Author: Kathie

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

It’s been a dead birds couple of weeks. For some reason, we are finding little dead birds scattered on our sidewalk. They’re the little bitty ones – sparrows? And they are always lying there neatly, wings tucked to their sides, as if they landed and just fell over.

A friend told me that the fall berries birds are eating have fermented, causing birds to get drunk and act crazy. Crash into each other in midair. Fly into things. Sit in the middle of the road despite traffic. We have one of these berry bushes behind our building. The birds have been raucous lately.

If you know me well, you know that I am terrified of birds. If they fly anywhere close to me, I scream and duck. I trace this fear back to a few sources. First, I saw Hitchcock’s The Birds when I was eight years old. Enough said. Next, there were nasty birds – mockingbirds, I believe my mother said – that attacked my father while he was mowing the lawn. I remember watching out the window as my dad mowed with a metal colander on his head, and behind him, my mother, wearing my brother’s toy army helmet, marched backwards with a broom, prepared to swipe at any bird that swooped. And they did.

And finally, at a time when I was apparently not yet afraid of birds, I carefully carried home a dead robin, wanting to give it a funeral. When I showed it to my mother, she screamed and knocked it out of my hands. “That’s filthy!” she yelled. “It’s full of bugs and parasites and maggots.” What followed was a hot-water hand-washing that seemed to last forever. And it has, in my mind. I don’t know what happened to the dead bird. I never dared to look.

So now, dead birds on my sidewalk. My husband took care of a few. But then he somehow always found himself in too much of a hurry. So with my skin crawling, I pulled on a pair of garden gloves, got a big plastic bag and lots of paper towels, and I picked them up. I felt bad about putting them in the dumpster. But we don’t have a yard – there’s no place for a burial. I did whisper, “I’m sorry,” as I let them go.

So today, I was pleased that there were no dead birds when I took my dog, Ursula, outside for her first trip. But as we headed into the city parking lot, I saw one of these little birds sitting on the pavement. Just sitting. “Shoo,” I said as I grew closer. It didn’t.

Hours later, the bird was still there. Upright. In the middle of a parking lot, it was sitting in doomsday. Someone was bound to pull in and hit it.

I have a hard enough time picking up dead birds. Now I had to pick up a live one? Ew ew ew.

But it was just sitting there. So vulnerable.

I put the gardening gloves on again. Then I stood in front of the bird. “Hey,” I said, braced in case it suddenly took flight, right into my hair. “Hey, are you okay?”

Nothing. Though it looked up at me. “You can’t stay here.” I pondered how to approach it. From the front? The back? Wait and let someone else do it?

I chose to approach the back.

I can’t tell you how freaked out I was. I mean, I was going to touch a BIRD.

I wrapped my gloved fingers around the little body and lifted. I tried not to think about bugs and parasites and maggots. He was so light, if I didn’t see his head poking out of my fingers, I would have thought I was holding air. I marched him down the street at arm’s length, across a parking lot, and to the river, where there was a nice grassy spot. There was a bush with berries. There was water. And it was quiet. I placed him just beneath the bush.

“Here you go,” I said. “It’s safer here. It’s quiet. It’s a better place…for what’s happening to you.”

When I got home, I threw the garden gloves into the wash. Hot, hot water.

But I felt pretty good. I did a good deed. I recognize the bird will likely not survive – he wasn’t acting the way a healthy bird acts. But I have to think that if death is inevitable, dying next to a river, on bright green grass, under a bush filled with red berries, is preferable to a paved parking lot where a car could come along at any minute.

Rest in peace, little bird. I’m glad I could help.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

One year ago today was the one day that I did not write a Today’s Moment blog, in the year I vowed to do so every day. It was the one day that I failed; I simply couldn’t find any words to write. I’d made it through the cancer diagnosis, the surgery, and radiation and I was embarking on long-term oral chemotherapy. While things were still difficult, we thought we were on the way back up.

And then my husband suddenly and with no warning was let go from his job. And of course, that meant we were “let go” from our health insurance as well.

You know that children’s book, Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Yeah, it was like that, but worse. We were completely blindsided.

