Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Love, Linda

I hadn't planned to be in Atlanta this week, but here I am, having gotten a phone call on Monday that my dad, already in the hospital after his second leg amputation, was having trouble breathing. Now he is on a ventilator in ICU and my mom and two sisters and I are going in two-by-two every few minutes to squeeze his hand. It's like Noah's Ark, but we are not going to save our species--or anyone, for that matter.  

The prognosis is that he will likely be on a feeding tube when he comes home, which the doctor and his ICU nurse are very high on because it will eliminate the pesky step of trying to stuff him with nutrients, which he needs badly in order to heal, via food. 

This is hard stuff, which I have generally avoided blogging about, but now it has filled so much space in my mind that I find I can no longer side-step it. One promise I made to myself when I started Friends Talking in the Night is that I wouldn't necessarily have to say everything, but that everything I do say must be 100 percent honest.

So back to my dad. I am trying to come to terms with his diminishing state. We are not talking here about the abstract problems of diabetes or a Parkinson's-like tremor or our aging population. This is my once 6' 1" father, who, until just a few years ago when his illness got markedly worse, was my very best pal. Before I got married the first time, we sat together in a restaurant and cried. And when that marriage was coming apart, he's the one who came to me and said that he knew something wasn't right and that he would love me no matter what.

We share a sense of humor and a love of history, not to mention a great appreciation for Southern biscuits. Our bond formed when I was in high school--we went to breakfast together every Saturday at a diner called Melvin's. And when I lived in New York, he made sure that I always had at least a dozen Melvin's (by then called Maria's) biscuits in my freezer. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again when your favorite childhood foods are involved.

Now I see that what I am really writing is a love letter to my father. Because squeezing his hand and saying I love you covers a lot of territory but not all that is in my breaking heart. 

Revenge--Even Hypothetical--Is the Best Medicine

Even though the bra-burning part of the 1960s turns out to be a myth, suffice it to say that the modern women's movement happened a long time ago, long enough, it seemed to me yesterday, that I was surprised to be treated like a woman who didn't know a nut from a bolt when I dropped off my car at the VW dealership for its 30,000-mile check-up. I shouldn't have been particularly surprised because ours is still a sexist society, starting with the way journalists sometimes wrote about Hillary Clinton during her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. I mean would Mr. Hillary Clinton ever have been described in newspapers as "shrill"?

The car experience was still galling me today when I went to the doctor for my 30,000-mile check-up. Why I told my GP that in Ralph's absence Sam carried my purse onto the plane when we flew to Atlanta for the holidays to free up my arms for Julia and two carry-ons, I'm not sure. But he easily topped my story by revealing that he was 1 of 20 kids in his family and that his 5' 3" mother, who was just as formidable as she was short, called each of her 13 boys "HITs," or husbands in training. She insisted that each one learn to cook, iron, and sew. On top of that, his seven older sisters trained their baby bro to buy their tampons, right down to the embarrassing price check screamed from the back of the store to the front. It made me realize that I have a lot of fundamentals to teach Sam before he gets sucked into some kind of macho force field. (After all, at six, he still kisses his mama goodbye in public.) 

But more than that, my doc inadvertently gave me just the right salve for my anger. I can take the car somewhere else for repairs, of course, but it won't ever satisfy me as much as imagining my Martens' VW man standing in line at the CVS with an armload of tampons, waiting for a price check.

Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now. 

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair. 

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

 

A Change in the World as We Know It

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours. 

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines. 

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.