In my defense

Darling Daughter knocked most of my family off balance Monday afternoon when she circulated the news that I had successfully defended my dissertation in technical communication and rhetoric that morning, which means that I can legitimately use the title "Dr.," although the degree won't be a done deal until December.

As it turned out, the defense itself was the easy part of the trip to Lubbock.

I had to schedule the defense at least three weeks before I could do it, and I had decided a Monday would be optimal for me. My adviser was amenable to 10 October at 10 a.m., so I set it for 10/10 @ 10. I booked a flight from the airport two miles from my house to the one in Lubbock and set up a rental car for travel around Lubbock. In the interim, I built and tweaked my presentation, and I was pretty well set to go.

The morning of 10/10 dawned a little gray and misty, and I had butterflies in my stomach more because I always worry about missing my flights than about the upcoming presentation. My boomerang son had promised to be ready to take me to the airport for the 1 p.m. flight, but when I learned that he would be missing a friend's wedding in Dallas to do that, I asked him to find me a backup ride and shoved him out the door. He hooked me up with Shrek, who called about an hour early to let me know he remembered, and I calmed down a bit.

During the course of the morning, the rains came down harder, but I concentrated on some grading I needed to do and kept an eye on the weather channel maps. If things happened as projected, the rain would ease up enough in time for my flight, and while the storm was supposed to skirt the west side of the Houston layover, I thought everything would be fine.

We went through security right on schedule (I had only one carry-on bag, but I had stuffed my computer bag and my purse inside it, and something in my stuff had a security person perplexed for longer than it should have), and I parked in the waiting room and popped open my computer to entertain myself for the short wait.

Sooner than I'd have guessed, I learned that it would be longer than expected: the storm had indeed reached the Houston airport, and flights were being delayed there so that our plane wouldn't have a place to land. I settled in with an online Sunday crossword puzzle.

The delay announcements kept coming. After the line at the help station subsided some, I asked what these delays would mean for my flight. The attendant told me my connecting flight had also been delayed, but he also had reserved a spot for me on a later flight, just in case. I went happily back to my corner to wait for the weather to get me on my way.

We finally boarded around 6 p.m. (That's 6 hours in the waiting room in a small airport that has no food available. I don't know why I had packed myself a little baggie of trail mix, but thank goodness I had.) We landed in Houston a little before 7, and I headed toward the gate where my flight was supposed to be—just in time to learn that it had been canceled.

No problem; I had a ticket on a later flight, right? No so much: the gate attendant told me it was a standby ticket, but she could print out a boarding pass for me, and I was "pretty high on the list," so I should go ahead and check in.

I had to haul my bag several gates away to get to the new location, and when I got there I told the attendant I needed to know what the chances were that I might make the flight. He started a song and dance about how this flight would have limited space because it was carrying extra fuel, so it wouldn't have as many stand-by openings as it might otherwise have. I bit my tongue so I wouldn't say, "No shit, Sherlock. You've had delays and cancellations all day long, and the chances that any standbys will get on is probably between slim and none, but why in the hell are you carrying extra fuel when you have an airport of tired, angry customers who need to get somewhere?"

Instead, I said very firmly, "Look, I need to know what my chances are of getting on this flight. I have to get to Lubbock tonight, and if you can't get me there, I have to find another way."

He started another tap dance about how airlines can't ever be sure how many people are going to be at the gate for any flight (like they can't check the check-in records, I assume? Or does the check-in-from-home thing just make that a bigger crapshoot?), but I had a "good" position in the queue.

"What number am I?" I asked.

Then he turned sarcastic and went back through his "I'm not allowed to tell you" routine, then told me it would be my decision about whether to wait to see what my chances were, knowing that if I walked out, I ran the risk of missing an open spot. He said this waving two fingers around, so I thought he might be telling me I was second on the list, which would have been worth at least a shot. In fact, I had already looked around the area enough to decide that I'd wait if I were first or second, leave if I were fourth or more, and flip a coin if I were third. His refusal to tell me anything but then to dare me to gamble was a little like challenging me to Russian roulette with a chamber that might have something between one and six bullets in it. I was furious, but I asked him if I had time to go get something to eat before the flight left.

He walked me over to a nearby food station that had tired sandwiches and salads, hot dogs, and microwavable pizzas and asked the girl to give me his discount on the food. Not what I wanted, but I felt as if he were at least making an attempt to be helpful, and maybe those two fingers meant I was second in line. That, I had decided, would be worth the stay.

The soda machine was broken, but the clerk told me she could give me two bottled drinks instead of the refillable cup I had asked for, so I took her up on it, got a limp salad, and sat down to eat. When the gate attendant call the flight, I hopped up to get my second drink and went to wait for calls for standbys.

By the time I got there, he had called two, and neither of them was me. He looked at me and said curtly, "I'm sorry, but with this extra fuel, that's all we can take."

"Can you help me get on a flight back home?" I asked him.

"No, you'll have to go to the service desk," he told me. "Or wait; I'll be right back."

The service desk had been backed up ever since I got to the airport—the one in that particular little gate pod is the only one in the terminal for that airline—so I first tried going to the terminal where I had landed to see if they could help me. They send me back to the first terminal, but at least the line was down a little. While I waited, I called Boomerang to tell him to gas up my car, grab me a blanket and a pillow, and come to Houston to get me. I could sleep a little while he drove me back home, grab a drink and a snack, and hit the road for Lubbock. I'd be driving all night, but it was a start.

I also called Discover to see if they would be able to help me if the airline got cranky about refunding my ticket, and as the agent assured me they could—but I should check with the airline first—I reached the service desk. I handed the agent my driver's license and reached for my bag to give her my boarding passes when she announced, "You're on a cell phone and I'm not going to deal with that. You can just wait."

I hung up the phone and said, "I'm not on a cell phone now and I'm tired of the way this airline is handling me."

She brushed me aside, but the person next to her was available and started typing my name into her terminal. She was fairly efficient, but the first woman wound up having to help her solve my problem. Once she decided to help, she was pretty efficient, but she could have been a lot nicer about it.

I called Boomerang back to tell him where to pick me up and went down to the baggage dock to see what I was going to have to do about the rest of the trip. I called the hotel to tell them I would be very, very late and I'd need the room for a second night, preferably at state rates, and they assured me that would be done. I called the rental car company to be sure I wouldn't be charged for the car at the Lubbock airport, and then I had a brainstorm: I could rent a car at state rates and drive to Lubbock, probably faster than Boomerang could get me home and routed through central Texas at at less cost to my department and less wear on my car.

The Avis clerk was friendly and efficient, and I had a shiny new Camry to drive north. Darling Daughter had taught me to use the satellite navigation on my cell phone when she was home the last time, and I set it up to help me find the best route. I had a little mist on the way north, but the traffic—even close to midnight—was moving at close to warp speed, and I was happy to spend my time mostly just keeping up. Mostly the trip was boring enough that I could go over the presentation in my head. I figured if I did it the way it ought to be done, it would take at least an hour; my adviser said 20 minutes, max.

Arriving at Dallas on I-45 is a lot different from I-35, where a long string of little burgs lines the highway before the city. I had planned a stop at one of those burgs, but I arrived at I-20 before I knew it, so I took the left and kept rolling. In fact, I rolled through Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth before I found a place where I felt comfortable slowing down—a little more than 4 hours of driving without a stop. By some miracle, the sat nav on the phone was still working, but the beeper started telling me my battery was about gone.

I pulled off at the first bright lights after I got out of Fort Worth, made a pit stop, and bought a cheap car charger so I could have the company of my phone to go along with the assortment of radio stations I found; I didn't need the navigation to get to Lubbock, but I was likely to once I hit town, and I liked knowing how much farther I had to travel and sort of what time I could expect to get there. (In-town driving in Lubbock slowed me down, but the sat nav was right within about 15 minutes.)

Highway 20 doesn't have a lot of traffic between midnight at 4 a.m., so that part of the trip went smoothly except for the stretch where Abilene was supposed to be. It was there on my way home, so I guess it was there on my way up, but it was covered with fog like polyfill that made every blotch on the road look scary, but worse than that were the streetlights. When I first approached one in that stuff, I wasn't sure I was still in the same reality: it loomed over the road like a humongous ghost, staring down as if it were looking into my soul. Once I figured out that I was still awake and rolling, I sort of adjusted to the parade of apparitions, but I dreaded the possibility that they might stay with me for the rest of the trip.

The fog lifted on the west of Abilene as unexpectedly as it settled in on the east, and the highway was again friendly and easy to drive. In fact, as I pulled through Sweetwater, I realized that I would miss seeing the wind farms west of Sweetwater and on the road north.

Then I made that turn north, and within a few minutes, I had a much happier surprise: the windmills mostly have big, flashing red lights in the middle, and as I approached, they all winked on like a miles-wide fireworks display. It made sense that they would be lighted to keep airplanes from crashing into them, but I never had thought about how cool that show would be.

I rolled into Lubbock around 5:30 in the morning and checked into the hotel at about 6 a.m.—9 hours after I had turned north on I-45 in Houston. I went to my room, stripped off my jeans, and tumbled into bed, expecting a wake-up call at 8:15. I'm not sure how much sleep I got; I remember having a vision of some sort in which my adviser had dressed my whole committee in "muppet bibs," so that their faces looked out at me over fuzzy puppets that had arms like Bucky Katt in the funny papers and legs like Furbies so the committee members could stick their harms in the "legs" and move the feet around. I have no idea where that came from.

