Category Archives: Elections

18 to 81, or Interesting Times

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Our beach party was small this year, just five of us, my family of four plus my mother. And for the first time since Noah was born, there were no minors present. We ranged in age from eighteen to eighty when we arrived and eighteen to eighty-one when we left.

Here’s what our all-adult group did at the beach and just after, while our country experienced nine days of twists and turns. (Ironically, while at the beach Noah and I were reading Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times, named after the purported Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times.”) President Biden was in Rehoboth at the same time we were, recovering from covid and contemplating his political future. It makes me a little sad to think about that. It was time for him to go, and he had a mixed record, but he did a lot of good, and it must have been hard.

Friday and Saturday: Getting There

North and I made it down to the beach by 5:15 p.m. on Saturday. It had been a long journey. Beth had left at 6 a.m. the previous morning to pick them up at camp, deliver them to a medical appointment and then home, where we were all reunited after almost two weeks, and had a dinner of homemade pizza. North always comes home from camp exhausted because they need to get up early and stay up late doing bed checks on campers, so they bowed out of meeting my mom at the airport. Shortly after dinner, though, Beth, Noah and I drove out to pick up my mom at National and dropped her off at her hotel in Silver Spring.

By mid-morning we were at her hotel again to fetch her and begin our drive to Rehoboth Beach. It took about six hours, with stops. There was almost no traffic at the bridge; in fact, most of the traffic seemed to be going the other way, which prompted my mom to tell the story of the time (when my sister and I were teens) when we were driving to the Outer Banks in heavy rain and all the traffic was going the other way and it turned out that it was because the storm was a hurricane and the islands were evacuating. There’s more to this story, involving my stepfather almost getting arrested for breaking into the closed realty’s office for the keys to our house. It’s a family favorite.

But while it was raining on and off during this drive, it was not a hurricane, and the only hardship we experienced was agonizingly slow traffic at the very end. We got to the house by 4:30. It has an interesting feature which is stone from an old lighthouse that collapsed in the 1920s is set in the brickwork of the chimney and around the front door.

Once the food was unpacked and linens distributed to all the bedrooms and bathrooms, North and I took a rainy walk to the beach. We only had one umbrella between us, and we tried to share but North ended up getting soaking wet. We were both happy to get our feet in the sand and surf, though, and to breathe sea air.

Meanwhile, Beth was doing a quick grocery shop for dinner and breakfast the next day. North and I made dinner—veggie burgers and dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, and watermelon. This was the day Trump was shot at the Republican convention. This was distressing news. I don’t want to live in a country where presidential elections are marked by violence against anyone, even him. (Before we left the beach, Noah reports, there were already t-shirts with the image of him with his fist up in the t-shirt shops. I missed that.)

But we were on vacation, so all five of us headed for the boardwalk, where we got frozen custard. The boardwalk was hopping, as befits a Saturday night in July, but I’d thought the rain—which had mostly stopped—might have deterred people. It was a pleasant night, though, not too hot, and we saw a rainbow on the way there. I spotted it first in a puddle and had a hard time finding it in the sky, but standing in the middle of the street, we found it, big but faint. It was easier to see in the reflection than in the sky. This seemed like it might be a good metaphor, but I’m not sure for what. Maya would probably know.

Sunday: Settling In

Sunday morning Beth and Mom did the big grocery shopping, North did a couple online modules they had to complete for school about alcohol and hazing—their Internet connection is not good at camp and they don’t have much time anyway—and I made and received calls from the realty about the fact that the house did not have hot water or any frying pans, which Noah needed to cook dinner. Once both of those problems were resolved with visits from the gas company and a realtor bearing pans, and once North had put together a potential class schedule for the fall semester and met with their advisor online, North and I went to the beach.

We got there about 2:30 and had a long swim, about an hour and half. The water was cold getting in, but pleasant once we got used to it and the waves were adequate. We saw pelicans and osprey catching fish and had a nice talk. In my opinion, the ocean is one of the best places to chat with someone.  After our swim, North headed up to the house and I went to one of the boardwalk pavilions to read my book club book (The Great Mistake, a 1940s cozy mystery) in the shade for about an hour until my mom showed up and we went to sit on the sand together. She’d had something of an odyssey buying a beach chair and finding our meeting spot, but we had almost an hour to sit on the sand, watching the waves and talking. The beach is also an excellent place to talk.

Noah made dinner that night—veggie crab cakes made of chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm. Beth loves these and had asked him to make them at the beach. They are quite tasty. After dinner, we watched Fancy Dance, which is very good, but heavy.

Monday: 37

Monday was Beth’s and my thirty-seventh anniversary. This is the summer anniversary, the one that commemorates our first kiss. We decided that rather than exchange gifts we’d just spend the whole day together, doing an activity of her choice in the morning and mine in the afternoon, and then we’d go to dinner.

Beth chose kayaking. We rented kayaks and explored Assawoman Bay. We saw all kinds of wildlife—egrets, geese, herons, dragonflies, a horseshoe crab, jellyfish, and mussels along the banks of an inlet. We were on the water for almost two hours. The day was sunny and warm but not oppressively hot, plus I was wet from the waist down from the water dripping off the paddles and that cooled me down. I haven’t been kayaking with Beth in a couple years—she goes frequently, so that was pleasant.

We returned to the house for lunch—Mom and the kids had gone out for Mexican, but they returned shortly after we finished eating. Our next stop was an ice cream place we’d never tried—it’s in one of the little alleys off Rehoboth Ave. I got black raspberry and Beth got cappuccino. I saw a gnome with popsicles on its hat there and photographed it for Nicole, who collects gnomes. It turned out to be the first in a series of vacation gnome pictures I sent her.

From there we went to the beach, where we rented chairs and an umbrella. This is something we don’t often do, so it felt luxurious. We read for about an hour and then stood in the surf for a while and then Beth went back to her chair while I had a brief swim before returning to our rented shade to watch the ocean.

I was people-watching, too. I spotted a young man in the surf with a glucose monitor on his arm. I thought—in his twenties and fit, probably type 1, but you never know. When he got out, he walked right by me and I wondered if he noticed my monitor and thought—in her fifties and plump, probably type 2, but you never know.

We went back to the house and showered for dinner. We went out for tapas and ordered a feast—a watermelon and berry salad on arugula, a cheese plate, ratatouille, tortilla Española, and two desserts to split—olive oil cake with berries, and a flourless chocolate torte. Everything was excellent. The waiter put a candle in the olive oil cake because it was our anniversary, which caused someone at the next table to wish me a happy birthday.

We went and sat on a bench on the boardwalk and almost immediately spotted dolphins. They weren’t going in a straight line north or south as they usually do, but circling and Beth surmised they were feeding on a school of fish. We watched them for at least twenty minutes and then took a walk on the beach in the sunset. I saw dolphins almost every day we were at the beach, but this was something else. It was a magical way to end the day, but the best part was just having a whole day devoted to spending time with each other.

And it so happened that the card I got Beth had dolphins on it. She got me one that said, “Let’s get old and weird together.” Apparently, North was with her when she bought it and opined quite firmly, “That’s the one.”

Tuesday and Wednesday: Being There

We went out to breakfast at Egg on Tuesday morning. Noah and I have worked out a system for summer breakfasts at this restaurant. I eat something high in protein at home before we leave, then we each order the lemon-blueberry crepes, and I eat half of mine and give the rest to him. I get a meal that doesn’t cause my blood sugar to spike or leave me feeling deprived, and he gets a plate and a half of crepes, which are one of his favorite foods.

Leaving the restaurant, we all strolled through the farmers’ market that’s right across the street and bought tomatoes and cucumbers for the gazpacho that Beth was making that night and peaches and blackberries. At a honey stand, I found a yellow and black striped gnome with a beehive in one hand a bee in the other and I took its picture for Nicole.

From there North and I continued down Rehoboth Ave where we went to BrowseAbout to get a birthday card for my mom. North browsed but did not buy anything. Next, we went to Candy Kitchen where I got taffy for the neighbors who were watering our garden in our absence, fudge for the house, sea salt caramels for myself, green apple army man gummies for North (eating them was an anti-militaristic statement, they assured me), and some dark chocolate-salted caramel-covered almonds for Beth, who had recently picked out a similar confection for herself at another store, put it down, and failed to bring it to the cash register.

Beth, North, and I went to the beach in the mid-afternoon, and the waves were better than average, the best of the trip so far. North and I swam and talked, but I also spent some time sitting with Beth and reading my mystery.

Beth left the beach first because it was her cooking night. Her beach meal is set—every year she makes gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with Spanish cheeses, baguettes and olives. North made a pitcher of watermelon agua fresca to go with it. The meal was superlative, as always.

Mom was in the mood for ice cream afterward and it didn’t take much convincing to get everyone to the boardwalk. North and I stayed to ride the Haunted Mansion at Funland, which I love beyond reason, even though (or perhaps because) I have it practically memorized. The only surprise is whether it will take the route that goes across a balcony that gives you a brief glimpse of the beach and boardwalk and makes your car visible to passersby. We always hope for that and this time it happened.

One thing I do not love beyond reason is the idea of going to a water park at the beach. I am fine with water parks in their proper place, which is within amusement parks on a hot summer day, but if I am hot at the beach, I want to be in the ocean. So, I did not go to Jungle Jim’s with Beth, Noah, and North Wednesday morning.

While they were gone, Mom and I went out to lunch at our usual lunch place, O’Bies by the Sea. The food is fine, and it has an ocean view. It’s where I often indulge in my once yearly departure from vegetarianism, with a plate of steamed clams. I paired it with devilled eggs with Old Bay, and a berry cup. Mom got a crab cake sandwich.

I was alone at the beach that afternoon and I swam, walked the almost the length of the boardwalk twice, and read.

Mom cooked dinner that night. She made portobello mushrooms stuffed with kale and cheese, which were quite good. North asked what we wanted to do after dinner and I said something “undemanding” because I was worn out, so we ended up watching Mama Mia, which fit the bill.

Thursday: 81

In the morning Beth and North went kayaking in Rehoboth Bay. North said they explored a marshy area and got a little lost in its waterways and they saw herons, egrets, mussels, and many fiddler crabs. North found their asymmetric claws amusing.

While they were gone, Mom and Noah and I took a walk down to the boardwalk and sat in one of the pavilions. It was quite pleasant there, with a nice breeze and view of the dunes. We walked down to the beach briefly to look for dolphins because Mom hadn’t seen any yet, but none were in evidence.

We all got back to the house around the same time and ate lunch. Then Beth and I went to the bakery to pick up my mom’s birthday cake. It had pink and purple roses in the frosting, and she said it was almost to pretty to cut, but we did. I’d picked up some candles to go with it because I thought she would like their pastel colors and did not notice until Beth told me that they were the re-lighting kind. I warned Mom ahead of time and she said I should have surprised her with them. They not only re-lit themselves after she blew them out, but they threw off sparks, so there was a surprise after all.

In the afternoon, North and Noah went to Funland and Beth and I went to the beach. Rain had been threatening so I swam right away. The water was calm, probably because it was low tide, as I heard a man mansplaining to his companion. (Did you know there is one high and low tide each day and night and that they are not at exactly the same time every day?) I got out and read a few chapters of my book while North, who had just joined us, swam, and then I got in with them and swam again. The waves were a little bigger. Perhaps the tide had changed. I don’t know. Clearly, only a select few understand tides.

We went out for Japanese to celebrate Mom’s birthday. It’s a very pretty restaurant full of greenery, strung with fairy lights, and crisscrossed with koi ponds inside and out. (I would have liked to eat on the roof, but there were no tables available there.) We got some of our favorites—the kids got noodle dishes, we had edamame with Old Bay, seaweed salad, vegetable dumplings, and vegetable tempura. Beth got sushi and Mom got seafood pasta. Afterward we got ice cream on the boardwalk, having lucked into an excellent parking space.

