Category: Lydia

The Lydster, Part 53: Room of Many Colors


Lydia is susceptible to allergies, not just peanuts, but also including dust mites. So it is incumbent upon us to scrub her walls thoroughly periodically. Last year, during the process, Carol and her father painted Lydia’s room a peach color that Lydia didn’t like for reasons of design that were lost on me. So this year, when she was asked what colors she would like on her walls, Lydia told them, and Carol and her father complied. The room is now pink. And blue. And purple. And yellow. And green. With a floor that’s a color called Rose Balcony. And now Lydia is very happy with a room that she can call her own. They also painted a white chair pink to match her bedding. Joseph, the 11th son of Israel, would be pleased.
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Other sources of allergies, which I share with her, are grasses and ragweed, which we monitor. Saturday, while I was cutting the grass, Lydia came outside to pick some wildflowers. That afternoon, she had shortness of breath, and that night she coughed for three hours; cough medicine is of no use, but the drugs in the nebulizer eventually did the trick.
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I don’t often say things like, “Boy, is my girl smart!” OK, maybe I do. But it seemed like only a few weeks ago, she insisted that twenty-nine was followed by twenty-ten, my insistence to the contrary notwithstanding. But now she can count to one hundred and beyond. Shades of Toy Story.

Picture #1 courtesy, of Earthworld Comics, May 2008.
Picture #2 courtesy of Uthaclena, August 2008.

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Julie Hembeck Turns 18

One of the great pleasures I’ve had as a result of reigniting my friendship with Fred Hembeck and his wife Lynn Moss was getting to know their daughter Julie. From an awkward 15-year-old teenager to a beautiful 18-year-old young lady, she has blossomed in her confidence as well as her artistic eye. She will be going to college next month in New York State, but about four hours from home, compared with a couple colleges she looked at right in the Mid-Hudson that were only about an hour’s drive. So Fred and Lynn have to cope with being empty-nesters.

In fact, Leonard Bernstein, who would have been 90 today, discusses and plays the Ode for Joy, just for Julie:

And speaking of the Hembecks, Carol, Lydia and I made our annual trek to their chateau earlier this month. As usual, Fred and I blathered about what we’ve later described as unincapsulable. I know we talked about FantaCo, Regis Philbin, and Fred’s new book. But the conversation tended to flit from subject to subject.

He, our wives and I also had a philosophical conversation about blogging. My wife chastised me for me saying that she should look at my blog, rather than me having to explain what I had written. I noted that it isn’t just the information in the blog that I was trying to convey but the style and manner in which I said it. So to give a Cliff’s Notes version of it wouldn’t do it justice.

Fred ragged on me when he discovered that I had watched on the Internet the last 10 minutes of “There Shall Be Blood.” About every 10 minutes he would find some parallel slapdown to give me, ending with “Oh I suppose you listened to/read/watched/ saw the last 10 minutes of THAT,” no matter what it was. He even got my beloved wife to join in the fun. I had a good time anyway, with Lynn’s vegetarian dinner a highlight of the day.
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Another satisfied Fred Hembeck customer.

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The Lydster, Part 52: Bachelor Father


Bachelor Father was a television show in the late 1950s starring John Forsythe (“Dynasty”, the voice of Charlie on “Charlie’s Angels”) as a single man who ended up raising his niece (Kelly Corcoran) with the assistance of his houseboy, Peter (Sammee Tong). I used to watch it, though I’m fairly sure it it wasn’t very good.

That’s the source of the title of this piece, but it has nothing to do with MY actual existence. When Carol went away to college late last month, it meant that I would take Lydia to daycare and have friends of mine pick her up and take her to their home from where I would pick her up and take her to our home. It, at least for a time, broke her of the habit of trying to decide on which was the preferred parent at any given time; she was stuck with me. On July 3, I got out of work early to pick her up, but the bus was extremely late, and I nearly had my nervous breakdown.

On July 4, Lydia and I took the bus to Oneonta to visit the grandparents. The bus stopped in a village called Cobleskill, where we unintentionally had the opportunity to watch the Fourth of July parade for about 45 minutes. After the parade ended and we followed the trailing police car through town, the citizenry waved at those of us in the bus as though we were part of the procession. Naturally we waved back. I stayed with Lydia over that weekend but left on Sunday by myself. Lydia did not want me to go, and was weepy as her grandfather drove off with me en route to the bus station.

