Having Our Day

 

Henry David Thoreau

Spring is coming on, for the most part earlier than usual. It is startling to see daffodils not just sending up shoots, but in full bloom. Having just finished reading The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle, I look down at them and wonder what kind of world my grandchildren will live in and what nature - anywhere - will look like. Bill McKibben's The End of Nature came out 44 years ago and we are still pretending everything is fine.

From The Great Displacement (which was just published; god, I love our library system), I turned to Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson by Jeffrey S. Cramer. Earlier this year I tried diligently to read Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert Richardson, and was taken with the subject, but the tiny type (9 or maybe 10 point) did me in. Richardson was known for the format of his major biographies: 100 chapters, all relatively short (5 pages was a long one), but I could not get through the typeset. All the same, I was fascinated with what I read, and expostulated to Warren and others that I could not believe that NO ONE in my early years (high school) ever exposed me to Emerson.

One cannot read or write about Emerson without reading or writing about Thoreau. And vice versa. I am far more familiar with Thoreau than Emerson. Emerson used to be a standard feature in traditional high school literature curriculum but he had all but disappeared from it by 1970. 

Thoreau was never in the high school curriculum, but many youth, and I was one of them, found our way to him all the same.

I was in high school when I first discovered his "different drummer" quote, and being deeply taken with a drummer who truly listened to and followed his own internal beat, I embraced those words. I wrote that quote in LARGE letters with a permanent marker on the back of the large scrapbook in which I was assembling my photographs. I had that scrapbook for years, carrying it across the country and back more than once. 

Note: That different drummer and I took over three decades to finally get on the same beat, so to speak, but here we are. And yes, Warren still follows the beat of that different drummer.

In read Jeffrey Cramer's author bio on the dust jacket, I caught a reference to his being a historical consultant on a short film, Walden, which was produced in 2017 for the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. So while I ate lunch that day, I tracked the film down on Vimeo. 

I watched it.

I watched it with Warren.

I will watch it again.

There were moments in that film when I could murmur along to the quotes, all from Walden, and come darn close to getting them right. The film reminded me of why I was so taken with Thoreau the first time I read that book.

E. B. White revered Thoreau and Walden, and referenced both more than once in his essays and other writings. He called May 6, the day Thoreau died, "the saddest day of the year," and meant it. White admired Thoreau's vision of the meaning of human existence. (Andy White, like my husband, also moved to the beat of a different drummer.) I

Several years ago, I gave my most recently owned copy of Walden to my stepson David after he expressed an interest in reading it. I don't know if he ever did read it or even if he still has the book.

That is not important because immediately after finishing the movie, I went online to ThriftBooks and found a paperback edition from the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden (1845). I ordered it on the spot. (Realize I rarely buy books anymore.) John Updike wrote the introduction to this edition. I have always admired Updike's writings on literature, so that was just an additional bonus. 

I can't wait for it to arrive.

What Thoreau always reminded me (and I have drifted far from remembering the lesson more times than I wish to acknowledge) was to pay attention to the natural world. Don't get so caught up in the hustle of modern society (for him, the Industrial Revolution) that you lose sight of what really counts.

Thoreau took to the woods because he "wished to live deliberately." He saw his retreat as an opportunity "to learn the essential facts of life" from the woods rather than, on his deathbed, "discover that [he] had not lived at all." He left the woods for a reason equally compelling: it seemed to him that he "had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."

Thoreau died a few months before turning 45. Of death, Thoreau wrote, "Live your life, do your work, take your hat." (The conciseness of that summation makes me smile.) It was his mentor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (who lived another 20 years, almost reaching the age of 80), who captured the essence of the spread of life: "Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short. But when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."

"We have had our day." 

Even without the cancer of 18+ years, let alone the new diagnosis, I have no illusions about my being in the autumn of my days. Like Thoreau, I have left lives - careers, communities, focuses - because I had others to live. And like Emerson, I can truly say I have had my day.

And am grateful for it. 

Small Things, Small Moments

This was two weeks ago in Minnesota, but trust me, Ohio has these same colors! 

Back in April, I wrote a small post in which I announced that I was no longer writing on Medium. In my Medium article, I let readers know that I do have this blog, but then warned them not to expect to find any stunning revelations. After all, this blog is "Small Moments of Great Reward."

"Small Moments," not "Great Big Honking Moments." Small moments. I try to write about what I see, what I do, how I manage my days. And as I make more deliberate efforts to write again, I remind myself that writing small is perfectly okay.

I take great comfort from E. B. White's observation about his own writing: "I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day...the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace."

White was 30 years when he wrote those words to his older brother. If White were looking back and commenting on his own work today, he would likely still say that about himself, perhaps adding that even his children's books reflected those "small things of the day." 

If small things worked for Andy White, they sure as heck work for me.

As I noted in a long ago post that disappeared due to operator error (and which I paid homage to in that small April post), a small focus does not mean I have parked my intellect at the door. That being said, for the most part, this continues not to be a forum in which I make pithy, political observations or solve world issues. When I do write about the issues of the day such as hunger or access to justice or homelessness, it is almost always about how those issues play out on a local and personal level.

The last several weeks have been hard at times on several fronts. I learned this morning on Facebook that a colleague from the very early years of the mental health docket, someone whose contributions as a therapist were insightful and gracious and, at times, hilarious, and who had just celebrated his 69th birthday, died suddenly this morning. Thinking of him triggered memories of helping create that docket over a decade ago and then seeing the rewards. Warren's schedule has been beyond packed, straining personal time (his, mine, and ours) and any of our calendars. There are elderly parent issues, there are other matters in our circles of family and friends. The recession is hitting this community hard, which means the number of people needing legal help is hitting all-time highs. 

It has been tough.

But here's the thing: life goes on. Life rolls on despite the hardships and losses and I try to take joy in brighter moments. While the weather continues to shift into deeper autumn, we are still having brilliant days. Today is one such day; I took a long walk earlier just to soak in the colors in the trees, the blue sky, the sunshine.

In my last post, I wrote about the tomatoes and peppers sunning on the deck. Some of them are out there right now as I type this. We had a meal of roasted stuffed peppers a few nights ago; I chopped and froze the rest of them. I have eaten some of the tomatoes; I still have hopes of nurturing the others to eating stage. This morning I texted my friend Pat to see if she wanted any; she and her husband were about to go out of town for the weekend and she was thrilled to have them. (Talk about perfect timing!) I bagged six medium ones for them to pick up as they left When I handed her the bag, she cradled it to her heart.  I have a small bag of cherry tomatoes to take with me tomorrow to a meeting with Amy; she loves cherry tomatoes.  

They are the last tomatoes of 2022. May Pat and Amy enjoy theirs. As for the ones I have, I hope to savor every bite.

