Wow, what a day.

It started off with a note from our son: his sister-in-law, who lives just blocks from them, had just had her baby. After three girls, Parker and Hudson finally had a boy cousin to grow up with.

But things had not gone well and they were praying hard that the baby not have a seizure during his first 24 hours and if he can pull that off then things will hopefully look much better.

Deep breath. He’s in the NICU with a breathing tube. We are praying hard along with them. So far, so far as we’ve heard, it’s been good news, no seizure. I want to be told that in the morning, too. I want it to *be* morning already.

I drove over to my friend Johnna’s.  Richard and I have promised her college-age daughter that she always has a place to stay when she wants to visit home and friends, knowing that it is really hard to have that change out from under you at that age; meantime, her family is leaving tomorrow first thing to move across the country. There’s that morning thing again. (I need to go knit a few long rows, to create, to center.)

I hugged Johnna and her new husband and the younger two kids on a day when they especially needed it. I did too.

Turns out Johnna’s youngest sister had a baby girl just yesterday, Juliette, likewise in serious straits and in need of prayers, and of course we again added ours to the mix.

I remembered the time the doctors gave me no more than a quick look at my own newborn who arrived blue, and ran, and she turned out peachy fine. I know, I know, the situations don’t compare.

I had totally forgotten in the intensity of the day–and so it was a surprise to get the message that had the video in it. Which isn’t on YouTube so I don’t have it up here yet, but. His other grandpa carefully slit open the box such that his grandson couldn’t see what was inside, then handed it to him to discover for himself; Parker pulled back the flaps. He took  it out of the box in wonderment: “A blankie!” He put it down still mostly folded up tight on the floor. He looked shyly at the camera, he backed away from it, and I wondered just for an instant if it was being rejected for being too solid now (but he hadn’t even opened it up enough to know that yet…)

And then he LEAPED as high as he could in a flying faceplant into his favorite, his made-with-love blankie, back with him again. It was HIS! It was safe and sound! It was home! YAY! Or as he said afterwards, and I quote, “Tee hee!”

We should all be so lucky. We hope to be.

All that time that I was kicking myself for not getting the repairs finished faster, for not getting it out the door sooner for my little grandson.

Today was the day they needed that to happen.

Update Wednesday morning: no seizures so far. And here’s the video.

Years ago, someone from my then-knitting group (which would gradually dissolve as people moved away), a staff member at Packard Children’s Hospital, was diagnosed with cancer. It was when they started her chemo that they found she had an autoimmune liver disease and could not take the treatments.

Lenore faded pretty quickly.

Near the end, she offered our group her yarn, having no family of her own to pass it down to, and I looked her in the eyes in a quiet moment and promised her I would make something beautiful from it to remember her by; she was grateful, with tears.

And then I was not in town, I don’t remember why, for the yarn get-together: people chose, and there was a bit saved for me for when I got back.

None of which, to be honest, had the remotest appeal. Just, none. I wanted it to but it adamantly refused to comply.

And I felt guilty about that. I had promised. It had meant so much to her.

I was cleaning out some old stuff today and came across a stitch sampler that had been among those itchy scratchy hideous s0-not-my-color yarns. It was knitted very tightly, like a good solid old Irish sweater. Way too short to be a scarf, way too funky shaped to be, say, a hotpad, way too much work to just toss aside; she’d put a lot of time into it when time had been the one thing she had had so little of left.

This time I put it around my neck and imagined it sewn shut at the ends as a small cowl.

You’d want a thick turtleneck under it to protect from the itch, but, yes! At last. She herself had made the pretty thing to remember her by.

And I do.

A bunch of us went out for dessert tonight together with an old friend who is about to move across the country after lo these many years here. We wanted a last chance to sit and talk and enjoy her company before she goes off.

She just got married.

The groom’s first marriage was to our oldest.

We wish them all the very best.

Last Sunday I finally saw her only as we were pulling out of the parking lot at church; Richard turned the car her way so I could ask. From the other side of the car I held up my needles and the stitches I’d done so far and asked her if she liked the color?

For who? she puzzled. It didn’t immediately sink in, and then she was stunned and overwhelmed: Oh, anything! Any color! Thank you!

