Five years, one week, a couple of lifetimes

I took a client out to lunch yesterday, stopping by to see her agency's swell new digs downtown, and happy to troop through the skyway system with a gal who clearly knew how to navigate Macy's in a Christmas-crowded flash. Stepping into the IDS tower, we heard a kids' choir earnestly yelping away on carols, while proud grannies raised phones for snapshots, and office workers raised the decibel level of their conversations, just a bit. "Wait a minute," I thought, "I've been here, I've done this before -- but when?"  Today I dug through a (virtual) dusty stack of posts and found this keepsake of a wonderful day, five years and one week ago.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011

The Extraordinary Ordinary

I think the magic started with the Cinderella-shoe, strangers-on-an-escalator moment at the IDS Center, but there was so much about that day that was purely extraordinary-ordinary. We look back now and say that it was a “great day,” but it wasn’t even close to being a full 24 hours of something special – more like five hours and change. It was just enough, though -- not only to make us happy at the moment, but to turn itself into a snow globe memory that we’ve been picking up more and more in this current, very different, holiday season.

The particulars: December 10, 2010. Emma had a performance with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony, to be held over the lunch hour at the IDS Center downtown. With the sort of what-the-heck laxness that my children will probably use as Exhibit A of my poor parenting choices when they’re older, I told Mary Katherine that she could skip school in order to hear her sister play. We bundled ourselves and the cello into my Beetle, no small feat, and I managed to get us to the right spot downtown.

Everyone in our little group was carrying something – Santa hat, purse, cello, music stand.  It's understandable that, as we arrived at the escalator to part ways with Emma, who was heading to a basement-level green room, that she had already begun to descend before Mary Katherine realized she was still holding the black heels that Emma needed for the performance. “Emma, your shoes!” she called out, and we saw a swivel from that dark, shiny head, as she considered how to get back to us. The escalator was thickly populated with lunch-hour-ers, and it was impossible to turn back. 

And then our heroes arrived. Two young men, just stepping on to the escalator themselves, turned back at the sound of Mary’s cry, and reached out their hands in unison. “Toss ‘em here; we’ll get them to her,” one of them said. Mary lobbed one shoe into each outstretched hand. They arrived at the bottom and dutifully turned the shoes over to the lovely young woman, dressed all in black, standing patiently beside her cello. “Here you go, Cinderella,” one of them said, and they headed off without another word.

During the performance, Mary Katherine and I sat on a balcony and looked down at the orchestra  We were cozy on the floor, flattening our cheeks against the acrylic guard, feeling the sound drift up. Afterwards, with the cello safely stowed back in the car, we tooled around Macy’s, trying on hats, squirting each other with perfume and wandering happily, and aimlessly, from department to department. I was able to make my favorite parenting statement of all time: “Take your time; we aren’t in any hurry.”

Then we ended up on the seventh floor, waiting to see the Great Man. They were the oldest kids in the Santa Line, and by several years. And because it was a weekday afternoon, they were the only kids who could see over the railing, write their names in cursive, or take themselves to the bathroom. I had told my girls I wouldn’t buy them lunch unless they sat on Santa’s lap. “Have you been good?” he asked, a bit ironically, and I held back the urge to try a full Bette Davis retort: “Santa, you have no idea.”

 They’d done what I asked, so I bought them lunch at the Sky Room. We sat together at a small table, looking out at a snowstorm brewing over the late afternoon skyline. And we laughed together, over nothing, just happy to be together and to have no agenda, schedule, tournament, rehearsal or competition to attend, just this once. After Emma had written all over her cup, and the bus boy had been truly terrorized by our loud hoots, we gathered up our things and found the elevator to the first floor. A quick stop at Candyland for ride-home treats, and we headed home.  

And that’s it. Those were small things we did that day, not momentous ones. We attended a performance, sat on Santa’s lap and laughed together over a meal. But one year later, it seems that the day is still sending us a clear, strong signal, reminding us that we really do matter to one another, and that we have a bond which time, distance and circumstance can’t break. 

 For many families, their traditions seem rooted in the rigid belief that if anything is ever allowed to vary from the approved script, everything will fall apart.  If all my kids remember of our traditions is that we had a lot of fun one December day in the Sky Room, watching the snow as it fell over the city, that’s good enough for me.

Baby blankets I have known

This is my daughter Emma, somewhere above the Pacific Ocean in July, 1995, in one of the few moments she slept during her long journey to the United States from China. (It’s off topic, but I just have to say: notice her hand. You can only see one, but she always slept with both of them up, as if someone had just said “stick ‘em up.” What a kid.) 

