Morning in America

Before I go to bed, one more word to two more little girls:

Sweethearts, go get that puppy!!!



Grammy, Nan, Daddy, Phyllis, Barb: I wish you were here to see this with all my heart, I do.

Between the lines

The broad supermarket windows are papered over with Halloween coloring-contest entries, and while the clerk bags my spinach, EggBeaters, bagel, frozen yogurt, I listen to several little kids bouncing up and down in front of the display and claiming their own handiwork. "That's mine," one girl says, glowing. "Ten years old," she emphasizes, underscoring a talent she hopes we realize is beyond her years, and when I collect my groceries and go over to look, I see that she has written the same next to her name on the form. Maddy! 10 years old! Maddy has embellished the line drawing of trick-or-treaters further by inscribing one of their plain paper bags with "BOO!" and some possibly bat-like squiggles in dark-green felt-tip. And time obligingly collapses, thirty years accordioning down so that for a second I can feel it too: that pride and validation, the fifteen minutes of fame that come from seeing your careful crayoned submission scotch-taped above the rack of Presto Logs and the food-drive barrel.

Outside half a dozen kids are swarming over the hay-bale corral of pumpkins in front of the store, selecting the perfect victim for a jack-o-lantern. I glance at them and one of their weary dads looks so much like my uncle that I do a double-take right there in the parking lot, almost speak to him before realizing, stupidly, that no, he looks three decades older than that nowadays, and don't we all. It's his birthday today, and my mother's too. Happy birthday, Unc. Happy birthday, Mom.

Grilled

I went to a barbeque this evening; there haven't really been enough of those, this summer, with the warm sunny days only really arriving in late June. It was a birthday dinner, actually, thrown by DerDer for her brother; we sat in the backyard under the grape arbor and had planked salmon and crab cakes and a shrimp boil and really cheap beer. Chocolate mousse cake for dessert.

And it was a pleasure, to sit around the table with people I've known since I was four years old, and people I've known since high school. We are scattered through each other's childhood photos, birthday parties and trips to camp...and then I periodically bump into DerDer's husband in the cafeteria at work. We sat around the table peeling shrimp, accidentally knocking over each other's beer bottles when the table wobbled in the grass, passing the baby around. DerDer has two boys, now, and after the meal we retreated to the basement playroom and shared a massive flashback over the treasure trove of classic Fisher Price toys she's been picking up at yard sales and on eBay. The parking garage! The houseboat! The airport! The little blue house with its working doorbell! It is possible that we were more invested in arranging the wee plastic cars and chairs and round-headed peg people than were her little boys, perhaps.

It was fun. I laughed a lot and got slightly buzzed on Pabst Blue Ribbon, and snorfled kisses into the baby's neck before I left. And then, strangely, I felt, I feel...bereft. I have had this experience a lot this summer, where I am surrounded by old friends and their kids, now, watching the next generation tumble around on the lawn, and it is wonderful and then I get in my quiet, solitary car and the silence is worse than deafening. I sing with the radio, I always have...but lately it is not enough to drown out that quiet. I am used to being alone, but I am feeling it differently now.

I don't know. I've started this fourth paragraph three different times already, trying out different thoughts and summary statements. But maybe, for this, there isn't one. Not tonight, I guess.

Madeleine

About Kai in that grocery cart: when he decided he wanted me to drive, I accepted the assignment with the appropriate degree of reckless irresponsibility that befits a Fun Auntie. We slalomed--if slowly--through the aisles of King's Market, me making tire-squealing noises as we veered around corners in search of tortilla chips and chicken breasts. I took advantage of the wider space in front of the bakery department to do a couple donuts (no pun intended). Auntie Him was a hit!

Kai laughed as I spun the cart around, lolling in the child seat and playing idly with my hands where I gripped the push bar. I was making random funny noises while he squeezed my fingers in his own...and then suddenly there was my dad, a memory opening up in me as easily as a door, something I hadn't thought of in probably 35 years: a game he used to play, with me when I was tiny, tiny.

