Tag: birthday

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Points of Light

It’s Birthday Month at Chez Rochat. And that usually means something special ahead.

First, a point of clarification. We don’t actually celebrate the entire month. That tends to be September, the golden month that seems to have kick-started half of my wife’s family, including Heather, her sister, her late grandfather, one of our nieces and possibly her fairy godmother for all I know. (If anyone’s seen that fairy, by the way, would you mind having her give us a call? I’m pretty sure she’s holding our lottery tickets.)

No, Birthday Month belongs to Missy, the developmentally disabled aunt we care for who’s been the star of many a column here. She’s an October lady, but the date we celebrate tends to jump all over the map. Still, she knows that when we hit this time of year, special things happen.

There’s been the Year of the Pink Bowling Ball, which Missy unwrapped and joyously lifted to the sunlight, both of them glowing like the climax of a fantasy novel.

There was the Bieber Birthday, when Missy’s temporary obsession with a certain Canadian pop star was rewarded with a cardboard stand-up at the party.

And of course, there was the Day of the Dancing, when a certain milestone birthday (never mind which one) turned into a musical marathon. Missy spent 98% of it on the dance floor, while the rest of us just tried to keep up with her.

Some years have been quiet, others have received NASA-level planning. But there’s always something to remember.

This year, it might just be the Lite Brite.

For those who haven’t met that old classic, Lite Brite is a children’s light board with colored pegs for creating pictures and designs. Missy got a set this year from her brother Jeff and his wife Meg, who know her far too well.

You see, as I mentioned a couple of columns ago, Missy likes temporary art. And few things are more temporary than a Lite Brite paper template. You fit the paper onto the screen. You punch each peg into its spot on the paper, like “B” for blue. And once you punch through, that spot is gone. The result is a beautiful design and a thoroughly perforated former set of instructions.

From all this, you get two basic results.

First, you learn to appreciate each point of light as you create it. You might not be able to do it the same way twice.

Second, unless you’re really good about stocking up on refills, you’re eventually going to have make your own designs.

Simple lessons. But lasting ones. Especially these days.

If we’ve learned anything in these last couple of years, it’s that change can come quickly. Old ways of doing things get transformed, old assumptions overturned. It’s been a time of uncertainty as we look to see what comes next, and that’s never a comfortable place to be.

In times like these, we become aware of how fragile our moments are. It becomes more important than ever to see them, notice them, appreciate them while they’re there.

And if we want to perpetuate them, we’re going to have to find the patterns ourselves.  Working point by point, not always sure if the image we’re making will be beauty or chaos.

But each step is another point of light in the darkness. Hopeful in itself, helpful in what it may become. And that’s a gift to cherish.

Maybe even one as marvelous as a pink bowling ball.

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Hands off the Wheel

The nightmare went right for the gut.

There I was, sitting at the wheel of a car in a crowded parking lot. A car in motion, describing constant circles, not answering any of my attempts to steer.

Foot brakes? Forget it. Parking brake? Somewhere on here, but where? Each new lever or button seemed to make things more disastrous, popping the hood, opening the trunk, making it harder and harder to see the oncoming doom.

The crash was coming. And I couldn’t stop it.

Finally the dream had mercy. Moments before waking, my fingers found the “angel of mercy” brake and yanked up, bringing the car to a slow – of course it was slow – stop.

My eyes blinked open. Relief.

I was never touching that cold medicine again.

We all have our fundamental fears in life. I’ve seen people paralyzed by the presence of a friendly dog, or whose breath grew short in a closed-in space. I even interviewed a phlebotomist once, a professional blood tester, who used to have a deathly phobia of needles.

Me? Well, there are things that make me uncomfortable, like sharp objects or falling sensations. But the deepest, darkest, most basic fear I have – one I share with my wife – is losing control.

After all, I’ve seen some of the consequences.

I’m epileptic. It’s well-managed, to the point that I can live a normal life 99.99 percent of the time. I hold a job, raise a family, even drive a car.

But on those rare nights – only three of them so far, all while asleep, all when off medication for some reason – it’s like Dr. Frankenstein reached over and plugged in the lightning rod.

The mercy of a seizure, at least in my experience, is that you’re not aware of it while it’s going on. You don’t see the jerks and pulls, or hear the noises coming out of your mouth, or know about the bizarre behavior that goes on in the immediate aftermath. (Heather once called an ambulance because my seizure had gone on so long; as they started to put me on the stretcher, I picked myself up, walked to the bathroom, did my business, and came back, completely unconsciously.)

The aftermath: that you know about. If Peyton Manning ran four quarters of the Broncos offense over your body …  if you suntanned on a lane of I-25 at rush hour … if you’ve tried bungee jumping and forgotten that silly little detail about fastening the hook … then you’ve got an idea of what it feels like for three days after a seizure.

It is the loss of control personified. After all, how much more basic does it get than not being able to control your own body?

I hate it. And yes, fear it. Letting go is hard. Admitting I need help – with anything – is even harder.

But lately, I’ve had some reminders.

And most of them are named Missy.

If you read the column last week – or, let’s be honest, many of the ones before – you know our ward Missy, Heather’s developmentally disabled aunt. In many ways, she has control over very little of her life. She reaches for an arm to help her walk. She needs help in a hundred different ways every day, from tying her shoes to managing her home. And yes, there’s many times where it’s frustrating for her, where I can see her wanting to communicate something very simple and not quite knowing how.

But so many times, I see the joy instead.

When we gave Missy her big birthday bash last week, we remembered food and guests and all the usual items – but we also remembered a DJ. Because at her heart, Missy is a dancer, at home with loud music and open floors.

