I confess that I have had some worries. Worries that I would end up the loud, horsey sort of woman who forgets her children’s names (or child’s, as thank goodness, Tyrant is a solo swimmer) and leaves them to the good will of Simons, nannies, dorm mothers, etc. That I would be off sipping martinis while my children suckle at the teats of wolves for lack of maternal care. That I would resent this baby, because my life is quite full enough, thanks very much.

Yesterday was the big ultrasound, and although Tyrant is only the size of a six-inch cantaloupe, I have discovered a sense of wonder in the fact that it is MY six-inch cantaloupe, with little legs that look just like Simons’ (I’m not imagining this), and little hands, and the darlingest little face with a nose that is turned up because apparently his/her face is wodged up against my uterus. Let us hope that it doesn’t stick like that.

I have been studying these pictures like they hold the answer to some eternal question. It must be a lot like Match.com, where people stare for hours at someone’s profile, wondering is he for you, what that smile means, what your future might be.

I look at the whole, I look at the parts, and I think, “I made this.” I gaze and gaze at that little face, just wondering–not even asking a question, just wondering. Twenty-four hours ago, I knew I was having a baby, but I didn’t know know. It was just a beer belly and some amorphous something-that-will-happen-in-January.

So even though I still think puppies smell better than babies, I think Tyrant and I are going to do all right. Know how I know? Last night, I had my first craving, which was not for pickled beets or potato soup with truffles or red velvet cake or even champagne. At 10 o’clock, just as Project Runway was coming on, suddenly I needed a hot dog and some baked beans with such electrifying intensity, I nearly crushed the dog sprinting for the door. Anybody who truly know me is aware that I can hide my white trash tendencies under Pâte Brisée for just so long before Simons lures me out the door with promises of baseball vendors, Hebrew Nationals, Rosamund’s… “Are you sure you don’t want to go to my fraternity reunion full of skinny tennis wives and Republicans? Because there will be hoooot doooogs.” That boy is wily. Last night, the urge was primal, like I could already smell them cooking, and if I didn’t have them in my mouth in 14 seconds, all hell was going to break loose.

Clearly, Tyrant and I are meant to be.

After the War of the Landscaping Plastic, Simons and I decided it was time to Leave The House for a weekend. His family shares a country house at Edisto, and after some wrangling and begging, we squeezed ourselves in last minute. Naturally, our first thought was how to pack as much fun into three days as possible. Boat! Surfing! Fishing! Shrimping and crabbing! Reading! Work! Lots and lots of visitors! Salad nicoise!

Thank God, greater powers intervened, which had an initial period of suckitude when the boat trailer had a flat tire, which after inflating, then exploded at the gas station. This was very loud, and immediate hand wringing ensued. Trying to limp the trailer over to our friends’ Andy and Harriott’s house (the closest safe location for a boat dump), we got pulled by a very surly cop, who kept his siren and lights blaring and flashing, demanded we get off the road immediately. “HELLO! What do you think we’re trying to DO?!” It took forever, and Simons was in his own private universe of fury, and being hungry didn’t help, and I was privately convinced I was having stress-induced, pre-term contractions. But we eventually made it, abandoned the boat, grabbed some barbecue to go, and made it to Edisto by 10.

While Simons slept in the next morning, the newly naked Beuls and I went for an early morning walk down the long dirt road that leads to Brick House–the ruins of the house where his grandmother was born. The marsh islands were hushed and steamy from Friday’s thunderstorms, and the morning mist hung from the oak avenues like Spanish moss. We saw fiddler crabs saluting the dawn from the causeway, and deer tracks crisscrossed the road, where they’d passed during the night. Beulah frisked ahead, chasing invisible squirrels, while I foraged for muscadine grapes and swatted the hordes of mosquitoes humming close behind.

