My sister and nephew (on Richard’s side) in Manhattan are fine, my friend Afton’s been allowed to return home, my daughter in Baltimore ended up with two leaks in her roof that the landlord is getting right to, my sister-in-law in New Jersey says they’re not going anywhere till things get cleaned up a bit–but all of them are fine.

And as I ran an errand in the late afternoon I marveled at how ordinary and untouched everything around me was. Real weather is a spectator sport in California, pretty much. I marveled at how few lives were lost back East, as terrible as Sandy was of a storm, while sobered at the ones that were.

On a different note. Or somehow not entirely; nature continues. Ahote, one of the peregrine fledglings of a year and a half ago from the San Jose City Hall nest, has in the last few months grown his adult plumage, found a female, (unbanded, so, not from one of our observed nests, yay for genetic diversity), and found a territory they clearly call their own together in anticipation of spring, having been seen numerous times by one of the falconistas, who took their picture today near the Bay. He’s on the left, she’s on the right. Beautiful.

From the shark falling out of the California sky, which was funny (since nobody was hurt and it lived) to the one swimming past the front porch of a flooded home in New Jersey today. Yow.

I’ve been reading updates from my sister in Manhattan and my daughter in Baltimore, along with various others.  I’ve been hesitant to call for fear of draining needed cellphone batteries at their end.

To all in the path of Sandy, my prayers go with you. Stay safe.

We went to hear the St Michael Trio perform at Stanford tonight.

Always a good time. Always a lot of old friends to run into who go, too.

We were talking to some of them when a very short elderly woman intervened, wanting our attention as if she knew us. Oh okay. The concert had ended and there were a lot of people talking in the foyer at once; the sound now was an impossible cacophony of joy.

Richard was paying attention, but more and more she focused on me as a sympathetic soul as she told her tale I couldn’t hear. I finally realized she was talking about the death of –somebody, through a major medical error–I caught the bit about the needle through the windpipe as Richard winced.

All of it said perfectly straightforwardly, even cheerfully, glad to share the news with old friends who would want to know. Richard told me later she was talking about her mother–who would have had to have been well into her hundreds if the story were new.

We had not the slightest clue who she was.

And then her middle-aged what I took to be her son found her and anxiously pulled her away from us, sorry to have bothered us.

No, no, really, I found myself wanting to tell him as they disappeared quickly into the night; I’m glad we were able to be an audience when she needed one for a few minutes and I’m glad she got to put on her best and have her hair done and go out and enjoy a good concert. I hope someday when I’m old and perhaps bonkers someone is patient enough to listen to me, too. To be with me.

More Parker pictures from our trip.

Or not. Huh. Silly computer. Meantime, we’re home. And the phone rang today: I had finally made a hat, out of a strand of Cascade Venezia merino/silk and a strand of sheared mink laceweight, for a doctor whose caring had made a great difference to me three years ago in the hospital. That bit of a flare at the end of this summer nudged me to just go do what I’d so long wanted to do and say thank you; I would regret it–I had regretted it–if I didn’t, finally. And so it came to be.

I left it in an envelope with his receptionist last week with a note explaining why I’d made it: how his words then had said to me, Wow. You’re a survivor! And so I had been.

He called this afternoon. “It’s so soft!” And he’d so loved my note. His voice was full of wonder at it all.

But first he had to get through my thick head. I was hearing the tones but not the words… I’m sorry–(finally), Oh! Is this Dr. F?

Yes!

He said it again, and the second or third time I got it, and thanked him right back.

Got off the phone, wondering how on earth I had been that deaf on the phone…reached up to my left ear…and found that although I’d put that hearing aid in hours earlier, both of them…

I’d never turned the darn thing on all day.

But he was patient with me anyway. Like I say, he’s a good one.

Within ten minutes of when we arrived Friday, Parker, who had woken up running a fever, barfed and clung. His daddy cleaned it up and comforted him.

Get a little tylenol in him, though, and you’d never know he didn’t feel well, he was pure toddler running around with a grin.

