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Thursday, December 30, 2004
I don't know what to call this one
I want to start off this entry with a little explanation. I have tended, in the year and a half I've been keeping this online journal, to keep it light in mood, or at least to focus it on the ins and outs of my daily life, rather than on large-scale world issues. I don't know why it started that way, but that's the way it's gone. I am not oblivious to these issues in real life. I do not ignore them. My heart is breaking for the tragedy in south Asia, especially for the parents who've lost children, and vice versa. I suppose I feel inadequate to do justice to things like that in writing; maybe that's why 99% of my posts here are full of frothy self-deprecating attempts at humor, instead of serious things that affect us all.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled shallow entry:
I feel guilty being happy about weather that is causing damage in other places. I really do. And I'm especially sorry for people in Southern California where apparently nobody knows how to drive if the roads are damp. Because they're, um, more than damp now. Bad days for you guys, no? And then there's my poor T, for whom this weather just means working in the snow instead of working in bright sunny sixty-five-degree conditions. Sorry, sweetie. But I AM LOVING THIS WEATHER. I am not having the best of days, hormonally-speaking, and I have to take the ashes out of the woodstove every other day because of the constant need for fires, and this wire-cage sign we'd made for Christmas fell over on our roof in the wind and I'm actually losing sleep worrying about what it might be doing to the shingles but I can't go up on the roof in this wind to fix it, and I keep hearing this mysterious noise like a fog horn which is either really quiet and very nearby (like, say, the sign sliding slowly down the roof, pulling off shingles as it goes?) or really loud and far away, in which case I got nothing. And I stayed up till 2 am last night doing a jigsaw puzzle and I don't even particularly like jigsaw puzzles. But even with all of this, I am in a state of glee because the wind is literally roaring outside and the snow level's supposed to get down to 3500 feet tomorrow (which still doesn't mean snow for us, but oh well), and there's not a single day in the seven-day forecast with no rain in it. I am TOTALLY going to bundle up and go out in this weather today, just to feel the force of the wind and the cold on my face when I get out of the car, and for the pleasure of coming home to a warm house (well, and to take back library books and get the mail, too). My life is so good, and don't think I don't know how blessed I am.
Saturday, June 05, 2004
half mast
We've known this day had to come, and really, one of the people I admire most in the world, who shaped my childhood and the world I (and we all) live in in so many ways, stopped suffering today and began rejoicing. Still, the world seems emptier without Ronald Reagan in it.
Of all the tributes I've read so far, Margaret Thatcher's says it best, in my opinion: "He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued."
Requiescat in pace, Mr. President.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
poor tomatoes
Generally? When you have plants? And, you know, you live in California where you get basically no natural moisture on the ground between May and September? Generally it's a good idea to water the plants. Who would have thought. Huh.
We bought tomatoes and planted them on Sunday. What happened was that we tore down my son's playhouse, and when we lifted up the floor, we found that the gophers had done a splendid job of aerating the soil underneath for us. So we thought, what the heck, it's only a few dollars, we'll buy a dozen tomato plants and plant them in this nicely tilled weed-free red soil. And we did. And we watered them. This was Sunday; I resolved to water the tomatoes twice a day. Monday they got watered, twice. Tuesday, I had my son water them at around 3:00 and that was all. Wednesday I, um, forgot that I had tomatoes at all. Until about an hour ago when my husband asked me if I'd watered them yet today. Oops.
I have, on occasion, heard women say that they couldn't possibly have children yet, because they can't even keep their plants alive. Ladies, gather close, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
Children are way easier to care for than plants.
