Memories – Page 5 – My Truant Pen

Cabin Fever

In my youth, I was heavily influenced by the great, classical writers whose influence will be felt down through the generations. I mean, of course, Erma Bombeck and Patrick McManus. What? You’ve never heard of them? And you call yourself an English major! Erma I’ll leave for another time: suffice it to say everything I know about maternity underwear I learned from her. Patrick McManus is the pinnacle of humorous outdoorsy writers. He wrote about the world in which I lived my youth — a world I left in the dust when I drove across a blazing hot country from my home in the shaded Northwest to arrive at a prestigious and ritzy New England college, dripping in history and “Natty Lite”.

I remember reading “Never Sniff a Gift Fish” in the log cabin my grandparent’s inhabited on the Cedar River, at a Boy Scout camp they ran (Camp Fremont). There were dogs milling about and arcane tools stacked in tubs in the corners. It was chilly and I don’t recall fireworks, which points to a Christmas visit. One of the prizes I unearthed in a back room was a stack of McManus Masterpieces. The great ones were there: “Rubber Legs and White Tail Hairs”, “They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?” and “The Grasshopper Trap”.

Anyway, one of his brilliant essays talked about Cabin Fever. Go ahead. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Read it? Good.

So Monopoly, fudge and the old “Great Northern Railroad” calendar.

That, folks, is where we’re at here. I’ve been home since Wednesday, when it seemed like a good idea to work from home. Ha! Since then, I think it’s snowed three times? Four times? Yesterday, a day I was willing to venture out, I had to take two passes at getting in to my driveway because I turned the wheel, but the car was disinclined to go that direction. Today it was much worse. For the second time in three weeks we had to cancel church. I was very much looking forward to church. You know, people who don’t beg to play their DS or scream at me because they’ve lost the lid to their very favorite toy: the empty milk jug?

I suspect my mother-in-law is planning a break for it. She keeps talking about “packing bags” and “plane leaves tomorrow at 11, but you could probably drop me off now if that’s more convenient”.

Grey is bored stiff. I don’t blame him. I’m bored stiff too — or possibly that’s a side effect of the shoveling. Did I mention that all of us except Grey is sick with a sniffly cold?

You know the only thing worse than being bored stiff? It’s being bored stiff and not permitted to sit down and read a good novel because someone wants up on the couch. And down off the couch. And up on the couch. And down off the couch. And up on the couch…. and wait! Where is the lid to the milk jug?!?!?

At least Grey is now at an age where he can play in the snow while his father and I shovel. He had fun this afternoon, getting buried in deep drifts, throwing snowballs at passing cars and pretending to be cold. I didn’t take any pictures because I was afraid that no one would recognize the white-haired gnome.

Tomorrow it should be all done. The winter storm will pass. We’ll all head back to work and daycare for the long slog of serious winter. Thane will probably have to go back to the doctor because he’s not better. All the balls that were put down on the ground for a week will be picked back up and tossed into the air. I’ll dye everyone’s hair back to the normal color, and life will go on.

Let’s just hope this is the last of the snow!

Quietly glorious days

It’s funny being in the middle of the times you know are the golden ones. Things are pretty quiet in my life. I am mostly done with my Christmas shopping. I’m terrible at stocking stuffers, so I’m sure that could be improved but eh. My Christmas cards are sent and done, which is one of my major projects of the holiday season. I’m now watching my wall fill up with other people’s Christmas cards. There’s snow on the ground and a bite in the wind.

My sons are healthy, growing and delightful. Grey is SO MUCH FUN these days. He’s incredibly aware and alert and always putting things together. He’s getting better and better control over his temper. He’s kind and loving to all of us. He’s started yelling “Grey attack!” and then smothering us with a bevy of hugs and kisses. He is an unfurling flower of delight.

