I'm sure that somewhere along the way I read Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day to my kids, although I don't think I recall anything at all about it except that it was about a little kid named Alexander who had a really, really bad day.
I wasn't far into yesterday before I realized that I was well into an Alexander kind of day.
I woke up, more or less, and dragged my body into the kitchen for my morning dose of thyroxin and vitamins. For some reason, my eyes fixated on the flight itinerary attached to the calendar. I'm really not traveling until next month, so why I stared at the itinerary that was mostly covered up by this month's remaining days is beyond me. But I did.
As I read over the dates and times, I realized that the itinerary said I'd be leaving for New Orleans Saturday morning, 3 October, at 8:45 a.m. That can't be right, I thought in my still-too-early morning stupor; my meeting is Saturday morning. I need to be there on Friday!
Still somewhat hung over from lack of sleep over the past several days, I flew to the laptop, flipped it open, and frantically looked up the airline website. Special deal: Change your flight to a different flight on the same day, and pay only $50. No good for me; I have to change to the day before—and hope like crazy that I can still get a seat.
Getting a seat wasn't the problem, and neither, really, was the $23 charge for the ticket at the "current" price. The $150 charge for changing a cheap ticket tied my stomach in knots.
A few minutes later, my eyes popped open and what sounded like the logical half of my brain kicked in and said, "Hey, stupid, you made that reservation while you were looking at all the details about the trip. Those meetings have been on Sunday morning for years. Your room is set up for the same days as the flight. You have to be flying on Saturday."
I checked my computer for messages—any messages—that would confirm that the meeting was Sunday, but nothing on my computer gave me any help. I couldn't even find my hotel confirmation to see if maybe I had set it up for Saturday, since I knew I had made at least one change in it since I got started, and maybe that had happened whenever I had heard that the meeting was actually going to be Saturday. But no, nothing. And that had to mean the meeting was really on Sunday.
Back to the laptop, find a phone number, and try to talk my way out of the change fee. After 30 minutes of dialing repeatedly, I gave up on the number to help the "rewards" clients and threw myself into the fray with the "normal" people—where a nice kid named Mark answered my call on about the second ring.
The frantic nature of the call apparently hit home with Mark immediately, and while he couldn't undo the charges for the new ticket and the first change, he could change me back to the Saturday flight for only $23 more; the Saturday tickets had gone up, too, since I canceled mine. Big deal! What's $23 if it will get me to New Orleans on the right day?
I spent the morning in my usual routine of grading papers, which didn't go as smoothly as usual for one reason or another, not the least of which being the knot hanging in my stomach as I considered the fact that I'd increased the cost of my ticket by $150 that might or might not (and logically not) be refundable on my travel allowance. (I was pretty sure I could get away with the $46 in increased ticket charges; the original ticket had been pretty cheap.)
Even the dogs seemed to sense my frustration. I usually take a short break in the morning for what other people would call coffee, but since I don't drink coffee, mine is more accurately a slice of toast and a few minutes of fetch with the dogs. Sherman, who adores fetch, ran out to where I had thrown his ball and stood looking back at me as if to ask what I expected him to do next. Parker, who has become a pretty competitive little fetcher, brought back her ball about three times and then wandered around the patio with it as if she were lost. I finally gave up and went out to collect Sherman's ball and pried Parker's out of her mouth and went back inside.
I had a class to teach at 2, but I needed to swing by a framing shop to collect some certificates for an upcoming awards banquet before then, so I cleaned up and headed for the office. On my Alexander kind of day, the frames weren't ready yet, and I'd have to return later. I handled a couple of small tasks before I fired up the computer to check my email. Oh. my. god....
Several messages from the top was one from one of the other members of my committee, apologizing for having to miss the Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting!
By this time I really was frantic. I flashed an email back to the meeting organizer, who assured me that yes, the meeting was set for Saturday. Drat.
I called the hotel and changed my reservation, then went back online to the airline (I was far too gone by then to face the idea that Mark might answer again) to move the flight back to Friday. The good news was that the ticket price hadn't changed since early morning; the bad news is that the airline slapped me with another $150 fee.
I was still finishing the ticketing process when one of my students showed up to ask me if I was going to class, although I had asked them to delay the start of class by 10 minutes so we could use a conference room instead of the big, barren classroom I had been assigned for a group of 8 students. I was less than cheerful when I got there, and even less happy when I glanced down in a chair next to the lecturn to see that someone had obviously spilled a drink and just left it, balling up on the seat of the chair. I thought maybe my luck was changing when I walked back to a storage cabinet, where I found that the group that had left the drink in the chair had also left a lovely plate of brownies on the cabinet. At least we had one tick up.
Class went swimmingly and I was really proud of my students when it was over, but I was still pretty balled up over spending $300 on what could be considered nothing more than a Stupid Tax—money I might as well have flushed as spent the way I did.
I had one possible out: I had a paper that needed to be edited for a consulting fee, and working on it when I got home could at least get my mind off the Stupid Tax. I worked on it for a couple of hours before Garry got home from a business trip.
As I recall, the one last thing in the Alexander book was that after all, Alexander's day turned out okay.
And so did mine. I still felt pretty miserable about the Stupid Tax, but I had a ball watching Garry. He's starting back to college 10 years after barely escaping high school with a diploma, and he's excited about getting going again. He's taking only an introduction to college course, but it's such a foreign world to him that he's really enjoying it. Part of the course challenges him to learn to operate a computer, and he's really stepping up to that challenge. Last night, when I was just beginning to unwind from my Alexander day, he was in a chatty mood, distracting me from my work and the t.v. news but filling me to the brim with the list of long, if basic, new things he's learning.
So if Alexander ended his day realizing that he's got it pretty good, then I really did have an Alexander kind of day.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Dogs are good for me
I've been a believer for a long time that pets are good. My family had a couple of dogs when I was a teenager, and I let the kids smuggle cats into the house when they were little because I thought they needed to learn about pets. One of those two cats lived 17 years; the other made almost 20. And while I loved the first one from the beginning and thought frequently about giving the other one a laryngectomy or lobotomy or something to shut him up, I was crushed as each of them died.
I was hurt in other ways when I lost the dog I had gotten the kids after their dad and I split up. I knew her time was coming—she was close to 14 years old and showing signs of glaucoma and maybe arthritis and other things—but I was not at all prepared for something to get over a 4-ft fence in our backyard, attack, and kill her. I had only recently acquired a kitten to replace the last cat who died, and here I was without my loving, smiling, always forgiving dog.
Within a matter of weeks, my daughter came home for Christmas and we hit the animal shelter. The little dog I found there was a ball of black fluff that I somehow hoped would stay small and fluffy; that didn't happen. Her 30-pound size makes her a little larger than I'd have liked, and her fluff straightened out into stiff, straight hair a couple of inches long and thick around her scruff. She's something of a weenie most of the time, but around her "cousin" Sherman who has been living with us lately, she becomes an alpha dog and I sometimes want to pinch her head off. For a long time I was pretty sure she was part hobbit; she could get from the den to my bedroom under a screen that kept Sherman out, and she'd steal all the toys from the den and hide them back in my room.
I specifically picked the runt of her litter because I was hoping for something fairly small; I didn't want a large dog because of the cost of maintenance and the challenges of assuring that it got plenty of exercise in spite of my own less-than-active lifestyle. Then Sherman moved in.
I hadn't intended to have a Sherman dog. Shortly after I adopted my little Parker pup, Second Son decided he needed a dog, too—only he lived with a roommate who had a large dog, and he had determined that large dogs were cool. Since he was out on his own, I had no reason to care, and he had picked out our delightful little Nikki dog.
SS trooped off to the shelter and called me to announce that he had found "his" dog. He had a long list of steps to follow before he'd be eligible to adopt this animal, and he had to wait several days for its previous owners to be sure they wanted to release it, and SS was second in line to adopt it. But SS was confident: the dog he had seen was going to be his.
I dropped by the shelter to see what I thought. SS had told me the animal was a boxer named Duke, and I sorted through the pens until I found a miserable looking beast who was so starved his ribs seemed to be cutting through his skin and whose hound-dog eyes begged for someone to love him. Much as I didn't want a large dog, I could see how easily SS could have fallen in love with him; this beast needed love! But there was still that one more name ahead of my son's on the list.
Sure enough, after more than a week of waiting for others to exercise their options and figuring out the logistics of taking the beast home, SS called me to tell me he was on his way to buy a kennel. The dog was still a puppy at only about 4 months old, but he was clearly not going to be the pocket-sized beast I had had in mind when I set off to find my dog. He also wasn't just boxer; the hound-dog eyes and speckled chest and gentle jaws have to indicate hound or bird-dog or something inside.
And a few months later, the puppy was living with me. SS graduated from college, moved away to start his first job, and needed a place for the puppy to stay. Sometimes I'm just too easy....
By the time the erstwhile Duke, who had now learned to answer to Sherman, moved in with me, he had already gained practical experience at fence jumping, so I was resigned to keeping him on a chain, even inside my fenced back yard. I had tried ropes of various sorts which had always been fine with Nikki; Sherman chewed right through them. I made a daily point of hooking him and Parker on leashes and hoofing through the neighborhood to get some exercise, but I knew I'd never be able to get his heart rate up beyond an occasional thump. At least he enjoyed the outings!
Once SS got settled in to his digs in Houston, he picked up Sherman to take him "home," which was a nice relief for me: I had my house back with just me and my puppy and kitten, who had fallen a bit behind in their bonding; Mandi the cat had been terrified of the much larger, more boisterous Sherman.
