You’re going to need another skein, I told myself.

What? I’ve got an hour’s worth of work before that hat is finished! I argued back.

You’re going to wish you had.

Well hey if I do run out then I can sit there and stare at my phone like everybody else does.

The cardiologist’s office had asked me to come fifteen minutes early.

There was only one doctor running behind.

Patients came. Patients were seen. Patients left. And then the next round. The nurse I’ve known forever said hi on her way by to, I think, lunch.

I started dreading a little the thought of being called back there mid-row once the decreases got down to the last few dozen stitches: not when you want to have a needle slide out as you jam the thing in your purse.

And then I was opening up my wallet and unzipping the coin part for the thing it’s really there for: the yarn needle, attached to the end from the previous hat. Ends: run in.

I pulled out my phone and read the news.

They finally called me back an hour and a half after I’d arrived. The doctor apologized; I laughed it off, no worries. I finished my hat!

He took his time, as he does with all his patients. Palpitations? Not since being on that med? Good.

So for the next two weeks I’m on a heart monitor for last week’s fall and light headed episode. But, he said: we’ve followed each other a long time. (All of his career at the clinic, and he’s my age. He read my first ECG when I was 32.) You’ve been remarkably stable (he didn’t say, for a lupus patient.) If you went to the hospital with last week’s ECG they would panic and throw all kinds of tests at you you don’t need, and this this this and this are why, so this is just to get it in your record that things are the same as they’ve ever been.

He also said something admiring about the hat but also something about the color that I didn’t quite catch. I didn’t want to fish for compliments by asking him to repeat and I didn’t want him to think I was giving it to him because he’d made it sound like he was asking for it and I didn’t want him to take a color he didn’t like in order to be nice. So it simply came home. A chance missed to deafness–and my trying not to hold him up for whoever was next on his schedule.

Next time I’ll think ahead and be a little more ready. And I will definitely take a second skein.

So much better of a day! And then it got better yet.

In the afternoon I noticed the sign was gone.

In the evening a car went past the window–and we’re almost at the end of the street.

So I did what anyone would do, right? I finished up my conversation with my husband and went outside to pull the recycling and trash bins back in from the curb for the day.

That didn’t do it.

I wasn’t going to knock on the door and interrupt them on their very first day, but I thought creating possibilities not a bad thing.

I came inside, grabbed a pitcher, and walked back out to water the little columnar apple tree out front by hand, a gallon at a time. All those strange 100F+ days this past week, it could use a little extra.

I had just poured the fifth gallon when she came out of the house to get something out of her car.

And that is how I got to exclaim, Welcome to the neighborhood! while introducing myself to the new neighbor.

When we moved in we were young parents; our last child was born a year later, and the couple living in that house had kids in college and made our little ones their adopted grandchildren.

And now there will be a baby in that house, once they do a little work and move in for good next month. I can’t wait to pay it forward and get to see their little one grow up.

Somewhere out there, though, you know there’s a skunk (I once saw one on our welcome mat through the window thankfully just before we were about to open the front door) that heard their dog in garden territory it might well by now consider its own and it was probably thinking, Oh honey I can give you something to bark about.

So many future stories for that house to tell!

The *ECG machine was a total flatline.

The nurse was getting flustered with it, so the patient laughed and assured the nurse that the patient at least was not.

The doctor, a little earlier: Was it a slip first? Or a faint first?

Patient: Slip, then a fall headfirst onto the cold water valve on the shower, missing my eye, then very nearly throwing up once finally getting up with his help, then starting hard to pass out but managed to just make it to the bed to collapse.

Doctor: It doesn’t need stitches, but you do need an ECG and complete bloodwork and thyroid tests. We need to find out why you were fainting.

Thus the ECG machine. A second nurse came in. I made a joke about wearing the wrong shoes–can’t reboot with clogs. Okay. They tried rebooting the machine. Then finally they sent me to cardiology down the street–but first I was to go to CT and get a brain scan. And the lab.

