The Tie That Binds

My mother hasn't spoken to me for two months. I don't know why. There was no inciting event of which I am aware, but that doesn't mean something didn't happen that she perceives as such. What I do know is she is not a happy person right now. The reasons behind this really have very little to do with me--as far as I know--but the fallout of her misery has reach.

I'm new to this mothering thing. She is a veteran. I have babies and hope. She has grown children that remind her of her failures. It's sad to watch, and scarier to contemplate.

Today Number Two fell asleep on my chest during a nursing session. His head rested in the crook of my arm while his midsection lay heavy on mine. He was a soft, sleepy weight. I tried to relax in this moment with my loving and dependent baby, but all I could think about was the fact that I am giving up our newness with each passing minute. Soon my two children will be out of this stage where they know they need me. Reality has already begun to take over where there had heretofore only been hope. They are no longer newborns, infants or wobbling toddlers. They're the realization of my dreams. Here's why that's scary: hope is all good; reality is good and bad.

Once my mother was like me. She loved her little baby. That baby was her chief interest. Then the baby grew up and suddenly it was hard to see how closely bonded they had been.

There's always something between a mother and her child. When a child is born, the connection is not figurative. There's the cord, then the breast, then arms that hold tight and easy in the absence of resistance. But babies grow and go. Still, there's that connection--this time it is figurative--which finds its strength in shapelessness. Sometimes it's so hard to see and feel that you'd swear it was no longer there. It is, though. And it's working harder than ever to do its job.

I Can't Stop Laughing At This

Here I am circa 1987. If this doesn't exemplify my childhood, I don't know what does.

Our Photo Album

I came upon this snapshot during my futile search for photographic proof of the Cookie Monster sweatshirt. It was in an album of my early years. The same book is littered with photos of my mother, who was roughly the same age I am now. She was beautiful. She was unlined. She was unfettered by even one extra pound. She seemed happy enough.

I find it so hard to see the mother I know now in that Kodaked woman with the black, black hair. I find it even harder not to fear the future. What would she have thought if she could've looked into the time-weary eyes of some fortune teller and seen herself as I do? She could only have been incredulous. No way. No fucking way.

They were my formative years, but I think they shaped her, too. Being a wife and mother can teach you more than you ever imagined you'd learn about yourself. It can be the most rewarding role of your life. But it can also guide you--with a hand so gentle you'd never think it was holding you back--into so much rationalization and cover up that you fail to see how things could be any way other than they are. You can play the martyr so well that you become one.

I don't know what happened. I was sheltered from most of the details of my parents' lives by virtue of being their daughter. I know little bits here and there, but they only serve to emphasize that I know nothing. I grew up happy, along with my siblings, and maybe my mother thinks that's the only thing that matters. In fact, I know she does.

I look at the photo album and I have to disagree. My baby book isn't just about me, the baby. It's about my parents, too. It's about the early choices that made the rest of their lives.

Cookie Monster

Today's Cookie Monster theme on Google (it's the 30th anniversary of Sesame Street), along with reminding me that I'm getting older, brings to mind a childhood sweatshirt. It was white and worn. Memory makes it brighter than it probably was, donned so often by the grimy frame of me as a four year old. It had a blue band around the neckline and the wrists. It had Cookie Monster on the front.

That was my summer sweatshirt. I'd wear it at bedtime when there was no bed in sight. Staying up late enough to necessitate layers in mid-July was always a treat. The amusement park; the cottage on Lake George; the back yard, watching puppies being born. Darkness would fall and the sun-fade would herald the first phase of night, the one that plucked goosebumps from my unprotected skin as wind blew my parents' cares into gentle eddies that I couldn't see, even if I knew where to look.

Mom pulled the sweatshirt over my head. The cotton was pilled on the inside. The fabric was strange to touch, and even stranger to taste, grating against my teeth when I pulled the collar over my mouth. But the outside was smooth, and that's the part I enjoy remembering. Bright and white and blue.

