Amazing and Apparently True Repenning Stories

OK I promised to record some of my childhood stories.  Here is the first one.  Remember the Repenning Family Motto: "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."  I think this is mostly true...


Whenever I am at one of those parties where they ask you to tell something about yourself that no one knows I say that, oddly enough, I was the ONLY girl in my high school who had an elephant buried in my back yard.  In all the years of saying this, I have only ever met one other person who had an elephant buried in their backyard.  They were from South Africa someplace.  I'm from a suburb of San Francisco.  Elephants buried in back yards was unusual in Mountain View.  Now that it's called "Silicon Valley" I assume it is even more unusual.

My dad was a paleontologist, zoologist and geologist.  When an animal died in the San Francisco Zoo they would give him first dibs.  He would often bring them home and display them on the front lawn for a day or two.  My husband remembers vividly our first date when he arrived to pick me up and there was a ram's head bleeding on the front walk.  He got the message and was VERY careful to get me home on time.  Another time Dad brought home two zebras and propped them up under the plum tree on the front lawn.  It looked very much like an African Savannah.  My mother says a police car drove by very slowly several times.  Mountain View had very strict pet codes, but nothing about dead zebras on the front lawn, I guess.

But back to the elephant.  This was back in the days when Stanford was building the Stanford Linear Accelerator.  This is a mile long underground tube.  Scientists stick an atom up on a dart board at one end of the tube and then aim an electron at it from the other end a mile away.  Obviously, it has to be pretty accurate.  The guy digging the hole, however, made a 100 meter error and cut off the head of some prehistoric beast.  Fortunately they discovered the error and went back to digging the tube and left the headless beast for my dad to identify and name.  He named it the Paleoparadoxia and I spent a lot of my junior high years crawling around in it's ribcage while he and Adele Panofsky excavated it.  

At the time they found this beast, my dad was engaged in the  study of shrews - a  VERY tiny rodent.  He kept some shrews in his bedroom in an aquarium.  They die of fright if you startle them, so we were forbidden to go into my parent's bedroom.  He wanted to develop a bio-chronology of these tiny rodents that would be similar to "Petersen's Field Guides."  Paleontologists could carry his field guide around in their back pockets and get a pretty accurate date for any fossil beds they might find.  It's the teeth that are important.  Remember that in case I write another chapter.

But back to the elephant.  With great reluctance, my father was convinced to put aside his microtene rodents and turn to this gargantuan thing-a-ma-bob and it's modern relatives.  This was how he became an expert in elephant seals and demostylians.  It was at this juncture an elephant died at the San Francisco Zoo.  He was really only interested in the feet, so he drove up there to collect them.  The zookeeper just pointed him to the pen and left him.

It was a dark and stormy night.  He pointed the headlights of his woody station wagon at the elephant and got out his tool kit.  As the storm raged around him, he managed to saw off the parts he needed and put them in great big garbage bags and stuffed them into the back of the woody.  Can't you just see the movie footage?  Lightning flashes and winds howl as our mad scientist waves his saw defiantly at the sky while the elephant's mate on the other side of a flimsy bamboo fence trumpets in a mad rage.  It doesn't actually thunder and lightning in San Francisco, but I always see lightning when I picture this.


Now in normal circumstances, after amusing himself and the neighbors, animals from the zoo were taken to the "bone yard".  This was a fenced off portion of our back yard presided over, appropriately enough, by our raven, Honker and decorated with fierce witch doctor masks.  In the bone yard were several barbeques and a large cauldron.  Really large.  I mean big enough to boil a missionary.  Here was where he would render the animal down to bare bones to study.  Unfortunately, he discovered that elephants are so big that even the feet will not fit in a large cauldron.


So my ever resourceful father went to the local hardware store, bought several shovels and gathered all the kids in the neighborhood.  "Find China" he said and we began.  We dug and dug and dug.  We made roads down into the hole.  We had a perfectly wonderful time until Barbara fell down and broke her arm.  That was the point where he figured we had dug far enough.  He unwrapped the elephant feet and dropped them in the hole.  And left them there for several years until they were clean.


And that, O Best Beloved, is how I came to have an elephant buried in my back yard.






 

Winter Approaches

 

 

It is December 2 and it just might snow tonight.  I'm mulching the garden and winding up hoses. But this rose has decided to bloom.  It strikes me that this is a pretty good life attitude: Creative, optimistic and defiant.

Bonita

Bonita is my Amazon Red parrot. I've had her three years now and she just turned 20. Two years ago we both had our annual physical and we both were morbidly obese. We both had very high cholesterol and we both had sore joints. She also had liver disease and I had borderline Type 2 diabetes.

I went to Heartland Spa - which is wonderful if you are looking for a great, healthy place to get away - and talked to Drs. Arthur and McKinley at McKinley Chiropractic and Wellness Center. (Also strongly recommended, by the way) With their encouragement, Bonita and I embarked on a fairly serious effort to change our eating habits and get more exercise.

