Grateful and Lucky

My friend Tani recently shared the story that her two sons, when they were young, had a wonderful ritual. When they came across two cherries connected with a single stem, they would hold them up and shout, "I am grateful and lucky!" 

Tani recently bought herself a necklace with a two-cherry pendant on it to remind herself that she is truly grateful and lucky.

I wrote her that her sons' shouts reminded me of Sam, my youngest, when he would have an unexpected surprise, such as finding a penny in a parking lot. He would burst out with a joyful "Is this my lucky day or what?" as he danced up and down in glee.

Grateful and lucky. Both Tani and I have had a heaping serving of health concerns lately, so her words resonated with me. 

In picking tomatoes (yes, they are finally ripening), I found this when I turned them out to wash:

I am grateful and lucky! Is this my lucky day or what? 

August Money Review

As predicted when I last wrote about our grocery spending, the food purchases (groceries, not eating out) made while out west pushed our August numbers way past the $175.00 mark.

Way past.

Just before we left for vacation, our combined food/household spending for the month was $197.13, $174.15 of which was food and $22.98 of which represented household items such as toilet paper and cleaning agents. So we were already past our $175.00 goal, but even so, our year-to-date average still came in at $165.80.

While on vacation, we spent another $111.20 at the grocery on food, nudging our year-to-date average to $179.70.

This is what that corn/cheese/bacon pie looks like. 

Why so much?

Because we bought all the food for two meals for nine adults. (I'm not counting the children, one of whom is an infant.) One meal was a variation on a Cuban pork dish my sons' grandmother used to make; the other featured three bacon/onion/corn pies and two roast chickens. Leftovers went to various homes or made reappearances in the days that followed. Another $20.00 or so went to a sundae bar (Ramona's favorite) when seven adults (and the children) gathered on the last evening. My sons (and their partners) provided the main meal and did all the cooking, but we supplied the dessert. (There were also some smaller purchases along the way, some of which we shipped home.)

Our August food expenditures were worth every penny.

I suppose I could take the position that our August food bill should be the lower amount and not count the vacation. But had all these wonderful people been in my home, I would have bought greater quantities of food and counted those amounts. So I'm counting them here. It will be nip-and-tuck to see if I finish 2019 with a monthly average of $175.00, but, ehhhh, I'm okay with that.

Surprisingly, our vacation eating out (just our portion, not the amounts we spent treating others) came in at a cool $93.29. Before we left, we had spent only $43.64 on eating out, which included our share of a lunch for my dad's 86th birthday and a desperately needed bag of food after a very, very late legal clinic. So the month came out at $136.93, with the bulk of that being the vacation, and I'm fine with that.

 When we got home on September 1 (new month, new totals), we did a major shopping to get perishables and restock some basics that had run low during July and August. I'm predicting September comes in around $175.00, especially if I make a point of turning to the freezer and cupboards. Between purchases at a local family-owned farm market and my dad bringing over zucchini from his garden, our freezer is packed heading into the fall and winter.

I'm eager to see what the last four months of this year bring, and where we end up on our food spending.

Back

We have been back for one week, having arrived back in Ohio last Sunday. I just finished catching up my accounts and am wending my way through paperwork I'd shoved aside before leaving. I'll post my August figures in the next day or two, but dollars take a backseat to these short glimpses.

Here are my sons, preparing a meal together, all grown up:

And here is Ramona, running into the ocean, just on the brink of being seven and beginning second grade (school started while we were there and she had her 7th birthday the day we left):

Lyrick will be three at the end of this week:

And this guy? Almost seven months old, almost crawling, and has an opinion on everything:

For the record, he was thoroughly approving of his sister making peanut butter cookies.

It's always good to be back home, but, oh, how I miss them!

Catching My Breath

June has been a bear on the travel front. We were in Nashville early in the month. Then mid-month, Warren and I flew to Denver for a three-day conference I needed to attend. Traveling alone is difficult for me (nigh well impossible); Warren was indispensable. While I immersed myself in the conference, Warren worked on Symphony matters (the 4th of July, the Symphony's annual free concert for several thousand people, is almost upon us) and spent time with his son David, who moved out to southeastern Colorado back in February.

From Denver, we flew to Minneapolis, spent an afternoon with friends and family, then headed south to Rochester and Mayo. Two days later, we were back in Minneapolis to go, finally, home.

That was last Wednesday. Saturday I took off to Kentucky with my dad, brother, and sister-in-law for a long overdue trip. It was just a day trip, but it was one more trip in a month full of them.

I feel as if I am still catching my breath.

But I'm home. At least for now. And that is enough.

I will be writing more  in the days to come. The Kentucky trip especially demands a post. But in the midst of all the travel, in the midst of 4th of July preparations, and in the midst of catching my breath, I ran into a wall. A small wall. A little wall. An insignificant wall, in the big scheme of things. But a wall all the same.

Someone was coming to our house at 9:00 this morning whom I had to meet with. I had a cream pie I needed to get made and in the refrigerator before then. At 8:05, I went to pour the heavy cream into a bowl to beat to soft peaks to fold into the pie base. I opened the cream container (which I had frozen two weeks earlier as we prepared to leave town but had thawed yesterday), went to pour it out, and...nothing.