Which is how my husband ended up leaving work early to spend hours with me at the clinic, because no way was I driving. He is my rock.

Thirteen previous concussions?! Knocked out five times? When was the last time you saw neurology? It has been too long, they told me.

Okay, so that’s on the list, too. But enough for today.

I figured all that was one way to get a carry-around project teal-green hat back into my list of ready-to-give-aways. But seriously, life? If you want a stinking green hat, you do know there are easier ways to say so.

*Update 10/9: I typed EKG yesterday when it was an ECG, and if that’s the worst mistake my brain did after that head banging then I’m okay with that. Update 10/11: Oh wait. I was thinking EEG when I corrected away from EKG. The brain is getting there!

(Detail near the top of the river from yesterday’s photo.)

I looked up the hotel confirmation email. I had one hour left to cancel or forfeit. It had to be done. Canceled.

I’ve been dragging my feet on the plane and the car rental. But when you’re waiting to see if the thermometer hits 102 to tell you to run for a strep test–although we’re not there yet–um.

You don’t get on a plane, expose a ton of people, and then bring that to your 93-year-old mom, you just don’t.

I did knit all but the last two stitches of a raptor at the tops of the trees and felt great about getting something useful done.

Years ago, someone I know opened a candy shop near both a university and a high school: target audiences. It did so well she opened a second one in another town.

The guy she hired to run that one was a recent graduate of a top-notch culinary academy, I guess getting in on the ground floor.

This was when political ads were being run warning of a bogeyman–remember when superpredator got smushed into its own single word for awhile? Ie big and black and tall and on illegal drugs that supposedly made him extra strong. After all, the Willie Horton ads had worked for Bush and Dukakis’s candidacy had gone down in flames.

Her employee was a large African-American man.

Her husband was the one who told me of the phone calls–multiple, he reiterated over my stunned disbelief, not just one and not just one person, of people telling them they would not step foot in that second store unless they fired the guy. They had walked in, seen him, and walked right back out.

Instead she offered him a job at the first store and closed the second and made a point of telling that town why. She wasn’t going to be in any way associated with a populace that treated a good man that way and they should be ashamed of themselves.

That was thirty years ago.

Today I was in that town. My audiologist is there, and my hearing aids needed cleaning. Since I have a lot of knitting I want to do on that afghan I brought it with me, carry-around project or not. They warned me it would be awhile, and I knew that, no worries.

So I had a front row seat.

A couple came in. Mid-eighties, easily. He was tall and stooped and walked carefully; she was just as old but more easily mobile. Perfectly coiffed in the kind of hairsprayed upswept curls my grandmother’s generation regularly saw their beauticians for, and perfectly sculpted and tummy-tucked in her skin-tight clothes. She looked seriously about 85 pounds but for the improbably large chest. There is a posh country club nearby and all they needed was the golf cart to complete the look.

He settled down on the couch and she went to the desk. I had started an afghan row with its five dangly balls of yarn.

I finished the row.

Started another one.

Finished it.

Finally, she walked back towards her husband and did a disdainful little yank with her head back towards the young African-American woman who had been trying to help her with all the graciousness one could ever ask for.

There had been others before her who had appointments (including me.) They were going to have to wait.

My friend’s story of long ago came flooding back and I knew I had to do something to show support without putting the young woman on the spot. How do you do this right especially when you know you didn’t hear everything. But I’d seen.

Turns out that technician was the one to bring my finished hearing aids out from the back room two thirds of an afghan row later (and after the couple had left.) The insides had collected water because I’d let it go too long since the last cleaning and that means it takes awhile to dry the electronics safely. So mine took longer.

No worries, truly.

As I put them in I looked at her and asked a little sheepishly, knowing it would be cutting into her work time, Can I show off my moose?

Sure!

I spread the afghan out a bit so she could see and she exclaimed over it and reached to touch that inviting, beautiful wool as I held it so she could. I thanked her; she beamed; she told me, sounding less convinced of it as the words were coming out of her mouth, I could never have the patience for that, while her face started to say maybe I could? I actually want to, no really want to now…

I said, You start off small and work your way up.

