It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Winter Traditions -- Light and Song

In the Catholic faith, Advent encompasses the 4 weeks before Christmas.  A candle is lit each of the 4 Sundays; traditionally, there are 3 purple candles and 1 pink.  As a child in plaid jumper and navy knee socks, I was told that Advent was a solemn time of waiting, a time to repent and reflect (not quite as severe as Lent, but not party time, either).  The purple candles symbolized the sorrow of waiting; the pink candle, lit on the 3^rd Sunday represented the joy of the approach of the Christ child.  This all seemed to fit for me – Advent was a time to be good, because Santa knows, and there was definitely something purple in the waiting – waiting for Christmas baking, waiting for grandparents, waiting for Santa, waiting for snow, waiting for Christmas carols, waiting to decorate the tree, waiting to open presents.  Advent was definitely a time of waiting.

As I grew older, Advent came to seem less of a period of waiting, and more of a countdown from Thanksgiving.  Light the candle – 1 week closer.  Tick.  Next candle.  Tick.  Pink candle.  Tick.  Last candle, andohmigodIhaven’tdonemostofmyshoppingyet.  BOOM.

It wasn’t until my children started school (yes, this is one of those posts) that I began to understand the place of light in winter.  In the lower grades, the children make beautiful paper lanterns and attend a Lantern Walk to celebrate Martinmas.  As the fall air begins to bite, the line of lanterns woven through the dark is threaded with song. 

After Thanksgiving, in the first week of Advent, the school offers an Advent (or Winter) spiral to the children in the lower grades.  In a quiet room, a spiral of pine boughs is laid on the floor, punctuated with luminarias.  One at a time, the children enter the spiral, carrying a white candle in a red apple.  The child lights his or her candle from the pillar at the center of the spiral, then bends to light one of the candles along the spiral on the way out. 

This year, the Winter spiral was only offered for the children up through fourth grade.  As my son and his classmates each took their turn in the spiral, I could see why.  Something changed in their faces.  Unlike the few younger siblings that walked the spiral during this session, the fourth graders that exited the spiral were not the same as those who had entered.  While the younger children glowed with a round innocence even after their candles were extinguished, as the fourth graders blew out their candles at the mouth of the spiral, they blew out something else.  Fourth grade marks the transition from little kid to big.  The unquestioning faith of childhood has begun to fall by the wayside, shadows creep into the corners.

The first light of advent is the light of stones,

Stones that live in crystals in seashells and in bones

The second light of advent is the light of plants,

Plants that reach up to the sun, and in the breezes, dance

The third light of advent is the light of beasts,

The light of hope that we may see in greatest and in least

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

This is the Advent verse my children recite at school.  To me, there is something deeper here, in this marking of points of nature, than just a lighting of candles to mark time.   The verse grounds the moment with the outside world.  It is easy in winter to experience a hibernation of the soul, to direct our thoughts and feelings inward, to protect ourselves from the outer darkness and to protect others from any darkness of ours that might ‘contaminate’ a season of joy.  Yet, as the kids light their candles with a verse, they are connected: to the stones, the plants, the beasts, and to each other.

Singing fills our house (and car, and yard, and grocery store) this time of year.  The English translation of the Swedish Santa Lucia song, the school Advent song, the dreidel song, “Channukah, Oh Channukah,” and a random assortment of Christmas carols (in English, German, French, and Spanish) float through our lives this time of year.  These winter songs have all been adopted by my children, regardless of festival or religion.

Light.  Song. 

The part of my brain that has studied other traditions, the part that remembers history books, or dusty lessons in comparative studies can trace the links between European pagan and modern Christian festivals without bursting any neurons.  However, it wasn’t until my children began coming home from school with songs and verses of light that the point of all of those Solstice candles connected with me on a visceral level.

Robyn Beaufoy, a good friend, wrote a piece in the school newsletter about Advent celebrations.  In this essay, she writes “Writer Annie B. Bond reminds us that ‘Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Christmas, Yule, Diwali, and the celebration of Buddha’s enlightenment all take place in December, the darkest time of the year.’ Despite these different leanings, our common searching for Light in the darkness of Winter unites us.”

When Caitlin was in 5^th grade, the mother of one of Aidan’s friends came in and talked to the class about Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.  As the class began their studies of world civilizations that year, they began to link the commonality of festivals.  In 3^rd grade, one of the other mothers had come into the classroom to teach the students about Channukah.  At the school, the 2^nd graders each year enact the Swedish festival of Santa Lucia.  The oldest girl in the class wears a crown of candles on her head, and the children distribute breads or cookies to everyone in the school – while carrying candles and singing, of course.

Winter has been especially dark the past few years.  When the economy began to flag, we first noticed the inadequacy of my paychecks in winter.  Within the last couple of years, we’ve been forced to tell the children, “Well, you know, Santa’s having a rough time, too.  There are an awful lot of kids out there who don’t have any toys at all, and he needs to take care of them.”  Two years ago, the last of my living grandparents, my maternal grandmother, passed away on Christmas Day. 

Yet, with each shadow, there is a spot of light.  Grandma lived a long and full life, yet her last years had been grey and shadowed with frailty and forgetfulness.  She was ready to move on.  Our economic challenges have forced the focus of Christmas away from elaborate lists and mountains of packages.  Though the bank account is not nearly so bleak this year, I have yet to begin or even fret about any Christmas shopping.  I’d rather inhale the Christmas tree and snuggle on the couch with my family.  There will be presents, but hopefully, they will bring joy, not stress.

Darkness comes.  In each of our lives, there are periods of long, black cold.  We all have our times of sorrowful or solemn waiting.  Rarely do we get to choose when that long Advent of the soul will strike.  But we have a choice.  We can approach these times with the joylessness of time marked, or we can hold moments of that darkness, be present in them, turn them over, and light a candle to move on.

The fourth light of advent is the light of man,

The light of love, the light of thought, to give and to understand

 

 

Good? Bad? But Never Indifferent: My Take on Modern Parenting

Maybe parenting has always been this hard, this fraught with judgment and dogma.  Maybe mothers in the caves of southern France said to one another, “Did you see her with her kid?  Doesn’t she know that you should never turn the sabertooth pelt fur-side against the skin?  Her baby is going to have such a rash…” Or, perhaps not.

Certainly there are literary and historical examples of poor parenting:  No one would give Medea mother-of-the year, and regardless of divine command, I’m not sure that a willingness to slaughter your kid based on the voices in your head is a great illustration of fatherhood.  But, most examples of ‘bad parenting’ from previous centuries and generations seemed to focus on the disastrous extremes.  Nowhere in the Little House books does anyone come up to Ma Ingalls and say, “Do you really want Laura playing with that pig’s bladder?  Little Johnny in the next town over did that last fall and you know how sick he was all winter!”

Yet, for my generation of parents, every choice – from brand of baby food (or homemade baby food) to when, how, or if to let children play – seems to have a rating system attached.  But, nobody seems to agree on the scale.  How are we measuring these things?  Do I get bonus points for letting Caitlin climb our tree in the front lawn, thus empowering her to take risks and improving her muscle tone, connection with nature, and sense of balance?  Or should I be reported to CPS and flogged in the public square for risking so much as one of her precious epithelial cells?  Am I a bad mother for allowing Aidan to possess a NERF arsenal that is the envy of the neighborhood boys, tacitly okaying the casual acceptance of violence pervasive in modern culture?  Or am I good for allowing him to accept and learn to regulate his natural aggression?  Will watching a documentary forever alter the biochemical functioning of Sierra’s brain, or will it give her a better insight into some aspect of our world?  Whose research should I believe?

Caitin in our tree 12/2010 w/ Sierra on the swing watching

And do I even care?

Obviously I care, or I wouldn’t be wasting the word-processor time.  But,(and go ahead and start lobbing stones for this) I don’t care as much about the implications of these studies, opinions and dogma to the children as I do about the scars each one leaves on the parents.  Ok, more specifically on the mothers.  What the hell are we doing to each other and allowing to be done to ourselves?  What weird line have we crossed when an intelligent, educated mother (and I heard this recently) agonizes over the morality of allowing her son to pick up a stick and say ‘Bang. Bang.’?

I hate to say this but I think this intensive maternal navel-gazing (and, to be honest, most of us ‘good mothers’ who nursed our children can’t even find our navels unless we’re wearing killer push-up bras) is at least in part a function of the unprecedented number of educated and career driven women in my generation.  What did society expect? 

I suspect that motherhood was less questioned in previous generations because it was simply something one did.  Like cooking, cleaning, (and a number of other life skills that seem to have been either lost or over-analyzed), parenting was just a part of life.  Parents fed, clothed, and housed their kids, provided them with the type and level of education that seemed appropriate, toys that matched the household budget, and went on with the rest of their lives.  If you had to make every loaf of bread from scratch, or wash all of your laundry by hand, your kids were going to either play outside and do their own thing or they would be pressed into service for chores.  Few households had the luxury of worrying about whether play was age-appropriate or ‘too risky.’  Parents were just glad to get the kids out from underfoot, and they certainly didn’t have time to make modeling dough by hand or to lead elaborate needle-felting projects.

Yet, my generation (particularly of women) is a bit different.  Many of us in the middle and upper-middle classes were raised by the first generation of more broadly educated women, the first women to truly have a shot at a life beyond kitchen, hearth, and child.  And we were raised with expectations.  C’mon, say it with me: “Anything boys can do, girls can do better!”  We were going to take over business, politics, and generally kick the patriarchy’s butt.  My generation (good old generation X) was the first where women equaled (and have now surpassed) the numbers of men in higher education.  We truly can do anything men can do.  But, we can also do the one thing men can’t do – carry a fetus, give birth, and lactate.  Oops.

Sooner or later (often later, and I think that, too is an issue contributing to our current parenting protocol obsession), many of us realized that there probably needed to be a next generation, and that our uteri were going to need to provide the early housing facilities.  And, so, we wound up with a generation of goal-oriented mothers trained to research, to interpret scientific papers, to absorb data like the fibers of the Brawny towels so lovingly advertised to our mothers, to achieve (and over-achieve).  And yet, the mothers of my generation and socio-economic class found that children had not evolved along with the ideals of our society.  Children still need to be fed, housed, and clothed, to learn to walk and talk, and to be educated and to be provided with playthings.

At that point, a generation of women with a veritable alphabet soup of letters after our names lost our collective minds.  Realizing that we would, in fact, be forced to compromise our career trajectory to one extent or another, we decided to channel all of our ambitions, energies, and training into something that humans have done for thousands of years.  But, we would do it better.

This brings me to the personal part of my rant.  No one who has read this blog can possibly doubt that I have some strong views on parenting.  Nor should they doubt that my views are more in line with those of my parents and grandparents than many of my peers.  I believe kids should play – with minimal adult supervision and interference.  I believe that children need scary stories with dark consequences for bad behavior.  I believe children need to learn that the stove really is hot by burning themselves while learning to cook.  I believe (and our house has proven) that a six-year old is capable of preparing his or her own breakfast and lunch.  I believe that a child who ignores instructions to ‘take a jacket’ and is subsequently cold will better remember the jacket next time than the child whose parent rushes back to school with the jacket.  I believe that kids need to deal with teasing, shunning, and name-calling on their own as much as possible and that these experiences (allowing exceptions for what I consider true bullying) make them stronger.  I believe that kids need to fall (physically or metaphorically) and that by doing so they learn to take risks and to pick themselves back up.  I believe that kids need unconditional snuggles and that they need to be corrected when they’ve screwed up.  I don’t believe ever in ‘letting a child win’ to ‘boost self-esteem.’  I don’t believe in empty praise.  I believe in giving kids more respect than that.  I believe in giving them the pride of earned praise.  I believe that the process is more important than the result; that the act of learning is more important than the grade. 

And I believe that kids need to learn to fight their own battles – the real, the pretend, the physical, and the verbal.  I let my kids have (pretend) guns and swords and give them rules that they need to follow to use those: you may not ‘shoot’ anyone who is unarmed or who doesn’t want to play.  You may not whack your sibling with a sword under any circumstances.  If an accidental whacking does occur, you must apologize.  Dragons live in your bedroom or the hallway, not in the kitchen, dining room or hallway.  No firing NERF guns in the house.  A gun, any gun, even a toy is to be pointed at the target or at the ground.

                                                            A well-armed Aidan. 12/2010

Do I believe in violence as a solution – generally no.  However, in self-defense, absolutely.  I have taken self-defense classes (many), my oldest daughter has, and I will insist that my son and youngest daughter do so.  Do I believe in war – generally no.  But I do recognize that while most wars are a useless waste of life and exploitation of our young, that some circumstances are so hideous that they can only be solved through force (the Nazi empire, for example).  Do I believe that humans are inherently aggressive?  Of course.  I fail to see how any person with half a brain can look at human history and say otherwise.  Humans are animals, and phenotypically, we are predators.  Do I believe that humans are also inherently cooperative, social, and capable of independent thought, kindness, and creativity?  Hell, yes.  Again, look at history, and look around.

Back to the personal.  My beliefs are my own.  You may notice that I have not cited a single study, article, or research paper in this piece.  That omission is deliberate.  For every study that substantiates a parenting or sociologic, or even physiologic theory, an opposing body of research can be found.  Statistics lie and all liars are statisticians – I plagiarize freely here, but the truism holds.  Parenting theories are just that – theory.  And they will be neither proven nor debunked until most of us are long gone. 

So, you don’t have to parent your kids my way, but don’t you dare demand that I parent my children your way.  Our classrooms, society, and species have enough room for many ways, and there’s probably a bit of truth everywhere.

Thanksgiving in the Great Hall

We’re dining at Hogwarts this Thanksgiving weekend. 

Ok, not really, but it’s pretty close.  My parents’ home has a large ‘great room’ with a vaulted ceiling and huge stone fireplace.  It’s normally the least used room in the house; big, and kind of echo-y.  It’s also the only room in which we could hope to seat 17 people around something resembling a single table.

Yep, 17.  We haven’t had this many family members gathered for a holiday in several years, and the logistics took some contemplation.  There’s been a generation shift in our family over the last decade or so, and the transition has been a bit uncertain. My parents are both only children, and so the holidays of my youth were a combined gathering of our core family unit and both sets of my grandparents with the occasional addition of the odd great-uncle, aunt or cousin.  But, since neither set of grandparents had any other children to work into the equation, their presence at holidays was a given.  We rotated major holidays between the three houses or occasionally a rented cabin or condominium.  The biggest logistical quandaries were who brings the turkey and who’s in charge of the Christmas tree.

Fifteen years ago, I married an only child, and the traditions continued essentially unchecked as our family, ameboa-like, absorbed my husband and mother-in-law into the matrix.  Then, roughly a decade ago, my sister met her now-husband, and things got more complicated.  Mike (yes, my sister and I married men with the same name – get over it.) has a brother and sister with spouses and children of their own, and a family with its own tradition of large, boisterous gatherings.  This was unsettling.  Suddenly, my sister’s presence at a family holiday was no longer guaranteed.  Granted, there were any number of childhood Christmases where I would gladly have sent her a few hundred miles in any direction if only I could find a box large enough or a jet pack, but as adults, we’ve reached that intimate, bickering symbiosis known only to two people with shared history of hair-pulling fights and sneaking in the cold dark to open Christmas stockings.  The first Christmas morning where my pre-dawn companion(s) in stocking reconnassaince was(were) not my sister but my children, was the first holiday where I felt the jolt of time.  I wasn’t the kid anymore.  I had moved up a rung on the generation ladder.  And, I didn’t like it.

During this same time period, the other end of the ladder shifted.  The grandparents, around whom our family memories of holiday foods and traditions center, were aging, fading, and dying.  When my maternal grandmother died – fittingly on Christmas Day – two years ago, the shift was complete.  Like it or not, each of us had stepped into the next role.  My children are now the children, not just generational hangers-on.  Santa comes for them, not for Steph and me; they put the olives on their fingers at Thanksgiving.  Mike and I are the parents; my mother-in-law and parents are the grandparents.  And, in this shift, our traditions have been tweaked and our core unit has shrunk. 

This Thanksgiving, however, through some cosmic serendipity, we have expanded again.  My brother-in-law’s siblings both had other Thanksgiving plans, and so, for the first time, his parents join our holiday.  The multi-cellular family organism has collected other matter as well.  My father’s cousin, his wife, and two sons arrived yesterday as we sat down to bowls of clam chowder.  After the required awkwardness of kids forced to join a table of half-strange adults, the bowls were cleared and the house pounded with laughter, shouting, and the clatter of billiard balls.

And Mom, who had called me no fewer than three times while I was in Texas on business wanting help with logistics and cooking (at one point, she was demanding a pecan pie) regardless of my geography or other commitments, said while stirring the gravy, “I’m enjoying this.  This is good.”  Her tone had about the same level of amazement as if the candles in the great room had actually started floating.  Our places have shifted over the years, and we’ve had to rearrange furniture and expectations, but the core magic of Thanksgiving remains unaltered: food, fun, and family.

Failure as Fertilizer

Your child is a failure.  My children are failures.  You are a failure.  I am a failure.

Ok, don’t start throwing things yet.  Our society vastly underrates the value of failure.  We all fail.  Most of us fail daily: at school, at work, in art, in the kitchen, at play, and in our relationships.  We are all failures.  We need our failures.

Just as Edison needed his myriad ways not to make a light-bulb in order to achieve success, we need our failures in order to learn.  We need our failures in order to learn what doesn’t work and by extension what does.  We need our failures in order to learn how to problem solve.  We need our failures in order to learn to adapt.  We need our failures in order to learn to persist.  We need our failures in order to grow.

Sunday was diorama drama day in our house.  As part of a 4^th grade book report, Aidan was making a diorama depicting the California Gold Rush.  His original plan had involved making a figure of a miner panning for gold out of modeling clay.  Now, while I did buy him some of the little pine trees (they were adorable; how could I resist?), we do not generally allow our kids to have pre-fab presentation kits.  You want to build something?  You find the materials and you build it.  You want an animal?  Make one – needle-felt it, sculpt it, whatever.  Do it yourself.

Aidan had drawn a miner with a pickaxe in the background, painted the riverbed, and figured out how to affix the trees.  Now he was ready for his figurine. 

Scene 1: Clay blob.  The modeling clay was too wobbly to support a kneeling figurine.

Scene 2: Wire skeleton.  He decided that his guy needed a skeleton.  So, Aidan went to the garage, found the reel of fencing wire, borrowed the wire cutters and got to work.  He bent the wire pieces into the shapes of kneeling legs, a torso, arms, and head.  He then pressed the clay muscle and bones onto the skeleton.

Scene 3: Tears.  Of the words parents hate to hear coming from a work area, “THIS IS STUPID!” has to top the list.  The miner (which I actually thought was much better than anything I could have done at that age) was not to scale.  He dwarfed the pine trees; ok, they looked like weeds.  Mike and I tried the “the trees are in the distance” approach, but Aidan wasn’t buying it. 

I take back my earlier statement.  Where school projects are concerned, there is another set of words that I dread even more than the above.  “Several (yes, my nine-year old talks like this) other people have turned in their dioramas already.  And they were PERFECT!  Mine looks HORRIBLE!” Hugging my son and growling under my breath, I told Aidan, “Well, I don’t think it’s bad, but it’s your project, so do what you need to to make it look the way you want” and went back to my office.

 

Scene 4: Facebook status update. 

A plaintive plea to other grade school parents: please, please don't do your child's projects for them. Don't even "help" substantially. Help them figure out how they want to do it. Let them struggle a bit. Help them problem solve, but don't do the construction. It isn't fair to those children whose "mean" parents feel that school projects are for children to do. My kid should not have to compare his work to that of 30, 40, or 50 year olds. Thank you. That is all.

