Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Mishpucha (mi familia)
New Year’s gift
Some of you may recall that I had wanted to use my short story “Heaven on Earth” for PBW’s eBook challenge, but it got published instead! Well, the requisite six months have passed, so I’m now able to post the story.
I won’t try to classify it. SF? Spec fiction? Magical realism? Who knows. I wrote it to honor the memory of my grandfather, on whom the character of Papa Nate is loosely based. My grandfather never hung with the zoot suit crowd but he was a terror in any grocery store’s produce section. The speech patterns are entirely my Papa’s.
He died with dementia, which I believe was indeed multi-infarct dementia, a complication of untreated hypertension. The man would not take his blood pressure meds. “I feel fine without them,” he would say. “What do doctors know?” But it was a horrible way to go for a man whose personality drew so much from story and memory.
It’s fitting, I think, to “fix” his terrible end with a story, and to leave him in an eternity built on memory.
You may use this post as a comment thread on the story, if you like. And don’t forget: I’m going to do my best to live blog tonight, 7 PST at the latest. If I don’t see you, drive safe, everyone, and enjoy your New Year’s Eve.
D.
We’re back!
The eats were good and the weather balmy, so we spent an extra night in Eureka (our nearest “big” city). Thursday night we ate at Cin Cin, an upscale Italian place, where the most memorable dish was a platter of five cheeses, walnuts, grapes, and honey. Mmm, walnuts dipped in honey. Jake, the Salt Monster, discovered he could dip grapes in honey and sprinkle them with cracked salt. Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Biggest dessert hit was the panna cotta, which I had never had before. Karen says they did an unusually good job of it, so I’m tempted to see if I can make one at least as fine. As for main courses, Jake had gnocchi, I had about the most perfect scallops imaginable (seared/caramelized on one side, quick-seared on the other), and I think Karen had a salad.
Family photo below the cut . . .
Thirteen disquieting statements
For me, Thursday Thirteens provide a means of examining my life through an ever changing lens. A micro-autobiography, perhaps, where the challenge is to be honest, entertaining, and (hopefully) insightful. Like any memoirist, I suppose, I am the topic that fascinates me most. The “entertainment” angle hinges on how well I can convey that fascination to my readers — and, let’s face it, it depends on precisely how honest and how insightful I can be.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Maybe I’m more introspective these days because we’re approaching the end of what has been, for us, a difficult year. The stress has done weird things to me . . . weird in ways I can’t even begin to discuss here. Or even hint at. Suffice to say (despite #13 below) I’m feeling a lot like a pupa, and I haven’t a clue what’s going to hatch out at the end of this metamorphosis.
Below the fold: thirteen disquieting statements. Things folks have said to me which stuck like peanut butter to the palate. They don’t hurt anymore. Mostly.
Better living through drugs
I’m better today. Really, I am. Last night, I tanked up on meds (all strictly legal) and got the first decent night’s sleep I’ve had in a week — at least six hours, give or take. Had the ER called me to see a patient, I would have called 911 so that the ambulance would bring me in. “I’m here!” I would have told the shocked ER staff. “But you’ll have to fix me first!”
But I knew what I needed. Heal thyself, yatta yatta. I forced myself to drink 2.5 liters of water and felt MUCH better for it. I can’t emphasize this enough to my patients (and to y’all): with upper respiratory tract infections, and especially with sore throats, push fluids like crazy. Last night, it was all that kept me from a trip to the ER.
Forcing down 2.5 liters was a bitch, however. It would have been easier to admit myself to the hospital and write my own orders: IV fluids, steroids, antibiotics, and a nice walloping dose of narcotics to suppress the cough. It would have been more fun — some of those ER nurses are damned cute.
Karen’s a bit better, too; these new opiate patches are doing wonders for her pain. Now if only we could do something for the nausea which accompanies the patches. Or, at least we think the nausea is a medication side effect. I bought a home pregnancy test kit today to play it safe. (No, it would not be a good thing if Karen were pregnant. You don’t want to know all the weird meds she takes. And, believe me, I have the clinical background to know what this stuff does to fetuses. Not cool.)
To all you proofreaders out there (um, SHAINA!) sorry if there are errors here. My eyes are half-lidded. I’m going to take a nap before tonight’s Medical Executive Committee meeting; if I don’t nap now, I’ll probably do it during the meeting.
