Traveling Mercies

If you're at all inclined towards prayer, my parents are going from one end of the country to the other today. So amazing that you can just go all the way from one end to the other. Of course, it does take the whole day. You have to get up in the dark, at like 4, and you won't arrive until probably midnight, and you will shove yourself into various kinds of means of transport. A bus, perhaps, and then another kind of bus, and then an airplane, and you will lug your enormous computer around until your shoulders ache and your back is on fire.

That's what they're doing today. Whereas in a week or so I'll be shoving the kids in and out of the car over the course of a long drive to Texas. “It's easier to drive,” I always say, enumerating for myself and others the hassle of taking the shoes off of six children, making sure they get through with nary a drink of water, plastering on my fake smile and pretending I don't see people counting silently, “onetwothreefourfive” ..eyebrow raises..”six.” That's what happens when you travel by air. When you travel on the ground, in a minivan, no one knows or sees or hears all the screaming. So. Much. Screaming.

Anyway, everyone is crying because they miss their Nonni (my mother). And Marigold is confused and sad that the wonderful wonderful lady whose existence was heretofore unknown to her but who completely enraptured her in about an hour and a half, is also gone and we don't have any arrangements to see her again. That's my own grandmother. Marigold swings wildly back and forth, calling her GGMs one moment and Great Grandmother the next. “Don't worry,” I said to her just now, “in a week you can see your Mimi.”

“Yeah,” said the Ass Alouicious (are all eleven year old boys so sarcastic and unkind?), “you can see Mimi and then say good bye to her and then see Nonni and say goodbye to her.”

“Shut up,” I admonished as Marigold let out another huge wail.

Well, that's what life is, one long series of loss and leave taking, puncutated either by agonizingly long airport trips or ten years in Binghamton. I gotta go shop for Shepherds Bowl now and cook up a pot of soup and begin making packing lists. Pip pip.

Oh wait, here's the daily picture of the robin. I don't believe it's a cuckoo or anything, I practically saw it hatch.