Rock the Cradle

Up, up and away

2008-09-19T09:39:00.013-04:00

Presque Isle. August. 2008.

I've very rarely been to event that was so satisfyingly...happy.

The simplicity of a balloon launch is it's charm. The crowd who come to watch knows how to wait, knows how to be still, knows the pure joy of watching something as simple as flame lift human beings off the ground as gently as a breeze. Add some homemade pie and red hots to the mix and you get an afternoon of pure enjoyment, even if you are still on the ground.

I found myself laughing out loud as these huge balloons finally lifted off the ground. Something in myself rose up and floated away as well. An unrealized anxiety that I wouldn't find anything in my new home that would make me feel ridiculously good, with no reservations.

How often does that happen?

Not often enough. Next time, I'm going up.

Now I know.

2008-09-08T10:18:00.006-04:00

Now I know why there aren't many bloggers in Maine. Everyone is just too damn busy.

In Brookline, chores were quick, thoughtless almost. It didn't take long to clean the kitchen. Or the minuscule bathroom. The hand-vac picked up most of the dust. The Impling and I spent most of our time out around Boston, in the park, doing errands in Coolidge Corner. Walking and walking and walking.

In the Shire, chores demand a to do list. Something I haven't used since my days as a professional graphic designer. To do lists were vital for keeping track of the 20 plus projects I had going at any one time. Now I have at least that many projects in keeping up with a house with not one, but two full baths and one WC; a big kitchen (with a dishwasher *kissing sounds here*) off a big bright wonderful room that takes an hour to clean each morning (fighting off mice and fruit flies is SUCH a joy); and lots of rooms to sweep and dust. So we got a Roomba. It rocks.

But even so, this is only the inside. Outside, we have the gardens and weeding, which is completely addictive. It's like nature's video game...the burdock is the mother ship that sends out all these little annoying alien weedlets, that my trusty fork and shovel and rake annihilate day by day. I need to start keeping score. Because yes, I am a major geek.

Then there is the cooking. I have increased my cookbook library by at least half since moving here. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin and Mark Bittman are my close friends now. I've made wild blueberry sauce, pilaf with pine nuts and raisins and cinnamon, salmon in a variety of incarnations, Crab Norfolk, crab salad with mango, crab cakes with a spicy red sauce, lobster sauteed with white wine and cream sauce...I'm getting hungry so I'll stop here. All seafood courtesy of our local distributor, by name of Chester, of unknown age (my neighbor, who is maybe 5 years older than me, said he was old when she was a little girl) and of infinite stories, deserving of a post all of his own. He is a Mainer. He is one of the Old Ones. He brings us yummy things to eat.

And of course, there is the Impling, who is growing in mind and body at an astonishing rate, absorbing everything around her with an indefatigable curiosity. Feeding her is my most rewarding work. So it is time to shut down the computer, go outside, and see what there is to see.

Then I have to figure out what to do with all the tomatoes and zucchini that bury the counter.

Ratatouille?

And no-one saw the carny go

2008-08-26T14:52:00.007-04:00

With apologies to Nick Cave...This carny didn't leave behind a murder of crows to feast on the carcass of a horse named Sorrow, but it had it's own bleakness.

Our bodies are sticky with deet, and heat, and particles of spun sugar, and grease from innumerable cardboard baskets of fries, and fried dough, and fried onions, and corn dogs. The air is dense with the smell of sixty years of oil and sweat and peeling paint and rusting tracks. These were rides I rode as a child. The tilt a whirls and bumper cars and ferris wheels. The ancient duo of motorcycles that went around and around along with battered cars and trucks and things that went. A land of gauges, every ride with its own measuring stick. Do you measure up? Are you big enough?

The Impling was overwhelmed. Never before had we ventured into a midway. Specifically, in Presque Isle, the Northern Maine Agricultural Faire. First, there was the assault of the ancient midway...the carousel with the dancing horses that MUST be ridden. There were the games...fish for the ducks, or the guppies, be a strong man and make the bell ring, or be exposed for the wispy excuse for a man you are...crossbows and darts, horror houses and super slides reeking of turpentine. Tired looking attendents who looked like they would like to be almost anywhere else than where they are. Were they all holding their breath along with us...hoping against hope that the sixty year old rides would hold together for just one more ride and another...and another?

We walked past a kiddie ride that was so evidently out of order the management didn't bother to put up a "closed for repairs" sign. Possibly because the locomotive that looked strangely as though a group of teenagers had cow tipped it off its track was so obviously beyond redemption. Its future...an empty field somewhere, rusting into oblivion.

Beyond the creaky midway and the brightly painted food vendors was the field for the main attractions. Today it was monster trucks.

No, wait...

MONSTERRRR TRUCKS!!!

TRUCKS

echo

echo.

We walked along side the track to see old tractors from the dust bowl era, and the far buildings where the cows and sheep and goats and pigs and rabbits chilled out in 4H glory. We watched young earnest men and women walk their prize cows into a small corral for judgement. Damned if I know what they judged them on. They all looked like pretty swanky cows to me. They were polished and combed to satiny perfection. Their noses gleamed. Their hooves pranced. The owners elbowed them into position (you must be damn strong to elbow something 5 times your weight anywhere) and stroked them on their bellies with long sticks. It must have been to calm them. I know I like it when my belly is rubbed...and I hate being on display...

And so we watched those cows until the Impling began spending more time considering the distance from the top of the bench to the ground. Then we walked back through throngs of people...very young mothers with requisite tight jeans, flip flops and toe rings, schools of Harley Davidson t-shirts over cheap beer bellies, old tired faces and young weathered faces, angry faces and too friendly faces and oh...look, a place for your wee one to get a free face painting...if you don't mind the free bible story that accompanies it. I began to feel slightly nauseous and my skin began to itch.

We passed over the face painting as the MONSTER TRUCK show began and the cheerleader began his unenviable job of pumping up the crowd. He finally got the to the point of some half hearted cheers, then brought out the big guns. He led everyone in prayer for the brave soldiers fighting for our freedom far away. Before the young girl belted out the national anthem, she belted out a hymn. No one batted an eye.

Then back through the long lines of folks waiting for more baskets of fries...baskets big enough to feed five people. Back through the midway where the lights began to shine diabolically, where quick hands slipped vials of "happiness" into sweaty palms to pay for their ride...

My itch became a rash. "The Carny" began playing over and over in my mind. It was time to go. We bought the Impling a balloon and called it a day. Time to tear ourselves from the layers of the carny, a strata of rust and dirt and grim reality disguised behind neon colors and flickering lights, away from the resignation of exhaustion, the oversimplifications, the outright lies coated in spun sugar that tasted just as bitter as ever beneath.

We rode back through the twilight past Jupiter, and Saturn and Uranus...driving through a scale model of the universe, back down Route 1 to our road that led to our house. A house that now seemed, for the first time, a home and a haven.

The Impling had been having trouble getting to sleep for the past few nights, crying after I would leave her room. But tonight, as we sang our lullabyes, I felt a sense of relief from her. Relief that we were home, and that, as strange and foreboding as the world outside could be, she felt safe for the first time in her little bed, in her little room, her big pink dolphin balloon beside her as she fell asleep.

"I say it's funny how things go"

Home again.

2008-08-07T11:05:00.008-04:00

Here we are.

It seems strange sitting down to write in this dim corner of the front room. There is a fireplace behind me quietly waiting for the truly cold weather and a cord of wood to burn. The Impling prances around in the other front room...what was once a dining room but is now a dining/ library/cello practice room. It is also temporarily holding all the paintings, finished and unfinished, that I have yet to either hang or haul up to my little office/studio with the sloping ceiling and window overlooking an apple tree and the road that leads to a farm where the cat is friendly and the pony and horse peek calmly from their stalls at an absolutely mesmerized Impling, and the dancer/organic farmer who owns it all tends her chickens and fields for the fun of it.

Here in this corner, I think of our favorite room, through the library/dining/music room, through the mud room, through a glass door with its tarnished brassy handle, into the great, bright room. It is a large space, larger than anything I've ever lived in. Coming from a small apartment, this house seemed overwhelming the first few nights. But as the days go by, we expand to fill the space. This is not so much due to us appropriating new stuff, as a more personal expansion, like breathing deeply and exhaling, and expanding with each breath until we fill the bigger spaces around us with our thoughts, and our laughter, our chats and our tears, our music and our puttering sounds.

I feel bigger, somehow, looser, as if part of myself is both inside and outside all at once. The great room is so bright with windows and skylights that it's more or less a room outside. It overlooks the fields and the herb garden where the Impling and I weeded this morning. We donned our hats, and gloves, and after a protective layer of bug spray, we set off to work. We saw earthworms, and beetles and mosquitos and bees, we turned over the earth and tore out weeds and flung them aside, leaving behind the fresh overturned soil and space for our spearmint, sage, marjoram, tarragon (or little dragon, as we now call it), and a host of other herbs I can no longer remember, to grow. While we were working, the previous owners of the house came by and gave us a rather nostalgic tour of both the herb garden and the vegetable garden, naming plants for me and pulling at the gigantic weeds as if they just couldn't help it. I would miss these gardens too, if I moved away after four years of tending them.

They brought us an apple picker, with advice to leave the windfall for the deer. I can't imagine picking apples yet as the veggie garden still looks like the forest primeval. And I have at least four or five more burdock plants to dig up. Burdock man. One tough weed. But I have my shovel, my arms, (stronger now from all the construction of furniture and lifting and carrying of boxes and the Impling), and my innate stubborn nature to help me dig down and down into that clean smelling earth and pry up the great weeds that threaten our dill and tomatoes. It is a good battle. It is a good new world.

Dandelion Break

2008-06-27T08:02:00.004-04:00

Brought to you by the new caretaker/owner of a little hill with dandelions and clover (house included). Before we head up to our new adventure in Maine next month, we will be having our much-needed and deserved dandelion break over in the Netherlands for the next two weeks.

Have a wonderful summer all. The next post may well be live from the Shiretown.
Til then,
TTFN
Ta Ta For Now.

Closure.

2008-06-26T10:07:00.006-04:00

After over twenty years of squeezing into tiny apartments...here is...

The House. With the barns, and apple trees, and greenhouse, and bluebird house and yes, a spiral staircase...and it is...OURS!

The Kingdom of Frogs.

2008-05-30T17:21:00.005-04:00

Here I am, writing yet again in a distracted funk, while the Impling pretends to float and fly and kick in the waters of imagination as a floppy purple frog named Alice.

Or, it might just be a real frog. The first frog.

Today, we went to Griggs Park.

And there, in the spring smelling air, surrounded by stray sand from the box, and toddler gymnasiums, the Impling had an experience.

"I want to go to Griggs park and catch my own frogs...with this dish!" she declares now, holding up her black cauldron (initially purchased for use as a Halloween candy repository) but now premoted to "Frog catcher". Appropriate, don't you think?

Yes, we are writing this together.

So there we were, eating, (and not eating) our lunch on a wooden bench beneath the pine cone shedding trees, when a boy approaches.

He is a little older than the Impling, but not by much. He has a broad wonderful grin, a wonderful laugh, and a cookie bin. A Trader Joe's cookie bin. Without the cookies, but with something infinateley better inside.

Two, hoppy, green and brown spotted...

"what were they?" the Impling looks up at me with sparkling eyes:

"FROGS!!!" she cries. Now melancholy is in her face.

"I miss the frogs. I want to see the frogs. Froooggggssss!"

Yes. Two frogs.

"I want to catch one of my own!" says the Impling as she looks over my arms and fingers as they type type type away, and then I get a a kiss and a huge grin.

Have I mentioned I LOVE hanging out with my Impling. I can even write with her.

"I can even frog." adds the Impling.

Anyhow. There were frogs. In the Cookie bin. And the Impling thought this was the BEST THING EVER.

Time stopped. The Impling and the boy looked at the frogs, watched them climb, and jump and crawl and try to get away. The boy lifted one little frog, gently gently, and placed it into the Impling's open hand.

"How did it feel, Impling?"

"It felt good. Impling hugged the frog!" The Impling blows out her cheeks like little vocal sacs and places her palms over them.

"Frog" she says. "I want to go to Griggs Park and find frogs! FROOOGS!" she declares.

"Let's wrap this up" says the Impling.

I have only one thing to add. Language. Overrated. The little boy and the Impling said not one word to one another. They shared, they watched ,they laughed and played. But even if they had wanted to communicate in something other than the innately wonderful language they already had, it would have been impossible.

Because the boy spoke only Russian.

The Impling, her own version of the English language.

And yet, they are friends.

Smile from the Impling.

"I want. To. Wrap that up."

"I want to hug."

"I want to see the Frogs."

The Bicycle Queen

2008-05-30T08:17:00.007-04:00

(with thanks to Cari Best...author of our favorite book of the year)

When the Impling was one year old, we didn't strap her on the back of our bikes. For one, we have no place to store bikes. For another, the idea of peddling around the outskirts of Boston on a bike with a toddler attached filled me with terror. So no bikes.

When the Impling turned two, she was big enough for the tough little trikes we saw tooling around the playground, but truth be told, the Impling was more interested, at that point, in climbing up the ratlines of the play fort, and pretending to be a dread pirate. Also, we still had the stroller hogging up space in our apartment. So the whole trike thing...never happened.

Then, the Impling turned three. We go to the library every Wednesday, and on one of our visits, the Impling picked out what became one of her favorite books ever. Sally Jean, the Bicycle Queen. This was the sign. The Impling was ready.

Do you remember your first bike? Mine was a wonderful royal blue, just my size. We had a huge sloping backyard perfect for coasting. After about an hour of wobbling around with the training wheels, my older brother helped me take them off. Away I went, down the gentle hill, with soft landings when I didn't quite make it. A far cry from my brother's falls on the coral path at my Grandparent's place in the Keys.

But parts of these experiences were lost. When we brought the Impling to International Bike to look around, it all came back. The excitement of the new...the strange; of being astride a beast, of sorts, with it's own ideas of how it would move; of climbing up, and down, poking prodding, touching turning the different parts; of spinning the pedals; of struggling with those pedals, trying to get them up over the top to push them down and forward; of the sudden jerking stops when I pushed backwards and discovered how to brake; of looking down at my feet going in circles, forgetting that I actually had to look where I was going. It was a microcosm of life.

But once you learn, you never forget. It may be years in between rides, but you'll always find your balance again, and go flying off down the road, off to adventure. With a sore backside come morning, but hey, the more you ride, the less it hurts.

Crossposted at NE Mamas

All we are...

2008-05-27T08:32:00.004-04:00

My 39th birthday. I awake to the birthday song.

It is 7 in the morning.

The Impling cheerily opens the left-over chocolate cake from yesterdays tea, looks up at me expectantly and chirps,

"Dust in the wind, Dust in the Wind, Mommy!"

So I put on Point of Know Return, pour the milk, and we devour the remains of the cake to Kansas refrains, Impling-style.

Doesn't get much better than this, does it?

Happy Day, everyone.

Turkey

2008-05-12T09:42:00.005-04:00

It is 8:30 AM. I am helping the Impling pull on her underwear. My phone rings.

It is Dr. Science, calling on his way into work.

"Hey! The Turkey is on the corner of Kent and Longwood! It's on the wall of that big house on the corner...you know the one...if you hurry, you might see it!"

"We're on the way."

So off we went, the Impling and I, rushing out the door like storm chasers. Would we make it? Would it still be there?

Why all this drama for a turkey? Anyone who lives in the area knows that Brookline has wild turkeys. This is old news. They have existed quite contentedly, it seems, in the Jamaica River Way park, and the tree park on Kent Street. To all reports, the wild turkey was now...common.

Except, I had still never seen one. And neither had the Impling.

Not for lack of searching. We are regular wanderers in that neck of the woods. It's a nice walk, and you can see the ducks and geese playing in the water. The trees are beautiful. It is fun to run around in, as long as you avoid the expanses of lawn that are the goose turd grounds. But for all our searching, in this past year, we had NEVER seen the turkeys. People would tell us they had seen them all the time, and eventually, I found myself nodding sarcastically and saying:

"Yeah, uh huh, right." And poults are about to fly out my butt. Face it, the only turkeys around here are the ones who don't use turn signals in busy intersections.

So we ran down the street, in search of the elusive turkey. We reached the appointed corner, and searched the grounds of the multi-million house for signs of turkydom. And were disappointed, yet again.