Dad would hold up his hand, fingers outspread, and let me squeeze each of his fingers in turn. He'd assigned a goofy sound effect to each digit, so that I would grab onto his hand and he would emit a wacko symphony of noises accordingly. The sounds, from thumb to pinky, were as follows: hooonk; beeeeep; toooot; whistle--all of these the words themselves, spoken onomatopoetically--and, for the pinky, zzzzzzzzzzz! This last was accompanied by a swift tickle in the ribs, which was a thrilling menace. You wanted to avoid that pinky! I'd honk away on Dad's thick, calloused fingers with my own, prolonging the hilarity and the ridiculous tune we were crafting together, before finally succumbing to the inevitable zzzzzzzzzz! right in the belly or armpit. Oh my God, Dad. Dad. Dad.

So I stood there in the grocery store openmouthed, the recollection thrown over me like a blanket, or a bucket of water. I had no idea I possessed this memory still, but suddenly there it was, my dad as real to me as if he was right there. I could see him, could see us, sitting in an orange vinyl booth at the Pancake Haus. I could smell him, the scents of my earliest memories of him: always, always Wrigley's Doublemint Gum and a freshly lit cigarette (though in truth he quit smoking 25 years ago). There was Dad, blowing the paper wrappers off of drinking straws. There was Dad, holding up his hand like a cornball instrument and letting me squeeze his fingers.

So Kai, I owe you one. You gave me back something I had no idea was even there, as if you'd put a little glowing pebble in my hand, something stashed deep away when I was no older than you are now. I won't forget it again. Thank you for that, buddy.

Auntie Him

Something I didn't write about, during my hiatus: Holly, Andreas and little Kai visited Seattle in June, and raced desperately all over the Pacific Northwest trying to spend quality time with at least a dozen friends and relatives, all while passing a stomach virus around (though, luckily for the rest of us, they kept that bug contained to the immediate family, poor things). Anyway. I'm ashamed to admit that this was the first time I'd met Kai; I'd been to visit Holly and Andreas in Munich, but before my fake nephew was yet a gleam in his parents' eyes. I have scores of pictures, and we'd had a few drastically limited telephone conversations--he sang me a particularly zealous rendition of "Happy Birthday" in December--but he's nearly three years old and I only just clapped eyes on the child last month.

We had fun, though. I got to spend a few days with the family, plus Holly's mother, in Roche Harbor. It turned out that a two-year-old's ideal vacation was just about the speed I needed: get up, have some toast, blow bubbles, throw rocks in the water, take a nap. Repeat. After sizing me up for a bit, Kai decided I was acceptably cool and began including me in his list of decreed privileges, like sitting next to him at dinner, or extracting him from his carseat. One funny thing, though--I'm not sure if it was pronoun trouble, or the German/English language barrier, or perhaps just a quirk of pronunciation over my name...but a few times during our visit, Kai referred to me as him. "Noooo, HIIIIIIIIIMMMMM," he would say, pointing furiously to indicate that I and only I should push him in the grocery cart.

It made me laugh. It still does. Kai, I will gladly be your Auntie Him for as long as you like, and beyond. And then remind you of this when you are old enough to find it embarrassing.

Death, take a holiday, fer chrissakes

I know, it's been too long. I'm sorry, Interweb friends, and I am so grateful to you, too: you have all been sweet and thoughtful and indescribably kind...and patient while I tried to get my head back in the game. I've written a lot, actually, in recent weeks--drafts and scribbles, much of it longhand, none of it quite fit for public consumption. But suddenly it is July, and so I thought I'd give myself a goal. It seems that NaBloPoMo is a year-round endeavor these days; you can pick a page of the calendar at will, and I chose this one. Thirty-one posts, a daily flexing of the writerly muscles! Good for me, like vitamins and ab crunches (neither of which I have been committed to lately).