I answered the wake-up call at 8:15, jumped into the tub and into my clothes, grabbed milk from the breakfast area, and met my adviser in the lobby at 8:45. (Thank goodness I keep the hair short!)

We got to his office before he asked if I'd brought the forms that needed to be signed, but we still had time to drive the few blocks back to the hotel and pick them up. Just as well I didn't count on having time to practice.

The department head showed up right at the 10 o'clock start time with the graduate studies representative hot on his heels; the other two committee members dragged in a few minutes later, just like my graduate students do. My adviser dispensed with the formalities and gave me the go signal, and I was off and running.

I dashed through my hour-long presentation as fast as I could, nearly finishing in just under 30 minutes. Not quite finishing; my COPD kicked in, my voice went out, and I ground to a halt. Everyone in the room was sympathetic, waiting patiently while I sucked down most of a bottle of water and popped a cough drop in my mouth. When I regained my composure, I finished the last few words of the talk and asked for questions.

The committee members mostly praised my work and asked me about the next steps I might take in pursuing this line of research, but the graduate rep had another line of questions. I didn't hear but one or two of them before I realized he had come with an agenda: he wasn't nearly as interested in finding out what my research had shown as in convincing me that his approach to engineering writing was The One True Way and trying to get me to admit that some of the things I said engineers had told me they preferred in their papers were just wrong. Eventually he asked me if I had read the paper he wrote 20-odd years ago about how to write an engineering paper, because if I had, I would have known how it should be done. I pointed out that I had read a number of papers of that sort, but they hadn't particularly supported one another; all of them tended to be one writer's opinion—and that was a large part of the reason for my research.

After almost two hours, one of the committee members—who had come in tired and had other work to do—announced that she thought it was time to stop with the questions and get on with the decision making. I smiled and said, "I think she's had enough of this," and she said, "No, I just want to get to the part where we get to call you 'Doc'!" They dismissed me, talked for about a minute (I had warned my adviser that if they carried on too long, he'd have to come wake me up), and called me back in. Over!

My adviser took one of the committee members and me out for lunch and then dropped me back at the hotel. I changed back into jeans and set out to see the Buddy Holly museum because I've never been there. Sat nav helped me find it; it didn't tell me that on Mondays the museum is closed. The irony just never ends.

I went back to the hotel and called Avis to see what would happen to my bill if instead of driving back to Houston, I went home and left the car there. If the charge were small enough, I could save time and frustration by not having to go back to Houston (and I could stop in Dublin for lunch with a friend who lives there); otherwise, I'd have to arrange to get home from Houston. Even though I asked specifically whether the change in drop-off location would add to the cost of the car, two company representatives told me it would not.

The trip home was lovely. I woke up early and got on the road, eased down the highway to Dublin in time to visit a while before lunch, and still got home well before Boomerang was due home from work. I cleaned out the car, grabbed the paperwork I needed, and headed for the airport. Where I was told that a one-way rental would still have the same per-day cost, but it also had a 20-cents/mile additional charge. I thought 20 cents seemed low, but for the 100 miles to Houston, that shouldn't be a problem. "So how much for that?" I asked.

"$200." Turns out they charge 20 cents/mile for every mile of the trip, Houston to Lubbock to home."You can call our office in Houston to see if they can remove that."

I had sat enough over the past three days, so I had decided to walk the couple of miles home from the airport. When I got home, I called Houston and got my charge reduced by half—enough to make the drive straight home really worth the effort.

I slept very well last night.

When I got to the office today, a couple of graduate students in my office happily greeted me with "Hi, doc!"

This old house

When Darling Daughter and Prince Charming made a whistle-stop through town earlier this week, they opened a door to me I hadn't been through in more than 40 years--the one that opens the house where I grew up.

They had been in the house a few months ago when an invitation to a "house party" landed them at the address they recognized as my old house. DD came in the next morning telling me I had been right about the length of the hall, although she had never really believed me when I had described it to her years before. She had a snapshot of part of the kitchen that floored me; I couldn't believe that it could be right. Turned out that it was.

When they took me back this week, they parked on the old gravel driveway--somewhat overgrown, but otherwise not much changed--and we walked around to the front door. The old sidewalk was just as I remembered it; I was amazed at how familiar the mosaic pattern looked after all these years. I had forgotten that Daddy had built in a gentle S-curve when he moved the walk from another part of the yard, but that made sense as I looked at it with the knowledge that the move also explained the broken concrete; the distance from the house to the other yard was farther than the distance from the front door, and the S-curve probably made the pieces fit.

The house sits on the south half of a square block that Daddy always said was one acre, although I never really knew how accurate that was. The north half of the block was divided into two lots:  the mysterious Granny Whalen lived on the east end for years (I think she was usually about 104; that's all I really remember about her), and the Nedbaleks with their assortment of little kids lived on the west. Our house stretched across the south side, facing a Little League ball field and a small, open field that backed up to the local golf course; I didn't know until I bought a house of my own what it meant to live in a house with neighbors an arms length away and houses across the street.

I had been warned years ago to expect the house to be carpeted; my brother Beau had been in the house when my children were small and had noticed that. Otherwise, the front living area was unsurprising to me. It was furnished, and with furniture and carpeting, it was no longer the "echo chamber" that we had called it in the years before Mother had reupholstered a couch and chair from an estate sale and eventually added a coffee table and end tables. The curtains she had made of sheets were long gone, but the plastic blinds in the windows reminded me of the jalousies Mother had complained about for years, even after Daddy replaced them with more modern aluminum windows. We walked through the front living area to the back, where the "family room" and kitchen are, but this tour really needs to begin in the hall.

When I stepped into the hall, I did a double-take myself. I remember growing up wondering how people lived in houses with tiny hallways, but I had forgotten over time how very long ours was: by my guess,  more than 40 feet from the coat closet where the hall deadends into the living room on the east end to the Fibber McGee on the west). I almost immediately flashed back to the year Ron Poof had gotten an Odd Ogg for Christmas and we scruffed along on the floor chasing the Odd Ogg and its bright-colored balls. The house might look different, but the memories really don't.

The old telephone window was also gone. I'm not sure what architectural gimmick that was supposed to have been, but it was about a foot-square opening in the wall between the kitchen and the hallway with a little shelf where our telephone used to sit. I remember picking up the phone to call a friend and hearing voices on our party line, and I remember sitting on the hallway floor for hours and talking to my friends while I was a teenager—a memory that will never happen for kids in a cellphone age.

The first room I remember sleeping in was the first room on the left down the hall. It was empty this week because the renter who has been there has moved out and another was coming in. I was a little surprised to see that it's probably about as big as my master bedroom now, but not so surprised to see that the door-sized mirrors are gone from the closets. I don't remember mirrors on the doors of the closet farther from the door, but I well remember all three of us girls preening before the mirrored doors in dresses Mother had made us to wear to parties and proms. For some reason, I remembered the pink dress with the rabbits in purple vests: I had pitched a fit when Mother first showed me the fabric for that dress and its matching purple apron, but the first time I wore it, it became my favorite dress. I wonder if Mother ever realized that?

I don't remember a small closet between the first two bedrooms, but since it wasn't my house anymore, I didn't open the door. It might have always been there; I just don't remember. (Sister Susan Rene says it might have been there, and since it's right across the hall from the kitchen door, maybe it once provided pantry space for the kitchen.)

The next room down had been Mother and Daddy's room in my earliest recollection, but after they added onto the house when I was about 8, it became SR's room; when she moved on, it became mine. Daddy had asked me what color I wanted to paint it, I had asked for "ice blue"  (I had in mind the almost colorless blue of a Texas sky on a hot summer day); the color I got was somewhat darker, making the room almost depressing, but it was the only room in the house that wasn't either white or "sand," so I was thrilled to have a color. I suppose the room had had a phone in it from the time the phones had been installed in the house (not for several years after I was born, but that's another story), and DD noticed that the paint between the two windows was still uneven where the mounting holes had been.

I had to force myself not to open the closet (the young men who live there had given me free rein to look around, but I figured opening closets was a little too invasive), but I could imagine the placement of the rods and the dresser I had pushed up against the back wall, and I remember hours in there reading or daydreaming or pouting—certainly no surprise that my Soldier Son found himself as happy in his closet as anywhere else in the house. The room had never seen to me to be much more than a closet itself, but it was my closet, and I loved it. (SR wonders if it would seem smaller to her now, and it might: she moved to it from sharing a room with Margaret Joan and me, and the openness of her very own room probably felt liberating!)

I jolted a bit when I stepped across the hall into the bathroom that had been "mine" for as long as I lived in the house. DD asked me if we had had that "funny" bathtub, and I saw immediately that the old tub had been moved out for a tile area that appeared to have been designed to accommodate a wheelchair. That also might explain why the owner at the time had torn out the vanity cabinet and, more disappointing, the medicine cabinet over it that I assume Daddy had built. As I recall it, the cabinet stretched the full 4 or 5 ft of the wall over the vanity. It was set into the wall rather than being attached to it, and it had sliding mirror doors that were maybe 30 in. tall. I've never seen a medicine cabinet like it since then, never one I've liked as much.

