Two Hospital Visits, 48 Years Apart

48 years ago today, my mother made a visit to a hospital and I was born. She was 32 years old, and I was the 5th out of what would become 6. She was married to a kind man, and had a world full of family, friends and church.

Today, she's back in the hospital, wrinkled, shrunken, and dying. Her husband is a memory almost two decades old, and most of the friends she had are gone. Her children are mostly scattered.

On Monday, she checked into the hospital with severe dehydration brought on by nausea following radiation treatments to relieve pain from bone cancer which had metastasized from breast cancer diagnosed in mid-February. Her kidneys have now shut down, she has developed fluid around her heart and lungs, her adrenal gland is suspect and she has pneumonia. On Thursday, she told me she thought she would be ready to go home and live alone again in a few days. Earlier today, her heart became so irregular that they called my sister to be with her at 3 in the morning, because it appeared she may be dying.

She was born in 1928, a second generation Polack on the north side of St. Louis. She married young, partially to leave a difficult home environment, and she married a handsome veteran of WWII with a sharp intellect, quick wit and gentle kindness. She was social, beautiful and perhaps a little headstrong. Their marriage, at least as it appeared to a child growing up in the small, packed house, was quietly happy - I don't think I ever heard angry words between the two of them.

Her husband, my father, had a massive stroke in 1982 that left him paralyzed and robbed him of his speech, and she was left to care for him until he died in 1990. After that, she kind of blossomed - she took over his seat on the Board of Aldermen in Beverly Hills, Missouri, and became the City Clerk. A yellow dog Democrat, she got involved in the background of County and municipal politics in St. Louis, and traveled with her sister to Ireland, Canada and Hawaii.

A few years ago, the politics turned nasty, and she left our home and bought a small townhouse in O'Fallon, a contemporary suburb of look-alike homes and chain restaurants in strip malls.

She grew up in a world of radio and her father worked on the railroad. She spoke of walking down to the corner bar and bringing her father locally-brewed beer in a pail. She loved to rollerskate and bowl. She hosted card parties and tupperware parties and "kidnap" breakfasts, where the ladies of the parish would show fill their cars with unsuspecting neighbors and "force" them to come over and have breakfast.

She is wired differently than I am or anyone else I know - with an absolute sense of wrong and hardheaded willingness to bear a grudge for years. One daughter-in-law she loves now spent a decade in the doghouse for daring to move to the town her son was living in. She did not attend the wedding of one of her daughters, or even let me know that it had happened, because the groom was a divorced man. Another sister removed herself from the family as a result of clashes with my mother. To this day, she is unable or unwilling to fully accept a granddaughter who went through a difficult period years ago. I do not understand her emotions or the depth of her antipathies, but I've learned to step aside from the full force of her anger. Her personality hearkens back to the an age of blood feuds and intergenerational battles. We, her children, joke that we will find a marked up list among her belongings after she is gone that will reflect her final ranking of her children.

Sometime soon, perhaps today, perhaps 2 weeks from now, almost certainly within a couple months, she will cease her struggles and her only presence on earth will be in the memory of those of us who knew her. When I started this blog almost 5 years ago, I wrote my first post about her and ended it with

Sometimes I feel like such a bad son. I never visit, and my irregular calls are usually multi-tasked with TV or some amusement. We have not really ever been close. But, Friday night, I thought she was beginning the death process. Now I know I have a limited time with her - maybe enough time to change our relationship.

That relationship has changed for the better, and I'm glad of it, though I failed in many respects. I wish my children had known their grandmother better. I wish I had visited more often. I wish I had learned more about her early life, and shared my life with her more freely.

This is not a happy birthday. The woman who created my life is losing her own. She's alert and lucid, and beginning to realize that she's not going to survive. She's not caught up in fear, but she's not unafraid, either. Similarly, I want her to live, but I'm tired of watching her suffer with tubes and monitors all around her.

I'm 48 years old today, and I know I need to say "goodbye" to my mom. And "thank you" - for everything.