Within a few hours he snuggled over next to me. I was smitten all over again–and then, just to make sure I knew the order of things, he pulled his daddy’s arm to come sit close on the other side. There. Love. Both sides.  Good. And in front, too, hi, Grandpa!

We got presented with a Parker doodle; after all, as Richard-the-younger teased me in a mock-accusatory tone, “He IS quarter hippy, y’know.”

Works for me.

Parker let us know he had the starving-artist thing down already.

First thing Sunday morning he was down that slide that had terrified  him the night before and was experimenting with the best ways to go and how to vary and control the speed. With his mommy or daddy right there, he can brave anything.

Funniest comment from my friend Beth after the debate tonight: “I just put my finger on exactly how I wanted the moderator to respond to Romney going over his time again and again:  Mr. Romney! 10 points from Slytherin!”

Meantime.

I went to the lab this morning for a fasting test. Came home, and the new gardener of the new neighbors two doors down was at work. Ten am.

I went to the doctor this afternoon and discussed the results, which looked very good. Yay! Headed for home…and decided to go this way rather than that, for once. Okay.

And so it was that I saw a guy on a bike calling over his shoulder back to someone else, while not seeing who till I turned the corner there. And then there was the second guy–not tipped off faster because I had come from behind, and he was back where he had no business being. I knew the real gardener had left four hours ago.

It made it much worse that that trespassing guy got on his bike and followed me. I got into my house and he stopped at my driveway. I hesitated for just long enough to send up a quick prayer and called the cops.

They may have been perfectly innocent, but there’s been a rash of home burglaries in the last couple months in this city and we are near the freeway–and the people across the street are among the ones who’ve had their house broken into. With a rock thrown through their window, and believe me, we’ve got lots of windows. The same cop who responded to their call came again, and now he at least had a lead–whether valid or not, only those two men know at the moment.

And they know where I live. But I know what they look like. And maybe they saw that black and white saddleshoe car.  Blessings on our police department, when I told them it was their call on these guys, they came immediately.

Wait, I said as she turned to me as I walked into church, you look familiar…

She told me afterwards that in that moment, she was trying to remember, was Alison the name of the mom or the oldest daughter? But she remembered my name, whichever one of us it applied to, because it was her twin’s name and her own daughter’s.

She and her husband are friends from church who moved away 15 years ago, back for a visit. They wanted to show their kids the California sights, since they hadn’t really been old enough to remember (or weren’t born yet.) And they wanted to see old friends.

Meantime, there was a speaker from a neighboring ward, and he’d only recently moved into the area. He mentioned they’d come from New York. I went up to him after the meeting and said, okay, this is a long shot but by any chance do you know Boyd and Carolyn R…

His face totally lit up. YES! I worked with him on…

Carolyn’s my sister.

He loved it.

And California became, in that moment, just a bit more familiar and comfortable of a place.

(p.s. I once saw one of the weinermobiles driving the main drag three blocks away, but never anything like this in our neighborhood.)

I watched this and it trumped anything I might have to say for the day. Wow. From designing for Christian Dior, dressing Jackie Kennedy to Gwen Stefani, to building an orphanage in Nepal where Mother Teresa asked her to go and staying and raising 154 children.

I guess sometimes Mormons do have big families after all.

I decided I wasn’t eggsplatly going to do any more baking today.

I was, though, doing my treadmill time.

Why is it that at about the eleven or twelve minute mark during every session of late my brain sneaks up on me and all the sudden I realize it’s playing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in my head? The version that was popular in the ’70’s. While I’m a captive audience to the earworm. A weemuhway. Oh joy.

And there it was again tonight, starting right on cue. I glanced at the time and could only laugh: 11:03, the little stinker. Okay, so what to replace it with: catchy, or, something, what’ve you got in there? (Walk..walk..walk….) Okay, James Taylor, and I hit the on button in my brain. A recording made when he was younger of You’ve Got a Friend.

