Life is full of ups and downs. In order to make life meaningful and enjoyable, there is a need to adopt a positive (and productive) attitude towards various experiences in life; one needs to look back and look around very often, summarizing personal and other people’s experiences, so as to draw lessons and inspirations. Such an attitude is beneficial, because it helps us meet challenges courageously, overcome difficulties, keep an open mind, and learn new things and enrich ourselves on a continuous basis.

A recent get-together with some of my childhood friends, who came from China to visit New York, revealed episodes of such a positive attitude. These friends—-Ming, Pang-Pang, and Grace—-and I grew up together in Beijing. We have kept our friendship, and we often exchange ideas with the type of long-lasting trust that can only be found among childhood friends.

Ming’s Story

Ming, a newspaper reporter, has a 25-year-old daughter who is now studying at a law school in China. We knew that Ming gave tremendous love and attention to her daughter. Her loving care was meticulous: from academic study to the type of friends to have, from survival skills to critical thinking capacity, Ming devoted tremendous energy. We also knew that, for a number of years, their relationship was quite tense, particularly during the daughter’s teenage time. Ming often complained to us how her heart was almost broken by her daughter’s teenager behavior. So when we got together recently, our concern about their relationship was still strong.

“How are things now?”

“It has been a pleasant surprise.” Ming confided. “A few years of college experience brought a lot of changes in my daughter.” During her college time, far away from home, Ming’s daughter had to cope with challenges all by herself. However, years of ‘family education’ helped her form a positive attitude toward life, and she met various challenges without fear or complaint. After college, she worked for two years to accumulate practical experience for the subsequent study of law. Gradually, she learned how to solve problems effectively, and she learned to prioritize issues to deal with. She learned how to communicate with people from various backgrounds, and she learned how to be a team player in her work. Through all these experiences, she also gained better understanding of the profound love that her mother gave her, and her interactions with Ming has become a constant joy.

“Look, this is a letter she wrote me recently,” Ming displayed a greeting card proudly.

We leaned closer, “Read it to us!”

What we heard was a warm flow of love and gratitude that a mature daughter expressed to her loving mother. Tears filled the eyes of us all.

Grace’s Story

Grace, one of my two other visiting friends, is a very graceful, gentle and quiet woman. When we were children, she would always stand aside, quietly watching the rest of us playing like crazy. She grew up to be a ballet dancer, and later a ballet instructor. She was always dressed up elegantly and in good taste, which complemented her slender figure and beautiful long legs. She was born to be a graceful performing artist for the stage. However, an unexpected incident changed her life overnight. Her right leg was seriously broken in a car accident last year, and the doctor told her that she would be no long be fit for a career of ballet instructor. She had never thought of parting with the ballet stage that she loved with all her body and soul. This harsh reality came like a bolt from the blue that, for a while, she almost lost her confidence in continuing her life.

“What happened later that has brought back your courage for life?”, we curiously popped our question to her, who was now still as elegant and gently quiet as before.

“It’s the power of example. An inspiration that goes deep into my bones. A will not to give up in life,” she quietly confided to us.

“During my worst down-spirited time,” she told us. “I didn’t even want to eat or sleep. I felt that my life was unfortunately brought to an end, and it was no longer meaningful any more.” Sadness surrounded her for quite a while until one day, lying in the hospital bed, she happened to notice that there were sounds of cheerful chatting coming through from a neighboring ward. She became curious and moved over to find out. What she saw was a middle-aged woman whose left leg had been amputated from the knee down. It was also the result of a car accident. “To my bewilderment, no signs of disheartenedness or grievance could be found on her face,” Grace told us. “So I began to exchange my feelings with her.”

That woman was a teacher of physical education, who loved her students even more than her own children. A traffic accident took away her left leg at a time when she just came to the peak of her career. What the woman said was totally amazing, “What should I be afraid of? I still have a right leg… With modern technology, I can easily get myself an artificial limb and go back to teaching.”

“And she said this with a laughter.”

Grace was so shocked by the woman’s positive attitude. “It made my own attitude pale by comparison. Just think of it: Here, I was merely suffering from some fractures, without losing a foot or a leg; yet I was so downhearted! Suddenly, I felt I was so small— that woman was a much taller and stronger person.”

