Part 1. Turns out my daughter has her own Piano Guy friend. He had no insurance and was saving his money to pay for the surgery he knew he needed but the stroke beat him to it. At 30.  Sam blogged a link to the effort to raise money for Jeff’s medical expenses and I’m passing it along.

Any amount is an emotional as well as a financial support and makes a difference. Thank you.

———

(Edited to add.)

Part 2. Later in the day I read that there is a surge of interest and donations to the Brady Campaign, with politicians and others coming through their doors who perhaps would not have been seen there before, asking what can we do to help? On Brady’s site, they decry the official NRA argument of it’s all guns vs no guns, setting forth proposed limits that most NRA members would find very reasonable.That we have had in the past. But to go on with no changes, now, even after Newtown…

Again, out came my credit card. My token amount was a small but present voice among the many.

I hit submit.

It took me very much by surprise how fiercely the feelings came, instantly. I had owned my voice. I had used my voice. I knew then that I will use it again. Our children and grandchildren need our every voice, and when they needed me I too was there for them, is the only way I can put into words how strongly good it felt: more powerful than, as Superman says, a speeding… Yes.

Well, and with a whole generation having happened in between.

It had been twenty-six years last time, surely at a winter-break coming-home time from his college, so even there, I rarely saw him; he’d graduated from high school just before we’d moved to his hometown in New Hampshire, when we were newly out of grad school ourselves.

There, that first Christmas, the good brother at church leading the meeting stood up to announce we were going to sing “With Wondering Awe.” Only, the guy pronounced it “With Wandering R” and Richard and I about died, hands clamped over our mouths to try to physically restrain ourselves from bursting out laughing, trying not to glance at each other for fear that would be it and we would lose it: that good man with the thick Down East accent had R’s that wanduhed in and out all ovah the place! What a perfect and perfectly inadvertent rendition of a small New England town at Christmas!

I kept sneaking glances over thataway during Sunday School today and finally mouthed, Are you Dave’s brother?

He grinned and nodded, confirming out loud after the lesson was over: Yes! Adding, looking at my now-gray hair and new-grandmother face, I remember you!

Their mother had been, in Mormon-speak, my Relief Society (the frontier-era-named women’s organization) President back when our children were small and hers were in high school and, this one, college.

The older I get the more it seems like random people from my past will somehow randomly show up again–and so often, you pick up right from where you were as if the conversation had never ended, somehow.

But I know that I’m glad that it’s so. Those are moments that bear witness to the immortality of the too-often-hidden love for one another that underlies our day-to-days.

And on a lighter note…

I told the story of my daughter randomly running into my brother-in-law in the airport in Tokyo a week ago, she on her way home from Japan, he on a stopover coming back to the States from China. Turns out, the story gets better.

A recently retired old colleague of his from work–I believe (I could be wrong) that that would be from his recently-ended assignment to Qatar–was somehow in Tokyo airport, apparently didn’t hear the exclamation of “Uncle GEORGE!” from the pretty, young, thin blonde who ran to him, but did see George hugging and being friendly with a woman who was so much not his former colleague’s wife that the guy knew.

One might add, they did share the same last name, though. Oddly enough.

It’s your birthday and I get the cake? my friend Deanne marveled yesterday in a message. But somehow, for all the attempts at getting together, it didn’t quite happen then.

I had made her and her family a chocolate torte as a thank you for an airport ride and the other of the pair was to go to Julia and her family for the same reason.  (Sue waved away the calories for now.) I had decided I’d better call before dropping them off, since the ganache part shouldn’t be at room temperature for hours on end–but yesterday we just didn’t connect, any of us, I just got answering machines.  So the tortes stayed in my fridge for the day.

I also had two almost-rollaboard-size suitcases to give to a young family, in great shape because they had no wheels and so had long gone unused–those, too, I was supposed to get delivered in the last two days but somehow it just didn’t happen.

I picked John up from the airport this afternoon. I was never so glad to see my own sweet child right there with me safe and sound and my heart is beyond words for all those parents in Connecticut who will never again have that comfort. I was listening to the President on the radio as I drove, and the long silence… twelve seconds, the reporter said it was, and then seven more as he struggled with his tears, all of our tears on his face and in his voice… All those innocent kindergartners and first graders. All those good people. They were our children. They were our teachers.

