Happy Halloween

Yes, it’s decorative gourd season again.

Halloween is nearly upon us. But you wouldn’t know it from our house. Outside, no pumpkins, no mums, just baskets of impatiens still hanging on with some periwinkle petals. The front door does not boast a bundle of dried corncobs. Inside, the same empty ceramic bowl has sat in the middle of the dining room table since the poinsettias were retired in January. No cornucopia overflows with fall’s bounty. I won’t even be here the evening of October 31 (although Jon may have to dole out some treats). Without kids in the house, Halloween has become a non-event.

But when the kids were young, Halloween definitely was an event. In fact, the event that heralded the beginning of the holiday season. At the first chilly night, the family went into seasonal overdrive. Off to Linvilla Orchards for piles of pumpkins, pots of yellow and orange mums, and a bale of straw to be turned into stuffing for our “fall tableau”: we each would contribute a worn shirt and pair of pants to be stuffed. The straw-stuffed bodies would be propped up on a bench in the yard and topped with pumpkins for heads. Voila! Mom and Dad and Jay and Annie in scarecrow form.

The heart of Halloween, though, was costume-planning. Well before the nights turned cold, sometimes at the first sign of summer's fading, husband Jon and daughter Annie would go into caucus over their costumes. Jon was not a big fan of trick-or-treating, but he joined in Annie’s planning with good-hearted gusto (and also with the hope that he might get a couple Oh Henry candy bars out of it for his trouble).  These costumes weren’t purchased at a Halloween pop-up store at the mall. These costumes were made by hand by Annie and Jon (mostly Jon) and were eagerly anticipated each year by the households they visited on their rounds. One year Annie was a maiden from Camelot who traveled with her own Merlin, she in flowing medieval wear and he majestic in long cape and outsized wizard’s hat. Another year, Annie was a Southern belle and Jon her charming beau.

As Annie got older, the costumes evolved from cute to clever, like the time they went as “Coke with a Straw.” Annie wore a silver cylinder of poster board with accurate Coke graphics, and Jon made a flexible tube by basting a series of hula-hoops into sheets painted with red stripes. This contraption was then worn in such a way that he could make it bow at just the right place for a bendy straw. And there was the time they went as “Partly Sunny.” Annie wore grey sweat-pants and -shirt with bunches of white balloons somehow attached to the sweatshirt so that she looked like a walking cumulus cloud. Jon fashioned a mask of yellow rays flaring from around his head, like the pictures of Old Sol in children’s books. Strapped around his head beamed a kind of miner’s lamp. As they walked through the neighborhood, there was no doubt that the day was sunny with some clouds. They always came home with bags bulging with sugared booty – and if Annie was happy and there was an Oh Henry in one of those bags, it was all worth it to Jon.

Many harvest moons have passed. Both kids are out of college and out of the house. Less than two months ago we were all together for Labor Day weekend, just about the time that Jon and Annie used to get down to serious Halloween costume business. Sitting out on the deck, Jon smiled and said to Annie, “So, what should we go as for Halloween this year?” Annie turned a pitying eye on her father and replied, “Oh, Pops. I never liked doing all that Halloween costume stuff. I only did it because it was so important to you.”

Now, there’s a taste of O. Henry for Jon.

From the Back Seat

When Jon and I first met in 1980, we uncovered some uncanny childhood coincidences—in spite of the fact that his father was a Philadelphia lawyer raising his family 25 miles north of the city and my father was a doctor delivering babies in the Altoona Hospital halfway between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh and raising his family in Hollidaysburg. Perhaps most astonishing, Jon and I figured out that we could have crossed paths at the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1962. How many East Coast fathers decided that the summer of ’62 was the time to take a family trip across the country?

There were differences. Leaving the older sisters at home, Jon’s mother drove Jon and his brother in the family station wagon to Taos, NM, where his father met them after taking the train. (The Broadway Limited to Chicago before changing trains.) They spent most of their extended trip at campsites or rustic ranches. They even walked down into the Grand Canyon and the next morning rode mules back up.