And so I didn’t write my moment. Something I’ve regretted.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from my Today’s Moment year was that happiness isn’t always obvious. Sometimes you really have to look. And I mean LOOK. Over that year, my perspective changed from believing that happiness is a gift to believing that happiness is a choice. You choose happiness. You reach for it.

And right now, up to my, well, breast in an acute infection that showed up a year after surgery, an infection that isn’t cancer, but is there because I had cancer, an infection that is basically under control, but is resisting going away completely, and an infection that occurred at a time when I planned on going insurance-less until Michael’s insurance from his new job kicked in, rather than continuing to pay the ridiculous COBRA costs – well, I could very easily choose to skip a week of This Week’s Moment Of Happiness. But I’m not.

I choose to be happy.

I choose it.

So I was blindsided again yesterday, when I went in to see the surgeon for a follow-up. The drain in my breast was gone, but the bandages had prevented me from seeing what it looked like. The night before my appointment, I took the bandages off as the adhesive was starting to get to me. I looked in the mirror. And what I saw was not anything like what I’ve seen in the last year, a view, a difference, that I’ve grown accustomed to.

The removal of the tumor left me with what I called an ice cream scoop taken out of my breast. I didn’t like it. But I could live with it. Now, it looked like a part of my breast collapsed. It’s like someone took a golf club and slammed it into the side of my breast. It looks misshapen, mangled, unnatural – I would even say butchered. The nipple no longer looks forward. It looks to the side, away from its healthy twin.

I couldn’t say a word. But I covered my breast with my hand.  I held it the way you would hold a stunned bird who just flew into your window.

When I saw the surgeon, I asked her what was going on. She said that apparently, there’s been a pocket of fluid in the surgical site pretty much since the day of surgery. That pocket of fluid gave me a more rounded appearance, and somehow, a year later, it became infected. The fluid has now been removed.

“So…” I said slowly, looking down at my breast, bared in the examination room. “This is it? This is the way it will look? This is the way I will look?”

My surgeon, who has gone through breast cancer herself, put her hand on my shoulder. “Yes, Kathie,” she said. “This is it.”

She left the room. I fell apart.

When I pulled myself together, I left the office. As I waited for the elevator, a mom and her young boy joined me. He was probably about four. He glanced up at me and I smiled at him. He looked at his mother, then back at me, and he took his free hand and slid it into mine.

“I like you,” he said. “You’re pretty.”

“Thank you,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever meant two words so sincerely before.

It took gargantuan effort to hold the tears back until I got to my car. I didn’t want to alarm him. I didn’t want him to think he’d said the wrong thing. Because he hadn’t.

Last night, after an evening of googling prostheses for partial mastectomies and being thoroughly turned off by their colloquial name of “chicken cutlets” (why don’t we ever just call things what they are?), I got ready for bed. I stood in front of the mirror and looked again at this battered breast of mine. This breast I refuse to call a girl, a tata, a boob, whatever. She’s a breast.

She’s a part of me. Still.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I still like you. We’re still a team. I will continue to hold you as you heal.”

I wrote this today. I choose to be happy.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

You know, it ain’t easy to find a moment of happiness when you find yourself, a year after finishing treatment for breast cancer, with a drain sticking out of your breast.

I thought I had the flu. Bone-rattling chills, body aches, fever. But then 24 hours later, I woke up with a breast that looked like a stop sign and was giving off more heat than my space heater. And pain? Holy cow.

On September 25, 2017, I finished radiation for breast cancer. What remained was long-term oral chemotherapy – swallowing a pill every day for the next five to ten years. So…the crisis was over. And then, on September 21^st 2018, after a trip to Urgent Care, the ER, and the surgeon, I ended up with a drain, removing an infection from the surgical site where the tumor used to be. Turns out that the space left behind doesn’t fill in for years – and sometimes, it fills with fluid, and if there’s bacteria in the body, it travels there, and bam. Infection.