I am not kidding. Sure, children require a lot more attention. And there's that whole diapers/shoes/paying for college thing. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of work. But the fact is that you're never going to just forget you have a child. Even if, against all maternal instincts (like happens to me sometimes in nightmares), you did manage to forget you had one in your house, the child would remind you in short order. A child will not just sit there and wither and die silently, waiting for you to remember its existence of your own accord. Whereas plants -- my plants especially -- are doomed to do exactly that. That is, if you aren't the meticulous sort of person who actually makes it part of her routine to put water on the darn things, rather than waiting for that maternal instinct thing to kick in. Which, let's face it, it won't. And that means a bleak, short existence for my poor tomato plants.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
the world is full of grief this week
I've mentioned before that I had a daughter who died when she was nine weeks old, of a congenital heart defect. When she was born I joined an online community of parents of children with CHDs. One woman in particular, I remember, mentioned a painting she'd seen and how it reflected her life on the day when she drove down a busy freeway and through a bustling city to a university hospital and found out that there was something very wrong with her yet-to-be-born son's heart; in the painting, a man was falling off a cliff in the background, while everyone else just went about their business like nothing was going on. When my daughter died I instantly remembered that painting, and the image has stuck with me ever since, of someone's life being drastically altered while everyone else just goes on unaffected by the events taking place. I remember driving to her funeral on a Friday afternoon, looking at the people in town -- women on their lunch breaks in business suits and tennis shoes walking around the block, kids on their way back to the high school, tourists -- and thinking, this is a day I will always remember with incredible sadness, and to them it's just another day. The word "surreal" doesn't really seem appropriate because it's used so lightly so often, but that's really what it was. And this past week I've found myself thinking of that painting again, with the shifted perspective that my own experience gave me years ago. I just got back from a week's vacation in Florida, visiting my best friend and her family. We had a marvelous time. But while we were obtaining boarding passes and going to the petting zoo and watching Phantom of the Opera and lounging around the house and going to Chick-Fil-A, and while the people we saw were just going about their ordinary business, and while the people back home and in between and everywhere around the world were just doing their normal first-week-of-February stuff, another close friend of mine, on the day before her thirty-first birthday, wrapped her son in his favorite blanket and held him as he gave up the ferocious struggle with cancer he's been engaged in for the last year and a half. Another mother, a total stranger to me, in a more public story, found out that her daughter had been kidnapped and then brutally murdered. A woman I've known since we were in junior high together lost her four-day-old daughter to SILT. If I don't carefully distance myself from these tragedies I will plummet into depression -- and yet I have that freedom, I can distance myself a little, just enough to go on about my normal life, with an undercurrent of grief. Those mothers can't do that. They can't set it aside or step away from it, it's right there with them, all around them, inside them. They will forever remember the first week of February 2004 as one racked with unbelievable pain, while I'll think of it as the week I took my first trip in an airplane, and while millions of people won't remember the week at all once it's been over for a while.
I remember when I was a little girl, maybe in second grade, I had this epiphany wherein I really actually realized that all the people I saw around me every day, the kids at school and teachers and parents and everyone else -- they were just as complicated on the inside as me. They had wants and thoughts, they had private lives and imaginations. And I was just overwhelmed (still am when I really let myself dwell on this) with the complexity of the world with all these souls in it. How full the world was of people, of individuals. And today all I could think of as I drove down the freeway coming home from the airport was: how many of these people are facing something they don't think they can face? How many are looking around at the people around them thinking for them it's just a normal day; how strange...? The world is just too full of grief this week. My prayers are so heavy.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
seventeen years ago today
I was always afraid of both of my grandfathers. I felt like I embarrassed them, like they didn't know me and what they did know about me, they didn't like. This began to change a bit, with my maternal grandfather, when I was eleven and started winning spelling bees. All of a sudden Grandpa was bragging about me to people -- something I was not accustomed to. My trophies grew a foot apiece every tim he told anyone about them. Up till this point Grandpa had always been terribly intimidating to me, and a small bit embarrassing. We moved into his house, my brother, parents, and myself, when I was 10 and he was 75. He had had a variety of careers -- he'd gone to college late in life, studied agriculture specializing in bird diseases (I later found out that he and Beverly Cleary's husband were in the same department at the same college at the same time; I wonder if they knew each other?). Then he kept William Randolph Hearst's aviaries until the beginning of WWII, when he enlisted in the Navy. He was a mechanic; he got the end of his finger cut off showing one of his superiors that a motor was functioning properly. (item: the only other Really Old Person I knew was my great-great aunt Hazel, Grandpa's aunt; she was also missing a finger, which caused me, in my early childhood, to believe that when you got old you just started getting fingers cut off as a matter of course, like getting glasses and gray hair). After the war he married my grandmother, seventeen years his junior, and they proceeded to bear and bring up seven children -- one boy and six girls -- on a narrow shoestring. They must have done a remarkably good job because there is not one "bad egg" in the bunch. Grandpa built his house and his barn by hand (although his methods were -- interesting, to say the least. Growing up I thought everybody's grandpas had cattle gates made from Model T frames); he ran a chicken ranch; he taught junior high. I bear a strong resemblance to both sides of my family; the people who knew my mother and aunts in school tend to ask me if I am one of them, and when I explain that no, they're my mom/aunts, invariably the next thing the other person says is, "Oh, yes, I had your grandfather as a teacher in junior high. What a man." As a matter of fact, Grandpa's first meetings with my dad took place in the classroom and were not auspicious. Dad was neither an excellent student or a model pupil where behavior was concerned (he was the guy smuggling kittens into the class and passing them around behind the teacher's back.). He should have had the foresight to know that he was going to fall in love with one of the teacher's fair daughters, because when Mom announced at eighteen that she and Dad were an item, soon to share a last name, Grandpa took quite a while to get used to the idea. But he eventually came around and had quite a bit of respect for Dad, in spite of the rocky start to their relationship.