D.
Foot and fist
Today, Jake had his first Taekwondo tournament. (Per Wikipedia, Tae Kwon Do and Taekwondo are both correct.) He turned 11 last month, which placed him in the 11-13 age group. Yippee. So he was the shortest and lightest kid in his group; but did that faze him? Naw.
I’d say That’s my boy right about now, except I was a craven coward at his age. Um, at any age. In 7th grade, when I mouthed off about a girl I didn’t even know and it transpired she was standing RIGHT BEHIND ME, I lived in terror for weeks that she would hunt me down and slaughter me. I checked out some martial arts books from the library, took one look, and cringed. Me? Do that?
But this isn’t about me. Here’s Jake working through his form:
REAL photos this time
I expect you have recovered from that pumpkin photo?
My brother-in-law sent some photos from their recent visit here. Here’s Jake lighting his birthday cupcake:
Because Kate’s doing it
I know I promised you a Berkeley travelogue, but I’m having trouble feeling motivated. I mean . . . Top Dog. The Campanile. Sproul Plaza. Telegraph Avenue. East Bay Vivarium.
‘Nuff said. I’ll write more about Berkeley when I feel ready to give it the love it deserves.
This morning, while procrastinating because I dread editing blog-hopping, I chanced on this lovely post from Kate, my long lost twin. How I love those old black-and-whites, even if they’re photos of strangers. (Although, since I can really see Kate in her mom’s picture, they don’t feel much like strangers.) That one of Kate’s parents in the photo booth captures a time, a mood, an emotion.
On that note, here’s a photo my sister sent me last week. I had never seen this one before.
That’s Sis looking pensive, my mom and dad above her. My first thought when I saw this photo: I don’t know these people. My sis is — what, eleven years older than me? Or twelve? So, for me, these parents are young.
I mean, really young. My mother looks barely legal.
But it’s not even their youth which looks so startlingly unfamiliar; it’s their happiness. I see real joy in their eyes, joy and hope, the expectation young people have that the life ahead will be full of good things.
Maybe it was just an instant, not representative of the era. Or maybe they were truly that content with each other. I don’t know. Considering what they became, I’m not sure which possibility disturbs me more.
D.
Thirteen memories of Jake
I would have posted a lot more pictures, except the HP Scanner Gremlins are disgruntled this evening. Oh, well.
1. Karen was given a “3% lifetime chance” to conceive. In preparation for IVF, she had to get a baseline ultrasound to look for fibroids, etc.
The infertility doc’s partner did the ultrasound. “Well,” he said, “there he is.”
“There who is?” Karen asked in what I imagine was her Must Be Aggressive With Doctors voice.
There was Jake, of course. And there was egg on the infertility doc’s face. Um, so to speak.
2. Jake was a real kicker. Get me the hell out of here! he would scream.
Here’s a picture of Karen and her good friend Kira. Karen’s the pregnant one:
3. Karen had a relatively easy delivery. By the time she asked for the epidural, her doc told her, “Give me another five minutes and he’ll be out.”
Sorry, no crotch shots of the delivery. I remember thinking, No, for the love of God no, get him the hell out of there already. I suspect that was the last time Jake and I ever agreed about anything.
How big? 5 pounds, 2 ounces. For a comparison, this is a normal-sized pacifier:
4. Karen and I are hyper-rational types. We thought of ourselves as scientists back then, even though neither one of us made much dent on the world of science. Imagine our surprise when the post-partum parenting instincts kicked in.
Wow.
We argued over who would get the job of changing diapers — we both wanted to do it. (Yeah, that didn’t last.) We were like toddlers fighting over a new toy.
5. Jake had the best nanny. Julietta had raised three daughters of her own, and she treated Jake as if he were her fourth child. We wouldn’t have survived those first seven months without her.
6. Jake’s first word. Soon after arriving in San Antonio, the three of us were having lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. Or, rather, Karen and I were having lunch, and Jake was having a bottle.
I pointed at a young couple at a neighboring table: 20-something gal in short-shorts, guy with handlebar moustache and baseball cap. “Bubba,” I said to Jake. “Buh . . . buh.”
“Bubba!” said Jake, who had never before uttered a syllable.
“Great, Jake!” we said. “Do it again! Buh . . . buh.”
