When we first moved to California from New Hampshire, having three preschoolers, I decided one of the first things I had to learn was the most direct route to the nearest emergency room. You just never know. After all, I was the kid who ran through the glass storm door, got hit by a car on my bike, and took the bottom of my foot off in the spokes of my new bike… The receptionist in the ER in Washington, DC cheerfully greeted my mother by name when she showed up with my brother one time.

So here I am, the new kid on the WordPress block, and I’m trying to find my way around the various routes. Haven’t figured out the photo thing yet, but I’ll get there quickly, I imagine.

The measure of a true klutz: being able to fall backwards into an impossibly tight spot in such a graceful, semi-slow motion as to look choreographed. Your kid reaches down and gives his mom a hug, lets go, and then she does this dance.

John ran for the icepacks. Richard, from across the house, ran for the noise. And then stood there speechless, not daring to laugh till I gave him the huge silly fake grin that the situation so much needed.

That was last night, and icepacks notwithstanding, I’m typing gingerly. The knitting probably won’t go on strike, but it might stage a slowdown for a day or two to show management who’s boss.

And yes, it was very funny. And no, there are no photos. Thank goodness!

Sometimes, when an amaryllis bulb has been deprived of water too long, it’ll bloom, but instead of having the stalk towering two to three feet high, it will barely grow, the plant concentrating on opening up its flower rather than how high in the air it can put it on display. The leaves, however, will grow to a normal length to gather strength in the bulb, so that maybe it can really put on a full show the year after.

The bulb I found last week shot the tip of its bud up immediately, as I said–and then held its breath and held still while the leaves played catchup. Now the five leaves and the bud are coming up in tandem; but if you look closely, the bud is already beginning to break open.

I can really relate to this one. I have a lot of limitations it would be nice not to have, because of health issues: even a few minutes in full sun right now makes my lupus start attacking my eyes. (I’m okay, don’t worry, I have more sense than to risk that one.) So, thank you very much, I’ll stay indoors–but for the things I really want to do, reaching out to others, writing, knitting, making people feel cared about the best I know how–there’s no limitation there at all. The things that are most important to me, I can do just fine (the church Memorial Day picnic at Foothill Park that I have to miss notwithstanding… If anyone sees a coyote or herd of deer this year, I hope they snap a picture for me. Keep an eye out for the mountain lions. And don’t let the preschoolers pick up a baby rattler near the creek this year, okay?) It even serves as a reminder that those are the things I want to do, and not to let the time just slip by.

The “bloom where you are planted” cliche works just fine for me.

You remember how I walked into the garage in April and found those amaryllis bulbs that should have died of neglect, having been dried out far too long, that were instead shooting up buds? And how I gave one to Nicholas and his family to celebrate his recovery from falling off the ski lift?

Yeah well. Our garage is fairly dark, and it doesn’t help that the lightbulbs are in places nearly impossible to reach when they burn out. So. Last night I was squinting in there, looking for–what else–the lightbulbs. And thought, nahhhh… But… I looked under a tarp that was folded up inside its package, and there…

…You guessed it. My friend C. is going in for that surgery, and I’ve been madly knitting her that shawl. There it was. I found one more pot buried under there. I laughed, marvelling at it, although a bit ruefully, and asked my son, “Do you think this one could bloom too?” I poked fingers from both sides at it: if they met in the middle, it was toast, toss it.

The outer edges were indeed soft, but the inner core was as solid as you could ask for under the circumstances. I soaked it in water to break the dormancy.

Four hours later this appeared. That’s not a leaf, that’s a bud. FOUR HOURS. Go C.!!!

I am emphatically not a morning person. But my daughter had an early flight out, and Oakland Airport isn’t far enough away from the MacArthur Maze, which recently made the news when a double-tanker gas truck crashed, exploded, and melted two layers of freeway ramps; we had no idea how much extra time we had to allow for with that mess.

Turned out, there was a major backup starting just ahead of where we got off 880 for the airport, and the three of us made good time after all. But it was way too early in the day, and all I wanted to do after waving goodbye was to go home and crawl back into bed.

Just as we got past the Dunbarton Bridge over the San Francisco Bay, I, in the passenger seat of our Prius, happened to glance up at the driver next to us, riding high in a large white pickup. He was watching the road but glancing repeatedly past us at the salt marshes alongside the roadway there: it wasn’t much past sunrise, and the sky and the marsh were beautiful. Shore birds were flying, it was a new day, and that man had the biggest smile on his face.

Without even knowing it or being aware of me, he was showing me what he saw, so I could see too.

