Overheard in the Wolfe House #194

By Peggy | September 7, 2012 |

Peggy: You really didn’t like this batch of spaghetti.

Sam: It had whole tomatoes.

Peggy: I should have pureed them.

Sam: You don’t have to keep saying that.

Peggy: Why? I should have. You would have liked it better.

Sam: It just shows you’re stressed about it. Don’t stress about it.

Posted in What Sam says

The move

By Peggy | September 3, 2012 |

Since we’ve been trying to move the actual family room for more than a year, I consider this move of the virtual family room a big step in the right direction.

This is my first post here, after shuttering the space at Blogspot. Like any change, I’m a little sad to walk away from the old space and its comforts and familiarity. But I’m excited, too. I’m grateful to SUMY Designs (see their link for author websites) and my good friend and running buddy, RunnerSusan, for the new, clean look and navigation. This is my third round of website design since “See Sam Run” came out in 2008. I’m still grateful for my Denton Record-Chronicle co-workers, Karina Ramirez and Randena Hulstrand (now at UNT), for helping me think through what was needed on the first website. It was a great foundation, and each version we publish on the web gets a little better.

We’ve moved everything over, including the autism resources from “See Sam Run.” I will get my news clips uploaded very soon, something I wouldn’t have given any thought to five years ago, but is all-but-required  of writer websites now. The annotated list of shale stories is still here, a service to those who have wandered into the Family Room over the years, and still do from time to time, looking for that help.

I’m the most excited about the room to grow. Shahla and I continue to chip away at our new book for parents of the bravest hearts. At least once a week we meet and talk and write together for a few hours. Lately, that’s been at Jupiter House, which makes me want to digress about the concept of the third place and how coffee shops replaced the neighborhood pub, but I won’t. Any more. Shahla Alai-Rosales, by the way, is a brilliant behavior analysis professor (winner of this year’s ‘Fessor Graham award) teaching at the University of North Texas and keeping her clinic chops sharp working with Easter Seals North Texas.

It’s a much slower pace of development than I’m accustomed to at the newspaper, but it’s still faster than the seven years it took me to write “See Sam Run” or the past five years I’ve been noodling with another memoir (the seeds of which are in Carrion.)

At first, Shahla and I had seven guideposts for parents. We’ve got that down to five. We plan a short book, and it is filling up with little fables that reflect the emotional landscape we parents work in. Shahla and I are assembling other bits of information in ways that should make the guideposts easy to understand and remember. We never forget how hard it is to be a parent and how pressed you can be for time to “sharpen the saw,” as the late Stephen Covey said in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and how high-stakes it feels when you are the parent of a child with a disability. Research has shown that some parents, when making a decision on behalf of their child of a disability, feel the same weight of that decision as world leaders do for their countrymen.

Welcome to the new Family Room. Hope to see you again soon.

 

 

Posted in decision-making, problem-solving

Patron Saint of College Kids

By Peggy | August 23, 2012 |

In my faith, if you have a need, we’ve got a saint for that. I’ve got one of those little “guardian angels” hanging from the rear view of the pick-up, but I don’t take much stock in it. Some would say I need a St. Christopher medal, but I got Sam and myself a membership in AAA instead.

If you’ve lost someone close to you, like we have in the Wolfe house, then you probably carry that person with you like a patron saint from time to time.

The year after Mark died, in my own year of magical thinking, I often talked to birds that came close, in case it was him.

Friends would tell me that they would get visits from their loved one. These were the greatest stories, by the way, friends who could see the loved one in a bedroom mirror after dark, or who would see the loved one next to the bed, and carry on a conversation. I was a little jealous. The birds never talked back to me. Once I thought Mark was trying to visit — coming down the hall after all the kids had fallen asleep — but I got so terribly frightened that he never tried again.

Hence the birds.

I digress.

Michael called when I got home from Iowa. He was filled with emotion. He had felt Mark’s presence all through the end of high school and through the first years of college. But now, as he is about to start his senior year, Mark has left his side, Michael says.

“He was trying to get me to be the man he wanted me to be,” Michael said.

Michael realized the message: he was there, the rest was up to him, it was his life to lead now.

Mark’s been gone for nearly five years and he still makes me weak in the knees.

Posted in aloha, hope, love

It’s 10 o’clock

By Peggy | August 18, 2012 |

Michael has moved into his apartment at TCU and Paige is packing. Tomorrow Paige and I hop in the pick-up and drive her back to Iowa for her sophomore year.

Summer ends again, tonight.

I tried not to cry when she started kindergarten. She’s my youngest. For years she had watched her older brothers go off to school. Even though she went to nursery school three mornings a week, she was so ready that day she went to kindergarten. She just bounded out of the car like her brothers and headed confidently to her classroom. She was big. How could I cry?

Sunday morning, we’ll move her into a new room, although in the same dormitory as last year. She’s out of her living-learning community, but the bonds between her and fellow writers from last year are strong. They are already trying to figure out how they can find a house to share by next year.

She may not even come home next summer. I’m mindful of that. I didn’t come home after my freshman year. We’re starting to collect things she will need to live in her first home away from home.

She’s big.

How can I cry?

 

Posted in love

Like food, but not a food writer (Strawberry pie)

By Peggy | August 5, 2012 |

My friend, RunnerSusan, brought me sweet corn all the way from Indiana and that got me hankering for Yankee summer food.

Brats on the grill. Roast corn. Strawberry pie.

You know, up north, where summer is this quiet, balmy time that you can linger outside all day under a tree and hold a grass blade between your thumbs and call to the birds — not spend a month hiding in dark room with the air conditioning running while Ercot pumps so much juice through the grid that it sparks down the line and sets whole counties on fire.

I digress.

Here’s a recipe that accompanied a story I wrote about berry picking for Texas Highways magazine that ran May 2007. The editors asked for it, and despite my admonitions that while I liked food, and cooked food, and grew food, I was not a food writer.

They pushed me just a little beyond my comfort zone by insisting the story just wouldn’t work without some kind of berry recipe. So I dug this little gem out of my recipe box — where all the family heirloom recipes have been stashed, except I remember my mother trying this one for the first time when I was a teenager. (Click to enlarge)

It’ll become an heirloom when my kids make it.

Posted in recipes