Tales from the Shark Tank

We’ve hit our first snag in the sale of our house. It looks pretty humongous from where I sit now, but I won’t really know if it was a speed bump or a brick wall until the end of the day, or possibly tomorrow morning. It is our buyer’s financing.

He thought he was set. Originally pre-approved for somewhat less than he offered us, he (and our realtor) had gotten verbal assurance from the mortgage agent that the extra would be no problem at all; he bid on the house with that understanding, and we accepted his bid on that understanding. Now, when the written response comes back, “no problem” has become “big problem”. He’s trying other avenues to make this work; he really has his heart set on our house. That’s a 24 hour scramble – for him.

For us? Well, the realtor, bless her, has been around the block a time or two, and didn’t take the house off being shown until she had the written commitment from the lender in her hot little hands. The result of that is that she had a couple of folks in queue who had said “call if anything changes”, whom she has already called. It was a short enough time that they might still be interested. We shall see. Things blew up late yesterday afternoon, so it’s simply too soon to know what will happen. But what seemed a sure thing, with the end in sight, is now wavering in the winds again. I guess the course of true love isn’t the only thing that never runs smoothly.

There’s even a first time for me doing a meme. I’m sure you all will be shocked – shocked, I tell you – at the result.

You Are A Genuine Celt! Be you from Wales,
Brittany, England, Scotland or Ireland, you
know your Celtic history like the back of your
hand. You are aware that kilts are not period
and that “Braveheart” severely
mangled the true story of William Wallace. You
probably own every book written by Mercedes
Lackey, but we’re willing to overlook that
part. You’re probably a self-styled Bard or
Druid, but that’s okay too, because you’re very
in touch with nature. Or at least you think
you are.

What Is Your SCA Clothing Style?
brought to you by Quizilla

For some reason I am missing my grandmother this morning. It’s nowhere near either her birthday (early February) or the anniversary of her death (early May). She’s been gone for 23 years now. I have friends that were born after she died. Computers that ordinary people could use had just begun to appear a few years earlier; there was no internet, no email, no blogging or message boards or all these things that I have come to take for granted, and yet I was already an adult at the time. I guess that’s what it means to be middle-aged.

And yet today is a day when I send an e-mail to our realtor, and think “wouldn’t this have fascinated Gram?” When I hear a story well told and hear her laughter at it in my mind. When I look around at this place I live, unlike anywhere I’ve settled before, and remember when Gram – already very frail by then, moving unsteadily and with difficulty – got my dad to drive her down to Bloomington so she could see my first apartment that I had all by myself. She’d have been the first in line to learn to use this laptop, with a plate of strawberries beside her because her two favorite foods in the world were strawberries and smoked fish and the smoked fish was too messy for a keyboard.

Everyone loved Gram, and she didn’t turn anyone away. People wonder, sometimes, why I never learned to say “no”, even when I’m exhausted, so that I have to work so hard at that basic skill of self-preservation now. It was Gram. She listened to people by the hour, in person or on the phone, gave them wise advice so gently phrased that even when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, they couldn’t get upset at her. She wore herself out doing it, so that Gramps and Mom were forever protecting her from too many demands. They’d learned the hard way that she wouldn’t stop when she needed to. When she was about the age I am now, she spent a month or six weeks at “that place in Martinsville” to rest and recover where the demands of her life simply couldn’t reach her. Mom can’t remember the name of it, nor what that type of establishment was called, but by her descriptions I think the modern equivalent must be a spa. I understand, now, how Gram got to that point.

But Gram’s greatest gifts were her sense of joy and of adventure, and those are the things I tend to think of at odd times, like this morning. The mist was over the fields I see out my side door (a sliding glass door where most houses would have a picture window); I wanted to take a picture of it to share with Gram. My son – her great-grandson – said something incredibly funny, and I wanted to call her and tell her about it. I wish she could have seen him, and then I sometimes think she has, she just didn’t bother bringing her body along so the rest of us could see her. I want to share my new book of Jewish bread recipes, A Blessing of Bread by Maggie Glezer, with her because it was she who taught me to make challah when I was seven, standing on a stool as my son now stands on the stool beside me. Gram hadn’t ever learned to bake bread; her mother always did it, and by the time she was teaching me her mother had just recently died. So she taught herself out of one of her cookbooks in order to be able to teach me. She said we could learn together, adding laughingly that she would never be too old a dog to learn new tricks. She was right. She never was. She taught me a lot more than bread-baking with that adventure.

She broke the molds when she thought they needed breaking. In a time when women were extraordinarily limited in what they were permitted to do professionally, she ran the Jewish Credit Union in Indianapolis. They tried to keep it going without her after her health forced retirement upon her, and couldn’t do it; it closed about a year after her departure. It even applied to little things. Long before the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph (“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple”) appeared, she was wearing the brightest colors she could find, predominantly red. She said it made her happy, and why should she care what a stranger might think? She was tremendously proud that I was going to be an attorney. The rest of the family didn’t know what to make of my pursuit of education and a profession; none of my female cousins had ever done such a thing. But Gram was right there behind me, ready to burst her buttons.

Gram never walked, she ran. Even when her doctor gave her a walker (wheeled walkers not existing yet), she simply picked it up and carried it ahead of her while she ran. My cousin and I laughed at that, shrugging and saying “well, at least if she stumbles she’ll have something to catch herself on.” Almost to the end of her life, she ran to meet her life with exuberance, with delight, with a loving heart. She’s a hard act to follow, and this morning, for whatever reason, I miss her terribly.

I’ve always been a night person by nature, and even having my own personal lark-of-the-morning in the person of our son has not changed that entirely. But night-owl or no, I’m having a problem with one particular aspect of our move: the unconscionably early arrival of darkness.

