That Vision Thing

I spent many years of my life squinting, so when I started to go blind, it sort of snuck up on me. Several years ago, though, I began to realize that my eyesight was reaching Mr. Magoo proportions, and I visited an optometrist. It was one of those awful medical visits where what you assume is going to happen (“Everything is fine, you just need a new prescription, nothing to worry about”) instead turns into a series of longer and longer waits, with rooms and equipment that you didn’t even know were there. By the time I made it to the final consulting room and the doctor flipped open a thick file folder, I was ready for the worst.

My optometrist was a cheery sort, though, a firm believer in the “it could be worse” school of medicine. First she told me that I didn’t have a brain tumor or a degenerative disease. By the time she got around to mentioning that I had  advanced cataracts, which would require two spaced surgeries that would pretty take up most of summer, I felt like I had won the lottery. No brain tumor, yippee!

She hustled me out of the office, and I made it to the car before the reality sunk in, but by then I was the surgeon’s problem, not hers. And of course, she was right. It really is great to see, and once I got through the surgery, and the recovery, and that weird six weeks where I had one good eye and one bad eye, and the fact that I couldn’t do yoga for three months, I was happy. 

As my husband said, after mentioning my lifelong reading addiction and childhood fondness for gobbling up the latest Nancy Drew under the covers with a flashlight, I had probably used my eyes well over the average amount for a human, and they just ran out of warranty. Now I have new, artificial equipment, and while it’s not always as good as the original stuff, I’ve tried to cope with the ensuing difficulties.

The complications are like those in a twisted fairy tale, one where I manage just fine in the day, but become an old crone in the darkness. My new reality is that I am struck blind when I move from one extreme of light to the other – from, say, a well-lit hallway to a darkened theater. (That I would prefer to spend most of my life in a darkened theater is an irony that has not been lost to me.) I have already embarrassed myself in the Southwest High School Theater more times than I care to recall, designed as it was by someone who seemed to relish that dramatic switch from high to low light, plus a lot of small, unevenly spaced steps that seem to spring out at odd angles for the fumbling foot. I’m sure many of my fellow parents at school think of me as “that mother of Emma the cellist and Mary the actress, the one who secretly drinks and stumbles quite a lot.”

Another problem I encounter is that I have a very hard time seeing straight down, as when, say, I encounter a flight of steps. I have difficulty making out where the next step separates from the one before, a challenge that I felt very keenly last year during our trip to Beijing, a city which believes that one 20-watt bulb is sufficient to light any stairwell, and which seems to view banisters as a capitalist tool. When I returned from China with both my legs unbroken, I considered it a minor miracle.

As anyone who has any disability can attest, there are great big gaps for learning to grow, in between all those broken places. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that I don’t really have a disability at all, just an inconvenience. I can still drive and read and write and walk the dog and do yoga, and that’s plenty of life for me. I have a deeper sympathy for the elderly and the lame. Whenever the lights go out, I’m one of them.

I do wish that what ails me didn’t feed so directly into my many anxieties, especially my desire to attract as little attention to myself as possible. That back-of-the-class mentality is in direct contrast to the stir I create when I’m creeping down to my seat in the dark, grasping at upholstery and occasionally somersaulting. I tell myself that it’s a great lesson in humility, but I’ve also learned that I generally hate great lessons.

My weakness teaches me plenty about other people, too. One thing I’ve learned is that everyone I know is blind, or deaf, or both. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I try to offhandedly mention, “I might take some time here; I have some trouble with the darkness,” it’s pointless. No one gets it, everyone just sighs, loudly. If I had a crutch or a bandage, maybe that would help. But maybe not.

I worked on a project last year with a customer who had a groovy space downtown, a building with slow elevators and dim stairwells. My client, a wiry and brisk woman, loved to take the stairs two flights up and down to our usual conference room, which would have been fine if I could have seen anything after stepping out of her bright office space, which I couldn’t. My entire experience of the project seems to be tied up in my terror that I would move too slowly and keep her waiting, which she seemed loathe to do.

