by Kate on February 4, 2010
I’ve been having trouble writing since my mom died. It’s the one thing I guess I can control because otherwise, soccer practices, dance classes, deadlines, dirty dishes—just keep coming. Last week I talked about how I touch base with my girlfriends when I’m feeling sad, which is definitely a more frequent occurrence these days. So now I’m going to share recent uplifting girlfriend call No. 2.. I dialed up my pal Liz Mulvahill, mom of three and currently substitute teacher—extraordinaire at both—to see if she’d like to join me in a walk. I catch Liz on her lunch break and she informs me that she’s got a regular sub job at a Boulder elementary school that she did some work for last year. “Where’s the teacher?” I ask. And then she informs me that Suzanne Schmidt, the teacher, also her friend, was in the process of adopting a 14-month old little boy from Haiti when the earthquake hit, and she was trying to bring him home.
She tells me to Google the story and I do. Here’s what I find out: Suzanne has always wanted to be a mom and last Mother’s Day she decided that she could no longer wait for the “right guy” to have children, and that she would adopt a baby. She had been matched with a little boy named Gavin who lived in a Port-Au-Prince orphanage. Last September she took a three-day trip to Haiti where she held her son for the first time. “It was the greatest miracle of my life,” she said.
It turns out that shortly after the earthquake struck Suzanne received an email from the orphanage letting her know that the children were all alright, but they were in dire need of food and water. Suzanne spent a heart-wrenching week not knowing when or if she would get to see her son. Thankfully, two Pennsylvania politicians (Governor Ed Rendell and Rep. Jason Altmire) as well as officials from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Republic Airways (they loaned out their plane) worked together to get the children and their caretakers out. When it came to light that 7 of the 53 children didn’t have adoptive parents in the U.S., and therefore didn’t have permission to enter the country, the Amercian women who ran the orphanage refused to leave without them. Rendell worked his way to a state department official who granted them special permission. They entire crew landed in Pittsburgh on Jan. 19 and on January 22 , Suzanne, with Gavin in her arms, touched down in Denver.
More than ten days later. Liz can barely get her on the phone to discuss what’s going on in her classroom. “There are always like thirty people there to see the baby, to help, to bring over food. It’s like this great community project and she’s in a complete state of bliss.”
So many levels of love, care and kindness in this story that it’s difficult not to melt in my chair. My mom called it, “The love force that binds us.” Amen to the force.
by Kate on January 21, 2010
Here’s the thing— whenever I’m feeling kind of sorry for myself, about to bust out into a full-blown pity party, I call one of my girlfriends and invariably something good happens. Either I turn my self-involvement into a comedy routine or they solve my particular woe, or they just start talking and it gets me out of my own head and cheers me up. It was Monday, only I thought it was Sunday, because that’s how out of it I’ve been lately, and I was feeling in the pity party way when I decided to call up my friend M.C. and leave a message asking how her Sunday was going. She called me back soon after to inform me that it was, in fact, Monday, and that she and three of her four children had just participated in the Martin Luther King Day March in Denver. I ask her who’s idea it was to go, thinking that it was a very cool idea indeed, and she said that the idea was conceived and executed by her daughter Annie.
My friend, Anne-Marie Vincent, age 11, sixth grader, was inspired when her choir teacher, Mrs. Martin, mentioned what a great event she thought the MLK march was. Annie then went home, researched the particulars on the internet and handed her mom the info. I have always loved Annie’s gumption and take-charge attitude and I told M.C. that this MLK story made my day, and that I wanted to interview Annie. M.C. then invited me up for a dinner of Jeff’s beef stew. Pity party over.
I love having dinner at the Vincents because it’s such a warm, loving household and when they say grace (it was Annie’s turn) they are always thankful for having me there at the table and mention it in their prayer. It melts me.
After Jeff’s stew (excellent, by the way) and cheese bread, Annnie and I got down to business. I wondered why she decided to march as opposed to, say, hanging out and watching TV or going skiing, which is the choice of many kids here in Colorado. “We had never participated in anything on Martin Luther King Day,” she said. “And so I wanted to go and celebrate, not just sit around.” Amen, sister, I am thinking, but I only smile and continue my line of questioning.
