Mold-A-Ramas at the Willis Tower, and Quinn Turns Seven

Do you know the story of the Taoist Farmer?  I heard it the first time in a martial arts class many years ago.  The version of the story I remember is that the farmer's horse runs away, which seems like bad luck, but then the horse returns with two wild horses, which seems like good luck.  Then one of the wild horses throws the farmer's son breaking the boy's leg which seems like bad luck, until all the able-bodied men in the village are soon conscripted into war.

Quinn's recent birthday felt like that all day.  There were both figurative and literal ups and downs, actual dark clouds along with rainbows and tears.  It was exhausting, and not a birthday we are likely to forget.

When I asked Quinn a few weeks ago what he'd like to do for his seventh birthday he was ambivalent.  Since he could take or leave a friend party, I decided we should just stick with family and do something interesting.  I suggested a trip to the Willis Tower (still the Sears Tower in my heart) for a trip to the Sky Deck and to add the two Mold-A-Ramas they offer there to our collection.  He loved the idea.

My thought was that if we were going to make the visit to the Willis Tower for Mold-A-Ramas at some point anyway, may as well tie the overpriced experience to an important moment.  I figured every time we drive through Chicago in the future we will see that famous skyscraper and remember celebrating Quinn turning seven.  What could go wrong?

Well, the weather, of course.  We woke up to rain, and wondered if driving all the way to Chicago just to look at the inside of a cloud at 1,353 feet up in the air was worth the trouble.  With the Museum of Science and Industry as a backup plan we decided to chance it.

By the time we reached Chicago the clouds had broken up and we decided to the top of the Willis Tower we would go.  We parked several blocks away, enjoyed a windy walk downtown, made our way through several lines to buy tickets (Ian was free with his military I.D.!) and wait for an elevator, and then we were on the Sky Deck.

It really is amazing.  Pricey enough I doubt we'll do it again, but certainly worth doing once.  The views every direction are tremendous, and there are four glass decks that protrude a few feet out from the building so you can look down to the ground underneath you from where you are standing.  The kids all felt very brave.

Whirlwind (Babble)

How was your Labor Day weekend?  Mine was surreal.

I drove out to Detroit and back to visit my dad in the hospital for a couple of days.  My dad didn’t resemble himself, hospitals are strange, I think a tornado touched down in my parents’ neighborhood (even though the weather people there kept calling it a wind shear but I don’t think I buy that), the power was (and still is) out so we came back every night to a dark house, dozens of hundred year old trees upended pieces of sidewalk and smashed garages and punctured roofs making the whole area look like a tree-seeking bomb hit it.  (What a time to forget my camera.)

So.  That was a lot of stuff.  And now I’m home and trying to process it all.

I started my trip in our twelve-year-old Hyundai, minus the radio that was stolen out of it last week.  (That’s the third time.  People keep asking if we lock the doors to the car, but I’d rather lose the radio than have the window smashed and lose the radio, so no, we don’t lock the doors.  I guess with the newest one we’ll bring the radio’s faceplate indoors each time.)  I brought along an iPod and listened to various podcasts on the insanely boring drive that is the trip from Milwaukee to Detroit.

I stopped in Chicago on the way to say goodbye to my brother and his girlfriend before they moved to Germany.  It was too short a visit.  I don’t see them enough, and I don’t realize until I’m with them again how much there is to say.  I wish we’d had more time, but for some things there is never enough time.


I arrived in my hometown of Pleasant Ridge, MI to find dozens of downed trees.  My mom called to warn me ahead of time that there had been a severe storm and there was no power, so I came armed with my favorite flashlight and a headlamp.  It took me a while to find a path to the house.  The normal route was blocked by fallen power lines and trees, as were several alternate routes, but eventually I found my way.  I think our specific block and a couple on either side of it got the worst of the damage.  It’s both impressive and sad.  I dropped off my things and headed to the hospital around dinnertime.

My dad was awake when I arrived, and glad to see me, but he wasn’t awake for very long.  He’s weak and thin.  Swallowing anything causes him enormous pain.  He fades in and out.  He winces in his sleep which is hard to watch.  He’s disoriented.  He just wants to go home.

The main thing I was able to provide for my dad in the hospital was music.  It was too hard to read to him or carry on a conversation because he was seldom conscious for more than half a minute at a time.  I put a mute on my instrument to keep the volume lower and played a lot of Bach.  My dad loves Bach.  There were times I was sure he was sound asleep and I kept playing, only to hear him say without opening his eyes, “Very nice” when I got to the end of a piece.  I don’t think there is any applause this season that will mean as much as those quiet words.

