Taking the cheapest flight meant going to Las Vegas before heading east to Baltimore.  We then flew over the Grand Canyon, the colors so Monet’ed from that height as to mostly blend together. I thought of a few friends who are colorblind and wondered if that’s more like how they would see it up closer; I don’t have the context to know.  I wondered how much of that vast landscape was the actual park: it went on and on, horizon to horizon to horizon, a great collapsed sand castle of sheer cliffs falling straight down, a meandering blue flashing in and out of sight at the bottom.  At the eventual edges, there were some softer-curving areas where the erosion of the water had been more spread out: one mountainside facing me looked like a Georgia O’Keefe ginkco leaf in fading fall colors. Glorious.

My newspaper put the hold on home delivery a day too soon: I wanted that November 5th paper to take on the plane! While we waited for our luggage, Richard bought me a late-printed Washington Post Special Election Edition in the Baltimore airport, which made me quite a few instant friends as I held it in my hands and people commented on the headline.  By this morning, a pristine copy was being sold on Ebay for $400, according to the Post’s amazed online edition; yesterday was a very good day to be a print newspaper.

The air got fairly turbulent as we flew into Baltimore, but that pilot placed that plane down just exquisitely so. Well done.

We’re home.

The elderly black man pulled up alongside my car a few minutes ago while I was madly dashing around doing last-minute errands–I’d gone to the polling place first, then the pharmacy, now I was on my way to the post office–and he made a point of catching my eye and giving me a huge grin.  I smiled back at him, wondering for a moment… Oh! Right! Of course. Duh.

I’ve got an Obama sticker on the back of my car. My first-ever bumper sticker in my life:

“Hope.”

I’ve been thinking about Kyle’s story and his mom, and it strikes me that one of the reasons it’s so very compelling, was, yes, what an incredible gift he gave her. It cost him a lot of planning, time, money, and devotion to pull it off, and he pulled it off, and what an incredible and insightful act of love.  And how many people he never knew, at 25, would be affected and touched by what he was doing.  The whole thing just totally wows me.

But there’s also this: there’s this deep, innate human yearning that every person who’s ever lived can relate to of wishing you could go back, just for one day, and have back something that was dear to you. Something that you’ve lost.

How often do we actually get to?

Kyle made that happen for his mother that day.  To life!

Kyle spoke with me at church and gave me permission to share his story:

His mom was a pilot.  Loved to fly, love love loved it.  Planes, helicopters.

Then she got married, decided to start a family, got pregnant with him… And during the pregnancy had seizures that cost her her pilot’s license.  And that was that.

But she still loved planes and she would sometimes take her little boy to the small local airport from time to time to show him around.

When he was 25, he decided he owed his mom and he decided to do something about it.

He called her up one day and invited her to meet him over at the municipal airport.  You know, look around, give her a chance to rag on him about who he was dating or not, quality time with her kid (I think he said it was her birthday).  Sure.

As they walked around the small planes, he asked her about the difference between the controls on, say, this Cessna here vs… and he opened the door.

Kyle! You can’t just…!

He climbed in.

KYLE! You can’t just… Kyle?!

Hop in, Mom, c’mon, show me!

She knew her kid enough to know he certainly wasn’t going to do something wrong, but this was someone else’s plane and this was going too far and what did he THINK he was…

C’mon in, Mom, here, show me!

She climbed in, started to ask what on *earth* is this about, what are you DOING, Kyle.

Then she looked in his eyes.  And suddenly got it.  “Did you…!”

Yup. He’d gotten his license, and he’d rented this plane to take her up. Pilot, co-pilot.  “Go for it, Mom!”

YEEHAW!!!

(Go here to see my best Halloween costume ever.)

It drizzled off and on last night and we only got about ten trick-or-treaters at the door, all of them quite young.  (Oh dear. My husband bought the 4 2/3 pound bag of mini candy bars at Costco in anticipation of there being lots more coming than that.)

Our neighborhood has an annual block party, so that even if I can’t keep everyone’s names straight, we all know each others’ faces, which is a wonderful thing.

The doorbell rang.  A young mom with her little ones whom I didn’t recognize introduced herself as the new neighbor down the street in the “pumpkin colored house.”  Cool.

