When our moving van finished up and drove away, 20 years ago, the retired neighbor across the street, who’d been casually watching off and on all day, sauntered over to our side and said wryly, by way of introduction, “I saw them taking a snow shovel off the truck. What do you think you need THAT for??”

Well hey, if it ever snows here, we could rent it out for a hundred bucks an hour and make a killing, right?
(Our tree, the neighbor’s car.)

I don’t know who might be needing to read this, but I have been feeling strongly that I needed to write this down today. I have one memory of my Grandfather Jeppson, who died a young grandfather from the effects of the rheumatic fever he’d had years earlier. It was from the last time I saw him, at three and a half: of sitting cuddled up in his lap, with him rocking me in a rocking chair on a wooden-planked floor. When I was little, I frequently had that image come to mind, and it was as if I were wrapped in his strong arms again. I was deeply loved. It comforted me greatly. As I grew into a teenager, the image came far less often, and I decided there was no way to tell if it had been a real memory or a three-year-old’s remembered dream, given that at the age I’d first experienced it, it would have been hard to tell the difference–and I pretty much dismissed it.

It wasn’t till I got quite a bit older that I realized that it didn’t matter which it was; that it had been a comfort and a feeling of the presence of my grandfather whenever I’d needed it as a child. With that, the memory of remembering it became a comfort to me again, now that I am someone facing what he faced way back then: the knowledge of a damaged body that is not likely to see my grandchildren’s children grow old.

In this life or the next, I do believe we look after our loved ones the best we know how.

I was talking to my folks yesterday; Dad had found my old high school graduation program and they’d been reminiscing over it. Dad went from there to saying, “You remember the Colberts across the street?”

Like I could forget? The family with all those kids, including boys my brothers’ ages and one my age? The ones with the big trampoline? And the house fire? Stevie was my little brother’s best friend. They moved away I think before Stevie made it to kindergarten, and then, word came back to their old neighborhood when I was in 10th grade–I have vivid memories of sitting in Mr. Battori’s English class at Churchill High School, wondering about the use of studying this stupid Silas Marner book when Peter and Paul and their dad had just died in a plane crash.

What Dad said next made me go google to check it out, and there’s a Wikipedia entry that says it all: the Wash. DC birth, the plane crash, the big Catholic family, the change in the pronunciation of the last name.

I guess Stephen Colbert isn’t little Stevie anymore. Good for him for what he has become (and wow!) I’m just hoping, by writing this out, that his family might perhaps come to know that their old neighbors always cared about how life played out for them after all that.

When my husband was considering a job offer in California, the offer letter solemnly promised, “No home delivery of snow.” Right there, in writing, with the added note saying, “and if you think you do see some, go back to bed for an hour. It’s just an illusion. It will be gone.”

We had 70″ of snow in two and a half weeks right before we moved out of New Hampshire 20 years ago, and they got hit with 15″ more the day after we left.

My friend Leanne lived around the corner from us in a cul-de-sac. Right after our development was built, the town of Merrimack banned builders from creating any more cul-de-sacs, for the very reason Leanne got stuck with: the snowplows would go through hers, pushing all the snow off the road from that big circle, piling it up and up and up and finally depositing it across the fronts of everybody’s yards and driveways.

I used to racewalk every morning for four to five miles before my small children woke up, time to exercise, time to myself, time to wave hi at the neighbors without distractions. So I got to see what it was like for Leanne.

Picture a Cape Cod saltbox, two stories high with a small front yard so the house was near to the road, that, standing in the street near the house, you could not see that house for the height of the snowbank in front of it.

Now, picture a mom with three kids under four years old, including a small baby. A husband stuck overseas on business on a work assignment that was only supposed to be for a few days, but that had ground on into several weeks. Now picture all that snow. What are you going to do? Do you take your babies outside in that weather for the amount of time it’s going to take to shovel that whole driveway and That Pile all by yourself? How do you have any energy for your children afterwards? Do you leave them inside, unattended, for all that time? Do you slip out when they’re napping, hoping they don’t wake up, that the baby doesn’t decide it’s hungry when you can’t hear it, yadda yadda. What do you do?

My own husband used to travel a lot, and issues like these helped contribute to our decision to take the job in California. Our last child, born here, was the first pregnancy where I didn’t have to push my Toyota out from being stuck in the snow–by myself!–in that condition.

