Running with Stilettos

The Coffee and Chainsaw Connection

2009-10-18T21:12:00.006-05:00

I pushed the familiar number on speed dial on my cell phone to let my friend Judy know I was running late for coffee.

This is nothing new, sometimes the "I'm running late" call comes from her end. We have four kids (now adults in varying stages) apiece, and two ex-husbands (one each). She has two grandkids, I have a dog and a cat and a "grand-pug" and two "grand-cats" that sometimes come to visit. Her house burned down about a year ago, my fifteen acres of fields and woods are starting to crowd me and look like something Maurice Sendik dreamed up. We both have things that make us stare at the ceiling in the middle of the night.

We're always trying to cram one too many things into our lives, but we try to make time for coffee once in a while, around hair appointments and sick children and travel plans and work schedules and the assortment of surprises life's always throwing at you. I invariably drink my coffee loaded with chocolate and whipped cream. Judy's the more adventurous one, she'll foray into things with pumpkin spice and caramel this time of year. Thirty years ago or so when we met, Judy was a dead ringer for the actress Kate Bosworth of "Blue Crush" and "Beyond the Sea" fame. I looked thirty years younger then too, and my hair was really and truly brown. I don't look like anybody famous, but I remind a lot of people of somebody they've already met. When somebody I work with told me they thought I looked like Annette Benning, I could have busted a rib laughing.

It's good to have friends who know where the bones are buried and always forgive you for falling off your diet. Because, as we all know, coffee loaded with whipped cream and chocolate will always be the slippery slope.

This morning, though, my excuse was a tad unorthodox, and eight hours later I'm still turning over the particular combination of words in my head.

"I'm running a little late because my chainsaw got stuck in a log."

Good lord, what being single has done to me!!

Now before you start to picture me as Paula Bunyon with a blue ox parked in the garage, picture this. Only two weeks before, I was doing the tango--badly, but with enthusiasm--on a vintage dance hall floor in a polka-dotted silk chiffon dress, magenta suede stilettos with tiny patent leather bows, and a Gerbera daisy the size of a saucer in my hair. I like shoe shopping, I'm absolutely addicted to chocolate, and I really like to be pampered.

Four years ago, when the ink was barely dry on the divorce that had followed a long and very traditional marriage (he worked long hours, I kept the home fires burning and the soccer uniforms washed), I didn't know a hex wrench from a jar of honey. But little by little, necessity being the mother of invention, I've accumulated a few tools and now know how to use them. A cordless drill was the first, sparked by the need to immediately fix a pasture fence to keep the horses in. A tool kit, though to be fair, it's really a pretty turquoise and opaque white fishing tackle box. A level. And the piece de resistance, the rechargeable-battery operated chainsaw. That purchase was made after one windy night when a large dead tree came down across my driveway and shattered, and I had nothing but a handsaw to use on some of the larger limbs. Aerobics classes be damned, that was hard work!

Envisioning yet more dead trees coming down across the driveway at inconvenient times such as when I'd be leaving for work, I took myself shopping and picked out the smallest, most benign-looking chainsaw I could find. It's not much bigger than a blender, though it still carries the requisite air of potential dismemberment that keeps me treating it with a lot of respect. And wearing heavy leather gloves. I remember still how terrified I was when, on one vacation, my ex-husband would disappear solo into the woods for several hours at a time to trim trees and brush on a lakefront lot we had purchased when the kids were still quite small. Death, disaster, life as a widow, all sorts of dire scenarios ran through my head like leaves in a storm until he'd walk through the door again, still in one piece. Now it's my friends who worry about me on the weekends as I wield my tiny chainsaw in the woods, battling nature and, to be honest, losing most of the time.

This morning's hitch came about as I was trying to detangle a Gordian knot of three dead trees that had crashed down on each other in a windstorm a couple of weeks earlier. I'd been working on it every opportunity where there was brief spell of dry weather. If a tree falls in a forest, nobody much gives a damn. But one of these trees had fallen into the beautiful crabapple tree at the edge of my yard that I had gotten from the kids for Mother's Day years earlier. Another rested in the branches of a smaller trash tree twenty feet away. And they had all come down like a giant three-dimensional game of JENGA. One fell east, one fell southeast, and one fell north atop each other, forked branches intertwining. As I cautiously worked on cutting the farthest, smallest branches and clearing out a thicket of leafy vines that obscured those complicated spatial relationships, I stood back often, trying to figure out what I could safely pull on that wouldn't have something else and something bigger fall on me.

I thought I had it all figured out, with several fireplace-sized cuts of wood already stacked on the lawn from my efforts today. But then as the little saw blade gamely tore through yet another good sized tree limb, something further up the line jiggled, and then something else shifted, and then the half-cut tree-limb closed down on the blade and the jig was up. I tugged, and tugged, and tugged some more, but it was hopeless. At least for me. I trudged back to the garage and brought out my hand saw and put a lot more elbow grease into freeing my stuck little battery-operated tool than I ever thought I'd do with a saw again. Then I put everything away and drove to meet Judy for coffee at a frou-frou coffee joint.

There have been a lot of little "self-sufficiency" markers in the past four years, starting with dragging out a ladder to change the light bulb in the foyer (always a source of much cursing by my ex, and, I've discovered, with good reason) and moving on to installing handles on the basement storage cabinets, replacing a bathroom fixture, and fixing a toilet. Twice. Nothing that I'd ever contemplated when my understanding of life roles came down to "his" and "hers." Much has changed since then, some of it still making my head spin if I think about it too much.

I still like chiffon, spike heels, romantic walks on the beach, and bouquets of flowers for absolutely no reason.

But dang it...I like my little chain saw too!!

Ship Out of Water

2009-10-08T07:49:00.024-05:00

A trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum is always such a visual treat, long before you even get to the artwork on display inside. Part "ship out of water," part mechanical giant butterfly, with a Dale Chihuly glass "tree" inside the lobby that looks like it's from "under the sea" and giant aspen leaves that never fall just down the street at Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin, it's always an excuse to grab a cup of coffee and just stop and stare for a while...

Tough Enough?

2009-09-13T08:49:00.004-05:00

The scene in the courtroom still haunts me ten years later.

I remember the tears that sprang hot to my eyes as I shut the door behind me and walked down the corridor, thinking "I am not tough enough to do this job." I was a law student then, a seasoned criminal prosecutor now. And from time to time, out of nowhere, still comes that memory. It is seared into my consciousness, a testament to "collateral damage," and a mother's grief--two mothers, in fact--and consequences reaped by horrific acts, and how nothing in life, either evil or good, ever happens in a vacuum.

But first, a bit about my job. For the past nine years I've been unbelievably fortunate to work as a criminal prosecutor in a part-time capacity. When I got hired, I felt like I'd hit the jackpot in terms of balancing life and work and family. I still do. I had four kids at home when I'd started law school, and still had three kids living at home when I finished. Getting to do the work I loved in a half-time structure meant that I could still make it to soccer practice and gymnastic meets and find the time to bake team cupcakes decorated like tennis balls and help with homework and volunteer at school and cook dinner on a regular basis. Okay, a semi-regular basis. My kids really got quite sick of "rotisserie chicken" and potato salad from the grocery store deli every Tuesday night.

This was a new position, not only for me, but for the District Attorney's office as well. And so little by little, my job duties evolved to make the most use of my time there and my previous background as a writer. While no one I work with would, I think, dare call me the politically incorrect "miscellaneous backup chick," I make sport of it myself. One cop, introducing me to another, described me as the office's "utility person." I have my areas of specialty--appellate work, child support prosecutions, seizing assets from drug dealers, responding to requests by inmates who are unhappy that their probation or parole has been revoked and want the trial court to overturn that administrative decision--and then I just get thrown into a lot of things with little warning. It comes with the job. I've argued four cases before the state supreme court, I've been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court...and I handle a lot of speeding tickets as well.

But being the part-timer means that for the most part, I don't handle the big cases from start to finish. I may review their police reports, I may issue the charges, I may even brief or argue a pre-trial motion, but I'm rarely there for the finish.

Ten years ago, I was simply a spectator in the courtroom. And it has stayed with me every step of the way since then.

A young man's life hung in the balance. His was the last sentencing hearing of a trio of young men who had, months earlier, kidnapped and savagely victimized a young woman in a highly-publicized case. There were no reporters in the courtroom this time, no television cameras, no members of the public. Just the routine players in this type of drama. A judge, the defendant, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, the courtroom staff. And the families. Both his and hers.

His mother went first, a lioness trying to protect her son. She walked into the courtroom with a bearing that was so precise it was almost military. She was a flight attendant, and wore her navy uniform proudly, crisp white accents with glints of gold, her hair pulled severely back. The courtroom was a high security place, which meant that in addition to armed bailiffs being present as a matter of course, the "gallery" was separated from the court by walls of glass and wood. Sound was amplified and conveyed by microphone and speaker.

For nearly a half hour the young man's mother spoke before the judge, passionately pleading for mercy. Sometimes her voice was strong, sometimes it broke with emotion. In her hand she held copies of papers and artwork he had created in grade school that had hung on her refrigerator door years before. She told the tale of his life, which was in large part a tale of hers as well. Of a severely abusive relationship that she had finally found the courage to leave, of her struggle to claw her way out of a life of despair and establish herself as a professional in a field that leaves nothing to chance and relies on absolute accountability and responsibility. Her son's failings were not all his, she argued. He had been such a good child. But a cousin--one of the other defendants, in fact--had often led him astray as he was growing up. And she, in her job, had not always been there to counterbalance the influence.

And then the victim's mother spoke. The girl herself was not in the courtroom, but her mother and some other people were there to stand up for her. This mother was, on the outside, less crisply glamorous, more plain spoken than the woman who spoke before her. But she spoke eloquently about her child nonetheless, about a wonderful and responsible young girl who was the first in her family to go to college, who had a life bright and shining with promise and optimism. And whose life had been utterly broken by no fault of her own. Her daughter had had so much taken from her, and would never be the same. There needed to be justice here.

The prosecutor spoke then too, and the defense attorney, though I remember little of what either of them had to say. Real life and real heartaches trump the speeches of professionals most of the time.

And then it was the judge's turn. The words of the law fell heavily in the windowless courtroom. Punishment. Rehabilitation. Protection of the public. Concepts that judges apply every day in courtrooms across the country, elastic in their application but fixed in their importance as guiding principle.

But the moment that stays with me was one that was happening on the other side of the glass, in the gallery that separates the official participants in the case from everyone else. As the judge began to speak, the mother of the young man who had done such wrong walked around to the first row of the gallery, and knelt in front of the young woman's mother and put her hand on the other woman's lap. "I am so sorry," she said, and bowed her head, and then the two of them listened together for a verdict delivered in the pursuit of justice that would never make either of their children alright.

I fled the courtroom at that point, though not before hearing a sentence handed down which ensured that the young man would never see an ordinary sunlit day outside of a prison for most of his life, if not all. "I am not tough enough for this job," I thought as I wiped the tears away with my hand and then left the building.

It's been ten years since that day in the courtroom, nine years since I started working as a criminal prosecutor. I've had by victories and I've had my defeats, and none of them have shaken me to the core as much as this one did. I look back and still wonder whether I'm "tough enough" for the oath I've taken.

If I'm very lucky, I think and pray, I'll somehow make it to retirement before I ever find out.

The Vigil

2009-08-29T11:49:00.003-05:00

The air streaming out of the grocery store cooler is dry and cold and bracing. I stand in front of an assortment of premium gourmet ice cream in single-serve cartons with high calorie counts and higher prices.

