Merry Christmas She Said

She smiled warmly when I stumbled in, "Merry Christmas" she said, in deeply accented English.

It was after 11:00 pm and I had spent the past six hours making a two hour trip, weather delays trapping me on the ground in a city I did not want to leave. There were no more than five of us on the plane, the last flight from Kansas City to Chicago, on Christmas night. It was snowing, in both places, perfect for Christmas, unless your Christmas is to be spent flying from one winter wonderland to another.

My dad took me to the airport. Even with an early dinner we had to leave before Nana's Christmas cake, a brandy soaked tradition. It was to be the last Christmas for my 90 year old grandfather, the year he repeatedly asked where he had tied up his horse. It was a Christmas that all seven kids had made it home, when my grandmother was still able to cook, my dad still able to carve the turkey and a family all together for one last precious time. Waving good-bye was like leaving the ghost of Christmas everything; taking me away from my family on Christmas is unthinkable, stepping onto a plane scattered with strangers, like torture.

Frustrated that I drew the short straw, that no one else, not even the other clerks and paralegals who weren't traveling, offered to be there on the day after Christmas, I moped and pouted with the time I did have with my family. I was angry at my horrible boss, the one who removed his glasses and used the end piece to clean his ears whenever we met to discuss medical records or boring depositions. The one who callously said "you know I'm Jewish, I could work on Christmas day" when I asked if I could at least come in late the next day; my need to repeatedly quote him not really enveloping the spirit of Christmas.

Because my father flew frequently, often three or four days a week, he was familiar to almost everyone at the American Airlines counter in Kansas City. Having Dad deliver me to the airport meant a seat in first class as they often extended this courtesy to his daughter when available. On this night, given that I was one of five people flying, my seat in row 3 was secure. He waited with me until they finally boarded, the two of us sitting in the lonely and cold airport, the bar closed and the place deserted. I encouraged him to go home, but secretly hoped he would stay, scared to be alone and wishing that maybe they would finally just cancel this flight and strand me, helpless and unable to get to work. The plane had to be in Chicago, the flight would go, even if we had to wait all night.

Two hours later they called the few of us remaining to board. Leaving home was difficult, saying good-bye to my father who was my Christmas constant, horrible. The plane was de-iced, we pushed back from the gate, and O'Hare closed to incoming flights. We waited. I buried my head in my mixed nuts, not at all interested in small talk with the nice flight attendant who was probably not exactly where she wanted to be either. I questioned all the decisions: grad school away from my family, the terrible job at the hideous law firm, the one that made me cry almost every day as the bus approached my stop. My dad suggested I quit, find something else, but I knew I was learning, more about what I did not want to do than what I did, and the miserable pay was better than nothing at all.

After almost two hours of waiting we took off. I cried when the wheels left the ground.

O'Hare was deserted, as quiet as I had ever seen it. My lone bag spun on the carousel, as lost as I was. I threw it over my shoulder and made my way out, heading to the taxi stand rather than the train as Dad had given me cab fare, not wanting me to spend the remainder of my night on two trains and a bus getting home. I stopped in the restroom before leaving.

She smiled warmly when I stumbled in, "Merry Christmas" she said, in deeply accented English. Merry Christmas said the woman who had spent her Christmas cleaning restrooms at the airport, away from her family and friends, working at a job I have always considered to be among the worst imaginable. My day of self misery was over; "Merry Christmas" I said to her, and thank you.

Bon Appetit Mes Enfants

We raised our glasses to travel.

The planning began last week. The girls created a menu and made lists. They consulted cookbooks to help organize their thoughts and then prepared, with no help from me and little from their father, a French meal complete with printed menus, a wine list and creatively delicious food. The significance of this, one day after the Paris attacks, is not lost.  That they started this process long before the attacks happened is perhaps most relevant to me: a meal created not to honor France and the tragedy of Friday but one that reflects the girls' appreciation and understanding of other cultures.

Three years ago we spent two weeks in France, visiting dear friends, traveling to the Normandy coast and baking in the August heat of Paris. The girls were seven and thrown into life in France with a limited net. First they learned to order milk in a restaurant, "lait s'il vous plait". They asked directions and found their way on the Metro. We handed them menus in French and suggested they find a word they understood and go from there.

They ordered their own food, in French (ish), and discovered new things to love (mussels) and things they expected to love and did not (croque monsieur). We did not seek out American restaurants and in fact left one when handed the American menu for children: hot dogs, chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese. We did not travel across the ocean to be immersed in American culture.

Traveling opens their minds to places and people beyond what they find in the neighborhood or down the street. Living briefly in another country forces them to the outside and teaches them to adjust to the changes inherent in international travel: new language, culture, currency, customs. And traveling makes places that might be far away seem much closer, especially when one beautiful place is attacked in the most cruel and horrible way.

We will continue to travel, continue to show our children that there is a world outside of Chicago, a world that is almost always good. It is a world that they should see and experience and enjoy; one that will send them back with memories and photographs and not just an appreciation for what they find but also what it means to be home. No terrorists can take that freedom away.