But accommodations for a wheelchair meant the owner had to have more space, so the cabinets were gone, replaced by a pedestal basin, and the toilet had been turned to the other wall; a handicap rail ran along the wall that would have been behind the old toilet and cabinet. Later, as we were coming back down the hall, I opened the storage cabinet to show DD how sturdily the cabinets had been built, and we laughed when we saw that the inside of the cabinet still appears to be the old pink that it had been painted to match the pink tiles on the vanity top and around the tub—more than 50 years ago.

The room next to the bathroom had been our brothers' room until the other two bedrooms were added, and then it became Ron Poof's. When Beau moved out, RP moved to the newer room, and the older one became Mother's sewing room. It also felt completely familiar, and I realized how big the windows seemed. The house I live in now has a couple of windows that sit about as low in the dining area, but none that low in the bedrooms. I supposed houses built, like mine,  in the 70s may have used smaller windows as a way of saving energy, but I remember loving being able to look out those big windows.

The tiny bathroom on the other side of the third bedroom had been added along with the two new bedrooms. It didn't appear to have been changed except that someone had mounted a small shelf above the toilet. Oddly, of all the rooms in the house, it was a bathroom that first felt the most like "home"!

The room that had been first Beau's and then RP's didn't look different to me (except for the addition of a ceiling fan and carpet), except that I mostly remember it when Beau lived there, and then you could never see the floor; he was a first-class pigpen, and his room showed it. The kid who lives there now isn't exactly a neat-freak, but except for the laundry piling up in the closet, the room was much cleaner than my memory allows. 

The old closet Mother referred to as her Fibber McGee had he same problem: the boys who live in the house have established a set of bowling pins on the floor of the closet, but the rest of it was sparsely filled. Otherwise, it's about the same, too.

And the room that became Mother and Daddy's is almost "normal," too. The built-in dressers that flanked Mother's dressing table are still there, but the table itself is gone. I was amused that the furniture in that room was nicer than any Mother and Daddy ever owned, and that there was a tricycle in the corner near the closet. I'd have loved to know why the tricycle was there, but I didn't dare ask. It's the only thing in the house that reminisces of kids.

Back on the east end of the house, behind the living room, I nosed into the utility room. DD was surprised when I opened the door  because of the size of the space. The last guy to move out took the dryer with him, so the room has only a washer and a water heater in it now and looks really empty; I was a little disoriented by the fact that Mother's ironing basket was missing from the corner and the ironing board was not open along the nearby wall. I suppose I can forgive myself my basket of clothes that often don't make it into the dresser since I mostly recall the ironing basket as full enough to imagine the wrinkled clothes just toppling off the top.

The kitchen and family room were the most jolting. The commercial-weight sliding glass doors that Daddy installed are still there, although they no longer have the "one-way" glass that was so much fun for us. I opened one just to test the weight, and I loved the feeling of the big, heavy doors that still glide amazingly smoothly on their heavy-duty tracks. One of them is covered by a tightly stretched sheet the guys use for tv projection; through the other, I looked out across the patio where Mother used to drink her morning coffee and read the newspaper and where she and Daddy sat outside for hours at night and just enjoyed the stars. I'm not sure why they weren't carried away by mosquitoes.

Beyond the patio, all of the Chinese tallow trees they planted are gone (one tallow stands outside the fence at the end of the house, but I don't think it's one they planted), but most of the yard is filled by a big, bean-shaped swimming pool, and beyond that is a privacy fence--which means I couldn't look out toward Granny Whalen's, the Nedbaleks', or Bocca Sue's old house.

I had mixed feelings about the family room, and I was totally deflated by the kitchen. I had always thought of the kitchen as big, although standing in it this week made me think differently; it's not as big as the kitchen I have in my little house, but I loved it when I was growing up because of its design. (Remember making cookies the day we stayed home from school because of Hurricane Carla? or in high school, when our resident Aggie requested peanut butter cookies so he could be the masher?) Back then, we entered the kitchen from the hallway, between the refrigerator (where Daddy always had a cold pitcher, which on good days was full of water) and the "sink end" along the west wall of the kitchen.

The kitchen had been on the back side of the house (I cried when they cut down the old Chinese tallow tree to add on the family room), so the cabinetry followed the old wall line, making an L from the sink area on the west end across the north side to a slot that eventually held a dishwasher, a range, and a double oven. Since the cabinet in the corner between the sink and the dishwasher would have been mostly inaccessible, it had been closed off on the kitchen side and opened into the family room. That way, we could always easily get completely into the cabinet and we had a fine spot near the dining area to store board games. I always thought that was clever.

With the sink and the range sharing an L shape, the refrigerator across the room completed a handy "work triangle," and the rest of the wall east of to the fridge was storage and workspace. On the bottom it had a couple of banks of drawers with a cabinet between, where we stored appliances like the mixer and the blender, and above that was built-in china storage, again with big sliding glass doors. Across the east end of the kitchen  was a pantry that ran the full width of the room (8 ft?) and had sliding wooden doors. I remember those doors as being big and heavy, but I would never have dreamed that the pantry would be broken into two smaller units, one with a swinging door and one with a folding one. The shelving seemed to be about the same, but the two doors were, at best, aesthetically disappointing.

The rest of the kitchen was more than aesthetically disappointing. All of the cabinetry has been ripped out and replaced with junky looking stuff from a second-rate supplier. The sink is still where it was, and the cabinetry next to the hallway is pretty much the same, but a similar cabinet sits to the right of the sink and the "game cabinet" is gone. The dishwasher has also been removed and the space where it was is open, leaving a pass-through into the family room. Where the range used to be is a bar sink, which seems silly since it's less than 4 ft from the kitchen sink and it consumes any workspace that might have been there. The double oven is gone, so the passage into the family room is wider, but needlessly so. A smallish refrigerator sits where the china cabinet used to be, and more of the cheap cabinetry flanks the oven on that wall, with more cheap wooden-doored cabinets above. 

The theme of cheap wood cabinetry extends into the family room in the form of cheap paneling that may have made someone think they were moving up at some time, but now it just looks sad. (It makes me think I need to take better care of the window-pane paneling I have in my house, and it makes me appreciate my paneling's much better quality.) The friend who let us into the house had noticed that the paneling is covering up the old windows where the water-cooled fan hung before the place was air conditioned; as hot as the house was when I was in it, I wondered if adding another water fan would have helped with the utility bill!

The odd thing was the fireplace that has been added at the north end of that room. Since it's not the "family room" for these guys, they have a bar-height table pushed against the bar sink in the kitchen and a couch at about the same place where ours used to be, but the rest of the room is pretty empty. The fireplace at the end of the room is where our television was, and it's about the nicest thing in the house. Except for the absurdity of having a fireplace in Texas (which I figured out about a year after I moved into a house with one), it's really quite beautifully built. Instead of the short, narrow hearth mine has, this one stretches completely across the width of the room and curves gracefully out in front of the fire, almost into a little "stage" area; in fact, I could easily imagine myself as a little girl playing pretend as an actor or singer on the family stage.

It was an odd visit; the place isn't "the same" (not that I could possibly expect it to be), but the changes except for the kitchen and bathroom are mostly amazingly small. It's not "home" any more, but I'm glad I got to go see; the memories are still intact.

Yahtzee!

On this date, Susan Renee and I played six games of Yahtzee in which eight Yahtzees were rolled. I rolled seven of them; she rolled one (in ones—and on the first roll! How cool is that?). We are each other's witnesses!

It's probably just all in my head

A few weeks ago, older sister Susan Renee asked me about my imaginary friend. SR had read a  novel about a young woman who found herself warming to an imaginary friend who had "come to live" with her nephew. Remembering that I had had an imaginary playmate when I was small, SR lent me the book and asked what I remembered about my experience.

The main thing I remember, of course, was that his name was Nicrolas. ("We" pronounced it rather like "nick-rah-lus.") I don't remember whether I "met" Nicrolas before or after I discovered that my cousin Nicky's "real" name was Nicholas, but I do remember thinking it odd that "my" Nick had such a similar name. (I never adjusted to calling my cousin "Nick" instead of "Nicky," and I don't think I ever dreamed of calling my friend anything but "Nicrolas." Nicky and I didn't see each other much after we reached teenage, and I suppose that my imaginary friend's more formal name may have mirrored the double name I always used.) Other than some possible tie to Nicky's name, I don't have a clue where his odd name came from.

I have only vague memories of my friendship with Nicrolas. The house where I grew up had a long front walk that ended in a small "bridge" across the front ditch. (I don't recall the sidewalk ever being "whole"; it appeared to me as if it had once been a solid strip of concrete that had been broken into erratic "tiles."  The odd shapes of the concrete bits with grass growing between them made the little bridge—which was maybe 2 ft x 3 ft—seem big and solid to a 4-year-old.) My clearest memory of Nicrolas is the two of us standing on the side of the bridge, "fishing" in the ditch after one of the city's visits to dredge it out. Why I spent so many hours fishing with Nicrolas is beyond me unless I thought he was a lot of fun; I don't remember ever being fond of fishing since then.

I remember playing with him on the walk, hopping from tile to tile so we wouldn't step on the cracks. We used to ride my tricycle together (he always made me pedal) on the old gravel drive—we weren't allowed on the street. I remember building castles in the sandbox. In short, I remember doing with him the same things I did on my own or with my brothers and sisters or with my cousins on their weekend visits. Having Nicrolas meant I got to do them with my friend.