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the other “perfect” dioramas, so I have no idea what, if any, parental input they received.  However, I have seen plenty of school projects over the years that were not completed solely, primarily, or perhaps even in part by children.  As a parent, the clean-edged, polished display that is obviously beyond the capability of an elementary school child makes me grit my teeth.  It’s hard enough raising kids with perfectionist tendencies without knowing that they are comparing their efforts to work that was not done by their peers.

But, there is another aspect to parental project participation that makes me sad.  The children whose parents “help” by doing all or most of the cutting, gluing, design, etc. are losing out.  They are being denied the gift of failure.

We all need to screw up.  We need to plan something and watch it fall down or crumble to bits.  We need to make a figurine that isn’t to scale.  We need to put forth an effort that was less than our best and face the consequences – even if those consequences are a bad report or a failed grade.  We need the gift of our mistakes – they are the fertilizer of our lives.  (Don’t make me use the obvious excrement metaphor.)

How many of us have crossed the waters of adulthood without foundering?  Speaking personally, I have: been fired from my first professional job; lost a house; been laid-off another job, hurt and been hurt by the ones I love; and made more mistakes than I care to contemplate.  But, each failure has made me stronger, braver, more creative, and more loving. 

How have I been able to grow from my failures?  I have a memory of cross-country skiing with my family.  I must have been about ten years old – about Aidan’s age.  Descending hills on narrow skis that are longer than you are tall is tricky at any age, and given that I had trouble walking without falling down, my rear was no stranger to the snow.  Halfway down one hill, I took a particularly spectacular tumble.  I was on the steep edge of the hillside, legs twisted, skis pointed in opposite directions and one pole out of reach downhill. 

I was cold, wet, bruised of butt and of ego, and my legs ached.  In tears, I asked my parents to come pull me up.  They came and stood near me, but didn’t extend a hand.

“Help me up!”

My dad handed me my wayward pole.

“I can’t get up.  Help me.”

“You can do it yourself.  Get your skis straightened out and pointed across the hill.”

“I can’t do it.  I need help.”

“You’re big enough to do it yourself. You know how.”

“I can’t.  I’ll fall.”  I pushed myself halfway up and slid partway down the hill, skis still in a knot.

“You aren’t trying.  Get your skis straight and parallel.  Use your poles.”

“I need help.”

“Someday you’ll fall and we won’t be around to help you up.  You need to learn to do it yourself.”

 

Later, there was hot chocolate, and I’m sure that in my mind at the time, that was the only thing that redeemed my parents from utter cruelty.  But, as an adult, I don’t remember the hot cocoa.  I only remember the gift of that last sentence.  As a parent, I now know the struggles that my parents didn’t show me as they stood there.  I know how hard it was for them to let me try, and fail, and not rescue me.

I wrote a guest blog last week about “saving” others.  One of the points I made was that rescuing diminishes the rescued.  Every time we refuse to let someone fail or to dig themselves out of failure, we tell them that we believe them incompetent.

Sometimes I hear parents say that they don’t want their children to feel overwhelmed or bad about their mistakes.  I find myself sometimes arguing the opposite to teachers.  Please, please challenge my children.  Please push them.  Please call them on their sloppy work, on their failures.   Please tell them that they are better than that.  Please let them know that you believe that their best efforts, uneven edges and all, are the work you expect from them – and then let them know that you expect better next time.

Life doesn’t get easier as we get older.  The scary, frustrating, and challenging things that attack us from the outside and from within only get bigger and darker.  Like everything, overcoming adversity takes practice.  Facing failure is like the metaphor of the man lifting the calf every day from the moment of its birth.   Eventually, he is still able to lift the grown cow.  If we allow our children to cope in small ways with the frustrating and scary, perhaps, someday they will have the tools to lift the whole thing.

Circling back to school and teaching; this is the best description I have ever seen of the value of a teacher:

  

Keeping Time

We’re haunted by a clock.

It’s impossible to have any literary sensibility and not be fascinated by the narrative potential of a clock.  A clock with a door, and a pendulum, even better.  Even the means by which the clock returned to our family had thriller-mystery overtones.   Let’s face it, there’s something inherently sinister about clocks and clock-makers.  A woman goes alone to pick up the family clock from being repaired and…

Is she kidnapped?  Has the shop been ransacked?  Is the wizened clock-maker dead?  Does he pass her a cryptic message with a bloody hand?

What if there is no shop with a creaking door and timepieces whirring, ticking, and chiming beneath dim eves?  What if the clock-man has retired, he tinkers with his last remaining projects, one at a time in his garage?  What if he asks the woman to meet him in a shopping center parking lot – years after she had nearly forgotten the place of the clock in her life?  Does the plot change?  Will she be stuffed into a van by masked men with machine guns?  Are there Tsarist jewels hidden within the workings?  Drugs?  Code?  Computer chips?

“Oh my God, you’re going to be killed!”  My sister’s response when I told her that I was meeting a man in a white Toyota Tundra in a strip mall parking lot to pick up our grandparents’ clock was a classic blend of horror and amusement.  We like our drama.  The suspense scenarios at least mitigated her irritation that I had told no one that the clock had been gone for years.

This isn’t an heirloom grandfather clock, hand carved by a distant ancestor fleeing an oppressive regime or while whiling away the darkness of winter in a pioneer cabin.  Our clock stands about 20 high, and while the carving is intricate and the Roman numeraled face appropriately yellow with age, as far as I know, my grandparents found it in an antique shop.  Still, at an estimated age of 120-130 years, it is one of the oldest possessions of our modern, wandering family.  We have no ancestral abode; any jewelry dates back a scant couple of generations; I think there may be a family Bible – somewhere.  More importantly, though, for my sister and I, the ticking pendulum and baritone chimes are key notes in the soundtrack of our childhood.

Further back than my memory, the clock sat at the wall end of the peninsula dividing the working kitchen from Grandma and Grandpa’s breakfast nook.  Seeming to grow from the counter and wall, it was less of an ornament than a fixture.  I think some part of my larval brain perceived the clock as an organ of the house, the heart perhaps, though the metaphor may be too obvious.  Still, so long as we heard the tick of the clock, the half-hour bong in the void of night, Steph and I knew, lying on the impossibly hard mattress of the sewing-room pull-out bed, that morning would come, that Grandpa would make pancakes (with beer) and that Grandma would let us make hot chocolate, stirring the powder into the milk with the tiniest of whisks.

The clock would count down the seconds of cold dark, of unfamiliar creaks, of the Akita’s rustling pace as he did sentry duty along the hardwood hallway, of a sister who stole the covers with knees and elbows.  The clock anchored our dreamships as we were cast ashore into the disorientation of a room that was not our own.  It told us that our parents were just down the hall, squashed into one of the twin beds of Dad’s old room.  It told us that our grandparents would welcome us into the soft bed of their oddly shell-pink and silver bedroom for cuddles and stories of Robin Hood, Maid Marian and their ‘beer-busts and barbeques’ after being chased by the Sheriff of Nottingham on his Raleigh bicycle.

Those stories are gone now, lingering ghost-like, only in our heads.  Steph and I never recount them, fearing perhaps that we’ve remembered them differently, and that our opposing memories might counteract each other, vaporizing the past.  Inherited – a dusty word, crumbling with the desiccated lines of loss.  I inherited the clock.

“Do you remember how it works?”  The clock man, benevolent, middle-aged, and not in the least sinister, smiled at me patiently.

Works?  It’s a clock.  It always ran.  Until it stopped.  It was always there, to be visited, to reassure me, to tell me that the world was safe.  Until it wasn’t.  This is the difference between childhood and adulthood, the realization that clocks, families, and lives require maintenance; that the permanent is ephemeral; and that we have to hold the key and know how to hang the pendulum.  “I never knew,” I fumbled with the pieces of the explanation.  “It wasn’t working when I inherited it.”

I didn’t try to tell him – this kind stranger in the daylight of asphalt and white sidewalk – that the ticking of the clock had stopped coincident with the faltering of my grandmother’s own heartbeat.  I didn’t tell him that when she died, claimed finally by the fluids left behind by a faltering heart, I inherited a broken clock, its pendulum wrapped in a paper towel.  I didn’t tell him that every month my clock was in his shop, through the three remaining years of my grandfather’s life, and the nearly six years since, that I have felt my failure as the guardian of the uncounted seconds.

I didn’t tell him as my hand closed around the cool butterfly wings of the brass key, that I wasn’t ready to be the person who made the clock work, that I didn’t know the stories, that I never collected the tall-tales nor the real life memories of our war hero grandfather in his last year.  My sister listened, she sat by and listened in those last weeks before his blood cells completed their conquest, as Grandpa talked of the things he never spoke of in life, of the triumphs and horrors of a war he’d spent 60 years forgetting.  I didn’t go to hear the stories of a dying man, because my grandfather wasn’t dying.  I was just getting the clock repaired so that he could come and visit it.  He could show me how to use it.  He would beat the leukemia like he’d defeated every other enemy.

The clock just chimed eight.  The kids watched as I placed it on our piano yesterday, hung the pendulum, and wound the hands to the correct time, pausing every half-hour for the whirr and bong.  My grandfather’s picture sits next to the clock.  I like to see him on the piano, to imagine him thumping the time into the heads of my less than enthusiastic musicians.  “You’re rushing again,” I hear as my fingers depress the keys of his old flute.  “Here’s the beat.”  4/4 time pounded into my skull.  Time is the place where reality meets imagination.

“If the clock were bigger,” said my son this morning, “and we owned this house, we could attach it to the wall and make a door, and a tunnel down below the house, and my room could be down there.”  His sister had come into the office around 6:30 because she and her “Little One” wanted “to watch the clock.”

Three faces watched yesterday as I closed the etched glass door of the clock’s case.  They filed out of the room as I returned to the computer.  The pendulum ticked away the seconds on my article’s deadline, chiding my clicks over to Facebook.  Before the next 30 minute chime, my oldest daughter knocked on the door.  “I really feel like baking something.  I don’t know why.  I just feel like baking.”

Two girls in terry-cloth jogging shorts jostle at their grandmother’s elbow.  “Always level the flour with the back of the knife.  Like this.”  A white cloud blows into the canister.  “You only need half the sugar.”  The picture shifts and the grandfather hands over the whisk.  “Put your back into it.”  “Fold the whites in gently.  You want the pancakes to be fluffy.”  “The secret is beating the whites separately.  That and the beer.”  The clock ticks away the revolutions of the whisk.  Another scene: the kitchen is hot in the July afternoon.  “Isn’t it ready yet?”  The girl has been stirring for hours.  She thinks that if they just throw in the nuts and shredded coconut that the frosting might be thick enough.  “It will get there,” says her grandmother.  “You won’t think that it will, but it always boils.  Just keep stirring.”   The girl knows, this has been her job, every year since she could see over the stove top, stirring the frosting for her dad’s German Chocolate birthday cake.

My children baked amicably together for four hours on the day the clock returned to our house.  Bowls and pans were put into the dishwasher. Cello practice went off without a hitch; Caitlin conquered Vivaldi and Aidan played the first measures of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with gusto.  I can’t see any lumps, but they have hard heads, my kids.  As far as I can tell, there are no packets of cocaine, no thumb drives stuck to the underside of the clock, no gems hidden in the mechanism.  But, something else came home with that clock.  We are haunted by some combined spirit of time, memory, loss, and love.   I have been given the key, and ready or not, I am the one who knows how the clock works.

My youngest came into the office a few minutes after her sister, past the noise of intent debate from the kitchen.  “Sissy wants to know what kind of cake Grandpa wants for his birthday?” 

I grinned at the clock.  Sorry Grandma, but I know a secret.  “Grandpa doesn’t really like cake.  Why don’t you guys make him a pie?”

Goldie

This wasn't the post I'd intended for today, but I was inspired by TheHorse.com where they are asking readers to post pictures of their geriatric horses on the  Facebook page.  Seeing the pictures and stories of these beloved friends made me realize that I haven't really posted much about the horse who epitomized the title of this blog.  This is excerpted from an early draft of an attempted memoir now gathering dust on my hard-drive.  It's a little long for a blog post; think of it as a love story.

 

Horsemanship in the central San Joaquin Valley of the 1980’s was utilitarian.  Matching tack trunks, handmade boots, monogrammed blankets: the vast array of equine paraphernalia now ubiquitous in tack stores and on the internet were, for us, props for movie sets and novels about fancy boarding schools.  Our horses were not specialists – if we wanted to jump, they jumped; if we put them in front of trail obstacles, they maneuvered the course; a Western saddle meant drop your head and jog slow; an English saddle told our horses ‘tuck your head and extend that trot.’  We were cowboys, Olympians, circus-style bareback riders, rodeo queens, and daredevils.  Breeches were expensive and consigned by our purse-watching mothers for use only in the show ring.  We did our riding in blue jeans.

True horsemanship is determined not by money, time, equipment, style or supposed expertise, but by a mindset – a gritty practicality, a determination to finish the job, to solve the problem, to use all of the resources at one’s disposal.  The first lesson is persistence.

“Mom!  We have to call them right now.  They’ll sell her to someone else.  Please!”  Standard pre-adolescent demand, except, I wasn’t that sort of teenager.  I was the quiet girl, the A student and pathological people pleaser.  In a family where the last cookie is courteously halved to the last molecule, demands for anything, let alone luxuries like horses, were not standard, nor tolerated.

“Are you sure she’s the horse you want?  You haven’t even looked at any others.”

“Yes.”  I would die if I didn’t have this horse.  Squirrels ran indifferently across the telephone wire that hung at table height along the tops of the pines outside of my grandparent’s breakfast room.  The fog rolling toward the room-length window from the distant bay was alien and eerie to eyes adapted to searing August sun.  I was trapped in the Oakland hills, and back in Merced, other people were trying to buy MY horse.  To my thirteen-year old brain the very fact that they wanted to turn her into a parade horse demonstrated the criminal incompetence and inhumanity of my arch-rivals.

Looking back through a mother’s eyes, I realize that my parents showed remarkable tolerance and courage in the face of their new adolescent’s foray into insanity.  When we had gone with my riding instructor to “check out” this prospect for my first horse, Goldie had not interviewed well.

The irrigated pasture was the only square of green in the buff, oak-blotted landscape.  One horse-shaped body grazed amid the rectangular forms of the cattle.  The ranch owner looked at Suzie.  “She’s pretty green.  They’ve had a saddle on her a few times, but she’s mostly been a broodmare.  You’d better try her.”

She was going to be my horse.  I wanted to be the one to ride her.  And I didn’t.  An electric jelly traveled up my legs and into my stomach.  My glasses slid down my nose; I pushed them up with my right index finger and tried to be invisible.  I had a theory that if I stood sideways, at the edge of a wall somewhere, and avoided eye contact, that no one would notice me.  I was later to learn that this is a great technique if you want cattle to move past you.  Everything rested on this moment.  With all of the intensity of adolescence, I felt that this was the only chance:  the only horse, my only opportunity to live something other than the stories in my beloved books.

My instructor swung her leg across the saddle.  The horse shifted her weight and froze.  As the faded denim of Suzie’s legs closed around her barrel, the horse shuddered: ears went back, head went down, hind legs kicked out in a buck.  The out of shape broodmare with the still engorged udder was no match for Suzie.  The mare’s last foal had just been weaned less than a week before.  Suzie guided her around the sand arena using spur and direct rein.  She pulled up.  “Yellow horses,” she said in disgust.  “They’re all ornery.  She’s pretty green.  You sure you want her, Chris?”

I nodded.  My throat closed around a tangled knot of hope and fear.

Suzie looked at my mom.  “Well, Jean.  She’ll need a lot of work, and she’s not papered, but I think she’s,” this time she nodded at me, “up to it.  But,” and now the glare hit me full force.  “You’ll have to toughen up.  No dreaming.  If you don’t pay attention on this horse, she’ll hurt you.  Bad.”  Then she spoke the words dear to my mom’s Scottish DNA.  “The price is sure right.”

I didn’t care about price, training, papers, or ornery attitude.  Left to untack and brush the mare while the grownups babbled the meaningless polyglot of adulthood, I wrapped my arms around her neck, tangling my fingers in the white mane and breathing the smell of horse sweat and valley dirt.  “You’re going to be mine.”  My breath was a whisper.  “I’ll train you and take care of you.  We’re going to be best friends.”  As though touching a precious artifact, I reached my hand to the muzzle where the white blaze dropped into velvet pink.  Nothing had ever seemed as soft or perfect.  I was thirteen; I didn’t care about anything else.  She was beautiful.

Palomino: coat the color of a newly minted coin or three shades lighter or darker.  So said my 4-H manual.  The summer before I began eighth grade, Goldie’s coat hovered half a shade to the light of that mythic coin.  Each leg blazed with a white stocking, a white blaze streaked from forehead to nose.  Her main and tail were white, peppered with a few black hairs.  Slight broodmare belly and bad attitude were invisible to my eye.  She was Trigger, Pegasus, and the unicorn.  Every other girl would wilt from envy.  Whoever said that dreams had to be wholly altruistic?

The stucco arches of the house hid behind the immense shrubs, pines, and half-circular drive that in the mid-80’s proclaimed loudly the “upper” in upper-middle class.  Our house had two stories and a deck over the garage, but the driveway was a standard cement slope -- pull in, back out.  Our family hovered just above middle, with an “upper” that was lower-cased, non-italicized.  Creatures flopped against my stomach wall as we waited under the yellow circle of the iron pendant porch light.  Dinner had writhed on my plate, squirming from the tines of my fork as my family dawdled over their meal.

School had just begun; dark had started to fall during dinner, making the time seem later.  I knew that we would get to the seller’s house and find out that my dream was sold to someone else.  I would wake up the next morning, in the same state that I had awoken that morning, an eighth grader with a flat chest, thick glasses, and no horse.  My foot pressed on the non-existent accelerator on the passenger-side floorboards.  Dad had to be missing every light on purpose.

In the house with the immaculate carpets that made me look twice at my Nikes for mud, Dad swooped the illegible, sprawling signature that mine now mimics across the bottom of a check for $800.  Both grownups signed the deed, and that was it.  I rode home in a shining chariot of glory, the owner of a horse.  And nothing was ever the same again. 

When I was in college, a male friend informed me that he doubted I would ever marry.  “You’re married to your horse,” he said.  He was wrong, and he wasn’t.  Like a marriage, a first horse is a complicated thing.  And Goldie was a complicated horse.  After that night, Goldie and I came to an arrangement.  I would work on training her to neck rein, to lope, to circle, to back, and generally to be a civilized riding horse.   She would buck me off at least once a week for the year it took for me to learn to hold my seat long enough to make the effort less worth her while.  At one point the rodeo performances were dramatic enough that my friends began timing my “rides.”  I learned to fall.  I learned to get back on, to start again.  And I learned to sit, to hold my position until we achieved the outcome I desired. 

            Ours was a strange relationship, that yellow horse’s and mine.  Flying through the air, hitting the sand with a roll and a grunt, I would look up to see a blaze face peering down at mine. ‘Oh crap!  Did I kill her,’ the brown eyes would say.  The ears would flicker as I hauled myself to my feet. ‘Oh crap! I didn’t kill her,” the hindquarters would say as she turned to run from my outrage.  Halters became irrelevant; Goldie and I were inseparable.  “Come on,” I would say, and my big yellow dog would follow, lead rope or no.  We played tag in the manner of The Black Stallion. I would lean against her legs, sitting in the shade of her neck as her copper coat dried in the summer sun.  And she never let me forget to pay attention.

            Goldie last bucked beneath a rider at age 34.  The rider in question was my then 3 year old daughter, and the buck was just a crow hop, but as I snapped. “Whoa.  Quit it!” the ears flicked forward and the neck arched even as she stood.  ‘I’ve still got it,’ my horse told me.

            Goldie was 36 years old when she took her last bite of grass in our orchard.  When I helped my best friend from this life, I ended a part of my own.  I have children of my own, including a daughter now who is nearly as old as, and far more self-assured than, that skinny teenager with the thick glasses, but some part of me will always be that girl with the golden horse.

