Toni Lee and Me by Dom Capossela

At what times in your life were you the happiest, and why?

I was married to Toni Lee for twenty-seven years.
The time and times I spent with her was and were the happiest of my life.

We met on a pilgrimage from Boston to Spencer Ma, our destination: St. Joseph’s Abbey, a community of Trappist Monks known as a center of prayer and monastic work. The monastery was also known as one of the origins of the centering prayer movement in the 1970s.
In the evening of our arrival, we had dinner in their dining hall and then repaired to a large gym where we sat on the floor and listened to speakers.
I entered the gym a bit late, looked for the nearest available seat on the floor, and sat beside Toni-Lee whom, up to then, I didn’t know.
From that night on, for twenty-seven years, we were together every day.

The most impactful moment of those years together was morning coffee.
From when we were married, we never missed.
Twenty-seven years times 365 days, 9,855 morning coffees.
I’ve been publishing my blog for an eternity. More than 1,000 days without missing.
Ten times that I shared coffee with Toni-Lee.
Whoever got out of bed first made the Chemex pour-over and served.
(Fifty years later I’m still making my coffee that way.)
We sat facing and spent an hour telling and listening.
Each totally interested in every detail.
The dreams of newly-married; the events of long-time married.
Meals for dinner, meals for the restaurant, for the kids.
Financial concerns – never without them.
Our campaign for State Representative.
The kids to and from school; at school.
Building and opening the restaurant.
Remodeling the entire building.
The kids, each of them, fully.
Never nothing to talk about.
The kids extracurricular.
Our Food magazine.
Her cooking school.
Her studies.
Good times.
My studies.
Bad times.
Until the first rascal woke and quietly demanded attention.

From our first days of marriage, dinners were splendid, formal events: all present.
Frequent visitors, often unannounced.
Creative people, artists and architects; musicians; foodies.
And the children.
Whomever, they never changing our rhythm.
Dinners as formal events.
Discussing the wine; the food; our days.
Toni Lee and I shepherding the group.

We took splendid vacations.
Most frequent were half or full days away from our normal routines.
To take in local artistic performances or art exhibits.
Johnny Cash at Symphony Hall.
The Mikado. HMS Pinafore at the Boston Common or at Harvard.
King Lear in a theatre.
The boys learning.
Toni and I sharing, she beaming with happiness.
Half or full days off.
Opportunities to take trips to Maine and New Hampshire, sometimes overnights.
To Portland, Me., for its museum and restaurants.
To Ogunquit, for the Marginal Way and especially to Arrows, a special restaurant while it lasted.
To Bar harbor and Mt. Desert. Cadillac Mountain.
As a family.
Toni Lee and I in perfect partnership, in the planning, execution, and enjoyment.

Most welcomed and most frequent of the overnight vacations were visits to North Caldwell, New Jersey.
Her family lived on Mountain Avenue.
(For fans of The Sopranos, note the intro to each episode. Tony Soprano took a left on Mountain Avenue. He lived on the top of that hill. Had we only known.)
Toni loved her mother so much that whenever there was a hiatus in our schedules she would inevitably plug in a trip to visit.
Once, a blizzard was predicted for the day we planned on leaving.
Toni was so distraught at a suggestion that we wait a day, we left Boston in the teeth of the blizzard.
Halfway to New Jersey the car hydroplaned, precipitating a twelve car collision in which, magically, no one was hurt.
Our new car was totaled.
The five of us, three sons, spent overnight in a motel.
What fun!
Fast food and non-stop TV. (Those days we did not watch TV so it really was an event.)
Toni’s mother came for us the next day.
One couldn’t help noticing their closeness and similarities.
Two amazing women.
Toni in her childhood environment, beaming.

