The save-the-date went out. I looked at some of the pictures of friends of long ago and couldn’t wait to see them in person again after all these years, but we’re talking fall ’27.

My second thought was, so that’s why I couldn’t possibly be old enough for a 50-year high school reunion yet: I’m not!

The forecast said .05″ of rain to start the season; we got .22″ and a forecast of more in a week.

I don’t know if it was the cold or the timing of the water or the combination, but suddenly there were a lot more pomegranates just starting to crack open. That’s when they’re perfect inside but they could go downhill fast now with the exposure.

They don’t just come off in your hands, you have to take pruning shears to them. Easy enough. Hi, neighbors.

There was a new family down the block that I’ve been meaning to meet. A card with our names and address just in case I didn’t see them–I didn’t–and a big one was set down at their doorstep. I thought, they’ll think I’m out campaigning, but ripe is when ripe is so there you go.

I don’t think they’ll mind.

(Not this one.)

I asked her, Do you remember when your mom brought those pomegranates to church to share?

She did indeed.

They were splitting open, there were segments falling into pieces in a way I’d never seen before, dead ripe, and it was easy for a lot of people to sample a bit outside on the grass to confine the mess.

I had never tasted a pomegranate like that! I told her, And that’s why–

–as I handed her one I’d just harvested from my own. The tree I’d planted because her mom had taught me what a pomegranate could and should be. She had decided that 80 wasn’t too old to try to plant something new and hope for fruit and she most definitely got it: she came to within five days of 98.

I’ve never seen one so big! my friend exclaimed.

I don’t know if whoever bought her late mom’s house kept her tree, but the memory lives on at mine.

One very proud daddy brought his eight-year-old son over to me before church started.

Both of them loved it when I gasped in delight at what they had to show me: the kiddo’s knitting.

Clearly someone who knew kids and who knew good yarn got him started: it was bright, had lots of colors, was soft, and a wool with just a bit of fuzz to it. Tactility, but not enough to snag on the needle. Hefty but not too thick, needles about a size US 9 or 10–not the tense-grip broomsticks like some kids get started on. Yarn that said Knit Me. It was gorgeous.

There were about three dozen stitches and they were close to perfect. He’d knit about an 8″ square in garter stitch.

Except it was a little wider at the top third.

The daddy explained (trying to help me hear over the organ prelude music, which my captions app was struggling with, too) that his son wanted to know what he had done that had done that and how to fix it.

I looked at the kiddo and told him, Every new knitter does that. I did!

He laughed with his dad while his face went, OH good!

It’s fine like that, I said, but if you want to make it smaller again, you put your needle into two stitches, as I gestured as if my index finger were the needle.

He clearly instantly grokked it. He’d already figured out that that’s probably how you do it but he wanted to ask before maybe messing anything up on this piece he was so proud of.

I saw him after church. He had made that slight decrease and from there the width matched the bottom part. He had already knitted about three more inches, maybe four.

What makes it all the more perfect is his name: Shepherd.

Re yesterday’s post: the woman knew she didn’t know how much she was asking so she was trying to find out if it was a reasonable ask. I suggested tie quilts because everybody could be involved in making however many and it would be more of a community outreach.

And because I was remembering the one we were surprised with and how much came from that.

Years ago there was just one girl in our ward finishing high school that year and the women decided to make her a quilt as a graduation gift; one is an easy number.

My daughter took her beautiful new pieced quilt to college and found herself with a roommate from a town in the Midwest that was going through a severe downturn.

Richard and I had lived in that state for a year during grad school: the next town over had had seven factories. Five had closed and two had cut half their workforces. I remember the Vietnam veteran dad who’d made a good wage pushing a union broom who’d never learned to read and suddenly had no way to get that income back. The ward there helped him set up a pick-your-own strawberry farm on his acreage so he could have an income while not having to pay anybody to harvest. I taught his ten-year-old, and I’ve long hoped things turned out okay for the four of them.