The biggest blast of that three-week off-and-ongoing snowstorm happened on a Saturday night. Leanne, like me, is a Mormon. She had a home teacher from church who had young teenage sons–and Mike looked at that brewing storm and knew from his own family’s experiences when his kids had been younger that Leanne was going to need help.

So: without saying anything. He and the boys got up early enough Sunday morning to dig their own car out, and then they headed over to Leanne’s. The snowplow had gone through, and the heavy, densely-compacted pile across the bottom of her driveway–never mind tackling the rest of the driveway–towered very much above their heads. They took their snowshovels and had at it.

Which means that when Leanne woke up that morning, expecting yet more snowboundedness on the one day of the week she could otherwise have had some actual adult company, some relief to help keep her sanity, some support while her husband was stuck in Singapore and unable to help, she saw–

–a clear path out all ready to go. Be our guest. Happy Sunday. See you at church.

And that, ever since, has been the story I’ve wanted to live up to of what true service to another person can really be about.

Is it just this household, or is there something that makes men not notice things around them in a way women find just unfathomable? For instance. My husband bought one of those Costco-sized bags of avocadoes. My (said person shall remain nameless, let’s just say, a male member of this household) set a heavy toolkit on top of that bag. Only squished the one avocado, luckily enough.

That toolkit didn’t get moved for days. This is what I found underneath. You can’t really tell from the photo, but the bottom is as flattened-out as the top. It didn’t rot, it didn’t go bad, it just adjusted to the way things are now and went happily on as is. Doesn’t look the same anymore, but the insides were fine.

Around Christmastime, I ordered a few copies of this book to give away; Chris Baldwin at littledee.net writes the best comic strip since Calvin and Hobbes. After I got done with all the wrapping and shipping to far-flung family, come to find out I’d miscounted and my own prized copy was winging its way across the country to make someone else have some good laughs.

Which Margo Lynn knew nothing whatsoever about. She just knew there was this really cool comic strip, and now there was a book, and she wanted to make me happy… So she ordered me a copy.

Meantime, I had taken the nonsense knitting pattern that Vachel the Vulture knits in one scene, had knitted it up out of a bamboo/wool mix, made a vulture wing with it, photo’d it for this blog, and eventually mailed it off to Chris Baldwin; I figured he’d get a kick out of seeing what that pattern turned into. He did.

So when Margo Lynn ordered me that copy, this is what he did before shipping it off…

Chris, you’re the best. You, too, Margo Lynn.

We had a Maytag dishwasher. Out of five dishwashers in 26 years of marriage, it was by far the best one we’d ever had–till we had a houseful of people (of course) keeping it going constantly in December. We replaced the hose; then it started smoking of burning rubber. Come to find out (thank you MSNBC!) that it was under recall, that Maytag would give you $75 toward a new one, and finding the motor fried at this point, we gave up and ordered one a month ago.

And waited. And waited. It seems there were a lot of people who suddenly wanted to replace their nine-year-old dishwashers too (ya think? After the part under recall set off housefires? And being offered that much to replace something that’s both that old and has worked so well in the past?)

Yesterday, oh, goodness, at last Home Despot finally delivered. Last night my husband and son worked till all odd hours getting that thing in, and then today my sweetie brought me locally-grown, bug-free, organic roses to top it off. No high-dose pesticides poisoning workers in Columbia. We’re lucky; there’s a small grower’s co-op just a few miles from here.

They say the way not to be romantic is to buy your wife an appliance. They also say no man was ever shot doing the dishes. Me, I’d say that the effort my sweetie put in to make my life far easier (grumbling for hours over the hieroglyphic-only instructions geared at the non-English-speaking) is just incredibly lovely, and he could have skipped the flowers altogether. He tells me that whether I like roses or prefer amaryllises is irrelevant, he has to teach his sons how to treat their future wives. Roses it is. And yes, he’d checked the undersides of the leaves to make sure no little oval carpet beetle eggs or bugs lurked there to come infest my stash. This man of mine: he’s a keeper.

Ditch the dishtowel and raise the flowers high: Happy Valentine’s, everyone!

Yesterday evening, we shared a potluck dinner with old friends (I brought the chocolate torte, and I had a picture of its remains up, but then decided it wasn’t doing the torte justice and ditched it for this wallflower instead.) We laughed till our sides were sore. Some of them hadn’t heard the story about the skunk’s tail caressing my husband’s arm that I wrote about on my Profile page on this blog. It reached right over that campfire… Good times.