Grace suddenly found a role model in that woman. She came to see that life could not always be a plain sailing. Life is dotted with various challenges that sometimes are disastrous. Nevertheless, as long as one has a strong will and a positive attitude towards life, a way can always be found for a courageous continuation.

“From that moment on, my heart began to brighten up,” Grace told us joyfully. Grace realized that, although it was impossible for her to remain on the ballet stage, there were still many other things she could do to enjoy life. As graceful as before, Grace gently and quietly revealed her new life plan to us: She would soon start to write a book, a book about her many years of experience in teaching ballet.

We were all so touched by Grace’s story that we clapped for her —- for her new life, and for her new perception of life.

Pang-Pang’s Story

My third friend at the get-together was Pang-Pang, an outspoken person who was always serious about everything. For years she was in charge of a media center at a university. But she finally came down under the pressure of the academic world. The constant impact of hard work, research projects, endless competition, and workplace politics resulted in health problems for her. Last October, she decided to take a breath from the stifling life. She put her work aside and got on a trip with a tourist group to a beautiful mountainous area for sightseeing.

What she enjoyed most was not the natural scenes. It was the local inhabitants whose attitude towards life that gave her a refreshing lesson.

“In that mountainous area, many people live up to over one hundred years old and they are still in good physical condition. They rarely get sick,” Pang-Pang told us. “You can see that they are very happy everyday. Most of the old people there still do manual work in the fields. When I asked them about their secrets of longevity, they all mentioned that they were living a simple life, a life that was with happiness and good for health.”

Those inhabitants told Pang-Pang, “It is true that manual labor is physically challenging, but we don’t need to go to gyms or health clubs. We get enough physical exercise in our daily work. In addition, we don’t have the worries of you city people. Our life is peaceful and our mind is calm. We are appreciative of what we already have. We are deeply grateful.”

That experience was a wake-up call to Pang-Pang. So, the source of happiness, and the secret of longevity, can come from a completely different way of life, from a very different mindset! It is the accumulation of small and simple pleasures that ultimately amounts to real satisfaction with life and a genuine gratitude to the Creator!

“In contrast, in the so-called modern world, we are constantly lured and tempted by visions of greater fame and material wealth, or instant popularity.” Pang Pang sighed. “We always want what others want — we never really appreciate what we already have. This is a major reason what it is so difficult for us to be have a peace in our heart or lasting satisfaction about life.”

Pang-Pang’s story made us think a lot. Yes, there is truth in a simple life. There is something great in living a simple life, in which you can enjoy more of natural happiness and genuine peace of mind. From now on, I will slow down my ‘modern’ pace of life, so as to enjoy every bit and piece of life pleasure in a simple way.

In short, a positive attitude towards life experiences can lead to a more meaningful life. That is what we want, isn’t it?

In many ways my mother, Sylvia, was ahead of her time in spite of the fact that she grew up in a conservative home. Brought up in an orthodox family in Boro Park, an area of Brooklyn that was overwhelmingly Jewish, my mother was the youngest of seven children. She grew up thinking that the whole world was Jewish until she went to Brooklyn College at the age of sixteen and discovered a new world . . . a world of different viewpoints, intellectually challenging and stimulating. After a very active social and political life, at twenty-three she met and married my dad who shared her world view and values. They were happily married for almost forty years. They had three daughters. I was the first.

In her late 40s, she went back to university to get a graduate degree and became a math teacher in the public schools in L.I. My mother had a keen intellect, challenged traditional thought and was an atheist and avowed Communist until the day she died at age 92. Had she started at a younger age in a different time, she should have been a lawyer.

Sylvia was a very attractive woman with a petite slim figure. Her weight never went over 105 lbs. She dressed tastefully and in the feminine style of the times wearing just a hint of lipstick. Her lively smile was beautifully radiant and warm. Large dark brown eyes showed compassion and warmth. She had a high forehead which my father always said was an indication of intelligence. I see my mom’s face as a young and vital person who was always interested in learning new things. It is her joyful pretty face framed by dark wavy hair that I still recall. She rarely got angry. When she did, we knew it by her silence. Can’t remember my mother ever raising her voice, but silence can sometimes be louder. Mom was an intelligent and warm parent encouraging our studies and praising our accomplishments. Approachable and likeable, to me she was the best mother possible. I spent countless hours talking to her, sharing my ups and downs with friends, boyfriends in particular, and was usually in awe of her intellect.