So it’s been a shaky week. A week of memories and flashbacks, of feeling like I’m going backward instead of forward. Compounding this is the anniversary of the launch of my novel, In Grace’s Time dovetailing with the release of Today’s Moment of Happiness Despite The News; A Year of Spontaneous Essays. Grace’s launch: 9/26/17. Today’s Moment’s release date: 9/27/18. When Grace came out, I was too sick and exhausted to enjoy it. I had to cancel appearances and a midwest book tour. With Today’s Moment, I swore I was going to get that time and enjoyment back.

And now, there’s a drain waving like a red flag.

In and out of the surgeon’s office and the Breast Care Center this week, I was walloped with reminders. Last Friday, as I waited to see if I was going to have to have the drain, a woman came from the examining area. She was rail thin and wore a stocking cap. And she was beaming. Her mother stood to meet her and the woman exclaimed, “They got it! They got it all! The surgery worked!” and the two burst into tears. So did the woman sitting across from me in the waiting room. And so did I. Group hug. Congratulations all around. The woman said she was going to go home and eat cake.

On Monday, I returned to the Breast Care Center because the protective wrap they covered the drain with where it entered my skin was peeling back. They very gently put a new one on for me. As I walked toward the elevators, another woman came around the corner. She was wearing a v-neck shirt, and I could see, from the redness of her skin and the apparatus poking out, that she’d just received her port for chemotherapy. Her eyes were full. She looked at me and I looked at her. I lifted my shirt, just a little so she could see the tubing for the drain, and then I held my arms out. She fell into them and sobbed on my shoulder. I couldn’t say it would be okay. I couldn’t say it would be all right. But I did say, “It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge after challenge. And you’re going to have help and support the whole way.” And then we parted.

Today, I went in for another ultrasound, to make sure that everything is healing. A young woman sat near me in the waiting room, looking at her phone. She didn’t wear a stocking cap, and her skull was just the most elegant smooth curve. When I sat down, I think I sighed. She looked up at me. Huge brown eyes. And then they filled. She held her fist out to me, and I bumped her with mine. We didn’t say a word.

I am part of a club I never wanted to join. And I am surrounded with grace, with strength, with compassion, with support. This week’s moment of happiness, #1.

During the ultrasound, I asked the technician and the radiologist if they thought the drain would be gone by October 18^th, the day of the Today’s Moment launch. I explained that if the drain was still going to be there, I’d have to get a new outfit. The one I chose would not cover the tubing. After the radiologist assured me that he thought it would be gone, the technician said, “Anyway, with your personality, I’m sure you could find a way to make it work. Some bling. Wrap it in a feather boa.” And the radiologist said, “Bedazzle it!”

Ohmygod.

I added that maybe I should just appear topless and wrap a pasty or tassel around it – though it’s coming from the side and not the front.

For a moment, this week’s moment #2, we laughed. And then they both hugged me.

Again.

This club I’m in. This club that reaches out and fist-bumps, hugs, smiles, wipes away tears, without even asking, without a word. I am lifted up. And I do everything in my power to lift right back. I’m still here to do it.

This week’s moment #3.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

When you’re a parent, there are all these moments. Some of them are obvious: first time sitting up, first walk, first run, first day of school, and so on. I remember with each of my four kids, I had a “baby’s first year” calendar that came with stickers that you could put on the date that your child met one of the calendar-maker’s “moments”. I was always so excited with these, and may have even fibbed on a few: “Well, he sat up for three seconds before falling over, so that’s sitting up!”

But as I lived my way through each child, I became aware of the other moments that maybe aren’t so obvious and that I’ve never seen on any calendar. When your kid suddenly shoots beyond you in height, grins at you, pats you on the head, and says, “Hi, Little Mommy.” The first argument that ends in its usual way at first, with the child stomping off to his or her room and slamming the door, but then that door opens and the child comes back with tears and an apology. The first serious talk that isn’t about toys or other kids at school or even what’s for dinner.

When you’re a parent, there are just these moments, some that can’t even be verbalized, when you look at your child and you see a person.

Over the weekend, I became my daughter Olivia’s personal shopper. She is going to Homecoming and by the time that decision was made, it was only two weeks away. With our different work schedules, there was no way we could go together before the big day. So while Olivia worked, I went to Goodwill, my favorite fancy-dress-you’ll-never-wear-again store, and brought home armfuls. On Sunday, I took back the rejects and came home with another armful.