There was quite a wait, and then the doorbell rang again: four children from two families, the oldest a boy about six, the youngest a girl of maybe three and a half at the most from the nearby cul-de-sac.  The parents stayed back away from immediate sight, letting the children in their costumes have their moment.

“Is there anything else?” The boy whined, picking at the bowl. “I want chocolate.”  The rubber hand came down on his with a gravelly voice, “Trick or Treat!” He grabbed it and waggled it back and forth, trying to make it do that again.  As I showed him that waving your hand in front of it without touching it made it activate, knowing that little boys like to see how things work, it was all I could do not to guffaw out loud at his disappointment, thinking, oh, me, too, hon, me too, but I didn’t pick out the candy this year, and they rarely sell Valrhona or Scharffenberger in bite sizes.  I tried to make it up to him by offering him extras of the dissed candy, and he pocketed it, sure, glad to; the five-year-old boy likewise.  They turned to go.

The two little girls were torn: clearly, their mothers had coached them well. You only take one piece.  That’s it.  Be polite.  I offered them more like the boys had gotten, and how could they disobey their moms?  But how could they leave, given an offer like that?

I rescued them by reaching into the bowl myself and putting extra into their bags, the slightly-older girl holding hers open for me.

Now, I’ve certainly been a young mom myself groaning over all the junk food my kids gleefully counted out of their loot on Halloween night after we walked them around to houses of people we knew.

This one little girl, the littlest, looked up at me with these huge eyes and these long eyelashes, and suddenly I felt I had passed the Grandma test: I was in cahoots with her. I didn’t make her disobey. But I got her what she wanted just the same; clearly my intent was simply for her to be happy, with the candy only a sign of that, and now she was ready to come in in her princess costume for a snuggle in the rocking chair and a good bedtime story.   Grandma.  I was adopted on the spot (and I knew her own Grandmas were half a world away.)  She utterly melted my heart.

Halloween became magical in that moment.

I asked my friend Robin if I could borrow her story here, and she said sure.  She flew early this morning, and there was a young family that was going to be on her flight.  In her words:

“When we were in the waiting area, the little boy was very much his parents child.  His dad held him up to the window, showing him the view through the plate glass.  His mom spelled his first name for the person to whom we were giving our boarding passes.  (I was right behind them but don’t remember the name because it’s not one I’ve ever before heard.)  The family spoke another language to one another.  English they spoke to the agent was clearly accented but was clear.  The father was wearing a tee shirt only one word of which I read:  Dutch.

Then the parents were delayed a bit folding up the two-child stroller. The little boy went ahead a bit to see what was next.  And all of a sudden he was everyone’s child.  The stewardess was ahead of him.  At the spot where the platform we were walking on meets the plane, there is a gap.  He stopped.  He looked.  He held up his hand in a way that let me know he wanted someone to hold his hand.  I did.  The stewardess was encouraging him to take that big step across the small gap.  He did.  I looked back and asked the mom whether her son spoke English.  Just then he said “Whoosh!”  Recognizable in any language. Then he looked up and realized it wasn’t mom’s hand he was holding.  Lucky mom was right behind us.”

And thus one little boy had a morning that showed everybody around him, through his eyes, that the world is a friendly place.

I can’t wait to go “Whoosh!” next week!

As I mentally pack for my trip before starting the actual packing:

I inherited this pin from my grandmother. I was startled to see Gov. Palin wearing a replica of it at one point, but I guess it means she can’t tell me I’m not a real American; I’ve got the jewelry to prove my bona fides.  Heh. (What did they do, hand these out at a Republican convention once? I’d love to know the story behind this. Mom? Uncle Bob?)

My late grandfather, as I’ve mentioned before, was a Republican senator, and he amassed an eclectic collection of elephants over his 24 years in office.  When he passed away at 95, each of his grandchildren was told to pick one out and take it home.  I chose a small mostly-roundish handblown lead crystal one, beautifully crafted; note that the tip of its trunk is 4″ high and the little thing weighs over 10 ounces.

I wrapped it carefully in my knitting that morning to cushion it from harm.  And late in the day, heading for the airport, totally forgot it was in there.

