Keeper of secrets

“I need to tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone…”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard these words! People like telling me their secrets, and I willingly partake.

Growing up at summer camp

Having never been to summer camp myself, I’m living vicariously through my daughter, who is working this summer as a camp counselor. The camp she’s at could be right out of a Wes Anderson movie: picnic tables by the lake, tiny, brightly painted cabins with bunk beds and screen doors; a mess hall with huge serving platters and ladles and pitchers lined up, freshly washed.

We visited my daughter the other day, for a brief 30 minute-stopover while we happened to be driving through the quaint Wisconsin town where she works. As she met us on the gravel lane between the road and the camp, I could already detect a difference, the way her messy ponytail bounced with every step. She looks casual and comfortable, as if she’s recently discovered that her skin fits her perfectly.

Going out in a blaze of glory

I was home sick the other day with a migraine, when I emerged from under my cold cap and darkened room to scavenge for something to eat. Not interested in any type of cooking, I found a slightly freezer-burned box of mini quiches behind the ice trays. I sighed. It would have to do. Thank goodness they at least had bacon in them.

Granny Core: hobbies that slow you down (in a good way)

Lately, granny squares have been popping up in unexpected places.

Remember granny squares? I watched my mother work her crochet hook like a magic wand when I was a little kid in the 70s. The sight of her yarn morphing into squares, which were then stitched together to become handbags and blankets is a core memory for me. So is the click-click of her knitting needles. As well as the whir of her sewing machine. As I grew into a teen, I rejected all these things, because I was determined to be more contemporary, not wanting to continue these “old lady” hobbies.

Do we even know what’s real anymore?

The statistics around bomb threats rank right up there with The Boy Who Cried Wolf. 90-95% are hoaxes. And yet, even these threats have to be taken seriously when innocent lives are at stake.

That’s how I found myself helping to direct community members out of my workplace — a public library — on an impossibly beautiful spring day. A suspicious call came through to a public desk. The caller spoke through a voice changer and made threats to the building and the people inside. Immediately, staff called 911 to report the threat, and the dispatcher advised that the building be evacuated.

Is everyone really doing their best?

A core value of mine is this: Everyone is just doing their best.

I really do believe this, and it plays out during the day when there are minor infractions committed against me, like getting cut off in traffic, or seeing when someone hasn’t cleaned up after their dog in the neighborhood, or the cashier forgets to scan a coupon.

Behold: The Commonwealth of Porchlandia

During the cold months, I pass through our front porch longingly, lingering for a moment to run my hands over the backs of the comfy chairs that wait patiently. “We’ll be together again, I promise,” I whisper to them, while I go back and forth from the house to the driveway, from the driveway to the house, over and over.

Once that first warm day hits, it instantly becomes Porch Season at our house. I defy rain, cold, or wind to keep me from my porch, no matter how heartbreaking midwest springs can be with their inconsistent mood swings. My front porch serves as a fort where I feel completely safe and cloistered without constraints.

Rocky Mountain chaperone

For the past four days, I’ve been on a coach bus with high school band students as a chaperone on a trip to Colorado. The crick in my neck insists the trip was longer than that, but (checks calendar) it was really only four days.

This trip was a bit of a homegoing for me, since I lived in Colorado a long time ago, when I was a newlywed and my husband was studying for a master’s degree. Now, my husband is a high school band director in Illinois. Colorado has become part of the rotation of band trips, which also includes Disney World, New Orleans, and Memphis.

Winter in the Midwest, where I’ve lived most of my life, is an exercise in survival and fortitude. The familiar “winter burrow,” when my neck and shoulders begin to melt into the rest of my body in order to conserve heat, begins in November. That’s when cold winds strip the trees of the remaining leaves and the world seems to be all shades of browns and grays. In December, there is some relief because of all the festive holiday lights and decorations. January settles into a cold, desolate winterscape once again. The lights and tinsel and baubles have been packed away, but a fresh layer of snow can brighten things up.

Watching my parents begin again

Whenever we walk into an Apple Store and belly up to the “Genius Bar,” I half expect all the Geniuses to greet us by name. Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of our hard-earned money over the years on Mac computers, iPads, and iPhones.

