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.