The Manic In Me

“You need to calm down,” Wendy, my close friend for thirty-eight years, told me. She knows me well. 

I’m an anxious person on a good day. Bring in the coronavirus and it’s a worry-party in my head.

“I know,” I said. “I just needed to get one last thing.”

“Lemons?!”

“I need them for my chicken marinade.”

“I doubt the market will run out of lemons,” she laughed. 

“Fifteen frigging lemons. What was I thinking?”

                                                _________________________

It was last Thursday, the day the Coronavirus panic really started to hit. I’d just dropped Tucker, our puggle, at doggie day care bright and early. Hank and I kept our plan to fly to Park City that morning. I was uneasy, though. We didn’t need to go. Alerts on the phone had been hour-by-hour the past several days. Yet, I was still in that denial phase. The media is overblowing this whole thing…I take care of myself…have always wiped everything down…

A bad feeling had come over me, though, after the Oval Office speech the night before. The powers-that-be had no plan or real grasp of the pandemic at this point, or how to deal with the growing numbers of infected citizens. And, seemingly, no real designated plan to help stop the spread of it. 

“I can’t go,” I told Hank when I came through the door with Tucker’s leash in hand.

“Totally fine,” he’d said. “I’ll call Delta.”

Hank came into the bedroom some time later. “Delta’s phone line is jammed. Tells you it’s the right decision.”

I was talking to my sister, April, on the phone. “Heath, you’ve always had good intuition,” she chimed in. “Follow it.”

“I hate to be an alarmist,” I’d told her, “but this thing is mounting. Hank and I are in the 60-plus demographic. And, I don’t have enough food in this house for self-containment!”

“Heath, you only eat lettuce,” April teased. “and maybe some chicken. But, Hank. Now, he needs food.”

First stop was a market on the LA’s west-side that has the best meat in the city. I got there early, sure to be ahead of the game. Who was I kidding? I was greeted with a harried parking attendant wearing a surgical mask directing traffic in a jammed parking lot. 

Inside, mayhem. Like every market since, it was cart-to-cart in the tiny aisles, empty shelves and this one was down to two packages of chicken! Horrors! What will I do?

Next, was another market closer to home. Same scene. Shoppers scrambling as if they were on “Supermarket Sweep” filling their carts to the brim, items stacked high like building blocks.

The rain had been pouring steadily that Thursday, the 12^th and I’d noticed a leak from the driver’s side window panel in my car separating the window from the windshield. Now my jeans were soaked. 

My car is less than six months old. A leak already? A call into the dealership and I got a slot and a “courtesy” rental car. 

“You mean, I don’t have to book days out like usual?”

“Right now,” she said, “it’s a ghost town in here.”  

I left the dealership at 5:45pm in my “courtesy” rental headed home. Wait, I thought. One more stop. Manic me. There’s always one more stop: the lemons! How can I make my marinade without them?

I headed to Ralph’s on Colorado Blvd. across from The Norton Simon Museum. The rain hadn’t let up and not a spot to be found in the lot except one in the annexed part against a wall on the far side of the market. I grabbed my credit card and car keys and dashed to the entrance; the hood of my raincoat soaked, dripping rain drops onto my face as I pulled it back entering the store.

I navigated my way through the crowd of shoppers to the produce department. There they were. Lemons. Beckoning me as if they were framed in Instagram hearts. 

A friend spotted me in line at check-out. “Ok,” she said, “Let me get this straight,” she laughed. “You are in thisline here for lemons?”

“It’s a thing,” I told her, only slightly embarrassed.  “Gotta have ‘em. I forgot them earlier.”

Fifteen minutes later, I returned to my rental car. The window had been smashed, glass everywhere. My handbag, gone.

Drenched in the downpour, I stood in disbelief. No way. Why the hell had I left my purse in the car?! Sh**t, I know better. The whole day had been a day where nothing seemed routine or normal. Still…

A man two cars away glanced over at the shattered window and the sea of glass at my feet. “My God, are you ok?”

“Yeah,” I lied.  “Just rattled. Did you see anyone do this?”

“No.” He was carrying two bags of groceries. “I’m so sorry.”

I reached into the car carefully, avoiding the chards framing the window to retrieve my phone which they hadn’t taken and called my husband, Hank, at home just a few miles away.

“Call the police to make a report. I’ll be right there.”

“Ma’am,” said the operator. “We’re a bit busy right now. It’ll be a while.”

It’s a rainy night at rush hour. Of course.

“At least this has made me forget about the Coronavirus,” I told Hank when he arrived. He pulled a parka for me from his car after I’d told him that I was cold.

Assessing the scene, he went back home to retrieve a long brush and a dustpan. “We’ll need it to clean up the car after the police see the damage.”

After standing under the covered entrance to the market a little over an hour, Officer Armendariz from the Pasadena PD arrived. 

 “I’m so sorry to make you wait out here,” he’d said. “Just got off a home burglary.”

He pointed his long police flashlight into the vehicle as I told him what had happened.

“My wallet had everything. My drivers license, credit cards, two debit cards,” I told him.  “Ugh, I never carry that much with me. I just switched wallets.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets to warm them, adding, “Been calling the credit card companies and the banks while I’ve been waiting.”