More importantly, and more to the point of this post, notice the blankets, above her and below her. She is in a blanket sandwich of love.

The pink blanket, on top of Emma, was crocheted by my best friend in all the world, Debra Gail Buxton, who was running an afterschool kids’ program in Hell’s Kitchen at the time, and probably had one or two other things on her mind, but who managed to finish it, even though we left for China about three months before even the most optimistic estimates had said we would. The blanket is, these days, the absolute favorite snuggle spot of Betty, the kind and orphaned cat who hides in the basement because the monster dog is trying to kill her. I like to think that the blanket comforts Betty. I also like to think that, someday, if I need to cover a grandchild with the blanket, I’ll be able to wash off all the cat hair. I might be overly optimistic on that last point. It has a lot of hair on it right now.

Back to the picture. Beneath Emma is a little peep of blue blanket. It is covered, though you can’t really tell in the picture, with images of big-headed, big-eyed cocker spaniels. I believe they were wearing blue bows around their necks. This was the blanket that my Aunt Helen, one of my mother’s three sisters, made for me before I went to kindergarten. I hated kindergarten. The only part I ever liked was the part the normal children hated, rest time. They squirmed and fidgeted and talked to each other, and I cried on my blanket and felt sorry for myself. God, I really hated kindergarten.

When we got ready to adopt Emma, my mother began a Great Search for baby things. I was the third child, a late-in-life accident, and there wasn’t much in the way of celebratory baby items, but she dug up this blanket somewhere, and I loved taking it along and having it be one of Emma’s first comforts.

That blanket was destined for a lifetime as a target for self pity, I guess, because as soon as Emma could talk, she did two things:  she named it “puppy blanket,” and she began to chew it when she was angry at me. Emma was often, often, angry at me.

Her favorite activity during her naptime, instead of napping, was to stand on tiptoe in her crib, where she could see the mirror in the wardrobe across the room. There, she would get a big eyeful of herself as she wailed at the injustice of enforced sleep. And she gave herself a big bellyful of blanket along the way. Emma chewed, gnawed and otherwise ingested the entire blanket, leaving only snot-covered strings that were once the binding.

She still has the strings. At college.

It’s quite a story. We love our blankets. We tell them our sorrows. And, sometimes, we eat them.

My beloved cousin Erin is due to have a baby quite soon, far away in New York City, and I wanted to do something to commemorate the big occasion. When I found out she was expecting, I was in the process of making a quilt to donate to the silent auction for Youth Performance Company, made out of squares of old show t-shirts. I started setting aside the wilder tie-dies and the bolder colors, and, as I did, I began to see how a quilt for Erin and Roger’s baby just might come to life.

I am a terrible seamstress – sloppy, easily panicked and utterly flustered around the mechanics of the sewing machine. But I managed to grind through the blocks I’d cut by hand (I also lack a rotary cutter, cutting mat and any other niceties of modern sewing). And then, miracle of miracles, I found the perfect backing -- a piece of the softest yellow fleece -- at the Saver’s Thrift Store MLK Day Half-Off Extravaganza (because Dr. King had a dream that someday we’d be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the contents of our shopping carts full of fabulous bargain-snagging).

What resulted was a baby blanket that’s perhaps a little more on the hemp-and-granola side of life than I had been anticipating, but it’s very soft, and well, very colorful. I hope Erin doesn’t look too closely at my crookedy seams, because she truly is a good seamstress. She inherited that from her grandmother, my Aunt Dorothy, who inherited it from her mother, my grandmother Katie Dalton Clifford, who was, it is said, a seamstress for the Anheuser Busch family. From my mother, I inherited no sewing skills, because Katie Dalton Clifford died when my mother was only seven years old, before anyone had a chance to teach her. Instead, I inherited from my mother a tendency to run on at the mouth, and a great capacity for self pity (hence the kindergarten moping).

I have to confess, and I realize I have a little ego and attachment going on here, that I hope that this dumb blanket of leftovers and half-off bargains becomes that baby’s favorite blanket, more beloved than all the trendy blankets, if there are such a thing as trendy blankets, that Erin has gotten from her arty New York friends.

I realize that this means that I am dooming this blanket to become loved to death – to be cried upon, eaten, thrown up on and generally wrestled to the ground and have the stuffing knocked out of it. That’s okay. Puppy lives on, just a corner of him, in this photo, and probably somewhere in Emma’s intestinal tract. (Plus, there are those snotty strings still at college.) I’m willing to offer up my goofy blanket for the same terrible and wonderful fate.

