After consulting with her doctors and being told that they've done all they could do, my mother and my father have come to the mutual decision that it's time to go back home to Nevada. On their last visit, the doctors told my father that my mother had 1-2 months left to live, and my Mother wants that time to be in her own home, looking out at the snow-covered Virgin Mountains and nearby buttes.
I found out about all this when I called my Dad to ask if he'd been watching the news. Apparently, Las Vegas and the surrounding areas got smacked with a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm.... a whopping 4" of snow. My parents and I both got a chuckle out of how much of a non-story story this was, with us having lived part of our lives in Western PA, where a 4" snowstorm would be no big deal at all. It probably wouldn't even have caused a school delay. You don't want to know how bad it had to get to get school cancelled where I grew up. It had to resemble one of the icy disaster scenes out of the movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" before the superintendant of the Ligonier Valley Schools would even consider picking up the phone and cancelling school.
My Dad calmly explained to me what the doctors had said, then followed up by saying that they wanted to go back home and spend that time with each other; that they'd gotten all their crying done the night before after they'd gotten the news, and now they had a plan to move forward.
I was glad to hear that they'd gotten all their crying done. I wish I could say the same, but I'd be lying. I guess, as I sit here and type, I can't help but think and feel angry and sad that God has really let us all down here, that he's really dropped the ball on this one. I'm angry and sad that my mom never really got to enjoy her retirement, as she worked right up until she got sick; that my Dad is about to lose the love of his life, his wife of over 40 years; that my sisters and I are all going to lose our mother; and that my nieces and nephews are going to lose out on knowing their grandmother as they grow up.
I'm so sad and angry and let down right now that I am almost at a complete loss for words. I am glad, at times like these, that there are people smarter than me who have already written words (in Latin, no less) that so perfectly suit the way I feel at this moment, that all I need do is "copy and paste" them here:
(sarcastically) gratias tibi ago, domine.
haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito?
cruciatus in crucem!
cruciatus in crucem!
(dismissive hand gesture) eas in crucem!
For the sake of my Dad's sanity, I'll not bother to translate that text to English. I'm pretty sure his head would just explode if he read this in English.
So... 1-2 months they say. Well, who knows. There's a great line from the movie, "The Godfather, Part II", delivered by Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). While sitting and having a "business meeting" in his house in Reno, Michael's brother Tommy, the family consigliere, brings up that Michael's enemy, Hyman Roth is returning to the country after being denied access "to live out the twilight of his life" in his native land (Israel). Michael slyly quips, "Hyman Roth's been dying of the same heart attack for the past 20 years." Maybe 1-2 months for my mom might be longer than they think. Doctors have been known to be wrong before, and my mother enjoys nothing more than confounding doctors and proving them wrong.
With flying back to Nevada is out of the question (altitude changes causing pressure on the brain would be BAD), my sister has been attempting the colossal undertaking of putting together an Alexandria, VA to NV Amtrack train trip for my parents and for her and her husband. Since Amtrack doesn't stop in Las Vegas, the closest she can get is somewhere in Arizona, and then they'll have to take a bus to the Las Vegas airport and rent a car to get back home. While this is all happening, my parent's car will be transported from Alexandria to NV by a coast-to-coast car transport company, that is, if my sister can find one that's going that way during the holidays.
After hearing her recount her adventure in travel agent-hell, I can now understand why the nation's Governors want the Obama administration to invest some of the bailout money he'll be chucking around into fixing the infrastructure of the US. I am a huge proponent of mag-lev and other types of high-speed rail, and believe that our country would be far more efficient today if we had been keeping pace with other foreign countries and upgrading our rail system as they have been. I believe if we could easily link state-to-state, intra-state and city rail/metro systems together so that they are easy-to-use, efficient,and relatively inexpensive, a lot of our traffic and car congestion issues could be resolved. Imagine being able to go from Asheville, NC to the NC shore in a few hours by hi-speed rail. Or having a 40 minute commute from Charlotte to Chapel Hill or Durham via high-speed rail and then being able to take a metro-like rail system to get around the RDU area. That would be the shit! And imagine all the jobs that would attract!
But I digress. With all of that planning being set into motion, my sister told me that the earliest they could do this would be just after Christmas, on the 30th of December. So I am going to try to make it up to visit my Mom and Dad around Christmas before they head back out West. I will, of course, be ready to go out to Nevada at the drop of a hat if her condition takes a turn for the worse, but I do hope that my Mom disproves her doctor's predictions and that the hat doesn't drop for some time to come.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
A Come To Hospice (and Jesus) meeting....
The bad news came the other night. My mother's treatment is not working, and there was swelling on the front right side of her brain that was beginning to impair her cerebral and cerebellar functions.
This was discovered when my mother was eating dinner and realized that her left hand had taken up temporary residence in her mashed potatoes only after she had lifted the aforementioned hand up and rubbed her head. In doing so, she smeared the potatoes across her brow and head. While the picture that may paint in your mind may cause you to chuckle, my sisters, who had been staying with my mom and dad, immediately freaked out thinking that my mom had suffered a stroke, and rushed her off to the Stroke Center in DC for immediate evaluations.
As it turned out, she didn't have a stroke, but the symptoms were similar enough in nature that it was a good precaution. The doctors immediately started my mom on medication to reduce her brain swelling, but postulated that the swelling was caused by the expansion of her existing tumors. The prognosis for this is grim, and though we all still hope for a miracle, the reality of the situation is that my parents and sisters and I all agree that my mom and dad need the help of a hospice to adequately deal with this situation however it plays out.
I was the latecomer to this clan meeting. I got word of this on Wednesday night, after I spent the latter part of the day at the doctor's office, trying to figure out whether the trouble I was having breathing was caused by pleuracy, a non-diagnosed hiatal hernia, or some other unforeseen ailment. The doctor I was seeing that day, because my doctor was booked full and unable to see me, immediately jumped to the "you're fat and having a heart attack" conclusion. This only succeeded in pissing me off. I explained that I didn't think that was it, and that the pain I was experiencing was only on deep inhalation, and when I breath when laying prone, and also when I cough. Undeterred, she ordered up a EKG to make sure my heart wasn't about to explode out of my chest and muck up her tidy office. When the test came back with a perfect heart rhythm reading, I think I limited my "I told you so's" to a bare minimum, perhaps 8 or 9 at best.
