Category Archives: Sarah

Hung one more year on the line

Sarah

Yesterday would have been Sarah’s birthday. In her honor, we had dinner at the Hous of Grous. I picked up a chocolate cake (with chocolate frosting) at Stop & Shop. I asked the baker to pipe Sarah’s name on top, in purple frosting. “No happy birthday? Just Sarah?” Just Sarah, thanks.

Nate and Jennifer helped blow out the single candle.

And just like last year, I got to snuggle Jennifer’s little sister (and Sarah’s namesake), Caroline Sarah. She is just over a year old, and walking like a pro. I kissed her on her sticky cheeks, and nibbled on the nape of her neck. She is the most beautiful little girl in the world, and I told her so. I think she believed me.

It was a pretty good day. Happy birthday, Sarah.

You’ll know what to do

Nate, Sarah

I decided to take it very easy this Christmas. Somehow, I always get overwhelmed. So this year, I am allowing some of the more time-consuming traditions to fall by the wayside. For instance, we always used to drive up to Freeport, Maine, to do some Christmas shopping. Well, I’d love to, but I don’t think a four-hour car trip would be much fun for Nathaniel. We’ll pick that up again someday, when he’s older.

Then there are the ornaments. Sarah was a collector, God bless her, so there are approximately four times as many ornaments as we could possibly fit on an eight-foot tree. We do have a cathedral ceiling in the living room, though, so maybe someday we’ll find a fifteen-foot tree that isn’t too wide at the base, and put up all the ornaments. Sarah always used to talk about getting multiple trees, and having themes for them: this one would be fish, shellfish, and other undersea creatures; this one would be nautical; this one would be Peanuts (she loved Snoopy); and then the main tree for all the rest (travel souvenirs, hippos, manatees, etc.).

In the past, for some reason, we would have to unpack all the ornaments in a blizzard of tissue paper, and lay them out on every available flat surface, and only then could we hang them on the tree. This was more than a bit stressful to me; I’ve never been diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorder, but there’s definitely a part of me that wanted to whimper and hide when Sarah would get going with the ornaments. I also never understood why it all had to happen in one night.

This year, I took it at my own pace. I left all the glass ornaments in their acid-free storage boxes, because I didn’t want Nate to feel left out. Perhaps tonight after he goes to bed I will hang a few of them; the tree is half naked, but the important thing is that we took it slow and easy and everyone had fun. We’d unpack one, decide whether to hang it and where, and then move on to the next one. I gave him metal ornaments, wooden ornaments, and plastic ornaments, and he hung them all on the same branch, whereupon the branch buckled and dropped them all on the floor. And several ornaments went directly into the trash. I never liked this one; even Sarah never liked these, but they held some precious memory or other for her, now lost forever; and here is an entire bucket of oh my God those are ugly.

This should streamline the process even more for next year. The house can only hold so much clutter, and I am getting to the point where if something doesn’t bring me or Nathaniel joy, then I don’t see any reason to keep it around. We go to Goodwill every week on our way to the grocery store, and Nate has been very helpful in identifying baby toys that he doesn’t love any more.

On Tuesday, I took the day off from work to bake Christmas cookies. This was always Sarah’s department, and I skipped the tradition last year, just because we ran out of time. But this year, I bravely got out the mixing bowl and set Nate up on a stool by the kitchen counter. We mixed and mashed, and eventually got to the point where I realized that someone was going to have to roll the dough into balls. Uh, wait a minute now. You want me to touch it, like with my fingers? The answer was clear: ain’t nobody else gonna do it. Even Nate was horrified at the idea. But I am father and mother to him, I realized, and Sarah would have done it without a second thought. So I dived in, and you know, it wasn’t so bad. She would have been proud. At least until the point where I burned 24 of the 36 cookies into little peanut butter cinders.

We’ll try again today. Top rack only, this time.

Wake up

Sarah

Now what?

So today is the 232nd birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It is also the 32nd anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And yes, it would have been my sixth wedding anniversary.

Let me tell you what’s happening in this picture.

Sarah’s godmother, Anne Louise, performed the second reading, from 1 Corinthians: “The greatest of these is love.” While she was reading, Father Murphy sat down in a chair in an alcove next to the altar. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. Was he praying?

