Monthly Archives: July 2013

The Caterpillar

Last Friday morning I was in a big fat rush. It was going to be a busier day than usual at work. I woke up stressed out about all the documents I needed to crank out, the emails I had to answer, and the presentation I was going to give that still needed fine-tuning. I wanted to get the kids to our neighbor’s house early so I could get to work.

To my frustration, instead of letting me drive them there, the children begged to be allowed to walk. I didn’t have the heart to say no, but I warned them that they would need to hurry. I drove the short distance myself, passing them as they walked. I parked the car at our neighbor’s house and waited for them. While I stood there waiting, acorns turned into mighty oaks, mountains eroded into plains, and species evolved.

I was reminded of my son’s first tee-ball experience. During one of his games I was standing behind the fence right behind his two coaches. Whenever it was time for the two teams to switch sides, they would tuck their chaw into one cheek with their tongues so they could yell out, “HUSTLE, BOYS! COME ON! HUSTLE! HUSTLE! HUSTLE!” as they stood there with their arms crossed over their beer bellies. All the little four year olds would run across the field as fast as their little legs could carry them. My son would lope along at a gentle pace a few yards behind the pack. At one point, one of the coaches turned to the other with a look of disgust and spat, “That boy don’t know the meaning of hustle.”

As I waited by the car in front of our neighbor’s house I could see my children slowly ambling along the road and thought, “Come on kids, hustle, hustle, hustle!” As if in perverse response to my mental plea, I saw them slow down instead, and then drop to the ground to inspect something.

“Come here, Mom! You have to take a picture of this!” my son called to me.

For a second I thought about scolding them and reminding them that I was in a hurry. For some reason, (OK, probably because my son so adroitly played to my photo obsession), I grabbed my camera and walked back to where they were.

To be honest, I was kind of disappointed at first when I realized they were just looking at a caterpillar. But they were both so completely entranced that I crouched down to look at it myself. I could see their point. The translucent lime green skin! The perfectly segmented body! Those curious speckles!

The caterpillar was a cosmic gift. For a moment, the mere fact of its existence arrested time, that most precious commodity of all, and we were wonderstruck. Oh, to always have the open heart and reverent eyes of a child…to slow down enough to see the abundant miracles around us and to know instinctively that appreciation of these wonders must always take precedence over lesser concerns.

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This is my mother…

When we were in Arlington this weekend, I noticed my mother was having more trouble than usual getting into the car. Upon closer inspection I realized she had a bruise on her chin.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, well…I fell the other day,” she said reluctantly.

“WHAT?!” I gasped in horror.

“I fell outside on the stairs that go to the basement and I couldn’t get up.”

The old “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercial immediately came to mind.

“Oh no! What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, since I couldn’t get up, I just stayed there on the ground for awhile.” My heart was breaking into a million splintery shards as I pictured my elderly mother face planting on the cold hard ground.

She started to grin and continued, “And then I noticed there were some weeds right where I’d fallen. So, since I couldn’t do anything else, I started pulling out the weeds. After a little while I could get up again.”

Yep. That’s my mother.

Mom gets her banged up leg bandaged.

My sister bandages my mom’s banged up leg.

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The Golden Screw

I’ve been at the hospital with my daughter for a couple days. She suddenly fell ill on Saturday while we were visiting with our family in Arlington. She has an as-of-yet unidentified infection, which is causing her to have a fever and headache. I’m hoping she’ll be discharged on Monday. I’m really hoping that she’ll be fully recovered by Friday, when she, her brother and I are supposed to fly to England to reunite with the rest of our family, who flew there ahead of us last Wednesday.

Being in the ER and at the hospital brings back so many memories…Last night when her gurney was wheeled into the room where they do chest x-rays, I had to laugh a little despite the situation.

“Do you remember the last time you were in this room?” I asked my daughter. She looked at me blankly.

“Remember when you swallowed the ‘golden screw’?” I asked.

She glared resentfully at the unwelcome reminder. (Kind of like this):

A few years ago, she came to me with a scared, guilty look on her face. She informed me that she had accidentally swallowed “a golden screw.” After this initial confession, her gut survival instincts kicked in. She worked out a story and she tenaciously stuck to it as if she’d been schooled by the US Special Ops on how to withstand brutal interrogation tactics. That day, scores of doctors, nurses, technicians, and family members asked her variations of the same, obvious question: “Why did you swallow the screw?” At first she was patient with her interrogators. She responded in a brisk, unapologetic, business-like tone: “It was an accident.”

People would insist on pressing her for a little more information, “But how did the screw get in your mouth?” or “Why was the screw in your mouth?” The girl never wavered from her version of the events. “It was an accident” was all anyone ever got from her, though by the end of the day her patience was wearing thin. She could no longer hide her exasperation with the relentless repetition of a question she had already answered so clearly and conclusively. When asked the same irritating question, her little shoulders would heave with an exaggerated sigh. She would reply for the umpteenth time, “IT. WAS. AN. ACCIDENT!” Although she didn’t actually tack on the word, “Dumbass!” you could tell that was exactly what she was thinking.