Good luck with that baby, Erin and Roger. You will be, and I know this already to be utterly true as I write it, wonderful, wonderful parents. Plus, your kid has got one -- um, unique -- blanket.

Seven things I learned at the sno-cone booth

For an unadulterated display of mindless patriotism, summer celebration, stressful family dynamics, addiction-in-the-making and the blank, unholy inability to make a simple decision, there is no experience more educational than staffing the sno-cone booth at the annual Fourth of July picnic in the Tangletown neighborhood of Southwest Minneapolis.

We’ve been going to the parade since 1996, when we wheeled our oldest daughter up to the local high school, tied a balloon to her stroller, and followed the shambling crowd on the five-block-or-so “parade route” over to the local park. Occasionally, we’d even spot an observer -- some bleary-eyed grownup sitting on a front porch, clutching a mug of coffee and wondering why all these wound-up families were shuffling past at such an ungodly hour. For the parent of a young child, ten a.m. is the shank of the day, and we’d wave energetically at our sparse array of spectators, full of energy and good cheer.

Years passed, another child arrived, and we continued to wake with the birds on Fourth of July morning to decorate bikes, tie bandanas around the dogs’ necks and be first in line for the balloons in the parking lot.

Back then, the food was a potluck lunch, served on tables set unhygienically in blazing sunlight (the trees were smaller then), and the games were of the “toss a bean bag in the hole and get a dum dum” variety. But the neighborhood has taken a significant turn upwards in the past 20 years, and the festivities yesterday featured two different varieties of giant inflatables, Guthrie-level face painting and, that ultimate hipster beacon of fun, a food truck. I looked around at the crowd this year, and I was definitely out of my element, especially in terms of fashion.

Several women sported attractive sundresses and chic sunhats, and I saw more fresh pedicures than I could shake an orange stick at. People had painted their children’s buzz cuts to resemble the American flag. There were red-white-and-blue top hats and vests, with a minimum of beer guts or lighted jewelry, once staples of my decidedly blue-collar childhood Independence Days. One had the sense that, later, processco and sparklers, not brats and bottle rockets, would be the order of the day.

At this event, I always wear my WW II shirt, a bizarre bit of Joe Boxer’s less spot-on haberdashery, featuring tiny pictures of Churchill and Roosevelt, plus key battles. One year, it so upset a fellow parade marcher, who had examined it and declared it "warmongering," that I swore to myself that I'd wear it every July 4th until my demise.

But the shirt has gone missing this year – hiding alongside that set of steak knives we misplaced about fifteen years ago, I guess – so I had to settle for my best fifty-cents-at-a-garage-sale purchase ever – a hot pink women’s bowling shirt with “Heather” written in black script over the pocket and “Gutter Galz” on the sleeve. But, even with Heather and my getting-pretty-beat-up paper Independence Day crown, I was no match for the groovily tattooed and snappily dressed folk lining up for empanadas at the food truck. There goes the neighborhood, I could see them thinking, as they shot surreptitious glances over at the slobs manning the sno-cone booth.

And just how did I end up at that booth, wearing my bowling shirt and my paper crown, letting gooey syrup run down my shins? Several years ago, I had sat at this very event, dipping my feet in the lukewarm wading pool (whose contents, I surmise, are 90% chlorine and 10% urine) and realized that my children were no longer hanging directly off me at all times, shrieking. They were, I realized gradually, no longer little kids, but kids. Perhaps, I wondered, it might be time to give back a bit to this event that we had enjoyed so much, giving us, as it did, a chance to leave the house and Wear Them Out a Bit.

The following June, I announced to my family that I had volunteered us all to work a booth at the picnic. “I asked for the sno-cone machine, because I figured it would be cool.” No one seemed overly thrilled with this idea, but I argued that we’d spent enough years lazily holding down a blanket on the southwest edge of the Fuller Park hill, so we arrived for early duty and got to work.

As these things usually turn out, we had much more fun working than we’d ever had lolling. Even during the hottest years, we have stayed cool at our icy station – well, at least our hands have. We have run into lots of people we knew, gotten up-to-date on neighborhood gossip and enjoyed the perfect perch for people-watching. This year was no exception. So, distilled for your reading pleasure like a full gallon of iridescent sno-cone syrup, here are several of the more trenchant observations of Team Sno-Cone, 2013 version.