Decluttering My Day

 I am on Joshua Becker's "Becoming Minimalist" email list. I have an on again/off again attitude towards those emails; typically I skim them then delete them. But today's article, 20 "First Step" Decluttering Ideas, caught my eye. True to his style, Becker advocated starting small: Declutter the inside of your car (#1), Clear off your nightstand (#5). Baby steps to encourage the reader to take more steps in simplifying their homes and, more to the point, their lives. 

I have felt worse—increasingly worse—physically lately than I have in a long time. Okay, than I have in years. Warren and I head back to Mayo in June, and of course for now I am continuing treatment, but I have questions and observations growing in my mind. And those questions and observations are touching off issues of decluttering—not of the top of the refrigerator (#10), but of my life.

Back in February, looking at what the spring held for me in Legal Clinic, I identified three major Clinic projects, separate and apart from the ongoing assignment of clients to attorneys, that I wanted to see accomplished. One is done. One is almost done (and will be done as of this Thursday afternoon). The third is on hold at the other end of the collaboration, so there is nothing to do right now. Clinic is, for all practical purposes, decluttered.

I'm deactivating my Medium account as an author, I hope by the end of this week. Will I continue to subscribe to and read Medium? Probably. There are some great voices on it. Will I continue to keep my account open to write? No. Not because I am lazy. Not because I feel inferior to some of those great voices (I mean, it is cool to read Barack Obama). But because there is too little of me and, frankly, this blog suits me and my observations best. (There is an E.B. White quote to that effect about his own essays; he felt he excelled best in that format when he wrote about his small observations about everyday life, but I am not going to search my commonplace books to find it right now. And White wrote beautifully and strongly in many formats despite his self-deprecation.) So this blog will continue; my life is full of small moments.

Deactivating my Medium account will declutter the writing corner of my life. 

Today earlier was brilliantly sunny. I thought about being outside, but kept doing inside things, trying to work through how lousy I felt. At about 1:20 today, I crawled into our bed, shaking and miserable. On waking up some 20 minutes later, I came downstairs and followed through on an email I had sent my friend Cindy in which I said first I "hoped" to get back outside in the sunshine, then added '"I know, I know—I need to get out!" 

And I did go out. Yes, I carried some gardening gloves and clippers with the thought that I would do some early garden work, but I quickly set those down. Our deck furniture is still in wraps, so I sat on the deck itself with my back against the tarped furniture. I added a Zildjian ball cap to shade my eyes. And I started writing (in longhand) this blog while feeling the sun, looking up at the blue sky with its scrim of clouds, listening to the birds.

The notebook in which I keep progress notes (how I feel physically) was the only one I had easily at hand, so I wrote in the back pages of it. The cover of that notebook is titled "Here's To Strong Women" with subtitles under it. One of them is "May We Be Them." As I diminish a bit each day, I wonder whether I am a strong woman by continuing on? Or just a stubborn, nay, foolish one?

Back to Joshua and decluttering. In today's trash were my worn out winter boots (which gave me a severe painful callous that may have to be removed by the podiatrist in all likelihood) and the most aged and worn of my three pairs of Skechers, about the only shoes I wear anymore. "Being frugal is not the same as being cheap," say my favorite frugal YouTubers, Larry and Hope Ware of Under the Median. I had been holding onto the boots, despite their being worn out AND painful to my callous, and the shoes thinking—what? That I'd get "one more winter" out of the boots? Another summer out of the worn out shoes? (To complete the picture, realize that the boots have resided behind a living room chair where I tossed them a few months ago to get rid of them, and the shoes had been stuffed into a too stuffed closet since, oh, maybe last summer?) (#9: Declutter old and unused coats and other items from your coat closet.) 

Putting them in the trash, finally, made me feel I was entitled to take care of my feet. Sometimes I forget that taking care of myself is okay. Sometimes I let my mind get cluttered up with thoughts of I might as well hold onto the bad ones "just in case." Just in case of what? That I need to injure my feet some more? 

Another thought decluttered, along with a bit of our living space.

As I wrote out there on our deck, I filled up on sunshine and bird song. My body relaxed and gained some ground. I had to get up to replace the pen as the first gave out. (This is a household of many pens from conferences and percussion trade shows,; we have pens everywhere. Okay, that is cheap and frugal. But this habit also adds to the stream of waste in the world, so that part is not cool.) My knees, feeling every dislocation from my younger years, every step ever climbed/walked/knelt, let their displeasure be known. When I sat back down, I changed my position and thought about my increasing balance and mobility issues. Some of that upcoming Mayo time is in the Neurology Department, a first. For now, I'm not going to let that clutter my mind.

All things come to an end and so did my time on the deck. As I have been typing this, the sky has gone gray and overcast. But oh, the sun! And the birds! And life. That time outside reset me. So maybe, just maybe, I decluttered some of my soul and my heart for now.

Ghostbusters, Ben, and Me

 Yes, I know. The correct grammatical construction of the title is "Ghostbusters, Ben, and I," but I'm following E. B. White's sage advice that sometimes it's better to go with your ear and not the rule. Thank you, Andy.

The original Ghostbusters movie came out in 1984. My oldest son Ben was born in late 1985. Thanks to a bootleg video copy made by my brother Mike sometime in 1987 (I think), Ben and I watched Ghostbusters not just once or twice, but easily two dozen times or more.

Probably more. We knew every character, we knew all the scenes, we knew it all.

How could you not love this this scene?  

So when Ghostbusters II came out in 1989, Ben and I were at the movie theatre in Sacramento on the opening day, our excitement of seeing it the very day it opened outweighing the hour drive to get there.

Ben was not disappointed. Neither was I:

Time moves on. Little boys grow up, interests change, and the once beloved movie or book or game ends up tucked away in fond memories.

Then in late 2021, Ghostbusters: Afterlife came out, reuniting much of the original cast. When I heard about it, my first reaction was, "But Harold Ramis died. They can't do Ghostbusters without Egon."

I didn't go see the movie. (Confession: I have seen no movies at a theatre in these Covid times but neither did I rent it to watch online.) I doubt Ben saw it in any format. I do remember sending him a quick email noting the new movie. After that, I put it out of my mind until I caught an interview with Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson, the remaining Ghostbusters, in which they talked about making the movie without Harold Ramis, but also with Harold Ramis, being careful not to give out any spoilers.

Then I saw an interview with director Jason Reitman (whose father directed the original two movies) in which he explained how they went about bringing Harold Ramis or, rather, his character, Egon Spengler, back using a combination of a body double and CGI. (Brilliantly, I might add.)

What is YouTube for if not to see bits of movies? Including the ending of Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

Without recapping a movie I have not watched, let me just say that the movie's final battle brings back Gozer (from the original movie) against the remaining Ghostbusters. When all seems lost, Egon's granddaughter Phoebe, who has been discovering and learning the lore and knowledge that her late grandfather had stored about the earlier battles, steps into the battle with Egon's proton pack on her back. She loses ground against Gozer until a translucent adult hand appears to help steady her aim. It is the ghost of her grandfather, who returns her amazed look with a gentle smile and helps her battle on until his former companions can rejoin the fight. 