But until I went to college, my mother was the chief cook, housekeeper, decorator, who maintained our household as unpaid ‘housewife’. She also worked as my father’s office manager in his family medical practice. She answered phones and patients’ questions, making appointments and doing his billing.

While she spent many years at home, she read the New York Times cover to cover, not to mention the many politically left magazines and newspapers that piled up in our living room. Her politics were the guiding light of her life. Well into her 80s Mom was a social and political activist always ready to go to a march in Washington or to stand on a street corner to register voters in New York City.

She enjoyed many creative outlets such as upholstery, gardening, sewing and making silver and copper utensils. But when I came home from school, mom was always there with the glass of milk and cookies just like mothers in the movies of the 1940s.

As accurately as clockwork, 6:00 p.m. dinner was on the table. No takeout meals for us. No frozen prepared food boxes ever found their way to our dinner table. Pizza? What was that? Restaurants? Chinese food was the rare once a month treat. Our dinners was served in the dining room with some fresh fruit to start, soup, meat, fish or chicken served usually with potatoes or rice and a green vegetable, salad, followed by dessert of canned fruit or baked apples. We all ate together talking about what happened in school that day or what current event had made the headlines.

Mom made blintzes when she felt like it which wasn’t very often. Making blintzes was a lot of work, but she never complained. She was very organized, meticulous in fact. About many things. No less in the kitchen for a task that called for organization.

In preparation for the task at hand she wore a half apron over her skirt which was the order of the day in the 1950s, perhaps an apron that I had dutifully sewed in home economics. It would have been made of cotton in some cheerful pattern with fruits or flowers. The rim of the apron would be trimmed in rickrack a kind of trim attached by hand after the whole thing was sewn on the sewing machine upstairs. The main body of the apron was attached to a waistband which I thought cleverly covered the stitches that were neatly basted underneath the waistband. Then the whole thing was attached to two long strips of cotton of the same variety as the skirt and these were tied in a neat bow behind her. All dressed for the kitchen experience, she was the head chef of our home.

To make our blintzes, eggs were cracked into a cream colored pottery mixing bowl which mom used all her married life. It wasn’t decorated except for the vertical lines indented like a pumpkin . . .it’s wide-mouth opening tapered down to a sturdy flat base. It was strictly utilitarian and nothing beautiful about it outside of the shape, but through the years it held many wonderful mixtures of ingredients: meatloaf, applesauce, pancake batter, tomato sauce, fruit salad preparation and cream for whipping were all combined at different times in this plain large bowl.

But first came the making of the crepes. She beat together whole eggs into a foamy and pale yellow froth adding flour and milk to just the right consistency of thick cream for pouring. Then with two metal pans heating butter on the stove she poured the batter into each pan. The skill and art came into play as at just the right moment she poured back the excess batter into the bowl. The crepe cooked for two minutes or so until one side was golden brown. Then she flipped it out with the cooked side on the bottom, onto a waiting kitchen towel and poured the next measure of batter into the empty pan. By then the second pan was cooked on the one side sufficiently to be gently coaxed out onto the towel and that pan was again refilled. Forty or so more crepes were cooked on one side and the towels would be laden with these cooling pancakes waiting for filling.

Then came the filling: dense, dry farmer’s cheese combined with lumpy pot cheese softened with a couple of egg yolks and a bit of sugar were all combined for the filling of the blintzes.

When I got older and could offer some assistance, I was cajoled into putting the filling onto each blintz and then frying the folded up square packages in the same frying pans, three or four to a pan. The blintzes were gobbled up slathered in sour cream or smothered in apple sauce. When cholesterol and fats were not an issue or even a known problem, mom’s blintzes ruled the day.