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page. St. Augustine

Kansas City, Kansas City Here I Come

"Do you wear shoes there?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, it's just, I don't know, do they wear shoes in Kansas?"

If only I had reading glasses then, to push down on my nose while rolling my eyes over the top of the rim, but sadly I was young, maybe 25 with eyes not requiring assistance, and had only my face to scrunch up in a most contorted and disbelieving way. Head cocked to the side, lips pursed, I answered, "really?".

She, the 17 year old suburban Chicago high school student who worked evenings with me at the Coach store, nodded. Eyes open wide, yes, she was serious. Oh so was I.

"Curious that you should ask because no, not really, or at least not all the time. But the thing is, when you leave Kansas you do need shoes, as people in most other states wear them, so just across the state line, in Missouri, there are shoe stores everywhere, for everyone coming across bare footed. It's probably the same in all the border states, it's just Missouri that I know best".

It was her turn to scrunch her face, "are you kidding?"

It's been over twenty years since I left the shoeless prairie but my past continues to haunt me. Just recently someone asked how I'm adjusting to life in the big city. A few years ago a colleague asked if we could fly to Kansas, "do you have to fly to what? St. Louis and then drive?". This weekend one of my friends guessed the population of Kansas City to be about 100,000 people; there are four Kansas City suburbs with more people. Poor Kansas City, all wild and west and unknown. Which is exactly why my father, who traveled constantly, loved coming home to Kansas City: "no one knows it's here".

Recently I've been back and forth quite a bit, busy each trip with the business of my mother, and organizing her life. But next week I go back and for the first time in five years I do not have to take out the newspapers and balance her checkbook; that work is all being done by someone else and I might have hours of free time to spend in one of my favorite places. I'm plotting my days.

 There will be a stop at the Nelson Atkins museum, where I took preschool art classes. The lower level, on the east side of the building will forever smell like tempera paint and erasers. I'll visit the creepy Egyptian tomb rooms on the first floor and the security guard, now moved to the modern wing, who scared me quiet when I was small. 

Saturday I will be at the City Market where my dad and I used to spend Saturday mornings shopping for corn and tomatoes and strawberries. I was mesmerized by the live chickens for sale near the entrance, clearly not understanding their market value. After sandwiches from the Italian deli we'd drive over to Independence Avenue to his favorite Italian meat market for fresh sausage. The origins of my non meat diet traced directly to Saturday mornings with my father.

At some point I'll find my way through the green door of the Peanut, directly across the street from my old office. Friday at five happened here. Turn left when you come in, the table in front of you, near the wall has been vandalized: ally loves jack. She did, she does.

Before the Peanut and before Jack there was Canterbury Lane. It was here, in front of the tree on the right, that I set up my very first lemonade stand, from here that I walked the four blocks to kindergarten, from here that I started out on my own. On this trip I'll make time to wander the curvy street that ends at the park, next to the church parking lot where I learned to ride my bike; from there it's just a few more blocks to Topsy's and ice cream on Saturday night.

What I like best, that Kansas City is not Chicago or St. Louis; that there are less than 3 million people in the metropolitan area, that traffic is never horrible and that I can get to my mother's apartment in the suburbs in less than 30 minutes. I love it's big winding boulevards and it's beautiful old brick houses. I love the golf courses nestled in amongst the houses and the huge trees that hang over the neighborhood streets. 

Kansas City is where I grew up, where I met my husband, where my family began.  I love Kansas City for what it has always been, what it will always be to me: the place that gave solid roots to a shoeless cow princess and sent her off to see the world. I'm forever grateful.

Visit Mrs. Blandings, a beautiful design blog that masquerades every now and then as the best possible guide to Kansas City. Her blog makes me want to visit more than I do, and see things I didn't even know existed.

Egg in the Mud

"You come here, you haven't been here in so long", and that, when coming from San Francisco is hard to resist. My side of the world was less exciting, and she was promising a spa day in Napa. I bought my ticket.

Where once we had been separated only by a bookcase, we were now over 2,000 miles apart, a thought unimaginable ten years prior. Before email, before Skype, we talked on the phone, constantly, and wrote letters, the wonderful old handwritten kind that now sit in a box in my closet. We met freshman year; I remember quite clearly that she was wearing a lime green suit and white pumps, although she dismisses this, horrified at the idea, and her very comfortable jean and cashmere sweater wearing self seems to negate my memory quite effectively. We were assigned as roommates sophomore year, the girl in the white pumps and the loud girl who wore plaid, which is how she remembers me, an image I cannot dispel. Her second impression, after a thorough scrutiny of my cassette tapes, was that I really liked Billy Joel. She was edgy, she had Flock of Seagulls hair and a taste for new music, crazy stuff like R.E.M. and INXS, I had a bob and John Denver. We were further apart than San Francisco and Chicago.

She spent her nights in the architecture studio, I spent mine at the Wheel. When my late night revelry caused her to oversleep and miss a final I thought we were done. A kind professor, a big heart and my slumbering through the last of Sociology 302 kept us together.

