He Rides!

In the past week, Eli, now nearly 8, learned to ride a bike. Personally, I can't believe it. Either can he. Tonight we were laying on the bed together, chatting after a long, wonderful summer Sunday. He said, "Boy, Mom, I am so relieved, I was beginning to think I was going to be an adult and not know how to ride a bike!" I chuckled and admitted that the same thought might have fluttered through my brain. Then he added, "And yesterday, when I could ride, but I couldn't get started without help, I was thinking to myself...boy, I will know how to bike as an adult, but I will have to go knock on my neighbor's door and ask them to come out and help me get started! I sure am glad that I got that figured out too." So now I keep getting this image of my wonderful adult son deciding he wants to bike off to the grocery store, but he has to go get the neighbor to help him get started down the alley, and then get the guy who carries the groceries out to get him going back home. I shared this vision with Eli and we had a hearty chuckle. I love dearly that he is so willing to laugh at himself. He is truly a gem.

Banana Moon

Right before going to bed last night I noticed a beautiful banana moon hanging outside my bedroom window. I thought of my grandfather. Last October he passed away after a long and wonderful life. Here is an essay I wrote for his funeral:

I’ve always loved a banana moon. Not only because it is a gorgeous sight on a dark night, but because that thin slice ties me to my grandfather. I don’t know all of the details of the original story of me, my grandpa, and the banana moon, because I was very young, and very feverish. But I do know that for the last thirty years, every time I happen to glance up and see it, my thoughts go first to my grandfather. And I’ve known that wherever he is, if he sees it, he’s been thinking of me.

I’ve been told that when I was four years old I developed a sudden high fever while at a mother/daughter function of some sort. The fever got so high that I had a seizure, so my mom quickly rushed me over to her sister Judy’s house where I was given an ice bath and my fever went down a bit. But I was still quite listless and unwell. It was the general consensus that my mother should not drive home with me alone in the back seat, so my grandfather volunteered to sit with me. At this point I was completely out of it, and there was a good deal of anxiety about how this was all going to end. But on the drive home, I stirred, glanced out the car window, mustered enough strength to say, “Look Grandpa, a banana moon,” then slipped back into unconsciousness. This was enough to convince my grandfather that I was going to be alright. When I recovered, he told me the tale of my midnight sighting of the moon. I’m sure I would have forgotten the story if he hadn’t continued to call me over the years whenever he happened to spot a banana moon.

The calls diminished in frequency as we both got older, but I know that on my half, the thoughts did not. I simply can not see a banana moon and not see my grandfather as well. And I know that the same was true for him, because the calls did continue to come, although sporadically. And those calls seemed to come when I was yearning for some kind of check in, some assurance that whatever I was doing was going to come out alright.

Once I left home for college, he moved to Florida full time, and I felt that universal feeling of spreading my wings and heading out beyond my family. I was a fairly confident kid, but grandpa’s occasional calls to my dorm room reminded me that we still shared the same moon, and that my grandpa was out there rooting for me, and that was a great comfort. When I went overseas to serve in the Peace Corps I was living without a phone and out of regular contact with everyone back home, but he got word to me anyway. He went through the trouble to reach the Peace Corps office and left a cryptic message. It just said, “Grettie, there was a banana moon hanging over the Gulf of Mexico last night, how did it look over the Caribbean?” The woman who took the message was baffled, but it sure made sense to me.

About two years ago, as I was working my way through the first years of starting my own family, I really used that connection to the moon and my grandfather. My youngest son Theo developed a very high fever late one night. I remember holding his hot little body in my arms and thinking, this is not going to end well. He started into a seizure and I got a little panicky. My husband quickly called 911 and almost before the seizure ended there was a medical team at our door. They checked Theo’s vitals and gave me assurances that he was going to be ok. Looking at his pale, limp, body, I doubted them. They said they needed to take him to the ER so I went with him in the ambulance. No, I did not catch a glimpse of a lovely banana moon out the window of the ambulance, I think it was raining. But I did think of it. And I did think of my grandpa going through this very thing with me, and I was comforted, and I did start to believe that it was all going to come out alright. And it did.

