“Tradition,” bellows Tevye like a summer thunderstorm in “Fiddler on the Roof.” “Tradition!”
It’s been stuck in my head since I saw my sister Lauren’s high school production of it last month. She played Golde, and I must say she was quite good. Well, that is if you can get past this blonde teenage, very-American girl playing a Russian Jewish mother of five in turn-of-last-century peasant garb and heavy accent.
Excuse me, but didn’t I just see you on a smart phone texting a friend? How peasant is that?!?
Anyway, that song’s been bouncing around in my head ever since, which is maybe why Tevye called me the other day, his voice disguised as my mother’s.
He (she) boomed at me through the phone: “Who every year put away money for the chores, so the children could buy presents for family at Christmas? The grandmother, the grandmother! Tradition!”
A little background: My mother took my daughter and I chocolate shopping before Christmas. She started this “tradition” last year so the little girl could have her own presents on Christmas morning, bought with her own money. All year she worked at my mother’s picking up pecans in the yard and violating all sorts of federal child labor laws.
Each time she would get a dollar that she could spend on herself, and another one that was stuffed in a clay piggy bank and secured with a cork stopper. She socked away $12, and I think next year I’m getting in on this racket. Most of the time she just fed them to my dog or dumped them in the rose bushes.
Off we went downtown to the chocolate store. My mother couldn’t remove the money from the clay pig before we went. No, instead she had to carry it in a straw basket so when we got to the store we could place our order and then all three of us stand at the cash register struggling to pull out enough wadded up dollar bills.
“Don’t worry,” I said as people in the store stared and marveled at our circus sideshow. “This will only take 13 or 14 years.”
“Tradition!”
My mother is all about tradition. It’s what makes her tick and governs the complex set of rules that govern her life. I complained about this afterward.
She must have thought about this, as she called later to give me the lecture on tradition. That my grandmother had started doing this with her when she was a little girl, that she had carried it on with my brother and me, and now a third generation was partaking in it, too.
But it wasn’t tradition I was grousing about. I love that tradition — how it teaches the value of money, what it takes to earn it, and of course that it is better to give than to receive.
Rather, it was the tradition of trouping around like a pack of drunk elephants that got to me.
“People were waiting on us,” I told her over the phone. “And watching us like we were poor peasants trying to pay for a sack of grain
“So what?” she said. “Besides, they loved it.”
“But we looked like dirt farmers!” I cried.
Going anywhere with my mother is kind of like processing in a Mardi Gras parade. You’re going to be on display and you’re going to draw massive amounts of attention to yourself. People will stare, shout, throw beads and even join in. You? Well, you just have to suck it up, try to enjoy the ride and try not to die from embarrassment. It’s not always easy — I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it.
But that’s all part of the tradition.
So don’t worry, Tevye. Not all traditions are dying. Some are quite live and kicking — even spreading to a new generation.
“Tradition!”