“Good. You have much cash?”

“Hmmm, maybe a hundred?” I told him, as he picked up the heavy-duty dustpan and brush to clean the glass after the Police report. “Losing all that. That’s not my worry. I’m scared the thief is going to rob our house now that he or she has my address.”

Officer Armendariz cleared the shards from the window frame. “Just keep an eye out for the weeks to come.”

“Scares me,” I replied.

“Look," he said, standing to face me, holding the brush. “I work the Homeless Outreach Program here in Pasadena. Most of these type thefts are for cash. You’re probable alright. Just be diligent.”

“We’ve an alarm, lighting…Heck, it’s lights, camera, action if an intruder comes to our house at night. But they have their ways…” I stopped, looking at him hunched over inside the car, broom and dustpan in hand. “Wait, Officer, you don’t need to clean all of that glass.”

He wouldn’t hear of it, as he finished up the seat and the floorboard. “It’s fine. Just doing my job.” 

A younger woman whose car was parked next to my rental, hesitated eyeing the policeman. Her cart was overflowing with bags. “Hey, what happened?” she asked me.

“Someone broke into my car.”

“What’d you have on the front seat? Toilet paper?”

I burst out laughing. “Thank you… God, needed that!”

“No, seriously,” she said, smiling. “It’s nuts in there.” 

Once the police report was complete, the glass cleaned up, I backed out and turned onto Colorado Blvd. As my headlights sliced through the early evening darkness in my now-open-air rental, I checked my rearview mirror. With no one behind me, I slowed to 25. I needed to take this all in. Something the Officer had said: “These are difficult times. Desperate people do desperate things.” “And,” he’d added, “it may get worse.”

Did I really need fifteen goddamn lemons? Had I gone that crazy? Caught up in the I’ve gotta have this! And, I need that?

I pulled into the garage and as instructed, opened the car door carefully to avoid loose glass inside the frame. Ahh, I thought. Nothing.

I closed the car door and a cascade of loosened glass fell to the garage floor. 

Once again, I stood fixed on the glass as if it were tea leaves warning me to pause.

Life is as fragile as this glass. 

Calm down, Heather. Calm the f**k down. 

Be diligent.

Be cautious.

Don’t be selfish. 

          With that, you will know that you are doing your best.

***A shout out to Officer Armendariz in the Field Operations Division of the Pasadena Police Department. Thank you, Officer, for your kindness. 

And, for your service to our community.  

What Would You Do If You Were Dating Him?

“Just leave! Go away!” the woman skiing close by me yells at a man I think must be her husband. “Leave me alone! Stop telling me what to do!”

It’s early and the snow is piste, a European term for the smoothly groomed slopes this woman is chopping up as she snowplows through a switchback to navigate the easier intermediate blue-grade slope. This couple look to be about my age, in their early sixties. Hard to tell, though, behind a helmet and googles. The husband’s clearly an expert skier, swishing up beside her in in a perfect parallel while she, dressed to the nines in high-end Bogner, is hunched over with her skis in a pizza slice.

“Just use your edges, honey,” he tells her, calmly.

“Goddamn it!” she yells. “Leave me alone. Look at that woman,” she says, pointing to me with her pole. “No one’s telling her what to do. And she’s the same as me!”         

            Swell I think. I’m that bad? 

“Her skis are parallel,” he says. “But she is slow like you.”

Do they think that I can’t hear all this?       

“I’ll just follow her then,” she says.  “You go away!”

            I slow to let them pass as she loses control and takes a tumble, landing on her rear with the tips of her skis, fortunately, facing uphill. 

Her husband leans down to give her a hand.  

“Stop! Just let me just do this by myself! I don’t need you!”

            I cringe. I can’t believe how she talks to this guy. 

“Alright,” he says, raising his voice and withdrawing his gloved hand, leaving her seated in the snow. “See you at 3:30 then!” With that, he dashes down the slope leaving a dusting of snow in his wake.

She rights herself, brushing off her snappy red ski pants, then, jams her poles into the hard-packed snow. “Son-of-a-bitch!”

“You ok?” I call to her.           

“Fine,” she says. “He pisses me off. That’s all. I don’t want to ski with him. He finally got me back out here and I’m miserable.”     

            She skies down a few feet to me, sliding onto the front of my skis to stop. 

            I try to cheer her up. “I get it. I only do a few runs with my husband. That was your husband, right?”

            “Oh, he’s my husband, all right,” she says, inching her skis back off my tips. “And, your husband’s fine with that? He doesn’t want to ski with you?”

“Not really, to be honest. I’m too chicken to ski where he goes. He learned that time he took me down a hard blue run that stranded me, paralyzed. An instructor skied by and offered to help me down. That did it!” I laughed. “I mean, he’ll take a run or two with me on my own little slopes then, he’s off and I’m thrilled. I know he’s trying to be nice, but I can tell he’s itching to go to the more challenging slopes. We meet for lunch. It’s perfect for us.”

“My husband wants to teach me to ski better,” she says. “Where I really want to be back at the lodge. On the deck. Having a hot toddy!”

