kiss the card

"Why?" Mom asks, when I suggest she kiss the postcard Lorna's holding up for her. Why indeed, it's admittedly a strange request.

We are sitting at Serafina, a neighborhood Italian restaurant on Eastlake, not too far from the Mirabella. We've just been seated--Mom, me, Jennifer and Lorna. This is our weekly outing and so for today's pleasure we've decided to go to lunch--something Mom and me would do quite often, particularly when we stopped seeing eye-to-eye about the world: lunch seemed somehow safer than dinner, less of a commitment. But it's been years since she and I have been to Serafina--this is a spot I usually reserve for girlfriends, where we sit and chat over a bottle of wine till our tongues have run down, emptied of words. It's a place to dissect badly behaving husbands and jobs that seem less than meaningful and parents who are dead or are still alive but lack the understanding to see us, their daughters, for who we are. There's nothing but companionship for me here, companionship and excellent food and wine.

So today, here with Mom and the gang, I've suggested we continue the tradition started years ago--that of kissing the card. It started when I was still in graduate school. My pal Cindy and I would come here to catch up. To commemorate the exchange we pressed our lipsticked lips firmly to the backside of the restaurant's postcard, a charming rendition of stylish women and men dining in a golden glow of food and wine. Over the years, the card has changed--new scenes represented, but all of them evoke warmth and good feeling. So here's the drill--each of us must kiss the card, that is after re-applying our lipstick, and we can't share lipstick colors, as each of our "signatures" must be individual. It takes a good loud smack to imprint the card and produce a set of lips suitable for souvenir purposes. There's no re-do here, as once you've begun the smack there's no going back. Each kiss must be perfect. After "signing," we each attest our names and the date. I have dozens of these cards--thirteen years of conversations--but only three friends who have shared their lips with mine in this way.

I explain some of this to Mom, not about why I come here with my friends (to whinge) but rather about how we "mark" each chat. I'm not sure if she's understanding. After all, it is a weird tradition, one that I imagine few other girlfriends enact. To get us started, I re-apply lipstick and smack the card--there's a loud noise that accompanies my smack, as quiet demure kisses are not allowed. At the point of my smacking, Mom looks startled at the commotion I've made, as in--what can my daughter be doing with that card? I explain it again, adding a gay, laughing voice to the description of our caper, hoping to capture Mom's sense of fun, something that has been thankfully reasserting itself of late. Jennifer then kisses the card. We compare lips--her imprint is light, softly pink as compared to my darkly red impression. When we get to Mom, we realize she doesn't have new lipstick to apply, so I lend her my tube, a violation of the "rules" but this is better than no lips at all. Lorna dabs the lipstick onto Mom's bare lips and then holds the card up close to Mom's face. But just at the last moment, just when the kiss would be recorded, Mom leans away, a normal response for anyone getting a postcard shoved into their face.

"Kiss the card," I say to Mom. And when she asks me why, I just say--"Do it, I'll explain later"--because I'm afraid of losing the moment, afraid of not getting her cooperation with my lipstick commemoration. "Okay," she acquiesces. There's no loud snacking noise for Mom, as it's more of a brush and a slide, as Lorna maneuvers the card close to Mom's face and tries to get her lips to contact the surface of the card. For a moment I think she's going to refuse, something about the card not being "clean"--this is a woman who carried a "Wash 'n Dry" to every eating establishment we ever visited, preferring this to using the restaurant's sink facilities. For Mom, there is no "five second rule"--what ever falls on the kitchen floor or the restaurant table stays on the floor or the table--no exceptions. Clean, alchoholed fingers equate to godliness for Mom. Gratefully, Mom moves beyond this germ stall, however, and allows the card to contact her lips, actually more like her entire face breezes by the card.When we look to see what impression Mom has made, there's two thin lines very widely spaced apart, as if she's saying--"Oh, my my, what have I done." Lorna completes our signage, adding her lips to our postcard.

When I show Mom what we've done, she finally gets it. "Kisses," she says, smiling. I'm rewarded with a raucous laugh, something fiery and brilliant that firecrackers out of Mom's mouth and draws stares from our neighbors to the right, despite the level of noise in the restaurant. I join Mom with my own less-than-genteel laughter. Soon, everyone at our table is guffawing. Our laughter has a life of it's own, a significance beyond the moment of our kissing. I take in this laughter, store it like the corsages I saved from high school and college dances. I tuck the card safely away in my "carpet bag"--something to conjure my mother in the future, when she's no longer here to lend me her laughter.

