Why Kim Gave Me A Fish

The original gifted Gurgling Cod, circa 2000

I remember exactly what Kim gave me for my wedding.

Which is remarkable, because I can no longer remember her last name.

Funny how that happens. At one point, she was the kind of friend you invite to your wedding because you can't imagine your life without her in it. We worked together every day. We knew each other's stories. And now, nearly three decades later, her last name is gone.

What I do remember is that she had impeccable taste.

She always wore the preppiest little cardigans, and her blonde bob was somehow always perfect. Whether she had attended prep school or an Ivy League, I have no idea, but she looked and acted like she had. She embodied a version of New England I was still getting to know.

So when I opened her gift and found what appeared to be a large ceramic fish, I assumed there was something I wasn't getting.

Because surely this wasn't just a fish.

I turned it around a few times.

It was definitely a fish.

A fish-shaped pitcher, with oversized lips and an expression that seemed permanently surprised.

As a kid from Wisconsin, I just didn't get it. Fish belonged in lakes, at coho salmon derbies, or smoked and served on saltine crackers. I didn't understand why, of all the things she could have gifted, Kim chose this.

Yet there it was.

A Gurgling Cod.

Although I didn't know that's what it was called at the time.

I remember staring at it, trying to understand why Kim, of all people, had chosen it.

And somehow my mother, who was also from Wisconsin and should have been every bit as confused as I was, knew exactly what it was.

"Oh," she said. "That's a Boston thing."

And this particular cod had come from Shreve, Crump & Low.

(Of course it had.  Because it was from Kim)

Shreve, Crump & Low is its own kind of Boston institution. At least that's how I understood it at the time.

If Tiffany's was New York, Shreve was Boston.

When people around me started getting engaged, Shreve was where you wanted the ring to come from. It had a reputation. A history. And if you were only planning to do this once, you might as well do it right.

So that's where we went.

And that's where we bought our wedding bands.

What I don't remember is seeing a single cod pitcher.

Maybe I did and dismissed it as an ugly fish.  

Which would have been unfair, because it has quite a backstory.

The pitcher itself wasn't originally from Boston.

Versions of it had been around for years, imported from England. Fish-shaped pitchers designed to make a distinctive gurgling sound when water was poured from them.

Or, depending on your perspective, a burping sound.

At some point in the early 1960s, Benjamin Dale Shreve got a little creative with the idea.

Looking at the traditional English pitcher, he apparently thought:

"Nice fish. Wrong fish."

So he turned it into a cod.

Long before Boston became known for universities, hospitals, biotech companies, or championship sports teams, cod was one of the industries that built the region. Ships carried it across the Atlantic. Fishing families depended on it. Coastal towns grew around it.

It was so important to the economy that a carved wooden cod known as the Sacred Cod has hung in the Massachusetts State House since the 1700s. Over time, it came to represent not just the fishing industry, but the ingenuity, ambition, and hard work of the people who helped build the Commonwealth.

And today, we still seem to love cod.

Cape Cod, obviously. Weather vanes, town seals, signs, and references tucked into old fishing towns all along the coast.

Shreve wasn't selling beach souvenirs.

They were selling engagement rings, sterling silver, crystal, fine china, and wedding gifts. The kinds of things people registered for, inherited, displayed in china cabinets, and passed down.

And somehow, among all the crystal, silver, china, and wedding gifts, there was room for a ceramic cod.

People made fun of them from the beginning.

Which I found reassuring.  It's a fish-shaped pitcher that gurgles when you pour water from it, after all.

But it stuck. So much so that, like my Mom said, it became "a Boston thing.”

Maybe because it was distinctive. Maybe because it came from Shreve. Maybe it was just the right amount of whimsy.

But I wonder if it was more than that.

The cod had come to represent the people who built Massachusetts. Fishermen, merchants, dockworkers, and coastal communities whose livelihoods depended on the sea.

And yet here it was, being sold alongside engagement rings, sterling silver, crystal, and fine china.

What I've learned after nearly three decades in Massachusetts is that we seem to have a knack for putting things together that don't obviously belong together—and making them work.

And if you look closely, you’ll notice that nearly every New England home has at least one, sitting on a shelf, or holding a few purple hydrangeas.

