Sunday, December 27, 1998

All five of us together for Christmas, plus Tommy, plus Ma. Sean flew in from Chicago on the 23rd with a new haircut and a new way of saying "you guys" that I'm choosing not to comment on. Erin and Tommy came for dinner on Christmas Day, their first Christmas married, and Erin brought her own pie, in her own dish, and set it on my table like a flag on the moon.

Ma had a lot to say at dinner about the President, who got impeached the Saturday before last. Ma voted for him twice and says she'll "pray for his soul and his wife." Jim changed the subject to the Patriots, which is what Jim does with any subject that has a soul in it.

Sean left this morning. We've got the table back to five chairs. Next Christmas, if the college letters say what Brendan wants them to say, there'll be a bedroom upstairs with nobody in it for the first time in twenty-seven years. I counted the chairs tonight when I was putting the extra ones back in the cellar. I don't know why I did that. I think I'm practicing.

Monday, October 19, 1998

Erin is married!

Saturday, two o'clock, at our parish, the same church where Jim and I were married, the same church where she was baptized, and the church was hot. They'd turned the heat on for the first time that week and the radiators were clanking and I was in the front pew in a dusty-rose dress with (I won the argument) little cap sleeves and no jacket, and I felt the first one start right at the "Dearly beloved," or whatever they say now. I had a church program in one hand and a folding paper fan from the bridal shop in the other. I fanned. Ma, next to me in her navy hat, gave me a look. I fanned harder.

But Erin. Oh, Erin. When the doors opened and Jim walked her down the aisle, his face all set like he was delivering mail in a blizzard, I didn't care what my thermostat was doing. She looked like my grandmother's wedding picture. She looked like herself.

At the reception, at the hall, the father-daughter dance was "Daddy's Little Girl," and there wasn't a dry eye, and then I danced with Brendan, who is seventeen and six-foot-one and led me around the floor to Sinatra like he'd been taking lessons behind my back. Sean flew in from Chicago Friday and gave a toast that made Tommy's grandmother laugh so hard she had to be helped to the ladies' room.

Sunday I slept until ten. Ten! First time in a year.

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

Last night at about quarter past nine I heard a noise from the den like somebody had dropped a piano on the dog, and I ran in, and it was Jim and Brendan on their feet in front of the TV, yelling and hugging. Mark McGwire hit number sixty-two. Jim is a Red Sox man all the way down to his socks and has never cared what happens in St. Louis for one minute of his life, but there he was with tears in his eyes, hugging his son, and Brendan let him. That's the part I'll remember. Brendan let him.

Today was the first day of school. Brendan's first day of senior year. I stood at the kitchen window and watched him walk down the driveway with his bag on one shoulder, the way they all carry them now, and I thought, that's the last first day. Then I got in the Buick and drove to my own school and read the new seventh graders the library rules and nobody knew I'd been crying except the rearview mirror.

Wednesday, August 12, 1998

The Fan War of 1998 is over, and I'd like to announce the terms of the treaty.

Background: I sleep with the window open, the ceiling fan on high, and the sheet kicked off. Jim sleeps in flannel pajamas, in August, under a blanket, and has done since 1971. For three weeks the ceiling fan has gone on (me), off (him), on (me), off (him), until last Thursday at about two in the morning I got up and slept on the couch.

Saturday Jim went to the discount store on Route 9 and came home with two things: a big box fan for my side of the bed, pointing only at me, and a tiny battery-operated fan the size of a lipstick that he'd found at the checkout, for my pocketbook. He handed it to me like it was a ring. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the stairs. Then I kissed him. Then we put the ceiling fan on low. Everybody gave something.

Sunday, June 28, 1998

Sean left Friday morning. He packed his Civic to the roof: his stereo, his skis (he's moving to Illinois, what does he need skis for?), four boxes of books, and a laundry basket full of shoes. I made him six sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. He was on the Mass Pike by seven. He called Friday night from a motel in Ohio and Saturday afternoon from his new apartment, which he says has "a view of the el." I had to have him explain what that was.

I held up fine in the driveway. I held up fine until I went into his room and saw the dent in the carpet where his desk used to be.

