When I open the back screen door, I notice
the three swathes of duck tape that keep the mosquitos out of Grandma’s house. I think those were adhered on that same
screen in 1884 when Grandma Lovejoy’s uncles, Abby and Herman Shram, first
bought this place.
I find my mom in an apron making pumpkin
cookies, a quintuple batch. She wants to
send a few over to the boys next store to thank them for taking Santi, Kelly,
and I for a boat ride (and to insure they keep chopping wood, changing lights,
and helping with the flag pole).
I pose for a few pictures with the batter
and learn in the process that the way to scoop the cookie dough onto the sheet
pan is to use two spoons—one to scoop the batter and the other to scrape the
spoon—that way they all come out the same size and cook evenly.
I talk mom into taking a break and we take
our places, each in an orange rocker with our Behling toes elevated on the
orange matching footstools. I am buzzing
from the second cup of Folger’s coffee I just made, Mom is buzzing from her
non-stop IV drip of Mountain Dew and Vernors.
She takes 18 pills with her soft drinks.
“I quit my anti-depressants after 17 years
and Dr. Harding has me taking homeopathics.”
Taking a sip of my caffeinated java, I am
almost hyper and respond enthusiastically, “I am so happy for you, can I take a
picture of your pill box? How do you
feel? And why does the kitchen buzzer go
off every ten minutes?”
“I have to take a different pill ten
minutes before I eat and ten minutes after I take a drink. I don’t want to forget. I feel the same as I felt before.”
“Have I told you about my orphanage
project? I started volunteering at a
private orphanage in Colombia. I would
happily take three or five or nine kids home if I could, but foreigners aren’t aloud to adopt and so
I am just hoping that one falls out of the sky into my lap.”
“You know Grandma Lovejoy’s brother, who
was really her cousin Alt, was adopted.”
I quickly grab the Post Its to work on my
family tree. Isn’t there a soft ware or
an app for this I wonder. Oh wait,
there is no wifi here, but still, even a family tree Mad Lib would be better
than me trying to figure out how many generations it has been since Charlie
Stalker adopted Alt. The bigger question
is why do Grandma’s great grand kids, ie me and Kari and Alt’s great grand
kids, who have a beautiful cabin across the river not have canoe races across
the channel or play hearts at night. In
fact, why don’t we even know each other’s name.
I reach for another post it to ask Grandma when she wakes up.
“So, mom” I say, changing the subject quickly
thanx to the Folgers. “I have a ten
point plan for my Sabbatical. 1. Be present to Santi when he crawls, walks,
talks, and potty train him asap. 2. Have another baby. 3.
Free thousands of babies from Colombia’s welfare system. 4. Write a memoir. 5. Grow the Ashram 6. Start a consulting
business. 7. Lose 20 pounds and earn
$200,000 a year 8. Rest, hike, nap, go to the spa 9. Take a salsa and Spanish class
each week and 10. Remove barriers to
love. (Maybe I should add Fashion to number seven, which is basically fitness,
finances and fashion maintenance).
“When will you know what country you are
going to next?” she asks leaning her arms on the rocker’s scratched wooden arm.
“December fifth. It will likely be Haiti, which means I won’t
impregnate myself until March 2014.”
“Haiti is a hell hole. Don’t go there. There are too many diseases, voodoo,
witchcraft, AIDS galore.”
I grab yesterday’s Wall Street Journal and
write quote that down word for word.
Grandma spends 15 minutes listening to Rush Limbaugh on her radio appropriately bashing Weiner for sending lewd texts before she
walks in with her cane and sits in the matron rocking chair. It has a darker wood, a built in footstool
and a matching orange floral print.
“When are you going to potty train that
boy?” She asks pointing at Santi and
unaware that she asked me the same question six minutes ago. “My mother used to wash every diaper, even
the wet ones, by hand the second she discovered it was wet. I just can’t believe that people wait until
their kids are two or three to potty train them. These new diapers are awful. The Indians used to fill the bottom of their
papus with leaves and branches and just let them go in there until they too got
the new diapers and now, if you go into some parts of Canada the trees are full
of plastic diapers that the Indians just threw away.”
I decide this is as good a time as any to
reinitiate Elimination Communication which I can finally call infant potty
training and get Santi out of diapers by one, like Kelly’s son. I grab a cooking pot from a hook on the wall
and agree with grandma to start now.
“You are right Grandma. It is a shame. I will potty train Santi here at Neebish,
just like your mother potty trained Brent.
I remember Brent sitting on a potty right here in front of the TV 35
years ago.” I hope to distract her as I take Santi’s diaper off and hold him
over the silver cooking pot.
My mom worries that Santi will poop on the
floor and pulls out a sheet to put underneath the pot.
“Amy and Kelly, please keep the print side
up. Every time you use this, fold the
print side in so that the unprinted side is what gets dirty and the clean side
stays clean.”
