By CLARE MARIE CELANO
When I was a child, Sunday family dinners were a ritual, a regular occurrence, not a rarity. Think Tom Selleck’s Sunday family dinner of police officers on the TV show “Blue Bloods” – only with pasta and parmesan cheese.
After Sunday Mass, dad would battle the traffic to Jersey City or Brooklyn where our family would spend the day eating and talking at one of my grandmother’s apartments. My brother, sister and I would play with our cousins after dinner, which was followed by the consumption of wonderful Italian desserts, and when we were old enough, rich espresso coffee. It was my grandmothers’ cure for everything.
My mother carried on that Sunday tradition as we raised families of our own. She would greet us in a festive apron amid the aroma of sauce she’d cooked for hours. And, as in the family dinners of my youth, we ate, we talked and our kids’ played together. The women had a break from cooking and the guys could watch a football game without being yelled at to do something else. We were creating precious memories at those dinners. And, my mom knew that.
Until the last few years I thought mom’s desire to have her children with her for Sunday dinner was more for herself, but now I realize she did it for a much more selfless reason. She cooked, cleaned and prepped for hours for the dinner that brought her children and grandchildren to her, of course… but also to one another.
As she grew older Ma would say to me, “Stay close to one another.” She worried that once she was no longer with us, we’d drift apart. My brother has lived on the West Coast for years, my nieces and nephews also now live out of state, so even though it’s impossible for all of us to be physically close, cell phones, email and social media make contact possible. Because we lost our sister almost 20 years ago, mom felt it was even more important that my brother and I, “stay close.”
The older she got, the more fervent her wish…
My mother was the glue who kept our family together. She knew those Sunday dinners kept us close and like it or not, we were there for pasta and meatballs or chicken. It didn’t matter what else you had to do. Unless it was work, you were there on Sunday. And even if it was a hassle getting there, it was always a great time and has left not only my brother and myself with priceless memories, but our children as well.
It’s up to the next generation to carry on the traditions of their heritage but today’s lifestyle does not make it easy. It moves too fast, we work too hard, we’re just too busy…and it shows in a million different ways in our families.
The Sunday afternoon ritual dinner is a thing of the past or was until we recently all got together. Although we always get together on holidays and birthdays, it’s the regular family Sunday dinners that have been missing. And my wish is to continue the legacy my mother so beautifully crafted.
And so, like a page out of my memory bank, our recent family dinner was reminiscent of those Sunday family dinners of my younger years. I was so tempted to shake my kids at that dinner to remind them how lucky they are to have one another and remind them how important it is to stay close. Because the reality is, life goes by in the blink of an eye, the whisper of a butterfly’s wings and when the moments are there they are to be savored, enjoyed and etched in our minds and on our hearts.
Anyone over 30 knows life can surprise us in a minute. Some surprises are joyful, others intolerably sad. And so, when joy shines its light on you, you soak it up, inhale it and hold it to your heart as long as you can.
Those Sunday dinners left an indelible imprint on our hearts, and so it will be as my children make memories of their own with one another and their kids. Family is everything…
Real life is moments strung together like a strand of precious pearls, adding a pearl here and there as we go. For my family, a large part of that strand of precious pearls was, and is, made up of Sunday family dinners.
I started working on this column weeks before our recent family dinner. The night before that dinner, my daughter found a letter written by mom in 1988 while she was going through some of mom’s papers. Why mom tucked it between bills and other ephemera is beyond me. Maybe she decided we’d find it when she wanted us to. The letter, hand written on notepaper she kept in a small napkin holder on her kitchen table, was addressed to her children, then later updated to include her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her letter thanked us for taking care of her and for loving her. She told us how much she loved us and that her love for us was her legacy. She asked us to “stay close” to one another and ended the letter, “Please pray for me and daddy.” Since my dad passed on decades before, her prayer request appeared as though she assumed the letter would be found after her death.
I believe in synchronicity and this letter, for me, proves its existence. She may no longer sit at the head of our dinner table but mom is still guiding us spiritually, this time, in the form of a 20-year-old unread letter to her children.
Her message remains crystal clear, “stay close.”
