Police Log

The phone rang at five a.m. Eric answered but the San Francisco police wanted to speak to me. Please, please , please let it be one of the teenagers in trouble with the law - not something worse. Let it be a situation we could fix, not the end of everything as we knew it. Trembling, damn near hyperventilating, I spoke to the officer. They had a subject in custody and she was in possession of my credit card bill. Did I know this person? Was she authorized to have my mail? No and no, but why must they scare the crap out of me by calling so early? Couldn’t it wait until a reasonable hour? The officer, a lieutenant, explained that in order to hold and charge the person they needed my statement. Little did I know that this was but the first ripple after the pebble was tossed into the pond.

We live in a quiet suburb outside a major city. Our house is on a one block street leading nowhere. When these houses were built about sixty years ago each handsome, solid front door had a stylish brass mail slot. The mailman would drop our mail through the slot each day until about fourteen years ago when the carrier took issue with, and maced, our dog. This was followed by a suggestion that we install a mailbox at the end of our very short driveway if we still wanted home delivery. I can’t say that I blame the carrier. Even though our dog was sweet she learned from the Akita next door that when the mailman arrived it was time to join the bark-off. She got so into it that she started pulling the mail with her teeth, while growling and barking, as he was shoving it through the slot. It was actually quite funny to see, but since the carrier had just been bitten rather badly by the idiotic cockapoo who lived around the corner, he was probably justified.

We bought a sweet white, mailbox like you’d see on a country lane and duly installed it on a post at the end of the driveway. It was kind of fun for the kids to put the flag up when we had outgoing mail and people could drop things off for us in the box. Best of all, I no longer had to pick up all the mail that was scattered around the floor by the front door each day.

I’d heard about mail theft in our town for years, but I couldn’t really relate to it. It was always a row of mailboxes that were lined up away from houses and in a busy area on the way out to the beach. But on our little street? How could this be? Reading the police log in the weekly community paper gave me my answer. We don’t have much violent crime here, although there has been the random murder and the very sad occasion when a young mother smothered her little daughter in a local hotel. Most of the reports to the police are fairly benign and some downright amusing. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has noticed this because I recently saw a comedy show in the local plaza and the MC introduced the show by reading highlights from, you guessed it, the police log.

Peppered in with Party Complaints, Advice to Citizens, Juvenile Disturbances and Animal Incidents are the reports of thefts from UNLOCKED cars. You would not believe what people leave in their unlocked cars in this town. Cameras, iPods, iPhones, brief cases, passports, wallets, credit cards, laptops,checkbooks, jewelry, CASH and more CASH. Of course every petty criminal in the tri-county area comes here to steal from unlocked cars. It’s the mother lode. It’s so easy. You don’t even have to smash a window - just go through the neighborhood at night and pocket the goods. What surprises me is that, despite that fact that I’ve been tsk-tsking in amazement about this for years, people don’t really seem to learn. We are not that special, that insulated, that safe. Yes, it’s a wealthy community, and obviously it’s citizens can afford to replace what they’ve lost, but they don’t understand that by making it so easy for outsiders to get a haul of loot, they are making us all less safe. There are more strangers who have no reason, other than criminal, to be here.

Mail theft is apparently quite common as well as lucrative. My credit card number was going to be sold to some overseas operation. Lucky me. Of course it wasn’t just the credit card that was taken, but it took me months to discover what else I was missing and I’m sure I still don’t know about all of my stolen mail. It made me wonder about how many times it had happened and how it could have been done without someone seeing. My early morning phone call was followed up by several calls later that day from the Postal Service and San Francisco police explaining the process and asking for my cooperation in the criminal prosecution. At that point I was more than happy to help. That was before I became part of the arbitrary, inane, bureaucratic machine called the U.S. Postal service.

Our home delivery stopped immediately with no explanation. I went to the post office and stood in line so I could find out why we weren’t getting mail. I spoke to someone who was unfriendly to the point of meanness but finally got my mail. I was assured the delivery would resume. It did for one day. When I went back I was told I needed to spend several hundred dollars to purchase a locked mailbox. They would no longer deliver to the mailbox that we had because there had been theft. I suggested they put the mail through the slot like they used to but that was not an option. Even though mail had been delivered to that door for over fifty years it was no longer possible because when we got the mailbox, at their request, the route was redesigned and it was now designed around the time it took for the carrier to put the mail in the mailbox, not walk up the walk to the house. Even though the houses on both sides of us and almost the entire street had the mail brought right to the front door. Once there has been a change in the route in favor of the post office you can never go back.

