Someone Else's Words Wednesday: Because sometimes lyrics are so true

Some day you'll see
Surrounded by angels floating atop of the sea
On bended knee
Don't go where they go, don't sing all the songs they sing

Nobody knows you the way you know you
But I think I do
But I thought I knew, yeah, I thought I knew
Nobody knows you the way you know you
But I think I do

But I thought I knew, yeah, I thought I knew

~Lyrics by Michael Angelakos to "Seaweed Song" by Passion Pit

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City kids in the surf

I live less than five miles from the beach. Five little miles from rippling blue water, warm sand and more helado carts than you thought could possibly be in existence.

A few times a week, I drive down Lake Shore Drive, happily soaking up the skyline and stretch of Lake Michigan over my left shoulder. I feel energized enveloped right there in between all of the concrete and steel and lifeguard posts and boats in the harbor. I often look out at the skinny piers stretching out past the pile-ons where seagulls and pigeons perch together and think that I never want to live in a city that is not on the water.

So it must be strange to people from other cities, and perhaps many who live here, that the idea of going to the beach completely escapes me every single summer. Oh, I might think of it a time or two, especially on a warm evening when the humidity sticks to the skin uncovered by my sundress. Or when I see small children and their parents cross the arching bridge over Lake Shore Drive to North Avenue beach just like I did as a kid growing up in Lincoln Park. Or when I wonder how in the world we will possibly break free from the central air in our rented condo in the middle of a neighborhood crowded with dogs and UPS trucks and kids skateboarding and the thumping bass on cars circling the block for a parking space.

The beach, I will surprise myself by thinking. Ohhhhyeahhh, the beach.

But this year, Lil E is in a summer camp with a group of his friends. They spend the morning doing fun activities indoors and spend the afternoons outside, exploring the zoos and conservatory and parks and other places they can duck into shade to avoid the 90-degree temperatures we feel day after day this summer. Every day, I drive past all those beaches, pick him up and retreat past them one more time on our way home. It only took a few pick-ups before the ohhhyeahhhh hit me. And hard.

"Why aren't we going to the beach like every single day after I pick you up from camp?" I blurted that out mid-week when he was sweaty and sucking down a juice box and fishy crackers in his car seat behind me.

"I don't know?" he asked in a question-response.

"Well, let's do that!" I was probably more excited than he was. But he's only been to the beach here a few times before.

"Do you promise we can take our swimsuits, not go in our jeans like that one time?" I promised, nodding shamefully to his memory -- the memory that will drive me to guiltily hand over therapy co-payments to him for years and years -- of the staycation a few summers ago when I was so apprehensive about letting him get in the water that I didn't even bring bathing suits with us just in case it was all OK.

I did give it up and we did play in the water we were soaked, stiffly walking back over that bridge in drenched, rolled up jeans. It was a glorious day, despite my hesitancy. We needed another one.

That Friday, we brought a buddy of Lil E along with us. It was a spontaneous beach play date, so this time, she was without a swimsuit. But she didn't mind getting in the water in her dress, then changing into shorts and a tank of Lil E's I packed as a back-up, then finally wearing a dry sundress of mine like a flowing gown.

I prepared like my mother did back in those bridge-walking beach days. I threw a bunch of toys and towels and snacks and sunscreen (it was Coppertone sun tan lotion back then) into a big bag, pulled on my suit and some shorts, grabbed the kid's swim gear, and ran out the door. We wouldn't have everything -- I was aware of that -- and we would have to squeeze in to find a space for ourselves. But we would have fun. And we would be at the beach, dammit.

Our beach. The one we ignore. OK, it's also the one with sand ground down from beer bottle glass and cigarette butts. It's the one with the occasional Pamper floaty in the bluest of tides. It's the one where skunk weed and Mountain Dew fill the air space around screaming mothers and high school boys with BlackBerrys and bags of Cheetos yelling obscenities while they play bags with rented boards.

But really, it's not bad. Even when it is crowded and littered and loud, it feels like a little peaceful pocket of the city. A peaceful pocket where another generation is learning to filter out the somehow-still-in-existence pop can tabs from their sand castles, but still a little bit of urban nature to navigate.

It was 98-degrees that day and the kids squealed and jumped and raced in and out of the water for nearly three hours. We ate snacks and guzzled water and when we were all heat-exhausted and pink-skinned and crabby, we piled back in the car and went home.

It isn't the ocean. It wasn't a vacation. But it is a beach in our very own city. That's something I really should try harder not to forget.

We'll be back with another friend this weekend. This time, everyone will have on their own swimsuit.

A note about my new city beach mama bag:

Bob at Simply Bags kindly sent me this beach bag, which I used to haul all of our gear to the beach last week and will pack full again this weekend. He asked only that I honestly review the product and, honestly, I wasn't prepared to like this large-sized woven bag so much.

It's cuter on my shoulder than in the pictures (I chose the red and white striped woven bag) and is mercifully lined so clean up was an easy shake out of all of the sand and goldfish cracker dust. I'm not a big fan of the look of the nautical-style rope handle, but it is really durable and I never worried about the weight within the bag straining when I carried it. Most importantly, I fit A LOT of stuff in it -- two extra large beach towels, a lunch bag full of fruit and crackers, three large water bottles, three pairs of kiddie shoes, a small purse, two changes of clothes, a swimsuit, two cans of spray sunscreen and my car keys -- and there was still a little wiggle room for sand toys that didn't fit in another tote bag. Lil E loves to see his own name stretched across it and says it is a reminder to go back to the beach...and SOON (we are, we are!).