North had been trying to get a root beer float since the water park, where they had been disappointed that it had been taken off the menu. They’d tried again that same day at another place that was supposed to carry them but had been out of root beer that day. We were returning to that establishment but, sadly, they were still out of root beer. North had to settle for coke float, their second one in two days. Beth drove Mom and Noah home and North and I walked home along the boardwalk in a fine, refreshing drizzle.

Friday and Saturday: The Last Hurray

With so much beach-going and other fun, I had been having a hard time keeping my blog up to date, so Friday morning I went to Café A-Go-Go to have a half-sweet Mexican mocha and a third of a piece of crumb cake and to pound the blog out before we returned home the next day and got buried in all those urgent things you have to do when you get home from a trip. Beth and North came with me and got their own drinks/treats, plus the other two-thirds of the crumb cake, and they sat outside so as not to disturb me. (When I asked my mom and Noah if they wanted to come and not talk to me, Noah said, “No thank you” and my mom seemed puzzled by why I was going in the first place instead of writing at the house or what she would do there.)

That afternoon everyone but Noah went to the beach. North and I swam in some very respectable waves, taking a brief break in the middle to reapply sunblock, rest, and eat cherries and pistachios. When the lifeguards blew the five o’clock whistle, we got out and headed back to the house for pre-dinner showers.

Dinner was mozzarella sticks, pizza, spinach stromboli, and gelato at Grotto. (Mom went around the corner to get a frozen custard.) The evening was mild and pleasant, after some warm and humid weather earlier in the week. Mom said festive umbrellas and strings of lights make every outdoor space more inviting and it does seem to be true. And when I went inside to use the restroom, I spied a pair of gnomes by the front door.

When dinner was finished all went around the table and said what our favorite part of the week had been, at Mom’s request. Noah wondered if he was allowed to say the water park (yes), Beth and I chose our anniversary, Mom liked her birthday dinner at the Japanese restaurant (“my favorite restaurant in Rehoboth”) and North chose swimming in the big waves that day. North had skipped dessert at Grotto because they wanted to try one more time to find a root beer float and this time, by trying a new store, they had success.

We got home and began packing. I assessed the contents of the fridge, tossing a few things and making decisions about what I’d throw out in the morning if no one ate it for breakfast and there wasn’t enough room in the cooler. (This is the most stressful part about leaving a rental house for me so it helps to think about it ahead of time.) Noah pitched in by eating a slice of birthday cake and some fudge on top of gelato. “I am doing my duty,” he said solemnly.

The next morning the kids had birthday cake for breakfast (“I do what I must,” Noah commented.) While we were packing and carrying things out to the breezeway in front of the driveway, an orange cat appeared and made the rounds, getting people to pet him.

After we vacated the house, we split into three groups. North and I went to the beach, Mom and Noah went to read in a boardwalk pavilion, and Beth returned the keys and went to read in a coffeehouse. Much to our surprise, the orange cat followed us when we left the house, even crossing a busy street. A man witnessed this, asked if it was our cat and when we said no, he scooped it up. North surmised he was going to take it to a vet to see if it was microchipped, because it was acting lost.

North and I had a nice final swim. When we got out of the water we saw a big pod of dolphins, including some that were jumping high enough out of the water that I saw their tails, but not their noses. It was the first time that week North and Mom (whom we fetched from the pavilion) saw any dolphins, so they were excited. Noah stayed in the pavilion to watch our stuff and by the time he got down there with his camera, they were gone.

We all met up for lunch. North got a sandwich at Green Man, Noah got fries at Thrashers, I got orangeades, and we brought them to supplement our meal at the crepe stand where we always have our last lunch on summer beach trips.

We had a few errands to do in town—a last run to Candy Kitchen, a last ice cream, a photo op at O’Bies by the Sea. Beth and I once took a picture there with my sister, who also went to Oberlin and Beth had the idea to take a new picture with our newest Obie.

Next we dropped by the realty to get the keys back because my mom had left a charger in the house, but the cleaners had taken it away, and when we checked back at the realty later (after a visit to the Crocs outlet on the highway) it wasn’t back yet, so we gave up on it and drove out of town, but right after a stop for gas, the realtor called and said it had finally been returned. We were not far away at this point, but I failed to consider that on a summer Saturday afternoon beach traffic is mostly going into town, not out, so it took much longer to get back than it had to get to the gas station in the first place. We weren’t driving away from the beach for good until 4:30.

After that we made decent time, but we got home later than we expected. Mom and the kids and I had dinner at Cava in Silver Spring, while Beth took the car home to unload it and then she came back and took Mom to her hotel. When we got back to the house, we were reunited with the kittens, and I was happy to see our first sunflower had bloomed in our absence. North and I tackled the first of what would be four loads of laundry so they could have all their clothes clean to take to camp and we fell into bed.

Sunday: Goodbyes

The next morning, we dropped North off at the camp bus stop where they would check campers onto the bus before boarding it themselves. Beth and I went to the farmers’ market from there and came home with tomatoes and a bounty of summer fruit (apricots, blueberries, peaches, and plums). Then she took me to Silver Spring, where Mom and I met up, wandered through a small street festival, listened to some music, and got Lebanese for lunch, while Beth finished the grocery shopping.

Back at home, Mom met the kittens, and took in the changes we’ve made to the house since she was last here. While Beth was out taking a walk, and Mom, Noah and I were chatting in the living room he got a notice on his watch that President Biden had dropped out of the race, so we turned on the television to learn more. It was a small relief, as I think Vice President Harris is in better shape to govern, though I don’t know whether she’s better positioned to win—and this question is causing me a lot of anxiety. At the very least, she’s not less likely to win. Beth came home while we were watching tv (also alerted to the news) because she had to work on a press release. It wasn’t the first time she had to work during this unprecedented week in American history. She is the communications director of her union so when something big needs to be communicated, it falls to her

Mom and I took a little walk around the neighborhood, ending up at a playground where we reminisced about taking the kids when they were little. Later that afternoon, we took her to the airport and our visit was over. I’m hoping next summer my sister, brother-in-law, and niece will come to the beach and then we’ll be 12 to 82. Also, less interesting current events would be fine by me.

Where They Are

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Wednesday evening Beth and I were on a Zoom call with North and North had just asked if I’d been writing about them on Facebook or my blog this week. I said no. They said not to post anything on Facebook, but as for the blog, “You can say where I am but not why.” So that’s what I will tell you.

Admission: 21 Hours

North is in an adolescent psychiatric ward and has been for eight days. On Thursday of last week during a routine quarterly visit with their psychiatrist, they said some things that caused Dr. W to recommend we go to the emergency room. She called ahead, approving North to be admitted, thinking this way we wouldn’t be waiting all night in the ER. We did get out of the ER in a relatively swift hour and a half, but instead of spending the night there, we spent it, and most of the next day, in the psychiatric screening area where patients wait to be admitted to the children’s or adolescent psych unit of the hospital or discharged home. We’ve actually been to this screening area before, about three years ago—I never blogged about it. That time, we decided to take North home in the middle of the night.

This time around, once we arrived in the ER, North stopped speaking, though they would communicate through gestures and writing. If you’ve been reading this blog a while you might remember when North stopped talking for six weeks in third grade. That time, they felt physically unable to speak above a whisper, though there was no organic cause and when it got better, there was no clear reason. This time is a little different as North can speak under some circumstances, but I’ll get back to that later.

It wasn’t clear why the admissions process took so long, as North had been pre-approved and there were beds available, but if you’ve spent much time in hospitals—and I hope you haven’t— you know how mysterious and excruciatingly slow everything can be.

The screening area, which we started to call the bardo, consisted of a hallway with a desk and chairs for staff and more chairs for patients and parents who were waiting, and five exam rooms and one restroom branching off the sides. Each exam room had one bed, some chairs, and a tv. There was a cutout in the door so staff in the hall could see inside. If you turned off the lights, the room was dim but not dark. North got an exam room right away and didn’t have to wait in the hall. After they changed into a hospital gown and we were briefly interviewed and a nurse had taken blood and they’d provided a urine sample and taken a covid test, North was able to sleep, but Beth and I sat in plastic chairs all night. You aren’t allowed to bring anything into the area, so we didn’t have our phones, or books, or anything to occupy ourselves and once North was asleep, we couldn’t even talk to each other because we didn’t want to wake them. It was a long night.

At one point after a shift change one of the staff who didn’t know that North is using catheters—yes, that’s still going on—saw them go to the bathroom holding one and asked me if we’d gotten it from a nurse, and I said yes. I wasn’t intentionally lying—I was exhausted and misremembered, but we’d brought them from home, and soon no fewer than four hospital staff were swarming around North and their illicit medical device. So, now we know how to get people’s attention in the hospital.

Kids were arriving and leaving all night and the next day, sometimes sent up to the inpatient unit, sometimes sent home. I left the screening area a few times, either to go the locker with our belongings so I could use my phone to scan the glucose monitor on my arm or in search of food, because while they feed the kids, they don’t feed the parents. When you leave and re-enter you must be screened, and it can take a while for security to arrive to do it, so I tried to keep my excursions to a minimum. By Friday afternoon I was starting to wonder if Beth or I should go home and get some sleep and then come back and relieve the other in case it was going to be another night, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave, and Beth wouldn’t either. As far as I could tell, North was the only kid there with two parents in attendance and at least half of them had no parents accompanying them.

For much of Friday we watched a lot of truly dreadful daytime television—one of those shows in which people are suing each other (not Judge Judy, but similar) a crime drama with bad writing and acting, and The Young and the Restless.  I paced the length of the little room for over an hour and a half, which made Beth so nervous she went out into the hallway, but I kept at it for a while after she left because it was having the opposite effect on me. Finally, we found a channel that was playing nothing but consecutive episodes of Friends, Beth came back to the room, I promised not to pace anymore and climbed into North’s bed with them, and we all watched several episodes. I haven’t seen Friends since it was on the air, and I’m sure there must be some episodes that haven’t aged well (that’s certainly true of Buffy) but from the ones we saw it seems to have held up. It was just what we needed, distracting and funny and North seemed to like it. It even made them laugh a few times.

Finally, at four o’clock Friday afternoon, almost twenty-one hours after we’d arrived at the hospital, North was taken up to the inpatient unit. Beth and I went with them but weren’t allowed past the lobby. We stayed there for another hour and a half, mostly waiting for someone to come talk to us and filling out paperwork. And then we left our baby there, went home, ate, showered, and fell into bed at seven. I slept for eleven and a half hours.

The Home Front: Weekend Plus Halloween

The next day was Saturday, the day of the Halloween parade. North hadn’t been planning to attend anyway because it was the first day of tech week for the school play and if they’d been home, they would have been at rehearsal. Last year Beth and I went to the parade without North (who had the same conflict) just to watch because we love it. We hadn’t decided if we were going this year and I’d completely forgotten what day it was until Beth asked me, tentatively that morning if I wanted to go. I didn’t. It seemed impossibly sad.  I went out on some errands that afternoon and I ended up near downtown Takoma shortly after the parade must have ended because there were a lot of kids in costume, including an unusual number of skeletons, wandering around. In the Co-op, a small Buzz Lightyear was in line in front of me and told me he got his balloon sword at the parade.

Halloween proper was sad, too. We did our civic duty—put out the rest of our massive stock of decorations, lit our jack-o-lanterns (which we’d finished the night before we took North to the hospital, all cats this year in Xander’s honor), and gave out candy. I found seeing the costumed kids at the door alternately cheering and unbearable. To distract myself, I started awarding them prizes, (unbeknownst to them) on Facebook. Here’s what it looked like:

6:08 p.m.

Steph thinks the best trick-or-treater in the 5:00 to 6:00 hour was the “unicorn witch,” even though she wouldn’t have known that’s what the tot was without the voluntarily offered clarification. But it made sense—she wore a unicorn headband and a long black dress.

