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.