One of my husband’s co-workers saved a New York Times article a week ago and sent it home with him, wondering what we would think of it.  Front and center was all about what their food writer had declared to be Mormon cooking.  There was a big picture captioned “updated funeral potatoes,” a take on that classic dish for feeding a big crowd that was a novelty to the co-worker but not so much to us.

No I do not cook with canned cream of anything soup myself. Go for the classic au gratin here if anything, thanks. The writer would have you believe that means we’re a generation removed from living in Utah.

Actually, that part is true.

Meantime, a lot of life suddenly got squeezed into the last two days, too much. I hereby request a breather for a few, I thought earlier today.

And then I got exactly that. I got to meet DebbieR; she’s a peach. She was in the area briefly and we met up at Purlescence.

I opened that door, she was two steps away on the other side of it, she came towards me recognizing my face from the blog and told me she was Debbie and I instantly felt in the presence of a true friend. Everything there confirmed it totally. I feel so blessed.

She was traveling with some friends who were very good about waiting for us as we caught up as if we’d always known each other.

After they all left, I knitted quietly for awhile on a baby hat, getting my Sandi-Nathania-Kaye fix, and then excused myself: I needed to go home to babysit the phone I could hear on and my PC’s inbox.

I had gotten a message from Sam earlier: with ITP and lupus, there are episodes where you just hold your breath and pray real hard.  The last message we got sounded better; we’re hoping she gets a new med approved and that it will work because honey right now nothing else does.

Debbie had offered her to knit her fingerless gloves in her choice of color. Sam was thrilled. Debbie asked me if a lace pattern would allow too much UV exposure. Debbie is thoughtful and careful in addition to being generous with her time.

How do you thank someone who looks out for your child  and takes her into her heart as if she were her own? A shoutout to DebbieR: Thank you. It doesn’t begin to say it.

And yesterday.

My friend Andrea asked me a few weeks ago to make two chocolate tortes for her; sure. She brought me some of the ingredients, the most important to me being the manufacturing cream, because it is sold in an open-air store that has sun exposure issues for me.

So I had the rest of that half gallon of cream afterwards.  You can’t just leave it there. I baked. A spare torte ended up in the freezer.

Every time I asked Richard if he’d like it for xyz, for this group or that, for us to munch on or… ?, he would answer, not yet. No, let’s wait. No, let’s leave it in there for now. I thought I had good reasons to share it and free up the space; he just didn’t feel…

Okay, no problem. There was no rush.

Yesterday that co-worker’s wife got a call in the morning: her father had passed. She went off to work: where she was told she was being laid off after 27 years. She went to the doctor: she got told that yes, that was probably basal cell cancer.

She has a bandaid now for the part they could fix.

Richard asked his co-worker today to be sure. Then he asked me.

Oh honey absolutely yes.

And that is how the chocolate torte that Andrea made to come to be became a gift of friendship and community at the moment it was most needed.  Without my even having to go out in the sun to make it for them–I know how much that couple likes those tortes. It was something I could do. Did do, all ready.

They stood there in the dark in front of their house this evening, holding it gratefully, inhaling the thawing chocolate.

I thanked them for saving the article. We joked wryly over funeral potatoes. I told them chocolate torte was my real Mormon cooking.

An article in the New York Times about the construction of the new Bay Bridge prompts this post. It says that the old span was built in the 1930’s and was not designed to withstand a big quake, with a picture of the short fallen section from October 1989 to prove their point.

I am here to take issue with that for Brother Brossard’s sake. (I’m not sure I’m spelling his last name right.) He knew.

You may remember my occasional posts about the December Club, the once-a-year potluck brunch certain members of my ward (congregation) throw ourselves in celebration of having a birthday at the time that everybody else is worrying about Christmas.

When we first moved here twenty-five years ago, Louis Brossard was the elder of the group; I remember him as a sweet man, frail and old and kind. I remember him playing a bit on a harmonica year to year.

When the Loma Prieta quake happened, I found out at that year’s party that he had been one of the engineers working on the original Bay Bridge. He said it was designed not to fall into the Bay in hard shaking and that it did exactly what it was supposed to do–just one short segment took the brunt of it and went down while the rest stayed up, saving countless lives at rush hour. He also noted with definite pride that *his* section of the bridge had not fallen!

