Why Ali Can't Die

Imagine you're fortunate to be 18 again and you're even more fortunate to get to spend two weeks in Ireland with three of your closest friends.

You'd go wild, right? You'd drink a lot and do crazy things and have the time of  your life. Ali and her friends may or may not have gotten wild, but they did do a lot of fun stuff. I got to hear about some of it as I drove them home from Chicago this week.


The best story, in my opinion, is this one:

One night, Ali was puking and wailing into the toilet, "I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. But I can't die because my parents love me too much."

Cool, right? The comment, not the puking and wailing, which apparently was on repeat for quite a while.

The story came to me just after I'd read and shared on Facebook a post from a teacher who said a lot of things about what it takes to make kids successful. It all boiled down to, "Just love your little ones; it's all they need."

My favorite parenting compliment came from a stranger at a grocery store when I was pushing baby Ali around in a cart and trying to decide from among the various jars of mashed up goo what her upcoming dinners would be.

"Now that child looks loved," the woman said with a huge smile.

I would argue that basics like food and shelter, love and a little bit of structure is all they need. And clearly, Ali's friends had both.

At one point, a guy tried to lure one away from the herd and the tiniest among them stared him down and ended his bid. They held each other up, braved the night to get food when others were hungry but tired, pooled their resources and their knowledge.

They chased pigeons until a couple of older women who were feeding the birds gave them forbidding looks. One came home with a tattoo. They made new friends.



The food swoons were many. After chasing pigeons every time they came across a flock, Ali took a chance to actually eat one on their last night, at a fancy restaurant. "Everyone in the world should be eating pigeon," she proclaimed. They ate liberally off each other's plates at every meal and the others are grateful that Ali introduced them to scallops. The soups! The stews! The bread!

In what should shock no one, there was drinking involved. Lots of silly drinking. One night, a tipsy Alison fell off her bed and rolled under it for some reason, trying to hide from her friends. Her size 11s stuck out to give her away -- not that she was in anyway discreet about her escape plan. They were all in the room when she thudded to the ground.

The hilarity continued on the ride home as they recounted the highlights. There were no real low-lights. Even the vomiting (and they ALL vomited at one point or another) took on a high note as they discussed the whens and wheres. You can guess the whys. In some cases it was heaved over the bridge rail into Europe's fastest running river. Other times it was waste cans on the street, and of course, the porcelain thrones.

In between giggles and laughs, they made up songs and chanted "Well, I sure hope it does!"  in unison every time a "Road Work Ahead" sign came along and one of them called out "Road work ahead." They devoured snacks from the bag I brought and clamored for O'Charley's. The closest one was in Lafayette, Ind., so the snacks may have saved their lives. (They'd miscalculated their departure time for the Dublin airport and had missed a meal.)

Ali's suitcase was loaded down with clothes that sincerely reeked. Among the clothes were gifts for family and friends. She had sea shells in a sock. For her father, she brought home a beer from Galway, green socks and "Amazing Boxer Shorts" that you drop in water to expand.

For me she brought super cool and soft fur-lined gloves and a kitchen towel with shamrocks all over it. And the gift of four hours getting the scoop on the best, worst, funniest, strangest moments of the trip.

I'm sure I'll never know some of the things that happened in their 14 days away, but I don't need to. They had fun and they came home safe and happy and eager to see their families.

Love is pretty much all we need, too...

One door opens!....and closes!

For 23 years, the door between our garage and back porch has failed to close.

Much like the painted cinder block wall that surrounds it, it was easy to overlook. For a the longest time, our garage was mostly a storage area and it was only when I got the convertible that we cleared the space out to better preserve my baby. So for the past seven years or so, it's been a minor annoyance that the door won't close.

The wall, frankly, was more annoying, but only when I looked out through the kitchen window or spent time out there. Two of the walls are screens/glass. The other is the outside brick. Even the ceiling is better than that wall -- it's varnished wood that kind of looks like the hull of a ship.

I disguised the ugly wall with with Alison's artwork for a while. I once tried to cover it with cork panels. It takes a lot of cork board to cover just under 12.5K square feet of wall space. I'm just glad I started with a small sample size because once I got one strip of cork squares up, they all started to slide down the wall, none would adhere. Probably because it was too ugly to cling to.