We’ve moved enough north that the winter days are perceptibly shorter than they were down in Indy, but we’ve also moved into the very eastern-most outpost of the Central time zone. The two in combination mean that it is 4:45 p.m. as I write this, and the sun has set completely. It isn’t twilight; it’s fully dark, and we’ve another month to go until midwinter’s day. I don’t want to think about what time sunset will be at that point. It feels odd, being a night-flyer in what is essentially the late afternoon. On the other hand, there are certainly abundant opportunities for star-watching.

Update: In an excess of pessimism, I went and looked up when sunset officially occured today. It was at 4:20 p.m., less than an hour after J. got off the school bus. Bleah.

R. D., rhetorically: “Whoever reads a mortgage all the way through?”

Response: “Er, me?”

I have discovered a new endangered species. Judging by the difficulty I have had in locating even a single example of the species, sightings must have been decreasing for some time, but it is only in this year that the absence has suddenly become striking. I refer, of course, to the Hanukah cookie cutter. It is a creature that normally comes in a variety of shapes, of which the Star of David, menorah and dreidel have always been most common. This year, I have been able to locate only the Star, and that generally with great difficulty, as it seems to have mated with the five-pointed star to which it is closely akin and to have failed to breed true in most instances.

At first I thought that perhaps my inability to locate Hanukah cookie cutters was due to the region in which I was looking. Northwest Indiana is not generally known for its large Jewish population, and so the things that would be of most interest there don’t get sold. So I went hunting in Indianapolis on two separate weekends. The first one, my friend Li and I stalked the elusive creatures through multitudinous high-end stores at the upscale mall in Indianapolis. The next one, I went wandering about the neighborhood in which most of the Indy Jewish community resides, poking my nose into assorted shops that I know have hosted the cookie cutters in prior years. No luck. We didn’t even get a whiff of essence of Hanukah cookie cutter. It was both distressing and frustrating.

I’ve given up. I ordered a set through Amazon. The price was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but hey, there comes a point when one realizes that further frustration is also not worth it. My son wants to make cookie cutter cookies for the holiday. Since he so seldom wants to do something that requires that sort of coordination, we are doing it. That’s all there is to it. And I’ve been asked to bring cookies for the second grade Christmas party (no, they don’t even make a pretense of calling it a “winter holiday party” here, and no, I’m not making a fuss, but that’s another story), and I will be bringing cookies in the shapes of Star of David, dreidel and menorah. It’s my own gentle, personal political statement. “We are here too”, they will say, to the parents far more than the children. “And by extension, so are others who aren’t exactly like you.” But I hadn’t expected to have a problem doing that because the requisite cookie cutters had, all unnoticed, become an endangered species.

Driving home from Indianapolis this afternoon, we introduced our small son to “Twenty Questions” as a means to delay the inevitable “Why aren’t we there yet? How many more miles to Boone Grove?” repeated as a one-boy Greek chorus. It was Dad’s turn to think of something, and he had done so. We had ascertained that he was thinking of a real person, and then that the mystery individual was an adult woman who spent most of her day in Boone Grove. Our son’s next question was “Does she take charge?” Dad said yes, whereupon our boychick reached over the back of the front seat, patted my hair gently and said “It must be you, Mom.”

I generally try to look nice. Hair stays brushed and clothing neat, chosen to suit the events of the day. Sometimes, though, there is a dissonance. It is my shoes.

After the foot I broke came out of its cast, my doctor instructed me to acquire good quality running shoes, which I did forthwith. I had never had a pair professionally fitted before, and it was a revelation. Not only did my feet not hurt, neither did my knees or hips, and I had simply come to take for granted that I had to tolerate that. I tried to at least get black running shoes, but given the odd size I wear that was a lost cause. I did not care. I wore those running shoes under suits in court. I have worn them to a bar mitzvah. I have worn them under black velvet pants at a dressy occasion, and will do so again. I do know how to acoutre myself for elegance, but I have my priorities, and a lack of pain is pretty high on my list. The shoes that make that possible are decidedly the wrong side of elegant, so I have decided that for me, elegance stops at the ankles.

Me: I’ve made my first recipe out of the cookbook you gave me for my birthday, and I actually followed it.

My husband: When did you say your appointment with the doctor is?

We are spending Thanksgiving at my in-laws. What this means as a practical matter is that someone else did the shopping, but I get to do a lot of the cooking. That’s right, get to. I enjoy the doing tremendously, and my mother-in-law is perfectly happy to let me take over her kitchen, modify her recipes on the fly, and generally play. I did a fair amount of that in preparation as well, baking two batches of bread (two different varieties) yesterday and a third batch this morning before we left. Now I’m taking a break, typing on my mother-in-law’s computer while the turkey “rests”.

I have many things to be grateful for. The list starts and ends with family and friends, with the people who see me and my son melt down and don’t disparage my parenting skills, but ask how they can help, people who have a plethora of good ideas for things I can do to work from home, who rejoice with us when good things happen and don’t just shrug when the news is less good. In the middle, the year that started in utter uncertainty is ending with stability. The fears I had for a rural school system have turned out to be not just unfounded, but reversed; it’s turned out to be so much better than the last one that whenever we do get to buying another house, we will be looking in this school system and no other. If our home is isolated, it’s also quiet. If it’s small, it’s also comfortable, and the owners are delightful. The family is together again after too many months of living in separate cities. If not for those who helped us – you know who you are – we’d have drowned. If not for those who listened to me – and you know who you are, too – I’d probably be a good candidate for the little room with the quilted walls. So on Thanksgiving? There’s a lot for which to be thankful.