Epinephrine

On a scale of one – ten, rate your level of pain?”
“Fifteen,” she replied.
The nurse made a note on her clip board. “I’ll see what I can do.”
A young man clad in green scrubs entered as the nurse was leaving.
“I’m Trent McKay. I’ll be performing the surgery.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mary forced a weak smile in reply.
“Right now, I am planning to tack you on at the end of day, which should be around 9:00.” He paused, “It could be later. We’ve been running behind all day. Can you tell me how this happened?”
She gave him the short version; he didn’t need - nor she suspected - had the temperament for the long one.  “I fell off the bulkhead and landed on my hip.” As soon as she said it she regretted it as the look that passed over his face told her what he was thinking. Middle aged female, fragile bones, foolish for sure; maybe feeble minded!
“Do you think you had a stroke?” This came out as more of statement than a question.
“I am quite sure I didn’t!” she emphatically replied, fixing him with the look that had unnerved her high school students years ago.
Dr. McKay’s pager went off; he looked at it, waved and left. “We’ll talk about this some more - later.”
The nurse returned with the morphine and as it began to work its way through her system, Mary closed her eyes reflected on the events leading up to this moment.


After weeks of unrelenting rain, January 13th had dawned dry and sunny.  To celebrate their good fortune, weather-wise, she and Barley, a notquitetwo–year-old golden retriever set off for the beach, he with an acid green canvas lunker in his mouth and Mary with a smile on hers. Heavy rains and high winds the winter before had taken out the last 35 feet of stairs which had been repaired and replaced with a series of new stairs and switchbacks. They paused when they reached the bulkhead and realized that the final four feet of stairs that would put them on the beach was missing.  Clearly, this was more of a problem for Mary than for Barley, who flew off the bulkhead, dropped the lunker, and then turned and looked at her expectantly – let’s get this show on the road! At one time Mary might well have followed suit but a torn anterior cruciate ligament and ragged meniscus that led to a total knee replacement a few months previously had made her more cautious. As a consequence, a more circumspect approach was called for. She knelt at the edge of the log bulkhead with her back to the water; intent on down climbing, she gingerly extended her left leg, seeking a foothold on the logs below. She shifted her weight over her left leg, but when the foothold failed her, she slipped backward, landing with all her weight on her left hip. The sand at the moment of contact felt more like cement than sugar. A flash of light behind her eyes accompanied by sharp pain and a momentary loss of consciousness suggested the possibility of a serious injury. Her first thought was a concussion but given the point of impact that seemed unlikely.

Regrettably, this beach-induced insight that something serious had happened was fleeting. Once she got back in the house, she felt euphoric and downright smug about her achievement, so that she carried on as if nothing had happened. She got out the broom, swept the floor and built a fire to take off the chill. Even though the day was sunny, it was still January with high temperatures cresting in the 40’s. Besides, she felt clammy. When she discovered that she was out of Advil she called her neighbor Pam. There might be some upstairs but at the moment tackling yet another flight of stairs didn’t appeal to her. Pam arrived, located the Advil, helped onto the sofa and promised to check back with her in an hour or so.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine. Ibuprofen is the wonder drug!” she assured her. For the moment, ‘denial’ was clearly in the ascendancy, though, in a matter of hours, it would crash to earth.


Around 11:00 P.M. a tired looking Dr. McKay returned to her room “We can operate now,” he glanced up at her,”but I’d rather wait until tomorrow.”

“That’s fine with me,” she replied, now that the morphine was coursing through her system, there didn’t seem to be any rush. By the time her hospital stay was over she would arrive at a heightened appreciation of pain. Medication might dull the pain but didn’t obliterate it; she realized, however, that she had the power to control it to a certain extent; to move it off center stage to the wings, as if it were a vase of cabbage roses blocking the view of her dining companion. It remained there in her peripheral vision but no longer front and center.

Dr. McKay continued, “Let me give you an idea of what you can expect following the surgery.” Nothing that had happened to her so far was as scary as what followed.
“Expect to spend four to six days in the hospital following the surgery and then another six or seven days at a rehab center.”
“Real-ly?” she replied, her voice dropping on the second syllable.
“Of course, if things go well, those times might shorten up a bit. But that’s the schedule I prefer and the one you should plan on.” He rose, smiled tiredly, “I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”
We’ll see about that! She congratulated herself on keeping her mouth shut. Going forward there would be ample time to straighten him out. She smiled to herself, and then lay back against the pillows of her hospital bed.



In her living room, she had adjusted the sofa pillow as she took in the view of the Olympic Mountains and the Sound that never failed to soothe her; today was no exception.  The wind had picked up so the water was rougher, but still it looked much the same as it had an hour ago. How long ago was it that I went to the beach? She had no concept of time anymore. More than an hour, she concluded. Maybe two?

She remembered that she and Janey were meeting at Casa Mia for dinner tonight and then going to the library to hear Garth Stein talk about his book they both had loved, The Art of Racing in the Rain. She and Janey were ‘dog people’ and had laughed and cried in the same places in the book.
She was annoyed that she hadn’t asked Pam to bring a phone into the living room. As it was, she would have to get herself to the kitchen in order to make a call. She was beginning to feel antsy anyway; she couldn’t stay on the sofa all day!  She tried to sit up and fell back against the cushions. Ow!  A violent pain took her breath away and left her feeling faint. It was hard to sit up without bending at the waist but she would have to find a way. After a few more painful false starts, she managed to get upright by planting her right foot firmly on the floor and pushing off with her right hand. A graceless gymnastic vault – but it worked.  She made it to the phone and called Janey.

“Oh hi Mary, what time should we meet tonight?”
Mary paused. “Um - I hate to do this but I don’t think I can make it.  I had a little tumble on the beach this morning . . .”
“Oh dear,” Janey broke in, “did you hurt yourself?”
“That remains to be seen. I slipped off the bulkhead and landed with all my weight on my left hip.” She paused, and then added. “It feels like a bad sprain.”
Janey chuckled. “Mary, you know you can’t sprain your fanny!”
“I know; it feels like it though.”
“You need to go to the hospital.” Janey said matter-of-factly. Mary was beginning to agree with her but by now was pretty sure she couldn’t drive herself. Janey interrupted her thoughts.
“You don’t sound like yourself. I’m coming out and can drive you there. ”



After a hard landing, she didn’t feel much like herself. She began to straighten herself out of the crumpled position she had landed in. In a rush, everything that she needed to do occurred to her. For starters, she couldn’t continue to lie on the beach much longer. The tide was coming in fast and she had to get a move on. She wiggled her fingers and toes; relieved that everything seemed to be in working order, maybe I just have a bad bruise - a hematoma - her doctor daughter would have called it. She took a deep breath, exhaled as she rolled over, and then pushed herself up on all fours.  About that time, Barley pressed the lunker, wet and coated with sand into her face.

Unlike Lassie, Barley didn’t have rescue on his mind. Retrieving was in his DNA and she had a necessary role to play. From the crouched position she was able to lob the lunker a short distance into the water distracting Barley long enough to crawl to the bulkhead and pull herself up. She leaned against it until the dizziness went away. In between lunker launchings, she calculated her next move which, all things considered, was the most challenging. She had to get back up on the bulkhead in order to access the stairs to get back to the house. Climbing back up the slick logs was obviously not an option.

On the other side of the boathouse there was a jumble of rocks and logs that had ridden in on a high tide and stayed there. They formed a rough ladder that she managed to scramble up. With that task behind her, she steeled herself for the hardest part - walking along the eight inch concrete wall in front of the boathouse.  Several seasons worth of high tides had long since washed the sand away between the concrete wall and the building, making the crossing treacherous, even in the best of circumstances. She paused and let Barley go ahead of her – she was feeling unstable enough and didn’t need a wet impatient dog pushing her from behind.

She braced herself with her hands against the weathered double doors and cautiously side stepped the distance that was no more than fifteen feet but seemed like half a mile. She made it and buoyed by her successful crossing, she began the ascent of the final 85 feet with marked dispatch. She thought it would be harder than it actually was and before she knew it she ‘summitted’. Along the way, she employed whatever technique seemed to work - in some places, she could pull herself along, hand over hand using the railing. Where the stairs were the steepest, she crawled on all fours, crab-like. It wasn’t until afterwards when people would ask her how she did it that appreciated the difficulty.

“I didn’t have any options – and of course, I was in shock,” became her stock reply.

Later, after she was long gone from the hospital, she learned that medically speaking ‘shock’ was not the correct term. It was her hypothalamus that saved her by signaling the pituitary, which signaled the adrenals to send out the advance party in the ‘fight or flight’ reaction, that motley crew of hormones that came into their own at a more primitive time and fortunately can still be called into service to suppress pain and boost energy – at least temporarily.


Mary decided to make tea before Janey arrived. The electric kettle was in the kitchen, one short step up from where she now stood and she found she couldn’t manage it.  In hindsight, it is quite likely that the prospect of facing the rest of the day without tea is what finally brought her to her senses.