Mentioning the word “surgery” isn’t much of an option, because I invariably get the “yeah, I had Lasik, too” response. I will confess that I hate to utter the word cataracts, because it sounds like something that an 80-year-old would discuss. Still, I feel like I’m 80, sometimes, and I suppose I’ll be relieved when my body’s chronological age matches that of my eyes, and everyone expects me to dodder.

As the years have passed, I have come to dread my Minnesota winters, with darkness descending at five p.m., and an icy patch for every footfall. This year, though, I have received a winter blessing from an unexpected source – straight from Paris, actually. Our exchange student, Hugo, is, I have mentioned before, a large and sturdy fellow, one who played defensive end for the Lakers this season with a maximum of well, defensiveness. I once described the experience of hugging him as akin to snuggling up to a flying buttress at Notre Dame.

Thanks to Hugo, I’ve been getting through this winter with a little bit more grace. He offers his steady arm to me on every dark journey that we take together, and I’ve learned to cling to him with rare assurance. My family long ago lost patience with me and my snail-like speed. If I ask for an arm to lean on, they generally can’t stop themselves from pulling me along, just a bit. Come on, already, what are you, blind?

Hugo never pulls. He matches his pace to mine, no matter how slowly I need to proceed. Last Sunday, we were going to an AFS Potluck, and he was maneuvering me up a sidewalk that was flanked by incredibly dark and scratchy bushes, creating even more shade. I was worried about a patch of concrete that changed shades too abruptly. I stopped short. “Is that a step?” “No,” he said gently, and stepped ahead, just a bit, to show me. On the way out, after the dinner was over, I found myself stopping at the same place. My eyes would just not let me go forward. Here is what he did not do – sigh, walk away or yank at me. Here is what he did do – show me, once again, that I wasn’t going to fall down if I stepped forward. So I did.

During our Christmas travels, we spent an evening at the house of some college friends of my husband. The evening was more “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” than “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but whatever. (Those board games can get pretty nasty in Oak Park). I was tired when we left, and happy to see that letter jacket of Hugo’s in my peripheral vision. He held out his arm and we stepped onto the porch.

We took one step, and then I stopped, assessing a patch of ice and wondering if my eyes would tell me where my foot should land. I began to wonder if these people were Communists – the steps were as bannister-free and scary as Beijing. The husband of the couple began to heckle me from his spot at the front porch: “What’s the matter with you? What are you, blind? My mother-in-law goes down those stairs faster!”

I looked up at Hugo. Part of me wanted to turn back, to tell this sneering creep that I was, indeed, blind, and also, let’s face it, afraid of the dark. Perhaps I should have asked Hugo to trot back and offer him a Knuckle Sandwich, La Courneuve style.  But I just looked up into Hugo’s eyes, and saw nothing but patience, nothing but care. We could stand there all night on that step, and that man behind us could keep mocking me, but Hugo would not let me go.  And, knowing that, I hugged his arm more tightly, and we made it down the stairs, together.

Shoes Before Breakfast

Mary Katherine has been expanding her French language repertoire of late. Her favorite phrase, “Cinq minutes, Hugo!” is currently being performed at 8:00 a.m. each schoolday, delivered with jazz-hands-level energy from the top of the kitchen steps. When she’s feeling extra sassy, she drops in an exasperated “Allez!” She waits for a Gallic grunt of acknowledgement from below, then finishes her Cheerios and starts getting the Mary & Hugo Show (or “Hewgz,” as she’s now calling him) on the road.

While her high school incarnation has a morning style that leans toward Lucy Van Pelt’s, Hugo is all Linus at 8 a.m., expressing pure, childlike amazement at the smallest things, and some not so small. His feet, for example. For several mornings running, he has appeared at the top of the stairs and stared down at those stockinged size 11s in astonishment. “Mes chaussures!” he exclaims, and turns tail downstairs to fetch the Vans. Meanwhile, Mary foot-taps and sighs at the back door, while I nurse my coffee and muse over the unique quality of the kitchen's lighting, which seems to reveal the unshod nature of feet so effectively.

