Swinging Friends

With Kanha home from camp -- hurray!, and unscheduled for an entire week -- amazing!, I took her and a friend -- a "guy" friend, as she would say -- to Monkey C Monkey Do, the zip-line and ropes course about an hour away in Wiscasset, Maine.  Kanha and I have noticed this jungle of hanging strings and wooden towers on our occasional trips up Route 1 North as it bears a  resemblance to a similar adventure park we visited in Switzerland four years ago.  She remembers it fondly, as if it was a return to her natural habitat where she could take flight and bounce lightly among the tall trees;  I remember it, in contrast, with immeasurable relief, having survived a couple of hours clinging to the lifelines they provide as my body violently swung from one hanging log to the next, my knees wobbling, my teeth chattering, my swear count rising by the second. 

So, as you can imagine, when the prospect of trying the park's US version arose, I was going to be sure Kanha had someone other than me to climb into Tarzan's territory with her.  So we picked up her guy friend, a twelve year old that a "girl" friend's mother could love -- a slim, red-headed, lacrosse player who says please and thank you and talks to adults -- and we headed north.  When we pulled into the lot, the deficiencies of the Maine monkey spot vs. our Swiss adventureland came more clearly into focus -- the towers and ropes were just feet away from the Route 1 traffic and there were very few actual trees in sight.  But the kids were excited so off they went -- through their safety video, harness acquisition, "ground school," and on up the wooden towers.

Kanha, once again, took to it immediately.  I watched a middle-aged guy, like me, precariously, and very slowly, cross a tightrope wire twenty feet in the air, dearly hanging onto the guide rope provided;  two minutes later it was Kanha's turn -- she literally danced across the line, her oversized Osiris sneakers as light as ballet slippers.  

But her guy friend -- not so much.  He handled the lower level sections with fortitude, following not too too far behind Kanha, trying to imitate her ease.  And he seemed to love the zipline as much as she -- gravity sliding them both quickly above the gravel "forest" floor to the other side of the park.  But I noticed from my sideline perch that he skipped the super oscillating swing that Kanha waited in line for twice, her kinetic body splaying through the air as the rope threw her from side to side, a giant grin on her face.  And he looked even more tentative on the middle level of challenges, his leg wobbles looking entirely familiar to this mom sitting, quite happily, down below.

So I wasn't altogether surprised when they bounded up to me, on terra firma, harness-free, with one hour still left in their two and a half hour adventure.  "Time to go," Kanha said, and her friend, as polite as ever, admitted, "I don't like heights."  So we went, off for ice cream by the harbor in Wiscasset center and then back home.  I was impressed by my daughter as I often am -- from what I could see, she had thought of her friend and his fear more than herself and the fun she had missed and had done what she could to minimize the embarrassment he might have felt.  

Yet, later, she played her cards more openly.  That night, when I asked her about the day, she asked if we could go again sometime, with someone more like her.  And the next day, when I said something about her monkey park partner, she reminded me that he was JUST a friend.  I entirely understood, yet, imagining an age when they will actually be looking for real girl- and boyfriends, I felt a bit wistful for them both.  If he liked her as more than a "girl" friend, would he have lost his shot just because he couldn't match her preternaturally fearless form?  And if she crossed him off her list because he couldn't climb a tower as high as she, would she never discover the other heights he could possibly reach -- perhaps in laughter, kindness, and love?

Ridiculous questions to be asking about two pre-teen friends, I know, but a mom can't help but wonder.

Not Cloistered But Connected One Summer Day

I spent last weekend in Massachusetts, first joining my brother and his wife's extended family to celebrate the life of her dad, Ed McHugh, who passed away last summer, and then driving further west -- further and further and further it felt -- in Massachusetts, to drop Kanha off at the Rowe Camp and Conference Center for her two week summer adventure.  To be expected, a bit of sadness twinged both days.  Saying goodbye to Ed stirred up emotions around my own dad -- they had been great friends for two in-laws, bonding over politics, books, and a good laugh.  My fondest memories of Ed also evoke Big Chip -- I enjoyed thoughtful, often wandering and fascinating conversations with both of them, typically spiced with a glass of wine (me), a tumbler of scotch (Ed) or a Pabst Blue Ribbon (Big Chip).  

