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.  

The Middle-Aged Prom

I've hit one more milestone to remind me I'm no longer young -- the weddings I get invited to don't star my friends but the next generation -- their children, who, amazingly, are no longer children but full-fledged adults of the marrying age.  I remember the thrill of weddings in my twenties -- there I was, at a grown-up party, with all of my best friends, taking the first giant step into real adulthood.  But after I had paid for my tenth bridesmaid gown and danced to "Celebrate!" for the twentieth time (which, in fact, was always fun), I was out of money and energy to put into someone else's life -- I was ready to get off the wedding circuit.  Then, the cyclical clock of life stepped in and I got my wish.  For another twenty years or so, my friends and I lived our adult lives, married or not, with a wedding invitation arriving rarely -- a distant much younger cousin, a friend who had divorced and was trying it again. 

Now, in my mid-fifties, with a next generation growing up all around me, ready themselves to step up as adults, the weddings have returned.  Like swallows in the spring, they come with music, an excited buzz and a sense of hope.   I'm ready to be invited back to the party.

Last year was the first big one -- my niece Becky, the oldest grandchild in our family, walked down a sandy aisle on Singer Island in West Palm Beach, where she grew up, to marry her tall, muscular prince of a best friend, Jonathan.  

Next month I'm invited to one here in Maine -- my friend Barby's daughter Dalit will tie the knot at her dad's house in Harpswell.

And this past weekend I went to another, a black tie chi-chi affair on the Boston waterfront, although it doesn't quite fit the pattern.  Yes, Missy, and her new husband Eric, are of the younger generation, right around thirty -- I'm definitely old enough to be her mother.  But I'm only an acquaintance of her parents -- I, in fact, made the bride's guest list.  She's a great friend and West Palm Beach high school classmate  of my niece, the recently married Becky.  Over the years, I, and my two sisters, through trips we all made between Florida, Massachusetts and Maine, watched Becky and Missy grow up together. There were parties and meals out and dinner table conversations.  We dragged Missy's oversized suitcase "Gertrude" up the steps of my house in Maine and I went to see her perform as the lead in a Cape Cod playhouse performance of Sunday in the Park with George.  Eventually both she and Becky moved to Boston, a mile away from each other with my house almost exactly in between.  I was almost "one of the girls" for the couple of years we all overlapped.   

When her big day rolled around, Missy chose to include us in her wedding extravaganza -- all of us:  Becky's parents -- Lynn and Keith, along with my sister Nancy and her husband, and me.  It helped, obviously, that her father, the infamous Al Jerome, has a very thick wallet.  But I loved being included, mostly because it took me back to a long ago time -- I felt younger, yes (especially when the adorable -- if married -- 35 year old at our table took me for a spin on the dance floor -- woo-hoo!), but also filled with lightness and hope, just as I did watching my twenty-something friends marry so many years ago.

The five of us were like teenagers as we dressed for the wedding, trying on shoes to go with our floor length dresses, trading necklaces and earrings to achieve just the right look.  Standing on the steps of my sister Nancy's apartment, we took at least 25 pictures of us in our finery, as excited as if we were heading to the prom and just as likely to be late.  But we made it on time, danced and celebrated, thrilled to be a little older, sending off a young friend into the adult world of hope and love.

What's Really Real

Another long break from writing here, but with a good excuse -- the mom and the kid sent the dog up to the country (my brother's house in Bowdoinham), locked the house up tightly, grabbed "the dad" and headed off to Cambodia for two and a half weeks.  By all accounts, it was an amazing trip -- with minimal planning, we arrived ten years less two days after Kanha climbed into my arms for the very first time on the steps of her orphanage in Roteang, Cambodia in April 2002, we happily and easily overlapped for a week with the family who had adopted their daughter, Kim Srean, the very same morning, and we managed to experience the country more as friends who can only visit every few years, not the wealthy tourists we would be without having our flesh and blood Cambodian link, Kanha.  For the time we were there, I (and we) wrote mostly about the kid and her, and our, experiences in Cambodia -- you can see them, and many pictures, at www.facebook.com/KanhainCambodia2012.  It's a cliche, but it truly was the trip of a lifetime.

We arrived home a couple of weeks ago with that hard, cold clash with reality that only happens when your time away has felt very real itself and you loathe feeling the connection to that other world loosen as the house, the kid, the dog, and all of their many needs begin to reclaim you. Jet lag, of course, didn't help.  Having been eleven hours ahead of east coast time, I should have been sleeping all day and up all night, but truthfully, for the first two weeks I just didn't want to drag myself out of bed, at any time.  There were a lot of naps.  

