Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Sorting Out What’s What Where and How
We took three bags of our winter jackets, hats, and scarves to Goodwill along with a lamp, a gingham blanket, and the last small stack of my deceased daughter’s clothes. On the porch sits a big plastic bin with my daughter’s blue striped tote bag and two Bibles, combined Old and New Testaments. I have been stuck on what to do with the Bibles. One doesn’t take Bibles like these to Goodwill.
So, I think, should I keep these massive Bibles for my five-year-old granddaughter, Paulina? Or should I try to give them to a pastor friend, someone who might appreciate their heft, find a purpose for their existence, so I don’t have them sitting in the attic for years waiting for someone to remember that they’re there. We already have boxes of jewelry and pictures and other keepsakes of her mother’s stored away.
This morning, Paulina shut the door to her room. It’s her room because that’s where her clothes and things are, her hair ties, stuffed animals, and little mementos of her life with her mom and her new life here with us, but she still sleeps on a cot next to my side of the bed. Our concept of space, however, has become very fluid. We treat the area encompassing our room and hers and my office and most of the downstairs living space as Paulina Land. It’s part of our new life, don’t you know.
Anyway, she emerged from her room reeking of perfume. When asked, she said she’d found the perfume in the drawer of the vanity, the one my folks bought in 1937 and where my mother used to sit painting her nails red with a perfect halfmoon at the cuticle. Unbeknownst to me, my daughter had left three bottles of perfume behind when she suddenly left our house for the hospital.
“You’re too little for perfume,” I told Paulina and she quickly scooped up all three bottles to bring to my room and put on my dresser. “No, keep them in your room. Just don’t wear any.” I’m thinking the perfume reminds her of her mom. Having the bottles on her vanity maybe says something, that the smells in them are still hers even though she’s so little.
“When I get bigger, can I put on perfume?”
The perfume stays. Do the Bibles stay? What about the tote bag?
There is so much losing and keeping and moving on going on here.
Driving Over the Bridge Takes Practice
Yesterday, I went shopping and then driving with my grandson who is trans. We split up for shopping but then drove off together so he could practice for his road test with the DMV. Today was the first time he drove on the freeway, a short but exhilarating run over Milwaukee’s Hoan Bridge. We were on the outside lane, the one overlooking the Milwaukee harbor and I, of course, had fleeting images of the car taking flight over the too low barrier. As I’ve done ten thousand times, I entertained the question of how to get out of a submerged car but then quickly put those thoughts out of my head. It seemed contrary to the great progress we were making on the driving education front.
We spent two hours together and I didn’t misgender him even once. It’s a first.
It’s not like this transition is new. I’d gotten hints of it while he was in high school, but it wasn’t until a week before his graduation that our grandson texted us that his name on the big screen was going to be different than his birth name. Oh my, I thought, and then ensued the seemingly endless battle of reality vs. reflex.
At a family picnic last week, I asked my grandson if he wanted another hot dog and he said yes. I grabbed a bun and the tongs and went to the grill to pick out the best one. Then I turned around and said, “Here you go, ma’am.”
I apologized. I always apologize. Sometimes I do an ‘end of the evening blanket apology,’ usually it’s mistake by mistake. I don’t have trouble with his name. It’s the pronouns that mess me up.
I need a shock collar.
As my mistakes are reflexive, so is my grandson’s forgiveness. I remember that when he takes a turn too wide or is slow to brake at a light. Grace. Taking our mistakes home with us in the backseat and tossing them in the trash. Starting out next time clean.
We’ll both get there.