7:22 p.m.

Best costume in the 6:00 to 7:00 hour: Flower in flowerpot. Second place, hot dog.

8:10 p.m.

7:00 to 8:00 hour. Elaborate homemade piñata costume. Second place, witch with cauldron for candy and stuffed cat familiar, for attention to detail and impressive use of the word “familiar.”

9:00 p.m.

8:00 to 9:00 hour: Marshmallow. And that’s a wrap. Blowing out the pumpkins and turning out all the lights.

When it was all over, I told Beth this year was sadder than the year North missed trick-or-treating because of the sixth-grade Outdoor Ed field trip. “Way sadder,” she agreed.

Hospitalization: Eight Days and Counting

Earlier in the day on Halloween I delivered some homework to North, copies of The Glass Menagerie and The Doll’s House and questions to answer about the plays. (They will have to do this in crayon, as no other writing implements are allowed.) We’ve been going to the hospital frequently to deliver clean clothes and other items, though frustratingly, sometimes it takes days for the items to make their way to North. It was a week before they had a hairbrush, even though they were allowed one. We even brought a second one, thinking maybe the first one got lost. The same day they got to brush their hair, they got Muffin, their stuffed monkey. This required special permission, so it made a little more sense.

When one or both of us go to the hospital, usually Beth drives, but when I brought the plays on Monday, I took public transportation and the hospital shuttle so she could get some work done and so I could see North through the glass of the lobby. Whenever you come into the unit, they bring your kid out to wave at you.

On Wednesday afternoon I got to visit with them for an hour in the classroom. I delivered some art homework and a note from Zoë and a crocheted bee she made for North, a Zobëë, she called it. At North’s request I brought the cards and tokens for Love Letter so we could play (they beat me 7-0) and the Iliad. I read the beginning of book 12 out loud. This isn’t even homework. North got interested in it after they read the Odyssey last year and they’ve been reading it on and off since last summer. Somewhere around book 7, I started reading it to them because they thought it might go faster that way. (After room inspection that night both the card game and the bee were confiscated.)

We’ve also had at least one phone or Zoom call every day they’ve been there. At first it was kind of ad hoc and it was hard to get through but once we got on the schedule for every weekday evening at seven, it’s been easier. It’s good to see them once a day. We can see their room, which has a view of the Capitol, the Howard university bell tower, and the reservoir, and a dark blue wall with white silhouettes of whales and sharks. They’ve been doing a lot of adult coloring book pages with the ever-present crayons, and they are taped to the wall, along with Zoë’s note. We can have these calls because North will speak to us when no one else is around.

We get a call from Dr. D, the main psychiatrist who is working with North, every weekday except Wednesdays, and one day we had a family meeting, which was a Zoom call with North, Dr. D, and a coordinator. In this call North communicated by writing and holding the paper up to the camera. This is what they’ve been doing in group and individual therapy as well, though they have been working on saying a couple words per session.

We’ll have another family meeting on Monday, which if Dr. D is right, might be near the end of North’s stay. No promises, but she says she’s cautiously hoping it will be “early next week.”

At Home: Five More Days

Meanwhile, Beth and I have been working in the day and watching A League of Their Own or Abbott Elementary at night, plus Licorice Pizza on Friday night. I was writing postcards to voters in Kentucky and Georgia until the mailing deadline passed and on Friday, independently of each other, Beth and I took our ballots to the drop-off box near the community center. Beth also took North’s because in Takoma Park, you are allowed to vote for municipal offices at age sixteen. It seemed a little sad they couldn’t have the satisfaction of dropping their very first ballot into the box themselves, but it was good they’d already completed, signed, and sealed it.

On Tuesday I had lunch with my friend Megan. We’ve been good friends since North and Megan’s daughter were in preschool together, so she knows pretty much all of North’s long backstory. It was nice to talk to someone who didn’t need a lot of explanation. In other self-care, Beth went kayaking this morning and we went to Brookside Gardens for a walk this afternoon.

We very much hope North will be coming home soon. They’ve asked us to leave up the Halloween decorations, so we have. I’ve even left the Halloween cats dish towel hanging from the oven door and my black cat, bat, and vampire-festooned pencils and Mummy eraser out on my desk. We’re planning a little Halloween do-over for our reunion. We’ll watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and eat Halloween candy we saved. I am looking forward to that.

Everything That Came After

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We’ve been home from the beach now for almost two weeks and while I can’t say we’ve had as much fun as we did there, life here is not devoid of fun. Here’s what we’ve been up to recently:

Week 1

The weekend we got back, the kids and I watched the last two episodes of Stranger Things. Noah refused to watch it at the beach because he considered the resolution on the television there subpar and as a student of media, he takes the visual elements of entertainment seriously, at least for some shows. It was worth the wait. I mean, that last episode… Wow. Now we just have to wait another two to three years for the next season.

That Sunday, North and Ranvita had a picnic dinner/stargazing date. North made a peach-blueberry galette for the picnic (and we got to eat the leftovers). North and Ranvita been dating for several months now, but I only just received permission to mention that. I also learned recently in a very interesting conversation that in between North’s sixth-grade boyfriend Xavier and Ranvita, there have been three other romantic relationships I didn’t know about at the time. Beth and I had guessed one of them was an unrequited crush (“because she seemed to make you so unhappy,” I said when North told me and North said “She did make me unhappy.”) The other two just flew under our radar, including a relationship that lasted more than a year and a half, without us realizing the girl in question was more than a friend. They’re still friends, as it ended amicably.

The next Monday was 7/11, so Noah partook of a free Slurpee from 7-Eleven. He had to go alone, though, because I wouldn’t have minded the walk, but didn’t want the sugar, and North wouldn’t have minded the sugar but didn’t want the walk.

That Friday it was the thirty-fifth anniversary of Beth’s and my first date, which we celebrate in addition to our wedding anniversary. I’d spent the week we were at the beach thinking about what to get her and I considered several options but when she told me she’d been to the bookstore to see if they still had t-shirts that say “Let Summer Begin” to replace a favorite of hers that’s getting a hole and that she hadn’t seen one in her size on the rack, I decided to go back and enquire if there were any in storage. The answer was no, but since Beth’s had this shirt for years and they’re still carrying it, it seemed possible they might restock before we go to the beach again in August, so I got her a gift certificate she can use if they do and for something else if they don’t. In a funny coincidence, she got me a t-shirt, too. I’d mentioned back in June that I don’t have enough gay t-shirts so she got me a purple one with the rooster that’s the symbol of Takoma Park, surrounded by the colors of the progress pride flag, arranged into a color wheel-type design.

We went out for pizza that night, sans kids. (They had Little Caesar’s delivered to the house.) We got a caprese salad, a vegetarian sausage and mushroom pizza, and gelato and ate it at a table tucked into in the alley next to the restaurant. I had two pieces of pizza and considering how my glucose monitor runs low, I probably went out range on that plus the gelato, but it was considered decision. I decided I wanted to just have what I wanted and except for a lemonade (I couldn’t quite go there), I did just that. I have no regrets.

While we were out, North was at their first babysitting job of the summer, for a two-month old baby girl. They sat for her again yesterday—it’s looking like it might be a semi-regular thing. North seems quite smitten with the baby—“so cute!”—and happy to have a source of income.

The other thing that happened that day was that Beth bought Noah’s airline ticket to Queensland, Australia. He’s leaving the Friday before Labor Day. He still needs to find housing and register for classes, but that step made it seem much more real that he’s actually doing this. I am happy for him to have this adventure, as he’s wanted to do it for a long time and it was delayed a year by the pandemic.

Week 2

Sunday we went blueberry and blackberry picking. I wasn’t sure we’d go because it’s unusual for us to go berry picking twice in a year and we’d gone to pick strawberries in May. I’m glad we did, though, because it’s a fun family outing and we came home with two quarts of blackberries and five pounds of blueberries, plus produce, egg noodles, cheese, and treats from the farm market. I froze half the blackberries and most of the blueberries and we are working our way through the rest. I made the blueberry kuchen I make every year after berry picking on Monday night, substituting almond flour for half the flour and coconut sugar for half the sugar. It turned out a little more cakey than usual, but it was still good.

Tuesday I voted in the Maryland primary. It was the first time in a long while that I voted in person on Election Day but I didn’t get my research done in time to vote early and I didn’t get around to requesting a ballot to drop in a box, as Beth and Noah did. It was a really long ballot, with twenty-one offices to consider and for some offices you could vote for multiple people.

There was an advantage to going in person, though. It’s nice to see other voters and the poll workers and the people campaigning outside the polling place; it’s like watching the wheels of democracy turning. I told North that even though voting in the primary is more work than voting in the general (because there are actual decisions to make), it’s also more fun because the choices are generally good, and while I want the candidates I voted for to win, it will be fine if they don’t, so there’s less stress than in a general election when there’s more at stake. I anticipate the midterms, with control of both the House and the Senate in question, will be kind of agonizing.

North had applied to be a poll worker, but never heard back. I told them that at least at my polling place it looked like they weren’t short-staffed, so there probably wasn’t much need for new workers. They went to the movies with Ranvita that day instead.

On Wednesday North started the lengthy process of making focaccia (it requires multiple rises over two days) and babysat again, while Beth, Noah, and I finished season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Originally I was hoping to finish two seasons this summer, but that’s looking unrealistic at our current pace, so now my goal is reaching the midpoint of season 5.

Today we ate the focaccia at dinner, with a Caprese salad. The focaccia was outstanding and it was nice to have a cold dinner, as we’re in the midst of a heat wave that’s only supposed to get worse. We might get into the triple digits on Sunday and we’re currently trying decide if that’s too hot to go to the pool, which we haven’t done all summer. (Will it be mobbed? Will the water be gross and warm? Or will it be the only thing worth doing on a day like that?) And that brings us up to date.

On our anniversary, I wrote on Facebook:

Steph Lovelady kissed a girl for the first time 35 years ago today and this morning talked with a roofer about repairs to the roof of the house where she has lived with said girl (plus kids and cats) for the past twenty years and tonight went out to dinner with her to celebrate the kiss and everything that came after.

Some of what came after is fun, like picking berries with our young adult and nearly adult children and gaining insight into their lives, and some is mundane, like talking to roofers about home repairs, but it’s all part of the life we’ve built together, day by day, over three and half decades.

By the Numbers: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 31

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So…. there’s certainly been a lot going on, but as you can probably get all the political analysis you need elsewhere, I’ll stick to our domestic goings-on for the most part. In between the shocking assault on the Capitol and the inauguration, we had a small celebration and a weekend getaway.

Anniversary: 01-11-21

On the second Monday of January, North looked up from their computer screen and asked me why I was so dressed up. For the record, I was wearing a white button-down shirt and tan corduroys. That’s what passes for dressed up around here. “It’s a special day,” I said, and gestured for them to turn their attention back to their English class.

Around lunchtime, they asked again. Apparently, my first answer wasn’t good enough. It was Beth’s and my winter anniversary, the double one, twenty-nine years since our commitment ceremony and eight years since our legal marriage. I didn’t notice this until after the fact, but the date, 01-11-21, makes a pleasing pattern.

But as North pointed out, we weren’t going anywhere. Beth and I would be working in separate rooms and she “would barely see” me.

Anniversaries during covid are tricky, or they have been for us. This was our second one as we celebrate our dating anniversary in July. (Not wanting to have three anniversaries was part of the reason we got married on an existing one.) During that last one, North was hospitalized (the first hospitalization of three last summer) and we basically skipped it, exchanging gifts well after the fact. All we had planned for this one was cake—I make the spice cake we had at our commitment ceremony every year—and presents, but at least these would be exchanged on the actual day.

