So there were little rumbly post-op things that had been bugging me for awhile.  It had become time to at least ask and get them out of the way.  I asked my doctor; he said go ask the surgeon.  So I made an appointment without pushing on the date, just, whenever.

One of the often-wonderful things about a teaching hospital is this: someone came in first who introduced himself as Dr. X, but the title was a rather new pair of shoes still being broken in.  He was very earnest. He began to take a history. (Didn’t matter if they had all my history already, this was a skill I imagine doctors spend their whole lives getting better at: how to ask a patient for details, how to observe them in their responses, what the questions should be.)

This guy was bright and he was good and I said to my daughter afterwards, I can see why he got into Stanford.  I told him that since making the appointment two weeks earlier, the symptoms had eased; we chuckled together at that. It’s so often so true.  I told him that you doctors cure things simply by being there for us and ready, and there you go!

He was someone I knew I could say that to.  I say he was good, because I knew from the moment he walked in that it didn’t matter who I was, he wanted the very best outcome for me and he would do everything in his power to make it so.

And he was perfectly comfortable telling me when he didn’t know something (yet, I would add) when I asked him a stoma question.  I thought, that ready humility will serve you and your future patients well.

He was thorough; for instance, he wanted to know how my hearing loss came to be.

I told him about the baby aspirin incident. I felt, by his interested *Huh*!, that I was bringing his textbook learning to life. And again, when I told him about the LE cells in my biopsies eleven years ago at the Crohn’s onset.

He asked me how long I’d had lupus.

I took a deep breath.  So many stories behind a simple question.  And told him simply this:  I’d had symptoms since I was 13; I was diagnosed at 31. In between, there were a lot of “are you sure?” and it must be all in my head reactions, so, “I learned to shut up fast.”

He bowed his head a little and shook it, grieving, and said quietly, “Bad medicine.”

“They didn’t know,” I comforted him. And it’s true; it was much easier to diagnose when it all hit pretty much at once, rather than in bits and pieces scattered across the years.

The surgeon, whom I quite like, came in later, and it was interesting to me that the dynamic changed when I was in that gown now and the surgeon was standing as he talked to me.  Which is how it had to be, no quibbles there.  I didn’t want to waste his time.  I figured that what he wanted to know, besides any questions he asked me directly–since I have seen him at his own question-asking best and know he’s good at it too–he’d just gotten from the other guy.  I was keen not to make him late for his next patient sitting in the waiting room without even my pink-shawl knitting project for entertainment now (one elderly fellow had been quite taken with it), keen to deal with the most specific issues at hand and get them out of the way.

But I wondered afterwards whether I’d done that part as well as I might have or not. I don’t know. Could I have asked more questions? Oh, sure, always.  But he did a good job of taking the time to examine and observe and set my mind at ease.

So what I do know is, I came out of there very reassured that no, the Crohn’s is not back, and I have nothing to worry about.

And that one young new doctor was keen to learn from what I, too, had to offer him in my small part of his Stanford experience.

Well done, sirs.

The robo-call reminder said, I thought, 12:30 and to be there a half hour early to check in with my insurance card, yadda yadda. I hit 4 for repeat this message. Heard it the same.

So I showed up at Stanford accordingly.  Got a confused receptionist, who finally found my name an hour down the list; she waved me away, clearly bothered for my sake that I’d wasted my time, and told me to come back later for my 1:30 appointment.

I stepped aside and did a quick loop around to the other side of the small waiting area, which put me in the hallway for maybe a dozen steps–that was away, right?  Sat down back in there with my shawl project, knitted till exactly 1:00, stood back up, smiled brightly at her and pronounced, “I’m here now.”

She cracked up.

I got an unexpected hour of knitting with absolutely no other demands possible on me. And this was a problem? But what was cool was, she totally got that after she saw what I was doing.

Richard and I went to a concert to hear the resident musicians at Menlo College performing tonight:  everything from Brahms to Gershwin’s jazzy notes to a new artist in New York whose work our friend Russ had commissioned but had had to download the music, still written in longhand, for the performance. It was that new.  I didn’t hear the composer’s name nor Russ’s description very well, but I tell you: New York City put into music, beautiful music, is how the piece sounded to me. The subway, the rush of commuters, the quiet of the museums, he’d captured it exquisitely and I could spend hours listening just to that and whatever else the man might write.  (Someone can stop me right here and tell me it was all about crop circles in cornfields or something, whatever, I  loved it.)

That was from the fellow who, if you will, wrote the pattern that knitted all the sounds together.

