Summer in a Red Mustang with Cookies by Boo King - HTML preview

Chapter 24

On the last day ofWoodstock it rained miserably and the place was declared an official disaster zone. It started to rain on the trip back home and it’s been raining in my heart ever since. Ma and Joe and Mrs. K. drove down and picked us up. I sat wedged between my parents in the front seat, my head resting on Ma’s breast, the sound of the windshield wipers beating in time with Ma’s heart. She must have already been in bed when I called because she smelled like her Second Début night cream. Harold and his mom road in silence in the back except for every once-and-awhile Harold would let out that sound he made when he first saw Beth in the bathtub, floating naked on the top with her wrists cut and bleeding, what was left of her life gone and flowing over the top and out the door, down the hallway beneath me, flooding everything in sight.

All she said to Harold and I before she died was “make yourselves comfortable” just like she did the first time we went into old man Luoto’s house and I spilled my drink. Those were her last words. Make yourselves comfortable. Do you know how many times I’ve said those words over and over inside my head? Comfortable? I would never be comfortable again.

Harold said it was because she didn’t want to make us suspicious, because we would have tried to stop her. Would we have? Could we have? You couldn’t stop Beth from doing anything once her mind was made up.

On the last day of August, Rocky Marciano was killed in a plane crash. This meant nothing to me but to my father this was a very sad thing. Beth was cremated on that same day—after two weeks of autopsies, legal maneuvers and other arrangements. There wasn’t a funeral or any other service to pay tribute to her life and say good-bye. Funerals weren’t Beth’s style, although she would have had the starring role, she wouldn’t have had a speaking part, which she would have hated. Beth without words. Well it just wasn’t Beth.

Her mother showed up in our kitchen one bright orange colored Saturday morning in mid-September with what was left of Beth contained in a silver jar. Imagine trying to contain Beth. She’d have to be dust. Harold and I were sitting in the living room watching Saturday morning cartoons with Dan when Mrs. Luoto arrived. We both got up to greet her, joining our mothers around the kitchen table for a cup of coffee and blueberry muffins just like all those other mornings that summer. As she was leaving she gave Harold the ashes.

“It was what she wanted,” she said handing him the silver urn. He quickly handed it to me like it was a hot potato. I could feel it slipping through my fingers but good old Ma, always there to catch me when I fall, reached up and scooped it like she was making some big play in a football game.

“She left a note,” she said, wiping a tear that had slipped down her cheek. “At first I didn’t understand. I found it that morning— right after you left—when I was making her bed. It was under her pillow. Give Jo-Jo and Hank the ashes. They know what to do. That’s all it said. It wasn’t even addressed to me nor was it signed. Just give Jo-Jo and Hank the ashes. I thought it was one of her songs or poems. She was always writing things I didn’t understand. I tucked it into her desk drawer with all the other scraps of paper she kept. She was forever writing things down on little pieces of paper. And then when you called I knew. I just knew.” Ma hung onto the urn full of Beth as she hugged her mother. Mrs. K. started to cry, which started this chain reaction of emotion with both Ma and Mrs. Luoto weeping as they walked her out to her car where they hugged one last time. Beth’s father was sitting behind the wheel of the Cadillac, emotionless, the stony figure he had always been, the shadow in the background of so much life. The monster. I hated him. He was just like his old man. I watched from our front window as the car backed out of the driveway and headed down the road towards John Street. I watched until there was nothing left to watch. The Manitoba maples that lined our street were in their full autumn dress, the finest they had been in years after such a hot summer and crisp September. The sky was so blue and hopeful. But it wouldn’t be long before it turned November gray and released its white fury over all of northwestern Ontario. I shuddered at the thought.

Harold was back on the couch with Dan who was scratching her scrawny little white legs. The casts had come off the week before and she was still scratching.

“You wanna go play some catch?” I asked Dan.

“Yeah!” she cried, practically jumping up off the couch doing this funny little hopping, limping thing because her legs were still kind of weak. “I’ll get the gloves.”