And for  three hours, with only short breaks, Missy danced. And danced. And danced some more.

They weren’t the moves of Baryshnikov or Astaire. They didn’t have to be. Just the bends and the sways and the slow spins of a person in gleeful ecstasy.

Missy had just enough control to reach joy. She didn’t need more. Maybe she even reached a deeper joy by letting go a little.

That’s something I need to remember.

Maybe I don’t always have to drive the car. Maybe, sometimes, it’s OK to just watch the road and enjoy the ride.

Once this cold medicine wears off, anyway.

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Taking the Cake

“BLAAAAKE!”

I followed my wife’s voice to the scene of the carnage. Heather stood there aghast, with an over-muscled Labrador mix on one side, and a half-empty cake pan on the other.

Big Blake, it seemed, had discovered my belated birthday cake.

At two weeks late, it had been meant as a bit of a surprise. It succeeded. Instead of getting frosted by Heather and Missy, it had gotten a two-minute sampling by our canine connoisseur of all things semi-edible.

Surprise!

At first, I was horrified. Then, a little worried for the big guy (needlessly, as it turned out). And then, finally, amused.

After all this time, my cake karma seemed to have finally come full circle.

It’s an old family story, told by me as often as by anyone. My youngest sister Carey had had a birthday and knew exactly where she wanted it to be: Chuck E. Cheese. (I’ll pause for a parental shudder.) As the joke goes, it was our early childhood lesson in junk food and gambling, and we plunged with abandon into both, gladly running from pizza to video games to Skee-Ball and back again.

Since this was a birthday, naturally there was a cake. Since we were a family of five, naturally we didn’t finish it in one sitting. As the big brother (all of 10 years old or so), I volunteered to carry it out to the car when we left, holding it proudly as we entered the parking lot.

A little too proudly, perhaps. With a timing worthy of Mr. Bean, the cake left my hands.

And with one simple plunge, Abstract Art Piece No. 7, a study in frosting and pavement, had been born.

Surprise!

It’s been 30 years since then. My sister has long since started talking to me again. But the funny thing is, I can remember that incident more quickly and clearly than my college graduation. In terms of sheer vividness, it competes with the opening-night play at the Longmont Theatre Company where I took one downstage step too many, descending into the orchestra pit.

Some things, it seems, your brain hangs on to. With relish.

(No, the cake didn’t have relish. Chuck E. Cheese wasn’t that bizarre.)

Oddly enough, that’s been a subject of major research over the last few years: why our mind clings so hard to mortifying memories. The hope is to be able to better treat post-traumatic stress disorder. And the studies seem to suggest that it’s a combination of a particular brain chemical – norepinephrine, released in times of strong emotion – and an understandable need to obsessively examine a situation and figure out “Why did I do that?”

“It’s our need to control,” scientist Angela Londoño-McConnell told msnbc. com in 2009. “person might have thrown up simply because they were getting sick. It just happened. But it’s very difficult to tell the brain, ‘It just happened.’ So we go over it, trying to figure it out, trying to make sure we won’t be embarrassed again.”

That can actually be a valuable way to learn. But it can also mean you beat yourself up for a long period of time and blow a small event into a huge one.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “but in rising up each time we fail.” Anyone can screw up – heck, Thomas Edison once burned down the family barn as a child. The question is what you do next.

I’ve had a lot of “nexts.” So have most of us, I suspect. More than enough to let a few cringes go, however vivid.

I know, it’s not often easy. But now that the years have worn this one from embarrassment to amusement, letting go shouldn’t be too hard.

You could call it a piece of cake.

But don’t tell Blake if you do.

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Growing Ivy

My niece Ivy is one year old.

Let me try that again.

My niece Ivy is one year old.

It still doesn’t seem possible.

Oh, I know it’s not just possible. It’s inevitable. But it still seems strange. A year ago, she was this cute and wrinkly little being who had escaped her mother’s body in record time. Now she’s this cute and far less wrinkly little being with bright  hair, a bright smile and a crawling pace to match her little Ferrari shirt.

Ivy passed the milestone on Monday. Probably in fifth gear. And it looks even faster one time zone away, as I follow her progress through picture after picture from Kirkland, Wash. Nine months ago, I was dangling keys in front of her face to stop her from crying. At this rate, it may only be another nine before we’re hiding the keys to stop her from driving.

Incredible.

Why do we always say that?

Maybe because it makes us look at ourselves again. Most of us, I’ve noticed, have a magic age that we mentally locked onto long ago. For me, even though I know darn well I’m 38, my mind froze time somewhere around 25, when I got married. Anything that’s a reminder of being past that point comes as a minor shock.

Babies are a constant reminder.

They can’t help it. Every day it’s something new. Opening eyes, learning to stand, nearly pulling the drawer of a end table onto themselves. You have to watch every single second or you’ll miss something – probably something that will go straight off the carpet and into their mouths.

Ivy has become 365 times older than she was the first time I saw her picture. She’s four times older than when I first saw her face. There’s room for a lot of change there.

And it forces everyone – moms, dads, uncles, aunts and more – to notice the changes in themselves as well.

The good news is, for a lot of us, it comes with its own cure.

No, I’m not the dashing (ha) young man just out of graduate school and just into newspapers. Thirteen years has stolen hair, added inches, accumulated stories and stress. But to a young lady in Washington (and another one in Arvada, and a young man in Johnstown), I’m one of the most fascinating people in the world.

She’s not going to see the changes that sometimes bother me. Not for a long time to come. What she’s going to see are the friends and the family who love her very much and can’t wait for the next step.

And that, dear Ivy, will never change.

Happy birthday.