One evening daddy came home and said "Let's go to the amusement park." I wore the sweatshirt then. One ride at the park featured several brightly colored motorcycles that thunk-thunked where each wooden plank connected to the next on a circular track. There were buzzers on all the bikes that blended into a cacophony of childish zealotry. There were lights in long lines--some blinking, some glaring--wrapping around canopies and climbing poles. I felt light. Riding on a stationary motorcycle at children's speed, I carried away those cares of my parents just like the wind. I hugged myself and rubbed two tiny forearms, content in Cookie Monster, ensconced in a lit summer night.

A Trip Halfway Across the Country - Part I (In No Particular Order)

The house sat on a lake in Kansas. Unlike Kansas, it was modern and glassy. Like Kansas, it sprawled. The place belonged to the daughter of my father's brother, and it was our first visit.

Uncle Sonny left Hartford for good in the 50s. He stopped in Topeka more than twenty years ago, setting up house in grand style. His daughter's place is grander still, built on the strength of her husband's endodontics practice in a town with lots of bad teeth and few practitioners with the two extra years of schooling necessary to root all those canals.

Not long after we arrived, my mother asked me if I'd seen the bathroom. "It has a window for a wall," she whispered. I raised an eyebrow at her. "A window," she repeated. "For a wall!"

Two Bud Light Lime's later, I saw it for myself. I closed the door behind me to find a toilet to my left, a sink like white art to my right, and an unobstructed view of the lake in front of me. The wall was floor-to-ceiling glass. A screen, which could be raised and lowered via a control panel next to the door, was in the descended position. I could see out, but nobody could see in. Not unless they really tried, anyway.

The grass rolled from patio to deck to beach. Two boats sat parallel on a slip. The Boss was a red, white and blue dart across it all. The Partner sat on an weather proof cushion under a tree as he pulled at a beer bottle while talking to the endodontist. I went about my business, more conscious than usual of my every shadowy move. I exited with my back to the door until the last moment, marveling.

After awhile, dusk fell. My northeastern nights are early; these were late and lazy. The sun was weightless in its last gold hold-off to night. The Partner suddenly nudged me from where we stood on the grass between the house and the lake. "Oh my God, I can see someone in the bathroom!"

I looked up one level and my eyes went buggy. The familiar stoop of shoulders like my father's, of a craggy face like Uncle Jack's, was centered in that clear square of glass. I looked away. "We've got to tell someone," I said, not waiting to lurch off toward the patio in search of my cousin, or the endodontist, or any of the family members in a position to do something (although I'm not sure what) about it.

Uncle Sonny is the oldest of my uncles. He's a sharp shooting joker with three children and a bevy of grands and greats. A year ago, or maybe two, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. There's medicine now to slow the progression, but his wife told me it's not working. The first night we arrived, he locked himself in his truck and couldn't get out. At a picnic on the fourth, he met an old acquaintance he no longer knew. My aunt says she can't get used to it, this evolution amidst the sameness of each new day.

"There's someone using the bathroom with the shade up!" I said to Andy, the first of my second cousins that I came upon.

"It's Uncle Sonny," The Partner added.

Andy turned back to the house and went in through the sliding doors. My duty done, I leaned against the deck railing. I thought of the shade's control panel right next to the light switch; I thought how the mistake could easily happen. I thought of the murkiness of the short-term against the clear view of a lake made to glisten by the tips of a fading sun. Below Uncle Sonny, his children and his brothers' children conversed, relaxed. Our own children played.

He looked over it all--caught inside that strange, contemporary enclosure of bodily functions--for all the world to see.

These Precious Moments

It was Wacky Hat Friday at the Catholic school in which I was a kindergartener. I wore a party hat--the cone-shaped kind with the annoying elastic digging into my chin--that my mother had covered with orange felt and decorated with construction paper dots. Bobbling atop the hat was a star on a coil. The class lurched into the auditorium for an assembly that I can only imagine was the culmination of yet another fundraiser.

A raffle was taking place onstage. I remember nothing of the offerings except for two Precious Moments baby dolls. They had blond hair and huge eyes. They were huggable-soft. I held my raffle ticket in a hand that shook to the beat of my thumping heart. At five years old, I'd never wanted anything so badly.

I didn't win, of course. The difference between then and now is that I actually thought I would. I probably cried. I'm sure I was sad all day. It is what I remember as my first disappointment.

