TCHOTCHKE TALES
TCHOTCHKE TALES
By John Tuft
Marmalade. Her mother named her Marmalade because everything about her boiled down to sweetness. Her name was soon shortened to Marmie as she grew up an only child in the home of a truck driver and security guard along with a mother who expected perfection of her daughter, her own last chance to leave any impact on the world. Because that’s what mothers do, intentionally or not. Daughters are their very own tchotchkes. Their pretty little girls, not unlike a trinket on the charm bracelet of their own lives. Marmie grew up learning how to be a good girl. And a good girl she became. As the years went by Marmie biggest fear was of becoming like her mother. She married at the first chance and in short order Marmie had a daughter of her own. Marmie decided she did not want a tchotchke daughter. And she kept a record of what she wanted her daughter to become.
Every evening Marnie would retire to her sewing room where she would don the worn blue denim shirt the she wore as her security blanket. And there in her sanctuary, adorned in her denim vestment, she began to make a quilt while she cried her dreams to sleep to the sounds of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Otto Klemperer’s version of course, the best unless one was there for the first performance in 1824. The music lifted her away into a place of magic and endless glorious possibility. Music gave her strength and meaning. The very qualities that she wanted to impart to her own daughter, Clementine. The qualities she was transforming into a quilt.
Inevitably, young women become in part their own mothers, like it or not. And one of the collisions between their hopes and their fears occurs in their thirties, that decade of wrestling and reconciling of dreams and emotional dynamics. Such it was that in her thirties Marmie’s daughter was in her teens. The quilt was slowly pieced together by hand, in the evenings after each of yet one more row of epic proportions as teenage confrontations inevitably become. Clementine, known as Clemmie, was determined not to become her mother. It is a time of painful blinding light for both parent and child. Marmie did not want her daughter to lose any opportunity and Clemmie saw all advice as unwarranted intervention. Any feeling of Clemmie being a tchotchke now remote. Marmie’s own adolescent rebellion urges had been squashed in the name of being pleasing to her own mother. So, she was determined to let Clemmie do any and everything necessary to not become Marmie. It is an intricate and lonely dance.
While Clemmie was in college her grandmother died. Marmie stood at her mother’s grave wondering at this strange grief. Crushing and freeing at the same moment. Clemmie was beside her, both of them quietly terrified at what new path lay before them now. Later, in a moment of stillness and exhaustion as the last of bereaved family and friends retreated back to their own lives, Clemmie sat with her mother and revealed to Marmie that she was to become a grandmother. Marmie knew what a rough path lay before her daughter, so she went to the hope chest and took out the quilt she’d made to the accompaniment of Mister Beethoven. She wrapped this labor of hope and love around her daughter and entered the realm of grandparents everywhere upon the earth.
Marmie did her best as she watched Clemmie go through her pregnancy without the father being around emotionally or financially. She drove her to some of her appointments, fussed about her nutrition and the tiny apartment Clemmie insisted upon living in. On the grand day Marmie held her daughter’s hand as a new female child entered the world. As Clemmie held her new daughter close she whispered to her mother, “I am naming my daughter Marmie.” Marmie asked gently, “Do you mean Marmalade, don’t you?” To which Clemmie replied, “No, mother. Marmie after the love you taught me to reside in.” And so Little Marmie, daughter of Clementine, and granddaughter of Marmalade made her entrance.
Marmalade doted on Little Marmie as grandmother’s are wont to do. And every evening she retreated to her sewing room and began to make a quilt for the daughter of her daughter. Clemmie went through all of the same things that her mother went through with her. And Marmalade became a close friend and confidant of her granddaughter, able to keep a secret and give little moments of quiet and not so quiet pleasure. At the same time, Grandma Marmie stitched together a different kind of quilt, at times adding Tubthumping by Chumbawumba to her music list. This would be magic quilt, a quilt with tchotchke powers. Tchotchke of the imagination and the spirit. For those are the true sources of all power. Those knickknacks on the shelves of our lives that are truly treasures often overlooked. Treasures of hard experiences survived, broken dreams tucked away in private, memories of overlooked triumphs
On the day that Little Marmie was to depart for college, her grandmother went into the sewing room and folded the tchotchke quilt slowly and firmly, pausing at each fold to inject the magic. Then she presented it to her granddaughter. After a grand sendoff, the first evening arrived for Little Marmie in her dorm room. She finally sat on the edge of her bed and began to unfold the tchotchke quilt. With the first fold she heard her grandmother’s whisper, “You are loved.” At the next fold, a whispered, “You are strong.” Another fold, “You are growing,” in the clear, loving voice of her grandmother, Marmalade. On the very last fold, the quilt now entirely open across her shoulders and lap, she heard the last tchotchke: “Every sigh is a prayer. Every prayer is a whisper. Every whisper is hope. I love you, Marmie.”
Words are magic and writers are wizards.oAZ