Anne Louise finished the reading. She stepped down from the dais and took her seat.

There was silence. Father Murphy didn’t move.

In the picture, Sarah is looking at me and whispering through her smile, “Honey? Ut the hell do we do now?”

I was trying hard not to laugh. Without moving my lips, I murmured, “I think it’s the best man’s responsibility to wake up the priest.”

Luckily, the organist was on the ball. He played a little filler music, maybe goosed the volume just a little on the coda, and Father Murphy woke up and continued with the ceremony.

I’ll never know if he was really asleep, or just deep in meditation. But this picture always makes me smile.

What’s in a name?

Behind the scenes, Nate, Sarah

Thanks to everyone who expressed their sympathy over the loss of Sarah’s jewelry. I think I am basically over it. It’s not as if I had intended to wear it, after all, and I still have the memories. I cancelled the maid service and changed the locks, and I (tearfully) gave the charm bracelets to Sarah’s nieces. I still have the first piece of jewelry I gave Sarah, a silver Tiffany bracelet with our initials engraved on opposite sides of a silver heart. That will have to do.

In the comments of the last post, Peg raised the question of how my blog got its name. It’s not quite as simple as she guessed.

Sarah’s totem animal was the manatee. She loved homely animals, and the manatee topped the list. She had manatee jewelry, manatee socks, manatee mugs, just all kinds of manatee paraphernalia. This made it easy for me to pick out gifts for her. A manatee trinket was shorthand for “I love you.”

When we met, I didn’t have a similar obsession. This made it a bit more of a challenge for Sarah to pick out gifts for me.

One day, when we were packing for our first overnight trip together, Sarah presented me with what she called a “travel animal.” She explained that one of her ex-boyfriends had been in the military, and he introduced her to the concept. Apparently it’s traditional for an infantryman to carry a small plush animal in his backpack, to be his “eyes behind” and help look out for danger. He shared the tradition with her, and now she was continuing it with me.

My new travel animal was a Beanie Baby: Happy the Hippo. I was completely delighted. Happy has accompanied me on every trip I’ve ever taken since then. He’s been all over the world. As time passed, however, we realized that this gift was much more than it seemed. It had revealed my totem animal to me. Any time I saw a picture of a hippopotamus, it reminded me of Sarah and how much she loved me. Soon the hippo-themed gifts began in earnest. We even made a pilgrimage to Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, where we took the Animal Adventure Tour specifically so we could go backstage and feed the hippos. (Of course, we also visited the Lowry Park Zoo and hung out with the manatees for several hours.)

The suffix -potamus entered our vocabulary fairly quickly, but it really took off when Nate was born. When he was hungry, he was a hungrypotamus. When he was sleepy, he was a sleepypotamus. When he was spitting up, he was a messypotamus (from Messypotamia, of course). And when he was cranky? Obviously, he was a crankopotamus. And when he woke us up in the middle of the night, we were all crankopotamuses together.

Nate inherited the (dozens of) plush manatees, but they’re not his thing. I await with interest the revelation of his totem animal. At the moment he loves penguins and turtles, but it’s still too early to say.

As for me, I still love hippos, but my collection has slowed way down since Sarah died. We saw a great wooden hippo puzzle while on vacation this summer, but in the end I just couldn’t bear to buy it.

I miss my wife.

Diamonds Are Forever

Around the world, Sarah, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Friday, June 30, 2000

Sarah and I are packing for a long Fourth-of-July weekend in Ogunquit, Maine. We’ve been talking all month about buying an engagement ring. My stance is that it just wouldn’t be financially responsible to spend that kind of money right now. We seem to spend a lot on travel, and we don’t have a ton of money in the bank. Sarah is glum.

Unbeknownst to her, I have already purchased a beautiful three-diamond engagement ring. It is the single most expensive thing I have ever bought, with my car coming in a close second. It is tucked away in the soap dish in my toiletries kit (which my parents always called a “ditty bag” and her parents called a “Dopp kit,” so go figure).

Saturday morning, as we are loading the car, she gives me a big hug, and grabs my butt as she kisses me. I know she is looking for a ring box in one of my pockets. She does not believe that I would leave the ring in the car. I can feel the disappointment in her kiss when she fails to find anything resembling a ring box in my pants.

