The slice of humanity that I know best: my family.
My son & his girlfriend
My daughter & her boyfriend
My sister & my brother
Weekly Photo Challenge: Humanity
Category Archives: Family
I Haven’t Forgotten This Day
I haven’t forgotten what we shared and how much it meant: how meeting you for the first time made me feel…
I haven’t forgotten the gift of holding you in my arms…
…or the joy of our shared laughter…
…or the sweet music we made together.
photographer unknown
I haven’t forgotten the caring; deep, yearning, hoping for all good things for you.
Not a costume nor an actual pirate. Diabetic retinopathy for reals. Still, we tried to have fun with it.
He whispered these things to my heart, and I responded, “Neither have we, my darling.”
To us: many happy returns of the day.
An august gathering of birthdays
If you ask around, you may find that families sometimes have uncanny clusters of birthdays. For my family, that cluster occurs in August. Both my maternal grandparents had their birthdays in August, although I don’t remember the exact days. My brother’s birthday is today; mine is on Thursday. My brother-in-law John’s is the 25th; Steve’s brother-in-law Dan’s is the 22nd. My husband Jim’s birthday was August 26. What could be the reason for all these babies being born this week?
Gotta be Thanksgiving. We are the product of grateful coupling, I suppose — cold nights and tryptophan relaxation. Why not? The harvest is in. Be fruitful and make babies.
As a child, my end-of-the-summer birthday precluded school parties and peer recognition. I was content with family gatherings that included spare ribs, corn-on-the-cob and chocolate cake (my frequently requested birthday dinner). My children introduced new birthday traditions, like Hoops & Yo-yo cards…
and this hysterical Birthday song by the Arrogant Worms (click to see youtube version w/lyrics) often sung over the phone by my oldest, Susan.
Lately, I’ve been giving myself year-end treats. I started this blog to mark my 50th year. The next year, I bought myself a digital camera to replace the Canon AE-1 that my husband had given me 33 years earlier. This year, I bought plane tickets for me & Steve to travel to California to visit my mother, my siblings, the family grave site (where my sister, my husband and my dad are buried), giant redwoods, tide pools, pinnacles and a winery. I am looking forward to unwrapping that gift slowly over 6 days. I want to savor it as much as I can.
At the piano in the old homestead. Photo by my sister DKK.
Today, though, I’m wishing my brother a happy birthday! He was a gift brought home from the hospital on my 11th birthday. He helped me grow up in a million ways — first by taking my place as the baby. As adults, we’ve always had miles and miles between us keeping us apart. I’m hoping that when that distance is bridged, we’ll find much to connect us again.
photo credit: Josh Galasso
This Old House
In the late 1960s, a couple with 2 young children bought their first house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
There were small trees in the back yard that grew and grew…
The trees shaded the house and the garden. The children played beneath the trees, and the mother and father planted flowers in the garden so that they could sit outside and enjoy their color and fragrance.
The children grew, too, fed at the kitchen table.
They grew tall and strong…
…and enjoyed their own place to dream and read and learn.
As time went on, the children grew to adults and moved away from the house. The couple lived there still, and grew older together. Then the father died, and the mother lived there alone. Finally, she decided to sell the little home to another young family with small children…and a baby on the way. So she and her grown-up son said ‘good-bye’ to the place together.
Thank you, little house, for sheltering this family. Thank you, trees and garden, for living and growing with them. May you continue to shelter and live and grow with the new family, in peace.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer Lovin’
Perfect timing! Believe it or not, this week’s photo challenge coincides with the first anniversary of my daughter’s wedding. Susan & Andy became engaged on July 28, 2012 and married one year later. We joined them for outdoor ceremonies in Madison, WI both years. The first year, the temperature was in the 90s (Fahrenheit). And humid.
For the wedding, although the sun was shining, the mercury never reached 70!
This morning, as Steve & I walked to a local breakfast cafe, I was wearing a sweater and a nylon jacket…it was 59 degrees out. Summer may not always be HOT, but here in the Midwest, it comes bearing flowers and greenery. Which is a wonderful way to show Affection, Tenderness, Beauty, Grace…and LOVE! I’m lovin’ summer here in Wisconsin!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Between
The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt invites us to interpret the theme “Between”. This response is dedicated to my oldest, Susan. When she was a little girl in Kindergarten, she memorized a poem by A. A. Milne (the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories) and performed it for the K-3rd grade Speech and Oratorical Contest of her elementary school. Here is the poem:
Before Tea by A. A. Milne
Emmeline
Has not been seen
For more than week. She slipped between
The two tall trees at the end of the green…
We all went after her. “Emmeline!”
“Emmeline,
I didn’t mean —
I only said that your hands weren’t clean.”
We went to the trees at the end of the green…
But Emmeline
Was not to be seen.
Emmeline
Came slipping between
The two tall trees at the end of the green.
We all ran up to her. “Emmeline!
Where have you been?
Where have you been?
Why, it’s more than week!” And Emmeline
Said, “Sillies, I went and saw the Queen.
She says my hands are purfickly clean!”