What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.

I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.

It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.

He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.

The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.

And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.

I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.

I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.

This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.

And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.

Back Away from the Bunny!

2009-08-13T20:44:00.009-05:00

It's the dog days of summer, and that can mean only one thing.

It's time to go to the fair.

I've been to two this year so far, the county fair and the state fair. Marvelous opportunities to people watch, eat food on a stick, pay way too much for alcohol, weigh the relative merits of things you'd never make at home like deep-fried s'mores, deep-fried cookie dough and chocolate covered bacon, and traverse the midway looking for more and more inventive ways to spend $20 to buy a stuffed animal worth two bits. I spent only six bucks this time, coming out ahead of the average, using a mallet to pound a catapault flinging a succession of rubber frogs into a barrel with rotating lily pads, and winning a tiny white stuffed tiger which I promptly surrendered to my boyfriend's daughter. She's eighteen. What, I should keep the toy for myself? My traditional prize-winning duty done, I passed on any further opportunities to win goldfish, throw darts at balloons, toss basketballs, fling plastic rings at upright soda bottles.

Because for me, the fair's not about the games, the food, even the music. The essence of a fair on a hot summer day is ... the animals.

Oh, the black and brown Clydesdales gleaming like dark satin under the floodlights in their jingling ten-horse hitches, silky white "feathers" floating around their hooves like cheerleaders' pompoms as they thunder around the coliseum, tons of beribboned and disciplined muscle on the hoof. Oh, the incredible assortment of chickens, some weirdly resembling poodles, other looking like eccentric characters in a British barnyard comedy. Oh, the cows, spotless and brushed and shampooed, nearly odorless, chewing contentedly in their stalls surrounded by perfectly clean straw, while the calves nestle together as cute as a basket of puppies. Sigh... I could go on and on and on.

It's not like I haven't seen cows before. Or horses. Or chickens. Or rabbits.

Over the years, I've been in the position of living with and cleaning up after all of them, in ways that left lasting impressions. At seventeen and Chicago-bred, I'd been privy to an abundance of bovine company when living on a once-working farm with my family in northern Wisconsin. Call it a social experiment gone awry, for a few years we nonetheless packed our decrepit barn with a horse and some ponies and some calves and some geese and some chickens and ducks and a pig. I could drive the route to the feed mill blindfolded. Noah's Ark meets Green Acres. The barn swallows moved in on their own.

When it came time to milk the cow my parents brought home from an auction one day, I was the only person brave enough or stupid enough to step up to the job that evening with a bucket between my knees and a wooden stool to sit on. We named her "Queenie," and the two things I remember most are the fact that she came with some wicked-looking horns ... and she didn't like to stand still during milking. The stool didn't have wheels. It was quite the sight, watching me scoot my rear on my little stool to follow her, the milk sloshing back and forth in the pail, and quite the job to perform twice a day.

But milking was by far the friendlier task. What goes in must go out, and after hauling bale after bale of hay into the barn and shaking it out in front of Queenie's nose, I recall shoveling mountains of ... by-products ... from the trench behind where she stood into a wheelbarrow and out the back door of the barn to a large, fragrant heap. A lot of what I was doing back then fits in the "character building" column. I've been told that I'm quite the character.

Likewise, when it came to the two horses I owned for more than thirty years. Yes, I just loved to look at them in a summer pasture, their tails switching back and forth as they grazed, their ears swiveling like semaphores at every sound. The sight of a horse grazing in the sunlight on a warm summer day can still make my heart skip a beat in fond remembrance. But again ... I was no stranger to cleanups, and medications, and fly-repellants, and near-death experiences at night in freezing barns, and hauling heavy hay bales and fifty-pound sacks of horse feed around.

But the animals at the fair--they're like what Playboy centerfolds are to real women, what Marie Antionette's little hobby farm at Versailles was to a working farm in the French countryside. For the rest of us, not the hard-working exhibitors, these are purely eye-candy! Fantasy animals! Hollywood-groomed and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille!

Really, what little girl or boy watching the Lone Ranger and Tonto thunder across the mesa in pursuit of bad guys ever thought that Silver and Scout might throw a shoe? Or need a hay wagon following somewhere behind in the badlands? Did Timmy ever follow Lassie with a pooper scooper? Did Wilbur ever lift a shovel behind Mr. Ed?

So with that frame of mind--voluntary and total suspension of reality--I stepped into the fairs. Oooohhhed and aaaaaaahhhhhhed over the flashy Clydesdales as they threw their weight into harness. Chuckled at the chickens, cooed over the newly hatched baby chicks. Debated just where, on a "cuteness" scale, human babies fell in relation to puppies, kittens, and fuzzy ducklings. (The jury's still out on that one.)

Walking past the dairy barn at the tail end of the evening, I passed by a lovely Brown Swiss heifer placidly chewing her cud. She was spotless, she was dust-free, she could have stepped right out of a Gainsborough painting. My arm immediately crossed over the low wooden fence to stroke her neck, and in an instant I was enveloped by the smell of fresh hay and memory and in some ways much simpler times. My hand found its way up to her ears and her forehead, and the recollection of just where to scratch to make a happy cow came flooding through my fingers. The heifer leaned into it as I worked my scritching around the nubs of her horns and around the base of her ears. If cows could purr, this one would have sounded like an Evinrude motor.

It was a delight. Still, when I go to the fair, I know I'm in no danger of acting on impulse and bringing home a horse or a cow or a goat or a camel. The rabbits, however, are another story.

For decades of fair-going, the rabbits have been my real weakness. So soft, so plush, so cuddly looking, so clean, so touchable! Blank slates of fluffy goodness. I did, in fact, succumb the siren song of cuteness a few years ago. Wandering past rows of "Mini-Rex" rabbits, my oldest daughter, soon bound for college, stared longingly at a perky brown rabbit that looked like the Velveteen Rabbit come to life. "Oh, if I was going to have a rabbit, that's the one I'd want," she said.

About three weeks later, we had a rabbit living in a crate in our kitchen. Yes, he was extremely cute! But she left for college about a month later, and for the next three years reality hopped around on my kitchen floor with inevitable surprises. I think we could have weathered just about anything else, but this bunny came with, ahem, personal hygiene issues that were truly dispiriting. I think that if someone had invented bikini waxes for bunnies, he might still be with us. But eventually, the routine of giving a fat, kicking rabbit haircuts in unspeakable places proved to be one too many things for me to juggle at the time, and he was routed to the local humane society, along with all his gear, food, crate, litter box, yogurt treats and toys. The cat has since taken over his job of covering all surfaces in the house with gossamer fluff.

And yet...I felt that dangerous surge again this year as I dawdled past rows upon rows of rabbits in their cages, clean, odorless, non-threatening, fluffed and brushed and fed, with ribbons displayed proudly beside their name tags. Nary a rabbit dropping to be seen underfoot. No hygiene issues here. The pull was magnetic, nearly tidal. I could feel common sense fall away at the possibility of owning one of these lovely, cuddly little animals again. I could feel myself falling in love-at-first-sight all over again--that ridiculous moonstruck phase that never really lasts but fires that brain chemistry to dizzying heights nonetheless.

I shook my head and forced myself to take a step back from the cages. Focused my mind not on the bunny in front of me but the one that had hopped around my kitchen for three years, leaving deep scratches on my arms every time it was bath time at the kitchen sink. Recalled litter cleanup and bunny hair tickling my nose and the necessity of running interference between a six pound rabbit and a sixteen pound cat. I stepped out of the small animal barn and back into the sunlight. I had escaped!

There's one more fair to go to before the end of summer, and so I'm not out of the woods yet. Looking into the rabbit cages, for me, is like an alcoholic staring at a bottle, or Elizabeth Taylor staring at Richard Burton. Oftentimes surmountable, but sometimes not.

I just hope that next time, I'll continue to conjure some common sense to balance out the endorphins and optimism that no doubt will start up all over again. And if I can't, that whoever I'm with will just take me by the arm, give it a tug, and say...

BACK AWAY FROM THE BUNNY!!

The Volcano Diaries

2009-08-08T13:31:00.010-05:00

"You can always turn back!"

Not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about setting off on a trek up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the 2.4 mile hike in the national park brochure was "strenous."

Gulp.

But then, I really hadn't been looking for encouragement. I'd been looking for validation ... or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.

My son and I were on a week-long traditional mom-and-me vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignance because he's the last of the brood and his departure for college means my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We'd stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we'd met at Yosemite when I volunteered to take their picture a couple of days earlier. I'd only planned for the first three days of the trip, figuring we'd make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves be carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I'd gone to Ireland for a month at the age of twenty-two with a backpack stocked with Carnation Instant Breakfast packets and a bicycle that I had to reassemble once I landed and the phone numbers of a few of my Irish relatives.

This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliancy of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.

My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel that had been recommended on the fly two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme here? One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, stepping back into the motel room after phoning his girlfriend at twilight to chat, "Mom, I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?" What's a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out behind us, you wouldn't believe how fast we beat it back into the room!

But while he was outside on the phone, I'd been poring over the pamphlets and maps we'd picked up by the visitor center the night before. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, and the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at I was going to chicken out in favor of a more leisurely walk half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.

All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina ... and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me, in fact. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it's been like that for most of my life.

But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness. And remember, "you can always turn back." I didn't even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.

We drove on to the base of the trail leading to the peak of Lassen Peak, topping out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in the backpack he'd be carrying. There were snow fields below where we even started. I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn't even list how far we'd traveled. I wasn't going for glory here, just endurance, and so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son's heels to keep from feeling dizzy just as I had hiking down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter a few years earlier. (It was a very character building experience.)

We met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn't want to wimp out while they were watching, and so we overlapped each other's rest stops along the way up. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.

The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were distant blue hills under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.

Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son's feet in front of me, occasionally getting a hand up over the rougher patches. And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.

Right then and there, my fear of heights suddenly nailed me to the side of the mountain. "Robert, honey," I said, "I'm sorry, but I just can't take one more step!" Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before--the extra pounds, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot--it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!

Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn't going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad for my seat on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him two hours to get back, factoring in the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.

As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this trip, that we'd be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photographing a yellow bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? It was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I'd experience.

A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars.

I hadn't thought about that in quite a long time, but thought about it again recently. At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and hgh and imposing...we'd both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.

But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had. I may not have made it to the top as I would have liked ... but I ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.

Grow, Dammit!

2009-08-02T18:29:00.008-05:00

One popular definition of insanity is that of doing the exact same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.

This might explain why for three summers in a row, I've planted blue butterfly delphiniums in the same spot in my garden, only to watch them die off. And I'm still pondering whether I should to run to the nursery and buy three more in four-inch pots...for the same exact place.

To be fair, I'm sure they had help on the way to their Valhalla of the Verdant. I have rabbits in abundance, little Peter Cottontails romping around the yard without the blue jackets. I have a chocolate lab that likes to dig at the roots of plants where I've sprinkled dried blood meal to repel the rabbits. I have little striped gophers who scramble in and out of the drain pipes for the rain gutters that empty into both sides of the garden. The frantic scratching of their tiny feet inside the metal pipes as I round the corner is a gentle reminder that out in the country, you're never alone. I've been known to neglect watering, neglect weeding, neglect fertilizing, neglect spraying. Are you sensing a theme here?

