Seven Minutes…errr…15 Years Ago Today…

Absurdly, it’s Tori’s 15^th birthday. I know it’s a cliché to talk about how the years have flown by and ask where the time went, but it’s a cliché for a reason—it’s a near-universal experience.

15 years and 12 hours ago, I was sitting at a rather grungy Denny’s, having been unceremoniously booted out of the hospital for not being far enough along in the process. The lasagna I’d made that evening was still sitting in my oven untouched, but that wasn’t why we went to Denny’s. Eating was out of the question, given that I was in so much pain I couldn’t even stand up straight. No, we went to Denny’s because it was across the street from the hospital, and you KNOW when you’re having a baby.

It was a long, strange night that seemed rough in the moment and has evolved over time into a fond and entertaining memory. My little sister’s pay phone fight with the condescending nurse has become legendary; we’ve all come to love the boy with the sno-cone colored hair whom I first met on that night. No one seems to remember who read Tori’s charts on the day she was born (or whether it was even someone anyone among us knew), but we all remember the dramatic predictions she (he?) made.

That part, I’ll admit, seems like another lifetime. Maybe more than 15 years. But something strange happened the very next day. I had a beautiful baby girl, and then she started kindergarten and a couple of days later it was middle school and now she’s 15.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about how each new stage in a child’s life brings its own joys, and I’m happy to report we haven’t reached the end of that road yet (though my friends with teenagers keep warning that the end is near).

In fact, it often seems to me that it's only the details that change--and sometimes not even those.

So rather than looking at all of the many ages and stages we've passed through and all the milestones my baby has left behind today, I'm thinking about how she's been the same remarkable, sweet, funny, positive, lovable and creative person for as long as I've known her.

And I've stopped waiting for something to change. I've stopped believing that one day I'll get used to her, and that she will come down the stairs in the morning and I won't notice all over again how beautiful she is. I'm going to stop believing that one day she'll run out of new discoveries to share with me, or that her enchantment with those new experiences will cease to enchant me. Yes, she will be driving in a year and I don't know how that happened, but it doesn't frighten me. Because I do know the sound of her half excited/half frightened laughter, and I can't wait to hear it the first time she eases her foot onto the gas pedal...I've heard it before, when she rode a two-wheeler for the first time, and it was delightful.

She's gone from baby to schoolgirl to "the big kid" to teenage aunt

and so far, every day is just as much fun as the one before. Somehow, I think that's going to continue even when she's all grown up.

Exciting Developments

I never meant to let more than two months pass without at least dropping by to post a picture or a quick update, but it's been a crazy few months.

First, as you already know, my new grandson Caleb came along at the end of August, just a few days before my last post. Here's a picture of Caleb, even though you've already seen him, because I just like to look at him they change so fast at this age.

Naturally, all that hanging out waiting for Caleb to be born and then hanging out looking at Caleb cut into my work schedule a little bit, which left me playing catch-up a bit. It wasn't so bad at my day job, since I work for Total Attorneys, a company that made a name for itself with concepts like corporate culture and work / life balance and puts its money where its mouth is. But, as luck would have it, I also had a freelance project in the works with a hard deadline at the end of September.

I was working with the founder of MadeinUSAForever.com, editing an eye-opening book called Re-Made in the USA: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing, and Compete with the World. The tight deadline was a downside in the wake of Caleb's more-time-consuming-than-anticipated arrival and all of the other things that had fallen by the wayside in the interim, but the material was both fascinating and frightening and I'm very glad to have been a part of the project. I hope everyone in America takes the time to read this book and think about the decisions most of us make without conscious thought every day.

With that wrapped and homeschooling back on track, I kept telling friends who wanted to get together that things would be back to normal in late October, and we did manage to fit in a little bit of Halloween fun:

But then, just when I thought it was over, it was right back to work. Tori landed a strange role in a crazy movie, Motivational Growth. Thus, she spent more than ten hours on Friday vomiting repeatedly while sitting on a cheerful looking couch with a bunch of kids playing video games. Nah, I'm not going to explain--you'll have to see the movie. Little inside bit of humor, though: she accidentally puked on the knee of the kid in the striped sweater. He was very good-natured about it.
I thought I had time for a breather, now, but it turns out Tori's entertainment schedule is going to break November for me. The "one day only" Les Mis tribute concert is on the 17th, and Harry Potter 7A comes out at midnight the next night...and then we're going to see Miranda Lambert on the 19th. Anyone want to borrow a teenager for a few days? The week before Thanksgiving looks good....

Stuff I Wish I Wouldn't Notice

Okay, I haven't even gotten started and...the title is a lie. A more appropriate title would be "Stuff I Wish People Weren't Dumb Enough to Do, But Since They Can't Get It Right I Guess I Wish I Didn't Catch It". But that would be too long.

The other night, far too tired after our adventures in waiting for Caleb to do anything productive, Tori and I went to see The Switch. She wanted to see Inception for the third time, but I nixed that because I didn't want to have to think.

Oh, the irony.

Since the whole premise of the movie is divulged in the previews and summaries, I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that Jennifer Aniston's character believes she's had a baby with a paid donor, but in fact someone has switched the samples.

When Aniston sits down across from the donor years later, the flaw is instantly obvious--they're sitting there flashing pale blue eyes at one another and the child has brown eyes. I thought it was a clue. I thought it was brilliant. Anyone who went to 7th grade would know that two blue-eyed people couldn't produce a brown-eyed child! And to top it all off, the kid was something of a medical geek...he'd probably know that!

