There being no paid clergy in the Mormon Church, who the speakers are varies every week. We take turns sharing of our faith and our lives lived by that faith.

And today, one of the speakers was my husband, and one was Marguerite. She stood there with her hair grown back in, gorgeous as ever, as composed as ever… And, I would say, even more so now.

She mentioned what a friend of hers had told her while she was so very ill with her breast cancer:  “I don’t know what to say or do to convey how much you mean to me. I’m on unfamiliar territory.”

Simply saying it was enough.  Marguerite will never forget it.  And now, neither will I.

The rest of the story.

Memories: of being first-time parents, scared, holding our very, very sick six-month-old, trying desperately to get her fever down.  Nighttime.  On the phone with the doctor, sorry to bother him, grateful that he was as concerned as we were. The cool-but-not-cold bath on his advice, after Tylenol proved useless, that brought her down to 104 from 105.4, but that temp just refused to budge more than that.

She’d been given her DPT shot that day.

There are people who wonder if their kids will react to their shots, and for most, they learn there’s nothing to worry about.  (Please: there will not be a debate here about the alleged autism thing.  I have too much of a scientific background to give it any credence.) We were one of the unlucky few for whom the DPT was actually a problem.  The pediatrician had no doubt it was the Pertussis part of the shot at fault, and insisted she not be given the full trio again.

So, K-12, we knew that if any other child at her school should test positive for whooping cough, our kid was the one who was going to be isolated at home by order of the school district (and common sense). Okay; you do what you have to do.

Which is why when our youngest was born, the Stanford researcher who knocked tentatively on my maternity-ward door in ’88 was surprised at how fast I said yes when she asked if we were interested in enrolling him in a study of a new, acellular DPT shot after she explained that, so far, two million Japanese two-year-olds had been given it without one single reaction ever.  But it had never been given to infants.  Did we want in?

Heck YEAH!!!

That acellular vaccine is now the standard shot.  It has meant that there is less genetic material for any child to hyper-react to like ours did, while still being immunized.

You’re welcome. And thank you for providing herd immunity for our oldest in return.

After all those years of knowing there were all these what-ifs…

Thank goodness for the astute doctor who recognized a rare disease.  And for the fact that it’s safer in adults.

Whooping cough in one’s late 20’s.

Now the trick is for her not to get swine flu on top of it.

LauraN has a story to tell on her neighbor; don’t miss it. And I bet I can guess who the benchpressing instigator was.

And now I’m going to tell you a story on my neighbor.

First, though, a memory.  Our last Halloween in New Hampshire, our toddlers were terrified every time I opened the door: no explanation of the concept of costumes made the slightest difference, and they could not understand how their own mother could continue to expose them to those, those, *things* out there.

The next year, in California, when the older two were now three and five, the five-year-old looked excitedly out the window and told her little brother gleefully, “Here come trick-or-treaters! Let’s be scared!”

Just a few years after that, there was a Halloween where our children all had the flu and, after all their anticipation of dressing up and playacting and getting candy, had to stay home.

We had a neighbor we didn’t see much, not a terribly outgoing sort, whose own kids were newly grown and gone.  We didn’t know she had planned a special surprise just for our kids.

But they never came to ring her bell.  Huh. Well, this wouldn’t do.

And so she finally rang ours instead: she had gone out and bought little decorated cardboard houses filled with the good stuff, one for each of our little ones, Halloweeny and celebratory to the max.

She had no idea they were sick. She had no idea how bummed they were that they had to be on that day of all days.  She had never thought to buy such a thing before, and come to think of it, she only did it that one year.

But our quiet neighbor, making an impulsive decision when she saw something cute in the store, decided it would be fun to be generous, and by so doing totally made their day when they most needed it.

And none of us old enough then to remember has ever forgotten that. Halloween always makes me think of her and those little boxes.

Last time I saw the surgeon he got to play Santa. But I missed one nurse from that day: she saw me into the examining room, and we spoke long enough for me to feel she was one who truly cared about her patients too. She just sparkled. I was impressed, and sorry later to have missed her.  I was expecting her to come back in but someone else did instead, the young nurse I surprised with a lace scarf at the end.