Then we looked across the street. And there, on the sidewalk, was the turkey.

He was taller than the Impling, with his neck stretched out, checking out the commuters with a air of superiority. The Impling was entranced. We watched as the turkey lived out one of the oldest jokes, and crossed the road. Of course, once he got to the other side, it wasn't as green as he had hoped (I think it was a he, I've no bloody idea if it really was). Longwood traffic, at rush hour, came to a standstill as the turkey strutted his fabulous self down the yellow lines. Swish swish, sweetie. Finally, a jogger, a amatuer photographer, and an earnest young man on a bike managed to herd the turkey to the sidewalk again, where he proceeded to strut his stuff down the street and across the bridge, leading a parade of onlookers (including an Impling who was now strutting "just like a turkey") in various states of amusement, annoyance and "oh for chrissakes it's just a fucking turkey get over it already I for one am sick of stepping in turkey shit all over my yard".

We spent about an hour following the turkey until we herded it (the jogger, the photographer and I were the only ones left towards the end...and that says...what about us?) down the path on the other side of the bridge to the river. At least, I think it eventually went to the river. The last we saw, the bird was making a break for it by doubling back through the woods towards the Riverway. That was one turkey with a mission. I hope it found whatever it was it was looking for. We had fun following it for at least a small part of it's journey.

That night I looked for reports of certain medical personal from BIDMC being assaulted by a wild turkey, but no such luck. Nice little fantasy I had going there, for a little while.

Be vewy, vewy quiet...

2008-05-02T10:52:00.009-04:00

Is it some sort of Darwinian impulse that keeps me from sharing the details of the house I am trying desperately not to fall in love with? I am a mass of contradiction. I feel like shouting out about it, and at the same time, I harbor a Gollum-like tendency to curl up around the property, shield it from the gaze of the world, stroke it tenderly and hiss:

"My preciousssssss.....my owwwnnnnn."

It's not like there is tons of competition in the town we are moving to. It's not like flocks of people are going to suddenly in the next 2 months (two months!!! AHHHHHHH!) move en masse to Aroostook County, Maine.

So. What the hell is getting my panties in such a bunch?

Maybe some of it is information overload. We saw 12 houses in the space of 9 hours. Houses in town, houses in the country, houses with crystal chandeliers, houses with scary, homicidal dogs, houses with apple trees, houses surrounded with farmland and nary another house in sight. I've learned about dug wells; drilled wells; septic tanks; the best foundation for the area (poured concrete); the pros and cons of metal roofing, and fireplaces; the wonderfulness that is the pellet stove; flood plains; waste disposal; heat zoning; the drawbacks of forced air heating;

Hmm. fast pulse, shortness of breath...panic attack coming on...

It's just a fucking house.

I'm healthy, if neurotic. So is my husband. (Healthy I mean). My daughter is happily tearing apart her room while I type. Our lease here runs out in August. We have to move by the end of July. Breath. Great. I just burned the fuck out of my lip with my green tea which thanks to my blasted travel mug is still scalding hot after ten minutes. Ah pain. The head cleanser.

Things are slowly falling into place. Daily, something is done to get us closer to our goals. We were approved for a mortgage. That's good. Dr. Science is one test and some paperwork away from obtaining his Maine medical license. That is also good. We have our passports all ready for our trip to the Netherlands at the end of June for Great Oma's 90th birthday. We have tickets. This is good.

We have 17 days between the time we return and Dr. Science's first day of work in Maine to move. That's...bad. We haven't made an offer yet. Also bad.

For those of you not in the know, the whole "this is good/bad" thing comes from the years in medical school. Particularly, from working in the ED. Things get down to basics very quickly when you have a short time to get results. So looking over a patient, one says..."he's breathing...that's good. He doesn't have a pulse. That's bad". It reminds you where your priorities should lie.

Right now it is...make the fucking offer already.

And be vewy, vewy quiet...

Cross posted at NE Mamas.

Dear RMV,

2008-04-17T19:31:00.004-04:00

I want to thank you for one of the more enlightening mornings of my life.

You see, I'd always been under the impression that in the course of studying for a driver's permit, one would want to focus on information pertaining to safe driving.

I can't thank you enough for relieving me of this gross misunderstanding. Why on earth would you be interested in knowing whether a new driver understands things like the three second rule, or when the road is most slippery, or who has the right of way at an intersection without lights? I understand now. These things are just not important.

Of course, it is important to know that when one sees a person with a white cane walking across the street that they are in all likelihood blind. This is a good bit of information to know. I never would have guessed. But I naively thought, going in to take a test for a driver's permit, that I would actually be answering questions on something relevant, such as, oh, I don't know, driving safely.

Instead, it seems it is in the best interest of a new driver to be aware instead of what precisely will happen to you if you do NOT drive safely. This is Massachusetts after all. Punishment and suffering is part of our Puritanical heritage. I'm so glad to see the RMV continuing this legacy in it's education of new drivers. And we can see by just looking at our local drivers how successful an education it is!

I will be sure to remind all my friends who are future drivers to be...in Massachussets...in Boston...do NOT study safe driving. Because when you sit down in front of that computer screen, 19 out of 20 questions will be about law. Specifically, the various and sundry punishments for the under 21 crowd out there. Not pahking the cah.

And I will remember, for that one non-law question you slide in there...that a person carrying a white cane crossing a sidewalk, is, in fact, blind.

Sincerely,
Rocks

I'm sharing this over at NE Mamas today as well. Just because I can.

New blogroll in the works...

2008-04-14T14:39:00.002-04:00

Hey all,

I'm currently rebuilding my blogroll. Consider this an open call.

Cheers!

Until the Summer Olympics are over...

2008-04-11T10:25:00.005-04:00

this will be my background. It will have to do.

I'm too poor and too clumsy with a razor to keep my head shaved.

The Education of Little Impling: Chapter 2

2008-04-04T10:54:00.013-04:00

To be honest, this is more about my own education, or my recent episode of reality clobbering me upside the head. A while back I began what is ideally to become ongoing coverage of the Impling's education, such as it is. At the moment this is where we are:

The Impling is 3 and a couple months. She is counting, rhyming, memorizing lyrics faster than me (and yes, I am listening to Blue Moo and the soundtrack to Oklahoma 5 to 8 times a day as well), doing giant 100 piece floor pieces with a little help from the Mommy unit, drawing shapes, typing her name, and spouting her phone number to whomever will listen. She loves learning the names of the streets we walk in Brookline. And she LOVES her books. So far, so good.

She is not in preschool. She is, while absolutely fearless in some arenas (see below) also very wary (read terrified) of other children her own age. This tendency, plus our family's lack of money money money, led to the no-brainer conclusion that we would just skip preschool, thank-you-very-much. It turned out to be a very good call. Over the past months, she has in the course of visiting the Science Museum and the Brookline Library story hour become more comfortable with other children. I could see her terror downgrading to fear, then to mild discomfort. Finally, on a day I will never forget, she sat down by the storyteller with a group of about 6 other little girls (who were, truth be told, mostly 4 year olds) and listened raptly to frog stories. This past week, she sat down with a group of 13 little girls and boys, and had a blast. To say I was proud is a vast understatement.

So she is growing up. And here is my little episode of enlightenment:

For the first time, I've sent the Impling off on her "own". One of the classes (actually, the only class) I've enrolled the Impling in ever since she turned 6 months old, is swimming. I loved the water as a child, and I want the Impling to have a chance to learn to love it too. I've blathered on about this before, so I'll skip over my own idyllic learning-to-swim history.

With the Impling, I started off with the swimming lessons at the Brookline High School, then moved over to the BU Recreation Center when BHS closed down for renovations. We only just recently got back to the BHS for their open swim. Anyhow, after years of swimming with my little one, catching her as she launched herself like a rocket off the edge of the pool into the water, chanting "Motor boat, motor boat step on the gas!" and singing "Three little speckled frogs", I signed her up for Two's in Training. Our delay may (*ahem*) have been partially selfish. I love playing in the water with the Impling. I was sad to give it up.

It was, however, the right time. The first class, we were in the water with them as they got used to their two instructors. Last class, the parents stayed at the side of the pool in their bathing suits, and learned to trust the instructors. And who taught us that trust? The one and only Impling, of course.

"Three Little Speckled Frogs" for the uninitiated, is a jumping exercise. The toddlers stand on the edge of the pool, and wait for the magic words "One jumped into the pool" before leaping (or sliding, or vehemently refusing to leap) into the water. This is possibly the Impling's favorite song in class.

But that day, they each had to wait for their turn to jump. You know where this is going. The Impling bopped and sang along with the lyrics, and when the magic words came, launched herself in a beautiful arc into the water. Only, it wasn't her turn. And there was no one on the other end ready to catch her. I lunged forward, but as I called out her name the instructors already had her. She had bobbed up to the surface with a radiant face, and as the instructor brought her back to the edge of the pool, I laughed while my heart was still in my throat and my hair turned white and yelled "THAT WAS AWESOME!"

"Just wait until they're ready for you next time, OK?"

PLEASE.

Next week, we will be in street clothes on the side of the pool. Oh boy.

Crossposted at NE Mamas!

bama bama mobama

2008-03-21T10:26:00.005-04:00

bama bama mobama

banana fana O bama

fee fi fo bama

OOOOOBAAAAMA.

OK, so the Democratic Underground got there before me. But between the inescapable coverage in the Globe of all things Obama (remind me to point out later the almost hysterically obvious visual campaigning for the Big O...all those ridiculously silly shots of Hillary we've seen over the past months were chosen for a reason) and the strains of Sha Na Na's contribution to Blue Moo, (“Banana nana nana nana nana na na na.” very catchy...and no, I'm am NOT making any sort of stupid racial editorial comment*) it was inevitable. I had to write it out to escape it's insidious hold on my brain. Like the home remedy of singing a song that has been going through your head over and over and over to stop it.

I voted for Hillary in the primary. I had many reasons. First and foremost is that she is everything Obama is not. She is not glamorous, or sexy (to me, at any rate), she isn't a fabulously talented orator. But damn, is the woman a fighter.

At that point, I was leery (and still am, quite frankly) of the groupie mentality I saw in some of Obama's supporters. I know my low tolerance for hard selling, so I kept my exposure to propaganda to a minimum. I had no real bones to pick with either candidate. Either one would be a vast improvement over who is “in charge” now. Through the last months, we've seen the gloves come off, the mud fly, and they both have managed to pick themselves up out of the dirt. Filthy, but standing. I'm glad Hillary went after Obama the way she did. Beyond seeing her at her most unreasonably aggressive self, we were able to at least glean how Obama might deal with the full-fledged Republican attacks which may be in his future. And let's face it, the Republican's want Hillary to go up against McCain. They know they could slaughter her before she even got to the house.

Because Hillary made mistakes. She made experience a big part of her platform. Then she proceeded to do what many of us do on our resumes. Embellish the hell out of it. Some might say fabricate the hell out of it. Whatever. It all part of the game. Every damn politician out there is doing it. But if she goes up against McCain, a big part of her campaigning will become useless. And she's got Bill baggage. The one thing she really has, a workable healthcare plan, will not be enough to beat the brutality of the Republican machine once it breaks out it's battering ram. The mud slinging will become shit hurling. I will stop reading the paper.

So what, you may be wondering, inspired this 30 something white woman to write about this demonic circus?

I watched Obama speak. Specifically, his March 18^th address in Philadelphia. And I saw in his candor about his response to the incendiary words of his “former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright” my own thoughts, my own experiences. It brought back my days of participating in training exercises at Women in Transition that enlightened all of us young counselors as to exactly what privileges are, and how we benefited or suffered from them. I too, have relatives whose racial prejudices make my teeth grind. I have ancestors who hid their racial identities because it was dangerous not to do so. Once upon a time, it was dangerous to be Penobscot. It was dangerous to be Irish. And look where we are now. We have a long way to go, but now I can proudly state my ancestry in a way that was impossible for my great grandparents to do.

Obama is a magnificent orator, he has stage presence, gravity, and yes, he looks almost presidential. Almost, because he is missing a key facial expression. I don't believe, (and you can correct me on this, if you please, if I missed it) the mashed lips that seem to be part and parcel of almost every candidate today. The look that says they have lost control, that they are on the defensive, that they are hiding baggage. He didn't have it.

So I say almost presidential. He has created an image of himself that is hard to resist. Upright, realistically hopeful, self actualized. When was the last time I listened to someone and thought...here is someone who could be a hero? Or even more...someone to look up to, as well as a good man. A real man. Not an ol' boy, like those that populate the White House. So what if he doesn't pick up his socks? Neither does my husband. So what if he doesn't have experience. Neither did Lincoln, and where would we be without him?

I wish Barack well. I hope for him. I want to believe in him. This is beginning to sound like a religious conversion, so I think I'll wrap this up.

I'd like to leave you all today with the 3 year old Impling's nature prose, observed and composed during a leisurely stroll through the streets of Brookline, and here by her specific request:

“They are Spring bare branches!”

*This would be particularly ridiculous of me since I think I might be on the brink of a big O conversion.

Cross-posted at that den of iniquity, NE Mamas

Moving right along...

2008-03-07T14:20:00.002-05:00

When I was six, my mother, father, older brother, younger sister and I moved.

I remember the house on 138 so clearly. I can draw a pretty accurate floor plan of it when I put my mind to it. For the first 6 years of my life, it was my life. My playroom, my world, my universe. I made up stories to entertain my sister and created fantastic worlds of make believe. Our closet was a hideout...a pirate cave, a hidden fort, an invisible room where our characters could come to life. We brought our imaginations outside, to the woodpile, the lawn, the forest behind the house, the path to Nana’s. We would run over to see her multiple times a day. In the twilight, we’d look out for the bats that came out to hunt. We peeked through the trees at the spooky run down house that lay in a think tangle of overgrowth next door. We smashed crabapples with sticks, built “tree-houses” in the wood, learned to ride our bikes on the smooth grassy slope of our back yard.

It was idyllic. And yet, when the time came for us to move, I didn’t feel an overwhelming sadness, primarily because of one thing. In the new house, one town away, I would have my very own room.

So it was that moving became a glorious adventure. I remember absolutely nothing of packing. I remember the truck though. And here is the major difference between then and now. I got to ride in the back of the moving truck. And it was the coolest, most exciting thing I’d ever done. The dim light inside, the last boxes strapped to the sides of the truck. I was a hobo, an adventurer. A stowaway on a huge ship. My six-year-old imagination went wild. Time stood still as my caravan rumbled out and off to adventure.

I didn’t move again until I was 18. Then I moved again at 19, and at 20, 3 times when I was 21, a few more times between ages 22 and 35, until I found myself pretty much back where I started, here in Massachusetts. But the first time I moved was magical. Perhaps everything is magical when you are six. Time moved so slowly. You could bask in your daydreams.

Now I am nearing forty, and this year, I will move again. This time is another first for me. All the other moves I’ve ever had were from rental to rental. Now, we will be moving to a house. Our house.

I’ve never even tried to buy a house. It made no sense, for my lifestyle. But now, in this year of mammoth change, I find myself poring over our finances, navigating a neighborhood eight hours away to try to divine which streets would be the best to try for, learning about points and financing and mortgages and insurance and and and...

When I was renting, I maintained an illusion that I still was, in some slight way, a child. Now I feel like the last vestiges of that childishness are evaporating with each new aspect of home buying I confront. I have to be practical. I have to be diligent. I have to keep my feet on the ground. I have to be the epitome of every grownup cliche you can think of.

Life was so much more pleasant when the moving van was simply a caravan, and my biggest worry was that the ride would be over all too soon.

Houston, we have logic.

2008-03-04T17:34:00.004-05:00

Okay. I know. KNOW that nap time is short lived. I heard all about the phenomenon of three year olds suddenly refusing to nap. I dread the day this happens and sucks up the precious hour and a half I have to myself during the day to nap myself. We've had our share of battles over the impending "you-know-what". But with (mostly) good humor and an attitude that it is inevitable, I've usually managed to wrestle a nap out of my girl. Sometimes there are tears.

Then I've been known to say to Impling..."I know you are tired, look, you're so tired you're crying."

I was hoisted today, my friends.

I hear a chirpy, "Want a hug and a kiss from Mommy!"
and go in to a smiling face. I sit beside her and tuck the covers in. The Impling looks at me with a little smile.

"Look! Impling's happy!"

