Monthly Archives: August 2018

D.I.Y.

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One of the unexpected legacies of Buddy’s death is my current inability to go into our backyard. He is buried behind the hot tub, where at his passing, I conducted a graveside ceremony. The internet is an impressive place when one is faced with becoming a Doctor of Divinity A.S.A.P., and true to that statement, I found a touching eulogy upon the loss of a beloved pet. While I could barely deliver it without choking up, the eulogy included a line asking God to care for your pet in death as you had cared for him in life. Every time I have walked into the back yard since June 4, I have thought of this request, and I have cried. In addition to plunging me into great sorrow, it has plunged me into a theological crisis. I find myself talking to God as if He were some divine petsitter, for if God were to care for Buddy in death as I cared for him in life, he needs to know a few things. But does an omniscient god really need a reminder to give Buddy his glucosamine supplement on the regular? Or that the dog panics during thunderstorms? In my world, He apparently does. So I cry for Buddy, and I cry for my hubris, and as a result, Chris has taken out the trash almost every night for the last 76 days.

Rather than tending the garden, I have spent a lot of time looking at it from the kitchen window. I have discovered two things lately. First, I have a pet squirrel. I blame my sister for that one, since she gave me a Squirrel Buster bird feeder for my birthday. I, for once, followed the installation instructions, and the feeder has successfully busted squirrels. The problem is that there is a small squirrel who apparently calls my backyard her world, and newly busted, lacks for food. She sits every morning where I can see her from that kitchen window. She looks sad. She looks hungry. I reciprocate by looking like a very soft touch, and I go aside and scatter seed especially for her.

(My pet squirrel. I call her by my daughter’s name, because I call my daughter “Squirrel.”)

The second thing that I have discovered is that someone has been playing the Barry White channel 24/7 on the outdoor speakers, for there has been a population explosion of birds in our backyard. I have counted two female cardinal juveniles, one male, and a number of small sparrows, brown thrashers, and chickadees. All of this avian youth leaves me with a single question: How do birds mate?

Apparently — and I have the internet to thank again — they have a cloaca, an inner chamber that ends in an opening through which either sperm or eggs are discharged. The female bird moves her tail feathers; the male perches on top; the birds rub their cloaca; there is an exchange of bodily fluids; and then they share a cigarette.

Undisturbed by my interruptions, in a yard left to grow unfettered in a hot and rainy season, in the seven birdhouses scattered around my city lot, the birds have gone absolutely wild.

I watched the fledglings most of the weekend as I painted the kitchen. Other people have people that they call to do home repairs. Chris and I are not those people, for at some point early in our marriage, we decided that we would do everything ourselves. During a visit to the Golden Gate Bridge, I read a placard that said that a paint crew is always working on the bridge. It feels that way in our home sometimes, for I am always painting something. On Saturday, with a fair amount of arthritis and inflexibility, I found myself climbing like a mountain goat to reach a high spot. It reminded me of a night in 1997, with a fair amount of fecundity and lax joints, when Chris found me 8 months pregnant, standing on a kitchen stool, painting and crying that the house would never be ready for a baby. Yet it was.

It hit me that this go around, the refurbishing of the newly empty nest, may be my last D.I.Y. hoorah. Will I really be scampering up to awkward spots when I’m 70, paint brush in hand?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I have found that it is easier to accept growing older since I quit coloring my hair. On a good day, my hair grows at a glacial pace. Continents have drifted apart faster and the NBA season has ended more quickly than my hair grows. Yet magically, after only 15 months, I woke up one morning and could pull back what was left of my colored hair to be greeted with my real hair, which looks like this:

I like it. When I look in the mirror in the mornings, I am no longer confronted by a woman who looks like a terribly weather-beaten 35 year-old. No, I am confronted by a woman who looks 50. It explains why my knees hurt. Why the skin around my eyes crinkles when I smile (and even when I don’t). It allows me to feel more confident in almost everything I do, for I have clearly been doing everything for a pretty long time. When you have grey hair, if you haven’t learned what you need to know by now, it’s on you.

My hair-induced bravery extends to the coming week. My daughter will be postponing college and working again for several months in Montana. She wanted to fly home and take her car back with her. Can I come with you? I found myself asking. She said yes, and in 12 hours, we leave.

I am nervous, for so much could go terribly wrong. But I am far more excited. The two of us will be driving 2200 miles in a Mini Cooper over eleven different states. We will see family. We will see the arch in Saint Louis. We will stay in a room in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Kansas City on Wednesday night. We will establish that South Dakota actually exists. I will have 33 hours of my daughter’s company in a very small car, and when she is 50 and I am 81, I have no doubt that we will still speak of this trip, probably while I’m painting the living room.

I have stared out the kitchen window this summer long enough to know one thing: Life goes on. I have looked in the mirror at my newly grey hair to know another: I can do this. I can take to the open road and see things I have never seen and be confident that I will know what to do if something goes wrong or even if (miracle of miracles) everything goes right. Adventure calls, friends, and with a small suitcase in hand, I am ready to answer.