But still. Other things abound, and in fact reproachfully encircle those pathetic empty spaces. The line of strawberry plants that run along the front of the garden have sent out tenacious masses of tendrils in each direction like a Roman gladiator hurling a net over an opponent in the Coliseum. I have to pull and rip and hack them into submission. The coneflowers behind them are sinking sideways from the sheer weight of their tangerine and yellow and white flowers. The hot pink phlox with the bi-colored leaves--a prized find at Home Depot last year--are ready to burst.

And yet, for whatever reason, the delphiniums have perished. Repeatedly. And yet, I recall their brief, glorious bloom the first year I put them in, and I still hope.

This is the third summer since the man in my life showed up with a pickup truck full of mulch and music and the enthusiasm for transforming 200 square feet of bare gravel-covered plastic akin to Michelangelo eyeing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In just a few weeks, the fuse had been lit, an oasis born, a garden begun in my soul.

Planting a garden is such an act of faith! And in my case, blind faith. Where others may plan and coordinate colors and heights and growing seasons, I still take a more devil-may-care approach. Approximation was, and still is, my watchword. The only thing that I usually expect now is that if I put a plant in the ground, it will grow, at least for a little while. That's a big step up from the pre-gardening years.

There have been a few surprises along the way. Who knew ... that the little clump of "obedient plants" my gardening friend Rosemary shared with me, a tidy and demure two feet tall at the end of their first season, would spread like a virus and double in height, shading everything behind them like Godzilla looking down at a Manhattan subway station? Who knew ... that the white butterfly bush that I planted that first gardening season "just to keep him happy" would flourish like a spray of fireworks and make the view from across my ironing board such a delight as hummingbirds and butterflies and hummingbird moths looking like tiny flying shrimp hovered delicately and landed? Who knew ... how personally and even parentally involved I could feel as my little charges took root and grew ... or not. Hopes raised, then dashed, as sunflower and coneflower sprouts grew from seeds in peat pots in the house, then flourished for a few days in another new garden, then were nipped in the bud, so to speak, by the double whammy of the gopher next door and a finicky doe who didn't think the other fifteen acres of vegetation had quite enough variety for her palate.

I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, how much suspense and satisfaction could be sparked by finding a broken off stalk of sedum sitting on the checkout counter of the local plant nursery last summer. As a general rule, I don't even like sedum. But this forlorn amputee was both unusual and gorgeous, with sage green foliage edged in cream, and a large raft of tiny pink and magenta flowers on top. "Good lord, that's beautiful," I commented to the clerk as she rang up my purchase.

"Why don't you take it home," she replied. "Just stick in the ground and see if it'll grow." I needed no further urging, and did as directed. Watered, and hovered, and watered, and hovered some more. By the time of the first frost weeks later, it hadn't grown any...but hadn't withered and died either. Post-winter, as the snow receded, I was back in the garden taking inventory, pushing away the mulch to see if all my babies had come back. The delphiniums didn't make it, but there at the site of the sedum stalk, was a tiny white bud just breaking through the soil. Eureka!!

There's not that much planting that will take place for the rest of this year. The challenge right now is just to beat back the weeds and remember to water through the dry spells of late summer. Even my watering technique has evolved into a tranquility zone of sorts over the past three growing seasons. Where I used to drag the hose from plant to plant to efficiently dump a gallon or two on each at a time, I now pull up a lawn chair on the parking pad nearby and sit and spray from a distance, remembering all the heat and dripping sweat and optimism and romance and pipe tobacco and sore muscles and music that went into creating it in the first place, as the leaves and stalks and flower heads bend gently under the cascading droplets.

That gorgeous sedum plant is just about ready to flower, and I'm no longer hovering like a demented soccer mom on the sidelines (been there, done that!). But something tells me that before the week is out, I'll be back at the nursery looking for another trio of butterfly blue delphiniums. And as I dig them into the garden, I'll be muttering both words of encouragement ... and telling them to "grow, dammit!!"

Scenes of Yosemite

2009-07-20T17:16:00.008-05:00

The Romeo & Juliet song

2009-07-03T20:41:00.011-05:00

There's a guilty pleasure I just have to confess. And then explain.

Not that there isn't already a list. Belgian chocolates. High heels. Coastal Georgia. Guys in uniform. The movie "Gladiator." Tropical drinks with little paper umbrellas. Down pillows and flannel sheets...as long as the air conditioning is still on.

But this is a chapter, and a phenomenon, all its own.

I'm a grown woman over forty...and I like the Taylor Swift song "Love Story." There I said it. Out loud.

You know the song. You can't possibly escape it on the radio. It's the one where she's Juliet and he's Romeo and it's got pre-feminist-to-the-point-of-Neanderthal lyrics like "Romeo save me..."

Good God, I thought, the first dozen times I heard it...or heard enough of it to change the channel with a cringe. How utterly dopey! How ridiculous. How unreal. How...godawfully uncomplicated and fairy-tale and unconnected to the realities of love and relationships. And for heaven's sake, didn't anyone read to the end of the Romeo and Juliet saga and realize that the star-crossed lovers died?? So much for teenage romance!

So that would be the starting point of the journey to actual affection. Active dislike, morphing into something else. Just like real life. Or any number of romantic movie comedies, such as "You've Got Mail." Okay, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had a lot to do with making that one work, but still...it's a formula for romance on the big screen. Even Harrison Ford got to be loathed by Anne Heche in "Six Days Seven Nights"...and nobody doesn't like Harrison Ford.

It was the beat that caught me first. Rhythmic and pulsing and steady and smooth (relentless, even), like the slap of a long plastic jumprope on a sidewalk during summer vacation. Three girls killing time on a warm afternoon, the jumper in the middle always changing, the rhythm as consistent as crickets chirping. Equilibrium as perfectly maintained--despite the occasional shift in positions--as a gyroscope spinning on a picnic table. I found myself humming along, even after I changed the channel. And then I quit changing the channel altogether, and looked at it through a new window.

Everything that drove me nuts about it at first--especially the cloying fairy-tale neediness of it--became a window into being a teenager again. Back in the day when all you could see was what you wanted, absolutely, with all your heart, right now, with no thought for the future other than the credo that love could conquer all.

Remember those days? Mine, I'm sure, were fueled by a childhood spent reading too many romantic suspense novels full of dukes and other noblemen waiting to rescue their damsels in distress and whisk them off to a life of happily-ever-after. It took me years to outgrow that template.

Well, by the time you've passed thirty-nine, you've grown up and figured out that no matter how grand love may be, it doesn't always conquer all. And it certainly doesn't get the toilet fixed or the living room painted or the dog taken to the vet. Real life is full of real frustrations, big and small, and tender eurphoric feelings sometimes have to get put on hold for just a wee bit of time while you run into the corner gas station to buy a carton of milk. Because you just can't live on love all the time...groceries and utilities and clean laundry are usually involved too.

But...

I've realized that when I listen (and even...ulp...sing along to) "Love Story," I don't have to think about real life at all. It takes me right back to being sixteen and absolutely blissfully ignorant of the myriad disappointments and compromises that real life will offer later. By the time the song wraps up with "Romeo" on bended knee telling our heroine to go buy a wedding dress because he loves her and that's all he needs to know...I get a quick fix of bottomless yearning fulfilled and a "when dreams come true" instant that's about as real as the Disney version of Cinderella, and just as much fun. Reality be damned for just a minute!

And as I've learned just not that long ago, those magic moments aren't entirely lost when your teen years are left behind. I had one of my own in the middle of a gardening project at my house with a man whose pickup truck and leather tool belt and love of blooming things beat out any central casting figure of a prince on a white horse.

One Sunday morning, after the plants were in and the mulch was spread and green things were watered and beginning to take root, the subject came up over coffee of how to create a footpath through the flower garden, which was rather deep in places. I, cursed with character flaws of ambivalence and a pathological fear of commitment and absolutely no imaginary sense of the visual, balked at every suggested solution. Hedged, even, at the idea of going window shopping. For rocks.

So we took the truck out to a local quarry anyway just for something to do, with the fig-leaf of understanding that there were always supplies for his own place that he could buy and therefore it wouldn't be a trip wasted. We walked, hand in hand in the sunshine, over pretty displays of granite and marble and slate and bricks. And when we reached a stretch of red Arizona sandstone, I could suddenly see my heart's desire. And imagine it among my flowers.

I still hemmed and hawed, pricing it out, trying to figure what I could afford, wondering at the enormity of the project, wondering whether I should go back home and think on it for a while longer. Like another week or two. And then Prince Charming cast his two cents into the pot, roughly rounded up to the fact that this was exactly what I wanted, we had the truck with us, it was a gorgeous day, and we might as well go for it.

I still remember the joy bursting in my heart as I threw my arms around him at that point and kissed him in the sunlight somewhere between the limestone and the crushed lava, casting caution to the wind and simply saying "yes!"

As blissfully simple and momentarily satisfying as the ending in "Love Story"? You betcha!

Sheboygan County Courthouse II

2009-06-22T20:15:00.004-05:00

An Art Deco gem on the Lake Michigan shore!

Sheboygan County Courthouse I

2009-06-22T19:56:00.007-05:00

I promised pictures of the Sheboygan County Courthouse, kid brother to the One North LaSalle building in Chicago. More to come...

One North LaSalle

2009-06-18T07:10:00.014-05:00

I sat in traffic as the rain came down, waiting to make a familiar turn to reach a familiar parking lot in what had become a depressingly familiar routine involving family matters and a courtroom in Chicago. I can't think of what drew my attention to the gloomy, dark scaffolding covering a high rise to my left, but as I idled, waiting for the light to change, I looked out the driver's side window. And a few square feet of ornate trim, nearly hidden from sight, sparked a flash of recognition. I searched for the address, and smiled when I realized I'd been driving past the One North LaSalle building all this time.

I'm not an architecture expert, I'm not a history buff. I can't tell a chevron from a Chevrolet. But for the past nine years I've worked in the only Art Deco courthouse in Wisconsin, in Sheboygan, and I know I'm a lucky person for it. Only blocks from Lake Michigan, the courthouse, built in 1934 as a WPA project in the Great Depression, is a visual gem. I walk down hallways of polished peach colored Georgia marble with dramatic black veining to reach my office, but not before passing beneath white ceilings sporting ornate plaster trim in geometric designs. Charming aluminum lighting sconces and heating grills decorate the lobby, and the mail box in the lobby is a work of art itself.

I was so entranced by the building's design that I researched it on the internet, and found that the Chicago architect on the project, K.M. Vitzthum & Co., was also the principal architect for the One North LaSalle building in Chicago. I found pictures of some of the architectural details from the building on LaSalle, such as the plaster trim on the ceiling, and thought "hey neat! Whodathunkit?" The similarity in the lines of the building are unmistakable, though as you can imagine, there's an economy of scale involved in comparing 49 stories with six, and a Depression era project with something from the end of the Roaring Twenties. It just felt good to walk around knowing that the place I love to work in had such sophisticated provenance, and a bigger, far more elaborate version standing somewhere in Chicago's Loop.

I parked the car, took care of family business, and decided to reward myself on the way home with a cup of Starbucks (soy mocha with whip, please) and a visit to the building on LaSalle. Between the rain and the scaffolding, there was no point in looking up to try to grasp the outer grandeur of the building. THAT, I figured, I could always scope out on line. But as I stepped into the lobby, I felt a thrill of recognition. The polished marble walls. The ornate light fixtures. The elaborate heating grills. The delicately angular ceiling designs in plaster above me. The mailbox!!!

