Prognosticator

As my aunt, grandmother & I walked down the mountain at North Pole, fresh from having seen Santa's winter wonderland, I said, "I hope the baby doesn't get 30 gifts for Christmas."

My aunt replied, "I will get your baby 30 blue gifts before you leave the hospital!"

I am most definitely not having a baby now, but I will look back at this dream and scratch my head a bit if my first baby is a boy.

Being bad is good

I had dinner with my dad and brother last night. I really debated having a salad, and kind of regretted not getting at least a side salad when I was eating my brother's cucumbers and tomatoes from his salad and then watching my dad enjoy his cobb salad.

I called my dad's office a few minutes ago to be sure he had gotten my brother's message that he was sick and wouldn't be coming by my dad's office this morning to help him because he wasn't feeling well. When my dad's secretary answered, she told me that my dad had gone home this morning because he also wasn't feeling well - also blaming it on last night's salad. Thank goodness I was bad! ;-)

Clever boy

My family and I were walking out of the arena after the rodeo ended and my brother said:
"Now that the rodeo's over, guess what's gonna come out and spread nice fresh dirt in the rodeo ring? A Zamdirti."

Odds

F called me yesterday morning. "Guess what?"

"What?"

"Your grandmother and mine are next door to each other," he informed me. I laughed. "I was going to send flowers up to your grandmother's room and I discovered they were right next door to each other."

Which odds are better: that they would place our grandmothers next door to each other or that I'd get such a thoughtful boyfriend?

Still more good news: Both grandmothers have been moved out of recovery, unfortunately ending their stay as neighbors, but they both seem to be doing well.

Freaked out

This song came on, just after taking a call from my mom as she followed an ambulance to hospital with my grandmother in the back.

I know that my grandmother does everything right--eating well, walking with her dog twice day, and has barely been sick a day in her life. This situation should have a positive outcome. But I'm still waiting on pins and needles. Please think positive thoughts for my grandmother.

While you're sharing those positive thoughts, please spare some for F's grandmother and R's father who are both having surgery or preparing for surgery today.

Good news: my grandmother's appendix ruptured but it has been removed and she seems to be doing well in recovery. F's grandmother is also out of surgery and doing well so far. Ironically they'll be recovering in the same hospital for the next week.

Please keep R's father in your thoughts while he's under the knife today.

Misunderstanding

I joined F's family for a Hanukkah breakfast yesterday morning. My mom asked me about it afterward and I explained that this breakfast was their primary celebration this year, they were even foregoing gifts.

"Oh, so they celebrate Christmas?" she asked.

"No," I answered. "Hanukkah isn't a major Jewish holiday..."

"I know," she interrupted.

"And they've just gotten away from giving gifts since their kids have grown up." I finished.

"Oh. So, have you guys talked about the holidays?" she asked.

I paused. "We have." I answered. I opened my mouth to say more and discovered it was suddenly dry. "We decided, since neither of us are very..." I faltered, "that neither of us have any objections to celebrating two religions that we could celebrate at least traditions from both." I looked down. "We haven't decided which one we would raise our, um, children in, so that's still a big question hanging out there."

Now it was her turn to be silent. "I meant whether you'd talked about celebrating the holidays."

"Oh," I said, embarrassed. "We thought we'd kind of just see how this month went. I told him I might be able to wrangle him an invitation to Christmas dinner."

"Sure," she said.

Thanksgiving snapshot

On Wednesday night my dad and his mother were working together to get a mincemeat pie in the oven for Thanksgiving. He had already carefully placed the top crust on it when he realized they had forgotten to put a little butter between the filling and crust.

"No problem," he said, cutting a large semicircle in the top crust. With his mom carefully pulling up the flap of crust, they inserted pats of butter under the edges of the dough.

"I feel like I'm watching a pie autopsy," my brother observed. "It's like 'CS: Pie.'"

TRL: Christmas cookies

When I was growing up, in addition to Christmas songs and oyster stew at my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve, there was one other thing you could count on: many homemade traditional desserts. It wasn't surprising to follow up our rich dinner with fudge, divinity, and the piece de resistance: Christmas cookies.

As my grandmother and her grandchildren have all grown older, the task of making of these Christmas treats has fallen more and more to the younger generations. Instead of waiting for her to make them just prior to Christmas, while we're all together during Thanksgiving weekend my siblings and I share the task of stirring the fudge and we pull out the cookie cutters my dad remembers from his childhood.

A couple of Thanksgivings ago, I woke up late the morning after Thanksgiving, and headed toward the kitchen. When I got there, I discovered nearly 10 people crowded around the island in the kitchen. My dad and his brother stood on one side, rolling out sugar cookie dough while people on the other side wielded knifes and sprinkles, frosting the finished products. As my aunt and grandmother made more dough and frosting, the army of family who were frosting cookies called out suggestions to my dad and uncle about which cookie shapes they should cut out next. When my mom requested a cookie that they didn't have a cutter for, my dad custom-sculpted that cookie shape for her.

If anyone had turned to me at that moment and asked what I wanted, I would've answered that I didn't want anything more than what I had in that moment.

Singing grace

There are certain holidays each year that we celebrate with my dad’s family, the family that is too close to be described as extended but it would confuse other people if I described them as immediate family. As I’ve grown up I’ve learned that this closeness and these traditions aren’t “normal”.