Literally everything.

Gaming Blog For the Game Geeks

Can a video game be literature? Can a blog of "Game Journalism" done by two undergrads reach a large audience?

My son Sam and his buddy Chris Plante have created a huge hit with their new blog Hardcasual. With entries as diverse as a 3-part interview with Leigh Alexander and an appreciation of Escape Velocity, the blog has been picked up by links in Hungary and by Newsweek writers. Believe it or not, Sam managed to pen something controversial and ignite a controversy. I would claim that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but Sam was blogging before I was, so my own blogging is actually the metaphorical apple.

If you're into the gaming thing, you might enjoy the blog.

I'm Fresh Out of Children

Today, my daughter turns 21. 21! By any societal measure, she is a complete, bona fide adult now, able to buy a beer, gamble, smoke, buy porn, join the military, pay taxes, sign contracts, rent a hotel room, get a tattoo, pierce whatever she chooses, and anything else she may want to do except rent a car. Since she was the youngest of my two, I no longer have "children" - I suppose I have "offspring" or "descendants" or some other less diminutive classification.

On Friday evening, she organized a sold-out crawfish boil to support CASA in New Orleans. Whatever you call her, I'm awfully proud to call her my daughter.

Koster Wants to Name Bridge For Ronald Reagan

I was over in St. Louis this weekend - my mother celebrated her 80th birthday with a great collection of friends, relatives and nieghbors. Happy 80th, Mom!

Did you know that there is a bridge proposed from St. Louis, Missouri to St. Clair County, Illinois? Did you know that Chris Koster, one of the Democratic candidates for Missouri Attorney General, co-sponsored a bill to name that bridge for Ronald Reagan?

What kind of democrat is Chris Koster?

My mother would never vote for a Republican, and she won't vote for Koster, either.

Contentment

Yesterday, we received a call telling us that our daughter's trip home from Budapest was going to face a major delay, and that she wouldn't arrive until today. They were wrong - she made her flight in DC by a feat of jet-lagged athleticism through a crowded airport, and today has been a quiet day of delightfully mundane activities, capped with everyone working together to make tamales.

Life is good, and I wish everyone well.

Not Worried, but Definitely Concerned

My daughter is spending the semester in Budapest, Hungary. She's been having a wonderful time, and boldly experiencing everything from porcelain to Transylvania. If you're interested, visit her blog, Hungary Heart. Everything has been going wonderfully.

Until tonight, on her way home from dinner, she encountered mobs of excited people. Right-wingers are rioting and clashing with the police. Tomorrow is the 51st anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. Let's hope things calm down instead of escalate.

I'm not really worried - she's a smart kid, and part of a well-run, responsible program. And, while I'm concerned, I'm happy she's over there, seeing everything - even this.

(Update: I chatted with her this morning, and she's studying at a friend's apartment further away from the center of the action. Her own apartment is in the heart of everything. She's more concerned about her History midtown than she is about the riots, though she might stay away from her apartment for the day.)

Blogger Appreciation: Scribblings from Sarajevo & Hungary Heart

Lengthy international travel used to mean that someone was out of our lives for the duration of the trip. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive, so communication was done by pen and paper, or, more typically, not at all. When the traveler returned, you would listen to their rehearsed narrative of the experience, while you handed pictures around in a circle.

The internet has changed that, making real-time updating of travel possible. Two great examples of the new mode of blog travelogues are Scribblings from Sarajevo and Hungary Heart. Both offer the vicarious thrill of living abroad through the eyes of Kansas Citians.

Scribblings from Sarajevo chronicles the experiences of Melinda and John - two people I met and chatted with briefly at Hooper's. They've relocated to Sarajevo for a year, and Melinda will not be working during that time, so we can look forward to lots of updates (and maybe even a novel). The joy of this blog and others like it is its immediacy. Today, we get Melinda's bemused reaction to a machine that jiggles your cellulite. That is exactly the sort of detail that adds to the oddness of being abroad, but would never register clearly enough on your memory to be included in a post-trip narrative. Similarly, her descriptions of seeing kittens and shopping for an apartment would be lost to those of us back home, and probably to her, as well, as memory fades.