Her face! Made me wish I could have taken the time to teach her on the spot.

There’s a yarn store maybe two blocks away; maybe we will have a new knitter soon.

But I loved that the fact that I’m one gave us a means to make each other’s day and, as much as could be done, make up for that earlier experience.

—

(Let me add here that having written most of this earlier and walked away to think about it some more, I’ve reflected on how hard it is to be elderly and stuck being a caretaker, if that was their case. And as someone whose own husband is 15″ taller and quite a bit bigger I know there are limitations on how one would be able to manage. But you just don’t demean others who are trying their best to do right by you. You just don’t. She should have known by now at long last that treating others badly can never make her happier.)

Two wonderful speakers at church today. The second was a man who started off by saying that my husband and I lived in the ward he grew up in in New Hampshire when he was a teenager, and so, he joked, “They have signed a nondisclosure agreement.” Brought down the house.

The first was my Richard.

With a very simple message, quoting from scripture about how dissension and anger are not of G_d: that we can disagree, but it must be with civility. That if we give in to rancor we are failing ourselves and those we’re talking to and G_d himself, who loves us without reservation and to whom we so much owe love by loving His children.

Nobody ever changed their minds by being argued with, he said. Only love changes people for the better.

It was the shortest talk I’ve ever heard him give.

It was all that needed to be said.

That flu/covid vaccine combination is not great for the next day’s plans but I’m glad we did it. It was actually easier than some, it’s just that it made me keep falling asleep.

So.

Nature and towering trees on one side of the river, a farm in pruned trees and neatly plowed rows on the other. (Or, what you do when you have dye lots that look at each other and ask, Say what??)

I’m torn between a farmhouse or a classic red barn later.

I knit a row this evening. That says tomorrow should be fine.

Being on Medicare and getting vaccinated was a new combination for me; I didn’t know which card to pull out so I did all three: Medicare, Supplemental, and Part D.

The guy stewed over the computer for awhile. Turns out someone had put my maiden name in the system and my last name bounced. We talked him through it, he tried again, and finally it worked.

Finally–not quite looking me in the eye–he handed me my two cards back.

There are three, I said. I gave you three.

He’d clearly been hoping I wouldn’t notice. He’d already picked one up off the floor and there had been no sign of the other.

He got another employee to look all over. Then to try. Then there was this little Monty Python sketch of all the methods they used (those tongs had a definite rubber chicken look to them) after they realized where it had to have gone.

There was the countertop, there was this one area where there were two filing cabinets just below the countertop side by side, and there was a metal plate under those cabinets. And somewhere in there, they determined, was the only place it could be.

They said they would work on it, and the original guy, who turned out to be the pharmacist, gave me my flu+covid shots and told us to wait 15 minutes to make sure there’s no reaction, like they always do. They promised us they would work on it in the meantime.

Forty minutes later, I said to Richard, quite sure of this though we couldn’t see from there, They’re not doing anything and they’re just waiting us out hoping the store closes on us.

We went back over there and I was exactly right.

They tried to tell us it was gone, it couldn’t be done, go have your insurer issue a new card, not their problem. Sorry.

Richard, looking at the cheap set up, told them all furniture is designed to come apart when you need it to.

They were in disbelief. We really wanted them to deal with this?

He offered to help, and he certainly looked the big and strong type.

They tried to say it couldn’t be done.

Things get put together and they can come apart and he was offering to do that if they needed the help.

So okay, boss pharmacist apparently thought, better you than me, and let him into the pharmacy area to help with those filing cabinets. Which he seemed to think were permanently installed.

They’re too heavy full, you have to empty them, Richard said to one of the women, boss-man having gotten himself as far away as he could. (Richard wasn’t about to touch official pharmacy stuff.)

Another store employee saw him on the wrong side of the counter and came over to ask what on earth is going on over here and all three pharmacy people said in unison and waving their hand away at her in unison, Never mind.