On the other hand, the trip to Kanha's camp was mostly upbeat -- she was excited to have two weeks away from home, plus her school and church buddy Selena was sharing her cabin -- what could be more fun?  I was honestly happy for her, yet a bit sad for me.  The rhythms of the house change so much when she's not around -- the only thing calling me out of bed in the morning is my desk, the only one to feed at night is Theo, and there's no one around to say, "Good night, I love you."  Even in the lovely (not!) pre-teeny, just-about-everything-is-about-me phase she's in, I love my life with her.

Yet I felt not sad, but joyous, on the long drive home as I experienced an incredible moment of grace during the trip, at Ed's memorial service in fact.  Eileen, his loquacious, loving and still very Irish wife, even after more than 50 years in the US, had befriended the monks at the Spencer Abbey, a Roman Catholic monastery down the road from her home, during Ed's illness.  She would visit their gift shop regularly to buy presents for friends and to receive the gifts she herself needed so much at that time -- an open ear and an empathetic word.  Therefore, it made perfect sense to her to return to the abbey when planning Ed's service and ask a monk to lead the celebration.  This, it turns out, was a nearly once-in-a-lifetime request -- the Spencer Abbey monks are cloistered and live most of the time in silence and prayer.   Leading religious services of any type is not part of their job description, nor is leaving the abbey's premises.

However, incredibly, they agreed, although those of us who know Eileen weren't that surprised -- she's a hard woman to deny when she has something to say.  On Saturday morning, the monk arrived just on time in the Abbey's Prius -- one bow they've made to the modern world -- and took his place before the open grave.  It was an exceedingly simple service, as Ed would have wanted it, not a church-goer himself -- the monk read a prayer or two mixed in with family remembrances and responsive readings, and he assisted Ed's two grandchildren, Griffin and Meriwether, as they placed the box of ashes in the open hole.  

Then, before he closed the service and the bagpiper blew out the final tune, he paused and looked out at us, the thirty or so people who surrounded him.  With eyes wet and voice cracking, he told us how impossible it was that he was standing there, having never left the abbey before, and simply how nice it was for him.  An awkward silence fell over us all -- such a raw personal moment from a man we didn't know.  Yet what an incredible gift, I felt.   His feelings rippled out as a prayer -- of thanks for his chance to be in the world, among others, among us, to appreciate a man's life, to appreciate being alive, to experience connection, if even so briefly, on a warm summer's day in a green field that remembers so many who have lived.  While we were acknowledging a death, I felt I'd witnessed a birth, of spoken love and gratitude, from an elderly man who lived his life in silence.  It made me happy, not sad, and grateful for all the connections, all the love, I have myself.  

Aging with Bonnie

In Boston this past weekend for my niece Eva's college graduation party -- woo-hoo, Eva, way to go!  We gave her Katie Couric's advice book, which belatedly I realized would likely be entirely irrelevant to a young twenty-something brought up on reality, not morning, TV.  But Ellen DeGeneres is one of Katie's experts, who Eva loves, so count one for the older generation.  

Double bonus for the weekend -- my dear friend Lynn invited me to join her and two other friends to share in her birthday present of a night at the Bonnie Raitt concert under the Bank of America tent in Boston's newly hot Seaport area.  What a magical night.  

The rain stopped just before Bonnie's opening act, Mavis Staples, started -- she was amazing too -- Wade in the Water indeed! The wind lightly blew through the audience and a pinkish twinge highlighted the clouds above Boston Harbor.  We four middle-aged women, certainly the older generation, with hair frizzy and attitudes frazzled, felt a blues-singing peer, with a much much better voice, maybe even better than her youthful days, lift us up -- our butts out of our seats, our spirits out of our stressed-out brains.  Near the end, along with all her thanks for us fans, Bonnie exhorted that this is how we should feel all the time -- yes, how right.  