The last time he came to our group, he lifted that harmonica to his lips, looking almost too tired to from the effort of getting ready to come join us that morning, and he could not summon the breath to sound that first note. He was crushed. He tried again; there was just not enough wind in him to share the music only he could hear now.

I knew then, but so much didn’t want to know.

Very soon after, he was moved from the home he’d lived in forever to an assisted living place. We talked on the phone a few times; he so missed his garden, his passion in his widowed retirement.

I immediately resolved to bring him flowers to tend.

I went to the local nursery, trying to find something not too heavy, not needing too heavy a cup of water, and bought a small potted plant of bright, happy color, the first few flowers ready and blooming to cheer him as he watched the rest open up. A perennial, to make a statement that I wanted him to enjoy them the next year, too, and the next, and the next, and. I called and arranged a time to come over.

But an assistant had gotten him into the shower (I’m guessing on their schedule rather than his) at the time I arrived and then the person had left him for a moment. I knew he knew I was coming, but he didn’t answer the door. I was hearing impaired, he was more so; I knocked louder. I waited, wondering what to do; there was no one in sight to ask for help. At last I left the little pot in front of his door, praying it would be seen and not tripped over.

When I got home, I called again to make sure the little blossoms might cause no harm, knowing how frail he was. He told me he had called out to me, but there was nothing he could do on his own to get to that door just then; he’d gotten those flowers, though, loved them, loved the thought behind them, and wanted very much to thank me.

He was a gem.

And I never got to see him again.  Those flowers outlasted him.

Whenever I see the Bay Bridge, all these years later, always, I think of Louis Brossard.

The old eastern span will be totally gone when the new work is all done.

And I wish I knew how to play Taps on a harmonica.

Here’s what I was working on. Got it down to the last five yards. Close!

Meantime…

Fragile Handle with Care, said the box.

A loud hard THUMP as it hit the ground in front of my door this afternoon.

Wait, box? Addressed to me? I wasn’t expecting any box.

Inside were this yarn bowl and tea mug, hand thrown pottery that I had admired in Angela Ingram’s Etsy shop but certainly hadn’t ordered; I sent her a note to make sure that hadn’t been a mistake. I sure didn’t want to stiff anybody.

She got right back to me: these were a gift from (name deleted in case she doesn’t want me to tell on her, a friend both online and in person), but that person hadn’t stipulated putting a card in. Don’t worry, everything was cool.

It definitely is. Very. Ndicsdwmttoh–you are so busted. Thank you! And a thank you to Angela for packaging these so well so that they weren’t.

The Malabrigo Rios made itself quite at home immediately in the bowl, trying to proclaim itself as next project in line, and I have a daughter who loves her herbal teas; now I can wave a cheerful mug at her as incentive to fly home to visit.

Thank you!

It was dark. The doorbell rang, a hard knock. We looked at each other wonderingly a moment–did you have someone coming over? No, as I got up to answer just in time to see a dark minivan making its escape.

Tonight is when the teenagers have a meeting at church (and my apologies to the perpetrators for not getting the whole thing in in my attempt at an Iphone shot while not stepping on the daffodils.) Come to think of it, I made a pair of chocolate tortes for them two weeks ago, and I’m guessing that had something to do with this. I had forgotten all about it.

I think someone loves us.

You have to post that story, Holly told me.

I was sure I already had. But using every search phrase I could think of on the blog, I’m not finding it. So here goes.

They were about to move away, and I know how the impending sense of loss at such times brings friends closer together and the emotions high.

I was talking a moment to Curtis, the husband, at church on I think their last Sunday before they left California, and in that conversation, he started to say something about an afghan his grandma had knit him.

Only, with such a sudden halting sense to his voice that I immediately picked up on it and went, “Does it need to be repaired? I’d be glad to,” before he said another word, hoping I wasn’t getting myself into too much.

The relief and joy and sudden hope in his face!

When he’d been in high school, his grandma had offered to knit him an afghan. Anything he liked; his choice. Years later telling me this, he said, And I asked for black. I had no idea what I was asking of her.

I smiled and nodded that yes, black stitches are hard to see to work with and really hard as you get older. I sympathized with Grandma with him.