Susan did not perform this poem ‘purfickly’. As I recall, she left rather a long pause between the second and third stanzas, perhaps for dramatic effect, perhaps to indicate that some time goes by in that part. The audience began to applaud too early. Nevertheless, her memory was perfect, and she finished in her own time, in her little 5-year old lisp, “Thillieth…”, and I was, of course, inordinately proud of her. I still am. I visited her this past Sunday, and we went for a stroll in the UW Madison Arboretum, where she slipped between the branches of trees — like this:
Weekly Photo Challenge: Extra, Extra
The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt posted today says: “This week, share a photo that has a little something extra: an unexpected visitor, or a tranquil landscape with a splash of color. A lone carrot in a sea of peas. Draw us in with a humorous detail, or find a photo with an added element that makes it an image only you could capture.”
(If you click on the photo, it should open in a larger window for a more panoramic view.)
The significance of this photo has many levels. Someone just visiting this blog for the first time might see a nice composition of natural scenery and a person enjoying it. Very pleasant. Someone who knows this blog a little better might recognize the person as Steve, my partner, who shows up in many of my photos. Someone who knows my history might recognize the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, opposite my grandmother’s beach cottage where I spent many childhood summers, and understand the sentimental attachment I have to this particular body of water. Only Steve & I know the thought that prompted him to sit in this place, the person he is memorializing as he pauses on our walk. The invisible figure in this photo is Steve’s father, Stanley.
I never met Stanley. He died one month before I first encountered Steve. I have been introduced to him many times in concept and story, however. Stanley was a gentle person, a father who did not assert his authority or enforce many rules. Steve sometimes describes him as “passive resistant”, but his assessment is one of understanding and acceptance rather than judgment. Stanley enjoyed going slowly through life, enjoying simple pleasures and quiet places. He worked many years in the US Postal Service and traveled with his family in his own whimsical way. Taking a cigarette break was a frequent excuse to absent himself from the social gathering at hand to enjoy a peaceful moment. When Steve saw this bench along the nature trail at Kohler-Andrae State Park, he said, “This is just the kind of place my father would like.” He sat down. I walked down the path to allow him some private time with his dad, and snapped this photo.
Happy Father’s Day, Stanley. Thanks for being the person you were and for all you did to make Steve the person he is. Well done, sir.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters
Letters and symbols, icons and shorthand. We use them to convey meaning, experience, fact and story to create a reference. Weave several together, and you have history. We’ve created these continually throughout time, and have become so prolific at it that most of us have begun to filter out these symbols habitually. We don’t bother to slow down to read signs. We delete pop-up messages and junk mail. We are inundated and overwhelmed with letters all day long and hardly think about them. What if we focused in on one letter, one symbol, and let it represent an entire text, like the medieval scribes did with illuminated manuscripts? 
This illuminated letter represents my daughter Rebecca’s first Christmas in 1989. What kind of a history does this describe? That there once was a mother who commemorated her child’s first Christmas by making a special ornament. She decorated a tree with it every year for 20 years. The child grew up, her father died, and she moved away from home. The mother stopped celebrating Christmas, but she gave her daughter the special ornament to keep. Soon the daughter had her own house and her own Christmas tree. She decorated the tree and invited her mother to come celebrate with her. Her mother was pleased to see the ornament hanging in just the right place, so she took a picture of it. The End.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Threshold
I’m tired and indecisive this evening, so you get two interpretations of this theme. The first is this one:
It’s my daughter, Rebecca, at her sister’s bridal shower. A couple of months after this photo was taken, her boyfriend proposed, and now she’s poised to be the next bride in our family. Perhaps she’ll be carried over a threshold shortly after that. (But that’s a pretty old custom; maybe no one does that any more.) Here’s another go:
This one’s probably a bit less literal, but maybe more poetic. I like the ascent from darkness to light, from the cool, barren rock to the wall of mossy fecundity. I like the passage littered with dead leaves that gives way to the vault of sunshine. Steve and I have been talking about the joyous urgency of blooming. He is in midlife, going to turn 50 in November, and he is eager to do something important with his life. And soon! So we are aware of this threshold and urging the “joy of change and movement” into our lives. Not sure exactly how that will be manifest, but stay tuned!
Writer’s Fourth Wednesday
I’m posting a piece that I wrote for a Memoirs class in November of 2011 for Victoria Slotto’s prompt, but before I do, I must post a joyful Happy Birthday message to my daughter, Emily!
Happy 23rd, Baby Eyes!
On the day she was born, it was pouring rain in California and CNN was reporting the end of the Gulf War. Does that mean she’s special? Well, of course!
Okay. Now my memoir piece. Not surprisingly, it is visual-heavy.
Sluggishly wiping the drool from the side of my face, I rose from the floor and went down the hall to look in on Jim. He was not in our king-sized bed. I found him in the master bathroom, weak and sweating. He was sitting on the mauve vanity chair, his massively swollen torso slumped over the toilet. He had been throwing up. I knew this meant another infection somewhere, and another trip to the E.R.
