Pick An Old Tradition and Keep it Alive

Even if it adds two thousand calories to your day.

I’ve gotta tell ya, it’s been difficult to find a shred of writing inspiration in the past ten days. This newsletter almost didn’t happen.

I tested positive for Covid a while back and today is the first day I’m feeling a speck of human in my weary bones. Plus, the sun is shining and my dog is awesome.

It’s a good day.

While dwelling inside my Covid bubble it wasn’t easy to find anything to smile about, never mind get off the couch about. But there was one day last week when I opened my freezer door and found….

…a chocolate cream pie I’d forgotten I had.

Immediately, I grabbed a fork, the entire pie, and sat on my couch eating it straight from the pan.

Why this pie mattered.

When my son was a young boy he and I had a little tradition between the two of us.

We’d walk to the grocery store and buy a chocolate cream pie. Then we’d come home, grab two forks, and eat it right out of the pan together. Forget the ceremony of using plates. We just ate the whole pie.

This might sound like no big deal to some but to us, it became “a thing we did.”

How do I know it was meaningful to him?

Because more than a decade later he wrote a Mother’s Day song for me and paid a talented singer to call me and sing it over the phone.

The lyrics in that song mentioned our chocolate cream pie ritual.

That particular Mother’s Day, I was away on vacation. My phone rang as I was peacefully driving along a desolate island road in Jamaica.

On the other end of the call, a man introduced himself as someone with a special delivery from my son. He proceeded to sing the song Curtis had written for me.

I cried and smiled at the same time.

It was the best Mother’s Day gift I have ever received.

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After Curtis died, I blindly shuffled my way through the first few months, struggling to find meaning in anything. Grocery shopping is at the bottom of the “meaningful list” on a good day, never mind in a grief-induced haze.

But one day I found myself in the frozen foods aisle and I’ll be damned if I didn’t zero in on a chocolate cream pie behind the freezer door.

Seeing that pie did not trigger the meltdown in aisle ten that one might assume it would. Instead, it triggered a hundred memories and a fond smile.

I picked that sucker up, paid the six dollars, and went straight home to raid my fork drawer.

I’ve been eating chocolate cream pies by myself ever since.

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Last year I wrote a story called Odd Rituals of Sad People. But who says all rituals need to be sad just because we’ve lost someone?

I feel like we should dig deep into the vault and recall old rituals and traditions we used to keep with our departed loved ones. Moments and memories that might spark that thing we call JOY.

Everyone talks about sparking joy nowadays. It’s not just about tossing or keeping old mugs and t-shirts you’ve hung onto for thirty years.

It applies to us sad people, too!

We owe it to ourselves and to our person to remember the joy they brought to our lives while we had them.

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Could you dig up and reignite an old tradition you used to keep when your loved one was here? Feel free to share it in the comments.

Maybe you’ll inspire someone today.