Nice touch, I was thinking. Good close-ups on the faces of both alleged parents to make this crystal clear. Great set-up with the kid previously spouting medical information.

And then my world came crashing down. Or not, actually, but my ability to enjoy the movie took a big hit. See, a minute later the "real" father popped up on the screen and...he, too, had blue eyes. Yep, all three of them. Not a chance in hell that old Jen could have produced that puppy-dog-eyed boy with either one of them.

How could everyone involved with the film possibly have missed that? How? And why, oh why, couldn't I have joined them?

Random Thought about Garbage

Is generating thousands of disposable paper stickers each week really a good way to handle trash disposal?

Conversations With My Daughter

So we're hanging out in my stepdaughter's hospital room chatting and staring at my new grandbaby (in order to set the scene, I'm compelled, quite against my will, to post this video)




when Tori casually tosses out "Mom, we should get DVR."

I'm tired, and (though I didn't tell her this) not even entirely sure what DVR is, so I said, "Why?"

A moment of silence while she stares at me as if she doesn't quite know what to do with that, and then she says, "'Cause...then we'd have DVR."

I guess that's a good thing. After we had that whole conversation and everyone laughed at her response, I can't bring myself to say, "By the way...what IS DVR?"

It's Margo's Birthday

Today is my friend Margo's birthday. I won't say which one, but I'm sure that when you get a look at the range of photos and the hairstyles here, you'll have some idea.

I'm not, as I've mentioned before, big on fuss and celebration. Greeting cards make my brain explode. $4.50 for a piece of paper you're going to recycle fifteen minutes after opening? Really? How does the tree feel about that? But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize that there are certain days that bear celebration. A birthday, after all, marks the day a person came to exist...and for those of us in that person's life, that's kind of a big deal.

This is what I looked like when I met Margo:

Well, not exactly. I didn't wear a toga made out of one of my bedsheets all of the time, of course. The purpose of this photo is really just to show you my hair, but I chose this one intentionally, because this night (Halloween night, 1984) was a very special one in my history with Margo...

as you will soon see.


My hair had never been shorter than shoulder-length in my whole entire life, and even that was short-lived, so without Margo, I might never have found out what I looked like with short hair.

Because clearly, that long wavy hair I was originally sporting just DID NOT GO with a toga. We had absolutely no choice but to cut it off in our dorm room bathroom before going out for the night, and Margo was perfectly qualified to do the job...after all, her mom owned a beauty shop.

(It was only years later that she mentioned that she'd never actually worked in the beauty shop or learned to cut hair from her mother...but by that time, it was funny. And my hair had grown back.)

Of course, without Margo (and a bomb threat, but we had nothing to do with that) I'd never have met Jim Belushi, either.
Margo, of course, took this picture...and we're not even out of our freshman year of college yet. You might want to get a cup of coffee, because we have more than a quarter of a century to go.

Speaking of being dorky freshmen:

When my daughter saw this picture, she said, "I notice you both have some interesting hair stuff going on." It was the eighties, but somehow even that seems inadequate to explain...

Margo's always been full of words of wisdom, too.

But there's much more. Without Margo, I'd never have been suspected of contemplating Hari Krishna; I'd never have carried a legendary set of red and black marbles in my pocket; I'd never have perfected the art of looking someone in the eye and, with a perfectly straight face, saying something so outrageous that we'd still be laughing about it two decades later.

We were really cool when we managed to buy wine (2 half gallon bottles for $5!) at Jewel-Osco when I was 18 and she was 19. I use "we" loosely here, since part of our strategy was for me to get the hell out of sight while she bought them since it was clear that I'd never pass for 21.

We were so cool, in fact, that my MOM took this picture, in her kitchen, right before telling us that we couldn't drink the wine unless we committed to staying in the house for the night.

So eight or nine years later, when Margo was working in Chicago and I was practicing law out of state and came visiting for BluesFest, we couldn't resist recreating the moment in our hotel room.

We didn't actually drink the wine at BluesFest--nowhere near as much fun if it's not contraband, I guess--just grabbed it from the hotel room bar to snap the picture and then put it right back. That was the weekend that I met Margo's fiance and also that I learned that my soon-to-be fiance had picked up a family ring from his mother to give to me. Neither of us actually ended up marrying those men, though, proving that friendship is far more enduring than romantic love.

Without Margo, I'd never have known how to walk into a newspaper office and talk my way into freelance work ("stringing," she emphasized. "Don't say freelance, or they'll know you don't write for newspapers.") when my only previous professional writing experience was in the legal field. And without that experience, I might never have written my book.

I suppose that there are many things I could point to over the past 26 years and say, "Without Margo, I would never have..." Many of them are mischievous, impulsive, highly-entertaining-only-to-us events like improving the signage at the River Walk in Naperville.

I mean, seriously--what's the point of putting up maps all along a miles-long River Walk but not giving you any indication of where along the route you might be?

We saw this as a public service. Really.

Of course, we felt the same way about taping "This too shall pass" and "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" up in the hallway of our dorm, and that netted us a $25 "vandalism" fine. Seriously. I mean, it was TAPE. It peeled right off with no damage whatsoever. Just like the tape flags we used on the maps.

Most of all, though...without Margo I would have had much less laughter in my life. So happy birthday, Marg. I'm glad you were born.

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The Waiting Game

Waiting really isn't all that bad.