She gave me a great gift in that moment. She gave me back that sense of, this is why I do this. To make people feel that loved. What all that yarn is supposed to be doing, not sitting around wondering what it wants to be when it grows up. About time I really got back into it!

And so I kept an eye on how long it took me to do the long rows, how many of them I was going to need to do to finish this thing, and kept at it till finally last night at about ten pm it was finally done and laid out to block. I wove the yarn ends in first thing in the morning.

And then I hedged my bets: I wore a shawl in a different color silk to give her a choice, and she duly admired it but knew I had knit that light pink silk one expressly for her and she’d clearly been hoping all week to see it again very soon. It was hers.

I can’t give back all that she’s lost in recent years, much less whom she’s lost. But I could give her a warm, soft wrap around her shoulders any time she needs to feel one there.

She just has no way to know how many more people will be blessed because her appreciation ran so deep. I know what knitting can do, I shouldn’t have needed that–but I did.

(Old pictures of shawls I knitted from my book, with Marguerite’s red a mixing up of two different patterns.)

Dale from my childhood popped in with a comment on the post about our meeting up with her little sister and her husband. Cool!

When I was in  kindergarten, the grades were in checks and minuses. I got all checks–except one: I couldn’t skip. I could run, I could even walk without running (it was hard!) but I couldn’t get the hang of this heel up in the air and slide a little bit with one foot while the other does a little leap with knee held high, then heel up in the air/slide a little with the second foot while the first now does the leapy thing.

I had to go skip down the hallway just now for my muscle memory to re-teach my verbal brain how it’s done.

Darned if I could figure it out back then at all.  Besides, why would you want to constrict a good run like that anyway? But I was in school now, ergo one of the Big Kids (especially since I had two younger siblings) and this was what big kids were supposed to be able to do.

I didn’t like that minus.  And I sure didn’t like not having mastered the thing, especially when pretty much everybody else in my class had and if I didn’t get it down pat soon, who knows, what if my little sister just might before I did.

My Mom tried to teach me. I think even my Dad got in on it at one point–I do remember him cheering me on.

And then my sister Marian and her friend Dale made it their mission to not only teach me, but to make it fun, and so we did a hop skip and a jump together–no, no, okay, like this, here, let’s try it again–from the end of the living room, down the hall, got to the end, turn, okay, let’s try it again, you’re getting there, GO!

And I got it! (Took a few tries.)

The crowd went wild! We even did practice runs together a few times after that, and darn if it didn’t turn out to actually be fun once I could do it.

And then there was the time I was trying to learn to tie my own shoes. My mom tried to teach me. This idea that I was supposed to do the mirror image of her motions as she knelt down in front of my feet was just totally throwing me.

She tried. Marian tried.

Let’s try Dale! Dale was called upon, Dale came over, Dale (who I think is left-handed but I’m not) showed me–and suddenly it made sense. Totally nailed that thing.

See what she started?  Look at the loops-in-loops I can make now!

The doorbell rang. Cliff! And Don, sitting over in the car pulled in front of the house. Hi!

Cliff handed me a bag full of clamshells they’d been carefully saving for me, for which I am very grateful. It was so good to see them.

The raccoons, meantime, had been clambering for more last night, partying and carrying on.

Occu-pie! In spite of their best efforts as they wall streaked, we made light of their raids on the sus-pension system and held a clambake in the sun all day to celebrate; Apple’s shares tanked on the news, being all caught up in white tape, while Fuji’s stalkholders held out hopes of  a crisp increase in dividends.

Apple felt boxed in by the French regulators on their case, protesting proudly, Mais je m’apple…

Fuji raked in the green, adding last week’s fallout to this in hopes of their own sweet success.

I think I’ll clam up now.

There was a new neighborhood being built just outside the then-future DC Beltway, with California-style houses with panels of glass set floor-t0-a break about waist-high-to-ceiling, looking out on the woods; it was near a ten-mile-long park set aside as a watershed preserve with Cabin John Creek running through it. Frank Lloyd Wright had built his youngest son a house to the left and down around the corner. You’ve seen Calvin and Hobbes on their sled out in the wilds? Yes.

There was a crowded neighborhood near the DC line of “war boxes,” my mom called them, small starter homes for returning GIs that large families quickly outgrew. My folks had four kids in one bedroom there.

