Month: June 2018

An Ordinary Gift


I was finishing up the day with my live chat tech-support customers when storm started rolling in. My office is at the back of the house and has no windows, only a sun tube we installed when we built the house to make sure that every room had natural light during the day and did not need to use electricity. My only warning of the approaching storm was sudden dropped connection as our satellite Internet lost signal.
I went out to living room to make sure the animals were in. Princess calamity Jane, our mighty grey huntress was by the window, meowing to go out. I ignored her plea and went to through the mudroom to the front door to call for Gentleman Jim, our orange tabby who thinks he’s tough, but is really just a big pussy cat (yes I went there).

I open the door and was blasted by the steamy hot air whipping around me. A few drops of rain had begun, and the clouds coming over the mountain were violent and purple. I didn’t see Jim and closed The door, turning the Tumblr lock to keep the wind from blowing it back open. Thing2 and I went to the living room window to watch the storm, uttering the odd “look at that” Or “there goes another tree” as the wind forced the trees surrounding the yard to bow to the ground and submission to the sky.

I went back to the door at one point to try to call for Jim. The wind was roaring, taking on familiar sound of an approaching freight train that, when I was growing up in Midwest, would have sent us scurrying for the basement. I could feel the air pressure change as I opened the door and called for Jim, wondering what I was doing risking our safety for a cat.

I could hear him yowling in fear, and turn my head toward the sound of the distorted meows. He had taken cover in the woodshed, but the rain was blowing in and, seemingly having forgotten his barn cat origins, he desperately wanted to be inside and dry. He heard me calling and looked in my direction. 

“Come on, buddy,“ I called to him as if he were one of the boys. He hesitated as the rain began to pound harder and then made the four jumps from the shed to the door. We rode out the storm at the living room window, with me thinking how lucky we are to live in a house that is essentially a storm cellar.

The storm was almost as brief as it was intense. Thing1 still needed things for his very specific diet at the grocery store. It was late , but the boys and I headed back to the mundane and to Bennington, riding out the second and last storm of the evening in the supermarket parking lot.

The Big Guy has issued dinner for the last few months, a weight-loss strategy that’s been quite successful for him. The boys and I still needed/wanted to eat, however, so we stopped at a nearby restaurant on the way home.

It became another completely ordinary evening, the powerful storm almost forgotten. we ordered our drinks as the waitstaff brought a birthday cake to a nearby table. We argued about just how much caffeine Thing2 do would actually be allowed to drink. Another family sitting directly behind us, speaking Spanish, celebrated a birthday with a singing cake. It was deliciously ordinary.

We told the birthday lady Feliz Cumpleaños as we got up and walked out to parking lot.

The last of the storm clouds are moving out, and a brilliant sunset begun. It was as if mother nature was trying to tell us that this ordinary day, this day when we had the luxury of worrying about the safety of pets because we knew our family was safe, when we could experience the potentially very dangerous power of mother nature with awe and not fear and still be able to enjoy a typical grocery store visit and dinner out marked only by the two performances of a birthday song, had been a precious — and rare — gift.

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pay it forward.

The Little Things

So one of the really annoying little things about writing a whole lot lately as it makes you appreciate things you think you want to change. Take, for example, that dream we all have about quitting when we hit some jackpot or (even more improbably) publish that bestseller?

I have a children’s book I’m wrapping up (some idiot who looks a bit like me lost the stylus for my digital drawing pad holding up progress) about a kids’ messy room. While I wait for the new e-pencil to arrive, I’m working on another book about family in the mornings before my day job. And I fantasize about a day when the book work would be my day job.

We’ve had enough healthcare disasters in our family that my day job will be a fact of life until I’m on Medicare and Thing2 is, hopefully, working some place with good health insurance. But that’s not the only reason I’ll have a day job for a long while.

Last week and the week before, I took a few days off for cleaning and Thing1’s graduation celebrations. I had a bit of extra down time, but, somehow, in the middle of that down time, no extra writing happened.