The men who were working with their hands using instruments invented centuries ago to create a thing new and unique each time they followed those given patterns were the musicians (you get to hear them here) that are the Saint Michael Trio.  They were selling CDs to help fund music festivals and commissions such as the one we got to hear.

It strikes how what they do echoes what we knitters do. From our ever-improving skills and our hands and our hearts to reaching outward.

And then they topped off the evening with a soothing-then-rocking-out “Stairway to Heaven” that was the best. version. EVER !!!

So it was knitting group night at Purlescence, and some people I hadn’t seen in awhile were there along with the regulars.  Having talked on end there about the antics of the falcons over at City Hall, I brought Hilary’s falcon carefully tucked away in a box for safety–not even thinking till just now as I write this that wow, just like the elevator rides for the misfledged fledglings!

A woman walked in wearing a “Not that kind of doctor” t-shirt; another stood up and they threw their arms around each other.  Something was mentioned about not having had a good conversation since 1994; they were old buddies.

I wasn’t following their conversation, not wanting to be in the way, but the one I didn’t know was working on the most incredible beaded glove in a deep sapphire blue with beads, both sparkly and plainer, and just the slightest brush of lighter shades mixed into the blue. The Milky Way?  There was fine embroidery and I thought, the Big Dipper!

Turns out I got that one right. She was an astrophysicist PhD and she was knitting the galaxies into her gloves.  Wow.  I wanted to stare at the one in her hands and study its emerging skies.  For me, the daughter of a contemporary art dealer, if I were doing a starry starry night, it would look like a Vincent Van Gogh–backgrounds are funny things.

She was visiting from Boston, if I heard right; as their conversation went on, there was a fellow, one of the regulars, who was spinning away at his wheel next to the pair.  He’s been quietly working away at that green wool roving for a goodly number of weeks.

And at some point that I missed but got told about afterwards, he interjected, Oh, you must know my mother!

His mother, it turns out, had been the woman’s thesis advisor.

Look at all those stars. Ours IS a small world!

I was channeling my inner Shel Silverstein: oh, I’m looking for my missing fleece…

And my inner Laura Numeroff.

The rest of Edgar’s curly locks had gone missing, and I have someone I want to share him with.

So then a closet suspected of holding them hostage got gleaned of Goodwill-ables.

So then discoveries were made of, wow, that really fits me post-op! Or, wow, that really really doesn’t wear well now with–should I–never mind. Out!

And if a closet gets gleaned of Goodwill-ables, it starts other cleaning in motion.

And if cleaning is in motion, it spreads to other rooms.

And if it spreads to other rooms, you need some hot cocoa. (Trust me on this one.)

And if you have hot cocoa, you have the perfect set-up for knitting with your feet propped up because you could use the rest. But the best knitting requires spinning up some fleece on that wheel. And Edgar would be perfect, if you could find….

And one last thing–if you have a  swept patio and you put a big plastic pot outside there to transplant your tomato plant into and pour in the last of one potting soil bag but decide lifting the other one in its entirety must wait for another day, the squirrels will attack it en masse, grabbing and pulling from opposing sides on their tippy-toes and will knock it over repeatedly trying to climb into it and will roll dirt all over the patio because they know, they just know!, that there has to be good stuff in there just waiting to be raided and you you and YOU get out of here this is MY plunder!

Fer cryin’ out loud, give it a little time, willya?

I was telling a friend her dog’s picture with it wearing deelyboppers was cute, and I got back a query of “Deelyboppers?”

That gave me one of those instant, oh, good, now I’m old! moments.  So I found this site.  I had guessed it was the 80’s, maybe early 80’s when they started being a big thing?

1982. I’m good. And scroll down a bit and check out that cordless phone. I knew someone who had one of those back when we were all dirt-poor grad students living in married student housing, making her purchase (her husband had just accepted a semi-mythical Real Job) all the more memorable: the sound quality was so much bad radio static, the price something Steve Jobs would have loved. (The electronics, though, not so much.)

Yes, children, when you were little we had to shovel the driveway both ways uphill in the snow with our telephones. Well, they were big enough to shovel with, anyway. If we’d had one of those. Which we didn’t.

But those deelyboppers?  Baby, we put those on you.

There was a visitor in church today. I didn’t recognize him, he didn’t remember me, but he really took me back.

For his 40th birthday he and his wife had decided to go do a road trip and visit where he’d served as a Mormon missionary as a young man, and our ward was a place he’d remembered fondly.

For twenty years.

