The Saint of Lost Things

The Saint of Lost Things (aka my handsome Husband) has found my cell phone. He has become a Saint due to his many miraculous successful hunts for anything lost. It could be the back of my Sister's earring, an important tax-related receipt, or even my Mother's charm bracelet. Yes, it's the same charm bracelet that she gave to me a few months before she died, the one filled with gold charms that mark all the important events in her life and that I remember hearing tinkle ever so vividly whenever she was getting ready for a big night, dressed to the nines! Granted he IS the one who had hidden it, and then later denied that he hid it in his desk before a trip and persisted in gaslighting me for years about it. Oh the sheepish grin when he discovered it, and I wasn't sure if I should kiss him or hit him. Perhaps he is paying penance for that time by always finding the lost object?

It made me wonder about my memory, of course. Should I just get that new test for Alzheimer's now, and start the medication while I still have a chance of remembering to take it? I could always blame my mental lapses on:
1) Being a Nursing Mom with no Sleep in my 30's, and
2) Going Through Menopause in my 40's
3) Having the Occasional Senior Moment in my 50's
4 ) And now, it's either ADD or early-onset you know what in my 60's, right?

We have always thought that said Husband would have been medicated early and often if there was an ADD diagnosis when he was a kid. Our son, the Rock Star, was reluctantly thought to have it, like his Dad he was only happy doing lots of things at once and continually lost his cell phone, and his clothes (which I'd find his friends later wearing since they were left at friends' houses) and his towels at the beach, and I could go on and on. But medication is never the answer - please don't Tom Cruise me about this - I think a lot of little boys are just active with a capital "A." Giving all these young kids psychoactive drugs is a dangerous custom and over-prescribing for the sake of our big pharmaceutical industry, in my opinion. Plus, so long as the Rocker had his guitar, he could focus just fine. So I'm thinking that he may have gotten his forgetfulness from me, and not his Dad. Because after all, Dad keeps all his appointments on a Google calendar and rarely forgets anything! And now back to granting sainthood.

The Bride, as I mentioned in the last post, had the power to stop a plane from taking off when she was flying from Atlanta. All those Halloweens in the Wonder Woman outfit payed off! Then when she returned to her hospital, she was one of many residents who presided over a resuscitation of a patient who had died at a Lady Gaga concert. Imagine. No really, imagine we are in say the time of the Tudors, the Catholics are taking a beating and they need some new saints quick. Well, a young woman who can stop a big Airbus and make somebody rise from the dead? I'd nominate her!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/04/22/tennessee.gaga.heart.attack/index.html?hpt=T2

Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday

It's Holy Week. Happy Earth Day to all today, and if you are Christian not sure if saying Happy Good Friday is correct? Good Yontef? I remember all the images in Sacred Heart Catholic Church being covered with purple velvet on this day, the day that Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. Easter is hopping right along this Sunday; the purple cloth will come off. We all celebrate renewal, rebirth, and forgiveness. But for me, a lapsed Catholic who would most likely describe myself as an anti-any-organized religion type, who once converted to Reform Judaism but is now considered an Agnostic married to a Jew (in secular terms only), well I have the whole pilgrimage to my MILs for the Passover Seder to discuss.

My 87 yr old MIL has been putting on this holiday ever since her older sister, Mary, now dead, became too ill and incapacitated to do it, which means about 20 years. I've been making the charoses for 32 years, since my own wedding. Everyone is assigned a dish to bring, so I guess you could call it a pot luck Seder! My hubby is her eldest son, he gets to read the Haggadah (the book of the exodus from Egypt) and lead everyone in the tradition - washing hands, hiding matzoh, talking about the fear of change and the wandering around the desert with Moses in order to escape slavery, etc. Jesus was a Rabbi, the Last Supper a Seder, and there is a hard boiled egg on every Seder plate. The similarities are endless because of course Christianity grew out of the Jewish monotheistic faith, just as Lutherans sprang from the Pope. The food that is served, in strict order symbolic of the holiday, is pretty much the same all over the world - gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup, tzimmes (carrots and beef), chicken. You are supposed to clean out all the bread and leavened products and only eat matzoh for eight days (7 for Reform) to signify the wandering around the desert wilderness part, with no time to let bread rise. But it's not the food that gets me.

