We were out taking a walk this evening and went a square block further over than we have in awhile.

Someone else is living my dream. We had no idea this was there and we wondered how recently it got set up (probably very recently) but, we not only got to see one in person finally, it’s in our own neighborhood!

And it had a steady light inside so one could read the titles in the dark. Well done.

There was a couple inside the house it was in front of and it was pretty clear that, while they were trying not to be seen seeing us and we were trying likewise to respect their privacy, they were enjoying how thrilled we were.

So, so cool. And I’m wondering what titles we have that are good enough to offer up to it. (Hey, any knitters in the neighborhood? I mean, that don’t already have…because I know there are two and they do.)

Meantime, it hit mid-9o’s today and these plums declared themselves done and fell to the bottoms of their clamshells, and oh, the smell of sun-warm newly ripe fruit. I saw a squirrel looking longingly up at that tree, thwarted.

I want a bumper crop and I want to make jam and I want to leave it on a certain doorstep with a thank you note. (Grow tree grow!) Ah well. I might have to settle for something else, like, you know, knitting or something.

I almost… I was tempted…

I thought about giving my son some Calvin and Hobbes books for his birthday, maybe even the entire boxed anthology (of which Bill Watterson once said was like looking at a coffin of his career.)

And I remember that same then-little boy wanting me to read those books to him and when I diverted him to something else, not quite wanting to give him any ideas, him studying those pictures on every page and really not needing to know what the words were.

I decided not to do that to my daughter-in-law re Parker.

I was never quite sure whether Calvin was implicated when my two oldest climbed a tree with the garden hoses, one of them tearing a brand new pair of pants in the process, and loop-de-looping, at least two per seat, they made swings out of them. Did a good job, too, with the hose ends well secured by totally mummifying that tree and they had so much fun that we left them up there for I think the whole summer.

One particular strip showed Hobbes asking Calvin if he’d asked his mom first if he could try to fly from his second-story window using his blanket as a parachute, and what Calvin shot back became a line for the ages in our family: “Questions you know the answer to, you don’t need to ask, right?” (Aside always added to the kids: YES YOU DO.)

Followed by Hobbes looking down and tsking, “His mother’s going to have a fit about those rose bushes.”

When Watterson was just getting started as a cartoonist, to be accepted into syndication he was told he had to sign on to allowing the syndicate to make extra money off his creation should his strip become popular. A lot of it. Hobbes dolls, bumper stickers, whatever they might think of.

Then when Calvinball really did take off, the syndicate started pressuring Watterson hard.

He didn’t want to see a million badly-sewn tiger dolls mocking what he’d worked so hard to create in the vivid imaginations of his readers; it would be a betrayal. Hobbes was always shown as real only around Calvin and a simple stuffed animal when his parents or arch nemesis Suzi were present.

And so he did what Sandra Boynton did when her publisher insisted on stocking her delightful greeting cards alongside their new line of porn ones: he stopped. If they couldn’t treat his artistry with respect he was done creating for them.

Richard Thompson eventually began his Cul De Sac strip that shows life through the eyes of small children, and like Calvin and Hobbes, it was masterfully done. There is such a need for being able to understand how the very young human beings around us think–we need more of this.

But those are reruns now–Thompson was stopped by young-onset Parkinson’s. The brilliant insight is there but the hands, not so much. There is fundraising happening in his name towards research into the disease.

Turns out Bill Watterson is his fan. And so in a less-than-six-degrees-of-Pearls-Before-Bacon moment, with an eye towards funding that charity, wonderfulness happened. The Washington Post scooped the story but reading Stephan Pastis himself tell the tale of how he got Watterson to draw again after 19 years–at least a little so far–along with Pastis’s being so thrilled to get to co-create with his hero is a great read.  Here you go.

There is nothing in the world like watching your child parent his children along with the best daughter-in-law in the world with love, compassion, understanding, and patience.

Happy Birthday!

Happy 88th Birthday to my dad! Take those two numerals, run a straight line across the centers and you’ve got a toy car in a toddler’s hands: Vrrrooooom! Go go go!

And happy birthday to my niece Laura, too, born on her Grampa Lawrence’s birthday.

My Tropic Snow (link to wholesaler’s descriptions) has seven gorgeous peaches tucked inside the plastic clamshells, having thrown off early in the season any extras that were too much for such a young plant. I water, I fuss, I watch each day’s progress, they’re almost ready.

