So to celebrate my birthday, the DMV took my picture.

Then they took it again.

Which immediately took me way back to the Maryland DMV that I went to with my newly-married name: that was the time that cured me for life of pushing my slipping glasses back up at the bridge with my forefinger, because what the camera saw was my finger up my nose. The cameraman shook his head and told me, You don’t want to look at that for the next ten years, lady, and insisted on a do-over.

Who knew DMV guys could be nice.

They tested my vision. I passed.

The forms-and-vision guy was bored out of his mind and a little annoyed at having to deal with some old (officially! Today!) person who had a hard time hearing him; he was like, get’em in get’em out next come on next.

Charming he wasn’t.

I’ll show him (glancing down in my purse.) Yeah that’s about the one he deserves. A bright green alligator with yellow spikes. A reptile. Rows of teeth.

(One of my sons on the phone later: you didn’t.)

Me: I did, and the thing is that when I handed the guy that finger puppet and told him Merry Christmas (a slip–I usually say Happy Birthday for universality but the season got to me. So sue me) his face entirely lit up. He was so delighted!

It is fair to say that I was more surprised than he was. He showed me, for sure.

Later, a friend dropped by and not wanting to bother Richard at work and not wanting to be in the sun, we sat in my car laughing and having a great time catching up and feeling like teenagers hanging out while the real teenagers next door came and went and probably wondered what on earth was up over there.

My sister–my oldest sister!–called and told me she’d streaked her hair purple when she turned 65 and I told her I wished she’d told me that sooner or that I’d thought of that and the DMV could have preserved it forever. What a missed opportunity!

It was the best day. I think I should turn 65 next year, too.

Balsam Hill was a start-up when one of my daughter’s close friends went to work for them after college, and that’s how we heard of them. It was some time before we finally splurged and bought one of their fake trees, but getting an allergy-free Christmas finally won me over. No handsaws, no ropes, no ridiculously small Prius sporting an unstable mullet driving down the side of the mountain from the tree farm. No explosion of bugs coming out of popping pine cones in the nice warm house. (That one year…!!)

Long needles, I said. No stingy branches. No stabbiness when you reach for a present. I wanted it lush. I wanted me a Scotch pine. I loved that they worked so hard to make their trees look real; it was their whole reason for being.

Richard’s only take was that it had to be taller than him.

The seven and a half footer we got is almost not taller than him in his fedora.

We’ve had it a goodly while now, and I remember thinking last year that it was finally starting to show its age–I couldn’t get this one branch to move into this one space and I kind of filled it up with ornaments and tried not to let it bug me.

Maybe, I thought, (not that we were going to justify the expense) we should get one of those models that you roll out from the closet, pull the bag off the top, flip it over, put the tippy-top on: pfft, done. Ours is five pieces you drag out there with lights needing connecting vertically. Lifting and putting the big bottom parts together is hard for both our backs these days.

And when I say big. The first January that we tried to wrestle the entire tree back into the bag it had come in, I called the company and said, It is not physically possible. I don’t know how you guys got that Scotch Pine in there but we cannot.

They said, That’s our fullest widest tree, we understand. (The high school friend later said, The people in the warehouse found that we can’t get them back in, either.) Then they sent me a whole new size large storage bag, free, to help us with that. Fixed. Great customer service.

So. Yesterday was rough news, tomorrow’s a celebration, why not get ready for that celebration: You want to put the tree up tonight? he asked me. Let’s.

Still working on those upper lights when I snapped the photo; he was programming his timer.

I found myself murmuring again and again, It’s so beautiful. Look at this. Such a nice tree. After all these years it still looks so good.

I can see that my sense of appreciation has sharpened, clearly. Always a good thing.

Years ago, one of my kids had an eye emergency and I was told they had no openings for six weeks.

The appalled pediatrician told me, You go to that department you put your baby on their counter and you tell them you’re not leaving till they fit your kid in. Now.

I did and they did.

So.

The good and bad news is the receptionist earlier this year moved my appointment forward by a day, which meant the insurance company bounced it; it had to be rescheduled, and three months out was the best they could do. I was able to get a simple vision test last month and the new glasses I badly needed but the actual eye checkup had to wait. To today.

