Now there’s a word for your next spelling bee.

The Atlantic did a fascinating piece a few years ago that is new to me. I think it’s stuck behind a paywall, but if you can get it to work, it’s here.

They’d discovered twins who were both fraternal and identical–and different genders.

Definitely only one placenta. Definitely looked like a boy and a girl.

Normally, they explained, if two sperm make it to one egg the result has three sets of chromosomes and is nonviable. What they figured happened was that that happened and survived long enough to split into three: the girl, the boy, and a third part that could not grow.

But.

The girl is 90/10 female.

The boy is 53/47 male.

The split wasn’t evenly boy/girl down the middle and both have parts of each other’s DNA.

Biology not only doesn’t always follow the rules, sometimes it plays Calvinball for the exuberance of joy that it can. To life!

He didn’t recognize the song last night, but then, I’m not the voice on the radio singing it from way back when to give him context and I had no idea of the words beyond the chorus. It’s just one of those catchy little tunes that pops up in the brain every decade or two and wants to get you to dance.

So I went and looked it up.

The No No Song, by Ringo Starr. (Me: It IS? Ringo?!)

Pulling out the second stained glass puzzle tonight, I found myself softly singing today’s silly little ear worm.

He didn’t recognize that one, either. So, repeat pattern from *.

Back Off, Boogaloo. By–you guessed it. Ringo Starr.

Which one of his will my brain come up with tomorrow.

He wondered why Ringo was using that word and what it meant.

Okay, Merriam Webster says this, that it’s Latin-inspired 60’s music, Collins says it’s a fast dance of Afro-American origin, of couples not touching while they dance in quick jerky moves (that is definitely our generation!)  and neither one of them says a thing about the group banned by Facebook that Ringo had no way to know would steal and twist that word.

I bet they had no idea who it celebrated. The self-mockery!

But then bullies were meant to be laughed at.

To the folk tune of, Did you ever see a lassie go this way and that?

The following is what you get when someone starts doing puzzles for the first time in her life at 66 after yonder friend Holly says you’ve got to try these.

This one, though, was from apparently a print-on-demand outfit. There is no artsy-fartsiness in the cut, none of the whimsy in, say, her recommended Nautilus puzzles that had me starting out with the best and I didn’t even know it.

Two shapes. With the only modification being the solid line at the edge pieces. It’s a pain to put together, it’s a pain to get them apart. “High-quality wood”? Yes, that’s what cardboard is made of, c’mon.

And it would be great for kids because if you don’t care if the picture you end up with looks like a wild game of 52-pick up, then, hey! If it fits it sits, right?

All that said. He finished it off yesterday (to my relief) while I watered the garden.

It’s pretty. It reminds me of my late cousin John, the only stained-glass artist I ever knew. I like it. I miss him.

And now, typing that out, I understand why I couldn’t make myself take it back apart till tonight.

The news from Texas has been heartrending. Historian Heather Cox Richardson says the National Weather Service did publish flash flood warnings, but the head of Kerr County said the warning systems that would have conveyed that locally were not in place because they had decided that cost too much.

Man.

My husband got his ham radio license after 24 hours of not being able to reach his aunt’s family very close to the epicenter of the big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (they were okay but their house had stories to tell) and from there he did emergency communications volunteering with the city, the county, and the Red Cross.

I said in agony over the lost campers in Texas, Don’t they have reverse-911 there!

And then went, Wait. Do they?

Which got him reminiscing. He knew all the people who started that. It began with an idea: the city had topography maps and it had 24 fax machines. What if… So they kluged up a system where if there was a risk of flooding, the homes in the lowest elevations could get a warning phone call by having a switch that disconnected all incoming faxes, because that’s not the priority in an emergency, and took over the faxes’ phone lines to call out to those homes with a pre-recorded message.

Twenty-four numbers at a time. That’s all.

But then you have the computer call 24 more, and 24 more…

That concept got tested pretty quickly thereafter: we had our 100 year flood in 1998. There were kids boogie-boarding down our street. There was the friend who saw his koi from his back yard swim past his feet in the front yard to go live happily ever after in the Bay (good luck). The elementary school principal hauled a canoe out and got himself in the paper paddling across the playground just for fun but there really wasn’t much water there. Might have drowned a few gophers, though.

There was one notable fire department rescue operation where someone thought his big pickup could easily do that puddle and tried to drive through the steep railroad underpass. Oops.