Got an email from the kids yesterday of the Eve’s Pride tree (link to retailer) I gave them as a housewarming present, with their okay. “Despite my best efforts at killing it” said the note with the photo.

Look at all those peaches! A dozen! Like mine, that’s a 17-month-0ld tree, pretty immediate gratification if you ask me. Cool! And you gotta love that 6’9″ vantage point.

My second thought was, if they let the baby see that those pretty pink balls detach from the tree they might get some help with the harvesting.

Got a message from a friend. There is a teenage member of her family who is giving her mother a very hard time, the father has left the picture, and there was a reaching out for support.

I asked re favorite colors….

And as I sat knitting tonight, trying to get that silk shawl out of the way because there’s a few more people now that I need to get to work for after this, I remembered. I would likely not have remembered that my sister said it but I will never forget that my daughter did.

My mom always said that my oldest sister was an easy teenager to raise. I mentioned that to Marian once and she said that when she got too mad at the world or at Mom she would retreat into the bathroom and soak in a long, hot, luxurious bath.  Time alone. (As the fourth kid of six, I could add, hogging the bathroom, making the rest of us go to the one downstairs, silently ruling the roost. Except that I don’t remember it at all so clearly I wasn’t too traumatized.)

I can just picture the whimsy of the occasional splash, observing the droplets as they fell, adding more hot as the water gradually cooled, keeping it going. She would always come out feeling all was well with the world now.

My girls were teens when she told me that and I just, y’know, happened to mention it to them.

You never know if your kids are listening, but there was this one day that my daughter emerged from the bathroom (good thing we’d added on a spare one by then), hair soaked, fingers wrinkled, and exclaimed, “Your sister is a GENIUS!”

I once read a Dave Barry essay on how women are far braver than men: as proof he offered the fact of his wife sticking her hand down into the kitchen disposal to get something out that was gumming up the works. *He* would never put *his* hand down in that smelly thing, he said; she was his hero.

Totally topping that tonight.

Note to the resident ileostomy patient: you never, never, ever hit that thing before you’ve finished closing the clip. Ever. (I knew that.)

But I did. I’ve been dropping things a lot lately, and that 3.5″-each-way hinged piece of plastic was suddenly the latest, and yelling NOOoooOOO! at it did nothing to dissuade it from washing out of sight.

I don’t even want to touch that horrid snake thing in the garage, but he was willing to. And so we don’t have to spend $150+ on a plumber after all. (It worked. Phew.) And not once did he say the slightest negative thing to me over any of it.

The Barrys ain’t got nuthin’ on my guy.

For all the studying and all the tests, they did not know for certain that they would survive the flight. It had never been done before. But the invasion of Japan was planned next and, for all the destruction this would wreak (and they did not yet know nor anticipate acute radiation syndrome), many more millions of people would surely die if the men in that plane did not take on this burden.

I mentioned once about my uncle’s role in WWII.

A fellow officer greeted my dad’s older brother in the mess hall that night with, “And what did you do today, soldier?”

“I think I just ended the war.”

I mentioned last month my cousin admitting to secretly fervently wishing for a purple hat and scarf from me and I’ve been keeping an eye out ever since for just the right yarn.

And not finding it. Nope, not in my stash. Not that variegated. Purlescence had one that was tempting but was split into two dye lots, no–but I had these other projects that had to get done first anyway and that silk still has easily another week on it, so, no hurry.

But having finished a hat for someone else I no longer had a carry-around project. Just the silk. I was driving friends to San Francisco Airport this afternoon, and just before we got there I finally mused out loud to them that Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco was a whole lot closer right now than it would ever be from home and they carry the Malabrigo that would likely include exactly what I wanted that purple to be: the shade, the superwash, the softness; the wow factor, basically.

(Making that link it just finally dawned on me after all these years that the background is pale orange because they’re on Orange Avenue. My, I’m quick.)

Would the owner recognize you? Lee wondered out loud. (I guess because of the distance from home.)

Phyllis and I guffawed at her husband and I told him, Even Kathryn’s husband knows me!

And so. The Borraja. When I said no, that Rios Purpuras was just a little too gray, Kathryn pulled out exactly the right purple in the Arroyo–and thank you, Malabrigo, too, it’s perfect.

