PenPenWrites

My mother's tea cups: three cups and saucers, gilt edged and hand-painted–each with a different flower. When my mother died several years ago and I flew down to Florida to clean and clear her apartment, I placed those tea cups on a heap marked "donate." When Alpha Daughter arrived to help out, she scarfed them up.  She loved them. Of course, as a grad student living in a one-room apartment, she hardly had room for them. So they were boxed up with rolls of bubble wrap and shipped to my home to store until the she was ready for them. A child, dog and small house later, the time was still not right. The tea cups are still boxed up in my basement, awaiting the right and safe place to display them.

And they are a reminder to me of the power of a legacy. My daughter wanted those tea cups not for any inherent material value. She wanted them as a reminder of her grandmother, of my mother's love for things delicate, her desire to surround herself with things of  beauty, no matter how fragile. When she was alive, the tea cups sat on dainty wood stands, two in little niches on her desk-armoire and one on the side table, next to the porcelain lamp with the pleated silk shade. My mother and daughter shared an aesthetic–among many other things. No wonder my daughter wanted the tea cups, even as I saw them as so much stuff to be cleared away.

They are also a reminder to me to figure out what I want my legacy to be–to my children and grandchildren. Paterfamilias has already started down that road. When he found in his files a 5-page, typewritten manuscript–A Portrait of Courage, it was entitled–he knew what he wanted to do with it. The manuscript had arrived years ago from a neighbor of his father. PF's parents had lived in a garden apartment in a working class neighborhood in Queens. His neighbor, typing the story out on a manual typewriter, wrote about how she saw my father-in-law leave for work every morning, dressed immaculately in suit and tie. They would greet each other with a good morning and go on their way. When she found out, she wrote, that he was dying of cancer, she would stop to ask how he was. He never complained, she wrote. He talked about the weather and the fine day it was. As he grew thinner and thinner, she worried about him. A few days before he died, she saw him walking to his car to go to work and asked how he was. "Not so good," he said. "But it's a beautiful day."

PF scanned that manuscript into his computer and sent the pdf off to Uber Son and Alpha Daughter. He wanted them to remember who their grandfather was–and, when the time came, for his grandchildren to read this simple tribute to him and his courage. It is part of a broader legacy PF is working on: Letting his children and grandchildren know from whence and what they came. His most recent "legacy:" a book he wrote about the congressman he worked for in the 1970s. [People's Warrior: John Moss and the Fight for Freedom of Information and Consumer Rights.]

I am finding the road to legacy more slowly. I doubt I will do what some friends are doing: recording a disc that their children and grandchildren can play years later that holds words of advice or wisdom from them. It's a fine idea for the right person, (remember Alex Baldwin as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock, spelling out "advice" to his unborn son?). It is not my kind of thing. And just when I thought I was coming up empty, I realized that my legacy has been simmering for years. I've been keeping a collection of notes on all the funny and clever things my children said when they were small–and still say now, my grandchildren as well. One of these days, I'll write up all those stories. We're an anecdotal family that loves a short, punchy story. I'll leave them all the evidence.

Legacy lived.