Sam’s roommate had a single thin blanket from Walmart and her family had zero funds for more. But she was there at college, with her whole future open to her.

My folks were visiting when Sam came home at Christmas. She and my mom went off to the local quilt shop and the two of them working together in great anticipation made a quilt for her roommate: to match hers, she told her, trying to avoid any whiff of my family has money that yours doesn’t. She told her, I’m paying it forward on what my ward did for me.

She’s one of our local church leaders, and like all of them, a volunteer.

She had been asked to help with local veterans.

They needed to feel cared about and the weather is cooling, she said to me, and she wanted to know if there were any other knitters or crocheters in our ward besides the three of us she knew about? Would it be do-able to ask us to knit hats or scarves for each of them?

I did not know at all how many people she was asking about nor over how large a geographical area. It might well be that she wasn’t sure yet herself.

I told her the story of someone announcing in the women’s meeting years ago that maybe I could knit everybody a scarf?

My first reaction had been a horrified thought of, You have no idea what you’re asking!

But somehow…it sank in. I could at least do some.

There was no kind nor reasonable place to stop once I’d started, but I didn’t say that–and I did love watching people’s faces light up.

That is how, I told my friend, I spent 10-15, sometimes 20 hours a week on those. For eighteen months. I didn’t get everybody because some people moved out before they could find out they were supposed to get one, but, that’s the kind of time we’re talking about. About ten hours for a cowl, about five for a hat. (If they’re nothing particularly complicated, but I didn’t say that.)

She said something in there about making blankets and I told her my current one takes about two hours an inch to do (again, that’s the simpler sections, but her eyes were big enough–my point was made.)

Okay, then. Wow. She’d had no idea it would take that much time.

Maybe we could tie quilts? I asked.

An old friend back visiting for the first time in twenty years grabbed my attention for a hug and we left it at To Be Continued.

Hey, I said to her, are you still interested in that Anya apricot seedling? That one planted this spring that was promised to someone else. They just finally decided they want it but they just don’t have the room nor the sun for it, so if you still do, it’s yours.

She was ecstatic!

Alright then, we just need to get it over to you. Wonderful!

So at that dinner last night.

An improved caption app on my phone means I can actually follow a conversation in a less than quiet environment. It wasn’t till today that I realized that she wasn’t expecting that. I don’t think she would have said this in front of me if she had.

There was an elderly woman and she was not talking directly to me when she lamented that (and it sounded like an out-of-context talking point straight from her preferred vulpine network) “A thousand churches in the US have been shut down and taken over as mosques. It’s the fall of civilization.”

The other person shrugged a yeah, okay, whatever, hon, and the subject was dropped.

I wanted to say, So people are still going to church (let’s not quibble over the cultural words for such), still looking for community, still trying to live up to their religions by holding themselves accountable before their fellow man simply by showing up to be reminded of their duty towards their fellow man and belief in G_d together. Cool.

Except that I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me in both senses of the word if I tried.

But I did find a moment later to tell her that a friend of mine had been at university in the US when the Shah fell, and she knew if she went back she’d be perceived as an American and in great danger. So she married a man in the same boat and they raised their family here.

When their daughter got engaged the dad made a point that he did not want her to do the American thing of living together out of wedlock. The family wanted to throw a big wedding for her. He wanted her to wait.

Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is very big on the waiting for marriage thing, I knew that that would mean something to my friend and maybe open her eyes a little.

To honor her parents, the couple chose to slip off to the courthouse and quietly get married there first so that they would be doing it right before G_d, or at the very least her parents’ perception of such: the commitment to each other comes first.

Maybe I got through a little bit. She seemed glad to hear of it.

I was talking to a friend at a dinner this evening; he’s a lawyer and had this to share:

A doctor, an engineer, and a lawyer were each claiming that theirs was the oldest profession.

The doctor: Well, Eve was made from Adam’s rib–clearly, that was quite the medical intervention.

