A little early morning music

I lurched out of bed at about 5:15 and into the bathroom to do those necessary things that one must do upon waking in the morning. While I was washing my face and my hands, I suddenly heard music. It was a bright, upbeat jazzy sort of melody of the sort that National Public Radio might play between segments in a program, so I assumed Richard gotten up and turned on the radio. But the music kept on going, so then I assumed he had turned on the computer to live-streaming music, which he sometimes does if the transponder for the NPR station is off the air (which it often is).

When I opened the door the bathroom, he was standing there waiting for me with a funny look on his face.

Me: Did you turn on the radio?

Him: No. I thought you had suddenly decided to play the keyboard. And I was thinking, wow, you have really gotten good!

Me: No, I wasn’t playing the keyboard. Obviously.

Obviously indeed, because the bright and lively music was still playing.

To my unanswered question he pointed toward “Kitty Prison”...

the section of the house in which we confine the Squeaker kitty at night because she bothers us and where I keep the electronic keyboard I use to practice.

He had just opened the door to let her out. I am not sure how the cat did it... 

because I have not figured out how to do it myself, but she managed to turn the keyboard on (well, I do know how to that), and step on just the right combination of buttons to cause the keyboard to begin playing preprogrammed music in its memory banks.

Not exactly Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, but fun anyway.

Father's Day

No human father has ever been perfect, so I expect just about everybody has a bad memory or too, of their dad, but for some people, being reminded of their father on Father’s Day is like having a sharp thorn thrust through their heart. Some fathers weren't just imperfect humans, but were monstrous and treated their children in ways we would like to imagine couldn’t possibly have happened, but did.

I heard a story yesterday from the man who preached at our church about his father. He came home drunk, opened a jar of pickled pig's feet, and ate all of the meat off the bones. Instead of throwing the bones away, he put them back in the jar, put the lid on, and put the jar back in the cupboard.

The next day he lined his children up and demanded to know who had eaten the pickled pig's feet. None of them had, of course, thus, none of them would admit to having eaten the pig's feet. So, he beat all of them because he knew at least one of them had to be lying.

I am thankful that don't have that sort of story to tell, but I always seem to have trouble finding a good Father’s Day card for my dad, who was not perfect but who was, and still is, the best possible dad a child could have wanted.

I found a very nearly perfect card this year.

The elementary school I attended was within walking distance of our house, and so I walked to school. During those early years, my dad worked part time at a gasoline station and went to the trade-tech school in the evenings to study to become an auto mechanic, and I think after that was done he worked swing shift. In any event, he was home during at least part of the day, and on many mornings, he rode me to school on the handlebars of a bicycle, and when I was too big for that, I sat on the crossbar.

And then I remember quite well one summer afternoon, the local parks and recreation department had a kit-flying contest at one of the nearby parks. My dad and I used the sticks from an old kite to frame and covered it with white tissue paper used to wrap presents. I decorated it with a sponge dipped in paint. We attached a tail and some fishing like and off we went to the park.

I stood in line next to the other children while our  parents stood with their child's kite. At the signal, each parent threw their child’s kite up into the air, and mine took off so fast it beat all of the other kites for that category. My dad never quite “got over” the fact our simple homemade kite had gone up against some very fancy kites and won. I got a certificate “suitable for framing,” which I think I still have stashed way somewhere.

And I am thinking of friends – including my dear cousin, whose father just died a few weeks ago– who are no longer buying Father’s Day cards, and am thankful that most of them can remember their fathers with joy in their hearts, and if not that, at least forgiveness.

The One-Hoss-Shay

One Sunday afternoon, it seems like an eternity ago now, but perhaps it was within the last month, I went to the hospital to visit my friend’s husband, who was recuperating in the ICU the day after the cardiologist had placed a stent in one of his coronary arteries to open a blockage. It wasn’t quite that simple, though. He was supposed to have had the procedure about a week earlier, but they had to cancel that one because another problem had cropped up in the results of the routine lab work the day before, and the cardiologist said they had to get to the bottom of that problem before they could do the stent. So, they had to schedule another diagnostic procedure, and during that test they did indeed discover what could have been contributing to the problem found in the lab work, but then they  found another problem they were not expecting at all which was most certainly life-threatening.