I translate into Spanish for Kelly and Grandma chimes in
with another story she repeats every hour or so.
“Your aunt Linda took FOUR years of Spanish
in college and she can’t remember a word.
If you don’t use it you lose it.” She adds holding up four fingers to
emphasize the years that Linda studied.
I have checked this fact with Aunt Linda
and it isn’t true but I don’t counter her, each time she repeats her self I
pretend it is the first time she has said this, because she believes it is.
I turn to my mom and grandma and ask them
if they can think of 50 words in Spanish between the two of them. Grandma starts, “I can count to ten. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete,
nueve.” She stops before saying
“Dies.” “I took a few classes in high
school.”
I translate for Kelly explaining that 70
years ago my grandma studied a little Spanish. My mom joins the game, “Agua,
Amigo, Rio Grande, Muchachos.”
“How do you know all that Spanish?” Grandma
asks dumbfounded. “Where is my Spanish
English dictionary, I used to have one.
I had another book you should read, a classic called Nutrition and the
Physical Degeneration by Westin Price copyright 1934. It was put together by two dentists who
traveled the world taking pictures of the native’s teeth while asking them
about their diets. They found that the second you stop eating what grows
locally you age 50 years. Where is that book?”
My mom continues, quite impressively while
I count each word and encourage her to get to 50, “Nino, nina, ninos, ninas,
escuela, biblia, adios, hola.”
“What is this infection that I have? What is it called? Why don’t we know anything about it?” Grandma
gasps. I get up and check the World Book
Encyclopedia, first I grab the letter D to see if I can figure out what year
disposable diapers entered the market and how much damage they have done to the
environment. (Note to self: I really
should use cloth diapers even when we are traveling.)
Next, I grab the C volume to see if it
describes “Clostridium difficle Infection.”
My mom interrupts. You don’t need
to check the dictionary we have a whole paper on it laying on her dresser. I walk in her room, reluctant to touch
anything and glance at the paper:
“Clostridium difficles is an important
hospital acquired pathogen, because it is recognized as a major cause of
diarrhea in hospital patients. This
infection is associated with antibiotic use and environmental contamination: it
affects mainly the elderly,” states the first paragraph of a three page
document. I decide not to pick it up and
head back to the front room.
“Grandma what word would you use to
describe each of your five kids?”
“Well, I always wanted six. I wanted a big
family. My sister and I were seven and a
half years apart,” she starts. Leaning in she hollers in that cross word puzzle
voice, “I felt like an only child. The
gap was too big.”
“What word would you use to describe my
mom?”
“Your mom?
You don’t know her like I do.
Your mom is….Industrious.”
“Gary?”
“Outgoing.”
“Linda?”
“When Linda was little she would walk up to
strangers and say "I is Linda."”
“What adjective would you use?”
“Oh I don’t know?”
Bonnie?
My mother and grandma say in unison,
“Smart.”
Danny?
“Danny hasn’t had a bit of sugar, not one
bite since his asma got so bad he had to be on a respirator. Danny doesn’t eat any sugar. He is coming tomorrow to visit us. They are all good at math.”
(I haven’t seen my 57-year-old uncle Danny
in ten or maybe 20 years. This will
probably be the only time I see him outside of Grandma’s funeral in my life.
I turn to my mom, “What word would you use
to describe Grandma?”
Getting up from her rocker to scoop more
pumpkin batter on to the cookie sheets Mom says, “I don’t like games like this.
I have work to do.”
“I was too easy going,” grandma continues,
“I let them get away with everything. My
mistake was letting a roaming husband roam.
But look where I am now, where did that get me, they are all dead now
and I am alive.” She explains still
angry about when Grandpa Ben left her and didn’t help support her as she raised
five kids on her World Book commissions.
I opt to look at old family photos with
Grandma and let the game go. What word
would I use for each of my siblings?
Brent—Daredevil. Kari, loving. Amy, intense.
Julie, fun.
I ask my mom. For Brent she says, “Careful.” For Julie, She
chooses “Whimsical.” Kari, “Practical.” For me, “Unique.”
I pull my rocker over to grandma and lay
the album on her lap. My mind
immediately turns to the three boxes of photos, cards, and ticket stubs I just
threw out. I feel a pin prick in my
heart and regret it. My grandma has two
photo albums at Neebish. One is of
postcards sent and received in the early 1900s and the other of family black and white photos.
We stop on a black and white picture of
Doris, when she was three-years-old (1929), with Maggie Lovejoy standing in front of
their first Ford. “What year did cars
become main stream?” I ask her.
“Henry” Ford invented them in 1900.”
