Lydia Archives - Page 2 of 48 - Ramblin' with Roger

My wife is a good mom

drive

My wife is a good mom. There, I said it. As I’ve noted, we came to parenthood from different perspectives. She seemed confident in knowing that this was something she wanted to do and likely would do well at. Conversely, I’ve been consistent in thinking that I have no idea what I’m doing.

Here’s something my wife did. After spring break from college, on a Sunday, my wife drove my daughter back to college about 100 minutes away. My wife picked up my daughter’s besties, Kay and Tee, whose college breaks were inconveniently set for that following week. Tee stayed at college with my daughter. My wife drives Kay back to Albany, taking her home.

Six days later, my wife and I pick up Kay, drive back to the daughter’s college. the five of us went out to a lovely Guatamalan restaurant. Then we went to a campus craft fair. We said goodbye to the daughter. My wife drove us back to Albany, dropping off Tee and Kay.

This is not the first time my ife has made round trips in successive weekends, despite her very busy work schedule.

As I’ve noted, my wife has taught my daughter about first aid. The daughter’s interest in cooking stems from my wife, not me. My daughter doesn’t drive yet, but she’s noted my wife is a great example of a conscientious operator of a motor vehicle. And I’m sure there are plenty of other examples.

Sandwich

She’s also helping to tend to her mother, who moved into a senior independent living center in our county a year after my FIL died. My wife takes her mom to some doctor’s appointments, does occasionally shopping, and helps sorting out papers.

My wife is not precisely in the sandwich generation in that she’s not tending to her mom for her day-to-day living, it is a commitment nonetheless. Yet she does it well.

Happy Mother’s Day, dear.

Lydster: two decades

cleaning the wound

This is the second part of the daughter at two decades extravaganza.

One of the mild life frustrations I’ve had is that my daughter didn’t get to know my birth family nearly as well as she related to my wife’s family. My father died in 2000 before she was born. While she did meet my mother a few times, most recently in 2009, she didn’t get to know her well. She had seen her cousin Rebecca on the TV show Wipeout but never in person until my mother’s funeral in 2011. In part, that’s why she and I went to Carnegie Hall in 2022 to see my sister Leslie sing, before which we experienced an … interesting… taxi ride.

But it’s nice that she has seen my wife’s family regularly. Though my wife’s brother John died in 2002, my daughter has gotten to know her grandparents before her grandpa Richard Powell died in 2020. I think my daughter “supported” John McCain in 2008 for President because he vaguely looked like Richard. Her grandmother now lives in Albany County.

She knows her mother’s other two brothers, their wives, and their three daughters. One family, with twin girls, lives in Catskill, about an hour away, though one of the daughters is now in NYC. The other family lived in Massachusetts, but now in southeastern Pennsylvania, a fair distance but a lot closer than Charlotte, NC, and San Diego, CA. She’s attended several Olin family reunions.

Self-advocating

She became more confident in many areas. It used to be that when we went to a restaurant, she wanted one of her parents to tell the server that she had a peanut and tree nut allergy. Then, about five years ago, she insisted on doing it herself.

During COVID, she would spend hours in her room. It was difficult to ascertain whether this was a function of the pandemic, the phase of being a teenager, or both. This eventually passed.

Early on, I wondered how to introduce issues of national and world events to her. As it turned out when she was about nine, I’d be watching the TV news in the living room; she was paying attention while in the dining room.

Her parents talk with her a LOT about whatever she asks, including issues of race. It’s impossible to protect one’s child from bigotry. When there were vigils after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, she organized a regular event in our neighborhood for about two months; as it was her gig, I only went once or twice.

Column A or Column B

There is a loose demarcation of what she will ask which parent. Her mother tends to get questions about cooking, cleaning, and first aid. Indeed, when one of her friends was mildly injured at college, she used tips her mother taught her to clean the wound.

I tend to get the music, movies, and politics questions. Also, because I am a librarian, she asks me college-related questions about finding citations, attribution, and the like. Both of us might field questions, such as relationship issues and money, though I tend to be more available as a retiree.

In her first year in college, she’d call or text now and then. This year, she phones more often. She called just to talk recently, and we were on the phone for an hour and a half.

We tell her we love her, and she reciprocates, which is very nice.

Watching people work

Fargo?

Here’s another day in the life post: Tuesday, March 26. For some reason, many of these are on Tuesdays. Reflecting on it, I spent a lot of time watching people work. The ones I watched for the longest time were the half-dozen people taking down that tree across the street from my house, especially looking out my middle bay window. It was better than television.

