Just Like Lightning

When grilled on the subject of school-in-country vs. school-in-city, he replied that the chief difference is that the day seems to go so much quicker in the country. "Just like lightning," he reported. From "Education," by E. B. White.

Days in school aren't the only things that go just like lightning.

Here is Ramona coming home from the hospital way back in September, all of three or four days old:

And here is Ramona recently coming home from a day in the park, almost seven months old:

Just like lightning, indeed.

Breaking the Silence

I have been quiet for a long time (well, three weeks almost, truth be known). I was struggling on the cancer front, waiting for lab results and a sit down with my oncologist. The work fronts, both mine and Warren's, have been wild. And writing, even when I thought of it, was not merely shoved to the side, but seemingly off the screen all together.

In short, it has been an intense, overcrowded, exhausting, worrisome several weeks.

The posting will resume (soon, soon, I say). In the meantime, here is the short version of what happened yesterday in Cancerland: the news from the lab was the best I'd had in years. My oncologist Tim grinned ear to ear, which he only does when he is really, really happy. Not out of the woods yet, but the forest just got a lot lighter. The cancer is receding! We are tweaking my regimen to spread the steroid out over the week, instead of all clumped up at the beginning of the week, as he thinks my adrenal gland is beat up from cancer/treatment and not functioning full tilt, hence the always feeling lousy long after the chemo (which does not make me feel lousy!) until the day of chemo, when I get 2+ good days and then feel lousy again. We'll review in four weeks when I see him again. 

Warren, who is always there for my appointments with Tim, hugged me hard before he went back to his office (he did not stay for the chemo treatment, which involves a lot of waiting around). Actions often speak far louder than words. 

I did not got home until early evening (a long and wild day at the office, once I got out of oncology) and, no surprise, I was wound up from steroids and the news. I called my sons, sent some emails, posted on Facebook, smiled a lot, and managed to get some sleep, but it has been a short night and a long, long, long day faces me today. (It is the height of truancy mediation season, which is my bailiwick, and there is no break until spring break next week.) 

So while I am steaming towards spring break, I wanted to share two links with you. The first is my third column for The Myeloma Beacon. In a nice twist of fate, it ran today, shortly after I got back from my oncology appointment. I was writing about my treatment, and had the pleasure of updating the situation in a comment to the post, The Velcade Velocipede. 

The second link is to a brand new blog that the Central Ohio Symphony debuted today: ReconnectingRhythms. I am proud to say that Warren is the pen behind this one; there will be other contributors as time goes on. Although he teases the reader, I will not: the Symphony will be starting a therapeutic drumming circle in collaboration with a local treatment provider and our Juvenile Court to provide drumming to young offenders with mental illnesses and/or addictions who are currently in the Court's treatment docket. I am so proud of Warren and the Symphony for this groundbreaking program! 

Warren's opening post encouraged the reader to "grab a drum and play a little every day." He surprised me at the end of last week when a new Remo Versa timbau arrived on our doorstep with my name on it. Warren decided I needed one to help me through my treatment. 

I have been drumming a little every day. Sometimes more than a little. Saturday night our good friends Margo and Gerald came over and Margo drummed on my timbau too. (What are drums for but to share with friends?) Warren is right: I needed a drum It lifts my hearts and it reconnects me to where I need to be: here, both feet in the present, facing the future. 

These are pictures of the Versa timbau drums from the Remo site. My drum has the finish on the right:
Warren knows I like colors. 

The Train Trip

Chicago's Union Station

Because the space in which the Symphony performs is closed while OWU renovates the chapel organ, Warren did not start 2013 in the midst of rehearsals and executive preparations for a March concert. While it is never easy for him to slip the surly bonds of the Symphony, February represented as good a time to get away as he was ever likely to get. So we were extravagant with our time and took the train to Portland to meet Ramona.

If passenger rails still threaded this country, I would never fly again. It was that wonderful an experience.

We traveled by train from Toledo, Ohio (our nearest Amtrak station) to Chicago, where we boarded the Empire Builder to Oregon. As a nod to my health and energy levels, we bought a roomette. (More about it later.)

We have traveled by train before, but never so far for so long. We left Toledo in the early morning, after a very short night and a two hour drive from our home.  I thought briefly of napping on the five hour trip to Chicago. But as the train rolled through the dark, I caught a glimpse of someone standing in their kitchen, the yellow light of the room spilling out into the still, dark morning and I could not go back to sleep.

