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.

She liked it! Hey Mikey! Jade Sapphire cashmere in lavendar, fingering weight, four skeins, the Bigfoot pattern.

So would this be Niagara Falls as seen from the Canadian side or the American? (No, no, that’s not where my son and his bride are going on their honeymoon–at least not as far as I know!)

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

My newly-tuned piano is heavenly, as is the rare treat of time with my son to listen to him playing it. With great verve and energy. That piano was handed down from my grandmother to my mother to me.

When I was a kid, the house rule was, piano practice absolutely took precedence over any TV watching. Being one of the younger children, from the time I was eleven on up I was the only one taking piano anymore. And it wasn’t exactly an instrument I could carry into a separate room and shut the door, like my sister’s flute or my brother’s violin.

So if I were mad at my siblings, I could take out my stress and vengeance, both, by practicing, like, real loud, drowning out their entertainment. And believe me, I did.

What goes around…

Three of my kids took piano lessons. (The oldest opted for oboe.) No rules about the TV, because there was no TV here, but still, there was one time about ten years ago that I called my piano technician because a key didn’t play. He came, took the lid off, and pronounced that someone had hit that one so hard as to break the hammer clean off.

I knew exactly which kid it would have been, too. So much my child. Although I should rescue him here and say the instrument was a good deal older by then and more fragile than back in the day and had suffered through two sets of moving companies since when we got it.

You should hear the kid play. He did his practicing over the years–he’s good.  Music to my ears.

Mom was right: do your work, and it pays off all your life and on into the next generation.

I’m usually not one for memes, but I’m going to use Sheila’s as a jumping-off point. Maybe I’ll answer another of her questions tomorrow. This is a bit stream of consciousness, but here goes.

What was I doing ten years ago? Driving, constantly driving. No school buses here, and I had four kids in three different schools, soccer games (we may have given up on soccer by that point, I’m not sure) and oboe, piano, piano, piano, clarinet, and saxophone lessons, later organ too, and for that one summer, trumpet tutoring thrown in as well. “Make a joyful noise.”

Ten years ago, we had a big family reunion coming up. When my Grandfather Bennett had died, Gram, at 94, watched all of us cousins having a grand time being reunited en mass for the first time as adults and asked us when we were going to do that again. Nobody could bear to say out loud, When you die, Gram.

Two years later, what was left of her hip, which had been replaced at Johns Hopkins when I was a kid, crumbled, and she became bedridden. My cousin Katherine’s husband, a cardiologist (trained here at Stanford), quietly told us that in general, once a very elderly person can’t get out of bed, they’re gone within about six weeks.

Gram would last about twice that.

Gram told her oldest son she wanted money not to be a reason why any of her 29 grandchildren couldn’t come to her funeral: he was to send $5000 of her money to each one right now, and promise to reimburse them for any hotel expenses they might incur as well. He did, and about two weeks later, after considering living to see three different centuries and deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, she slipped away.

We came.

We had such a lovely time together. We lined up by order of year born, and everybody pulled out cameras and snapped pictures of each other.  (I had at the time, for a winter coat, my Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds in two strands of wool and mohair knitted on size 9s, quite dense and warm, but it definitely seemed a bit bright for the November occasion, happy/sad as it was. I have no doubt my cousins remember me standing in the snow at the gravesite wearing that 86-color piece of clothing. I later bought a somber charcoal coat, a little too big, not realizing immediately that it was a horse-after-it’s-left-the-barn effect. Once I did, I gave it to my tall daughter to take to college in the snow, where she needed it far more than I, and it fit her better anyway. I had my handknit one; in my climate, why would I want more?)

And so, a few years later, it was decided that we needed another reunion, one with no funeral attached to it, just purely for the sake of joy. It was July 1998, the year Grandpa would have been turning 100. As a central gathering place in the country, Katherine decided to schedule us at an offseason ski resort that was within a stiff hike of where our grandparents had owned a mountain cabin near Brighton. (I can see the ski afficionados nodding their heads.) That cabin had a small back patio overlooking the creek with an iron railing around it, deeply bowed in; my grandmother had once told me that it was from the weight of the snow there.

Grandpa used to like to go that cabin to get away from the pressures of his US Senate seat; to get to a phone, he had to walk a mile to the little general store. Nobody could reach him unless he chose to be reached. When he was on vacation, he was on vacation, walking that mountain, listening to the icy-cold water of the creek going over the pebbles, seeing chipmunks dart and eagles soar. I used to feed those chipmunks, the times I got to go to that cabin in the summer, growing up; it was a lesson to an antsy child in being still and waiting, trying to teach a tiny animal not to be afraid of me.

