Tag: family

Creating Community

Long ago explorers and settlers left their communities not knowing what they would find. Whether on foot, boat, horse or wagon, they set off with vague stories from those who came before and carried uncertainty along with meager provisions. Some intended to return and others planned a one-way journey to create a new start for themselves and others. I often wonder whether I could push into the unknown like they did; by the time I made a habit of leaving my hometown, I had the benefit of well-paved roads, efficient air travel, and international banking.

The last time I left was the hardest. That time it wasn’t just me it was us and we had built the kind of deep roots that are hard to dig around and even harder to transplant in new soil. We had a nice home in a pleasant neighborhood within easy driving distance of family. Our children, ages 12 and 9, had developed their personalities, friendships and activities. We had shifted into the comfort and confidence of knowing where we liked to go and what we liked to do, individually and as a family. Consequently, my announcement that we were moving so mom could take on a new awesome job didn’t have everyone jumping into the Dodge Caravan with joyous enthusiasm.

If we had been in a real caravan, I’m pretty sure I would have been lost in a tragic and mysterious accident.

But, we persevered. We found a house, enrolled the kids in new schools. Sought out activities and started the difficult process of building our new normal with only our nuclear family as a starter kit. At the time, I was too busy establishing myself in a new job in a new company to actively worry about whether or not our roots were healthy. But, looking back I know when our new community started to feel like home. When it felt like we were in a place where we belonged and could be happy.

Sometime in our first year we were in the mood for middle eastern food. We were still finding our way to anyplace beyond the grocery store and the kids’ schools using Google Maps, so I pulled up this relatively new foodie app called Yelp and searched for “middle eastern” near me. The result showed a place with a five star rating (not a ton of reviews, but the restaurant had just opened) in the community next to ours. We’d never been there, but thought, ‘what the heck it’s only 20 minutes away’, piled the kids into the car and took off.

When we pulled up to the restaurant it was the end space in an unremarkable strip mall that also included a convenience store and an ice cream shop. The parking lot was small and weirdly shaped to fit on the corner. We passed a wondering glance at each other, double checked to make sure the GPS hadn’t failed, and then made a split second decision. We headed in.

I wish I had more crisp, clear memories of that first time. I don’t remember finding our way to a table or navigating the menu. I’ve watched the owners, Mike and Marlene, welcome so many people now I suspect that I am remembering those seatings and not my own. I am certain they told us to take any table that we would like. How they greeted us warmly, answered any questions. They would have come with the bread and sauces in big squeeze bottles without any worry about profit as they relished our enjoyment of the food. They finished our meal by giving us baklava “on the house” — I do remember feeling special for many visits with that kind offer. And, it didn’t make me feel any less special when I realized that all guests get that treatment.

After that first visit, we came back regularly. Once or twice a week someone would ask, “How about Marcos?” and the rest would smile widely and we would all jump into the car. We built our community around that place.

My son would only eat chicken tenders and ranch dressing when we started going there. Slowly, Mike coaxed him into trying Lebanese specialties bit by bit with free samples. First, one link of kafta. Later, a plate of shawerma. Then falafel and bourak. Ask him about the time when he still ate chicken tenders at Papa Marcos and he’ll get somber; he sees that as a deep affront to his great love of middle eastern food, something he deeply regrets.

Every out of town guest would get taken to Papa Marcos. We would take up one of the long tables set up for six or eight and Mike and Marlene would want to know who they are and where they are from. They would recall, when people visited again, how they connected to us and why they mattered. When it was just the four of us again, they would want to know how our family back home was doing, remembering that our people were somewhere else.

We watched their young son Sharbel grow from a toddler to a young boy who would show off his tablet games to our son, just enough older than him to be amused by the conversations and not annoyed. Once I remember that my son thought of a cool Lego set that he had miraculously kept in the box with all the pieces, “Do you think Sharbel would like this?” he asked. It went on the next visit.

