Or as Vio says, "What a year this week has been."
I sat on that question for a minute. I am a human who can feel a myriad of emotions in a split second, but mad didn’t even teeter on the brink of the list.
It could have been that I was with my sister, Nancy, on a food truck (which really isn’t a food truck anymore) at a horse show in Maryland. We were working 12-14 hour days helping our friend who owns the business and filling in for Leo who has worked there for the past five or six years but opted out of the final two weeks of the season. I didn’t have a whole lot of time with a line of 30 hungry horse riders and their stable hands standing in front of me to process the text. The text that showed my mother’s engagement ring on the finger of the very lovely, Vio (yes their names rhyme) at Flat Rock Brook Nature Center. When I apologized to the woman in front of me for blanking out on her very simple order of a turkey club without the turkey, she reached over and grabbed my hand.
“Congratulations,” she said. “This is big news. Don’t worry, I’ll just take the turkey off of the sandwich myself.”
Three days later, still on the on the food truck that isn’t really a food truck anymore, I got a phone call – one of a handful I’ve ever gotten from this youngest child of mine.
“We’re getting married on Friday in Portland, Maine,” Leo said. “But don’t go telling everyone.”
Now what would ever possess me to do that?
Sure enough, a week after their engagement, Vio became a Voreacos in a civil ceremony, witnessed by my ever-loving spouse and their ever-loving bestie, Tehilla, who was there way back when the love couple first laid eyes on one another.
To give this all a little more context, Leo was once a baseball player who had little control over his life. If he wanted to play on an elite team, he had to do x. If he wanted to play in college he had to do y. He followed the program all the way through, sacrificing or enhancing - depending on whom you ask, and when - his childhood for his dream. There wasn’t much wiggle room or deviation. He loved every minute of it. Until he didn’t.
He hung up his cleats midway through his freshman year of college saying wistfully of his teammates, “These guys have reached the pinnacle of their lives.” He switched his major to philosophy, graduated on time, and then set out to find something more.
In his quest, he walked 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago. Twice. Alone. He picked up odd jobs here and there but nothing that did much more than finance his minimalist living style. He floundered and as his mother, I struggled as well.
Along the way, Leo discovered the art of meditation. And then a random card his father had picked up at a Bikram yoga class led him to an ashram in upstate New York. Which prompted him to explore the Sivananda Yoga Retreat in the Bahamas where he lived in a tent for three months. He followed the yoga karma program, followed by an intense teacher training course – working, learning, growing and cosmically connecting with a young woman from Israel who needed help setting up her tent.
I didn’t hear much from Leo during that time. The environment was intense, the training was rigorous, the hours were worse. But he did call one day and of course my first question was, “Did you make any friends?”
He told me about Tehilla and Vio who had become a trio, sitting on the dock in their spare time tossing food to the gulls and laughing their heads off.
“I hope you meet Vio one day. She’s the most joyful person I have ever met.”
And of course my next question was, “Are you interested in her as like, you know, a girlfriend?”
Leo responded with an eye roll that I could not see but knew was there. “No, Mom. We’re just best friends.”
Mmm hmm, I thought as subsequent texts mentioned this girl over and over and over again.
Once Vio went back to Israel, they confirmed what we already knew. Leo bought a ticket to Tel Aviv but the war broke out and he couldn’t go. They courted by FaceTime and What's App and finally had their real first date when they rendezvous’d in Peru a year after they first met. From there they went back to the Bahamas for an advanced yoga training course, then to New Jersey to meet the family, then to Athens, Gdansk, Georgia (the country, not the state), and a bunch of little places along the way to Afula, then back here for one final stint before their ultimate move to Israel.
Which is happening as soon as their honeymoon in Italy is over.
Vio is fluent in English, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese. She understands every one of my nuances and quirks. She has a beautiful soul despite our differing opinions on whether or not to domesticate our backyard squirrels or save the spiders crawling in our basement. She is smart and savvy and stylish. But most importantly, she knows how to handle Leo. And loves him in spite of himself.
We managed to throw together a beautiful family celebration last week in the few days between their marriage and move to the Middle East. Max and Kaylina and their five-month-old puppy, Koa, flew in from the west coast and we toasted the love couple along with Leo’s best friend, Koree and the rest of his family. Through the years that our lives were intertwined with the Hargraves, this was all we talked and cared about -- that our kids would find the person who would help build a happy family like theirs and ours. Of course if they became professional athletes, we'd be just as happy.
There were heartfelt toasts and speeches and sage marital advice from both the young and the old. It was the kind of intimate and meaningful celebration all the cash in the world just can’t buy. We came back to the house for pictures and hugs and constricted throats as everyone said goodbye to Leo and Vio.
I left the next morning for Pennsylvania to help run my 50th high school reunion. But not before Leo and Vio asked if I could make it back in time for a blessing of their rings on Sunday. At noon. In the Catskills. In the midst of the impending nor’easter that was plastered all over the media.
And so after too much fun at the reunion (that story is still to come), I drove back early Sunday morning and then up to Temple Israel in Catskill, NY with my ever-loving spouse and the ever-loving love couple.
Leo and Rabbi Zoe had a connection through Tehilla and also a swami (whatever that is). She prepared the most beautiful, heartfelt, spiritual experience I'd ever had. She combined Christianity, Hinduism, Buddism, and Judaism in a moving ceremony beneath a heart made of dried flowers under a sukkah decorated with gourds and reeds and bamboo and colorful papers on which people wrote names of those to be remembered. And of course, wearing her engagement ring, one of those names was my mother's.
“How can you possibly be OK with your son moving to Israel?” another friend asked.
Well, you can’t have it both ways, I responded. You can’t raise your kids to love and accept everyone, to follow their dreams and travel the world and then be surprised when they do. All I feel is the joy that they bring each other. Honestly. I’m not even making that up.
And thanks to Rabbi Zoe, I didn’t miss my last-born and ironically first-married son’s wedding.
The only thing I missed was that first dance to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Teach Your Children.
Teach your children well
Their father's hell did slowly go by
Feed them on your dreams
The one they pick's the one you'll know by
Don’t you ever ask them why
If they told you you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
But I’m holding out hope for that dance. I’ve still got two other kids. Wink. Wink.
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