I got very agitated with the manager. I could literally feel myself "going postal". I grabbed the mail and left in a fury. There went cute.There went my idea of the sweet country lane. This was the new reality of my suburbs. I refused to buy the box and they refused to deliver. We removed the mail box and knocked the post out with a sledge hammer. I had my lawyer husband talk to the woman in charge of the criminal investigation who spoke to the mean manager. The postal regulations were on his side and they did not have to alter the route. It was explained that I was cooperating with the criminal investigation. It seemed to go unnoticed that I was the victim of the crime. An agreement was made. If we would make the door slot bigger the post office would start to deliver again. Apparently the door slot was too narrow and it took too much time for the carrier to push the mail through. It wasn’t too small before the post office asked us to install the mail box but it was now. My husband said we would capitulate and the mail arrived for several days and stopped again. When I called the manager he said that delivery had ceased because we hadn’t done the retrofit. I explained that it had only been a couple days, we both work and we are not carpenters. We would have to hire someone.

Finally my brother came to the rescue after I begged him. It made me sad to have to cut the door and not be able to use the original brass slot, but he did a nice job and just in time. My husband had decided to get started on it since my brother was late. I texted frantically urging him to hurry. Eric is absolutely brilliant, but he’s not a woodworker. He once asked his cousin, a fine carpenter, how long it would take him to get good at building and the answer was, "Three generations."

The day after Thanksgiving I was showing property to clients when I was pulled over by the cops, flashing lights and all. Mortifying. I didn’t have a current registration sticker. I’d sent it in on time back in August, but it obviously had been stolen with my other mail. Another ripple. I had to go to the DMV, stand in line and pay for a new sticker. More fun. The whole postal incident is pretty much behind me. I was sent some information about how to track the criminal investigation online but I couldn’t understand the instructions and gave up. Other than having to pick up the clutter off the floor by the front door everyday, life is pretty much back to normal.

Divorce Blood

Is there something in the blood that causes people to divorce? Is it nature or is it nurture? I wonder. I have been married three times and I come from a line of the multiple married. There have been so many marriages in my family that it is almost impossible to understand. Maybe it’s not just that we are divorcers, but as my father’s cousin put it, ”You Partridges, you’re marriers.” The resultant progeny does not even bear explaining. Throughout my life I’ve had two brothers, one step-brother and a half brother younger than my firstborn. After one murder, one accident and one estrangement, I have one brother left as well as two sisters and an ex-stepsister.

When people ask me how many siblings I have it confounds me. We started out as five and three weeks after my little sister was born my oldest brother was hit by a car and killed. My father left my mother for another woman a couple years later and married someone with two children. Five minus one plus two. My step-brother was killed and shortly thereafter my father left my step-mother. There is a pattern here. I met the half-brother he had with his third wife a few times, but way too much damage had been done and I became estranged from my father, step-mother and little brother when he was three years old. Ironically, after my father got lung cancer and started chemotherapy his third wife kicked him out and he died alone. I can’t say it was an undeserving end for someone who had never been there when anyone needed him.

I made my choices in life and ended up having had three husbands. Three distinct men, intelligent and charming in their own way. There was a musician, a lawyer/surfer/musician and a tennis playing lawyer who surfed in his youth. Divorce is awkward and the transition from one husband to the next has been inconvenient for many, with misplaced friends and ex-in laws all over the place. I could have made better choices, but at the time I didn’t really see how.

Since my maternal grandparents were divorced as well as my parents, there was a certain bounty that resulted. At one point in time I had five living grandmothers. My parents each had a mother and my mother had a step-mother. Both my parents had remarried and their new spouses had mothers. I had my mother’s mother, my father’s mother, my mother’s step-mother, my step-mother’s mother and my step-father’s mother. They had a fine assortment of names too: Alice, Mim, Grandma Dot, Mommy Vining and Edna. Christmas was good at our house.

The numbers really started ratcheting up when I married someone whose parents had also been divorced, as I did in my second marriage. Around this time both of my parents were on their third marriages. I was losing grandmothers by death and divorce and the new ones never really matriculated. My husband’s mother was married three times (twice to my husband’s father) and his father was on his fourth marriage, having married and divorced my husbands’s mother twice. I will explain. My former in-laws married and had three children and then got a divorce. They each married someone else and my husband’s mother had another child. They both got divorced and remarried each other for a few years. It did not last and they divorced again. My ex-father-in-law married a fourth time while his ex-wife (twice over) remained single until she died in her early nineties.

My second husband and I realized that the marriage tally between our four parents totaled thirteen. Three for each of my parents, three for his mother and four for his father. That’s a very odd statistic and rather damning about the long term aspects of the institution, but then something even more unlikely happened.

