Best Christmas Gift Ever

We took my youngest sister, who has lived with a chronic lung disease for 14 years, to the emergency room on Wednesday, December 16 with a very bad cold. So she thought. After a slew of tests and breathing support, they recommended intubation and told her and us--me and another one of her sisters--that with her disease, she "probably would not come out of it." Ruth immediately declared  that she wasn't ready to die yet and was willing to live with constant oxygen support if she needed that in the future. I was to treasure those fighting words for many days to come.

They transferred her to the Intensive Care Unit, inserted the breathing tube, and connected her to a ventilator Wednesday evening. At that point the bubbling and feisty personality of my little sister vanished, and her body was transformed into a large lump of flesh splayed out in a hospital bed, connected with wires and tubing from every point imaginable to machines that dispensed life-sustaining substances, and monitors that reported on their efficacy or lack of it. Her face was unrecognizable: her eyes remained closed and her nose and mouth were occupied territory. Other connections came from her arms and legs, holding her poised like one of those sprawling cardboard doll puppets that I remember from childhood and have seen in old European toy collections. Still other connectors were covered by her hospital gown and a blanket. I did not dare to look.

The week before Christmas passed with early-morning visits to the hospital to check with the night nurses, the doctors on their rounds, and the day nurses. I cannot remember the last time that I was ever out of my house so early in the morning consistently for so many days; even way back in my going-outside-to-work days I took weekends off! Not now. After the hospital routine I emailed regular reports to Ruth's many friends, fielded phone calls, conferred with my two other sisters on trivial and important practical matters, spawned by the imagining of dozens of "what-if?" scenarios, and planned our small family Christmas dinner, which was to be at our house this year and now, we soon realized, would consist of eight instead of nine family members.

Prayers, positive thoughts, and skilled and caring healthcare professionals worked their many small miracles, and after a week, Ruth was ready to be extubated, i.e., to have the breathing tube that trailed down her throat removed. The aftermath of this procedure is not always as safe and certain as I would have thought, and definitely not as safe and certain as one would wish. More family conferences with "what-if?" scenarios. More "if-then" decisions. More hoping against hope.

The tube was removed Christmas Eve afternoon and the outcome is positive.  There are fewer connectors stringing out from body parts now; Ruth's mouth is free again to open and close, though she cannot produce many sounds yet, and no words. The outer part of her nose is still occupied territory, but with smaller equipment, and the eyes are open. Ruth looks around curiously with her beautiful big brown eyes and seems to be trying to fathom where she is and what has happened. I imagine she must wonder how much time has gone by, and I can only guess what memories or dreams she may have from her ten days of deep sleep. Each daily visit starts with new hopes and goals and is tempered with small achievements. It is going to be a very long process for Ruth to gain enough strength to live her life in what will undoubtedly be a new normal.  But she is back with us, and that is the greatest gift we could have.

Holiday Highlight: Krohn Conservatory

Last Friday I had one of my "we-try-to-get-together-every-month-even-if-we-don't-always-succeed" days with my sister Nancy. After a delicious lunch at O Pie O near her home in O'Bryonville, we moved on to the Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park, one of the city of Cincinnati's renowned parks. At this time of the year, the Krohn's special show was "The Poinsettia Express," and we spent a lovely hour or so engulfed in poinsettias, but we also walked through some of the permanent expositions of greenery, and that was a calm amid the storms of hectic life experiences and the season. The picture to the left shows the entrance to the special poinsettia room, where, in addition to wonderful groups of amaryllis, speckled caladiums, and crimson-and-white dappled  poinsettias, there was "botanic architecture" of Cincinnati's historic landmarks, made from locally sourced willow twigs and other natural objects, a design and assembly of the aptly named and nationally recognized Applied Imagination organization. I recognized several of the Cincinnati buildings--Symphony Hall, the Incline, the Roebling Bridge--not least of all through the efforts of my sister, who has helped me get to know the city through our almost-monthly visits.

Model trains run through this miniature landscape--Applied Imagination founder Paul Busse has always been fascinated by trains and created his first public garden railroad for the Ohio State Fair in 1982. By 1984 he had officially added model trains to the garden creations that he now makes in numerous cities throughout the United States.  One of those installations is at the New York Botanical Garden, and THIRTEEN, the WNET public television station, has made an excellent video describing the process of creating botanical architecture, especially as it is applied to the buildings of New York.

The poinsettia tree is so high that I was unable to get its full height within my iPad camera!