While my parents were here visiting over Christmas, my dad actually ate a tiny piece of good European chocolate we had lying around, just to taste. My father never eats chocolate! Mom generally could take it or leave it, so we simply never had it around when I was growing up. Me? Pfft. I buy cocoa by the 25 lb bags, when I can find them at baking supply stores. Now, if I could only get Valrhona cocoa at wholesale, my life would be perfect.

A story on my folks from their visit at Christmas: it was time for saying the prayer before the dinner one evening. My husband, as head of the household, deferred to my father with the word, “Boss?”

And with perfect comedic timing, my father hesitated the slightest second, then turned to his left, and asked, with the most perfect upward lilt to the voice and gentle twinkle in his eye towards his wife: “Frances?” We laughed ourselves absolutely breathless. It took a moment before the prayer got offered and dinner got started, but, hey, God was definitely there already.

My camera and my computer are not currently on speaking terms, so I’m afraid knitting pictures are temporarily on hold.

I got an email yesterday, one of those things that gets forwarded around the Internet, a poem from a “Crabby Old Man” that had been found in the man’s pocket after he’d died in a hospital in Florida, rebuking the nurses for only seeing an uncooperative patient who didn’t want to eat that food–because he still wanted to be able to make choices. Who didn’t comply over various other things, either, wanting to be seen as a human being, and warning them that they, too, would be old someday. I read it, understood why the nurses were touched and passed it around, but thought, oh, but he could have had such a different experience!

One more story about that trip to Urgent Care last summer: the IV that a young nurse put in was done painfully (okay, so they never exactly feel wonderful.) I had two IVs running at a time for eight days, with many a blown vein, before I got a central line installed while I was at Stanford in ’03, and feel I know a bit on the subject now. But hey; this nurse had tried her best. I wanted to introduce her to Rachel Remen, because Dr. Remen writes of the time she, while in training, was basically handed needles and told to go draw blood out of a hospital ward full of patients. She had no idea what she was doing, and she knew she had no idea what she was doing. Finally, a large gruff patient on the ward who totally intimidated her exclaimed, “Don’t they teach these kids anything!?” And he took her around, patient to patient, showing her how to draw blood out of any kind of vein, easy or hard, with such finesse that she says that she as a professor has now taught thousands what he taught her that day–and that there have been times where that skill has saved a life.

Her story has a powerful surprise ending that I won’t spoil; go read her “My Grandfather’s Blessings” and “Kitchen Table Wisdom” books, they’re powerful reading.

So. There I was, with that IV in Urgent Care, and a couple of hours later another nurse goes to check it. He’s big, he’s gruff, and he shoots a glance towards the other medical personnel across the ward, grumbling, “Don’t they teach these kids anything? Look at that IV!” Grr… and he goes to fix it as best he can, annoyed at it, annoyed at himself for grumbling out loud, annoyed at everything, it seemed to me.

And I looked up at him, and thought, You have never seen me before in your life. You are unhappy because you don’t want me to be suffering any more than I have to. You are acting gruff because I, a stranger, matter to you, and you don’t want me to be in any pain I don’t have to be in.

I managed to voice a quiet “Thank you” that surprised him, and he looked at me, then. And saw me looking into his eyes hoping that he would see how much I meant that thank you. How much I hoped that he, too, would be in less pain.

He saw. A look of wonder passed his face. He instantly softened, and he let the gruffness go. He saw. I wonder now how he is, and I hope he sees all the time now.

I started to answer Anonymous’s question in the comments, and it got so long I think I’ll just move it here. I do not remember who made my first pair of hearing aids: I got them just before my third child was born. I’d had two such soft-spoken little babies before, and then, my stars, that third one was LOUD! They do take awhile to get used to. Um, the aids, I mean.

My second pair was the latest and greatest at the time, 19 years ago, with adaptive compression to try to squeeze things down into my hearing range. Which meant that the higher the notes went in the music, the flatter they went, and everything was offkey, my brain fighting with the aids. I absolutely hated it. And there was nothing better out there to be had. I have perfect pitch, and was trained as a musician before my deafness advanced. You can imagine… I simply quit listening to music for years. Years. For such a wasted long time, till one day something simply snapped: I remember the moment vividly. I was playing Taxi Mom, sitting at the red light at Charleston and Alma with a carful of kids, and suddenly punched the radio on, to whatever station it might be set to, I had no idea, I’d never listened to it, I didn’t care. I needed music! Off key, on key, who cares, just deal with it, I’m a musician and I can’t live without music!