Today was my last (oh honey I so hope) post-op at Stanford.  A medical assistant told me they were crazy-busy today, that they had 45 patients to get through. Wow. But when Dr. S. came in, one of the first things he said was how much his wife loved her shawl. The man is a peach. (And so is his wife!)  He was completely focused on me and on taking care of me and on answering my questions; nothing else intruded. I’d been scoped yesterday?  (Thank you Dr. R.!)  We discussed where the bleeding had been and for how long–it finally stopped today; he told me why it was normal there with a blockage, and I came away very reassured.

But he also told me to call him next time there’s any such problem, and he clearly meant it. Having done two blockages now, I needed to hear that. Thank you, Dr. S.

Before I left home, I’d put some of the cuter Peruvian fingerpuppets in my purse, and as he was on his way out the door, I gave him a few for future pediatric patients or for children of patients.  He looked at the fish and laughed.

I saw that missing nurse briefly again in the hallway as I was coming out.  She was talking to another patient, and there was a scale right there with a chair next to it; I commandeered the chair while fishing quickly through my knitting bag for the scarf that had been waiting a month for her.  But by the time I got it out of the ziploc, she was walking briskly away.

I called her name after her. That startled her–Who? as she spun around.  How did you…?

And then she was exclaiming, “These are my favorite colors! Oh wow!” I told her that a friend of mine had dyed the yarn. (Hey, Lisa–the Mardi Gras colorway in merino. Love it.)

I finally got to tell one more person who deserved it how much her kindness and smile meant each and every day to all the people streaming through those doors. Forty-five people is a lot of eased burdens just today.

She was so thrilled. She so much deserved it. She made me so happy.  This is why I do this.

An experiment in Sweden to see if making the stairs fun would cause people to choose them over the escalator in the subway station. Go see the stairs that were turned into a piano.  Great fun!

(Typed while wearing Jasmin’s handspun and -knitted socks.)

I met up with Gigi of the Knitmore Girls and some of the Minions of the Pointy Sticks at Le Boulanger down thataway today.

Four years, maybe five, you’d think I’d have taken a picture of it by now.  Sorry for another no show here.

Anyway, the story, and I think I’ve told some of it before, is: I was going to Stitches West one time, and it was the first time I was trying to manage my electric chair by myself which I need for long days out.

Open side door of minivan, pull out unattached ramp, unfold ramp, set it up in doorway, done.

Except the “This side up” sticker happened to have been glued on the wrong side. My husband had never noticed; he just intuitively got the mechanics of the thing, like I would have if it had been something reasonable, like, say, a knitting pattern.

Which is why when I started backing that 250 pound chair down the ramp the hinge was on the wrong side and the whole thing collapsed on my foot.

Annnnndddd, the newly-charged battery hadn’t held the charge.  It was nearly dead. Just enough juice to get it back up in there with the desperately-needed help of some random passersby.

It was not starting out well here.  I IM’d my husband and he offered immediately to leave work, rescue me, and get me in for x-rays.

“I have waited a year for Stitches and I am going to Stitches!”

I made it to my friend Karen’s booth, holding myself together right up till that point, but the moment Karen and Gigi looked at my face and asked, wonderingly, “Are you all right?” I lost it and bawled in pain and frustration and worry.

Gigi’s daughter Jasmin (and Gigi and Karen, for that matter) offered to drop everything and drive me to the doctor; when I said I just couldn’t go yet, not when I’d just gotten here, and besides, they needed to man their booth, Gigi’s then-teenage son Sam came to my rescue. He went out, found someone in charge somewhere there at the Santa Clara Convention Center, came back with a manual wheelchair which by now I really really needed, and proceeded to push me around for the next two hours.  He was very patient with my being interested in random people or yarns going by–oh, look at *that*!  Ooh, that’s pretty! Hey, Alicia!  BARBARA! How ya *doin’*!   Stitches West is a grand reunion as well as a knitter’s Disneyland.  Sam was the soul of gentleness and totally put up with the craziness that is me at those conferences, all while being very mindful of where my foot was going.

He got me to Lisa Souza‘s booth, where I bought some sock merino in her Seafoam colorway and showed it off to Gigi before calling it a day, and Gigi exclaimed over it, telling me she’d bought the same colorway from Lisa too.

Two weeks later, when I’d recovered enough to make the drive, I took Sam one of my chocolate tortes and thanked him for being my hero when I’d so much needed him. Such a nice kid!  I wanted him to know how much his cheerful readiness to help and his patience had meant to me.

