18 Years Ago: May 22nd--Simon's cohort

Birthday cake on Simon's "8th birthday"
during a lemonade stand at Liberty Heights Fresh
in Salt Lake City, May 17, 2005.

I am ending the 18 Years Ago series today. If you missed the beginning, the series started on May 1st and ran daily until now, May 22, 2015.

Flash to 2005
I chose this date as a way of remembering Simon's many friends. In May 2005, we passed Simon's birthday for the first time since his death. How do you celebrate a missing child? We decided to seek community. On the actual birthday, May 17, 2005, we held the first of several annual Lemonade Stands in Simon's memory to raise money for childhood cancer research. It's lemonade stand season again--find out more at alexslemonadestand.org. Hold a stand, buy some lemonade, send a donation--research funded by this organization is making a difference for children with cancer.

Miguel interviewed for KSL TV on May 17, 2015.

The top photo shows some of Simon's classmates and other friends, eager for some of the gorgeous cake but also contemplative about the birthday boy. The cake was a donation from Pinon Market, and owner Victoria graciously invited Miriam (age 5) to help decorate! The boy in red and white stripes is Tobias, who will be graduating from high school about now, along with Ellen, the blond girl right next to him. Both of them had sat at Simon's table during first grade the previous year.

The second photo shows Simon's buddy Miguel, who was interviewed for local TV news during the event, as were several other children. I'm sad to say we've lost track of Miguel since moving away from Salt Lake City. He must be a wonderful young man now.

Simon's Cohort
Recently, I've seen facebook postings about some of the boys who are Simon's age (or a bit older)--the ones I consider his cohort. They've all been turning 18! They've been going to prom! They've been formed into young men by testosterone, life and sports! Nathan, Schuyler, Rowan, Lev, Ross! And there are all the other boys and girls from Simon's 1st grade class in Utah, kindergarten in Michigan, and daycare at Linda's. These young people are moving into adulthood, as they should be, starting college, confronting choices, making plans. They carry the mark of knowing Simon and losing him in such an unfair way. I expect that changes your view of life. I never witnessed the loss of a peer growing up. I hope remembering Simon brings a richness to their lives and never anything like guilt.

Four days after the lemonade stand in 2005, we held a birthday party in Simon's memory at our house. Technically, the party was on May 21, 2005, so I'm off by one day. Not a big deal. After a few more thoughts on this blog undertaking, I will close this post, and the series, with a recap of the 2005 birthday event.

Reflections on writing a series
Writing my serial meditation around Simon's 18th birthday has surprised me in several ways. The idea came spontaneously at the beginning of May, and I have easily found material for a new post every day. I had to conquer a few impediments: I got my 12-year-old scanner to work with my latest operating system, and I re-rigged my old Photoshop Elements 6 to function (at least some of the time). I even learned the four-finger keyboard command for paste-and-match-style. I used a smart phone to upload a post, and I proved I could meet a daily deadline not just for NaNoWriMo.

This blog series has sent me back through boxes and albums of photos, many of which I hadn't looked at in a long time. The images not only make the text more interesting (and "sell" a post better, for example on facebook) but they also offer a layer of dialog between text and image. This layer enhances the underlying construct: a dialog between then and now. Add to that the peculiar workings of my mind (soccer goalie-ing is like perineal stretching? see May 12th), and a sticky web of meaning emerges. A few days into the project, the need for individual titles became clear, adding to the playful connections.

I'm not a plotter, at least not yet. My writing focuses on the "real," on events that have occurred. The "plot" is given, and it's my job to follow along, choosing what to emphasize and what to leave out. Conjecture remains fair game, but I haven't got the muscles for creating characters and then creating the things that happen to and around them. Still, as I followed this series with its more or less pre-defined storyline, I found myself jotting down ideas and semi-planfully taking many of them up in different posts. I haven't gotten to all of the ideas--I've got a lot more to say about breastfeeding, for example. But it can't hurt to leave with a few good cards still in my hand.

May 22, 1997, 5 days old

Have I figured anything out? Have I increased or decreased the pain of not seeing my son grow up? I don't know. I've distracted myself. I've enjoyed myself. I've sat peacefully next to dancing flames atop colorful candles. I've renewed memories of happy and healthy times. I'll never know the Simon who would have become an adult. I know that. And I'm not alone in being the poorer for that loss.

We sure did have him while he was here. A week or two into his life, while sitting with him at the dining table, I had a wonderful thought: I enjoy his company. I enjoyed every day of his life (even the awful days), and it's a gift to feel his delightful company still.

