Cereus Magic

We were sitting at the dinner table at our friend Tune's house, finishing off a mixed berry pie, tart and sweet. There were vases of flowers, lovely as paintings, arranged around the sun room that glowed in hues of yellow and salmon. Through the windows we could see gardens and rocks like giant dorsal fins rising from the earth. Wendy brought her dog, Ben, who was happily tethered outside in the cool summer night. Tune's mom discussed books and her recent trip to Tanzania.


Next to our places, small pieces of paper had been placed, face down. When it was time, I opened mine and found a question: Describe a time you spent with one of your grandparents.


"First thought best thought," Tune said, meaning don't take time to think, just respond.


"I remember sitting on my grandfather's lap on a porch, probably at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. We were in a rocking chair and he had his arms around me. I felt safe. He died soon after of Parkinson's."


Someone else was asked to describe an earliest memory. Wendy remembered sensations and light and being outside on grass that was parched white from the sun. Tune told about taking a match and trying to light her younger brother's trundle-bundle on fire, just to see if she could. Juan the Gardener remembered sitting in his dad's lap, picking splinters out of his dad's face.


"Splinters?" We cried.


"His beard was scruffy. It must have been a weekend and he hadn't shaved."


I remember climbing out of my crib using my teddy bear as a stepping stone to reach the bureau, and having the bureau tip over on me so that I was holding it up with two hands, like a baby super child. Now I realize it was a co-mergence of memories. At a later time I had climbed up the bureau by pulling out the drawers and it had tipped over and I had to call for help and Arnie, the nanny, was not amused. I had to climb: up into closets, into kitchen cabinets, up into the dancing tops of trees.


Juan described being at a party at his parents' house. He and a little girl were running naked from one end of the room to the other, laughing as they passed, not touching.


"So, that's the origin of our special game!" I laughed.


"Do you think it's true that men are led around by their peckers?" Tune's mom asked.


Then Tune said that tonight might be the night when her night-blooming cereus, a sprawling spineless climbing cactus opened its buds to produce pure-white flowers.


"It's so amazing," she said. "It only opens once all year and the fragrance fills the house."


"Maybe we ought to check." I said. 


Tune quickly left the table and we heard her exclaiming,"Oh! Oh! Come see!"


We raced into the den, and there framed by the window, dangling from snaky, green, glossy stems, two enormous white buds had begun to open; a magnolia-like fragrance spilled out into the room. 


We murmured ooos and aahhhs, and examined the flowers from underneath, from behind, from outside; we shone a flashlight into their creamy depths; we inhaled their perfume.  

"Oh!" Wendy called from outside where she was walking Ben.


"What?" We answered. On a mid-summer night like this, anything was possible.


Suspended in the silky near-darknesss, visible between pine trees, round and pumpkin-orange, was the full moon.

I realized as we stood together like rapt children all grown up, that to truly connect, one must dare to open from the heart bud, to open constantly, to burst into flower like the magical night-blooming cereus. 


After that, anything is possible.

Sinking Ships & Desperados

"Hello! Hello!" My mother sang out, opening her front door to admit Tripp and his mother and me. She led us into the living room for iced tea and cake with white frosting and pink flowers. Vera, one of my mother's aides, leaned in to view the baby.

"I wasn't here for his first visit," she said.

"Well, Tripp meet Vera," my daughter smiled.

"So, you're a great-grandmother," Vera told my mother.

"I know that, Vera," my mother said crossly.

"You're GG," Vera said. "Little boy, that's your GG."

"We call my grandmother Gogs, and Tripp will too," Katherine explained.

"Oh, why not GG?" Vera asked. "I like GG."

"Vera, would you pour the ice tea?" my mother asked.

"I did," Vera said. 

Vera lingered, eating cake, and then disappeared into the kitchen. 

"Thank you, Vera!" Katherine and I called out. Vera is charged with keeping my mother safe, which includes guiding her to bed at a reasonable hour. Although she will grudgingly acquiesce, mostly on her own terms, Mom will often sneak out of her bedroom and back to the pale azure lure of the computer screen.

"What did you do today?" I asked as Tripp slumbered in his car seat, emitting the occasional uh  or guh. 

"Well, I went to the beach for lunch with the Sages, and on the way back in the car Andy and I suddenly broke out into song."

"Song?" I repeated, fork in hand.

"Song," my mother laughed. "I used to sing it you and your sisters," Mom said to Katherine. 

"I think you mean to me and my sisters," I corrected.