Not for us the “roughing it” version. My parents packed all four kids and four weeks of suitcases for hotels and motels into our white four-door Sedan de Ville. My brothers were 17 and 14; I was nine and my sister was seven.  Since brother #1 was practically a grown-up, he shared the driving with my mother and father. To have any chance at extended peace, it would not work to have the 14-year-old brother in the back seat with his two elementary school sisters. So through complicated calculations that kept some configuration of grown-ups and brother#2 in the front seat as much as possible, my sister and I saw the U.S.A. not in a Chevrolet but from the back seat of a Cadillac.

And what do I remember from that trip? The first morning we left very early, driving to Bedford to get on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading west. Our goal was a motel on the outskirts of Chicago. My dad, an avid golfer, talked about a PGA tournament due to start that same morning. Not long after the comment, we could see in front and above us a walkway over the turnpike. Sure enough, overhead and through the mist appeared a number of men in pastel pants on that walkway, followed by lackeys lugging golf clubs. It was almost too good to be true.  (Jon tells me that it must have been the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh, Jack Nicklaus’ first win.)

The car clocked mile after mile, every AM radio station in the country playing Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You” or the spooky space music of “Telstar.” Through the back windows we saw abattoirs, buffalo, and twisters, things as alien to us as pagodas, volcanoes, and windmills. Billboards were our reading material. (We never visited anything that started with “World’s Largest…” nor did our pleas result in a stop anywhere that ended with “Caverns.”) But we did hit more highlights than I can list. In addition to the Grand Canyon (where I may have passed my future husband in a gift shop?), we saw the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We stayed overnight in Las Vegas, where the temperature was 107° and we went to a grand hotel to see Victor Borge, who made us laugh while he played the piano. We toured Beverly Hills and Fisherman’s Wharf.  We visited Knots Berry Farm, and at Disney Land I was allowed to go on the scary rides with my brothers, as long as I could keep up with them. (To this day, I walk very, very fast.) We saw Lincoln’s home in Springfield, IL, and Route 66’s home in Springfield, MO. We gazed in awe at the Hoover Dam and we crossed Lake Michigan on a ferry. (The trip was so rough I still avoid ferries— and as a result have never set foot on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket.)

Over the course of four weeks surprisingly few things went wrong, although we each had our difficult moments. My dad found a Rotary Club lunch to go to in San Francisco, where the president of the club mispronounced my dad’s name when introducing visitors. (No mean feat that, mispronouncing “Taylor.”) When we were in Jackson Hole, WY, my mother had an unhappy time on a trail ride when she would kick her horse as she also pulled back on the reins, saying “Whoa!” (The horse probably had an unhappy time as well.) At the same stop, brother #1 went to a “hoe-down” at the Lodge and the girl he had his eye on danced with someone else. Brother #2 left his prescription sunglasses on the roof of the car when we stopped to take pictures in the Badlands and for the remainder of the trip had to wear clip-ons over his regular glasses. (Not cool.)  Because my mother liked to buy us matching outfits, on several occasions I had to put up with people mistaking me for my sister’s twin. (Also not cool: I was 21 months older!) And my sister was never allowed to pick the radio station.

Nevertheless, we arrived back home without much incident in mid July, and summer settled back to normal, with swimming during the day and catching fireflies in a glass jar after dinner. The trip out West became a collection of photographs.

That was 50 years ago. Impossible.

Recitals

I had a good piano lesson on Monday.

Yes, a piano lesson. I have been playing the piano since kindergarten, when I would pick out nursery tunes by ear. One of my most vivid kindergarten memories—next to the time I ate the crayoned cut-outs of fruit that we made—was the day a very large blind man came to our classroom and played “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” I am not being politically correct when I say that his size was inconsequential. What awed me was that he sat there at the old upright piano in the basement of the small Methodist Church with his tawny dog sitting next to him and he played big chords without mistakes and he couldn’t even see the keyboard.

