Since Last Week

Where do I start? I got home from the hospital with Sophie last week on Thursday night and left at 4:30 on Friday morning for my first trip to New York City in about eight years, I think. I got a killer deal on two flights -- took Oliver along because he's just a kick-ass kid with a full-time job, finishing high school early and on to University of Arizona in the fall! Here we are bleary-eyed in the plane just before take-off.

We arrived in Newark and were picked up at the airport by my cousin Paula's husband Jim. We spent Friday night with them and their dear daughter Faith, and the next morning they drove us up to my cousin Philip's house so we could finally join all the other cousins and aunts and uncles for the annual Pittule Day celebration. Pittule is a Calabrian specialty -- basically, fried dough that is either sprinkled with sugar or stuffed with anchovies. Both are pictured above.

Here's me taking a stint at the fryer with my cousin Mary:

Here's a few more pictures from the afternoon:

My mom, 80 years old, Aunt Dorothy, 90 years old and Aunt Mary, 87 years old

My cousins Frances and Mary

The whole Famiglia

Matriarchs and Patriarch

Me and my cousin Philip

That's a lot of beautiful family, and I'm grateful for every single one of them and for the opportunity to get together with them, talk and bond and eat delicious food. I'm so glad that Oliver got to experience it as well.

I should end this post here, but you must know that I also went into the city and stayed with two of my oldest friends, Jane and Phil, in their beautiful home on the Upper West Side. They lit candles for the first night of Hanukkah. I also got to see my very oldest friend -- not biologically but from my junior high years and onward -- Audrey.

Friends for 42 years!

On Sunday morning I took a Lyft uptown to visit Sandra, a woman and fellow caregiver whom I've been close friends with for at least six years -- yet have never met. I could have wept when I finally did get to hug her -- and her son and husband. For any of you social media naysayers, I reiterate that these online friendships have proved to be some of the most deep and profound of my life in every single way.

Speaking of profound connections, I also had the pleasure and nearly unspeakable joy of finally getting to meet Rosemarie. I held on to her for an extra beat as well, just so grateful to find this person as beautiful and graceful in real life as she's been to me online.

I think I'll save the rest of my New York City photos for another post. We flew home on Monday night and on Tuesday I started feeling chills and a general lousiness that ballooned into some kind of horrible flu-like thing -- no fever or congestion but damn, I feel like crap. I haven't been sick in so many years, I guess I was due for something or another, so I'm not complaining.

See ya'll later.

Ghost Songs

"Tracy, wake up!" I whisper across the space between our beds.

I am ten and she is eight.

It's the middle of the night and I've had a bad dream. I have to go to the bathroom but I'm afraid to go alone.

She sits up without protest and gets out of bed, then walks shoulder to shoulder with me in the dark hall, holding my hand. In the bathroom I switch on the light, and covering her eyes with her hands, she sits on the edge of the tub and waits for me.

 from Regina McBride's memoir Ghost Songs

The above passage comes at the end of the memoir, and like much of the rest of the memoir, it moved me to tears with its simplicity and sweetness and fierce love.

More than twenty years ago, well before Sophie and My Next Life, I took a writing workshop at the New York City YWCA on the Upper West Side. The teacher was Regina McBride, and what I remember from the class was how inspiring she was -- how we were each encouraged to tap into our deepest selves to create story. It seems almost dreamlike now because the writing I did for Regina was actually the last writing I would do for more than ten years. I was pregnant with Sophie then, and three months after giving birth -- well -- you know the rest of the story.

When I randomly moved into an apartment building across the street from her family a couple of years later, we became friends and visited one another often. She was working on a novel then, and I remember being envious of her discipline, of how she appeared to make space for her art even under the duress of new motherhood.  When I left New York in 1997, we kept in touch. I read, avidly, her novels -- The Nature of Water and Air, The Marriage Bed, The Land of Women -- and her exquisite book of poetry, Yarrow Field. Her writing is luminous -- like she is as a person.

Regina's Ghost Songs: A Memoir was published this fall, and I've taken weeks and weeks to read it. I knew right away when I dipped into it that it would be something to savor, to take in over time in sips. Regina lost both parents to suicide within months of one another when she was seventeen years old. Raised as an Irish Catholic and deeply affected by the mystical elements of that faith, Regina weaves together childhood memories, sibling love, the immediate aftermath of the suicides and her trip to Ireland as a young adult to tell a story of sadness but also of great love. She's written a story in fragments, here, her pain not so much disguised as elusive, like the ghosts that she encounters in the aftermath of the shattering events. Her encounters with what you might call the miraculous are written without a trace of awkwardness or cliche. Her prose, both spare and magical, conveys a wisdom not just hard-won and brave but truly numinous.