When we get to our hotel, I pull some sleight-of-hand and produce a bar of soap, ostensibly from the soap dish, and place it in the shower stall. We lock her camera in the room safe and go to dinner. I leave the ring in my ditty bag.

Sunday morning, we are scheduled to go sea kayaking. We explore the Ogunquit River for a couple of hours, and head back to our room to change into our street clothes. While Sarah is in the bathroom, I put the ring in the pocket of my cargo shorts. A huge surge of adrenaline sets my heart racing. Oh God, this is it.

We wander through town, and buy ice cream cones at the store. We buy a wooden hippo puzzle. We browse the bookstore. We decide to walk the Marginal Way down to Perkins Cove for lunch. I am playing it cool, but my heart is still going a mile a minute.

About halfway along the Marginal Way, I suggest that we stop and sit on the rocks for a while. It’s early for lunch yet and the surf is booming. As we sit down, Sarah is thinking, “This would be the perfect place for him to propose. Too bad the dope doesn’t have a ring.”

We talk about this and that: how beautiful it is here, how much we love it, and how much we love each other. I say, “Speaking of love… will you marry me?”

Sarah laughs. “Of course I will, silly.” She doesn’t yet realize that this is It.

I laugh too. “Well then. I suppose I’d better give you this.” I pull out the ring box and offer it to her with shaking hands. She is speechless; we both start to cry and laugh.

I ask her several times if she was really surprised. She was always difficult to surprise, but just this once, I got her good.

At lunch, she shows it off to the waitress, and anyone else who will hold still. She plays with the sunbeams, breaking them into a constellation of rainbows that shine on the ceiling, on her face, on me.

March 1, 2006

I am with Sarah in the Emergency Department. She refuses to believe that she is dying. As they are getting ready to intubate her, I ask her if there is anything special she would want anyone to have, just in case. “No,” she says. I give her a stern look: just in case. “Give my charm bracelets to the girls, then.” She means her nieces, Catherine and Eliza. And the charm bracelets are her most iconic pieces of jewelry. They are choked with memories. There is one charm for every trip she’s ever taken. I start to cry. She squeezes my hand and says, “Hey. I’m not going anywhere.”

October 7, 2007

Nate and I are at the bagel place with Sarah’s family. Her sister, Sue, brings up Egypt, and Eliza’s face lights up. She says, “I remember when you guys went to Egypt, Sarah had those gold pendants made for us, with our names in hieroglyphics!”

I leave Nate with Sue; I have to run back to the house for something. While I am there, I decide it is time. I go upstairs to get the charm bracelets, and to double-check that I know where Sarah’s hieroglyphics pendant and bracelet are located. When I open the jewelry box, however, I discover that it is basically empty. All of Sarah’s gold jewelry has been stolen.

The engagement ring is gone. Our wedding rings. The Egyptian bracelet and pendant. Her manatee earrings and charm. The opal she bought in Australia. The three-strand braided pearl necklace I gave her the night Nathaniel was born. The list is a long one; she loved pretty things. Bracelets, necklaces, earrings. She had a lot of jewelry.

But they left me the charm bracelets. Silver, you know. Not worth taking.

Is dis love?

Sarah, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I am feeling much better, thank you. Last week’s fever really messed up my head, though. As I mentioned in my last post, when I tried to read, or write, the words would rearrange themselves on the page as I was looking at them. It occurs to me to wonder if this is what it was like for Sarah.

You see, Sarah was dyslexic. I read pretty fast, when I’m not febrile, and she used to take it as a personal offense that I could finish a book in the time it would take her to finish a chapter.

Sarah had an extensive collection of floaty pens, so the word Eskesen was pretty common in her vocabulary. When we were first dating, every time she would say Eskesen, I would correct her: no, it’s Eseksen. And when she would say Eseksen, I would correct her: no, it’s Eskesen. It got to the point where even I didn’t know which was right any more. I managed to keep a straight face for almost two months before I couldn’t keep it going any more, and confessed. We laughed, but then she said, “That’s a really mean thing to do to a dyslexic.”