We have swallowed a golden screw. It’s been a rough couple of days, but there have been some sweet moments. I have been filled with gratitude for so many things and for so many people. When we arrived in Charlottesville at 9 pm on Saturday, my son urged me to take his sister straight to the ER. He reassured me that he would take care of our dogs and that he would be OK, even if it turned out that he would be left on his own if she were admitted. I was so proud of him. The ER attending happened to be his Sunday School teacher. He offered to swing by our house to check on him on his way back home when his shift ended at 1 am. In the morning our fairy godmother neighbor swooped in to bring Nicholas over to her house and took care of him until another friend came by to take him swimming and then back to their house so he wouldn’t have to spend another night alone. Other friends and family members have generously offered their help. At the hospital we have gratefully appreciated the kind ministrations of nurses, whom I wholeheartedly worship as higher beings.

Although the circumstances are lousy, it’s been good to have this time with my girl too. After she endured the traumatic experience of getting her IV put in, she said through her tears: “I feel so sorry for really little kids who have to get IVs.”

“You’ve been one of those little kids, too,” I pointed out.

With all the weight and experience of her seven years my daughter replied, “Yeah, but I’m not little anymore.”

Today we watched the men’s Wimbledon final. The most entertaining part of the game for me was listening to Tatiana’s expert running commentary. She reeled off stats and filled me in on the human interest backstories like a pro. She conked out from exhaustion before the game ended. When she woke up again we turned the television back on to see that Andy Murray had won the Wimbledon title. We cheered for Murray and expressed our sympathy for his opponent. I made her giggle when I said, “Oh look at that. Poor Djokovic only gets 1.2 million.” We’ve commiserated over the lousy hospital food. We’ve had chit chats about this and that. And tonight I sang her to sleep with one of our favorite old lullabies, Loch Lomond, in honor of Murray and our upcoming trip to Scotland.

Five Poems for Summer

Miracles

by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the waves – the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

On the Grasshopper and the Cricket

by John Keats

The poetry of earth is never dead:
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s — he takes the lead
In summer luxury, –he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never;
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

From Shakespear’s The Tempest, Act V, Scene I

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Back Yard

by Carl Sandburg

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month;
tonight they are throwing you kisses.

An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a
cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go – I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking
white thoughts you rain down.

Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.

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Independence Day

Today Colin and Teddy land in England, the country whose yoke of oppression we shrugged off 237 years ago – the very event we celebrate today! Teddy is celebrating independence of his own kind. Colin will drop him off at his parents’ house in England and will move on to Edinburgh, where he will be singing with his early music chorale group, Zephyrus. For the first time ever, Teddy will be without anyone else in his immediate family for an entire week. That’s a lot of independence…Maybe even a little too much independence for my taste. I decided I would feel better about the whole situation if I wrote up my own Declaration of Independence for him to sign before he left:

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They’re off!

There they go!

My husband and son are flying across the ocean to England tomorrow morning. I’ll take the other two kids and we’ll all meet up in a little over a week. It’s 10 pm and we’re all preparing in our own little ways. Colin is blithely pecking away at his computer without a care in the world. Tomorrow morning he’ll toss a few clothes into a suitcase. Meanwhile, I’m wringing my hands and will be up until 3 am doing a million loads of laundry as I try to get my son packed. His siblings have been fretting all week about missing their “middlest” brother, and are camping out on his bedroom floor tonight to maximize their time together…

Intersection

I remember as a child idly gazing out the car window at an intersection as we waited for the light to change. Suddenly, I had the startling revelation that the cars flanking ours were not merely a part of the passing landscape, but vessels containing people who were in the midst of a life as vivid and complex and important to them as my own was to me. Even more astonishing to me was the thought that to them, I was as inconsequential as they had been to me only moments before.

I’ve been reliving that experience with my new macro lens. A whole kingdom of living beings that are normally insignificant, and even invisible to me have suddenly become the focus of my attention. Through my macro lens I experience the shock of seeing miniature life and death dramas playing out as if on a big screen. I see eyeballs staring up at me, hairy legs, luxurious bumblebee fur, delicate antennae…The macro lens bridges our separate worlds, making it so that the insects and I are fellow travelers at an intersection, waiting for the light to change.

As the spider quickly encased a smaller insect in its web, a larger bug struggled to free himself.
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Weekend Snapshots 6

Around his thirteenth birthday a few months ago, my son was waxing expansively about how it would be less than three years before he would get his learner’s permit to drive. It’s true that somewhere, somehow, some crackpot, who was smoking weed or was in some other way mentally impaired at the time, deemed fifteen and a half the age at which children could get their learner’s permit to drive in the state of Virginia. Of course, I hastened to disabuse my son of the notion that he would be getting his license at that age.

In as neutral a voice as I could muster I said, “It’s not just about how old you are. We would have to see that you were really ready for the responsibility of driving. We’d want to make sure that you were mature enough to handle that responsibility.”

This silenced him for a few moments. I could see that he was performing some mental calculations before coming to an obvious, but unpleasant conclusion. Finally, he erupted, “If T (his eight year old sister) is driving me around when she’s fifteen and a half, I’m going to be really, really mad!”

It may be years before he ever gets behind the wheel of a real car, but this weekend we went Go-Karting at Windy Hills Sports Complex in Richmond, Virginia for his little brother’s belated birthday celebration and we all did some driving:

Clearly, my daughter was unimpressed with her mother’s driving:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
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