Harold sat glued to the television set. Coyote just fell off a cliff for about the tenth time. I hated that Roadrunner. He was such a smart-aleck. I don’t think Harold was actually watching. He didn’t do much of anything since he found Beth. We didn’t talk much anymore either. It was a lot like it was before Beth came into our lives—except quieter. We never talked about that night. It was almost like she never existed—like Harold and I had the same dream and then we woke up and that was all it was, a crazy dream. I went back to school but Harold refused to go. He was still working with my old man in the bakery. His mother was worried sick and spent a lot of time with Ma at our kitchen table drinking coffee and eating sweets. She must have put on ten pounds since Beth died just from worrying about Harold and eating Ma’s homemade cookies and cakes, which she baked every day. There was Joe’s bakery and there was Ma’s—except the only one eating at Ma’s was Mrs. K. The rest of us had lost our appetite for sweets. “Look at that boy,” she cried to my mother as she bit into a chocolate double fudge brownie, crumbs on her chin and chocolate icing stuck to the end of her nose. She wiped her mouth with a napkin she kept permanently clutched in one hand and took another bite. “He just sits there watching that stupid cartoon, not talking to anyone. He doesn’t care about anything anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“He’ll be fine,”Ma reassured her. “He just needs time, you’ll see.” “I hope you’re right,” Mrs. K. said, swallowing the last bite of brownie and looking over at Harold as he sat mesmerized by the Coyote and Roadrunner. “I can’t bear to watch him like this.” “Another brownie?” Ma put the pan in front of Mrs. K. and got up to pour her another cup of coffee. Mrs. K. dropped in four sugar cubes and topped it up with cream, took another bite of brownie and washed it down with the sweet coffee.

“How’s Jo been?” she asked.

“Jo’s Jo. I never really know with her,” Ma answered wistfully, taking a sip of her coffee.

“Yeees Jo’s Jo. She’s a character that girl.”

“That she is.” Ma brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen over one eye and gazed past Mrs. K., out the kitchen window to something far away, something so far away only Ma could see. That was Ma’s gift, her ability to see beyond that moment to another time when the world would be okay. Ma always had hope. Of all the gifts she gave to Dan and me, that was her greatest. “Hey Sam you wanna play catch boy?” Dan laughed and tossed the ball across the grass so the old fart of a dog could catch it and bring it back all wet and slobbery. “Atta boy. Good boy,” she cooed, dropping to her knees and burying her head in his neck as he licked her face, covering her in stinky old dog breath.

“Come on squirt. You wanna play catch with me or that old coot of a dog?”

“He’s not an old coot. Are ya boy?” She gave him a hug, stood up and tossed the ball into my glove. “How’s that?” “Now we’re talkin’.”

Life After Beth

“Hey! They’re having a Woodstock Reunion,” Harold called out from the family room, expertly maneuvering the remote with one hand, while cradling a sleeping Elsbeth Anna in the other. Perky Mary Hart was in the middle of offering up all the latest entertainment gossip on ET like it was news from God himself. “We should go.”

“Go?”

“Yeah. To Woodstock.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“I’m serious Jo.” He put the remote down beside him on the couch and kissed the top of Elsbeth Anna’s head. “Beautiful girl,” he whispered, kissing her again, tracing her round face with his finger. “I think it’s time to put you in your bed. Mommy and I have to have a serious talk.”He got up and headed upstairs. I could hear the old stairs creaking as he made his way to the cradle in our room. I listened through the baby monitor as he put her into bed, sang her a few bars of John Lennon’s song to his son Sean substituting beautiful girl for boy at the end, turned on the teddy bear mobile and whispered good night.

Beth was right. I did love Harold. I had loved him all my life. That was just the way it was.

