The Vigil

The air streaming out of the grocery store cooler is dry and cold and bracing. I stand in front of an assortment of premium gourmet ice cream in single-serve cartons with high calorie counts and higher prices.

What flavor to buy for a dying man to coax him into taking a little more nourishment, a few more molecules of fat and sugar wrapped in the dulcet flavorings of Haagen-Dazs? Chocolate? He has quite the sweet tooth. Coffee? He loves his morning coffee. Dulce de Leche? Oh why the hell not? I buy two of each, then drive a few blocks further to a liquor store.

I am waging a war against death, and my pathetic weapons are ice cream, chocolate pudding and German beer.

It has been nearly a week since my eighty-six year old father, already afflicted by dementia and Parksinsons disease, was admitted to the emergency room for the second time in a month with a perfect storm of converging handicaps—untreated diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, a blood clot in his leg running from hip to knee, a raging bladder infection, and a foot in serious trouble from circulatory problems. Unable to speak articulately for months before this, he was unable to tell anyone the things going wrong in his body this time until they had reached critical mass.

He has now made it more than three days past the phone call from the hospital telling me—as I stood at the counter of a German gift shop buying him some more CDs of folk songs from his native land—that he would probably not live another half hour. This old soldier is tough…but he is still wasting away. He is now in hospice care, a method of care designed to ease suffering rather than aggressively try to change nature’s course. Treating him with something even as simple as an IV line for fluids and nutrition has been complicated by his dementia—he has spent most of the past month in hospital beds with restraints to keep him from tearing the IV lines from his arms. A hospice worker who knows nothing of the man wondered aloud whether he had pulled his IV lines out because he wanted no further treatment to prolong his life. No, I retorted, given that he spent four years as a prisoner of war, three of them working miserably in a French coal mine, I think he was more likely simply trying to escape.

The conundrums are many. Enough pain killers and sedatives to dull the pain in his tortured foot keep him too sleepy to eat enough to regain some lost strength. Intravenous fluids would require readmitting him to a hospital and placing him in restraints again, which must be a horror to him. The difficulty he already has swallowing make it more difficult to get any measurable amounts of food or liquid into his stomach.

And yet…I know I have made small inroads. A half cup of ice cream one day. A half bottle of German beer yesterday, a full twelve-ounce bottle this morning, sucked down through a straw to the accompaniment of German soldier songs on the boom box. I knew I was on to something the day before when I lifted the straw to his lips and he tentatively drew in the golden liquid. Afraid that he might take too much at one time, I pulled the straw away. He tried to speak, and I leaned closer to hear. It was one word. “Again.” Again what, daddy? More beer? Another single word answer. “Beer.” I look into his hazel eyes that still light up sometimes with recognition when he looks at me, and I know I will keep it coming. There is no “bar time” at this place.

I feel helpless to change the larger workings of fate, and so I focus on the smaller things that I can do. A promise to bring some Bitburger beer, an evening ritual from a family reunion in Germany a few years ago. The collection of German songs, which he sometimes taps his foot to or tries to sing along with. I try to remember to wear bright, colorful shirts, and perfume, and long dangling earrings to catch the light. My boyfriend, who speaks a little Deutsch from his time overseas in the Air Force, sat with us and spun a tale of taking my father to Berlin for Oktoberfest. We set up a bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook outside his window, and watched as goldfinches, bright as lemons, came to feed only minutes later.

I’ve brought my old chocolate lab to visit, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball around the hospice room to keep him busy. At one point I searched the room for the ball for another throw, but could not see it anywhere on the floor. It was only when I straightened up that I realized Bandit had placed it on my father’s bed beside his elbow. I don’t think my father knew this at all, but I still patted my retriever on the head in gratitude. “You’re such a good dog,” I told him.

This evening as I leave the nursing home I feel an inevitability settling in, a waning of hope. The odds are long against him.

