Precious Moments

The calendar dictates that my spring vacation is over, but there are some moments that I would like to hang on to. It’s like the Climax song that I was infatuated with in high school. (And isn’t high school the perfect place for infatuations?) “Precious and few are the moments we two can share. And if I can’t find my way back home, it just wouldn’t be fair, cuz precious and few are the moments we two can share.” The academic world in which I live is ruled by the bell schedule and the clock. I start and end my day with a sharp jangling, and I constantly have my eye on the clock to get it all in, make everything fit, and get the charges out the door on time. And God forbid I am in the middle of a sentence, no matter how profound, when the lunch bell rings. No one will hear the end of it.

My home has a much different feel. Vacations are not governed by time. We wake and sleep in a more natural rhythm (although, let’s face it: two year old and natural rhythm are usually mutually excusive.) We sometimes start with a loose plan, but are willing to jump off the beaten path and go with the flow. I like it that way. And so while others traveled to far-off beaches and enjoyed sun and sand over vacation, my home and I enjoyed some stellar moments. I love these glimpses when time stands still and I can focus on being rather than doing.

So here is a glimpse of moments, in no particular order, that I would like to tuck away in my memory:

The look on Marty’s face, half-hidden by sun and helmet, as he streaked down the sidewalk on his bike. Faster than I thought possible, his legs pumped furiously and his giggles kept the rhythm of the beautiful moment!

The fit of giggles I encountered with some new friends and some old ladies. We happened upon a Ladies’ Guild meeting while waiting for a speaker, and I saw a glimpse of the future I am sure (hoping) I will never find. God help me if I dye my eyebrows brown and wear sandals and hose together, or feel the need to talk about the social excitement of wakes.

The scenes in my back yard watching my kids play with the neighbors. We have been through foods, fires and tornados this week: it was big for natural disasters. Even as I type this, there is a very serious happening with swords and spy gear on my front lawn.

The sweat dripping from my face and the strength in my body that I never knew I had. This spring is a time for re-birth, a time for me to re-construct my body and mind and take control. I like this feeling of power an awful lot.

The lilt of my youngest as he constantly croons: “Mommy, I want to tell you sumpthing.” The boy is a myriad of runny nose and sparkling eyes and freeform ideas. And let’s not forget the pteradactyl shrieks whenever someone does him wrong. And even when they don’t.

The feeling of semi-consciousness as I waken from a nap in my back yard. The sun was out, the warmest of breezes blowing, and the book I had been reading was laying cock-eyed across my chest. Perfection.

The ham. Oh that amazing ham times two houses and the potato salad and the twice baked potatoes and the chocolate-covered pretzels and the…..Well, you get the picture. Easter was not a good day for re-tooling my body, but perhaps my soul took a turn instead?

The amazement I feel when I watch my daughter read and how she opens four books and reads the first chapter in each with her little eyebrows knit in concentration. And then she moves on to chapter two and so on until my head is dizzy. Can’t imagine that I had a hand in her creation. Beautiful!

The knowledge that the best things really are what money can’t buy. The way my kids feel in my lap when we read “Maltilda” before bed. The pitter patter I hear at bedtime because they just want one more hug. The grins of accomplishment that come from jungle gyms crossed or art created.

Precious and few. It’s really true.

Old

When I am old I will wear bold prints,
Or perhaps a red pleather coat with golden shoes.
I might adorn a simple black dress with macramé and beads of many colors.
And dye my eyebrows the deepest muddy brown.

When I am old I will speak loudly and out of turn.
I will fall asleep upright in chairs and ramble on with no one listening.
I will adorn my bony fingers with giant shards of costume glass
And coif my blue-tinged hair with careful hand.

When I am old I will shuffle my feet
And get up slowly from my chair. I will dress to the hilt and
Always wear colored hose with sandals. I will murmur often.

When I am old I will always get my money’s worth and dine
Exuberantly at the table of snacks. I will even take some home in my purse.
I will be nosy and always have an anecdote about a grandkid,
And dig relentlessly for connections.

