A little over a week ago, I made plans to visit friend in the hospital. It was a well laid plans, but it was not meant to be, and that’s OK.

Knowing my friend was dealing with some big decisions and wanting, most of all, not to intrude on her privacy, I texted her the day before to make sure she’d be up for or even want a visit. She texted back “Anytime.” The response wasn’t out of character for her, but I planned to text again, just in case her status changed.

Last year I was working weekends so that I could do a teaching internship a few days a week. The arrangement kept me locked to my computer most of the time and torpedoed most of my social life and lay waste to creative time. My one bit of girlfriend time came on Saturday mornings when I went to work at a favorite café. My friend would join me for a little brunch, and we would sit and solve the worlds problems for a couple hours while I worked.

It was such a little thing, and yet, for me, it was huge. It kept me (and I hope, her) tethered with the kind of social interaction everyone needs. It was our way of saying “hello” to possibilities.

Our brunches tapered off in the summer –she still worked every other weekends, and I was busy with the kids — but we still texted, always making the attempt to connect.

By the next afternoon, it was clear that her status had deteriorated. Seeing no response to another text, I went about some errands and went home, not wanting to disturb her privacy or quiet. I was sad, knowing it might be the last chance to see this person, but visits are about what the person in the hospital needs, not what the visitor may want.

Another friend is chronicling her story on his blog as he helps her navigate hospice. I know, given her condition, we may have said our goodbyes, and, while I will mourn when she passes away, I am choosing to focus on the ways we said “hello” to each other. I know that you never really say goodbye to people who have made a difference – however briefly- in your life.

This is not a cat or pet blog, but if it were, I’d write that I’ve always thought of dogs as the guardians of their humans and cats as our benevolent dictators. I’m not sure what I’m seeing in Jim-Bob this weekend, but I am seeing a lot of him.

When I wake up, Jim is curled up in the scooter chair right next to my bed. As I fall asleep, Jim is settling himself into the crook in my arm. When I get up for a bathroom run or to roll down the hall for a change of scene, he is behind me and then in front of me and then right next to me all the time.

I’m no cat psychologist, but he seems to be trying to reassure the both of us that everything is all right. Either that or, like any reasonable monarch, he’s making sure the peasants stay strong enough to keep his dish filled and his head scratched.

Last Sunday seemed like my last day of freedom for a while. There was school the rest of the week, and tomorrow, Friday, I’m having surgery on a foot that has been malfunctioning for some years.

Several years ago fractured my foot but, believing it was only sprained because I could walk on it, I did not seek care. Since then it’s been like driving Ford Pinto with the left turn signal on — any little ding caused it to explode. watching to a job that has me on my feet for eight hours a day was the ding that broke the ankle for the last time.

So Sunday, I headed over to Saratoga to my favorite used bookstore to look for some fun additions to my classroom library. I had a little lunch and cleaned out my car. I texted a friend to see if she could see visitors but, knowing she was not well, quickly updated my plans to include making a card for her.

It’s anti-climactic to go into the winter break, knowing staycation will be spent in a motorized scooter. The only projects will be literary and academic items that have been on the back burner for far too long. There will be time to hang out with Thing2. And the more I think of it, the more the enforced downtime seems like a week of freedom.

I think Thing2, a.k.a SuperDude has been training me to be a teacher for his entire life.

I had mapped out my curriculum for my high school English classes for the winter. I’d planned short stories in January, before launching into a literary survey of Black History Month in February, essays in March, and National Poetry Month in April.

It was a bulletproof roadmap. It just wasn’t teenager proof.

Short story is a great way to introduce and review literary devices, as long as you have a killer short story to use for your example. Knowing my students’ love of gothic and horror themes, I started with the Grimm brothers’ version of Snow White. It’s a story almost everyone has read or heard, so I figured we could use our common knowledge of the plot to review things like theme and character.

And first teenage head came to rest on a pair of hands folded on the table on the far end of the room. Twenty minutes to go, and I was losing the crowd just as we were talking about protagonists. As I hobbled over to the table to give my potential sleeper a reference sheet, however, I noticed a Captain America badge on her backpack.

