Our Ordinary Life

The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things." -Ruth Reichl

In my younger days, I expected wedding anniversaries to be magical. 

I mean, weddings are magical, right? So I figured that if one is celebrating a day of magic, then something pretty darn good ought to be on tap for the festivities. Visions of second honeymoons and surprise parties danced through my head during the early years of marriage, though I figured I'd probably have to log a solid decade and get through the childbearing season of life before the glamour and glitz really kicked in.

I was expecting a diamond tennis bracelet somewhere around the two-decade mark, and certainly a Caribbean cruise by thirty.

But a funny thing happened along the way. 

Life became a celebration of the ordinary.

Simple pleasures mean more to me now than flashy, grandstanding gestures, and while I'm certainly not against trips and jewelry, I don't need those things to make my anniversary special.

You know what I do need?

A big bunch of white flowers, just like my wedding bouquet.

A nostalgic dinner, featuring favorite foods from our reception menu and our pre-kid life.

A nice glass of red wine.

And a bit of reminiscing about the day we said I do. 

Today we did a deep dive into the facts surrounding the bench-clearing Cubs versus Reds baseball brawl that erupted on TV on our wedding day while I was in my bedroom getting ready and sent my brothers into fits of hollering and catcalling as they watched from the living room.

My then-intended, safely ensconced in a hotel room across town with his soft-spoken family, missed the entire brouhaha. Thankfully, he has me to rehash the story for him every few years, because he always forgets these important details and I consider them a key component of our wedding day lore. 

Because that's what wedding anniversaries mean to me now.  Not a showy over-the-top spending spree, but a simple remembering of the delightfully ordinary life that two people have built together. 

And ordinary lives, I have learned, are the most magical kind of all. 

* * * * *

More anniversary-inspired stories

Staying Together

Three Things I've Learned About Marriage

* * * * *

My other musings about marriage:

How Walt Disney May Be Ruining Your Life

My Big Fat Malaysian Wedding

Malaysian Mail Makes My Day

A Multiplication Of Joy

A Foretaste Of The Feast To Come

A Bright Wedding

Surprising Pjoe And Amy

Nephy Ties The Knot

Marriage Advice

Bulletproof

For the past, oh, decade or so, of life at my house, daily dinnertime conversations during the months between May and September sound like this:

Me: Is it supposed to rain tonight?

Husband gets out his phone to check.

Me: What about tomorrow? Is it supposed to rain during the day?

Husband sighs and keeps checking.

He sighs because he knows what will happen next. 

If the answer is yes, or even maybe, then I immediately default into patio cushion protection mode. And my husband knows what that means. As soon as he rests his fork, I'll be chasing him around the yard to help me gather up the various cushions, pillows, and throws decoratively draped around our outdoor furniture and stash them in the garage, delicately balanced in a towering heap, until the rain has gone away and it's safe for them to come back outside. 

Now let me be clear. The rain itself is not really the problem. My patio textiles can stand up to water, no problem. Sure, they'll get wet but in time, they will dry and life will go on.

However, damp fabrics create a whole new set of problems.

• Little bits of grit and grime carried in the wind settle onto the wet fibers and, once dried, hold on for dear life.  

• Prolonged damp leads to moldy, mildewy muck, even on the best water-resistant fabrics. 

• Worst of all, horror of horrors, soggy cushions and pillows invite creepy crawly critters to burrow into their moist nooks and crannies, and settle in.

Trust me, there's nothing to kill a post-rainy day mood like flipping over an almost-dry patio pillow to find a half dozen slugs lazily napping underneath.

So over the past few summers, as a few of my older chairs have fallen into disrepair and I consider my options for buying something new, I've made a bold decision.

No more outdoor fabrics.

