Saved By a Vet

If my mother had confined herself to embroidering baby clothes during her pregnancy, all would have been well.  Unfortunately, she also read books about baby care, and at the time these were rife with behaviorist principles. New mothers were instructed to pick up their infant only for feeding and diaper changes, at strict four-hour intervals. This was supposed to result in a well-disciplined baby who would lie quietly in her crib, entertaining herself with her own thoughts and not relying on other humans for company or comfort.

But, for my mother and me, things did not go as the books promised.  Long before the next feeding was due I would begin to mewl and grouse, progressing to ear-splitting shrieks that went on for hours. My mother would hover over the bassinet, watching my face grow from red to purple and my arms flail in distress. Longing to comfort me, but determined to do things properly, she would only allow herself to stroke my fist with one finger. She was probably even more miserable than I.

When it was finally time to nurse, I latched on so fiercely and was so reluctant to let go that my mother developed cracked nipples. This caused her such pain that the only way she could bear to feed me was to bite down on one of her lace-bordered handkerchiefs.  The pain did not make it easy for her to let down her milk, and the slower the flow, the more savagely I sucked...Forget those placid Madonna-and-Child nursing scenes.  Ours was more like the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha.

(My mother was not the only one to suffer under the influence of behaviorism. Across the Atlantic, my future mother-in-law, on her doctor’s advice, would leave my husband-to-be shrieking in his crib and go out for a walk, to avoid being tempted to pick him up and “spoil” him. It must have been as compensation for this draconian upbringing that our generation morphed into the love-obsessed flower children of the 1960s.)

My mother’s parents lived in Ivars d’Urgell, a village in a fertile plain south of the Pyrenees, west of Barcelona. As soon as she heard of my birth my grandmother packed her suitcase and a basket of autumnal home-grown provender—dried figs, almonds, raisins, and the last of the year’s butifarras  (sausages). My grandfather hitched the horse to the covered wagon and drove her to the train station, but he declined to go along. Having a grandchild--I was the first, my mother being the eldest of his children—made him feel old, he said.

He was in his fifties, one of the last generation of large-animal veterinarians who cared for the horses, mules, and donkeys that plowed the fields and brought in the harvest. His car had been requisitioned during the Spanish Civil War, and for the rest of his career he visited his patients on a bicycle, wearing a black beret on his bald head and bicycle clips around his ankles, and smoking endless roll-your-own cigarettes.

It took him a month to get over his fear that the sight of me would turn him into an old man. He got on the train, arrived in Barcelona and, as he climbed the five flights of stairs to our apartment, he could already hear me screaming. He kissed my mother, handed her another food-filled basket from my grandmother, and followed the howls to the bassinet. He picked me up, lifted my dress and inspected my abdomen. He had seen enough calves, foals, piglets and lambs, in addition to his own four children, to know what a thriving infant looked like, and I did not look like one. 

 

“This child,” he exclaimed “is malnourished!  Why haven’t you been feeding her?”

“I think perhaps I don’t have enough milk, because she cries day and night,” my mother answered. 

“Of course she cries—she’s starving! Forget about nursing. She has to gain weight right away, or she won’t last long,” he said.

Then began the search for something to feed me. In the years following the war infant formula was practically unavailable, but, as it happened, a relative of my paternal grandparents owned a factory that manufactured powdered milk. He let my parents have as much as they needed, and I was put on a diet of powdered milk thickened with bread crumbs.

For all his initial reluctance to accept my birth, by the time he boarded the train back to Ivars my grandfather and I were firmly bonded, probably helped by the fact that he had saved me from dying of hunger. During my summers in the country, and in his letters after we left Spain, he repeated to me the Catalan saying: els fills dels teus fills son dues vegades fills (your children’s children are twice your children). I didn’t understand then the depth of affection that he was trying to convey, but the saying became as much a part of my grandfather as his beret, his cigarettes, and the bicycle clips that he put on before he set out on his rounds.

Despite the vast amounts I consumed, the powdered-milk gruel did not kill me. “You were so ravenous,” my mother used to say, “that it took two people to feed you—one to put the spoon in your mouth while the other filled the next spoon. If there was the slightest interruption between spoonfuls you would fly into a rage, choke, and vomit. And then we’d have to start all over.”