It's the drama. 35 people show up, some as early as noon last Monday when the Seder begins right before sundown. Aunt Mary's single daughter from NYC comes to my MIL's house six days ahead of time to get the place ready. She brings folding tables, silverware and linens. along with her latest addition, gravlax, which is like a fancy lox for the appetizer table. They make ancient, disgusting food from Yiddish ancestors that maybe a few people will eat, like eggs in chicken aspic (p'cha) or burned chicken fat and feet (gribbenes). And a long time ago I learned that it doesn't matter how early I get there (I used to go up 2-3 days early to "help") when we lived an hour's drive away instead of 8 hours - there is nothing for me to do, except chop up the apples and nuts of Charoses. We drove at dawn on Sunday, the day before the Seder, in order to pick up the Bride at the airport. The Groom had to work. But my son was coming and indeed he arrived before noon on Monday.

The Flower Girl bit her Aunt Becky; my MIL called me Sheila when she remembered to thank me; the NYC cousin insulted my sister who came out from NYC; the 55yr old disabled brother-in-law, who is still living with my MIL and her husband, showed up rarely and did nothing, which means he was "...having a good day." When I got there I was informed that 11 people out of the 35 were Jewish, and they didn't count me as one, I'm only half...which I had always half suspected. We did get to meet the 5 month cousin who was born in Iowa and is adorable! As usual, I was happy to get home, to passover the Mason Dixon line and return to my flowering dogwoods and mountain serenity. But I can't complain since my daughter's pilgrimage beat mine for its level of complexity and confusion.

The Bride's plane was 4 hours late from Atlanta. First, there was something wrong with the crew and they had to get another crew to come in. Then, while sitting on the tarmac, a lady had a nose bleed. Paramedics were called and my exhausted ER doctor didn't bother to get up. Then, after packing the nose, they were actually taxiing to take-off, when another tumult was happening in the back of the plane. Someone said a passenger was having "...difficulty breathing." Magic words to an ER doc and so my daughter tended to her patient, who was not the nosebleed. The flight attendants brought her a stethoscope, and said the pilot wanted to know if they could take off. She said, "No." Imagine, she had the power to stop a plane? I'm sure the other passengers loved her at that point. Back to the gate, paramedics were called again and the patient was transported directly to a hospital. The Bride received a free ticket to anywhere Delta flies, though they did want to see proof that she was indeed a doctor.

"Once we were slaves in Egypt," and now I refuse to be a slave in the kitchen. It's important to know when the time is right to gracefully give up the things of youth, and pass on your wisdom to the next generation. In this family, we seem to have jumped that shark long ago.

My Guilty Pleasure

For the past few days I've been mesmerized by a bird...well, four and a half birds really. I've got the Duke Eagle Cam up and running all the time on my desk-top computer. It's a live feed from high up in a sycamore tree at their research facility in Hillsborough, NJ. This year the nesting pair of eagles, who mate for life btw with no pre-nups, laid their first egg in the nest on February 28th. This was followed, at three day intervals, by two more eggs. When I started tuning in to this miraculous event there were two baby hatchlings, all grey and woobly, with one egg left to hatch. I saw the papa eagle swoop in with a fish in its talons and proceed to feed on it while it was still breathing (yes, I know fish don't breathe but this one was moving its gills). I saw the mama Eagle gently roll the egg around and step off the nest to feed ever so carefully both babies. I got all mushy and cooed to myself over this amazing bit of technology. Mere minutes turned to hours of eagle gazing.

It brought back memories of the spring when a Robin made its nest right outside my bedroom window in NJ. Backyard ornithologist that I am, I loved to see the Great Blue Heron swing over our house at dawn on his way to breakfast in our tributary. Catching a glimpse of Egrets nesting in the trees around a pond on our street was always a show-stopper on my daily dog walk. Listening to the bird's cacophony when our backyard huckleberry tree ripened was the harbinger of Spring. But this year was the year my son was getting ready to leave for college. So I kept an eye on the comings and goings of this Robin pair. Finally, the last little baby robin was left alone in the nest. I'd watched its nest mates hopping around the branches, testing their wings, only to fly into the woods. The last baby was crying for its mama. I was getting desperate. Finally one morning, he jumped onto the lawn and proceeded to hop over to the woods. At last he flew up into a tree. I found myself crying with joy and relief. Because very soon, we'd be packing up our son the future Rock Star, our last child, for his college adventure.

