Two grandchildren

I felt as if I’d found myself when my children were born. They gave me confidence because suddenly I had someone else besides “me” to look out for. I was never very good about looking after myself, but I felt strong and fierce with my babies. When my grandchildren were born, it was another sort of emotion. When I held them – looking back and forth between the child in my arms and the grown-up person (who used to be my baby!) in front of me – it was as if I could feel all the weight of my years, but also the weight of my parents and grandparents behind me. It made me realize that I’d lost a little of my identity when my children were born, but I gave it up gladly. It felt constructive, as if I were building something, but I didn’t quite know what it would be. What I didn’t realize then was that I was forging a chain.

My mother in law died last week. She was 93, and fell and broke her hip. Less than six days later, she died of pneumonia. Although she had been old, she had been in good health until then, so it was a shock when she died. When we gathered for her funeral in a small chapel, and I saw her in her coffin, it was another shock. She’d always been so energetic, even in the last years of her life when she could hardly get out of bed. But she’d lived alone, with part – time caretakers, and had mostly kept her wit. My husband went to see her every other day, and a month before she passed on, my son stopped by to present her great-grandchild to her and she had been thrilled. Her other great-grandchild was at her funeral, making three generations of mourners. We told some stories, recited a poem, and shed some tears. It’s hard to say goodbye.

Perhaps were are nothing in this world; we pass through it like shooting stars – trees last longer, the oceans are eternal – but we are just flashes of light. Last week we said goodbye to a vibrant, funny, energetic woman, whose life had been full of both glamour and regrets. She would have liked to have lived in the south of France, she told me one day – with plenty of sunshine, near the ocean, in a village where her dream had been to run a little shop. But she was one of those people who live very much in the present, and her interests were centered firmly around her children.

I look at my two new grandchildren, and I wish them all the best. I wish that their lives be full of joy, peace, and prosperity. I am glad they are links in the chain that is my family – but ultimately, that they are part of the web that is humanity.

Auguste the Amazing survivor dog

Two weeks ago, we woke up to find Auguste in a coma. He was unresponsive, didn’t raise his head or wag his tail when we called him, pet him, rattled a bowl of dog food under his nose. We took him to the vet’s office in a panic. He is, after all, a very old dog. The vets saved him – he spent ten days in the vet clinic – he had a massive infection and his gall bladder nearly burst – it was a close call. Now he’s home, and trotting around, bossing me around as usual. This morning he barked at me when I didn’t feed him fast enough – he’s definetely feeling better.

The vet bill was pretty high, but worth it, as he’s doing well, back to being his confident, silly self. I don’t regret the money spent, and for once, we were actually able to pay without it making too huge a hole in our budget.

After all, my twins cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems that, (for me anyway) life, health, and money and very closely related. I am lucky to live in a country (France) where healthcare is affordable. We can even afford to pay for private health insurance plus what the government offers (basic primary healthcare for all, which covers everything, really) – the private insurance costs about 20€ a month & is required by law now, but for years I never had it and never needed it. Auguste was a reminder that healthcare is essential. It was so scary when he was sick, and we were so relieved when he got better, that I can’t Imagine what it must be like for the parents of a child – or any loved one – when that child gets sick and they can’t pay for medical expenses. How unbearable. This is a true story – close friends of our lost their first son because they couldn’t afford healthcare when they lived in Texas. This was back in the 1950’s. I like to think that today, something like that would never happen again.

Anyway – back to more cheerful things – Auguste, the mighty dog, is a true survivor. He survived cancer, and now he survived a coma and massive infection. He even survived me having to give him a shot every day for a week (I’d never given a shot and got a crash course from my husband who Hates giving shots so he showed Me how to do it, figuring the sadist part of me would probably like it. I got so good at it, I’d give the shot to Auguste when he was eating, and he Never even noticed when I did it!!

The Writing on the Wall

When the twins were eleven months old, we flew from hot and sticky Buenos Aires to icy, wintry Albany, New York (via Rio de Janeiro and NYC) for the holidays. We stayed with my mother in her tiny house in Kinderhook. The twins had their cribs in an upstairs bedroom, pushed against one wall. Almost from the first day, a mysterious thing happened – scrawling scribbles in what looked to be pencil appeared on the wall by Sebi’s crib. Now, the twins were, at that time, eleven months old. They didn’t walk or talk yet, so we couldn’t ask what was going on. I looked everywhere for a pencil. We took Sebi’s bed apart. We took his mattress off, we shook out his covers. We looked in nooks and crannies in the crib and found nothing – but every morning there were more scribbles.

We washed the wall. Searched again. A pencil in the hand of an eleven month old could be dangerous. We took the bed apart, again. The next morning – more scribbles. This happened for over a week. We could Not understand where Sebi got the pencil. Where was it? How? And then one day, as we were washing the wall and again, searching for the pencil, my mother moved Sebi’s stuffed bunny out of the way, and felt something hard in it. Carefully looking, we found a tiny hole, and poked into the hole, was the stub of a pencil. Sebi had been taking it out, scribbling on the wall at night, and pushing it back into the stuffed animal when he was done.

