The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Niche-less

I've been thinking about this for some time now.  I'm still not sure what I'm going to do.

I was thinking of splitting this blog in two - one for JUST food-related content, and the other for JUST family/kids/my own silly thoughts.

But.

It's not so easy to peel them apart.  My kids help with a lot of the cooking and baking (as you've no doubt noticed if you've been reading me for oh, more than a week)...my husband and I both love food, love cooking...it's hard for me to separate the two.  Because then...if my kids are decorating cookies...is that a food post or a family post?  If my husband and I go out to eat at a new restaurant and I want to talk about the food here...well, it was a "date night" so it's about family, but there was good food involved, so should that be on the food site?

I don't know what to do yet.

Why does it matter?

Oh, because I'm trying to fit into a few different niches.  I'm going for targeted advertising and sometimes there are stipulations - like your blog needs to be a certain percentage of food-themed posts in order to be considered a food blog (in some places)...or a certain percentage of family/parenting posts...or whatever.

The problem is, food is a big part of my family.  We grow it, we catch it, we cook it, we eat it.  (I do most of the dishes, but that's a different issue.)  The point is, we are not separate from the food.  We are intertwined.  Food and family.  Family and food.

I'm still thinking about what I'm going to do.

If anyone wants to put in their two cents...feel free. 

Right now I'm going to help my son create a book of sea creatures.

(See, now, you'd think that would be a family/parenting kind of a situation, however, the story of these sea creatures is that, in turn, each one gets eaten by another sea creature bigger than itself.  So...does that make it a food post?  And WE eat a lot of seafood, too.  Again, food post.)

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout.

It Sure Seemed Like a Good Idea

We spent a couple of hours at my sister's house today.  My kids like playing with their older cousins, or at least playing nearby while the two cousins play Guitar Hero.

 

I just wanted a few minutes of peace and quiet.  And to drink a whole cup of coffee without having to reheat it.  I brought down the last of my Bittersweet Chocolate and Poached Pear Tart as payment for both.

My sister said Alex and Julia could get some markers and color the big empty cardboard box in the living room.  Both kids thought that was a great plan, so Mere showed them where the markers were and soon they were busily creative.

At one point Julia came into the kitchen wearing Calvin's hat.  She looked cute. 

And while Alex played with my sister's practice nun-chucks, Julia held aloft my sister's bamboo practice bo.  I imagine in her mind she had just defeated a few classmates.  Or her brother.

Eventually they both went back to coloring the box, and with the exception of the Guitar Hero noise, the living room was fairly quiet and Meredith and I actually got to hang out and chat a bit. 

At one point Mere left to go upstairs, and as she passed the living room, she did a double-take and said "Um...Jayne...come see what your kids are doing."

That's never a good thing.

She wouldn't have said that if they were, oh, dusting the bookshelves or sweeping the floor.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the living room.

Both kids were in the box.

They were laughing hysterically.

And here's what I saw.

Can you see it?  Did you look at their faces?

They weren't just coloring the cardboard.

In fact, when my sister had walked by, the kids were facing each other, markers in hand, each gently drawing on the other's face.

 

I should have switched to color for these shots, but I was too busy telling them to STOP IT!  MARKERS ARE FOR COLORING ON PAPER!  OR CARDBOARD!  NOT EACH OTHER!

These lines on his face were blue...and there were also blue marks on Julia's face.  And red and blue on their ankles and bare feet.  And Julia's hands.

They really didn't care what I thought at all.

But just to placate me - or shut me up - they resumed drawing on their cardboard canvases.

At least while they thought I was watching.

Thanks, Mere.  Thanks a lot.  Hope you enjoyed the ganache.

Some Pictures from Sunday

  We went to my cousin's house for Easter brunch, as we've been doing for the past bunch of years.  They have two Easter egg hunts, actually - one for the little kids, and one for the older kids. 

The number of little kids has been dwindling - there were 3 of them this year - my two and another little boy around Alex's age.  So each kid makes out pretty well in the candy department.

And we all make out well in the overall eating department, too.  My cousin's wife, like me, I suppose, cooks with the notion that too much is not really quite enough, so better to make more.  Other people contribute food, too, but even if they didn't, we'd have more than enough to eat.

