Suzy Says

My brother and his Jed, Christmas Eve, 1993

Fourteen years ago, my brother fell in love.

Like many great loves, his was both unexpected and head over heels. He took one look and never looked back.

It was Christmas Eve. Our father and stepmother were visiting from England (their custom was to celebrate Christmas in England one year and in California the next) and had rented a house in Mendocino big enough for the whole passel of us. Dad and I were making dinner, and Jonathan went to town to pick up a few last-minute items. When he came back, he came into the kitchen and said, “Guess what I did?’

Dad and I said, “You wrecked the rental car.” This made no sense, since Jonathan is a speedy, yet excellent driver. In answer to our unjustified accusation, he reached under his sweater and brought out the cutest puppy I had ever seen. For once, I was actually deprived of speech, as I gasped and grabbed for the little bundle of black-spotted, white fur. Dad got there first, though. Dinner was forgotten as we welcomed Jed to the family.

She was the best Christmas gift ever.

It turned out that while Jonathan was running errands, he stopped by what he calls “the pity pit”, which is the local Humane Society displaying pets up for adoption near the main street of the town. He took one look at Jed, and their lives changed forever.

My brother trained Jed carefully and thoroughly. His belief is that a well-behaved dog, like a well-behaved child, can be taken anywhere, but it takes consistent discipline to achieve that goal. People used to tell him he was too hard on Jed, but he wasn’t. He made it possible to take her with him anywhere he went. When he was still a carpenter, she’d go with him to the construction site, and never got in the way. (Once he left his lunch in the truck with her and she didn’t eat it.) My brother is a volunteer fireman, and Jed went with him on every call. He also teaches science, and Jed goes with him to school. It’s hard to know who the kids love more: Jed or Jonathan.

The training was part of it, but there was also her Jedness that made her so special. She grew up to be beautiful, a queenly, fun-loving tomboy. She always jumped on me with joy when I came to visit – the one “bad” habit my brother couldn’t break her of – and one of the great pleasures of visiting was sleeping with Jed the first night I got there. She’d cuddle up to me and I’d have the best sleep with her, loving and reassuring, beside me.

Awake, she’d chase the ball until your arm was about ready to fall off. When my brother moved from his former house to his current one, Jed went into the woods and retrieved her tennis balls, piling them up by his truck as if to say, “If you’re bringing your stuff, I’m bringing mine.” He took her camping, winter and summer, Jed proudly carrying her little backpack full of her own food – that dog pulled her own weight. She loved to swim, and we’d take her to the river, throw the ball, and she’d bring it back. Even in old age, she could out-swim much younger dogs, and she had fun every day of her life.

That happy life ended yesterday. Jed was surrounded by her loved ones and left us peacefully. We were lucky to have known her, from her puppyhood to her adulthood. She is always loved, always remembered, a once in a lifetime friend and companion.

My Dad has his very own Wikipedia page!

My mail is delivered to a post office box. Partly because the building was out of mailboxes when I moved in (remember, no-one is supposed to live here), and partly because I can go and get the mail when I feel like it, instead of having it just appear, like an uninvited guest.

The truth is that the mail is seldom fun, but it really outdid itself this time, containing the following (all in one box!):

• A charming missive from my bank, returning a check I had foolishly attempted to deposit by mail, and informing me that they can no longer accept deposits by mail (even though they list an address for mail-in deposits on their website). I am beginning to think Kafka has been reincarnated as my bank.
• A letter from my friends at the State of California Franchise Tax Board, trying to get me to pay $1,000 in import tax for “importing” the grandfather clock I inherited from my late father. Faithful readers may recall that I went down this road already about three years ago, and that the road ended in my not having to pay the tax and my stepmother giving me a sedative.

  Why they are trying it on again after all this time, I don’t know. The Governator must really need some cigars. Anyway, the paperwork from Round One is with the rest of my stuff in storage, so I asked my sister Beth to send me a copy of Dad’s Will, which specifies the clock is mine, and I can prove that I don’t owe them a thing, except my abiding contempt.

• The Third Edition of one of my father’s books, Principles of Ecotoxicology, dedicated to his memory and with a forward praising his personal and professional achievements. I collapsed into tears. It’s amazing that almost 5 years after you lose someone, you can feel as bad as you did when it first happened. I hope I can face the copy of his Will with more courage than I could the copy of his book.
  

