From: Jan, unicorn(a)sun-spot.com
The Dumb Supper (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series)
She laughed, her voice tinkling as clearly as any silver bell, "Oh
yes! Did it at midnight we did! Wanted to see who came!" And she grinned
mischievously at me, waiting for my obvious question. She is frail and
tiny, not much more than eighty pounds soak and wet. Her legs don't work
very well any more, but there is nothing wrong with her sense of slyness
and mischief, evident in dancing eyes and a quirky little smile. Nor is
there anything wrong with her sense of audience, and her love of a good story.
My aunt, nearly 90 years of age, may well have a bit of trouble remembering
what she had for breakfast, but she has absolutely no trouble with the
past. Now it is true that many pieces of her past are pieces that I
remember myself, and her memories are not always entirely accurate, and
frequently embroidered with details from another story. But who is to
argue with something she remembers from seventy or eighty years
ago? Certainly not I! And all too many times, her stories have the ring
of truth, and always an interesting twist.
We had been talking of my son's recent marriage, and the topic of "old
beaus" had come up. She twisted in her wheelchair to peer at me
mischievously. Grinning, she told me of her youth and of the perils
involved in "courting" two beaus at once. I laughed, thinking of my very
traditional old aunt as a young attractive schoolmarm caught in the age-old
dilemma of wondering which beau to keep. (Actually it turns out she "kept"
both of them, and married both, at different times of course, marrying the
second after being widowed by the first).
And then she glanced slyly out the corner of dancing eyes at her sister,
elder by a year, and grinned again, "We tried to figure out which would be
the keeper, didn't we, Sister?" Although this Sister generally has a very
good memory, she didn't remember, much to my aunt's frustration. She
frowned, and if she could have stood to her feet, I am sure would have
stamped them smartly and given Sister a quick rap on the head to jog her
memory. "Oh yes you do too remember, Sister!", emphatically pronounced
this aunt, who has a great deal of difficulty remembering just where she
lives these days, but considers the past in sparkling clarity. "It was the
night we had the dumb supper!"
I had been listening with amusement, quite used to this exchange of sibling
frustration between the two. But now, I knew I was going to hear a story I
had never heard before, and my spine straightened as I scooted to the edge
of my chair, ready to hear yet another story. She responded to my eager
questions with her typical slyness, unwinding just a bit of the tale at a
time, teasing me to ask another question, and yet another until the whole
of it was unwound. And this, I take, is the gist of it:
"Reba was who put us up to it," she said, laying the blame on a neighbor
girl a lifetime ago. "Reba it was that filled us in on most things." She
glanced surreptitiously out at the hall; to make sure no one was in
passing, then lowered her voice to a slight whisper. "She told us how
babies got here! And she was the one put us up to the dumb supper too!"
Ever ready to work a tale to its end slowly, holding the audience in
suspense, she waited. And of course was rewarded by my next barrage of
questions. "Well," she said, pausing for effect, "You have to wait till
after dark. They come at midnight, if they are going to come. Mama and
Papa were asleep of course. We didn't tell anyone what it was we were
doing! Don't you remember this, Sister?"
Sister didn't, and my aunt shook her head sadly at the thought of her
sister's forgetting.
"Set out the supper and turned off the lights and waited," she said,
pausing again maddeningly.
The Dumb Supper, was of course an old tradition, but one at the time I was
unfamiliar with, and it took a bit of our give and take of teasing hints
and eager questions before I realized that the "dumb supper" was a way for
hopeful young girls to catch a glimpse of the "shade" of their future
bridegrooms. The idea was to lay out a supper, backwards, in the
dark. Then the eager and somewhat nervous young girls would await to see
what phantom foretelling of the future would appear at the door.
"Well???" I asked as the suspense built, "Did you see him??"
"Heard him," she answered.
"Heard him??? What did he say???"
"Oh, he didn't say anything," she said, lowering her eyes, and
smiling. "He knocked something down out on the porch!"
"Well who was it? What did you do?"
"Put that supper up and went to bed!" she declared, and her laugh again
tinkled as surely as any silver bells. "Spect someone overheard us talking
and decided maybe to scare us!"
I laughed and she looked at me thoughtfully, "But weren't any tracks in the
snow. And Mama and Papa were in bed!"
And so ended yet another tale. They never fail to surprise me, these aunts
of mine, with the things that pop out in conversations so unexpectedly. I
have known them all of my life, and yet it seems each time I visit, they
have yet another surprise I have never heard tell of. It is true these
jaunts to the nursing home are sometimes tiresome. They mean meetings with
doctors and nurses and social workers. They mean endless discussions over
medications and treatments, diets and well being. They mean searching for
a "missing" bit of laundry or misplaced partials. In looking after two
elderly aunts without children, I have often wondered what on earth the
Lord is preparing me for, so thoroughly has he made sure that my education
included any possible feasible problem that might arise in the care taking
of the elderly.
But this I also know. A good deal of my education has been in
appreciation. It seems the older they have gotten, the more time I have
had to actually sit down and listen. And the more time they have to
actually sit there and talk. And it is amazing, the fun and good times
that have come of that. It is amazing the chapters of family history that
have unfolded because of that. In the days I was a child, I had no time to
listen and they had no time to tell. In the days I was a harried young
mother, I had no time to listen and they had no time to tell. In these my
middle years, and these, their twilight times, it seems the Lord decided to
throw a special lesson in to sweeten the parts that have been so hard. It
was forced upon all of us, this time, and none of us wanted or expected
life to evolve quite as it has. But there is sweetness in it. And
everytime I come, I think we are having something of a "dumb supper"
together, sitting the table to see what will jolly good story will come
through the door next.
Just a thought,
jan
Copyright ©2001janPhilpot
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Thanks, jan)
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