15
February 2008
How about berry pie? Anyone can make it.
Guacamole? With a jar of Frontera guacamole mix anyone can make it.
Rice? I measure, she dumps.
Garlic? With a Quick Chop, as seen on TV, Delphine can bash it to a pulp.
Carrots? Delphine starts on one side and can peel straight through to the other.
Table setting? Well, what’s wrong with a little extra spilling here and there?
Low blood pressure? What about another job?
We’ve all missed a lot in the months without a report. I am a little worse for wear. Besides being tired and unkempt, I have a new scar at my hairline. I’m either moving too fast for my own good or thinking too slowly. I hit my head changing a hummingbird feeder in a December downpour. I failed to check the stepladder footing and it fell away under me into lawn soup. Bill, Ted and I spent 6 hours in the emergency room waiting for a student to stitch me up. We did. We allowed a student to sew up part of my face. Repeat after me, “Yes, you can evaluate my case, but, I’d like senior staff to perform any procedures.”
A week ago a house burned down a block away from us. We were at the park when the fire trucks started screaming into the neighborhood. One after another and another and another. When we started home, we had to wait at the crosswalk for yet another to speed up from the south and then turn onto our street. Only then did I start to think about how I hadn’t left anything on the stove.
We couldn’t follow that fire truck even though it was driving toward our home on our usual route home because Delphine, the fearless -- never said no to a pony ride or a jungle gym or a crowd of new people – was afraid. Fire trucks are loud and Delphine does not like loud. All told, eight fire trucks came to our neighborhood unloading at least forty firemen onto the streets and I was kept as far as possible from the scene. I never get out and on the one day that fortune brought the firemen to me I had to take the long way home and scurry inside.
Bill came home later after the start of bath time. Herding Delphine around in the upstairs hallway he showed some real enthusiasm about dinner, “What smells so good?”
“Kind of smoky?” I asked. “That would be the house on fire.”
I am afraid I’ve started to laugh at Delphine’s misery. Last night as Bill tried to sit her down at the dinner table she noticed that I had carried her plate of food to the table while she was busy with a present that arrived in the mail for Bill. She went crazy. Bill and Ted froze as she started screaming and jumping up and down. I watched from the kitchen guessing at the outcome. She would not sit down. She would not calm down. Fortunately Bill’s hands were full with Ted so that he could not make her sit down. In silent fury she picked up the plate carried it back through the kitchen doorway, turned around, brought it back to the table, and sat herself down. I, who have harbored nearly four decades of resentment at not being taken seriously, laughed myself silly.
Ted is a happy boy. He likes to be held. He likes to play on the floor, grab things, shake them, and jam them in his mouth. Whereas our first child was given a plastic cup to chase around the bathroom floor while we showered, the second child had to go find himself a plastic potty seat to slam around the room. He started crawling last week and has already been over to a bookshelf to rip out some books. Now we know for sure that it’s going to be like that again.
Hard to believe that someone so small could have a social circle, but Ted knows his family and loves to see them. He perks up for Delphine and Beate and has stopped nursing in favor of visiting when either of them is around. When Bill comes home from work Ted screeches and flaps his arms in what Bill calls the Screaming Eagle greeting.
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