It’s a warm summer afternoon. A breeze ruffles the leaves on the tree outside the open window, and the flowers bow their heads gracefully. The scent of freshly cut grass drifts in.

A girl – a woman, really, but since she’s the youngest in the family, she’ll always be a girl – sits at her mother’s bedside. The hospital bed is raised up so that her mother is sitting. She is painfully thin and drawn, the battle scars of her long and valiant fight against cancer. In contrast, her youngest daughter is strong and flushed with youth, her bright hair shining in the sun.

But her mother looks better than she has in days, even weeks. She is bright and alert and smiling. The daughter is reading to her mother from The Phantom Tollbooth, which was a favorite of her childhood. Mother even jokes about the story, and they laugh together, the old voice and the young voice mingling together with shared joy.

When the daughter is ready to leave that evening, the mother says to the nurse, “I’d like to fly!” The nurse, who knows and loves her, says, “You do? Well, I’ll get you some ativan.” Mother says happily, “I want to hang glide!”

The nurse goes out to get the medication. A doctor, who has overheard the conversation, says, “Let’s give her the full dose and really let her fly.” He, too, has become fond of her, as has most of the staff during her long stay at the hospital.

The nurse gives the mother the medication and asks, “Are you flying now, honey?”

Mother says, “I’m flying! I’m flying!”

Those were her last words.

I hope she is flying.

We love you, Mom. Always and forever. And just as we once shared a body and a soul, we will never be separated.

Well, the good will toward the Howler has left the building as suddenly as it came. She escaped through the window again, only this time, she attacked Rita the Wonder Dog, who was on her way home with her owner after spending the weekend with me. It was a brief, yet terrifying encounter. No-one was hurt, and I hope Upstairs Guy is suitably embarrassed. They have caused an astonishing amount of trouble in the short time they have lived here. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot (or paw)!

My sister had an unpleasant experience of her own this weekend. While swimming at the river, someone stole her wallet out of the trunk of her car. No-one locks their car doors there in the depths of the country, but she figured, why tempt people more than necessary, so she put the wallet in the trunk. One of the other swimmers left, and then came back to tell my sister and the other swimmers that her car had had its windshield smashed.

I would have gone up right away to see if my car had been interfered with, but Megan figured, it is what it is, and finished her swim before returning to the parking lot. There was a whopping six dollars in the wallet, and now she has to replace her ambulance driver’s license along with her regular one, and all the other stuff. The worst thing was she carried around a little something I sent with her for encouragement as she nursed Dad through his last illness, and now it’s gone forever.

On the other hand, she’s getting this adorable replacement wallet. Nothing like shopping to cheer a girl up.

And just when I’d pretty much lost all faith in both human- and dog-nature, my friend Charlie returned from a trip to Venice with an adorable handbag for my collection and two shotglasses (Venetian glass!). He knows me too well. Cheered me right up, shallow Suzy that I am.

I don’t think I’ve watched as much teevee in the past 20 years as I have in the past couple of weeks. My Mom always has the tv on (ironically, since my parents would hardly let us watch any tv when we were kids) in the hospital, even though she’s asleep half the time. It seems rude to read, so I just watch tv with her, whether she’s awake or not.

The result of this is that I’ve really gotten into ER, about a million years after the rest of the world. There I am, just doors away from a real ER*, watching it on tv (back-to-back episodes at 10 and 11!). My sister, who works in a real ER, just rented the first season on DVD, and when we’re done at the real hospital, we go home and watch the tv one together. Is that weird?

One thing I definitely know is weird is pet food commercials. The makers of these gross-out fests seem to be laboring under the delusion that dogs and cats shop for their own food. No self-respecting cat I ever met would deign to do such a mundane errand, and dogs never know what’s good for them, so the people end up doing the buying.

News for pet food purveyors: We ain’t gonna eat the food. So close-ups of gelatinous brown chunks don’t make us want to buy them. It makes us want to blow them. Got it?

*There’s some debate in my sister’s hospital about renaming the Emergency Room the Emergency Department, since it’s more than one room and everything else is a department. And the ER staff I’ve seen here are nowhere near as cute as the ones on tv. Go figure.

This bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, the church bells are ringing out. I wonder whether they are calling out for worship, a wedding, a funeral? A beginning? An end? A comfort? Hope? There’s something about a Sunday afternoon that’s always a little melancholy, invoking thoughts of homework still undone, the week-end at its end, the duties in the week ahead.