“I don’t think I can get into your car Janey,” Mary told her, as she hung over the barstool, to take the weight off her hips. Comfortable positions were becoming scarce. 
“I’ll call 911. What do you think?” Mary didn’t say anything while Janey picked up the phone and placed the call.
Then Mary said, “I need to call Kate and leave a message that I won’t be home this afternoon.”  Kate had promised a chat that afternoon when she got home from work. Kate was a third year anesthesiology resident and the weekly phone call that Mary unapologetically lived for required considerable advance planning.
She punched in the number and spoke to their answering machine, advising Kate and her husband that she had ‘taken a spill’ at the beach that day and was popping over to the hospital to have it checked out.
“Don’t worry; I’m sure it’s nothing serious.  I’ll call when I get back home this afternoon and let you know what I find out.” Before she could sign off, she heard the wail of the emergency vehicle careening around the corner. Most likely their answering machine heard it as well.
“Oh shit!” she said and hung up the phone.

Janey followed the emergency vehicle to the hospital and sat with her in the ER. There was a shortage of gurneys in the emergency room but no shortage of emergencies, so Mary was offered a wheel chair instead. She knew she couldn’t sit in it but with her legs stretched out in front of her and her back where her bottom ordinarily would be, she was reasonably comfortable.

I have been moving around like a crab all day, she thought to herself as she rolled into the cubicle marked ‘admissions’ where the woman asked for her medical insurance card. After that she crab-walked her way to an examining room. X-rays followed. During the interval, she thought about calling her daughter but was told that cell phones didn’t work in that part of the hospital. Just as well, she thought as she still didn’t have much to report.

The young ER doctor who introduced himself to her in the examination room returned - ashen after seeing the x-rays - and informed her that the ball of her femur had broken off, and was floating around in her hip. She imagined a golf ball, bouncing back and forth between her femur and her pelvis. She winced at the image.

“You’re probably experiencing significant pain,” he volunteered, nodding as he did so.

“Yes   I   am.” She spoke deliberately but she tried not to sound cranky. After all, none of this was his fault. “Please call my daughter and explain this to her. You speak the same language.” She handed him her cell phone. By now, even if reception was possible, she didn’t want to make the call. He took the phone and left the room.


She left the examining room herself shortly after that and was taken to the sixth floor of the hospital, the orthopedic wing she remembered from last year’s knee replacement. Sometime, after the doctor’s first visit and the nurse’s second that introduced morphine to her system, Kate called.

“I’m flying out tomorrow morning and should be there by early afternoon.”
“Oh honey, you don’t need to come. I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure you will be mom, but I am coming anyway. Where’s dad?” she added.
“He flew to Texas a few days ago, in order to go to Padre Island and Port Aransas.”
“What’s the attraction?” Kate asked.
“Spoonbills and whooping cranes. They winter there, I guess. By now, he ought to be in Belize.” When Mary and Barley returned from the beach that morning, there was a message from Fred calling from the Dallas – Fort Worth airport, en route to Belize.
“Does he know you are in the hospital?”
“Gosh no – and I really don’t want him to!” Mary paused; actually, she didn’t know if there was a way to call him. Mary and Fred were appalling casual about that kind of information, much to their friends’ and family’s frustration.
“I really don’t want dad to know about this. Promise me you won’t tell him.” It was Kate’s turn to pause.
“Okay,” she finally said. “I won’t.” They chatted a bit longer and then rung off with “see you tomorrow.”

As it turned out, she wasn’t taken into surgery until close to seven the next evening so Kate was able to be with her in the pre-op room. “I’m sorry you felt had to come," Mary said as she held her daughter’s slender hand, “but I am glad you’re here.” Mary looked over; Kate’s eyes were brimming with tears.
“Oh honey, don’t worry about mom. You know how tough I am. Everything is going to be fine.” Even while she said it she realized that her daughter’s perspective would be altered by their relationship as well as her work. Kate bit her lip and nodded but the tears still spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, sniffed and then laughed at herself.
The nurse arrived to take Mary into the surgery room. Kate kissed her cheek and followed the nurse’s directions to the waiting room.

The procedure went smoothly and by the time Mary was brought back to her room Kate was there waiting for her with a smile on her face.
“How do you feel?” she asked her mother.
“Great. I feel great!”Mary waved her hand to emphasize her point.
Kate confirmed that they had given her mother a regional block in addition to the general anesthetic. “You should be pretty comfortable for the next twelve hours, maybe longer if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t expect my luck to run out anytime soon.”
“Dad called a little while ago from the airport. He should be here in half an hour or so.”
Mary’s eyes took on that hard look that signaled her displeasure.
“You promised you wouldn’t call him!”
“I didn’t. Somebody else did.” Kate looked away and then back at her mother. "I told them to."
“He’s going to be mad that I ruined his dive trip.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Not as mad as he’d be if he hadn’t been told!”


Three days later she was discharged from the hospital, not to a rehab facility but to home. Fred and Kate had put an extra mattress on the Murphy bed in the computer room so that she could get in and out of bed without lowering her hip below her knees. Kate worked up a spread sheet for ‘Mary Care’ assigning friends to drive her to physical therapy and doctor appointments until she could drive herself.

In the days and weeks that followed, Mary retold the story many times, shamelessly basking in the wonderment of her audience. “Necessity fueled by adrenalin makes heroes of us all!” she often concluded, pleased with that particular turn of phrase. Kate informed her that ‘epinephrine’ was another word for adrenalin. Epinephrine – epinephrine.  She liked the sound of it, the way it rolled off her tongue. 

Over time, she came to realize something about the heroes of the story as well as the extent of her indebtedness. Of course there were the medical heroes –not just the surgeon and the folks at the hospital, but the surgical pioneers who had figured out how to do this procedure in the first place. If this had happened thirty years ago, I’d never walk again! she reminded herself.

Most of her heroes, however, were closer to home; they were the friends and family members who looked out for her; who ignored her when she told them to stay away.

They were her girlfriends who met Kate in the surgery waiting room, took her to dinner then stayed with her, distracting her with laughter and stories until Dr. McKay arrived to tell her that her mother was out of surgery. Then the friends went home; they hadn’t come to see Mary - they had come to be with Kate.

“How did they know I was even in the hospital?” Mary asked her when Kate told her about it.
“Oh mom, this is Olympia. Everybody knows!”

Maureen and Don were special heroes; they sat with Mary in her room, and fixed her tea or found saltines for her if she asked for them. But mainly, they just sat quietly, bringing serenity in with them, like a cashmere throw over her shoulders.

Fred was  a hero as well,  for when she apologized for ruining his dive trip, he smiled and shrugged. “I didn’t miss much. The storm had stirred up the water so the visibility would have been lousy.”

Epinephrine may have made Mary look like a hero, at least momentarily; but it was the unfailing loyalty of her noble family and friends that made her feel like one.

Dust Mites

"Couldn’t you hire someone to do this?”Fred was standing in the bedroom doorway watching his wife rip up the carpet. She had that determined look that was all too familiar to him.

“Nope. I tried. Everyone I talked to either said they were too busy or it sounded like too much work.”

Last night, he had helped her dismantle the bed and move the dresser and bed out of the guest room so she could start taking out the carpet first thing this morning.

 “What’s wrong with the carpet anyway?” She gave him an incredulous look, by way of reply.

“I just wondered. It still looks pretty good to me.”

“It’s old,” she said as she ran an Exacto knife along a seam. “And dirty.”

“Not that old, is it?”

“Twenty-six years,” she paused, “and four dogs.” She pointed to a greenish stain in the tan carpet that faded to yellow in the center.  Looking up at him she said. “That’s 182 dog years in case you are wondering. Besides, this carpet is infested with dust mites!”

He looked more closely at the carpet.  “Dust mites?”

“Oh, you can’t see ‘em but, trust me, they’re there.” She sat back on her heels. “They’re gross looking. I bet you’ve seen pictures of them in the Sunday supplement. They look like lobsters. ” She rocked forward and went back to work.

 “Oh, and they’re really bad for anyone with allergies.” That pointed remark was intended for him; he had allergies and she didn’t.

So throughout the weekend, the dust mite driven project continued apace until the three upstairs bedrooms had been stripped of the carpet, along with the pad and the wooden strips filled with sharp staples. Fred made three trips to the land fill and each time he returned to find another pile of carpet or padding on the ground waiting to be hauled off.

On Saturday evening he said. “You work harder than any woman I know!” It was true and he meant it as a compliment but he immediately regretted saying it.

“Is that so?” Her eyes narrowed as she fixed him with a penetrating look. “Well just name me one man you know who would take this on.”

She was right and that was part of the problem. Actually, it was the problem - with the project specifically and with his wife in general. Once she made up her mind there was no dissuading her. If he brought up the matter of expense, he knew she would dismiss it by informing him that one’s children and one’s home were the best investments you could make. Frankly, though he’d never admit it to her, he wasn’t really sure he agreed; still he knew it would be churlish to suggest that a nice vacation and some well chosen toys should be right up there.

Mary was as strong as she was fearless – qualities that he couldn’t help but admire. It was just that sometimes he wished he could admire these qualities at more of a distance - say in somebody else’s wife. Besides, all her work made him feel guilty. He really didn’t like that.

On Sunday, after the second run to the landfill, he stopped by the marina to commiserate with his friends. It was Labor Day weekend, warm and sunny – perfect conditions for fishing or sailing or just hanging out.

“Where’s Mary?” someone asked. “Is she still taking out carpet?”

“Yah. When I left, she had started on the master bedroom.”

