Areas of expertise

“You know the best thing about Fortnight?”

“Hmmm. ... What’s the best thing?” I asked, hoping my measured tone with its gentle lift at the question mark would be enough to fake rapt attention.

“I’d have to say it’s getting two skins on your birthday.”

I turn on my directional and squint into the rearview mirror. He continues on, listing all the things a person can do inside the computer game if they are skilled with a keyboard or a controller.

I add a sound here and there that might allow him to believe I am paying just as much attention to him as I am to the unexpected rush of mid-day traffic.

Even under the best of circumstances, I’d be in no position to comprehend any of the words he strings together. And these circumstances, though purely routine, were not ideal. We were driving into Albany for the boy’s medical appointment. A biannual follow-up for a benign renal condition that preexisted his birth.

Naturally, I was anxious about what the tests would find, but we still had one highway exit and six miles to go, and Mr. B.M.W. had no intention of letting me merge.

But merge I shall ... 

He honks.

The bird is all his.

“High Five, mom. ... you can just pretend though. I know you’re driving.”

He asks me how long until we’re there. It occurs to me that the stream of play-by-play descriptions may be his own coping mechanism for stress.

“You remember how this works right? 

“They rub jelly on me and tickle my sides with a scanner, then they make me pee in a cup.

“What are they looking for again?”

“The insides of your kidneys are a little stretched out, and they are checking to see if it’s gotten more stretched out.”

What does a kidney do, actually?

“Kidneys filter out waste from the body. The liquid gets filtered through the kidneys, goes through the ureters into the bladder and then out of the body through the urethra.

“You can stop now ... don’t say the word ....”

“Urinate?”

“Oh my god, mom!”

I know he’s not as squeamish as he makes himself out to be. Once we’re alone in an exam room, he asks about the medical terms for some of the conditions he saw in the waiting room. 

He makes me define “tracheotomy” and “stoma.” 

He wonders if these are kidney related.

Probably not. Lots of people have different medical conditions that overlap, especially if they are lucky enough to live a long time. 

Eventually, organs are scanned, urine collected, and an assessment made complete with a thumbs up.

A young man studying to be a doctor gets to tell us the good news in excruciatingly accurate detail.

After which the intern offers my boy a sticker.  He smiles and politely declines.

“I’m a little old for stickers,” he explains, telling the student doc he’s put away childish things in pursuit of glory in Fortnight.

“I play that, too. How many solo wins do you have?”

“Hey now, I’m not that good.”

They leave it with a slightly awkward high-five.

As we exit the building, my boy takes my hand as we cross the street to our car.

“I’m sure those doctors are good, but they need to work on their kid skills. If I wanted to know how my kidney worked, I’d ask my health teacher.”

Last laugh

I had been walking home from the library one warm, spring evening not long before summer.

The sun hadn’t set yet, but the sky was drawing its curtains around the orb’s shoulders and drawing it inside for the night.

A car slowed down and kept pace with me along the sidewalk.

The men were loud and boisterous as they forced themselves out of the passenger-side car windows and into my consciousness.

“Hey baby, wanna take a ride? We’re going places!”

They pounded on the side panels of the sedan and hooted for effect.

It was 1984.

I wasn’t even halfway through my teens, and I knew these old boys were nothing more than a quartet of circling jerks trying to entertain themselves.

Street harassment, as they described back then, was just an example of boys being boys … even when they were grown, men.

My harassers were in control of that moment, and they reveled in my discomfort.

Any adult in my life would have called the behavior harmless and told me to ignore them. Ignore them, they would go away.

A truth that allows a person to hope and believe that what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger. When in reality what doesn’t kill us leaves us with a sense of dread and anxiety and a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs.

Those things stay with a person long after a racing heart returns to a normal rhythm.

In fact, it never entirely goes away.

So that every car that slows, every stranger who demands a smile, or acknowledgment, or even a second of your time for their momentary entertainment, is a potential threat.

My daughter hasn’t experienced this yet. Or so she tells me.

“I passed a construction site once, and I felt like everyone was looking at me, but the guy who yelled out just told me it was safe to use the sidewalk. That was kinda helpful.”

I am relieved. Though I know times haven’t changed.

Maybe it’s the result of living in a small town where the most robust river of pedestrian traffic flows past families inspecting vegetable booths and the wares of soap sellers at the Farmers’ Market.