For a while, anyway. Within a matter of weeks, SS had decided that the job just wasn't working, and the only option open to him was to move back home, reorganize, and start the job search all over again. Sherman, of course, managed to move "home" several weeks before his master did.
Sherman managed to get out of the yard a couple of times before SS moved back home, and I made the first order of business after the move the establishment of a fence high enough to keep him in. Our old fence was farm fencing that let me look out onto the virgin forest in my backyard, and the cheapest option for a taller fence was another, higher round of the same stuff all around. I spent a few days collecting parts from the lumber yards, and SS and I spent a weekend giving Sherman a place to run.
And run he did. When daughter came home the next Christmas, she was appalled that Sherman had pretty well done in the groundcover that had once made my yard look lush and cool; now it looked like a beach. The aspidistra that mostly hid the fence from view was already badly trampled, and the tree stump that used to be low enough to mow over was sticking about 8 inches out of the ground. But Sherman was healthy and happy, and Parker bounced happily along at his heels.
I had been trying to teach Parker to fetch a ball by tossing it out and giving her treats for bringing it back, and she had seemed to be catching on until Sherman moved in—and he was a whole lot more fun to chase than a silly ball. The logic of "fetch" escaped Sherman completely.
Until he discovered we could play with his stuffed tiger, Romo. He dragged Romo over to my chair one day, I guess to play tug-of-war, but I just picked Romo up and tossed him across the room. Sherman happily brought him back so I could throw him again. Ah—he had the concept, but could he transfer it to a ball?
Since Parker and Sherman are about the same age, they both went through the chewing phase together, and they chewed everything in sight. In my search for toys that would suit them, I stumbled over an old basketball, which took Sherman's big mouth about a day and a half to pop. For some reason, he picked up its carcass and hauled it up to SS one day, and SS flung it back into the yard. Sherman ran after it and schlepped it back, ready for another round. The game of fetch was on.
SS found an old baseball in the house and decided it was too small and too hard for fetch. We found a softball, and that was better until Sherman chewed the cover off. We went to tennis balls and found they got so filthy we couldn't even find them in the yard again. But it didn't much matter what we threw; Sherman would bring it back. One afternoon I came home from work to find SS playing with him in the backyard, flinging the ball into the last of the aspidistra plants where Sherman had to dig around to find it, but he never failed: regardless how lost it seemed to us to be, Sherman always came back with his ball.
Then we discovered that if we didn't just throw it but bounced it on the patio, Parker also would join in the game. With both of them playing now, we were going through cheap tennis balls pretty quickly, so I started looking for alternatives. I found a goofy, weirdly shaped, heavy rubber toy with a noisemaker inside that Sherman enjoyed for a while, but it lost its appeal when the noisemaker died.
Then I found an off-balance ball that bounced high but erratically when we threw it down, and both of the dogs thought that was fun to chase. In somewhat rapid succession, we acquired several rubber balls the same size as the tennis balls but much more resistant to dogs, and a small collection of racquet balls that bounce like crazy. Sherman was in heaven, and even Parker learned that if Sherman was chasing the rounder balls, she could claim the goofy-shaped one as her own.
Before long, I learned that I could throw one of the round balls for Sherman to chase, and Parker would chase and return the goofy-shaped one. I spend a part of my day working from home, and the dogs will beg me to take an occasional break to throw the balls. Sherman is currently working on his ability to catch low pitches, and Parker is loving chasing her ball as far as I can bounce it.
As much as I've enjoyed playing with them when I can catch a break, I didn't realize until today how much they give back to me. Things on my job have been really frustrating lately, and I've grown to resent having to drag myself to the office to endure the latest vexation. Today's class met after usual hours, I discovered some reasonably significant errors in the assignment that was due today, and I don't have an appropriate workspace for the teaching assistants I need to help me with the course. I came home tired, angry, and tense.
I had left the dogs in the backyard when I went to the office, and SS had left them out when he buzzed through from a trip to Houston to scoot to his job, so I figured they'd be eager to come inside and soak up cool (and maybe dry—we might have had a shower today) air.
Not so much—both of them seemed eager to get on with the balls. I grabbed a couple and chunked them across the yard, and the dogs both took off eagerly to round them back up. Sherman has perfected a way of placing his ball gingerly on the step so it doesn't roll away until I have a chance to pick it up, but he's working on catching slow pitches just off the corner of the patio. Parker tends to toss the ball at me so hard it often bounces away and she has to go round it up again for me, but she's getting good at charging out across the yard and coming up right under it when it lands.
Sherman bounced a couple of tosses off his nose and right back into my hands, and Parker grabbed up a couple of big aspidistra leaves along with the ball when she brought it back, and she seemed upset that she hadn't been able to separate them before she gave the ball back to me. Both would stay with their balls until they were sure I had them firmly in hand, then take off for their various starting points to wait for their next pitch. Both of them would wait eagerly, eyes bright and tails wagging, for their next chance to chase the ball.
Fifteen minutes of fetch didn't take my frustrations off my plate, and it didn't help me figure out how I'm going to handle tomorrow. But it made me laugh, and my spine relaxed, and I knew I will figure this all out somehow.
Sherman's too big and Parker's too cranky and I don't have time to exercise them much, but I'm sure in spite of it all that these dogs are good for me.
I was hurt in other ways when I lost the dog I had gotten the kids after their dad and I split up. I knew her time was coming—she was close to 14 years old and showing signs of glaucoma and maybe arthritis and other things—but I was not at all prepared for something to get over a 4-ft fence in our backyard, attack, and kill her. I had only recently acquired a kitten to replace the last cat who died, and here I was without my loving, smiling, always forgiving dog.
Within a matter of weeks, my daughter came home for Christmas and we hit the animal shelter. The little dog I found there was a ball of black fluff that I somehow hoped would stay small and fluffy; that didn't happen. Her 30-pound size makes her a little larger than I'd have liked, and her fluff straightened out into stiff, straight hair a couple of inches long and thick around her scruff. She's something of a weenie most of the time, but around her "cousin" Sherman who has been living with us lately, she becomes an alpha dog and I sometimes want to pinch her head off. For a long time I was pretty sure she was part hobbit; she could get from the den to my bedroom under a screen that kept Sherman out, and she'd steal all the toys from the den and hide them back in my room.
I specifically picked the runt of her litter because I was hoping for something fairly small; I didn't want a large dog because of the cost of maintenance and the challenges of assuring that it got plenty of exercise in spite of my own less-than-active lifestyle. Then Sherman moved in.
I hadn't intended to have a Sherman dog. Shortly after I adopted my little Parker pup, Second Son decided he needed a dog, too—only he lived with a roommate who had a large dog, and he had determined that large dogs were cool. Since he was out on his own, I had no reason to care, and he had picked out our delightful little Nikki dog.
SS trooped off to the shelter and called me to announce that he had found "his" dog. He had a long list of steps to follow before he'd be eligible to adopt this animal, and he had to wait several days for its previous owners to be sure they wanted to release it, and SS was second in line to adopt it. But SS was confident: the dog he had seen was going to be his.
I dropped by the shelter to see what I thought. SS had told me the animal was a boxer named Duke, and I sorted through the pens until I found a miserable looking beast who was so starved his ribs seemed to be cutting through his skin and whose hound-dog eyes begged for someone to love him. Much as I didn't want a large dog, I could see how easily SS could have fallen in love with him; this beast needed love! But there was still that one more name ahead of my son's on the list.
Sure enough, after more than a week of waiting for others to exercise their options and figuring out the logistics of taking the beast home, SS called me to tell me he was on his way to buy a kennel. The dog was still a puppy at only about 4 months old, but he was clearly not going to be the pocket-sized beast I had had in mind when I set off to find my dog. He also wasn't just boxer; the hound-dog eyes and speckled chest and gentle jaws have to indicate hound or bird-dog or something inside.
And a few months later, the puppy was living with me. SS graduated from college, moved away to start his first job, and needed a place for the puppy to stay. Sometimes I'm just too easy....
By the time the erstwhile Duke, who had now learned to answer to Sherman, moved in with me, he had already gained practical experience at fence jumping, so I was resigned to keeping him on a chain, even inside my fenced back yard. I had tried ropes of various sorts which had always been fine with Nikki; Sherman chewed right through them. I made a daily point of hooking him and Parker on leashes and hoofing through the neighborhood to get some exercise, but I knew I'd never be able to get his heart rate up beyond an occasional thump. At least he enjoyed the outings!
Once SS got settled in to his digs in Houston, he picked up Sherman to take him "home," which was a nice relief for me: I had my house back with just me and my puppy and kitten, who had fallen a bit behind in their bonding; Mandi the cat had been terrified of the much larger, more boisterous Sherman.
For a while, anyway. Within a matter of weeks, SS had decided that the job just wasn't working, and the only option open to him was to move back home, reorganize, and start the job search all over again. Sherman, of course, managed to move "home" several weeks before his master did.
Sherman managed to get out of the yard a couple of times before SS moved back home, and I made the first order of business after the move the establishment of a fence high enough to keep him in. Our old fence was farm fencing that let me look out onto the virgin forest in my backyard, and the cheapest option for a taller fence was another, higher round of the same stuff all around. I spent a few days collecting parts from the lumber yards, and SS and I spent a weekend giving Sherman a place to run.