And yet, as long as he’s still breathing and still smiles at the sound of my voice, I will keep trying to fend off death, one spoonful of ice cream, one Oktoberfest beer at a time.

Back Away from the Bunny!

It's the dog days of summer, and that can mean only one thing.

It's time to go to the fair.

I've been to two this year so far, the county fair and the state fair. Marvelous opportunities to people watch, eat food on a stick, pay way too much for alcohol, weigh the relative merits of things you'd never make at home like deep-fried s'mores, deep-fried cookie dough and chocolate covered bacon, and traverse the midway looking for more and more inventive ways to spend $20 to buy a stuffed animal worth two bits. I spent only six bucks this time, coming out ahead of the average, using a mallet to pound a catapault flinging a succession of rubber frogs into a barrel with rotating lily pads, and winning a tiny white stuffed tiger which I promptly surrendered to my boyfriend's daughter. She's eighteen. What, I should keep the toy for myself? My traditional prize-winning duty done, I passed on any further opportunities to win goldfish, throw darts at balloons, toss basketballs, fling plastic rings at upright soda bottles.

Because for me, the fair's not about the games, the food, even the music. The essence of a fair on a hot summer day is ... the animals.

Oh, the black and brown Clydesdales gleaming like dark satin under the floodlights in their jingling ten-horse hitches, silky white "feathers" floating around their hooves like cheerleaders' pompoms as they thunder around the coliseum, tons of beribboned and disciplined muscle on the hoof. Oh, the incredible assortment of chickens, some weirdly resembling poodles, other looking like eccentric characters in a British barnyard comedy. Oh, the cows, spotless and brushed and shampooed, nearly odorless, chewing contentedly in their stalls surrounded by perfectly clean straw, while the calves nestle together as cute as a basket of puppies. Sigh... I could go on and on and on.

It's not like I haven't seen cows before. Or horses. Or chickens. Or rabbits.

Over the years, I've been in the position of living with and cleaning up after all of them, in ways that left lasting impressions. At seventeen and Chicago-bred, I'd been privy to an abundance of bovine company when living on a once-working farm with my family in northern Wisconsin. Call it a social experiment gone awry, for a few years we nonetheless packed our decrepit barn with a horse and some ponies and some calves and some geese and some chickens and ducks and a pig. I could drive the route to the feed mill blindfolded. Noah's Ark meets Green Acres. The barn swallows moved in on their own.

When it came time to milk the cow my parents brought home from an auction one day, I was the only person brave enough or stupid enough to step up to the job that evening with a bucket between my knees and a wooden stool to sit on. We named her "Queenie," and the two things I remember most are the fact that she came with some wicked-looking horns ... and she didn't like to stand still during milking. The stool didn't have wheels. It was quite the sight, watching me scoot my rear on my little stool to follow her, the milk sloshing back and forth in the pail, and quite the job to perform twice a day.

But milking was by far the friendlier task. What goes in must go out, and after hauling bale after bale of hay into the barn and shaking it out in front of Queenie's nose, I recall shoveling mountains of ... by-products ... from the trench behind where she stood into a wheelbarrow and out the back door of the barn to a large, fragrant heap. A lot of what I was doing back then fits in the "character building" column. I've been told that I'm quite the character.

Likewise, when it came to the two horses I owned for more than thirty years. Yes, I just loved to look at them in a summer pasture, their tails switching back and forth as they grazed, their ears swiveling like semaphores at every sound. The sight of a horse grazing in the sunlight on a warm summer day can still make my heart skip a beat in fond remembrance. But again ... I was no stranger to cleanups, and medications, and fly-repellants, and near-death experiences at night in freezing barns, and hauling heavy hay bales and fifty-pound sacks of horse feed around.

But the animals at the fair--they're like what Playboy centerfolds are to real women, what Marie Antionette's little hobby farm at Versailles was to a working farm in the French countryside. For the rest of us, not the hard-working exhibitors, these are purely eye-candy! Fantasy animals! Hollywood-groomed and ready for their close-up, Mr. DeMille!