Thane is harder. It’s a stage of life thing. I was telling my brother that children take turns so you never have a favorite. Right now, Thane is communicating by way of ear-splitting screeches. But he’s the silliest little dude. For MONTHS now I’ve tried to get him to say and point for “nose”. This is one of the first things I did with Grey. It’s a very concrete word, “nose”. Pretty easy to say. And cute as all get-out to watch chubby little fingers pointing. For months now, Thane has ignored my attempts to teach him to say “nose”. He just refuses. I start to wonder… is he having some challenge learning? Perhaps his ear infections have affected his hearing?

But the other day the cats were attempting to scavenge some tasty chicken scraps from the garbage and I “tsked” at them. He looked at me, fascinated, and then spent the next five minutes doing the most adorable “tsk” imitation. What? That’s a VERY HARD SOUND. You really have to coordinate teeth, tongue, palate and wind speed. Not like nose, which is easy. But, unlike nose, he’s interested in it.

Anyway, our house is full of music and chaos and bouncing and little toy cars.

The back yard has, in huge letters visible from the fourth floor, the word “MOM” written in snow by my son and husband while they were playing during the big storm.

In the morning, my husband will bring Thane into the bedroom where I’m trying to eke out the last minutes of sleep on our comfy, comfy, warm bed. Thane curls right up to me and sucks his thumb as he snuggles. It lasts for about 5 seconds, but what a sweet way to start your day.

Everyone I love is on the ok or great spectrum (well, with prayers for my godfather to make a complete recovery). We’re all working, in relationships that work, in safe circumstances, in our normal degree of health.

There’s even been “me” time. I’ve gotten to bring my character up to 10th level in Torchlight. I read the first quarter of a fantasy novel. We’re playing Deadlands tonight.

The best times aren’t glamorous, or news-worthy or even, heaven forfend, blog-worthy. They’re busy, and silly, and look a lot like the day before or the day after. They’re the nights when you order pizza and watch a movie together, or go for an after-dinner drive to look at Christmas lights when you teach your son to say “Bah Humbug” and discover that he knows all the words to your favorite carol.

So I don’t have much to say, other than that these are the small times of great delight, and I know it, and I’m grateful both for the delight and for the knowing.

Grey tries to talk me into letting him watch Willow

What Santa is packing in his sleigh

My son is four years old this Christmas. If you are old enough to find your way to this blog, you’re probably old enough to be told the truth. I was four the year I found out that Santa isn’t quite as corporeally real as we pretend. When I was three, many years prior, I had a desk that had gotten left behind when my parents packed us into a station wagon and drove from Atlanta to California by way of Canada. Mom and dad were never too keen on that “Fastest way between two points” stuff. I digress. I yearned for this desk. (Full disclosure: I STILL yearn for that desk in some tiny part of me and am working very hard not to buy Grey a desk-like-object because the four-year-old in me wants that desk.)

Anyway, it was made abundantly clear to Santa (and daddy) that I wanted a desk for Christmas. My sister and I shared a room in our small house with the walnut trees outside. Christmas Eve came, and two very excited young girls gabbled and bounced sleepless in their beds. I had nodded off when my sister woke me up. A sound of thumping was heard through the wall. “He’s here. Let’s sneak a peek.” And so with infinite subtlety, we snuck open the door and poked rumpled blonde heads out to see the Man Himself.

And there was my poor father, nursing a stubbed toe from placing my desk under the tree. We understood immediately. The door was quietly closed, and we retreated to discuss strategy. We agreed on a pact of silence.

I don’t know how old I was when my PARENTS figured out that I had figured out what the game was. It never made it any less fun to play, but I’m glad they didn’t pretend any harder than they did. I would’ve known the lie. Because I wasn’t really looking for inconsistencies, I hope my parents didn’t have to work too hard. (No buying special “Santa” wrapping paper, for example.)

I’m thinking of it this year, of course. Grey wanted to know if he was sitting on the REAL Santa’s lap. I assured him without hesitation that he was. He announced to me the other day that he’s figured out his goal career. He wants to be one of Santa’s Elves and make presents. He’s ok with the uniform constraints, but admits that he might miss me every once in a while. (All humor aside: it was surprisingly well thought out with the data he had. He had considered quite a few consequences and outcomes of this decision!) We are at the very height of Santa-joy: old enough to make cookies, young enough to not consider the physics of Christmas eve flight.

