Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Friday, April 3, 2009

Last weekend my son Henry and I put on a celebration for my sister Jane’s April 1st birthday. Instead of purchasing a store-bought cake or buying a mix, I retrieved a can of poppyseed from the pantry — something that had been gathering dust for several years now — removed the recipe affixed to the can’s spine; together, Henry and I whipped up a decadent poppyseed cake. After dessert, the three of us and Mother moved the short distance from the table to the couch and chairs to watch the honoree unwrap her modest gifts.

It was certainly no extravagant display. I had contributed two items — a hand-made ceramic spoon rest that I’d picked up for less than $10 at an antique emporium in town — along with a tin of fancy Clipolia paperclips. Jane had requested the spoon rest, and I threw in the paperclips, thinking of my “nothing’s too small to make a difference” mantra. After all, if the tie makes the man, the elegant paperclip makes the attached documents. (Confession: When I discovered these round brass paperclips eight or so years back, my enthusiasm for their unique design caused me to over-buy. But the fact is, I wasn’t thinking. My need for an extra inventory of paperclips is as great as a recycling center’s need for extra plastic bags. I always reuse paperclips unless they’re rusted or quite literally bent out of shape, and I always salvage paperclips, retrieving them from any documents crossing my desk. So I realized the other week when I stumbled on the extra, unopened tin in the basement that I’d probably never get around to using them. The round tin was still shrink-wrapped with its $9.95 pricetag affixed beneath. So I set it aside, as novelty surprise for Jane.)

Mother, however, upstaged me with her inventiveness and thrift.

Jane looked a tad puzzled when she picked up a floppy package wrapped in red and green wreath-covered Christmas paper. Obvious wrinkles removed any doubt that this paper had obscured many a holiday gift in its past. She opened it and found … McCall’s magazine, dated April 1966. The cover girl for this ad-rich, oversized edition was a saucy-looking brunette in a black-and-white houndstooth check woolen suit, wearing white button earrings and a large-brimmed black laquer hat. Meaty coverlines sang out: “A skeptical report on the experts who tell women how to be women” was the lead story. Directly beneath: “Indira Gandhi talks about her father, her unpopular marriage, her life in jail.”

However, it was the third coverline — “ ‘The many facets of love’ “ Memoirs of a remarkable woman” — that caught our attention. This story turned out to be an autobiographical reminiscence of the French writer Colette. (I whetted Henry’s interest by identifying Colette as the author of “Gigi,” a well-worn favorite from our DVD collection of old movies.)

Mother had stayed up late the night before, reading the old magazine. “Read everyone a paragraph,” she suggested. For the evening’s entertainment, I’d planned to put an old movie into our DVD player, perhaps even “Gigi.” But Mom’s idea seemed like good fun. I started in.

“I search my memory in vain for any early signs of the sacred fire, childish poetry, vocation, predestination,” wrote Colette. “Instead, I find a foot warmer.” She goes onto to describe the accessory that no longer exists — the metal foot warmer that children carried to school to keep them warm in draughty school rooms. “Every little girl had hers in the primary class,” Colette recalled. And sometimes they’d try to roast a pear or potato in one; occasionally they’d burn their socks. “Foot warmer, thou wert my shield, projectile, stove, every kind of comfort for so many years,” she wrote.

I began reading with every intention of wrapping it up after a paragraph or two. Instead, Henry, Jane and Mother sat transfixed.

“Keep reading,” Henry begged, his 11-year-old’s imagination charged by the thought of schoolchildren, younger than he is now, carrying their source of heat in little boxes to school, of chestnuts exploding inside foot warmers, of the march of time. His mind must have taken stock of his own possessions to decide which thing that he cherishes today might be antiquated — or unknown — 50 years from now.

When I closed the covers over an hour later and we decided to close up shop for the night, Jane asked Mother, “So you’ve been saving this magazine for me for 43 years?”

“On the contrary,” Mother responded. “I picked it up last week at the library in the free stack and stayed up last night reading it. I couldn’t put it down.”

It was not even open for debate. That McCall’s magazine that might otherwise have gone to the landfill was the hit gift of the evening. It was something on which nothing was spent — in the acquisition or the wrap. It set the stage for a free but utterly unforgettable birthday — a birthday celebrated in the spirit of the moment, of caprice. In the spirit of my sister Jane and for Colette, the woman who made herself into “a sort of national French property in which all her compatriots sunned themselves. She was notre Grand Colette” — on this occasion — for our notre Grand Jane.