Just got an email from a cousin who said she's worried, "The Eagle looks cold." I've turned so many friends and relatives onto the Eagle Cam, I'm afraid we'll overload its circuits! I'm concerned about the third egg. It should have hatched a couple of days ago, and now I can't see it. Of course I didn't like to see the first hatchling getting more food than the little second one, and being beak-bonked by its bigger nest mate too. But that seems to have evened out, the mama bird makes a point of leaning over the bigger first-born to feed its smaller baby equally. A living and breathing lesson in Darwinism, maybe the third egg will hatch, or maybe she's pushed it out already as nonviable.

After this past week, and the news stories about the GOP holding our budget ransom with riders about de-funding Planned Parenthood, I was happy to zone out on the Eagle Cam. After all, Roe vs Wade happened in 1973...almost forty years ago. And the morning-after pill (emergency contraception) has cut down significantly on the number of abortions performed in this country. If these ideological zealots can't get it into their heads that we American women have the right and freedom to choose what we can do with our own bodies, well maybe they should be watching the Eagle Cam too!
http://www.dukefarms.org/Education/Eagle-Cam/

Letter Writing

When Elizabeth Taylor, one of the greatest movie stars of all time in my humble opinion, died last month, one of the news stories to catch my interest had nothing to do with her awards or her philanthropy or her husbands. No, it seems Taylor's earliest romantic letters will be going up on the auction block. She was barely 17 and writing to some guy we never heard of, William Pawley; it was her first fiancee though she didn't marry him. And Pawley kept those letters all these years, and now his estate will be getting a pretty penny for her thoughts...like this:

"I've never loved anyone in my life before one third as much as I love you - and I never will (well, as far as that goes - I'll never love anyone else - period)." Elizabeth

Now we know that's not true! She went on to marry 8 times, twice to Richard Burton, back in the day when "living in sin" was seriously considered living sinfully and could break your contract, and drown your career in the Hollywood studio system. What touched me about this story is how we are losing so many wonderful love stories to emails, texting and twitter accounts. Think about the letters of John and Abigail Adams, or Winston and Clementine Churchill.

"Time passes swiftly, but is it not joyous to see how great and growing is the treasure we have gathered together, amid the storms and stresses of so many eventful and, to millions, tragic and terrible years?" Winston

For me, writing is a form of meditation. It's a way to make sense of the world, and a way to keep me focused on the here and now. Why perseverate about a problem in the middle of the night, when I can jot it down in a notebook and be done with it. A relative once looked at me menacingly and said about his ex-wife, "So you're the one who told her to write me letters!" OK, so maybe her letters were more like, "Why don't you get up up off the couch and be useful for a change?" Everything we write may not be full of starry-eyed, wonderfully romantic prose.

One of my earliest treasures was finding a letter my Mother had written to an Aunt while my Father was dying and I was a baby. It's dated Oct. 20, 1948 Scranton, PA. She was trying to write to everyone and let them know about the new baby, me.

"She is wonderful, God bless her. She crys at night from 7 to 10 but the rest of the time we don't know we have a baby. Jimmy was such a crybaby that it is a great relief to me to have such an angel...we are having her Christened Sunday. ...her hair is still red and I'm hoping it stays that way...Bob (my Father) stays about the same. He doesn't have those spasms anymore. Also the tic in his eye and face have disappeared. - his right arm is useless - he seems to get more helpless every day. I thought having the baby would cheer him up, but he gets more depressed."

My Father died the following April of a brain tumor. Maybe I carry the letter because that makes a part of my childhood real, it's better than stories, I can hold it in my hand, something that happened when he and I existed in the world together. And my Mother always kept with her a letter I wrote to her my first year in college. I had just returned to my Boston dorm room after marching in a peace rally after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was a fledgling activist, and Mother must have loved that little spark, that forging of my young identity.

I have a few love letters, and a poem from my husband. I keep them locked away in a hidden place. He wrote them many years ago, before we were married, as a way to woo me I'm sure. So this is what I'd recommend for any newly engaged couple....take the time to write to each other. If we're lucky when we write, it's as if some higher power takes over and types what we'd always longed to say. And since We missed out on our 30th Anniversary a couple of years ago because, there was a family wedding, and an 85th birthday party to plan, and a move and life in general, I think I'll start planning our 33 and 1/3 Anniversary Party. After all, I love him at least two thirds more!!