At the wheel again, I tossed various pattern thoughts around as to what I would do next with my time.

One stooped, elderly man stood alone with his memories at the foot of the Army-built Golden Gate Cemetery, a world away from the seven lanes of cars streaming past on the other side of the fence. The light turned and he didn’t see me stopped alongside him, wishing suddenly I could get out of my car so that he wouldn’t have to stay alone. I turned onto a quieter street and up the hill running alongside the place as I continued towards the freeway.  A small American flag had been planted at each grave marker, with large flags flapping vigorously in the Bay breeze around the small steep hill overlooking them all. Families were getting out of their cars near the entryway for the the Memorial Day weekend, and I silently wished the old man way down the hill company and camaraderie, too.

And I wanted to ask them, too, to tell me their stories. To see their loved ones come back to life in their eyes.

But I did not interrupt what was so intensely personal but continued on to my own place, knowing I would never forget the sight.

There’s an old family tease as the siblings in both our families moved around early in their careers of, “I don’t see how you can live in such a dangerous place…”

Drab dry California-summer hills nearby, birds that blend into them… and every now and then something with color pops up. The chest on this one is bright orange in the sun.

I only get to see black headed grosbeaks a few times a year and it’s been a treat to have this one hanging around under the olive tree the last three days.

The plums and Yellow Transparent apples are growing fast with harvest next month. Then come the peaches, more apples, and the blueberries seem to just be nonstop…

Meantime, I stumbled across a pair of photos someone took today near where my brother lives–I was checking the Denver weather reports after his county had a tornado warning. Click on the one on the left to get the full effect of those tennis-ball-sized hailstones. Yow.

I’d smirk, because, you know, little sisters do that sort of thing, but you know I’d get thwacked with an earthquake if I did.

Another Mother’s Day photo to show off.

In peregrine news: last week the two San Jose females accidentally bumped their brothers off the ledge early. Both got an elevator ride to the roof for a do-over and both are flying well now and getting past the stage of trying to grab the side of the building with their feet on the way down.

Today, the first female took a good flight herself and landed on an outside stairway. Then, as if she’d forgotten she’d just used these flappy flappy things attached to her and they’d actually worked, she walked–!–up five flights of stairs. Just like any baby can go up them before they can go down, but, still.

Later the last eyas finally flew, too. And she hiked up the stairs like her sister.

So far it looks like we will have all four survive this year.

The San Francisco trio (their fourth died early) are about a week behind ours.

And then an old friend shared a link to a peregrine cam in Salt Lake City today. Wait–this one’s in color and the image is sharper. And it has audio! More firsts on the list of things newly heard: babies screeching and parents soothing and I’d had no idea they sounded like the sounds that keep coming out of my speakers, I’d only ever heard the parents’ strident defending of their young mid-air. This is so different. Almost like a cat purring, at times.

It is amazing how many of the city sounds below the cam picks up, too, including, at one point, a siren going by.

Given where that cam is, if anybody calls for an ambulance in the building my parents now live in, if that cam’s running and that tab is open on my computer I’ll be able to hear it.

Who knew a peregrine falcon cam could play kind of a backup Life Alert for senior parents. Mind. Blown. (Oh hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!)

Church was different today.

Jim’s friend Craig Jessop was in town, and Jim (my son’s old organ teacher) introduced him to the congregation.

Brother Jessop is the former conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and I wrote about him once here, a great story, don’t miss it if you haven’t seen it yet. (And I’m sorry to add that this time Richard was the one who was home sick with a fever and had to miss out on the experience.)

He sang a solo with just the most glorious voice and then he had us all sing a few hymns.

Just the first verse of Now Let Us Rejoice–and suddenly I had tears streaming freely. One friend had no idea why but she reached an arm around me. It’s okay, it’s cool.

Brother Jessop talked some more about the power of music in connecting us with God, and then said, I’m going to ask you: if you have a favorite hymn, if one has a particular meaning to you, would you come up here, maybe 30 seconds (and then he smiled and kind of laughed and said, okay, a minute) and tell us why it’s important to you.

Collette talked about the schizophrenia that had betrayed her grandson, (the answer to the last line on that post? It was true. None of our children has been lost since that day) and at his funeral we had sung Lead Kindly Light. It had brought her so much comfort.

