Hiatus

You may not hear from me until May 9th. It's not you. It's me.

Oral defense: Monday, May 5 at 5 PM
Integrative Final Due (25 - 30 pages): Wednesday, May 7
College Impact Final Due (10 - 12 pages): Thursday, May 8
Die of Complete Exhaustion: Friday, May 9, then drive to Rochester for Harrison's birthday party
Wait for Graduation: May 12 - May 23 until 1:59 PM
Become Master: May 23, 2:00 PM
Begin Student loan repayment: six months later

For Gram

Like Sarah, I am posting the eulogy we delivered together at Gram's funeral. Yesterday was Easter, the secular version of which invariably reminds me of Gram. The last few weeks have been hard, and I have a few moments when I am thinking about something else entirely. These moments are sometimes punctuated with memories of her, or visions of her in her casket, or other moments from the last two weeks or of her eighty-eight years. In the end, she has given us so much, and though her physical body is gone from us, there are so many things, countless things, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I love you, Gram. Thank you for everything you have ever given us.
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We want to talk a little about memory today. We want to talk about memory because, as most of you know, in the last few years of her life, our Grandmother lost much of her memory to Alzheimer's. Much of the time, she could not remember us, her beloved family and friends. On very bad days she could not remember even herself. It seems fitting, then, to honor her memory with remembrance and recollection.

You are a girl. There is the fresh sweet taste of still-warm milk on the farm; the family of skunks befriended one summer and visited every day in the fields; being scolded by your mother, our great grandma Gladys, for mussing the dress and Mary Janes you are forced to wear, even though you are a tomboy and invariably prefer trousers. The dresses never stop you from climbing every tree. You skin your knees. The patent leather shoes lie in a heap in the mud. You love your daddy, Freeman Ordway, and he adores you above all else.

There are near death experiences as a child, later retold with humorous sensationalism to wide-eyed grandchildren: a lightening strike on the house, with your hand just a few inches away from the post of a cast-iron bed, sheets scorched; an amusement park accident with a collapsed chair swing, returning the next day to find eyeglasses crunched next to a giant, steel support beam.

Later, as a teenager, you are carousing with Curly, with Vince, and your "gang" of friends, everyone smoking and drinking, all packed to overflowing in your cars and always going to country dances the next town or county over.

There is Curly, our grandpa, Clarence Richard Hooper, the love of your life. You go all over New York, Pennsylvania, and even Canada, to explore your love of music, especially organs and organ music. There are three children, first Douglas, then Donald, our father, and finally a girl—Martha. There are swimming trips and picnics. Silverware sewn to napkins with fine silver thread as an April Fool's prank. Piano lessons, Girl Scouts, county fairs, train exhibits, and home-sewn costumes. Vegetable gardens, perennials, annuals, iris beds, saplings, and raspberry canes. A pet bunny carried in your apron pocket. Beloved dogs Lady, Mugsy, Joey, Nicky, Mokey, Macduff, and Duffy. Cats too numerous to name. You are always scanning the skies—in the day for birds and at night for constellations, shooting stars, meteor showers, and eclipses. Your children grow. There are weddings and divorces. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Accounting class, pottery class, basket-weaving class. Lifetime subscriptions to Smithsonian, Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American. Countless books and more books.

Later, when Curly retires, you come home every day at your lunch hour, from your job at the gas company, to make him lunch. This works out very well for Grandpa, since you are off from 12 to 1, Price is Right ends at noon, and Days of Our Lives starts at 1, so he has an hour free in his afternoon schedule. You have lunch together every single day. Many years later, after Curly's death, you play for me and my husband a record of organ music and recollect emotionally how this particular organist's hands remind you so much of Grandpa's when he played. It is the only time I have ever seen you cry, remembering your husband's hands and how they danced over the keys.

Then there are our own memories of you, like the flickering 5-4-3-2-1 countdown before an old black and white movie: the smell of fresh molasses cookies and the POP! of the cookie jar seal, or of fabric softener sheets, tucked into musty old volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

There are old margarine containers, holding red coins from Michigan Kitty, orphaned boardgame pieces, or leftover cinnamon apples after Thanksgiving. There is a freezer full of pinkish applesauce in square Tupperware, TV dinners, orange push pops. Dead birds in plastic bags you rescued from the driveway or from the radiator grills of parked cars, and froze so you could examine them later.

There's the sweet treat of Lifesavers tucked neatly into the corner of the electric organ, a hideaway for mixed fruit, wintergreen, butterscotch. The measure of a perfect dollop of pear and fig filling in the center of a cookie. Angel food cake upside down, waiting to cool, ready to cover with sugared strawberries, handpicked raspberries, or to eat plain, with our fingers, swinging together on the back porch.

There is the taste of Dr. Pepper, which we bought with extra quarters you brought just for me, and sipped from fat glass bottles in the laundromat, waiting for the wash to dry, swinging my feet in the plastic chairs when my legs were too short for my feet to touch the ground.