“I get it. You don’t want to be forced to do something that you’re not comfortable with,” I say as we move down the mountain. 

“It’s not that. He’s just hovers  and it makes me crazy. I like the ski clothes, though,” she adds.

“You look great, I must say.”

“I may have the outfit,” she replies, “but I feel like shit. I like the beginner slopes and that’s where I want to stay.”

“Look, you seem around my age. Here we are, out here in these clunky boots, schlepping on and off the lifts.”

“Yeah,” she says. “He should be thankful I’m up here with him.”

            “And you should be thankful he wants you up here with him.”

“I guess,” she sighs.

“You know what I discovered about skiing at 63?” I ask as we begin to move down the slope. She’s slows down behind me, hands gripped to the poles, pizza-pie skis. 

“What?” she calls. “Tell me something good about skiing.”

“On a ski lift is the only time my mind goes quiet. I’m not a nature person, but the beauty of the scenery. The wind whistling through the trees. It calms me.”

“I can get that kind of calm in the spa!” she calls out. “I’m screwed. My husband loves skiing. He wants me to love it, too.”

I slow my pace. My mind travels back to when I used to complain to my mother about Hank wanting me to go with him some place I didn’t want to go. Mostly, it was work trips. “Do I need to be there?” I asked him. 

“What would you do if you were dating him?” Mom asked.

“I’m not, Mom. We’ve been married 30 years. I don’t have to do all this.”

“Oh, really?” she said. “Well, someone out there would love to do these things with him.” My mom had been married three times, divorced twice, and had learned never to take a good man’s love for granted. It sounds old fashioned in many ways today, but it’s advice. It’s important to recognize the people in our lives who love us and cut them some slack. Mom had a way of bringing me around. “You’ve got it wired with this guy. He’s one of the good ones,” she told me. “Don’t screw it up by being complacent.  You’re lucky he still wants to be with you, you fool.”

The truth was, I wanted to be with him, too. But I’d gotten spoiled living in my little bubble, going only where it suited me. 

“Never get complacent,” my mother warned. “It’s the kiss of death.”

            “And, neither should he!” I said back to her.

“He’s not. He wants you to be with him.”    Her words always stopped me in my tracks. Now, she’s gone but her voice is with me as Hank and I move into our forty-first year of marriage. I no longer have to be reminded because I know now what I have.  That’s the great thing about aging. You’ve been around, seen a few things and know when what you ‘ve got is pretty damn good.

“Why don’t you ask him to go to the spa with you after skiing?” I call over to her. “Your turn to pick the event.”  

It’s the first time I see her crimson lips smile. “Hmmm. There’s a thought.”

            “Look, what would you do if you were dating him?”

            “What? Oh, shit,” she says, catching herself before she falls again.

            “What would you do if you were dating him? That’s what my mother always said to me when I’d complain.”

            She hunches over, concentrating on a turn. “Wow, there’s one way to look at it.”

            “Your husband seems like a nice guy.”

            “Yeah, he is. What else did your mother say?”

            “Don’t get complacent. It’s the kiss of death.”

            She laughs and I’m not sure what she’s thinking. We round the curve past the yellow sign indicating “Easier Route” when I spot her husband waiting below. So much for 3:30. We both come to a halt, the tips of her skis crossing.  

            She looks at me through mirrored goggles. “I can’t even remember when we dated. We’ve been married forever.”

“And he still wants to be with you. To do things.”

            She nods. 

“There you are!” her husband calls. “I was worried sick. I’m sorry I left like that. I shouldn’t have…”

She looks down at him and then back at me. “I’m Cheryl, by the way.”

“I’m Heather. Nice to meet you, Cheryl.”

She shoves off, making her way down to meet her husband.

The Best Gift Ever

I debated taking the tree down on Christmas Eve. It was one of those holidays…

At 2:45 on Christmas Eve, I woke to the sound of my husband, Hank, coughing. When did this come on?

“You ok, Hank?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I just started coughing. So weird.”

We’d gone to bed around 11:00pm, having cleaned up the kitchen after having our close friends over for our traditional December 23^rd dinner. Hank had been in good form then. Wine. Food. Laughter. We’d had a great time.

But, as the sun came up on Christmas Eve, Hank was no better. In fact, worse.

“We’re going to Urgent Care as soon as it opens,” I insisted.

Once they saw him, they sent us to the ER. Hank had Pneumonia. 

“I just looked at your chart,” Marilyn, the ER nurse, told my husband. “Hey, all things considered, you look remarkably good!” she’d laughed. “Not the pneumonia patient I expected.”

“First,” she continued, pulling up a chair and taking a seat close to his bed, “I want to be steady when I put in your IV.”  She’d made us smile with her antics.

I zipped up my puffer jacket against the cold of the ER and pulled my chair closer to Hank where he lay scrolling through his phone. He actually did look pretty good for a guy with pneumonia. Looks can be deceiving, though, and he needed a strong antibiotic. I reached over to tuck the warm blanket under his feet while trying to avoid the flimsy curtain separating us in a bay next to a young woman who’d drunk two bottles of wine and needed a CT scan.