And run he did. When daughter came home the next Christmas, she was appalled that Sherman had pretty well done in the groundcover that had once made my yard look lush and cool; now it looked like a beach. The aspidistra that mostly hid the fence from view was already badly trampled, and the tree stump that used to be low enough to mow over was sticking about 8 inches out of the ground. But Sherman was healthy and happy, and Parker bounced happily along at his heels.
I had been trying to teach Parker to fetch a ball by tossing it out and giving her treats for bringing it back, and she had seemed to be catching on until Sherman moved in—and he was a whole lot more fun to chase than a silly ball. The logic of "fetch" escaped Sherman completely.
Until he discovered we could play with his stuffed tiger, Romo. He dragged Romo over to my chair one day, I guess to play tug-of-war, but I just picked Romo up and tossed him across the room. Sherman happily brought him back so I could throw him again. Ah—he had the concept, but could he transfer it to a ball?
Since Parker and Sherman are about the same age, they both went through the chewing phase together, and they chewed everything in sight. In my search for toys that would suit them, I stumbled over an old basketball, which took Sherman's big mouth about a day and a half to pop. For some reason, he picked up its carcass and hauled it up to SS one day, and SS flung it back into the yard. Sherman ran after it and schlepped it back, ready for another round. The game of fetch was on.
SS found an old baseball in the house and decided it was too small and too hard for fetch. We found a softball, and that was better until Sherman chewed the cover off. We went to tennis balls and found they got so filthy we couldn't even find them in the yard again. But it didn't much matter what we threw; Sherman would bring it back. One afternoon I came home from work to find SS playing with him in the backyard, flinging the ball into the last of the aspidistra plants where Sherman had to dig around to find it, but he never failed: regardless how lost it seemed to us to be, Sherman always came back with his ball.
Then we discovered that if we didn't just throw it but bounced it on the patio, Parker also would join in the game. With both of them playing now, we were going through cheap tennis balls pretty quickly, so I started looking for alternatives. I found a goofy, weirdly shaped, heavy rubber toy with a noisemaker inside that Sherman enjoyed for a while, but it lost its appeal when the noisemaker died.
Then I found an off-balance ball that bounced high but erratically when we threw it down, and both of the dogs thought that was fun to chase. In somewhat rapid succession, we acquired several rubber balls the same size as the tennis balls but much more resistant to dogs, and a small collection of racquet balls that bounce like crazy. Sherman was in heaven, and even Parker learned that if Sherman was chasing the rounder balls, she could claim the goofy-shaped one as her own.
Before long, I learned that I could throw one of the round balls for Sherman to chase, and Parker would chase and return the goofy-shaped one. I spend a part of my day working from home, and the dogs will beg me to take an occasional break to throw the balls. Sherman is currently working on his ability to catch low pitches, and Parker is loving chasing her ball as far as I can bounce it.
As much as I've enjoyed playing with them when I can catch a break, I didn't realize until today how much they give back to me. Things on my job have been really frustrating lately, and I've grown to resent having to drag myself to the office to endure the latest vexation. Today's class met after usual hours, I discovered some reasonably significant errors in the assignment that was due today, and I don't have an appropriate workspace for the teaching assistants I need to help me with the course. I came home tired, angry, and tense.
I had left the dogs in the backyard when I went to the office, and SS had left them out when he buzzed through from a trip to Houston to scoot to his job, so I figured they'd be eager to come inside and soak up cool (and maybe dry—we might have had a shower today) air.
Not so much—both of them seemed eager to get on with the balls. I grabbed a couple and chunked them across the yard, and the dogs both took off eagerly to round them back up. Sherman has perfected a way of placing his ball gingerly on the step so it doesn't roll away until I have a chance to pick it up, but he's working on catching slow pitches just off the corner of the patio. Parker tends to toss the ball at me so hard it often bounces away and she has to go round it up again for me, but she's getting good at charging out across the yard and coming up right under it when it lands.
Sherman bounced a couple of tosses off his nose and right back into my hands, and Parker grabbed up a couple of big aspidistra leaves along with the ball when she brought it back, and she seemed upset that she hadn't been able to separate them before she gave the ball back to me. Both would stay with their balls until they were sure I had them firmly in hand, then take off for their various starting points to wait for their next pitch. Both of them would wait eagerly, eyes bright and tails wagging, for their next chance to chase the ball.
Fifteen minutes of fetch didn't take my frustrations off my plate, and it didn't help me figure out how I'm going to handle tomorrow. But it made me laugh, and my spine relaxed, and I knew I will figure this all out somehow.
Sherman's too big and Parker's too cranky and I don't have time to exercise them much, but I'm sure in spite of it all that these dogs are good for me.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
My in-laws, my friends
The idea that my in-laws might also be my friends may seem foreign to folks who share jokes about how terrible their in-laws are. For me, the case is inverted: I love my in-laws; it's my ex who's out of my life.
Suffice it to say that ours wasn't exactly a marriage made in heaven, whatever that is; where the divorce decree said "irreconcilable differences," it largely meant differences that I had recognized from the beginning, but it didn't cover a lot of similarities that I had really believed would give us enough wiggle room to make the differences work. Not so much.
The divorce wasn't nearly as messy as some I've heard of, but it wasn't exactly congenial either; I complained about his shortcomings, he complained about mine, and ultimately we agreed that we disagreed—too much to make it work. We've hardly endured even casual encounters since then.
Enter the in-laws. Full disclosure dictates that I have to admit that I said some things about their son around the time of the divorce that not only could have but probably should have locked their door to me for eternity, but somehow they both managed to nod and accept it without killing me, and the last time I left their home before the paperwork was signed, I got the feeling that of all the members of both sides of the family, those two incredible people were my strongest allies.
But the hard feelings between me and the rest of the family (mine liked him best, too), combined with the challenges I faced in trying to keep my life together as the single mom of three teenagers, meant that I steered clear of their apartment for the next several years. I never felt as if I would be unwelcome there; I was more embarrassed by the unkind things I'd said about their son and unwilling to remind them of that.
And then one of their daughters invited me to Christmas lunch one day. The kids had all made a practice of having Christmas on Christmas Eve with their dad and his family and on Christmas morning with me. My life had fragmented to the point that I almost never cooked, and the idea of a big Christmas feast for me, two carnivore sons, and a vegetarian daughter didn't enchant me. The in-laws loved to cook and so did their two daughters, and having the grandkids troop back for Christmas lunch suited all of us pretty well. They were happy to eat together, I was happy for the piece of quiet I got, and the leftovers were always delicious.
After the ex remarried, his Christmas dinners moved more and more toward his wife's family, and the in-laws had an extra seat at their table. So the sister who always got along with me best asked if I would be welcome. The in-laws and the kids were all delighted, and I was pleased to join them.
Then the accident happened. Father-in-law lost control of his car for long enough to bang it up enough to have to replace it. The ex and his wife called the sisters in Texas City to tell them about the accident, but the information they gave was too spotty to be helpful to the medical professional. Recognizing that their communications with their brother were typically irregular, the sisters determined to find a better source of information about their parents' situation.
For reasons I'll never know, they picked me. They called and invited me to go out for a drink on their next visit to town and outlined their request: Would I be willing to check in on their parents from time to time to see how they were getting along?
They seemed to think their request might be an imposition; later, my own sisters were shocked by their presumption that I might be willing to comply. I saw it as a welcoming open door; after all, these people had been kind and generous to the kids and me through plenty of opportunity not to be, and they are my kids' grandparents. I was happy to agree.
My first visit to them was on a Sunday afternoon. I typically shop at a store near their apartment, so I just dropped by on my way home from shopping to see how this would go. I had armed myself with updates on the kids' latest adventures and some other pretense for dropping by, and they greeted me as graciously as I had expected them to.
After my excuses for being there began to run thin, my father-in-law stopped me dead when he asked, "Okay, so why are you really here? Did the girls put you up to this?" Busted! I wasn't in to this to deceive them, so I admitted the ruse. He assured me they loved having me over, but more than 60 years of marriage had taught them plenty about how to take care of each other. He knew the wreck must have been part of the reason their daughters had called on me, but he was curious as to whether that really were the whole story.
Well, no, not exactly. As a matter of fact, one of the sisters' biggest concerns was their eating habits: The sisters had heard the parents occasionally resorted to eating at, of all places, Taco Bell!
Now, when the sisters had reported this, I had had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing or admitting how frequently I also swung through the Taco B drive-through on my way home for work to pick up a quick meal before an evening of grading papers or consulting or other business. I know that's not the healthiest way to eat, but offset by lots of meals of fruits and vegetables and yogurt, it seemed not to be wreaking havoc on my health, and hey—I enjoy TexMex. So I certainly didn't share their concern about the in-laws eating at Taco Bell.
But once the truth was out, I admitted to my father-in-law: The girls are concerned because they've heard you're eating at Taco Bell. I thought my mother-in-law was going to pull her whole 4 ft 10 up on her lounge chair as they both chimed in unison, "It's good!" This time I didn't have to bite my tongue; I just laughed and told them I agreed. I also understand their lack of interest in cooking for two in their 80s, and I understand the frustration of buying healthy food and watching it turn green in the refrigerator because you just don't cook enough to use it up. From my perspective, an occasional jaunt to Taco Bell is a convenient and healthy-enough solution, especially for a couple who have survived into their 80s and want an occasional change of pace.