Thank you, Regina, for the gifts of your writing, for being a touchstone for me of my other life.






Buy Ghost Songs at your independent bookstore, at Tin House or on Amazon.




And happy Christmas Eve Eve!

Muscle Memory

Today is an anniversary of sorts, albeit a painful one. On this day, twenty-one years ago, Sophie was admitted to New York Hospital on York Avenue after being diagnosed with infantile spasms. Those who've read my e-book might remember that I was given the diagnosis while sitting in a gray folding chair in an emergency room. I was holding Sophie. The two young residents were holding clipboards. Their voices came from the end of a long tunnel, and I stood up, raised my voice and said what are you talking about? I remember them backing out of the room when I told them to leave, and then I remember being admitted to a room at the hospital that was straight out of a Dickens novel: six or eight metal cribs with babies and toddlers inside, some alone. Sophie's crib was by a window that looked out onto a shaft. The panes were coated in dust from the 19th century when the hospital was built. A cheerful nurse brought an orange into the room and some hypodermic needles. We practiced shooting the needle into the orange and then pulling it back out to make sure we hadn't hit a vein. The drug needed to go into the muscle. The drug was a powerful steroid given in a very high dose. The skin of the orange was thick and puckered and the needle slid right in. Sophie had been on the planet for three months, and the skin on her legs was so soft. Do babies have muscles? We stayed in the hospital for one week during which the baby's appetite grew so grotesque, my breasts couldn't keep up. Don't worry, a young doctor said to me as I pressed my face against the dirty window and wept. Breastfeeding isn't everything. We went home to our little apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up on the Upper West Side. We continued to give her the shots, twice a day. Her face blew up like a moon, her eyes slits in puffs of pale, the white pustules of thrush around her lips and bottom. She screamed 22 hours out of 24, so we walked with her. Up and down, up and down, up and down the little balcony off the bedroom, the roof-top water towers marking the sky. She continued to seize. I wasn't going to mark this day, but why not? Muscle has memory even after twenty-one years. I have practiced and never hit a vein.

Word Sips

Henry

No, things don't usually go on as if nothing ever happened, because something did happen and more will probably happen and until it does, we'll all be subject to despair and worry and grief and anxiety and -- well -- annoyance, particularly for me --  at the yammering and yammering on and on of opinion. I'm going to sit tight and be quiet and maybe dip my toes in one article or another but politely decline from engagement in anything but an assertion of peace, love and my vote when the time comes.





On another note, this afternoon I am going to hear the great Ursula K. Le Guin speak at Royce Hall. I'm so looking forward to her and then to Patti Smith tomorrow night. I bought both tickets months ago and feel a tad self-indulgent going two evenings in a row to an event, especially given my deadlines for work and just all the other stuff, but those feelings are tads and as soon as I'm in my seat, I'll be thrilled. And grateful.

Reader, what are you reading? I'm immersed in City on Fire and thrilled that I'm once again able to plow through a 900-plus page book. I had thought that skill was lost as the last few tomes I'd attempted were ditched around 150 pages in, with 500 pages looming. I wasn't sure if I was getting old and decrepit and losing my mojo as a reader extraordinaire or that those other books were just duds for me. They were duds for me. I might also be losing my mojo, at least in tolerance for what I don't love. I don't feel like being a critic, so I won't tell which ones, but they were literary sensations and best-sellers by wunderkinds. City on Fire, on the other hand, keeps getting better and better. It's a great story about numerous characters in gritty, 1970s New York City, and the writing is plot driven and literary. I'm generally a hardback novel reader, but I downloaded this one on my Kindle, and other than having no idea what page I'm on (27% through so far, but I'm IN), I'm enjoying the ability to look up some words that I'd never seen used. All you have to do is push on them with your finger and the definition pops up. This never ceases to amaze me and make me glad to be alive in 2015. Here they are:

horripilation: the erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear, or excitement

oubliette: a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling

vigorish: an excessive rate of interest on a loan, typically one from an illegal moneylender

monorchid: (of a person or animal) having only one testicle

Here's a sentence using all the vocabulary words:


I knew I owed him, so I descended into the oubliette, the sack of coins a monorchid hanging in front of me, a horripilating woman with the vigorish he demanded.