“You camping out tonight, Fred?” Everyone laughed. His wife’s affinity for projects was the stuff of local legend. Everyone in the neighborhood knew of the time the contractor came out to confer with her on repairing the flat roof over the family room and they ended up with a major remodel.

“Well,” Mary later explained, “when he told me he wouldn’t guarantee his work on a flat roof it only made sense to go up.” So up they went with a new bedroom over the family room that now was part of a fully renovated kitchen, topped off with a new roof that matched the pitch on the other half of the house.  

By Monday afternoon all vestiges of the carpet were gone, exposing the plywood subfloor. On Tuesday, they both went back to work, and the following weekend Fred packed up his truck and headed down to Death Valley on what Mary referred to as his ‘fall migration.’  When he returned ten days later, cork flooring that mimicked burled maple had been installed. The new floor felt cold when he padded into the bathroom in the morning in his bare feet.

“This isn’t a criticism, but I just wondered why we didn’t just put down new carpet?”

“Dust mites. Cork is hypo-allergenic and it will last forever.” She brought him a cup of coffee, then enlightened him further. “You know, there are wineries in Italy and France where the cork floors have been down over a hundred years.”

“Well, I don’t expect to be here another hundred years but in the meantime, I am going to have cold feet in the mornings.”

“Wear your slippers.”

Fred sighed and returned to the Sudoku. In most respects he knew they were compatible. Everything would be great if it weren’t for her penchant for projects.  As it was, he could never fully relax, knowing that just when it seemed that there was nothing left for her to tamper with, he would come home and be met by workers. Several times he had tried to talk to her about it.

“I really like change,” she always told him. “I think it’s fun and exciting.” When he pressed her on this, she replied. “Of course, I don’t want to make major changes – don’t want a new house, don’t want to switch you out. But when it comes to the “little stuff “– well, it seems as if there is always some room for improvement.”

Naturally, he was relieved that she didn’t have him on her ‘punch list.’ Of course, he didn’t want to move or get remarried either, though if he had to choose, marriage would be preferable, provided he could stay put! He admitted he didn’t like change. He couldn’t think of anyone, except Mary, who did. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’ carried the day for him.

Once these projects were over with and the workers had gone home, he always came around. Further, he made a point of telling her how much he liked the end results.  But getting there was so painful – the mess, the delays, the hammering and digging that often was still going on when he got home from work. That was by far the worst part. It threw his routine off and made him feel guilty to boot, like he should grab a hammer and join them when what he wanted to do was put on his shorts, crack a beer and sit in the front yard and read Sports Illustrated.

Besides, he took issue with her idea of what constituted ‘the little stuff.’ Surely the new roof/remodel couldn’t be classified as ‘little stuff’ nor could the front yard renovation that followed the Nisqually Earthquake. ‘Sod to Slate’ he had dubbed the undertaking. The quake left cracks in the basement retaining wall which seemingly could only be repaired by digging up a large part of the front yard.

“Are you sure?” she frowned as she looked at the flower bed whose days were evidently numbered. “What a pain,” as she dug up the lilies and peonies and put them in pots until they could be replanted.

One evening before the anticipated digging had begun, she came out to where he sat  reading.  “You know I’ve been thinking . . .”she began.  At that, an alarm went off and Fred closed his eyes, as if that might block out her voice. Pretending not to hear her was a ruse he’d employed in the past with limited success.  When making her case, Mary never hesitated to repeat herself if she suspected she didn’t have his undivided attention.

“I’ve been thinking that while we are at it, we might as well take out all of the grass.”

“So, what would we have in place of grass? Asphalt? A deck?” She ignored his attempted joke with the asphalt and went right on to the deck.

“Well, I considered a deck but I don’t think it would look right. Too modern looking for this old house. Besides, decks get slicker than snot when wet and we both know it’s wet a lot of the time.”  Well, that’s a relief, he thought to himself.

“I’m thinking about putting down flagstones.”

With that, she set a couple of books in front of him with pictures of patios and terraces created with large flat stones. They looked heavy and were referred to as “hardscape” he learned as she turned the pages, showing him more designs. “Hmm. That’s interesting,” he said wishing he could just get back to SI and the NBA.

The contractor and his crew showed up a few days later to tackle the wall repair. That night Fred got home from work first and was informed that it wouldn’t be necessary to dig up the front yard after all. Once the men got into it, they discovered they could manage the repair working from the inside. Wow! For once, a reprieve. He could hardly believe it.  No real mess involved and they promised to be in and out in a couple of days.

“That’s great!” Mary said when Fred gave her the good news. He could hardly believe his ears. At last, a project she would back away from.

“But the grass is history. I’ve just talked to Mark Osborn and we’ve got a plan. He’s never done flagstones before – just pavers, but is willing to give it a try. I know it will look great.”

As an afterthought she added. “It will be a lot of work to install the slate but once it’s in place, it will be really low maintenance. You’ll see.  No more mowing.”

“It only takes Wes ten minutes to mow the grass now.”

“Wes is getting too old to mow.”

“Surely we could find somebody younger then,” he said to her back as she went into the kitchen.  But by then it was too late and he knew it; he was just pissing into the wind.

And so the sod came out, the yard was scraped and leveled, a drain system installed and then gravel mixed with sand was smoothed across the surface. Finally, the slabs of Montana Blue slate were put in place. For the rest of the summer Mary spent most every evening and weekend, kneeling on the stones planting moss, thyme, and Corsican mint between the cracks as well as other plants whose names he promptly forgot.

“It’s given me a new appreciation of the term ‘stoop labor’,” she told him one evening at the end of the summer when the planting was complete. By this time, new flower beds had emerged around the perimeter of the slate patio and colorful ceramic pots were placed strategically along the fence and by the front porch.

“It looks great, honey,” he said as he took her hand while they surveyed the front yard. “But you have to admit it took a helluva long time and a lot of work to get here.”

“So did the Sistine Chapel.”

And she was right - it was more practical than grass, where the legs of the lawn chair always sunk in and the picnic table cut deep ruts. But when it came to her claim of low maintenance, she was off the mark. The first year the slate had to be watered regularly to insure that everything took off. From then on it required annual power washing and whenever they threw a party, it had to be ‘vacuumed’ with the blower set on reverse.  

A couple of weeks ago, she picked him up and they drove out to the mall. “Tell me again why we’re here?” he asked as she led him past the sofas and entertainment centers  to the mattress section at Macy’s.

“We’re getting a new mattress.”

 “What’s wrong with the one we have?”

“It’s old,” she replied as they turned the corner and were met by a saleswoman who introduced herself as Elizabeth.

“So? Not that old. It was an expensive mattress, I seem to recall.”

Elizabeth smiled at the two of them. Most likely she had heard this conversation before. “You really should replace your mattress every twelve to fifteen years.”

“Our mattress can’t be that old. Is it?” He looked first at Elizabeth and then at Mary.

“Twice that,” Mary informed him as she kicked off her shoes and stretched out on one of the mattresses. “It is old and saggy and probably full of dust mites!” 

A few days later, the new mattress arrived. They both had trouble sleeping that night though neither was sure if they could blame it on the new mattress. It was comfortable enough – it just felt different. As he lay there, getting drowsy, he thought about the dust mites and concluded that they were a lot like his wife’s projects- invisible and stealthy, in equal parts. Just because he couldn’t see them, didn’t mean they weren’t there, poised and ready for attack.  On that uncomfortable thought, he rolled over, resigned himself to the inevitable and went to sleep.

Long Hair Like Abby

It’s not fair!” she said as she climbed into the back seat and pulled the door shut a little harder than necessary.

“Pardon me?” her mother said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror as they drove out of the school parking lot.

Fairness was something Katie understood, even if she was only seven. Fairness was when a grownup said that if you did something or quit doing something then something good would happen. Unfairness was when you did the something you were supposed to do and the grownup forgot all about it.

Just yesterday her mother had told her that she couldn’t have long hair until she stopped dawdling in the morning. So, this morning she got right up, dressed and came downstairs before anyone even knew she was awake. She pulled on her socks and her cords and her turtle neck, which she had to take off and put back on again because the first time she got it on backwards.

But now they were on their way to see Dee to get a haircut!

“Mom, why are we going to Dee’s?”

“It’s time for a haircut. Your bangs are too long for one thing. Remember last week when you went swimming? You told me that the reason you lost every race to Michael was because your hair was in your eyes.”

“I know.” Katie wished she’d never told her mother that, but she was mad about losing.

“I know I said that, last week, but, yesterday you said if I quit dawdling in the morning I could grow my hair out . . .  and this morning I didn’t dawdle. I got up and got dressed and came downstairs right away.” She paused, then wrinkling her forehead and looking at her mother in the mirror she continued. “Remember? You said you were proud of me.”

“I was proud of you.” Her mother smiled at her in the mirror. “’One swallow does not a summer make,’ my dear. Besides, I made this appointment weeks ago.”

Katie stared at the back of her mother’s head. Some of the things her mother said didn’t make sense. “I am not talking about birds. I am talking about having long hair. Like Abby.”

Abby and her cousin Shannon both had long hair.  Sometimes they wore it in a pony tail, and sometimes their mothers braided it. And sometimes it was just parted in the middle. That’s the way Katie liked it the best because when they bent their heads over a worksheet or spelling paper, it fell down on either side and hid their faces.