It was the perfect pitch I was hoping for. It even got me to walk longer while it played.

p.s. With a shout out to Ellen, who does beautiful work. Thank you!

It was General Conference weekend, wherein leaders of the Mormon Church speak to the members. Favorites: Henry B. Eyring, and that listing at the very bottom of the page is his talk I mentioned earlier about his daughter’s recent life-and-death delivery at 15 weeks early and her visiting teaching companion’s having happened to show up just when she direly needed it. (Women’s Conference was last week.) Also, Richard G. Scott, whose younger kids I used to babysit back when he was a nuclear physicist in Washington, DC. and who gave an hour of his time to talk to my husband when he was a 19-year-old about to leave on a mission, hoping for a little guidance and wise words and so, seeking out an old family friend. Elder Uchtdorf. Whose family escaped on one of the last trains out of East Germany to West when he was little.

Jeffrey Holland: “The crowning characteristic of love is loyalty.” I had to think about that a moment. Yes, I can see that. Definitely.

How’s the closed captioning going? asked Richard, glancing over, watching from his own screen.

They’ve got the words going to yesterday’s talks, I answered. Oops. But then, they said it was still in beta. ‘Sokay, I’m not needing it.

Early on, I finished the project I was working on and being a captive listener, needed something else to do with my hands.

I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t want to…  I just don’t do baby knitting… I had to. I knew it. And so I picked up the outfit I started making maybe a month ago for my namesake great-niece (wow does that make me sound old, but I was 16 when her mom was born to my oldest sister). I had gotten a great start on it, had wavered on the width I had going and whether it would work and had ziplocked it away.

When else would I do it? In time for her to wear it? Or for her own baby someday? Alright, then.

I added a few inches to what I had, started into the armscyes (ie picture the J and backwards J indentations at the underarms), counted stitches while the Tabernacle Choir sang and started the decreasing.

It looked terrible. I had merrily knitted a few more inches. No go. Rip. I did the decreases, *then* the armscyes. So much better.

I finally put it aside when I got to where I would need to find a pattern somewhere to doublecheck the length to the back of the neck on that dress.

But what I’m coming here to say is, I had this project that was important to me that had stumped me and it had bugged me. Listening to all those talks about the effects and the dear necessity of love in our lives, of looking out for the children, hearing stories told and experiences shared and wisdom offered, the thing in my hands became easy at last. And not just because I was at the stockinette part.

This morning I had no idea how I was supposed to make that beginning look like anything that could fit a baby well. But it gradually came to me as I just kept going, ripping and redoing, and before too long I knew exactly how it was going to come out and what will be next. I don’t like the idea of ribbing around the arms and around the front because it wouldn’t go well with the lacework at the bottom? But the raw edge look, no? Well then, repeat the lacework, there you go!

“The crowning characteristic of love is loyalty.”

And I love my niece and her baby I get to meet in a couple months. And so, hearing that, it was all the more imperative that I get this done, and after being afraid of it for too long, now I love how it’s coming out.

I can’t wait to see it finished and on Eden Alison!

Left the house at 2:00 to take a friend to the airport: his grandmother had just died of Alzheimer’s and he was taking one day off from the intense world of medical training to fly out for the funeral.

When someone needs a ride for that, you take them.

But I asked him beforehand if we could leave just a few minutes earlier? Maybe ten? I had a doctor’s appointment to go to.

Sure, no problem!

As we went down the road, he talked about the strangeness of grief mixed with relief and the loss that had happened years before–and loss again, but with a…but…. Now at last she’s with his Grandpa again.

And then. I only got a brief glance because I was the one at the wheel–but at the place where I have seen one before, a peregrine falcon suddenly burst past the trees next to the road and zoomed across in front of us, both of us going, WOW!, low enough down that for a split second I worried maybe a semi might… But it was safe. In the blink, I would have guessed it a female for the shape of the body and likely an adult or near-adult. So close! Wow!

And I wondered silently, Ty, you have no idea, but a raptor always shows up when I need one, especially peregrines and my Cooper’s hawk. Maybe you needed one too.