This time, I approached the Genius Bar with trepidation: I had been given the daunting task of picking out a computer to replace the old desktop my parents used for the past two decades; it was so old that it was no longer able to be updated; the keyboard and mouse were, on a good day, slightly functional at best. Despite their best efforts to keep it going, it was finally time to find a replacement.

When the flavor and the scenery are a package deal

I just returned from a trip to New Orleans, where my husband and I took in the local scenery, fabulous music, and of course…food. We ate our way through the city, gorging ourselves on all the fresh flavors of catfish, oysters, shrimp, jambalaya, red beans & rice, and gumbo.

“Oh, you must go to Cafe du Monde and have beignets!” said one person after another, almost word for word, which had me suspecting they were part of a mass marketing campaign aimed solely at me.

The Emily Post of snow removal

“Well, we are witnessing the downfall of society,” said my Gentleman Friend, as he kicked off his boots next to the front door and brushed snow out of his hair.

Sometimes I’m not sure if he’s being funny or overly dramatic. So I wait.

Everything old is new again

The universe is conspiring to tell me something, to impart some wise lesson to remind me what this season is supposed to be about.

I felt a twinge of it with the first snowfall of the season. I woke up to a beautiful wonderland blanketed with snow and something bubbled up inside me. Instead of checking the temperature and worrying about levels of antifreeze in my car, I poured a second cup of coffee, sat in my comfy chair, and swiveled to face my picture window. Everything was still and sparkling and bright, while I sat in jammies and slippers thinking how lucky we were to have a cozy house.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Gig

When the server shows me to my table, I ask her in my signature apologetic way if I can be seated at a table with a closer view of the stage. I am related to two of the performers, I tell her. My husband, a trumpet player, will be playing live music at a music club with a jazz quartet and for one night only, my son, Ben, will sit in with the group on guitar. I settle in my chair and wait for the lights to go up.

The glow in the courthouse basement

We stood in line for nearly an hour at the Cook County Courthouse across from the Daley Center. It made for excellent people watching — an assembly line of brides and grooms, gripping their marriage licenses in sweaty palms, slowly advancing through the line one by one, as each couple went into the small room where they took their vows in front of a judge. There were brides of all shapes and sizes, wearing short dresses, long dresses, full makeup and eyelashes or just a modest white dress. There, as if illuminated by a spotlight, I saw my oldest son, Clark, and his beautiful bride Lizzy, waiting patiently for their turn to get married.

When one ring meant ‘I’m here’

Waaaaaay back in the 1990s, when calling long-distance (outside my area code! On a landline!) was cost-prohibitive, my mother devised a system: In my college dorm, I would wait until Sunday evening when the phone rates went down after 10 p.m. I would call her at the top of the hour, ring once, then hang up. That was our signal. She would know that I was ready for our weekly phone call, so she called me back, usually while puttering in the kitchen, while my Dad picked up the extension in the living room close to his favorite chair.

Finding a new groove

We’re barely 30 days out from the day our youngest child moved away from home, and my Gentleman Friend and I are still rattling around, trying to find our groove.

We knew this day would come, when we no longer lived with dependent children, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that we had no idea what that really entailed. We have both been hopelessly knocked off our game.

Happiness bender

My 24-year-old son lives in Chicago, working as a musician. One night after a gig, a woman drove up to him on the street, got out of the car and tearfully handed him a small bundle.

“I can’t take care of him,” said the woman, trembling. “Can you take him?”

My son looked at the bundle in his hands and saw two twitching ears, whiskers, and a pink nose. They belonged to a tiny kitten, mostly white with some orange striping on his tail and back.

Bird Launcher

This morning my husband calculated how many days we’ve spent as active parents, ever since our first child was born in 1996. The number is astounding: 10,531 days. For each of these days, my primary identity was “Mom.” Every waking moment was spent thinking about momming, or executing the tasks of momhood. It swept me up in a funnel cloud of carpools and parent-teacher conferences, youth group and birthday parties, moderating arguments and doling out band-aids for scraped knees. There were many unglamorous moments, but of course memory doesn’t work like that. I can already feel my memory distilling those 10,531 days down to reels of first giggles and piano recitals and the many Hallmark moments when my children were happy, hilarious, and oh-so adorable.

