Leesburg Essay 5

Passings

We lost several family members in the last few months: my Aunt Marilu (wife of my father's brother, Dwight, and mother of my cousin,Cheryl); my Aunt Pat (my mother's sister); and George's Aunt Ilona (George's father's sister).

Aunt Marilu's death came only three and a half years after Uncle Dwight's and was a particular shock. She was only diagnosed with cancer in early November and Cheryl moved her to Florida to care for her and obtain treatment for her at a big cancer center in Tampa. In the end she never made it to treatment because the disease was so advanced. She died in a hospice facility in Florida, not too long after her 70th birthday in January.

In some ways Aunt Marilu did not have a very easy life. She was married very young to a kind of a playboy and then got divorced. I always chuckle when I remember the story (covered in the local society pages) of her serving dog food to her husband and guests when they came home one night, probably from drinking, demanding food. She took her son Tom with her to Indiana where she married my uncle. My uncle really struggled to establish his business and I imagine their first years together must have been tough financially. In 1973, Tom, then a teenager, died in a terrible accident. In later years Aunt Marilu's arthritis was so bad that she had lots of trouble getting around, but she helped care for her mother (now 95) and her sister, who has had numerous health problems.

One thing that I will always remember is her succession of dogs (Uncle Dwight was, and Cheryl is, a cat person). There was Bonnie the bulldog. There was, if I remember correctly, a large Rottweiler called Ebony Mist who had to go away because she didn't like anyone other than Aunt Marilu. There was a golden retriever that Hon and Cheryl drove out from New Jersey to her, although that particular dog didn't work out. Her last dog was Mookie (now with Cheryl in Florida), a white fluff ball (Maltese) that Hon got for her at the time of his wedding to Cheryl.

In the last couple of years Aunt Marilu became interested in quilting, although at the Open House that Cheryl held at Aunt Marilu's house in Indiana (see the pictures above featuring the local weather that weekend), a friend suggested that Aunt Marilu preferred the going-to-the-fabric-store part to the actual quilting. She loved mystery stories and gory novels. She loved football. She liked the cold. She spent a lot of time on her computer. One of my last memories of her is from Christmas 2005, when she and Jolie were doing Soduku puzzles together.

The summer of 2004, just before we returned from Berlin, Aunt Marilu took an Alaskan cruise with Aunt Marcia and Jolie, Cheryl and her family, and some friends of theirs. Apparently it was a great trip for everyone and I'm glad she got to do that. Last September she was down in Florida with Cheryl and her family on a trip to Marco Island, eating crabs and talking of moving to Florida to be nearer to them and her grandchild.

My Aunt Pat had a different kind of life from my mother, who I would describe as an urbanite. Except for some time in Bedford, New York, Aunt Pat and her family (four children) lived in the west. They took many camping trips, although my mother pointed out that this wasn't much of a vacation for Aunt Pat as she had to do all the cooking and whatnot! It seems to me that they moved a lot: Boulder Colorado, California (San Jose?), St. George, Utah and finally Tucson, Arizona.

I didn't see them that much growing up, but three visits stand out in my mind (although with hazy timeframes). When I was in elementary school we visited a “dude ranch” and I had a terrific time hanging out with my cousins and trying horseback riding. This may have been at the same time as my mother's family reunion up in northern Wisconsin (a huge affair, as my grandmother was the youngest of something like nine children), where I got to go swimming in the big lake. I also remember visiting them in Boulder when I was maybe 12 and going up into the Rocky Mountains. And then the year after George and I were married I went to Tucson with my mother. I took a really long hike with my uncle Mac and we all went on a stroll through an arts festival with my cousin Judy, an artist herself. Aunt Pat and Uncle Mac didn't come to Knoxville anymore; the trip itself was hard on her, but in addition her allergies were so severe that Knoxville (not a place to go to escape from pollen) was just too much for her. All her surviving children were home at Christmas, and my mother said that she enjoyed that. She and Uncle Mac were married for about 50 years.

I met Ilona (Ilynéni, the Hungarian way of saying “Aunt Ily”) only a few times, including on a trip George and I took to Montreal where she and her husband lived in an assisted living facility; there she enjoyed gardening and taking walks. She also came to our wedding, although her husband, ill with Parkinson's, could not come with her. She had an interesting life, which she documented in an essay for her family. One of the more arresting stories was about her and her husband drugging her son so he'd sleep while they smuggled him out of Communist-controlled Hungary. George says that he and his sisters always had fun with her when they were children.