Now I have a three year old daughter and a real-life baby doll of my very own. And suddenly, in the memory of twenty-five years, I realize that the gratification I sought in those Jesus Loves Me dolls wasn't denied but delayed. That blond hair, those big eyes and the huggable-softness of a gurgling core.

I can't believe it. I finally won something.

Photo by Lauren

More To Love

The Boss was in the kitchen with my mother. I was sitting with The Partner at the dining room table when we overheard a plaintive, pipsqueaked "what's that?"

"That's medecine to help me lose weight," nana said.

Though a wall stood between us, I had no trouble picturing my mother lifting a capsule from the "Sunday" compartment of her pill organizer while my daughter looked on with big blue eyes that see everything and forget nothing.

I recalled my mother's mention of the Hoodia supplement earlier in her visit. I'd raised my eyebrows just short of an eye roll, a familiar facial tic that my mother dismissed with the assurance that her doctor had told her it was safe. The finality of her statement precluded conversation.

In the kitchen with The Boss, it seemed nana had re-opened the issue for discussion. "Do you think I'm too big?" she asked The Boss.

"No."

"You don't think I should be skinny like your mommy?"

"No." The Boss was matter of fact. She wasn't wise; she wasn't trite. Her voice trilled with the naturalness of an I Love You. "You should be just like you are," she said.

When New England Is At Its Most Frigid

If my parents ever doubt my overwhelming devotion to them, they need only look to exhibit A:

I am still living in Connecticut.

They are the only things tying me to this godforsaken suburban box where winter lasts for 7.5 months and you can buy a 1000 sq ft split-level for roughly the price of the South Dakota governor's mansion.

I'm bitter because it's cold. I get this way toward the end of every January, though my inability to deal with it gets worse with each passing year. I am seasonally affected and dis-ordered. I can't get myself together. I would like to sit in the bathtub beneath a heat lamp and read for the next three months straight, but then my skin would fall off and the authorities would probably take away my kids. Instead, I put on two sweaters and turn on every light in the house. I do the best I can. But my February best is nowhere near good.

The Partner and I stay here because of our parents. It's not just that The Boss and Number Two need babysitters; the truth is that we all genuinely appreciate the company of grandma and grandpa, nana and poppy. There's no sacrifice involved. We're lucky to have them and we take full advantage of this time we share.

Still, in the depths of winter, when my lethargy allows me to do nothing but dream, I have visions of barrelling south on I-95 in a Penske truck that will keep going till the thermometer hits 70. I imagine getting out, stretching my arms in the rising heat, and reducing to tank top and shorts. All around are people in a similar reach, tied to nothing but the sun.

The Grimace Only A Grandmother Can Deny

Here's the necessary caveat: I love my mother dearly.

But she is delusional.

She contradicts me when I say Number Two is surly.

"He is not," says she.

"Is too," says I.

"He's always smiling when he's around me." She's positively preening.

"So I'm a bad mother, then. Because he's surly to me."

She shrugs. "I guess so." The easy acquiescence must be her attempt at levity.

I fall for the bait, choking back a snort that emerges snort-ish anyway. "I've been around both of you all day, and he was not smiling the whole time. I've got the pictures to prove it."

"No, you don't."

Oh, don't I?

Still, nobody's denying he has his moments.

You've got a cute grandkid, mom. I'll give you that.

Shopping the Deep, Dark Recesses

I entered Abercrombie & Fitch only to be accosted by darkness, cologne, a blaring beat, and the realization that I am thirty years old.

In the haze of fragrance lit by no bulb brighter than 15 watts, I squinted at the form of a salesgirl who seemed to be speaking to me. I shook my head with a rueful smile. It was a universal gesture that I hope conveyed both the fact that it was ridiculous for her to think I could hear what she was saying or see her well enough to read her lips and that, no, I don't need any help anyway. She went back to folding skintight wool sweaters.

The merchandise in the women's (and I use the terms loosely) section consisted basically of one single outfit, the pieces of which are meant to be layered on top of each other until the waif wearing them is sufficiently buffered from the December chill. First a cami and jeans, then a long sleeved tee-shirt. Then a tight sweater and a looser buttoned one. Then a hoodie. Then a scarf and a cap.