My knitting was of course in my carry-on bag for my flight home; I would never trust my projects to baggage handlers, much less fly without something to occupy me.

This was before 9/11.  The airport screener ran my bag through and freaked, and I thought oh crud: I brought those because they’re not my favorite needles, but I should have remembered they were metal. I tried to reassure her: “It’s just knitting needles.”  She shot me a look of oh you drop dead! that I thought was totally uncalled for, and in her panic, dropped everything and ran for the manager.

Leaving me with free access before me should I happen to care to nonchalantly pick up my bag and stroll away whistling.  Which of course I wasn’t about to do, but…

The manager and the screener came running back.  They started throwing everything out of my bag onto the conveyor helter-skelter.  Given that I was only flying in and back for an overnighter, everything, actually, was in that carry-on, including my underwear, being shaken out and thrown aside during their search.  Thanks, guys.

Then the screener saw the elephant.  She suddenly knew.  It had looked exactly on the screen how she’d been trained to see that a bomb would.  She screeched in relief, grabbing it and holding it high for all the other screeners and the manager to see, starting to sob in relief.

While everybody behind me in line waited for me to repack my delicates.  Joy.

During the flight afterwards, I dropped one of my straights as I was changing rows and it instantly rolled somewhere far behind me in the ascending plane. I never saw it again.

And I never knitted with metal straights again.  Enough was enough.

Thank you, everybody. I especially loved the image of the angels blowing on their fingertips.  If you feel so inclined, if you could say a prayer to help speed Kyle along his way on his recovery, and for his mom, I’d be most appreciative; thanks.

Here’s what happened:

Newbie.

Friend’s new skateboard (how do you stop this thing again?)

Mountain.

The doctors couldn’t believe he’d survived.

It makes me wonder once again at my own very existence and that of my siblings and cousins: my dad and his brothers used to have summer jobs as caddies at a golf course atop Lake Tahoe and ride their bikes straight down the mountain home to Carson City, Nevada.  Dad told me this while we were driving that exact spot, and looking down that mountain, I was speechless and he was chuckling and allowing as how yeah, it wasn’t the brightest move.  He described the speeds they would hit by the time they got to the bottom and how very fortunate they were that a car never appeared at the wrong place or wrong time or that a rock never got in the roadway, because they were going far too fast to safely turn to the side.

But I have to add: in my own experiences, the people I’ve encountered who went through major traumas or illnesses in their youth generally grew up to be deeply compassionate individuals who are a great blessing to society.  A heck of a way to get there, and I have no doubt Kyle would have done just fine in that regard without this; he’s a good soul.

Two weeks ago, I called the doctor’s to ask about getting a flu shot, with the gut feeling I needed it *now*, knowing I’d never pass the screening questions at the drug store–they won’t take the liability.  The nurse who answered the phone didn’t know me from Adam and couldn’t be moved, permanent chemo or not; one week’s wait for an appointment, no cutting in line.  I stewed a little and debated simply showing up and telling them I would leave only when I got that shot; had I known what was coming, I would have.  I should have.  I did get my shot, but by then I’d been exposed to the flu three days before.

The doctor yesterday prescribed me some Happy No-Cough Sleeping Juice and offered a chest X-ray, and I told him let’s wait till we’re sure I need it; no pneumonia yet, but he made me promise to run back if it got any worse at all.

I was feeling a little sorry for myself.

Till we got a phone call this morning, and I have nothing! to complain about whatsofreakingever.

Imagine a fight between a car and a kid’s unprotected body that totals the car.  Miraculously, no brain damage.  He will heal. It’s simply going to take time.

I’m sending a card to the kid’s mom. She’s already got one of my shawls from when her husband slipped into a coma this past summer.  And once again I passionately wish I could knit cures.

Joansie’s comment sparked this memory:

I was at a gas station, filling up, in a really good mood on a beautiful day.  One of those wonderful moments when your heart feels open to the whole wide world.

A young man roared up to the opposite tank: sports car, windows tinted dark and nearly pulsing outwards from the rap coming from his speakers–you get the picture.  A decibel level designed to say, Pay attention to me!, with the added subtext for anyone who’s ever parented a teenager of, Pretty please? Or, (defiantly), I’ll make you!