The good news is that had that goof not happened, what they saw today might not have so apparent in September and adding nine more months to that could have been catastrophic.

The bad news is that the retina specialist can’t see me till the end of January.

The good news is that I now have that appointment. And a second one, because,

the bad news is that two weeks ago I found a lump above the other eye socket, the one that had a squamous-celled growth removed.

The good news is that I’ve lived 37 perfectly good years since then with no cancer from it, and this is probably nothing.

My dad was told that if he’d seen a retina specialist right away (and not flown across the Atlantic Ocean first!) they could have saved his eye. He went straight from the airport to the doctor and was sent straight to the hospital.

But he lost it. I refuse to. Mine’s not an emergency yet–but I won’t wait for an appointment if it becomes one.

I know how to sit on a counter.

Typing this out is my equivalent of having a good cry, because yelling, NO!!! in the car on the way home to try to tell it all who was the boss of it just didn’t quite do it. (Having now tested the theory I’d heard of whether such shenanigans are helpful, I’d have to say that for me, no, not really.)

I will forever be grateful for the empathy of our Dr. S of thirty years, who was closer to tears than he might have thought was professional as I left, but I saw it. It helped more than he could have known. We were in this together, even if he won’t be the one managing this.

And life goes on.

No return address. It was a beautiful little square black box in perfect condition despite having been in an envelope.

We did a mutual, Huh? The other must have ordered it. We were sure of it. Some discussion along those lines ensued, till I opened that little riff on Apple-style packing and burst out laughing. Yes, actually, yes I had ordered that.

$5.94 for a new oven thermometer. Who knew it would arrive in a little black dress?

The potholder looms of my childhood were made of metal: sturdy and with a definite heft to them. Once you had one you had one.

When my kids were growing up, the concept had been watered down to flimsy, cheap plastic looms that broke and thin synthetic loops that made your potholder gap and then they would scorch or even melt–which defeats the point of having the kids not only create it but be able to be proud of seeing their work being put to good use for years to come. I never was able to find the old metal type; they just weren’t out there.

Harrisville Designs (yes the woolen mill) has revived them. Which makes sense; they sell weaving looms, so, hey, start them young!

Their custom loops are thick braided cotton. They’ve improved the pegs to help keep the loops on while the weaving is happening, and they offer patterns to show what those loops could become.

In case anyone’s looking.

Could you pick up my prescription?

Sure.

(Runs to the pharmacy, Trader Joe’s is across the street, we’re low on milk, need our hot cocoa in the morning, okay, quick trip.)

As I was coming to the checkout lines a dad with a very young toddler in a stroller was about to cross my path. It was not quite dinnertime and too late for a nap, she was not home and not fed and she suddenly arched her back, threw her arms up and legs out and let out a yell. She didn’t have the words yet but man, she had the volume. I think everybody in the store heard her.

I stopped my cart. Sir?

He took a deep breath, ready for the–lecture, scold, whatever was coming, as I did a sudden dive into the purse.

(Thank you knitters in Peru!)

His face transformed.

I smiled and continued over towards a clerk because it wasn’t about me, I wanted them to have a good time having an outing.

I looked back from there to see him pointing at me and then looking back at her and her waving bye-bye/thank you/look at me being cute the way little ones do. She was giggling. Wow, what a difference.

As I was loading my car they strolled past with their groceries and a small finger puppet on a small hand down there waved bye bye again.

(p.s. And yes, she got a lion. They can practice their roars together!)

And on a sillier note–

Scene: dinner table.

Him: If it were my blog, I wouldn’t link to a recipe I hadn’t tried.

Me: But in this case maybe that’s part of the point. I’m not gonna try it, *you* try it! Or most likely not.

Both of us: reminiscences of the infamous Oobleck Pie thirty years ago from my then-new Joy of Cheesecake book.  All the other recipes in it were great; avocado/honey cheesecake with a wheat germ crust was… um… a tad green. And sticky.