The engineer: Genesis says that the earth, the sky, the day, the night, everything was created from chaos. So clearly it was a feat of engineering.

The lawyer, triumphantly: Chaos?

A motion-sensor chime went off: someone was at the door. I went to go retrieve the package-?

He’d been nicely groomed and you could see his sweet face. His tail was wagging happily at the sniffing all the new smells: roses! Holly bush! Azalea plants!

I walked to the front of the house to see if the little guy’s owners were coming right up behind–I know he’s always on leash when they’re on walks–but they were nowhere in sight.

He ran next door and that had to have been even more fun because they have a white dog about his size. Who was not coming out to play; when I called, he came back over to me.

Not the least bit skittish. He let me pet him. (So soft!) But I had no leash to help take him home.

And then he sat. And looked up at me. He seemed to be expecting something.

Would he let me pick him up? He would, quite happily, that tail and those big eyes and lashes looking up into my face as if he’d discovered his very bestest friend and I always thought he was cute but let me tell you, that little dog melted my heart right there. He didn’t wriggle nor try to get down, he was where he wanted to be.

Nobody answered the door at his house.

I finally stepped back a bit and saw that their gate was open. Mystery solved. I walked over there thinking I would put him down in there and quietly close it behind him, but a plumber was on the other side of the yard and I got glimpses of the neighbor on the other side of him.

I called out his name: Would he like his puppy back?

The two of them walked over towards me, chuckling, and the neighbor took up his small dog fondly into his arms and I had to let it go.

As I sit down to type: we just got back from the hospital, now that he was up to visitors.

He and his wife told us he went from fine to, two hours later, her asking whether she should call an ambulance–but they got in the car and she raced for the ER. They wondered out loud between them whether he would have made it if they’d waited for a 911 response. He described what happened next as staggering in the door there knowing he was dying and he had no idea why.

They had no idea triage could work that fast.

The first surgery was in the middle of the night. The second was the second day. The twisted paralyzed part of his intestines is gone now and he was actually eating a liquid bit of dinner.

Plain chicken broth is the worst, she said.

Actually, it’s pretty good, he said, glad to be able to get anything that wasn’t through an IV.

She said she knew he was feeling better when he started wisecracking at the nurses to make them laugh.

My rule of thumb is never stay more than an hour; let the patient rest, and so it was. But he looked way better than I expected.

After all the times they showed up for us it felt good to be able to be there for them.

Her plane is in the air, I can’t wait!

One of the things Whole Foods is good for is allergy-friendly food. I picked up a number of her favorites.

I found it. Yes! They had a dairy-free chocolate hazelnut spread. I debated on various cream substitutes for the rest of the ice cream batch I was plotting but realized I’d better let her tell me her preferences first.

You have to read every ingredient every time. Manufacturers make changes all the time.

The tired clerk looked like he was just counting the minutes till his shift was over and he could get out of there as he rang my stuff up.

I looked at the conveyer belt as he started to bag it up and told him, My daughter’s flying in from Boston tonight. So: all the chocolate!

He laughed and he looked at me with joy for my joy that I was going to get to see her. He was young but old enough to really know comings-home. It made his day, and that made mine: it was one of those moments that takes you by surprise and almost takes your breath away because all the sudden the love is right there, totally out in the open, we were strangers no more.

I told him Thank you! as I headed out of the store.

Richard’s reaction to the New York Times article about Andy’s farm turning into housing was the same as my initial one: Go. Go now. Everybody will want to.

I said, But I’m going tomorrow with Holly, but he and I both still felt it–Go! The place will be cleaned out.

I hopped right in the car and went.

She loves figs like I love peaches and the figs were on, along with the last of the nectarines and plums; from her house we are more than halfway to Andy’s and she wanted to see the place while it was still there. Her husband had a meeting in our town today. What’s an extra ninety minutes on the road at that point?

Cool, we’ll have a great time!