The next day, I called her at about 8:30 p.m. and read her bedtime stories. This seemed to be working until I finished reading when she started negotiating her desire to have “someone from Albany” stay with her. She sounded so forlorn that I felt like hopping the next bus and picking her up. What I discovered subsequently, though, was if I called her earlier in the evening when she wasn’t so tired, she became less needy and coped with me hanging up after our conversation much better. That Friday, I called her around 7, which was fine, but then she called ME around 8:30, asking for stories. I complied, and she was OK because she knew i was coming soon.

I went back to Oneonta the next day, went with her and her grandparents to the family reunion in Binghamton, and then on Monday, Grandma and Grandpa drove Lydia and me back to Albany so we could have a reunion with my wife/Lydia’s mom, and go out to dinner.

I did miss Lydia when she was away, but I’m really happy that she found a way to have a good time going to the playground every morning and going swimming most afternoons, and then telling me about it at the end of each day. Now I’m done with those long-distance talks between her stuffed creatures that made the trip and those that didn’t. The goodbyes alone rivaled the Waltons’.

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Panic attack

Once upon a time, I used to find myself in bad situations, sometimes of my own making, and I was at a total loss as to what to do. I’m a really big fan of redundancy. For instance, when I’m leaving work after 5:37 and the #27 Corporate Woods bus is running late, I know the #31 Albany-Shaker bus will be by in about 10 minutes; I actually used that particular plan B a couple Fridays ago.

On Thursday past, I was leaving work early to pick up Lydia. I planned to take the 4:07 but it never comes. I went back into the building to check the time, and it’s 4:22; the security guard said there is traffic backed up on I-90, which the #27 takes. What are my options? I could have called an expensive cab, but that didn’t seem viable either, because there was a guy out there waiting for a cab longer than I was awaiting the bus.

So I decided to walk out the back way out of Corporate Woods and try to catch the #31, which does NOT come into the CW at this hour. My chances of catching it are slim. If I don’t, I’ll have to walk an additional mile to call the day care and tell them…what?

When I’m really stressing, I talk to myself. Out loud. Apparently in an animated way. One of the people who I’ve seen on my floor, and who I’m friendly with but don’t know extremely well, is driving by in her vehicle. She sees this display, pulls over and asks what’s wrong. I note that it’s now 4:36 and I have to take two buses to get to day care by 5:15 and the first one’s nowhere in sight. First she offers me a ride to where I could pick up the second bus, then getting close to there, decides to drive me cross town to where the day care center is, near one of the Albany hospitals. I should note that she was going to Latham, in absolutely the opposite direction. Also, she was a smoker, but refused to smoke in her vehicle until I was delivered to my destination, which I get to in plenty of time, since was taking Albany-Shaker rather than the highway.

I feel so blessed.

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The Lydster, Part 51: Bigger


When we took Lydia to the doctor’s for her physical shortly after her fourth birthday, she weighed 42 pounds and was 44 inches tall. A couple of months later, when we took her to her allergist, she measured 49 pounds and 47 inches tall. The size 11 toddler shoes which had fit her for several months no longer came even close to getting on her feet. She’s wearing size 13s and is very close to size 1 for children. Inevitably, when I tell someone she’s just had her birthday recently, people say, “Oh, she must be 5, or is she 6?” And invariably, I have to correct them and tell them that she is merely 4. Even her daycare teachers who see her daily sometimes forget.

Meanwhile, she’s seemed to have developed allergies to the spring grasses. One night, she was out while Carol (subbing for me) was mowing the lawn, and the next morning she broke into a coughing jag, worrisome because she ended up crying while walking in an unfocused manner. I scooped her up with my right arm – which still hurt but less than doing it on the other side – Carol got her some water, and she seemed OK.

In fact, it was her follow-up trip to the allergist when she gave us more trouble than she has in years. Usually, we have to wake her at 6:30, but that morning, she woke up at 5:30. I’m convinced that the worry awakened her. She was demanding and whiny almost constantly, uncharacteristically. I went downstairs to put the upstairs garbage in with the kitchen trash when I saw an invasion of black ants there, maybe 50 or more. Oddly, I called to Lydia, because she seemed fairly obsessed with few ants we had seen previously. I took out the garbage bag only to find more in the can, which didn’t drown easily. Lydia pointed out every escaping insect. (Subsequently, we got traps, which are working.) After this excitement, Lydia was back to her cheerful and cooperative self.

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