Category: Family

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Dock Talk

I’m back in New Hampshire, back from the family visit at the Jersey shore, back to regular internet access.  A sweet tradition with David’s family is gathering on the deck overlooking the bay after dinner to watch the sunset.  Every sunset was wonderful, even if not glorious.

One night while we were there the almost constant wind died and the water reflected every color and nuance of the sky.  We talked about the unusual array of colors and shades and then David’s father said, “When the water is this still, it makes me suspicious.  That’s what I don’t like about lakes.  They just sit there and look at you.”

Ninety-two year old wisdom to ponder.

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Sunset, No Internet

I’m sitting on the curb as I write this, between 84th and 85th Streets on 3d Avenue in Stone Harbor.  This is the annual “shore” trip for David’s family.  His parents’ house is perfectly situated for watching sunsets, but there’s no internet, and the neighbors whose internet we often rely on aren’t here.  So I’m in the one spot I’ve found where I can pick up a bit of signal from some unsecured network, and posting briefly to say, the sunsets have been glorious, and a few days of paying attention to what’s right here, right now, not what’s on the web, is probably a good idea.

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So Much Is Happening

Dusk is full on. It’s Sunday evening and this is my first quiet moment of the weekend. The sun is painting the horizon grey and deep blue against the last yellow light, and the four horses in the pasture are up to their knees in grass. In the last two days I’ve seen Adrienne and Emilio, my mother, father, three sisters, two brothers-in-law, two nephews, two nieces, a grand-nephew and a nephew-in-law. I didn’t see my other brother-in-law John because his father went into the hospital yesterday morning, clearly dying, and John spent the next 24 hours with his family gathered in the deep and transformative process of accompanying a loved one to death’s door.  The door opened.  I have 8 days of work left.  I talked to Eric’s mother and cousin while I watered my gardens when I got home. Eric’s cousin talked about how much better he is when he’s working.  It’s summer now and he teaches, so he’s not as busy as he likes, having so much time makes him “edgy.” I’m about to walk off that edge.  Except it’s not an edge, and it’s not a final door, and I’ve been to that door and I’m still here.  Emilio clearly recognized me when he first saw me yesterday, continually meeting my eyes and smiling as he was passed around among the family sitting in the sun on my sister’s deck.  Does this seem like a lot for one weekend?

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Channels 100 and 17

The tag line for my twitter profile is “I have 140 channels in my brain.”  There is a lot going on in there.

I’ve decided, in the poetry channel of my brain, or maybe it’s a haiku channel, that I’m going to take the haiku posts to 100.  I’m at 98.  Why stop at 100?  I’m not sure. Haiku is a stream in the poetry channel and that’s what the stream is murmuring to me.

In the countdown-to-the-end-of-my-job channel, I’m very aware that I have 17 days of work left.  Seventeen is my favorite number, because it’s attractive (that sloping 7 pointing back towards the 1) it’s a prime number (I love prime numbers though I can’t explain why) and mostly because 17 was John Havlicek’s shirt number when he played for the Celtics during my childhood.  My father was, and still is, an avid Celtics fan, and I grew up watching them play.  Havlicek was handsome and brilliant and captivated me.  I was twelve on April 15, 1965 when I got to listen live to one of the most famous play-by-play calls in NBA history, when Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most exclaimed “Havlicek steals it! Havlicek stole the ball!” after Havlicek intercepted an inbound pass to clinch the Eastern Conference Championship against the Philadelphia 76ers.

I have since moved in and out of being a sports fan of various sorts, and since Eric died, have been out of that zone.  The sports channels are more or less dormant.  But I’ve always hung on to number 17, and can still remember the thrill of a stolen basketball, a clutch play, an over-the-top excited sports announcer’s voice rumbling out of the radio, perfect awareness of a perfect moment.   Humming in channel 17.

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Family

I’m out of my usual routine, in Tennessee since yesterday afternoon for Marianna’s (Sam’s fiancée) graduation from Law School.  Adrienne and Matt and Emilio arrived today, and we had lunch at Sam and Marianna’s house with her parents and sisters.  It was the first time we’d met her family, and it was a lively yet relaxing early afternoon on the porch, with the main item of discussion being who would get to hold Emilio next.