The next step for her was palpation of my back and chest. Unknown to me however, was that this doctor was either a bonafide member of the undead or that she was just off in the other room with her hands in two buckets of ice. When she put her ice cold "Dukes" on my back, I nearly shot off the exam table into John's arms halfway across the room. She laughed and rubbed them together, bringing them from a frosty 20 degrees to a much balmier 22 or 23 degrees. I've heard of having ice in your veins, but she put new meaning to those words, as she kept me jumping and wriggling all over the place as she poked and prodded me with her icy digits.
I was then informed that the x-ray tech had left for the day and that I would need to come back the next day for an x-ray to check to see what might be going on in my chest. Figuring that the worst was over, I took my chart and paperwork and headed over to the labs area so that they could do some blood letting... er... blood drawing on me to see if they could find anything there. As I got there, the doctor strode up to me and added one more thing to the list, a fecal sample card pack, and I realized that I had cursed myself by thinking the worst was past and that the day could indeed get a whole lot worse.
If you've never had the pleasure of doing one of these, a fecal card pack is a multi-day test wherein you have to collect specimens of your own poop and put them on a card and send the whole lot of cards back in an envelope so they can be tested for blood or whatever else it is you can look to find in poop these days. The lab tech handed me the pack and I looked at it, mouth completely agape. I quickly asked if I could just grind one out right there for them and not have to do the collecting, spreading, letting dry, folding and mailing off business. I admit it, I'm a wuss. The idea of making teeny-tiny poop picassos on the inside of what looks like a bunch of matchbook covers just has no appeal to me whatsoever.
First off, I've not had a regular bowel movement since Bill Clinton was in office and I had my gall bladder out. I actually worry when I DO have a normal bowel movement as that's usually a sign that I'm sick or about to be sick.
Second, what does come out of there usually looks and smells like it went through New Jersey on its way out. I mean, some people say that they think their shit doesn't stink. I assure you, mine certainly does. My shit REALLY REALLY does stink! My foolishly curious dogs will push the door of the bathroom open and waltz on in when I'm trying to do my business, then get one whiff of the wolfbane I'm dropping and quickly back the hell out of the bathroom. That's gotta be a sign! I mean, if a dog thinks your shit smells so awful that they have to leave the room, well... there ya go!
Third, the idea of using a piece of a stick that's smaller and thinner than a tongue depresser to fish through the liquid loveliness that is my fecal matter holds absolutely no draw for me at all! I don't understand scat play, I never have and I can honestly say that I never will.
Lastly, I know what comes out of my butt is gross, nasty, and probably toxic on many, many levels. I know this because I've had to clean my toilet, and the chemicals I have to use to remove the lingering remains of my time spent on the porcelain throne are so powerful, bleaching and caustic that the poison warning on the label is practically as big as the product logo itself. And that's just not a good sign at all when the makers and marketers of a product feel that the poison warnings for their product should have as much real estate on the label as the name of the product itself. So my last protest against the at-home scatology painting and self-mailing lab kit was that the mailing pouch didn't look nearly sturdy enough to mail my poop anywhere safely. Come ON...it was PAPER! You definitely want a little more between my shit and the outside world than some flimsy papery envelope.
I mentioned this, apparently not too quietly to the lab tech and due to the close proximity of the office layout, most of the entire office as well. All of them, including the patients who were also within earshot, began to giggle in a rather school-girlish fashion. Great! Just great!
So yeah, I'd have definitely taken any bets at that moment that I'd hit rock bottom there, and that the day couldn't really slide/freefall any further down the abyss. Fecal collection... I mean... how much shittier can it get, right? Well.. I definitely wouldn't have beat the spread (fecal collection pun intended) on those bets, as my sister called just as I got back in the car and began driving off to get something to eat before I headed home. She called to let me know about Mom's possible stroke and to let me know that they were testing her now and they'd know more later on that evening. It was then that I knew, without a doubt, that I'd hit the bottom of the laurentian abyss that had been my day.
When I called my friends on Wednesday and Thursday to tell them what was going on with my Mom (there's a group of my friends that ask me for constant updates oon my mom), every one of them asked me if I'm alright. I've found that I have two base instinctive reactions that can happen when disasters happen, and I think this may be a "guy thing" too. I can either throw my hands up in the air, scream, yell, wail and cry, or I can "fuck shit up", which is wherein I take something/anything and just slam it against a wall, a tree, the side of the house, etc., til it's just splinters. Though both of these usually makes me feel better, the first really doesn't do much of anything positive except burn calories, and the second makes me wish I had better property insurance after I calm down and realize that the "insert destroyed object" cost "$xxx.xx" dollars and destroying it was just stupid. It's definitely a guy thing!
I got my chest x-ray the next day (Thursday) and then, that evening, got the news from my sister that what my mom had wasn't a stroke, but brain swelling that was causing my mom's symptoms. John and I discussed my options and I decided that, sick or not, I was going to go up to visit. I called my coworker and told her what was happening and she told me not to worry about whatever I was working on, that it would get done and that I was to go be with my mom. My boss, whom I called as I drove up today, said much the same thing, adding that everyone in my workgroup thoughts were with my mom and me and my family.
When I got to my parents sublet in Alexandria, I got to see a familiar sight, my parents forcing food on my siblings, and then onto me even before I was able to set down my bags and greet everyone. This ritual is one my partner never fails to make light of. This stems from the time we'd taken a trip to PA to visit my folks when they lived in Latrobe. We'd driven up there one night after work and had arrived there around 5 am, and, despite the hour and the fact that we'd been driving for 10-12 hours, my parents got up to greet us at the door and to tell us that they'd made some chili for us, and to ask would we like some? John just looked at my parents as if they'd just done something really, really disturbing and then, shaking his head in disbelief, toddled off to bed. I, of course, had some chili, and then went off to bed. Having been raised by them, I'm nothing if not well-trained when it comes to that kinda stuff.
