love
OMG
I wanted to pass on a particular invitation this weekend. It wasn’t the company. I’m smitten with the great people at nonPareil Institute, where Sam interned in spring 2011. They are having their second fundraiser this weekend, a Sunday night banquet and a golf tournament on Monday. No golf for this working girl, of course, but even the banquet price was a little rich for me.
I reminded Sam we were already heading to another fundraiser earlier in the day — a fajita fiesta for Denton County’s newest therapeutic riding center, Born2Be.
But he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Why didn’t you ask me to buy the tickets, Mom? It’s nonPareil. I should be the host.”
After he finished the order, it hit me.
I’m a trophy mom.
What little girls are made of (reprise)
The adorable photo of the girl in the jumper comes from the Women and Girls Lead Facebook page and has been pinned around cyberspace. I saw it on the page of a comrade in single motherhood. It made me think back when Paige was in kindergarten and first grade and she went after school to the community dance program at Texas Woman’s University. For a while, she learned ballet, then she tried another dance class that mixed up the styles a little more.
You could see, even then, that she was a talented dancer, but she tired of it. I didn’t make a fuss.
If she thought of dance during the rest of elementary or middle school, I didn’t know it. For all I knew then, dance had only been an early childhood interest. But when the high school marching band added a color guard, she was all in, not just with the flags, but the dancing, too. Such a personality she had during performances!
Sam’s younger years were a gift to his siblings in some ways. We were trying so hard to get Sam to “average,” we didn’t fall into those traps that so many anxious parents fall into with their kids and their extra-curriculars. Michael and Paige tried out lots of different things: music, sports, leadership, theatre, and 4-H.
And that was a beautiful thing. Paige worked hard with her dancing in high school. Yet, because it was never a chore, never something she did to please anyone but herself, dance will be a lifelong love.
It’s a good thing to remember when you’re sinking $200 into gear or lessons. I never let myself think it was an investment in a future, four-year scholarship. It wasn’t something to distinguish my child from their peers. It was something to allow them to stretch and explore and learn and feel and discover who they really are.
Four weddings and a long ago funeral
Tonight was the fourth wedding I’ve attended since Mark died. The first wedding came about eight months after, and I was a wreck.
On your own wedding day, part of your heart opens up and it just gets bigger and bigger until your beloved isn’t there anymore.
Oh, mercy, that expansive, empty space hurts on another couple’s wedding day, no matter how happy you are for them.
When I first saw the date on the invitation, the night before Mark’s birthday, I wondered. But it’s also been nearly five years. Tonight, as we were waiting for the bridal procession, I heard the violinist begin the first few phrases of Ashokan Farewell — one of Mark’s favorites. My eyes couldn’t focus, and I could feel my knees and my heart giving way, but then the string ensemble transitioned to another tune.
Then, I told myself that little bit of music was just Mark’s way of winking and letting us know that they were all there …
Congratulations, Megan and Brandon!
Patron Saint of College Kids
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.
It’s 10 o’clock
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?
Horse bling
Sam isn’t a belt-buckle-wearing kind of guy. When he’d come home from Chisholm Challenge with another trophy buckle, usually from being the best in English equitation, we’d look at it lovingly for a minute. The organizers of Chisholm Challenge order the trophy buckles each year from the silversmith in Placerville, Calif. That was always fun to see, too. I knew the shop since I worked for the El Dorado Arts Council for three years, back when Sam was an infant and toddler.
But then, we’d just put the buckle back in the velveteen box and shove it in the dining room cabinet. (Lots of room in there. We don’t have many fancy dishes.) After a few years, I felt bad. He worked hard for those buckles and he didn’t get one every year for every event. (Unlike Special Olympics medals and ribbons, but I digress.)
I figured it was time for a display. I asked Dad, and the next time we were talking on Skype, he showed me what he’d built. I brought it home two weeks ago and showed it to Sam.
He’s not really a belt-buckle-arranging kind of guy, either. I pulled them out of the box, marveled at the craftsmanship and then arranged them.
I hope he’s a belt-buckle-noticing kind of guy.
Love Letter to Caleb
Our family has been touched again by tragedy.
Happy Valentine’s Day from Mark and Peggy
Sometimes we did things just to see if we could.
http://chirb.it/Fwy53p
Being Who You Are
My grandmother’s 90th birthday was was her last.
We knew that. Her cancer was untreatable. She had been blinded by macular degeneration years ago. She sent word through the family that she wouldn’t be sending Christmas cards anymore.
It’s a big family, on my mom’s side. My mother is the oldest of nine. I’m the oldest granddaughter of, um, about sixteen, or so, I think. I haven’t met all my cousins. Many are still in Wisconsin, but not all. The great-grandchildren number more than 40, and yes, I believe there are great-great-grandchildren, too. My youngest uncle is only two years older than I am.
What can I say, except we’re a big, Catholic family.
Except about 10 years ago, Grandma let go that we weren’t always. Mom went back to meet the cousins in Northern Ireland. My great-grandfather came over from Ireland as a Presbyterian. He never sent for his family. He married my great-grandmother, shown in this photo with my grandmother. 
Grandma converted to Catholicism to marry Grandpa.
My grandmother liked ham sandwiches and drank black coffee no matter what. She knew everything there was to know about babies. She was loving, but not a sentimental person nor the keeper of scores of family treasures (if there even were any).
She liked tossing out the old and in with the new. Grandma was in the moment.
But she was always stitching something. She was the first relative to show me the value of handmade gifts. One year, Grandma and Grandpa made all the granddaughters doll beds of wooden spools and cut coat hangers. They were canopy beds, and mine had pink flocking. I couldn’t believe I got the pink one. In my seven-year-old opinion, it was the prettiest of all the beds.
Whenever I visited my grandparents, which got harder and harder to do as the years went by, I would get a tour of the house to see the latest creations. It was as good as touring a folk art museum.
There were other family secrets Grandma never shared. Some we knew, but couldn’t speak of, because she wouldn’t acknowledge them. Some we learned from Aunt Bea.
Aunt Bea, the originator of the family’s sweet roll recipe, and the speaker of family secrets.
Grandma probably just found out how much her sister Bea let on. Don’t worry, Grandma. It’s all good. It’s all about the love. You knew that and so do we.
Mark’s Kahlua
Just about every year this time of year we’d have to hightail it outside and stay gone for a while because Mark would be making kahlua for his friends and music colleagues. The only thing that stinks up the house more than making kahlua is making mustard. Caramelizing onions isn’t even on the same scale of stink, I’m telling you.
Ok, guys. Here’s the recipe he refined while we were living in Sacramento.
2 quarts plus one cup water
7 cups sugar
6 ounces of freeze-dried coffee
1 T. Hershey’s cocoa, optional
1 fifth of Everclear
3 T. vanilla
1. Drive to Reno to buy Everclear. (After we moved to Texas, he drove to Paradise.)
2. Boil water and add sugar. Add coffee and boil for 15 minutes. The house will be really smelly, so go outside. Add the cocoa and remove from the heat. Let cool.
3. Add Everclear and vanilla. Bottle and keep in your liquor cabinet.
Today it’s four years since he’s been gone.
I don’t like thinking that at some point in my life I will have lived more of my life without him than with him.