Room 14

I let out a scream so savage my children froze. As I hugged my foot, writhing on the floor mat at the base of the stairs, my younger daughter resumed her mermaid play in the next room. When I was finally able to mouth the word “ICE” to my one child capable of empathy, she raced dutifully to the kitchen as if released from a hypnotic spell.  I glared at the rogue toddler boot that precipitated my fall. Black rubber boot on black tile.  It seemed to mock me, motionless and unscathed.

Later, with my mom sandwiched between the two girls on the couch, I hobbled out to my car clutching my dad’s foam-handled quad cane for support. I drove to the ER solemnly, my left foot already numb from the ice.

It was the same drive I made two months before when I had gotten that text from my mom at 11:30am on a Monday morning – Dad is dying. I had flown out the door, one arm threaded through my sagging coat, and shifted the car into reverse. I cut through side-streets and careened through stop signs with the faintest tap of the breaks.  Another text came through. You may not make it. I accelerated and glared at the digital clock as if it were an hourglass - that my stare alone might hold back the trickle of sand.

Eight minutes later, I catapulted into the ER waiting room, flushed and breathless, spitting out my dad’s name at the registration desk. A security guard escorted me through the automatic double doors into a make-shift waiting room. My hands pulsed.  I paced anxiously. Let me be on time. Let me be on time.  Someone finally came to lead me down the far hallway. I have no recollection of who this person was – whether it was a he or a she, a nurse or a custodian. I was solely focused on getting to him.

Standing in front of Room 14, I bit my lip and pulled back the grey curtain. He was lying there, unconscious, but still breathing.  Audible and strained. His mouth was agape, eyes closed. My mom turned her head toward me, tear-streaked and tender. We touched and folded over dad as if sealing an envelope.  

This visit was different, of course. I ambled into the ER waiting room, hopping on one foot like a deranged kangaroo. Even the crazies looked up. I settled into a vinyl chair with a puddle of coffee spilled underneath and read my book. After a half hour, I pulled the ice pack out from under my sock and placed it down on the seat next to me.  When they finally called me, I was wheeled down the main hall and over to the left. I inhaled sharply.  I knew what room lie just ahead.  

They apologized. All beds were full - I’d have to settle for a gurney in the hallway. I crawled onto the cot, my back square to Room 14, the 100-square-foot windowless void where they take patients with a DNR to die. It is a room that doesn’t require a view.

I twisted my torso, my neck craning to steal a glance behind me. Dimness pooled underneath the drawn curtain. Behind it, my dad’s last breath had commingled with the air, dispersing molecules and microbes onto the safety rail, the monitors, the tile floor, onto that very curtain.

An X-Ray technician arrived soon after to take images of my foot. When she deposited me back to my hallway, I asked her to pivot the gurney around. She eyed me strangely, but I didn’t explain. Room 14 was both a beacon and a betrayal. The thick industrial curtain, rippling along its track, entranced me. My dad had been behind it.  Alive. Just 50 some days before.  I couldn’t tear away my gaze. Its proximity was all-consuming, stripping my sadness down to the studs, demanding intensity like staring a cobra in the eye.  I was raw. I was broken. I was simultaneously healing.

A radiologist walked toward me and cleared her throat. Hairline fracture. Six weeks in a boot. I watched her mouth move. Working on your discharge papers. Discharge.  The nurse fitted me into a walking cast and placed crutches under my arms. When it was time to leave, I glanced at the room and my legs twitched as if snared on a fish hook.  I was leaving him again. Like I did in January, when we finally willed ourselves to gather our coats, our purses, our tissues and open the curtain – his body still warm, his face already sallow.  I exited down the ramp on crutches and steered my car out of the parking lot before I had to pull over and sob. A $250 co-pay and I was going home. My dad never made it out.  

The morning after I wrote my dad’s eulogy, my wise and wonderful friend in St. Louis gave me permission to go on eulogizing him. That I didn’t have to encapsulate my grief or say goodbye with one succinct memorial.  A week after. A month after. A year after. They would all be different.  What I didn’t expect was that I would keep knowing him.  That I would continue to learn things after his absence. I considered him already summarized in my head, a tapestry of childhood anecdotes and memories that for whatever reason were the moments I retained.

