Fifty-seven

Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She died on May 7, 1991 at the age of fifty-seven. I will be fifty-seven next year. I will breathe a sigh of relief when I turn fifty-eight. There will be something to surviving my fifty-seventh year. I’m not normally superstitious, but I’ll admit – fifty-seven freaks me out a bit.

I am so young (I think I am!) and healthy (my doctor says I am!). I’m sure my mother felt the same. What am I doing to protect myself from the perils of fifty-seven? I quit smoking on the day my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cold turkey. Watching your mother waste away in M.D. Anderson Hospital is the best cure for kicking the smoking habit I’ve found. Forget the patch, I’ve discovered a better way. My husband quit with me. (He also stopped riding his motorcycle after my brother died in a motorcycle accident, but that’s another story.) I see my doctor regularly, not waiting and worrying, and putting it off like mother did. How long did she have the big C before she sought medical treatment? Her last excuse was she didn’t want to ruin Christmas. She went to the doctor after the first of January and was dead by May 7th. Four months of hell.

Perhaps she knew and was afraid to face it. Of course she knew. Part of me wants to be mad at her. Mad at her for leaving me, leaving my daughters, leaving my father, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, the great-grandchildren she would one day have. But you can’t get mad at my mother; she was too nice, too kind, too gentle.

She shouldn’t have smoked. She began at an impossibly young age and smoked a lot, refusing to believe the Surgeon General’s warning applied to her. Doctors used to say it was good for you to smoke. She even switched to menthol cigarettes when she had a cold or a sore throat. She said the menthol was soothing.

She was a nicotine addict. She was fifty-seven. She was my mother. I miss her.

I’ll be fifty-seven next year.

Sight

It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Big Red restored my vision; she’s been helping me to see for a long time.

On what would have been her 105th birthday my Uncle Steve, the executor of her estate, made a cash distribution to her heirs. We were all grateful and surprised by the unexpected gift. On a family e-mail several of my cousins, aunts and uncles commented on what they were going to do with the boon. There was talk of reupholstering dining room chairs and buying new shoes. I put my check in the bank. I felt that my always frugal grandmother would have approved.

Right about this time I found out I needed cataract surgery. Health insurance covers the procedure, but not the new corrective lenses that would give me twenty-twenty vision, something I have not had since I was nine years old. What to do? I didn’t have several thousand dollars just sitting around the house, but I did have my benefaction from Big Red. Thinking about using her money to restore my vision brought back a memory and made me smile.

When I first went to live with her in my junior year of college I was wearing the old-fashioned hard contact lenses. Wearing them was like putting a plastic tiddlywink in one’s eye. Soft contacts had recently come on the market, but were cost prohibitive for me trying to finish school on a budget. After yet another day spent in a dark room with a cold wash cloth over my eyes suffering from a scratched cornea courtesy of the hard lenses Big Red announced she was buying me a pair of soft lenses.

“I promised the Lord that if I won at Bingo I’d give the money to charity and I think your eyes are a good charity,” she said after winning $1,000 the night before at the church hall.

I took her up on her offer. Little did I know that was just the beginning of gaining sight from my beloved grandmother. Over the next thirty-plus years she taught me how to look at the world. I learned to see my life, my home, my family, my friends, my career as she would have seen them. I’ve asked myself on many an occasion, how would Big Red do this, handle this, react to this. I became a better person by examining things through her eyes.

She is gone, but she is still giving me sight – both literally and figuratively. I now have twenty-twenty vision afforded because of her monetary legacy and I have the gift of her love and her example for how to live my life. Sight is a wonderful thing.

Fire

I’m still having a difficult time wrapping my mind around Courtney and Evelyn’s fire experience. This morning I recalled a stage Courtney went through as a child where she was scared to death that we would have a house fire. Perhaps it was from a fire safety program at her school or from something she saw on television, but she was nearly panicked over the idea that our house would burn to the ground. Her fear, which at the time I found absolutely unrealistic, nearly came to fruition a quarter of a century later in her own home.

The fire in her apartment building began on the fourth floor, but she had no way of knowing this when the smoke alarm in her sixth floor apartment went off. She grabbed only her cell phone and entered a smoke filled hallway with her three month old daughter, my granddaughter, Evelyn.

This was on Monday so Courtney was at home with Evelyn. Had it been Tuesday or Thursday Evelyn would have been home with my niece, Taylor, the nanny and Courtney would have been at Columbia University finishing her final month of law school. But it was a Monday and Courtney was in her bathrobe breastfeeding Evelyn when their recently replaced smoke alarm began beeping.

I can only imagine the thoughts that went through my daughter’s mind at that time: annoyance, disbelief, and panic, followed by a mother’s instinct to save her child. She put her palm to the front door feeling for heat, there was none, so she exited and made her way down a stairway so dark with smoke she fell once on her hip, still protecting her child. The fifth floor was smokier than the sixth, but not knowing where the fire was she didn’t know where to go. She somehow managed to open a window in the hallway and hold Evelyn to it so she could breathe fresh air. And then my soft-spoken daughter screamed louder than she thought she could for help until New York’s finest firefighters burst onto the fifth floor, ran them down the remaining flights of stairs and into an ambulance for the hospital.