In addition to those who passed away, other members of George's extended family/friends have been ill with cancer, although luckily they are recovering. As a result of all these recent events, I've decided to volunteer with Capital Hospice, which is the non-profit hospice association that covers the Leesburg area. I completed the initial training this month. It was pretty intense at times because some of my classmates had some very wrenching stories about the events that led them to volunteer for hospice. It will be a while before I can do much for them because I have to find a way to be available during the day.

Filling out the hospice application led me to recall my other experiences as a volunteer. When I first moved to D.C., I volunteered at a battered women's shelter in Alexandria. The location was ostensibly secret, but I was still concerned about some violent boyfriend or husband showing up, especially when I did an overnight shift “sleeping” at the house (I recall in particular watching an old and somewhat bad movie called “The Emerald Forest” in the middle of the night). I was bored most of the time because I never actually had an admit in two years or so of working there, but I was amazed and horrified at the size of some of the files; i.e., women kept coming back to the shelter and then going back to their abusers, and so on.

What Christmas Looks Like In Florida

Two days before New Year's, I received a call from Cheryl in Tampa telling me that her mother was failing and had to be moved to a continuous care facility. She was told that if friends or family wanted to see Aunt Marilu they had better come right away, so I flew from Newark to Tampa the next day (which was also Cheryl's daughter Annaliese's 4th birthday). New Year's Eve in Tampa was very weird. Houses were still draped in Christmas decorations and Santa and his reindeer were dressed in scarves and standing next to palm trees, but as there were so many lights and fireworks going off all over the place, I took a very atmospheric walk around the neighborhood at about 10:30 that night.

This year, even more than in years past, Christmas decorations really outdid themselves with the proliferation of the giant blow-up Santas, Grinches, and Christmas snow globes complete with carousels. These may be cute for the kids at night, but they take up quite a bit of electricity and thus are left deflated and lying ever so attractively on lawns during the day, an effect that leads one to think, as George put it, that there had been a vast drive-by holiday shooting.

In early February the nation was treated to the Marilu Memorial Super Bowl (otherwise known as Superbowl 41), in which her team finally won the big one and Peyton Manning showed that he could deliver. I was very concerned about the whole match up of the Bears and the Colts, being a Colts fan myself and having vivid memories of Aunt Marilu rooting for the Bears. Cheryl, however, put my mind at ease about rooting for the Colts against the Bears, as it turns out that Aunt Marilu had become a Colts fan in later years. Even though he rarely actually sees any football, Alexander has inexplicably decided that he's a Patriots fan—inexplicably because we don't live in New England, he's too young to look up to Tom Brady for dating (and impregnating) supermodels, and I don't watch the Patriots.

Nora Discovers Herself, And Becomes Just As Much Of A Pain As Her Brother...

Just as Alexander did when he was her age, Nora has reached the Character Assertion Phase (remember that Alexander actually referred to the whole family using character names from “Bob the Builder” for five whole months). Nora regularly informs us that she is some character from a book or children's television show, but she doesn't behave any differently. Occasionally there might be an associated activity, but most of the time she just says something like “I'm Roo” or “I'm Eyeore” or “I'm Bob the Builder”—and keeps insisting on different names throughout the day. In addition, her Baba (blanket) now has a personality and a body and sometimes plays board games with us.

I was listening to Nora tell herself stories in her bed as she was falling asleep and it occurred to me that it's only really kids that do this. I then began to wonder what people would think if I started doing that when I was falling asleep. Maybe I could talk loudly about current events or sing my favorite songs at the top of my lungs. That poor woman has Tourette's, they would say, which makes me wonder why this is considered normal behavior in children.

Nora has been admitted to St. John the Apostle Preschool for September (which is where Alexander went), which means that potty training needs to be fully accomplished by that time. She showed a bit of interest last fall, but then lost interest after Christmas (“I've stopped peeing”). I decided that I just needed to set a date to take her out of her diapers, and that day turned out to be February 23rd, although I didn't get up that morning thinking I was going to be taking her out of her wet clothes over and over again. She had basically gotten the hang of it two days later and maybe we can finally ditch the diaper pail. I don't really remember much about Alexander's potty training because at the time I was deranged from having a newborn. George says we just put him in underwear and let him go at it. As far as self-care is concerned, however, Alexander would be quite happy even now to have us dress him and put him in diapers.

