Please please please don’t nothing bad happen

There is a mundane rhythm to my life these days, peppered with ecstatic happiness.

Mark’s job is good. He’s become a regular media darling. This morning, for instance, he was on Morning Edition on NPR, and he was amazing. That great resonant sexy voice of his that I fell in love with over endless epic phone calls early in what I was too gun-shy to even call our “relationship.” And he was articulate, like he is. Explaining something that someone else using other words would not convey in nearly as compelling a way. That’s my boy. I got into work and one of the women in production said, “I heard your husband on the radio this morning,” and I broke out of my I’m-the-boss-and-mostly-professional mode to gush for a few minutes about how great he sounded and how smart he is and how proud I am, and then I sort of shook myself out of it and said, “Okay. Have a good morning,” and wandered off to my office.

And my job is good. I mean, there’s a reason when in every one of my interviews people prattled on about the employees there being “salt of the earth.” The thing is, they ARE. I mean, I’ve been searching like a truffle sniffing pig for some office politics and have yet to unearth any. It’s almost creepy. And Thursday I’m co-hosting a holiday party with the editorial director that it appears people are genuinely looking forward to. I mean, in our team meeting this morning I felt like that intangible element of team-ness was really taking shape. Two months in and I’m no longer looking out at everyone there as them, and feeling more like a natural part of things. (Sure, I still think they’re the Bad News Bears in some client meetings, but with firm gentle guidance I’m hopeful we can even make progress there!)

And Kate. [Insert proud mama rant jam-packed with love here.] What can I say other than she continues to dazzle and delight us. Our trip to North Carolina was another wonderful touchstone with the Miller clan. Kate discovered the joys of getting to know a dog up close with Chuck and Ann’s beagle Zoe. Day One she peered down at her from my arms. On Day Two she woke up in the hotel where we stayed chanting “doggie.” Day Three she sat in the middle of the living room and let Zoe lick her face. And in the course of all spending the days together, I walked upon scenes with Kate and her grandma and/or great grandma that were too sweet for any Kodak film to ever capture. And as the report goes (since I was in DC with Amelia and company), on the traditional post-Thanksgiving shopping day, Kate greeted every mall shopper she encountered with a “hi.” Mark claims she said that no less than 200 times.

Wal-Mart: If you’re hiring greeters on the other end of the age spectrum, we have your gal.

And sure, the nanny has put an occasional bur in my saddle. (You know, that ‘ole saddle of mine.) But overall, even when it’s just the coming home and getting Kate in bed then sitting on the couch with Mark to, yes, eat dinner in front of the TV (sorry, Mom)–I just get silly happy and have to do little dances and lunge at Mark with cheek kisses. Hooray! We have a sweet-ass little baby sleeping in that room! I have this plate of ravioli, here for the eatin’! I have my husband to sit with and not even maybe talk so much but just lounge head to toe on the couch under an afghan. What on God’s green earth could be better? I ask you.

I really really really don’t want anything bad to come up. I just feel like stuff was bad for a while. Or everything good was paired with something bad. I got engaged. My mother got cancer. My mother died. I got married. I got pregnant. My weird eye problem came back. But then the eye got better. And Kate arrived on the scene.

And here we are being happy even though, with the exception of Kate’s glorious existence, nothing really big is happening in our lives. (As much as we’re enjoying watching Lost on DVD, I don’t think it’s something we’ll look back on years from now and be nostalgic about.) But sometimes I can’t help feeling like this is too good for me to deserve. Or maybe just that my the-good-with-the-bad spate was the way my life was always going to be from here on out. But I’m hoping that I’ve broken that pattern.

Please don’t let the other shoe fall. Please let me roll with this too-good-to-last feeling for a while longer. I really am relishing it and appreciating it, if that counts for anything. And if it does have to be interrupted by something, hopefully it’ll just be that there is office politics at Sunset after all.

To Hell with Cancer

I really hate to always have something to whine about these days but the preponderance of cancer I’ve been hearing about seems a legitimate reason.

First I find out that my friend Barb has a 40-year-old friend with late stage lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life. Then Blanca, Kate’s former Thursday babysitter, tells me her father has cancer that they first thought was isolated and treatable and later determined was spread throughout his body. Then Mrs. Demopulos, Amelia’s mom, is diagnosed, which is a crushing blow since my mother already got cancer so it doesn’t seem fair that hers should too. And also because I love Mrs. D like a second mother. Then yesterday my father asks me on the phone in the course of an otherwise mundane “how’s the weather there?” conversation whether I’d heard that my Aunt Mary has colon cancer. (I had not.)

