Time to Put Away Childish Things

For Will's 18th birthday, all he wanted was clothes, or money for clothes so he could be a new man going to college in the fall. I tried to explain to him that the best clothes for New Orleans in August are probably gauze bandages or a bathing suit, but he isn't listening to me anymore. 

Typically frugal, I made him divest himself of old clothes that no longer worked, either to donate or trash based on condition. There was a third pile for clothes he might want to wear when he comes home for break -- if he comes home for break -- and needs something warm or different to bide his time.  He went through all diligently piling up clothes or putting away spares. And then from the depths of his closet, he brought out a wooden chest he'd had forever.

One of our neighbors makes jewelry and collects stones. Vic was at some point many years ago trying to dislodge a large couch stuck in his doorway. My husband happened to be walking by and helped him move it. Since then, Vic has been a friend but also like a tooth fairy. He drops off baked goods and he gives me tomatoes from his garden. Vic gave Will some rocks immediately after the couch incident. One was a showy crystal and the other a flat piece that sort of shimmered like shale. 

An interesting coincidence these gifts of rocks because as a kid I shared a love of rocks with my Grandpa Fred. I would walk around telling everyone, "I'm going to be a paleontologist."

Will put the rocks away and then some time later he bought a wooden box at a tag sale that became a kind of treasure chest. In it he stashed the crystal and the flat rock. He put marbles he got with my mom. Feathers, coins, a $2 bill my Uncle David gave him.  All his little treasures.

He hid this wooden chest away in the back of his closet, which of course I found immediately while doing laundry. But it stayed there for years. Until this year. This year, he decided he didn't need it anymore. The box was just taking up space in his closet. 

Now the box is sitting in our guestroom. I emptied its contents including the rocks and other treasures. Now an empty box, it's still a treasure to me. It's a reminder of Will's childhood.

It's a reminder to me of believing wholeheartedly in a world of magical rocks and found feathers and coins from a distant land. Yes, it is time for Will to put away childish things. But I'm keeping the box for that day when he wants to remember rocks and feathers and magic. Or maybe I'm just not ready to put it away. 
  
1 Corinthians 13:11
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

In a World Without Earbuds

Eighteen years ago today, I was in labor with our son Will. It was a tough labor. It went on for over 30 hours, even after I was induced with pitocin. Pitocin is pure crap by the way. Don't believe the lies.

I saw one shift of nurses, and then another, and then the first ones came back again. I went through three OBs and regrettably ended up in delivery with the one I referred to as "Dr. Hair Plugs." That guy was the worst. He said at the bitter end, "Maybe we should've done a C-section after all." I would like to just go on record here and say you should never tell a woman that after hours and hours of labor.

It was not a shining moment for me. It was not a moment bathed in pure light as I saw my little boy for the first time. The doctors were worried about Will and the trauma of such a long delivery so they whisked him away from me. They sent a lung team in to check him. The nurses scrubbed him down and put him under warm lights. I could see him from a distance. He had a beautiful head of black hair. He was okay.  He was healthy.

I saw my husband Rod put his hand on Will's chest and it covered his entire torso. I remember thinking when we brought him home -- a nearly 10 pound baby is actually pretty tiny. Please God don't let me break him.

They did finally hand Will to me, just the way you see in movies. Swaddled in a little baby bun. Our beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy. We immediately nicknamed him "Tiny Elvis" for his amazing head of hair.

Tomorrow, Will turns 18. I'm trying so hard to keep it together and to remember the little boy who is now a junior man. I want to be happy for him and accepting of him and start to let him go. 

This morning he was complaining about his lost earbuds again. I believe this is two pairs of earbuds in one week, a world record here at the Risher-Morton house. I've come up with an idea for a new reality show where young adults are dropped on a desert island without earbuds. "In a World Without Earbuds" teens will be forced to talk to one another or make earbuds out of coconut shells like on Gilligan's Island. This is what I think about so that I can pretend this isn't happening. But it's all happening. And off he will go. I'm gonna predict he'll lose 17 sets of earbuds as a freshman at Loyola New Orleans. 

Yesterday I spoke to my good friend Leslie and we caught up on all the college news. I told her Will is going to New Orleans and that I was worried, because I know the dangers of New Orleans as a former Tulane grad. She said something so sensible to me, something like, "If he's a good student now and a good kid, wouldn't he continue to be that in New Orleans?" 

