Wednesday, June 30, 1999 — The Red Tent
Flashes today: 7. Reading: The Red Tent, which I started at 4 p.m. and finished at 2 a.m.

Last day of the school year. I checked in the last overdue book at 1:40 (a boy brought back The Giver, four months late, with a Pop-Tart in it for a bookmark, which I'm keeping as evidence) and turned out the lights in the library and stood there in the dark for a minute. It always gets me. All that noise, and then none.

Book group picked July's book at our last meeting: The Red Tent. Dot, who's a retired nurse and chooses most of our books by just announcing them, said, "This one's about us, girls," and she's right. It's the Bible story of Dinah, told by her, and it's about the women in Jacob's family, and the tent where they go together every month, and the births and deaths and secrets they tell each other in there that the men never hear.

I read it straight through in one sitting on the back porch with my feet in a bucket of cold water. When I got to the end I sat there in the dark and thought about my mother's kitchen, and how there was never any red tent for her, only a window.

Sunday, June 13, 1999 — Pomp and Circumstance
Flashes today: 6, two of them during the speeches. Reading: the program, cover to cover, looking for his name.

Brendan graduated from high school on Friday night.

It was outdoors, on the football field, at six o'clock in the evening in June, in full sun, and I was wearing (I am an idiot) nylons. Three hundred and some kids in maroon gowns. The superintendent spoke, the valedictorian spoke, a state representative spoke for longer than anybody had asked him to, and I sat in the bleachers between Jim and Ma with the sweat running down the backs of my knees, and I did not care. Not one bit.

When they read "Brendan Patrick Callahan" he walked across that stage in his big sneakers, took his diploma, and turned and pointed right at us in the stands, and Ma, who's seventy-nine and doesn't approve of pointing, stood up and waved her whole arm. Sean had flown in from Chicago. Erin and Tommy were there. All my babies in one place, and one of them in a mortarboard.

Afterward Brendan hugged me and said, into my hair, "Ma, you're so hot," and meant my temperature, and we both laughed until Jim took our picture. It's at the drugstore now. I'll put it in the album. You'll have to take my word for it.

Sunday, May 9, 1999 — Mother's Day
Flashes today: 5. Reading: the card Brendan made me, which is a coupon for "one (1) car wash, no complaining."

Took Ma to brunch after the ten o'clock Mass. Eggs Benedict for her, which she has every year and which she says every year is "too rich," and finishes.

I tried again. I can't help it. I said, "Ma, I've been having an awful time with the hot flashes. The doctor wants me to take hormones."

She put her fork down. She looked out the window at the parking lot. And she said three words: "It passes, Nancy." Then she picked her fork up again.

Three words in two years. At this rate we'll have had a whole conversation by the time I'm ninety.

But I'll tell you something. She squeezed my hand on the way out to the car. She never does that. I'm counting it.

Saturday, May 1, 1999 — Vermont
Flashes today: 4. Reading: a financial aid award letter, which is its own kind of fiction.

The deposit check went in the mail this morning. Brendan's going to the little college in Vermont. The one on the hill, with the cows across the road and the library with the big windows, where he stood in the quad in April and said, "Yeah. This."

Three and a half hours north. Jim has already looked up the route and the mileage and figured out how many times a semester we can reasonably drive up without Brendan being mortified, and the answer, according to Jim, is "every weekend." The answer, according to Brendan, is Parents' Weekend and not one day more. They'll work it out.

I walked up to the mailbox with the envelope and stood there with my hand on the little door. Eighteen years. You'd think you'd have it figured out by the third child. You don't. You just know the way to the mailbox better.

Thursday, April 22, 1999 — Quiet
Flashes: I haven't been counting this week.

After what happened at that high school in Colorado on Tuesday, the kids came into the library yesterday and today and were quieter than I've ever heard them. Seventh graders. Quiet. A few of them wanted the newspaper. Most of them wanted the funny books, the Garfields and the joke books, and I let them take out as many as they wanted and didn't say one word about limits.