Apparently most families don’t sing “God Bless America” every year before they sit down to hamburgers and hot dogs on the 4th of July. Every year my grandfather would start the family singing that song, despite the fact that he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. After my grandfather died, the responsibility fell to my mom.

So this year my mom will lead our cacophony of voices in "God Bless America" and I will be proud that we aren't your normal family.

Keeping the faith

As a senior in college, two of my roommates and I went out one night to see the latest romantic comedy - Keeping the Faith. From the previews it looked like our standard "feel good" fare. But when Jake, a rabbi, breaks off his clandestine relationship with his childhood friend Anna because she isn't Jewish, I started to sob so hard I couldn't breathe. I stared straight ahead, barely seeing the screen through my tears, afraid that I was going to have to run out of the theater because I couldn't handle the film's parallels to the end of my relationship with PJ.

Sharing dinner on Saturday night with my parents, grandmother and uncle, I chose to remain completely silent as my uncle proudly told my parents how my cousin, who is pursuing entering the seminary, refused to date a guy from college she was obviously interested in because he was not of the appropriate faith. Now that he has started attending the "right" church, they have started dating.

The aspect of these conversations that I hate the most is that I feel like a hypocrite criticizing my ex-boyfriend or my cousin for judging potential mates based on faith. After my breakup with PJ I questioned whether I would have been able to convert to Judaism if he had given me that choice. I ultimately determined that while I rarely demonstrate my faith, it was important to me to raise my future children with the same quasi-religious traditions I grew up with. The fact that now I use religion as a criterion for dates hurts me when it reminds me of how PJ and my cousin have pushed me and others away.

Things people remember

My uncle turns 50 next week and we're having a surprise party for him. My mom came up with an interesting idea--she asked our immediate family to write letters for him, each detailing a memory we had about him or something we love about him. The things I wrote about? The skunk costume he wore to my first birthday party which caused me to scream hysterically until he changed out of it; a conversation we had about dating when I was 13; his advice to me a couple years ago about how to buy a house; and his sense of humor about my aunt's crazy alternative life.

My aunt on the other side went on a religious retreat recently and I received a similar request from her sponsor--could we write a letter telling her why we loved her? I was stumped--not because I don't love her but because I didn't know why. I seized upon inspiration at the last minute. I wrote about my aunt's love of photography and how she expresses her love for us my sharing those pictures with us and how much that means to me.

A few months after I graduated from college, I returned to St. Louis to go on the second part of a religious retreat with the Catholic Student Center. During the first retreat to demonstrate love, the retreatants had been inundated with letters from people who loved them--family, friends and perfect strangers who loved us simply because we were opening ourselves up on this retreat. (Very similar to my aunt's experience I would imagine.) Those letters were amazing to me--something I still keep and pull out when I need to feel those emotions. But that part of the second retreat was different. The organizers asked someone we were close to who was part of the community to name one thing they loved about us. My former roommate Wendy mentioned a pillow that I keep on my bed--one side embroidered with "Ashes of Bad Boyfriends" and the other with "Ashes of Problem Professors." Wendy told about how that pillow was representative of how I was always there when she needed someone to talk to--about bad boyfriends, problem professors, or anything in between.

It's interesting the things people remember.

Top ten highlights from my Estes Park weekend

1. Coconut shrimp at Timberline

2. Watching The Wedding Planner and Return to Me

3. Ignoring my cell phone

4. Trying Southern Twist, the new liqueur from the makers of Southern Comfort

5. Playing with my new toy

6. Driving down the road and seeing elk laying in someone's front yard.

Elk as lawn ornaments--they posed nicely for my pictures. :)

7. Buying presents and getting presents (new earrings, yeah!)

8. Champagne brunch at the Other Side with a table by the lake

9. Seeing snow that fell on the mountains at the end of August

The view of Longs Peak from my grandmother's great room. Note the snow that fell on Friday night.

10. Staying up way too late talking with Mia

Last night's mares

We were at my grandmother's house, three generations of Shackel women. It became dark outside and we headed in. My mom went out to get something and I heard her coming up the back walk. Something made me close the inner door before she got to the locked screen door. She knocked and then called out to me--letting me know by what she said that she wasn't alone and that something was wrong. I crept back to the living room to alert my sister and grandmother, trying desperately to figure out how to get out or where to hide.

Perhaps fortunately that's where I woke up. I did what you're supposed to when you awake from a nightmare--solve the problem. My now-wakened mind told my sister to call 911 and hide in the bathroom while I looked through the peephole to see if we could sneak out the front. Now partially satisfied, I fell back to sleep.

This time it was fire--something I'm truly frightened of. It started with tons of sirens and a huge explosion. Somehow, even in this dream, I went to sleep to escape it. When I woke up (in the dream), the light coming into my apartment was sooty and orange. My friends in the living room were glad I woke when I did--the airport had just reopened so we could get out because we were under mandatory evacuation order. I truly woke up as I was trying to figure out what to fit in my biggest suitcase as I left my apartment which would surely be destroyed.

Vignettes

After meeting two of my male friends--both Jewish--my dad says to my mom, "Maybe when she went away to college and we told her to meet nice guys, we should've told her she could meet nice Gentile guys."
...
I told my mom about an on-again, off-again relationship I had through college and she says, "Don't get me wrong, (your dad and I) don't think he's right for you, but now I'm primarily concerned about why you're so afraid of committment."
...
Men always think I’m too demanding . . . but all I ask is that they treat me like the goddess I am.
— cartoonist Kathy Shaskan, in her cartoon Blossom Fuller