I made sautéed Brussels sprouts and white beans for dinner because these are two of Beth’s favorite foods. North helped me with the cake frosting and in between dinner and cake, we opened gifts. I got Beth a mortar and pestle because she’d recently said the one we had is too shallow and she got me Red Hot and Blue, an album we used to have that wasn’t available until recently on Apple Music. It’s a thirty-year old collection of Cole Porter remakes that was an AIDS benefit. I’d been missing Annie Lennox’s version of “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” for years. I played part of the album while I did the dishes, and then we all played a text adventure. Normally, we’d go to dinner or a movie (or both) to celebrate our anniversary, but as we got married in our living room, maybe that was an appropriate place to end the day, with everyone who was there (minus the officiant).

Ocean City

Friday: 21842

Four days later we were on the road and the reason was indirectly related to North’s aforementioned health troubles. In August, my friend Megan offered us a three-day, off-season stay in an oceanfront condo in Ocean City she’d won at a school fundraising auction. She said we deserved a get-away after all we’d been through last summer—North’s paralysis and seizures, the car that crashed through our fence, our cat’s death. Beth was a little reluctant to accept such an extravagant gift, but she said it was up to me, and my answer to Megan was “Hell yeah!”

Speaking of North’s health, I haven’t done an update in a while, so here’s the current situation in a nutshell: They’ve been able to walk normally for a few months, but have pain that was recently diagnosed as fibromyalgia, so on longer walks they sometimes use crutches or the walker. They are trying to exercise every day for a half hour. The urinary issues have been cleared up since early November. They still have non-epileptic seizures, sometimes several a day, but often none for several days in a row. Overall, they seem to be getting less frequent. For the past couple months, they’ve also had some verbal tics, in which they involuntarily say things like “woo hoo” “hello there,” or “good morning.”

So, back to the beach. We arrived at the condo a little after six and after we’d explored it, admiring the stunning ocean views in the upstairs bedroom and the living room and bay views in the kids’ bedroom, Beth went out to get some groceries and pick up pizza for dinner. While we were trying to figure out if we in a delivery area for Grotto we needed the zip code and had to look it up. Only later did we notice Ocean City’s zip code—21842—was on a piece of art on the kitchen wall. I found this amusing.

I unpacked food and distributed linens while Beth was procuring more food. After we ate, I sat on the balcony, nineteen stories up in the air, and watched the waves crash on the shore for a half hour until I got chilled and had to come in and watch the ocean from my bedroom window instead. While I was doing this, Beth and North watched The Fosters.

Saturday: 99th to 119th & Inlet to 3rd 

The next morning all I had to do was reach out and part the drapes to see the ocean. I didn’t even need to get out of bed. I did eventually, though, and ate breakfast and went down to the beach for an almost two-hour walk. It had been foggy when I first woke up, but eventually the sun broke through the clouds. When it hit the sea foam on the sand it turned it opalescent with pinks, purples, and greens. I watched a seagull hunt and eat a fish, or part of a fish, as it set it down too close to the water and its meal was swept away before it could finish. I actually saw this exact same thing happen twice. It made me wonder why they don’t take their prey to the dunes the way I often see osprey do.

Ocean City is a lot different than Rehoboth, architecturally speaking. It’s high rise after high rise, with the occasional smaller building tucked between or in front of the mammoth ones. When I set out on my walk, I studied our building, so I wouldn’t miss it on my way back, but this turned out to be an overabundance of caution, because 1) there are regular signs that tell you what intersection you’re at, and 2) the buildings are more different than I thought, both in height (ours at twenty-five stories was one of the taller ones), color, and materials, but also shape. Most are rectangular, but one was in a horseshoe shape and a couple were wedge-shaped, to allow for units with side views. At one point while I was looking at the buildings and comparing them, I did something I would have told the kids never to do, at least not in January. I turned my back on the ocean while quite close to it and got soaked almost to my knees. I considered going home at that point, but it wasn’t that cold—mid-forties and sunny—so I kept going.

I discovered a path that ran for a long stretch parallel to the ocean, between the dunes and the high rises, with regular intersecting paths for beach access. I found a snack bar and public restrooms (both closed) and various playgrounds and empty swimming pools, most of which wasn’t visible from the beach. It was like a little secret world and I was pleased to discover it. At one point the path rose slightly and you could see over the dunes. I noticed a surfer in a wetsuit, so I stayed and watched him ride the waves for a while. By this point I’d come twenty (very short) blocks, from 99th street to 119th, so I turned back.

At home I changed into dry pants and socks and left my wet things on the balcony and had an early lunch since my walk had left me hungry.

In the afternoon, Beth, North, and I went to the boardwalk. Noah had a paper to write for his film and philosophy winter term course, so he stayed at the condo. We weren’t sure what, if anything, would be open, as we’ve only been to Ocean City twice before, both times in the spring. The answer was, surprisingly, a lot of indoor entertainment (arcades, Ripley’s Believe it or Not Odditorium, and the mirror maze), but not much food. I would have guessed the other way around since many of the stalls are open air and seem safer. Anyway, we didn’t go into any arcades or Ripley’s, though North said wistfully they would like to go back there someday.

Thrasher’s was one of the few food vendors open and I could have gone for some hot, vinegary fries, as I’d put my still-damp shoes back on and I was feeling chilly. Also, we didn’t get fries on the boardwalk when we were at the beach over Thanksgiving and it felt like a missed opportunity. But I have never seen such a long line for Thrasher’s, maybe half a city block long, and I didn’t want fries that badly. We did find a funnel cake place and North got one.  There was an open Candy Kitchen, too, and I popped in to get some treats for everyone, after waiting in line outside because only ten customers could be inside at once. Beth was hoping to find ice cream and for some reason (it was a cool, cloudy afternoon in January perhaps?) no ice cream stalls were open, so we stopped on the way home at an ice cream place on the highway and she got a sundae. There were at least two signs near the window where you order that said “No profanity” which made us wonder what had happened to make that necessary. Beth joked about ordering “fucking coffee ice cream with god-dammed Oreos.” 

The whole time we were on the boardwalk, I kept remembering the time the kids got lost there, when they were six and almost eleven. Everything reminded me of it—the benches where we sat and ate ice cream right beforehand, all the sunken restaurant patios where I looked for them in a blind panic. This was a less eventful visit and I did not mind that one bit.

At home, Noah continued to write his paper and North did a little homework and drew Harry Potter characters with a drawing program they like while Beth read The New Yorker and I read The Winter Soldier, which my book club is discussing tomorrow. It takes place in WWI field hospital and does a good job of making you really glad you never worked in a WWI field hospital.  We ordered Italian takeout for dinner and then Noah and I finished I, Robot and after that Beth, North, and I watched an episode of The Gilmore Girls.

Sunday: 99th to 79th & 40 Feet 

It was clearer when the sun rose the next day and the light that came through the gap at the top of the curtains threw a vivid orange triangle on the wall, near the ceiling and filled the room with a rosy glow. I pushed the fabric aside and saw orange-red ball that seemed to rise out of the water.  Beth and I were both awake by seven-thirty but we lazed in bed for a while before we got up. I made myself a hearty breakfast—a broccoli and Monterrey Jack omelet, veggie bacon, grapefruit, and orange juice. Fortified, I went for another long walk on the beach.

Since I’d gone twenty blocks north the day before, I decided to go twenty blocks south this time, down to 79th Street. Noah said he was going to follow me with the drone and I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but I didn’t see it. Later he told me by the time he got it set up it was too windy to fly it as far away as I’d gotten.

On my walk I saw a building that looked like a Mayan pyramid and one that looked like a spaceship, also a Little Free Library at a dune crossing, which is about the most delightful location for a Little Free Library I have ever seen. In the last five blocks or so of my walk the high rises petered out and there were more two and three-story buildings. Coming back, I found a beach chair someone had left around 84th Street and sat in it for ten minutes or so, watching the ocean.

Back at the house, Noah and I read the first seven chapters of Trail of Lightning, a story about a Navajo monster hunter operating in a post-apocalyptic landscape. (Psst, Allison, I think this might be up your alley.) Beth made a Chipotle run because North wanted a burrito, but everyone else ate leftovers or other food we had in the condo. 

A little before two, we left for Assateauge Island National Seashore in search of the famed wild horses and some pretty trails to hike. We’ve been to this park twice before (the last time on the same trip when the kids got lost on the Ocean City boardwalk) so I was confident we’d find both. There were plenty of signs forbidding feeding the horses or getting closer than forty feet to them, but we saw people doing both. Some people were throwing apples out their car windows and we saw a half-eaten pumpkin and some stubs of carrots left along one of the trails.

We hiked the marsh, forest, and dune trails. North only felt up to one and chose the forest trail, waiting for us in the car while we were on the other trails. They chose wisely as it was the only trail where we saw a horse. Or more likely, they just got lucky because based on the presence of horse poop, the horses roam all three trails, and the roads, and the parking lots and pretty much everywhere in the park. The horse in question was reddish-brown with a shaggy coat and a flaxen mane. It was grazing in a marshy area just outside the forest.

Even though we didn’t see horses on the other trails, we saw some very lovely landscapes. As we drove across the narrow bridge off the island, looking at the late afternoon light on the water, I felt a little drunk with the beauty of the world.

We picked up Starbucks on the drive home. At the condo, North worked on Japanese, and then we watched Locke and Key, while Beth made Pad Thai for dinner. This was the first installment in what qualifies for me as tv/movie bingeing. After dinner, Beth, Noah, and I watched Predestination, which he needed to watch for class. The professor is on a time-travel movie kick. They’re also studying The Time Traveler’s Wife, Back to the Future, and Time Crimes. It’s enough to make me wonder if she wrote her dissertation on time travel films. Anyway, have you seen Predestination? It’s something else and I can’t explain why without major spoilers. We rounded out the evening with an episode of Buffy because it’s our Sunday show and Noah didn’t want to skip a week.

Monday: Countless Gulls & 21 Waves 

The next morning when I pulled aside the curtain to peek at the sunrise, there was a band of dark clouds on the horizon, but you could see where the rising sun was because threads of reddish orange light leaked through cracks in the clouds. It looked like molten lava under black rock.

Usually on the morning we leave a beach house, it’s all hustle bustle, but we had no set checkout time, so we were more relaxed. After breakfast, Noah flew his drone off the balcony again and then we read a chapter of our monster-hunter book. We packed up everything but the kitchen, since we’d be eating lunch at the condo, and then Noah and I took a walk through a bayside neighborhood intersected with canals. There was no beach access except through private property, but we were able to get pretty close to the water and we saw an egret in a marshy area. There was a huge flock of seagulls floating on the water and we could hear their cries, even from far away. As we were walking back the sound changed to a loud rustling. We both turned around to see the whole flock rising into the air. Noah was quick with his camera and got a shot of them.

We ate lunch and finished packing up and moving out. (North was quite taken with the building’s garbage chute.) We drove to the boardwalk and found the line for Thrasher’s much shorter so I got in it, while Beth went to get funnel cake and some dark chocolate almond bark, and we sat on a bench and ate our treats. Beth walked on the boardwalk and along the edge of the closed-for-the-season amusement park while North and I went down to the water. We’d had a long discussion about whether the kids should put their feet in the water, per the Lovelady-Allen Goodbye-to-the-Ocean ritual, because none of us was sure whether this was just a Rehoboth tradition or if it applied to other beaches. I think we might have come to a different conclusion if it wasn’t January and if had been able to locate my rainboots before this trip, but North and I decided we’d stand at the shore and count twenty-one waves without actually standing in them, and I put my hand in the water for the first and last one, thinking more than that would pretty much guarantee I’d soak the shoes that had just dried out.

Around three o’clock, we left the boardwalk and drove home. We crossed the Bay Bridge around 5:25, just as the sunset was starting to fade. I felt very content. But there was more happiness just two days later, because of course, the number that has most of our attention now is forty-six.