"On Learning Norwegian"

As usual on my recent travels through the Dayton airport, I visited the excellent small bookstore in the terminal, and this time I came away with three books. I got through one (An Uncomplicated Life: A Father's Memoir of His Exceptional Daughter, by Paul Daugherty) and left it with an enthusiastic recommendation to my friend in Aalborg. I still had five that I had acquired in Dayton and Denmark--and we are talking physical books here--so you would think that I wouldn't need to buy another on the trip back from Orlando to Dayton. However, I walked into the Hudson book shop in Orlando and fell over a new release called Freeman's Arrival. It is a collection of short stories by various authors, described on the cover as "The Best New Writing on Arrival." I was captivated by the idea of having a whole book about arrivals in the departure lounge of an airport, and when I saw that one of the pieces was "On Learning Norwegian," by Lydia Davis, my will power disintegrated.

I did not know Lydia Davis before I picked up this book, but remembering my own long (and continuing) efforts to learn Danish, I thought I could understand why "On Learning Norwegian" might represent an arrival of sorts. Davis learning Norwegian was not like me learning Danish, however. Her story recounts her own experience in reading a 426-page (plus appendix) "novel" by Dag Solstad that "gives detailed accounts of the births, marriages, deaths, and property transactions of Solstad's ancestors in Telemark from 1691 to 1896." She read this book without previously knowing a word of Norwegian, and she didn't use a dictionary.

By the time she finished the book, she knew some Norwegian, and she understood the narrative. The story that fascinates me lies in her reflections of how she successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) puzzled out meaning from letters on a page.

It took her over a year to read the book. It took me less than two hours to read the 56-page story. I finished the last paragraph about a minute before we touched down and arrived at the Dayton airport.

Home for the Holidays

We are home in Cincinnati, having touched down at the Dayton airport on Thursday morning after a short trip to Denmark by way of Orlando. We spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Copenhagen. We didn't sit down for the traditional turkey dinner on Thursday with family, but we did sit down for a very good dinner and warm evening conversation with cousins of Johannes earlier in the week, and later in the week we enjoyed several days with old and good friends in Aalborg. And we had taken advantage of our Orlando safe departure point (safe because we thought we might not have to fight bad weather if leaving from Chicago or the northeast, and we were right) to spend a day with my aunt, who is approaching 92 and still living independently in Kissimmee. Good visits, all.

Now I have done three loads of laundry, and most of the books, DVDs, recipes, clothing, Christmas decorations, and food that we acquired in Denmark have found their proper places. Well, the Christmas material is in a staging area until I pack the fall decorations away--they were out a very short time this year. And yes, I did carefully avoid the customs' officer's question "Did you bring any food with you?" and waited to answer "no" until he specified "fruit, vegetables, meat." We declared the two bottles of aquavit, and I kept my mouth shut, until now, about the seven packages of kransekager that I was bringing back to the julefest of the Scribblers and Readers groups of the Scandinavian Society of Cincinnati. I honestly forgot about the ham bouillon cubes, the cardamom, and the yellow dried peas for soup that I had purchased the week before. (It's hard to believe that I blanked out about the cardamom after the security agent in Copenhagen airport had thoroughly disrupted my carry-on bag, searching for a container the size of a roll-on deodorant, and came up with a spice jar instead, but these lapses happen when you travel over time zones.)

In addition to catching up with work, I have spent time creating a fun quiz for the Scandinavian fest on Monday. It has been interesting to have thoughts of, for the most part, descendants of Scandinavians who formerly immigrated to the U.S. and of friends and family who are presently living in Denmark all going through my head at the same time. Thoughts of those journeys and those efforts to create home shuffle around with thoughts generated by the book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia (Michael Booth), which we discussed at Readers and which I am using as a springboard for the Christmas party quiz. Part of the conversation with others and with myself over the past two weeks has been a new awareness of immigrants who returned to their home country--and we could include expats in that group--and why and how. And so I woke this morning with a deep appreciation of the experience of living in this modern world that now makes it relatively easy to travel periodically from one home to another and to enable individuals to preserve and strengthen ties with friends and family no matter where they live.

End of the Fall Term at OLLI

One of the reasons I have found it hard to contribute to this supposedly weekly blog of late is that I have had a heavy schedule of classes with OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute's adult learning course offered in this city through the University of Cincinnati. I first started with OLLI in the summer of 2014--I signed up even while I was living in Spain--and attended the summer program of single-session lectures on different topics. Fall, winter, and spring sessions offer a combination of single-session lectures and regular six or eight-week courses that meet once a week.

I have two good multiple-week courses this fall. Financial Planning is one of those for which I was long overdue. It would be stretching the truth to say that I have enjoyed it. Rather, I found it valuable, since I have now reached the age where decisions have to be made about the various pots of money that I put away toward retirement during my working life. I have been fortunate to have a partner who was more interested than I in exploring investments and following the stock market; of course I should have been more involved to maximize the value of my savings, but frankly, I found it boring. Now after this class I am motivated, and while I still find investments tiresome, I no longer pass over the emails from the organizations where my money is sitting, nor do I pass the statements on without opening them. That is a small but positive and measurable outcome, I told the instructor at my last class.