Like Nora with her potty training, all of a sudden one day we discovered that Alexander had a new skill: he was reading—really reading—well into Dr. Seuss's “If I Ran the Zoo.” We hear only bits and pieces from him about what he does in school, so now we know he must be learning to read. He insists on reading to Nora, and sometimes she's willing and sometimes she'd rather just have him go away. I was surprised at how quickly he went from 0 to 60. He still, however, hasn't been taught to tie his shoes.

Alexander has had some classic lines through the years, such as the one that still amuses George's boss: “You're not in charge here, Mommy is...” One of my personal favorites came a couple of months ago as we were all sitting down to lunch together and Alexander (for once) liked something that I had made. He looked at George thoughtfully, told him “Mommy's a good cook,” then looked at me and said “Mommy, you're very good at cooking.” He then looked back at George and said “and you're...” That was it. Dead silence. Try as he might, he couldn't think of anything positive to say about George at that moment.

George was also witness to the following gem when we were trying to correct some unacceptable behavior of Alexander's. In an effort to incentivize him, George warned him that he might not be able to use his scooter for a few days if he continued doing whatever it was he was doing. Alexander, honestly trying to be helpful, and flush with new art supplies from Christmas, countered with a suggestion of his own: “How about you take away my old markers?”

Some of Alexander's lines actually reveal how much concern he has about Nora's well being. When we were in New Hampshire this past Christmas, my uncle Tim—who was playing Santa Claus and distributing the presents to the kids—snuck up to Alexander while Nora was occupied with a gift of her own and gave him an extra present. Tim quietly explained that Santa brought him more than he brought Nora, and suggested that he open it without making much noise so as not to upset his sister. Alexander went over to George and told him he was sad that Nora hadn't gotten as many gifts as he had, then suggested he share his new present with her so she wouldn't be unhappy. Likewise, after we returned to Leesburg, Alexander remembered that he hadn't made Nora a present (he had made George and I pictures with captions before we headed north). He suddenly insisted on making a gift for Nora. Despite these touching moments, he still torments Nora much of the time, but at least we know that he sincerely likes her.

Leesburg Update

In the fall I read an article about how our region of the country has been reassigned from (USDA) cold zone 6 to 7. This seemed reasonable to me as December was so warm that the crocuses started to come out not long after I put in all my tulip bulbs. Perhaps winter had just slept through itself? But then it woke up, shook itself, and then it snowed and Snowed and SNOWED until school was closed for three days in a row one week in February. By the end of last summer I was tired of gardening, particularly because I had to keep watering and watering through July and August. Now I'm ready to get out there again and start clearing out the vegetable and perennial beds. Alexander finally stopped saying that he didn't want the snow to melt and started saying that he was looking forward to going to Florida. It got so bad that on March 7th—a slightly overcast but otherwise uneventful day—Loudoun County Public Schools closed because of the weather forecast. Not a flake of snow fell.

Some of you may remember the problems I had with grocery stores in Berlin: the hours (although these have apparently improved since we left), the lack of ethnic foods, the unhelpful personnel. I was thrilled to come back to my stores here with wide selections, endless hours, and (sometimes) friendly check-out clerks.

When we lived in Arlington before Alexander was born and we had double incomes and little time, I used to do most of my shopping at Whole Foods just a couple of blocks away, a store that still makes me sigh when I see it. Here in Leesburg there's no Whole Foods; instead, we are served by such stores as Target, Costco, Giant, Safeway, Shoppers Food Warehouse, and the new entrant, Bloom, which features a little self-checkout device for those really in a hurry.

The bottom of the barrel (including in terms of price) is Shoppers Food Warehouse (SFW), but this is a store (in addition to Costco and Target) to which I have become very attached. The thing is, no matter how much the more-upscale stores try to draw me in with fluffy produce with a special sprinkler system, store-brand organics, eggs from ecstatic chickens run wild, antibacterial wipes at the door, and all the other trendy items, the fact remains that SFW, although kind of grungy and depressing, often is the only store that consistently stocks the items that I'm looking for and where the checkout clerks are uniformly friendly. Even jalapenos, ubiquitous and uncontroversial chili peppers, are often missing from the shelves of Bloom and other places with large marketing budgets, and forget the more obscure ethnic spices and whatnot. Often the most mysterious absence is Dannon coffee yogurt, which George consumes in abundance.