They gave him some blood transfusions and did the stent, and the team of doctors that had been assembled (two family practice doctors, a cardiologist, a general surgeon, an eventually, an oncologist) began collaborating to figure out which thing to treat first and how to do it, and they scheduled him for major abdominal surgery 2 days after the stent procedure to try to fix the second life-threatening problem.

My friend pointed out how much the situation with her husband reminded her of the poem The Deacon’s Masterpiece or The Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay ), written by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the Supreme Court Justice.

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay,

That was built in such a logical way

It ran a hundred years to a day,

And then, of a sudden, it--ah, but stay

I 'll tell you what happened without delay,

Scaring the parson into fits,

Frightening people out of their wits,--

Have you ever heard of that, I say?

The poem goes on to talk about how the Deacon builds his carriage and how long it lasts, going and going and going, and it keeps on going and passes from person to person to person until it comes to its final owner, a Parson. And then, all of sudden and without warning…

First a shiver, and then a thrill,

Then something decidedly like a spill,--

And the parson was sitting upon a rock…

Everything falls apart at once, and it wasn't too much of a leap to see the similarities with my friend's husband.. It was just sort of mind boggling how all of these unfortunate medical things seemed to be happening to this lovely man all at the same time.

The abdominal operation the next day achieved what it set out to do, but there was some trouble getting him home to recuperate until one of the GPs finally came up with a solution to the problem being caused by one of the medications the general surgeon and the cardiologist were squabbling about.

He has started chemotherapy, and now we wait and see.

My friend was there for us when our world began to turn upside down in June 2010. And now here it is, 4 years later, and my friend’s world is now starting to tilt. It is a terrible coincidence. I hope with all my heart that her world rights itself, and that she does not have to go through what we did. I hope that I can be here for her now the way she was for me.

No flowers for Phoebe

This is the day when we honor those who served in the military. And most of the communities in the area have services to do just that. But also part of the tradition of Memorial Day here is decorating the graves of relatives.

We drove to our friend’s house Sunday afternoon for a visit and so Richard could help him with a project in the yard. He is slowly recovering from major abdominal surgery, and lifting large plastic bags of topsoil into a garden cart, pushing/pulling it over to the strawberry bed, and shoveling it on the ground and spreading it around is not on the list of approved activities.

The country road we take to their house passes a cemetery, and by yesterday afternoon just about every grave with a headstone was decorated with at least one brightly colored arrangement of plastic flowers. I found myself thinking back to one of the vacations we took when my mother was still alive, and she decided she wanted to find her “Grandma Phoebe’s” grave.

I remember being rather surprised by this request because visiting graveyards was not something our family did. My mother, for whatever reason, did not want her children at funeral homes or at funeral services. I was 8 years old when Elsie, my mother’s mother died, and I was not taken to the visitation, to the funeral service, or to the cemetery for the burial. My father’s mother died about a year later, and although I do remember looking at her body in the casket at the funeral home, again, I was not taken to the funeral service or to the cemetery for the burial.

And once the relative had died and was buried, my parents’ attitude was that there was no point in going to the cemetery to visit the grave. So that was something we just did not do.

My mother’s mother, Elsie was born in 1886. While she was still very young probably 3 or 4 years old, her mother died, I assume not too long after giving birth to Elsie’s younger sister. She left behind 4 children – 2 boys who were 11 and 8 and the 2 younger girls. Their father was not able to care for his children, so one of the grandparents took the two boys because they could help out on the farm. Elsie was taken in by a childless couple, Warren and Phoebe McDowell, who raised her as their own daughter. I am not sure who raised the other girl.