Summer’s Embarrassment of Riches

“That was a good meal,” he says, leaning back in the creaky wooden chair. He inhales carefully, as if his belly is so full that even breathing in could cause him to burst.

This is a hazy memory I have, from a scene in my childhood. I can’t remember if it was a church potluck or around the family Thanksgiving table, but for some reason, that sigh of contentment, that feeling of attempting to straighten the abdomen by stretching like a wooden board, completing the isosceles triangle with the dining chair, sticks in my mind. I still hear the unbuckling of the belt, only loosening it a bit to allow the food to digest and settle. The way, after a good meal, the conversation slows until a comfortable silence takes over. This is especially true at a meal that offers an embarrassment of riches, so much food that you can’t bear to say no to any of it and now you’ve stuffed yourself so full you can hardly speak.

Driving under a paper moon

Age 5: I let him sit in the driver’s seat. He could barely see over the steering wheel, and he made car sounds while he steered hard to the left, then banked hard to the right. He turned every knob on the radio dial, flipped on the turn signal, and startled himself when he turned on the windshield wipers. I snapped a picture of him that day, his smile as big as the moon.

Shame stood up and took a bow

For a few days, the Coldplay Jumbotron incident captured the spotlight in the headlines, much like the couple captured on camera encircled in each other’s arms, rocking blissfully back and forth to the smooth (and to some, romantic) crooning of frontman Chris Martin.

In the Before, they were like any typical couple, enjoying date night on warm July evening at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Father of the groom

Our oldest son is getting married! He and his beautiful girlfriend announced to us earlier this month that they will be getting hitched in late October. We suspected they would tie the knot at some point, but for the past few years, they didn’t seem in any rush. This proved to be a challenge for my husband and me, Gen X-ers who were married at ages 21 and 22. More than a few times we’ve kicked each other under the table when one of us was about to ask, “So, are you two ever going to get married?”

“Stay cool,” we’d mouth to each other behind our water glasses. “Relax — It’s none of our business.”

Embracing my inner Mrs. Roper

I saw it hanging on a hanger at the store. I’d only gone in to grab a bottle of shampoo, but somehow I meandered aimlessly through housewares, then electronics, and finally women’s clothing. Before me hung a caftan, a flowy, flowery, dress that set off the sound of harps in my head. It was so fabulous, so indulgent, so … not me. I was pulled to it like a moth to flame.

Where time stands still

Our recent trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was a rare just-the-two-of-us vacation that I expect will become more common, as our adult children are establishing their own lives and their own traditions. So off we went, my Gentleman Friend and I, with our trusty teardrop camper in tow up to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore near Munising, Michigan.

Our campsite turned out to be mere steps from the shore of Lake Superior, and if it weren’t for the 40-degree temps, I would’ve been tempted to wade into the crystalline blues and greens of the water. Instead, we sat as close as we could to the frigid waves that lapped the shore, reading, napping, and occasionally commenting on cloud formations or seagull antics.

Faces in the crowd

I’ve written before about the singing group I’m in, a 60-voice choir that sings mostly classical literature. This choir has become “my thing” the past several years, as I emerge from my mommy cocoon and start to spread my wings as a woman with adult children. This choir has given me my voice back, in more ways than one.

Tuesday night rehearsals have become a sacred space for me. During these evenings, nothing else gets scheduled, and I often trudge into rehearsal still carrying the burdens from the day. As I climb the steps to the second-floor choir room, the day’s headlines swirl around in my head, bumping into family worries, missed deadlines, and things I wish I hadn’t said. But as soon as 7 p.m. hits, our director plays a full chord on the piano and we begin our vocal warmups. For the next two and a half hours, my entire focus is on deep breaths, reading notes, and counting rests.

A season of lasts

The graduation gown is hanging in the closet, patiently waiting for its one day in the sun. In a few days, my youngest child will walk across the stage and officially end her years in school. As she receives her diploma, she will be tipping the scales, closing a chapter and beginning a new one.

The scale tips for me, too. I’m far removed from my season of firsts: First apartment, first home, first pet, first job. From now on, there will still be firsts, but they will slow considerably. From now on, I will have to seek out new experiences intentionally, because they will no longer be coming at me like water from a firehose.

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