The soul of the building was the same. My little courthouse in Sheboygan didn't just have a kissing cousin down in the Loop, it had a big brother! I added up the extra aggravation involved in returning to my car for my camera, slogging back through the rain, and getting at least a half hour closer to the brinksmanship of rush hour traffic...and decided it was worth it. I knew from experience that the parking ramp was going to cost me thirty two dollars anyway, so I might as well get some more fun for the money.

Enjoy! Pictures of the Sheboygan County Courthouse to follow one of these days!

In Plain Sight

2009-06-01T23:05:00.013-05:00

In all the years I've been picking Lilies of the Valley, plunking them into vases, swooning over their wonderful perfume and even buying a fragrance called "Muguet des Bois"... I'd never turned them over to look inside until now.

Voila!

Love in the Time of Cupcakes

2009-05-26T19:55:00.011-05:00

The last of the "tennis ball" cupcakes set sail this morning, a small but telling harbinger of the fact that I'm going to be facing an empty nest in the fall. Twenty seven years of "hands on" mothering symbolically reduced to two dozen clumps of devil's food cake in little foil baskets. They swooshed out the door with my youngest son, for what would turn out to be his last tennis meet of high school. He graduates in another couple of weeks, heading for college in the fall and instantly turning any use of the words "high school" into the past tense.

I've been making cupcakes decorated like tennis balls--light yellow frosting with the slightest tinge of green, arced with curves and swoops of white icing--for fourteen years now, ever since my oldest daughter signed up for high school freshman girls tennis before the school year even started. Call me OCD, I don't mind! I consider it a badge of honor.

There are fundamental differences between "girls tennis" and "boys tennis" and only some of them have to do with testosterone levels. Girls tennis season starts in late summer and continues barely to early fall, guaranteeing splendid and warm afternoons and entire weekend days watching budding young ladies flit around on the court in bouncing pony tails and miniskirts, suntanned legs flying. Girls tennis, from my experience on the sidelines, has involved matching hair doo-dads with color coordinated ribbons, team posters, lots of conversation, and a great appreciation for cute snacks. Hence the tennis ball cupcakes, a big hit for both my daughters and their teams for a bunch of years.

Boys tennis, on the other hand, starts just on the cusp of very early spring, when winter hangs on for dear life. And here in the upper Midwest, winter's claws are deep. More than one tennis season for my sons has started its first practice as snow flakes were falling. The weather leans more toward rain, and cold, and wind, and if there's coffee involved for blanket-wrapped spectators under grey, stormy skies, it's been hot, not iced. Very few boys sported pony tails, and nobody wore matching barettes. The guys still appreciated the cupcakes...but I don't know that they even noticed the decorative flair right before they inhaled them.

And still, despite the fact that for years my cupcakes have been nearly vaporized in haste (and without a single squeal of how "cute" they were) by their entirely masculine patrons, I clung to tradition. At least once a season I needed to send those sweet, fluffy treats along to a meet, even if, as the years went by and my job schedule got less flexible, another tennis mom would actually have to deliver them for me. Call me crazy, it's been done before.

While the tennis ball cupcakes stretch back fourteen years, the cupcake thing has actually been a fixture for something more like twenty four. Long ago enough that my oldest daughter would have needed to bring a birthday treat for kindergarten. Or preschool. So through the next two and a half decades, the miniature confections were a constant and a comfort amid the multi-tasking, crisis-response mentality that goes into raising four kids with a minimum number of trips to the emergency room. There were cupcakes with sprinkles for birthdays, cupcakes with candy dots for art shows, cupcakes decorated like little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.
This last tradition--the Halloween cupcakes--nearly drove me into the ground once. I had three kids in the same grade school at the same time. The youngest wanted Halloween cupcakes for his second grade class party. I signed on for two dozen, half of them orange and half of them white, with little ghost outlines and pumpkin smiles drawn on with melted chocolate, eyes made from chocolate chips. Then the fifth grader chimed in. I signed on for another two dozen. And then as I started the baking, when I thought of my daughter's class in eighth grade going without my cupcakes on this festive day, I threw caution to the wind. Halfway through decorating seventy two little ghosts and jack-o-lanterns with dribbly chocolate I rethought my enthusiam...but it was too late to turn back.

I was planning to dress up for the second graders' party, and I tweaked my daughter with the thought of showing up in costume to deliver the goods. She's got a dark, sultry beauty to her, and she warned me off. "Mom, don't you dare!!" she said ominously, her eyes flashing like the fiery gypsy in Carmen. I filed that thought in the "hmmm..." pile. Made some soothing mention about bringing a change of clothes.

The next day I dutifully and precariously loaded six dozen cupcakes into the minivan, and set off for school. Fifth grade cupcakes were dropped off and put out of mind. The second grade Halloween party was so cute it could make your back fillings hurt. I think that was the one where I'd made my son a little royal blue cape with fake ermine collar, for his part as the "king" in a teeny tiny little play.

And then the lunch bell rang. I grabbed the last two dozen cupcakes from the van and walked them down the length of the school to my daughter's eighth grade classroom. As I stood in the doorway, her back was to me. A friend she was chatting with looked up, and announced slyly, "Sarah, your mom is here." Slowly she turned... and there I stood, a shallow cardboard box filled with treats utterly overshadowed by my appearance in a Pocahontas style beige fringed tunic with red embroidered trim, black leggings, and a feather in my hair. I bit back a grin, but it was really hard.

My daughter flashed daggers at me with those dark brown eyes. If looks could have killed, I'd be writing this from the great beyond. But at the same time, despite her fourteen year old peer-reviewed fury, I could see the corners of her mouth start to turn up in a smile in spite of herself, at the sheer perversity of my guest appearance. I delivered the goods and quickly exited stage left, fighting back a laugh.

Eight years later we were chatting on the phone as I drove to drop off yet another batch of tennis ball cupcakes for her younger brother's meet the next day. I was going to have to miss this contest too, and so once again the cupcakes were going to stand in for me, making me feel like I was still sharing a part of the adventure. We shared a good laugh about the day I showed up looking like Pocahontas at her eighth grade classroom. At the age of twenty-two, you develope a lot more perspective and forgiveness for antics like that.

I bemoaned the fact that with her in college, I didn't have the opportunity to bring festive or seasonal or downright ridiculous treat to her classes anymore. "Mom, you can bring cupcakes to my class any time!" she assured me. "We'll eat 'em!" I could resist pushing the envelope. If it was around Halloween, could I wear the Pocahontas costume again? There was just an instant of hestitation, then..."okay!" I could just imagine her eyes rolling across the miles between us. Maturity comes in many forms, and learning to humor a mother during a fleeting moment of insanity is a remarkable milestone for a daughter of any age.

I never did drive eighty miles to a college classroom after that to bring a sugary treat to a bunch of accomplished and sophisticated college students. Life just got a little too busy, it seems, though in hindsight I wish I'd grabbed the opportunity. But I still remember laughing at the memory with her, and the beautiful thread of give-and-take the offer and acceptance held, binding us tightly and preciously with love and affection despite the distance.

They were just cupcakes. And then some.

Back in the saddle

2009-05-21T18:06:00.013-05:00

The coastal breeze on Sea Island carried a bouquet of aromas. The tang of salt sea air from the Atlantic coast nearby, the lush marshes beside the causeway, palmettos, white gardenias in full bloom. But it was the familiar fragrance of horse hide and fly spray that hit me like a gentle glove across the cheek and made me smile and inhale deeply in recognition.

I was about to go horseback riding on the beach in coastal southern Georgia, and this was a very big deal for several reasons. Despite owning horses for close to thirty five years, I hadn't been on board more than twice in the last fourteen, ever since the riding accident.

I'm a very lucky person. I took a long fall off a tall horse in a jumping lesson when I was pushing my limits in more physical ways, and ended up in a body cast for three months with a fractured vertebra in the middle of my back. Every day, I remember how fortunate I am that I came out of the accident alive, and came out of the body cast hurting...but still walking. The accident was one of those transforming events that divides the world as you know it into "before" and "after." I got braver, I got more intuitive, I went to law school and tested my limits in ways I could never have imagined before. When you start law school with a severe tendency to hyperventilate when called on for public speaking, what are the odds you'll not faint from nervousness when you have to argue before the state supreme court? Pretty slim. If anyone had placed bets, they'd have a nice little nest egg now.

But the horseback riding, which had been part of my life since I was a pre-teen, fell to the side. At first it was a case of still recovering from the accident. I went for a whole year afterward, measuring just how much pain it would cost me to pick up a dirty sock, and keeping a running tally of the number of times I could reasonably bend over in a day before my back quit holding me up. And then I started law school. My theory at the time was that as my kids got older, they would need me less and I'd have more time to devote to school and other things. Any parent of high schoolers who participate in sports would have laughed his or her head off at my naivete. I found that as they got older, I only got busier...but by then it was too late to rethink the plan.

But free time was only part of the problem. As my body gradually regained some semblance of "normal," I found that by that point my horses had finally grown too old and decrepit with age to ride. One suffered from arthritis, the other from emphysema and the occasional case of "founder." They lived out the rest of their thirty-plus year lifespans as expensive and pampered lawn ornaments, their nearness a comfort and a thing of beauty but their "useful" lives done with as far as remotely earning their keep.

I climbed into a saddle only twice after that. Once was a trail ride a few years after the accident, with my eleven year old son and a group of other children who had taken some basic riding lessons through the local recreation department. This, I thought, would be easy. A nice, gentle, completely supervised reintroduction to a part of me that I truly missed. I confess I was scared to death the entire way, uneasy in the saddle, hestitant and unsure. The next time was a few years later, when I took one of my daughters out West for a trip before college. A trail ride through the woods near the Grand Canyon seemed like fun, we thought. Again, I remember an overlay of dread and not much else.

But here I was, staying down on St. Simons Island, Georgia, taking part in the "Scribbler's Retreat" writers conference, and visiting my favorite place on the planet with a whole new perspective. Recalling wonderful week-long spring vacations on St. Simons when the kids were all young enough to get the same Easter breaks, I had wondered, before I hooked up with the conference, whether I would ever have a reason to return to this serene place. And how it would feel to walk the beach solo, without a herd of four children to count heads on continually, like a mother duck checking her trailing brood.

I settled in just fine. Picked up a rental car for a day of "me" time before the conference started, sat on the beach beside a tidal pool and watched a Great White Egret move in stop-motion as he stalked his dinner, admired the last of the blooming azaleas in the area, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, shopped for souvenirs at a delightful stained glass shop, "Pane in the Glass," which had been completely off the register for me before despite driving past it dozens of times on earlier trips with the kids in tow. The same way someone leading a bull by the nose would be reluctant to take him into a china shop.

And in reclaiming myself on the island, I asked my island friend Jeanie to set me up with a horseback ride on the beach. No better place to confront the fears of the past, I thought.

And so here I stood, as the trail steeds rested in their shaded stalls, all freshly groomed and saddled and sprayed for the first ride of the day, steadily munching their hay and smelling like a familiar trip through most of my life. I was matched up with a well-mannered little chestnut mare named "Penny," and once we were properly cinched up and our stirrups adjusted for length, our little band of four riders and a guide set off at a leisurely walk to the shoreline.

I ached in various places for pretty much all of the two hour ride. Knees, ankles, thighs, hips--all were body parts that hadn't been shifted into this position on a regular basis since I'd started having kids. Twenty some years ago. But the rhythm felt good, and the morning sunlight on the ocean was beautiful, and for the first time since the accident I could say that I wasn't afraid.