The chocolate tortes got delivered today, instead. The right day. (Who could possibly have known.) Friends opened their doors and exclaimed over them, over John being with me, home for Christmas, how good to see him! We zipped back home for the forgotten green Travelpros and then dropped those off too, waving hi at the little kids playing outside with their next-door friends we knew well, too, that dad raking the leaves as he kept watch over them, the other young parents welcoming us in.

Love and coming together, again and again and again, was such a dearly-bought, vitally needed thing.

When we came home from Texas last weekend the phone line was dead again, only, this time the problem was inside somewhere.

It was getting old.

Richard stayed home this morning until he tracked it down to a problem in the jack in the kitchen; unplug the wall phone, boom, there you go, just in time. (Sing it, Paul!)

My little sister, 19 months younger than me and who was always almost catching up to me growing up, being just a year behind me at school and getting the same teachers, who (since she was the fifth kid) would say to her like they’d said to me, Oh, *another* Jeppson, called: “How does it feel to be an old fart?”

“Actually, I can’t fart anymore.” I grinned.

That stopped her a second. “I never thought of that!”

Happy Dozens Day!

I signed up for freecycle.org awhile ago to give away something, and so now I get the local posts in my inbox.  So it happened that one caught my eye last night: someone had a tree full of Hachiya persimmons, my favorite type, and was looking to give them away.

You can find the hard Fuyu ones in the stores but the fragile, very-soft-when-ripe Hachiyas, not so much. I love them but my husband does not and so we do not grow our own.

I waited hours to let others go first.  And then I sent off a note, saying that I remembered the days when my children were young and my food budget tight but that was not the case anymore; please put me in the back of the line, but if there were a few left after that, then I would love.

When the man responded, his name showed up in the email; there was plenty, and he would love me to have some, answered Eric.

While I was thinking, wait, are you…!?

I decided to take the plunge: are you Walt’s son? (I could not remember having ever met him, just Walt bragging on his kids and grandkids happily.)

He answered in the morning: yes, I am.

I adore your parents! I told him. Small world.

I offered to come pick up the fruit but he asked for my address. Shortly after, my doorbell rang and I opened the door.

And then we both stood there in surprised delight. I *have* met you once before! I thought. What a good man from such a good family!

He had the same wait–I’ve seen you before, I’m sure of it! look on his face, though I don’t know that we’ve ever actually had a conversation before. He asked for a box and I grabbed a mixing bowl from the kitchen; he opened his trunk and filled it up, then asked if he could give me more and filled a second large bowl. He assured me there was plenty for everybody. Pointing to the tree down the street that was all winter-nakedness with bright orange dreidel shapes hanging, he said his tree was even bigger than that one (and it was a good size.)

I told him those neighbors, after they’d moved in, had asked around what on earth to do with all those and I had told them, Call Second Harvest Food Bank; their volunteers will pick them, clean up the drops, and put the crop to very good use. “But I haven’t had the chutzpah to knock on their door and ask for a few for me,” I laughed, grateful for his. There is nothing in the world like a homegrown Hachiya persimmon, something I had to move to California to experience.

Wait–there was that one time they were giving out samples in New Hampshire of this new shipment of exotic fruit, only, they didn’t know the difference between the two types and the woman was sawing off rock-hard pieces of the very unripe, very astringent Hachiyas. I, uh, don’t think they sold too many.

Eric so enjoyed my anticipation. He mentioned a site with persimmon recipes, and afterwards I looked it up and then some more and emailed him that I was intrigued by the jam idea. He wondered if I might share a jar with him if/when I do?

Ever since, I’ve been thinking, Hurry up and ripen, you guys, c’mon, I’ve got me some jam to give back. I can’t wait!

I had ignored the reminder message for quite some time:  the rheumatologist likes to keep semi-annual tabs on me whether I like it or not.

Don, do you remember from the pool… I will forever remember what a woman there I had always thought of only in terms of being a very sweet, kind old lady once related to me. She had long been severely disabled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She had gone in to see her rheumatologist after a long absence and he’d demanded of her, “Where have you been?!”

She retorted sharply, “What have you  learned?” If he couldn’t do anything new, there was too much life to live to bother with being reminded again and again of what she couldn’t do, so, hey.