So anyway. Instantly it became: how do we make it so we can reach everybody? In time? Can we do it all at once?

Well let’s see: the Feds had passed a law requiring the phone companies to provide the phone number to every address for 911 calls so that the first responders could know where to go no matter how much information the caller was able to give them. Early cell phones weren’t covered. The Feds made them cover them, too.

That database existed. How about if you invert it?

You could draw a circle on the map and say, everything in this boundary, or you could say everybody in the city.

And thus they created the reverse-911 system that lets you know there’s an emergency.

The surrounding cities thought this was great and copied us.

The county thought this was great and copied us.

And it took off from there.

I thought by now everybody had it. I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth any municipality wouldn’t.

I got the nicest thank you note yesterday from a waitress.

While we were traveling, we invited some relatives out to dinner, and after asking them where they’d like to go since they knew the area and we didn’t, they said, Well, are we talking Olive Garden or–?

The –? won out. We hadn’t seen his sister in awhile and as my father used to say, How many meals do you eat in your life? Now, how many do you remember?

The meal itself was very good, the waitress, perfect.

It wasn’t till after we flew home and I was working on the bills that something seemed off. Found the receipt.

The math didn’t math at all. The intention had been good but someone had been a little too tired to think straight.

We had to make it right.

At least I had her first name on that receipt, and so I sent a check to, simply, FirstName, c/o that restaurant, asking them to please give her the tip amount she should have gotten and apologizing profusely to her.

A side note here: it helped greatly in those first moments that Richard had entered the restaurant’s name and address into his Waze app to help us find the place after his sister had named it, even though she knew perfectly well how to get there–there it was in his phone’s memory. Oh wait, it was on the bill, too. Of course.

There was a card in the mail from a name I didn’t recognize and as I opened it up and read that sweet note I almost cried. What a lovely, lovely young woman. I wish her all the best in all that life brings her from here on out.

A grocery run.

A young couple with a baby girl of about 15 months, absolutely adorable. Proud grandparents. Ukrainian, was my guess, along with the dad who was clearly their son, while the mother of the baby looked to have Californian ancestors going way back.

Sometimes I see too late where my deafness trips me up: it wouldn’t occur to me to begin speaking from behind someone or where we weren’t directly facing each other and expect to be paid the least attention to because I wouldn’t hear someone speaking behind me. And so, I brushed the older woman ever so slightly on the arm to get her attention and handed her a particularly cute finger puppet. Whoever the knitter in Peru was, she put a lot of time and color into that bright bird.

“I’m a grandma too,” I smiled, offering it to her–

–while her face and body froze in abject horrified fear. Which did at least lessen to uncertainty when she saw the little toy and then followed my glance towards her beautiful granddaughter.

“Happy Birthday,” I added, still smiling, and got out of their way quickly to make it clear I wasn’t trying to demand anything whatsoever of them.

Her daughter-in-law translated.

Ohhh…!

Next time I glanced their way they were so much more relaxed than even before I’d approached them: smiling, laughing, enjoying this precious time together while the little one is so little, and oh so much better than that initial moment.

Which was such a relief.

And I got to see how much the daughter-in-law rejoiced over being able to make everything okay for her mother-in-law.

They will always have that.

There’s a book club being put together by a friend who moved here in the last year.

She announced what the first book was going to be, so of course I ran and looked it up.

Twenty-four hours later and here it is: “By the Second Spring: seven lives and one year of the war in Ukraine,” by an American who had grown up there and has a PhD in history. You know I couldn’t pass that one up.

The first thing I did was to look for a list of chapters, hoping for names, but right after the title page there it was, a list of them. I knew there wouldn’t be someone I knew–but you just never know… (Thinking in particular of the gerdan artist who trusted me with photos of the shelling damage to her home inside and out and whose town has now been evacuated.)

I didn’t want to start reading yet. Not at this time of day. I didn’t want nightmares tonight; I wanted time after the first dose of the book to sift through my emotions and make peace with what I would encounter inside.

And yet.

I opened to a random page.

There were two mug shots and a poem.

Quoted in part:

Oh human, I cannot believe your life is

just about looking into my cell?

you stand in my heavy sorrow, my aching heart is filled with your misfortune

because you are just twice as sad as I am.