But the big karmic boot was not done stepping on me and mine, yet. Yesterday morning, my aunt PJ, Mom's older sister, succumbed to a swift and wicked pancreatic cancer. She went to the doctor complaining of a backache and jaundice; she was diagnosed about a week after my dad died, and bounced from ER to rehab center and back for a month. She never made it back home, even, and I don't have any more eloquent words for that particular denoument than to say that it fucking sucks. It is the complete shits, and I honestly don't know, can't fathom what lesson I might be supposed to learn from this, from the last six weeks of the Shit Train Express. Unless it is, simply, that Warren Zevon was right: enjoy every sandwich. You damn well better, hadn't you?

The optional theme, for July's NaBloPoMo, is "Food." Well, there you have it: run, don't walk, and make yourself a fried-baloney-on-white, or a PB&J, or an egg over easy, mashed between a couple of toaster waffles. Or, hell, a huge obscene Dagwood hoagie, folks, because damn, it is a short trip. Even the long trips are.

* * * * *
I don't want to end on a totally black note. Instead, I'll share PJ's 15 minutes of childhood fame. After WWII, my grandfather, her dad, was stationed at the local Sand Point NAS (now decommissioned and a park, where things like the Friends of the Library book sale are held). For Christmas, 1950, they flew Santa in to the base on a Navy PBY Catalina, "specially painted"--though to look like what, it's hard to say--a reindeer? At any rate, for some reason my aunt was chosen to be Santa's first guest; she made the back cover of the December 1950 Naval Aviation News. She's about six, here:

I love how unperturbed she is, held aloft by Santa Claus astride a bomber. In the full-size version, there's a glimmer of tooth in her smile, and a visible gap where more teeth are pending. Every page of the magazine says "Restricted," top and bottom; on the front cover, beneath a cartoon of another Santa hitching a ride on another military aircraft, a subdued but direct headline in small type mentions "Warfare in Korea." But this picture takes up the entire back page, bigger and brighter, its "XMAS GREETINGS" dominant. This little girl is looking forward no further than Christmas...certainly not as impossibly far ahead as 60 years on. In this moment, she's anticipating only the very best things: toys, sugarplums. Would that we all could stay suspended in that kind of jolly bubble, for just a minute or an hour or half a century longer.

A very Pagooey Chrismukkwanzukkas!

Hey everybody, it's time for Pagooey Holiday Dinner Bingo! Can also be played as a drinking game. Make yourself a card and play along, at our home or yours!

--Get mustard on festive holiday shirt: 2 points
--Arrive wearing footie pajamas: 5 points
--If you are more than two months old and arrive in footie jammies: -3 points
--Cookie wears her shiny gold pants: 5 points all
--Lob dinner roll across table like softball: 2 points
--Successfully intercept thrown roll: 5 points
--Heckle vegetarian attendee with slab of corned beef: 3 points
--Make derisive reference to my failed bacon-wrapped breadsticks/burnt offering hors d'oeuvre mishap from '02: 3 points, and for the love of little apples I AM SORRY, DAMN
--Whose wineglass is this? Oh well, it's yours now: 10 points
--Bust in on someone in the hall bathroom: 4 points
--Get busted in on, in the bathroom: 8 points, and somebody really needs to fix that lock, seriously
--Put on Stan Boreson Christmas album: 5 points
--Switch allegiances in the mashed potatoes/mashed rutabagas--combine or segregate? debate, to venomous outcry from both camps: 3 points
--Slide down iced-over back steps on ass while carrying out recycling: 6 points (warning: you will be required to repeat this story multiple times throughout evening, and lose a point with each telling)
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Busted for surreptitiously texting at dinner table: -5 points
--Whose wineglass is this? Whatever: 10 points
--Salsa dance with baby: 5 points
--Put on Dean Martin Christmas album: 5 points
--Perform "Dance of the Stepped-On Brio Train Set" in breakfast nook: 7 points
--Poppy has giggle fit easily mistaken for cardiac event: 5 points all
--Lie on floor, sporting two pieces of Hanukkah gelt like the coins on a dead man's eyes: 5 points
--Put on Otis Redding's Greatest Hits: 9 points
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Baby vomits copiously on Mr. Sis: 10 points to Mr. Sis, who made sure to keep a six-foot perimeter between himself and all children for the duration of the evening to prevent a repeat of such occurrence; hence, 5 points also to the baby, for difficulty
--Hide Mom's purse, for old times' sake: 5 points; an additional 1 point shall accrue for each five minutes' duration of her search
--Get a little weepy in kitchen, but only because you love these people SO MUCH: 7 points
--Suggest going to midnight mass: 6 points
--Actually make it to midnight mass any Christmas in previous decade: 30 points
--Change into footie pajamas before departure: 5 points
--If you are over the age of four and change into footie pajamas before departure: -3 points
--Get poured into cab or otherwise require services of a designated driver: 10 points
--Hope drool on your sweater is from baby: 2 points

