tonight we’re taking a break from charlie posts to write about what we’re eating tomorrow for thanksgiving. i like t-day because it’s my time to shine! i love cooking.
spatchcock turkey (we’ll see how this goes)
dressing
potatoes/gravy
squash
sweet potato casserole
green vegetables of some variety
rolls
cranberry orange sauce
pumpkin pie
pumpkin pecan tart
jane came tonight and the dressing, cranberry sauce, and squash are done. i made a pie and a tart last night. maybe i’ll try to get some pics tomorrow!
welp, liz is still contracting with no baby out yet. charlie is sleeping 18 hours a day. and we’re going to have thanksgiving on thanksgiving, i guess! we’ll see how jane and i do.
(i know we’ll do fine. i did thanksgiving on my own back in 2011. that may have been the easiest thanksgiving ever! i ate at the time i wanted to eat, took pictures along the way, and it was grand.)
tonight i made a pumpkin pecan tart for the first time ever. we’ll see if it was worth it to replace the pecan pie. then i decided to make two pumpkin pies for the heck of it.
why? cuz we like to eat (that’s why i run), and although life has thrown a lot of crap at us the past month, and i mean a lot (5 other things on top of cha), there’s still a TON to be grateful for.
let’s spatchcock this turkey. BRING IT ON.
while charlie was in high school, i was out in the world working and dealing with crappy roommates and meeting nate and all that jazz. i wasn’t in new london and hearing everything that happened to charlie on a daily basis.
oh sure, i heard the highlights. his friends drinking cough syrup and him abstaining (“i don’t need cough syrup to get my jollies”); his encounter with a girlfriend’s enraged father (i hear he barely made it out in his skivvies [heh, barely]); the summer from hell in colorado helping paul hardwick stripping wallpaper (…or something…).
and then there were the cars.
i think it all started with liz’s buick. (yes, liz had a buick. this is what happens when norm wallace decides to buy you a car: he buys you a car HE wants.) charlie crashed the buick, on an icy patch if i remember correctly. this turned out happy for liz because she got to put some money toward a car SHE wanted (a white mazda), but it started a chain of events that were undeniably weird.
then during the prom parade around green lake, charlie ran his buddy jimmy’s cadillac into the car in front of him. granted, they were only going like 15mph, but he still did some damage.
and then there was the time he ran into a deer with the jimmy’s pizza owner’s van while delivering a pizza. (NOT technically his fault.)
after all that, my parents decided it was a good idea to buy him his own car for some reason (all their daughters had to wait until college to get a car). i had put a good amount of money into my chevy celebrity to fix the rack and pinion, but i was still looking to buy a new car. so dad bought my celebrity that i would have sold either way, and charlie got my old chev celeb. which he then ran into a light post in the local lutheran church parking lot.
and EVEN THEN, the parental units got him another car. (i dunno; at this point it may have been prudent to think about letting him ride with friends or suffer the indignity of driving the wallace safari van.) (also, there is something weird about this. it kind of irks me. but you can read about that here.)
the next car was a nifty little manual black mazda, sunroof, drove well, for $500. good little car! well, cha decided it was a good idea to race his buddy (jimmy again, i think) around green lake. along the northeast end, there was a holding pond next to a curve and an intersection. charlie had passengers, and took the curve too aggressively and ended up crashing the car into the pond. after many people looked at the crash site, they all agreed it was a complete act of god/higher power/allah/earth mother that they didn’t end up upside down and all drowning.
that’s what it took. charlie didn’t get another car until after college. biking works.
so you can see the complete irony here with his car accident. here’s hoping his next car will last him a very long time, and he’ll be able to sell it to some teenager when he’s ready to upgrade.
when it rains, it pours?
so here’s what’s happened in the last 23 days.
charlie, obviously, is the huge one. now that he’s home, it’s weird looking back and thinking his entire ordeal so far has only been 23 days. unreal.
my cousin on my dad’s side had been battle cancer for a long time, and they quit chemo last month. just two weeks ago she was given one-and-a-half to two weeks to live. she died last tuesday and her funeral was on friday.
liz is at the hospital as we speak ready to give birth to a kid. at least this one is a big positive!
so yeah. not quite sure why everything is happening right now. wow. at least we’re in the home stretch?
guest post by jane!
Living in Austin for the first 7 years of my life didn’t leave many memories. I have more memories of living in New London (and almost none from living in Spicer).