It was while we were waiting for Hugo’s re-emergence last week that Mary Katherine dug into her endless bag of family trivia and reminded me of the “No Breakfast Without Shoes” rule, later amended to the “No Breakfast Without Shoes That Are Completely On Your Feet, Not Just With Your Tippytoes Stuck Into The Tops” rule. Emma argued against the rule every day (“Mom. Mom. Mom. I have something to tell you. Mom. Mom. Mom. What do my feet have to do with eating? Mom. Mom. Mom.”), but I held firm.

The rule, which I realize may seem arbitrary to anyone who never tried to get Emma out the door on time each day, was enacted one cold September morning, after I watched her hop on one foot to the school bus, trailing her other sneaker behind her. Seeing something like that does things to a mother. It was either start drinking gin out of the cat dish, or make the kid put on her shoes before she got to the table.

Mary’s memory triggered a discussion of other bizarre mealtime rules from those early school years. “No Blankets at the Table,” for example, was an edict laid down after the chill of the morning kitchen led Emma to decide that she could cover her head with a blanket, leaving just a tiny slit that would allow her to effectively spoon breakfast into her cozy face space. The resulting calamitous spillage was of Exxon Valdez proportions, and blankets were henceforth banished.

Free speech even took a backseat to the efficiency of morning meals. I laid down a “No Discussion of Hair Color While Eating” dictum because protracted debate over that thrilling subject of black vs. brunette, or yellow vs. blonde, was leading to a marked increased in early morning pop-ups to check out the refrigerator mirror, thus slowing breakfast progress. And what do you mean you don’t have a mirror on your refrigerator? If you don’t stick one there, a girl has to run all the way to the bathroom to check out if one of her eyebrows really is higher than the other, as her sister contends, and that pushes everyone even more precipitously toward tardiness. If mirrors could wear out from overuse, all of the ones in my house would need fresh batteries every week.

I’m sure we’ll settle into a routine that will seem like a piece of cake (or, if Hugo manages to teach us anything, morceau de gâteau) by next spring, but for now, there are still a few kinks in the two-high-schooler system. Mary and Hugo have missed the bus only once (so far), but delay-inducing snow is on the way, so I have some concerns. On the plus side, the two of them don’t seem interested in early-morning debates about hair color, at least so far, and for this, they earn a tired mom’s unending gratitude.

It's a Boy

 

It took me quite some time to get over the shock of being pregnant (and yes, I know there are some who suspect I’ve never quite fully recovered, nigh on these 15 years). But once the initial tumult, hysteria and indignation had died down, I comforted myself with the fact that I knew the baby was a boy. It just seemed to make sense, since Emma, center of my known universe, wanted a brother.  When I was told that I was carrying a girl, I was, well, just a wee bit disappointed. (Translation: they could hear the wails from the sailboats at Lake Harriet.) I’d had it all worked out, and things hadn’t gone according to plan. Welcome to motherhood.

As the years passed, I began to see the lucky break I had gotten in giving birth to Mary Katherine, the world’s most female female (to quote Oscar Hammerstein II). I realized that I would have sucked as the mother of boys, at least sporty ones. (Arty ones who planned to go on to big careers in the American Musical Theater, well, that’s another story.) But as I bought heaps of dress up clothes, hosted nail polish parties and collected the stacks of fashion magazines from the incoming mail, I knew, in my heart, that I was never meant to be a mother of a son.

And then Emma had the brilliant idea that we should be the welcome family for an AFS exchange student this fall. “Fine,” I said, “but you pick the kid. You know my issues.” My issues, specifically, are that if you take me to an animal shelter, I am going to leave with the three-legged, blind, diabetic, pregnant and ugly dog, no doubt about it. And it’s not like I’m all self-righteous about my lack of discretion. I know I’m stupid, but I can’t help myself. 