He eventually went back to school at night and got his high school diploma. We went to university together, graduated and got jobs teaching at our old high school—me art and theatre and Harold music. Imagine that, Harold and I both artists?The kids call him the Music Man and me Mrs. Shakespeare, and every year we do some kind of offbeat Off-Off-Broadway take on one of Willy’s plays. In the end we never did leave this place. No Jack Kerouac adventures for us. To people who don’t really know us, we’re just a couple of small town kids who grew up together, fell in love, married and never went anywhere or did anything spectacular. But Harold and I knew differently, that we had done enough for one lifetime in one summer—it just wasn’t that transparent. In the end, the life we really wanted was the one we chose— inconspicuous and far from the limelight. We fancied the small precious things, the quiet moments together, the noisy celebrations with friends and family, the arguments over toothpaste caps and toilet seats, the sleepless nights worrying about some kid who wasn’t our own but had touched our hearts so deeply we forgot we were his teachers and not his parents, the cup of tea before work on our sunny front porch across from a childhood creek that no longer exists, the glass of wine together at the end of the day, watching the Blue Jays lose yet another game on television, mulling over fresh asparagus at Safeway and wondering was it really worth four dollars a pound and picking up the broccoli instead but not because it was cheaper but because we didn’t even like asparagus, Sunday dinners at Ma’s, Christmas trees with handmade ornaments and Valentine hearts from not-so-secret admirers, blueberry muffins and fresh perked coffee, bacon frying at six am, getting caught in the rain at the bus stop and cursing under our breath, walking the dog after dark with only the stars to light our way, reading just one more page of an Anne Tyler novel before turning off the light, singing along to songs from the sixties on the Oldies station, slow dancing in the living room to Paul McCartney, baking chocolate chip cookies and burning toast, and the best thing of all—a sweet kiss goodnight from my love and an even sweeter kiss good morning.

We got married on our thirtieth birthdays. It was a small, quiet wedding in the backyard of our house with just our families, a few of the teachers from the school, Wendy and Brenda and their husbands and a justice of the peace who was missing a thumb on his left hand and wearing a burgundy polyester leisure suit. Danny was my maid of honor and Luke, Danny’s husband, was Harold’ went to work for after she graduated from college as a Veterinarian’s Assistant. After the fall from the tree Dan wasn’t so good in school so she abandoned any thought of becoming a vet herself and pursued anything she could that would allow her to be around animals full time. She always did accept things the way they were rather than waste time wishing for things she could never have. That’s why she was always happy. Unlike me, she never set herself up to be disappointed. Pretty smart that Danny. Her and Luke have this big house in the country with four dogs, six cats, an ever-growing population of rabbits, three birds and a menagerie of strays and rejects abandoned at the clinic, and a brood of kids. There’s always some creature, human or otherwise, giving birth in their house. Mrs. Luoto wanted us all to have something of Beth’s. “She would have wanted it that way,” she said. “Something for you to remember her by.” Of course, we all knew we didn’t need anything to help us remember Beth. Beth wasn’t just a memory; she had become part of our DNA, genetically encoded into our hearts for eternity. But we appreciated the gesture and accepted Mrs. Luoto’s gifts with love and for once in my life, grace. First thing she did was hand Sam’s leash to Dan and for the first time in our lives Ma allowed an animal to live inside our house. Sam not only lived with us but he slept under the covers next to Danny, both their heads on the pillow, Danny’s arm wrapped around his big yellow girth as she slept. Sam was old and I think Ma didn’t expect him to hang around as long as he did, but for five years Sam woke up beside Dan. “It’s all that loving she gives that animal that keeps him going,” Ma would say. I’d tease her and tell her “it was all the left over spaghetti and meatballs he consumed that kept him going.”When it was pretty clear that Sam wasn’t going to make it through too many more nights sleeping next to Dan or eat much more spaghetti, Ma surprised her with a Golden retriever, a young version of Sam. I don’t know what happened to Ma’s allergy to animals but it never manifested itself the whole time Sam or Little Sam lived with us. Miracles do happen I guess.

Ma took pictures of everything. Over the years, the walls of our house sprouted her black-and-white images replacing the calendars, plaques, knick-knacks, Zellers framed prints of flowers and deer, and all the other family bric-a-brac that takes over people’s homes like invaders from foreign countries. Joe used to say “we’ll have to move to a bigger house just to make room for the pictures” but Ma just laughed and kept on taking photographs. It was her passion and his pride. It was his idea to frame them and it was he that arranged them throughout the house—in the living room, hallways, our bedrooms, the kitchen and even the bathroom displayed Ma’s artistry and view from her sensitive eyes. Ma was never very good at expressing her feelings but these images allowed her to express them in a way that surpassed words. The photographs drew Ma and Joe closer and closer as she recorded the events of our lives and he arranged those events in a way that told our story. As the collection grew, you would often find him standing in front of one of his groupings staring intently at the pictures just like he was some art aficionado in one of those fancy art galleries in New York city that Beth told Harold and I about.