    

And yet, I am discovering him in artifacts. In stories shared by those who knew him even longer than me. I am excavating him in basement boxes of souvenirs and old papers. In class rings and certificates. Amidst his keepsakes, my mom discovered a letter, dated 1970, from a New York modeling agency who had seen my dad’s football picture and wanted to photograph him. He never pursued it or told anyone, but here was that letter, saved amongst his treasures, a secret that likely amused and emboldened him. I found myself wishing I could tease him.

In another pile, I came across a hand-written note on the back of a white envelope, scrawled by his mother when my dad was in high school: “You must be hungry after practice. There are strawberries for you in the kitchen. Love, Mother.”  I never knew my grandmother or had glimpsed her handwriting. She died before I was born. I traced my fingers over the long, loopy curves of her penmanship.  It was a simple note. Why he kept it, I’ll never know, but those strawberries seized me. They were his favorites. Not the winter ones with their hollowed cores, but the ones that drip sweetness when you take your first bite. I would often bring a Tupperware full to the hospital, sliced and dusted in sugar to disguise their off-season tartness. Even when his appetite had waned toward the end, he would eat every one. His mother knew. 

Since my accident, I put on my compression sock each morning and fasten my broken foot into a bulky black boot. It is meant to contain it, to keep it stagnant, in place. But, every night, I feel its throbbing ache.  And so, I settle myself in our living room chair, prop my foot up on the ottoman and unravel my bandages. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I sit and listen to the creaks in the house, the chatter of my girls upstairs. My dad’s cane waits loyally by my side. I wonder if I will miss it after I heal.  For now, I stretch my foot out and wait. It seems all it wants is some time to breathe.

Weight

It is a hair shy of nine pounds. I don’t know why I felt compelled to weigh it. But there it is, the bar hovering in mid-air on my parent’s beam scale. When the funeral director first handed the box to me, the density of it surprised me. How much should ash weigh?  He asked if I needed help bringing the box out to the car - like they do at a grocery store when an old lady is leaning on her cane or a frenzied mom is juggling three kids and a cart full of frozen pizzas.  It seemed a bit excessive, but I suppose I had my own impediment.  He had seen my tears at the funeral.

I shrugged him off politely and carried my dad out into the cold.  It didn’t feel right putting him on the floor mat. I scanned my back seat and placed him in my daughter’s booster chair. After a moment of hesitation, I decided to pull the shoulder buckle around and click him in. 

I drove the half mile to my parents’ house, soberly, carefully, with tears blotting my eyes.  My dad had left on a stretcher exactly two weeks before - carried out the front door into an ambulance and now I was carrying him back in.  When he was discharged from the hospital, bound for the nursing home, my mom had the sagacity to have the medical transport detour past their house. I wonder if my dad knew then as he looked out the window. I am consumed with the hope that his final glance of their red brick English Tudor offered him something profound.

I am in my parents’ house alone now and I’m not sure where to put him. Later this spring when the ground is mossy green and the warm wind flips up our hair, our family will pick a weekend.  We will fly out east and scatter his ashes in his Elysian Fields, his college campus that marked the pinnacle of his athletic success. We will find a robust, patriarchal tree with branches as thick as elephant limbs - one that is worthy of him and we will lay him to rest.  His fragments of bone, his dust, his DNA.  I am at ease with leaving him there in the earth’s care.

But, for now he needs a sojourn. Perhaps in the living room where he sat and read the sports section before he stopped being able to concentrate on the words?  Or my old bedroom, where he spent his final year, shifting from the chair to his bed with his diaper between his legs and his knees wobbling beneath him?  Or even the basement, where his shelved athletic trophies overlook sofa cushions greased with the oil from his hair.  I consider the rooms carefully, anxious of what he might approve - as if he still has a say. As if he might claim his own vantage point from which to watch life unfold in this house. My mom coming down in her robe to brew the morning coffee. The grandkids setting up the toy train tracks.  Blake basting a ham in the oven for Easter brunch.