Have you ever cried during a hot flash? I don't recommend it. It's like weeping in a sauna. You don't know which part of your face is wet from what.

Saturday, May 30, 1998

Sean got the job in Chicago. An insurance company, a big one, with an office in a tower and a real title, the kind you put on a business card. He starts July 6. He called Thursday night so excited he was talking like when he was eight and caught his first fish.

Jim said, "That's great, pal, that's great," three times and then handed me the phone and went out to water the lawn in the dark. He was out there forty-five minutes. The lawn is fine. The lawn didn't need it.

Sunday, April 19, 1998

I did what librarians do when something happens to them: I went and looked it up. Saturday I went to the big public library downtown, and do you know where they keep menopause? In the 600s, which is Technology, right in with medicine, a couple of shelves over from raising goats. That about sums it up.

There were two kinds of books. The first kind is so cheerful you want to throw it across the room. Embrace your wisdom years! The second kind is written by doctors in words my seventh graders would put in a spelling bee to be cruel. Then there was Gail Sheehy's book from a few years ago, which is the only one that sounded like a woman talking to another woman at a kitchen table, and I'm on my second renewal.

I told Maureen, the guidance counselor at school, about this page on Friday. She's fifty-two. She went pale and then she went pink and then she said, "Nancy, I thought I was the only one who kept a bag of frozen peas in her desk drawer." We've been having lunch together every day since.

Tuesday, March 17, 1998 (St. Patrick's Day)

Well, I finally went. Ten months after that School Committee meeting, I went to the doctor and told her about it. Dr. Amaral is about forty, has a picture of her twins on her desk, and did not once look at me like I was being silly, which is more than I can say for myself.

She listened to the whole list. The flashes. The three a.m. The way I cry at the telephone company commercials. She said it all sounded like exactly what it is, which is my body doing what women's bodies do, and she did some blood work to be sure. Then she brought up hormone replacement. She said it would help with the flashes and the sleep, and that it's good for your bones, and that a lot of her patients my age take it and feel like themselves again.

I said, "Let me think about it." I don't know why. I don't take pills. I don't even take an aspirin unless Jim stands over me. My mother went through this with nothing but an open window and never said a word, and some foolish part of me thinks I ought to be able to do the same. Dr. Amaral said that was fine, there's no rush, and to keep track of how many flashes I have and how I'm sleeping, and come back in the fall.

So: new feature on the page! Starting today I'm keeping count. You'll see it under the date. I'm also going to tell you what I'm reading, because I'm a librarian and I can't help it.

Tonight: corned beef, cabbage, Jim's sister and her husband, and me opening the back door every twenty minutes. Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Wednesday, February 25, 1998

Wedding dress shopping with Erin. The bridal shop is in a strip mall in Auburn and it's kept, I'd estimate, at eighty-five degrees, because the brides stand around in strapless dresses. Erin tried on eleven. I sat on a little gold chair outside the fitting room with my coat on my lap and my sweater on my coat and watched my daughter come out, again and again, in white, and every single time I thought I was going to die, from love or the heat, one or the other.

The saleswoman asked if I'd be looking for something for the mother of the bride. "Something with a jacket," she said, "most of our ladies your age like the coverage." I said I'd prefer something sleeveless, in ice. She didn't laugh. Erin did.

Number nine was the one. Erin cried. I cried. The saleswoman cried, a little, professionally.

Saturday, January 10, 1998

I FINALLY FIGURED OUT TABLES! Do you see? There's a box! It has a purple border! Raj showed me after school and I stayed until the custodian turned the lights off on me. If this looks crooked on your computer, please don't tell me. I've had a very long week.

My only resolution for 1998 is to stop apologizing when I open a window. My own house, my own window.

Jim's cousin Frankie up in Maine has been without power for five days in this terrible ice storm. They're heating one room with the woodstove and cooking on it too, and melting snow for the toilet. Jim wants to drive up with the generator from his brother's camp, and Frankie says the roads are closed and he should stay put. I feel for them, I do. But I have to confess that when I heard the words "no heat for a week," some small, wicked part of me thought it sounded like a vacation.

January in Worcester. Everybody else is miserable. I've never been so comfortable in my life.