As I awaited the arrival of my
new, expensive coffee cup, I soon learned that the fall-out of losing my old one
on my birthday was not over.
Now, my daughter is a good
daughter and she loves me, but she doesn’t always get me. She doesn’t
understand the concept of a place for everything, and everything in its place;
she doesn’t understand that for me there is a right way to fold towels or make
the bed or fold my lingerie for my too-shallow dresser drawers.
She doesn’t understand that for
some people there are indeed preferred coffee mugs.
I used to tell her that my
favorite mug was my favorite because of how it felt in my hand, and that its
dimensions, with coffee, creamer and sweetener combined made the coffee taste
just right. All of that was true. But she didn’t ever really buy that—and, she
told me, especially since we got our Keurig and the coffee/water combinations
are always the same.
She came in the day after the
cup broke, shaking her head in confusion. She told me she’d just been with one
of her ladies (my daughter is a nurse’s aide, visiting clients in the
community). She told this woman about my coffee mug and how upset I was over its
demise. She admitted to me she’d let this woman see her true response to the
situation—that her mother was just being silly, again.
The lady responded with genuine
sorrow for me. When my daughter said to her, “but it’s just a mug”, this lady
said, “But you make me my tea in the same mug every day.”
Her response was, “I just use
the mug that’s there.”
Her client nodded. “Yes!
Exactly. I set out that mug for my afternoon tea. That mug,” my daughter said
she pointed to another, different sized one in the cupboard, “is for my morning
coffee.”
I didn’t let my daughter see me
giggle. I just nodded sagely. But that wasn’t the end of it.
My daughter visited me on
Friday, three days after my birthday and brought me a birthday gift of—you
guessed it—coffee mugs. They were about the same shape as the one recently lost.
Though not of china, they were very pretty and of course I thanked her for her
gift. She immediately washed one of them and made me a cup of coffee.
It was an ok cup of coffee—but,
as I said, the cup was not made of china.
The day after she’d brought me
my gift, she showed up again with her sister—my second daughter. To remind you,
Sonja is the daughter of my heart, not of my body. She’d been engaged to my late
son, but they parted ways before he died. She is the mother of his two children,
and she and my daughter have called each other sister since they met.
Sonja brought me a large gift
bag for my birthday. She handed me a card and told me it was the first card I
needed to open. I found in the envelope not a birthday card, but a
sympathy card. And inside she and my daughter had altered the text to
read, “Your loved ‘coffee cup’ was so very dear that it’s so hard to find
words to ease your recent loss and bring you peace of mind”.
But the fun didn’t stop there.
In the bag she’d brought, there were....cups. LOTS of cups. I am now the proud
owner of: A huge mug (bigger than a soup mug) with “Happy Birthday” written upon
it; a plastic “Disney Princess” mug. I nodded and told Sonja that since she is
the only princess in the family we’ll save it for her use when she comes to
supper; a big red mug inscribed with “Stay Calm and Move On”; an 8 ounce mug
that declares itself “My Mug”; a “chalk board mug” complete with chalk for
writing on it; a plastic travel mug that you can plug into your car’s cigarette
holder, to keep the contents warm; and last, and certainly least, a sleeve of
disposable paper coffee cups with lids.
As I pulled each item out of
the bag I laughed, and thanked them warmly for their thoughtful gifts.
And I felt genuinely grateful,
too. They might look at me and make fun of my little idiosyncrasies. But the
example of smart-ass I’ve set all these years clearly has not gone to
waste.
Love,
Morgan
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