The next morning I went for a walk/run, an appropriate middle-aged woman's exercise, around Jamaica Pond near my sister's condo.  

Despite the garbage truck pacing me as it drove from trash can to trash can, me catching it then watching it speed off only to be caught again in another burst of strides, I felt almost invincible.  Age has made Bonnie sound stronger, feel more grateful -- I'm grabbing that gift too and walk/running with it all the way home.  

Lupine and Love on Father's Day

A weekend thinking about my dad.  Father's Day yesterday. His 81st birthday the day before.  The publication of my essay in the Sunday paper about finding a home in Maine, his own indisputable home, even for the 45 years he lived elsewhere.  Picking lupine from my garden for flower communion at church, the flower that blanketed Monhegan Island's meadows on the weekend we shared there when he was so ill more than a decade ago.  He would have loved my article, he would have loved the lupine.  He should still be here.  But in his absence, I remember him with love.  

My Daughter, On the Knife's Edge

As I recall it some forty plus years later, sixth grade was all about experiences and very little about education, at least of the academic sort.  I met my BFF Kim that year, the girl around the corner, the alluring Thelma to my practical Louise. We both simultaneously fell in love with Danny Jones, the juvenile delinquent-in-training from our class who neither of us ever had an actual conversation with, which perhaps made our love for him even more intense.  The real world intruded too -- one school day we sat through a couple hours of graphic slides depicting men and women who had smoked as kids and lost their tongues and voices as adults, and we watched in stunned silence as our teacher, tears rolling down her face, announced Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in June 1968.  In truth, we were still children, still a couple of years from even crossing the teenage threshold, yet adulthood, for the first time, was encroaching.

Fast forward a few decades and here I am, experiencing it all again, in Kanha, who just finished her sixth grade year on Wednesday.  I know less about the details of her day to day experiences at school of course but I see the precipice she sits upon.  On Friday night we went to an end-of-year junior choir party with the other singers and their families from our church.  The kids, from six or seven to Kanha's age, talked and ate and played together for a couple of hours.  The older among them, including Kanha, had dropped their attitudes at the door and just had fun.  After dinner, we all, parents and kids alike, families mixed among each other, stood in a big circle as the choir members taught us adults the Flea Fly Flo song and a few dance moves to go with it.  I watched Kanha, who stood almost exactly opposite me (when I could get away with it without appearing the hovering mother) -- her streaked bangs swinging in time to the music, her shiny smile, the abandon she invested in the song and dance. She looked to me who she had always been -- my kid.

Fast forward again, to the next morning.  All dressed up and ready for her friend Amelia's bar mitzvah, the social event of the early summer.  She walked down the stairs and I gulped.  The same hair, the same beautiful smile, yet in that dress, ready for that grown-up event, she in fact looked preternaturally grown up.  I felt an emotion that was just becoming familiar -- pride and fear wrapped up in one conglomerated ball.  I suspect it's a feeling I better get used to.

On Sunday, things felt like they had returned to normal.  She played a great soccer game and we stopped for a gigantic ice cream cone on the way home.  In her uniform, relaxed and playing with Theo, she looked eleven, exactly her age, teetering on the knife's edge between being a kid and an adult.  May she slide over, if not gracefully, at least with very very few cuts along the way.

What Grows in the Rain

I seem to remember from sophomore botany that rain makes things grow, an axiom I'm proving true this weekend.  It has been raining since Saturday night, and there's a lot of growth going on here in my little world in downtown Portland Maine.  Unfortunately I'm not growing carefully cultivated cucumbers or a well-landscaped garden, the longed-for fruits of my labor.  No, I'm growing problems, disasters, leaks, and green growth in all the wrong places, which I'm afraid will require oodles more labor to repair.

The yard is bad enough. The lilacs and peonies, once designed into a symmetrical array around the edges of my lawn (a layout developed by the former owner, which I'm sure is obvious), now lean heavily over onto the grass, the sidewalk and my parking space, right in front of the driver's side door, guaranteeing me a soaking every time I climb into my car's front seat.