Even my husband, notorious for not liking onions or peppers, didn’t have to ask or feel bad for getting his shawerma with “tomato only” or wanting a bucket full of tahini sauce. They always put two bottles at our table and once or twice, they sent us home with a bottle to go with our leftovers because they just knew us and cared.

When we moved home again, after eight years in Illinois, the one thing we agreed we would miss was Papa Marcos. Every middle eastern restaurant we go to is compared to them and they all come up short. “Not as good as Mike’s,” we say. It’s the food, yes, the food is incredibly good. But that wouldn’t, by itself, have helped us shift from visitors to members of a community; they helped us be a part of something bigger when we had left everything we loved behind.

Last week, I found myself on a work trip in Chicago. With a car and one open evening, I drove 45 minutes to see them. Coming in the door I saw Marlene at the counter and Mike heading off to a table. I caught their eyes and we smiled. It was like I’d never left as we fit the exchange of friendship around the bustling needs of a restaurant. Hugs and “how’s the kids” and what is going on in the life flowed as easily and happily as the food coming out of the kitchen and the to-go pick-ups in and out the front door.

Sitting alone in the corner booth I saw a couple in their early twenties come in. I didn’t want to eavesdrop but I heard enough to recognize that they were at Papa Marcos for the first time. Me being me, I poked my head around the booth back and asked, “Did you just find this place?” They shared that they had found them online and the young man noted that pulling up they weren’t quite sure what to expect. Chefs from out of town, they had decided to give it a try, wanting something better than fried food at the amusement park. I smiled. “Good choice.”

There are moments in your life when you don’t realize at the time that everything has changed. You continue on, thinking it was just another day, just another drive, just another “no cook Friday” dinner. It is only looking back that you see it for what it was, a thread so inexplicably woven into your family’s fabric that you can’t imagine what you would look like without it. Would you be the same people? Would your story be the same?

That happened the first time we walked into Papa Marcos Restaurant — and now they’re stuck with us. No take backs.

Sibling Rivalry

Earlier this week I put a call out to Facebook asking for editorial help. I found myself stuck with 47 ideas in various stages of disarray — from hastily recorded quotes to nearly complete but only seasonally appropriate posts. The responses were all encouraging (variations of “Just get it out there, Mel!”) except for one. Visiting with my mom for Memorial Day weekend she summoned me urgently letting me know that my brother wanted to talk to me. “If you want something light,” he said, “write about Warcraft.”

But before I go there, you need to know why that moment matters.

My brother is three years my junior, wicked smart, and the nicest guy you will ever meet. When he was born, I immediately took on the role of wise elder, committed to both teaching and protecting the little guy I felt my parents had given me. Now, I know he could have easily rejected my mini-mothering, but he didn’t. Whether by nature or nurture, I’ve never met anyone in my life as comfortable as he is with going with the flow. And everyone who knows me knows I like to direct the flow.

We continued down that path — with me comfortably in the role of prototypical know-it-all bossy big sister — until my dad brought home an Atari.

The timeline is fuzzy, but as the golden age of video games smacked into our family, a new reality emerged. While I had an ability to quickly grasp the key elements of a game in the first handful of plays, my brother had the patience to soak in the patterns of the games. He would memorize the long arcs of the game, while I was only interested on what was on the screen in the moment. So, I would win the early games and then a switch would flip and I would never win again.

It happened head-to-head with Combat and Indy 500. It happened in solo games like Frogger and Pitfall. I was playing the game with my eyes and he was playing the game with his memory. Sometimes my window of opportunity would last for days, others for only hours, but no matter what, if I gave him time to understand the strategy and patterns of a game, it was all over. In 2019 it will be 30 years since the day I wrote “I will never play chess with him again” on a napkin, dating it and hanging it on the fridge. I haven’t.

Flash forward to a day in the late 90’s. We were both attending Michigan State at the time, me to get my MBA, him to get his undergrad in Computer Science. I’d recently done a presentation on the business principles of a game called Warcraft II and suggested that he might like it. We fired up the computers and I gave him the gameplay basics and we kicked off the game.