I know. So sad. Photos of gorgeously styled outdoor spaces layered with textiles galore dazzle me, and I feel my commitment to this draconian law weaken. But look, the people with these opulent outdoor spaces all live in LA or the Mojave Desert, and while I'm sure they have their own problems, soggy patio furniture is not one of them. They are playing by a different set of rules, and my Pacific Northwest slugs and I cannot compete.

My new rule, I sternly remind myself, is waterproof furniture only.

And so it was a happy surprise that during one of my recent midnight deep dives into weather-resistant outdoor furniture options, I stumbled across these Acapulco knockoffs. 

Stylishly on trend.

Comfortable and cool.

Completely waterproof.

And best of all, no place for the slugs to hide. 

These babies are bulletproof.

This afternoon, a cloudless blue sky began to cloud up a bit. By dinnertime, the temperature was dropping like a stone, and a row of heavy clouds rolled in on the western horizon.

But as we ate our dinner, I felt no need to inquire about the weather forecast.

I know it's going to rain soon.

And when it does, I am one hundred percent certain that my new bulletproof chairs are going to be just fine. 

Life Of A Math Teacher: Test Drives

Slide into your seat, and buckle up.

Examine the instrument panel and imagine how it's going to feel to get this baby on the road.

No, technically she doesn't belong to you, but this is your golden moment to 

give her a whirl, 

see how she performs, 

try her around some tight curves, and 

get a feel for how she handles. 

Now you're ready. 

Hit the ignition, put her in drive, pick up a pencil, and let's get this test drive started.

* * * * *

When it's time to serve up a midterm or final exam to my math students, I write my own.

Well, I'm not insane, so I don't make up my own problems. But I do sort through the textbook to find just the right combination of deliciously difficult but not unreasonable problems to test the concepts that I deem most important. 

Then I write them out in my own hand, make lots of lovely copies, and then collate them together into a test packet ready for my wonderful students to work.

But before I deliver the tests, I give them a careful run-through to make sure I haven't made any mistakes. Dropping a critical word, transposing a number, even dashing off a sloppy 5 that looks like an innocent S might be enough to derail an eager test taker, and the last thing I want to do is create needless confusion for these kids.

So, as the final stage in my preparation process, I take my tests for a test drive.

Literally.

I clear away the flurry of books and papers required to compose the tests as well as several hours' worth of empty La Croix cans, take a deep, calming breath, and shift gears to a peaceful environment and headspace. Just as I remind my students to do.

Then I fold back the instruction page on the first test - I start with pre-algebra and work up from there - take one more deep breath, and begin to work the problems. 

I work carefully and deliberately, 

showing each step as I expect my students to show them, 

highlighting formulas, 

working out some multiplication and division calculations on the side margins (no calculators allowed in my classes), 

and indicating my solution with a neat box. 

 I double check my result against the Solutions Manual, just to be sure I got it right. 

And when I've finished all ten problems on the test, I flip back to the first page and in the upper right corner I write "Answer Key." 

That always feels good.

But as I continue working my way through the higher level tests, with the problems becoming more difficult as we proceed from negative exponents to completing the square to exponential functions, I find that my task has shifted from fact-checking to pure joy.

I love to work math problems. 

And taking this year's final exams for a test drive last night was the most fun I've had in quite some time. 

* * * * *

Read more stories about my life as a math teacher. I'm building up quite a collection.

Test Drives

Bringing Joy

Math By Phone

Yabba Dabba Do

Eccentric Connections

Math Mammals
Socially Distant
Playing With A Full Deck

The (Math) Joke's On Me

Sharing Life

Little Brothers

Sweet Inspiration

My Hero

What I Do

Number 15

Christmas Edition

3.1415926

Buy It And Burn It

In Honor Of James K. Polk

House Tours

My Deep Gladness

Isolating The Radical

By The Numbers

Teaching My Own: High School Art And Algebra

Life Of A Math Teacher: Bringing Joy

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit. 

-Stefan Banach, Polish mathematician

The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers. 

-Maryam Mirzakhani, Iranian mathematician

^Sunshine

^Teddy bears

^ My students' names

Let me guess.

