I grew up surrounded by family. My father is one of seven children and on his side alone, I ended up with dozens of cousins along with my own six siblings. My husband’s family, while not quite as large, still lived within an hour of most of his family on both his mother and father’s side. However, fate or rather “the perfect job” brought me and my little family to Memphis, where the nearest family is a 27-hour car ride away.

Occasionally it gets lonely. And I get sad that my own children won’t grow up with cousins right around the corner or on the other side of town.

This distance also has made me appreciate the people in my life who’ve I known a good long while. A few years back when I turned 28, I called my closest friend from high school to tell her that we’d officially known each other half our lives.

This weekend, one of my husband’s friends from college was in town. It wasn’t for the happiest of reasons, but we were thrilled to get the opportunity to spend a few hours with him, his wife and their adorable baby. While we chatted and made kissy faces and the baby, I realized that my husband and his friend have also now known each other for half their lives.

Their history together is long and predates when I met my husband. Listening to them talk I can get a sense of who my husband was and who he’s become. And it makes me smile to think of how the boys I knew in college have turned into men with babies and professional careers.

I can’t quite name the value in keeping people around who’ve known you when you were a silly teenager, but I feel it everytime I have them come back into our lives, even if it is only for a few hours.

Our street is full of wonderful people: a retired detective, a latin teacher, a poet, an artist, the aunt of a well-known politician who inconveniently lost an election and so many more. The only problem is that until about a year ago, it was virtually devoid of children, which meant that my two kidlets were the only ones sledding down the hill on cookie trays, or wobbling down the sidewalks on bicycles newly released from training wheels.
Not that any of the neighbors minded. They spoiled my kids–baskets of goodies left on the porch for Christmas, for Easter, for Valentine’s Day. And if you’d asked me, I’d have said it was perfect. However lately, my daughter has started a campaign against our street.
She complains that there’s no one to play with and invokes the universal justification used by children throughout the whole of time: all the other kids live in better neighborhoods. Oh the agony of being eight and a half.
I see her point. When I was younger, there were always children about. All you had to do was hop on your bike and go trolling for somebody to hang out with. Part of it is about the world changing and the dangers we are more aware of than ever. But part of it is that she has parents who are committed to living in the city. We don’t want to move to the suburbs where we might find a more homogeneous group of neighbors–all with children my children’s ages.

There are some days when I see her point, when I think of my own childhood filled with afternoons at the house of the kid down the street, or playing a neighborhood game of hide and seek, but there are other days when I think of how much more our street has to offer my children. Last year a couple with two small children moved in and just a few weeks ago the poet had a baby.

When I look at the street now, I see the years unfolding ahead of us. I see that at the very least my daughter will have children to babysit and my son can help the boys learn how to ride their bikes. And that may be more valuable in the end–or at least a different type of childhood.

My five-generation photo

The earliest memories I have of my great-grandmother were made during the weeks she spent in our house just after my baby sister, Megan Marie, was born. In my mind she arrived like Mary Poppins with an umbrella and a sense of order that was like a foreign language to us. Winnie, who only had one daughter (my mother’s mother) must have had similar feelings about us. Megan Marie was the seventh baby in eight and half years and the delivery had not been an easy one.

With our mother on bedrest and our father departing for work before the sun ever rose, that September, it was Winnie, one of eleven children herself, who fed us breakfast and assuaged worries I and my brother had about the start of a new school year. She knew how to help when help was needed.

Even though she only lived about 14 hours away, we didn’t see much of her growing up. Every year she sent each of her great-grandchildren a birthday card with a crisp dollar bill and one year I spent a few days with her in her apartment in Oakland. She took me to the circus and laughed harder at the clowns than any of the children. She also took me to the zoo and paid the few extra dollars it cost to ride a giant tortoise. At night I slept in her bed with her and I remembered how strange and paper-like her bare feet and the overwhelming aroma of her cold cream.