So, as the early evening wore on, all of my sisters showed up, and, like kids waiting for Santa Claus, we began to wait for the "Hospice Lady" to make her appearance. While we waited, we threw in a copy of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" and my parents watched incredulously as my sisters and I recited the entire show, verbatim... in chorus; pointing out our favorite parts of the show as they passed. I remarked on the eerie similarity in looks between John and the Grinch in several places during the show. most notably when he was grousing about the Whoos to his dog Max, and again when he began to smile "a smile most unpleasant" as he watched the Whoo children asleep with their candy canes (right before he stole them.) My sisters goggled at me for a second and then began to laugh and point at the screen and say, "oh my God, he really DOES look like John!" There's more than one reason we named our dog Max.
The Hospice Lady showed up and went through the whole spiel on what all was entailed with the hospice and hospice-care and then got the paperwork going for my mom's enrollment. My mother's doctor, Dr. Kressel called the Hospice Lady to confirm all the facts with her and in doing so, inadvertently upset both my mom and my dad when she relayed out-loud his rather grim prognosis for my mom, which is necessary to get the hospice care going. After my sister walked the Hospeice Lady back to her car, thanking her for the housecall, she and my other sisters began to explain to my parents that it wasn't a death sentence, but only his estimation, and that it might be completely off the mark.
My Dad, God love him, refuses to believe anything but the best will happen, and predicts my Mom will still beat this back. I quietly asked my sisters if they thought he could see the pyramids and Sphynx from his vantage point in de Nile (sic).
The rest of our evening was spent having a really, really fascinating conversation about the state of our family; how the way our family works positively impacts the new family members (i.e. spouses, daughters, sons, cousins, aunts, uncles, mother and fathers-in-law, etc., and how proud we all are of the way our family has stayed so tightly together through the years in contrast to other branches of our family who have splintered off.
I have to admit that I know where my Dad's coming from with his unflappable optimism (aka Denial), as part of me is seeing the pyramids just as clearly. There's that part of me that believes it could happen, too. I mean, I keep thinking to myself that, in a world where the son of a lowly carpenter can become the King of the Jews, anything is possible.
This was discovered when my mother was eating dinner and realized that her left hand had taken up temporary residence in her mashed potatoes only after she had lifted the aforementioned hand up and rubbed her head. In doing so, she smeared the potatoes across her brow and head. While the picture that may paint in your mind may cause you to chuckle, my sisters, who had been staying with my mom and dad, immediately freaked out thinking that my mom had suffered a stroke, and rushed her off to the Stroke Center in DC for immediate evaluations.
As it turned out, she didn't have a stroke, but the symptoms were similar enough in nature that it was a good precaution. The doctors immediately started my mom on medication to reduce her brain swelling, but postulated that the swelling was caused by the expansion of her existing tumors. The prognosis for this is grim, and though we all still hope for a miracle, the reality of the situation is that my parents and sisters and I all agree that my mom and dad need the help of a hospice to adequately deal with this situation however it plays out.
I was the latecomer to this clan meeting. I got word of this on Wednesday night, after I spent the latter part of the day at the doctor's office, trying to figure out whether the trouble I was having breathing was caused by pleuracy, a non-diagnosed hiatal hernia, or some other unforeseen ailment. The doctor I was seeing that day, because my doctor was booked full and unable to see me, immediately jumped to the "you're fat and having a heart attack" conclusion. This only succeeded in pissing me off. I explained that I didn't think that was it, and that the pain I was experiencing was only on deep inhalation, and when I breath when laying prone, and also when I cough. Undeterred, she ordered up a EKG to make sure my heart wasn't about to explode out of my chest and muck up her tidy office. When the test came back with a perfect heart rhythm reading, I think I limited my "I told you so's" to a bare minimum, perhaps 8 or 9 at best.
The next step for her was palpation of my back and chest. Unknown to me however, was that this doctor was either a bonafide member of the undead or that she was just off in the other room with her hands in two buckets of ice. When she put her ice cold "Dukes" on my back, I nearly shot off the exam table into John's arms halfway across the room. She laughed and rubbed them together, bringing them from a frosty 20 degrees to a much balmier 22 or 23 degrees. I've heard of having ice in your veins, but she put new meaning to those words, as she kept me jumping and wriggling all over the place as she poked and prodded me with her icy digits.
I was then informed that the x-ray tech had left for the day and that I would need to come back the next day for an x-ray to check to see what might be going on in my chest. Figuring that the worst was over, I took my chart and paperwork and headed over to the labs area so that they could do some blood letting... er... blood drawing on me to see if they could find anything there. As I got there, the doctor strode up to me and added one more thing to the list, a fecal sample card pack, and I realized that I had cursed myself by thinking the worst was past and that the day could indeed get a whole lot worse.
If you've never had the pleasure of doing one of these, a fecal card pack is a multi-day test wherein you have to collect specimens of your own poop and put them on a card and send the whole lot of cards back in an envelope so they can be tested for blood or whatever else it is you can look to find in poop these days. The lab tech handed me the pack and I looked at it, mouth completely agape. I quickly asked if I could just grind one out right there for them and not have to do the collecting, spreading, letting dry, folding and mailing off business. I admit it, I'm a wuss. The idea of making teeny-tiny poop picassos on the inside of what looks like a bunch of matchbook covers just has no appeal to me whatsoever.
First off, I've not had a regular bowel movement since Bill Clinton was in office and I had my gall bladder out. I actually worry when I DO have a normal bowel movement as that's usually a sign that I'm sick or about to be sick.
Second, what does come out of there usually looks and smells like it went through New Jersey on its way out. I mean, some people say that they think their shit doesn't stink. I assure you, mine certainly does. My shit REALLY REALLY does stink! My foolishly curious dogs will push the door of the bathroom open and waltz on in when I'm trying to do my business, then get one whiff of the wolfbane I'm dropping and quickly back the hell out of the bathroom. That's gotta be a sign! I mean, if a dog thinks your shit smells so awful that they have to leave the room, well... there ya go!