My sister Anne and her six boys decided to drive from Atlanta for that reunion, and since they were coming that far anyway, went further and came here first. We got to spend a joyfully noisy week or so with them at our house before they continued to Yosemite and then on over to Utah with us joining them there. Muir Woods, Chinatown… That was the visit where I gave her copies of my photos, and she asked her identical twins gleefully which one of them was in this picture in her hands. They both claimed themselves. “See! You can’t tell you apart! Now you can’t get mad at anyone else!”

My kids had loved Tim Robblee, the best music teacher any school ever hired; Tim announced ten years ago that he was leaving to go back to school himself. He had led our high school’s jazz band to a national high school competition in Monterey, where they did so well that his kids were invited to play as professionals at the famous Monterey Jazz Festival in the fall!

I knitted Tim an afghan in many colors, a picture as best as I could do of the Monterey Bay, complete with waves of water at the beach, in remembrance of how he’d believed in his students and what he’d helped them achieve. I took a roll of pictures of it before I gave it to him.

I later found I had a roll of film that had been double-exposed: Anne’s kids at Stinson Beach. Tim’s beach afghan. Superimposed on each other, so that in one wonderful piece of kismet, Anne’s boys were reaching down into the water, their feet submerged in wool and water in the tide. I got not one single good picture of the afghan, in the traditional sense, but the ones I got–after the initial disappointment, because Tim had moved by then and the afghan was out of my reach–delighted me.

Oh, and, one funny thing about the reunion? Katherine, the one in charge, kept emailing me re the arrangements and kept getting antsy about getting no response. I heard through the grapevine, and protested that I had received nothing. She insisted to my brother that the emails didn’t come back to her, so clearly, I was simply not remembering. (This is often a very valid thing to say about me.) But no, I’d been waiting and looking and getting nothing.

Christmastime, five months later, Katherine sent out an extended-family email, and at long last she got a response: from an Alison Hyde in England, saying she’d been enjoying all the emails, almost felt like a part of our family now, and how had the reunion gone? Had we had a good time? And where in the world were we? Were we in Spain for that vacation? (I guess it was all those Californian place names when Katherine wrote to me.)

It let me off the hook, at least!

“We need to bake a cake! An angel food, maybe.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“We need to bake a cake!”

“Okay, Mom, I am *not* quite following what you’re saying here.”

I explained that slugs and snails can’t climb over broken eggshell jags, and since that was way better than poisons, we needed to put some around the new base of our tree he’d just planted for me.

He allowed as how he could handle that type of tree treatment. Bake a cake. Right on.

Later, thinking I ought to use the tree I’ve got going already, I looked at the Meyer, picked some lemons, and pulled a lemon sponge cake out of the oven a few minutes ago instead; that’s the way the eggshells crumble sometimes. (I took the picture first while it was still semi-light out.)

Back to the shawl on the needles for his wedding.

I wanted to show E here how her roses are opening up today; she grew these herself.

My son Richard arrived home last night with a gift for me from Ann, his about-to-be mother-in-law. Ann lives near the beach, and at one point told me she was looking forward to showing it to me. I had to explain, to make sure she knew, that it would have to be getting towards sunset for me to be able to safely go: lupus and UV and all that.

Richard handed me one-day-delayed Mother’s Day chocolates from him and his fiancee, and a box from Ann. I opened it up, and…

Wow. It was SO perfect.

She had gone down to the beach and collected some sand dollars. She had carefully wrapped each little one, fragile as they are, so it could make it through the flight unbroken and without damaging the next one over.

She had brought the beach to me.

(Toute being French for “all.”)

Michelle and I needed to go shoe shopping. Not my kind of thing to do: trying to buy shoes for me in most stores is like trying to buy qiviut in Walmart. They ain’t got’em. EE width in a formal shoe? Uh, no.  Try Nordstrom’s, lady. 

So Michelle shopped and didn’t quite find what she wanted right away either; I, since I look at shoe stores as something to escape from, thought that meant we were going to be out of there in no time. Right. I should have pulled my knitting out about fifteen minutes earlier than I did, but hey. A lovely African-American woman about my mom’s age was being dragged around shopping with a woman about my age, and as I knitted away, I grinned at the older one, “When the yarn’s gone, we’re done.” Totally cracked her up.

And then from a number of aisles over, Michelle’s voice, suddenly: “I heard that!” The woman about doubled over, laughing.

I had to shoot a picture of these with my phone when I saw them: did the person who designed them think of Tutenkhamen too, with those bright gold and lapis stripes?  Put these on, and you, too, can walk like an Egyptian.

