Short Story

Setting: Any given town, on any given night. Parents’ bedroom, 1:00 am. Dad is sound asleep. Mom has had a headache from a lingering cold, so she’s sleeping fitfully. There’s a knock on the bedroom door. Their 8-year-old daughter is upset, having awoken to an outlandish racket outside her window. She wants to come into their room, and to crawl into bed with them.

8 year-old, in a quiet voice, knocks tentatively on the door.

She knocks again, a bit harder. “Mom?” She pauses. “Dad?” Another pause. “The noise woke me up and I can’t get back to sleep. Can I come sleep with you?”

Mother, waking slightly: “What is it, honey? Come on in.”

Daughter opens the door and comes to stand by her Mother’s side of the bed.

Mother: “It’s OK honey, it’s the raccoons. Why don’t you just go back to sleep. Everyone is safe.”

Daughter: “I just want to come in with you and Daddy. I’m scared.
Can I sleep in your bed?”

Mother: “We won’t get any sleep if you stay here all night.”

Father, finally wakening and realizing what’s happening: “You can hear the raccoons from our room too. We’re just going to hear them tonight. Go back to bed, honey. We all need a good night’s sleep. Your Mom hasn’t been feeling well.”

Daughter: “I don’t want to go back to my room. I want to stay with you and Mommy.”

Mother, acquiescing a bit:
“Stay for a bit, then I’ll walk you back to your room. But I have to get some sleep tonight or I’ll never get over this cold.”

Daughter: “Just let me get in with you and Daddy.”

Father, becoming slightly irritated: “You just want attention.”

Daughter: “Of COURSE I want attention. We ALL want attention! You wanted attention when you said that to me! And Mom’s been wanting attention for having a headache and needing to sleep.”

Father, Mother: Stunned silence. In unison, voices rising, “You’re right!”

All three: Laughter, laughter and more laughter.

Mother nudges Father to scoot over a bit, rolls to the middle, and makes room for their daughter. They sleep poorly but happily until morning. All the next day, both parents are aglow with middle-of-the-night wisdom imparted from their tiny sage. Father can’t wait to tell his coworkers of the brilliant thing his daughter came up with. Mother says a silent “thank you” to the raccoons, followed quickly by an entreaty to the Heavens that the raccoons will simply move on.

They tell the story to their friends, family members, and coworkers. By the time the story gets to me, I take it the way I take most things – wondering what lesson I’m supposed to learn from it. I’m not that struck by the obvious theme – kids say the darnedest things – but just below that, how kids are able to hone in on the absolute truth of what humans of all ages need, even if grown-ups no longer acknowledge or live by these truths. Regardless of age, all anyone wants is attention. The good kind of attention, of course - where we are seen, taken in for the totality of our being (our quirks and weaknesses are held gently and tolerated, rather than ignored or frozen into icy denial), and the contents of our thoughts and hearts are welcomed. Attention that conveys recognition, appreciation and acceptance. Who wouldn’t want this, at just about any hour of the day?

I crawl into bed every night seeking exactly this kind of attention, and delighted in the knowledge I’m likely to receive it. Ah, but perhaps here’s my lesson – how good am I at offering this kind of attention to others? Do I hear my husband the way he wants to be heard? Support him in the way that makes sense to him, not just in the way I like to be supported? Accept his thoughts and feelings, and hold the painful ones gently, especially at the moments when I don’t fully understand him? This lesson has come before, through a variety of stories and funny anecdotes and even a few self-help books that have graced my nightstand, so I can now say that the answer is, many times, yes. But there are definite times when I might deny that I’m seeking attention, or deny that someone else deserves it; I can still find moments, though I cringe to acknowledge them, when I turn away at the exact moment I should lean in and provide the loving acceptance.

So here’s my silent “thank you” to an 8-year-old girl I’ve never met, who had the courage to claim what she wanted. And thanks to her parents, who have already created an atmosphere where her acceptance is so likely, she’d risk banishment to her room in the middle of the night because she knew, fundamentally knew, she wouldn’t be banished for her wishes. And one last “thank you” to whatever forces operate in the universe that bring a lesson we (still) need to learn right smack dab in front of us.

If I put Prince William’s name in this title, will it count as part of the world-wide buzz?

If Prince William asks for a groom’s cake to be made from the McVitie’s company, perhaps the little Digestive biscuits I’ve been eating for 20+ years aren't something to sneer at.