The smile expands.

"Impling's not crying!"

Now we have a grin. Understanding is slowly illuminating my brain, like a low watt lightbulb. Uh Oh.

"Impling's not tired!"

big grin.

"Impling's happy!" she chirps again. Smile smile smile...

giggle.

Guess who didn't have a nap today.

Couldn't exactly enforce it while laughing hysterically into her pillow, could I?

I'm doomed.

DOOMED.

Long distance meme

2008-02-22T07:44:00.009-05:00

And Here's the Campfire.

My good mate Carolie...all the way on the other side of the globe, has managed to reach over 7000 miles to tag me for a meme.

I need a break from writing “the story” in a most desperate way. So I'm going to curl up by Carolie's campfire with some marshmallows and meme away.

Rules:

Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog. check.
Share five random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.
Share the five top places on your “want to see or want to see again” list.
Tag a minimum of five random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment in their blog.

The Meme:

Five Random/Weird Facts About Me:
- I was born on the same day as my youngest uncle. May 27^th. Of course, we are 23 years apart. But 1969 was a pretty fun year to be born.
- When I was a wee one of 5 or 6, my Mom made most of our clothes. She also volunteered us (me, my older brother and younger sister) for modeling her clothes in some fashion show I don't really remember.
- I make a mean Chocolate mousse.
- When I was 18 I worked as a volunteer for the Royal National Eisteddfod in Wales. That year it was in Newport, in South Wales. I lived in a little village called Rhiwderyn and walked a couple of miles to work each day through the Welsh countryside. The best part of this walk was climbing over the fence turnstiles at the foot of a grassy hill surmounted by old Roman ruins.
- When I was a kid, my older brother packed up his huge, five string double bass and headed out to Tanglewood for a summer studying with “Tiny” Martin and other members of the BSO. My little sister and I, for the July 4^th bash, were given the jobs of gate runners. Which meant, basically, that we pressed our little faces up against the gates with hundreds of other concert crazies, waited for it to open, panting and chomping at the bit, and when it finally did, left the gate at full gallop, blankets streaming behind us like superhero capes as we made the mad dash across the green perfect lawns to our favorite spot by the big tree near the main shed. There we spread the blankets and collapsed into jellylike lumps to wait for our parents to catch up. They would bring the lunch/snack/dinner basket. In the meantime we watched a small city spring up around us. A few blankets away, a card table was erected, spread with snowy white linen, and set with china and wine glasses. Over behind the shed on the other side of a line trees, we could see hot air balloons begin to swell and rise over the foliage. A line of cannons waited quietly on the lawn for their moment, hours away as of yet, when they would fire and bring down a rain of fireworks that would all but obliterate the strains of Tchaikovsky blasting from the shed. But what did it matter? We were young, happy, and dreamed young dreams of flying off in those hot air balloons that would eventually rise from the earth and float away over the mountains.
Top five places I want to visit or visit again:
- Tanglewood
- Japan
- Wales
- Machu Pichu
- Greece
Tag! (with no obligation included. Memes are completely optional. And not for everyone. You have to be in the mood. Or you may have already done this one.) ahem. Not to mention that since I've all but stopped reading and commenting on blogs, the immediate reaction of my tagees will probably be...you want me to do what? Who are you again? tag? Yeah. Right.

Just a little storm...

2008-02-07T17:25:00.000-05:00

February 5th-8th, 1978

“...snow...came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss...”

-Dylan Thomas A Child's Christmas in Wales

I've seen this snow, many times in my childhood, but 30 years ago this week, it did not cover our roof with anything like a delicate stippled rime. Snow lay like 30 ton blanket of wool, heavy enough to make the roof groan with the weight of it. The weather men at that time fore-casted a "little storm", hardly anything to worry about...

In 1978 I was nine years old, still shorter than my older brother, but bold in his cast off snow suit and bottle green rubber boots. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First I have to wake up.

And so I did...to muffled silence. It was February 8th. The whistling and banging of the radiator had stopped. The howling and shrieking of the winds from the days and nights before were silent and still. I lay in my bed, gazing out of all five of my windows (I had the gable room, tiny, but well lit...usually) at nothing but white. This wasn't, as you might think, because it was still snowing...it was...but that wasn't the snow I looked out upon. I was staring at the snow that had already fallen...and completely covered the windows from sill to lintel. A dim cold light shone through the top panes of glass, so I knew somewhere up there was the surface of the snow. But damned if I could see it.

I ran down stairs...I wanted to be the first to try the doors. I climbed on the kitchen counter to look out the window over the sink to the driveway. Our car was gone. This was not a small car, but a station wagon. There was no sign of it but a slight rise in the drift...a softly sloped hill that might have just been a whimsy of the wind. Except there was a car somewhere underneath. I crowed with delight and jumped down to the floor as Dad came lumbering up from the cellar, toolbox in tow.

“Look out the back door!” he said with a grin. I opened the inner door and laughed. The storm door was completely snowed in. There was nothing to see through the plexiglass window but the bluey gray of packed snow. Dad calmly set down his tool box and began unscrewing the hinges. Soon, he had peeled away the storm door and a good bit of snow fell into the back entry way. We scooped it into the sink, digging a tunnel through the snow until we broke the surface.

Now this might sound like a tall tale right about now, but I assure you, it isn't. Any one who survived the Great Lakes Blizzard of '77 will be familiar with the images of graveyards of buried cars on the highways, and street signs barely breaking through the top of the snow drifts. Some might say that '78 was a flurry in comparison, but comparisons, as someone once said long ago, are odious. Both years, the National Guard was called in, states of emergency declared, people lost their homes and businesses, people died. On February 6th of 1978, in our neck of the woods, the snow fell and the wind blew for 33 hours, at times at a rate of 4 inches an hour. Throw in some thunder and lightning as well, just for good measure. And some 75 Mph winds. And flooding.

The Blizzard of '78 wasn't just one storm, but a convergence of three that turned into one mother of a nor' easter that dumped (in our town) almost four feet of snow on top of the almost two feet we already had on the ground from the Jan 25^th storm (our little blast of the Great Blizzard of '78 that nailed the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes). In sea side towns, homes were blown off their foundations by hurricane force winds. Other towns were flooded. In Bristol county...in Easton...we got buried. There were drifts of 15 feet reported in some areas. The power was out. For a week. Over a week for others. Mom filled the bathtub with water and brought up our camping equipment...the Coleman stove (we had an electric range...useful for storing water that week), the coolers, the lanterns and candles and flashlights and batteries. We stocked up wood for the fireplace on the front porch. The shovels had been brought in and now that the snow was finally tapering off, we began to dig ourselves out of our house. It took the
better part of the day.

I see pictures of it now but it doesn't match the memories of a four foot something little girl. I don't remember if Dad's head cleared the top of the snow in some places or not. It didn't matter. What did matter was the unbelievably warm memories of one of the coldest times of the year. When we finally dug ourselves out, we met others on the road, their sleds and toboggans and skis making tracks through the flat white expanse where the road used to be. We'd bundled up Michelin man style, and my older brother and I climbed every plow mountain we could find... one that reached almost to the top of the gas station's sign. Do you remember? Did you climb it too? Then we followed the brave souls who'd heard through word of mouth that Fernandez (our local supermarket at the time) had managed to open, so we all set off for a afternoon of it...sleighing and coasting a mile up the road to load up our toboggan with whatever we needed...though I can't remember at all what we could possibly have needed.

Mom and Dad seemed to have everything under control, so we did what New Englanders did best back then...hunkered down. With no electricity, we were, to all intents and purposes, cut off. The only radio station we could get on our transistor was WBZ. We heard sobering reports of people dying in their cars on Route 128. Of flooding in Revere and Hull. Of homes flattened by the wind. We felt grateful, in our cold house, that we had it at all. That we had a fire, and our family and our friends, and our lives. It made us want to enjoy everything we could as if it was the last day we could enjoy it.

Over the next week my brother and I built a rabbit warren of underground tunnels in the front yard. We made snow forts and snow aliens. We came in when we were soaked and dried off before the fire, and played board games. Monopoly, and Scrabble, and Parcheesi, and Mousetrap, and even Candy Land (little sister loved that one). I usually hated board games (except for Scrabble), but somehow, possibly because of the death and destruction the storm had caused, everyone tried to rise above it by being the best possible people they could be (at least in our town...the looters lived somewhere else). There were neighborhood potlucks. Food tasted better, we enjoyed our company as we never had before. There was no pressure. No where to go, no where we had to be. The storm had passed, and we were buried, but we were alive, safe in our iglood house, free of the sadness and worry our parents undoubtedly had, but didn't share. We were free of time, free of concern. The dreadful, wonderful freedom it seems at times only a big storm can give.

Cross-posted at the one and only NE Mamas.
And for a piece of lovely writing about '78, check this out.

1%.

2008-01-25T08:28:00.000-05:00

One percent of the population of the US does not watch any TV. I don't know if there are grades of abstinence. Whether you are included in this exclusive one percent if say, like me, we have a big ass, movie house of a set, but no cable. No connection. Really, we don't watch tv.

This is not because I am some holier than thou bitch. It is completely selfish. TV annoys me. I felt a thankful kinship with the Globe writer who outed herself as another member of the 1% in the Sunday Globe Magazine a couple weeks ago. I'm not alone!

It's not just because there is nothing on (truly, the only show on now I would watch is Wired) but the commercials. The constant break of concentration. If I was lucky enough to have a show I really enjoyed, why would I want to watch it, only to be yanked out of my enjoyment by ten minutes of commercials every fifteen minutes? Ah, you may say. TiVo or some such recording program can bypass all those things. But I am too lazy. If I can rent the DVD from Netflix, I sure as hell don't need to fork out the cash or the time to set up a program to winnow through the shit and filter out the gold.

I'm not sure how the annoyance factor breaks down. It could be a ratio of 80% annoyance at commercials to 20% annoyance at time spent clicking through bullshit. Or vice versa.

It wasn't always this way. When I was a kid, I was a TV junkie. Here is just a little of what I remember zoning out to, in no particular order: Grizzly Adams; Good Times; The Jeffersons; Fat Albert; Little House on the Prairie; Julia Child; Sesame Street; The Electric Company; Mr Rogers; The Love Boat (and Fantasy Island, of course); The Gong Show (remember Chuck Barris? That HAIR?), The Price is Right; every holiday special I could stay up for; Barnie Miller; Taxi; Cheers; MASH (oh, how I loved MASH); Silver Spoons; Punky Brewster; All in the Family; Get Smart; That Girl; Mary Tyler Moore; The Facts of Life; Family Ties; MacGyver; Murder She Wrote; Magnum PI; Charlie's Angels; Marcus Welby M.D.; Leave It to Beaver; the A Team; Hollywood Squares; The Bionic Man; The Bionic Woman; Wonder Woman; Batman; Hawaii Five-O; Quantum Leap; Fame; Old classic movies; every musical ever made; after school specials; all those “back to nature” movies with the horrible child non-actors one suspected of being “hired” by the producer or director but who were really sons or daughters who wanted to play on the big screen...

I could go on, but by now, you get the idea. I was a teen couch spud.

I'm not sure when it all changed for me. It may have started the year I graduated from high school, and for all intents and purposes, stopped watching. I traveled, I went to college, I didn't have time for it. So by the time I was working nine to five, and had the time again, I watched. But now, there were channels like the cartoon network, and Turner, and HBO. Suddenly I didn't have to deal with commercials. I also realized that there was not as many things I was interested in watching. Beakman, Dexter's Lab, Space Ghost Coast to Coast were regular fare. But these were all short-lived indulgences. We watched Homicide and taped almost every episode. Never watched them a second time, though. What exactly were we taping them for? The VHS tapes are slowly disintegrating in boxes in the basement. We never really talked about what we watched with our friends either. Our tastes were too esoteric.

Of course there were reruns. But there were only so many times I could swallow another episode of Andy Griffith or the inevitable Brady Bunch without my feeling guilty afterwards for such a pathetic waste of time. I'd been there, done that. Then I began to be annoyed with the “personalities”. The talk show hosts, the newscasters. Then the stupidity of new sitcoms. The same old things, over. And over. And over.

Then, med school started, and financially, we had to make some choices. DSL or cable. It wasn't a difficult choice. We walked away from the cable easily enough. I was done. The addiction was routed, and I kissed the tube goodbye. Netflix now sends us our Wired episodes, which we barely find time to watch, let alone the other 300+ movies and animes in our Q. It is more than enough.

As for the Impling, I doubt she would have the interest to sit and watch even if we were inclined to let her watch, which we aren't. There are numerous reasons for this. First, I've no interest in mucking through what looks at a glance to be horribly insipid and stupid and badly animated children's shows to find one that's actually worth watching. I don't want to train her in how to watch. I don't want to deal with a whiny toddler demanding Elmo's or Disney Princesses or neon breakfast cereals. I do want to give the National Association of Pediatritians the benefit of the doubt as they reiterate over and over that TV for children is not so good. They recommend limiting TV viewing to 2 hours a day (for the over 2 set...no TV at ALL for the wee ones). This boggles my mind. Two HOURS? There is the transit time to the Science Museum for us, or a good tramp to a playground, or a new train track creation. Or reading. Or drawing. Or dancing.

So no TV. No DVD's. And sometimes, it's hard. Like when I have a bad cold and there's nothing I'd love more than curling up on the sofa and showing the Impling an old Gene Kelly musical. But I know, as soon as I start, there will be no going back. So I wait, visions of tap shoes dancing in my head, until the Impling and I are ready.

"Let's do some tracks now Mommy!"

New Year Resolutions.

2007-12-28T09:44:00.001-05:00

Read more books.

Eat more snow.

Happy New Year, All!

At the moment...

2007-12-13T14:13:00.000-05:00

It's snowing like a mo fo. See?

The Impling is warm and cozy in her nap, and I sit in the dark and try to type as quietly as I can.

I am hungry, but I don't know what I would like to eat. Maybe some hot chocolate. It's snowing, after all.

I'm wearing my “Mom” jeans. The ones that cut me off at the waist. I hate that. On the other hand, they're lined in flannel. So that part's cozy. My kingdom for some lined, dropped waist jeans.

I'm also wearing a cozy, beat up red cardigan with funky buttons that I only wear on my “off” days.

It is one of those “off” days. I feel not so much tired as just sort of pale. Like my face isn't getting enough blood or something.

I'm mildly annoyed at fund-raisers who call during nap-time. Even if it is for Obama.

I have no idea what we are having for supper. Soup, maybe. Or breakfast. Pancakes?

I don't give a shit that no-one cares what I want for supper.

I feel distinctly un-profound. I could write about the quality of the winter light...nah.

One wall is the Impling's gallery of art. Her first finger-paintings, and her own collage she hung/made herself. See?

I'm growing annoyed with this list, but I can't think of anything better to write. Besides the book I'm supposed to be working on, that is.

I don't have a publisher. Or an agent. Or connections.

I need to eat chocolate.

We have no Christmas tree.

There are white lights quietly brightening our Ficus Ali. I want to look at it now because it's cheerful and pleasant to look at. Of course, our Japanese screen is in the way. And I'm too not interested to actually get up and move to see it.

I wonder how our new colored LED lights will look on our little tree once we actually get it. Get a load of my bad green ass self. Insert snort of derision here.

It's still snowing.

At least the Impling is ready for it.

See?

This stream of consciousness brought to you by an absolute lack of motivation, and the letter L. For Lazy.

One big pipedream.

2007-11-29T19:37:00.000-05:00

Welcome to December.

I am not going do indulge myself this year in my annual rant about the behemoth of marketing and capitalism that wraps itself up as Christmas. Nor will I go on and on about the fact that the first signs of Christmas now appear just after HALLOWEEN. Less is more folks. Really. But I promised not to rant. So I won't.

Instead, here is my own personal pipe-dream of a Christmas that exists mostly in my head. You are all invited to share your own holiday pipe dreams as well. Don't feel confined to Christmas. Any holiday will do. After all is said and done, they really do begin to look a lot alike, a mish mash of cultures and customs of days gone by. Christmas is really an essentially pagan holiday at it's roots, (before Jesus came into the picture) a holiday conveniently acquired by Christians of old to help stamp out the old pagan celebrations. Religious and non-religious fantasies (agnostic, here) are welcome. So let the holiday pipe-dreams commence.