But all those needs could not be ignored.  The house spoke first.  With heavy rains the first week we were back, a new leak sprung in the second floor door of our attached apartment.  Water rolled through the hall on the way to Kristin's (our tenant's) bedroom, made clear in the iPhone photo she produced early one morning.  Soaked through mats appeared on the front lawn and she pleaded with me, very very nicely, to get it fixed.  The dog came home from the country with a pound or two newly packed on -- which is a lot on a twenty pound puppy -- and no less penchant to chew.  The kid landed in Portland one evening at around 8 pm and was happily playing a lacrosse game with her Waynflete teammates less than 24 hours later, and I don't think she has stopped since.  (I am getting a new appreciation for the term "soccer mom" although in our case it's "soccer/basketball/lacrosse/whatever other sport I'm loving at this moment" mom.  And yes, I realize, I'm contributing to the problem... But that's for another day.)

I'm working on getting back to normal.  My newly found handyman arrives early this morning to evaluate the apartment's leak, Theo, much to his grumbling stomach's chagrin, is on a diet, and I'm taking advantage of the "soccer/etc. dad" in our family and letting him do a lot of the driving from game to practice to game to practice (even if it's a bit reluctantly).  

And I'm carrying the memories of the trip with me into my reality, here and now.  Seeing Kanha navigate the worlds of America and Cambodia so adeptly -- playing with the orphanage kids, learning how to weave in a family's home on Mekong Island, bargaining with the merchants in the Siem Reap Night Market, learning Khmer phrases from her penpal, while remaining the modern, jean-short wearing, shopping-obsessed, boundlessly energetic, American girl I know  -- did not surprise me but it amazed me:  in my eyes, my amazing daughter became more fully alive, even more beautifully real, no matter where she was, and is, in the world.  

Happy for the Presidential Hassle

Chip (Kanha's dad) didn't want to use the two tickets he bought (for $250 each...) because he didn't want to deal with the hassle -- the bumper to bumper traffic, the long lines, the jostling people.  So he gave away the tickets to see the President in the flesh, to Kanha and me.

He had it mostly right -- the traffic was slow getting over to Southern Maine Community College, we waited in line, on a sunny but briskly windy Maine March afternoon, for an hour and a half, we got jostled a lot by the 1699 other people crammed into the athletic center, all standing around on the basketball floor waiting to hear -- and see -- President Obama.  And Chip even missed a few of the not-so-pleasant details -- the coffee and hot chocolate promised while we shivered on line turned out to be water, or beer or wine you could pay for, each person's standing spot was awarded in order of arrival so if you, a short person -- read: 11 year old Kanha -- arrived just a few minutes after Jane Q. BasketballPlayer -- read: the 6 foot tall woman claiming the space just in front of us -- you were basically out-of-luck to be able to see much of anything.  Plus it was a short payoff for a lot of waiting -- a 30 minute stump speech (an exact repeat of what I heard reported from Burlington VT  as we drove home) out of a four hour outing.

the President in person

But for me it was worth it, and hopefully, one day at least, for Kanha too.  While driving to the event, I found myself ruminating to her that, even coming from a highly political Democratic family, I had never seen a President "in the flesh" while in office before.  (I did shake candidate Bill Clinton's hand when I was in graduate school at the Kennedy School although I realized I was hardly unique when I overheard 3 people in the Obama line, all from different groups of friends, recount their own stories of getting a "Bubba" handshake during his time in the presidential limelight.  Perhaps he really did personally shake the hand of everyone who voted for him in the New Hampshire primary...) 

I loved being in the same room as Barack Obama, albeit a very very large room -- our first African-American president, a man of brains and commitment (if a bit too strong of a penchant to compromise), a man I indeed would like to have a beer with AND feel reassured that he is leading our country.  

And I loved taking Kanha, loved knowing that, from then on, she could say she had been to see a President speak.  Never mind she got very tired and a bit bored, never mind she had to jump up or have me lift her a bit to actually see him, never mind she found it more fun to get her picture taken next to the Obama cardboard cut-out outside.  

Kanha with the President -- a sideways view

Having been born in a country where power hungry men, in the name of egalitarianism, had destroyed her ancestors, their land, and their way of life, she had had the chance to hear the words, in person, of a man who stands, in my opinion, fully and completely for exactly the opposite.  For both of us, I think it was worth the hassle.  

The Family Bed

You would think that a single woman of a certain (still very young) age who has her own house and her own room would also get her own bed. A nice, not too soft, not too hard, just right sized (a queen, of course) bed all to herself. To read in at any hour, to keep as clean (those freshly laundered sheets!) or messy (those yummy Oreo crumbs!) as desired, to sprawl across or to share (hopefully!) with a selected friend, to wake up in, to an angry alarm, or to sleep late in, to her body's content.  

But last night this woman's bed was not her own. First, at a little after 10, Theo arrived, pitter-pattering up the steep stairs to the Margie-Cave, wandering into my little bedroom, surveying the rumpled sheets, and, in one little hop, landing on top of the comforter, plastered against my (very warm, I guess) legs.  It only took a couple more minutes to hear another set of feet on the stairs -- this time, only two, a little heavier, a little slower, but around the corner they came.  And there was beautiful little Miss Kanha, nowhere near as sleepy-eyed as an 11 year old should be at 10:15 pm on a school night.  She pleaded a sniffly nose -- at least she had an excuse, which was more than could be said for the puppy.  Before I knew it, she had crawled over me, leaving only a few bruises and scratches, dragged the covers down on the far side of the bed, and snuggled in.  