There’s the smell of paper and ink, a dull brass key held tight in my hand, sweaty with responsibility as I move with purpose toward your Fillmore post office box, Number 51.

We traipse through Southern Tier cemeteries to find graves of long lost relations, Val and I gathering the discarded plastic flowers for our own morbid collection; we stand in the big farm kitchen, learning how to spoon flour into a measuring cup and scrape the excess with the flat back side of a knife. There are candy hunts on Easter morning with personalized riddles leading the way to each sugary treat. We are hunching over the dining room table over baking and science and sewing projects. We are reading Mary Jemison's autobiography together and then leaving flowers at her grave in Letchworth Park.

There’s me, leaning on the doorframe of your bedroom downstairs, watching as you ready yourself for a grocery trip "downtown." First, Listerine, then a thorough brush through your long, grey locks, carefully separating it into an even part, then braided and pinned neatly to your head until the braids meet, then cross, in the middle, ends tucked in. All this held in place with the familiar spray of White Rain Extra Hold. A quick flash of a toothy smile into the mirror to double-check. A tug of the shirt to straighten it out, wisping away any stray animal hairs. Perfection.

I am eight, and it is summertime and we are with you during summer vacation, like every summer before. It’s humid and sticky out during the days, but at night the air is biting and cool. You set up lawn chairs in the back yard and tuck us in up to our chins while we watch for shooting stars. For each one we see, you ask us to say a wish out loud. I thank the stars for you. Before bed time, you bring us mason jars to collect lightening bugs, and we marvel at them glowing inside the jars and in suspension above the irises. Before we sleep, we open the lids and release them into the night air. We whisper, “Goodbye. And thank you.”

You are calling to the chickadees, listening to the quiet whirr of hummingbirds in flight. You reply to each piercing squawk of the nearby cardinal or jay. You laugh when I shave my fingernail into the batch of butter pickles we are making. This summer, there's a litter of bunnies borrowed from a farmer friend, on loan just for us.

Finally, here I am, tucked into bed in my own father's childhood room, the room where I was brought first as an infant, just back from the hospital. It's a few years later, I am bundled under high quilts with stories—House at Pooh Corner. Later again in the bed, as a teenager, exhausted from a night of late talking or rummy. Finally, in the end, as a woman, with my husband beside me. You kiss us both, tuck us in, like children, then go singing down the stairs and into the night.

Thank you, Gram. Thank you for your memory.

Image: Grandmother

Goodbye, sweet lady. I love you more than you could ever know.

Making Peace

I've had several epiphanies over the last several days, and I am officially making peace with the work I have to do over the next 2 1/2 months. The bottom line is:

- it has to be done
- it will end at some point
- I can do it

I am looking forward to May 23, and also certain stops along the way. I have to be OK with it. I have chosen this.

(Can you see me still convincing myself?)

bad day

Today was a bad day. A bad, bad day. Not for any particular reason, just because of the combination of 1,000,000 little and semi-little things that added up to too much stress.

The only consolation is that with tonight's class getting over, I have only 19 classes left until I'm done, and boy am I ready.

I'm exhausted.

Valerie: Version 3.0

I will post soon about my recent upgrade and the subsequent weekend away with Tara. It was really a wonderful weekend together, and was the recharge I needed to get through the next few months of really busting my ass in order to graduate, among other things.

Onto the next things in my life...and I'm looking forward to them all.

Thank you to those who called, sent cards, sent balloons, sent pictures of balloons (Griffy) and many other wonderful ways to show me that I am special to you. I appreciate you more than you know.

With love,
Val

Image: Jenna, I'm just not sure how I feel about the fact that this is even a possibility

Image: Sisters

I think if anything, Sarah and I can thank our parents for our good teeth.

Image: Eyes

I sure hope our baby has Tara's eyes.

Three things

1. Go, Obama, go!
2. If Romney wins anything close to the presidency, I'm moving to Canada.
3. Not sure if I'm ready for President Hillary. Jury is still out.

Now from the F***ed Up News from Missisippi Department...

http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/2008/pdf/history/HB/HB0282.xml

There is currently a bill being proposed that would require restaurants in Mississippi to ask patrons to step on scales to determine Body Mass Index before dining in their restaurant as a means to address the obesity issue in that state. If the BMIias found to be too high, the restaurant would be legally bound to deny them service, and turn them away.

Apparently, lawmakers in Mississippi haven't learned several things, including that people can't only get food in restaurants, and, oh, that there are 400 million other ways to change people's habits with food and develop healthier relationships with themselves and their environment.

Oh. My. God.

What is family?