I said, "Leslie that's crazy talk!" And then I laughed. Because she's right. Or as my mom often says, "Honey, he's cooked." Or baked. Basically, he's done. He's made. He's Will. 

NB: This is Will with Lars Ulrich from Metallica at Berklee last summer. I'm not Facebook friends with Lars or else I would totally tag him in this post. Rock on!

The Slippery Fish Won't Get Whacked

I went into the City on Thursday to meet up with a friend who was in town from Portland. It's been ages and I'm so glad we had the chance to catch up. Her 9 year-old son was with her and I was telling them one of my favorite New York stories about my son. 

Will has always been a dreamy kid as my mom puts it, just happy to be wherever he is at the moment. I remember that we were standing outside of Serendipity. It's the famous ice cream place where all the tourists go and have huge sundaes or whatever ice cream creation you want. Will was staring up at the sky or wandering or something and he got in this older lady's way. So she whacked him with her cane. And kept going. Not a hard whack, but it was odd. It was a first, even for New York.

So I asked Will if he was okay, and then I said, "Will, you've got to be a slippery fish in the City. You've got to weave in and out of the crowds of people looking for gaps where you can slide through and keep moving ahead. You have to pay attention to where you're going, watch for bike messengers. You can't just wander around."

You can always spot a City kid. They're still. They stand serenely on street corners holding their nanny's hand waiting for the light to change. They know the dangers of city streets unlike suburban kids who wander around looking up at the tall buildings touching every single filthy surface possible. City kids glide, kids from suburbia flail.

I met my friend and her son at Grand Central and by that time he was tired from walking -- there's so much walking in the City. I told him the story of the slippery fish. "You've got to be a slippery fish," I said. And my friend and I were laughing about that old lady whacking Will with her cane. And then this happened.

I was walking back to Grand Central to catch my train home. The sidewalk on 44th was a mess with scaffolding dividing the passage into two sides. On the right side, pedestrians were walking east and the left west. Well there were a lot of people walking east, so I decided to jump sides and walk in the opposite direction. There were a few people I had to dodge, but mostly I made it through well ahead of all those other poor people on the right. Until the very end.

At the very end of the block sat an older homeless woman who seemed to be directing traffic in that section of sidewalk. When she saw me walking on the left, she whacked me on the butt with her hand and said, "Get on over to the right side." Not a hard whack -- like the way your grandma might whack you to get in the house because it's getting late.  

I must be slowing down, because I never saw that whack coming. I used to be a slippery fish. 

Here's to You Millenials

Over the holidays I interviewed for a job in the City. I haven't interviewed for a job in a long time, but this one really interested me because it was an educational start-up teaching kids through news and current events. Some day, I will get back into news. I don't know how yet, but I will. News is a profession you can grow old in. I often tell my younger friends, think about what you're doing. Because time flies and some professions don't want you when you're older.

For the interview, I went into the City to meet the marketing VP at their offices on 8th Avenue. He is a very nice man, even though he didn't offer me a job. Probably in his early 40's I would guess. Not so far off from where I am. 

He introduced me to his team, all very young people. And I could swear one of them let out an audible gasp when I was introduced, as in I didn't know people could BE as old as you are now. That's part of what led me to this blog about millennials. Hey, my son is one of them. Or maybe even younger. 

Here's what I thought when I heard the audible gasp, though of course I didn't think of it until later. "Good luck with that neck tattoo," I said in my own head much later. "It will serve you well when you're in your 50's." Because nothing looks better in your 50's than a sagging neck tattoo. Good luck with those earring things that are creating giant holes in your ears for what purpose I don't know. Good luck with your impending hearing loss caused by never removing ear buds from your ears. Ever. Good luck with your gigantic thumb pads earned from swiping and texting. 

And then I had this terrible thought. Make it an awful idea. A wonderful, awful idea. Could it be that I'm the Grinch in this scenario? That soon every HR manager I ever meet will have a neck tattoo and something sticking through their ear. That I'm the one who looks strange without earbuds? That my thumb is lacking because it's regular-sized?

"And THEN They'd do something He liked least of all! 

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, 

Would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing. 

They'd stand hand-in-hand. And the Whos would start singing! 

They'd sing! And they'd sing! And they'd SING! SING! SING! SING! 