I ended up having two ex-husbands who married the same woman twice. My first husband was a long term boyfriend, completely unsuitable for marriage or parenthood. Ignoring the many warning signs, young and senselessly optimistic, I believed that love was enough. Once we had a child it became immediately apparent. Love is not nearly enough. Not even close. Some years after we split up my ex-husband married a woman who had put her Mexican prayer doll under the pillow and prayed for a man who had already had a child and didn’t want anymore. Voila. She met Ben who’d had a child with me and that had been a stretch. They got married. I don’t know the details, but they were not married very long when they had it annulled. Not much more time elapsed before they remarried and remain so twenty years later but they don't seem very happy.

My second ex-husband had been married at an early age to the love of his life. Things went seriously awry and they divorced acrimoniously. When they sold the house and divided up their possessions she said she never wanted to have any contact with him. He was devastated and moped around for ages. I met him a couple years later when he was recovering from another mini-heartbreak but claimed he still wasn’t over his wife. Like all the other warning signs, I cast this one aside. I was a waitress, a single Mom with a one year old and he was steady as a rock. We met in the nightclub where we both worked, him still thinking he could avoid being a lawyer, but the realities of family life soon negated that idea. He adopted my daughter and we went on to have two more girls. We had a good life for ten years. The second ten years we were just going through the motions.

Our marriage unraveled for all the usual reasons when our kids were almost grown. After we split up I met Eric playing tennis and we got married two years later. I gained a step-daughter six months older than my youngest daughter. My ex husband found his ex-wife via the internet after twenty something years and discovered she was also in the process of divorcing. When they started dating again her two children, who were in high school and college, had no idea she’d been married before, let alone to her new boyfriend. Some explaining was required. They recently remarried and all seems to be well. My girls really like their step-mother and new “siblings”. For their sake, I hope history does not repeat itself.

All of these changes have made me think a lot about my kids and wonder about this fractured legacy they’ve been handed. It would have been so much better for me to have the right start in life but I didn’t. I had some advantages; an educated family, loving grandparents and nice places to live, but not nearly enough of what I needed. Things were said that should not have been said. Things were done that should not have been done. There were numerous losses. I moved out when I was fifteen. I had to take care of myself when I was way too young. I want so much more for my children and I think they’ve mostly gotten the stability and childhoods they’ve deserved.

None of my daughters has married and my eldest daughter is twenty-seven. By the time I was her age I’d gone down that road twice. This gives me great hope for her. She’s getting ready to meet someone and settle in with them for a domestic life. My wish is for her to meet a true love who is enough of everything that she wants, not just part of it. My relationships have served certain purposes. I went from wild and fun to calm and steady to great love with someone who also had a traumatic childhood. We’ve helped each other deal with our broken places. He gets me like noone ever has. We want to grow old together. This divorce stuff is not in the blood. It is not hereditary or inevitable. My sister is on her second go around but my brother and my other sister are still with their original spouses. So far, in this generation, it’s fifty-fifty. My mother has been with her third husband for thirty years.

Being married is so much more difficult than it appears. When I got married the last time it was to someone so different from my previous partner, yet, certain problems and unhealthy dynamics ended up being remarkably similar. How could this be possible? This led to a sickening realization. Maybe it’s not the ex. Maybe it’s me.

Going Public To be Green

When I was born, in the late fifties, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, times were very different. My birth certificate was different. My tiny feet were dipped in ink and footprints were put right on my birth certificate. I’m not sure why-maybe if the infant wandered off she could be identified by her little feet? Fingerprinting the mother made sense. Right thumb. Left thumb. If Mom slipped away she could be identified and hauled back to do her job, but the baby prints must have been done just for cuteness. My prints are less than three inches long, already showing signs of wideness and very high arches. More than half a century later footprints have taken on another meaning-carbon footprints.

Much of what we do now has some meaning, ecologically. Keep the footprint small. Plant trees. Recycle. Reuse. Carry your own bag into stores. Don’t waste. Don’t drink water from plastic bottles which may have been shipped by truck for miles or even worse, flown from a far flung spring. Combine errands. Conserve. Save the planet. Buy carbon offsets to ease your guilt. If we don’t have “green” fatigue, we soon will.

I recently overheard a young mother with two preschoolers talking about the schools she was looking into for her son who will be starting kindergarten soon. She mentioned several private schools that are in towns some distance from our town. Our wealthy, suburban town with award winning public schools. It made me think about the environmental consequences of commuting five year olds. These otherwise green families are driving their SUV’s right by several perfectly good neighborhood schools to crisscross the county for something better. Our town has a choice of five elementary schools. You’d think there would be something for everyone.