On Monday, Tara and I were honored to attend our Godson Gus's adoption. His parents, Lisa and Tanya, invited us to witness their hearing in family court, a process that legally formalized Lisa's role as Gus's mother and provided both Lisa and Tanya (Gus's birth mother) with the same rights. It was an emotional week leading up to the adoption ceremony, as Tanya just returned to work after three months at home with Mr. Gus, and the daycare/work/family time dance began. Needless to say, the three months of sleepless nights, agonizing over daycare drop-off, shit-filled diapers, and other pleasures of new motherhood have not really made Lisa feel like she needed to be validated as his mother. Who else has been more of a mother to him than each of the two of them? No one. But there are these hoops, and sometimes, we have to jump through them.

Ultimately, it was really a beautiful ceremony, one that acknowledged Lisa more than it asked her to prove herself to the court or the judge. And though we celebrated their legalization as a family, and each day we try to honor the intimacy they create between the three of them, the bottom line is that they were a family before Gus arrived. They were a family when Tanya got pregnant and Lisa was there holding her hand. They were a family during all nine months and four days of her pregnancy, and, I believe, they will always be a family in God's eyes. No matter what the law says. No matter what some Christian politician says. No matter what anyone else says. I see them, and I see what's in their hearts, and nothing could be clearer to me in the world.

It's the final countdown!

Classes start tomorrow, and 14 short Wednesday/Thursday combos after that? I gradgimitate. It's going to be wonderful!

So, mark it: as of today, the countdown is 28 classes.

Rock it.

Image: The Germ himself

Image: Fallout

Considering I'm recovering from what is possibly the worst cold I've ever had in my ENTIRE life, I'm just posting a picture for now.

Fallout from playing with Germy Harrison at my parents' house this weekend.

Grades are up!

I got an A- in Student Life Research and an A in Leadership in Higher Education. I thought the grades would be reversed, but I'm pleased anyway.

I also completed my practicum with a PASS/SAT and now I'm rocking a 3.9 GPA. Not bad for full-time plus job plus partish/fullish time school.

Dare I say it - I'm proud of myself. Oh, and I'm going to be done in FOUR MONTHS!

Wahoooooooo!

Resolutions

I've never really been big on New Year's Eve plans, but one of my favorite parts of the change of the year happens on New Year's Day. Each year, after Christmas, we buy a new calendar for the year - the house calendar. This is where we put family and friend birthdays, anniversaries, planned visits, car maintenance, dentist and doctor appointments, days off from work, paydays, vacations - anything that's really relevant to Tara's and my schedule. I love picking out a new calendar, flipping though it to check out the pictures, and going through page by page against the old calendar and thinking about each thing that's written in the old calendar before transferring the birthday or event over to the new calendar.

Last year, we had the New York Audubon society calendar, and each month we turned to a new Audubon illustration that reminded me more of my grandmother than the last month's illustration, and one in particular was my favorite:


This year, we got the National Geographic American Landscapes 2008 calendar, and on New Year's Day I went through 2007 before putting it in the recycling. It was fun to think about everything we did last year, Tara's graduation, Bermuda, and all the other things we were lucky enough to do. When I got to October my heart dropped. Now, I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but when I saw this I vowed never to have another October like this, the busiest month of my life/our lives/Tara's life:



Though this year promises to be busy with other things, including another busy travel season for Tara in the Fall, I will not be in school. This will make a huge difference and allow me to better take care of the house while Tara is away. This year it was absolutely too much for me to do work, school, and all the homemaking. I'm looking forward to one of those significant obligations to be done soon. In May. On the 23rd. Not that I'm counting.

Oh, and now a random picture of C. Bob we took that I think is funny. Here's the back story: we bought a new pet carrier for the cats and there were labels inside in case you used the pet carrier on the plane. We made some additions that seemed more appropriate for our animals than the original version of the sticker:

Movies! Movies! Movies! Movies I will play!

Tara and I have been watching movies up the wazoo! What fun!

We've watched: Tomb Raider I; Tomb Raider II; Shortbus; Juno; Red Eye; and Jesus Camp.

TR I and II were entertaining - basically a low-grade version of Indiana Jones but with Ms. Jolie. Shortbus was...interesting. Juno was FANTASTIC. Red Eye was entertaining...and while I blog I'm watching Jesus Camp. I have two things to say about this: I'm extremely frightened and I'm moving to Canada.

Holy crap.

I'm DONE!

The practicum that I've been working on since May is now done also, which means I am DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE

...until January 30th when I will have only THIRTY class sessions to complete before being done with my Master's Degree. THIRTY. I can do thirty. That's only 150 episodes of JEOPARDY! 321 if you take the fast track!

(Gaylen - now I can call you back!)

Dear Sweet Baby Jesus

Dear Sweet Baby Jesus,

Is there such a thing as praying too hard? Because I think we accidentally prayed us into a 13" snow storm that fell over seven hours, and we prayed my smokin' hott wife right into a Motel 6 in Hartford after FIVE HOURS in traffic. And by "in traffic" I mean parked on I91 in a complete bumper to bumper standstill that could only be resolved by turning around and driving the opposite way of actual, legal driving and going the other direction.

Right.

At least she's safe.

Love,
Your loyal servant