The dresses covered many moods, which reflected my daughter, because when you’re almost 18, your life is many moods. Some were sexy, some were fru-fru, some were kinda silly.

And then there was one.

The dress is different for a Homecoming. But my daughter is different too. The dress is a dark chocolate brown, silky, flowing. It’s a halter top, and the straps of the halter come up over the dress material and are sheer and wide. The dress is classic, romantic, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn (and Olivia knows who Audrey Hepburn is), beautiful, gentle. Stunning in a way that makes you turn and look again and whisper, “Wow,” instead of popping your eyes wide open and shouting, “Holy cats!”

When Olivia tried it on and looked at herself, her left hand came up and rested naturally on her hip. And the smile that crossed her face was just…oh. There’s that not being able to verbalize it. But that smile. Maybe it’s the smile that shows she recognizes her own beauty, but also knows that beauty isn’t the only thing. Maybe it was satisfaction with how she’s turned out, but also the determination to do even more.

Maybe it was just Olivia. My girl.

And I found myself thinking, Oh, look at her. Just look at her.

Moment.

Then, last night, I came downstairs to find Michael and Olivia in a deep conversation. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Olivia looked up at me. “I’m going to be voting soon, so I figure I better know what’s going on and what to do. I asked Dad to explain liberalism and conservatism to me.”

Another Wow whisper. Moment.

On Facebook this week, a friend who has just become a grandmother for the first time posted a photo of her granddaughter. And my friend’s caption was, “I’m in love.”

Me too. I’ve been in love since January 18, 1984. March 12, 1986. April 8, 1987.

And October 17, 2000.

(not to mention my own granddaughter, since January 21, 2013.)

That moment. That smile. That dress. That desire to know.

Oh, that girl.

And yes, that helps. SHE helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

I don’t like bugs. I duck if I think I hear or see one. If there is one, I leave the room. I won’t squash them because I don’t want to be within ten feet of them. And this extends to ALL bugs, even the “nice” bugs, butterflies, ladybugs, dragonflies, pretty sorts of things, but still with those icky legs that are remarkably similar to a mosquito’s or a spider’s or a bee’s. I will admire “nice” bugs from a distance. Ten feet, at least. You will never catch me in a butterfly garden. I think the word roach should be reconfigured to four letters. All bug-names should be four-letters.

So imagine my surprise when I was in line at the drive-thru lane at Starbucks a couple days ago and I heard a “Tonk!” Looking up, I found myself face to face with a grasshopper. A BIG grasshopper. And there was just the windshield between us. No roof – I was in the convertible. We looked at each other. Like his legs, my skin crawled.

This is a very narrow drive-thru lane. The other day, it was blocked because a swarm of bees took over and the baristas couldn’t use the window. Today, it was grasshopper day, and I couldn’t get out of my car. I couldn’t back up or move forward. And a grasshopper was glaring at me through my windshield.

There have been a lot of grasshoppers lately. I’ve seen them on the studio’s windows, on the sides of Walgreens, sitting on the sidewalks. They’d left me alone.

Until now. And now, I had no escape.

So I sat there and stared at it.

I remembered chasing grasshoppers when I was a kid in northern Minnesota. Back then, I was okay with bugs. I caught grasshoppers, held them until they spat “tobacco juice” on my palm, then I shrieked and let them go. I picked up fuzzy caterpillars and put them in old jars, complete with a stick and leaves and grass and a lid with holes, and I watched them wrap themselves in cocoons and then come out as butterflies, which I released. I chased yellow and white moths, moths in name now, but butterflies then, and let them sit on my fingers. I held ladybugs to my heart and made a wish because I believed ladybugs were lucky. And oh, the fireflies. I didn’t call them that until I moved here. In my little corner of Minnesota, they were lightning bugs and I loved that they were flashes in the night that didn’t scare me.

I have to admit, I am still charmed by lightning bugs. So okay, there is a bug that I still like.

And now, this grasshopper. And me, trapped. I thought briefly about turning on my windshield wipers. But then I thought of all the grasshoppers I’d held, when I wasn’t afraid of grasshoppers.