Our small town of Louisville is lacking in color and the Denver crowd was a new experience for Annie. “At first it felt kind of weird because I was surrounded by African-Americans and I wasn’t used to that, but it felt good to be there marching. It felt kind of like that scene in Hairspray where everyone is marching and carrying signs,” she explained. Annie said she liked the statues of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges and the different sculptures depicting moments in African-American history. She was especially moved by the Civil Rights marches “ I felt sad and happy,” she said. “Sad because of what people had done…the police dogs… and the hoses.., but happy to be celebrating Martin Luther King.”
I went home and told my girls about Annie’s day. They said that next year, they want to go.
Thank you, Annie Vincent, for reminding us all to be grateful and celebratory and not to forget.
by Kate on January 4, 2010
Natalie "Nina" Meyers with four of her eleven grandchildren, 2006.
I often went to my mom with existential questions. And she always had good answers. When I asked her what it was she believed in, she said: “I believe in the Love Force that binds us.” We were all so lucky to be in hers, and she felt equally so to be in ours. We will all miss Nina in a million ways, but her love force is forever.
A few months ago, Muzz, Stu and Bildo had rigged up a somewhat tenuous contraption in Muzz’s van to hold Nina’s wheelchair in place so they could drive her back and forth from her nursing home. On a recent visit, as they were strapping her in, she could tell I was skeptical. She looked at me with her stunning smile and a wave of her hand and said, “If I fly away, I fly away.” As if that were a perfectly delightful option.
When she looked up at me on Monday in the Emergency Room, she said “Kiss me, Kate.” And I did. And then she said, “I like your hat.” She had been the one to explain that the trim on this particular hat was the Native American symbol for flying geese. I think that she had been preparing to soar with the geese for some time now. And this poem, by Mary Oliver, is the one she wanted to be read when that day arrived.
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love
what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
by Kate on December 21, 2009
I don’t know the number of my mother’s corner room in the Beechwood Wing of her nursing home. Her room has lots of windows and looks out over the Monongahela River when the trees are bare. The trees aren’t bare today. They’re coated with snow and even though my mom has her glasses on, she says she can’t see them. She’s in a cantaloupe-colored top that I bought for her at Target and her hair is brushed but slightly greasy and she’s wearing her trademark black glasses. She looks like this hip, old NY designer to me, whose name I’ve forgotten. Her glasses are a replica of the original pair, which broke when she fell here one day. For a while she wore them with one lens out and the middle held together with tape. When I saw her in the damaged pair I immediately thought of former L.A. Laker, Kurt Rambis, whose trademark was his black Clark Kent glasses held together with tape. I don’t live here in Pittsburgh so when I came for a visit and saw the new “look,” I immediately ordered a new pair. “We can’t have you looking like Kurt Rambis,” I told her with a loving laugh. The original version of my mother would have gotten the reference and laughed with me.
My mom was the smartest woman I knew and an Olympian talker. She rarely speaks a full sentence now, though occasionally one will emerge. Usually, it’s “Hi Kate, “ or “Isn’t’ that wonderful,” or “I love you, too.” I have been lucky enough to have my mom for 49 years now and though I deeply miss our real conversations, I don’t spend much time thinking about them. I call her almost daily and hold up a one-sided conversation. I tell her I love her and she tells me she loves me, too. Thankfully, that phrase hasn’t disappeared and when she says it to me, I feel like she does take in the one thing I am desperately trying to convey across the distance. I feel my mom so much inside of me that most of the time, I know what she’d be thinking or saying. The only part of my life where I’d truly like her advice and where I don’t know the answer has to do with my relationships with men. I am divorced. My mom married my dad. Louis “Doc” Meyers at 21 (she knew he was the one when she met him at his going-way to the navy party thrown by my grandmother. She went home that night and announced,” I just met the man I’m going to marry.”)