So, no haiku yesterday or today, and really, ever since reading Adrienne’s most recent post about being a mother, about her own little family, I’ve been thinking there is nothing I could post right now that would be anymore right on about where I’m at — in the middle of family and loving it.

Click here and enjoy — it features a photo of the amazing Emilio too:  http://barnardbabyblog.tumblr.com/post/5360037730/4-months

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Mother’s Day

I recently listened to my daughter answer a friend’s question about what it’s like to be a new mother.  “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said, without hesitating.

“Ah, yes,” I thought, remembering all the times I’ve said the same thing.

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Coffee Shop

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I’m in a coffee shop in Madison with cappuccino, wi-fi and time.  This is a place I often imagine myself and hardly ever really experience.  In my imagined life I have boundless time to sit in a cafe and be creative, or read, or just watch the life of whatever city I’m visiting move through.

Coming to Madison this weekend for a visit with David’s family, I thought maybe I could make it happen, I could actually get to a coffee shop with some open time and sit and read and write and just be.  And here I am.

But the path here is not what I expected, though this particular cafe is playing the role well. It’s an independent coffee shop (Starbucks just doesn’t work for this particularly fantasy) with interesting cards, a bucket of slogan buttons by the cash register, coffee accessories, and a fairly spectacular railing for the upstairs seating area — circles of metals and looping silver chains, the kind of repeating and swirling patterns I draw myself when I doodle.

Sam called yesterday with unexpected news.  Marianna has been offered a job in Tennessee, so their planned move to Boston for Sam to go to BC graduate school may be taking a 180 degree reverse turn.  We talked twice yesterday, as they’re trying to sort out what their best move is, how real is this offer, what does this do to Sam’s plans, just simply, what should they do?

Early this morning I heard my phone buzzing.  I got up to check to see who had called. Natalie, Eric’s mother, was in the hospital last week and is now in a rehab facility, and I wanted to be sure it wasn’t someone from Connecticut calling.  It was Sam and Marianna.  I tried going back to sleep but couldn’t.  David was still sleeping, so I left the room to call them back.

“Guess what?” Sam said.  “I won a 37 foot, two bedroom camper trailer in a raffle!”  He and Marianna are camping with her father at a music festival, and Sam bought two tickets for a charity raffle.  And then won.

“Do you and David want it?”  David and I do talk a lot about our plans to take off and travel the country, teardrop trailer in tow.  Sam wanted to be sure we didn’t want to amend our vision of what will be following our VW Passat wagon.  “I really don’t know what to do with it.”

And isn’t that just what life is?  Right turn swerves, then left turn swerves, tumbling chances and changes.  We’re in Madison because we’d planned to come to a family wedding here and then that fell apart, but a good number of the wedding guests came anyway and there was a wonderful gathering of lively and interesting people last night.  Sam and Marianna were moving to NH in two weeks, to spend the summer with David and me before moving to Boston.  Now they may be staying in Tennessee.  I was planning to spend the rest of my life with Eric and then he died.  Now I’m in the big, interesting life of another man and in places I never expected to be.

Like Madison.  Except for a long time I’ve expected to be in this coffee shop.

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Passover

A determined robin is singing outside, the notes coming through the windows that look out on another gray day.  “April is the cruelest month,” has come to mind often in the last 24 hours.  I’d envisioned these few days off around Passover as sunny and warm, days in the yard gardening, sitting in the sun drinking coffee, gathering with friends for a relaxed Passover celebration.

I woke up to a churning gut and head yesterday, Erev Pesach, the day before the beginning of Passover at sundown.  It was cloudy and cold and windy, making work outside uncomfortable.  With cooking to do for the seder last night, I turned to inside work and tried to focus my attention on making recipes out of Joyce Goldstein’s Cucina Ebraica, a wonderful collection of Italian Jewish recipes.

But the dozens of wheels floating in the air above my head (many thanks to David for this right-on image) just keep whirring, nothing touching down and able to get traction.  When I finally sat down to have some lunch, I found tears more than anything else coming up, and when I looked behind the churning and preoccupation that I was somehow “dithering away” this precious time off, I found grief.  As I often do when I look behind whatever is bothering me.

There, as soon as I recognized it, were all the years of Passover seders with Eric, and the five Passovers he’s missed since he died.  Grief is so sneaky and unpredicable — abating for months at a time, anniversaries of numerous events going by smoothly one year, then slamming me with a “ball to the head” (and thanks to Adrienne for that right-on image) the next year.

