Fighting tooth and fail

Now, really. Could YOU keep track of all the holes in this smile?

Earlier this month my morning newspaper reading inspired me. I read about a woman, blind for the last nine years, whose sight was restored by implanting a tooth into her eye. Her eyetooth, no less. Her surgery was the first of its kind in the United States.

I chewed on this while I ate my Rice Chex. Wow. Totally amazing. Even more intriguing to me than the surgery itself is how someone even came up with the idea! What -- did the ah-ha moment come when someone picked himself off the floor after a bar fight and realized he could see better? I'm joking, of course. The tooth is used as a platform for a plastic lens, but still, how do people come up with this?

The human body is an incredible machine, and the human mind's ability to become mechanic is pretty impressive, too. This story rekindled my long-lost interest in pursuing medical research. (I ultimately went a different direction because I knew I wanted to be at home while raising my children.) I thought about it all day, even remembering a friend's dad who started medical school when she was a teenager. I could do this someday.

And then my brain got a reality check.

Next morning a crestfallen Elise came into my room to announce that the tooth fairy had forgotten to come.

Aargh! Elise lost the tooth the day before, I mean really lost it, when she washed it down the drain. Upon my suggestion she wrote the tooth fairy a note, which of course was still there beneath her pillow.

"Oh," I fumbled, "the tooth fairy doesn't take the notes with her when she comes."

Elise's smile lit up her face. "Oh, yeah! It's so we can save them."

Phew. I slipped into her room, gave a code nod to Emma and strategically placed a dollar bill hanging over the back edge of the bed. Crisis averted. 

The very next week Elise lost another tooth. I even took a picture of her holding it that afternoon, perhaps willing myself to remember.

We all know where this story is going, don't we? Always the first one up, Elise again greeted me at my bedside. Her sad, dejected face seemed to put me in the pronoun: "She forgot."

There was really no way of salvaging this one. My down-the-hall plan was to slip money inside the pillowcase and hope that our dramatic discovery of it -- See! There it is! -- would overshadow the big fact the tooth never got picked up. The elements were all there: Elise distracted, my "Hi, again" to Emma, her knowing sigh. But there was no pillowcase!

I left the coins anyway, trudged back to the kitchen and hugged Elise. The incident got lost in the furor of breakfast and backpacks. "I think the tooth fairy only remembers when I tell you she forgot," Elise laughed after school. Maybe so, I thought, but when the tooth fairy loves you, I do too.

So if there are any medical researchers out there reading this, could you please come up with an implant to restore my memory? I'd work on it myself, but I'm afraid I'd lose my notes.

End of summer pets

We shake hands with another summer, bid her adieu, say goodbye to her season of bounty and creature comforts, to her supply of the only pets my poor children think they'll ever have.

(This praying mantis provided a fun afternoon of enjoyment, then we let it slip away back into the grass, and it was gone. Kind of like summer.)

Circles

This is my baby brother Jeff gazing into the eyes of his new baby daughter, Greenliee. Have you ever seen a more beautiful, round, alert minutes-old child? All babies are angels, but this one looks the part. I think she'll have great skin tone for life.

My brother Jeff called Tuesday with the wonderful news that he and his wife Madison delivered their first baby. I've been blessed to be a new aunt a dozen times over, with cute kids I love and that I am so glad can be my children's special friends.

This little niece (well, not quite little -- she weighed in at 8 lbs. 11 oz.!) forms a different link. She is born to someone, my brother, that I remember fondly as a baby too. I loved him more than anything. I changed his diapers and made his baby food. I paraded him through the neighborhood in the stroller, just for fun. I read him stories and taught him how to sit on my up-high feet when I lay down like a letter L. Our mom found out just recently that I often soothed Jeffy in the middle of the night, helping him get back to sleep. (We slept on opposite sides of the same wall, he and I, and I'd hear him cry before my mom did.)

When he learned to talk he called me Nennies.

Jeffy was 13 when my oldest child Kyle was born. Now Kyle is 13.

These circles in our lives are amazing, wrapping us in tight, bringing us back to where we began. Jeffy has been the rough-and-tumble playful teddy bear of an uncle, showing my kids that he loves them the higher he throws them in the air. They can't get enough of him. No wonder I recognize that look on Greenliee's face, it's the same one my kids show whenever they see this uncle they adore.

Come on, Jeffy, let's play. Come on, Daddy.

Jeffy, I know you'll be a wonderful father, even if it does make me feel so old that you are. Congratulations to you and Madison.

Welcome to the world, Greenliee! I can't wait to meet you.

Please help

A darling little 4-year-old girl in our family (the daughter of Jeff's cousin) has been diagnosed with leukemia. To complicate the already difficult task of dividing themselves between home and distant hospital while she undergoes chemotherapy, the mother just had a new baby last week (by c-section). If you can find it in your heart to pray for this family, I know it can make a difference.