Inauguration: 46

Beth, North, and I watched the inauguration together. North had an early dismissal and was finished with classes around 11:25, but Noah’s 11:30 class went on as scheduled, so he had to miss it. We turned on the television during Amy Klobuchar’s speech and we watched the rest of the ceremony: Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks singing the national anthem, “This Land is My Land,” and “Amazing Grace” and the startling youthful and talented Amanda Gorman reciting “The Hill We Climb.” We spotted many former Presidents in the audience. We watched Justice Sotomayor swear in Vice President Kamala Harris and Chief Justice Roberts swear in President Joe Biden.

Let’s just pause and take in those last three words—President Joe Biden. It was an unusual inauguration, even more heavily guarded than usual, sparsely attended as these things go, with the audience all masked and on the lawn at least, seated in distanced clumps. The parade was tiny. There will be no inaugural balls tonight. But in the end, the pomp of an inauguration isn’t the point, it’s the peaceful transfer of power from one President to another. And after January 6, I was not taking the peaceful part for granted.

In other ways, it was a completely normal inauguration. In his address, our new President sounded hopeful and determined, coherent and rational. He sounded like a President. That’s something we haven’t heard in a long time. I was more than ready for it.

Tonight Beth and I watched the inaugural concert on the mall on television, eating chocolate-peanut butter ice cream because we read somewhere that’s Biden’s favorite flavor. At the very end, when Katy Perry sang “Firework,” we could actually hear the fireworks that were going off behind the Washington Monument. The broadcast must have been on a delay because we heard them start before they did on tv. It reminded me that on January 6, we could hear the helicopters heading for the Capitol. That’s the distance we’ve travelled in two weeks.

 

Sky Full of Stars: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 26

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Well, that was a wild ride, wasn’t it? I mean a four-day wait to find out who won the Election shouldn’t seem that long when I lived through five tense, stressful, and eventually heartbreaking weeks to see who won the 2000 election. But that was twenty years ago and while the stakes in the Bush/Gore contest seemed high at the time, we had no idea how high they could get.  It’s satisfying that the baby I was pregnant with back then just voted in his first Presidential election and that it was such a momentous one.

I had to think hard about what to serve for dinner on Election night. In 2016, we had tacos—because of the memes about taco trucks on every corner if Clinton won—and I have not eaten a taco since then, much to North’s distress because they really like tacos. (I did consent to make them on their birthday every year since, though I always ate something else.) North advised me not to make anything anyone particularly liked. Then I was listening to a podcast about the history of voting in the U.S. and I learned that George Washington, when he was running for local office in Virginia, used to throw big parties to sway his neighbors to vote for him. This was in the days of voice voting, so he’d know how his guests had voted after he fed them. Anyway, one of his favorite things to serve was barbequed beef and corn pudding. Now I do like barbequed seitan, but I thought since it was a food choice that wasn’t inspired by this particular election, if Biden lost, I wouldn’t have such a strong negative association so I chanced it. And corn pudding is not in my regular rotation, so there was no real risk there.

Dessert was more obvious. Tuesday was Noah’s half-birthday and we always have cupcakes on the kids’ half-birthdays. This year we had a selection of red velvet and cookies and cream cupcakes from the grocery store. We ate them separately because we ended up splitting into two groups on Election night. North and Beth chose not to watch the returns come in and watched The Fosters instead in hopes that it would be less anxiety-inducing. Noah and I watched MSNBC. He started while I was still doing the dishes and when I came into the living room at 7:20, two states had been called: Indiana for Trump and Vermont for Biden. I won’t go through the blow-by-blow because either you watched it or you didn’t, but either way, you know how it went. By eleven (an hour past my normal bedtime), it was clear it wasn’t going to be decided any time soon and probably not that night, so I went to bed, jittery but holding on to hope. Noah stayed up until 12:30. I woke up around the time Noah was going to bed and checked the count on my phone, but when I woke again at four, I resisted the urge. It was better than four years ago when I was waking up every hour, checking my phone and being sick in the bathroom.

In the morning I heard Beth telling North it wasn’t decided yet but she thought Trump might win a second term. I listened, considering the fact that because of her work, Beth knows on a more granular level than I do what the returns in various places mean, but also considering the fact that Beth has a tendency to catastrophize and trying to weigh these two facts about my wife.

Then something completely unexpected and unrelated to the election happened on Wednesday. North spontaneously regained the ability to urinate normally, after two months of only going through a catheter. We have no idea why it happened, but as North said, it was “a good thing about today.” It’s been five days now and so far, so good. We’re all very happy about this.

And then the days dragged on. We went to bed without knowing the outcome again on Wednesday and then again on Thursday. But as time passed, it began to look better and better. When Biden pulled ahead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning, Beth texted me “Ice Cream Time!!!!!!” This was because we’d saved the emergency/celebratory ice cream until we had an answer and she intended to eat some whatever time of day that happened. North had gone to the bathroom during their Japanese class and walked by our bedroom (where Beth works) and Beth called out to them that Biden had won.

North, still wearing their headset and carrying their laptop, came into the living room (where I work), crying and almost unable to speak, but when they did, they said, “He did it! He won!” This time I was the cautious one, saying the chances were very good but it wasn’t for sure yet.  Beth was on the phone a long time but eventually came down to the basement to fetch the ice cream from the chest freezer. I was on the exercise bike down there and we had a long hug.

We thought it might be called later that morning, but it wasn’t. North finished their Japanese class, and attended History and Biology, while Noah attended Computer Science, Ethnomathematics, and Philosophy and did some work for ICTV, and Beth and I worked and still nothing. North had a tempting one-day-only star offer on their Starbucks app and talked Beth into a Starbucks run. Noah was still in class, so he didn’t come, but we picked up an iced tea lemonade and a cake pop for him.  We got takeout pizza for dinner and watched the first half of Emma, after which Noah and I read a chapter and a half of Quichotte. We were close to finishing the book at ten, but I was exhausted and went to bed.

The next morning, while Beth was off for a long walk in Wheaton Regional Park (which has become a Saturday morning habit for her in recent weeks) and Noah and I were watching The Handmaid’s Tale, she texted me again, no words, just her bitmoji blowing a noisemaker, surrounded by confetti. I knew what it meant. The race had been called for Biden.

That afternoon, we went on a family outing. We went to Catoctin Creek Park in Frederick County, which is further from home than we usually go, but it had a couple things to recommend it. There was a paved loop trail, which was convenient because North’s been having more pain the past several days and wanted to use the wheelchair. And it’s near Catoctin Mountain Orchard, which has a farm market with a lot of baked goods. (We visited it once before, on our way home from a Unitarian retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park last fall.)

As we drove, we counted Biden/Harris signs and Trump/Pence signs. Frederick County is more purple than our home county, Montgomery. (It went 55% for Biden, versus 83%.) Eventually we lost track, as we passed back over some of the same roads, but I think it was pretty even. My main observation was that the Biden signs were somewhat more numerous, but tended to be smaller (and Beth added, not in all caps).

We’d gotten a later start than we intended so we could only spend about forty minutes in the park if we wanted to get to the market before it closed, but that was long enough for Noah to fly his drone, for Beth and me to amble down to a peaceful stretch of the creek surrounded by boulders covered with lichen and trees with yellow leaves glowing in the sunlight, and for everyone to draw joyful noise from the percussion instruments along the trail.

At the farm store we got three pies to freeze for Thanksgiving (pumpkin, pecan, and apple), and some treats to eat over the next few days (apple cider doughnuts, apple dumplings, apple caramel bread, and popcorn). We found a picnic table near a covered bridge and drank cider and ate doughnuts. Even though we’ve been exploring parks in the Maryland suburbs and exurbs ever since Noah got his drone, at first weekly, now more like once a month or so, this outing felt different, suffused with deep relief and joy.

We got home around seven, so dinner was on the late side, but no one was starving after those doughnuts. Noah and I made sauteed gnocchi with Brussels sprouts and brown butter. I think it was really good, but who knows? Anything might have tasted good that day. We’d hoped to finish Emma before watching Vice President Elect Kamala Harris and President Elect Joe Biden give their acceptance speeches, but there wasn’t time, and no one really minded. I don’t need to describe the speeches. You watched, right? You saw Harris looking radiantly happy in her white suit, telling people “While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last,” and you heard Biden sounding coherent and rational and compassionate.

After the speeches, we watched the sky over Wilmington, Delaware light up in red, white, and blue stars. The country is still in the midst of a pandemic that’s killed 237,618 Americans, economic uncertainty, and what I hope will be a true reckoning with systemic racism. There’s a lot of hard work ahead, and I do still have my worries and sorrows for my country, but at least right now, every now and then I feel as lit up as that sky. I hope you do, too.

Also, tomorrow we’re having tacos for dinner, with blue shells.

Once in a Very Blue Moon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 25

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So in the end I wrote another twenty postcards to Michigan voters and seventeen to Iowa voters (that last number was how many stamps I had left). I mailed the Iowa batch Friday morning. Time’s up for getting things in the mail and I voted a week and a half ago (via drop box), so all I can do now is wait, but Beth is going to phone bank on Monday night.

We’ve been trying to decide what to do on Election night, as watching the returns come in and not watching the returns come in seem equally impossible. Beth bought “emergency ice cream” and when I asked her if that meant we couldn’t eat it if Biden won, she said then it would be “celebratory ice cream.” What I remember about snacking during the night of the 2018 midterms, though, was that I thought I’d overeat Halloween candy but when it came down to it I was too nervous to eat much at all.

Okay. That’s all I’m going to say about the election. The rest is all Halloween. Though we were all sad about the cancelled parade and costume contest, I think we salvaged a half decent holiday.

On Wednesday night I made soup in a pumpkin. The kids aren’t fans of this soup, which consists of evaporated milk, rye bread crumbs, swiss cheese, onion, mustard, and horseradish, served with chunks of the cooked pumpkin, but Beth and I like it so I make it most years around Halloween and feed the kids canned soup.

Around 5:45 Thursday afternoon, I was asking Noah about his evening plans when he remembered we’d all been invited to the outdoor premiere of the movie he’d been helping some local families make and it was going to start at 6:30. The film is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret. There’s a group of families that traditionally put on a play around Halloween (not always Halloween-themed), but this year they decided to make it a film, so people could watch it remotely. Noah did some of the filming and lot of the editing. The gathering was just for people who were involved in making the film and their families. After some hurried consultation, we decided Beth and I would go and North would watch the film later. The screening took place on the deck of a house. There wasn’t room for people to stand six feet apart, but I managed at least three feet most of the time and everyone was masked. After the screening, there was carrot cake and a little awards ceremony. Noah got a statuette that said “Miracle Editor.” When the director presented him with it, she said he’d made “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” working under tight deadlines without a lot of direction. It was a fun event and it’s always nice to see your kids recognized, so I’m glad we made it, even if I was little nervous about the contact.

Here’s the film, if you’d like to watch it. It’s thirteen minutes long.

When we got home, the cinematic fun continued.  We watched a series of vintage short horror films the city of Takoma Park was screening, while decorating paper bags with Halloween-themed stickers and filling them with candy, stickers, stamps, and temporary tattoos. The first film was from 1896 and consisted a thirty seconds of a dancing skeleton, whose pieces come apart and then reassemble. We watched a about an hour and fifteen minutes of films, ending with a 1912 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In that span of sixteen years there was a lot of innovation in how to tell a story on film, including the introduction of intertitles to provide dialogue or explanations of what’s going on. In the earlier films, it’s often a little hard to follow the plot. In a funny coincidence, a lot of the films were by George Méliès, who is character in Hugo’s Cabret’s Big Fix. When The House of the Devil (by Méliès) started, Noah said, “I’ve seen this.” When I asked when, he said in his sixth grade media class. It was this class that got Noah interested in silent film. (I remember one night when he was eleven, he showed us several of his favorites. I probably should have had an inkling then that he’d be a film buff.)