More life happened, and, when I got back to my mundane early morning write, late morning work for money routine, the writing got back to normal. I’m still writing about the ordinary family stuff, but it occurs to me that the day job forces me to treat the writing like a job with its own schedule. To show up each day. It makes the mundane family stuff, like the battles with the insurance company and the purchase of a tomato plant or two, possible in a lot of ways.

It’s a little thing, and, even though it’s always been appreciated, sometimes it’s nice to see it in a new light.

Functional Art


I am the last person to suggest that art should exist for anything but art. My garden being less about art than food, however, features vegetables and fruits almost exclusively. Almost.

Marigolds are one of the few exceptions, tucked in between the tomatoes to keep the bugs at bay. They are all about enjoying art of the  functional kind.  And just for the heck of art, too.

How Does Your Garden Grow

Baby Cukes

The first spiky baby cukes appeared today. The cherry tomato plant next to it is sporting a few green ornaments.

I once had the boys convinced that cherry tomatoes and sugar peas were so sweet because they were candy. I admit it, it was fun of watching them fight over vegetables.

The only problem is I think they still believe it, and there’s only one cherry tomato plant this year.

Fathers and Sons

The Big Guy and Thing1 have been working to replace the radiator in Thing1’s Volvo wagon, a car that’s seen more winters than he has, gifted to him by my parents when they bought a new one two years ago.

The Big Guy went to a car show with a friend earlier in the day.  Interested more in exotic cars, our boys Stayed home while I worked. I’m working Sunday, Fathers Day, so the holiday atmosphere is a bit muted.

We’re closing out the afternoon as the Big Guy and Thing1 closed out the repair job. Thing one was so engrossed in the project he forgot to try to dodge the camera.

It’s a quiet, gorgeous afternoon, but it’s not the shared love of cars and fixing things that makes the afternoon glow. It’s watching them bond and the Big Guy’s pride as he remembers he had a big hand in raising the capable, affable mechanic next to him.

I can’t help feel like that’s the most best way to honor a relationship between father and son.

Zoom Out

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,Undeterred

For most of the almost 6 years that I’ve been writing this blog, almost every single post has been accompanied by an illustration. started to change about a week ago when my stack of unillustrated but otherwise just finished posts started getting that musty, too-long-in-the-drawer smell.

I don’t have anything against photography. I actually shot weddings and portraits for almost 5 years when Thing1 was little. Thing2 came on the scene, and suddenly I needed both my hands to focus on him, on a new work-at-Home-mom role, on everything except focusing lenses and clicking a shutter. 

I traded a DSLR for a point-and-shoot, and then the point-and-shoot for whatever camera happened to me on my cell phone, operating on the theory that the best camera for Snapchat‘s of the kids was the one I kept with me all the time. 

I thought art was secondary.

I still scribbled my notebooks. When we took the kids to the art museum, I sketched my sketchbook pretending I might one day a great artist. It wasn’t until I started my blog as part of writing class, that I began drawing again in earnest.

The funny thing was that the drawing was not about art – or so I thought. It was something to add to the writing on the blog. It was stock illustration I didn’t have to buy and images I didn’t have to wait until the kids were occupied during daylight hours to make. 

It was utilitarian. And then it became something more, it reminded me it had always been something more. The drawing took on a life of its own, enabling but also becoming an integral part of the blog.

I will never stop drawing again.

Just as drawing became a tool to enable the blog, however, an old creative outlet, photography – altered and not, is starting to re-emerge as a facilitator. I doubt I will purchase another expensive DSLR, but I have reclaimed a mirrorless camera I traded to the Big Guy before our trip to Iceland. 

Right now the photography is a tool. It helps writing progress without letting the creative and meditative but time-consuming task of illustrating slow it down. It helps make sure nothing gets in the way of responding to inspiration.

I’ve been at this a few years now. In that time I’ve learned that the art is never secondary; only the tools are, and allowing yourself to zoom out, to pick up a new one, can become a source of inspiration all on its own.