And Nicrolas might not have been my first imaginary friend. I'm pretty sure that any "memory" I might have of the incident is really a false memory built on what my mother said, but she told me more than once about my sitting on the floor near her sewing machine, talking into a box. When she asked me what I was doing, I explained to her that I was talking to Jesus, who was in the box. I never really knew why she liked to tell that story except that I think she thought it meant I had already developed a relationship with Jesus that made her proud; in retrospect, I may have developed an imaginary friend but just didn't have enough imagination to come up with an original name for him. (Or her. In retrospect, I wonder why my imaginary friends would have been boys.) Or maybe I sensed that mother would be more comfortable with me talking with Jesus than with me talking to, well, a box...

SR suggested that maybe having an imaginary friend indicated a level of creativity, but I don't see that as happening. The entries in my blog are probably enough testimony that I'm willing to write about things I know but not too big on fiction; I think that's why I turned to journalism and technical writing for a career instead of attempting the great American novel. In journalism school, my profs referred to journalistic writing as "an art and a craft," and while I've thought for a long time that I'm okay with the "craft" of it, I leave a lot to be desired in the "art." So I don't think in my case an imaginary friend says much about creativity.

As I read the novel, I occasionally ran across thoughts that resonated with me about the kind of people who had imaginary friends. (Naturally, normally when I found them, I didn't have the resources at hand to record them.) A couple of them stuck with me: one was that kids with imaginary friends might feel "trapped inside their own heads"; another was that they might feel a need for affirmation or attention that they're not getting.

Both of those have some possibility in my case, at least. I read once that our earliest memories start to stick with us about the time we learn to read, so my memories of Nicrolas are really pretty vague; SR recalls that I was maybe 4 or 5, which would have been about the time I was learning to read, and it would also have been around the time my younger brother was born. Joe Duck's birth made me the fourth of five children, and the potential that I might have felt lonely and underappreciated is probably pretty good.The neighborhood we lived in was relatively isolated, and there were seldom children my age around, so having a friend at all mostly meant that I had to make them up. My older siblings were approaching teenage and involved in "big kid" activities and my younger one was the new baby, so I'm sure they all seemed to need more attention than me.

I also have pretty solid memories of asking my mother why I didn't get attention I thought I deserved; I was pretty good at the Younger Child's Complaint: "Why does [older child] always get everything?" to which the reply was typically, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." I guess I just never developed the talent for being the squeaky wheel.

But I've also come to believe that that may have been less a reality than I recall. I do remember asking at various times why she wouldn't volunteer to help out with my Girl Scout troop, be my class room mother, or do any of those other "parenting" activities, to which she replied that she had already done them with the older kids and she didn't need to do them for me. In retrospect, that's probably reasonable; she saw it as having served her share of the time to scouts and schools, although I saw it as having given her time for the older kids and mostly ignoring me.

That, of course, comes at least partly from the other side of the equation: that sense of feeling "trapped inside my own head." The older siblings left the nest about the time I reached teenage, leaving only JD and me. Like SR, JD was gregarious and bright and always involved in something, so mother and daddy proudly indulged his every activity—mostly to his chagrin. While I was "trapped inside my head" and feeling sorry for myself for not getting more attention, JD was grateful for the relative lack of interference in his life and maybe even a bit stifled by the attention he did get.

I've seen a suggestion that children who have imaginary friends might develop language skills earlier or faster than children who don't, but I rather doubt that. In a family of six or seven, I had plenty of exposure to language to mean that I would have developed language skills whether I had an imaginary friend or not. If anything, I'd think it was my language skills that allowed me to give my imaginary friend words. Besides, I've studied Spanish off and on over the years, and I'm pretty sure my attempts to practice my Spanish on my own have been mostly counterproductive; I can't imagine that practicing language with my imaginary friend would have done much more than exacerbate any language weaknesses I might have had.

I've also seen a suggestion that imaginary friends might help children develop social skills, but that's not so likely in my case, either—witness the fact that I've never had more than a handful of friends, I was unsuccessful at marriage, and I typically have to be dragged out of my house to keep from holing up like a mole. I may be trapped inside my own head, but I've sort of grown accustomed to it and it doesn't eat on me anymore. Alone doesn't have to mean lonely; I've just figured out how to feel less trapped by living in my head.

Movin' on

Our latest four-legged house pest moved on today, and I find myself a little sad to see her go.


When the kids' friend Shrek came home from his mission trip, Number One Son made it clear that his dog, Serenity, would not be moving "home" until Shrek made the place fit for her to live in, and that meant cleaning up an accumulation of household detritus and getting the swarm of fleas exterminated. NOS was willing to help with the cleaning, but he was not willing to let the dog move back until he was sure she would not become reinfested with fleas.

Shrek had told us before he left that he had Serenity on a diet because she had gotten out of shape, so NOS felt certain Shrek would want her to have a healthy place to live when she went back home. We were never quite sure how much food she was supposed to have, but we fed her amounts similar to what we fed Tank, and she seemed to do fine.

In fact, although she appeared to have gained about a pound (if you can translate exactly from the vet's scales to our household scales), she was in better shape than when she first came to us, and she had gotten as eager to run after a tennis ball chucked across our yard as our two dogs are.

She was definitely getting her exercise; for some reason, Tank developed a fondness for licking her face, and he had great fun tussling with her in the evenings. In fact, the tussling was about the biggest reason I was growing ready for her to go home; I never wanted big dogs, and while I love Tank dearly, he is active enough without the excitement of the evening wrestling matches.

And we had had only one little fracas with Serenity here. Tank is inexplicably defensive about his food bowl (his rule is that he can eat out of any dish in the house, but only he can eat out of his). For some reason I don't know, his bowl had wandered from the kitchen to the dining room (for a while there, it moved itself into the entry way), so that if we fed Serenity in the kitchen, she had to walk near it to get back into the den.

One evening, she strolled out of the kitchen, and Tank apparently thought she was coming after his food. He must have growled or snapped at her, because the Alpha Bitch decided he needed help, so she jumped into the fray. By the time I got home, Serenity had a scratch down the right side of her face. Over the next few days, it first seemed to heal, but then it seemed to swell a little. I kicked into mom mode and treated it with some pet medicines on our shelf, and by today, it was healing nicely.

As soon as Shrek had a chance to rest up from his trip, he kicked into gear and started cleaning his house and made an appointment with the exterminator. They came on a Thursday, and NOS went to check on the job. Both of the boys reported to me on the results: NOS's socks were covered in enough fleas to appear to be polka dot. On Monday, a second exterminator came out, and NOS found only a couple of fleas and pronounced the place safe enough for Serenity.

That was last week; NOS had told me earlier this week that Shrek had decided he wasn't ready to take on responsibility for Serenity again, so one of Shrek's brothers was going to take her in. The brother has a rotweiller, and NOS felt certain Chuck and Serenity will get along fine. Serenity is about 8 years old, so she may only live for a few more years, and with only one other dog in the household, they shouldn't have the problems of friskiness with Tank and snippishness with Alpha Bitch.

But this afternoon, I heard a little different story. The brother in Houston is concerned—from a previous time when Serenity had to be farmed out for a while—that she might have a problem with incontinence, and he isn't sure he and his wife will be up to having two large dogs in the house. So this move to their house may be a matter of "until something more permanent" becomes apparent.

I really don't need three dogs, and I particularly don't need three large dogs (I'm a little jealous right now of my two sisters' pocket-sized chihuahuas), but Serenity is such a sweetheart; I just hate to think of her being passed on just because nobody wants her.

So I'm enjoying the quiet this evening of having only our two dogs at home, but I'm a little blue to see Serenity go.

Imagine that!

I did it again—and again on a Tuesday!

I finished the whole New York Times crossword by using only the across clues. Since I subscribe to the puzzle online, it tells me when I finish whether I have it right. I had missed one letter, but when I corrected the spelling of the last word (I was off by a letter), I got it all.

One more for a hat trick!

Serenity

Sometimes when the kids were little, I mostly wanted to pinch their little heads off, so it's gratifying now that they're all growed up when I get to see evidence that they're actually using them.

This case started, really, a year ago when the kids' friend Shrek moved in with us for the summer. He had just returned from several months in Swaziland, where he was helping his parents on a medical missionary project, and I was happy to be able to scrape out space in my mostly-unused upstairs to let him bunk with us while he tried to set himself up with a job and better digs.

Stuff happens. The renter who had been in his parents' place at a small "ranch" a few miles away was as ill-disposed toward paying rent to Shrek's parents as Shrek had been toward paying or working off the rent to me, so the family served her papers, booted her out, and moved Shrek into a tiny "caretaker's" house on the property. I hadn't heard much from him over the several months since he moved out except to know that he was supposed to have been dubbing some videos for my Soldier Son and me (which he didn't so very much do) and he "dog sat" for us a few times when both Number One Son and I had to be away from home at the same time.

Somewhere along the way, dad has buzzed through on a break from Swaziland, and for reasons we don't know,  retrieved Shrek's yellow lab, Serenity, from Shrek's brother who had been caring for her in Austin. We were at best skeptical; Shrek had not done much in the way of caring for himself or his space while he was at my place, and we couldn't see a reason for Dad to trust him to care for the dog.

About 3 weeks ago, Shrek made the trip back to Swaziland for a mission trip with his family's church, and he asked NOS and me to watch Serenity while he was gone. Serenity is about 8 years old and a lovely beast, so NOS was happy to watch her. Since she's pretty low-maintenance, we figured we could move her over to our house to stay for the duration, and that would make caring for her a snap.

