Crossing It Off

During church Sunday I made a list of all the things I want to do during my stay-at-home-vacation. (What? You don't make lists during church? You do know that lying is a sin, right?)

Look at how much fun I'm having! I am crossing things off left and right.

Clean out Boy#3's closet? Cross it off!

Clean refrigerator? Check! (And, whoa. Gross. I definitely need to take more days off to get things done around the house. Or maybe I need to give up Breaking Pointe and clean the refrigerator instead?)

Meals into freezer? Crossed off, because who am I? Rachael Ray? No, I am not.

Next up is lunch with a friend, a friend with whom I don't lunch nearly often enough. Then this afternoon I'll re-pot the philodendron, and work on the shawl that may be part of my Mother of the Groom attire and watch a couple more episodes of Homeland (I'm only two and a half seasons behind now). 

Envy me. This is my life for three more days. 

I Refuse to Call It That

If things had gone as planned Husband and I would have been waking up in the cool fragrance of the Colorado mountains this morning. This was the week we had set aside for our annual camping trip, and every year we look forward to the books and knitting and cool breezes. Well, one of us does; the other one looks forward to hiking and exploring nature, but whatever. Po-tay-toes, po-tah-toes.

That was the plan until last Monday anyway. We had our national park camp reservations and I'd cleared the vacation hours with my boss, but we've been running pretty much non-stop since my mother-in-law's health began to fail at Christmas. We're down to fumes and the to-do list before vacation just kept getting longer. As we were eating supper and trying to plan when we would pick up the camper, clean it and get it stocked for travel, Husband looked at me.

"What would you say if I suggested we just stay home instead?" he asked.

"I'd say this, right here, is just another reason I love you," was my reply.

We decided we'd treat this week as a vacation, but stay at home and divide our time between taking care of the non-urgent household tasks that hang over our heads all the time but keep getting pushed behind things that are on fire at the moment, and doing the things we normally do on vacations--books, knitting, day trips to antique shops. I declared a limit of two hours on "work"--if the linen closet isn't straightened out in two hours, it's waiting until the next day.

Today we spent two hours cleaning out a closet in Boy#3's old room, packing up two big boxes of Star Wars and Star Trek books for the attic and stuffing two garbage bags full of clothes for Goodwill. Next I'm going to shower, then work on Boy#1's t-shirt quilt for a while, then maybe take a nap.

You might call this a "staycation," as you legitimately could since it was added to Merriam-Webster's dictionary in 2009, but for some reason that portmanteau sets my teeth on edge and I don't plan to do anything this week that sets my teeth on edge. Just knitting, reading, and using my own bathroom.

Aaaaah. This is going to be nice.

My Day With Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas |Occidental Dissent

(Someone asked me about the original story I wrote for the alumni magazine about my day with Helen Thomas. Here it is, reprinted with permission.)

NOTES FROM HELEN THOMAS’S DEN MOTHER

So what’s it like to spend the day with the world’s most famous woman journalist?

Yes, that one—the one whose piercing “Mr. President, I don’t think you’veanswered that question” have made her feared by eight administrations. The one you saw boogeying with Aretha Franklin just one seat down from Hillary Clintonat the White House Correspondents’ Dinner less than twelve hours before she stepped off the plane in Wichita on her way to speak at Small College's Commencwment. The one mentioned in the same breath as Sam Donaldson as the White House correspondent most likely to make a press secretary sweat.  

Well, I’ll tell you what it’s like.

It’s like spending the day with your very intelligent, very energetic, very lovable grandmother.

Really.

The Helen Thomas who had been my idol since I saw her for the first time in the front row of the White House press corps turns out not to be the hard-bitten harridan I had anticipated (and dreaded). She came off the plane with a black bag holding her return ticket and her passport (she doesn’t drive; it’s her identification at airports) in one hand, and a plastic carrier holding a copy of the New YorkTimes and a pair of red shoes in the other. She’s tiny, only five feet tall or so, and much prettier than cameras would lead you to believe, with a jeweled red pin in her hair. She is, in fact, huggable.

Within minutes this woman who has brought entire administrations toaccountability is asking me about my family.  Helen Thomas is asking me about my family. And it seems only natural to be telling her all about them.

She is charming, self-effacing, direct. Her stamina is unbelievable: The correspondents’ dinner had lasted late, she explains, then she wanted to catch CNN to find out what was happening with the release of the American servicemen, and she was afraid she’d miss her 6:40 a.m. flight so she just stayed up. An all-nighter at age 78.

She is a news junkie, who quietly frets about being out-of-pocket, and needs an afternoon CNN fix more than she needs the opportunity to put her feet up in front of it.