But one specific memory (and possibly more will pop up as I write this), involved Charlie, myself, and a couple of tractors. We were gathering for something or other at Colettie’s home away from home on the George and Kathleen farm, a little half house connected to the garages set back near the barn and silo. Charlie and I were young. I couldn’t put an age to it; younger than 10 but older than 5. I’m not sure if we had already moved north, or were still living at the Red House down the road. What I do know is we were not old enough to drive tractors.
Being of small body and short-spanned mind, Charlie and I got bored with the adult talk at the gathering and asked to go outside. I believe it was summer because I don’t remember wearing a coat out the door. One of the main attractions on Kathleen and George’s farm is the barn, where all the hay is stacked, the cows eat, and the tractors live. I even got to name a cow once, but that’s another story. I wonder what happened to Red.
I digress. Charlie and I bee-lined it for the barn, saying hello to the cows that were lunching, breathing deeply to take in the strong hay and slight manure smell that comes with any farm. I might have suggested playing on the hay bales. I may have even suggested naming another cow. Charlie had a better idea. Let’s play on the tractors! There were at least two, one for each of us, and I took the front one. Charlie took the one behind, and wouldn’t you know, someone left the keys in it. I protested the idea of turning it on, but Charlie must have had a convincing argument. Or he did it without asking.
the scene of the crime
Either way, the tractor was on, and Charlie pushed the buttons in the right order to make it move. Who knew tractors could move so fast! Before I knew it, Charlie had rammed his tractor into the back of mine, jolting us a bit. I’m sure we had looks of panic on our faces. I’m sure we were nervous about getting in trouble. Before we could do more than blink at each other, a horde of adults stormed the barn with their own looks of panic and nerves. I remember George leading the pack with a look of terror on his face. Knowing tractors like he does, the noise we’d created probably brought the worst to mind.
We were quickly collected from the tractors and given a stern talking to about not playing around the farm equipment. At that point, I’m sure we were corralled back to the homestead away from anything that ran on gas.
I don’t remember much else about the day, just that we were lucky we didn’t injure ourselves. That might have been Charlie’s first run in with a vehicular accident. Who knew it would preface a lifetime of such events? (editor’s note: lifetime indeed – more on that later.)
the last three times my phone screen broke, charlie replaced the screen for me. it flew out of my hands onto the floor the other week, and the screen cracked again, so i bought a replacement and attempted the replacement myself.
welp, that didn’t go as planned. i think the directions i was following were not the greatest, because either it or missed a connection, which broke even at the slightest tug (i suppose when it’s been messed around with five times, it’s bound to break sometime). i think it was the earpiece, but we’ll see.
now i’ve put it together and i’m waiting for the battery to kick in. i’ve got it plugged in waiting to see what happens, but so far nothing.
might be phone shopping tomorrow 🙁
after charlie was in his accident and we weren’t sure if he was going to make it, something started unfolding on the interwebs.
for a couple people, those in the immediate know, it happened that same day. over the next couple days, the rest of his friends caught on, and it spread.
whenever i logged in to facebook, and it was a lot because i needed some sense of otherworldlyness and community, slowly but surely, many of cha’s family and friends changed their profile pictures to one they had with charlie. one after another, i started seeing charlie everywhere in profile pictures, and it was so comforting to know he had so many people rooting for him.
it almost makes me understand the france profile pictures, but with charlie, his friends actually did stand with him and not just put a good face on. they visited. they gave money. they sent things in the mail. they left him messages on his facebook wall even though he might not ever read them.
****
tonight i went to my cousin’t wake. she had been battling cancer for a long time; this was the third onset she’d had, and it had spread to so many difficult places that it was a relief that she was out of pain.
it was just my dad and me, and my dad goes to funerals to see people he hasn’t seen in a while. at the same time, i saw people who i knew from our austin days and from when i was very young. what was curious is that every single person we talked to that we knew, and even many people we didn’t know, came up to us and asked how charlie was. there were people who knew he was doing great and came up to dad patting him on the back saying it was great news; others asked him how he was doing; even more were completely surprised when we told him or her that he had been released to home. i even had people i didn’t know at all ask me how my brother was doing. i don’t think i talked to one person about my cousin whose wake we were attending.
