Between the Bricks

In the spring, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love*, my middle-aged husband’s fancy turns to thoughts of lavish landscaping. His neck swivels at an artful display of mulch the way other men ogle scantily clad women. He regales me endlessly with grandiose plans for building a “simple little” retaining wall/covered deck/gazebo . This is generally where I call a screeching halt to the conversation by waving our sadly deficient checkbook around and crush all his horticultural hopes and dreams. He then helpfully suggests that my heart is three sizes too small and our compromise eventually shakes out to purchasing hanging baskets for the front porch.

My husband scouts out the offerings, and inevitably falls deeply in love with something that looks like this.

I know this looks lovely, but he conveniently forgets that we live in Atlanta where the median summer temperature is 146 degrees and the front porch gets direct sun 19 hours a day. Like any new lover, he faithfully waters the baskets morning and night and tenderly whispers sweet nothings to them as he gently plucks their dead leaves, but as in most relationships, sooner or later…. he has to go out of town. You thought I was going to say he forgets, didn’t you? Well, HE doesn’t forget . I do. I halfheartedly try, but morning comes really early, and I’ve heard you shouldn’t water in the heat of day, and at night it’s… dark, and, ….I just can’t remember, ok?

So quicker than you can say, “Miracle NO”, our baskets look like this.

For those of you with inquiring minds, that green thing sprouting is probably a misguided acorn that fell there last fall. Why yes, now that you mention it, we DON’T have any shame and we DO leave these specimens on the porch year round so we can be confronted by our inadequacies on a daily basis.

As I came in the front door the other day, thinking how beautifully the burned out porch light complemented the desiccated flower baskets, I noticed this:

In case you can’t believe your eyes, apparently one lone petunia seed from a bygone season’s basket fell and sprouted BETWEEN THE BRICKS.

This seed thrived for more than a year in a hostile environment between two bricks and mortar, through one of Atlanta's coldest winters (including multiple snowstorms) with absolutely no care or attention, yet last spring the entire basket was deader than a dodo in less than a month under the protective onslaught of all my husband's ministrations. (Pay no attention to him mumbling that my black thumb needs to take responsibility...)

I know there's a lesson here somewhere and I'm looking really hard between the bricks to find it. "Bloom where you're NOT planted" doesn't seem quite right, yet “Why Bother?” is a little too fatalistic to motivate (and probably won’t get embroidered on a pillow anytime soon).

I suppose, as with most things, the happy medium is somewhere in the middle. The first couple of years after Eli’s accident, we figuratively fertilized and watered that child darn near to extinction. He initially thrived, and then, like the baskets, inexplicably dried up around the edges and seemed to plateau, making very little progress, just eking out a minimal existence. Everyone adapted; Pete went back to work, I went back to school, Maddy, Sawyer and Hudson did their thing, and we settled into a new normal.

But lately, we’ve seen a couple of little sprouts in the most unexpected places, so we’ve hauled out the watering can and are spraying Miracle-Gro like mad. I’ll let you know if something breaks through.

*Courtesy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” - I knew that English degree would be good for something someday.

Let Me Count the Ways...

76 answering machine messages.
19 phone calls in a two hour period.
253 hours of South Park and That 70’s Show recorded on the DVR.

Remember the scene in Rainman where Raymond counts the spilled toothpicks in the diner and his brother, Charlie Babbitt, is amazed that he gets it correct? That scene is Charlie’s first intimation that Raymond has unusual skills at counting, ultimately leading him to use Raymond’s abilities to count cards in Vegas. There is a lot of counting that goes on at my house, but so far, no one has made any money at it. Now that I think about it, it isn’t always just Eli who’s doing the counting – often it’s me muttering under my breath, “1…2…3…breathe Tanya, have patience Tanya….”

The accident that caused Eli’s severe brain injury happened almost four years ago. He’s come a long way in those years, progressing from being in a coma for several months to studying (and excelling at) high school algebra in preparation to take the GED. Yet it seems that most of our breakdowns involve numbers. Eli can remember my cell phone number, but he doesn’t remember that he’s already called me 6 times to tell me he would like some gum. He very cannily remembers the code to order Pay-per-View movies, yet doesn’t remember ordering the same movie 16 times (at $4.99 a pop). My answering machine stays full because he can’t remember no one answers it since we all have cell phones. Once a week, I have to stand by the machine, push the play button and listen to the robotic voice drone on and on, “You have…76 messages. First message…” Every single message starts outs, “Mooommm…” and then I hit delete, because there are only about 4 reasons he calls:

1) He wants his socks off,
2) He wants some Coke,
3) He wants his iPod/phone charged,
4) He wants a cheeseburger.

He calls at 2:00 a.m. wanting to know why he’s in bed. We tell him it’s the middle of the night and he says, “My bad…I thought it was 2:00 in the afternoon.” He calls to tell us that he’s leaving his daycare center. He calls again to say he’s on the interstate. A third call informs us he’s getting close to our neighborhood, followed by the fourth call that conveys the scintillating news that he’s coming down the hill toward our house. All those calls translate to my counting out large sums of money to pay the cell phone bill.

I count packs of gum to determine how many days it will last him.

I count the hours until he goes to bed and relinquishes the TV remote so I can have some peace and quiet.

And then I count the many ways I should be ashamed.

Because there was a time I sat in an ER waiting room counting down the critical hours that would determine whether he lived or died (24). There were days we watched in horror as the bolt screwed into his head monitoring his ICP rose to 50 and above (and normal should have been about 15). There were months we anxiously watched for a sign that he understood what was going on around him, telling him to blink once for yes, twice for no.

My bad, Eli. You’d think by now I would have learned how to count my blessings, huh?