Third, the idea of using a piece of a stick that's smaller and thinner than a tongue depresser to fish through the liquid loveliness that is my fecal matter holds absolutely no draw for me at all! I don't understand scat play, I never have and I can honestly say that I never will.
Lastly, I know what comes out of my butt is gross, nasty, and probably toxic on many, many levels. I know this because I've had to clean my toilet, and the chemicals I have to use to remove the lingering remains of my time spent on the porcelain throne are so powerful, bleaching and caustic that the poison warning on the label is practically as big as the product logo itself. And that's just not a good sign at all when the makers and marketers of a product feel that the poison warnings for their product should have as much real estate on the label as the name of the product itself. So my last protest against the at-home scatology painting and self-mailing lab kit was that the mailing pouch didn't look nearly sturdy enough to mail my poop anywhere safely. Come ON...it was PAPER! You definitely want a little more between my shit and the outside world than some flimsy papery envelope.
I mentioned this, apparently not too quietly to the lab tech and due to the close proximity of the office layout, most of the entire office as well. All of them, including the patients who were also within earshot, began to giggle in a rather school-girlish fashion. Great! Just great!
So yeah, I'd have definitely taken any bets at that moment that I'd hit rock bottom there, and that the day couldn't really slide/freefall any further down the abyss. Fecal collection... I mean... how much shittier can it get, right? Well.. I definitely wouldn't have beat the spread (fecal collection pun intended) on those bets, as my sister called just as I got back in the car and began driving off to get something to eat before I headed home. She called to let me know about Mom's possible stroke and to let me know that they were testing her now and they'd know more later on that evening. It was then that I knew, without a doubt, that I'd hit the bottom of the laurentian abyss that had been my day.
When I called my friends on Wednesday and Thursday to tell them what was going on with my Mom (there's a group of my friends that ask me for constant updates oon my mom), every one of them asked me if I'm alright. I've found that I have two base instinctive reactions that can happen when disasters happen, and I think this may be a "guy thing" too. I can either throw my hands up in the air, scream, yell, wail and cry, or I can "fuck shit up", which is wherein I take something/anything and just slam it against a wall, a tree, the side of the house, etc., til it's just splinters. Though both of these usually makes me feel better, the first really doesn't do much of anything positive except burn calories, and the second makes me wish I had better property insurance after I calm down and realize that the "insert destroyed object" cost "$xxx.xx" dollars and destroying it was just stupid. It's definitely a guy thing!
I got my chest x-ray the next day (Thursday) and then, that evening, got the news from my sister that what my mom had wasn't a stroke, but brain swelling that was causing my mom's symptoms. John and I discussed my options and I decided that, sick or not, I was going to go up to visit. I called my coworker and told her what was happening and she told me not to worry about whatever I was working on, that it would get done and that I was to go be with my mom. My boss, whom I called as I drove up today, said much the same thing, adding that everyone in my workgroup thoughts were with my mom and me and my family.
When I got to my parents sublet in Alexandria, I got to see a familiar sight, my parents forcing food on my siblings, and then onto me even before I was able to set down my bags and greet everyone. This ritual is one my partner never fails to make light of. This stems from the time we'd taken a trip to PA to visit my folks when they lived in Latrobe. We'd driven up there one night after work and had arrived there around 5 am, and, despite the hour and the fact that we'd been driving for 10-12 hours, my parents got up to greet us at the door and to tell us that they'd made some chili for us, and to ask would we like some? John just looked at my parents as if they'd just done something really, really disturbing and then, shaking his head in disbelief, toddled off to bed. I, of course, had some chili, and then went off to bed. Having been raised by them, I'm nothing if not well-trained when it comes to that kinda stuff.
So, as the early evening wore on, all of my sisters showed up, and, like kids waiting for Santa Claus, we began to wait for the "Hospice Lady" to make her appearance. While we waited, we threw in a copy of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" and my parents watched incredulously as my sisters and I recited the entire show, verbatim... in chorus; pointing out our favorite parts of the show as they passed. I remarked on the eerie similarity in looks between John and the Grinch in several places during the show. most notably when he was grousing about the Whoos to his dog Max, and again when he began to smile "a smile most unpleasant" as he watched the Whoo children asleep with their candy canes (right before he stole them.) My sisters goggled at me for a second and then began to laugh and point at the screen and say, "oh my God, he really DOES look like John!" There's more than one reason we named our dog Max.
The Hospice Lady showed up and went through the whole spiel on what all was entailed with the hospice and hospice-care and then got the paperwork going for my mom's enrollment. My mother's doctor, Dr. Kressel called the Hospice Lady to confirm all the facts with her and in doing so, inadvertently upset both my mom and my dad when she relayed out-loud his rather grim prognosis for my mom, which is necessary to get the hospice care going. After my sister walked the Hospeice Lady back to her car, thanking her for the housecall, she and my other sisters began to explain to my parents that it wasn't a death sentence, but only his estimation, and that it might be completely off the mark.
My Dad, God love him, refuses to believe anything but the best will happen, and predicts my Mom will still beat this back. I quietly asked my sisters if they thought he could see the pyramids and Sphynx from his vantage point in de Nile (sic).
The rest of our evening was spent having a really, really fascinating conversation about the state of our family; how the way our family works positively impacts the new family members (i.e. spouses, daughters, sons, cousins, aunts, uncles, mother and fathers-in-law, etc., and how proud we all are of the way our family has stayed so tightly together through the years in contrast to other branches of our family who have splintered off.
I have to admit that I know where my Dad's coming from with his unflappable optimism (aka Denial), as part of me is seeing the pyramids just as clearly. There's that part of me that believes it could happen, too. I mean, I keep thinking to myself that, in a world where the son of a lowly carpenter can become the King of the Jews, anything is possible.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Longing For Christmas Past (Reprint)
I wrote this a few years back for my family, and, in a nice surprise, had a few newspapers contact me about printing this at Christmastime. My folks asked me to put it somewhere on the web where they could send people to read it.
Enjoy!
Enjoy!
