The Plunge

So. It happened. I had my first day of clinical. And it was... fine. Nice. Which is to say, a bit anticlimactic after the amount of energy I'd put into being crazy-nervous about it.

My preceptor, Julie, was low-key and pleasant and welcoming. She's 34, has been working on the same floor since she graduated from nursing school 12 years ago. She's my height (but slender as a reed), has hair and eyes the same color as mine, and also has a 3-year-old daughter. I could be her older, fatter shadow.

Our patient assignment turned out to be quite light. We had two bone marrow transplant patients, which I guess could be a handful if they were having problems, but one was a new admit who wasn't even due to start his chemo until the next day, and the other was five days post bone marrow transplant, and so they were just waiting for his white blood cell counts to come back up (from essentially zero) so he could go home. He needs to be watched extremely closely for infection and for serious side-effects from the various nasty substances recently or currently pumped into his body, but at the moment he had no signs of infection at all, and all that was going on with him was a little nausea and a moderate elevation in blood pressure (knock wood). The new guy mostly just needed orientation and teaching, along with a general intake assessment. Both of the patients were very, very nice, and cheerful and matter-of-fact despite their rather tenuous prognoses (both having "failed" initial therapy and now having a chance of survival under 30%).

Some moments in my day:

Getting off of the subway just before 7 am with a whole flock of people in scrubs, all crossing together and heading toward the main entrance of Other Famous Hospital (let's call it OFH). I tried to be cool, but it actually kind of gave me chills.

Realizing that hey, it's just about the beginning of July (which is when new interns & residents start), so I probably won't be the only one on the floor with terror in my eyes. And sure enough, in my first half-hour there, some skinny guy in a lab coat is striking up a conversation and trying to be friendly. (New intern. Sign of panic. Otherwise, people with MD after their names in a teaching institution, in my experience, do not spontaneously reach out and gratuitously act friendly and social with people with RN after their names. It just isn't done.)

Going to teaching rounds of the Bone Marrow Transplant team and forgetting my place and asking the attending a clarifying question as he's up at the board explaining the history and theory of the non-myeloablative BMT process. He gives me a weird look but answers my question.

Making a big deal to my preceptor about how I don't have acute care experience and very little clinical experience in general, and how nervous I am. She's then a little surprised when it turns out that I nonetheless do know some stuff about clinical care. Yeah, well, I'm good at the book-learning part, I say. I'm just terrified by the hands-on, practical stuff. She seems distinctly relieved and says oh, well in that case, you'll be just fine.

Learning to do a whole mask-hand wash-glove procedure every time we enter a BMT patient's room. Forgetting to use the alcohol hand scrub and washing my hands with soap and water because that's the habit I'm in from before alcohol hand scrub was made the standard.

Getting the chance to do the intake interview with our newly admitted BMT patient. He and his family talk about how he used to have a mustache, but he ended up getting rid of it after the first time he got alopecia from his chemo. His wife would have to leave early for work, so he would make his teenage children's lunches. They would find little clumps of hair in their sandwiches, but they loved him so much they didn't tell him. (Eventually, they mentioned it to their mom, and she told him.)

Eating a piece of really wonderful coffee cake brought in by the baker husband of a former patient, who was coming in to OFH to get outpatient follow-up.


So, well, I go back on Friday for another 12 hours. I got a book called Oncology Nursing Secrets or something like that and have been reading up about multiple myeloma and leukemia and mucositis and different classes of chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant and tips for giving super-harsh drugs safely by IV and stuff like that. I'm all excited. I can't believe I'm actually going to be useful for something in the foreseeable future. It's such a rush.

Tizzy

I'm all in a tizzy. (A quiet, internal tizzy, but then that's me.) Tomorrow is my first day of clinical. Twelve hours on the oncology ward at Other Famous Hospital, 7A to 7P. I'm incredibly nervous, and I'm not even sure about what. From what I've heard, you don't really do much besides watch your first day. Watching. I can watch. I'm all over watching.