The ride triggered a sea of memories for me. Weekend riding lessons with my aunt in grade school; Friday evenings spent cantering through the woods on the outskirts of Chicago with my friends in our high school riding club; lunging my buckskin in large circles with voice commands, a long-handled whip cracking the air gently behind his haunches for encouragement; Sunday mornings spent on trail rides when I was eighteen, worshipping at the altar of nature with just my favorite livery horse for company.

It was a delightful trip through banks of memories, and it's still far from over. And it all started with the smell of horsehide and fly spray...

Conquering the Lighthouse

2009-05-17T21:08:00.031-05:00

My old friends (and even people who haven't known me all that long) know that when I say I'm afraid of heights, I'm not kidding. Even remotely. Two steps on a conventional ladder or step-ladder is as far as I go. My personal step ladder at home comes with two gigantic platforms...and a safety rail to hold on to. If I can't reach a burned-out lightbulb with that ladder, it'll keep until someone braver than I can do the task.

Which is why, when I recently returned to St. Simons Island in Georgia for a weekend at the Scribbler's Retreat Writer's Conference, I made a point to revisit old haunts...and confront old fears. I remembered visiting the historic lighthouse on the island when the kids were small. My ex-husband took the children up the spiral staircase to the top, while I stayed at the bottom, my stomach in queasy knots as I stole fleeting peeks at them waving cheerfully above me before looking away.

I'm proud to say that this time, I made it! White knuckles all the way, innards lurching dizzily and clutching the handrails like lifelines. But I've got the pictures to prove it!

Double Chocolate Lab

2009-05-03T09:37:00.008-05:00

Bandit nearly bought the farm the other night, and it was his sweet tooth that would have done him in.

Bandit is a chocolate lab, eleven and a half years old, with chronic liver problems, a golf-ball sized cyst on his shoulder that the vet doesn't want to remove because of his age and the bad liver...and that's just the tip of the iceberg. This dog of mine--my fourth since I was sixteen--was a stray pup at an animal shelter when the kids and I brought him home eleven years ago. I joke that he must have some beagle in his background because he "sings" on occasion. Most often in answer to the question "do you want to go out?" This absolutely mystifies my boyfriend, who can't get the same answer when he asks Bandit the same question.

He's lightening fast, and still as playful as a puppy on the days when age doesn't come knocking on the door, and he's had separation anxiety bad enough when he was still new to the family that we put him on Prozac. No kidding. We also tried aromatherapy. It didn't work either.

But what's really made things interesting in the past few years is his taste for eating stuff that he shouldn't. Post-winter yard-cleanup can be such an archelogical excursion. After the snow melts, there's plenty of evidence of misdeeds laying in the grass. A half box of Kleenex scarfed down in boredom, still brilliant white after its trip through the dog. Fourteen sticks of chewing gum stolen from my purse recently...including the silver foil wrappers. The list goes on.

Chocolate--generally acknowledged to be poison when it comes to other dogs--needs to be kept under lock and key. My sons and I could have skinned Bandit alive a couple of years ago when he found the chocolate we'd brought home from Germany in our suitcases...and ate it all, leaving colorful wrappers in foreign languages all over the living room. Just a couple of months ago he polished off a carton of Nestle Quik on the front stairs, leaving nothing but a large chocolate stain behind. Never an ill effect for the dog, though it tended to leave the humans in the room pretty steamed!

My kids and I have long ago learned to keep our bedroom doors closed behind us at all times because of other behavioral ...quirks. But the other night, my youngest son fell victim to juggling too many things at once--violin practice, then tennis practice, and a violin lesson after the tennis practice--and forgot to shut the door behind him before he left for the night at his dad's.

I got home from work and didn't notice. Drove into town for an hour's worth of errands, and came home to find the paper wrappers from two huge Cadbury chocolate bars my son had brought back with him from Scotland as presents for the family just the week before. The chocolate was nowhere in sight. Bandit lay on his bed in the kitchen, with a very guilty look on his face. "Bad doggie," I said, and went to town again to meet some friends for a wine-tasting. I didn't even bother to shake a finger at him. We've reached an understanding over the years. He's going to do something he shouldn't, and I'm not going to like it.

Two hours of delightful conversation and a lesson in how to mix peaches pureed in sugar syrup with Italian champagne for a "patio drink" later, I returned home at nine to find to dinner plate sized pools of regurgitated chocolate on the living room carpet (off-white of course) and a very sick doggie. I shooed him outside to keep being sick and miserable, then Googled chocolate+dog+poison. What I found scared me plenty.

We set off for the animal emergency room twenty five miles away, where Bandit was X-rayed, his stomach monitored, an IV line run to pump him with fluids and some charcoal somehow inserted down his gullet to absorb what chocolate it could. By the next day and $550 later on my credit card, I had a healthy dog again, along with the memory that I had run a quick cost calculation of what I could possibly afford to spend on an eleven year old dog with a bad liver (nothing, if you really must know!) and ultimately checked the "do not rescuscitate" box when asked what should be done if he went into cardiac arrest. I hope nobody tells him. I'm sure he wouldn't have checked the same box for me! But the last time I took a dog to an animal emergency room, I spent $3,700 dollars on last-ditch surgery...and he still died the next morning. It took me years to pay it off. I knew I couldn't afford to do it again.

Bandit's back to normal right now, which means chewing on sticks in the yard and following me around with a tennis ball in his jaws, hoping I'll throw it. The only lasting markers from our adventure are the dark circles under my eyes, the shaved patch on his foreleg from where the IV was inserted, and the chocolate stains on the carpet. I've shampooed them four times now and figure on leaving them for the carpet cleaners some time between now and Thanksgiving.

My son was suitibly apologetic and deeply chagrined over causing the whole incident by leaving his bedroom open and the chocolate available. He informed me that there were actually three Cadbury bars in his room. They're all missing now. One was probably wolfed down with the wrapper intact. I'll find the evidence some day when I'm out in the yard.

In the meantime, I figure all that guilt's gotta be worth some really good help with the yardwork this summer.

The Feline Zone

2009-04-26T12:22:00.006-05:00

Living with a serial killer is starting to get to me. After three consecutive mornings of stepping out of my bedroom and greeting the day by finding a fresh white-footed mouse corpse on public display, it's now the fourth morning, and I haven't stopped looking around corners for yet another surprise.

Though I shouldn't have to look hard. He placed the last body at the foot of the front stairs, perfectly centered, front paws outstretched in death agony, head thrown back, perpendicular from head to tail to the edge of the bottom step. Hannibal Lecter in a fluffy fur coat when it comes to artful murder and postmortem staging. I pity those poor little mice who think they're moving to safety when they come indoors for the winter!

I didn't remember this much drama or bloodletting from having a cat when I was nine or ten. I recall one summer day when we had moved in temporarily with my grandparents, bringing the family pets. My grandmother was in the back room off the kitchen ironing a shirt when I let Tippy, our black and white shorthair, in through the back door. What I didn't know until then was that Tippy had a fat field mouse clenched in her teeth. The mouse wiggled free as soon as the door slammed, and my grandmother shrieked and flung herself across the ironing board to get her feet off the floor. Tippy pounced on the mouse, I pounced on Tippy as soon as she recaptured her prey, and I threw them both out the door. I still laugh at the thought of Grandma straddling the ironing board with her midsection. Lowbrow comedy, yes. Horror? Hardly.

We moved to a farm up north a few years after that, and I don't remember any fiendish "death art" scenes from our cats there either. I do recall looking across the farmhouse kitchen one day and spying a fat field mouse sitting atop a flour canister on the hutch next to the kitchen table, upright on his haunches and staring straight at me with an air of nonchalance. Obviously the cats we had back then didn't take their "search and destroy" missions too seriously.

My life was pretty much kitty-free after I left home for college a long time ago. Marriage to a man whose entire family was ferociously allergic to cats swept the idea of caving into the kids' pleas for a kitten every time one of their friends did right off the table. Twenty-five years later, though, divorce opened the door a crack...and then a canyon. Three days after I broke the news to my youngest son that his family was dissolving, he started to square his shoulders, get a little color back in his cheek, and look for a silver lining.

"Do you think that now we could maybe get a kitten?"

I smiled. He started to plot. At his urging, I began to call humane societies for kitten availability, but apparently it wasn't quite "kitten season" yet. To keep him out of my hair, I handed him the want ads. I was busy getting ready to paint a bedroom when my son, all of thirteen and more than a little reserved, came to me with an ad circled in the paper. He'd already made the call and had the first conversation with the owner. C'mon, Mom, please call this lady!

There was one kitten left, black with white paws and a white chest, in a small town, twenty five miles away. It was the day before Easter, and another buyer who sounded interested had already promised to come by. But still, she'd keep my number, and if this other person didn't show, we could stop by later that night. All the kids were home for the Easter weekend, and my soon-to-be-ex stopped by to pick them up and take them out to a custard stand for burgers. My son, ever the optimist, elected to stay home "to keep Mom company." Ha!

The "cat lady" called about ten minutes later. The earlier prospective buyer turned out to be a phantom, and the seller was out of patience. My son and I were in the car five minutes later with a written set of directions and a carrying case that most recently had been used to transport the rabbit to have his picture taken at a photography studio. That's another story.

As we rode along and the miles slid by, I voiced all the standard disclaimers. We were only going "to look." There were lots of other kittens out there somewhere to pick from if we didn't like this one. Animal shelters would soon be awash with spare kittens. We were not necessarily going to buy this kitten!!! My son nodded and kept on smiling, his grip tight on the carrying case, his excitement and anticipation an electric, palpable third occupant in the car. As I drove, I realized that unless this kitten had only three legs and a really bad case of mange, we were coming home with this cat. Dear God, please let it be a good one!

As expected, the kitten was tiny and frisky and healthy and adorable. Short-haired too, but appearances later proved to be deceiving. Twenty-five dollars later, the three of us were in the car for the ride home. We stopped at Wal-Mart for a litter box and some Tidy Cat before we even set foot in the house. My son spent the following week of Easter break largely cuddling and man-handling the newest member of the family, with the result that the kitten soon came to regard him as his new mother.

That was four years and sixteen pounds ago. Smokey, as we soon named him, has been altering our routines and our lives ever since. When he grew bigger than the rabbit and started looking at his fuzzy, spotted friend like he might be on the dinner menu , the rabbit went to the local Humane Society. When my daughter brought her new kitten home from college for eight months until she could find a new cat-friendly apartment, the two cats eventually reached a detente...but not before shredding the bedskirt of my new comforter set. When his long, fluffy, black gossamer fur started collecting on the bottom of the creamy white semi-sheer curtain that screened off the big bay window from the road and gave us a little privacy, I recognized a losing battle when I saw one and cut my losses. The curtains came down. I didn't think it was possible for a single cat to produce so much hair...but I soon learned otherwise after the vacuum cleaner intake hose got jammed up, and the utility sink in the basement overflowed from a clogged drain.

Smokey has staked his claim on the furniture as well. His favorite seat these days--when he's not curling up on our of our laps--is an antique overstuffed chair with carved hunting dog heads sprouting from the arms instead of knobs as ornamentation. My father-in-law had collected several of these chairs in his years of antique hunting, and had restored two of them for us. My ex and I spent ninety-five dollars a square yard on the woolen tapestry we picked for the upholstery, which with medieval-styled rabbits and deer romping on a field of navy and bunches of flowers, would have looked right at home at Windsor Palace. Smokey has reserved the chair nearest the crossroads of dining room and living room, and sits preternaturally upright in repose, one arm stretched the length of the armrest, his paw stopping just short of the carved dog head, looking for all the world like a corpulent Orson Welles in those old Paul Masson wine commercials. Adding insult to injury, he's commandeered my favorite pillow as well--velvet backed, with an elaborate needlepointed scene of scarlet-coated fox hunters on thoroughbreds clearing a hedgerow under a bright blue sky. You must admit the cat's got good taste. I derive some dregs of comfort by reminding myself that the chair was never all that comfortable to sit in anyway. And when was the last time I'd really used the pillow?