One day she called me from work, giggling. “Hi honey,” she said. “I saw the strangest headline on CNN.com today. It said, CLAM BELLIES UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST. And I thought, what could that possibly be about? Is it because shellfish aren’t kosher? Or, what’s-it, halal? Maybe something to do with the oil spill?”

I didn’t know.

“So then I went to a meeting, and when I got back to my desk, it said, CALM BELIES UNREST IN THE MIDDLE EAST. That makes a lot more sense, don’t you think?”

We shared a good chuckle over that. Her sign-off was the same, whenever she looked silly: “Aren’t you lucky? You get to keep me.”

Where the horses run free

Around the world, Nate, Sarah

It must have been around 1999 when we took Annie and Ben and Lisa over to Martha’s Vineyard for the day. We bopped around Vineyard Haven for a little while, then took a cab to Oak Bluffs to ride the carousel.

The Flying Horses Carousel has been in operation since the late 1800s. It claims to be the oldest operating platform carousel in the nation, but I’ve noticed that they all claim that. I wasn’t around then, so I can’t say. The important thing is that Sarah had been riding the Flying Horses since she was a little girl.

This is the first carousel that I had ever ridden that included a ring grab. The ring machine arm is in easy reach. You can grab ring after ring, but they’re all steel. Towards the end of the ride, the operator puts the one and only brass ring into the chute, and one lucky rider grabs it and gets a free ride.

Native Islanders have perfected the multiple grab technique. I once saw Jeremy get six rings on one pass. Sarah was no slouch, either, but she had never caught the brass ring… until that day. She whooped with laughter and held it up. I think Ben took a picture. We all filed off the carousel, but she stayed on to collect her free ride with the next group of riders.

Under the cover of the crowd, I went to the concession stand and bought a souvenir brass ring, with a purple ribbon (her favorite color, of course). By the time she was off the ride, I had hidden it safely away in my pocket.

On the ferry ride home, we rode right up front in the bow of the boat. She noticed the tears in my eyes and asked me what was wrong.

“Nothing; I’m just so happy.” She started to tear up too, and gave me a big hug. I said, “I feel as if I’m the one who caught the brass ring. I’m so lucky to have found you.” Then I pulled the crumpled paper bag out of my pocket. “I bought you a present…”

The summer that Nate turned one, the weather was brutally hot. We took him to the mall fairly often, to escape the heat in their air conditioning. The food court had a big, fancy carousel, and after one of our lunches, I suggested that we take Nate on it. “No,” said Sarah. “I want his first carousel ride to be the Flying Horses.” Sure enough, it was; later that summer, we sailed over, and she took him on his first ride. He wasn’t sure what to make of it all, being so young, but he didn’t seem to mind.

Last month, my mother and I rented a house on the Vineyard for a week. It was her first time there, and I was overjoyed to be playing tour guide once more. Early in the week, we spent the day in Oak Bluffs, and of course, we had to ride the Flying Horses.

“Nate, do you remember the Flying Horses?”

“No…”

“This is the first carousel you ever rode. Your mama took you when you were just one.”

At first, he wanted an outside horse, but the inside horses are lower and much less scary, so we switched to an inside horse. I belted him in, and pointed out the ring machine. I wasn’t sure he would be able to manage it, but I held him tight, and by durn if he didn’t get a ring every time around. I was so proud as he stacked them up, six, seven, and ah, God, Sarah should have been here for this. I hid my tears from him as best I could, but he felt me sobbing. “Why are you laughing, daddy?”

“Because I’m so happy! You’re doing a great job.”

Usually I let him see me cry, but I didn’t want to spoil his moment. I managed to wipe my eyes with my shirt and put on a smile, just before he turned to show me what he had in his hand.

The brass ring.

Two-part invention

Nate, Sarah

It was almost midnight on Christmas Eve, 2002. Sarah and I were at her parents’ house. The party was over, and I had eaten far too many cookies, as usual. I was lying on the floor like a beached whale, watching the end of Holiday Inn, also as usual.

When the movie ended, we made up the pull-out couch in the office and crawled in. I snuggled close and wrapped my arm around her. I whispered in her ear, “Merry Christmas, honey.”

Then my eyes snapped open. “Oh, my God. You’re pregnant!”