Maybe I'm worried my preceptor won't like me. She sounded slightly dubious over the phone, having been forwarded my resume. Are you really interested in oncology? she wanted to know.

Maybe I'm worried I'll say or do something really, really stupid.

I don't even know whether to wear my scrubs and nurse shoes to the hospital or to change once I get there. I mean, I am taking public transportation (on-site parking is something ghastly like $40/day) and I am working with (I mean, observing someone else working with) immunocompromised patients. On the other hand, it sounds kind of like a geeky thing to do, to bring scrubs and change. On the other other hand, that would mean I wouldn't have to be out in public wearing scrubs. (And I care why?)

Will I get horribly hungry? Will I feel really dumb as my preceptor keeps working but sends me off for a lunch break?

What will 12 hours feel like? How exhausted will I be?

Oh dear oh dear oh dearie me.

I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I had a fortune cookie a couple days ago that told me that I could achieve great success with humility and diligence. I will be humble and diligent. Plus gracious. And cheerful. And then humble and diligent some more. Okay. Okay. Wish me luck.

Kvetchy Dame

Well, the valiant amoxicillin is in the process of vanquishing the streptococcal foe, and this damsel in distress is good and thankful (wait--I'm married; I think that might make me a dame in distress. hmm. well, then.). My fever's gone; I'm not all achy and exhausted any more; and although my throat still hurts a little, it feels like the cleaning lady's been through and gotten rid of the repulsive coating of bacterial scum on my soft palate.

Not only that, but yesterday when I went to class, I finally got to turn in my health form, and the administrator lady walked it over to the student health office herself and pushed it through and got immediate clearance, so I'm fully signed off for my clinical placement. It's finally taken care of, after weeks and weeks of procrastination (and then having to wait to get in to be seen for a physical, and then glitches with getting the form filled out, and then the administrator lady being out for a week...), feeling gnawingly anxious and guilty about it the whole time. Having it done with at this point feels like... like... like peeing when your bladder's really full. (Well, to be honest, maybe a more apt analogy would be the old chestnut about hitting yourself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.)

So you might think that I'd have run out of things to complain about, at least briefly. But you would be mistaken.

My sermon for today is entitled Clerical Workers Are Not Appliances, and This Means You, Even If You Think You're Exempt Because You're Already So Enlightened Because You're a Nurse or a Social Worker, or for Any Other Reason. Well. Come to think of it, I guess the title of the sermon is probably all you really need just now. But I'm happy to deliver it in full with no honorarium required (just transportation and maybe some tea and cookies) to any sewing circle, ladies' garden club, scout troop, board of directors, womyn's collective, or motorcycle gang you wish. Just say the word.

Oh, and also? It's not my fault you're tired, so don't act like it is.

Um, and don't be dumb like me and take amoxicillin on an empty stomach. You might be very sorry.

Group A, Beta-Hemolytic

Strep throat. My rapid in-office test was positive this afternoon, so they didn't bother to send a culture. My temperature was 102.8 (gratifying, since it was an objective measure to reflect--and somehow justify--how crappy I was feeling). I started amoxicillin as soon as I got home from the CVS with my little bottle stuffed full of cream-colored capsules. While I was waiting for my prescription to be ready, I also did some self-pity shopping: an Entertainment Weekly (our subscription ran out, and I've been missing it), an Oprah magazine, a bottle of lime-flavored diet coke, and a big bar of dark chocolate.

I slept most of the day after that. Pete did all of Cassie's evening stuff--dinner, bath, bed. Now I'm tired but not sleepy, and feeling weird and spacy and also intensely bored. I took some tylenol a couple hours ago, so I'm all clammy and sweaty from my fever going down.

Last spring and summer I had five bouts of strep throat, but it had been nearly a year, so I didn't immediately think of it when my throat was getting a little sore. After all, Cassie had been sick with a cold-ish kind of thing, so I figured it was just that. But then I recognized that there was something naggingly familiar about how I was feeling.