I hope you and yours had as much fun as me and mine. Merry Happy Everything to one and all!

Easy, breezy, beautiful

Because an excess of junk in the trunk is the least of my problems, I've also had a bit of a blemish situation this week. (Bring on the chocolate-covered pretzels.) Sis, ever helpful, has alternately suggested that I have impetigo, or the flesh-eating bacteria--just like the gals on America's Next Top Model! While furtively searching the Intarweb for various and sundry dermal horrors, I was suddenly visited by another fond memory of our late friend Barb.

As a doctor, Barb was on a number of intriguing mailing lists. Assorted drug-manufacturer swag poured in to her home and office on a daily basis--free samples, or little notepads that posed sympathetic, rhetorical questions like "DIARRHEA?" across the top. One set of lapel buttons featured photographs of assorted people grimacing in agony, their distorted features a rictus of headache pain; she gave those to me and I still have 'em. In addition to all these goodies, Barb received her share of esoteric medical journals. A standout among these was Cutis magazine--a journal of skin disorders. Every month, this thing would show up without so much as a plain brown wrapper, each cover featuring a close-up color portrait of some suppurating pustule or flaky, blistered welt. Cutis was better than a violent comic book. It also proved useful in one of the finest insults in the history of smack-talking, originated by Barb's own kids and gleefully embraced by us: "Oh yeah? Well, you're the cover girl for Cutis magazine!"

Oh, stop Googling. Of course they're now online!

"I'm afraid to click," Sis said when I alerted her to this Intarweb presence. Sadly, this month appears to feature your average brown melanoma--not all that exciting. However, some of the headline links suggest things I want absolutely nothing ever to do with, such as "Multinucleated Atypia of the Vulva." Aaaaaaaah! No atypias, ESPECIALLY of the vulva, thanks much.

On the other hand, "What's Eating You? Fire Ants!" is possibly the best title ever. If anybody asks me what my problem is, I now have a new answer.

The Robertson

So said the sign at the end of their driveway. One of Barb's sons had made it--poorly--in wood shop, the letters slumped and crowding each other off the end of the board, no room for the plural. Whichever kid it was convinced the shop teacher that the singular was in fact the correct Scottish clan designation, no "S" required, and got a decent grade.

My family met Barb Robertson when I was about 13, the first year we were completely consumed with figure skating. So was Barb: in her early 60s, she'd decided she needed a new hobby. She signed up for private lessons and shared the ice with us, turning stately circles in her sweatshirt and knit tam o'shanter while little girls in lycra dresses hurled themselves aloft all around her.

Off ice, Barb was a doctor, and in her spare time had raised five grown children. She was accustomed to a crowded life, and welcomed us indiscriminately into it--kids, coaches, parents, champions and junior- hockey thugs, others who'd drifted into the sport out of love. She volunteered her services at local competitions, ministering to wrenched knees and bonked heads or the occasional nervous puker. On Saturdays after practice, she'd load us into one or another of her never, never, EVER-washed cars and make a pizza run.