This was not our typical Christmas Eve…

Earlier, our daughter-in-law, Anna, had swung by SoulCycle and taken a picture of our granddaughter, Grace, with one of Hank’s favorite spin-class teachers and the behind-the-desk squad at that location to cheer him up. Our son, Allan, had offered to come by the hospital. 

“No way!” I’d told him.  “Your place is with Grace and Anna. We’re fine.”

Still, I worried. What if the blood test revealed something? What if the EKG…? The mind goes wild when you’re awaiting test results.

Relief flooded me at 4:45pm when Hank was released with a prescription in hand. They’d caught the pneumonia early and he wouldn’t have to stay the night. 

“He’s strong,” Dr. Vargas had said. “He just needs to be on antibiotics and ride this out.”

We headed home, our Christmas Eve plans to see our kids shelved, I dropped Hank and set off to Gelson’s for take-out soup and to fill his prescription.

I’d only driven two blocks when Hank called. “Forget Gelson’s. Allan and Anna left homemade soup on the doorstep and a couple presents to open tonight.”

I pulled over to read Allan’s text to me. “Mom, we just wanted to do something for you.”

My heart was heavy as I passed by festive houses on the way to Rite Aid. I could see people shadows against lit windows. I passed a row of sedans with backseats occupied as I waited to cross the boulevard.  A woman in velvet pants and a sparkly top hopped out of her car to grab a last-minute something at the market, her husband waiting with the car in idle. 

I felt alone. What many must feel on Christmas. I thought about the many happy Christmases I’d celebrated. Maybe, while I’d been seated at a table with family each year, someone like me, tonight, was out there. Perhaps they’d driven by a house like mine, lit up, seeing people shadows in the window. 

Remember this feeling, I thought. Remember this.

Christmas morning, we ate our breakfast at the dining room table.  The kitchen island seemed too ordinary for a Christmas morning.

We took our usual places, seated at opposite ends of the table.  “Oh my God,” I’d laughed, eyeing the Los Angeles Times by Hank’s plate. “We’re like one of those couples in a 1940’s movie at opposite ends of a dining room table.”

“With no one in-between,” he’d added.

“I know.”

Picking up my fork, I’d added with a cheery lilt: “Well, here we are!”

“I’m so sorry…” he started.

“Stop! You didn’t ask for this. I’m just sorry that you’re not feeling well. That you don’t get to see any of your children or your first grandchild on her first Christmas.”

But, by late Christmas morning I was feeling sad. 

“Hank, I’ve an idea. I’m going to deliver the gifts to the kids. Then, we can FaceTime back here while we exchange gifts. Heck, If I’d thought of that earlier, we could have had breakfast with them, too!”

Hank insisted on loading the car and alerted the kids that I was already on my way. 

Allan’s house is closest, so it was my first stop. Anna, his wife, a surgeon, wouldn't have me not hold our grandchild, Grace.

“But, Anna, I’m a human petri dish! I’ve been around really sick people. God knows what I may have.”

“Come in this house. Wash your hands and let us hug you! And you,” she’d said, “need to hold your granddaughter, Heath.”

Next stop was Hilary and Oliver’s, just minutes away. Then, I let myself feel the preciousness of the season and of my family and the tears poured. I pulled over on Canyon Drive with the Juniper trees lining the sidewalk front of Hilary’s home in full view, and called my sister, April.

“Heath, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t stop crying, Ape. I don’t know what’s wrong with me?” I took in air between the sobs.  “I can’t stop. Maybe it’s a buildup of a lot of things. I just don’t want Hilary and Oliver to see me like this.”

“You don’t know why you’re crying!? Well, let’s see…Joseph, your youngest, is half-way across the world. You spent eight hours on Christmas Eve in Urgent Care and ER worried about Hank. You go to Rite Aid and the bitch in the elf hat behind the counter there tells you it’s a minute after five, that they are closing, and you need to find a 24-hour pharmacy as she slides the window shade down in your face. Hmmm, and then you find one and there are sixteen people in line ahead of you.”

 “Yikes,” I’d interrupted, “I guess I called you a lot. I’m so sorry to have bothered you…”

“Shut up and let me finish. Then, some woman at CVS behind the counter somehow whips your prescription through in minutes.”

“Cassidy was her name,” I said. “I’d wanted to reach over the counter and hug her. I think I did!”

“Cassidy, right. Ok, then, oh, I don’t know, Heath, you finally get home and your Christmas Eve dinner is a bowl of soup in front of the TV watching Mrs. Maisel when your children are fifteen minutes away spending both nights with their in-laws and not with you.”

I wiped the tears that had gravitated to my chin. “Oh my God, you nailed it. But, April, there are so many people out there who really suffer during the holidays. The homeless, those who’ve lost a loved one. Think of those people. This is nothing.” 

“Yes, true, but this is your something this year. Quit being a martyr and policing yourself. It’s ok to feel like sh**t. Now, go to Hilary’s and call me after. Wait,” she added. One more thing. “You can tell Allan and Anna you had a meltdown. It’s ok!”

