DeVore family

The DeVore family

The DeVore family is pampering me so much that I wonder where the fine line between my resting wisely and being just plain lazy falls.  On Friday morning, Lisa (always veggie, sometimes vegan) made a giant broccoli cheddar omelet with a side of veggie “bacon.”  We all loved the omelet and universally loathed the faux strips that looked ripped from some tropical scrub with their soybean origin way too visible.  Dave took a bite and wondered if even the dogs, who eat anything, would stoop so low.  We took bets.  We expected Grandma’s hyper Chihuahua Leila, that she can’t have in assisted living, would snarf it down without tasting.  But slow-moving 11 year old black lab Shadow would taste and spit.  Wrong.  Both dogs ate the strips.

Lisa and Dave took off at noon for a three-day cruise they’d planned to take while Cheyenne and I were in NY.  I assured them we’d be fine, we have been. That night we watched my movie choice from Red box: The Illusionist.  I loved the exquisite drawings of the Scottish landscape—the misty Highlands, islands possibly the Orkneys with burly men in tartan kilts kicking up scuffed shoes in a Highland Fling, and the steep streets of Edinburgh so familiar from climbing them in fall 2007.  Cheyenne didn’t really care for its sad ending. “That’s French film,” I tell her.  “They always end with sadness and uncertainty.”  Cheyenne says Disney movies always set up some impossible problem and then solve it at the last minute so everybody’s happy.  I go soft on my comparative film lecture about American adolescent tastes versus European realism.

Earth Mother Lisa takes care of everyone in a graceful dance that sometimes looks like spinning in place but flows ultimately forward.  She and I have always had our mother/daughter mind meld connections and secret code of laughs.  Now I observe her holding the core of an extended family sometimes in a frenzy of multi-tasking when she’s trying to finish the Girl Scout Troop financial report before the midnight deadline while downloading her latest shoot of mommy/baby photos at the Winter Park Hospital lactation workshop.   Lisa has been an activist for animal rights and the environment ever since she took a class at Rollins in human-animal communication.  She’s a fierce advocate for recycling, locavore eating, and rescuing sea turtles.

At 44, she’s crushed between the needs of two generations older and younger.   She worries about her 92 year old granny in Arkansas, Dave’s 90 year old mother newly in assisted living in Orlando, her dad, and now me.  She’s mother to Dave’s daughters from a previous marriage.  Stephanie, 27, works here as Dave’s assistant in his 3-D construction business, which operates out of the family room.  Twice a week Lisa watches 6-month old baby Ella so that Miranda, 25, can work and balance her life between stay-at-home mom and grown-up in the workforce.   Jazzercise is her salvation.  As registrar, she gets free dancing-to-the-beat classes, from which she returns refreshed.

Lisa’s two paying businesses are DeVore Photography and her job selling Mary Kay cosmetics.  She’s always zooming in on detail—the sudden shaft of light illuminating the hibiscus.  She snapped over 600 shots in nine days in Scotland with me in 2007.  Some of these—a sun-dappled Highland cow sticking out her long curved tongue and a maze of mossy gothic arches in a ruined castle—have won  ribbons at art shows.  Scroll down http://www.lisadevore.com/ to Greeting Cards and Wall Art to see these images.

Red meat Republican Dave, 52, has his own balancing act, bidding on jobs, checking construction, orchestrating sudden repairs.  Lately he’s been building frozen yogurt shops in shopping centers, but these times are hard for any small business, especially one dealing with new construction.  He’s been brilliantly attentive to my needs, setting up a desk beside the window in my room for my laptop, connecting my portable printer. His three daughters clearly adore him.

We don’t talk politics in the DeVore house, but Lisa isn’t averse to playing it as a trump card with her lefty dad.  Trying to convince him to pay more attention to Granny’s caregivers, she chided him, “We’re liberal Democrats, Dad.  We protect old people.”

I love the high energy silliness of Cheyenne at 14 dancing into my room disco-style.  Lisa claims Cheyenne is just like me, usually when she’s fretting about trying to get the attention of one or the other of us on our alien planets.   Cheyenne calls herself a nerd.  She’s a studious achiever who likes winning.  At eighth grade graduation from Lake Eola Charter School, which focuses on science, she won the top award for foreign languages.  She’d hoped to be one of the top two in science.  On the last day, her science teacher gave her a pottery vase decorated with sea turtles, her obsession, and a card telling her she is his third best student, but each teacher could only give two awards.  She was more thrilled with that than the language award.  In fall she starts an International Baccalaureate program at University High.

                Cheyenne loves theatre, especially Shakespeare. She goes to Shakespeare camp in July for the seventh summer.  The other night she recited her whole Puck speech for me from last summer.  Missing our New York trip saddens both of us, but we’ll go when it will be even better for both of us. 

One of her last assignments before school ended was to make a book trailer.  She made a 3-minute slide show on a novel called Bruiser about an outcast boy with super power to take on the pain of those he loves.   She cast me as Bruiser, wearing her new fedora and skulking about with teen angst.  Lisa played my scolding uncle.  Miranda and her husband Kevin played a squabbling brother and sister, friends of Bruiser.  Cheyenne was shooting my scenes right before we went to Lisa’s chiropractor on that not-fatal day.

Lisa and Dave returned from their cruise to the Bahamas glowing with slight pink sunburns, wiped out from dancing till 1:30.  Lisa and I whirled through stores—my first outing since I came home from the hospital.  OK, I didn’t whirl; I zipped around in a cart, not toppling anything.

Tuesday between appointments with my new local PCP and new Cardiologist, I got twisted around on my way to deliver Australian books to Rollins.  I drove down familiar Winter Park streets sparkling with red tile roofs but turning the wrong way as if I were tangled in a Bermuda Triangle of my past—a nostalgia trap—and found myself in my old neighborhood where I drove right to my beloved little bungalow still in its web of trees and then into another jungle where I’d also lived.  What should have taken less than ten minutes took half an hour—like the dream where you’re lost in a strange country, don’t know the language, know you have to get moving, but your feet become sandbags.  I did get to Rollins, where the librarian met me at the curb, where I left the three cartons for her to go back and get a dolly.  Finding the next doc in a place I’d never been in Oviedo was easy.

Tuesday evening I relished sushi with old friends in their Zen-peaceful WP home, where we mused on memoires of the 80s and present political disasters.  It was a fitting close to my last evening in Orlando.  Today Cheyenne helps me move into my condo on Indian Harbour Beach.