The part I have watched repeatedly is the final scene, after Gozer has been defeated, between Egon's ghost and his estranged daughter, Callie. Callie's version of family was that her father had abandoned his family and her heedlessly. Egon looks at her longingly. Will she forgive him for seemingly running out on her so many years ago? Will she understand that he left his family behind in order to protect them?

Spoiler alert: yes, she will and she does. She goes into his arms. and they embrace. His hope fulfilled, Egon's dissolves into the night sky. 

Ben and I are not estranged. We live far apart, true, but we stay connected. So I don't have that element. But if wishes come true, when I transition from life to death, I would love one last opportunity to meet up with Ben, my Ghostbuster pal of yore, and have that one last loving embrace.

And then Ben, not unlike Peter Venkman in the end of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, can go have some hot cocoa. With or without marshmallows. 

Jumping to the Daylight

For the first time in years (decades?), the switch to Daylight Savings Time last night was seamless for me. Usually I wake groggy and stumble around all day in a fog, cursing the stupidity of moving the clock an hour ahead. But today, smooth sailing.

The difference between this year and all the other years? The myeloma in me. Don't get me wrong. This is not a new announcement about my crappy health. I am stable. But what "stable" means and looks like at 14 years out is very different from what "stable" means in other contexts. The sensation of myeloma, the distinct feel of it, if you will, is something I live with now pretty much around the clock. That feeling typically recedes when I am involved in something, such as a round of attendance mediations, but reasserts itself when times are quiet Accompanied often by fatigue, the myeloma is the reason I have cut back steeply on evening activities, joining friends for coffee, traveling, and the like. It is an increasing reason I read a lot (A LOT) because I can read without having to leave my chair (and my comfort zone) every evening.

There is no quieter fort me than when I go to bed each night, so guess what? The myeloma wakes me up in the deep night, sometime just enough to remind me it is here, sometimes for a long, whiney chat. It is an annoying alarm clock that I cannot set to the time I need.

But this morning it did me a favor. When it went off around old 4:30 a.m., we were already at 5:30 a.m. And it was easier (okay, marginally) to wait out another hour before getting up for the day.

Lots of people comment on my positive attitude as I move through this disease to its inevitable conclusion. I don't know about positive attitude. I think rather than a positive attitude, I am pretty realistic about what this is and what it means. Accepting that I have an incurable, progressive cancer that progresses even when it is stable allows me to savor the time I have and move through my days a little (a lot?) more easily. But today, I will go so far as to say "okay, myeloma, that was a gift."

I take them where I can find them.

And speaking of gifts, Orlando has been in the world and part of our family for a little over three weeks. Three weeks! Time flies. Ramona is very much the big sister, reading to him nightly per reliable reports. That makes me smile extra wide; I was in first grade (like Ramona) when my baby brother Mark was born, and I read to him all the time. (So much so over the years that he jokingly blames me for his being a slow reader because, as he puts it 56 years later, "I didn't have to learn. You read to me all the time!") So here is our Ramona (dressed up for Read Across America as Charlotte's Web; her top half is Wilbur, her bottom half Charlotte), Orlando in arms:

Now that is a gift.

The Best Book of the Summer

Last week, Warren received an email at the Symphony office asking surreptitiously whether I was feeling okay. The sender had not seen any posts from me recently and was worried that perhaps I had taken a turn from the worst. 

This morning I received a call from longtime friends Dick and Milly. Dick came right out of the gate fast: he reads my monthly column in The Myeloma Beacon (and perhaps this one too) and was concerned that I wasn't doing well because he hadn't seen anything from me recently. After I had assured him I am fine, really, he said "good!" and passed the phone over to his wife.

August was a grab bag: treatment, zucchini bread (24 or 30 loaves to date), school mediations (yes, we have started already), poetry, a benefit concert, tomatoes, and most of a solar eclipse (although not as much as Ramona got to see in Vancouver, Washington). Threaded throughout it all has been books—so many that I cannot recall most of them except in snatches. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (highly recommended), $2.00 A Day (which I am reading for the second time), a splendid new biography of Henry Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls just in time for the bicentennial of his birth, some memoirs (always a favorite genre). 

And then, thanks to a glowing review that piqued my interest, I found and read what is clearly The. Best. Book. Of. The. Summer. 

The book is Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy. 

Handy is only two years younger than I am, which means we share some common touchstones in both our reading and our childhood/adolescent experiences. That made his book fun to read, even if, unlike Handy, I did not discover the Narnia books until Ben was young. But it is the sheer love of reading and the love of children's literature that snared me immediately. That Handy references many books that I (a) love, (b) read to my children, and (c) still read from time to time sealed the deal.

Handy writes with humor, an occasional snarky comment or two, and great insight as to why some books work and some books don't. He makes no pretensions about this being a comprehensive look at children's literature; this is his personal stroll through his favorite library, and he brings the reader along for the walk.

Handy starts with Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and ends with E. B. White's Charlotte's Web, which he rightfully concludes was one of the finest books ever written. I still have a copy of the White and so can turn to it, but his homage to Brown was so on point that I almost drove to a store to buy a replacement copy. I won't tell you what other titles and authors he works his way through (although the title and the cover should give you a hint as to at least one of them): read it yourself.

I will add that I picked it up this past Wednesday evening, reluctantly set it aside to get some sleep, read some more while the oatmeal cooked Thursday morning, and then finished it off with great satisfaction (and not a little anguish because it was over) Thursday night. 

Of course I read it in great gulps. I could do no less. 

So that was the Best Book of the Summer. Heck, it may qualify as the Best Book of the Year, and given how many books as I read, that's no small beer.

It is a gray and damp Saturday evening as I type these words. The remnants of Hurricane Harvey have been moving through the area for the last few days. I think of all the displaced people, children and adults alike, in Texas, and hope that there are books in the shelters to help shut out the overwhelming trauma of the storm. 

We have had a wonderful (albeit atypical) cool summer this year. Not great for the tomatoes, but not to be beat for curling up in the evening with a good book in hand. Or at hand. Or both. 

It's nice to be noticed. So Becky, this is for you. You too, Dick.

Inch One Hundred Fifty-Two: Soapbox

My friend Margo summed it up best. "I'm learning to be loud."

I don't like confrontation, which is why I never enjoyed trial work. As a mediator, my goal is to find common ground. I don't typically engage in electronic shouting matches or post political memes on Facebook (although I often "like" them).

But sometimes I read something and think "I have to say something." And this is that time.

In last week's post, I wrote of my fears and concerns about the incoming administration. A longtime reader, a friend and fellow blogger in the blogosphere, took me to task: "Please don't believe everything you hear, especially about the election. News media is very bias[ed] and most of what gets reported is not correct.Wait and see of what comes of this new administration. My bet is that it will get better."