I’m also doing the last minute planning for the presents. I probably need to do a present-review and see if I’m sadly lacking in any category. You know, are there books, crafts, obnoxiously noisy plastic toys, stocking stuffers, and most of the items on his and Robby’s Christmas lists? In future years, I’ll need to make sure I have present-parity between the boys.

One of the things I’m doing for both boys this year is new-to-them toys. Thane will be getting, wrapped up, some of the toys I set aside years ago from Grey’s room. Why not? The only difference between those and a new toy is packaging. Grey will be getting his first real Legos. We have roughly 30 – 40 POUNDS of Legos from my husband’s childhood. Seriously. A huge duffel bag and a big plastic garbage bag FULL of teeny tiny Legos. At current market prices, that quantity of Legos would cost thousands of dollars. (Seriously, have you SEEN Lego prices lately?) I got overwhelmed by them, and just picked out a nice pile for him.

The more I think about it, the more I think I’d like to give the boys all their presents without packaging. In our culture, packaging marks the difference between “New Presents I Bought For You” and “Presents Of Unknown Provenance”. When my mother-in-law scores a real find for me in thrift stores, she’ll often say, “And it still has the tags!” since that proves that it’s new. When we give gifts we use that packaging as a marker of newness. It actually gets in the way of the gift experience, though. “Wow, a truck! OK, now give mommy 20 minutes with wire clippers and you can play with it!”. It also conditions our kids to think that proper gifts come with original packaging and proper gifts are new.

I don’t want that. If my son was holding out for new Legos, he’d get about 15 of them for $30 bucks. (Seriously, this set has under 300 pieces for $150 bucks and is not that unusual pricing-wise.) By being ok with pre-loved Legos, he’ll get a big bag for, um, free. I would like that to hold true as my sons get older, too.

I think I’ll make it a point for things that are unlikely to be returned (no sizing issues) to remove the packaging before wrapping it. Yes, it means my sons won’t know when the toy they’re getting is new. But hopefully it means that they’ll evaluate their toys on whether or not it’s fun to play with, and not whether anyone’s ever played with it before. In some tiny way, perhaps that will help dial back the commercialism of Christmas.

What do you think? Do you always keep new toys in their new packages? How hard to you work to maintain the Santa mythos? How old were you when you found out? How did you take it?
Grey's letter to Santa

Ernie

On Sunday, Grey and I went caroling with our church. Our first stop was an assisted living facility our church has a relationship with. Grey was the youngest of the carolers by a good two decades. Faced with a room full of the pale elderly, my tired son demanded that I pick him up hold him. He shyly waved his jingle bells, his back turned to the foreboding crowd.

As I sang the old songs, I thought about my relationship with the aged, or, as they were known in my youth, “old folks”. Frankly, I always loved old folks. You want someone to pay attention to you, go to a nursing home as a cute young thing. When I was an adorable kid, I quickly discovered a great affinity for these folks. They had wonderful stories, kind faces, and lots of positive attention to devote to me.

I’d like to now, publicly, apologize to my parents for a deed I did in my youth. Here’s the story.

I wanted money to buy candy. Bonanza 88 actually had things you could buy for 88 cents, and coins represented true value. I, sadly, was lacking in coins and being 7 or so years old, also lacking in the means to earn them on my own. (Sometimes I helped worm-pickers harvest worms on the practice field behind our house, but this summer day was apparently short on worm-pickers.) But I, a budding entrepreneur, thought I saw a way out of dilemma of no-candy. I sat down and drew 8 or 10 very fine pictures, took my portfolio, and went door to door with my best friend as an art saleswoman.

Some of the houses had no one there. Some of the houses had shy Mexican immigrants, who peeked through the tightly-held door and shook their heads at us. But a goodly number of the 20 or so houses on the block had my target audience: old folks.

