It is new year again. It seems every January I try to reimagine my life. Though the details continue to elude me, the dream stays alive. I am writing. We are traveling. We live downtown. We call it home, only because I have grown up enough to know that wherever I have been in my life, I have called it thus. Amherst, Akron, Cincinnati, Oceanside, Portland, Seattle, Loveland. Home.
I sit at Panera, trying to conjure up images of walking the streets in my winter boots, stadium coat, hats that I didn’t use to be fond of wearing, but now wear them everywhere because I finally have a haircut that can withstand hathead.
I text my husband, “Can you stop in on your way to work at the hospital?” If we lived downtown, he’d be at work in minutes. But we are suburbanites. How we got here, is the one story. How we arrive at another place, will be another.
Anyhow, he asks, “How long will you be there?”
“I’ll wait for you,” or until a new idea takes hold of me and my fingers begin to fly across the keyboard, in which case I will be here all day, or until the next kid pickup.
While on the Internet, I note too that I am “just checking in on the Quarter (The Gateway Quarter)”. This has become our pastime. While most people dream about the next golf course they will pursue or next beach they will inhabit, we dream of downtown. Actually, given our past experiences of life cutting short, we have already done the golf courses, the beaches. They offer no stretch for us, unless we are trying to achieve scratch scores or sunburns. I recall telling my son that his now deceased father would want him to go to the high school where he can best grow.
I can think of no better example of this, than to tell our kids, we want to move back downtown someday. Of course, for us it is back, only in the sense that we would be moving back into the city limits, which we both lived in off and on during our twenties and thirties (ok, maybe not thirties).
After a few phones calls, Mark realizes that he cannot meet me at Panera, not even for coffee, which I have already poured, part caffeinated and part decaf, for fear my mind could not keep up with my fingers. We decide to call it quits on the rendezvous and see each other in the morning. He is on call at Christ. If we lived downtown, I could see him for dinner. If we lived downtown, I would not be here at Panera.
He texts back a reply to my original message. “Is that what we are calling it now (the Quarter)?”
I reply, “Not sure…should we just call it home?”
Our lives crossed paths after our first spouses died, both of cancer, Mark’s wife Susan, courageously lived with lung cancer (though not a smoker) for five years. He has three girls, who were teenagers when they became mine, Cheryl, now 21, Shannon, now 18, and Kaitlyn, now 16. Devin, my husband endured a battled with leukemia and a BMT for three years. I have one son, by Devin. His name is Davis, and he was ten when he was blended into the mix. Now, he showers twice a day, like the rest of them. And we are in a position to reconsider the places we call home.
I wrote a book about my first husband, our life separate and together, his cancer fight, my reluctance to becoming a single mother and widow. No one wants to be called a widow, especially when you are 35. Three years later, Mark and I met. Three years after that we married. Three years later I am writing again.
I rather tired from my readers and friends and family who were always asking about when the next book was coming out. I contemplated the same, always frustrated that I could not respond quick enough to think that I was going with my gut feeling. I felt like I had to keep thinking about it. And if I had to keep thinking about it, then that topic was probably not the best option for me.
There was so much to consider, so much rich material when you grow up in a large Italian Catholic family. There is religion. There is ethnicity. There was my father’s family shoe store. There were my mother’s cookies. There were mental health issues. There is my mother’s dementia and my father’s Parkinson’s. Through it all, I could write another “cause” book, one that promotes understanding of cancer, caregiving, leukemia, death, grief, widowhood. But honestly, it would not differ too much from a Sunday Night Lifetime Movie. And honest to God, given the events of the past two months (see previous journal entry (sundowning), I could not imagine giving of myself to a cause that would consume my energy in any negative fashion.
I grew up in small town in northern Ohio. I love Amherst, but only now. It small town nature could not contain my wanderings or my attention deficit disorder, or my need to plod on a path separate from “Are you another Januzzi? Geez how many more are there of you at home?” or responding to the incessant berating by classmates, “Get your shoozies at Januzzi’s”. And while I now treasure those lines, they are forever etched in my lifeline, as a teen, my first and only reaction was to cut and run.
Amherst was then, by no means suburban. It has its own small town charm, the sandstone Capital of the world. A few Easters back, the kids, Mark and I walked uptown from my parents home, with our new puppy in tow. I snapped a picture of the kids standing in front of town hall, made entirely out of sandstone, in front of a millstone made of the material for which the town was famous for. My kids still dispute the fact and think that the town then was famous enough with the exploits of my siblings and I, but I will leave that to the general public and the retired principals of schools we attended.
They have heard stories of daring rooftop escapes by my sisters, hanging out the pool at the neighbor’s house, whose pool was in full view of my parents’ upstairs bedroom, skinny dipping at Andy’s dad’s beach house, despite the fact that my dad’s friend lived next door and was often complaining about the kids who partied there late at night. There are rumors of bus barn painting, and singing something about Vermillion and their donkeys, following a tough ninth grade football team loss and a suspension of cheerleading privileges for a time. There are also rumors of skipping lunch room for maple crème sticks from Kudrowskis bakery. The list is endless.
I often thought my kids missed out on the opportunity to grow up in a small town and I hope they read this with the intention to do so, to stay out of any areas which do not have a community feel to them. To be on the lookout for towns that are connected by sidewalks and families and family businesses.
During the month of December, I spoke only twice to my neighbors. Despite the many family hardships we were enduring underneath our roof, the only two women that I would have reached out to, had moved away. We all busied ourselves with the holidays, prided ourselves on getting up our Christmas lights, waving to the neighbors who were doing so at the same time as we, and congratulated ourselves on making the Christmas card list of people we hardly knew anymore.
Inside our home we were dealing with some of the more serious teenager issues and neighbors who didn’t know how to respond the first time let alone again. We were dealing with my mother who’s dementia had caused her some depression, lack of eating, too much sleeping and how would we handle encouraging my father and she to move somewhere where they could get the care they need. Mark had shoulder surgery, and I had pulled every muscle in my back. The roof was caving in on the place I had called home.
I had lived in that home for ten years. Devin and I had purchased the home, following his diagnosis and subsequent return to Cincinnati for his job. We were grateful at the time to be in the place where relatives and friends could lift us up. New to the neighborhood, we all bonded, as our children were of the same age, each new family became our family too. We had grown up that way, my mother always welcoming us to bring new friends and boyfirneds home, mostly they came because of the Sunday brunch. We had a lot more friends because of mom’s cooking. I suspect mom did too.
The home sat on a .5 acre lot. It was beautiful, with lots of sunlight. Over the years, decks were removed to open up to backyard living space of putting greens and fireplaces. And it was always home, for the kids, as they became one family. I took offense when kids chose to spend the day at someone’s else’s home thinking they were forsaking this place I called home for the comfort of someone else’s.
Mark and I met through my neighbors Mary Kay and Mike. Their children were the same ages as Mark’s girls, and they enjoyed a friendship was the fruits of the crossover of grades at school, lunch room duties, fundraisers, etc.
Mark and I were never the conventional couple. When we married, we had a wedding weekend, because we could never quite settle on a single approach to the ceremony, the party, the setting. We had one ceremony, two parties, three cakes and a lot of potatoes leftover from lobsterbake, potatoes which are still sprouting at our home on the lake.
What, you ask, you have a home on a lake? And you are considering moving downtown where the crime rate continues to rise at the same level of the smog on an August day downtown?
And I answer, “Well, yes.”
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