We can fit all of our clothes, assorted house plants, books, a dog and some kitchen paraphernalia into his Toyota Station Wagon and my VW Bug. We have no furniture to speak of, apart from two bent wood rockers and three gigantic stuffed floor pillows from the Prize Department of Truth or Consequences, where Mark is working. We are moving to our first house!
For little over a year, we’ve been renting in Laurel Canyon from Jeanne, the contestant coordinator of the show. She tells us about a friend of hers who is getting married and moving cross country to Michigan and needs to lighten up.
Her name is Lyda Tong. She invites us into her Park La Brea apartment this evening to look at what she wants to sell. It’s 1973. Lyda is seventy eight years old. She is moving back to Michigan to marry her first love - college sweetheart, Sedgwick. It might be his first name, or his last, or both, but that’s what Lyda calls him, and every time she speaks his name, her eyes twinkle behind her glasses more brightly than the rhinestones on her beige frames.
“Sedge lives in a lovely and gracious home, right on the lake, but I can’t bring all this stuff with me! My husband died five years ago. Sedgwick’s wife died three years ago. We reconnected at our sixtieth high school reunion last fall and fell in love all over again - as if we’d said good bye only yesterday! Our children think we’re crazy. Maybe we are... crazy in love!”
She shows us a brass floor lamp with heavy marble base and silk shade. “We love it! For how much would you like to sell it?”
“I expect five dollars is a pretty fair price.”
“Make it ten and we’ll take it,” Mark says. “And the chair?” he points to a rosewood chair with carved back and upholstered seat.
“Oh, maybe seven dollars for that,” she chirps from a chair behind two huge steamer trunks.
“We’d love to buy that too,” I nod.
The steamer trunks are the kind that stand on end, and open length wise. Each has space for hangers on one side, and drawers and built-in shoe-boxes in the other half. Plastic wrapped clothes and strings of pearls are spilling out of one trunk. On the floor in front of the other is a pile of dress shoes. The scent of mothballs and lavender mix with Earl Grey.
Lyda gently guides us to a chest made of cedar wood. The lid is propped open. Inside are linens, photos and a flag. Lyda sees my eyes light up at the sight of embroidered napkins and white cotton crocheted placemats. She bends forward and brings forth several beautiful pieces.
“Back in the day, I embroidered all these for my “hope chest.” My granddaughter has the chest, but she is such a Modern Miss, she doesn’t want anything to do with these relics.”
Lyda straightens up and looks us each in the eyes. Her jaw juts forward as if she’s considered and decided something important. Behind her lenses & rhinestones, her own eyes mist over. She pulls the rolled-up flag from the cedar chest, clutching the long cylinder to her heart.
“This was over the casket of my brother William when he came back from World War II. Will you please keep it for me? I think you’re just the right couple to honor his memory.”
Our own tears are touched. I smell the cedar-infused red and white stripes as she hands it over to our keeping.
“Thank you, Lyda Tong, you have given us so much in such a gracious way. We will always remember you.”
******************************************************
And so we do! Forty two years later, we still have Lyda’s lamp, chair, and the chest of linens. The forty-eight star flag reminds us of her brother’s service to our country, and all the ones who fought for a cause and came back in boxes, or broken into so many pieces that some of their souls still need mending. We keep William’s flag in the large, formal cedar chest which had been my grandmother’s.
The little cedar chest from Lyda Tong held our clothes when we went on a two week camping trip in 1975 - B.C. (Before Children) to Colorado to see my cousins, Mesa Verde, Salt Lake, Tahoe, Mendocino, Willtts, Fort Brag and San Jose - where Mark’s Aunt Hilda lived. We had bought a tie-dyed Volkswagon Bus from a production company. Mark built a plywood platform, I sewed a cover on a foam mattress. Voilà! We had a bed. Out of Noah’s Ark sheets, we made curtains.
The little chest now contains musical instruments which we pull out every family occasion where noise or music is required. It also holds many memories, including memories of feelings that cannot be contained - even by so sturdy a chest - but must well up and flow out from time to time.
No comments:
Post a Comment