At first, they were impossibly difficult to procure in the US – I bought some at British import stores, later found them online, and now, sheepishly, I can buy them at the largest supermarket in my area. Sure, Prince William’s cake had 1700 rich tea biscuits, and I’ve only ever eaten the Original Digestives. I would hope Royals would have a better/higher quality treat with their tea than I’ve had all these years, but still, it puts my luscious little bite right up there for the world to see.

As a person who received very little validation as a kid, and ended up with a strong self-doubt mechanism (if I think it, it must be wrong; if I want it, no one else will; if I don’t want it, others will think it’s great; I’m destined to dislike most popular media and books; I used to eat pizza from the top down, layer by layer, ending at the thickest, breadiest crust I could find; I like musicals, for heaven’s sake). So my liking of Digestives, and, subsequently offering them as a treat to others at weekend escapes and finding that no one enjoyed them quite as much as me, gave me just a few doubts.

I know of only one other person as fiercely loyal to the lowly biscuit as me, and that’s the best friend I made in 1982 on our junior-year semester abroad, where we attended a Midwestern university via transcript only, and spent the semester in London. We had classes at the University of London, but they were taught by Midwestern faculty hell-bent on getting out of the Midwest for a semester – we made up stories of love affairs and marital escapes to overcome what otherwise looked like the pathos of middle-aged professors who were bored with their lives. We didn’t have classes with British kids, just other Midwestern undergrads who wanted to get out of Dodge. We were ensconced in a 6-story row house, simultaneously part of and totally separate from the London around us. We had classes a mere three days a week, so as not to interfere with the shows, field trips, and travel that was planned for students every Friday through Monday. We saw so many shows, so many cathedrals, so many historic and amazing places that we developed the only possible response – glazed boredom and what I guess I’d call tourist fatigue. “Not another Titian,” we’d moan. “Do we have to go see Cats?” Stonehenge felt like the drudgery of an elementary school field trip foisted on unwitting kids for their own good. Such ingratitude, such lassitude in the face of overwhelming and matchless opportunity. I’d give anything to go back now, in my 40’s, and cherish every last painting, every church’s spire, every architectural tidbit, every inch of sculpture. I’d read up on things before I saw them. I’d try to sketch them even though I'm no good at drawing. I'd write poetry about them. I’d do anything to breathe the life of these masterpieces into my soul, hold them captive there until I could understand these things that were so much larger than me, so much older, so much evidence that my tiny little existence is, in fact, a tiny little existence.

Of course some of the art and culture penetrated my young self, but I seem to remember mostly my focus on social interests, my new-found best friend and classmates and the freedoms we experimented with at being 20 and living not only away from home, as we all had since coming to college, but across the ocean, as far away as you could be from the familiar and the family, except that, of course, there was so much overlap between Britain and America that the leave-taking was safe, the equivalent of ordering Thai green curry and requiring the kitchen keep it mild. At the time, though, it seemed to be as much spice as I could handle. Our bedroom was perched on the 6th floor of our 6-story rowhouse, and next to our room was the most gorgeous blond man you could ever hope to be perched at the tippy top of an old house with, but this guy was, disappointingly, verifiably gay – he asked my friend and I to shave his back before he went on a date. This had not yet occurred on our home campuses, so it felt exotic. It never occurred even after we came back, so it may have something much more to do with this particular gentleman than with anything else, but at the time it felt like it was because of where we were.

For me, Digestives are the taste memory of this trip, of my lasting friendship that seemed to fall from the stars and couldn’t possibly be made from worldly parts, as the distinctness in the lives of my friend and I are so clearly delineated, with so little overt overlap. She shouldn’t like me, and she shouldn’t make sense to me. Yet we do, to each other. We wear (or at least, wore) the same dress size, which is impossible, since she’s 5’8” tall and slim-waisted and I’m shy of 5’4” and, for a long time, was curvy without being slim. For my first wedding, I tried on a lovely black cocktail dress that fit me perfectly, making me look sophisticated and beautiful and just a touch sexy. I bought it for my friend to wear, and she looked outstanding in it, a taller, thinner, blonder version of beauty, more striking with her hair and features and the whiteness of her smooth shoulders shown off by the black dress. We shared our stories, our humor, our experiences with being too-darned-smart for our families and most of our friends and retreating to this intelligence to dull the pain of gawky adolescence in which we both suffered having none of the beauty and grace that would emerge decades after our classmates bloomed. And we shared Digestives. We ate them slowly, savoring them. We’d eat them when we got together (eventually we moved away from the Midwest, even living for a brief overlapping time in California, and now again we’re separated by most of the continent), and still do. I bring them with me when I’m going to a bed and breakfast or somewhere where I want a little taste of something decadent. The biscuits and the friendship have come to taste as one to me – cherished, delectable moments where all is right with the world and I’m not alone in my thoughts, yearnings or values.