Fortunately they were not physically injured. Courtney is hoarse and is coughing up soot. Evelyn’s pediatrician gave her a clean bill of health and assured Courtney that the baby will have no traumatic memories of the fire. When Courtney was able to phone me after she was released from the hospital she kept repeating, “I thought Evelyn was going to die.” How does a parent recover from that? How does a grandparent, on the other side of the country, recover from that? I can’t close my eyes without imagining what horrors Courtney experienced in the few minutes between the smoke alarm sounding and the ambulance doors closing. I know she will never be able to forget it.

She has learned the toughest lesson of motherhood. Try as we will we can’t be sure of our children’s safety. We have to protect them and let them gradually make their way in the world. There will be illness and the first day of school and driver’s education classes and dates with boys in cars and going off to college. I pray that she never experiences anything worse than this horrific fire. I am sorry she had to learn this lesson so soon and so traumatically. I am not there now to hug them, but I will be soon. In the meantime I am saying I love you more often and giving more hugs to those who are near to me. I hope everyone does the same.

The Sewing Machine

The Sewing Machine

After searching stores and the internet for the perfect curtains for my kitchen and utility room I gave up and decided to make them myself. Believe it or not, it was sort of fun. I don’t sew often. In fact, I sew so little that I almost sold my sewing machine in the great-purge-of-2011 garage sale. My father bought the machine for me when I was in junior high school. He bought it from someone he knew who either owned a pawn shop, or had a connection to someone who did. I think he paid a whopping thirty-five dollars for it, but for someone as frugal as my father that was a dear price.

I was taking sewing in my Home Economics class at the time and the adage, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” was certainly applicable. The first sewing project I undertook on my new sewing machine was to re-make a pair of my father’s U.S. Navy white bell bottoms I found in his ancient footlocker in the closet under the stairs. The entire fashion foray was a frustrating fiasco. I remember staying up half the night (I wanted to wear them to school the next day) sewing and seam ripping and trying on and crying and cussing. My parents had gone to bed hours before and I cussed an adolescent blue streak, damning both the bell bottoms and the sewing machine straight to hell.

I never succeeded in re-fashioning those Navy issued bell bottoms, but I learned more in that sewing all-nighter than I learned in the whole semester of Home-Ec. I learned one must be patient to be a good seamstress. I learned following a pattern is easier than trying to wing it. I learned you cannot re-size a pair of pants just by taking in the seams. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned that night was my parents were willing to let Miss Know It All make her own mistakes without saying, “I told you so.”

As frustrating as that first experience was I grew to love sewing on that old machine. I made clothes, cute clothes, from Simplicity and Butterick and Vogue tissue paper patterns. I made most of my college wardrobe following the fashion advice from Seventeen Magazine. The old machine followed me into my married life and I made maternity clothes and matching “sister dresses” that miraculously didn’t warp my daughters’ fashion sense.

I’m still using that old machine. Last night I made curtains out of a lightweight white canvas duck cloth that was ironically similar to the fabric in that long ago bell bottom debacle. Thank you Daddy, for giving me much more than a second-hand sewing machine all those years ago. You gave me the confidence to try new things – even if I didn’t know what I was doing. You taught me to keep trying even when I failed the first time. And, most importantly, I knew you always believed in me. Not bad for a thirty-five dollar investment.

Grandmothers

My oldest daughter celebrated her birthday last month. It is hard for me to realize that thirty-one years have passed since I gave birth to my firstborn. It is even harder to believe that a little over a month ago she gave birth to her firstborn. Thirty-one years ago I was twenty-four years old and clueless about being clueless when it came to babies. I thought I was prepared to be a mother up until the point when the nurses let me leave the hospital with my newborn. What were they thinking? We knew nothing about babies, especially this bald, big-eyed one who could twist my heart with a whimper.

The drive home from the hospital was like driving through a Bosnian mine field, there was danger everywhere. I now saw the other drivers for the idiots my father always swore they were. I couldn’t depend on traffic signals to stop the flow of oncoming cars, and even pedestrians presented peril. Were the doors locked? The elderly woman waiting to cross the street could be a crazed babynapper.

Once home I had no idea what to do with this baby of mine. Should I put her in her crib, her bassinette, her infant seat? Unable to make a decision of this magnitude I think I just held her for two days until my mother arrived. My mother, who was now a grandmother (at the ripe old age of forty-seven), knew what to do with a baby and I learned from her. Or, so I thought.

Having just been through the new grandmother experience myself, I think I can say with some authority that we grandmothers don’t know much more about babies than the new mothers. It’s been too long, and believe it or not, things change. Oh, babies don’t change – they are still cute and helpless and smell like sweet milk, and pee and poop and spit up, but their care and handling changes.