****
coming together as a community was such a huge part of this experience. one thinks that you just have to handle this on your own. not true. more people care for him than you’d think, and that’s by and far the most humbling part of what happened these past 2-1/2 weeks.
coalescing for charlie.
today i was visiting charlie, and the RN came in just as i was about to leave and announced that he was going to be released tomorrow! woo!
here’s a list of things we’ll need to think about:
showers! bars and stools and where to put his clothes while he’s getting clean
keep that helmet on, boy!
his jaw still hurts when he chews. will this go away with time? will his face figure itself out when the doc does surgery to fix his face bones?
keep the cat away from the top of his head…
living with his parents again for a while
and in that vein, never being alone for a while
…and spending days with dad 🙂
…and then running to my house when he needs a break!
we’re taking a break from the charlie posts for a night because a) life update bullet time and b) i can’t think of anything charlie-related at the moment, and bedtime is fast approaching.
BULLET MONDAY…
thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK. how did that happen. this is my time to shine, and this year’s t-day may be a mess due to unforeseen circumstances (pregnancy, cancer, head injuries). at the same time, it all just might work out. and if we eat food on friday or saturday, that’s fine too. COME TO ME, SPATCHCOCK TURKEY.
i installed a ceiling fan in my bedroom. do you know how easy electrical work is as long as you have instructions? in fact, instructions make life projects in general a lot easier. because when stuff doesn’t come with instructions? well, let’s just say that nate and i call that stuff “rustic as f—“. in fact, i just made a RAF little crafty box and stained it tonight. i told nate that as long as it’s full of stuff, it doesn’t matter. (same reason my entry bench has some crooked inserts. NO ONE WILL KNOW.)
apparently i can’t print from photoshop with my new printer. i think that’s weird. photos print great from iphoto, but it has lines in it when i print from pshop. what gives, adobe/canon?
i have to get everything completely out of my garden tomorrow. i think it’s finally going to decide to be winter-ish around these parts. i still have some leeks, onions, and carrots hanging out in my backyard.
HALF MARATHON. yes. you heard that right. next may, liz and i will attempt a HALF MARATHON. i have 6 months. i think i can do this.
i’ve shared my story about the time my dad, charlie, cousin karl, and uncles greg and jon floated down the missouri river in 2003. i believe i focused on the bathroom aspect. (really, go read that. jane laughs every time.) what i didn’t focus on was how whiny charlie was! holy cow. he really did not want to go on this trip, and i feel like my dad thought this would be a great father-son bonding experience. instead, he got his oldest daughter to come on the trip and a whiny 15-year-old son. probably not what he was envisioning.
at one point, my dad told me his expectations for this trip were entirely different when it came to charlie 🙁 he complained; he was annoyed with the work; he didn’t want to be there. i felt really bad for my dad, as i knew i had sort of wedged myself into this trip and his son wasn’t really being a great participant. i think at one point, i actually pulled charlie aside and told him to shape up. cuz we couldn’t ship him out.
we spent three days floating on the missouri river. my dad and i paddled this weird almost-canoe that was great when the wind was at our backs. i got a pretty severe sunburn on my chin and an appreciation for porta-potties out of it. my dad was enamored by the white cliffs, and charlie told me more than once that every time he looked back at us, i was paddling and dad was sitting there (way to go, dad). we avoided the specified campsites and ended up camping for the night at weird locations – both islands in the river. the first night was an island full of yellow mustard weeds and a great latrine my cousin karl dug. if i remember correctly, this night our uncle jon passed around a flask of irish whiskey (i passed) and IPAs (i did NOT pass). this may have been charlie’s first sip of whiskey.
the second night was an island found while on the run from a thunderstorm, with no trees and barely a bush to dig a latrine behind. (this is where i gained my deep appreciation for any type of non-hole-in-the-ground bathroom facilities.) it thunderstormed all night, and the morning after, charlie told me he had been afraid the tent would blow away; i had been afraid the river was going to flood us out. neither happened, so we continued on our way.
OH! and before we left for the canoe trip, we stayed at one of my dad’s friend’s brother darryl’s house in montana. this guy had a giant pulldown screen with a projector in his living room. we watched “ice age”. he also had a lot of cars, INCLUDING a delorean!
that was kind of fun!
but the morals of this story, kids, are: don’t be a whiny little bugger. wear sunscreen. appreciate elevated toilet places. and don’t make your dad regret he brought you along!
