More Parker pictures from our trip.

Or not. Huh. Silly computer. Meantime, we’re home. And the phone rang today: I had finally made a hat, out of a strand of Cascade Venezia merino/silk and a strand of sheared mink laceweight, for a doctor whose caring had made a great difference to me three years ago in the hospital. That bit of a flare at the end of this summer nudged me to just go do what I’d so long wanted to do and say thank you; I would regret it–I had regretted it–if I didn’t, finally. And so it came to be.

I left it in an envelope with his receptionist last week with a note explaining why I’d made it: how his words then had said to me, Wow. You’re a survivor! And so I had been.

He called this afternoon. “It’s so soft!” And he’d so loved my note. His voice was full of wonder at it all.

But first he had to get through my thick head. I was hearing the tones but not the words… I’m sorry–(finally), Oh! Is this Dr. F?

Yes!

He said it again, and the second or third time I got it, and thanked him right back.

Got off the phone, wondering how on earth I had been that deaf on the phone…reached up to my left ear…and found that although I’d put that hearing aid in hours earlier, both of them…

I’d never turned the darn thing on all day.

But he was patient with me anyway. Like I say, he’s a good one.

Within ten minutes of when we arrived Friday, Parker, who had woken up running a fever, barfed and clung. His daddy cleaned it up and comforted him.

Get a little tylenol in him, though, and you’d never know he didn’t feel well, he was pure toddler running around with a grin.

Within a few hours he snuggled over next to me. I was smitten all over again–and then, just to make sure I knew the order of things, he pulled his daddy’s arm to come sit close on the other side. There. Love. Both sides.  Good. And in front, too, hi, Grandpa!

We got presented with a Parker doodle; after all, as Richard-the-younger teased me in a mock-accusatory tone, “He IS quarter hippy, y’know.”

Works for me.

Parker let us know he had the starving-artist thing down already.

First thing Sunday morning he was down that slide that had terrified  him the night before and was experimenting with the best ways to go and how to vary and control the speed. With his mommy or daddy right there, he can brave anything.

Finally! See yesterday’s comment for the first day; I couldn’t log in to start a new post.

Today Richard and Richard-the-younger spent putting together a new swing set for Parker and his cousins and future siblings.  Cedar wood, two swings,  a chin-up bar between them and a slide that terrified the poor kid: too high!  I got the first swing in, and very quickly he was pulling his mommy over there for help not to mention moral support in  getting up on that first seat, the one I’d just been on. He liked it! Hey Mikey!

You know he’ll get over the slide’s height the second his older cousins discover that thing, and like his daddy at that age, the kid was born to climb.

The men were pretty tired by the end of the day.  But how many grandparents get to say they flew in to town and got to help build the swing set their grandkids would use forevermore? It was just a really really cool way to spend a day.  While I helped distract the little helper.

Wow, you guys. Thank you! Boy, Sam’s numbers sure jumped overnight.

Now here’s a political link to enjoy: Romney and Obama at a fundraiser for Catholic charities, poking fun at themselves and each other together for a good cause.

Meantime, we get to hug the kids and play with Parker tomorrow. I so can’t wait.

This is the weekend, at last. Our Sam will be in a walkathon for lupus on Saturday. All proceeds go directly and only to funding research into the disease, with all administrative costs being donated. And that funding is the only reason why we have Benlysta, the first new lupus drug since 1955 and which was approved by the FDA last year.

And Benlysta has made all the difference in Sam‘s disease, whose lupus likes to attack her platelets.

I posted about it before, and you good people shot her up to being the #6 fundraiser out of everybody participating.  I so wish I could give so much more; you all did what I could not. Thank you does not begin to express my gratitude–you all are wonderful.

I notice there’s a new person on her team with zero dollars so far. Hmm.

Wait, I said as she turned to me as I walked into church, you look familiar…

She told me afterwards that in that moment, she was trying to remember, was Alison the name of the mom or the oldest daughter? But she remembered my name, whichever one of us it applied to, because it was her twin’s name and her own daughter’s.

She and her husband are friends from church who moved away 15 years ago, back for a visit. They wanted to show their kids the California sights, since they hadn’t really been old enough to remember (or weren’t born yet.) And they wanted to see old friends.

Meantime, there was a speaker from a neighboring ward, and he’d only recently moved into the area. He mentioned they’d come from New York. I went up to him after the meeting and said, okay, this is a long shot but by any chance do you know Boyd and Carolyn R…

His face totally lit up. YES! I worked with him on…

Carolyn’s my sister.

He loved it.