There was some slowdown going on in San Jose but I got out of the backup and away to the gate about the time expected–but coming back around onto the freeway, traffic where I had just been was one solid mass of cars clear back to the next city. Had we left five minutes later, I would have been utterly hosed.

I was exactly on time for my doctor. We had a fair bit to discuss, and she’s a good one: she takes the time.

I raced home (it was 5:00 by now) and started peeling apples. Richard called; I dropped everything and went to get him since I had his car. Coming out of the neighborhood, a large red-tailed hawk soared right above. I have never seen one here before!

More backup. They’ve been digging up the road where pipeline 132, the infamous San Bruno Fire pipeline, goes down the neighborhood. Came home. Chopped apples. An old quick New Hampshire autumn dinner is that you cook sausage crumbles with diced preferably Granny Smith apples (getting out absolutely as much grease as you can) and then when it’s all done, pour just a little maple syrup on it in the serving dish, grade B for the more intense flavor if you can find it. Trader Joe’s here has it.

Thirty-seven minutes after we walked in the door together, the table was cleared and set, three different dishes were cooked from scratch, and our dinner guests arrived. We did it.

I could never have pulled half of that off in the bad old days. Wow life. Look at me now!

When Richard was working on his Master’s degree at BYU in Provo, Utah, his advisor and his wife invited us over for dinner once.

They had eleven kids, some grown, the youngest a bouncy little boy, not to mention that Dr. Ivie’s brother’s family was nearby and it was pretty brownian motion around there. I loved it. Dr. Ivie had made their dining table so as to accommodate the crowd: round, and from about a foot in from the edge it was all one giant lazy susan. It would start spinning at the beginning of the meal and when it stopped all the food was gone and the meal was over.

And if you were new there like I was someone had to fend for you, my new husband Richard laughed as he did so, helping me to a dish of I-don’t-remember-what as the center spun. (He’d been there before.)

We saw the reports today. Richard thinks Nicholas was the youngest, I think he was their grandson. But that Border Patrolman‘s face in that picture is one of theirs.

There was a woman’s conference broadcast from the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Mormon Church.

Henry B. Eyring was the final (and only male) speaker. He thanked the sisters for the ways in which they go about their work–and for one particular (unnamed) sister in a different city and time zone, he said, This father thanks her.

The Church has a setup called Visiting Teaching, wherein pairs of women are assigned together to go visit several other women to make sure that everybody has someone they feel they can turn to in need–by their making the effort to get to know each other better.

The names and pairs occasionally get changed around.

Let me tell a story on myself. Back when we’d been married about a year and a bit, while living in an apartment complex full of married students and grad students, I found myself one day not long after a miscarriage at nearly four months and Richard was doing finals week for his Master’s degree classes and we had to move and clean that place well enough to get our cleaning deposit we needed back (never happened for anyone with that landlord), tired and frustrated, and at 5:00 the electricity was going to go out and be transferred to our new place a few blocks away–and it was a hot, stale day on top of that.

So I had my kitchen door open.

A middle-aged woman I had never seen before was suddenly standing in that doorway. “Are you the maid?” She proceeded to tell me all the things I had not done well in preparing her apartment for her and she wanted to move in now and why wasn’t it ready. She wasn’t angry, just firm. She was talking about a spot several doors down, turned out, but there was such a Niagara Falls of words and assumptions that I couldn’t swim past them for several minutes to get through to her, simply, that, No. I’m not!

And so she too easily became the focus of a bad day. I really really never wanted to see her again.

Guess who was in church the next Sunday? In our own ward? She’s Mormon? Guess whose Relief Society president, knowing not one word of any of that, instantly assigned me to be her Visiting Teacher? I groaned an inner, Yes, Lord. I hear you. But–really!? Do I *have* to?!

Never turn down a Visiting Teaching assignment.