The most brilliant of our trips was an eleven-week summer in France.
She loved, loved, loved the research, the planning.
She was a scholar.
Before we left, Toni generated a detailed list of the most famous of French dishes that we had to track and taste while I consulted with our wine wholesaler to coordinate the wineries we would visit and the Guide Michelin restaurants.
In the event, we all stayed in a resort area in the south of France, Sanary, we being our three sons, and our helpers: my aunt Marie, my mother, and my teen-aged niece whose job it was to babysit the boys (ages 4, 6, and 8.)
While in Sanary, Toni and I left everyone for two ten-day car trips to visit France’s major wine-growing regions to study food and wine
Idyllic.
Letters of Introduction to the wineries always precipitated detailed tours in which the owner or vintner personally walked us through the winery, outlining each step of the wine-making.
Several times they also took us to the closest three-star restaurant for dinner.
I loved Toni.
Throughout the trip she assiduously updated her food checklist.
Sometimes we ate takeout from the town’s traiteur because they offered one of the items we needed to checkoff.
Sometimes we chose a restaurant for that same reason.
As we reached the end of our stay, we had checked off all of Toni’s extended list.
Only Clafoutis, the French Plum Tart, remained elusive.
We chose, one night, to have dinner at the faded, legendary, super-elegant Maxim’s in Paris.
For no reason other than its historic place in Paris’ gastronomic history.
We were not anticipating I but when they wheeled out the dessert cart, there it was!
Clafoutis!
We ordered it.
Our terrific waiter touched his serving utensil to it.
Looked at us and smacked it with his serving spoon.
It bounced.
He said, “C’est ne pas merveilleuse.”
We laughed.
We ordered it anyway.
Despite the warning, it was pretty good.
Perhaps not marvelous.
And the story lingered: we repeated it time and time again.

Through the restaurant, Toni got to know several other literary types (Toni had a PhD in English and taught at Boston University for several years) and, under her auspices, we put together a magazine, calling it Food, not original, perhaps, but to the point. She the Editor, our friend Howard, the Creative, and I the Publisher.
It fulfilled her need to research and write and combined those talents with her love of food.
Every month we waited anxiously for the magazines to be printed and delivered.
Exciting.

She opened a cooking class at the restaurant.
We integrated the work counter, with its large ceiling mirrors so students could see her handiwork without getting up, with the design of one of the dining rooms.
Class nights were exciting.

Not really a vacation – our home on Squaw Island, Hyannis port, Cape Cod.
We bought the house for summer and long weekend holidays.
Eventually, it became our residence.
Toni Lee was in heaven.
We were alone, alone and she loved it.
With the children, too, of course.
With only us; and her mother.
And, occasionally, her siblings.
She loved, loved the isolation.
We had dinners.
We regularly took 6.00am birding walks. We were blessed with a number of nearby wildlife sanctuaries and took advantage of them.
We took long walks, daily to the Post Office, a mile away along the beaches.
Always together.
Hand in hand, always.

Our Cape Cod home was the setting for all calendar holiday events when we vacationed in place.
We were set up for the group.
These events were always only with Toni Lee’s family.
Our dining room table on Cape Cod held twenty-four chairs without moving anything.
And our holiday events saw each of those chairs filled.
We had plenty of bedrooms.
Although neither of us grew up with happy holiday traditions, Toni and I set a lovely tone for our own family.
We were regarded as the head of the family and all visitors, including Toni Lee’s father, were on their best behavior.
The holiday rhythm started at noon with a Gravy that my mother made for us.
Not only the Gravy and a wide variety of meats, but some wonderful hand-made pasta, like Ravioli or Gnocchi.
My mother always made a Gravy for us although she never joined us.
Pasta was followed by Godiva chocolates.
The youngest took one and passed the box on, everyone taking one and passing on the box.
Appetites for chocolates usually ran out before the box. Or two.
Then we all went outdoors to the field we had plowed level for outdoor games and we played family football, wherein even the youngest among us managed a touchdown.
Then we broke to regather at six pm to enjoy the roast, usually provided by Toni Lee’s hunting-brother, Mark. Wild goose or squirrel or turkey, whatever came into his sight, in season, of course.

Toni and I both loved sharing artistic performances
We were active members of the Museum of Fine Arts. Every special exhibit meant we bought and read the catalogue. So much fun.
We had season tickets to the Boston Opera and to the Celebrity Series which we paid for by giving the impresarios dinners at Dom’s.
The exchange brought tens of world-renown artists from the opera and the theater into the restaurant.

We loved our weekly wine dinners with the Eks.
Toni cooked multi course meals.
Fred brought appropriate, pretty spectaclar wines.
The next day’s morning coffee was filled with a rehash of the event.

And pervading all this activity we oversaw the growth of three handsome, healthy boys.
Infants, toddlers, boys, adolescents, young men.
At home, at school, extracurricular.

Two important areas that Toni rarely participated in were the boys’ tennis experiences (Mino and Chris were New England-ranked players) and the many after-hour visits to the restaurant by the most famous rock artists of the day.
But even here, she was tremendously interested and wanted to hear every word of what went on.

As I transcribe these events I’m coming to a better understanding as to why Toni and I had so much to talk about during our morning coffees.

We loved each other.
Our marriage was an ongoing opportunity to share and show our love in thousands of ways.
And we did.
The happiest years of my life.