Nearly six decades in the news business have given her a unique perspective—her thumbnail sketches of presidents are based on personal observation (Jack Kennedy had the most vision, Jimmy Carter is the best ex-president, Clinton will beremembered for his gains in education and the economy as well as for his sordid affairs).

Her comments are surprisingly kind, for someone who has seen politics at its most down and dirty. But she can turn sharp. She reads prodigiously, and talks about columnists she admires. How about Cal Thomas, one mischievous questioner asks? “Hell, no,” she says tartly. (In fairness, that was the only expletive out of her mouth all day.)

At Commencement, in a speech she predicts beforehand will be “utterly forgettable and filled with cliches,” she charges graduates with the responsibility of dealing with a world that is producing Kosovo and Littleton. Get a life, she tells them.

Then she walks away from the stage party, and tells me (by now she’s calling me her den mother) she’s ready to go back to the plane. It’s still an hour early, but she’s a worrier—“so much can go wrong on the way to an airport, and I have to be back tomorrow for Clinton’s summit with the Japanese prime minister.”

So as we sit in the airport waiting for TWA 516 to board, we make final chitchat, the legend and the den mother who met only eight hours ago.

“You’re coming to Washington? Are you going to bring all the boys? Make sure to call me—promise to call me, and we’ll see the sights together,” she seemsgenuinely excited at the prospect of herding us around her town. “Here, I don’t have a card but let me write down my phone numbers,” and she carefully prints her home address and home and office phone numbers.

And then, after a final hug, and last waves, the tiny figure is back on another of a lifetime of planes. She’ll sleep on the way back to Washington (“I can doze on anything that moves”) and be up in time to cover the most powerful man in the world tomorrow.

As my husband and I leave the terminal, the security guard asks us about her.

“I watch her all the time on television—is she a relative of yours?”

No, but I wish.

She Was Just Like Us, Only Incredible

Boy#1 and Helen Thomas. He's on the right.

I believe I've mentioned that I have the best job in the world, and 90 percent of the time I would do it for far less money. Fortunately, the remaining 10 percent of my job is taxing enough that on average, I'm paid decently. (Have you ever had to notify a newspaper after the death of a student? Then you know what I'm talking about.) Today I'm going to talk about the 90 percent. 

I had been working here for three years in 1999 when Helen Thomas gave the Commencement address at Small College. I was the director of public relations at the time, and was assigned to make sure Ms. Thomas was where she should be when she should be, and that the president didn't have to worry about this famous visitor.

Well. 

Helen Thomas had been my idol since I had been old enough to realize that a WOMAN was sitting in the front row of each and every White House press conference I watched. She repeatedly went  head-to-head with the president of the United States, and the man in the office always answered her with respect.

Teenage and even slightly older than teenage women today have no idea how powerful this image was when I was that age. We were still of an age where it was daring to think girls could be doctors as well as nurses, principals as well as teachers. And there was Helen Thomas, asking hard questions on behalf of the entire world. She was the opposite of the one-named rock stars whose fame abbreviated their names--Elvis, and Cher, and Bing. Her body of work had made it impossible for me to think of her in anything less formal than her full name--she was always Helen Thomas in my mind.

Helen Thomas turned out to be delightful. She was tiny, not even as tall as my shoulder, wearing a red jeweled pin in her hair, and genuinely interested the college and (flatteringly) in me. She called me her den mother, and when it was time for her to board her plane back to Washington she wrote her home phone number and address on a piece of paper and told me to be sure to call her if I was ever in the city. "Promise you'll call me and we'll see the sights together," she told me.

In the article I wrote for the alumni magazine I described the experience as "like spending the day with your very intelligent, very energetic, very lovable grandmother."

She had been my professional idol for a couple of decades, but the best part wasn't that I got to talk to Helen Thomas and pick her brain about presidents, it was that Boy#1 also had the chance to meet her. To say he was an avid fan of the political process would be gross understatement. He lived and breathed politics, to the point that we had to put a ban on dinner table discussions of favorite presidents. And here he was, getting to meet the woman whose "Thank you, Mr. President" had closed White House press conferences through several administrations.

I still look back on the day I spent with Helen Thomas with wonder. I met my professional idol, shared the experience with my husband and with Boy#1, then wrote about it. I regret that we didn't call her when we were in Washington a decade later, because I bet she would have remembered her trip to Kansas and her den mother.

And when I heard of Helen Thomas's death this week, I thought about that day. It was the first time that I realized I might have the best job in the world.