I think of my mother, still battling the disease that will eventually win – and there is no winner when it’s your own body that’s attacking and killing you. I think of my sister and brother, who have borne this almost unconscionable burden for more than two years now: watching the woman whose body gave them life destroy itself. This in the wake of our beloved father’s death. It is truly amazing what the human spirit can overcome. I love and admire my siblings more than I can ever say. They are nothing but courage and love.

I think my mother is surviving by a combination of stubbornness and fear of death. I do. I feel the echo in myself. I’ve always been afraid of death. I’m afraid of my impending orphanhood, much as I wish for my mother to be released from her pain and fear. I don’t want to think about the present or the future, with all the fear and uncertainty. I want to remember the past, when I had my parents and my grandparents, and it seemed that nothing could go wrong.

On the other hand, there were a flock of birthdays to celebrate, not just Mine (Megan’s on May 25; Mine on June 4; Erica’s on June 5; Caleb’s on June 3). So Meg threw a big barbecue for us, starring fabulous grilled veggie kabobs, grilled shrimp, turkey burgers, and two works of art disguised as cake, made by the multi-talented Erica.

This is Megan’s cake. Called “Key Lime Trauma”, it features an ambulance going to the rescue of an overturned car. Fortunately, this time the blood is chocolate. The blue-flecked meringue is the ocean. For those of you who don’t know, Meg’s an EMT.

My cake, however, was a glorious chocolate mocha dream, covered with buttercream and roses. The rose in the middle is called Sweet Jessica….

…But this is the real Sweet Jessica, Erica’s daughter and greatest work of art.

And this is as maternal as you’ll ever see Me.

Since I’ve been up here, I have had time to think, and to think about time itself. Yes, much of the day is occupied with doing chores and taking care of Mom, but there is definitely time left over to think, if not to write. For I find that I am more or less permanently tired and therefore uninspired. I finally have time to write, but no inclination to do so. It seems that the idea of “if I just had time, I’d do [fill in the blank]” is not necessarily the case – or at least, not for me.

Yet I do have time to think.

A year ago today, I marveled at the fact that my brother, sisters, and I had survived an entire year without our father. Another year has passed by, another 365 days, and we have survived that, too. In some ways, it seems like just yesterday that we lost him – the grief and anger and sorrow are still fresh – but in others, it seems like so very long ago. It’s been so long since I heard his voice or his laugh or saw his smile. I have been to London twice since we lost him, and though my head knows he is gone, my heart still expects to see him glance up over his reading glasses, break into a smile while simultaneously folding up “The Times” and hugging me across the barrier at Heathrow. No-one meets me at the airport now, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be my father, my friend.

A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of you, Dad.

Two years ago, when you were in the hospital, we were consumed with fear and worry about you. Now, we are all occupied with taking care of Mom, knowing that the end is coming, but not when, and doing our best with the time we have left with her. Her departure is as long and lingering and painful as yours was sudden and unexpected and they assured us, painless. The contrast between the two could not be greater. But one thing remains constant: your children united in the face of disaster, doing the best we can under the circumstances and loving and supporting each other.

And one more thing does, too: we all love you, always.

My sister’s little house in the pygmy woods (the soil is too acidic for the redwoods to reach their usual majestic heights, so it’s known as pygmy forest, though pygmy is relative) is far too pygmy itself to accommodate the entire clan. It?s overpopulated as it is, with Megan and her husband; Mom’s hospital bed in the living room, and my other sister Beth sleeping on the couch.

So I’ve been sleeping in a tent in Megan’s garden, like Claudia Salinger in Party of Five, only outside. Sleeping in the tent has made me understand more about silence and darkness. It’s not just the absence of noise and light, but the presence of the silence and the darkness. The silence is so intense you can feel it – it almost presses against the city dweller’s ears, as strong a contrast to the usual city noises as a sudden power outage.

But after a while, you realize that the silence itself is made of many components. The wind in the trees, which almost sounds like the ocean. Distant crickets. Grass rustling. An animal walking through the woods: a cat? A raccoon? A skunk? Maybe even a deer? The mylar ribbons on the flower beds (supposed to deter marauding birds) softly rattling as they turn in the wind. You know how they say, you could hear a pin drop? You can hear a pine needle fall, and you do.