There's this particular sensation with strep throat, one that I've spent some time trying to put into words. Putting things into words is important to me, for some reason, and when people say that something is "indescribable," it tends to make me feel exasperated and impatient. It's not indescribable, I think, you're just too lazy to think hard and analytically enough to come up with words to talk about it. So I can't bring myself to give up on finding the right words to describe something so mundane and concrete as how strep throat feels. Part of my problem is that I cant really even figure out what sense I'm using to detect it. It's kind of a feeling, and kind of a smell, and kind of a taste. The closest I've come to describing it is to say that I keep expecting my throat, when I look at it in the mirror, to be covered with the kind of grayish tan scum you find in a kitchen drain that hasn't been cleaned in a while. It feels bacterial. It feels disgusting. It seems as if someone should attack my tonsils with a scrubby sponge and some Formula 409. But, well, anyway, I guess that's what the amoxicillin is for.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about learning to paint. They're hiring someone permanent at the place where I've been temping. And the administrator for the nursing refresher program is being rather snippy about my getting my health form in late (probably wouldn't bother me much if I didn't already feel stupid and guilty about it). Pete's been working like mad on the index for his book, and it was supposed to be done last Friday, and there's still no clear end in sight, and we're all starting to fray a bit from the extended crisis-mode push. But when I read on-line about how to get started painting, and how to stretch your own canvases, and how to take care of your brushes; when I think about compositions I'd like to start with; when I think about how much practice it will take to be as comfortable with a brush as I am with a pencil, the anxiety and guilt and crap all kind of fall away, and I feel so happy and serene. Painting in my head.

You'll Forgive Me If I Get a Second Opinion

Cassie had a bit of a fever again today at day care, but by evening she was perking up substantially. I, on the other hand, started feeling worse and worse just as she was feeling better and better. As I was rocking her in the rocking chair as part of our pre-bed ritual, she wanted a story about Gus (Gus is the plump little mouse in Disney's Cinderella--we've appropriated him, and he has different adventures almost every evening), but I felt like I just didn't have it in me. I explained to Cassie that I was sick, and she apparently decided to fix me.

She waved her fingers at my head, cheerfully exclaiming, "Cut, cut, cut! Drill, drill, drill!... Bandaid!"

What $10 Will Buy

A million years ago, either for Christmas or for her birthday in February, Cassie got a present from one of my aunts. It's a zippered cloth wallet with a girl's face embroidered on one side, complete with yellow yarn hair. A pink ribbon is attached to the two top corners, so it can be worn as a necklace. It came with 6 neatly folded bills inside--a $5 and five $1's. Ever since she received it, I've been meaning to take Cassie shopping somewhere where she could pick out some things to spend it on.

I finally got to it yesterday. For the first time in ages, Cassie was sick this weekend--something viral, no doubt, since her temperature never got above 100.5, and she was cranky and labile but not glazed and lethargic. But still, by Sunday afternoon, we both badly needed a little walk and some fresh air. I didn't think she'd be up to the playground, so decided on a leisurely walk to the old-fashioned-y five-and-dime up the hill. We took our time, and I carried Cassie part of the way, because she was feeling pretty punk, but she was happy enough when we got there. We spent probably half an hour going through the store and looking at things. I kept reminding her that she could pick things out to buy with her money. We looked at various rubber balls, toy cars and trucks and fire engines, pretty little boxes you could keep treasures in, some molded plastic dinosaurs. We smelled the votive candles and remarked on some things that were just like what she has at home (kaleidoscope, inside-out ball). She didn't deign to even look at the sticker books I was pushing, nor the bags of big wooden beads I thought would be such a good idea.

What did she choose to spend her very own money on? A hula-hoop (pink, $3); a big roll of the kind of flat plastic cord that you use for crafts projects when you're 8 and at camp (also pink, $3); and two 4-inch molded plastic ants (black, one with red abdomen, the other with yellow abdomen, price unmarked-couldn't have been much).