I sucked back the deluge from sinuses compromised by fragrance allergens as I unfolded a sweater. I was pretty sure my sixteen year old sister would like it. She wouldn't care that it was scratchy as long as it was like everybody else's. I wondered if I was like that when I was her age, and I quickly discounted the idea. I've always hated wool.

I didn't hear a single word the cashier said during the whole purchase process. The sound from the speaker overhead was the kind of mainstream music that is non-memorable except for its frenetic bass, which went in through my ears and promptly got stuck in the sludge of my nasal cavity. I watched him slide the sweater into a sturdy paper bag with a cloth handle. They probably could've skimped on it and maybe charged a little less for the stuff inside. But whatever. We both reached out, the bag falling from seller to buyer. I wrapped my fingers around the fabric grip and let my arm drop to my side. The bag bumped my leg as I made my way out of the cavern into the light. The fluorescence was startling.

In that shock, an inconsistency occured to my thirty year old self. I thought it strange that the dark place is the one devoted to youthful perfection, while the undiluted brightness of the rest of the mall is a shining light on every wrinkle and fat deposit hurrying through. But whatever. I threw myself into long strides so that my image blurred as I looked sideways into the reflective storefronts. I sped toward the exit and the cold, New England winter, where gray illuminates everyone just the same.

Looking for Daisy in Long Lost Detroit

I saw in my periphery the slow, automated descent of a Cadillac trunk lid and I felt a pang in my chest. Some people feel this when they see newborn babies, or a sunset, or the first of a five course meal being delivered to their table on a tray. Me, I get palpitations at the sight of a 90s-era Cadillac STS with a Northstar engine.

I had one, once. Her name was Daisy. She was born in 1993 and showed up in my parents' driveway circa 2000, the year I graduated college. She was shiny then. She was not dented or missing side panels in the way she would quickly become accustomed to once I slid behind the wheel. The leather seats were only beginning to show rear-wear in the driver and front passenger seat when I took ownership. The dashboard arched in front of me with luxurious architecture. She was sublime. I required only two years to drive her into the ground. Each stop on the journey through my milestones--my first job, my first apartment, my first trip halfway across country for a weekend-long outdoor concert--was another nail in her coffin.

I cried the day someone paid $700 for the privilege of hauling her off in a flatbed. It was a steal. The engine alone was worth more than that. But she had a phantom battery problem which necessitated near constant jumping and left me broken down on the side of the road at the whim of AAA almost daily. Many tried to fix it, and many failed. Then there was the issue of extensive body damage that came from her up close and personal relationship with curbs, guardrails and concrete barriers all over New England. Cheapened almost beyond recognition, she hung her headlights in shame and she died. Repeatedly.

I have a plan. As soon as I have enough money, I will buy another 1993 Cadillac STS with a Northstar engine. Black, with a tan interior. I will keep her in our garage and I will drive her monthly to keep the oil pumping in her veins. Then, when I am retired and old and Daisy II is recognized by all as the classic wonder I always knew her to be, The Partner and I will travel New England, from car show to car show, on a wave of American-made nostalgia. We will be very grumpy; Daisy II will be the same as she ever was. She will remind us what it was like to be young and free and powerful.

I don't ever want to lose that again.

Bed

Tonight I changed The Boss's sheets, smoothing flannel over a layer of egg crate and fluffing out the comforter. I took the scalloped edge of the top sheet and folded it over the comforter, then, like my mother used to do, I folded that edge on a slant.

It was the perfect pocket for The Boss to wiggle into. Like an envelope, the bed was an invitation. I resisted the urge to crawl in. As I looked at my daughter, I thought back to when that three year old was me, bone weary from a day of being curious and unencumbered, eager to let the powder of my skin seep into the mattress as words from my favorite book floated above me. Back then I was blissfully dependent.

In a bit I will change the sheets on the queen bed that is mine and The Partner's. I'll smooth flannel over egg crate and I'll fluff out the comforter. I'll take the edge of the top sheet and fold it over the duvet, then, like my mother used to do, I'll fold that edge on a slant.

It won't be the perfect pocket and I won't wiggle. Instead I'll slide in with limbs heavy from caring and commitment. I'll read a book to myself. And as I begin to nod off, it will be with a snore of acknowledgement that the weight of thirty years was once the air of safety around a three year old's deeply sleeping hush.

