An emotion I can't name

a repost, now out from behind the paywall

Note: Welcome and thank you to the new paid subscribers this week, especially for your kind accompanying notes. I, and my biz partner in Disaffected, Kevin Hurley, really appreciate you helping us make the show and the writing.

This is a reprint of a story I published last year. I like to pull out some of the essays I and readers like best for people who may not have seen them before. I hope you find it worth your while.

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“They’re just junk made in Hong Kong, you know,” my mother said, dragging on her Merit Ultra-Light 100 as she sorted whites from colored over the washing machine. “Your grandmother has no taste.”

That hit me in the gut. It was the first time I felt an emotion that I cannot name.

I was about 10 years old, and my grandmother had given me something that was very special to her, and very special to me. I had hurried home to show mother the wonderful presents that had made me so happy. That my grandmother would have given me this present, these small items of beauty that she was fond of, touched me and filled me with wonder.

She loved me enough to want to make me happy by giving me something that made her happy; I’d never experienced anything like that before.

This is what she gave me.

She gave me a pair of these. Cobalt blue oil lamps in miniature. They’re called “fairy lamps.” They enchanted me when I went to visit grandmother, and I begged her to light them when we had dinner. She always did. And usually, she made us rice pudding on the stove to eat for dessert while we watched the Lawrence Welk show before bed.

It wasn’t that my grandmother had no taste, as my mother claimed. It’s that she had little money. Her social security paid for her old-person rent-controlled apartment, with little to spare for luxuries. The luxuries I remember with grandmother were having lunch at the Woolworth or K-Mart cafeteria when we did the shopping.

The kind of beauty my grandmother could afford can only be found at second-hand stores and tag sales. Naturally, much of it would be made in Hong Kong, not in a French glass factory. Knick-knacks to brighten the shelves in the apartment came from the boxes of tea or muffin mix that used to include a ceramic coffee creamer or other small item as a prize.

How could my mother be so . . .cruel? This is what I wondered to myself. Why was she making fun of grandmother, who did the best she could? We didn’t have any money either. Why was my mother putting on airs?

My mother’s relationship with her own mother was almost as troubled as my relationship with her. I won’t gainsay my mother’s account of her abusive and neglectful childhood. I give her credit, now, that she had reasons to feel as she did about her mother.

But as a boy, I only experienced a grandmother. An old lady who was unfailingly kind and warm to me. A woman who, unless I am entirely deceived, loved me. She certainly never screamed at me, called me a bastard, or hit me. I didn’t fear the sound of her footsteps coming up behind me.

Years later I was in a Goodwill thrift shop sorting through kitchen items for some things I needed. I love a secondhand store. Thrift is important to me, as is not being wasteful. The feeling of shame and inadequacy that came over me as a boy when mother bought my clothes from the Salvation Army was long gone. As an adult, I understood the practicality and value of buying serviceable goods for low prices without worrying about having “new” or “brand-name” items.

As I picked over the spatulas I noticed the home decorations on the other shelf. Garish stuff, brightly colored. Made in China. Most of it in bad taste. And the items that attempted to mimic real gold, or real stained glass, seemed all the more pathetic for it.

”Blech. Who would buy this stuff?” I thought, wrinkling my nose.

And then I started to cry (don’t worry, I left public view without making a spectacle of myself). My grandmother would buy these things. Old women and men who live alone on a fixed income would buy these things. Maybe for a grandchild who likes pretty things and needs a birthday present. Poor people need beauty and comfort too.

What kind of cold-hearted person could even think of making fun of these poor people instead of being happy that they found something that could make a tiring life a little happier?

Someone like my mother. And, apparently, someone like me.

That was years ago, but I still feel the emotion I can’t name. It’s an emotion about the lives of these people and their affordable beauty, their best-they-can-manage luxury. It’s an ache, it’s a feeling of protectiveness, it’s a bit of shame. And as mawkish as it sounds, it includes wanting to wrap my arms around one of these grandmothers.

Those cobalt blue fairy lamps got lost in a move during my semi-homeless and unstable teenage years. I ache for them. Several times I’ve hovered my finger over the Ebay “buy” button, but I can’t do it. They’re not my grandmother’s lamps. They won’t be the same. Even if they were made of the rarest crystal they wouldn’t have the value of those beautiful pieces of love in blue glass.

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Coda—I can’t name the emotion, but Suzanne Vega sings about a part of it.

Those men who lust for land, and for riches strange and new

All those trinkets of desire, oh they never will have you

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