Luckily for me, my mother’s younger sisters, Maria (whose name I changed to “Xin” as soon as I could speak) and Pepita, periodically shared our apartment and helped with the mealtime dramas. But their influence went far beyond those early feedings. Until we left Spain when I was ten, my aunts were treasure troves of entertainment—they made up stories, played dolls, and let me watch them put on make-up. Xin recited Lorca poems to me (“Huye luna, luna, luna...” and “Verde que te quiero verde...”) long before I could understand them, but the pure music of the language engraved itself in my brain. And she taught me to read when I was three.

As an only child surrounded by adults, I sensed in my aunts’ youthful presence a secret sympathy. But many years later I realized that their most valuable gift was to help dissipate my mother’s intense focus on me.

(To be continued)

Champagne and Lace

When she felt the warm liquid run down her legs and splash onto the tile floor, my mother didn’t know what to think.  What was this?  Probably not urine, since it wasn’t yellow, but it came from down there, so who knew? Her father was a vet and she had grown up on a farm, but she had always been sheltered from the spectacle of animal birth.  She had an idea that having a baby--which, according to the doctor, would happen any day now--had to do with pain followed by great happiness. Could this clear puddle between her feet have something to do with that?

As soon as my father came home from afternoon rehearsal, she whispered that perhaps they should go to the doctor.  Was anything wrong? he asked, putting down his violin case.  Probably not, she said, but still...

They made their way in the October dusk over the near-empty streets of Barcelona to the office of my father’s school friend, an obstetrician who had offered to be on hand for the birth.  “In Spain, by the 1940s,” my mother told me years later, “babies were usually born in the hospital.  But your father and I were so terribly romantic that we wanted you to be born at home, and Dr. Sala said he would come.”

Dr. Sala took one look at my mother, told my father to get her home immediately, and said he’d be along as soon as he could. My father’s first problem was to find a taxi.  The Spanish Civil War had ended in 1939, but five years later the country had barely begun to recover.  Bread was scarce, electricity was rationed, and taxis (few people owned personal cars) were hard to come by. But he managed to flag down a cab, and after helping my mother up to their fifth-floor walkup, he ran back down to find a phone (private phone lines were expensive and hard to get). Fortunately the café around the corner was open and he was able to call the midwife and his mother, who had agreed to act as sous-chefs to Dr. Sala.

The midwife and my grandmother set water to boil on the kitchen’s tiny wood-fired stove; then they dragged a cot into the master bedroom and covered it with newspapers and an old sheet. Finally, the doorbell rang and Dr. Salas entered, carrying his leather bag.  It’s hard to imagine what followed, since neither of my parents had been given any details about what to expect.  Fortunately my mother had wide hips and was in great shape due to all that stair climbing, and by nine o’clock the commotion was over and order had been restored.

Clean sheets—one of the half-dozen sets on which, the year before her marriage, my mother had embroidered her initials--were spread on the four-poster bed.  She was sprayed with lavender cologne and dressed in her best nightgown, the one with a yoke of tiny blue and pink flowers centered in drawn-thread squares.  Since there was no central heating, and October nights by the Mediterranean are chilly, my grandmother draped a powder-blue angora bed jacket on her daughter-in-law’s shoulders.

Once the midwife had cleaned and dressed me, there was a discussion about my hair.  I had arrived with a sort of fierce black wig on top of my head. “You even had some fine dark hairs on your ears, like a little donkey,” my mother used to tell me when I was small.  Certain that a spacious forehead was a sign of intelligence, she told the midwife to tie back my mop with a couple of narrow satin ribbons—white, to match the ribbons on my hand-knitted angora sweater and booties, and the ones interspersed among the yards of lace flowing from the long skirts of my dress. This marked the beginning of my mother’s lifelong struggle to keep my hair out of my face: on my last visit to her, when she was well into her nineties, she reached out a spotted hand to push my bangs off my forehead.

They laid me in a lace-enshrouded bassinet, and my father went to fetch the  bottle of champagne that had been cooling on the kitchen windowsill.  In those years, my family didn’t have a car or an icebox, a telephone or central heating, but we never lacked for fancy linens or celebratory champagne. My grandmother dipped a finger in her goblet and put it on my tongue, so that I could join in the toast to the happy event. This was the first of many sips of special-occasion bubbly that I was offered at Christmas and Easter and on various saints’ days throughout my childhood.