I challenge you to give it a whirl.

Books & Bakes February

photo by Sir Cecil Beaton, 1938

If you squint, don't I sort of, kind of, look like Gertrude? I even have a poodle! My Alice B. Toklas is Mirtha (just the cooking part), and I'm getting ready to have another group over to discuss Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt. Because the book is about a Vietnamese chef who works for the legendary couple, our menu is both French and Vietnamese. We'll start with Pate and Gherkins and French cheese and crackers while sipping on a French rose. Dinner is a Vietnamese Noodle Salad with Shrimp, Beef or Vegetable Pho and Tofu Bahn Mi. For dessert I've shined up my rusty French pastry skills (another life) and made a Vacherin with Berries and some Ginger Black Peppercorn French Ice Cream. I won't divulge what happened to my first meringue.  Did it burn in our ancient oven that predates Gertrude herself? I'll never tell. I told you that I'm rusty, a far cry from this gal who cooked in a four-star New York City restaurant back in the day under one of those maniacal pastry chefs you read about and an equally maniacal French-Swiss-Hong Kong chef who yelled so much, his white face turned pink and his tall chef's hat nearly blew off with the steam from it. Never at me, though. Never.

The ice-cream base nearly boiled over, too, but I saved it in the nick of time, and it's now sitting in an ice bath, slices of ginger and tiny multi-colored peppercorns steeping away. Oh, la, la.

Wish you were here.

The Things I Carry

In a small zippered leather purse that looks like the old-time New York City coffee cups, I carry the following items everywhere I go:

1. a cut-out photo of Sophie when she was recently diagnosed with infantile spasms and puffed up due to steroids
2. a silk and silver pacifier clip that someone gave me when Sophie was born and is emblematic of that brief time before when sucking on a pacifier was enough to calm her crying
3. a New York City subway token -- because I loved living there for the almost nine years I did so
4. a dirtied, softened piece of paper with a note from my father that accompanied a check he sent to me for a treatment we wanted to try when Sophie was a baby. This is going to work, it said.
5. Several angel charms
6. A LOVE charm
7. A Flow charm
8. A MIRACLE stone
9. A bug encased in a marble that I forgot to give one of my boys and decided to keep myself

Reader, what things do you carry?

Waiting and trepidation

That's Sophie when she was about 21 months old. We used the photo as our Christmas card that year, and it inspired the minister of All Saint's Unitarian Church, Galen Guengerich, in New York City to write a sermon about it on this exact day in 1996. Today is the day that we begin giving Sophie Charlotte's Web, with hope and trepidation, seventeen years later. Here is an excerpt from the sermon:

... Every new parent soon learns that the birth of a child changes lots of things substantially, the least of which turns out to be the thermostat. The essence of the Christmas story, however, is how the birth of one particular child changed almost everything. Yet my own guess is that the infant born to Mary and Joseph was not unusual at all. He was just another child born to parents who loved him, a lot like the child whose photograph adorns the front of a Christmas card I received here at the church just this week. The child in the photo is a beautiful little girl, about a year and a half old, dressed in white like an angel, with golden wings and a little halo of golden stars on top of her head. She's sitting on a bed which is covered by a white comforter, with a Christmas tree alongside. The photograph shows her face in profile as she looks upward, her arms uplifted too as if waiting.

But it's when you notice her eyes, which reveal an innocent intensity reflected in the hopeful openness of her hands and fingers, that you realize this is no seasonal charade. Her parents got it exactly right. Every child is born of his or her parents'  fondest hopes, the offspring of life's most fully-realized longing for itself. Especially at Christmas, each child is an angel in waiting. For some parents, however, the longing is more poignant, the hope more heartfelt, the waiting more riddled with trepidation.

You see, I know the angelic little girl in the Christmas photo. She is a child of this congregation, dedicated here on the chancel by you and me and her parents last December. But I also know what the photo does not reveal. She suffers from severe epilepsy, which subjects her to dozens of seizures each day and has delayed her development and put the quality of her future in serious question. The photo is no conceit: the little girl and those who love her really are waiting for a new advent of hope. In her case, it may come, but then again, it may not. 