For the past couple years, I've papered over the wall with Christmas wrapping paper during the holidays. That actually looks better than you'd think, but it's obviously a temporary measure.

Jeff has refused to invest in my plan to put wallboard over the concrete until I scrape the column-y like spaces between the windows. In another failed home improvement project, I painted them once. I used the wrong kind of paint, apparently, because it quickly peeled. I don't remember how long it lasted, but I pass it off as shabby chic to everyone but Captain Reed who feels I should have done more research before slapping on the paint.

The porch is in a bit of no man's land, getting neither heat nor cooling. Moisture seeps in through the screens and windows, so it's difficult to get excited about really fixing it up. Usually, I just turn my back on the wall and hold the door closed with a small decorative brick when I think of it.

So only just about every day, the door hands a bit ajar and the wall stands there waiting to glare at me whenever I walk through the kitchen and glimpse it through the Dutch door that connects the porch to the house.

Until today.

Leading up to and during her graduation party prep, guests had used our old sidewalk chalk to leave Alison messages. She and her friend, Nikki, had drawn all over the door and wall.

I'm determined to cover the wall with wine crate panels, but have to clean the wall before Jeff will be happy about ordering the wine panels I need for the project.

Ali and I were wiping off the chalk when I started playing with and talking about calling a handyman to replace the door -- the option Jeff believed we'd need to do. My quick Internet research showed me that it could cost $500.

But as I fiddled with the door, my future scientist said, "I looks like that's loose up there. Maybe that's the problem."

The screws on the top hinge WERE loose. I tightened them and the door swung better but still wouldn't close. We looked at the knob.

"Isn't there supposed to be a thing there?" she asked, pointing to the latch, which was, indeed, missing the protruding part of the hardware.

"Huh," I said and silently thanked (again) Amil Gelb, who'd designed our house and left behind all sorts of things in the basement.

We'd taken down some of the doors, but as Reeds are wont to do, we kept them. Because of course, why wouldn't you keep spare doors? Jeff has used a couple of them as tables -- screwing on spare legs that Amil had, of course, left behind.

Sure enough, I found a door that had a latch mechanism I could remove. We had to remove the entire door knob to get the poor-performing door's latch mechanism out.

Once that was done, though, it was pretty simple to insert the new one and screw it back into place. We share a moment of mother-daughter high when the door snicked securely into place.

Who needs a handyman? Not us. We're handywomen. And I just made $500 toward my wine crate panel project.

Boo-yah.

Yeah. I know. For 23 years, I had completely missed the fact that the door latch was broken. I didn't say I am an observant handywoman. Let's focus on the fact that I saved TeamReed $500.

Independence Day.... it's a coming (Plus that time I almost died walking home)

No more a student driver. No more a college student. And soon to be an unchaperoned international traveler.

It's been 18 years, almost to the day when I first introduced that face up there to the world outside my most immediate family and close friends.

Ali is about three months old in the baby picture I used in what was the first "photoshoot" that led to weekly emails to my mother-in-law and then to a growing list of friends and family. To the right is her a week or so ago when she finally got serious and secured her driver's license.

I was her ride to the branch. I helped her get the necessary paperwork but sat back and let her deal with everything else. At one point, she came back gloating, telling me that for the first time in her life, she could sign off on everything needed to make something legal.

"I'm 18!" she said. "I can do it myself."

Back when she was learning to get her own clothes on her own self, tie her shoes or ride her bike without training wheels, she'd said a similar thing -- sans the double digit age reference.

"I can DO it, Dad," was a common refrain back then when the Captain was deep in teaching mode and she was sure she'd advanced beyond his help.

Now, it's super real. She's truly an adult.

We all got oriented at Purdue a couple weeks ago. We all managed to get weepy at different parts along the way but there was no actual crying. (Juxtapose this to some of the helicopter parents on the Purdue parents Facebook page. Oh. My. God. I'm nowhere NEAR the level of crazy some of those folks are displaying.)