I remember sticky ribbon candy, “healthy” popsicles, linoleum floors, antimacassars in dim living rooms, and kindly old ladies offering a quarter for a drawing.

The last house I remember visiting on that sunny day was the best of all. It was in that house I met Ernie. Looking back, I suspect Ernie was a WWI vet. He was at least 80 back when we became friends, in 1985 or so. His house was a wonder and a delight, and so was he. He always stayed put in his arm chair, weighted down by age and frailty. But somehow he remembered and knew where every single thing in his house was. He sent me downstairs to gape at the mounted trophy buck head, the hand-cranked light-bulb, the medals and odds and ends that were the remnants of what must have been a fascinating life. He sent me upstairs for the popup books of gnomes and giants, and cluttered guest rooms that must not have known his tread for years. He gave me tigereye stones and spun the age-old tall tales about how these would prevent tiger attacks (I believe his version contained details about his journeys in India – God only knows whether they were part of the trope or true accounts). I wandered through a week of my childhood fingering the stone in my pocket and looking for the warded-off tiger attacks, as is right and good. Ernie and I had a fine old time.

It goes without saying that when I got home with my $2 in small change, flush with the afternoon of delights I’d experienced, my parents were, um, less than pleased. I believe I got quite a lecture on talking to strangers and inviting myself into their homes, selling my wares, eating their popsicles and scavenging their basements (although I must’ve managed to convince them that Ernie wasn’t a stranger because I knew him now! At least, that wasn’t the LAST time I visited him!). And of course, with the poetic justice of childhood, it was hardly a week or two later that I badly injured myself a mile from home and insisted on accepting no grownuply help from the kind folks who noticed as I trudged past my bloody, weeping face because “I wasn’t allowed to go to strangers homes” to call for help.

Did I mention, mom and dad, that I’m really sorry? And I’m sure I’ll get what’s coming to me?

But I still smile and think fondly of Ernie. With no pictures, or other folks in my family who knew him, my memory of him is dim, as if a dream. I remember his chair and some of the marvels I saw. I know I went to visit him several times, to hear the stories and have adventures. He must be gone by now — I know that 7 year olds tend to underestimate how old people are, but he was truly quite old.

I find I miss old folks. I’m much less irresistible to them now than I was then. Sadly, no one could describe me as waif-ish, and I have that bustle that parents seem to accrue to themselves. I simply don’t have a ready supply of old folks to delight. I certainly hope my sons will discover the delight of the company of the lonely and slow-moving. There is a great joy in that relationship between the very young and very old, that we middle-life-dwellers have either forgotten or do not yet know.

I hope my sons find their very own “old man” to tell them the traditional lies and spoil their dinners and to show them how to brighten lives.

Happy birthday Frodo and Bilbo Baggins

Today is the day that ought to have been my birthday, by all rights. Today is the first day of fall. More importantly, to my young self, today is Frodo and Bilbo Baggin’s collective birthday. Do you have any idea how much it would’ve mattered to me to be the SAME as those two notable halflings in such an important event? I used to try to work out with the time zones and Zaire (my place of birth) whether I had REALLY been born on the 22nd and this incontrovertible FACT was masked by my impossibly-distant place of birth. Or maybe bad record keeping. Or SOMETHING.

Of course now, thinking about it, I’m pretty sure my mom wouldn’t have minded. I was three weeks later than expected. My due date was Labor Day. I used to think this just meant my mom was bad at counting, until I myself went a verifiable two weeks late with Grey. Sorry about that, mom.

Frodo, Fall and I all twine together for a brief period this time of year. If you’re unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings, this birthday on September 22nd is a critical milestone throughout the books. It’s during a grand birthday that Bilbo disappears in a puff of smoke from Hobbiton. Years later, on that birthday, Frodo grabs his walking stick and three best friends and heads off on desperate, epic quests that make dragons look like child’s play.

Um, it’s possible that these books were just a TOUCH influential on my growing self, ok?

