Laurel and I left before the crack of dawn for a swim meet this morning.
As we came over the top of Murphy Hill, I caught my first glimpse of the eastern horizon.
“That’s going to be a beautiful sunrise,” I told her.
She started to laugh.
“Just you wait,” I said, assuming she was laughing at me gushing over another sunrise. “Some day 50 years from now, you’ll see a breath-taking sunrise, and you’ll think, Mom would have liked that.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You laughed,” I said.
“I thought you said, ‘That’s no surprise’,” she said, referring to the conversation we had been having before I was distracted by the crack of dawn breaking through the sky ahead of us.
We both laughed. I mis-hear a lot. This time is was someone else’s turn to hear incorrectly.
I handed Laurel my phone. “See if you can take a few pictures on the way,” I said.
And she did.
I know that beautiful sunrises are simply caused by light reflecting through particles in the atmosphere.
Still, it was a lovely way to start the day.
Every time we came around another curve or crested another hill, the view just got better.
It doesn’t happen often , but I’m so glad that some days are like that.
On the way home from New York City Mary asked me what my favorite song from Dear Evan Hansen had been.
Mind you, I had heard all of the songs a grand total of one time.
Unlike Mary, who knew every word of every song.
Unlike the woman sitting next to Mary, who also knew every word to every song.
During intermission I asked the woman if she had seen the play before.
“No,” she said, “I’ve just listened to the soundtrack a thousand times.”
Now, two weeks out, I’ve joined their ranks.
I want to see the show again in the worst way, but the tickets were a huge splurge the first time and would fall into the realm of ridiculous expenditures if I were to see it again.
“What’s it about?” Karl asked, a little mystified about my latest obsession.
In a nutshell, the story is about a socially awkward teen (Evan Hansen) whose counselor suggests that he write a pep talk to himself every day — Dear Evan Hansen. One of these letters falls into the hands of another social outcast who commits suicide. When the letter is found in the pocket of the deceased boy, his parents conclude that he and Evan Hansen were friends, and a fabricated friendship begins. This barebones synopsis leaves out a thousand important details, I know, but it’s a start.
What’s it about? I could have answered mental health or high school or parenting or social media or life.
I’m still trying to figure that out — life, and what it’s about.
~~~
As Mary and I stood in line to enter the theater, we saw a sign saying that the part of Evan Hansen was being played that day by Michael Lee Brown. People in front of us and behind began to grumble. Before taking my seat, I listened to a woman argue with an usher about it.
“I paid to see Ben Platt,” she said. Purse looped over her forearm, gloves in one hand, ticket in the other, silver-haired — she looked like the innocuous grandmotherly sort, but she went after the usher like a Rottweiler.
The opening set for Dear Evan Hansen
To future Dear Evan Hansen viewers: May you be so lucky to see Michael Lee Brown perform the title role. He was amazing. He was the perfect amount of awkward as he stuttered. His hands fluttered — a stage-visible sign of a racing heart, something I know too well. I watched his hands, fascinated.
~~~
What was my favorite song?
I know them all now and sing along as I make dinner or walk the dog.
The lyrics are quotable, meme-able, but so layered and rich.
I think I know which song I would choose now — but that’s probably a post for another day.
Two years ago this — Helen and I kept vigil through the night with my mother. Helen had snapped this picture while I was dozing.
Three generations of hands
I went home in the wee hours, grabbed a little sleep, then went back to the hospital to relieve Helen.
After struggling so much the day before, making terrible gurgling sounds as she tried to breathe, my mother finally slept peacefully. I think the atropine helped.
Atropine gets its name from Atropos, one of the Fates, the one who chooses the mechanism of death and ends a mortal’s life. I find that both strange and interesting.
But my mother slept.
And we took turns sleeping.
At the end, Helen was sleeping when my mother passed away. My siblings were all there, but Helen, who had been so close to my mom, so faithful and present in so many ways, was not. In retrospect, I should have called her. But I didn’t know when the thread of life would finally be severed. None of us really do.
November 3rd feels heavy, like a weight on my heart.
My friend, Michael McNevin, wrote a song we play every November 4. The first few lines run through my mind unbidden.
Thinking of the cold to come…
It was 61° this morning — not very cold, but I shivered anyway. Today my father goes for a physical as a step toward entering an adult home. I am so unsettled with this decision. Ah, the cold to come.
From what I hear it will make me numb…
I remember the numbness after my mother died. I don’t want to feel that again, and yet, it is inevitable. My father walks more slowly now, shuffling along with his walker. His pacemaker paces 90% of the time. His thinking is muddled at an unquantifiable percentage.