You associate math with drudgery and boredom.

Your days as a math student filled you with confusion and dread, if not rampant stress and anxiety.

And if you're an adult, you see math now at best as a dry, dead process necessary for filling out tax returns, doubling recipes, and checking in on bank accounts that adds precious little to your vision of a creative, dynamic life. 

Hmm. Maybe those aren't your exact thoughts, but I bet I'm close.

And isn't that a shame?

Mathematics should bring us joy.

The language of nature.

The expression of our physical world. 

The very fingerprints of God's design.

To me, math is sunshine and teddy bears and the colorful expression of human life, and I've created these postcards for my students to prove it.  

I hope to bring my students joy. 

* * * * *

Read more stories about my life as a math teacher. I'm building up quite a collection.

Test Drives

Bringing Joy

Math By Phone

Yabba Dabba Do

Eccentric Connections

Math Mammals
Socially Distant
Playing With A Full Deck

The (Math) Joke's On Me

Sharing Life

Little Brothers

Sweet Inspiration

My Hero

What I Do

Number 15

Christmas Edition

3.1415926

Buy It And Burn It

In Honor Of James K. Polk

House Tours

My Deep Gladness

Isolating The Radical

By The Numbers

Teaching My Own: High School Art And Algebra

Use It Or Lose It: Pencil Post Bed

Back in the 1980s, when I had a passion for Shaker furniture but precious little disposable income, I fell in love with a pencil post bed.

Natural mid-tone wood.

Four square-sided posts at each corner.

And in perfect rectangular order, a crisply geometric canopy.

To me, this unbeatable combination of dreamy design and delicious detail would be the most perfect first thing to see when I peeped open my eyes every morning, and the last satisfying glimpse of the day to send me off to sleep every night.

For years on end, I wanted a pencil post bed real bad.

Sadly, I never got one.

Well, spoilers, but at least not back then. 

However, my mom did.

Yes, that's right. At some point in the 1990s, my mom marched herself off to Ethan Allen and bought THE exact bed I'd been dreaming of for years on end.

I wasn't mad.

Well. Maybe a tiny bit jealous.

But over the course of her life, my mom had patiently waited a long, long time for many good things to come her way, and if she scored her pencil post bed before I got mine, I could only be happy that her dreams were finally coming true.

And as I admired her bed - which was exactly the kind that I coveted - a tiny little voice whispered, Maybe someday this one will be yours.

I shushed it immediately. 

Years passed. 

My mom moved this bed from my childhood home on the lake to her new condo in town, and it was a vision in the new bedroom with soaring ceilings. 

More years passed.

My mom eventually moved the pencil post bed up to the loft bedroom, where I slept when I visited her. 

The pencil post bed and I bonded. And that tiny voice whispered some more in my ear about the possibility of a future together. 

I still shushed it, but I thought to myself, Maybe.

A few more years passed. In July 2017, after my mom passed away, my husband and I loaded the disassembled pencil post bed into a U-haul trailer and drove it across the country.

Was my dream finally coming true?

But alas, we were missing all the hardware, and had no way to put the bed together. 

So we stashed it in our storage unit and tried to figure out our next step.

Three more years passed. 

Last fall, I reached out to Ethan Allen to see if they could hook me up with the right hardware. Luckily, we'd pulled a bar code sticker from the frame so they could easily identify the item and give me a quick answer. No, they did not have any hardware available for this piece. But they could send a parts list. 

Yes, please. 

Which I dutifully forwarded to my husband's email, where it sat in one of his folders for another six months.

This spring, I informed him, it was do-or-die time. We were gonna buy the hardware, get that freaking bed out of storage, bring it home, put it together, and give it a whirl.

My husband knows when I mean business.

And we were making great progress. By late April, the bed was sturdily assembled and standing in the middle of my bedroom, and the last and final step in my almost-forty-year-mission to acquire a pencil post bed was five minutes away from completion. All that was left to do was heft our queen-size mattress into place.