Cooking with mom was an excuse to talk . . . to share with her and unburden myself of my constant complaints about high school issues: the unavailability of mature boys to date, the essay that was due in English class, the gym teacher who wouldn’t allow girls to stay out of gym with menstrual cramps.

Life was easier when mom had the answers or at least was willing to listen. I listened to my mom’s opinions and welcomed her sage advice. . . .not always, but most times. It’s a rare mother and daughter relationship these days that allows for that give and take across the kitchen sink. Perhaps more mothers have to prepare dinner more often.

Mom’s Blintzes

Crepes:

6 eggs beaten

1 ½ C. milk (add ½ c. at a time to the eggs)

1 ¼ C flour (measure as sifting adding a little at a time making sure no lumps form)

Using two 7 inch pans, oil each pan once only. Heat up the pans. Pour a little batter into crepe pans and then pour out the excess quickly. Cook on one side only at this stage. Makes about 45 crepes.

Filling:

1 lb. farmer cheese

1 lb. pot cheese

2 egg yolks

sugar to taste

Combine cheeses, egg yolks and a couple of spoonfuls of sugar. Set aside until you have all the crepes ready. Placing each crepe with the cooked side INSIDE, fill each crepe in the center with about 1 T. of the mixture. Fold two sides over the cheese mixture and the top and bottom sides over those….making a square for each. Then fry several of these blintzes in a buttered/or oiled pan a few minutes on each side to finish the cooking.

Add applesauce or sourcream when serving. Sometimes Grandma would use apricot jam as a filling instead of cheese for leftover crepes. Yum. Yum.

Author’s Bio:

Nancy Eder worked for over thirty years as an administrator at New York University. She wields a paintbrush in the Pyrenees, a shovel in school gardens, and now a pen in her second year of the “Writing from Life Experience” workshop.

We could hear it from around the bend. he boxy bus, bright yellow, high on its wheels, bumped around the curve and stopped at Oatis Viele’s garage each morning at 7:30, barely daylight in December. Up its steep steps my younger brother and I hoisted ourselves and sat down quietly. Our cheeks were red and our breath was visible. Already on the bus were the silent gangly boys from the farms: one from Turnwood, another from the farm next to the fishery, and a third from next to the YMCA camp. My brother and I were new. If they noticed us, it was with a deep reserve, the withdrawn quiet of people who worked alone with their strong arms and their own thoughts.

The sounds of the slow 13-mile ride to school were the noises of the motor, the clutch, the brakes, the laboring up a hill, no singing, no shouting. We sat shy, not even talking. We stared out the window, watching to see if the schoolmate at the next stop was there. The bus would wait three minutes, longer if we were early. Was he sick? If he came on he sat silent like the rest of us.

The high seats with straight backs bounced and swerved us along the winding road, keeping to the course of the stream. The water might be high, surging noisily around the worn stones, or it might be low with the stones all exposed. In the long winter white crusts of ice and tall hats of snow sat over the water’s rush. “Water is low” or “Water is high” was the appropriate conversation. We were not likely to spot animals because our noisy motor gave warning.

We memorized the route. There was Lew Beach, the small crossroad with only a garage and bar. The father, Cliff Stewart, tall and gaunt always in the same overalls waited at the gas pumps. His oldest son, Cecile, slight and pale, later got elected to Town Supervisor, and enveloped himself in a sex scandal with a farmer’s wife. He was a drunk and died before he got old. A younger son, in school with us, died when a truck hit his motorcycle. The entire high school attended his funeral in the small Lew Beach Cemetery.

Around the next curve was an old farm cemetery, a dozen old stones on the slope. Around another curve stretched the horse farm, then the exclusive fishing club for rich members from the city, with their hip boots and casting rods. We passed acres of state park, covered with second growth trees and brush. Before the state bought them these stony fields had been cleared of the maples and oaks; the stones had been lifted out and piled on one another to fence the fields. These fields yielded meager crops. Finally we saw the small cluster of homes built by generations of Decker family; the half dozen homes bore the honorary title Deckertown. At last we turned onto Route 17 where smooth highway took us the remaining 2 miles to Livingston Manor and school.