I started piano lessons in 1^st grade with Miss Leighty. Not only had she taught my older brother, she had also taught my father. (My grandmother liked to say that “the Taylors put Alma Leighty on the map.” I don’t know what map that was.) I took piano lessons with Miss Leighty for nine years, up until I went away to school. Every year was a roller coaster for Miss Leighty and me. I hated to practice, and week after week Miss Leighty graciously hid her disappointment about what I had not accomplished. Then Spring would come, bringing the annual certifications by some national musicians’ organization followed closely by her pupils’ recitals. Would I get through them? The certifications involved proving that I had mastered the appropriate levels of technique, arpeggios and the like. The recitals meant performing a piece of music.

A harbinger of term papers to come, at the last minute I would work like mad and pull off an A-/B+ production. Good enough for the little pins the certification organization awarded (tiny gold-plated pianos I still have in an old jewelry box) and the applause from the parents gathered in Miss Leighty’s living room. Of those recitals I can recall only one piece, the last one: Carl Sinding’s “Rustle of Spring.” Much more clear is the reward after each recital: We (my father, mother, little sister and I; my two older brothers were excused from attending the recital) would go to Seward’s Drugstore on the way home and I could order a chocolate soda.

And then I was the one with children. It must be the curse of parents that they perpetrate upon their children the very things that they themselves had dreaded as children. We insisted that both Jay and Annie take some kind of music lesson. After a disastrous try at piano, Jay took up guitar lessons. Annie took up piano lessons. After several false starts for Annie with less than satisfactory teachers, we found Miss Priscilla. Annie settled in contentedly—practicing only 24 hours before each lesson. Like mother, like daughter.

Annie at 11, looking pleased

Of course, there were recitals. How to reward the effort of recitals became a question. Stopping at a drugstore for chocolate sodas wasn’t going to work. For one thing, you can’t get a chocolate soda at a drugstore anymore. Not to mention that anyone can get a metallic-tasting chocolate soda anytime at a fast-food emporium—an opportunity that (blessedly) did not exist in 1960’s Hollidaysburg, PA.  So I watched. For Annie, I saw parents bringing bouquets. And that’s what I did. I’d sneak away the morning of the recital to buy a lovely bunch of flowers, which we would hide in the car. Once at the recital location we’d get Annie situated, then I’d again sneak out to the car to collect the flowers to present at the end of the program. She always seemed pleased.

For Jay it was a different story. He was learning electric guitar that, in sharp contrast to his sister and mother, he practiced diligently. His teacher was in a band. Recitals featured “Sweet Home, Alabama.” He was a boy. We went through a couple recitals when the reward was that he could pick what we ate for dinner. I finally did hit on an equivalent of flowers. For his last two recitals, I wrapped up a family-sized bag of Doritos Nacho Cheese chips (Jay’s favorite) and presented them like a bouquet at the end of the recitals.

Now for the past three or four years I have been taking piano lessons from Annie’s teacher, Miss Priscilla. My lessons are every two weeks, and I am doing much better than when I was a kid: I actually practice three or four times between lessons. I recently nailed Chopin’s Prelude in B minor (Opus 28, No. 6). I grinned like a maniac when Miss Priscilla praised me, and I almost said, “I could do this one for the recital!”

There aren’t any recitals for 59-year-old piano students. But that’s okay, I guess. Anyway, where would Jon take me to get a chocolate soda?

Mendelssohn's next...

Unmovable Objects

Not long ago an envelope appeared in our mailbox from a realtor. It was addressed by hand—really by hand, not “by hand” by a machine. The writer identified herself as a local agent working with clients in search of a “special home” in our neighborhood. She designated the preferred streets and noted the desired square footage, the hoped for excellent condition, “nice back yard and unique character.” Gosh. What a coincidence! Their “special home” description sounded just like our house! (Especially the part where she allowed that if the house had “unique character” but wasn’t in excellent condition the clients would feel comfortable making moderate updates.) 