“I get up and walk back to the World
Books. Should I use C for car or A for
Automobile?” I ask Grandma
When I open the back screen door, I notice
the three swathes of duck tape that keep the mosquitos out of Grandma’s house. I think those were adhered on that same
screen in 1884 when Grandma Lovejoy’s uncles, Abby and Herman Shram, first
bought this place.
I find my mom in an apron making pumpkin
cookies, a quintuple batch. She wants to
send a few over to the boys next store to thank them for taking Santi, Kelly,
and I for a boat ride (and to insure they keep chopping wood, changing lights,
and helping with the flag pole).
I pose for a few pictures with the batter
and learn in the process that the way to scoop the cookie dough onto the sheet
pan is to use two spoons—one to scoop the batter and the other to scrape the
spoon—that way they all come out the same size and cook evenly.
I talk mom into taking a break and we take
our places, each in an orange rocker with our Behling toes elevated on the
orange matching footstools. I am buzzing
from the second cup of Folger’s coffee I just made, Mom is buzzing from her
non-stop IV drip of Mountain Dew and Vernors.
She takes 18 pills with her soft drinks.
“I quit my anti-depressants after 17 years
and Dr. Harding has me taking homeopathics.”
Taking a sip of my caffeinated java, I am
almost hyper and respond enthusiastically, “I am so happy for you, can I take a
picture of your pill box? How do you
feel? And why does the kitchen buzzer go
off every ten minutes?”
“I have to take a different pill ten
minutes before I eat and ten minutes after I take a drink. I don’t want to forget. I feel the same as I felt before.”
“Have I told you about my orphanage
project? I started volunteering at a
private orphanage in Colombia. I would
happily take three or five or nine, but foreigners aren’t aloud to adopt and so
I am just hoping that one falls out of the sky into my lap.”
“You know Grandma Lovejoy’s brother, who
was really her cousin Alt, was adopted.”
I quickly grab the Post Its to work on my
family tree. Isn’t there a soft ware or
an app for this, I wonder. Oh wait,
there is no wifi here, but still, even a family tree Mad Lib would be better
than me trying to figure out how many generations it has been since Charlie
Stalker adopted Alt. The bigger question
is why do Grandma’s great grand kids, ie me and Kari and Alt’s great grand
kids, who have a beautiful cabin across the river not have canoe races across
the channel or play hearts at night. In
fact, why don’t we even know each other’s name.
I reach for another post it to ask Grandma when she wakes up.
“So, mom” I say, changing the subject quickly
thanx to the Folgers. “I have a ten
point plan for my Sabbatical. 1. Be present to Santi when he crawls, walks,
talks, and potty train him asap. 2. Have another baby. 3.
Free thousands of babies from Colombia’s welfare system. 4. Write a memoir. 5. Grow the Ashram 6. Start a consulting
business. 7. Lose 20 pounds and earn
$200,000 8. Rest, hike, nap, go to the spa 9. Take a salsa and Spanish class
each week and 10. Remove barriers to
love. (Maybe I should add Fashion to number seven, which is basically fitness,
finances and fashion maintenance).
“When will you know what country you are
going to next?” she asks leaning her arms on the rocker’s scratched wooden arm.
“December fifth. It will likely be Haiti, which means I won’t
impregnate myself until March 2014.”
“Haiti is a hell hole. Don’t go there. There are too many diseases, voodoo,
witchcraft, AIDS galore.”
I grab yesterday’s Wall Street Journal and
write that down word for word.
Grandma spends 15 minutes listening to Rush
on her radio appropriately bashing Weiner for sending lewd texts before she
walks in with her cane and sits in the matron rocking chair. It has a darker wood, a built in footstool
and a matching orange floral print.
“When are you going to potty train that
boy?” She asks pointing at Santi and
unaware that she asked me the same question six minutes ago. “My mother used to wash every diaper, even
the wet ones, by hand the second she discovered it was wet. I just can’t believe that people wait until
their kids are two or three to potty train them. These new diapers are awful. The Indians used to fill the bottom of their
papus with leaves and branches and just let them go in there until they too got
the new diapers and now, if you go into some parts of Canada the trees are full
of plastic diapers that the Indians just threw away.”
I decide this is as good a time as any to
reinitiate Elimination Communication which I can finally call infant potty
training and get Santi out of diapers by one, like Kelly’s son. I grab a cooking pot from a hook on the wall
and agree with grandma to start now.
“You are right Grandma. It is a shame. I will potty train Santi here at Neebish,
just like your mother potty trained Brent.
I remember Brent sitting on a potty right here in front of the TV 35
years ago.” I hope to distract her as I take Santi’s diaper off and hold him
over the silver cooking pot.
My mom worries that Santi will poop on the
floor and pulls out a sheet to put underneath the pot.
“Amy and Kelly, please keep the print side
up. Every time you use this, fold the
print side in so that the unprinted side is what gets dirty and the clean side
stays clean.”