************

Thanksgiving is over, and I walk with my family under starry skies. We are far enough out of the city to see constellations. In a few weeks, houses will begin to twinkle with their own stars. The sun disappears too early for many to enjoy the afternoon rays, so up go the lights...icicles, and wreaths, and wrapped trees. Candles warm windowsills. Neighborhoods shine, and chase away the depressing knowledge that it will be dark for a good long while before the sun returns.

On December 1rst, we set up the advent calender. It is made of wood...a winter forest with lots of animals and a curious little house with glowing windows. No candy or toys inside, just beautiful little pictures. I've always liked advent calenders. They create a wonderful sense of anticipation, kind of like an egg timer for the holidays.

December 5^th, Saint Nicholas Eve. Dr. Science and I help the Impling find her old klompjes. I set up a little centerpiece on the table. Wooden shoes filled with hay and a carrot for the Saint's horse. Water in an ornate glass. A big red candle to light the way. The flame casts a warm light over the glass and golden wood of the shoes. A poem sits beneath the glass, a collaborative effort until the Impling can write her own. It is a wish list for Christmas.

In the morning, the glass will be empty, the hay and carrot will have mysteriously vanished. The poem has also vanished, but the wooden shoes are now filled and surrounded by rolls of sweet tarts, chocolate letters, speculaas and stroopwafels. A small toy peeks from behind the pillar candle.

For the next few weeks, life goes on as usual. Here and there little embellishments and decorations begin to appear. Shops begin to play carols, and decorate their windows. The most I do is purchase a few things, mostly for the Impling, as Dr. Science and I don't gift each other. I send pictures of the Impling to all our friends and relatives, and keep a steady supply of hot chocolate and peppermint Jo Jo's on hand. And dark chocolate caramels. I might feel ambitious enough to bake butter cookies, or gingerbread, or not. I will if I feel like it. It is enough to smell cider warming on the stove top, fragrant with cinnamon and cloves. Sometimes I will drink it steaming with a good splash of dark rum and a knob of butter. We listen to carols on the radio...Bing, and Nat, all the good old tunes. We enjoy the anticipation of good things to come.

Ah, the presents. No wrapping paper to be seen, just wonderful glittering boxes that are used year after year, much the same way the ornaments are used. Some of them are old friends. Every year they are dressed up with extravagant bows, and every year they look tantalizing. They have to. Most of them will be opened over the course of twelve days.

Christmas Eve, we bring home a tree. A beautiful, fragrant balsam that freshens the whole house. The night's entertainment is decorating it, listening to King's College choir, eating junk food. There is, of course, a roaring fire. We roast hot dogs and cheese and marshmallows. Not necessarily in that order. After the Impling goes to bed (cookies and milk left in generous quantities), Dr. Science and I watch Tokyo Godfathers, feast on the cookies and milk, and get to bed at a reasonable hour after setting up all the presents, and filling the stockings. We leave the Christmas tree lights on.

Christmas dawns. By the time it does, the Impling has already been up for ages. She bounces into our bedroom, climbs up, and plops down between us. She eventually falls asleep for a short while, then awakes and starts waving her hands in the air and singing her own little songs until we all wake up. We have a leisurely morning watching the Impling open her gifts. We build another fire, turn on some early morning music, Vivaldi, or a Bach Christmas cantata or something. We eat fresh cinnamon rolls and drink chocolate and mocha and perhaps a mimosa or so. The kitchen, of course, is all ready for me to start cooking the feast.

This is the part I love. I love my chef's knife, a big roasting pan, and plenty of wine to baste with and drink. During the next twelve days, we eat all our favorite feasting foods, turkey, goose, tarragon chicken, roast beef, roasted potatoes, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash soup, fresh greens with sugared almonds and mandarin slices, cranberry relish with ginger and oranges, acorn squash stuffed with wild rice, hazelnuts and cranberries, oyster stews, oysters on the half shell, huge pots of mussels cooked in wine and garlic, a decadent yule log cake, pies of all kinds for breakfast lunch and dinner. There are three major feasts. Christmas (goose) New Years (roast beef), and Twelfth Night (anything and everything). I never have to clean up afterwards. I just sit by the fire with a good book, a glass of port, and a little dish of Colston Bassett.

On Twelfth Night, we have a costume party. A huge themed blow out for all our friends. We all look forward to this one last bash...wassail and dancing and games and eating until, at last, the festivities are over. Decorations are quickly packed away, the mistletoe and ivy and holly returned to the earth. The tree comes down with some relief, and is mulched. The lights stay up in various configurations in the windows to brighten the remaining winter until the end of February. But just the clear lights. Colored lights are just for Christmas.

Cross-posted at the one, the only, NE Mamas. going live Monday, December 3rd. Check it out!

Failed Resolutions

2007-11-21T11:13:00.001-05:00

I will not think about Christmas before December.

I will not write about Christmas before December.

Shit.

Of Turkeys, Pilgrims and...Maypoles?

2007-11-15T15:55:00.000-05:00

Ah, it's that time of year again...the annual slaughter of the turkeys; the inevitable inaccurate images of drably dressed pilgrims; the old American legends of Pilgrims and Indians sitting together in harmony in some vaguely horrible but much more idyllic circumstance, to give thanks for being alive; Algonquins and indentured servants erecting a Maypole in celebration of their new found freedom and new homes...

Say what?

I'd like to introduce you all to my new personal hero for the Thanksgiving season, Thomas Morton.

Thomas was well-educated, opinionated, inclined to fight, and got on well with his Algonquin neighbors. All of which did not endear him to the good folks of Plimouth, particularly William Bradford.

So in 1624, while the poor wretches at the plantation were ostracizing the various indigenous peoples who had saved their asses the previous years, Tom settled a small outpost with his trading associate Captain Wollaston and about 30 indentured men. They were given a bit of land by the local Algonquin people (we now know this land as Quincy) and set up a trading post. Thomas Morton was a man ahead of his time. He respected and admired the Algonquins, and preferred their company to that of his Puritan neighbors. His own particular brand of Christianity, (which just happened to rub the Puritans the wrong way) may have had something to do with this preference. It also helps if you treat the people you are trying to convert in a friendly and helpful manner, but I digress.

So they set up a healthy trade in guns and liquor for furs and provisions. The trade was so successful the post was expanded into an agrarian colony named Mount Wollaston. Unfortunately, Captain Wollaston decided to start his own trade on the side...in slaves, with the Virginia tobacco plantations. Also unfortunately, the people being sold into slavery were the indentured servants they had brought with them. Morton encouraged the remaining servants to rebel. In a rare triumph of the underdog, Wollaston left with his supporters for Virginia in 1626, and Morton became “host” of the colony, which he promptly renamed Mount Ma-re or Merrymount.

And now began a short, idyllic interlude. All the indentured colonists were declared free men, and a community of tolerant Europeans and Algonquins began to coexist in quite a friendly and prosperous manner.

The good folks at Wikipedia have a great entry about Tom, so I'll let them do the writing for a bit.

“Morton’s ‘Christianity’, however, was strongly condemned by the Puritans of the nearby Plymouth Colony as little more than a thinly disguised heathenism, and they suspected him of essentially ‘going native’. Scandalous rumours were spread of the debauchery at Merrymount, which they claimed included immoral sexual liaisons with native women during what amounted to drunken pagan orgies in honour of Bacchus and Aphrodite. Or as the Puritan Gov. William Bradford wrote with horror in his history Of Plymouth Plantation: "They ... set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians."

In truth Morton had merely transplanted traditional West Country May Day customs to the colony, and combined them with fashionable classical myth, couched according to his own libertine tastes, and fueled by the enthusiasm of his newly-freed fellow colonists. On a practical level the annual May Day festival was not only a reward for his hardworking colonists but also a joint celebration with the Native Tribes who also marked the day, and a chance for the mostly male colonists to find brides amongst the native population. Puritan ire was no doubt also fueled by the fact that Merrymount was the fastest-growing colony in New England and rapidly becoming the most prosperous, both as an agricultural producer and in the fur trade in which the Plymouth Colony was trying to build a monopoly. The Puritan account of this was very different, regarding the colony as a decadent nest of good-for-nothings that annually attracted “all the scum of the country” to the area. Or as Peter Lamborn Wilson more romantically puts it, ‘a Comus-crew of disaffected fur traders, antinomians, loose women, Indians and bon-vivants’. The reality as ever was probably somewhere between the two.”

And so they all existed quite happily until the summer of 1628, when Bradford sent Miles Standish to shut down the operation.

Apparently, the Mayday revels that year, with it's eighty foot, deer antler topped maypole, was just a little too over the top for our Puritan fore fathers. Or maybe they were singing this too loudly:

Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,
No Irish stuff* nor Scotch* over worn,
Lasses in beaver coats, come away,
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.

Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes,
Let all your delight be in Hymens joyes,
Iô! to Hymen now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

Personally, I think they were just jealous of the drinking song.
And they couldn't take the competition.

But, while it lasted, it was a hell of a party. Thanks, Tom, for some of our first real Thanksgivings. Even if they were in May.

*not whiskey, you bad people, woolens.

Cross posted at NE Mamas

MIA, and the comfort of rocks.

2007-11-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

This is where I fling myself on the mercy on the blogosphere and humbly beg all your pardons for not reading not commenting not posting not doing basically any of the things that a good, friendly, productive blogger should be doing. Yes. I am socially inept. Yes, I am innately a hermit.

And yes, I am going to give you excuses.

It all started out innocently enough, as a desire to write a little non-twee story for the Impling. This, of course, snowballed into a full-fledged novel of gargantuan proportions, complete with research into late Victorian fashion, recreation, and architecture, drawings of floor plans, essays on politics and society, and endless pondering, editing, second guessing, and stalling.

I have a first draft, and the beginning of a mock up.

Yay me.

Now I have to do the illustrations.

Not that I'll be able to actually do anything with them since my Mac G4 is for all intents and purposes, dead. Until I can finance a new power board and/or new logic board. Money I don't have. Until we get that new job next year.

Also, just in case you don't feel my craziness, we STILL are waiting for the lawyer to do his lawyer-fu with the contract from Maine, so we can sign the damn thing already and send it back to the people who are offering us our next paycheck, our new community, hell, our new life in general.

I like my rock. I'm going to crawl back under it now.

No Faire!

2007-11-02T14:03:00.000-04:00

Carver, Massachusetts.

This is a town that holds more than one childhood memory, one of the happiest being of their annual clambake, sponsored by the local fire department. Good thing, too, as the main event is a gigantic fire pit built in the middle of a pine grove. Which is, for all intents and purposes, the town of Carver. It is pine groves. And cranberry bogs. Edaville Railroad and Plimouth Plantation (down the road, that is), Miles Standish National Park, which was right next door to the Girl Scout camp I went to as a child with my family, and worked at as a teenager during summer vacations.

The pines. Dr. Science rolled down his window some time after we turned off of Route 3, and the heady scent of pine swept through the car.

“Yup,” I said “This smell is it. This is Carver.”

We were not, however, heading off to the old grove packed with long white clothed tables, which in turn would be packed with piles and piles of steamers, and corn, and hot dogs, and potatoes, and more steamers, and little bowls and puddles of butter and broth, and the smell of seaweed and hot rocks and wet canvas and fire smoke...hay and pony dung, birch beer and root beer. Moxie for the old timers. Not this time. Sigh.

Nope. That day, the Impling braved the vomitous hour long trip (luckily with only a few explosions) with good grace, because, well, we were going...to the Faire.

King Richard's Faire, to be exact. There are any number of Faires in these here parts nowadays...The Festival of the Lion, in Grafton; The Connecticut Renaissance Faire just over the border; a Pirate Festival I heard tell about up in Salem; and I think New Hampshire had one for a while as well. All, from what I have read, good, family friendly faires, with lots of costumes; lots of engaging not-so-innocent-but-all-in-good-fun banter going back and forth between patrons and players; and entertaining if not spectacular acts that had more guts than glory. This is what I remembered King Richard's Faire being like when I was a gawkish teen, driving with my posse into the dusty parking lot in a beat up Pinto. We dressed up as various characters from the Canterbury Tales. I dressed as the wife of Bath. I had a huge crush on one of the Gypsy Dancers. Yummy. Lord, the man could dance. And did I mention? He was HOT.

But that was then. This, is now. The parking lot was exactly the same. I was halfway out of the door as Dr. Science pulled into a spot. First issue of business, to get the Impling out before she projectiled again. I dodged the good natured Rennie who climbed down from the cab of his pickup truck (in a shirt I would have loved to own at one point...you know, one of those big sleeved, floppy sorts that well built men wear open to show off their chest hair) with a smile and hello before extricating my sodden toddler from the back seat. Then we joined the ranks of die hard Faire patrons who dress up...in the parking lot. Adjusting bodices, strapping on swords, touching up hats, hooking on mugs, or horns(?), or fox tails(??), and for us, wiping off vomit.

So after a quick change into the Impling's costume...she dressed as a non-vomit coated toddler...we headed for the main gate to meet my sister and her husband, who drove up from NYC for the day. They are Impling junkies, they are. Plus, they were as curious as I was to see what had become of our old stomping grounds. I'd heard rumors. But they were a couple of years old. Maybe things had gotten better for the ol' Faire.

At first sight, it seemed virtually the same (after of course, getting beyond the expected butt-fuck of a $25.00 admission fee...that did not include rides or games...or food) there were lots of patrons in character walking about, some trying (and failing) to sing, others just walking about adding to the local color. I hadn't heard any attempts at old (make that olde) English yet though. Not beyond the standard “prithees” and “good day, milady's” that anyone with half an imagination could utter. Chances of a good insult exchange were disappearing fast.

But no matter, there were all the old buildings, the smell of wet pine, the rose sellers and mug sellers and costume rentals and other such authentic period specific shops selling authentic, straight from the Renaissance inspired wares. Sky chairs, for instance. And sparkly butterfly wings. And, um...mad cow horns.

what IS this?

We got Frenchie. The dude in purple. He rocked.

Just in case that guy next to you was looking just a little too excited about his sword...

who needs teeth? Or a GI tract?

My little terror of the seas.

Yeah, they're mine. I make them suffer. Whatever.

pledging allegiance to the Gypsy Dancers...pirate style

So we headed for the joust, to see what we could see. We watched the blacksmiths, wandered around until we stopped for the inevitable turkey legs, and there were the Gypsy Dancers! We went to the pirate workshop, where the Impling sang “Yo ho Yo ho a pirates life for me!”, then showed off her best pirate sneer before press-ganging the whole lot of pirates for her own personal entourage. Then we strolled around some more, until the Impling succumbed to the gravitational pull of a sparkly pair of butterfly wings, and weak mother that I am (it's not all my fault, my sister had been waiting for this all day) I walked out with one purple pair and my wallet $40 lighter. Ok, $20, sister grrl paid half. But still...forty bucks? And for something SO twee? I envisioned a future of princess costumes and pink vanities. Shudder.

WHAT? Is there a problem here?

I am a such a glutton for punishment.

So basically, all we did was walk around. We weren't there to shop, or drink, but take in the local color.

The thing is, it is character that makes a good faire. You can have the crappiest acts in the world, but if the attitude is one of fun and mischief and a little raunchy badness, that's the faire I want to be at.

Unfortunately, this is what King Richards Faire no longer is. They have good acts...great jousters, a group of cat trainers who seem to live year round on the property and seem to have a pretty good relationship with the big cats they show off. The mud show was good, raunchy fun, and came closest to the feel of the Faire of my childhood. And the Gypsy Dancers still put on a fun show, much to the Impling's joy. Two brave women strolled along in full faire garb, belting out “Spanish Ladies”. We gave them big smiles.

But the effortless back and forth banter of the "locals" was almost completely nonexistent. Maybe everyone was just tired. As the day wore on, the grounds lost the early morning child friendly feel and suddenly went carnival on us. A darker, seamier side became more prevalent. More yards of beer in hands than maps or cameras. It was time to leave. So we packed up our tired toddler, said our goodbyes and hit the road.

The next day, we went to the Arboretum, where the Impling ran about in ecstasies, wearing not her sparkly wings, but her favorite trophy from the faire...her pirate patch. My fears, it seems, were unfounded.

Yo Ho Ho.

Waiting.

2007-10-19T18:24:00.000-04:00

Waiting.

I hate it.

We are interviewing for new jobs next year. A job for Dr. Science that will take us far, far away from the life we know. Not as far as Nome, or the South Pacific, but far enough.

cows. 'nuff said.