With my son getting ready to head off for college in a few months, it's been dawning on me recently that I'm going to have the equivalent of a heavy, warm, fur-covered boat anchor in my lap every time I sit down on the sofa for the next fifteen years. Nice on a cold winter night when there's a chill in the living room when there's no fire in the grate, not as wonderful when you're trying to slice into a pork chop while you watch "Law & Order" reruns with your feet up. Even more, though, it's going to be fifteen years of living with an inquisitive, unpredictable, languid, affectionate, unreadable and occasionally sadistic intelligence that's never boring.

The man in my life describes watching a bonfire at night instead of television as "only one channel, but it's always changing." I can safely say that Smokey's got his own single channel going as well, and it hasn't gotten boring yet. And until he decides to quit showing off the spoils of war instead of eating them...I'm just going to have to keep watching my step.

Marley & Rocket & Me

2009-04-21T09:56:00.009-05:00

I just got over weeping through the end of the movie, "Marley & Me." My youngest son had bought it on DVD for his sweetheart, and the two of them were all settled into the sofa with me for a routine Sunday dinner-and-a-movie night to start the week. They'd seen it. They loved it. They thought I'd love it too. It caught me by surprise.

Let's stay straight off that it's a marvelous movie. A lot deeper and richer than I'd expected, having only seen the movie trailers, which were heavy on the slapstick and nonexistent on the character development. I even knew that **spoiler alert here if you've been living in a cave for the past year the dog dies at the end. Hey, I'm a firm believer that "all dogs go to heaven." It's an okay ending for any dog movie. You get to picture them up there romping in sunny, celestial fields, gnawing on a rawhide bone or chasing a fuzzy yellow tennis ball that never gets dirty or wet with saliva.

But what I didn't count on was the fact that not only did this incredibly destructive yet beloved movie canine look exactly like one of the best dogs I'd ever had...he died of exactly the same thing. It had been twelve years since I'd wept like a baby at the unexpected passing of a dog who drooled like a St. Bernard, slouched like a lion, and stood as tall as a pony. But there I sat on the sofa with two happy but mystified teenagers, surrounded by damp Kleenex, voice cracking and sobs lurching and gasping from my chest, explaining that unlike Marley's owner in the movie...I never got to say goodbye.

Rocket was the third one of my string of uniquely wonderful dogs. Muttsie came first, a beagle/dalmatian mix who strayed into my life, attacking our flock of Leghorn chickens one day when I was home alone on the farm. She sported one brown and one icy blue eye and a combination of spots and patches that made her look uncannily from some angles like Adolph Hitler. She was mine for fourteen years, and the phrase "dogging her master's footsteps" was invented for this dog. Shadow came next, a purebred Flat-coated Retriever with a glossy, silky long black coat and magnificent physique, and a stark deficit in the brains department. In nine years despite the "retriever" in his breed, he never learned to let go of the tennis ball he brought back to you for another throw. He wanted to wrestle you for it instead. I'm a quick learner--a game of "fetch" always started with two balls. The boys grew up using him as a shared pillow while they stretched out on the living room floor and watched cartoons. Shadow loved to run around with a stick in his mouth...though at a hundred pounds, the "stick" could be a tree branch and when he ran up joyfully behind you and accidentally whacked you with it as he flew past, you felt it for a while. If you were still standing.

Shadow eventually passed on after nine years, and there was a four-footed void to be filled. I've never known life without a dog, and I believe deeply in bringing kids up with a canine companion. I look at dogs and see furry, tail-wagging, divine packages of unconditional love. They don't hold grudges, they forgive you everything, and they are always happy to see you. Take two kids growing up in parallel universes--same houses, same yards, same schools, same friends--but give one of them a dog. I guarantee that the kid who has a dog has a richer life. So not getting a new puppy was never an option.

We found Rocket nearby in the neighborhood, one of a litter of gorgeous yellow pups produced by a union of a prim and proper purebred Golden Retriever and a randy neighborhood lab who just didn't respect boundaries. Word of warning for folks relying on a buried electric dog fence--it'll keep your dog in the yard, but it sure won't keep the other dogs out!!

The kids fell in love, and we brought Rocket home as soon as he was weaned at eight weeks. We "crated" him in the kitchen at night, a training tool that had worked well with Shadow as a puppy on the theory that dogs inherently like enclosed spaces where they can retreat and feel safe. This little guy, however, deeply (and loudly) mourned the sudden loss of his mother and siblings, and I spent the first three nights lying on the kitchen floor next to his crate to keep him company. By the end of the first night I figured that if I ever got another puppy at eight weeks, it would kill me. On the up side of things, I saw some truly beautiful sunrises.

The little guy started to grow like Clifford the Big Red Dog. He hit twenty pounds in just a few weeks and got too big to comfortably carry in my arms. Damn!! He kept on growing, and by the time he was six months old he stood tall enough to look over the kids' shoulders at their breakfast cereal on the kitchen table. I swept the contents of the middle kitchen counter to someplace else, and bought a few bar stools so that the kids could eat their meals at a higher dog-free altitude. So life's full of adjustments. We had the perfect dog! He romped, and fetched, and cuddled, and just plain lazed with us without impatience. He was another of what I think of as the "hundred pound club," but tall and rangy. He had grown into his puppy paws that had looked at the time like they belonged on a lion, and he slouched around the yard with a grace that was absolutely feline, accentuated by an extraordinarily long tail that carried and twitched like a big cat. He was the size of a pony, with a deep chest and a deep "woof" and a tawny coat that reminded me of Elsa the lioness in "Born Free."

For the first time I could remember, we had a problem-free pooch. No tendency to wander off like Muttsie, no fondness for chewing on us and the furniture and the cabinets like Shadow...Rocket was good-natured, and lovable, and well-behaved, and housebroken, and above all, cuddly. Maybe if we'd had him longer this honeymoon phase would have worn out. But after only a year, we would never get to find out.

He seemed suddenly in distress one night, wanting to go out repeatedly, unsure of what to do when he got there. In the circle cast by the yard's floodlight, I noticed that his sides seemed oddly distended. It was nine at night, but I called the vet and described Rocket's symptoms and appearance. "Don't even bother to bring him here," the vet advised. Take him as quickly as possible, he said, to an animal emergency center in Milwaukee, thirty miles away. This was serious.

We packed a layer of blankets into the back of the minivan, settled Rocket in, and I set off on a desperate mission. I'm sure that the statute of limitations has run on speeding tickets from twelve years ago, and these days with the job I hold I'm sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution. So let's just say vaguely that if there had been a cop that night equipped with a radar gun as I flew past edging close to triple digits, I would have been in big, big trouble. The expressway was virtually empty, though, and Rocket and I made it to the clinic without incident or arrest.

He was unloaded, and examined, and the diagnosis was that he had suffered a "gastric torsion." In other words, his stomach had twisted in that deep ribcage of his, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. Surgery was an option, but it was expensive and most dogs would not survive anyway. What did I want to do? I pulled out the charge card and authorized a preliminary look around. The news was bad, one of the worst cases they'd dealt with. What did I want to do? I called my husband. Could we afford this? We took the charge card out again and said "go ahead." I spent part of the night at the clinic, part of it catching a few winks of uneasy sleep on my friend Judy's sofa in Milwaukee.

By morning Rocket had made it through $3,700 worth of surgery, and I stopped by the clinic to see him before heading home. He was bandaged, and hooked up, and looked like he'd been through a hell of a lot. But he was young, and incredibly strong, and as I stroked his head before leaving, I felt sure that he would turn out to be among the small but lucky percentage of dogs who could survive this. I would have stayed longer, and held him more, but my younger son's birthday party was set for that morning, and in another couple of hours a dozen little boys would be showing up in our backyard to paint a "teepee" made of scrap lumber and scrap bedsheets and put on little feathered headdresses and run around noisily and eat hot dogs and scarf down birthday cake.

The clinic called about twenty minutes before the first guests arrived. They were very sorry, but Rocket hadn't pulled through. I blinked back tears and told no one the news as I put on a headband with a blue feather myself and went out to greet the guests and their parents. Two hours later, the party was over and it was time to drive back down to bring home our dog.

I brought my oldest daughter with me. It was a silent drive to the clinic. We couldn't claim Rocket right away. The clinic was bustling that morning and we had to wait our turn. We sat side by side as dogs and cats and their owners came and went. A big yellow lab sat directly across from us, beside his master. Black, liquid eyes, golden coat, sturdy shoulders just asking to be hugged. My eyes started to mist up. Beside me, I could hear my daughter fight back a sniffle. We looked at each other, then back at the dog. I caught his owner's eye, and made a special request. Our dog just died...and he looked exactly like yours. Could we pet him please? The lab's owner graciously said yes, and we wrapped our arms around our new friend, who stood stoically as our tears fell and dried on his yellow fur.

Rocket's buried in the yard, with a lilac bush to mark his final resting place. In the movie, Marley's spot is marked with some large rocks, but I like the idea of something growing, and blooming, above my old companions. Muttsie has a lilac bush of her own, and Shadow rests beneath a rose bush.

I don't think I could possibly watch "Marley & Me" again. But for the first time in quite a few years, my mind is again enjoying the memory of a big, friendly yellow dog who graced our lives and passed much, much too soon.

Conversation Without Words!

2009-04-06T18:41:00.004-05:00

I never thought it possible to hold a conversation with a complete stranger without exchanging a single word. But life's full of surprises, which makes it fun...when they're the good surprises!

I'd pulled up to the angled parking space outside a Walgreens in Chicago, next to an enormous white van. Preoccupied, I was there to fill a prescription for my father, who'd had a surgical procedure done just a couple of hours earlier. Then I planned to dash next door to the grocery store to pick up a few cans of soup and a loaf of bread to keep his meals "light" as instructed.

Living a couple of miles from a small town, I'm not used to plugging parking meters. One of the great virtues of life outside a major metropolitan area is that pretty much every big store and shopping mall comes with acres of free parking. I can't think of a single parking meter in the nearest city of about 35,000. When I buy groceries, I try to get rid of the spare change in my purse, laboriously digging through the bottom to find the exact combination of pennies, dimes, and quarters that will lighten the collection of coins weighing down my shoulder bag and return me one more piece of folding money from the checkout clerk. It drives my kids nuts. So what else is new?

So I rifled through the coin collection underneath the dollar bills, and retrieved a few dimes and a couple of nickels. Not bad, I thought. You could buy a least an hour or two of parking by the courthouse where I work in yet another small town with that handful of change. I stepped out of the car and locked it, then walked up to the side of the meter that faced away from the street. Damn. It only took quarters. I put the smaller coins in my pocket, then unzipped the purse and clumsily started fishing again. I came up with a single quarter, enough to buy me fifteen minutes of time at the pharmacy, certainly more than I needed.

I plugged the meter, then started to zip the purse closed. Nearby a horn started honking insistently. I looked up, and realized that the honking was coming from the white van. Staring at me through the windshield was the driver, a man a bit older than me, who caught my eye. He pantomimed that I actually needed to put money in the meter next to the one I had just plugged. Oops!