Take Me to Church


During our first years in Vermont, my garden was my church. In both of our homes, I spent the winter months planning the aisles and the rows; I spent the summer on my knees planting and weeding, harvesting and cooking.

Then life sped up. A fractured foot benched me for a year. Between two Little Leaguers, family travel, work and time creativity that was deemed even more sacred than the weeding, I became a non-gardening gardener.

I’ve never been big on flower beds. They’re pretty, and I like other people’s beds, but when it’s at home, it’s a lot of weeding and nothing to eat. Our border is the forest – we pick a line in the lawn, mow up to it and let mother nature pick out the flowers or the weeds.

A few weeks ago we added on a deck. It’s pretty basic – a step, no railings. I’ve tried dancing on it, generating a warning from Thing2 that people (via Google earth) could see me, so I know it’s a good deck. The main purpose was to replace the weed patch we used to call our patio so that the house looked less like the set of the Addams Family when we celebrated Thing1’s graduation.

But it’s had an unexpected effect.

Five minutes after the deck was finished, I started filling my mismatched collection of planters with green. Still a vegetable-tatiana, the planters now nurture tomatoes, cucumbers and salad greens. We may not get much actual food from our mini kitchen garden, but the cucumber tendrils wrapping around a trellis and the tiny ruffled row of lettuce is making a growing sculpture gallery. Thing1 helps himself to a few leaves of lettuce for his sandwiches each day, but for me, the garden is a feast for the soul. 

For this lapsed worshipper, it is a rebirth.

What Kind of Mother

It’s two day before Thing1’s graduation. I’m on hold with the pharmacy for the third time this week trying to find out what’s happened with the most expensive of his five prescriptions. The insurance company won’t approve an increased dosage.

I’m scrolling through Facebook while I wait, stopping to like a friend’s post about a daughter’s scholarships or add a frowny-face to a post about a shelter dog on ‘death row’. I’m thinking about Plan B and C, including a three hour drive to Montreal to buy the temperature-controlled drug there. 

The hold music is still playing as I pause at a picture of a crying toddler. I click on it and open the article.

The boy in the article has been recently separated from his immigrant mother. The article doesn’t mention if they entered the US illegally or were seeking asylum, only that he is traumatized and that his mother is now incarcerated several states away. I break a strict self-imposed rule and scroll to the comments below the article. There is outrage at the child’s situation. There is also indifference and even smug vitriol cast at the mother and, by extension at the child on whom our government is visiting this psychological trauma, for his mother’s ‘sin’, a misdemeanor at worst, of crossing the border.

The pharmacy customer service rep returns and pulls me back to my current battle, which suddenly seems almost insignificant. I harden my heart and head and click the back button, for now forgetting the child and the hundreds like him.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” she says, her voice almost robotic. “The insurance company has denied the claim again.”

“Well can you at least send out the original prescription?” I ask. “He’s getting way behind now.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” she says again. “The old one was canceled with the new one. We’ve sent it back to the hospital to reauthorize.” 

I want to ask her if she worries about job security if medical marijuana – a derivative of which we are on now wholly dependent to stop my firstborn’s internal bleeding – ever gains real traction. Instead I thank her for nothing, knowing I’m being rude for no good reason and with no expectation of an improved result. I call the hospital as soon as I hang up. 

The nurses – there’s a special place in heaven for them – are already faxing and calling and liasoning between the doctors and the ‘experts’ at the insurance company (there’s a special place for them too). The nurses inform me that the insurance company’s chief pharmacist denied the new dose again, and they are appealing the denial a second time.

By Friday afternoon, company is due to arrive for Thing1’s graduation. I finish most of the cleaning and sit down to call the hospital before the weekend starts. I sit on hold, thumbing through the Facebook feed on my phone again, smiling in spite of my frustration. Images of kids smiling at parties and beaming parents flood my feed. I know they have their worries too, but, for a moment, I feel like I’m looking through a window at another world.