When Phoebe’s husband died, Elsie and her husband took Phoebe in, and she was living with them when my mother was born. Phoebe became my mother’s “Grandmother” in every way except by “blood.”

National Public Radio had a feature today about how our childhood memories are often memories we have “recreated” from photographs of ourselves at events that we really don’t remember. I have seen a picture of myself with Grandma Phoebe, Elsie, and my mother, and I like to think I remember her, but probably not, because I was very young, about 3 years old, when she died.

So, off we went to the cemetery to find Grandma Phoebe’s grave. Elsie is also buried there. We had to go to the office to locate the graves, and the man behind the counter brought out a map showing approximately where Phoebe had been buried. My uncle had been given money to purchase a headstone for Phoebe’s grave. But he had used the money for something else. There was no headstone. No marker. Nothing to indicate the spot. 

Trying to figure out where Phoebe was buried was quite complicated because there were several other unmarked graves in that row, but eventually, we were fairly confident we found the spot. So, we stood there for a minute looking at the grass-covered gap between the other grave markers. I think my mom was wrestling with the idea of buying a headstone for the grave, but then decided not to. She was the last living person, besides my dad, to have known who Phoebe was or to have had any family-type connection with her, and there would be no point buying a head stone. There were no long-lost relatives on a genealogy quest coming to look for it.

I expect that some flowers were placed on her grave at the time she was buried, but no flowers were placed the day we went, and no flowers were placed there today to honor her memory. I believe Phoebe has a better treasure now. I believe Phoebe began laying it up for herself in heaven the day she put a plate of food in front of a hungry little girl who had wandered into their temporary quarters and almost certainly saved her life. I am so very thankful she did.

That magic moment

Last night when I took the Wogster out for her last squirt of the day, I first noticed the lovely crescent moon sort of surrounded by several bright stars and/or planets in a rather pleasing display and then, down much lower near the ground, the flashing of a firefly, the first one I’ve seen this Spring.

I suddenly realized with some surprise that the next day -- today -- would be the anniversary of our arrival here in 1981 (unless it was May 7, but no matter, close enough). We arrived late in the afternoon, already in a daze with the beauty of this part of the state, but that was only the beginning of what was in store for us later on that evening.

Richard drove the U-haul truck, which contained our stuff, I drove our family car, and my parents had come along in their car, pulling a trailer. It was much too late in the day to begin unloading the truck, and we were all tired anyway. They began to set up the trailer, and we drove to town, before it got too dark, to reconnoiter and figure out where we might sleep ourselves. We came back as it began to get dusky. And then suddenly we heard ourselves oohing and aahing. We did not need a prompter on the sidelines encouraging us. We watched in stunned amazement at the incredible display that began very gradually and then got increasingly intense as the sky darkened. We were surrounded by twinkling fireflies. It was magic. They were everywhere, flashing, rising, and falling and moving in all directions. None of us had ever seen them – our closest experience with what fireflies were had been at the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland, which they had mimicked by stringing small twinkling lights.

A lot has changed here since then. We decided not to continue to brush hog the pastures that surrounded the house and to let everything grow back. And it certainly has. Gradually, over the years, the number of fireflies has diminished; perhaps because of the changes to our land and perhaps for another reason; in any event, there are not that many any more. But there are still a few, and seeing them is still magical …

What happens when a geezerette tries to multi-task?

Things that are supposed to be done don’t quite get done. Sometimes what has failed not to get done is not that important -- the pile of trash that has been swept up is still sitting in the middle of the floor an hour later -- but sometimes there can be “dire consequences” and yelling, or otherwise loud conversations and recriminations might be involved, and one feels as though one is going to loose 10 years off her life.

I am supposed to take my cell phone with me when I leave the house to take the dog for a walk anywhere away from the immediate yard or when I go to town.

On the morning of the aerobics class, this is what I thought had happened: I attached the phone to the waistband of my jeans, checked my computer to see what the new e-mail was about, got the dog ready to go, and then left for the aerobics class.