When I am old I will think that a short trip across town is as amazing
As man walking on the moon. But maybe on both counts I’ll be right.
I will eat the cake AND the brownies with icing.
I will know that the elevators won’t arrive until long after I am gone.
And I will be finally comfortable enough to simply be.

Too Much

It’s the old man at the deli counter that gets me. I’m waiting in line today, the kids behind me clamoring for donuts and cheese slices, and I happen to glance in his direction. He has been waiting quietly, head down, feet shuffling. My eyes take it all in with a glance, and I can’t help but stare at the brown dress shoes. Worn with work-out pants that zip at the ankles, it makes a strange sight. And I wonder who is not there to help him dress.

He is eyeing the containers for the take out foods, and even now I choke up as I recall. He just looks lost, his eyes like my son gets when he loses sight of me in a crowded room.

“May I help you?” the clerk finally comes to take his order.

“I’ll have a small tub of….of Grandma’s Potato Salad.” The words a bit halting, and his eyes still kiss the floor.

“May I help you, ma’am?” another clerk calls impatiently to me, and it is obvious that I had missed the first request.

“Ham, the one on sale. I’ll have a pound please.” But my eyes are drawn back to the man at the end of the deli as he shuffles away with his small tub of potato salad and mini-loaf of Italian.

I choke up as he passes by my mounded cart of groceries.

This has certainly been the month for grief and I to tango. In the past few weeks, two local police officers have died in the line of duty: one collapsed while running, an apparent heart attack victim on a foot chase, and the other was shot in the head several times while responding to a neighborhood dispute in a nearby town. The perpetrator was angry about a discrepancy over his fish pond, clearly a reason for snuffing out a life.

My friend’s dad died last week after a long, heroic battle with cancer. Hospice was there at the end, and the entire family was present to witness their father, business partner, and confidant breathe his last.

In Cleveland, a little girl close to my son’s age was killed by her mother; the little angel spent her last days in a motel bathtub being scalded by the mother whom Social Services had recently let back into her life.

Natural disasters fill the earth. I had barely registered the devastating earthquake in Haiti before I turned my prayers to Chile after Mother Nature detonated her latest there. Snowstorms and floods continue to wreak havoc in ravaged areas.

The world is filled with vats of grief; and surprisingly, I have no choice but to turn away. I just can’t take it all in. I simply don’t have enough emotion for it all. Perhaps it is self-preservation, a stoic wonderment, an unwillingness to rock my own world. I am content with the runny noses that never leave and the crushing snubs at recess. And the hangnails. This week I even had a bleeder.

I cannot feel everything; I am not a caustic woman, (unless you ask my students of whom I demand much) but the typical grief-worthy events do not grab me. It is only those moments, uncalculated and unexpected, that find me catching my breath and dabbing my eyes.

And so it is with the man at the deli. I have no idea of his circumstances; there is no way to tell if he is lonely or at peace. But somewhere between the zippered work-out pants over dress shoes, my heart is just a bit more broken today.

The Circus is in Town

"Mommy, mommy, mom, mom, mom, mom!!!” The two year old is insistent and incessant.

“What is it honey?”

“Ummmm….I forget.”

Meanwhile, his brother is sitting in the middle of the floor looking forlorn.

“What will happen when I fall through this trapdoor?” he queries.

“What trapdoor?”

“I just know this is a trapdoor and I am about to get sucked in.”

Cut to camera three where sister is doing her homework. She bites her lip and talks out loud as she fills out her paper: plants and animals that live in ponds.

“Water scorpion, muskrat, algae, dragonfly, flatworm, roundworm, leech,” she painstakingly copies.

“Mom, what’s a basscarp?” I stop her for a quick lesson on the beauty of commas. She is not amused.

“Mom, mommy, mom, mom, mommy.” He’s at it again. “I ride stop sign.”

“No honey, you are not allowed to ride your bike to the stop sign when you are two”

“Mom I just know it. I’m going to get sucked in. Will you catch me before I fall into the floor?”