As a teenager, I loved hearing her stories about the movie theater she helped operate with her parents and listening to her play the piano. I also bragged to everyone I knew when she went back to school in her eighties to learn how to use a word processor so she could write a book about her family. That book, self-published, when she was ninety-one, is one of my most treasured possessions.

We had the opportunity to visit her this summer when we drove across the country and as I’ve said before the moments shared between my children and their great-great grandmother are as much as I’ve ever wanted out of life. I wish I could have been there on January 14th as she celebrated her 104th birthday and I hope that the group home she lives in now indulged her with the breakfast she’s been eating as long as I can remember: Mountain Dew and M&Ms.

True fact: Root canals fail 30 percent of the time.

My dentist rattled off this bit of information as if it were no big deal, as if it were only worth mentioning now to reassure me that I am not alone in my failure. I wish I’d known that failure was a possibility three years ago when I had the original procedure. What I assumed was that a root canal was like setting a broken arm. That is once it was set, it wouldn’t spontaneously break again on its own. However, it is more like removing a tumor–that is the dentist is pretty sure she filled in all the canals and passageways where bacteria like to hang out, but there’s always a chance some hidden area escaped being filled in.

Enough about my tooth. The real issue is that I’m okay with failing, as long as I know it is an option. What I don’t like is the surprise failures. You know the feeling. When your 1989 Honda station wagon with 200,000 miles fails to start in the morning, it is a minor inconvenience. However, when the heel breaks off of your just purchased yesterday shoes, it is a soul-crushing blow.

These surprise failures have a way of sticking with you and making you cautious in ways that you never were before. Here’s a list of failures that I’m still holding onto:

• Being told I wasn’t the singing type by my second-grade music teacher
• Not making the varsity basketball cheerleading squad after spending all of football season cheering varsity
• My high-school boyfriend breaking up with me after I’d taken two busses and skipped school to surprise him
• Overhearing my college roommates planning ways to ditch me on what I thought was going to be a girls night out

Looking over that list makes me sad. It seems like my surprise failures are all wrapped up in my relationships with other people. So, maybe what truly sticks with us and changes who we are and how we view the world is when people fail us. I kept trying to think of times I’ve failed–and there have been plenty–but the thing about failing yourself is that you always see it coming.

Makes me grateful most of my surprise failures these past few years have been from inanimate objects.

P.S. This is not to say that I didn’t deserve not to make the varsity squad. I tripped in my audition, I’d just never considered that I wouldn’t. The breakup with the boyfriend made me cautious in love until I met my husband. The eavesdropping on the roommates changed the way I trust my female friends. And my second-grade teacher was right–I am more of a tambourine girl. I can’t sing on key to save my life.

For the better part of my childhood, I didn’t have regular access to a television. My parents were early adopters of the “kill your television” movement. Which meant from the time I was small enough to actually remember watching television to right up until I was a teenager there were no screens in our house. This was of course well before personal computers, the internet and phones that primarily serve as angry birds video games. When I mention this in my more academic of circles, people applaud my parents’ decision and imagine a childhood full of classical music, the world’s good books, and discussions about chaos theory. If I had to describe my childhood, I would just use the word chaos, but that’s a story for another day.

I didn’t enjoy not having a television. At school when the other children discussed Mallory and Alex, I played along offering such insightful commentary as “Skippy is my favorite.” and “Alex is cute.” Here and there I was able to sneak in some television–the neighbors down the street, in addition to having  a whacked out Felix the Cat clock, also had MTV and my friend Angela would run into the street and holler anytime a Michael Jackson’s video came on. If I was outside at that moment, I’d sprint the half a block to her house and arrive breathless in her living room just in time to see the moon transform movie Michael into Wolfman Jackson. It wasn’t until youtube was invented that I finally saw the first three minutes of the Thriller video, including the disclaimer that it is no way glorifying the occult.

