He answered the phone. “You want me to hand it to her?” And then he continued listening, and then talking, and then finally held out the phone, telling me my doctor wanted to talk to me.  Acknowledging afterwards she’d wanted to talk to him first.

Because apparently I would give too cheerful a spin on things.

Busted.

But no! Really! I woke up with a temp of 99 and able to stand upright this morning for the first time since this started. (Just don’t push it too long.) I guess all we had to do was buy that blood pressure meter to make my bp stay up enough. (Gotta love that $1.62/ounce breakdown on that price. Doesn’t everybody buy electronics by the pound? So, how cheap would that make an Ipad2…?)

Note in the reviews that there were some complaints that the thing read too high. Note that some of those reviews are answered by others gently saying, you need to read the instructions. Palm up…

And the best? Who knew 5.5 mm rosewoods were so heavy, but, I got about 400 stitches knitted tonight. It felt like I was reclaiming a part of myself.

As the phone call was ending, Richard was going, Ups and downs, ups and downs.

“Did he say ups and downs?”

Yes he did. But I’m ready to stay at the ups.

If you haven’t discovered her yet, I highly recommend Sharon Randall: her writing, and, simply, her. Her column used to run in our paper, and for years, till it fell apart, I kept a particular one on our whiteboard. (I had a description of it up but it didn’t at all do it justice so I’m deleting it.)

Her columns continue on her website, and I just thought I’d mention. I love that she’s got a first grandson just a little older than mine.

Oh, and as for Richard catching my germs? Apparently they gave him a one-night scam.

I’m someone who can walk around with 80/40 blood pressure, so I’m not sure what it is with this ongoing get down quick before you fall down thing all morning.

I picked up a Little Dee book to make myself laugh after a fairly long day.  I’m looking forward to knitting my Lisa Souza cashmere/silk when I have the oomph to wind it up. It’ll come.

Richard’s hoping he’s not coming down with this…

So our friend Phyllis brought us dinner and tailored it around what I can eat, with pecan brownies to cheer him up. She’s a peach!

This morning had my Dr R’s old phrase ringing in my ears: “Progress is nonlinear.”

Uh, yeah.

Note to self: do not faint in the bathroom (nope, nothing got hurt) in the middle of changing the ileostomy dressing. Just–trust me, don’t. Richard laughed a few minutes later when he came in the room, which was exactly the comic relief I needed just then. He’s a treasure.

Meantime, my friend Teena brought more flowers, another card, homemade cookies, and some mango sherbet. I am ready for this germ to get out of here, but meantime, again, I am well taken care of and very grateful.

I’m catching up on some book reading; today, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and I quite recommend it. Oh, and Don, you grew up in San Francisco, the video here is for you: a tornado today just off Ocean Beach! Or, more technically and in Eensy Weensy Spider terms, a waterspout.

Doing my treadmill time last night, I was pleased at how energetic I felt. It had been a really good day.

Today so much not. Woke up with a sore throat and fever and the lupus went bonkers. I did a little email and put myself back to bed.

It went downhill fast from there. I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t even lift the phone from above my head in the headboard to call Richard. For hours. I finally willed myself to anyway, because it was so bad that the will to live kicked in and made me.

We just got back from Urgent Care and two IV bags of saline; my kidneys are working now, the heart is behaving, but if tomorrow is like today they want me to come back and get more.

I had Richard bring along a shawl project with me in case they admitted me at Stanford, but they didn’t. Hope springs eternal: can’t go anywhere without my knitting, even if.

Sue Nelson of XRX has been accepted into an experimental treatment, Stage 1 trials (the kind you don’t ever want to have to be in but are ecstatic to get into when all else has failed–which is where she is) for her Stage 4 ovarian cancer. She will have to fly in for treatment repeatedly, her insurance may deny all, and her expenses will be huge. XRX is raffling off not the book but their actual Great American Afghan to try to help her meet what this is going to take for her. Sue helped piece that afghan.

Benjamin Levisay’s post about it is here.  Tickets are $10 a shot. I’m joining the many trying to help and to get the word out.