As he got out of his car, I caught his eye, and chuckling, yanked my hearing aids out of my ears and held them out in front of me. Thinking of some of the loudspeakers I’d sat in front of in my youth that had contributed a small bit to my hearing loss, I told him, “Just don’t make it too loud or you end up with these.”  Then I put the aids back in, which is something that never looks like a particularly graceful motion–push the hair out of the way, twist just so into the ear canal, hit the button in your ear to turn the thing back on, push a little further in to tighten up the fit in the ear canal, look like a total dweeb, know it, and laugh.

I was not the cliche of the white lady grabbing her purse close to her in the presence of a young black man; I just had something funny to share with him in the moment and a sense of delight that his music had provided a way of coming together, of being glad to have gotten a chance to meet.

He actually reached back in his car and turned the sound way down with a smile back. I couldn’t believe it.  And we continued on our day and on our way.

Thank you everybody for the input and help; I think the biggest reason I didn’t knit yesterday was I just wasn’t up to it. Today’s a good deal better.

Now.  It’s much easier to learn something or remember something if it’s set to music.  And it’s much easier to maintain a rhythm at something if there’s music going; many a store has installed muzak to get people to slow down and look around more at the merchandise.  Or, in the case of some stores I know of that cater to teenagers, loud, edgy music to drive their parents away so the kids can look more cool, ie be seen hanging out there while definitely not with Mommy nor Daddy.

I like to knit to music, and the tempo often matches without my even noticing.  When I’ve got a heavy deadline looming, I have a tendency to pick out albums with more verve and energy to them.

My apologies in advance for the earworms I’m about to inflict on you.  Someone somewhere, who must have been a teenager in the ’70’s too, was teaching a CPR class and came up with a way to demonstrate how to aim for the right number of compressions per minute a rescuer should be doing.  Which is 103, ideally.  You ready?

“I. I. I. I’m staying alive, staying alive.”

Okay.  Well, it’s the right idea for your heart attack victim anyway. This, though, not so much: (using *!* to represent sharp drum beats)

“*!* *!* *!* Another one bites the dust!  *!* *!* *!*”

(With thanks to John, RN, for the information.)

Two childhood memories:

President Johnson threw a party on the White House lawn for all the children of all the US Senators.  We were the grandchildren of one, and we lived close by in Bethesda; we got to go.   The crowd of kids walked in a careful line through a small part of the White House first, and just before we exited into the Rose Garden area, we were handed an extremely cool official plastic white pen with blue and red retractible colors and the words “The White House” printed on the side.  You better believe I took that one to my elementary school to show off.

There was a small Ferris wheel set up on the expanse of lawn, which looked a lot bigger as a kid than it does to me now, and rides on the small ponies being walked in circles.  No way no how was I getting on that Ferris wheel, but I was in heaven with those horses.  I’m sure there was cotton candy and the like, but I remember nothing about the food–just the fact that I could ride all afternoon, and did, and only briefly once did anybody tell me I had to get off to let some other kid have a turn. They had enough ponies to make every child who wanted one happy for just about as long as they wanted.

I came home and told my mom how cool I thought President Johnson was, and that I hoped he would run and win again.

I saw the look on my mother’s face in speechless response, and had no idea what to make of it, other than that, clearly, this was not the great desire of her heart.  But I wanted more pony rides!

Memory number two:

It was the Fourth of July, the late 60’s, and our baby boomer family with six young kids was going with my aunt and uncle and their little ones to watch the fireworks together on the Mall in downtown Washington, DC, the grassy stretch that runs between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.  The crowd was already huge in the late afternoon as we arrived, the best spots taken hours earlier and more people pouring in by the minute.  Soon there was hardly room to move.  There was a sit-in of war protesters going on a little further down, with families on their picnic blankets edging right up against ours and a kind of a temporary no-man’s land in between us and the protesters that was rapidly filling up. There were a lot of people there. There was a strong smoke smell going on over thataway that I didn’t recognize at that age; it wasn’t cigarettes.

A number of Park Police on horseback started an ambling pace towards the protesters.  I noticed–I liked the horses.

And the protesters started running.  En masse.  But there was simply no room.

