Kombucha, Cathy and the doctor in the Denim Skirt

Tonight is the residency graduation for the 3rd years, held at the such-and-such Lodge. I expect it to be filled with not-really-inspirational speeches and elongated introductions and Thank-yous to various people. It will mean something in two years, when that’s my Love up there, but for now, it’s blah blah blah and the graduation of a crew of residents I hardly know. My Love and I figure it will be nice to show our faces and cheer for the folks who are done with residency; however we are hoping to bypass some of the boring stuff by arriving considerably late.

Our wonderful sitter, Nicole shows up and after various configurations of hugs and kisses and last things with the kids, we are off. Our plan is to peruse the natural foods store kitty corner from our apartment for a few of our favorite snacks. Sincee site of the  graduation has the name “Lodge” in its name, so I’m picturing a lot of meat and grease on the food. I’m hungry, so I figure some hummus and a Kombucha sound a lot easier on my body than what’s likely to be served at the graduation. I’m psyched for our slightly devious plan.

To get to Lil’ Green Grocer from our place, all you have to do is meander through an urban park and your there, which is where I am now, searching for Kombucha in its usual spot, just below the iced teas, to the left of the locally-produced  fruit smoothies. It’s not there. Odd. I found out about Kombucha a few months ago and was mezmerized by this fizzy drink that tastes like a punchy, distinctive offshoot of sparkling juice – less sweet, with nuanced flavors and undertones that make it fun and interesting. Kombucha carries reputed health benefits ranging from sugar regulation to anti-aging properties, which in addition to whatever objective healing properties you actually imbibe, adds a fabulous placebo effect to the enjoyment of this cool beverage, which I recently began nabbing from the fridge of Green Grocer. I’m sorely disappointed to find an empty zone of fridge space in lieu of Kombucha of in a rainbow of colors and flavors.

I march up to the front counter and in a friendly tone (after all, I like the owner of Lil’ Green,) “What’s the deal with Kombucha?”

It turns out there is some question about the alcoholic content of Kombucha. Apparently rumor has is that a Kombucha set of Lyndsay Lohan’s alcohol monitor and that tipped off a frenzy of investigation, leading to the leading Kombucha company having to stop production until evaluation and possible relabeling is complete. Oh my freaking goodness. The other night I witnessed a drug deal right outside my window and when I called the non-emergency police number the lady spent five minutes trying to figure out which side of the cross street the dudes were on and by that time they drove off and she was basically like, “yeah yeah yeah, well call us if they come back.” She didn’t want their license plate number or want to know which way they went. But my gosh, if I’d said they were making Kombucha outside my window, maybe they police would have just looked up the cross street on their GPS and headed straight over to end the outrage, because the people who drink Kombucha might loiter around doing random acts of kindness and talking about the latest Green initiatives, and that would be a threat to society as we know it.

The owner of Green Grocer is on our side. In addition to being a sane and nice person, Kombucha is his best selling product. Sometimes life is just upside down.

So my Love and I get some hummus and some Mary’s Gone Crackers, and instead of Kombucha, I get an organic chocolate bar, 73% cacao. I like my drugs of choice to confer health benefits. Outside in the park, I lounge on my Love while we snack, and then we get in the car and snack all the way through rush hour traffic until we arrive at the such and such Lodge. I have asked my hubby at least three times if there will be dancing, or only food. I keep getting this answer: “Well, I’m pretty sure there will be food…and I think there may be music…” The thing is, for me food and music are almost meaningless without dancing. Moving to the music, letting sound and energy swoop through me is the thing that captures the purest sense of the word “Life” for this little woman typing words on a screen.

I ask my hubby to promise he’ll dance with me, even if there is no dancing. I give the face. You know the face. It never worked with my dad, but it works with my Love – and if relationships are at least a little bit about working through childhood issues, there’s a check in at least one box: Lover meets unmet childhood longing for adorable sad face to melt heart and lead to wish fulfillment.”