1.     Everything is more fun with kids

Of course I love my practically grown-up teenagers, but I firmly believe that all social activities are more fun with a soupcon of children. This year, I invited my friend Tammy’s two darlings, Mike and Maren, to assist at the booth. They made everything about 25% more fun, and the obvious delight they took in being the big kids behind the counter made all of us happier.

2.     There is a Zen of filth

When you’re covered from fingernail to sneaker with drippy, sticky, gooey syrup, there is only one logical choice to make – just go with it. Ever since the year our booth was next to the Girl Scout Troop’s cotton candy maker, we discovered that the filth of syrup is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the worst kind of dirt. Try being up to your elbows in hot, hairy cotton candy, and sno-cones will start to look like a clear mountain stream.

Once you can decide, “I am just going to be sticky and disgusting,” it’s easy to become Zen with the muck. And there were some simple joys among the goo. Maren’s elbows increasingly looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, my left hand resembled something out of a Steven King novel and Mary’s shins developed a strange case of bluish varicose veins, so we had plenty to look at during the lulls in the action.

3.     No one is sad in the sno-cone line

While there may be frowny faces aplenty at the DMV, everyone seems very, very happy in the sno-cone line. And – I swear this is true – every single person, even the ones who look like they’re planning a suicide attempt for later in the evening – genuinely smiles when that sno-cone gets handed over. It’s just some ice and whole lot of sugary food dye, but it’s a daymaker, I tell you.

4.     Your neighbors appreciate a quick decision

This year, as with most other years, it turns out that the very first thing most people want to do after they’ve finished that grueling parade route is head to our booth. We had a long, long line. Our workers were keeping up their end of the bargain, but the customers … well, let’s just say that waiting until you're asked for your order to begin the negotiation with your two-year-old about what kind of sno-cone flavor he wants, then asking the both staff to remind you once again what your choices are, because you weren’t able to observe them at any point during your ten-minute wait – you, sir or madam, will not be named Tangletown Neighbor of the Year.

5.     Sno-cones are simple, but some people make everything complicated

And also? When I tell you we have red, green and blue, please do not ask what “flavor” those colors are. They are not flavors. They are dye and sugar. I told one woman that the day-glo green syrup was made with kale, and she was so excited that she ordered for four cones. My feeling on that is, if you want to believe a woman wearing a Gutter Galz shirt and a paper crown that's been mended with Scotch tape, you deserve to be deceived.

We also have a secret staff-only contest every year, won by the first person to help the customer who, when asked "What do you want?" says, “I want a sno-cone.” Really, as we stand here under the giant tent with the "Sno-Cone" sign out front, we thought we were selling parboiled-unicorn-meat-on-a-stick, so we're not sure we're going to be able to help you, standing as we are In Front of A Giant Sno-Cone Machine.

Our favorite fellow this year was an otherwise intelligent-looking hipster, who, when he finally had finished his wait in line and was asked what he wanted, looked around in confusion and said, “Oh, I didn’t know there were flavors.” Yeah, life is complicated like that sometimes, pal. NEXT.

6.     Our daughter is good at customer service, who knew?

Our oldest daughter has been working at the local grocery store for four months, and, in that short amount of time, Kowalski's seems to have accomplished what I failed to do in 18 years. She looks people in the eye. She bares her teeth in the form of a smile. She says chatty things like “Hey, how are you doing?”

Her father said that if she had begun to speak fluent Urdu, or levitate off the ground as she scooped ice into paper cones, he could not have been more surprised than when he heard her say, “How’s your Fourth going so far?”

Still, it was funny to see the kid-I-know-and-love return as she shut down an old guy who tried to hit on her. He trotted out a Pepe Le Pew accent and told her he’d come all the way from France to enjoy her sno-cones. Her glare, it was withering, and I felt sorry that he was from the one country Emma is least likely to ever give a break to, ever again.

7.     There will always be addicts

Some people get one sno-cone. Some are so refreshed by our delicious offerings that they come back for a second. But, every year, we have our contingent of addicts. This group always fits a very narrow demographic: affluent (hey, it’s three tickets a cone) white boys, about age 11, who tend to travel in a pack. I served each member of this year's group about 10 sno-cones apiece. And this year, they had a king – a swimsuit wearing titan whose lips, tongue and teeth had  become stained blue from the number of “Blue Raspberry” cones he was downing.

