Susie Again

I’ve heard the parents of twins describe how their babies, sharing a crib, will sometimes identify each other’s thumbs instead of their own and set to work sucking anyway. That’s how close they feel one to another and that’s how it’s been for my girl Annie and the friend she met at that 6th grade party: I speak of Susan, whose arduous initiation into motherhood I wrote about Monday.They were inseparable back then. Weekdays when she slept here, they would tackle that homework right away, eat an early supper, bathe or shower and  be tucked into Annie’s big bed up under the eaves by 9pm. I remember the morning Annie got down first to breakfast and reported that at one point during the night Susie, still sound asleep, had tried tucking a strand of Annie’s hair behind her own ear. (Easy mistake to make: you could let yourself down from a second-story window on Annie's hair back then.)Maybe I talked enough about their friendship the other day but what can I say? It isn’t often that such a large event takes place in the life of a person whose stuffed platypus has so often been through your washer and drier.Susie’s a natural athlete; every coach she has ever had has said as much. Annie, meanwhile, could care less about making the team. When, in sixth grade, she was pressed by her orthodontist to say what sport she most enjoyed playing she stunned him by quipping “I don’t do sports; I think sweating is  bad for you.” So too,  on her very first day of Archery as a freshman in high school she came home to say she’d gotten stuck inside the bow.They’re as different as day and night are Susan and Annie, and yet so close they consider themselves real sisters.I talked with Sooz yesterday in the hospital where she has been since Friday, rather a long stretch by today’s standards. She sounded a million miles away and calmer than the Buddha. I loved hearing her like this though it’s hard for me to picture her so still and quiet, knowing what she’s been like most times in our company, playing games and making everyone laugh, as see here below with our boy Michael  back in '98. That new baby she and Kevin just had, God bless him, is in for some very lively times.It isn’t  every day a baby is born to a person whose stuffed animals you’re on intimate terms with.)

New Mother

Pretty nice weekend with the warm weather and  the birds all yelling with joy like they’d just gotten a governor’s pardon. Then yesterday morning as I made the coffee the news flashed over my phone: Susan had had her baby, little Susie who came into our life when she met our girl Annie in 6th grade and they both just knew they would be friends forever. She is resting now in Salt Lake City – the birth was hard and she couldn’t yet talk on the phone - but oh if she were next to me now what I wouldn’t say to her! Maybe something like this:“Remember when Annie brought you here the day after you two met? It was Good Friday and we dyed Easter eggs. And then the next day we shopped for pale-yellow and purple paper goods and a stuffed bunny the exact color of that warm spring soil. And then Easter and then that Monday was April vacation and they were running the Boston Marathon and I brought all you kids into the Museum of Science, remember that? Do you remember how later that day when you got out of the car at your own house you said in this cute shy way “I have a brother.”And then he came too, after school and on outings, and your oldest brother as well and it was a whole new stage in the life of this family, already enriched with one honorary son but now with you three too. With YOU, Susie, and your flashing dark eyes and your love of all dogs everywhere. You leaping away in the name of Track and Soccer and Basketball in high school and then off to Smith College right alongside your Annie. Remember sitting in Sage Hall the first time everyone accepted to the Class of '01 was assembled, you turning to us with an impish smile and whispering . “Where are the guys?!” Ah but you flourished at this fine women’s college, you and Annie both. She made notes on her notes and threw elegant beer parties in her room and aced every course they threw at her while you cracked Geology wide open, swam competitively, sang in an à cappella  group and used that cute scratchy voice to get your own little radio show. Then it was field study all over the planet, and grad school, and then suddenly Kevin as if he'd been waiting for you all that time, the perfect match, blonde to your dark, tall to your tiny…And now this unimaginable gift of a child.I remember when your mom died at last of her terrible illness in your 10^th grade year. At her memorial service you stood to sing an à cappella version of  “In My Life”  together with your closest singing pals - only your face began to crumple part-way through and Annie rose and encircled you with an arm and brought you back to the pew.You couldn’t feel your mum that day maybe - or maybe you could feel her all too well, I don’t know. But I bet you can feel her this morning, the beautiful Peggy, gone too soon of ALS. And thank God, thank God for this: that when her sister Ginny heard the news on the farm yesterday she got on the very next plane, and isn’t she there right now this morning as you wake, there holding you all in her incomparable Aunt Ginny way.To you both! To you all, until Annie and I and your dad can get there too!