A Happy Sunday

We had a great Sunday today.  First, at 9 am, we went next door for fresh bagels from Brueggerman’s.  Paula says they are the only place in E. Lansing that boils their bagels when they make them.  My poppyseed bagel was perfect with cream cheese, smoked salmon, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers and even capers. Yum.  Then, Bob and I headed off to church at Edgewood UCC only a few blocks from our house.  The temperature was only 22 degrees, quite a drop from 56 yesterday.  There were snow flurries but the church was warm and the sermon was a good one.  Then we drove 1 1/2 hours southeast to Tecumseh, MI where a high school classmate of Bob’s invited us to lunch.  It was fun to see them again and see their lovely house.  We enjoyed a leisurely lunch and happy conversation before we headed back to E. Lansing to meet the family at Dublin, an Irish Pub, to watch the MSU basketball game.  As we drove through town, students dressed in green and white were milling around everywhere, lining up outside bars or just marauding around town in big gangs.  We got a table for 6 just between two tv’s and ordered drinks and dinner.  The game was close, we cheered whenever MSU made a basket.  The pub was just crowded enough to make it exciting.  At the end of the game, someone called out “Go Green” and everyone in the pub cheered back “Go White.”  The end of the game was a nail biter - and MSU pulled it off, winning by just 1 point to advance to the Final Four round of March Madness.  Driving home, the students had set a chair on fire in the middle of a street, there were students walking everywhere.  It was a very busy and happy Sunday despite the chilly temperature.

The First Day of Spring Break

We came here to E. Lansing to help out the family looking after the kids during days off from school and during their trip to Phoenix.  Today was the first day of Spring Break.  For me, it was very overwhelming.  I made buttermilk waffles from scratch to start off the day.  Then, we played board games and after that the girls got involved in making a movie with my IPad.  Fun to watch Erika’s expertise with the IPad, even though she doesn’t have one herself.  Something wonderful to see how the  just plays with the device instead of being afraid of every new thing like I am.  Lunch was homemade Mac and Cheese and then they finished up their live video of Sonja singing “Let It Go” from Frozen. I wanted them to get outside so we choose “Gramma’s scootering adventure” to do.  I loaded the scooters in the trunk of the car and off we went to Haslett, a not so far suburb of E. Lansing.  There we found the Interurban Pathway and set off, the three of us, with our scooters.  I hadn’t been on a scooter, perhaps in my whole life.  It wasn’t so hard.  After a little while, I felt more confidence and began to enjoy sliding along between the pushes.  I was very surprised that the leg on the scooter was the one that got tired.  I had supposed it would be the pushing legs that would get tired.  But my leg and hip ached and I had to switch legs on the scooter often.  We scooted along this paved 2 1/2 mile long path, stopping to take photos and rest.  After we made it to the end, we hurried to the nearest bench, a ways down the path, to have our snacks.  Sonja, who got there much sooner than Erika and me, had perused the rocks under the bench and found amazing fossils.  On the way back, we enjoyed the nature:  Sonja counting 11 birds’ nests until she stopped counting, Erika noticing the caterpillar crossing the path and the slimy life in the stream.  We had fun blowing the milkweed seeds, like dandelions but better.  I loved hearing the girls’ chatter about camp and things they loved all the way back.  I thought this is what it’s all about: just being with them and having adventures together we can share.  I am so very fortunate to have this opportunity and I am also exhausted and most happy I did not crash.

The Little Things

Four days of babysitting is just coming to a close.  The parents will be back in half an hour.  As I look back over the four days, I think about what was important.  To me, it seems the little things are the most important.  Being there, able to help Sonja paste her book report on to the folder, when the glue stick had run dry, using folded over pieces of tape.  We had adventures: going out to the farm where I bought my roving wool to see the baby lambs.  The girls loved to hold the 6 week old lambs and see the baby goats.  I loved seeing mohair on the hoof.  It was fun to go to Tasty Twist and get ice cream together.  We dealt with a chicken crisis, a bloody comb on #19.  At first we thought the chickens had turned on her and pecked her, but Sonja doing sleuthing, figured out there was a nail near the brooding box that #s19 got her comb stuck in and tore up her comb.  I was impressed how Sonja was calm during the bloody crisis, very nurturing, so gently blottin

g off the dried blood and putting on Neosporin.  We had fun playing games, or just being around each other.  Maybe that’s the best, just being so comfortably together.  Our pleasure is babysitting, it’s why we came.  I’m happy the parents got to have a vacation together but for us, the pleasure is being with the granddaughters.