Where she is organized, I am madness. Eventually she learned to sign my name, being the responsible one when we moved from dorm to apartment, and bills had to be paid. As a person who liked to be at the airport two hours before her flight and forced to rely on someone who happily sauntered to the gate as the doors closed, she returned home with a wonderful gift to say thank you for living, only so briefly, on my schedule.

Years later she was at the gate to greet me, of course she was, she had been there for hours. I bet my flight was late. We ate at the garlic restaurant, Johnny Rockets and Hamburger Mary's; we got food poisoning somewhere on the wharf (and lived through it in her Marina neighborhood one bathroom studio apartment), and we rented a car and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge towards Napa Valley.

We stopped in St. Helena, the best small town I have ever seen, and ate sandwiches in the park from a wonderful market, next door to the most amazing kitchen store I could imagine. We were on our way to Calistoga, and the mud baths. Her friends recommended Dr. Wilkinson's Hot Springs, home to the man and the mud. My father was entertained by the entire idea, amused at the idea of the two of us paying money to be immersed in a pile of wet dirt.

Mud smells, and it's hot. It clogs your pores and makes it hard to breathe. With at least a fifty year cushion, we were the youngest people in the room. Every one of us was naked, although it seemed that we were the only ones exhibiting any sense of modesty at all, the rest of the mud sinkers, all seventy plus years of them, wandering from room to room, wearing little but scraps of dried old mud. Forcing yourself, naked, into a pile of warm mud takes youthful stupidity, old determination and strong arms.

My father delighted in this story, "Everyone else was old? And they didn't change the mud? You sat, naked, in used mud?". This had not occurred to me. "Why do you think the mud was so warm? What do you think the old gals did in that mud Allyson? How bad did it smell?". I hung up and called San Francisco, the shriek of horror could be heard across 2,000 miles.

Many years later, when Jack had to call her, on her birthday, to tell her that my father died, she cried, "not today, please not today". But she has shared this day, one of my very favorites, for bringing her into my world, and the worst possible I could imagine, for taking away someone I loved so much. It's become Bill Day, for celebrating and toasting my dad, but it will always be Egg's birthday, a reminder of the passing of time and the value of true friendships.

Twenty six years later we are still friends, best friends.

I wrote this to post on September 25th, but was, of course, late.
Happy birthday my friend!

Painfully Accurate Forecasting

The day before we left for Michigan Kate hugged me tightly and then threw up all over my feet. Apparently she was not feeling well, and she then passed that feeling on to her sister. Our favorite summer holiday started on a bit of a "sour" note.

We leave soon for a short end of summer getaway and guess who is sprawled in bed, head in a bowl, body full of fever? It's Mary's turn to kick off this vacation but if history has taught us anything she won't be alone for long.

Jack calls me paranoid and while I'd really like to agree, it's hard to call my fears baseless and excessive; our children get sick at almost every inopportune moment presented.

Kate spent two weeks this summer at what Jack and I called smart camp: a three hour per day gathering of six and seven year old children wearing glasses. I hesitated, the sessions she wanted ran in the weeks immediately before we left for Michigan. Eeek, exposure to that many children right before vacation, never a good idea, but I turned off the crazy voice in my head and enrolled her. See above.

This past week we have had three events well stocked with germy children: two birthday parties and on Sunday, 30 people, including children, at our home for an end of summer soiree. The timing concerned me, so close to vacation, but our calendars were full and surely this madness would not strike twice in one short summer. See above.

There is a certain empty validation in finding that I am not paranoid but rather, scarily accurate in my illness forecasting. Most regrettably we are raising social girls who truly delight in the presence of other children. They actually look forward to school and the sharing of their days with so many small germ carriers. It's torture, allowing them this childhood access to friends, but option B, sending them to school in togas fashioned from Lysol Germ Killing Wipes seems extreme, but not completely unthinkable.

Making Copies, Keeping Friends

Five copies, all stashed in a box at the back of my closet, waiting to be mailed. They've moved at least six times; that I have found them, yet again, is a true wonder. I made the copies around 15 years, ago, in the supply room at UMB Bank on the Plaza, in Kansas City. Over lunch at my desk, likely steamed vegetable dumplings from Bo Lings, I read an article in Town and Country about five friends who took a hotel barge river cruise through France. Floating down the Burgundy Canal on the Fluer De Lys seemed idyllic, and completely possible; I was unmarried, without children, and working hard to be able to do things like float around in France. And so I made the copies, to send to my friends, thinking that maybe someday, possibly soon, we could take such a wonderful trip.

The articles never made it to the mail, the trip never happened. Our lives grew, jobs became careers; we became wives and mothers, architects and milliners, but not sailors. We live in three different states, the last time I was in the same room with all these women was when I got married. The idea of four days together, without agenda or distraction, is mesmerizing.

Certainly the Canal du Midi is lovely but I'd be content with a few days at the beach, or in a hotel room in Akron, Ohio. This might be the best birthday present in the world; check your mailbox ladies, it's not too late.