________
Photo by Zach Lisko on Unsplash
What I’ve been Doing on My Days Off
I’ve been resting and gathering myself and also starting a little girl in kindergarten, selling a once-beloved beach house, studying death and dying, writing papers and getting grades, taking my last swim (probably) in Lake Superior, loving the lake I have (Lake Michigan), dancing to music from a new toy record player, searching for the purple shirt, reading emails from the teacher written entirely in Spanish, wondering if I should sign up for Spanish I at the Rec Department, thinking about taking riding lessons at Steppingstone Farms, writing a long essay (for me) called The Guys and Gals in My Death & Dying Class, writing Postcards to Swing States (for Wisconsin), showing up as part of the leadership of a new Disability and Aging Advocates for Crowley (running for Governor in Wisconsin), surrendering my ungainly and quite ugly office lamp to Goodwill, turning on Paw Patrol every morning, taking the same little girl to a family grief program where we had pizza and cookies and made things with pipe cleaners, and sitting on the back porch at 6:30 every morning drinking coffee with the old man and our ‘ward’ to count the birds on the wire overhead (today there were sixteen!) and wait for the cardinal to appear which he or she does depending on whose turn it is that day.
Sofas I Have Found and Loved from Down the Street
I could claim to have found a lucky charm or a hundred-dollar bill, but what I really found, careening around my neighborhood late for some meeting or some kid, were two sofas. A rose-colored mid-century beauty that seemed to have been barely touched and a serviceable, tending toward the raggedy, kind of lumpy thing that drastically needed a cover-up.
I zoomed home to get my boys to help me load them one by one into the back of our SUV. It was just a few blocks from the ‘curb store’ to our house but treacherous, the physics of the carry (more weight out than in the automobile) making the odds of a dump in the middle of the street not in our favor.
People are embarrassed by curb shopping, especially in their own neighborhood. I get it. My neighbor ventures out in the dark when I put something yummy at the curb. It’s like “I don’t want to know you that well.”
I’m not above tiptoeing down the street in the dark if there was something especially lovely. During the pandemic, I scored the cutest wooden table and two chairs, but the chairs quickly became undependable, sitting-wise so we, of course, put them at the curb for someone else to pick up.
Once my husband and a neighbor came upon a pair of bedroom dressers at the curb. “You should take them. You have a lot of kids,” my husband said to the neighbor. “No, you should take them, the drawers don’t shut right.” I’ll let you guess.
I’ve been infatuated with the whole ‘making do’ approach to life forever. So picking up furniture off the curb makes sense to me – not all the time, you know, we have actually purchased decent furniture in actual furniture stores but sometime when there is a particularly unique sofa or table or lamp or whatnot that someone has fallen out of love with, something that has been orphaned, well, that’s a magnet for me.
You asked.
Dear Deb
Dear Deb,
A few months ago, you told me to collect myself, buy a small camp chair for our new little friend, and get back to doing our freedom thing.
Well, here we are.
With a fire and an Etch-A-Sketch and chocolate milk and a raided bag of marshmallows and the dog fast asleep and the old man napping in the van.
We made it.
Thanks, friend. Thanks for telling me the thing that’s stuck in my head the past few months.
We can make a new life. We can and we are.
With great appreciation,
Jan
Reading Whistler on my Kindle for Six Weeks
My new hobby seems to be reading the book Whistler by Ann Patchett.
It’s been nearly six weeks since I put it on my Kindle. Every night I’d read in the dark, wonder what the deal was with Eddie and Daphne, the horse, and all the other people with their brunches and rides around New York. I finally finished the book this morning.
What is this book about, I’d wonder. Who are these people – Eddie and Daphne and all their assorted relatives and former relatives? And why should I care about them? And it wasn’t until I’d finished every single word and then read a review on Goodreads that I got the point of the book. (My brain has been eroded by too many readings of Curious George Goes Swimming.)
The point is about the endurance of love and kindness – a grown woman remembers her nine-year-old self’s connection to a man who was very briefly her stepfather. And he has the same connection to her – little rubber band bracelets they kept in their pockets for forty years. We all have someone like that. Someone, who if they walked in the room this instant, we would love them like we did in that fleeting moment years ago.
It took me a while, but I got the point. It was worth hanging in there, so I’d have this reflection to ponder, wonder who those times and people are for me, and whether I could be that unforgettable, loved person for someone else. Maybe.
Meanwhile, I’m going to beef up my reading. I’m also going to go back to actual books and park the Kindle for a while. I want a paper page and a bookmark to remember my place in the world.