I don't remember how long after Shrek left it was before NOS brought her over here, but we soon saw that she was quite laden with fleas. I put my foot down: bathe her with flea shampoo, spray her down with some dog-approved spray I had, reduce the flea population significantly, or haul her back to the ranch.

NOS led her upstairs to his bathroom and washed her down. He came down several minutes later almost in tears: Serenity had so many fleas that two rounds of shampoo had not begun to get rid of them. "It's so bad that her butt's bleeding from her biting it so much," he said.

Much as I hated sending her back to the little ranch house, I insisted that she go. Since NOS's schedule wouldn't allow him to go care for her as much as he needed to, I agreed to a schedule that had him "on duty" in the early mornings and late nights, and I caught her once in between.

A few days later, one of Shrek's brothers drove into town to move some of his personal items from the ranch to his place a few towns away while Shrek's pickup truck was available for his use. NOS and I met the brother and his wife for dinner, then NOS drove the brother and me to the ranch. The brother was as upset at the sorry state of the little house as I was. Little Brother agreed with us that Serenity would need to be shaved and dipped before she could move to our house, and he assured us he'd come up with money to pay for it.

With that assurance, NOS scheduled a shave/dip with a local groomer, but the treatment was to be a week later and contingent on our presenting the paperwork to ensure that Serenity's rabies shot was up to date. That, of course, required telephone tag with the available brother to find out where to get the documentation, and a call to the vet showed that she hadn't had a shot in a couple of years.

While we waited to find out whether the brothers would cover the cost of the vet trip, I decided Serenity needed to live somewhere besides the filthy, flea-infested ranch house. NOS had taken a fan to the house, and I had propped open some windows that hadn't been open in months, but she still seemed pretty miserable. (I didn't find out until today that the house has a couple of small air conditioner units that would at least have made her more comfortable, but with the flea infestation, I'm not sure that would have been really helpful, anyway.)

I scouted around on the ranch and found a horse stall that for some reason had what I call "farm fencing" covering up the stall gate, which was initially the same wide-spaced pipe design that is normal for the ranch. Without the mesh of the farm fencing, Serenity would be able to slip out easily between the pipes, but the metal mesh was small and secure enough to keep her in. I moved her and her food and water to the horse stall (putting her bag of dog food up in a contraption that I suspect was designed to hold hay) and texted NOS to let him know what I had done.

NOS texted back several hours later to tell me she was fine and seemed happier and more comfortable out of the stale, stuffy, dirty house. She stayed in the horse stall for the next several days.

Then Soldier Son came home for R&R from Afghanistan. When he heard the story, he asked, "What are you waiting for? Where is the vet and how long will it be before they can see her?"

"Who's going to pay for her checkup and shots?" we asked him.

"Who cares? The dog hasn't been cared for properly. We need to get her in. I'll pay if I have to."

NOS got the number, called the clinic, and found out they could take her about as quickly as the boys would be able to get her there. They drove to the ranch, collected the dog, and headed for the vet.

The vet not only could give her the rabies shot she needed, but also give her a pill that was "guaranteed" to get rid of fleas that were on her within 30 minutes and to keep them from coming back. As extra precautions, they gave her a bath in their flea shampoo, recommended a topical, over-the-counter flea medication, and sent her home before closing time. SS picked her up in his car and brought her back home.

NOS knew Shrek had left several bug bombs at his place, so he went over a day or two later and set a couple of them off. "It's horrible," he reported when he got home; "the fleas are jumping all over the place, and it seems as if I had to wade into them up over my ankles." A couple of days later, he went back to set off two more of the bombs, and he reported that the situation wasn't really much better. "Shrek isn't taking Serenity back into that," he said. "He's not getting her back until he can get the place ready for her." As a precautionary measure, the brother who had borrowed the truck had arranged for another brother to take Serenity to live with him if Shrek didn't get the place cleaned up enough.

Shrek made it home late Friday afternoon, but NOS explained to him before he was very close to home that Serenity was healthy (except for a scratch across her face from an altercation with my Alpha Bitch), and he would have to earn her back by cleaning his place up and getting an exterminator to treat it for fleas.

This morning I had to take SS to the airport to head back to Afghanistan, and I asked him about the money Shrek owes for the care of his dog—over a hundred for the vet visit and a third of that again for the topical meds, which I had put on all three dogs when we saw that her residual fleas were getting on the Alpha Bitch, too.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "If he were responsible, he wouldn't have ever let her get in that condition, so I don't think he's likely to pay for her now. The important thing is Serenity."

My boys could both have just left her stuck in that hot little house or out in the stables without any company but the night critters, or they could have brought her to my place and infested my house and animals with her fleas. But they did what was right: the important thing is Serenity.

Guess they do use those tiny heads after all.

Alpha Bitch for [office of your choice]

During the first few years of my teaching career, I carpooled with a fellow English teacher whose schedule matched mine since she stayed at school late to coach volleyball and I was there to work with the newspaper and yearbook staffs.

One evening as we drove home after dark, we laughed about the fact that the majority of our students seemed to think we were some sort of robots that somebody ran around and plugged it just before 8 o'clock every morning and unplugged sometime around 3:30 in the afternoons. At least, that was the best explanation we could come up for with our students' surprised looks if they happened to see us in a grocery store or mall outside of school hours; it seemed never to occur to them that we had lives outside our classrooms.

Those same students appear to be the elected officials who are accusing classroom teachers of draining state treasuries and causing the mounting debts every state and, indeed, the nation are facing. My own state has recently proffered plans to reduce teacher salaries, implement "furloughs" (which is French, I guess, for layoffs without pay), and other steps to reduce this huge and terrible expenditure for education. In our state, the future looks bright: Barbara Bush herself has published at least one editorial that notes that by some measure (or more) we already rank 49 out of 50 states, and with a few deft tweaks, I'm pretty sure we can make it right on down to 50 on several.

I'm pretty sure the reason our state hasn't started a stink about busting teacher unions is that we don't have them, and I haven't heard our legislators say—yet—that teachers have "cushy" jobs because they only have to work from 8:30 to 3. The ones who say that, of course, are the ones my friend and I were laughing about; I'm pretty sure we never dreamed they would be making such short-sighted but damaging decisions.

I don't know that I've heard any legislator anywhere acknowledge that the only way anyone can enter this profession is with at least one college degree, and I don't hear any of them suggesting that their reduction plans will help the younger ones pay off their college loans.

Alpha Bitch seems to know better. I have had a serious student overload with insufficient or insufficiently qualified teaching assistants for the past four semesters. What that has meant is that my day normally starts between 6:30 and 7 in the morning with grading papers until noon or so, when I hop in a shower and dress to go to my offices so I can prepare for a teach class, counsel students, and handle the "administrative" parts of my jobs—all of which typically takes me until 6 or later at night. Weekends are not much different from weekdays except that I don't go to the office, but often my Saturdays and Sunday mornings are consumed by grading time.

That doesn't include time to keep up with changes in theory, technology, or other factors that affect my ability to be a good teacher; those fall into the "after 6" time frame, when I can relax at home with my laptop and download and read relevant literature through the university library and occasionally participate in online meetings for like-thinking souls.

Of course, I have the relative luxury of grading at home because I'm a university instructor. When the kids were small and I taught in public schools, I was determined not to take home anything I didn't have to so I could have some time with my children. I discovered that if I planned very carefully, I could get to school on time at 7:30 a.m., work straight through until 5, and make it back to the day care before closing time. That gave me a few evening hours before their bedtime to spend with the kids, and usually I could finish up last-minute tasks after I tucked them in.

That wasn't a perfect plan, of course. Since I taught English, I had to make exceptions from time to time to take home major writing projects or exams to grade, and except for the "faculty improvement" sessions on student holidays and the required continuing education courses I took during the summer, I had no time in my schedule to keep up with changes in anything, so 12 years into my career I was still teaching pretty much the same way my teachers had taught me 20 years before. I think I was a pretty good teacher; I think that if I had had time to continue to learn as well as to teach, I'd have been even better. But keeping my commitment to "close to 9 to 5" was hard enough without the additional effort of my own education.





At any rate, Alpha Bitch seems to understand something about what it's like to be a teacher. I got up this morning with my usual pile of papers to grade and settled into my easy chair, but AB set up a whine to go outside. I let her out and left the door open when I went back in, but she followed me and set up the whine again. I decided I could give up a couple of minutes on a Saturday morning to play fetch with her, so I picked up our ball chunker to toss it for her.

After a couple of tosses, AB caught the ball and took it back into the house, watching to see if I was following. When I got back to my chair, she started to whine again. Frustrated, I picked up my papers and pencil and followed her back out. She led me over to my favorite patio chair and lay down at its foot.

I think she knew that I needed to be grading, but she also knew I deserved to enjoy the spring weather.

Now if she could just get that across to the legislators.....

A fun guy

While Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming and I were at the wedding last weekend, PC told me a story that still makes me chuckle. I hope I can tell it right here; it's just too precious to lose.

PC probably met the kids' grandparents the first time he came back to Texas after he moved to Los Angeles, and Granddad spoke fondly of him frequently in the months before he died; if he had any reservations about him, he never let me know.

On one of their visits, PC had told a joke as a way of making conversation:

A mushroom walked into a bar, but the bartender told him, "We don't serve your kind."