Nothing. The cream had the texture of butter. I didn't have time to try it, analyze it, and decide whether I could made it work. The clock was ticking: on the pie, on the upcoming appointment, on the day. So I taped this note to the door and left:

"Baking emergency." Seriously? I have to laugh. But I made it. And it served to remind me that life rolls on, on and off the road.

It's good to be back.

Small Moment

I have been clearing out my clutter (again). Stashed away in a desk drawer and long forgotten were old CDs, backup to my old desktop computer. The few I have glanced at contain materials that are preserved elsewhere: photos, some of my writings (joy of joys, though: two nascent novels I thought I had lost forever popped up on one)—those kinds of things.

They also hold journals I kept, ranging from mid-2001 to some point in 2010.

I have no desire to preserve those journals. They cover years of great pain, of hard times and harder decisions, of ugly moments that I either lived through or was caught up in. They are full of bitterness and harsh judgments. There are brutal times caught in great detail in them.

But I also know there are moments of great joy and happiness in these selfsame volumes (I said "volumes" deliberately: there are sixteen in all). Ben and Sam still living at home are in the early ones. Many of my notes about my sons are happy or proud or amused (more amused in looking back than at the time, thinking of the infamous "RUN!" incident). My reclaiming my life is in them. Warren is in them.

In very, very brief snatches of reading, I catch glimpses of moments shining here and there, like these lines about our Symphony conductor, Jaime, waiting to take the stage, written back before I was married to the Symphony, back before we all became best of friends:

Jaime was at the far end of the hall walking back and forth, stopped, and just started conducting—a few flourishes, a stick in the air—and then went back to walking. It was wonderful.

And it was.

I will not reread the journals. (Or every other item on those CDs, for that matter.) Those times are long gone. After I glean a few documents here and there, l will consign the entire batch of them to the shredder.

But I am grateful for that little glimpse, that little moment.

Small Moment

We have been clearing out stuff: old stuff, used stuff, discarded stuff, no-longer-needed stuff. Bags of stuff are piling up in my study to go to Goodwill sometime soon. Boxes of stuff are downstairs in the basement to exit to somewhere else.

As part of all this un-stuffing, Warren's son David, about to turn 29, came and went through boxes of his stuff: old toys and such in the basement and the contents of his bedroom closet, which has been packed full since I moved into this house over a decade ago.

David's stuff in his closet spanned from the years from grade school through high school. Old science fair boards, books, Boy Scout pamphlets, camping equipment, drumsticks from high school band, reports, a chemistry book. Stuff.

With his dad's input and my looking on, David sorted through it all, dividing the piles into "keep until later" (one or two boxes neatly packed and slid back into the closet), "take now" (a hefty pile), "give away" (several of the bags sitting on my study floor), and "throw away." It took a few hours, but in the end, the closet was usable and everyone was smiling.

I rescued a few items from the "give away" pile: two small stuffed animals to head west to Lyrick and Ramona. And I grabbed the Literature textbook from high school (from which year I do not know) because I love high school Lit texts (and still wish I could get my hands on the ones from my high schools years).

David pointed to the textbook and said there was a poem he used to sit and read over and over during class when he was bored (which he indicated was most of the time).

Really? Which one?

"Eldorado" by Edgar Allan Poe.

I flipped to the Poetry section of the book and found it. "Go ahead," I commanded.

David closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then quoted the first of the four stanzas:

Gaily bedight,
     A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
     Had journeyed long,
     Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

I applauded. "Well done, David!" I exclaimed. "Well done!"

Well done, indeed. This is, after all, someone who has never once indicated that he ever read, much less memorized, anything smacking of literature. Science, history, that kind of stuff? Absolutely. But poetry? I figured David was not unlike his father, who once searched on the map for Proof Rock in order to surprise me by traveling there (which still remains one of the all-time greatest acts of love my husband, who is a most romantic man, ever undertook, albeit unsuccessfully).

A lot of stuff exited that day. Afterwards, David exhaled loudly. "It felt good to get rid of all that stuff."

All that stuff and "Eldorado" too. Some days are made for keeping.

On Trauma and Therapy

In the treatment world (drug and alcohol addiction and abuse), it is not unusual to have a number of providers, from counselors to doctors, who are recovering drug addicts and/or alcoholics themselves. (I say "recovering" because that population knows that even if you have not had a drink in decades, that physiological trigger is always there in your brain.) They are drawn to that field because they know what the patients and clients are going through and they want to help.

In the juvenile court world, the one in which I have operated for seven years now, a disproportionate number of us were traumatized as children. By traumatized, I don't mean we (and I am one of that group) had moments in our youth that were less than Norman Rockwell idyllic. I'm not talking about "oh, I once got spanked by my dad when I misbehaved" or "my mom called me stupid when I was five and I never forgot that."

I'm talking major trauma: physical assault, sexual assault, verbal assault, emotional assault.

How disproportionate is our court? Several years ago, we had a very, very inappropriate (for lots of reasons) all-court training in which the facilitator handed out a worksheet where we marked off responses (by alphabet letters) to various situational questions and then tallied up our letters. Whichever letter you had more of corresponded to an animal with particular personality traits.

Most of the room, maybe 95% of us, were "golden labs," which meant we took care of others, put others' needs in front of our own, carried on even if exhausted, and so on. When most of us raised our hands in response to that identity, the facilitator frowned and looked flummoxed.

"I always get a more diverse population," she said. "I don't understand."