But this time of year brings out the itching in my feet, too. My drive in apparently got the memo about it being the first day of fall. The low places – the mist-covered swamps by the sides of the freeway – have already put out their scarlet and vermilion banners, in anticipation of hordes of tourists coming to admire. The trees are heavy with their fruits. Apples and pears weigh heavily on pregnant limbs, hoping for eventual homes in pies and pastries. The boundaries of my mind get less definite, and I’m mindful of Bilbo’s warning: the road in front of your door connects to all other places in the world. Who knows, by stepping on it, where you will end up?

I admit to inflicting Tolkien on my son at the youngest possible opportunity. His fourth birthday is still eagerly anticipated, but already you can hear him sing, if you listen carefully:

The greatest adventure is what lies ahead
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said
The chances the changes are all yours to make
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.

The greatest adventure is there if you are bold
Let go of the moment that life makes you hold
To measure the meaning can make you delay
It’s time you stop thinking and wasting the day.

Brownsmith

The summer we lived in Bonner’s Ferry, I was five, or maybe six. I remember that summer fondly — the first of the golden buzzing summers in the Northwest. I remember one of my favorite things to play: Brownstone. I would walk out of the house – on the side with the big tall trees toward town, not towards the deep forests – holding a full cup of water and a spoon. Then I would creep under the porch. There was dappled light down there; more than enough to see by, but not enough to nourish plants. It was just plain dirt. Not dirt with construction waste mixed in, or dirt with old roots, or rocky dirt. Just, well, dirt.

And with the consummate care of an artist, I would spend hours under there transforming that dirt into mud. There’s a particular delightful state of mud when it’s nearly solid, but the surface gleams with smooth moisture. I can see it a lifetime later in my mind’s eye. My goal was to create patties of this delightful stuff. I named myself a brownsmith. A blacksmith works with iron, but a brownsmith’s stuff is mud.

From the eyes of a parent, I have to suspect that what this looked like was an hour of silence followed by the need for a bath. Funnily enough, I don’t remember the baths at all. Just the way the mud looked.

Yesterday I had a reprieve from my usual schedule. A friend was coming, and she was bringing dinner. So instead of tying my children to my apron strings as I cooked a proper meal for them, we all sat in the front yard together. Thane sampled the tasty bubble rods. I drew an outline of Grey on the sidewalk and added antennae and a spaceship, having way more fun with it than he did. But finally he noticed the flowerbeds. I had mulched them, but they need loving care again. Apparently you have to deal with your lawn more than once or twice a summer — who knew? Anyway, he asked if he could dig in them. My first reaction was: no! You’ll mess up the flower beds.

Then I thought, “Am I the sort of mother who won’t let my son play in the dirt?” and I said yes.

Then he wanted to use some bricks to plant brick seeds that would grow into brick plants. And I thought, “What a mess this will make!?” and then I wondered. Am I the sort of mother who won’t let my son play with blocks in the dirt? So I said yes.

For 20 minutes my son happily built a brick hovel and piled intermixed dirt and mulch on top, while Thane sampled the fine vintage of grass clippings on the lawn. I played Bingo with him for the 30000th time. The sun shone dappled through the trees, and I remembered the dim recesses of Brownsmith.

Maybe tonight I’ll give Grey a spoon and a cup of water, too.

Enjoy your week of summer!

It’s hot here in the greater Boston area. The last three days it’s been in the low 90s during the day, high 70s at night with the standard miserable amount of humidity. It has been a very cold summer so far. This has been our first real heat wave, and given that we’re in the middle of August, there isn’t a whole lot of really hot possibilities left. We don’t have central air conditioning — instead we have four really big, really have box ACs that we usually put in the windows — cursing and sweating — somewhere in early July. They’re so obnoxious to install and then remove that we don’t put them in until we HAVE to. And now it seems a little late. All that effort for the remaining two or three weeks where it MIGHT be that hot? Turn on the overhead fans, and suffer, says I.