I admit now that it was underhanded, but at the time I honestly don’t think I realized how much of a head start I had given myself. I had forgotten how many games I had played up to that point, how many pieces of knowledge I took for granted that he didn’t have. I left so much out of my tutorial that he had to ask questions every few minutes, piecing together the gameplay on the fly. Meanwhile, I built up my resources, constructed my defenses, trained my army, and prepared to attack his base. With my advantages, it should have been a rout. Not so much. He went down with good-humor, but he didn’t go down easy.

Later that day he asked whether we were playing Warcraft again. I said no, we both knew who would win and what’s the fun in that?

I still play games with my brother. He is one the smartest people that I know and I like a challenge. We both like deep games that mix strategy with chance and we’re usually well-matched. I have an advantage in randomized games that require quick assessment and spontaneity while he is best with deep patterns and long strategies. Our younger brother is the wild card — he’s the biggest player of us all and he can beat us both if he’s on his game. In my 40’s I recognize that win or lose it’s the time together that matters, not who wins.

But I still really love to win.

A Home Rooted in Stories

Last weekend my brother and his wife moved into their new home. Well, new to them. The house itself is more than 70 years old, lovingly built and renovated by the same couple throughout their marriage. You can see their uniqueness throughout the character of the rooms: a great room off the entry perfect for entertaining; a large, private master suite with only a sliding glass door for escaping to the backyard; a central galley kitchen designed for efficiency; small private spaces for hobbies including a dark room, library, office and wine closet. It is the kind of house that leads to questions and wonder in every oddly shaped room, layer of plaster and bricked up window. It is a house begging to share its stories.

I know many of them — the owners were my grandparents.

My grandfather returned from World War II ready to marry his sweetheart and start his life. He told me once that there weren’t enough homes available for the returning GI’s — he just wasn’t able to find a home to purchase. So, being the resourceful person he was, my grandfather moved his new wife and infant son into his parents’ house, bought land from his father and proceeded to build his young family a home. Years later, he could articulate the thinking behind each of the design decisions and the practical evolution as his family grew and their savings made enhancement possible.

When I was growing up we visited their house every Sunday. It was a family ritual that needed no explanation and brooked no argument; few things overruled our 5:00pm trip down familiar roads to my father’s childhood home. I learned the little bit of patience I have from those visits, over the 2,500 hours of amusing myself and my brothers while the grown ups chatted. To be honest, I learned about life without even knowing it. Once during a job interview I was asked what interested me about the automotive industry. I answered, without embellishment, that listening to my father and grandfather “talk shop” had taught me about business before I even knew I cared about business. Family, loyalty, conflict resolution, straight talk — I learned all of that and more as a child at their feet. 

I remember that sometimes grandpa would fall asleep and we would all wait patiently for him to wake up knowing he would smile and assert that he was just reading his eyelids. I remember my grandmother disappearing into the kitchen to come out with plate after plate of snacks (cut fruit, cheese, chips, cheese balls) that we would eagerly devour. I remember getting old enough to be given permission to go off on my own into their bedroom (the only room with a tv) to sit on the bed and watch 21 Jump Street and Star Trek the Next Generation. I remember summers throwing lawn jarts, climbing trees and playing hide and seek under the massive willow tree — the one that was later struck by lightening. I remember one glorious summer afternoon (and only one) when we churned ice cream by hand — it was filled with chunks of Oreo and delicious.

As an adult I created new memories. I got dressed there for my wedding, journeying across the driveway to walk down ‘the aisle’ — a cobblestone path through the grass to my parents’ back deck. We brought our children as infants and toddlers, setting them on the carpet and pulling out familiar toys while grandma brought fresh baked cookies. I remember the warm feeling when my kids first asked if they could go over to “Old Papa’s” house, watching from the kitchen window as they ran across the driveway on their own. They would open the door and head straight to the back bedroom without any warning; grandma and grandpa didn’t mind, their door was always open.