I recognized this maneuver, as years ago my sister-in-law wrangled her dream house by going straight to the owners, who initially had had no thought of selling. (My brother and his wife have now been living in that house for over 25 years.) I confess that I was flattered that someone might want our house that much; it confirmed that I was an excellent judge of houses! Moreover, it was heartening, in this vale of depressed housing prices after having purchased our house at the peak of the market in 2005, to see the proposed price range. The offer would be very attractive-- if we had any interest in selling.

           

But we don’t have any interest in selling. More accurately, we don’t have any interest in moving. At least, I don’t. The last time we moved it almost did me in. And I thought we had been so organized. I had even contracted with a “moving manager,” someone who specialized primarily in helping “older folks" downsize from their rambling piles in Chestnut Hill into their new cottages in Main Line retirement communities. Our situation wasn’t quite like that, of course, but I gauged that I was going to feel the same trauma level. She sent her minions to help us pack up 225 cartons of books and unnumbered boxes of our mix-and-match glassware and the various sets of Wedgewood and Lenox handed down to us from various branches of our families. Everything she scheduled went off as planned. But I made a significant tactical error: I left too many odds and ends behind to deal with after the main move. We didn’t have a deadline to get out of the old house, so I thought, “Why push it if we don’t have to?”

           

Well, you push it so that everything gets done in the old house at the same time that you are ready to settle in and recuperate from the move in your new house. So there we were, one toe still in our former home, with kitchen drawers filled with rubber bands and paper clips, shoeboxes full of loose photos, clothes trees with two out of three legs toppled onto empty bedroom floors, and more. All in a house of dust once hidden but now painfully apparent and inducing sneezes and itchy eyes.  For four long weeks after our move, every day, after work and on the weekends, we went back and forth between the houses, loading things out of the old place into the back of the Jeep and hauling them over to the new place. Finally, in a fit of desperate exhaustion, we rented a dumpster and just started throwing things away. We swore we had learned our lesson about stuff.

           

We have now been in our current house 6½ years. The 225 cartons of books are still in the garage, and down in the basement we have box after box of old vinyl records, Annie’s artwork from lower school, files of W-2’s going back to Jon’s and my college years. A fine film of dust covers gym bags containing Jay’s lacrosse gear from upper school, which he last used in 2003. Under the ping-pong table is a duffel with roller blades and kneepads purchased for a 2001 trip to Key West. (Neither ever came in contact with asphalt—in Florida or elsewhere.) Against a crumbling wall lean towers of stereo equipment so old that the components are a turntable, tape deck, and tuner. A T8200 Vision Fitness treadmill, purchased in 1999 and broken since 2009, blocks the way to the old bureau whose drawers house VCR tapes of Disney movies. There’s no way we could move with all that stuff down there.

           

Scary stuff

Last fall we were visiting with my brother and his wife when, over drinks, she turned to him and wailed, “Don’t you dare die before I do! I couldn’t possibly clean out the basement by myself!”

I know just how she feels.

My New Year's Countdown

Thursday, January 5: A dingy day, a dull gray that just won’t lift. To break the gloom I go into the living room to plug in the lights on the Christmas tree and into the dining room to plug in the lights that lace through the pine roping draped over the hutch. Only two more days (and counting) that the lights will be up, so might as well take advantage of it. The first floor comes to life, and I take a couple minutes to count up all the things that “had to be done” to create the holidays…

...starting the day after Thanksgiving with making the Christmas pudding with 17 ingredients. Then December is upon us. We get 120 copies of our Christmas photo to go into the cards that I don’t get around to sending until December 20. I spend 60 minutes at the computer ordering food gifts from Williams-Sonoma for four families. (It takes so long because I can never remember my “log in credentials” from one year to the next and can’t use Express Check-out and have to recreate the recipient list all over again.) Off to Wedgewood Nurseries for two large poinsettias for the front windows, eight small poinsettias for the dining room table and two mantels, and three wreaths. On the way back, pick up more boxes of 100-bulb strands of Christmas lights since the August hurricane flooded the basement and we lost some decorations. A week later we pick out the tree. It goes up for seven days without decorating so that the cats can get acclimated to it. Annie gets home and we decorate the tree – an exercise that takes hours in itself: in fact, the 2½ hours of Handel’s Messiah, all three parts. Part I is devoted to the lights; Part II to determining the correct placement of the 30-year-old strands of gold beads and musical notes and clef signs (“Hallelujah”); and Part III to the glass ornaments, cardboard cutouts of the kings and queens of England, miniature scrolls with scores of carols, and any sparkling non-breakable balls to fill in the empty spaces. (Jay tops off the tree with our angel when he arrives home for Christmas weekend.) Handel winds things up with “Worthy is the Lamb” and we plunk down on the couch with glasses of wine to admire our handiwork. Worthy is the tree.

