The little guy was long and scrawny and new at this. He perched on the chairback, looking almost straight up at the feeder. The angle was a little too… He cleaned his beak, drawing little x’s with it against the wood. Looked up again. Shuffled his feet a bit, bobbed his head up and down, up and down, gauging the distance.  It’s, it’s, right there, I can do it! Cleaned his beak. Five times: dance, crane, look, shuffle, clean. Have you ever seen a finch on tiptoe?

Finally he leaped for it, beating his wings furiously, overshooting just a bit and flappingflappingflapping and coming right back. He got it! The fountain of food! Break out the pizza, hey, guys, let’s celebrate!

(And if he ever takes up knitting, his sweaters will be bob bob bob bob bob aran style.)

p.s. after Marian’s comment, no, I hadn’t seen that comic–too funny!

Warning: this is a rant. It’s not G’s fault in any way, shape, or form. They did her wrong.

It is not easy to be a musician by nature and upbringing and to have lost so much of my hearing. But it’s life and you deal.

Sometimes, though, others, making assumptions that everybody is like everybody else, make it suddenly exquisitely painful all over again. Thank you Kaiser Permanente, where you made my deafness a potential threat to someone’s very life.

Here’s what they did. My friend G had to have follow-up tests done there today and they had her booked for 7:15 am-3 pm. Not an easy time for her, and they told her to have someone drive her there and pick her up.

I am not a morning person, and if I am a person up at that hour I’m getting ready to drive my daughter to the train station–so I offered to do the afternoon pick up. That was fine; someone else offered to take care of the early part so we had her covered.

Turns out, Richard took Michelle this morning and let me sleep in.

The phone rang after he left. I did not hear it. The phone rang again and again. I was in the shower, apparently, when there were hang-up calls. I heard a call, but it was the too-usual telemarketer; no, he’s not home.

I checked my email. Oh good, there was one sent from G early this morning giving details on just where to find her when I came; I’ve never been to Kaiser Santa Clara, that was very good to know.

Being so bad on the lupus sun sensitivity, I don’t go outside on a summer afternoon if I can avoid it, even to park and run in, but when someone needs you to go you just go.

There was no 700 number on the side of the building as I drove in via the main entrance; I had to go in the next building over, look for the map, come back outside, and go back in the right one. A little extra outside time. Down a corridor connecting to yet another building, and finally the right room.

No sign of her. I’d left early to give myself extra time and with my knitting in hand, I was ready to wait as long as she might need. I asked, and eventually got sent upstairs–another map, another corridor, another stop and ask.

The new room was in a department that had nothing to do with the tests that she was going in for as far as I knew, nor did I imagine she did either coming in. I worried about her.

They checked: Oh, she recovered in here but she’s not here, she went home.

She what?!

Someone checked in downstairs and they got her.

No, wait, *I* checked in downstairs. I did not get her yet–I’m here to pick her up.

The receptionist checked again and insisted, She’s gone home, someone came and took her in a wheelchair to their car and took her home. The woman didn’t quite add, “Honest!” but implied and implored it.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I didn’t want to leave my friend stranded. It had taken a half hour to get there through the traffic that was rapidly increasing out there–there could be no quick turnaround if it turned out I did. I checked my cellphone and was horrified to realize how few numbers I had in there of my friends from church: this was because I use my cellphone as my address book and I don’t use it for an actual phone. Texting, yes. But I email or call locals from home as needed, I don’t text with them, my address book is full of far-away folks for the most part: the voice quality is wretched, I can’t hear on the darn thing.

It was not a fun drive home. I had no way to know till I got to my amplified landline I could actually hear on, no idea if she’d be awake, thinking that likely I’d be disturbing her recovery. But I was responsible for her well-being, I had to know.

Well, she was up after I called her from my kitchen. And here’s the kicker:

It turns out that when she’d arrived at Kaiser, after a far too long wait to get that appointment she so much needed, they told her that they personally had to ascertain that the person whom she said was coming at 3:00 was for real. Or they would turn her away.

Now, I can understand wanting to make sure someone’s going to pick the patient up, and that’s par for the course, advising an about-to-be patient in advance that they are not to drive themselves home. Making sure they know that if all else fails, they’ll have to call a cab.