And so that lonely, newly divorced woman old enough to be my mother and I became fast friends. By the grace of God I got over myself and got rescued from my own resentment while being given a dear friend I didn’t deserve. She was one of the people I missed the most when we moved to another state a year later.

Elder Eyring said his daughter a month ago was six months pregnant and home with her three-year-old while her oldest was in kindergarten class, when suddenly she found herself bleeding. And heavily. She called her husband and he told her to call 911 and get an ambulance; he would meet her at the hospital.

Before she could make that second call her doorbell rang: it was her visiting teaching partner, who had simply felt somehow that she should swing on by. No appointment that day, it just seemed the thing to do–and so she was the one who got her friend to the hospital, while being able to take care of the three-year-0ld; I imagine the paramedics wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about her past those ER doors and the mother ended up being sent straight to surgery. The dad was on his way as fast as he could. Waiting for him was his little girl in a strange place–with someone she knew.

And so, too, Elder Eyring’s daughter got to the hospital perhaps sooner than had she had to wait for that ambulance to come.

The baby was fifteen weeks early but is alive. They had to deliver her to save her mother’s life. Both of them made it.

And now the good women of that ward are taking turns helping out the family so that they can spend as much time at the hospital with their newborn as they can. That means the woman’s visiting teachers are in charge of coordinating care for the other children, meals brought in, whatever else may be needed as needed.

And you know every single person who chips in and helps will feel thisclose to that family forever after, that baby, their baby.

And Elder Eyring just wanted to say, with all that was in him, Thank you.

Bill Gold was the columnist for the Washington Post when I was a kid who taught me to love reading the newspaper–he was wise, he was funny, he was generous, he was and showed so much that was good about the area I grew up in.

And I remember his word contests: take any word, add one letter, and give it a definition.

My friend Ruth was marveling a few minutes ago as we chatted that, unlike herself, our friend Holly can knit lace, socks, intricate patterns, and chat at the same time without losing track of the pattern or dropping a stitch–only, the way Ruth put it was, she could do it simpultaneously.

And Ruth goes for the Gold!

It’s late as I type and I’ll come up with more tomorrow, but here’s a start.

Yarn’t. Not going to knit that one.

Musht. Gotta finish that oatmeal.

Spilk. What I did with my hot cocoa on my blouse on Sunday. (Right at the bottom, and I quickly rinsed it off, no problem.)

Prolitics. The likelihood that your candidate will win in November.

Windoww. Why I have scars on my arm from when I was eight.

Hamperr. The one with the happy cat in it.

Birrdfeeder. The one they would go to to cool off on a hot day.

And with that I’m off to bed. Anyone?

Edited to add in the morning, squirrtel. What my supersoaker is.

It’s hard to be a teenager and have your dad decide to take a new job and uproot the family and did you ask to move away from all your friends? Did you?

Not that any of them said any such thing to me, just, I’ve been a teenager and I’ve had friends move in/move out even if my own folks were kind enough to stay put for 47 years in the house built for them when I was three. One of the quirks of growing up in the Maryland suburbs was having friends afraid their dad–it was always the dad, back then–might lose the election and then they would have to leave. Back in those days, Congressmen moved their families to DC–and if their political fortunes didn’t hold, then, often, back out.

So. A new family recently moved into the area and showed up at church, the kids ranging from teenage boys to a babe in arms.

The mom is always smiling. Always cheerful. I like her already.

We got sent a picture–and I want to show it, but I don’t know how to access it from this computer–of my son and his little Parker, toddler totally copying daddy, very cute. Richard printed it out at work on Friday and I folded one of the copies and put it in my purse.

So there was the mom today by the door when the meetings were over, waiting for her husband to find her, holding the baby, her two teenage boys standing in front of her. They really don’t know me from Adam yet, so I explained I had one grandson: and then I pulled out that picture.

The mom went, oooh, so cute. The teens leaned in for a closer look and had the same reaction. They had a baby brother. They totally got this babies-are-adorable thing.

And then they looked up from the picture and into my eyes, still smiling.

I think they made friends on the spot with me as much as I did with them.