So what can I say, except that she's her own girl. And she has two dollars and change left over.

Time Suck

There's this part of me that still really believes that everyone else manages their time magically right. I know that people complain about how they don't have enough time and have to make compromises, and lots of people are around to preach that you can't do it all. But for some twisted reason, I can't make myself believe it. Somehow I really think that I'm the only loser who doesn't have it figured out.

I do manage to get to work on time (8 am) pretty much every morning, and I make it to my 4-hour nurse refresher classes twice a week. My daughter gets fed and bathed and cuddled, and my cat gets her daily medicine. I try to be really disciplined about getting enough sleep so I don't get a recurrence of the chronic fatigue syndrome. And ocassionally I sneak in a bit of time to blog. But that's about it. Our apartment is a truly embarassing disaster area. I still owe thank-you notes from April. Phone calls and e-mails go unreturned. The shelf in the upstairs bathroom that came down at some point before Christmas is still hanging there at an absurd angle, unrepaired (not to mention undusted). Lord knows I never do anything extreme or exotic like exercise. It feels like a triumph every time I manage to change the litterbox.

My dad and his wife Susan are arriving tonight for a four-day stay before heading back to Honduras, and I feel bad not to have everything nice for them. I feel bad not to have everything vaguely sort of acceptable for them. Not that they'll complain--to the contrary, they just try to help out however they can, which is of course very compassionate and nice, but the whole thing makes me feel like such a dithering fool.

I have a picture in my head of brisk, efficient women. They charge around getting things done and also know things like where's the best place to go for toddler swimming lessons and where to buy watch batteries. They aren't squishy and squinchy and waffling and eccentric. They're firm and tough and no-nonsense. They don't suffer fools. I think they get manicures. They probably drive minivans. Come to think of it, maybe they're stay-at-home moms, which would explain how they know the stuff they know. I don't know. I just know I fall short. I feel like a pale, soft cave creature, blinking ineffectually in the sunlight as sleek, shiny birds swoop nonchalantly overhead, doing things I can't imagine knowing how to do.

I'm tired of being overscheduled, tired of hating the household chaos as I pass by it seven or eight times a day on my way to do something else, tired of trade-offs. It's making me cranky and whiny and burnt out around the edges. It makes me want it to be somebody's fault. It makes me want a swimming pool and a drink and a rainy afternoon someplace soft and clean, with a novel. It makes me want to drop glass objects from 3 stories up for the satisfaction of watching them shatter.

Pete got Cassie an ant farm, and the ants are dying.

Phooey.

Normal Development

Cassie has a toy she loves, a hand-me-down from our next-door neighbors. It plays songs, and by pressing on different parts of it, you can make the music go fast or slow, or distort the notes in one of two ways. The other night, as she sat on her potty before bath, she played a whole repertoire of intensively modified tunes. She announced the title of each piece after she played it. A partial set list:

Blue Failer
Munko John Willy
Gobble-Gobble
Mummadun Dilly Mama
Hippo Pumpunn
Harriet Smilly Millitumper
Tunafish

(Incidentally, while we're on the subject of the young blond one, she had a follow-up visit with the neurophysiologist yesterday, and it went very nicely. Given her lack of episodes and her normal development (he seemed particularly impressed that she draws eyebrows on the faces of her funny little people), he's not even going to push for an EEG any time soon, and we just go back to check in with him in a year. Eventually we'll probably have a follow-up MRI just to make sure the little funky stuff they saw on the last one("possible delayed myelination in the frontal lobe") has resolved. But that doesn't have to be until she's 5 or 6, and can probably even do it without being sedated, which was the source of all the ghastliness last time. Of course, if she has another seizure, he says, call him. Um, yeah, we say. If she has another seizure, you will definitely be hearing from us.)

Breathe, Dammit, Breathe!