The sermon goes on beautifully and even weaves some poetry of Seamus Heaney:

Peace on earth, men of good will, all that

Holds good only as long as the balance holds

For the little girl in the photo and countless others as well, the scales seem badly out of balance, tilted far to one side by the onerous weight of unwarranted suffering. Joy and hope, even when they make their occasional visitation, seem far too ephemeral to act as a counterweight and bring the balance back. Most of us have been lucky enough to know what life is like when the balance does hold, when pain and pleasure come our way in roughly equal measures, when experiences which bring sorrow don't finally overshadow the ones that leave us filled with laughter and contentment. But many of us have experienced the anguish of life gone awry.

____________________________________ 

Further along in the poem, Seamus Heaney admits how easy it is to stand idly by while malevolent forces or malicious people throw things out of kilter. He recognizes that none of us can restore the balance alone. Even so, he insists:

...every now and then, just weighing in

Is what it must come down to... 

The Bible is filled with stories of how God through the ages has weighed in to right the balance in this world. Whenever hope is lost and peace just a memory and good will nowhere to be found, God shows up -- through a miracle, the word of a prophet, the voice of an angel. That is exactly what happened yet again, as the story goes, almost two thousand years ago in Bethlehem. God weighed in, this time as a child, and in so doing once again united the Spirit of Life with the human heart and opened the wonder of heaven to those of us who walk here on earth.

Does that mean everything is wonderful -- that pain is banished and sorrow forgotten and evil forever vanquished? Not at all. Lest we forget the hard truths, life has an uncanny way of reminding us, through Christmas cards and newspaper headlines and late-night telephone calls. But the glad tidings of this season renew our faith that the balance will hold. To us, even you and me, a child of hope is born, this day and every day. To us, a gift is given: the gift of life, the gift of joy and laughter, the gift of love. 

How We Do It: Part XXXIV in a series

When I forget to take a breath and take a breath, it's like late afternoon sun that slants through a door, sirens outside, through a glass and down a marble bar. The bartender squints, his shiny black head gleams, I take a sip of amber and swallow. A long time ago, I sat in a pale coffee-checked armchair on the fourth floor with my baby girl. She was inconsolable for hours at a time, twenty out of twenty-four, I wrote in my spidery script in the spiral notebook for the visiting nurse. I tallied the baby's jerks. Despite the twice daily injections, the baby jerked and now screamed. One, two, three, four, five, a slanted cross over upright sticks, hundreds of slanted crosses over upright sticks. Two years earlier -- or was it? -- I had walked with the small bald Vietnamese man, at the back of the crowd, his robed bent frame in front, twenty blocks, peace in every step. I knew to breathe and how to. Sitting in the coffee-checked armchair on the fourth floor with my baby girl, crying, I knew to breathe. Breathing in, I calm myself. Breathing out, I smile, I said in my head, under breath and through it. The small, bald man gleamed at the front of the line, before the baby, in my head as I sat in the chair with the baby, as I sat at the bar years after the baby, as I lifted my glass, the amber, the sunlight. Breathe and swallow.

Spreading the LA Love In a Messy Way

Obviously I didn't take the above photo of Los Angeles, but there have been plenty of days that I've looked east and seen that exact view and subsequently marveled over this piece of crowded land that I call home. I'll be honest and say that I almost never agree with my friends who really don't like living here. The complaints are always about the traffic, about the nasty entertainment industry, about the crowds and the many ugly neighborhoods, about the tackiness, about the culture and the plastic surgery and the bad schools and the excessive privilege. I'm moving back to the midwest, eventually, one friend always tells me. I would never want to grow old here. Friends who have also lived in New York say that there's no comparison, that they miss the grit and the darkness and the chic and effortlessly cool people, the walking and the honesty of that city. I, too, adore New York and feel as if the almost nine years that I lived there were among the greatest of my life. I don't think a day went by that I didn't think God, I love this place! and less so, but still frequently, God, I hate it here! I see my fair share of the grotesque here in Los Angeles -- even at my son's benign high school in the San Fernando Valley, you might rub elbows with Larry King and his eighth wife, Sylvester Stallone picking up his kid in a gold Bentley, and a veritable freak show of eighty year old men with trophy wives and teenage kids. But you'll also see the California boys and girls of your imagination, golden skinned water polo players with tousled, stiff chlorine-tinted blonde hair, towels around their waists, jumping into jeeps with surfboards on the top. I won't go into Los Angeles' weather, because you might up and leave, if you haven't already, but what might surprise you is that the culture here -- the sheer size of the city and the incredible diversity -- rivals that of any other city in the world, I think, and you only have to drive

a

bit

to take advantage of it.