When I lived with Grandpa, I got to know him as a mandolin-playing crotchety-seeming old man. He was on a restricted diet due to his heart problems and it was impossible for anyone serving him food to win where that was concerned. If we offered him ice cream or milk we were trying to kill him. If we didn't we were excluding him. Heaven help the person who spoke too loudly while Ronald Reagan was speaking on television; Grandpa had been a huge fan of Reagan all the way from Hollywood on.
He used to walk around the house strumming the mandolin and belting out old songs like "Has Anybody Seen My Gal" and "This Old House". At the time -- I was, you remember, in that sensitive and easily-embarrassed preteen stage -- I found this mildly humiliating, but to this day, those tunes bring back my grandfather so strongly to me that I can smell his goat's-milk-and-wool-flannel kind of smell.
Grandpa wrote his memoirs something like three or four times. This fact bears a bit of a breath of self-importance in it, doesn't it. But now I'm glad he did. It's very interesting to read about the life of someone who lived through all the things he lived through -- and to laugh a little at the grandiose way he describes everything, especially his experiences with women. (more than one of his daughters bore as one part of their names, the name of one of his former flames. Wonder how Grandma felt about that...). He was born in 1910 in blazing San Joaquin Valley heat, well before the advent of air conditioning, weighing 12 pounds, at the end of a two-day labor. His poor mother. It's a wonder she got near her husband ever again. He rode streetcars around Fresno for a nickel, and survived the flu epidemic, two world wars, the Great Depression, and severe heart disease, all by the age of 40.
This is the seventeenth anniversary of the day my grandfather died. His was the first death of anyone I was even remotely close to -- my first grief, my first funeral. We were on the way home from a Thanksgiving dinner when he became terribly ill in a city far from his home in the hills. He died in their hospital a few days later. At the time I felt very Important And Sad because Someone Close To Me Had Died. I didn't understand him very well when he was alive. I had no idea how much more I would grieve for him years later, wishing I'd had the chance to know him as an adult.
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Saturday, October 25, 2003
maybe tomorrow will be better
Sad day today. Jared, one of the JMML kids whose stories I've been following, died this morning. JMML is Juvenile Monomyelocytic Leukemia and it is a hell of a disease, with a very low survival rate even with treatment. sigh.
On the home front it's been a lazy, quiet, mildly depressed kind of day. We did go to the SPCA's rummage sale, where I bought even more books. I thought about driving over to the coast to go to a Diana Gabaldon book signing, but sanity set in and I realized how foolish that would be, considering the following:
- I am not going to buy the book she's promoting on her current tour (Lord John and the Private Matter). I was talking about that a couple of weeks ago. And I already got my Outlander series -- the only other books I have of hers -- signed. I did think briefly about doing some Christmas shopping and getting signed copies for someone, but I couldn't think offhand of anyone who would want them.
- The coast is a little over three hours away.
- The book signing/talk starts at 7:30. Do the math.
- I would be bringing both kids -- and if DG is still opening her book talks with the same joke about socks as birth control, I wouldn't want them there even if they would sit still the whole time.
- The last time I went to a Diana Gabaldon book signing, our car died partway there and we had to buy a new (used) one to finish our trip. I'm not superstitious ordinarily, but with my husband 300 miles away, I didn't want to press my luck.
Overall, it just didn't look like a good idea, even though thinking about it as a possibility brought about one of the few moments of actual enthusiasm and excitement in my day.
I just sat here for like three minutes trying to think of something that would make me feel cheerful or excited. Nope, nothing. I must be really tired. And now T just called, and said that it looks likely that on Tuesday, instead of coming home, if the fire he's on is under control, they'll just roll him over to another fire. I think I'll go to bed and cry. sigh.
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