Anyway, here are some random shots taken throughout the day yesterday.

My Dad, the Young Photographer

I've had this monstrous project looming over my head.  Well, maybe not looming, because it's not a scary evil project.  Just a long-overdue one.  And it's big.  VERY big.

I have not put pictures in photo albums (with the exception of small albums of my kids' photo shoots when we go to the zoo) since, oh, before Bill and I started dating.  Which is going on eleven years ago.  Actually, since, oh, since my sister's son - her firstborn - was born.  So that's fifteen and a half (sorry, Mere) years ago.  So you may or may not be able to imagine the tons and tons of photos throughout the house, just sitting in their envelopes, chatting with their negatives, waiting patiently for me to get my act together and put them some place where people (including myself) could actually sit and look at them from time to time. 

And now that I've gone digital, which is going on...wow, two years this July...there are also all sorts of images in my laptop and the external hard drive I bought JUST SO I'D HAVE SOMEWHERE TO STORE THE PICTURES BECAUSE MY LAPTOP IS CONSTANTLY FULL that no one looks at but me because I don't print enough of them or upload to flickr on a regular enough basis, because I am disorganized or lazy or something.

Oh, and in addition to the pictures in all their envelopes, there is a good-sized box full of a huge melange of pictures and negatives that were caught in the flood in our basement in August of 2003.  Yes.  Four and a half years ago.  There were pictures down near the floor - a box of them or something - oh, yes, I think I had begun to attempt to try to think about to hope to organize them back THEN.  And they got wet along with anything else on or close to the floor.  So I spent a bunch of that afternoon/evening laying out all those pictures on the furniture and floor in the living room and our bedroom, and fortunately they really didn't get too badly damaged...but they did get totally mixed together.

So anyway.  On Sunday, I started working on this.  I sat down on the floor in my bedroom and started just sorting envelopes of prints and negatives into boxes loosely categorized thusly:  Before Bill.  With Bill But Before Kids.  With Kids.  Black and White.  Bill's Family Way Before My Time.  They're broad categories, but it was the easiest way to begin, rather than with years, for example.  And so far that's all I've done.

But while I was going through things, I came across a small envelope of some black and white prints my father gave me - copies of prints someone sent him, actually, of him (my dad) when he was a young photographer with a big ol' camera and before he had a wife or daughters. 

Here's one:

 

And here's the other:

 

Aren't they cool? 

Anyway, I just wanted to share them.   

I'll probably be posting other pictures, too, as I go through the mess.  So be warned!

Elbows In

Today is my Dad's birthday - Happy Birthday, Dad!

I've mentioned this before, but my father is a photographer (retired) and he is responsible (or at fault) for putting a loaded camera in my hands at a young age and letting me loose on the neighborhood.

It was one of those boxy little cameras that used a flash cube...I shot the roll of black and white film in a matter of oh, seconds, probably, and went back to the basement door in our kitchen and called down to him "Now what?"

He stuck his head out of the darkroom and answered "You're done already?"

And I haven't changed a whole lot since then.  Too bad the digital age hadn't hit yet - my parents probably could have bought a summer home in the mountains with the money they'd have saved on film and flash cubes.

But then, if it had been the digital age, I would never have learned how to process a roll of film - including how to load that roll of film in complete darkness, just by touch.  I would never have learned to print contact sheets, with all my little images in nearly-neat rows on a single 8 x 10 sheet.  I would never have encountered the pure magic of printing a picture and watching the paper as it rested in the developer tray, waiting, rocking the tray gently, practically coaxing the hidden image to slowly appear.  My picture.  That I took.  And processed.  And printed.  Myself.

So in honor of my father, and to give him a good laugh as well, probably, here are a few old pictures I dug out, pictures I took (as evidenced by every single flaw you can see).

This is our back deck, and in the back you can see the grill...and in front of that - some buckets, and some little tiny blurry things.  Those are some of my little plastic farm animals and my little tiny Fisher Price people.  Note the...well, the blurriness, and the crookedness...it was ART.

Next up, my younger sister.  Even then she was interested in karate...that must be some sort of kata she's doing.  And of course, THAT would explain the blur of the picture.  Nothing to do with me.

That's the vegetable garden behind her.

Since I'd mastered black and white so handily, I was quickly promoted to color....