A Change of Heart

This is a ridiculous story. I was once playing Donkey Kong on the Intellivision with my father around the time that such a game console was popular. It was my father's turn, and he made it all the way up to Donkey Kong only to be crushed by a barrel right at the big ape's feet. It was an understandable mistake; not realizing he had one last ladder to climb, he thought he'd already beaten the round.

I was a sensitive child. That's the only explanation. With dad's game ended, he asked if I wanted to play. I said no. Then I went to my room and cried because my poor father hadn't known that the game wasn't over. I thought my father knew everything. I was moved to tears because he didn't.

I'm thinking about that today because I still hate the idea of my father facing disappointment, or the unknown, or fear. The lesson I first learned from Donkey Kong has only been reinforced as I've grown. My father is human. It's a strange understanding to have as someone's child--knowing that while I can control my own emotions, I am powerless when it comes to his.

My dad went in today for a cardioversion, which is an electrical shock to re-set the heart so the heart's natural pacemaker can take over. His first appointment earlier this week was cut short when it was shown that the medication used to thin his blood had not thinned it enough to reduce the risk of stroke associated with the procedure. So he went back in today. I'm still waiting to hear how it went.

I get all tight in the windpipe area just thinking about it. And, yes, I still think it's ridiculous that my first premonition of that feeling came in highly pixelated form on an old, wood-paneled console channeling Intellivision.

A Different Kind of Funny

I was reading the latest Janet Evanovich book in bed last night when I laughed out loud at a passage. That in itself was not unusual. It's her fourteenth Stephanie Plum by-the-numbers book, and each one leading up to it has elicited in me everything from giggles to guffaws. But there was something about the evening--the July heat, the humidity, the fact that both the children were quiet and sleeping--that reminded me of the first time I'd ever read a Stephanie Plum story. It was five or six years ago. I'd laughed so loud I woke up my parents in their nearby room. My father growled a string of unintelligible obscenities. I just rolled my eyes and went back to the hilarity. I was a college graduate living back at home while searching for a job. I was so selfishly happy.

My memory is fixated on the lightweightness of it all. The thin blanket in a tent over my legs as I perched the book on my knees. The crickets outside a window where tall trees were shadowed a degree darker than the night. The turned-away clock that meant nothing.

Not long after that--a year, maybe two--I was engaged to be married. Our first child came a year after the wedding. Our second arrived two years and nine months after that.

Four years. Just four fast years. Last night I found similarities between my old life and my new one in the evening, the bed, the out-loud laughing and the summer heat; but more than that, I felt differences. Oh-my-freaking-God. I am married. I am a mother. I am beholden to my husband and my babies and a mortgage company.

I am happy. There's no doubt about that. My days have more dimensions than they ever have before. Each moment is heavy with consequence. But selfishly happy I am not. I can't imagine I ever will be again.

The days of lightness are stuck in my head but I can't feel them. There's no mellow flow of air raising goosebumps on my arm. Outside, the grass clippings settle beneath the moon but do not release the cooled-earth scent I used to inhale.

But that's okay. Like the Bible and the Byrds say, there's a season for all of it. And as long as Ms. Evanovich keeps churning out the funny, I'll continue laughing right along.

The Rest of Us

Yesterday we attended the funeral service for great aunt Sonia at the Russian Orthodox church of which she'd been a member for most of her adult life. The building was onion-domed on the outside; inside, it was all gold, crystal and the most ornate of wood paneling. There were shimmer paintings of the saints on walls and images of them on stained glass. The air was so thick from incense that it reminded everyone just how tenuous the connection is between properly functioning lungs and this mortal earth. I sat in the back, closest to the doors, where I hoped to gasp in some of the morning's fresh, rain-bedazzled air.

The casket at a Russian Orthodox funeral is traditionally open. That's what I assume, anyway, based on the sight of aunt Sonia's pancaked features turned up toward the ceiling as she rested on a pillow beneath a cloud of incense for the duration of the ceremony. "Give rest to your servant fallen asleep," the priest repeated as he swung the golden canister of burning ash in sweeping arcs around the casket, like a yo-yo in the hands of the most experienced entertainer. Everything was in threes. "Fallen asleep. Your servant fallen asleep." Our Father, who art in heaven. And again, and again.