 

 

 

Circling Round

                                    Make new friends, but keep the old,

                                    One is silver and the other’s gold.

                                    A circle’s round; it has no end,

                                    That’s how long you’re going to be my friend.

 

Kindergarteners and parents circled the summer garden, hands joined and singing.  As we circled, the teachers tapped shoulders, and motioned for some to join them outside the circle.  We joined their chain, and coiled along behind.  As the last repetition drew to a close, the feet stopped.  Two circles had formed.  The inner circle held the younger children, now the “big kindergarteners,” who would remain in the sunlit rooms for another year, mentoring the 41/2 year olds who will seem so small in September.  The outer circle was formed by the children and parents who were moving on – to first grade, or to other schools.  Their year had come full circle.

“Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  Good-bye, Sierra.  It’s time to say good-bye.”  The children sang and laughed, as one-by-one their friends were summoned to the teachers with their ritual dismissal song.  One-by-one, they hugged Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly, accepted their small gifts and returned to the circle.  One-by-one, Little Ones (don’t call them dolls), the treasured small friends of the kindergarten, were placed in pouches, and also dismissed by name.  The Little Ones who had come for the first-years will return to Little-Land to spend the summer with Fairy Mother.  However, for the older children, their Little Ones will accompany them home, to support them in their new adventures.  Petal, Sierra’s Little One, had already gotten a head start on summer break and , like Stevenson’s “lazy little shadow,” “ had stayed at home behind [her] and was fast asleep in bed.” 

Nearly two years ago, Sierra was the smallest and youngest member of the Climbing Rose kindergarten.  Barely 41/2, she squeaked into the age cut-off.  A brand new kindergartener with a brand new teacher.  Yesterday, I cried as she walked with deceptive demureness toward her teachers then took a flying leap, anchoring herself to Karina’s lap.  My last kindergartener is now a first-grader, and her teacher, the teacher who has nurtured her with humor, discipline, and boundless love will be moving on to her own blessings.  Teacher Karina and Teacher Kelly will remain part of our circle, friends of gold, but Sierra has moved to the outer circle, on to the grades, to a teacher as yet unknown. 

In September, first graders are welcomed into the grades, the heart of the Waldorf curriculum, with the “rose ceremony.”  As they are greeted by the teacher who will carry them through the lower grades, each child is presented with a red rose by his or her “eighth-grade” buddy.  The eighth-graders, many of whom are Waldorf ‘lifers,’ will partner with their first graders throughout the year, leading by example, showing them the ways of the school, and giving them someone ‘cool’ to admire.  And, at the end of the year, the circle of the rose will be completed.

“That’s Bay’s class.  And Curtis’s class.”  Sierra, sitting on my thigh (and incidentally squashing my sciatic against the wood seat of the too-short chair), whispered as the seventh-grade recited their verse.  Something caught in my chest as they were dismissed, to “sit down as eighth graders.”

“Sissy’s class!”

I feel my destiny
My destiny finds me
I feel my star
My star finds me
I feel my goals in life
My goals in life are finding me
My soul and the great world are one

The sixth-grade’s song was familiar from their class play; their teacher had set to music one of Rudolph Steiner’s verses.  Yet, familiarity doesn’t prevent tears.  Sierra’s hair got very wet as I watched her sister’s class, suddenly no longer round-cheeked children, sing with the mingled poise and acute self-consciousness of adolescence and “sit down as seventh graders.”  It’s coming, the end of that circle, more quickly than I could wish.

“Zoe’s class!”  No, Sierra doesn’t have a sibling in fifth grade.  Her brother has a classmate with a sister in fifth (now sixth.)  But it went this way through the grades.  As the now fifth grade stood for the last time as fourth graders, Sierra proclaimed, “Tyson’s class.  Oh, and Nicole.  And Carpenter.  I know lots of people in that class."  By the time she said, “Aid-y’s class!” I was starting to get it.  The circle is a spiral, or maybe a Mobius strip. The close of her time in kindergarten isn’t kicking my child into an unknown world.  She is joining a larger circle, a circle in which she already sees herself as a link.  “I know everybody,” she said.  Not everybody, but she has found connections to each of the grades, and in doing so, has begun to picture herself in their place.  In the rhythm of the curriculum, the children find both predictability and adventure.  Last night, as we lingered around a picnic table with two other families, Caitlin explained her hatred of cauliflower, stemming oddly from a fifth grade botany lesson.  Tyson, the now-fifth-grade brother of one of Aidan’s best friends, broke his customary quiet to say, “I’m studying botany next year!” They make the connections, find the links, and draw upon each other to move from one point in the circle to the next.

Sierra’s hair was soaked by the time my son and his friends – when did they all get so tall and sturdy looking?—sat down “as fourth graders.”  They had completed their verse and song (in Hebrew!) with word and note perfection. And with grins and a surreptitious fist-pump or two, that class owned their new role.  They know exactly who and what they are.  Uncertainty and self-consciousness will come to them in a year or two as adolescence begins to shine its spotlight, but for now, they are nine years old and invincible.

“That’s Joey’s brother,” Sierra pointed at one of the eighth graders – the brother of one of Caitlin’s classmates and son of Caitlin’s teacher.  Each member of the graduating class was called up by full name.  Their years in the school were announced.  From the lifer with ten years behind her to Ricky (Joey’s brother) who joined the school this year, each has made his or her mark upon the school and has earned the right to stand before their younger peers as testament to the completion of the cycle.

And, then, the first graders were asked to join their buddies.  Sierra remained silent as the class she knows best – many of whom were the ‘big’ kindergarteners when she started school, and with whom she played and laughed – stepped forward to stand before their eighth graders.  I wish I had the words to the verse that the first-graders recited, but it began something like this: “When we were much smaller and you seemed so much taller…”  The first grade told in verse the tale of their year, from their first moments in that September rose ceremony.  And as they finished, each first grader turned and presented an eighth grader with a red rose. 

Scarlet roses clutched in their chubby hands, first graders enter their classroom for the first time beneath an arch of flowers held aloft by their parents.  They process beneath the stems and petals, are greeted with a handshake by their new teacher, and enter the classroom of chalk and wonder for the first time. 

Scarlet roses clutched in elegant and strong hands – hands that have learned to knit, to cook, to play recorder and string; hands that have drawn runes and written of the fall of Rome; hands that have joined in song, and dance – eighth graders depart their school beneath an arch of sunflowers lifted to a (finally!) summer sky by teachers and parents who must now stretch to raise the stems above the teenaged heads.  They bid farewell with a handshake to their first graders and to the school as they leave for a world of new wonders.

Epilogue:

Sierra was quiet as she watched her friends hand their roses to their buddies.  “Next year, that will be you; are you ready?” I whispered.  She shook her head.

As I pulled the covers to her chin last night, Sierra asked, “Will I get a rose tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow.  In September.  In three months.”

“I’m ready, Mommy.”

“I know you are.”

In September, Mike and I will watch as Sierra receives her rose and greets her teacher for the first time.  She doesn’t know who her “buddy” will be, but it’s a good bet that that eighth-grader will be known to her.  As spring morphs to summer, she will return that rose to the one who has shown her the way.  And, in that following fall, Caitlin will offer a rose to a child who seems impossibly small.  And the circle will continue.

Turn Loose

“Now if it starts to go to pot out there, just turn loose.  Turn loose of everything.  You’ll be fine.”  That was the sum of my pre-solo sail advice from my grandfather.  Turn loose of everything, and then regroup, that and, as he and my dad glanced over their shoulders at the empty gravel parking lot, “I guess you’d better wear a life jacket in case your mother gets back.”

I was ten.  The boat in question was an El Toro, a two-man (or one girl) dinghy.  The body of water was a man-made lake on the outskirts of Merced.  Lake Yosemite must create its own weather, for even on stagnant August days, winds can whip white caps in the middle of the lake.  My mother had driven Grandma to Mass, taking my little sister with her.  As the oldest daughter in a boy-deprived family, I got to stay “with the men.”  I had sailed before, but always with an adult crammed alongside the centre-board.  However, Dad and Grandpa, apparently tired of the boom-induced cranial lumps from my unpredictable jibes, had seized upon the absence of female interference to teach me to solo.

Shivering under the 90 degree sun in a damp bathing suit and clammy “Mae West” life preserver, I slid into the stern.  Lake water lapped at the bottoms of my thighs as I clutched the tiller and sheet.  “Ok, I’m ready.”  My knuckles were white.

“Turn loose.”  Over 30 years later it amazes me that Grandpa Bligh could give that advice with a straight face.  Ask anyone who knows me well to describe me in three adjectives, and chances are, “stubborn” will be one of them.  I am not good at letting go.  Ropes, people, relationships, ideas, jobs, paragraphs, clutter, bad habits – I hold on.  I come by my tenacity honestly.  He who said, “turn loose” was the master of pig-headedness.  Yet, he knew what all too often eludes me still.  Sometimes, it will all go to pot out there, and the only thing to do is to turn loose, to let go of everything, and to hope that once the waters still, you can regroup, pick up, and begin the voyage again.

“Why didn’t you let go?”  My riding instructor stared at me as I handed over the once white cotton lead rope of my sister’s horse.  Mud caked my boots and splattered my jeans, shirt, and hair.  The calluses along the palms of my hands flared red, soon to blister.  My legs felt like jelly and my shoulders as though giants had been tearing at my arms.  Waterskiing through a muddy pasture behind a runaway horse will do that to you.  Suzie shook her head in disgust.  “Come on, Chris, you know better than that.  The gate was locked.  She couldn’t have got away.  You’re gonna get hurt doing stuff like that.  You should have let go.”

I was older in that February pasture than I had been on the summer lake, 15 or 16, but no wiser.  I did know better: if you are holding something you can’t control, let go.  I knew the rule, but had not integrated the wisdom.  When Noel, my sister’s Morgan, pulled away from me in hopes of rejoining her pasture mates in their wind-whipped freedom, I clung to the rope, stubbornness telling me that my 100 lb body could stop a 1200 lb force of nature.  Logic, reason, and common sense died beneath the wheels of the tank that is my fear of loss and failure.

I’m not good at letting go.  Hold on a little longer.  Try something different.  Try one more time.  Say the right thing.  Just keep going.  Don’t give up. 

The last one is the kicker – no one wants to be a quitter, no one wants to give up if there is a chance, just a chance that it might work.  But, the reality, the one that my Grandfather, veteran of war and widowhood, and Suzie, with two divorces behind her, knew, is that sometimes it won’t work.  Sometimes the forces pushing against us or pulling us in our wake are more powerful than we.  Sometimes it is broken and can’t be fixed.  Sometimes it will go to hell, and then it is time to let go.

A few years ago, I went on a call to vaccinate a group of semi-feral ponies.  The stallion had recently encountered some barbed-wire, and while his lacerations looked superficial from a distance, I wanted a closer look.  He wore a halter, but no lead.  “You’re going to have a hard time catching him,” said the owner.

I looked at the pony, the halter and the size of the pasture.  “No problem.  I’ll go out there by myself, and once I have him by the halter, you can bring me the rope.”  Bull-shitting through a situation is a professional specialty.

Sure enough, the pony was curious enough to come say ‘hello.’  I scritched his neck, and slid my hand down, grabbing the halter.  Just as I called, “Ok…” my patient pulled away.  No problem – he was only about double my body weight.  I centered myself and jerked on the halter.  “Whoa.”  He stopped, then pulled again.  Same response from me.  Now, this is where I went wrong – in my head this was a horse.  For a normal horse, one or two failed attempts at misbehavior is usually enough to correct the behavior.  Not so for a pony stallion – ponies are short, and have much to prove.  He jerked back a third time, and took off running.

Enclosed pasture --  no problem, right?   After all, I learned my lesson 25 years ago, didn’t I?  Sadly, not so much.  My fingers remained clenched around the cheek piece of the halter, and unable to hold my ground, my feet trotted along with the pony.  As he broke into a canter, my brain finally returned from the sandy beaches of denial, looked at my feet which had turned into cartoon wheels and the speeding ground below, and said, “This looks bad.  Maybe you should let go.”  Oops.  The brain had apparently left its knowledge of physics beneath a palm tree.  My four-legged partner and I had been travelling at his speed, not mine.  As my fingers released the halter, my body fell victim to inertia.  My feet, unable to sustain their free-wheeling momentum alone, slowed, but my upper body continued to travel at pony-speed.  Like Wile E. Coyote plunging from a cliff, I had a split-second of “Uh-oh” before the ground rushed toward my face.

Back in the office, as I held an ice-pack to my knee (in a last ditch effort to ‘save face’ I had broken my fall with my left patella) and tried to make an incident report sound logical (How will you avoid this incident in the future?  Turn loose of the damn pony.), my technician Mel and a client stared at me and shook their heads.  “Why didn’t you just let go?”

The only answer I can give is that some of us need more lessons than others.  For some, through faith, reason, or emotional balance, letting go seems to come fairly easily.  The rest of us need the rope burns, the bruises, the heartache, and the spectacular failures to learn the balance between giving up and accepting the inevitable.  The house has been gone from us since September.  I have finally stopped planning projects or trying to drive too far up I-5.  The practice where I worked closed a week and a half ago.  I still run through cases in my head in the evenings, thinking, “When I get to work, I need to…”  “Kill your darlings,” goes the writing advice.  I am editing the first draft of the novel now, and bleeding just a little as I force the ink across any paragraph that doesn’t work, doesn’t contribute, or is trying to get away.

More things exist outside of my control than within it. 

“God grant me the serenity

 to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference...”  Reinhold Niebuhr

And God grant me the ability to turn loose when it all goes to pot.  Oh, and can I have a life jacket, please? 

The Last Day

“Wake up!  Support your wife.  It’s her last day of work!”  Mike is not a morning person.  At 6:30 every weekday, I get up from my computer, walk into our bedroom, and spend the next 15-30 minutes convincing my husband that he must overcome gravity in order to contribute to his corner of the world.  As I chirped out this morning’s greeting, a sense of déjà ecoute wacked me on the head.  This sounded hideously familiar.  My hummingbird brain tracked the sense to the source.  Lethal Weapon (III?  IV?).  Great.  At 6:30 A. M., I channel Danny Glover.  ‘This is it,’ I thought.  ‘I’ve jinxed myself.  This is going to be the day my job finally kills me.’

Since I’m sitting here typing, it’s not exactly a spoiler to point out that I was wrong.  I escaped the last day alive, and with all limbs attached. 

The last day.  My last day as a practicing veterinarian (for the foreseeable future) and the last day for Bradshaw Vet’s Large Animal Clinic – forever.  It was a good day, pretty damn close to a perfect day.

It was the sort of day that makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t become an ambulatory vet:  St. Patrick’s Day green, chalk-pastel-impossible grass; white, puffy trees, azure skies, distant, snow-capped mountains; country roads rolling endlessly across hills; and grazing cattle.  It might have been easier to say goodbye had the hills been baked brown, or had chill rain soaked my windshield, but this was the sort of day that says, “You are alive.  Every end has a beginning.  Nothing is permanent.  This will all change, and therein lies the beauty.”

Seven years ago, on a February day much like this, a palomino mare stood beneath the fragrant almond blossoms of our orchard, munching stems of cartoon grass.  My friend, my horse.  Goldie died that day.  She was 36 years old, arthritic, and in liver failure.  I euthanized her and friends buried her in that orchard.  It sounds bare doesn’t it, matter-of-fact.  It isn’t.

Points in life stand out, stars that shine through the continuous fog of daily existence: places, events, people, animals, experiences.   These are the things that shape us.  I still love spring, but I do not see grass in that extraordinary shade of luminous, tender, green without remembering it passing the lips of my best friend, my best teacher just before I ended her life.  I felt relief that day too. 

Spring – humans celebrate new life, new beginnings in the spring.  However, in our most primitive places, we know that nothing begins anew without an end.   In the Christian tradition, Easter celebrates the Resurrection, but first you must have the Passion and the Death.  The legend of the Phoenix speaks of a bird reborn – from the ashes of failure.

Goldie was in my head today, because in many ways, she was the beginning.  My first horse: ornery, beautiful, challenging, dangerous, and loving – she taught me to accept pain and persist, that stubbornness could be a virtue, and that I was worth following – almost anywhere.  That spring that I let my mare and her aching joints and failing organs sink into the ground, I was also  letting the things of my childhood pass away, exchanging memories for motherhood, shifting friendships into adult status, working through old hurts and insecurities, finding my footing in a job that had been a bold adventure.

As that job ends, and as I let its bones sink into the soil, it is easy to forget how new and scary clinical medicine was, easy to forget the huge leap of returning to a field that I hadn’t touched since graduating vet school five years before.  The terror of cutting living tissue for the first time in years, and doing so without a protective net of residents and clinicians hovering over my shoulders, has receded.  The humiliating, soul-crushing pain of the first angry phone call from a client has dimmed with time and familiarity.  As clients called, hugged, and left tearful cards yesterday, it was strange to remember my first months in the practice, months when people asked “Isn’t there anyone else?” when they discovered that their appointment was with the new, woman vet, months when I heard, “You’re not Tom!” every time I stepped out of my truck.  As Lana and I headed out on our last ambulatory call last night, the last time a truck would leave that parking lot to treat an animal, memory hit.

It was late spring, blossoms on trees had given way to unfurled leaves, emerald grasses were streaking gold along the tips.  Cattle lowed in the corral behind us, and the smell of dust, oiled metal, and anxiety blew across the gravel drive.  The wife of the rancher looked at me, “I suppose you’re only going to treat horses.”  It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.  I’ll treat anything with hooves!”  I forced myself not to cross my arms or straighten my shoulders, shoved my body back into the sideways slouch of those who wear boots for a living.

She looked at Lana – poor Lana, torn between the automatic defense of “The Doctor,” a defense tattooed upon her brain in technician school, and the reality of her experience of a revolving door of associates – “So, how long is this,” the chin bobbed toward me, “one going to last?”

Lana hesitated, “I give every one of them a year.  Then we’ll see.”

I had originally given myself a year, but these words committed me to making this job work, to staying longer, to prove that I could do it.  That was May, 2001.

Yesterday, as Lana and I pulled out of the parking lot, I giggled and looked over at her, “Should we call Kathy and tell her I went down with the ship?”

A grin shoved its way past Lana’s tears.  “You sure made it past that year.”

I made it through that first year and through each of the subsequent nine largely because of Lana.  I haven’t written enough about our technician, my friend.  And I’m not sure how to.  Lana taught me the parts of my job that the university never mentioned.  How to drive a stick shift; how to remove a lariat rope from the neck of a rank steer without breaking fingers; that it is possible to finish gelding a horse as he recovers prematurely from anesthesia (“Just cut faster!”); that someone who has never been able to hear my voice could spend a decade reading my lips, and when she couldn’t see them, would read my mind.  Lana is the one person who, no matter how bad the situation (and some have been very bad indeed), would say to me quietly, “You can do it.  I have great faith in you.”  And because she did, I did.

The closure of the large animal clinic is removing the only job Lana has known in 25 years.  And so, she is going into the small animal practice, to be a surgery technician, using skills largely untapped in that quarter century.  She will be working in surgery – in a room full of people whose faces are covered by blue paper masks.  Lana reads lips.  But, I know that she will find a way to read their minds.  I know she can do it.  I have great faith in her.

Spring – new life, renewal, transition.  Death precedes new life.  Yesterday, I was Dr. Corp, the vet.  Today I am a writer.  I remain a veterinarian, and I have always been a writer, but there is a palpable shift into the unknown.  The writer sees pages of complete, edited text behind me, and reams of blank white ahead.  The trick is to remember that the chapters of the past decade were once empty paper. 