At the first break, a co-worker commented, "She didn't understand because she's never had a room full of the walking wounded."

I'm giving that background so that I can place the rest of this post in context.

As juvenile court staff, we work with traumatized children and teens all the time. Often the parents, especially the mothers, also experienced childhood trauma. So we are constantly looking for training, books, and other resources to learn best practices about serving this population. And because more than one of us are in this population too, we glean what we can from the training and books to help our continued healing too.

A coworker recently gave me a book she uses in her program working with volunteers who served abused, neglected, and dependent children. The book is The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. I just finished it last night and have been turning in my head ever since.

Van der Kolk is a psychiatrist known for his research and work in post traumatic stress. He along with others was instrumental in getting the medical world to recognize post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its high rate of occurrence in military veterans. (He first worked with Vietnam veterans.) He then started working with adults and children who had been traumatized in their childhood. He and his colleagues soon recognized that this population exhibited symptoms that echoed PTSD, but did not fit the definition. (A fascinating part of the book is the extensive work he and others put into defining a new disorder, developmental trauma disorder (DTD) and the rejection of that disorder by the American Psychiatric Association as unnecessary for a "niche" population" As Van der Kolk writes, "One million children who are abused and neglected every year in the United States a 'diagnostic niche'?")

I can't begin to sum up what Dr. van der Kolk lays out in his book, other than say read it yourself or go on YouTube and watch clips with van der Kolk explaining childhood trauma and its impact: neurological, physical, emotional. This is all insightful for the work I do, but it was not what I took away.

What I took away from the book was gratitude.

Gratitude? Absolutely. Almost twenty years ago, I went into counseling, not for the first time. I had a spotty history of therapy, dating back to high school, but had never gotten much benefit out of the counseling. Some of that was due to my inability to be honest about my history; some of it was due to the lack of resources (as van der Kolk makes clear) available to even the most diligent counselor during those years. And some of them, in retrospect, were just mediocre therapists.

But in late 2001 I hit the jackpot.

I went into therapy because my life and my marriage were falling to pieces around me. Without going into great detail, I was in a very toxic marriage, it was killing me, and my sons were being traumatized as well. I finally realized that if I did not get help, I was at risk for harming or killing myself. I needed to stay alive to protect my sons. My husband urged therapy (each of us with our own counselor) as a way to salvage our marriage. I saw therapy as a way to save my life.

My therapist, Douglas Kramer, PsyD, at Ohio State University, was the right therapist at the right time. Over the course of several months, he led me through a series of approaches, especially using guided imagery. Two things he said at the very outset of our meeting have stuck with me all these years.

The first was his explaining how he approached therapy. He was not there to tell me what to do to "get better." "I'm here to help you decide what direction you need to go and help give you ways to determine that within yourself." I remember looking at him and saying, "Good, because if you were going to order me to do this or that, we'd be done right now."

The second thing Doug said, towards the end of that first session and after he had some background on me, is that I was not required to tackle everything in my life and my past. He said that past events were like rocks in a field. They rise to the surface over time but that didn't mean I had to go dig them out. "We can plough around them, April. It's your decision." I remember thinking (and later saying) that there some rocks, especially from my childhood, that I would never dig out. I also remember the session, many weeks down the road, when I walked in and said, "I'm ready to dig some rocks out."

Doug used guided imagery to take me back into my past, to talk and interact with the young April, the April I had been, to bring me (and to a large extent, her) into the present. Van der Kolk describes EMDR (eye movement and desensitization response), a more recent therapy method that we have seen success with at court and that some of my colleagues have gone through and I recognized some of the same techniques (minus the eye) that Doug wove into his guided imagery working with me.  Slowly and surely, rock by rock, I worked through my trauma and got my self, my soul if you will, back. (Incidentally, tying Doug and van der Kolk together, I do have a diagnosis of PTSD, because DTD was not identified back then and still is not an official diagnosis.)

That work made the rest of my life possible, from the community work I do to the committed, healthy marriage I have with Warren.

I will always carry my trauma with me, but now it is a scar other than a throbbing wound. I still have trauma triggers—less from my childhood and more from the toxic marriage—and there are times when I have to take a time out and regroup, using techniques that Doug taught me. Yoga helps, and I was thrilled to see that van der Kolk uses it as a therapeutic technique. (Right, Amanda?)

So I am grateful: not for the trauma, but for the healing. Bessel van der Kolk's book was a reminder of just how grateful I still am that when the teacher appeared, I was ready.

***********************************************************************************************************P.S. While writing this blog, I Googled Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to see what he looked like. He looks like this:

Then I looked up Doug, who looks like this today:

I don't think it is coincidence that they both share open, trusting faces. And have great smiles. And have spent their professional lives helping others figure their lives out.

Inch One Hundred Forty-Nine: Benjamin

My son Benjamin is thirty-one years old today. He came into the world early on a Monday morning, just past 5:00 a.m. I remember taking him into my arms and exclaiming, "Benjamin is here!"

Benjamin lit up my world that morning. He has never stopped.

Happy birthday, Benjamin.

Inch One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Golden Moment

It has been a long week already and is not even over yet. There was a family medical emergency earlier this week that is resolved for now. I have had an atypically strong reaction to this week's chemo despite it being the very same chemo I have had for weeks now, so I have been dealing with fevers and cold chills and other miscellaneous reactions (but no nausea) since Tuesday. Earlier today I spoke at a Magistrate's conference in the late morning, leaving from and returning to Court, resulting in a late lunch. And today was a longer day than usual because we just started a new Victims Awareness group, which means working with the kids until 5:30 and then staying on to debrief until almost 6:00.