Longing For Christmas Past
I remember when I was ten years old. Christmas seemed so much more intimate, so steeped in tradition and family. There were the many activities and events that led up to the Christmas Holiday, like going to church during advent, and watching as one by one, the four advent candles were lit. I remember going to sit on Santa’s lap at the volunteer fire hall just down the road from our house in Wilpen, P.A., and then, days later, writing that last minute letter to Santa Claus to ask for any important gifts I’d forgotten to ask for when I sat on his knee. Back in those days, I gave the letter to my mom and dad who promised to check it for spelling errors, (wow… was I ever gullible!), then they’d take me into town to drop off the letter in the huge “letters for Santa” mailbox in front of the town hall on the Ligonier Diamond.
I also vividly remember all pre-holiday baking that got done a day or two before Christmas Eve. I remember watching as Grandma would mix together rice and beef, boil cabbage heads to loosen and separate the leaves, then roll out casserole after casserole full of halupki. She would then mix together batch after batch of yeasty dough to roll out on the counter into long sheets which she would then fill and roll into kolacky rolls. I remember her whole house would smell of the heady aroma of bakery goods for hours, almost days after she baked.
Those are just a few of the many memorable little details that made the time leading up to the big two day Christmas holiday magical all unto itself. Why do I call it a two-day holiday? Well, because I'm Slovak-American and Christmas Eve is just as much a holiday to us Slovak-Americans as is Christmas Day.
Christmas Eve started early for me back then, and by early, I mean it started off really, really early! At some point just as the barest hint of dawn began to lighten the dark winter sky in the east, Dad would wake me up and help my clumsy, still half-asleep little body get dressed in all my heavy winter clothes. He would then push me out the back door of the house so that I could start the day off by fulfilling an old Slovak Christmas Eve tradition. Let me explain the concept behind the tradition here so that you can gain a better understanding about why anyone would wake a young kid up, throw some clothes on him and toss him out of the house into the pre-dawn chill of Christmas Eve morning.
The old Slovak tradition of “vins” dictates that a young man or shepherd would call from house-to-house making his Christmas wish or "vins" to all in the household:
On this glorious feast of the birthday of Christ our Lord,
I wish you from God, good health, happiness and abundant blessings.
May it be yours to enjoy comfort from your children,
salvation for your soul, the kingdom of heaven after death,
and for the family's welfare, may you have whatever you ask of God.
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok -- Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Now the tradition that my family and most of my neighborhood prescribed to, however, had changed slightly, altering through either some odd Americanization of the original Slovak tradition or just from the lunacy of the old Slovak ladies in my neighborhood. The newly modified, updated tradition of my neighborhood stood thusly, "Young Slovak-American males are to be awoken in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning, dressed warmly and tossed outside into the biting cold of the Western Pennsylvania wintertime where they are expected to take on the role of the “shepherd” traversing the neighborhood knocking on the doors of their Slovak-American neighbors (read as the aforementioned loony old Slovak ladies) and wishing them a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Did you happen to note the "Slovak males" part of the tradition? It's there for a reason, let me assure you. It is considered the height of bad luck for a woman to be the first person to come to your house on Christmas Eve. (I mean it's that kind of terrible “breaking a mirror while holding an umbrella open inside the house while walking under a ladder all at the same time” kind of bad luck!)
Sounds kind of sexist, doesn’t it? Well yeah. It is sexist, but hey, it's tradition! My grandmother is famed to have screamed at my mother through her kitchen window one Christmas Eve morning that she wouldn't let her into the house until a man could come to do the Christmas Eve blessing.
Of course, it’s not as not as if there isn’t any benefit in this for the young Slovak-American males as they fend of a sure bout of hypothermia schlepping all over the hell’s half-acre upholding this tradition. The old ladies in the neighborhood really took this blessing stuff seriously, and were more than happy to make with the cash handouts. A speedy route of a neighborhood like mine could net about $20 or $30, which, back in those days, to a ten year old, was a pretty good haul.
After that, the day went on fairly uneventfully. Christmas Eve is a day of fasting for Slovaks, so after I finished my freezing pre-dawn tour of the neighborhood, I’d head home and then hang around with my family as we would continue our fasting and preparing for the traditional Christmas Eve supper that was held at my Grandma's house. Around about 4 or 5 PM, we'd all walk up to her house and start getting ready for the "meatless dinner" that was traditional for a Slovak Christmas Eve celebration. The meal would consist of fish, usually highly breaded baked crispy fish sticks that bore absolutely no resemblance to fish. Getting my sisters and I to willingly eat fish when we were kids was only slightly easier than teaching a herd of elephants how to pirouette gracefully. Also on the evening’s menu were pierogies, peas, beets, stewed prunes, mashed potatoes, and brown sauerkraut gravy. There would also be kolacky, the Slovak pastry rolls my grandma usually made a day or two before, with different fillings such as ground walnuts, apricot, poppyseed, prune butter or pineapple.
At the start of the meal, each family member would be given a piece of Oplatki. Oplatki is a thin rectangle of unleavened bread that can come either in white or in various pastel colors. It usually is pressed into a mold when it’s made so that the side is embossed with a intricate and beautiful Christmas scene. The Oplatki is served with honey at the beginning of the meal along with a blessing. My grandmother would always do this blessing and I think that this, above all, was the main reason that she was so beloved by all the dogs that we had owned during my childhood. She would take some of the food, usually a spoonful of peas and throw them over her shoulder as the blessing or offering for "the birds and the animals of the forest." Apparently, our two dogs, Porky and Ebony qualified as the aforementioned “birds and animals of the forest" and they usually waited behind her like black and tan shadows, sucking up the fallen food like little 4-legged vacuum cleaners.
After dinner, we would go into Grandma's living room and open our Christmas presents. Now, there are Christmas purists that say you should wait until Christmas Day to open presents, but our family usually got "church clothes" for Christmas and opening them early on Christmas Eve ensured that we'd be wearing them later on for Midnight mass. After presents were opened at Grandma's house, we'd head back down the hill to our house (we lived next door to Grandma in those days) and go to bed to get in a nap so that we would be awake and alert at midnight mass.