Katie did have another friend with short hair: Jocelyn. She and Jocelyn often talked about growing their hair out.

 “Jocelyn says she’s going to grow her hair out so long that it comes down to her feet.” Katie reported to her mom, who rolled her eyes. “That’ll be the day.”

“I just want my hair to be long enough so that when I swing my head from side to side, it swishes back and forth.”

The haircut proceeded as planned. After Dee cut her hair, Katie swung her head from side to side and back and forth and nothing happened. Her hair just stayed put. 

“It looks nice honey” said her mom. Katie gave her a wary look.

They got back into the car and drove to the swimming pool. Katie’s mother just didn’t like long hair. Every morning while she was growing up she had had to sit on a stool while her own mother braided her hair. She told her it was braided so tight that it hurt but she couldn’t move or it would mess up the braids. The first time she went to scout camp, her counselor couldn’t braid, so by the end of the week, her hair was a snarled mess and she didn’t get to go back to camp for a long time. Finally, when she was twelve, she was allowed to get her hair cut. Now it seemed like Katie would have to wait until she was twelve before she could have long hair. Twelve, Katie thought. She didn’t even know anybody who was twelve. The oldest kid in her school was only eleven.

When they got to the swimming pool, Michael was waiting for her. “Wanna race?” he asked. Michael always wanted to race and last week he won every time. This time, her hair didn’t get in her eyes and she didn’t have to stop even once. She won two of the races, Michael won one. 

“I got there first!” Michael insisted after the fourth race, but his mother called it a tie.  “How come you were so fast today?” Michael asked her as they left the pool.

The next day when she got to school, Jocelyn and Shannon were talking to a new girl – with short hair. Katie put her book bag in her cubby and ran right over. The new girl turned to Katie and smiled.

“Abby, Abby, what happened to your hair?”

“I got the end of one of my braids caught in my parka zipper so I cut it off to get it out. Then I cut the other one so they would be even. When my mom saw what I had done, she took me to the beauty college. I told the girl that I wanted it real short like yours so I could go swimming!”

Abby ran her hand through her short brown hair, and then swung her head from side to side, and her hair didn’t move. Katie was stunned; then she smiled and did the same.

Epiphany

In the abstract, the “ah ha” moments in one’s life arrive with dramatic fanfare, lights flashing and Beethoven’s Fifth playing in the background. Yet, if my own experience is in any way typical, nothing could be further from the truth. Unannounced, they slip stealthily into the room through a door inadvertently left ajar.

The first of these realizations that I recall with any clarity occurred when I was twenty-two; legally an adult, just not a practicing one. I have always been a decisive person and at that time in my life, if ever I decided to do something, “wild horses,” could not avert me from the course. Some might have considered me stubborn, but I prefer to think of myself as determined. In any case, once uttered, my decisions were edicts, etched in stone. And, since I rarely had a thought that I didn’t express, the stonecutters were kept preternaturally busy.

It was the summer before I got married and instead of my usual job as a camp counselor, I was engaged in Summer Theatre at the University of Idaho. This weekend, I had come home to confer with my mother on various matters wedding related and to pick up the invitations. At some point during the course of the weekend, I had announced my intention to return on Sunday night. We had finished eating and my parents were settling in for the evening.

“Are you sure you have to go back tonight? Why not get up early and drive back in the morning, after you’re rested?” Dad stood in the kitchen doorway on his way to bed. He would be out of the house early the next day, in order to ensure that all the cattle, sheep, and swine that had come into the stockyards over the weekend were in the proper holding pens in preparation for the weekly auction.

“I’ll wake you up when I leave in the morning and you can be to Moscow by 8:00.” It was a reasonable suggestion and he waited for my response with his head cocked to one side, a gesture I knew well.

“No dad. I gotta go back - now.” I answered without making eye contact. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t exactly the truth either. I didn’t have a rehearsal until 3:00 the next afternoon, but I was antsy and just needed to move. “I’ll call when I get there if you want. Don’t worry.” This last I tossed off as I zipped out the door, clutching my purse and a bag of clean laundry, careful not to let the screen door slam behind me.

“Don’t drive too fast.” Mom called after me from the living room where she sat in her chair reading.

It was still light when I drove out our long drive way, apple trees bearing fruit lining one side and roses and peonies with spent blossoms on the other. The distance ahead of me was about ninety miles, a drive that in summer is neither difficult nor dangerous. The route was a familiar one, as most of my mother’s extended family, both living and dead, could be found either farming or buried somewhere in the Palouse.

At the first intersection, I turned left onto Sullivan, drove past my old high school, and soon the primarily residential areas were replaced by fenced fields, some of them full of corn and cantaloupe others with alfalfa. There was one large dairy farm along the route, flanked by pastures with a few head of cattle and horses still grazing lazily. In a few years, this pastoral landscape would be converted to housing developments, some of them designed by guys I had gone to high school with. But in the summer of 1965, it looked much the way it always had when my brother and I rode our horses out to Saltine Flats or drove my Uncle Alfred’s green Chevrolet out to cut down a Christmas tree and collect pine boughs to make swag for the front door.

At 32nd I turned west and drove another couple of miles until the road intersected with Highway 27, which I would stay on until I got to Rockford, where I would cross into Idaho and eventually turn south on to highway 95 following it all the way to Moscow. On this occasion, I didn’t get that far; I didn’t even get to Rockford, for by the time I reached Mica, about five miles south on highway 27, I turned around and started back. In the twenty minutes I’d spent behind the wheel, I had calmed down enough to realize that I really was tired and the drive ahead of me, which would be sunny and pleasant in the morning promised to be dark and lonely tonight. And so I turned around and drove back home.

“I’m back.” I called as I walked through the kitchen and into the living room.

Mom looked up from her book and held her glass out to me. “Top this up and fix yourself one and come sit with me.”

I took the glass from her hand, and then stopped by their bedroom door on my way to the kitchen, listening to see if my dad was asleep.

“Hi Honey.” He said clearing his throat.

“Sorry if I woke you up.”

“I saw the car lights as you drove in. I wasn’t asleep yet anyway.” He paused. “I’ll wake you in the morning.”

“Thanks dad. Good night. See you then.”

I went into the kitchen and poured a little Johnny Walker into a tumbler then added ice, water and more Scotch into mother’s glass then returned to the living room. I handed mom her drink, then sat down across from her in dad’s chair.

“Thanks.” She smiled and looked at me for a moment. “I’m glad you came back.” Then returned to her book.

“Me too.” I pushed back in the chair so the foot rest came up and closed my eyes.


I wish I could report that I never again felt compelled to blindly follow some rule or convention, mine or someone else’s. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case. Nonetheless, it has been instructive, and occasionally it saves me from barreling down a path I have set out to take for no other reason than the preconception that it is what has to be done.

For instance, several years later the memory surfaced when my daughter and I were in a department store. I don’t recall the mission we were on, though it is safe to assume that it was something specific as I rarely undertake shopping unless I have to. Having paid for my purchases, I turned to see Katie, who was three at the time, holding a baby doll. I watched her for a moment, as she cradled the doll in her arms. She must have sensed me looking at her for she looked up, smiling sweetly.

I knelt down to eye level. “That’s a nice little baby, isn’t it?”

“Can we buy it?” I shook my head.

“No honey, we can’t. Now put it back.”

“But why?” She asked as she gently returned it to its display stroller.

Oh honey!, I thought to myself, if only you knew! Because, of course I knew - knew if you ever gave in, even once, when a child asked for something, it would never end. That a ‘given into child’ would morph into a manipulative, spoiled teenager, destined to go straight into juvenile detention. Worse, all of the havoc wrecked along the way would be traced back to the mother who took the line of least resistance and caved to the demands of the child. I was already skating on thin ice as an older mother of an only child. This was one of the principles of parenting that was most certainly engraved in my library of stone tablets.

All this I said to myself as we bustled out of the store into the parking lot. Once at the car, Katie waited by the backseat door while I put the packages into the trunk of my red Dasher. Maybe I would get the doll for her for Christmas or her next birthday. I reasoned. After all, it was exactly the kind of doll that I wanted her to have. A baby doll, without a lot of bells and whistles. The eyes opened and shut but other than that, it was just a sweet little doll, perfect for a three year old. Still – I knew the rules. Everyone did.

When I opened the car door to help her into her car seat, I could see she was crying; silently, holding her body still, and biting her lip while tears welled up in her eyes. I stood there looking at her for a moment. “Let’s go.” I said and she started to climb into the car. I took her hand and pulled her out.

“No. This way.”

“Where are we going?” She asked looking up at me.

“Don’t you think we had better go back and get that baby before someone else takes her home?”

Her eyes widened with surprise and cautious delight.

Together we sprinted though the rain and back into the store. She named the doll Elizabeth after the baby sister of her friend Megan. Katie took good care of all of her dolls, but Elizabeth always received a measure of special attention. She slept in the little blue cradle that grandpa had made and was routinely tucked in with a poem or a song. And Katie turned out fine as well. Didn’t throw tantrums. Didn’t end up in “juvie” and I don’t recall that she ever again asked for anything.