The little one is going out on the freeway, possibly getting stuck in traffic, every day in order to attend school. It’s not just the two trips a day one hundred eighty days a year. It’s all extra-curricular activities, meet the teacher nights, concerts and other evening programs. It’s whenever Mom or Dad volunteers in the classroom or drives on a field trip. The child makes friends who live in other communities and there are play dates and birthday parties on the weekends. Does it not, at some point, eclipse the meaning of living in a sweet, small town where you know people and are known by them?

When my children were little and out riding bikes or playing with their friends they knew they couldn’t get away with anything. There was always someone I knew looking after them. I would hear about it if they rode without helmets or took stupid risks. People would tell me about it and I would reciprocate, notifying my friends if I saw their kids do something wrong. My daughters acted like they hated it, but I don’t think they really did .We belonged in our community and there was such an easy spontaneity for them when they rode bikes together and ended up at each other’s houses after school without having to plan it around a car pool schedule.

Wealth has it's privileges. One of the privileges that money affords is choice. I’ve been trying to figure out what drives that choice. One trend I’ve noticed is that as property values here increased substantially more new families buying homes have been employed in the finance sector. These guys are investment bankers, stock and bond traders and private equity investors. Money people. Until recently there was no question that they could afford private school tuition, yet, it seems to go deeper than that. It’s some kind of equation with money that maybe takes a money person to really understand. It’s almost as if it must be worth more because it costs. You get what you pay for? Even though you’ve paid a premium for your house and your property taxes, you are paying tuition for elementary school because you are buying something for your child that will make their way in the world better and the purchase of the that life experience begins at year one.

This could be the flawed reasoning that comes from the darkest fears of parenting. If you control your child’s destiny through these types of choices then he or she will become more than they would have if you’d just rolled along with the tide. As a young parent you just don’t know how little control you have over what lies ahead. Or maybe you have some inkling, and think if you throw money at the problem it will lessen your chances for it all to go wrong. Further along in parenting you realize that the influences on your child, for good and evil, aren’t what you expected them to be. Several coaches and a wonderful babysitter had lasting power. I would beg my kids to drink more water when they were practicing their sport. They waved me away like I knew nothing. Then one day the swim coach told them to hydrate more and it was the law - gospel. The girls had a babysitter who made them promise to never, ever smoke cigarettes. They never did and still talk about the pact they made and how she put the fear of God in them.

There were lots of families with money who chose public schools when my kids were little. The girls had friends whose parents were eminent plastic surgeons, entrepreneurs and real estate investors as well as lawyers and even a few blue collar workers. The insecurity about getting the kids on the right path didn’t seem to start until much later, closer to SAT time. The kids were kids and they went to school and played their sports and didn’t seem to be on a track that would lead them straight to Harvard or Stanford or Columbia, but in fact it did. These products of the local high school are predominantly extremely successful. A number of my daughter’s friends have become doctors, one works for Genentech, someone else for Google. There are some teachers and business people.

I frequently get into conversations with people who have decided that the local high school isn’t good enough for their child, doesn’t have the best curriculum and won’t lead to the better colleges. I cite all my usual anecdotes but recently a father I was talking to just wouldn’t give an inch. About twenty minutes later we converged at the bar while waiting for orders and got to talking again. Somehow it came out that he was trying to get a photography job for a web project at a prominent company. Coincidentally, my daughter is working on that project. My daughter, who went to the not good enough local, public high school, and then to a liberal arts college on The East coast from which she graduated and became immediately employed in the field of her choice. My twenty-seven year old daughter who works for a world-renowned advertising company and makes about twenty percent less than my husband who’s a professional with an advanced degree. The guy was practically begging for her contact information so she could help him out. Even though the irony was completely lost on him, I loved it.

Not everyone will fit at a particular school. Certain students have needs better suited to private school. I understand that. What I don’t understand is rejecting out of hand what you’ve never tried because somehow you’ll be safer, better insulated from the dangers. It’s a perilous journey no matter what, especially for adolescents, and fortunately most of us end up being very lucky, despite our choices.

The Obama Victory Garden

Several weeks before the First Lady of the United States started planting her kitchen garden at the White House my husband made a startling pronouncement. “We should plant a garden. A kitchen garden.”, he had said.

The suggestion surprised me, but when I thought it over it made very good sense. Eric loves to cook and one of the aspects of cooking he so cherishes is his trips to the window boxes where we grow herbs for his cooking. A small pleasure but therapeutic and inspirational nonetheless. The garden is like that, only bigger.