Around about 10 o'clock in the evening, Dad would go off and start getting ready for midnight mass. Mom would hustle us into our rooms and get my sisters and I started on getting into our clothes for church. About 11 o'clock, Dad would tell me to go and get my Grandma and I would go up to her house and walk her down the path to our house. We lived in Western PA and it was usually either icy or snowy at Christmastime, usually both. I escorted Grandma down the walk between our two houses under the glass half full pretense that, had she slipped, her holding on to me would stop her from falling. But let's face facts, I was a small kid at ten years old, and, had she fallen down, that old woman would certainly have taken me right down with her. Dad would go outside and brush the snow and ice off of the car, then heat it up and we'd be heading off to St. Anne's Church in Wilpen, PA, a little over a mile or so from our house.
St. Anne's is a beautiful little Catholic church way out in the country. It is built at the base of a very, very steep hill. I honestly never realized how steep it was until I was one of four pallbearers at my Grandma's funeral just a few years ago. I thought briefly I might be joining her in the grave after nearly having a heart attack getting her casket up to the the cemetery at the top of that steep hill. Aside from the hill, there's a nice graded cement sidewalk with three small flights of steps that runs from the gravel parking lot up to the back of the church, where the doors to enter are located. During the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve, when we arrived thirty minutes before mass, before anyone could come and salt this sidewalk down, this trek was always particularly treacherous. I can remember many times that I wound up slipping and falling on my butt on this slick stretch of concrete sidewalk.
We would aim to arrive at church by 11:30 PM, easily a half-hour or more early, so that Grandma could say her rosary. Not that you would ever want to, but if ever you wanted to get Grandma really good and angry with you, try getting her to church without her allotted thirty minute rosary and prayer time. She was definitely a woman who took her pre-mass prayer seriously.
Inside, the church had 2 sets of about 20 rows of pews separated by the wide aisle that ran down the middle of the church. Women and young children sat on the left, and men on the right. I am unsure if this really was tradition, or just Grandpa's clever way of getting away from Grandma for an hour or so. Since nearly all the old men and women sat on separate sides, I always just assumed it was yet another one of those Slovak/Catholic traditions. I remember the many times I’d sit next to my Grandma and listen to her and Mary Miney, one of her many church bingo buddies, say their rosaries. Those two old women were “power prayers”. They could zoom through a rosary so fast that all you'd hear were hisses from rapidly whispered S's in the “Hail Mary’s and “Our Father’s.”
One Christmas Eve mass that I remember very well, my mother had decided to come along with us to midnight Mass. Mom was Methodist and didn't usually come to our church so this made it an unusual Christmas Eve indeed. The mass started out in the usual way with the priest entering from the back of the church and swinging ‘round the frankincense censor with such vigor that, if had he’d misjudged the chain length even a little, he’d have taken out the people standing in their pews who were next to the center aisle. Once to the altar, the priest passed the still-smoking censor off to the nearest altar boy, turned and welcomed us all to the church, wished us a Merry Christmas and began the liturgical part of the mass. Mass went on fairly routinely until communion, and then it went South in a hurry. As the people began to line up down the aisle and the priest began to dole out the hosts to them, the choir decided that it would be a good time to have a violin and vocal rendition of Ave Maria. Unfortunately, due to either poor planning or utter tone deafness, no one had thought to tune the violin beforehand, and so it was completely off pitch. In addition to this, the violinist was apparently a novice or really out of practice and would squeak the bow across the strings every few notes or so.
As the squeaky off-key intro to the song played out, the ridiculousness of the entire situation overwhelmed me and I began to giggle uncontrollably. Usually in church, a swift elbow to the side from my Grandma would have stopped any errant giggling, as the Catholic mass back those days was certainly no place for irreverent amusement. However, on that unusual Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sitting next to Grandma, I was sitting next to Mom and she too was also trying hard to hold back her own giggles brought about by the awful, squeaky off-key playing.
As the intro ended, the choir leader Anna Thomas, an older lady who possessed an amazingly powerful and penetrating voice, began to sing… very loudly and, unfortunately, very off-key. Now whether she sang off-key by accident or on purpose so that she would be in tune with the off-key violin accompaniment I’ll probably never know, but it was at that point that my mother, my three sisters and I all dissolved into semi-silent laughter, pushing into each other; hissing and shaking with barely controlled mirth. My Grandmother was livid, glaring over at us from the other end of the pew as if silently hoping and praying that the God that killed Cain and squashed Sampson would get back to work on us for our making merry in His church on Christmas Eve. Mass ended shortly afterwards and, on the walk back to the car and during the entire car ride back to the house, we got long and rather stern lectured from Grandma about not being "simple" in the house of God.
Come to think of it, I was always really good at being “simple.” I am (or was) apparently naturally talented in that particular area. I'm pretty sure that, unless my younger cousin Matthew beat me out, my Grandma probably told me I was being “simple” more often than anyone else in my entire family.
When we got home, we would all get out of our church clothes, wash up and head off to bed. Christmas Day would see us getting up and having the big Christmas dinner at our house around two in the afternoon. After dinner, we'd all laze around and watch television, nap or play with our Christmas presents.
As I write this account and think back on all those happy memories, I find myself feeling somewhat sadly nostalgic for those long ago days. I can't help but mourn the loss of those long-held traditions that my family and indeed, our whole neighborhood, celebrated back in those days. I feel terribly sad for the next generation of my family, and of Slovak-Americans in general who will never experience that facet of their heritage because of our current generation's loss of the knowledge about, or downright indifference towards, all the old Slovak traditions we celebrated when we were growing up.
As odd as it may seem, I know that if I were offered the choice of a million dollars cash or the chance to go back in time, to be that ten-year old kid again and be able to re-live that one Christmas, I would choose the latter without even a second's hesitation.
To be able to once more experience Christmas with my family; to once more be awakened by my dad before the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve and get tossed outside into the cold to walk the neighborhood and bring good luck to the loony old Slovak ladies by bestowing holiday vins…
To once more be able to be in my grandmother’s house to smell the delicious odors of her baking all the old Slovak food, and then sit with my family at Grandma's table for Christmas Eve dinner and watch her throw the peas over her shoulder…
Or to once more take that hazardous trek to Midnight Mass at St. Anne's Church and listen to those old women speed through their rosaries and then laugh with my mom and my sisters at the squeaky violin playing and off-key singing during communion.