And this one, it really didn’t look so bad. It had an intelligent face.

The car ahead of me moved up and so did I. So did the grasshopper.

“Hi,” I said.

It moved a bit to the left.

When I reached for my cell phone to take a picture of it, it leaped. The helicopter whirr made me duck. I don’t know where it went, but I spent the next several seconds patting myself down, making sure it wasn’t in my hair, on my shoulders or my neck, anywhere. It wasn’t. And I laughed.

The duck-down was definitely me now. But it was nice, just for that bit, to go back to being a small town northern Minnesota girl who chased butterflies that weren’t butterflies, thought that grasshoppers spat tobacco, and was charmed by lightning that only lit up the sky in a pinprick way and with no accompanying thunder.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

I awoke this morning to a cooler Wisconsin. A glance at my phone told me it was only 59 degrees outside, beyond my shut-tight windows that have held in the air-conditioned air for weeks. Air conditioners all around the state have been working overtime, keeping unusually hot, unusually humid, unusually wet conditions from turning us into drenched sweating crabby beasts. Which we’ve turned into anyway, because we still have to go out there, and we know it’s there even when we’re inside.

But this morning at 9:30: 59 degrees. Blue skies. Sunshine. No rain.

I went downstairs and flicked off the a/c. Then I opened the windows and the two deck doors, one of which is beside my desk.

I sat down, finally, with a cup of strong hot coffee. I turned my face to the deck door and…Fall blew in.

It was one of those moments. Those perfect moments where all I could do was hold still, breathe in air that was no longer saturated with a wrung-out Summer, but chill with Fall and with the promise of Winter.  There was the strong scent of coffee. There was silence. Michael was at work. Olivia was at school. One cat slept beside me on my desk, one slept on my reading chair. A 45-pound dog sat on my feet. In five minutes, I would meet with the first of five clients today, but then, right then, I just held still.

I couldn’t help but take a breath because my world was taking a breath all around me. Encouraged by the arrival of Fall.

Fall, and familiarity. The feeling that, hey, this is all normal. This is the way it’s supposed to be.

Last week, I had a bizarre experience in physical therapy. A year after diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, I am still struggling with fall-out. Lymphedema and radiation fibrosis syndrome restrict the range of motion in my right arm. The fibrosis makes my breast feel as if there are ropes just under the surface of my skin, and these ropes pull at muscle and tendon and tissue, causing pain.

In this second physical therapy appointment, I lay flat on my back on a table while the therapist massaged my breast in the slow circle of a self-exam, the type that I should have been doing, but didn’t, from 2013 to 2017.  The therapist’s fingers were primed to break apart the ropes that I apparently tied on myself, through self-neglect and busy-ness. As I lay there in the a/c air, in a room in the Cancer Center, a room right across the hall from where my mammogram turned my life upside down, where I had two biopsies, I listened as my breast gave off sounds like the shuffle of leaves as I’ve walked through them in the past. As I will walk through them again, soon.

Breasts are not supposed to crinkle.

That was not familiar. That was not normal. But by the end of the session, my breast had fallen silent.

Today was silent too, when Fall blew in.

I know I am living a New Normal. I am amazed at how quickly, sometimes, New can become Familiar. I walk into the Cancer Center without a flinch now, though I do find myself turning my face away from the radiation department, where I know Xappa lurks. I take my medication without thinking about it. I glance in the mirror, and then I glance away – the reflection hasn’t become familiar, but the avoidance of it has.

The New Normal. The Familiar Unfamiliarity.

At the end of my physical therapy appointment, I walked back out into the unusual heat, the unusual humidity, and looked up in the sky to gauge the next unusual rainfall. I snarled at the weather, but I just got in my car and drove home. I persevered. It’s what you do when the unusual becomes the usual.

But today, Fall blew in. And for one of those moments, those perfect moments, everything was normal. All was as it should be.

And you know, it really, really is.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

The piano’s story continues.

Over the weekend, I heard Olivia intermittently plunking on the new old piano. Every time I heard her, I smiled. And when I passed it, I smiled at the piano too. From time to time, if no one was around, I folded back the keyboard cover and plunked a little myself. A cheerful or melancholy rendition of “Chopsticks” (yes, Chopsticks can be melancholy). A song I remember that my brother made up, though I no longer remember how to do the left hand. The right-hand melody of “Heart and Soul”.