The darkness is as shocking to a city girl’s eyes as the silence is to her ears. There’s no ambient light from a nearby city or town, and no streetlights. So if I’m going to be out at night, I need a flashlight to light the way immediately ahead of me. I am returned to my childhood, when it seemed that any sort of monster or imaginary creature could be hiding in the woods, ready to leap out at me. The shadows in the flashlight’s beam, even my own, grow and move alarmingly and in a very monster-like manner.

But if I look up and away from what’s right in front of me, I see something beautiful: countless silvery stars against the blackness of the sky. Light in darkness. Hope.

Dentist: No cavities for me, but John got my helping as well as his own and has at least four and possibly more. Looks like there’s some pain in his future.

Other than that, mild flossing lecture and complete removal of what little make-up remained after a day’s work and walking to the dentist’s through torrential rain.

Dinner: Mom and Alice seemed to cancel each other out, proving that there really is some truth to algebra after all and two negatives really do make a positive. And I thought I’d never use algebra in my every day life. Who knew? Though it did take 30+ years to come in useful.

Food was as cafeteria-like as ever, and the pouring rain and darkness didn’t enhance the usually stunning view from the dining room, which looks over Aquatic Park, the historic ships at Hyde Street Pier, and Alcatraz, which was too bad, since it was Mom’s first time there. It will also be her last, since the Officers’ Club is closing at the end of the month.

Mom: Treated us to a visit to a whole new room in the funhouse of her mind. She informed Alice and John over dinner that when I was a kid in Upstate New York, we used to cut down trees (we did have 5 acres of land, including a pine forest, and we really did cut our own tree each year) for every class in our elementary school, treat them with flame retardant, and then bring them to the school, where we also supplied the happy little students with hot chocolate complete with marshmallows. I changed the subject immediately. John and Alice looked bemused, but were too polite to comment.

She was driving me so crazy that when I went to the gym on Saturday, my trainer asked me if I was stressed, because I had the tell-tale flush over my throat and chest that I get when I’m upset. It was gone by the time I left the gym, but reappeared fairly rapidly after getting back home.

Took Mom to the airport in the worst of the storm on Saturday afternoon. Carried her stuff, got her checked in, where she was supplied with a wheelchair and an airline person to push her in it. I had to leave her at security, and as I hugged her good-bye, we both started crying. I am such a perverse little freak. She annoyed the crap out of me during the scant 24 hours she was with me, showing that I am:

1. A really horrible person, since I get annoyed at my terminally ill mother; and 2. A really horrible daughter, same reason.

Weather: Hell. We have been relentlessly pounded by storms and high winds since Friday, and it looks like we are in for at least another week of it. Jonathan was wise not to come down here. They got almost 17 inches of rain up there between Friday morning and Saturday night. Their power’s been out since Saturday, though Jonathan bought a generator a few years ago, so Megan can come and visit the electricity at his house when she’s tired of the silent, lamp-lit dark of her house. It’s funny how close they live to the 19th century there.

Jonathan got 12 calls on Saturday alone, and at one point, he and Jed were trapped in the fire truck on Albion Ridge Road (the road that leads to their “town” and the sea), by downed power lines on one side and fallen trees on the other. He just turned his pager off until help arrived. A tree fell and missed his house by less than a foot.

Guest Pets: I’m already sick of walking the dog in the pouring rain and scraping poop off the soaking wet sidewalks, and we’ve only had her for three days. She is a very sweet dog, but not very smart. For example, she pees on a hill with her butt facing the top of the hill. We also can’t let her in the bedroom, because our cats need their own place to be sans the guest beasts, who get the whole rest of the apartment. So you can imagine how fun it is feeding 5 cats and a dog in separate rooms.

At least Mom’s cat and dog curl up together on the couch, which we have covered with a sheet.

It’s going to be a loooong month.

We had a great Thanksgiving. The weather could not have been more glorious, and in honor of Mom being with us for Thanksgiving for the first time in years, everything looked its best. Dinner was fabulous, and it was a happy evening with family and friends, the way it should be.

On the day after Thanksgiving, we went in to Mendocino for the annual craft fair, where I saw this sculpture and finished up my Christmas shopping – late for me! Tried not to think about all the horrible wrapping and mailing which awaits me. Wouldn’t you think I’d be good at Christmas wrapping? But alas, my impatience cancels out any pretensions to artistic ability and it generally puts me in a Grinch-like mood, which is why I get things wrapped at the store if possible. You can tell an authentic Suzy wrapped present by the amount of tape and unevenness of the paper.