Gigi is having heart surgery next week. What she never knew, was, I knitted up that Seafoam all that time ago and set it aside for the right moment: whether it was for her to wear to brag on her son or for Sam’s future bride someday way off in the future, I did not know. But it could not possibly go to any other family. That skein of yarn had too many important memories from those moments to mean as much to anyone else. It was for them.

I told Gigi all that today as I handed it to her for her to wear now.

Heal well, friend. As your family helped me to, too, on many an occasion by now.

Driving to Purlescence tonight, I caught something on the radio that surprised me and I thought I’d come home and blog about it: a Beethoven piece that I’d always heard as a very solemn piece, very introspective, even slightly mournful.

But here, instead of an orchestra, it was a single piano playing, and the pianist was–playing. He was having a good time. Matter of fact, that left hand started getting jumpy, progressing to a full-blown pogo-stick effect. Let’s dance!

It took me a moment to get past my “that’s not how you play that!” response and sit back and just listen to what the guy was doing.  And you know? It was really cool!  It was very creative. I found I liked that.

So that’s what I thought I’d be talking about, about being open to a new take on things.

Well.

At the shop.  Somehow the subject of blood donations came up; how, exactly, I didn’t hear. One woman said, Oh, I’ve been a platelet donor for some time. Then another chimed in, I do that too.

I had no idea you did that! I was exclaiming, Platelet donors saved my daughter’s life!

It was their turn to be surprised.  It all suddenly became very personal.

And then, to the one who didn’t know, I told her, And blood donors saved MY life last January, and I told her the story of the man in the hardware store. (Looking back over the January posts, I see that I didn’t mention at the time that I’d lost half my blood volume before the surgery, and they had to replace it then as well as what was used during the colectomy itself.)

Every now and then I get another chance to tell a donor thank you.  It was so cool.  SO cool.

So yeah, I had this blog post I was going to write. But life opened it up into a whole ‘nother direction. And it left me wanting to just dance for joy.

When they first put me on a chemo drug for my Crohn’s in ’03, I thought I would lose all my hair. And then I started to wonder about what hair I would have if I could buy anything I wanted–hey, this could be cool!

And thought of my friend Mona Jo, who moved away several years ago in retirement.

Mona Jo once told me, with great delight, the story of when her husband turned (was it 4o or 50? Been awhile.)  She decided it was time for him to have a midlife crisis.

So. She had short black hair; she went out and bought a blonde wig, long, too, if I remember right. Then she called her husband at work and invited to meet him for lunch.

She showed up early at the restaurant and sat down to wait for him to come in.  He came in, glanced around–no Mona Jo. The clock ticked.  Where WAS she? This was her idea, and he had to get back to work!

She watched him get antsier and antsier.  Finally she said his name softly and he jumped!  They got their table, sat down to lunch, and Mona Jo was all sweet and lovey-dovey as they ate, while, as she tells it, he was absolutely petrified. Mona JO! What are you *doing*! What if someone SEES us! They’ll think I’m stepping out on you!

Not that he was planning on it anyway, but, he never did.

In the end, I actually didn’t lose my hair on that chemo drug the six years I was on it, although I did lose a great deal of it after my flare earlier this year.  I look in the mirror and think, wow, it’ll take three years to get it back to where I want it.  Patience, patience; it’s growing.

But there’s a wig store near Purlescence, and every now and then the thought offers just a touch of temptation.

Slinkys and Lanafactrix’s comment reminded me of someone my husband worked with when we first moved here, back when our children were quite little.

Call the co-worker Tim.

Tim put a quarter in a gumball machine on a whim in some random grocery store–do any of them still have such things on the premises?–wanting to buy a superball just like the ones he’d gotten as a kid those times when his mom had given in. A nostalgic impulse.

Turn the knob.

No dice.

Turn again. Nope.  Dang. The thing had ripped off his quarter.

Well, hey, that’s no good.  While trying to figure out the thing and if there were still some way to make it work, he noticed the very fine print at the bottom of the machine: if you have any problems please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx.

So he did. Turns out it was the number for ordering more superballs for refills. Hey! Cool! What’s the minimum order?

A gross gross.  144 balls to a bag, 144 bags.

Coooooooool….