Before the 30 minutes of low-impact aerobics begins, the routine involves weight lifting, and then about 15 minutes of stretching exercises that I do not like. Instead, I leave from the side door and take the dog for a walk. I have it timed well, and I usually arrive back before the aerobic exercises have started. If it is too hot or too cold for the dog to sit in the car for 30 minutes, then she joins the class (and behaves herself).

The other morning, we had almost finished with the walk when I felt for the mobile phone. It was not there. I did drop the phone once when I was at the post office (and miracle of miracles, someone I go to church with found it and turned it in), and so I am nervous about loosing it.

Not there. I got that “feeling” in the pit my stomach. The phone has about 2,000 prepaid minutes on it.

I went to the exercise room and borrowed Judy’s phone to call Richard and ask him to check to see if my phone was there. He did not answer, so I left a totally incoherent message on the answering machine.

I told Judy that I needed to retrace my steps to make sure the phone had not somehow become detached from the waistband of my jeans and was on the ground somewhere, and she said she was going to come with me.

We talked about various and sundry things as we walked along, and found a glove and a sock and a few other items, but not my phone. I called Richard again, and I left another incoherent message on the answering machine. I figured he had probably decided to take a walk himself.

When we returned to the Y, I promised Judy I would send her an e-mail to tell her the end of the story, picked up the mail at the post office and went home.

And the story had a happy ending. I passed Richard, so I was able to delete the two messages I left on the answering machine before he listened to them.

My phone was not lost. It was sitting next to the computer monitor, where I had put it instead of following through and attaching it to my waistband.

Lessons learned from this escapade: I need to insist that I complete one task before I start another. I used to be able to think about – and do – two different things at once (or at least I thought I was able to). Now, though, I am being reminded more and more that the old gray mare ain’t what she used to be…

May you have an interesting…. flight

Urban legend has it that there is a Chinese curse that goes something like

 “May you live in interesting times…”

I suppose one can look at this from several angles, but what strikes me is that “interesting” can often be very complicated and fraught with adventures that perhaps one would rather not have.

As it happens, one of the three books I took with me to read during a glorious week of no work was Terry Pratchett’s novel...

...which is a delightful tale of the bumbling wizard Rincewind who does indeed find himself in “interesting times” and having all sorts of adventures, as does his Luggage, which has hundreds of little feet and seems to be alive and always seems to be able to find Rincewind no matter where he ends up.

I had an interesting time on the journey home. Of course I was not alone on this adventure, many travelers were also having an adventure right along with me.

Many times we are not bailed out of difficult situations, but instead are given the grace to go through it. In this case, the grace was a lovely woman, Ann, who also happened to be waiting at the gate for the same flight to Dallas-Ft Worth and who was also expecting to board the same plane to Springfield as I was after we got there. Having that little blessing of someone to be with made all the difference in the world as the hours crawled by and the adventure unfolded. 

Enough time has passed now that I can look rather calmly at the first Thursday and Friday in the month of April and be very grateful that everything actually did come out all right in the end, although perhaps being awake for most of 36 hours is a bit harder to do when one is on the far side of 60 than when one is oh, say 20…

All airplanes that take off from Los Angeles International fly out over the ocean and then, depending on their ultimate destination, make a sweeping turn or go straight. Airplanes heading to Dallas-Ft Worth turn left and follow the coast for a while as they gain altitude before completing the U-turn and heading inland over the California desert and then across Arizona, New Mexico, and on into Texas.

The arrival of the plane that was to take us to DFW was delayed about 2 hours because of mechanical problems, and when it finally did arrive and we were all on board the plane, our take off was further delayed because they couldn’t get the door to shut properly. But, once we were in the air, and everyone breathing a sigh of relief, I had an opportunity to watch the coastline pass by and remember with lovely nostalgia the Saturdays my father took us and our friends to the beach during the summer. 

 And then the plane was passing the harbor complex at San Pedro, where Dad loved to take us to watch boats being unloaded and sometimes to tour ships that were docked, and where I had just taken him a few days before. 