“I can imagine this guy at his first fraternity party,” my husband said, “and it’s not going to be a pretty picture.” Toward the end of the afternoon, the kid wove his way back to our booth with a giant, sweaty wad of tickets. “Keep ‘em coming,” he roared, his eyes spinning in his head from the simultaneous sugar rush and brain freeze, “I just won these in a bet.”

“Oh good,” my daugther murmured under her breath as she scooped ice and started hitting the pump of blue syrup, “he’s got a gambling problem, too.”

Her 19-word writing career (and rodents the size of bulldogs)

This bulldog-sized rodent is native to Central America. 

 I hope I never see one up close, unless it's in the damn zoo.

Every contractor can tell a story about seriously underbidding on a job – the plumber who forgot that all the pipes were lead, the carpenter who didn’t realize that the house was nothing but crooked walls and plaster – that sort of thing. A couple weeks ago, I was approached by a travel web site to create some content. I asked questions about the scope of the project, and got some webby answers about subsections and character counts. I still felt baffled. “Perhaps I’m just acting all print-centric and looking for a word count, and that’s not the way the world works anymore,” I thought, always the first cheerleader to run out on the field in the “Julie Sucks” halftime show. “I’m sure I’ll be able to write 20 pages a day,” I thought. “What could go wrong?”

Turns out that I, the person who can usually offer a very long list of reasons why anything, anywhere, could possibly go wrong, had failed to consider this project thoroughly enough. Here’s the one part that wasn’t in the job description: I needed to write 15,000 total words of well-researched, snappy and character-count-correct copy. I was able to complete about five pages a day if I kept my fingers – and brain – moving fast, not the 20 I had originally estimated. And, I realized, I was making a fraction of my current professional rate, a really big fraction. Or do I mean a really small one? (See why I’m a writer and not a professional fractionator?)

I logged a lot of hours on this virtual round-the-world writing jaunt, starting at about 3 a.m. every day, when I’d wake up in a cold sweat, realizing how many more descriptions I had to write that day. As I kept working, stopping just long enough to wiggle my fingers to get the blood flowing, I tried to stem the self pity that was oozing out of my home office, down the stairs and onto everyone who passed by on the sidewalk outside. To accomplish this, I thought of two things. First, I remembered that I wasn’t a coal miner or a cop, and that the only things getting tired were my creativity and my fingers. And second, I remembered back to a few times in those fat and happy days of 2007 (Remember then? When you weren’t scared all the time?), when agencies, desperate with overwork and looming deadlines, had happily sent me tidy sums for completing writing projects that were only mildly vexing, or time-consuming, or possibly a teeny bit annoying.

Of course, I had already been paid for those jobs way back in 2007, so the money was spent long ago on trips to the emergency room, groceries, grade school tuition, dermatologists, triple-ply toilet paper and boatloads of daughter-approved hair care products. I wish I’d had the foresight to have taken a few of those gigs on “deferred payment,” with the proviso that a check would be cut only during times of financial crisis, national and/or personal. I’d be getting one of those babies in the mail right about …. now.

But that’s all paid-for toilet paper under the bridge (a phrase I just made up but think I will continue using), and did not provide much solace to me, last week, making my way through my Slough of Despond (which is, I hope, the only Pilgrim’s Progress reference you’ll encounter this week). But then, just when things were looking bleak, one of my children entered the sad, dreary picture, and things got a little bleaker still.

My children usually adopt a very firm policy of refusing to offer any sympathy to me, on the principles of 1) It will just encourage her and 2) Was that mom’s voice? I thought I heard something through my earbuds. I managed to pierce Emma’s protective shell, however, because, while she was ignoring my kvetching about worn out brainpan and fingers, she quickly picked up my distress over what I considered to be the overly  modest payment (like “Amish girl” modest, I’m not kidding).

“Really? I would like to have that much money,” she mused aloud, “Maybe I could be a writer. Could I ever get a job like yours, Mom?” Since she calls me “Mom” about once a year, I was instantly suspicious. But still, maybe she’d want to follow in my limping, energy-drained footsteps one day. “Okay,” I said. “You can write one page, as an audition. Then maybe I’ll recommend you to the editor for the next project, if there is one.” She looked happy. I think I even saw her teeth, a rare occurrence for me, but apparently a quite common one for tall, handsome college men.

“But if I have to correct ONE mistake – a run-on sentence, a fragment, anything – then the whole deal is off.” She looked less happy, and I knew why. My girls have grown accustomed to 24-7 access to an in-house copy editor. (I’m not exaggerating; I have been woken out of a sound sleep to proofread an essay that was due the next day.) As I’ve heard is the case with privileged people, when you have staff, you forget how to do things for yourself. As a result, my kids are terrible proofreaders, especially in light of their reputed intellectual capacities.