I lean against my parents’ sliding back door. The glass is cold and shocking against my cheek. I peer beyond the garage at the house on the adjacent block where my dad grew up. It remained in my dad’s family for decades, passing through his parents, to one brother and then the next.  When my parents bought the house saddled up right behind it in 1980 it seemed almost kismet.  A looming 6-foot privacy fence now surrounds the underground pool where my dad taught us to swim.  I marvel at how I never noticed how small my dad’s circumference was.  Even when he was healthy, most of his life: his home, his work and his history were confined to four neighborhood blocks.   

The scale of it saddens me. I wonder if he had regrets. I wonder if the human life span might just be long enough to disguise its brevity until it smacks us in the face.

The truth is we are lucky if we get to watch our parents die. Give their eulogy. Hold them in a box.   Mourn their absence. I can only hope my daughters will do the same for me someday.  It is the natural order of things.  The alternative is inconceivable.

I think of my girls and wonder if I handled it right. The way I told them, poised like dolls on the love seat, quiet hands at their sides, sensing my heaviness. I tried to keep it simple. Grandpa was old. Grandpa’s heart was sick. Grandpa died and he is not coming back.  Perhaps I should have googled in the driveway how to articulate death to kids. My three-year-old wept. The older one asked questions and later cried when I tucked her into bed.  I have a sense that they are okay.

A few days after the funeral, I dropped off my youngest at day care.  The teacher opened the door and my daughter chirped matter-of-factly, “My grandpa died like our goldfish died.”  I shrugged and took a deep breath. Devoid of emotion, that is pretty much the gist of it. 

I pull my face away from the glass and carry the box through the empty house, room by room, waiting for what feels right - not wanting to put him down.  I am used to the weight of it now and somehow, it begins to feel impossibly light. I’m trying to comprehend how the strongest, most solid man I knew could be reduced to fit into a container the size of a tissue box.  How a heavy weight wrestling champion could disintegrate into matter that doesn’t tip nine pounds.

I envision how my dad must have cradled me thirty-seven years ago in that hospital room, his firstborn daughter, a squirming pink-faced infant curled up like a snail in his tan September arms.  I must have felt so impossibly small to him.  An 8lbs 15oz gift that instantly made him a dad. 

We have changed places in perfect symmetry. I see that it is my turn to do the carrying.  

Dad

One of my dad’s favorite movies was Lawrence of Arabia, which won Best Picture in 1963. I always loved watching the Academy Awards with him. He was a movie buff and could rattle off the actors’ names in the In Memoriam segment faster than the producers could identify them on the screen.  As I was composing my thoughts last night, I hid in my home office and lit a candle.  I was reminded of his favorite line in that movie when Peter O’Toole extinguishes the match between his thumb and finger.

“Of course it hurts,” O’Toole says. “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” I smiled thinking of all the times he had impressed us with that maneuver when we were growing up. He was the strongest man I knew. 

After my dad passed away yesterday, our family sat around him, sorting through all the memories that encompassed who he was. The good stuff: before the depression, mania, electric shock therapy, and heart failure. The times before overflowing pill boxes and the embarrassment he felt while eating in front of others because the Parkinson’s made his hands shake.  

We recalled the many hours Amy and I spent pitching to him in our driveway - him suited up in full catcher’s gear and perched on a painter’s bucket.  We remembered the time he literally leapt from the stands in jubilation when Blake qualified for state at a high school wrestling meet.  We were reminded of that family trip we took to Mexico - how he and Tony Navilio belted out country western songs while riding these scrawny, geriatric horses down the beach.  And we thought of him, marching proudly in the Princeton alumni parade, sporting that ostentatious, striped orange jacket. We can see him so clearly, lacing up his beat-up running shoes that he’d tape together out of frugality or piling his plate with peeled shrimp at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, determined the restaurant would lose money on him.

I thought about how strong his back was.  How large and looming it was to me as a child.  I envisioned him scaling the rope in our backyard and lifting us up in the swimming pool with his arms outstretched.

I used to love to sniff the collar of his flannel shirt when he came home from the hardware store at 6 o’clock every night.  He’d give me a hug and I’d breathe it in.  It was really just wood dust, plastic hoses and peat moss, but to me it was dad.   Years later, when I found myself homesick while studying abroad in Australia, I’d frequent an old local hardware store down the street from my house.  I’d wander the aisles, sometimes finding something small to buy.  I was on the other side of the planet, but the smell was the same.  It instantly transported me home.

