for the gloomy feeling that comes with decline, knowing things will get worse, but in Turkish the word is hüzün.
When my grandparents could no longer care for themselves they came to live with us. I don’t know how, never having flown, they boarded a plane in Illinois where they’d always lived and flew to California where they’d never been. A few months later grandfather died, but Lillian, eight years younger, lasted several years, until my mother put her in a convalescent home.
I don’t know what life was like as the oldest of 13 children in a large farming family, but I imagine it is why Lillian eschewed marriage for a job teaching, eventually going to business school in Chicago. In her travels, she collected silver spoons, souvenirs embossed with a cut-out of the capitol building, or curved to fit her thumb, engraved with an ‘L’. Several spoons bear all three initials telling me Lillian Matilda Stahl was fiercely attached to her maiden name.
I know the wry smile on Lillian’s face stands out in the family portrait where she is surrounded by somber siblings. I’m assured by her satisfied smile as she sits sideways on a smiling crescent moon in a photo of her as a career woman attending the World’s Fair in Chicago.
I don’t know if hitting the low glass ceiling for women in the 1930s is why she married Diamond Jim, a divorced horse trader and owner of the world champion harness racer. I know she snatched two babies from the jaws of menopause in her mid-forties, giving birth to a boy and a girl.
I don’t know how she bore watching her only son go off to the Korean War as a medic, never to return. Or her thoughts when my mother, her only daughter, left Illinois for California with her husband and children.
I know the spoons intimately. I inherited them along with Lillian’s silver service for twelve in the Buckingham pattern encased in a linen covered chest left closed for years, but I stirred my tea, scooped up soup, and lifted untold delicacies to my lips with Lillian’s collection of seven commemorative spoons. Lately their silver tongues have begun to speak.
I’ve learned that spoons, shaped like ears, gather snippets of conversation, their little bowls like tiny soup tureens, hoarding and holding a hodgepodge of facts and fancies, bathing them in a rich, golden broth and delivering them back up in dreams.
I didn’t know this until the thought flew up like a whisper from another world as I stirred my tea. The whisper brought with it forgotten stories—before she became a farmer’s wife and the mother of 13, Lillian’s mother, Ida, had the chance to dance with Edward VII, the future King of England when he was the Prince of Wales.
That night, after sliding a silver spoon under my pillow and falling into dreams, I saw Ida seated at an elaborate table for dinner. After the dance, she slipped a silver spoon up her sleeve.
In the light of day I reflect on my teen self who had a penchant for lifting things- not only taking strawberries without asking, but also dime store jewelry, make-up, and clothing until getting caught. Even now I hear a voice urge, It’s yours for the taking.
Another night, the spoons deliver up the cream of dreams—my mother’s voice singing Que Sera, Sera, as she plays the piano and the organ simultaneously. Lillian holds out a silver spoon like a scepter, beckoning me to follow. I join a line of women, each holding a spoon, passing along confectionary fragments. The handle of each spoon fits into the bowl of the next, a serpentine spine of spoons that has somehow imprinted my bones.
I look around for my three daughters.They appear tiny, cradled in a soup spoon, nestled together, the middle one, Lillian’s namesake. Surrounded by ancestors, I know the conversations will include them and continue through memories interwoven with dreams. I awaken in the dark with the taste of a word on my tongue.
There is joy in having a word at hand. I know it spares us from our own persecutions, despite the darkness closing in. Reminded that our misfortunes are largely collective in nature—I whisper hüzün, my word for what I might have missed but for the spoons.
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