Thing1, but especially Thing2 has dragged me to and cajoled me to sit hrough dozens of viewings in theaters, on Netflix, and on DVD, of every Avengers movie made in the last eight or nine years. I will admit that more than a few of those viewings have been spent snoring or scrolling, but more than a little Avengers’ trivia has flitered into my consciousness.

In mid-hobble, I suddenly asked how many of my students had seen Avengers Infinity War. All hands went up. Had they seen the entire series? Again all hands went up. I stopped at the far table, and my student was now sitting up straight.

“Who would you say is the protagonist in Infinity War?” I asked.  A few brows furrowed, and then answers started resounding.

“Ironman!”

“No, Chris Evans! He was sooo cute!”

“Who is the character with a goal who drives the plot?” I asked.

“Thanos!” The answer was a chorus, and we began talking about plot and story arcs. We were discussing series’ themes by the time the class transition was announced, and I had to usher kids out of the room toward the next class.

As the backpack with the Captain America badge disappeared through the door, I mulled over SuperDude’s role in the success of the morning. Protagonist or antagonist, he had saved the day.

Katie the Wonder Dog and Princess Jane may come from different litters and different species, but they are sisters in almost every way.

When Katie goes out to play, Jane usually trails close behind. If I poke my head out at night to call the cats in, Jane will bide her time (Jim come right in to claim his spaces on the humans) until her big furry sister signals that she, too, might want to go in and lie front of the wood-stove.

Most nights the three of them will camp out in my office. Jim sleeps on my arms on my desk or paper recycling basket. Jane, however, often ends up on the dog bed, and I am never sure if her choice is an act of sisterly affection for the spaces where Katie has been or a little good-natured sisterly competition for the things she thinks they should both have.

I don’t know about the rest of you with sisters, but  this question’s a tossup for me.

For the last year or two I’ve returned to the drawings for what should already have been my first children’s book and blamed its delayed completion on my dissatisfaction with them. The other night as I walked into Thing2’s still-messy room that inspired the project in the first place, however, I realized my frustration wasn’t with the drawings or even with the eternally messy room. The problem with the story was, well, the story.

Thing2 recently renovated his room. He bargained its cleaning in exchange for being able to swap out his bunkbeds for a “real bed“ and a coat of paint. He used money from odd jobs to add LED light strips near his computer, turning his room into his “studio“.

The other night as I was bringing in his laundry, I realized that the room, somehow still a mess despite our bargain, is actually a temple to his creativity. His guitars are in one end of the room. My old keyboard is a table, and, while he does a fair amount of gaming, his computer is set up and used for making and editing video montages and digital music.

And it hit me. I’m not living with a slob. I’m living with an artist.

One of the longest-running ‘jokes’ of my marriage is that I, at 5’3”, can turn a 6’6” bear of a husband into a trembling bowl of pudding by merely whispering the magic words, “I have an idea.” He knows that those words can be the beginning of a new painting or post, or they can be a red-flag warning of a manic house- and life-renovating binge that could spin out of control before, half-completed, it sputters out as a room half-painted and remade or a previous, perfectly fine renovation removed to make way for the new idea. Those words, given life, have the power to turn large portions of our house into Thing2’s room, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time.

I write. I paint. Often, even though neither is my vocation, I like to consider myself an artist. Despite our inside joke and my frequent guilt about the chaos caused by my ideas, I am usually hopeful that my husband mostly enjoys living with one.

But chaos’s ugly offspring is doubt, and that doubt was playing out on the pages of the story book. The child in my story turns his room into chaos. His mother tolerates it, cleaning up after him, until she can tolerate it no more. When her best effort’s to get him to “Fix“ the space result in a bigger mess, she surrenders, rather than celebrates what the mess is.

I’m still going to police that room and my ideas. It’s one thing to fill a room in a house with sketchbooks and scraps of paper from DIY movie props, after all. It’s quite another to try to feng shui empty Doritos bags into something resembling an ambience. But, thinking about Thing2’s creativity, I realize I need to go back to my storyboard and think about how to celebrate the messy spaces and lives of budding creators of all ages.