Kansas, You're Mean

Oh, Kansas. Why you gotta be so mean?

No, no, Kansas, I still love you, even though you huffed and puffed and blew most of the sweetgum tree in our back yard down onto the deck last night. I do appreciate the rain that came with the wind, because I remember all too well that last year at this time I was doggedly emptying water out of the aquifer and onto our dying lawn and this year the Boys are MOWING.

And I'm not even mad because this tree is the one we we rely on to shade the back of our house--I appreciate that you left the apple tree on the other side of the deck mostly intact. I mean, you had taken down half of that tree a few years ago, but we still have the potential for enough apples to make a pie this year! Woo!

And I do appreciate that you blew last night from east to west rather than the customary west to east, because you could have brought the top of the sweetgum down on the roof rather than toward the back yard, and then we'd be having an entirely different conversation, one that begins with a call to the insurance agent and ends with fretting about rising premiums.

No, I'm irritated with you, Kansas, because as I was scoping out the storm damage this morning the phrase "Why you gotta be so mean?" popped into my head, and I vaguely knew it was A Thing so when I got to work I Googled it. Then I watched the Taylor Swift video that came up in response to the query, and now all my brain can think is "Someday, I'll be livin' in a big ol' city...."

Oh, Kansas. You have infected me a tween song. Why you gotta be so mean?

At What Cost?

My parents raised me to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. They were extravagant in their encouragement of my dreams, their extravagance neatly balancing my lack of confidence.

"Sure, you could write for Sports Illustrated," my mother told me once when I was admiring the story-telling journalism this magazine did so well. "Why not?"

"You could be Miss America if you keep practicing the violin," I remember my dad telling me, and it warms my heart to remember that he wasn't concerned that I was beautiful enough; he wanted to make sure I had my talent ready to go.

I am one of the lucky ones, though: I have grown up to do exactly (EXACTLY) what I dreamed of doing. I wanted to be a wife, and a mom, and I wanted to write. And here I am! Sitting smack-dab in the middle of my dreams.

But what about people whose dreams lead them into a funnel so narrow that only a few ever make it through? What if I had really dreamed of being Miss America? That was not going to happen, not in any parallel universe. What if I had really wanted to skate in the Olympics? What if I had really set my heart on being an ambassador to the United Nations?

The truth is that not everyone can do what they dream. If you have a minute or 20, you should read Bounced Around, a non-judgmental feature story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about an assistant basketball coach who has been willing to go to any legal length to prolong his dream of being a college basketball coach. He has worked for almost nothing, worked harder than anyone can imagine, to keep this dream alive. He has separated from his family for months and years, and still, as he enters middle age, he's living in crappy dorm rooms and sleeping in his car because he believes in his dream.

I am tormented by this story. We, too, have told our Boys their options are limitless. We encouraged them to keep their options open, to follow their hearts, to explore and sample (with some restrictions--I could not bring myself to let them play football). And with the exception of piano lessons, which were mandatory through eighth grade, they were not required to sign up for a second season of any sport or activity. Each filtered down into a comfort zone, and while they are still in process, they all seem to be pursuing lives that are joyful.

What would we have done if we had been blessed with one or more of those children whose dreams drive them? What would our lives have been like if Husband or I had been so consumed in our drive to get through that narrowed funnel that we sacrificed everything to that goal? What if one of the Boys had had the drive and the talent and the physical attributes to be a world-class swimmer?

I have no answers. I have only gratitude that my dreams and my reality have, in this stage of my life, been the same, because for some they are not.

Back to Normal

This is the first day in about a month that I've had to cast around for what to write. I've had adorable children and wedding tastings and oh-so-much food and cooling pillows and all sorts of things drifting in and out of my life, and it was an embarrassment of riches for blog post subjects.

And then....nothing.

So today I'm posting a picture of our new television room couch, which replaces the saggy old futon that for the past decade has given this room a distinct dorm-room-cast-off decorating vibe. We bought the new couch Saturday at ONE-QUARTER of its original price during Small Town's sidewalk sale. This purchase makes me inordinately happy, almost as happy as the pair of lamps we bought at the same sale for ONE-FIFTH of their original price and which may be my favorite piece of home decor ever.

The lamps are especially fun because I loved them but we didn't need them so I had started to walk on down the street. Then, when Husband asked where we would put them and I replied "Well, one of them would replace the lamp we got for $3, at an auction, 15 years ago," and it struck me that buying those lamps would probably be okay with the universe.

Especially when Husband went back to get them and the saleslady, without being asked, discounted the price even more.

What have you bought lately that you didn't really NEED but that pleases you immensely?