Decoding Groundhog Day

By Harriet Cooper

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.

~Patrick Young

After removing my toque, gloves, scarf and parka, I rubbed my hands together, trying to get the circulation going. "I really, really, really hate winter," I said, my fingers tingling as they began to warm up.

Susan, my best friend and an avid cross-country skier, sat across from me in the restaurant. "You are such a wuss," she said. "It's barely minus ten."

I groaned. "That's at least twenty degrees too cold for me." The waiter placed a cup of coffee in front of me and I wrapped my hands around it. "Besides, it's not my fault my hands are always cold. If I lived somewhere warm..."

"...you'd be complaining about the heat," Susan finished. "It's already February. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day and winter is practically over."

"Right. Like some rodent knows more about the weather than we do. If it weren't for reporters trying to take his picture, he'd still be fast asleep in his den."

I took a sip of coffee, savouring the heat flowing into my body. "Now there's a job I'd like. Sleep through the worst of winter, wake up for ten minutes, and then go back to sleep for another month or two."

Susan drank half her coffee before speaking. "Considering how much you hate winter, maybe you were a groundhog in a previous life. Or a bear."

I shivered. "With my luck, it was probably a polar bear."

After breakfast we went for our traditional Sunday morning walk. Too cold to snow that day, what had already fallen on the ground crunched under our feet. With the sun shining, it truly was a beautiful winter day. Not that I would have admitted it to Susan. An hour later, cheeks red with cold, we headed back to my house for something warm to drink.

After unwinding, unzipping and pulling off layers of clothes again, I thought back to our earlier discussion. "Susan, have you ever wondered how many groundhogs are forecasting weather tomorrow across Canada? Is there some kind of Groundhog Weather Network? What happens if one of them says early spring, and the other says long winter? Do they just flip a coin — heads it's spring, tails it's winter?"

Susan shrugged. "I thought you didn't care about groundhogs."

"Well, it is almost a national holiday. Just because I don't think they can predict weather, doesn't mean I'm not curious," I said. "I'm going to check."

Two minutes later we were sitting in my office in front of my computer. A quick Google search brought up pages of sources. I scanned the titles and clicked on one, then another and another.

"I was right about the provinces each having their own groundhog weather forecasters," I said. "Wiarton Willie may be Ontario's most famous prognosticating rodent, but he has a bunch of cousins spread across Canada."

I counted them as I read out their names. "There's Nova Scotia's Schubenacadie Sam, Alberta's Balzac Billy and Manitoba's Winnipeg Willow, the only female. If you're feeling bilingual, there's even Fred from Val-d'Espoir in Gaspésie."

"See," Susan said, "with all those groundhogs, at least one of them has to be right."

I clicked on a couple more articles, skimming their contents. "Aha," I said triumphantly, "Willie and his kin are more lover boy than meteorologist. Our furry weatherman couldn't care less about whether he sees his shadow. He's channeling his hormones. The little guy just wants to get lucky."

I paused to read a bit more. "If it weren't for the publicity and the urging of his handlers, Willie wouldn't be interrupting his annual hibernation for a chance at some nooky until the middle or end of March. If he waited, then his score — meteorologically speaking — would be much higher. He'd probably find more female groundhogs, too."

"So what is his score?" Susan asked, peering at the computer screen.

"Not good," I responded. "Groundhogs have a worse record of predicting the weather than Environment Canada. Willie and his cousins are right only thirty-seven percent of the time. In any other country, they'd have been fired years ago. Here, we take their pictures and splash them across the front page of the newspaper."

Susan shook her head. "You really know how to take the joy out of winter, don't you?

At my grin, she continued. "I guess that means you're not going to be checking out what Wiarton Willie has to say tomorrow?"

"That's exactly what it means," I said. "I'm going to be curled up in bed under a flannel sheet and two polar fleece blankets, wearing my favourite turquoise toque."

"A toque?" Susan interrupted. "You wear a toque to bed?"