So next thing you know, some co-worker is typing away, engrossed (sorry) in their work, and Tim leaps into their office and yells, “Bouncy bounce!”  ripping open one of those bags, arms held high. Superballs!  Then in the next guy’s office.

Their then-employer was trying to be Silicon Valley-er than thou, with a pool table for break times and a yoga instructor coming in: Ohmmmmm… Playtime was taken very seriously.  It feeds one’s creative juices around other electronically-creative types, good for the employees, good for business.

There was a three-story indoor atrium in that building.  Look out below…!  Superball!  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

As long as they were careful, management pretended not to know about that last part.

Bouncy bounce!

I had a neighbor who went off on vacation a few years ago and didn’t come back and didn’t come back, and people along our block were beginning to ask, Have you heard from?… Her answering machine is full…

I stepped out to get the mail at the very moment a car dropped her off from the airport.  She had survived the tsunami in Phuket–the big one–and had stayed for weeks to help.

She threw her arms around me and told me everything.

I just got the

Wait.

Change the sentence that that was going to be–I got interrupted by a follow-up email right as I was typing that. Rather than revise it, I’ll leave it right like that.

A friend’s friend was in American Samoa, and she emailed me earlier today to tell me he had not been heard from.

I got my kitchen mopped. I got the dishes done. I got the counters clean.  I got some laundry done.  I got the rugs vacuumed. I got short of breath. I kept going.  Sometimes, some news, you cannot sit down and you cannot hold still but you’ve got to stay busy busy busy, (hoping my lupus won’t hold it over my head tomorrow) even if I didn’t know the young man myself, much less any of the Islanders.  It all hit so close to home for me.

The waves, she just found out, had circled the island he was on but did no harm.

Dear God: thank You that those people on that one island, anyway, are all okay.  I thought I’d mention, though, I know I needed to put down my needles and get that housework done.  But there are gentler ways to talk me into it.  Just sayin’.

How to get back into the knitting:  (note that these are platters that are too big to go into my cabinets as you try to gauge the size of this project so far.)

1. Have a flu shot. (Note to self: you wear a bag now. Have the shot on the right arm. Ignore them when they ask if you’re right handed.  The cane’s on the left anyway, and you gotta have somewhere you can roll over to in your sleep. Get a clue.)

2. Have a day that requires getting up early.

3. Be engrossed in two really good books you can’t put down, while being tired enough and slightly achy from the shot that holding your arms up for hours, well, it just isn’t the day. Nor is the next.

4. Be so knit-deprived you can’t stand it, and the moment it’s a new day, you wake up feeling fine, the books are already read and that yarn’s still waiting, you get through twelve 400-stitch rows of Fino laceweight right then and there.  And the day’s not over.

The books were very worth the time spent, but there’s something to be said for the motivating effects of you-can’t-have-it-yet.

Thanks to Lene, I looked up Richard M. Cohen‘s book, “Strong At The Broken Places,” and reading the reviews, ended up ordering it and also his earlier one, “Blindsided.”  They arrived this past week, and I’ve been having a hard time putting them down.

I knew Cohen’s name from his political column.  I had not associated it with MS.  “Blindsided” is his story of being diagnosed with it at 25 just when he was finding success as a TV news producer.  Vision loss was one of his first symptoms.

He mentions an assignment in Lebanon early on where he found himself in an argument with someone while he was standing apart from his camera crew, who, when he walked back over to them, were stunned, going, how could you be yelling at that guy with all those guns aimed at your head!

Guns?

He’d been too blind to see them.

He writes of his anger and frustration at the disease, and yet of his joy at being married to Meredith Viera and at the arrivals of their children.  It comes out over and over again, in both books: while he freely admits how hard he and his disease are and have been on them, they are his strength and his way of getting through the day okay.

Over and over, I’ve been finding myself wanting to exclaim out loud, Yes! THIS is what it’s like!  YES!

One moment that so hit home for me was the day he was walking down the street in New York City and suddenly found himself ducking on impulse into a shop that sold canes.  No doctor had told him to, he says; he had resisted it for so long and had stumbled so much; but it simply was time. And that was that.

I spent a year after my car accident demanding that my brain relearn how to navigate the world.  It would be awhile longer before the various ways in which it had been damaged became more clear.  One eye saw normally; to the other, everything bright was very near and everything dull was far, and the cacophony would argue and throw me overboard if too much visual information was incoming–my left side would simply collapse. But I was determined to progress in my recovery.