To say that I was done in by the time I got back up to my office after debriefing would be an understatement. I was way past done in. Done in was in the rearview mirror.

Before shutting down my office computer for the night, I checked email. Court email was routine. But in my personal email was a gift, pure and simple:

Hey Mom,
Just writing you to say we love you. We are as busy as ever as working lots and hanging out with Ramona and having a good time.

My son Benjamin could not have timed his email any better if he tried. It was just what I needed, a little shot of love that was totally unexpected, a little pick-me-up at the end of a long, hard day, a little moment shot through with gold.

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.

Christmas Eve

It is not coincidence that "invalid" (a sick person) and "invalid" (being without any foundation of truth) are both from the same root, meaning weak.

As I pen these words on Christmas Eve night, I am under medical house arrest. Thanks to a wild combination of screwy factors, two large veins blew out on Friday and I am a mass of bruises. Painful, swollen bruises. When I saw Dr. Tom today (the husband of Dr. Pat, my doctor), his eyes widened in surprise at the extent of the bruising. I'd had a racing, half-crying phone call with Dr. Pat the night before and she had briefed him well knowing he would see me today. However, the visuals proved yet once again that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Once Tom ascertained that I was medically stable, he cut to the chase. Go home and rest NOW. Do not do ANYTHING.  Tom has a soft delivery, but there was no mistaking the emphasis on NOW and ANYTHING.

We are old friends, Tom, Pat, and I. He looked me with a sad smile. "I would like to wrap you in bubble wrap to keep you safe for the next few days."

Point taken.

I was in tears when I called Warren and gave him the results of the appointment. "I can't do anything," I wailed. "Tom said go home and rest right now." I don't think I said it out loud, but I thought I'm an invalid for the next few days.

An invalid. I felt invalidated. I can't do anything. I can't help prepare for Christmas Day dinner, which we are hosting. I can't finish shopping. In one swift move, I was sidelined.

In short, I was moved, temporarily I trust, from "April in treatment for cancer" to "April, the invalid."

I saw Dr. Tom early in the morning. A lot more tears fell before noon. I'm tired. I hurt a lot. I cry out every time I see my bruises (concealed beneath clothing) and again when I move or shift around. I hate sitting on the couch while Warren does everything.

I hate being an invalid.

Warren is taking great care of me and the multitude of tasks that need to be done before tomorrow midday. I have made peace with not being able to complete shopping the way I had planned. I am making peace with the thought that I may not be baking tonight.

After all, it is Christmas Eve. David just came through the door for the night. We are all together.

And maybe that's my takeaway from this whole mess. We're together and it's Christmas. The bruises will fade and heal. It's Christmas. Ben called earlier and I talked to him, Sam, and Alise while Ramona tried out her new sounds in the background.

It's Christmas.

And that is enough.

This Space

The purple bannister (an inside joke) leading from the half landing to the front door of the apartment was gone, ripped from its sturdy wall mooring. One of the mounting brackets lolled upside down, almost torn out of the plaster. The landing walls were fingered up with dirty smears.

After Roger found the keys and unlocked the front door, we stepped into the apartment hallway, the long, slender hallway that runs some 100 plus feet from front to back. We walked to the front room, the large room with its three single light windows that look down on our core downtown.

"Oh," I said. Then I repeated it. "Oh."

Every direction, it was "oh." The nails pounded into the walls, the holes in the walls, a broken lower glass pane on the French doors leading into what was once a study, the hole in the glass about the size of a boot.

Th dirt. The squalor.

"This is nothing. You should have seen it before we carted out the garbage."

We moved through the apartment, room by room. More items nailed into walls. More holes in the walls. Broken wood panels in several of the original four panel interior doors. The antique blue glass fixture in the kitchen broken and hanging askew.

I felt a lump in my throat. This was the first time I had been back in this space since March 2005. And here it was, dirty. Forlorn. Abused.

"This space" is a third floor apartment the building owners had rehabbed ten years ago after it had sat empty and locked for a quarter of a century. "This space" is a 2000 square foot apartment atop a late nineteenth century commercial Italianate building in the heart of the downtown. "This space" in 2002 was a gleaming restoration and updating of the 1920s era apartment.

"This space" was where I lived for three years, first with Ben, then with Ben and Sam, then with Sam, from the time I began the long, slow, hard unwinding of my marriage to the time I began the long, slow, hard trek through my cancer treatment.

Roger, my longtime friend and part owner of the building, stood quietly beside me as I took in the damage. We had just come from lunch together, during which he told me of the current conditions of the apartment. I asked him if he had the keys with him and when he said he did, I impulsively said, "let's go see it."

And here I was, seeing it.

The front room, which had hosted Ben's graduation party and many a DI practice. My study, where I wrote and put my life back together. Sam's bedroom, which sat empty for the first year until his longing for his big brother overcame his anger and sadness towards me. Ben's room, where he found refuge for the last two years before college. The kitchen, which had seen numerous D & D tournaments and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary dinner. My "Live Like You Are Dying" party, which saw 100 plus people pack the kitchen, the front room, the study, and the long hallway full.