Media Update

Given that I began this essay during Oscar season, I thought I would write about actors. For years, as probably everyone knows, I was a huge Harrison Ford fan. His movies are now both extremely rare and extremely repetitive (I think the last good one was “Air Force One,” and that was about 10 years ago) and worse yet he dumped his wife a few years ago and hooked up with actress Calista Flockhart, who last time I checked is a year older than I (that would make her 42) to his 64 or so. Now he's set to make Indiana Jones 4, and the actress reportedly set to play against him is Cate Blanchett, all of 37.

My favorite remains Russell Crowe and is likely to remain so until he actually kills someone—with or without a piece of telecommunications equipment. The only movie I didn't like of his was “A Beautiful Mind,” which I found more weird and disturbing than anything else. The other actors I consistently enjoy are Hugh Grant, Kiefer Sutherland. Ralph Fiennes (although recently there was a strange airborne incident with a Quantas flight attendant), and John Cusack. Kyle Chandler, who plays the lead in the TV show “Friday Night Lights,” is also great. The question is, why are actresses so uninspiring? Except for Kate Winslet, I can't think of a single actress that I would go out of my way to watch, although as I write this I think I should include Renee Zellweger, who's good in just about everything she does, and on TV I have enjoyed Katee Sackhoff from “Battlestar Galactica.”

I watched the Oscars this year, although George and I came to the conclusion that we should really TiVo them until next February, at which point we'll have gotten the chance to actually see the films first. We've managed to catch some recent movies through Netflix. “Poseidon” was lackluster despite the direction of Wolfgang Peterson (“A Perfect Storm,” “Air Force One”) and the presence of Kurt Russell. It didn't seem to really have a script, but then I guess it's tough to do boat movies after “Titanic.” (Director James Cameron is working on his first new movie since “Titanic,” which was released in the last century.)

We caught an Australian western called “The Proposition” (amazing how similar the landscapes are to the American west), starring Guy Pearce of “Momento” and “L.A. Confidential” fame, which was interesting but very violent. “United 93” and “Black Hawk Down” are both excellent movies, but as they're based on actual, gut-wrenching events, they are kind of tough to take. The pet Warren Beatty project “Reds” from the 1980s was released recently on DVD, and it warmed our hearts to see the unrepentent left in action. “The White Countess” (Merchant/Ivory's last film) was very atmospheric and Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson were great. The really curious one was “Good Night and Good Luck,” which seems like more of a vanity piece for George Clooney and his pals than an actual movie aimed at a live audience, since many of us were not around in the 1950s and don't know who Fred Friendly was.

As for TV,“24” has gone downhill quite a bit in season six. I'm not necessarily bothered by the constant torturing of one character after another (much commented on in the press), but the lack of an emotional center is a problem. Jack has lost a general humanness, and, because the characters keep shifting each season, the viewer repeatedly needs to become familiar with a whole new set of people, and this season they seem to be lackluster at best. “Lost” has a similar struggle as it moves away from its familiar and fun characters and introduces a whole new set of island dwellers. “Battlestar Galactica” remains by far our favorite show (we are thankful that the SciFi channel has renewed it for a fourth season) and continues to keep us genuinely riveted. Another terrific show that only about five people in America are watching is “Friday Night Lights” (which confusingly airs on Wednesday nights). It's about high school football in Texas, but it has such a great cast and characters that even George is now hooked (I guess that means that six people are watching). If you want to check it out, you can view past episodes on-line.

Upcoming Events

As we moved past New Year's and into the late winter, I realized that before I know it, it's going to be summer and if we want to go anywhere, I'd better get planning. So, we are going to Cheryl's in Tampa over spring break, which is also the week of the kids' birthdays, and then when we get back there is Easter, and then the weekend after that is probably going to be the kids' birthday party, so April is not likely to be a boring month.

