Unless I want to be an Edie, Big or Little, in an ersatz-colonial Grey Gardens,…
Widow’s Weeds 21: The Holiday Spirit
One waits and knows they’re coming. The holidays. Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Hew to the old rituals or devise new ones? Or maybe just ignore the events altogether? Thanksgiving Thanksgiving is an excuse to eat good food and too much of it. Once upon a time, it...
Widow’s Weeds 20: Boxes Of The Past
Let us now praise those who keep their ephemera in immaculate order, fully identified and thoughtfully edited. Okay most of us aren’t people of particular cultural or historical import. Our scraps of paper, tchotchkes, photographs and whatnot are unlikely to be the...
Widow’s Weeds 19: Charlotte’s Web
I must have read Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White dozens of times; probably for the first time when I was about thirteen. The book and I are the same age, both of us born in 1952. Charlotte’s Web was in a pile of books I had pulled from Dan’s study, mostly children’s...
Widow’s Weeds 18: Back Home And So Alone
On Sunday, October 15, I ended the day feeling ill, and was grateful for Tali’s Ayurvedic ministrations. They helped. Monday morning saw some improvement but by evening I needed an early bedtime. Tuesday, we attended to a number of tasks, and right away I realized...
Widow’s Weeds 17: Sentimental Journey
Vilnius—in fact, all of Lithuania—is a constant experience of déjà vu. Or perhaps more accurately, jau matytas. Every day seemed a trip down Memory Lane. October 6 I hadn’t planned to be ensconced in my room at Bookinn B&B by that day, but I had fled the pas...
Widow’s Weeds 16: Reminders of What Matters
I expected the village of Žiežmariai to be a quick stop. My target was the church, St James the Apostle, where so many Tomkuses had been baptized, married and seen off to the hereafter. The wooden prayer house those ancestors would have known was replaced in 1924 by...
Widow’s Weeds 15: In Search of the Tomkuses of Miežonys
The plan was to spend a couple days in the place where Dan’s paternal grandfather, Kazimir Tamkus, came from. Kazimir and his brother Petrus died in the Diamond Mining disaster in Scranton, Pennsylvania in December 1914. Family facts and fancies died with them when...
Widow’s Weeds 14: Just Don’t
When I traveled with Dan, my chief focus was his comfort. Car rentals, hotel choices, itineraries: all decisions reflected our very different tourism styles. Inefficiencies, inconveniences and the unexpected don’t rattle me but they could easily discommode him. Rent...