Emma ran a few kids’ dossiers past me, and I was leaning toward Vipaporn, the girl from Thailand, because my first action upon meeting her would be to tell her that her new American name was Brittany. I thought I could save her. Emma, on the other hand, picked the kid who was in cuisine school in Paris, guess why. And also, he played American football, she told me. You’re the boss, I told her. Just make sure you make up a fresh bed for him.

Enter Hugo. In just about a month, this kid has challenged my memory of high school French, introduced me to the world of angry teachers who talk about failing grades, and, horribly, frightened me half to death with the ambulances that keep showing up at high school football games. He is a massive hunk of towering Gallic stamina. Hugging him is like sidling up to one of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame for a quick snuggle. He has already been the cause of more heartache and worry than our last exchange student, darling Angela, was in her entire nine months with us.

And yet.

He has twin brothers, both mentally handicapped, and just about the first thing he did when we met was to show me little booklets with photos of them. He has shown me pictures of his cat. He worries about his mother, Beatrice, worrying about him, and I think she worries about him worrying about her, and so it goes. What this budding chef can do with an onion is sheer poetry. And to watch him make a threadlike chiffonade of the humble basil leaves I tote in from the garden is, honestly, a thing of beauty. When I tell him that the girls at school are losing their minds over him, he honest-to-God blushes, and he tells me that he thinks he is “too timide” to ask anyone to the homecoming dance.

So, I started rethinking the whole boy thing.

On Friday afternoon, we went to his football game, goofily toting “HU” “GO” signs. It was all fine until the third quarter, when something not-so-good happened between his left arm and someone else’s helmet. Honestly, I thought, as we raced him out of the stadium, I am just not cut out for this. This giant boy was struggling so valiantly, and I found myself, on the ride to Twin Cities Orthopedics (which handily had a doctor right there at the game, handing out business cards!) cradling his head, wiping his tears, and holding his good hand as tightly as I could.

The news was as good as it could be, no break, and we got him home, cleaned him up, and fed him mac and cheese. I felt as if I’d been through a Roller Derby of epic proportions, but he was cheerful at the thought that his season was not finished. A friend told me, “You’re going to have to pace yourself,” and I began to think about how helpful a nice stiff Xanax prescription might be to get me through the rest of the season. Or the rest of the year.

He told me today, “you are my second maman,” and I knew it was true, and I also knew that, despite his handsome visage, I’ve got one heck of a three-legged, blind, diabetic dog on my hands. Still, I hope that I can learn to be the mother of a son in the months to come, because I believe in this boy – in his fierce courage, his unwillingness to back down, his lack of ego and pretense. I see what is noble in him, and in what he loves. Even if I never learn what a first down is, and even if I attend his upcoming games with a rosary in hand and a bottle of Vicodin in my purse, just in case, I know that our time together will be worth the effort.

Allez, Hugo, nombre quarante trois.

Their Thing

It was one of those typical weekend afternoons in a which a playbook, a GPS system and a healthy dose of Ritalin would be required in order to keep up with where everyone had to be, and when. It involved a lot of driving, a lot of talking and, of course, a 13 x 9 potluck dish. And yet it turned into one of those days that, better than any birthday or Christmas celebration, gave me a chance to witness pure delight in each of my girls. So, even taking the potluck into account, it turned out to be worth the effort.

The first leg of the slog involved that now-familiar routine of fetching various teenagers from wherever they happened to have landed that Sunday afternoon, then ferrying them across the river for a climb up those steep stairs to their theater space. Because we needed to head to the next part of our own personal goat rodeo after this effort was complete, I didn’t just drop and dash, but followed them upstairs and tried to melt into the background.

With that particular sort of short-term amnesia that seems common to actors, they squealed and jiggled at the sight of one another, even kids they’d seen just a few hours ago. But all that free-floating energy snapped into place when the director called them to order, introduced them to the choreographer, and got them started learning new steps. Their focus was a surprise to me. I’m used to watching these kids lounge about my house watching reruns of “Awkward” and hitting the pause button every thirty seconds for a sidebar conversation, so it was strange to suddenly observe them as such unwaveringly determined professionals.