And so three families picked up together when I was three and moved to the quiet new neighborhood where there were miles of trails along the creek to explore that had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, there were children to play with, parents who knew each other and looked after each others’ kids and you knew you couldn’t get away with anything–it was a great place to grow up.

One of those families was Wendy’s, and so I’ve known them all my life. Their house was the second door to the upper right of this photo.

She and her husband decided to come from across the country to take a tour of Napa’s wine country and it turns out they were flying in and out of San Francisco airport. He had an old college roommate in the Bay Area who wanted to see him, and I meantime offered to drive up to the airport to try to see them for, oh, maybe ten minutes while they were waiting to go through security or something but only if it would work out okay for them.

They had a better idea than that.

They were meeting the old roommate for dinner in Burlingame at 5:00, and Richard and I drove up to see them at 4:00. To show off our husbands to each other. To reconnect.

We all ended up walking a half block from where we’d met up to a place Richard and I knew would be a lot quieter: and so there we were, back in Copenhagen Bakery, buying those Chef’s Surprises again. (And now we know why they’re called that: the filling is almond and–whatever. Not blueberry this time; his was apricot, mine egg custard.)

We talked. We laughed. We all showed off pictures of our kids, our two grandsons (they’re not there yet), Wendy’s sisters and kids and her parents, and it just now hits me writing this that I forgot to show her pictures of my folks–the point being that it is amazing how, 36 years after I probably last saw her and childhood long left behind, I could have picked any one of them out of any crowd anywhere. It was so cool.

Part of me, part of you, always will be. So glad it’s so true.

She wondered, Do you remember running through our storm door?

Yes, I thought it was ajar and I just went to go push it the rest of the way open to tell Marcy who lived across the street to stop bugging us while you were trying to teach me a new game. I had just enough time to think I didn’t know that glass bends… (And then I stuck out my arm across the table.) Wendy saw the scars, proof of her memory of the story, and exclaimed.

I added, I always tell Californians it was a window (which it was, but) because they have no idea what storm doors are. (Flimsy screen-type doors, only with glass instead of metal mesh, to give you one more line of defense against the latest thunderstorm or hurricane.)

How long had I had lupus?

Diagnosed 23 years, why?

Her sister they think might have…

I’m so sorry. While being glad I was proving that life can go on, d* the statistics, full speed ahead!

Wendy had been beating some statistics of her own this past year and we knew how good we had it that we were able to get together. It was so good to see her. So good to see what a good husband she has, and such beautiful kids!

The college roommate and his family walked past the windows of the bakery, glanced in, saw us and the guy’s face totally lit up and then his kids’ did–just like ours had (and had stayed that way, and I imagine theirs did too). Peter ran to go throw his arms around them, Wendy staying for just one last hug and laugh of our own first.

I tell you. I could live off the joy of this day for a long time to come. Thank you thank you thank you, Wendy and Peter. Blessings on you and yours forever.

—

Edited to add–p.s. You guys are heroes all over again. I told them about the Caremark debacle in Jan ’09 and how you guys called, emailed, stormed the gates en masse, and in a life-and-death situation made that company pay attention and get me my Humira after all, after their employee had told me on the phone that they weren’t sure they wanted the liability of providing me with such a dangerous (read: newly approved very expensive biologic) drug and had refused to send it. Go you guys!

We were eighteen, serving on a Mormon youth conference steering committee, the advisor assigned to me the woman who would later be my mother-in-law.

The adults had asked that the program have a little more to say than just this this and this here here and there.

I was asked to read the proffered piece aloud.

“Who *wrote* that?” Steve, deeply moved, asked the group at the large table.

That moment was the highest compliment I could ever have asked for and the first moment where I knew I might actually have a chance at becoming a writer. If Steve thought it was that good…

There’s a small handful of us out there who grew up together, who knew each other from our babyhoods, always there in the background, with other good friends too moving in before we all moved on (or not) from our corner of the Maryland suburbs but just us few who knew each other that long. Being members of the same church brought our families together from whatever our circumstances and equalized any outside differences inside, in our case, Chevy Chase chapel.

I married one of them.

I signed into Facebook this afternoon and immediately felt the breath knocked out of me. It was the first post I saw and for quite awhile the only one I wanted to see and I signed right back out while I tried to take it in.