I moved out of the apartment when I fell too far behind on the rent and my advancing cancer made ever catching up rent and climbing daily the 44 or so stairs to reach home impossible. On the day I moved, a whole army of friends and family showed up to do the work. There was one quiet moment, when almost everyone was in transit between the two places and I just stood in an almost empty room and cried. My friend Linda found me and hugged me, then gave me a squeeze and said "I know it hurts. But the next step is a good step and you will get better." The next day, a second wave of friends descended upon the empty apartment and cleaned it to a gleam. And then I left it behind, handing the keys to Roger two days later after one final walk-through with him.

Until now.

After Roger and I closed the door and went our separate ways, I walked to the Symphony office to see Warren. I told him about going back to the apartment. Warren said he'd like to see the space as he never made it there when it was my home. (The "Live Like You Are Dying" party? He was playing percussion in "The Nutcracker" 60 miles away that night.) "I'd like to see it to place you there in my mind," he said.

Next time, I said. And when I got home, I emailed Roger and told him the same. Next time.

Next time I will be ready to show Warren the apace. Next time, I will be able to say "this is where I lived. This is where this part of my life played out." Next time I will be able to say, "here is where Sam and I watched the World Series late into the night when Boston won, here is where Caitie kept her drum set for two years, here is where I would sit and watch the snow come down." Next time I will be able to say all those things.

This time, though, I needed to see it without that overlay of explanations. This time I needed to let the memories rush past me up the stairs and swiftly down the hall, just beyond my fingertips.

And this time I needed to say "oh." And "oh" again. And nothing more.

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!

My Norman Rockwell Moment

"Breaking Home Ties," by Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell is kind of a hard one to place in terms of his role in our cultural history. Was he an artist? An illustrator? Did he paint America as it was? Or America as it never existed? I enjoy his work because it reminds me of my childhood. I didn't live in a Norman Rockwell world; no one I knew did. But my parents subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post and I saw a lot of his cover works as I was growing up. 

"Breaking Home Ties" is one I have seen often over the years. It is deceptively simple: a father and son waiting for the train. The son is off to college, undoubtedly a freshman. His father is waiting with him, holding both his son's and his own hats, one shiny new, the other worn and stained. The son is looking expectantly to the future, the father to the past.

Tuesday was my Norman Rockwell moment.

My son Sam came back to Ohio in mid-June, looking to lay over briefly, earn some money at odd jobs, and then go on farther east to backpack and hike. He spent four weeks here, managed by hard labor to make a tidy sum of money, all the time finalizing his plans for the next stage of the summer. He found a ride to share to North Carolina, his next destination, with a college student from the Cincinnati area.

It was time to move on.

Tuesday morning I drove Sam to Covington, Kentucky to rendezvous with the driver. We reached the agreed upon meeting point first by, oh, ten minutes or so. Sam pulled out his carefully loaded backpack and propped it against the car. He pulled out his shoes and a bag of food I'd packed for him.

Then Sam plopped down on a parking curb and waited expectantly, looking for all the world like Rockwell's young man sitting on the running board waiting for the train. And me? I'd have been holding both our hats and turning them over and over in my hands if we'd had hats. 

Sam was clearly ready for the next leg of his summer adventures. And me? I was saying goodbye yet again to one of my children.

When the driver arrived, Sam jumped up. We talked for a few seconds, then Sam easily hoisted his backpack on and gave me a hug. "Have fun," I said. "Travel safe," I told them both.

I headed back home. It was mid-morning and already hot; my car windows were down. I found an oldies station in Cincinnati and cranked it up high, singing along when I knew the words. And bit by bit, mile by mile, Sam's train rolled on into the future.

Childhood Moments: Easter

When my sons were little, we sometimes went to an upscale Easter brunch. At one such brunch, an adult wearing a large bunny outfit was greeting small children. This was during the years when Sam was terrified of anyone, especially an adult, wearing a costume. The Easter Bunny was over to one side, with a ring of children around him, so Sam was comfortable with proceeding to our table. Midway through the meal, the Easter Bunny started circulating the room. At some point, he came up directly behind Sam, who was intent on eating, and placed a large paw on Sam’s head. Sam froze, the color draining from his face. Ben, in an act of big brother protectiveness, hissed “Sam! Don't. Look. Behind. You.” The adults waved the Bunny off, the moment passed without further incident, and that morning remains a favorite memory of mine.

Other memories are not so pleasant. One such moment occurred with Ben and Easter when he was in first grade. Religion, like so many other topics, was one more landmine in the household. As a result, the boys grew up with no religion or discussions of faith and spirituality. Easter, even in its most commercial and non-religious form, somehow also ended up on the non-observed list.

Just days ago I posted a sonnet about how life is only a one-take proposition. All the same, what parent out there hasn’t replayed events from their children’s childhood and winced? The moment captured below, in contrast to the day of the giant Bunny, is one that eighteen years later I still wish I could take back and make right.  (And for those who wonder when they get to the end, yes, Sam got one too.)

**********

Easter

Your 1st grade classmates were talking
About chocolate bunnies
And Peeps
And hunting for colored eggs.

Peter Cottontail was hopping into every one of their homes.

You came home, all of seven, and asked
Tentatively
If we celebrated Easter.

“No,” said your dad, “we don’t believe in Easter.”

You hung your head to hide
The disappointment
But I heard you whisper,
“I believe in Easter.”