A few weeks ago I was out on a retreat with students from my school. It was freezing cold for September and we were huddled around a campfire. As I looked through the tree branches I spotted a gorgeous sliver of a banana moon hanging over the St. Croix River. I thought of my grandfather down in Florida, and I shared our story with my students. I should have gone up the path back to the cabin, to my cell phone, and called him. I didn’t. But I did send him my love over the skies. Now, this morning, I received word that he has died. Although he was 91 and it was his desire to go quietly before life got too painful and difficult, it is hard to let him go. But I take some solace from the thought that every month that moon will cycle around, and I will have him in my heart again. And it will all end well.

I want to describe for you the picture I get in my mind everytime I see that banana moon: It's of Grandpa Bill (who self-imposed the nickname 'Wild Bill' on himself) sitting on his patio in Naples, Florida. He's wearing a pink polo shirt and some snazzy pants that feature yellow and lime green stripes. In his right hand he's gently swirling the ice in his glass of scotch. His left hand is in the peanut dish, squirrling out a few nuts. He's looking into the middle distance with a twinkle in his eye. He says, "Grettie, did I ever tell you about the time Bud and I...."

The Compact

Earlier this spring, some friends convinced us to join them on a year-long project to live by the 'San Francisco Compact'. This title refers to a movement started in the Bay Area of California by a group of people who were looking for a way to tread more lightly on the planet. What they did, and what we have done, is to pledge to not buy anything new for a year- except food, health and safety items, and underwear. We can buy anything else our hearts desire, as long as it is second-hand.
When I first heard of this project, I thought that there was no way I wanted to be a part of that. I figured that Jon and I were already very low on the conspicuous consumption continuum and that it wouldn't make a big difference in our spending/buying habits anyway, but would be a headache to be in 'compliance'. But then I ran some errands with my youngest son and while we walked through the aisles of the hardware store I was bombarded with his pleading for this item and that item. He didn't even care what it was, he just WANTED. And this is a kid who has been exposed to less than 10 hours of commercial tv/radio in his five years of life. But apparently he's bought in to the American consumer idealogy that prevails in this culture.
And so we joined up. We decided that we would make a small list of 'other things' that would be ok to buy new, but when we sat down to make up this list, the only thing we could think to put on it was running shoes. We told the kids that they could decide if they wanted to follow the compact with their allowance, or if they wanted to make some new purchases. When Eli found out that he would realize 52x his allowance at the end of the year he enthusiastically jumped in-certainly with visions of what this motherload of cash would be able to purchase next spring. Theo, whose first allowance was handed to him one week into the compact, was more eager to spend. When he got his first allowance he said, "Mom, let's go buy something, let's buy..." and then he looked at me, and I saw him remembering the compact and he finished with "...some food!" So apparently the compact is not going to quell his desire to spend, but it may redirect it.
As for me, I have loved the first 1.5 months. I don't think I have ever done much frivolous shopping, but I do remember some lovely trips to REI with no specific goal in mind. And there are several catalogs that came to my house that I would page through and covet. Really covet. I would go to the websites then and browse and check out the sales. Maybe once or twice a year, I would actually place an order. So actual money spent was fairly low, but time spent was not something I am proud of. Now, the catalogs come and I just toss them into the recyling bag without a glance. And I love it.
We have 10.5 months to go, and who knows what will happen. And there is the incident of the hummingbird feeder that I am not quite ready to fess up to yet. But I do see a change in our habits, our thinking, already. And that is true for the boys too. We're just hardly in stores anymore. And if we are, and Theo starts to beg, I say, "Remember that we're not buying anything..." and he moves on.
I never imagined that living by 'the compact' would actually provide me with a greater sense of freedom. My first reaction was that I would constantly be checking some onerous set of rules and I would feel very restricted, frustrated, and ultimately judged for 'breaking' the compact. That has not happened in the least. Instead I have felt our whole family kind of let out a big sigh, and step back, in fact, step off of the never ending treadmill of consuming that we so unwittingly were running on.
Let it be known that when my older brother found out that we were going to give this a try, he dialed up our mother and asked, "What in the hell is wrong with Gret and Jon now?" She, suspiciously, did not report to me what her answer was.