Really, what little girl or boy watching the Lone Ranger and Tonto thunder across the mesa in pursuit of bad guys ever thought that Silver and Scout might throw a shoe? Or need a hay wagon following somewhere behind in the badlands? Did Timmy ever follow Lassie with a pooper scooper? Did Wilbur ever lift a shovel behind Mr. Ed?

So with that frame of mind--voluntary and total suspension of reality--I stepped into the fairs. Oooohhhed and aaaaaaahhhhhhed over the flashy Clydesdales as they threw their weight into harness. Chuckled at the chickens, cooed over the newly hatched baby chicks. Debated just where, on a "cuteness" scale, human babies fell in relation to puppies, kittens, and fuzzy ducklings. (The jury's still out on that one.)

Walking past the dairy barn at the tail end of the evening, I passed by a lovely Brown Swiss heifer placidly chewing her cud. She was spotless, she was dust-free, she could have stepped right out of a Gainsborough painting. My arm immediately crossed over the low wooden fence to stroke her neck, and in an instant I was enveloped by the smell of fresh hay and memory and in some ways much simpler times. My hand found its way up to her ears and her forehead, and the recollection of just where to scratch to make a happy cow came flooding through my fingers. The heifer leaned into it as I worked my scritching around the nubs of her horns and around the base of her ears. If cows could purr, this one would have sounded like an Evinrude motor.

It was a delight. Still, when I go to the fair, I know I'm in no danger of acting on impulse and bringing home a horse or a cow or a goat or a camel. The rabbits, however, are another story.

For decades of fair-going, the rabbits have been my real weakness. So soft, so plush, so cuddly looking, so clean, so touchable! Blank slates of fluffy goodness. I did, in fact, succumb the siren song of cuteness a few years ago. Wandering past rows of "Mini-Rex" rabbits, my oldest daughter, soon bound for college, stared longingly at a perky brown rabbit that looked like the Velveteen Rabbit come to life. "Oh, if I was going to have a rabbit, that's the one I'd want," she said.

About three weeks later, we had a rabbit living in a crate in our kitchen. Yes, he was extremely cute! But she left for college about a month later, and for the next three years reality hopped around on my kitchen floor with inevitable surprises. I think we could have weathered just about anything else, but this bunny came with, ahem, personal hygiene issues that were truly dispiriting. I think that if someone had invented bikini waxes for bunnies, he might still be with us. But eventually, the routine of giving a fat, kicking rabbit haircuts in unspeakable places proved to be one too many things for me to juggle at the time, and he was routed to the local humane society, along with all his gear, food, crate, litter box, yogurt treats and toys. The cat has since taken over his job of covering all surfaces in the house with gossamer fluff.

And yet...I felt that dangerous surge again this year as I dawdled past rows upon rows of rabbits in their cages, clean, odorless, non-threatening, fluffed and brushed and fed, with ribbons displayed proudly beside their name tags. Nary a rabbit dropping to be seen underfoot. No hygiene issues here. The pull was magnetic, nearly tidal. I could feel common sense fall away at the possibility of owning one of these lovely, cuddly little animals again. I could feel myself falling in love-at-first-sight all over again--that ridiculous moonstruck phase that never really lasts but fires that brain chemistry to dizzying heights nonetheless.

I shook my head and forced myself to take a step back from the cages. Focused my mind not on the bunny in front of me but the one that had hopped around my kitchen for three years, leaving deep scratches on my arms every time it was bath time at the kitchen sink. Recalled litter cleanup and bunny hair tickling my nose and the necessity of running interference between a six pound rabbit and a sixteen pound cat. I stepped out of the small animal barn and back into the sunlight. I had escaped!

There's one more fair to go to before the end of summer, and so I'm not out of the woods yet. Looking into the rabbit cages, for me, is like an alcoholic staring at a bottle, or Elizabeth Taylor staring at Richard Burton. Oftentimes surmountable, but sometimes not.