My aunt’s youngest was an infant, and in the sudden terrifying confusion of the stampede, there was a moment of instant clarity: she had pulled a young man down to the ground in front of her and was screaming into his face at the top of her mother-bear lungs as the surge of feet continued around and over and straight through us, “YOU STEPPED ON MY *BABY*!!!!”

He was suddenly more scared of her than the cops or horse hooves and wrestled himself away from her and took off amongst the others still running through our picnic blanket.

That was it. All the adults announced we were out of there, and while the older kids were half-protesting, what, no fireworks, it was a relief to leave. I’m sure we had seen enough fireworks already in my aunt’s face. The baby was okay.

Watching McCain stepping back out of reach and deliberately away from Obama’s outstretched hand and smile, it hit me that here is a man who does not know how to be friends with his friends. How on earth then can he wage peace in an unfriendly world using the skills of diplomacy he does not have?  “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.  Who cares? The Iranians?”  (I’ve seen the video, sir, it was not the one-on-one joke you claimed in the debates, it was before a crowd.)

Imagine the good we could do if Iranian parents (and others), their leadership aside, felt that the mighty US wanted to make the world a better place for their children, too, rather than they worry that our leader wants to trample them personally out of mob-like fear.  Imagine the American President telling them that he, too, had gone if only briefly to a public school in a Muslim country; that he knew personally that there were dedicated teachers there and here’s how he’d like to help them improve their educational resources.

Amy Goodman, the syndicated columnist, wrote this article after being violently assaulted by the police for trying to interview protesters at the Republican National Convention.  Along with her fellow reporters, her press credentials were ripped off her neck for telling the cops who she was and who her fellows were, and then *she* was charged for it and hauled off, along with her fellows, who were bleeding. They were told after they were beaten that they had the right to cover the police’s work only if they were embedded with them, ie only if they went where they were allowed to go and saw what they were allowed to see.

Alright. Voters?  We have been through this before.  We thought Simon and Garfunkel’s protests, “I said be careful, his bowtie is really a camera” were quaint old songs now.  Back to the future?

Or do we choose a better one?

My ballot says mark it with blue or black ink only, don’t use the red.

Done.

(Scroll past this paragraph as desired…  Again, remember that “Wrapped in Comfort” is on sale at Knitpicks.com and cheaper there right now than the used copies on Amazon; I might have a vested interest in saying so, but hey. Signed and inscribed copies are available as always through Purlescence.  Thank you to so many of you for buying copies these past few days, as well as everybody else who has, and thank you, Stephanie!  I’ve been harlotted!)

These are Nathania’s felted wool pumpkins; I photo’d them, with Kay’s permission, at Purlescence’s knit night tonight.

What a difference a year makes.

Our last winter in New Hampshire, our older children were two and four and terrified of the weird-to-worse-looking people that knocked on the door come Halloween night.  It was unusual enough there for people to knock on the door at all; people in upper New England very seldom dropped by unannounced.  It was a cultural thing, as far as I could tell as a newcomer–but then, it’s true that there was an awful lot of snow in the winter getting in the way.

All my prepping the children beforehand as to what to expect, even the bribes of candy as part of the trick-or-treating deal just didn’t do it for them.  They shrieked and screamed and stayed far from the door and didn’t want me to open it–and they weren’t going out there either, no way.  Mom! Don’t you know what’s OUT there?!

The next year, we were here in California, and even though I again talked to my little ones about Halloween and about playing dress up for it, and remember, don’t forget about that candy part, candy being a highly unusual treat in our household, I worried how they might react this time around.

There was a tall narrow window to peak out of alongside the front door, and back then, people had to come up the walkway past the kitchen windows, so you knew when they were approaching.

My little girl said in great glee to her younger brother, as they craned their heads to try to see down the walkway, “Here come trick-or-treaters! Let’s be scared!”  Pretending to be afraid had magically, at age five, become part of the thrill of pretending for the night to be a witch.

After a conversation with a friend last week, I wanted to put this out there.

I was born with a gift for music.  One day, several hours after we’d returned from a jazz concert, I asked my son Richard, who takes after me that way and who was then in middle school, to sing the start of a song we’d heard there that was totally new to him, “Bedtime for Bigfoot.”  He nailed it.  He not only remembered it, he had the exact right pitch from the first note.  That’s my boy.