(One of the pharmacy women had basically said they’d all be fired if I went in there to try to help, too.)

Richard said to me afterwards, There was no organization in those cabinets–just stuff. Thrown in randomly for someone else to have to deal with later.

But drawer by drawer it all got removed and then at long last one steel file cabinet got moved out of the way. Then the other. (See? They do move.)

And there, under the metal plate on the floor that the two filing cabinets had been standing on, was my Medigap card. How it got there I’ll never know. But one hour and fifty minutes after we arrived for my shot we finally had my card back, and my husband is a hero because they would utterly have blown me off, and in fact did, but he refused to be. Nicely, but firmly.

It was probably not a good time to ask them if they could squeeze in the paperwork and a shot for him too even though online had said there was only the one opening. So we didn’t. His is tomorrow and thankfully somewhere else.

As I type this I’m realizing, we still don’t know which card we’re supposed to hand them. We don’t ever want to give them too many again.

Now that is a sky with promises of the rainy season to come.

Meantime, I found a new use for finger puppets: every time I finish a row, I put one of those bright cheerful little things on top of the stack of books next to me that I’m not reading while I’m trying to get this thing done in time. I think I forgot to one time: 3484 stitches today if I didn’t, 3752 so far if I did.

I drove four hours to go two miles to see an old friend today and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Kelly’s kids and mine grew up together, or most of the way before she moved away. It’s been way too long.

Today also happened to be one of the very rare times when my husband had to go into the office, one of those, weren’t we going to buy a second car one of these days? days.

I can affirm that morning and evening rush hour across the Bay Area say the economy’s doing great!

As I was coming home, there were three people walking by taking in the feel of the area, a couple and, lagging behind a little, an older gentleman, whom I had to wait for before I could pull into my driveway–just as the woman was about to get into their car across the street.

I got out of my car. She closed the door on hers after seeing me looking her way and we all four converged eagerly on the sidewalk to make introductions.

They are putting an offer on the house next door tomorrow. I had the same reaction to getting to meet them that she’d clearly had to getting to meet one of the neighbors before doing so: YES!!!

I asked, Does it still have the koi?

A quizzical, Well, it has a pond, I didn’t see any koi…

Me: I used to feed Alma’s koi when they went out of town, and they forgot to tell me it was on a timer. Went over a bit late one day and got zapped hard with water by their raccoon defense set-up.

They laughed. We talked gardens briefly.

And I thought, that full bath Alma and Jim added onto one bedroom for a caretaker’s use would be great for their family’s grandpa to have his privacy.

I came away so hoping they get that house. But there have been so many people coming to see it in person since Saturday that, well, whoever gets to have these good people as their neighbors will be very fortunate. I just selfishly hope it’s us.

I booked it. Then I did the math. What have I done to myself, knowing how much I’d wanted to hand my brother his afghan in person and computing just how many rows per day at 268 stitches (six strands per row currently and six rows per inch) I’d have to do to get it finished by then. I’m not even quite to the halfway point.

Every time I’d gone to book that trip I’d found myself going to a certain weekend. No matter how many times I checked the fares further out–and Southwest, for all their sale emails enticing me towards them, kept giving an error message that was very frustrating.

But that set of dates worked.

Okay, then, that one, I don’t want to wait any longer to see Mom. It just felt right. Done.

And then I sat down and spent most of the last three hours knitting like crazy even though that’s too much because I have to at least try.

To make myself give my hands a break I went to go check to make sure I’d written the flights on my calendar. I had not. Okay, looking up at the itinerary and then down to the page as I flipped to the–

–there smack dab in the middle of when I’d booked it for were the words in my own hand, written small and emotional at the start of the year: “Miss you Dad.”

It will be the fifth anniversary of his passing. My mom misses him so much. We all do. And so that brother and my oldest sister and my son and I will be there with her on that day, celebrating the man with the best laugh any of us ever knew.