I think that happened because a dear friend had recently surprised me with the gift of some tapes of his compositions. How could I not put them in and enjoy them. I didn’t have them in the car, but I was in the car, and suddenly it all just came together–it was quite a dramatic moment for me. Rock on!!!

Later, Sonic Innovations, a new company, was developing their first hearing aids, and, having a friend on their Board of Directors (this being Silicon Valley), and knowing through him what they were working on, I kept bugging him to bug them to get them out on the market. I wanted some! They sampled from I think thirteen bands of sound whereas my old ones did from three. Rather against my audiologist’s advice, I had him order me a pair immediately after they became available, even though they were only making moderate-loss ones at the time. The sound was so crystal clear, so perfectly pitched, that they actually sounded louder than my old ones, even though they were actually 13 dB less.

But I really did need more oomph, even so, and when, after another four or five years, they came out with a severe-loss version, I got a pair. At 8000 Hz, my hearing loss is 110 and 120 dB. And they, for the first time, gave me hearing at that 8000 Hz. It was absolutely mindblowing. I could walk outside and hear all these birds I couldn’t see–where on earth were they? Man, you guys live in a noisy world! …I remember being woken up by the birds in the woods immediately behind the house, growing up… I was totally in love.

But that first miserable pair of in-the-ears aids from 22 years ago fed back all the time, and when we moved to California I asked my new audiologist, John Miles, (who was quoted in Newsweek recently, go, John!) if that could damage my hearing. He kind of went, huh, nobody’s ever asked me that before. He dropped everything and took my audiograms, new and old, over to Stanford University and asked around. They said, yes, there hasn’t been a lot of research in the past, but we’re doing some now, and yes, hearing aid feedback can cause further loss, and yes, your patient is a classic case. Fifteen more dB gone from that at this and this frequency.

Great.

So. I got the adaptive compression ones I used for so long. Fast forward to my new louder Sonic Innovations aids, which did not have the feedback suppression they should have; I’m assuming that was due to patent/licensing issues with older companies. I finally had to, with great regret, hand them back to my audiologist, because they were feeding back, they weren’t worth the risk, and my husband was beginning to tell me I was getting deafer again. I replaced them with a pair from Oticon. The Oticons are safer for me. They have lots of bells and whistles. I can actually, for the first time in my hearing-aided life, use things with earphones; they can plug into them. (Wow, movies on airplanes are suddenly an option!) They’re very nice. But they are not quite entirely musically perfect, and oh, do I miss my Sonic Innovations: and if they ever do come out with much better feedback suppression, the very first thing I would do with my very first royalty check from Martingale would be to blow the bucks on a new pair.

John Miles once mentioned to me that severe-loss hearing aids are only a very tiny, tiny part of the market. My pair of Oticons cost $5400. On the other hand, that price tag is what it costs to feel like a participating member of the human race when I’m around other people, and to say they were worth every penny doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m grateful to have them.

Now, when you all see me at Stitches, it’s really really noisy there; make sure I can see your face when you talk to me…

This just in (announcer slightly breathless.) Houston, we have a dial tone, repeat, we have a dial tone. Richard the wonder man.

I have an AT&T Princess phone, nearly as old as my marriage–1980–that has served me well for a long time. We gave it a handset that Ma Bell sold for the hearing impaired at the time. It wasn’t perfect–it amplified all the frequencies, when I just wanted the high ones, which is where my hearing loss is and where the consonants of speech predominate, but that’s the way it is. Amplify the vowels too, oh well, beats deafness. (And if you know anybody who complains that people mumble these days, people don’t, it’s that they’re missing the higher-pitched consonants while hearing the rest of the words as loud as ever. Take that sentence, strike out all the consonants, and see how intelligible it looks. Mumble.)

Later, we found that phone didn’t buzz if the computer was on the way the newer cordless ones do. Point for it. It drew enough amps from the phone system that several friends mentioned to me, when I left messages on their answering machines, that they couldn’t make out what I’d been saying. Apparently too much of the juice went to amping up their machine to me, at the expense of my voice to them: making them the ones being, for that moment, the hearing-impaired one. I thought it was rather funny, actually, but used the other phones to leave messages after that.