Hannibal ante portus

Broken boards dangle from the fence.  Gaps, like missing teeth, lie among the rows of bottles on the shelves.  My work boots went into the trash last week, uppers yawning away from the sole, swallowing mud over the tongue of my foot.  It feels like the last days of Rome as we finish out these final few weeks at the clinic in the knowledge that our era has ended, that we have lost, and the invaders have conquered the city.  Hannibal ante portus.  “Hannibal is at our gates.”

There are no elephants.  Elephants would be cool.  Instead, we simply opened the gates to “pink-slip” e-mails stating what was already known: essentially, ‘Large Animal is closing, and since you were unique, there is no place for you in the company.  We wish you the best.’  I wonder if this is what happens to politicians in the lame-duck period.  Do things begin to fall apart?  Does no one refill the stapler?  Is it hard to sort through the in-box or to go to ribbon-cuttings that are so ill-timed as to require the presence of the walking dead?  My truck could stand to be cleaned.  But there seems to be so little point.  Of our fleet of three, only one truck is operational at this point, and a colleague and I rotate it between us on our alternating days.  I could pull everything out, scrub and organize it, but by the next day that I work, it will again be “all humble-jumbled” as Sierra would say.  And so I content myself with taking out the trash, scooping up the syringe case that has rolled and jammed beneath the pull out drawers, and periodically scrubbing the instruments and buckets.

The pillaging and looting have begun as well.  The phone calls are changing tone.  Now, there is less mourning and more people looking to “stock up on supplies” or refill prescriptions, “before you close.”  ‘Where were you six months ago,’ we want to ask.  I received a card yesterday from a sometime client, telling me what an asset I have been to the community and how much I will be missed.  It would have been heartwarming, but for the fact that this particular person, by her own admission, routinely used other practitioners and only called us in emergencies, when none of her cronies were available.  We have had angry phone calls from people wanting to know who they are supposed to call now in the middle of the night since we were the only practice they could reach at those hours.   Clients who scorn routine work and pride themselves on only calling a vet “when it’s really bad” are crushed that we will no longer be available.  Again, I want to say, “Where were you?  How did you think we would earn a living?” 

I don’t ask.  It’s not their fault.  We bent over backwards trying to accommodate everyone: answered every phone call, squeezed in clients at all hours, complicating our own schedules even for cases that could have waited for the next open appointment.  We hadn’t raised prices in nearly five years, assuming that we were doing our clients a favor.  We dispensed hours of free advice over the phone.  We didn’t show that we valued ourselves.  In retrospect, how could we have thought that this attitude would make others value us?

And yet… All of this makes me sound bitter.  And some part of me is; I think bitterness is part of the process, part of the grief.  And yet, sometimes, there are moments like yesterday.  Moments in which, while being appreciated, I realize that appreciation was never my job.  It’s easy to forget, in the midst of anger, sorrow, and loss, that my job was never to be appreciated, nor to be loved or lauded.  My job was to make things better.  

I had two calls on the book yesterday.  The first looks straightforward in writing.  Three horses to vaccinate.  Dread dragged my feet; I stalled leaving the office as long as I could.  I know these three horses.  One is old, no problem.  And then there are the other two.  Both had been donated to this non-profit by a well meaning owner who had spoiled them until they became dangerous. 

One, the gelding, I have known since he was a foal.  In fact, I gelded him.  I suspect he holds a grudge.  Along the way, he learned to rear and strike when things aren’t going his way.  Apparently his previous owner thought that this was a cute trick.  It may have been cute in a 200 lb foal (personally, I think not), but it is downright lethal in a 1300 lb adult horse.  He isn’t needle shy in the truest sense.  He simply doesn’t like being messed with and doesn’t like the vet.  He and I have reached an arrangement over the years.  Once I take his lead rope from the ranch manager and we go for a walk, it is established that I am the boss mare, and then generally vaccination proceeds without incident.  However, part of his game involves trying to pull away as the handler passes the lead rope to me.  Yesterday, thanks to a 12’ lead, we moved past that stage smoothly.  Our routine then involves me asking him to walk, back, and turn.  I mix up the order and repeat the steps until I feel that his attention is engaged.  Then I pet and play with his face and neck until he allows me to take the roll of skin just in front of the shoulder in a move we refer to as a “neck twitch.”  Neck twitching a horse doesn’t hurt.  It provides a means of control, and in many cases, I have watched horses lower their heads and relax their ears as they are neck twitched.  With this particular gelding, typically, once I have a hold on him, he never even acknowledges the needle.  Unfortunately, since I am right handed, I use my left hand to grasp the roll of skin, and my right hand to inject the vaccine.  My left hand is the one that I broke this summer.  Yesterday, in the chill wind, I could feel my metacarpal ache, seemingly at every screw.  I lost hold of the neck twitch between shots.  Sure enough, my friend the gelding pulled away, and reared.  Repeat process.

With him vaccinated, we turned our attention to his “sibling.”  Now, the mare is barely trained – what we call green-broke.  And she is truly needle-phobic.  Not only does she feel the needle, she reacts violently to the sensation.  And, joy, oh, joy, she has the same escape mechanism as her partner.  Rear, and flail.  We try the usual desensitizing steps.  No go.  The neck twitch does not relax her.  She simply realizes that it is a prelude to the dreaded shot.  Finally, I rub her face, rubbing over her closed eyelid, and with her vision obscured, inject her neck in one quick jab.  She pulls away as I withdraw syringe and needle.  Great.  Vaccine done.  Wonderful, except that she is due for two.  She’s onto me now, and the challenge of giving the second shot is magnified.  Eventually, we get the job done.  The old gelding is a piece of cake.

As I walk back to the truck, the ranch manager and I chat about the closure of the practice.  He seems truly sorry, and there’s this weird sense of something floating between us.  A giant elephant painted with the words “LAST TIME” walks between us, and neither knows how to address it. I’ve seen this elephant a lot lately.  I want some good parting words, something meaningful, but not sappy.  And yet, we aren’t friends, not really, just Dr. and client.  But, Dr./client doesn’t cover the relationship we have had.  And thus, the elephant.  The ranch manager looks at me.  “Do you like Divinity?  The candy?”

I smile and he makes a dash for his truck.  Returning, he presses a plastic wrapped box into my hands.  I give him a slanted hug – awkward for us both, and dive into my truck, biting back tears.

My next call is a sadder one.  A young steer has gone down, as the result of a leg injury sustained some weeks ago.  The owner had been trying to manage on his own, with advice from a nearby vet, but the steer has continued to deteriorate, and the owner, not a “real rancher,” confesses to our office manager that he can’t bear the thought of shooting the animal himself.

Sure enough, when I finally crest the hill of his long driveway – after passing two lurking CHP cars, missing the driveway, and attempting to find a safe place to turn around on the rolling, two-lane highway – the gentleman is almost pathetically relieved to see me.  Given his house, hair, and bearing, I suspect that he is or was a businessman, and sure enough, a few sentences reveal that he has come to ranching late in life.  He shows me the steer, asking without asking, if he is making the right choice.  He is.  The animal has shed at least 150 lbs from the pre-injury weight that the owner describes, and of course he has lain down in the lowest corner of the paddock, in the slickest mud.  I climb over the panel fence, bashing a shin as my clay-slimed boot slips on the rail, and kneel next to the steer as the owner asks questions that he doesn’t want to sound nervous.  Do I have to hit a vein?  Will we need to halter the steer?  What’s the discharge from his eyes?  Do I think he’s started to develop pneumonia? Yes. No. Infection.  Probably.

I climb back over the panels and under the oak branches, retrieving from my truck: a pair of clippers, two IV catheters (if you grab two, the first one will work), a stethoscope (more signs of the fall of Rome – one earpiece is missing), and 60 cc of pentobarbital.  60cc is excessive; 35 would have done the job.  However, when it comes to euthanasia, overkill (pardon the pun) is no bad thing.  I explain the process to the owner, using words that are their own script, slide the catheter into the vein, and inject.  Seconds later, the flanks stop moving; the muscles stiffen and then relax.  I check for heartbeat and corneal response – none and none. 

My client has changed, even as his steer exhaled the last breath.  I can feel the exhale of relief, the sense of pulling together in the man.  He takes the clippers from my hand and offers to assist me over the fence.  His sense of normalcy, of control is returning.  As he asks a few more questions, probing for my thoughts as to what happened to the steer and what he could/should have done differently. 

This is what matters in the end, in these last days.  It doesn’t matter that some of my patients may have been unruly.  It doesn’t matter that the owner of the steer consulted with another practitioner throughout the injury, only calling me in the end.  What matters is that somewhere along the line, someone’s life is returned to normal: horses are vaccinated, suffering is ended.   What matters is the work.

To Be Missed... And Lessons Learned

In Friday’s post, I touched on some of the less, shall we say, savory aspects of veterinary medicine, the things I will not miss (at least not while they happen.)  That was the bitter; today I give you the sweet.  I’ll try to stay to the edge of cloying.

I will miss the colors of the sunset shifting between the naked branches of valley oaks as I head back to the clinic after my last call.  I will miss the egrets rising out of the rice stubble in the wetlands as I head across the causeway in the morning, letting my coffee warm my hand as the heater kicks in.

I will miss the smell of fresh shavings, of golden straw, of slightly dusty horse.  I will miss the smell of silage on the dairies.  And yes, I’ll even miss the manure smells.

I will miss the incredible frustration of waiting for a foal to take its first drink of colostrum.  I’ll miss the urge to grab the wobbly head and stick it onto the mare’s teat.  I’ll miss the softening of a mare’s eyes as she turns to her new baby.

I will miss the endorphin surge from accomplishments gained only after forcing “heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they have gone.”  The feeling of pulling a calf or foal, of placing the last sutures in the skin after a successful surgery – those are senses of accomplishment that will never leave me.  Nor will the joy of watching a horse that I’ve monitored on fluids through the night eat its first bites of grass with gusto.

I will miss the feel of hair, hide, or wool beneath my palm, the beat of a heart through the tubes of my stethoscope.  I will miss soft lips wibbling my hand, hay-breath blown into my nostrils.

And most of all, I will miss the people.  I will miss the offers to “stop by the house when you’re in the area.”  I have had clients offer the use of kitchen and bathroom while I’m on my rounds.  “Don’t worry if we’re not home,” they say.  “Just come in the back way.”  I’ve never taken anyone up on this; I guess I’m not really a country girl, but I will miss that sense of hospitality.  I will miss the obvious things like the cookies and breads, the ornaments at Christmas, the thank-you cards and pictures.  But, I will also miss the things more obscure: the circled ‘C’ in the upper left hand corner of an appointment that says that the client requested me; the less orthodox gifts such as the packet of lamb chops pressed into my hand after euthanizing a goat, or the children’s book about a pig with the same name as the pig I had just euthanized; the bag of tomatoes and fresh eggs on the front seat of my truck. 

I will miss the delicious and unexpected details of my clients’ lives: the taciturn dairyman I overheard telling his herdsman that his favorite place was the café of a chain bookstore because he liked to watch the people while he drank his coffee and read; or the bear-like, ‘good ol boy’ cowboy talking about playing golf with the grin on his face that said he knew perfectly well our brains were tying themselves in knots picturing him on the links.  I’ll miss the leather-faced, no-nonsense reining trainer who paints and reads fantasy novels in her spare time.  I’ll miss the tiny, bent, apple-faced woman who has spent a lifetime raising kids of both kinds – goats and over a hundred foster children.

I will miss the clients who, when I first drove onto their ranches, looked askance at the new “lady vet” and wondered “how long’s this one going to last,” but who now never fail to ask about my children.  Along the way, my kids became the practice’s kids.  Aidan and Sierra were both born while I was working here.  For a while I was known as “the vet who’s always pregnant.”  Caitlin used to ride with me during school vacations.  She has held a sheep’s prolapsed uterus while I stitched a tear, she has lost boots to the mud, and wiped a newly delivered calf with a towel.  I will miss sharing with my children that sense that real work involves blood, dirt, and sweat, life and death, that work is more than words on a page or numbers in a spreadsheet. 

This has been more than a job; it has been work – grueling, exhausting, frightening, exhilarating work.  My quote earlier in this post comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.”  “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’…”  Like most of the writing of the era of British colonialism, the poem as a whole is a testament to a bygone time, with a typically male chauvinistic conclusion.  Yet, despite this, or perhaps because of it, “If” is a fitting testament to work that has historically been male in a region where a way of life is fast disappearing.  I will miss those who taught me the lessons of this poem through the lives that they live every day.  There is no effort that goes more unsung in our society than that of those who raise the crops and animals that become our food.  For your reading pleasure, here is the poem in its entirety. 

If

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

I Will Not Miss...

At the risk of appearing unsympathetic, cold-hearted, etc., I’m going to take the bold step of using this post to reflect upon the things I am unlikely to miss during my hiatus from large animal medicine.  Bear with me, the next post will wallow in sap as I list the things I have loved.  So, if you like a little bite to your morning coffee, stick around for this post, if you are a hot chocolate with whipped cream type, come back in a day or two.

I will not miss the mud.  Winter in the Central Valley can be described with two nouns: mud, and fog.  Winter penetrates with a grey cold that seeps into your bones and sucks you into an endless slime of slick clay.  I doubt that I will miss having my boots sucked from my feet as I struggle to find a vein in the mud-balled, shaggy neck of a down horse, or the futility of exhausting myself trying to extract that horse from the mud.

I will not miss uterine prolapses.  There is nothing fun in trying to replace a uterus that has turned inside out following delivery of a calf, lamb, or foal.  Well nothing fun unless you enjoy trying to shove a sleeping bag filled with blood soaked oatmeal back through a 3” PVC pipe.  Oh, and someone on the other end of the pipe is pushing back, and the sleeping bag is made of really old silk, and you’re lying on your belly in a pool of blood, manure, and fetal fluids.

I will not miss 2 A.M.  Nothing good happens at two o’clock in the morning.  No one calls you out of bed into that black chill when nothing works for something easy.  Those witching hour calls almost always involve blood, death, and a whole lot of physical effort.

I will not miss Bangs vaccination.  The immunization of female cattle against Brucella abortus or “Bangs’ disease” is essential to the protection of human and animal health, and is boring as hell.  Line up a bunch of heifers.  Inject 2 cc of vaccine under the skin.  Tattoo ear.  Tag ear.  Fill out forms.  Repeat.  My hands ache just thinking about it.

I will not miss people who want their animal cured via telephone.  Nor will I miss their cousins, the folks who seem to think that anyone can do what a vet does if they have the right drugs. 

I will not miss pigs.  Have you ever tried to examine a screaming blimp?  Welcome to swine medicine.  And the smell never, ever comes off your shoes.

I will not miss bad foalings.  There are only two types of foal-delivery calls: the kind where we arrive to find that the foal has slithered out of the mare while we were driving, and the kind that descend into a nightmare.  I will not miss the backbreaking labor, the fear in the eyes of my clients, and the feral, white-eyed pain of the mare. 

I will not miss euthanasia.  I won’t miss the vision burned into my brain of blue liquid in a syringe, injected by my hand, of dilating pupils and lip-curled, grey-gummed agonal gasps.

I will miss none of these things, and I will miss every instant, every bruise, cut, black-eye, and strained muscle.  I will miss none of these things and I will so deeply miss the people, animals and stories that go with them that I can barely fathom a life without this work.  We joke that our worst days make the best stories later, and now, in these end days of this job, these are the stories that fill my mind.



Love Letter Eulogy

It’s been nearly fifteen years since I first saw the practice.  I was working in vaccine industry research. I was tired to death of the cycle of injection, blood sample, observation, and statistical analysis, and the narrow yellow building with its neat little arena, soft lawns, and white veterinary trucks parked alongside, looked like something close to paradise.  I dropped off the milk samples for analysis by the microbiology laboratory tucked into a corner of the large animal clinic, sighed at the trucks with their packs full of everything I had given up, and headed back to my spreadsheets.  “I wish I worked here,” I mumbled as I got into my car.

Five years later, I had left the vaccine company, and was on month 8 of a year-long experiment in stay-at-home motherhood.  I had spent the bulk of that year in a house in the middle of nowhere with a toddler and a mother-in-law with a recent knee replacement.  I needed to go back to work.   When the phone call came, everything clicked into place.  “This is Tom Zehnder of Bradshaw Veterinary Clinic.  I got your name from the AVMA matching service.  Are you still looking for a job?”

I explained that I was still looking, and that I would love to work at his practice, but that I had been away from clinical practice for five years, essentially since graduation, and that I lived over an hour from the clinic, so I wasn’t sure how it could work. 

“Oh, well, we’ll figure something out.  You can ride with me for a month or so, and we’ll figure something out for the on-call situation.  Why don’t you come down, and we’ll talk.”

What I hadn’t realized at the time was that the shortage of large animal practitioners was so acute, and my future boss so desperate for an associate, that he would have taken any warm body with a valid veterinary license.  But, we suited, the practice and I, and I agreed to give it a try, to try the commute -- “for a year or so,” I told my husband.

“A year or so,” the standard run for a new associate, particularly in large animal practice.  Most of us, after that year, purchase a used pack for a used truck and go into practice for ourselves or transfer into the more lucrative and less hazardous world of small animal medicine.  But, there was something no one told me.  At some point, my positions stopped being a job and became membership into a community.

I can’t tell you when the shift happened.  Was it the first time a tearful client pressed a packet of cookies into my hands after I euthanized her horse?  (Over the years, whenever I return home with a gift or food from a client, Mike asks, “So, what did you kill this time?”)  Was it when Lana, our amazing technician finally loosened the technician-doctor boundary enough to tease me about my incompetence with the ancient stick-shift truck?  (The thing was missing 3^rd gear, and 1^st only went to about 5 mph on a good day.)  Was it the first time a rancher called and actually asked for “the lady vet?”  (I am, and I suspect will forever be, ‘The Corriente Queen of the Northern San Joaquin.’)  Was it when a client gave me a handmade baby quilt just before I went on maternity leave?  (Incidentally, the best way for a woman to prove that she can work in a man’s world is not only to do everything the guys do, but to do it while pregnant – see the Corriente Queen title, for example.)

I don’t know when I became a part of the community into which our practice has been so deeply embedded for over 30 years.  There are a lot of landmarks in a decade.  But, I have watched children grow from grade-schoolers to college students.  I have listened to clients as their jobs failed, their marriages disintegrated.  I have consoled them in times of loss and congratulated them on triumphs.  I have cooed over new babies, and offered sympathy to the newly widowed. 

Large animal medicine, particularly the sort of mixed, ambulatory ranch work that we do, creates a deep bond between veterinarian and client.  We do not rotate patients through our exam room at 7-15 minute intervals.  Our average appointment lasts an hour, and we frequently travel to our patients, often visiting our clients’ homes.  I can tell you who the obsessive housekeepers are, whose horses live in greater luxury than the owners, who collects which sort of memorabilia, whose children need extra tutoring, and whose teen recently wrecked the pickup.

This is a love letter of sorts, to a place where I found a job and a home; to people who welcomed me, who put up with my inadequacies and foibles, and gave me space to grow; to Sheila whose voice fills me with dread when she calls to apprise me of a “situation,” but who works her butt off every time to help remedy that situation; to Lana, who carried me through my first few months in clinical practice with her endless tact and boundless knowledge, saving me from more mistakes than I care to contemplate, and who always has “great faith” in me; and to Tom, who gave me that shot nearly ten years ago to “see how it goes.”  It is a love letter to my patients, to the wounds I have sutured, to the newborns I have delivered, to the colics I have treated in the dark and in the rain; to my failures, the ones I was too late, not smart enough, or not lucky enough to save.  It is a love letter to my clients: to Mel, once my tech, always my friend, and the person I call for everything under the sun because she always “knows someone;” to Al, farrier and friend, who loves me because I didn’t sew up his horse, and whose gift for gab is un-thwarted even by a broken jaw; to Marc, who made me what I am “The Corriente Queen of the Northern San Joaquin; to Lynn and Chuck, who never complain, always follow instructions, and who have taught me that the truth usually lies between two viewpoints; to Tina who manages the people and horses of Project R.I.D.E. with perpetual calm and a terrific smile; to another Tina with her “woolly mammoth” cattle, who never lets me out of the driveway without a 15 minute chat, diesel running or no; to Fred, who remembers the lost art of civil debate, and that agreement is never necessary to intelligent discourse; to Joe, who always knows how to find me when there is an emergency, and who will get me the name of the horse and the owner – sooner or later; to Elaine, who has a cure for everything and who never gives up on anything; to so many people, the list wanders into the hundreds as their faces flash into my mind.  This is a love letter to them all, to all of those whose lives have touched mine in so many ways.