Then the three traditional holiday dinners. On December 18 it’s Chicken Marbella for 12 for our former neighbors. On December 23 Boeuf Bourguignon for 12 for a longstanding group of friends and family. On December 25 roast goose and Brussels sprouts for the four of us.

I’ve made myself cranky again by thinking of all the hours spent on all of the above, and I go back up to my office to get in a better mood.

Friday, January 6: But we’re not done yet. It’s Twelfth Night and I am off to fetch the galette des Roi – Kings’ Cake. We are not French or even of French extraction. Nor do we observe Epiphany in any liturgical way. But when Jay and Annie were little they had a babysitter from France who introduced us to the puff pastry with almond paste and to the tradition of the little plastic trinket embedded in the cake. Whoever gets the piece with the trinket gets to wear the cardboard crown that comes in the box! So of course that became one more item that “had to be done” as part of the holidays. In contrast to yesterday, today is beautiful, a lovely day for the 20-minute drive to the authentic French pastry shop where I plunk down $17.00 for an eight-inch cake. During the drive, my mind frets over the things that we had left undone this year. We ran out of time for Annie to visit her childhood piano teacher. I baked only two batches of chocolate chip cookies, never getting around to a batch of peanut butter cookies. And I completely forgot about making the hot buttered wine. I guess the list could have been worse.

Saturday, January 7: Two more things that have to be done. The easy one is baking a pan of monkeybread to snack on while we do the hard one: “un-decorating” the house. Start time is 2:30. For this chore we need some hard, thumping music to keep us moving and our tradition is the soundtrack of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Starlight Express.” We turn up the volume to 11 and away we go. Off come the outdoor lights; down come the wreaths; out go the small poinsettias to the compost. The Dickensian figures get packed in plastic boxes for the attic; the fake pine roping entwined through the bannister spindles gets jammed into a big plastic bag for the basement. And the tree? The cats have already helped us by knocking ornaments off the lowest 18 inches. Off comes everything else in the opposite order of the decorating. (We discover that Good Queen Bess is missing in action.) Annie and I pack up the empty liquor boxes with all the strings of lights. Jon drags the tree out to the curb. We do a quick sweep of the dry needles. “Starlight Express” has seen the light at the end of the tunnel and the hall clock chimes 4:00.

90 minutes. 90 minutes to undo how many hours of work? Two hours later we wave good-bye to Annie as she walks off to the commuter rail station on her way into Philadelphia for a friend’s birthday party. She’ll go back to school straight from there on Sunday.

Sunday, January 8: The only traces of the holidays are the two big poinsettias in the front windows. They are still in such good shape I didn’t have the heart to chuck them onto the compost pile. The house is quiet. The old year is over.

Happy New Year.

January 2012

The Death of a Cat

Gizmo. Gizmatron. Mr. Gizter. Gizzie. Adopted from the local SPCA, Gizzie was a black domestic short-hair cat distinguished only by his shape – 16 pounds precariously balanced on four dainty paws with a triangle for a face – and by his animosity toward strangers and his adoration of his family, marked by his heartfelt “head butts” which served for hugs.