There are several good things about playing live music for someone in the hospital; it blocks out all the beeping and chatter that is a constant part of life there, you can sleep to it or actively listen and it’s all fine, and I think it help set my dad apart as a patient.  Everyone in the oncology ward said they liked hearing the music, and I would see people pause in the doorway as I played.  (One nurse was even proud to have figured out I was playing a viola, not a violin.)  I think anything that draws attention to the fact that my dad is loved and adored gives him an advantage in an environment that is dehumanizing, and now even the people who don’t deal with him directly know he’s the man whose daughter plays music for him.  He’s not just some old man hooked up to a million tubes.  He’s special.  He’s my dad.

Mom and I didn’t stay until the very end of visiting hours each night because it helped to get back to the house while there was still some natural light.  Having the power out at home was such a strange added twist to the trip.  We walked around the house in headlamps and never got over the habit of flicking the light switches when we walked into certain rooms.  We could still use the stove top if we lit the gas ourselves with a match, but cooking in the dark is weird.  My first night home it was warm enough we went for a long walk.  (The temperature dropped by about thirty degrees not long after I arrived and I hadn’t packed for that.  Mom gave me a jacket but for the most part I was really cold in Michigan.)

It’s hard to describe what the storm did to my old neighborhood.  No one was hurt, and most of the houses were spared, but the few that got whomped by trees really got whomped.  Several garages were crushed, as were a few cars.  My parents’ property was spared, which is good because I don’t know how they could handle one more thing.  With luck insurance will do what insurance is supposed to, and I’m hoping nothing too personal was lost by any of the people who experienced damage to their property.  It’s a lot of expense and inconvenience but probably not the end of the world for most of the neighbors.  The thing that has changed is the general look and character of the street.  The trees that came down were about a century old, most of them on personal property, not city trees.  (Although the ones by the street that came down ripped up the sidewalks, which was something to see.)  There is a lot of light suddenly where no one is used to seeing it.  Everyone’s view has changed.

I’m glad I was able to be there with my mom at such a strange and trying time.  It felt good to make her laugh.  I made her go with me into the chapel at the hospital and I taught her how to play Heart and Soul.  The place was empty, and my mom looked alarmed when I sat down at the piano because she thought we were being disrespectful.  But to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, all music is sacred.  And music makes things better so I didn’t feel for a moment we were doing anything wrong.  I bossed mom around on the keyboard until she was able to poke out enough of a bass line to play along with, and she laughed and wiped at her eyes.  It was worth the drive to Michigan just for that.

My dad was doing well enough when I left late on Tuesday that I felt it was okay for me to go home.  The medication that sent him to the ICU (Xeloda) had horrible effects on his body and he nearly died, but the ever encouraging and kind Dr. Pearlman said we’re past the hump and dad was improving.  I trust him.  All the nurses were excellent, and I am forever impressed at how caring yet firm the physical therapy people are.

On the downside, some people in hospitals need to remember that discussions about life and death are not casual events for many of us.  One well-meaning young doctor rattled my mother badly in the hall when she stopped us on the way to lunch to ask if we had orders in place about whether or not to revive my dad if he got suddenly worse.  She saw a frail man with stage four cancer and was calling things as she saw them based on her everyday experiences, but she doesn’t know how hard my dad wants to fight.  She just kept saying, “Because he’s really very sick, and if you’re not here we need to know whether you want us to let him go if his heart stops.”  My mom was flustered as she explained that at this point in time we’re quite sure my dad would want to be revived if possible and of course she’d signed papers to that effect. 

It was not appropriate to approach us in that way.  We had been feeling okay on our way to lunch, and that doctor destroyed our equanimity for the day.  There was also a palliative specialist who talked to my mom only in terms of dad never leaving the hospital and how to go about pulling the plug.  I hope we never see either of those doctors again.  I know there is a time and a place for those important discussions, but they shouldn’t have been sprung on us when what we needed was reassurance.
 
On the drive back to Milwaukee I thought about the trees of my childhood.  When I was little, Pleasant Ridge was filled with huge, majestic elms with limbs that spread out like fountains shading all the streets.  When I was nine, our neighborhood, like much of the nation, was struck by Dutch elm disease.  We lost all of those trees.  The neighborhood seemed unbearably bright for a long time.  But the truth is that there were many smaller trees in the neighborhood that could suddenly reach for the light.  I looked around my old street before I left, past the endless rows of tree removal trucks and wood chippers, the debris in the streets, and damaged maples with what was left of their splintery limbs poking at the sky while awaiting chainsaws and cranes coming to take them down.  I saw the new generation of smaller trees, some of which had grown up leaning odd directions just to find some sun.  The neighborhood will be different, and for a while it will be unbearably bright.  But now the new trees have a chance to grow into new roles. 

It won’t be the same, this new view, but for some it will be the view they grow up with.  The new view will become home.

Snow! (Babble)

(I tried to think of a clever title, but really, that sums it up.)

