First, thank you to all who have written about Ruth. My hope is that her husband aka The Roketman will follow the link back here and read your words and mine and find comfort in them.  I am told there was a spinners’ guild meeting yesterday with him present, with tears and funny stories told on his wife.

What I wanted to mention for this morning.  Yesterday, my husband and I went off to Costco a little before they closed, and ended up in a slow line well away from the busy central aisle.

Very shortly a young couple with two little girls pulled their cart up behind us: three and a half year old twins, identical as far as I could tell, and absolutely adorable.

The mom looked really frazzled, the dad less so, but clearly it had been a long day; it showed in all of them.  As the wife went off to grab one last thing somewhere, my husband looked at the dad, smiled, and said, “I remember the days.”

When your children are little, there’s nothing in the world so comforting as a middle-aged stranger who thinks they’re adorable rather than a pain for being fussy.  And when you’re a parent, that is one of the perks of getting to that age. One twin grabbed her sister’s head and pulled it into her lap and rocked  back and forth a moment.  The other enjoyed the closeness at first, laughing, then decided to assert her individuality and pushed away hard. Normal sibling stuff.  She got her daddy to let her out of the cart, and then promptly laid down on the floor, swishing her arms and legs full circle.

“Wrong climate for snow angels,” I laughed, and the dad’s face lit up and he laughed.  He mentioned a trip to Tahoe they were looking forward to.  The other twin experimented for a few moments with the fact that she now got to take over the leg holes in the upper cart for both sides–it was designed to seat two–and then, when it wasn’t fun to take over her sister’s territory if her sister didn’t notice nor care, asked to be let out too.  Whereupon she flopped down on the floor a moment herself, looking the very picture of exhaustion, then leaped up and ran around her twin like a sheepdog herding her.  Never letting herself get too far away from her sister.  Stay close where it feels safe from the big world.

“I wish I had that much energy when I’m tired.”  Again, the dad laughed in response.

Next time Costco exhausts me, I will picture myself on the floor making snow angels.  Maybe one of their 25-lb bags of powdered sugar would help.

I love knit night at Purlescence.  I was going through serious knitters deprivation while we were on vacation and then they were too for awhile there.

So here’s the scene: I asked if I could have the shawl back that they had in the window, the Julia pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” a little one made out of one skein of Handmaiden Casbah on big needles to stretch the yardage as far as it could go.  It’s softer than the blue Bare one I’d been working on, and softness was something the circumstances really needed.

Kay not only gave it back to me, it had been held on the model with a shawl pin made by a local artist, which she put in my hands and asked that I send it with the shawl to the woman whose husband Marc is so very ill.

Wow.

I regretted not having the Casbah to knit the shop another one; they have it on backorder, and it hadn’t come in.

At which point a woman across the room, Mary, who’d been quietly spinning away at her wheel, and who I hadn’t even known had heard any of that, reached into her knitting bag, stood up and walked over to me, and asked how many skeins it had taken to knit that shawl that was now in my hands.  One?  Good, then!  And she held out a skein, a beautiful blue, Casbah no less, and urged me to take it.

It took me a moment to sink in.  Wow.  I could knit it up and gift it in turn to the dear friends who own that shop.  And that’s what Mary was hoping I would do.  She was giving me her Casbah and blessing all of us in the face of the loss that this other woman that none of them had ever met was dealing with.  We were all in this life thing together.

I was fighting tears.  Wow.

Cast on.

Kristine sent me a link to a chocolate-chunk cookie recipe with feves by Valrhona in it–oval shaped bits of dark chocolate, available from Whole Foods.  I wrote back that I was embarrassed to say I actually had some in my cupboard.

And we’re off to the races with another story…

Years ago, I really got into baking cheesecakes, back when the kids were very little; so much so that I bought a copy of “The Joy of Cheesecake.”   And in it, I found, at a stage when I was reading Dr. Seuss to my kids, a recipe for Oobleck Pie.

Avocado lime honey cheesecake.  With wheat germ sprinkled on top.

It was almost impossible to buy a good avocado in New Hampshire, where we were at the time, so my hubby and children were spared; I didn’t try it.