I specialized in group photos of both people and animals.  Here's a shot I took in our kitchen (see the wallpaper in the back?  I love that wallpaper.  I wish I had some.  Just to look at.  All different kinds of flowers all over it.  Sigh.).  Note how EVEN THEN, I was rather, um, overly organized, and if you look closely, not only are all the animals grouped by species, but also by color.  Especially over there on the right.  I don't even know what all the little black and blue and red things are, but at least they are grouped by color.  Very important on a farm.  And see the happy Fisher Price family in front.  Not dead center - no, it's a much more visually interesting image BECAUSE they are off center.  I was quite the prodigy. 

The one good thing (well, one of so many) about this shot, is that it's not as blurry as the previous two.  Clearly, I was improving.  I remember my father's mantra - "keep your elbows in" - keep them tucked against your body, to steady the camera.  If you can keep yourself still, even in the middle of a strong wind, the picture will be the better for it. 

I could go on and enlarge that to mean something more universal, but I've got to get the kids ready for school, so I'll leave that up to anyone else reading this.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Dad.  I'm keeping my elbows in!

Love,

Jayne

The Hats

My sister finished Alex's hat and we picked it up yesterday.  Here are the kids this morning, getting ready to go outside and play in the snow.  Wearing the hats that Auntie crocheted for them...

Aren't they nice?  The hats, I mean.  Thanks, Auntie!

Before I Forget (Again)

My sister, Meredith, is not only a first degree black belt in karate, but she is also an up and coming crocheting ninja princess.

She crocheted a lot of gifts for family and friends this year, and one of the things she made was this hat for Julia.

Actually, I need to get a better picture of it so you can see the top of it with the four crocheted chains that sprout from the top and dangle down.  But I wanted to at least MENTION it, finally, because I keep forgetting to and I really like braggin on my sister.  So take a look.

 

The blend of colors in the yarn are (00ps) is perfect for Julia, and she loves the hat. 

Mere also made scarves for Bill and me - I'll take pictures of them soon.  She's also working on a hat for Alex, and I'll post a picture of that when it's done, too.

Thanks, Mere!

Bits and Pieces From the Past Week or So

Alex has "discovered" cartoons.  The old ones.  The real ones.  His favorites?  Hands down, it's Tom and Jerry, and the Pink Panther. 

I swear to you I have never heard him laugh SO HARD in his entire five and a half years as he does when Jerry gets the best of Tom in some evil, painful way...or when something blows up and that little large-nosed man who gets annoyed by the Panther is turned briefly to soot. 

Today it's Christmas all over for Alex - there's a Tom & Jerry MARATHON on TV, and he is soaking in as much as he can.  Every so often I hear this burst of helpless, happily horrified, chortling laughter burst out from the basement.  Sometimes he'll see the gag coming and let out a little "oooOOOHHHHHH!" before the guffaws take over. 

And watching him - he can't sit still.  The mirth flows through his blood and makes his legs dance and his arms flail about in blissful delirium.  If he's on the floor, he's jumping up and down.  If he's on the furniture, he's either wiggling unstoppably or jumping up and down (until I catch him and tell him to cut it out). 

This is enormously fun to watch.  Alex, I mean.  His blossoming appreciation for physical humor and cartoon violence....it's a coming-of-age thing, kind of.  And it's priceless.  That sound, his laughter.  There is nothing better.