ALC

 

alc@roco.pro

August 5, 2018

We went to the beach last week with Chris’ family, an annual affair that finds at least 15 people stuffed into a single beach house. Because it has rained everywhere I have gone this summer, it rained at the beach, too, heavy horizontal sheets of rain broken by the occasional drizzle and the rare hours of partly cloudy skies. I went to exercise classes every day, the island book store four times, a movie once, and the yarn store twice — all of which was fine, but I would have preferred long walks on the beach instead.

On Thursday of that week, our son was returning from a summer abroad. (As happy as we were to send him, there were moments when Chris and I both wished that someone had handed us plane tickets and a credit card and sent us into the larger world to visit museums and ancient ruins. Alas.) His flight arrived in Atlanta, but his grandfather announced that he had gotten a ticket for our son from Atlanta to New Bern, a small town an hour from the beach.

My father-in-law was uncharacteristically mum about those plans until dinner on Wednesday night. Taking advantage of Chris’ mouthful of crab cake, my father-in-law asked Chris if he had any problem if he — my father-in-law — picked up our son at the airport. Although I had firmly believed that such a plan was afoot all along, and had even warned Chris about it, Chris replied that that was fine. It was a sneak attack on the weaker flank. But perhaps he felt my glare, for several beats later, my father-in-law turned to me and asked me if this plan worked for me. It did not, I told him, it did not work for me at all, for I had not seen my son in months, and he was my son. After spending ten minutes telling us both just how difficult a drive it was to this airport and how easy it was to miss a turn, my father-in-law discovered that I would not relent, and finally bent himself to my will.

My father-in-law is a man who loves his grandchildren deeply, a fact that I reminded myself repeatedly as I searched for the flight that would most likely bring my son into New Bern, North Carolina. I surmised that it would arrive at 9:24 p.m., and to be on the safe side, I messaged my son as if I had known it all along.

You may not be surprised to find that there was no tricky turn, no hardship in the route from the beach to New Bern. It was an hour in rural North Carolina through what was billed as a national forest, although the parts we saw appeared to be a national forest of mobile homes and convenience stores. We left the beach early to eat dinner at a restaurant in New Bern, and the food was surprisingly good. The dessert was incredible.

If you are not from the South, I will give you this little tip. If you are ever in a restaurant and see “Memaw’s Famous Strawberry Cake,” you should order it. The fact that someone has become locally famous in a microcosm of potluck dinners, funeral spreads, and church social hall meals means something. One of the loveliest people I know, my across-the-park neighbor, brought me a carrot cake for my birthday with the explanation that her husband really liked it. She is unassuming and incredibly kind, and her modesty prevented her from describing that carrot cake properly: It should have been regulated by the DEA, for it was just that addictive. When I found out that Memaw was the chef’s grandmother and baked every single one of the desserts at that restaurant, I ordered the dessert sampler. There is a star in her crown in heaven, let me tell you.

Whenever Chris and I have a good meal, we invariably compare to our best meal. In early 2002, these same in-laws came to Savannah and took care of the children, who were then 2 and 4. Chris and I drove to St. Augustine and immediately fell asleep; if you have ever had children who were 2 and 4, you understand. We woke up very late that evening and walked around St. Augustine and happened on a little courtyard leading to a French restaurant. It was about 9:30, and someone had canceled a reservation, and there was a single table for two that we secured. I remember what the restaurant looked like, and that there was a large group of men seated at a table nearby.

The food was so good that we practically licked our plates. The waitress told us that it was such a pleasure to see people who enjoyed a meal so much; it made her happy. It apparently made the chef happy, too, for he sent out small plates and sorbets and amuses-bouche. I have no idea of what we talked about that night, but I recall clearly how liberating it was to feel free from responsibility for a few hours, to swap “Mom and Dad” for “Amy Lee and Chris.”

I tried unsuccessfully to find the restaurant the next day and on later trips. I am not certain now that it even existed outside of my very vivid memories. But as we ate last Thursday night in New Bern, North Carolina, Chris and I spoke of it once again. Here we were, 16 years later, trying not to escape our life as parents but to embrace it. We were not running from our children; we were running to them. When I saw my son walking down the corridor into the public area of the New Bern airport, I practically cried. It had been a very long time. Is there any wonder we all look so happy in the photo?

We are delivering him to Athens in a few days, a U-Haul truck full of our old furniture headed straight to his first apartment. He can hardly wait. His apartment is a few blocks from my first apartment, and in a neat bit of fate, built to the same mid-60s plans. Except for the hardwood floors, ceiling fans, and dishwasher, it is the same space I occupied 30 years ago.

As I have helped him corral furniture and the flotsam and jetsam of life in one’s own place, he has said that our home was no longer his home. I remember calling my apartment “home” in a conversation with my mother, and she burst into tears. Your home is with me, she said. Even then, I did not think that that is exactly right. Your parents love you fiercely, to be sure, but it is a job of planned obsolescence. We have given him the living room sofa, the old dining room chairs, a table, a number of lamps. But we have also given him independence, advice, a full panoply of mistakes not to make if he has only been watching and listening. At his apartment, we will watch him unpack it all, and then we will drive back home.

ALC