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102 today

Today, my grandmother is 102.

She's been ill for the last week, requiring oxygen and spinning my mother into action to rush downstate to be by her side. It has happened at least four times before -- the call that indicates her life is quickly coming to an end, the bags quickly packed, the conversations about the do-not-resuscitate order and phoning distant family members and a possible funeral.

And then, somehow by the grace of a miraculously healing body and a soothing hand upon hers and maybe just time, Grandma Alice pulls through. Her vitals return to her normal. She opens her eyes. Her color returns to a pinkish flush.

Seven years into Alzheimer's and retired to a bed in a room at the end of the hall of a county nursing home, my grandmother is not OK. She is taken care of and my mother tends to her lovingly. She files her long, pointed nails. She brushes out Grandma Alice's brilliant silver hair, somehow naturally streaked with black in the last year. She massages scented lotion into her hands. My mother lays out outfits, replaces clothing for the appropriate season, swabs her mouth with a damp sponge, puts lip balm on while my grandmother sleeps. Some of the nurses and aides in the nursing home are wonderful and she still gets cards from ladies in the church she attended for decades.

But Grandma Alice no longer speaks or walks or even shifts around uncomfortably on her pile of starched, bleached pillows. I've learned not to know what to expect when I walk in her door. I know she will not recognize me and I know that it will be enough to just sit beside her and hold her hand across the bars of the hospital bed. For years, I've steeled myself that her death could come at any time, but still there's been the soft vulnerability of thinking she was right there again and again.

This last week, I chose to step back from the worry that she was in the final days or even hours of her life in that nursing home. I got teary once when I told Lil E that Grandma Alice was not well again, but I made the conscious decision to wait. And see. My parents went to be with her, reporting in three or four times a day on her progress, her pulse, her coloring.

Then yesterday, it was time for us to see. My dad, home for a few days to attend some events in our city, said he'd drive Lil E and I downstate to see Grandma Alice. We picked up a sheet cake from Costco, decorated in my grandmother's favorite pink roses. We did not take presents or cards. Being in the room would be enough.

We were there to celebrate her birthday, a nearly unimaginable number of years to walk to this planet and much longer than anyone -- including my grandmother -- thought she would be with us in body. She'd spent days sleeping, but had been eating small portions of strawberry shortcake and pudding my mom fed her. She'd been drinking juice and water and even had a milkshake. Her pulse was up, she was still on oxygen, many questions remained.

But when Lil E and I walked in the room, those things fell away. All I could see was my grandma, and in some moment of complete grace, my grandma saw me.

"Hello, Grandma! It's Jessica." It's what I always say, years away from any expectation that she will or should recognize my face. "This is my boy, Lil E."

He chirped a hello, and I leaned over him onto her, touching her cheek and hair with my hand, kissing her, getting close to the eyes she loved to say Lil E also wears.

Her eyes brightened and she raised her eyebrows and she kissed me back.

"She doesn't have to recognize us or know us," I told Lil E repeatedly yesterday just as I have on our other visits and during our conversations about the great-grandmother he only remembers being in bed. "We just know that she feels the love all around her."

I do believe she did feel the love. My parents wheeled the cake on a cart out into the lounge where wheel-chaired residents slept and yelled and stared blankly at the television, which had the title sequence of "Forrest Gump" on it for hours. They cut and served the white cake with pink roses to the staff and Alzheimer's patients and their families. Lil E did Tae Kwon Do moves to entertain some ladies, and led one woman down to the room to visit my grandmother. She talked to me for fifteen minutes before she realized she didn't know my grandmother at all and, in fact, had no idea she was in the room. But she let Lil E lead her back to the lounge to get another piece of cake to celebrate anyway.

I sat in a chair that was scooched up as close as I could get to Grandma Alice. With a plastic fork and a bubblegum pink party napkin in hand, I fed her every single bite of a sizable piece of her own birthday cake. She ate, slowly and with my assistance, but she ate. Once in a while, she grunted like she wanted to me to know something she was thinking. She let me gently rub her shoulders. She held tight to my hand the whole time. 

I told her abbreviated versions of stories. I said that I loved her many times. I smoothed her hair, I wiped her mouth, I adjusted her oxygen tube. She was in and out, as awake as she can be for a minute or two, then glazed over for another minute or two, then back again. I took my time, I felt no rush, I waited for her to look at me again so I could offer her another bite.

When the icing was cleaned from the pink plate and she'd finished two glasses of water and a cranberry juice, after Lil E and I sang "You Are My Sunshine" to her and I'd lowered her bed down a bit, she quickly drifted off to sleep. Her eyes were closed but her fingers were still wrapped around mine.

Her day was over and it was time for us to go. We took turns kissing her forehead. I pressed my cheek to hers, cool and soft against mine.

My Grandma Alice is 102 and somehow, still here. I'm not sure that she'd be happy about that if she was lucid. But in the middle-place where she floats, I like to think the belligerence and anger and intensity and confusion and paranoia that filled her brain at the onset of her diagnosis have slipped away. I pray she is where she is, at peace.

There may not be another birthday celebration for Grandma Alice. But there may be. I got to be with her for a few precious moments yesterday and, as for that future, we will all just wait. And see.

Get to know Grandma Alice:

I am my grandma's girl: Her 101st birthday

The gift she gave us all: Her 100th celebration

She taught me to love flowers. And to know their names.

She brought me up, baking pies at holidays by her side.

Oh, how she loved babies. All babies.

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