The one-skein Casbah Julia shawl is sized for the petite; two skeins and, say, the Constance pattern on size 11 needles would be a good choice for a larger person. I showed it off to Nathania and Sandi at Purlescence yesterday, and traded them my getting to hold Nathania’s baby for an hour for letting them put the shawl on display for now.

Stephanie tells of Stephen and WonderMike taking her to Millenium for dinner after the Maker Faire, and writes, “Go there now. After a month of hotel and airport food Stephen and Mike can both verify that I almost wept into my dinner out of sheer relief and joy.”

Amen amen and amen. (Having once lived off hotel food for a month, too.) I’m not a vegetarian, but if I could eat there every day, I very happily would be. We took our vegetarian daughter and vegan son-in-law there for dinner a year ago for his birthday, and oh goodness, I have never tasted such gloriously good food. Our daughter explained to us what “biodynamic” in the description was all about, the back-to-the-land intensity of mindful farming. We don’t drink, so I can’t say a thing about that part of their offerings, but I can tell you their biodynamic grape juice was to die for.

But I committed a faux pas there. Okay, let me back up. My son-in-law had created me a pair of knitting needles that were really nifty and a bit large, and I had given them a test drive in the passenger seat on the way up the freeway to Millenium, casting on just after we got in the car. Forty-five minutes north and time spent look for parking. I had Knitpicks Suri Dream going in a lace stitch, so that half of what I was knitting was air spaces. Very soft, very fluffy, very fast, very natural-fibers, very gratifying. I cast off as we searched for where to put the car, got the ending yarn worked in across the cast off stitches, and stuffed it in my purse quickly.

That dinner was like nothing I have ever tasted. I have been fervently wishing for quite some time that I could remember the name of that place, and when I clicked on Stephanie’s link just now and saw the picture, it was an instant rush of, that’s IT!!! YAY!!! THANK YOU!!!

The waitress we had was young, loved what she did, loved the food, loved her customers on the spot, and was just the best. Hey. I had a scarf. So when we were done eating, I called her over and said I had one more thing to ask her.

Yes? Was the food okay?

The very best! But here: (unzipping the purse): was this a color she liked?

Run grab a spatula out of the kitchen, she’s lost her jaw there, folks.

She was gobsmacked. “For ME!?… You knitted this? You knitted this ON THE WAY HERE?!?” It was so soft. It was a bright color, a red on the orange side, and it suited her perfectly. She loved it.

A moment later, as we waited for our check, I asked her back over. It had hit me: I was in a vegan restaurant, and I had just given an alpaca fur scarf to their employee. What if… Sheared from the happily living animal, but some vegans don’t go even for that. I asked her, “Did I just commit a faux pas? Will your boss have a fit if you wear that?”

She told me she had to tuck it away for now, but it was okay. She glanced nervously in the direction of the kitchen and added in a whisper that I didn’t hear but my family filled me in on after we were safely outside, “I’m wearing leather boots. Don’t tell my boss.”

Thank you, everybody, for your kind words and thoughts. I could picture my doctors breathing a sigh of relief that I didn’t get out into that crowd after all. And yes, I could really relate to Lene’s comment: there are occasional days where I just want to demand, can’t I just chuck this lupus/Crohn’s thing? Just for one day?! I used to walk miles every day at a brisk clip for the sheer enjoyment of taking in the world on a fine day out there. I might have risked that walk from the parking anyway, if it hadn’t been for the worry and pain it would have caused my Richard. But I just couldn’t do that to him.

But hey. All the more reason to look forward to Stephanie’s next book. She sent me encouragement when I was going nuts during the final proofs stage of my own book; she’s such a good soul.

I woke up this morning and looked up at my sweetie, already out of bed, and announced, “I’m going to pout.”

“Because you didn’t get to see Stephanie?”

“Yes!”

He hunched down so we were eye to eye: “Here, I’ll pout with you.” And he put on this little-boy face–you know, eyes narrowed down to here, lower lip stuck out to there, that made me burst out laughing. I’ve got me a good one.

I try to take good care of him, too.

(Added later: if you’re curious to see some of what was going on at the Maker Faire, these photos were taken by the family of commenter RobinM.  I want to see that helicopter fly–with me in it.)

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, risking life, ship, reputation and crew to maybe fall off the edge of the flat world or have them all be devoured by monstrous creatures of the deep, in order to…save the world from bland and boring food. He wanted a new spice route. One man’s career choice, and it changed a few things.

First things first. Ditch the suitcases in the entryway: after frantic packing after the last college final, then an hour’s drive, an hour or two at the airport, an hour’s flight, an hour to collect her bags and get home, the kid was starving.