And California became, in that moment, just a bit more familiar and comfortable of a place.

(p.s. I once saw one of the weinermobiles driving the main drag three blocks away, but never anything like this in our neighborhood.)

One thing my daughter has not been able to have for eight years, since she developed her allergy to dairy (after having mono–who knows), has been the simple pleasure of a pizza with cheese on it.

A new spot popped up near the university, Patxi’s. Vegan crusts, two types of vegan cheese if you so desire, all meats naturally cured.

I would never have heard of the place, but someone told Michelle about it and she hoped we could try it? They even had a chart of what allergens are in which of their foods. Now there’s a place that can capture a big market segment right there. Being able to go out to eat safely is a rare thing around here, and we were hoping the place would earn the loyalty we so hoped to be able to give it. This is after a place she went to last week listened to her concerns, assured her all would be well, and then handed her a dish that, it turned out, had melted cheese hiding on the inside.

It is not fun having your throat swell.

Daiya? What’s Daiya?

And so, at long last, tonight we all had pepperoni, sausage, and *cheese pizza. It looked like mozzarella, it had the mouthfeel of it, it even tasted like it in the presence of the best pepperoni I have ever had. (Take *that,* nitrates!) And as we finished our small splurge of a dinner, Michelle was just overwhelmed suddenly at how wonderful it was to be able to–wow. She could have real pizza again in her life!

Sometimes, the little things are the big things.

——–

*Cut and pasted: Daiya Vegan Mozzarella Ingredients: Filtered water, tapioca and/or arrowroot flours, non-GMO expeller pressed canola and/or non-GMO expeller pressed safflower oil, coconut oil, pea protein, salt, vegan natural flavors, inactive yeast, vegetable glycerin, xantham gum, citric acid (for flavor) titanium dioxide (a naturally occurring mineral).

Random fact of the day: our house, like most around here, is a single-story built on a concrete slab; we’re close enough to the Bay that our water table is far too high for any kind of basement or wood subfloor.

I have my chocolate hazelnut torte recipe, and with last week’s prediabetes diagnosis (oh didn’t I mention that. At 111 pounds!) I’ve been trying to learn to avoid sugar, but Michelle’s been dying to have me make her favorite torte version from my Cocolat cookbook. She’d baked it while at grad school but I’d never tried it–by the time I found out about it, I already had the recipe I wanted.  Cocolat’s uses about half the hazelnuts mine does–not a feature, I thought, and now I would need the extra nuts to buffer it all the more, if anything.

But there was my child I could so easily make happy.

She walked in the door tonight and her face lit up as she figured out what was in the oven. When we sampled it after dinner, it had come out, as she put it, as “Less rock! More cake!”

I casually mentioned: “You know how I’m really good at dropping things but really really good at catching them between my leg and the cabinet on the way down so they don’t break?” (All that Pyrex and Corningware around here over that hard floor, not to mention my Mel and Kris stoneware.)

“Yes”… (wondering where this was going.)

“Doesn’t work so well with an egg.”

It was General Conference weekend, wherein leaders of the Mormon Church speak to the members. Favorites: Henry B. Eyring, and that listing at the very bottom of the page is his talk I mentioned earlier about his daughter’s recent life-and-death delivery at 15 weeks early and her visiting teaching companion’s having happened to show up just when she direly needed it. (Women’s Conference was last week.) Also, Richard G. Scott, whose younger kids I used to babysit back when he was a nuclear physicist in Washington, DC. and who gave an hour of his time to talk to my husband when he was a 19-year-old about to leave on a mission, hoping for a little guidance and wise words and so, seeking out an old family friend. Elder Uchtdorf. Whose family escaped on one of the last trains out of East Germany to West when he was little.

Jeffrey Holland: “The crowning characteristic of love is loyalty.” I had to think about that a moment. Yes, I can see that. Definitely.

How’s the closed captioning going? asked Richard, glancing over, watching from his own screen.

They’ve got the words going to yesterday’s talks, I answered. Oops. But then, they said it was still in beta. ‘Sokay, I’m not needing it.

Early on, I finished the project I was working on and being a captive listener, needed something else to do with my hands.

I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t want to…  I just don’t do baby knitting… I had to. I knew it. And so I picked up the outfit I started making maybe a month ago for my namesake great-niece (wow does that make me sound old, but I was 16 when her mom was born to my oldest sister). I had gotten a great start on it, had wavered on the width I had going and whether it would work and had ziplocked it away.

When else would I do it? In time for her to wear it? Or for her own baby someday? Alright, then.