We moved to California, and a few years later I found myself with a lupus diagnosis and doing swim therapy every day at a local indoor pool.  You had to have a doctor’s prescription to use the place.  It made for a close-knit community, where people tended to know each other and look out for each other.

Which is how one guy who loved to cook got told about the Oobleck Pie, and decided that that was just too weird: he had to try it.  I don’t think I told him about the wheat germ when I gave him the recipe.  Some things go far enough as it is.

So.  He actually baked one.  (No wheat germ.)  And then he brought it to the pool and handed it to the staff in the office, intact, unsampled, beautiful, slightly green at the gills, and whole.

I, totally unsuspecting, walked in the door, went to check in, and one of the lifeguards grabbed the thing from the desk, shoved it at me, and said, This is your fault. You have to take the first piece.

What, no wait an hour after swimming?  You guys trying to ground me from doing my laps?  Heh.

The first bite was a shock.  You know what’s coming but you don’t really, and then there it is.  After that, after you get past the “but I wanted cheesecake” mode, it’s actually, kind of, um, good.

Oobleck, for those who don’t remember, is the green sticky stuff that King whateverhisnamewas ended up with after telling his magicians he was tired of the same old stuff, rain, snow; he wanted something new.  They chanted and eye-of-newted till the oobleck filled the skies, superglueing everything and everyone it touched to everything else it touched.  This quickly became a massive, kingdom-wide problem.

And it stayed that way till the king admitted he’d made a mistake and said he was sorry.  At which point the sticky Oobleck gunk all magically melted away.

My sweet husband and I were at Flea Street Cafe for I think our anniversary, several years ago, when Jesse, the owner, came over and chatted a moment.  She had angel food cake with lavendar flowers in it on her menu, and I told her about the Oobleck Pie.

She really wanted that recipe.  I went home and mailed it to her.

Whether she ever used it, I don’t know, but if she did, it was probably from avocados and limes she grew herself and honey from a local beekeeper.  I love California.

Oh, right. The purple shawl.  I promised.  Here goes.  Twinsies.

Mim posted a map of the US as seen by Californians.  Oregon/Washington are vaguely displayed as “coffee,” anything east of there to the Great Lakes as Canada, etc. Having corrected my kids’ take on history after school a few times, I burst out laughing when I saw her post.

There was one memorable time, taking a walk around the neighborhood, when there were some teenagers hanging out together, and I smiled and wished them a good day.  One of them, for whatever reason, suddenly piped up with, “Are you from around here?”  (I think I need to walk more often!  I’d only lived around the corner longer than he’d been alive!)

I put on my best Southern accent and asked him, “Do I *sound* like I’m from around here?”

“Where are you from?”

“Maryland.”

Clearly that was a head-scratcher for him, so I asked him, “Do you know where New York is?  Washington, DC?”  (Trying to gauge the depth of the education deprivation.)

Yes. Yes.  Uh huh.

“Okay,” I told him.  “When they were building Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia both donated land for it to be built on.  During the Civil War, Virginia took theirs back.”

Throw a little extra at him with his geography lesson: US history did NOT start with the Gold Rush!

I’ve always wondered if that kid paid more attention to his country after that.  Given how funny I thought the conversation was, and the fact that kids learn more when they’re cared about, I like to think I helped provide some positive motivation.

This is the link to the webcam at Nepenthe: the beautiful resort in Big Sur (scroll down a bit to see a collage on the left of days’ worth of views) founded by Kaffe Fassett’s father.  Discovering Kaffe’s “Glorious Knits” book is what helped bring me back to knitting nonstop eighteen years ago.  I feel I owe the man, and I have met him several times at Uncommon Threads booksignings: he is warm and gregarious as well as infinitely creative.

The SJ Merc today says that Kirk Gafill, grandson of the founder, his brother, and four others are refusing to evacuate to try to save Nepenthe.  They have their fire-retardent gel at the ready.  All those affected are in my prayers.

(Update Sunday 10:56 am: their webcam’s image is frozen at 6:22:45 am today. I’m hoping they simply lost power.)

It sits there, looking so innocent. Like a kid going who, me?