I’ll never forget that moment when Mrs. Luoto handed Ma the Nikon, one single tear slid down her cheek, off the edge of her nose and landed on her hand. There was a time when this would have embarrassed Ma and she would have quickly wiped it away with the edge of her apron but instead she immediately turned to Dan and me and snapped a shot and then another and another. There was a full roll of black-and-white film in the camera all ready for Ma to use. She’s never without it and wears it around her neck like a big Saint Christopher’s medal that she keeps on for protection.

“You never know when you might like to take a picture,” she says when we tease her about the camera being with her even when she takes a bath. “I don’t want to miss anything.”There was no fear of that. Joe claimed she even brought it to bed with them. One of Ma’s pictures even ended up in the newspaper one time. Her and Joe were out on one of their Sunday drives, just past Murillo when Ma spotted a small plane that had gone down in a farmer’s field. Ma and Joe jumped out of the car and ran towards the plane. The pilot was unconscious when Joe pulled him from the wreck but he was alive. Without even thinking, Ma snapped a picture of Joe cradling the man in his arms the same way she captured all the moments of our lives. He was young, “only a kid—with his whole life ahead of him,” Joe would tell reporters later. “I couldn’t let him die in there.” Seconds after Joe pulled him from the plane and just before she ran to the nearest farmhouse to get help, Ma snapped another shot of the plane exploding into flames. A halfhour later the rescue units arrived and took over. That night Ma developed the film in the little darkroom Joe had built for her in our basement. The photograph of Joe weeping over the young pilot’s body hangs amongst the pictures in our private family gallery while the other one, the one of the plane exploding into flames, Joe rushed to the News Chronicle. It was published the next day along with another picture taken by a reporter of the hero who saved the young pilot’s life.

Joe died last year just before we found out we were going to have Elsbeth Anna. He started having these seizures the last year he worked at the bakery and kept falling down and banging his head. The fall that finally killed him was down the stairs of our family home, a full tumble from top to bottom. The night before he died, for reasons unknown to Ma and the rest of us, he had been sleeping in my old bedroom. Ma had gone to bed early that night with a migraine. Her last memory of him alive was of him sitting in front of the television in his recliner watching a Jay’s game and eating a bowl of Sour Cream and Onion Lays. The next morning she found him at the bottom of the stairs soaked in his own urine with his neck broken, the garlicky smell of the chips still on his lips. It was only later that we realized he had been sleeping in my bed that night. I had gone up to my old room to lie down and be alone when I discovered that my bed had been slept in. The covers had been pulled back with the stuffed teddy bear Joe gave me the night of my high school graduation laying on the pillow like he had gone to sleep hugging it. Lying next to the bed in a small heap on the floor were his trousers and shirt that he had been wearing, the cuffs of his pants still damp from watering the garden earlier that last evening when the hose back-fired, soaking his pants and shoes. I couldn’t help but think of all the times he fell down drunk and never once hurt himself. The Christmas after Beth died Joe got so drunk he knocked down the Christmas tree. Harold put him to bed while Ma and I picked up the broken bulbs. I wanted to take the tree down and call the whole thing off but Ma insisted we put things back the way they were. She even took a picture of me redecorating the tree, shot from behind without me knowing as I placed the silver star back on top. When I think about times like that I’m relieved he’s gone. But when I think about him driving all the way to Minneapolis that night to get me and Harold and how he picked my crumpled body up from the floor and held me in his arms and told me everything would be fine, that one day everything would be good again, I missed him with an ache so deep nothing could ever heal the sorrow and loss I feel for my father. “There’s a lot of good in Joe,” Harold always said. “You’re just too close to him, maybe even a little too much like him to see it.” Harold was right, there was a lot of good in Joe. A few weeks after he died Ma and I were going through some of his things. Ma was emptying out his wallet when she came across a picture of him and me that she had taken. I was about four months old. The only thing you could clearly see of me was my small face scowling into the camera from the hood of an over-sized snowsuit. Joe held me in his arms and looked so young, his thick black hair a shocking mop on top of his head. The photograph was cracked and fragile from being carried around in his wallet for over forty years. Ma had forgotten she had even taken the picture and I never knew it existed. It broke my heart to know that he had carried it with him all those years. Too bad we can’t remember when we were infants, to know that first pure unconditional love of our parents, the perfect time before the pain of living covers it over like layers of paint. Years and a lifetime later, the love is still there, it’s just that you have to scrape so hard and so deep to find it that sometimes you don’t even try. That’s how it was with Joe and me.