When the director interrupted to share some bad news with the cast – a local television station that had been planning to film them that afternoon had canceled because of a hurricane – they handled the setback with a grace and professionalism that I don’t think I could have pulled together on such short notice. They seemed to be thinking not Now I won’t get to be on Live at Five, but Hey, at least we got to learn the new number. With the shoot cancelled, they were told they could leave early, but no one rushed to the door. They doodled around on the piano, sang snatches of lyrics to each other, demonstrated the finer points of the new dance. Sitting in the back, I took the opportunity to look, really look, at Mary Katherine’s face. She was utterly at home, as if, in this rehearsal space, she fit in her own skin in a way that just wasn’t possible anywhere else.

Here, I thought. Here, stuck inside on a beautiful day, with someone playing the piano and everyone wanting to play someone else -- this is the place she is meant to be.

But the potluck was looming. We re-deposited the teens we’d accumulated, then headed for a massive scramble of directions and dishes and reminders to bring the dogs inside, before we shot out the driveway again, this time in two cars (naturally, since that’s more complicated). We arrived at the welcome picnic for our new exchange student. There were at least a hundred people already there, bunched up under a gazebo at Minnehaha Falls. All of them were either kids who’d just arrived from some other land, or American kids who had just returned, or their host families and parents. The food may have been standard-issue Midwestern glop, but their faces created the most diverse display of humanity I’d possibly ever seen in Minnesota.

Plopping the dish onto a massive lineup of refined carbohydrates, I slumped onto a bench and affixed my name tag over the “Heather” that’s stitched over the pocket of my bowling shirt. (It’s my hands-down favorite piece of clothing, but if I don’t cover up the name, these lovely people with irony deficiencies just call me “Heather” all evening.) Mid-slump, I allowed myself to think about how, when I die (which should be any minute now, given this pace), I want my remains to be forever stored in a 13 x 9 potluck dish, with masking tape slapped across the top and my last name written in permanent marker.

That’s when I noticed Emma. She hadn’t sat down, she hadn’t gotten a drink, and she hadn’t stopped smiling. First she had decided to locate every Chinese national and welcome them, in Mandarin, to the U.S. Then she found a white kid who’d spent last year in China, and she compared notes with him. She sat down long enough to size up the college boy I’d roped into chatting in French with our Hugo (when I found out he’d spent last year in Belgium, I dragged him over). As she listened, she leaned backward to eavesdrop on the huddle of Italians at the end of the table.

“My brain is about to explode from all these languages!” she said, and I realized that Emma is the only person in the world who would accompany a statement like this with a smile. “Explosion” is the only pace that isn’t too slow for her. Then she hopped up and ran off to speak a few more languages to a few more jetlagged foreign nationals. Here, I thought. Here, with an ever-expanding chance to explore what’s unknown, to keep cramming new vocabulary and syntax into that near-exploding brain. This is the life she’s meant to live.

It was getting dark. The first day of school was tomorrow. We had to go. On the ride home, Emma was jubilant. “That’s my thing, you know, that’s what I love best! I got to talk to people from all over the world! Those are my people!” From the backseat, Mary Katherine mused, “I got to do that today, too. I got to do my thing and be with my people.”

I hated to ruin the sweetness with a teachable moment, but I just had to say it: “Some people go their whole lives without knowing what their thing is,” I said. “And you two know already. And you both got to have a taste of it, all in one day.” 

And me, I got to see the two girls I love best experience their greatest bliss, all in one short span of time. There haven’t been many days like that one in my life, and there probably won’t be many more.  Even if it did have to include a 13 x 9 potluck dish, it was worth it.

Hey Ladies, Look at My Spinach

Mademoiselle MacGill was not a master teacher (they didn’t have such swanky designations in my weary, failing high school), but I’ve just discovered that the lessons she taught back in Ritenour High School certainly seem to have stuck.