I translate for Kelly and grandma chimes in
with another story she repeats every hour or so.
“Your aunt Linda took FOUR years of Spanish
in college and she can’t remember a word.
If you don’t use it you lose it.” She adds holding up four fingers to
emphasize the years that Linda studied.
I have checked this fact with Aunt Linda
and it isn’t true but I don’t counter her, each time she repeats her self I
pretend it is the first time she has said this, because she believes it is.
I turn to my mom and grandma and ask them
if they can think of 50 words in Spanish between the two of them. Grandma starts, “I can count to ten. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete,
nueve.” She stops before saying
“Dies.” “I took a few classes in high
school.”
I translate for Kelly explaining that 70
years ago my grandma studied a little Spanish. My mom joins the game, “Agua,
Amigo, Rio Grande, Muchachos.”
“How do you know all that Spanish?” Grandma
asks dumbfounded. “Where is my Spanish
English dictionary, I used to have one.
I had another book you should read, a classic called Nutrition and the
Physical Degeneration by Westin Price copyright 1934. It was put together by two dentists who
traveled the world taking pictures of the native’s teeth while asking them
about their diets. They found that the second you stop eating what grows
locally you age 50 years. Where is that book?”
My mom continues, quite impressively while
I count each word and encourage her to get to 50, “Nino, nina, ninos, ninas,
escuela, biblia, adios, hola.”
“What is this infection that I have? What is it called? Why don’t we know anything about it?” Grandma
gasps. I get up and check the World Book
Encyclopedia, first I grab the letter D to see if I can figure out what year
disposable diapers entered the market and how much damage they have done to the
environment. (Note to self: I really
should get Kelly back on cloth diapers even when we are traveling. Am I a pushover?)
Next, I grab the C volume to see if it
describes “Clostridium difficle Infection.”
My mom interrupts. You don’t need
to check the dictionary we have a whole paper on it laying on her dresser. I walk in her room, reluctant to touch
anything and glance at the paper:
“Clostridium difficles is an important
hospital acquired pathogen, because it is recognized as a major cause of
diarrhea in hospital patients. This
infection is associated with antibiotic use and environmental contamination: it
affects mainly the elderly,” states the first paragraph of a three page
document. I decide not to pick it up and
head back to the front room.
“Grandma what word would you use to
describe each of your five kids?”
“Well, I always wanted six. I wanted a big
family. My sister and I were seven and a
half years apart,” she starts. Leaning in she hollers in that cross word puzzle
voice, “I felt like an only child. The
gap was too big.”
“What word would you use to describe my
mom?”
“Your mom?
You don’t know her like I do.
Your mom is….Industrious.”
“Gary?”
“Outgoing.”
“Linda?”
“When Linda was little she would walk up to
strangers and say I is Linda.”
“What adjective would you use?”
“Oh I don’t know?”
Bonnie?
My mother and grandma say in unison,
“Smart.”
Danny?
“Danny hasn’t had a bit of sugar, not one
bite since his asma got so bad he had to be on a respirator. Danny doesn’t eat any sugar. He is coming tomorrow to visit us. They are all good at math.”
(I haven’t seen my 57 year-old uncle Danny
in ten or maybe 20 years. This will
probably be the only time I see him outside of Grandma’s funeral in my life.
I turn to my mom, “What word would you use
to describe Grandma?”
Getting up from her rocker to scoop more
pumpkin batter on to the cookie sheets Mom says, “I don’t like games like this.
I have work to do.”
“I was too easy going,” grandma continues,
“I let them get away with everything. My
mistake was letting a roaming husband roam.
But look where I am now, where did that get me, they are all dead now
and I am alive.” She explains still
angry about when Grandpa Ben left her and didn’t help support her as she raised
five kids on her World Book commissions.
I opt to look at old family photos with
Grandma and let the game go. What word
would I use for each of my siblings?
Brent—Daredevil. Kari, loving. Amy, intense.
Julie, fun.
I ask my mom. For Brent she says, “Careful.” For Julie, She
chooses “Whimsical.” Kari, “Practical.” For me, “Unique.”
I pull my rocker over to grandma and lay
the album on her lap. My mind
immediately turns to the three boxes of photos, cards, and ticket stubs I just
threw out. I feel a pin prick in my
heart and regret it. My grandma has two
photo albums at Neebish. One is of
postcards and the other of family black and white photos.
We stop on a black and white picture of
Doris, when she was three (1929), with Maggie Lovejoy standing in front of
their first Ford. “What year did cars
become main stream?” I ask her.
“Henry” Ford invented them in 1900.”
“I get up and walk back to the World
Books. Should I use C for car or A for
Automobile?” I ask grandma
“A for
Automobile.” She directs. Walking to the
Encyclopedia I notice a hummingbird at the feeder.
