There's just something about a bunch of friends getting together to sing that I love love love. After our wedding, friends and family crammed into the tiny living room of our rental duplex and we sang Nanci Griffith songs together. My first niece was just a baby crawling around after our cat.
Now that niece is a teenager in her first "relationship," and Jörg and I haven't sung together in years.
Love, old and new and in-between. This video gave me that old nostalgic-melancholy-but-warm feeling:
That's the name of one of Annika's favorite songs for going to sleep. OK, actually it's "Be Still My Soul," * the old Lutheran hymn set to the tune of Sibelius' Finlandia. But she's loved this song since before she was old enough to realize that she just might possibly have misheard the refrain.
Of course, I never corrected her because I enjoyed my nightly giggle when she asked for Bees Stole My Soul.
Maybe I should have wondered about the fact that she adored a song that her strange little head evidently interpreted as some sort of apiarian nightmare. But we've always been OK with Annika's extra helping of childhood weirdness.
I include it on my hospital playlist because it's easily her most requested song at night. Which was all fine as long as it was being played for regular sleeping on the regular floor, and not for that unnatural and scary sleeping of the PICU, where it feels like life is so fragile that even something weightless, a negative thought or less watchful attitude, could break through to the other side of disaster. "Be Still My Soul" has lyrics that are entirely too comfortable with the notion of death for any parent in the PICU, where death is the enemy guarded against every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
But I still played it for her, because she loves the song and because she fell asleep to it on many quiet nights at home. Fell asleep imagining the constant hum of fuzzy bees brushing soft wings against her chest, swarming jealously?
Ever since Annika's last transplant I haven't been able to relax my guard. I remember after Annika's second transplant, right around the time we decided we'd have another child (Anni's liver disease isn't genetic, so there wasn't much to worry about on that count), how I had a feeling of safety, like I had some rough idea of what our lives would look like. Don't even bother telling me that no one actually knows how their lives will follow along, because we mostly all act like we do. Otherwise, there'd be a lot less long-term planning and a lot more hying off to California in search of the perfect shell on the perfect beach where the perfect wave is breaking.
But that was over 7 years ago now, and I suppose I've just gotten used to holding my breath. There's no lightheadedness and no crying, but just the waiting. I thought this waiting feeling would be over after Annika was transplanted, but it's not and I can only think it's habit, because there's no reason to keep on without exhaling.
On the other hand, the waiting is a whole lot happier now than it was before her third transplant. So that's progress, anyway.
Then Annika's liver enzymes go up like damn (ALT: 3-freakin'-80), and we have absolutely no clue why, and my cheeks puff out a little more.
On a more rational note, please share in my celebration of Frankie finally conquering her terror of robots (thank you, helpful Pet Robots book) with this delightful video from Thao and the Get Down Stay Down:
Frankie strongly disapproves of the implied Smurf-stomping, but agrees that Twizzlers are indeed delicious.
* Annika's version is from State of Grace by Paul Schwartz (with Lisbeth Scott as vocalist)
Falling Down, November 2004
Balloon in hand, my 4-year-old
twirled across the kitchen floor,
singing nonsense words
in her own key.
"It's my gift!" she declared
to the world at large, which
was really only me,
sitting at the table. Enough
twirling, and she lost
her balance, tumbling
to the floor in a theatrical
slapstick of elbows and knees.
She lay on her back
for a few seconds,
staring
at the textured ceiling
with the mysterious
spaghetti sauce stain.
Suddenly she
began
flapping her arms and legs
there on the floor, as if to swish
the imaginary snow
into a snow angel.