We made eggs and bacon and the slow kind of grits, drinking coffee on the porch overlooking the river and the ruins. The afternoon was spent in peaceful visitation with old friends and their two small children, showing their daughter the tiny crabs, shrimp and sea squirts clinging to the side of the dock. We (they) drank cold beer and tossed sticks for Beulah from the dock, feasted on muscadines (mostly me) and later, devoured quiche Lorraine, salad and sweet potatoes fries on the porch—all easy stuff, with no lonely sweating over the stove. The TV stayed off; the stereo was quiet. The only noises we heard were the jet-ski buzz of ruby-throated hummingbirds, the what-cheer-cheer of cardinals, and the whir of the porch fan.

I’ve read an entire book this weekend (the largesse!), and found a new one at a tiny local bookshop by my favorite Southern author, Ferroll Sams, which I didn’t even know existed. Simons went surfing at Edisto Beach, while I spent Sunday afternoon working on the porch, actually enjoying myself, without having to grind my thoughts into unwilling submission for a 5:00 deadline.

We dove off the dock, went swimming and ate three-bean salad, working side by side until evening, admiring the light on the water and patting the groaning, exhausted dog. I feel calmer than I have in weeks, like I can cope. Like our house isn’t running feral in our absence. Like we can have a baby and it will be fun instead of a race to some unforeseen finish. I’m going to try to bring some of this calm back to our everyday lives.

Today has not been a good day. At all.

It started with the Horrifying “Bug” Incident of 2009, of Which We Shall Not Speak Again, Yea God. This is best summarized by a series of text messages with my friend Amanda, while I walked the dog through the park.

J: OMG! OMG! Flaming heebie-jeebs from hell!
A: Spider??
J: Maggots. Maggots everywhere. Trashcan was apparently crawly and we discovered them this a.m. inching across the kitchen floor.
J: Have removed skin and am now setting self on fire.
A: Dancing, squealing, retching, poking out of eyes?
J: All of that, yes.
A: I have the squidgies now.
J: House will be disinfected with blowtorch and then nuclear bomb dropped on it.
A: And acid?
J: Hair is mad from clawing at it with heebie-jeebs, and park walkers think I have the heroin withdrawal twitches.
A: Did dog eat any? Do you have to boil her?
J: Am dropping her off at 10 to have her shaved, just in case she touched one. Have so much work to do and will never be able to concentrate now.
J: And to culminate, just walked through gigantic spiderweb.

After bleaching the house and crying all morning, I dropped Beulah off at the groomer’s to be nudified. But I was too mortified to tell them why she needed “Paranoia Shaving,” so I spent all morning terrified that she’d have one on her fur, and the SPCA was going to show up with handcuffs for neglecting our dog. I did warn the nice groomer lady not to attempt to shave her paws without a muzzle, because she turns into a chupacabra the instant someone messes with her feet. Seriously, it’s like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr Hyde on meth. I found out later that they did muzzle her, but she flipped out so badly during the nail trimming (I didn’t know they were doing that or I’d have recommended an Iron Maiden), that she fell off the table, and while being hoisted back on, she escaped from the muzzle like a Satanic Houdini and mangled the groomer’s assistant. I have the remedial kid.

And to really ice it, Simons and I are looking for a church and had set up a meeting with the minister of one of them to learn more. Only he had already decided we were a bunch of commie pinkos, because we lived in San Francisco, and the meeting ended up being two and a half hours of terrific discomfort. I’m telling you…childbirth is going to be a breeze compared to this lunch. South Carolina is going through some ridiculous schism in the Episcopal Church, which generally smacks of shot putting in glass houses to me. And apparently this church and its minister were embracing the party line of not accepting gay ministers or gay congregants or what have you, and at one point the man mentioned a gay couple by name as an example of how he would not accept gay partnerships in the church. Well, in fairness, the minister couldn’t have known that one of the men whose personal business he was bandying around is a good friend of Simons’ and a pretty awesome human being in general; but perhaps it’s not his business or in good taste to talk about people by name. Simons nearly leapt across the table at him. I think that even could I convince Simons to step foot in the door again, it’s not a very good fit for us. We prefer to bring our child up in a loving church that welcomes all kinds of sinners, not just perfect ones.**

So, in short, I’m tired and afraid to go home and my dog is a vampire and God hates me. I wonder if the cupcake store is closed.