But calling at an hour when I was not yet awake, and threatening her with the potential loss of maybe even her life by the further delay if I don’t hear, which I could not, and answer my phone unless she can get someone else right now right on the spot (which fortunately she did), is just unconscionable.

———

“Listen to your answering machine,” G told me.

I’d had no reason to check my answering machine. Everything had been arranged and agreed upon and I’d been home all morning and hadn’t heard but the one call.

So there it was: with the tape proclaiming the early hour, an impenetrable, muffled strange voice that I could make not one word out of. Beep!

And one “Hello?” that was apparently G. Beep!

And several hang-up calls. Beep! Beep!

And, at the last, a call from the other friend: the one who’d dropped her off this morning, who turned around later and went back and got her just ahead of me, letting me know she was taking care of it…

Missed that one too.

(Yeah, I’m worried about my friend, can you tell?)

The nurse, same nurse (oh good) as during the surgery brought me back into the exam room and said she was the one who was going to take out the stitches. Or rather stitch.

Only one? I asked, wondering at all the black thread I’d tried to see in the mirror on the top of my head back there.

Only one.

I stopped her a moment first and pulled out a red gift bag.

She’d seen this process before, she knew what that meant. She was delighted, disbelieving–and then, “Can I look…?”

Well, yeah!

She looked and her grin got even bigger: “Oh, I LOVE that color!”

And then we got down to business. There was a fair bit of work snipping, tugging carefully, a number of tiny pieces of strong thread coming out bit by bit, making me a bit of a redhead in the process.

So it’s true.

I’ve been frogged.

I guess a birdfeeder has become a safe place to perch. Guess who came for a visit just before the light was gone tonight? (Click to clarify.) She let me come outside and get a good long look at her. This time, though, I got to watch her fly away, as if to tell me, See? I really can do it now, it’s okay.

Meantime, my new Lisa Souza yarn has been hard to put down today, like any good soft fiber worth the hours should be. And the color! Although I did set it aside long enough to go stock up at Los Gatos Birdwatcher, my favorite seedy place.

Tomorrow I get my stitches out and hopefully get to stop putting goop in my hair. Working away on my project, wondering if I wanted to haul that complicated a pattern with that long a row to the waiting room with me or not, I was remembering the moment I’d given the doctor her silk scarf and had wished I had something for her nurse watching her getting it. I still wished I had something–when suddenly it hit me–you goof, who do you think Saturday night’s sudden impulse of a soft Meriboo hat was for? It was just sitting there waiting to be figured out.

Oh wait, did I mention that? I grabbed a random ball of Frog Tree yarn that night and didn’t go to bed till I’d finished a quick hat with a sideways-cabled brim and twirly-decreased top, quite pretty. Then I put it aside and simply forgot all about it.

Well now. My fingers don’t have to fly quite so fast.

Just wait till I come back there.

I woke up this morning and checked: my little finch was still up there. Her feathers were fluffed way out against the foggy chill, her soft gray down showing, but she was alive and she was there.

For about the first hour all the other birds, all species, kept well clear of her feeder. The other was getting low, though, and the morning was getting on, so I leaned my head out the door as if to ask her if she would mind my opening the storage can of seed on the ground near her. I wasn’t going to touch her feeder but neither did I want to scare her into anything.

Her eyes met mine and from there I felt comfortable going on ahead. She watched me at work, still barely moving, no sign of eating, and I wondered how long she could last. I marveled at her determination to survive.

I filled the seed above all the portholes on the one over there;  the flying circus noticed. Soon I had quite the flock settling in: fledgling finches mostly hopping around gleaning, more of them up on the feeders, jockeying for position. My injured one turned her head this way and that to watch them, and finally one flew over by her. And then another and another, coming and going, one bumping right into her. She ignored him but startled at the next one, spreading a wing wide and pulling it back in quickly. Hey! I did not know she could do that!

I was just wondering where all the squirrels were when a black one showed up and took over ground control. At his sudden incoming, all the little ones took off in a fright immediately followed by half the ones that had been clinging above them.

I had just turned for a moment to watch that sudden flurry happen, turned back, and–she was gone!

I checked the patio. I checked the amaryllis table. I looked about and around and over and under, and again, but no, she really had, she had flown too, much though I wanted to have seen it happen.