We sang Lead Kindly Light for her, for Brian, for God.

Others spoke too and we learned things about each other we had never known. Music is an intimate art.

I had a sister-in-law who was diagnosed with cancer when her youngest was in middle school. Her husband…acted out his pain in ways unfathomable to those who loved them. Their marriage ended and still he wrought destruction. He threw away so much that he could have been.

Eight years after her diagnosis, our phone rang very early one morning when we knew what that would mean.

It was a Sunday morning. There was certainly no going back to sleep and I walked quietly towards the kitchen to start the day with a moment to myself to take it in before the kids would wake up and be told.

And as I walked down that hallway I had this growing sense of music being sung, as if a whole crowd of happy people were giving praise to God in every note shared together.

Now let us rejoice in the day of salvation.  Just the first two phrases. I was in the kitchen by this point; the last note seemed to shine with light in the still air.

And with that, at long last after such a struggle she’d endured, peace was given to me.

A modest proposal ahead:

We as a society provide childhood vaccinations to rich and poor alike, without charge when need be for the good of everyone simply because it’s the right thing to do. Our grandparents suffered greatly but by the grace of God, our children don’t need to.

The old DPT shot is now the DTaP: diptheria, tetanus and acellular rather than whole-virus pertussis, just as effective but with no side effects, whereas the pertussis part was the biggest source of fevers and aches in the old version.

I chose to be a part of that change. My son was a newborn at Stanford when a researcher came to my bedside and told me that two million Japanese two-year-olds had been given a new DTaP vaccine with not. one. single. case. of reaction, and they hoped to be able to replace the old DPT entirely with this improved version that was so much easier on the children but that still clearly worked. It might require an extra booster later; they did not know yet. She offered me access to any information I might want about her team’s work.

But to be able to get that version in the US at any age would require finding parents willing to have their babies given this shot while it was still in study, Level III, if I remember right. It had not been given to anyone younger than those two-year-0lds. She explained the level of monitoring they would do and the care they would take to make sure my baby was okay and they would immediately discontinue it across the board if any problems surfaced whatsoever among the infants.

Of which there would be none. And so the FDA would later approve it and it would become the standard.

My oldest is allergic to the old DPT and, having reacted, cannot be fully immunized even with the new shot for all the wishing in the world.

So there was that, and, I pictured possibly millions of people spared a long night awake with a crying, unhappy baby in pain–my husband and I signed those papers. Which is why our youngest is part of why your children and my grandchildren have a safer, easier version of their shots now. There’s definitely an amount of pride in that.

Some don’t want vaccines for their kids. They haven’t seen their baby struggling for breath from pertussis or deaf from measles or paralyzed by tetanus so they don’t believe it could ever happen, and they put every immunocompromised person at risk too and don’t see it and don’t think it matters. They don’t know or they don’t want to know that the man who started the anti-vaccination fad had, by very many accounts, a huge financial stake in doing so.

I have an elegant, simple solution. A conservative solution, even.

Pass a law.  Aim it at any parent whose child does not have a valid medical reason and yet who knowingly outright refuses to immunize their child with the DTaP and MMR shots–the basic childhood shots, I’m not talking about Gardasil–any parent who cannot empathize with nor want to protect their own child from the harm these diseases could do to them, well, okay then, that’s their choice, even if I would want to argue with them that my real-world worst-case scenario, that their child dies, beats their imagined worst-case scenario, that their child becomes autistic.

But they should then be on the hook financially for the outcome of that choice. Hospitalizations, medications, therapies, hearing aids, doctors, nursing care, we can’t make them not risk their children’s suffering life-threatening or simply life-crummying illnesses but we can choose not to take the burden off those parents of the financial costs they expect to impose across the rest of us for it. Society already offered, they refused, they need to own it.

All we have to do to make this happen is to say that the insurance companies are, as of some date in the near future, not required to cover any costs incurred by a child’s illness of these specific and preventable types if this is why they were left susceptible and got sick.

The insurance companies will quite gleefully do the rest.

(Edited 5/18 to add: No, I certainly don’t think children should go without medical care. I do think we must speak out more about the costs, of every kind, of this terrible fad. See my comment below about friends of mine who dealt with a major medical debt and how it got worked out; another thought might be to, rather than withhold all coverage, impose a huge co-pay with, if needed, long payoff terms.)