Julia watches too, and she laughs sometimes, but she's not as enthralled as her brother. 

~~~~~

The kids have been playing against Bill at some little memory card games - the kind where all the cards are face down, and you have to turn two over and if they match, you keep them, and if not, you turn them back over.

Bill has lost most, if not all, of the games they have played.  And he's not LETTING them win, either.  Oh no.  He's not that kind of person AT ALL.  So it's particularly amusing when a five year old and a three year old beat him repeatedly.  Alex tried to console him one day by offering to help him do better next time.  "How bad is that when a five year old practically offers to let you win???"  He was visibly upset.  hahahahaha. 

Last night they were playing and I was folding laundry - I was sort of around the corner in the basement and couldn't see them, but I could hear.  Julia had just won the most recent game.  Alex had won the game before.  And Bill had come in third both times.  Alex helpfully pointed out what the problems might be.  "Daddy probably doesn't win because he's not in school any more.  Maybe they didn't HAVE memory games when Daddy wasn't in school!"  on and on like that, until Bill actually cried out, anguished, "Alex, shut up!" 

They play Go Fish also.  I watched the end of a game when I was done with the folding.  It's pretty funny.  The kids are finally learning to hold their cards up so the other players can't see what they've got.  But still, there are tactics they haven't quite mastered.  For example:

Julia:  "Does anybody have any flowers?"

Alex:  "Nope."

Bill:  "Go fish!"

Julia: (as she leans over and everyone can see the cards in her hand.  She picks up a card from the pile) "I have a turtle!"

Alex:  (who has a turtle in his hand) "Does anybody have a turtle?"

Julia:  "I do!" (she hands it over happily and says, laughing at the coincidence) "Alex wanted a turtle and I HAD a turtle!  Wasn't that funny!?" (and she does a Homer Simpson-like "doh!" kind of thing).

Bill:  (says nothing.  Just opens and closes his mouth a couple times and shakes his head.)

Alex, no surprise, won the game.

~~~~~

Julia had asked Santa for a baby doll for Christmas.  She got four.  One from each of Bill's brothers, and two from Santa himself. 

One is a "Baby Alive" that drinks and wets and came with only three spare diapers.  The manufacturer apparently has never had a newborn for longer than an hour and does not realize that three diapers is not gonna cut it for long.  That baby also makes sad noises when she's hungry, happy noises when she is content (i.e. drinking her water) and then restless and fidgety when she's wet. .

Baby number two is, I believe, the biggest baby of the crew, and she sounds frighteningly real.  So much so that if she's crying in another room, I have thought that it was Julia crying.  The baby says "Ma-Ma, Ma-Ma" when you squeeze her cheeks, and I think she laughs when you tickle her feet.  Interesingly enough, Bill dropped her on her head one day and she didn't cry at all.  After Julia had opened this one, she carried it around just like a real mommy would carry her real baby, offering the baby her bottle when she cried, and ferociously telling Bill to "Go Away!" when he came anywhere near the baby.  She is already quite the mother tiger.

Baby number three is a Cabbage Patch newborn - her second, and a boy, and black.  He's very cute.   The lone blue-clad baby in a sea of pinks.  He gets along  nicely with her other Cabbage Patch newborn.  I don't actually know what color her clothes are - they're most likely pink or purple, but Julia strips her children naked early on and those clothes have long since disappeared.  Baby Boy, so far, has not suffered this treatment.  But he will.  She just hasn't gotten around to it yet.

Baby number four is all cloth and came with a little sling kind of thing to sleep in and a backpack so Julia can tote her around.  She arrived with pink clothes, but she's down to her skivvies (sewn on) now.

Julia also got a set of Princess baby accessories - a high chair, a stroller, and a playpen.  The playpen can be disassembled and stored in a cylindrical fabric case that zips closed and has a fabric handle.  A day or two after Christmas I saw Julia load one of the babies into that cylindrical case, zip it closed, and lug the child around like that for a while.

These four bring her baby total up to ten.  I thought it was eleven, but apparently Dressy Bessy isn't a baby, so she doesn't qualify for inclusion.

One afternoon in order to break up a squabble in the making, I did my idiot-mother thing of gasping in surprise and delight, widening my eyes and announcing "I've got an idea!"  They stare at me and forget about wanting to hit each other, and I will say something like "First, you guys have to get ALL the BABIES and bring them UPSTAIRS!"  So they dash off on their scavenger hunt and this keeps them busy for a bit.  Alex is still happy to play with the baby dolls sometimes, which is nice for Julia, until he gets tired of it and she gets mad at him.  Kind of like practice for when they're married to other people and have kids of their own....

Anyway, all the babies were rounded up and brought up to the bedroom.  I'd been using the old changing table as a storage area for stuffed animals, but I cleared them off of the top two shelves and grabbed some baby blankets and made up two long beds.  I called for the babies, and arranged them in two rows of five on their new bunk beds, then covered them with a couple more baby blankets.  Ta-da!  Mommy's so clever.

Yesterday the kids were playing in the room and all the babies were lying on their bunkbeds but with no blankets covering them. 