Two of his peers took him to lunch the other day. When his friend brought him home, he pulled me aside. “Your father really couldn’t follow any of the conversation today,” he said, “And he fixated on one small thing. That was all he could talk about.”
Yes, I’ve noticed that, too. It makes me sad.
Look at how the wind goes by…
A breeze refreshes, but the wind is the wind. It blows through our lives – pushing us along, trying to hold us back, knocking dead branches out of trees, grabbing loose items and skittering them away.
Two years ago my mother died on a cold November day.
I can remember walking up the hill to the hospital that last time when she was still alive. It was still dark, maybe 5 AM. I wanted to give Helen a chance to sleep. The wind blew tiny raindrops against my cheeks — portending tears to come.
I didn’t know yesterday was going to be such a great day and here’s why —
In preparation, I had focused on the tired parts of the day: the getting up before 4 AM and the getting home after 1 AM.
I was worried about the city, all those people crowded together and the tall buildings holding them in, a barricade between city and country, urban and rural, not home and my home — and I was spending a day on the wrong side of the barricade.
I braced myself against the day instead of leaning into it.
I felt like you, who had never been to the city before, should be going with someone who loves the city and that’s not me — but you wanted me to go so I figured I’d better make a good effort.
“What do you want to do?” I had asked you. We had several hours to kill on either side of Dear Evan Hansen.
“I dunno,” you replied, in that helpful way you have.
So I worried about that, too, and finally decided we should go to the New York Public Library. You love books. I knew that if it turned out to be just a bunch of books you would be thrilled. You would pull the oldest book you could find off the shelves so you could hold it in your hands, feel the paper, and smell the old book smell. I’ve seen you do that.
The library was the right choice. You reached up to touch one of the stone lions that guarded the main entrance.
Inside, I touched the Lego lion that guarded the entrance to the children’s room.
“Mom!” you said, aghast. “The sign says ‘Please do not touch.'”
Oops. My bad.
But what a magnificent place! You wished you could climb up the ladder to the second tier of books that ran the circumference of the study room. I wished I could have seen the original card catalog where now tables of computers sit, the card catalog’s modern replacement.
We walked the long hallways, climbed the marble stairs and admired the art work that was everywhere.
a long hallwayArtwork — a man readingArtwork — mother and child readingceiling in the McGraw Rotunda
As we were leaving, we noticed a sign for tours of the library. Our 2 hour visit served as a peek — there’s so much more, I’m sure. Next time we’ll have to take the tour.
Did I just say next time? Next time?
After spending some time there, I kind of want to go back. We should do that, don’t you think?
Laurel brought a math problem to me the other day.
I looked at it and looked at it, but years of only doing grocery store math or tip calculations have eroded away much of the math soil in my brain. I found myself asking the question Mary, my non-mathy daughter, asked all the time — why do we need to know this stuff?
Back in the day, I loved math. A math sheet was a page full of puzzles to be solved, and they all had answers.
Now the variables and exponents and coefficients and fractions jumble together and refuse to tell me the story they’re supposed to tell.
In real life, when is a-cubed-minus-three going to be a denominator in any equation?
I decided to go for a walk to think about the problem.
The corn has been harvested in the fields down the road which makes them nice places to walk the dog. Our road has minimal shoulders and most of the drivers don’t care about the speed limit on it. It can be a little scary walking on it.
In the closest field, the harvesters missed a bit of a row on the edge.
The stalks stand as sentinels — guarding nothing.
Nothing but a safe place to walk.
Sometimes in the summer, I would walk through the rows of tall corn to escape the sun and heat for a short leg of my walk. I would think about the time the farmer escaped from the nursing home that used to be down the road and wandered into the corn field. The state police had to bring helicopters to help find him.
But in the fall, the mowed rows are straight lines of what once was.
The shadows of the stalk stubs combined with the dried fragments of corn leaves made pretty patterns on the ground.
Maggie ran on ahead, and when I looked at her waiting for me down the field, I noticed where the planter had veered months ago — maybe because of an obstacle or maybe he was just distracted. The nice straight lines were not so nice and straight — like a math problem where the answer isn’t a sensible whole number, but full of exponents and variables.
By the time I reached the end of the row, I had figured out Laurel’s math problem. My brother had called me because I had sent it to him, and he confirmed what I suspected was the solution. It wasn’t a nice neat answer.
The end of the row was rounded. I could see where the tractor had turned.