Give the President-Elect a chance? He has already announced Cabinet choices, most of whom I disagree with politically and morally. Rex Tillerson? Steve Mnuchin? Betsy DeVos? JEFF SESSIONS????

So with all due respect, I think the President-Elect has already indicated the tone his administration is going to take, at least out of the gate. So I don't think I need to wait and see. 

The second comment was far more upsetting and this had to do with the upcoming planned armed Neo-Nazi march in Whitefish, Montana, against the Jews in that town. Armed march, mind you, because that's how hate groups roll. The blog comment was "I just saw what you were talking about at Whitefish. A bunch of idiots, who were not supported by those in charge. I don't see this any different that 'black lives matter' groups that condemn white people."

I agree that the President-Elect has no connection with or endorsement of the Whitefish march. But I am stunned that a man who is on Twitter relentlessly, a man about to become President of this country, who can chastise a Broadway cast or a SNL skit at the drop of a hat, cannot bring himself to tweet a criticism, even a mild one, about Whitefish. Or one about the Klan marches in North Carolina on December 3. Or about the Hitler salutes thrown at the alt-right conference in D.C. 

Hoping I was wrong, I spent time on Google hoping for a tweeted comment or criticism from the President-Elect. Nothing.

I find that silence, especially in light of the man's volubility, disingenuous.

But what struck mw to the core was the casual comparison of Neo-Nazis and the Black Lives Matter movement. The latter is a movement arising out of deliberate and unlawful killings of citizens, primarily black men and usually unarmed, by law enforcement. Period. It is not a "let's kill the white people" or even a "let's kill the police" movement, despite what FOX News reports. (Talk about "most of what gets reported in not correct.") Black Lives Matter is about calling attention to the very real threat that millions of Americans live with daily because of their skin color. The Whitefish march is about threatening and intimidating a population because of its religion. I cannot begin to connect those dots.

In my gut, I feel my personal security and civil liberties are threatened by the upcoming administration. So are the safety and civil liberties of my sons (Hispanic and Jewish), my daughter-in-law (Native American), and my granddaughter (Native American, Hispanic, and Jewish). And so are the civil liberties of million of American citizens because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identification, disability, and gender. Regardless of what the President-Elect may believe, he has surrounded himself with staff and cabinet choices who are against me and others of us in this nation. Think of Steve Bannon, chief strategist for the President-Elect, and tell me I am wrong.

Three final comments and then I will step off my soapbox.

First, contrary to others in my circle of friends, I do know people who voted for the incoming administration. One of my very closest friends, Katrina, campaigned for the President-Elect. We may have to tiptoe around political discussions for a long time. Yet I am confident that our friendship will last because I believe that should my worst fears be realized, she would not turn her head and pretend she did not see. Katrina would have her Colonel Welch moment.

Second, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote The Wave of the Future (subtitled A Confession of Faith) in 1940, a little book which was seen at the time and forever after as an apology for and a plea for accepting the evils of Nazism and fascism as necessary to better the world. (Among the many critics of her work was E. B. White, in his December 1940 essay "The Wave of the Future," in which he neatly dissects her disturbing position.) AML followers like me now know that Anne was heavily influenced and pushed to write this by her husband, Charles, who was anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi and may not have had any choice to do otherwise. That's not the point. That book cost Anne her reputation for decades. I own a copy of the book and have read it, but I cannot bring myself to read it in 2017.

Third, I am not allowing comments on this particular post. It is a soapbox of one. In my personal life presently, there is too much going with friends and family to respond to "yes, but you didn't consider this" comments. This is not an equal time open forum today.

I wish I were braver. I wish I were louder. And I fervently hope that, when tested, I speak up and say "this is wrong."

Inch One Hundred Five: Small Notes

I was in Rochester, Minnesota, or in transit to and from the same, for much of last week. This week I have been dazed from the travel, dazed from the intensity of work (it is the heart of the truancy season and I am mediating attendance issues in schools throughout the county, usually several a day), and dazed from just the rush of things: oncology, legal clinic, work, home, truancies.

So this will be neither a long nor a complex post. Simple accomplishments, once I stagger home from work or from the infusion center, are about all I am capable of. Today, that meant getting laundry done, doing a very, very light grocery shopping, and tending to a handful of tiny tasks. I have letters to answer and other work to do, but it all has to wait. When it becomes too much, I retreat to a book.

One thing we ("we" meaning Warren and I) did do today was attend the annual Delaware Lions Club pancake breakfast. We took along Aunt Ginger, and had Warren's son David meet us there. Ginger loves outings like these and she loves pancakes. She ate with enthusiasm and pleasure. Because of her advancing dementia, she would look at someone walk by, then turn towards me and say "That person looks familiar. Who is it?" After about the tenth inquiry, I laughed, hugged her, and said "Ginger, everyone looks familiar to you."

I just finished reading the collected letter of Ursula Nordstrom, the children's literature editor at Harper for a huge chunk of the 20th century and a woman who broke through the male-only world of publishing and rose into the upper echelons of the business. The book is called Dear Genius and I loved it so much I found a used copy on Amazon and bought it just so I could return to it time and time again. Nordstrom edited E. B. White, Maurice Sendak, and Mary Stolz, among others. As my friend Margo pointed out (and thank you, Margo, for telling me about the book), one of the few major children's writers of the mid-twentieth century Nordstrom did not edit was Beverly Cleary.

Right now, though, I am reading In The Slender Margin by Eve Joseph. Subtitled The Intimate Strangeness of Death and Dying, it is holding me spellbound.

As I said, a short post. A simple post. More later.

Inch Ninety-Nine: New Year

I have not yet grown used to the idea that it is a new year. Oh, I am getting the date right on checks and letters, but another year? Already?

The first nine days of January have been a hodgepodge. Some days off, some truancy mediations (already), some sunny cold days, some warmer but rainy days. We continue to have no snow. This morning, Warren and I took a walk in weather more like mid-April than early January. Portland got some snow and ice at the beginning of the week; the video of Ramona playing in it showed more snow clinging to her mitten than we have had all season.

Our tree—the one that dropped needles before it was even in its stand—is still with us. The press of time on Warren and my personal lack of energy have guaranteed that the holidays will linger yet a bit longer in this house.

To say I have been reading a lot these last several days would be an understatement. I just finished rereading The Lord of the Rings, not for the first time. Before that, I inhaled Roger Angell's This Old Man, a collection of his short pieces, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, a magazine which he and his mother and stepfather before him have been associated with almost since its inception. Angell's stepfather was E.B. White and by some magical, non-biological process, he inherited a goodly portion of White's writing skill. Angell's mother, Katherine S. White, was a formidable editor and no slouch at writing herself, but she was not E.B. White. She may have taught her son a sense of structure, but the effortless sentences that Angell turns out could have come straight from White's pen. As my good friend Margo noted, reading Angell is so easy, "like floating."

