Back to Boston

My apologies for not posting - I've been re-tracing family history in Boston. Our first day in the city united Aden and me with my brothers, niece and a subset of nephews. We walked the Freedom Trail from the Common to Quincy Market, where the boys breakfasted on blue slushies and the girls split a caramel candy apple with sprinkles.

After a quick descent through the North End and ascending Beacon Hill, the boys raced scooters and the older people strolled down the sunny Esplanade, wiping away the Indian summer sweat. At length, brother Michael and his boys turned back toward the Common and the girls, John and I walked across the Mass Ave Bridge to Cambridge. The girls took in the pillars of MIT and then the leafy splendor of the Harvard Yard, marred as always by renovation and ‘keep off the grass’ signs. I showed them my freshman dorm, where I spent many an early morning sobbing in lengthy showers, hiding my homesickness in a haze of communal steam.

We had frozen yogurt at a quiet table in front of Lehman Hall where tour groups flooded the spaces around us and a young couple spoke French at an adjoining table. The stores and technologies have changed – almost completely – in the twenty- three years since I lived in a Cambridge dorm. The girls declined our invitation to purchase Harvard gear as I told them to seek college admittance elsewhere.

Saturday night reunited us with two of my college roommates and their families at the beach house in Scituate. The ghosts of dinners past entered with Tara’s parents, who made a brief journey from their home down the road to look in on the girls they welcomed and fed on long-weekend Sundays and holidays.The seven-layer dips we finished before the other guests could have a taste, the big dinners that sat heavily on us at swim team weigh-ins the next day, the travails of finding our way out to West Roxbury in the days before cell phones and traveling expertise - all fodder for "do you remembers?" and "I can't believe it" conversations.

Sunday morning’s alarm pierced through the shriek of wind and rain, a remnant of Hurricane Matthew that dampened the day of my niece, Mae's, baptism. The weather demanded coarse blue raincoats over the carefully packed and ironed church dresses. At the back of the church, we watched bemused as cousins drew pictures, arm-wrestled and pew-hopped through the service. Little Tommy ate his grandmother’s necklace and the priest enthusiastically led his flock in their praise of the “Lawd.”

As the full congregation filed out, we gathered around the baptismal font. Karen called my parents to Skype them through the service as the Julia and Aden snapped photos. John and I flanked Mike, Pam and the baby as her godparents. All of the 23 cousins filed through to mark Mae with the sign of the cross or a gentle kiss, which benedictions she received in squirming impatience. When Father Chris decorated Mae with cold holy water she “screamed all the demons out.”

Inconvenient emotions settled like clouds of gnats that we hastily waved away, longing to center ourselves in the moment of joy but unable to squelch the sorrow of absence and the recognition that this would be the last Boston baptism. Wild, specific tangents unsettled us: my four-year-old nephew watching the mouth of the priest as he pressed his hands together and sought anxiously to pray the Our Father correctly. My parents on Skype, sobbing quietly from a distance of 3,000 miles. 

We’re often with people we love, but rarely with all the people that we love. Each time we share a meal and memory, laughter and like-mindedness, it’s a sharp prick of miracle, which leaves the faint ache of loss as it fades. The seasons pass, we seem to shed our past selves with the rain or the wind or the tidal flux, and yet they collect inside us and refuse to flee.  

Reclaiming Peace

It's windy today and the yellowing trees toss and wave like Broncos fans bemoaning an interception. Our internal affairs mirror the outside drama: my oldest got up at 4:30am to swim, wailing of a sleepless night; my middle child's bus was twenty minutes late, resulting in anxious text messages with frowning emojis; and our youngest staggered out of bed complaining of an upset stomach.

It's strange how a series of events can erode even a deep sense of peace. I swam in the outdoor pool from 5 - 6am while Aden's team took up the indoor space. The dark skies were unbroken by moon or stars, the pool only lit by random floodlights. No radio interrupted the stillness, and only two other swimmers parted the waters. Occasionally a maple leaf darted and danced into the pool - or my shoulder - on its way to winter sleep. As I paddled and kicked through three 800's, I meditated on the teens inside, the torn fibers of my bicep tendon, the small tear in the rotator cuff. There was no pain, only a detailed recognition.

After I dropped my daughter at high school I had to merge onto southbound I 25, where the traffic tore at my sense of peace within minutes. That was followed by a series of unpleasant emails which required even more distasteful phone calls to the bank and insurance companies, and the shards of peace broke and fell onto the unclean kitchen floor. After a morning full of errands and phone calls, I am only beginning to breathe again, trying to recall through my writing that sense of peace I felt so early this morning. It's still there, underlying everything. I'll do my best to find it, iron it out, and wrap myself inside.

Mumford, take 3

We took our two oldest kids to a Mumford & Sons concert on Wednesday. My third and their first.  I possessed a number of reasons for taking them out on a school night, the most important being that a Mumford & Sons concert is a transcendental, semi-religious experience. On the practical side, we had the two extra tickets (and Daniel at camping, so not missing out), and the concert venue is five minutes from our house.