The math erosion in my brain probably looks something like it.
Harvested — all that stuff I learned so many years ago gone now.
And rounded, like nearly every mental calculation I do.
Image from ALLOTSEGO.com from Veteran’s day 2016 — Mr. Hanson on the right
I don’t think he was there the first time we visited the Methodist Church a few years ago, but he was the second or third time we went back.
“Sally,” he said to me in his strong deep voice. I was flattered that he remembered me. It had been 40-some years since I sat in his 7th grade math class.
“Hi, Mr. Hanson,” I replied.
“You can call me Dick, you know,” he said, smiling. “You’re an adult now.”
“I don’t think I can,” I said to him.
Teachers, especially good ones, have a special status. When I hear kids today calling teachers by their first name, or, worse, just their last name, I cringe a little inside.
Sunday after Sunday he would engulf my hand in his while he greeted me. If I called him Mr. Hanson, he would give me a look and then say, “Dick, please,” so I took to calling him nothing.
“Good morning!” “Good to see you today!” “Merry Christmas!” I avoided the naming, and he allowed me to, until one Sunday, he said, “C’mon. You can say it.” He held my hand and waited.
I took a deep breath, and said, “Dick?” in the smallest of voices, and quickly followed it with “I don’t think I can.”
He looked at me a long time, then let go of my hand. “Okay,” he said, and he smiled at me but never mentioned the name thing again.
Mr. Hanson was one of those larger than life teachers. A former marine. Physically a big guy. A booming voice. A great smile.
I said something to another woman at church who had had him as a teacher. “I just can’t call him anything but Mr. Hanson,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, ” but let me tell you something about him. Do you remember when I was in the hospital?”
I did. When we were in school, she had been in a tobogganing accident that resulted in a broken neck, broken jaw, and months in the hospital. I spent many afternoons sitting in her room with her. Her jaw was wired shut. A device that resembled tongs attached to her skull and held her neck in traction via weights that hung down over the end of the bed.
“My mother was taking a mandatory First Aid class for teachers on Monday nights,” she said, “and she must have mentioned something about it to Mr. Hanson because he started showing up in my hospital room on Monday nights to visit. He never said anything to her about it, and it took me a long time to figure it out, but on the one night she couldn’t be with me, he came by.”
I wondered how many other Mr. Hanson stories are out there.
Therein is greatness.
Not doing big things that draw attention and bring accolades, but in doing the small things, unnoticed and unseen, but not unimportant.
“I hurried over so you could take a picture,” said Matt, the lifeguard who was taking over for me so I could home.
Two weeks of working together and he’s got me figured out. How many times has he heard me say, “I need to get a picture of that!” Or, how many times has he seen me grab my phone out of the office so I could snap a shot of the sunrise.
I told someone at Hutchmoot that I was practically giddy over the prospect of working at this job, and that hasn’t changed since it started.
Leaving the house at 5 AM to lifeguard for two hours every morning has been fun.
And stimulating. Adult conversation is such a treat.
The sunrises aren’t bad either.
I arrive in the dark. This morning I stood, looking out from near the pool, and snapped a grainy picture. The white dot in the distance is a lighted lamppost.
Since the pool was redone, it has a wall of windows facing east. The lights are always on in there. In the darkness, the pool area fairly glows when I arrive.
Of course, when working as a lifeguard, I’m not staring out the windows. I’m scanning the pool, in case any of those early morning lap swimmers need help. So far the only help anyone has needed is turning the music down or alerting maintenance that the hot water isn’t working in the showers.
But I love my co-workers. They are such interesting people. And we converse in complete sentences.
I’ve tried explaining to people how being a caregiver for someone with dementia is like taking care of a toddler. Anyone who has had children knows the stage of incomplete conversation. That’s how it is with my father these days. That, or trying to guess what he’s trying to say, or trying to follow the tangents that his mind travels down.
Right around the time I’m getting ready to go home — I can only really afford two hours when I know he’ll be sleeping — the sky is changing.
One day last week, I tried to take a picture of it, but the pool reflected back off the glass and gave me this shot.
So this morning I went from window bay to window bay trying to find a place that didn’t reflect the pool.
“Just step outside,” said one of the other guards, so I did.
Golly, it was pretty.
I stopped again just beyond the pool on my way home.
I wondered if there was a liturgy in Every Moment Holy for the sight of a beautiful sunrise.
Then I realized I already knew one, and recited on my way home —
But this one thing I bear in mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
They are new every morning;
Great is thy faithfulness.
Hot Dogs and Marmalade 