"Well, it goes like this:  A big bold man was this desperado from Cripple Creek way out in Colorado, and he came to town like a big tornado and everywhere he went he gave his WA-HOO!"

As my mother sang, gesturing with her hands like a band leader, I remembered.

"Wasn't there something about how he came into Chicago just to give the West a rest...?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Wasn't there a song about the Titanic?" Katherine asked. "You sang me a song about it," she said to me.

Without pausing a beat, my mother and I immediately launched into the Titanic song: "Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue, and they thought they had a ship that the water would never go through, but the Lord with his mighty hand said the ship would never land. It was sad when that great ship went down..."

"It was sad," Mom sang.

"It was sad,"I echoed.

"It was sad when that great ship went down (to the bottom of the) husbands and wives little children lost their lives..."

"More cake, Katherine?" my mother asked after the last verse.

"I'd love some, Gogs, thanks."

"Oh, look, the baby is waking up!" Mom exclaimed, brandishing the cake knife.

Katherine lifted Tripp in his car seat throne as he stretched and snuffled, and brought him close to his great-grandmother, who touched his tiny feet.

"They're so soft," she said, gently tickling them. "Ticky ticky." 

Conversing with Little Gobblets

We were all hanging out in the kitchen: Yeh Yeh (Grandpa) was making his special blueberry pancakes breakfast with yogurt and fresh berries and maple syrup, and Oliver had pulled himself up onto the kitchen island by his elbows to explain the finer points of a game called Gobblets, a game of strategy not unlike tic-tac-toe.


"First, we do rochambeau to see who goes first," Oliver said. 


"Okay," I agreed.


"Once, twice, thrice," I chanted, as my mother had taught me a good fifty years before.


"It's not once, twice, thrice," Oliver corrected. "It's rochambeau." He shook his head, as if having to explain something to a child much younger than himself, say a three-year-old.


"When I learned, it was once, twice, thrice," I said, feeling ancient, "But, let's just say rochambeau."


We counted off and I threw rock. Oliver instantly formed something that looked like a peaked roof with his hands raised at eye level.


"Volcano!" he crowed. "Volcano beats everything."


"Volcano? What do you mean volcano?" I asked. "There's no volcano in rochambeau." 


"Well, let's say there is."


"Let's say you throw lava," Oliver elaborated, making a wavy motion with his hands. "Volcano would beat lava."


"Or dinosaur," Maggie suggested. "Volcano would definitely beat dinosaur."


"I see your point," I said. "Why don't you just go first, Ollie."

*

"How about a game of I Spy?" I suggested later as we drove towards the politically themed Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont. "Maggie can go first."

"I spy with my little eye something blue," Maggie said,

"Is it in the car?" asked Oliver.

"Yes, it's in the car."

"Is it Yeh Yeh's shirt?"

"No."

"Is it Maggie's fleece?" I guessed.

"No."

"Is it the cover of the Map of Vermont?" Yeh Yeh tried.

"No."

"Is it the sky?" I said absently.

"No, in the car," said Maggie.

After a few more rounds of incorrect guesses, it was determined that what Maggie had spied was a thin line of blue writing on an envelope just barely visible poking out from behind the sun visor on the passenger side.

"Are the puppets we're going to see scary?" Oliver wanted to know. 

"I think some of them could be scary," I said, "But, I've never actually seen them. They're pretty big."

"How big?" Maggie asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, not realizing that some of the puppets are actually 15 feet high, described as some of the largest puppets in the world.

"What if I don't actually want to go in?" Oliver asked a few minutes later.

"What if I just want to peek inside from the front door to see if they're scary, and not actually go deep into the heart of the museum?"

"That's fine," said Yeh Yeh reassuringly. "You don't have to go in at all. You and I can wait outside while Maggie and Amy go in."

"But, if I change my mind, can I still go in?"

"Of course," we said.

"It's okay, Ollie, if you don't want to," Maggie said.

"Just because I don't want to doesn't mean I'm not brave," Oliver said emphatically.

"Of course not," we said. 

"Because I am brave."

"You're a brave warrior," said Yeh Yeh. "Like me."

We all peeked inside the entrance of the Bread and Puppet Museum which was housed in a large old barn with a wide-planked wooden floor. An elderly woman, her long white hair pulled back, wearing an apron, long skirt, faded lavender blouse and black shoes greeted us and suggested we might particularly like to see a flying pig puppet. She had wisely deduced that some of us might be feeling a bit timid.

"See?" she said, as she rapped gently on a large puppet face. "They're all made of papier mache - paper. There are some interesting ones down this aisle," she smiled at Oliver.