Birthday in Memoriam, May 21, 2005

Children starting to chalk the driveway.

Watching Marcus Funny Man Who Does Tricks,
who also made Simon laugh.

Miriam (front middle) with Simon's school friends.

Julio, Miguel and mom Luz.

Card trick.

Parents hanging out indoors (oh, I miss that kitchen!).

We all lit a candle from the big magenta
Simon candle.

Everyone signed the pink balloon.

We got ready to send our love up with the balloon.

Past the utility wires.

Past the trees.

Away.

My love and thanks to folks who've come along on this blog ride. In case you're curious, the whole series is 15,000 words long. The most popular post so far? May 10th--The fashion post. As you can see from the birthday party photos, we've had a lot of support from children and grown ups who love Simon, too. We know you are there, and we thank you.

How I spent November

I did again! For the second year in a row, I have jumped onto the NaNoWriMo train, and I have typed in my 1,700-ish words per day to reach a goal of 50,000. It's a fun and organized way to keep a deadline, and entering a daily word count into the NaNoWriMo website is a tidy motivator.

Last year I used the month-long process to draft memoir material. That is what I'm used to writing. This year I took a small leap foot-first off the high dive and pushed myself into fiction. I cheated, of course, by giving myself a first-person "actual self" narrator in addition to a third person narrator telling the fictional story. I call it a blend of fiction and memoir. Today, I call it "done" because I have reached a certain goal in word count and I have assembled what feels like most of the parts. I'll be working with my writing groups to get input and move the piece forward. I'm posting an excerpt below. It's first-drafty and skeletal. Response and input from readers are most appreciated!

Screenshot of today's NaNoWriMo status of my novel-writing. I won!

Here's an excerpt. The protagonist, Janice, takes a course in the history of 20th century western art course as a sophomore at the University of Oregon. She selects a painting by Karl Hofer that hangs in the Portland Art Museum as the subject of a two-paper assignment. In this excerpt, her attraction to her professor blends with her study of the painting, which shows a couple lying in bed. It's interesting what happens in your writing when you let it be fiction.

Chapter 4 (or thereabouts)

 Janice made three trips to Portland in all to study and write about Hofer’s painting. The museum’s curatorial team helped her locate valuable literature to incorporate in her analysis. An interview with the registrar offered the most substantive information about the painting’s provenance, although some of the history remained a mystery. 

The first paper was due just before the fall break, so Professor Gault had time to read the papers rather than the students having time to ruin their vacations writing them. Janice was sure his choice was designed to improve the student experience. Some professors believed in giving students a real break. Gault was a man who had eyes and ears open for his students. She found him available, responsive, and easy to be around. In fact, she craved contact with him and searched for excuses to stop by office hours again. 

Once, she studied the posted materials about study abroad opportunities outside his office. She waited there for 45 minutes, hoping just to catch sight of him. 

“Hello, Janice,” said a voice behind her. She pivoted and found Professor Gault standing in the hallway, close enough to smell his cologne. She pivoted so fast she nearly knocked into him. He stepped back quickly and reached out a hand to steady her. 

“Professor Gault! I didn’t hear anyone coming,” Janice said. 

“Are you thinking about a semester abroad?” he asked. 

Janice was sure she had mentioned the idea before, during one of her conversations with him about the Hofer painting, but she guessed he hadn’t remembered. Perhaps he was less attentive than she’d thought. “I’m applying for a semester in Germany, through the exchange with Baden-Wuerttemberg.” 

“I see,” he shifted an armful of books above his hip, patting his pocket for his keys. 

“I was going to ask you after the break, but since we’re talking about it, would you maybe do a recommendation for me?” 

Requests for letters of recommendation stacked themselves invisibly in front of Professor Gault’s eyes. He could barely see over the pile. “Sure. Yeah. Just bring all the pages and envelopes and postage required so I can get it done." 

“Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. OK, then, see you.” 

Later that afternoon, Janice sat herself down under a tree on the bump of a hill outside the Humanities parking structure. The grass was damp. Yellow and brown leaves played around in the wind over the grass. October was yielding to early signs of winter. She sat on top of her backpack to keep herself off the wet grass and nestled into her jacket, putting up her hood to stay warm. 