Check out their story:

www.tayliebug.com

Better left unsaid

Words you don't want to hear while you're working in the kitchen and your husband is re-installing a leaky toilet:

"Can I borrow a ladle?"

Better yet, you can HAVE one.

The Anti-Muse

Jeff and Samuel, May 2009

Muse (myooz), n. 1. Class. Myth. any of the nine goddesses who presided over various arts and sciences. 2. the power regarded as inspiring an artist.


I'm in a tippy canoe here in this, my first published tribute. Sometimes I read about others' loved ones, and I am inspired. Other times, especially where spouses are described, I gag on my suspension of too-good-to-be-true disbelief.

So here's a very human shout-out to my very human, very deserving husband on his birthday, or whatever day he chooses to show interest in this blog. :)

First, the title. I jokingly tell Jeff he is my anti-muse. This latest nickname comes from the way he greets most of my ideas with laughter and skeptical eyebrows (albeit above smiling eyes), or blatant "That will never work"s. (He's often right.) And these are the times when he hears me! Generally, I don't blame him for tuning me out.

This aloofness could bug me, squash me even. Yet -- when I'm in a good frame of mind -- I find it oddly empowering, for when I really want to do something, I'm challenged to find a way to make it work on my own. And fast! Two practical cases in point: the grand dollhouse I was going to make from a military trunk left in our garage when we moved in; and the elaborate grape arbor I planned to make from our replaced wrought iron storm doors -- until all materials mysteriously made it to the dump the very weekends I intended to start these projects. Well, at least that's when I discovered their absence; they'd been gone months before.

Jeff knows me too well, knows that I'm full of ideas, but that my follow-through lags sorely behind. No more of my saying, "Wait! Don't throw that out yet. I might make something from it." No more mere thinking. More doing. Jeff is like a filter that makes me evaluate what's doable, what's not, in an effort to make the flow of my time and energy more effective.

For years whenever Jeff says "I love you," I've asked, "Why?" It's a sincerely desperate plea. I want him to elaborate, to give me some nugget of detail that I can savor for days to come. I want him to wax poetic.

He never has. But I've realized that Jeff is not a waxing and waning kind of guy. His devotion may not be a dramatic wave, but it doesn't ebb in retreat either. He is constant.

"Why, why do you love me?" I say.

"Because I just do," he always answers.

To turn the tables, however, here are reasons why I love my husband:

• He helps me see the importance of laughing at myself.

• His face lights up in turn to see each and every child when he comes home from work.

• He sweeps the floor every day.

• He serves others.

• He plays with his children.

• He takes his spiritual obligation to his family very seriously.

• He thinks he's so clever to let the kids stay up late as long as they're scratching his head/feet/back.

• He is steady. He is the cabinet to my pinball, the string to my kite.

That Jeff loves me is more a reflection of his good qualities than it is of mine. To not need a reason to love? Why, I suppose that's the greatest love of all.

Happy Birthday, Jeff! I love you too.

Squirrel season

Here are Friday's and Monday's harvests from our small garden, minus all we ate and gave away over the weekend. Zucchini, tomatoes, beans, red/yellow/green peppers, broccoli, spaghetti squash and a handful each of raspberries and strawberries await transformation. (No, the goldfish will not be processed.)

I have a love/hate relationship with canning. Love, love, love to grown my own food. Love this small exercise of self-reliance, and the gratitude I feel during it. Love to have a taste of summer follow every "swoop" sound of an opened bottle in the winter.

Hate trying to fit canning in with everything else. It makes me a wee bit crazy. Every year I ask: why am I doing this?? Harvests are great until they take the upper hand in a do-something-or watch-them-die standoff, with no regard to your schedule. Counter of produce or counter-productive?

The hardest part, for me, is finding the big chunk of uninterrupted time that canning requires. I've already peeled and chopped the tomatoes from the picture, but have to wait until tonight because none of my pockets of free time today is deep enough to finish any processing I start. They're seamed by carpools, school pick-ups, appointments, piano lessons and waiting for a worker who needs access to my neighbor's house. Oh, and the family's meals. Almost forgot that one.

Still, if the squirrels can do it, I guess I can too. Hmm. Do you think they have squirrel carpools?

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On a related note, I've been so impressed with friends who have menus planned ahead. That's been a real struggle of mine. I'm more of a "pull something out of nowhere" kind of cook, which has yielded some fun triumphs, but is generally not worth the daily stress of answering my son's constant "What's for dinner?" when I myself don't even know yet. So, as a nod to Katrina, I've started a menu list of my own. Imititation is the sincerest form of flattery.