**Afterthought: Not that the church would want an unhygienic bug-infested bunch of commie pinkos anyway. Clearly, we are no great loss. And the minister did pay for lunch, which was very thoughtful.

“Make-Up Bread & Butter Pudding – for when you need to apologize for being an evil raging harpy to your generally very kind husband (even though you maintain he was being an a-hole at the time) during a fight over the proper way to fold landscaping cloth, which resulted in your sulking in the guest room all night and him not kissing you goodbye when he left for work the next morning*.”

1/2 French baguette left out after making bruschetta three days ago, cut into 1-inch pieces (or 2.5 cups sliced and toasted stale bread cut into small pieces).

1/3 cup raisins – currants, cherries or chocolate chips are perfectly acceptable, although aforementioned husband does not like cherries.

1/4 stick unsalted butter, melted

1/2 cup skim milk

3/4 cup whole buttermilk

2 large eggs

1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

dash of cinnamon (if desired)

 

Preheat oven to 350. Put bread and raisins in fairly deep dish, as you want it to be a little gooey. Pour in melted butter and toss all the bread around to coat. In a separate dish, mix everything else and whisk vigorously until blended. Pour over bread and let sit for an hour, stirring once, and perhaps pressing everything down with a spoon if you get bored. Bake pudding in middle of oven until just set but still trembles slightly, about 50 minutes. Serve pudding bubbly hot or at room temperature, with ice cream or whipped cream.

 

Serves 4, or just 2 with lots of leftovers for you to sneak the next day.

 

* May actually be a longer title than Fiona Apple’s last album.

Six years ago, which in New House Time is really last Friday, Simons and I waited breathlessly for the arrival of, no, not our firstborn child, but something even BETTER!

Dirt!

An entire truckload of dirt. Four thousand pounds of sifted topsoil, mushroom compost and regular compost, all mixed and swirled like dulce de leche ice cream, only probably with cow poo. It was like an Everest of dirt on the sidewalk, from pavement to doorstep. So high, you can’t go over it. So wide, you can’t go around it. So pungent, best walk on the other side of the street.

My angelic mom and dad arrived promptly (unlike the dirt delivery man) to help move it, bucket by bucket, from the street to the backyard. We have an ancient wrought iron fence that does not swing (yet), so everything must be taken in small loads down the driveway, you see, which is incredibly inconvenient. I was convinced that Daddy was going to have a heart attack, but afterwards, he actually felt heroic enough to go pickaxing all of the stray sugarberry roots in the yard—no mean feat since the stupid axe weighs 20 lbs., and sugarberry is evil.

Ever since, I have been in a frenzy of planting. Yes, it’s incredibly late to plant things, and the tomatoes are gangly and barren after a summer languishing in itty bitty seeding containers. But I don’t care. We have gorgeous borders of liriope and palms and ferns and elephant ears. We have native grasses lining the swampy sideyard boardwalk. I took pictures with my crummy iPhone camera, since my other camera kicked it, citing roadtrip exhaustion.

Behold! The orange is oranging!

The pepper plant is peppering!

The banana trees are rising from the dead like a Panamian Lazarus! Would that make them Lazaro?

Best yet, two days ago, delirious with digging and planting and pulling shrieking weeds with two-foot tap roots and swatting mosquitoes, I tucked seven little pumpkin seeds into the soil, from those delicious heirloom pumpkins I found in Half Moon Bay. They had been painstakingly de-gooed, dried and stored, to be carried tenderly in a cooler from one coast to the other–rather like donating a heart. By eight o’clock the next morning, I swear on the Farmer’s Almanac, there were seven little pumpkin sprouts popping out of their loamy little bed. Look, here they are, at a precocious two days old. They’ll be reciting Shakespeare by Sunday.

And just so you can feel jealous, I took this photo about a week ago while walking Beulah.