Christmas night, Hilary was hosting a gathering at her house. I sat home quietly with Hank, but, at 6:30, the doorbell rang. There she was, bathed in the porch light above. “I slipped away,” she’d said, her coat wrapped tight around dressy black pants, the cream lace of her blouse peeking above her collar of her coat.

 “You didn’t need to do this,” we told her. “You’re hosting!”

 “Traffic was so light from Hollywood,” she commented as she handed Hank a Christmas Tri-tip dinner in a bag. “Oliver cooks,” she smiled. “I just deliver.”

So, today, on this first day of 2020, we celebrate. The antibiotics have kicked in, and Hank is back to himself, having ridden out the holiday on a leather club chair in the den.

Me? 

I’d like to phone in the holiday except for one thing. I got the best gift ever: Perspective. Next year, I won’t be worried about the trivia, the décor, the gifts, the cards, and who goes where. I’ll have that ten-minute drive to Rite Aid to remind me what it felt like to be alone. I’ll remember Cassidy and Marilyn and all those who leave their own families to take care of others. Our children and their spouses, their kindness and love.  Even “the bitch in the elf hat.”

  

For Grace

“It’s like Cheers without the booze,” I tell people of my job at Hodge Podge, the gift section of A Stitch in Time. It’s a gift/needlepoint/knitting shop in San Marino where I work one day a week. There’s something about the female bonding that happens there, the women supporting eachother, that I love.

The thing is, though, I’m lousy at needlepoint. I struggle with a needle and fiber. It takes me eight months just to stitch a holiday ornament no bigger than a luggage tag. 

After working at the shop nearly four years, I attempted a special canvas for my son, Joseph’s, graduation from college. I gave plenty of time to compete it, then, accidentally, I left it on an airplane. My close friend, Wendy, a gifted stitcher, gently took the newly replicated canvas from me. “Let me do it,” she’d said. “I can do it quickly.”

I had to come clean with Joseph. “Wendy did it.”

“Whoa, Mom,” he’d said. “That’s so cool of her. To do this for you.”

“No,” I’d said, “It’s for you.”

“Maybe,” he’d replied. “But she was looking out for you. She knew you needed her help to finish.”

I’d wanted to do something for Wendy in return for her help, to thank her somehow.  “Stop, Heather. It’s not about a tit-for-a-tat. Just accept that I wanted to do this for you to give to Joseph.”

I was humbled by her generosity and I felt the need to give her something in return. I felt uncomfortable and, frankly, undeserved, a byproduct of growing up in a household where attention was scarce. Despite a loving husband and devoted children, I still struggle with self-worth.

Though I continued to attempt needlepoint projects of my own, the truth is, most get sent off to the Philippines where the artisans finish what I am unable to complete. I wish I had the patience for this timeless art dating back to the Egyptians, and the passion to needlepoint as the women at our shop tables. But I do love the finished project!

So, when my first grandchild, Grace, was born on Friday, June 7^th, I called my co-workers at A Stitch in Time where I’d already picked out her stocking with no intention of stitching it myself. 

“Grace!” I told my co-worker, Gina, my voice bursting with joy on the other end of the line.  “She’s here and she’s healthy and her name is Grace!” 

“Congratulations! Such a beautiful name,” she'd replied. “Ok, we’ll send it out right away to get her name painted on her Christmas stocking.”

Time is of the essence on these things. The canvas must be stitched and ready (no easy feat) at the end of September to get to the finisher to do the backing and the trim in time for the stocking to hang on the mantle at Christmastime.

A few weeks ago, three months after Grace’s birth, I was with my co-workers, catching up with eachother before the shop opened.  “I’m in a writing slump,” I told them. “I have random slips of paper with scribbled ideas littering my desk.”

“Don’t worry, you’re gathering your thoughts,” Gina said.

“I’m in my own slump,” another co-worker, Caryn, said, joining Gina behind the waist-high wooden counter. “I haven’t had any inspiration to needlepoint.”

“You?” I asked. “But your work is beautiful, and you love to stitch!” Caryn’s needlework is flawless. 

She looked over at Gina, also an expert, who teaches our needlepoint classes, and bent down, reaching for something. “I had absolutely no inspiration,” she said, her voice betraying a smile, “until this." She rolled out a needlepoint stocking across the counter. “This one sang to me.”


Grace’s name was stitched across the top. 

I stared at the finished canvas in disbelief. Wait, wasn’t this sent off to the artisans in the Philippines weeks ago? My stomach tightened, my heart beat fast trying to take in what was in front of me. This was no ordinary work from the Philippines. Complicated stitches, beading, French knots… I studied the decorative stitches, thinking about what has been said about needlework - that each tug of the needle imprints a story and an emotion. It can take someone like me years to complete such a work of art. Or, let’s be honest, I’d never finish it. 

“Caryn, you’d do this for me?”

“Gina did the stitch guide,” she replied. “We confiscated it,” she winked. “We wanted to surprise you.”

I looked over at Gina, brandishing a big smile. Then, back to Caryn. My mouth, gaping open, had gone dry. “When did you…”

“I took it home. Worked on it there after you told Gina that you wanted decorative stitches.” Caryn said.

I thought back to that conversation at the end of August when the canvas had come back with Grace’s name on it. “That was five weeks ago! You did this huge stocking in five weeks?”