———

Edited to add: the USGS is showing three (now seven) strong earthquakes in the last hour in Japan, including an unfathomable 8.9 (now reappraised as a 9) and a tsunami that followed, with more warned of. Forty-one quakes in two days and that number changing fast. My prayers go to everybody there, too. My stars.

While we were in San Diego:

“Your ring!”

What about my ring?

“Your ring!” she couldn’t get over it.  Then, finally, “Conway had that ring!”

I explained that during one of the times I’d been very ill my more standard wedding ring didn’t fit anymore and I’d started wearing this one, since my husband didn’t mind: four turquoise stones, one for each of our children. (I didn’t add, and the fact that it needs to be polished and paid attention to to keep its shine I find to be a good reminder.)

Conway had had that exact same ring, and clearly he wore it enough that she remembered it.

Wow. I had no idea.

And then my daughter-in-law’s aunt went on to tell me a story to match my own: her father, as a young dad, had been a reporter in the next county and happened to come and take a picture near the university here of an adorable little boy and his daddy; it got published in the paper.

A couple decades later, he found himself telling her, Wait, that name rings a bell…

She married that little boy. And that daddy was Conway.

A comment by a young mom at church today prompts this post.

Year: 1984, Baby #2. Scene: Toddler #1, a beautiful angel of a child up till then, had become  the instant proverbial Two Year Old (TM) now that she had competition for my attention. These screaming fists-pounding-the-floor temper tantrums? Where on earth had they come from? And of course when she cried the baby cried in sympathy and pretty quickly we were all miserable while I tried to reason with her, hug her, scold her, time her out, anything, please make something work.

I heard from one mom much later that what she had done was to get down on the floor alongside her little kid and throw a no-holds-barred tantrum act herself, fists and feet flailing, making her kid stop and look at her like, Are you crazy? Why are you making this scene? In public!

But that was years in the future.

In tired new-mother desperation one day, I called my Mom.

Mom said, Offer to pour a glass of cold water on her head.

Me: Say what?

Mom: Offer to pour cold water on her head. A little cold water does wonders on tantrums. Trust me.

Note that she didn’t say to just pour it, she said to make it the child’s decision.

So then I was just waiting for my chance, curious to try it, and hoped it would come at a time at home where I had instant access to the tap. It was. She did.

I smiled sweetly, totally knowing I could do this, and in my best loving-Mom voice asked, Sam? Would you like me to pour some cold water on your head?

NO! MILK!

Given who the clean-up crew would have been on that one, thanks, we’ll let that suggestion pass, and I quickly half-filled a cup at the sink. She screamed away and I poured out just a few drops into the top of her blonde curls–just enough to get her attention.

Instant end of tantrum while she assessed this new outcome. (Me: Wow! Magic!)

The next time she threw a major tantrum we were again, thankfully, at home, and I smiled and happily reiterated the offer.

End of screaming fit. Like flipping a switch.

After that I only had to offer I think once more ever.

She learned at the ripe old age of 27 months that she didn’t have to be controlled by rage but could stop. That she could respond instead to my being loving to her. It required I be at my best for it to work, and I wasn’t going to risk losing a foolproof method by fooling with it with a bad mood, but it let her be her best, too.

And I felt like the best Mom ever.

So, with a thousand thanks to my Mom and her wisdom, I pass the idea along.

They had given it a 50% chance of snow for yesterday or today, the last snow here having been in the mid ’70’s. My kids were disbelieving; I was hoping; my very old snow shovel that, it turned out, was not good for digging to China, was waiting with dilapidation; it didn’t happen. (Yet.) Unless you were several hours south of here at the beach.

And in that toasty weather, Clara, the celebrated City Hall peregrine falcon, laid her first red egg yesterday; every single year that first has come earlier than the previous year’s. Eggs, then white fluffballs, then baby birds with enormous feet, hanging over the 18th floor ledge waving a wing at the gawkers, and–okay, I won’t make them grow up too fast. 240 mph is going to be fast enough.