Once the ice was broken, I started making a point of dropping by as often as I could; my Sunday routine has generally included a stop by their apartment every couple of weeks to check on how they're doing and to update them on the latest goings on with me and the kids. They are dependably attentive when I talk about myself, and they are intent on hearing the latest with the kids; I sometimes feel as if I'm their old-fashioned radio serial, bringing them the latest installment in the story of 20-somethings trying to carve out a life in this crazy world.
And I think they appreciate the company. Father-in-law joked today that everybody who knows him is getting tired of hearing the same old stories over and over again, but at "four score and seven," he delights in revisiting the times of his life that brought him to where he is today.
The kids have always been amused to see that he has so often been an early adopter of technology, even if neither they nor he has known what that meant. I saw my first microwave oven at his house, my first hand-held calculator, my first VCR, my first audio cassette, and my first DVD recorder. I had a computer several years before he did, but 30 years past retirement he checks his email daily, knows how to use instant messengers, and today I set him up with a blog. He's not too sure he'll be much of one to use it, but it's there, and I'll be surprised if he doesn't try.
In fact, when I set it up, I suggested that he capture some of those familiar stories—the dogs that used to nip at him when he delivered newspapers, the pet he had to shoot, the adventures of his military life. I reminded him that I don't have those stories from my dad, who died far too young; the efforts I made to capture them from my mom were much too little, too late. I hope he'll use his blog to capture the stories for his grandkids—and, if ever, their kids, too—to treasure long after he is gone.
And I want to see my mother-in-law there, too. When I started a list of possible blog topics, I included a couple that would focus on her life, too. In fact, when I suggested that they write about why she likes scrapbooking, they both carried that to her interest in lots of crafts over the years, and she was bursting to tell me about her childhood, when her mother and aunts used to get together and work on their hemming or their quilting or whatever handwork was in progress as they visited—an image of her life that reminds me of an awfully lot of mine.
I'm really hoping they'll do it. Octogenarians are too rare in our world today, and these two just happen to be particularly lovely people. I want to help their stories live on forever, just as their humor twinkles in my children's eyes.
I love those fine old birds!
Suffice it to say that ours wasn't exactly a marriage made in heaven, whatever that is; where the divorce decree said "irreconcilable differences," it largely meant differences that I had recognized from the beginning, but it didn't cover a lot of similarities that I had really believed would give us enough wiggle room to make the differences work. Not so much.
The divorce wasn't nearly as messy as some I've heard of, but it wasn't exactly congenial either; I complained about his shortcomings, he complained about mine, and ultimately we agreed that we disagreed—too much to make it work. We've hardly endured even casual encounters since then.
Enter the in-laws. Full disclosure dictates that I have to admit that I said some things about their son around the time of the divorce that not only could have but probably should have locked their door to me for eternity, but somehow they both managed to nod and accept it without killing me, and the last time I left their home before the paperwork was signed, I got the feeling that of all the members of both sides of the family, those two incredible people were my strongest allies.
But the hard feelings between me and the rest of the family (mine liked him best, too), combined with the challenges I faced in trying to keep my life together as the single mom of three teenagers, meant that I steered clear of their apartment for the next several years. I never felt as if I would be unwelcome there; I was more embarrassed by the unkind things I'd said about their son and unwilling to remind them of that.
And then one of their daughters invited me to Christmas lunch one day. The kids had all made a practice of having Christmas on Christmas Eve with their dad and his family and on Christmas morning with me. My life had fragmented to the point that I almost never cooked, and the idea of a big Christmas feast for me, two carnivore sons, and a vegetarian daughter didn't enchant me. The in-laws loved to cook and so did their two daughters, and having the grandkids troop back for Christmas lunch suited all of us pretty well. They were happy to eat together, I was happy for the piece of quiet I got, and the leftovers were always delicious.
After the ex remarried, his Christmas dinners moved more and more toward his wife's family, and the in-laws had an extra seat at their table. So the sister who always got along with me best asked if I would be welcome. The in-laws and the kids were all delighted, and I was pleased to join them.
Then the accident happened. Father-in-law lost control of his car for long enough to bang it up enough to have to replace it. The ex and his wife called the sisters in Texas City to tell them about the accident, but the information they gave was too spotty to be helpful to the medical professional. Recognizing that their communications with their brother were typically irregular, the sisters determined to find a better source of information about their parents' situation.
For reasons I'll never know, they picked me. They called and invited me to go out for a drink on their next visit to town and outlined their request: Would I be willing to check in on their parents from time to time to see how they were getting along?
They seemed to think their request might be an imposition; later, my own sisters were shocked by their presumption that I might be willing to comply. I saw it as a welcoming open door; after all, these people had been kind and generous to the kids and me through plenty of opportunity not to be, and they are my kids' grandparents. I was happy to agree.
My first visit to them was on a Sunday afternoon. I typically shop at a store near their apartment, so I just dropped by on my way home from shopping to see how this would go. I had armed myself with updates on the kids' latest adventures and some other pretense for dropping by, and they greeted me as graciously as I had expected them to.
After my excuses for being there began to run thin, my father-in-law stopped me dead when he asked, "Okay, so why are you really here? Did the girls put you up to this?" Busted! I wasn't in to this to deceive them, so I admitted the ruse. He assured me they loved having me over, but more than 60 years of marriage had taught them plenty about how to take care of each other. He knew the wreck must have been part of the reason their daughters had called on me, but he was curious as to whether that really were the whole story.
Well, no, not exactly. As a matter of fact, one of the sisters' biggest concerns was their eating habits: The sisters had heard the parents occasionally resorted to eating at, of all places, Taco Bell!
Now, when the sisters had reported this, I had had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing or admitting how frequently I also swung through the Taco B drive-through on my way home for work to pick up a quick meal before an evening of grading papers or consulting or other business. I know that's not the healthiest way to eat, but offset by lots of meals of fruits and vegetables and yogurt, it seemed not to be wreaking havoc on my health, and hey—I enjoy TexMex. So I certainly didn't share their concern about the in-laws eating at Taco Bell.
But once the truth was out, I admitted to my father-in-law: The girls are concerned because they've heard you're eating at Taco Bell. I thought my mother-in-law was going to pull her whole 4 ft 10 up on her lounge chair as they both chimed in unison, "It's good!" This time I didn't have to bite my tongue; I just laughed and told them I agreed. I also understand their lack of interest in cooking for two in their 80s, and I understand the frustration of buying healthy food and watching it turn green in the refrigerator because you just don't cook enough to use it up. From my perspective, an occasional jaunt to Taco Bell is a convenient and healthy-enough solution, especially for a couple who have survived into their 80s and want an occasional change of pace.
Once the ice was broken, I started making a point of dropping by as often as I could; my Sunday routine has generally included a stop by their apartment every couple of weeks to check on how they're doing and to update them on the latest goings on with me and the kids. They are dependably attentive when I talk about myself, and they are intent on hearing the latest with the kids; I sometimes feel as if I'm their old-fashioned radio serial, bringing them the latest installment in the story of 20-somethings trying to carve out a life in this crazy world.
And I think they appreciate the company. Father-in-law joked today that everybody who knows him is getting tired of hearing the same old stories over and over again, but at "four score and seven," he delights in revisiting the times of his life that brought him to where he is today.
The kids have always been amused to see that he has so often been an early adopter of technology, even if neither they nor he has known what that meant. I saw my first microwave oven at his house, my first hand-held calculator, my first VCR, my first audio cassette, and my first DVD recorder. I had a computer several years before he did, but 30 years past retirement he checks his email daily, knows how to use instant messengers, and today I set him up with a blog. He's not too sure he'll be much of one to use it, but it's there, and I'll be surprised if he doesn't try.
In fact, when I set it up, I suggested that he capture some of those familiar stories—the dogs that used to nip at him when he delivered newspapers, the pet he had to shoot, the adventures of his military life. I reminded him that I don't have those stories from my dad, who died far too young; the efforts I made to capture them from my mom were much too little, too late. I hope he'll use his blog to capture the stories for his grandkids—and, if ever, their kids, too—to treasure long after he is gone.
And I want to see my mother-in-law there, too. When I started a list of possible blog topics, I included a couple that would focus on her life, too. In fact, when I suggested that they write about why she likes scrapbooking, they both carried that to her interest in lots of crafts over the years, and she was bursting to tell me about her childhood, when her mother and aunts used to get together and work on their hemming or their quilting or whatever handwork was in progress as they visited—an image of her life that reminds me of an awfully lot of mine.
I'm really hoping they'll do it. Octogenarians are too rare in our world today, and these two just happen to be particularly lovely people. I want to help their stories live on forever, just as their humor twinkles in my children's eyes.
I love those fine old birds!
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
First day of school
Yesterday was Number One Son's first day of school. Not your typical first day, by any means; certainly no weepy young mom packing her darling five-year-old off to school, or even me, who was neither weepy nor young when NOS tripped eagerly across the threshold of the kindergarten classroom door—I was too busy wondering how I was going to shut up the two littler ones who refused to understand why they weren't going to "school" (daycare) that day, too, and whether our family was going to survive the somewhat rocky financial conditions we were in. One in kindergarten was a load off my mind for several hours a day.
No, this was NOS's first day at Blinndergarten, the knock-off name for the local community college that charges out-of-district fees because its main campus—half the size of the one here—is 35 miles away. And the course he's taking is called "Blinn 101" because it's designed for kids like NOS—coming back to the college whirl after a lot of years out of school. "Packing him off" in this case wasn't as easy as dressing him up in the new shorts and t-shirt his grandmother had bought for his first big day and hanging his bright new backpack on his back; no, this time it meant scraping out a part of my home for him to live him, getting him into an old, junker car that would get him back and forth to school, and helping him start dealing with several thousand dollars' worth of debt he's accrued.