“Well,” she laughed, “my fingers are pretty raw.”

I brought my hand to my chest. “It’s beautiful. I can’t…” I started to cry. “I need to tell Grace when she’s older.”

Gulping in between sobs, I added, “I’m overwhelmed. You did this for me.”

“And, for Grace,” they laughed. 

“Oh yeah, her,” I laughed back through the tears, reaching for a tissue in the box on the counter. 

“Seriously,” Caryn said. “We loved doing this. You’re special, Heather.”

As much as I try to believe that I’m special, and work with a therapist who encourages me to resist constantly feeling as if I have to pay, or do, or say something to be liked. Old habits die hard. 

“I don’t know what I can do to repay you both. I need to do something for you.”

“No, you don’t,” Caryn said.

Meanwhile, the store had opened, and a customer had wandered over to my gift section. My emotions still running high, I headed over there thinking back to Wendy and the canvas for Joseph. Now this. This breathtaking piece of handiwork. I rang up a sale and sat down with a sigh behind my counter. My hands shook as I picked up a pen and the little yellow scratch pad next to the register.

Dear Grace,

I did not stitch this stocking for you. My co-workers took this on to help me get to the finish line in time for your first Christmas. 

It is your birth and your name, that has inspired me to accept an unearned gift, to accept the grace of the people around me.

Sure, Santa will fill this with toys and how exciting that will be, but the real gift I want to give you is to remind you to be open to the love that surrounds you. May you always know your value which has taken your grandmother sixty-two years to understand. 

*Thank you, Caryn Moore, Gina Luizzi.  And, Wendy Siciliano.  You women rock.

Making The Call

“Sir, you need to put your bag under your seat or in the overhead bin,” says the female flight attendant while making her final safety check before take-off.  

“Can’t I leave it on my lap?” replies the man. I turn around. It’s the heavyset thirty-ish guy I’d given a friendly smile to as we waited in line to board. 

He’d responded to my smile with a blank stare. 

 “Sir,” the flight attendant's voice is calm, “it’s not safe for you to have anything on your lap at take-off.”

“Why?” he asks, his voice like a petulant kid.

It’s a full Southwest flight on a hot August afternoon. I’m on the aisle. 13F. He’s behind me in the middle seat, 14E. 

“If it’s under the seat,” he adds, his voice rising. “It’ll slip back when the plane takes off.”

“Back where?” the female flight attendant responds. “It’s pretty tight in here,” adding, “Sir, it’s for your safety and the safety of the other passengers.”

“What’s your name?” Petulance has turned to cantankerous.

“Lisa.”

“Well, Lisa, this is f**king ridiculous. F**king crazy….

We freeze, us passengers surrounding this, as Lisa takes matters into her own hands. As usual, my mother’s words pop into my head. “Never argue with a drunk.” Yet, I can tell a drunk a mile away. This guy was an argumentative a**hole. Not a drunk.

Maintaining her professional demeanor, Lisa tries again: “Sir, you have two choices. The overhead bin or under your seat.”

“You’re rude, Lisa,” adding more expletives directed at her.

“We’re going back to the gate,” Lisa says softly, and heads to the cockpit as the plane rolls to the runway to take-off.

My surrounding passengers sit quietly as my heart thumps out of my chest. Please get this guy off without a scene.

I’m thinking that this is the stuff you see in videos on The Daily Mail. “Disruptive passenger on Southwest flight…”

I’m flying solo. No Hank to distract me with a written note or a whisper. Then, I see an opening. The man next to me starts having a coughing fit. He sips his water but can’t seem to quell it.

“Would you like a mint?” I ask him. “Sounds like you’ve got a dry throat and I get those, too. I’ve got three kinds of mints to choose from,” I say, as I fish around in my bag.

You see, that’s what I do. I talk to distract myself when I get anxious. I would have given my right arm to keep a conversation going.

Meanwhile, I watch out of the corner of my eye as the flight attendants converge at the front of the plane. Two bells ring. The purser picks up the phone.

The pilot comes on: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are returning to the gate. We’ve a customer service situation we need to take care of. Won’t be long. Thank you for your patience.”

He’s quiet, this angry man in 14B, and I wait for some reaction from him. 

Nothing.

The plane comes to a stop. The doors are disarmed.

The plane remains quiet except a crying baby a few rows back.

A uniformed woman comes on board, heads straight to him, her tags dangling, and stands next to me to look straight at him. I focus on her tags, eyelevel to me.

“Sir, I’m from Southwest Customer Service. You need to depart this plane.”

“Why?” he shouts. “She was rude!”

Her words are calm and concise. “Sir, you need to depart this plane.”

The elderly man on the aisle steps out and the disgruntled guy in 14E reluctantly heaves himself up and out of his seat into the aisle. The woman from customer service has stepped forward.

“What about my overhead bag?”

“You may take that.”

“What about the bag I checked?”

“That stays on. We’ll book you another flight.”

I watch him clutch the white plastic bag to his chest. What is in that thing that he won’t let go of? 

He curses as he follows her down the aisle. 

He’s gone. Phew.