The main drag.

farm stand. leave your money in the tin can.

the river that runs through it.

This, is Houlton.

Only two states away. Right on the border. So close to New Brunswick, in fact, that if one cares to look at the satellite image on google maps, one sees that half the town is a blur, but the side closest to the border, you can zoom down until you can look in the windows of the buildings. You could see people, if there had been anyone out on the street in the middle of the day. Border patrol has to keep vigilant with these guys. Guess that's whats up with the super focused satellites. So they can keep up with all those damn Canadians trying to sneak into our country over the Houlton border to...what?

Really, there is almost no one on the streets during the day. I noticed this, walking around the main drag with the Impling. She had her meltdown in the middle of the sidewalk and there was no one to cast mean looks in my direction. She freaked in peace. Where WAS everyone? Guess they are all at work, on the fields, in the hospital, or at home, drinking a cold frosty one over the classified. Or just drinking a cold frosty one.

Hell. Now I want a cold frosty one. May as well. It's not like I have a JOB or anything, right? Right. I want my $300,000 in SAHM back pay RIGHT now. 2 years. And 8 months.

Things are going to change. We will have a house. The Impling will have a new bed, as she has already outgrown her little toddler IKEA confection of a bed. I will have my own car. (Yes...I am actually getting my license). Shudder. New...everything.

IF we get a good offer. This is what we are waiting for. This is what has been absorbing my attention, distracting me from writing, and reading, and being, well, present. Wondering...where the HELL will we end up? Will...

Damn. I was all ready to go off on a major rant about the suckitudiness of waiting for shit, and we get

THE CALL.

THE OFFER.

Dudes. We are going to be TRIPLING our income. With benefits. And relocation help. And something else I can't remember because I am JUST SO GOBSMACKED.

I get wet just thinking about it.

I just taught the Impling how to scream into pillows. She thinks it's hysterical.

So...we know. Next year, this old MA resident will be posting from Houlton ME. The border lands. I have something solid to work towards now. A house. Preschool for the impling. A community. A neighborhood.

I could cry.

If I wasn't slightly drunk on cheap wine, I probably would be. The yoke is beginning to break away. By next June or July, it will be gone. A new life. A new home.

Possibly, a new yoke.

I welcome it.

Crossposted at NE Mamas. Because I just had to share.

Geijin: Part II

2007-10-09T23:10:00.000-04:00

Since I began writing this post, I thought, (as I remember more and more), that to be kind to my small group of readers, I would break this up a bit. A mini series, if you will.

So off we go...

**************************

For most people, going on vacation to Japan would not constitute a reason to worry for one's sanity. And truthfully, I have no real reason now to believe that at that point my family would have turned me into a raving lunatic. I didn't have a real reason then, for that matter. I just knew that I was on edge. A pretty sharp one. The man who had helped put me there was far away only physically. The memory of our breaking point was still all too close.

It happened in the middle of a work day at Borders. Slightly sleepy, as the night before by boyfriend and I had gone to a dinner party. I answered a page on the floor...a phone call for me.

“Hello? Mark! Hi!”

“Hi, how are you?”

“Fine, fine, what's up?”

“So, you had a good time last night?”

“Yeah, so good to relax...”

“Glad you had so much fun.” it was at this point I heard the dripping sarcasm in his voice, and something in my stomach dropped. I won't go into details of the rest of the phone call. It was the first and only time (I hope) I will ever be on the receiving end of a psychotic break. Mark ranted, raved, and said some of the cruelest words that had ever been said to me. I realized vaguely that he was in some reality I did not share, but it didn't help. I was completely blindsided. By the end of the call, I was reduced to a sobbing, shuddering mess. I left work to try to get my brain going again.

Anyone who has ever had a conversation with someone suffering with schizophrenia will know the confusion and guilt and outrage I felt. Mark was (I believed) a charming, quiet, brilliant artist with an unassuming personality and wonderful smile. And honestly, he still was all those things. He was also schizophrenic. Undiagnosed, until a couple of weeks later when he tried to walk into the middle of an intersection. His brother rescued him and he voluntarily checked himself into a clinic. By then we had called it off.

At that point, I was still struggling to determine what my own baggage was. I was ill equipped to deal with other people's baggage. Baggage check girl I was not. Nor did I want to be.

This was the relationship that made me, finally, look into myself to see what it was about me that was attracted to “damaged” men. The process of self actualization is a gritty one, exhausting and painful. I was possibly in the most unapologetically bitchy period in my life when I climbed on the plane to Japan. I wanted everything to be clear, and obvious, and real. No denial of unpleasantness, no glorification. Just life, as it was, in the moment. In all it's amazing, flawed beauty and ugliness.

So as my brother drove us all through Tokyo traffic, I listened to my father go on and on about the gloriousness that was Japan, the amazing school systems, the wonderful sense of security, the low rate of heart disease, isn't it wonderful wonderful wonderful the students are so intelligent and motivated...I suddenly found myself stating “It's too bad the suicide rate for students is one of the highest in the world.”

Dad gave me the appropriate look along with a quiet “now is not the time...” and I lapsed into a sullen silence. I knew I'd been rude. I felt as though I had toads in my throat that were mercilessly struggling to get out. I've never felt so constrained in my life. And it was purely because I was with family, and in a sense, it was safe to feel all those things that, when alone, were just too completely overwhelming and frightening to contemplate.

****

So where were we? A Mall in Tachikawa, as I recall. Food Court. Scheduling the next week, with varying degrees of success in between slurps of soy ramen.

The next morning, the 12th, bright and early, we left for a day of temple hopping. The day was clear and hot, and we drove through small towns that still had the aura of old Japan. Whenever the van paused at a stop light, I stuck my camera out the window and clicked.

“What are you taking a picture of?” my Mom finally asked in a tone that said “why are you wasting your film?” It's nothing but an old store.”

“No, that's Japan.” I said. It's what I want to remember. But I couldn't explain. Words got stuck in my throat all too easily.

So off we went to Kamakura Daibutsu, to the largest statue of Buddha I had ever seen. (Well, honestly the only statue of Buddha I'd ever seen, but really, it was so large you could climb up inside it and look out of it's eyes...how's that for a metaphysical mind fuck?) It was 13.35 meters tall, cast in bronze sometime in 1252 A.D. It is the image of the Amida Buddha, otherwise known as the Buddha of Everlasting Light. But solid as a rock. There is no wonder looking at it that this immense icon remained when the hall that once surrounded it was swept away by a tsunami in 1495. And there has sat ever since, complacently being one with whatever Mother Nature chooses to send it's way.

Then we walked, along with hundreds of other tourists, to a temple on a hillside overlooking Kamakura Bay. This was Hassekannon, a temple to Kannon, the 11 faced Buddhist goddess of mercy.

It was strange, with so many people, the sense of quiet that permeated the area. Maybe it was the silent stares of the thousands of little Jizo statues that lined the staircases and walkways that created the blanket of stillness. These thousands of donated figures each represented a child who had died. Many of the statues wore bibs. Jizo, not surprisingly, is the Buddhist deity who protects travelers, the infirm, and yes, children.

After a short ride to rest our legs, we climbed out to contemplate possibly the most steps up I have ever taken in my life. But what the hell. As the Dali Lama once observed on an NPR interview, “No pain, no gain” So we climbed, and climbed, and climbed some more, until we reached Sengakuji Temple, the resting place of the 47 Ronin.

The thing I remember most about these temples were the rich silences that seemed to amplify sounds...wind in the trees, footsteps, crickets, koi splashing in the quiet pools and ponds, hands clapped in prayer. In the silence within the temples, two blocks of wood were struck together, and the sound ricocheted off of the walls of the temple with clap loud enough to hurt. The sound was used to attract the attention of the gods. Hearing it, you believe it could.

August 13th Friday

This is Obusuma, in Ogawa, in Saitama prefecture. We were all walking up the steep village road to the home of SIL's Mom and stepfather. On the way, we passed groves of bamboo, and little shrines coexisting peacefully with parked cars and neighborhood cats. The house itself was a beautiful traditional meets western, but with no plumbing whatever. They were too far up the mountain for such things. The toilet room/WC/loo/John, for instance, was a very clean, very modern latrine.

So we met Moto and Juu Shin, and other members of SIL's family, for a strange yet tasty early lunch of frozen tangerines, turkey hot dogs, sweet potatoes, oreos, potato chips, and gum drops.

Junk food turned out to be the perfect precursor to Japan's answer to Plimouth Plantation meets Disney world meets Renaissance Faire...Nikko Edo Mura Village. This is where many film makers went to shoot all those great Samurai flicks I love to watch. Mom turned the bowl three times in a formal tea ceremony. Dad nearly got his head chopped off by a Ninja, I finally loosened up enough to ham it up with one of the “locals”, and my sister had her own quiet moment resting in the comfort of a rickshaw (or the Japanese equivalent). We went to the Ninja Theater for a very cool show, then set off to check out the Shinto Temple of the Three Monkeys.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

August 14 Saturday

T took us on a tour of the Yokota Airbase, It was like a town unto itself...a very. Beige. Town. EVERYTHING was painted beige. The houses. The roofs. The walls. The supermarket. The plane hangers. The utility sheds. The Dunkin Donuts. The effect of all this beige was that it made the grass look positively neon. And I don't mean in a nice, pleasant way. More like the color of a reeaally nasty poison. Radioactive. Glow in the dark. Rothko would have either been totally inspired or blinded himself in self preservation.

After this vision of color gone bad, we went for a late morning visit to the Saitama Craft Center and soothed our eyes among the fanciful dolls, hanetsuki, Samurai armor, screens, furniture and kimonos. We painted our own dolls. I sat next to Mom, and tried not to regress completely into the eight-year-old child I felt like.

Then, as we left, I saw a sculpture that brought me back to myself. It was a statue of a man, sitting on a bench that was used as an actual resting place. But the image...the figure was completely black, and wrinkled, and emaciated, and all looked to me like the charred remnant of a human being. All I could think of was Hiroshima...Nagasaki. The ghost of that time, quietly sitting in the sunlight, among the green potted trees.

We went to Moto's for lunch. After a warm welcome, he sat us all down before a low table on zabutons, and plied us with a feast of food ranging from fish paste, miso soup, noodles, rice, and edamame to sweet egg omalettes. And plums. Dad was thrilled.

“I LOVE plums!” he said with a broad grin, and popped a little bright pink one in his mouth. We stared at him, our mouths hanging open.

“Ah...Dad...”

We all watched as Dad's face turned a shade remarkably close to the color of the pickled plum he'd just swallowed. We nearly choked laughing. Moto plied him with Asahi cool him off.

Then we were off, into the mountains...where the slopes looked as groomed as a bonsai, over winding roads, till we reached Nagatoro.

For Obon. The festival of the Dead.

To be continued...and I promise, not 8 months from now. Really.

A Quick word.

2007-10-03T17:22:00.000-04:00

Another week, another jaunt to Maine. This time up to Houlton to have a look at the neighborhoods, the potatoes (lots of potatoes up there), the broccoli, the fields, the turning leaves, the future...

So we will hop in the car tomorrow afternoon and drive for 7 hours up past Portland where just last Friday the Impling was dancing up a storm, past Topsham, where my mother's Uncle Jake once had a farm, through Bangor, up and up until 95 ends and the French begins.

I'll meet the doctors Dr. Science may be working with, check out the preschool(s?), and generally make a pest of myself.

Since I'm all about spreading myself too thin this week, I'll finish up here and send you on over to NE Mamas for the play by play of the Impling's first New England wedding...(the Catholic version).

Random Poetry Fridays

2007-09-28T09:47:00.000-04:00

What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Know
-for Abigail

When you were two you used to say
I can do it all by myself, then when you were three
You had tantrums, essentially
Because you wanted to go back and be a baby like before,
And also to be a grownup.
It was perplexing,
It was a mini-rehearsal
For adolescence, which lurks inside your body
Now that you are almost nine,
Like a duplicate baby, an angel
Or alien, we don't know which,
Forceful and intelligent and weird,
Playing with the controls.
Fetal eyes blinking, non-negotiable demands
Like Coke bubbles overflowing a glass,
It strengthens and grows.
When you read it stares through your eyes,
It vibrates when you practice piano,
The cotton dresses hang in your closet
Like conspirators, wavering in its breeze.
We watch you turn inward, your hair
Falls over your face like a veil that hides whatever
You would rather others don't know,
You lean your head listening
For its keen highstrung melancholy voice.
Here comes the gypsy caravan,
Ding-a-ling, the icecream man,
Plenty of glee and woe up the road.
We would do anything for you,
Sweetie, but we can do nothing—
You have to do it all by yourself.

by Alicia Suskin Astriker, from No Heaven. © University of Pittsburgh Press.

Brought to you by the frantically typing before finishing packing for the wedding i was originally attending solo, but now through the grace of having a doctor for a husband, now attending with the Impling, not a little stressed and completely out of time MOTHER, (who thanks her very good friend for introducing me to this wonderful poem).

Unplugged.

2007-09-21T21:59:00.001-04:00

Yeah. Right. You, lady, are insane.

I don't know, Daddy, I still think I could take the moose out...

bet I can get this whole cone in my mouth...

I win.

this was more fun when I was dumping all these pieces all over the floor...

It was a time unplugged. In a sense.

Once upon a time, as a child, unplugged meant something quite different than what it means to me today. Then, it meant no electricity, no plumbing, no radios. When we went camping, we left it all behind, packed up our canoes with plastic containers from Dunkin Donuts...the ones that were once filled with blueberry, apple or lemon fillings (remember when they still made those donuts?), now filled with sleeping bags, clothes, tents and tarps, food and other supplies one might need for two weeks in the wild (m&m's for me and my sister, a large bottle of whiskey for my parents).

We canoed everywhere, on the Rangely Lakes, down the Saco, the Androscoggin, the west branch of the Penobscot River, even along the coast of Maine, around islands with rip tides strong enough to bend canoes around rocks. We would paddle to a lobster pound, pick them out of a trap, bring them back to camp crawling around in our canoes, then kill them quickly in hot boiling water. Minutes later, we'd crack them open, sitting around on glacial rocks over looking the bay, cracking claws, sucking the tiny legs, pushing meat out of the tails, making a glorious, barbaric mess. Lobster never tasted better. Before or since.

That was then. This past jaunt up to Maine, unplugged merely meant without a computer. If we had brought a laptop, though, we would have had internet access, in addition to a washer and dryer, a microwave, a gas fireplace, a jacuzzi...well, it was basically a picture out of House Beautiful. The wildest I got was building a wood fire in a pit to roast marshmallows. No swinging out over a river on an insanely high tire swing to let go and fly through the air before hitting the water with a back burning smack; no lashing of canoes together to create a floating city that moved lazily down the then quiet currents of the Saco; no paddling like a bastard to beat the thunderstorm that spontaneously cracked open the sky while we were in the middle of Chesuncook.

Ah...Chesuncook Village. Population: 6, year round. Accessible by plane, or boat. No roads. “The Store” was a front porch. It sold four things; ice, frozen pizza, chocolate, and homemade root-beer. All of which were stored in a fridge at least 40 years old.

Now I am almost 40 years old. And that first morning in Maine, in our expensive, hi tech “cabin” in the woods, I awoke with a sense of expectation I hadn't felt since I was a child. Because I smelled the lake, and the pine, and saw the thick mist rolling over the surface of the water, and the Impling had never seen it before. We dressed quickly a little after 6 and headed down to the dock together. The first of many mornings of simply being.

The Impling is a child who can be in the moment so supremely, so utterly, you can't help relaxing into it with her. There is the water. The mountains, the sun. We sat together, lost in time, and just looked, and felt and listened. Watched the mist evaporate, the water begin to stir, the shadows shorten. Felt the damp of the mist and the cool early morning air. Heard the soulful cry of a loon echo across the water. It was so simple. We played. We laughed together at nothing at all but our own delight in each other.

We canoed, put together a puzzle, swam, hiked, and through it all, the Impling continued to meet each moment on her own terms. Throwing around a stuffed duck took precedence over the lake some times. Wading in the water was not an occupation for an hour, but an afternoon. We slowed down. We breathed.

I recognized how distracted I had become at home. How easy it was to turn on the computer, how difficult to not pay attention to it from moment to moment while it was on. At any point, at any moment, someone might be trying to contact me, through an email, through a comment, through a new post...and it is so easy to sit down “for a moment” to “just check”.