At 5:40, the door of the humanities building closest to the parking structure swung open and shut with a metallic bang. Gault strode toward the structure, glancing at a wristwatch. Janice sat in the near dark, no longer able to read. She hunched behind her knees and saw Gault enter the structure by a side door. Three minutes later, a brown Audi sedan pulled out of the garage. She looked inside to see if it was Gault. Then a red Subaru Forrester. That was Gault. She didn’t notice the license, just the schoolhouse red color. For weeks, she startled every time she saw a red Subaru. She would make herself as available as she could, especially if she sighted the car randomly in town. Maybe he would think he had happened upon her. Maybe seeing her off campus would make him notice her in a different way. Maybe he would think it was his own idea, picking her out of a crowd. 

As Janice wrote the first paper, the description of her chosen artwork, she tried to avoid phrasing about the couple in the bed that would seem too suggestive. The hidden location of the man’s penis, at the exact middle of the canvas, went beyond anything she was willing to commit to paper. But she thought of it. She pictured it. Was it an intentional bit of indirection on the part of the painter, to highlight exactly that which is covered from view? The same was true for the back side of the woman and her shapely hip line. Janice couldn’t see her buttocks, but she could imagine their suppleness and rounding. The unseen spot between the man and the woman was filled with moonlight, and that’s what she talked about in her paper, hinting only at the implication of the distance between their bodies: was it suggestive of intimate contact or the opposite of that, suggestive of uncrossable distance? 

She wrote about the colors and how she felt them—relaxing, pulsing, dull, serene, harmonious. The painting did not frighten her, but she wondered if it should make her uneasy. Often she felt she could curl up next to both of them and be as calmly asleep as the woman. More often than she admitted, she projected herself into the painting, lying there next to an undressed Professor Gault. Is that what it would feel like? she wondered. Janice’s brushes with boys in high school had been so superficial. In college she looked around finding no one who captured her interest or who seemed interested in her. Professor Gault—and the painting—became receptors of her held-in fantasies of male companionship. She had eyes on every side of her head when she walked around campus, looking for Gault. She undressed him in her mind. She thought of him when she lay in bed. She touched herself in ways she had never tried before and brought herself to orgasm, quietly to keep Jen from hearing through the wall. She felt like her imagined picture of a cat in heat. If only he would notice and make an approach. 

She left her paper in a box in the office. The secretary said Professor Gault was not expected on campus that day. Janice had hoped she could hand it to him in person.

I won! And another excerpt

NaNoWriMo ends officially on Saturday, but when I validated my word count this afternoon, I passed the 50,000 mark and became a winner. Here's the story in a graphic:

NaNoWriMo winning results on November 28, 2013

The accomplishment feels really, really good. A daily writing mandate can carry you through times when you aren't clearly motivated to write. You just sit down and write the next thing.

As the graph shows, I had short days (when I was teaching) when I added 500 words or so. That's where the curve flattens out. The sharper rise is on the days when I did not have to teach, and I used those days to catch up (2,500+). According to my own altered schedule, I was actually "ahead" the whole time, although it only felt that way when I reached the grey average line last weekend.

I set out to write the story of being the mother of a child who died of cancer. During NaNoWriMo I drafted seven chapters. I am working chronologically and with the expectation of cutting lots of what I wrote and finding ways to make it non-chronological in the end. Where did I end up? I reached Christmas of 2001, when Simon's diagnosis was confirmed. I have a long way to go. The story grew heavier to write in the last few days--no wonder.

Here's an excerpt from chapter seven. Maybe it will never be part of a book, but I bet Ann Arborites (and others) will enjoy it anyway.

Without overtly trying, Markus and I have managed to live together in the USA only in cities that make top-ten lists for livability. In the late 1980s, not long after we became a couple in 1987, Markus had an internship to Madison, Wisconsin. I followed him there and stayed for a year of graduate school (in textiles). The gorgeous lakes Mendota and Menona, the bikable city, the cultural offerings, and Chicago only two hours’ drive away. We followed that up with Portland, Oregon for two years. Markus got his MBA at Portland State, and I studied textiles at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts and worked out of a studio in the not-yet-gentrified industrial north side. Glittering tall buildings with green and pink glass reflecting Mt. Hood when the cloud cover cleared, the Rose Garden, the Japanese Garden (where we became engaged), the Pacific coast a 90-minutes’ drive, the early days of Starbuck’s and brewpubs.

1992-1995 took us back to Germany, and we lived in the city of Karlsruhe for three years. Bikable, unusual in its classical city structure fanning out from the palace at its center, plenty of culture, the French border and Alsace-Lorraine a mere 30-minutes’ drive. Markus set his sights on a PhD program, and that search landed us in Ann Arbor. Eight years later, in 2003, his first job as a professor took us to our fourth “most livable” place in the USA: Salt Lake City, Utah. But that’s getting ahead of the time in Ann Arbor.