I learned how to juggle in grad school. I have half of a technical theater degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and since I am not currently blessed with enough time to play with power tools and hang light grids, the juggling is all I’ve got left.

And boy does it come in handy with three kids and their various problems on a random Thursday night. I started with balls and haven’t progressed much from there. Unless you count the kids and the myriad questions/problems/wonderments at any given moment. No knives or flares of fire for me though. I’ll leave that to the professionals. And I have to sing that circus song. Always. Or I can’t get the rhythm right. “Da, dadada da dada dad a da.” You know the one I mean.

I laugh when I think back to how much I didn’t know then. How stage managing a show seemed so difficult and all-consuming. Theatre’s got nothing on the “mom, mom, mommy” crowd.

I like this role. Don’t get me wrong. But gone are the days when I could do just one thing at a time. I no sooner get this thought into my frontal lobe when I hear the familiar refrain:

“Mom, Mo-om!!” The dramatic daughter cries when I am busy talking Marty away from his imaginary trap door. “I just got nail polish on my face.”

I look up in time to see the bright green smear covering most of her right cheek.

“Just tell them it is your pond visual aid,” I quip. "Algae."

And her perfectly placed seven year old glare tells me clearly that I have dropped the ball.

Pop Goes the World

“Mom, blow a bubble! Please! Please!”

It all started so simply, my son dancing around the living room until I did his bidding. But by now the bubbles have me. I can’t get them out of my mind. My son has a huge obsession with gum chewing and is constantly begging me to blow bubbles. He sits patiently on my lap as I chew, waiting for the bubble to expand and for his chance, if quick enough, to pop the gum all over my face.

These bubbles have taken hold, and I can’t stop. First it was soap bubbles. I love blowing bubbles, hearing the giggles of my children as they chase the soapy spheres through the yard. And as I started thinking, I remembered a night about two decades ago when I was blowing soapy bubbles outside my freshman dorm on a Saturday night. And no, I had not been drinking. It sure was fun, though, to see the looks and antics of the people who had been drinking as they chased my bubbles through the street!

My mind flits to Macbeth’s three witches and my ill-remembered “Double, double toil and trouble” as the cauldron bubbles. They were wishing a double dose of bad wishes on the man himself as they stirred their pot. I suppose it is no coincidence that I have this memory as I watch my own three little monsters stirring a pot of mud, snow, wood- chips and goop in the fire pit with their plastic golf clubs and giant sand shovels . They are out enjoying the barest, earliest moments of almost-spring and I laugh as I watch them dig through mounds of snow to find the tiniest scraps of dirt. I am sure from watching these antics that the spring’s first worm farm cannot be far behind.

And speaking of sleeping with the fishes, I can’t lose these pictures I have in my head of floating long-haired women with the last of their carbon dioxide floating as bubbles to the surface. Perhaps I have read one too many mystery stories, or maybe I am the long-haired heroine, swamped and flailing and fighting to the surface. I am accused like the witches in Salem. I always loved those odds. If you lived you were a witch and would be hung. If you died you would be proven innocent. But still you’d be dead. Sometimes that sounds pretty familiar.

Bubbles and more bubbles. The financial crisis of bubble mortgages. And now it turns out that Siberia’s frozen sea-bed is emitting fierce greenhouse gasses and bubbles that are going to advance global warming. Certainly not all child’s play around here.

Life on the bubble. That is me at this moment. Bouncing, bounding, fluttering, flooding, drowning, popping.

Sometimes Gold Can Stay

Frost knew it. Ponyboy knew it. Today my boys and I know it too. Nature’s first green really is gold. The path through the Metroparks is still covered with slushy snow. The tall trees won’t let the sunlight through to melt it quite yet. But the sun is warm and my boys are so giddy in their sweatshirts. We run. We collect sticks. We marvel at animal waste. There is so much to see in this newly unlocked world.

We follow deer tracks through the slush and see the animals themselves in the distance. It is a perfect moment. One buck has already lost his horns in anticipation of new summer growth. We spy some daffodils popping through the soil. The eldest climbs a fallen log wedged in between two older trees. He goes beyond where I can reach him with the proudest of grins. Nature is growing all around me. His little brother toddles up after him, still clutching my hand. He is no longer a baby. Frost again. They are only so an hour. This fresh day, just this side of spring, sprouts newness from many angles.