Was it one of her babies that had flown off in a fright? Was it simply the call of her flock? I don’t know. But this I do know: a small wild thing trusted me night and day till she was able to care for herself again.

Later, I found myself looking at the anonymous random others of her species that came and went, and wondered, Are you my finch? Too much white in the bar on the wings. Are you the one?

And realized that she who had so claimed me had made all of them mine now.

Speaking of visitors… I got a heads-up last night from my friend Kathy: were we still on for tomorrow?

Oh honey you bet!

And so at noon she swooped me up and took me out to lunch. I treated her to Kara’s Kupcakes afterwards, hardly a fair trade except that we promised to do it again and take turns. Then we headed for my house, where we sat and visited and swapped stories and just plain spent the time that a good friendship deserves. She is such a treasure.

As she sat she was facing my birdfeeders and I was tickled that they caught her eye like they do mine. “You could never be bored with this out here.”

Amen.

She exclaimed over the variety of birds, and then over the pretty stained-glass feeder my daughter-in-law had given me; I told her the squirrels have managed to get on it just once, maybe twice, but immediately learned there was nothing for them to scramble up to that they could hold onto and actually eat. And since it’s not where they can leap downwards to it, they can’t chew up the wooden base and so it’s safe from them.  It is left alone.

Kathy went off to pick up her son, I soon after went to pick up my daughter and life returned to normal. I did want to show her the Lisa Souza Alpaca Silk I was sure would arrive today, and it did–at 5:15. Mailman was late. She’d just missed it.  I told her I was holding off on starting another project till it got here because I didn’t want anything else in the way when it came.

Evening settled in, dinner was over; I was about to head outside to water the amaryllises when I heard the smack. A finch. I looked up to see not the expected hawk ready to retrieve its fair meal but the neighbor’s cat who has no need of such things. It saw me and scrammed over the fence and away.

Poor little bird. I opened the slider and checked on it. It pulled its wing back to its body and in such very slow motion over the next half hour, seemed to recover somewhat: she pulled her head back into a normal position. Her eyes were watching. She shifted position a bit.

It was getting dark, so I started watering the plants at last, free now from the dangers of the sun but wanting to be able to see what I was doing. The little finch followed my movements just ever so slightly.

At last I bent over her. I thought about it, and then as gently as my huge human hands could manage, I stroked the back of her head gently. Her eyes closed. I stopped. Her eyes opened. I stroked. She seemed to enjoy it.

I didn’t want to leave her exposed to the raccoons and possums of the night. What to do. She wouldn’t leave.

I thought about a book I’d read that one of my birder friends had recommended (thank you Sally), that described birds lost in a fire in Santa Barbara because they simply slept through the noise of the flames and the smoke till they were overcome by it. It said that birds sleep very soundly.

It was night by now. And in the best way to heal, my little finch had fallen asleep. I stroked her gently again and she roused a little and looked at me and settled back into herself.

There was only one thing to do. All my childhood warnings from my parents came back to me, the don’t-touches, the warnings about downed creatures in the deep woods we explored all summer long and I ignored them and gently scooped her up, cupped between my hands. Her feet reached for a proper footing, her wings moved tentatively, wonderingly, but, it felt to me, with somehow a sense of trust.

I put her up on that stained-glass feeder. She did not fall. She gained her perch.  She has food; whatever may come, she is safe.

I remember, when we lived in New Hampshire, a woman I adored at church (yes, Herb, your mom) who’d lived in southern California most of her life and who had a hard time understanding what seemed to her a frosty culture where one must give much notice before dropping in on someone; “Lighten up, people!” I also remember that she was the only person there I knew who could pick out the one avocado in the store that would actually ripen before rotting after the snowplows opened the roads back up so you could get to the grocer’s.

Years later…

I dropped Don an overdue note: I’d knitted him a hat (no not the pink one I finished last night) as a thank you and needed to get it over to him sometime.

The response: would now be a good time?

It would!

And so we had an impromptu visit at what turned out to be just a perfect time for him when he had much to be happy about; thank you, Don!

Our chat was interrupted by a spammer calling my phone. So when, just after pulling away from his house, it rang again, I pulled over in front of his neighbor’s thinking at the spammer that hey, what part of Do Not Call do you not get?