You never mentioned Easter again.
You never asked to dye an egg.
You never asked for a chocolate bunny.
When Peeps came home from the grocery,
You ate them without comment.

Easter was never on your calendar.

Over the years, I would hear your small
“I believe in Easter”
And yearn to give it back to you.

This year, I packed a box 
With chocolate eggs and a surprise or two
And shipped them out to you,
A long overdue visit from the Easter Bunny.

Time

Just a couple of weeks ago, the sun was rising to the south of the Victorian mansion due east of us across our backyard. I noticed this morning that the sun has moved a few notches further north and is now rising just on the south edge of the house, reminding me again of the infinite motion of the universe.

We had another vivid reminder today of the swift passage of time. Warren's son, David, turns 21 tomorrow, and we were addressing birthday cards to put in today's mail.

Warren was at a loss. "I don't know what to write," he said.

I looked at him, only to see unshed tears in his eyes. "I  don't know what to say. I haven't seen a lot of him in the last several years…and I just don't know."

We were both quiet for a moment. Then Warren blinked hard and finished signing the cards.

After I mailed them this morning, I found my thoughts turning to David, my stepson of now two plus years. I still find it improbable that I have a stepson at all, let alone the one I am blessed to have. And now he is turning 21.

Time flies. Time races.

I have known David for much of his life; I've seen him grow up. When he was a middle school student and I was still practicing law, he interviewed me as part of the requirements for a Boy Scout merit badge. I turned the tables and interviewed him when he finished his questions. David gamely went along with it, but I can only imagine he left that interview thinking "man, was that weird."

When Warren began divorce proceedings, David was a junior in high school. Because of the machinations of his then spouse and the gross neglect of the magistrate (long since removed from her position), he barely saw his children during the two years of proceedings. He missed almost all of the events that made up David's final high school months, including his becoming an Eagle Scout. There was a long, painful interlude where Warren had no children.

David was on the verge of leaving for college by the time the divorce was final, and now the emotional distance was joined by a geographical one. It was a time of a new start for him, a time of picking up pieces and starting all over again for his father.

For a long time, David flitted in and out of our lives on an erratic and intermittent basis. He would be funny and sarcastic and bombastic. He loved making provocative, in-your-face statements about his world views. "All mankind is evil and should be bombed!" When he talked, I imagined his words scrolling by in boldface 48 point type with exclamation points used liberally.

We would see him for five minutes here, an hour there, and then he would blow back out the door and out of our lives again. Warren would sigh and reflect that he hardly knew his son, hardly knew what to say to him.

But time moves swiftly and brings changes to us all.

In recent months, David has been stopping by more frequently and staying longer. He is still funny and sarcastic. But he is less swift to voice an outrageous opinion just for the sake of causing a stir. He will sit for long periods talking seriously about his studies, about his life, about topics of mutual interest with his father. When they made Hyer peanut brittle this Christmas, it was a joy to watch them work together in concert, each knowing the other's rhythms.

The teen has turned into a young adult, and the young adult is turning into a man.

A week ago tonight, David came by the Symphony office where we were participating in the downtown First Friday events. I was busy talking with those stopping in, so did not join David and Warren as they visited. When he left, David - my husband's son, my stepson - gave me a long, sweet hug.

My marriage has been a long string of gifts, starting with Warren. Two of those blessings have been his children. Under the circumstances, I didn't know whether they would accept me in their dad's life, let alone let me enter theirs. 

I am blessed beyond measure on all counts.

I have a stepson, David, who is 21 tomorrow. Happiest of birthday wishes, David.

Winter Night, Winter Memories

The first Friday of each month, our downtown stores stay open late and people come out to eat and shop. The Symphony office, located downtown next to the movie theatre, stays open for the event. So last night found both of us headed out for First Friday.

I had a book to return to the library, a block and a half down the hill from the Symphony office, so I walked there in the gathering evening before coming back to help Warren out.

It was snowing lightly when I walked down, and snowing a little harder when I headed back up towards downtown. As I walked up the small hill, I could see the lights of downtown burning bright against the evening sky.

I was hit with a strong, cold wave of memory as those lights came into view. Not strong enough to knock me off my feet, but it jarred me all the same.

When I first came back to Delaware 20 years ago, I worked as an associate in a very small law firm in the heart of downtown. For reasons sometimes too twisted to decipher even decades later, I rarely was allowed use of the family car. Fortunately, we only lived six blocks from the office, and I loved to walk.

I last worked at that office 11 years ago, but I still remember, strongly, emerging from the building on an early winter evening onto the very same street down which I was now gazing. Street and window lights would be on, often it was cold, sometimes there'd be snow falling. I would walk home quickly, bundled against the chill, eager to reach the shelter of the house.

My thoughts would often be on the day I'd just left behind - the clients, the paperwork. As I walked, my mind would transition to whatever awaited me at home. In all likelihood, I had talked with my then husband and already taken an initial reading of his mood over the phone. I was too often tense over what probably awaited me when I got home, but that often propelled me to walk faster, not slower, to get the homecoming over with and to be there for my sons.

I missed my boys. I wanted to be home with them more, but as the sole wage earner, that was not an option. Despite the troubled household, despite the tension and pain that laced so many of the days, I gathered strength from the looks of their faces when I walked through the door each evening. I knew that for the next few hours at least, I could focus on Ben and Sam, the stories of their days, the bedtime books, the blissful look on their sleeping faces.