Stories of children being separated from parents also appear. I don’t click on the articles; I’ve just heard their stories on the radio. A father, separated from his young son, has killed himself. Mothers in detention are being told they may never see their children again. Today, knowing I can do nothing, I choose to be blind.

The nurse picks up and tells me the insurance company is still stalling. My son is now over a week behind on the main medication he needs to know will work before he makes too many plans for fall. 

Saturday I tune out, focusing only on our small family celebration. At noon, our firstborn, my baby crosses the great divide from high school to a world that expects something of him. It is a huge step, and I constantly think how fortunate we are to have been able to travel toward and cross over that divide with him. Now, increasingly, he will travel independently. 

Once, I thought this part of the journey would be like ripping a band-aid off of an unshaved leg. 

Before Thing1 was born, I did not want kids. I was a wretched sinner. I had fornicated. I had lied — to people I hated, people I loved, to myself constantly. I had been guilty of almost every deadly sin. I was selfish. I was the worst candidate for a potential parent.

Somehow the miracle of my son happened. It would trite to say that he saved me, and he didn’t. He instead brought out a best part of me that I didn’t know existed so that I could be there to save him if the need ever arose.  

When he was first born, in my dreams, the need always arose. Shortly before I went back to work my dreams became colorful scenarios of someone pointing to my past sins. A judgmental family member or actual judge would tear him from my unfit arms, a rhythmic, colicky cry providing the nightmare’s soundtrack.

Initially, I thought these dreams were more selfishness — the fear of losing the one good thing I had ever been a part of making. Eventually, I began to see my anxieties about losing my child were really about the fear that my earlier sins, in the form of karma, delayed ‘justice’, or just incompetent mothering might threaten his foundation, that the sins of his mother would be visited on him.

Tuesday is Thing2’s last day of school. Our older son’s case is still under appeal. The three of us decide to go to lunch rather than wait by the phone. It’s a perfect Vermont summer day until we get back to the mailbox where we discover the first denial letters, signed by the insurance company’s chief pharmacy officer. 

I call the hospital for a status report. As I wait on hold, I google the pharmacy officer, a woman I discover. Knowing it’s psychotic, I get on Facebook, stalking the woman who’s denied my child’s prescription. I find her profile easily, discovering a professional portrait and a few snapshots of her with a little girl, maybe her daughter. 

I want to message her, to ask her what kind of mother can look at my seventeen-year-old’s charts and deny his chance at health. How can she be so blind to his condition?

The nurse returns and informs me that the doctors have conferred with the insurer for yet another review. We’ll know more Wednesday morning. 

Wednesday after lunch I start my daily calls. Our son is anxious to go back to work. Three weeks without his medication, however, are causing a backslide, despite the cannabis oil on which we’ve pinned too much hope.  

But I still have hope. I have a Plan B and C through Z if needed, and Thing1 knows it. That knowledge is letting both of us see his future through an optimistic lens. 

I keep Facebook open for a few more minutes after I hang up the phone. Graduation photos still appear in the feed. So do more articles about children being torn from their families in the name of national security. 

I click on a few, avoiding the comments, focusing on the families, on the children. I mull over a new Plan A, then Plan B to help safeguard those futures. They are not my children anymore than my son is the pharmacy officer’s child, but they are someone’s children. I still don’t know exactly how to help, anymore than I know if we’ll win our second appeal, but today, as I wait, I refuse to be blind.

Widgets and Wonders

The senior class graduates Saturday. The fifth grade, the elementary school’s senior class, celebrated their ‘moving up’ to middle school a few days earlier. Thing2’s graduation to the next step of his education was a huge milestone for us. It’s the first time in twelve years that we won’t have a child in elementary school. But it’s not only our perspective that made the afternoon unique.

The Big Guy and I each went to schools with thousands of kids. Graduation at mine lasted almost two hours because we had to wait for hundreds of kids to accept their diplomas. I knew the principal’s name, but I doubt he knew mine before he read it on the slip attached to my diploma. We were widgets, school was a factory.