We chose a sunny spot in the side yard that had seen several previous iterations that each had something to offer at the time. I was talking to a friend and she asked where we had put our vegetable garden. I told her that it was in the spot where the swing set had been and then the hot tub and finally the trampoline. Oh, yes, I remember all of that she said, nodding. The same spot with so many different uses and associations.

The swing set with it’s white and pink and gray paint. It wasn’t very fancy, someone had given it to us as a hand me down. It squeaked like crazy. The baby seat. The memory of the sweet, sweet faces and chubby little hands almost makes me feel like I can’t breathe. The “train” where the girls would face each other. The constant admonishments to stop pumping so hard - it was starting to shake. Careful, you’ll flip it over.

Time passed, as it always does, and everyone outgrew the swing set which was taken off to the dump. When my parents walked into Costco and bought a new hot tub on an impulse buy (probably thought they were just going out for toilet paper), they offered us their old one. It seemed like such a good idea at the time and only one hundred dollars to have it delivered. It turns out that hot tubs can’t function without what one of the kids called “electricical.” It also turns out that an old house with Zinsco breakers does not have adequate “electricical” to power a hot tub, even a somewhat outdated one. Kaching. The electrician was a lovely man moonlighting from his real job with “Those Darn Accordians”. The house was amped up to 220 Volts or something like that and a cable was run from the house under the yard and popped up in a gray pipe to provide the requisite power.

The hot tub had its positives. I loved sitting in it during a light rain in winter when the leaves were off the trees and you could see the beautiful outline of the bare branches. It provided opportunity to be outside at night when it was dark and cold. The worries were many, however. When we first got the spa Allie was around four and had hair down to her bottom. I read something about a little one having her hair caught in the jets, getting trapped and drowning. I’m sure that is not a very frequent occurrence, but the image the was not good. One more thing to worry about.

There was an “attractive nuisance” aspect to it when Lucy became a teenager and started bringing her friends around just as we were settling into bed. The jets would be on and the kids (whoever they were) would have to talk loudly over the jets, use all the towels and drip everywhere. I tried not to think about what could be happening on the infrequent occasions we were not at home.

There was the maintenance issue which didn’t seem too problematic until we were in San Diego visiting my in-laws, one of whom is a nurse. Apparently, they hadn’t cleaned their hot tub properly and on the long drive back to San Francisco the younger girls developed all over itchy body rashes that turned out to be a nasty condition called hot tub folliculitis. Ugh. Now we had to wonder if we were being diligent enough with the chemicals.

The absolute worse experience we had with our hot tub was the August we went on vacation for several weeks following a rat problem. Before we left for the trip we decided to put out poison which I wasn’t too sure about. My brother, who knows much about much, assured me the nasty creatures would go off in search of water and die. When we got into the spa upon our return there was a horrible smell. We checked the water which looked alright but there was something so, so wrong. Thirteen rats had gone off to look for water and died under the hot tub. It really lost its allure for me after that and we got rid of it. Only a hundred dollars to have it carted away. As they rolled it out on its side over my neighbor’s driveway bits of the pink insulation began falling out with rat crap dropping all over the place.

The trampoline. Another attractive nuisance. Another potential source of danger. Different parents had different policies. My next door neighbor said her little boys were not allowed on it. Period. Some parents didn’t seem to care about anything their kids did. At the time we also had a dog who used the back yard as her bathroom and we were not always so timely about the scooping. The kids’ dad, a lawyer, joked that we should have children from other families sign a waiver that they wouldn’t sue us if they broke their necks OR stepped in dog poop. Funny.

After a time the novelty wore off and it was rare that anyone actually jumped on the trampoline. It became more a place to gather and sunbathe, do homework or host the occasional pajama party. Other than being hideously large and truly ugly, I didn’t really have a problem with it. Over the years sun damaged the stretchy part attached to the springs and bits began to flake off. Unfortunately, one winter we had a flood in the neighborhood and our garage and front and back yards were left covered with smelly mud. Fortunately, the town where we live provided pick up service for all the damaged goods and, without consulting the children, I decided the trampoline was terminally ill and dragged it out to the rubbish pile. There were a few little peeps of discontent, but we all pretty much knew those days were gone.

That was early January 2006. Fast forward to the spring of 2009. There have been some changes in this country. There have been some changes around here. My husband and I divorced. He has remarried his first wife. Eric and I were married two years ago. We have tried “blending” our families with abject failures as well as some successes. Our youngest daughters are now nineteen. We underwent great trauma when Eric had a catastrophic motorcycle accident from which we are both still healing. My chosen profession, residential real estate sales, has gone in the dumper. My plan B, staging homes for sale, has also gone in the dumper. We are still buying this house from my ex-husband and when we finish paying him off it won’t be worth what we agreed to pay. Our two youngest are in expensive colleges in Connecticut and Scotland. Some costly therapy has been necessary.

