Free Thank You for All Things by Sandra Kring Page B

alongside Feynman, patting his head some more, so that the poor dog’s snout keeps whacking the sides of his metal bowl. “He would probably like it if you scratched him behind the ears,” Oma says.
    Milo looks up and grins, then starts scratching. “Guess what, Oma? The tag on his collar says his name is Feynman. Like Richard P. Feynman, spelled the same! Could he have been named after
the
Feynman?”
    “I’ve no doubt but that he’s named after your Feynman. Your grandfather was quite the science buff. You’ll see what I mean if you go into the study off the living room, across from where he sleeps now. It was his private sanctuary. A room full of treasures for a boy like you.”
    Milo hurries off to find them, and Feynman follows. “Weird,” I say. “Milo was just listening to that guy’s stupid CD in the car, and now he finds out that the dog here is named after him. That’s quite a coincidence.”
    “Oh, honey, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. It’s synchronicity.” Oma smiles blissfully.
    “As in the synchronicity Jung studied?” I say. “When two or more seemingly pure chance events coincide, forming a connection that has extraordinary and particular meaning for the one who observes it? Those meaningful connections between the subjective and the objective?” (A definition I read—more or less—on page 367, first paragraph down, in a study on Carl Jung himself.)
    Oma laughs softly and pulls me to her. “My little Lucy,” she says. “As bright as the stars.” She gives me a kiss on the top of my head. “There are no accidents. Just remember that.”
    “Wanna bet?” Mom says as she comes into the kitchen to refill her coffee cup. “I think the old man just crapped his pants.”

chapter

S IX
    T HAT NIGHT I sleep downstairs with Oma (who snores!) so she can hear Grandpa Sam if he needs her, and Mom sleeps up in her old room. Milo beds down on a roll-away in Grandpa Sam’s study, even though there are two empty bedrooms upstairs. Mom doesn’t like dogs, so she wouldn’t have told her secrets to one of Grandpa Sam’s but to those notebooks instead. Secrets that will tell me why she looked at Grandpa with an odd mixture of fear and revulsion as Oma steered him into the bathroom for his shower. A reaction, I think, that stems from something deeper than the fact that he smelled worse than a neglected baby.
    When I wake in the morning, Oma’s side of the bed isempty. I go into the kitchen and see Oma out the window, doing her tai chi in the backyard. Grandpa Sam is still asleep, and Mom is at the table, her hair damp from a shower, her “breakfast” before her: a cup of black coffee, a Paxil, and three ibuprofens (they mean her neck is stiff and sore again, which Oma says represents her stubbornness and inflexibility, her resistance to “seeing what’s back there,” and which Mom insists stems from nothing more than her poor posture at the computer). Mom gets up to get a glass of water so she can down her Paxil. She gives me a morning hug as she waits for the water to cool. “Know when I love you best?” she asks.
    “When I’m sleepy and squishy,” I answer while rolling my eyes because I’ve had to answer that question every morning for as long as I can remember. I go to the cupboard and root around inside, looking for cold cereal.
    Mom fills her glass and shuts off the faucet. She gazes out the window, her Paxil momentarily forgotten. “You ever notice how after your Oma finishes one of her wacky rituals, she wears the same glazed expression as a fundamentalist after a revival?”
    “I’ve never seen a fundamentalist after a revival,” I say, as if I’m every bit as left-brained as Milo. I open the next cupboard.
    “Well, they look just like … well, never mind. Now she looks more like a—” and she stops. I shut that cupboard, because the only cereal I can find is a tub of oatmeal and a yellowed box of Cream of Wheat. I slip over to the window to stand