I realized, coming home, hearing the thrum of the fan as the computer booted up, that some change was necessary. Because I suddenly felt like it was a chain, rather than a release. I don't write to live, I live to write.

So from now on, the computer goes on when the Impling naps, and after the Impling goes to bed. This means much less time for reading and commenting, my friends, and it will take me a week to do the rounds once, so undoubtedly I'm going to be missing some great writing. But the Impling...I can't miss.

I carry a sense of freedom with me in the mornings now, as we get out of the closeness of the apartment to tramp around and “see what we can see”, following our noses, and stopping now and then, to just be.

*******

I'm on a roll...more Maine love over at New England Mamas...

One Morning...

2007-09-14T21:19:00.000-04:00

Early morning, and I lie on the couch, in the dim cool light of predawn, a warm Impling curved in the recess of my body. She sleepily played with my face, little fingers tracing a soft path over my cheeks, my nose, my eyes and eyebrows. Her own blue/brown eyes are inches from mine, then she turns her head so the soft gold of her curls warms my nose with the scent of baby sweat and shampoo.

She falls asleep, her breathing slow and regular. I fall asleep myself, smiling at her little snore. We lie together, at peace. I am in a light doze now, so I open my eyes to the grey light and the ceiling and the smooth expanse of wall. The shadows are muted and soft. Sleepy light. I absently note a black smudge on the wall, then feel a shiver of horror down my spine as the huge black smudge begins to move.

I am not wearing my glasses, so I can only guess what it must be. A roach? The Impling, oblivious, sleeps on as I watch the thing slowly crawl across the wall away towards the back door. It's crawling away. I don't need to move. Yet. Christ, it must be 5 inches at least. I've seen big roaches before. They still give me the creeps. But this...this didn't seem like a roach. I didn't know what it was. It crawled, faltering every once in awhile as it lost it's grip and falling, then catching itself...oh, crap. Please, don't let it be a spider. Please please please.

It was above the back door when the Impling woke up. She smiled at me and sat up, awake and happy. All was right with the world.

Except now, I had to do battle. Dr. Science was catching up on his sleep. I couldn't wake him for this. So I smiled at the Impling and followed her towards the kitchen. It was time for juice.

It was time to see what the monster on the wall actually was.

A space alien, on my wall. The long body, countless long legs moving in tandem, huge antennae waving. All the air left my lungs as I moved a chair and grabbed the Maine road atlas.

Ok...Ok... up on the chair. Shuddering in primal fear at this thing that was easily five inches long. I stared at it, and saw flecks of blue in the body, a kind of sick grace, beauty even, that made me want to cry. I was going to kill this thing. Because I was afraid of it. Because it was in my space. In the Impling's space. And it didn't belong.

“Okay. One...Two...Threeee...”

THWAP.

Behind me, I heard the sudden intake of breath, and I turned around to a stricken face, the Impling looked up at me with overflowing eyes, her mouth a mask of tragedy.

“What did Mommy do?!” she cried.

Then I was beside her, arms wrapped around her shaking little body.

“I was...Mommy had to...take care...of...” I stumbled.

What the hell am I telling her...I can't say “take care” Now she's going to freak out if any one ever says they are going to take care of her...I just scarred my child for life. She is frightened. I frightened her. Or the bug did. Or we both did. She will never come into the front room again or sit at the table or look at a map without breaking out into a cold sweat I suck i suck I suck. Don't say “take care”, moron.

My voice came, finally, with a regret at my brutal action, that I hadn't had the presence of mind to maybe trap the thing and throw it outside. Yeah. Right.

“Mommy squashed a bug sweetheart. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you.”

The morning had mutated into a killing field, and now I reaped my reward...persuading my sobbing child that the chair was okay, the map was okay, the room and the table was ok.

“Whaywe's the bug Mommy?”

“on the map. I need to clean it up” I reached for a fistful of tissues.

“NOOOOOOO!!!”

“it's ok, sweetheart, there's nothing to be scared of”

“wanna go in youw woom now”...she pulled at my hand insistently. Security gone. We go to her room. We read books. We hide until I persuade her to come out for breakfast. She will not walk by the table. She cries in fear when I do. For the rest of the day we talk about it. How big the bug was. How it “startled” her, how Mommy squashed the bug. It got better. Dr. Science joined in the calming words and by the end of the day she was mostly back to her little cheerful Impling self.

The next morning, though...memories die hard.

I have never been so sorry for killing a creature in my life.

Helloooooo!

2007-09-10T14:06:00.000-04:00

I am, as you can see, back. We've actually been back for a couple of days, but this is the first opportunity I've had to actually write for any length of time due to a prolonged period of re acclimation to our urban existence. We had to get used to the noise again. Which is still an ongoing process. The Impling has had some trouble getting to sleep since we got back. No doubt not helped today by the big honkin' crane that parked just outside her window just as we got settled for nap and proceeded to spend the next 40 minutes hauling mysterious crates to the roof of the apartment building next door.

Of course the Impling thought this was the coolest. thing. evah. But finally, she sleeps.

Since I have less than 2 hours on the machine today to post, catch up on e-mail, and even begin to start my reading, I will post some tantalizing images for you until my fingers can catch up with my brain and I can give Maine (and a host of other things) the attention they so rightly deserve.

The house.

The view.

One morning in Maine.

So...um...we're waiting for what, exactly?

The Impling casts off. She caught a flounder. Just so you know.

I'll just let you guess what she's up to here...

Nobody's Perfect. A post award. (and other things)

2007-08-31T13:44:00.000-04:00

Sweet Monkey Jesus, I'm tired.

A good friend moved away today. For the past couple of years, we've had the kind of comradeship that let us call each other on the spur of the moment, pack up the kids, and meet up over there, or over here, at this park or that...just a call to vent, or...hell.

I am sad. I am moping. I walked by this morning and the moving truck was parked in front of their apartment. The white curtains gone from the windows, monolithic shapes of boxes waited in the dim light to be moved to a new space, towns away.

We will still see each other. The train will take us to our friends whenever we wish. But it will be planned. The days of just dropping by are ending. So. Big sigh.

In the meantime, I really don't have time to mope. Tomorrow, we head off to the wilds of Maine. The relatively heavily populated and rather touristy part in the greater Portland area, but still. It's a house. On a lake. With a sandbox. And horseshoes. When was the last time you played?

There, I will sit on our dock, look for loons (besides myself), and let myself write with a pen rather than a keyboard for a week.

So before I start the whole packing thing and put up my “gone fishing” sign, I need to pass on some linky love for the month.

It has been a rich writing month for so many out there. And I know that I still have posts I've missed that may be even better than these, but out of all I have had the opportunity to read, here are the posts that will not be forgotten any time soon:

Blog Antagonist blew us all away with her Funeral in a Small Town series, which let us know, in no uncertain terms, that she will be a published writer one day.

Antique Mommy with Flying Bricks.

Third Times a Charm with Balancing Act.

And finally, the woman who wrote the post that punched my gut backwards and forwards , the mother of personal epiphanies, Deb of i obsess.

I send over the perfect post award to her knowing as well as she that there is no such thing. But there is writing that is good, writing that grabs you and throttles you around until you find yourself looking at yourself and your world in a different way. Maybe because you recognized a part of yourself in what you read, but didn't want to, because you're just to chicken-shit to deal with the consequences of self-actualization. But things aren't quite the same, because now, you understand yourself a little better. And there is suddenly a bit of hope that you didn't know you needed, but there it is.

So thanks, sister, for the heart-wringing kick in the ass.

The shirt says it all, eloquently enough:
nobody's perfect.

On that note, I'm off.

TTFN
Ta Ta For Now.

Gone Fishin.

August 26th, 2007. New England Mamas.

2007-08-27T14:52:00.000-04:00

Whew!

We are home. We have napped (some of us are still napping). And I'm here, all jazzed up from talking with some very inspiring gals. Women who are excited about writing and living and like chatting it up.

In some instances (when fueled with a couple good shots of scotch, for instance) I can be a very affable, witty, charming person. Then there is me, stressed out, waiting for my husband's pager to go off any minute, hauling me away prematurely from these women I've wanted to meet for so long. Then, it's a different story. Then, I felt the smile glue to my face, my short term memory evaporate, and my heart start up with the fight or flight response. Luckily, I did neither (start a brawl or run out the door, that is).

Miguelina had a beautiful, warm smile that greeted us and pulled us in as we entered the restaurant, which was a fantastic distraction for me. I walked in with the Impling and Dr. Science unexpectedly in tow. Turned out Dr. Science was on call, attached to his pager, but determined to spend time with the Impling. So instead of dropping us off as we originally planned, we decided to have lunch together. As in, he and the Impling would play around while mom tried to keep her foot out of her mouth for the duration of the lunch. I think I mostly made it. Foot out 25% of the time? Maybe I'm being generous.

Every time I am inspired to meet up with new people, I think this time will be different. I won't, for instance, repeat myself, or blather on and on about my family, or go for an easy escape from the meeting-for-the-first-time-awkwardness by chatting with any toddlers in the area. Major Bedhead knows how well I did with the redundancy, and probably half the women know how well I did in the family arena. And I had at least one fantastic exchange of silly faces with Binky's little one, and I only colored and spelled with MB's little one for a relatively short amount of time. Honest.

But in the midst of it all I had a blast, and regretted not having the chance to talk more with these awesome women. Guess we'll just have to plan another meet-up, eh? No kids, drinks, and no husband on call.

I'm ready.

Today, I am here...

2007-08-21T15:01:00.001-04:00

New England Mamas

Resident Evil

2007-08-17T21:24:00.000-04:00

I just reflected, about two seconds ago, that in all the time I've been posting, pontificating and blathering on, that I really haven't said much about my life as a resident widow. It came up at times, incidentally, as I was griping about chores and diaper changes and the relentless early mornings. But not much beyond that.

I couldn't really write about it since it would come out as one huge putrid rant, and who would want to read that? And really, with the hell Dr. Science has gone through, complaining at this point is just, well...pointless. Plus, I couldn't safely write specifics about our experiences.

I am still writing under gag rule, even now. But we are in our fourth year. Next July, it will all be over, and we will move on.

Then, sistahs and brothahs...it'll be time to TESTIFY.

Right now what concerns me most is that next year, we will be moving. We don't know where.

Do you remember the show Northern Exposure? The moose on Main St.? The slightly off balance chick who flew the planes? The cute nerdy doctor? That's us. Except I don't have a pilot's license. Yet. I thought it might be nice to get a plain old driver's license first.

But I digress.

Dr. Science went to a lovely conference last week in sunny, sweltering Tampa to meet and greet, booze and schmooze (yeah, as if), trip the con fantastic with his charm and wit and enthusiasm. He made contacts. He saved money by eating peanut butter crackers in the privacy of his room instead of spending $30 bucks on a mediocre dinner. We're snobs that way.

He came home with lots o' swag, good contacts, lots of receipts for the reimbursement deities,
and a very short list of places we may well be moving to next year. Nome, Alaska, for example. Truly. Main Street moose, here we come. Or maybe an island in the South Pacific. No DSL though. Off the list. So is the place in Arkansas, and Louisiana. Maine, I can totally live with. I am just confused to see Connecticut on the list, but apparently there are under-served populations there as well. Who knew?

The deal is (in case you didn't know), that you sign on with the National Health Service Corps, they help you pay for school, and then you pay them back after residency by working in an under-served area. Which is what Dr. Science was always interested in doing. It's actually what inspired him to go to medical school. He realized what crappy services the poorer population of Philadelphia received when he worked for a women's clinic years ago. So one night, over a huge piece of apple pie (read ahead) he announced his desire to become a family doctor.

So we survived organic chemistry, the application process, the rejections, and the acceptance (from the same school no less...how often does that happen), then the first formaldehyde soaked year, the hypochondriacal second year, and so on and so forth, until we found ourselves sitting on a winter-dry fountain on campus on March 18^th with a thin white envelope in our hands. Inside, was a single 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper that would tell us where we would live for the next four years. To say we were nervous would be an understatement. Particularly after shoving through the gauntlet of graduates who were in various states of euphoria and despair to get outside and away so we could have at least a modicum of privacy. As much as a public park in the middle of down town Philly would offer us. Drumroll, shaking hands, shaking nerves...

We got his first choice. We were off to Boston. And hell. But a paid-for hell. So next year, it is payback time.

I have lived in many places through out my life. Before I met Dr. Science, I lived in Massachusetts for 18 years, Europe for 5 months, and Philadelphia for 12 years(during which time I lived on Pine, 12^th, Lombard, Camac, 15^th, and Catherine Streets). And Oh, the memories.

Pine St...first the dorm, then 2^nd semester, Cid and I and another of Cid's friends went in together to rent a two bedroom, 3^rd floor walk-up. I had a room to myself, though I did bed sharing with a very cool woman who worked as a security guard at night and was trying to save up money for major plastic surgery for her face. It was non frivolous surgery she needed. When she was a little girl, a doll she was playing with caught fire and burned off most of her face. She was a spectacular person, and we had good times road tripping on her Harley.

12^th St. was a little studio with a loft Cid and I rented together, after a rather nasty break with the “friend” from Pine St. It had a loft, a tiny balcony, a roof deck(!), and a middle aged landlord who refused to take off his headphones. Ever. I had my first Christmas tree in that apartment, along with a severe cut from trying to trim it with a bread knife after 3 or 4 scotches. I bled for that tree, man.

On Lombard, I lived with a woman who was a friend of Cid's. I had to vacate the 12^th St. unit when Cid fell in love and moved in with his partner. Like the upright fellow he was, he continued to pay rent, but since finding another place proved difficult on my meager income, I hauled my belongings over to the other side of broad until I could find a place of my own.

Which turned out to be my wonderful, cozy little artist garret on Camac St. I met Dr. Science while I lived there. We would go to More Than Just Ice Cream some evenings (when it was still in a rather dilapidated house on Pine St.), then climb up the narrow winding stairs to my third floor retreat and gorge ourselves on a single slice of their mountainous apple pie. It would be supper, and breakfast. For the two of us.

We had no idea at that point he would become a doctor, and I would become a married single woman.

We moved to 15^th St. together, then to Queen Village when things got a bit too loud in the neighborhood. I worked, Dr. Science studied, and we restaurant hopped our way through most of the BYOB's in down town Philly, good little foodies that we were. We went to extravagant dinners, saw all our movies at the Ritz, were regulars at our farmer's market, and went to concerts and museums together until school started, and then all our together time suddenly more or less vanished.

So here we are, years later, back in the state of my birth, living in a bucolic neighborhood in the un-Suffolk-ated part of greater Boston, and pondering the future. We have been urban creatures for so long, the thought of moving to upstate Maine, or Nome Alaska, or a little town in the middle of Montana seems positively liberating. We don't really take advantage of our urban existence now. For one thing, we haven't had the money to do things like the museums and restaurants on even a limited basis. No extra for a baby sitter, which has transformed date nights into evenings curled up on the sofa watching movies with headphones so we don't wake the Impling, crunching M&M's and Chex mix.

I think of all we could do in the country...have a garden, space, fresh air, canoing, quiet, quiet and more quiet. I'm tired of hearing strangers walking over my head. And goombahs who decide to practice drums at 1 in the morning. And don't get me wrong, there is a certain charm to hearing middle-aged gay prostitutes belting out “On My Own” at 3 AM on 15^th St. Or the dulcet tones of a young man with one too many cheese-steaks on his waistline yelling “YO! VINNIE” outside of our 2^nd floor walk-up on Catherine St. Could have done without the mob hit next door, but there it is. You can't have everything.

But if we moved to the country...we could see the stars. Maybe even the northern lights. I grew up in a village, so I have no rose colored glasses obscuring my vision. I know the gossip of small towns, the petty arguments that can arise, the boredom of teenagers with nothing to do and no adults to supervise them.

But I also know the dry humor of people who know each other intimately, the comfort of greeting acquaintances on the street, of not looking over your shoulder, of unpretentious good will.

And it would be so lovely to really see the stars again, and to show the Impling the universe.

The Education of Little Impling: Chapter 1

2007-08-10T19:34:00.000-04:00

This post is a long time coming. And as I write, it is becoming more and more obvious I'm going to have to break it up. There is just SO much to blather on about.