"You bet I do. I turn down the thermostat at night to save energy and it gets really cold. The toque is my modern equivalent of a nightcap. Unlike Willie, I don't have a fur coat, but I do have a big orange tabby cat or two nestled beside me to help keep me warm." I paused. "Now that's how to spend a Canadian winter."

I lied. The next morning I did, in fact, get up and check the news to see what Willie had to say. Like millions of other Canadians, I decided that if waiting for a groundhog to declare an early spring gives us even a thin ray of sunshine in the middle of a cold, dark winter, so be it.

Willie predicted an early spring. Environment Canada disagreed. Since I wasn't teaching that day, I went back to bed, complete with toque and a couple of cats. This human groundhog knew we'd have at least another six weeks of winter. Remembering the year I wore turtlenecks into June, I shivered and snuggled deeper under the blankets.

Goodnight Willie and sweet dreams. See you in a month or so.

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A Journey on Cane River

By Lalita Tademy

Growing up, I knew for an absolute fact that no one on the planet was stronger than my mother. So when she told me stories of who she admired growing up, I paid attention. She was clearly in awe of her grandmother Emily. She described her grandmother as iron-willed and devilish, physically beautiful and demanding of beauty from others, determined to make her farmhouse in central Louisiana a fun place to be on Sundays when family gathered, and fanatical and unforgiving about the responsibilities generated from family ties.

My mother drew parallels between her grandmother Emily and Jacqueline Kennedy. "Emily was class," she would say, describing her physical attributes: her long, graceful neck, her tiny, tiny waist. "Emily was class, Emily was elegant, just like Jackie."

How my mother came by this first-name familiarity with the president's wife I couldn't begin to imagine, but as I grew older and listened carefully to other stories about my great-grandmother Emily, that was the least of my bafflement. The pieces wouldn't fit. On the one hand, Emily, refined, graceful, elegant, soft-spoken, classy. On the other, Emily, a woman from the backwoods of Louisiana, possibly born a slave right before the Civil War, unapologetic about dipping snuff, buzzed on her homemade muscadine wine each and every day. Not exactly "just like Jackie."

Emily intrigued me and the puzzle of this woman simmered on the back burner of my conscious mind for decades, undoubtedly triggering questions about who I was as well. Not until 1995 did the search really start to heat up, for the simple reason that I was no longer gainfully employed and suddenly had massive quantities of time on my hands. I had been a corporate executive, vice president and general manager of Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, when I decided to change my life by stepping off into the great unknown. I quit my job. Not a sabbatical. No looking back or second-guessing. Just walked away.

"When does your new job start?" asked my mother. Actually, what I heard was, "How could you possibly walk away from a good job you got only because I sacrificed to put you through school, and by the way, I spent fourteen hours in labor to get you here in the first place." She didn't really say the last part, at least not out loud, but that is what it felt like she said.

"I refuse to take a job for at least a year," I replied, trying to sound confident. "I need to listen to the silence, find the inner me, re-engineer myself outside the confines of corporate America."

My mother had no patience with this drivel. "Who's going to pay you to do that?"

"I've saved enough for a year or two."

"Can you get your old job back?"

"I don't want my old job. It's gone. There's something else I'm supposed to be doing," I said. "I just don't know what it is yet."

"You're supposed to have a job."

I let the silence build. For some things, there is no response.

"So what are you going to do for the next year?" she pushed.

Here was the critical moment where a persuasive argument could win her to my side, put her mind to rest, reassure her of my ability to adapt.

"I don't know," I said, which unbeknownst to me would become my mantra of the next few years.

I couldn't explain it because I didn't understand it, but I felt compelled to leave my job and research my ancestry. Gradually, and then overwhelmingly, I slipped into the dark, shadowy, addictive parallel universe of genealogy. Entire days disappeared from my life when I entered the bowels of the National Archives to pore over census records. Secretive trips to Louisiana to chase down fragile leads in local courthouses, newspaper archives and libraries followed. I began to lie to my friends, telling them I was "just relaxing, taking it easy, enjoying my newfound free time."