Looking slightly ridiculous.

And completely at home.

Cemetery Hopping and the Art of Material Affection

I have a habit of tucking things away.

Four generations (circa 2007)

Not everything. I’m actually more of a read-it-and-throw-it-in-the-recycling-bin kind of person most of the time. But throughout my life, there have been certain things I saved anyway.

Cards. Letters. Notes. A few newspaper clippings. Things I wasn’t attached to at the time, but trusted that I might be someday. So I stash them away.

I think I write the same way, because I don’t spend much time thinking about who is reading the words right now. Once written, they go where they’re supposed to go. Maybe next week. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never. But they were given a chance to.

I’ve always trusted that kind of timing.

If you missed Amy's other recent posts, you can find them here at Kitchen Table Conversations.

And that’s how I found myself recently sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes of old photographs that had followed me through multiple moves and different versions of my life, looking for a picture from my college graduation.

Thirty-one years later and I realized I couldn’t remember a single detail from that day anymore. Not the weather. Not who stood next to me. Not what I felt walking across the stage.

I wanted photographic proof the day had actually happened.

While searching, I found a card.

White with a red heart on the front.

It was from my grandmother.

My maternal grandmother died a few years ago, and I miss her. She was an extraordinary woman in every way. But she was never the grandmother I associated most naturally with softness or sweetness (although she did make the best Christmas cookies).

I had another grandmother who embodied that kind of love effortlessly. Warmth. Nurturing. Hugs. Comfort. Patience.

This grandmother loved differently. Or at least that’s how I understood her for most of my life.

She loved through action. Through doing. Through showing up. Through movement. She didn’t sit still for very long. Literally or figuratively.

And when you know her story, it makes perfect sense.

She grew up the eldest daughter of Wisconsin dairy farmers during the Depression, helping raise younger siblings and working the farm before becoming a teenage mother herself and eventually being kicked off the farm.

By 32 she was divorced, raising five children alone while her ex-husband spiraled through alcoholism and all the instability and violence that came with it.

And then, she built a life anyway.

She worked factory jobs at all hours, often balancing survival and caregiving at the exact same time. She earned her GED at 40, became the first female foreman on the manufacturing floor at Kohler, bought property, and spent decades advocating for women and children living in poverty and survivors of domestic abuse.

She had a way of showing up for people the way no one had shown up for her.

And that’s why her memorial service was standing room only.

Even her cards arrived with a kind of consistency I took for granted. Birthdays never passed without one (and it never arrived late). Usually typed. Even the checks tucked inside were typed once upon a time.

Before arthritis changed her hands, she typed everything.

I don’t remember exactly when that stopped.

But the cards never did. Not even near the end.

The card I found was from 1997.

My grandma, newly married

I’m sure I read the card when it arrived in 1997. Back then, it was mostly what seemed like ordinary communication. Plans for a visit. Excitement about things we might do together.

A few years earlier I had moved east, and at least on paper, my life looked exciting. I was young, independent, and life was full of possibility.

But I also remember feeling untethered and vulnerable during that time. A little disconnected from myself. Like I was floating through a life without having one. I would visit places like I was scoping them or checking them out so that someday, when I had a real life, I could come back and actually experience them. Weird, I know.

So when my grandmother said she wanted to come visit and see a few things in the area, I remember genuinely looking forward to it.

Inside the card she had typed out a list of things she hoped we could do together while she was there.

More than anything, she wanted to go to Ellis Island.

So we did.

We took the train into the city from Connecticut into Grand Central, a place that had already started to feel routine to me by then.

We caught a cab (this was in the days before Uber) and stood among tourists waiting to hop on to the ferry, the one that passes the Statue of Liberty, to arrive at Ellis Island.

Once we arrived, I remember walking through the halls feeling like it was going to take forever because my grandmother stopped to read absolutely everything.

But then again, she had waited a long time to get there.

Don’t get me wrong, at 24 I thought Ellis Island was interesting. Now I think about what it must have felt like for my grandmother, pushing 70, finally seeing places she had only read about or seen on television.

Because at 24, I was living on the East Coast, moving through New York City without thinking much about it. At 24, my grandmother was raising children in poverty with an abusive alcoholic husband and trying to survive.