Every night of our married life together, Harold and I have carried out the same bedtime routine like some voodoo ritual; he standing behind me in front of our bathroom mirror as I brush my dark hair. When I am finished he takes the brush and does the final strokes, braids it into one long braid down my back and kisses the top of my head and rests his hands on my shoulders for a moment as we look into the mirror at our reflections. No matter what is going on in our lives this simple loving gesture on his part reassures me that life is okay. It is this nocturnal ritual that has kept my hair long years after I should have cut it off, through the heat of summer and pressures of fashion trends, through the Farrah Fawcett shag of the seventies and the big disco hair of the eighties, my hair remains long, thick and straight down my back, braided lovingly by my husband every night. The images in the mirror don’t appear to change from night to night, yet somehow we have been transformed into this middle-aged couple without even realizing it.

“Is that another gray hair?” I ask, frowning.

“It’s the same one as last night Jo. Stop worrying about it.”

“I’m not worried. It’s just that I seem to have grown more gray since we had Elsbeth Anna.”

“It only makes you more beautiful.”

“You always did know how to charm me,” I bantered as we laughed out loud at our reflections in the mirror. “Are you serious about this Woodstock reunion thing?”

“Yeah. It might be fun. A lot of great bands. Who knows we might even see some people we know.”

“I doubt that. We don’t know anyone. Remember. And what about Elsbeth Anna?”

“We take her with us,” he said, taking me by the hand and leading me into our bedroom. We stood over Elsbeth Anna’s cradle for one last look before going to bed and marveled at the child we created together. How could two nerds like us create such a breathtakingly beautiful child?

“Take an infant to something like that? You have lost your mind.”

“I lost that years ago baby.”

“You mean I’ve been married to a lunatic all these years?”

“Certifiable. Married you didn’t I?” he teased.

“Well this proves it.”

That night, spooned together, Harold’s arm wrapped around my waist, his chin resting on the top of my head, Elsbeth Anna asleep in her cradle close enough for me to reach over and rock her, to smell her sweet baby scent, we decided that it was too late for Woodstock. The truth was, there was only one Woodstock and we missed it. But it was also that night that we realized what had to be done with Beth’s ashes. After all these years, Ma was still their keeper, the one who prevented them from spilling all over her kitchen floor and be swept up by the Electrolux. Beth was wrong about Harold and I knowing what to do with them. We didn’t have a clue and had almost forgotten they existed until news of the Woodstock Reunion reminded us we still had unfinished business to take care of. For twenty-five years Ma kept them safe and protected in a secret hiding place that only she knew about, waiting patiently for the day that we asked for them to be retrieved. Ma was always so good at keeping secrets.

Every family has their secrets. Those things that aren’t quite horrible enough to tear you apart—just bearable enough to live with day after day. We lived with Joe’s drinking and his abuse, his bad temper and his childishness because we loved the other Joe, the good, kind funny one, the one who “would give you the shirt off his back” as Ma always said. The Luoto’s hid their child away for sixteen years. They lied to Beth her entire life and in the end broke her heart. That was the real cause of her death, not suicide like the papers said but a terminal case of heartbreak. And poor Mrs. K. kept the secret about Harold’s father from him his entire life, ter-rified he’d learn the truth and feel her shame. That’s why she got so scared when Harold was so depressed after Beth died for fear history would repeat itself. Harold’s father didn’t die of a heart attack. There was no face plant into his birthday cake. He hung himself. For no apparent reason either, at least not one she could think of except that somehow it must have been her fault. She was to blame for his death, for robbing her son of a father. My parents knew the truth but guarded her secret as closely as she did. Secrets and lies were woven through our lives like the wool strung end to end in Anna’s scarf, stretching endlessly, changing colors from time to time but that was all. Kept to preserve and protect our families from the judgment of the outside world but what good were they when the price was so high that the people they were designed to protect were destroyed in the process.

We got up early the morning we left for New York. It was already stifling in the house, another long hot, humid summer. Harold put Elsbeth Anna’s car seat in the front next to me so he could ride gunshot with his guitar, not one of the new ones but the one that belonged to Beth from a lifetime ago. The year after she died he worked during the day with Joe at the bakery and came home every night and taught himself to play the guitar. By the time he got his high school diploma, there wasn’t a Beatles tune or anything by Cat Stevens he couldn’t play and it was clear to everyone except his mother that he would go on to study music in university. I think Harold tried to make sense of what happened to Beth through his music especially that first year when he spent all those nights alone with the guitar, scaring his mother half to death. She spent her evenings with my mother fretting over Harold’s strange behavior.