The phone calls began on Friday, as people received their letters.  Some tearful, some optimistic, some angry, others frightened, some have rotated through all these emotions and more, as we all process the inevitability of our new reality.  You see, this is also a eulogy.  After February 28, the large animal side of our practice will exist no more.  Our little group, in the office “out back” will be disbanded.  Like any terminal illness, this one has been hard fought, and a long time coming.  But, it turns out that livestock medicine is not recession-proof, and the practice that once supported 5 full-time doctors has been struggling to carry three of us part-time.

“What are you going to do?”  I prepared for this question during the interval week between learning that my job was evaporating and the official notification to the clients.  My answer still feels inadequate.  Of course, after speaking to a few people, I begin to realize that my discomfort lies not with my plans, but with the uneasy sense that I am somehow abandoning those who have come to depend on me.  My answer is not the one they wanted to hear. 

I have neither capital nor credit to purchase my own pack and supplies and begin my own practice.  Nor, at 40, with aching joints, many a night spent waiting for the phone to ring, and many, many hours spent away from my family, do I want to segue into the life of a solo practitioner.  Looking back at my last couple of years, I get the sense that the universe is shoving me in a different direction.  Either that, or I’m the mole in a cosmic game of ‘whack-a-mole.’  Being of an optimistic nature, I prefer to think that the mallet thumps to the psyche, bank account, and body are directive rather than destructive.

So, what am I going to do?  I’m going to start fresh, building on something that I lacked the courage to do twenty years ago.  Apparently I required this roundabout course, especially the last decade, to develop that courage. I am going to expand my freelance writing, pursuing magazine and newspaper pieces more aggressively, and branching into commercial writing.  You can always find me here with my personal musings, or, for a more professional perspective, at my new website, http://www.vet-writer.com.  (Give me a couple of weeks, it’s still under construction.)

We are a family of adventurous cooks.  I ate calamari at home long before the battered rings appeared in bistros and bars.  I also suffered the trauma of squid sandwiches in high school, but that’s another story.  As a group, we will try out almost any recipe, but there are three that you don’t mess with.  All three make an appearance at Christmas.  Christmas morning is heralded by “Cheesy Egg Bake.”  This is the sort of dish that draws screams of anguish from arteries; we don’t tell Dad’s cardiologist.  Slices of crusty French bread line a baking pan, edible standing stones guarding a mess of Swiss cheese sauce into which eggs have been broken.  The pan bakes until the eggs are poached and then the only question is “one, two, or three?”  Even Caitlin, who claims to hate both eggs and cheese, openly rebelled the year Cheesy Egg Bake failed to manifest on Christmas morning.

The Christmas desserts are also non-negotiable.  “Carrot Pudding” (a steamed Christmas pudding, served flambé), and “Pink and White Cake” (Properly called Gateau Noel) come to us from my maternal grandmother, and, I think, from her mother before.  Certainly, the mould for the pudding earned antique status decades ago.  The recipes, carefully copied onto 3x5” cards, show the quirks of their era.

Once upon a time, people knew how to cook.  They possessed the intrinsic knowledge and common language that has been lost in this era of celebrity chefs and televised gourmet smack-downs.  Once upon a time, people knew that life was something you got through by following a general framework, and not fretting the details.  The capriciousness of life was once considered normal.  Meals anchored the day, and were prepared using techniques that were passed from one generation to the next by the osmosis of constant exposure.  There was no need to write instructions for a buttercream icing beyond “add lemon zest.”

This vague instruction with its blithe assumption of a shared knowledge causes my mother and I to grind our teeth annually.  Every year, the same questions arise.  “Is it powdered sugar or granulated for the hard sauce?”  “What’s the butter to sugar ration for the icing?”  “Do I add anything besides the lemon zest?”  “If I’m just using marzipan to decorate, I don’t have to do all this stuff that it says for the almond paste, do I?”  “How long do we steam the pudding?”

Last year was the only year in my memory that we did not have a Christmas pudding.  Grandma Doris passed away on Christmas day, and the collective association between her gnarled hands with their giant ring and impossible, adamantium fingernails and the preparation of the pudding was too strong.  I first began to make the pudding about 15 years ago, as Grandma’s strength waned, sapped, I think, less by the demands of age than by worries over my grandfather.  Grandma was a worrier.  The minutia of daily life could chip away at her nerves like a caffeinated woodpecker.  Yet, under two sets of circumstances, Grandma was a rock.  Given a major life crisis, heart attacks, car accidents, birth, death, Grandma would remain unfazed, keeping her head with British stoicism while those about her were losing theirs.  The second condition that called for calm was the preparation of Christmas dessert.  “Grandma!  The recipe doesn’t say anything about the hard sauce.  I know it’s butter and sugar, but what else?  What kind of sugar?”

Grandma’s response to the panic in my voice was to saunter to the kitchen island.  “Let me see…Oh, I don’t know.  It’s been so long since I’ve made it.  I can’t remember anything anymore.  I think I used to…”  The hands would move among the boxes, spoons and bowls, pausing here, scooping there, mixing, and patting as the diamonds flashed.  Before I knew it, the hard sauce would be in the mould, the pink-and-white cake would be assembled, and I would be left standing with a crumb-speckled spatula dangling from my fingers.

Over the years, we’ve learned lessons from our Christmas desserts.  Neither mom nor I has ever added more specific instructions to the recipe cards.  There is an unspoken, unconscious agreement that this would be heresy.  Once we move beyond the moment of “oh, now what do I do?” our hands remember the task, and the desserts always taste the same, flavored with tradition and trust.

We hear it all the time on the news – calls for “more specific guidelines, and protocols.”  We live lives derived from flow charts, and we lose the ability to improvise.  If we trust our hands, they can remember how to make a buttercream icing.  If we trust our hearts, they can guide us through the complex forests of life and love.  Life can’t be scripted or outlined; there’s no manual, and the recipe is pretty general.  Add some lemon zest, throw in a little brandy, and move on – it’ll taste fine.

Pink and White Cake (Gateau Noel) Christmas 2010

Solstice Shift -- Thoughts on the Davis Waldorf School Winter Concert

It happened again this year.  The metamorphosis occurs in a flash of light against pressed, white cotton, the dull gleam of black polyester, the light-swallowing glow of velvet, and sometimes denim.  They change in a quickening of mahogany and sinew, of nickel, brass, and uplifted voices.  Before the houselights dim, they are familiar, our children – boisterous larval forms of potential.

Something changes: not as they poke, giggle, and shuffle onto stage, not even perhaps in the glare of the footlights, as they wave with varying degrees of enthusiasm at smiling parents, or grin in self-conscious tolerance at the yells of a younger sibling, and as they correct each other with grins while taking their marks.  Something changes: at the uplifted finger of teacher, raised bow of conductor.  For the older children, we see it as they wrestled battered rental instruments into submission before their music stands.  The instruments change, too, in the borrowed glow of the stage.  My daughter’s rental cello, chipped and scratched by the erosion of years of students, with its colored tapes to mark finger position, and iffy bridge, gleamed against her black trousers.  With the older children, it changes with the first strike of a tuning note.

They shuffle in their seat as the prelude plays, yell to their friends as families wander in staggering herds to upright seats.  They slouch, slide, and sulk, tucking aggravating shirttails into submission and finger-combing hair mussed by contraband ball caps.  They giggle, whisper, and finger-shoot each other, run in packs to bathroom and drinking fountain.  Even the 7^th and 8^th graders playing the carols as the theater fills do not take this seriously.  They’ve been at this long enough to recognize an audience, and they don’t have one yet; they are background.  Then, the teacher hosting the evening takes his mike, low voice – the one that always has a grin behind it – carrying the room.  Restless grownups settle down, poising cameras and shooting one last whisper to a friend.  The first piece is introduced, and it’s on.

The same junior-high students whose pleasant holiday tunes accompanied the filling of the hall transform as their instructor raises her bow.  Around the semi-circle, bows meet strings, and in the breath before the first notes of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” sound, faces change.  The shift is in their faces; it is there, too, in the crook of elbow, arch of finger, but mainly in the face.  In the moment of performance, they are no longer children – no longer the rough, proto-people.  Idiosyncratic touches: Santa hats, ties, skater-inspired modifications to concert attire, Beatles haircuts, and varying posture slide into the union of purpose.  They are not children, they are performers, and in their faces, we glimpse the outlines of the people they will present to the world.

Something in this transformation is, I think, unique to their schooling.  The arts inform and infuse the daily curriculum of a Waldorf school.  Kindergarteners create “people-plays” from the stories teacher tells.  First graders begin playing wooden flutes in class, a year before they will perform on stage.  Lessons are acted as well as absorbed.  Complex songs and rounds are learned from early childhood on, and by fourth or fifth grade, Waldorf students argue as knowledgeably and casually about multi-part harmony as other kids do about movies and video games.  By the time they take the stage with their classmates in second grade, the performance grows from the child. 

I think this is the difference with this winter concert.  I remember the Christmas programs of my own youth, of the roles into which we had been jammed around Thanksgiving break, roles that fitted about as well as the polyester angel costumes and that, like the costumes, itched in all the wrong places.  It is this memory of awkward hesitation that cringes when my son refuses to tell me what his class will perform, or my daughter announces a few weeks before the concert that she finally has the music for the piece her class will play.  How can I help Aidan memorize his songs?  How will Caitlin be ready in time; she’s not the most devoted cellist.  Each year, I fret, bound by the shadows of my own stage frights, the memories of tolerant faces of pained grownups as instruments squeaked and lines were forgotten.  Each year, I forget what, by now, I know.  Aidan doesn’t need my help learning a song.  Caitlin will play whether she has the music for a year or a week.  This is what they do.  The words, the music, the performance comes from them; it flows outward, fitting each child.  They will have their share of rough rehearsals, of missed lines or missed notes.  They will display varying degrees of talent and enthusiasm, but, from earnest second grader through veteran teen, each will claim a spot on the stage without fear or irony.

The second grade teacher will kneel before her class, finger conducting and mouthing the words, but she will not carry the song.  Even for the younger children, when they open their mouths, the shuffling, muted shoves, and nose-wiping fade to the back.  They sing.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, the junior-high teachers needn’t worry about pranks or rebellion.  By sixth grade, art has become part of their physiology.  Whether they can carry a tune, regardless of level of home practice or private lesson, each face on stage says the same thing.  “Here I am.  This is what I do.”  And this is the gift that I hope my kids will take into the world: the ability to step onto the stage of humanity and to say, “Here I am.  This is what I do.”

Onions and a Novel

My alarm went off at 4:00 this morning.  Did I pull myself out of my turkey hangover and stumble into my car for a morning of mercantile mayhem?  Nope.  For one thing, last night we had home-made cream of tomato soup and grilled cheddar on baguette sandwiches; our turkey feast will take place tomorrow.  As far as Black Friday goes, I had a different set of numbers in mind.  I donned the navy blue bathrobe that predates three children and even my marriage. (It took some verbal gymnastics to explain to my mother on the morning of the first Christmas Mike and I shared how he knew I needed a robe.)  I brewed my tea (Peets’ Winter Solstice), made my breakfast, read the paper and deliberately repressed the urge to break routine and race to my computer.  But when I sat down to the keyboard, it was with a sense of delicious urgency.  This morning I reached the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.  In the interests of literary integrity, I’ll refrain from putting the abundance of exclamation points and emoticons in my head onto paper.

Tomorrow is our family Thanksgiving.  This oddball tradition-nouveau of holding our celebration the Saturday following the fourth Thursday of November dates back several years to my first Thanksgiving on call.  Through the years, our family has discovered that moving our dinner to Saturday enables my sister and her husband to join his family on Thursday and to celebrate with us on Saturday.  This system is great for familial harmony, but a bit hard on Steph and Mike and their digestion – particularly since I’m not sure that my sister even likes turkey.

I spent yesterday chopping, slicing, boiling, sautéing, and baking.  Total production: candied yams – 1 pan, cranberry relish – 2 varieties, apple pie – 1, mince tarts – 11, bourbon-laced pumpkin cheesecake –1.  Also bringing olives, cheese, and a loaf of pumpkin bread from my freezer.  With all of this bounty, and with the anticipation of my father’s famous BBQ’d turkey, it may seem strange to note the one dish that calls to me every year.  The dish for which I accept no substitution or omissions.  Stuffing?  No.  Yams?  Nope.  And, no, not the bird.  I can’t comprehend Thanksgiving without creamed onions.

This is not something other people understand.  Even within our family circle, I think there are only four or five of us who like this dish.  Outside of the family, well, let’s just say that claiming that creamed onions are your favorite part of Thanksgiving, does not raise you in the estimation of the general public.  In addition to being pretty much devoid of nutritional value, this is a humble dish – our family’s equivalent of the hoary green-bean-casserole (btw, a favorite of my husband’s family and now the only green vegetable all of my children will eat.)  Here’s the basic recipe.

Pearl onions – frozen, 1 package

Bechemel sauce

Mix together in casserole dish.  Top with dried breadcrumbs, and place under broiler until breadcrumbs are golden and sauce bubbles. 

This is usually cooked and sometimes (depending on how tired Mom and I are) even served in Mom’s most humble casserole dish – a square, blue-flowered, Corning-ware pan that may be older than I.

As a family, ours tends toward culinary and intellectual elitism.  (My husband would say snobbery.)  My sister and I were raised with foods like calamari, fennel, and sorrel decades before they were trendy.  We once spent the better part of a summer scouring the foothills of the gold country in my father’s legendary quest for a sausage-stuffer.  When it comes to pop-culture trivia, we are abysmal failures, but references to politics, history, literature, and classical music wander into our daily conversation.  I am by far the worst offender, and the one crowned “snob” by my husband.  I hate fart jokes, buddy comedies, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart.  Peeps fill me with horror, and I am more likely to bring risotto stuffed baby bell peppers than chips-and-dip to a potluck.  I’ve been known to quote Shakespeare or Donne while sewing up a horse, and I believe that we should never elect politicians unable to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”  If these things make me a snob, I’m okay with it.

For several years now, I’ve been struggling with the written version of haute cuisine, the literary short story.  As a self-designated over-achieving elitist, I felt it incumbent upon me to strive to produce exquisite works of Literature. (Note the capital ‘L.’)  Here’s the problem. I wasn’t having any fun, and it showed.  I read and review literary fiction, subscribe to several journals, and generally admire and even wallow in the works of great writers.  But, when I want to read for fun, where do I go?  Do I call upon Updike, Oates, or Franzen?  Nah?  I visit my friends: Rowling, L’Engle, Riordan, and Alexander .  I will say it.  Children’s literature, particularly middle-grade fantasy, is my fictional creamed onions.

So, when I decided to embark upon NaNoWriMo (an undertaking often excoriated in the halls of serious literature and publishing), I threw pretense to the winds.  This month, my characters have fallen through cupboards and into swamps, met a gnome, battled a dragon, suffered heat stroke, been kidnapped by a donkey, and followed a spontaneously combusting mountain goat.  There’s also a magic sword, a mysterious cape, and an enchanted necklace.  What a blast!  The novel itself is nowhere near done, but in honor of reaching my word goal, here’s an entire chapter.  Enjoy!  I’m going to go pack, and then it’s off to my creamed onions.

Chapter 17

Follow that Donkey!

Dylan’s first thought was that she was sitting in an oven, being eaten by a furry giant with a long, ugly face.  She jumped to her feet, but the oven door didn’t open, and no one turned down the temperature.  Dylan rubbed her hands across her eyes, pushing the tears back inside, and looked around.  The oven opened before her as a vast ocean of sand and beige rock, reaching almost as far as she could see, revealing itself to be a desert.  The ugly giant turned out to be a shaggy grey donkey.  Dylan scratched at her head.  The donkey must have mistaken her hair for a crop of carrots.  “Gross!  Donkey spit.”

“Is that your idea of some new bad word or something?”  Richard raised himself on one elbow, his free hand checking for his glasses, which had miraculously stayed on his face.  He looked at his sister.  “Oh, I see.  Hi, Donkey.”

“Do you think it’s going to answer?”  Sylvia sat up, pulling her robe, now no longer white, around her ankles and hugging her knees.

“The way things have gone lately?”  Richard squinted at her.  “Doesn’t seem too impossible, now does it?”

“Improbable, maybe,” Sylvia muttered, but she looked closely at the donkey.  So far, however, it showed no signs of turning into anything other than an ordinary if somewhat randomly appearing beast of burden.

“The ass will not speak.”  Abbletrotkin clutched the base of his razron as though fearing that it would separate from his head.  “Magic is not strong in this world.  Not that sort of magic, at any rate.  Here, you will find that the animals are merely animals.  The men, however…”  He shook his head.

“What about the men?”  Sylvia said.  She bent over Dylan, checking her arms and legs.  “I think you scraped your knee again, but that looks like the only damage.”

Dylan shook her head.  “No, that was from falling out of the tree at school yesterday.  Was it yesterday?  I can’t remember; it seems so far away.”

“I know.”  Sylvia wrapped her arms around Dylan’s shoulders.  “It’s going to be okay.  I wish we had a band-aid for that scrape, though.  It wouldn’t be good for it to get infected out here.”

“Maybe there’s something in the pack that George threw at us,” Richard said.  “Do you still have it, Syl, or did it get sucked into the ground in the earthquake?”

Sylvia looked around until she spotted something dark brown behind a pale rock.  “Here it is.  Do you really think there’s going to be a first-aid kit in here or something?  We just came from a world with a dragon infestation, where women die in childbirth, for pity’s sake.”  Shaking her head, she bent nonetheless to untie the leather thong that secured the neck of the bundle.  She cleared a flat spot in the sand and began to lay out the items one by one, inventorying them aloud as she unpacked.  “Looks like some bread, a couple of loaves.  Something squishy, looks like it’s filled with liquid; could it be the medieval version of a water bottle?”  She paused and Abbletrotkin nodded.  “Ok, water then, I hope.  Oh good, four of those.”  She handed around the water bottles.  “Tuck them into your tunics or whatever.  Each of us should carry our own.  But don’t,” she glared at her siblings, “drink it all right away.  Who knows when we’ll find any more.  Ok, what else?  Some…moss?”

“Poultice,” said Abbletrotkin.

“I guess that’ll work.  Here, Dylan, let me have your knee.  I wonder if there’s something I can use to tie it on.  What’s this yellowish thing?”  Like a magician performing a scarf trick, Sylvia pulled an increasing length of glistening fabric from the pack.

“Whoa!”  Richard blinked.  “That’s no band-aid.   What is that?  A cape?  Is it gold?”

Sylvia ran the fabric between her fingers.  “It feels like really heavy silk.  The threads kind of look gold.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “I didn’t see anything like this in the village.  Is this one of those things that you know something about but we don’t?”

He shook his head.  “I am as bemused by this object as you.  I can tell you that it has great value, and is very old.”

“How are we defining old, these days?” Richard asked.  “Old from our time – world, whatever – or old from George’s time, or yours?  What is your time, for that matter?”

“Time is a construct, Richard.  You humans seem to look at time as a straight line, along which one can move only forward.”

“Well, yeahhh.” Dylan shook her head.  “Time is like a story, it goes from start to finish.”

“What if, instead of a line, you look at time as a tree, with many branches, some of which touch and cross each other?  Could you not move along the branches, passing between them at will?”