Aunt Mary isn’t really an aunt. She was our neighbor growing up and in many ways is closer to my sisters and I than many of our blood relations. I guess the aunts that you pick versus those that you just get can be that way. I mean, not to say anything remotely negative about my “real” aunts–but Aunt Mary is an amazing special person and force of nature. She’s super positive and friendly and fun and a great cook and has tons of energy and a fabulous head of (natural) strawberry blonde hair and you’d never know in a million years that she’s 87. In fact, she’s got so much vim and vigor that she takes care of her 92-year-old sister.

I still don’t know the complete story of what the doctors have said the deal is with Aunt Mary, and with all this other cancer news and Rose having died and the new job and new nanny and Mark traveling for work a lot stress, I kind of just can’t deal right now. Hopefully maybe there is something they can do about it.

Speaking of Mark, he’s away for one night for a work retreat and I’m forlorn like a schoolgirl. I think I’m still feeling the fall-out of the world’s stressiest week last week and while we all continue to transition into me working again, I would just prefer that he be here to sit in the couch with me and pat my hand saying “there there” as needed. Next week he’s away Monday through Thursday in New York. (Don’t tell any robbers.) I may well languish without him.

Speaking of “there there,” I really want to get Kate to sleep through the night more consistently. It’s never fun to be awakened from a deep sleep to go and nurse her, but when I need to wake up at 6:15 the following morning to go to work, it’s particularly unsavory. So, the other night when Kate had already woken up once, we decided Mark would go in the second time and try to get her back to sleep sans boob.

Kate’s pediatrician told us to do the ole Ferber thing of going in and saying in an unemotional tone, “It’s time to go to sleep,” and rubbing her belly to try to calm her down. Mark has done this a handful of times and more often than not it results in Kate losing her shit upon seeing him. It’s clear her internal dialogue then is, “What are you doing in here? I want the one with the boobies! I want miiiiiilk!” She starts crying hysterically and when he comes back into our room I always say to him, “How’d that go?”, and every time I think that’s a really funny thing to say.

What was so weird/funny/great was the other night Mark went in to do what we refer to as “there there” and when he arranged her blankets nicely over her and cooed, “Time to go to sleep,” she actually did! When he got back into bed we didn’t even say anything to each other because we were both bracing for her to lose it (and of course didn’t want to jinx anything). But despite us waiting for the other shoe to drop, she just settled back down into sleep. It was divine.

Of course, when he tried it last night, she lost her shit, and a few minutes later I caved and went in to nurse her. Ah well. As my grandmother used to say with a sigh of resignation, “What are you going to do?”

Sunday

Got a “not good news” call yesterday from my friend Amelia who I’ve known since we crawled around on blankets in each other’s backyards as our mothers looked fabulous in cat’s eye glasses and clam-diggers. Turns out her mother has cancer. It’s something that was just discovered in the past week, and they don’t yet know what course of action the doctors will recommend. I’m so incredibly sick of hearing about people getting cancer. What the hell is out there that’s poisoning us? And can’t it skip over the people I love?

What’s weird is that our neighbor who is pregnant just lost her father to a heart attack. And here is Amelia, eight weeks until her due date, and dealing with this horrible diagnosis that leaves her stressed out and emotional and checking on airline policies to see when and if she can fly, instead of nesting like a maniac like she should be.

At least there’s no terrible conclusive word on her condition. So I’m summoning all my powers of cancer-ridding thoughts and sending them across the country to beloved Mrs. D. Damn it.

After getting off the phone Mark and I were off to do some errands and I said I really should visit Rose first. She’s been in her final days for about a week now, and even though someone is supposed to call me from the nursing home if her “status changes,” I still wasn’t sure whether she’d be there when we arrived. I was already so sad about Mrs. D, but since geography prevented me from being with her (another adoptive granny to Kate), I’d try my luck at seeing Rose.

When we arrived, Marie, an administrator at the nursing home who loves Rose like a Mama, told us Rose was out in the garden. I had to admit that for a second I thought, “Alive in the garden?” Marie said they were able to move her into a kind of wheelchair bed and roll her out there. She was getting a manicure actually, from her son’s girlfriend. They were all out there–Rose’ twin sons and the girlfriend. Walk to the yard and turn all the way around to the left, she said, and we’d see them. “I’m sure they’d love to have you join them.”

Mark and I looked at each other as we headed for the back door. Huh. We’d been geared up to brace for news that she’d died, so it was odd shifting gears to the fact that she was getting a manicure outside. Odd but good, mind you.