I added a few inches to what I had, started into the armscyes (ie picture the J and backwards J indentations at the underarms), counted stitches while the Tabernacle Choir sang and started the decreasing.

It looked terrible. I had merrily knitted a few more inches. No go. Rip. I did the decreases, *then* the armscyes. So much better.

I finally put it aside when I got to where I would need to find a pattern somewhere to doublecheck the length to the back of the neck on that dress.

But what I’m coming here to say is, I had this project that was important to me that had stumped me and it had bugged me. Listening to all those talks about the effects and the dear necessity of love in our lives, of looking out for the children, hearing stories told and experiences shared and wisdom offered, the thing in my hands became easy at last. And not just because I was at the stockinette part.

This morning I had no idea how I was supposed to make that beginning look like anything that could fit a baby well. But it gradually came to me as I just kept going, ripping and redoing, and before too long I knew exactly how it was going to come out and what will be next. I don’t like the idea of ribbing around the arms and around the front because it wouldn’t go well with the lacework at the bottom? But the raw edge look, no? Well then, repeat the lacework, there you go!

“The crowning characteristic of love is loyalty.”

And I love my niece and her baby I get to meet in a couple months. And so, hearing that, it was all the more imperative that I get this done, and after being afraid of it for too long, now I love how it’s coming out.

I can’t wait to see it finished and on Eden Alison!

Swooping in an arc around the patio, and suddenly it was across the yard, having grabbed a small bite on the fly as a second finch hid stock still in the elephant ears. A few hours later something again caught my eye and I looked up: it somehow did a hairpin turn right in the olive tree and away. Whoosh!

A Cooper’s hawk in flight is like time personified: when you’re paying rapt attention, the moment stretches  from here to forever, and yet look away and it’s gone. How on earth do they go that fast? It’s like the speed at which little kids grow up. After they grow up.

It’s hard to be a teenager and have your dad decide to take a new job and uproot the family and did you ask to move away from all your friends? Did you?

Not that any of them said any such thing to me, just, I’ve been a teenager and I’ve had friends move in/move out even if my own folks were kind enough to stay put for 47 years in the house built for them when I was three. One of the quirks of growing up in the Maryland suburbs was having friends afraid their dad–it was always the dad, back then–might lose the election and then they would have to leave. Back in those days, Congressmen moved their families to DC–and if their political fortunes didn’t hold, then, often, back out.

So. A new family recently moved into the area and showed up at church, the kids ranging from teenage boys to a babe in arms.

The mom is always smiling. Always cheerful. I like her already.

We got sent a picture–and I want to show it, but I don’t know how to access it from this computer–of my son and his little Parker, toddler totally copying daddy, very cute. Richard printed it out at work on Friday and I folded one of the copies and put it in my purse.

So there was the mom today by the door when the meetings were over, waiting for her husband to find her, holding the baby, her two teenage boys standing in front of her. They really don’t know me from Adam yet, so I explained I had one grandson: and then I pulled out that picture.

The mom went, oooh, so cute. The teens leaned in for a closer look and had the same reaction. They had a baby brother. They totally got this babies-are-adorable thing.

And then they looked up from the picture and into my eyes, still smiling.

I think they made friends on the spot with me as much as I did with them.

Heard elsewhere:

Sarah Palin called Senator Joe Lieberman’s office.

“I’m sorry, he’s not here, it’s Rosh Hoshanah.”

“Hey, Rosh, could you take a message for me?”

———-

Edited hours later to add the real post. You know how some days are all about winding yarn while your brain sifts through what project and idea to pursue next? Only, I’ve been doing that with fruit trees, winding my way through websites, learning everything I can while trying to decide what makes the most sense for our small lot. Avocado trees are poisonous to birds? Forget that. Wait–we get 880 chill hours? We do? (The number of hours of cold a tree needs in the winter in order to produce a good crop come spring.) That’s a lot more than I thought and gives me a lot more options.

Note that if you plant close to a light-colored house it will reflect warmth onto the tree and up the hours needed.

Wait–Lorings? 750 hours–Yamagami nursery in Cupertino has Lorings?! (Down the right side there.) Lorings are the peach trees of my childhood!

There was a commercial orchard just barely into West Virginia that grew them.

The farm hands would come through and pick everything ripe or that might ripen, leaving only the tiniest and greenest that could never sell like that. The trees would then put their all into those very few, and over a few weeks they would become huge–a pound, a pound and a half, drip-through-your-fingers juicy and with a flavor like no other. But getting to them was so much work that to the farmer it wasn’t worth hiring help again for.