Meanwhile, the relentless search for dead relatives consumed weeks and then months. I lost all sense of shame, carrying tape recorders into nursing homes to interview people who couldn't remember what they had for breakfast but could spin sharp tales of events from eighty years ago. I craved one more fact, one more connection, one more story, but one was never enough. I had to have more, to know more about the people in my family, dead for a hundred years. I was hooked.

So hooked, I traced my mother's line to a place in Louisiana called Cane River, a unique area that before the Civil War housed one of the largest and wealthiest collections of free people of color in the United States. I decided to hire a specialist on Cane River culture, a genealogist who could read the Creole French records that I could not. The task I assigned her was to find my great-grandmother Emily's grandmother.

"Let's get the facts we know on the table, starting with her name," the genealogist said.

"I don't know." (The mantra echoed.)

"No first name or last name?"

"No."

"Okay. Was she from Cane River?"

"Maybe," I said encouragingly. "Her daughter was."

"Okay. Was she slave or free?"

"I don't know. I can't find any trace of her in the free census records, but I'm not sure."

The genealogist seemed doubtful, but she took the job anyway. I was, after all, paying her by the hour just to look.

No job, no paycheck, so how long could this foolish obsession to find my unnamed great-great-great-great- grandmother last? Turns out, for eighteen months, by the hour, until the genealogist recovered a document that banished any doubt I would write a historical novel based on the characters revealed. In a collection of ten thousand unindexed local records written in badly preserved Creole French, she found the bill of sale for my great-great-great-great-grandmother Elisabeth, who was sold in 1850 in Cane River, Louisiana, for eight hundred dollars.

I wondered whether my great-great-great-great-grandmother spent as much time envisioning her descendants as I had spent envisioning her life. I held the bill of sale in my hands, awed and humbled, curious what any one of the women who came before me, born slaves, would think of one of their own having the opportunity to become an executive at a Fortune 500 company. Could any of them have even dreamed of that possibility in 1850 as they changed hands at auction from one property owner to another? I wondered what they would think of the world we live in today. What would Elisabeth have thought of my quitting my job and spending far more than her selling price to find any evidence she had existed?

At this point, I had no choice. I had to write their story and document their lives — my history. They were, after all, real flesh-and-blood people. I pieced their lives together the best I could from over a thousand documents uncovered in my years of research, re-creating what life must have been like for them during the 1800s and 1900s. The result was Cane River, a novelized account covering one hundred years in America's history and following four generations of Creole slave women in Cane River, Louisiana, as they struggled to keep their families intact through the dark days of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the pre-civil rights era of the Jim Crow South.

The rest — the dog-work of writing the novel, finding an agent, finding a publisher and doing the book tour — was as grueling and exciting as discovering my ancestry. Within days of being sent to several publishers, Warner Books purchased the novel. Once again, my family was on the auction block but this time in a more satisfying way, honoring instead of dishonoring. Things had certainly changed over the last hundred and fifty years. I wished I could show my great-great-great-great-grandmother Elisabeth the price our family commanded this time.

Three months after the publication of Cane River, the phone rang as I was packing for yet another book-signing trip.

"Hello, this is Oprah."

"Yeah, right!" I said, wondering which of my friends was playing this cruel practical joke. I waited for laughter that never came.

"This is Oprah," the distinct and ever-so-familiar voice said again.

As recognition registered, I mustered my most professional corporate voice in the midst of my total embarrassment and surprise.

"Hello, Ms. Winfrey. What can I do for you today?" My heart pounded so hard I could hardly hear what followed.

She had called to tell me she selected my novel for her book club, which ultimately led toCane River spending seventeen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and a readership broader than I dared dream.

My mother has conceded once, and only once, that quitting my job wasn't as disastrous as she had feared. But she still thinks I should be out interviewing for a corporate position, as a backup. The women in my family are strong, and strength is a mother's legacy. Worry, on the other hand, now that's a mother's prerogative.

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The Woman Who Could Not Stop Crying

By Bobbie Jensen Lippman

Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.

~Rosa Parks

Early on a Saturday morning, I was on my way to run some errands. Up ahead on the street in our quiet neighborhood I could see red lights flashing and a crowd of people standing on one side of the street. I slowed down, like most of us do, to check out the scene.