Last night, I had the pleasure of listening to my great friend, Tanya Ward Goodman, read from her new memoir, Leaving Tinkertown. She read a bit and then her brother, a tattoo artist and incredible musician with a gorgeous voice, sang songs that he'd written to accompany her. The performance was at a Masonic Lodge in the famous Hollywood Cemetery -- yes, a famous cemetery -- and it was filled with old people, hipsters, artists, attorneys, NPR folks, screen and television writers.  I met an attorney who works with families of kids with disabilities, and it turned out that she reads my blog daily and also knows of the organization that helps kids in the foster care system that I also work for!

Today, I finished a cake for a young girl's sixteenth birthday, and now I'm off to type for an hour at a performance art thingamajig going on at USC. I'll be pecking away at John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, part of a typing pool, and as soon as I find the announcement about it, I'll post it. Maybe I'll even get a photo.

Here's the cake in process:

I don't mind getting old in Los Angeles, by the way, as long as I have these things to do, the sun still shines year round, and I'm able to make a living doing the things I love.

Three Cities: A Short, Short Story

Urs Fischer exhibit at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2013

Nashville, 1988

A bed, a boat, it's all the same. She lay on the bed pushed against the wall, her back flat, sheets kicked out of the way. He lay beside her, hands folded over his chest. It was hot. The sun was high in the sky, visible from the bed. It was golden brown with fuzzy edges leaking into gray sky. The Laotians in the house behind them were cooking. I think it's dog, he said. She closed her eyes, ran a finger (she had long fingers) down, drops of sweat between her breasts. The air conditioner had fallen out of the window and lay in the dirt below. He had strained and cursed at the machine. The window didn't hold. They had laughed themselves silly, the bed a boat that rocked.

Nashville, 1990

That place was always in shadow. The bed was dark and wide, a mattress covered, no top sheet. Sometimes they started on the black couch in the front room. She was a silhouette, naked, sinuous (she had long arms and legs). He traced her. She looked over his shoulder out the window. A tree, bare of leaves, its thin branches reaching up, out of view, a tattoo on glass. Later, she lay on the bed and he smoked in the kitchen, leaning on the stove, holding the cigarette just under the fan, its cheap, electric hum.

New York City, 1992

Her bedroom was downstairs in the basement of the brownstone. It was carpeted, damp, quiet. A boy named Daniel walked through hers to get to his so she had set up a screen at the end of the bed. The sheets were expensive because she worked overtime, time and a half. He lit a candle before they started. It was winter. They were under the covers. She closed her eyes, head back. Was there a crackle? She opened her eyes, a blaze of light behind him over her. Fire! she shouted and they beat it back and out. The quilt had a hole burned through it as big as her hand (she had large hands), the edges charred.

Los Angeles, 2013

She wandered through the gallery, amused. Boxes placed here and there, drips of cement, a string of real fruit, a house made of bread, real bread, Persian carpets crumbed. Blue raindrops fell in a slant. The corner of her eye (she had large eyes) caught a bed, alone, a boat bent, black smudges on a wall. The bed was bent, alone. She closed her eyes, folded into it, on it, over and under it, the grey sludge of cement spilling.

The Brothers' NYC

Oliver's NYC from the Empire State Building

The Brothers are back, bubbling over with stories of New York City, filled with cousins and old friends, M&Ms and taxi-cab fights. They loved the city and are glad that they live in Los Angeles. They had a wonderful time and missed Sophie and me. They are at least a foot taller, their hair is too long, and this morning, when I was given a raspberry M&M, I agreed that it was delicious and then closed my eyes and breathed in the electric air.

I'm off to Washington, D.C. this afternoon to give another presentation to a group of health care professionals, so I probably won't update the old blog for a day or so. Carry on!

Central Park, NYC

Long ago time

Coney Island, 1995

This is me, about a month away from giving birth to Sophie, nearly eighteen years ago. It was late February, and The Husband and I lived in a tiny apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan. I suddenly and quite emphatically wanted to go to the beach, so we packed a lunch and caught a train out to Coney Island. I felt ridiculously happy. When I look at this photo, I don't see the future other than how important the beach would become in Sophie's life. She, not yet Sophie, and I appear to be casting a long shadow. Is there a metaphor in that? I can look at these photos of me, peer at them intensely and know nothing. All is inscrutable.  I think I sort of mourn that young woman standing in the cold sand with a plastic bag, lace-up oxfords and black stirrup pants.

