Wore Slap Out

wore slap out – a Southern colloquialism that describes, at least somewhat adequately, how grandmas feel when their precious progeny finally buckle up and head for home.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my grandkids.  It’s just that they are very, very busy and my home is very, very small.  

In an attempt to define grandkids' kind of busy, I’m going to try to quantify five-year-old Miles and three-year-old Georgia’s recent visit that ended, thank you God and Jesus, Thursday afternoon at 4:29 PM, despite daughter, Melissa’s worries that they might hit rush hour traffic. 

Number of:

• Grammy's knick-knacks rearranged by Georgia:  472
• knick-knacks moved by adults to get them out of Georgia's sight line:  327
• crumbs on the floor: infinity
• times Georgia hit Miles: 73
• times Miles hit back: 6
• times Georgia told on Miles for hitting her: 6
• bath salts poured into bath: all
• Grammy’s bran muffins eaten by grandkids:  just 1 as the rest were hidden
•  cups of milk poured: hundreds
• pictures colored by Miles for Grammy: 3
• times Georgia lost her bear, Beary Manilow : 326 
• Nick Jr. shows ordered On Demand: 8 (well worth the cost no matter what it was)
• parks visited: 2
• swing pushes: infinity
• times I went down a slide: 4 
• times kids were told to stay with us: 500
  times they listened: 0
• times we mistakenly thought we could go to a restaurant as long as we dined al fresco: too many
• escalator rides to nowhere: 2
• Pumpkin Patches we visited: 2
• times Georgia dropped her pumpkin: 15
• times we got lost going to and returning from the zoo: 5
• animals we saw at the zoo: 35 (1000 counting the naked mole rats)
• times we had to pick up a kid so he/she could see: 72
• animals we got to feed:  just 1 but it was a GIRAFFE!!!!
• things climbed on in spite of our admonitions not to do so: 85
• animals brushed at the petting zoo: I don't know.  I was sitting on a bench at that point.
• times we rode the train despite telling the kids we were all out of money: 1
• times Georgia and I rode the Merry-Go-Round despite telling the kids we were all out of money: 1
• times Miles climbed the very tall climbing wall: 2
• minutes Miles waited patiently to climb the climbing wall: at least 30
• times we lost the children: only 1.  We were sitting and resting while they played on the playground at the zoo, patting ourselves on the back about how careful we are with them at all times.  While we were talking and resting and watching so carefully,  they somehow managed to see the little kid door into the naked mole rats building, which they visited unchaperoned until they gleefully exited via the tunnel at the other end of the building while we were dutifully watching the playground where we were sure they were. 

To tell the truth, the visit was a great one and the kids were pretty good, considering their ages and my small Atlanta home. I would have liked for them to stay longer, but when they finally, thank you God and Jesus, left, I was wore slap out.
 

Number of lies I just told about wanting them to stay longer: 1

Number of sweet memories of the trip: infinity

 

 

 

Birth Control at Table Four

When I’m in Portland for the summer, my kids and I like to take part in excursions with the grandkids. Wait. Like may be too strong a word. With Melissa having two children, Miles being four and Georgia almost two,  and with Billy’s little one, Cami, being right smack in the middle, age-wise, at almost three, they are definitely stair-step children and corralling them for anything big or extended is quite a feat.


But, because we are optimists and also because we don’t have good sense, we soldier on. We take them to parks and museums and kickball games. We’ve dragged them to the beach, to the zoo, to a giant waterfall, to concerts at Sauvie Island, and on the Odell Excursion Train at Mount Hood.


And on some occasions, when it seems that we have a communal death wish, we take them to restaurants.  Escorting one or two young children to a restaurant is doable as long as there is at least a one to one ratio.  Billy and I have taken Cami out to breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  She does fine until the orange juice sets in, but, between the two of us, we are able to run interference when she starts ricocheting.


Melissa and I have taken Miles and Georgia out to eat from time to time, carefully choosing the place for it's willingness to put up with chaos and ketchup.  A play area filled with toys that don't look like they carry the H1N1 virus is helpful but not absolutely necessary.  A table away from others almost always happens if the hostess is savvy at all. The promise of a big tip early on also seems to help.