It turns out I was mostly right about the food. Lots of greasy vegetables, potatoes, fried chicken and some salmon that I’m pretty sure is not the Wild Alaskan kind that is supposed to be okay to eat. On the upside, the salad is unexpectedly delicious – dappled in cranberries, walnuts and enough dressing to clothe a small nation in oil. I also dig into the apple crisp, because it looks like the boring talks are in full force and I’m not sure I can endure this sort of thing without sugar.

The talks take up the rest of the evening, but they aren’t as bad as I assumed. A few are even funny. Of course it’s impossible for the evening to progress to its conclusion with me doing something mildly humiliating and that moment comes when the program director says in an artificially hyped up voice, “Let’s all give a round of applause for our support staff. YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE!” I see some people stand up, and I figure it’s a standing ovation. I’m all in favor of a standing O for a population that gets little of the glory or the paycheck, so I stand and clap loudly.

My Love looks at me, amused and says, “I didn’t know you got a side job as a part of the support staff.”

The unendingness of introductions, speeches and awards is softened by the fact that several of the speakers are funny, and because some were funny in a sort of cruel way, I have to assume that there is a deep connection among the physicians and residents. One excerpt of an awards presentation for faculty member of the year or some such thing:

‘So when Dr. Flynn showed up for her interview three years ago, the first thing I saw was woman in a denim skirt, like the kind I associate with people involved with fringe religions. And she was sitting on a desk. She looked really tired, like she had cancer or something, [which she actually did at the time] and I wondered about her, but ever since she came on board, things have just really looked up around here. So since you seem like kind of a woodsy girl,  Dr. Flynn, we got you some camping accessories. Here [he hands her a bag of stuff that looks more like beach toys than camping equipment.] Thank you Dr. Flynn.’

After the official event is over, people circulate a little, saying hellos and “nice to meet yous.” A young woman in a flowery dress comes over and touches my arm almost as if I’m special fabric.

“You must be doctor Kwon’s wife. I’m Cathy, one of the medical assistants. I work at his station. We love doctor Kwon. He’s our favorite to work with, cause he’s just so nice and wonderful.”

“Yes, he is wonderful,” I say, trying not to laugh out loud. I mean it’s true, my husband is one of the kindest people around and he is nice and wonderful, and I’m not surprised that the support staff apparently have a collective crush on my guy. It’s just weird hearing him spoken of as if on a pedestal of admiration and me the lucky woman who gets to share his pillow. I knew this guy whose pillow I share when he was a medical assistant who preached at a Methodist church when the pastor was away. I would have been fine if he was a nurse. Or an EMT. Or a boat fixer. Just as long as he was himself, doing what gave him joy, I’d have been fine with it. I just love him. And the Great Physician has a imprinted my Love with a calling in medicine. So whatever. He’s a person and I’m happy we share pillows, among other things.

As the crow thins and various conversations wind down, the band is still playing. Several of the doctors are in the band, mostly playing wind instruments. My Love’s dad, who is a doctor also plays a wind instrument. Is there a connection between listening for breath sounds and creating them for pleasure? I wonder. I also wonder if my Love is going to dance with me, after all. I’m not the mood to force it tonight.

And just when I’m thinking it won’t happen, it does.

My Love gently grabs my arm and pulls me in the direction of the music.

“Is it time to dance?” he asks.

In a whirl of stepped on toes and spins and a beginner swing steps mixed with improv, we dance and dance and dance and laugh the whole time. It is as if the band is playing just for us.

Professing love to the wrong person

It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m feeling tired and happy. Tonight will be my husband’s last bout of night float for intern year. And better still, once night float concludes, my guy will be on his last rotation of intern year. Just a month in the ER, which everyone says is a fairly light weight rotation in the scheme of things.  I have finally given myself permission to feel optimistic relief, to consider to possibility of a less demanding lifestyle. What a happy feeling to look forward to living into in these coming weeks! I snuggle into my Love, and our son who has joined us in bed for a little nap.

Suddenly I smell something and it isn’t good. A girl appears in the doorway and she is the picture of a princess in pink: velvet leotard; chiffon skirt. head held high.

