20 Minute Aunt

She stumbled over “dejectedly”. I guess it has been years since I’ve thought about what a strange word it is. But is…strange. Dejectedly. It is strange enough to hear but how often do you see it written? She read on, recognized it when she saw it again but still struggled with the pronunciation. She did better with “precautionary” – sounding it out in its parts and then putting them all together triumphantly. Remembering it when she read it a few sentences later. 

My niece started off our skype session with so much enthusiasm. Be it the novelty of using skype (something we rarely do although I have no idea why) or at having a reading buddy, or maybe just to see her aunt who lives 2000 miles away…I have no idea. Whatever it was she smiled brightly and opened her book ready to read, “The Phantom Tollbooth”.

It is times like this that I am in awe of technology. For all of the ways people use it and think they are getting closer –posting selifes, checking in at restaurants, liking some statement or article or whatever – but are mostly just curating their life’s experience, sometimes true connection is possible.

The time my 90+ year old grandfather marveled that he was looking at and talking to me, an ocean and continent away, comes to mind. “Is that Nea Nea?” he asked, his voice steeped in wonder. He knew I was in Uganda and yet he could see me clearly and I was waving to him and asking how he was doing. Here is a man who remembers party-lines on phones, live operators, rotaries, heck – not having your own private home phone at all. And there I was, his granddaughter, speaking to him from someplace he’d never been.

 In the case of my niece, the connection is different. She only knows a world of immediate gratification and digital displays. She assumes everyone can FaceTime and is irritated that car radios don’t respond like Tivo.

My nieces are young and so conversational depth is limited. Once I find out how school is “fine”, what they learned “proper adjectives”, favorite parts of the day “lunch”, there isn’t much to keep us talking and they are easily pulled away by television shows, art projects, anything but the disembodied voice of their aunt. While I was in Texas for Christmas it was a little different. There were hugs. They showed me their rooms. We did a craft together and laughed and talked while doing other things. We grabbed lunch, they did my nails. But the phone is dimensionless and so when I am here – so very far away – we don’t talk extensively.

But one of my nieces has assigned reading – 20 minutes a day. Reading is something I love and listening to my niece read is something I can gladly do. Today was our first session, her with a physical book in hand and me with my kindle copy, we sat face to face and she read, sounding out words assiduously.

Her 20 minutes complete, I told her she could stop, “let’s read a little longer,” she replied. The smile on my face beamed brighter as we read a few more pages. Finally, she made a show of putting her bookmark in-between the pages of her book, we were done for the night. Behind her, one of her sisters danced into the frame, vying for some attention of her own. Books put away, all of my nieces drifted in and out of conversation with me, they showed me the finished craft product we started over Christmas, I showed them my apartment. It was an actual conversation, and for 45 minutes or so, it was like we were all right here…together.

A Thud to the New Year

I bit it. 

Not a subtle stumble or even a quick falling and a jumping up that assures everyone you are fine. Instead I tumbled. It felt like slow motion. I walked toward the step and brazenly turned my head toward the folks seated at a table not too far away. Brazen, because it assumed I could walk and talk and turn my head all at the same time. My limbs tending to themselves without all of me supervising them. As if.

Just moments earlier I’d been chipper. Moments earlier, glass held high, I toasted 2014 with my friend – rehashing an earlier toast. “Good sex, good food, loving relationships, good jobs that we love and that pay well and offer ample time off…and of course, health and wellbeing of our family. Truly. Not in the ‘last thing I put in my toast kind of way’.” We’d giggled about it over earlier sips of champagne and now it was an old joke. A classic. And so we clinked glasses and sipped champagne, smiling over the rims in a knowing way.

The table to the side of us – the table that would momentarily witness my plunge down the cold concrete stairs – had toasted to the New Year as well. And so as the six of us sipped mediocre (albeit free) champagne we heard the folks inside the restaurant begin their count. “Ten, nine, eight…” there was a lull and then a few moments later the counting began anew. “ten, nine, eight…” this time the six of us, separated by a pathway to the infamous stairs and a table or two, made eye contact and shook our heads at their lateness.

“They must be on CPTime I whispered to my friend,” the irony not lost on her because all of us outside were brown and almost everyone inside was not. One of the diners from the other table looked our way, shook his head and said, “They are a little late” and we nodded and smiled. Then I chimed in, “it’s almost February,” more giggles and smiles. 

And that was that. We all returned to our dinner spheres. The four of them laughing quietly amongst themselves and me and my friend with ourselves. 

Bill paid, we rose to leave. There was better champagne at my place. And so I stepped toward the steps, turned my head (so cocky to turn my head even as I walked) to say a parting word to our fellow table and that’s when I saw it. Slow motion. Inevitability rising up to greet me. 

My foot, slender and faux secure in my sandaled heel, missed the step. In my head I could see the miscalculation but I was unable to recalculate and execute it on firmer ground. Instead, I watched my glossy toenails sail through the air past that first step. Then I felt my heel catch on the very step I’d missed. And that sent me lunging forward to try to compensate for the error in balance. 

That led to another missed step and then I was…well…sledding. On my chest down the steps. Thud thud thud. Knees dragging across the concrete with the metal tipped stairs that is always included to help keep the form. Thud to a stop on the landing. 

All I could do was laugh. Not because it didn’t hurt. I was pretty sure my knees were bruised and my toenail possibly bent backward. But I hadn’t hit my head. My teeth were still intact. It is a running nightmare for me that I will fall forward – grace is not a gift I was heavily endowed with- and my teeth will be the thing to break my fall…I shudder even as I type that. 

I broke a fingernail, ruined my pedicure, scrapped a knee. I’ll probably be bruised the color of an eggplant in the morning and in an effort to stave off that inevitability I downed to ibuprofen with our better tasting champagne back at my house.

And despite the liberal references to champagne I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t even drunk. I can’t blame the missed step on anything other than my questionable ability to walk upright. My spectacular performance ended with me settled in the car and our waiter running down the steps to make sure I was in fact ok. He leaned down to look in the car window, gave me two thumbs up and then darted gracefully up the same stairs I’d just sledded down. I’m sure he didn’t mean to mock me but oh how grace in the wake of gracelessness mocks.

Falling was not the highlight of the New Year that I was hoping for. It was not the auspicious beginning my idle mind might have conjured up. But champagne flute in hand (my friend insisted on bringing them to my house because my fanciest glasses are stemless wine glasses) we toasted, “may this be the worst thing that happens in this New Year”.

A sustained giggle from us both as we drank generously from our flutes. Eggplant knees and a friend who made sure I was ok before she laughed…2014 hasn’t committed to a position just yet. We’ll see what else she brings.