What You Can Get Me For My Birthday

LO IT IS THE DAY OF MY BIRTH.  Which is, of course, the most important day of the year!  And naturally, the world is ablaze with the inevitable question: “What, what, can I get Ferrett for his birthday?”
Fortunately for you, I ask the same two things of my audience every year.  If you’d like to get me an inexpensive gift that will nevertheless make me do little happydances of joy, you can:
1)  If you are so consensually inclined, feel free to post cheesecake pictures of yourself in the comments here. (Alternatively, if they’re spicy or you’re shy, mail ‘em to me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  Or text them to me at 216-965-3895.)
2)  Failing photographic revelation, here’s my real gift: Go out and do something you enjoy today that you wouldn’t normally have done.  Doesn’t have to be big; a walk around the block, a call to an old friend, a poem you tossed off, a special treat at dinner.  Then let me know what it was, and how you liked it.  You can best make me happy by being happy yourself, and then sharing the joy.
Also, a pony.  Thank you.

Last Time Counts For All

I’ve sent flowers to my Grammy for years now, ever since she moved into the nursing home and didn’t need more knickknacks to clutter a small apartment.  Her birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day; always a bouquet, always love from me.
But last night was my last order. She’s dying.
Oh, let’s be honest; she’s been dying for years.  She’s ninety-six, and in amazing spirits for all of that.  When I saw her last month, she asked about my heart, urged me to exercise, was happy to hear I was going on a cruise with my family, asked about my Mom.  Maybe she repeated herself a bit, and you had to speak louder so she’d hear you, but I doubt you could have a better conversation with someone in their nineties.
But with age comes the ravages thereof, and she has been fighting a failing body for decades now.  And now she’s refused to fight.  Never in a mean way; that’s not her style.  But she doesn’t eat unless prompted heavily by the many loving family members who come to visit, and she keeps asking whether this is really necessary.  And so, after realizing the next set of treatments would destroy her quality of life, my family has put her on hospice.  She’ll eat when she sees fit, and take only the barest of medications.
I don’t know how long she’ll last.  No one does.  But none of us thought she’d make it this far, so she may surprise us.
And I thought oh, well, she’s in her mid-nineties, she’s literally had the best life I can imagine, that’s sad but it’s inevitable. When my Dad told me, I heard and then went out to lunch.  I’d been braced for this for years, no biggie.
Then I realized: this will be my last chance, ever, to send her flowers.  So in a panic last night I went to 1-800-flowers and ordered her a nice big bouquet of daisies, her favorite, and clicked the “Finalize Order!” button and then had to go for a very long drive with the windows down.
I hope the florist sends her the right flowers.  I know from long experience that whatever you order online often has very little resemblance to what you get, and they may decide to replace it with tulips, or daffodils, or whatever.  Will she know that I meant daisies?  She will not.  She can’t even talk on the phone any more, not really.
And I could, I suppose, get on the phone to emergency change the order, to tell the florist how terribly important this all is, but…. I don’t know that it’ll matter.  I don’t know how she is today.  Maybe she’s already in bed, sleeping her days away.  Maybe she’ll never know, not really, now that she’s off the big medications.  I know my temptation is to make a big deal, send flowers every day until she’s gone, but… that’s not her way.  She hates having a fuss made, hates being reminded of bad times.  She’d want to steal out of life quietly, like slipping out of a lovely party, which for her it has been.  A family that adores her.  Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all summoned to her side effortlessly for endless parties, a house by the seashore, a husband who doted on her, a bond of Steinmetzes brought together by mutual worship.
Dear florist, I hope you know that my Grammy has a magic power: she makes people better by only seeing the best in them.  Anything unworthy or shabby about you is discarded in her eyes, only the good reflected back, and when criminals are in her presence they straighten their backs and live better.  She quietly sees you as so wonderful, clapping her hands in joy, that you vow to be wonderful, and walk out of her presence a better person.
You don’t know that.  You can’t know that.  And yet, inexplicably, your flowers will be my last, clumsy message of love to her.  Whatever you decide today will be my last gift to her, my last way of telling her that I care, this random bouquet of flowers on her windowsill.
I hope you give her daisies.
I hope she knows just how much she means to me.
I hope.

If You're Going To Channel Orwell, Don't Be Stupid

At 6:00 a.m. this morning, my iPhone buzzed for long enough to wake Gini up.  It was, as it turns out, an Amber Alert to let us know that a child had been kidnapped in our area.
We had not signed up for anything remotely like an Amber Alert, but apparently everyone around us got one anyway.  Which is a little distressing.  I’m all for saving kidnapped children, but I’m also all for not having my phone hijacked against my will.  I like the illusion that I control my phone – I know it’s not true (HELLO RSA), but I cling to it anyway.  A random police department call being able to bug me at a moment’s notice without my consent or opt-out notice is a little terrifying.  (And if you had your phone noises on, which we never do because people text me at all hours, apparently it made a terrifying alert noise.)
But fine.  I’m all for helping children.  How do I do this?
I don’t know, because there’s no record of the alert.  Didn’t show up on texts, no history, nothing.  If you were not lucky enough to be awake when the alert was sounded, or slow to answer your phone, the information vanished.  So if you were, say, checking your phone twenty minutes later because you were in the shower, well, I guess the kid’s gone, too late, let ’em go.
I hope that child is okay.  I really do.  But if you were going to commandeer my phone sans notice, I’d prefer you do it in a way I could know what to be on the lookout for all day, and maybe a second notice to let me know how it turned out.

All The Things That Were Not Me.

This last Saturday made me wonder who I’d become.
My friend Angie was in town, and rather than seeing a movie, we opted to go team up with my daughter Erin to go paint my arcade cabinet, because that sounded like more fun.  So we spent the afternoon outside, painting and then waiting for the paint to dry for the next coat, eating raspberries picked from our bush while we watched the bees hum and work.  Erin made a fire and showed off her hula hoop skills.  Gini did some gardening.
I am not who I was.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to work on crafts projects, or if the lustre will fade like webcomics and I’ll not return.  But I thought about all the things that recent blog-readers would identify as uniquely me, and I can pinpoint their start in the last five years:

• The pretty pretty princess nails? Started in March last year.
• The snazzy hats? December 5, 2010.
• The beekeeping? February 24, 2011.
• Hell, the polyamory? We weren’t even poly seven years ago, and we only came out officially as poly on February 13th, 2009.

And speaking of Clarion, I was a writer before that, but my attempts to be professional were pretty stunted, and had no serious basis in reality.  The Ferrett Who Publishes Short Stories didn’t effectively exist before August of 2008.
This mutation makes me deeply, deeply happy.  I’ll be turning 44 this week – mark the date, as July 3rd is the most important day of the year – and I’m still greatly in flux.  I don’t want to be one of those old men walking worn paths, doing the same thing he always was.  So much of the goodness in my life comes from an influx of new activities, new learning, new risks to take.  I look back over the last decade and the Ferrett of 2003 would barely comprehend the Ferrett of Today – and that’s such a good thing, in the same sense that Teenaged Ferrett shouldn’t have a real solid grip on the Mid-Twenties Ferrett.  It shows I’m growing.  It hopes I’m learning.
I’m living at the speed of life, and all the things I am and might be are still negotiable.  This is a happy way to begin my birthday week – surrounded by loved ones, covered in fresh black paint, working on something that didn’t exist a week ago.
The cabinet is built, as am I, with a little help from my beloveds.