It is that intimacy—that quick glimpse into peoples' lives—that makes train travel so gripping. Train travel is travel at a personal level and rhythm. The train flashed through Indiana downtowns that mirrored our own, the Italianate structures so familiar that I felt I could walk down those strange streets and not feel disoriented. As we moved further west, we passed little towns pinned in place by the train tracks that split through them. The vaster the spaces became between communities, the more the train served as connecting thread and viable short-distance mass transit.

Montana 

There is a soliloquy about baseball in the movie "Field of Dreams," about the importance of baseball to this nation's history. I feel the same about railroads and train travel. As E.B. White noted more than 50 years ago, we did ourselves a great disservice when we turned our backs on passenger trains and took to the air. Now, as airlines disappear and airports contract back in upon themselves (St. Louis and Cincinnati, to name two), I wonder whether we will turn our eyes back to the rails as a viable way to travel.

As I mentioned, we bought a roomette for our travels. An adventure in micro-living if ever there was one, a roomette requires two adults to live in a space in which one youth might comfortably take up residence. It taught me a lot about packing light and being compact in how much space one takes up. Fortunately, Warren and I are highly compatible travelers (no surprise), so we made the roomette work with a great deal of laughter and love. While a roomette adds to the cost of travel, it includes hot showers (a wonderful luxury), linens, and all meals, which on Amtrak are substantial and excellent. (There is a full galley on a dining car, and the food is cooked right there on the train.) I don't think Warren and I stopped smiling from the time we got on the train in Chicago, we were so pleased.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like E.B. White, also spent a lot of time on trains, even after she took to the air. In a letter to her younger sister, written while en route from the east to Mexico City (where her father was the US Ambassador), she wrote, "Tonight all through supper, having ordered baked apple with cream (I hesitated between that and cornflakes), I regretted the cornflakes. And it occurred to me later that life might so easily be that eternal "If only I'd ordered cornflakes—"

At breakfast, I contemplated the hot crab cakes versus the Amtrak french toast. I chose the french toast. It was magnificent.

I did not once regret the crab cakes.

Sunrise over the Columbia River Gorge 

The Gift of Ramona

Grandchildren are a gift. I know many others have expressed that very statement, or words to that effect, but it is so true that I will say it again.

Grandchildren are a gift.

After months of anticipation, starting from the minute I learned that Alise was pregnant, and weeks of waiting as we made our reservations and the trip to Portland drew nearer, we finally met Ramona Dawn face to face.

She was worth every minute of the wait.

With my own children in their 20s, it had been many years since I had been with a baby for such long periods of time. I had forgotten a lot.

I had forgotten the warmth and heft of a baby. I had forgotten the way a baby stares into your eyes while taking a bottle. I had forgotten the way a baby burrows her head into your shoulder while struggling with sleep.

I had forgotten that a baby is pure love.

Everyone's grandchild is the world's most amazing grandchild, and mine is no exception. Ramona's smiles melt your heart. Her giggle is bright and infectious. She is alert and adorable and clearly the world's greatest grandchild.

Of course she is.

Ramona is acutely visually oriented, looking around with hard, fierce stares. She would swivel her head 360 degrees if possible to take the world in through her deep brown eyes. Sometimes I would laugh at the intensity of her gaze, watching her catalogue every new sight, starting with this strange lady who suddenly dropped into her life.

Preverbal, Ramona is equally fierce in her vocalizations. She squawks and growls and coos loudly and determinedly, stiffening her body and throwing out her arms when she really wants to make her point. She has started to learn inflections and verbal cues. I would ask, "So, what did you do today, Ramona?" and she would smile and chirp a reply. Ramona is not yet stringing together sounds, so there is no babbling as such, but she is close. I suspect that when words come, they will come in a torrent.

It was hard, as our week wore away, to realize that it will likely be many months before we see Ramona again. She will not be this baby again ever. I am envious of those of my friends who have grandchildren close at hand, sympathetic to the generations of grandparents who waved their loved ones goodbye and saw them off across a continent, across an ocean, across the world to somewhere else.