One of the highest quality-of-life aspects of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has to be Zingerman’s Delicatessen. Its Detroit Street deli in an old red-brick shop with outdoor seating and a spill-over building next door attracts a sandwich line that often stretches out to the sidewalk. Outrageously delicious deli meats and cheeses, olives, oils and vinegars entice shoppers to consider outrageous prices. We came most often for the bread. Zingerman’s has its own bakery, providing bread to meet (and sometimes surpass) our German standards, even at $4 a loaf. The family favorite was Farm Bread, which had a crack down the length of the oblong loaf. Simon said the bread, when sliced, looked just like a rabbit. It had a chewy crust that flaked on a fresh loaf, the inside just a little more putty-colored than white. Another favorite, more for the grown-ups, was Cherry Chocolate Bread, a tiny round loaf of dark brown bread filled with rectangular bars of a fancy sort of chocolate and soft cherries.

Zingerman’s breads became available at several supermarkets in addition to their deli, but the best place to go was the Bakehouse itself. Hidden in the winding drives of a warehouse park just past the highway that runs near the mall south of town, the Bakehouse is a room full of ovens, mixing vats, boards, and bakers with flour on their hands. You can watch it through a glass window from the salesroom. There’s a stool for kids to stand on. My first visit, I had to drive in circles around the mostly unmarked buildings until I spotted a truck with the Zingerman’s logo parked at the back. Soon, I learned to find the place as a stop on my way home from church Sunday mornings. Pastries, soups, dairy products, salty snacks, focaccia. But what we really came for was the wall filled with round and cracked and flour-topped loaves of bread.

NaNoWriMo 2013

Perhaps you've heard about the project called National Novel Writing Month. People all over the world sit down in the month of November to write a novel. I believe the project was initially directed at youth. Now it has expanded to entice writers of all ages to commit to a month of steady writing. The task: write 50,000 new words of a novel. The FAQ page on the NaNoWriMo neatly answers questions about authenticity and other issues. For instance, I'm actually writing memoir, not a novel. Officially, that classifies me as a "rebel". I like that.

Basically, you answer to yourself alone, and that's all you need. The website offers a handy place to track your progress. Here is what my graph looks like today:

Daily progress in words written, November 1-24, 2013

NaNoWriMo was in the periphery of my awareness until friends from the Writers in Stuttgart group encouraged me to give it a try. I had to teach a full schedule of Business English courses in September and October, but my November looked enticingly more free. So I mapped out my own course. Rather than the recommended average of 1,667 words per day, I planned to write 500 words on my teaching days and while traveling (9 "short" days). For the rest, I've been working 2,000-2,500 word days. I was thrilled yesterday when I finally caught up to the target line. Today I surpassed it!

The project is working. I will have 50,000+ words by Saturday when the month ends. There's a word count validator on the NaNoWriMo site that will declare me a "winner" once I cross that mark. I anticipate twelve chapters, probably more. Some of the chapters I mapped out have split as I work. Realistically, I will have eight or nine of the chapters written at the 50,000 word point. The full work will be longer.

And what is my subject? I am writing about my life as a mother--becoming a mother, having two little children, going through my son's cancer, being a mother after a child's death. I'm using this project to guide me through a chronological account. The project helps me stay steady on this straightforward path of telling.

Yesterday I posted an excerpt of new writing (on a familiar subject) that I expect to put in a final chapter. Today I want to share a paragraph from the draft of chapter FIVE about life with two little children. There's a 28-month age difference in my son and daughter, and here the memories fuse.

        Can I remember what it was like to live with my children when they were very young? The time vanishes like dead skin cells sloughed off in silence, without the slightest thought. Old experience makes way for new. Children grow moment by moment. You watch them raptly, like a time-lapse sequence of an amaryllis coming into bloom. You don’t want to miss even one small change, one step toward maturation, one moment’s learning. Now he can raise his head from a belly position. Now she can roll onto her back. Now he can sit unsupported without falling over. Now she can sit herself up. He’s crawling, but he tends to go backward and wedge himself under sofa and chairs. She’s crawling, but she drags her left hip along as her right leg and arms do all the work. He’s discovered the foot of the stairs—I guess a gate would be smart—he’s up a whole flight of stairs—we need the gate now. She’s pulling up to standing. He’s letting go of our hands to walk on his own feet. She’s outside with our cute teenage neighbors, and suddenly they’ve taught her to walk.