My resident Cooper’s hawk chased a dove and away.

I saw another Cooper’s standing on a light pole near downtown yesterday and  wondered if it’s one of our previous year’s hatchlings. All these magnificent big birds that had all but vanished when I was a kid: and they are back.

At least one of my Bewick’s wrens has her belly full and low and she seems hungrier than usual. Sweet gherkins or sour for you, m’dear?

And with my white wool of a previous Spring now blue yarn and put to needle, a few more stitches wrap happily around my life.

Yesterday morning, dark o’clock:

Me: “So am I going on this trip by myself or are you coming with me?” (Sometimes my husband is difficult to wake up in the mornings. Sometimes, I am.)

Him: (leaping out of bed, suddenly awake at last.)

So we hit the road later than planned. Got to security, had the boarding passes, went to pull out my wallet and ID.

No wallet.

Me, wondering: so is he going to go on this trip by himself, or am I coming with him?

He spared me the sun exposure to run back to the car himself to see if it had fallen out of my purse there. That, and, I don’t run too fast and there truly was no time to spare. I plunked down, just out of the way of the people coming up the stairs there at San Jose’s new terminal as I searched again for the wallet I already knew wasn’t in there because I’d already taken nearly everything out of my purse and my knitting bag.

A clearly pregnant young woman was very sympathetic when I, feeling rather in the way, half-apologized: I was supposed to be going to see my first grandchild for the first time but…

Did she pray for me? I don’t know. I do know that my husband is not the go-to guy when you want a missing thing found.

He found it! (I wish I could somehow tell her to thank her for her kindness, whoever she was.)

The security guy saw him coming back and waved us to the front and got us immediately through his part. Thank you San Jose Airport security.

Remember how I say I don’t read knitting charts well with my head injury, that the x’s  just bounce around? Yeah, and so I headed us to the gate one shy of the one we were supposed to go to. Richard, stressed, read the leaving time there and the relative lack of people and pronounced, “It’s 8:40. We’ve missed our flight.”

I stared at him disbelieving and in my fatigue could only exclaim, in the protest of a small child, “Is not!”

Is not indeed. Next gate. We got there after the boarding line had formed but just before the fliers filed on. Too close, way too close. We are not morning people and it showed.

And from there on out it was all wonderful. I finished Kim’s soft Malabrigo hat in the air and she later pronounced the colorway perfect.  Our son picked us up in his in-laws’ car: his wife had needed a break from the snow and cold and some time to decompress at home, showing off the baby to her friends and family, and so they were blessing the baby in her parents’ ward.

To say we fell utterly in love at first sight, even more than we ever did before via pictures and Skype, would be a vast understatement that anyone who’s ever seen their own child or grandchild for the first time would understand instantly. Parker is perfect. And when he looked in our eyes, his new ones a little wobbly from each other, our hearts were claimed forever and we knew each other as if he had already been in our family always.

Soft words and gentle rocking when he was screaming tired, and he settled down in my arms and drifted, quieting, to sleep. Bliss.

His other grandmother fed us and the other relatives who came and the brunch was beautiful, delicious, and carefully done within the realm of my ability–I can see why our daughter-in-law is such a nice person–and then we were off to church for the baby blessing. Kim waited till Parker was about to be taken up to the stand before wrapping him up in that lace christening blanket I’d brought with me, just to make sure it was pristine in the moment it came for.

Babies being only human.

In some ways.

Kim and her whole family were very generous in letting us have cuddle time, and I remember as a new mom how hard it was not to snatch my baby back to hold mine to myself. She got to see how tenderly her father-in-law cradled and snuggled him, and I loved her observing and learning more about where her own husband had gotten his tender touch from.

After the blessing, with the rest of the service continuing on, my Richard held Parker for awhile and then offered me a turn. Kim’s mother’s close friend, sitting on the other side of me, clearly so ached to hold him too that I knew that as the visiting grandmother the highest gift I could offer her was some of my limited time with him–and that she knew it too, though the only words spoken were a, “Would you like to hold him?” and an “Oh of course!” whispered back with such intense wishing and gratitude.