I cannot pretend that Ramona will remember me and Warren snuggling her, reading to her, giving her a bottle this visit. She will not remember her effervescent joy at seeing us each day or the way she lit up whenever we said her name and smiled at her. When we see her next, there will be another period of renewing our family ties. Ramona will have to learn anew our faces, the timbre of our voices, the way the shine of Grandpa Warren's blue eyes match the shine of her chocolate drop eyes, the fit of my lap as I hold her and read to her. Yes, next time Warren and I will meet a new baby, a new toddler, a new child.

But the love we have now, that we gave and received from Ramona every day of our trip, will be the constant thread. Love will thread together the gaps of time from one visit to the next, lace together our family. Love, love, love will bind us together tight and carry us into the future.

Big & Little

We are on the road and I am away from the blog for another week at least, but I have just enough time to share the big picture and the little picture.

This is the little picture:

Portland, Oregon at night

And this is the BIG picture:

Ramona Dawn

And in other news...

I just debuted as a columnist for The Myeloma Beacon, an online news source for the myeloma community. Inquiring about becoming a columnist was a huge step for me. As much as I love to write, I often second guess myself as to my skills and commitment.

My introductory column ran yesterday. After this, I will be found at the Beacon on the third Tuesday of each month. I was pleased when they assigned me that slot: the third Tuesday of the month is Legal Clinic, and it is an easy date to remember.

"New occasions teach new duties" is engraved upon the facade of our 5th/6th middle school (our former high school) downtown. This is certainly a new occasion. It is oddly familiar to be working with an editor again (the first time I have done so in almost nine years) and it is strange to be working on deadline again.

It feels great. It feels a little scary. It feels like I just jumped off the high dive.

The water is fine.

A Chicago Story

I spent Saturday in Chicago, holed up in the downtown library writing and reading. At lunch, I went across the street and had a bagel at the corner Dunkin' Donuts. I sat in the storefront at a window counter, eating and watching the constantly changing street scene.

There was a young man across the street who was clearly asking passersby for change. I watched him try to engage people as they walked by, spinning around and trying another when the first one did not respond. He was big, with an engaging smile. Everyone appeared to walk by without handing him any money, but the smile never left his face.

The young man walked across the street and entered Dunkin' Donuts. He was known there; one of the sales clerks called him by name and asked him if he would like a hot chocolate. He was polite and thanked them carefully for the warm drink. Then he began to ask the patrons of the store, scattered at little tables throughout, if they had any change.

Admission: I am acutely uncomfortable when people on the street ask me for money. I don't care about their age, their story, their cleanliness, or whether they are mentally ill, chronically unemployed, or disabled. I tense up, feeling trapped between acknowledging their humanity and avoiding the whole uncomfortable encounter.

I was tucked away in a corner of the doughnut shop. I hoped Mr. Panhandler would overlook me.

He didn't, of course. He came right up to me and asked, "Excuse me, but can you help me out with some money to eat?"

I could have said no and he'd have left me alone, gone on out the door. I could have called his bluff, if he had one to call, and said, "No, but I will buy you a meal right here." I certainly did not have to turn and look him in the face while he asked me. But I did, and he looked right back at me.

He was a kid, really. In recounting the story to Warren, I said, "I'd be stunned if he was as old as Sam." And when we looked at one another, straight on, I felt a seismic shift.

I don't know who was more surprised—the kid or me—when I responded, "Yes, I can." Shock and amazement registered on his face.

"Really?"

I nodded and reached for my bag. I'd just stuffed my change, four dollars, into it. Now I took the bills out and handed them to him, saying, "it's hard to be hungry. Go get something."

"It sure is," he said. "God bless you."

With that benediction, the young man moved on. I watched him go. At the door, he turned back and looked my way, then smiled and waved when he saw I was watching him. I gave him a thumbs up.

I watched the young man walk south on State Street after he left the shop. He did not ask people for money as he walked along. He looked like he was walking a little lighter and a little taller.

Maybe he was just another panhandler.  Maybe he was a drug user or an alcoholic. Maybe he walked away laughing his head off at the middle-aged white lady that he just conned out of four dollars.

And maybe he was just a kid with a somewhat empty stomach and less than adequate skills at filling it.

"There is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on," wrote Gary Schmidt in his Newbery Honor novel, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.

It was only four dollars. It was all I had on me and Lord knows, I could have used it too. But not after looking him in the face and seeing the person. Not then.