While sitting in the obstetrician’s waiting room during my daughter’s last pre-delivery appointment I read an article in a parenting magazine that reinforced just how much things have changed in thirty years. Babies now sleep on their backs. In the olden days they had to sleep on their stomachs. Dear God, if I don’t even know the fundamentals how am I going to help my daughter through the new-baby-at-home-stage like my mother helped me? Were things this different for my mother when she was my new baby salvation? I committed the rest of the doctor’s office magazine article to memory and reminded myself that my daughter was much smarter and surely more baby savvy than I had been as a first time mother.

Then it was her turn to wonder why she was allowed to leave the hospital with her infant daughter. The new parents and precious newborn arrived at their New York apartment via a taxicab. (I can only imagine the horror of that ride home from the hospital.) I was there waiting for them, waiting to be the arms of experience and knowledge for my daughter to pass her daughter into. How did I pull it off? I did what my own mother had done over thirty years ago. I took my granddaughter into my arms and silently vowed we would get through this together, and then proceeded to pretend I knew what I was doing.

Progress Report or I Promise I'm Not Hiding Under the Bed

Art Museum in San Angelo, Texas

Last night was San Angelo’s third Thursday Art Walk. I really, really wanted to go, but I did not want to go by myself. My husband’s work schedule is such that I never know when he will walk through the door in the evening. After thirty-two years of marriage I’ve gotten used to being fairly flexible when it comes to planning and I’ve never shied away from going out on my own. But circumstances feel different in a new town where I don’t yet have friends I can count on seeing when I solo.

I made myself a deal: If my husband didn’t get home in time to go on the Art Walk I would stay in and have a glass of wine with Dr. Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory) instead. Fortunately, I was spared my virtual date and had the pleasure of a real date with my spouse.

Our first stop was a new studio, Art in Uncommon Places, where I had the pleasure of meeting the owners. These two women are literally changing the face of San Angelo with their creativity. I got to see a mosaic mural in progress that will soon adorn one of the bridges near the Concho River. I also learned of other public art installations planned for their work. Being in their studio, talking to them, inspired in me such a rush of creativity I am inspired to get back to work on my own projects.

At another stop we enjoyed a glass of wine and listened to live music. While there I met one of the owners of the wine bar, eavesdropped on a conversation about a yoga studio, and realized I had met the performing singer the day before while in line at Office Depot (one of the joys of living in a small town).

Our last stop of the evening was the cosmic culmination of the night. At a gallery/wine bar (yes, another wine bar) with live music and open mike night, we enjoyed a glass of our favorite local wine (Christoval Vineyards Tempranillo) and listened to a very talented bar patron sing songs by Paul Simon, The Beatles, and Neil Young. Then the stars aligned and who should come into the bar? The singer from the previous bar and the yoga conversation woman. We enjoyed more dialogue and discovered we all live in the same neighborhood and have similar interests.

I’m meeting people. I’m not hiding under the bed

Apologies to Dr. Sheldon Cooper for standing him up.

Home

So here I am, back in my new town trying to get on a schedule after a month and a half away. I didn’t really have an opportunity to settle in to my new home before I left. The house is a mess, not even fully unpacked from the move (or even my trip). There are many remodeling and renovation projects yet to do. I still need to learn my way around town. I still need to meet the neighbors. I still need to make some friends. I want to find a place to volunteer, to exercise, to get my nails done, to shop. The dogs need a vet and I need a housekeeper and a contractor. If I let myself think about it all I get a little overwhelmed.

Perhaps I should focus on the positives. I’m here. I’m reunited with the man I can’t stand to be away from after living apart for over a year. I have a doctor, a dentist, a pharmacy and a drycleaner. I found someone to cut my hair. I met some wonderful women and hopefully new friends in the extended learning class. I took the extended learning class. I have affiliated with my local political party. I joined the museum. I discovered the river walk. I went to a wine tasting at an awesome wine bar. I found a great place to listen to live music. I found a place to have a glass of wine at four o’clock in the afternoon while contemplating buying art. I’ve eaten at several really good restaurants. I met another newcomer and we’ve enjoyed several outings. I learned about The Chicken Farm Art Center and attended one of their first Saturday events. I went on the third Thursday art walk in November. I’ve had houseguests twice. I’ve gone to garage sales and estate sales and antiques stores. I went to the mall. I have a workable home office. I guess I’m doing okay.

After hearing that I had signed up for an evening class at the local university one of my best friends commented that if she were me she probably wouldn’t have left the house yet. That comment brought on thoughts of how much easier it would be to just hide under the bed all day or sit on the couch and watch bad reality television on Bravo until my husband came home from work and announced that this move was just a joke and we were going home. But I am here and this will work. No more “Housewives of Anywhere” marathons, no more episodes of “Hoarders,” no more hiding under the bed. I’ve got things to do, people to meet, and a housekeeper to find.