Six

Fang has already written a paean to five.  (And he totally stole my idea for a blog post, the bastard, and then did a far better job than I would have.)

Six years ago today (Labor Day–ha ha) at around 1:30 p.m., I finally delivered baby Lucas into the world. Forty-plus hours of labor produced a lovely but cranky baby boy who would, it ends up, not sleep through the night for fifteen months.  Add his only-weekly bowel movements and colic, plus the thrush and mastitis that he caused in me, and you can begin to see why we stopped with just one child.  (Another significant data point in that study: $50,000 in daycare and preschool costs over 5 years.)

Knowing how it all turned out, these six years later, if we had the financial werewithal and physical energy, we’d be jonesing for a sibling.  Lucas is bright, inquisitive, funny, creative, and sensitive.  He’d be an awesome big brother.

I am so very grateful that in the cosmic genetic lottery, we ended up with this child.  I’m thrilled that Fang is his father, as he’s ensuring that the quirkier aspects of our joint DNA experiment are channeled productively in an environment filled with love, understanding, and creativity.

Congrats to all of us, then, on six.

Eighty-eight

Yesterday my mom and her sisters held a memorial for my grandmother, who died last month at age 88. Like many family weddings, it was in a backyard. Despite my grandmother’s assertion that everyone she knew was dead, 52 people showed up.  We’re not a particularly religious family, but I imagine it was a service infused with tremendous spirit and gratitude.

I say “I imagine” because the memorial ended up being scheduled on the day between Lucas’s birthday party and his actual birthday, and I didn’t think it was appropriate to drag him to such an event on what should be an awesome, Lucas-focused weekend.

Still, my parents opted to read aloud some of Fang’s blog post from last spring, as well as the letter I wrote to my grandmother the week before she died. When my mom read the letter to my grandmother a month or so ago, Grandma apparently announced, with typical grandmotherly pride, that the letter needed to be framed and hung on the wall, as well as published in the newspaper.  (Cute, yes?)

Anyway, I had thought the letter was the kind of thing that she’d want to keep private between us, but apparently she wanted it shouted to the world, so I’m going to share it here.  If you’re family, get out the tissues. . .

Dear Grandma,

I know you’re going through a really bad time right now, and I wish I could do much more to help. The best I can think to do right now is to put in writing—so that you can read it, or have it read to you, more than once, if you like—how grateful I am to have you as my grandma.

I love you. You’re not only the best grandmother I could ask for, but also one of the best friends. I’ve been wandering around this world for 36 years now, and I’ve realized something:

Everyone else has old ladies for grandmothers.

I have you.

I have pinned up on my bulletin board at work the photo of you that was printed in the newspaper—the one where you’re emptying sand from your shoes. It makes me smile every day. I wish I could have known you then as well as now; how fun it would have been to be young together!

Regardless, I’m so happy for the time we’ve spent with each other. You have created an absolutely amazing family of women—daughters and granddaughters—dedicated to the public good through education.  I’m so grateful to be a part of that clan, to be a recipient of that heritage. I’m so glad that Lucas feels he knows you well—he’s more [Surname 1] and [Surname 2] than you may know.

You contributed so much to my growth, not only by taking care of me before and after school, but also by letting me live with you for a time. I treasure all those memories.

Some things I remember:

• Making kites from dowels and white butcher and tissue paper on your kitchen table, and gluing onto them pictures of jewelry you helped me cut out of the J.C. Penney catalog. Pops and I flew the kites on the playground at Fremont.
• Thirty-six years of frosted and sprinkled sugar cookies.  (It’s a miracle, really, I’m not diabetic.)  I have your recipe, and I make the cookies with Lucas.  He loves to add the sprinkles.
• Drawing portraits of each other while sitting at the old marble table in the living room. I was in elementary school. You drew a really funny, ugly picture and we both laughed really hard.
• How much you helped me with my tricky “Think Pages” while I sat at the big round table in the kitchen. They were really hard for a third grader, but it was fun to have you figure them out with me.
• When I once said a bad word, you told me you were going to wash my mouth out with soap, and then you asked, “Where’d you learn that crap?”
• You knew, somehow, that [Fang] was going to propose to me on my 26^th birthday. I remember leaving your house for a fancy dinner, and you asking me, “What if he asks you to marry him?” I think of you several times each day when I look at the wedding ring you gave me. I still have the envelope in which you handed it to me, with the business card from the jewelry store.
• Looking for four-leaf, and even five-leaf, clovers under your lemon and grapefruit trees. One day we found six or seven of them. You taped them to pieces of notepaper, and we wrote the date on them.

The last time I was at your house, I went out into the yard and looked for four-leaf clovers, but there weren’t any. I wish I could send you a bouquet of them.

Mom told me you’ve been praying. I hope it’s helping you with all the awful things you’re going through. I was reading some poetry recently, and a few lines of a Walt Whitman poem jumped out at me, as it captured this idea, I think, that you’ll always, always be a part of this family, and of me especially:

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

You have definitely contributed to my soul, to the woman and mother I am today. Thank you for that. A million times thank you.

[Fang], Lucas, and I love you very much. Please know that we’re thinking of you all the time.

Love,

Leslie

It may not always be apparent from this blog, but when I put my mind and heart to it, I can write quite well.  I usually overcome writer’s block pretty quickly, too.

But not this time.