I smiled, moved a few feet down the street, and started fishing in my purse again. Damn my luck--that had been my last quarter. I pouted and shrugged in the van driver's direction, showing my empty palms to the sky. Then I got back in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and started to back out of the parking space.

I heard the honking once more. Curious, I put my car in park and looked at the van again. What, was he planning to hand me some change for the meter? The driver smiled, and pointed to the meter directly in front of his van. Then he started to inch slowly out of his parking space. I understood immediately--chivalry was not dead, it was alive and well on a pot-holed city street outside a chain pharmacy. The white van cautiously cleared the parking space it had occupied, then held back while I pulled my itty bitty subcompact car out and maneuvered it into the space I had mistakenly fed my last quarter to.

I laughed to myself at this act of courtesy, and as the driver of the van pulled abreast of my car, I opened the door and theatrically, extravagantly, blew him a big kiss. My smile could have lit up a moonless night.

Hours later, our random, silent exchange can still make me laugh! Whoever said you need words for a conversation?

Pelican lessons

2009-03-20T16:06:00.011-05:00

Everybody's got "the story."

For some folks--most famously Oprah these days--it's the "aha moment," that wonderful instant in the cosmos when a vital, incredibly important, life-changing realization strikes and the heavens part and the world divides into "before" and "after" and the path ahead becomes suddenly clear.

Before the "aha moment" entered the modern lexicon, it was the "Eureka moment," inextricably linked to Archimedes jumping out of his bathtub a couple of millenia ago and running naked down the street with excitement at the recognition of the concept of water displacement, which was a very big deal.

Well, "aha" and "Eureka" moments are great and all, but there's something beatific and divine and let's face it, bland and rather undramatic about them in the long run. I think "aha" and I think celestial energy and light flowing down from the heavens to shed enlightenment without irritation or effort or sweat or rueful discovery.

The story I'm sure everyone has lurking in their past and marking another important fork in the road has a bit more of an edge and a definite learning curve to it.

I think of it as the "I knew it!!" moment. It's that flash of genius when you realize that you've been listening to the wrong voices (sometimes your own), ignoring your own insight and intuition, turning a blind eye to the truth. It's that moment when a wife's discovered her husband was in fact cheating and the lipstick on his collar really wasn't hers; the good advice of friends wasn't nearly as good as it seemed; and that little old lady who lived down the lane really was running the drug ring you suspected but just couldn't put your finger on why, or get past the smell of her gingerbread cookies wafting into the street as you passed.

The "I knew it!!" moment sometimes come with a tinge of regret, often comes with a "once bitten, twice shy" moral, and always comes with the conviction that listening to your inner voice is the most important counsel you'll keep from now on. It can appear while you're laughing out loud, crying with disappointment, or having coffee with a tart-tongued buddy. And despite our best intentions, if we're slow learners, we can even get more than just one.

In my own case, I'll admit to being denser than a gourmet cheesecake at times and I have several of these road markers along the way. The most portentious, serious, highest stakes incident involved ignoring that "inner voice" in favor of taking one more run at a wood fence on a tall horse against my better judgment, and ended up with an ambulance, lights and sirens, a backboard, a whole lotta pain, and the words "you have a broken back" to ponder for the following three months in a body cast.

But I'd rather not use that reference point most of the way, when all I really need to think of are...pelicans.

The road to revelation was a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that ran through the Horicon Marsh. I was passing through on a long drive from the courthouse where I work to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where my daughter was receiving an award of some sort that came with a very nice dinner. With no time to spare, no binoculars or field guide in the car, and no hiking clothes either, I still stole ten whole minutes to explore a three mile driving loop through the marsh that caught my attention as I drove the scenic route recommended by a cop I work with. So I'd rather watch birds than people. Sue me!

I drove deep into the marsh and far from passing traffic, and parked the car by a boardwalk that ran directly into the marsh. I stepped into a world of water and nature and trilling sounds and wonder. As the late afternoon sun shimmered on the water and illuminated the tall vegetation beyond, there were myriad takeoffs and landings occurring around me, splashings and wingbeats and fluttering sounds. Something white caught my eye, and I stared in wonder as three huge white birds soared in from the periphery and came in for a landing past where the glimmering plane of water was interrupted by rushes and cattails and an air of mystery.

I stood, transfixed and mesmerized until they disappeared. The golden sunlight shown on gleaming white feathers with wingtips tipped in inky black. From my far-off vantage point, there was a joy and and an ease and a lilt to their flight as they circled and floated and finally landed gracefully in the reeds, well protected from prying eyes. These birds were huge. They seemed the size of hang-gliders, easily the biggest birds I'd ever seen.

And there was a flash of something familiar to them. For just an instant, I thought "pelicans!!" And then reason and rationality set in and I shut that thought down. "Nah," I thought. "Couldn't be." Too big by far, entirely wrong in color, a thousand miles from the Georgia shoreline where I was used to seeing them skimming the waves and the palm trees overhead like prehistoric throwbacks before alighting by the dozens on a sandbar in the Atlantic.

I got back in the car, drove the rest of the way to the awards dinner, and wondered all night and for days after what exactly I had seen. Could they possibly be whooping cranes? I knew that a few of these rare birds had been sighted recently somewhere in the marsh, and that seeing them was like finding the birdwatcher's Holy Grail. Could I have been among the chosen few?

I pondered the mystery for the next few weeks. Called a Department of Natural Resources warden I worked with on occasion and asked his advice. Where had I seen this trio, he asked. We weren't entirely sure that the area of vegetation was a customary place for whooping cranes to nest. Had I thought about the possibilities of trumpeter swans, he wondered. What about herons?

I stewed over the puzzle for weeks, reaching out to other birdwatchers with little satisfaction. The optimist in me really hoped that I'd seen a trio of whooping cranes. What an accomplishment!! What bragging rights!! But as I thumbed through my well-worn bird guides, I realized that this couldn't be the answer. Whooping cranes would have the same silhouette in flight as the slightly smaller sandhill cranes I could identify in my sleep--a vaguely alien form, as though you took a goose and added an element of elastic to it, neck strangely thin and elongated, long legs trailing out behind like twigs. I'd caught just a fragmentary glimpse, but there was an elegance of movement that could not be denied. Just like a few bars of Beethoven's Fur Elise can be mistaken for nothing else.

Likewise for herons--the size was off by a lot. What I'd seen was enormous. And the more I looked at the descriptions and listing for trumpeter swans, the more I recognized that the flight pattern was wrong. The birds I'd seen soared and glided and flew with a playfulness that swans and geese, I knew, just didn't have. If you've ever paid attention to a goose in flight, you know that it's a big-ass bird. There's a lot of meat to haul from one point to the next, and there's no room in that equation for burning fuel to have fun. A goose reminds me of a C-130 transport plane--it moves a lot of weight, and flies in a no-frills straight line.

I had reached a dead end. The mystery was still alive and well, but I was all out of leads. I tried to push it out of my mind.

A few weeks later, though, I was back at the marsh, this time for a leisurely morning of hiking and bird watching, a sanity break in a busy life, a battery recharge at the font of nature. Sneakers on and binoculars looped around my neck, I walked, and I sat, and I kept an eye out for another glimpse of those white visitors. No luck. As I finally heading home I took a different route, one that ran past the wildlife refuge's main visitor center. I stopped in, looked around, stepped out on the deck and looked out at the marsh spread out before me. A ranger was working in the office, and I put the puzzle to her. Explained the inspiring thrill of the sighting, the inquiries, the ponderings, the frustration.

"I'll bet they're white pelicans," she said.

WHAT!!!

Unbeknownst to my local expert fifty miles away, the Horicon Marsh is a summer breeding ground for thousands of white pelicans. I hadn't even known they existed. I'd simply asked the wrong person for advice. The ranger showed me a postcard in the gift shop. Sure 'nuf, they looked right. I ripped through my bird guides to the section on pelicans I'd never thought to open, and there it was, in black and white and full color. With a wingspread of nine feet, no wonder I'd thought they were the biggest damn birds I'd ever seen.

And with that, I smiled, even laughed a little. "I knew it!!" I thought in triumph.

And now as I blunder through every day since then full of judgment calls and leaps of faith and decisions big and small, if I need a little validation for the idea of trusting my gut, I just look back at a warm spring afternoon on a Wisconsin marsh, and think...

Pelicans.

Objects in the rear view mirror...

2009-02-20T18:29:00.006-06:00

The news of his death was nearly four years old, but it was still news to me.

Earlier that day I had appeared in court for a routine set of "initial appearances" on some criminal cases, and had smiled to myself at how closely one of the defendant's names resembled that of a boy--a young man, really--I had gone to journalism college with. It had been a good fifteen years since I heard from him in the aftermath of a college reunion only one of us attended, brief updates changing hands via email. He had become an acclaimed newspaper reporter in his field, had married, and he and his wife were eagerly awaiting the adoption of a daughter from China. He sent me a copy of a recent award-winning series he'd written to bring me up to date on his work. I can't remember if I returned the favor.

I promised myself that I would look him up when I got home after work and shoot him a quick email about the morning for a shared laugh. But while I waited on "hold" as a polite, drawling young police officer in Alabama searched for some information on an individual I had charged closer to home, curiosity got the better of me and my fingers quickly typed his name on Google.

I hit "enter" with a quiet confidence, expecting to find the name of his most recent newspaper employer and, hopefully, an email address. What popped up on the screen instead was an obituary. And the news that his death nearly four years earlier had been "investigated as a suicide." The smile of anticipation turned to the taste of ashes.

Thirty years passed away in an instant, and I felt both hollow and tremendously sad.

My mind kept turning back to younger, more innocent days, when we all shared the shining idealism of young journalists in the post-Watergate years. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford had made investigative journalism seem not only rigorously principled but absolutely glamorous in the film version of "All the President's Men" just a couple of years before. Nobody told us we couldn't change the world every day, and even if they did, we wouldn't have believed them.

The young man I remembered was tall and slender, with gorgeous deep brown eyes and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. We were never very close, but our journalism school was small, and everybody pretty much knew everybody else. I remember that he was unfailingly polite, and well spoken, and ferociously smart. He was a couple of years younger than I was, at a time when things like that mattered, and he had what I think of as "Breck girl" hair--layered and a bit stylishly long and shiny and squeaky clean. He cooked dinner for me at his apartment one evening--one student-apartment building over from where I lived with my roommate--and I remember a night of baked pork chops and candlelight and glasses of wine and nice conversation. We shared a G-rated kiss in his doorway as I left to go back to my own apartment and reality.

I printed off a bunch of pages about his passing, and read them the next day, parked down at the lakefront under a cold, sunny sky. There were so many things I had not known. There were profound and well-earned accolades by the dozens, fond reminiscences, tributes to his inspiring and encouraging nature, celebrations of his colorful character and incredible intellect. But along the way there had evidently also been depression, professional turmoil, a strange admission years earlier that he had slept for a while with a gun under his pillow.

The thing which had apparently tipped the balance for him to take his own life beside his favorite fishing spot, it was reported, was an upcoming initial appearance in court on a charge of drunk driving. The sort of thing that is absolutely routine for me on the other side of the table, but in his position obviously terrifying and unfathomable. I guess it's true, that "the bigger they are, the harder they fall." I tried to put myself in his shoes, tried to imagine how he must have felt at this very public frailty, his reputation as a crusader for the public good on the verge of being seriously tarnished, and the humiliation that would have followed. It didn't feel too good.