We had skills lab again in class last night. It had been a couple weeks, and it felt kind of bracing to get back to the nitty-gritty (and scary) stuff after a bunch of med-surg and pharmacology lectures (where even if I don't already know the specific material, and I often do, it's still all academicky and therefore playing to my strengths).

This time it was respiratory-related stuff: trach care, chest tubes, suctioning. We started out nice and easy, with a little video on asthma, and then our instructor passed around a bunch of asthma thingies (inhalers, spacers, peak flow meters). Now, not too long ago, I spent a couple of years in an asthma job, which included patient education, so I'm all over the asthma stuff. I even have a few little practical nuggets to offer when it comes to asthma (something that is true in almost no other clinical area). So I got to start the session feeling all confident and competent, which was nice, because once we hit the other stuff, I was really out of my depth.

Everyone else in the class has done acute care in the past and so at least has memories of dealing with this stuff. So when we're talking about how you ambu somebody before you suction, everybody else can picture it, based on their own experience. I myself can picture it too, but it's only because I watched a lot of ER for a few seasons. (By the way, "ambu-ing" is the same thing as "bagging," which is to say, using those squishy blue football-shaped things (called... ambu bags!) to push air/oxygen into someone's lungs. You want to do it before you suction somebody's airway because while you're suctioning, they're not going to be getting much in the way of oxygen. Since oxygen is something a person does get to missing, it's nice to kind of stock up beforehand.) It's actually kind of scary how much of my knowledge of acute care comes from fictional television programs--mostly ER, but also Gray's Anatomy and even Scrubs. I mean, yikes. Of course, if there were a nice, funny, engaging, compelling, well-researched dramatic series called Med-Surg Nurse, I'd really be set.

When we left class, having just practiced suctioning on one of the tan plastic simulator mannequins (the poor dear had a tracheotomy in addition to the nasty assorted wounds of all major types he had all over his body), I felt all fired up to go suction an airway. Let me at it, I can do it! Of course, that feeling is already starting to fade, and by the time I actually get to a clinical setting, it's going to be gone completely.

My clinical probably won't be starting until the week after next, which could be my fault (because I've been a little bit laggardly about getting my health forms filled out), but which is, to my relief, also the fault of the program's administration, and even if I had all my paperwork in months ago, I still wouldn't have set foot on my unit yet. The grumblings among my classmates about the poor coordination of the administrative aspects of the program are getting louder. One of our classmates actually has her first clinical time set--she starts next Monday--but most of us have only just received the name and phone number of our preceptor.

Our main med-surg instructor, Deb, is being pretty circumspect and not openly rolling her eyes or anything, but last class she did rather delicately say that hmm, well, usually by this time in the program, we would have started clinical and would be able to talk about our experiences together... And after last night's session, the somewhat more earthy Margaret, our skills lab instructor, was a bit more open about her exasperation. The problem, I think, is pretty much entirely Bea, the doctoral-level nurse who's the administrative head of the program. I'm not sure what's up with her. One thing is that apparently her secretary left recently, and Bea herself didn't even know which file drawers to look in for such things as the copies of our nursing licenses or our proof of malpractice insurance. It seems go a bit deeper than that, though, like maybe Bea is having a little personal/professional breakdown of some kind. (Maybe the departure of the secretary was a symptom rather than a cause?) We see her occasionally, briefly, and she's always cordial enough but also tends to look kind of distracted, and somewhere in her eyes maybe even a little hunted.

My emotional reaction to the delays is nearly evenly split between two opposing sentiments: a raging impatience to get on with it, already; and a feeling of blessed temporary reprieve from coming tortures. I really don't enjoy being bad at things. No, see, I really don't. But then, when I get too comfortable in a job, I get antsy and itchy and bored.

At least now it's all been set in motion, and all it takes is momentum and waiting, and I'll end up in a new place. I don't have to decide anything more right now. I don't really have to be brave at this point, I just have to endure being scared, and the rest will take care of itself. I'll let you know how it goes.