But she had knit it because she loved him and he had been thrilled. He held it all the more closely when she died, love meeting loss and finding warmth in the dark places.

And then his cat had gotten to it. It was torn in four spots. He was heartbroken and had no idea what to do with it except to put it in the closet and hope that at some point in the future something somehow could be done.

I would be honored to give it my best, I told him.

And so later he swung by the house with it, knocking on my door to hand it over. One look and I told him, Oh, good. This won’t take very long at all, if you don’t mind waiting.

His wife was in the car with their two little kids, who were sick, and they hadn’t wanted to expose me so they’d stayed in there and he didn’t want to leave them waiting alone and not knowing how long I’d be.

Well then. I picked up my yarn needle and, afghan in hand, walked out to the sidewalk next to their car and plunked myself down. Let the kids wave hi and watch if they want, and besides, I wanted to see them and his wife every moment I could.

The afghan had been fairly loosely knit out of a nice, soft wool. That looseness made it vulnerable to a good cat-claw snag and there were long pulls in it–all I had to do was work the yarn back into the sides to where it belonged, here, here, here, and a little bit over down here. Not a single break.

I told him he had done the right thing: he hadn’t lopped off the loops and that had saved it.

The whole thing took maybe five minutes. There was such an intense joy the whole time. Curtis, Jenna, the kids, getting a little extra time with them before they left–but it was also as if his grandma herself were standing chuckling over my shoulder, glad to see her work restored to go hug the great-grands with.

First there were the tapes. Family voices from long ago that Richard digitally transcribed for his mom for Christmas. She was absolutely thrilled that she could now share them with her brothers and sister and children rather than having them sit in a drawer. Most. Successful. Present. Ever.

That having worked out so well, a box from his dad showed up two days ago despite our saying we had no such player. Reel-to-reel tapes. Now there’s a reely current technology.

Could we would we?

Uh…

A check of Ebay revealed non-working machines and one listed in the hundreds; Richard remarked that there’s a rubber part that wears out, and at the ages of these…

But the box was here.

Oh and. His dad mentioned that Uncle R had had a machine and had donated it to a tech museum and it was in our town! Maybe we could ask to borrow it back?

Uh…

So I put a note on our ward chat list, feeling like that was our last chance. Someone from church responded almost immediately, saying her husband was determined to hold onto one of every technology that might have family recordings on it, and so, yes, they had a reel-to-reel; would we like to borrow it?

Blessings on Sue and Ken, the problem is solved and now we just have to get started.

(Anyone get that Rose Mary Woods reference in the title?)

p.s. Watched my first Republican debate tonight, transfixed by the political theater. Gingrich wants a lunar colony with hopes for it to be the 51st state by his second term. Really. Maybe they could just aim that $99 billion railroad at the sky.

A Costco-sized package did this to me. They looked so good and they were so cheap but there were so many!

And I can never follow a recipe, so here’s my version. I rinsed the blackberries and then rolled them gently from paper towel-covered plate to paper towel-covered plate, patting them on top too to dry them off as much as possible.

Oven ready at 350.

Melt a stick of butter and pour in a 13×9 pan and swish around. (I greased the sides with a little extra butter.) Cover the bottom with 18 oz blackberries, ie one Costco package’s worth, trying to spread them across as they hit rather than pushing them around a lot afterwards so that the butter stays distributed as evenly as possible.

Meantime, have 2 c sugar, 2 c flour, 1 tbl baking powder, 1 tsp salt mixed together; pour in 2 c milk and beat. (Okay, so I substituted about 1/4 c super-heavy manufacturing cream in there for that much of the milk.) Pour over the berries and get it quickly into the oven.

Bake one hour. Makes something between a popover and a pancake with its own fresh jam. Note that the measured volume of berries, at about 5 c, nearly equals that of all the other ingredients together.

But be careful: the original recipe said to melt the butter in the pan in the oven, take it out, then pour the milk mixture over and add the berries. That, my friends, is a good way to have exploding glass all over your kitchen unless you’re using a metal pan. Cold liquid should never come in contact with hot glass.

Oh, and the knitting? Got past my roadblock and knitted up most of an ounce of fingering weight today. Love love love how it’s coming out, with credit for the exquisitely soft, beautiful yarn going to Lisa Souza. The cobbler was to celebrate and to get my hands to take a break.