Amy asked my mom when she thought dad had been the happiest. She told us it was probably when we were growing up.  When he was coaching us or driving us to practice or watching proudly from the sidelines.  He was our most devoted fan. 

My dad drew a short straw in the twilight of his life.  Chicago’s 1967 Athlete of the Year wouldn’t ultimately get to be the grandpa who’d teach his granddaughters how to hit off a tee or model how to perform the perfect half nelson to his grandsons.  Yet, they loved him as ‘grandpa’ without judgment, accepting that even the strong can become frail.

Two years ago he was in the ICU on Christmas Eve and the staff told us that he would likely not make through the night. We reflected on how he had been slowly leaving for us for a while – how the quality of his life had been dissipating like the air from a carbonated can.

Yesterday as he took his final breaths, my mom gave him permission to go…to be free of affliction, free of suffering, free of the physical demands that had become too much for his body. He was unconscious, but it was as if he heard her and listened.   

We were all with him through the afternoon after he passed. We sat around my dad in the dim, our own continued vigil in room 14 - One of us occasionally pulling back the curtain to enter the glare and commotion of the hospital to make a call outside, to make preparations.  At one point, we paused to listen to a woman in an adjacent room singing a hymn. With us going in and out, he was still a part of it all.  A part of our family unit.  It took us a few hours to feel ready to leave him.  And as I stood there, the sheer finality of the moment seized me–it would be the last time we would all be alone together.

It’s heartbreaking the things that make you laugh in the most bewildering circumstances. As we were planning the funeral gathering, we contemplated the idea of buying some flowers to beautify the space. We quickly discounted the idea, knowing that my dad would have hated spending the money on arrangements.  I said, “Actually what dad probably would have approved of, is a bouquet of dandelions.” Being a hardware man who sold weed killer, he always teased that they were his favorite flower.

I will think of him in the summer when I see those yellow faces persevering in the most unlikely of places - Darting up through the sidewalk cracks and skirting chain-link fences.  I may even encourage my girls to blow on them when they turn to seed, scattering them to the wind.  Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. They are the strongest flowers I know.

Dad, I want to say that it hurts. I’m trying not to mind that it hurts, but it’s not just a simple match.  A much grander light was extinguished…and it hurts. 

Pee Wee Boot Camp

Car doors befuddle my kids.  Actually, any doors that require the foresight to stand back because they open outward. 

It’s not from lack of experience. We make it a point to physically leave the claustrophobic cavity of our home at least once a day to stimulate their sprightly synapses and save my sanity.  And that usually means all piling in the old CRV. 

And it’s not from lack of practice. Every time my kids line up directly in front of car doors, screen doors and heavy wooden front doors, I gently convey that if they don’t move back they will simply be plowed over like corn stalks.

And yet, still, with astonishingly brainless muscle memory they continue to stand in the perfectly wrong spot like a pair of turkeys in the rain.  Since it typically takes every last festering fragment of my patience to lovingly corral them back a few steps while I dig out the keys and juggle 18 grocery bags, I often wonder….  When the hell will they finally get it?! 

 

And then it dawns on me.  What they need, and not just for basic fundamental entryway practice, but for the myriad of other habits they get away with throughout the day – Jillian Michaels.  My kids need boot camp.  Some no-holds-barred, highly concentrated, intense training for squirts to root out the nonsense and reinforce cooperation.  And if that’s not a thing, it should be. 

Most boot camps, by design, encompass strenuous drills and training to help reprogram new behaviors.  (I looked this up since I have zero personal experience with them).  In my world, rising at 5am to perform lunges and jumping jacks is the very definition of torture, and likely supreme humiliation, given the current state of my pelvic floor.  But just because I have never subjected myself to such vile treatment doesn’t mean I wouldn’t offer my kids up on a platter to be molded into more gracious and empathetic little runts.