During my chemo sessions, which are twice a week, I am reading for the first time War and Peace. It's a lengthy tome, but there are lots of chemo sessions in the future. While sitting in the waiting room waiting for chemo, I read an essay in a cancer magazine on the nearest table. The essayist talked about her changed priorities since receiving her diagnosis. She no longer spent time on things that did not interest her, such as "boring" books that "were supposed to be good" for her. On the strength of that conviction, she chucked War and Peace.

War and Peace boring? Boring? Lengthy, yes. Freighted with complicated names and lineages and story lines, absolutely. But boring? Never. I put down the essay in disgust.

For my home reading, I am rereading Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. In the dark of winter, in the start of the new year, it is good to read and dream of road trips down the blue highways of our own choosing.

Inch Seventy-Nine: Learning to Conserve

Conserve.

My battered red Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tell me the word means to "keep in a safe and sound state, [especially] to avoid wasteful or destructive use."

I am learning to conserve.

Let me make clear what I am conserving. Not money, not land, not my tangible household goods. I'm good in that regard. I consider myself fairly thrifty and frugal, and I reflect regularly on ways to reduce my eco-footprint. I recycle and reuse. I limit my spending and vigorously eschew conspicuous consumption. While I am not at the same level of routine subsistence living as my son Sam and other millennials, I easily surpass most of my coworkers, all of my siblings, and many of my friends. Long before the Non-Consumer Advocate adopted it, I had already made this World War II slogan my own: Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

So what am I conserving if not the treasures of this world?

I am learning to conserve me.

I have moved into a new phase of cancer: chemotherapy. My new regimen is two consecutive days (Tuesday/Wednesday) for three consecutive weeks, rest one week, then resume. Because I have am incurable, unsolvable, and terminal cancer, chemo is not for so many weeks or courses. It is an infinite loop until it or I fail.

It is such a wearying prospect.

I have just finished the second week of the first round. It could be a lot worse. Way worse. So far I am not experiencing acute nausea. I am unlikely to lose my hair. It does not take all day, only about three and a half hours with driving. On the first day, I went to our monthly legal clinic afterwards. I have gone to work afterwards three of the four chemo days. So I am well aware and grateful that I am tolerating chemo so seemingly well.

All the same, I am becoming increasingly aware that the chemo is charging a heavy tariff.  And in that regard, I am the wastrel, the profligate intent on squandering her assets while the tax collector waits in the hallway, shifting stolidly from one foot to the other.

Our home life often moves at a fast pace and as of late it has moved at a frantic pace. Most of the most frenetic activity is in Warren's spheres, which invariably spill over into mine, but some of it is of my own doing.

I need to learn to step away. I need to learn to turn off the engine. I need to learn to conserve.

I took a baby step a month ago, resigning my seat on our town's civil service commission. I have served on the commission since 2006 and that was a hard letter to sign. Afterwards, I cried, especially after the note from the fire chief arrived in my email.

I am taking bigger steps right now, wrapping up a yearlong court project with my old court. The project was community building in the truest sense and I am proud of my work. But as I draw up my project punch list, I find myself handing over the reins (and the paperwork and the responsibility) to the new court coordinator with a palpable sense of relief rather than reluctance. It is time to let it go.

I am learning to conserve myself.

The most daunting frontier of conservancy is personal. I can not, I will not winnow my friends. But I have to start limiting my engagements. And that is hard, hard, hard. No, I can't meet you for lunch; no, I can't do coffee that day or even that week.

It is hard and I resent it. But then I come back to the definition of "conserve" and the reality of my life now. To be able to work, I must conserve myself. To be able to write, I must conserve myself. To be able to be Warren's companion and helpmeet, I must conserve myself. Already others have called me on the carpet. My friend Kevin wrote "Especially while you are in treatment, if the choice is between baking and taking a break, you should take a break!" Kim echoed him in her email: "Lastly, I know you are the mentor and I am the mentee but I do have to say April take care of yourself. I only say this because it seems that you're spreading yourself really really thin even for person who had 100 percent health. " And my wonderful friend and coworker Dodie looks at me and says, bluntly, "April, just go home!"

So I must learn to conserve. My friendships will carry on, even if the emphasis shifts to emails and shorter contacts. One dear to my heart, discussing my health, wrote "God has blessed you both with many friends.  Hold tightly to them." I hold those words tightly and gratefully.

I find myself thinking a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and E.B. White, the two writers I return to time and time again. Anne was famous for the sheer volume of friends and acquaintances she had. Her correspondences, tea and luncheon engagements, and evening events (plays, dinners, concerts, movies) were staggering. She wrote in her lyrical Gift From The Sea:

There is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on, the time has been filled. There are so few pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives, but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures.

Anne did not often take her own wise counsel, although she passed it on.

At the other end of the social spectrum was E.B. White, who tended to lean far away from the limelight and the social bustle. Quiet and introverted by nature, he filled his days, but tended to fill them at his pace and with his writing. I have been rereading the exquisite Essays of E.B. White. White's writing is deceptively simple, so clean and clear that you read and then catch your breath in sheer delight. In one, he wrote:

There is one big boulder down in the pasture woods where I sometimes go to sit when I am lonely or sick or melancholy or disenchanted or frightened, and in combination with sweet fern, juniper, and bayberry this old rock has a remarkable restorative effect on me. I'm not sure but that this is the true energy, the real source of man's strength.

Fall is just over the horizon and conserving—canning and harvesting—is in the air. I don't have a rock but I can sit for hours on my deck and watch the bees ply the sunburnt flowers. Doing so has a remarkable restorative effect on me.

"Conserve" also means to preserve with sugar and a conserve is a candied fruit mixture, much like a very thick jam. It is time for me to take stock. It is time to candy those memories and store them against the darkening days, the gray winter ahead.

It is time to conserve.

Inch Sixty-Nine: This House

This house—our house—is a mess.

There is no other way to put it. Between the music festival this week (concerts or rehearsals every night), my health, Warren's schedule without the music festival, and other family (the larger family) matters, there is no time, no energy, no bigger picture, no anything to spare.

Monday night we decamped to a spare bedroom. It is the same bedroom in which I have my writing desk and which was already in a state of—ummmm—disarray before we moved in.

It was in a state of chaos before because I have been purging again: eight bags to Goodwill, personal papers to recycling or shredding. There were still those piles of "do I send this out to Ben (or Sam) now or wait?" and "well, what about that?" Those stacks got hastily shifted to the perimeter of the room when I cleared and made up the bed at 11:00 p.m. Monday night.

Our sudden late night exit was due to the invasion of bedbugs from one of our travels or one of our activities. It was the dermatologist examining Warren who said "have you looked for bedbugs?" We did that night. The good news is that we caught them early; the great news is that the mattress in our bedroom was long overdue for replacement.

The bad news is that we are now strung across two bedrooms since we are sleeping in the spare room but our clothes are in our bedroom.