My grandfather only admitted to one time when he and my grandmother had truly disagreed. It was when his business had been taking off and his peers in industry had suggested that he needed to move to an affluent town to ensure financial success. Achievement was important to grandpa and he thought they needed to do it. My grandmother was adamantly against it — she argued that they had to remember where they came from and stay true to their roots. More than 20 years into my own marriage I have a hard time seeing that argument in my mind’s eye. It must have gotten pretty heated, but my grandma was a strong woman and she loved her family more than anything. She won and they didn’t move.

I have a hard time imaging my life if she had lost.

There was a time in my life when I was convinced that my past, present and future would be lived within a few miles of that house. I thought I might be the one to live in their home. My parents were living in my great-grandparents house across the driveway and I had moved home to raise my own young children just a few miles away. I envisioned the changes I would make, how I would be true to the history while building a bright future for my own family. And then I moved away, pulling up roots four generations in the making to start over in a place where we had no history at all.

I would be inclined to be maudlin if not for my brother and his wife. I’ve watched as they have embraced the old while creating a new space totally their own. Walking into the front door brings a feeling of comfortable recognition tied to their own character. The house includes furniture that was my grandparents, pieces that were once mine and things all their own. They’re creating new stories, stories that the next generation will share. I can’t help but think that perhaps it has worked out the way it was meant to — that the house was always destined to come to them. I like that.

Grandma would have liked it, too.

Celebrating Stickiness

This time last year I sat down and set a goal for myself: write an average of 2.5 blog posts per week or 130 posts in 2016. I didn’t deliver, not even close. I only wrote 64 posts not even 50% of my goal. In fact, I tried and failed to write two posts yesterday and now I’m sitting here stymied.

I considered the possibility that this whole blogger experiment had run its course and that I’m out of thoughtful witticisms.

I countered my inner critic with the fact that 2016 was a complex year and my overactive brain was struggling to simplify the world into succinct posts. As my brain warred against itself I worried. I’m heading back to work soon and I wondered what it would mean if I couldn’t pull off a decent retrospective / kick-off post. What would happen to my legion of followers? My thousand dollar speaking engagements? The big book deal?

Ok, there is no book deal.

My life, like this blog, has never been about a book deal. It’s been about showing up every day, doing the best I can and hoping it is good enough. It doesn’t mean I don’t let people down — I do. It doesn’t mean I haven’t failed — I have. It doesn’t mean that I won’t ignore the world and play Candy Crush — I will. But after it all, I pull on my big girl pants and go back at it, mostly because I know people are counting on me to do it. It’s about being sticky.

Over the holidays I had breakfast with an old friend. A really old friend who I hadn’t seen in person for more that 20 years. We picked up right where we had left off and between the hug hello and the hug good-bye I told her how I met my husband and she told me her story of starting over. We talked about as much as we could stuff into an hour and as we stood to walk away she hugged me with tears in her eyes. She told me that I had been one of a handful of people who had helped her get through a really rough time. She thanked me for just being there even as I felt horribly inadequate. I hadn’t done anything. Heck, I had done less than nothing. I hadn’t helped her pack up her things and find a place to live or a new job. All I had done was ping her on Facebook, remind her that she was worth her own happiness and share the stories of other smart, strong women who had done what she was trying to do.

It felt like so little, it was just stickiness.

For me it’s simple — life brings people into your circle and sometimes their velcro sticks to your velcro. It’s quiet and sometimes you barely know it’s happening, but then later on you notice that they’re hanging on there and you wonder, hmmm, when did that happen? This year, I’ve added some people to my velcro. Their connections are new and they likely have no idea that they are stuck to me, no idea that I may pester them 20 years from now to squeeze me in for breakfast. After all, it’s not like friendship has a rating systems so they can learn what they are in for from those that came before: “She can’t party, but you can count on her to stick.” – 4/5 stars.

I think stickiness is a lost art. It doesn’t have the same epic nature as storybook love or the passion of firework lust. It doesn’t have the daily demonstration of best friend texts or next door neighbor porch sits. But stickiness is precious because it doesn’t care about distance or time or frequency; it’s the complete confidence that someone is there and will be there regardless of evidence. Stickiness is a lot like faith.

