Thanksgiving, Part 2

Posted September 07, 2007

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^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Usually I raise issues here only to drop them. Sure, there are recurring themes: anxiety and impatience; my chaotic efforts at peace or the way I lumber after gratitude. But I don't tend to follow the thread of a particular story. Just because I complain about the gutters, for instance, doesn't mean you really want to hear the whole boring tale about how they finally got fixed, how when it rains now the water no longer sheets past our windows on its drenching beeline for the basement.

But this column is going to be like that second episode of the Brady clan's cliffhanger in Hawaii. Surely you were on the edge of your seat last week: Would Ben's cough get better? Would I finish work in time to leave for the vacation that I didn't even mention because I couldn't bear to confess the connection between my self-pity and a beach trip? Would I shed my glum self-absorption to reveal the sparkling gratitude beneath?

The short answers are: No, no, and no. But the longer answers are: Yes, yes, and yes. Let's just say, though, that things got worse before they got better.

We were scrambling, scrambling, scrambling. There was writing to finish, turkey to gobble, massages to, um, massage. And packing. For the first time in our lives, we had plans to go to Cape Cod that involved us renting a little cottage! Not camping (which we'll do again in August) and not staying in some nutty hostel. But a real little house that we fell in love with online and rented way back in January. If this were an episode of a TV drama, the show would open with Michael and me hunched smilingly over the computer, exclaiming, "That will be so much fun!" and "I know! I can't wait!" And you would get the feeling that things were doomed to go awry.

We planned to leave on Saturday, and on Friday afternoon, at, oh, about 4:45, it occurred to us to take Ben's temperature one more time. He'd had a cough and a fever all week -- an illness that alarmed my pediatrician brother because it started with "a kind of weird pain right here, in my breathing," but that one doctor at our practice had already dismissed as a bad cold. Ben had been chipper and hungry, after all. But his temperature was up to 102 again, which is what it had been, more or less steadily, for 8 days. We live less than one minute from the doctor's office, and they agreed to squeeze us in before closing, at which visit Ben was diagnosed with pneumonia.

This is a red herring.

"There's no reason you can't still go to the beach," the lovely pediatrician told us, as she wrote out a prescription for Ben's antibiotics. And later, in the night, I would think of this pronouncement and realize that she should have been a little more specific: "... because of Ben's pneumonia," she should have clarified. Because at a quarter to midnight, we heard it. The coughing, crying sound of Birdy barfing in her bed. Birdy, who'd been eating raspberries right off the canes at a friend's house and was now regurgitating what appeared to be quarts and quarts of summer's bounty. "Maybe it was simply too many berries!" I thought, optimistically, until Michael appeared in the middle of the sweltering summer night in a hooded sweatshirt and complained of the cold.

And, elbow deep in vomitus, with my son wheezing nearby, my weeping daughter inconsolable about the barf in her braids, the love of my life shivering under a comforter, did I get it, the great cosmic message written out in fever and puke? That it's not the work or the stress or the vacations that really matter, but this, our health, our very lives? No, I did not. "I can't believe we're going to miss this trip," I complained to Michael, who was too busy trying not to barf to answer me. "I've only been looking forward to it for six months." It's amazing that such a petulant child as myself can actually take care of other people.

But by morning I got it. Birdy woke chipper and hungry, remembering from the whole, horrible night only that she'd gone to bed feeling a bit too full ("But that hot water bottle sure helped!" she said, from the soul of her amnesia, and Michael and I still quote this line to each other and laugh.) Michael was fine. Ben's fever was gone. The sun was shining. And yes, I finally got it. I was filled with gladness and gratitude, and I didn't even know yet that we'd still go to the Cape a mere one day late. I didn't know that our cheapo cabin would be our dream getaway, what with its tiny deck and its ancient board games and citronella candles. I didn't know that we'd have, perhaps, the best week of our lives. I didn't know that Birdy would float in the mild bay in her rainbow-dotted swim ring and cry, "This is the life!" Or that she would revise this statement a minute later with the comically existential: "This is my only life!" But I did know something like that. That this is our only life, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. To love and to cherish, as long as we all shall live. I did finally know that.

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Thanksgiving, Part 2

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Thanksgiving, Part 2

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