I don't know that we cried, any of us. I know we looked at aunt Sonia in repose and thought how strange was this quiet. We tugged at our skirt hem, or adjusted our pants, or patted our hair. She would not have been impressed. We knew that. That's why her silence was so odd--the voice was still in our heads.

During the eulogy, the priest told us that aunt Sonia had trouble accepting the world for what it is. She had trouble accepting people for what they are. Flawed. And I thought that this priest hit the coffin nail on the head. He also told us she was the church's second oldest parishioner. She knew so much and she shared that knowledge. It was true, too. She was not all good or bad. When she was part of this world she was flawed just like the rest of us.

Afterward, our family lingered together in the game of catch-up we play only upon death. It's so good to see you. I'm sorry it had to be under these circumstances. We ate together. We exchanged email addresses and promises.

Even as we talked about someday having a real family reunion (it's not too late, said cousin Cindy, optimistically) we all knew that the next funeral would come first.

And we are scared, lazy and helpless, knowing there will be one less soul in attendance.

The Russian Sisters

Yesterday my uncle found great aunt Sonia, age 99, dead on her kitchen floor. It was my mother's brother's weekly routine to check on their spinster aunt. Aunt Sonia had lived alone for her entire life--to the very end, as it happened.

She kept herself impeccably. Her makeup and its application was old, not cakey so much as thick and iridescent. She used to be a cosmetologist. On her head were platinum curls. She smelled of perfume dabbed on from the same bottle, one finger at a time, over fifty years. She had wattles under her chin and both arms. She was not soft, though; there was venom and pride in all her angles, all her words.

My uncle arrived at the house on Sunday and considered going straight to the garage to give her big, blue boat of an unused car a start, as was his custom. Instead, he went to the back door. He let himself in. He walked into the kitchen, where she was lifeless in a nightgown. He told my mother later that it was a good thing he hadn't gone to start the car first. Those were the emotions talking, because reality stated she'd been dead for at least a day, maybe a day and a half. Aunt Sonia could've waited five more minutes.

My mom was no more ruled by rational thought. "I can't believe she's gone," she told me.

"What do you mean?" I honestly wanted to know. Did my mother mean she was struck suddenly by the passage of time, by a long life no longer, by the unbelievable inevitability of death? Or did she mean what I thought she might?

"I mean, I can't believe it. She was not supposed to die, ever."

So I was right. My mother was not being philosophical. My mother was in denial. But as strange as it sounded, I think I understand. Probably we all do, those of us who knew aunt Sonia. Somewhere along the line we came to believe what we had always joked about: "Only the good die young."

My grandmother went first. She was Nadezda. Her name meant hope. Vera died next; she was faith. Then Anna and Olga.

Sonia meant wisdom. She was the last to go.


___

Sleeping Soundly, With Thanks

I spent today celebrating Veteran's Day with my family as my mother was awarded the Connecticut Veteran's Wartime Service Medal, along with a host of veterans from all the wars since WWII, at a ceremony in my hometown. She was a soldier (stateside) in the Women's Army Corps during the Vietnam era.

It was a moving day that I would write about in more detail if didn't end so late.

For now, I will sleep on it--gratefully.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

~Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865, second inaugural address

'Tis Better to Give Than to Receive...Or Something Like That

Every year, my mother-in-law picks out a day planner from the catalogs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Then she tells my husband which one she's selected so he can buy it as part of his Christmas gift to her.

They've always done it this way in The Partner's family. There are very few surprises under the Christmas tree as each member tells the others exactly what he or she wants, sometimes right down to the SKU. They're also big believers in tradition. My mother-in-law has been receiving her day planner for almost fifteen years. His father has unwrapped a Tour de France DVD and calendar for 7 years, except for last Christmas, when he informed us in advance that he was boycotting the DVD on account of the American doping fiasco.

Personally, I find variety makes for a more spicy existence. But I've learned to accept his family's way of doing things and even to embrace it. Until this year.

At our last visit to his parents' house, The Partner found a bag on the nightstand next to the guest bed in which we sleep. Inside that bag was a day planner. Not only had his mother made this year's gift selection, but she'd actually gone ahead and purchased it for him.

