"I recommend removing it because it looks like cancer," said my shiny new Kaiser dermatologist—the would-be Jewish sister with whom I wish I'd spent my childhood—as if she were reading from an owner's manual.  

"What?" 

"It's probably just the irksome kind, not the fatal kind. We'll know after the biopsy, but we should remove it to be safe." Smiling. 

"I didn't know there were two kinds." 

"Actually, there are three, but only two are fatal." Sharing details of her upcoming flight to see her family on the East Coast. 

"Oh. Okay." 

"You'll smell your flesh burning; it's not pleasant. But it doesn't hurt. Do you have anything going on today?" Typing on her Big Kaiser Brother computer.

"My middle daughter is graduating from 8th grade." 

"No problem. Just get a dress that will cover the bandaid. Or not. You could just own it! You're almost 50. You're not alone." Putting her hand on my hand. 

Almost 50. Talking about the C-word, but not saying the C-word. Which will turn out to be nothing. And everything. Everything in that it's as if rather than carving away, she added a lens over my lens that allows me to see through the closed, lacquered parts—of people, circumstances, arid outer lives—to the parts that love and matter.

The parts that swing, whiff and try again. 

And in the end are better off for it.






















 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=czFgKa7YcIQ

Stories need music. Mine would be no exception.

I felt this -- exactly:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd9vh89To4M

I'm old enough to have some friends whose kids are headed off to college. They are in a bit of a free fall* these days (the parents, I mean, not the Gen Zers who are as ready as ever). Emotionally conflicted doesn't begin to describe it. It must seem like yesterday that their budding young adults were in the hellscape of middle-school drama, as my youngest, Tessa, was last week, when she called in tears from the nurse's office because her friend (note, how I resisted putting that in quotes) -- the cynosure of the 6th-grade-girl gaggle --  ditched her. She used the actual word: ditched, which I thought went out in 1978, along with puka shells and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers.

I tried to say all the right things: (1) your friends are the people who make you feel good about yourself, no matter what, and even when you screw up, (2) this too shall pass, and (3) love yourself because you're worth it and then some. Admittedly, this parental advice was vetted by a friend who is a high school counselor. Left to my own devices, I would have gone ursine on the perp by calling her mother -- but that's a first-kid-parent move. It's a good thing I didn't go with the latter strategy because, predictably, Tessa called me from school the very next day, begging to hang out with the ditcher. And I, predictably, said "of course!"  For ditching, we know some 40 years later having been both accused ditcher and distraught ditchee, is more perception than reality.

On the topic of friends in her Map of My Heart (above), Tessa wrote: "I love my friends because we make each other laugh and support each other." She made it last week in her "21/6" class, which is designed to help them master skills they will need in the 21st century. I am comforted by the fact that helping them know what's in their hearts is still on the list of modern-day, good-to-have skills for our kids. Good for adults too, yes?

I vow to reread her heart map often ... until the day we drop her and the Ikea essentials off at a college dorm room. Maybe she will allow me to hang it on her wall. (#wishfulthinking)

Till then ... what's in your heart?




* Love this definition: In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where its weight is the only force acting upon it.