“Becca! Em! You kids are going to have to find a ride to the high school,” I called out. “Your dad’s got to go the hospital again.”
“Aw, Mom! Can’t you drive us on the way?”
I mustered that stern, guilt-inducing look that I imagined would silence them until their own anxiety took hold. Was there a better way to tell them that I needed them to grow up and parent themselves so that I could take care of their father? “Save it for therapy,” I told myself and bundled my shivering husband into the passenger’s side of his car.
My own remorse was beginning to gnaw on my conscience. I had spent the night hiding out in my college son’s empty room, Seagram’s gin in hand, crashed on a bare mattress, convulsing in tears and bitter anger, muttering aloud my rejection of the realities of my life.
“This is not right! This is not the life I deserve! Why have you failed me, God? Just make it all go away!”
In the master bedroom suite, Jim was already medicated with his 15 different evening prescriptions and hooked up to his nightly round of technological prophylactics: his insulin pump, his peritoneal dialysis machine, his CPAP (Continuous Positive Air Pressure) mask and the flat screen TV. His dark blonde head was propped up on several pillows, puffy blue eyes straining in a vain attempt to clear the haze of bleeding retinas. There was no way I could sleep with all that whirring and beeping and blinking of light. I wanted to slip into oblivion for just eight hours, escape the strain of appearing sane while chaos, stress and fear overwhelmed me. I figured that if I went into suspended animation and let time go by, things would have to be different when I surfaced. And different could be better. It could hardly be worse. I lay back and let the world spin.
We had arrived on the block 15 years earlier, The Golden Couple from California, high school sweethearts who married right out of college, refugees from the cinder block crack yards of Pomona, eager to raise our four above-average children in the economically stable Midwest. Our baby Emily had been hospitalized with bacterial spinal meningitis just a week before, but miraculously survived without a trace of brain damage. I unbuckled her from the car seat and held her up to see our new four-bedroom house. The moving van driver pulled up, squinted at the August sun, and looked around the neighborhood. “Good move,” he said wryly.
I thought we were finally safe, ready to live out our American dream unscathed. That winter while Jim was shoveling snow for the first time in his life, he felt pain radiating from his chest to his jaw. His doctor said “Mylanta”, but the cardiac stress test said total blockage in two main arteries. How does this happen to a 31-year old, tennis-golf-bowling athlete? We discovered he had diabetes and probably had had it for a decade or so. He had gained weight during our first year of marriage and during my pregnancies, but we never suspected anything. But again, we were saved from tragedy by open-heart, double-bypass graft surgery.
Jim had lived to see his children grow into troubled teenagers, and they had lived to see him grow sicker each day. Which was the cause and which the effect? And why had I failed to be able to pray another miracle into our life? Were we being afflicted for some extraordinary purpose? Driving to the hospital, I kept trying to make everything fit into a positive outlook suitable for our fairy tale life, but a nagging skepticism kept surfacing. We had lost our magic. We were no longer charmed. The dragons were winning, and I was mortally terrified.
Two days after my alcohol-induced escape, I rode the hospital elevator up to the fourth floor, cynically noting how routine the trip was becoming, how familiar and sad the décor seemed. I stepped into the room and saw Jim in the first bed with a tube sticking out of his neck. Betadyne colored the surrounding skin a bruise-like orange brown. Flakes of dried blood speckled the area. A dark-skinned male nurse was applying bandages to the wound.
“Oh, hi! You’re the wife, right?” he greeted me and began his instructions again. “Let me show you what we’ve got on him now. This is where he’s catheterized for hemodialysis. You can’t get this wet, so no showers while he’s using this port. Just sponge baths for a few weeks, okay? If the bandage gets wet or bloody, you’re gonna want to change it. Use gloves when you’re putting on the gauze, and cover it over completely with this plastic patch. These tubes can be taped together and then taped down on his chest like this. Careful of the caps. They unscrew to hook up to the catheter. If you take them off, you have to wear a surgical mask because, you know, this jugular vein goes directly into his heart. Any infection at this site is gonna travel swiftly in a life-threatening direction. Got that?”
I breathed deeply and felt as if I were still on the elevator, dangling by a cable. I then became aware that I had missed the last instruction.
“Um, hold on. I don’t think I heard that last bit. Actually, I’m suddenly not feeling too well. May I sit down?”
My semi-conscious brain was frantically sending warning messages. “This is not sustainable. You are not going to be able to keep him alive.” Jim’s ever-friendly and imperturbable countenance looked meekly on in an odd juxtaposition to this feeling of dread. It seemed like he could take any amount of medical abuse and be grateful for it. “Better living through technology,” he always said. I wanted to cry out, to interrupt this surreal charade, but I felt like I was under water. I realized we had no endgame and had avoided discussing it entirely. Platitudes and prayers were not addressing the issue adequately. Death. Mortality. It wasn’t supposed to be part of our story, and I was woefully unprepared. I blinked dumbly and swallowed.
“Okay. How do I do this?” I finally asked. The nurse blithely continued, never noticing that I wasn’t talking about the bandages.
© 2014, essay by Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
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