Sure enough there they were. The garden was in bloom and sun was peeking in from the shade of the trees, and there was Rose in a hot pink fleece robe and black and white patterned scarf. He sons stood up when we approached (she raised ‘em right) and I introduced Mark, and we met Stephanie, Martin’s girlfriend, who was sweetly holding Rose’s hand.

Rose was more lucid than she’d been in days. She still dozed off often, but when she did open her eyes she smiled and laughed to see Kate. She even scolded us for not dressing her warmly enough. “That baby needs socks!” she said to Mark. Her sons shook their heads and chuckled. (Those twins tend to move in unison that way.)

We had a lovely visit. The weather was warm and comfortable, our sprits were high, and the garden was so peaceful and intimate that you’d never know looking down at our little party we were sitting outside a nursing home. Rose’s sons joked that according to their mother, none of us would ever be dressed warmly enough. We even took some great pictures.

It seemed, if only for a little while, Rose was back.

Farewell, Katie

Katie Couric, that is. For those sub-stone dwellers, Wednesday was Katie Couric’s last day after a 15-year stint on the Today show. And uncool as it is to admit, it kills me that she’s leaving. This is right up there with my despair over Judging Amy going off the air, though the Katie Couric thing is probably remotely more socially-acceptable to admit.

The thing is, I didn’t even watch the Today show very often, but it was somehow comforting knowing it was there. I’m one of those can’t-have-the-TV-on-when-it’s-sunny-out types. Or at least, I’m assuming there are others like me, and that collectively we make up a type. So, the last time I really indulged in the show was during The Rains.

There truly is something down-to-earth and likeable about Katie Couric. She’s articulate and all, but can be really goofy, and shares a good deal of personal stuff on the show that makes her seem like you and me, not some rich celebrity. Not that I didn’t already know everything that there was to know about her from my mother.

My mother was a world-class Katie Couric fan. Aside from the more largely known facts of her husband’s death from colon cancer, my mother knew that Katie was one of four girls, and the youngest. (Starting to sound familiar?) She was the celebrity daughter my mother never had. For all her accomplishments, my mother was bursting with maternal pride. And she’d ruefully express concern over Katie’s bad haircuts, or love life exploits. It seemed that despite the fact that she was one of millions of other fans, my mother saw herself as having a unique connection to Katie Couric. I guess that’s the secret to her success.

For the record, my mother also adored Matt Lauer. “He got his start in Rhode Island, you know!” For anyone who might have thought he cut his teeth in some other market, my mother had a grass-roots campaign going to ensure she spread the word that he started on Evening Magazine in Providence—our own back yard!

So, once in an unusual twist of Bruno-family geo-positioning, my sister Ellen, my mother, and I were all in New York City at the same time. Mom was watching Ellen’s kids as she did some film thing, and I was passing through to visit Mike and Lorin before a trip home to Bristol. The gods would never smile on us this way again, I thought. My mother was hardly one for jaunting off to NYC at the drop of a hat. I suggested I pick her up at a painfully early hour at her hotel, and we make ourselves part of the nuisance that gathers outside the Today show studio. My mother was thrilled with the idea, and I think she got plenty of mileage out of the adventure before we even went.

Of course, that morning I woke up with the after-affects of a few glasses of wine throbbing through my skull. But I felt like a parent who’d promised an excited child something. I dragged myself awake and managed to shower and get from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Tragically, Katie Couric was out that day. We were peering into the studio and didn’t see her. I thought my mother would be crushed, but she brushed it off and focused her attention on the dashing Matt Lauer. “Look at the cut of his suit! He dresses so beautifully.”

Mark Tivoed the show that day, and in a pan of the crowd you can see Mom and I waving along with all the other camera-hungry fans. And I have some good photos too. Mom was wearing a blue scarf on her head babushka-style.

When she was sick she told me that day was one of her “highlights.” And in the days that I was home taking care of her, we would wake up every morning and tune into the show on the old kitchen TV with the rabbit-ears antenna. Even when she was in an ornery sick-of-being-sick mood, or I was stressed because she was clearly not eating the eggs I’d cooked her, we could sit in front of the Today show and let the light and chipper mood of it all wash over us. Of course, half the fun was making fun of things. “Celine Dion. What a puke,” she’d say. Or we’d ravage the culinary merits of the meal a guest chef had prepared.

So last night I finally tuned into my recording of Katie’s final show, and had a good bawl. With Mom gone, the show had provided me with some connection, some continuation with her. And not only does it kill me that she wasn’t around to call when the announcement was made that Katie was leaving, it just sucks that for me here now it won’t be the same any more.

As Marie pointed out, Mom would have been happy at least that Meredith Viera was stepping in. She went to the Lincoln School in Providence, you know.