But I baked it! My first one was a gift to a friend group–and they took one look at that thing and made me eat the first piece. I made it again for my family. Once.

So here’s the recipe that just the description tonight made his face go all funny before he finally asked, Why??

Peanut butter ketchup cookies.

With apologies to its creator, but, it almost reads like a college psych student’s research paper on internet gullibility.

Our friend Jim was back in town (flashback here from when his young son fell 30′ off a ski lift–and lived and recovered) and he was playing the organ in a concert at the creche exhibit.

Two of the pieces were composed by Mary Finlayson, including her All Will Be Right. It is one of my favorite Christmas songs. A children’s chorus performed it. It was perfect.

My parents, who lived in Maryland at the time, went on a trip to Israel when Mom retired and that’s where they met Mary and Norris, who were taking the same tour. Just adding that aside for my mom here.

Mary had been an avid knitter but with aging had felt she just couldn’t manage it anymore, and she asked me once if I’d like her old Barbara Walker stitch treasuries. I of course had my own, but my oldest had started knitting and she would love. We’re a half hour’s drive away and I offered to come pick them up; she instead wanted to bring them to me.

The morning she called to ask if this was a good day to come on by, I… I knew enough about infirmities to think, if you’re having a good enough day to feel up to doing that then this is going to be the day to do that. I didn’t tell her.

But when she arrived, she felt it. And so I explained: we had gotten the call that morning that my mother-in-law in Texas had just died.

(Michelle was with us and the three of us had just

how does one confine the infinite into the smallness of human-created words

we just needed

to Be.

Together. Close. In stillness.)

In the heart of the sacredness of the love we felt surrounded by. Mom Hyde had been through so much with her cancer and now it felt like she wanted us to feel the joy on the other side of all that.

In ringing the startlingly ordinary doorbell and stepping into the room with us, Mary brought her own love and of herself in the effort she had made to bring those books and to help a new generation create more love with their hands and somehow Mary, by her grace and her empathy, made that morning complete in a way I don’t quite know how to explain. But it was good that she had come. I will never forget it.

A dozen years later, she and Norris were sitting behind us tonight as Jim played, and they are going for Rosalynn and Jimmy’s record. Family surrounded them. She was praised and thanked by the various performers coming up and joining Jim, and then at the end when the audience was clapping hard for him, he walked down from the podium to be level with Mary, holding his hand out her way with every step and inviting the audience to turn their clapping to her.

And did we ever. Standing up for it was a bit much for her so we all followed her lead and stayed sitting, too, but applause we could do. Such a good woman who has put so much love into the world, and her husband is right up there with her.

She and Norris were in tears. So were their kids and grandkids (I think there were some great grands in the mix), and man. It felt so good to be able to give back a little.

When we were visiting the up-north kids this past spring, Mathias made me a beaded necklace. He was in kindergarten and it was a string of random letters and sweet little beads from a kit. (Something roughly like this but geared towards slightly older kids, and with actual necklace chains.)

He made me a little choker, the length his mom wears (I thought that was observant) and proudly watched as she helped me put it on. I wore it all day and then, long after he’d gone to bed, Richard was helping me take it off when–CRASH!

There wasn’t a stopper at the end, so there they all were scattered across the floor. Grandparent quiet time fail.

We scooped them up hoping we hadn’t woken up the kids and, well, the easiest thing to do was to put them away in the little travel container for my hearing aids, and they quietly came home with us.

So Thanksgiving week there we were again and I had brought them with me in case he’d like to reassemble them–only, now he’s in first grade and reading so instead of picking letters that looked pretty in his eyes, I was wondering if he might want to spell out words this time? I didn’t even know if they had any more letter beads, though.

I brought it up when Mathias wasn’t right there to hear; I wanted his mom’s take on it first.

Sam said something about, oh, we’ve got the findings so they don’t fall off again, no worries.

But Lillian was in the room and she wanted to get right to fixing that for me. So she did. She made me a new necklace. She restrung everything at hand, the letters random as they were meant to be. The plastic fake Venetian glass bead. The embossed metal flower. Another that looks like a repurposed memory from the collection of antique teacups my father’s mother loved to collect. All the original beads, all put back together.