To my horror I saw a yellow tarp covering what had to be a body on the sidewalk. Around the body were eight or nine scattered, broken bicycles. Having been an avid cyclist most of my life, I simply had to pull around the corner, park my car and walk back to join the crowd of people who were quietly standing and staring.

"What happened?" I asked a woman. She filled me in.

"There was this group of bicyclists," she said. "Somebody had a flat tire and they were all up on the sidewalk while one guy fixed the tire."

She stopped talking for a moment, then pointed at the covered body on the sidewalk. "A guy in a big truck came around the corner too fast, lost control and plowed into all the bicyclists. Most of them have been taken away in ambulances, but that poor young man is dead."

I sat down on the curb. It seemed eerily quiet. The police were still marking the area with yellow tape and talking to the young driver of the truck. The truck itself had ended up on someone's lawn.

I never ran my errands. I must have sat on that curb for over an hour. Eventually I just went home, my heart aching for that young man and whoever loved him. Three months later I would realize why I "happened" on that scene and why I could not tear myself away.

My granddaughter, Autumn, was working at a job while in high school. One day Autumn called me saying she had a huge favor to ask.

"You have to help," she pleaded. "I work with this woman whose son died a few months ago in a bike accident. She works for a while, then goes to the back and cries her heart out. You know how to help people and you have to do this."

Click went my brain. The bike accident. The young man under that yellow tarp. The son of this woman where Autumn worked.

I told Autumn I really had to think this through. Could I help without being intrusive? This woman did not know me and I didn't know her or her son.

I went into what I call my "Quiet Zone," and came up with a plan, having no idea if it would work. I told Autumn to gently tell this woman that her grandma (me) did a lot of hospice stuff... and to explain hospice because this woman was from another culture and maybe didn't know all that hospice does. Autumn was to give Saheema my phone number because maybe I could help with her grief.

I was honestly surprised when Saheema called, and yes, she was crying on the phone. My intuition told me to see her on neutral ground... not my house and not her home.

I asked Saheema if she would meet me in a park. I described the park and a quiet place where we could sit at a picnic table and talk. The only time she could meet me was 7 a.m. Fine with me. I suggested Saheema bring family photo albums.

I got to the park first, with a big thermos of tea and two cups. I waited ten minutes, thinking she wasn't going to show up. Then I saw her walking slowly and tentatively toward me, carrying several photo albums.

Yes, she was crying. I got up and helped her put all the albums on the table. Before we sat down, I opened my arms and she came to me for a hug. Neither one of us said a word for at least five minutes. I just held her, this tiny woman, with a heavy accent, from a faraway country, who could not stop crying. I'd brought plenty of tissues, but noticed Saheema used colorful real handkerchiefs.

We spent an hour together, drinking hot tea, and looking at pictures. As she slowly turned each page, naming the faces of her large and extended family, we lingered a long time on every picture of her son. Pictures of him as an infant, then as he grew up, school sports, college graduation. Her son was clearly the shining star in her family and particularly in her life. He was tall, dark and movie-star handsome.

By the time we closed the page of the last album, Saheema was no longer crying. She actually smiled a few times and just dabbed at her eyes. We never spoke of my hospice life, or even an "afterlife." We were just two women who knew what grief feels like, two women from different cultures whose paths just happened to cross.

I'd like to believe that Saheema began to heal that day. A lovely letter arrived from her about a week later, saying "Thank you for helping me and being interested in my family and my dear son."

The best part was when Autumn told me Saheema was no longer going to the back room to cry.

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I Don't Date

By Lori Bryant

Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it.

~Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle

He pulled up to the curb in a red VW bug all smiles, obviously unaware that I was not dating. I clenched my jaw and knew instantly what was happening. A blind date (or as I now call it: a deaf, dumb, and blind date) set up by my well-meaning friends, without my permission.

"It's just dinner, Lori," my girlfriend whispered. "It will be fun and you could use some fun." She continued out loud now: "Everyone, this is Bob."