I think “Heart and Soul” with just the right hand is a pretty lonely sound. But I never learned the left hand/bass clef.

Over the weekend, I was at a used bookstore, and I found the nicest Introduction to Piano book. Not only did it teach finger placement and notes and songs, but it talked about a piano’s care and placement. I brought it home. Before the book even made it into the piano’s bench, Olivia snatched it and disappeared into her room.

On Monday afternoon, I was pretty deep into writing. It took me a while to realize that I was humming. I stopped when I became conscious of it because I wondered what the hell I was doing. The song certainly had nothing to do with what I was writing.

Though maybe it did. The song was “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring”.

From downstairs, I heard the piano, and the piano was singing that song. Only Olivia was home with me. Only Olivia could be playing it. With both the left and right hands.

I removed my own hands from my own lettered keyboard and just listened. There were a few hesitations, a few misplaced fingers. But then a silence and she played it again. Start to finish. Flawlessly.

There’d been no lessons yet. Just a friendly book from a used bookstore. And a young woman’s desire to play.

And my desire to hear. I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to live in a home filled with piano music. There was a piano in the home I used to share with my first husband. Each of my older children took lessons for a time and I loved to listen to them. When I left that home and that husband, the piano stayed behind. I hadn’t paid for it, he said, he did. So it was his.

But now there was another piano in my living room. And another child playing it. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”.

Joy.

As Olivia started to play again, I sang the words, quietly.

“Through the way where hope is guiding,

Hark, what peaceful music rings…”

Later, Olivia asked me how I thought she did. When I told her she was amazing, she didn’t believe me. But she was. In how she managed to play. In how she made me feel.

And later still, home alone again, I sat down and played my lonely one-handed version of “Heart & Soul”.

“But now I see, what one embrace can do

Look at me, it’s got me loving you madly…”

Joy. Heart and soul. Sometimes, you can play a song with just one hand, but hear a symphony. Or at least, hear what you’ve always wanted to hear: a home filled with the sound of a piano.

Eventually, like Olivia, I’ll figure the bass clef out. Until then, I’ll listen. And play with one eager hand when I’m by myself.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

On July 7, 2017, I wrote this for my Today’s Moment:

And now, every time I pass a piano, I stop and look at it. That’s the instrument I always wanted to play. But beyond lunchtime renditions of Heart and Soul in the chorus room in high school, it never happened.

But I always thought it could. I thought I could do it.

I think I might want a piano for my birthday. I think I might want to learn. And even if I couldn’t, I could play Heart and Soul. Over and over. With heart. With soul. I could teach Olivia and we could play it together.

That piano never materialized. Not last year’s birthday. Not this year’s. And then today happened.

Perusing through Facebook a few days ago, I saw that Olivia’s first grade teacher (and also the mother of one of my son’s best friends and the mother of my daughter Katie’s first boyfriend) posted a photo of a piano. She said she was giving it away for free. She said it was hard to let go, and she was sad, but it was time for it to find another good home.

Hello.

I credit that teacher with turning the magic key that helped Olivia finally understand how to read. She was six years old and she was struggling. And she was unhappy that other kids in her class were already reading chapter books. She was hearing chapter books, which we read to her every night. The Junie B. Jones series was her favorite. But at times, I would find her sitting on the couch, holding a Junie B. Jones book open in her lap, and she’d have the most bewildered look on her face. She wanted to read. But she couldn’t make sense of the words.

And then her teacher gave her a book about a frog. I wish I could remember the name. The print was large and dark and there was only one word on each line. The illustrations bright, but not predominant and overwhelming, distracting from the words. And the “chapters” were only one page each. For whatever reason, Olivia lit up. She caught fire. She tore through that book, and then more by the same author. By the end of that school year, she was reading Junie B. Jones and more.

And now, years later, Olivia is a budding writer, artist and musician, playing four instruments – the violin, the acoustic guitar, the electric guitar, and the ukulele.