"Why not? I'm a fun guy!" came the answer.

PC figured the joke was innocuous enough for a fourth-grader, so he was a little flummoxed when Granddad didn't laugh. The English teacher in me had quickly processed the joke this way:

Okay, the joke is supposed to be on a mushroom being a fungi, but that doesn't work because "fungi" is plural. If PC just told it wrong, maybe two mushrooms walked into the bar, but then it would be "fun guys," and that wouldn't work, either. So the joke has to depend on the listener knowing that mushrooms are fungi but not being too picky about whether "fungi" is plural or singular. I can do that.

But I also knew Granddad, and he couldn't possibly have been upset about the grammar error. He held a college degree and had graduated from Baptist seminary so he could serve a career as an Air Force chaplain, but he admitted that he had struggled with English all his life and had worked hard to get through school. The fungus/fungi problem would probably never have made his radar.

Then PC told me the rest of the story:

Granddad had let the joke hang in the air for a couple of beats, then broke the uncomfortable silence with his simple explanation:

"I just don't like those racial jokes," he said.

Missing cheerleader

Darling Daughter was in town all last week with her little Junkyard Dog in tow. JD is a wonderful little beast, but she's used to being the only dog in town: Darling Daughter slipped her into the apartment complex under the no-dogs-allowed radar, so JD has to readapt whenever she finds herself around other barking beasts. (She has cat friends in her apartment building, and she sort of "gets" them.)

Our house, on the other hand, features two large-ish dogs who are used to being part of the pack; Tank is a gentle giant at about 70 lb, and Alpha Bitch lives up to her name at 45. Tank has made Kitty a little skittish around dogs, although she's marginally okay with AB. With JD, maybe not so much.

A couple of evenings, Tank stuck his big head as far as he could under the side of my bed so he could sing along to Kitty, which I sort of assume drives her up into the box springs so he has at least a less-direct view of her. JD, who outweighs Kitty by only a few pounds, decided she could get in on that game.

But instead of sticking her head under the bed and wagging her tail outside while she sang, JD marched right in under the bed and barked her head off. That sent Kitty scampering through the bathroom toward the living room and the relative safety of the crawl space behind the couch, with JD and Tank hot on her heels. AB came flying off the bed to slow JD down, and Tank's plans to cut Kitty off at the pass were arrested while he stopped to check on the skirmish. Both times, Kitty got safely away.

The house dogs love to play fetch. AB mostly likes the super balls that I found for our ball chunker, but Tank will chase or catch just about anything we launch for him. Number One Son and I try to get out several times a day to play with them so they can get their exercise, and we didn't stop when JD was in town.

JD doesn't quite get the rules. She had to work a lot harder to get the ball from the larger dogs, who can jump higher and run faster than she, although she gives them both a good run for their money. And even if we played a sort of seditious keep away to simplify the job of getting the ball back, she occasionally came up with it; then we either encouraged AB to snitch it when JD dropped it (usually to bury it in the sand) or wound up prying it out of her jaws.

Between times, she parked herself behind the other two dogs and barked. She might have been trying to get our attention so we would throw the ball to her (which was long since futile), but she appeared just to think it was her job to bark until we threw it, because she shut up as soon as it was in the air. NOS and I are pretty good at ignoring barking when the dogs are outside as long as we know what the cause is and we don't appear to be annoying the neighbors, so we mostly just let her bark and laughed back at her and called her the cheerleader.

Yesterday was our first day without JD around. I work at home in the mornings, and usually I toss the ball a few times when I take "coffee breaks" a couple of times during the day, but yesterday they weren't very enthusiastic about the game. NOS played with them a couple of times, but their play also seemed to end sooner than usual.

Today NOS spent most of the day in his room, so playtime was up to me. I worked at home all day today, so I took one play break during the morning, but only AB played, and that wasn't for very long. This afternoon, only Tank seemed to want to play, but he only took a few balls before he decided to go in, too.

It can't be the weather; today has been mild and bright. It can't mean they're off their feed; I've made sure they're both eating just fine. It can't mean they're feeling lonely; they both have each other and the cat.

I think they miss their cheerleader.

April wedding

I can't remember when I didn't love April in Texas, so when Darling Daughter told me her best friend was getting married in April, I was pretty sure the bride had made a pretty good choice.

Darling Daughter stepped right into the wedding arrangements, offering to help in any way she could with preparations and planning. The bride has two sisters and several aunts who were eager to pitch in, too, so when she put out the word that this was to be a "country church picnic" wedding at her family's lake house, the calicos and ginghams and Mason jars took center stage. When I got there, streamers of cotton "flags" were draped through the trees, the tables had been covered with bright "quilt top" cloths, and several rows of old-fashioned wooden folding chairs had been lined up in front of an arbor decorated with paper flowers.

About the time the wedding was set to start, the bride's younger sister rushed over to where her brother and sister-in-law were allowing me to cuddle their baby. Little Sister explained to brother that his job was to walk his wife and their baby down the aisle, after which she was to be seated on the front row (next to a shade tree where the stroller would be parked) and he would take his place nest to the arbor. Clearly, the slip of paper Little Sister had in her hand was about it for "dress rehearsal" for the event, and she looked a little frantic about whether the members of the wedding party were likely to arrive at the right place, much less the right time.

A few minutes later, the wedding guests were sort of herded off in the direction of the chairs and a guitarist started playing soft music I didn't recognize. The guitarist turned out to be a member of the groom's band, and the music could have been something he wrote. Whatever it was, it was definitely nontraditional and pleasant, and I was pretty much hooked on the kind of wedding this was turning out to be.

The first person down the aisle was probably one of the groom's brothers, with a woman on his arm I believe to have been his sister or aunt. (I'm horrible names on a good day, and this crowd was way too far over my head for me to keep track.) The woman had the bride's little dog in her arms.

Each member of the wedding party came down the aisle with an escort—but instead of "groomsmen" escorting "bridesmaids," in this case the wedding party served as ushers to members of the family who wouldn't be at the front of the ceremony. I wasn't paying enough attention to who was with whom when the groom's family came in, but I'm pretty sure either he or his son by a previous marriage escorted in his mother. And the son stood at the front, right next to dad.

The bride's brother escorted in his wife, then took his place on the bride's side of the stage. How cool for the brother to be the bride's attendant! Maybe I just haven't been to enough weddings lately, but I loved it. Her two sisters were her other attendants, one escorted by her significant other and the other ushering in their grandfather. The bride appeared on the arms of both parents.

As the procession unfolded, I loved what I saw: not only was this the sort of nontraditional wedding I'd have loved for my own event in the early 70s. My mothers and sisters were champs about pitching in to bring my wedding together, but this one also involved the whole family in being a part of this union in ways mine didn't. It reminded me a little of the only Catholic christening I've ever attended, where the priest made a point of telling the parents and godparents that the ceremony was not just a matter of making the baby a Catholic but also of reminding them of their responsibility to be sure the child was raised right. In fact, the preacher at this wedding had a similar message of family and friends being important to ensuring that the marriage formed that day had all the help they could give to be sure it endures. I liked that.

The photographer took far to long with the "requisite" pictures. I can think of maybe five or six that make sense to me: the "big" new family, the bride and groom with each other's families, and a posed shot or two of the bride and groom. But the hour or two this photographer spent on those  poses mostly kept the bride away from people who wanted to wish her well and be on their way; with all the "photographic overload" we have these days, I'd rather have the photographer roam around for an hour and capture candids that might ultimately have more meaning.

Once the photographer finished the list, the bride and groom were free to enjoy their evening, and enjoy they did. The "church picnic" had the requisite iced tea and lemonade, but it also had a couple of washtubs filled with iced-down soft drinks, a couple of kinds of wine, and several cases of beer. Except for the beautiful gown the bride wore, the wedding had not been "traditional" in very many ways, but after a washtub full of beer, it was certainly a celebration. As the sun went down, the music came up, and the laughter came up with it.

The bride confessed to me a time or two that the boning in her strapless gown was somewhat less than comfortable, but she shed her shoes and kept the gown on right up until the party died down sometime after 2:30 in the morning. That made perfectly good sense to me: she must have forked over a fortune for that dress, and it's a shame to wear it for only a couple of hours. She danced a couple of waltzes with her groom and one with her father, clearly relishing the sweep of the full gown as she twirled, and then she took as many opportunities as she could to turn and swirl and run in it, carefree as an eight-year-old.

A little after midnight, she was dancing on the lawn with a clutch of her friends from high school who had made it to the show, when she mistepped and fell. Once on the ground, she rolled into a somersault and came up laughing. Her groom—who had long since changed into jeans and a t-shirt—watched her play and observed drolly, "My bride is getting grass stains on her wedding gown. I love it."

I don't think the family and friends will have much of a challenge in helping this marriage last.

Small Blessings

Sometimes things that at first seem bad turn out okay. In this case it has caused Number One Son a little pain, but I think what he is getting will more than offset that.

A couple of weeks ago, he came downstairs earlier than I anticipated. He waited a minute I guess to be sure that I had my composure, and then turned to face me so that I could see full-face the damage to his bottom lip, which had a gaping scar and was swollen to at least twice its normal size.