We were always celebrating something with Barb: birthdays and graduations, exam results, pregnancies, promotions. Some time in the late 1970s she'd strung Christmas lights around the ceiling beams in her dining room...and then just never bothered to take them down. Flip a switch: instant party. Barb made enormous chocolate-chip sheet cakes and never ran out of ice. We camped out on her living room floor to watch Tentacles on the late-night movie. I had my first alcoholic beverage in Barb's presence, a closely-supervised glass of raspberry champagne...though I no longer remember what achievement had occasioned the event. Barb introduced my family to mu shu pork; she made a noble effort to teach me to drive a stick shift. At a certain point in my adolescence, I was entirely comfortable rummaging through her refrigerator for the soda or snack of my choice. As an adult, I think that's one of the highest compliments I can pay someone, really: I am at home in your home.

When you did open the fridge, you'd find at least a dozen little notes taped to the shelves inside the door, proclaiming "Happy Birthday Mom!" in crayon or marker. Her kids had started this one year and Barb never took them down.


The first check arrived in September of my freshman year in college. One hundred dollars, and a note from Barb, reminding me that I was minutes from the greatest city in the world and I ought to take advantage it. "Don't tell your mother," she said; this was between us; I didn't have to tell anyone what I spent it on, Barb included...though I think, I hope, that I did. I bought a full-length black wool coat with that $100, at Macy's no less, and thought myself hot snot on china. Barb sent me another $100 each month, for my entire freshman year...kept me in bagels and incense and cheap silver jewelry and MoMA posters that, properly framed, now hang in my home and my office. When I graduated, I got another check: $2700. The other three academic years, in a lump sum. "I thought you might need a nest egg, starting out," Barb said, and I did. I secured and furnished my first apartment with that check, bought a bookcase and a futon and the desk I'm typing at, tonight.

When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, Barb was philosophical: "I won't ever have to Christmas shop or go to the dentist again." But radical surgery, performed by an old colleague, spared her to endure those and other jolly annual irritants time and again: this was fifteen years ago. Her hair grew back, mysteriously chemo-altered into poodle-pouf curls; she shrugged and went back to the rink, even though her lung capacity was not what it had been. She lived to see a passel of grandchildren.

And I grew up, all the rink kids did...ended up with cars, careers, spouses or houses. In recent years, Barb and I had become primarily Christmas-card friends, though we'd still sometimes surprise each other at potlucks or restaurants--find time to catch up even as it seemed like mere minutes had passed. She came to one of my Christmas parties. When my grandmother lay dying in the hospital, I called Barb, for consultation and consolation.

When Barb's cancer improbably resurfaced this year, maybe autumn, after more than a decade of remission, she told no one but her husband. In her eighties, she didn't want to endure the rigors of fresh treatment, or wither tragically for months. She kept skating up until the first week in December, when her illness had devoured too much of her muscle tone for her to continue. She waved off worry, implied that a new medication was affecting her badly. She spent Christmas with her family...and stopped taking her meds on December 26th. On December 31st, the world grieved by candlelight for all those who suffer, and then faced forward, with fireworks and confetti cannons...and Barb slipped quietly out with the last of 2004.

* * * * *

When someone we love dies, someone who's been a touchstone and a role model and a savior, a one-woman charitable organization, a friend...I think it's our responsibility, our obligation, to smooth over that void with ourselves. To live for that person, and to play a part in the lives of others, as he or she did for you. In some way I can't well-enough describe, I'm glad I was at Darcy's when Barb died--another place where I feel confident enough to rummage through the fridge, surrounded by another family I've come to think of as mostly my own. We ate cheese fondue and chocolate-chip brownies and drank champagne; the Christmas lights flashed hectically and the kids staged epic, shrieking board games, wired and laughing and up too late. The calendar rolled over, with smooches and bottle rockets, and everything is possible and new.

Happy New Year. Come on over. There are pretzels, and cookies, and I've got plenty of ice.