But it was a good first day, I think. He came home a little irritated because his teacher had assigned the students to set up their Blinn email accounts before the end of class, but in his case the computers on campus were not cooperating. He was pretty sure Second Son had set up the account for him, and he was pretty sure he was making the right moves to get into it, but nothing he did at school had made it work. Somehow the "packing him off" part had also included my move to a newer computer so he could use my retiring one, and he flopped into a chair and went to work on it about as soon as he got in the front door.
Sure enough, within a matter of minutes he was in the email account, and he paused long enough to tell me his next assignment was to set up the debit card he had received a week or so ago to handle his school financial transactions. I had tried to spell out the need to do that when the card had arrived, having had the benefit of SS's job last spring with a call center for a university financial aid department; I'll bet SS had tried to explain it, too. As usual, NOS didn't want to do it on our advice, so I was tickled pink that he was willing to do it to satisfy the teach.
In fact, I'm pretty tickled that he's doing this, anyway. NOS got off to a fairly good start in school, but soon after he started kindergarten he started mirror-writing. I had documentation that he had been writing his name correctly for a year or more, so the reverse approach had to have started after he started school. When I asked, he explained that he was writing it the way his teacher did; in his five-year-old mind, if she wrote from the side where she held her pencil, he should, too. Since she held her pencil in her left hand and wrote from left to right, he held his pencil in his right hand and wrote from right to left. Why did I wait until the third grade to ask him that?
In the third grade, he was mirror-writing in earnest—and in cursive. That's when the teacher called me in to consider testing him for learning disabilities, which showed that—major surprise—he's dyslexic. Since he'd been mirror-writing since kindergarten, struggled to learn to read, and had a father, an uncle, an aunt, and a younger brother who all were dyslexic, I wasn't particularly surprised.
His real problems started in middle school, though. There, he signed up for band (his dad played the French horn in school and the cornet in the Marines) and basketball, but was prevented from participating in either of them when he failed a six-weeks period of Spanish. Without the band or the team, he was at loose ends and found other ways to amuse himself—with friends whose ideas of fun were mostly pretty far away from school. His dad agreed to let him help out at the bus station Dad ran, and that gave NOS a source of income and of pride.
Unfortunately, in retrospect the income may have also opened doors better left closed. He loved being outdoors, so Boy Scouts had seemed a good way to keep him occupied—until I discovered that the troop leader wasn't concerned that middle-school-aged boys were smoking on the camp outs. And his friends outside of Scouting had taken up the habit; if NOS wasn't buying cigarettes with his earnings, he was likely bumming them either from friends or from his dad, who frequently left parts of packs lying around and forgot them.
Before long, I could see that he was headed toward trouble, and I tried to get his dad to take time out of whatever it was he was doing (I still can't answer that) and invest some time and energy in his son; he was out of my control, and headed for being out of others'. Dad's response was a pretty clear "I can't," and our marriage was headed for the rocks over it; we split up about the time NOS got to high school.
For the first year after the split, NOS went to live with his dad, and things didn't get better; after a year, he decided to try living back at home. The summer went reasonably well; he passed driver's ed and I bought a used car so he could drive himself to work and play, and he enjoyed the freedom if not the rule that he had to have the car home by 11 o'clock .
Once school started, things got worse: he was caught on school property not only smoking but also carrying a small pocket knife, which didn't work in a no-tolerance zone. Having taught at the high school for six years, I knew the school staff enough to wiggle him down to a lighter penalty than he might have had, but I knew we were on a slippery road. Before the end of the year, he had decided to move on to a place where he could have his freedom from my rules—and from anybody getting him up and sending him off to school.
He rolled around for a couple of years before the school practically dragged him in and made him earn enough credits that they felt they could tack a diploma on him and call him a graduate. (I still don't think he really earned the diploma; I think the district was in trouble for having too many dropouts and needed every graduate they could dredge up, and he was one they could find. He was plenty smart to graduate—still is. I just don't think he legitimately did.)
After that, he spent a couple of more years living with friends and cobbling together a life, then he signed himself up for an auto mechanics program at a school in Austin. He took off to start his future against my better judgment, but things worked out mostly okay for him; ultimately, he got a decent job at a Goodyear tire shop, and he walked away with a really enthusiastic letter from his boss, assuring some future employer of the best traits I know of in my son: he's sincere, he's willing to work hard, he plays well with others.
What he doesn't do well is pay off his debts. Somehow, nothing he did in arranging for a place to live, food to eat, and transportation to and from work fit into his income level, no matter how well he did. And then last fall he went to Los Angeles to spend a few days with his sister. Little Sis has way more debt than he'll ever have; the difference is hers is all in college loans that she accepted when she signed on for them, and she has worked hard to pay them off and still make a life for herself. And it's paying off for her.
What he came away with was the perception that her degree was giving her a lifestyle that he could only sit by and envy. The difference, he decided, was in her education. When I was in Los Angeles to visit her for my birthday, he called me to announce that he'd decided to leave his job and go back to school. He'd landed on a position in radiation technology as a career he'd rather pursue, and he wanted to know if he could move back home, live with me, and get himself through school.
So here he is.
I'm not sure radiation technology is really the place where he needs to be, but I suspect that he's closer there than in auto mechanics; he has way too much heart not to work well in something in medicine, and if he's willing to stick to it, radiation technology may turn out to be "it." And if it's not, I'm willing to hang in with him while he continues to look.
And I was really glad to drive home from work yesterday to find him sitting on the front walkway reading a book, and to watch him bound down the stairs this evening to finish the last of his assignments from last night.
One way or another, we are going to make this work.
No, this was NOS's first day at Blinndergarten, the knock-off name for the local community college that charges out-of-district fees because its main campus—half the size of the one here—is 35 miles away. And the course he's taking is called "Blinn 101" because it's designed for kids like NOS—coming back to the college whirl after a lot of years out of school. "Packing him off" in this case wasn't as easy as dressing him up in the new shorts and t-shirt his grandmother had bought for his first big day and hanging his bright new backpack on his back; no, this time it meant scraping out a part of my home for him to live him, getting him into an old, junker car that would get him back and forth to school, and helping him start dealing with several thousand dollars' worth of debt he's accrued.
But it was a good first day, I think. He came home a little irritated because his teacher had assigned the students to set up their Blinn email accounts before the end of class, but in his case the computers on campus were not cooperating. He was pretty sure Second Son had set up the account for him, and he was pretty sure he was making the right moves to get into it, but nothing he did at school had made it work. Somehow the "packing him off" part had also included my move to a newer computer so he could use my retiring one, and he flopped into a chair and went to work on it about as soon as he got in the front door.
Sure enough, within a matter of minutes he was in the email account, and he paused long enough to tell me his next assignment was to set up the debit card he had received a week or so ago to handle his school financial transactions. I had tried to spell out the need to do that when the card had arrived, having had the benefit of SS's job last spring with a call center for a university financial aid department; I'll bet SS had tried to explain it, too. As usual, NOS didn't want to do it on our advice, so I was tickled pink that he was willing to do it to satisfy the teach.
In fact, I'm pretty tickled that he's doing this, anyway. NOS got off to a fairly good start in school, but soon after he started kindergarten he started mirror-writing. I had documentation that he had been writing his name correctly for a year or more, so the reverse approach had to have started after he started school. When I asked, he explained that he was writing it the way his teacher did; in his five-year-old mind, if she wrote from the side where she held her pencil, he should, too. Since she held her pencil in her left hand and wrote from left to right, he held his pencil in his right hand and wrote from right to left. Why did I wait until the third grade to ask him that?
In the third grade, he was mirror-writing in earnest—and in cursive. That's when the teacher called me in to consider testing him for learning disabilities, which showed that—major surprise—he's dyslexic. Since he'd been mirror-writing since kindergarten, struggled to learn to read, and had a father, an uncle, an aunt, and a younger brother who all were dyslexic, I wasn't particularly surprised.
His real problems started in middle school, though. There, he signed up for band (his dad played the French horn in school and the cornet in the Marines) and basketball, but was prevented from participating in either of them when he failed a six-weeks period of Spanish. Without the band or the team, he was at loose ends and found other ways to amuse himself—with friends whose ideas of fun were mostly pretty far away from school. His dad agreed to let him help out at the bus station Dad ran, and that gave NOS a source of income and of pride.
Unfortunately, in retrospect the income may have also opened doors better left closed. He loved being outdoors, so Boy Scouts had seemed a good way to keep him occupied—until I discovered that the troop leader wasn't concerned that middle-school-aged boys were smoking on the camp outs. And his friends outside of Scouting had taken up the habit; if NOS wasn't buying cigarettes with his earnings, he was likely bumming them either from friends or from his dad, who frequently left parts of packs lying around and forgot them.
Before long, I could see that he was headed toward trouble, and I tried to get his dad to take time out of whatever it was he was doing (I still can't answer that) and invest some time and energy in his son; he was out of my control, and headed for being out of others'. Dad's response was a pretty clear "I can't," and our marriage was headed for the rocks over it; we split up about the time NOS got to high school.
For the first year after the split, NOS went to live with his dad, and things didn't get better; after a year, he decided to try living back at home. The summer went reasonably well; he passed driver's ed and I bought a used car so he could drive himself to work and play, and he enjoyed the freedom if not the rule that he had to have the car home by 11 o'clock .