But it was Richard: his aunt and uncle, who live halfway to Santa Cruz, were on their way over.

That gave me the incentive to explore using the freeways rather than surface streets for the route back. I managed to beat them home, where Michelle was doing a quick sweep and spruce and we were both glad for the kitchen do-over yesterday.

They wouldn’t stay for dinner but did succumb to good chocolate and a very fine Sunday afternoon was enjoyed by all.

I came away wondering, whatever the house may look like, why don’t we do this more often? We’re always happy when we do. Why do we let silly things snow us in? I hereby resolve to visit more and enjoy more.

Speaking of which, before I emailed Don? My Cooper’s hawk, which I had last seen every single day that I was waiting for my biopsy results, arrived and visited me, again right outside the window here.

And only just now as I type this am I realizing that that was such a shot of joy that I had to go email Don.

The microwave blew up on Michelle this morning with a spectacular gust of smoke and stink after I’d had my hot cocoa but before she’d had hers. This still constituted an emergency, then.

A few reviews on Amazon about unseeable controls on the one that Costco turned out to have, unless you crouched down to its level each time, and we went off to a second store and found just the right thing. Stainless steel and black. Looks great.

What that triggered, of course, was a burst of energy towards making the kitchen look really nice too, by myself because Michelle had other errands that had to be run. Scrubscrubscrub. Let’s see, why is this still here? Out! Scrubscrubscrub.

I finally sat down too tired to move when suddenly Richard called for help: one ambitious project had begotten another in another room.  Our Web connection was going to be down for he didn’t know how long unless he got this finished. Okay, I’m all ears–glad to help. He was half under a table, drilling a hole, rewiring bedrooms; “Could you tell me where this is coming through so I don’t go through anything wrong?”

STOP you’re going to hit the rug!

He stopped.

I came to check on things from his side and managed to fall and twist a few things. Landed on him. Oh sorry dear. Picked myself up, got out of the way…

Then another yell for help: the bookshelf had collapsed, at him but thankfully not on him.  We emptied the contents of the bookshelf, fire brigade method.

I am sitting. I am knitting.  A randomly grabbed single stash skein of Frog Tree Meriboo that hopefully will be enough to make a fast not-really-for-warmth hat to cover the vasoline etc on my head. But boy does it feel good to have gotten all the things done we got done.

(Do I dare try my treadmill time with a twisted ankle…)

Maybe I should unsubscrub to that idea just for today.

Friday’s DrGreene.com post is here, the story of the young dad with the screaming toddler. I’ve always loved how that one played out; I wonder how they are now. That would have been back when I was dyeing my hair, the only reason I shopped there, which would make her maybe ten by now.

Give her a few years and maybe she’ll go for the purple dye over thataway. The most harmless thing a kid can do to rebel is with their hair, and whatever they may look like for awhile, it grows patiently naturally back on its own time.

Speaking of which, with this vasoline in the scar thing going on, the Spaceman Spiff look? Totally nailed it.

(Eleven rows of 448 stitches today, an ice session in the middle, and I finished it! The shawl is blocking.)

My DrGreene.com post for Thursday is here.

A quiet day of knit, write, knit, write, knit, erase/write over again, with the occasional glance out the window (and a happy dose of Purlescence time near the end and some atrocious puns at Lene’s.)

A finch saw it. There it was. I was holding out on her, and look, no other finches in there to argue over it. Hey! She eyed me and hopped up from the doorway to the outer ledge of the window, exploring the glass oh-so-tentatively with her beak, hopping awkwardly down the narrow length of it and back, checking out that measuring cup just inside the window–clearly, her Pyrex was half full.

Well, nuts. She hopped back down to the sliding door as if waiting for me to open it. It’s there, the sunflowers are right there, why can’t I have it all to myself all that lovely lovely seed and not have to share it with that horde behind me? Let me in! We’ll be friends!

Two chickadees, meantime, birdwatched her at their favorite restaurant.

And a lace shawl slowly worked its way towards reality.

My DrGreene.com post for today is one that was here previously: Got Milk?

Today: putting your glasses on top of your head  when it’s full of vasoline and stitches to try to see that dark yarn on the needles from up close is, well, kind of a boneheaded thing to do.