Stitching Little Stitches
Yesterday was haircut day for Paulina, our about to be five-year-old granddaughter who lives with us. Long hair is a lice magnet I’ve been told and we can’t have that. Especially with school starting and all the little heads.
I know my way around lice, nits, shampoos, the wicked little metal comb, all of it – ah, the riches of a long life, especially one that involved raising four kids and granddaughters showing up from foreign countries. So, wanting to avoid any more forays into the kingdom of lice, we went for a haircut yesterday.
There were mild protests, surprisingly mild since she seemed always to love her long, wild hair, never wanting it tied up or braided. Her mother told me this, “She just always wants her hair to be free,” and the hair really was part of Paulina’s identity as a sturdy, confident child.
“How about we get your hair cut like your mother’s?” I showed the picture my husband had snapped of her mother on a day at the hospital when they’d rolled her downstairs to the Starbucks. In the picture, her mom has bangs and shoulder length hair and she is smiling a wry smile and her sometimes dimple is showing. It was when we thought things would work out.
The woman at the haircut place was surprised we wanted to cut so much hair off. “You want four or five inches off?” I showed her the picture on my phone. “Yes, just like her mom.” And Paulina heard me, sat up straight in the chair, and smiled at herself in the mirror.
At the counter when we paid, Paulina told the nice woman that she wished she could have purple streaks in her hair. The lady said maybe when you’re older and gave her a sucker. And I felt like we had stitched something, like when Paulina made a tiny rip in her new pink sweater and I mended it with thread from a postage stamp-size sewing kit I’d kept in my purse forever and when I was done, it felt so mended.
That’s what it felt like leaving the hair salon yesterday. A bit mended. Stitched.
I Didn’t Want to but I Had to Answer this One
I don’t really want to answer this question but if I do, maybe it will quit haunting me.
The last time I saw my daughter alive, I was standing in the doorway of her hospital room, itching to leave because my husband and I were late for a meeting. We’d been ‘visiting’ if you want to call it that for a couple of hours, her four-year-old daughter Paulina, our granddaughter, sitting on the wide windowsill watching videos on her mom’s phone and my husband, daughter, and I watching a seemingly endless game show that involved guessing numbers and either winning big or jumping off a cliff in desperation.
Every so often, my daughter would see an imaginary speck of dirt on her bed, pick it up with two fingers and flick it on to the floor. We knew she was having a procedure done later in the afternoon, a last-ditch effort to unstick a heart valve that was causing so much trouble. It was an intravenous thing, not a surgical thing so we felt okay leaving, even though she expressed surprised that we weren’t coming back to, what? to sit in her room waiting for her, I guess. We were exhausted with everything – the room, the condition, the time, the future, things that happened decades ago floating around the room like vaper from an unplugged oxygen machine.
Thirty days of visits to the hospital had made me crazy. Crazy with wanting fresh air, crazy with wanting to be driving somewhere, crazy to be free of the game show and the flicking of imaginary specks of dirt. So, I beckoned to my granddaughter who was by then sitting on her mother’s bed. “It’s time to go. If we go now, we can go to the playground.” It was the bribe that always worked. She loved the playground more than anything.
It was then my daughter started stroking Paulina’s hair. We’ll never get out of here, I thought. I heaved a big sigh. “Time to go, honey.” We’d be back the next day, probably to spend the entire night before my daughter’s open-heart surgery. “We really have to go.” I might have been tapping my foot, I felt like I was tapping, drumming my fingers, jumping out of my skin, that’s how bad I wanted to leave the room, close the door behind me, walk down the endless hospital corridor to the outside world, hold Paulina’s hand and go to the playground where there was air and sunshine and families eating McDonald’s.
And that was when my daughter looked me square in the eye and said, “You better go, Paulina. Grandma’s getting impatient.”
Those were our last words to each other. Our daughter never woke up after the procedure to unstick the valve and passed away the next day during open heart surgery. So yeah, if I had a day to relive, that one would be a prime candidate.