Well, I was not in the mood for any fun. Recently divorced, a single mom to a sick two-year-old and working two jobs left me little time or energy to go out with friends, much less date. I was tired and bitter. The last thing I wanted right now was to spend time with this happy stranger in the red VW.

Halfway through the evening Bob leaned over and asked, "Do you want me to give you a ride home? I know that you don't really want to be here."

"It's not personal," I replied. "I just don't date right now. I live more than an hour from here and my girlfriend is supposed to take me home."

"Grab your purse," he smiled. "Let's go."

Bob and I talked and laughed all the way home. I shared my story so easily with him. The details came out so naturally it surprised me. I explained my failed marriage as well as my daughter Missy's illness. At one point I choked up as I shared the pain that I felt and how scared I was to do this all on my own now. Bob was so easy to talk to. Before I knew it we pulled up to my curb.

As I got out of the red VW Bob said, "Hey, maybe I could take you and your daughter to SeaWorld sometime." He laughed, "It doesn't look right for a grown man to go without a kid or something. It wouldn't be a date," he reasoned. "Just SeaWorld."

I hesitated. "Maybe. Can I think about it?"

The truth was there was no way that I could afford to take my daughter to SeaWorld. I was working as a dental assistant in the daytime and waited tables at night. The bills were piling up and I was barely making it.

"Yeah, maybe." I nodded. "That might be fun and thank you so much for the ride."

Over the next six months, Bob, Missy, and I went to every theme park imaginable. We shared meals that always included a toy. He would spend hours on my living room floor playing with Missy and the little neighborhood girls. The kids would giggle as they called Bob "Ken," grabbed their Barbies, and dressed them for adventure.

One afternoon I pulled into my driveway and noticed the red VW at the curb. I walked around the house and there was Bob mowing my lawn with that that big wide smile.

"I hope you don't mind but I noticed your grass could use a trim the last time that I was here." He went on. "Maybe some water too. I hope it's okay with you."

"It's okay, thanks," I replied. My hardened heart was starting to soften.

One evening as I cleaned my kitchen I caught a glimpse of Bob and Missy in the living room. They were walking around with pillows on their heads. I laughed, "What in the world are you doing?"

The pillow fell off his head. Missy shouted, "Bob and I are models! We are practicing walking with pillows on our heads." Bob's face turned bright red.

That evening, before Bob went home, I asked him if he would like to go out for a real meal, one that didn't come with a toy.

"What will Missy do?" he asked.

"I just thought maybe my mom could watch her sometime and we could go to dinner, maybe a movie too," I replied. "You and me."

"Wait a minute. I thought you didn't date!" he teased. "That sounds like a date to me!"

The happy stranger in the red VW won my daughter's heart, and then he won mine.

Happy 25th anniversary, Bob!

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Storm-Stayed

By Judy Carter

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to go back to.

~John Ed Pearce

"Storm-stayed?" my husband replied with a questioning glance. "That's an odd expression." But that's what my family called it whenever you were unable to make it home because of one of those infamous winter snowstorms that regularly afflicted Southwestern Ontario when I was growing up. For children, this occasion inspired an exciting impromptu pajama party; for teenagers, the opportunity to hang out just a little longer with their friends. For adults, it was an inconvenience, but also the chance for some shared company or an extra game of cards on a blustery night. Being storm-stayed at school, however, was a whole other story.

I was ten years old and attending elementary school in a tiny village about two miles from my family's farm, when a fierce winter storm hit. (And by tiny village I mean a church, a general store that doubled as the post office, a feed mill, a small cluster of houses, and our school.) The buses had delivered us safely to school that morning, but the wind and blinding snow had come up so suddenly that we were unable to be transported home. By early afternoon it was clear that something had to be done with the entire student population and staff of the school.

The school facility could not accommodate everyone, so the inhabitants of the village rose to the challenge of providing shelter for as many people as they could. Students who lived in the village gathered together a few classmates to spend the night at their houses, and I was chosen. Yes, chosen! I felt so relieved to be among those who would not have to sleep on the hard gymnasium floor under the watchful eye of the principal. Selfishly, I gave no thought to my three sisters in the other classrooms, and didn't stop to wonder where they might end up spending the night.