Soon the midwife packed her bag and departed, and the doctor drove my grandmother home (he had a car!). “The room was suddenly very quiet,” my mother would say years later, “but I was so excited from the champagne and the hormones that I talked for hours, despite the fact that your father—exhausted from all the emotion, poor man!—had fallen asleep on a chair.”

Every year on my birthday, my mother used to call and tell me narrative of my birth.  I used to joke that it was her version of the gospel according to St. Mark, with the anxious trek to and from the doctor’s office instead the trip to Bethlehem, my grandmother and the midwife instead of the shepherds, and a lacy bassinet in place of the manger.

My last few birthdays have come and gone without a retelling of that long-ago saga, and it’s been a long time since anyone pushed the hair off my face, but I can still hear my mother’s youthful voice saying in my ear, “your father and I were so romantic, that we wanted you to be born at home...”

No Cat Yet

Three months after Wolfie's demise, we're still a one-dog, two-fish household.  I had forgotten how simple life with a single dog, especially a single small dog, can be.  Gone are interminable grooming sessions, when my arm would give way before making even a dent in Wolfie's perennially shedding, dense undercoat.  Gone are the daily heartbreaking walks, when he would alternate between hopping on three legs and lagging behind on four.  And gone, at last, is the anxious watching--is he getting worse?  Is he miserable?  What should I do?

With only Bisou like a little red shadow at my side, the days seem to have expanded, and I have been using the extra time and energy to revisit a project that I began four years ago--a personal account of my two decades with CFS, enlivened and redeemed by the company of dogs.  A couple of years ago I got as far as printing out a first draft, and then the illness itself took over and robbed me of the  energy to write about it.

But now that I no longer have a garden to tend or meals to cook, let alone a large sick dog to care for, I have managed to revisit that old manuscript.  And that is why I've gone so long without writing here.  I've been busy keeping the almost 70,000 word narrative straight in my head and on the page, taking out enormous chunks of blather (I am, if nothing else, a superb deleter), and striving to tell a good story while also telling the truth, whatever that is.  I used to find writing--essays, speeches, short stories--less than agonizing.   But this memoir business is a bear.  A grizzly bear, in fact.

There are hundreds of writers out there, prolific novelists, essayists, and memoirists who somehow manage to write copiously and continuously on their blogs.  I am not one of them.  You should know that I have been been beating myself up about this regularly, though.  I have been grossly lacking in blogger's noblesse oblige, all but abandoning My Green Vermont without explanation or apology.  But the truth is that I never intended to stop posting.  Every day I would tell myself that I was planning to write a post, that I would very soon write a post, that I was about to write a post any minute now...And then--you know how it is--guilt and embarrassment took over, so that the thought of ever writing anything here again made me cringe.

Today I have obviously stopped cringing long enough to write this, but I suspect that I'll have to get that memoir into a lot better shape before I can post regularly again.  In the meantime, I'm still thinking, thinking, thinking about getting a kitten for Bisou.

One Dog, Or Two?

When Wolfie expired quietly next to his water bowl last month, I asked the vet to wait before taking his body away.  I wanted Bisou to see him one last time.  I thought she might want to say goodbye, or get a sense of closure or whatever it is a dog needs when her life's companion dies.  But she didn't pay any more attention to that long, still body than if it had been a pile of laundry.  Instead, all her focus was on the vet, whom she loves and who said, seeing my surprise, "I've seen this kind of reaction before.  Dogs are really good at perceiving the difference between 'alive' and 'dead.'  To her, Wolfie is no longer here."

In the following days, I watched Bisou carefully for signs of mourning, but there was nothing obvious.  Then I went away for an overnight trip, leaving her with my husband, who fed her and threw balls for her and was around most of the time.  When I walked in the house on my return, she became hysterical.  She barked and yelped and moaned.  She ran around in frantic circles and barked some more, and couldn't seem to stop.  I finally had to throw balls for her to drain some of that energy and bring her back down to earth.  My husband said, "Maybe she thought that the vet had taken you away like he did Wolfie...."

Wolfie was so much bigger than she that they didn't play together, unless you count as play Bisou's jumping up into his face to get him to yodel and open his mouth wide so she could stick her head inside.  But the two of them would casually check on each other during the day, and sleep close together at night.  I am sure that he was a steadying, reassuring presence in her life, as he was in mine.

Now people are asking if I plan to get another dog.  One friend says, "You should always have at least two dogs.  That way, when one of them dies, you're not left dogless." Another asks, "If dogs kept humans as pets, wouldn't you appreciate having another person in the house?" 