It tried to die once before, and Richard spent $20 on electronic parts to revive it again. I’m not sure that’ll work this time. It’s the phone I keep–or kept, anyway–just above my head in the headboard at night, so that if the phone rings when my hearing aids are out I have some chance of responding. Richard once slept through dynamite going off outside his dorm room. I wake up for anything, if I hear it.

As a matter of fact. I inadvertently became part of the local Red Cross’s training manual for Disaster Services operators. He’s on their DS team, and they called in the very dead of the night one night: some house fire, or some such thing. People in need. He’s the modern-day equivalent of the Boston Minute Man.

At the time, we had been getting a slew of New York City brokers making cold calls and not having a clue where we were or what time zone we were in, and often calling right when they got to work at 8 or 9 am. We are in California. This did not prove to be a fabulous selling point on their part. So when the phone rang at dark o’clock this one time, I picked up that Princess handset and simply dropped it back down on the phone. Somewhat gently. I was so proud of myself. I hadn’t slammed it down after giving them a piece of my very opinionated mind on what they had just done to my good night’s sleep, and no, I did not want to invest in Kansas oilwells!

I stewed for about 20 seconds before it hit me that, um, wait, that could have been the Red Cross instead. Oh. My. I hoped they would call back, but the dispatcher at the other end was sitting there holding out the phone staring at it going, Great. NOW what do I do?

So now the training manual says, if you call in the middle of the night to one of the volunteers and get hung up on, count to ten, then dial again. Let the person wake up enough to answer. They don’t name me by name. But everybody knows. I will never totally live it down, but that’s fine, everybody needs a conversation piece for the annual Christmas party, right?

Too funny.

Dropping a cordless phone back down just doesn’t have the same effect. Where on earth am I going to replace this old thing? I’ve never yet found another phone I could hear as well on.

A stray follow-up thought on Friday’s post: if I hadn’t dropped that chair earlier, that technician wouldn’t have been able to make quite so much of a difference later when I so much needed him to, when I had pneumonia. And Sam wouldn’t have had me thanking him and calling him my hero–which he very much was–and don’t we all need to be needed. I still promise not to drop it again, though, promise.

Someone who knows me wasn’t quite sure my blog was mine when she found it, because I had never set up my profile. Now I’ve got one. Go enjoy a marshmallow, but watch out for helpers… (My husband’s face pleaded silently, Please don’t laugh. PLEASE don’t laugh!!! I managed not to. But it was very, very hard.)

Making a multi-berry crisp, hey, where’s the cinnamon.

Oh, that’s right…

And as I walked towards the bedroom closet, I suddenly remembered the question I got lobbed at me yesterday that I’d forgotten to answer: surely I’d never had to deal with moths? I never seem to mention them?

One of my children for Valentine’s one year gave me a heart-shaped ornament made from a baked paste of cinnamon and water; I wonder how many Costco bottles it took for the six middle-schoolers (they’re in their third year of college now) to make those for their moms (I wasn’t in on it, the gift was a nifty surprise.) Something to make their kitchens smell nice. And maybe to induce them to make multi-berry crisps by sheer Pavlovianism.

I eventually tucked mine away in a drawer, along with a neglected angora sweater.

No bug has ever touched anything in that drawer, even though angora is moths’ very, very favorite food. Oh! Come to find out cinnamon is one of those things, like lavendar and cedar oil, that repels buggies; one of these days I’ll have to figure out just how to make more of those ornaments. Meantime, I’m taking the lazy way out and leaving a Costco jar of cinnamon with the half-lid left open in the back of my closet. Carefully. Right there next to the cedar chest, with everything woolen in heavy-duty ziploc bags, sometimes bags within bags, cedar, cinnamon, and lavendar notwithstanding. To back that up, I’ve got the tennis-racket mothzappers pictured way back in the beginning days of this blog–$2 at the hardware store, snap’em up if you find one.

My vacuum broke once and I borrowed one for a day from a friend who had wool-to-wool carpeting. Where I parked it, out came… So now my friend knows, after exclaiming to me, THAT’S what carpet beetles look like?

Like innocent little lady bugs that forgot to put on their red dresses for the party?

Yup.

Nope! Oh no, I’ve never had a problem with moths… (Listen, y’all, I had one get in through the screen in the bathroom, that couldn’t find its way around the plasticized curtain, so it chewed a perfect round hole through it. Round=carpet beetles, random chomps=moths.)

This needs a soundtrack: cue Sandra Boynton’s DogTrain album, the very funny Penguin’s Lament track. “We’re all a little too cute…”