Sylvia dropped the cloak into her lap and stared at the gnome.  “The garden.  The designs in the garden at the castle.  They have something to do with time, don’t they?”

Abbletrotkin nodded.  “As I told you, the garden tells our story.  Did Dylan not just say that time is like a story?”

Richard shook his head in disgust.  “And that’s all you’re going to tell us, isn’t it?”

“For now, yes.”

“That’s a bad habit, you have, Abbletrotkin, this keeping stuff from us unless we weasel it out of you, or you think you need to know.  Not to mention distracting us.  Back to the cape.  What did you mean it was old?”

“Simply that the knowledge required to turn gold into cloth has been lost for centuries – in any of the worlds, as far as I know.”

“Can’t somebody just climb back to that branch and get it,” Dylan asked. 

Abbletrotkin chuckled.  “Trust you to make a complex problem seem simple.   Well, Dylan, given that the garment is here, it appears that perhaps someone did just that.”

Sylvia found a strip of cotton in the pack and bound the poultice to Dylan’s knee.  She stood up, stretching and took in their surroundings for the first time.  “It’s getting hotter.  It must still have been early when we landed.  We really need to find some shade, and do something about water.  Desert dwellers try to stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, and so should we.”  She looked critically at her brother.  “Richard, you’re going to burn like a lobster, come here.”  She rummaged through the pack again.  “Well, old and valuable or no, this is going to have to do.”  She fashioned the gold cloak into a sort of head covering for her pale-skinned brother, ignoring Abbletrotkin’s shudder.  Precious artifacts were all well and good, but if Richard died from exposure in the desert, what good would the cloak do any of them?

The heavy silk felt like an anchor dragging at Richard’s head and shoulders, but he knew better than to argue with Sylvia when she’d been having a bad day.  Since the day looked like it was turning into the better part of a week, Richard figured he’d just keep his mouth shut.  “I think that the most effective course of action would be to head for those palm trees over there.  There can’t be trees without water, can there?”

“I wouldn’t think so…” Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin who shrugged.

“My people are miners.  Boldarkin is the only one of us so obsessed with trees and plants.  But, I suspect you are right.  At any rate, the trees may provide some relief from the sun.”  He picked up Dylan, setting her on the donkey’s back over Sylvia’s protests.

Dylan grinned from her perch.  “What do you think is going to happen to me up here?  It’s not like the donkey is going to take off or anything.”

That sentence seemed to Sylvia to be tempting fate.  She grabbed for her sister – a moment too late.  Right on cue, the donkey bolted into a rapid, bone jarring trot into the horizon.

“Well, at least he’s heading the right way,” Richard said.  He took the hand of his shaking sister.  “Come on.  He’ll stop eventually.  Let’s go follow.”

Sylvia thought her body would shatter from the shaking.  As she spun to scream at Richard, she caught the eye of the gnome, and realized that her brother was right.  Of the terrifying things that had happened this week, a donkey trotting away with Dylan across a flat, empty desert ranked pretty low.  There were no trucks, no cliffs, and, as far as Sylvia could see, no wildlife or people of any sort.  She sighed; she was getting tired of freaking out constantly, and she didn’t at all care for the fact that, on this adventure, Richard was turning out to be the one who had it together.  “Ok, follow that donkey!”

They soon realized that donkey tracking was easy.  The desert was like a giant sand table; the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  On the downside, the tracks of Dylan’s donkey were the only feature for miles.  There was literally nothing to see beyond each other’s faces and a world divided almost equally in half – completely blue sky, and completely beige ground.  After an hour in the blinding sun, Richard would have given his arm or leg, or at least a couple of toes, to see a tree, or a house, or even a good sized pebble.  The only things that kept him moving forward were the string of hoofprints, Sylvia’s glare between his shoulder blades, and the faint promise of trees at the distant seam between blue and beige.  Even the trees seemed like a cruel joke.  “Do you think it’s just a mirage?” he asked, sipping a bit of water from his container and trying not to think about the fact that it tasted a little like medieval goat.

“Do I think what’s a mirage?”  Sylvia barely looked up from the line of hoofmarks.  Her feet had not broken stride since they had set out after Dylan.  If she was hot, tired, or thirsty, it didn’t show.  Nothing showed except a robotic determination to find the donkey and their sister.

“The trees.  Are we just heading toward something that isn’t real?  I mean what if there’s no point?  What if desert is all there is?”

“The point is to find Dylan.  Even if the trees are just a mirage, the donkey went that way, so we go that way.  Richard,” Sylvia stopped, and cupped her hand under his chin.  “Whatever else is going on here, we stick together.  We need each other, and the only way to figure out how to get home is together.  I know you’re scared and hot and tired and bored.  So am I, but we don’t stop until we find our baby sister, ok?”

“It is not a mirage.”  Abbletrotkin’s voice sounded like glass being ground over gravel, but his step was firm, and he looked like he could walk forever.  “If we are, as I suspect, in the World of the Book, there are oases in this world.  You should know that as well.  You know the stories, do you not?  You knew of my kind, and of St. George, and the archangel Michael.”

“Which Book?”  An idea was slowly unfurling in Sylvia’s mind.

“I do not know its name in your world.  It holds many stories of the balance.  The tale of the cloak of the colors, the story of the one who turned back the sea, the man whose wife turned into mineral for her faithlessness.  There are more, but these I remember.”

“Lot’s wife!”  Richard jumped in place.  “And Moses!”

“And Joseph and the coat of many colors.”  Sylvia looked at Abbletrotkin.  “We call it the Old Testament of the Bible, but there are other names for it in our world, too.”  She stared at the line of donkey tracks and back at the gnome.  “So, you’re saying that we are in the world of the Old Testament stories?”

“It would appear so.”

The two children looked at each other. “Gnomes and elves in one world,” said Sylvia.

“St. George and the Dragon.”  Richard nodded.

“And now we’re in the Old Testament.  Do you get the feeling that we’re moving through the grades?  Each of these worlds is like something from Main Lessons.”

“Ok, but why?  Is this some sort of test that no one told us about?  I’ve never heard any of the kids talk about it, and besides if it’s a graduation test for you, what are Dylan and I doing here?”

“I don’t think so.”  Sylvia shook her head slowly.  “I mean it is a test, or a challenge or something, but not a school test.  I think we’re looking at it backwards.  I don’t think the worlds are based on school.  I think school was teaching us about the nine worlds.”  She looked at Abbletrotkin.  “That’s it, isn’t it?  Our school is some sort of training ground or something.  For what?  What are we supposed to do?  And why us?”  She grimaced.  “Yeah, I know, that’s the question the heroes always ask.  But, seriously, why us?  We aren’t heroes.  We’re three kids with a screwed up home, from a screwed up world, who can’t even get stuff from an old classroom without it blowing up.  That’s not heroic, that’s accident-prone.”

Abbletrotkin trudged ahead, leaving Sylvia and Richard staring at his back.  For a moment, it seemed as though he would refuse to answer.  Then, his voice floated back to them.  “You are correct about your school.  The Guardians have always known that the ultimate battle for the Balance would take place in your world, the world in which Ahriman is most likely to manifest, where he has the strongest hold.  Thus, it was determined that those who would provide the final defense of the Balance must also be of your world.  And so, a system of schools was begun with the purpose of training those who would restore the Balance.”

“Okay, but Sylvia’s right, why us?”  Richard stopped walking.  “Don’t tell me this is where you say ominously, ‘There have been others,’ and allude to the terrible fates of other schoolers.  Or, no, wait – you said something before about a Prophecy.  Let me guess, it said ‘Lo and a Bossy girl with black curls, a super-evolved but near-sighted boy, and an annoying brat with carrot-salad hair will restore the Balance, and you all thought of us.”

Sylvia punched her brother on the arm as Abbletrotkin answered seriously.  “No, I know of no others.  Any terrible fate must be your own.”

“Gee, that’s comforting,” Richard muttered.

“And, as for Prophecy.  Yes, the Prophecy exists, but insofar as I am aware, you are not mentioned.”

“Insofar as you are aware?  What does that mean?” Richard asked.

“The actual wording of the Prophecy was lost generations ago.  What little knowledge we Guardians possess of the text has been passed between the Guardians of the words over time.”

“Your time or ours?  Never mind.”  Richard disavowed his own question.  “The time thing still makes my brain hurt.  Ok, so some idiot in one of the time arcs put the Prophecy ‘in a safe place,’ and now it and the Balance are missing.  Nifty.”

“Ok, but if we’re not the heroes of the Prophecy, what are we doing here?  Why did the stupid cupboard eat us?  Why didn’t it suck up the right kids?”  Sylvia twisted her hair up into a knot.  Sweat trickled down the back of her neck, and the donkey footprints seemed to go on forever.  “But really, could the cupboard be in the wrong school or something?  I can’t see any of the kids saving the world, or worlds, or whatever.  I mean most of us are lucky if we remember our homework and lunches.  Some of my class can still barely tie their shoes.”

Richard nodded.  “Yeah, as schools go, we’re not really a heroic bunch.  I mean, Josh can throw a basketball ok, and Amanda in Sylvia’s class plays a mean violin, but as far as world-saving skills, not so much.”

Abbletrotkin turned to face them.  “What makes you think that there are designated heroes?”

They stared.  “There’s always a hero,” Richard said.  “That’s how the stories go.  The guy or girl or whatever with the special destiny has all of fate resting on his hands, or hers.  There’s always a chosen one.”

Sylvia nodded.

Abbletrotkin shook his head.  “No destiny.  No chosen one.  What we know of the Prophecy speaks of the loss of the Balance and the rise of Ahriman in your world.  Our stories allude to a human child, but the allusion is general.  The decision to create your schools was one of prudence rather than a bow to destiny.”

“But then why did we fall through the cupboard?  And why did all of our teachers send us to that room at the same time?  And why has Mom seemed so worried lately?  And why did Mr. Loupe appear in the room if it wasn’t something to do with us?”  Sylvia’s head felt like it was spinning, and the tracks in the sand began to blur.

“I cannot speak for your teachers or your mother.  From what you say, I presume that your Mr. Loupe is one of the Guardians of your world, and I can only guess that he was drawn by the energies surrounding the Balance.  He may have been as surprised to find you in that room as you, yourselves were.  As for your trip through the cupboard, you were simply the ones who were present when the cupboard opened.  Nothing more sinister nor more grand.”

Richard felt like a fish with his jaw flapping.  So, all this craziness had nothing to do with some pre-ordained Fate; they were simply the victims of bad luck?  His head felt a little woozy trying to process.  So, the fate of the universe could have rested in the hands of Larry in seventh grade or corkscrew-curled Emilia in Dylan’s class.  Wow!  He looked over at Sylvia to see how she was taking the news of their insignificance, and bolted to catch her as she turned white and fell.   “Abbletrotkin!  A little help here!”  He lowered his sister on to the sand.  Sylvia didn’t look it, but she was heavy!

The gnome knelt by Sylvia’s head.  “I believe that the heat is affecting your sister.”  He joggled Sylvia’s full waterskin and shook his head.  “We see this in the mines with new workers who wish to prove themselves to their elders.  They neglect their own care in their eagerness.  Your sister has not stopped to drink or to rest, and now her body pays the price.  We must stop here, and provide her shade and water.”

Richard touched Sylvia’s clammy forehead and looked at the endless trail that led Dylan away from them.  “We can’t stop.  Dylan’s just a little kid, and she’s out there all by herself.  What if something happens to her?”  He started to shake, suddenly understanding the pressures Sylvia felt every day.  He was responsible for his sisters, and he had no idea how he could take care of both of them.

“If your sister does not rest and cool her body, she will die.”  Abbletrotkin’s face twisted as though someone had punched him.  “I am concerned about Dylan as well.  The little one should not be alone, but I fear that we have little choice.  If we continue to seek her at this pace, Sylvia will not survive.  I have seen that as well in the mines.  The body can be pushed beyond endurance.  When that happens, the spirit leaves.”

Richard stared at the distant, shadowy trees that seemed no nearer despite the passing hours.  “Okay.  Well, I guess this fancy cape might make a decent tent.”  He dribbled some water into Sylvia’s mouth and soaked a strip of cotton from the pack, placing it on her forehead.

“Wet her wrists as well,” Abbletrotkin said as he fashioned a low canopy from the golden cloak.  “There should be enough room in the shade for the two of us as well, if we remain prone.”

Richard groaned as he crept under the cape.  “Good thing we aren’t foreordained heroes.”

Abbletrotkin looked at him in question.

“When Syl wakes up, she’s gonna kill me.”

 

 

Looping

 The Foundational Theory of Chronodiegetics: Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.-- from  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe  by Charles Yu

The leaves are morphing and falling around my time machine.  The swishing of bicycle tires through damp leaves and the smell of wet asphalt pull across two decades. Driving down Covell Boulevard in Davis yesterday, on my way to collect the children parented by my present self, I realized that the city of Davis, itself, is in a way my time capsule.  I last lived in Davis between the ages of 18 and 26.  So regrets, yeah, I have a few.  If there is anyone who has managed to travel that expanse of early adulthood without regret, I take off my non-existent hat to him/her/it.  However, in my time machine, the memory drive is the stronger engine.

This set of musings came about while I was contemplating my forthcoming write-up of an interview with the terrific Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and searching for a lede.  The lede still eludes me, hence this rambling blog post of procrastination.  Part of my problem in writing up the interview resembles the same difficulty I had in reviewing the book as much as I loved it.  Yu, drat him, hits too close to home with his wry insights. 

Of course a person would choose to revisit the worst day of his life if given time travel.  That might not be the first destination, but it would make the top five, easy.  That’s what we do with our past – pick it apart, unravel it, looking for patterns, missteps, course-corrections.  We “what if.”  What if I had studied more?  What if I had changed my major?  What if I had thought before saying that?  What if I had stayed home that night?  On and on, we analyze and recriminate, until we find ourselves looping through what Yu calls the “Present Indefinite.”  Unable to move forward, we revisit our past, continually mining it for clues to illuminate the people we have become and the messy lives we inhabit.

Memory and regret drive our time machines.  They influence the choices we make and the things/places/people/situations we avoid.  Before we moved back to Davis, when I came into town, I would visit my old haunts – walk through campus, the Arboretum, past my old apartments.  I wallowed in memory.  Yet, since we returned here in September, I find myself confining my wanderings in town to areas that have been more a part of my life as wife and mother than as student: home to school, grocery store, Farmer’s Market, the occasional restaurant (not generally one that existed in the old days).  I wandered onto campus once to do some research in the Health Sciences Library (at the western fringe of the University); I jogged once past the house where I lived in vet school; and I have rarely driven by any of my old abodes.  I think, like the protagonist in How to Live Safely, I sense some danger inherent to mingling my past and present lives.  I don’t think that my past self is likely to shoot her future (my present), at least not literally, but some part of me seems reluctant to let the two play together.

Perhaps that is for the best.  Memory and regret are good teachers, but at some point, it is necessary to graduate into one’s own future.

Note: I still have no idea how I’m going to write the interview, but perhaps my future self will come up with something in a day or so.

States of Grace

Our grace has a genealogy.  Passed from the Moore family to their great friends, my great-grandparents, the Davises, the verse has wandered through generations, presiding over everything from elaborate holiday feasts to store-bought pizza.

I guess you could say that ours is a secular house.  Raised Presbyterian, but with the imprint of eight years of parochial school, I became confirmed as a Catholic during college.  That was a different era of Catholicism.  Vatican II still rested fresh in most minds; my cradle-Catholic, Polish-American grandmother told stories of masses in Latin, fish every Friday, and entire days of fasting during Lent.  Mine had been a Catholic education with guitar masses and softball playing nuns teaching evolution.  Abortion, birth-control, pre-marital sex, and homosexuality were still big church no-no’s, but the lines seemed less stark, and one sensed that if the church could make the radical shift to female altar-servers, other changes would come in time.

In a big church wedding with a full Mass, I married a Lutheran-baptized, secular, rationalist with the promise that other than for weddings and funerals, I would never again force him into the pews.  My own church attendance – always spotty – began to fade after the birth of our first child, and when the baptism questions began.  At first, “when are you going to get her baptized” seemed reasonable, and there was no conscious procrastination on our part.  Life had simply become complicated, there were diapers, more laundry, and I spent approximately 20 hours of every day with something attached to my breast.  But, gradually, the questions became intrusive, demanding, and resented.  This was our choice, and really, what was the rush?   Other than occasionally testing her newly emerging teeth on inappropriate surfaces, I failed to see what evil Caitlin could be harboring.

Years pass, more children are born, and a new pope is elected.  Somewhere in the decade, either the Church, or my views toward it, has shifted.  Strictures that once seemed eccentrically stodgy reveal themselves to me as cruel bigotry.  I can’t see taking my children to listen to homilies that preach values completely opposite to those we attempt to instill at home.  Catholicism and I have parted ways.  I’m somewhat drawn to the more liberal Episcopal Churches, or perhaps Unitarian Universalism, but haven’t yet mustered the impetus to explore either denomination.  So, our lives exist more or less independently of organized religion.  We teach the children that religion is a human means of understanding the universe, and that all religions are equally valid attempts to reach that understanding.  At this point, I suspect my older kids know more Hebrew songs by heart than they do Christian hymns.  At times, this free-ranging ecumenicism has had its drawbacks.  Caitlin, currently obsessed with all things ancient (and particularly Greek), wound up in an unfortunate confrontation with a classmate last year.  When told by the classmate that the Greek gods were not real, and that God was the only true god, Caitlin retorted that maybe God wasn’t real and that the Greek gods were.  This prompted a discussion at home about respecting the beliefs of others.  Caitlin’s response?  “Doesn’t he have to respect my beliefs?”  In the midst of trying to explain that the Greek pantheon is no longer widely worshiped, I wondered, ‘who am I to tell her that some gods are myths while others are real?’ 

The only daily sign of Christian faith in our house is grace.  Here, I refer to the pre-meal blessing rather than a spiritual or mental state.  The more uplifted meaning of the word fluctuates in our lives by the minute.  Grace is, to me, not only a thank you note to God, but it is a connection to those around me, my family, my companions, and those who have gone.

God is great. God is good.  Let us thank Him for our food.  Amen. The everyday blessing of my childhood evokes memories of muttered arguments of whose “turn” it was, and the surreptitious kicking of shins by the sister who felt that her turn had been usurped.  This was the grace of weekday meals, chanted in a singsong by either my sister or myself with eyes closed and hands tightly clasped in laps – when they weren’t poised to grab the biggest piece of pizza.

Bless us, O Lord for these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive.  FromThybountythroughChristourLordAmen.  In the name of theFatherSonandHolySpiritAmen.  My knees still feel the brush of polyester pleats, and the wood rim of my desk chair pressed into their backs.  With these words I smell chalk, rain-soaked coats, and bologna.  This was the pre-lunch blessing, said in a rush designed to enable each class to get to the cafeteria before the garlic bread was gone on rigatoni day.  My thoughts were usually less occupied with gratitude to God, and more concerned with the fear of explaining to my peers yet another atypical lunch (Calamari sandwiches, anyone?) and wondering if I could convince the yard duty teacher to let me go outside for recess without finishing every last crust of bread.  I held the record for World’s Slowest Eater until Aidan came along to take the title.

Oh, the Lord’s been good to me.  And so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need – the sun, and the rain, and the appleseed.  Oh, the Lord’s been good to meeeee.  GORP, instant oatmeal, hot dogs, and pocket stews – these are the foods that accompany my fingers as they type Johnny Appleseed’s song in rhythm.  This was the blessing of Girl Scout campouts and family camping trips.  Of the graces of my childhood, this is one of two that I have carried into my children’s world.  This is the grace of trees and mountains, of woodsmoke and the cries of bluejays.  This is the grace sung of freedom: the freedom to explore and to get dirty.