They are right, of course.  But...

Although I have almost always had two dogs (for a while I had three, but that was way too many), there is much to be said for the one-dog life.  It's so much easier, especially if the dog is a reasonable, portable size.  These days, when I go on errands, I often invite Bisou along.  And if I have time after I've done my shopping, I let her out of the car and we go for a walk.  There is just one collar, one leash to deal with.  One "heeling" behavior to correct.  One poop bag.  True, in my two- dog days I sometimes left one at home, but oh, the guilt on my part, and the uncomprehending sorrow of the dog I left behind!  Of course I would tell him over and over that it would be his turn next time, but he didn't know that, he was just a dog, and all he knew was that a terrible injustice was being perpetrated.

A single dog not only means less guilt, but less hair on the furniture, less poop to pick up, fewer nails to clip, fewer vet bills and visits.  And it also means, for me, a more intense relationship with the dog.  As with human marriage, there is something to be said for person/dog monogamy.  Our capacity for love may be infinite, but our time, energy and attention are sadly limited, and it's so much easier when you don't have to worry that you're giving too much to one dog and depriving the other (yes, there goes the guilt issue again).

True, with a single dog there is the danger of neurotic over-involvement on the part of the human.  Sometimes I worry that I've started down that road already.  I find myself wishing that Bisou were half her size so I could take her on airplanes, to restaurants, stores, everywhere.  Will I end up, twenty years from now, mumbling endearments to a Chihuahua in my purse?

I think I can stay vigilant enough to prevent my  relationship with Bisou from degenerating into neurosis.  As for her, as long as her nose keeps her attuned to that universe of smells into which I cannot follow, and as long as her love affair with the entire human race continues, she is in no danger of becoming pathologically attached to me.

Still, it would be nice to be able to leave her for a couple of hours without worrying that her little heart is breaking.  Should I get her a cat?

(To be continued.)

Like A Tree Shedding Leaves

Soon the time will come when I can no longer play the recorder.  Well, maybe not soon, but the time will surely come, if I keep on living.  And it seems unfair and sad that, having finally found a way to enjoy playing music, away from the tensions and compulsions of my early experience with the violin, I have only another ten or at most fifteen years in which to do it.  

I went to a memorial the other day for a woman who had lived a life brimming with gardening,  dancing, and art.  She had excelled at all these things, but one by one she had had to give them up--first the gardening, then the dancing, then the art.  By the time I met her she could barely hold a conversation.  She kept shaking her head, apologizing, wanting me to know that she knew what was happening to her.   

How the old apologize!  For a while, in college, I played violin/piano sonatas with an old colleague of my father's.  After a lifetime spent in some exalted music circles, he was losing his grip.  He would forget our appointments, couldn't remember which piece we were playing, lost his place over and over.  And he apologized, and lamented, and insisted on telling me that he knew what was happening to him.  All his pride was focused on his awareness of his decline, on the one thing in the core of his being that was not affected by dementia, not diminished by his inability to find his place on the score or to remember what he had said two minutes ago.  He may have been losing his mind, but he clung fiercely to the awareness that he was losing it—and that was both his torment, and his only consolation.

On my therapy dog visits with Bisou, I watch the various ways in which my fellow Wake Robin residents deal with the myriad losses that age brings, and I feel an urgent need to build a large reserve of humility to see me through the coming years.  I had better make peace with the idea that I am not my writing, or my music, or my hair, or my ability to walk the dog or use the bathroom by myself.  Like a tree shedding leaves in the fall, I will probably live to see each of these abilities leave me, one by one.  How, I wonder, to find a way to do this well, to submit with grace, and to say, with deep acceptance:  yes, this is who I am now?

3,672 Stitches

Three years and 3,672 stitches later, the needlepoint pillow I started from an Ehrman kit is finally finished.  I didn't actually count the stitches.  I just multiplied the number of stitches per inch (12) by the size of the design (18"x17").  Math is so useful sometimes.

When I told a friend--an exceptionally creative woman who is always elbow-deep in some project she has just invented--what I was working on, she opened her eyes wide.  "You are working from a kit?" she said, appalled.  "But that's just like painting by numbers!"

Well, yes, it is--except slower.  And that is precisely why I do it.