After dreaming

Last night I dreamt of yard sales and marble statues, a baseball coach who was a sore loser and some rushing water, like Niagara Falls in the middle of the street. This morning I stood and scooped coffee into the well, my hair too long, a short notice from an old friend in my head, the stealth of fall in New York City, that gray bite of the sidewalk. Past, present, future. When I reached for the sugar on the highest shelf, I might have gone there, the past, I might have caught the tail of long ago love and my small children, peals of laughter and shreds of melancholy, but I let it swim by, pulled the sugar down and stirred it into my coffee.

You might not get this, unless you do

This morning, I pulled the strap of my sandal through the buckle, tight, and felt the muscle memory of a day spent walking in D.C., a blister forming on the bottom of my heel, the endless mall and museums, looking up and around and nodding, the rubbing a nagging, forgotten when I pulled it off that night and remembered a week later when I pushed the white bubble, the wrinkled skin a fingerprint over contained water. This morning, I pulled the strap of my sandal through the buckle, tight, and felt the muscle memory of a day spent walking, out of a hospital on York Avenue in September, the air cold, the scarves wrapped tight around necks and heads, eyes squinting with wind tears and the gray sky, the brisk life around me oblivious to what lay in the hospital behind me, my baby, my baby, pseudo-tumor cerebri they said, shaking their heads at the rarity. A complication from weaning steroids. It will resolve, they said, as they stuck their needles into her bowed spine, screaming, pulling the fluid out, relieving the pressure that I'd found, myself, a fingerprint over contained water on the top of her head, the fontanel bulge.

An End

The week after Christmas, and the skies had reverted to gun-metal. It was cold, and when I said good-bye, he turned into a crowd of people and I watched his back and then his head, and then the crowd closed around him and he disappeared.

Small Stone 20

A September 11th Poem

Beloved city, looking south, March 1993

On a Quiet September Day


The quiet morning light shines on the small black table,
once my mother's, and on the silver bowl from my wedding,
and on my grandmother's purple cut-glass paperweight.


            (Now four men are standing in line, waiting
for their bags to go through the security check.)


I move into the bedroom and pull my mother's trousseau
quilt, embroidered with lavender butterflies, smooth on the bed.


            (They are boarding the airliner now, moving
quietly into First Class, walking quiet, sitting quiet.)


In the kitchen I put down fresh water and food
for the cat, and then I move again to the faucet
to water the plants.


            (The men sit tightly clasped by their safety belts.)


Now I move outdoors, down the deck, to feed
the goldfish. They flash and suck into the surface
for the flakes, winding around the lily pads
below the waterfall.


            (The plane taxis, rises into the morning-blue
sky. The young stewardess smiles,
begins to move down the aisle, offering coffee.)


I come indoors to make coffee. I sit
down to drink slowly and to watch the hummingbirds
flash swift gold, swooping at the feeder, then away
in great free circles, then returning, radiant,
glittering in the sun.


            (The men have moved, have seized the
beautiful flashing plane, now head it toward the high tower, feeding on their dark fuel.)


Now I turn away from the shining morning,
and I turn on the t.v. to watch
this day's news.

-- Jeanne M. Nichols

Off To a Beloved City

I'm leaving in the morning for New York City, my favorite place in the world (except, maybe Florence, Italy) and won't be blogging for a few days. I'm going to the People Against Childhood Epilepsy gala on Thursday night. I helped found this organization many years ago -- you can read more about it by clicking here.

I've packed my bags, stacked up the old New Yorkers to catch up on and somehow micro-managed my kids' various activities so that The Husband doesn't go too nuts trying to do it all. I placed a call to The Neurologist and wrote her an email asking for some advice and clarification about this new drug that Sophie has been taking for a few weeks. I haven't heard from her, yet.

This is what I think: I DON'T KNOW.

Sophie has been having fewer and less intense seizures of a certain kind and more of another. She walks with a quicker step and looks pretty bright-eyed. But those big seizures, occurring 1-3 times per day just kill me. All of us. We're throwing those little pink pills in her mouth faithfully, but it feels more like this:



The dart appears to have completely missed the board.

Maybe it's too early to tell?

It's a crap shoot -- the anti epileptic drug game, and we've played it before.



Let's hope we raise some money on Thursday night to refine the game.