Twenty years ago last month I was diagnosed with SLE, ie, lupus. (The Crohn’s add-on with SLE cells came nine years after that.)

My kids were 2, 4, 6, and 8, and I had no idea if I would live to see them grow up.  My mom’s cousin had died of lupus a week before her wedding date.  It did not help when I read outdated literature that described some of my complications and stated baldly that five years was the outside of such a one’s life expectancy.

I had severe rheumatoid-type arthritis the first six months, to the point I had to use plastic utensils to eat.  My ear doctor, to whom I will forever be grateful, figured out when I had a horrific day of complete, utter stone-cold deafness in reaction to naproxen that my progressive hearing loss had been an allergic reaction to aspirin all along–thank goodness it came back to what it had been when the med wore off.

So no NSAIDs.  No pain meds other than tylenol, and even that was out later when I went on chemo for the Crohn’s.  I was severely allergic to Plaquenil.  I utterly refused for years, until it was a matter of life and death, to try potentially mind-altering steroids–let me at least keep control of my brain, if I can’t control anything else! (And then my brain handled them just fine but they had not the slightest effect on my disease.)

I was on my own with this.  Well, heck, I got through childbirth, now we were just going to have to have lifebirth.  I invested in Corelle and set the stoneware aside.  I began to learn how to give up the outdoor life–while wondering what on earth effect it would have on my kids!

I started to learn to cope.  I’m still learning to cope.

I have no idea how we got through it. I have no idea how we did it. But look at us now; I think we did okay. Actually, to be honest: I think this helped me grow up far more than I ever could have without it, shaped me into a more compassionate human being, shaped my children into being more compassionate human beings, and I am intensely grateful for the experience.

I’m also unspeakably grateful that right now, it’s in the closest thing to remission I have had in all these twenty years.

First, the evening peregrine report I gave to my fellow falconistas:

Clara showed up a few minutes before eight and paced the inside of the
nestbox back and forth, finally stopping, head bowed with Little Boy
Blue's remains just in front of her. Her beak opened wide a moment, her
head went down, and she appeared to be trying to push it all down, down
into the gravel with the top of her head bowed way over. She came back
up with her empty beak closed.

Then she hopped out of the box. Flew to her sentry spot. She preened
just a moment, and then was away and out of sight.

Kekoa and Maya continue to hang out on the louver, Kekoa's face to the
building, Maya's in her back--wait, now she's looking around again. But
she's clearly no longer afraid of heights nor of standing on the edge
looking down. Cool.

Meantime, there was a two-hour hearing health to-do at our clinic today and I was curious to know what the latest and greatest hearing aids might be.  I decided to go.

I made it through the first 35 minutes of, this is what hearing loss is, this is what hearing aids are, and this–I guffawed out loud without meaning to, having gotten my first pair at 27–is why they won’t make you look old. The statistic appeared on their PowerPoint: 65% of the people who wear them are under 65!

Granted, I’m not new at this.  But I was disappointed that when the speaker talked about speech sounding like mumbling without hearing aids, she didn’t say outright that the reason is because consonants are higher pitched than the vowels because they’re made with your tongue against your teeth instead of vibrating in your throat. I remember what a revelation and how extremely helpful that one piece of information was to me at 18 when I was told I was going slowly deaf (it was an aspirin allergy, we eventually found out).  It all made sense now why I could hear someone and not process what they were saying.

Can you imagine some person there who IS old–the conference room was packed with old–who thinks they’re going senile when that’s all that’s the matter? I wanted to exclaim, Be merciful, woman, don’t dumb it down!

I escaped.  When one of the audiologists stepped out the crowded conference-room door in front of me, I followed her. She’d gone to the end of the hall to direct incoming human traffic if need be. Well, so I was the traffic, then: I had questions to ask, definitely, and no patience to sit through another 85 minutes of that, not even with my makes-me-look-old knitting.

The best thing to do, she told me, was go talk to the vendors set up outside in the courtyard.

Greaaaaaat… We peeked through the blinds together and she pointed out a particular table in the shade near the door–I later went to the guy and said, I can’t be out in the sun at all. You’ve got two minutes. He used his three minutes well. And I went home with the usual two temporary very small spots of white-out in my vision that are my first sign of sun overdose. Worth it. They have a music setting now… I need to learn more, but I’ve got the brochure and I’ve started.

Meantime, upstairs, as she and I talked, I got the impression she was enjoying being able to be really helpful and informative for someone who was motivated and who knew what she was talking about.  For me, I was thrilled at being able to talk about the health stuff that is part of the context without having a new person get all sorry about it–it just is, is all, move on.

