We've had a very busy week

Christmas Eve Day 2009
Melissa and I drove out to Lynnwood to get "Gramma Jane" and took public transportation from Northgate to the airport to meet Harrison, arriving from Buenos Aires. The air was chilly, and it was a quarter-mile walk from the end of the train line to inside the airport, but it felt safe (no traffic to contend with) and was totally flat (no out-of-breath-gramma. Hooray!)

Harrison had traveled 19 hours (via DC) and he looked wonderful in his Christmas tie-die t-shirt (lovely forest green with dark red.) We were thrilled to see him and always amazed at his ability to slip from Spanish back to English. He had checked two huge suitcases and his skateboard. He also had his laptop, backpack and jacket. The four of us took the new light rail and tunnel bus back to the car, an easy ride, except for the crowd from downtown to Northgate. (On Christmas Eve, downtown workers head home early, so the bus from the bus tunnel was quite crowded.)

What a cheap way to get someone from the airport! And the day was beautiful.

Christmas Day 2009
Mother & Wayne joined our family for Christmas morning. It was supposed to be Christmas-lite -- de-emphasizing purchases, and focusing on treasuring one another. Lelia and Tony came from Bellingham, Melissa was home from Portland, Harrison was in from Buenos Aires (until the end of February), my sister, Micah, came in the morning, and Sara Keizer (our like-a-niece student friend, daughter of the best man at our wedding) took over the main breakfast tasks (her gift to the family). With all the chocolate in the Christmas stockings, it was great to have a nice egg-filled breakfast casserole to top off the morning.

Toward the end of the gift-opening, the "non-presents" from Melissa were opened. What brilliant ideas she put together, two deliveries of organic produce for Rich and me, "a bike for a kid" for Elizabeth (this is a program in Portland where you can provide the funds and an organization coordinates getting bikes, helmets, etc. to kids from the area). What a perfect gift for bike-riding, kid-loving, tender- hearted Elizabeth. Gramma's handiwork came next, with booklets of the family history. Mother had done such a wonderful job, writing up a page per person, talking about the various people back through our family's generations. We were overwhelmed, and everyone started flipping through the pages and reading to themselves. It had gotten quiet, but it was a rich warm sort of quiet. Lelia was brought to tears, when she read about my brother, John, and my dad, who had both died. She was overwhelmed at the thought of losing a daddy and a brother. It was so tender. It looked like everyone made the individual response to Gramma Jane, amazed at all the work she had done, at the brilliance and the awesome stories. We were very grateful.

Gramma was a little wacky, missing words now and then, and just a little "different"; but one of our family mottos is "Everybody's somebody else's weird guy", so we just loved her, thinking that it was just the stress of her recent evacuation from her apartment and living without her normal surroundings at the holiday season (due to water pouring into the living room from the unit above, she and Wayne had been relocated two weeks earlier with just a few of their belongings, and the expected "day or two" would end up extending past the first of the year, just as Wayne predicted.)

Wayne and Mother left in the early afternoon to go to Steve Banta's for another Christmas celebration. We were all glad to have the families so close. (Melissa also left early in the afternoon, so that she could spend time with Brendon's family, Harrison went to work at the last-run movie theater up the street, and the rest of us went to a movie . . . except for Micah, who had Minutes to type up.) I received a call from Steve Banta later in the evening. Mother had been "different" during the Banta Christmas get-together. They were concerned and wanted to let me know. I told him I'd take her to the Group Health walk-in clinic the next day and get her checked out.

Little did I know what December 26th would hold.

The Day after Christmas
Late in the morning, I phoned Wayne and told him I'd like to take Mother to the clinic. That sounded fine to him. So, I drove the fifteen minutes to their temporary apartment and told Mother I'd like to take her to the weekend clinic to see what's going on with her. She was fine with that, got ready, and we were off to Bellevue (Group Health, beside Overlake Hospital). It was the middle of the day.