The nearby high school marching band practices in a field down the block with a very enthusiastic audience. They have flag twirlers (Flag Twirlers!) and drums and large horn-type instruments, and they ALL dance. And I mean to tell you, they boogaloo. I nearly burst into flames of ecstasy the first time I caught them at it. Damn, I love a marching band.

Here is the problem with owning a fix-up* house: it never ends. You bushwhack the jungle of a yard, only to walk inside and realize your mother-in-law is looking at your dirty Chinese takeout boxes from three days ago. You paint the kitchen, and as you hang the new bistro curtains, you realize the French doors are rotten.

 

When we got here, Simons and his business partner went outside on a hot, hot, hot day, and using a crowbar and a hammer, removed the entire horrible patio that blocked the backyard from the front (you try bringing a lawnmower through your living room), and causing rainwater to pour into the kitchen. Then, recycling the lumber like the good citizen he is, he made a gorgeous raised garden in the back, and also designed and built a deck and back stairs. Only, the stairs haven’t really happened (I will say “yet,” so as not to sound like the fishwife I am rapidly becoming).

 

And as soon as he was done with the deck, he ripped out the moldy drywall and insulation in the baby’s closet, only to realize that the patio wasn’t the culprit. Nope, that was a roof leak. He borrowed his dad’s fancy extension ladder and patched it and sent his dad home. Only that wasn’t the right hole (how many holes are up there, I’d like to know?). The leak continues. And the gypsum and insulation and putty and roofing tar remain on the porch. As do the boards to repair the side of the house, which Simons cannot do until the roof is fixed.

 

The boards for the stairs sit in the side yard. Piles of unused lumber clutter up the backyard. There are drills in the office, levels in the living room, bags of awls and chisels in the kitchen, along with cordless drill batteries, and bags of surfboard fins. There are nails on the bedside tables. The nursery is filled with saws and power tools, which really is what every mother wants for her newborn…tetanus.

 

Sigh.

 

I spent all day searching for a nice wooden patio bench with storage, joyfully anticipating Simons’ arrival into a clean home and a fat wife who for once did not greet him at the door purple-faced and lathered with rage for having tripped over a rusty bandsaw and landing in a pile of used and rusty screws. I went to Target. I went to World Market. And then I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond (hateful place). And finally I was driven to despair by Home Despot and Lowes. I even called ahead and asked cheerfully incompetent people if they had them in stock, was assured they did, and then arrived to be shown some atrocious putty-colored plastic Rubbermaid containers and no promised wood bench. And to top it all off, the fridge shelves I ordered didn’t fit, so the one thing I thought I had actually accomplished today, I didn’t.

 

SIGH.

 

You know what I did instead? I went back to Target, bought bed lifters and a bedskirt, and raised the bed eight inches and stuffed all of the goddamn power tools underneath and covered them in pretty pleated linen and pretended like my house was clean. And then I called a friend to have lunch tomorrow, because there is more to life than perfection.

 

*I almost said fixer-upper, but doesn’t fix-up just mean the same thing?

Oh hi, it’s me. The long lost. I have reasons. The first was that there was a very large cross-country move, which I realize is excellent blog fodder, but really, here is what I have to say about our transcontinental drive: the U.S. smells.

This is the Grand Canyon. It smells.

This is Red Rocks. It smells.

This is New Mexico. It smells.

The tent smelled. The dog’s breath smelled. The Grand Canyon smelled. And the car, oh my freaking God, I still can’t even look at it parked on the street without wanting to gag, and it’s been over a month now. (Anyone want a 2001 Subaru? Cheap?)

You try camping and driving when you’re 8 weeks pregnant.

Your heard me. Jemima is K.U.

How I found out…I had just run that 200-mile relay (Here’s what that was like: eat, sleep, get lost, wait, wait, wait, run, get assaulted by a rabid cow in the dark, run faster, wait, wait, sit in own stink, run, eat, feel carsick, wait, get rained on, run) and then gone boozing during Bay to Breakers, so I thought maybe I was just feeling a little run down. For a week, Simons kept coming home from work, and I’d be falling asleep in the wok with the eggplant, weeping about how TIRED I was. OH MY GOD, I’M SO TIRED! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW TIRED I AM! KILL ME, I’M SO TIRED! (ad nauseum), and then would hurl the spatula at him and crawl into bed at 7 p.m.