So is adding 2+2+the rest across the repeats and finding, 800 stitches later, that they added up to zero increases. Someone wasn’t paying enough attention to the swatch, a little scattered there… t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k t i n k.

It feels good to be past where I was when I had to start the undoing. It feels good to be one more day past Monday and closer to being able to get my hair wet.

A bit of scrutiny in the mirror after a joking moment between my friend Marguerite and me–

–I’ll be darned. Look at that. It’s not just that it feels a little funny, that cancer surgery really did give me a slight facelift.  The surgeon played Fifty-two Pickup!

Thank you, everybody… Much appreciated.

Between the server crash and the dermatologist making cutting remarks yesterday, I forgot to mention.

I have posts here and here on DrGreene.com, Dr. Greene being my old friend Alan I grew up with. I was going to mention those Monday, and there will be one there for each day through Friday, but yesterday, an Apple a day kept the Doctor at bay.

I wrote this yesterday afternoon and then our server died. Richard was up late wrestling with it, knowing people would worry (plus he wanted me to have my web access.)

Not sure when the lidocaine finishes wearing off, but for now I am a bit of a numbskull. It is a highly odd sensation to have your ears pulled together by the top of your head.

As the dermatologist got set to leave, I asked her to grab the white paper bag with handles sticking out of my knitting bag. She did, wondering, and then pulled out the scarf I’d made her: Handmaiden Camelspin (luminous and a bit greener in real life). “I love the colors!” as she felt that soft yarn and I explained the 70/30 silk/baby camel content. I can’t help it; I’m a fiber artist, it’s important to me to say what a thing is made of.

And it was important to me to tell that good woman what a difference she made in her willingness to drop everything and see me right away.

(Tuesday morning, getting ready to get Michelle on her train.) By the way, I was looking at some old pictures of us holding Parker in February, and there it was–a clear shot of my part in my hair. No sign of the lesion. So it did grow that fast that recently. 2 cm. And my head already feels better than yesterday.

I was going to post a picture of the lilies, type, Just one more day, and leave the blog at that for the night and distract myself with Epiphany yarn. Row 72.

Michelle popped her head around the corner: “You were going to make almond cake, right?”

“Was I?” (Total head tilt.)

She’d just assumed, since I’d bought almond milk at Trader Joe’s on that trip yesterday and said it was for making cake with, well, so, tonight, right?

After we both got a good laugh out of that miscommunication–I’d simply wanted it on hand for the possibility–we both admitted that lemon cake actually sounded more fun, and since we already had five lemons picked we wouldn’t even have to brave the thorns in the dark out there.

1952 Betty Crocker’s Hot Milk Sponge Cake, substitute fresh picked lemon juice for half the milk–all of it is even better but again, it was a thorny issue–double the butter  (using Earth Balance to substitute) and soy or almond milk for the rest of the milk if needed (the dairy allergy thing) and there you go.

I got interrupted by the timer during the previous paragraph, and oh, does that kitchen smell heavenly. Michelle and Richard are looking forward to their early-morning breakfast before the dash for the train, everybody’s cheered up, and I’ve totally lost any leftover moping about the skin cancer surgery and any hair loss tomorrow.

Just because you can definitely means you should.

I chatted a little with the Cascade folks today, hoping there might be some hope of bringing the Epiphany back; they wished so too. They said they’re careful to test the fiber contents for quality control on the yarns they have milled for them–which is why the changed label on the last run of it. They loved that yarn, too.  But, along with the pricing issue, it’s got to be what it says it is.

Meantime, I was picking up a few things at Trader Joe’s this evening, and the clerk, well, he was having a good time. Chatting with the customer before me. Chatting with me. He clearly wasn’t on clean-up crew tonight because he grinned that in ten minutes he got to go home. All was well in his world.

“So! How was your day?” he added.

Oh it was fine, I smiled back.

“Nothing exciting? No adventure?”

(No long line of customers behind me, so hey, why not.)  So I told him about the friends visiting from out of state, the book, the huge surprise that totally blew me away and the exquisite yarn yesterday.

You should have seen the grin on his face as he took that all in. “Wow. That is so cool”–and so much more of a story than he’d expected for his question: adventure indeed. “That was AWESOME!”