Sometime in the insomniac haze of last year, I stumbled across Fairly Odd Mother's blog and was delighted to find someone in the thick of home schooling. I admired her creativity in building a space and curriculum for her children designed to keep them interested and curious. I love what she has to say about educating her children. I found it inspiring, encouraging and enlightening. I said I would love exchange ideas at some point, then conveniently put my head in the sand, placed my fingers in my ears, and chanted “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” as loud as possible, to drown out any possibility of really thinking about the subject.

Because, at times, I see this future for myself, and I am terrified.

The Impling is only 2. Two and a half, to be exact. The age of preschool is approaching and what am I doing about it? My fellow mothers at the playground have enrolled their little ones in a variety of heavily researched (and paid) preschools and daycares to ensure that their children are on the road to being comfortable around other children, respecting authority, and listening well. Social conditioning is a necessary part of life. I know this. I want the Impling to be comfortable in herself, confident in her autonomy, and assertive enough to not let her fears get in the way of her fun. Preschool would perhaps offer this for her. So why, you may ask, have I not signed my little one up for preschool?

I could tell you it is because we have no money (which is true).

I might tell you that as we will be moving within the year, it makes no sense to start her schooling here now. (in reality, if she did start here, she would be red shirted, and probably have an advantage over her classmates, and have no trouble whatever transitioning, as by the time we move, her class would be over any ways).

I will tell you quite honestly that she will be in schooling probably for the next 18 years, and hopefully learning for the rest of her life. That this first four years is her time to play and learn on her own speed. Absorbing words and concepts and ideas as naturally as a sponge. And retaining that information. I am loathe to take her away from that.

Because as soon as we start school, suddenly, all those natural ways we had of sucking up information are suddenly completely disregarded and we are presented with rules, and tests, and textbooks, and lined paper and coloring books and told to stay within the lines.

I don't want to put this little mind in a cage.

Get over yourself, you might say. This is the world. This is how education works. It was good enough for us, it's good enough for them. If they don't learn how to adapt and take tests and do things they don't enjoy doing they will never survive in the real world. They will become bitter, disillusioned and depressed. Unlike the rest of us. You are ruining your child! Bad mother. Thoughtless mother. Should be locked up, she should.

I don't want to put my little girl in a cage. And really, I know that school isn't a cage for everyone. It just depends on your temperament. For me, it was a cage. This doesn't mean it will be for the Impling. But until public education learns to value those innate ways we have of absorbing knowledge and language and utilize them constructively, I will continue to keep my child out of public schools.

NOW some of you might be thinking, what an elitist bitchy fool, she's just building a different sort of cage for her poor child. After all, without an education, how will she ever get ahead, how will she succeed? What if she wants to go to college? Will she be able to do this without a “traditional” educational program? She will still have to take tests. She will still have to learn how to conform.

I have to tell you now, we can give children the talent and tools they need to do whatever they want without pigeonholing them into a vast and useless waste of time which is what much of our public schools offer. (I think we are awfully dim on what constitutes “getting ahead” and “succeeding” as well, but that will have to be another post) . Schools are only as good as the students and teachers in them. If you have an engaging group of curious, kind children and indefatigueable, creative, good hearted teachers, you will have a wonderful learning environment, and with the right tools to go along with it, you will have an exceptional learning environment.

Raise your hand if you have consistently had this education yourself. Parts of Junior High and High School keep getting in the way, don't they? Perhaps you had (like a certain blogger friend I know...*ahem*) brilliant English teachers, but poor to downright nasty ones for science and math. Most likely, you had, like most people, a spotty experience.

Get a load of me trying to write about education. And what's my background? I went to public school. I went to a University. My father taught 5^th and 6^th grade for over 30 years, then worked with troubled teenagers in detention. He taught kids music, and had the opportunity when Montessori love swept the school systems back in the seventies to teach the same class consecutively for 5^th and 6^th grades. At that time, he became enamored of an educator named John Holt. Ever hear of him? I hadn't.

John Holt wrote about his experiences teaching and observing children . “How Children Fail” and "How Children Learn”. Dad gave me his copy of “How Children Learn” and I opened it with the healthy skepticism I greet anything new with. Particularly if those introducing me to said new things are overtly enamored of it. I'm bitchy that way.

So I started to read the Foreword. I had that patient, sardonic smile on my face as I read the first lines, waiting for the first leap into the proverbial stratosphere of unreality (which, quite frankly, still may come...we shall see).

But then, I read this.

“...children have a style of learning that fits their condition, and which they use naturally and well until we train them out of it. We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves.

What are the results? Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds, not to learn, but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do...to make them learn. In the short run, these strategies seem to work. They make it possible for many children to get through their schooling even though they learn very little. But in the long run these strategies are self limiting and self-defeating, and destroy both character and intelligence. The children who use such strategies are prevented by them from growing into more than limited versions of the human beings they might have become. This is the real failure that takes place in school; hardly any children escape.

When we better understand the ways, conditions and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure. School may then become a place in which all children grow, not just in size, not even in knowledge, but in curiosity, courage, confidence, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, patience, competence, and understanding.”

I very nearly cried. Suddenly, I was reading, beneath a light coating of melodrama, basic common sense. YES. I thought. This was just the way it was for me. This thinking is right. It FEELS right.

And watching my Impling as she investigates the world...I KNOW, that at the moment, it is right.

John Holt wrote this in 1967. For many schools, not much has changed since then. Case in point...a valedictorian of the high school my father worked for who “won” that honor not for her hard work, but because she knew how to cheat and get away with it. You all can fill in the blanks here. How many experiences outside of my own would validate his words?

Next...A little John Holt bio (shocker of the week...the man was slightly eccentric), and a brief history of our system as we know it. And some actual statistics and other scintillating tidbits of information.

My incredible, fabulous, unbelievable weekend!

2007-08-02T20:57:00.000-04:00

What a long weekend. I'm still dragging myself out of the haze. Part of me (and a pretty big part) positively ached. Because I saw pictures of all you beautiful Blogher women partying it up, chatting it down, backwards and sideways. And if I was a different sort of person I would undoubtedly be INSANELY JEALOUS. Me? Jealous? Moi? But no. I must, I told myself, do something constructive with my time. Something that will spur me on to greater heights of self awareness...inspire me to the write the best damn...things...stuff...I've ever wrote. Written. My own, personal Blogher. Yeah.

So while seemingly all of blogging creation was out happily communing in Chicago, (or rocking out at the Police concert), I had my own little adventure.

Really, dahlings, one can't just sit around and mope simply because one doesn't have the minutes and moolah to go gallivanting about the Windy City hijacking horses and carriages and accosting delightfully good humored police officers. I must be creative, I thought.

So of course the first thing I had to do was get myself arrested for no particular reason.

I stewed around my cell for a while, trading bitchy threats with the inmate across the hall, when who should happen to pop by but Patrick Stewart! At least his gorgeous, silky English voice did. He looked alarmingly swollen and bilious up close and personal, and had questionable taste in clothing (particularly for a visit to my incarcerated self) but suddenly, it just didn't matter. Patrick had had a dream. About me.

“You!” he exclaimed. “You are the one from my dream!”

“It must have been a good one.” I replied, and gave a little wink. This seemed to please him, as he decided to take me with him and the two hunky bodyguards he traveled with. Things were looking up.

He decided he liked me SO much he gave me a present...a necklace of dubious worth, but still, free bling. And he decided to break me out.

Of course, after we made it through the worst part of the correctional facility (Walpole...you know) some beeyotch in an awfully cut red frock killed Patrick! Of course I hauled off and beat the bastard with my bare hands till he died.

There I was, (left with nothing but the pitiful clothes on my back, the bling of dubious worth, and a rather dull blade I stole from the dead fashion-challenged beeyotch) in the middle of nowhere (Walpole, you know).

Could be worse, I thought.

Then, it started to rain.

Really. Enough to jolt me right out of Oblivion.

Yes, my friends, it is time for true confession. I am, at times, a red-eyed, soul-eaten shell of a woman, clicking desperately at the keyboard to slice, hack, fireball, block and dodge my way through various and sundry RPG games. It isn't a hobby I am exactly proud of. I view it as more of a barely controlled addiction. Really, with all the time spent figuring out the various nuanced ways of sneaking through a goblin infested dungeon, I could learn how to do so many other things. Like...um...crochet...or stand on my head. Or practice my cello. No, wait. That would wake the Impling, then there goes playtime. OK, so I'll just play until I reach the next village. How far could it be? Plus, I need to beat up more things.

Hello. My name is Aerona. Goddess of Destruction. I have a gaming problem.

I think the first game I was ever completely addicted to was Civilization. I played until the wee hours of the morning. Played until I was dreaming in squares.

“Gandhi demands the secret of internal combustion!”

How could I not love a game with lines like that? Eventually I had to give it up. I couldn't take the square dreams any more.

Then I found Betrayal at Krondor. I played the hell out of that game...every plot, every side-quest was mine. I cracked every chest, I drew maps. I hummed the theme song. I reverted into a bleary, prepubescent D&D fanatic (which I really never was), except now, I had no one to tell me to go to bed. My boyfriend (now husband) was a gamer too. He understood. He egged me on (except of course, when HE wanted to play).

Then there was Torment, and The Longest Journey. We got a PlayStation. And then it was Final Fantasy, Xenogears, and Xenosaga. Dragon-Quest and Ico. Suikoden.

To my (dubious) credit, I only let myself play a MMORPG once. Final Fantasy XI. I was Sabriel, Red Mage hume with a moogle and an attitude. I got up to level 30, then gave it up. The Impling was on the way, and the game suddenly became more social, so consequently, more work. Because while I loved chatting with some of the other gamers (I had one truly interesting and intense conversation with a young Arab gamer about religion, the universe and everything) I wanted to kill things on my own. I like the sense of control, of freedom. In that universe, there is no one to tell you must do anything...there are only guides. But at level 30, you were suddenly expected to play nice with others (or at least suffer them until you completed the game).

I have a hard enough time playing nice in real life. Why would I want to struggle with it in my free time as well? So I said farewell to the Final Fantasy on-line universe and concentrated on the work at hand...winnowing down to a single shared computer and transforming the former office/gaming room into...THE NURSERY.

Now that the nesting has passed, and the Impling older and more inclined to go off and play with her little people and stuffed dragons (SHE picked them out...I SWEAR), I can manage to actually write a little during her waking hours, which allows me a few hours of real playtime.

But inevitably, playing fills me with guilt. I'm inclined to believe it is, in part, due to a sense that even play must be in some way constructive. One can't merely play for plays sake. This attitude may come from a generational anomaly. My family, in a way, skipped a generation.

My Great Grandparents were, to all intents and purposes, my Grandparents. They brought up my mother, and we visited them regularly. Every year we stayed at their house in Lakeville during the summer. Grampy built this house himself. No contractors. Just family. They hunted. Grampy's mother, full-blooded Penobscot, taught him how to find his own medicine. They were self sufficient. They were not what you would call technologically savvy people. And neither, quite frankly, were my parents.

But they had community. Neighbors, and friends, and family close by and always dropping in. They didn't mind solitude.

My family tendency to technological shyness is still with me. For instance, I am quite comfortable with programs like Photoshop and Quark (fat lot of good that program is to me now), but I prefer pencil and paper to Access, and a check book to automatic bill payment (I know there is a better term for that, but I'm to lazy to think of it now).

More importantly, I too, desire solitude. But for someone who loves the quiet moments of reflection and of doing absolutely nothing, I have remarkably little of it. So I turn on Oblivion, and lo and behold, I am still doing absolutely nothing, but have the illusion of being incredibly busy. I can forget about our transitory life here, the fact that the wonderful friend I have made will be moving soon, that I will be moving on as well next year, that our days of impromptu meet-ups are coming to a close, and that we will have to become on-line buddies. It's not like I make friends easily. I would write a post about my difficulty finding women friends, but BA just wrote pretty much everything I would have written.

However, while I am busy doing nothing, the noise of the game prevents reflection. It is hi tech escapism. No reflection allowed. Otherwise that giant mole creature will kick your leather armor shod ass into the next parallel universe.

So while I enjoy my gaming time, I can't honestly say it makes me feel very good. It's great for relieving pent up aggression, it's true. But so do karate, Tai chi, yoga, parkour, or any other past-time that involves actually moving. Drawbacks...all those wonderful athletic pursuits require some key things I do not have...namely...babysitter...and money. Money to pay said babysitter. Money to pay for said classes. So why not Oblivion?

For that matter, why haven't I joined the throngs of people on line in that on-line world called 2^nd Life?

Maybe because, lame as it seems at times, I value my real life more than the eye candy life on line. I like meeting my friend at odd times and watching our children play together. I love communicating with all the wonderful people I've "met" on line. I love spending a little extra time cooking if it means watching the Impling stir the pancake batter (and a little extra cleaning). I like knowing I have an almost indefatigable partner in crime when I need to go for a good long walk. A simple "let's go see what we can see!" is enough to get the Impling into her sneakers and hat in record time.

I would miss some key things in that 2nd Life...the smell and taste of food; the feel of the breezes that cool our street and rustles the leaves of the poplars; all the times my senses are awakened and I am reminded that I am an organic being, and like it or not, inescapably part of the world around me.

Plus, I don't think the 2nd life locals would like it if I started whaling on their stylish selves with a steel claymore. Ya think? I'll take my 1st life, thanks.

Monday meme

2007-07-23T15:57:00.000-04:00

THE 5 THINGS MEME (I was tagged along with the other NE Mamas a while back by the intrepid Whirlwind)

It's true. I have not been a good blogger. No insightful ramblings to see here this post. But you can take a peek and look it all of my shit. C'mon. You know you don't have anything better to do. (Insert heavy drip of sarcasm here).

5 things in your refrigerator.

1. An old but seemingly imperishable jar of capers.
2. a mason jar of dried bonito flakes for the soup base I almost never get around to making.
3. Hershey's chocolate syrup (really, how could anyone not?)
4. Left over Thai take out...(the spicy beefy broth from a vat of boat noodles, and the sweet creamy spicy thick broth from the Kow Soy. I am absolutely convinced I will use it, and that it will not, in a month or so, transform into an actual thing as opposed to food.)
5. A lonely bottle of Sea Dog India Pale Ale. What's wrong with us?

5 things in your closet (The coat closet...it's more interesting than the others)

Yes. We are geeks. Is this REALLY a surprise?

1. An old D & D type game called Battle Masters (Whirlwind's not the only gal with dragons in her closet).
2. An old stiff green canvas bag (once used for carrying coin at a Rockland Trust Company) of glass marbles that belonged to my grandfather.
3. Winnie the Pooh Pez dispensers. Still wrapped.
4. An old straw hat that only fits when my hair is cut very, very short.
5. My old fake leather cello case.

5 things in your purse or backpack

1. The Impling's sippy cup
2. One tiny bottle of ibuprofen
3. wipes
4. an old, freckled roll of sweet tarts (which can't count now...as I just chucked them. Ew.)
5. A small book I made for my bookbinding class in college, only slightly written in (it got tucked away in a safe place for a while and never saw the light of day for some years) A nice gift, finding it again. Particularly with the page of e.e. cummings:

I Thank you God, for this most amazing day

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky, and

for everything

which is natural which is infinite

which is yes.

(I missed this last Random Poetry Friday. This is a good excuse to make it up. Plus, the Impling loves it, and listens to me read it with a huge smile, and asks for me to "Sing it again" as soon as I've finished. Another gift. Yep.)

5 things in your car

1. cookies, in microscopic crumbly form around the base of the Impling's car seat.
2. Kleenex
3. plastic bags
4. extra towel or so
5. an old bottle of water that rolled under the car seat some time during the first year of residency and never rolled out again.

5 things in the world you want to see before you die

1. The northern lights
2. Barack Obama as president
3. the house we live in by the sea
4. a world where secular humanism is the norm and not the exception
5. my daughter's children

Since I have NO idea who hasn't been tagged for this yet...I'll do a little shopping around and get back to you. Or if you know you haven't been, consider yourself tagged.

Monday Morning

2007-07-16T15:20:00.000-04:00

La la, la la la...

Every Monday, my parents come to visit. They drive from my home town, which is about 40 minutes away. Monday mornings, I whisk through the apartment, dump laundry in our bedroom, clear the dining table and couch of books, make a path through the various wood puzzles for the door to open, and do what I can to make the bathroom and kitchen presentable. After this whirlwind of activity, the Impling and I set out for the playground, which is luckily only a block away.