The lawn, patchy in the first place like a young boy's face -- stretches of unadorned territory interspersed with startling dense growth -- has become even more unsightly and, worse, unmowable.  The grass is so tall and waterlogged it winds its way into the blades of my push mower, causing it, then me, to stop short, every foot or so -- so far I've managed to avoid catapulting over the handle.  I've sent the mower in to have the blades sharpened but with the grass up over my ankles in spots, I'm thinking I'll soon need a scythe to make my away from one side of the lawn to the other.

Then there's the house.  A couple of weeks ago my tenant reported that the door to nowhere on her second floor was leaking -- well, really gushing -- water when it rained.  I told her to stick some towels against it until I could find the $1000 or so it will cost to repair or replace it.  I haven't had the nerve to check in with her this weekend -- I'm just hoping her towel supply is holding up and, if not, she has a dinghy.  

Over on our side, things are headed downstream too.  After I put an exhausted Kanha to bed on Saturday night, I sat on the couch in the family room, appreciating a moment of quiet before I turned the TV on to catch up on Mad Men. (An hour observing the emotionally disconnected, misogynist world of Don Draper always reminds me that life in the 21st century isn't so bad after all...)  But it wasn't so quiet within those four family room walls -- instead of silence, I heard "drip drip drip...," emanating from my centuries old fireplace.  Now I remembered -- when I had had the house inspected a couple of years ago, some concern about the two chimneys had been noted.  Apparently willful ignorance is just not enough to solve the problem.

Some day soon it will stop raining -- that's what I've been told anyhow -- and the problems will dry up, at least a bit.  We'll put our towels and buckets and watercraft away and maybe even, this time, I'll fill in the holes, cut back the grass, mower or scythe, whatever it takes, and be ready for when the rainy growing season comes again.  Remember, I said maybe.

A Walk in the Woods with Some Dogs

I sneaked away to our house in Lovell this weekend with Theo.  I wasn't escaping Kanha, who, lucky angel, was on her own get-away in upstate NY with her good pal Selena and family.  I was escaping my desk.  It's Memorial Day weekend, and with the annual Conference I run coming up in just a few days, I should be yoked to my computer, producing registration lists and organizing nametags.  

But Becky and Jonathan, the newlyweds, and my brother Dan and his son Griffin, were heading north to the family house to check out a boat we might buy, so I figured I would join them for just one night.  We had a lovely evening, taking the boat out for a spin, eating burgers from the grill, watching the four dogs tumbling about, catching up on the gossip, sucking the stillness of this house in the woods into our beings in an attempt to carry it back to the craziness of our lives.

The next morning, with Dan and Griffin gone late the night before and the newlyweds sleeping in, I took the dogs for a walk.  There were only three  by now  (Isaac, my brother's golden retriever had left with his family) -- Theo and two other mutts:  West, Becky and Jonathan's beagle/lab rescue who Theo looks up to, literally and figuratively, and Gouda, their friends' puppy, who is the perfect  playmate.  Gouda's  adoption agency called her Havanese but she looks like a chubby white Chihuahua with ears pointed straight for the sky.  She's clearly Theo's type -- both spayed, they still couldn't keep their paws off of each other.  

So out we trooped, Theo's grandma and the three dogs.  We had one leash, one collar (on Theo), and no bug spray, all of which made for a potentially treacherous stroll.  But I moved faster than the bugs (for the most part..), the dogs kept up (well, West had a little trouble until he did number 2 in the woods -- with a lighter load his step lightened significantly), and we made it all the way to the end of our one mile road and back with nary an incident.  All three dogs gathered near me when they heard the engine of each of the 3 cars we passed in our 40 minute walk and Theo only got side-tracked by a chipmunk once but quickly rejoined his mentor and girlfriend when he realized they were sticking by me.  The birds chirped -- a low wolf whistle, a cawing call to a friend -- and the squirrels' tails rustled the low leaves just off the road.  Vistas of the lake popped out between the houses as we passed, water calm and shiny, this little world in the Maine woods at peace.  

The dogs were tired when we got back but I felt better.  Ready to return to the city, and my desk, bringing a piece of the peace with me.