It took a year. One day it was simply finally enough.  Now.  I walked into the orthopedic place a few blocks away and bought my first cane, impressed at a man there who knew his trade and how long to cut it based on whether I needed it for support for a leg, or balance?…  And do you usually wear shoes of this height of heel?  Ah. This long, then.

I had not expected to immediately find someone who knew what it was like, in a way, to be me as I was now.  It was a quietly stunning moment.

I’d been so worried about the stigma. What I hadn’t realized was how much of my freedom that cane would give me back, how much I’d avoided, how many places I hadn’t gone and things I hadn’t done because I couldn’t walk upright through crowds or visually noisy places without stumbling badly (or worse).  My children had become protective of me, offering me an arm to give me the tactile feedback that kept me from falling.

And now I could manage on my own, poof, just like that.  I wondered how many people had thought this good little Mormon was drunk so many times that past year. Stigma?  Gimme the cane already, I’ve got places to go.

And on and on as I read “Blindsided” I continued to relate to this story and that. My lupus and his MS, my Crohn’s and his colon cancer.  Although I had to chuckle a tad ruefully; ileostomy? Dude, I’ll show you ileostomy. Yours was temporary.

Cohen’s writing really blossoms in the second book (which I forced myself to put down halfway through to come write this).  In it, he’s not being as self-conscious about exposing himself, but rather he’s reporting more on the stories of others with chronic illnesses who chose to share their lives with him.

We truly do become strong at the broken places. Especially when we see each other–and ourselves–for who we are despite their getting in the way.

Richard and I had a wonderful time at Don‘s this afternoon; ice cream was consumed, chocolate was sauced, raspberries were sacrificed. Don’s little parrot Pepper stole the show, making it very clear that Don was emphatically hers, not ours, thank you very much.  Where Don went, Pepper puttered along right behind on tiny waddling feet and we were not to come between.

And a good time was had by all.

There’s a proud little corner of me that was glad we went in Richard’s car; mine is a wreck. It’s  a ten-year-old minivan the kids learned how to drive in, and boy does it show. The third time the sliding door got sideswiped against a pole, we refused to fix it again: it still shuts.  The alarm doesn’t sound.  Good enough.  If it’s ugly, I thought at my then-teenagers but didn’t say, you guys made it ugly and it’ll be all the more disincentive to do stupid kid driving tricks because there’s no way in heck that car is ever going to impress other teenagers.

Even if it has comfy heated leather front seats.

Nowadays it also has a crack in the windshield going nearly all the way across the bottom.  Nice touch.  The deductible would put it all out of pocket, and I refuse to put a dime more into that car that I don’t have to.  With about 17k by now in out-of-pocket medical expenses this past year, starting just after we contracted for that solar system having no idea what was about to hit us, that wreck is just plain mine for awhile longer. The transmission keeps threatening to die, but it’s been threatening for two years and I keep calling its bluff. So far so good.

We got home from Don’s.  I was a bit tired, so I tried to find a ride to Menlo Park.  The church there was showing a worldwide meeting being broadcast from Salt Lake City to the Relief Society, which I believe is, at 167 years, the oldest women’s organization in the world.  Several wards’ worth of women were coming to watch it there, with a potluck to be held afterwards. I would get a chance to meet many people I didn’t know and to see old friends I rarely see.

But no luck on the carpooling idea. I got in my van and simply went.

There was a talk given wherein they described some of the history of the Relief Society: how the early women’s efforts started some of the first hospitals in the western now-states, how the Mormon Church’s system of being able to reach into disaster areas with medical and food supplies grew from the efforts of those women way back when.

But, they said, the point is to keep remembering to be actively involved on a personal level, taking care of and looking out for one another right wherever you are.  I sat there thinking, oh yes.  The small moments mean so much more than it seems like they could ever, at the times we’re planning them.

There was the potluck, there was chatting; there was the woman who bumped into me so slightly that she probably didn’t even notice, who was stunned when my cane and I went sprawling; she grabbed me, along with Julia of Julia shawl fame, just before I totally went over. She apologized profusely, having no idea, poor thing.

I explained to her she had no need to whatsoever, that the only person who should apologize was the man who’d smashed my car nine years ago.  She looked at me…? Head injury, I affirmed. My balance is tactile and visual only now. Bump and the tactile goes poof, especially when the visual’s already on overload. No big deal, honest.

