Handbag

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."

-- Satan, in Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth

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Back in Franklin, KY, after a long Easter, a Sunday which began at 7:30am, having dressed me in a suit and tie. I had decided to go to my girlfriend's house for the weekend, and her parents are Catholic. My original decision was not to attend Mass, but I realized that there was something profoundly oxymoronic (or maybe just moronic) about staying in a Catholic household for Easter and not going to a Catholic Easter.

After all, what was I going to do instead--stay at home, eat macaroni and cheese, and watch The Passion of the Christ online? No thanks.

So I went to the 8am Mass, and when we returned at 9:30, I made my way to the guest bedroom, mumbling half-jokes to the wall, and took a morning nap.

Then, after baskets, a lamb lunch, and meeting Teresa's grandmother (see story below), we drove back to Cincinnati, repacked our bags, and met up with the other actors to do this overnight.

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Teresa's grandmother is adorable: her eyesight failing, she tends to stare, wide-eyed, in the direction of something (or someone) new. So as I chomped on lamb, she stared at me, no doubt running slow calculations in her head, like an old computer. I smiled every time.

The conversation turned to knitting methods. And crocheting. Every female at the table--Teresa, her sister and her mother--can trace their knitting technique back to this woman, this old lady with shaky fingers. Like spindles on a wheel connecting to the hub, their talents derive from her. They were talking about right- and left-handed knitting, and how you can hold the needle like a knife or like a pencil, and then, after a few minutes of silence from the grandmother, she told a sudden story--of this one handbag she made, years ago.

It was simple, yet it pangs. It went something like this:

I made my mother a blue handbag when I was a little girl. I'm right-handed but she was left-handed, so the entire time I was making it she kept saying, "What are you doing? That's the wrong way. That's not the way I taught you." But I couldn't tell her that I was making the handbag for her, or it wouldn't be a surprise. So I kept knitting with my right hand holding the needle--like this--and finally, I finished it. And I gave it to her, and she wore it the rest of her life.

And when she died, she left it to me.

The woman's face filled with grief, worry, and tears, as if she at once remembered something that was lost or forgotten. It was a guilty look, above all, and while we thought about her story, she stared at each of us with fresh, wet eyes, playing the persona non grata at the family meal. Her eyes, slow and intense, stumbled down to the plate, and with a trembling fork, she raised some lamb to her lips.

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We are low-grade, nickel-plated angels, according to Twain. Yet after a lifetime of polishing, our nickel can shine like silver.