Places that felt accessible to me probably felt extraordinary to her, and only a generation or two separated us.

And she loved history. So much so that we had a family tradition we called “cemetery hopping.”

As kids, my cousins and I would get piled into her brown VW Rabbit and spend hot afternoons driving country roads from Waldo to Plymouth to Fond du Lac visiting the gravesites of our ancestors. She would talk excitedly about who they were, what spouse had died, children they had. Most were farmers with long German last names that barely fit across the stone.

At the time, completely normal to me. But I’m guessing most people’s childhood memories don’t involve poking around cemeteries with grandma.

And now, almost thirty years later, I’m holding that white card in my hands, the oversized red heart still bright against the front, and I suddenly understand why I had saved it all those years.

I hadn’t saved it for the woman I was at 24. I saved it for now.

I used to think my grandmother was better with action than affection.

Now I think action was her affection.

And that’s a strange thing about growing older yourself. Sometimes people keep revealing themselves to you long after they’re gone. In a way, your relationship with them hasn’t ended at all.

And sitting there on the floor surrounded by boxes that had followed me across decades of my life, I knew the card had arrived exactly when it was supposed to.

A Graduation I Don't Remember: A Mindful Reflection On Parenting Milestones

Graduation is supposed to be about the graduate.

And of course it is.

But it also becomes something else entirely when you’re the parent. And maybe it’s okay to say that out loud.

Graduation, Marquette University, 1995. Me and my mom.

This weekend, we celebrated a milestone. My youngest daughter graduated from college, and we trekked up to Burlington, Vermont — one of the most beautiful places on earth — to watch her walk across that stage.

There were ceremonies and inductions and honorary recognitions, all wonderful and well deserved, while at the same time we were moving years of life out of a downtown apartment near Church Street, remembering the hottest day of the year a few summers ago when we first moved her in.

If you missed Amy's other recent posts, you can find them here at Kitchen Table Conversations.

And this is where I have to say it. It’s amazing how time flies. It really does. Especially when you have children in your life who suddenly become adults, while somehow you still feel pretty much the same yourself.

So I don’t know about you, but for me, their milestones have a way of pulling up your own stories.

You know the ones.

High school hallways. College campuses. The feeling of leaving home for the first time. First apartments with mismatched furniture. Late-night conversations with friends you were certain you’d know forever. First jobs. First heartbreaks. The combination of freedom, uncertainty, excitement, and fear that comes with so much of life still in front of you.

And what hits hardest is realizing those memories don’t feel far away at all until suddenly they do. And you start doing the math over and over because it just can’t possibly have been that long ago. But somehow, it was.

Throughout the weekend, I found myself thinking a lot about my own college graduation. And I mean really thinking about it, because oddly enough, I can barely touch an actual memory of it.

Truly.

I know I was there — there’s photographic evidence. One picture of me in a cap and gown standing next to my mom.

But I have no memory of crossing the stage, hearing my name called, or really anything else that’s supposed to mark this rite of passage. I’m sure I did it. I must have. But it didn’t leave an imprint, or enough of an imprint to last thirty years, according to the over-and-over math.

And I wonder now if my parents remember it more vividly than I do. I wonder if my mother felt all the things I’m feeling now, standing next to me in that picture, while I was already mentally halfway into whatever came next.

Because I think that’s exactly where I was.

My head was already gone from Wisconsin, thinking about the move, the job, the new city out east, the life waiting ahead of me. Too busy thinking about what was next to fully appreciate what was happening. Too unaware of how quickly these seasons pass.

How fleeting these moments really are.

And yet, watching my daughter graduate, I felt everything.

Immense pride. Heart-swelling love. Admiration. Gratitude. Relief. Hopefulness.

All of it. With an intensity that is anything but forgettable.

And no, it isn’t about me.

But it is, a little bit.

Because yes, this is her moment. Her accomplishment. Her stage to cross. But this is also my experience as a parent.

Maybe that’s what surprised me most this weekend. Not just how proud I was of her, but how deeply I felt the moment myself. More deeply than I think I felt my own graduation.

Which makes me wonder if this is one of the strange gifts of getting older.

Maybe we become more capable of understanding the importance of a moment once we’ve lived enough life to know how quickly it passes.