I have myself, and you are just a shadow

I am the good, you are the dust, decay

we are both prisoners…

I closed the book. Tomorrow I start.

The misoprostol wasn’t so bad this time–it probably helped that now I knew what to expect?

Note that one Texas newspaper wrote that it is a felony to distribute it in Texas now. That boggles my mind. There are a lot of incumbents there who ought to be charged with practicing medicine without a license.

I have a niece in OBGYN training there and was told a year ago that her colleague didn’t want to learn how to do D&Cs because of abortion. I told my in-laws about accrete, with its 7% fatality rate, where the placenta grows past the uterine wall and bleeds dangerously at and after birth and how a D&C saved the life of someone dear to us two weeks after her baby was happily in her arms.

I had a D&C with a miscarriage years ago at 12 weeks along two weeks after they’d lost the heartbeat. I had no idea at the time that the doctor was risking my getting sepsis by not doing it sooner.

At age 66 I had a D&C as part of today’s procedure to take a closer look for endometrial cancer after all the biopsies and ultrasounds.

I got pretty pictures to take home along with post-op instructions. And the hopeful news so far is that things looked good.

Our first week in California in the late 80’s, someone at church invited me to come to a baby shower she was throwing for another member because, as she told me later, she figured that was a good way for me to get to meet people faster.

Hah! I was prepared: the Toys R Us in New Hampshire had had a clearance baby outfit for all of twenty-five cents, just get it out of our store. Nobody had wanted to buy light cotton baby clothes during a New Hampshire winter. I even knew where the moving box was.

I asked Karen, the expectant mom, if this was her first?

The room erupted in laughter and kidding. And no she did not finally get her girl but a baby boy to go with his six older brothers and my outfit was light blue. Perfect.

Her oldest was in high school. A really nice kid.

Soon I was asked to be the Compassionate Service leader. Sure. I’d never done that before and wasn’t sure what all was expected but the woman who’d asked me…didn’t quite know what to do with me either and so she did nothing. No phone calls, no guidance. No meetings. No inclusion nor decision-making. It may even be that she’d entirely forgotten she’d asked me; I didn’t know how at that age to ask a much older woman a question that could put her on the spot. We’re all volunteers here anyway.

Well then, I’ll just make it up on the fly all by myself, I eventually decided.

Our house came with multiple rose bushes.

I delivered a number of roses to a number of women who’d looked like they could use it but there were more flowers and a feeling like I wasn’t done yet.

Hmm.

I figured, every teenager needs to know that an adult who doesn’t have to cares about them just because they are, and ended up calling Karen and her oldest and explaining what I was hoping to do.

He was all for it and his mom thought it was a great idea.

So I went and picked Robert up and then he guided me to the homes of the teenagers in the ward that he thought could use a rose and a hello to cheer them up. I would drive and he would run a flower to the door and say the ward wanted you to have a nice day. Anybody who’s struggling with their classes, or life, I told him, or anything. You know them; I don’t yet. So you tell me where.

Mostly, I noticed, we ended up at the homes of the girls, and he had me as an excuse in overcoming any teenage shyness.

One particular girl… I never mentioned to him that sitting in my car as she opened that door I saw just how much it meant to him to be able to do this unexpected nice thing for her.

Her older brother flew into town this weekend. He is the only person I knew when I was diagnosed with Crohn’s who had Crohn’s. From childhood. A survivor who showed the way, and kept in touch with me via FB, and there he was! Seeking the two of us out and making sure we didn’t miss seeing each other.

Because his old buddy he’d grown up with had finally done what his mom had long thought was just never going to happen at this point.

Robert and his bride look gloriously happy in all the pictures and their loved ones in church today all were, too.

She was worth the wait, and so was he.

Congratulations, one person told us back then, You picked the hottest day on record in Washington, DC.

Which was topped thirty years later at 99 to our 98. It took that long. But at the time, we were like, Oh. It’s hot? I mean, yeah, I guess it is but, um, we kind of hadn’t really noticed.

Jokes about how maybe I should stand on the low stone wall along the garden pathway near the temple’s doors so that I could get up into the same picture as him and his family.

The skunk raiding the marshmallow off his campfire stick right over the fire on our honeymoon in the Shenandoahs with its tail brushing his arm as it sat back and savored the thing–with his face pleading, Just don’t laugh. PLEASE don’t laugh.

