Three Tales of Wonder and Suspense

I'm really, really tired.

I'm home again, and, as I guess it should be, the plane ride was exhausting. The new iPod made the cut, and I was listening to tunes and playing a little solitaire for a good portion of the trip, and the battery held out like a champ. Nice.

So, I have a few things to tell you about.

The first isn't about this trip - actually, it was on the way back from Calgary at Christmas. I hadn't had a Ceaser while I was there, and it seemed like a bit of a shame. It's a drink that was invented there (at Ceaser's steak house), and it's a combination of spicy clamato juice (tomato with "essence of clam" or something... I'm not exactly sure, and have been hesitant to dig much further than that into what actually goes into the bottle), with a little bit of tabasco, some vodka, lemon, and salt and pepper.

Anyways, on the plane, if you ask nicely and get the right attendant, they'll mix some drinks for you, but this one is usually a little bit complex to try for when they still have 200 people to serve. So, I asked for tomato juice and vodka. And the stewardess nodded, grabbed three vodkas, and held them out. I assumed that one was for me and that a couple other people had asked for the same thing. So I took one.

And she didn't move. She just kept looking at me.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do. I mean, I didn't want to seem ungrateful. I must admit, though, that I didn't really need three vodkas. And I was a little unsure as to what it was about my appearance that made her take one look at me and think, "here's a guy who obviously needs a triple". So, I took one more, let her keep the third, and gave her a look that was, I hope, an appropriate mix of genuine appreciation and mild disdain.

That's completely unrelated to the next story, but, in a kind of charming way, that complete lack of common context (other than me) is the thread that ties - or, I guess, doesn't tie - all three stories together.

The little chick has a cold. A nasty cold. She's coughing a lot, which scares her, because sometimes in the past, she's coughed hard enough to make herself throw up. Not much fun, and when you're 2, it can make a common cold a rather scary thing. For a while, she actually associated "sick" to throwing up, so if I asked her if she felt sick, she would just say "no", in the hopes that, if she didn't admit to it, her lunch would stay where it was supposed to.

So she wasn't her usual self during the day. I was happy to see her after not much time together lately, and she was happy to see me, too, but she wasn't sure what to do with herself. We played with Lego a lot. We played with Veggie Tales. We watched some movies. We built a tent in the living room and sat in there with some popcorn to watch our movies. We read stories. We fed her baby. And we a lot of had tea parties with a tea set she got for Christmas.

And we did each of these things for about 45 seconds before moving on to the next one. Cold = short attention span, it turns out. The funny thing is that she likes to get things cleaned up before starting something new (hooray for that, I say), so we actually spent most of the day putting toys away. Oh well - she didn't seem to mind.

It got tricky at night, though. She was having a lot of trouble sleeping. So she would lay in bed, be okay for a while, and then start to cough, and she would call out to me, "Allison coughing more! Daddy, need a hug and a kiss. " So I would go and try to comfort her, give her a kiss and a hug, sometimes lay down with her to try to help her sleep. And when I did, she would put both of her hands in mine, and then wiggle up close to me until her forehead was touching mine, and she would try to sleep like that. It was a little sad, but it was beautiful.

And it made me think... If I feel it this deeply when my daughter has a cough and can't sleep, how would I be able to handle it if something was seriously wrong? My cousin's little boy had leukemia. I can't begin to imagine how that would feel, how I could try to care for her in that. I just can't get my mind around it. It would be devastating.

And (here's part III) today, at work, I saw something kind of cool. We had some network issues - I guess a router went down. So one of our IT guys came out from Lausanne to fix it, but since they needed some replacement hardware, he had one of the guys from the hardware people come out to give him a hand.

Now, this guy is usually very quiet. Not that he won't talk, but he doesn't choose to talk much. But once those two got together... wow. He was chatty, laughing, making jokes, and just generally showing a kind of confidence that I've never seen him show before. It was really cool. It was really, really different.

And that made me wonder. Is he just usually quiet because nobody around him really speaks his language?

And how many people around me every day are in that same situation, where they just feel like they can't be themselves because they don't really believe that anybody gets them? How many people never get to really open up? Tricky.

It's a lot to think about when I'm jet-lagged and running on a couple hours' sleep. But still, worth thinking about.

Tomorrow.