The First Day of Spring in Michigan

Yesterday was the First Day of Spring.  Here in Michigan the signs of it are subtle.  The daffodils are poking their leaves up, maybe they’ve grown 1/2 inch in the week we’ve been here.  The birds seem move active and diverse.  I’ve seen 12 different species looking out our living room window in the last two days.  The locals say the high of 35 degrees today is warm.  Well, at least warmer it’s warmer than it was.  There is no green here yet.  Yet the sap is rising.  Something is coming.  We saw sugar maple trees with buckets hanging on them.  We didn’t expect warm weather, but hoped for our hearts to be made warmer by the family here and that’s how it’s worked.  It’s fun to see the girls doing more.  Every Friday night, Erika cooks dinner now.  On St. Patrick’s Day, Sonja made green shamrock pancakes and gold medallion pancakes, all from scratch.  On Wednesday after their piano lessons, Erika’s Jazz Band had a concert at the Middle School.  There’s nothing like 30 eager 7th Graders playing “Birdland.”  Her band teacher seemed like a saint!  Little things are made special and fun doing them together with the grandchildren.  I want to remember that each day and each interaction is special, a one of a kind thing and will never happen again in exactly the same way.

Telephones

I’ve been thinking about telephones while I’m here in Michigan.  It struck me as amazing that last night I called Bob on my cellphone to tell him dinner is ready here in E. Lansing, when both our phones have California area codes.  The girls tell me that most of their fellow students in 7th grade and 4th grade (!) have cell phones.  Cell phones are universal these days.  Back in the days when I grew up, we always had a telephone.  I can still remember our number (Atlantic 29027).  We didn’t have an area code and hardly anyone called long distance.  As long as she lived,  Bob’s mother used to use a secret code to save the cost of a call.  When they would leave our house in Berkeley to drive home to Lafayette (about 12 miles), she would call our phone number to let us know they got home ok.  We were instructed never to answer the phone in the first three rings, then she would hang up.  Without our ever picking up the phone call, they weren’t charged for it.  In our Berkeley home, we only had one wall phone with a really long cord that used to be stretched to go from the hall into a nearby bedroom if anyone ever needed privacy.  Earlier when Bob and I moved to Denmark in 1967, telephones weren’t in every household there.  We were lucky the apartment we rented had one.  To place a call you had to dial the prefix you wanted to call and then, in Danish, tell the operator the number you wanted.  For example, the Niels Bohr Institute number was Tria-1616 (Tree-Ah size-ten, size-ten).  If one didn’t say the numbers properly the operator would yell - “Hvadbehager” (pronounced Van-Bah and meaning What?) at you.  Long distance calls were possible but we never once in the year we lived abroad called Bob’s or my family in the States and they never called us.  If something big happened and there was a need to communicate promptly, one sent a telegram, otherwise we wrote aerogram letters.  They were one piece of blue thin paper.  You wrote on one side of it, folded it up in thirds and glued it shut, writing the addresss on the outside.  It took two weeks for a letter to get from Denmark to California.  If the family wrote back the same day they got the letter, it would take two more weeks to get back to Denmark.  So there was always a month lag in the communication.  Nowadays, nobody writes letters anymore.  We get only advertisements in the mail.  Even the bills are delivered and paid on-line.  Fast communication is the way of the world.  E-mails can go anywhere there’s internet almost instantly.  But e-mails aren’t fast enough.  Most people communicate with texts - short written messages sent via the phone lines.  Communication has changed so drastically.  Now I hate the land-line telephone because most of the calls we get are telemarketers trying to sell us something we don’t want.    I miss the joy of holding a letter in my hand and rereading the message in it over and over again.  I wonder where the record of our communications will be stored now - the old emails and texts and if they will be ever re-read?  This is just one way the world has changed in my lifetime.  You might wonder how we ever survived, we did just fine.  The communication was just much slower.

Miss Saigon

Life is always exciting around here.  This afternoon I got to go see “Miss Saigon” the Broadway remake of the 1980’s musical.  The family here has season tickets and I got to go in Paul’s place.  We drove the 6 or so blocks instead of walking because it was so cold.  I’d seen “Miss Saigon” in 1991 in London when I took my mother to England for a tour in honor of her 80th birthday.  All I could recall was that there was a real helicopter on stage at one point and there was a lot of the color red.  The story is similar to the opera “Madame Butterfly” in that a soldier has a love affair with a local girl and she has a child he doesn’t know about until much later that is in the end taken to the U.S. by the soldier and his American wife.  If possible, this performance was more dramatic than I remember the opera being.  I cried at the end when she gave the child away and killed herself, was appalled by the brothels in the first act (I thought the girls were getting quite an education) and loved the dancing and singing.  There was an 80’s thread of sleazy, sexy VietNamese coming to greedy, sleazy United States.  My mother and Erika both love musical theater and it is wonderful to have gone to see this musical and sit beside Erika.  It’s something about this love of theater spanning four generations in the family.

