My childhood Thanksgivings were always filled with the pure and simple delight in being alive!
That’s because they were spent at the home of two extraordinary people.
Doris and Henry Dreyfuss lived in a gorgeous Craftsman house in South Pasadena, with large glass windows looking out on a ubiquitous jewel-like Southern California pool surrounded by wooded areas filled with fairy circles and wonderful hiding places for childlike adventures and make believe.
The Dreyfusses (or the Dreyfii, as my mom liked to call them) were among my parents’ dearest friends — and they were the first adults to ask me to call them by their first names.
Henry and Doris. I called them Henry and Doris.
There was something memorable about this. It told me not only that they were not like other adults — but also that they did not see children the way other adults did. Children were not to be ignored and shunted off to play amongst ourselves. We were as interesting and as interested in living as adults. Henry and Doris affirmed that to each and every one of us kids.
Not only that. Children were probably more aware of something most adults had lost — en•joy•ment. Children had not forgotten the pure and simple delight in being alive. Henry and Doris knew that — where most other adults seemed either to have forgotten or not to care.
In this sense, Doris and Henry were so much like my own parents. All four of these supposedly “older people” — each in their fifties or sixties — were omnivorously interested in everything and everyone — even, maybe especially, kids.
Doris and Henry had three children of their own. And their kids had kids — kids who were my age. Those kids made me feel like family. . .but not nearly as much as Doris and Henry did.
Henry viewed every gathering as a learning opportunity. Not like school though. Rather as an opportunity to remind us kids how wide and wonderful the world is, how much there is to learn, how unlimited our creativity can be. On Thanksgiving, he made us feel the pure and simple delight in everything about being alive!
Henry giving all us kids Thanksgiving presents.
On this Thanksgiving, we all received vests from Mexico along with Mexican-themed gifts. We learned all about our neighboring country to the south in ways that made it come far more alive than it did on the pages of a school book.
Sometimes Henry made fun bibs (as in the picture at the top of this blog). One Thanksgiving, Henry transformed regular old brown paper grocery bags into African animals — and we each paraded around as our animals. As an animal lover, that Thanksgiving was hands down my favorite. And the bags were incredible. Just gorgeous! I wish I still had mine.
Fortunately I still have other animals created by Henry and Doris.
Henry drew this and Doris needlepointed it when I was a baby. Two giraffes forming my initials: MV.
One of the many wonderful drawings Henry sent my parents for birthdays and anniversaries.
Doris and Henry died when I was ten years old. Business and life partners, they chose to end their lives together when Doris was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
A ten-year-old girl could be forgiven for not really remembering two people who died almost fifty years ago. But I have never ever forgotten Doris and Henry.
In the late 1990s, I had the privilege of seeing the large retrospective of Henry’s life at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and reading the wonderful book that accompanied it, The Man in the Brown Suit. I had known that Henry was a designer, but as a girl I don’t think I fully grasped just how extraordinary he was. Henry Dreyfuss, as the Los Angeles Times wrote in this article (click HERE to read it) — “invented the way the twentieth century look[ed]”.
To quote the article:
You know that AT&T telephone that sat on your desk or next to your bed in, say, 1980? Dreyfuss designed it. You remember the sex-kitten Princess phone? He designed that, too. Ever own a Polaroid camera? Dreyfuss designed most of them.
You know the round Honeywell thermostat on your wall? Yeah, that too.
How about the 20th Century Limited, perhaps the most elegant train in U.S. history? Yeah.
The green-and-yellow John Deere tractor that still looks so cool?
Hoover vacuum cleaners?
The Big Ben alarm clock?
The Singer sewing machine?
The Royal typewriter of the 1940s?
Yeah. All of them.
As someone who grew up to be very interested in both design and cultural history, to learn more about Henry’s designs and the business and life partnership between Henry and Doris brought these two extraordinary figures from my childhood back to life.
But the fact is, they never really faded into the wallpaper of my past.
Why?
Because they never stopped being alive in my heart.
As children, we knew what it is to feel joy — to FEEL the pure and simple delight in being alive. Mostly we felt it with our friends or in our imaginations. But if we were really fortunate, there were adults in our lives who hadn’t forgotten how to feel and share and live joy!
I had the immense good fortune to grow up with joy-filled adults. Many of them, in fact!
Because my dad lived his life in joy, he drew to him others who did the same. People like Henry and Doris Dreyfuss.
Henry Dreyfuss famously said: “To look ahead one must learn to look back.”
As I look ahead to a new decade — one in which I aim to nurture and grow and share my daily practices of joy and connection and discernment and centering and compassion with others — I can’t think of a better way to re-ignite my blogging practice than by looking back on two of the adults who modeled the pure and simple delight in being alive.
And in doing so to remember that I am now an adult like they were — and that it is up to me to live this legacy of joy-filled engagement in life forward with everyone I meet of every age.
It is up to each of us to live our legacies of Love and joy forward.
We have so many excuses to despair of our future. But so did they. That generation lived through war after devastating war. Through the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons. Through the loss of faith in our governing bodies the world over. Their world was no better than ours. And yet they managed to teach children like me that life is about living Love.
It is up to us to live Love forward.
It is up to us to keep living Love.
I learned that from Henry and Doris Dreyfuss.