Friday night AFI was screening Nosferatu and that was also fun, especially since we’d just watched Dracula the week before and Beth and I had an interesting conversation comparing the two afterward. I have a soft spot for classic horror, so it was nice to watch so much of it this month.

In other Halloween observances, we did decide to enter the yard decoration photo contest and we didn’t win, but those are the breaks. Our letter carrier told me that we have the best yard on his route, so there’s that. On Halloween afternoon I had Noah set up his tripod so we could get a picture of all of us in the Halloween masks Beth made and we’ve all been wearing for the past few weeks, since they probably won’t be getting much more use (unless we still need them next year). North had a seizure during the mask photo shoot and fell to the grass, which seemed to encapsulate the year we’ve been having. (By the way, the brain MRI came back normal.)

Noah and I watched Rosemary’s Baby that same afternoon, which was fun. He decided not to accompany North (dressed as a galaxy) and Zoë (dressed as Hawaiian Punch—a Hawaiian shirt and a boxing glove) trick-or-treating, but North did fine with the walker and didn’t need the wheelchair.  They came home with just a little less candy than a usual year, though they had to walk a long way to get it because there were fewer houses giving out candy.

Back at home, Beth, Noah, and I set up our candy table and took turns supervising it from five to nine. We decided to have only six bags of candy out at a time in case anyone got the idea to grab it all. (One teenager did make off with four, which made me wonder, if you’re going to be greedy, why not just take them all? I mean, the karma wouldn’t be much worse.) After every group of trick-or-treaters, we’d restock the table. I didn’t expect anyone in the first hour, but we started getting customers pretty soon after we were set up. During my shifts, I saw a couple Power Rangers, skeletons, and kids in Scream masks, Bat Girl, a hunchback, a devil and angel, and a unicorn with a light-up rainbow horn. At least half the time, though, I couldn’t make out what the costumes were because it was dark and I was on the porch, probably about ten feet from the table. That was a little sad because seeing the kids’ costumes is one of my favorite parts of Halloween. Some of the kids were perplexed by the bags because they couldn’t see what was inside, and that led to their exasperated parents saying things like, “Just take the one you already touched.”

By 8:05, we were down to five bags of candy and I thought we might run out, so I bagged some more candy in undecorated sandwich baggies, but we didn’t need to put them on the table. There were only two more trick-or-treaters before we closed up shop a bit after nine.

North came home a little after nine and put a mason jar of water outside in the moonlight to make moon water because in addition to being Halloween, it was also a full moon, and a blue moon to boot. That hasn’t happened since 1944 and won’t happen again until 2039. This unique Halloween wasn’t all bad—it was actually pretty good considering—but given the reasons we were all avoiding crowded parades and close contact with dressed up neighbor children seeking candy, I wouldn’t mind not having another like it for a long time. Once in a very blue moon is plenty.

Moon photo credit: Gretchen Weigel Doughty

Things Frightful and Hopeful: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 24

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Do you need a little break from sickening dread about the coming election or is that just me? I mean the polls look good, both for the Presidential race and the Senate, but I can’t quite trust them after the last time.  I’ve been churning out postcards to voters, mailing one hundred to Pennsylvania, sixty to Florida, and twenty to South Carolina in just the past week. Noah and I watched the final debate on Thursday. Beth couldn’t bear to do it but I watched all but the dueling town halls, mostly with Noah (He skipped the vice presidential debate and missed the fly.) And I voted on Wednesday, so there’s not much else I can do, unless I find time for more postcards before they stop giving out addresses, which I imagine will be soon.

Well, if you do need that aforementioned break, this will be a post about our Halloween preparations and not much else, if I can help it. (I don’t even have any medical news to report, other than that North had the brain MRI a little over a week ago, but we haven’t gotten the results yet.)

It’s going to be a strange, somewhat austere Halloween, with no parade, no costume contest, and curtailed trick-or-treating. The city arranged some alternate activities but they are mostly online. There’s a Walk and Chalk event on the afternoon of Halloween which I think might be kind of like a parade, but more dispersed, with people in costume strolling down the street during a two-hour stretch but not all marching in the same direction at the same time. I’m a little less clear on the chalk part, but it involves drawing on the street.

I thought it might be fun to go and see other people’s costumes and if I had younger kids I might have pitched it harder, but North wasn’t interested, because they’d chosen a costume that will be covered in glow-in-the-dark paint and not that impressive in daylight. (They are going to be a galaxy.) Noah’s not making a costume this year. Without the contest it’s not the same. Well, he’s probably not. North and Zoë are planning to trick or treat, but only at houses where people have set candy out. They’ve been instructed not to knock on doors. I’m not sure how many people are going to do this, but it’s what we plan to do, and North’s trying to enlist Noah to push the wheelchair so if he goes with them he might come up with a costume or he might just go without one.

Anyway, this is what we have done this month to mark one of our favorite holidays: we made cookies with our Halloween cookie cutters and frosted them, we went to our usual farm to get pumpkins for our jack o’ lanterns, and we carved them.

We made the cookies about a week and a half ago on a Thursday, because that’s our designated family activity night. It couldn’t all be done in one evening, though, so earlier in the day North made the dough and cut most of the cookies, with Noah and me pitching in a little bit, too. North also made the frosting and then both kids tinkered with the food dye to get just the right shades of orange, green, purple, and gray, while I did the dinner and cookie dishes. The actual frosting and decorating was an all-hands-on-deck project. The cookies were a little brittle so we had a bunch of broken bits, but we frosted those, too.

When we finished making the cookies, I said to Noah, “It’s nice to have you here for this but I hope next year you’re not here.”

“Me, too,” he said. (I think we may have had the exact same exchange when we dyed Easter eggs.)

We got our pumpkins last Sunday. This was something else we never expected to do with Noah again, and it felt like a small, bittersweet gift. We drove out to Northern Virginia, to our traditional farm stand, making surprisingly good time. Apparently, when there’s almost no traffic it only takes a half hour to get there, though some years it’s taken us over an hour. There weren’t as many pumpkins on the pallets as usual, and some of them had moldy spots. Possibly this should have given us pause, but there seemed to be more than enough to find four good jack o’ lantern candidates and a big white pumpkin to cover with little metal spiders. We also got several little pumpkins for Noah’s, North’s and my desks, freshy pressed cider, pear butter, and pickled vegetables. For the past few years this outing has involved dinner at Sunflower, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant, and Dessert Story, where we’d get bubble tea or macarons or cheesecake or waffle sundaes. We did get a feast from Sunflower and ate it in a nearby park, but sadly, Dessert Story has gone out of business, a victim, perhaps, of the pandemic.

After eating we wandered around the park a bit. Behind the mansion we found some community garden plots where tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and flowers were flourishing. Noah had brought his drone, but it turned out we were too close to D.C. or maybe the airport so it wouldn’t take off, just displayed a restricted message. It’s too bad because it would have been fun to see the little gardens from above.

We drove back to Takoma got dessert from Mark’s Kitchen and ate it at one of the picnic tables near the gazebo. I got my favorite early fall dessert, the gingerbread sundae. They were out of the ginger sauce, so it was just vanilla ice cream and whipped cream on gingerbread, but it was still good. The whole outing was highly satisfactory.

During the past few weeks, we’ve also watched Young Frankenstein, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and Dracula (the 1931 Tod Browning version). The Peanuts special we watch every year. The films are special favorites of mine so it was treat to watch them this year. I’ve loved Young Frankenstein since I was younger than North (though I admit parts of it have not aged well). When I taught a college class on horror, I used to do a Frankenstein unit that consisted of the novel, the 1931 James Whale film, Bride of Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein. We also read Dracula in that class and while I didn’t teach the film, I always had a few students writing research papers on it, so it was familiar and nostalgic as well.

Last night we carved pumpkins. We got takeout from Chipotle for dinner because there was  a fundraiser for North’s school that night and it made for a quick dinner before the carving. When we lifted them from the porch wall where they’d been waiting almost a week we were alarmed to discover three of the four had soft spots that weren’t there when we bought them, and two of them had rotten bottoms. But we persevered. My pumpkin is the political one. Beth’s is the flaming skull and the kids did the witches (Noah’s is on the left and North’s is on the right). As I said when I posted the picture on Facebook, they represent things frightful and hopeful.

As we were finishing up, Noah said cheerfully, “I hope I’m not here for this next year” and we discussed whether he could carve a jack o’ lantern in Australia, and decided probably not as it would be spring there and pumpkins would not be in season. Then I told the story of how the fall of my junior year of college I was studying abroad at the University of Córdoba and the Spanish students in my dorm got the idea to throw a Halloween party for the Americans, but as they weren’t that attached to the actual date of the holiday, it kept getting delayed and didn’t happen until mid-November. The kids thought this was pretty funny.

When we’d finished carving, Beth had the idea to slice the soft bottoms off her pumpkin and mine and replace them with foil so the rot wouldn’t spread as quickly. We also spread petroleum jelly on the cut surfaces to protect them. These are the tricks you learn when you live somewhere where it sometimes gets almost up to eighty degrees in late October, as it did several days last week. Fortunately, it’s not supposed to get warmer than the mid-sixties next week. Fingers crossed the jack o’ lanterns will last a week.

We are not finished celebrating. Friday night AFI is going to stream Nosferatu and we’re going to watch it. The yard decoration isn’t complete—the project stalled for a while but I’m hoping to work on it soon. The recreation department is having a photo contest for best yard. We could enter and given how over the top our yard usually is, it seems we should. I hesitate only because I’ve always found it hard to capture the overall effect in one photo and you can only enter one. I actually wrote the rec department to see if a short video panning the yard would be accepted. (I haven’t heard back yet.) One nice addition we have this year is the set of solar-powered colored lights we have to spotlight certain areas of the yard in purple, green, and red.

And of course, we’ll also be giving out and collecting candy (in a socially distanced fashion) on the big night. We’re going to set up a table at the front gate with little goody bags of candy so people don’t have to reach into a communal bowl. We’ll sit on the porch and watch so we can see the kids’ costumes (and so no one gets the idea to swipe all the candy at once). I hope you all have a very happy Halloween, with just the right amount of fright and hope.

Plateau: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 22

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After North’s last ER visit almost three weeks ago, things have plateaued. This is both good and bad. The good part is that no new symptoms cropped up, North didn’t need any emergency medical care, they were able to start attending class regularly, and life calmed down. We got to have two more low-key weekends than we’d had in a while.  During the first one I wrote postcards to voters in Colorado and Noah and I started watching The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.

That weekend we all went for a walk at Font Hill Wetland Park in Howard County, which is apparently famous for its dragonflies. We did see some, but not a remarkable number. We also saw a heron, a deer, a bunch of turtles, and some ducks. Noah took some drone footage and when North wanted to throw sticks into an algae-covered pond, he filmed them splashing into the water from overhead. I thought of all the time I spent when the kids were younger watching both of them throw sticks and rocks into water or through ice. Minus the drone (and the masks and the wheelchair), the scene could have taken place a decade ago. It felt sweetly nostalgic to me.

 

The bad part of the plateau is that North’s two main problems, the seizures and the bladder issues, remain unchanged. The seizures are more dangerous now that North’s walking is almost back to normal.* Now that they can walk, they want to and we want them to, but this means they sometimes they fall if they seize while standing. They know it’s going to happen just a fraction of a second before it does and luckily they’ve been trained in stage falls, so they can usually manage not to hit their head, but some days they fall several times. If they are going to stand for an extended period (while cooking for example) they put the walker behind them in the locked position so they can fall into it. Outside they usually use the wheelchair, for safety.