Awhile back, my phone rang in the middle of the night. Not, with my ears out and on the headboard, that I noticed. And my husband can snooze through anything. We were pretty horrified at the message we discovered on our answering machine in the morning: “Is there something really wrong over there, or can you shut that thing off? My son’s family and I are leaving for Thailand at 3:30 am, and we really want to get some sleep first if possible.”

Which was far nicer than what I would have wanted to say had I been them. Sometimes we don’t deserve our good neighbors.

Our ‘00 Chrysler minivan, or, for those teens-learning-to-drive years, the dentmobile, has a psychotic alarm system that maybe four times in its life now has randomly gone off of its own accord, honking and braying and kicking up its lights. How To Win Friends And Influence People. Not. Overcast, drizzly days have seemed more likely to set it off, but with the rarity of the event that might be just random attribution, akin to what Californians call “earthquake weather” (ie unseasonable warmth at a cool time of year, based on which past earthquake I have yet to figure out, but the Oct ‘89 7.1 Loma Prieta got lots of comments of, well, it WAS earthquake weather…) Ie, it could be that drizzly overcast was simply what the weather was, the days that that van did its Heavy Metal act.

That story wasn’t finished, though; our neighbor kept not coming home from that trip, and we around her started calling each other: have you heard? No, you? It was a month after that call that I happened to step outside to see if the mail had come yet, just at the moment S stepped out of a car dropping her off at home. She saw me, I walked over to ask how the visit with the grandkids had gone, and she threw her arms around me and bawled.

They had been going to take the grandkids to the beach that one day. In Phuket. Somehow things fell apart and they just didn’t get there–which meant, when the tsunami hit, they were safe. They spent the next month visiting survivors they knew in the hospital, one of whom had seen her sweetheart pulled away from her, running relief supplies, driving the trucks, being keenly needed every single moment.

And now she was coming home to a quiet house in a quiet neighborhood where nobody knew. And I happened to step into sight at exactly the moment she most needed, offering her a transition to home and a shoulder to cry on.

Last night, I was making some of what is basically strawberry pie filling, for spooning onto all kinds of things to make them taste good. Strawberries pureed with a little sugar and a little cornstarch. Amount of cornstarch depends on number and runniness of the berries, and sometimes I get the equation right for it to set, but if I don’t, well, hey. Nuke for long enough to boil one minute or maybe more, but not less. Add juice of one Meyer lemon if you happen to have a tree handy.

Someone was asking me about new Crohn’s meds. That’s mine. It does seem to help.

I needed a lemon. I walked outside, thinking, man is it dark out here! All the ash in the sky from all the fires–842 in California at last count I heard–and all our usual city-lights-nightsky was smudged out. It looked very overcast. It was a bit strange out there.

The puree took all of two minutes to prepare, and into the microwave you go. As it cooked, it hit me:

Go disable the alarm on that car tonight.

I hadn’t thought of that thing in months. How do you even do that, given that it sets automatically? None of us remembered. I was going to have to look it up in the owner’s manual. A bit of a pain.

Compared to what it did that one time?! Go disable that alarm. Remember how S’s whole trip started off.

I’m going! And I did.

Hopefully, my neighbors will never know what didn’t hit them. But it stopped me and made me realize, you know? It’s been awhile since I made a contribution to Doctors Without Borders. I need to fix that.

We could use a little of the drizzly to go with our smoke about now. Nothing I can do about that. But there is something major I CAN do some small thing about. And I lay in bed last night, marveling at how the connections came to be for me. A nudge to go make sure my beeping car stays quiet.

A nudge to make the world a more gentle place.

(With thanks to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee for her Knitters Without Borders work for Doctors Without Borders.)

I wrote this a few days ago, and waited permission to post it:

We went to a celebration tonight, one like no other I have been to. She’d told me, when she’d called, that she wanted to “take a page from your book,” but she wrote her own here and I love her penmanship on the page of our lives that was written tonight.

After my hospitalization, I’d thanked my doctors and nurses individually, with knitting. She brought hers home en masse.

Marguerite had invited her medical team and just a very few close friends who had played roles in supporting her in her ordeal to come to her home as the time of her treatments came to an end. This was for the doctors, the nurses, the woman at the clinic who scheduled her appointments: she felt she owed much. She wanted to give back. She wanted to thank each of us for playing a role in sustaining and affirming her life in the face of her cancer, to have us celebrate with her her last week of radiation. Her teenage son snapped pictures of the small crowd, keeping record.