When I was a teenager, I was told I had a progressive hearing loss that had taken the uppermost frequencies and now was impeding my hearing speech. They had me take sign language and lipreading lessons.  Finding out that it was all an allergic reaction to aspirin was way in the future.  (Here.)

And I bottomed out.  It’s hard enough being a teenager, much less an aspiring musician going deaf.  I gradually pulled myself out of it, with much prayer and a lot of daily exercise to clear the brain, but it was a long, hard, slogging, two year process.  My first college roommate, upon meeting me, lasted two hours before she ditched me.  (The one I ended up with became a lifelong friend.)

I’m actually glad now that I went through all that: it taught me compassion. It taught me to keep my eyes open for people in pain.  I can’t fix everything for everybody or even everything for anybody, and in some cases, anything at all, but I have to be my best self and try. It is important to me never to inflict any pain on any soul for any reason if I can in any way know, and to help if I can.

So I was quite interested when I read Dr. Rachel Remen recounting having counseled a fellow doctor, who was terribly depressed, to write down five things every day that surprised him.

Me, where I am now, all that part of my life being long in the past, I would say that the thing to do is to look for things to be grateful for.  But I have come to realize that Remen was right; her patient had gone into an emotional lockdown where he was just trying to defend himself from being hurt any more.  He wasn’t ready to fathom gratitude; he was a cancer surgeon, and he just couldn’t handle the unending sense of loss.  He didn’t see that that loss was because he so deeply cared about his patients, whether he knew them well or not, that it represented the good side of him.

She writes of his begrudging reaction to her challenge.  And yet, slowly, trying to dutifully fulfill her assignment, he starts to notice things. At first, it was a tumor that shrank rather than grew.  Then came the day he had a lovely young mom in his office, where he knew how ill she was, with her small children  cuddling up shyly with her as they spoke.  Despite the intensity of the fatigue he knew she must be going through, their hair was washed and their clothes were clean, and being with her in a strange place, they felt secure.  And it hit him.  He told her that clearly, her children were well loved: he saw a great strength in her.  He told her he felt that that love would sustain her and pull her through this illness.  She was surprised, and thanked him then, deeply moved.  As was he.

And it had surprised him that he could see that and be that kind of a doctor to her.  He was surprised at how much it meant to his patient.  He was surprised that he had somehow become a doctor now whom a patient would think well of.  He was surprised to see: he’d had it in him all along.  It was just waiting for him to see it.

And he was grateful.

Our losses become our strengths by which we can bless others, especially with the gift of time added to them.  They are still losses.  Sometimes it takes a great deal of time.  Sometimes hearing aids, in whatever form they may come, be they electronic, be they friends, be they circumstances, be they God, are necessary.

I promise you this: it is worth going through what we have to go through to get there.

During part of my growing up just outside Washington, DC, we had a family next door where the father (later Ambassador Cleveland) had worked in Indonesia for the State Department; their youngest child, at three, didn’t even speak English when they transferred to DC because his parents figured he’d pick it up fast enough once they moved back to the States.  He did.

One of the children was a girl slightly older than me, and she told me a few stories on what it was like to live in a place that seemed perfectly normal to her, quite enjoying the fact that in her telling it, it was anything but, to me–having to wait for a hot bath till the elephants delivered the logs for the fire to go under the tub was just not quite in my daily experience.  Not to mention that the tub was on the outside of their house, I guess because, well, you don’t let the elephants tromp around inside, right?  But hey!  She could top that!  And she told me of the soldiers coming up the hill toward their home with their guns and how scary it was.  She reiterated the point: there was the government. And there were people fighting the government, and they all had guns and sometimes there was actually shooting going on.

I had a very hard time wrapping my mind around all that at seven or eight years old.

Now, one of the sayings around DC is that the definition of a diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.  And what I saw of the mom next door, looking back now as a mother myself, I imagine she could probably have dealt with those soldiers just fine by herself, though I don’t know if she ever had to or not.  She was a strong woman.  But I imagine that strength had to have been blended with a whole lot of that kind of diplomacy, on both her part and her husband’s, given where they’d been living; and so, her children turned out to be safe.