The puppets were thrilling and frightening and brilliant. The Bread and Puppet troupe, which performed in New York City during the Vietnam Era, travels throughout New York and Vermont, participating in parades and performing live theatre. We found the flying pink pig and then Ollie and Yeh Yeh waited while Maggie and I tiptoed upstairs to where the truly GINORMOUS puppets were.

"It's okay, Ollie," Maggie called down to her brother. "They're not too scary. You can come up."

So, Ollie and his grandfather joined us, Ollie safely ensconced in his grandfather's arms, and we explored and touched cautiously and imagined what it all might mean, and told stories. We spied George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and the Devil.

"Let's go now," Ollie said.

"We were all brave," said Maggie.

"We were all brave warriors," Yeh Yeh echoed.

Berry Pickin'

"Time to get ready to go pick strawberries," I announced after Maggie and Ollie, Juan the Gardener's visiting grandchildren finished up their breakfast of made-from-scratch blueberry pancakes. Ollie liked his pancakes with just a bit of butter spread on top ("even the corners") and requested his own small bowl of maple syrup for dunking each bite. Maggie asked for seconds.


I was anxious to get us all going. The weather forecast had called for rain and I had visions of endless games of hide n' seek, or worse, getting trapped inside the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.


"Are we there yet?" Ollie asked after we had turned out of the driveway onto the main road.


"Not quite," we laughed.


"How much longer?" Maggie asked.


"About 20 minutes," Juan the Gardener aka Yeh-Yeh replied.


"How much is that?"


"About as long as your Flowertop video."


"That's the stupidest movie ever," Ollie grumbled from his booster seat. "Only two-year-olds watch it." (The twins are five.)


"Ollie and I are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn," said Juan the Gardener.


"Who are they?" Maggie asked.


"Boys who go on adventures," he explained.


"Well, I'm Mary Poppins," Maggie said. "And she's magic."




We met Elizabeth at the farm and she guided us down to the long, neat rows of strawberries. On the way, we stopped a few times to kick a soccer ball for Bob the Border Collie. Elizabeth explained that we were to pick only the berries that were bright red all the way around; we were to examine them carefully, leaving the ones with white tips or those partly orange for another day. We picked on both sides of our row, wandering off occasionally into adjacent ones and needing to be summoned gently back once or twice. While Juan bent to search beneath the leaves, Oliver danced back and forth, popping berries into his mouth. Maggie and I brought up the rear.


"Is this a good one?" Maggie would ask, before gently plucking each one off its stem.


"It's perfect," I said.


As we picked, it began to rain, a soft drizzle at first, then harder.


"Let's go!" Juan called, so we gathered our trays of berries and raced back up the hill. 


"When we get back can we first cozy up and then have strawberry smoothies and strawberry milkshakes and strawberry jam and watch the rest of Mary Poppins?" Oliver asked.


"I'm not sure we have enough berries for jam," I said, "But, I could make strawberry crisp."


"Then can we first cozy up and then have strawberry smoothies and strawberry milkshakes and strawberry crisp and watch the rest of Mary Poppins?" Oliver asked.


"Sure," we laughed.


"Ollie is eating all the berries!" Maggie said.


"Here, Mags, you can have some," Ollie offered.


"So then," Ollie continued, "Can we follow my plan when we get home? Can we follow it exactly?"


"Yes," we said.


"What time is it?" Juan yawned.


"Just after 10," I yawned back. "10am."

Cool Dude Meets Julie Andrews

Harsh words were said. Items were dumped from drawers. A suitcase was packed. A paintbrush lay in a congealing pool of yellow paint in a room half-painted. We, unwilling participants in a dispute over money that churned with childhood echos and blurred images of how things should be, retreated unhappily to our corners. At times, we are both wounded and dramatic and stubborn and angry and confused and ever so vulnerable. Our feelings get hurt. We attack. We go too far.


Coming back to sanity after such a lapse is painful. It's like walking with cement boots. Each step back towards the other requires such willingness. It would be so much easier not to. But here we are, and where else is there?


It feels like pushing through heavy curtains. We reach for each other's hand, someone makes coffee, we sit on the couch in the living room, and gently begin anew.


It was there on the living room couch earlier this morning surrounded by potted plants and our favorite framed art, when I met the Cool Dude.


"Why didn't you come down to welcome me home when I came back from Long Island?" I asked. (This wasn't the basis of The Fight, but a tiny thread in my own skein of resentments.)