I confess that I still find rules and routine attractive, but I realize they don’t have to be sacred. They often simplify things, “Monday – wash day, Tuesday - Ironing,” helps establish a welcomed rhythm to my life. And there are simply some things that might never get done if they weren’t obsessively observed. Running comes to mind. Inspired one New Year’s Eve by a friend, who told me she had run a five mile race at that day, I got up the next morning, determined to be a runner myself. Once I made the decision, I never again asked myself if it was something I wanted to do; if it was too cold, or too dark, or too rainy. I just got up every morning, laced up my shoes and ran out the door.

Still, that evening in July of 1965, when I managed to throw that stone tablet out the window and turn around, marked a turning point. I realized I could change my mind and my world would not collapse. I marvel at my parents’ wisdom and forbearance – they didn’t know I would pull U-turn and come home on that particular night, but they were willing to let me discover when I was ready to bend my own rules. I will never stop being a decisive and determined person, but as the years go by, I’ve come to value flexibility right alongside structure. Defining oneself and then acting accordingly is a fallacy; it is through our experiences and actions that we truly come to know ourselves.

Fred

Jo and I paid for our beers and crossed to the empty table we had spotted when we came into the bar. Soon we were joined by Benjamin and Fred, two 3rd year law students I knew only by reputation. Jo and Benjamin were soon engrossed in a conversation about her former boyfriend and Fred and I were left to get acquainted. He asked about my spring vacation and I regaled him with a martyred account of preparing Easter dinner for the family when mother took to her bed. We must have talked about something else, but I don’t recall what it might have been. It was peanut night at Mort’s, so any conversational lulls could easily have been filled with cracking and chomping. What riveted my attention were the laugh lines on either side of his eyes. I counted them more than once. Ten in all, with deep grooves in the center fading to light #4 pencil lines at the edges. A few weeks later when I told my friends we were getting married, they gaped. “How do you know he is Mr. Right?” Nearly fifty years later, the question has been altered but the answer is the same. “Laugh lines!” I tell them with a smile.

Aunt Mary Knows Best!

Clayann Lankford and Colin Peeples are getting married next week in San Francisco. It is a small family affair which will take place at the courthouse. In August, they are planning to have a party in our yard. In the meantime, Colin’s Aunt Bonnie hosted a bridal shower this week. I have known Colin since he was a baby and I only wish I had known Clayann that long as well. I love them both dearly, which I am sure you will agree justifies the following unsolicited advice I gave them to accompany a gift they didn’t ask for!

Dear Clayann & Colin: When I checked out your wish list I discovered that towels were on the list. White towels to be precise. I am giving you towels but not white towels – indeed these towels, coffee bean brown and sea foam blue, are at the other end of the color spectrum. Well, there is a reason and a story behind it of course.

Six years ago when Kate and Micaiah got married they put towels on their wish list. Just like you, they thought white towels would be nice. As a consequence they received a set of very nice white towels, which are still in good shape – no fraying at the hem or worn spots in the center; however, within six months, they took on a gray patina and six years later, even when they came fresh out of the washer or off the line, they were revolting. Stained and dirty looking, even though they were clean. Not at all the sort of towel you wanted to dry your bum with let alone bury your face in!

So, last Christmas I replaced those towels with colored towels like the ones that I am now giving you and after they raved about them, I got some for us and another set for them. Yesterday, I got this set for you.

Here is the deal on white towels my dears. They are just great in fancy hotels, where despite the rather self-serving notices strategically placed in the bathroom, that the company is “greener than grass” and a "great friend to the environment," in truth those towels are regularly washed in hot water and routinely soaked in bleach, which ultimately breaks them down and wears them out at which time they pitch them. In the meantime, their fluffy feel and pristine appearance fools you into thinking they would look nice on your towel rack.

In the event that you still want white towels I am including the sales slip so that you can take these back and exchange them as white is an option with this particular model.

In the alternative, maybe one of your other friends will accede to your wishes and give you the white towels that you asked for and then you can trade these in on one of the gardening items on your wish list. Just don’t dry your hands on the white towels after you come in from turning your compost pile!

So there you have it – the latest installment in the ongoing saga of why Aunt Mary (and all your other aunts for crying out loud) knows best!

Primal Fear

There I was, perched at a perilous height, with the deafening roar of a tractor coming straight at me, and the barn collapsing before my eyes. It was so loud, I couldn’t even hear myself screaming. The sheer terror of the moment is the only thing I remember with certainty. The rest of the story has been fleshed out with time and retelling. My family insists that I am wrong, that I misunderstood, that it couldn’t have happened this way. “Don’t you see?” they would say. “The barn is still standing.” That may be. Still, however factually implausible my narrative is, it is emotionally true and counts as my first recorded memory. I might have been three, still small enough that when I walked with a grownup and held their hand, my arm was up in the air. My parents, my older brother and I were spending a few days with my Aunt Josephine and her husband Clyde on their ranch in Cottonwood, Idaho. The term “ranch” is used advisedly, for their spread was little more than a few hard scrabble acres of arable land devoted to alfalfa, in an arid mountainous region dominated by Cottonwood and White Pine. Still Clyde, lanky and slightly bow-legged, was a cowboy and not a farmer, so it follows that his place was a ranch and not a farm. Adults may not realize that an unintended consequence of children “being seen and not heard” is that children do a lot of listening, accompanied by their own unfettered and unfiltered interpretation. This practice was, in truth, the source of my undoing. Among the many snippets of conversation overheard during the few days of our visit, which surely included such benign topics as remaking a winter coat or the recipe for tomato soup cake, was the mention of pushing over the barn. It is at this juncture that my family takes issue with my memory. They claim there never was any such discussion. Be that as it may. By anyone’s standard, barns are large structures, and barns remembered from childhood are immense. Uncle Clyde’s barn was two stories high, grayed with exposure, with a door on the second story into the hay loft and a ground level sliding door, wide enough to accommodate a truck or tractor. A circular corral made of peeled poles was attached to the barn, which was entered through a wide gate. That day I had accompanied the men out to the corral, very possibly without an invitation. I don’t know what project they had in mind that morning, but it is safe to assume it was unsuitable for a three year old. As a consequence, someone set me up on the fence, to keep me out of harm’s way. The picture I call to mind is taken from a long way off, peering across the corral. I am perched high up in the air, on the gate post. No doubt, the height of my perch is greatly exaggerated, but relative to my own height, it is stratospheric! I imagine that I liked it at first - heights have never been a problem for me. Soon, however, I realize that I am alone. The men along with my brother had all wandered off. Somewhere out of sight I hear the explosive sound of a tractor starting. The noise increases as the machine rounds the corner of the barn, heading in my direction. In that moment, the raucous presence of the tractor coalesces with my belief that the barn is about to be pushed over. There I am, unable to get down or be heard over the noise of the tractor. Panic ensues. But that is where it ends. The barn didn’t collapse. Someone rescued me from the post. For most of my life I assumed that the source of my terror was the imminent collapse of the barn accompanied by the deafening noise of the tractor. Upon reflection, I suspect that there may have been a more primal fear at work – the fear of being forgotten. I had been placed on the fence post for my protection, but had subsequently been forgotten, like a ring placed on a window sill over the sink for safe keeping and never returned for. Surely this is a universal fear? Years later when I was late to pick up my own daughter, I explained that I got involved in a project and forgot all about her. “You forgot me?” Her lip quivering, her eyes wide in disbelief. “But, how could you?” How indeed.

My Mother's Daughter

I recently returned from closing up the cabin for the season. It will be at least seven months before I get back there, and the leave taking is always bittersweet. On the one hand I like thinking that I have tidied things up and tucked the place in for the winter; on the other hand, closing up the cabin also means saying good-bye to my parents. In truth, mom and dad passed away nearly twenty years ago, yet at the cabin, they live on.

My parents acquired this cabin, located in a small mill town in the Idaho panhandle, after my brother and I were launched; at least we had both finished college and married and were no longer looking to mom and dad for financial support. The building itself was an old logging camp cook shack, and at the start it only had three rooms. It served as both a vacation spot and a repository for all things from our family’s past. My parents had been storing anything that might be given a second life in their barn for years, so it was no surprise when the kitchen cupboards, the wood stove and the round oak kitchen table that had been resting in the barn since an early remodel, made their way to the cabin.

Let your eyes wander around the few rooms of the cabin and it will become apparent that long before the practice became popular or the word became a household term, my parents were recyclers. Everything from the light fixtures to the rocking chairs, started out as something else. Like many of their generation, the notion to “waste not/want not” was part of their DNA. Living by that edict satisfied their practical interests and simultaneously sparked their creativity.

Early on, mother’s recycling forte was clothing and her knack for renovation grew out of necessity. Her large extended family was populated primarily by aunts and female cousins. According to mother, though none of them were wealthy, most had more “wherewithal” than mother’s immediate family. A visit to or from any of them was accompanied by a variety of hand me downs – coats, sweaters, and the occasional party dress. I don’t know how my aunts felt about it, but mother reveled in the prospect of rummaging through this treasure trove and finding something to make over.

A full length coat with a ragged hem and worn cuffs was shortened to three-quarter length. With the collar and cuffs removed the coat might be trimmed in velvet or plush corduroy and dressed up with new buttons. Once Peter and I arrived, these coats would be made into snow suits. Sometimes mom took the coat apart and turned it inside out before she re-cut it, so the fabric looked like new. If the front of the original coat wasn’t too shabby, she would try to re-cut it in such a way to utilize the existing buttonholes. Failing this, the alternative was to bind new buttonholes by hand with embroidery thread or painstakingly make bound buttonholes. Every photo of me and my brother taken in the winter until we were about ten years old shows us in jackets, pants and little hats our mother made out of material that started life out as something else.