I can just picture Dad doing just that at the moment it finally got through my thick skull. I’m sure he’d been trying to get my attention for awhile. For Mom. For all of us.

A talk in church today:

He grew up in the more rural outskirts of DC, not all that far from where we did. His parents grew up very poor, the children of immigrants, one grandfather a refugee Ukrainian Jew.

His family had bought a small wheat farm in Maryland with the intent of as much self-sufficiency as they could manage in order to supplement their paychecks.

But it needed a new well, so his father took a branch from, he thinks it was a peach tree, and used it for divination.

Nathaniel hastened to add that divination has been debunked, there’s no science in it, it’s an old folk tale, he made sure we knew he knew that. But that’s what his father could afford to go on so that’s what he did.

Seems the peach seemed to tell him there was more water where everything was greener. Worked for him. So he got some help and dug himself a well and when there was a drought it kept right on going.

On finding out his neighbors’ wells had gone dry, he shared his water with the farmers around him–because when you’re in a position to be who and what someone else needs, that is a gift from Above.

And then Nathaniel read the scripture that whoso comes to God to take part in His love, “It shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Love thy neighbors.

Help them water their much larger fields. Because that’s the one thing they most needed that they couldn’t do for themselves right then, and his family with their very small farm could do something about it.

The children and their children have never forgotten the lesson.

A photo before today’s knitting began.

I ran to Andy’s to try to get some of the last peaches of the season to share but they were sold out. I did get some Reine Claude Green Gage plums, which Trees of Antiquity considers the best stone fruit of them all.

As the couple in front of me in the line turned to go, I said to them, If you’re going home by way of 101 north there was a brush fire just starting on the northbound side near Capital Expressway as I came down–you might want to go a different way.

I can only imagine the traffic snarl, much less the risk of being hemmed in that close to it. They thanked me.

I went the other way, too, with visions of how fast those flames had spread down the side of that onramp. Not high–things had been mowed recently enough and I saw no bushes nor trees–but the smoke! Whoosh!

In the emergency of the moment, I told Richard later, I realized I didn’t know how to make my 6S phone call 911 without my touching it while I was driving and I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road for fear others were looking at it rather than where they were going. There were so many other cars; surely someone else reported it, I wouldn’t want to flood their lines.

He, a former county and Red Cross emergency communications volunteer, told me, Actually–almost no one ever does.

Sounds like I need to get up to speed.

They left for their 7:00 a.m. flight and we woke up to a house that felt far too quiet.

Walked in the laundry room and eyed the distilled water bottle next to the iron: Wait. That one was new, right? I hadn’t opened it yet. Why then…?

…!!!

And so life with its wry sense of humor handed me back one of those blankets nice and wet again along with just a few other things in reach of that water. No mildew yet, not this time. After all, I needed that extra laundry to distract me from missing them so much, right?

So much laughing. Such a good time.

It was the daughter of my high school best friend and the daughter’s husband, doing a long driving trip of a lifetime to see sights never seen before, with our house as a crash landing spot mid-California.

Amy and I each took a turn at generational double taking: she said they were going next to see her aunt, her father’s sister.

I started to say, I didn’t know he had a sister–and stopped and realized I meant her mother’s father, and of course she meant her dad and he did and silly me.

Just before they left this morning, I told her she reminded me of her grandmother: she was a sweetheart.

There was this flicker of confusion and she was trying to figure out what I meant. The only grandmother she ever knew was a step; her grandfather had been widowed around the time she’d been born and had remarried to someone who’d never had children, to whom Amy had been her only grandchild.

Your mom’s mom, I said gently. The one you never knew. I did.

She took a deep breath inhaling the essence of that thought and held me in a long, long hug.

I know what it’s like to grow up missing a grandfather lost to an early death. I know that wondering and I feel that strong wistfulness.

At long last, at least for her, I knew I could do something about it. The connection is real.

I sent them off with Andy’s peaches to share with her aunt and they will be back here Sunday before turning in the rental and flying home across the country. I cannot wait to see them again.