I hope Prince William enjoyed his Groom’s cake. And that all the guests did, too. Perhaps there’s something to pairing an exquisite moment of connection with the guaranteed savory simplicity of a tea biscuit. There is for me.


For K,
Thanks for 2 full decades of our
McVitie's-style friendship.
Here's to the decades to come.
Love, B

Our First Tulip Has Died

Right on schedule, April came to a close and our first tulip has died.

My son was initially disappointed at the death, but I was delighted, as it meant two things – first, that we really did plant a successful tulip garden, and the darned things grew and grew and got taller and taller and more beautiful, opened daily and delicately closed again each night. The near-frost conditions that dogged the entire month of April were no match for our sprouts.


Second, the first tulip has, as I said, bent its head after a full life course, but there are still bulbs to bloom. My original idea to have tulips that would open early and late turned into actuality. I haven’t yet seen a single white flower, and I could swear I planted them. But we’ve had regal flowers throughout the month, and now, tulips in May, is just gravy. We may have new blooms over the next week or so, and we just might have a few of Custer’s last stand flowers in bloom all the way until Memorial Day.

Our daily flower checks have continued, and all three people in our house have way too much pride in this project. If pride cometh before the fall, we’re all gonna crash. My son can’t get over the fact that he can see flowers right out his bedroom window. I took him to see tulip farms, with acres and acres of perfectly groomed tulips, all in rows, and he still thinks our tulip garden is something special.


He’s begun to wonder what we could plant for my next birthday – more tulips? If so, where? Perhaps around the base of the trees on our front lawn. Maybe it’s only my pride that is dangerously high. I am proud of the garden, proud of our family efforts, proud – inordinately proud – that I’m raising the kind of child who has been touched by this project and who brings his open spirit and willingness to enjoy our life to the silly, adventuresome, kind-of boring things we choose to do. He can appreciate masses of tulips, rushing from one bed to the next to describe a color combination, or shape of tulip leaf, or excitedly taking a picture of a perfect open tulip revealing its inner sanctum of unexpected darkness and beauty – and still appreciate our little garden. It took me decades to find worth at all its levels – the grand and the simple. And he’s found it before his first decade has ended.


So go on, tulips, continue through your life cycle, eventually leaving us with nothing but drooping flowers. 70-something drooping and dying flowers will grace our front windows. And I know a few people who will find something amazing in all this. And one who will probably write about it.

"Did you feed the dog?"

This, according to a 13-year-old girl giving a speech to an entire congregation, is one of the most frequent things her Mother has asked her over the years. “Did you feed the dog?” and then, not much later, the same question. The next day, “Did you feed the dog?” And on and on it went. The soundtrack of her time at home is variations of the theme, “Did you feed the dog?”

Only in hindsight was the girl able to appreciate what she surely, certainly, must have experienced with dread, eye-rolling and slumped-shouldered retreat to the chore as required. The pull from playing, from reading, from doing something, anything, that the girl had started to do, back to the realm of what she was supposed to do. The interruption of her own thoughts, her own plans, subsumed to those of her parents.

Only in hindsight did the girl realize that she was being taught how to care for something other than herself. That the nagging wasn’t for the (sole!) purpose of driving her crazy, but was to instill the ever-present sense that others have needs, too. That there is only one way to learn how to tend to another creature, and how to tend to ourselves, and that’s to have it modeled and then required of us, day in, day out.