I didn’t see much of him either, only when he and Mrs. K. joined us for Sunday night dinner but even then he’d sit in the living room afterwards watching Ed Sullivan, but he really wasn’t there. He was somewhere else nobody could reach. And then about a year after Beth’s death he showed up one afternoon at my summer job at Zellers to take me for lunch. It was there in the Zellers Restaurant, while we were sharing a plate of fries sopped with gravy and ketchup that he told me he loved me, had always loved me and that one day we would get married and have a family. For once in my life I didn’t blow it. I didn’t tell him he was nuts or ridiculous. I didn’t walk away leaving him with an empty plate of fries and ice in the bottom of a Coke glass.

“I love you too,” I said reaching across the table and touching the back of his hand. “There, I finally admitted it. I love you Korkala and always have and always will.”

After that day we were inseparable. We started talking about Beth’s death too—uncontrollably, compulsively, and obsessively. Over and over, always the same thing but never any answers. Did we see it coming? Remember our first meeting. She talked about euthanasia. Was she crazy? She went to a shrink. Was she that angry with her parents? Was it revenge? Had she planned it from the start? Were we to blame? Could we have stopped it? Why did she do it that night? Had things gotten so out of control that we missed the signals, missed the warning signs? Could we have saved her life? Were we players? Did she orchestrate this whole little drama or was it an accident, an impulse taken too far?

Round-and-round we went—never any closer to understanding why Beth did it. We only knew that we couldn’t change what happened that night no matter how many questions we asked and that in order for us to go on we had to stop asking the unanswerable and let her go.

Mrs. Luoto gave me Mustang Sally. To her it was just a car but to Harold and I it was a symbol of the summer that changed our lives forever. It sat in our driveway until we went to university, then one crisp autumn Saturday morning Harold said it was time to put her back on the road with me behind the wheel. Naturally I protested but Harold insisted that the time was right, the car had sat idle too long and that it was Beth’s wish that I drive the thing, after all it was she who taught me to drive. How could I deny Beth her wish? Had I ever denied her anything? Had either of us? I drove Sally all through our university years and even drove it to Vancouver on our honeymoon. We spent our first summer together as husband and wife on a road trip across Canada, camping our way across the country. Like the guitar, there have been new cars and now one of those silly family van things Harold insisted we buy when we learned about Elsbeth Anna, but the Mustang would stay with us forever. Harold does all the necessary mechanical work on her to “keep her purring like a kitten,” he says. She spends her winters in the garage and every year on the first warm sunny day in May we take her out, hood down, Mick Jagger screaming he can’t get no satisfaction from the cassette deck Harold bought, wind in our hair, magic in our hearts and we go back. Back to that summer when a beautiful crazy young girl from America came into our life and changed its course irrevocably. Ma took pictures of the three of us in front of Sally the morning we left for New York, Harold cradling Elsbeth Anna wearing nothing but her tiny undershirt and diaper to keep her cool. Harold rigged up a canopy over her car seat to protect her from the sun so we could keep the top down while we drove. I smiled as I watched him fussing over the thing at how responsible he had become since she had been born. We both had. She had been such a long time coming that we had given up trying for years, resigned ourselves to being childless and had grown quite happy in our lifestyle and role as the best aunt and uncle to Danny’s brood and surrogate parents to so many of the kids we taught. And then on my annual check-up with Dr. Kirby I learned that my lack of period for two months wasn’t because I was beginning an early menopause as I assumed but because I was pregnant.

It was both the worst news and the best, but Harold got us through it like he did everything else—the anxiety over becoming a mother when I was old enough to be a grandmother, the morning sickness which lasted all day, the amniocentesis and the excruciating month-long wait for the news, the Lamaze classes where we had to learn to breathe, breathe, breathe, the natural childbirth where I forgot how to breathe and threatened to kill him if he didn’t give me at least one good dose of morphine, the postpartem tears and my frustration when Elsbeth Anna and I struggled to get into rhythm with breast feeding. But all that was gravy compared to my