I envision Pee Wee Boot Camp going like this:

Mornings start off chipper and efficient, reeking of Mary-Poppins-sweetness with genuine smiles and serenading robins.  There are no audible grunts or throwing stuffed unicorns at me when I come in to rouse the troops. 

Without prompting, my five-year-old then miraculously dresses herself without feigning that she has somehow forgotten overnight how to put her hands through sleeves.

I am actually granted fifteen blissful uninterrupted minutes to shit and shower without voyeuristic bystanders or a picket line forming on the other side of the glass door.

My girls eat something, anything, wholegrain for breakfast without discriminating against the raisins and gingerly place their dishes in the sink. 

My toddler sits dutifully on the stairs to put on her shoes and heartily agrees that her socks are in perfect order inside her gym shoes and are not bunched up in the slightest fashion or require any urgent adjusting.  Even after standing up.

My family leaves the house ahead of schedule with brushed hair, minty breath, the day care check in-hand, and the most cerebral and unique show ‘n tell item the preschool teacher has ever witnessed to honor the letter of the week.  

My girls professionally stand clear of all car doors upon entry. At this point, preschool boot camp has paid for itself.

After work, I pick the kids up and they lovingly rehash all the playful moments from their day. With actual details.  Minus shrugging.

While I cook dinner, my girls sit patiently on the bar stools across from me, munching on carrot sticks, with their legs swinging, asserting that they absolutely, under no circumstances, want the TV to be on during mealtime and, by the way, the kitchen smells absolutely divine.

 

My children sample everything on their plates and eat pasta with actual, real-life, red sauce on top, making direct contact with the noodles.  We are talking, full on touching.  They use silverware, are 100% satisfied with the color of their sippy cups, and refrain from regurgitating unsavory items into my hand.  In fact, there is not one frantic demand to remove a disgusting green item from their plate and have the area wiped clean of all revolting residue. 

After squatting behind the front curtains post-meal, my toddler is not remotely interested in investigating her soiled diaper in attempt to identify all the digested components of her smelly ball of turd.

My girls do not throw themselves on the floor in protest of taking a bath and then sob barbarically thirty minutes later when it is time to drain the tub.  They even affectionately agree to trade off who gets to sit near the faucet and fondle Ariel’s mangy, mildew-smelling, mermaid hair.

Bedtime takes twenty minutes.  My kids curl up like obedient mollusks after reading books that aren’t bent and insist that it would be silly to ask for water or a different pair of pjs now.  Like magnets on a fridge, they stay put in bed, without getting up to inform me of a burp or a mysterious closet creak or a pang of hunger that would likely resolve itself if they could please have the raisins they picked out during breakfast because they were really just trying to save them for later.

     

And how do all these new boot camp behaviors become ingrained, do you ask?  Of course, I’m not expecting the Milgram shock treatment exactly, but perhaps…. something close.  Look, I’m reasonable.   I understand that they’re kids and there’s over-arching social pressure to ensure any punitive action is a bit more humane than conducting a hair-raising current through their nervous systems. But,… I don’t see how getting pelted between the eyes with a miniature plastic shopkin, let’s say, every once in a while would cause any irrevocable harm. 

And if it gets them a few feet away from my car doors, I’m more than willing to pay the therapy bills later. 

I Need A Day

I have a greeting card in my desk with a picture of a giant porcelain toilet bowl on the front.  Inside is written “If men can miss such a large target at close range, then why are they in charge of the world’s nuclear weapons?” I bought it a few years ago at an art museum gift shop without any occasion or recipient in mind, but simply because it gave me a chuckle.  Today I am not laughing.

Earlier I watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech on CNN and she is more magnanimous and gracious than I.  I am all for unifying the country and a peaceful transition of power and approaching the next four years with as open of a mind as I can muster, but for goodness sake, I need a day.  I need a day to wallow in grief and shake my head and hover over my steaming cup of ginger tea, staring into oblivion in my slipper socks. I need a day to curse at the uneducated white males in this country, sob in the shower, and fantasize that last night was only a misguided spoof on Saturday Night Live. In the words of the Dixie Chicks: “I’m not ready to make nice.”  I need a day to get it together.