But all three together, hoo boy! It's like they are more than the sum of their parts.  They can tag team us, what with the "having to go to the bathroom" from the ones who are potty trained or working on it, to the one who isn't and does number two in her diaper.  Then there's the ordering.  What they ordered, they no longer want.  Instead, they want what we have, leaving us to eat the mac and cheese and the peanut-butter quesadilla.  Then there's the salt and pepper just begging to be turned up-side-down and the ketchup bottle that could use a good squirting.  Oh yeah, I forgot the standing backwards in the booth and putting crackers in the hair of the lady behind us.


Last summer, as we were traveling to catch the Odell Excursion Train, we stopped for lunch at what looked like a family-friendly restaurant.  It was.  It was so friendly, in fact, they gave us our own room, complete with toys and swinging bar doors.  Billy remembers eating his entire meal standing at those swinging doors, making sure no one escaped.  He wasn't so worried about losing a kid.  He wanted to make sure neither Melissa nor I went to the bathroom, never to return.

And just this past Saturday, as we were heading to the beach and after we'd scared the sea lions back into the Pacific at the Gearhart Pier (renamed the pee-er after Miles christened it), we once again tried to have lunch, this time at the St. George Brewery.  The hostess took one look at us and seated us at Table Four.  Although it wasn't in a separate room, it was at least a booth with backs high enough to protect the people on either side.  

Since Georgia had arrived with a prepackaged load in her britches, Melissa took her to the bathroom for a change, leaving Billy and me to deal not only with Cami and Miles, but also with what seemed to be a surly waiter, someone not all that thrilled to be dealing with a group who would most likely soon be throwing food and spitting milk.  However, when Melissa and I each ordered a glass of wine, he cheered up some, thinking that we just might get wasted enough to mistakenly leave him a big tip.

A while later, after schmoozing with the waiter, asking where he was from, etc. and after I had, indeed, tipped him well in spite of being way too sober, he actually told us that he'd enjoyed serving us and then he relayed a little secret.


And the secret was that, after the hostess had seated us, she'd announced a new party in his section with this bad news:  

"Birth Control at Table Four."


Oh well, there's a good chance that the waitstaff at the St. George Brewery will have their own kids one day, and they too will know how to get a raisin out of a child's nose without calling an ambulance. 

And they'll think it's all worth it.

Flossie

Some time around the turn of the century (that last century, not this past century), Flora Selma Teresa Hartwig stood somewhere in San Francisco Harbor, champagne bottle in hand, and christened a ship. Her parents had nicknamed her Flossie, her husband called her Florence, my mama called her Mother, I called her Mammo, and my children called her G.G.

Mammo was my grandmother and we didn’t get along particularly well. She came to live with us after Dadding died, when I was around 12. She was smart and bossy and we got in each other’s way. She walked with a stoop and kept telling me not to step on the cat. The next year, we added an addition to our house for her to live in – a mother-in-law suite. It was pretty cool and I would have liked to have had it and probably deserved it, being 13 and all. It had a mini kitchen and a nice bathroom and a living room-bedroom combo. It was a lot better than my room and having to share a bathroom with my brother.

From what I can tell, Flossie was a difficult child. She was headstrong and probably too smart to be just a girl in Milwaukee Wisconsin in the late 1800’s. Family lore has it that Flossie was sent to live with her aunt in San Francisco after running down a railroad track after some boy who’d been sent away for some reason probably having to do with Flossie.

I’m pretty sure her parents meant for the deportation to be a punishment, but, according to my mother, life in San Francisco with a young aunt and her well-to-do husband was heaven. Not only did Flossie get to christen a ship, for a while she had access to Uncle Deep Pocket’s bankroll, until, at some point, she went too far and Uncle cried "uncle" and her money was cut off. But, by then, she’d met my grandfather, Perry Ling, who just so happened to be engaged to a minister’s daughter in Los Angeles, where he was finishing Law School at USC.

At that point, Flossie became Florence and Florence found herself living with her husband and mother-in-law in Prescott, Arizona, a place not exactly in the same social stratum as San Francisco. But Florence prevailed and became pregnant with my mother, sipping champagne imported from France during prohibition in order to stave off morning sickness.