Gizzie, with friends

Gizzie turned 13 in March of this year. You couldn’t tell. He still acted like a kitten, albeit a 16-pound kitten. He’d hunt down and snatch up an old catnip “cigar” that had been pushed around for eight years. All narcotic effect had evaporated, but Gizzie still found it intoxicating and would carry it into our bedroom with a deep-throated, gargled growl that said, “Look what I captured – and you’re not going to take it away from me!” He would leap from the dishwasher counter to the kitchen island with the arc and agility of a Lipizzaner stallion, only to sail to the other side by landing on a scrap of newspaper. He chased his tail, chased our younger cat, chased an errant untied shoelace. If one of us happened to lie down on the couch for a catnap, he would jump on our chest and settle in with a contented purr, not caring that his 16 pounds severely compromised his chosen beloved’s ability to breathe.

In fact, Gizzie spent his life not having to care, because we always cared for him. This was more than just providing Purina cat chow and water. We often had to save him. He was in our family for all of two weeks when he managed to scramble up over the barrier in the room in which he was sequestered, scuttle across the kids’ 2^nd floor playroom floor and scoot right through the posts of the banister to begin his free fall onto the kitchen tiles below. I happened to be heading up the steps. I put out my right hand and caught him in my palm. Not many months later, we returned from work to hear a plaintive mewling in the kitchen. No kitten in sight, but we traced the sound to a gap between the kitchen wall and a counter top where lodged a heating unit. Gizzie had managed to get himself wedged into the two inches between the heating unit and the wall. I still can’t remember how we got him out of that tight spot, but I think it may have entailed Jon holding on to me while I half lay on the counter with my scrawny arm blindly groping for the kitten.

As Gizzie grew, he found different tight spots. Not realizing that he had outgrown one of his hiding  places, he once got himself under the hutch in the dining room only to find that he could not get himself back out. Caterwauling ensued. In this case, I think it was Jon who was the hero. Then there was the winter that Gizzie managed to get lost in the French drain system that ran under our old farmhouse. Naturally it was after a blizzard and snow was piled high. Again, Gizzie knew that we would rescue him. Once we realized he was missing, I went out and circled the house, calling his name. He answered immediately—from underground. Gizzie’s talkative nature saved him as his cries helped Jon pinpoint where in the French drain system Gizzie was located. Jon pulled out the grill from the closest spot, I called Gizzie, and Gizzie responded by coming within arm-reach of Jon, who hauled him to safety.

Gizzie also had two bouts with a classic neutered male cat malady, a urinary tract blockage. I won’t go into great detail. I will just say that the first time standard procedures were followed. The second time our wonderful vet completely reconstructed Gizzie’s innards, in essence making Gizzie's urinary tract that of a female cat. No more blockages. And then there was the time at the old farmhouse when a fox chased Gizzie up from a pasture. (At 16 pounds, Gizzie presented a mouth-watering morsel.) I was on the back porch and screeched like a fishwife to scare the fox away as Gizzie bounded onto the porch and then sauntered into the house.

All of these events occurred at our old house. In 2005 we moved to the new house and life with Gizzie became much calmer because he became an “indoor” cat. We settled in, and I thought we would have him around for at least 16, or more, birthdays.

In early August I noticed that Gizzie was not eating with his regular gusto. By mid August I was worried because it looked as though his chest contained bellows working at full force. I took him to the vet. X-rays were taken. Specialists were consulted. This time it was Gizzie's breathing that was compromised. He had tumors in his lungs.

If you were keeping track of the Gizzie events, you would have counted that we had saved him seven times. If I wanted to stretch the truth for literary purposes, I would have invented an eighth episode so that at this point in the essay we would be at nine lives. But I’m not going to invent. At event #8 we were defeated. We could not save Gizzie, or even lengthen his time on this earth. We tried. We got him a super steroid shot. We got him a special prescription to stimulate his appetite. We got him Fancy Feast Gourmet Chicken to accompany the prescription. Nothing worked.

On August 30, our wonderful vet came to the house. Even though Gizzie had spent four days straight on daughter Annie’s bed without budging, even though he next struggled onto our bed for what he could not have known was his last night, even though he could hardly move – when the vet appeared, he was still our Gizzie : snarling and biting and ornery with someone who was not family. And then Gizzie was gone.