And there is a sense of history here too.

“Grandpa used to take me to the woods to gather sticks,” I tell them.

“Like these?” Marty bellows, clutching a whole arsenal in his dirty hands.

“We used to balance on logs and ride them like horses,” I remember. “We even made one our pet and named her Henrietta.”

Marty’s wide eyes show he doesn’t quite believe me. I’m sure he cannot picture his mother as a little girl. Sometimes I can barely remember it myself.

We follow the youngest on his makeshift path through the woods. He is looking for a log that is not quite so high so he can copy his big brother.

“Dis one, mommy. Dis one.” I hold his hand as he carefully crosses, his little eyebrows knit in concentration and his tongue sticking out. He is a marvel, this one. His language is unfurling like the closed buds that will open in a few short weeks. He’s grown a temper. And a sense of humor. His eyes twinkle mischievously as a matter of course. And he beams when he completes the log crossing.

Meanwhile, Marty finds another large fallen tree. He clamors aboard and straddles it with glee. I can see his antics out of the corner of my eye. Hatless cowboy wonder today, prodding and poking his imaginary horse. The horse is decaying; he nudges it with a thin branch as he plays.

“Giddy-up, Henrietta,” I hear him shout through his giggles. Sometimes gold can stay.

A Mother's Pain

The lone carton of French vanilla coffee creamer in his hand tonight broke my heart. I recognized his face walking sullenly towards me as I rounded the last row of the grocery store.

I’m always in the dairy aisle when I lose my mind. I can navigate the rest of the store, but somewhere between the 50,000 yogurt choices and light vs. fat free sour cream, I wave the white flag. Today was no different. My two-year old son had been remarkably patient, but still, he’s two. A patient two year old is a bit like a serene polar bear. An oxymoron at best. A disastrous tantrum every other time.

Pierce walked quickly, and I knew where he was going before he ever opened his mouth. He is the father of the sickest young person I have ever known. I taught her last year. I loved her smile and the shy way she painted her nails for her demonstration speech, and the way her friends flocked to her at lunchtime. But she is really sick. It started in fourth grade, an autoimmune deficiency disease so rare that the doctors can’t even figure out how to treat her. She is in ninth grade now, and even though the school year is three-quarters over, she has only attended school nine days.

She has spent the last two straight months at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, where doctors struggle to find out why she won’t stop throwing up. She has been on a feeding tube for the last three weeks. And she still can’t stop throwing up.

“Kimberly needs her coffee cream,” he says, after a mumbled hello. And its not the two year old that is crying in the dairy aisle this time. I imagine this mother, sitting powerless night after night, and it is a moment I almost can’t bear. The horror of tubes and sterility and doctor upon doctor is too much: the gourmet creamer the smallest of favors in a sea of anguish.

In a way I have walked this path. As a daughter, I have supported my father through four straight months of hospital convalescence and a series of surgeries, and helped my mother wage her battle on cancer. I know what its like to eat in hospital cafeterias and sit endlessly at bedsides and rush home to take a quick shower before the next shift begins. But as a mother, I don’t know that I could have survived the last six years, and I selfishly pray that I will never have to find out.

Where does she get the strength to breathe and smile and try when her heart is breaking and her arms are powerless? The most precious gift of all, a beautiful daughter, and no way to wrap her tight and keep her safe. This is surely any mother’s worst nightmare.

Embarrassed, I fumble to hide the antibiotic prescription that I just had filled for my daughter and her earache. It broke my heart last night to hear my daughter’s sharp cries of pain. But it was only one brief night. And the antibiotic will quickly deliver relief.

We chat for a moment more, I offer my support, and watch Pierce hurry to check out with his one item in order to join his wife at the hospital. The image of that gourmet creamer will stay with me for a long time. And I’m sure my heart will continue to break as I return to my comfortable home to hug my kids tight.