As we settled our hands into the lifting straps and prepared to hoist, another little voice whispered in my brain. 

What if the frame is a full size instead of a queen?

I shushed that voice immediately too, but it was too late.

The damage was done.

And two seconds later, the truth was told.

THE LITTLE VOICE WAS RIGHT.

Indeed, my mom had purchased my dream pencil post bed, but in the wrong size. She bought a size called full XL, which made perfect sense for her, but was an all-important five inches too narrow for our queen mattress.

Now at this point, a third little voice spoke up in my brain. And this voice whispered gently, with just a hint of derision, Don't you think it's about time you gave up on this silly dream? You are just not meant to sleep in a pencil post bed, and you should stop trying to force this.

I told that little voice to shut its mouth.

And I told my husband we were going to sleep on the queen mattress on the floor while I puzzled this out.

The next day, I asked him if it would be crazy for us to get rid of our queen and buy a new full XL mattress to fit the pencil post bed. His answer: I never liked that queen mattress anyway. So why not.

Hallelujah. 

A week later, our new mattress arrived. 

I breathed a sigh of relief as we unwrapped the mattress and settled it into place in the pencil post frame. 

It fit perfectly

"Grab the fresh sheets," I directed my husband, "and let's make it up for tonight." 

"Uh, these instructions say that we need to let the mattress rest for 24 to 48 hours before sleeping on it."

Of course they do.

So we slept on the floor for two more nights. 

And then finally, finally, F I N A L L Y, on a Tuesday evening in May, 2021, I slept for the first time in my very own Shaker style pencil post bed. 

It was everything that I ever hoped it would be. 

* * * * *

P.S. Grace likes the pencil post bed too. And as I imagine my mom looking down from heaven and seeing this big red galoot sprawled out across her beautiful bed, I am 100% certain she is smiling. 

* * * * *

More stories about my Use It Or Lose It adventures:

Thrifted Cubbies

The Marriage Tester

Small Quilts

Office Updates

Shaker Stool

Pencil Post Bed

A Gift From My Mom

I know for certain that we never lose the people we love, even to death. 

They continue to participate in every act, thought, and decision we make.

-Leo Buscaglia

For Mother's Day this year, my mom bought me this plant.

Oh, I know. She's been gone almost five years now. 

Gone in a physical sense, that is.

But her voice inside of me is alive and well, thank you very much, and speaks out to me more clearly than ever.

Of course, it would be nice to communicate with her on human terms, but I'm not complaining. To be honest, I feel closer to my mom now that she's an eternal being, as if the static from a poorly tuned radio has finally been adjusted and the reception is crystal clear. 

And while I feel, in an indistinct, hazy, spiritual kind of way, that she and I are still very much connected and moving along together, there are times when I'd like to cement that sensation in a tangible, physical kind of way.

Now some people report that their dearly beloved ones leave them dimes or feathers, lead them to butterflies, or even appear as visions. And I believe that all those manifestations are real, though my mom has never chosen to communicate with me that way.

Instead, my mom buys me gifts. 

Oh yes, she does. 

It happened again this past week, just a few days before Mother's Day.

As my third and fourth daughters and I wandered around the indoor plant displays at Sky Nursery, I saw a hundred leafy lovelies and pretty planters that I wouldn't be mad about getting, but nothing really caught my eye. Shocked - and thankful to be getting out of there without spending a fortune for once -I sidelined myself into an alcove crammed with basic, boring terracotta pots to wait for my daughters to finish their shopping. I figured I was safe there from any further temptation. 

But what I didn't know was that tucked back behind the predictable rows of conventionally-shaped orangey-brown numbers was a vision waiting for me to happen upon it.

White,

textured,

patterned with circles and ovals, 

dancing around a happy shape,

the most beautifully perfect pot I've seen in quite some time. 