When Eric and I met we each had apartments and offices where we would go to work. Between us we had two cars and a motorcycle. I had half a house and he had cash in the bank. We have dwindled down to one car. Now he has an office. Mine has been shut down, but we have the garden.

Because of the wars and our reduced economic circumstances, we started to call it the Victory garden. Because of the our new administration and our hope for the future, we now call it the Obama Victory Garden. We have the sweet peas and climbing beans and squash and tomatoes. We have spinach and Swiss chard. We’re hosting a little dinner party on Saturday and Eric will pick something fresh from the garden to serve our guests. The garden is pretty and peaceful. It’s wonderfully relaxing to just look at it. We will have grandchildren in a few years and they may need swings and hot tubs and trampolines but we won’t need to provide them. We have the garden with this strange gray, plastic periscope poking up between the carrots and basil. People always ask about it and I smile to myself and tell them it was the source of electricity for the hot tub we used to have.

Lemon Tree

When the youngest of our three girls became toilet trained it became apparent that one bathroom for a family of five was less than ideal. It was time to expand. The house was fewer than a thousand square feet - three bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, small dining area and living room but it had a big, flat back yard. Right off the back of the house, behind the original kitchen, was a wonderful, mature lemon tree. The girls who were then three, seven and eleven were excited about the prospect of the new house but were distressed that we’d have to cut down the lemon tree in order to expand. I promised we’d plant a new lemon tree to replace the old one. We finally did, but it took fifteen years.

My then husband wasn’t so sure about adding on. He felt we couldn’t afford it, but realized it would be less expensive than moving and finally relented. We cobbled together the financing including a $50,000 advance on the inheritance from his father as well as a home equity line. My brother was a contractor and he would do the work but he wanted me to act as the general and hire all the subs, run the job, order the materials and so on. It would save us a lot of money and he wouldn’t have to bother with all the details. I bought a pair of work boots and took on the job.

After fighting with City Hall and one of the neighbors (all the rest were great) the permits were approved. The project was to take four months and we would live in the house while the work was being done as another way to save on expenses. Demolition began in August and during that time we took a trip to Southern California. The workers ripped out the ceiling in the living room so it could be vaulted and tore out the existing kitchen so we could push out the back of the house. When we got home a week later we had no roof on part of the house and had to wash the dishes in the bathtub. The front coat closet became the pantry. It was a lot like camping. I’m not much of a camper and when I look back on it, I cannot imagine how we managed.

The two older girls went back to school after Labor Day and the little one was in pre-school part time, but mostly she was my “helper”. Every morning the guys arrived bright and early and fired up their power tools. I tried to stay on top of ordering the windows and appliances and lumber so we could stay on schedule. I was barraged with constant questions. I made ten thousand decisions. It was exciting to think that we would have a house with a three hundred square foot kitchen and fireplace - a great room with granite counter tops and ten foot ceilings. I couldn’t wait for the master bedroom upstairs with it’s own bathroom and view of the mountain.

We had a problem with the stairs. Because of the high ceiling in the kitchen there needed to be a fast rise with a short run. Everyone, including the engineer, said it could not be done. We’d have to sacrifice the ceiling height in the kitchen in order to achieve the rise in the space allowed for the run. I would not be swayed off course. Armed with a book on stair design and the Uniform Building Code, I got to work. I realized we could get up high enough if we used three winders which are stairs that turn a corner. It’s not the safest construction because the winders are shaped like triangles and they’re very narrow on the inside, but it was a solution. I drew it out on pattern paper and waited with bated breath while the building inspector looked it over. He deemed it acceptable. Success

Of course, problems arose. My brother began to have a nagging cough and then got really grouchy. My husband and I fought. A lot. By acting as the general manager I had become his employee. Before I would even have so much as a sip of coffee in the morning he would start questioning my decisions and whether the crew was working hard enough. He was the “suit’, the client and he wanted to control how his money would be spent. Even though he knew nothing about design and was partially color blind he wanted to have “input”. He would argue for the sake of arguing and repeatedly say he was not giving me “carte blanche” to make all the decisions. I had to talk him into everything and when it was done he would always say what a good idea it had been.

It’s true, what they say about remodeling and marriages. Cracks develop that might never be repaired even when they’re spackled and taped. My husband and I fought over shades of white. After we divorced some years later I thought about the fact that he’d split up with his first wife shortly after they’d completed building their house. I don’t know that it was even finished when she moved out and refused to see him again for twenty-five years.

