4th of July

It was five years ago tomorrow my husband and I walked through our new neighborhood here on the ‘prairie,’ incredulous at the firecracker carnage littering the streets. Equally amazing, by the following day the streets were pristine.

So goes life in Nebraska.

Sitting now on the deck, that same husband and I with matching laptops, I’m listening to the crackly sounds of fireworks – actually eager for darkness when we’ll quietly shoot off a few before retiring.

Previous years we’ve blown things up with friends. Tonight with a jetlagged husband recently returned from a trip to China, we’re just hanging out. I’m hopeful he’ll be alert enough to join friends and me at a showing of Jaws at the vintage theater downtown tomorrow night.

In the summer of 1975, I saw Jaws in a theater in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on my first-ever movie date. An old dear high school friend asked me recently on Facebook how I can remember that. 

Honestly, I can’t remember anymore what day of the week it is. Chances are, though, if you ask me where I was a month ago or 40 years ago – I can tell you.

Keenly interwoven in the memories that unreel in my mind like home movies is a sense of place.

This morning while Skyping with our older son – employed in his ‘first ‘big boy’ job in Seoul, Korea, said son mentioned wanting to climb mountains there before moving on to his next adventure. Already I can’t remember the exact reference but he mentioned something about being a child of Arizona. He was born in Flagstaff, which rises 6900 feet above sea level. We moved to West Virgina when he was only two-and-a-half, but before leaving the southwest we went on one memorable hike where he climbed up and down nearly 200 steps at a national monument minutes from our home.

I was born in Michigan and lived there 20 years, spent eight-and-a-half years in Iowa, five-and-a-half in Arizona, 15 in West Virginia (where our second son was born), and now tomorrow marks five years smack dab in the middle of the country – Nebraska. The math adds up I think.

Missing every place I’ve been and embracing every place I am is what I do.

In addition to remembering – always remembering.

Back to school

This morning my 16-year-old (for one more week) told me he graduates from high school in nine months.

This ‘revelation’ kind of took both of us aback.

He’s ready for school to start, ready for senior year, ready for what lies ahead…college...and beyond.

Me, I think I’m ready for the nursing home.

Also this morning I had a routine appointment with the surgeon who did my foot surgery last summer.  Earlier this summer I had a blood clot, most likely caused by hormones and a long car trip.  Since then I’ve been having shin pain, and the ‘good’ news is that annoyance isn’t  alarming. It just takes time for all the ‘vascular systems’ to return to normal after a blood clot.

But I also got some ‘not so good’ news. The nerve damage in my other ankle has worsened. Deep down I think I’ve known this as I limped along on my daily hour-long walks. Fortunately, I inherited my mother’s high tolerance for pain.

Unfortunately, high tolerance notwithstanding, this needs to be taken care of surgically so I can continue to be active into my declining years.

Which quite frankly have felt like this summer.

Now a disclaimer…

None of this is life threatening (well, except for the blood clot), it’s just annoying and depressing. Recovery won’t be nearly as extensive since I’m not having toes pinned, etc. as I did last summer. But the bottom line is I’ll still be inactive for a longer period of time than I’d like.

Exercise makes me happy. It keeps the endorphins flowing and prevents me from being pudgier than I am.

My ‘baby’ graduates from high school in nine months, and it took me ten years to lose the worst of the baby weight.

Another disclaimer: My mother says the statute of limitations is up on that area of blame.

Exercise also gifts me with excellent cholesterol numbers, keeps me off high blood pressure medications, and staves off the diabetes which runs rampant on both sides of my family.

So…if I want to be able to keep exercising I have to take time to have surgery and recover.

Time has a way of passing quickly though.

After all, in nine months my baby graduates from high school.

Heat wave

I was reading an article this morning in our local newspaper that quoted a National Weather Service forecaster as calling the heat wave gripping the central part of the country “unrelenting.” Temperatures on the prairie soared to 98 today.

A good friend of mine lives in Oklahoma, which is particularly bearing the brunt of the heat. In the same article it reported in Oklahoma City another day of 100-degree heat was expected last Sunday, making it the 27^th day the city reached 100 or above. (I’m behind on my newspaper reading). And the triple-digit temps could last through September. My friend, Sandra Dark, is the co-author of a book coming out that month on weatherproofing your landscape.