Lunch is an exuberant affair, after such a raucous start, how could it not be? We have plates of food delivered to our table, all of which we eat family style. We begin with two orders of bruschetta, something Serafina does particularly well: bread toasted with olive oil and accompanied by fresh tuna, a coarsely ground olive tapenade and (my favorite) warm goat cheese with roasted red peppers. I could be entirely satisfied with this, but most of our party requires "lunch," something that looks less like a bread-indulgence and more like a well-meted out selection of protein, vegetable and starch. So we add to our repast a mozzarella-fresh-tomato panini and a brisket of beef that has been cooked so long the meat falls off the bone into a sea of spaetzle. It's all very divine, particularly the brisket of beef--it's Serafina's signature dish, and rightly so.

Conversation moves easily between us, much of it centering on Mom and her travels. I point out how Serafina reminds me of cafes we visited during our European travels. Particularly, our focus on bread and cheese and olives today brings to mind bakeries we frequented once arriving at a new place--it was our way of discovering the lay of the land through our newly-full bellies.

"Shall I reveal classified information?" I ask Mom, once we have eaten our way through most of the bruschetta. I can tell Mom's startled and, of course, has no idea where I am heading.

"Well...do you remember the tuna?" I ask her.

Mom's expressionless face screams--what tuna!

"You know, the tuna cans you carried to Europe in your suitcase on each of our adventures?"

Still no response. It's clear Mom does not remember eating much less ferrying tuna across the Atlantic Ocean, the English Channel, Lake Como, the Arno, the Seine, the Thames and many other places. I will have to remind her.

"Well, you packed pounds and pounds of tuna into your baggage, just in case we couldn't find anything "decent" to eat on our journeys." This was in the days before there were serious poundage limitations for oversea travels.

"No," she says then with a bit of a whine. "No...I didn't."

"Oh yes you did," I counter with a laugh. "You certainly did. You even had me stuffing some of those cans of 'Star-kist Albacore Tuna' into my suitcase."

By now Mom's mouth has formed something of a petulant pout--I can tell she's a little miffed, embarrassed really. But the truth is the truth. Lorna and Jennifer are delighted with my revelation--they want to hear more. So I tell them about how much our bags weighed (35-50 pounds) and how many of them there were (12-15 between us), partially due to the tuna and the Quaker Instant Oatmeal she insisted we bring. Mom's theory was that "foreign" food would make her, us ill. When we are traveling to Italy, she's thinking Mexico, and insisting that the water and the lettuce and vegetables are contaminated and that the rest of the food--pretty much all that there is delightful to eat in Italy--was compromised by "germs." Where she got these ideas I never learned. But she was adamant. When breakfasting at the Villa Cora she ignored the beautiful baguette steaming on her plate and instead requested a cup of hot water. "No tea or chocolate, Signorina?" "No," she'd say. "Just water, no gas." She was unstoppable in her vigilance. By our third trip to Italy,however, she finally relaxed her standards, agreeing that perhaps tuna and oatmeal were not required (though she still hid a few cans and packets into her bags--I saw them). By the time our traveling days were over and she had begun traveling with my brother's children instead, her food ferrying rules of thumb had evolved--it was Burger King and McDonald's all the way, as these were the only food group her grandchildren would eat while abroad.

By the time I finish my storytelling, I have the whole table laughing and Mom, thankfully, is laughing right along too. She seems to have gotten over her pique at my revealing a family secret and it's clear she finally has remembered these strange antics of hers--the world according to Dorin Anderson Schuler.

By the time we get back to the Mirabella, we are sure there's nothing more we can stuff into our stomachs for the day--our bellies are full, overly full. This was no lunch for the faint of heart! In my camera are the moments we made--the laughter and the words and the kisses we exchanged while gathering forkfuls of food from each other's plates. Tomorrow will another day at the Mirabella--there won't be a fancy lunch or the company of Mom's friend, Jennifer. It will just be Mom and me, doing what we do all day, everyday: finding a way to get through the hours with whatever emotion and brain capacity we have the grace to enjoy. Perhaps this is the way to cope--to be grateful for small things--laughter over bruschetta and goat cheese, storytelling in-between bites of beef brisket. A world this small can be as large as we choose to make it.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--