Once school started, things got worse: he was caught on school property not only smoking but also carrying a small pocket knife, which didn't work in a no-tolerance zone. Having taught at the high school for six years, I knew the school staff enough to wiggle him down to a lighter penalty than he might have had, but I knew we were on a slippery road. Before the end of the year, he had decided to move on to a place where he could have his freedom from my rules—and from anybody getting him up and sending him off to school.
He rolled around for a couple of years before the school practically dragged him in and made him earn enough credits that they felt they could tack a diploma on him and call him a graduate. (I still don't think he really earned the diploma; I think the district was in trouble for having too many dropouts and needed every graduate they could dredge up, and he was one they could find. He was plenty smart to graduate—still is. I just don't think he legitimately did.)
After that, he spent a couple of more years living with friends and cobbling together a life, then he signed himself up for an auto mechanics program at a school in Austin. He took off to start his future against my better judgment, but things worked out mostly okay for him; ultimately, he got a decent job at a Goodyear tire shop, and he walked away with a really enthusiastic letter from his boss, assuring some future employer of the best traits I know of in my son: he's sincere, he's willing to work hard, he plays well with others.
What he doesn't do well is pay off his debts. Somehow, nothing he did in arranging for a place to live, food to eat, and transportation to and from work fit into his income level, no matter how well he did. And then last fall he went to Los Angeles to spend a few days with his sister. Little Sis has way more debt than he'll ever have; the difference is hers is all in college loans that she accepted when she signed on for them, and she has worked hard to pay them off and still make a life for herself. And it's paying off for her.
What he came away with was the perception that her degree was giving her a lifestyle that he could only sit by and envy. The difference, he decided, was in her education. When I was in Los Angeles to visit her for my birthday, he called me to announce that he'd decided to leave his job and go back to school. He'd landed on a position in radiation technology as a career he'd rather pursue, and he wanted to know if he could move back home, live with me, and get himself through school.
So here he is.
I'm not sure radiation technology is really the place where he needs to be, but I suspect that he's closer there than in auto mechanics; he has way too much heart not to work well in something in medicine, and if he's willing to stick to it, radiation technology may turn out to be "it." And if it's not, I'm willing to hang in with him while he continues to look.
And I was really glad to drive home from work yesterday to find him sitting on the front walkway reading a book, and to watch him bound down the stairs this evening to finish the last of his assignments from last night.
One way or another, we are going to make this work.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
I miss my mom
Eighteen years after her death and a few days before what would have been her 90th birthday, I find myself still missing my mom.
Our relationship was often rocky, especially for all the years from my earliest real memories until my kids were old enough to appreciate her. I often heard, with a sigh, that she wished I were more like my sisters—the older, gregarious, energetic one (who apparently always made straight As in school) or the younger, quieter, more feminine one (who also apparently always made straight As. Which I didn't).
Mother often referred to the older one as the squeaky wheel—the one who continually demanded and usually got attention. Big Sis never lacked for friends and seems in her middle 60s to have twice the energy I had at my best. She was an active member of the church's Girls Auxiliary and a Girl Scout, where she probably reveled in the advantages of being the leader's daughter. She always seemed to be surrounded by friends, and Mother reminded me regularly that Big Sis never sat at home on a Friday night, and Big Sis didn't have to be in the pep squad to go to all of the football games, and so what if I was editor of the school paper—Big Sis had been head of advertising for the school yearbook.
Big Sis always made good grades, and Big Sis trained to be a nurse—apparently the apex of achievement in Mother's eyes at a time when "women's jobs" were pretty much limited to nursing, teaching, and secretarial work. I often just assumed that Big Sis could do no wrong. And when I found myself off at college and grabbing a moment now and again to write home, I was pretty sure Mother was muttering under her breath that Big Sis still never missed her weekly letter . What could I say? Even today I'm pretty sure Big Sis never sleeps.
Because all of her energy and all the good I see her do, I've always felt lucky to call her my sister, but for most of my youth I was pretty sure I could just never measure up. I even convinced myself for a while that I wanted to be a nurse so I could be more like her, until I finally realized that medicine was not the road for me. But even that led me to respect and appreciate her more.
I was closer in age by 4 years to Middle Sis, who was in many ways different from Big Sis. Middle Sis always seemed to have friends, but they were fewer and quieter than those of Big Sis. Middle Sis dropped out of Girl Scouts by junior high school because she really had no interest in being outdoors (which makes it all the funnier that all three of her grown-up kids love camping). She was the one who went from tap and ballet (all the way to toe dancing! How impressed I was!) to school choir (one love she shared with Big Sis) to charm school.
Active in Sunday evening church groups from the time she started junior high school, Middle Sis met her future husband there when she was 14, married him before she turned 18, and has had a marriage I have longed for for most of its 44 years. If Mother ever groused about Middle Sis, it was usually that she always had her nose in a book, which was probably part of why she always made great grades in school—and managed to graduate from high school a year early. But Mother often muttered that Middle Sis never had trouble with school and always had a date on Saturday night, so why was I always sitting at home?
If we were Catholic I'm pretty sure Middle Sis would be eligible for sainthood, and I'm pleased for her that she eventually realized her childhood dream of becoming an English teacher, even though she had to get her own kids most of the way through public schools before she even got a shot at it. She spent a lot of my teenage years listening to me whine about Mother, and I wouldn't be surprised if she spent a lot of that time listening to Mother whine about me. Sainthood might not be good enough.
I never had to worry about being compared to Big Brother. Although his school years ended well before educators started to define and treat learning disabilities, he was clearly learning disabled; his first grade teacher spanked him daily for not being able to read. As a result, his grades were poor to bad most of the way to school, and he wound up repeating at least one grade in elementary school and ultimately earning a GED instead of a regular diploma.
In spite of his learning obstacles, Big Brother could take apart and put together nearly anything, and he spent hours in high school memorizing line after line of Shakespeare. He was generally at least outwardly happy-go-lucky, perfectly happy to spend hour after hour alone in a room that was more often than not an impassable pigpen. He fiddled, he doodled, he taught himself to build and rebuild, and he nurtured a sense of humor and creativity that eventually emerged as a sort of genius that endeared him to nearly everyone who got to know him.
But except for a successful if not distinguished tour of duty in the US Navy, Big Brother did little to hold up as a role model, and while I'm sure Mother was perplexed for years because he was "different" and she was uncomfortable with "differences," he was the last of us she asked to see before she died; I often think she held on those last few hours exactly because she needed to be sure he was safe one more time.
So for many years I just never seemed to measure up for Mother. I was a Girl Scout and became possibly the first aide ever to work exclusively in a specific camper unit at our local day camp, but that couldn't possibly have ever measured up to Big Sis's trip to a national Girl Scout Roundup. I begged to be allowed to take band, but that was nixed because Big Brother had been a failure there; Mother insisted I should be taking choir, even though I had been politely dismissed (and invited never to come back) in fifth grade because it was obvious that I was unavoidably, hopelessly tone deaf; I still can't begin to carry a tune.
My grades were never extraordinary, starting from sixth grade when my math teacher spent the whole year calling me by Big Brother's name (all the more perplexing if you know that he was tall, thin, and dark, and I was short, squat, and blonde) and giving me a final grade much more reminiscent of his than of either of my sisters'. None of my problems in school had anything to do with any of my siblings, but they did complicate my relationship with my mom.
That all began to turn around after I had gone off to college, spent a few years teaching in school districts in Houston, and moved back to my hometown to start a new life, which much to my delight included first one, then two, then three babies I adored. By the time my first was born, six of his seven cousins were at least 7 years older, and the seventh lived a good 3 hours away. That meant that if Mother wanted to have any convenient babies to hug on, mine were the available ones.
And they adored her. All of the older cousins had called her Grandmother Chris, carefully following their mothers' instruction. Mother never said anything to me about that except to tell meher own mother had become our Nana when an older cousin had been unable to pronounce "grandmother." But when my oldest trooped into her apartment one day and brightly said, "Hi, Mo!" he absolutely stole her heart.
For all those years that I had frustrated her by being the nonconformist, the one who didn't play by the rulebook, the one who didn't measure up, I finally had her attention: my own refusal or inability or whatever it was to conform and to make my children conform meant that 13 years after she had become a grandmother, Mother finally had her very own "grandmother" name. In fact, when the older cousins heard my kids calling her Mo, they immediately announced that they had always wanted a pet name for her, and several of them picked up Mo immediately.
For the next 10 years, I found myself often relying on her to lend a hand when I needed help with the kids, and I made a point to take them to play at her apartment as often as I could. When the last baby was only a few months old, I slipped on our stairs and broke my right ankle, rendering myself unable to drive; the first person I called for help in collecting the kids and myself from work and school was my Mother, and just as I anticipated, she was delighted to volunteer to help me out. She was working for the nearby university at the time and I was teaching school, but we quickly worked out a plan that allowed her to work until 5, drive to the school to pick me up, and then get to the day care center in time to pick up the kids before closing. More often than not, she would circle the drive-through at the local McDonald's to grab burgers or chicken nuggets for the boys and keep me from having to cook for them when we got home.
I can't imagine what I did to thank her for all of that, but whatever it was, I'm sure it wasn't enough. How could I have guessed then that being stuck at school until 5 would teach me to organize my time to finish work at work and have time at home for my family? How could I have said enough that I couldn't have done it without her?