My grandfather was offered a job as City Attorney for the mining town of Jerome, Arizona, a place Flossie would have hated and a place you'd think Florence would have abhorred, but, before long, Florence had her card games and her ladies' clubs and her off-handed good works for the brown and yellow and non-English speaking families of the town. And, when she had the time, she mothered my mother, who eventually realized she would be an only child.

Some time after Mama grew up, my grandfather became an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Arizona and he and Florence moved to Phoenix. I remember summers as a young child, staying at Mammo and Dadding's house on West Whitton, especially one summer when Mama and I went by ourselves, riding a bus all the way from South Georgia. That was the summer I learned that grown-ups did other things besides go to work and church. I think of my grandparents as using their home as something akin to an intellectual salon, sort of like a small wild-west-American version of the Left Bank. I remember Saturday nights with friends over for a few drinks, when politics and the ways of the world were argued over and smoke and adult laughter filled the Arizona air.

My Grandparents with friends. The Lings are on the right.

Reconciling the image of Flossie with what I remember about Mammo is difficult, but not as difficult as it was before I too moved from girlhood right past womanhood and straight into Grammyhood. Remembering that Mammo was once a Flossie, and then a Florence, helps to remind me that we all grow and change as we age, but our true selves are right there where they always were. I remember that Mammo loved Johnny Carson and she loved politics; she was always up on current events and she was smart as a whip until the day she died. And now I see that Mammo was a feminist before most people realized that options were an option for women, and she somehow knew she didn't have to give every part of herself away to be a wife and mother.

Was she a good wife? Maybe. Was she a good mother? Sometimes. Did she offer something to my mother and then to me that I can share with my daughters and granddaughters? Absolutely.

What she gave me was a part of herself that somehow latched on to a part of me. I think I have her to thank (and blame) for my irascibility, my liberal world view, and my love of a cocktail before dinner.

So, here's to Flossie, Florence, and Mammo. All three made up a truly memorable woman.

Home

I flew home to Atlanta the other day from my home in Portland. This is the first time I felt Portland to be as much my hometown as Atlanta and leaving was difficult. I know I’m lucky to be able to spend so much time with my grandkids while still having a space for myself. I’m also lucky to be able to live in two incredibly beautiful cities and in two spaces I truly love.

Below are things I miss about each particular place when I'm not there.

Portland

1. my grandchildren
2. hanging out with my very own grown kids
3. toys underfoot
4. my tiny front yard that I don't have to maintain
5. wandering around St. Johns
6. Sauvie Island
7. the rivers and bridges
8. my big bathroom
9. the weather in summer
10. my gas fireplace (even in summer)
11. Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens
12. being able to walk to the grocery store
13. my new Portland friends
14. Trevor's cooking
15. dancing with the family
16. not working
17. family field trips
18. happy hour in Grammy’s Garden
19. a new state to explore
20. a new life
    

Atlanta

1. closer proximity to Molly
2. family furniture
3. my job
4. my car
5. Friday early bird dinners with Allison
6. my old Georgia friends
7. going to the movies with Allison
8. not having to walk to the grocery store
9. my sunroom
10. the old ladies' Macy's at North Dekalb Mall
11. my ottoman
12. Publix Supermarket
13. Piedmont Park
14. walking through Ansley Park and by the High Museum and Atlanta Symphony Hall
15. my view of the Atlanta skyline
    
16. movie star neighbors
17. not having to put the trashcan out each week
18. my purple bedroom
19. an old state with many memories
20. an old life
    

My experiences in each place and space are quite different. My Atlanta home is old and historic. My building was completed in 1917 and Margaret Mitchell once lived in it. My furniture is comprised of mostly old family pieces and my decor is shabby not-so-chic with lots of things (the good, the bad, and the ugly) I've created and collected throughout the years. My Portland home is new and "green", built in 2004 to improved standards. My furniture is all new (at least to me) and the decor is still sparse, although I'm working hard on adding my own personal tacky to it.

My Atlanta home is private. What I put down stays down and all dirt is mine. My Portland home is communal, with kids and grandkids in and out, the toilet seat up and down, the refrigerator opened and closed (and occasionally slammed), toys and kid paraphernalia everywhere, sometimes a dog named Lou.