Simons would stand there in the doorway with his bag, like, “Um, what just happened? Was that my wife? Why do I have eggplant in my hair? HI! I’M HOME!”

By day three of Tiredfest, I was positive I was pregnant, seeing as I’m not much of a crier or an early sleeper. One morning before Kristin came over for a fun freelance day, I crept out to Walgreens and got one of those fancy expensive digital tests that eliminates the need for non-color-blindness and math, and instead just says, Pregnant or Not Pregnant, and lo and behold! Pregnant.

You would not believe the insane hour of buyer’s remorse that followed.

Also, poor sweet Kristin was babbling merrily on about her wedding plans, and I was all, “OHMIGOD,I’MHAVINGABABY! SHUTUPABOUTYOURSTUPIDWEDDING!! DON’TYOUUNDERSTANDTHATI’MFREAKINGOUT!” It was all I could do to wait for Simons to get home before exploding. The secrets, they are not my forte.

In all the movies and commercials, everyone is immediately glowing with happiness and massaging their bellies pensively, dreaming about Disneyland and pink booties. Well, I’m still waiting for that. I’m not panicking anymore, thank heavens, but neither does any of this feel particularly real.

We don’t plan on finding out whether the baby is a boy or a girl, so for the time being, we are calling it The Tyrant. For its first three months of existence, he/she made me nauseated 25 hours a day. It is already extremely dictatorial and cruel. For instance, coffee is disgusting. Who knew? I really had no problem giving up caffeine, since every time Simons would brew up a pot of espresso, I would have to lie on the bathroom floor for two hours, thinking evil thoughts about him and his deviant coffee addictions.

The very presence of olive oil in the house would wake me up at odd hours with a vague sense of doom. That might be because an entire bottle upended itself in our camping box, ruining a pair of my running shoes, and sending me shuddering off into the bushes. We drove from Arizona to Oklahoma with the pong of olive oil wafting up from the back seat.

Pasta was the world’s nastiest creation. Meat was horrifying. Seafood was as nasty as Holly always said it was.

Back in Charleston (which is hotter than Satan’s fiery backside) at my first OB appointment, I was sitting across from the extremely intense nurse, who asked the usual series of questions:

Do you eat red meat?

“Not lately.”

Fish?

“Not lately.”

Caffeine?

“Not lately.”

She paused in her chicken scratching and gave me a hard look. “You should have called. We could have written you a prescription for something.”

Well strip me down and slap me naked, WHY DIDN’T ANYONE SAY SO? That dumb, smug What To Expect When You’re Annoying book doesn’t mention a damned thing about anti-nausea drugs. All it says (and well meaning friends/sisters) is that if you’re feeling queasy, GOOD! That’s a great sign.

I’m sorry, but if one of your friends ever gazes blearily at you from the throes of morning/afternoon/evening sickness/progesterone poisoning, do not say, “Oh Good!” Seriously, it’s like people who wave sausage under your nose when you’re hungover.

The doctor wrote me a delicious prescription for Zofran—which my friend Nancy said saved her life, her marriage, and her three unborn children—and although it halted the nausea, it also halted everything else, and we will speak no more on that subject, other than to say that everything culminated in a fit of hysterics with my walking from room to room wailing, “I d-d-don’t w-w-wanna-a-a b-b-be pregnant anymooooooore! Waaaah! This isn’t any f-f-f-uuuun!”

I cleaned while I wailed, because I hate to be unproductive.

But after offering hope to the (w)retched, the nurse then proceeded to shatter all potential happiness by telling me that I can’t run, can’t get my heartrate over 140, can’t get overheated (hello, has she walked OUTSIDE lately?), can’t eat anything fun, obviously can’t drink, can’t exercise for more than 15 minutes at a time. Clutching at Simons’ hand, I asked plaintively if I could still run for short distances, and she gave me this look like I deserved The Chair, and said, “You will depriving your baby of oxygen! Do you want your baby to DIE?”

