Empty nesters

Our baby birds looked like this a few days ago, and then yesterday, gone. They quite literally have flown the nest.

In other news my mother is in surgery as I type. Whoohoo. The whole thing takes a few hours, so I will be lighting candles and saying prayers for awhile.

Delays...

Ugh. My mother STILL has not had her surgery. The good news is she is well enough that she isn't on death's doorstep. The bad news is she is sitting in a hospital room, hooked up and not able to do much of anything. Which she shouldn't she had a heart attack and needs a bypass. But it is frustrating. Her platelets were low, and she may be allergic to heparin, the anti coagulant they used when she was taken to the hospital, so they have to work those things out before doing the surgery. Yes, please do. I would rather there are no surprises when this happens.

In other news, Cooper's ear infection never went away completely, and has resurfaced in both ears. So we are now trying a different, more potent antibiotic that has the lovely effect of giving him the runs. Temporarily, so we have been told, but still. The thing is that my kid is SO GOOD even when sick, it is hard to complain about it. He is not a screaming meemie, he just looks sad. He was running a 102 temp and just looked sad and flopped on me on the couch and kind of moaned. Like Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally" and he is on the phone, going "uuuuuhhhhhnnn" because he thinks he has something.

All will be better in the end. It has to be.

And the beat goes on

So my mom is having bypass surgery Wednesday. Double bypass surgery. But for now she is doing pretty well. She is very stable and being well taken care of. My dad is holding his own, as long as he can eat dinner with my brother. There are things I have never seen my dad do - the laundry, vaccuming, and cooking anything other than scrambled eggs or grilling something on the BBQ. He makes his own breakfast and lunch with no major assistance, but dinner has always been my mother's "responsibility". So he needs to go to Chip's house for dinner. Otherwise I am not sure what he would do.

Once upon a time, when I was visiting them and they were living in a house I had never lived in, as they had moved there long after I had moved out, and my mother was still working part time at the local bookstore, she had some evening hours to work. She left for her shift around 4pm. My dad looked at me around 5 and said "what's for dinner?" Hmmm. I have never lived here, I am not in charge of you, and yet I am in charge of dinner? I responded that dinner was whatever was served at whatever local establishment he wanted to go to to eat. We ate at McMinnican's, a brew pub. It was lovely.

This time would be different. I will be going out the first week of July. It will be after she has had her surgery and gets home. It will allow me to assess how things are going, if she is in fact behaving herself as she is supposed to. My exhusband has been through open heart surgery and his advice is do what the doctors say, take the pain meds and do what the doctors say. I guess when they do open heart surgery, you are not supposed to do any heavy lifting, or any lifting for that matter, for a month. The point being that the plates of the chest bones need to fuse back together. If you don't "behave yourself" they might not fuse properly, and they will have to do it over again. It behooves you to behave.

I will be going out alone. HA. The Bob gets to be in charge of Cooper for a week. Alone. The hard part is walking the dogs. We have one dog who won't poop in the back yard. He is weird, poor dog. I would like to take Cooper, but that is not realistic. He is 19 months old, and going by myself with him would be insane.

That is it for now. Hope all is well in all of your blogger worlds.

To my mom...on Father's Day.

Yesterday I was informed that my mother suffered a heart attack. She is currently in the hospital and awaiting bypass surgery which will happen in a day or so. She is in Oregon, I am not. I am in Boston. This is not ideal. Fortunately my brother IS in Oregon, and lives only two blocks from my parents, so he is now officially in charge of my dad and of relaying info to me. They have both said I should not go out right now. She is stable and my uncle, who is a retired surgeon, has confirmed that she is doing well. Still it is hard. I am, of course, worried for her, but also for my dad. He is pretty dependent on her and this is not the way he would have liked to have spent Father's day. They have been married since 1959. More than half their lives they have been together.

I will go out in a few weeks. With prices for flights being what they are I may have to sell a kidney to get there, but I need to go. This will leave the Bob in charge of all the dogs and the kiddo, but he will manage.

So to my dad - Happy Father's day and I wish it was a better one. To my mom - what can I say...I wish this wasn't happening and I hope you get better soon and I miss you both.

On smells and memories...