And then I got to see how much this dear woman loved my grandson, very much as if he were her own.

What more could I ask for him to have in his life? My son married into a good family with good friends and we are fortunate to be gathered into their circle. Kim is just the best.

Her mom fed us dinner, too, we visited, we rocked Parker some more, and then we were back to the airport and on our way. I started a new hat…

I took no pictures. Our son has a better camera than mine and he took many and I am happy to wait to see them. But we will both carry forever the pictures in our minds of that beautiful, beautiful baby boy, surrounded on all sides, as were we, by love.

We walked back again down that long terminal. Exit: stage left. Back to our car in the night, and my door had been caught all day on something in Richard’s haste to get back to me. I wondered if the battery was dead or if the Prius was sufficiently protected from losing power that way. Were we going on this last leg of the trip with our car, or not?

It carried us on our way just fine.

Long long long long wonderful wonderful marvelous wonderful day more later.

Meantime. One other Stitches moment yesterday: my water bottle being finished off, I pulled out a juice box–and found to my dismay it had no straw.

Who sells a single serving container without a straw? I don’t remember ever seeing one on it at the store, either, come to think of it. Huh. Well, I could pour it into the bottle, no problem, if I only had a sharp pointy oh wait…stick…

Thing the first:

Last night just around bedtime. Me: I smell something funny.

Him: I don’t smell anything.

Me: Something smells funny; I think it’s more here (standing under the air register in the hall while the heat is blowing.) Do you think the furnace is okay? (Given that we’ve had three die in 24 years here, this is easily worried over.)

Him: (getting out of bed to check) I’m sure it’s fine.

I walk away down the turn in the hall for a moment and suddenly hear behind me, Open the front door!

Me: What? (wondering, why on earth…)

Him: Open the front door, quick!

I run and do so and there he is right behind me, this thing in his hands, running to put it outside on the stone-and-concrete entryway and out in the rain.

Remember that battery pack that didn’t work? He’d tried again to see if he could recharge it after all. I’ve never seen a battery (and we are talking a big battery) bulging all over like a can with a severe case of botulism, ready to blow.

He hadn’t smelled a thing–but he was willing to get up and go check it out.

Thing the second:

As he got in the car tonight after disassembling the scooter in the rain and putting it in the trunk, he remarked, pleased, that I looked far more energetic than last night.

Well, yeah!

I thought, I didn’t have to spend the day anticipating going back across a very busy street and bouncing across the lightrail tracks in the dark and the rain, being low down and out of sight and trying not to be hit by cars while going to my own far across the parking lot, being so cold and soaked–you get a lot wetter sitting than standing–that I could barely feel my fingers, and the basket bouncing right off the wheelchair on an unseen pothole that splashed me and scared me that I might short the thing out while the countdown on the light cycle was getting ever closer, and how do I get to my basket! … And thank you to whoever it was that grabbed it and helped me out, and then I had to try not to be hit by cars in the lot backing out that couldn’t see me at all…

I’d scootered across that lot once after circling in the car for a half hour trying to avoid it, and I knew I had to go back out there. I waited to leave till there would be a crowd going at closing time so at least I wouldn’t be alone.

When I got home and described what it had been like, he went, Nuts to that, he was going  to take me and pick me up right at the door. And he did, and I knew I had no worries. He is *My Hero* (trademarked) and with good reason. I know how lucky I am.

I forgot yesterday to mention another new-to-me vendor that I found absolutely delightful and wanted to praise out loud: Ellen’s Wooly Wonders, with patterns for felted dinosaurs, motorcycles, butterflies, turtles, airplanes, crabs, etc, a new grandmother’s delight and a little kid’s too.  Dreams of orange dragons, in whatever color, came home with me.