I was talking to a friend today and showed her a quick sequence of shots of Parker on his birthday: face coated in cupcake and grinning with his mom, then contemplating whether to eat more or smash more, then arms thrown high in delight: Taadaah!

She loved it; then she showed me her niece and nephews on her own Iphone.

Oh cool!

She flipped through a few and then stopped at one of her eight-year-old niece, the oldest, running happily in front of the incoming tide. She told me why she loved this photo so much.

Her brother and his family had been visiting recently and it was the first time his kids had seen the ocean. His little girl kept running after the receding water, then running back in to the beach just in front of its return, over and over and over and over, till finally my friend asked her what she was doing? (Clearly there was a perspective here that the adults weren’t quite in on, and she wanted to know.)

“I’m playing tag with the ocean!”

Our friends Nina and Rod were throwing a birthday celebration. And so we went.

We need a word for this: “party friends” doesn’t do it at all. Friends you really like but you only get to see when the mutual friend who knew them first brings everybody together, and then you happily catch up on the years missed. We have all always liked each other a great deal and it’s clear why Nina and Rod have been such great friends with them, and this being Silicon Valley, our lives have kind of run in parallel over the years.

But somehow these are the only times we actually see each other.

As Lou put it, “The difference between Heaven and Hell is the people. This is Heaven.”

So, um, we tried to figure out how to ask Nina to have her birthday more often. (We did suggest a potluck with great enthusiasm; there is hope. You know who’ll bring the chocolate torte.)

According to InfoWorld, John Boehner has been paid nearly $1.5 million by supporters of SOPA. His mouth is where his money is.

If you want to see an interesting chart of where your congressperson stands, go to Propublica’s page here. But note that half of Congress isn’t telling yet as I write.

Where are your representatives on this? Do they have any technical expertise or, if they’re uncertain, are they willing to learn from people who do? Do the merits of a cause matter to them?

Rupert Murdoch presented himself as an arbiter of moral authority on the subject of SOPA/PIPA, bashing opponents of this poorly written, poorly thought out legislation.

Follow the money, because he certainly always does.

Okay, let’s go back to InfoWorld. They have a story about seven people running two companies that allegedly raked in $175 million via pirated movies, books, software, etc, the very thing the supporters of SOPA and PIPA are talking about. The alleged perps are in various countries oversees.

And with the help of the court in Virginia and the help of those countries, four have been arrested and the sites have been shut down. All done under current law here and abroad. The system as it now is worked. Are there still problems in some countries and on other sites? Yes of course–my own book has been pirated and there are dishonest people stealing it and I know that. Life is imperfect.

But throwing out the due process clause of the Constitution–it’s just unfathomable. Utterly unfathomable.

Progress has been made but it’s not over by a long shot. Please keep writing/calling/emailing your representatives to defeat SOPA and PIPA. Your Internet and mine depends on it.

p.s. On a happier note, I got to see and hold Jasmin and Andrew’s newborn daughter Genevieve tonight. Dimples and thick dark hair and the cutest face you could hope for. She’s absolutely perfect.

I went to knit night determined to finally finish that baby hat. Which I did. But when I pulled it out of my bag, I got asked point-blank if it was for Jasmin‘s baby.

Yes it is.

Good time, good LYS, good friends, good yarn, and now it is done. (No, no picture, I have to keep some surprises, you guys!)

Meantime, if you have a moment: Lene has written a powerful post that is being voted on for a best blog post award in Canada, and it would help her in her effort to raise the profile of disability and access issues if it were to win; one-time voting goes till Jan 20 here if you are so inclined.

I took my knitting but it stayed in the bag. I didn’t want to miss a word.

I had extra incentive to go to my lupus support group today: a representative from Human Genome Services, the company that makes Benlysta, was there.

Benlysta being the first treatment for lupus approved by the FDA since, I kid you not, 1955. I think corticosteroids were still extracted from cadavers back then.

The rep was a registered nurse and she knew her stuff and she clearly loved being able to offer good news to patients, at last, at last. She said that now that that monoclonal antibody finally got through, there were more in the pipeline targeting other cells too.

She answered a lot of questions from the group.