Fast forward to today. Both of us have very healthy cholesterol levels. Both of us have much improved joints. I don't have anything resembling diabetes and she has completely normal liver function. She is also a healthy weight. Of course, I am still morbidly obese, but I console myself with the fact that I have a lot more weight to lose than she did. Plus she is only 20 while I am, well, a lot older.

Healthy food and exercise. That's all it takes. Now my goal is to get "Morbidly obese" off my record. Her goal is to maintain her healthy habits and learn to land without crashing into things. Did you ever see the way they land on 321 Penguins??? Yeah. Not pretty.

Charley's Reading List

I enjoy eccentric people - people who don't remind me of anyone but themselves. I think that must be at least part of why I married Charley. This morning there are 5 books on the bathroom floor tht were not there when I went to bed last night. This must mean Charley had a bad night. It might also mean that Sam had a bad night and Charley spent much of the night in the bathroom steaming Sam. Anyway, here are the 5 books Charley found essential companions in his long night: The Naked Sun - Isaac Asimov, True Believer - Nicholas Sparks, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies - Alexander McCall Smith, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunru Suzuki and something in Russian, I believe it is the New Testament but I don't read Russian myself.

Ya just gotta love a guy that eclectic.

Addendum

It occurs to me that you don't really make progress emotionally, spiritually, psychologically until you actively choose those things over which you have no choice. I don't mean passively accept - I mean actively choose. You don't have to LIKE them, but you do have to choose them. Whether it's your lousy parents, an amputated leg or a job loss or any number of unexpected things which happen, you have to choose them before you can open the door and discover the interior gift of them.

And that isn't easy.

Product Endorsement: I absolutely adore Tena Wash Cream. I don't know what I'd do without it. When changing hugely poopy diapers, there's nothing better. Thank you Tena.

Crones

Just back from dinner with the Crones. (The three aspects of a woman's life: Maiden, Mother and Crone) These sisters are precious women not so much for their wisdom, although they are wise, but because of their faithfulness. We have been together for a very long time. Sometimes more intensely than others, but I have always known that they love me and I love them. That's a rare and precious thing.

Deb was talking about her less than enjoyable job and Anthea said something like we should only do those things in our lives which we love. This is one of those things that sounds simple but is really very hard. Doing what you love requires sacrifice and hard work and saying no. Sometimes it means saying no to people you love. It also means giving up your addictions - and we all seem to have addictions of one kind or another.

Deb is a very wise woman, but she isn't quite a Crone yet. She is still in the Mother phase. She pointed this out and I didn't really pick up on the truth of her statement until I was in the car coming home. Doing what you love is often the privilege of a Crone. The way I have always heard it was the Maiden does what she is told, the Mother tells others what to do and the Crone finally gets to do what she wants.

Deb said she wished she could live any one of our lives and I countered with, "oh no. You do NOT want to live my life." Meaning, of course, Sam who was sitting right there slowly going ballistic about something. It was a very noisy restaurant and I manage Sam quite well, so none of the other Crones noticed a thing when he started having one of his strange fits where he gets very stiff, shaky and angry and cannot control himself and scares us both. I held him on my lap until it was over and he sank into me exhausted.

On the way home I thought about my life. I have been struggling to come to terms with Sam's delicate medical conditions and the probability that I will have to stand by him as he dies. But the bigger challenge, or the one I have to face up to each day, is how to live with the reality of how he is right now. Being his primary caregiver makes it impossible to do many things. Being his primary caregiver means to live in constant fear and to be always on the alert for subtle signs of distress. Being his primary caregiver means being tired all the time and feeling cut off from the world.

On the other hand, I have the luxury of being able to knit and make lace and do many creative things I wouldn't be able to do if I had a more "regular" life. I do live pretty much exactly the way I want to and I do put the things I love first in my life.

So I guess the moral is this: It is important to spend your life doing what you love, even if it breaks your heart.

Yeah. I can do that. I can't think of any way I'd rather live this life I have been given.

What Have I Accomplished?

Yesterday my therapist and I were discussing my diagnosis of PTSD. This is a bit of a misnomer. I've never been in a war zone or been attached by dogs or raped or anything like that. I actually suffer from CHRONIC Traumatic Stress Disorder, except there isn't any such thing. There should be. It's the result of being the oldest daughter of a WWII vet who DID have PTSD, which gives me a vulnerability to developing it, combined with 27 years and counting as the mother and primary caregiver of a profoundly sick and disabled son. (In this case, Person First language is inappropriate. Sick and Disabled are the point of that sentence). And then, the final blow, the brutal murder of my PTSD Dad 4 years ago. These things combined have transformed me into someone I am struggling to get to know. Someone who apparently deserves the diagnosis of PTSD.

So we were talking about my life and my guilty feeling that I haven't accomplished much. I'm no Madame Curie and I sort of grew up thinking I should/could be. She (my therapist) said that I'm too close to my life to be able to stand away from it and say, "WOW. That's a lot of work." All I can see is that I'm getting more and more tired and frightened and that there are days when I really don't want to leave the house. I just want to stay home, take care of Sam and do something creative. And, the way my life is constructed, I can do that. Which makes me grateful but I wonder if I'm really pulling my own weight. Maybe I'm so far from being Madame Curie that I'm actually a wimp.