The second full-term class was called Listening-Confrontation Skills: More Joy in Relationships. I took the course to concentrate on personal relationships, but much of the earlier sessions used examples from work and parent-child relationships, which have less applicability for me. It has been a long and difficult series, but the instructor asked us at the beginning not to judge the course until the final session. I heard him, but even though we have two make-up classes still to go this coming week, I can now confidently say that I have benefited from the course--at least one major argument has been averted using the techniques practiced in the class.

And then there are several one-time classes that I have experienced this term, usually presented as a lecture by a person with a passion:

• What We Wore: American Fashion, 1900–1970
• Reflections of a Tuskegee Airman, the remarkable story of two men who grew up next to each other but separately in Cincinnati, flew together but separately over Europe in WWII, and only met 50 years later
• Writers, Readers, and Buyers of Books, five presenters from the book scene in Cincinnati
• Chocolate, Chili, and Riverboats, a history of some of the families and institutions of Cincinnati
• Getting the Scoop: Maryanne Zeleznik at WVXU News, the local NPR station
• They Invented What?, a roundup of interesting inventions and how they came to be, together with a little information about patent law
• Oddities of England, dispelling the myth that the British are prim and proper--though I knew that already from my time with Brits in Spain, and
• An Autumn Tram Tour of Spring Grove Cemetery, the second largest cemetery in the U.S. and a National Historic Landmark

A discerning reader may note that many of my selections have to do with events and topics introducing me to the history and culture of my new home. It came as something of a surprise to me this week to realize that we are now approaching the one-and-a-half year mark of living in Cincinnati.  OLLI is one of the opportunities that has made the transition from living in Spain easier and more enjoyable, and for that I am grateful.

More Amazing Grace

On July 12 I wrote about our first visit to The Gathering at Northern Hills, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Cincinnati, and my joy at hearing and singing new words to the hymn Amazing Grace. At the time I did not know the author of those new words.

Now four months later, I confess that I have been spending most Sunday mornings with this congregation. We have been welcomed and are getting to know numerous loving and caring people,  and we always find the services enlightening, hopeful, and thought-provoking. A large part of the intellectual stimulation comes from the congregation's minister, Rev. Doug Slagle.  Today, following his message on Gratitude and Confession, we sang Amazing Grace again, and this time, the name of the adaptor was given in the program.

Amazing Grace

Text by John Newton; revised by Rev. Doug Slagle

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That loved a soul like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see!

'Twas grace that taught my heart to love,

And grace such love received;

How precious did that grace appear

The hour 'twas first perceived!

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,

We have already come;

'Tis grace that brought us safe thus far,

And grace will lead us home.

When we've been here ten thousand years,

Together just as one,

We've no less days to sing love's praise

Than when we'd first begun!

Immigration Crises and Family Values

In between the gross excesses of the U.S. political campaigns blared daily on the evening news programs you might find a few minutes, or occasionally a longer, thoughtful story, on the unending immigration crisis. I mean the immigration crisis playing itself out in Europe, though I can think of no reason why it should end there. Earlier we saw huge boatloads of refugees from war, crossing treacherous waters and arriving on land, and the ensuing chaos as the people tried to move farther along in their journey but were stopped by bureaucracies and fear. Many of these first arrivals were men who had left early and were trying to find a new home for their families. Now the families have joined the journey, and we tend to see unending lines, comparatively orderly, of men, women, and children walking hundreds of miles in long queues, still on their way north, still trying to find countries that will take them in, if only for the length of time it takes to pass through to a place that will accept them legally.

Here in the U.S. we tend to focus on our own immigration crisis. I have been dipping into an extraordinary book about the toll that illegal status places on children in families in the U.S. The author, Joanna Dreby, speaks about families in New Jersey and in Ohio. Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families is an academic book; her research is thorough, but imparted in plain English. What makes this academic title also a book for general audiences, however, is her recounting of her own story and that of her two children, who somehow entered into the uncertainty of a family living with illegality through some mishandling of paperwork discovered in a divorce transaction. There are hundreds of gotchas that affect thousands of children, and this book shows in painful detail how families can be torn apart in our own immigration crisis.

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Even though I haven't read it all, I need to take this book back to the library soon. I've already renewed it once and I just don't think it's right to keep it longer. But it's worth mentioning that getting the book represents a minor everyday miracle of the library system in Ohio. This title was not available through the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library system, but it came to my local public library from Capitol University, via OhioLINK, the consortium that links many libraries of different types in the state. I worked for multitype library lending and cooperation many years ago (in Massachusetts) and Ohio was a best practices model then. It is nice to see that the system still works. And it's always nice to see my tax dollars going for something good.