Well, for that matter, we are also strung across two bathrooms right now too. Warren and his son yanked out the toilet from the little bathroom adjoining our bedroom (it is too small to call a "master bath;" a "master bath closet" is more accurate) because it had been leaking and the floor needs replacing. We might as well paint our bathroom while we are at it. Our toiletries and the shower we use are in the bath closet; the working toilet on the second floor is in the other bathroom, which is conveniently located next to our current bedroom.

The toilet, incidentally, is in the other spare bedroom, along with all the art work from the first floor which came off  the walls last May when we repainted and had new carpet installed before Ben and Alise and Ramona came to visit.

The first floor has its own issues. The whole floor is the staging area for the Symphony's Executive Director and timpanist (i.e., Warren) and last night we filled the living room with the remains of the percussion ensemble's performance. Did I also mention that there are more crotales in this house right now than most major percussion manufacturers keep in warehouses at any given time? And there are Zildjian hats of different colors scattered around as well, courtesy of last night, including the checkered flag one perched on the kitchen table right now.

And let's not forget the bedding which I washed and dried on HOT post bedbug search just in case they had any bright ideas of migrating. It occupies three-quarters of the couch right now.

I am writing this longhand outside on the back deck in the early morning. I like to start my mornings out here when I can, listening to the birds bringing up on the day. From where I sit, I can glance to the right and see the garden. This year's garden is a riot of flowers...and grass and weeds. The flowers are perennials—some wintered over, some established by me in past years—none of which got moved to new beds because of schedules and travels and illness and the fact that Boger's son never brought back his dad's most excellent rototiller and so we did not get the new garden beds dug.  The garden is beautiful if you don't look too closely, but if I don't get some of it cleaned up, the grass and weeds will choke the pathetic tomato plants.

The other beds are hardly any better, although I did finally get the suckers around the ornamental cherry cut back after the robins fledged.

You must also appreciate that to get to the garden from the deck, although it is a short distance, you must navigate past the bagged soil that never got opened and used, the spare cargo trailer that occupies that bulk of the weedy brick patio and that I want Warren to give to his son because I cannot easily reach the garden with it in the way, and the small heap of wood (ends of old boards) that came up from the shed in the backyard and never got used this winter.

E. B. White wrote an essay, "Memorandum," in October 1941 in which he listed all the miscellaneous chores he really needed to do that day, ranging from bringing in the pumpkins to writing a long overdue letter to replacing a broken light in the workshop. White rolls through a lengthy to-do list, then concludes "I've been spending a lot of time here typing, and I see it is four o'clock already and almost dark, so I had better get going. Specially since I ought to get a haircut while I am at it."

I know just how White felt. It is already 6:30 a.m., I need to get showered and dressed, fix breakfast, and get to a half day training session. And I really should take another bag of stuff to Goodwill while I am at it.

Inch Twenty-One: Afternoon On The Deck

This afternoon found me outside on the deck, in the pleasant shade by the house, the last of the towels drying on the line. The rudbeckia is in full bloom and as I wrote, I let my eyes stray to them often as I watched bees and other pollinators work over the flowers. In the farthest corner of the back yard, where Warren's shed is, the rudbeckia we transplanted along the west side of the shed now reaches above the lowest part of the sloping roof.

A cicada chattered somewhere. Finches and other small bird plied the feeder on the dogwood tree.

Need I add that it was an ideal summer day? The temperature was cool, the humidity was low, the sky was blue, the air was mild. It is evening now and rain is coming as I type these words, but they were penned in the sweetness of the afternoon. The rest of this post reflects that present time, not this one.

On the deck against the house and in the shade are three pots of coneflowers I brought home from the store earlier today. These will go into the ground this weekend. Against the garage wall, in the vegetable garden, are nine pots of daylilies (two crowns to a pot), also waiting to go into the ground. Warren and I have been discussing making a bed of daylilies in the back yard against the pine trees.

The daylilies, which are not in the Lily family at all, are mostly a creamy white/yellow flower, although three pots are of a bronzed red shade. The coneflowers are one of the new shades that recently debuted, these being a red color instead of the traditional purple.

Against all odds, I am becoming a lady gardener.

I don't use "lady gardener" as a pejorative. Gardening is hard work, regardless of your gender or your name. By lady gardener, I mean I see myself drifting away from food production (a few tomatoes aside) and increasingly establishing and planting perennial gardens that bring color to my eyes and peace to my spirits.

The rudbeckias are perennials. The black-eyed Susans  against the back of the house are perennials, along with the blackberry lilies (which are true lilies). Blanket flowers are also perennials, although I will likely have to reestablish them next year due to poor gardening tactics (mine) and even poorer planning (also mine) this year.

As I write these lines, I glance up at the rudbeckia. The yellow of the petals is so intense that it almost hurts my eyes.

I will move the spiderwort beds to the shadier north side of the house in the spring. They are in the front bed now, which is on the west side, and they always burn up in the full sun.

As I said, being a lady gardener is not easy.

I have two favorite books about gardening, but they are not gardening books per se. One is Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White. It is a posthumous collection of her reviews of garden catalogues for The New Yorker, at which she worked for many years. While ostensibly she was reviewing the seed offerings for the season, White, a passionate gardener, added commentaries and observations about gardening as well. E. B. White, her husband, gives us a glimpse of his wife in the preface: "I seldom saw her prepare for gardening, she merely wandered out into the cold and wet, into the sun and the warmth, wearing whatever she had put on that morning...unhesitatingly she would kneel in the dirt and begin grubbing about, garbed in a spotless cotton dress or a handsome tweed skirt and jacket. She simply refused to dress down to a garden..."

The other favorite is Noah's Garden by Sarah Stein. Despite its title, the book is not about Biblical gardening. Instead, it is about re-establishing "the ecology of our back yards." Stein writes of turning her rather standard "dead" yard (mowed, fertilized, and sprayed lawns, hybrid annuals that did not seed, non-fruiting ornamental planting) into a living property with native plants and bushes, seed producing plantings, and increased cover that attracted back to her non-urban property insects (fireflies, bees, other pollinators, to name a few) and animals (quail, frogs, songbirds, foxes, to name a few more). Every time I look at the Bradford pear in the backyard, a tree of great beauty when it blossoms but of no use after that, I appreciate Stein's theme all the more.

Both books are by and about strong woman gardeners, both to me are lady gardeners.  And now I am drifting towards that rank. Each year there are fewer tomatoes (an apostasy in and of itself) and more color.

There will still be annuals: the marigold border around the vegetable garden (increasingly a flower garden), a large basil patch (some of it for pesto, most of it for the bees), the tomatoes, of course. But my thoughts will continue to be of perennials, of leaving a legacy in color.

The yellow of the rudbeckia! I cannot get enough of it. And the bees in the rudbeckia! And the intensity of the day!

And the brightness in my soul.

Inch Five: Sycamores

Sycamores along the Olentangy

The sycamores are still with us. Spring is coming on slow this year; the sycamores will hang around until the undergrowth and other deciduous trees turn green and fill in the landscape.