“I pooped.”

Yes, there is a clear pronouncement if there ever was one.

“Where?” I inquire, dreading the truthful response I’m sure to get.

“I pooped some of it on the stroller and some of it in the living room and part of it is in the bathroom and there’s some in my undies.”

I follow the trail of brown smelly substance on an obstacle course throughout the house and finally back to its source. Lovely.  Avsi’s wipe down is quite an understanding, but she stands there quite patiently. Eventually she is more or less de-pooped and ready for a bath. I watch her poor water and soap on her terry-cloth frog, cleaning him as I have just cleaned her. I wonder how much poop residue a microscope would find in the water that is “cleaning” her frog.

With that taken care, it’s time to get ready to go. I’m meeting up with a friend at Living Room Theater, and my Love is joining for the first little while before he has to get sign out from the daytime at the hospital and start his night shift. I’m doing some very minor primping when he walks in the door with a frown and sad, downcast eyes that would leave a toddler’s sad face in the dust most days.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. concerned.

“You know how there was that weird thing that was supposed to be at the end of the year that I told you about, well somehow it got switched around and I have to work tomorrow. I tried to get out of and trade with someone, but I couldn’t.”

Tears. A feeling like being punched in the heart with disappointment. A feeling like it is personal, like the program must have somehow known that I had just mustered up the faith to feel it’s okay to feel like the worst is over and they wanted to sock it to me one more time. It’s irrationally. I don’t care – that’s what feels true in this moment.

What makes this moment different from others like it is that we reach for us each other. Instead of my enemy, this is my friend, the one with whom I’m linked in body, heart and essence, happily so, even in times that just seem unfair. We hold each other and it’s okay that I’m crying and he looks like his eyes are breaths away from letting out their waters. It’s okay to feel…fully…in each others’ presence…about that which formerly stood as the great impassable wall between us.

Upon seeing me cry, Avriana stretches up her arms to be picked up, then wraps her entire being around me. “I love you,” she whispers. Avsi, my Love and I hug each other for a while, then I fix my eye liner, wipe my tears and give a few quick instructions to the sitter.

Our friend doesn’t know my hubby is joining us for a for a stretch before work, so my Love calls her on his cell (since I don’t have one,) and leaves a message, which sounds normal until he pauses at the end of it and says, “I love you, bye,” and then looks at the phone like, “What the?”

“Did I just say “I love you?” he asks, clearly disoriented.

“Yep, you did.”

“That was really surreal. My brain is doing funny things. Well, don’t worry, I don’t feel any eros (ie romantic) love for her.”

I’m laughing and crying at the same time, because I totally get that when you’re zombie-tired, you do things on autopilot – who does he usually call and leave messages for? Me. What does he typically say at the end of whatever other content in the message? “I love you, bye.” So his resource-depleted neurons have made the equation as simplified as possible: When leaving a message, end with saying “I love you, bye.”

Whatever. This is what it has come to – my husband is so damn tired that he is like a robot, telling another woman he loves her, bye.

It turns out our friend, to whom my husband has unwittingly professed love to is held up at a meeting and will be late which gives my Hubby and I a chance to have a little date. I go ahead into our chosen location, Living Room Theater, while my Love continues the search for parking. We hardly ever have to deal with parking, living downtown, but we’ll be parting ways after Happy Hour, me to go home and watch over our roost and him to go to work and watch over patients hooked up to various machines.

I seat myself at a cute little table with a couch on one side and chairs on the other. When our server approaches, I beg off the mandatory alcoholic beverage that is usually part and parcel of ordering off the happy hour menu and order an acai white tea instead. I’m on a cleanse, designed to help my overextended adrenal recover from the last few decades of life.