"That's okay, Mommy,"  Alex told me, before I had even said a thing.  "We put baby spray on them and that keeps them warm.  They don't need blankets."

Baby spray.  hahahahahaha.

~~~~~

Don't know if you remember, but several posts ago I mentioned that Julia is now being treated for Lyme disease.  I mentioned the red splotchiness on the side of her face, between her red left ear and her left eye.  That's subsided, but last night a new symptom appeared.  I was taking a bubble bath and Bill was bringing the kids to bed.  Julia banged on the bathroom door "I wanna give you a KISS!" she hollered at me, so I wrapped up in a towel and opened the door.  She stood there in her pink snowflake jammies looking coy, just half a grin on her smug little face.  Or so I thought.  Turns out she's got a partial paralysis of her left cheek going on.

At first I thought maybe she had a canker sore and it hurt to move that side of her face, but no.  I had her close her eyes, and sure enough, her right eye closed fine, but the left eye - well, the lower lid wouldn't rise up to meet the upper lid, so I got the creepy experience of seeing the left eye roll up, leaving a bit of the white exposed.  When she's asleep, the eye closes completely and she looks fine.  But if you just ask her to shut her eyes, you get that partially opened thing happening.

I looked it up and that's actually one of the symptoms of Lyme disease in toddlers.  It goes away, but at the moment, it's a little disconcerting.  I want her to have her whole smile back.

Sure, it's a cute half-grin...

...but it's not quite the same.

Always

This post is for my Mom, in a way.  It's her birthday today.  She's always been a wonderful mother, except for that time when we were little and she told us we could eat AS MUCH CANDY as we wanted.  That frightened me.  But apart from that...she's done a damn fine job.  From her I've inherited a love of books, and of cooking, and of music, and, hopefully, decent mothering abilities.  Time will tell.

Happy Birthday, Mom.  Mind how you go....Love, Jayne

Not long after my mom's father passed away, after the funeral was over, and we were supposed to start to "get back to normal", I was in my old bed at my parents' house, and I dreamt of him. 

In this dream, I was sitting on a bench in a park - I don't know where, I didn't recognize it.  And he, Grandad, came over and sat beside me.  He didn't look like he had looked toward the end - tired and gaunt and shrunken and sharply angled.  Instead, he was tall and healthy and hearty - full of "vim, vigour and vitality" as he used to say.  He looked as he had when I was younger, when I looked up at him always in awe and admiration and love and a huge desire to be with him all the time. 

I was so blessed with the lives of all of my grandparents when I was a child.  I knew each of them. I have separate and distinct memories of them.  My dad's parents moved to Arizona when I was nearly 4, and they came east once more when I was in the 6th grade.  I never saw my paternal  grandfather - Grandpa - again, but I did see my grandmother shortly after Grandpa passed away - Dad and I flew out to California, where they had moved, and we visited and I met other family members for the first time.

My mother's parents were constants in my young life, especially after I turned 7 and my grandfather had retired and the two of them moved up to Rhode Island and into a house on the same block as ours.  I was 22 when my grandfather passed away - so that's a huge chunk of my life with him in it.

Anyway. 

There I was on the park bench, and him sitting beside me.  And he was wearing a thin maroon windbreaker sort of jacket.  He used to walk down to Healy's News Store on Sunday mornings to get the paper.  He'd pick up two and drop one off at my parents' house before going home.  I can see him coming around the corner of Main street, newspapers rolled and tucked under an arm.... 

He walked at a purposeful, destination-bound pace.  He neither sauntered nor meandered, and I think this was true in most aspects of his life.  I remember sleeping over at my grandparents' house and wanting to get up to get the paper with him.  I knew I had to be up and ready to go on time, so I slept in my clothes, just to make sure he wouldn't leave without me.  I was young and small; he was larger than life.

When he sat down on the bench beside me, he spoke to me in his strong, London-laced voice.

And he said "I always love you."

It was a strange phrase.  Not "I will" or "I have...loved..." - but more of an "I do...."  Not "when I was alive" or "looking down from wherever I am now" - no - it was a constant, uninterrupted thing.

I woke up in tears. 

Days later, back at the house I shared with some college friends in CT, I told one of them - the one with the most religious upbringing - about the dream and asked if he believed that the dead can visit us in our sleep.  It had been so real...I could recall the feel of cool nylon jacket on my palms and fingers as I clung to him in a hug.  He felt solid.