Hey, tell Parker: there’s a new kind of digger!

There were a few tomato pots where the seedlings simply vanished.

And then… I found a tomato seedling, couldn’t be anything but, planted quite nicely in an amaryllis pot  a few feet away.

Can squirrels really carry such a tender thing gently enough? Their digging ability can never be doubted, I mean, there’s a lizard species that depends on them to get past the hardpack. Look Ma, no teeth! Who knew. The thing looked quite happy there.

I scooped it out anyway and put it back where it wouldn’t compete with my bulb.

And there was a safflower sprout via my birdfeeder a dozen feet away growing in another tomato pot, the little farmer. Okay, out you go.

On the peregrine falcon front: it’s supposed to be a few more days before fledging, but one of the females turned and bumped her brother off the low ledge today when he hadn’t even made the hop-and-flight yet to the upper one to see the world in that direction for the first time. (Here’s his more antsy brother in a video from sunrise this morning.) He didn’t fly really but gently coasted, landing straight below the 18th floor nestbox. Safe!

And so Glenn Stewart, the biologist in charge, drove an hour from UC Santa Cruz, got the baby-in-the-box from wildlife services, went up on the roof and put the little guy up there where his parents would keep feeding him as he got the hang of this flying thing. Glenn wasn’t about to rappell a floor down City Hall to the box with the parents going for his head like he does during banding, the eyas just needed a little more time where humans couldn’t reach it.

Clara and Fernando didn’t even react with more than a glance to the familiar face that stayed further away this time. Oh, it’s you. Carry on.

(p.s. And on a happy for her, sad for us note, Nathania is devoting herself fulltime to her yoga business and letting the others carry on at Purlescence.  She will be much missed.)

My favorite little boys again…

After last month’s lupus meeting there was no way I was going to miss today’s. I wanted to see her, to be there for her. I came with a hat I’d knit in bright navy and royal blues done in two strands of merino and cashmere/mink, with a second hat still on the needles in purples and pinks in a machine washable merino/silk for her to choose from. (I’m dangling those descriptions out there in case she wants me to email her photos or if she’d rather have how they look be a surprise.) I hoped things had gotten easier in her life, but in the meantime, being a knitter, I did for her what I knew how to offer love and support.

Okay, granted, it was 97F today and nobody would even want to think about wearing a warm hat, but the ocean breezes and cool evenings will be back by the end of the week.

Turns out she’d injured her foot and stayed home.

The parking at that hospital is always terrible and our group meets at 12:30–a difficult time to take a long walk across the brightness for the very sun sensitive.

And yet the parking lot is where the hospital chose to throw their staff appreciation barbecue today.  I don’t think someone thought through that they have this nice inner courtyard with doors right there to the blessed air conditioning for people to escape from the record-breaking heat wave, and one can only imagine what it was like for the people manning those grills I saw smoking away.

Oh wait now I get it they didn’t want the walls of the hospital to spontaneously combust. A little distance, a little asphalt. Gotcha.

I circled through the handicapped area. As if. I circled a wider area. Finally, I lucked out as someone pulled out and I put the placard up (so they wouldn’t ticket me if the meeting went over the two-hour limit) and pulled in.

There was an electric cart with a driver watching me as I turned my car off and I mentally apologized to him for getting it before he could as I grabbed my cane and opened my door.

But no:  he was an old retiree volunteering and cruising the parking lot for people who might be stranded by that party and need a lift to the front doors. Really?! He had spotted my placard and stopped. He offered me a ride and suddenly I had a roof between me and the worst of the UV and less time outside than if I’d gotten the very best spot. Sweet.

During the usual how-you-doing part of the meeting, where we’re expected to actually answer that question, I admitted that summer UV is hard: it kicks up my brainstem inflammation and makes it hard to breathe at night. Y’know, the autonomic nervous system thing–not so autonomic. Not, I hastened to add, anything at all like a dozen years ago when it first hit where I didn’t know from night to night whether I would get to wake up in the morning. Only enough to make it a struggle to breathe deep enough to fall asleep, a far better problem to have.

And it didn’t even occur to me till writing that just now that I could have handed that finished blue hat to one of them for safekeeping, just in case. Because I simply took it utterly for granted that there was no need.

Which is so much better of a place to be in. And, but for that question, I’d almost missed seeing it.

Life is good.