 

On the Occasion of My Cousin Nancy’s 75th Birthday

While as adults we have always kept in contact through Christmas cards, my cousin Nancy and I have crossed paths in person only a handful of times that I can remember. This was a result of the unusual age differences on my mother’s side of the family. My mother Jane was 16 years (or so) younger than Nancy’s mother, Kathryn (after whom I am named). When my baby brain was not even conscious of a cousin, Nancy would already have been in college. My first memory of that side of the family features only my aunt and uncle. My parents had taken my younger sister and me on a very long car ride out of Pennsylvania and into strange lands. I remember a great gray building in Washington, DC, which housed the offices of my uncle--certainly a grander building than any in Altoona or Hollidaysburg, so I knew he must be a very important man. And then we drove to an area with tree-lined streets and cozy houses and it was named Something Park. What fun it would be to live in a park! Best of all, in her house my aunt had a dog named Skipper who could play the piano! It was a wonderful trip, filled with marvels--but I don’t remember a cousin being among them.

The next memory I have was a time when Nancy’s family visited with the Taylor family at the little place we called “the cottage,” about 40 miles south of our house in Hollidaysburg. I think I have the story right: that the cottage had been owned as a fishing retreat by Uncle Roy, Nancy’s and my great uncle, from whom my father had bought it. By the time of this visit I was in elementary school and Nancy was not only married to a very tall man named Gene but she also had two little girls of her own. This made things even more complicated, with the lines of relationship very blurred. The little girls were younger than my sister and I, but not by that much. Yet they weren’t our first cousins. They weren’t really our second cousins either. But we definitely were related to them! And the person who was my cousin was a grown-up, sitting in the rustic little living room with her husband and chatting away as equals with my parents while the four little girls played Po-Kee-No and Go Fish out on the porch. Not much of a real connection there.

Jane and Nancy in the center (5/29/93)

It was decades later that the real connection was made. In late May of 1993, the Taylor family threw a big weekend party to celebrate the 75^th birthday of my mother, by then a widow for 23 years. At the time, my husband and I lived on an old farm property of his family. We were able to house all of the guests for the birthday celebration between our place (which had been a livestock barn) and what we called “the main house.” The four children of Jane Taylor were there, with their spouses and offspring--and Nancy was there, too. To have a whole weekend for cousins of all ages to get acquainted and reacquainted was a wonderful luxury. At that point, I was 40 and Nancy was 57 – and miraculously the intervening decades had demolished the age barrier. We found our connection: writing. Specifically, writing from memory. I remember sitting around the green wrought-iron table under a tree, talking through the afternoon and evening about writing and writing classes. Nancy later sent me a lovely gift: a book entitled “Court of Memory” by James McConkey.

Now it is Nancy who is celebrating her 75^th birthday, and I am about the same age she was when we last were together. So much has happened, and so many are no longer with us--including my mother, who had tied us together. Following my mother’s death, Nancy again gave me a lovely gift: a letter in which she shared her memory of my mother as a young woman, barely more than a girl. A glimpse of a side of my mother I could not otherwise have known. And I am so grateful.

Happy 75^th birthday, Cousin Nancy.

Great Expectations

       I have always believed in being prepared. And over the years, I've found the best way to be prepared is to buy a book.

       Books tell you what to expect. What to expect when you plan a wedding. What to expect when you join a corporation. What to expect when you buy a house.

       What to expect when you become pregnant.

       From the first positive blood test, I methodically worked through chapters and checklists. I was prepared for an April 6, 1986, due date.

       My water broke on February 14, a decidedly unexpected diversion in the middle of a business meeting. Jay arrived 10 hours later and seven weeks early. The books had not prepared me for a number of things.

Special Delivery

By the Book: Check out the parking regulations for the maternity wing a month before your due date and be sure to keep your car in good working order with plenty of gas in the tank. Several weeks before expected delivery, pack your “hospital bag,” remembering to include your breathing instruction sheet, hard candies for you, and a snack for your coach

       When my water broke I was on the 37th floor of the Mellon Bank building in downtown Philadelphia. My husband, Jon, was on the 33rd floor of the same building. Our car, however, was 20 miles away, parked in the lot of a commuter train station. We rendezvoused in the express elevator and flagged down a taxi.