Hungary Heart is my daughter's blog, chronicling her semester abroad in Budapest. It features less daily detail than John and Melinda's blog, but it makes up for it in terms of some wonderful reports on traveling though the Hungarian countryside with a roving band of college students. Again, though, the amazing thing is the breadth of detail and its immediacy. The old lady with "the beer bong of wine" in the Valley of Beautiful Women would probably be lost in the wealth of details Ali will accumulate over four months in central Europe. And the photographs are half the fun.

Both of these blogs, one by a virtual stranger and one by one of my favorite people in the world, connect me to places I've never been, and provide a surrogate form of experiencing fresh and strange surroundings and culture. They do so in the fashion of the best travel writers of the past, but infused with the digital photography and immediacy those writers lacked. The work of these and similar writers is shrinking the world, and enriching it with details we'd otherwise never see. Thank you to both of them!

Hungary Heart

Those who know me and my circumstances would be justified in expecting one of my maudlin, ruminative postings today. In a few hours, we'll drive to the airport so Ali can begin her journey to Budapest, Hungary, from which she will not return until the eve of Christmas Eve. It's been a great summer with her, and I've enjoyed having her around. I'll miss her horribly.

But I'm not going to be weepy today. This is cool - this is joyful and outstanding.

Studying in Hungary for four months! She'll be surrounded by history and the present. She'll see the Danube River. She'll visit Romania and God knows what other countries I've always wanted to see. She'll taste foods, see sights, drink beers, hear music, meet people and live in an apartment in a city that was sealed off behind the Iron Curtain when I was her age. In so many ways, the world has opened up for her.

And few people I know are better suited to carpe this diem. Ali is wide-eyed but streetsmart. She attracts people with her wit, beauty and smile, but she's selective about who gets close. She's adept enough in languages (state medalist in Latin!) to venture boldly into a country where the only native word she knows is Hungarian for "beer". (She may look like her mother, but I've had my own influences . . .)

So, bon voyage, sweetheart. Living abroad will teach you lots about yourself and the world. I'll check your new blog regularly. You'll be absolutely brilliant in Hungary, and I'm thrilled you have this opportunity.

Sail on silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way

Visiting

Over the weekend, we took Sam to the airport after a quick ten day visit. We also bought Ali a suitcase, so she can start packing for her semester in Budapest. For a few days there, we had noise and inside jokes and rollicking battles over who drove which car. It was a flashback - it was a richly detailed encore presentation of a few years ago. A few times, I simply fell silent, not wanting to break the spell.

It was a fine visit, but it was only a visit. Somehow, in the signing of New York City leases and part-time jobs, the balance shifted. Not long ago, he lived here, but went to school in New York. Now he lives in New York, but came back for vacation. His "stuff" is mostly in New York - the closet full of Star Wars items is only nostalgia.

Ali, on the other hand, has lived here this summer. We've had the luxury of time, so that we could spend it in bickering over plugged in hair straighteners and who does the dishes. But it's about to end, and we'll be driving her to the airport, too, for a flight to a country I've never seen, full of people speaking a language I've never heard. Chances are strong that her balance will shift before she returns home, or over the next summer. Next time, or the time after that, she will visit us instead of live with us.

I'm proud of them and wouldn't have it any other way. If the choice is whether to have them visit us or move back home because they couldn't find their places in the world, I'll gladly host their visits.

Sometimes, though, I wish the calendar would roll a little slower.

Silver Anniversary

25 years ago today, I stood up in front of friends and family, and married the woman I will kiss goodnight this evening. We were 22 years old and one week out of college. Neither of us had a job which would last past mid-August, at which time we would move to a city we had never visited before. We had no car, no savings, and no idea of what the future would hold. All we knew was that I would start law school in the fall, and she would find some sort of job.