Perhaps she’ll also come to see that she was being taught the very nature of love. We learn to brush our teeth daily, to put on fresh clothes, to clean our dishes, to take out the trash and recycling (and, if you’re in my area, the food waste), to do the most mundane of daily tasks, and that this forms the basis of how we love. We do things for our loved ones whether we want to or are in the mood for it; whether it is a grand statement of adoration or a lowly chore to help make home life more livable. Love, as I tell the people I work with, is not a noun or a vague feeling; it’s a verb. Love is the set of constant, relentless actions we take to meet another’s needs. Love is the keeping another in mind even as we unwind, or want to escape for a few minutes, or read a book, or play with our (grown-up) friends. We love ourselves through relentless self-care. We love others the same way. We are kind when we’d rather be rude and snippy; we forgive when we’d prefer to punish with grudges; we accept weakness but focus on the strength. We remember to feed the dog.

Only when this girl is a mother in her own right will she understand that the constant reminding is exactly the way she was loved by her parents. That when she’s too tired to cook, she’ll still feed her child. When she’s too tired to read a bedtime story, she’ll probably read a few pages anyway. That when she doesn’t have much of anything left over to give, she’ll give it. She will worry and ask and wonder if she’s done all she can that day, then go to sleep and wake up and do it all over again.

What will my son’s soundtrack be? Some combination of “Did you brush your teeth?” and “If you finish putting things away completely the first time, you wouldn’t have to go back and do it again.” I hope his soundtrack is also filled with my laughter, my “Thank you, honey” for when he follows through on things, my “I love you” and “Thanks for a great day” and “I will take you anywhere” in response to his adaptability and good humor when we go someplace new. But this is just self-serving, as there’s no reason to believe that the 13-year-old girl’s mother didn’t pepper her daily barrage of chore reminders with love reminders. She ended her speech by thanking her parents, telling them how much she loved them.

John Gottman, a psychologist who has studied what makes couples successful (by actually studying couples in a research lab, set up like an apartment, so he can monitor their heart rates and galvanic skin responses and correlate their physical well-being to the audio-tape and videotape of every utterance, every embrace, every eye-roll, every dismissive glance, every smile, every grimace ...), has noticed that couples who stay together have a 5:1 ratio of supportive/ loving statements to complaints. Complaints are so difficult to hear that they require an overwhelming counterbalance of acceptance, respect and love.

There are days when I surely fall short of the 5-to-1 ratio. I can see it in my son’s eye-rolling, slumped-shouldered sense of being burdened by yet another chore reminder. He doesn’t experience this as a life-long lesson in how to demonstrate and express love. He doesn’t even know he has to learn how to love. He thinks he will go on forever being loved in the way parents love children, and being able to love others the way children love their parents. If he’s too tired to express love, he doesn’t. He just falls asleep. He doesn’t really have to do much yet (other than take out the trash, put his laundry away, brush his teeth, do his homework, set and clear the table, help unload groceries from the car...). Hmmm. He is doing a lot already.

So here’s to making a soundtrack with 5 strains of love, warmth, acceptance, reminders of just how much we value him, and one nagging musical overlay reminder to do the mundane, boring, sometimes unpleasant tasks that build the foundation of sustainable love. A soundtrack to accompany acts of love that he performs not only when he feels like it, but when he’d rather not.

Everyday Math

My son’s math curriculum is called Everyday Math – the idea is to use math concepts in everyday situations we encounter, rather than keep math separate, a subject during the school day that has no tie to real life. Thus, he can figure out fractions when we need only 2 of a dozen eggs, or find the perimeter of a Lego base, or do fraction and percentage equivalents on things like what percentage of his teeth got brushed (we haven’t actually done that one, but it sounds like something I just might do tonight). As the homework checker, I’m frequently required to check long division, perimeter estimates, areas of geometric figures I’ve forgotten the names of (“rhombus” just doesn’t seem to have a permanent place in my neural network). I have to follow the many manipulations of numbers to find out if there was a small error at any point in the calculations that would have led to a wrong answer. Did he do the addition correctly? Put the number in the right column? Did he carry the right number over if he is subtracting and regrouping (the politically correct, updated name for what I was taught was “borrowing” – but I guess there might be too many problems with borrowed numbers and who they really belong to, so now children must “regroup”).

Recently, my Mom turned 75. Neither she nor I can quite believe this. My husband and I spent most of our pillow talk the other night reflecting on the necessity for the math to be in error. We can’t have 75-year-old mothers (both our Moms are the same age, even though he’s 7 years older than me). There is no skill within the Everyday Math curriculum that we seem to be able to bring to bear that can solve this problem. We keep getting it wrong. The answer keeps being 75.