You never know though how plans will actually work out and they had a long drive ahead of them. I was standing in Andy’s farm store thinking about roasting figs and saving them in the freezer as an ingredient in winter, ready to go, and how good those have been to have. You never know. The figs will still be on next week, I’ll still be making my weekly trek. I don’t need a lot of them right now, I started to brush it away. One should be plenty for now. I’ll be right back tomorrow.

The thought persisted, hard, you never know.

So I brought home not one box for us but three: Exel, Tiger aka Panachee aka Panache depending on who’s doing the spelling, and Black Madeira. The descriptions of Black Madeira on the Fig Forum were so good that I actually bought a scion once but did not succeed at rooting it. I got a bit of leaf out of it before it died.

It was ten bucks. If I’d been serious about it I’d have bought a started tree but I knew I had no room for that.

So what actually happened: traffic was horrible and they were stuck in it for an extra hour and by the time she’d dropped him off across town, the idea of getting back in the car for another ninety, when we could just sit and talk and for me to be able to hear with no traffic noise…

And there were her figs all ready and waiting. Or mostly. One each of the Black Madeira and the Tiger had been sampled by then, because hey, we were going to go to Andy’s together the next afternoon. The one Delicioso plum she let me add to them hoped to make up for it.

Dr. Rachel Remen passed away on Saturday.

Kitchen Table Wisdom. My Grandfather’s Blessings. Two of the most important books I’ve ever read, and I recommend them to anyone and everyone.

She went to bed in her college dorm room one night and woke up six months later after a coma from blood loss, her first sign of Crohn’s disease. She made it through not just college but medical school after that.

She got offered head of pediatrics at Stanford, her dream job–but turned it down after seeing how they treated one of her young patients. She was determined to alter the culture of medicine for the better since she knew it well from the patient side as well as the professional. People went into it to be helpers but the process stomped the empathy right out of them. That had to change.

I have lived long enough and been a patient long enough to feel it is fair to say she succeeded at that.

A memory: meeting up with a man I grew up with since third grade after finding out he lives here–and realizing as he told me his story that he was in one of her stories, it all matched up, though you’d never be able to figure it out just from what she wrote. His dad and Rachel were old friends. She counseled the son when he was ready to walk away from medicine and helped him instead become a great doctor by working through his pain with him, to see that his compassion was the very strength that his pain was making visible. I have long been grateful to her for that.

She gave a reading at a local independent bookseller sometime in the early 90’s from her book, “My Grandfather’s Blessings” and then took questions from the crowd. I wrote about that here.

For those with long memories, Don Meyer was an elderly friend who used to comment on my blog all the time. Before he went into hospice, he had a visiting med student from UCSF attending to him once a week, they had some program going, I’m not sure of the details. But: Don got chatting to him about Dr. Remen and the young man said with great pride that she was one of his professors.

So through that avenue I sent a request that offered context to the evening at Kepler’s as to who I was, wondering whether Dr. Remen would like a lace shawl knit just for her?

It wasn’t going to be a wedding ring shawl–those take months on tiny needles and I didn’t know how long Don would be getting those visits–but fingering weight soft, soft baby alpaca in cream, I figured that would be pretty universal.

Dr. Remen’s response to my query was to send me her home address in great delight for me to mail it to directly. Afterwards she went me a much-treasured thank you note.

She was 88. The world was so lucky to have her as long as we did.

For the first month I figured, let them be. New moms are so tired and toddlers can act out when there’s a new sibling upstaging them and you want your kids to be seen at their best–I remember the days. Give them some time to adjust.

But you know those peaches I got extras of at Andy’s on Friday weren’t going to eat themselves: they were meant to be shared.

Was it a good time, I texted.

Yes! she wrote back.

And so I brought the neighbors some Cal Reds and some Kiaweas, perfectly ripe.

She came out with the baby in a front pack sleeping blissfully all snuggled up in there. It was such a gift to let me get to see him. So much love. We caught up a moment, grateful for it, and then let each other go back to our evening.