Last night's walk in the early evening brought back the feelings - the anxiety, the sadness - I used to wear almost every day but most especially as I walked back home each night. But it also brought back the bright moments: the joys in my children's faces, the warmth of a small boy snuggling up against me to hear a story or to tell one himself.

The poet Rilke, commenting on his decision to leave therapy, said "if my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels would take flight as well." That sentiment applies to the past as well. The past is what it is and I cannot dwell too long in its deeper depths. But I can reach into the gloom and pull out the brightest moments, and those would be the times with Ben and Sam.

When I got back to the office, awash in these memories, I looked over at the bookshelf inside the front door. On it are rhythm instruments and a collection of children's books with rhymes and music and art themes. Most of the books are loaners from my collection. They are books that were interwoven through Ben and Sam's childhoods: Color Dance, Mouse Paint, Traveling to Tondo, Brother Billy Bronto's Bygone Blues Band (a picture book that magically features both dinosaurs and a train wreck, which automatically made it a hit with Sam when we first read it).

Looking at the titles, I could once more feel the weight of my boys on my lap, once again hear their quiet, rapt breathing while we read. Surely it is a prerogative of every parent of grown children to hold close such memories, especially when their warmth and glow are inextinguishable against the dark winter night.

A Christmas That Fits

It is the day after Christmas. There are some occasional snowflakes coming down outside - more fretful than anything serious. The house is warm. Warren was on the couch, tapping away on his laptop, but now he is down in the basement, sorting out music. Xylophone music - a recording of virtuoso George Hamilton Green - rattles its way back up the steps to the kitchen. I was folding laundry; now I am baking biscotti. There is a quiet to the house and a peacefulness.

My thoughts have been all over the board today. I had an email this morning in which a good friend wrote: Yesterday was a total bust!  Spent most of the day on the couch.  Wasn't sick, just couldn't make myself do anything!  Mom & I wanted to go shopping but of course nothing was open!  With our family doing Christmas on Christmas Eve, and no other family to go to any more, Christmas Day is nothing!

I laughingly replied that one major way in which she and I differ greatly is any day of the year, no matter what, I would NOT want to go shopping. I then tried to answer her in a more serious vein, giving up for fear of sounding preach or goofy or both.

But a thread of thought about Christmas has tugged at my fingers and at my conscience all morning, so much so that I am sitting down to write it.

It has been a different Christmas for us this year. Let me start out by noting that for the five Christmases Warren and I have celebrated together, the hallmark of them all has been low key celebration, not free-for-all shopping sprees and wild extravaganzas of consumerism. Neither our budgets nor our personal tastes lean in those directions. But even by our standards, this year was very quiet.

The blogger at I am the working poor honored me by linking to an earlier post of mine in her Christmas Day post. I commented back that economic conditions are still grim (and in my opinion grimmer) than when I wrote the post a month ago. Our biggest holiday outlays this year were for family members whose budgets are way past tight. Some are struggling to keep food on the table or a roof overhead. Some have lost that roof; some are getting their groceries from food pantries. In those situations, even a "small" gift - $25, say - is enormous.

When faced with that kind of need, Christmas is simple.

I guess the real question for all of us to answer is "why do we celebrate Christmas and what do we expect it to be or feel like?" Your answer will differ from mine, and that's fine. It is when your answer differs from your celebration that you run into difficulties (or at least I do).

My answers have changed several times in my lifetime. As I look back, I seem to be constantly removing layers of expectations from my thoughts about Christmas, not unlike peeling an onion.

Christmas 2010 was very low key in terms of commercial consumption, yet rich in all the ways that count, starting with family. We breakfasted on vegan cinnamon rolls that Warren and his children had baked the night before. We then opened presents together, laughing and teasing. Warren's children moved on to Christmas with their grandmother and a small wave of my family moved in for lunch. It was a simple meal, a good one, and the flavor of the food was matched and exceeded only by the talk and the laughter around the table. Our "daughter" Amy showed up in the evening with her fiancé; I talked by phone with both of my sons. After everyone was gone, Warren and I cuddled together on the couch and watched "A Christmas Carol" with George C. Scott, one of my favorite holiday films.

And that was Christmas 2010. Other than wishing that Ben, Alise, and Sam were also joining us at the table, it was one of the better Christmases I have spent when it came to how I felt about the day. I have often found Christmas hard to deal with both from an emotional standpoint and also in terms the rampant consumerism. By choice and design, our Christmas was quiet and personal and frugal. It fit.

I hope yours did too.

Flaming Christmas Robins

In Blogville, when another blogger leaves a comment on one of your posts, it is good form, if you have not yet "met" the blogger, to visit her blog and leave a comment of your own. I have met some wonderful friends that way. That is how I recently met Stacey, a young mother in England, who blogs at Stay at Home Mummy.

Yesterday, Stacey wrote about holiday traditions, listing some of her favorites. As I was skimming over her list this morning, one in particular caught my eye: "Hide the robin - buy a Christmas robin with wire feet and he hides around the room, children have to come into the dark room with a torch and find him - a tradition when we were little!" [Emphasis added.]

I thought about that for several minutes. A torch? Children in dark rooms with torches? I was thinking of a stick with cloth wrapped on the end and set on fire. It took me more than a few moments to realize Stacey was talking about the children using flashlights, not firebrands.