Yesterday for dinner I made hamburgers on the grill, and I boiled some red bliss potatoes and made baked beans. And by made, I mean I opened a can of Bush's baked beans. As I came back into the kitchen from having been outside at the grill, the smell of boiling potatoes and baked beans hit me, and snapped me right back to my grandparents' kitchen. This would be my fathers parents, who have not been alive since the late 80's. My grandfather died in the fall of 1986 and my grandmother in the fall of 1988. So it has been 20 years since I have been in that house.

But that house was the touchstone of my life in so many ways. My family moved roughly every 5 years. The first time was just to move to a larger home now that there were the four of us, mom, dad, myself and the bro. And a dog. The first schnauzer I ever loved, Schnaupps. But I digress. After that move, we moved because of my fathers job. While he was not in the military, the war machine did fund my entire existence. Dad worked for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft as an aerospace engineer, and worked on many defense contracts. We were relocated between Connecticut and Ohio a few times. Then to Florida, which was where my parents were living when dad retired. I do believe my parents are the only people on the planet who LEFT Florida when they retired.

During my life, the house in Minetto NY where my father was raised was the one constant, the one thing that almost never changed. We visited them at least once a year, if not more. It was practically the country compared to how we lived in the burbs. There were 9 or so acres of land, so you could explore and be off by yourself in the peace and quiet. There are sounds that often take me back there, the song of the morning dove for instance, which I would listen to in the mornings as I lay in bed in that house, before the day got really hot and humid. But mostly it is the smells.

The sense of smell apparently is the sense that is most directly connected to the brain and to memory. The brain is a fascinating place, and I love when smells catch me by surprise and take me places I haven't been for a long time. The smell of baked beans and potatoes was so familiar I thought if I closed my eyes and opened them again I would be in that kitchen with the table stuck in the nook and the window over the sink where I could watch the bird feeder while washing dishes.

Another smell that snaps me back to that kitchen is the smell of vitamins. Weird, I know, but my grandfather took what seemed like a dozen pills a day, and this one cupboard in the kitchen smelled of the vitamins. It isn't a great smell, but it is a fond one. The smell of raspberry jam, specifically if it is warm, reminds me of these awesome cookies my grandmother made, which were a sort of popover with jam in the middle. The smell of grass being cut combined with the buzz of an airplane will take me back to that back yard, where I would swing on this old swing made from a slab of wood hung by a very large, very rough piece of rope from a metal support structure my grandfather concocted. It was not a very stable swing, and you could tip off of it forward or backward in a heart beat. It was probably a great abs workout, just trying to swing on it and not fall off.

These grandparents were not the most gregarious, expressive or even talkative people in the world, but they were generous and loving. In keeping with my previous discussion about ducks, my grandfather, who didn't say much to people, had these ducks he would visit down on the river. They probably belonged to someone who lived along the river, but he would go down with a bucket of cracked corn, and whistle for them. As soon as he whistled, you would hear "plop slash" and two white ducks would eventually find him and get their treat. It is one of the last memories I have of him before he got very sick and ended up in the hospital before he died. He also had a way with fish. He raised angel fish, and they would come to the top of the tank, and lay down in his hand which he would cup just below the surface of the water, so he could feed them. Dogs from around the neighborhood would appear at the back door of the house after dinner to get the bones from the evening meal. He was the guy who went to the butcher shop every day to get the meat for dinner. Those dogs ate really well. And he had a series of black cats that skulked around the house and basement, all named Skinny Guts from what I remember. They were not friendly to us, but they LOVED Roswell.

Oh yes, Roswell and Ella, those were my grandparents. I briefly entertained naming Cooper Roswell, but then thought I could also just tattoo "kick me" on his forehead.

I wonder what smells and memories will make their connections in Coopers' memories. I hope over his lifetime he finds some that are as fond as the ones I have of that house in Minetto.

It is just me and the schnauzers today.

There are four baby birds, not three. At first I could only see three, but today I confirmed the existence of the fourth. The pictures here are not great, I have to stand on Cooper's little stepping stool and take the picture out of the top of the window that the air conditioner is in. But there they are! Bob wants to call them Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp. I said which one gets to be Shemp? Cause no one wants to be Shemp.

I am on an antibiotic now. I went to see the dentist and the back up doctor for mine who is on vacation yesterday. So my crown is back in place, and the doctor agreed that neon green business coming out of my nose was indicitive of an infection. I feel moderately better today, but that might have something to do with the fact that I am home alone with just the two schnauzers. Bob took Cooper to day care and I got to take the dogs for a walk, take a very long hot shower and then a nap. Wheeeeeee. And I am reading a book. I know - reading in uninterupted stretches! I am reading a book called Dead Man's Hand, a collection of crime short stories that center around poker. One of my favorite crime authors, Michael Connelly, has a short Harry Bosch story in it.