I just hope that next time, I'll continue to conjure some common sense to balance out the endorphins and optimism that no doubt will start up all over again. And if I can't, that whoever I'm with will just take me by the arm, give it a tug, and say...

BACK AWAY FROM THE BUNNY!!

The Volcano Diaries

"You can always turn back!"

Not the most encouraging advice ever given to a hiker thinking about setting off on a trek up the side of a dormant volcano where the trail began at more than 8,000 feet above sea level and the difficulty rating for the 2.4 mile hike in the national park brochure was "strenous."

Gulp.

But then, I really hadn't been looking for encouragement. I'd been looking for validation ... or any other form of an excuse to not climb the mountain.

My son and I were on a week-long traditional mom-and-me vacation on the West Coast, a trip of particular poignance because he's the last of the brood and his departure for college means my nest will be empty for the first time in twenty-eight years. We'd stopped at Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California at the suggestion of a middle-aged couple we'd met at Yosemite when I volunteered to take their picture a couple of days earlier. I'd only planned for the first three days of the trip, figuring we'd make it up as we went along, and so we let ourselves be carried to higher altitudes on the descriptive phrases of our newfound acquaintances. This was my most wing-and-a-prayer vacation since I'd gone to Ireland for a month at the age of twenty-two with a backpack stocked with Carnation Instant Breakfast packets and a bicycle that I had to reassemble once I landed and the phone numbers of a few of my Irish relatives.

This time I was (much) older, and (much more) out of shape, and without the resiliancy of youth to cushion my missteps. And my left foot had been hurting like heck for the previous four months, making a reusable ice pack and a microwavable heat pack and a bottle of Advil part of my packing essentials.

My son and I had scoped out the park the evening before, after checking into our remote little motel that had been recommended on the fly two hundred miles before by the young man who had carved the bear I bought at a gift shop. Are we finding a theme here? One of the most memorable things my son said to me during the entire vacation was, stepping back into the motel room after phoning his girlfriend at twilight to chat, "Mom, I think I just heard a cow get attacked by a bear. Do you want to come outside?" What's a mother to say? Of course I stepped outside for a listen. And when the porch lights went out behind us, you wouldn't believe how fast we beat it back into the room!

But while he was outside on the phone, I'd been poring over the pamphlets and maps we'd picked up by the visitor center the night before. And by the time I went to sleep, I was convinced that between my lifelong acrophobia, and the troublesome foot, and the vivid description of altitude sickness that usually sets in at lower altitudes than we were even going to start hiking at I was going to chicken out in favor of a more leisurely walk half the distance to see a pretty waterfall.

All I was looking for when we pulled up to the park entrance the next morning was an excuse. I pled age, I pled infirmity, I pled forty extra pounds, I pled an appalling lack of stamina ... and then I threw in the vertigo and fear of heights for good measure. The heights thing is no laughing matter for me, in fact. I get dizzy if I climb higher than the first step on a ladder, and it's been like that for most of my life.

But the cheerful young lady in the Smokey the Bear ranger hat kept trying to steer me in the direction of optimism. Hikers of all ages and sizes were known to have made it to the summit, she said. Drink plenty of fluids to stave off altitude sickness. And remember, "you can always turn back." I didn't even have to turn my head to know that my son was grinning at the exchange.

We drove on to the base of the trail leading to the peak of Lassen Peak, topping out at 10,457 feet above sea level. We packed water bottles and granola bars and extra clothes in the backpack he'd be carrying. There were snow fields below where we even started. I felt out of breath at the first switchback, which was still so close to the parking lot it didn't even list how far we'd traveled. I wasn't going for glory here, just endurance, and so I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, watching my son's heels to keep from feeling dizzy just as I had hiking down the side of the Grand Canyon with my daughter a few years earlier. (It was a very character building experience.)