Yeah, that’d be worth a million bucks. Heck, I think it’d be worth that and a whole lot more!
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok!
(Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!)
I also vividly remember all pre-holiday baking that got done a day or two before Christmas Eve. I remember watching as Grandma would mix together rice and beef, boil cabbage heads to loosen and separate the leaves, then roll out casserole after casserole full of halupki. She would then mix together batch after batch of yeasty dough to roll out on the counter into long sheets which she would then fill and roll into kolacky rolls. I remember her whole house would smell of the heady aroma of bakery goods for hours, almost days after she baked.
Those are just a few of the many memorable little details that made the time leading up to the big two day Christmas holiday magical all unto itself. Why do I call it a two-day holiday? Well, because I'm Slovak-American and Christmas Eve is just as much a holiday to us Slovak-Americans as is Christmas Day.
Christmas Eve started early for me back then, and by early, I mean it started off really, really early! At some point just as the barest hint of dawn began to lighten the dark winter sky in the east, Dad would wake me up and help my clumsy, still half-asleep little body get dressed in all my heavy winter clothes. He would then push me out the back door of the house so that I could start the day off by fulfilling an old Slovak Christmas Eve tradition. Let me explain the concept behind the tradition here so that you can gain a better understanding about why anyone would wake a young kid up, throw some clothes on him and toss him out of the house into the pre-dawn chill of Christmas Eve morning.
The old Slovak tradition of “vins” dictates that a young man or shepherd would call from house-to-house making his Christmas wish or "vins" to all in the household:
On this glorious feast of the birthday of Christ our Lord,
I wish you from God, good health, happiness and abundant blessings.
May it be yours to enjoy comfort from your children,
salvation for your soul, the kingdom of heaven after death,
and for the family's welfare, may you have whatever you ask of God.
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok -- Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Now the tradition that my family and most of my neighborhood prescribed to, however, had changed slightly, altering through either some odd Americanization of the original Slovak tradition or just from the lunacy of the old Slovak ladies in my neighborhood. The newly modified, updated tradition of my neighborhood stood thusly, "Young Slovak-American males are to be awoken in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning, dressed warmly and tossed outside into the biting cold of the Western Pennsylvania wintertime where they are expected to take on the role of the “shepherd” traversing the neighborhood knocking on the doors of their Slovak-American neighbors (read as the aforementioned loony old Slovak ladies) and wishing them a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"
Did you happen to note the "Slovak males" part of the tradition? It's there for a reason, let me assure you. It is considered the height of bad luck for a woman to be the first person to come to your house on Christmas Eve. (I mean it's that kind of terrible “breaking a mirror while holding an umbrella open inside the house while walking under a ladder all at the same time” kind of bad luck!)
Sounds kind of sexist, doesn’t it? Well yeah. It is sexist, but hey, it's tradition! My grandmother is famed to have screamed at my mother through her kitchen window one Christmas Eve morning that she wouldn't let her into the house until a man could come to do the Christmas Eve blessing.
Of course, it’s not as not as if there isn’t any benefit in this for the young Slovak-American males as they fend of a sure bout of hypothermia schlepping all over the hell’s half-acre upholding this tradition. The old ladies in the neighborhood really took this blessing stuff seriously, and were more than happy to make with the cash handouts. A speedy route of a neighborhood like mine could net about $20 or $30, which, back in those days, to a ten year old, was a pretty good haul.
After that, the day went on fairly uneventfully. Christmas Eve is a day of fasting for Slovaks, so after I finished my freezing pre-dawn tour of the neighborhood, I’d head home and then hang around with my family as we would continue our fasting and preparing for the traditional Christmas Eve supper that was held at my Grandma's house. Around about 4 or 5 PM, we'd all walk up to her house and start getting ready for the "meatless dinner" that was traditional for a Slovak Christmas Eve celebration. The meal would consist of fish, usually highly breaded baked crispy fish sticks that bore absolutely no resemblance to fish. Getting my sisters and I to willingly eat fish when we were kids was only slightly easier than teaching a herd of elephants how to pirouette gracefully. Also on the evening’s menu were pierogies, peas, beets, stewed prunes, mashed potatoes, and brown sauerkraut gravy. There would also be kolacky, the Slovak pastry rolls my grandma usually made a day or two before, with different fillings such as ground walnuts, apricot, poppyseed, prune butter or pineapple.
At the start of the meal, each family member would be given a piece of Oplatki. Oplatki is a thin rectangle of unleavened bread that can come either in white or in various pastel colors. It usually is pressed into a mold when it’s made so that the side is embossed with a intricate and beautiful Christmas scene. The Oplatki is served with honey at the beginning of the meal along with a blessing. My grandmother would always do this blessing and I think that this, above all, was the main reason that she was so beloved by all the dogs that we had owned during my childhood. She would take some of the food, usually a spoonful of peas and throw them over her shoulder as the blessing or offering for "the birds and the animals of the forest." Apparently, our two dogs, Porky and Ebony qualified as the aforementioned “birds and animals of the forest" and they usually waited behind her like black and tan shadows, sucking up the fallen food like little 4-legged vacuum cleaners.
After dinner, we would go into Grandma's living room and open our Christmas presents. Now, there are Christmas purists that say you should wait until Christmas Day to open presents, but our family usually got "church clothes" for Christmas and opening them early on Christmas Eve ensured that we'd be wearing them later on for Midnight mass. After presents were opened at Grandma's house, we'd head back down the hill to our house (we lived next door to Grandma in those days) and go to bed to get in a nap so that we would be awake and alert at midnight mass.
Around about 10 o'clock in the evening, Dad would go off and start getting ready for midnight mass. Mom would hustle us into our rooms and get my sisters and I started on getting into our clothes for church. About 11 o'clock, Dad would tell me to go and get my Grandma and I would go up to her house and walk her down the path to our house. We lived in Western PA and it was usually either icy or snowy at Christmastime, usually both. I escorted Grandma down the walk between our two houses under the glass half full pretense that, had she slipped, her holding on to me would stop her from falling. But let's face facts, I was a small kid at ten years old, and, had she fallen down, that old woman would certainly have taken me right down with her. Dad would go outside and brush the snow and ice off of the car, then heat it up and we'd be heading off to St. Anne's Church in Wilpen, PA, a little over a mile or so from our house.