This summer we are going to try a short trip to Chincoteague in August, although we're not going at the time of the pony swim (which is in late July) because it sounds a bit like a literal zoo. George and I were really impressed with Chincoteague when we went on a kayaking trip around the island back in the day when we were able to do such things. Alexander's concerned about swimming in the ocean because he is worried that he's going to “run into things.” Or alternatively that things are going to “run into him.” Of course, he won't have to do what I did when I was a kid, which was to start swimming as soon as possible after leaving the safety of the beach so that I didn't have to put my feet on the bottom. The advent of water shoes has changed all that.

Politics Rears Its Ugly Head

I have been reading the left-wing blog called the Dailykos (he has a link to “DraftGore.com” prominently displayed) because I think the intra-Democrat fight (e.g., Hillary vs. Obama, via David Geffen; Blue Dogs vs. Murtha left wingers) is more interesting than anything happening on the Republican side at the moment. It's frighteningly early for the presidential race (consider that Alexander will be in SECOND GRADE by the time that this election takes place!), so I may sicken of this before November 2008. One constant thread in the blog is the need to “bring the troops home” and that “supporting the troops” (which the contributors disparage as a meaningless phrase that conservatives use to trump liberals) really equates to “bringing them home.” But just like in the conservative press, things are just taken for granted, and in this case the undiscussed subject is whether the troops are actually interested in being “brought home.” It seems that many of them are interested in fighting (and winning) over there, so if they were to ask the troops what they wanted, as it is they whom we are ostensibly “supporting,” what would the majority say?

As for Al Gore himself, he begins to look more and more weird, almost like he's morphing into the Dalai Lama. I liked him with Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars, as Leo was clearly very nervous with his hero next to him at the podium, and joked a couple of times about whether Gore was going to make an Announcement. Oh—the horror! At least John Kerry has disappeared safely into the vortex of failed candidates.

In late February the Washington Post ran a couple of front page articles from reporters investigating conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital (“The Other Walter Reed” beginning February 18). Although the articles were written in the typical Post style, which is maximum impact/low explanation up front (and thus confusing if you're trying to actually understand what's happening, rather than just “feel” the story), I was happy to see what we so rarely see: journalists performing a true service. If you didn't see the articles we could e-mail them to you, although you probably know the gory details already and I know many blogs have linked to the articles. George and I find editorial standards to be pretty low at the Post, and we are consistently surprised at how poor the political reporting is for the nation's supposedly preeminent newspaper for politics, but I have to hand it to the journalists on this one.

You may have the impression that the CIA is populated by a bunch of red-state, tree-cutting, SUV-driving, gun-toting conservatives, but if you thought this you'd be wrong. The CIA, at least the Directorate of Intelligence where George works (as opposed to the Dark Side, or the Directorate of Operations), has plenty of really left-wing types sprinkled about. And, being George, he loves to argue with them. In fact, I believe that liberal baiting is one of the primary reasons he loves going to work. One woman in his office is even opposed in principle to marriage—so George of course refers to her live-in boyfriend as her common-law husband, or, alternatively, as the “DP,” for “Domestic Philosopher”, since he's a philosophy PhD. One day recently they were arguing about the public policy issues surrounding global warming and it made her so annoyed that she apparently got up early the next morning to go on line and further develop her counterarguments. So now George annoys her by going around the office referring to lots of little “Inconvenient Truths.” She also told him that he's one of about three people remaining in America that really likes Dick Cheney. And she's right: one morning when I got up and logged on to the laptop, I found some new wallpaper George had installed the night before—a photo of some Australians holding up a giant sign that says “The World Needs Great Men Like Dick Cheney. We Love America.” I almost screamed.

Finally, here are nine reasons our kids will think that we were weird when we were kids:

• We watched TV shows when they were “on.”
• We had to look for pay phones when we were out and about and needed to call someone (it would have been really cool to have a cell phone in high school so I could order pizza while on the beach).
• We read newspapers, watched the “evening news,” and went to the library to “look stuff up.”
• Schools closed when there was an actual blizzard.
• We never sat in car seats and never thought about bike helmets.
• People dried their laundry on clotheslines, clipped on with associated clothespins.
• We didn't buy things when we didn't “have any money with us.”
• You had to buy the whole album if you wanted just one song, unless that song was released as a 45 “single.”
• We had posters of Shaun and David Cassidy (with associated blow-dried hair) and Charlie's Angels (the original ones) on our walls.