Steve was gone.

I would never get to see him again.

Richard would never get to see him again.

At some primal level I still cannot understand how that could be. Steve’s *dad* and Richard’s dad were babies together and they’re still here!

Steve made my later lupus and Crohn’s combo a walk in the park. He started having some trouble with his hearing in high school, and at one point back then I tried to talk to him about it; my hearing loss had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier, progressive at the time, and I knew what a blow it could be. Neither of us knew then why it was happening to us.

But he didn’t want to talk about it. Too soon.

Mine later was found to be an allergy to aspirin, plain old garden-variety aspirin, a reaction from having climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and overdosing on the candy-tasting baby pills.

His, not so much, and his sight began to have problems too.

But he graduated from college and then from an MBA program, married one of the nicest people I have ever met, and carried on as his sight and hearing both continued to slowly, inexorably dim.

My family and I were back home maybe ten years ago. I knew he had only the slightest peripheral vision and hearing left. It was summertime, traveling time, but he didn’t know we were coming and had no reason to expect me to be there from the other side of the country–and yet, when we came into church and I said hello to him, his face turned to wonderment and then mine did too as he asked, almost afraid to for half-disbelief half-joy, “Alison?!”

How he knew I did not know. But I knew it had to have meant a great deal to him to have been able to figure out that I was there, I really was, and so that moment meant all the more to me too. I had been wondering how to let him know, but there you go. He knew.

And I have hoped for another such moment ever since. Steve would know me. There was the pure certainty of a child’s trust in the thought, he always does. Steve would know. And he would be glad.

My parents moved away, then Richard’s parents moved away, and I no longer had quite reason enough to fly home to visit that ward.  We did seriously consider staying through the weekend when we were in Baltimore a few weeks ago just so we could do exactly that, but logistically, given the time Richard was already taking off from work and the extra thousand on the plane tickets it would have taken, we just couldn’t make it happen.

I so wish.

I’ve wondered from time to time over the years how long Steve would have to live with so much taken away from him. At the same time, so much was given to him: a good wife, good children, and the family financial resources to deal with whatever help they might ever need, and, best of all, a strong faith and a cheerful disposition that saw him and her both through so much.

The disease that had taken so much of his body finally claimed the rest today. Fifty-four years. It was enough. Our friend Brad let us know he got to go home.

Rest in great peace, old friend. And thank you for teaching me a little of what you knew: that there is more joy to be found than can ever be taken away from a grateful heart.

Several years ago, I was at the Copenhagen Bakery and Cafe in Burlingame and in their display case was something that said, if I remember right, Baker’s Surprise. Or else Chef’s Surprise? They looked good, so, I bought some–and at first bite instantly wished I’d bought many, many more and that the place was much closer to where I live. Picture a crunchy amaretto cookie filled with sweet almond paste done just so, perfection in a confection.

Somehow the memory of them caught my attention the last couple of days: to the point of emailing the bakery, describing the things, and asking if they still made those? It would be worth the trip…

I haven’t heard back so far but I wasn’t really expecting to. Just encouraging them and hoping. If only. Maybe actually drive up there some day this coming week, if they answered? Somehow I just really wanted to go there.

Richard and I were out looking at flooring store after flooring store today, trying to decide this option vs that, and it was getting dinnertime-ish. We bought smoothies to tide us over and to get a chance to sit down a moment.

I mentioned that bakery and those cookies, and somehow on a whim he chimed in, Sure, let’s go!

It was about 35 minutes up the freeway.

The street it was on was closed and torn up. At least some walking in the late sun would be involved.  We shrugged our shoulders and carried on. The parking lot was full? Someone pulled out just at the right time, there you go.

Now for the backstory that we didn’t know was going to have anything to do with this: Katie, about our age, has been a teacher and mentor to some of the teenage girls at church for some time now, and one of them was being raised by her great-grandmother. Who recently had had to move to–where, I have no idea. But it’s hard to graduate from high school and have to have a new place to come home to, hard to have your mom figure aging and more than anyone else’s that you know, lots of changes flying at the kid all at once.

Katie had kept tabs on her, and it turns out she’d invited Helen to dinner tonight. She knew the best bakery in the Bay Area and it had a great cafe, too.