    

My 91-year-old grandmother demanded she vote early this year because she said when you are 91, you can’t afford to take any chances. My mom told me she left the booth giddy and gliding, shaking her cane at the line of people waiting to vote and proclaiming, “I just voted for the first woman president!”  This morning on the phone she broke down into tears and implored me, “Emilushka, what is happening to my Dreamland?” This is a woman who fled her German-occupied homeland during World War II. She was an immigrant who, to this day, is profoundly grateful to my grandfather for bringing her to this country. She learned English, embraced American values, built a home, and raised two successful children here. She put down roots and today the soil resembles sand.

   

I glimpsed a post on Facebook earlier that read: “Worst Day in America 9/11.  Second worst day in America 11/9.”  This morning’s shock when I awoke to the official news had the impact of an assassination.  I will remember where I was on this election year.  I will remember Bridget’s crestfallen face when I shared the news and my blundering attempt to explain to a five-year-old how someone who spouts such hateful things can be a decisive winner. I will remember many of my friends admitting that they were curled in the fetal position or calling their mothers to cry or praying for the first time in years.  I will remember my daughter holding up her laminated map of the United States and asking why there were not more states she could color in blue.

As a friend in St. Louis reminded me this morning, we went from electing our first African American President eight years ago to one last night who was endorsed by the KKK.  Our next Commander-in-Chief is a man who has insulted every possible faction of society who neglects to mirror his own orangutan-esque appearance or beliefs (apologies to our primate cousins for that unfortunate comparison): Muslims, women, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, POWs, and hell, even Iowans, my husband’s home state.  It is a slap in the collective face of this country. 

I am still attempting to digest the vile truth that we voluntarily elected a man to our most elite position of power who brags about grabbing women by the pussy.  I am still dreading all the social progress that may be unraveled and bulldozed after four years of his leadership.  I am still reeling from the realization that his Supreme Court nominations have the potential to cripple the rights and freedoms of my daughters for decades to come.  His extreme smugness and blatant narcissism I resent being rewarded, but that is not the worst part.  What horrifies me the most is that his hateful rhetoric is what precipitated his election. His ascent to power came at the expense of trampling those with weaker voices, in smaller numbers, and with everything to lose.  The rural white populace swallowed the Kool-Aid and somehow believes that this one person with a sweep of his magic orange toupee is going to eradicate Islamic terrorism, put cash in their pockets, and construct a wall to keep out all the drug dealers, rapists and abhorrent immigrants soiling our American innocence. They believe this entitled, conniving dipshit with a gold-plated spoon in his mouth is going to actually roll up his sleeves. To all the coal miners and steelworkers out there, Trump’s hands are soft and supple– it is his conscience that is calloused.

   

As I fumble through my day today, keenly aware I am marching through the well-documented stages of grief, I linger on an over-arching cloud of sadness. I think about last weekend when my mom, sister and I spent a few days in Manhattan, taking in the sites and foot traffic and carb-laden bagels. One of our favorite stops was exploring the 1.5 mile High Line, an elevated linear park built out of the old train line.  It was Marathon weekend in New York City and as we walked through this beautiful garden of trees and shrubs, we encountered so many from around the globe, basking in this rare green space. The sun was shining, teasing the air to a perfect crisp 60 degrees and around us the leaves had morphed into hues of rust and cranberry.  I heard fragments of Mandarin, rapid directions in French, and a toddler exclaiming in Spanish while pointing excitedly at a sparrow.  I relished in the shared experience of accents and took a photo for a family from England who was traveling with their teenage son in a wheelchair.  I thought, yes, we are a melting pot.  And the colors intermixing are magnificent. There were no walls. No barriers. Just trees.

So, as I said, I need a day to be a sore loser.  To fantasize about his impending failures, but at the same time to be utterly vulnerable in my love for this country.  After our stroll on the High Line, we headed uptown to Central Park where we had a lunch reservation.  We had almost canceled it the week prior when we discovered the restaurant was actually in the Trump International Hotel.  We decided we could stomach the indiscretion at the expense of Jean-Georges’ French rolls, but on the way out, the three of us joked about hiking up our skirts and publicly urinating on his ostentatious gold sign.  After breakfast this morning, my sister lamented to me on the phone that she wished we had done it when we had the chance.  I happen to agree and something tells me we nasty women would have had pretty good aim. 

Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years ago on a brisk Tuesday morning in September, I laced up my running shoes and jogged around Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus. The air was cool and dewy with the fog still clinging to the foothills, but by mid-run I had tied my sweatshirt around my waist and was damp with perspiration.  The day would be a warm one.   School didn’t start for another few weeks, but all the Residential Assistants had arrived early for training.  Upon my return to the dorm, I hurried down the hall to women’s bathroom and heard murmurs and gasps coming from the lounge. It would a moment that would forever imprint in my memory. A day plucked from thousands. One that I can conjure as vividly and intensely as the births of my own daughters.

RA Training was inevitably canceled that day.  Instead, eighty or so of us upperclassman gathered in a conference room and scrutinized the live television coverage on a 28-inch tube TV in make-shift rows of hard plastic chairs.  The room was eerily somber. Even when the same coverage began to loop over and over, smoke billowing from the towers and the surreal shot of that second plane hovering on the brink of the building, we sat there, stupefied and welded to our seats.  There were rumors of a plane still in flight bound for San Francisco.  United Airlines Flight 93.  All of us, silently wondering if there was someone on that flight whom we might know.  All of us, mentally scanning our roster of incoming freshman for those who listed New York City as home.  Fearing whose father, whose aunt, whose cousin might be perilously stranded on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

I remember calling my family that day, clinging to my desk phone like a barnacle as I heard by mom’s colossal heave of maternal relief.  I called my grandparents, my siblings, my friends scattered about the country, even one long-distance dial to Australia.  I felt the urgent need to gather them all, to hear their voices and familiar cadences and inflections. I curled up on my yellow bean bag chair with the sagging smiley face flattened beneath me and let them all envelop me.  Here was proof. There was still something good. 

  

I laced up my sneakers again today, but this time to escape on a walk through my neighborhood.  The normal upheaval of my family’s early morning breakfast routine - protests over hand-washing, fits over the amount of cereal milk and pouts over who claimed the Ariel sippy cup proved especially suffocating.  I needed some solitude.  

It was another gorgeous September 11th morning.  The infant sun was already white and blinding, forcing me to squint under the shield of my sunglasses.  Fleetwood Mac was playing in my earbuds, but I could still hear the satisfying pop of fallen acorns crunching under the weight of my heels.   I was thinking about the legacy of this day.  Despite not personally knowing anyone who lost their life fifteen years ago, I felt the weight of it before I went to sleep last night and it was my first thought as my dreams dissipated into wakefulness.

To my four-year-old daughter, this day is simply Grandpa’s birthday and the Lemonade Stand, an annual charity fundraiser my parent’s block started in 2002.  We go every year, drop cash in a bucket for a local non-profit and watch the neighborhood kids frolic around with brownie smudges on their faces and dirt caked on bare feet.  It has become an end of summer ritual and one that is filled with face painting and balloon animals and visits from the local fire department.  The real reason behind the lemonade stand I cannot share with her yet, though I find myself searching for an honest and somehow restrained way to one day explain it.  Right now, I can still turn off the evening news and turn on Daniel Tiger.  I can still distract her with her math games on her iPad as we disrobe and file through airport security.  She doesn’t understand the ‘why’ behind it all yet and it hasn’t dawned on her to ask.

As I crossed a vacant soccer field this morning, the damp grass licking at my ankles, I heard the rumble of a jet overhead.  It was one of those jumbo 747’s having just ascended from O’Hare with the upper deck visible from the side before it turned and soared directly above me.  The sky was a vast canvas of cornflower blue without a single cloudy blemish and as the plane passed overhead, its outstretched wings seemed to glide through the air with the natural ease of an albatross.   The sight was so magnificent and peaceful that I pulled the buds from my ears and was awed by the sheer miracle of man-made flight.   I watched that mammoth plane carve out its path in the sky until it was gone and only its contrail lingered, a spidery wisp of white dissolving into azure.

   

As I resumed my walk I wondered if there had perhaps been a passenger aboard peering down at my smallness through his oval window.  I wondered if he might have seen me, a mere speck of color amidst a blanket of green grass.  Just a single human, standing erect, watching with reverence, mourning a loss, but with a hand on her heart.  