Along with four other children I made the trek through fresh, deep snow, literally following in the footsteps of our classmate Joan, whose home would be our camp-out site for the night. I felt like a miniature explorer, braving the elements in search of some mysterious destination. Even in the semi-protected streets of the village the snow was heavy. Worried about losing my way, I never took my eyes off Joan's red toque bobbing along in front of me, collecting a thicker layer of snow with every step she took.

When we reached the house and shed our heavy winter clothing, we were instantly welcomed and warmed with hot chocolate. Five sets of fingers curled around steamy mugs as puddles began to form around five sets of boots in the front hall. The rest of the day was spent playing board games and, when our clothes were dry enough, creating intricate forts in the backyard snow. That night, all of the extra blankets and pillows in the house were pressed into service to keep us warm and comfortable. I had never been storm-stayed in an unfamiliar place before, but so far, the whole situation was a thrilling adventure.

And then the storm continued. The wind howled all the next day bringing with it whiteout conditions and massive accumulations of snow. Our backyard forts became great shapeless lumps. Highways were totally impassable. Hydro lines went down. The local news station offered little hope that things would clear any time soon.

By the third day, the sight of more snow outside the windows seemed to elicit a collective groan from everyone in the house. I was tired of board games and sick of playing cards. I had no desire to pull on my damp boots and trudge through thigh-high snowdrifts. I hesitated to confess that I was homesick. Joan's family had been wonderful, but they weren't my family. I missed my own warm kitchen, the familiar faces and food around our table. I wondered where my sisters had been staying and if, somehow, they had been able to make it home yet.

With my face pressed up against the kitchen window, I peered hopefully at the sky. No glimmer of blue. No weak ray of promising sun. No break in the interminable wall of white. Feeling my chin begin to quiver, I swallowed hard to stop the ache that was growing in my throat. My eyes filled with tears and my shallow breaths began to create a small circle of fog on the cold glass in front of me. I looked at it glumly without the usual impulse to draw a little happy face or trace my initials in the fog.

The voice of Joan's mother caught me off guard. Using my sweater sleeve, I quickly dried my eyes. After all she had done over the past few days, I couldn't let her see me crying. It took a moment before her words really sank in.

"Judy, your dad is on his way," she announced.

I didn't stop to ask any questions as I flew to the front hall to retrieve my coat and boots. My soggy toque was still in the coat sleeve where I had stuffed it after our most recent expedition outside into the winter wonderland.

Fully dressed and sweating slightly, I was waiting by the door when I heard the distant drone. Minutes later, my dad pulled up beside the front steps on his snowmobile, encrusted in snow from head to toe. I had no idea how he had found his way through this blizzard, or why he had decided to set out at all. After we had both thanked Joan's family, Dad handed me my helmet and I squeezed it on. I then climbed onto the snowmobile behind him and wrapped my small arms tightly around his waist. I didn't let go until we had reached the safety of our own front steps.

That evening, as the storm continued to bluster outside, we all sat down together at the kitchen table to enjoy our mother's warm, comforting meal. Mom told me later that Dad had driven to the village and back four times that day, gathering his daughters one by one and bringing them safely home. The roads were still closed, but he had blazed his own snowmobile trail to carry out his mission.

I have been snowed in on several occasions since then, but never for such an extended period of time, and never with such a timely and, in my eyes, dramatic rescue. It seems to me now that the best part of being storm-stayed is coming home again.

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A Dog on a Bender

By Sallie Wagner Brown

Strength is the ability to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands — and then eat just one of those pieces.

~Judith Viorst

Quimby is our stately, black Labrador, tall, beautifully proportioned, calm, and a deep thinker. The trouble is that he is addicted to chocolate. He prefers at least seventy-six percent dark, organic, expensive chocolate, but he'll eat any kind in a pinch.

We are Quimby's family only because he was too cautious to continue in the Guide Dog Program. His trainer called it "fear response," and she was right, but we like to think of him as too wise to put himself in harm's way. Still, he couldn't be a guide dog if he was going to hide under a table every time he saw his reflection in a skylight at night.