One boy asked me if our library had a back door. I told him yes, and showed him where. That's all I'm going to write about it.

Saturday, April 3, 1999 — Thick and Thin
Flashes today: 8. Reading: the mail. Only the mail.

Any mother of a senior can tell you: the thin envelope is no, the thick envelope is yes. All week I've been getting to the mailbox before Brendan does, which is not hard, since he gets home at three-thirty and I get home at three-fifteen and I drive like a bat out of you-know-where.

The tally: five applications. Two thin. Three thick. One of the thick ones is Vermont.

I did not open anybody's mail. I want that on the record. I did hold one up to the kitchen light, and Jim caught me, and said, "Nancy Anne," which is what he says when I'm doing something his mother would have done. I put it down. Brendan opened it at the table with a butter knife. When he read the first line he didn't yell or jump. He just looked up at the two of us with his face all bare, like when he was little and brought home a good report card and didn't know yet how to act about it.

Then he yelled. Then we all yelled. The dog next door barked for ten minutes.

Sunday, March 7, 1999 — Back to Dr. Amaral
Flashes today: 9, the worst in a month. Reading: the label on a jar of black cohosh.

I went back to Dr. Amaral on Thursday. Full confession: I went back in November, too, like I promised, and said I was "still thinking." She was very nice about it. That was four months of thinking ago.

Since then I've tried: soy milk in my coffee (terrible), black cohosh from the health food store on Highland Street (I think it helped a little, or I wanted it to), no coffee at all (lasted two days; the seventh graders suffered), and a cold washcloth in a Baggie in my desk drawer, which is an old family remedy that I just invented.

Dr. Amaral looked at my little flash diary, the same numbers you've been reading under the dates here, and said, gently, that eight or nine a day and waking at three every night is not "managing," it's "enduring," and that I don't get a medal for it. She recommends the hormones, for the flashes and the sleep and my bones, and said most of her patients my age are on them and she thinks I'm a good candidate.

I said I'd think about it. She laughed, and so did I. But I've been saying it differently this time. I think I'm almost done thinking.

Thursday, February 4, 1999 — The Book Group That Meets on Thursdays
Flashes tonight: 3, all during the discussion. Reading: Angela's Ashes.

First meeting of our book group tonight, in Maureen's living room. It was her idea. There are six of us: Maureen from guidance; me; Dot, who's sixty-eight and a retired nurse and has never once in her life been embarrassed; my next-door neighbor Pat; Pat's sister-in-law Joanne; and Heather, who's twenty-eight, teaches English at the high school, and is six months pregnant, which made her, as Dot pointed out, "the only one of us having the opposite problem."

The book was Angela's Ashes. Dot said, "That's just my family with better grammar," and we talked about our mothers for two hours and about the book for maybe twenty minutes, and nobody minded.

Around nine, Maureen's thermostat got to be an issue. She keeps it at seventy-two. Within ten minutes Maureen, Dot, Pat and I had all taken off our sweaters, and Joanne had opened the storm door, and Heather was sitting there in her maternity sweater looking at us like we were a science film. Dot patted her knee and said, "Honey, you'll get here. We'll save you a seat."

We're meeting the first Thursday of every month. I haven't laughed like that in a year.

Sunday, January 10, 1999 — Thirty-Three Cents
Flashes today: 6. Reading: college applications, one last time, for typos.

Stamps went up to thirty-three cents today, and I bought a whole roll yesterday at the old price, like a woman stocking up for the Depression. Then I found out I'd need the one-cent stamps anyway. Jim says that's the least efficient thing he's heard of in twenty-five years at the Post Office, and he's heard of plenty.

Brendan's applications went out before Christmas, all five, and I proofread every essay with a red pen and was told, very politely, to "stop being a librarian at me." His essay was about his grandfather, my father, who died when Brendan was nine, and who taught him to fish off the dock at the lake. I didn't know he remembered that much. I had to leave the room.

New look for the new year! Lavender. Raj says it's "very you." I've decided to take that as a compliment.