(Photo edited by request to after they’ve been chilled.)
Michelle made dark chocolate-dipped strawberries, but just in case that wasn’t enough dessert, pulled out the ice cream. (I am suddenly reminded of an infamous remark made by a family friend in our university days, saying, a BYU dinner is one where the dessert is bigger than the dinner.) Michelle and I were going at the strawberries, which was a wonderfully messy enterprise because the chocolate had not yet congealed. Meanwhile, the menfolk were mostly ignoring the berries and devouring a third of a box of ice cream between the two of them. Then a certain, um, blog minder says he’s too full to have more than the couple of strawberries he’s already eaten, at which point his wife might perhaps have mentioned that worrying about getting fat on strawberries (knowing full well what was on them but ignoring that little fact in her comment) was perhaps a tad silly if one eats large quantities of ice cream first. Said blog minder might perhaps have grinned and pulled out his cell phone and pointed its camera at his quickly-ducking wife–who now has threads of the melted bittersweet flipped across her face from ducking, and probably some in her hair. He might have said he’s going to post the picture on her blog. She manages to keep the back of her hair towards him as she runs for the bathroom to go clean up chocolate and avoid him. When she returns she does not go back in the kitchen but rather to the computer, having told him she can delete his photos as fast as he can take them. He has perhaps given her an evil grin in response.

Hypothetically, of course. Meantime, I ain’t goin’ back in there quite yet.

I’d already explained, and so I thought she was going to go for a different vein in my arm. “That’s a blood clot,” I said again.

The phlebotomist ignored me, and went right for the spot in the crook in my elbow.

“I have a blood clot right there, you MAY NOT put that needle there!”

She ignored me till right as the needle came in at the spot and I was pulling away from it. Oh. A blood clot? Oh, okay. We’ll do the other arm, then. (Ya THINK!?) She then had a hard time getting blood to come forth, my veins having been fried by multiple IVs in the hospital shortly before, and yanked the needle around hard to and fro, up and down, to try to make it come. It was excruciating.

That was four years ago. Today, there was a new face in the lab (you know you go too often when you know all their faces, it’s a huge clinic) and she wrapped the tubing around that arm. No… Veins too small… Let’s try this one. Her face fell. Oh. That’s worse. Back to the first one, and she wrapped the tubing around it again.

Given the past experience–and of having informed the lab back then that that first worker was never to touch me again–all my pavlovian reactions surged forward. I debated the urge to say, You get one chance and one only and then I want the supervisor. But then I thought, if I make her nervous she’ll do a worse job, and if I’m rude she’ll hope I never come back (fat chance). So instead I silently said a prayer for her.

And lo and behold, I almost couldn’t feel the needle, and it certainly didn’t hurt. I didn’t look, so I was quite surprised to see, at the end, that she’d drawn four vials. I was sure they weren’t mine. There’s always that jerk of the needle as they change vials, and there was no tug at all. Surely…

…But no, she then took the computer printout with my name and patient number printed onto the stickers and wrapped a sticker around each of those vials. Man, she was good!

And I wonder now, if I’d prayed for that other woman, if it might have made a difference. Dunno. It would have in my attitude towards her, at least.

When my husband turned 29, I found a card that had a mountain goat climbing up a steep hill, with the saying, “You’re 29? You’re not over the hill.” (Open the card, and the goat is perched on a sharp pointy top with a very goofy expression on its happy face) “At the tippy tippy top looking down…”!

I tried to save that card for when he turned 39, but it got lost in the chaos of a house remodel. I need an updated version again for today. Happy day, sweetie. I’ll go start your angel food cake now (somebody go run get some cream and freeze and crush some Heath bars to whip into it.)

This one is courtesy of the squirrels, is my guess. I love the way it’s leaning into the siding, kicking back and taking in the view on a beautiful spring day.

Not long after we moved here, our ancient Gravenstein apple trees were dying of old age, and I bought every kind of apple I could find in the markets to decide what to replace them with.

And so we planted a Fuji tree, a variety that was pretty new at the time.

It grew well enough right away, and we’d been told we would have apples by the second year. The third, fourth, fifth years went by, the tree branched out beautifully, but where were my apples?

Till one morning, quite early, I happened to go in the back yard. Now, of all the pests imported to a place they don’t belong, with the original intention of providing food (or whatever) to the new settlers there–snails? Someone couldn’t live without their escargots?? And so California is besieged by snails and slugs with no predators (they’re not dumb), and, lo and behold, my Fuji was in flower: and there was a whole herd of snails and slugs sliming back down the trunk at daylight, with a few still munching on apple blossoms before calling it a night.

I read recently that they won’t climb over broken eggshells. Makes sense. I mentioned this to someone buying a 25 lb box of snail poison in the hardware store, and he listened sympathetically, but exclaimed, “Lady–I’d have to open a restaurant!” to get enough eggshells.

I’ve been baking a bit lately–it’s appleblossom time.

I am the daughter of an art dealer, and a modern-art dealer at that. I was taught by my father and his artist friend Nat Leeb to spend a lot of time looking at a scene or a painting, not to make snap judgments or brush strokes, but to observe first. “Look at it for ten minutes: paint for one,” M. Leeb told me the summer I was 16, as if I were his art student. (My little sister was superb with a paintbrush and a gifted artist in her own right. I, however, could only wish. My knitting later grew to fill that niche for me.)

When I saw that photo from Jim, just the top showed on my screen at first, and that shaft of light and the glow it emanated from really stood out. As I scrolled down, the closer to the earth, the more it faded into the overall picture. You had to be looking for it then to really see the same brightness it had had just a moment ago.