We met a delightful pair of teachers from Florida, Pat and Jackie, who went on hiking adventures during their summers off and decided to tackle Lassen this time. They each had a good dozen years or more on me, and were taking this adventure in stride. I didn't want to wimp out while they were watching, and so we overlapped each other's rest stops along the way up. They called out a lot of encouragement to me on the way up.

The higher we climbed, the more breathtaking the views became. The Sierra Nevadas were distant blue hills under a nearly cloudless sky. Lake Helen gleamed azure in the park below us. Snow fields were striped pink and white, but the air was still warm. The forests below looked as tiny as the shrubbery on a model train display. As we scrambled over loose gravel and larger rocks and tree roots, a doe picked her way across the side of the mountain above us, twin fawns scampering quickly behind her to the cover of some brush.

Continuing in the vein of being practical instead of heroic, I took plenty of rest stops along the way, chugging water and letting the faster hikers pass us by. And sometimes Pat and Jackie! There was usually a tree or two that I could sit under for shade, but inevitably we began to leave the tree line behind. Still, I kept going, watching my son's feet in front of me, occasionally getting a hand up over the rougher patches. And then, with less than a mile to the summit, I came to one more switchback and stopped. Up to my left, I could see the trail cross back and forth upon the bare mountain face. And to my right, I could see nothing but open sky.

Right then and there, my fear of heights suddenly nailed me to the side of the mountain. "Robert, honey," I said, "I'm sorry, but I just can't take one more step!" Of all the things that I thought would have shut me down long before--the extra pounds, the thin air at 9,000 feet, the gimpy foot--it was such an anticlimax to call it quits because of this!

Still, there was no going forward for me, and I sure wasn't going to go back down alone. I folded my fleece sweatshirt into a pad for my seat on a nearby rock, took custody of the backpack, and settled in to wait for my son to make it to the summit and bring back some good pictures. It took him two hours to get back, factoring in the half-hour phone call to his girlfriend from the top of the mountain, a lot of picture taking, and some time spent just glorying in the achievement.

As I sat, I basked in the sun and marveled at the grandeur surrounding me, and the total serendipity that had brought us here. Who knew, when we set out on this trip, that we'd be setting out to climb a mountain to its very top? Or photographing a yellow bellied marmot peeking out of his den near a set of volcanic vents? It was certainly an altitude on the side of a mountain that I never thought I'd experience.

A very long time ago, when a friend of mine was getting ready to leave college without graduating and faced a very uncertain future, I sent him on his way with an inspirational poster that read something to the effect that if you set your sights among the heavens, even if you fail you will fall among the stars.

I hadn't thought about that in quite a long time, but thought about it again recently. At the tail end of our vacation, we drove the well-maintained highway to the visitor center of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and realized that even though it looked rugged and awesome and hgh and imposing...we'd both made it farther above sea level than this national landmark.

But for me, an even bigger victory was just in getting as far as I had. I may not have made it to the top as I would have liked ... but I ended up sitting high enough that I could nearly touch the stars.

Grow, Dammit!

One popular definition of insanity is that of doing the exact same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.

This might explain why for three summers in a row, I've planted blue butterfly delphiniums in the same spot in my garden, only to watch them die off. And I'm still pondering whether I should to run to the nursery and buy three more in four-inch pots...for the same exact place.

To be fair, I'm sure they had help on the way to their Valhalla of the Verdant. I have rabbits in abundance, little Peter Cottontails romping around the yard without the blue jackets. I have a chocolate lab that likes to dig at the roots of plants where I've sprinkled dried blood meal to repel the rabbits. I have little striped gophers who scramble in and out of the drain pipes for the rain gutters that empty into both sides of the garden. The frantic scratching of their tiny feet inside the metal pipes as I round the corner is a gentle reminder that out in the country, you're never alone. I've been known to neglect watering, neglect weeding, neglect fertilizing, neglect spraying. Are you sensing a theme here?