Well, no. But neither do I want to have a nervous breakdown. If you have a l’il tater, did your doctor/nurse tell you to become a vegetable while you were pregnant? My San Francisco doctor said that was utter nonsense and terribly antiquated, so I’m meeting them halfway in the middle and still running, but very sloooowly, and not that long or often.

It’s keeping me sane, what with the house to paint, yard to defoliate, the husband’s new architecture practice, my deadlines to meet, knitting classes to plan, scary birthing books to ignore, and my pants no longer fitting. Awesome. So tell me, folks, exactly when does this get fun?

So I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about our trip to Chicago yet, but I’ve been totally swamped getting ready for my big race tomorrow! My 12-person team, the Flying Monkeys, is running 200 miles, from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, starting tomorrow. I’m running twelfth, so I have lots and lots and loooots of time to hang out eating sports beans and reading Runners World before my first go. Also, since I’m already practically the granny on this team, I won’t be ashamed to knit. Seriously, today, I had to go sign for the two enormous rental vans, because everyone else isn’t OLD ENOUGH.

I am so not even kidding.

Monique is also amongst the elderly, so we will be the chaperones, herding the young whippersnappers away from the free wine tastings along the route. Because let’s see, what could be better than a half dozen sweaty people in a stinky van? That’s right, a half dozen sweaty drunk people hurling in the backseat of said stinky van. Sweet!

We run between 14 and 18 miles, three legs per person, all day and all night and all day again, through wine country and the Santa Cruz Mountains and then finally to the beach. I’m so excited about it, I can barely stand it! (by Sunday, I’ll just barely stand, period)

I have lots of snacks and Gu and trail mix and pasta salad and ginger-lime-cabbage slaw and Gatorade. And plenty of bandaids and tape and a bunch of fresh socks…because it’s going to rain the whole time. At least it won’t be too hot, right? At this moment, I still haven’t found my headlamp for night running, but maybe I can force Simons to root around in the camping gear for me. That way he will have contributed.

I’m trying not to be too grim about running at night in the rain. I tend to be very jumpy in the dark, and I really wish our team captain hadn’t told us that someone got stabbed during the night portion of the race last year. Maybe he was kidding? Yes, because, HAHAHAHA! Stabbings are hilarious!

So, Everyone? Fingers crossed. No stabby-stabs.

Since we now live in the sticks, ie, the Richmond, I’ve been exploring all of our newfound neighborhood options. For instance, the Irish bakery a few blocks away makes excellent hot cross buns. People hop out of doorways begging you to eat their sushi and dim sum and dumplings and dungeness crab and curry. It pretty much rocks out here. Even our tiny movie theatre gets all fancy with the concessions.

And we are down near the cool and less traveled sections of Golden Gate Park with all the beautiful trail running. The frisbee golfers are a bit of a nuisance. I think they’re all so stoned by 10 a.m., their aim is hopeless. Good thing I have catlike reflexes. Beulah likes to chase all of the ducks and seagulls, although we had the Unfortunate Incident the other day, when she forgot the cardinal rule, which goes like this: “Dammit, Beulah, if you JUMP into that DISGUSTING pond, I will beat you into next week. Beulah, are you listening? BEULAH! NO! NO! BEULAH! BAD DOG! BAD DO….NOOOOOO!!!!”

Only I couldn’t beat her, because she was too gross to smack. Instead I bathed her with the hose rather than the warm tub, like she likes it.

We see the buffalo every day and the tai chi-ers, whom Beulah likes to run up to mid-chi and try to start conversation. And the model ship yachters…those skippers are very serious.

But there is one thing that has always intrigued me, although I suppose it’s not terribly posh of me: Golden Gate Park has fly casting pools. I’ve run past the signs for it every week for about three years, but have never gone in…and not only because it’s not a good idea to venture off too far in the park lest you become a deadbeat hippie and start shooting up. But my running friend, Monique, said she’d always wanted to try it (flyfishing, not the smack) too. So, ignoring the mockery of our respective husbands, we signed up for the free casting classes they hold every month.