For these and all Thy gifts of love, we give Thee thanks and praise.  Look down our Father from above and bless us all our days.  For Jesus’ sake, Amen.  Written down, the verse seems simple, the words easy, yet this is the grace that has challenged many.  I remember, and I suspect this to be true for my sister, a sense of mild triumph when I finally memorized “the family grace.”  I have seen this same triumph in my children, manifesting in the display of superiority by the elder two over Sierra who still mumbles “fordesandallygiftsabove…”  This grace took my genius (I mean that literally, not sarcastically.  He really is a genius; it’s quite discouraging.) husband several years of family holidays to memorize.  Mike and I have been married over 14 years; about a year and a half ago, my mother-in-law announced that she had finally memorized the grace.

I can only attribute the confusion to the complex and rich heritage of our family grace.  Join hands and close your eyes. 

For these – the grace came from Mr. and Mrs. Moore, dear friends of my dad’s maternal grandparents.

 And all Thy gifts – the Moore’s son Eddie had died young, leaving widowed a woman named Gloria. 

Of love – Gloria’s sister Ginny came out to California, to visit her sibling, and to look for a new life. 

We give Thee thanks – Grandma and Grandpa Davis’s daughter Sylvia had died of cancer, leaving a husband and young son, my father. 

And praise – Grandma Ginny always claimed that she fell in love with the towheaded child before she succumbed to the charms of his father Carl, my Grandpa Bligh. 

Look down our Father – Heads bow – around a turkey, a ham, platters of sides, a prime rib, a rack of lamb, enchiladas, pork chops and sauerkraut – the foods were many, varied, and meaningful in their ability to bring a family together.  Generations depart and enter.  Rich, the blond boy, grew up and married Jean – another only child.  They produced me, and then my sister.  Our holidays and birthdays joined in an endless circle of grandparents, great-grandmother, great-aunts and uncles, hands joined in unison. 

From above – Grandpa Davis died when I was a toddler.  Uncle Mac, my Aunt Glo’s second husband, and Grandma Davis passed while I was in high school.  But my grandparents all saw the entry of the next generation.  Grandma Ginny lived hold her first two great-grandchildren, and Mom’s father, my Grandpa Mac got to know not only Caitlin, but Aidan, the great-grandson who resembles him not only in red-hair, but moral certainty.  Grandpa Bligh knew all three, and was able to hear Caitlin and Aidan sing “his cowboy song” and to see the infant Sierra before his death.  Grandma Doris, my maternal grandmother, knew all of her great-grandchildren, and though the pictures they colored must have been only blurs and though time and memory floated in hazy clouds, her face lit whenever they walked into the room.  Fittingly perhaps, the last of my grandparents passed away just before grace on Christmas Day.  While eulogizing his mother-in-law, Dad commented that it was characteristic of Grandma Doris to time her transition to that moment when everyone was busy with other things, to not be a ‘bother’.  I think that it was fitting that she depart just as we prepared to join hands in the blessing that connects our family’s past to its present and future. 

And bless us all our days.  Our days are full.  Sometimes weeks pass before my sister and I can end our games of ‘voicemail tag.’  My children see their grandparents more often than many of their peers, but less frequently than any of us would like.  Some nights gathering five people around a table and enforcing a few seconds of what I envision as joyful reflection and my children see as rote nonsense seems too much bother.  Some nights, we pull out another family staple.  Everyone yells, “Yay, God!” and digs in.  But, when we stop, join hands (or in Sierra’s younger days, ears), and say the words, my family is present – in body and in spirit. 

For Jesus’ sake, Amen.  I still don’t know which window into the universe provides the clearest view.  For all I know, Caitlin’s subversive worship of a pantheon of capricious and flawed deities may be correct; it’s certainly a more fun idea than that of a single, perfect deity.  Maybe my Jewish friends are right, and Jesus was a nice guy, but not the Messiah.  Does it matter?  Religions are human constructs, and whatever one’s faith, humans are very small dots in a very large universe.  So, let’s all join hands, close our eyes, and appreciate our dysfunctional human family.  Pass the bread, please.

Moving Parts

Today we move.  Move forward, move back.  When I was a child, the phrase “moving day” had a ring of triumph, of excitement tinged with the fear of the unknown.  Today, the phrases that run through my head come from the books I have read to my own children in this house. 

“In the great green room…goodnight house…goodnight mouse.” Ok, so I won’t miss the mouse or his thousands of friends and family.

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines…”  Our lives have never been lived in straight lines, two or otherwise, but Madeline is stuck in my head.  What would Madeline do, if forced to leave that house?  The girl who “was not afraid of mice [who] loved winter, snow, and ice” would probably see the opportunities for new adventure.  When I raised the possibility of adventure to Caitlin (whom, by the way, I wanted to name Madeline) she said, “I’m like Lucy Ann (a character in Enid Blyton’s Adventure series).  I don’t really like adventures while I’m in them.”

That’s the thing with adventures, even fictional ones.  When the characters, even those who dream of daring exploits, find themselves in the midst of said exploit, all they really want is to return home.  “And the ceiling was hung with vines, and the walls became the world all around, and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max.”  Yet, though Max was made king of all the wild things, what he wanted in the end was to be “where somebody loved him best.”  And in the end, his boat returned him to his room where “supper was waiting for him.  And it was still hot.”

‘I want to go home’ has been a mantra of mine for decades – when stressed, embarrassed, worried, or frightened, I hear my mouth say “I want to go home.”  On occasion, I have said this while standing in my own shower or lying in my own bed.  Home.  This house has been home for twelve years, and yet, it hasn’t.  This town, this region has never been ours.  We have no close neighbors, all of the interactive portions of our lives: work, school, shopping, friends, family happen elsewhere.  In a sense, by moving to Davis, I do feel as though I am returning home.

I was raised in Merced.  But, I grew up in Davis.  Twenty-two years ago this month, I spread my comforter across my dorm bed, and unpacked my belongings for the first time under a roof that did not belong to my parents.  I paid my first phone bill in Davis; got in my first car accident; wrote my first checks; bounced my first checks; had my first kiss; failed my first exam; fell in love for the first time; had my heart broken for the first time; took my first drinks; had my first sexual experiences; bought my first groceries; filed my first taxes; marched in my first rallies.  And, in Davis, for the first time, I found myself.

That was two decades ago.  Davis has changed; I have changed.  We have both expanded.  We both have a few more sags and wrinkles.  We have evolved.  I haven’t yet decided if I feel as though I am a warrior returning home after an adventure, or if I am an adult child crawling back home after failure.  Can I choose both?

As my thoughts turn away from this house, and toward our new home, the lines that run through my head come from a deeper past, a past that is pre-children, nearly pre-adulthood.  “Homeward bound/ I wish I was/ Homeward Bound.” 

Note: Quotes in this essay are from Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans, Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, and song lyrics performed by Simon and Garfunkel.  All of my books and CD’s are packed, and so I quote from memory, accepting all responsibility for any errors.

The Best Tree Ever

Every year, I get out the brooch.  I dig a wool blazer from my closet, ignore the niggling moth-bites,  sweep the detritus of tangled shirts and mismatched shoes aside with my foot, jam the hanger back between its friends, and pin the brooch on the lapel.  About the length of my thumb and twice as wide, it is a roughly triangular frame of gold hung with freshwater pearls from its branches.  I don’t know if the designer intended it as a Christmas tree, but she always wore it at Christmas, and now it is my turn.

My paternal grandmother did Christmas better than anyone else.  As a child, I simply accepted this as fact.  This was what grandmothers were supposed to do.  She arrived with an endless stream of suitcases and grocery bags, and an equally endless stream of instructions for my grandfather as to the disposition of each.  The grocery bags were like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, bottomless caverns of delight.  Fudge, shortbread, dried apricots filled with marzipan and chocolate, fruitcake – not the kind people joke about, but a specific (severely alcoholic) joy that spelled Christmas, stollen – my grandfather baked that, pickled mushrooms in a jar, smoked salmon spread, and, in some years, a Buche de Noel – the Yule log cake.  Grandma wasn’t French, she was Polish, but she had seen the recipe in a magazine, and that was it.  I remember several, pistachio moss, meringue mushrooms and all.  It wasn’t until I attempted that particular pastry feat in college that I realized my grandmother’s dedication to Christmas and to family.

You see, not only was Grandma not French, she was not –technically – my grandmother.  She married my grandfather – a widowed veteran of the war in the Pacific – when my dad was five.  She claimed to have fallen in love with my father first.  That wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.  Men weren’t supposed to be the ones widowed during that war.  But my grandfather survived, often with few others, the brutal amphibious engagements of the South Pacific.  His wife, the grandmother whose name I and my oldest daughter bear as our middle names, was diagnosed with terminal cancer even as their son was born. 

I don’t know how the transition went; my father was very young, and if he remembers, he doesn’t talk about it much, but it can’t have been easy.  Dad’s maternal grandparents had been largely raising him, and my great-grandmother was a formidable force in her own right.  Yet, by the time I came along, no recognizable division between blood and love could be found.  The line had been so blurred, that it wasn’t until Grandma’s funeral that I truly integrated the concept of family that she had forged.  I remember introducing two men of about the same age to each other.  We call them both cousin.  They both called her aunt.  One was the son of her sister, the other the nephew of dad’s biological mother.  Yet, to both, she was Aunt Ginny.

Grandma was the one who remembered things like paper chains, and stringing popcorn and cranberries.  She wore red and green at Christmas.  She sang Christmas carols gloriously off key, and often off-lyric.  She and grandpa tuned the radio Christmas Eve to the Santa Watch, where we would listen for updates on Santa’s location around the world.  And I suspect she orchestrated the Christmas tree.

We don’t have a tree this year.  The reasons are practical; we won’t be home for the week before and much of the week after Christmas.  We cut down and helped decorate the tree at my parents’ house shortly after Thanksgiving.  It took days for the rash on my shoulder from lying in the prickly sand, forcing the dull saw through the sticky pine trunk, to fade.  But, the smell is missing from our living room.  I plugged in the lights around the window; they glowed at me with a lopsided sort of bravery.  They should be glad to be down from the attic at all.

One year, when I was quite young, maybe six or seven, we almost had no tree.  Every year, we collected in a pre-ordained location: my parents with my baby sister and me in tow, my mom’s parents, and my dad’s parents.  Everyone had set assignments:  Grandma Doris made the Christmas pudding, and the pink-and-white cake from recipes handed down from her mother, Grandma Ginny brought the aforementioned endless bags, we brought the cookies that mom and I made as vacation started.  Groceries, ornaments, and tree were divided in advance.  And the tree – when we gathered at a home, that group provided the tree.  But, for several years, we had taken to renting a cabin or condominium along the North Shore of Lake Tahoe.  Generally, someone brought the tree; I remember pine-boughs strapped like hunting trophies to the roofs of the various cars.  I remember the unloading of boxes and bags and the mysterious transformation of the rigid green spikes into a perfect triangle of Christmas.

But, one year, we all arrived at the condominium in the evening snow of Christmas Eve with boxes, bags, and ribbons, but no tree.  Dusk had fallen, frosty flakes fell from the stars, and the strings of lights that outlined the tree lots were dark.  I remember choking on the tears of a little girl weeping into the couch.  I remember my mother trying to console me, to tell me that Christmas without a tree was still Christmas.  I knew she was wrong.  The tree was Christmas: it was the smell of Christmas, it was the place Santa put the presents, the lights were the beautiful dance of the Christmas carols.  The stories of a baby in a barn were cute, but the concept of a Savior was esoteric beyond comprehension to a six year old brain, and the notion that Christmas was somehow in the heart belonged in the fairytale land of television.  Christmas was a tree.

I think Grandma understood.  A cradle Catholic, she had a deeply ingrained sense of the power of symbolism and ritual.  She also had no patience with the notion of hopelessness.  Before I knew it, I was poking a needle carefully through pieces of popcorn, feeling the foamy crunch along the needle, the drag of the thread.  “Where are we going to hang them?” I asked, not daring to stop threading.  Grandma had said we were going to make decorations, so I was making them.

“Your daddy and grandpas will find a tree.”  The snow skittered outside, and I had a vague realization that my father and grandfathers had drawn on jackets and boots and were somewhere in the dark storm.  Mom had said that they couldn’t just cut down one of the many trees around us, which seemed unfair, like being thirsty and surrounded by forbidden water. 

Late, late, after popcorn was threaded, paper chains were made, and Mom was making noises about bed, the door opened, and the tree entered.  Looking back with adult eyes, I see the absurdity of the sight – a scrawny, makeshift tree surrounded by three large men – Ghandi flanked by linebackers.  It was a Charlie Brown tree.  Barely taller than me, with patched on branches – they had made it from the bottom of a too-large tree that a woman in a condo nearby had been throwing out. 

Christmas morning, the little tree had been transformed into a Christmas miracle.  It wore the lights like jewels, had donned my paper chains and popcorn strings with flair.  And Santa had found a place for the presents.

When the time came to go home, Grandma and I paid the tree a memorial visit at the dumpster.  I wept over its popcorn draped branches.  “Grandma, this was the best tree ever.”

And it was. 

Thirty-three years later, metaphorical snows flurry darkly outside.  Santa has been hit hard by the recession.  Grandma Ginny died when my middle child was an infant.  Both of my Grandfathers followed within a few years.  This year, Grandma Doris is on hospice care, and may not see Christmas Day.  Dad is recovering from a heart attack of two months ago.  We’ve come down to Southern California to visit family, but last night we found ourselves visiting Dad’s cousin, not with his family in their home, but in the hospital where he’d had emergency surgery earlier in the day.

I wear the brooch.  I still like to flick the pearls and watch them dance on the bottom branches.  I have inherited something from Grandma besides her jewelry.  Like my Grandmother, I refuse to accept the darkness.  Christmas will happen.  There will be a tree.  Today, we will go to my cousin’s house and make cookies with his children in the conviction that he will be home with them for Christmas.  We will join my parents for Christmas, and I will make the steamed pudding and marzipan covered cake that Grandma Doris can no longer remember, that she may not be here to taste. 

I don’t know what Christmas will bring.  Advent seems particular in its darkness this year.  But, Christmas morning, I will sneak downstairs with my children to collect the lumpy stockings, and, when no one is looking, I will sniff the tree in memory of all those that have gone before.

Love and Loss

Time is waging war on our family.  We are down to one horse.  The grandparent pool is rapidly dwindling, as well.  We muster our defenses: children are born, pictures are taken, memories preserved.  Yet, looking at the now uninhabited backyard, the missing chairs at the holiday table, I sense that we are losing.

We never meant to have a Dalmatian.  The spots are cute, but I never would have chosen such a neurotic, highly strung breed as a family pet.  Spotz was part of a package deal – two accidents really.  She and her companion, a black lab that we named Sophie arrived one grey January morning, literally on the back porch.  Malnourished, pathetic scraps of puppies, they had squeezed between the slats of our back fence, and shivered with hopeful, thumping tails on the boards of the porch.  We called animal control.  We already had one indoor dog, our lovely, sensitive German Sheperd Jasmine.  We didn’t need two unruly puppies.  I was pregnant.

I was pregnant.  The hormones took over, and the rest was inevitable.  Uncharacteristic and incomprehensible tears cancelled the animal control truck.  “I’m a vet.  We’ll find homes for them.”  We became their home.  Sophie and Spotz never became house dogs.  Jasmine guarded her cats and later her children with a maternal ferocity that banned all other canines from her abode.  But they were ours.

As the children grew, the pets and grandparents aged.  Since Aidan’s birth seven years ago, we have lost: one horse, three cats, four great-grandparents, and now three dogs.  Fred, the barn cat, and Sophie both fell victim to our busy road.  The children learned the finality of car vs. living creature the night Sophie was hit in the dark.  They may disobey other rules, throwing caution to the winds, but even four-year old Sierra stays away from the road.

My husband and I have had the incredible grace of knowing our grandparents as adults.  Our children have been blessed with wise and doting great-grandparents.  They have also attended more funerals than any three children should ever know.  Caitlin remembers them all.  She remembers when Grandma Ginny got sick; she remembers pushing Grandpa Mac in his wheelchair; she remembers visiting Grandma Fumi in the nursing home.  She remembers better times with Grandpa Bligh – singing, visiting Disneyland, his stories and hugs.  She also asked the critical question when he lay dying in the hospital.  We had told her that my beloved grandfather was very ill, that the doctors couldn’t make him better.  “Mommy, can’t they just give him that shot?”  I knew what shot she meant; she had ridden in my truck on a day when I had been forced to euthanize a suffering horse.  “What shot, Honey?”  “The one you give the horses when they are sick and can’t get better.  The one so they die sooner and don’t suffer.”  No, the doctors couldn’t.

Aidan and Sierra remember very little.  Aidan was an infant when my Grandmother died.  He was not much older when we lost the grandfather whom he so strongly, and unnervingly, resembles.  His memories of Grandma Fumi are tangled with those of her daughter, my husband’s aunt.  He says he remembers singing the cowboy song for Grandpa Bligh.  Someday, he will have only the stories.

Sierra remembers less.  She was only six months old at the time of the last funeral.  She remembers our pets.  She will remember my remaining grandmother.  Grandma Doris is 96 and on hospice care.  The doctors can’t fix her.  No shot will relieve her painful, confused half-existence.  Death isn’t real for Sierra yet.  Yesterday when Aidan found Spotz, Sierra said “we can take her to Mommy’s work.  Mommy can fix her.”

Mommy couldn’t.  My sensitive, serious son found his dog lying dead yesterday morning when he went to feed her.  Spotz was his responsibility, and one he took seriously.  He fed her, spilled water on himself filling her bucket, played with her, and tried futilely to train her.  It was inevitable, I suppose, that he would be the one to find her.  And, yet, I wish I could go back, look out the kitchen window yesterday morning, and spare him that pain.  I can’t.  We can’t take away the loss that is the flip side of love.

Spotz is buried in the orchard with her best friend Sophie, our beloved Jasmine, and my first horse and best friend of twenty years Goldie.  The cats, Fred, Bandy, and Mystic, are on the other side of the property, resting at a distance from the dogs.

My grandparents are harder to visit, in distant cemeteries.  They visit me sometimes.  When I’m in the kitchen, Grandma Ginny hovers near the measuring cups and flour.  She tells me to level the flour with the back of a knife.  I ignore her, I cook like her husband – a little of this, a little of that.  But, I listen to her about the sugar; you never need as much as the recipe says.  Grandpa Mac shows up in my red-headed son’s set jaw.  When Aidan knows that something is not being done just right, I can hear my grandfather’s emphatic fist on the table.  Grandpa Bligh speaks through my mouth more often than I realize.  His quirks and turns of phrase shape my speech daily.  “Where is the ________?” “In the _________locker.”  I still hear his bellowing “Hey there!” at holidays.

I would spare my children loss forever if I could.  But, that’s not possible.  People age and die.  We mourn them, we remember them, we learn from their lives.  Pets don’t retire to happy green farms.  They are hit by cars, they die of old age and are found stiff and cold in unexpected places, they are euthanized to end suffering.  Loss empowers love, heightens it; the shadows give dimension.  Spare my children?  No, they deserve the gift of loss.

Runners, Pipers, and Tambourines

Bagpipes as a Zen moment?  What can I say?  I’m Scottish. 

The soft skirl of the pipes drifted around the corner of the hillside.  The first hill had been a pain.  The incline did not challenge my body, but my patience had been sorely tried.  Foolishly, I had begun the race in the group with the posted pace for a 10 minute mile.  I knew I could keep the pace for at least 3 miles, though I was uncertain about the entire 6.  As a road race newbie, I hadn’t realized that this group would also include every person who planned to run at least a little.  A block or so past the start, the crush had thinned a bit, and my feet had found a rhythm.  Just as I began to feel that maybe this crazy endeavor was doable, the mob screeched to a halt.  Like gawkers at an accident scene, the masses ahead had hit the first hill and apparently said to themselves, “Oh, this is too steep.  Maybe I’ll just walk this one.”