The narcissistic injury of being old enough to have old parents is so particularly painful that I think I’ve glossed over my Mom’s own difficulty – it is, after all, she who just turned 75. I know she doesn’t feel 75, as if any age has an actual feel. I remember my ”golden birthday” - turning 7 on the 7th of the my birthday month – and waiting, watching the clock for the numbers to turn to 7 am, absolutely expecting to feel different, but the second-hand passed the 12, and there I was, 7 years old, but I didn’t feel any different. I also thought 13 would have a feel, and then 18 (I always assumed the “little” birthdays wouldn’t feel different). And you’d think if any birthday could have made me feel like a different person it would have been my 20th, spent in Paris – Paris! Me, a Midwestern girl doing the oh-so-sophisticated study abroad thing, and here I was, turning 20, spending the night out with two new best friends who I’d met just a day or so prior to the trip, and we came back late to the youth hostel we were to stay at and were locked out. Locked out! So we took turns sleeping on a bench, one person always awake, until the hostel doors opened in the morning. And when they did, I was a full-fledged 20-year-old, and I felt worldly and grown up. I was full up with what I now know was the power of youth, but at the time I thought it was the magical power of adulthood.

But for most of my years since 20, I’ve felt that I’ve remained in my twenties. This is almost embarrassing, as I’m middle aged, but I don’t feel it. So my Mom’s math must be wrong, and maybe, maybe, if we re-worked the problem I’d end up 30-something, but certainly not 40-something. If I get surprised looking in the mirror and seeing the age, or simply looking at my hands as I type and seeing dry skin that has not a hint of youthfulness in it, imagine my Mom’s surprise. She blinked one day, got married, had some kids, raised them to adulthood, had some grandkids, sure, you can’t really deny that grandkids are gonna add some numbers to the equation, but there’s no way it should all add to 75.

75 is the age of old-age homes and prosthetic devices and dentures and things I associate with my own grandparents’ aging process. Of course, 75 is the new . . . give me a break, it’s not a new anything, even if 50 is the new 30 – but this can only be asserted by other people who are basically my age on the outside but haven’t matured a day past their inner age which is decades younger. But my Mom has her hair, her teeth, her sense of humor, and she’s able-bodied. She doesn’t color her hair, and hasn’t had a thing “done” – she’s the template for me as I grow older (again, it’s all about me) - if I ever stop coloring my hair.

In the short time since her birthday, she’s noticed a change in her energy level, a way in which pain stays just a bit longer than before. Psychological or real? After 75 years of walking upright, you’d think our bodies would groan, sag, buckle at time. We’re made out of flesh and bone and muscle tissue – not the strongest building materials around. My own body, so much younger than my Mom’s, groans, creaks, pops, a percussion section protesting moments when my mind announces imminent action. My husband has titanium and ceramic hips, but the rest of him is pure human, so it’s possible his hips will outlast the entire rest of his body. There’s a visual – all the rest of him gone except expertly crafted replacement hips.

My Mom is 75, and she has no idea how she got there. Sure, if pressed, she could recreate the narrative, a whole timeline of what she did and when, but that’s not the same as having the emotional sense that one has lived such a long time. How is it that lived moments seem so short, especially when some of them - such as the painful ones - last for an excruciatingly long time? I, too, can create a timeline and plot exactly what would account for my years and my life to date, but in general I just walk around assuming my life has always been this way and then getting surprised to (re)learn how much it has changed.

There is nothing original to say about the existential yearning for youth, for power, for the gift of more time; if we’re honest, what we want is time coupled with the strength and vitality of bodies we no longer have and wisdom we haven’t yet achieved. I have the luxury of being a generation behind my parents, and can continue to be foolish enough to think I’ll have a few more decades of time, and that I can still accomplish things, be the person I want to be, get closer and closer to . . . something. I wonder what my parents yearn for. Time well-spent before death? Time in a healthy body? Does my Mom still think about making a mark or leaving a legacy or things she’s hoped to accomplish in her lifetime? Does her life make sense to her? Is it the one she wanted? I sure hope the answers are “yes.”