The Creative Process

After bath there are two options: go right up to get pajamas on, or pee on the potty and then get pajamas on. Cassie may try to plead or argue or delay or run around as crazy naked toddler, but these diversions are brief in the face of Mama's iron will. Very soon, the naked butt is on the potty, and then, quickly, pajama-clad. (Mama is firm on this point--a tiny bit because consistency and routine are important to very young children, but mostly because Cassie's bedtime is a Very Important Time in Mama's day.)

So. The night before last, after an uneventful tub, some strange bug crawled into the naked butt in question, and all of a sudden Cassie was shooing me out of the bathroom, emphatically telling me "LEAVE ME ALONE! GO AWAY!" At the same time, she seemed to be doing something complicated with the potty seat that fits on the regular toilet, something that may have involved her car puzzle. I may have seemed a tad hesitant about leaving, because Cassie repeated her orders to "GO AWAY!" and then explained the urgency of this command with "I'M MAKING A MOVIE!"

And so I did. I went away. It worked. I went out obediently and sat on the couch and flipped through a catalog. It was the damnedest thing. See, I guess if you're just stalling and being a dawdly toddler, it brings out the hard-ass in me, and I impose my will. But hey, if you're in the middle of an artistic project, however imaginary, I guess I'm just willing to let you be. I think this was just a fluke, and that it's not a sign that Cassie has learned how to play me that well all of a sudden. But it does give me pause. I may need to do some real girding of my disciplinarian loins before this childhood thing is over.

(By the way, we did finally get her to bed without much trouble, though not until she was done with her project, such as it was. Pete went in to check on her shortly after she'd sent me away, and she got rid of him, too: "DON'T WRECK MY MOVIE!")

Flames

We hadn't seen Max and Lucine in ages (well, weeks, but still), and last evening they called as they were on their way home from an outing and asked if they could drop by (and, when prompted, renewed their pledge of indifference to the proto-squalor of our surroundings). We were all delighted to see them, including Cassie, who promptly dragged Lucine into her playroom, and kept saying "Lucine?... um... um...," not really having anything to tell her, just wanting to be sure she still had her attention.

Pete had taken Cassie to the grocery store Wednesday (Cassie's in day care Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday--Wednesday is Daddy Day), and in with the frozen blueberries and whole wheat bread, had splurged on steaks and frozen pierogis. So when we couldn't bear to let Max and Lucine leave before the evening was spent, that's what we all had for supper. (Well, I myself am not so much with the eating mammal flesh, but anyway I was a pierogi participant.) Plus a few little stalks each of some lovely young asparagus left over from when my dad and his wife Susan were here and made us all dinner. Pete cooked the asparagus and steaks out on the grill, out in the lovely late-spring evening (a novelty, as until this week we've been having about 3 months of March).

Max and Lucine have recently started Weight Watchers together, and I am recently renewed in my quest to not eat everything I possibly can. This week I had a check-up so I could get paperwork filled out for my clinical rotation, and I weighed 10 lbs more than I did last August, and my blood pressure, formerly a predictable 110/70, was 130/80. Not a horribly shocking number in itself, I guess, but jeez. I'm hoping that getting my weight down a bit will result in my BP coming down also. I have a tickly little thought that maybe it's the Prozac messing with my blood pressure--I don't know whether it does that or not. I'm just crossing my fingers that the weight thing does it, and I don't have to switch meds again. Prozac is my Dumbo's magic feather, if nothing else. Whatever comes up, I can always think "oh, heck, I can deal with this--after all, I'm on Prozac!" and it seems to work very nicely.