Whew!  So, how is everyone else doing after the big storm?  (And I’m not talking to any smug people out there on warm beaches or someplace that missed the fun, because, well, I’m pretending we’re all in the same boat and that that boat is covered with snow.)
School was out, our street didn’t get plowed until very late so there was no way to get to work, and any plans to swim got swapped with shoveling for exercise.  But we had a good day.  I’ll write more about it in a second, but first, pictures!  (Because what fun is there in talking about a snowstorm without pictures?)

We will not be using this door to the garage until Spring:

And the front door was no picnic to dig out, but we need that one, so after I found the stairs I got that all squared away:

And this was the view of our house across the intersection.  If the railing and the headstone weren’t there I wouldn’t have known where to start digging for the sidewalk:

So the first order of business the morning after the storm was to look out all the windows and marvel at just where the snow was really high.  This was out our side window by our neighbor’s house (that’s all from drifting, not digging out):

Next, after feeding kids, was to head out and start clearing things up.  Which is actually pretty fun.  Ian and a couple of other people on our block got out snow blowers and started clearing the alley and all the sidewalks.

My neighbor, Julie, and I were just armed with shovels, so after clearing our own walkways went across the street to help over there.  It was funny shoveling my old corner.  I spent ten years clearing snow over there, so it was certainly familiar.  And my new neighbor in our old house was grateful for the help because there is a lot to shovel when you live on a corner.  I am a believer in random acts of shoveling, so I worked my way about five houses down until I connected with someone else’s path.  The snow was too deep to simply scoop straight from the ground, so it had to be tackled in layers.  And the funny part was that Julie’s dog, Toby, waited patiently as we cleared the sidewalk as if he had somewhere to be, advancing slowly with each new bit of exposed concrete.

I just assumed my kids would be all over the crazy blizzard adventure and don their snow pants as soon as they saw the winter wonderland that our yard had become, but they settled in to watch cartoons and were quite content to let the grownups brave the snow.  After a little while I decided they really needed to come see it all for themselves and asked them to come out.  Mona was all for it, Aden was skeptical, and Quinn looked at me like I was insane.  He snuggled down under a blanket and just shook his head.  But my intrepid Mona literally dove right in!

Aden complained after a moment that there was snow in her boots.  So then she grabbed a small shovel and tried to dig her way around the yard which was not really all that fun, so she soon retreated back inside.

Not that this is actually the biggest snow storm we’ve ever had to deal with.  We were living in Pennsylvania during January of 1996 when we got more than 30 inches in one night.  THAT was impressive.  It took us eight hours to dig out our car.  (It took us a long time just to find the car.)  The problem shoveling then was that there was nowhere to put the snow.  The buildings came right up to the sidewalks and the sidewalks were right next to the streets.  We had to walk each shovelful of snow down the block to dump it somewhere that wouldn’t be in the way.  The snow had to get piled straight up in most places, so walking around town was complicated because we couldn’t see over the eight foot walls of snow on either side of the sidewalk and it was easy to get lost.  The storm happened on January 6th and our street didn’t get officially cleared until Valentine’s day.  That was wild.  This merely shut things down for a day.  (I’m such a jaded old person now!  “Why, back in MY day….”)

So anyway, the lessons to take away from the big storm are:  It does pay to go to the grocery store beforehand if you get the chance, because being stocked up on bread and eggs, etc., makes being snowed in a lot better.  A warm hat helps.  Working together with your neighbors makes the whole world seem like a pretty nice place.  Always be friendly to the guy on your block with the snow blower.

Rain Rain Rain and Basement Cards (Babble)

In the Midwest of the United States we are spared things like hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, dramatic earthquakes, and even dangerous insects.  But hoooo boy do we know about thunderstorms.  As I’m typing there is a huge storm raging outside with lots of thunder and lightning. We just spent the last hour in the basement because we heard the tornado sirens go off.  It’s nice to be upstairs again.

My children are easily spooked by crisis.  Their lives are pretty easy going, so when something dramatic happens they take it very seriously.  There was an Amber alert all over the television a couple of weeks ago and Aden kept finding me wherever I was in the house and breathlessly telling me about the two children who were missing.  I told her it didn’t really concern us since we were just at home and not likely to spot them here, but the concept of kidnapping injected into her afternoon cartoon deeply affected her.  After the third time the Amber alert popped up, Aden came and found me again, clutching her pink bunny, tears in her eyes.  I asked what was wrong and she said, “I’m scared of kidnappers.”


I sat her down and told her that there are indeed scary strangers out there who take children, and that’s why I need to know where she is and why we review not going off with people she doesn’t know without telling me, even if they seem nice.  But then I told her those cases are extremely rare, and I asked, “Do you know who most often kidnaps children?”  She shook her head.  “One of their parents.” 