At Thing2’s ceremony, there were songs. The music teacher handed out awards to the kids who had done chorus and band. The teachers from each 13-kid section handed out academic awards, and then, at the fifteen-minute mark, it was time to hand out the ‘diplomas’.

The principal started with a gentle reminder of the rehearsal instructions the kids had received earlier, producing a chorus of giggles from the risers behind her. She started to read out a name and the first boy climbed down to accept his certificate, but then she stopped.

“Wait a minute Mr. Smith,” she said, holding up her hand and seeming to wipe a speck of dust from her eye. The grinning boy froze, watching her as she stopped to tell the parents a story about his first day at preschool. It took less than thirty seconds, and the entire diploma handoff took less than thirty minutes for all thirty kids, even though, for most of them, the principal paused to recount a special moment or running joke.

Even for a small state like Vermont, we know our school system is on the very small side. It’s small enough that, despite ranking second in the state, there’s been a push from above for improved efficiency and lower costs by consolidating with other districts. Our district has strenuously resisted that push, and much of the resistance has focused on the school’s academic achievements. The district has also conducted more than one study to justify its existence financially.

It was Thing2’s commencement that reminded me that, in education, value can’t be determined solely by efficiency, or even scores.

The principal and teacher to student ratio won’t be any different on Saturday when Thing1 is climbing the risers. The high school principal has taught each of the kids, has coached many of them in little league, has been a presence in most of their lives for the last thirteen years. The teachers have been coaches, are parents of their classmates.

The whole ceremony, if history is any judge, will take 30-45 minutes. In those 45 minutes, however, will be packed thirteen years of phone calls and parent-teacher conferences, of field-trips and spur-of-the-moment meetings to talk over a parent’s concern, of newsletters and community service days, of nurses calling to make sure everything’s still alright, of teachers saying ‘he can do better’ because they absolutely believe that their students can. Those 45 minutes will be the result of thirteen years of creating young adults invested in a community that they know has invested in them. They will be the results of a community saw something more important than widgets.

It saw the future.

Negotiations


Since he could crawl, Thing2 has been chasing after Thing1.

Thing1 played in Little League. Thing2 cheered for four seasons straight, mangling his brother’s name at top decibel. Thing1 started playing golf, Thing 2 held the flags. Thing1 wanted to be alone, Thing2 had to be next to him and even on him.

Thing1 was about four when he began begging us for a baby brother. He didn’t want more playdates, and he definitely didn’t want a baby sister. He even accepted that, eleven years ago, Thing2 was the big present that Christmas.

He was very serious about his responsibilities as his big-brother. He read to Thing2 and held his hand on the jungle gyms. He made sure that I didn’t pick any outfits or Halloween costumes that violated the boy code of ‘not-too-cute’.

Seventeen years later, Thing2 is still chasing after, but for the last few years Thing1 has been wanting ‘space’. Often their relationship is like watching a match chasing a long fuse, and the match has been burning hotter as he realizes his big brother is about to put some serious geographic space between them.

This afternoon, after a morning of working together with the Big Guy in the yard, Thing1 grabbed his keys and golf clubs to go to the free course at the park.  Thing2 watched him and retreated to the couch to work on a script. Thing1 noticed his brother sitting in a dark corner on a sunny day, knowing I had to work and that Dad needed to rest his bum knee.

“Get up off the couch,” he ordered. Thing2 started to object, but years of hero worship, like any cult, is hard to fight.

“Why?” he asked instead.

“You’re coming with me,” Thing1 announced. “It’s too nice a day to sit inside.”

The Big Guy and I looked at each other. Thing1 is very serious about his golf time, especially since his hair-trigger colon has kept him off the fairway all spring. The last time the two tried playing together, three-year-old Thing2 had rearranged all the flags on the practice putting green so they ‘lined up’ and Thing1 had sworn he wouldn’t have him as a partner. 

But, as we get the house ready for graduation, Thing2 pitches in with as much vigor as his taller but somehow not-as-much-older older brother before they head out for a fun afternoon together and without parental supervision.  They both seem to understand that something was being renegotiated for the better.