"I don't know," Juan the Gardener replied thoughtfully, "But, I think I have certain pictures in my mind about how couples relate. I think you do too. I think most couples do. When our images cross, we begin to have problems."


"Tell me about your pictures," I said. I felt a familiar flicker of fondness.


"Mine go way back," Juan said. "Way back to my hippie days, to when I wanted to be a Cool Dude. I had a good friend and I thought we were Cool Dudes and Cool Dudes related to one another in a certain way. We were, you know cool, laid back. When he didn't behave the way I expected, I realized for the first time that my ideas about how things should be weren't necessarily like someone else's."


"So, a Cool Dude doesn't welcome his girlfriend home with too much enthusiasm, is that it?"


"Yeah, sort of. We're cool, you and I, we don't have to get all caught up in convention. You know how much I love you. We're relaxed, we'll just relax into being back together after you've been away. Not too much effort."


"Well, I have more of a romantic idea of how couples relate," I said. "Sort of a Sound of Music idea. You rush downstairs to greet me, bearing flowers, possibly edelweiss, perhaps singing. An unseen orchestra would swell. Our lips would touch."


We laughed.


"Probably when I was hanging around with long hair imagining myself to be a Cool Dude, people were saying to themselves that guy, he's just strange," Juan said.


We laughed again.


"Yeah, I completely understand," I said. "It's like we don't know our parts in each other's plays. We haven't read the scripts, we haven't rehearsed our roles." 


We misread the cues, we flub our lines.


I looked at Juan and he looked back, and we saw each other, as if for the first time.

I Bought Bought Bought and Survived

Tripp and his mom were napping when I first forayed to the mecca of box stores for new parents: Buy Buy Baby. Clutching my list on which I had scribbled a few simple items like night light, diaper bag, organic baby wipes, kimonos and breast pads, I froze in the doorway in the face of bewildering arrays of... BABY STUFF. Miles of baby clothes on circular racks, a parking lot sized space of jog strollers, walls of car seats from infant carriers to convertible carriers to booster seats, rolling shelves, aisle upon aisle; what looked like striped baby circus tents hung from the ceiling. I felt instantly nauseous. 


"Can I help you?" a cheerful woman piped up.


I may have muttered something unintelligible, but mostly I was backing away.


"Do you have a list?" she tried.


I nodded.


"Can I see it?"


I held it out.


She found me a cart and guided me to where newborn kimonos - what Tripp's dad refers to as Jedi Knight shirts, because they snap cross-ways across the baby's chest - could be found. I took a breath. They came in white, three to a pack.


"N-night light?" I stammered.


"Right over here." She pointed to a shelf, excused herself, and vanished behind a stack of pink musical potty seats that twinkle when baby tinkles. There were yellow star night lights, vintage Mickey Mouse night lights, nights lights with 72-hour ultrasonic humidifiers, night lights that talk and tell time. I chose something jungle-ish with a monkey and giraffe on it, and fled.


I called Katherine in front of a floor-to-ceiling display of designer diaper bags. A video extolling the benefits of temperature-controlled baby whirlpool spas played softly nearby.


"Huminahuminahumina," I stammered into my cell phone like Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners when Katherine answered.


"Mom? Where are you?"


"D-diaper bags," I said.


"Mom? I trust you completely. Whatever you choose will be fine."

After I finished up the remaining items, having consulted a variety of mothers on the subject of nursing pads and grooming kits, and having bypassed "Boogie Wipes," but scooping up a few bottles of hand sanitizer, I ventured by elevator to the second floor. Katherine had mentioned needing a rocking chair. A saleswoman pounced the instant the elevator doors slid shut behind me.


"New grandmother?" she demanded.


"Why, yes."


"Lunatic on the second floor!" she shouted.


Several people who didn't look much like new parents were seated in what were termed "rockers." One man held a venti-sized cup from Starbucks and was reading the New York Post. A woman was doing her nails. 


"Can I help you find anything?" asked the saleswoman who had denounced me as a crazy person. 


"I think I'm done," I said, overwhelmed by clusters of jungle-themed baby furniture sets, baby swimming pools and masses of stuffed monkeys.


"I nearly got you one of those Baby on Board stickers," I told Katherine later.


"I'm so glad you didn't," she said. "Have you seen those stickers that people paste on their rear windows that tell everyone on the road who's in the family? There's a mother, a father, two children, a parakeet, a dog, a gold fish, whatever."