She told me what I needed to know about cochlear implants should I have to have that next surgery (I’ve spent the last four or five days getting over yet another blockage) and should I again lose hearing from the pain meds–tylenol. I can do tylenol.  Which is not so good in the scalpel department.  I described the dilaudid going into the IV and the voices of the medical personnel around me going out.

I am a musician. A fairly deaf musician, but a musician. She told me the implants wouldn’t give me music quite well enough–but they would give me back speech. She talked about having to retrain the brain to hear again amidst noise, and I was like, yeah yeah been there done that a couple of times now I know all about that. But then, she said: for speech, my hearing would be normal with this.

She said it again for emphasis.  Normal.

I very nearly burst into tears on the spot. Which totally surprised me.

But would I give up music, really hearing music at perfect pitch, for life? No.

Which is fine because they wouldn’t give me the implants at Stanford without putting me through a bajillion tests to make absolutely sure I can’t manage on the hearing aids. And I can.

At least until that next surgery.

But now I have a backup plan for something that had had me in such great fear.  After having been told over and over in  years past (before the surgeries and the reaction) that cochlear implants would do me no good.

They would do me unfathomable good should I come to need them.  Again, I have a backup plan, now that I need one.  And I cannot begin to tell you what a relief that is.

Another peregrine post–they grow up so fast, the season’s so short.

Maya made it into a palm tree this morning but was being harassed by some crows. (Note that one of the San Francisco fledglings died on its first flight last year while being chased by ravens.)  Her mother tried to help out.  Her father finally decided he’d had enough of that and buzzed them: Don’t you mess with my daughter!

They didn’t let up.  He divebombed them–at which point they backed off and gave her her space.  She flew out of that badbird neighborhood.

I noticed the peregrines did indeed eat crow later at lunch. So there.

Maya flew around near City Hall, bit by bit, losing altitude perch by perch as she flew without quite making it home. One report said she’d climbed five flights of outside stairs! You know, you *are* a bird, there’s an easier way to do that…

Finally she ended up on the ground right in front of the main door of the Rotunda at City Hall, exhausted, a peregrine protester, declaring emphatically that it is indeed true: you can’t flight City Hall.  Binoculars on the ground had been following her, City Hall was notified, and so it was that the facilities people surrounded her in a circle till the rescuers could get to her.

And then like last year, it was a hat, a box, a trip up the elevator, a dousing on an already-rainy day just to make it clear she was not to fly off in a panic while the rescuers fled the roof but was to sit there and take it easy.

And she did.  Real easy. Mostly she hid her face from that scary edge, still not used to this heights thing, staying in one place and snoozing her fatigue off.  Meantime, her parents–and her brother!–did flybys around and around overhead, screaming warnings to the two-legged intruders in their territory.

Kekoa couldn’t keep it up too long with his still-short wings, though. He took a rest, then eventually a short hop up to where his sister was and stayed right by her and kept her company like a good little brother.

But the little scamp couldn’t resist sticking his head over the edge, watching the camera following him, eyeballing it and playing peek-a-boo again.  Oooh, is it still there? Is it still moving? Does it taste good? If I sit on it again will it hatch?

At one point, EC flew into the nest when none of the others were around and hopped over to where the remains of his son Little Boy Blue still lay.  He stood there, head bowed towards it as if considering, for several long moments.  Then to my great surprise he tried to bury a part of it in the gravel in the nestbox.

Then he flew.

After something like six hours, finally the parents brought food down to the runway area and that did it:  Maya came down and got a good bite. The cameras switched to her just seconds before and caught her going over and most of the way down, wings flapping properly. There now, dear, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

She is on the upper ledge behind the nestbox for the night. Kekoa is on the louver where he can keep an eye on her.

I’m grateful to those who took the time to be the boots on the ground ready to rescue as needed. (I can just imagine the crick in one’s neck after doing that all day.)  They were needed.

And all is well now in falconland.

(Added later) Okay, here’s something new: it’s 10:30 pm and *Clara* is in the nestbox! With her daughter standing sentry!  Clara has a classic spot where she spends her nights where she can see her young in the box, once they’re old enough and it’s warm enough that they don’t need to be tucked under her wings but she still wants to watch over her flock by night. The city lights fill the upper background, the runway below; it is the iconic shot of her.

I watched. She came out and flew up to her usual spot.  There you go.  Maya, who earlier in the night had been pancaked flat like a young falcon does, is standing there, too, at the end of that same ledge. Watching over her brother below.