Back to the transcendental portion of my reasoning. Music, singing, stomping and arm-waving that pass for dancing, they all spring from an ancient segment of our DNA. We stood with a large group of friends from our neighborhood, and the kids' eyebrows rose past their hairlines when all of the adults began jumping around like grasshoppers on pogo sticks, singing off-key at high volume. The fifteen-year old appeared only slightly embarrassed, and she liberated her own feet, arms and voice as the evening wore on.  The thirteen-year-old was quietly stunned, and at times wanted to just lie down and nap until the craziness passed. (He eventually shuffled his feet, clapping and shouting for the encore performance of "I Will Wait.")

I whisper-shouted into my daughter's ear that no one cared to criticize, that riding the wave of musical and tribal energy was free-ing and energizing. She loved the performance, but her favorite part of the evening was the miraculous, cell-phone enabled neighborhood reunion at the heart of an 18,000-seat venue. Being on the lawn, watching the sunset, nibbling contraband chocolate while the other adults drank beer, observing the awe in both children's eyes when thousands of cellphones lit the sky during "I Believe" - transcendental at the very least. The night was magic and well-worth the sleep deprivation and croaky voices that resulted from our mid-week evening out.

Mourning my Collagen

I looked down recently and saw that someone had replaced the skin on my legs with elephant hide. Yes, indeed, as I dutifully climbed the outside stairs at a nearby park, congratulating myself on strong quads and hamstrings, I happened to glance down and - wham! - buzz-kill; there were dimples and wrinkles where my smooth skin used to be.

I've come to terms with the deepening wrinkles around my eyes and on my neck by never looking in the mirror, but it just isn't fair to see the skin on my legs detach from its foundation and go sliding off in whatever direction it pleases.  Like an old flame, my collagen has left the building, and I never knew how much I cared until it was gone.

After doing some research, I'm even more irate. Women's eggs have a pre-programmed end date, and our estrogen production declines as the eggs lose their bounce. With the loss of estrogen comes - you got it - the sharp drop in collagen, that magic stuff beneath our skin that keeps it smooth and glowing. The worst part is that men don't have an expiration date on their sperm, so even though testosterone decreases somewhat over time, it doesn't have such a pronounced affect on their wrinkles.

So my husband, eighteen months younger than I, will look progressively more young by comparison?  That is so unfair. The babies came out of my body, and the task of cleaning the cat litter box falls to me - shouldn't I catch a break on the collagen?

And if matter and energy are conserved in this universe - nothing new created and nothing old lost - who gets my supply of collagen? Perhaps a new baby snagged it, or my glowing teenage daughter caught it by osmosis. If anyone sees my old collagen, tell it I miss it and wish it would come back!

Outlander and Antibiotics

To follow: a sad commentary on the state of basic medicine as well as the state of my bedtime reading. Taking the latter problem first, I confess to purchasing (and devouring) the first four books of the Outlander series. I had steadfastly resisted picking up the books in the past, for mysterious reasons related to stubborn pride and lack of time, but Rob got me started on the TV series and from there my capitulation was complete.

I find the series to be diverting and non-anxiety producing. Author Diana Gabaldon makes me laugh, invites me to ponder the advances of the twenty-first century, and never creates nightmares (just the lurid fantasy or two). I'm astounded by the characters and predicaments that Gabaldon conjures. Currently, the main female character, Claire, attempts to reproduce penicillin in her rural frame house by using beef broth and stale bread as petri dishes for mold.

What Claire, a 21st-century doctor, knows about living in the boonies in 1770 is that antibiotics are magic. Without penicillin and its kin, infection can kill an individual after a minor injury or bacterial illness. Though I admire Claire's gumption in recreating Alexander Fleming's 1929 experiment, I'm truly thankful that antibiotics already exist in our time. We now have a new problem, which is the overuse of these magical meds.

When I was in my teens, I took an oral antibiotic for acne. This went on for years, and my family thought nothing of it. It worked, my dad was on a similar med for a similar reason, and scientists either didn't know about the dangers of evolving, drug-resistant bacteria, or they just weren't telling.  Fast forward three decades: I can't take antibiotics any longer without producing a head-to-toe yeast infection (including thrush, stomach, intestinal, etc.) which then requires strong and prolonged doses of anti-fungal meds.

I'm the teensiest bit irritated about this predicament, especially when I see Facebook videos on the amazing ability of bacteria to adapt and resist ever-stronger doses of antibiotics. But what really steams my pores is the continued use of antibiotics to fight acne. I went to the dermatologist on Monday with one of the kids, to ask what might be done to alleviate teenage acne. We explained the dietary changes made, the extremely careful cleansing and moisturizing rituals, the washing of pillowcases and special face cloths.  Upon conclusion of our litany, doctor said, "well, you're a candidate for oral antibiotics."  

WTF?  Thirty years later, that's all we have?  I explained that people aren't even supposed to eat chicken that was raised on antibiotics, let alone take it daily for years upon years, and the doctor shrugged. On the way home, as I ranted (calmly - I was in rush-hour traffic), my child noted, "why would they change? they're still making money on the same old stuff."  We've come so far, but - somewhere along the way - we threw common sense out with the moldy bread.