Today, the cabin is home to the original sofa and accompanying chairs bought for their first home in Spokane. They are covered with quilts made out of squares of corduroy each with their own story. The red corduroy comes from my first grade Christmas jumper and the royal blue squares were once part of my junior high cheer leading skirt. The salt and pepper cords that Peter wore throughout grade school are alongside forest green squares from dad’s favorite LLBean shirt.

In large part the cabin is a testament to my parents’ great collaborative relationship. If mom had an idea, dad could give it a form. He made swing rockers from wooden wheel chairs salvaged from the Edgecliff T B sanitarium. Mother was un-phased by raised eye brows and unbridled laughter when she fashioned lamp shades out of yellow foam egg cartons, which, by the way are still in service to this day.

Last summer, when I cleaned out the storage room in the attic of the cabin, I threw out the remainder of the stuff that they had saved for future projects. One bag held remnants of wool and corduroy, some of it cut up and ready to sew into yet another quilt. When I looked into a second bag, I was initially baffled for it appeared to be a collection of plastic bread bags. You may remember the time when only bread came in plastic bags and groceries came home in a paper sack or a cardboard box. In the bottom of the bag, I found the beginning of a crocheted rug, fashioned from strips of the bread bags. I had to laugh as I put them in the trash. “Really mom, this is a stretch even for you!”

Fast forward one year later, and who’s laughing now? Here I am industriously knitting new rugs for the cabin kitchen out of loops I have cut from old T-shirts and connected with a slip knot. I just know they will be the perfect complement to the egg carton lampshades. An added bonus to this project is the fact that the next time Fred looks in his T-shirt drawer and asks me if I have thrown out any of his favorites, for once, I will be able to say no without blinking.

If the T-shirt recycle project goes as well as I think it will, when I open up the cabin next June, I may just cut up the plastic grocery bags that have taken over the broom closet and knit them into – well, who knows what? Placemats? A hammock? You name it. Anything is possible when you are my mother’s daughter! (And perhaps to my own daughter’s dismay, it appears more and more likely that this recycling behavior may in fact be part of our genes!)

Just Deserts

You don’t deserve a friend like Malbec.” I said to Barley as I put him into a “Down/Stay” in the corner of the family room. Malbec had just returned after a month’s hiatus and Barley had welcomed him home with a curled lip and growl, modulated somewhat by the tennis ball and hedgehog in his mouth. We have attempted to temper his predisposition for inhospitable behavior toward other dogs by insisting that Barley sits and waits for Malbec to enter the house or get into the car. At meal time, Barley sits and waits in front of his own food dish until Malbec has been fed. Actually, Barley generally performs these tasks with alacrity, often without prompting, which, to the uninitiated might suggest that he is willing to share the throne or even to take turns. Alas, that would be a false assumption, a fantasy known universally to the mothers’ of naughty boys. If breed were any real indicator of dominance, Malbec, the Rhodesian ridgeback/boxer mix, who is taller and heavier, should be calling the shots for Barley, the runt of his golden retriever litter. No amount of Pavlovian parlor tricks or “down time” is going to alter Barley’s perception of himself as “top dog,” and the rest of us might as well get used to it, as Malbec obviously has.

On this day, while Barley put in his time in “the penalty box” – first looking around and then nodding off in a nap – Malbec inspected the house to insure that I had things arranged to his liking. Malbec likes to have things orderly, or at least he likes a particular order to things. For example, given that he never walks but always dashes, he likes to have a rug between the door and his bed so that he doesn’t slip and slide on the wood floor when making his entrance. “His” water dish must be on the floor in the computer room- he never drinks out of any other dish, though Barley freely helps himself to water wherever he finds it. His secondary bed should be placed between the wing back chair and the TV where he can not only enjoy the warmth of the wood stove but also keep his eye on the squirrels cavorting in the front yard.

Driven in large part by their perceived place in the pack, these two have developed a rather elaborate set of rules that informs their behavior as predictably as any prescribed liturgical practice. When we head down to the beach in the evenings, they engage in a dance with little or no variation. Barley gets the lunker or the float first and runs with it to the gate where he drops it. Malbec picks it up. Barley waits at the gate until one of us arrives to open it. Then Malbec drops it and Barley retrieves it, and then pushes down the stairs in the lead. Once the dogs get to the beach or the bulkhead, if the tide is in, Barley drops the lunker and waits until someone gets down there to throw it in water (as far out as possible, thank you very much!) Except for a narrow window of tunnel vision, Barley is virtually blind, so the lunker we use is a large acid green sausage shape with a rope attached. It floats high up in the water and makes a big splash when it lands. Don’t ask what it costs; the company has quit making them, but with the aid of the folks at The Granary (the local pet store), I have six more in reserve.

Of late, if the dogs perceive that we are dawdling and don’t get to the beach fast enough, Malbec has taken to picking up the lunker, wading out in the water and dropping it for Barley. This new variation of the game was going on by the time Fred and I arrived at the beach on Malbec’s inaugural return visit. Barley staggered around for a few minutes, unable to find it, so Malbec picked it up and dropped it again, this time right in front of Barley, who lunged for it and then ran up onto the beach with it in his mouth, triumphant as any gladiator!

Malbec is anxious by nature and when he first came to stay with us, he was afraid of getting too close to the water. Of course, growing up, as it were, in Albuquerque, his only exposure to water was what was put in his dish. At first he approached the edge of the water tentatively, coming close to the edge and then darting away if it lapped against his feet. Even now, if a boat goes by and leaves a sizeable wake, he will chase the waves down the beach, as if they were prey that he needed to grab by the neck and shake. On his first actual plunge into the water, he resembled a prancing pony, his feet lifted high into the air – as if he thought he might be able to swim without getting his feet wet. Despite this inauspicious beginning, within a few days he hit his stride and is now a very powerful swimmer. He is able to launch his body about ten feet into the water, and then with his head down, pulls strong and steadily on target, frequently reaching the lunker before Barley has figured out exactly where it is. Barley frequently cheats, heading out into the water before it is even thrown, giving him an edge, assuming he gets lucky and swims in the right direction. No matter which dog gets there first and brings it back to shore, Barley brings it across the finish line, as this is part of the sacrosanct ritual they observe. Malbec swims in until he can stand up and then drops it, whereupon Barley swoops in like a feral beast and trots triumphantly up the beach with it in his mouth, head and tail held high.

One day last week when we were down there, the tide was all the way up to the bulkhead, so in order to bring it home, Barley either needed to swim to the end of the bulk head where the steps are located, or climb up over the rocks at the other end. He is an experienced “up climber” so this was not a problem; however, when I launched the lunker from that end of the bulkhead, he was less sure about how to get into the water over the rocks. I encouraged Malbec to “go for it” as he had a sure opportunity of beating Barley to the kill. Meanwhile, Barley frantically tried to find a way to confidently get in the water. No matter how often I encouraged Malbec to “go get it” he held fast – pacing back and forth in front of Barley, as if encouraging him to take the plunge. Finally, that is exactly what Barley did – threw himself off the bulkhead, into the water, and the race was on, with both dogs heading for the target.

“You don’t deserve a friend like Malbec!” I repeated for the umpteenth time as Barley pushed past me on his way up the stairs with the lunker in his mouth. Fortunately for Barley, in Malbec he got the friend he needed instead of the one he deserved. Upon reflection, maybe that is true for all of us—at least I think it is true for me. Like Malbec, my friends are loyal and steadfast, despite my sometimes cavalier behavior. I rarely initiate phone calls and never “drop by.” I am vague about birthdays and anniversaries, congratulating myself if I happen to recall the month or even the “quarter” of the year the event falls in. I’m endowed with broad shoulders that have been called into service more often to move a piano than for comfort or solace. Still, my friends hang in with me. I guess it is about time I quit admonishing Barley and admitted that we are both fortunate to get what we need rather than something else entirely.

A postscript. “Just Deserts” may well seem an odd title for this piece. For starters, the correct spelling is a matter of debate. Google it and you will learn that even though it is pronounced as if it were referring to Black Forrest dark chocolate raspberry torte, it is spelled as if referring to a vast, arid place - think Mojave. The word is an archaic form of “deserve” and the expression, loosely translated, means that the punishment fits the crime. So where, you may reasonably ask, is the “punishment” piece in Malbec’s unfailingly genial treatment of Barley? To get there, you must embrace the notion that the best way to deal with difficult people is to “kill ‘em with kindness.” The efficacy of this philosophy, at least as applied to me and Barley, is open to debate. As far as Barley is concerned, if he is experiencing any twinges of conscience, they don’t appear to be keeping him awake nights—or days either—for that matter.

I'd know you anywhere!

A couple of weekends ago, I attended Central Valley High School’s 50 year reunion, not as someone’s guest but as a member of the class of 1961! It is hard enough for me to believe I might know someone old enough to attend one of these celebrations let alone be one of the celebrants myself. But I did and it was fun and one of the highlights of the evening was a visit with one of our teachers who had graduated from CV about 15 years ahead of us. Del Muse taught physics and chemistry to those of us with the courage to enroll. He continues to educate today by coaching folks studying to take the GED. At our reunion, he could easily have been mistaken for a classmate.