And so, I get to live two lives, both of which embrace and reflect my loves, my interests, and my crazy quirks. On the west coast, I get to be up close and personal as I pretty much think of myself as a full-time Grammy. And then on the east coast, I get to find my solitude and pursue my other selves.

Okay, I know it’s difficult to feel too sorry for me, but I have to say that the transitions are tough, and I'm not just talking about time zones. I have a hard time figuring out which keys are which and I can’t remember if I have any toilet paper or where I keep it. I can’t recall which aisle my Diet Cokes are on in each of my two grocery stores or where are my favorite TV channels are under which remote-control buttons.

And then there's the letting go of the little ones. It was especially hard this time as they are getting old enough to realize I’m leaving. Miles had a meltdown when it came time to say goodbye, his outward falling apart mirroring what I was feeling inside. My heart felt broken in two, each half situated on opposite sides of the continent.

Because there are so many people without even one home, it does sound a bit self serving to be complaining about "oh what a burden" two are, but it's the straddling that's difficult, and I know it would be even more difficult if I didn't have the means to have comfortable surroundings at both ends of the straddle.

So, since I’m not ready yet to give up either life, I'm back to feeling lucky, and I guess I’ll just continue to try to appreciate each place and experience when I'm in the middle of it all and to remember that the transitions will be confusing and painful.

Invasion!

My legs are bruised from knee to ankle and my ice cream is missing. My home is littered with debris and my furniture is all askew. There are smears all over my windows and my blinds have been violated.

Was it a burglary? A hate crime? A hostage situation?

No, it was a tiny (not tater) tot convention, an invasion of the Grammy snatchers. It was my grandkids.

Although they try hard to maintain what's left of my sanity, the longer I’m in Portland, the more things my kids think up to do so that I can keep their kids. But I’m not complaining. The primary reason I make my twice-yearly trip to the West Coast is so my grandchildren can realize how wonderful I am.

And they have! They think I’m great! That’s because I let them eat chocolate and run rampant. I don’t make them go to bed and, one time, I let Miles watch South Park when I couldn’t find his mother-approved wussy cartoons on television.

My kids don’t dare complain because I’m free and available and I don’t do drugs or text my boyfriend while I’m babysitting. They do get a tad testy about the chocolate, especially when I give it to the little overstimulated urchins right before they come to pick them up.

And I do love those grandchildren of mine, their sticky sweetness, their hugs when I don’t even beg, their goofy smiles, and their childlike, yet discerning, retorts.

But, boy, do they wear me out. Just getting them in and out of their car seats is an exercise in fortitude. Back when my kids were small, we just threw them in the car and prayed for their safe arrival. Now you have to have big biceps, strong thumbs, and a tolerance for cursing just to shoehorn the little tykes in and buckle ‘em up.

And now, you can’t just send your kids out of the house and lock the door. You have to slather them with sunscreen having something called an SPF and make sure the Child Welfare people aren’t being called when they bang on the window when their protection wears off. They're like mini vampires, waiting for the sun to go down before they can venture out.

And then, there’s the park. They always want to go to the park. Even Georgia wants to go to the park, although she often falls asleep in her stroller on the way. Cami’s favorite thing to do is to go up (but not down) the slide. How can a kid who isn’t even two figure out what the rules are so she can break them? Miles’ favorite thing to do at the park is to strip and pee. Right there in front of God and derelicts. My job is to first tell him no he can’t pee at the park and then to shield him from perverts and the police as he carries on with his plan.

When I have all three of them over, it’s like inviting drunken sailors to a tea party. They lurch around and fall down; they fight over the smallest things, pretend to mourn their bad behavior, and then break out into furious tears over the slimmest slight, all the while swilling and spilling and spewing outrageous claims. The rules of war are followed as they adhere to a stringent pecking order: Miles takes advantage of Cami; Cami gets the best of Georgia; Georgia cries; and Miles gets back at Cami. There seems to be no real fear of retribution (at least while Grammy is there), and to put it bluntly, they act just like children.