There were some big-ass clouds that day and a hint of rain, but it was warm. There was a breeze from time to time and only a hint of a drizzle here and there. We traipsed along together in some parts and separately for others.

While she met with her advisor -- no parents allowed -- we found an outside bench. Jeff sat. I laid down with my head in his lap, dozed a bit and just looked up at that big, blue sky.

There's not denying that it's nearly time for ol' Mom and Dad to take the back seat.

Sigh.

We're getting some empty-nest practice in as she's been with her Auntie Jen in Maine since last Thursday. We'll pick her up tonight from the airport and then lose her again to a trip to Ireland in a few days. She's going with three other new adults and my own 18-year-old self is a little green around the gills. She moves into her dorm in 41 days.

Not that I'm counting, but if I was, I'd deduct 15 from 41 because of her Ireland trip and planned time with other friends. That gives me (I mean us) only 26 more days with her.

Picture me carefully packing that thought away in a padlocked suitcase and putting it at the very back of a very dark closet. Deep breath.

When Ali's away, we generally try out new restaurants, but this time we mixed it up. The rules were we had to be able to walk or bike to get there and it had to be new or a place we'd not been in at least three years. My waistline can't take the every night thing, and my liver is already protesting, but it's been fun.

We cheated a bit with a tapas night the first day, Jeff grilled steaks and I made the pan-fried the Brussel sprouts that were threatening to germinate in our crisper. I tossed them with a little balsamic and soy sauce. An avowed sprouts hater, the Captain tried one.

"Still Brussel sprouts," he sniffed and went back to gnawing on his slab of meat.

We walked to the Thai Cafe the next night and then Marco's on Tuesday -- both exceptional choices that resulted in lunch the next day as well.

Our culinary exploration almost ended tragically with that Marco's walk. The restaurant is 1.2 miles from our house. It was hot but not horrible and all was well. I'd remembered to visit the ladies' room before we left. But I didn't factor in the second G&T that I somehow ordered.

About 0.2 miles into our return home, my bladder alerted me about that second drink and the water Jeff had made me drink when he noticed that I hadn't touched my drink. "Oh," he said. "Two?" And pushed my water glass at me.

I'm not really a whiner. Or if I am, the whining I do inside my head before it escapes is pretty severe. I was eyeing the elementary school and thinking about where there might be cover for a squatting, middle-aged woman when Jeff took my elbow.

"Nope," he said.

As we passed the bricks and the opportunity they presented I remembered a time when my brother, David, had stopped for similar respite. He was still flowing when the policeman behind him said, "Hey, Dave. Whatcha doin' there?"

Naturally, David turned to converse and sprayed the poor uniformed officer. That memory gave me the fortitude I needed to keep plodding along.

By the time we rounded Crestview and were mere blocks from our house, I was picturing my bladder as a Ziplock bag straining at that strip of plastic where it seals your leftovers safely in side. The plastic film was straining and I could feel tiny pinpricks where the previously delicious gin and tonic was pressing for release.

The Captain started pointing out puddles and mentioning how many of our neighbors have swimming pools. I shut him out and walked faster. I refrained from pointing out the strength of my Kegels because A. I couldn't really form words and B. He didn't deserve the reminder.

Instead, I squeezed harder and pictured the little boy with his finger in the dike somewhere in Sweden or Amsterdam or where ever the hell he'd kept the waters back. I needed that little boy.

I would be lying if I said I didn't eye every bush, every tree, every parked car along the way, wondering if I could crouch and flee without anyone seeing me. It was a long 1.2 miles home, let me tell you.

And I'm sure I was less than graceful as I raced for the closest bathroom once the Captain managed to unlock the front door. But I survived with nothing but sweat marks on my clothing.

Last night an ill-timed loss of a/c at my niece's (Rebecca) boyfriend's house  brought us surprise and welcome dinner guests last night. So we grilled burgers and dogs and took a much shorter walk to a new ice cream stand down the street.

We get Ali back tonight. She's a little bummed that she's not getting in later because one year we came home late on the 4th and were able to watch fireworks from above. It was super cool.

In the meantime, I think we're biking somewhere for lunch. I'll be scouting public restrooms along the way, just in case. Hope your Fourth of July is a blast.