Eventually (right around the time my Dad’s favorite college basketball team made the NCAA tourney) my parents caved and purchased one of the dreaded boxes. There were strict rules attached to it–each of the seven children was allowed one twenty-minute segment of time to pick what to watch. Since all the shows we wanted to watch were at least a half an hour, this meant  daily negotiations and minute swapping. And then after dinner ,the television became the sole property of my father–whose priorities seemed always to be sports, star trek, weird PBS shows, and badly-written comedies starring teenage girls. Which meant that when we got married I knew more about basketball than my husband, had a crush on Wesley, an affinity for large red telephone boothes, and an obsession with buying a chair in the shape of a hand (see  Out of This World).

The last vestige of my parents’ anti-television campaign became the no television on Sunday rule, which lasted until I left the house at which time all rules seemed to disappear and my younger siblings had the advantage of watching television whenever they wanted (provided my father wasn’t around). If you are an oldest child, you understand this phenomena. There ought to be some scientific law that addresses this issue of the diminishing enforcement of rules once children begin to leave the nest so that by the time the youngest child leaves, the home is in a state of near anarchy.

In my own family I have tried to have the no television on Sunday rule, but it has been amended by my husband to include the important phrase “except for sports.” A few years ago, when my children became old enough to realize the computer could offer entertainment, I had to amend it again to no screens on Sunday. And because I am my father’s daughter and have a little bit of the dictator in me, I had still allowed myself to indulge in screen time on Sundays. This year, tired of being a hypocrite and tired of feeling chained to my laptop and phone, I amended the rule again to include no screens for parents (until the children go to bed).

Sunday was my first test of this new system and it was harder than I thought, but like kale, really good for me. Instead of incessantly checking my email and facebook I made it through 2/3rds of The Glass Castle, played Apples to Apples, baked 80 cookies, watched my husband work on CJ’s bike riding skills, visited with our dear neighbors, and  ignored 99 percent of my list.

Of course now it is the first real day the New Year and I’m trying to stave off the panic I feel about all that remains undone. Thank goodness I have those 80 cookies to help me through it.

I like lists. I make them in my head, on post-it notes, on scraps of a paper, on my computer, on my iphone, in fancy notebooks, in plain notebooks, in the margins of books. I make teux deux lists where I write down tasks I’ve already accomplished just so I can cross them off. I’m sure you do this too. I think it is a natural human behavior, like avoiding the chatty check out clerk at Target.

Yesterday, in the midst of my great purge and organize of every space in my house, I came across a list I made when my daughter was an infant of 54 items I’d like to accomplish in my life. Considering the list was numbered to 100 and it was tucked in with a similar version from my husband (he only had 10 written down). I can assume that the lists were some sort of ill planned reconnect with your spouse night written around the time our oldest child was six months old. Those of you with children will recall how insane you felt the first year of your first child’s life. Marriages go through accelerated change during that time and it can be scary and provoke all sorts of ridiculous behavior–like making bucket lists with your spouse.

At the top of my list is take a trip to Italy. Can’t say I can check that one off and unlike some of the other items on the list (find the perfect shade of lipstick) it is still an accomplishment I want to have under my belt. I can’t even comprehend what state of mind I must have been in to have written down the bit about lipstick. I haven’t worn lipstick in twenty years. I don’t like it. Charlie doesn’t like it. Then there were the accomplishments that are entirely out of my control (be surprised by a surprise party). Think about it. In order to be surprised I have to know nothing about the party. I might as well have written in number 11 on Charlie’s list: surprise wife with surprise party. It would have spruced up his list a bit, which starts with wear a tie and a hardhat and ends with write a book.

Reading over the list I was able to cross out about ten items–the highest ranking of which was No. 2: write a novel. That is a little more than an item a year, which given my family history is not too bad of a pace. I think I’ve got at least another 44 years left. Of course there’s a good chance I’ll never learn how to do a proper dive (no. 20) or own a small newspaper and be the editor (no. 27). This year, though, I plan on taking care of number 5 (invent a new cookie) and number 22 (ride a horse on the beach).

And maybe, just maybe in 2013 when my book is released in Italy, I’ll have a reasonable excuse to visit.