Sometimes I wish there was a way to weatherproof my internal landscape, to better manage my inner mercury. Oh, I’ve mellowed considerably as I’ve aged. It’s been nearly 30 years since I lobbed a blob of Thanksgiving pie dough at the ceiling of the apartment my husband and I lived in our first year of marriage. I’m fairly certain something was preying on my mind in addition to my leaden crust.

Over the years, I’ve tried and failed to adapt my mother’s adage of “only worry about things you can do something about.” I’m a worrier, and worrying can make me cranky. Aside: I imagine my husband, mother, sons, and friends reading that last sentence and laughing hysterically. Perhaps cranky is too mild a word. Conversely, I have mellowed somewhat in my old age. I still worry excessively, but I think I do a better job of handling it.

Then a week comes along where an egg would fry on the sidewalk, two fairly new appliances fail, family challenges arise, work is ‘interesting,’ and the post-surgery boot feels welded to my foot. But I see an amazing physical therapist, work always works itself out, ditto on the family stuff, it wasn’t the AC that broke down, and the heat, well…

The weather is the one thing I never worry about because it is totally out of my control. When shivery 50 mph winds whip across this piece of prairie in late winter, I’m going to remind myself to be grateful it’s not nearly 100 degrees outside. And when life lobs lemons at me, I’m not going to make lemonade; I’m just going to lob them back.

Just not at the ceiling.

So many books, so little time

Back before I was even pregnant with my first son I harbored this little fantasy of what life enceinte would be like. I imagined something akin to an extended beach vacation (a smooth, sandy Great Lakes beach) where my only responsibilities were to plump out and devour all the books I ever wanted to read.

I got the plump part right at least.

Instead, right up to my delivery date, I taught two classes at Northern Arizona University—much of the time in pain from sciatica. Between grading and clearing out the spare bedroom as a nursery, reading took a back seat. My husband, Ralph, was teaching fulltime at NAU and commuting up and down the mountain to Arizona State University in Tempe for his final PhD class. Our son Erik’s December birth coincided with Ralph finishing his coursework.

I went back to teaching parttime a semester after Erik was born. Sleep deprivation and school work trumped reading. It horrifies me to think of it now, but I only read one book that entire year: a Barbara Michaels romantic suspense novel that obviously did not keep me in too much suspense.

Fast forward to late summer 1995: I’m recovering from the C-section birth of my second son (my mother, God bless her, ‘edited’ my legs out from many of the pictures of me in bed holding my new baby. A career as an old-timey circus sideshow attraction was surely an option for me then…and I ain’t talking about the Bearded Lady.).

Why I chose as post-pregnancy reading material the Kazuo Ishiguro book from the library I did, the title of which escapes me and even a trip to Amazon doesn’t enlighten me, I’ll never know. I still have nightmares about that book. The ceaseless repetitive surreal scenes did not mix well with the pain pill Percoset. I soon abandoned both the narcotics and the novel.

Books are my vocation and avocation. Ever since my mother introduced me to the Honey Bunch series when I was five, I was hooked. They sure beat Dick, Sally, Jane and their insipidly named pets, Spot and Puff. A voracious reader from that age on, I soon ‘graduated’ to Nancy Drew and never looked back. The year I was ten I read “The Catcher in the Rye” and “True Grit,” both probably too gritty for a ten-year-old, but there was no turning back.

The only time my mom ever censored my choice of reading materials was when I was in 7^th grade. The Detroit Free Press was serializing excerpts from “Sybil,” the story of a woman diagnosed with multiple personalities. One morning the newspaper was missing. My mom explained she threw it away. That day’s installment contained graphic descriptions of abuse Sybil suffered as a child at the hands of her own mother. Naturally I dug the paper out of the trash and read it.

And I’ve regretted doing so to this day.

Over the years, I’ve belonged to four book clubs in three states and read countless tomes crisscrossing genres. About a week ago someone posted a question on the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Facebook wall asking people their favorite authors. Nearly a week later the thread is still going strong. I responded with just a smattering of my favorite books and authors.

And I’m constantly discovering new favorites.

But also over the years something alarming has happened. Some of the joy went out of reading—and writing. Granted, I write to earn money but also because it’s akin to a calling with me. That’s a part of writing I never talk about except to say I knew from elementary school on I wanted to be a writer and have never really veered from that path.