The mystery cleared up, we could stop worrying about ghosts handing out pencils to wakeful babies at night. And then we went to Florida for the polo season. There, we rented an apartment with pristine white walls. And there, one day, Sebi (or Alex – I’ll never know) found a pen and scribbled all over the wall behind the couch. My husband had been gone all morning and I’d been watching the twins. When he came home, I was busy scrubbing the wall. Obviously, I’d failed in my duty – the blue markings on the wall proved it. “How could you let him do that?” My husband said. “How hard can it be to watch two toddlers for an hour?” 

Well, the next day I went shopping and an hour later I came back to find my husband, red-faced, scrubbing the wall. While I’d been gone, and while he’d been watching one twin, the other had found a pen and had scribbled all over the wall again. I was far too virtuous to say “I told you so.” But one day, I promised, I’d write the story down. And so I have.

 

The obligatory Hamster Post

My twins bugged me for years about getting hamsters, but since we had a cat I told them “no.” So when the cat died (of old age) the boys and I went to the pet shop and bought hamsters. I wanted two males or two females – of course we got one of each sex. And they had little wrestling matches (delighted comments from the boys) I rushed out and bought a second cage – too late – at 6 a.m. we were woken up by Sebi screaming that “Brownie has Kittens!” And sure enough – in Brownie’s cage were five tiny pink…things. Baby hamsters are Not cute in the beginning. The twins (aged 10) named the new babies (Verb, Adverb, Paragraph, Page, and Cootie.) Cootie being the runt of the litter.

My daughter, aged two, loved to play with the hamsters and would take them out of their cage. I would tell her to put them back or they’d bite. She didn’t care. She got bitten a few times but it just made her stop squeezing them so hard.

One day I was vacuuming the dining room and my daughter (2 years old) came running in screaming “Stop Stop – the babies are all over!” She’d taken them out to play and left them in the dining room. Horrified I stopped the vacuum cleaner and started to look for one-inch-long baby hamsters. I found four, but not Cootie. Hands shaking, I started to take apart my vacuum cleaner, when I noticed our dog, Fudge, lying under the table licking her paws.

Eyes narrowed, I crouched down and said, “Fudge, bring it over here!” Sheepishly, she got up and walked over and spit a tiny hamster out onto my outstretched hand. The hamster was a little wet (well, a lot wet) but intact and perfectly fine. I sighed and put all the babies back with their mother, and put the cage high, where my daughter couldn’t reach it.

The baby hamsters all found good homes with the twins’ schoolmates. (The hamsters were also invited to spend a week in my daughter’s kindergarten class, where the mother hamster promptly bit the pricipal’s thumb much to the children’s delight.)

About a month later my daughter set the father hamster free in our garden. (“But he wanted to play in the bushes!”) and the mother hamster lived on for a few more years and then died peacefully in her bed. (Hamsters only live about 3 years, so don’t get too attached to them)

The twins, by then, had another hamster that they “rescued from a bunch of ‘wild hamsters’ in the pet shop that were picking on him” – he was the smallest hamster I’ve ever seen. He looked like a gray walnut with long, wild, Einstien hair.

He was so weak and sickly the boys named him Kenny – after the South Park character who was always dying. Kenny didn’t grow very much bigger, but he lived to a ripe old age of nearly 5 years – an amazing feat for a hamster. He was also the sweetest hamster, and never bit anyone, not even children or principals. When Kenny died, an old hamster practially all white by now and moving stiffly like an old man – (he died sitting in his food dish, so it took us a while to figure out he was actually dead) we decided to give away the hamster cage and not have anymore small animals. Until my daughter wanted goldfish. But that’s another story.

Auguste gets sick

There is an expression, “Sick as a dog”, that means just what it says – when dogs get sick, they get very sick. When Auguste was a puppy, he got his first or second round of vaccinations, and when I took him home and looked at him, I noticed I couldn’t see his eyes anymore. His little face was all puffy and his eyes were just slits. I rushed him back to the vets, where he got some emergency care for a violent allergic reaction. A few hours later, we were back home, Auguste asleep on Julia’s lap, his face back to normal.

A few years later, I noticed a bump on his back, near his spine.  It looked like a blood blister, but I took him to the vet, and she took a sample and had it tested. It turned out to be a particularly nasty sarcoma – so off that went. Operation, recuperation, home  for the holidays. He has a small scar, but everything healed nicely.

Auguste loves bones – he used to get veal bones as a treat – until the day he ate his, then stole Rusty’s veal bone and ate that too – and got an intestinal obstruction. That was serious. I rushed him to the vet after seeing him walking around, straining. He spent nearly a week at the clinic and came back home covered in feces, but healed. I dumped him in the bath, scrubbed him, and put him out on the porch in the sun to dry (he was so tired, all he could do was sleep). He had a large, infected sore on his back too,  and as he lay outside, a fly laid its eggs in it, and the next day, he was covered in maggots. It was horrifying – but oddly enough, they cleaned the sore so well it healed within days and never left a mark.