It's not Christmas until Poppy cries

I got to participate in another long-held holiday tradition Sunday morning, actually, when I attended a St. Lucia brunch. My mom's friend Cookie has been doing this as long as I can remember, hosting hordes of people for coffee and pastry to celebrate "the Swedish Christmas." When we were little, Cookie's daughter, DerDer, would play the role of the Lucia Bride, leading us into the dining room with the crown of candles on her head--tipped with gold foil, when we were very small, and thrillingly, fearsomely lit, when she was older. (Apparently battery-operated ones are now de rigeur.) DerDer married, last year, so the celebration has moved to her home.

There were a lot of new attendees this year, neighbors who didn't know the story, so DerDer and Cookie gave a little presentation. I didn't know much about the actual legend, either, it turns out. Lucia was an Italian saint, and it's not clear why the Swedes so fell in love with her. One story has Lucia, a devout Christian, refusing to marry a Pagan husband and putting out her own eyes. Another has her bringing bread to starving, persecuted Christians hiding in tunnels and caves; she wore candles on her head to free her hands and light the way. Yet another has her arriving in a harbor on a ship, bringing light, bringing food to the hungry.

When I was a kid, the processional part of the celebration seemed interminable--though I envied DerDer the attention, and her gripping role, fraught with danger. We'd gather around the table and listen to the traditional hymn--originally on a record, later copied onto cassette--a choir of children warbled verse after verse in Swedish or Latin or whatever, and some of the grownups would fumble along tunelessly, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get to the food. I was eager to line the pockets of my corduroy jumper with gingersnaps and start running up and down the stairs with DerDer and her three brothers, my sister and all the neighbor kids and cousins, shrieking and slamming each other's fingers in doors while the adults drank gallons of coffee and didn't notice when we kept slinking back to the table, keeping our blood sugar levels just on the frenzied side of a diabetic coma.

I don't know when it changed. I think it's partly Poppy's fault. DerDer's stepdad is legendarily, hilariously sentimental; he weeps at the proverbial drop of a hat, at Hallmark commercials and Notre Dame championships. When DerDer announced her engagement, Poppy cried for an entire year at the mere thought of walking her down the aisle. We mock poor Poppy, with great love...but even as we laugh, he has the power to get everyone else going too. (During the father/bride dance at the actual reception, my particular table of friends and family sobbed so hard the d.j. had to crank it to eleven to drown us out.)

So. This year, DerDer and her husband had actually burned the Sankta Lucia hymn onto a CD for her folks. This is close, but not quite the same version; you have to imagine it dubbed and redubbed off the original vinyl, with the pops and scratches, the needle hissing in the groove. DerDer pressed "Play." The introductory measures wavered across the living room. And...

...Poppy let out an audible, gulping sob and abruptly swiveled his Barcalounger to face the wall.

So. Yeah, we all giggled tenderly at Poppy. But it's a long hymn, and you have a lot of time to look at the tree, and the candles glowing, and the faces of family and friends and the babies they have now. You think about being kids, all in a sugared-up Christmas lather; you think of your Grammy, and DerDer's grandma KittyCoat, neither of whom are with us any more. And let me tell you, you harrumph and sniffle and blinkblinkblink HARD at the ceiling to keep from getting mascara face...

...and finally, thank God, it's time to eat. To laugh at yourself, and blot your eyes with an IKEA napkin printed with a little blonde girl in a fiery crown, and hug your own mom and your extra one, Cookie, and Poppy and DerDer, and then hit the smorgasbord. Cardamom bread, generously slathered with butter. Buttered lefse, rolled up with cinnamon and sugar or with summer sausage. Almond ring. "Spritz" butter cookies. Gingersnaps and coffee with cream and soft yeast rolls with butter. Did I mention butter?

It was so lovely. I really feel like the holidays can now get underway. Of course, I consumed nothing but pastry and coffee and red wine for the entire day, so I could possibly be just addled by my nutritional deficiencies.

I did realize that I was fully in a new demographic, staring down the barrel of 35, when I spent a considerable portion of the brunch in DerDer's kitchen, admiring her retro-look electric percolator from Target. It combines classic style with modern convenience!