Bath time is my favorite time, partly because the little imps are somewhat corralled. I've bathed two at a time; never all three. I have bathed Miles and Cami while Georgia tried to climb into the tub. They are so much fun when wet, although they can be slippery. They love to pour the dirty water into cups and suck on the washcloth. I’m pretty sure there’s some urinating going on in there but, so far, no number two.


Since my time with my grandkids is relegated to two weeks at Christmas and six weeks in the summer, I'm realizing that each West Coast visit I make becomes like a snapshot in time. Never again will these three look, act, or be like this, and when I have a moment or the energy to think about it, it feels so precious and makes me a bit melancholy.

But, although I would like to sit and mourn the sweet but sad passing of time and the delicate texture of experience, there's some dried spaghetti I need to scrape up off the living room floor and a diaper in the trash that's starting to stink.

Thank God.

A Place Called Grammyville

Grammyville is where I live, not just when I’m within physical proximity to my grandchildren, but all the time.

Grammyville is difficult to describe. It's a fine place, but its skyline is changeable and directions there are tricky. I can tell you it not only offers some sweet spaces and a few social graces, but also busy intersections and noisy neighborhoods.

I have to admit I didn't feel like a grandmother right away. It wasn't the same as when my own serial litter began arriving thirty-five years ago. Because it doesn’t involve hormonal changes or an alien body invasion, I think becoming a grandmother is more like being a father, or, perhaps, an adoptive mother. All of a sudden there is this new person in the world, a person you didn’t have nine months to get to know.

A blogger friend recently posted something about how, as soon as someone becomes a grandmother, that’s the way she’s defined. While that may be true for marketing directed at me and people like me, I don’t think I’m particularly bound by my grandparenthood. Besides being a Grammy, I am also a teacher and a reader and a writer and a friend and a Democrat and a lapsed Methodist and a Diet Coke drinker and all the other good and bad and so-so things I am. In addition, I don’t own any t-shirts with pictures of my grandkids on them and my internet username doesn’t include precious references to them. That said, I did iron their photos on my little hand-made wallet, but that’s obviously more about creativity than progeny.

I do know, as soon as the grandchildren started arriving(and kept arriving) in Portland, Oregon, my living in Atlanta, Georgia became more problematic. Having my two oldest children live on the west coast for almost a decade hadn’t affected me all that much until they started having children of their own. Until then, the twice yearly quick-trips seemed to suffice quite nicely as we all went on living our lives.

I was in the room when Miles was born and what a memory that is. But I have to say my joy was more for Melissa and Trevor and for our family as a whole than it was for me personally. I was certainly excited, but I hadn’t quite landed in Grammyville yet. I held the little critter and thought he was mighty cute, but, at that point, I was more focused on how Melissa, my own baby, was doing. The bonding began to happen the more I was around Miles, especially when I had him to myself. I remember when Melissa and Trevor came to Georgia to attend the Master’s Golf Tournament and I kept Miles overnight, letting him sleep with me for a little while when he woke up in the middle of the night. I still recall the feel of his baby skin and the rhythm of his heart as he slept next to me.

When Cami came along, I made it to Portland when she was just a couple of days old. Again, I was happy for Billy and Mary and for all of us, and she was an adorable little nugget too. But it was months later, when I took her for her first walk in her stroller with her little red sunhat and we stopped and looked at the flowers and listened to the birds, that I began to see the two of us as an item.

Georgia, my newest grandchild, while a cutie pie herself, still isn’t too sure about me. In fact, she tends to cry as soon as I walk into a room. However, I’m confident we will become friends as soon as we can get rid of her mama for a couple of hours. She already thinks I’m pretty funny when I make my stupid noises and that’s an important first step in learning to love me.

I believe good communities are based on mutual affection and shared experiences, and that's certainly true for Grammyville. When Miles grins and says "Hi Grammy" in his gravelly boy voice and then does his special burlesque act for me, my heart expands with real joy. When Cami lets me hold her hand as we take a walk and when she sits in my lap for a story, it feels like the old ticker is going to burst. And I'm thinking the first time Georgia picks me over everyone else in the room (and she will), I just might explode with happiness.

And so, if I had to pinpoint Grammyville's whereabouts, I'd have to say it's located somewhere near the center of my heart. I just hope that having it take up residence there doesn't cause me to go into cardiac arrest, or, worse yet, to change my email address to something like grammyspreciousangels@yahoo.com., or, worst-case scenario, to become so delusional as to believe there's a place called Grammyville.