In the dead of winter of this year, my mom and I had a heart-to-heart talk. We both wanted to make writing fun again. And so we have.

That decision opened the floodgates of reading joy. I’m no longer approaching every book I pick up as a ‘textbook,’ wondering if I should try something new, stretch my skills, stick to tried and true, the list is endless. I’m not saying I won’t do any of those things, but for now I’m at peace writing in the voice my mom and I do best together. And ideas for exploring future projects ‘out of my comfort zone’ are already scribbled in a notebook.

This summer, ‘thanks’ to foot surgery, I find myself with lots of reading time and no maternity clothes in sight. So I’m devouring books the way I used to race through the adventures of Nancy and her pals Bess and George.

There are so many books I still want to read (and write) and I need to embrace my enforced stillness rather than railing against it.

Who knows? I may even spend a few hours revisiting “The Secret of the Old Clock,” or “Harriet the Spy” or Harry Potter or pick up Anne Tyler or Jonathan Franzen or Lynn Austin or—the list is endless.

And I, for one, feel like a kid whose just been let back into the candy store.

Happy Birthday, Mom

On the Ides of March, my mother was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Reinhart Rock, a pharmacist, and Violet Stubbe Rock, the daughter of a grocer. The previous year my grandmother had gone off to college with a car, a fur coat, and a high IQ, intending to study journalism. She met and married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother, Barbara. Later my Uncle Jimmy and then my Aunt Judy came along.

This is intended to be my mother’s story, but aren’t we all the product of our own mother’s stories?

My grandmother was a so-so parent… good with her children and grandchildren when they were young but lacking overall in the maternal instincts department. She wasn’t a bad mother by all accounts; she just wasn’t the superlative mother my siblings and I were fortunate to have (still). On my late uncle’s birthday he was always ‘king for a day.’ My mom and Aunt Judy were never ‘queens for a day’ on their birthdays.

Not that my siblings and I were feted like royalty on our birthdays, although we did get out of dishes. It’s just my mom was and is scrupulously fair, treating all her offspring alike.

She’s also generous to a fault, a trait inherited from her father. My mom turned her childhood pastime of collecting picture postcards into a lifelong adult avocation; for 25 years she sponsored a mail postcard sale with all proceeds going to world hunger relief.

One thing my grandmother excelled at was taking her three children (sans my grandfather who never took vacations), her sister, her nephew, and her father on cross-country trips. My grandma loved to drive, a trait neither my mother nor I inherited. Ironically, the only driving that ever did her in was hilly pre-Interstate West Virginia (birthplace of my second son).

Though a voracious reader herself, my grandmother always prodded my mother to ‘put down her’ book and go outside to play. My mom has never been an outside person.

From a very early age, as I’ve recounted before, my late Aunt Judy would make breakfast for my mom and their brother. Grandma

Rock preferred to sleep in. To this day, I tease my mom about her lumpy oatmeal; but I’m also grateful to have a mother who got my three siblings and me up every morning for school and made us breakfast.

My mom used to say all she ever wanted to be was a mother, although her original career plan was to be a lawyer. She was accepted at law school but ended up teaching school while my father finished college.

She didn’t like teaching; she liked being a mother. Decades ago my pregnant mother thought she had indigestion from Christmas dinner, but it was just me… coming a little early.

This is one of our shared stories, a part of the family mythos. In a December eons later, I gave birth to my first son on one of the coldest days on record in Arizona. ‘It was so cold there was snow on the cactuses’ has become part of the thread of our life stories.

In addition to being my mother, she’s also my writing partner. She’s the author of more than 50 novels, and the co-author with me of more than 30 of those.

In addition to being my parent and partner, she’s something else.

My mother is and always has been my best friend. She never hovered but was there when needed. She never belittled and always encouraged and always had my back. She’s continually been there for me and my siblings and now our families, always knowing the right thing to say and do. For more than a dozen years, she’s lived with my husband, sons and me. Sure we have our differences, but we never stay mad for long.

I’m fond of another family story, one where my five-year-old self stood at the top of the stairs and threw a tiny brass vase down at her. She gave it back to me when I was 18. I try to stay on her good side.