Tuesday of last week was a good day, or what passes for one these days. We finally got the sedated MRI scheduled. Beth had been calling and calling about this for almost a week and a half. It wasn’t clear why it was so difficult, but Urology didn’t want to see us until spinal compression causing the bladder difficulties was ruled out, so having it on the calendar was a breakthrough. The same day, we had our second telemedicine appointment with the psychologist who’s doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with North. She spoke to us together, then alone with North, then alone with me and Beth. She seemed to be hearing what we were saying, which has not always been this case on this journey, so that was nice. North, who’s been having trouble concentrating in class some days, due to their chronic pain and fatigue from the seizures, had a focused and efficient school day. Finally, we’ve been having some home repairs done—because in the midst of all this, we got cited by the city during the summer for peeling paint on our porch and some other issues—and the stucco people finished on Tuesday, two days earlier than planned, which means I could schedule the painters.

Of course, things couldn’t go well forever so the very next day when Beth, having secured the MRI, got an appointment with Urology, it was for early November. That’s a really long time from now, so we were discouraged all over again.

We had another relatively calm weekend, though we were of course saddened by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and more than a little alarmed by the political implications. Honestly, I get more terrified about the election every day and this doesn’t help. I wrote postcards to voters in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and that helped a little. On Sunday, Noah painted part of the section of fence we had replaced after the car accident last spring (helping to continue to chip away at our home repair to-do list) and then we watched a couple episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. We’re trying to finish it before our three-month Hulu subscription expires—we’re two-thirds of the way through the first season.  I’m enjoying it, but as I watch I do find my mind wandering to worst-case political scenarios, especially when we were at the part that covers the backstory of the Waterfords’ role in the coup that installs the theocracy.

On the positive side, that night Beth made a very satisfying late summer/early fall dinner of matzoh ball soup with fried green tomatoes and apple slices and then I watched the first half of the Emmys with Noah, while eating popcorn and writing more postcards, which was fun. Another nice thing about the weekend was that I slept in my own bed for the first time in about a month. North had been sleeping there with Beth, but we had them experiment with sleeping in their own bed Friday and Saturday night. They agreed, but wanted to return to sleeping with Beth for several nights after that. (On Thursday, with some encouragement from the psychologist, we all switched back to our own beds again, for good, I hope.)

Monday morning North went to Children’s for a covid test (#5 for them) which was required for their MRI on Wednesday. They continue not to have it. We all had to quarantine for two days after the test, which wasn’t a big change, though we did have to postpone some errands and Beth and I skipped our morning walks. The MRI itself went smoothly, though we don’t have the results yet. I was sad, but not surprised of course, to see the total of covid deaths in the U.S. hit 200,000 that day.

Wednesday was also North’s half-birthday, so we had cupcakes after dinner. This is a family tradition. There was a virtual Back to School Night for their school that night. The beginning of the evening was extremely glitchy, but eventually we got to hear from all of North’s teachers, except for their English teacher because she’d resigned earlier in the week. She’d found trying to teach and keep her own two elementary school-age kids on task unworkable. And really, who can blame her? Instead of the teacher, the chair of the English department explained the course objectives but it seemed she would not have mentioned the missing teacher except a mother brought it up during the Q&A. (Class the next day consisted of a screen saying to keep working on a personal essay the students are writing.) It was good to see the rest of the teachers and get a feel for their classes, though. I always enjoy Back to School Night. It turns out North’s history teacher is six months pregnant, so there will be a lot of subs in North’s near future.

Thursday was “a great day” in North’s words. They got an A on an algebra quiz and got completely caught up on homework. (Noah has been helping them with algebra when they get stuck and it seems to be paying off.) North’s friend Charlotte unexpectedly dropped off twenty-three homemade cupcakes, with a note that said they were for their half-birthday. Charlotte bakes for Bakers Against Racism and we’d ordered a dozen, so I wondered if the exact number of the extra ones were because the half-birthday was on the twenty-third. I’m still not sure. In addition to all that, North’s case manager at Children’s—we have one now—secured an earlier urology appointment for North in mid-October, out in Howard County, which is a schlep but it was an improvement over November, so we took it. Finally, we got takeout from Italian Kitchen for dinner, at North’s instigation.

Friday Noah and I spent over an hour moving furniture off the porch and stripping ivy from it so the painter could come power wash it in preparation for painting and North had a little backyard party. (Well it started in the yard and then rain moved it to the porch.) Back in March, when the lockdowns were startling and new and half of humanity hadn’t already had a scaled-back birthday, North turned fourteen and we let them see several friends one at a time on the porch to eat cake and promised them a proper birthday party when it was feasible. Three months later, I asked if they’d rather have a small, outdoor party instead of holding out for a sleepover and they said no. When I made the same offer recently, to my surprise, they said yes.  I guess sleepovers are seeming impossibly far away. So they invited four friends over, all at the same time, to drink root beer and eat Cheetos, pizza, and cupcakes. Three of the guests had celebrated with North six months ago, but one was a friend whose mom has been very strict about seeing friends so North hadn’t seen her since March. Norma even brought a present, which North wasn’t expecting.

And in another bit of good mojo, on that day the urology appointment got moved to next week.

 

*Bolded after the fact. As Nicole picked up in the comments, I seem to have buried the lede.

Back at the Hospital: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 21

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In the past nine days, North’s been to an urgent care once, the ER twice, and admitted to the hospital for two days and three nights. It’s gotten to the point where when discussing some mundane family plans, like when Beth, Noah, and I will finish our currently-in-progress game of Settlers of Catan, we’ll append things like “assuming North’s not in the hospital.” 

Before the Hospital: Wednesday

North’s online classes meet Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Wednesday is supposed to be a day to do homework and go to teachers’ office hours. The first week of school, North didn’t have much work, so they used Wednesday to finish the last of their summer homework assignments. We also had a 504 meeting for seizure-related accommodations, with the ninth grade counselor and several of  North’s teachers. It went surprisingly well. We tried to get a 504 plan for Noah’s ADHD twice, once in elementary school and once in high school, but were denied both times. We thought this accommodation would be easier to get, but not to have it granted in the meeting. I didn’t even know that could happen.

ER Visit: Wednesday Night to Thursday Morning

I was feeling happy both about that and the summer homework finally being done, so of course on Wednesday evening, things went sideways. Beth was at the grocery store when North told me they needed to pee, but they couldn’t. They’d already tried running the faucet in the bathroom, so I suggested a warm bath. By the time Beth got home, North was very distressed, so we decided they’d go to Children’s. I stayed home because there’s still a one-parent rule in the ER, but Beth and I were texting through the evening.  Apparently it was a strange night at Children’s, very crowded in the ER and there was a group of twenty-somethings who seemed to be having a tailgate party, playing music and smoking pot in the garage.

It took a while to get seen because of the crowd, and when they finally were, the doctors wanted to do a bladder ultrasound. If you’ve ever been pregnant, you know that means your bladder needs to be full, so it was 1:30 in the morning before North finally got a catheter to empty their bladder. They didn’t feel as if was completely empty, though, so they went to the bathroom and were able to go on their own. Because of that and because the urine sample and ultrasound didn’t show anything unusual, North wasn’t admitted and they came home.

Back to the Hospital: Thursday Night to Sunday Afternoon

However, the next morning when North woke up they were unable to go again. Beth called our pediatrician for advice. We tried another bath, this one with candles and rose petals (from our rosebush) floating in the water. I was trying to make it as relaxing as possible, but no go. It was dinner time before we got a call back from the pediatrician, who sent us back to the hospital, calling ahead to let them know we were coming and recommending admission.

This time Beth drove us there and dropped me and North off at the ER. One of the intake people recognized North from the night before. (This reminded me of the paramedic who came both times we called 911 this summer. And then sometime during the hospitalization I’m writing about now, one of the neurologists actually remembered North from the complex migraine that paralyzed their hands and feet in fifth grade). What can I say? North is well-known in greater metropolitan Washington area medical circles.

While we were talking to the triage nurse, North seized and all of a sudden all kinds of people rushed in offering oxygen and asking if we had rescue medicine on us, so I had to explain it wasn’t epilepsy so there is no rescue medicine and this wasn’t the problem that brought us here. It wasn’t even a very long seizure, something we’d pretty much shrug off at this point.

Once we got in an exam room, they wanted to do another ultrasound, so again, there was a long wait for the catheter. By this point it had been something like twenty-one hours since North had peed.

Now something I haven’t mentioned yet is that North had been feeling sick to their stomach since Sunday morning after breakfast and it was now Thursday evening. During this whole time they hadn’t eaten except to suck on some candy Sunday afternoon. They were drinking but probably not as much as usual. Still, they were very uncomfortable and as the doctors and nurses discussed whether or not they were dehydrated and needed iv fluids—opinions on this issue were divided—I kept asking everyone who came in the room, over and over, if they could get a catheter. Finally, they did. They also got some anti-nausea medicine and then they were hungry for the first time in days, so I asked a nurse if we could get something to eat. She came back with apple juice and an assortment of crackers. North ate a bag of goldfish and some saltines.

After the ultrasound, two different medical personnel told me North did not have a tumor blocking their urethra—that was something I hadn’t even thought to worry about yet. North got their fourth covid test of the summer, and we got a room. It was one a.m. before we got to bed. Then North was being examined and catheterized again with the lights on from four to five a.m. and a med student came in and woke us up at seven-thirty, so neither of us got much sleep.

Friday was kind of blur, honestly, as I was really tired, but there was a parade of medical personnel who came by, nurses, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, neurologist(s), urologist(s), etc. Beth came by in the late morning and we overlapped for a couple hours and listened to doctors and played Clue with North. I left for home in the early afternoon. Once home, I put in a load of laundry, slept, and updated my mom on the situation. I’d hoped to work but I was just too wiped out, even with the nap, so Noah and I ordered pizza and watched The Witch.

Back at the hospital, North had an MRI but seized during it, so they didn’t get the images they wanted. The doctors wanted to do a test to see if going an extended period of time without using the catheter would cause North to be able to pee, but it only caused them a lot of pain, so we never repeated the experiment.

I slept nine hours Friday night and stayed at home long enough Saturday to keep doing laundry, menu plan for the next week, make Beth a grocery list, and to work some—with a nifty new two-monitor setup Noah made for me—and I went back to the hospital in the late afternoon. While I was gone, they tried another MRI, with Valium, but it didn’t keep North from seizing. Apparently it’s harder to get slots for the MRIs with an intravenous sedative scheduled because you need a different kind of tech to do it. In their down moments, North tried to watch some of the classes they’d missed Thursday and Friday and do homework.

Beth and I overlapped again for several hours that evening during which we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls with North. Beth needed to stay at the hospital because a nurse was going to show her how to use the catheter. If she could do it successfully that night and the next morning, North could be discharged. She got it on the first try and went home. I spent another night at the hospital with North and then Beth came back in the morning, used the catheter successfully again and North was discharged. We had lunch in the hospital cafeteria– which, strangely, is a treat for North– and went home.

Back Home (Mostly): Sunday Afternoon to Thursday

We were all very glad to be at home together, but frustrated that the new problem had not actually been resolved. North still needs to have the MRI, which is supposed to rule out any spinal compression from their herniated disk, and we need to secure appointments with neurology and urology.

We had most of Sunday and nearly all of Monday at home. North got caught up on schoolwork, Beth grocery shopped, I wrote a batch of postcards to Florida voters and Noah and I made dinner (pasta with basil-mint pesto and fresh mozzarella) on Sunday. Then we went out for frozen yogurt, which we’d meant to do the Sunday prior. Ice cream or frozen yogurt the night before the first day of school is a family tradition, but North had been either sick or in the hospital for a week and we are not people to skip something like that just because it’s a week late.

Monday, Beth made homemade waffles for breakfast because she always does that on three-day weekends and I made a peach-berry cobbler to celebrate the end of the first week of school. Noah and I watched the series finale of The Magicians. Zoë came over for a three-hour porch visit with North and had some of the cobbler with us. We had a backyard picnic for dinner and then went out for Noah’s last-night-of-summer vacation ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s.