"Yeah, they're really dumb," I agreed. An open invitation to home invaders I fretted, with some of my usual paranoia. In my day, had we been sticker people, our family station wagon would have boasted cutesy stickers depicting a mother, a father, three girls, two dogs, numerous cats, a few ducks, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, languishing baby turtles, newts, and a horse named Sam.


"Once, I saw a car with 13 cats on it," Katherine laughed. "Can you imagine?"


"No," I said.  "Can I hold the baby now?"

*

PS: By the way,  no one, not even a lunatic grandmother's first grandson, needs this. Am I right?

Naming Grandmother

I'm obsessed with finding a grandmother name. It needs to be perfect, which is why my daughter (the baby's mother) was 6 weeks old before her older sister came home with the name Katherine from pre-school. It was the name of a classmate's new baby sister. The name on Katherine's birth certificate read "Baby Girl Robinson" until she was 10, when a trip from Vermont to Long Island was required to change it.


Katherine was adamant about me - or anyone else - not knowing the names she and Ty had chosen for Baby Tripp. When Juan the Gardener and I visited at Thanksgiving, The Big Book of 60,000 Baby Names lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and it fell open to a page marked by a small white piece of paper. Despite my determined resolve to say nothing, my mouth fell open when I noticed the name of a well-known Southern writer printed in Katherine's neat script.


"Oh, my God," I blurted, before I could stop, "You're not thinking of naming the baby ---? I mean, I doubt the baby will pen another -----."  I named a literary classic featuring a feathered creature in the title. That's all I can say.


"And that," said my daughter, clanging pans, "Is exactly why we're not telling anyone."


Juan had to walk me around the block a few times while he suggested that I not mention one more word about names.


"Use discriminating awareness," he urged. "You can do it."


Even while Katherine lay post c-section in recovery, babbling happily through exultant tears about seeing the color blue in the operating room, she wouldn't give so much as a hint of a name until Ty was present. I love that.


Back to grandmother names. There's "Granny," which I kind of like. It's just sort of how I feel, and it's light-hearted. My mother, the baby's great-grandmother is known to grandchildren and greats alike as "Gogs," short for "grand old gal." But, that's her name. My grandmother wanted to be called "Grandmere," but the best we could manage, not being French, was "Grumma."  On my father's side, our grandmother was known as "Nan" short for Nancy, or "Nin-Nin," which is what I called her.


Katherine likes "Mormor," the Swedish equivalent, but I don't, particularly as it sounds too much like More! More! which is a failing I wrestle with most days. More peanut M&Ms, more Tate's Oatmeal Raisin cookies, etc. There's "Oma," which is German and which, quite frankly, leaves me cold.


Juan is known as "Yeh Yeh" to his grandchildren, so I went with the feminine version, "Ya Ya." Positive and playful. Perfect, I thought. "Ya Ya."


"I'm Ya Ya," my sister Helen stated, when I tried it out on her and my mother at lunch one day. Even though I was a mite disappointed, she got to be grandmother first, so the only mature action was to defer.


Some other thoughts, returning to Francophilia, have included "Beauma" and "Bellemere."


"Goodnight, Grandma," Ty said, when I left after dinner the other night. 


"Hm," I replied, banging myself with the screen door, "Not bad. Grandma," I repeated.


"Kind of traditional," Katherine commented.


After some serious reflection, I decided "Grandma" sounded like a grey-bun-and-support-hose type of grandmother. I'm more the jeans, tee shirt and Tory Burch flip-flops type.


Next, I looked up grandmother names on-line. There was even a test to match one's personality to a corresponding name. The ensuing results described me as "intellectual" and "literary," the sort of grandmother likely to take my grandson on a museum outing, and to read him The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I was also depicted as "natural." Tripp and I shall splash in puddles and hike Vermont's Long Trail. The name this test produced, however, was an insult: "Me Maw." Me Maw? Like Hee Haw or Gee Gaw? No, thanks.


Then I came up with "Lela," pronounced "Layla," after the Spanish word for grandmother: Abuela. I know a little Spanish, and I spend time in Mexico. Both Juan the Gardener and Katherine liked it, but Jane didn't. 


"What? You're hanging out on the corner in Spanish Harlem?" she snorted. (She doesn't get out much.) "Besides," she continued, "Did you ever hear a baby burbling "lalala"? They can't. Find something else."


Names can be difficult.


"It was a pleasure to meet you, Tree," my mother said sweetly after her visit to the hospital to meet her great-grandson.


"Actually, it's Tripp," corrected my daughter.


"Of course. Goodbye, Trey," said my mother.


Back to the original dilemma: I still have a fondness for "Lela," but, c'est moi?