Twenty-nine years ago this month, my Grandma Rock died. I was a senior in college, struggling through a physics class to meet a science requirement (because I’d flunked a science class the previous spring). Another class was also giving me fits. I was taking way too many hours, working at the university newspaper and applying for jobs, making sure I’d graduate so I could get a job and get married.

I loved my grandma. She spoiled me rotten (but I knew it so that made it less odious, I think), letting me stay up til all hours of the night watching Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and old Clark Gable movies. She used to fill paper cups with M&Ms, mini-marshmallows, and cashews for my ‘midnight snack.’ No mystery why when my son and his girlfriend were stranded in Denmark in a huge snowstorm a couple years ago, I buried my face in a bag of candy-coated comfort. She was a good grandma when we were young.

Because I loved my grandma and because I was afraid I was going to flunk yet another science class, my mom gave me a wonderful gift. She told me to stay home from the out-of-state funeral and study, absolving me of all guilt for not going.

That’s the kind of mom my mom is.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.

Free to be…like everyone else?

When my older son was young he had a best friend named Petey. Petey loved the movie Free Willy. He also loved hot dogs.

Erik liked neither to the point of what I feared was rudeness during play dates.

“I don’t like Free Willy, I’m never gonna like Free Willy, and no one can make me like Free Willy,” he pronounced on the way home from Petey’s one day.

My son’s adamant stance against this movie (and hot dogs) didn’t seem to affect his friendship with Petey. But I still apologized to Petey’s mom just in case Erik’s independence bordered on impoliteness. She actually said to me she wished as an African American mother her son was more independent. What the teen years would bring concerned her.

I was on the verge of teendom when Free to Be…You and Me, was released, a record album and book featuring stories and songs performed by celebrities. The original message was both boys and girls could achieve anything.

When this phrase pops into my head, I think of it as meaning more. We should respect each other’s individuality, not disparage it. We can’t all like Free Willy (or hot dogs) and why should we?

Previously I’ve written about what a huge fan I am of our local YMCA and the great classes and instructors. A new type of workout is being offered at multiple times, and it’s extremely popular.

I don’t like it so I’m not doing it. It’s not the exertion that doesn’t appeal to me, it’s the preparation. Putting weights on bars is not my thing. Same with photography, make-up, accessorizing, and crafts.

During those pre-teen years my Grandma Rock, a prolific knitter, tried to teach me the art of twisting yarn on needles. She was far more successful with instructing me on playing Gin Rummy for nickels.

Those who like this new workout are usually quite polite when they ask me what I don’t like about it. Recently, though, someone I don’t know well asked me rather impolitely.

I nearly channeled Erik’s age-old Free Willy litany…but refrained.

But it got me thinking about being free to be…me. I have no problem being a non-conformist. And in some areas I conform to the norm, though what that is I often wonder.

Parents spend so much time worrying about their children “following the crowd.” I actually had a friend once who confessed when she was a teenager she did jump off a bridge when everyone else did!

How can we, as parents, exhort our sons and daughters not to succumb to peer pressure when we send mixed messages our adult selves all have to like the same thing?

And I’m not just talking about a new exercise workout.

We can’t all like Free Willy. Or hot dogs.

Passages

My younger son, Andrew, posed an interesting question at brunch yesterday. He wanted to know what seemed stranger, that his older brother, Erik, was going to be a junior in college next year or that he himself was going to be a sophomore in high school in the fall.

After mulling for a minute, I told him what freaks me out most is his going off to college in three years. I vividly remember sending him off to the first day of kindergarten on Bus 209 piloted by Crazy Louie. I still miss Louie.

Yesterday afternoon I went to an honors recital at the university with my neighborhood walking buddy. On the way home she was lamenting the end of the elementary school years. Her son heads to middle school in August and her daughter enters high school.

In 2013, Andrew will graduate from high school… 35 years after I did. Erik, as I may have mentioned before, took the unconventional route: foreign exchange student, ‘dropping out’ senior year, getting accepted to college a year early, earning a GED, going to college a year early…whew.

Andrew is following the conventional route. My two sons are very different from each other, but they do share a common trait. Years ago their Aunt Mette, my husband’s younger-by-seven-years sister, was visiting.

“They certainly are relentless!” she said, exhausted after spending a couple days with her nephews.

They are indeed relentless, and goal-oriented…and the loves of my life.

Me, who is so good at letting go, is having a hard time envisioning the day when they both leave the nest…for good.