She didn’t speak very long, just a few words that said much; she let the music, and the very act of playing it, convey the rest of it for her. Her husband, Russ, was on his grand piano, and two friends and one of her doctors joined in with their own instruments. Joyful music, lively music, a touch of jazz here, of Bach there, music that acknowledged the grief, music that returned to the underlying joy. Music that showed life honestly and in true celebration.

I can’t tell you how much it meant to me. To life!

Gotta love that skylight view through the bathroom. A cacophony of crows indeed: they added their touch to the day.

Two toilet removals, many hours, much mopping, much laundering and folding of towels on my part and $634 later, the deed was done.

This morning my shower backed up. Could have been worse.

Michelle missed all the excitement yesterday, and went out to dinner with her friends almost as soon as she got home from work. So much for the easy way out for the rest of us: I hit the wall in the middle of cooking dinner with my mother-in-law, went in the other room and quietly told my husband that if I stood on my feet one more second I was going to barf. Which is what happens when I overdo. He’d had a long day too, but he instantly leaped up and took over, bless him.

I was far too tired to even knit.

I had gotten out the leftover brown rice and the Chinese hoisin sauce to go with the stir fry, hadn’t found the sesame oil, looked in the fridge, had seen the giant jar of pineapple mango salsa from Costco and thought, well, we gotta eat it sometime, and since I didn’t use sesame–I’d dumped half of it in. The more the merrier. Fruit. It’s good for you.

Richard went in the kitchen where the veggies were cooking away and the meat was ready to go in. Grabbed the hoisin sauce, cooked the meat, threw the rice in with the rest. One pot. Done like dinner.

And didn’t understand the funny look on my face when he presented it at the table in a color I wasn’t expecting.

Actually, it was surprisingly good.

Twenty-four years and about, oh, a week ago, I called and got told, We can’t possibly fit you in for at least four days, ma’am.

I stewed a few minutes, called again, and asked to speak directly to Dennis, the owner of the shop, who knew me. Dennis: my baby is due in four days and my battery keeps dying on me.

Dennis knew we only had the one car, and he told me, You bring that thing right here. I’ll do it right now.

Little kindnesses are huge and they reverberate forward through the years, remembered. And so it was that I found myself, about four months ago, suddenly thinking of Dennis and how much less stressful he’d made Richard’s arrival into the world. I googled and found that Hansen’s Automotive Service in Nashua NH was still there, wrote him a note telling him do you remember when–and thank you. When we needed your help, you were there for us.

And wondered. I don’t know what brought him to mind or why his being thought of now from afar for the basic goodness of the man–and he was a sweetheart–needed to happen now. But I felt I needed to speak up, right now, don’t wait, enough so that I did and snailmailed it off to his shop.

All I know is, whatever battery needed fixing over there, I was glad to be able to help.

I have to show off my mom a moment. I wanna be like her when I grow up. (I’m amused that I get to invert the cliche of someone waving at the camera and going, Hi Mom! at the vast TV audience.)

Picture it, since I have the photo but don’t feel I can post it without asking–I got a wonderful shot yesterday of the small boy (maybe four?) reaching up and his great-grandpa, bent way over, reaching down, doing a “give me five!” together with great glee on both their faces.

I snuck in that photo of Kim yesterday in the time I had between helping set up the hall and the reception we held here for the newlyweds. Decades ago, the Catholic Church in Menlo Park (Kim’s mom’s family is Catholic) sold some land, including a few existing buildings, to the local Mormons. They kept the surrounding acreage and joked to our leaders, “How do you feel about being surrounded by Catholics?”

To which, I’m told, they were answered with a laugh, “How do you feel about having Mormons in the heart of you?”

The centerpiece of the property is a huge-trunked redwood that was honored as the best one in the city a few years ago. Both churches kept it for the treasure that it is, and it will grow on long after all of us are gone. It’s too big to fit in any one picture, and somehow that goes well with a wedding celebration.

We built our own church building, kept their cottage to house a genealogy library which is open for anybody and everybody’s use, and kept their reception hall. It’s a lovely old exposed-beam building with high ceilings and tall windows looking out on very old oak trees, and yesterday, that was where we celebrated.