They were in disbelief at seeing us walk past the windows. Katie leaped up to say hi, and there we were coming into the bakery part at the next door down. There was this, What are YOU doing here! moment of surprised delight all around.

We bought our pastries–the guy grinned and proudly pointed out the amaretto/almond paste pastries when I asked, blueberries in them too now, and wow, they were good, he was right–and we went over to their table.

Helen! We were so glad to see her. Katie, too, but Helen was the biggest surprise. *So* very glad, how ARE you?!

And how often do teenagers get to see that the adults they know feel that strongly about them? That they are loved, that they matter, that it doesn’t matter that they’re not family. To see that age has  nothing to do with degree of friendship–that she was absolutely as important to us as Katie. Go Helen!

To Copenhagen: thank you beyond words, and please keep up the good work. We will be back.

Got my semi-annual Prolia shot, got the usual instructions to please wait 20 minutes to make sure there’s no reaction to the med. Did I want to wait here in the exam room or out there?

Oh hey, out there. And I have a whole lot of yarn: waiting, not a problem.

While I sat in the reception area, someone else pulled out her knitting, too, a soft, fuzzy and I’d guess handpainted yarn. Kid mohair most likely, quite pretty.  We talked shop a moment.

She asked about my project, and I described the top-down circular shawl it was going to be when it grew up, not a closed circle but (and I drew it in the air with my hands. A bagel with a slice taken out.)

She asked, very much wishing, “Oh. Where do you *find* patterns like that?”

(Bwahaahaa.) “My book,” I grinned, wishing I had a copy with me, but today just hadn’t been a day for carrying extra weight on that shoulder. (Oh look, Amazon’s not asking hundreds for a copy today. It bounces around now that it’s out of print.)

That led to, “Purlescence? Where’s that?”

“Well, across the street from where the Sunnyvale Trader Joe’s used to be, in the same strip mall as McWhorter’s used to be, and the Lace Museum used to be at the other end.”

She laughed.

She’ll find it.

(An aside: I’m healing far faster than I have any right to expect from yesterday’s backflip. Thank you for your kind words, everybody.)

I bought the aqua silk for me. It would so show off my favorite blouse.

I’ve been using it to design a new pattern with, and it stalled out for about two weeks between the traveling and trying to decide what direction to go in next with it.

I’ve gotten past that, been knitting quite a bit yesterday and today and am down to 30-odd grams left to work with out of the original 160 g. (Colourmart seems to nearly always tuck a little extra onto their cones.)

But as I’ve been carefully counting stitches, tinking, reknitting, pushing ahead, something has been persistently tapping me on the shoulder, and the name in the thought was a surprise when it first came yesterday–and then near-instantly it wasn’t.

This is not for me. Or if it is, then I need to pay attention to what colors she likes and make her something else, but it is important for reasons that I know, and there are always others that I don’t, that I knit something non-trivial for her. And if after blocking this turns out to be just too tailored to small-sized me than I need to tweak it when I start over, but it doesn’t feel like I’ll be having to do that.

I have wondered since her great loss a few years ago–but that’s her story–if there were anything I could do…if I should put my knitting time out there, since quite honestly not everybody gets knitting and it doesn’t do much for some.

If it might help.

The answer is yes and somehow the answer is now. It sure wasn’t my timing. Maybe the universe was waiting for me to knit the exquisiteness of silk in aqua? But it’s clearly not about me, and if that color silk is not quite it I’ve got a few others at the ready. I’m on it.

Lunch with friends, taking the time to take the time, a too-rare thing. Home, then dinner at Nina’s with more friends, some I knew, some new to me. Another friend just arrived in town and is crashing here for the night before flying back.

Tomorrow is going to seem pretty quiet.

Some friends stopped by tonight.

Paul wanted to see my fruit trees: how did this clamshell thing work? I walked out there with him and showed him and he looked closely: “So you did get them snapped shut. How did you…” I acknowledged that it took some working around the branches in some cases. There were leaves tucked inside quite a few along with the fruit.

Turns out he has a Fuji apple tree, too, and a pear–what kind of pear? A Comice? Oh, I so want one of those, I told him–and an apricot. They get apricots, but the Fujis and the pears not at all. It’s always the squirrels, and so he’d wanted to see my clamshells in action.