After hours of squeezing words out of my brain and onto the screen, or notes out of my mouth and into my recorder, nothing restores my soul like threading a needle with bright-red wool and filling in a poppy petal.  When you do needlepoint from a kit, the goal is to reproduce exactly the design stamped on the canvas.  In a way, it's not unlike playing music composed by someone else, except that the player has a lot more room for interpretation.  With needlepoint, you color outside the lines at your own risk.

When I sit at my embroidery frame, it doesn't take me long to enter into a semi-hypnotic state, lulled by the "thwack"of the needle piercing the canvas and the "swish" of the wool pulling through.  It's a rhythmic activity, not unlike walking, and like walking it frees my mind to saunter at leisure, and even to wander off its usual well-worn paths.  Sometimes, between one row of stitches and the next, an idea comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, or the solution to a problem appears as I anchor the end of a length of wool.  But the main virtue of needlepoint, as I suspect is true of most varieties of handiwork, is that it is almost impossible to remain tense while doing it.

As petals, leaves, and stems begin to emerge I take pleasure in their colors and shapes, and feel grateful to the artist who created them, just as I send thanks to Georg Philipp Telemann for taking the trouble to write, back in the troubled 1700s, the lovely duo recorder sonatas that I am struggling to learn.  There is so much beauty in this world, and I give thanks to the artists, musicians and writers who make it their own and then offer it for me to delight in.
A while ago, I briefly considered making my own needlepoint designs, but this would negate all the therapeutic effects of needlepoint.  With every stitch I would anxiously question my choice of colors, the curve of a leaf, the shape of the negative space.  It would be like endlessly rereading my own writing, word by dispiriting word.

No, for me, the virtue of needlepoint lies in its very absence of creativity, an absence which, happily but unpredictably, sometimes triggers my own.

My Mother Says...Continued

After her story of the Spanish Civil War, my mother begins to tell how she met my father.  She might never have come across him if my grandmother had been more traditionally minded and kept her in the village, or if the war had not happened, or if my mother had not taken it into her head to learn to play the violin. 

I've known about these near-misses for years, but my cousin in Barcelona recently told me something that her mother, my mother's youngest sister, had revealed.  It seems that in the middle of the war, while my mother was falling in love with communist soldiers on their way to the front and my father was starving in Barcelona, a lieutenant colonel in Franco's army saw her and decided to marry her.  Secretly, he wrote a letter to the priest of my mother's parish asking for information about the family--their political views, religious practices, financial status, and so on.

According to my aunt, my mother was so enraged when she heard that he had written to ask about the family without first consulting her that she never spoke to him again. Whew!  If it hadn't been for my mother's sense of what was her due, I could have been the daughter of a fascist officer.

After the war, my mother says, I went to Barcelona to study Greek and Latin so I could teach high school.  I had become disillusioned with the law, which I had imagined to be about saving innocent people accused of terrible crimes, like in the movies, but which turned out to be extremely dull instead.

There was so little food in Barcelona!  Luckily my mother sent baskets of food from the farm, and Evita Peron sent ships loaded with wheat from Argentina.  (I remember as a toddler being fed pasta that had been sent by "that kind lady in Argentina."  You can read about my grandmother's food baskets here) The bread that my mother sent used to go hard and stale, and little worms would grow in it.  I was always careful to shake them out before I ate.  What? my mother says, seeing our horrified faces, it wasn't as bad as it sounds....

As a teenager, I  had bought a violin because it seemed exotic and exciting, but I had never learned to play.  The people with whom I was boarding in Barcelona recommended a music academy, and I went to meet the teacher.  I was expecting an old man, bald and bent over.  Instead I found a young man with thick black hair and a mustache.

I started taking lessons from him, but for two years we barely spoke, other than about bowing and intonation  (I wasn't a very good student).   Then one day he invited my parents to attend a concert that he was going to give near their village.  Next, his parents invited me and my sisters and brother, who were also studying in Barcelona, to have coffee at their apartment.  And then he started walking me home after the violin lessons.  I was the first woman he ever kissed.

We were married in 1943, in the village church.  His entire family came from Barcelona in a rented bus.  During the Mass, I was kneeling in front of the altar with my long veil spread out on the floor behind me when suddenly I felt a sharp pull:  the altar boy had accidentally stepped on the veil with his boot and torn a huge hole in it.  After the Mass we went back to my parents' farm, had a big meal and drank lots of champagne.

That night, we tied the mattress and the sewing machine that my parents had given us to the roof of the bus, and rode back to Barcelona with all the relatives.