And oh my God, SO MUCH FUN! It went all day. Seriously, all day, from 9:30 until 3:00, when your arm feels like bruised jello and you can no longer think of anything but “arm position, wrist tension, not too high, slower recoil, oh damn…” There were tons of us, all armed with fly rods, watching these, well–let’s not beat around the bush–geezers performing all kinds of aerial tricks with a flick of the wrist. They’d flick one way, and the line would swirl around like the Circque de Soleil, and then flick it left, right, and hither and yon. And then we tried it, and it was sad. And we tried it again, and maybe it was a touch less sad, and so on, but those geezers totally handed it to us. We stopped for a delicious grilled lunch, and then most of us couldn’t wait till 1:00 and dragged our favorite guru castmasters up to show us some more exciting maneuvers. We roll cast and back cast and false cast. It was fantastic.

All those guys are licensed master castmen, which is a title I quite fancy. And they’re all so nice! And friendly and desperately want to convert the whole world and will do anything to make it fun for you. Where else could you go and learn from about 20 flyfishing experts in one day for free? It’s like the recession baby’s dream.

Monique and I came back home, talking like we knew it ALL, bragging about our surely innate flycasting gifts and pretty sure we would have survived the Oregon Trail while our lousy varmint husbands had to eat the oxen.

Only today, Simons and I strolled over to the casting pools before dusk, and all those hours of work are for naught. I’ve totally forgotten it all. And SIMONS IS BETTER THAN I AM. Harumph.

So I’ve been watching a lot of tv. No, not really. Well, okay, maybe I have.

But in between episodes of Big Love, a lot has happened. When last I posted about Grubious the carpet mushroom and his illicit paramour, Myrtle, the carpet shrubbery, we were crossing our fingers and rubbing Buddha’s pendulous tummy that we would get a fabulous new sub-let. We did, and the new place is just as wonderful as we hoped.

It has one of them fancy remote controlled garages! And a yard for Beulah’s tinkling pleasure! My office looks out onto the Marin headlands (not directly, but hey look, there they are!) and is one block from the park so I can heckle the bison whenever I want, and we have whole separate areas for eating and working and playing and sleeping. The floors, they are wooden. The plants are only of the potted variety.

However, our landlord refused to give us back our deposit, saying that we didn’t give the full 60-days notice before moving. Simons and I maintain that 30-days was ample in light of the house being INFESTED with mold and creepy rug forests. Fortunately for us, our lawyer agrees. That’s right, we have joined the ranks of litigious Americans and are suing the pants off those who have wronged us/hurt our feelings/given us the typhus. Normally, I am opposed to capital punishment, but after coughing for five months and being forced to take steroids that made me eat 24/7 and developing chronic asthma and getting chest x-rays and weeping at the doctor’s office convinced I had lung cancer, I feel strongly that they deserve The Chair. I might settle for public flogging and a modicum of torture, but I reserve the right to change my mind and give them the chair anyway.

I must say though, I’m not really cut out for this kind of confrontation. Since we made the decision to seek legal counsel, I have these recurring nightmares that someone hits me with a bike or chops off my leg or what have you, and we have to sue. It’s this whole nightmarish world of conflict, and I wake up exhausted and cringing apologetically.

But moving and suing were not the greatest changes.

I had to go home at the end of March. My granddaddy died. My mom’s father passed away before I was born, so I only knew about him in stories and old black and white photos. But Daddy’s father I knew in Technicolor.

When I was little (and I was always so much younger than everyone else), Granddaddy always seemed so tall to me. He’d stoop down to show me a bright red tomato, fragrant with dirt and vine and salt air, and have me help mend the chicken wire fence around his garden so the marsh rabbits wouldn’t steal his vegetables. We’d gather fresh mint from the back steps to make sun tea on the porch; it was always cool under the stairs, with glossy dollar weed and sand and no stickers for small, bare feet. Granddaddy would take us crabbing off his dock, pulling up big pots of furious, clicking blue crabs; “grab him here, behind his back legs, Miss Tippy Toes, and he can’t pinch you with his claws.” He called me Tippytoes for the longest time, because I always walked around on my toes, I think the better to sneak up on and scare my sister. Then he’d crank away at his hearing aid so he could hear whatever “Why” question I had for him that particular second.

