Rituals and Traditions

As we coast into the second week of this recuperation phase, there are rituals developing.  Some are subject to change (I take meds every two hours, but we are decreasing the doses little by little and someday that ritual will be a thing of the past) and some are as predictable as the moon. 

To set the stage right now, I am on the proverbial couch and Benjamin is on the other one, carefully watching and listening to a YouTube about forge welding. He has it on speeded up talking so it is funny to listen to from over here. It just amazes me that people will take the time to create those videos for people so others can learn every skill known to humans. That is so generous.

As I was contemplating this post this morning, I realized that I am conscious that I should not be too brash about how lucky I am.  It can be a form of bragging, insensitive to my friends who have a much harder life than I do. I can think of many people out there who are struggling specifically with caregiving and being patients (Julia and Mike, Carrie and Al, Rachel and Jeff, to name those who I most conscious of right now) and my situation is so rich that I feel like I just shouldn't talk about it anymore.

Yesterday when I was on the phone with Rebecca I said I was starting to get tired of this routine, as deluxe as it is. I confess that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do while on house arrest -- I haven't watched any movies, I haven't listened to music, I haven't knitted, I haven't practiced the piano.  The possibilities are endless. But in fact I seem to have the attention span of a small mammal (better than a fruit fly but much worse than a panda, say). I said I wanted suggestions for the best Netflix material I could watch. I just have a really hard time thinking about watching a movie in the daytime. To be honest, the only thing that keeps me focused is writing. So that is why we are here today. 

Okay, so instead of wallowing in the present I will tell you of a tradition from long ago when I was growing up. When we were growing up. Our cousins from Boston, children of my father's sister, used to come to Virginia every summer. It was absolutely the best entertainment of the summer to have them come. There are two older girls and two younger boys who are approximately the same ages as me and my siblings. My family is a touch older. The oldest girl has been musical all her life and had a strong interest in composing music, teaching songs, making us all sing (she came by it honestly, as this is what her mother does too).  The second girl is the one that is most likely to melt into the situation, not taking over, just adding to the joy. The boys were much younger than I, always a presence but I didn't play with them myself.

They stayed with our grandparents in the house on Beulah Road. This is the house that Tony and Sarah (older brother and younger sister, our parents) grew up in from when they were 13 and 10 years old, so it is a house that shaped our collective lives.  I don't want to go sideways too much, I can talk about the house later, but it had bedrooms upstairs that housed all the cousins and we spent many hours there going through boxes of costume material (real clothing that our grandmother had saved that we found just perfect for our purposes).

In addition to our three swims a day in the pool, we always had The Show to prepare.  Usually Carrie, the musical one, had arrived with some ideas and sometimes even with a whole musical already written. We also contributed to the writing.  Sometimes we had a whole month to get The Show together, in the early years, and as we got older and they came for shorter visits, we had to squeeze in rehearsals around the farm cousin work schedule. My cousins or aunt could probably tell me how many years in a row we managed to put on The Show, but I would say this tradition lasted something like 12 years or more. The best way to remember is to think about what guest artists were included and how old we all were when they visited. Cousin Berta from Hawaii was here for a summer when she was about 12 and we performed Rumpelstiltskin -- we were already pretty sophisticated by then, with our show habits, so perhaps our run was even longer than I think. The last Show happened when I was already out of college, and Jon was at the last couple of shows, so I bet I was 23 when we did the last one.  My father is in the family picture for that one, so it must have been 1983. (Can you just tell me, Carrie and Helen, and then I will stop obsessing about this mundane detail?)

Our shows were ambitious, musical, hilarious to us.  We announced when they would occur, sometimes we did multiple showings. We used the Moutoux Barn as our venue, or the little circle in front of Grandma's house or often the top of the hill outside the screen porch.  There was always a curtain, of course. The audience was our grandparents, their friends the Moutouxs, whatever workers we could coerce, our own parents. It was exciting and scary.  We made ourselves laugh so hard.  Owen was probably our most reliable comic, but Lani is also very funny.  I am earnest. I try, but I am not funny or showy.  We did shows that were based on books, songs. We sang madrigals, we sang ballads. We took it for granted that this is what we did, although we relied very heavily on the Boston cousins to make it all happen. The Virginia cousins would never have thought of it.

This was a part of the fabric of our childhoods.  It was only a few weeks every summer, but it is part of who we all are today. When we get together with our cousins, we sing the songs we knew when we all shared a childhood.  Our voices still blend beautifully. We don't all remember all the words and we haven't learned a new song in years, but we can burst into a reliable rendition of Sto Mi E Milo without even knowing what just happened.