She got the finding attached at the end with some help from Sam so this time they would all stay on that chain like they were supposed to, and then looked up at me with those beautiful four-year-old eyes of innocence and counseled me solemnly, “Don’t tell Mathias.”

I was not expecting that and laughed like you do when the joy all comes out in a little burst at once, thinking, I will, though, honey, I will. Probably at a toast at his wedding someday. Or yours.

Andy’s Orchard sent out a note saying their holiday figs stuffed with dried peaches mixed with honey and candied orange peel and nuts were available.

I wait all year every year for those. Coming!!

The woman manning the register was the one I’d seen most often all year. About my age, quiet, and since my cane leaves me one-armed with the groceries she is always quick to help out.

She looked a little tired. She rang up my fresh-picked persimmons and Comice pears and stuffed figs, and it wasn’t till she was done and payment made that I reached into my purse again.

There was a dark dull purple and a much more vibrant purple, and I had more color choices waiting in the car if she’d rather. (Zoom hat knitting for the win!)

Her face lit up in surprise as she went for the lighter brighter one, and then so was she. It was a treat to see.

It’s wool, I told her.

That surprised her all over again: But it’s so soft! she told me. I have a wool hat (as she looked upwards as if to see it and patted her head) but it’s scratchy. Scratchy, she said again. This is soft!

I told her that it was machine washable but would fuzz out if it went through the laundry; her choice. But something not to have to worry about if it does.

She offered to carry my filled box out to the car, didn’t ask to see the other colors, loved the one she got, and I loved getting to see her so happy.

Richard and I each had one of those figs when I got home. Clearly, I need to go buy more before they close down for the winter. They are so good!

And they have more employees I’d love to say thank you to.

My audiologist sympathized when I got them but told me that no, that feature couldn’t be turned off.

The resident engineer was sure it was for calibrating the things each time.

To me, it’s an aural ping-pong ball bouncing up and down on the table till at last it rolls in a straight line.

What it is is a sixteen-note little tune that my hearing aids play starting about ten seconds after I turn them on. You cannot just instantly hear the world; you have to wait. And then you have to listen to that (stupid) little tune finally getting to that one repeating note before any outside sound will click on. The volume is pre-set to make the tune loud enough for someone like me to be able to hear it even in a noisy environment–and that’s a lot.

Which is how I got told by Lillian, who was standing looking up at me, Grammy! You have birds in your ears!

It was 2:15, sundown was 4:25, Seattle being at a latitude that gets an hour less of sun than we do, so with sunblock and a big hat I thought I was pretty well covered lupus-wise against the UV.

We took what I thought was a pretty long walk for the kids. They rode their training wheel bikes and I don’t know if that took more energy or less, but we definitely had fun. Explored the new neighborhood going up. Then the park. Lillian was surprised to find out that Grammy can swing on the swingset, too. And then at last we headed for home.

I was feeling it that night. Costochondritis isn’t dangerous, but it was a warning, so when Mathias wanted to do the two-mile loop around the wetlands the next day I with a quiet regret that ran deeper than I was ever going to say stayed home and started knitting another hat.

Everybody understood.

They split into two directions, with Lillian going for a shorter ride but it was still good and long enough to wear a kid out.

Then the door opened.

Lillian had found a leaf. A big leaf. A perfect, pretty, autumn leaf. To share with her Grammy. If I couldn’t take that walk in the woods then she was determined to bring that walk to me.

(The folded edge happened when I was packing it to take home. Oops. She took better care of it than I did.)

I look forward to the day when I can show it to her and tell teenage Lillian the thoughtful thing she did when she was four and how grateful I am for it.

She’ll probably already know, because it made her so happy, too.

We were leaving and four year old Lillian was Not Happy. Mathias wasn’t either, till I told him it was a great reason for a hug to go with the goodbye.

When you take the last flight out after Thanksgiving, it’s going to be late. It was. More tomorrow.

When my husband and I were young children, we went to the Chevy Chase Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a beautiful old brick building on the dividing line between DC and Maryland.