Picking it up and turning it round in my hands, I read a satisfying seventies vibe, and caught a flash of those years of growing power and success in my mom's life. 

I felt my mom's presence.

Carrying the pot in my arms, I headed back toward my daughters, who were still browsing, and asked their opinion. 

"Yes," my fourth born confirmed. "It's very you."

Now my attention tuned to finding a plant that spoke to the pot. 

A plant that would also speak of my mom.

And again, my fourth-born readily tuned into my wavelength.

"What about this one?" she suggested, holding up a darling schefflera arboricola. I gasped. 

My daughter had no way of knowing that for many years, my mom grew a huge schefflera arboricola in our front entry way, one of the few spaces in our eccentric little lake house that gave her a genuine sense of pride. 

It was the perfect plant for the perfect pot, and when I set the two together to get a glimpse of the total effect, I fairly vibrated with certainty.

This was a gift from my mom.

And I love it, in so many ways. Thanks, Mom!

Reading | Earth + Space and In The Stream Of Stars

Earth + Space | Photographs From the Archives of NASA

If there's anything NASA has done well since the heady days of the manned flight programs, it's to take photos. Taken from space - beyond the interference of earth's atmosphere - by astronauts or space telescopes, including our old friend Hubble, the images are crisp, clear and mind-blowingly beautiful. Arranged from near to far, the images move out from earth to moon to solar system to star-birthing nebulas to galaxies, and leave me grasping for words to describe their majesty. Apparently, the person who wrote the captions had the same problem, because the texts presented are rather wooden and technical. But no matter, the pictures speak for themselves and they are pure poetry.

In the Stream of Stars | Edited by Harmann, Sokolov, Miller & Myagkov

We all know about the notorious Space Race, the Cold War competition between the Americans and the Commies to be the first to the moon. Well, during the late 1980s, in an attempt to wipe that old slate clean with a new focus on partnership and collaboration, Soviet and American space artists worked together to create this fascinating collection of art. Organized into themes - such as The History of Space Art, Visions of Flight, and An Artist on the Moon - each chapter opens with an essay penned by a different artist in this field, and their writings range from virtually incoherent to sublime. But the paintings, which burst off the pages and astound me with their variety and creative punch, are transcendent, each and every one. 

* * * * *

Daughter of a mathematician and a would-be chemist, I was schooled early in the holy trinity of math, science, and well, nothing else. No other areas of human endeavor compared. I'm not sure if they delivered their message in these exact words - though they may very well have - but my parents made it crystal clear to me that English was for runners-up and art for those with raw talent rather than intellect, but the chosen few, the truly smart people (as their daughter surely must be) should devote ourselves only to the brilliant twin stars of math and science. 

It never occurred to me in those days that my parents were dead wrong about that but, as I know now, the exact opposite is true. 

The authors of the Stars book build a compelling case for art as the driving force of scientific exploration, where the expression of our collective dreams and fantasies pushes us to seek the truth about our world around us and even more so, the universe beyond. The NASA photographers present an eye-popping visual record of our discoveries to date, as well compelling proof positive that if anything is true about the mysterious universe in which we float, it is beautiful beyond compare. 

And I am thankful for both of these books which help to grow me not into a math nerd or a science geek but a well-rounded and deeply inspired human being. 

* * * * *

Hey, wanna read more reviews of books I've read in 2021? Here you go:

Magnificent Desolation

Moon Shot and Falling To Earth

A Man On The Moon and Apollo 13

First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong

The Astronauts Wives Club

Rocket Men

Mission To Mars

The Right Stuff

Earth + Sky and In The Stream Of Stars

At Home In Joshua Tree and Abandoned Detroit

Carrying The Fire

See San Francisco and Corbis Royalty Free RF004

Space and Moondust 

Where The Crawdads Sing

A Million Little Pieces

The Art Of Racing In The Rain

Normal People

Centennial

Honey, I Love