On the way home I said something about everyone getting to sleep at home two nights in a row. I should not have said that. North suddenly developed symptoms of a painful UTI shortly after we got home. She and Beth tried an urgent care but they couldn’t handle a catheter, so they had to go back to the ER. It was “uneventful” in North’s words because they were diagnosed with a clear-cut ailment and treated for it. It did keep both Beth and North up late, though. It was two-thirty before they got home.

Meanwhile, in news of the other kid, Tuesday was Noah’s first day of the semester. He only had one class, Audio Production II. On Wednesday he had the remaining three: a computer science class, Ethnomathematics, and Intro to Philosophy. We weren’t able to get much information about his classes out of him. They are all “fine.” They’re all small, roughly twenty-five students each, except for Audio Production, which is about ten. He thinks this audio class might be more hands-on than the one he took last spring, which he would like. He declined to take Cinema Production II this semester because he’d rather have it in person. This makes sense, as the excellent film studios are a big part of what drew him to Ithaca.

North says their favorite class is Japanese because it’s interesting learning such a different language. But they also appreciate that yoga is the only class they are allowed to attend in bed. One day in sculpture class they were assigned to make an assemblage of items that represented their morning. North chose Sunday morning, the day they were discharged, and arranged their mask and some medical debris around their stuffed monkey Muffin, who always goes to the hospital when they do.

Tuesday we also had our first appointment with North’s new psychologist. She seems nice and she does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which has been recommended to us for Functional Neurological Disorder by more than one person, so for now, we’re hanging our hopes on it.

Wednesday morning we couldn’t wake North for their first or second class, despite repeated efforts. They slept fourteen hours, from ten p.m. until noon. This was worrying, but when Beth called the pediatrician she thought it could just be fatigue from fighting off the UTI. This would be less of a problem if all of North’s teachers posted video of their classes for students who’ve missed them, as they are supposed to do. But not all of the teachers are doing it and North has been missing a lot of class.

Wednesday at dinner North said high school is hard, but I told them not to judge it based on two weeks full of medical drama. We trust it will get better—we just don’t know when. And in small sign of normalcy, North was able to attend all their classes on Thursday. (Only three out of the four met because their algebra teacher’s house flooded in the torrential rain and he had to cancel class.) It was the first time they’d been to all their classes since Tuesday of the previous week. I’m taking it as a win.

Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

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After the first forty days of our new pandemic lives, and then again after eighty, I wrote posts marking off each traditional forty-day period for a quarantine with lists of forty things. I skipped one hundred twenty days because that was the week after North stopped walking and was hospitalized and it wasn’t a good day for me to write or for Beth to post. (It’s true—I am so tech-challenged I don’t post my own blog.)

I missed the one hundred sixtieth day, too, but it was only yesterday, so I’m plowing ahead with forty things about the past week:

  1. On Monday, North and I made an unbirthday cake because it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. I did this five years ago on a whim and North still talks about it so I thought it might be cheering to do it again. The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting.
  2. There wasn’t room for the leftovers in the fridge, so I left the partially eaten cake in the oven and forgot it was there while I was preheating it the next day to roast eggplant, but I remembered pretty early in the preheating process and the frosting just got a little runny.
  3. However, the next day when I was preheating the oven again for roast cauliflower, I left it in longer. The crumbs on the empty part of the pan burned, but the cake didn’t, and the frosting actually acquired a pleasant toasted marshmallow taste, so all was not lost. I do think it’s a good demonstration of how preoccupied I am these days. Fortunately we finished the cake on the third night, or who knows what would have happened to it?
  4. Tuesday we got notice that Ithaca College is going completely online for the fall semester. This wasn’t a complete surprise, given what’s going on at other colleges and universities that have opened for in-person classes and had to shut down. I’m not critical of the school’s decision, but I am sad for Noah.
  5. He’d been tracking Maryland’s numbers, which have been trending in the right direction to get off New York State quarantine list, so I think he was hoping to be allowed back on campus. We all have mixed feelings, of course, but it seems no matter what, he isn’t going to have a normal college experience, at least not in the first two years.
  6. On Wednesday North had their longest seizure ever. It lasted more than an hour and a half and sent us to the emergency room.
  7. For several days before this, they’d been having one to three of what we now think of as the medium-length seizures a day, the ones that last around five minutes. (Since then they’ve increased and yesterday they had six.)
  8. When I got home from my morning walk a little before eleven, Beth was sitting with North, whom she’d found seizing. When it had been going on for at least ten minutes (North later told us it was closer to twenty or thirty) we called 911, for the second time in a week and a half.
  9. When the paramedics got there, one of them remembered North. This isn’t something any mother wants.
  10. This time we didn’t get a choice of hospital—we went to the closest one. Given that the last time we called 911, the paramedics weren’t even sure we should go to the hospital, this made it seem more serious.
  11. As we did last time, I rode in the ambulance, but in the front this time, not because I asked to, but because there were a lot of medical personnel in back with North. Meanwhile Beth followed us to the hospital in the car and waited outside. North got two anti-convulsant shots in the ambulance.
  12. When we arrived, there were so many people crowded around North in the tiny exam room that there wasn’t room for me and I had to stand in the hall answering intake questions for people with clipboards.
  13. Eventually, people cleared out. When I got in the room, North had an IV with a different kind of anti-seizure medicine, and eventually they started to recover, though they’d intermittently slip back into smaller seizures. It was sort of like a series of aftershocks. It was 12:20 by the time they stopped all together.
  14. Beth brought North’s stuffed monkey Muffin from home and had a nurse bring it to them. He was conscientious about wearing a mask.
  15. North got their second covid test of the summer and it was negative.
  16. We were there until three o’clock and several times various people told us we would probably be transferred to Children’s. As bad as the experience was, Beth, North, and I were all thinking that maybe it could be the impetus for more timely scans. We already had an EEG scheduled for the first week of September, but we were all hoping for answers sooner.
  17. ER visits have a kind of rhythm to them, in my experience, and once it seemed we were in the wait-alone-a-long-time part, it was hours past lunch time, so I decided—with North’s encouragement—to go see if I could find us some food.
  18. It took me a while and a number of redirects from passersby but eventually I found the coffee shop where I bought yogurt, grapes, Cheetos, and an iced latte. The cafeteria was in sight of the coffee shop but I was in hurry to get back because North was alone so I thought we could get by with what I bought.
  19. I got lost again getting back to the ER and had to exit the building because some doors are blocked off now to stop people from circulating as freely through the building as they did pre-covid. I ran into Beth, sitting outside the main entrance, so I gave her an update. (Of course, we’d been texting the whole time.)
  20. Beth had North’s phone she’d brought from home and she let me know that Zoë, who was supposed to come over that afternoon and had knocked on the door only to have no one answer, had been calling. Beth filled Zoë in.
  21. When I got back to North’s room, they had a balloon and a teddy bear and some hard candies, which had been delivered by a social worker. The balloon looked like a cookie and said, “One Tough Cookie.” Apparently the first words the social worker spoke on entering the room was, “I hear you’re one tough cookie.”
  22. This whole interaction reminded me of the volunteers with the heart-shaped balloons in The Hostile Hospital (Series of Unfortunate Events, book eight), but Beth said, even if they had no way of knowing it the balloon’s message is true of most patients, in North’s case, it is.
  23. Shortly after this the doctor came back and told us North was being discharged, not to Children’s but home. We were surprised, and frankly disappointed not be able to get more answers that day. He also advised us not to come back to the ER, but to ride the seizures out at home, no matter how long they are. He seemed to be of the opinion that it wasn’t any of the medication North received that stopped the seizure but that it had burned out on its own and he said medicating a non-epileptic seizure could do more harm than good.
  24. All the medical professionals we’ve seen suspect North’s seizures are non-epileptic, which seems to cause a lot of them to lose interest. Beth really had to advocate to get the EEG we do have scheduled. When telling us North wasn’t being transferred to Children’s, the doctor actually said “It would be a waste of a transport.”
  25. The next day Beth went to work trying to get an EEG before September. Both our pediatrician’s office and North’s psychiatrist have been working their contacts to find us a bed at either Children’s or Georgetown. We’ll take whatever we can get first. Among other reasons, we need an official diagnosis before the school system will even begin to talk to us about accommodations and it’s clear North is going to need some.
  26. In the meantime, we made some changes at home. We stopped leaving North alone except to go to the bathroom and they’ve been sleeping in Beth’s and my bed with Beth while I sleep in their bed. They are not crazy about the lack of privacy. (And today we relented a little, leaving them in alone in a safe position in our bed for a half hour or so. They did have a seizure during that time, but they didn’t fall off the bed so I guess the experiment was a success.)
  27. So, life goes on. Thursday it was North’s turn to pick the weekly after dinner family activity so we had a faux campfire, with microwave s’mores, votive candles on the patio table, what stargazing was possible on a cloudy night, and a chorus of crickets and cicadas.
  28. Friday in physical therapy North walked 185 feet with a walker, surprising the physical therapist.
  29. After North got back from PT, my friend Megan and her daughter Talia came over for a socially distanced backyard visit.
  30. We all met twelve years ago when North and Talia were in preschool together. Megan is one of my best friends and North and Talia stayed in touch throughout elementary school because they were on the same rec league basketball team—the Pandas, as long-time readers will remember. After attending different elementary and middle schools, they will be at the same high school, and North thought it would be nice to get re-acquainted.
  31. It was nice. I positioned chairs in the backyard in pairs far away enough from each other so that the adults and the teens could have separate, private conversations. This was only my second get-together with a friend since March and it was good to talk in person to an adult other than Beth. It turns out I had a lot to say. I think I monopolized the conversation, but I’m guessing Megan will forgive me.
  32. As for the kids, North said it wasn’t awkward, even though they haven’t seen each other in a few years. Also, we prepared Talia for what North’s seizures are like, but they didn’t have any more than a few seconds long during the visit.
  33. While Megan and Talia were over, we got a phone call from our pediatrician letting us know they were getting closer to scheduling an EEG, and they thought they could get one early next week. Fingers crossed.
  34. Saturday morning, Beth, North and I had a telemedicine appointment with North’s therapist and at the end he offered to write his own letter to the school, in support of accommodations: we want North to be allowed to have their camera off so they’re not seizing online, extra time on assignments if they seize during one, and no penalties for not participating orally if they’ve just seized and can’t speak.
  35. That afternoon we went for an outing at Downs Park in Anne Arundel County. We got Chinese takeout and ate it at a picnic table in the park, then we went for a walk. North alternated between using the walker and the wheelchair. I’d say they walked about half the time, which was encouraging to see.
  36. The park had nice views of the Bay, some wooded trails, an aviary with a red-tailed hawk, a Great Horned owl, and turkey vulture, all injured. The vulture was being rehabilitated to be released, but the other two were permanent residents. (The owl only had one eye so probably didn’t have the depth perception to hunt, Noah guessed.)
  37. While we were there we found a moss-covered stone bench with a plaque saying it was a wishing bench, so of course, we felt compelled to sit on it and make wishes.
  38. I won’t tell you what I wished for because everyone knows if you tell a wish it doesn’t come true. But if I’d had a second wish, it would have been less personal and more political. I bet you can guess what it is.
  39. And speaking of politics, we haven’t been to as many protests as I thought we would this summer, for reasons that are probably obvious, but I’m sorry we weren’t able to make one in support of the post office this weekend. Did you ever think we’d need to protest for the post office? But that’s where we are. For now I’ll have to content myself with writing postcards to voters. I mailed my six hundredth one today, in another batch encouraging Democratic voters in Florida to enroll to vote by mail.
  40. Keep doing whatever you’re doing to help our country weather this dangerous passage and if you have any wishes to spare, send a few our way.