Sycamores don't physically move, of course. They just become part of the general landscape when all the trees are in full leaf, standing alongside the oaks and maples and buckeye trees. Once that happens, I tend to push the sycamores to the edge of my consciousness until the late fall, when they will come to my brain's forefront again.

Sycamores are great, graceful trees that tend to line riverbanks. You see them along the Olentangy River, which splits through Delaware. There are even a few along the banks closest to the downtown, where most sycamores in that area disappeared when the feds brought the high bypass through in the 1950s.

 My very old (1956) Golden Nature Guide on TREES (all caps, all the time) notes that the American Sycamore is characterized by the "cream-colored fresh bark" visible when the outer brown bark peels off naturally. Don't think yellow cream, think white cream. Now picture the Route 23 North onramp at the north edge of town. The onramp, high in the air, shoots straight east towards the Olentangy, then curves north and drops to highway level right along the river. When I get on that ramp before the world turns green again, all I see is sycamore after sycamore, those cream-colored trunks and branches reaching high into the sky.

Sycamore are tall, among the tallest hardwood trees. They do not have the heavy girth of oak trees, but they more than make up for the oak's mass with their slender proportions and that ghostly, other worldly appearance. No state has chosen the sycamore for its state tree, a fact which surprises me. I would have thought some legislator around this part of the country would have recognized the beauty and grace of the sycamore, not to mention its ubiquitous presence.

Robert Frost wrote a poem, "Goodbye and Keep Cold," in which he bids his apple orchard farewell for   a long season. E. B. White wrote "Farewell, My Lovely!," his essay to the Model T as it disappeared from the American scene. I have a fleeting sense of Frost and White's moods as I look at the sycamores, soon to disappear again for a long season. Farewell and see you in November.

The Bees Are Still Lingering

Fall is deepening around here. Most days are crisp, most nights are chill. We may have a frost this week, there may even be a little snow. Yesterday it rained for several hours, a cold, chilling autumnal rain.

Today, however, is bright and sunny. This morning I pulled up the tomato stakes in the garden and started the pre-winter cleanup. I managed to snag a few tomatoes; I picked half a dozen peppers that will be turned into relish shortly.

And I watched the bees.

I have started planting native perennials and the blanket flowers (Gaillardia) did amazingly well in the back of the garden. We may move them in the spring, but I have enjoyed their bright colors against the white wall of the garage this year.

Apparently the bees have enjoyed them also. While I worked nearby on the tomatoes, several of them plied their trade in pollen.

I wrote about the bees earlier this summer, when the zucchini blossoms and rudbeckia drew them to our yard. It is good to see them, knowing that they will soon be gone.

E. B. White, in his introduction to his wife Katherine's work, Onward and Upward in the Garden, wrote of watching her plan and direct the planting of her spring garden in the late fall. He captured her as "oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection."

I feel the same way about the bees as I watch them wrap up the season. I am already planning on the spring, already anticipating the resurrection.

Just Like Lightning

When grilled on the subject of school-in-country vs. school-in-city, he replied that the chief difference is that the day seems to go so much quicker in the country. "Just like lightning," he reported. From "Education," by E. B. White.

Days in school aren't the only things that go just like lightning.

Here is Ramona coming home from the hospital way back in September, all of three or four days old:

And here is Ramona recently coming home from a day in the park, almost seven months old:

Just like lightning, indeed.

The Train Trip

Chicago's Union Station

Because the space in which the Symphony performs is closed while OWU renovates the chapel organ, Warren did not start 2013 in the midst of rehearsals and executive preparations for a March concert. While it is never easy for him to slip the surly bonds of the Symphony, February represented as good a time to get away as he was ever likely to get. So we were extravagant with our time and took the train to Portland to meet Ramona.

If passenger rails still threaded this country, I would never fly again. It was that wonderful an experience.

We traveled by train from Toledo, Ohio (our nearest Amtrak station) to Chicago, where we boarded the Empire Builder to Oregon. As a nod to my health and energy levels, we bought a roomette. (More about it later.)

We have traveled by train before, but never so far for so long. We left Toledo in the early morning, after a very short night and a two hour drive from our home.  I thought briefly of napping on the five hour trip to Chicago. But as the train rolled through the dark, I caught a glimpse of someone standing in their kitchen, the yellow light of the room spilling out into the still, dark morning and I could not go back to sleep.

It is that intimacy—that quick glimpse into peoples' lives—that makes train travel so gripping. Train travel is travel at a personal level and rhythm. The train flashed through Indiana downtowns that mirrored our own, the Italianate structures so familiar that I felt I could walk down those strange streets and not feel disoriented. As we moved further west, we passed little towns pinned in place by the train tracks that split through them. The vaster the spaces became between communities, the more the train served as connecting thread and viable short-distance mass transit.

Montana 

There is a soliloquy about baseball in the movie "Field of Dreams," about the importance of baseball to this nation's history. I feel the same about railroads and train travel. As E.B. White noted more than 50 years ago, we did ourselves a great disservice when we turned our backs on passenger trains and took to the air. Now, as airlines disappear and airports contract back in upon themselves (St. Louis and Cincinnati, to name two), I wonder whether we will turn our eyes back to the rails as a viable way to travel.

As I mentioned, we bought a roomette for our travels. An adventure in micro-living if ever there was one, a roomette requires two adults to live in a space in which one youth might comfortably take up residence. It taught me a lot about packing light and being compact in how much space one takes up. Fortunately, Warren and I are highly compatible travelers (no surprise), so we made the roomette work with a great deal of laughter and love. While a roomette adds to the cost of travel, it includes hot showers (a wonderful luxury), linens, and all meals, which on Amtrak are substantial and excellent. (There is a full galley on a dining car, and the food is cooked right there on the train.) I don't think Warren and I stopped smiling from the time we got on the train in Chicago, we were so pleased.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like E.B. White, also spent a lot of time on trains, even after she took to the air. In a letter to her younger sister, written while en route from the east to Mexico City (where her father was the US Ambassador), she wrote, "Tonight all through supper, having ordered baked apple with cream (I hesitated between that and cornflakes), I regretted the cornflakes. And it occurred to me later that life might so easily be that eternal "If only I'd ordered cornflakes—"

At breakfast, I contemplated the hot crab cakes versus the Amtrak french toast. I chose the french toast. It was magnificent.

I did not once regret the crab cakes.

Sunrise over the Columbia River Gorge 

The Lake

E. B. White wrote an evocative, haunting essay, "Once More To the Lake," about taking his young son to the same lake White had vacationed at with his family as a child. It is a moving commentary on time, generations, and mortality.

This past September, Warren and I made a trek to a lake, although, unlike White, this was not one I had frolicked in as a child. In fact, it was a lake I had never seen before. On my very short list of things I want to accomplish in my lifetime is standing, wading, or swimming in all five Great Lakes. I'd knocked off Erie, Ontario, and Michigan decades ago, but never managed to get to Huron or Superior. Early September found us on our way north, to the Upper Peninsula, to finish the cycle.