As a newly-diagnosed lupus patient at the time with Crohn’s soon to come, doctors aside, she taught me a valuable way to look at this chronic stuff. Just go live!

I should add that in the 24 years since then, the medical field has learned a lot about her JRA, actually.

Well anyway.

So I went in today. And asked the doctor how he was doing.

“Busy.”

Oh?

He told me he was now coaching his daughter’s basketball team.

Cool!!!

He was pleased with how pleased I was with that, so he asked after my grandson and then asked if I were doing any writing; somehow that became an opening for me to tell him about the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads project (which I totally mangled the name of, trying to spit it out, giving him an on-the-spot example of lupus brain fog) and how we knitters had knit a hat for each member of the Senate and a goodly percentage of the House; I gave him my line about “to tell them to put a lid on it,” not the most, um, diplomatic way to describe it, and he laughed and added, “And get to work?”

“Yes!” My turn to laugh.

So we didn’t come up with any magical cures today. But I came away feeling heard about the medical stuff that I honestly didn’t particularly want to talk about because we had heard each other out on a few of the important things near and dear to our hearts. Which made the rest easier to discuss. (Stupid chest pains. He looked up the cardiologist’s notes and reassured me. The cardiac cough is in remission, always a good thing.)

Okay, then.  I’ll see him again in six months.

I’m not sure how but I forgot to mention the honey.

Lynn, the friend who took me to the Madeline Tosh shop, gifted me before we parted with a jar of orange honey that had come from her late mother-in-law. I’ve wondered if there was a story behind it–did she have hives? Orange trees? And did I mention to Lynn that the fresh orange juice we bought in Ft Worth was better than any we have had this year  in California? There was this surprised moment of, Wow, that’s good. The $8 a gallon organic  stuff at Costco doesn’t begin to touch it–Texas does oranges right. (And Dallas Fort Worth airport very, very badly–the GPS kept trying to steer us onto former roads that were now concrete crumbles, to chained-across no-man’s lands; we spent an hour in long circles trying to get to the car rental return in the dark alongside a few other wanderers just as lost. The place is city-sized unto its construction-mangled self.)

But enough of the whine. It was so good to spend time with those we hold dear.

And Lynn’s honey was as exquisite as the oranges it came from. I had to put down the computer, typing that, to go sneak another twirled-forkful.

I didn’t sleep well last night, I admitted to John this morning; I couldn’t get that image of Dad on the ground and all that blood out of my head.

It wasn’t all *that* much, he countered–then thought a moment and added, But. Yeah.

So here’s how yesterday went: lots of people came to the openhouse. Old friends, old relatives: I don’t think I’d seen Max and Lee, Dad’s still-identical twin cousins, since I was ten. Much love, much celebration, much admiration of art.

Comparing notes between us siblings, all of us thought the idea of Dad taking us all out to dinner afterwards was too much for one day: he and Mom especially had been on their feet for hours and he looked a little unsteady to my eyes. Other ideas were brought up–take out, perhaps?–but dismissed. Dad wanted his family party.

And so we piled into two cars and went to the folks’ favorite Chinese restaurant.

Which, it turned out, had two concrete bulbouts jutting into the sidewalk near the door, one to either side. I did a last-second half-jump-and-dance in the dark over one as we approached. Mom and Dad had had to park around the block and they were a minute or two behind us.

Suddenly Mom was shouting into the restaurant for help. I didn’t hear or see but others did and I caught on quick. Dad was down and there were four puddles of blood around him. The goose egg was already huge and his hand was bleeding.

Someone had already gotten him a chair, I’m assuming brought by the waitress who was trying to know what to do. Son John and brother-in-law Bill lifted Dad up to it. Richard pressed napkins to Dad’s hand to stop the bleeding, Marian held an icepack to his forehead and then let me step in and hold it there with my other arm carefully around my father in support.

Richard and my brother Bryan had asked Dad questions and in the immediate moments he was lucid but then briefly out of it and the decision was obvious and clear and beyond any protests: emergency room.

No! I’m taking you all out to dinner!

John, can you bring the car around?

Absolutely.

I’m going with you and Mom too, said Bryan.

Dad pitched a fit: Bryan is diabetic and the food was inside that door right there.