This week Erik heads out to spend the summer working and doing an internship in Morgantown, WV…where he ‘grew up.’ He’ll get to spend time with his wonderful girlfriend, Morgan, home from college. And he’ll be back to being on his own, something he excels at. It has been kind of nice to have him home for awhile.

In August, Erik will be home for that junior year of college. Andrew will start his sophomore year of high school the day after he turns 15.

As for me, I’m going to spend the summer writing, sitting on my deck sipping sugar-free lemonade, and wondering if I own a copy of Gail Sheehy’s book.

Switching Gears

When I was young, I wanted to be:

1. A writer
   
2. Mom to 10 children
   
3. A musical comedy star
   
4. The First Lady (girls couldn't even wear pants til 6th grade in the small Michigan town I lived in, yes, Michigan...freezing cold...we had to wear 'stretch pants' to school then take them off until recess time)
   
5. Mrs. Donny Osmond
   
6. Mrs. David Cassidy
   
7. Mrs...well you get the idea....
   
8. An environmentalist (I  had no idea that's what it was called...I just wrote letters protesting the use of colored dyes in toilet paper and tissues and lettered on wooden medallions 'Save the Seals')
   
9. Thin
   
10. Happy

Are you what you want to be?

June Cleaver I ain’t

Once I asked my older son, Erik, if he wished he had a conventional mom. Nope, he said, he liked me.

In many ways I adapted a traditional parenting style, from trotting off to the pumpkin patch years ago with his kindergarten class to chaperoning a 7^th grade field trip to NYC.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly conventional, but I’d already done the aforementioned autumn trip, the ‘farm’ (famous for baby animals and torrential downpours) and the international festival at the university student union.

So the week before Thanksgiving six years ago, I boarded a bus along with several other hale and hearty (or foolhardy) parents and a few grandparents -- Big Apple bound.

Let’s just say some people embrace the role of chaperone more ‘heartily’ than others. This is how my group ended up with Max, who became one of Erik’s best friends.

Erik’s friends are an adventurous lot (their parents a courageous, supportive cadre). Currently two are doing ‘gap’ years in Slovakia and Chile. The spring of Erik’s sophomore year in high school, he and several of his friends participated in a trip to Guatemala. That summer we drove then 16-year-old Erik to DC, the first leg of his first trip to Germany.

Life is divided into different kinds of people. Some have curly hair, some have straight hair. Some are wanderers, like Erik and his dad. I swear the ancestral blood of Erik the Red flows like lava through the veins of my husband (technically he has strong Danish roots, but a viking is a viking). When we lived in West Virginia, dh once rode his motorcycle to Ohio…via Buffalo, NY.

Erik is no different. When he was little, we lived in Flagstaff, Arizona. I belonged to a faculty wives’ playgroup. We’d get together, and the children would play and the moms would drink tea…and my toddler would be tryin’ to head for the Mexican border.

Others, like my mom and me, are ‘castle builders.’ She’s traveled extensively over the years but is firmly rooted to the notion of home. I loathe the act of travel (unlike the gleeful men in this family, younger son included) but do enjoy seeing things. I just am awfully fond of home, wherever that may be.

Monday marked the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In spring of 2008, my husband, younger son and I flew to Germany to visit Erik for spring break (tad chillier than Ft. Lauderdale). We walked those streets, visited the cluttered testament that is the Checkpoint Charlie museum and stood next to the Brandenburg Gate.

Easter Sunday we took the train to Amsterdam and visited the Anne Frank house. Erik had gotten us tickets on the Internet so we could bypass the long lines waiting in the falling snow.

A videotaped interview with Otto Frank played as the queue filed through the last of the cramped twisty quarters. His words still resonate. He spoke of his daughter being a ‘typical’ teenager. I marveled that I never knew the 'house' where the Franks and others hid was actually quarters above a jam warehouse. It wasn’t important to Anne so she didn’t feel the need to mention it. I tried to imagine what life must have been like, especially for the children, never being able to go outside or make noise during the day for fear of exposure. Otto Frank spoke of what an ordinary teenager she was, and that’s what made her so extraordinary.

Anne Frank was somebody’s daughter. She could be cantankerous and fight with her mother and sister and dream of kissing a boy. She didn’t get to grow up. She didn’t get to see the world.

I am thankful every day my children can and do.