Broken Arms, Wounded Thumbs, and Pains a Little Less Physical

A broken arm may be even harder to deal with when it happens to your sibling.

As tragically crippled N has been the talk of the town and eager recipient of phone calls and letters and visits from teachers and friends for the last couple of weeks, healthy, irrelevant L has been struggling with graciously playing second fiddle. Progressively more gloomy and bitter, she had taken to pouting and foot stomping, with bouts of stubbornness and occasional entirely out-of-proportion emotional breakdowns over ludicrously trivial things. Stacy, who had borne the brunt of the woe-is-mes Monday through Friday and was wearing thin, was having her own emotional challenges to work through. Mr. Dick Wahler, her long time neighbor and husband of her beloved friend Helen passed away last week a month shy of his 93rd birthday - the funeral was to be this afternoon and Stacy was to play the piano. Sad and stressed, she had little patience for a drama queen who'd lost her court.

This morning L had a 9:00am choir rehearsal so I decided to give Mommy a break and take her to her practice, but first, to make an L-centered event out of it, we would have a Daddy/Daughter Breakfast. We left the house (and Mommy, and that insufferably wounded 6-year-old) at 7:30 and drove to a little diner on the way to her practice. L, all bubbly and buzzed, was a far cry from the goth child of moments before. At least until we got to the diner and she slammed her thumb in the car door in the parking lot. Without hesitation every woe of ages past descended anew and the meltdown was superb. I can't doubt that it hurt, but the display of unbridled agony demanded far more blood and gore than the slight indention evident on her thumb. I flailed about trying ineffectively to de-escalate the situation, alternating wildly between cuddling and cooing on one hand, and threatening additional severed digits or limbs on the other. I'm not sure exactly what transpired to bring heads to a cooler state; it probably had something to do with the waitress, sympathetic to my plight, who soundlessly mouthed "Hot chocolate?" to me while gesturing toward L. Cocoa always brings the world back into perspective.

Having recovered, our breakfast was breezy and bright again and the world was a happy place.

Joy restored.

Displaying the horrifically mangled digit.

The scene of the crime.

L demonstrates safe door-closing technique.

We got to the community college where L's choir meets with a half hour to spare. L quickly and graciously accepted my invitation to take a walk around the campus while we waited. Being early on a Saturday morning the place was fairly deserted. Nevertheless as we wandered by the art building we noticed that it was open, so we slipped inside and pursued the cases of student sculpture that line most of the hallways. I was a little amused at the works. Most were graphic and distorted and were clearly full-hearted (if misguided) attempts at being disturbing. Lots of half-melted skulls and mangled, severed body parts --apparently a theme I wasn't fated to escape this month. Aside from one particularly savage sculpture of a ravenous flesh-rending dinosaur, L thought the pieces rather "gross."

Eventually L was delivered to her class and I putzed around the ethnic markets in the neighborhood for the two hours I had to kill before retrieving her. (My weird purchases for the day were "almond oil" from the Arabic market, and "ginger tea," which was really more like ginger jelly from the Japanese grocery.) When we got home Stacy was all puffy-eyed when she greeted us at the door, and I assumed she was dwelling on Dick's upcoming funeral that afternoon. But she pulled me aside out of earshot of the kids and broke some more bad news. Her grandfather Lefty Harris had died that morning. Evidently it had been quick and peaceful, and at age 90 no one could argue it was unexpected or a death out-of-season - but it was a blow.

There's a blessing to busyness, and we only had a few minutes to eat and change before heading up to Burbank. The traffic on the way to the Wahler funeral was horrible, so with all the griping and complaining we were able to extract from that we all kept pretty well focused on other things and reasonably composed. It was only L, who internalizes stress in ways I haven't yet come to understand, who, once we got to the church, betrayed that all was not well. She began complaining about her stomach and retreated to the sour and bitter attitude of earlier in the day. Her maladies were forgotten when Aunt Claudia and Grandma arrived or Uncle Kyle showed up, but once she was alone again and thinking, her stomach came to the forefront. "I'm not sad about Grampa Dick or GGPA (Lefty)," she quickly disclaimed through her tears, though no one had suggested she was; "My tummy just hurts a lot." After the funeral Stacy took N downstairs to the reception, and I took L outside for a walk and some fresh air. We ended up just sitting on the church's front steps while she cried in my lap. All because of her tummy, of course.