Bryan told me later he could just picture John dropping Dad off at the curb and Dad falling again and maybe taking Mom down with him: no. He was coming too. Bryan is unruffleable and he stayed put in that car and off John went with the four of them.

Meantime, my sister Carolyn had gotten a message from her son that he was interviewing here Monday and had just realized that oh wait, his mom was here from NYC and–and so he got dropped off on his way in from the airport to the restaurant.

Almost immediately after that car pulled away.

So those of us who were left were talking when suddenly it hit us: Mom had the keys to their car and John had driven the other one. Oh wait.

And so when the time seemed best, John drove back to us from the hospital, gave us keys, and by that point the dishes Dad had pre-ordered were served. We boxed up meals, labeled Bryan’s and not-Bryan’s and sent those back with John to the hospital.

Dad had bent his right pinky backwards so far his skin had split wide open. Six stitches. CT scan of his brain was okay and skull uncracked, and our icepacks had done the trick: the goose egg was essentially gone when he came home, although he’s got an impressive bruise across the side of his upper head.

But before they could send him off, he started complaining that there was pain in his left arm and it was growing worse.

Okay, x-ray.

Broken.

But everything will heal and Dad, who is 86,  is still our Dad, and of good cheer even. Thank heavens. He laughed and laughed when I had to cut up his melon for him over dinner tonight and suddenly told him the old pun, melon-choly baby.

We all played our part perfectly, each of us, as he needed us and in the way we needed to in each of those moments.

It was a darn close call, and he’s going to hurt for awhile, but essentially, he’s alright.

Don’t mess with the hoarse woman with the flu who’s having a hard time breathing.

My credit union overhauled their online system, and a week ago I found I couldn’t get in. I called, they tried, it didn’t work, but my brother-in-law was on his way over and I just had to leave it at that. And then of course I got sick.

Time to try again. Long wait. (I’d have sworn that was my friend’s oboe solo in that hold music. Small world.) We were far from the only ones the update messed over.

Got through. The clerk tried unsuccessfully to make it work–

–and then the line went dead.

Called again. Waited again. The next clerk tried to help–and when it didn’t work, told me baldly that no she couldn’t help me. When would Mr. H be available?

Wait. What?

He’s the primary name on the account, ma’am.

Would you give me a different answer if I went into your branch in person? (As if! right now.)

She hesitated; No, ma’am, they’d tell you the same thing there.

This stiff-the-housewife thing: AmEx used to pull stunts like that, they don’t anymore, they learned. It’s not good business to take the mommy wars to the mommies.

What time do you stop taking phone calls?

Six o’clock.

He won’t be here.

They tried to tell me he could be interrupted at work to take care of it, I flatly said no.

So you’re telling me you’re not going to let me access *my* money in *my* account? Tell me, I said wearily, why do I bank with you?

Boom! The magic words! All the sudden they snapped to, did whatever they had to do to the system, told me to try it now, and bam I was in.

Would it have been so hard to have done right by me the first time? I can’t see how I could ever have any customer loyalty again, since they had zero to me.

Michelle, who has been studying Japanese, went out to dinner with her co-workers. Some of whom got into a conversation in that language.

“Did you understand any of it?” I asked her.

She got this rapidly-growing impish grin on her face. “Only one phrase: ‘I understand what you’re saying here.’ ”

A punchline is always the best way to start anyway.

I bought a rotisserie chicken last Saturday, kept it in the coldest part of the fridge, and today plunked what was left of it in a pot and boiled it down.  Chicken soup. (Michelle was home sick too.) Actually, Richard would have been happy to do it for me; he worked from home in case we needed anything but I had this decisive toddler moment as I opened the fridge door of, me dooz it.

I kept thinking if I just go knit something, too, I’d be energized for sure, but I haven’t quite made it there yet. Eh.  It’ll come. The Crohn’s early-warning flare that hit with this flu seems almost over, and for that I am very very grateful. Pass the soup. And thank you, everybody.

My profuse apologies to my brother-in-law for the exposure I didn’t know about.

He took the train down last night from San Francisco, where he’s staying for a conference, to visit with us last night. We had a good laugh, all of us, at Michelle’s declaration of No politics! Given that it was election night and we were all dying to know how it was coming–but there was a conscious decision all around to focus on the short time we had together.