St. Anne's is a beautiful little Catholic church way out in the country. It is built at the base of a very, very steep hill. I honestly never realized how steep it was until I was one of four pallbearers at my Grandma's funeral just a few years ago. I thought briefly I might be joining her in the grave after nearly having a heart attack getting her casket up to the the cemetery at the top of that steep hill. Aside from the hill, there's a nice graded cement sidewalk with three small flights of steps that runs from the gravel parking lot up to the back of the church, where the doors to enter are located. During the winter, and especially on Christmas Eve, when we arrived thirty minutes before mass, before anyone could come and salt this sidewalk down, this trek was always particularly treacherous. I can remember many times that I wound up slipping and falling on my butt on this slick stretch of concrete sidewalk.
We would aim to arrive at church by 11:30 PM, easily a half-hour or more early, so that Grandma could say her rosary. Not that you would ever want to, but if ever you wanted to get Grandma really good and angry with you, try getting her to church without her allotted thirty minute rosary and prayer time. She was definitely a woman who took her pre-mass prayer seriously.
Inside, the church had 2 sets of about 20 rows of pews separated by the wide aisle that ran down the middle of the church. Women and young children sat on the left, and men on the right. I am unsure if this really was tradition, or just Grandpa's clever way of getting away from Grandma for an hour or so. Since nearly all the old men and women sat on separate sides, I always just assumed it was yet another one of those Slovak/Catholic traditions. I remember the many times I’d sit next to my Grandma and listen to her and Mary Miney, one of her many church bingo buddies, say their rosaries. Those two old women were “power prayers”. They could zoom through a rosary so fast that all you'd hear were hisses from rapidly whispered S's in the “Hail Mary’s and “Our Father’s.”
One Christmas Eve mass that I remember very well, my mother had decided to come along with us to midnight Mass. Mom was Methodist and didn't usually come to our church so this made it an unusual Christmas Eve indeed. The mass started out in the usual way with the priest entering from the back of the church and swinging ‘round the frankincense censor with such vigor that, if had he’d misjudged the chain length even a little, he’d have taken out the people standing in their pews who were next to the center aisle. Once to the altar, the priest passed the still-smoking censor off to the nearest altar boy, turned and welcomed us all to the church, wished us a Merry Christmas and began the liturgical part of the mass. Mass went on fairly routinely until communion, and then it went South in a hurry. As the people began to line up down the aisle and the priest began to dole out the hosts to them, the choir decided that it would be a good time to have a violin and vocal rendition of Ave Maria. Unfortunately, due to either poor planning or utter tone deafness, no one had thought to tune the violin beforehand, and so it was completely off pitch. In addition to this, the violinist was apparently a novice or really out of practice and would squeak the bow across the strings every few notes or so.
As the squeaky off-key intro to the song played out, the ridiculousness of the entire situation overwhelmed me and I began to giggle uncontrollably. Usually in church, a swift elbow to the side from my Grandma would have stopped any errant giggling, as the Catholic mass back those days was certainly no place for irreverent amusement. However, on that unusual Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sitting next to Grandma, I was sitting next to Mom and she too was also trying hard to hold back her own giggles brought about by the awful, squeaky off-key playing.
As the intro ended, the choir leader Anna Thomas, an older lady who possessed an amazingly powerful and penetrating voice, began to sing… very loudly and, unfortunately, very off-key. Now whether she sang off-key by accident or on purpose so that she would be in tune with the off-key violin accompaniment I’ll probably never know, but it was at that point that my mother, my three sisters and I all dissolved into semi-silent laughter, pushing into each other; hissing and shaking with barely controlled mirth. My Grandmother was livid, glaring over at us from the other end of the pew as if silently hoping and praying that the God that killed Cain and squashed Sampson would get back to work on us for our making merry in His church on Christmas Eve. Mass ended shortly afterwards and, on the walk back to the car and during the entire car ride back to the house, we got long and rather stern lectured from Grandma about not being "simple" in the house of God.
Come to think of it, I was always really good at being “simple.” I am (or was) apparently naturally talented in that particular area. I'm pretty sure that, unless my younger cousin Matthew beat me out, my Grandma probably told me I was being “simple” more often than anyone else in my entire family.
When we got home, we would all get out of our church clothes, wash up and head off to bed. Christmas Day would see us getting up and having the big Christmas dinner at our house around two in the afternoon. After dinner, we'd all laze around and watch television, nap or play with our Christmas presents.
As I write this account and think back on all those happy memories, I find myself feeling somewhat sadly nostalgic for those long ago days. I can't help but mourn the loss of those long-held traditions that my family and indeed, our whole neighborhood, celebrated back in those days. I feel terribly sad for the next generation of my family, and of Slovak-Americans in general who will never experience that facet of their heritage because of our current generation's loss of the knowledge about, or downright indifference towards, all the old Slovak traditions we celebrated when we were growing up.
As odd as it may seem, I know that if I were offered the choice of a million dollars cash or the chance to go back in time, to be that ten-year old kid again and be able to re-live that one Christmas, I would choose the latter without even a second's hesitation.
To be able to once more experience Christmas with my family; to once more be awakened by my dad before the crack of dawn on Christmas Eve and get tossed outside into the cold to walk the neighborhood and bring good luck to the loony old Slovak ladies by bestowing holiday vins…
To once more be able to be in my grandmother’s house to smell the delicious odors of her baking all the old Slovak food, and then sit with my family at Grandma's table for Christmas Eve dinner and watch her throw the peas over her shoulder…
Or to once more take that hazardous trek to Midnight Mass at St. Anne's Church and listen to those old women speed through their rosaries and then laugh with my mom and my sisters at the squeaky violin playing and off-key singing during communion.
Yeah, that’d be worth a million bucks. Heck, I think it’d be worth that and a whole lot more!
Vesele Vianoce a Stastlivy Novy Rok!
(Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!)
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