“Now, honey,” she said. “Even if I am, it’s too early to tell. And it might take us a while. I don’t want you to get your hopes up.” But I just knew.

A few days later, we went to CVS to buy a pregnancy test. I picked up a single pack. Sarah said, “They’re cheaper if you buy three.”

I smiled. “We don’t need three. We don’t even need one. I already know you’re pregnant.” She laughed, and we bought the single pack.

Seven months later, and she was as big as a house. We were going sailing with Sarah’s parents. We were in the dinghy, on our way out to the boat, when I was struck by the same cosmic lightning that had hit me on Christmas Eve. “We’re having a girl,” I said.

Sarah turned and looked at me. She peered into my eyes.

“Baloney,” she said.

Happy birthday, Nathaniel.

Ouija Board

Nate, Sarah, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

The latest craze at day care: Perler Beads. They’re just the right size to fit up Nate’s nose, but aside from that, they’re actually pretty cool. They are little plastic beads that come in all different colors. You arrange them on a pegboard in pretty patterns (or completely at random, if you’re Nate). Then you cover them with wax paper and heat them with an iron. They melt a bit, fuse together, and presto, you’ve got a nice little suncatcher or what-have-you. Just hit the link above if you’re having trouble visualizing it. The kids love them, and they are super good for honing fine motor control.

Anyway, the day care center’s petty cash has been a bit low lately, so I’ve been subsidizing vast quantities of Perler Beads for Nate’s classroom. On our most recent trip to the crafts store, Nate asked if we could get some for our house. Why not? They’re cheap. We got the basic bucket starter kit, complete with simple geometric shape pegboards.

As soon as we got home from the store, he was frantic to try them out. I set him up with a cup of beads and a heart-shaped pegboard. He quickly put beads around the perimeter and asked me to iron them. Down to the basement I went, pleased that I knew exactly where the iron was, even though I had never used it. And that brings me to the title of this post, because I have a question for Sarah:

What in hell is this gunk on the iron?

Please don’t tell me you actually tried to use it to make a grilled cheese sandwich. I was totally kidding when I suggested that.

Anywhere With You, Part II

Around the world, Sarah

My sister, Veronica, spent many years living in California. Mostly it was Santa Cruz, but she lived in Arcata while she was working on her undergraduate degree. Last year she relocated to North Carolina to go to graduate school. That’s still quite a ways away from us, here in New England, but she is living in Massachusetts for the summer. This is a rare treat; we don’t usually get to see her very often.

A few weeks ago, she came to dinner at our house. After I’d put Nate to bed, we got to have a real, grown-up conversation. She observed how strange it is that the town where we grew up no longer feels like home to either of us. We agreed that it can take years before a place starts to feel like home. She’ll be going back to North Carolina soon, but her heart is in Santa Cruz.

Veronica asked me where I considered my home to be. I had to stop and think about it.

When Sarah and I started planning a family of our own, we knew we couldn’t stay in Salem. It was a fun place to live, but it did have a few drawbacks. I never felt terribly safe living there. It’s at least half an hour’s drive to get to a major highway, and Sarah told me that the public schools were a nightmare. Sarah was living in Brookline when I met her; we loved it, but no way could we afford to buy there. So we drew circles on the map around her parents’ house, my dad’s house, and her sister’s house. I sat down with the Commuter Rail schedule, and she sat down with the public school rankings and per-student expenditures tables. We arrived independently at the same suburban town. I can’t recommend house-hunting with someone who is eight months pregnant, but it didn’t take us long to find the perfect house. We moved into our new home a little less than a month before Nate was born.

Sarah was the one who was putting down roots here. She joined the Mom’s Club, and took Nate out exploring every day. They went to the library, they found all the playgrounds and parks, they took Baby Yoga together. Now that she’s gone, Nate goes to day care, and I spend most of my waking hours at work. I have made a few close friends in town, but I can’t say with any degree of conviction that this is where I was meant to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no intention of moving. This is Nate’s home, if nothing else, and I want to give him as much stability as I possibly can. I do like living here, and I know it will seem like home to me soon enough.

But the question remains. If money were no object… if Nate were grown and living on his own… where would I want to be? Where do I belong?

There are a number of places where I can remember feeling at peace, but they’re not home.

Home is wherever Sarah is.