The story was that the night before, after he had crawled into bed, he had been tussling with Soldier Son's big dog. I had just taken Tank to the vet a day or two earlier, so I knew he weighed about 70 pounds, more than half what I guess Number One Son weighs. The play had escalated to the point that Tank had taken on the attitude he uses when he plays with the Alpha Bitch; the difference is apparently that the Alpha Bitch's skin  is much tougher the Number One Son's, so hers is not as likely to puncture,  tear, and bleed. Number One Son's, obviously, is.

Number One Son moped around the house for a day out or two, nursing his wounded lip and feeling sorry for himself, especially since he didn't see his pizza delivery customers tipping very generously the guy with the swollen, scarred lip. But he soldiered on, doing the job in spite of himself.

So I was a little surprised a couple of days later when he slunk downstairs and turned to face me with a nasty scrape on his left cheek, just below the eye. "How did you get that?" I asked him.

"That's not the worst of it," he said. "Look at my tooth."

Sure enough, half the left front tooth was broken off. Of course, that's also the side where his lip was busted. So now the left side of his face had a scrape the size of a tennis ball, a broken tooth, a swollen lip, and a nasty gash. He was a sight. And he still had to deliver pizzas.

"What did you do this time?" I asked him.

"I was roughhousing with a friend."

"Who?" I guessed a couple of names. At first, he didn't want to tell me, but finally he admitted it was Shrek, the kid who had lived with us for a while not too long ago. "How did he do that?" I asked. Knowing Shrek, I didn't figure he meant to hurt my son. but I wouldn't be too surprised if he's close to twice my kid's  weight.

Sure enough, the guys had been tussling, the testosterone had kicked in, and weight had apparently overcome strength. And Number One Son looked like something the cat dragged in. Aside from not having any kind of medical or dental insurance to take care of the damage to his body, Number One Son was not too hopeful about his tips that night.

I offered him a deal. I've had a bunch of jobs I've needed help with ever since he moved in here, but his enthusiasm for them has been, to put it mildly, low. This time I had a bit of a carrot: I'm okay financially, and I could more likely afford dental work than he can. I shudder to think of the cost of a cap for that tooth, especially since I know the dentist will see the condition of his other teeth. But I think he shudders to think of going through life with a broken tooth.

I had found a deal on a really cheap greenhouse that happened to be in my garage at the time. I had already told him that his Mother's Day gift to me was going to be to assemble my greenhouse. But now I had that carrot: I was (and still am) willing to credit him at $10 an hour to do some of the chores around the house until he earns enough to pay at least most of the cost of the cap—but if and only if he would get started on them during the next week. I didn't plan to count any part of assembling the greenhouse as credit toward the new tooth, but of course I had no idea how long "greenhouse assembly" takes.

The next week, I had to be away from home on business, and I told him the deal would only work if he got started while I was gone. I didn't hold my breath, so I was happily surprised about the middle of the week when I got a photo text message from him. Not only did I see the frame assembled on the greenhouse, but the message came early in the afternoon. That had to mean not only that he had been working on my project, but also that he had not slept two-thirds of the day away. I was pretty impressed!

A day or two later, I got another snapshot, this time of the greenhouse with the sides put together. I replied immediately—and truthfully—that I was excited and could hardly wait to get home to see what he had done.

I was able to get away early enough Friday afternoon to get home well before dark. I was thinking so much about getting there in time to see the greenhouse (and I really needed to go to the potty) that I almost didn't notice the wrought iron fish tank stand at the front edge of my parking space in the garage. Fortunately, I did see it,and it was just far enough out of the way that I didn't knock it down.

Number One Son hadn't told me that he had also started another project. I've had the old fish tank stand since shortly after I married, and over the years it has collected enough rust that it has occasionally needed to be sanded and repainted. The sanding and painting part hasn't happened for too long a time now, and since the dogs somehow managed to crack the fish tank (which was, fortunately, empty at the time), it seemed like a good idea to repaint the stand before I installed the new tank. I had asked Number One Son some time ago to check with body shop that had a sandblaster to see if they could strip it down for us, but so far he hadn't done anything about that.

Sometime while I was gone, however, he talked to a friend's dad who also has a body shop. The dad lent him a couple of tools that helped him knock the bigger pieces of rust off the iron and had recommended good old hand sanding for the rest of it; Number One Son obviously had put in some time at that. It wasn't looking great yet, but it was a whole lot better than the last time I had seen it. And it meant that he had been out of bed and moving while I was gone.

The greenhouse saga clearly isn't over with. The greenhouse is standing and looks pretty good, but the land in the back slopes, and I'm afraid that's going to affect the way the door opens and closes, so were going to have to do something about leveling it and giving it some sort of foundation. I think we've pretty much agreed that standing it on garden timbers and filling the inside with pea gravel will just about make me happy. We cruised the hardware store yesterday and came out with wire brushes and paint for the fish tank stand and some ideas for landscape timber and pea gravel. And I conceded that Number One Son had contributed more than his share in constructing the greenhouse, so the time he spends on the foundation will all count toward his new tooth.

Yesterday afternoon he was back at Shrek's house. Broken tooth or not, Shrek is still his friend. And Number One Son is on a mission: he needs a truck to haul timbers and pea gravel, and Shrek has a truck that has needed some repair. Since Number One Son has some training as a mechanic, he fixed the truck, and now Shrek can help with the hauling. It probably won't hurt Shrek to help with the loading, either.

I'm happy to see my little greenhouse standing in the backyard, and I'm happy to see the progress coming along on the fish tank stand, but most of all, I'm happy to see Number One Son grinning. I think he's pretty proud of what he's done, and I think he's proud of himself for getting up and getting moving.

I'm proud of him, too.

Angels watching over me

When I was a little kid, Mother was my sister Susan Rene's Girl Scout troop leader, and the group often met in the big living room of the house where we grew up. I was supposed to stay in my room/out of the way during troop meetings, but of course I frequently sneaked down the hall to stand in the doorway and listen to what was going on.

Mother loved to sing—she and Daddy used to sing away the miles as we traveled, and I remember looking out through the back window of the station wagon many nights to the melody of their Shine on Silvery Moon and other songs from their familiar repertoire—and singing was often a part of the Scout meetings. By the time I was big enough to be aware of what they were singing, the girls were singing melodic rounds of White Coral Bells, the tripping air of An English Country Garden, the solemn Peace of the River, and the descant of Angels Watching over Me.

I loved listening to the songs, whether as the Girl Scouts sang them in our living room or as my sisters harmonized as they went about housekeeping or as we gobbled up miles on family trips. I'm the tone-deaf one in the family who got kicked out of the school choir in the fifth grade, but I squawked along the best I could and thoroughly enjoyed the music in our home.

I started first grade the year our Girl Scout council bought a little chunk of land just outside of town and built a camp so those of us growing up here could adventure into the out of doors. A few years before she died, Mother told me that the real story behind the camp's name was that Daddy had picked it out, campaigned for it in his quiet way, and made it stick.

Daddy had picked our little town to establish his glass business a couple of years before I was born because he liked the friendliness of the community, which was symbiotic with the atmosphere of the college just down the road. At that time, the college was small, all male, and all military, and students greeted each other and visitors with a single word: Howdy. Daddy liked that message enough to think it fit as the name of the new Girl Scout facility, and from the early days when the site team was clearing out spaces for campsites, it became known as Camp Howdy.

Three decades later when my Darling Daughter was a Brownie scout, Camp Howdy had grown by a few acres and had modernized substantially, but when I returned there with her as a day camp unit leader, I found that feet that had run those trails for 10 years in my childhood could still find their way around camp without a map. Most of the camp sites had running water and picnic tables by then, and most had some sort of preparation area for cooking, but the main trails and camp sites were pretty much the same.

Best of all, the woods rang continually with music. In the years that I was away, singing had become at least as big a part of the day camp experience as anything else was, and the only real "competition" in camp was to see which unit sang the most on the trails, as observed by collection of trinkets from camp staff as campers moved through camp. The music had changed substantially over the years, but whenever I have found myself alone on the trails—which has been pretty often during almost two decades as the leader of the aide-in-training unit—I find myself going back to the old songs I remember from my own camping days.

Sunday afternoon was not quite one of those days. I volunteered more years ago than I can remember to serve on the site team that takes care of the camp, which mostly means that from time to time I volunteer to go out and head up a group of university students who are willing to help us clean up and care for the camp. My assignment Sunday was to take a crew of them down into the depths of the camp, where earlier volunteers had defined a new spot for a fire pit and had started trimming undergrowth to open up spaces for gravel-covered tent pads.

Our job was to drag out deadwood around the perimeter of the site, knock out and clean up the area where the old fire pit was, and set the landscape bricks for the new pit. I had everybody in the group stop on the way to the site to pick up a couple of bricks and one or another of several tools we would need. Three of the kids volunteered for the fire pit job, and I set the other four to pulling out deadwood. I clipped away enough yaupon to get the deadwood crew to work, then left them to it so the others could get the fire pit started.

I showed the pit builders how to use the tools they'd need to make the circle the right size and to level the bricks on the gentle slope of the site, then went back over to help with the deadwood. I had acquired a cool new pair of loppers a couple of weeks before, and I was eager to see if they did the job I wanted them to do. Besides, the girls on that crew were moving at a snail's pace, and we'd never finish the job if they didn't have more help.