Or maybe it’s just that the opportunity hasn’t presented itself. She hasn’t yet been to the mall, or the grocery store or even a Target without her mother in tow.

Street harassment hasn't gone away. It is still out there, waiting for its chance.

When it happens, I hope she feels safe enough to look that person squarely in the eyes and tell them she thinks they are deplorable. Or rude. Or that they should be ashamed of such behavior.

Anything that takes her sense of control back.

And then I hope fate smiles on her when she turns on her heel and walks away, taking dignity along with her on the high road.

As fate smiled on me so many years ago when those men tried to speed away from the scene of my harassment.

Just a few yards away, their car sputtered and died. I kept walking, maintaining eye contact, as I passed.

I certainly had the last laugh.

Don't let them eat cake

“Sit up straight.

“Napkin goes where?

“Elbows!

“Is this really appropriate conversation for the dinner table?”

My daughter can be a real drag.

Being in a restaurant with her reminds me a little of dinners with my great aunt, Mildred. She was a proud, delicate woman who, from the perspective of this former youngster, seemed happiest when she was swooping down over the children’s table at formal family gatherings and offering clear instructions on how not to hold one’s fork.

“Do you find that your friends often call you Emily Post when your back is turned?”

“Har-de-har-har,” she replied with a more modern vernacular that I refuse to quote verbatim. But then with a tiny, almost imperceptible sneer, she corrects my pronunciation: “‘OFF-ten’ ... You enunciate the T in often.”

Two generations later, it seems, the reception of criticism has made not an inch of progress.

“No, you don’t,” I shoot back with dubious gamesmanship. “The T is silent. You don’t pronounce the T in soften, do you?”

This ongoing argument will trail off into hiatus for the evening as soon as our server appears with drinks, and asks us if we’ve made our decisions or if we need more time with the menus. 

We are never ready, but we order the “usual” by their proper menu titles as if “the same thing we always get” is now a seasonal delicacy.

My husband likes this restaurant. It has good food, and it puts up with us and our no-holds-barred conversations about politics, religion and all the topics that, we can be honest here, our grandmothers would have encouraged.

On tap tonight? Maxine Waters and the very tall order of serving our elected officials an entree of crow whenever they venture out into the world they apparently have no intention of sharing.

“That seems a little unfair,” says my daughter, who for six of her fourteen years refused to be seen in public with her little brother for fear he’d tantrum and cause a scene.

She’s not wrong. The boy never did get a single thing he wanted that made him go blue in the face. But making life a little unpleasant for others in line as we wait with a cart full of groceries isn’t precisely signaling the end of humanity.

It’s not like I could have left him at home by himself anyway.

Fair isn’t always a measurement that balances. But speaking up. Writing letters. Making signs. That’s part of the American way, too.

I tell her of my encounter last weekend with one of our esteemed US senators, Charles Schumer, who routinely congratulates 15K racers as they cross the finish line at the Boilermaker road race in Utica.

“I literally asked someone to hold my beer when I went to shake his hand and ask him to reconsider his admonishment of Waters.”

“We can never advocate harassment,” he responded, a stance that I can’t fault, but that doesn’t address our right to speak out against the abuse of power.

I could have argued, but that would just be the beer talking.

I said my piece. And went back into the crowd.

There’s a difference between a dose of social discomfort and, say, a bloody coup.

Our server arrived with hot plates and a wink toward the girl who wants nothing more than the world to be polite.

We’ve got your favorite dessert tonight. You might want to save a little room.

She sits a little taller, and her eyes get a little brighter as she considers the possibilities.

I narrow my eyes as if this discussion will be more thorough.

And all of a sudden she sees the power of NOT letting folks eat cake.

Summer mysteries

It's a hundred and seventy thousand degrees in the house. 

All day long the people who live here have gone their separate directions: East, to work; West, to rehearsal; North, to camp, South on errands.

Finally, at home, we continue to go our separate ways, each to our air-cooled rooms.

Dinner is still a possibility, though breakfast cereal seems more likely.

My husband wonders if we put a steak on the flagstone in front of the grill will it cook to a medium rare?

It is too hot to laugh. At least that's what I tell the man when he repeats the punchline, looking for reassurance there is humor in that dad joke of his.