I am in the midst of middle age, and my Mom is square into her old age. I feel more powerful now than I ever have – partly physical, since I’ve taken to exercising in a way I didn’t when I was younger, but not wholly physical, as I get that there are bits and parts of me that just don’t have the benefit of youthful resilience. And, my hearing is intact, so I hear every audible sound of protest my body now makes. I’m more resilient, more able to stand up for myself, more able to realize that certain things are just gonna work themselves out so I don’t need to do much except get out of the way and let the process continue. Not a strength of my youth, where I inserted my will, opinions, and any other control option available to me to try to force outcomes. Again, I thought I was being powerful and that it was the essence of my grown-up-ness that led me to be such a participant in my life; now I see the desire to control that which we can’t as something between youthful folly and the wistful tragedy of the human experience.

Happy Birthday, Mom. May you come to find – even at 75 – a feeling that your life makes sense to you. This is the only gift I can imagine being of any true value (other than the bonsai tree I had sent, which apparently died an early and unceremonious death, and a package of 75 Hershey’s kisses mixed with 75 little love notes, requiring my son to use Everyday Math to count out 75 of each), even though I can’t be the one who gives it to you. It’s the only gift that’s ever mattered to me, and it’s a crime it took me this long to receive it. But I did, and I think I’ve gotten it in time to bring with me as I step, year by year, right in your footprints, headlong into my own old age. It’s just a matter of adding more years to my current age – the most basic of everyday mathematics.

Florence and George

“Write this down, take a little note
To remind you in case you didn’t know
Tell yourself I love you and I don’t want you to go
Write this down.”
-George Strait, 1999

I heard this George Strait song on the radio, and it brought my Grandma Florence back to me. I could almost feel her with me, in the passenger seat, singing along. I was lost in a rare moment of unselfconsciousness, singing at the top of my lungs, not caring that I was at a stoplight where someone could have looked in to my car and seen me looking like a howling lunatic. Then I realized that my Grandma had never gotten a chance to hear this song; she died well before George Strait recorded it. He’s got tons of music, in fact, that she hasn’t heard (unless there’s a good country music station in Heaven, which I know I’m too old to believe in, but where else can you imagine your Grandma being?).

Grandma Florence loved George Strait. She preferred his fast-tempo songs to the ballads, in fact preferred dance tunes to ballads from anyone. Her philosophy: why listen to sad songs? There’s enough sadness already. She listened to the happy, danceable music, tapped her fingers on the newspaper on the table, and got lost in the joy of “Angel, Angelina” “Oh me, oh my sweet baby” and “Adelida.”

One year, for her birthday, I signed Florence up the George Strait Fan Club. She was ecstatic to receive their introductory packet – a signed photograph, information about his life. Her face lit up like the schoolgirl she still held deep inside her. She thought he was handsome, strong, and oh, could he sing. And she loved that he was a family man. That he married his high school sweetheart and they were still together. One love for a lifetime. Florence was that for my Grandpa Joe – she outlived Joe, as did most in her generation, but until his death he was a one-woman man who never stopped loving her.

George might be more handsome than my Grandpa Joe – just slightly - and he’s got a smoothness to his moves that Joe didn’t (unless he had them in his younger years and I was just not around to see it), but as far as I can tell, George and my Grandpa Joe were cut from the same cloth. After Joe died, Florence kept his name. She was Mrs. Joseph ________ until the end, no matter how many times my feminist strivings tried to argue that she was her own person so she could go by her own name. She lived and died in one community, the one wife of a man recognized widely throughout that community as a good, honest, generous man. Traits that George is known for, too.

If you’re reading this, Grandma, you’ll be happy to know George and Norma are still together – it’s been 39 years now. They’ve made it, somehow, through the tragic death of their daughter when she was 13, and no amount of George’s increasing stardom has threatened their relationship. Florence, at age 74, wept for George and Norma Strait’s loss. She’d wept for her own losses, too, but didn’t dwell on them. She wasn’t a dweller – no one who prefers up-tempo can linger long in melancholy or tragedy.

No one else in my family likes country music, so it was an absolutely private thing my Grandma and I shared. She favored George Strait, but back then, I was all over Alan Jackson. Black hat, dark hair for Florence; white hat and blond hair for me (I’d had a thing for shaggy-haired blonds, who I knew on some level were not for me, but that only strengthened their pull over me). Now, all these years later, it’s George who seeps into my musical pores; Alan Jackson’s music is great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s George’s voice that washes over me, and I sing along as loudly as I can and feel the bright, broad presence of a grandmother who seemed to see me in a way that others didn’t, knowing things I didn’t dare show others, and cherishing me just the same.