My friend said no, something like that was more likely the work of the devil.

And since I had no way to prove otherwise, I let the subject drop.  With him.  But I didn't agree.  How could that dream be an evil thing?  How?  If anything, it was...uplifting, and joyous, and beautiful.  I didn't discuss it again.  But I still think my dear, wonderful friend was full of crap that day.

Someone larger than life leaves a huge gap in the lives of his family when he is physically no longer present.  The fallout, I think, has never stopped, though the vibrations have softened.  We all handle things differently.  Sometimes wisely, sometimes not.  Regardless, time continues on, oblivious.

I don't visit the grave where both my grandparents now lay.  Well, the physical part of them.  I don't really think they are there.  I think my grandfather, wherever he is, continues to move purposefully and with some destination in mind.  I think he visits libraries, and opera houses, and small amateur boxing clubs where the fighters are there to fight and not just for spectacle or ear-biting. 

For a long time, I kept the green vinyl recliner that had been his.  I actually had it before he died - my grandmother or my mother or someone wanted to get him a new chair.  I couldn't bear the thought of them throwing this chair away, so I claimed it. He'd had the chair when they lived in New Jersey.  When we went down there to visit, my sister and I would sit on his lap on that chair, listening to the soundtracks of "Oliver!" and "My Fair Lady." 

The chair smelled faintly of pipe tobacco.  Borkum-Riff Whiskey blend.  It came in a black and white and silver tin, and there were tall-masted sailing ships on the top and sides.  Even when the chair was no longer in his house, when he hadn't smoked a pipe in many years, especially since the heart attack, I could, if I pressed my face against the vinyl in just the right spot, still smell the tobacco.  I inhaled it like a drug. 

My husband and I have now lived in our house for just over 6 years now.  The whole house had been refurbished before we bought it - so much of it was like new.  It smelled of paint for months.

A couple of times, upstairs here, I have caught a whiff of that pipe tobacco smoke.  Unannounced, unexpected, unexplained.  (I don't have the chair any more.)  I wondered at first if maybe someone in a nearby house was smoking that same pipe tobacco, and that the wind had carried a bit of it in through an open bedroom window.

But I have dismissed that idea.  It didn't last long enough to have come from anywhere outside.  There was no more of it than a fleeting olefactory glimpse.  It was an eye blink of a smell.  There and gone.  But definitely there.

So he has stopped by, I believe, to check in on things.  And I'm sorry the books aren't in better rows, spines flush with the edge of the shelf.  And that I sometimes dog-ear the pages.  But I don't think it matters much.  I think so many of the things that matter to us on a daily basis, things we worry about and obsess about and torture ourselves with and bury - as if that will make it go away when all it does is hide if for a while - I think they don't really matter at all.  They just keep us busy.  And moving.  And distracted.  And we do them anyway.  Because we must do things.

Monday night - two nights ago - I was watching TV with my husband.  The program he had been watching ended, and I took up the remote and began to scroll through the programming guide to see what else was on.  I  am weird like this: no matter what channel we are on, I need to scroll to channel 2 - to the beginning - and proceed from there.  So I did, paging back from wherever we had been until I reached the beginning.  And there, on channel 2 - "Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti in Concert."  I hit the info button - it was the 1990 concert in Rome.  I hit "Select" and settled in for the night.

My grandfather died in 1988 - two years before the concert took place.  I'm sure he was there, floating above in the night sky, eyes closed, index fingers twitching, perhaps, as he conducted along with Zubin Mehta.   He would do that.

I know the whole concert by heart.  I know some of the songs in Italian, or French, German, Spanish...and what I don't know that way, I "know" phonetically.  I even sing along with the orchestra.  I'm sure I'm quite annoying to be around, but I don't particularly care.

I thought about my grandfather while I watched and sang in my chair.  I thought about my Mom, his only child, and wondered if she knew this was on, and if she was watching.  The holiday season is tough on her, I know.  But then, the season is tough on so many people who have lost loved ones and must celebrate without them in a chair at the dinner table. 

