'Make My Grumbling Cease'

So, what was I doing in 1994?

The question came to mind the other night while I was washing the dishes.

I noticed that the towel I was using to dry off the plates and silverware was an old cloth calendar that had once hung in the kitchen at my parents’ house.

That year caught my eye. I couldn’t believe this thing in my hands had survived nearly four decades.

The calendar bears the image of a house with a picket fence and trees on either side. Near the top there are a pair of roosters crowing on either side of a scroll bearing the Kitchen Prayer.

“Lord, warm all the kitchen with thy love,” it reads, “and light it with thy peace. Forgive me all my worry and make my grumbling cease.”

I’m particularly fond of that last line since it would pretty much take an act of God to get me to cease my grumbling.

There’s little doubt that my mother had picked out this calendar. She had fondness for colonial theme décor and these cloth calendars fit in much better than any of the freebies we from the bank.

The calendars were hung on the door leading to the basement and I don’t think I ever used one to check the actual date. They were more decorative than anything else.

They also pulled double duty. Once they year was over, we put up a new calendar and used the old one to dry the dishes.

“Waste not, want not,” Mom used to say.

This week marks the 11th anniversary of the day we sold our parents’ house. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long, harder to believe that house no longer belongs to us.

Long, Long Time Ago...

We had to clean some 60 years’ worth of stuff out of there and it was such emotional time as we literally dug through our family’s history. I took a bunch of stuff to my new home, including sheets, towels and, yes, dish cloths.

Back in 1994, I was working at a newspaper in Waterbury, Conn., having moved there a few years earlier from Stroudsburg, Pa.

I turned 37 that year—and I thought that was old back then.

I wasn’t the happiest fellow on Planet Earth to be blunt, and I made no effort to cease my grumbling. In fact, I think there was a part of me that enjoyed it.

My parents were very much alive, my nieces were still children and our family house still belonged to our family.

This was also the year of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding ice capade.

The Channel Tunnel opened between England and France, Lorena Bobbitt was found temporarily insane for cutting off her husband’s yin-yang the year before and the Brady Law, which imposed a waiting period to buy a handgun, went into effect.

Bill Clinton was the U.S. President and Nelson Mandela was officially sworn in as the first black President of South Africa.

The year saw the debut of such films as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Schindler’s List, and The Shawshank Redemption. On the small screen, Friends began its 10-season run.

This was the year O. J. Simpson did his Ford Bronco crawl from the LAPD and a baseball strike led to the cancellation of the World Series for the second time in history.

A lot has changed since we first hung that calendar. My parents have left this world, our house belongs to someone else, my nieces are adults, and I am officially a senior citizen.

I’m still grumbling, but I’m working on it. On the good days, I’m able to focus on the warmth of love, the light of peace, and the memories of good times and great people.