It's been a quarter of a century now. We've been married for more than 10% of the time that the United States has been a country. In 1982, Reagan was in the White House, and they broke ground for the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. Iran was at war with Iraq, and Britain was at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. I didn't know anyone who owned a CD player, a cell phone, or a personal computer. The Berlin Wall stood, and fears of nuclear war were rising.

You'd think I'd be full of advice on how to make a marriage last, but I'm not. If you're looking for one of those happy marriage recipes, I'm not your guy. In fact, we've probably violated most of them. We've gone to sleep peeved with each other, we've failed to set aside time for each other, and we've never gone to Marriage Encounter. Part of the reason we're still together is good luck and stubbornness.

One of the reasons that it is hard to offer advice is that not only is every couple different - every couple changes, and so does each partner. I've changed physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and just about any other way you might suggest. And she has, too. Some of what was important to us a couple decades ago is less important now, and other things have taken their place. It's been years and years since we spread the Sunday New York Times across the floor and drank coffee while reading it, or paged through a Williams-Somona catalog together. On the other hand, we didn't even want children when we got married, and now our two children are central to who we are.

All that said, there are things that haven't changed. She still makes me smile, and making her smile is one of my favorite things to do. We still listen to each other - not only to what the other is saying, but how we say it. (It is fascinating how many nuances can be conveyed in a word as short as "okay".) We share interests, but we've always had metaphorical rooms of our own - areas or passions we pursue without expecting or even really desiring the other to participate fully.

25 years ago today, we held hands and took off on an uncertain journey. We had no idea what was coming, but we knew we wanted to face whatever it was together. I have no idea what ups and downs will be coming in the next 25 years, but I know I'll be lucky to have her by my side. She makes the joy sweeter, and the sadness easier.

Tonight, we'll eat at a nice restaurant we've never tried for dinner, and then go to a presentation on a book about Einstein she's read. There may be more traditionally romantic ways to spend the evening, but this seems to fit us pretty well. After a quarter century together, we have a pretty good feel of what is better and what is worse for us.

I am an extremely lucky man.

My Wife is a Mistress

(Shouldn't women who get Master's degrees really get Mistress's degrees?)

Yesterday was graduation, and Kansas University conferred the degree of Master of Public Health on her. Not only that, but they gave her the Analee E. "Betsy" Beisecker Public Health Excellence Award - she was selected as the best student of the program!

She started working toward this degree several years ago, taking advantage of an employer tuition plan, and has stuck with it through classes she didn't like, through distracting pressures of work and home, and hundreds of excuses to do other things with her time. Throughout, it has been pure intellectual curiosity that has motivated her - there's no direct benefit to earning the degree, such as an automatic pay raise or promotion.

She earned a perfect 4.0. She never settled for doing "okay" in a class she didn't particularly like, nor did she focus less attention on the classes taught by professors she didn't enjoy. She worked diligently on a thesis - producing original research and winning Honors.

It was interesting to see the group of fellow-graduates. Some were in their early twenties, and some were in their forties. Some were already MDs, and some were fresh from undergraduate programs. Many or most had multiple degrees, but my wife was one who launched into the program after a two-decade break from classroom education.

Obviously, I'm quite proud of my wife/mistress. She's a private person who I tend to avoid mentioning in this space, but she was awfully cute in her cap and gown!

Quick Visit

Saturday afternoon, we picked Sam up at the airport, and Sunday morning, he was off on a road trip to visit Ali in New Orleans. It was great to see him for a few hours.

I'm thrilled that we are in this technological age - that all of us in this family have laptops and wireless connections. We have IM, email, and Facebook. We have free long distance on our cell phones. These days, being apart sometimes seems the same as having them home, only with lower grocery costs.

But nothing technological can take the place of clowning in a silly hat, or the fragrances of Robin teaching Sam how to make Chicken Marsala. Digital magic can't match a dinner table conversation about nothing in particular.