I sat there and kind of waited to feel tearful.  I really did.  I waited for emotion to well up in me, perhaps while Domingo sang "e lucevan le stelle", and pour from my eyes.  I waited to feel them sting a bit, and for my nose to feel prickly as it does when I'm going to cry.  But none of that happened.  I just listened, and sang along softly, and groaned and rolled my eyes whenever the program was interrupted because the public television station was in the middle of their fundraising.  And I got annoyed with this one woman who kept pronouncing Pavarotti "pavarot-tay" - what is that?  Get over yourself dear, you sound ridiculous.

And while there was singing, I also wondered if, maybe, I might suddenly smell some pipe tobacco.  Of course that's asking a lot, I know.  He could be watching this from anywhere.  Actually, he could be hanging out with Luciano instead, discussing other great tenors of the past and which arias were their favorites.  But still...I wanted something to happen.   

I've been watching Lisa Williams / Life Among the Dead.  I thing she's fabulous.  First - because she seems genuine.  And because she's got a great smile and funky hair and a cute little blond son and an English accent.  And because I have always been interested in the other side.  And according to Lisa, yes, they do communicate - though not always in the ways you expect them to.  So you have to be open to it, in whatever way it comes.

Well, I sniffed the air - quietly, so my husband wouldn't wonder what my problem was - on and off for a while.  Nothing.  I physically tensed as I tried REALLY HARD to - I don't know - squeeze pipe smoke from thin air through sheer force of will.  Didn't work.   

During one of the breaks, when the smiling, unblinking, fund-raising folk returned, waving CDs and DVDs, I went upstairs to move our son out of our bed and into his own.  He falls asleep on our bed because if both kids go to bed in the room they share, neither one falls asleep.  So this is how we're doing this for now.  It can't go on forever.  My son is five and a half, and growing taller by the minute, it seems.  It's a production picking him up off of the bed - sound asleep, so he weighs twice what he weighs when he's awake.  I lean in and hug him to me and then bend my knees a bit and lean backward to shift his weight onto me instead of the bed, and then straighten up so I don't fall over backwards.  I lug him as gently as I can from our room down the short hall to the kids' bedroom, trying not to whack one of his dangling legs against the door frame in the process.  Then I heave him up so he's somehow horizontal in my arms and then gently - in theory - set him down on the bed.  Cover him with the sheet and blanket and comforter, kiss him on the cheek, whisper "I love you" in his ear.  Sometimes he stays right where I put him, other times he sits up and slowly lays back down against the pillow, rearranging himself into a more comfortable position than the one I dumped him in, or he sometimes  mumbles or babbles in his sleep. 

So I got him settled in and whispered "I love you" and kissed him and was on my way toward the door when he spoke - perfectly clearly, as if he was awake, except that his eyes were closed.

And he said "I always love you."

I was so focused on not waking him or his sister up that what he said didn't really hit me until I was sitting on the couch watching the last portion of the concert, where all three tenors are on stage for that one grand and glorious and fun medly of opera and musical theatre and folk songs. 

And then I suddenly thought - huh?  What did he say? 

He said "I always love you." 

Not "I will..." or "I have .... loved..."  - future or past...

It was more like "I do" - something constant, in the present - in the ever-present tense.  The always.

And I watched the remainder of that concert lying on the couch, snuggled under a blanket, smiling.  I felt...happy.  I didn't feel sad at all.  My nose refused to prickle; my eyes would not cry. 

And - that's a good thing, I think. 

I don't believe we are supposed to cry forever.  I think we are supposed to live our lives - really live them - not wasting a single moment if possible.  I think that is the best way to honor those we have lost.  "Every day an adventure," as Grandad was wont to say.  Our time here is precious.  It's wrong to waste a minute of it.  I think we are supposed to love and cherish those around us - hug our loved ones tightly - and work hard and play hard and laugh and yes, remember, and move purposefully toward our destinations, wherever and whatever they may be.

Sure, maybe my son saying what he said, that way, that night, was a coincidence. 

But I don't believe in coincidences.

I do, however, believe love is endless.

Always.

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BABY SISTER!!!!

We called her house earlier this morning so the kids could sing to her.  No audio, but here's a picture.  Happy Birthday, Meredith!! 

The cat was indifferent.