Over the years that followed, the kids learned to love going to "Mo's house" as much as I had enjoyed spending time with my own Nana when I was a child. They quickly learned where she stored puzzles and books and games, and they'd race into the game cabinet, dump puzzle pieces all over her floor, and climb up in her lap for reading after reading of The Little Engine That Could and every other Little Golden Book in her collection. Mother would giggle as my girl would patiently guide her next older brother to "turn it and turn it" to get puzzle pieces to fit, and she loved their stream of stories about daily life at "school."
Mother's hearing never got so weak as to miss the sound of their childish voices, so she always appeared to be listening to them as closely as she really was. Before long, they began to realize that they could count on Mo to be completely attentive to them during the hours they spent at her house (or she spent at ours during occasional stretches when she helped me over other hurdles).
They loved their other grandmother, and they knew they could count on her for wonderful adventures and new clothes and toys and all kinds of spoiling they recognized as meaningful, but as long as Mo was alive, they felt much closer to her not only because of her proximity (a few minutes rather than several hours away), but also because she could hear them and always listened. While their other grandmother often gave them things that were out of my price range, they recognized that the time and attention my mother gave them was more than money could buy.
Not surprisingly, I soon developed a habit of picking up the phone whenever the kids said or did anything I thought was funny, and I knew she'd laugh when she heard even the silliest story. In the immediate flurry of cleaning her apartment, surviving her funeral, and reorganizing life to face the days without her, I knew those phone calls were over, but more than once over the next several weeks, I found myself reaching for the phone with a smile on my face because I had something I needed to share with her right now.
Sometimes I still wish I could. My oldest has just moved back home to try to carve out a new lease on his life, the middle child is biding time with part-time jobs until his full-time hitch in the Army begins, and the little one calls me time after time to tell me of exciting and wonderful things going on in her life that I know Mother would love to share. For all our rocky beginnings, for the best part of my adulthood I knew that she was proud of me—in fact, I'll never forget the day she said almost exactly those words to me—but what I miss is sharing my little joys with her. I find a modicum of comfort in believing that her spirit hasn't really gone far away from us, and she shares our joys in ways we just can't see.
Shortly before her death I gave her a silly little coffee mug that said "A Mother's Love Is Forever," because I wanted her to know the bond we had finally forged would not end with her death, which we knew by then was near. I slipped the mug away from her apartment when she died, and for some odd reason commissioned it as a toothbrush holder for my bathroom. Certainly its soft pink design and its ordinary style wouldn't make it a striking addition to my kitchen ware, and I've often thought that filling it with a warm cup of tea or hot vanilla milk would be a more respectful way to use it. But somehow it fits there in the cabinet in my bathroom, and that warm reminder of forever comes back to me every day.
And so here in the days before her birthday, I remember her fondly. And I realize that all these years between us have continued to draw us together, and I still miss my mom.
Our relationship was often rocky, especially for all the years from my earliest real memories until my kids were old enough to appreciate her. I often heard, with a sigh, that she wished I were more like my sisters—the older, gregarious, energetic one (who apparently always made straight As in school) or the younger, quieter, more feminine one (who also apparently always made straight As. Which I didn't).
Mother often referred to the older one as the squeaky wheel—the one who continually demanded and usually got attention. Big Sis never lacked for friends and seems in her middle 60s to have twice the energy I had at my best. She was an active member of the church's Girls Auxiliary and a Girl Scout, where she probably reveled in the advantages of being the leader's daughter. She always seemed to be surrounded by friends, and Mother reminded me regularly that Big Sis never sat at home on a Friday night, and Big Sis didn't have to be in the pep squad to go to all of the football games, and so what if I was editor of the school paper—Big Sis had been head of advertising for the school yearbook.
Big Sis always made good grades, and Big Sis trained to be a nurse—apparently the apex of achievement in Mother's eyes at a time when "women's jobs" were pretty much limited to nursing, teaching, and secretarial work. I often just assumed that Big Sis could do no wrong. And when I found myself off at college and grabbing a moment now and again to write home, I was pretty sure Mother was muttering under her breath that Big Sis still never missed her weekly letter . What could I say? Even today I'm pretty sure Big Sis never sleeps.
Because all of her energy and all the good I see her do, I've always felt lucky to call her my sister, but for most of my youth I was pretty sure I could just never measure up. I even convinced myself for a while that I wanted to be a nurse so I could be more like her, until I finally realized that medicine was not the road for me. But even that led me to respect and appreciate her more.
I was closer in age by 4 years to Middle Sis, who was in many ways different from Big Sis. Middle Sis always seemed to have friends, but they were fewer and quieter than those of Big Sis. Middle Sis dropped out of Girl Scouts by junior high school because she really had no interest in being outdoors (which makes it all the funnier that all three of her grown-up kids love camping). She was the one who went from tap and ballet (all the way to toe dancing! How impressed I was!) to school choir (one love she shared with Big Sis) to charm school.
Active in Sunday evening church groups from the time she started junior high school, Middle Sis met her future husband there when she was 14, married him before she turned 18, and has had a marriage I have longed for for most of its 44 years. If Mother ever groused about Middle Sis, it was usually that she always had her nose in a book, which was probably part of why she always made great grades in school—and managed to graduate from high school a year early. But Mother often muttered that Middle Sis never had trouble with school and always had a date on Saturday night, so why was I always sitting at home?
If we were Catholic I'm pretty sure Middle Sis would be eligible for sainthood, and I'm pleased for her that she eventually realized her childhood dream of becoming an English teacher, even though she had to get her own kids most of the way through public schools before she even got a shot at it. She spent a lot of my teenage years listening to me whine about Mother, and I wouldn't be surprised if she spent a lot of that time listening to Mother whine about me. Sainthood might not be good enough.
I never had to worry about being compared to Big Brother. Although his school years ended well before educators started to define and treat learning disabilities, he was clearly learning disabled; his first grade teacher spanked him daily for not being able to read. As a result, his grades were poor to bad most of the way to school, and he wound up repeating at least one grade in elementary school and ultimately earning a GED instead of a regular diploma.
In spite of his learning obstacles, Big Brother could take apart and put together nearly anything, and he spent hours in high school memorizing line after line of Shakespeare. He was generally at least outwardly happy-go-lucky, perfectly happy to spend hour after hour alone in a room that was more often than not an impassable pigpen. He fiddled, he doodled, he taught himself to build and rebuild, and he nurtured a sense of humor and creativity that eventually emerged as a sort of genius that endeared him to nearly everyone who got to know him.
But except for a successful if not distinguished tour of duty in the US Navy, Big Brother did little to hold up as a role model, and while I'm sure Mother was perplexed for years because he was "different" and she was uncomfortable with "differences," he was the last of us she asked to see before she died; I often think she held on those last few hours exactly because she needed to be sure he was safe one more time.
So for many years I just never seemed to measure up for Mother. I was a Girl Scout and became possibly the first aide ever to work exclusively in a specific camper unit at our local day camp, but that couldn't possibly have ever measured up to Big Sis's trip to a national Girl Scout Roundup. I begged to be allowed to take band, but that was nixed because Big Brother had been a failure there; Mother insisted I should be taking choir, even though I had been politely dismissed (and invited never to come back) in fifth grade because it was obvious that I was unavoidably, hopelessly tone deaf; I still can't begin to carry a tune.
My grades were never extraordinary, starting from sixth grade when my math teacher spent the whole year calling me by Big Brother's name (all the more perplexing if you know that he was tall, thin, and dark, and I was short, squat, and blonde) and giving me a final grade much more reminiscent of his than of either of my sisters'. None of my problems in school had anything to do with any of my siblings, but they did complicate my relationship with my mom.
That all began to turn around after I had gone off to college, spent a few years teaching in school districts in Houston, and moved back to my hometown to start a new life, which much to my delight included first one, then two, then three babies I adored. By the time my first was born, six of his seven cousins were at least 7 years older, and the seventh lived a good 3 hours away. That meant that if Mother wanted to have any convenient babies to hug on, mine were the available ones.
And they adored her. All of the older cousins had called her Grandmother Chris, carefully following their mothers' instruction. Mother never said anything to me about that except to tell meher own mother had become our Nana when an older cousin had been unable to pronounce "grandmother." But when my oldest trooped into her apartment one day and brightly said, "Hi, Mo!" he absolutely stole her heart.
For all those years that I had frustrated her by being the nonconformist, the one who didn't play by the rulebook, the one who didn't measure up, I finally had her attention: my own refusal or inability or whatever it was to conform and to make my children conform meant that 13 years after she had become a grandmother, Mother finally had her very own "grandmother" name. In fact, when the older cousins heard my kids calling her Mo, they immediately announced that they had always wanted a pet name for her, and several of them picked up Mo immediately.
For the next 10 years, I found myself often relying on her to lend a hand when I needed help with the kids, and I made a point to take them to play at her apartment as often as I could. When the last baby was only a few months old, I slipped on our stairs and broke my right ankle, rendering myself unable to drive; the first person I called for help in collecting the kids and myself from work and school was my Mother, and just as I anticipated, she was delighted to volunteer to help me out. She was working for the nearby university at the time and I was teaching school, but we quickly worked out a plan that allowed her to work until 5, drive to the school to pick me up, and then get to the day care center in time to pick up the kids before closing. More often than not, she would circle the drive-through at the local McDonald's to grab burgers or chicken nuggets for the boys and keep me from having to cook for them when we got home.