In the beginning of October my grandmother got sick and died. We had the family gathering after the service at our house, the construction site. My grandfather had worn a suit for his wife’s funeral but his dress shoes were uncomfortable. When we got home for the get-together he took them off and tossed them in the dumpster saying he’d never have to wear them again. Now that my grandmother was gone he was free to wear sneakers for the rest of his life which is what he did.

By November the house was enclosed after some early rains and battles with blue tarps. My brother was still coughing and moving slowly. We didn’t find out until later that after decades of being a builder he’d become severely allergic to wood dust and his lungs were inflamed. The kitchen started to come together. It would be unfinished but we’d be able to cook Thanksgiving dinner. The counter tops were still plywood and the oven had no fan yet but, by god, we were going to cook a turkey. The cabinets had just been installed and the”client” was insisting the knobs should be six inches up rather than in the lower corners. It went on and on. Everyone went to bed and I sat by myself in the new kitchen the night before Thanksgiving looking around. It was all I’d ever wanted in a kitchen but it meant nothing. It didn’t feel like my house. I was in a strange place with nothing familiar and no memories and oh, what a cost.

By December I was becoming unglued. I couldn’t make any more decisions. I had insomnia, the kids got sick and one day I took them to the pediatrician. When we got back home at eleven a.m. the painter had gotten drunk on champagne he’d found in the frig and started listening to our records while painting the stairs. He was so out of there. We were running out of money and I was exhausted. I pressured the guys to get it done. One day my brother and I had a screaming fight. He accused me of having unrealistic expectations and putting everyone under too much stress. We yelled at each other while the tile guy was working on the upstairs shower. I stormed off in the cold and rain and called my husband crying from a phone booth. He was really nice. Go shopping, he said. Buy yourself something. Christmas came and we were almost through. I was too tired to join the family for a holiday visit with the in-laws in Southern California. I just needed to be alone. The new parts of the house crackled and creaked in the wind.

In January we had the kitchen floor finished. Beautiful, wide-planked, knotty Southern yellow pine. Everyone warned that it would be soft and the floor guys said it would be easy to scratch and dent. As soon as they went out the back door we came in the front with a six week old Lab mix puppy. She scratched the floors immediately and throughout her long and happy life. She’s gone to doggy heaven but the scratches still remind us of her glory days.

The girls were incredibly resilient throughout the construction process. When the walls were being insulated and sheet rocked we stayed in a friend’s cottage for a week. It was all an adventure for them. When we were settled back into the house there were many projects to be completed but what really bothered them (other than the lemon tree) was that the toilet paper holders hadn’t been installed. It was such a small detail compared to the chaos that had surrounded us that I didn’t really think much of it. When we finally bought the damn things and attached them there was great relief. Oh, good, now it feels like home. Now we just need a new lemon tree.

I got distracted and forgot about it. I didn’t fulfill my promise to plant one. Years and years passed. The kitchen is home again and we have memories of birthdays and Christmas parties and quiet dinners. They kids all grew up and we were divorced. I found love again. About a year ago we brought home a Charlie Brown lemon tree; small and scraggly with one huge lemon. It’s struggling. When I think about what we’d had before it seems such a shame, but we have great hopes for it.

My Meltdown

We've all seen it; the overtired toddler who seems to disintegrate before our eyes. They go and go until the tipping point when exhaustion overwhelms and they are no longer able to listen to reason. In 1983, when my daughter, Lucy, was about 15 months old she would fall apart so completely it reminded me of the reports of the nuclear reactor accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The descriptions of the accident explained a core meltdown, basically an implosion of the radioactive material unto itself. That's what my daughter was doing. She became toxic, radioactive. She was having a core meltdown and I began to use the phrase to describe it. I'd never heard anyone say it before, but other friends with kids began to pickup the term and passed it along. Friends from the East coast went back with the term and it proliferated further. Core meltdown morphed into meltdown as in She's having a meltdown or She's melting down. Wikidpedia currently defines it like this: Meltdown: (tantrum) a particular kind of fit or temper tantrum that occurs in babies and young children. Bingo

Meltdown caught on and spread. There seem to be no references to the term until a year after I began using it. In 1984 “Meltdown” was used as the name of a Christian rock group and later several albums and song titles, a music festival, record label, episodes of television programs and a video game were all called “Meltdown.”