And the more the Grinch thought of this Who ChristmasSing, 

The more the Grinch thought, "I must stop this whole thing!" 

"Why, for fifty-three years I've put up with it now!" 

"I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! But HOW?" 

Then he got an idea! An awful idea! 

THE GRINCH GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!"

Act As If This Is Your Last Chance

My friend Julie and I had a pretty funny conversation this afternoon, or it seemed funny to us. Through crackling cell phones we had a series of "old people" exchanges as follows,

"I'm hot," I yelled.
"What?" she yelled back.
"I'm hot," I yelled.
"What?" she yelled back.

This went on for at least a minute. A glimpse of things to come. 

At the same time, Will, my son was trying to tell me something about his scholarship money from Loyola in New Orleans. Some extra financial aid had appeared out of nowhere. A gift from the heavens. Great. Fantastic. At last, we can relax.

Then I opened the mail. You, Will,  have 8 absences, of which you are only allowed 12 in English for the entire year.  Or you lose credit and I don't know, maybe lose your biggest scholarship opportunity at Loyola. That's $15,000. 

I panicked. I got mad. It's like all the stages in Death and Dying by Kubler-Ross. Really panicking because it is frightening trying to get a kid into college these days and then figure out how to pay for it. 

I'm trying to be Irish Zen like my friend Lou Lou Mulderrig or my other friend Mike Casey. Just breathe, take it easy and know everything will be okay.  But that's not really how I tend to think. I tend to think the worst, predict the worst, fret about the worst case scenario that I know lies just around the bend. 

Until the worst case scenario happens, and then my thinking switches into another level of panic something like, "What if this is it?" I've experienced these moments under positive circumstances, for example when you see a landscape like parts of Texas and Louisiana, or pretty much anywhere on the Pacific Coast Highway. It's overwhelming, the feeling of smallness and finite and wow. This is really it.

And sometimes it happens in an emergency room, when I see my son attached to tubes and oxygen meters. Or when the vet finds Daisy, our beloved Doodle, has swollen lymph nodes. Or when, or when. It happens all the time. 

Bargaining kicks in. Dear god, I will do this thing, if you'll do this one for me. And the one thing becomes another, and another, until I would sell my soul to have one more chance. As I sit here thinking about how to tell Will that the absences in English could sink his ship, I try to also think of what I would say if I had one last chance. 

"Dear Will," I hope I would say. "It has been my great honor and pleasure to be your mom. You have a kind heart, a wonderful curiosity, a strong body and voice, a magnetism that could work in your favor if used wisely, an oblivious in the clouds nature that I think has to do with the music in your head, crazy confidence, less than exceptional work ethic and organizational habits. You would give a friend your last dollar and way too much of your time, so choose them wisely."

You asked me today how Dad and I raised an awesome kid like you -- not your words but I won't repeat them because you're a teenager and sometimes you say stupid stuff.

I think your dad and I made conscious decisions about choosing each other and not making the not-so-great relationship decisions we'd made in the past. We avoided certain patterns that were not healthy for either of us. We also discussed up front very important issues like how to discipline, how to talk to you, what to do about media (or too much of it), getting outside to build strength, what was important for your development. Most importantly, and THIS IS SO IMPORTANT, we wanted to keep an honest, open relationship with you. So we made a decision early on that if you told us the truth, we wouldn't punish you.

From what I've seen with your friends, this has sometimes been perceived as a positive and often times a negative. Some parents don't want to know what's happening. We do.

Full circle back to my typical worst case scenario thinking. You can't miss any more classes Will or you'll risk your scholarship, or worse, graduation. I'm seeing Poseidon Adventure scenes now in my head - the old one with Shelly Winters. 

But what's really important is to put this in context. I need to spend more time thinking like it's my last chance. When I think that something is finite, when we're in the ER with you because you've been bitten by a dog, fallen down a water slide, are overcome by asthma, then I start to think clearly about what is important. 

Dear Will. It has been my great honor and pleasure to be your mom. 

(NB This is one of my favorite videos of you singing at Greenfield Hills Congregational)

I Love You in Minus 25

Today is Valentine's Day. I sort of forgot. I didn't because I bought a card for my husband and my son. Then I forgot.

It was -5 Fahrenheit today, so that may have thrown me off. That is really cold by the way. It was actually -25 with the wind chill. That's also really cold. My neighbor, who is old school New England, said he walked out of the grocery store last night and the bridge of his nose was so cold he immediately got a headache. 