The summer after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin (she was the first in her family to attend college) they wed in my grandparent’s living room. My Uncle Sam had to come home from summer camp to play the first two bars of “Here Comes the Bride” on the piano and he was pissed. I have a picture from that day on a wall in my living room. To me, my parents look like these gorgeous 1940s movie stars, preserved forever in black and white. Anyway, they loved each other and laughed together until my dad died from bladder cancer at 71, thirteen years ago. When he knew that there was no more fighting the cancer he told my mother “we’ve had a good run,” which was classic Doc Meyers understatement. But she understood his language and took in all the love behind it and they had their own private cry. So it’s hard for her to understand me. I didn’t marry until I was almost 33, divorced ten years later, had my heart ripped to shreds once post divorce by a completely inappropriate guy and now I’m in a five-year relationship with a man who has never lived less than a two-hour plane ride away, and who I keep hoping will move to be with me, but it hasn’t happened. Those kinds of situations weren’t in her realm of thinking. Still, I’d desperately love to hear what her younger, precise mind would have to offer.
This afternoon I brought her a grilled Rachel sandwich for lunch. It’s corned beef, melted Swiss, coleslaw and Russian dressing. It’s one of her favorites and my brothers and I are always trying to bring her dishes she likes because she hates the nursing home food and she’s getting very frail. And also, because my mother took great joy in food. We sit and share our sandwich on the little table that rolls and slides over her wheelchair. It takes me three minutes to eat my half. It takes her thirty, but I know she’s enjoying it. After the meal I talk a bit and smile and give her play-by-play of what my daughters and I have done since we’ve been in Pittsburgh. My sister-in-law Ann and Emmy and I took a long walk in the snow and then she treated the girls to pedicures. Annie my oldest, will go to the late afternoon Steelers-Packers game with my brother Muzz. My mom listens and smiles but doesn’t say anything. I ask her if she’d like to listen to some music, she nods her head. I put on Diana Krall Live in Paris and we hold hands and listen. Sometimes we close our eyes and sometimes we look at each other and smile, sharing an appreciation of these jazzy tunes. Occasionally, I’ll sing a line. I know a lot of old lyrics because my mother was a jazz connoisseur since she was 15 and played so much of it in the house when my brothers and I were growing up. We stay like that, holding hands and listening closing our eyes and listening and opening them occasionally to smile at each other for an hour and a half. It is a beautiful, heavenly way to be. There is a peace that comes from it—deep and powerful and accepting. And in my heart, I hope that whenever my mother is ready, she can float away on a bright cloud of music.
Footnote: The evening after I posted this blog, my mom, Natalie Roth Meyers, passed away. She was surrounded by love.
by Kate on December 15, 2009
My youngest daughter Emmy is 12 and she is currently playing on a Y basketball team. They practice once a week for a couple of hours and have games on Friday nights. They call themselves “The Gorillas,” though I’m not sure why. I think it may have something to do with the fun of beating their various-stages-of-adolescent-girl chests in the huddle, but I’ve never asked. This weekend her team played in a tournament in Loveland, Colorado and though they lost two out of the three games they played, their performance was epic. I watched each and every kid—Emiko Patterson, Mari Pacheco, Greta Dunn, Margot Dolan, Olivia Kois, Taylor Collins, Ali Scheifele, Olivia Rogers and Courtney Roeber—play their heart out. Three games in a five-hour span. The girls are just learning the fundamentals of basketball so their lay-ups and shots aren’t there yet. Most can’t dribble with their heads up, but they’re working on it. Some of them truly don’t have the muscle to shoot from ten feet. Defense, however, is not as much about strength and technique as it is a beautiful combination of effort and heart. Their “D” was so fierce and scrappy that they held the eventual tournament winner, Eaton, to just two baskets in the second half. Eaton was a team with way more skill and double the amount of games under their belt. Our girls’ performance came down to one thing: giving everything their body weight could muster. Mari sprained her ankle coming down with a rebound, Emiko got sick to her stomach (the between games panini at Panera Bread, no doubt) , but they never gave up and they never stopped fighting. Most of them play soccer together in spring and fall and I have always marveled at how quickly they move on—win or lose. I was a basketball player so it was easier for me to grasp why when I saw them on the hardwood. I could also fully understand the David/Goliath nature of their match-ups. What I witnessed from those ass-numbing bleachers was some very young women warriors in basketball shoes and baggy shorts go all out with Final Four, fourth-quarter effort and then leave it on the court. I am in awe because that’s a powerful thing to know and do at 12, and a “W” in the much bigger game every time. I looked at all of those red cheeks and depleted faces, gave some pats and hugs and do what moms do, which is buy the after-game Gatorade. I am always grateful to the coaches (Ernie and Megan) who volunteer their time and give so much of it—along with patience, kindness and optimism to our daughters. And truly, I feel lucky to be in those uncomfortable stands with all these other parents who are rooting and supporting and nurturing to the group. After the tournament, Emmy and I carpooled home with the Pattersons. My friend Terri, who is Emiko’s mom, and I talked in the front seat of her minivan while she drove us through the darkness of Interstate 25, back to our homes outside of Boulder. The two Emmys were in the middle seat, listening to music on an iPod, sharing one set of headphones, drinking Gatorade, laughing, and occasionally singing out loud. It was a perfect moment in parenting.