The pool guys are coming to open the pool today. If only it had been opened two weeks ago. We could have used it this last week with the 90 degree heat. I could probably learn how to do the opening and closing myself, but the cover is hard to get on and off. I would hate to screw up the filter too. Paying them to do it is cheaper than replacing the filter.

That is it. I hope Cooper likes swimming. He didn't get to do much last summer. He was pretty small. But of course there will be pictures.

Aaaaggghhhh oooowwwwooooowwwww whimper

So I don't have strep throat, but I do have a VERY sore throat. And a cough. And nasal congestion. And right now a raging headache. Oh, and did I mention that while flossing my teeth tonight (I practice good dental hygiene) I popped the temporary crown off my back tooth? From the neck up I am a festival of pain. Cold or hot beverages cause pain when I swallow, and now pain in my tooth because the nerve is exposed.

I want my mommy. And she lives 3000 miles away. I would call but talking induces a coughing fit that makes me want to vomit. So, since I banished myself to the couch in the living room because I had a major coughing fit and thought at least one of us should get a decent nights' sleep, and because I took MucinexD, with the real honest to goodness psuedophed in it - you know, the stuff the crystal meth dealers use to make their product so now we all feel a little like criminals when we go to the pharmacy to ask for it - I am not as sleepy as I was two hours ago. But at least my head congestion is better. I can breath through both nostrils at once! And while I am still coughing, it is much less gasping for air and more I want to get that tickle out of my throat. But because I am awake at the moment and can't call my mom for fear of waking the neighbors coughing, I am blogging.

We have baby birds. I took pictures but don't have the wherewithall to load them right now, so maybe tomorrow. But there appear to be three baby robins in the nest outside our window.

Speaking of baby birds, the toddler room at my son's day care decided to try hatching duck eggs. They had 12 eggs, they have 3 ducklings. They are going to a farm out further from Boston once they are ready to go. And I don't mean that figuratively, as in Lassie went to the farm Timmy, she's happier there, but they will really go live on a farm. They are supposed to grow up to be those white ducks you kind of expect to find on a farm.

Speaking of raising ducks, Audobon Ron at http://ducksmahal.blogspot.com/ blogged recently about dreams and how his wife has very vivid dreams. So do I. I was teaching a psychology class at a community college once upon a time and we were doing the section on dream interpretation when I happened to have a dream that I was walking across a very dark space, like a stage, with spot lights every so often (think Marcus Welby if you are old enough to know that reference). As I walked through these spots of light I walked into one where a man was standing waiting for me. He was familiar to me, or to my dream self that is, and he hugged me and said "You have a choice, you can go with me now or you can go back for awhile longer". I thought for a moment and said that I would like to go back for awhile longer, that I had some more stuff to do. At which point he smiled a very satisfied smile and I woke up like I had been shot, sitting straight up in bed. I shared this dream with my class, and Shaniqua, this absolute riot of woman in my class said "That was God honey, and if you had said you were going with him, you would not have woken up."

That might be. I kind of like the idea that it was God, that maybe I had served whatever purpose I was put on this earth to serve, and now could go on to the beyond, or I could choose to stick around and do more stuff. Hopefully good stuff. Another friend of mine agreed that it was God, and was amazed, saying that there are holy people around the world who spend their lifetimes meditating and trying to speak to and hear from God and all I did was have a dream. Personally I think the divine is around us all the time, we simply are not paying attention. Too many of us sleep walk through this life, worried about the mortgage or gas prices or whether this guy or that girl likes us and we don't see the important things in our every day lives that make this life so very precious and beautiful. I feel it very acutely with Cooper and Bob. Cooper came into my life later than I think most people expect to have kids, but I feel that I am better equipped to handle it and appreciate it more now than I would have been in my 20's. I try to take that moment every day to just soak it up, be with him and see him for his little divine self. In yoga class you traditionally close a class by saying Namaste to your fellow yogis. This loosely translated means the divine bright shiny part of me sees and acknowledges and rejoices in the divine bright shiny part of you.

So despite my misery right now, I say Namaste to all you out there in blogger land. Try to see the divine, bright shiny parts of your life at least once a day and rejoice in them.