It was a great trip, no surprise there. It was full of good food (most of it local), great sights (a giant Paul Bunyan!), and lots of time for me and Warren to be away from our daily lives and focus just on one another. By weekend's end, I'd stood in both lakes and fulfilled a long-held goal.

What I did not count on was being so totally captivated and mesmerized by Lake Superior. Almost five months later, I can close my eyes and still feel its pull.

Lake Superior is the largest and deepest and fiercest of the Great Lakes. It has a deep booming voice that one hears long before catching a glimpse of it. Depending on the shoreline, the waves are gentle lappers, firm, steady rollers, or powerful whitecaps all on the same sunny day and sometimes within less than a quarter mile of each other. I can only imagine what it must look and sound like at the height of a winter storm.

When we drove to Lake Superior, Ramona was only a week old and my thoughts were often on her out in Oregon. All of the land surrounding Lake Superior was once Anishinaabe land; the Anishinaabe these days are the Ojibwe or Chippewa tribes. The tribal presence is greatly reduced in this modern era, but I could not walk the sandy paths to the lake without feeling a strong, spiritual presence permeating the air. I found myself thinking of an older Ramona, a little girl, and wanting to bring her to Lake Superior and show her this, this magnificent expanse of sky and water that her people once came from.

Along with the whitefish and the local doughnuts, I tasted briefly a strong dose of regret that I had never been to Lake Superior with my own sons when they were boys. Don't misunderstand me: they had some great vacations when they were little, including days spent at Lake Erie. But something about the Upper Peninsula, about Lake Superior, about the weekend, made me wish for just one swift moment of being a young mother again and showing my two young sons the vast lake and exploring its rock strewn beaches.

We carried some rocks home from Lake Superior. Warren picked up his rocks in memory of his mother, Ellen, who had an affinity for picking up rocks on her travels. I searched for a small rock for Ramona, and then picked up a few small ones—more pebbles than anything—for myself. Ramona's rock recently went off to Portland; mine sit on my desk.

Lake Superior rocks are smooth and round from the constant churning of the waves. I sometimes rub one of them between my fingers, feeling the velvety contours, then closing my eyes and listening once more to the lake.

Ramona

Ramona is three months old. Yesterday, in fact, marked the end of the first quarter of her first year in the world. We were at Margo and Gerald's the Saturday night that Ben called and said, "She's here." In a wonderful serendipitous turn of events, her anniversary was also a Saturday and we were again sharing the evening with our good friends Margo and Gerald. We all celebrated Ramona's three month anniversary with a shared amazement that she already that old.

I have yet to hold Ramona is my arms, although I have pored over the many photos of her and have seen her when skyping with Ben and Alise. In this short amount of time, she has gone from being a Baby Blob to being firmly entrenched in the land of Babyhood. I see new expressions in her face, I hear of new feats of dexterity. I long to see and meet her in person.

The incomparable E. B. White wrote a small poem after his son Joel was born, "The Conch:"

Hold a baby to your ear
   As you would hold a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
   New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby's code?
   And which is the older—
The listener or his small load?
   The held or the holder?

I think of White's words when I study the most recent photos. I look at Ramona's little face, at the deep, solemn look in her eyes. I see traces of all her heritages in her: Chippewa, Cuban, WASP. I wonder what she is already thinking and what she already has known for centuries.

I cannot wait to hold her to my ear.

Song of the Open Road

This is my son Sam, who is 22 this summer.

And this is my stepson David, who is also 22 this summer.

When last heard from, Sam was in New Orleans, debating which direction to head next.When last heard from, David was entering Yellowstone National Park for the evening. Eventually, both young men will crisscross the country, with each ending back up where he started from. In Sam's case, that would be Portland, Oregon. In David's, Akron, Ohio.

What is it about young men and summer that makes them want to hit the road? Long before Jack Kerouac ever took to the highways, a young man named E.B. White drove with his friend Howard Cushman from Ithaca, New York, to Seattle, Washington. This trip was undertaken in a Model T long before there were paved highways in many parts of the country. White captured his trip in his letters home (which are collected in The Letters of E.B. White) and in his essay, "The Years of Wonder." He and Cushman were 23 at the time.

When E.B. White became a father, he wrote a poem, "Apostrophe to a Pram Rider," on the subject of travel:

Someday when I'm out of sight,
Travel far but travel light!
Raise the sail your old man furled,
Hang your hat upon the world! ...
Joe, my tangible creation,
Happy in perambulation,
Work no harder than you have to. Do you get me?

So to my far flung sons, measuring their days in miles and destinations, travel far and travel light!

The Man Who Took Us Outside Over There

Maurice Sendak is dead. When I heard the news this morning, I emailed Warren: "I may need to go home."

I didn't, but I sure felt like it. I felt I needed to go home and pull his books off the shelf and reread each of them again.

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

Now Ida in a hurry snatched her Mama's yellow rain cloak, tucked her horn safe in a pocket, and made a serious mistake.  She climbed backwards out her window into outside over there. 

Did you ever hear of Mickey, how he heard a racket in the night, and shouted "QUIET DOWN THERE!"...

I read a lot of Maurice Sendak to my boys when they were little. We would study the pictures of Mickey in his airplane over the kitchen city. For a long time, a poster of that very scene hung in Sam's bedroom. We would read about the Wild Things, about Ida and her wonder horn, about milk in the batter.

A poster of that very scene hung in Sam's bedroom.

And now the man who created all those wonderful images and characters is gone. 

I had kind of been waiting to see who died before Ramona Dawn arrives this August. I was thinking Beverly Cleary or E. L. Konigsberg, but it turned out to be Maurice Sendak.

That sounds grim, "waiting to see who died," but I don't mean it that way. I don't believe in some giant cosmic balancing act: you get a grandchild, but I get to take this person away. But given my deep love of books, and knowing that Ramona Dawn will be blessed with two parents who also love books (let's face it, Ben eats books for breakfast), I mourn when a giant in the pantheon of children's literature exits the world just before someone dear to me is scheduled to make an appearance. 

I was pregnant with Ben when E.B. White died. I remember crying that night when I heard the news on  MacNeil/Lehrer, thinking how sad it was that my child was being born into a world in which E.B. White no longer lived.That was shallow thinking, of course, which I now chalk up to prenatal hormones. Andy White was dead, physically, but his books were still there. They still are. I just reread Charlotte's Web last night with its evocative ending lines: It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

And I know it will be the same with Ramona Dawn and Maurice Sendak. The man is gone, but the Wild Things, Mickey, Ida, and all the rest of his amazing cast are still here. They will always be here. They are here waiting for someone to open up the books and let them out. They are here waiting for someone to fall into the batter or climb out the window backwards into outside over there. They are here waiting for someone to sail to the island where the Wild Things are.

And they are here waiting for Ramona Dawn, waiting for her to discover them.