by Kate on December 7, 2009
We spent several formative years bonding over the girls in Stars Hollow (see 10/25 “I Love Television” entry) and I silently blessed creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino for teaching my daughters all this wonderful stuff—that being a book nerd is cool, that quick wit and giving good repartee is cool, that setting your sights high and having Madeleine Albright in your dreams is also cool, ditto for hanging out with your mother. We’ve shared a few good series (My So-Called Life, Felicity) in between. But we have finally found our next TV nirvana: Friday Night Lights.
A caveat: I only pick shows that have been around for a while so we can get them on Netflix and then watch after homework is finished (it’s also, by the way, a great motivator for getting the homework finished ). With DVDs there are multiple blessings. You watch when you want, as many episodes as school-night sleep requirements allow, and there are no commercials. My cousin Billy, who is my oldest friend and a law professor at Harvard, is also a doyenne of television. The first show I remember him being crazy about was The Golden Girls. It was so uncool, that it was cool. I loved how he talked about it with endless delight. When we lived in New York in our twenties, he was infatuated with this incredibly low-rent local access show called Wallowich, hosted by this bald guy with glasses. For my birthday he called Wallowich and had him sing to me. I still have the VHS but alas, no machine to play it on. Anyway, Billy and I were catching up recently and he was giving me a list of must-watch shows. Friday Night Lights was in the top three and it caught my attention because I thought it was one the girls and I could sink our psyches into. We love football, and it sounded like—barring an occasional racy scene where I’d have to put my hand over Emmy’s and Annie’s eyes, or pause and fast forward—something we could fall for.
It was love at first watch. We loved Kyle Chandler as Coach Taylor, his adorable guidance counselor wife Tami (Connie Britton) and their interplay. We love when he makes dumb guy moves when dealing with his daughter (or women in general) and she looks at him and says, with love, “You’re an idiot.” We love quarterback Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), his quintessential sweetness (we all have crushes on him, though mine is not hormone-induced) and how he takes care of his grandmother. We root for his romance with the coach’s daughter. We love all the real-life messiness in the lives of these small-town Texans laid out before us—screwed up parents, alcohol, sex, athletic hero-worship, racism, gossip. We love the characters because they’re complicated and there is much greyness. The show is not cliché or trite and at it’s core, it’s got a very big heart.
We now refer to it in our daily lives, which is the true test. Once a show comes into the ongoing conversation of our world, then it will be forever embedded into family lore The first time it happened, I was, of course, at the wheel of the minivan. There’s a guy on the show named Buddy Garrity who’s rich and owns the local car dealership. He’s the head Booster for the team and he’s always around trying to run things, driving Coach Taylor to forehead-vein-popping madness and always acting like he runs the show. The actor, Brad Leland plays this man-child to sleazy perfection. Emmy was referring to a pushy soccer parent who got on her nerves as “my own Buddy Garrity.” I was laughing, but also feeling extremely proud of her for making the connection.
We call the show FNL for short, and our new thing is having FNL marathons. My two daughters and me in my king-size bed enmeshed in high school football in the small town of Dillon, Texas. That and a large, stale box of one dollar Juijyfruits from Walgreens and we’re in girl heaven.