After the craft fair, we stopped by the Fetzer tasting room in Mendocino, and tasted different wines before buying some, always the best way. We ended a lovely day at Ledford House, in their beautiful, comfortable bar overlooking the ocean. You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful view of the sunset. Our friend Mark was working at the bar, which meant that a glass of Roederer chamapgne was waiting for me by the time I sat down, and we were also treated to their fabulous baked garlic and ch&egravevre on toast. The perfect end to the perfect day.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Jonathan’s dog Jed, who has recovered from her run-in with the bench a couple of weeks ago. Her fur is growing back on her chest, but the stitches have been removed and it’s hard to believe there was two inch deep gash there. She is even back on ball duty.

Jonathan’s cat Iggy is either chillin’ or killin’. Here he’s doing the former. I envy him.

I’m off to my brother’s and sister’s for Thanksgiving in the country. I’m picking up Mom on the way, and I can’t even remember the last time we were all together for Thanksgiving.

The last time I was at my brother’s and sister’s for Thanksgiving was two years ago, when we found Dad lying in the mud on the dirt road between their houses after he had had a stroke. I rarely, if ever, pass by that spot without thinking of that night, and being up there for Thanksgiving for the first time since that fateful one is going to be hard. It won’t be the same day, obviously, but it will be the same holiday. We will all be thinking about it. but no-one will speak of it, unless Megan and I have some time alone, because Jonathan can’t or won’t talk about Dad.

Maybe it’s the way men cope with these things, but I want to tell him that you cannot skip or shorten the mourning process. You have to go through it and work through your feelings. There’s no easy way. Not talking about Dad or your feelings and memories about him will not make them go away. And it’s not morbid to speak of these things, as my brother believes. Rather, the opposite: it’s morbid and unhealthy not to.

Since my sis and I are on T-Day cooking duty, and I’m not bringing my iBook with me, there will be no Suzy updates until Sunday at the earliest. However, John is staying at home with our cats, so he might be inspired while I’m away.

Wishing you all a very happy Thanksgiving with your friends and loved ones. Have fun and stay safe!

My brother’s best friend, Jed the Wonder Dog, is OK but had a ball-chasing accident. Chasing the ball is Jed’s main interest in life, other than going everywhere her Food Guy goes. Ball throwing for Jed is much like sex for high school guys: there’s no such thing as bad. As long as you’re getting any, you’re happy. In my family, we refer to a condition known as Jed Arm, which is the result of throwing the ball for Jed for too long (too long for you, that is. It’s never long enough for Jed).

The other day, she was chasing the ball with such intensity that she failed to notice the pointy edge of a park bench until it was too late. She gouged a hole in her chest and was immediately taken to the vet. The vet said that Jed would have to be knocked out to repair the damage, because it required inside stitches as well as outside ones, like when she was spayed. The vet said that while Jed was asleep, she’d clean Jed’s teeth, too, which needed it after 8 years of continuous kibble service.

So yesterday, Jonathan brought Jed back to the vet and held her while she was knocked out and then waited to bring his repaired dog home. Her chest is shaved where the hole was, and it’s bruised pretty badly, but Jed and her Food Guy are resting easy today.

Well, the trip is pretty much over. Tomorrow I go to a hotel near Heathrow to spend the night, since I have to be at the airport at 6 am on Tuesday morning and to do this from Wimbledon, I’d have to be out the door by 4:30 am and I’m just not man enough for that. I almost certainly never will be.

Time itself has blurred by weirdly these past three weeks. I feel like I’ve been here forever, but I haven’t stayed in one place for more than 3 or 4 days, so I’ve been living out of a suitcase, which is always slightly unsettling. And I always seem to be waiting for or on a plane or train or sitting in traffic. I feel like that line from the Talking Heads song “The Big Country”: “I’m tired of traveling/I want to be somewhere.”

I’m mostly packed. I had to borrow a garment bag and an extra suitcase to bring back all of Dad’s things, including awkward stuff like paintings. Went through an entire roll of bubble wrap and had to buy more to finish insulating everything. About the only thing not in my bags is the 250 year old, 7 foot tall grandfather clock, which will be crated up and shipped to me. Couldn’t find a bag big enough for that one.