I told her I’d been put on Remicade (when it had a black-box warning against its being given to lupus patients) when it was still experimental; we’d had to read about every single mouse that had sneezed before deciding to go ahead with it. It saved my life, so, hey, sneeze away! But after it was approved, all that trial information seemed to vanish–granted, this was going on nine years ago. You know, back when the Internet was still in training pants.

Then she gave us something useful for every patient everywhere: she told us go to clinicaltrials.com and type in your disease.

Someone finally did that?! (Knowing how bad the problem has been of clinical trial information not being shared lab to lab and manufacturer to patients.)

Go check it out.

Cool! (I just did, and it seems a lot smaller than I hoped but it’s a start.)

One of the things she did say was that if you’ve had cancer it rules you out for Benlysta.

Basal cell? I asked.

She considered a moment and answered, Talk to your doctor. (In other words, not a no. Good.)

She handed out her card so we could ask her personally more later if we wanted. Very nice. I laughed in delight when I saw it, then had to explain: my friends back home in Maryland will get it when I say Shady Grove Road. Cool!

And her last name: Hawkes.

Okay, c’mon, now, is that perfect or what? For me, at least. Love it. Ms. Hawkes, your namesakes put on quite a show around here.

After she left, some of the younger patients did too and suddenly it was just us oldtimers left. We talked.

One, it turned out, had just been put in that definite-no category. Bigtime. That was such an unexpected piece of news; we held her in our arms and our love and each of us asked to be asked to do things to help. Chemo is rough stuff. Let’s keep in touch more than this once a month thing.

Cancer clears out the emotional debris and leaves only the things that are most real: the caring. The desire to make things better for each other. Love made luminous.

Lupus does too, but in slower motion and often far quieter colors.

I am so glad I didn’t miss that meeting. That was why I most needed to be there. I’d had no idea.

I was at the OB/GYN office today for a test and while waiting for the appointment started in on a small pink baby hat.  One nurse, then a patient, then someone else happened to walk past, and as they did I caught each one noticing my gray hair, my baby knitting, and then discreetly (they thought) checking out my belly to make sure I wasn’t the one expecting.  Uh, that would be a no.

I was at a meeting at church tonight with it in my hands again.

One young mom said something that made it safe to ask her the obvious–yes, she was due in May–and she clearly wanted to…but stopped, embarrassed, just happening to mention it was going to be a girl.

Right, then, I should have a little left over when this is done. It’s always more fun to knit for someone you know is going to appreciate it.  No, I didn’t hear a hint, did you? No worries there.

Then she wondered if I could teach her how to knit?

Absolutely! (And I am most definitely going to knit a little something for her baby!)

Meantime, just for fun, there’s no place like home.

When our kids were little, a trip to Urgent Care or the ER meant a stop at Rick’s Rather Rich on the way home for some of my husband’s patented Emergency Room Medicine, daddy style: made-on-the-premises ice cream, a special treat. There’s a wooden placard inside the little shop declaring, “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

A million miles from Rick’s, our child with ITP ended up in emergency a few days ago.

And a friend there, having no idea we used to do that…showed up later in the day with ice cream to try to make things a little better.

(Ed. to add: my forever thanks to all those who can donate blood and do. You’re a life saver.)

(One more Parker birthday photo.)

John stayed healthy, no sign of my germs, for which we thank the heavens. And so it’s safe for him to pack to go give his grandparents a two-day hug before heading back to school. (Staying at his aunt’s just to be sure.)

Tonight I got a chance to talk a bit with him and one of his friends whom I hadn’t seen since probably their high school graduation five years ago, and it intrigued me how important it felt: there is nothing in the world like a little face time to make someone feel like, no matter how few the moments of time scattered over however long, we are forever important to one another and that’s just simply the way it is.  A good lesson for a young man. Heck, me, too.

Michelle’s already back to class.

It’s going to be too quiet. I’ll get busy with planting some new jumbo (they’ll be huge!) amaryllis bulbs, Richard’s Christmas gift, and when I inquired of (company deleted later) what they wanted me to do with the wrong ones they sent me they told me to consider them a gift: the ones that were supposed to be in that box are now going into a new one on its way.

They grow and they blossom and they never stay quite the same.