My thanks to all the people who stopped me to say hello and for a hug the last two days while I had my head down trying not to cream anybody’s toes but missing the faces above me. Thank you for all the hugs, all the kind words, all the great times hanging out around fellow knitters and crocheters. Stitches West is one of the high points of my year because you all make it so. I hope I returned enough in kind. Lisa Souza, the folks at Abstract Fibers, Melinda and Tess at Tess Designer Yarns–more on that later–Sheila at Ernst Glass, Blue Moon, Malabrigo, Warren of the much-missed Marin Fiber Arts… So many people and I love every one of you. I tell you. This knitting thing: it’s a great life.

And Warm Hats Not Hot Heads is up to 171 tonight. Woohoo!

The first speaker at church today said many things, but one that stuck with me is that her father had told her, if your heart and your head are ever not in agreement, pay attention. Sit down and figure it out till they are.  We are to follow the Spirit that leads to all that is good in our interactions with God, ourselves, and each other.

The second speaker talked about his little sister Katie.

Katie was born with hydrocephalus. I grew up with a kid my age around the corner with that, so I was particularly interested to hear him tell about his sister, whose case was clearly far worse than my friend’s; Katie wasn’t just a little slow, she had definite mental retardation.

Her brain shunt got infected and she passed away recently.

People her family didn’t know not only paid their respects but showed up in their lives to tell their stories. Things the family had never known. Lives she had touched.

And one of those was a girl who, twenty years earlier in kindergarten with her, had been, she realized later, bullying another child in the class.

Katie’s reaction was to step in, hug the victim of the moment, and tell her, Stop! She’s my friend!

To Katie, everyone was her friend.

The woman told the grieving family that it had made a permanent impression on her: from that moment on, she wanted to be more like Katie.

A kid who was different.

A kid who set the example for everyone else around her to live up to.

A kid whose heart and head were forever in the same place.

My father being an art dealer, we spent some of my summers growing up going museum-hopping.

I remember, on one such trip at 16, admiring a gorgeous landscape in a room full of natural Western scenes from the 1800’s, and an artist friend of Dad’s, Nat Leeb, asking me, “What’s wrong with this painting?”

Nothing was wrong with it, it was beautiful!

Look again.

*confused look*

Then he pointed it out: the light is coming from this direction, lighting up this area and leaving that area in shadow–but over here, in this one corner, look: the shadow goes in the wrong direction.  The light also should not have caught that detail; it’s in the wrong place for it.

M. Leeb decided to teach me a lesson on how to draw as we waited for our meals at a restaurant. “You observe for ten minutes. Draw for one.” And then he grabbed the paper placemat and drew a horse by sketching a perfect series of quick connecting-Slinky ovals that surprised me: he was right! It was a horse! Here, he told me, you draw it like this and learn the shape of it before you draw it in a different form.

I knew I was getting a lesson from a master but struggled with my teenage desire to harrumph that I knew what shape a horse was. I had the sense to simply nod and say okay.

My little sister was probably absorbing the lesson too, though I don’t remember: it was where she totally outshone me.  I, being more musical, got the piano lessons from a master teacher; Anne got the art lessons at the Corcoran Gallery in DC.

(Side conversation with the folks just now: Anne rode her bicycle a good ten miles+ each way down the C&O Canal towpath during her summers in high school to get to those lessons. It’s funny what you don’t remember about your siblings that was so day-to-day to them way back when.)

So. Today Dad wanted to see the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. After the Loma Prieta quake, the museum was closed for years and years, needing millions to rebuild and redo, and now he could finally see it again.

It was way better than the building that was destroyed. The marble walls and high, ornately done ceilings of the new, the rotunda at the center, all reminded me of Washington, DC: the Capitol building, the Senate offices, and on and on. I said that to Mom and she gave me a look of, Oh yes!

I’d seen last summer’s exhibit with my niece, but the place is surprisingly large and with her toddler in tow we hadn’t made it upstairs.

There’s no way Dad was going to miss upstairs. He had waited too long for this. There’s way more than all those Rodins and a few paintings to be seen.

Two Picassos up there! I’d had no idea.

