Your Assignment

October 13, 2008

When I asked Erin this morning if she knew why today was special, she said, "It's Columbus Day, right? That's why I don't have school." I told her that we did celebrate Columbus Day today, but more important for our family, today marked the day that her dad and I got married twenty-four years ago. She lifted a (barely visible) eyebrow and asked, "And why did you choose Columbus Day for your wedding? We're not Italian."

Rim shot, please.

Erin has scans tomorrow to check whether the heavier duty chemo has done its job. We have to report at Texas Children's by 6:30 in the morning. We'll drive up this evening, eat our anniversary dinner at the Houston Downtown Aquarium as a threesome, and report as ordered bright and early in the morning. Anyway, I heard you were looking for something to do today. Here's your assignment: we need you to pray or dance or cross your fingers or push your thumbs or burn your incense or polish your crystals for favorable results and wisdom for our future course of action. Please.

Erin continued to slump a good portion of the day yesterday, BUT not all day. I can tell you the precise moment she turned the corner. Her friend Congressman Chet Edwards arrived at our house 6:08 for a visit. She showed him our yard, the lake, and her room and visited animatedly about a range of topics. It pushed towards dinner time and Chet asked us to choose a place that he could take us for dinner. We offered him three choices: a fajita dinner at the park sponsored by our church (I thought maybe he'd want to meet some new folks and do some subtle campaigning), a trendy, newly opened German restaurant downtown (where again he might be seen by potential voters), or Gina's restaurant (which we felt would be virtually empty). He chose Gina's because he wanted to focus on Erin with no distraction. [I was actually fairly excited about the choice because I suspected that Erin's white counts were on the slide and the fewer people we mingled with, the better.]



Later that night after Chet and Chris had moved on, Erin was chattering away, might I even note bouncing a bit in her usual style. She said, "Time is so funny, momma." I thought she was setting me up so that I would stumble into a straight line for a joke, and she could deliver the punch line. I complied, but instead of a joke, I got a 6th grader's version of Einstein's pronouncement on relativity: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity." Erin's version: "time moved so slowly all day, I didn't think it was moving at all, and then dinner went by so fast I thought it was just a blink."

Last night wasn't just a fluke or the result of adrenaline. I called the house a few minutes ago, and she and my mother were baking naan bread and grooving to Rhapsody. A double batch (of bread, not Rhapsody). One made with Fleishmann's yeast. The other with nutritional yeat (Yikes! I didn't know such a thing existed.). Why? She has designed an experiment for her consumer science project comparing the two. That's all I know. I think she's made plans to hang out with Sam V. this afternoon when the baking's done. I hope she's home by the time we need to leave for Houston. Or maybe I'll just cool my heels and wait, letting her soak up a little more fun.