ANYWAY, there was this whole big discussion about whether to make one or both packages of frozen pierogis, and I started to bring up the fact that Max, Lucine, and I were all... but then I stopped, because "dieting" is such a repellent verb, and "trying to lose weight" sounds just so weak and whimpery, and I didn't know how to finish my sentence. But then Max chimed in with something about the three of us "reducing," which cheered me up immediately. That's what we're doing! We're reducing! I'm sure if we were British, that would have loads of unattractive connotations, too, but since we're not, it's just kind of cozy and vaguely euphemistic. (It reminds me of how swearing in a foreign language never carries the same emotional punch, even if you know full well what the words mean and native speakers have carefully explained to you how strong they are.) So since the three of us are reducing, we only fried up (fried up, mind you, in butter) one box of the frozen pierogis. Such steely restraint.

And then, as we were lounging about and not yet ready for the evening to be over, Pete turned on the television and looked through the menu of what our cable service offers "on demand" for free. There were a few documentaries, some thick and gooey cheese (Gidget Goes Hawaiian, St Elmo's Fire, something called Teen Sorcery...) And there was Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip. So we watched that.

It wasn't what I expected it to be. Somehow, you think "Richard Pryor," and you think "shocking" in all the predictable ways--sex, drugs, and ooh those terrible swear words. I don't know. Just the living definition of "working blue." But what was actually striking about it now, from this remove, was how genuine and vulnerable and sincere it reads. This particular show dates from 1982, I think, which means it's after his catching-fire-while-freebasing-and-running-down-the-street-in-flames episode. In fact, in this show, he spends a lot of time talking about addiction and then does a whole description of what it's like to be on fire, and then what it's like to be in a burn ward. And it comes to a raw place where it somehow doesn't even matter whether it's funny or not. It kind of is, and it's kind of not, and both the funny and the not funny stem from the fact that he's up there telling the truth in a way that frankly is not too socially acceptable. If you were at a party and said those things that Richard Pryor is up there saying, people would look stricken and move away from you. It's not the "fuck" and the "shit" and talking about cocaine that's impolite almost to the point of obscenity--it's the bare need and pain. And the naked hope for redemption. That's scalding. And then it's haunting. It hangs over you afterwards, making it seem like life is sad and difficult and kind of important. At one point, he gets a nice laugh with "Racism is a bitch, man," and goes on to observe that just plain old being a human being is hard enough.

Pomp, Circumstance, Silly String

Pete, Cassie, and I traveled to Indiana this past weekend for Pete's niece's high school graduation. It had been a long time since I'd been to one of those. It was much as one remembers these things to be, only this one somehow even more so, probably because of its midwestern-small-town spin. For maximum authentic feel, it was held in the high school gym, with family members thronging the bleachers all around.

It seemed a little unsporting to me, but Pete's brother-in-law (my brother-in-law-in-law?) went a couple hours early and put down blankets along one bench to reserve seats for us. He was far from the only one doing this, though, so I guess it's accepted practice. Besides which, his 89-year-old mother (she'd have you believe that she's 90, but don't be fooled--her birthday's not until July) was there for the occasion, so it did make sense to get spots that didn't require too terribly much climbing. (She could by all rights have sat in the "special needs" seating down on the gym floor in the section behind the graduating class, but I doubt her pride would allow such a thing.)

Our little family unit definitely tipped its hand as out-of-town city slickers by wearing a suit and pumps, a jacket and tie, and a smocked dress with tights and mary janes, respectively. (We had wondered about dress code, but figured we'd err on the side of formality, which seemed safer, since at least it shows a respect for the occasion.) At the other end of the spectrum were a good number of people in shorts, and my favorite--a guy in boots, Wranglers, a straw cowboy hat, and a navy blue t-shirt with big red letters spelling "Redneck Bass Fishing" and a cartoon of some dopey-looking guys setting off an explosion in a lake and sending dead fish flying through the air.