Valentine's this year falls on a Sunday morning.  My husband and I have our Sunday rituals and one is going to the grocery store. Not big fans of grocery shopping, either of us, especially when  it's -degrees temperature. He went out and started the car to warm it up and we took her for a little spin through the neighborhood to make sure everything was A-okay. 

Down the street, we have a relatively new neighbor. I don't know them but I know the guy is a Dallas Cowboys fan because he has a huge Cowboys star on his truck. No one here in Connecticut is a Cowboys fan except me, my neighbor, and like one other guy I met at the DMV.

Anyway our relatively new neighbor has an older son living with them plus the son's girlfriend. I think this phenomenon is very common with millenials who move back home either because they can't find a job or they can't find an affordable place to live. 

Based on handwriting analysis, I'd say the girlfriend went out in the middle of the night last night -- in sub-zero temperatures -- to write I Love You Messages on her boyfriend's freezing cold truck. And I thought wow, that is true, young love. Getting out in this cold to surprise your boyfriend with I Love You on his truck. 

I don't love like that anymore. I'm not getting outside in -25 to spray paint a love letter to my husband. But I did get a very sweet card from him to say Thank You for all you do. We're not young love anymore, but we are love.

This Apple iPhone Fell Far From the Tree

Dear Tim Cook, CEO of Apple,

A funny thing happened yesterday. Oh wait, it wasn't that funny. 

My iPhone 6 is about 1.5 years old now. It recently started doing weird stuff -- mainly not staying charged during the day so I had to carry around my charger with me everywhere I went. Kind of a pain, but hey I dealt with it. Then the new iOS came out. I tried repeatedly to download it and nothing. Wouldn't work. I deleted apps -- sorry Facebook and LinkedIn. To no avail. 

Yesterday I tried again, this time tethering my phone to my Mac (yes I also own a Mac and Apple stock -- like 2 shares).  Then it got weird. I started getting an error message, error 53. Here is a very interesting article about error 53 entitled Error 53 will kill your iPhone and no one knows what it is. Thank you Mike Wehner from The Daily Dot because you are absolutely correct. No one can explain it or repair it and your iPhone just dies. The only difference between Mike's story and mine is that my iPhone was out of warranty, and Apple will not replace a phone out of warranty EVEN if I had nothing to do with causing the error. I didn't drop the phone, I didn't submerge the phone in liquid and I didn't replace any part of the phone. It just died. But it was my fault. 

I went to the Apple store. Nope, can't help. I contacted Apple chat support. Super cheery support guy named Chris told me, "I do want to point out the price for repair listed, is the price you'd pay to have the phone completely replaced, if they are able to repair it the price will be less." (This is a run-on sentence by the way Chris. I'm a writer. I know.)

My reply, "I see."

Chris' reply, "I just know that price scares a lot of people, wanted to make sure I pointed that out for you." (There are other grammar problems here, but at this point I'm more concerned about the CONTENT of what you're saying Chris.)

You see Chris, I don't think the price "scares" people. I think it enrages them. Because I work for myself as a freelance writer, I need my phone. I don't have a "work" phone. My work phone is my cell phone.

Like a lemming to the sea, I went to AT&T to trade in my phone, but they can't give me a new phone until I pay off the remainder due on my dead iPhone 6 with error 53. A mere $243 later + $40 something in tax for my new iPhone 6 that I'll be paying off for 30 months, and I'm back in business with another iPhone 6. 

Here's the funny part, Mr. Cook. (Aside from the part where I actually bought another Apple phone.) The only thing I can relate this to is the time I bought my first couch as a 20-something. I didn't have $1,000 in cash so I signed up to pay off the couch interest-free for 1 year. I loved that couch in my crappy Raleigh apartment. Until about 2 months into couch ownership, I came home one day to find my bulldog/boxer/mutt had eaten the stuffing out of my new couch. Just destroyed it. Couch stuffing was everywhere. So I had to throw it out. And continue to pay for it as it languished in a landfill somewhere. 

I can't even donate the phone, as I normally would, because no one can get in the phone to wipe my personal info. So I'm going to mail my error 53 lemon of an iPhone to you Mr. Cook. You sort it out. Now it's your $300 paperweight.