While I am now convinced that England is not at risk to go up in smoke from robin-seeking children (although the riots over tuition hikes may indicate that other problems are smoldering), the image of entering a dark room with a flaming stick to look for an ornament has stuck with me all morning.

When my boys were young, they regularly played a self-invented game, called, I believe, "Dark." It was a simple game: players gathered in Sam's room (which was big) at night, all the blinds were closed, all the stuffed animals in the house were heaped in piles in the room, Ben or Sam shut the door and turned off the lights, and everyone started firing pillows and animals while running around the room, leaping onto the beds (if the player was lucky enough to know the room layout) and crashing into furniture (if one was not so lucky). The game was played at breakneck speed, with lots of screaming and shouting. It went on until either (a) someone got hurt enough to call for a parent or (b) everyone agreed to a mutual truce and turned the lights back on.

[Note: For those of you who are wondering what I was thinking allowing them to play this game, realize I grew up with only brothers and had only sons. So this game made perfect sense to me. When they got much older, Ben and Sam played a variation of it, using air pellet guns instead of stuffed animals, in the empty second floor space in the downtown building in which we lived.]

So the notion of seeking robins with lit torches holds a peculiar charm and fascination for me. It is a tradition (my version, that is) that Ben and Sam would have wholeheartedly embraced when they were little. They probably still would, for that matter. It lends a whole new meaning to the French carol, "Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabelle - Un flambeau!" 

I can see my boys now, torches in hand, running through the house, looking for the robin in the dark, calling out for Christmas. 

Saying Goodbye

I have been saying "goodbye" to my boys since they were little.

"Goodbye, I'll see you after school."

"Goodbye, have fun at camp."

"Goodbye, let me know your plane got in."

Being a parent and watching your children grow up is one long series of goodbyes. Everything we do to guide them to adulthood is aimed at one day saying "goodbye" as they step into their new lives.

So why does it still hurt so much when that day comes?

When we were out in Montana for Ben and Alise's wedding, I had to say goodbye to both of my boys at the same time. The wedding weekend was over and Warren and I were leaving early the next morning to start our trip back to Ohio.

Ben now lives in Montana with Alise and I would be saying goodbye to both of them for who knows how long. And Sam was staying on in Montana for a week with Ben and Alise before heading further west to Oregon, where he will start at Portland State next month.

I've said goodbye to each of my sons many times and under many circumstances. But this time was different. Here was Ben, stepping into married life. Here was Sam, making some new and important life choices.

Our last day in Helena, the day after the wedding about which I hope to write soon, most of us went to Lake Helena for an afternoon of boating. Alise's father, Joe, took my parents and the boys' father and his fiancé out first, while the rest of us stayed on shore and talked about books and other things. Then Alise, Ben, Sam, Warren, and I joined Joe and Jenna, Alise's younger sister, and we went out on the lake for a couple of hours - my farewell tour, as it were, with the boys.

It was wonderful. I got to see Ben and Alise in a setting familiar to them, unfamiliar to me. I got to watch Sam, who back on shore said he was ready to experience life directly instead of through his computer, try out a new experience. We all got the chance to laugh and talk and joke and relax.

After we came in, we caravanned back to Joe and Mona's house for one last meal of wedding reception leftovers. We ate, we talked, I watched my boys.

And then it was time to say goodbye.

Sam was first. Sam, with whom we had had a most excellent time (well, if you didn't count the last ten minutes when we arrived in Helena and were looking for Ben and Alise's apartment) driving cross-county. Sam, who'd stood on the rail at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the North Dakota Badlands, gazing endlessly, saying "I want to come back here and hike." Sam, who'd just yesterday stood by his brother while Ben recited his vows and then broke into a loud cheer when the wedding was concluded.

That Sam.

Sam gave me a hearty hug. "Okay, mom, goodbye until whenever! I love you!"

Oh, I love you so, Sam.

A goodbye hug from Ben. A long, hard hug from my firstborn, who I have watched over from afar for so long. "Thanks for coming out to the wedding, mom. I'm really glad you did. I love you."

My dear Ben, how I love you!

Then goodbyes and hugs to everyone else - Alise, no longer my almost-daughter-in-law, Jenna, their parents, Joe and Mona.

I told Warren I was ready to leave. And although there was a large lump in my throat, I was in pretty good shape as we left the room.

Joe and Mona live in a tri-level house, and to leave the living room where we were, you walk down a short flight of stairs to the front door. As we were walking down, I glanced back and saw Ben standing at the top of the stairs, watching us leave.

He had followed us out.

That killed me.

I have seen Ben only three times in the last five years. I don't know when I will see him again. He's almost 25, he's married, he and Alise are forging their own paths. Yet there was my boy - all grown to manhood - watching his mother leave.

Maybe it occurred to Ben that he wouldn't see me for some time. Maybe he just wanted to see his mom for a minute more. Maybe it was just coincidence (but I don't think so).

I held my tears until I was in the car, and then they came. I cried much of the way to the hotel. Not torrents of tears - more like a spring that fills a basin slowly until it wells over. I cried the same, slow way through the night while Warren held me close.

The next morning we left Montana early, driving into a golden sunrise. We exclaimed over the trip so far, we talked about the wedding and the reception. We told each other "I love you."

The road was brilliant before us. Adventures lay ahead.

And I silently bid my boys goodbye one more time.