My Mother's Day Apology: Thirty-some Years in the Making

My favorite line in the classic holiday movie, A Christmas Story , is not “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid” or “I can’t put my arms down!” or even “Fra-gi-le…must be Italian.” – although that last one makes me chuckle every time.  It’s without a doubt the one movie line that amuses me during the feral frenzy of dinner hour as I shell pistachios, boil pasta, pour organic milk into sippy cups, and dance around discarded Cheerios, all with a one-year old clinging to my leg like a ring-tailed lemur:  

  

“My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in fifteen years.”

Those may be the truest words ever spoken.

On this Mother’s Day weekend, I’ve been reflecting on the vast quantity of otherwise overlooked and unacknowledged sacrifices my own mother made throughout my childhood.  I barely remember a sliver of them, but there were thousands, tens of thousands.   And I’m only aware of them now because I’m the one doling out the martyrdom for two little toe-heads of my own.

I found that the transition to parenthood unraveled much like astronomy.  One minute you are gazing into a blank, black infinite sky and the next, you have been handed a telescope.  The sheer shower of stars and luminous galaxies were always there, but you are awakened to them as abruptly as an infant’s head emerges from the womb.   Suddenly, there is another person in the room.  A tiny, squawking, pink, gooey ruckus of limbs that right then and there, without a quiver of hesitation, you would give your life to protect.

  

There is a ferocity to motherhood that often lies dormant in the day to day tedium and tasks.  But, it is the life force, the heart that pumps the blood to all those branching veins of altruism.  It is what makes you willing to pull back in the driveway even though you are running late because your daughter forgot her stuffed ponies on the front porch.   It is why you forgo sipping your Chardonnay while flipping through a fashion magazine to practice spelling words with your second grader.  It is why you are a caffeinated, sleep-deprived, often weary woman who can’t find the damn car keys, sporting shabby five-year-old capris from Kohl’s, an old nursing bra, and a ponytail.  We are mothers first and everything else second.  

So, thank you, Mom.  Thirty-plus years late and three decades humbled.  I watch you now with my girls and it makes my heart leap and hurt all at once.  I recall how tender you always were.  How creative and attentive and pure when I wasn’t capable of appreciating it.  With you at the helm, we made placemats with Con-Tact paper and pressed autumn leaves.  We baked cookies with real butter, licked the beaters, and never once contracted salmonella.  Hell, when it was raining you even got out the finger paint.  Something I now avoid as stealthily as those 80-page tongue-tying Dr. Seuss books.

The truth is, you’re an extraordinary act to follow.

Mom, here’s the crux of it.  

I’m sorry about all those inside-out socks and underwear tangled in pant legs.  I’m sorry about the roast pork I regurgitated in a napkin after you had devoted five hours to chopping, dicing, and braising.  I’m sorry for the nights I tiptoed down in search of a sip of water or because my covers were not cooperating or the shade was not pulled down to the exact perfect spot when all you wanted was 30 minutes to watch Siskel and Ebert.   I’m sorry for all the dress shoes that I insisted felt great in the store, only to whine that they were digging into my baby toe half-way through church.

I’m sorry for any and all melodramatic protests that may have occurred when I was asked to put on a coat or heaven forbid, go pee before leaving the house.  I’m sorry for the many times I used your arm sleeve to smear snot or coughed in your face or spat out my gum in your hand in the middle of the supermarket because the flavor was completely gone after exactly three and half minutes.  And I’m sorry for all the times I ran away from you to join my friends and forgot to wave or even glance backwards.

I’m sorry for all the dishes you washed,  pots you soaked, toilet paper rolls you replaced,  tears you wiped, Band-Aids you applied, t-shirts you folded, bread you peanut-buttered,  carpools you juggled, hugs you administered, and patience you bestowed without so much as a whisper of gratitude.

I can’t thank you enough.  As your daughter.  As your admirer.  As now the mother of your granddaughters.  Although, I would like to make you that roast pork again and make sure that this time you get to enjoy it actually sitting down and most importantly, piping hot.    

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.