While we sat together at the kitchen counter, I showed Emma a list of topics I was working on that day: Central America, Eco-Travel, Fishing and Destinations for Bachelorette Parties. Guess which one she picked. I handed her an instruction sheet. “Here are the SEO keywords you need to include in a 150-word intro. Then you need to write about these four featured cities in 325 characters each, and the next six cities in 110 characters each. I’ve been getting a first draft done in about 45 minutes, so try not to take longer than that. I’m going to be proofing the pages I wrote this morning and eating my sandwich, so I’ll be right here if you have any questions.”

I started reading, eating and waiting for the quick tap-tap of my very smart daughter as she cranked out this work that could be done by a roomful of monkeys (as she’d indicated in past remarks about my chosen career). Tap. pausepausepause Tap. Tap. pausepausepause. “I could do this,” she finally said, “except for the beginning part. It would all be easy after the beginning.”

“That’s called the lead,” I told her through a mouthful of turkey. “It’s always the hardest part. You have to write that, or no deal.” Tap. pausepausepause Tap. Tap. pausepausepause.

“How’s this?” she said, turning her laptop screen toward me. “Your friend is getting married. You should have a party. You should go to one of these good places.” 

I looked her in the eye, suddenly the editor, not the mom. “Is this the best you’ve got?”

“Yeah, I erased the other two. They were worse.”

I chewed my sandwich reflectively, waiting for the stench of her lead to clear the room.

“I give up,” she said, finally. “I don’t want to be a writer.”

“Well,” I said, “You gave it 19 words. I think that’s fair. Hemingway only had six.”

“What?”

There’s a story that someone bet him he couldn’t write a story in six words, and he wrote “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Used.”

No one can twist the moral out of a story and ego-boost it quite like this kid. “Well, I wrote 13 more words than Hemingway did,” she self-esteemedly said (and if that’s not an adverb, it should become one, exclusively for this generation). “Good for me.” She went back to Facebook, I went back to work, and the project continued on, and on, and on.

As with all life challenges, I did learn a few things while writing those 15,000 words, and I share them here now:

First thing I learned: There is some truly bad travel writing out there on the interwebs. One site described a location as “dripping with history,” a thought that made me get up from my desk right away and go wash my hands.

Second thing I learned: I would most like to have a beer with the characters who write content for Lonely Planet. Their description of why it would be fun to visit Central America included this sentence: “Wander through dense jungle to find Mayan pyramids that date back a millennium as bulldog-sized rodents scurry past and howler monkeys commute in the treetops above you.” Hoo boy, when can I book my ticket, fellas? Can I bring a rodent back home as a souvenir?

Third thing I learned: After researching and writing about 370 destinations, all over the globe, I was able to compile this list of dream vacations:

1.     New York

2.     New York

3.     New York

4.     New York

5.     New York

6.     New York

7.     New York

8.     San Francisco

9.     New York

10.  That place with the bulldog-sized rodents and overhead-commuting howler monkeys (Just kidding, I really meant New York)

Fourth thing I learned: Hey Julie, it might be good to ask a few more questions the next time you’re bidding on a project.

Fifth thing I learned: Emma won’t be enrolling in journalism school anytime soon. Ditto that MFA program for creative writing.

Cool Cloths

From broken legs to broken hearts, my mother believed there were few human ailments that could not be cured by a cool cloth laid across the forehead. She was, in her own modest way, a master of this motherly art form, making the cloth neither too cold nor too warm, wringing it out to a perfect degree, and folding it in exact thirds. Laid across a fevered brow with a delicate touch, that cloth brought instant comfort of the kind that only a mother can provide.

My days of being tended to are long gone now. I’m the Cool Cloth Applicator in Chief for my own children, and I hope to live up to the high standards set by Katherine Clifford Kendrick.  This time of year, I stay pretty busy. If I can ever find a copy of my kids’ union contracts, I’m sure I will discover a subclause that stipulates that one of them must always be ill, between the months of October and June, on an alternating schedule, major holidays always included (see Appendix A, paragraph iii). I’ve spent the past several weeks getting one young woman back on the road to recovery, only to have the other one succumb just hours later. (Hugo the exchange student, may God protect his upper sinus cavity, has been blessedly well, but the girls have been, well, a bit bronchial.)