Our bedroom door swung open, and our son walked through it with the grace of a bull in a china shop. The sound of its wood boards thudding against the plaster of the wall behind it echoed through the room adding even more volume to the whirrs from the fans and air conditioning units. 

"Close it, please," I said, and he turned on his heel and shut it with a slam.

"My eyes feel sticky," he said, nonchalantly, as he slipped into our bathroom and slid that door shut soundlessly. Water rushed into the sink basin. 

"Lemme see," I said peeling myself off the bed and away from the cooling, binge-watching lethargy of the television screen. 

He turns his face into the light, and, for the first time, I see his eyes have changed. Their usual deep, round set now appear as two shallow almonds.

I look for redness on his cheeks and eyelids. There is nothing.

Does it hurt? Does it itch? When did you notice this? 

No. Nope. Shoulder shrug.

My Dr. Mom brain swims into the depths of likely possibilities: Random allergy, Pool Chemical imbalance, mild sun poisoning.

I prescribe a School Nurse remedy: "I'll get you some ice."

Of course, it was no better in the morning. No worse, either, which is why I sent the kid back to camp slathered in sunscreen and shielded by brand-name sunglasses of dubious origins.

At noon, when I went to retrieve him, he refused to remove the shades.

Cheeks flushed from exertion, his hair dripping with sweat under a baseball cap.

"I still look like a mutant wild mushroom," he said.

I asked about the puffiness, noticing it had seemed to spread up past the sunglasses.

"What's up with your noggin? Does it feel like the swelling is up in your forehead now?"

"No. That's probably just where I got hit with a baseball. Everything else feels the same. It doesn't hurt."

He gets in the car and slumps into the seat.

“I'm tired of looking like a cartoon boy. Will this ever go away?”

“Of course it will,” I tell him. “It's just difficult to predict when. Not sure what caused it.”

We go back to search his mind for event markers.

It happened after we got out of the pool the last time when the bugs started biting.

Did you get a bug bite yesterday?

“Yeah … right here between the eyes.”

Dog days

The dog came bounding over to me, a moist tangle of curly, black hair and slobbery jowls.

“Stay down, stay down, stay down,” I chanted as she proceeded to plant her front two mulberry-stained feet on my midsection.

Summer has arrived, and suddenly my desire to wear white departs.

And quickly, the true reason one never lets dogs on the furniture becomes self-evident.

Pawprints. Everywhere. Reminding me again why it is we can't have nice things.

The impulse strikes me to cut down the tree and be done with it. Weed tree has grown big and tall and fruitful.

But there are so many options.

I know I should be more consistent with training and consequences. I know the best practices: Ignore unwanted behavior, restrict access to the object of desire, reward desired behavior. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I stay cool and calm and collected. Not overly enthusiastic or encouraging. I turn my back. Still, black and purple berry stains dapple my clothes like bruises.

Oh, sure. Eventually, a calm will set in. The dog will get tired of pin-balling around and curl up near a kid. Compelled, as Summer usually is, to have at least one part of her being touching a part of theirs. Everything slows: breathing, heart rate, blood pressure.

At this moment, anyway, I wish we could all be a little more like dogs. Or at least the attributes we humans tend to ascribe to them:

Joyful, loyal, loving and just a little bit ludicrous. Resilient. 

Not that it would solve anything. We‘d still have to keep an eye on the royal Corgis, who will nip at your heels; and possibly that Great Dane, who doesn’t know his own strength.

Maybe it is just knowing they usually are what they seem, and that remedies are as straightforward as action/consequence that leads me to such thoughts.

I can tell who is eyeing whom with wicked thoughts, and when to intervene. I can gauge when a single timeout will reset the entire clock or when it won’t work at all.

And though I don’t know what’s zooming around in their minds as they chase a squirrel or run a fence with another pal, I just know in those moments they seem wholly unencumbered with any other trouble. And I wish we all had a lot more of that.

You know …except like the bumper sticker says, Bark less, Wag more.

In human terms, it seems like some kind of faith in humanity. Some sort of faith in the future. 

And the more I try to draw a distinction, the more I see how alike we are.

It’s always going to be messy. There will still be misunderstandings and misdeeds. Most of the time we will handle it easily. But not always. Especially when Summer eats my shoe.

But I also know, eventually this will end. The birds and squirrels will dispatch the fruit, and the remainder can be washed away with a hose. Maybe next year we could make wine.

Every season requires patience and persistence. Even this one.