A familiar scene: Costco, late Saturday afternoon.  In the fruit aisle. A dad trying not to buy the wrong box among the too-picked-over whatevers.  Distracted by two adorable little girls sitting seatbelted in his cart, ages about 2 1/2 and 4.

The girls were wearing identical dresses, their blonde curls brushed and carefully done up, cute as all get-out, and they were on the edge of being bored.  They were clearly well-loved kids.  They were being rambunctiously cheerful, in that way that experienced parents know will turn into tears instead in an instant on the part of the littler child fairly soon now if they kept that up at that rate.

The dad could see it coming, too.  He looked tired.  He tried to get them to calm down and hold a little more still, clearly wishing this shopping trip were over.  What they wanted, of course, was for him to stop and pay attention to them for a moment–many moments, hey, kids are kids–but his face was pleading that he had to buy these groceries and the store was closing in 15 and he just wanted to check out the apricots and actually look at them a moment first.  Okay?

Out came the handknitted fingerpuppets.  I apologized for butting into his space, basically, telling him I’d had four kids in six years; would they like these to play with?

His whole face changed in that instant.  He was thrilled.  I told him they were from a Peruvian women’s co-op.  He exclaimed, “That’s so cool!” turning them over and over in his hands, marveling at the details. Fingerpuppets!

I smiled and quickly got out of their way–last I saw, he was the one still playing with them in great delight, holding them out for his daughters to see.  But I came away thinking, that guy doesn’t know it, but his reaction just made it so I won’t forget to do that the next time.

Speaking of which, I need to go re-stock my purse.

I’ve been hoping that that evidence of a successful hunt yesterday morning (hit it, little Garfunkel: Lalalalaaala lalaaala. Feelin’ gravy) wasn’t the vivid-headed parakeet that had spent most of the previous two days here and that you could spot easily in the trees–but it has not been seen since.   Although the hawk or a cat are the more likely cause, squirrels do eat eggs and small or baby birds in the spring when they need protein and their caches of nuts are rotting or sprouting.

What did I tell that flighty little thing?  Never harass an animal that would eat you or you risk a coo d’etat.

Random other item: I don’t know if this link will still be valid by morning, but as the daughter of a modern art dealer, let me say, there are easier ways to diss the artists of the last 100 years or so and this was not one of them. One might say the UPS driver was making a special delivery of performance art to the Hirschhorn.  And it was a bust.

The question was asked in church today: how do you prepare for the unknowable, the un-prepare-for-able.

The usual answers were bandied around, like, this is how we’re ready for the next earthquake, etc etc.  I started to laugh, and the Sunday School teacher’s face lit up and she started to walk towards me holding out the mic in her hands–but I, wanting not to be boring, wanting not to state what seemed so obvious to me and that I knew they all knew anyway, really, just kind of waved her away with a “Don’t GO there!” The room, full of old friends and newer ones, broke out laughing.

I instantly regretted it, though.  Yes, actually, I did have something to say. I am, however, better at writing it than saying it out loud, so here you go:

The only way you can be ready for whatever life might throw at you is to already have had it throw some of it at you. Experience counts.

Experience is only a small part of it.

It’s who we are. Who, I should say, we choose to be.  Every day. In the little details. It adds up.  The little decisions, the little interactions with others, the little reactions to setbacks and how we deal with the aftermath (including of our own making).  A sense of humor is essential.  If our focus is on ourselves–and the really, really hard part about illness is not to get so wrapped up in dealing with it that we’re too focused too inward too often–then we’re not prepared for the next blow.

But if we take each thing life throws at us in terms of, okay, God, I know You love me, I know You say You won’t give me anything we can’t handle together but this part really does seem a bit much to me right now and do You suppose You could trust me just a little less with this testing thing right now? But after that initial reaction, if we go, okay. What am I supposed to learn from this.  Is there some way I can turn it around to be a blessing to someone else.

Then, I say, we stay open to the possibilities around us and no matter what our circumstances may be we are fully alive.

Then, I say, we are prepared.

Okay, No-Blog Rachel, the best part is your fault. I only had that cast-off to do. But I kept not doing it.

The good but bad part is, I found myself out unexpectedly in the sunlight in the afternoon–lupus alert!–in a chance encounter with a neighbor I’d wanted to talk to.  Good idea, bad timing and place.  After maybe 20 minutes my face was flaming into a painful sunburn, at which point I reluctantly excused myself.   I’m glad I had that conversation, very glad for a good neighbor, but when I’m reacting that hard that fast, I know what so often happens next. Maybe I should just go schedule the cardiologist appointment and beat it to it.

