[Fandfs] Cynthia, This Morning

[Rachel Neumann <rachelbneumann@gmail.com>]

This morning, Cynthia seemed to visit me as I drank my tea. I was writing about aging, and I think she thought she could tell me a thing or too.   The first time I came to Cynthia's,  I couldn't have been more than five years old, and I thought I was entering a whole magical world at the top of a cliff in the Carmel
Highlands.  I didn't have grandparents around or any other older people in our lives. My parents were jewish intellectual hippies fleeing new york city to
get their hands dirty building utopia.
Cynthia was an emissary from a whole different world, a traditional world,
where children were let to run free outside and behaved themselves inside.  There was a parrot in the garden, ducks
in the pond, chickens and dogs and hundreds of wonderful trees and bushes to
hide for hide and seek.  There were
tire swings and big wheel tricycles and secret paths to the beach. 
>From Mad Magazine and Archie and Sabrina, I learned that gas prices had gone
through the roof and that teenagers didn’t say it directly when they liked
someone.  From Cynthia, I learned
that the key to a long life was a banana and a glass of hot water with lemon every
morning. 

At Cynthia’s there was tea cozy with black tea, a set of playing
cards, and a tin filled with oreo cookies that could be sneaked in the night
without consequence—as long as you didn’t take the last ones.   Cynthia was the kind of older
woman I’d always hoped to meet but thought only existed in
books: she was brisk but loving,  practical
and no-nonsense, yet a big lover of of children and community and
celebration.  Her traditions were
flawless—from Thanksgiving to Easter she knew what made a ritual work.  We shared a belief in aloe vera for
sunburns, an interest in baseball (mine was fleeting), and a very firm
understanding that tradition grounded a person and that consistency was a
necessary safe harbor amid the world’s chaos.  
Since My children will never get a chance to know her as I did, I'll just have to tell them stories, introduce them to her community, and emulate her as well as I can.



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