Reunions are a funny business. Our expectations are decidedly mixed. We want to reconnect with friends we may have lost contact with, laugh at some of the antics that occupied our youth, and celebrate the fact that we can still “come to play.” And, if we are entirely honest, the possibility that there will be someone there more out of shape motivates many of us. It’s called the “gloat factor” – its appeal should not be underestimated. While I was in the process of becoming reacquainted with friends I hadn’t seen in many years, it became clear that the person I really needed to get reacquainted with was myself, for as you will see in what follows, I was not the person that others remembered.

There were over 300 in our class and about 125 of us made it to the reunion. A handful were having surgeries and sent their regrets, others simply chose to make themselves scarce, and for another 50 or so, attending regrettably wasn’t an option. Though I have never been a part of the cadre of dedicated folks who track down addresses and organize the reunion, I believe that the internet made locating people considerably easier. Many of us got “re-friended” on Facebook in the course of the past two years. Several classmates who at previous reunions had been listed as "unable to locate" were present, seemingly happy to be found. The award for the person who came the greatest distance went to Jim Dahl who flew in from New Zealand. Another classmate, Gary Kahler, who for the past 25years had been listed as deceased was discovered was found alive and kicking on Facebook and made it to the reunion. Coming back from the dead gets the prize in my book.

In general, I would say that the women fared better than the men, at least as far as appearances go. Of course, in large part that observation can be attributed to the hair migration many men experience, as it leaves the top of their head and relocates in various places on their face. Additionally, women have the benefit of clothing that helps hide some of the ravages visited upon us all by gravity. Women can float around in caftans while such garments for men are generally limited to those who have entered religious orders. Still at fifty years, simply “showing up” trumps appearances every time.

More than one person remarked that I looked “exactly the same” as I did when we graduated. The remark was meant as a compliment and I took it as such, but trust me, I know what I looked like when I graduated and a little alteration wouldn’t have gone amiss. As the reunion wore on, this rather benign bit of flattery took on a decidedly ironic twist.

The reunion kicked off with a cruise on Coeur D’Alene Lake on Friday night. It was a beautiful evening following a day with temperatures in the nineties. The cruise boat had a bar and buffet table on the main floor with rows of tables and chairs, set up cafeteria style. On the top of the boat there was an open deck. I started the evening out upstairs moving from table to table visiting with folks. After about an hour up there, I made my way down to the bar. While I was waiting for my glass of wine, a guy behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said. "Mary Gladhart - you haven’t changed a bit! I’d know you anywhere.” I turned to look at him and obviously he had changed as I was clueless to put a name with face smiling back at me. While I tried to discreetly peek at his name tag, he continued.

“You probably don't realize this, but I have been in love with you since the 6th grade."

“No you haven't." I replied with absolute confidence.

"No it’s true! I used to walk by your place up on 8th and Evergreen, just hoping you would step outside and see me." Bingo. Wrong person.

"Oh, you must mean Melissa Jones. She lived on 8th and Evergreen not me."

"Oh, you're right - it was Melissa.” At this point, the poor fellow had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Is she here?"

I point Melissa out to him; he squints and asks me if I am sure. I am sure and pick up my glass of wine and move along to visit with someone else who, believe or not, launches into a similar routine about his seventh grade crush on me, how he'd know me anywhere, and how I lived just three blocks away from him on – you guessed it - 8th and Evergreen.

"That was Melissa." I told him with a sigh. So much for looking the same. The same as whom? After that, I primarily struck up conversations with women.

The next night was a dinner at the Coeur d’Alene Casino. As I was standing in line to pick up my ticket, I struck up a conversation with Joe Simmons who claimed he remembered beating me in a spelling bee our sophomore year. This was obviously still a source of pride for him so I didn’t have the heart to tell him what a hollow victory that was. I was generally the last person chosen to be on a spelling bee team – never the last man standing. Besides, I was pretty sure he had me mixed up with someone else. For all I knew Melissa might have been a champion speller along with a world class heart throb. I was getting a little nervous about then; afraid the Joe might ask me to spell the word I missed, just to prove a point, when he said something even more startling.

“You were first in our class, weren’t you?” Hastily I looked around, hoping that none of the really smart kids were standing close enough to hear this and then assured him that I wasn’t even in the running.

“Well, if you weren’t – who was?”

“Beats me.” I replied. There were a lot of very bright kids in our class and I could think of a number of contenders. When it comes to remembering class rankings, I am of the opinion, than unless you were number one or, one of the nine people next in line, you are not going to know, or care, for that matter.

Really, have you ever heard anyone announce that they were 17th in their class? Well, maybe someone who was 17 in a class of 17 and then became the CEO of a Fortune Five Hundred company might like point out of how little academic standing had mattered in “the real world.” Otherwise, it is pretty much a dead topic. Not so for Joe, it seems, as he brought it up again at the end of the evening as I was leaving.

“Are you sure you weren’t number one?”

So once again I find myself mired in an identity crisis. To think that at my age, I could be someone entirely different - a Nordic beauty or a Brainiac; a heartthrob or a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Wonder if I could be both?

In truth, Melissa and I actually had a lot in common – Girl Scouts, church choir, Rainbow girls and later on we were both teachers. Still, with all of that, we never looked alike. For starters, she was and still is tall, slim, and blonde and whereas the blonde part is easy, “tall and slim” require a mixture of genetics and will power that have managed to elude me. As for the brainy business, thankfully my older brother Peter had a corner on that, which relieved me of the responsibility. The perception of my academic prowess may well have benefitted from a little brainy blow back from my brother, but surely not enough to catapult me to the head of the class.

Tempting as reinventing myself might seem, I think for now I’ll just stick to the me I have been getting to know for the past 68 years and hope for the best. After all, if I started to act like someone else, it might just appear that dementia had set in, and my family would seize upon the opportunity to have me committed and there I would be drooling out the rest of my days in some care center and be among the “unable to locate” at my next reunion.

Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose! I’ve always thought that there was a lot of truth to that remark, but now I am not so sure. Evidently, it depends on whose memory you are relying on. And memory, as I have recently learned, is a fickle friend, unreliable and obdurate at best.

What once was lost . . .

There are few aggravations in life that I hate more than losing or misplacing stuff. Of course in the grand scheme of things, I recognize there are calamities of greater import – floods and famine, to name but two. But in my little world of personal disasters, losing something gets the prize. For one thing, it pushes all of my OCD buttons, so that I am flailing around, tracing and retracing my steps, opening cupboards and drawers, emptying out purses and backpacks, all the while muttering to myself.”How could you be so stupid, careless, lame-brained, etc?” My daughter will testify to the occasions when I came into her bed room after she had gone to bed and riffled through her drawers in search of a missing sports bra or a shin guard. “Mom, I am trying to go to sleep.” “Forget it mom! It doesn’t matter.” All of this falling on deaf ears as I admonished her to just ignore me, assuring her that I’d only be a minute and would be quiet as a mouse.

My most recent case of loss followed by self-flagellation occurred when I got home from a 12 hour flight from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands in February only to discover that I had lost my little jewelry case, at least I thought I had. It was a small flowered Clinique bag, designed I suppose to hold a lip stick, a car key and a tissue, but I had found it the perfect size for the two necklaces and three pair of earrings that I felt I needed to take along. This was a scuba diving trip, so the clothing requirements consist of swimsuits in the water, fleece on the boat, and sun dresses for evening wear. When packing for the return flight, I made a conscious decision to put my jewelry in my back pack rather than my checked bag.
I flew home on a red eye and in the course of the next twelve hours, was in and out of the back pack numerous times, pulling out pillows and Advil, books and granola bars, creating the perfect opportunity to dislodge my little flowered jewelry case. The jewelry was not expensive but that isn’t the same as saying it wasn’t valuable, because to me it was. Every piece had a story and most were acquired while traveling: two pair of earrings were from Shanghai; a necklace that was made entirely of seed pods found on Little Corn Island, off the coast of Nicaragua; another necklace made of silver beads and jasper Fred acquired from a local guide in Death Valley. Also in the bag were my opal earrings which I have worn for nearly thirty years, a gift one Christmas from Fred and dad.

For five months I have been grinding my teeth over this debacle. I missed all of these pieces but refused to seek out replacements, determined to punish myself appropriately for my carelessness. Last weekend I started on a purge of the “travel closet” where I keep our suitcases, back packs, and all the little bottles of shampoo and lotion, mosquito repellent and sun block that I tuck into our bags when we take a trip. Some things made their way to the bag destined for the Goodwill and others “did not pass go” but went right into the trash. I opened every suit case and back pack, clearing out stray socks and a hairbrush, Purell and toothpaste, as well as boarding passes and ball point pens. And, miracle of miracles, floating around inside my back pack was the little flowered case with all the missing jewelry!

I was elated to say the least. I put the opal earrings on and haven’t taken them off since. This great finder’s event put me in mind of a number of other times when I have been sure that I lost something only to discover it, sometimes years later. When I was in law school, the large jade stone from the ring I wore constantly disappeared. I bought that ring in Peurto Villarta at a time when I still thought I should ask Fred for permission to spend $40 on a piece of jewelry. I was sure I must have lost it in the parking lot and enlisted my friends to help with the search which turned out to be futile. At home that night when I was unloading my book bag, I found it. No doubt I slammed my hand just right against some heavy legal tome and dislodged it and it fell into the book bag.

