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!