So much scrabble was on the ground that I didn't need the clippers; I picked up armloads of wood and hauled them out to the trail where two of the girls were carrying them in small loads up to the parking area where next week's crew will mulch them or load them off to a burn pile. On one trip into the woods, I felt something pull at my pocket and made a mental note to be sure the car keys were safe in the bottom of it. I had driven my soldier son's car because mine was running on fumes and his needs to have the fluids stirred up from time to time, and losing his keys while he's stationed in Afghanistan might not be my best move. I keep an assortment of store cards and a little pill box on a small ring that snaps onto my key ring, and I stopped on the way back into the woods to be sure the hook was snapped firmly onto my belt loop.

When our 4-hour service time was over, my crew and I had hauled enough bricks to get the fire pit to its full complement of 60, knocked out the old fire pit and moved its old railroad ties across an old trail to slow erosion, and created a fairly prodigious stack of deadwood for mulching. We gathered up our tools and trudged back to the parking area where the site team leader had brownies, oranges, and soft drinks for the kids. I visited briefly with the rest of the team about what we had accomplished and what's next on the plans, then headed off to the car and home.

Except that the car keys were not so much in my pocket. The ring with the store cards and cold medicine was still hooked on my belt loop, but the keys were not there, not in my pocket, not with the sweatshirt I had peeled off and set aside, no place.

I called back to the team leader that I had lost the keys and had to go to the unit to look for them, and all three of them men agreed to hop in the ATV and go with me. When we got to the site, the guys piled out and asked where I thought they should look. I swept my arm in a large arc and said, "There." From where we stood, I had worked over a swath of land probably 30 feet wide and maybe 100 feet long; the keys could have been anywhere.

They all nodded along and seemed to agree in unison that they needed to check out the quality of work on the new fire pit. I stomped into the nearest area we had cleared of deadwood and tried to figure out where I would go from there. I had beat my way through underbrush and vines in an arc from about 15 away in one direction to maybe 40 feet in the other, and that kind of work—bending, stooping, ducking through the scrub—was the most likely place for the keys to jump from my pockets. I decided to start on the near side, ducked under a yaupon bush, and stopped: the oddly symmetrical shape a few inches from my feet couldn't have been anything but the remote control for the keys.

I couldn't help but grin as I bent down to pick them up and heard the echo of the songs in the living room from so many years ago: all night, all day, angels watching over me!

Sweet spring

After a goofy-cold winter, I'm a little surprised to see spring leaping out at me, but as I walked back toward the house from picking up this morning's paper, I noticed a cheerful little row of white, bell-shaped blossoms peeking out from my somewhat disorderly front flowerbed.

Like a lot of other plants in my front yard, these babies have a history. The liriope and monkey grass that define my planting spaces started in the backyard of mother and daddy's best friends in Houston. The springeri fern has burgeoned from a tiny root I swiped from the first apartment I lived in after I married. Most of the amaryllises are probably great-grandchildren of the house where I grew up, and the daylilies are from one or the other of my sisters or from one of mother's cousins who brought daylilies to cheer her during the months when we knew she was dying.

These little white guys are from the backyard of the aunt who lived in town until a few years ago. Auntie's husband, my dad's brother, had been daddy's business partner when they first moved here more than six decades ago, and she lived in the only house I ever remember as hers until Margaret Joan and her husband shipped Auntie off to the nursing home a couple of years before she died.

For a couple of years before that, I tried to do the Good Samaritan thing (although that has never come as easily for me as it has my sisters) and pop in to visit Auntie from time to time. Once or twice, she needed help with yardwork, so once I mowed the lawn for her and other times I helped water or move or otherwise tend the plants that so eagerly grew on her back porch.

The little guys in question—I have no idea what they are called or where to look to find out—grew in a little clump about halfway from the back porch to the vegetable garden that had gone for years untended. Most of the time, the clump just looked like a stray clump of liriope or some grasslike kin, but in early spring, it tossed up a sprinkling of small, bell-shaped flowers with little green dots on each of its tiny "petals," if they could be called that.

When Margaret Joan moved Auntie into the nursing home, I went by the house and collected what I could of the pot plants and dug up a few ground plants that I figured would never be missed. I'm sure I could have taken the whole clump of white guys, but instead I scooped up a small clump and tossed them into the truck.

When I got them home, I planted them in a few places around my yard to see if I could find somewhere where they could grow. At Auntie's house, they sat in full, open sun; my yard doesn't understand that term. I remember putting maybe one clump in the front yard, in the sunniest spot I could find, and two or three other clumps in the back yard. They managed to poke up in a place or two, but I don't remember much more than that.

After Soldier Son's dog Tank moved in with me a couple of years ago, I lost all hope of anything surviving anywhere in the backyard except a small flower bed that I preserved by putting a fence around it. I have a vague recollection of digging up a clump of the white guys from a flower bed I had begun around a tree that died a couple of years later. Since I didn't have much hope for blooming plants in the shady front yard, I didn't bother to remember where I might have moved it.

Apparently, I broke it down into a dozen or so little clumps in the front bed, because that's how many were sparkling up at me this morning. I was glad to see the little starscape and to smile as I remembered my diminutive Auntie with the bright green thumb.

Weird dream

I had a very strange dream the other night. 

When it began, I was the door of my friend Alyssa’s house, a tiny place where Alyssa lived alone. As my friend welcomed me in the front door, I was fascinated by one heavily-textured, rich-milk-chocolate-brown wall, dominated by the image of a large cross sculpted into the texturing mud.  What I would normally have considered oppressive or weird somehow made the whole wall feel like a work of art. 

The room was sparsely furnished: a chair, a loveseat, a couple of end tables. A lamp turned on near the chair where Alyssa was seated lent the room its warmth and dignity. The few knickknacks on the tables and a small bookshelf were all spotless.

Through an open door, I could see the dining room. Its cinnamon red walls extended the sense of warmth and art from the living room, although in contrast living room, they had a linen texture. Beyond the dining room, the bright white kitchen invited conversation and friendship.

In the kitchen, I drifted mentally back to the days when Alyssa and I had been friends. We sat next to each other in Ms. Gatlin’s fifth grade classroom. That was the year our school was bulging so much that they had divided the cafeteria into two classrooms, leaving only enough room for students to file in along the temporary wall and back out through the serving line with their trays.

I had always taken my lunch to school, so for most of my years, I took a shortcut through the milk line instead of the lunch line, but that year we were all stuck in one line together. We all filed in along the temporary wall, out through the serving line, and back to our classrooms and our desks. Ms. Gatlin  allowed us to talk quietly that I desk as we ate, and Alyssa and I used the time to laugh about things as simple as my blue vinyl kaboodle kit lunch box.

In retrospect, I wonder why Alyssa and I were not also after school friends. I was not one to make friends, and that was the year Mattel introduced the 0dd Ogg, with its catchy little jingle that I heard probably more than I deserved. Alyssa was gorgeous and tall and already beginning to “blossom,” as my mother said, making her a target for a lot of impudent fifth-grade boys. I don't know that we ever talked about it, but I think she was rather embarrassed. If we had nothing else in common, we both were the targets of childish teasing.

But after school, I was as much a mole then as I am now. I would go home, grab a snack, ride my bike, and maybe visit a friend who lived a couple of houses away. The five o'clock train whistle was the signal to come home for supper, maybe a TV show, homework, and bed. By junior high school, Alyssa often accompanied the school choir on the piano, and I suspect her afternoons in the fifth grade involved a lot of practice. Somehow I can't imagine her running home, playing, or riding a bike, although it's entirely possible that she did.

By sixth grade, I'm sure we annoyed a lot of our classmates. The sixth grade homeroom teacher like spelling bees, and Alyssa and I were good at them. I can't remember if we had spelling bees in the fifth grade, but Friday afternoons in sixth grade were spelling bee time. I don't remember how the spelling bees started every Friday, except that the whole class stood along the chalkboard and Mr. Newman started with the weekly spelling list. Two or three or four of our classmates went down on every round; I suspect the most of those didn't want to participate, and some who stayed up longer probably just wished the contest would end. Mr. Newman would work his way backward from the list of the week to the beginning of the school year as long as anyone was still up and spelling.

I loved the spelling bees; spelling was one thing that made me feel like a winner, and I didn't have many. I think Alyssa liked them, too, because she usually was the other one left, and she probably beat me as often as I beat her. I remember clearly that the last word of the last spelling bee was “mustache," but I don't remember which of us spelled it right, so I suspect it must have been Alyssa.

In my dream, we walked together from the kitchen, through the small "master" bedroom and into the remaining bedroom/sunroom. I remember the master bedroom being an earth tone shade of green, and I remember the sunroom having almost a wall of windows, a French door, and a cheery feel, but I drifted back into deep sleep before I really saw any details.

I've sometimes wondered if a time will ever come when I might ask an old friend how she remembers those times half a century ago. As I woke up the next morning, I realized how much I would like to know Alyssa’s side of my memories. But I know that can never happen.

I never saw Alyssa much after sixth grade. Partly, I think that's because she got shuffled off into the “smart kids” group in junior high, while my math grades pushed me back to probably the “second tier." I always thought of her fondly when I heard that she had played for a school performance, and I assume that she was aware of my work on the school newspaper. But I don't remember sharing another class with her, and I don't recall whether she was in pep squad with me.

Alyssa married not long after we got out of high school and had a baby within a year or so. The last news I remember hearing of her was that she had taken a ride on her young nephew's new motorcycle. He had turned too fast on loose gravel, and she had been thrown off and died.

We were not yet 20.