Always Remember That

Happy birthday and happy anniversary to my best friend. I love you!

Today is the 15th anniversary of my employment with the Company I work for. Tomorrow Chris will be 40. Monday is our 13th wedding anniversary. Phoebe will be 6 in two weeks. We are leaving for Chicago in 20 days. I'll see my parents, sister, niece and nephew in 33 days. Some of these things make me happy; some stress me out; some are bittersweet. I'll let you guess which ones are which.

My other grandfather wasn’t at all curmudgeonly and I don’t think I ever saw him get mad. My grandmother recently told me a story, though, about the maddest she’d ever seen him. One day Granddad came home from work and found me sitting on their front porch. I often walked there after school, and evidently on this day, their front door was locked. (Unusual – I grew up in a town where no one locked anything. I didn’t have a key until I went to college.) He opened the door and let me in, and I got a snack and my mom came to get me and we went home, and nothing was said about it. When my grandma came home, however, he let fly. “Don’t you ever lock that door and leave my granddaughter sitting on the porch, in the cold, again!” he said. He was mad . My grandma said she just couldn’t have felt worse about it. I got a little teary when she told this story. Granddad wasn’t a grouch, but he was never overtly affectionate, either, and to hear this demonstration of how much he cared – well, it...

My Grandad John is an interesting mix of curmudgeonly (he tends to grunt rather than speak) and sentimental (he wore sunglasses to our weddings to hide his tears); I think he tended to be a softie when it came to his grandchildren. Nevertheless, all of us – my siblings and cousins – have our own story of The Time Grandad Yelled At Me. (My brother probably has more than one, actually, since, as the boy, he was required to work on the farm with Grandad and therefore was more often in his proximity.) My sisters’ stories have to do with vehicle mishaps, I believe – either getting stuck in the mud or locking keys within. For me, it was pajamas. One Christmas, when I was 10 or 11, my parents went on a trip and left us all with our grandparents. (I think I was in 6th grade, in fact, because I’d gotten my first Walkman for Christmas. My other grandparents took me and Jana to see Yentl , which I despised, and then shopping at the mall, and I bought my very first cassette tape. Not the Yentl ...

I told my mom what a good time I had with my little sister last weekend*. She said that it was one of her main goals as a parent, to raise me and my siblings to want to spend time together as adults. Mission accomplished! The first thing Mallory said tonight when I told her that she'd been invited to a friend's house for a sleepover tomorrow night was: "Is Phoebe invited too?" So I'm thinking my two girls are off to a good start as well. *Weekend before last, I guess. I hate how long it's been since I last blogged. Will try to do better.

Phoebe graduated from Kindergarten yesterday. I'm not totally convinced that such rituals are completely necessary, but it was very cute. They sang songs, and now I'm going to make Aimee cry by telling you about them. They sang the "Days of the Week" song to the tune of "The Addams Family": Days of the week (snap, snap) x 3 There's Sunday and there's Monday There's Tuesday and there's Wednesday There's Thursday and there's Friday and then there's Saturday Days of the week (snap, snap) x 3 They sang "Kindergarten" to the tune of "Love and Marriage": Kindergarten, Kindergarten Now we're almost through with Kindergarten Our teachers wish we could stay But now we're moving up to first grade! And because it's a Catholic school, they sang about Jesus, with a song that I find both corny and clever. See if you can guess the tune (hint: look at the first word of each line): Don't yo...