On another occasion, I thought that I had lost a necklace of Venetian trading beads that I fell in love with in the little resort gift shop in Antigua. Naïve as I was in those days, I still was aware there were no bargains to be had at the resort gift bar. Still these were the beads that I wanted and so I bought them. Once the exchange rate was sorted out, I think that once again I ventured into the $40.00 range. Though by this time, I by-passed the permission step.

I wore those beads a lot – both for work and casually. They were predominantly red and blue and graduated, so that the center bead was larger than all of the others. The summer that my parents moved over here from Spokane, I made monthly trips back and forth to help with the packing and of course, I wore the beads. Once my parents arrived in Olympia, I never saw them again. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to them – had they fallen off at a rest stop? Surely not. I would have heard them hit the floor if they had come apart. My mother felt badly about it and found a similar looking set of beads from a museum gift store catalogue, for I am sure twice what I had paid for the original. They were nice but they simply weren’t the same.
After my mother died, I found them in what seemed to me a very unlikely place. When we visited my parents in Spokane, one of Kate's favorite playthings was my old doll buggy with a large doll that Katie called "grandma baby" - a name that defies logic unless you understood that this doll, that once was mine, now lived with grandma. The doll buggy and grandma baby were one of the last things to be loaded for the move, as they had provided a welcome distraction for a seven year old while the rest of us were boxing and packing. So now, several years later as I was going through things in my parent’s home, sending some directly to the dumpster and others to the Good Will, I came upon grandma baby and the buggy and a miscellany of odds and ends including a plastic bag that appeared to be full of dust rags. I was on the verge of consigning them to the dumpster when I paused to look inside, and there, quite incredulously, I found the little jewelry box with my favorite beads.

I could go on about my amazing luck in finding things; or maybe, it is my amazing knack for thinking that something is lost that really isn’t. I feel as if I should be taking some lesson out of this. That perhaps, if I were able to channel Saint Anthony he would tell me that from now on, I am on my own! That he has saved me and my stuff for the last time. Maybe if I really tried harder, I would become a “place for everything and everything in its place” kind of person. But I know better than to hold my breath on that idea. Maybe what you do with good luck is just be grateful and let go of it. Just relax and move on. It is a tempting notion. Still, on this next trip, I have a plan for my jewelry case – I have pasted an address label to the inside and plan to pin the case to the inside of one of the many zip pockets in my back pack that I rarely get into! That should do it and I can leave the old hair shirt hanging in the closet when I get home. Provided, of course, that once I get where I am going, I can remember where I have hidden it!

Finding myself and then some

Introspection is one of those things, like red wine, that we are told is good for us – in moderation, of course. I’d like to think that I have always been somewhat introspective, recognizing that the unexamined life is, if not empty, at best less than it might otherwise be. At the same time, I have avoided over analyzing myself because, well for starters, it is boring and there has always been something more pressing if not interesting to do – like cleaning the toilets!” Even so, no amount of talk or drug therapy would have led to the most recent “discoveries” about myself. I am both amazed and amused. Hope you are too.

Having lived at the end of the road in the same house for 44 years with the same person, I have more or less taken it for granted that at least some part of my identity was common knowledge. We consider ourselves “old timers” in Boston Harbor, part of the landscape much like the big leaf maples that populate Burfoot Park. When I learned recently that some of my neighbors “knew” quite a different me, it caught me off guard. Here’s how the story unfolds.

A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday evening Fred and I dropped in on the 50th birthday party of a friend and neighbor. We had an earlier commitment so the party was well underway by the time we arrived. As is often the case at these large neighborhood gatherings, I knew most but not all of the attendees. While I was standing in the kitchen, taking in the view of the marina back lit by the fading sunlight, a guy I had never seen before limped over to me and said that he wished he could walk every day like I did but he had bad knees. I told him that I used to have bad knees myself – at least one bad knee – but I had surgery a few years ago, and now I am better than new! He smirked and allowed as how he didn’t like surgeons – they had knives. To which I replied that the prospect of the scalpel was less frightening to me than the prospect of the “Lazy Boy” and my only regret was that I hadn’t gone under the knife sooner!

Well, we tossed injuries and surgeries back and forth a bit longer and then I asked them where they lived. By this time the guy’s wife had joined the conversation.

“We live right next to you, on 76th!” The wife offered.

“You live in the judges’ house.” Said the husband, simultaneously.

“Well, actually I don’t. I live at the end of the road.”

“You’re married to the judges’ son.” They went on.

“Chris? Chris Hamilton? No. Chris and I are good friends but we’re not married. I am married to Fred.” And I pointed to my husband who was standing out on the deck, drinking a beer and visiting with friends.

“Maybe you’re not married and just live with the guy who lives in the judges’ house.” The wife interposed while I continued to point to my husband. “We don’t mind. We live in the ‘gossip’ house.’ ” She offered, giggling. I knew that ‘gossip house’ referred to the place where Kim and Wes lived until Kim and the neighbor became an item, Wes moved out and then Kim and “whatshisname” lived in the house.

“Oh, now I know who you are.” The man interjected. “You’re the one with the kids who are always trying to sell me something. Your son told me that his mom was the one who walked the dogs.”

Now I was baffled. My daughter and son in law now live in Seattle. Both have gone to some pain to convince me that they were extremely busy with work and studies. If I find out now that they have been hanging out in the neighborhood selling candy bars and magazines without so much as stopping by, I will be miffed!

“No, actually, I think that must be someone else.” I concluded as I excused myself in order to find a bathroom. Clearly this conversation was going nowhere and I decided that there really wasn’t much point in trying to convince this couple otherwise. They were pretty satisfied with their version of ‘my’ story, and I could tell I was just boring them with my facts.

Amusing as this encounter was, it wasn’t the first time that a neighbor had created a new identity for me, one that was once again linked with Chris Hamilton. A couple of years ago I was in town walking Barley around Capitol Lake and saw a woman from our neighborhood that I knew only as someone I wave to when I am driving by. As Barley and I approached her, she called out. “You’re Chris Hamilton’s mother, aren’t you?”
“Actually no. I’m not his mother.”

“Well, I have seen you driving his car.”

“Really? I have never driven his car. We both have red cars.”I conceded.

“Well, it was when I saw you driving his car, that I decided you must be his mother.”

“Nope. Must have been someone else.”

We exchanged a few remarks about our respective dogs and then moved on in opposite directions. As we parted, I wasn’t entirely sure that she believed me. If I were to have a son, Chris wouldn’t be a bad choice. He is kind and helpful and reliably cheerful. He is the “go to” guy in the neighborhood when anyone has computer problems. As a practical consideration in this progenitorial conundrum, I am older than Chris, to be sure. Still at five I wasn’t that precocious!

It is startling the way in which folks will stick to the story they have concocted despite irrefutable testimony to the contrary. I wish I could inform you that I had never engaged in such specious speculation myself, that my unwavering commitment to the truth had unfailingly guided me to the high road. Alas, the following example from my childhood is illustrative of my own penchant for filling up the void.

Along a route that our family routinely took when we visited our grandmother, there was a partially completed house. The basement had been dug and finished so that there was a row of windows at ground level, with the ceiling of the basement room forming the floor of what would ultimately be the main floor of the house. When we first noticed it, we all assumed that shortly the rest of the house would be framed out and finished. But time went on and nothing more was done. Fall and winter came and passed – too wet and cold to be building. Then spring and summer with no activity and then another year went by.

Once we recognized that the house was not going to be completed, at least not any time soon, the speculation began. The most obvious conclusion was that they owners had somehow run out of money to complete the project. Death or divorce were likely considerations, but they lacked sufficient novelty to really grab our imagination. Ultimately, we concocted the story that we could stick with and enthusiastically add to as time went on. I believe mother was the primary author of the narrative.

The wife, having grown tired of living under ground like a mole and convinced that her slacker husband was never going to finish the job, simply bailed. One morning after the kids had gone off to school, she packed a bag and walked to the bus stop and was never seen again. Chilling, when you think about. And though our father was the polar opposite of the putative father in the story, it did give me pause that our own mother might consider such an option under similar circumstances.

We never met the family who lived there, indeed we never saw anyone on the premises that I recall. Still we populated the story with the familiar – kids, pets, and parents – even a mother in law. For all I know, a man lived there alone, with no intention of ever building a story above ground. Maybe he was a “survivalist,” getting his bomb shelter kitted out for the inevitable. (See, here I go again!) You can bet that if I had ever met someone who lived there, I would have asked about the mother.

A few minutes with the news on any given day serves as a healthy reminder that whereas are all entitled to our own opinions we are not entitled to our own facts. Still, that doesn’t keep them at bay. “WMD’s” and “Birthers” are but a couple unsettling examples of our penchant for filling a void with “facts” to fit our presumptions. Obviously, nature is not the only force that hates a vacuum.

In my case, to date the factual misconceptions of my neighbors have served me well. After a couple of years of haranguing Chris about my expectations of him as my son, he did his duty this year, bringing me a fuchsia basket for my birthday. Now that I am not only his mother but his putative spouse, the guilt induced performance arena has expanded exponentially.