The Left Coast

Okay, I've been meaning to come clean about this but have been putting it off. I think I'm ready now. Here goes.

I'm bi-coastal.

I know it's hard to believe and, trust me, it's a difficult life. The looks I get, people not understanding, the indecision, the not being able to remember where I am when I wake up on any given morning.

I have to blame my children. Two of them just up and moved to Oregon, which is on the West Coast or, as The Big Kat calls it, the Left Coast, while the third one refuses to leave Georgia, which, if I remember correctly, is on the East Coast, or, as the Big Kat would probably call it, the Right Coast. Then, the two who moved started procreating at an alarming rate, three kids in three years, and those kids turned out to be pretty darned cute despite their parentage and grand-parentage. And, to further complicate things, I have to believe my baby will have babies of her own at some point, little southern babies, not western babies.

So what was a Grammy to do? I tried staying in a hotel when I was in Portland but that was too expensive a way to seek refuge for very long. Stay with the kids? You’ve got to be kidding me. We don’t like each other that much, plus it takes me weeks to get used to west coast time.

I ended up buying a tiny condo in St. Johns, a quirky little village in the middle of Portland, where I’m within walking distance to my first and third grandchild and a pretty quick drive to my second. I like to describe my Portland condo as being like a not particularly well-appointed suite in a mid-priced hotel. I live there each Christmas vacation and during the summer. While I’m gone, my friend Susan waters my poor pitiful Atlanta houseplants each week and checks on my car to make sure it's still there. One thing I had to do was to give my cat Chloe time to die of old age before I could make my move to dual citizenship, as I was pretty sure neither of us would've survived her taking on this lifestyle.

I lucked out with my Portland home, parlaying someone else's misery into something good for me when I purchased it in a short sale. And I like to think, because I enjoy small spaces, my two homes are smaller together than the one home of many of my friends. For example, I have two bathrooms. They just happen to be twenty-five hundred miles apart. Rather inconvenient when I have guests, but otherwise just fine.

Although The Big Kat cleverly calls the West Coast the Left Coast, I’ve found Portland and Atlanta to be about equal on the liberal-o-meter, although that conclusion just might be based on the people I hang out with. Portland is, however, much greener than Atlanta. There are bike lanes everywhere and Portlanders take their recycling quite seriously, so seriously, in fact, that I’m a nervous wreck as pick-up day arrives each week. Am I putting everything in the correct container? Are the garbage people going to ridicule me because there is evidence of meat eating? Is possession of styrofoam in Oregon a misdemeanor or a felony?

Another difference between my Atlanta home and my Portland home is air conditioning, in that, in Portland, I don’t have any. When I tell Southerners that little tidbit of Oregon news, they automatically start fanning themselves with invisible cardboard funeral parlor fans. But, the truth is, except for a few days in late July, I don’t miss it at all. In fact, June almost always finds Portlanders in some kind of funky hoodie as they bike to the green market or recycling center.

In front of my Portland home. Note the bicycling family and the blue recycling bin.

I also like to think about how Georgia and Oregon are alike in a weirdly wacky diametrically-opposed kind of way. Georgia, on the East Coast, is the second most southern state in the contiguous US. Oregon, on that other coast, is the second most northern state within the put-together part of our country. They both have a gorgeous coastline, although Oregon has much more of it. They both have mountains and rivers and back-wood small towns and people with few teeth and/or meth addictions. They also both have professional sports teams and state universities with rabid football fans. I must say, however, that UGA's uniforms are much manlier than those green and yellow get-ups the poor University of Oregon players are forced to wear.

Despite all the ways Georgia and Oregon are alike and different, and my good luck in finding a second home in Portland, the sad bottom line of this otherwise happy story is that my first two children couldn’t have moved any farther away from their mama and still stay in the united part of the United States unless I lived in Miami and they moved to Seattle. But I’ve outsmarted them and I know where they live and I’ll be in Portland in a few days, as soon as I drive down to middle Georgia to kiss my third one goodbye for the summer.

I just wish I could have a cat.