Here are some things that I do on an average workday: conduct interviews, write, talk with colleagues, develop plans, do invoicing, and dial in on conference calls. Here are some other things I also do:  walk the dog, eat lunch, look out the window at the runners trudging up the Parkway hill, and think two consecutive thoughts in a row. It is, no surprise, the latter category that tends to get shoved aside when one of the Precious Blossoms is ailing. Instead, I juggle conference calls with cups of tea, deadlines with Tylenol dispensing … and many, many cool cloths.

They each have their own personal sickness style. Mary Katherine always adds a heap of self-flagellation to her symptoms, creating her own little version of Adelaide’s Lament:  “I don’t know why I let this happen. I have too much homework for this to happen. I have to get better Right Now.” Poor Mary Katherine. Her birth mother must have been some sort of guilt-ridden Irish Catholic, because that kid’s DNA seems to have be soaked in Jameson Irish Whiskey and set on fire.

Emma, on the other hand, always finds opportunity for delight during the process of falling, succumbing and recovering from a major illness. She savors the ample time for self-examination, accompanied by minute-by-minute symptom reports, live from the Emma Newsroom: “My left ear hurts a little more than my right, no wait, I think it’s my throat that hurts a little bit more, but more in the front, not in the back ... ooh!  Now my head hurts!”

I can remember the first time I realized that this kid must have an ancenstral link to a major Chinese dynasty. She was about five years old, bedridden and lying against several recently fluffed pillows. I was scurrying around her bedroom, clearing away the tray of lunch, which had included homemade broth that she’d insisted I feed to her, spoonful by spoonful. 

I looked up from my labors and saw a look cross her face that could only be described as Utter Joy. “You like being waited on, don’t you?” I asked, just realizing it myself. She nodded happily, leaned back against the pillows, and began her Symptom Report. This kid would have liked to have her feet bound, I found myself thinking, as long as there was a nice retinue around to carry her around the Forbidden City.

Back around that time, I gave Emma a little bell my mother had let me use when I was sick, and told her to ring it whenever she needed me and felt too weak to call out. The bell got quite a workout one sad, sick weekend, and then Leah arrived for nanny duty on Monday morning. We stood over Emma’s bed, Symptom Report droning in the background, while I explained the details of her condition. “Show her the bell,” Emma croaked. I did. I will never forget what Leah said next:  “No.” Calmly, clearly and professionally, she explained that no bell would be used to summon her. Ever. Emma shrugged, realizing that she was no match for a well-developed psyche and a healthy display of self-esteem, and continued to use the bell to summon me, as soon as Leah had left for the day.

As old as my children are, I am starting to see the end of my engagement in the Cool Cloth business. It can’t last forever, I tell myself. And not that any parent ever gives in expectation of receiving the same sort of affection back, but I do have a pretty good idea that neither of these tootsies will ever be wringing out the cloth to lay across my ancient forehead as I gasp my last lungful on earth.

I got my confirmation of that suspicion this spring. Fifty percent of the family was in China, visiting Emma’s birth city. Of the contingent remaining at home, one was staying busy with the last days of eighth grade and nightly rehearsals for a play in which she’d been cast, happy as a clam with the lovely spring that was unfolding before her sparkling eyes.

The other 25 percent of the family was lying in bed, moaning, and wishing for a swift death. Mary Katherine popped her head into my bedroom every now and then, seeming a little puzzled: “Mom?  Not working?  Hmmm … oops, there’s my ride to rehearsal.” One night, I felt so bad that I began debating with myself about the wisdom of calling an ambulance. It is some measure of how much motherhood has taken over my last bits of personhood that I decided against this plan, thinking that it would upset Mary Katherine if she came home from her rehearsal and saw the flashing lights in the driveway, or discovered that I was no longer at home. I imagined the story being replayed at bitter holiday retellings: “The time Mom called an ambulance for herself and I was so upset.” I decided to roll over and just die in my sleep.

Sadly, I woke up the next morning, feeling just as bad. The phone rang at noon and I found it in among the covers. It was Julie Brown-Price. I already knew that she was my friend. I was about to discover that she was even more so. “I’m sitting here at Q. Cumbers. You’re never late. Are you okay?” she asked. I groaned. We’d had lunch plans. I told her what was happening. She asked me two questions: 1) When was the last time you ate? (24 hours ago, as best I could make out, but I’d been drinking tap water from the little cup in the bathroom, I assured her) and 2) Is your back door unlocked? I said that it was and fell back on the hot, mushy pillows. Oh, for some fluffing.

