grit

In the face of inconvenience, sentimentality and grit prevail.

This is the first Christmas that my childhood best friend will soldier
through without her mother who passed away suddenly in May. It will be a
season of memories that cannot be reshaped, only burnished with the
acknowledgement that things just won't be the same. This doesn't keep the
snow from falling or the lights from twinkling. It is the unmovable and
natural movement of the world.

I sent her a note a couple of weeks ago asking if she might want to do a
foreign gift exchange. It wasn't a request without its considerations of
the logistics and the cost and the guessing game played by two very faraway
albeit longtime friends. I wanted to send her something to comfort her and
bring her a bit of joy and knowing that she would want to do the same, an
exchange would be necessary.

She agreed that it would be a fine tradition to resurrect after a few latent
years. Ideas were rallied back and forth. A massage, a robe, a good book
perhaps. We settled on two very different items that we each needed in our
own ways. I was to send a bottle of wine and she was to send a sharpening
stone for my knives. One takes the edge off while the other puts it on.

The grit of a sharpening stone is determined by the nearly microscopic
particle size of the stone. They are measured in microns which are
one-thousandths of a millimeter. Tiny. I have a 1000 grit (about 11
microns) stone from Osaka and needed a 5000 grit (2.5 microns) or higher to
really a polished edge on my knives. The higher the grit number, the
smaller the particles and the sharper the knife. But, stones are easy.

How does one measure the grit of a woman with multiple university degrees, a
full-time job and a little girl? How narrowly do we have to squint to see
the indomitable spirit of my childhood friend as she gave her mother's
eulogy, her future sister-in-law occupying her daughter in the lobby of the
funeral home? In her speech, she said that her mother had become a
transcendent force, able to not only move through space and time but able to
grow and shrink. I sat in the front row, my friend in white as is our
tradition, thinking about her mother zooming into the nucleus of a cell.
Perhaps in the needle of a Christmas pine. Perhaps in the organized lattice
work of a snowflake on her daughter's lapel or in a raw sugar crystal on a
butter cookie. Or maybe she's as big as the goodwill of men.

I will smile and bow my head as my friend toasts her mother this holiday
with well-traveled cabernet that will chill on her doorstep until she
retrieves it. "[My daughter] has more toys than she can shake a stick at.
But what she really needs are a mom and a dad, extended family to love her,
good food, sunshine, health care when she needs it and kindness and
boundaries. It doesn't change after your grow up, either." A few thousand
miles away, the soft, rhythmic brushing of Japanese steel on smooth ceramic
will herald a new year of refocus. It is the steel that is scraped away
which leaves the steel that remains in the shape that will best serve its
purpose.