And here was her teacher with a piano.

Now I have to admit, the piano isn’t all for Olivia. You can see that last year, I wrote that I always wanted to play the piano. I have. My brother played the organ, and when I asked to learn piano, my parents said we already had a Hammond in the house and a built-in teacher, so I could just do that. Well, that didn’t go so well. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. It wasn’t who I was. Who I am.

I arranged to have the piano transported to my home. Olivia’s teacher asked me for the colors of my living room and then she recovered the piano bench in coordinating material and made a matching runner for the top.

And now, there is a piano in my living room. I wasn’t even all the way down the stairs to show the movers out when I heard the first plinks and plunks. It appears that Olivia’s first grade teacher has turned the key to another facet in her brain.

I sat on the stairs for a few minutes and listened. The plinks and plunks weren’t music yet. But they will be. Just like the letters on the page weren’t words yet, there for a while. But they are now.

I got out the Liquid Gold, my mother’s ever-ready furniture-ER-in-a-spray-can, and I polished that piano to a high shine. When I dusted the keys (sans Liquid Gold), I plinked and plunked myself. I haven’t actually pulled out the bench yet, haven’t seated myself, haven’t laid my hands on the keys. Though I did stand next to a seated Olivia and played a rousing chorus of Chopsticks.

Hello, Piano. You’ve come to another good home. You are going to be well-loved. Again. Hello, long-standing wish.

I’m gonna play. So is Olivia.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

We decided to take Grandbaby Maya Mae to the Racine Zoological Gardens. She’s been to the Milwaukee County Zoo a number of times, so we thought a visit to a smaller, more intimate zoo would be a great experience. We didn’t tell Maya one of the benefits of the Racine Zoo – it’s right next to Lake Michigan.

I was excited. Maya has three sets of grandparents. One has a backyard swimming pool, and another is installing one of those infinity lap pools, so Maya is well-acquainted with chlorine. But Lake Michigan…

I remember well introducing my own kids to large bodies of water. Rehoboth Beach and Virginia Beach and a beach in Rockport, Texas, for my first three kids. Myrtle Beach, St. George Island in Florida, and Waldport, Oregon for Olivia. And for everyone, Lake Michigan.

Once the zoo was thoroughly visited, I helped a hot, sweaty and tired Maya into the back seat of the convertible. “We’re going to someplace special,” I said. “Lake Michigan.”

“Yay!” she said. “What’s that?”

Oh, education time.

We found an incredible beach a short distance away from the zoo. As I parked, all Maya could see of the lake was a strip of blue over the edge of my car. She asked if that was part of the sky. “Yes,” I said as I unbuckled her, “the wet part. The great part.”

And then she stepped out. And froze. Instantly dumbfounded. “Whoa…” she said quietly.

“We’re going to it,” I said. “You’re going to put your feet in Lake Michigan.”

She leaped straight up and then plunked down on the sand to take off her shoes. “I’m going in the ocean!” she crowed.

I looked toward the lake. Many times, returning from Oregon and my visit with the Pacific, I would dare to look out the window of the plane (I normally keep the shade closed) and admire the sheer presence of Lake Michigan. It is our ocean, on the Midwest coast. I always felt like she welcomed me home after my trips, and reminded me of her presence. But how to explain the oceanic personality of this great lake to a five-year old? I decided to keep it simple and let the lake do her own talking. “It’s not an ocean,” I said. “It’s a lake. A great lake.”

“Lake,” she repeated.

“Its water isn’t salty. It’s fresh,” I said. “But it’s big, like the ocean. And it’s blue, like the ocean.” We began our walk across the sand.

“It sounds like the ocean,” Maya offered. I brought her a conch shell from my retreat this year. Maya met me at the airport and she held the shell to her ear all the way home.

We stood on the edge of the lake. We just looked. Then Maya took my hand. “I’m a wittle bit nervous,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s big. She’s going to feel cold. But she won’t hurt you. Besides that, I’m here.”

And we walked in. Maya shrieked and laughed and exclaimed over the way the sand shifted under her feet. “I can’t believe I’m here!” she yelled and flung her arms to the blue sky.