Later, as the plane bounces from intense heat rising up from the Salt Lake, Lisa is collecting the trash. “Thank you,” I tell her. “You handled that guy so well.” 

She lowers her bag and makes eye contact. “I haven’t asked anyone to leave a plane for fifteen years. He was…”

“He was awful,” I interrupt. “And, who knows what after we took off had he stayed.”

“Thank you,” Lisa replies. Her smile is sincere.

The flight attendants are asked to sit due to turbulence. The guy next to me is clutching my role of Peppermints and his cough has subsided.

The baby has stopped crying. A group of inebriated women in back are loud and happy. “Woah,” one of them laughs as we hit an air pocket.

Praise to Lisa. Praise to her Purser, Brian. Brian trusted Lisa’s judgement and the crew followed through.

Upon landing, we stood waiting to depart the plane. The guy in front of me tells me, “that guy shouldn’t have been taken off,” as he overhears his seatmate and me talking about it.

“If every disgruntled person gets taken off,” he says, “we’d be late all the time.”

“Late?” I reply. “He was scary awful. Did you not hear him? That flight attendant made the right call.”

“But, I’m an hour late,” he argues, giant earphones encircling his neck. 

“And, you had a safe flight.”

“Well,” he admitted. “There’s that,” he said, offering a smile. 

*Thanks to, and respect for, all those flight attendants out there who make good calls. Lisa working Southwest Flight #1845 – you rock! 

The Monarch Butterfly

Last Saturday, I called my daughter-in-law, Anna, as soon as we got back from our hike. “Remind me about when you saw that Monarch Butterfly?”

“Oh,” she replied. “It was amazing.”

I leaned back in the worn leather club chair to listen.

“I drove into the driveway,” she said, “and there it was fluttering in front of the white garage door….”

“That’s right,” I interrupted, “I’d been there visiting Baby Grace, and you’d mentioned it when you came through the door.”

“Yeah,” she continued. “I was thinking it was weird seeing it because I hadn’t seen any in the migration that went through Los Feliz recently. Then I saw you in the den with Grace, and I knew it was Nana, Heath.”

It was timely, Anna’s sighting. A few days before, I’d received what would be my last “coping with grief” letter from the Jewish Home For The Aging - letters that I’d received throughout this first year of mourning a parent as part of Jewish tradition. There were mostly poems and articles as an aid to deal with the loss of my mother. I would glance over them, maybe read a poem or two, and at times, dismiss the letters altogether.

I’m fine. I thought, Mom’s in a better place. She’d lived a long, full life. She’s out of a physical body that had succumbed to Parkinson’s. One-liners that moved me forward.

Truth is, I hadn’t really moved forward. I just kept busy keeping myself busy. Yet, there were a few times this past year I’d allowed my grief to rise to the surface. Losing Mom would hit me out of nowhere. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked my oldest son, Allan, on Mother’s Day. “I’m not good today. I can’t stop crying. It kind of surprises me. I thought that I was fine.”

Or, in line at airport security last Fall, when a TSA agent admired the pendant I often wear, engraved with Mom’s monogram. “You’ll always have your mother with you when you wear that,” she’d said after I’d told her it was Mom’s monogram with mine on the back. I’d cried, picking my carry-on off the belt. “What’s wrong with me, Hank?” I’d asked my husband after we’d cleared security.

The Jewish religion has death wired. Although I’m not Jewish, it was something that I admired deeply the day Mom passed away. The Rabbi. The support. And it didn’t end there. There’s not much this wonderful religion misses when it comes to loss. I was contacted regularly this past year. Those letters. A phone call from Hospice. …How are you doing?Recognize that your mother is gone. Deal with her loss. It’s healthy to feel your grief. And, it’s part of life…

A lot has happened since Mom has passed.  Her grandson, Allan, welcomed what would have been Mom’s first great-grandchild. A baby girl, Grace Marlowe. The Mar named after Mom’s name, Marilyn – the low, after Grace’s maternal great-grandmother, Lorraine, who passed recently.

I can just hear what Mom would say. “I got top-billing!”  It would have been all about her. 

“Grace is a looker,” she’d say. “She’ll never have trouble finding a man!”

This past April, her only granddaughter, Hilary, got engaged. “It’s hard to think that you never met Nana,” Hilary, said to her fiancé, Oliver, recently at a family dinner.

“He’s a winner,” Mom would say. Proud that Hilary, who, like my mother, “got out there” and made a new life for herself.

She’d be proud of her grand-daughter-in-law, Anna, a wonderful mother to Grace. 

Mom, who loved men but championed women, would say: “See, even with the kid and the career, Anna still makes time for the husband.”

______________________________________

   

I shifted forward in the chair, my left hand holding the phone, my right hand splayed on my knee.  “Anna, Hank and I were on a hike today and this Monarch butterfly - it looked like the one Nana tattooed on her ankle- it flew right in front of me and I remembered your experience.”

Photo Credit: Hank

“Heath…”

 “I know. I wondered and turned to Hank and told him that you thought about Nana when you’d seen that Monarch in front of the garage. I told him to take a picture of it quick before it goes away.”

“Hank quickly leaned toward it with his camera, then, all of the sudden that butterfly took off from the bush and headed straight for me.”

