Nonfiction by Tarah Friend Cantore
I place the delicate ornament into the small box, nestled in the green tissue paper. It is a pink ceramic baby shoe with Baby’s First Christmas on it.
I imagine it is the year 2033. My family is gathered for the holidays at our New Hampshire home.
My youngest granddaughter, Ella, giggles and says, “Poppi, tell us the story about how you and Nonni met!”
From the kitchen, I can see Vinnie sitting in his leather chair in the great room. Bode climbs onto his knee, exclaiming, “Yeah, Poppi!” Ella is occupying the other knee, grinning from ear to ear. The four-year-old inseparable cousins are curly-haired, brown-eyed bookends.
Hazel runs from the kitchen to join her brother and cousin. As the flour from her auburn hair releases, a cloud of white dust trails behind her. At only nine years old, she has entered the Children’s Baking Show, and this afternoon, she is schooling us in the kitchen, baking Linzer cookies with raspberry filling.
My daughters, Brittany and Molly, as well as Molly’s wife, Jordan, are with me in the kitchen. Jordan is sitting at the island, where Molly is standing next to her, caressing her pregnant belly. I bring my favorite blue-glazed mug to my lips, appreciating the warmth in my hands and my heart.
“Bake at 350 degrees!” I shout at my new oven. Apparently, it will sense the temperature of whatever is baking or cooking so as not to overcook or undercook. While I am confident it will be efficient and accurate, there’s something to be said about slightly undercooked, gooey cookies. Besides, perfect baking doesn’t exactly fit with my hope to give my grandchildren the gift of imperfection, something I never had.
Hazel’s younger sister, Lydia, momentarily pops her head up from reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone when Hazel enters the room, then she resumes reading. She is sitting in the “cubby” with her father, Bo. When our daughters were little, they referred to the “cubby” as the spot at the end of the couch where they would sit in the bend of someone’s legs. When our grandchildren come to visit, they fight for the spot, yelling, “I want the cubby.”
Lydia is seven years old and a real bookworm. She will likely complete the first Harry Potter book and bring The Chamber of Secrets home with her. She has wavy, auburn hair and resembles Hermione, one of the characters in her book.
Vinnie begins, “Well, first of all, I had a crush on your Nonni before we even met.”
Ella inquires in her soft little voice, “What is a crush?”
He tilts his head slightly towards Ella. “A crush is when you really like someone and believe you could even love them.”
Ella and Bode nod in sync.
Hazel looks at her father. “Dada, did you have a crush on Mama?”
Bo smiles and says, “I did!”
Without Lydia’s eyes leaving her book, she adds, “On the softball field.”
“That’s right! But that’s another story,” says Bo.
Hazel plops down on the rug in front of the fireplace and focuses on Vinnie.
He says, “I saw her that night at Minerva’s. The closer I got, the more pretty she was-“
Bode interrupts, “What’s Minerva’s?”
“It was a bar in Burlington where Nonni went to college.”
Lydia sits up from the cubby and exclaims, “You and Nonni met at a bar?”
“That’s right.”
He had all of the children’s attention now.
“I asked Nonni if she remembered me, and she did. We talked some. I was about to ask her to dance, but my friend, Mark, was bugging me to leave. I asked her if I came back, would she dance with me? She smiled shyly and said, ‘Yes!’ When I returned later, I found her, and we danced. But then she said she had to leave.”
I recalled the sticky bar floor, the 80s music, and his adorable face.
“When we walked out of the bar, I leaned over and tried to kiss her.”
Bode wrinkled up his face and said, “Gross, Poppi!”
Vinnie refrained from laughing. “Well, she didn’t let me anyway, Bode!”
I was no floozy.
“She gave me her phone number, though.”
“And that is how Nonni and I met!” Vinnie nods and falls silent.
Hazel pops onto all fours on the rug and shouts, “But what happened next?”
Lydia chimes in, “Yeah! What happened next?”
“Well,” Vinnie orchestrates the perfect suspenseful pause and then says, “I didn’t call her.”
Hazel shouts, “How rude, Poppi!”
“Very rude. I imagine she was disappointed. And maybe a little mad.”
Lydia shakes her head with disbelief. “Well, how did you ever fall in love with her?”
Hazel inquires further, “And get married?”
“Well, she called me a couple weeks later when she was home visiting Gigi. I guess I didn’t make a bad first impression after all.”
“Why would you, Poppi?” Hazel asks.
“Because I had a little too much liquid courage.”
Bode reaches up and takes Vin’s face in his little hands. “What’s liquid courage?”
“Well, I drank too many beers. I thought I needed them to be brave enough to talk to her.”
Hazel yells, “But you didn’t! You didn’t at all!”
“Why do you say that, Hazel?”
She replies, “Because Nonni had a crush on you too!”
I walk into the great room, like I’m accepting an Oscar, and say, “I really did!” I give Vinnie a kiss. My family applauds, hoots, and hollers.
I return to the present moment. I wrap the ornament in candy cane-striped paper and tie a red velvet ribbon around it. I feel the smooth velvet between my fingers, inspecting the asymmetry of the loops, and decide to leave them uneven. Vinnie and I used to joke about which version of the story we would tell our grandchildren, when we were old and gray, about how we met in a bar. This one is perfect.
Tarah Friend Cantore has published a non-fiction memoir incorporating her artwork in tough & vulnerable, in addition to her novel, Spiral Bound. Her poetry has been published in The Bluebird Word and in the Telling Our Stories Through Word and Image Anthology.