I can't imagine what I did to thank her for all of that, but whatever it was, I'm sure it wasn't enough. How could I have guessed then that being stuck at school until 5 would teach me to organize my time to finish work at work and have time at home for my family? How could I have said enough that I couldn't have done it without her?
Over the years that followed, the kids learned to love going to "Mo's house" as much as I had enjoyed spending time with my own Nana when I was a child. They quickly learned where she stored puzzles and books and games, and they'd race into the game cabinet, dump puzzle pieces all over her floor, and climb up in her lap for reading after reading of The Little Engine That Could and every other Little Golden Book in her collection. Mother would giggle as my girl would patiently guide her next older brother to "turn it and turn it" to get puzzle pieces to fit, and she loved their stream of stories about daily life at "school."
Mother's hearing never got so weak as to miss the sound of their childish voices, so she always appeared to be listening to them as closely as she really was. Before long, they began to realize that they could count on Mo to be completely attentive to them during the hours they spent at her house (or she spent at ours during occasional stretches when she helped me over other hurdles).
They loved their other grandmother, and they knew they could count on her for wonderful adventures and new clothes and toys and all kinds of spoiling they recognized as meaningful, but as long as Mo was alive, they felt much closer to her not only because of her proximity (a few minutes rather than several hours away), but also because she could hear them and always listened. While their other grandmother often gave them things that were out of my price range, they recognized that the time and attention my mother gave them was more than money could buy.
Not surprisingly, I soon developed a habit of picking up the phone whenever the kids said or did anything I thought was funny, and I knew she'd laugh when she heard even the silliest story. In the immediate flurry of cleaning her apartment, surviving her funeral, and reorganizing life to face the days without her, I knew those phone calls were over, but more than once over the next several weeks, I found myself reaching for the phone with a smile on my face because I had something I needed to share with her right now.
Sometimes I still wish I could. My oldest has just moved back home to try to carve out a new lease on his life, the middle child is biding time with part-time jobs until his full-time hitch in the Army begins, and the little one calls me time after time to tell me of exciting and wonderful things going on in her life that I know Mother would love to share. For all our rocky beginnings, for the best part of my adulthood I knew that she was proud of me—in fact, I'll never forget the day she said almost exactly those words to me—but what I miss is sharing my little joys with her. I find a modicum of comfort in believing that her spirit hasn't really gone far away from us, and she shares our joys in ways we just can't see.
Shortly before her death I gave her a silly little coffee mug that said "A Mother's Love Is Forever," because I wanted her to know the bond we had finally forged would not end with her death, which we knew by then was near. I slipped the mug away from her apartment when she died, and for some odd reason commissioned it as a toothbrush holder for my bathroom. Certainly its soft pink design and its ordinary style wouldn't make it a striking addition to my kitchen ware, and I've often thought that filling it with a warm cup of tea or hot vanilla milk would be a more respectful way to use it. But somehow it fits there in the cabinet in my bathroom, and that warm reminder of forever comes back to me every day.
And so here in the days before her birthday, I remember her fondly. And I realize that all these years between us have continued to draw us together, and I still miss my mom.
Gobsmacked!
I think I first collided with the word "gobsmacked" several years ago when a friend of mine introduced me to Stephanie Kinsela's Shopaholic series, where the very British heroine used the word from time to time to mean she was completely taken aback. I thought it was pretty cool then, and I thought it was about the only "right" word to describe my encounter with a rather unusual new student in my office a couple of days ago.
With the age of my brain cells, I don't recall perfectly everything he said that sent me reeling, but I do remember seeing a tall, thin, dark young man whom I immediately assumed to be one of our graduate students—probably from India, judging from his looks but not so much from his voice, which was smooth, cool, and deep and accented in a way I couldn't quite peg, even after 16 years in a widely diverse engineering department.
I was finishing up an email to somebody when he materialized in my door. When I nodded him in, he strolled near my desk, ran his eyes pensively around the room and up and down the collection of old name tags hanging on my bulletin board and announced, "I can tell from your office that you've been here a long time." Well, yes, in the department for almost 17 years and in this office for probably 5 of those—and with plenty of clutter to attest to that.
"The model?" he asked. My daughter, who isn't really a model although she was trained as one. Her latest adventure is a job in a strip joint.
"And you don't care what people think of you." It wasn't a question but a statement, and it startled me off the train of thought on the email I was writing—which is pretty unusual for me. I couldn't help but laugh as I asked, "You can tell that because my office is a dump?"
"Well, yes, because your office is a dump," he nodded, "but also because you don't mind telling people your daughter is working in a strip joint." Okay, she's not actually stripping at the strip joint; she's a professional lighting designer, and she's designing and hanging the new lighting for a club that is reopening after having been closed for a couple of years. She makes a good deal more money as a lighting specialist than a stripper would, and she's using her profits to finance a helicopter trip through the Grand Canyon that I'd love to be able to share.
A bit more time with this student made me wish he were maybe 20 years older than he admits to being; his resume, which he had come to ask me to edit for him, showed that he entered our undergraduate engineering program with an MBA and several interesting job titles already in his history, and that history was a great deal more unconventional than any I think I've ever encountered. "Nontraditional student" comes to mind immediately, but "nontraditional" just somehow doesn't seem to cover it.
I think part of the fun was that he's not 20 years older, and it was pretty clear that that didn't matter; when a Shakira song came on my radio, he was first surprised that I listen to music not too diverse from what some of the other students might enjoy and second that it was a singer he said would be his first choice if he could pick a chick. That spoke volumes about his interests—I left any hopes of bearing any similarity to Shakira in the dust about 40 years ago!
I don't know whether I was gobsmacked more by the fact that he was as immediately perceptive (and willing to exploit that) as he was, or that he seemed to peg some things about me I didn't realize were so obvious to people. But it was fun to get an impetuous but gentle dose of it!
With the age of my brain cells, I don't recall perfectly everything he said that sent me reeling, but I do remember seeing a tall, thin, dark young man whom I immediately assumed to be one of our graduate students—probably from India, judging from his looks but not so much from his voice, which was smooth, cool, and deep and accented in a way I couldn't quite peg, even after 16 years in a widely diverse engineering department.
I was finishing up an email to somebody when he materialized in my door. When I nodded him in, he strolled near my desk, ran his eyes pensively around the room and up and down the collection of old name tags hanging on my bulletin board and announced, "I can tell from your office that you've been here a long time." Well, yes, in the department for almost 17 years and in this office for probably 5 of those—and with plenty of clutter to attest to that.
"The model?" he asked. My daughter, who isn't really a model although she was trained as one. Her latest adventure is a job in a strip joint.
"And you don't care what people think of you." It wasn't a question but a statement, and it startled me off the train of thought on the email I was writing—which is pretty unusual for me. I couldn't help but laugh as I asked, "You can tell that because my office is a dump?"
"Well, yes, because your office is a dump," he nodded, "but also because you don't mind telling people your daughter is working in a strip joint." Okay, she's not actually stripping at the strip joint; she's a professional lighting designer, and she's designing and hanging the new lighting for a club that is reopening after having been closed for a couple of years. She makes a good deal more money as a lighting specialist than a stripper would, and she's using her profits to finance a helicopter trip through the Grand Canyon that I'd love to be able to share.
A bit more time with this student made me wish he were maybe 20 years older than he admits to being; his resume, which he had come to ask me to edit for him, showed that he entered our undergraduate engineering program with an MBA and several interesting job titles already in his history, and that history was a great deal more unconventional than any I think I've ever encountered. "Nontraditional student" comes to mind immediately, but "nontraditional" just somehow doesn't seem to cover it.
I think part of the fun was that he's not 20 years older, and it was pretty clear that that didn't matter; when a Shakira song came on my radio, he was first surprised that I listen to music not too diverse from what some of the other students might enjoy and second that it was a singer he said would be his first choice if he could pick a chick. That spoke volumes about his interests—I left any hopes of bearing any similarity to Shakira in the dust about 40 years ago!
I don't know whether I was gobsmacked more by the fact that he was as immediately perceptive (and willing to exploit that) as he was, or that he seemed to peg some things about me I didn't realize were so obvious to people. But it was fun to get an impetuous but gentle dose of it!
Monday, August 24, 2009
So now it's my turn....
I challenged my daughter some time ago to start a blog because, well, she's a pretty neat kid and she has fun things to say. Besides, she sometimes says she wants to write more, and I think blogging is a great way to start honing her skills. (She's good, but she's young.) You can find her now at TxChrysalis.blogspot.com; you'll have to go there to find out what that means.
So I figured I've goofed around long enough that maybe it's okay for me to have a blog, too. The name of this one is from my Chrysalis (not her real name), who watched me struggle to survive a painful divorce with the help of Wayne Dyer's book, Real Magic. When my daughter decided I needed a screen name for instant messaging, she didn't think twice: Real Magic had meant so much to me during those years that she pinned me to realmagicdj. Seems like a logical place to start a blog.
So here it is, with a tip of my hat to my terrific Chrysalis—and a bit of a sense of the silly, to boot!
Cheers!
So I figured I've goofed around long enough that maybe it's okay for me to have a blog, too. The name of this one is from my Chrysalis (not her real name), who watched me struggle to survive a painful divorce with the help of Wayne Dyer's book, Real Magic. When my daughter decided I needed a screen name for instant messaging, she didn't think twice: Real Magic had meant so much to me during those years that she pinned me to realmagicdj. Seems like a logical place to start a blog.
So here it is, with a tip of my hat to my terrific Chrysalis—and a bit of a sense of the silly, to boot!
Cheers!
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