At first Quimby would just steal a double chocolate chip cookie that fell to the floor, or a piece of Halloween candy forgotten on the bottom of a plastic jack-o'-lantern — nothing that would hurt a ninety-pound dog.

Once he ate most of a large Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate bar, so we called our vet. She calculated the amount of chocolate versus his weight and said he'd be okay, but that we needed to be very careful. Quimby was clearly in need of a doggie intervention.

To tell the truth, I share Quimby's addiction. As a human, however, all I have to worry about is weight gain and a caffeine rush if I eat too much chocolate. Therefore I am very careful to have small amounts of the very darkest, most satisfying chocolate I can find, and only indulge when I need it most, a surprisingly frequent event.

Before small packages of chocolate were readily available, I would take great pains at Christmas, Easter and Halloween to buy several packages of Hershey's bite-sized candy bars in the assorted multi-packs. I pulled out all the Special Dark Miniatures and stashed them in Ziploc bags in a drawer in the kitchen.

If my family ever noticed that they never got Special Dark in their stockings or baskets, they never said anything. Smart family. They know they are better off when Mom has plenty of her Special Dark.

One Easter I'd just finished packaging my stash. It had to last me until miniatures would be available again at Halloween. I keep my Special Darks in a drawer low enough that Quimby could reach, but it's very hard to open, so I was stunned when I came home from errands to find Quimby surrounded by shredded Ziploc bags and tiny bits of pink, yellow and silver aluminum foil wrappers.

Wrappers stuck to his nose as he shook his head and flicked his tongue in and out, trying to dislodge more wrappers from his teeth, all the while offering that "who me?" look Labs are known for. I laughed, then panicked, as I realized how much chocolate he had actually eaten.

My six-month stash was not a trivial amount of chocolate.

It was after-hours for our regular vet. How long did I have to get it out of him? How would I manage that? Would that save him? I called the ASPCA's animal poison control line. I waded through the recorded voices until I reach a real person who told me I needed to force-feed him hydrogen peroxide to make him vomit right away.

Ten minutes later, I found a bottle of peroxide in the back of a cabinet in the bathroom. Was time running out? I took him outside and squirted a dose down the back of his throat with a turkey baster.

Nothing came up, and he tried desperately to escape. He was a big dog determined to be wherever I, and the turkey baster, were not. Still no action.

I called back the ASPCA to see if I could give him another dose. More time was lost with more recordings, and then the live person wasn't sure what to do. Supervisors were consulted and finally I was told I could give him more peroxide.

But Quimby was onto me now, so I had to wrestle a ninety-pound Labrador while holding a turkey baster full of peroxide, which was flailing around my head. (The bright side was that the "highlights" in my hair had never been so inexpensive, or so orange.)

Having no success with the second dose, my husband and I opted for the emergency vet clinic on the other side of town. I wished ambulances would carry doggies as we careened down our mountain road, bumped onto Highway 99W and hoped for more green than red lights on our way past town.

A vet tech took Quimby to a back room immediately upon hearing our story. We tried to laugh at the comedy of the situation instead of thinking about the possible dire consequences. We picked up, then put down, one slobber-coated, torn-up magazine after another, unable to concentrate on any of them.

Another vet tech came out to say they were having trouble getting him to vomit and wanted more clarification on the timing of his chocolate bender. We weren't exactly sure how long before we got home he actually got to my stash. After a few minutes, yet another tech rushed from the back room and ran out to the parking lot. Before we could get out the door and catch her to see what was wrong, she returned with a camera in her hand, smiling.

"Oh, he finally vomited. He should be okay. I'm a student at the vet school, so I just want to get a picture." She stopped to shake her head and laugh a little. "None of us has ever seen that much chocolate come out of one dog. Some of the pieces were still whole and in their wrappers!" She hurried off, still chuckling.

Quimby survived his chocolate bender and became famous in the process. A picture of him standing next to his astonishing pile of chocolate is still on a wall at Oregon State University's College of Veterinary Medicine.