The process involved a guy in the cherry picker trimming the branches of two trees and tethering the damaged section with rope so it would not fall too quickly. The guys below were putting the small branches in the wood chipper – wood chippers always remind me of the movie Fargo. The chips flew into the back of a truck like the one pictured. A guy was running a tractor-like vehicle that carried logs to the chipper. One fellow was carefully controlling passing traffic in both directions.

It fascinated me because I would have had no idea how to take down the tree without potentially damaging a house or car. And the tree is gone; there aren’t even signs of the roots. I love Men At Work.

Library

I helped facilitate the interview of author Ian Ross Singleton by educator Geri Walsh concerning his book The Two Differences, which is a lot about Detroit but especially Odessa, Ukraine.

They had invited the Ukraine Solidarity Capital District to table at the event. The group stands for the country’s “independence and territorial integrity.”

Kudos to reference librarian Susan, the new liaison with the FFAPL for Tuesday book reviews and author talks. Oddly, we went to library school simultaneously but only realized this a few months ago.

I saw the interim branch manager, Deanna, at the circulation desk. Librarians do it all.

Indian food

I agreed to order takeout from our nearby Indian restaurant. I usually order takeout to pick up around 5:30, and it’s relatively efficient. Because of my wife’s work schedule, I arranged for a slightly later slot. I called at 6 p.m. and was told it would take about 25 minutes.

When I arrived at the restaurant at 6:25, I was asked to sit at a table. People arriving after I got there were told the same thing. There was some confusion; the guy at the register was not a native speaker, I gathered, and it became incumbent for me to explain to them that we were all in the same situation.

However, an increasingly impatient couple was there before I was. He said repeatedly, “How long will this take?” with an increasing edge in his voice. She counted up: “It’s been 35 minutes!” “It’s been 40 minutes!”

When the next order came out, the guy at the register asked them, “Is this your order? Aloo gobi, chicken tikka masala, and lamb saag?” Er, no, that was mine, which made them more disgusted. I wondered, in retrospect, if they were walk-ins. I understood their frustration, but their attitude made me uncomfortable.

Still, the usual manager or owner might have diffused the situation with free mango lassis or another strategy.

And finally

Our daughter complained online that her parents hadn’t gotten her anything for her birthday. “I didn’t know what you wanted.” “I made a list online on Saturday!” That would have been useful to have known.

So, some mail-order workers will get some items to our daughter soon.

I like Easter

We can say Hallelujah! again

I like Easter. It’s much less a theological thing, though. For a brief time, I had a pastor named Matt who described himself as more of a Lenten than an Easter person. And I get that.

There was a meeting I was supposed to attend this week, but I blew it off because it was on Maundy Thursday. Someone said that he didn’t know what that was. I noted that if you’ve seen the painting of The Last Supper, not just the one by da Vinci, you have some idea. Or if you’ve listened to/seen the latter half of Jesus Christ Superstar, which ends before the resurrection.

Those Lenten songs, Requiems, and the like resonate more with me than the triumphant Easter anthems.

I like going to church on Easter Sunday. One year during the first decade of this century, my wife and I were driving to Charlotte, NC, to visit my family. But I hated not singing. Listening to church music on the radio merely made me more melancholy.

I love to see the C&E people at church. C&E refers to those folks who come only on Christmas and/or Easter. I do think about the limited theological picture they get. “They sing the Hallelujah chorus almost every time I’m there,” they might determine, but so it goes. Do people still wear Easter bonnets?

When is Easter?

I’m a fan of Lent and Easter bouncing around the calendar. It’s like jazz; ya gotta riff with it. As timeanddate.com notes: “Easter falls on the first Sunday after the Full Moon date, based on mathematical calculations, that falls on or after March 21. If the Full Moon is on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated the following Sunday.

“Although Easter is liturgically related to the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere (March equinox) and the Full Moon, its date is not based on the actual astronomical date of either event.

“March 21 is the Church’s date of the March equinox, regardless of the time zone, while the actual date of the equinox varies between March 19 and March 22, and the date depends on the time zone.” And it’s even a little more complicated than that.