Forty-five minutes later, there she was, steaming into my kitchen like the deli angel, arms laden with hot chicken soup from Whole Foods, flowers and Throat-Coat tea. She talked to me. She felt my forehead. When I took that first spoonful of chicken soup, I knew I would live, for whatever that was worth, and that I had her to thank for it.

Sometimes the cool cloth does arrive, just not from the place you expect it to. I hope that every person who reads these words has a friend as true and good as my friend Julie, who understands when it's time to stop standing around and get over to someone's back door. And if any of you mothers out there have a bell that you let your kids use when they’re sick, go throw it in the trash right now, I mean it.

Just One Slice, Boys

For a minute there, I thought Emma was going to pick up the pizza slicer and go after that lady. And honestly, I wouldn’t have blamed her. I try to avoid giving in to small-minded prejudices, but I have to confess that I harbor a deep loathing for a certain variety of my own tribe – the Absolutely Correct Mom. Last week, Emma got an eyeful of one of those high priestesses in action, and the results were entertaining for me and educational for her. Finally, my daughter got a snootful of what I’ve been contending with, lo these seventeen years of the enforced volunteer-at-the-potluck servitude that is modern motherhood.

Emma had helped me drop off yet another dish at yet another team dinner, and we’d been hanging around to help out. “Help” is always a dicey term at events like this, because there are usually several women in attendance who have very, very strong opinions about the way things need to go down, and woe to those carefree souls who don’t comply. At potlucks in my past, I’ve been instructed to move the same table forward, back and a little over to the side, all by warring factions of the same group. I’ve moved the napkins to the front, no, that’s crazy, put them to the end, no, we need to find a space in the middle for them … and then I’ve just hidden in the ladies’ room for a while until the Great Napkin Controversy gets sorted through.

So there Emma and I were at the serving table, stationed right behind the pizza boxes. I’d already followed instructions to cut each slice in half, and we’d set up a couple boxes and watched the team file past and dig in. Then, our vigilance slipped, and we leaned back against the wall and began talking to each other. That’s when the lady who was spooning the Starch Surprise out of the slow cooker swooped in to set us straight. “You’re going to have to tell them that they can only take one slice,” she hissed at Emma.  My darling, rational daughter considered her demand and countered, logically, with this observation: “But there are like, ten more boxes of pizza here,” she said. “There’s plenty.”

O, you little fool, I thought. Rules always trump reality in these settings, and sure enough, the Starch Surprise lady called over the dinner’s organizer for an official opinion. Everyone talked at once about the new one-slice mandate, with a great deal of righteous indignation serving as subtext: two slices, as if. Then one of the boxes was emptied, and, as Emma moved to replace it, her new bestie offered even more advice. “You’ll need to put that cheese over there, and stop handling it so much, we want to handle it as little as possible,” she harrumphed, as if Emma had somehow missed the mandatory Pizza Serving Skills Seminar.

That’s when I got a glimpse of my darling daughter. The way her eyes were rolling in her head, I was put in mind of a crazed horse from a bad Western movie. Starch Surprise didn’t know what she was dealing with, however, and she reached around Emma to fuss, adjust and otherwise manage this ultra-complicated serving task in a manner befitting its incredible strategic importance. That’s when I noticed that Emma was tightening her grip on the pizza slicer in a manner that can only be described as menacing. 

“Look at the time!” I chirped, glancing at my watchless wrist. “We don’t want to be late for choir practice, so we’ll leave all this pizza in your very capable hands.” I linked arms with Emma and got her to the vestibule before she blew. “What the hell?” she spluttered, and I had a quick flash-forward vision of new momma Emma at the playground, the first time some other mommy tries to shame her for not having eco-friendly wooden teething rings, or organic cotton diapers, or whatever the latest mommy must-have will be in the (what I hope will be very, very distant) future.

“This is what mommies do to each other,” I told her. “They make up stupid rules about unimportant stuff and drive each other crazy.” Then I thought of Emma’s oft-voiced thoughts about a career in intelligence work, and I imagined Agent Emma drawing a bead on that self-righteous twit who is breast-feeding her seven-year-old at the Teacher Appreciation lunch.

Come to think of it, I could not imagine one potluck volunteer experience that would not have been improved through the judicious display of firearms. Good luck to you, future mommy Emma, I thought, and let me know how those other mommies fall in line when they find out that you’re packing heat.

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.

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.