Florence has been gone over 15 years, which is hard to imagine but numbers make it so. I miss her, miss that she never got to meet her great-grandson who is named after her. I miss that she’s not around my table when I celebrate holidays. I miss her scolding me in the way she would, when my humor edged too close to sarcasm. I miss talking with her about my Mom, as we had such different perspectives on the same person. I miss that I can’t play Rummikub or cribbage with her or go swimming at the pool in her condo complex. I miss her gravelly, scratchy, hoarse deep voice which still seemed musical when she called for me, with a pet name that no one before or since has ever used.

When I hear George’s songs that Florence has never heard, I wonder: can she hear them? Does George know what a big fan he had in her – of course not, he has millions. But maybe George knows her anyway. Maybe he knows the essence of a strong, capable, loyal, loving woman who came up from hardship to live a life of honor and love and hard work, a woman who was quick to laugh and wanted to dance when she heard him play.

So thanks, George, for being a good man whose music gave such pleasure to a good woman. And thanks for sending me that little bit of Florence the other day.

Here’s a link to one of Florence’s favorite George Strait songs, Adelida: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf1aTVlc4SU

And here’s a link one of his recent songs that’s a favorite of mine, Troubadour, which she didn’t get a chance to hear. Or maybe she has: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo-tSAtM9ZQ

Over the river and through the woods . . .

My husband’s 96-year-old grandmother died this week. She had been relatively healthy and well for most of her years, but 95 ushered in the beginning of a slow yet relentless decline – hearing, vision, cognition, weight and muscle tone, her interests and pleasures, her memories and ability to stay present in interactions - all systems weakening until this once strong woman became a shadow of herself. I didn’t see her at the very end, but I envisioned her as a baby bird, fuzzy haired, toothless, and more bony than a living thing ought to be.

Her funeral will fall right smack dab in the middle of Spring Break – and we will have to postpone or cancel a trip to an indoor water park that we were set to take my son and two of his good friends. Nothing but water, pools, more water, water slides, pools, a hot tub for adults, some treasure hunt activities throughout the Lodge, and, of course, food. But mostly a family getaway time, with buddies for our only child, in a fantasy world. Not that unlike Disneyland – without the lines or rides - just pools for splashing, cavorting and playing. A place so unreal, so impossible to incorporate into everyday life that you happily agree to pay exorbitantly for the opportunity to feel completely removed from your every-day.

I don’t want to miss our Spring Break adventure – I took off of work to be with my son – vacation time is not that abundant. I don’t much want to attend a funeral – who does – but it’s a lifecycle event, as I see it, and if I show up for the happy occasions I’d better show up for the difficult ones. And I have to show my son how to do this, without resentment or bitterness. That life goes on even if certain pleasures get postponed. There’s no joy in a waterpark adventure if we haven’t supported and sustained the essential framework on which we live – our family. Our deepest joys will come from nurturing family and honoring the living as well as the dead. I’ve married into another person’s family and my place is with them, rather than in an 80-degree weather-controlled water playground. I’ll add my farewell and blessings and gratitude for getting to share ever-so-slightly in this woman’s life to the people who knew her so much better than I.

I’ve no doubt we’ll miss the water park, and I hope we can reschedule it rather than miss out completely. Yet part of me knows that it’s not the trips to Disneyland (or Disneyworld or a Disney Cruise) that make for a good life. It’s how we choose our everyday moments in the mundane reality of household chores, laundry, tables to set and clear, homework to be checked. There’s no room service at home, no treasure hunt for hidden gems and mysteries, and I don’t count a bathtub or shower as a water feature, although my son, who sings and dances nightly in the shower, might disagree. We make a good life every day, and if we’re lucky, we occasionally take ourselves and our good life with us on an adventure somewhere else. We don’t have to pay admission fees to enter “The Happiest Place on Earth” – we’re already there.

Spring Break this year now will have us go over the mountains, through the tumbleweeds,and actually over a river to Grandmother’s house at the Redeemer Lutheran Church. Once there, we’ll find loved ones waiting for us, to share the grief and sadness of the loss. We’ll provide whatever comfort we can and shed our own tears. We’ll build memories and talk and play cards and laugh and cry and eat – just like we were going to do at the waterpark (maybe without the tears, true) – a family vacation regardless of the change in destination.

Rest in peace, Grandma G.G.
May your memory be for a blessing.