And I thought back over four kids, getting their feet wet for the first time. And now a grandchild. I can’t believe I’m here either.

“Look, Gamma Kaffee, look! I’m on my knees!”

There she was, this “wittle bit nervous” girl, on her knees, her dress floating around her waist. She repeated the arm-fling to the sky, bringing up a great slosh of water, which of course, fell right back down on her.

She wasn’t in a swimsuit. We didn’t have a change of clothes. We didn’t have a towel. There were no outdoor showers. Ohboy.

When we finally got back to the car, we scraped her off as best we could. We wrung out her dress. She laughed the whole time. And it was then that I learned that invaluable benefit of being a grandmother.

We gave this sand-encrusted, sweat-layered, soaking wet child back to her parents. There was no washing the child in the tub, and then washing the tub from the child.

And best of all? Maya said, “This was the best day of my WIFE!”

More grandchildren, please.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Last Saturday, Michael and I drove to Beloit, Wisconsin, where I introduced a student at his first book debut (Yay!) and took part in the celebration. We’d never been to Beloit, so we took advantage of the time between the event and the dinner and we explored. We ended up in a lovely park right next to the Rock River.

Photo opportunities abounded, so it wasn’t long before Michael wandered away. I wanted to get closer to the water, so I crossed a walking bridge that went over a thick patch of lilypads. I was partway across when I heard a little boy yell, “Look! A frog!”

A frog! I stopped and leaned over the railing, looking where this boy pointed. And sure enough, just like a cliché, a big green frog sat on a lilypad. The sun sparkled in his eyes and his chin filled and emptied with his breath, like a bubble pulse. I was charmed, as I always have been around frogs.

From the ages of six to twelve, I lived in way northern Minnesota, in a little town called Esko. During the mid-sixties to early seventies, it was the type of place where a summertime child could fly out the door right after breakfast and disappear and nobody worried. Every child was always Somewhere. Even though the area was home to grizzlies and moose and porcupines and skunks, a child was always Safe.

A little creek ran through my back yard. Every spring, against the banks and tucked in bends, were beds of frog eggs. I filled ice cream buckets with eggs and silt and creek weeds and then I watched as the eggs hatched. The tadpoles were swimming commas and then suddenly, like magic, they sprouted legs. When that happened, I returned them to the creek.

Which led to a bumper crop of frogs. I became an expert at catching them, holding them, talking to them, and then letting them go. Or maybe not an expert – maybe the frogs just knew that I’d never do anything to hurt them.

Watching this boy now, I both hoped for the frog’s escape and for the boy’s opportunity to hold such a creature in his hands.

When I wrote my first “novel” in the fifth grade, one of the main characters was a frog. In high school, I had to take the class where everyone was required to dissect a frog. I refused. Luckily, my teacher was patient and willing to sit down and discuss my arguments against the dissection. He offered me an alternative – write a research paper about how the frogs in our classes came to be there. I think he thought that I’d find it was a benign thing – the frogs were raised and then sent to the schools. Their whole life purpose was dying so we could learn. I believed we could learn just as easily through books and illustrations.

I did the alternative. I unearthed tons of material about frog farms, the inhumane environments frogs were raised in, and even found evidence that the “painless” way we were taught to kill the frogs – inserting a pin in through the back of the head to the brain – was actually torture.

I got an A on the paper. Then I sent it in to the Humane Society of the United States’ magazine for kids, KIND (Kindness In Nature’s Defense), and they published it, and then published it again in the HSUS magazine.

This past spring, I was on my way to pick up Olivia from work when I passed a swampy area and I was bowled over by the chorus of singing peepers. I pulled over to listen. After getting Livvy, I pulled over again so she could hear them too.

All brought back to me on this day, the day of a young boy shouting, “A frog!” and seeing a frog with the sun in his eyes.

The boy took one splashing step in the water and the frog disappeared under the blanket of lilypads. “I just wanted to see it,” the boy said, looking up at me on the bridge. I nodded. “It’s okay. You’ll get the next one. Just walk really quiet. And think hard about how you would never ever hurt it. The frog will know.”

The boy smiled at me and the sun sparkled in his eyes too.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.