Classmates who lived in town were children of shop keepers, or of taxi drivers, carpenters, the bakery. They chatted and flirted in the lunch room, and I imagined them on sports teams, having outings and romantic times together. They dressed better and had a confident air. They went to movies and the ice cream parlor. They knew everyone in town.

The new central school, first grade through twelfth, was big and fine for a poor community in the Catskill Mountains. Red brick wings stretched out from a central spire along the Beaverkill Stream. The corridors were wide with marble insets. Large parking space and playing fields lay behind. WPA had built it shortly before I arrived, my grade had twenty-six students, my French class, five. The science teacher took our graduation photos with his hand camera. He printed our personal calling cards which we exchanged with classmates. We wrote “best wishes” or “have a happy life” on the backs.

School for me was strictly classes, because the school bus waited, ready to take us home. No teams, no clubs, no night time functions, no parties, no hanging out, no social visits. No distractions from homework. In the long idle winter evenings I invented a game: telephone one of the boys, laugh and hang up.

That bus came without fail, never late, as the season grew soft and warm, then hot, and in the next season once again crisp, windy and cold. The driver stopped, swung open the door for us, nodded, then closed it and went on. No need to waste words.

For my brother and me it was always a scramble to get to the pick-up spot on time. In our headlong morning rush, our books slowed us only a little, but on the long trudge home after school, the uphill mile and then the steep rise to home, they pulled our arms down and dragged our legs. We kicked the pebbles on the red dirt road. No hurry now, warm afternoon, tired, shackled. I asked my brother to carry my books, but although he was altogether a very satisfactory brother, he refused.

We stopped at the spring and bent far over and put our mouths to the rusty pipe for a swallow of its icy water. Across the road wizened shrunken Hank Christian rocked on his meager porch and waved to us. We visited him sometimes, in his two tiny rooms with low ceilings, walls tightly sealed from the weather with sheets of plastic. On cold days his coal stove warmed us for a few minutes. In the dark interior a small table was set with tin cup and plates, all old. Nothing had been shifted or painted forever. He pulled up his pants leg to show us the growth on his leg the size of a cantaloupe, brown, with raised surface veins. No, he wouldn’t see any doctor. And if he had only a few teeth left, they sufficed.

In the spring of 1940 a plague of gypsy moths infested the mountain maples. All along that mile to the school bus each morning and afternoon we walked through the silken threads of the caterpillars lowering themselves from the overarching trees. We could not avoid the sticky threads or the small caterpillars dropping on our hair, our shoulders, the back of our necks as we bent forward to protect our faces. Then once clear, we gingerly pulled off the squirming green caterpillars and brushed off the white threads. It did no good to step on them; we were outnumbered. The forested mountains turned brown with bare branches for the rest of that growing year.

Now years later I ride from time to time on a yellow school bus, as teacher or helper for a children’s trip, or for a senior tour. It is the same bus, with the same uncomfortable seats, but buzzing with chatter and laughter. Inside my aged self I am the same young girl, sitting with my adored younger brother, shyly noticing the boys in the back, memorizing every curve of the road.

Everything has changed on our old route. Even the road is different from my school days. The red dirt is now tarred and widened to two lanes. The little graves are still there, headstones leaning into the slope. Oatis Viele’s garage is gone. The Lew Beach garage is gone. The beautiful stream and hills are now large estates for wealthy men. Nothing stays the same. But I will end up there in the small Agudas Achim Cemetery a few miles away, on a steep hill next to my husband, near my mother and father. I accept it matter-of-factly, although I don’t like thinking of the cold and wet sticky clay. I can sense why it would be comforting to imagine a reunion, a resurrection. But I won’t be comforted by such wishes. I will be part of those stony hills that keep changing yet remain the same.

Jan, 1996 updated Feb, 2007

Author’s Biography

Rebecca Rikleen ran an early childhood full-day program, used her spare time to create assemblages out of discarded children’s toy pieces, wrote, and finally worked hard at painting when she retired.She is a young painter and fledgling writer. She says, “Even though I am an old woman, and unfortunately, there is no short cut to honing skills. In my head I was always a painter and a writer. The eye and hands are trying to catch up.”