There are compensations to having all this baggage. I used to do it with one carry-on bag, but knowing that I have bags to check and room to spare have given me carte blanche with respect to shopping, so I have been as acquisitive as a magpie all over Europe. Today, I spent the sabbath worshipping Suzy style at the shops in Kingston on Thames, where Kings were crowned in ancient days (and when they say ancient around here, they mean it: these were Kings in the year 900). Now it’s the best place for retail therapy near Wimbledon.

So that’s pretty much it. At the tail end of a long and exhausting trip, both emotionally and physically. My bags are in the hall, the essence of my father distilled down to a few beautiful objects, my mind looking forward to getting home and back to the halcyon days when Dad and I would have been making a special dinner and breaking out the really good wines, planning our next visit together. I think he would be pleased with the things I have done on this trip and how I did it. I just wish he was here to tell me himself.

When the phone rings at my house before 7 in the morning, I can be reasonably sure that it’s a member of my family, since they know I am congenitally incapable of sleeping in, even with the best of intentions. Of course, I can’t know if it will be bad news (my younger sister calling me at 6:30 a.m. to tell me that Dad was dead) or good. Wouldn’t it be great if they could make a caller ID that told you it was bad news so you could just ignore it and pretend it isn’t happening? I wish my reality was as stringently edited as “Jaws” playing on the Family Channel. I never want to know the bad news.

Since those in charge of technology development consistently ignore what I want, like the bad news caller ID and teleportation to Europe, I have to just answer the phone and hope for the best. Today, it was my city-hatin’ brother Jonathan, unexpectedly in town and inviting me for breakfast across town with a bunch of people I had never met before.

So I got dressed and took a cab to the Lower Haight. The Haight is not a place I go to very often, so it was fun to hang out in someone else’s neighborhood for a change. It’s a funny thing: although I live in a city, I don’t often venture outside my neighborhood or the Financial District, where I work. Jonathan’s friend C lives in a converted brake shop in a block of lovely Victorian houses. His place has a huge hammock hanging from the industrial-sized skylight in the livingroom, which also features a bar, found art, and a fairly impressive record collection. Definitely a bachelor pad.

A couple of C’s friends, who live around the corner, joined us for breakfast at the euphoniously named Squat & Gobble, where we had fresh OJ and eggs scrambled with chicken apple sausage. We sat outside with Jonathan’s faithful dog Jed at our feet, whose usual patience and good manners were rewarded by her very own plate of sausage, as well as miscellaneous breakfast food items that were surplus to requirements. It was nice to hang out and laugh and talk, especially since I had such an exhausting and horrible week. No-one can be uncheered around Jed. Happiness is, as Charles Schulz so truly observed, a warm puppy. Even when she’s almost 9 years old. Maybe especially.

And here’s the story.

A few years ago, I was coming home from visiting my brother and sister, and actually on the Golden Gate Bridge before I started looking for the $3 for the toll (you have to pay to get into the city, but not to leave it). Uh-oh. No money at all in my wallet. You would think I would have noticed when I spent my last dime, but apparently my thoughts were elsewhere, since this was the first time I had noticed my complete and utter brokeitude.

All the time I was waiting to get to the tollbooth, I wondered what would happen. When I finally got there, the bored County employee called the business office (located on the ocean side of the bridge) and gave them my license plate number, and told me to go over there and wrote them a check. So I did, feeling like a complete idiot.

I never forgot to have toll money again.

But I didn’t have to worry about the toll since I was heading out of the city on Friday. It was a very foggy day. So foggy that the towers of the bridge vanished into the mist, you couldn’t see Alcatraz, and you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began. It was all grey and misty and dreamlike, except for a mystery spot of golden sunlight where a lone, white-sailed boat floated.

With the wonder of micro-climates, though, it was sunny across the bridge in Sausalito and close to 90 in Santa Rosa, where my brother picked me up. We drove through beautiful Anderson Valley – I love the look of the rolling, golden hills with the dark green live oaks making deep pools of shade – stopping as usual at Gowan’s, where we got corn, peaches, and cider. I’m always amused by their sign, “Please park OFF highway”, because you just know someone actually parked ON the highway, at least once.

When we got to Albion, the town my brother and sister live near, I noticed that the flag at the post office was at half-mast. Turned out that the owner of the Albion Grocery, known locally as “the Gro”, had died of cancer on Thursday and the flag was lowered in her honor. Her birthday had been two days before, and the store had closed and her many admirers brought the party to her in the hospice.