I’ve been trying for months to write a letter to my grandmother because I want to thank her for everything she’s done for me.  (I did tell her last time I saw her how grateful I am for her love and support, but I wanted to put something in writing so that she can refer to it when she’s feeling down.)  I wrote countless drafts of this letter but never sent one.

Until tonight.  I learned that she has very little time left—days or weeks—and that she’s so weak that she can’t sit up to read, and probably can’t even hold a letter. She isn’t taking phone calls. I asked my mom if she would read something aloud to her, and Mom agreed.

So I had to keep it short. I was amazed, really, that when it really counted, I was able to finish the note.  I’m pretty satisfied with it for now, but doubtless in a few weeks I’ll think of something else I should have said.

The letter is just over one page, and it comprises paragraphs of gratitude and bullet points of happy memories.

As I wrote the letter, I realized a couple of things.

I wrote to her,

I have pinned up on my bulletin board at work the photo of you that was printed in the newspaper—the one where you’re emptying sand from your shoes. It makes me smile every day. I wish I could have known you then as well as now; how fun it would have been to be young together!

And I do wish such a thing. Over the past decade, Grandma has been telling me she’s been seeing long-dead friends and relatives in her dreams, and that while she finds the experience a bit unsettling, she enjoys spending time with them again. I hope I get dream visitations not only from Grandma as I know and knew her, but from young Dorothy as well.  She looks fun, no?

The other thing I realized is that I need to get back to reading poetry regularly again, as of course even lines I thought I knew well shift and deepen as I age.  I was looking for some scrap of poetry that spoke to the way I feel, and I found it in Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”  I included these lines from it in my letter to my grandmother.  She’s taken to praying lately—even though I never knew her to be a religious person—so I hope she finds in them some little bit of happy eternity, some understanding that she has had an enduring influence on me.

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Whatever you believe, I’d appreciate it if you’d send some kind thoughts in her direction.  She could use some relief, some peace.

Grandma and her most recent great-granddaughter, a few months back.

Fang has had a hard week.  And month.  And year.

But this last week was a bitch.

First, there was my pneumonia, which required him to step up to do all the parenting.

Second, he found a new dentist–one he really likes.  However, after years of well-meaning dentists who used a Pickett’s Charge strategy in the battle to save his teeth, Dr. W leveled with him: it would be waste to throw any more reinforcements onto that slippery slope.  She said that sooner, rather than later, he’ll need to get all his upper teeth pulled and replaced with dentures.  We had been hoping to go the implant route, but at around $3,000 per tooth, and with Fang’s bones likely weakened by the same thing that ruined his teeth, it’s more than we can afford and the implants might eventually be rejected by his body.

Third, he learned that the mole he had removed and biopsied is cancerous.

Fourth, he’s having that “two ships passing in the night” communications problem with a new freelance client.  He speaks web, and she speaks academic journal, and neither of them seems to know a single word in the other’s language.

Fifth, he did some volunteer work for Really Cool Activist Nonprofit, and they seemed enthusiastic about having him take some photos at Boise’s Pride event on Saturday, but then–even though they’re really good about contacting volunteers–they didn’t follow up with him to get him a photographer’s lanyard so that he move around more freely at the event.  He didn’t want to be Persistent and Slightly Creepy Guy Who Seems To Have A Predilection for Photographing Underdressed Drag Queens.  I’m thinking that in all the event planning, RCAN just forgot to contact Fang; Fang thinks he didn’t pass their political litmus test, and since he’s been a supporter of the national RCAN for years, he was pretty depressed.

Sixth, when he finally did feel the tiniest bit of contentment on Saturday and was messing around with my phone, texting a mutual friend of ours, I was snapped at him, and that took the bloom off the evening, even though it was super awesome roller derby night with family friends.

Seventh, his best friend for life had some really crappy stuff happen, and Fang’s absorbing some of that sadness.

Eighth, he took out an ad in Craigslist for other beginning guitarists to play with, and he didn’t get any responses.

Ninth, he’s far from family and friends, and he’s feeling that distance especially acutely right now.  He works from home, so it’s not as if he’s running into a bunch of potential new friends.

Tenth, another doctor told him he needs to stop eating just about everything he likes.

I’m sure there’s stuff I’m leaving out.

But throughout it all, Fang has been an awesome father to Lucas.  He listens.  He translates the world for the boy.  He’s teaching him to ride a bike.  He’s encouraging him to be adventurous, to try new things.  He’s taking him to movies, buying him comic books, and ensuring his fluency in the Marvel superhero canon.  He applies sunblock liberally.

This from a man who spent the first 14 months of his life in an old-school Catholic orphanage, who was abused physically and emotionally as a child and teen, who had to endure an adolescence in working-class Tucson, who dropped out of college after a semester, who became addicted in his teens, 20s, and the first half of his 30s to just about everything.  On paper, this is not the profile of an ideal candidate for Father of The Decade.

And yet he is.  Despite all the inner demons he wrestles with day in and day out, he’s an amazing dad.  Lucas has no idea, really, that Fang is depressed and frustrated.  Quite the opposite–Lucas calls him “silly.”

So while Fang may feel as if he’s fallen into yet another unlucky streak of gloom and doom, I’m feeling exceptionally fortunate to have found such an awesome dad for our son.

Thanks, Sweetie.  It’ll get better.

Psssst. . . I’d really appreciate some yaying and cheerleading for Fang in the comments, as I know he checks The Clutter Museum regularly.  The guy could use some cheering up.