In the early mornings, Granddaddy would go for his dawn run, from his house three miles down to the front beach on Holden. There he would hunt for shells, conchs and sanddollars, olive shells and angels wings. The side porch was loaded with piles of bleached white shells, but the ocean kept washing them up on the beach, and he kept bringing them back. Every year at Christmas, he and Granny would decorate their tree with little sanddollar ornaments, painted with the names of all the children and grands. The boiled red shells of blue crabs, painted with gloss, glowed festively from the larger branches. Their colored lights played electronic Christmas carols and flashed in time with the music, but I don’t think anyone liked that much besides me.

Their house was a treasure trove of fascinating junk, because Granny and Granddaddy never threw anything away. I could rootle through my dad’s old schoolbooks, old photo albums of the family homes, Granny’s costume jewelry–always redolent of tea rose and cigarette smoke–and my uncles’ old playboy magazines, which is how I first figured out how bosoms were supposed to look (Sadly, those never panned out.). Then my sister, Melissa, would bust me and drag me outside to play pirate, where she would make me eat vile potions and leave me tied to the purple martin post while she went inside for snacks. She was a very cruel pirate. Sometimes being prisoner meant being tickled half to death and forcefed milk bones–those actually weren’t half bad.

At Granddaddy’s funeral, Melissa and I remembered the big sacks of penny candy he would buy for us. He’d hide one behind his back in his big, basketball player hands and make us guess, “Which hand?” We always guessed wrong, “Nope, not that one. Guess again.” I still despise myself for the day when I was too cool to play the candy game anymore.

Everyone in the family had such fond memories of Granddaddy, or Uncle Robert, as most of them knew him. There must have been a hundred cousins (almost all named Polly), and I forget how much I like them all. Not that I didn’t always, but I just don’t see them very often. I was terrified that it would be this very grim and sad occasion, where I would scuttle into corners, trying not to make eye contact, stuttering over people’s names (this is what I do at networking events), but it wasn’t like that at all. These were all familiar faces with wonderful stories about Granddaddy’s courtly manners and his ability to eat more than anyone else in the universe, and how he never let anything go to waste. The man once ate 13 burned hamburgers because Daddy said he was going to feed them to the dog.

My favorite story is of how he met my granny, Ethel Claire. She had already been married and had two little boys, my dad and my uncle Mike. One Valentine’s Day, her cousin came to her to ask her to go on a doubledate to a dance on some fancy lake. Apparently, Granny was an excellent dancer, and I’ve seen photos of her in her prime…what a knockout! She fixed her cousin with a steely eye and said, “No way. The last time I double dated with you, I ended up defending my virtue in the backseat of a car with my high heeled shoe.” The cousin eventually talked her round to at least inviting these two soldiers over for a beer and if she didn’t like the look of her date, she could just claim not have found a babysitter. After an hour or so of conversation, it was time to head over to the dance, and Granny smirked and said, “Now just a minute, Robert, while I go call the babysitter.” And that was that.

I’m sad now that I didn’t ask him more questions about the War or what it was like growing up in the Depression. We always rolled our eyes at his crazy magpie habits, but that whole generation knew something about knuckling down and getting by with what they had. And these days, we can all use a little more of that. I’ll miss his elegant penmanship–no one wrote as beautifully as he. I’ll miss the way he said, “Saaar-ah” and greeted new people with a “a what do you do?” I’ll miss his long, skinny frame and his spectacles and his horrible hearing aid–the damned thing never worked. But I’m pretty sure he could hear Granny waiting on him when he got to Heaven, ready to tell him, “Robert, you’re late,” and make him a plate of something.

Do they have tomatoes in Heaven?