I am still in a state of wonder over Auggie’s recovery, and seeing him here in his usual pose on the couch fills me with emotion. He is vigorous and joyous, insatiably hungry, and insatiably ball-mad. I have already lost track of the exact day we got the cone off him, so I went back to look at the photos on my phone, which I use as a diary of my life.
That’s when I came upon these, from the day the collar came off, less than a month ago. Until the stitches were out and healing, he was not allowed to come on the bed. This was upsetting to us all.
Until this moment, Auggie had never allowed Eli to love him before.
I had a busy night planned. It involved cleaning out a cupboard where mice had been and sanitizing and rescuing the framed family pictures that had been stored there when I repainted the stairway a year ago last November. I was planning to hang the pictures—about a dozen or so—in the repainted hall. I wanted to tackle this disgusting job so I wouldn’t be ashamed in front of my cleaning lady. (It was, in actual fact, another clever procrastination technique in my novel-writing avoidance scheme. But I digress.)
Instead, as I was elbow deep in sanitizing wipes and thinking words that would have shocked my mother, my husband called my grandson from upstairs—and me—to come into the kitchen. My husband has a mischievous sense of humor, and is fond of calling me on the phone from upstairs, or summoning me from various tasks to show me something entertaining. I was not amused. “I am in the middle of something,” I said, forgoing the opportunity to explain the precise substance I was in the middle of.
“This,” he said, “is serious.” He then read aloud an email from our grandson’s math teacher.
Only yesterday we were celebrating an excellent report card. But something had gone awry in the past four days since grades were closed, and we were exhorted to ensure that tomorrow’s test did not reflect yesterday’s quiz.
My husband, whose confidence in me is sometimes misplaced, assured my grandson. “Grandma is great at math. She will be able to help you.” Some of you may recall a note from a few days ago in which I explained my loathing of accounting. Which is math.
I need to say that it has been…some time… since I did basic algebra, and when I saw the graphing equations and the formula for slope ( y=mx +b) I was a bit shaken. The required physics course I took in college was affectionately referred to as “Physics for Poets”. There was no math. Opera singers don’t use much algebra, either.
So we turned on the lights in the dining room. “Get pencils and paper” I told my grandson. He brought two sheets. “That’s not enough.” There was no way I was wasting my precious writing notebooks for this.
And so, we began—both somewhat irritable—to review the past two weeks of eighth grade math. He was gleeful when I made a mistake, and sullen when I was right and teacher-y. And that gave me insight into how to help. So, I told him I couldn’t remember how to do it—which was sometimes true—and he had the fun of explaining to ignorant me just where I had gone wrong. Sometimes I genuinely was wrong, and sometimes I had to be right to explain where he had gone wrong. Old Person Sidebar: Why don’t they teach kids multiplication tables anymore?
But I have to admit, even if he dramatized how much he hated it (“Why do I have to do math? I’ll never use it.”) I was positively joyful that I could access the algebra file drawers in my brain.
Later, I told my husband the kid had better never take Calculus because I wouldn’t be able to help him. We giggled.
After two hours, we had gone as far as we could in one evening, and when my grandson came back downstairs in his yellow pajamas, he had hot chocolate, and I had two whiskeys.
I feel I earned them.
***
And now your gratuitous dog photo.
A friendly battle over Pink Pig, who was revealed under the leaves yesterday.
The telephone rang in the sleek, city office of Victor Eldridge. As he reached to answer the pain came again with a deep, resounding blow that made it difficult to breathe. He braced his hands against his desk, waiting for it to pass as it always did. The ringing phone, mixed in the wake of his agony, was almost beyond bearing.
Victor Eldridge was not a religious man, but what he experienced now was as much of a prayer as he would ever utter. Please, let this be the end of it. Please let the pain stop.
He did not care how.
The ringing and the pain faded at the same moment, and it seemed as if the room echoed with both. He stayed frozen in position, his breathing shallow.
He straightened slowly and leaned back in his chair. There. His breath became deeper and he could feel his heartbeat slowing to its normal pace. His reason returning from the chaos of suffering, he began to think. He had much to do but very little time. The pain was gone. For now. But he knew it would come again.
J.F. Riordan 