Auguste didn’t learn from his bone debacle. He scarfs down anything he can fit into his jaw – crunches and swallows it before we can get it away from him. Most of the time, we can, if we act quickly, grab his muzzle and stick our fingers into his mouth to pull the whatever it is he’s eating (dead bird, chicken bone, fossilized pizza crust, candy along with wrapping…) out of his jaw. But he’s a dachshund – he is low to the ground and he’s fast – he smells garbage and dives at it before we can see it! The upshot of that is he gulps a lot of garbage – and he comes home and is sick afterwards.  Our conversations go like this:  “Quick! He’s sick! Get him off the rug!”   “Where did he go today? The stables? Weren’t you watching him?!”  “Of course I was! (fingers crossed behind back – who can watch a dog every second?) He went into bushes!”   “What did he eat?”  “How should I know. Ugh. You clean it up!”

Sick as a dog. Makes sense – they eat everything and decide later if they want to keep it. But then, yesterday, he didn’t look good at all, and he refused his food. That made 2 days in a row. We took him straight to the vet, and he was diagnosed with a large tumor in the spleen. How did we miss it? I was devastated, but the vet reassured me. Apparently these tumors develop in less than a month – in three weeks it can go from nothing to a grapefruit size. Auguste didn’t even notice until it started to press on his stomach, taking away his appetite. He wasn’t in any pain – he just seemed slightly less boisterous than usual – and as he’s nearing his 12 year birthday, we figured he’d finally calmed down.

An emergency surgery took place last night. He’s resting this morning (minus one spleen & tumor). Hopefully he’ll be able to come home in a few days and with any luck, he’ll be up and around in a matter of weeks – ready to go back to the stables, chase cats, ride Kalin with Julia, and eat all the garbage he finds on the ground!

For the Dogs

We’re a dog family. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have a dog. When I was a baby, we had two golden Labs – Cain and Abel. I don’t remember them at all, but I do remember a golden collie named Lassie. I must have been 4 when we got her. She was sweet and silly, and was run over by a car and killed a few years later. It was my first heartbreak so I remember very clearly. I was in Sunday school then and was glad that there was a heaven, so she’d be waiting for me up there. When my Sunday school teacher said that dogs didn’t have souls, and therefore would not be in heaven, I decided I’d rather go to Hell. 

The Uncle Peter Stories

When my twins were little, I’d tell them a story every night. Sometimes I’d read a book – Rosie Anderson MacDowell gave Alex his favorite book “Goodnight Moon”, and we read it until it literally fell apart. Sebi liked Thomas the Tank Engine stories. We read Curious George and The Runaway Bunny – But both boys loved Uncle Peter Stories. Those stories were their absolute favorites, and they would beg and plead for an Uncle Peter story. 

Hit the Box

I told a funny story about my sister Julie yesterday (strange, none of my family are speaking to me today…) So I suppose it’s only fair to poke fun at myself as well. As you can see from the picture, I was an adorable little sprout, with crossed eyes and a club foot – but those things sorted themselves out – and thank goodness for our family dentist, who managed to tame my teeth into some semblance of an order, else I’d look like a sabertooth tiger (honest).

Well, I was kind of a nerd, even when I was a baby, and the next door neighbor would come over and pick on me. (He must have been about 3, so don’t go thinking child abuse -) anyhow, he would pick on me, I’d cry, and my mother decided she didn’t want a wimp for a daughter and she would teach me self defense.

Julie’s Hairy Legs

Since I made a section for family stories, I thought I’d fill it up – then years from now my descendents can find out about their ancestors…

The story today, my dear children, is about Aunt Julie’s hairy legs. She’s over on the other side of the ocean, so she can’t punch me – not that she ever did – she was the Good Child. The worst she ever did was to take all my sleeveless shirts and sew up the straps so she could wear them. Oh, and on my graduation day we drank a little more than we should have, but it wasn’t her fault we fell down the embankment – I pushed her.  

A broken frame

It’s not a big deal. My daughter broke the frame that held a photo of her great-grandfather on a polo pony. But because it was broken, I decided to take the photo out and scan it.

Here is Great-Grandfather Jules Macaire on a bob-tail polo pony around 1930.

I never met him. He died at a relatively young age. A polo accident when he was only 35 left him paralysed on one side, and it affected his health.
He ran a riding academy out of a small stables in Neuilly. During the war, the academy and horses were confiscated. When the war finished, he went back to teaching riding and polo. His son took over when his health failed, but never really made a success of the riding school. When Jules died, his son (my husband’s father) moved the ponies to the Bagatelle club in Paris, then sold the stables for a pittance to a developer for apartment buildings.
Family fortunes move up and down. I can follow my husband’s family fortune as it slowly sank. War, health problems, and financial mismanagement depleted the fortune, and today, of the riding stables and farm they once owned, there is nothing left. It’s sad. Only a few pieces of furniture remain that speak of bygone days. A bronze statue of two horses, an ebony table inlaid with ivory, a few knick-knacks. And a photgraph with a broken frame.