        As I maneuvered over the cracked vinyl seat, Jon gave directions to the doctor’s office and explained why there was some urgency. Chomping down on his cigar and stomping down on his accelerator, the cabbie sent us careering around City Hall Square so fast that the centrifugal force threw me against the door. We made record time.

       My doctor confirmed that I was in early labor and called the hospital to alert them that we were on the way. Our taxi was long gone. We walked the three blocks.

       Once in the labor room, we longed for our props. The only bags that had made the trip were our briefcases. Three files of financial reports and a supply of business cards didn't help much when the contractions were two minutes apart, my mouth felt like an ashtray, and my lower back seemed to have a bowling bowl sitting on my spine.

      

Blissful Bonding

By the Book: Immediately after delivery, the nurse will place your baby on your chest. Notice the deep blue of the infant’s eyes and the strength of the tiny grasp around your own fingers. Later, when you are back in your room, the nurses will wheel in your newborn. In those moments of peace, examine the minute yet perfectly proportioned fingers and toes.

       Jay’s early arrival ruled out any lingering in the delivery room. Faster than a quarterback could call the signals, Jay was hiked to the nurses, who bound him tightly in a yellow blanket, pulled a blue stocking cap down to his eyebrows, and waved him under my nose before passing him to the NICU staff. He was gone before I could see the color of his hair, let alone the color of his eyes.

       Several hours after delivery I found myself gingerly positioned on a doughnut cushion while Jon wheeled me to see our son.

Jay, at 3 days old

       There through the glass was Jay. Not snugly swaddled, but splayed on a platform with needles dangling from his tiny foot, wires snaking around his tiny chest, and tubes running into his tiny nostrils. Granted, his fingers and toes did look in proportion.

       At Home

By the Book: To avoid overstimulating the baby and exhausting yourself, limit the number of visitors during the baby’s first weeks. Eliminate trips back and forth to the nursery by setting up a pretty bassinet in the corner of the living room.

       Even if we had had visitors, they wouldn’t have found us at home. We spent the first month of Jay’s life wearing out the road to the hospital. We jockeyed for parking spots with the rest of the 7 AM shift. We learned the three different ways to get to the Pediatric Nursery while avoiding the Visitors’ Elevator. We became connoisseurs of the cheese fries in the hospital’s cafeteria.

       Receiving guests in the comfort of our living room? Jay received us, but only after we had donned geometric-print hospital gowns and scrubbed up with soap that smelled like Lysol. We did have company in the Nursery: a couple named Tony and Maria murmuring over their daughter Angela. We barely exchanged nods with them.

       Around the Nursery, machines graphing pulse rates whirred and apnea monitors went off with high-pitched beeps. In the hallway, the intercom system crackled, “Dr. Tomlinson. Dr. Tomlinson. Please report to OR.” At night, Jay slept with a flickering TV screen for a nightlight and, for a lullaby, the all-news radio station.

Determined to have Jay distinguish us from the high decibels and distraction of the hospital, we read to him every evening from one of Jon’s childhood favorites, Ozma of Oz. I would rock Jay next to his monitor while Jon would read until his throat became dry.

Jay, at 23 years old

       One evening the Nursery grew unusually quiet. The monitors seemed inattentive, and the new shift of nurses had not yet turned on the television. Even Tony and Maria had paused in their conversations with Angela. The only sound in the room was Jon’s voice: “Just then, Ozma reentered the room, leading Dorothy by the hand and followed closely by Princess Langwidere.” A bit self-conscious, Jon shut the book.

       “Hey, you can’t stop now!” Tony turned in his chair to face us. “What happens next?”

       The four of us pulled our chairs into a circle. As our tiny infants slept in peaceful defiance of lunar charts and Estimated Dates of Confinement, we listened to Jon continue with the next chapter, “Ozma to the Rescue.”

       I guess a book came in handy after all.