Spoons

Last night, Friday night, Erika made dinner.  She does that every Friday night and last night she made delicious tacos.  It’s fun to see the girls growing up and taking on more responsibilities around the house.  After dinner, voluntarily they both wanted to practice their music.  Sonja went to the piano and Erika went to her special room where she practiced the clarinet.  After a half hour of music drifting through the house (I got very sentimental remembering all the music we had at this stage in our lives), they gathered again in the living room.  Sonja wanted to play “Spoons.”  It is her very favorite game.  So we all got down on the floor and she explained how to play.  It is a card game that is a little like musical chairs.  You put spoons in the arranged like a star, one fewer spoon than the number of players.  The dealer deals out 4 cards to each player.  The goal of the game is to get four cards that are the same - four 6’s or four jacks and so one.  It starts when the dealer draws a card from the deck (you use two decks of cards), assesses whether it helps her get the matches she needs or not.  If not, she passes it on to the next player who does the same assessment with her hand.  And so it goes around the circle until the last player puts the card she/he passes on into the discard pile.  It goes faster and faster depending how fast one can grab the card, assess, keep the card and pass on another one.  We always keep only four cards in our hand.  When the first player has four matching cards, she/he grabs a spoon and then lightning fast the other players grab a spoon.  The person who doesn’t get a spoon, is out.  With each hand there is one less player and one less spoon.  It was really fun, testing our reflexes with lots of laughing.  One time I grabbed the spoon but when I went to show my hand, my eyes had blurred the 3’ and the 8’s to look alike to me in the rush of playing.  Oops.  It was a great family game that ended when we all were served some Mexican hot chocolate I’d brought them from California.  How much fun it is to be here.

Traveling

Yesterday we traveled from Berkeley to E. Lansing.  We rode on every means of transport there is except boat and maybe segue, bicycle or scooter.  We took an Uber to the BART station, then caught a BART train to the San Francisco airport where we got on a jet plane going to Detroit.  From the Detroit Metro Airport, we caught the Michigan flyer - a big bus and 2 hours later Paul picked us up in his Prius and brought us to our Michigan home.  We arrived late - around 11 pm so we missed seeing the girls.  In total, we traveled 1800 miles in 12 hours.  It wasn’t hard, except for sitting still so long so I don’t know why this morning I’m feeling so disoriented and tired.  My body is designed for walking, not flying.  I feel like I’m only halfway here, like some undescribed part of me hasn’t yet finished the trip.  I used to love flying.  It felt special.  Now it is truly a slog, but it’s the only practical way to get here.  I guess I’ll take it easy today and remember that it takes two days to fully get here, one day to travel and one day to recover.

Mila

Yesterday I had the privilege of leading a tour of 2nd graders at the Botanical Garden.  When the tours are good, I always say I’d pay to do this and it was a good tour.  They were from a Catholic school, their tidy navy blue uniforms covered with scarves and jackets.  The tour topic was Extreme Environments focusing mostly on the greenhouses.  While trying to stick to the tour guidelines, I mostly want to encourage their curiosity and excitement about plants and the Garden.  I only had 4 kids in my group and three of them were full of questions and very excited.  I had to be patient to answer all their questions and keep them on task.  One girl stood back, away from the others and never asked or answered a question.  Her name was Mila and she just watched with her big beautiful brown eyes.  I saw she was paying attention, but always from a distance.  As we went from observing cacti and Ajaves covered with rain drops in the desert to the carnivorous plants in the greenhouse and then on to the tropical house where they were all pleased to get to taste some chocolate, learning that chocolate comes from the cacao tree which grows in tropical rainforests, Mila stood at the back.  It was at the banana trees where there was a beautiful Anna’s hummingbird feeding on the strangely positions flowers that I realized their attention was waning, so I began a hike through the redwoods.  Kids love finding the cones and picking them up, it always perks them up.  We ended at the newt pond where happily there were lots of newts to be seen.  Coming back to where we started, I asked them what they learned or liked the tour.  Their answers always surprise me.  As the others rushed off, Mila stood back and I bent down and told her how I had noticed that she had paid close attention, noticing everything.  Then I told her to always keep that up, that she was really special.  A bit later after the wrap up when all the kids were getting their lunches, Mila came over and gave me a hug and said a very special thank you.  I always love the quiet ones and feel so grateful to be able to have affirmed Mila with the big brown eyes.