Ann and I calculated the plane should arrive in D-FW in time for us to make the new connection to the later flight to Springfield that we had rebooked at LAX. But the weather conspired against us. Severe storms over D-FW meant we had to turn around and land in Lubbock and spend 2 hours on the ground. By the time we got to D-FW, all of the connecting flights had been cancelled. The airline had rebooked both of us on flights to Springfield later the next day, but we put ourselves on the standby list for the first flight to Springfield Friday morning.

We ate, got some blankets that the airport provided (the cots were all gone by this time), and found some lounge chairs and put them together and made beds for ourselves and pretended to doze through the night, but of course neither of us slept much at all.

The following morning, we were high enough up on the standby list that we both got on the first flight to Springfield. I was not very hopeful that my luggage would arrive with me. My luggage does not have hundreds of little legs and cannot follow me, but much to my amazement, the airline had indeed managed to get it on the same plane as I was, and there it was. I had to wait a while for Richard to arrive -- it takes longer to drive from our house to the airport in Springfield than it does for the plane to fly from D-FW to Springfield, but that was OK. I was safe, my luggage was safe, and my honey was coming.

My sister will probably plan a party for my dad’s 90th birthday in the fall. There is no question but that I will go So, I’ll have a few months to become very philosophical about what might or might not happen when I hop on the airplane for that event.

Goin’ to the chapel… The earth moved under our feet… I can see clearly now…

Funny how it seems too easy to use song lyrics to summarize events, but sometimes it just works…

The initial reason I went to Los Angeles for a week was to attend her wedding at the end of March.

She is my brother’s daughter, and the last grandchild to get married. This will very likely be the last wedding in my immediate family for quite a long time. It was indeed a very special and very happy occasion.

Often parents sit horrified as they watch their child go through a ceremony that will officially begin a relationship with someone they view as the worst possible choice in a partner.

No one was worried that the girl would make a bad choice. She had very high standards. In fact, when my mother was alive, she worried the girl would not be able to find the right man to be her husband, but my mother was wrong. She has found a wonderful man.

Her mother and father are delighted.

We are all delighted

It was an evening wedding, and they had a simple dessert reception rather than a meal. It was quite fun…

...especially a few minutes after 9 p.m., when an earthquake hit on a fault not that far from the venue. It was one of those rolling type of quakes that seemed to last for quite a while, and almost immediately people were heard singing the opening lyrics to the Carole King song. The earth did indeed move under our feet.

The only noticeable change at my Dad’s house was that the quake had stopped the pendulum in the grandfather clock in the living room, so we knew exactly when the quake occurred.

And then unplanned, but coinciding providentially with my trip, the ophthalmologist who takes care of my father decided that the cataract in the eye in which he still has some vision (he is blind in one eye) would be removed a few days after the wedding. The eye drops (two different kinds, four times a day) needed to be started 3 days before the operation, so I was there to supervise that and to help take care of him after the operation, when he then had to put in three different eye drops four times a day.

My younger brother drove us to the hospital, and when we saw the other patients who were having cataracts removed that day (the doctor schedules all of these operations on the same day) coming out of the surgery with gauze pads over their eye, we were a bit concerned. It would not do at all for our father to have his good eye covered, which would basically leave him blind. But we needn’t have worried. The doctor put a clear cup over the eye.

That evening my sister and my other brother, the father of the bride (who brought his dog Rosie), came to see how Dad was doing, and we hung out in the den watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. We always guess what color dress will Vanna White will be wearing. We all guessed wrong.

My sister worked on my Dad’s toenails, which were in dire need of being trimmed (I didn’t realize how hard it is for elderly folk to trim their toenails), and he got to love-on Rosie a little bit.

The next morning when my dad got up and sat down to watch the morning news, the first words out of his mouth were “Wow, this is great. It is really clear!”