“No way!”

 “And smacked right into the rim of my hat! Bam!” I laughed. “It’s like Mom was telling me to pay attention!  It’s been a year. Stop with the hair shirt and quit with the constant keeping busy. You’re like a shark. You can stop moving now. I’m gone, but I’ll always be with you. Relax for Crissakes.”

On July 26^th, my year of mourning will be “officially” over. 

Time to celebrate that butterfly with the knowledge that Mom is all around me. That she knows Grace. Knows Oliver, and watches over all of us.

The signs are there. I’m paying attention now.  Her voice is in my head.

The evening of the 26th, Hank and I are going to a party celebrating my oldest friend’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Just a little over a year ago, we’d been at her son’s wedding when I got the call that Mom had taken a turn and needed hospice care. 

The year has come full circle.

And, how fitting to round it out at a party. My mother always loved a party. 

“Belly up to the bar,” she’d tell me. “And hoist a few for me.”

Cheers, Mom. Thank you…

A Roll Of The Dice

We’re on a flight.  Usually, it’s a business trip.  There’s an itinerary. Where to be, and when. Lots of Hank checking his watch, hating to be late.  “What’s your timing, Heath.”

This time, though, it’s to our get away in Park City, Utah.

I look out the window. A ridge of mountains in the distance is peeking out from a layer of haze. Instead of my usual coffee, I’ve ordered a glass of wine. I want to relax. Be quiet, and reflect.

You see, in a few days Hank and I will celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary.  

And, we’re not on a business trip. I sip the white wine. It’s not good. Not even the kind I like, but who cares. It’s airplane wine, and it’s doing the job. Mellowing the hyper me. 

I look at Hank beside me, working on what looks like some sort of graph on his computer. It’s work. I press my hand on his arm, feel the soft cotton of his shirt. He gives me a smile, presses my hand, and returns to his graph. I rest my head on my seatback and go back forty years.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the Right Reverend Ollie Garver said, smiling. “You may now kiss the bride.”

Hank, lifts my veil and I take his wire-rimmed glasses off. We kiss for the first time as a married couple.

We walk back down the aisle, full of glee and innocence, smiling wide. Clueless.

And, so our life began.

Because, for me, my life did begin when I married Hank.

“Whom can you trust?” my mother’s therapist had asked her years ago when she’d been debating between two men after my father had left.

“Allan.”

“Then, you have your answer, Marilyn.”

And, I’d had mine. I married a man whom I could trust.

“He’s sane,” Mom had said after Hank proposed to me. “You’ll have a beautiful life with this one. He won’t cheat.”

At twenty-two what did I know? I knew I loved him, but I was twenty-two! Still finishing college when we married. Hank, just a few years older than me, was working but he wasn’t totally convinced that the music business was the path for him. 

“It’s a crapshoot,” Mom had said, “But I think you’ll be cool with this one.”

My mother had lived a life by then.  She could call it like nobody else.

Upon our engagement, Hank’s grandmother, MG, wrote a letter from her beach house, its address printed atop the page.  “I’m thrilled that St. James is the church you have chosen, as our wedding took place there over fifty years ago – maybe that’s a sign!!”

Hank’s grandparents. Affectionately named MG and PG. The lunches she’d prepare for PG at the beach. Little bits of healthy things on a china plate. Just like their marriage.

Hank’s grandmother, Nonnie.  The warmest, most generous woman. Her blue eyes twinkled when she spoke of her beloved deceased husband. She loved to gesture with her hands, the crowded charms commemorating all that had been right in her life, dangling off her linked bracelet like badges of honor.

Hank’s parents. Watergate. Challenged beyond what most married couples would ever have to endure. Yet, there they were. They’d weathered the storm. Solid and together.

I saw this at twenty-two. Marriages that worked. Something I’d never seen before, growing up in a chaotic home with only my mother to ground me until my stepfather came along. 

In her wild scrawl, my mother had written to me the night before my wedding on a torn piece of notebook paper.  “I stayed in bed with you six months while I was pregnant. So that I’d have you my whole life. I tried,” she wrote, “to do my best but it wasn’t that good. But I tried. Better than my mother – hopefully, you’ll do better for your daughter.”

“Remember, Heather, hope springs eternal – fear buries faith - boldness has virtue in it.”

I’m jostled to the present as we hit rough air and the seatbelt sign illuminates. I hold onto my glass, not wanting the contents to spill all over my jeans.

Flying is kind of like marriage, I think. Turbulence, then holding on, waiting for it to pass to move to smoother air and never really knowing what the rest of the flight will be like.

I look back out at the horizon as we pass over a patchwork of the Great Salt Lake. The pilot banks a turn. The horizon disappears and now it’s just the colors of the minerals in the lake out my window like a painting at the MOMA.

As the pilot announces our initial decent, I glance over at Hank.

This guy next to me. The crapshoot that I chose to wager with all those forty-years ago. The guy my mother told me to trust, who would be cool. The guy who would never cheat.

The guy I chose to build a family with, to fight with, to make up with. The guy I chose to love.

I’d rolled the dice.

And came out a winner.