In happier small town news, a family of barn swallows have built a nest right over the door to the post office. The nest is now full of peeping, adorable babies!

And at my sister Megan’s house, the sun was shining and the garden was blooming.

That night, we had dinner at the wonderful Ledford House restaurant, just across the road from the Gro, to celebrate Megan’s new EMT job. Our friend Mark was bartending that night, and the owners of the restaurant are good friends of my brother’s and sister’s. It’s an elegant, yet comfortable place, and attracts locals as well as tourists. The sunset was spectacular, as was the food and wine. It was the perfect way to start the weekend.

It’s my sister Megan’s birthday today!

Here’s how we looked 31 years ago, when Megan was a baby. How well I remember being called to the principal’s office that bright spring morning when she was born. I had never been called to the principal’s office before, and I was a little scared as I walked down the silent hallways, my footsteps echoing. As I walked to my doom, I mentally reviewed all the things I had done wrong recently, then all the things I might have been caught doing wrong. Then I was at The Office.

When I opened the door, the school secretary smiled at me brightly and said, “You have a little sister.” I had not expected this at all, and it was such a relief that none of my crimes had been found out. And oh, yeah, a new little sister. I ran back to my classroom and burst through the door yelling, “I have a little sister!” All the girls yelled, “Yay!” and all the boys yelled, “Boo!”

I’m still saying yay. And Megan has changed from a tiny, 5 pound baby to a tall, beautiful woman, and more than my sister, she’s my friend.

Well, things went pretty well yesterday. Number one, the rain that had been forecast with consistent gloom to be here from Wednesday through Sunday has yet to appear. In fact, the sun even peeped out coyly from time to time. Our stove seems to have recovered from its temporary fit of diva-ness, and roasted the turkey to perfection and turned out several batches of Suzy’s famous cheese biscuits (which, if I could figure out a way to market them, is definitely my million dollar idea).

Dinner was fun and stress-free, and no-one cried. I had my brother, sister and brother-in-law here, as well as my brother’s wonder dog Jed and his friend Carrie, who is expecting her first baby on Christmas Eve. I hadn’t met her before, but I really liked her, and it was a happy and relaxed evening.

Of our four cats, only Hannah was brave enough to approach Jed and smell her curiously. Jack, who thinks she’s so tough, barely looked at Jed for a split second before vanishing for the rest of the evening (later, we found her wedged under the couch). However upsetting this may have been to Jack, it did mean that for the first time since Jack entered our lives, we were able to eat a meal in peace, without her whining and demanding food, or possibly even jumping onto the table, which would have been really embarrassing in front of someone I had just met. So that was good, too.

We left the house at about 12:30 this afternoon with the intention of seeing “Harry Potter”, along with most of the city’s population. Insane traffic snarls, parking problems, crowded theater lobbies, and sold out show after show later, we finally bought tickets for the 4:00 p.m. show at 2:00 p.m., went and had a weirdly late lunch (hey, everyone’s eating habits are all screwed up now anyway) and finally got into the movie. By the way, all the shows up to 11:00 p.m. were sold out when we got back to the theater for the 4:00 p.m. show.

I liked the movie, but they fucked with some plot points for no reason (i.e. Norbert the dragon), and I didn’t like Hermione, but other than that, the casting was great. But Harry’s scar was lame (as my sister said, it looks like someone put it on with eyeliner) and I don’t understand why they didn’t give him green contact lenses when the books make such a big deal about his green eyes and this kid has the standard-issue English blue ones. But, having nit-picked and griped (and you just knew I would), it looked absolutely spectacular and the actors were wonderful. I guess with any beloved book, it’s very difficult to translate it to the screen and win everyone’s approval for how you did it. Definitely worth seeing, and worth seeing in the theater.

I never know what to do with myself now on Sunday mornings when Rufus and the cats are sleeping. I used to look forward to this time every week, because I always wrote to my father and always found an email from him waiting for me on Sunday mornings. He wrote to me at the end of the day, when he had changed for dinner and had dinner on its way. Then he’d go up to his study with a glass of wine from his collection and write to me, overlooking the garden. I would write to him on Sunday morning, quiet but for church bells and fog horns, the day before me. I have to say I have much less interest in my email now I know I will never again see one with the subject “Letter from Pooh” (our nickname for Dad since we were kids and he would tell us Pooh stories), but a part of me keeps on hoping I will.