Then on Saturday in his good-night nursing, Thane seemed hot. Really hot. To the touch. All that night he seemed really hot. When we finally got around to taking his temperature, even after we’d administered Tylenol, it came in at 102.4. Ouch. 90 outside. 102.4 in your body. So you’d think that Thane would be super fussy and uncomfortable. Nah. He’s mellow and going with the flow, although he is a touch fussier than usual and is completely uninterested in food. (That’s ok — you don’t need to eat a ton all the time. I do, however, wish he was more interested in beverages. I think he’s at high risk for dehydration.)

So my helpful brother installed the AC in Thane’s room. It’s already one of my favorite rooms in the house. Now, however, I am trying to talk my husband into moving our bed there.

I’m working from home with Thane today. My brother took Grey to and (will) from daycare, and is pinch-hitting with Thane while I work. His temp was down to an unmedicated 99.9 this morning and 99.4 this afternoon, so he’s clearly on the mend. I might’ve sent him to daycare this time last year, but with the swine flu rooting around, it seems like the better thing to do to keep him home. My only regret is that work has AC.

I spent most of the weekend making jam. Ok, that’s not ACTUALLY true, but it feels true. On Saturday, after swimming lessons and before our trip to the pool I made a batch of strawberry jam from $2/pint organic strawberries from the Farmer’s Market outside the YMCA in Melrose. Then I made blueberry jam from our farmshare blueberries. Then I realized I’d totally underestimated just how much sugar jam takes and my paltry 5 lb bag was completed wiped out.

Sunday, my husband and Grey picked up more sugar and pectin for me after church. I put in a second batch of strawberry jam from the farmer’s market strawberries (strawberry is the jam of choice in our household). I have plans for two to three more batches. I have peaches, but I didn’t buy QUITE enough and I’m likely to get some from our farmshare tomorrow. Also, the peaches aren’t quite ripe, so they can stand another day or two of sitting around. I’m also planning on farmshare apricot jam. I got only about half the apricots I needed, so I processed them and will hopefully get another 20 apricots this week, which should be enough. My husband has requested marmalade, which I’ve never made before, so I may give that a shot, too.

So my jam count:
2 strawberry (completed)
1 blueberry (completed – unless I get a lot more farmshare blueberrries)
1 peach (fruit obtained)
1 apricot (50% fruit obtained)
1 marmalade (speculative)

I find jamming intensely satisfying. There is something about capturing the moment – about your hard work turning these ephemeral items into the durable, delicious product that I will eat for the rest of the year, share with friends, give as gifts, and feed my family with.

It’s also something I’ve done since I was a girl. My mom has been making raspberry jam every summer since well before I was, er, 6? I know we had raspberries in Prosser, and I think she planted them in Bonner’s Ferry. Fresh homemade jam plus fresh homemade bread is one of the great delights of summer.

When I stand stirring the dark jam, the hot sugar and fruit smell permeated the kitchen, with sweat beading out and darkening the small curls on the back of my neck, hearing the “pop” of the previous batch of jam setting. Well. Those are the moments that are the last to leave you when you look back on your life.

Choices

I could write posts, or I could upload and edit pictures. I chose the latter. I regret nothing.

The link to Picasa. The captions have made this infinitely more fun.

24 hours later one of these people was wearing a tux

20 years ago today

A friend whose anniversary it is rhetorically asked where we, the audience, were 20 years ago today. This got me remembering.

I was 10, almost 11. It would have been the summer between fifth and sixth grades, I think. We would’ve been out of school by now — kids these days seem to be in classes later than we were. That winter we had moved to the house that my parents still live in. I seem to remember a good deal of reading (specifically the “Sword of Shannara” which I’d been given as a graduation present), tromping through the woods, and swimming across the lake (too cold in June). I hadn’t learned to play trumpet yet. I hadn’t picked up my love of hiking. I’d never seen or heard a baseball game. The next year I’d get shipped across a mountain pass to Jr. High. There was a freedom to summers when I was a child which I suspect will be unreproducible in my children’s lives. My mother was a school teacher, so she was off summers. I’m sure she provided childcare, but I don’t really remember being actively taken care of. I remember the freedom and the roaming.