His consolation prize being that the skunk sided with him over me: a long slow roast over my burn it fast and crunchy and blackened and then reach for more while he’s still working on three marshmallows ago.

The hair stylist in Indiana who couldn’t cut my hair because she was husking.

What the heck is husking?

How do you not know what husking is?! She’s helping bring the corn harvest in.

Oh.

George Winston’s December album playing softly while we turned off the lights and with our babies in our laps, watched the snow fall (and fall and fall) in New Hampshire to the music as each perfect silvery flake danced and sparkled in the moonlight.

Our oldest remembered, and took that album off to college.

The monochromatic boredom of white snow, grayed parking lot snow, more snow. And how pretty and quiet and peaceful it was. Along with the how do you shovel snow so you can pick up your husband from work and leave your kids alone inside but how do you shovel snow with them outside in weather that cold? You can’t take a baby out in zeroF for an hour+ while trying to watch the toddler while trying to get this done.

Somehow I got it done, or enough, anyway. I don’t remember how. Naptime? I just remember I had to, so I did.

The househunting trip in Spring in California, going straight from 72″ in 17 days to green, glorious green and flowers everywhere.

The kid who left me speechless by saying, Mom, I don’t think I could ever call anything on the East Coast a forest.

Say what now?? Why??

Because no redwoods.

We have got to get these kids an education… We flew us all home and played tourist in DC.

Taking my sister’s boys to where the sun sets as the ocean waves goodbye, laughing that yes that feels like you put your dawn on backwards in the morning.

The day we drove past the high school, knowing there would never be another Back To School night for us.

The knit night at Purlescence where I took my cell phone out of the shop for a minute, needing it to be on speaker and wanting to hear my son and where he could have a little more privacy. Then walking back in the shop, holding my phone out to my friends, and saying, This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged!

The whole shop burst into applause and cheers. As well they should. Such a profound gift to our family Kim has been.

The arrival of grandkids.

The feeling, within five minutes of meeting my daughter’s boyfriend, of, I don’t know who you are. But I HOPE you marry my daughter.

He did.

The arrival of their two.

The missing them. The treasuring every moment with them when we are there with them. So much love.

Our younger two, hoping for those blessings too but entirely blessings themselves as they are. So proud of them. All of them.

The gratitude beyond words at this dear, dear man in my life who made all of this come to be with me and that he gets to still be with me and I still get to be with him, well beyond the time we once thought I might have left.

I got up this morning, picked English Morello sour cherries from the tree that he’d driven me over the mountains to Santa Cruz for and had helped me pick out in happy anticipation of moments to come just like these, let them soak in their sugary filling mixture for awhile and then put the pie in the oven to bake while I headed to Andy’s Orchard. Richard got off work, checked the pie, and had it cooling and waiting when I got home with the first peaches of the season and the newest Candycot apricot developed by the guy who gave the world the Anya: the Yelena.

Just an ordinary day. But one that gives a meaning I love to the new-to-us number of 45.

This song. Thank you, Sly.

The box in her hands was very big and awkward and it looked heavy. I said, Here, let me get that door for you, and ran a little ahead to the post office entrance and then made sure she went ahead of me with that; all I was sending off was a couple of hats. (Still working on the blue, the gauge was way different with a finer yarn but I wanted my cousin’s granddaughter to get to match her grandmother and it was time to get those off.)

Such an ordinary interaction on an ordinary day. It wasn’t till quite a bit later that I realized how fortunate we were and how quiet it is here: I didn’t have to try to bodily throw my privilege between us to try to save her from masked random men on the street claiming to be ICE, none of that, and I can’t imagine….

We could simply. have. a. nice. day. You know, be in America. With a shared smile at having met in the moment.

The car had to be smog-checked. The first time we ever got that notice I exclaimed, But it’s a brand new SULEV! (Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle.)

But it does still have a gas engine, however small.

I looked up the usual place and prepaid online.

The computer auto-filled my landline number onto the form and I didn’t notice in time. Which they auto-texted to to confirm my payment and appointment, and obviously that didn’t work.

Well that’s a nuisance, so I typed into my cellphone the time of payment and the order number so I would have that info to prove I was me and headed on over.

The young guy running the place by himself wasn’t sure he could make that work; he asked me, sounding a little nervous, had I printed it out?

I had not, I’m sorry. (I was thinking, since when does his generation expect a print-out? Too funny.)