It is also where our friends Conway and Elaine invited us to the wedding reception of their son fourteen years ago, where we first met another of their sons and his family–whose daughter is now in our family. Kim was ten.

In San Diego Friday a week ago, a couple who were friends of her parents sang, “Sunrise, Sunset” together, and everybody nodded yes at the “When did she get to be a beauty,” and laughed very much (he’s 6′9″) at the “When did he grow to be so tall!”

Ask and ye shall receive: wedding photos.

When my son explained to his then-future mother-in-law that I needed to stay out of the sun, Ann booked the reception inside the Loews resort overlooking the water, letting us safely see the beach in all its glory, hibiscus and roses and honeysuckle blooming all around the windows. It was very kind of her and her husband. The tall picture windows were in a series of squares with a circle in the center, as is so often seen in Californian architecture: the image of the sun framed right into the building.

During the ring ceremony, someone sang “You Raise Me Up,” and as his voice rose with the high notes, a small bird just outside from us flew suddenly upwards in perfect synchronicity, disappearing from view by flying in front of the sun.

Meantime, visit your favorite veteran today and tell them thank you. I wished a silent one across the bay towards the naval base there, and hugged my dad, a veteran of WWII, grateful to have him around, telling bad puns and fun stories and making us laugh.

“You may now kiss the bride.”

You may all applaud me on my restraint: it was all I could do, but I managed not to jump straight up from my chair and shout, “YAY!!!!”

If you drove on I-5 in La Jolla yesterday and saw a group of happy people snapping pictures right at the bottom of where the beam of the car obscures the view in this picture taken from that freeway on the way out, that was us.

If you remember Kathy from my book, that was her town in California, and I tried to figure out how to drop by and say hi to her mom for the first time in 28 years, but my time was too short and just too tightly choreographed.

There were moments every wedding ought to have: the old friend of my mom’s from long ago in Maryland, long since moved to San Diego, walking in the door, seeing my mother, having no idea she was the grandmother of the groom, and her jaw dropping on the floor: “FRANCES!!!”

There were other delightful moments: ain’t nobody can dance like my son-in-law. My oldest kindly lent her husband to our young niece, who danced beautifully with him and then looked way up at him with the widest Bambi eyes that said, That was wonderful, did I do that right? Can we do it again!? And then they did.

There were ohmygosh moments, like when the wait staffer suddenly grabbed the bride’s bouquet off her table and blew fiercely on it: the edges of the flower spray had caught in the tea candle. Close one. Then the groom later put his dinner napkin on the table to go dance the first dance, suddenly realized he’d covered over another tea candle and grabbed it off quick before they had a matching set of moments.

There was the groom’s friend who danced Cossack-style.

There were the two sides of the bride’s family, getting a rare chance to come together again and renew acquaintances again as they all included us in on their joy now, too.

There were many, many people clearly having the time of their lives. I tell you, we were CELEBRATING! To LIFE!!!

There were very kind words from the father of the bride, thanking us for raising such a fine son. And you both, too, we told him and his wife. You too. Well done. So very well done. Your Kim is a peach.

There was a husband-and-wife photographer couple who so much belonged to all of us in the moments of the day as we did to them and each other and everybody and…! Such a gathering of hearts! The wife of the couple came over to me before they left to give and receive a hug goodbye, with a fervent wish from me that they lived near us, felt likewise. We would have beautiful pictures forever, not just in photographs. I certainly hope someone snapped some of them, too, for me.

There were pictures in other people’s cameras that haven’t gotten to me yet; I kept either forgetting mine or being unable to manage its clunky presence. If ever I wished I had something smaller and definitely lighter, but that was okay, there were other cameras in abundance.

There was the bride’s elderly maternal grandmother, wishing to me that she had the energy of these young folks to dance with her husband like that. I guess that was a declaration that became intent: a few minutes later, she and her sweetheart were swaying gently together to the music with the rest.

There was a friend’s musical piece playing in my head, “Sail Away,” a tune that has always spoken to me of love and belonging, in the quieter moments as I watched the boats going past our hotel room’s deck overlooking the bay from Coronado Island. My friend had no idea what a perfect future backdrop he was creating for me when he gifted me with his CD. Hummingbirds and terns flitted past our window as boats swished through the waters and on out of my sight.