Of course not everyone sticks, not everyone wants to stick and some people don’t deserve to stick. This year I pulled some people off, painfully aware of that long, loud noise that velcro makes when it separates. I wasn’t the only one who made that hard decision this year, walking away from connections that have been in place for a long time. Pulling apart is hard and scary in the moment and if you’re wrong ‘people’ velcro doesn’t go back together again, not like the real stuff. And sometimes being sticky to the wrong person can hurt. It’s complicated.

Fortunately for me, Colbie Caillat laid it out well in her song, Never Gonna Let You Down. The song articulates the way I want to be to my friends and family, so well that it had me in tears the first time I sang the chorus aloud to my car radio:

I’m never gonna let you down
I’m always gonna build you up
And when you’re feeling lost
I will always find you love
I’m never gonna walk away
I’m always gonna have you back
And if nothing else you can always count on that
When you need me
I promise I will never let you down

As we head into another year, I’m reaffirming my commitment to be sticky. I’m going to keep showing up, on this blog and in real-life. You’re stuck with me and when you need me I promise I will never let you down.

Count on it.

Home for the Holidays

When we moved away from our hometown three years ago, nothing changed more than our approach to holidays. For twelve years we took for granted our close proximity to family and our ability to be available for everything from impromtu birthday dinners to elaborate Easter egg hunts. We laughed at people who fought airports and highways, packing presents and pets in a weighted down minivan to get to family festivities.

We didn’t realize how good we had it.

When our kids were little we packed a ton into the 30-hours around Christmas. Without taking any vacation time at all we could host a Christmas Eve gathering, be in bed by 1:00am, wake-up and open presents with the kids by 9:00am, be showered and to my parents by 11:00am, pop over to my grandparents, swing home to drop off presents and let the dog out, go over to the in-laws and be home again — exhausted but happy — by 9:00pm. So much joy, so much family and so little inconvenience.

Moving changed that and in a heartbeat everything got harder. Alerting Santa to the change in delivery address. Dealing with pets. Taking vacation. Driving on crowded highways. Packing for a week. Wrapping presents. Cooking dishes. Buying an artificial Christmas tree for the first time since owning a house. I hadn’t thought Christmas had been easy before, but suddenly I knew better. It had been a cakewalk and I hadn’t appreciated it.

But even more than that, I took for granted the relaxed ease that come with geographic closeness. There’s an ability to just share space when you’re close that you lose when there are many miles between you. The everyday meals and everyday  stories that don’t feel special enough for a visit are fine when shared on any given Thursday across the dinner table. I remember with longing sharing a grilled chicken breast and microwaved potato with my grandfather on our everyday plates, talking with him about my day at work. I remember dropping the kids off at my mom’s for an overnight so my husband and I could go to see a movie, watching them toddle off for just another night at Nana’s. I remember sitting for an afternoon at my mother-in-law’s pool watching wet kids jump in and out, dripping on every towel. It wasn’t special then, it just was.

Those days are gone.

Now, when we are together every minute is on a clock, measured for value. Every moment is either greatness or wasted opportunity. I had a friend who had moved away from family once say that when you have fewer moments they are better moments because they are special. I understand that, but I’m not sure I agree. Maybe I am just being maudlin — reminded more than ever of relationships that are struggling and that I haven’t been able to cultivate — but it feels to me that the truly great relationships of my life are built on top of lots of regular moments shared. Not special events, but boring routine times when the comfort of just being allowed me to share my whole self with someone. Allowed them to say in return…

…yeah, I like who you are.

Being home for the holidays reminds me that I have fewer of those moments now with the people I love than I would like. It reminds me that I could do more to make the most of those moments. It reminds me that I am imperfect and I will, on occasion, waste those moments by playing Candy Crush or scrolling the neverending feed on Facebook. But, it also reminds me that it isn’t over. That every moment is an opportunity for a hug, a kind word, an unexpected visit or an out of nowhere message through Facebook. As long as I’m breathing I can make the most of moments.

So, what are you doing reading this? Go make a moment matter.