Saga of the Sad Old Bathrooms

With all this COVID stay-at-home time, I've been circling around the rooms in this old ark of a house, where, for almost 20 years, even with TEN people living here, we had just one shower. We had to get up at 5:00 every day to squeeze in a mere six-minute sprinkling. That's when my spouse and I began to think remodeling.Usually, though, that was as far as we got - the thinking stage. And you have to know: these bathrooms were bad, with tiles done in weird unearthly colors, one a strange green like the nasty tongue-coating mint-flavored Milk of Magnesia with fixtures the exact queasy hue of Silly Putty.They dated back to the 1940s, which meant the strangely off-plumb sinks stood on skinny metal legs and were topped by medicine cabinets the size of cereal boxes. Their potholder-size wall tiles were ancient rectangles. Every few weeks, despairing perhaps of their out-of-fashion lives, first one and then another would pop out of its dry frame of grouting to smash itself silly on the floor tiles which, like ancient petrified Chiclets, kept lifting from their crumbling matrix to affix themselves like wee clinking ice skates to the bottoms of our showered-dampened feet. One friend, on seeing the awful truth about these rooms, delivered herself of the opinion that we were true saints, as otherworldly as Mother Theresa. “You’re so... non-materialistic!” she had exclaimed - by which she meant, “Gad, what crummy bathrooms.” And she hadn’t even used the one with the famous Toilet That Tilted, which, if sat upon too quickly, would give its shoulder a quick porcelain shrug and flick you off like a horsefly.But it isn’t that we were so ... other-worldly, so evolved. Our bathrooms were crummy because younger, pushier members of the household clamored for changes in their bedrooms, thus sucking up all their parents’ energies in the home-improvement department.First, it was one of our daughters, then 12. Suddenly, she despised her peach-colored bedroom. She wanted to spatter-paint it, she thought. I went along; masked every inch of molding and baseboard and painted the whole room white, walls and ceilings both. I tarped up the floor. Then, at the appointed signal, the two of us pried open four cans of bright primary-colored paint, dipped our fists clear to the knuckles in the vivid goo, and heaved it by the handful in every direction. It actually looked pretty good. (And boy was it fun!)Not two springs later, our then-sixth-grade son became desperate to redecorate his room. He said he couldn’t even study in it anymore; the wallpaper was that embarrassing. (Teddy bears in cowboy hats: we couldn't blame him.) He thought instead, a kind of God’s Eye View would make a nice decorating motif.First, we steamed off the old paper and pulled up the rug. I painted the walls pale blue and he hand-sponged them with fluffy white 'clouds'. Next, I made the ceiling a deep indigo, as directed, so he could paint upon it the nine planets, each in its proper relation to the sun.The whole project cost me three solid weeks of personal time and a permanent kink in the back from the night I knocked the black paint over and created an oil spill to rival that of the Exxon Valdez.But hey, the kid was happy. He spent all his time up there from then on. We would hear him from our own room, nights, zooming across the bare floor in his new desk chair with the wheels. And isn’t that a perfect metaphor for parenthood?  Your kids above, redecorating your world and sailing along among the stars; you down below, trying to limp to a crooked sink on rocky Chiclets. 

Evolving

We all evolve; nobody starts out perfect.Consider this little person, a casual caregiver at best, with her bottle of beer and her baby splayed, arms outstretched, in the grass.She LIKED the baby well enough. She just didn't really know how to care for her.Her grandfather David and I didn't know how to care for her mother at first either: we read her to sleep on a waterbed in the basement of our friend's house by the sea.In Coastal Maine.In late August.And the waterbed, it turned out, wasn't even heated - so when we came back downstairs many rollicking hours later, having played rounds of Botticelli til we were blue in the face, we found our child seemingly blue in the face herself - or so we at first thought when we touched her and felt her cool, cool skin.People almost shouldn't be allowed to have babies until they're like 40.And yetAnd yet.Only six months later, this little person is still only one year old and already she has grown in the nurturing arts, as you can plainly see. .Moral of the story? Love a little person hard and s/he will learn to do the same.

Time and Patience

Kids are so frank. We were at the church where little Peter goes for day care. It's a very welcoming sort of place in spite of the posters showing Adam and Eve as white people with straight blow-dried hairdos.Now Peter is little; not two feet high, so it was faintly surprising to me see a eight-year-old named Connor hailed him.“Yo, PETE! High five!” he called and Peter offered his own version of that universal male salute before losing his balance and sitting down hard on the church hall rug."Hey HEY!" shouted  Connor approvingly. Then his glance fell on Peter’s mom Susan, who bears the marks of the surgery that three weeks ago severed  her 8^th cranial nerve, ending her ability to hear ever again with her left ear.“You look kind of …weird,” the boy said.Thanks!” said Susan. “It’s the eye patch.""She looks a little like  a pirate, right?" said I, going for a jaunty take on things."No but there’s more. Your mouth looks funny.”In fact that whole side of her face is still without feeling, the muscles still unable to draw the curtains of tissue up into a smile or down into a frown or anywhere at all really. Her right side is completely mobile so the contrast is marked."It’ll go back to normal soon. It’s just resting now after an operation she had.”That was me again. I say this ten times a day, sometimes to kind strangers so greet me here in the home of Mormonism and sometimes - many times - to myself. It’s a fact, the doctors say, and not a fond hope. It will go back to normal eventually: when Annie was here last week the doctors said all feeling and movement would return to that side of the face though it could take months. “Months!” Annie agonized in the email she wrote to to fill me in on things.I think we all feel as Annie felt when she typed that word: Anxious. Scared. Maybe even faintly outraged?If we do feel that way it’s because we are only laymen and have no real sense of the miracle is to be able to remove a tumor so rare that only ten people in a million are diagnosed with it each year. We have scant sense of the miracle it is to be able actually to sever the slender filament that is the 8th Cranial Nerve without doing damage to the surrounding circuitry - and THEN to see the beneficiary of the surgery sitting up and talking and even taking a step or two just hours after it.Laymen want miracles and instant results but Fate is schooling us all in patience.And so we can wait until her body heals and she can resume life as the same dark-eyed beauty she was on the day of her marriage to kind tender funny Kevin who wraps her in his arms many times a day here in the city of the Great Salt Lake and all through the night as well.I guess patience is what we all need to pack in our daily knapsacks. Patience and a strong dose of gratitude for blessings received.I know I felt blessed yesterday when the woman behind me at the checkout in Wallgreens asked what brought me to Salt Lake City and heard the story and then asked for Susan’s name.“I will pray for her tonight” she said. She hugged me  and I stumbled back to my car in the blinding high-desert sun, a wash of fresh tears brimming in my eyes.