If you were Mormon and political in DC you went through that building at some point. I remember a whispered wave of sound washing over the staircase one time as we were going up it and later asking my mom about it; she told me it was George Romney, a Presidential candidate at the time and the father of Mitt, steps ahead of us.

My grandparents attended there when the Senate was in session, Eisenhower through Ford.

About twenty years ago we were visiting the folks, who by then were attending a newer ward closer to home but for reasons I don’t remember, for that week everybody was sent to the old Chevy Chase building and we just happened to catch the right day.

When church was over I said I just wanted to look around; I’d been twelve when we’d started attending in Potomac. The Mormon Church likes to keep congregations small enough that people have a chance to meet and make friends and feel included, so when one ward gets too big they often divide it.

Which means that when my husband and I got old enough to turn into teens who might have gotten on each other’s nerves, both our towns got spun off into new wards.

Anyway, one of the fun quirks of that building–which my father-in-law and his father helped build–is that between the chapel and the overflow area that is sometimes used as a small basketball gym, there is a wall. The original pop-up add. It comes up slowly, noisily from below when you push a button. I never did find where that thing hid down there when we couldn’t see it. I always wanted to know what the building did with it. It looked so thick and it went clear up to the tall ceiling or slowly disappeared and left just a level floor there and nowhere else I knew had anything like it. I loved that: when you needed it, it was just there. And it was all ours.

So I walked into the gym now that my own kids were growing up and was looking over at that wall, trying to figure out if it was as thick as my childhood had made it and where had that control button been all this time, when I realized that someone else was across the room. After all the people packed in for the meetings, it was somehow just us two. We smiled at each other and he said something about wanting to see his childhood ward again while he was in town.

It was Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon. Which is how I found out that that Senator was in fact a member of the family I knew growing up and Jessica’s big brother. I could add a story here about his dad being in a plane crash in Alaska and surviving for two weeks on a Hershey bar that he and another guy found in the snow before their rescue, and how he then adopted his brother’s kids because their parents had died in the crash. Ten kids plus eight. Yes Gordon’s dad had a big house.

In the chapel, there were–I want to say six? There were big, glorious chandeliers hanging down, and many a time when I was a kid I would watch all those tiny crystals shimmering and listen to them sing when I was bored–and what little kid having to hold still that long isn’t bored at least a little bit. “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam to shine for Him each day,” hey, I could definitely get with celebrating sparks of light from the windows on those.

Wisps of air above our heads, only just moving. But the crystals knew and they sang for joy.

With all the hearing I’ve lost since then, if I am perfectly still in a quiet room with no distractions and look up and watch a crystal chandelier, my brain fills in those sounds. I can hear them again. They’ve been gone from me for so long. There is no other source of very high pitches that my brain remembers–except those and in that context. That is the gift Chevy Chase Ward left me with for life–well, that and the little boy I’ve now been married to for 43 years.

That room is where the fire yesterday took out the roof.

That would probably have been where the firemen who were inside were; there were about a hundred on the scene, they said. I could just picture those chandeliers falling, shattering, ending, sharp shards stabbing everywhere, and it was horrifying to know someone could have been underneath that.

And yet the initial reports were, no serious injuries. No deaths.

Loss, absolutely.

And now, or at least hopefully soon…other people’s work and lifetime memories will go into our families’ building’s renewal.

But man, it’s hard to see those flames.

Even my mom had never seen this picture before. The cousins are all passing it around to each other, going, Did you see this?! This is so cool!

One of them had spotted it first at MSNBC, when they were showing some previews from the LadyBird Johnson documentary. Another cousin watched the documentary and didn’t see it there and wondered if it had made it past the cutting room floor, but MSNBC had it and now we do and there you go.

Jackie Kennedy on the left, LadyBird Johnson on the right, and the woman who was head of the Congressional Wives Club, whose luncheon they were attending, in the middle: Frances Bennett. My grandmother. Properly wearing her hat and white gloves in respect towards the First Lady and the Vice President’s wife.

Jackie Kennedy, Frances Bennett, and Lady Bird Johnson