In the creepy old attic that is my brain, high school French was buried under several layers of dusty show tunes, to-do lists and towering stacks of worry. Yet, when our exchange student, Hugo, arrived from Paris on Friday night, the old French reappeared – a bit worse for wear, but still vaguely useful.

It appears that, between watching countless episodes of “Love, American Style,” I seem to have spent the majority of my study time on French nouns, because they are the only parts of speech I recall with any accuracy. Poor Hugo looks more alarmed than reassured when I blurt out a word that’s just come to me, delivered in a rusty accent that’s been made even less comprehensible by that Minnesota lilt I’ve picked up over the years. But hey, we talked about the “bateau” that would be at the cabin, and I made repeated references to Betty the “chat,” feeling mighty worldly as I did.

As we groped for ways to amuse this sweet, jet-lagged and obviously gobsmacked kid, we took Hugo to the farmer’s market. He wants to be a chef, and I thought that food might be a universal language, which it pretty much proved to be. But how in the world did I remember that an eggplant was an “aubergine?” That, I’m afraid, is a mystery for the ages, but of course the credit goes to Mademoiselle MacGill.

By the end of our visit to the market, I’d even found that I remembered two entire sentences related to food: Allons, mesdames, voyez mes epinards ("Hey ladies, look at my spinach," from the “At the Market” chapter in our textbook) and Vous n'êtes pas un homme, vous et en champignon ("You aren’t a man, you’re a mushroom," from Le Petit Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery.)

If my French was awful, it turned out to be significantly better than my mime skills, which I starting putting to use whenever one of those dusty nouns could not be pulled into service.  On Saturday afternoon, we had our usual family emergency, the sort that’s delivered fresh and hot several times daily in these parts, and I had to mime my way out of it. 

Mary Katherine bolted into the garden, where I was supposed to be weeding and where, in fact, I was doing what they used to call “woolgathering,” intoxicated by the crisp weather and the scent of the basil plants.  “Dad is missing,” she announced dramatically, “and we have to leave for the theater RIGHT NOW.” We tried a few vigorous shouts, but he seemed to be hiding, abducted, or lying in an exhausted heap somewhere. Then someone noticed that the dog’s leash, and – here’s where the real detective work comes into play – the dog itself, was missing, and a theory was formed as to the parental unit's current whereabouts.

Mary Katherine could not wait, so I pulled off my gardening gloves and prepared to drive to a location near the giant Jesus Wall off 35W, one of my favorite locations in the city, because I get to say “Jesus Wall” when I go there. She told me that she’d bought a ticket to the play for Hugo, too, so I tried to tell him that he was leaving, like NOW, as she was putting it. Too lazy to look in the French-English dictionary we’d been using, I decided to act out what was going to happen next. “You are leaving with me,” I said, with lots of mutual chest-pointing.

“You will go to a plaaaaaayyyy,” I added, very slowly and loudly, which is the surefire American treatment for communicating with foreign-like-talkers of all stripes. I added what seemed like a true touch of genius at this point, and enacted what I thought was a perfect approximation of a person taking a seat in the theater (I was doing so well, I thought, that Hugo could probably tell that the seats were red velvet), and then I tried a sweeping hand gesture to indicate my joy at the show that was unfolding before me.

Hugo, who is nothing if not incredibly polite, nodded in what might have passed for comprehension and headed off to get his sweater. It was only when I got to the car and started to tell Mary Katherine of my great breakthrough in Franco-American communication, that I began to see my recent performance in a new light. Viewed another way, by, say, a sane person, my indication of taking a plush red theater seat might have looked vaguely intestinal, and my sweeping indication of the action on stage might have looked like something requiring Windex. I began to feel that perhaps Hugo had gotten the idea that I was telling him I urgently needed to wash windows, while sitting on the toilet. 

I began to laugh, very hard, at my own stupidity, which is such a wonderfully freeing activity that I do it several times a day. Mary Katherine became suspicious, asking, “WHAT did you say to him?”

“Oh honey,” I said, as I wiped my eyes, “at least I didn’t ask him to look at my spinach.”