The art piece was created by my daughter, who writes: “Re-coop-erations – Recuperations Project – Scale Shift. Eggs represent a very literal sense of recuperation, new color, new season, and new life. In many traditions spanning geographies and time, many cultures have used eggs in customs, especially those around the time of the Spring Equinox. During Nowruz, the Iranian and Persian New Year, families decorate eggs to bring good luck and fertility. Pre-Christian Ukraine brightly decorated eggs.”

Of course, Christianity leaned into the spring festivals, just as they positioned Christmas to coincide with the Roman holidays of the winter solstice.

Happy Easter!

Lydster: something substantial

clarinet

My daughter has commanded that I write something substantial about her for her significant birthday. But it’s TWO hard! How can I encapsulate her TWO decades in one post? I know – I’ll write TWO posts over TWO months! My blog, my rules.

Let’s start before the beginning. My wife had asked, more than once, if I was ready to have a child. My response, of course, was: how the heck do I know? I had said I was amenable to trying, but when you’re five decades old, you don’t know if it would happen.

Then it did. My wife and I remember when we first knew she was pregnant, but no one else, save for folks in the doctor’s office, did. We were returning from a small party when we saw our friend Fred. He was out with his one-week-old named Carol. Indeed, Fred has mentioned this encounter in the past year, so it was significant to him, too, especially after he heard about our secret.

We developed a birth plan, and when we realized the ob/gyn was not on board, my wife changed doctors at eight months pregnant, which I thought was great. Scary, but bold.

Eureka!

The child was born. She didn’t sleep well for a few days, so neither did we. But things got better eventually. Someone had told us that the way one gets a child to sleep is to drive them around. This was SO not the case for her! On trips to see her maternal grandparents in Oneonta, NY, she’d cry -OK, wail – for ten minutes before falling asleep for an hour. She’d wake up and start wailing again UNLESS her father got into the back seat with her and sang to her constantly: e.g., OldMcDonaldHadAFarmEIEIOAndOnThatFarm… This generally worked.

My workmates had gotten us a red carriage, and I loved to ride her around the neighborhood. The school district has razed the 99-year-old School 19 and then built Pine Hills Elementary School on the same site. I appreciated that they built a new structure just for my daughter, or so I chose to believe.

After my wife returned to work, she dropped our daughter off at a private daycare for the first year. It was during that time that I SHOULD have been recording all of her milestones: when she started to crawl then walk – the former was earlier than the norm, the latter, slightly later. She crawled up the stairs, much to the horror of her mother.

As a result of NOT tracking her progress in the book, I’ve been writing about her EVERY month on the 26th since May 2005. I might have written about her on other days, but this is at least the 227th piece. Now, I could wade through this blog and pick out highlights in her life. But, with few exceptions, I will wing it instead.

Daycare

Around that time, I took her to Mercy Cares for Kids, right on the bus line. We were happy about the diverse population of the children. I loved dropping her off, and it was our little time together. Then I’d take another bus to work.

Only one time that she got there but refused to stay, and it was a morning that, for some reason, we got there about a half hour late. She did NOT like to go in when all of the other kids were already there. So I brought her home and took off the day from work. Even then, she had rules.

When she started school, she attended Watervliet Elementary for kindergarten since her mother taught there. Then, she went to Pine Hills Elementary for grades 1-6. She met her bestie, Kay, there.

Her sense of fashion was evident early on. After she outgrew the hand-me-downs my wife’s friend Alison gave us, my daughter largely specified her wardrobe. Early on, it was pink and purple, but she quickly developed her own style. She also started taking care of her hair, in part because her parents were fairly hapless. Eventually, she also got into makeup. Her process is tied to her sense of art, which is very strong.

Popular culture

We watched a lot of television together, such as Little Bear and Franklin. Wonder Pets was a favorite; her mom was Linny, the guinea pig, I was Turtle Tuck, and she was Ming-Ming Duckling. Later, she watched some Disney shows, some of which were not awful.

The first compact disc I bought her was the Beatles #1s. When we saw Paul McCartney in 2014, she knew most of the band’s songs but was less versed in solo Macca and Wings. I also tried to let her know about 1960s and 1970s Motown. Ultimately, she found her taste, listening to Pentatonix, then BTS, but ultimately 1990’s soul, especially Blaque. She owns a 3-LP set of

My daughter was involved in various ballet, soccer, and other activities. It’s all a learning process, and we never prodded her to continue. She WAS pretty good at the clarinet, though, and we still have the instrument in case she ever wants to return to it.

That’s enough for this month, except to wish her a wonderful birthday!