Mom and Dad would call, and when the peaches were ready for gleaning we would go. It was a long haul from the DC suburbs but also one of the adventures of our childhoods.  Putting ladders here and here and here with Mom and Dad, we six kids got to climb up in the trees after those scattered few, so perfect peaches left behind, while getting an incredibly good per-pound price for our prizes; for the farmer, it was found money.

And also found friends. He loved that we so much loved what he did–and that we got to see his peaches not the way they ship best but fully how they’re supposed to be.

Meeting new neighbors down the street once with some of those incredible peaches the day we’d picked them answered their wondering as to whether anyone would notice or care that they’d moved in. Wow, *where* did you get these?!

It took us, what, Marian, an hour and a half? Hour three quarters each way to get there? But it was always worth it.

I can grow Lorings here in California! Who knew!

You just missed it, I told Richard this morning; the hawk just chased thataway. (Gorgeous picture at the link. Feather–and fan, said the knitter.)

Kissed him goodbye, walked back in here, and a minute or two later, there it was coming back again, swooping past the porch in front of me and rising up into the olive tree, wings and tail wide. I guess catching breakfast on the fly hadn’t quite worked the first time.

It observed my typing awhile.

Equinox is when day and night are equal; solstice, the shortest or longest day of the year. Next week is fall equinox and I always see Coopernicus more when the season draws close to those four times. It affirms its territory, it claims its place in the world.

By the light.

Thanks to my cousin Jim passing the word on, I found out that my great-grandfather met Helen Keller. In front of the Mormon Tabernacle Organ that my son has played–so I know just how much sound that thing can put out in person: you wonder if the windows are all going to fall out when the organist really wants to pull out all the stops (which is where that phrase comes from).

Now, let me tell you a story about Heber J. Grant. Born in 1856. He was completely tone deaf. He was also a strong believer that anything he worked hard enough at, he could achieve, and so at one point in his life, he decided he wanted to learn to sing. I mean really sing: he got a pianist friend to work with him, telling him when he had the note right or not and learning by how it felt in his throat because his ears just had no clue. Memorizing, practicing, because after all, music was an important part of the church services. He got to where he had a repertoire of three hymns that he was assured he was doing well.

And then they announced he was going to sing a solo in church.

The pianist played the intro. He joined in.

The congregation suppressed twitters all around–the oops moment of being caught off guard and reacting in spite of themselves.

He soldiered on, got through it, sat down, and leaned to the pianist, “Didn’t I sing that right?”

“Yes, you did,” she whispered back. “I played the wrong introduction. I’m so sorry!”

Rhythm, pitch–he’d had no idea.

His youngest daughter was my grandmother with perfect pitch.

Sitting in the front row at that Tabernacle building is where, at an annual, long-scheduled Grant family reunion that was held the weekend of Gram’s passing at 96 (I think she let go then so that we could see more relatives in the extended family), I heard for the first time her father’s voice. It had been remastered from a very old recording for that reunion and all of us out-of-towners would have missed it had the funeral been held at any other time.

Singing.  My tone-deaf great-grandfather was singing one of those songs again in his great old age. It sounded like an old man’s voice, but he only hit a few notes wrong. I would not have known he couldn’t hear better.

Wow. Just, wow. Helen Keller held his hand and didn’t let go. He guided her to that organ console in front of all those pipes. Alexander Schreiner belted out that hymn for all he was worth and they got to hear it as they could, together.

—–

Edited Monday to add: I finished that post, went off to bed, and the obvious suddenly hit me: Helen Keller had learned to speak like my great-grandfather had learned to sing. By how it felt.

My cousin Grant Bennett spoke at the Republican Convention tonight about his neighbor and did a fine job of it: straight from the heart.

Then he introduced a few people, and I ended up emailing a friend from our ward here: was that your mom?!

It was. The mother of this child, if you want more of the woman’s story.

I still have no intention of voting for Romney, but I read a comment on the Washington Post today by a fellow Obama supporter who said that clearly the man loves his wife and she loves him: you can’t fake that look he saw between them.

Much though I dislike that Paul Ryan last night repeated outright lies that have been exposed again and again and he didn’t care–like that Janesville plant that closed not under Obama but while Bush was in office, that that debt commission report didn’t get acted on because he voted not to let it out of committee, and on and on–but his little boys stole the show by hamming it up every time the camera landed on them last night and tonight. I laughed as it got snatched away again and again, trying to find that right moment while the youngest especially was simply being a cheerful little boy cooped up too long in cooped-up clothes. Bring on the balloons!

I think it was his sister that caught one almost as big as her at the end and was wobbling with it, exit, stage right.