He and my sister live in upper Manhattan, some of the lucky ones whose power stayed on last week.

Richard drove him to the train station with me tagging along, wanting all the Boyd time I could get but finding myself suddenly tired and not wanting to be behind the wheel.

An hour later I was running a fever.

I stuck it out through Obama’s speech last night but shouldn’t have–I was desperate to collapse in bed.

It is quarter after three in the afternoon and I’m finally up again. I’ve been offered by the doctor to go to Urgent Care to have IV fluids but I think I can get more down on my own now.

Okay, let me go check those returns. Did the California Propositions pass? Did Obama at long last win Ohio? I’m about to go find out.

And I saw my Cooper’s hawk soaring as I glanced up through the skylight, always a message of, I’ll be fine.

My older daughter has the right roommate: she was driving and told Sam, How cute! Look, there’s a sheep!

And she too has the right roommate: What I see, answered Sam, is unsecured hay bales.

Her roommate slowed down in response, which is why when one of those bales was suddenly coming at them on the freeway they weren’t hurt–but the driver of the pickup took off. They did call in his license plate.

They had to pick hay out of the car but they were okay and it was too.

Thank goodness. *blink* Live by the sheep, drive-by by the sheep.

The NYC marathon continued on too today, unofficial or no,  and so, some athletes decided a vertical run was the way to go–who else could go up and down as many flights of stairs to tend to the stricken? Some of the runners carried backpacks full of supplies to Staten Island, one of the places hit hardest. They were warned that they would see things they had never seen before and that not all the dead had been found yet. The needs they would encounter were so great.

Well, they could do what they could do and so they did it. Flashlights. Blankets. Clothing. Ignoring the crank honking at them, yelling, Don’t you know the race was cancelled? Oh, but sir, if you only knew….

I would think the whole world wished they could be doing what those runners were doing. I say they totally placed first and first things first.

Update Monday: here’s an even better article about the runners.

Another crazybusylotsofdriving day, although with family along this time.

There was a little salad left.

And spaghetti. The boy scouts scooped lots of sauce and meat onto those noodles–good for them. Then, with their white shirts and fake mustaches (upside down on one kid), they waited the lines of folding tables covered in butcher paper, refilled the water pitchers, and offered crayons to the little ones so they could break all the rules of home by drawing on the table. They’d papered over the differences.

Then they were offering ice cream with a chocolate cookie in a cup to all as Dave warmed up. There is nobody who can talk as fast as Dave when he wants to.

It was Troop 66 fundraiser time again.

Dave: I have this beautiful cranberry-apple crisp–and it’s still warm from the oven! Who’ll bid me $20? 22, 25. 27? 30! Do I hear 31–33! (No, in an aside to his little kid, I’m not counting–oh, did Mom say so? Okay, 34!) 35!

Going once, going…37! Do I hear 40? Forty, forty, SOLD!!! for forty dollars!

It was a beautiful thing to behold. That man knows how to play auctioneer for the day after the day after the day after Halloween. Tablesfull of homemade desserts went home with happy people, and I know that tomorrow the question of the day at church will be, Did you get one? Cool, whatja get? …Oooh!

There was one that Phyllis (whose own dessert went for a good price) had had her eyes on, and when Dave started in on it she jumped out of her chair from across the long room, announced the price and announced it sold.

This had never happened before in all the years of doing these and it almost threw him a moment:  Wait, $20?

Yes, $20, it’s mine, sold! (The room laughed.)

He looked around, questioning his large audience. Twenty?

Heads nodded all around.

Twenty! Sold! To Phyllis!

There were a few other things–actually, a lot of other things–and a plate of homemade chocolate truffles came up–and there was Phyllis. Before he could even begin she was rushing forward, waving a fistful of bills and telling him he had to sell her just one.  (Knowing that if everyone followed her lead there would be a good price indeed for that plate.)

Never get in the way of a good laugh at everybody’s enjoyment; she got her truffle, big enough to share, and share she did. It was fabulous.

As she said to me afterwards, Dave is so good at this and he’s such a crackup. It’s all about the entertainment, never mind the spaghetti.

Not to mention a little sharing of good food and good deeds. And a good time was had by all.