I should mention here that I shared this fear with my husband at dinner and he actually snorted! (A comforting sound) and said, "You are NOT a wimp. No one is Madame Curie." God Bless him. Since he gets up every morning and goes to a very difficult job without complaining, his opinion means a lot.

Another thing that happened yesterday was I got to sit in with Sam's Spred Group at Agape and watch while someone else struggled to keep him clean and keep him from aspirating food and keep him from stealing food from someone else's plate. It's a frantic activity. She's really good at it and I trust that she takes the whole thing very seriously. It was like looking at myself as other people must see us when we eat at a restaurant. It looked really hard. It looked really beautiful because they obviously enjoyed each other. For the first time, I sort of understood why perfect strangers think it is okay to interrupt us in restaurants and say drippy things like "God had sent you a little angel". ("The Stars are God's Daisy Chain" - Madeline Basset) "Angel" is not the first image that comes to mind when you are wiping chocolate milk and snot out of your son's nose.

So I was thinking about this "standing back from my own life" thing. The closest I can come to that right now is the secret thoughts I have and shove away because they are not nice. For example, when I am talking to a new mother. She will talk about how tired she is and how the baby never stops crying and how nasty poopy diapers are. She is afraid the baby might have a little cold or an ear infection. I will give her grandmotherly sympathy and, if appropriate, suggestions. Usually she just needs encouragement and approval. I'm good at giving those.

But here are the thoughts I'm struggling NOT to think: "You WIMP! Your baby will be fine and 6 months from now you will be sleeping soundly." MY baby has grownup poop and pubic hair. Try changing THAT. (grumble, grumble) I have been changing diapers every day for the last 30+ years.

For 27+ years, I have gotten up in the middle of the night to be sure my child is still breathing and often sat beside him and waited too long for the next breath. It is routine for my husband or myself to get him up and do some physical therapy or connect him to some machine to stimulate his breathing.

I have ceaselessly watched my child with an eagle eye to see that he doesn't aspirate too much liquid. I have tried to get his other occasional caregivers to understand the life and death importance of feeding him appropriately. When I drop him off for a few hours at school or Adult Day Care I worry that they think I am over-reacting and will not take my instructions seriously.

I have slept in hospital beds beside him when he is hovering between life and death. I literally pull him back from the brink of death 3 or 4 times every year. I check his oxygen blood levels every night at least once, usually more. I have 3 machines which I use on him 2 or 3 times a day to keep him breathing. I have 3 more I can use if he needs them. I grind up everything he eats and then try to form the pureed food into something that doesn't look pureed because he doesn't like to eat pureed food. I have developed a kind of mental telepathy with him because he is non-verbal. I am the captain of a team of doctors who advise me, but defer to me as the primary care-giver. This is a responsibility I accept gravely and with terror. I just barely have a Bachelor's Degree! But I guess I deserve a doctorate in "Sam".

I worry that the roofers will light a cigarette while I am giving him oxygen and blow up the house. I have told them how dangerous it is over and over again and they say, "Yes, yes." But I still find cigarette butts in the garden under the eaves.

I clean blood and chocolate milk out of my son's ears so routinely that it doesn't even occur to me to call a doctor.

There are so many things that I deal with calmly at home without even thinking of calling the doctor. These are things that would have any other parent calling 911! But I know how to treat them and a trip to the ER is so hard on him. I went to the ER so many times early on. Now its only once every year or even less. This is partly because he is stronger and partly because I know what to do at home. It's much easier to treat him at home where we can all watch Kung Fu Panda and sleep in our own beds.

That ER hiatus may be drawing to a close, however. His health is very slowly deteriorating and there may come a time when frequent ER trips once again become routine. I try not to think about the future very often. If it happens, it will happen when it happens.

He looks so happy and "normal" because I have dedicated my life to keeping him that way. But people don't understand how fragile he is because he doesn't have tubes coming out of him. I have fought against tubes because I want him to be happy. I hope I have made the right decision. When he dies, I will worry that it was because I refused the tubes. But no one ever knows what would have happened if... He looks so happy, doesn't he?

Sam Care is wearing me out and I'm getting older. I see what happens when a mom dies at 82 or something and there is no provision for her child. It's terrible. Yet, here in Illinois, there really isn't any way to plan ahead. I worry about what happens if he doesn't die first. I worry about how I will continue to live without him if he does die first. I can't imagine living without him.

Wow. That is a lot of work. Maybe I am not a wimp.

But there are occasional days when I am too tired or too depressed to do his machines, or only do them once instead of 2 or 3 times. There are days when all he will eat is Ensure and I give up and take him out to IHOP because I know, nutritious or not, at least he will not go to bed hungry.

For 27+ years I have struggled with the question, "Is it really okay to take a break?" "If/When he dies, will it be because I missed a treatment here and there?" People are always telling me it is important to take care of myself. I see the logic of this. Where would Sam be if I got sick or died? Sam himself knows how important I am and worries if I seem to be sick or if I walk away from him in a public place. But the fact remains that every instant I spend on myself is time I didn't spend on him. What is the cost of that?