A whole year?

I can handle it

Chloe tells me that "everyone" is freaked out about me being in Pamplona for San Fermín. I have no idea how crazy it's going to be, I've never seen anything like it, what am I going to do all night after my daughter abandons the loving mother she hasn't seen in ten months so she can selfishly spend her last few days with the friends she's made in the place she's called home for those past ten months?

Well, I can read and do have an idea of how crazy it's going to be. No, I've never seen anything like it, but I've also never been to Mardi Gras or Carnival. But, through the magic of television, movable type, and sticky ink, I have some sense of how crazy a mob celebration can get. Of course it will be different in person, but it won't be a complete surprise.

I suspect that what is really going on is that everyone is afraid I'm going to put the hammer down and insist that Chloe spend the whole time with me, which would preclude a good part of the celebrating she and her friends intend to do. Do these kids really think we don't know that they've been celebrating openly in ways that they have to do covertly at home? And I'm not a needy monster - she can't abandon me for the entire time, but I do realize how important those last few days will be for her. Who knows - maybe she'll get in my way and I'll be happy to send her off with her friends. Not that that's occurred to anyone.

Countdown

Less than a month until I leave to pick up Chloe. Less than a month to get a dumpster here and and get the front-end loader home so I can clean out the back room so there's room to walk so I can move the stuff out of Chloe's room so she can get to her bed. The bed that still has the same old sheets on it. I think I remember washing them, though.

Daddy's Chloe fix

Chloe and I don't talk on the phone much any more, and she doesn't e-mail as often, but she almost never communicates with Steve because he's not here when she calls and he doesn't quite know what to make of The E-mail that all the kids are talking about these days. In fact, he just asked if I was "still e-mailing Chloe" because if I hadn't sent "it" yet he'd add something to the end of it. I told him that it doesn't cost more to send a separate message or 80 separate messages.

So she sent him a real letter telling him that she misses him and that she appreciates him even more after living in a somewhat male-chauvinist society. Now he's a whimpering mush head. He's on his third reading of the letter in two hours and said he's going to reread it all night and probably sleep with it under his pillow. Then he saw my blog on the monitor with the picture of CC right below the picture of Chloe at the beach. I had to scrape him off the floor after that. She wanted to know if he was still going to make her school lunch for her next year. He told me to tell her that he'd make it for her even if she was a divorced mother of five who moved back home. She's lucky that one of us is a nice guy.

Cough::nerd::cough

Another geeky travel tip that you might have read elsewhere. It's a good idea for all travelers to make copies of passports, plane and train tickets, visas, etc. and bring one copy with us and keep one copy at home so that if we toss our luggage overboard in a fit of borderless exuberance while abroad someone can get the copies to us by mail or fax. Just try convincing immigration officials that you don't need documentation because you are a citizen of the world. Imagine there's no countries . . .

A photocopy of your passport is not going to work where a real passport is required, but it can make getting a replacement easier. Although, on her trip to the south of Spain, Chloe brought the photocopy of her passport just in case she needed it for identification because she didn't want to worry about losing her actual passport. They ended up staying in a hostel in Madrid unexpectedly (and were left to their own devices to find a place to stay for the night) and the management accepted her photocopy as proper ID.

I'm bringing copies with me, but rather than leave another set of copies at home, I'm scanning all of my tickets, hotel confirmations, and passport and e-mailing them to myself. If I lose anything, I can get to my Gmail account from any computer anywhere in the world and print out the lost documents myself. If you do the same thing with all of your exchange student's documentation before she leaves, she'll always have access to it. Of course, not everyone will have Internet access on their exchange, but chances are that someone in a nearby village will.

Bye bye, CC

November 5, 1991 - May 17, 2005

What'ja bring me?

It varies among Rotary clubs and districts, but most American clubs send their outbound students with lapel pins for the kids to trade and club banners to exchange. A great idea because the kids collect pins from fellow students who live all over the world (which leads to competition, hence the often garish, tinkly, fun spectacle of paraphernalia on many Rotary blazers) and the clubs end up with banners from around the world to display.

Just so you know, Rotary clubs, if you send a kid to certain countries, chances are that kid is not bringing home any Rotary swag and won't have the opportunity to present the host club with the banner you sent with her because she hasn't seen anything resembling a Rotary club or club member since shortly after she arrived. In fact, your banner is in the suitcase she just sent home full of other items she won't be needing for the remainder of her stay in one of those certain countries. She sent her pins home, too, but I'm bringing them back and we'll spend time on our trip deciding who among the people we meet are pin-worthy (they are very nice little pins). In at least one of those certain countries, the students may be told that they cannot attend a Rotary meeting (a case of children - even though most of them are legal adults - being seen but not heard?). No host-club contact, however, leads to a much more independent stay, which is a good thing when there are no problems.

Missing the bad stuff

Nothing too tragic usually happens in our family. Few divorces, few serious illnesses, only two deaths of close family members during our kids' lifetimes (my dad and Steve's mom, and Chloe was not born and then too young to remember those). Until Chloe left. And then the floodgates opened. First, a step-grandfather, then a great grandmother, then a great aunt (that sounds so old - she was only 60). Now Chloe's aunt's mother has received a grim diagnosis. There are other assorted peripheral relatives with newly diagnosed cancer. Steve took our 12-year-old dog, the one named after both of the kids, in on Tuesday and now she's chasing balls on a happy farm in the sky. My brother's dog died unexpectedly. But those damn llamas are still here. If you'd like a couple of llamas and have room for them, let me know. No, they don't spit. Unless you get between them and their food.

Chloe is lucky because she wasn't here to be a part of all of this sadness. The relatives who have died were not a constant presence in her life and so her grief was more a vague sadness that someone had died than something that required the physical presence of friends and family for support. The dog is sad, but she knew CC wouldn't be here when she got back (we didn't think she'd be around when Chloe left).

But these experiences are part of life that she's missing so far. When tragedies happen later, will she have a harder time dealing with them? Or will she long for the year when she wasn't around and so didn't have to deal with them?

All of her will be back

When a loved one has been gone for a long time, either just living somewhere else or who has died, we tend to remember only the positive things. We miss her laugh or the jokes he used to tell. What we forget is the less than charming things about that person. I read a book by Virginia Graham, Life After Harry: My Adventures in Widowhood. She had a friend who went on and on about her dear, departed Frank: what a wonderful guy he was, how he always had a kind word for her, how he brought her flowers for no reason at all, and was just in general a kind, considerate husband. Finally, after weeks of hearing about Saint Frank, Virginia asked her oldest friend if she'd been married more than once. "Why, Virginia! You know Frank was the only man ever in my life! Why would you say such a thing?" "Because I've never met the guy you've been talking about."

Today I was IMing with Chloe and she said she feels like an old lady whose bobby pins pop out of her hair because her broom is flying too fast. She's been finding bobby pins all over the floor. Then she said she "got told" about not keeping her bedroom spotless (hair stuff again, and if you have Chloe's hair, you need mountains of all manner of hair stuff). The first thing that occurred to me was, "Oh, how I haven't missed that." I've written before about Chloe's lifelong habit of leaving Chloe detritus in her wake and, while I can't wait to see her again, that I could live without. Yeah, yeah: that's all part of why we love her. Right.

Graduation wheels

This is how we got there. Got around the $22 parking fee that way. That's Ann in the background, finishing her boxed breakfast.

Graduation 8

Maren, on the other hand, stayed awake and was rewarded with the discovery of a new favorite word: cum laude, to the chagrin of a couple of people around us. If you're thinking that looks like a baseball diamond in the background, you are right: graduation was at Safeco Field.