The Lovely Magic of Spicy Chips
What’s the last movie that made you cry, you ask? I want to answer, the one I’m in. But that would sound self-pitying and if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s wallowing along with chocolate chip cookies that are limp and falling apart like the one I just ate.
The cookie was dessert after eating a little bag of Crunchy Cheetos which, in my opinion, are way better than regular Cheetos. I have little bags of Cheetos, crunchy and not, along with a few assorted bags of chips left over from packing lunches for Street Angels. Paulina thinks I bought them for her but erred in not buying spicy chips (Doritos) exclusively.
A few weeks ago, I surprised her with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of weird looking blue juice when I picked her up from day camp. I whispered to her, loud enough for one of the day camp leaders to hear, “There’s Doritos in the car.”
“Oh,” the leader said, “Grandparents can do that.” She laughed. I shrugged. Yeah, if I was a real parent, I’d be showing up with carrot sticks and tap water or nothing because whoever it was I was picking up (name any one of the other four kids I raised) could just wait until dinner, don’t you know, because eating snacks ruins your appetite, for heaven’s sake and we can’t fucking have that.
I’m into the joyful look of a four-year old with her own bag of Doritos and bottle of weird looking blue juice. “You bought this for me?” she asks. Yes, I did, little lady, and there’s more where that came from. Not often, just often enough and unexpected enough to be delightful. People evolve over time, right? That’s my little evolution. I no longer give much of a shit about snacking before dinner. A couple of hard-boiled eggs will nullify practically any hideous snack. I think the same thing about outrageously surgary cereals. I don’t care anymore. I’m not dying on those little hills like I used to.
Today when we pick up Paulina, I am packing a peanut butter sandwich, chips, maybe an applesauce, and a bag of juice (the ones where you poke a hole in the bag with a pointed straw). This more elaborate meal is because we are going straight from day camp to her new school for K5 family orientation. Yes, Granny is going to get oriented.
There’ll probably be a whole session on healthy snacks.
____________________
Note: My husband and I are legal guardians for our four-year old granddaughter, Paulina. Her mother (our daughter) passed away in June. We are facing this new challenge in our lives with good humor, occasional hysteria, and plenty of spicy chips.
Happy Showed Up and Wants to be Friends
We bought our Neighbor Pete tamales, rice and beans, chips and pico de gallo, churros, two kinds of Mexican beer, Pacifico and Dos Equis, four ears of today-picked corn, freshly roasted Hatch chile peppers and an avocado. Also, flowers, including a couple of sun flowers which have become my favorite flower for a while. This took a bit of driving around town which was fun, during which I realized that it is okay to be happy.
We did this because contractors fixing our basement occupied his driveway for most of the week and because he made a surprising and very generous donation to our granddaughter’s college fund as a gesture of support after our daughter died. But we mostly did it because in the very early morning while we are sitting on the back porch and my husband calls out “Good morning, Neighbor Pete!” and Pete answers from his backyard, “Good morning, Neighbor Howard!” we all laugh and feel good about the day even though we don’t know what’s coming and whether it will be bad or good.
Yesterday I picked Paulina up early from day camp to go to a new beach on the far south side of Milwaukee County. Good wind, healthy waves, clean packed sand, a bag full of snacks, a plastic bucket and a shovel, two towels, and just a few other families. I let the waves knock me around a bit, then sat down on a towel to build a cairn which Paulina quickly wrecked, then watched as she wandered off with her pail to fetch wet sand. A few yards from her there were what seemed to be plovers, tiny birds I’d only known to be in the U.P. I laid down on my towel and looked at the sky, the clouds moving so fast it almost made me dizzy, and I realized that it is okay to be happy.
For a long while after our daughter died, I’d catch myself feeling pretty good and then think, hey, what’s happened was a terrible tragedy, and so everything, every little bit, every bite of breakfast, every load of laundry, each story read, all the good nights and good mornings, everything has had the sheen of tragedy even when we were laughing. But now, I think the sheen is wearing off, gone in some spots, dull in others, all because I realized that it is okay to be happy.
I love this. I feel like the waves are taking me to a good place.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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