Quimby, however, is still a chocoholic.

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The Dad He Planned to Be

By Stephanie Welcher Thompson

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.

~Kate Douglas Wiggin

Michael was shocked when we watched a videotape of a baby's birth during childbirth classes. But I, like several classmates, got teary-eyed as the tiny miracle entered the world. Passing a box of tissues around the room, the instructor turned on the lights. My twenty-nine-year-old husband leaned over to me. "What have we done?" he whispered, his face pale with horror.

After seeing that tape, Michael was adamant about not viewing the birth of our baby. He conceded to coach breathing exercises during labor, but when it came time for the actual delivery, he envisioned himself seated in a chair at the head of the bed holding my hand.

"Delivery is the touchdown," joked our birthing coach. "You wouldn't sit through four quarters of the Super Bowl then go to the fridge if the score was tied, your team had the ball on the two-yard line and there was less than a minute left in the game, would you?"

Throughout my pregnancy, Michael was the "go-to guy." During the first and second trimesters, I felt too tired to do anything but work and sleep, so he did the grocery shopping, errands and household chores. Weekly, he read me excerpts about how both mother and fetus were changing. "Your body is growing precious cargo," he'd reassure me. "It's taking all your energy to make our baby."

When my back hurt, he rubbed it. When my feet ached, he massaged them. The first time we felt the baby move, he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at my bulging belly, "Hi, little girl. I'm your daddy!"

But incongruent as it seemed, Michael wanted to sit in the stands rather than be on the field during the actual birth. "In fact, I don't want to look at the baby until she's properly cleaned," he emphasized. "And changing a diaper is out of the question. I'll vomit." From my husband's comments and behavior, I knew he would love our child, but the hands-on care of the baby would be my job.

Finally, I was in labor — for twenty-three hours — and Michael was by my side the entire time. He coached my breathing and held my arm as we walked halls. When the time came for me to give birth, Michael walked over to the dry-erase board in the hospital room and wrote: "Happy Birthday, Micah." He then took his seat near the head of the bed and prepared to watch the labor-and-delivery team perform their magic.

A few minutes later, one of the nurses called to him, "Dad, we need your help with pushing." White-faced, Michael stood. A nurse positioned him at the edge of the bed, shoved my foot into his stomach and wrapped his hands around my shin. "There, now," she said enthusiastically. "This will give you a perfect view of the birth." Michael smiled weakly. I thought he might faint.

A few minutes later, Michael shouted excitedly, "I see black hair!" Our daughter, Micah, was born, and the doctor immediately handed the gooey baby to my husband. "Isn't she beautiful?" he gasped, cradling her tiny body in his strong arms. Tears of happiness pooled in his eyes. I began crying as well, not only because our baby was here, but because of the tender joy in my husband's face.

When the nurse wanted to put Micah under warming lights, he said, "Honey, I don't want to leave you, but I should go with the baby to make sure she's all right."

"Hey, there, little girl," I heard him coo from across the room. "It's okay. Daddy's here."

Moments later, our families came. Michael proudly displayed our newborn, even before she was bathed.

That night, a nurse took Micah to administer some tests, saying she'd be back with the baby in an hour. "Let me put on my shoes. I'll go with you," hollered my husband from the foldout couch.

"I'll change her diaper before you go," I said.

"No, Honey, you rest," said Michael. "I need to practice changing her."

I tried to look nonchalant as he gently lifted Micah's legs and fumbled to get the diaper around her six-pound body, but inside, I was amazed. He's a hands-on dad, after all, I thought.

Micah is now eighteen months old and the pride of her daddy's heart. She's baptized him in bodily fluids and blessed him with giggles. Michael's shared in the good (when Da Da was her first word), the bad (when, as a newborn, she had jaundice and had to be strapped to a light table for seventy-two hours) and the ugly (when six-month-old Micah caught a virus and vomited in Daddy's face) aspects of parenthood.

Michael admits there's a big discrepancy between the way he planned to be a father and the dad he's become. But daughters do that to daddies.

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