Aden’s eyes got wide and then she laughed because that sounded so odd.  I explained that sometimes things get messy between moms and dads who don’t live together, and sometimes those moms or dads take their children at a time they are not supposed to and people get frightened.  I went over the rules one more time about dealing with strangers, and told her the secret word we have in case we do send someone she doesn’t know to pick her up somewhere so she’ll know that person really is safe to go with, and reminded her that she may run and kick and scream if a kidnapper ever did try to grab her. 

I added, “But statistically the most likely person to kidnap you is daddy, and he’d just bring you here.”  We both agreed that would be awesome, so she really didn’t need to spend time being scared.  That night on the news they reported that the children from the Amber alert were fine.  They’d been taken by their dad and returned to their mom.  Aden felt better.

Anyway, today my kids were getting really freaked out by the weather alerts on the television.  Neighborhood Recess got cut short because of lightning, and my kids were worried all through dinner about tornadoes.  When the sirens went off at about 7:00 they all looked panicked.  That’s where the real test of being the grown-up comes in–being the one to guide them calmly through the fear if possible.  I grabbed a book, my laptop, a phone, a stack of games and some marshmallows.  It’s hard to think of any situation as a crisis when there are marshmallows available.

Our basement gets pretty wet when it rains.  Not knee-deep flood water kind of wet, but water trickles in from all edges of the house toward the drain in the center of the floor.  The kids took turns jumping over the dozens of little rivers running all over while I set up a card table and chairs in the driest area.  We watched a bit of a Buster Keaton movie on YouTube.  We called to check in on a neighbor.  But the kids were still concerned about the tornado warning and all the thunder we could hear from overhead, so I pulled out the big guns.  I invented Basement Cards.

I’d grabbed Operation, Boggle and a bag of what I thought were Uno cards before heading into the basement.  Aden didn’t want to hear the buzzing of the Operation game right then, so I opened the bag of cards only to discover it was a weird mish-mash of things.  In addition to the Uno cards there were parts of several different regular decks, bits from two Old Maid decks, instruction cards from various games, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards, an aquatic themed Crazy Eights deck, and one card from the game Cadoo. 

I dealt them all out, told everyone to make a neat stack, and then just made things up.  Quinn laughed so hard he kept slipping off his chair.  Aden looked annoyed at the randomness of it all until I announced she was winning, and then she was all into it.  Mona’s squeals drowned out any thunder.  I ordered people to trade cards, pick cards, put cards on their heads….  By the end it was kind of like Slap Jack or War where I was having everyone put cards in the middle at the same time and then I would tell them who’d won that round by deciding Quinn got all the cards because his pig card beat the ace of clubs, the rules to cribbage and Autoworker Alan.  They were all sad to leave the basement by the time the tornado warning was over.  (Quinn ran up to me a couple of minutes ago while I was typing to say, “I love Basement Cards!”)

I asked Mona to run up the stairs first and tell me if the house was still there.  She ran up excitedly and started yelling, “Yes!  It’s all still here!  Hooray!” and then went off to play with legos.  Aden was still scared of the lightning.  I asked her why, and she said, “Because we have so many big trees.”  I said, “Do you know why they are so big?”  She shook her head.  “Because they’ve never been struck by lightning.”  That made her feel better.  I also pointed out that the abandoned smoke stack on the next block by the old tannery was the tallest thing around and no lightning would be attracted to our house while that was available to strike.

I didn’t tell her about the NPR program I once listened to about lightening that made it sound as if it would practically come hunt you down in your bed while you slept.  Those nightmares are for another day.  I have a terrible time sleeping with Ian gone, so at least if my kids sleep I feel good about that.  I remember during the first deployment lying in bed, pregnant, listening to a terrible storm, and wondering how I would know if it was bad enough to wake up the girls and drag them into the basement.  I kept thinking about how everyone who has ever heard a tornado says it sounds just like a train, and then it hit me that I live down the street from railroad tracks.  How would I possibly be able to tell the difference between a tornado and a real train?  Then I really couldn’t sleep.

Anyway, I hope the rain lets up soon so I can go move the car to the right side of the street for overnight parking without getting completely drenched.  Not that I think the overnight parking checkers will be out in force tonight with so many people stranded in all the flooding all over town, but with my luck lately I’d be the one person they’d find to ticket.
I left the card table set up in the basement just in case I hear sirens in the night and need to move the kids to safety and another round of Basement Cards.  If I get too bored lying awake in the dark I may go down there and invent Solitaire Basement Cards, but that doesn’t sound like as much fun without the kids laughing their heads off. 

On days like today it’s hard to imagine the rain will ever end.  Just like July seems to be stretching on forever.  Thunderstorms are more fun with Ian home, even with Basement Cards to distract us.  I wonder if he’s awake right now, wherever in Iraq he is.  I wish I knew.