What about you? Where were you 20 years ago today?

My coming of age

A friend was recently talking about their graduation from college and how it had been a difficult and uprooting experience for them. That got me thinking about MY graduation from college. In retrospect, my graduation actually was a coming of age and a sweet memory to boot.

Let me set the stage. Four years prior, my father, brother and I had driven from Washington to Connecticut. (In four days. Another story for another time.) My mother had flown out to Connecticut to join us. They were dropping me off at Connecticut College, 3000 miles from home, where I knew no one. This graduation ceremony was the next time they came out. They brought with them my recently widower grandfather — the first time he’d flown since the 50s — and my godfather (he of the had-quintuple-bypass-surgery-yesterday fame).

I was 21. I had been engaged for just over a year and was going to get married in August. I had lined up a “real job” which I had already begun working at as a programmer.

The graduation ceremony itself was typical. Hot. Long speeches. Parents hearing for the first and last times the full names they had graced upon their children on their birth certificates. My litany read “Major in English (distinction) and Medieval Studies (honors and distinction), Cum Laude”. Not the most fantastic of bylines, but respectable. I was and am proud of it. My godfather bought me this truly remarkable frame for my diploma.

The coming of age, though, begins the next day. We had rented a van with room for my grandfather’s scooter, but no room for my fiancee. We started early in the morning. I remember as we pulled out onto Mohegan Drive, I had just gotten my thesis back and was digesting the comments thereon — my last college paper. (I was affronted to have gotten an A-. If he’d told me what he wanted earlier, I could’ve gotten a A. Pbbblft.)

We drove through the Connecticut countryside towards Worcester, where we had breakfast.

It’s funny, but there are moments where you transition. That breakfast was a great breakfast. We sat at a big table and ate eggs and bacon and talked. I recall that we got into a heated discussion on when gunpowder had been widely used in Europe. Then I sneaked away from the table. For my entire life, these people had taken care of me. They had fed me, housed me, clothed me, transported me. (Including my godfather.) I went to see the waitress, to pay the bill for my family’s breakfast. It was my way of saying, “Look at me. I’m a grownup too!” It had the desired satisfying outcome of amazing the assembled, and causing them to pause for a moment to think, “Why yes, she is a grownup.”

In an aside, while I was waiting to pay, a woman came up to me and asked if we were part of some history club. No. We’re just family. But man, I love that about my family.

After our desultory and educational meal, we went up 495 to Lowell and Lawrence. We went on a tour of the historic mills, saving up facts for future breakfast arguments. We stood in the bright May sun in the brick alleyways. I think of that part often. I now work in one of those old mill buildings like those we toured. The floorboards below my desk are nailed down with handmade nails and have captured, between the cracks, hundreds of tiny shoe-nails.

Thus educated, we wended our way up to St. Johnsbury Vermont where we stayed at a terrible dive of a motel. We didn’t always stay at terrible dives of motels growing up. No, sometimes, well often, we decided that it was too much work and just kept driving.

Starting the next morning in the Northwest corner of New England, we proceeded to drive through every New England state. We drove backroads across Vermont and New Hampshire up to Portland Maine, and then 95 down to Burlington MA where we had dinner with my beau. After dinner, we continued down 95 through Rhode Island, and I was deposited back in Connecticut.

There were some other moments — my grandfather slipping off a bar stool at Rosie’s in Groton and nearly killing himself, my parents taking me shopping for my graduation-present bicycle. But soon they left. I had a month or two of in-between time, after graduation and before my wedding. But it was on that trip with the folks who raised me that I stepped forward out of dependency and into full adulthood.

It was also the moment when my grandfather realized that 86 was too young to be bounded by two oceans. He started laying plans immediately, which culminated with him and my godfather going to Scotland for a month, where he wrecked a van, broke his leg, reconnected with long-lost relatives and generally had the time of his life. I was so glad that he had these opportunities, and so impressed at his willingness to take big risks in order to live out his life to the fullest.