But what intrigued me most was one small plaque: it said that with the completion of the transcontinental railroad–remember, Stanford was a railroad baron, and two of the ceremonial spikes from the joining of those rail lines was in a box downstairs on display–with that new transportation, the land that, as the plaque put it, had belonged only to dimestore novels and Twain and Brette Harte were suddenly open now to artists.  At a time that landscapes were considered the pinnacle of art in popular American culture.

And so they came.

We’d been on our feet a long time and I finally sat in front of my favorite there to wait for Mom and Dad to finish. It was a painting of the head of the American River in California. It was huge and the details were exquisitely done. You could almost feel the slipperiness of the moss on the twiggy brush near the river, the white of a rider’s shirt catching the sunlight exactly so as it filtered between the mountain peaks to burst on the area of greatest interest. There were men on horseback, a burst of cloud at the top of the falls, rushing, falling water that splashed on the canvas, twists and turns of desert plants. The thing was just gorgeous.

But dang if the light didn’t shadow one mountain back there the wrong way. I wonder if I just rediscovered my long-lost artist.

I knew what I really wanted to give my folks for Christmas, but I just didn’t know how to pull it off. I so did not want them to get thrown in a drawer. I did say what my wish was; Dad’s reaction was, “What if I don’t wear them?”

“Fine,” I retorted, “then I’ll stop wearing mine!”

“No! You need them!”

“Welllllll…??”

And now while they’re here…

I drove them to my audiologist’s office today for them to fit Dad for my old Oticons, perfectly good hearing aids–for someone with better hearing than I have now.

Joan the technician summoned Dad back to make the earmolds and Mom went back with him; I, knowing the size of the room they were likely going to, stayed put with my knitting.

After they were out of earshot, though, I got up.  I went over to the receptionist and told her I wanted to pay for those molds.

She protested, “But they’re not even back yet!” They have to do an impression of your ear canals, send it out, get it back, check the fit, attach it to the behind-the-ears, and only then are you done. She would have told me all that, but I just smiled and said, “I know.” I gestured towards where they’d gone and–she got it. She told me she didn’t know yet how much to charge me for John-the-audiologist’s time for adjusting my old aids to match Dad’s audiogram, though.

Fine, not a problem, we’ll deal with that part later, just, quick before they come out.

She grinned. On it!

Joan told us, coming out to talk to me too when she was done, that the one thing is that the length of the tubing is a question. Yes, John likes to check the fit of everything and Mom and Dad won’t still be here, but tubing or fit, Dad can take it to an audiologist local to him for that last little bit. Or we might just totally luck out and have it come out right.

As I handed her my old aids, she smiled, “Oh, I like these. These are good ones.”

Not as good as my Sonic Innovations, but then, Dad doesn’t have a musician’s ear so he wouldn’t care about sounds being pitch-perfect. (Note that I have no idea what Oticon’s latest might be, this is simply what I had.)

And the thing is: I told Dad these were my back-ups in case my new ones ever had to go in for repair.  And then I told him how much the Oticons had cost.

“Well then I can’t take them.”

“In two and a half years I’ve never had to repair them. ” Then I told him how much my new ones  had cost.

Because by golly, I knew those hearing aids needed to come with the gentle pressure of John and Joan asking if they’d worked out well for him; I knew that if Dad knew I’d given up something valuable to me for him to have these, he would wear them out of sheer gratitude; he’s a good guy.

I told my mom she was going to need patience too with how things were going to change for him–having the world suddenly much louder is going to take him some getting used to, no question about that.

But I remember how, back when my older children were babies and I would start my mornings with a long racewalk before my husband left for work, there was the day after I got my first-ever set where I stepped out my front door in the quiet of the early day.

Only this time it wasn’t quiet.  I stopped dead right there on the doorstep, stunned.  What on earth were all those sounds.  Where on earth *were* they.

Birds. There were birds singing, greeting the new March morning. I hadn’t heard birds like that since age 12. I. Had. Forgotten.

Back home again, sitting down to lunch, Dad suddenly realized, aghast, “We never paid for those molds!”

I looked up. “Yes we did.”

“No we didn’t!”

“Yes. We did.”

Heh.