Mostly yesterday I keep seeing Eric the last Passover he was alive.  He’d been diagnosed with the metastatic cancer by then, and we’d missed the family seder in Connecticut, and had no capacity for the big seder with friends we’d planned for that weekend.  Eric was just home from the hospital on Saturday, and we had a small seder — Eric, Adrienne and Matt, and Sam and Rachel, his then girlfriend, and me.  Eric sat at the head of the table and told stories about Passover, about the mitzvah of retelling the story every year of the Jew’s liberation from slavery in Egypt, in the same order, “seder” in Hebrew.

It was one of the last times Eric was up at the table, eating with us.  His illness was vicious and swift.  The next year his mother and I skipped Passover all together, unable to imagine the holiday without him,

Now I’m trying to create new traditions, and now there’s a grandson who’ll soon be old enough to start learning Passover stories.  Last night the seder with friends was lovely — a lively reading of the haggadah, the Passover story, friendly discussions and reconnections, delicious food.  Today I’ll go out in the grey and pull the gardening wheel out of the sky and force it onto the ground, getting some traction with earth and compost and the first seeds breaking through the soil.

Tonight David and I have decided to read each other poems as our own, second night seder.  Folding up one set of traditions, we’re unfolding new ones.

I think I’ll read the begining of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Image courtesy of http://thesmartlyanonymous.com/

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Shehechiyanu

“Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Ha-Olam Shehehchiyahnu vekiyamanu vehegianu lazman ha-zeh,” I recited to myself, when I came out on to the back deck, the first morning this year it’s been warm enough to sit in the sun and drink my cappuccino.  David shoveled the snow off the deck yesterday, just so we could do this, knowing the forecast was for a sunny day, wanting to be out here without our feet in snow.

What is the Shehechiyanu blessing, and what does it mean?  Literally, it means “blessed are You, our God, Ruler of the universe, who has kept us alive, and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.”

The Shehechiyanu is a Jewish blessing that thanks God for bringing us to a moment of joy and renewal in our lives.  It’s way to stop and cherish a moment, particularly in the cycle of time we experience as our lives move with the rhythm of seasons and yearly holidays and events.  The Shehechiyanu is recited on Jewish holidays, when a ritual is observed for the first time during a year, or for the first time in a person’s life, or when something happens for the first time in the year.

Besides saying the Sheheckiyanu at holidays and festivals, Eric always recited the blessing the first time he went kayaking in a new year, at the first snowfall, the first cross country ski, the first fresh peas from the garden, the first swim in Squam Lake, the first fresh corn, any moment that was a blessing to be able to experience again.  And how right he was to celebrate all those moments of return and renewal, because he got fewer than the normal share, living a relatively short life.

Two weeks ago Emilio was named in our Temple, and he was given Eric’s Hebrew name — Yedidya.  Friend of God.  The Rabbi had asked Adrienne and Matt to talk about the person Emilio was named for, and what traits they hope Emilio will carry into the world from him.  Adrienne talked about a number of Eric’s traits she hopes Emilio will have, but she also talked about how she hopes Emilio will live his life.  “When my father was very sick, he said, ‘If I have to die, I know I’ve had a good life.  I have no regrets.’  I wish that for Emilio,” Adrienne said.  “That he’ll live a life that will allow him to look back and have no regrets.”

Celebrating moments of blessing and renewal is a path to such a life.

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Big Moon

There’s a big moon coming tonight, a 20 year moon, a super perigee moon.  From the NASA website:

“Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee). Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon’s orbit.

Super Full Moon (movie strip, 550px) 

Above: Perigee moons are as much as 14% wider and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons. [video]

“The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee–a near-perfect coincidence1that happens only 18 years or so.”

I drive east when I drive home from work, so I often see the moon rising, huge and yellow shining through the trees on the horizon.  Though I’ve always noticed how big the rising moon looks, with objects on the horizon as a size reference, I’ve never fully understood why, and assumed I could look up the answer some day.  But the NASA website goes on to say, “The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects.”

Regardless of whatever information I have in my mind, the moon tonight is bound to be beautiful.  And it’s Sam’s birthday, so I can’t help but think this big moon is here today to say, “Happy 25th Birthday, Sam!”