But still. Other things abound, and in fact reproachfully encircle those pathetic empty spaces. The line of strawberry plants that run along the front of the garden have sent out tenacious masses of tendrils in each direction like a Roman gladiator hurling a net over an opponent in the Coliseum. I have to pull and rip and hack them into submission. The coneflowers behind them are sinking sideways from the sheer weight of their tangerine and yellow and white flowers. The hot pink phlox with the bi-colored leaves--a prized find at Home Depot last year--are ready to burst.

And yet, for whatever reason, the delphiniums have perished. Repeatedly. And yet, I recall their brief, glorious bloom the first year I put them in, and I still hope.

This is the third summer since the man in my life showed up with a pickup truck full of mulch and music and the enthusiasm for transforming 200 square feet of bare gravel-covered plastic akin to Michelangelo eyeing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In just a few weeks, the fuse had been lit, an oasis born, a garden begun in my soul.

Planting a garden is such an act of faith! And in my case, blind faith. Where others may plan and coordinate colors and heights and growing seasons, I still take a more devil-may-care approach. Approximation was, and still is, my watchword. The only thing that I usually expect now is that if I put a plant in the ground, it will grow, at least for a little while. That's a big step up from the pre-gardening years.

There have been a few surprises along the way. Who knew ... that the little clump of "obedient plants" my gardening friend Rosemary shared with me, a tidy and demure two feet tall at the end of their first season, would spread like a virus and double in height, shading everything behind them like Godzilla looking down at a Manhattan subway station? Who knew ... that the white butterfly bush that I planted that first gardening season "just to keep him happy" would flourish like a spray of fireworks and make the view from across my ironing board such a delight as hummingbirds and butterflies and hummingbird moths looking like tiny flying shrimp hovered delicately and landed? Who knew ... how personally and even parentally involved I could feel as my little charges took root and grew ... or not. Hopes raised, then dashed, as sunflower and coneflower sprouts grew from seeds in peat pots in the house, then flourished for a few days in another new garden, then were nipped in the bud, so to speak, by the double whammy of the gopher next door and a finicky doe who didn't think the other fifteen acres of vegetation had quite enough variety for her palate.

I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, how much suspense and satisfaction could be sparked by finding a broken off stalk of sedum sitting on the checkout counter of the local plant nursery last summer. As a general rule, I don't even like sedum. But this forlorn amputee was both unusual and gorgeous, with sage green foliage edged in cream, and a large raft of tiny pink and magenta flowers on top. "Good lord, that's beautiful," I commented to the clerk as she rang up my purchase.

"Why don't you take it home," she replied. "Just stick in the ground and see if it'll grow." I needed no further urging, and did as directed. Watered, and hovered, and watered, and hovered some more. By the time of the first frost weeks later, it hadn't grown any...but hadn't withered and died either. Post-winter, as the snow receded, I was back in the garden taking inventory, pushing away the mulch to see if all my babies had come back. The delphiniums didn't make it, but there at the site of the sedum stalk, was a tiny white bud just breaking through the soil. Eureka!!

There's not that much planting that will take place for the rest of this year. The challenge right now is just to beat back the weeds and remember to water through the dry spells of late summer. Even my watering technique has evolved into a tranquility zone of sorts over the past three growing seasons. Where I used to drag the hose from plant to plant to efficiently dump a gallon or two on each at a time, I now pull up a lawn chair on the parking pad nearby and sit and spray from a distance, remembering all the heat and dripping sweat and optimism and romance and pipe tobacco and sore muscles and music that went into creating it in the first place, as the leaves and stalks and flower heads bend gently under the cascading droplets.

That gorgeous sedum plant is just about ready to flower, and I'm no longer hovering like a demented soccer mom on the sidelines (been there, done that!). But something tells me that before the week is out, I'll be back at the nursery looking for another trio of butterfly blue delphiniums. And as I dig them into the garden, I'll be muttering both words of encouragement ... and telling them to "grow, dammit!!"