Nightmares

Eli is on the home stretch to his 8th birthday. And he can tip the scales at 50 pounds if he has his pockets full of treasures, and a full meal in his belly. He is not large. Tall, but very thin. It's not that he doesn't eat. I think that he often outeats me if the meal consists of noodles or pancakes. Anyway- this morning he came crawling into my bed at 6:30am. He was shaking and teary. In a very quiet, shaky voice he said, "Mom, I just had the WORST nightmare." Oh great, I thought, the decision to let him watch the first Harry Potter movie was going to come back to haunt me in the form of sharing my bed with Eli for nights to come as he worked through his fears of Voldemort. Then, "sniff Dad was down in the basement making origami butterflies..." Where was this going? There was a basement involved, so that's scary, but his dad was down there...making butterflies...
"So I went down and helped him...shudder, sniff... and when I came back up, I had MISSED BREAKFAST!!" At that point he broke down into very sleepy shuddering and sniffling and eventually dozed back off. I lay next to him, looking at his face, still tense even in sleep. Eventually he slept more peacefully.

Where have all the diving boards gone?

I spent the summers of my childhood on, in, or under water. My mom believed firmly in getting us out of the house when the weather was good. Sometimes she did this by simply ushering us out the sliding glass door to our back yard and locking it behind us. She would stay inside, ironing our t-shirts and sheets. But most often, she would load us into the back of the old Ford Falcon station wagon and head to her parents’ back yard. They had a pool.

There was a tradition in my mother’s family to throw the grandchildren into the pool at an early age. We were taught a few rudimentary strokes, and then, when a child was judged ready, my grandma would ceremoniously place a bundt cake at the deep end of the pool. The chosen grandchild would push off from the shallow end and pull for that cake. I earned my bundt cake the summer I was four. My brother Pete, only two, claimed his own a week or two later.

Before we even earned our cake, my mom and her sister would get us kids up on the diving board. There is one home movie of me toddling precariously to the end and then gleefully jumping into my mother’s waiting arms. I couldn’t have been much over one.
I’m sure my mom logged hundreds of hours treading water as she waited to catch us. As the summers passed, we got more confident, and my mom was able to just watch from the side. All of us cousins devised very unique ways to launch ourselves into the water. I can still remember the sting of my belly flopping stage as I was moving into diving. We would go off in twos and threes and fours. We always came up laughing. To this day, standing on the end of a diving board brings me great joy.

Only now it’s not so easy. We don’t know anyone with a private pool who still has a diving board. I hear that insurance worries have caused most homeowners to remove them. Last summer my son Eli was gearing up to take the plunge. He couldn’t do it over the winter even though we swam on a weekly basis. All of the indoor pools at the YMCA have lost their boards. So we journeyed up to the Y near where I grew up. It has an Olympic sized outdoor pool. I have fond memories of the high dive and all the crazy tricks we pulled off of that one. When we got out of the car I noticed that the high dive was gone. I didn’t ask anyone, but I’m willing to bet it had to do with risk management. There were still two springboards in action, so my son and I hurried over. He’d never gone off of one before, so I was prepared to get into the water and tread, offering him encouragement and a helping hand once he jumped in. But we met the sign declaring the DIVING BOARD RULES on our way. No waiting in the pool. No wearing goggles or a mask. No wearing a life jacket. Only one person on the board at a time. And all potential jumpees must first flag down a lifeguard and pass a swimming and water treading test. I read these rules to Eli and watched his confidence flag. He could have done it. He has the skills. But he kind of wanted me in the water. He kind of wanted to wear his goggles. When I got to the bottom of the list, I asked him if we should go find a life guard. “No mom, it all sounds too complicated.” I agreed.