I’m sure Jim snapped that to show his son later the perspective on the scene that day. To me, though, and the reason I asked them and then posted it on Easter Sunday, was that the ski lift looked like a modern-art version, for his family, anyway, of the Cross. The suffering of the son, the compassion and love of the father.

And I saw the huge need for each human being to step up when help is needed.

And the huge need to say thank you when they do.

At the light in that sky reaching down.

Photo by Jim (posted with permission).

“To those who fall, how kind Thou art.”

I went off to the knitting group at Purlescence Thursday night; when I was there two weeks ago, one of the owners had just gone into the hospital. Last night, after she’d had a five-day stay that had involved IV antibiotics and all kinds of fun stuff, she was there at the store (yay!), back where she belonged. Thank goodness.

For those who remember the post about Noel at Stanford, I know how much you need to laugh to keep your sanity in the face of the sorts of things she’d just gone through. A few side comments from me, such as, “They flushed the IVs with saline?” was all she needed to hear to know that someone had a good idea of what it had all been like. It helped. Then, to keep things on a lighter side, I told the tale of mooning the Lifeflight chopper, and of my roommate who absolutely could not sleep unless the TV was on, which was of course on a platform well above the curtain dividing the room. I pleaded with the nurses: She’s asleep now! Can’t you turn that thing off? No, she has the right to have it on (but they did turn off the sound.) Picture a bunch of interrogators randomly flashing bright lights directly in your eyeballs all night–oh joy.

The night nurse, without turning on the lights, told me that maybe she had a solution. She went out of the room for a moment, came back, and I felt rubber bands being placed behind my ears and something soft going across my face. Okay, whatever. It’s dark, that’s all I care.

I was beyond exhausted, and slept completely through the mostly-male doctors’ rounds in the morning. And woke up to find…a feminine pad across my face.

I bet the chopper pilot put her up to it.

So we all laughed over that, a good time was had by all, and then I came home.

…And walked in the door to the accusation, “You forgot your phone.”

I did?

“Yes!”

Okay, you know if this was an issue something happened. What?

Platelets at 10. Five units in the hospital.

Our daughter with ITP got to go home that night, late, and is now much better.

I got her permission to post this thank you to every person who has ever volunteered as a blood donor. I owe you my daughter’s life.

Stanford Hospital holds a concert series in its wide open atrium, and I got an email from Karen Bentley Pollick that she and her friend Dmitriy Cogan would be playing there today, he on the piano and she her violin. Given that she lives on the East Coast now, and that she’s in my book, I–well, I basically moved heaven and earth to be able to go hear her. If you live in the Bay Area, she’ll be playing Sunday as well in San Mateo; details on her kbentley.com website (not to mention access to her exquisite playing).

So I got a chance to show her my galleys with her story in it, which is way more fun than just an email of the story. And I got to show it to her proud mom, visiting from Seattle! Very cool.

Near the end of the concert, my eye doctor suddenly appeared, stopping to watch and listen, leaning on the rail of the floor above us. I caught his eye from way below and smiled hi. Last time I’d been in to see him, he’d told me his mom had taught him to knit, and that he’d done one row. She had never told him what to do next, how to turn the work and continue on, so he didn’t know how and had done just that one row, but–and then he was suddenly shy about being proud of having given it a good try. Hey. I bet it was a great row.

Karen’s old high school buddy was there, and the three women invited me to join them for lunch; quite the honor to be included, and it was my turn for being shy. I thanked them but said I was on my way to go look for some of my old doctors and nurses.

There was one doctor, from last October, that I never did get anything knitted for. It had bugged me. So I went looking, but missed him; he’d been there earlier. I said to the nurses, well, then I’m afraid he doesn’t get to choose a color; generic white it is. We labelled the lace scarf, whom it was for, whom it was from. Dr. B., if you see this, look behind the monitor at the nurses’ station, it’s waiting for you.

And this is what Stanford looks like just outside that atrium. Healing and rest for the eyes, while the music provides healing for the soul. My thanks to every musician who has ever played there. And thank you, Karen, for the heads-up and the invite!

Last night my husband was posting a link to my book on Amazon on my website, while I was in the other room working on the taxes. I pulled up a window to check how he was coming along, and–hey! Where’s the other photo on my blog entry?

Turns out Blogger had inserted “local host” on it, meaning it showed up on the one computer and nowhere else. Richard fussed with it and couldn’t get it to go up; he finally added the tilted car photo with the wet flower petals all over it, and warned me it had taken him an hour to get that one to work. And he’s a software engineer.

Yeah, well, so, I should have listened. Today, I thought, hey, I have an easy answer to that, and simply re-loaded the photo to Picasa, which is the photography arm of Blogger.

Blogger has lupus. It’s rejecting itself. I got to where, in the drafts, I had his tilted picture and my correct one, side by side, ready to publish. Phew. Now just edit out the tilted one.

And that is when it decided it didn’t want my photo now. Matter of fact, it rejected the whole post. I will take a deep breath and try again later. (But you *can* go order my book from my site now! Not that I’m hinting or anything.)

Edited to add: okay, tried again. It will let me post it with the tilted car but not the other one. Weird.