My thought , my image. Years passed and many more headlines appeared using the term about sports teams and other subjects. I felt a little jab each time, like something had been taken from me, but I shrugged it off as the price you pay for being an original thinker. You have an idea and others run with it. It was manageable until the financial crisis of 2008. Suddenly, the term was everywhere. Mortgage meltdown, Wall Street meltdown, banking meltdown and with the presidential election, we had the McCain Meltdown. STOP People, think of something else to say. It's tired and overused and anyway, it's mine. It's my meltdown and you can't have it anymore.

The Accident

Friday afternoon traffic was heading to the bridge. A car was stopped dead in the fast lane and there was no time to react. He tried to brake, went into a skid. My beloved had to figure out in one split second how not to die.

The helmet went through the back windshield first. The driver of the car screamed. His leg broke on the rear quarter panel and the middle of his body hit hard. He bounced off and ended up in the roadway. There were bones sticking through the skin, excruciating pain and blood. The indignities began when the paramedics sliced off his clothing while people, even several people we knew, went whizzing by in the rain. He never lost consciousness and even had the wherewithal to have someone call me. The man said he’d been in an accident and was badly hurt.

I couldn’t move or think. I called my daughter and she appeared. She drove and did my thinking for me. Another call came, more reassuring. He was conscious, joking but his leg was broken. I said to tell him I loved him and I was mad at him for messing up our vacation. I began to breathe again. We stopped by the site of the accident to pick up his wallet. They gave us a bag of bloody clothing, helmet and gloves and we saw the damage to the car and the motorcycle. The accident had backed up traffic and it was so hard getting to him. Everything was in slow motion.

Friday evening in the emergency room was so scary. I couldn’t think about how hospitals have always made me sick and anxious. There was only him. He was alive and I was so relieved and grateful that it was just a broken leg, no head injury. Then they did the abdominal CT scan and everything changed. The mean sounding words and phrases began. They continued for many weeks, aggressive and unwelcome. Emergency surgery, rupture, peritonitis, extreme measures, transfusions. We kept talking about not being out of the woods yet. Just how big were these woods? As my brother pointed out, who would have thought that the broken leg, a compound fracture requiring orthopedic surgery and a titanium rod, would seem so insignificant compared to the internal injuries?

The trauma team did a beautiful job but there were the post operative pains and frustrations: IV’s and wound care and enough medications to slay an elephant, even Thorazine for hiccups. He sold the motorcycle from his hospital bed, never wanted to see it again. No food by mouth until the bowels began to move. The bowels, which had ruptured and been sewn back together, were expected to get back in working order within a week. They did. Then they sent him home and I became nurse 24/7.

An open incision slashed his belly like a canyon and couldn’t be sewn closed due to danger of infection. It needed dressing twice a day. He couldn’t walk, could barely sit up and couldn’t get to the bathroom. A friend noted he had the stamina of an eighty-five year old. He needed me with him constantly so he wouldn’t get discouraged and give up. I was hesitant to leave him at all, so afraid something bad would happen again. I’ve been waiting for this, since my beloved brother was hit by a car and killed when we were small. I knew that if I found real love, and I let myself succumb to it, it would be taken away.

We had the best time we could under the circumstances. He was brave and wonderful, thanked me for everything. We took naps and played cards. When he was able to get around I took him places. I tried to tempt him with food because he’d lost over thirty pounds. We got so much support from calls and emails and visits. We planned a wedding. The cancelled vacation would be the honeymoon.

Complications ensued. We knew something was wrong but kept pretending otherwise. There were fevers and night sweats and finally a CT scan confirmed the infection. There were trips back to the hospital to install the drain. I learned about a medical discipline which was previously unknown to me; interventional radiology. I told friends in an email that changing dressings had become so routine, now I’d added measuring pus output to the daily regimen.

Weeks passed and I drove to the hospital fifteen times. It was so heart wrenching to keep going back there, passing the scene of the accident each time. Tuesday was convict day. They came in for tests in their orange sweat suits, handcuffed to the guards. Soulless creatures lurked the halls. Discarded human beings were scattered about in the lobby. One day there was a man out in front of the hospital who had the shaved, zipper head from recent brain surgery. He sat by himself asleep in a wheel chair in the freezing cold.

It all started to get to me. The patient, as I called him, began to get better. I struggled to keep my composure, going from ecstatic gratitude about his survival to sadness and resentment about my loss. I became uncharacteristically emotional and cried at stupid things. I got tired of hearing the accident story. Friends kept exhorting me to take care of myself but I couldn’t figure out how.

The patient survived. I had to regroup and let go. It became time for him to go back to work even though he was weak and sore. I told him I felt like I was taking him to his first day of school and he wanted to know whether he’d be able to stay home if he cried and clung to my leg. No, he had to go back into the world and so did I.