I was incredulous. "She bought it herself? And gave it to you to give back to her at Christmas?"

"Yeah." The Partner's eyes and mouth were set to sheepish. "I tried to give her money for it but she wouldn't take it."

"Are you kidding me?"

"No."

And I thought my family was weird.

The Eyes Have It

I have uniquely bad vision. I am not one of the people who can walk into a well stocked optician's office and walk out with a pair of contact lenses. Mine are always special order. I don't have much in the way of natural eyesight.

I've been through a host of eye doctors due to changes in geography. I am always amused by their reactions as they get the first inkling of just how bad things are. My favorite is the one who told me that it's a good thing I wasn't around in prehistoric days, because I would've been eaten by a dinosaur. I call him Dr. Darwin. Then there was today's appointment, when the doctor chuckled that I "have a little bit of nearsightedness." I call him Dr. Hilarious.

It was at this appointment with Dr. Hilarious that I realized another troubling element to my eye situation. Since it is likely that I got my abyssmal vision from my mother, and such things are usually genetic--not to mention passed down from the female--there is a good chance my children will suffer a similar affliction. From now on I have to keep a close eye (ha) on The Boss to see if she starts sitting on top of the television or holding books one inch from her face. Or tripping over her feet because she can't see what's in front of her--that would probably be a good clue, too. It's what happened to me.

My mother still speaks with venom about the pediatrician who repeatedly told her to yell at me for my scatter-brained ways when she kept bringing up to him my clumsiness. Though my mother thought there must be something wrong with someone so completely out of touch with balance, the doctor just figured I was in my own little world and needed to be jolted back to reality every so often. It wasn't until over a year later that she finally took me to an eye doctor who determined I was not only seeing poorly, but I saw single objects in multiples. It was no wonder I was falling all over myself. Though my mother was always the first and the proudest to say that I tripped along to the beat of a different drummer, she knew there had been something a bit extreme about my strange parade.

My main hope is that my children have their father's vision--but in the absence of that, I hope I can uncover any vision issues early so that they can get back to exploring their world with eyes wide open and fully functional.

I have to wonder if my inability to see far is what helped to direct me early on toward books, which I could hold close to my face as they opened up whole new worlds of imagination inside my head. If so, then at least I can justify the trials of my early four-eyed existence that way. I probably wouldn't be the person I am today without my start as the cross-eyed klutz who morphed into a bookworm with Coke bottle glasses.

So, it's not that bad, really. And we all know that it's also not nearly as bad as it could've been. Thank God I wasn't born a cavewoman.

An Introduction to 29

The Boss stayed with my parents this weekend while The Partner and I went up to his old fraternity house. The Partner helped make repairs to the old brownstone mansion (yes, it's a historical treasure, and yes, it's a long, long story how it ended up housing college-aged males year after year). If you are wondering about the extent of its Victorian grandeur, I will say that a few scenes from the movie Age of Innocence were filmed there.

After a day of work, we went out for dinner and then to the old watering hole, wherein we re-enacted the days of yore by getting completely blotto. Who says you can't go home? It was almost like being just-twenty, except that nobody carded us and, if they had, we would've been able to show non-fabricated ID.

The next morning we continued to uphold tradition by calming our roiling stomachs with grease at the breakfast spot two blocks over. There is nothing like a fat omelette after a night of bourbon and Coke. Absolutely nothing. I was giddy with reality in the form of nostalgia.

Today I turn 29. I am home again and will soon be picking up The Boss from her grandparents'. Tomorrow the grind will again be set to daily. I'm content.

It's easy to go back to college for a weekend and to remember the good times. But I know myself better than that. I know that even then I was never satisfied. I could never live in the moment.

I am finally starting to appreciate now. That, I think, is what may very well make these the best years of my life. I didn't take for granted our weekend trip, or the winding ride back through the Hudson River Valley with its quiet, northeastern splendor. The Partner and I came home to a place I am astonished to call ours. I talked for awhile on the phone to a friend I've had since elementary school. After that, I fell asleep right away in a fluffed-out bed beneath a ceiling fan.

I'm not chasing after something like I have been for my entire life. That doesn't mean I've stopped moving, it just means I'm finally at a speed where I can catch the scenery.