There were two young people dearly and deeply in love, who laughed for sheer joy many times in the day, and a whole flock of people come to tell them how much we loved both of them and how glad we were that they’d found and come to cherish each other. And how grateful we were that they’d brought the rest of us together in their doing so.

If one were to get married in the middle of the street, this is what I’d go for, flower petals circling down in the soft breeze on a glorious spring day.

This was one of the streets we drove through on our way to my piano lessons, which were held twice a week, as I was growing up. I saw this photo and instantly heard the classical piece whose name escapes me but which I could go play the intro to right now, that came on on radio station WTOP as Mom drove home: announcing that it was 5:00 and time for the news.

But Mom made a point of exclaiming over the blossoms and making sure my friend Kathy and I took them in, too, as we went along, not getting too distracted away from the moment. It would be over all too soon as it was, and then you’d have to wait another year.

These cherry trees, 1200 of them, were I believe the same variety as the more famous ones planted along the Tidal Basin. This is the Kenwood neighborhood in Maryland near the DC line, and one of my fellow piano students lived just off to the left. Photo from http://www.pbase.com/bryan_murahashi/image/15389068

Sheila also asked where I’d lived.

While in college and far from home, I used to enjoy stumping the occasional clueless classmate by telling them I was born in the United States, but I wasn’t born in a state; where was I born?

I would get, Puerto Rico? Guam? On a boat? On a plane? Nope, and not the Philippines, either (I’m not that old!)

And then there was the day my sister, away at school in that same town, got told by the postal clerk that she didn’t have a state birth certificate and Washington DC’s didn’t qualify; they refused to process her passport application for her semester abroad.

Okay, now, that’s like when the aide to the Senator from New Mexico (Domenici, if I remember right) once asked for information from another Senator’s office and got the response, ‘We don’t give out that information to foreign countries.’ (Hello?)

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, lived in Provo, Utah (that answers where I went to college), then West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University), Merrimack, New Hampshire, and now California. I’ve traveled to most of the states in the US–46, I think–and been to eastern and western Canada and, for one afternoon, Juarez, Mexico. Watched an armadillo raiding our marshmallows in Florida as a kid. Saw it snow on the Fourth of July in Banff later that summer.

I noticed Sheila had Topanga Canyon on her list of places she’d lived, and that quite got my attention: Laurel Lee had lived there. Years after I’d gotten her first book, “Walking Through the Fire,” out of the Merrimack Library, I’d stumbled across Laurel’s later ones (I’ve got “Godspeed” around here somewhere, too), and Topanga Canyon was where she’d lived for awhile after “Walking” ended. She wrote of visiting her parents in Fremont. She had grown up in the same not only town but neighborhood as Tara’s dad: the Tara whose name graces one of my shawls in my own book now, whose late Grandma, who would have been Laurel’s old neighbor, I knew. Small world.

When I read “Walking,” I had three kids under five years old. Laurel wrote of her having three kids about those same ages as mine at the time she found out she had Hodgkins, and her husband’s reaction to her cancer being to cheat on her and then ditch the family altogether. Her courage, cheerfulness, and strength were something I wanted more of for myself, when all I had to deal with from day to day was simply to run a young family.

I had no idea… And I’m glad we moved near Stanford before it hit me.

I looked around last night and found out that Laurel had survived longterm after all. Yay! That she’d written another book I hadn’t heard of. Double yay! And then, to my wonderment, that she’d finished college, taught creative writing on the college level, and had married the author of one of my kids’ all-time favorite books in elementary school, “The Teacher from the Black Lagoon.” The man who had truly loved her. Who had stayed by her side as she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer eight months after their wedding.

Had I googled her sooner, I could have told her she’d made a lasting difference to me. I have kept her example of cheerfulness in the face of illness close by for eighteen years now of my autoimmunity. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to see a picture of her and do a doubletake: in that particular photo, she looked a lot like me or at least members of my family enough that I relate it to me.

“Tapestry” is now on its way to my mailbox. I will strike up a reacquaintance with an old friend in these older pages as I wait.