OK, I know what you're thinking, and in fact, you're kind of right.  It's not such a bad picture -- who doesn't love other warm, breathing bodies that you love snuggling up next to you.  Certainly not me.  And it was just lovely, for about two or three minutes, that little cocoon we had all created together.  

But, then, Kanha fell asleep, on her back, with that cold, and the heavy breathing started -- I'm being nice, it was really a snore.  And it went on, and on.  By then I had realized I couldn't turn the light back on to read a couple more pages of my book, The Mindful Woman, because I really didn't want to take the risk of waking her up if she was really sick.  So my minuscule little 10 minutes of reading I covet every night disappeared into the thick air of her snores.

Finally I managed to fall asleep myself and all again was right with the world.  Until, of course, I woke up at 3 am to that familiar feeling of a moist brow and clammy sheets that only a fifty-something woman can relate to.  But this middle-of-the-night came with an added challenge -- my full-sized woman's body had been shoe-horned into one tiny wedge of the bed.  The adorable tween at my side was literally sleeping on my side of the bed, pushing me to the very edge.  And the dog had managed to stretch himself further over next to my feet -- no chance he was going to get left out of the bed party -- so that the only way for me to avoid going overboard was to hang on to the bed's sideboard.  I wanted to scream -- everyone, move over, this is my bed!  I wasn't feeling very mindful.

The Family Bed Minus Mom

But then I took a deep breath and looked at my charges.  Here was my family all comfy in one (not-so) big bed -- the sinewy young lady with the red streak in her just-cut hair, limbs splayed out, at peace, the puppy, on his back (and miraculously NOT snoring), four legs pointed straight up to the ceiling, snoozing away.  I could be tired perhaps but how could I be grumpy?  It sure felt like we were all exactly where we were supposed to be.  

The Death of Foom

Kanha -- aka Ya, a nickname a mother could never love -- got me my favorite Christmas present ever this year.  I know - because you sense I'm such a spiritual, non-materialistic type, because you know my favorite get-away in 2011 was a mother/daughter seminar at the Omega Institute in October involving tent cabins (brrrr), because you heard my previous favorite gift was a pipecleaner sculpture that forms the "letters" Y "heart" M-- you think the gift was emotional and a bit esoteric.  Perhaps a picture of her water skiing for the first time last summer or a pamphlet of poems she wrote as a third grader.

But you would be wrong.  It was, and is, an actual thing that she paid money -- her own money -- for.  A $50 spin-hair dryer.

The best Christmas present ever

A small item, advertised on TV, cheaply made, simple in idea and construction.  Ahh, but oh so life-changing for its recipient.  You see, when I was an adolescent, not too much older than Kanha is now, my hair had received its own private descriptor among my friends -- fooming.

fooming Marge

While I can no longer remember who originated the term or exactly why, I knew what it meant -- a levitation of every last one of my both wavy AND wiry -- doesn't that seem a little unfair? -- blondish-brown hairs that created their own independent atmosphere around my head.  Think of Silly String that spews wildly from a can, in a less outrageous color but far more electric.

I had this type of hair in a day before blow-dryers and curling irons, in an era the only solution for out-of-control frizz was to wrap sections of your hair in one direction all the way around your head, carefully secure i
them with bobby pins, and then wait for at least eight hours for the hair to fully dry,which I religiously did every weekend.  The resulting "do" was definitely less wild but fell unevenly on each side of my face, as if I had a hidden fork holding up one side of my hair.

Fork-lifted hair

Suffice it to say, it was not heading me for selection as Westwood High School's next prom queen.

While over the last 30+ years my "foom" has never disappeared, I have taken advantage of the plethora of drying, curling, and straightening appliances that have become available along with the conditioners, mousses, creams, and gels, and I've listened to the advice of at least a dozen hairdressers.  All have combined to help bring my hair somewhat under control.  But it has never had that soft shiny bounce, that insouciant flair that Westwood High's popular girls pulled off when they tossed their heads.

That is, not until last week.  The day after Christmas, Kanha and I gathered in my bathroom after I had taken a shower and my hair was a half-dry, messy conglomeration of brittle curls just waiting to plant themselves scalpside for the duration.  But, alas, we had our spin dryer.  She plugged it in, turned it on, pressed the button to begin the brush twirling and all of a sudden those crunchy, unlovable curls -- I can admit it now, now that they're gone -- were subsumed into submission, automatically gently stretching out as they wound around the brush, slowly transforming into that beautiful bouncy, still blondish brown (every girl of 50+ needs a little help...) wave I'd dreamed of for so long.  I just loved to watch my new little toy -- I didn't want Kanha to stop.  But eventually all my hair was dry and stop she did.  I shook my head like you used to see on those Breck commercials and my hair just bobbed softly into place.

Breck girl

Breck girl -- side view

I could have sworn I heard the sound of a balloon slowly losing air as my "foom" gasped its last breath.  I smiled, not even able to conjure one tiny tear for its demise.