As the days passed, the shock finally lessened. I tried to "shake it off," rationalizing that we had never actually been close friends, that I shouldn't feel this so personally. By the next time I had to appear in court for more "initial appearances" in drunk driving cases, I was back to my usual form, confidently asking the court to require this, that, and the other thing as bond conditions "for the protection of the public." It's my job, it's what I do without hesitation and without doubt.

But in the moments in my office when the phone isn't ringing, when nobody's looking for my signature in a hurry, and I've caught up just briefly with the tide of paper that drives my work, I can see him still. Tall, slender, in blue jeans and a checked shirt, standing at the top of the stairs outside his apartment, smiling, his eyes a beautiful brown, and the light from the hallway shining on his fluffy "Breck girl" hair.

Photos at the Loose Leaf Lounge

2009-02-10T08:35:00.008-06:00

I think my prevailing artistic philosophy at this exact point in time and winter is…what the heck, why not??

Some of you have been following my progress since last year with my self-published book of essays, "Running with Stilettos: Living a Balanced Life in Dangerous Shoes", and noticing that on my website, I've taken to posting digital photo spreads more often. What can I say?? I’m certainly not stepping away from writing!! But since buying a digital camera a few years ago, I've become taken with the immediacy and emphemeral nature of the art form, a quick and happy contrast with the torturous and lengthy and occasionally agonizing process of wrestling with words and trying to get them "right." With a camera, you've either got the shot or not, and there's nothing you can do about it later!

At any rate, this is an open invite to stop in at a four-week shared art show of my nature photographs at a little cafe on Chicago's Near North side, called the Loose Leaf Lounge, at 2915 North Broadway. http://www.looseleaflounge.com/ I'll be sharing wall space with an artist named Nuria McNeal, our show opens the first weekend in March. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop by--the cafe is small but lively and very cozy, and the sandwiches are delicious works of art in themselves. I hate to leave a crumb of the "lemon pepper tuna" behind on the plate.

I hope to have some copies of the book for sale down there during the art show as well, but that's still entirely up in the air. Hope you stop in!

Makeshift Christmas

2008-12-25T21:57:00.005-06:00

Imagination stood in for Christmas wrap this year.

“Sit down,” I instructed my various children and my new son-in-law, “and shut your eyes!”

Then I exited stage left, grabbed their bundles of unwrapped presents from the spare bedroom, and returned to the living room where one after the other followed instructions and sat with eyes closed and hands face up on their lap to catch the goods.

“Okay,” I said, “now just imagine there’s a big bow! And shiny ribbon! And gorgeous wrapping paper, all sparkly and shiny! And when you tear that off, there’s a box inside. Then you take the top off the box, and imagine there’s some tissue paper! And you rustle it and rustle it, looking for what’s under it, and finally…”

That’s when I’d hand them their unwrapped sweater…or gloves…or flannel-lined pants…or scarf. We laughed, I got by without a nervous breakdown trying to find two extra hours for present decorating I didn’t have time for, and there was no cleanup of tumbleweed sized balls of cast-off wrapping paper. I guess there’s an upside to this after all.

It’s been that kind of a Christmas. Never tried the “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach to holiday wrap before, but hey, they say necessity is the mother of invention.

Two months ago I couldn’t have foreseen that my eighty-five year old crippled mother would break her leg and need to go to a nursing home for three months, that my eighty-five year old father would need to follow her because of his own serious health problems, that my—ahem, never mind how old—godmother would suddenly wind up in the hospital only a month later in serious pain and distress, and that my father would then deteriorate suddenly and require hospitalization himself.

Two months ago I was still envisioning the kind of Christmas I wrote about two years ago in Tale of the Christmas Axes. The kind of Christmas that evokes echoes of Norman Rockwell with the seasonal decorations around the house and garland around the banister and the tree festooned from top to bottom with hand-embroidered ornaments and a glorious angel atop, a mistletoe ball hanging in the living room, family around the dinner table for a fabulous meal, Christmas music playing softly in the background. I’d even found the crèche this year that had been lost for the past two holidays.

But then life got in the way, and a few thousand miles got put on the car running back and forth again and again to my hometown of Chicago to deal with the unfolding dramas, and Christmas shopping and Christmas baking and Christmas planning and Christmas cards went right out the window. My younger son and I had managed to pick out a live tree a few weeks earlier and get it into the house and upright with the assistance of his lovely girlfriend, but with less than twelve hours left until Christmas officially arrived, the only thing the tree had on it was a few strands of lights. And bah humbug, I was about ready to leave it that way.

But somehow things went right anyway. By the time it was afternoon on Christmas Eve, the kids had come home and the ornament boxes got dragged out of the closet, and then some of our favorite decorations made it onto the branches through no effort of mine. While a new fire crackled in the grate, they then set to rolling out the batch of cookie dough I’d made the day before, and the usual irreverence and laughter and the smell of coffee lit up the kitchen as they came up with new demented ways to decorate the axe-shaped cookies and their “victims.” Yes, we have Christmas stars and bells and pine trees and Santas. But we also ended up with a gingerbread man wearing a Speedo, a couple of Christmas giraffes, some Christmas pineapples, a pirhana, and a cookie decorated like a liquor bottle.

Then after the cookies were baked we raced through passing out my gifts before driving over to a family gift exchange, because I knew I’d be on the road to Chicago and back on Christmas day, visiting at hospitals and nursing homes and basically crashing my cousin’s delicious family dinner on the way home. Not the best timing in the world, but it was the only day in the week that the weatherman could guarantee I’d have dry pavement and clear skies for two hundred fifty miles. I drove home in the dark to an empty house, since the kids had spent the day with their dad. Christmas dinner at my house is going to be a day late. I hope the chicken in wine sauce a few days ago is still good.

Taking inventory of this year, there are a few things we missed. The percentage of ornaments is a little thin this year…though the kids still managed to get the strands of wooden “cranberries” threaded through the branches. We’re missing the angel and the mistletoe ball, the crèche never made it out of storage, and I can’t begin to imagine getting out the garland. Never bought a wreath for the front door, left the big electric outdoor Santa down in the basement, and the singing moose that chimes “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” is nowhere to be seen. We skipped the tinsel on the tree too.

But we had warmth, and love, and laughter, and delight, and once again, Christmas cookies shaped like little bloody axes. As for the rest of the traditional things that got left undone, well…

We can always imagine them too.

"Alles klar"

2008-11-11T20:06:00.003-06:00

I thought briefly about packing the shotgun, but the car was nearly full and I was exhausted with 120 miles yet to drive. Having any sort of a weapon in a house with an elderly ex-soldier with dementia issues never sounds like the brightest of ideas during daylight, no matter how "dodgy" the neighborhood. I also left the chain saw behind. Not that I'm sure I couldn't find a use for it...

The car was packed to the brim with my vacuum cleaner, the tool kit (with hex wrenches AND flat head screwdrivers), the cordless drill, extra plates and silverware, clothes for colder weather than the night I'd blasted down to Chicago like a bat out of hell, extra movies on DVD, my latest Oprah magazine, winter jacket, gloves and, of course, my Swiss Army knife which had already been pressed into use. And don't forget the plain black suit and heels, equally appropriate for either a funeral or a court appearance. Next stop, a nearby hardware store for a replacement part for an ancient broken doorknob, a fillup at the local gas station where regular unleaded goes for fifty cents less a gallon than it does in Chicago, a pitstop at Starbucks for some caffeine and a comfort zone, and a cruise through the racks of Best Buy looking for DVDs of Lawrence Welk and the Jackie Gleason show. Didn't find 'em, but at least I tried.

When I finally pulled out of the driveway, the late afternoon sky was starting to darken, heralding temps below freezing just ahead. The setting sun blazed gold from behind swaths of grey and silver clouds to the west, while the three-quarter moon glared brightly like a chunk of ice in the clear eastern sky. Squadrons of geese flew overhead, and a hawk soared over the interstate, utterly unconcerned with the myriad human dramas unfolding below him at seventy miles an hour on six lanes of traffic.

I was headed back to Chicago, my home town, for the worst of all possible reasons. The first frantic dash had been a few days earlier. One minute I was sitting at my desk at work, pushing my way through a neverending pile of paper. The next my cell phone rang with the news that my elderly mother, already in a wheelchair most of the time, had fallen and badly fractured a femur. My equally elderly father, incredibly feeble and showing symptoms of both Parkinson's and cognitive impairment, needed full-time care and supervision while the medical crisis unfolded.

And so I went, and waited, and talked with doctors and social workers and administrators and nurses, and tried to reassure my father that all would eventually be well. This last was a Herculean task. He and my mother had shared the same apartment for thirty years, and his anxiety was palpable.

In the coming days, I tag teamed him with my mother's two sisters--one with a game leg and a psychotic Dalmatian, the other, younger, married to a former firefighter who, in his eighties, proved to be the Rock of Gibraltar every evening as we showed up at their house for dinner and a movie like orphans in a storm. With my father's limited mobility and attention span, we've watched a lot of TV and movies. Took in Gunsmoke episodes, laughed at the Three Stooges, guffawed at the mud-splattered antics of George Clooney and his football team in "Leatherheads." I tried hard to find movies in German, his native tongue, but turned up only two. One, "Schultze Gets the Blues" was so slow paced we switched it off. But not before he surprised me by singing along in German with the characters in a scene where some miners were being congratulated on their retirement.

We also watched Wolfgang Petersen's wrenching WWII epic "Das Boot" again, which we had first shared last summer when he visited. Seeing it again reinforced my twin beliefs that (1) the movie is a genuine classic with a thrilling, haunting musical score, a "must see" for film buffs even with only English subtitles, and (2) the actor playing the stoic, nuanced submarine commander, Jurgen Prochnow, is the most compelling actor I've ever seen on screen. And that includes Russell Crowe in "Gladiator," Viggo Mortenson in "Hidalgo," and Cary Grant in just about anything.

Just to get out of the house one day for a destination that didn't involve the hospital, I loaded him into the car and we visited the Garfield Park Conservatory, reveling in a riot of exotic chrysanthemums and bizarre succulents and lush foliage. We stopped for a while by the indoor pond populated by a colorful variety of ornamental carp and decorated with enormous glass waterlilies by the artist Dale Chihuly whose thousands of colorful glass flowers also famously grace the ceiling of the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. I restrained myself from physically yanking the trio of folks seated in the only bench near the water, and reminded myself that I was lucky to be here at all.

We drove through Humboldt Park in the old neighborhood, where I used to bike and swing and sled as a child and he and I searched for lost marbles on our walks in the woods. We cruised past the fieldhouse and the park's formal gardens and pool flanked by the pair of magnificent bronze bison originally designed for the 1893 World's Fair by Edward Kemeys, the same sculptor who created the signature giant lions guarding the staircase of Chicago's Art Institute. As we drove through the park, he recalled the neighborhood bakery, Rosers, and so we stopped there too, buying a loaf of rye bread and a butter coffee cake smothered with icing. Our drives here and there were often spent just listening to music, but sometimes he would give me a short impromptu lesson in German. I would have to lean close to hear him, because his speech is no longer clear.

My mother continues to improve, and the next days are fraught with uncertainty as to the future for both. But every night, as I have since this crisis began, I tuck him into bed with the words "Guten nacht, mein Papa." Then I kiss him on the cheek and tell him "alles klar." Roughly translated, it means "everything's fine." He smiles and closes his eyes and I turn out the lights.

Alles klar. At least for this night.