The graduating class were in royal blue nylon robes and matching mortar boards with headpieces that puckered in an unflattering way on all but the largest, roundest heads. The regalia was more complicated than I generally associate with high school: the top 15% of the class had gold tassels on their caps (the rest had blue and white), and there were 4 different kinds of cords that could hang around a graduate's neck, denoting participation in selected activities (honor society, naturally, but also debate, drama, and one other I'm forgetting--interestingly, there were no athletics-related indicators). Almost all of the girls had long hair, though one I noticed did have her ends dyed blood red, and another had facial piercings, which went a bit oddly with the Jackie O-style large-pearl choker she wore for the occasion.

The speeches (class president, salutatorian, valedictorian, principal, superintendent) were blessedly quite brief, and just exactly what you would expect. They were, in fact, so utterly unsurprising, that I actually felt a little... surprised. I know that the high school graduation speech is not really a genre that tends to inspire much in the way of originality, but I guess I thought that one of them would have a little something, some small spark. I was wrong. Each of the five speakers seemed to have taken the average of all high school graduation speeches ever given and moved the words around on the page just enough to each give his/her own version of the self-same thing. I guess it was impressive, in its own way. One couldn't help but notice, though, that the salutatorian's speech was, embarrrassingly, not consistently grammatically sound (which I can't help but take a bit personally, as a blot on the reputation of high school salutatorians everywhere).

Then there was the calling of the 330-odd names of the graduates (a few Audreys, which I found striking). It was a very white group, with maybe 1 or 2 each of Black and Latino kids. Enough so that you couldn't say it was an "all-white" school, but not even really racially diverse enough for, say, a McDonald's commercial. The social class mix was much broader, though, from the sleek and glossy children of successful midwestern businessmen to the resolutely working class kids (some with seemingly the very same haircuts as the working class kids in my high school class). There were the obligatory introductory pleas to hold applause until everyone's name had been called, and the pleas were roundly ignored as per protocol. I myself could have done without the sporadic sounding of airhorns, but I guess the high school graduation of certain 18-year-olds just calls for very high-decibel celebration.

It seemed like had it had been forever, and we weren't even to the end of the M's yet. The bleacher was getting very hard underbutt (despite the blanket Pete's brother-in-law laid down), and Cassie was getting distinctly antsy. She wanted milk, and I'd forgotten to bring her sippy cup. She'd drawn quietly with colored pencils, and then sat staring blankly for a while (she was tired--travel always messes up her sleep). Now she was really ready for this to be over, and I absolutely didn't blame her. We managed to eke a few more minutes out with the colored pencils, but they only got us through the P's. Pete pointed out that with so few Jews, the alphabet gets front-heavy, so that being at the P's wasn't so bad because there weren't any Sugarmans or Weinsteins or Zuckermans to come after. Even so, I was relieved that when I finally pulled out a bag of Wheat Thins (I'd been saving them as long as I could so she wouldn't get even thirstier), they kept her happy all the way to the Z's.

It was too bad that Cassie was so glazed and cranky and exhausted by the end, because otherwise I think she would have enjoyed the graduates' final eruption, once the last name was called, with cheers and silly string and assorted small projectiles. They didn't throw their hats in the air--though they looked for a moment like they really wanted to--and made do with one lone beach ball bouncing around as they prepared for the recessional.

And finally it was over, and we were slowly filing out of the gym. Back to Pete's sister and brother-in-law's house for a weekend of full-on sun-dappled suburban lounging (great green swaths of soft lawns, big old trees, a dozen royal blue beachballs ("Class of 2005" in red on the sides) scudding in the gentle breeze across the lilypad-shaped swimming pool in the back yard). There were acres of food, including some enthralling aioli and perhaps the best vanilla ice cream I've ever tasted, and I ate until I was sore, and watched Cassie harrass the poor ants and pill-bugs and tried to keep her away from the pool's edge. We saw our dear friend James, who lives only a couple hours away and who had driven down to hang out with us a little, and he and Cassie enjoyed each other a good deal.

I'm kind of glad to be back at home, though. Back where life is stressful and the apartment is a pit o' chaos and the litterbox stinks but we need to get more cat litter before I can change it. I don't know. It's home.