I started to get a little angry. Why did they wait until the man was 89 years old to do this? Why didn’t they do this much earlier, before the cataract got so big? Well, no point in getting worked up about it. The fact that he can see clearly now after who knows how many years in the fog is indeed a blessing.

I'll do it myself...

Years ago, when his sisters came with their children to visit Pater (which is what they called their father), my dad had a knack for entertaining his nieces and nephews by making funny faces.

I was very happy, when I saw him at the end of March, that he was feeling lively enough to give me an encore performance when I began taking his picture.

 It brought back many wonderful memories of boisterous gatherings in the living room with aunts and cousins laughing at his antics.

And on this particular morning, as he does on most mornings, he begins by eating a bowl of homemade yogurt, which he makes himself and has done for probably 30 years or more,  topped with a variety of fresh (bananas), canned (pineapple), and stewed (prunes) fruit. Nearly every day he also eats eggs and bacon, which he has cooked himself and has done since my earliest memories of him. He has no sign of cardiovascular disease. Go figure.

On this particular morning, I watch as he struggles to open a can of pineapple with a hand-operated can opener – the sort that you clamp down on the can and then turn the knob. He will be having cataract surgery in a few days, and I expect his difficulty is partly because he can’t see too well.

Would you like me to help?

Nah. I can get this, he says.

I restrain myself from grabbing the can and the can opener and leave the kitchen to do some cleanup in the bathroom.

When I return, he has indeed opened the can the old-fashioned way, the way they used to do it, before the second-generation of can openers was invented. He has used a “church key” to punch holes around the edge and has grabbed pliers from the junk drawer to pull up the lid enough to shake out the pineapple. He has managed to do this without cutting himself. Whew!

I understand how important it is not to try to take over doing the few things that he is still able to do for himself. My sister suggested that I not leap up to do the dishes after breakfast. Let him take care of it, she says. So I don't. I also leave the drainer full of air-dried dishes so that he can put them away himself. In the first few days of cleaning up after myself, I put a few things away where they did not belong. He has come behind me and rearranged the knives in the knife holder, and I have put the containers that are used for leftovers in the wrong spot.

We made some major mistakes in trying to control what Richard’s father did when he came to live with us. I don’t see my father very often, but I am determined not to make similar mistakes when I do.

Little cat feet....

The dog’s sharp claws make a staccato tattoo on the asphalt as she trots briskly ahead of me. The Flexi Leash is almost fully extended. She is able to sense how much tension is on the thin cable that connects her to me, and if I walk faster to catch up with her, she just speeds up even faster. On the few occasions when I have launched myself into a jog to see if I can draw up even to her, she has shifted into a gallop to make sure I don’t.

She often needs to be persuaded that she is not the leader of the pack.

I have given up trying to count the number of steps she makes to one of my steps. I can’t manage two counts at the same time, which I suppose is a good thing, otherwise I’d focus on counting steps instead of thinking about more important things, like rehearsing what I am going to say the next time I teach Sunday School... writing lead sentences for blog posts that never seem to get written...  

This morning a heavy fog has settled like shroud over the hills and hollars of the route we walk. I am reminded of the Carl Sandburg poem

The fog comes   
on little cat feet.   
 
It sits looking   
over harbor and city   
on silent haunches
and then moves on

The sun appears briefly as a pale, white disk. I can look directly at it, and then the mist swirls and it is gone again.

We walk around the pond just about every day. And today, for the first time, I notice a Red-winged blackbird...



arrived back from wherever he has spent the winter, flying into the large tree near the water’s edge. Its bright red epaulets flash briefly, and then it begins to sing.

It is supposed to be 70 degrees today, so although it is a bit chilly right now, there is no need for the knit cap, the ski mask, heavy winter coat, or the gloves.

The crocus have appeared...

their sweet lavender and yellow flowers pushing up through the leaf litter.

Spring is arriving, much like the fog on its cat feet… not quite as silently though, the birds make sure of that, but no one is quite ready to believe the winter is truly over.