She felt better when she saw it didn’t bug me. My standard line is, hey. Burns extra calories.  Keeps me thin.

All of which, it turned out, delayed me just a bit more.

…I went out to my car, ready to go home…and stood there speechless.

A group of five women I didn’t know walked out together a moment later, and I tried to tell them and did such a bad job of it that one of them asked, “Are you okay?!”

There was just too much to put into any simple sentence by way of explanation. The surgeries. The extreme sun sensitivity. The cracked windshield that makes it so I can’t possibly put my car through a car wash. The abdomen that still makes me have to take it easy.  The hose I can’t yet manage to get around to the front of the house.  The sunlight I can’t begin to stand out in to hose the thing down anyway.

My car was spotless. Someone had snuck up on it and washed it while I was inside. My car was clean!  Months of tree dust and dirt and bird poop and quiet inner frustration on my part, not spoken of to anyone outside my family as far as I know. It had so bugged me.  I hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.  MY CAR WAS CLEAN!  I had to do a doublecheck to make sure someone hadn’t removed my car and put the same model and color in its parking spot.  Nope–there’s the crack in the window, there’s the box inside still waiting to get dropped off at Goodwill.  I was absolutely gobsmacked.

I don’t know how they got away with it.  I don’t know how I got singled out nor by whom.  But I will forever be grateful someone noticed, that someone thought of it, planned it, and carried out that suds attack. (And if someone is guffawing that it took me all day to notice, if you did it last night–but I don’t think so. My family doesn’t think so.  And Michelle says she knows nothing.)

I’m still shaking my head in delighted disbelief.  Yes, Universe–yet again, I owe you. THANK YOU!!!

I hoped for a picture, but not so much so as to disturb it just at that moment. Having established myself as the meanie who must be run from and whose birdfeeder boundaries must be respected, I have to live with that.

I saw one of the black squirrel babies climbing over the edge of something on the patio that made no sense to me–and then I watched as it gagged.  Squirrel CPR being beyond me (oh, yeah, that’ll go over well), I held my breath till it was fine again.

I braved the sun time to go see what that was about: it was some water from last week’s brief rain, dripped from the awning and collected in a container with some potting soil in it and thoroughly rottingly gross by now. Mosquito heaven no more–over and out you go.

If it was thirsty enough to drink something that rank… I filled a small clear plastic cup with clean water and set it out at the edge of the porch, wedging it upright.

And was rewarded later to see a baby, the smallest of the litter, holding the lip of the cup in one paw as she lapped up the water; I could see tiny ripples moving in steady rhythm across the top.  So much dark fur on a hot day–I bet that drink really hit the spot.

I wonder if providing water will help keep them from the last of my tomatoes; I have no idea.  But the satisfaction of watching that tiny animal finding physical relief, a subject near to me, meant much.

So, picture this (happened a few years ago, but I’m still telling the tale.)  An older couple comes home one day to find, of all things, a mattress blocking their front door.  What on earth?  They hadn’t ordered any mattress!  Oh, wait–must be for that other house again.

It was.

Picture winding roads out a bit from the main suburbia and a street sign that delivery truck drivers sometimes read wrong, with a home to each direction from that intersection with the same house number.

Picture my dad growing up in Carson City, Nevada.

Picture his high school classmate (and there were how many in that class, Dad? Eight?) now living in the one house, on the inadvertent receiving end of that mattress, and in the other…  Our friends V and V.

Don’t you love it when the world shrinks like that?

And just to make it even smaller: when we moved here, the father of someone we knew at church owned a house that was good for entertaining in and would occasionally turn it over to his kids for parties, and we got to go there a few times.  But Mitch’s dad retired and moved away and that was that.

V and V called us a few years ago to invite us over, but mentioned they’d moved. Okay, cool; we got the new address, we’re driving there, and the closer we get, the more we’re saying, Do you think?!… Nah…  *I* think…! And then we pull in the driveway.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Richard knocks on the door, V opens it, and Richard asks if the house still has the such-and-such room down at the end to the left.  V, stunned, goes, How did YOU know?!

Dad’s classmate got a good laugh out of that one.  And we offered to help her with any mattress removals she might need ever after.

What are your small-world stories?