Needless to say, by the time I crested the hill, I was ready to bite someone.  Then the moment arrived.  The first notes wafted down just as I heard someone say, “Bagpipes?  Really?”

Yes, really.  Silhouetted on an emerald knoll, a group of kilt-clad pipers played against the mist.  Perfect.  Wrong tartan, but that was forgivable.  My grandfather was a McIntosh.  The clan motto is “Touch not the cat bot a glove.”  Basically, mess with us at your peril.  A stretch of asphalt opened before me and my feet found their cadence.

Back in May as I descended from the endorphin rush of my first 5K race, the 6 mile Wharf  to Wharf (Santa Cruz to Capitola) seemed quite reasonable.  ‘Two and a half months to train.  No problem.’  Therein lays the danger of accomplishment.  The human brain is never satisfied.  I caught myself yesterday afternoon seriously contemplating a brochure for a half-marathon in October.  Endorphins are insidious creatures.  What I had failed to foresee in the balm of May was the effect of summer on my will to exercise, or really on my will to do anything.  My physiology functions best from 65-80 F.  I had also been unable to predict the case of shingles that made the notion of a sports bra unbearable for a full week before the race.  Yet, here I was.  6 miles.  The brochure stated quite sternly that runners must keep to a 15 minute/mile pace and that the course would be closed within 90 minutes.  I envisioned myself dragging at the rear of a pack of thousands, calling my husband for a ride somewhere around mile 3, the pointing and mocking onlookers.  I was dragged to the starting line by two factors.  I had told the children that the weekend camping trip was so that mommy could run a race, and I didn’t want them to see me backing out of a goal.  Also, my mother had told me that I should rest the shingles and scratch the race.  39 years, and my mother still hasn’t learned that the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I shouldn’t.  Sorry mom.

Another hill, another corner.  Passing a folk guitarist, a glimpse of the sea.  A Kiss tribute band played on my left, my feet grinned.  Pulling up a long slope I saw my favorite group of the run.  10-15 tie-dye clad musicians lined up behind a sign that read “Sons of the Beach.”  As I passed, a tambourine and soap bubble infused version of “Rawhide” followed me.  Ah, Santa Cruz.

Balloon arches marked each mile.  The first split time depressed me so badly that my feet almost halted there and then.  ‘19minutes, seriously??’  I told my feet that we had started at least 5minutes back and had been held up in traffic.  ‘Get with it.’  The legs heard and obeyed.  The second mile took just over 10 minutes.  At each rainbow arch, my body responded to the called time as to a challenge.  With each mile my pace increased. 

Onlookers lined the roadway.  Far from the jeering phantoms of my insecure imaginings, these people projected lifesaving goodwill.  Generous with their cheers and encouragement, they gave the impression that each of us had our own personal pep squad.  Some held out hoses or sprinklers for those of us longing for a shower.  One lovely man offered a tray of strawberries and orange segments.  The crisp sweetness of that kind orange carried me a full mile.  One mother and her two children held out their hands to ‘high five’ each of us as we passed.  Just past a percussion group, a lone man stood and banged with a mallet on the back of a skillet which rang sweetly across a slough. 

‘Come on,’ called Capitola.  ‘Come see me again.’ 

‘You can do it,’ Santa Cruz pushed me from behind.  ‘You started here.’

Start there, I did.  Certain places weave in and out of our lives like thin gold threads.  From early trips to the beach and Boardwalk with our grandparents through my college years and into those of my sister, Santa Cruz and Capitola have flickered in and out of my life.  Indirectly, my current adult life has its roots along that bay.  Had I missed a party in Santa Cruz 20 years ago, I would not have met my husband 5 years later.  Strange but true.  After all, it is all Dave’s fault.

Saturday had been spent dragging the kids from one old haunt to the next.  Plugging up the hill to the UC Santa Cruz campus, I demanded of the backseat, “Do you want to see where Aunt Steph went to college?”

As we entered the grounds, their enthusiasm turned to confusion.  “Where’s the college?”  “This is it.”  “This doesn’t look like a school; it looks like a forest.”  I grinned to hear them echo my first impressions.  20 years ago, my roommate and I circled the campus endlessly ‘looking for the college.’  It had seemed impossible that the random collection of buildings that sporadically dotted the forest was indeed a university.

Our next stop was Natural Bridges State Beach.  Flashes of the essence of Santa Cruz drifted past:  surfers floating like black seals on the waves, the requisite amateur-painted VW van, the skateboarder towed by a large, enthusiastic dog, the smells of brine, kelp, fog, and fish.  On the beach, the kids caught a connection to home.  “Come on, Aidan.”  Caitlin dragged her brother to a specific vantage point along the shore.  “Look!  See it?  See the rock; it’s the one from the painting.”  They knew the story, knew that mom had painted the scene in oils from a photograph sent by a college friend.  However, this was the first time they realized that mom painted actual places, and that they were visiting a place that had hung on the living room wall longer than their own lives.  Ghosts of my past walked the sands where my children frolicked.  Past and future joined near a crashing, grey surf beneath the spiraling wings of pelicans.

As we parked near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, a more distant past floated through my memory.  The Boardwalk rang with the excitement of childhood.  Screams and laughter danced above the rumble of surf and roar of rollercoasters.  Grease, salt spray, and tanning lotion ran under the sweetness of cotton candy.  Clutching the hands of my children, I became the child.  My grandparents appeared at every corner.  Glancing at the waves, I heard my grandmother’s mantra as my sister and I ran toward the surf, “Don’t go in past your knees!”  We stopped for lunch and my husband’s jaw dropped as his calorie-conscious wife ordered deep-fried artichoke hearts and a linguica sandwich with grilled onions.  As the crisp grease and metallic artichoke melted onto my tongue, my grandfather’s grin appeared.  My children had a bag of plastic sand toys wedged under the table; the cups of neighboring beer drinkers evoked the memory of hops-scented sand castles.  Grandpa had always saved his beer cup for us to use as a sandcastle mold.  The first tower or two smelled faintly of beer and the paper had a tendency to disintegrate after a couple of trips to the ocean for water, but it was a tradition.  As we draped our bright beach towels over our patch of pillowy sand, I felt the rough edge of brown and white striped terry-cloth.  Grandma line-dried her laundry, and her towels had all of the pliability of coarse-grain sandpaper.  As we emerged from the waves, sunburned, salt-scoured, and sand-crusted, Steph and I stood with meek trepidation as Grandma rubbed us down with the agonizing vigor of love.  We were well into our teens before we managed to convince her that a) we could towel ourselves, and b) that we would really rather not change out of our bathing suits in the middle of the beach with only a towel tented around us.  I resisted the temptation to similarly torture my children.

On the beach, the kids proved themselves as individual as their nicknames – neither clones of each other, nor of my childhood.  Sierra, our “marmot” played happily on the sand, shunning the waves, like a good little land mammal.  Aidan, the “alligator” was happiest in the shallows.  An overly strong wave would cause him to tug at my hand with shouts of “Back!  Back!”  And Caitlin?  Caitlin stood as far into the surf as I would permit.  Two or more weak waves caused her to raise an eyebrow at the sea and ask sardonically, “C’mon, Poseidon.  Is that all you’ve got?”  (She’s re-reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.) “Do you really think it’s a good idea to taunt Poseidon while we’re standing in the ocean?”  “Moommm, I’m an otter.  I’m a creature of the sea.”  And so she is.

Aidan’s hand tucked into mine as we stood in line for the Giant Dipper, reminding me of the mingled excitement and guilt as I held Grandpa’s hand in the same line 30 years ago.  The thrill of riding a “really big, grownup rollercoaster” tangled with the fear that Grandma was right.  Maybe he really was too old for “those rides.”  What if he did hurt his knees or back or heart?  As Aidan’s face went still as the lap bar engaged, the old fears seized me from behind.  What if he was too young?  He was just barely over the height limit; what if it wasn’t safe for him?  What if he was scared?  I screamed with laughter around the dips and turns darting glances at my son’s white face.  The glory of risk-taking fought for supremacy with my need for a guarantee of security.  There are no guarantees; I abandoned myself to the last swooping turns.

Buckled into the car, the first bite of my caramel apple caught my teeth and dripped down my wrist.  In the back seat, the kids shared a bag of cotton candy.  30 years ago, the traditional treat “for the way home” invariably produced the need for at least one stop in response to my sister’s agonized cries of “I’m stickyyyyyy!”  From the back seat, a voice asked, “Mom, do you have any wet wipes?”  “Nope, they’re all in the back.  Do you want a napkin?”  “No, that’s okay.”

Feet flew the 6^th mile past the coast and into Capitola.  A man with a wig like a giant tribble skin ran on my right; I passed a woman with a tank top that read, “Never tutu old.”  She wore a red lace tutu.  I sprinted down the hill with the long galloping strides of my childhood.  My own children and patient husband waited just beyond the finish as I ran from the past into my future.

Respite

A brief break from the ranting today.  Triple digit weather, a case of shingles http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/shingles/dis-faqs.htm, and an on-call weekend punctuated with oddball emergencies have conspired to suck the indignation (not to mention the inspiration) from my soul.  Needless to say, the tick of the clock to 8:00 this morning filled me with joy as it signaled a day off.  Freedom!  Air-conditioning!  The shingles was, alas, still present but was rendered far less annoying by the previously mentioned circumstances.

Summer evokes childhood -- swimming, ice-cream, watermelon, flopping on a couch with a book, mosquito bitten games of hide-and-seek, and movies.  In the pre-video, pre-megaplex days of my childhood, the downtown movie theater played one movie at a time, and lines snaked along the baking sidewalk for blocks.  Around mid-July, doubtless sick of the cries of “I’m bored,” parents would load 5 or 6 of us into a van and drive us downtown.  Admission money carefully safety-pinned into change purses, and illicit brown bags of popcorn smuggled into pockets and backpacks, we were ready.  The oldest member of the group always had a dime for the pay phone, just in case.  The downtown theater in Merced looms grandly in my childhood memory.  The orange top of the white tower stood out for blocks.  I felt very grownup as I handed my money to the teller encased behind the sweeping curve of glass and stepped into the lovely cool of the lobby.  In those days, there was one screen that seemed impossibly huge, a grand staircase that led upstairs to a painted balcony that made me think of Cinderella’s castle.  Smells of popcorn, dust, and an obscure stickiness known only to movie theaters filled the air.  Movies on that screen seemed so real that I would look back to the light from the projector during the scary parts just to reassure myself that it was only make-believe.  The outside world vanished for a couple of hours into the cool, fantasy-laden darkness.  When the doors opened to the blaring heat and light, we would stand, blinking moles, on the sidewalk until a double-parked parent honked and waved us back to reality.

My heart broke when that theater was renovated and split into four smaller screens.  But, by then the VCR was common, and it had become increasingly difficult to convince our parents to shell out the time and money for a downtown movie excursion.  New digital technology and the mandatory blockbuster action scenes have somewhat revived the movie, but my children will never have the same feeling of movie-ness that permeated my childhood and that of previous generations.  Theaters are clean, well ordered, and completely generic.  Bag searches make greasy brown bags of home-popped popcorn impossible.  I may drop them off at a theater, someday – when they’re 15?

Today, however, I reclaimed a bit of my lost past.  I decided to celebrate freedom (and distract myself from the hideous rash on my shoulder) by taking myself to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/harrypotterandthehalf-bloodprince/.  I nibbled on my popcorn through the endless previews, unimpressed.  Then, it happened.  The mist rolled in, carrying the Warner Brother’s logo.  The movie was starting!  In that instant the whole sense of movie-ness, of being a solitary adventurer swept over me. 

Watching the adolescent forays into first love increased my sense of nostalgia.  The chairs grew smaller; I was old again.  That sense of uncertain excitement fled dimly into my past.  As the summer heat burst through the exit door, my feet stumbled mournfully away from youth.

I consoled myself with lunch at Tucos in Davis http://daviswiki.org/Tucos_Wine_Market_and_Cafe.  Between tiny spoonfuls of a dancing cucumber melon gazpacho, I sipped my wine, read The Language of Bees http://www.laurierking.com/, and lounged in the shade of an olive tree and green umbrella.  By the time the beef Carpaccio watercress salad had arrived, my consolation was complete.  Nibbling on the cheese course and sipping a glass of port, I realized that, perhaps, adulthood isn’t so bad after all.

Independence?

The smoke still smells the same; an acrid odor of burnt tires and excitement billows out with every burst.  The strobe flashes still pop with the staccato of a giant stamping bubble wrap.  The lingering hiss of the fountains still sounds like the quenching of stars.  And despite the growing number of regulations (I miss sparklers,) a sense of adolescent rebellion lingers.

 

Last night, my youngest child cuddled in my lap, sucking the thumb of one hand, clutching my earlobe with her other while her older siblings huddled together in the adjacent lawn chair chanting “Ooooh.  Ahhhhh.  Ohhhhh.  Yaaayyy,” in a pod-people monotone. This chant was followed by the cynical giggles of co-conspirators.  Less than an hour before, Caitlin had informed me that Aidan had no reason to exist.  Her tune changed as darkness fell; apparently he’s warm.

 

“Look.  When a parent or a teacher tells you to do something, you don’t get to ask why.  You don’t get to say ‘no.’  Unless it’s something dangerous or something that makes you feel uncomfortable, the only proper response is to do as you’re told.”  Hmmm… doesn’t exactly have a “we hold these truths to be self-evident” ring to it, does it?  In my defense, when I uttered this proclamation, I was driving an extended (not club) cab F-150 containing my three kids and my mother-in-law.  Aidan had challenged every statement I’d made that morning, and yes, I’d forgotten what day it was.  Still, I was the one who had made a big deal the night before about the meaning of Independence Day, and freedom from tyranny.  Oops.

 

Fireworks have become a major event in our family.  In a family where everyone cooks, cleans, and sets the table without regard to gender, the 4^th of July fireworks are archaically sexist.  And, for the most part, we like it that way.  My husband and future brother-in-law traditionally mount an expedition to buy out every fireworks stand along the road.  They and my father elaborately prepare and present the display to the admiring women and children.  This year, stogies were added “just to light the fireworks.”  Rebellion?  Nah.  Of course not.

 

Bottle rockets shot over the house from a neighboring yard.  Where does the boundary for freedom and justifiable rebellion lie?  “No.  You may not kick your brother.  Ever.”  “Don’t bite your sister’s leg.”  “Do NOT toss the water bottle around in the truck.”  “That is enough loud singing.  I will stop the car.”  Safety? Annoyance?  Ideology?  Our Founding Fathers declared treason against their lawful king.  The Honduran military just deposed their elected president.  Yet another member of our military has been discharged for the nature of his personal life.  The night before last, after our 5 minute symposium on The Declaration of Independence, the kids and I sat down to a living room picnic and movie.  (Burgers, corn, root beer floats.)  As we watched National Treasure, Caitlin looked up and asked, “But, Mom?  If they wrote all that stuff about ‘all men are created equal,’ where did the disrespect and bad treatment of African Americans come in?”  Oh dear.

 

“Well, umm… You see, most of the men that signed it, and Thomas Jefferson, the man that wrote the Declaration of Independence, they owned slaves.”

“What!  That’s stupid.  That’s wrong.”  Her outrage continued for several more paragraphs.

“Well, yes, of course it’s wrong.  It takes a long time for people to change ideas.  That’s why I always tell you guys that quote about how ‘the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing.’  If people don’t speak up for what they believe when they know something is wrong, nothing will ever change.”

“But, Moomm,” this one earned me an eyeroll.  “Everyone thinks that what they believe is right.”

Thank God for action sequences.

 

As the fireworks popped and bloomed, and my husband puffed on his repulsive cigar, I found myself wondering again about the nature of independence and right.  When is it justifiable rebellion against tyranny?  When is it treason?  What happens when our rights crash into the rights of others?  What if the sparks from our rockets light the neighbors’ roof on fire?  What do we do when “everyone thinks that what they believe is right?”  Uncertainty, destruction, chaos, these are the prices we pay for disrupting the status quo.  Stagnation, rigidity, intolerance, abuse of power, these are the risks of resting securely within the system.

 

I kind of like the explosions.  Happy Independence Day!

Attack of the Fluorescent Lace

Bubble skirts loom above and around me, malevolent jellyfish.  I catch a glimpse of a pair of lace leggings and find my breath rasping in jagged spurts.  Get out of here.  Leave.  Run.  This is a bad idea.  You couldn’t pull it off then.  Caught in the headlights of day-glo bangles and beads, my feet feel glued to the linoleum.  “Can I help you find something, ma’am?”

            Trapped.  “Um…I’m trying to find something.  There’s a… some friends are having an 80’s party and…” Advice from every fashion magazine leaps in bold print into my mind, “if you can remember a trend, you’re too old to wear it again.”  I dodge the eyes of the twenty year old stick figure standing before me.  I really don’t want to see the pity or the condescension.  I’m pretty certain that the 30 pounds I’ve so proudly shed over the last 6 months have reattached themselves to my hips.  New wrinkles crawl around my eyes as I stand there.  “Forever 21,” reads the sign above the store -- 21, not 39.  Once again, I’m in the wrong place.

            Familiar ground – I had hoped to leave that feeling buried with my bad perm, coke-bottle glasses, braces, and turquoise beret.  You see, I was a nerd.  I will submit that it is a far worse thing to have been a female nerd.  As history has shown, once male nerds and geeks climbed the evolutionary ladder from the lockers into which they had been stuffed, they proceeded to inherit the earth.  The triumph of the male geek is almost a tenet of faith for Gen Xers.  Female nerds, though, that’s another story.  No one made movies about us.  You may not have even noticed us.  In fact, invisibility was our only defense. 

Think back:  remember the endless rows of desks, the smell of chalk dust and bad aftershave, the drone of that one fly bashing itself against the window.  Now, chances are, while you were slipping a note to your friend about the party Friday night, there was probably one girl whose eyes were on the board, whose hand was actually moving across her binder.  Look carefully, see her?  There’s no pocket protector or plaid shirt to identify her.  She looks like you did – almost.  She may have had glasses for a while, but probably got contacts at some point.  She wore the excitement of those new contacts for a day or two until she realized that no one noticed.  She dressed preppy, but the collars of her polo shirts never flipped quite right.  Her hair never reached the proper heights, and forget the blue eyeshadow; her mother wouldn’t have let her out of the house in it.  But you wouldn’t have noticed the eyeshadow or lack thereof.  Her face spent most of its time behind a book. 

            These days you wouldn’t know the girl nerd from any other 30-something mom.  She may be dowdy, fashionable, sporty, who knows.  Somewhere along the line, she found her own look.  But, I can guarantee you that a well-timed Cindi Lauper song will still cause her intestines to twist into Rubik’s snakes, and her hands to grab for a book to hide behind.  Yet, time yields a wider view.  She now sees what we all failed to realize at the time, that we all hid behind something.  Adolescence provides a place for metamorphosis; we all find our own chrysalis: geek, cheerleader, jock, pick-a-label-any-label, and we crawl inside.  Hopefully, we emerge into a shared humanity from which we can show our children the view from the other side of the dance floor.

            I manage to grab a few garments, duck into the dressing room and convince myself that I am anthropologist, a historian studying a distant culture and time.  As I swipe my credit card, the clerk says, “Sounds like the party will be fun. You can feel young again.”  Ouch. 

There is, however, something that clerk couldn’t have known.  I don’t want my own youth back.  Age gives us other opportunities, and sometimes it gives us the chance to check out someone else’s cocoon.

            So, tonight, I’ll be the girl in the bubble skirt with the lace leggings and bright pink headband dragging the popular guy onto the dance floor.  It shouldn’t be too hard.  See, there’s one more thing – remember that cute football player, the one with the flattop that you liked to run your fingers through?  Yeah.  Him.  He married me.