Memory and Ritual: Solace at the Solstice

This past Wednesday was Yom Kippur, and, thanks to our school's Jewish families, we all got the day off from class.  It was also the first day of fall, and I was determined to enjoy, one last time, all my summer activities: coffee, prayer, blogging before sunrise, a walk with the dogs, a long bike ride listening to pleasant conversation on WABE radio, a sandwich from the local deli, a visit with Mom, late-afternoon cooking, and reading.

[Photo: Fall leaves on the Silver Comet bike trail on Wednesday Sept. 23.]

The rush to relive summer's highlights in a day brought to mind a similar day fifty years ago when Dad took me with him on a business flight -- a prop plane with TWA -- from our home in Pittsburgh to see my Grandmother in Cincinnati.

I'd turned six at her home that summer, where I'd learned to ride a bike and to swim.  Grandmother, reminiscing years later, said that I'd returned to Pittsburgh longing to go back to Cincinnati.  When Dad had the opportunity to take me, it was a thrill I still recall.

I remember a sunny day in early fall, breakfast with Mama Craig my great-grandmother, and then a day of touching base with all the places that had been part of our summer routine: I literally touched favorite furnishings in every room of her house (and, years later, after her death, I was able to keep a couple of chairs).  Then we took a ride in her Pontiac all over town: to lunch at Frisch's Big Boy; to visit John and Mary's tiny neighborhood grocery store that survived a few years into the Age of Supermarkets; to run around Frisch's Farm to see horses in the barn, ducks at the pond, and the private merry-go-round; to drop by Grandmother's real estate office in the faux-Bavarian village Mariemont; and, best of all, to ride a bike belonging to one of my eight cousins around the vast estate of my Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack. 

This past Wednesday, reviewing developmental psychology for a presentation to seventh graders, I ran across the observation that ritual becomes an important "coping" skill for a five-to-six year old child.  Dealing with first grade and the changes it brought, I'd been in mourning for summer; the ritual re-enactment of summer in a day was comfort enough. I returned home, content.

At 56, when the pressures of things done and left undone wake me in the early hours of the morning, ritual is still a way of coping:  there's a life outside of all the things that worry me, and I'll return to it again.