Which is why the next thing I saw was her hunched over, rear in view through the garage doorway, looking through the big freezer. Something that would cook fast, while I was offering her a banana to start off with, peeled and ready to go.

“MOM!” came the spluttering, befoozled, what-on-earth tone. “Beef Samosas? Do you know what… Samosas are an Indian food, and–*beef*?” She was shaking her head from wanting to ask, and then finally did ask, “You *do* know what animal beef comes from? Right?” In SAMOSAS. Totally nonpsychodegradeable.

Well, hey, they have a nice spiciness to them. Welcome home to Californian multiculturalism, kiddo. Oven at 375.

Someone was raving over their Addi needles, so I have to tell you the story of my Addis. My husband and I got married in 1980, when gold hit its then-all-time-high of $380 an ounce just at the time we were shopping for rings. We were students, romantically and completely broke like all young-in-loves ought to be. “Teaches you to live frugally,” my favorite old high school history teacher told me about starting out that way–my mom worked at that school, and I’d stopped by to say hi for old times’ sake before the wedding. (Hi again, Bill Cormeny, wherever you are out there.) Then he guffawed–“Teaches you poverty!”

Richard and his dad each had a bum tooth that had gone through a number of gold fillings, and his dad had collected the gold each time they’d been replaced. Dad Hyde had wanted to try playing with them for some time, and this was his chance. Their dentist went in on the project with him: they got our ring sizes, got some casts, melted those down–it was 20k, quite soft (22K?)–and created wedding bands for us that were plain and simple and like nobody else’s anywhere as far as we knew. It was quirky, it was creative, it was frugal, and I found it totally charming, other than that it felt like cheating that I wasn’t really giving him a ring from me so much as permission to wear that one.

So, with that mindset in the background of Richard feeling like gold was still somehow stratospherically expensive, when I found out that Addi was selling gold-plated knitting needles (which have since been discontinued), I plotted with my daughter, who’d been wondering what to give me for Christmas. They actually cost less than my beloved and now-also-discontinued Holz and Steins, and I could just picture knitting in waiting rooms and the like with them: talk about a way to open up a conversation with one’s knitting! Good as gold!

Not to mention. I opened that present on the day, trying to play innocent and not grin too hard at my frugal husband’s expense.

He totally fell for it. GOLD knitting needles! He was trying to bite his tongue, and totally failing at it. Isn’t that taking this knitting habit of yours a bit too–I mean, how could–Michelle…!

If only I had a video of his face just then to show the future grandkids. It was so priceless.

I spent 24 hours, after he came home from the grocery store with those, trying to figure out how on earth I was going to sweet-talk him out of the house at the very time he would be expecting to be cooking up his filet mignons in celebration.

We went to church, and Jo ended up right behind us. When the main meeting was over, I turned to her and told her, “Richard’s an old man today!”

She perked right up and asked if it was his birthday. It was? “How old is he?”

“Fifty!”

She guffawed loudly and waved us away while Richard grinned. Good old Jo.

But how do you…I’d thought I had a halfway decent idea, but… In the end, getting antsy, looking at the clock, I came in the room where he was talking on the phone to one of the kids, “Cell or home?”

“Cell.”

Oh, good, I thought, I don’t have to cut off the conversation, then. “COME. NOW.”

There was a look of utter confusion on his face (and he got off the phone)–I’d already given him his birthday presents. But the tone of my voice conveyed the right amount of Do Not Argue. Come where? Kitchen? Huh?

I asked him, “Your car or mine?”

He drove. I didn’t tell him it was because I could never remember which long cul-de-sac it was without actually driving down them to see the houses at the end; all three of them look identical to me. “At least tell me where I’m going. Am I turning left or right there? What is going on?”

There was only one problem while all this was going on–I’d been told through the grapevine when to show, the time had been changed, and the grapevine had shrivelled before the harvest rather than gotten back to me. Oops.

Which is why we pulled into the (right) cul-de-sac and nobody answered the door, and just after we got back in the car with me having to explain, the first would-be-surpriser showed up. We gave the guy this huge sheepish oh-well grin, waving, and pulled away, all of us laughing. Richard, who can hear on the cell phone whereas I most often can’t, called the host just to make sure we did have the right host and that that too hadn’t been changed. We did; come back in a half hour.

Silly people. About ten minutes later they called again, saying, come now, and so we did.

“SURPRISE!”

And I think that way was maybe the best of all. Because now he gets to laugh and tease about it for the next 50 years. And dinner was far better than anything we could have conjured up alone, both in food and friends. Happy birthday, sweetie. And Nina and Johnna and everybody who came–you guys totally rock. Thank you.