Of which I had a couple extra because my friend Kathy saved them for me and dropped them off at Purlescence last night. (I was a no-show at knit night; oops. She gave me a heads-up and I dropped by this afternoon and retrieved them. Thank you, Kathy! And the Purl Girls too.)

Paul said something about how I would need to poke airholes in them, and I showed him how the produce ones came with them–Kathy’s didn’t, whatever they had had in them previously, but I’d found it no big deal whatsoever to poke some in there. They’re all good.

Paul and his wife had been collecting clamshells after I’d mentioned the idea and they were hoping it really would work; well, for me, so far, totally. We’re crossing our fingers together now.

(Oh and. I saw a slightly lighter colored scrawny-teenager-looking Bewick’s wren today, clearly a fledgling as it bounced around. It so made my day.)

Went to our friend Nina’s daughter Gwynnie’s showing of the movie tonight that she produced, Return To Nowhere, at the Cinema 12 in downtown San Jose tonight. Lots of old friends in attendance, and when the lights came on, the cast turned out to be attending the premiere too. (Now that I knew their faces.)

Amazing experience. California’s high speed rail project as a plot device. Phyllis’s office as a prop! Sarah as secretary–I’ve known her since she was a toddler, cool.

We carpooled with Phyllis. And a good time was had by all.

It didn’t even hit me till this morning: the other part of the story. That the two were connected.

Yesterday after Karen dropped us off at the airport we found what gate we were supposed to go to, A23, and then while Richard found us some seats in the holiday crowd I went off to the restroom and to buy us some orange juice while we waited.

It was awhile later that I pulled out my phone, which I’d already turned off in anticipation of my bags being overhead, turned it back on, and checked the time, wondering at my sense that it seemed to be taking a long time.

Wait. 5:22. Were we delayed? Wasn’t it supposed to leave at 5:30? The place was full of people but there was nobody actually lined up in our immediate area.

Richard hurried over to the counter to doublecheck and then came running back: yes it’s on time and we were at the wrong gate! They’re almost all boarded–run! “Good catch,” he said gratefully to me as we went down the gangway just in time.

We usually preboard: it’s very difficult neurologically for me to walk through tight, visually very busy spaces, they toss what’s left of my balance and make me stagger and hang on for dear life and with the bag thing going on too I don’t want to be very far from the restroom and I don’t want to break a hip getting to it. (Okay, and my 6’8″ husband likes not bruising his knees if he can get a seat at the front of the plane.)

We were well back in the plane because of our near-miss. I found seats on opposite sides of the aisle, but he said, no, let’s go a little further back to over there where there are still two side-by-side, and so we did that, settling down next to a young woman by the window.

And that is the only reason I ended up next to that nurse in training. We would never otherwise have even seen each other.  Along with the rest of the conversation, it was a comfort to her to know that our going to see Richard’s mother just before she passed had been a great joy and comfort then and since–that she was doing the right thing by going now.

I guess it was more important than I could guess that that whole thing happened, because I cannot fathom, other than the intervention of God, how it did. How neither my husband nor I took in the obvious fact that we had the A25 sign above our heads rather than A23. It just didn’t enter in. Neither of us got antsy over it when we found out, either, we just fixed the problem and were quite grateful we hadn’t missed our flight, in other words, we were emotionally prepared for all that followed without simple human stress tripping us up.

I wish I knew who she is so I could marvel together with her over how our meeting up came to be.

And on a more mixed note, John did a one-day drive for a two-day stay at home that was supposed to end in another one-day drive straight back to Salt Lake City on Monday. Only, the people he came in with went off to San Francisco on Saturday (while he was planting my cherry tree for me, among other helps around the house) …and they came back to find their car window smashed.

Along with several others parked along that block. New car. Nothing was stolen, nobody was hurt, just, they have to wait for an insurance adjuster to see it so a shop can get the okay to fix it and tomorrow’s a holiday and and and.

Looks like we get a few extra days enjoying our son’s company that none of us were expecting.

I’m very sorry they’re having to go through that terrible experience. And I am very much going to enjoy the extra time we suddenly get to have with him.

I like my blessings wrapped in nicer packages certainly than that one, but they come as they come.