I will be highly relieved to have the next week or so turn out okay with no flare. Crossing my needles.  Tightly.

But in an antidote to that, I got a note from Rachel. The end result is, she is coming over here tomorrow to help me wind skeins and to simply have a good time hanging out, or rather, in.  Friend time, risk-free!

She felt bad that an earlier offer to do so hadn’t worked out till now. She had no way to know how much I would be needing, today more than any day in a long time, not to let resentment flare up hard against the lupus I can do nothing about.  Resentment that does no good for anybody.  Her timing was the perfect antidote.

And by golly, I wanted to show off that shawl enough, especially after she complimented the color in the comments, that it is finally now finished and blocking.

I needed that. Thank you, Rachel. I can’t wait!

Happy Earth Day!

The Slinky got totally upstaged today. Even after Michelle suddenly noticed it this afternoon and stopped speechless mid-sentence, her jaw slowly hitting the floor as it entered in what that was out there and what it must be for.

So how do I one-up that moment?

Looking in the fridge for a glass of milk, I see: the whip-cream whipper, not yet empty.   Hey.  It has fat. It has protein. It has what I’ve read that momma squirrels need this time of year (and after the hijinks going on out there, I guarantee you there are momma squirrels this year and which individuals they are likely to be.  Look for the one with the white spot in the center of its back where it got nipped in the action.)

So I took a paper cup. I cut it way down to about two inches tall. I squirted some fresh whipped cream in (don’t forget there’s that little bit of sugar mixed in there, too, just a touch), and of course the gadget sprayed way more than I intended, they always do–quite the sundae there.  Add a little sunflower garnish on top.  Voila.  Then I put it out on the patio.

The black squirrel came to it pretty quickly; she danced around it, a hilarious combination of severe lust and fear of the unknown.  Come close, dash, close, sniff, dash.  This strange set-up sure wasn’t going to take a day of acclimatizing.  Forward and away, forward and away.

A dove took a quick peck at it.  Well, then.  Not going to let some dumb bird show her up.

The next thing I knew, that squirrel was sampling, oh, just the seeds, not that weird white stuff.  Don’t you pay attention to me. (As the camera comes out…) Then holding the cup still with her paws while eating away at the top of the white swizzle. Then suddenly throwing caution to the wind, grabbing the whole thing and running for the grass, where she wrestled it to give up every last drop of cream.  I started to step outside at one point, worried that somehow I’d done damage because it was on her head and she was falling over to the side–but she grabbed it back up from the ground and stuck it back on her head and did it again and again, pulling it down over her ears, trying to reach every smidgen in the bottom seam of that cup. I glanced upwards for the Cooper’s hawk, just in case, but the coast was clear. She fell sideways in ecstasy again.

I tell you, that little animal with its white-fringed whiskers twitching in delight was the funniest thing ever. Then she stashed the magical cup near a tree, hoping it might sprout more later.  Maybe start a whole forest of whipped cream.

Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.

(Edited to add: about three hours later, she came back on that patio, plunked herself down facing me through the window, and just stared, willing me to turn around and look. I had this feeling of being watched and glanced out the window.

May I have more nirvana? Pretty please with whipped cream on top?  I laughed and turned away. She picked herself up, moved a foot or two closer, laid back down again facing me–no time for shyness, this was serious business here–and resumed staring.  BRING. ME. MORE.

When that didn’t work, she stomped off.)

Wait, I thought–you’re still here?

He commutes here once or twice a year from Sweden. I’ve never met his wife, although I’ve knitted her a scarf; I figure, when you live that near the Arctic Circle, a little warmth sent one’s way is always a good thing.

He was there in church last week, but then he was again today too.  I did a doubletake.  He’s like the Brigadoon of the ward, y’know?  But two Sundays?  He was talking to my husband and as I came up I overheard–oh of course. The volcano.

He had discovered Walmart, in answer to my asking.  He’s close to our taller son’s size; if we’d known we could have given him some great hand-me-downs.

We offered him dinner any night every night any time till he can get a flight back out.  He smiled, thanked us, and told us he had plans: his daughter was in college about 800 miles away and her semester was ending this week.  If by then they were still grounded, he was going to take his rental car, go get her, and they would do the sightseeing road trip they could only otherwise have dreamed of ever having the time to do together.

“Vol,” French for “fly,” can? No.  So. Don’t miss Carlsbad and the Grand Canyon on your way!