Nonna's magic

There are certain things that an Italian Grandmother is supposed to do, and Nonna's great at them all;

-Cooking fabulous meals, either with the most carefully chosen and freshest ingredients (Crabs and Spaghetti!) *OR* with whatever might be lying around in the kitchen when we haven't been to the grocery store in ages (Therapy Soup!).
-Yelling at her daughter for neglecting to tell her Grandfather first when she got engaged to a nice young man (Anita, you could have guessed that your Post-Modern Anthropologist daughter would know more about Balinese wedding rituals than she does about Italian ones) *AND* taking her wedding dress shopping to four more stores even when she looked perfect in the first dress she tried on.
-Scaring her children to death will stories of a youth mis-spent on cliff diving in the lesser-known Hawiian islands.

Alright, so two out of three ain't bad. We would never want to give up on the stories of your mis-spent youth, Anita. They make you who you are, and have contributed indirectly but importantly to who your children are. And I, for one, would never want to change a thing about any of you three (spoken like a true Mr. Rogers fan, I guess).

While I'm riffing on what Mothers are supposed to be like, I can't help but bring up the traditional idea of feminine intuition. Nonna shows a very peculiar version of ESP that satisfies this stereotype quite handily, but in fact reaches far beyond it. I couldn't quite put words to this part of her until I read a book called "Blink". She knows things sometimes that she can't explain why she knows them, and before she should "logically" be able to know them, and she's right a high percentage of the time. At least as often as I can be in my most cerebral and researched way.

I have not only been impressed with this trait in the abstract, I have benefitted from it quite directly. You see, I'm lucky in a million ways to have Sam as my partner. But it isn't just luck, or serendipity, or my prodigous repetoire of sappy love songs (and trust me, I tried them all) that brought me Sam. At a crucial moment late in 2004 Anita handed Sam the phone and said something like "For God's sake, would you just call this guy?". Without that nudge, it would have been a "boy meets girl, boy falls madly in love with girl while paddling in a beautiful setting, boy goes home to dead-end job in his hometown, never gets girl, and suffers until the end of his days" story.

It is important to note that, at that moment late in 2004, Anita didn't know me at all. She had never met me, never seen pictures of me, and Sam had already sent me a letter basically telling me that "this has to end". And since there wasn't even a "this" to end in the first place, I can't imagine that she was giving Anita much to go on.

But Anita knew that "this" shouldn't be over before it had even started. And she trusted her "blink" circuits enough that she and I effectively ganged up on Sam without ever meeting, or speaking, or emailing, or anything else. Then, when I paid my first visit to Doylestown in January of 05 and Sam and I realized that we loved each other even when we weren't on a beautiful lake as the sun was setting (with 8 fourteen year olds in tow), Anita wasn't surprised, or worried, or protective. She knew everything she needed to know, already.

There was a second pivotal moment, that I'm sure was created by Anita. The first morning of my first visit, I woke up quite a bit before Sam did. I padded into the kitchen to find some breakfast, and Anita was already awake, too. We carved up bagels and fixed up some breakfast quite comfortably together while Sam slept in her room upstairs. Now, I didn't need to be accepted instantly, in spite of tousled hair and scruffy morning face and faded PJs, by my potential mother-in-law. But it sure helped. Our comfort together, in that instant, told me that the tightness which I had always experienced with my own family, and couldn't imagine going without, could be there for Sam and I together. I could be sure that we could mix-and-match the key members of our combined blended families without worrying about any of the possible constellations.

I don't know if Sam is glad every day that we ganged up on her back then. Right now, for instance, she probably thinks I'm staying up late writing something for which I will be paid :-) Oh well. I know I am glad every day, and that I will be eternally greatful to Nonna and her sense of Blink for the support she gave in those early, fragile days of a relationship that I thought didn't stand a chance. At least no one can deny that she got two of the world's cutest grandsons from the deal!