Nothing.
Nothing at all for another two years. Now we can’t shut him up.
7. When he was about eighteen months, we took him to the San Antonio mall to buy new shoes. The saleswoman was a Hispanic gal with a low-cut top and ample cleavage. Karen and I watched open-mouthed as Jake grabbed two handfuls.
I imagine he was curious, never having seen anything quite like that before. The saleswoman laughed it off and seemed a whole lot less embarrassed than Karen or I. Afterwards, I told Jake, “You know, once you turn two, you won’t be able to get away with that anymore.”
8. Before he turned three, he figured out how to do things with the TV remote that we couldn’t do. Not content with Total Control Over Television, he tried to use the remote to shut off the room lights and the swamp fan. Then he pointed it at us, hit the off button, and laughed maniacally.
9. The kid has always had an amazing mind. You know that game, Tower of Babel? That’s the one with a stack of seven disks, one smaller than the next. You’re supposed to transfer the stack from one post to another, one disk at a time, never putting a larger disk on top of a smaller one.
Unbelievable would have been if he’d figured the puzzle out at age 2. Sorry, he’s not unbelievable. Amazing, however, was watching Jake play with it for two hours nonstop. Most adults don’t have an attention span like that.
10. And then there’s that puzzle with pegs and holes. You’re supposed to put the square pegs in the square holes, round pegs in the round holes, and so forth. Before he was one year old, he figured out how to do it the right way, but he did it that way only once. Forever after, he kept trying to figure out how to get the pegs to go into the wrong holes.
If we hadn’t seen him do it right that one time, I suppose we would have been pretty worried.
11. Remember Comet Hale-Bopp? I do. For two or three nights, I took Jake outside, put him on my shoulders, and pointed out the comet to him. I doubt he remembers this, but at the time, it seemed like an important thing to do.
12. Early religious instruction. One of the San Antonio synagogues had a fair — a Purim fair, if I remember correctly — so I took Jake to the fair to soak up some Yiddishkeit.
To this day, I regret not having a camera. They had set up a Jonah and the Whale ride: little kids climbed into the whale’s mouth, bounced around inside his stomach, and then slid out . . . well, you can guess how they slid out.
13. Twelve memories, and we haven’t even scratched Jake’s fourth year. I wanted to close on a recent photo, however. Here’s Jake, today, practicing Tae Kwon Do at the dojo (do they call ’em dojos?)
You know what to do. Leave a comment below and I’ll give you some linky lurve.
Next week: Thirteen Things I Learned from Cosmo, Part Quatre.
Lyvvie? Gene Tierney. Definitely Gene Tierney. (Not Lyvvie’s most recent post, but how could I resist?)
Pat goes a-voting (don’t you Canadians know the election is in November?)
See Dean choke the bald giraffe
Darla introduces us to author Jim Butcher
Placate May’s screaming dreamer
Trish’s Thirteen Ghosts of Toronto
D.
Best picture ever.
Click on the photo to see the full-size, full-color pic.
We took this photo in April, ’96, at Huntington Gardens, one of the nicest places in LA (and about the only redeeming feature of the notorious robber baron’s villainy). Karen looks so happy in this, and Jake has such a precious “WTF?” expression, as if he were debating the wisdom of this whole life thing.
Had another cud-chewing memoirist bit in mind today but then I thought, Eff it. What’s really important? These two are really important.
Today is Jake’s day. No homework, except we’re “making him” watch Scotland, PA. (He read Macbeth earlier this year, so this movie should be a nice tie-in. Plus, it’s funny as hell.)
Afterwards, we’ll pick up cat food, make a run to the bank (the kid never spends any of his money. He likes to say he’s richer than we are. He certainly has less debt), and buy fudge.
And for once, tomorrow’s Thursday Thirteen is a chip shot: Thirteen Memories of Jake — with more photos.
D.
Overheard at Chez Walnut
The TV sound is muted. Zombies stream across the screen, arms extended, running after a car.
Doug: What’s that?
Karen: Some new remake of Dawn of the Dead.
Doug: Have we seen it?
Karen: No. But I find it deeply offensive. Offensive to the core of my being.
Doug: Really? How come?
Karen: Those zombies. They were running.
That’s my wife. A zombie purist.
I think I’ll keep her.
D.