Soon our sweetly skinny, eccentric and almost certainly gay waiter sets down a lovely goblet of tea in front of me, along with generous a hummus platter, augmented with with thick, round, warm pitas. I  It’s lovely to be together over yummy food. I learn from my Love that the first official artificial life has been created – a DNA strand identical to that of a known bacteria – a bacteria within a family of bacteria that can be harmful to people. So now there’s this constructed life form that can independently replicate itself and I think to myself, Wow, another potential way for humans to destroy themselves as I dip my pita bread for more hummus. We hold hands, look into each others eyes. Perhaps the thought of the world ending is helping me keep own destructive emotions in check, at least temporarily.

Eventually our friend shows up. She isn’t totally sure she heard the message right. I assure her that she did and  then my Love explains how tired and out of his mind he is and we all laugh. Then my hubby has to go. We kiss sort of wistfully and in a whoosh of scrubs, he is out the door. It still feels lie our weekend has been ruined, but at least in this moment there is the sweet presence of love as I watch him exit.

I linger and chat with my friend for a while and it’s a good time. We talk about the different kinds of love there are in the world, about mother-daughter tensions with our kids, and about what makes connections magical. Before I know it the clock as struck 9 and I’m a few minutes late home to a house full of kids who have been tucked in to sleep. Within minutes, one sleepy little boy pads down the hall and hops into the pullout bed and squirms until he has found the perfect position.

Elementary Functions

Its  a Thursday afternoon, toward the end of an unusually rainy May. Last year at this time our family was fresh off a plane from Jersey and we were embraced by lovely blue skies dotted with puffy white clouds.  This spring has been a little different.  Whereas we had summer days in February, May has been an onslaught of cold rains, punctuated by arbitrary patches of blue, with concurrent, literally out of the blue hail. Today has been the first pretty day in a while.

Today I get to do something uncannily normal: attend an elementary school function for our oldest – WITH my husband.  It’s daughter’s end of the year party, which is held early, due to the teacher’s upcoming foot surgery, which is complicated enough to warrant miss the last two weeks of school and being off her feet all summer. A  sub will see the kids through the last two weeks of the academic year. It’s the first time in a long time that we’ve gotten to go to one of her things as a couple. Most of them coincide with when Daddy is on call. The one other time he’s come to one a thing since internship started, he swore up and down the wazoo (whatever the wazoo is,) that he’d be home by 6:30, to pick us so we could go as a family, in time for our daughter to get there by 6:45, which is when the teacher expected her in the dressing room for the 2nd grade play. My Love (though I didn’t call him that on the evening in question,)  arrived 45 minutes late, with no phone call and twenty reasons why, until it was too late, he really thought he could get out on time. During that 45 minutes, of course I had to take the kids on my own, not knowing what was gong on.  It was that time of the month, to add insult to injury.  I was so mad I made him sit separately from me when he finally arrived.

I keep learning again and again that if you choose to hold expectations of life, then your happiness will be dictated by luck and a plethora of capricious influences outside your control. I keep learning this lesson over and over again because of two annoyingly simple and painful words: Unfair, and Promise. Immediately these two words put you at odds with other people, life and possible God. They even pit you against yourself, though whereas we tend to feel rage and self-pity when someone or something outside ourselves screws us, when we are unfair to ourselves or break our own promises, the emotion we typically feel is guilt. Lovely. Unhelpful.

With fortune on our side today, this elementary school function t is actually  fun.  My Love and I walk across the grass from car to classroom with linked arms and enter portable 2. It’s cool to see our oldest girl in her “other” environs; to observe her cruising around the room arm-in-arm with her best friend; then to our 2nd grader  sitting at her work table (albeit eating pizza and popcorn instead of working on class assignments,) and to watch her reaction when a boy offers her his crackers (something between polite disdain and innocent amusement.) When the party winds down, we thank her wonderful teacher. In the course saying goodbye to a fellow parent, I mention all the fantastic qualities of this fine educator and how perfect she is and then casually say something about how our daughter Nika said that while she’ll miss her teacher, the sub gives longer recess. At that moment,  As fate would have it, at that very moment, the teacher walks right by. I’m fairly certain she heard only the last bit. Food in mouth. Foot in mouth. And off we go to pick our little ones from preschool.

In a few short hours, my Love will be back at work for the night.