He wasn’t sure he could make that half-off price work and was clearly a little afraid of how I might react.

I told him, Hey, I’m the one who didn’t catch that auto-fill in time. If I have to pay full price than I pay full price, no biggy, I just need to get it done. (Thinking, before the state deadline next week. Before minor surgery next week with anesthesia but no painkillers because I’m allergic. Before I have to deal with all that. I was just so glad that I’d finally kicked myself into getting this done.)

He was visibly relieved.

My heart went out to him. I wondered how many customers… It’s not his fault his bosses charge one price online and twice that in person if you skim and see and expect that but just show up without paying first.

From there he got the work done and went over the DMV’s paperwork I’d brought with me, making sure I would save the certificate that the car had passed inspection till the state sends their sticker–the whole time treating me like his favorite aunt. Like we were old friends.

I thanked him and we both came away with our day much better for those few minutes of making sure my old car doesn’t fart at the public.

Good friends

Great birthday party

Good night

Part two.

We got to see Janna and her husband. We walked into the presence of such an immense sense of love.

She was joyful, she was exhausted, and I hope at just under an hour we didn’t stay too long. I have more experience than most at how wonderful and tiring it is to see people even when you love them so much when you’re so ill and we were all trying to be mindful of that, though I’m not quite sure we were mindful enough. But man, it was good to see her and to meet her prince of a husband. (Her first one died years ago.) He is so good to her.

I had four more hats ready (Richard says five), including one begun in the airport, and two balls of yarn to ask if she’d like those colors next. She said sure. She had one on that I’d mailed earlier.

But she gently let me know that all of these were really more than she could wear.

Not knowing that I had thought of her beloved as I packed this thick warm greens-etc Mecha one and that earlier one and was thinking of her granddaughter and her two older sons and the son I’d knit the Christmas stocking for years ago: her mom had knit one with the name knitted in for each of her grandchildren–but he hadn’t been born yet when she died.

When Janna told me that of course I made him one.

I had never knitted such a thing before and I couldn’t find a pattern for one with the kind of cabling I wanted, so I just winged it. I can do socks, right?

Um. Sometimes letting the object be its own size swatch has its idiosyncrasies, not to mention Malabrigo Rios is not sock yarn.

So I asked her if he wishes he had one that weren’t so big and she exclaimed, He LOVES his big stocking! You can fit anything in it!

We all laughed.

He’s in his mid-20s now. We sat there a moment with the unspoken thought between us that his future children likely won’t know their grandmother, either.

An experimental med in ’03 snatched me back at the edge of life. If only. You never know.

I will have my work cut out for me. I’ll let him and his future love decide what size to aim for.

But meantime, any of her family who want to wear a Malabrigo hat in solidarity with her in this beautiful month of June, maybe when the hot sun dips below the mountains? I think with these last two coming along, if she wants, we’ve pretty much got them covered.

And I can always knit more.

Part One.

All my siblings came. Mom got feted, Dad’s stuff got divided between us, and as my older brother said afterwards, “I am amazed and grateful for how well everything went.” Everybody was mindful of everybody else and trying not to be too eager about any one thing: we didn’t own it before and if we didn’t own it after, what’s the difference, right? So. Your turn.

There was a painting I loved. The others noticed the two gouges in the paint before I did, two white canvas spots showing, about the size of the inside circle when you hold thumb to forefinger.

Bryan, who along with Anne has entered juried arts shows and done well, instantly offered, “I can fix that for you.”

Two days later my sister was holding it out for me to see.

Now, I’d been expecting to have to pay to ship it to Atlanta and then to our house and to wait for however long everything took.

But, but–where were the spots? You can’t even tell! Where were they? as I bent close to see.

Bryan happened to come in the room in the middle of that, so I said again, “You can’t even tell!”

He laughed. “That’s the point!”

I just couldn’t get over how very very perfect and untouched it looked.

He was staying at a cousin’s; we were at a hotel a half hour from there.

So it was with great delight this morning that I looked up at the TSA station where you retrieve your stuff and exclaimed across the conveyor belt, “BRYAN!”

He looked over, laughed, and we got one last big hug across that metal space before he raced off to his flight while they finished patting me down. (Holding my arms above my head while circular glass walls move rapidly the way they do, close to my face, makes me fall down. So, yeah.)

So, so glad we got to go.