There we settled into the swings, the slides, the climbing and running and spinning and jumping until the Impling spied my parents coming through the old iron gate. Then she made a beeline for Grandma to forage in the special yellow frog bag for Animal Crackers, and then to the swings, as she knew she had a tireless pusher in Grandpa.

We watched her play, and I talked with Mom...there were showers, and weddings to plan for, old friends who said hello, someone moved away, the oh, yes, the minister had his last Sunday sermon...We chat in the shade of the great oak tree that rises like a grandfather giant in the center of the playground. The tree is easily over a hundred years old. Boys and girls undoubtedly played with hoops and jacks around that tree once upon a time. The ghosts of those children seem to rustle a faint hello through the leaves.

An acquaintance I hadn't seen in some months showed up with her boy, she called a hello and was greeted by her play-date mom. The regulars settled into the morning...a patchwork of familiar nameless faces and familiar named ones. Strollers dotted the landscape. Lily sat on the bench by the sandboxes, Jeanna scooted around the sand-strewn paths on one of the park's toys. One toddler discovered the button for the fountain, and sprays of water arched in a sudden blast that startled the children who had innocently climbed into the dry space to retrieve toys that had migrated from the sandboxes.

Eventually, when the cookies vanished in a carnage of be-headings worthy of the French Revolution, we headed back to the apartment. Then Mom was dragged to the Impling's room to look at books, and I put water on for tea, and settled down at the table to chat with Dad.

Then the past and present came together as we spoke of gardens...the Impling's batch of marigolds began to form flower buds. Mom's tomato plant had yielded it's first tomato...she cut it up and ate it straight, no salt, no mayo. Two more were ripening on the vine.

Then came a seeming non sequitur. Dad had found a tape of an interview with an old lady I had known, and had spent many afternoons with as a teenager. She had suffered from scarlet fever as a child, and as a result, went blind. She lived, at the time I knew her, in a wonderful old stone cottage that was built over a river. There was actually a window in the floor where you could look down at the water rushing beneath you. It gave an extraordinary sensation that you were in motion, even though you stood still, watching the water flow under your sneakers. The river flowed out from under the stone cottage, and into a tiny ravine that was bordered on one side by a steep slope of ferns, aspen, birch and sugar maple, and on the other by a sidewalk and an old chain-link fence that was overgrown with Concord grape vines.

I remembered the smell of those grapes in the hot summers, and I remembered picking them as I walked by, biting through the tough skins to suck out the juice. The sidewalk was always stained with the discarded grape skins from other impromptu epicures who had passed by.

Dad went back further, to the old Victorian house where Nana once lived. There had once been an arbor covered with Concord grapes, he said. Nana had harvested them, crushed them in a large bin, then mixed the pulp with sugar and set it in a cheesecloth bag over another bin to drain. She collected all the juice, boiled it until it thickened, then filled her mason jars with grape jelly.

I barely remember that kitchen, if at all. I was all of 6 years old when we moved one town away to the north, and Nana moved (one town away to the south) into small house she could keep up with, but large enough for her two baby grand pianos and a good sized vegetable garden instead of a back yard. But I know the smell of those grapes, and the sun and the heat. I created memories I never had as I listened to my father go back in memory even further, to the garden of his grandmother, along with chickens, goats, and sheep that they kept for the wool. “She was the kind of woman who felt like she had to do it all” said Dad.

Now I remembered the smell of hot sheep and sun baked wool and hay from the 4-H fairs I wandered around in as a child. I know the smell of the farm from Sheep Pasture, and summer visits to a family farm in Maine. My father's grandmother looked to me like Nana. In my mind, my child-ghost was hovering around their kitchens, their parlours, their arbors, pastures and ravines. I watched with heart-full nostalgia women I never knew, and who never knew I would one day exist. I have nothing now from them but my father's memories, and the still, sure sense that right now, if I needed to, I could do it all.

Random Poetry Fridays

2007-07-13T20:45:00.000-04:00

The Ant by Ogden Nash

The ant has made himself illustrious Through constant industry industrious. So what? Would you be calm and placid If you were full of formic acid?

Random Poetry Fridays

2007-07-06T13:40:00.000-04:00

KISSING THE TOAD

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing
the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous
but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

Galway Kinnell

...and giving...

2007-07-02T12:28:00.000-04:00

July 2nd.

Last year at this time, I haven't the faintest idea what I was doing. It was one of those days which time and habit formed, and through repetition, became invisible. I know we awoke, had breakfast, went to the park, played, had lunch, a nap, an afternoon walk to Trader Joe's or the pharmacy or the farmer's market for ice cream, then supper, a bath, stories, and bed.

The routine still exists, with the potential to become tiresome. But it never does, because within that structure of time, magical things happen. Then those things fade from memory, and I have to really stop and think to remember just what it was that makes my memories of this past year so special. What specifically was it?

Blog Antagonist wrote such a beautiful piece on memory. The Gift. Mom 101 had the same love of this piece of beautiful writing. So of course, we both had to nominate Blog Antagonist for the June Perfect Post Award.

So I read her words and my own memories began to return. Of what makes my days so special.

A little voice laughing, and the pad of her feet bouncing into our bedroom at 6 in the morning. She leans her head on the side of the bed with such a smile. How can we not wake up?

The Impling climbing on my back as I kneel to sweep up crumbs after breakfast, or lunch, or supper.

The way her face looks after she has grabbed my knees in a bear hug and looks up at me.

Our bedtime dreamtalk:
"What are you going to dream about?"
Gonna dweam about the moon! Gonna dweam about wadio towahs! Gonna dweam about excwamation poins!"

and those final good night words:
"Need a hug."
"Need a kiss."
"Goodnight, Mommy's hair!"

Thanks for the memories, BA.

For more great reads, check out the list for June 2007 Perfect Posts at:
www.suburbanturmoil.blogspot.com
www.petroville.com

Random Poetry

2007-06-29T13:19:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the first of Random Poetry Fridays.

The basic idea being, choose a poet, open the book at random and share.
Today, the poet who came off the shelf was Louise Gluck.

Formaggio

The world
was whole because
it shattered. When it shattered,
then we knew what it was.

It never healed itself.
But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:
it was a good thing that human beings made them;
human beings know what they need,
better than any god.

On Huron Avenue they became
a block of stores; they became
Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever
they were or sold, they were
alike in their function; they were
visions of safety. Like
a resting place. The salespeople
were like parents; they appeared
to live there. On the whole,
kinder than parents.

Tributaries
feeding into a large river; I had
many lives. In the provisional world,
I stood where the fruit was,
flats of cherries, clementines,
under Hallie's flowers.

I had many lives. Feeding
into a river, the river
feeding into a great ocean. If the self
becomes invisible has it disappeared?

I thrived. I lived
not completely alone, alone
but not completely, strangers
surging around me.

That's what the sea is:
we exist in secret.

I had lives before this, stems
of a spray of flowers: they became
one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon
visible under the hand. Above the hand,
the branching future, stem
ending in flowers. And the gripped fist---
that would be the self in the present.

Better Late Than Never. (And Other Empowering Thoughts)

2007-06-16T17:07:00.000-04:00

Two years and 5 months ago, the woman I was disappeared. Somewhere in the space of 12 hours (in which I had needles injected into my spine, magnesium pumped into my veins...introducing a sense of stupidity that has somehow remained with me ever since), a tiny new life pumped out of me, and my old life was completely and irretrievably lost. Looking into my little ones eyes for the first time, I sensed an intense feeling that could best be described as a challenge. “Here I am”, the eyes seemed to say. “Now what are you going to do?”

For the first five months, the answer to that question was simple. I was not going to sleep. I was not going to even try to think. I was going to breast-feed, change diapers, cuddle and sooth, and then start all over again. There was constant worry. (Why won't she stop crying? What am I doing wrong? I Don't have any damn clue what else I can do here. Except maybe cry.) It was a long five months. There was no time for anything other than just making it through the day. I had no idea where the time was going. I still don't know where it went. But it passed, and now I have a wonderful little girl running around amusing herself while I write. She sleeps through the night, laughs more than she cries, and can tell me what she wants in her little dictator way, with the occasional “pwetty Pweeeeze” to take the edge off.

Somewhere towards the end of that first year, I realized through my sleep deprived stupor that I could to do something for myself or remain in a state of solitary misery. So I began to write again.

Blogging has brought back a part of myself I thought I had lost. The part that communicates with words rather than sound and expression, the part that desires to lose myself in a chain of thought that can take me to a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me. The part that needed to vent and scream and bitch and moan. I'd read a few blogs, and they had comforted and uplifted me. I thought maybe I could try to give a little back.

Starting out was like calling out tentatively into a black hole. I had no idea who was out there. No sight or sound or smell to direct my words at. I was liberated by this lack of direction. I could write about anything,(in the comfort of anonymity). Someone might hear me. I hoped it would be nice someone.

If not, I could still send out my posts, like a homemade SETI program, and let my words and ranting be sucked into that seductive black hole to disappear among the millions of other words.

You can imagine my astonishment when lo and behold, someone was actually out there. Who took the time to comment. And so it began. A relationship with the not-quite-so-black hole. Which eventually began to look more like grey matter, then morphed into a world where I began envisioning the people I read, and the people who read me. I realized I was looking at a community, but was still wary of committing myself to it. It was virtual, not real. But then I realized it was real. Here was a group of women who were sometimes but not always like minded, but who had one thing in common. They, as mothers, didn't know what they were doing either. Suddenly I didn't feel quite so alone. When I posted, my words were no longer vanishing into that black hole.

But as community emerged, I perceived that my role as a writer was changing. I now felt obligation, and pressure to create, where before it was merely an outlet. I had to step back and let a balance come. I have my child, my husband, my friends. They must come first. So it is that whenever I lean over this keyboard I wonder if I am doing the right thing. Should I be spending more time with the Impling? Should I be occupied with the endless errands and chores? Making sure the pasta doesn't boil over?

Be right back.

The question of what I should be doing with my time is a universal one. It all comes down to understanding myself. I am not solely a mother. If I was, I would be able to be with my child without ghosts of stories and posts occupying part of my brain. But since I have started writing, I find that the times after I post are much richer...that I am truly with the Impling. Not thinking of other things, but delighting in her, cuddling her, enjoying her smile, her laugh, her songs. Kissing her “bruises” and bumps without a thought for anything but the beautiful little girl in my arms. I am a better mother because I write. I am a better person because I write. And for now, that is empowerment enough.

Remaining true to form, nursing the Impling through her cold took precedence over deadlines.

But here it is, HBM.

Today, I am nervous.

2007-06-14T13:47:00.000-04:00

Today, I will be checking in hourly with Ryan's Take.

For those not in the know, today is the day of the Seventeenth Constitutional Convention here in Massachusetts. The one where it is decided whether basic civil rights should be at the mercy of voters. Whether we should literally be voting on whether to take away people's civil rights. Whether gay people should be allowed the right of marriage.

Pardon my language, but HOW FUCKING BACKWARDS IS THIS?

My position on this has not changed since I wrote this.

I'm in knots, here. Excuse me while I go and be ill.

FINAL RESULT!!! RELIEF, HAPPINESS...GRATITUDE!!!

Utterly Fabulous

2007-06-06T21:43:00.000-04:00

There have been some pretty amazing posts around the blogosphere these days. The Blog Antagonist is writing a blue streak, Girl's Gone Child is making me cry, and bloghers in general are sharing amazing, profound and thought provoking ideas.

So it's with some chagrin (HAH, how often do you get to use THAT word!) that I must confess, the thing that has kept me awake for the last week (ok, not literally...it's been haunting me then) is how much of a frump I feel like. Like if I even tried to get fabulous, I'd end up a mocking image of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. And really, who wants to look like a demented John Water's icon when it's not even Halloween and the memories of being fabulous at Henri David's annual bashes are a good 15 years behind you?

I'd like to report that this is simply a clothes thang, and a wish to be rid of the blemishes that will not go away, the scaly feet and the once chicly cut hair that now merely resembles Cousin Itt's on a bad day...maybe even more than a pathetic attempt at a play for sympathy (snort).

The thing is, I've never been a clothes horse. I hate shopping, with the possible exception of shoes. Shoe shopping I have down. Upon entering a realm of shoes my eyes become precision targeting devices, scanning rows and rows with brutal efficiency. The right shoe will stop the relentless wave of dismissal by being either exactly what I had been looking for, or something beyond my wildest expectations. Everything else is summarily ignored.

But clothes shopping...ugh. I feel myself starting to hyperventilate at the thought. I have the worst luck clothes shopping. Inevitably, I never find what I am thinking of, and I get livid at the knowledge that I am going to spend over $40 for jeans, let alone $20 for a bra. I have expensive taste, and if I can't get (read afford) what I like, I settle for simple classic practical clothes. Which is hard enough. I once left Target in a fury because I could not find a simple, white, crew neck t-shirt. I mean...excuse me? So inevitably, I end up in a lousy mood and the urge to scream loudly at no one in particular. I don't have a very extensive wardrobe, as you may well imagine.

Granted, money is definitely an issue. And age. I can no longer feel fabulous wearing the chic/punk I invented for myself in art school, simply because nearing forty, I know better. The fabulousness of retro 20's meets fishnet and denim would not fit into my current realm of comfort. Which, sadly, is a solid t-shirt and khakis or jeans. I lost the habit of wearing earrings and bracelets during the first year with the Impling, and have yet to start wearing them again. I dress through my child now. She gets the funky flowered yoga pants, the embroidered jeans, the cute little peasant blouses and ruffled t's and fun little sun tunics. The cute tweed skirts, funky hair bands, and clunky black shoes covered with glittering stars.

At least I have my memories. So here they are. The two times I felt utterly fabulous.

Meaning, more accurately, that I looked fabulous. I felt fierce...goddess-like...all powerful...like nothing could touch me.

The first time, I was still in school, just after having a brutal experience with my then boyfriend. The mother of all fights that we both knew spelled the end of the relationship, if not the friendship. The best thing would have been to just call it off and never talk to each other again. Of course, this was not to be. Because previous to the breakup, both Mike* and I had agreed to help a mutual friend with a blowout fashion show/apartment eviction, and we were both in it up to our eyeballs.

For Mike, it meant working the spotlight. For me, it meant opening the show. I donned my red Louise Brooks wig, a pair of 5 inch platforms, multi colored hot-pants, and a matching vest that had “GAY PRIDE” beaded in vibrant sparkles on the back. There was exactly one button between my boobs and the world.

The studio apartment had been emptied of everything our friend owned for this party. All that remained was the runway, dominating the room; the racks of clothes behind the scrim; a huge sound system; kegs and a small makeshift bar; and about 200 people packed into the spaces in between. I'd spent hours before practicing walking in the damn shoes, praying I wouldn't kill or maim myself or anyone else, and now I waited in the dark, weight on one leg, back to the audience, while a hush fell, and was just as suddenly blasted away by the first riff of Techno remix Carmina Burana. I waited, through the first swell, shifted my weight to the other foot, listened to the whistles and cheers as the music finally whomped into a bassline that shook the floor and rattled the windows, and then there was my beat. The spot flashed, and I spun my face into it, missiles shooting from my irises towards the asshole behind the light, and whipping my body around, walked the walk. My feet nailed the wood of the runway, my body moved with the attitude, the audience boiled, arms punching the air, waving, screaming and whistling and die die die I strutted my fabulous bod towards that light with nothing in my mind but fuck you fuck you fuck you, in sync with the blasting music. I worked it. I was high on the adrenaline, the heat, the noise, my anger, and my triumph. I hadn't tripped. The rest was cake. And I walked out of that apartment still seething, but glowing with fabulousness.

15 years go by...

Second time. My sister's wedding. Manicure, pedicure, hairstyle shellacked and pinned and tucked and curled. I could have stabbed someone with that hair. Then, the makeup. “Dewey” was how it was sold to us, as being the hottest thing for brides and bridesmaids that season. Then, the dress, a goldy-beige satiny sheath, laced and beaded in all the right places, spaghetti straps glittering with glass, the skirt flaring below my knees in alternating panels of lace and satin. Matching stole. I summoned the spirit of Katherine Hepburn, and managed to be completely unrecognizable to my extended family. At least, for a while. I stood before two families for my sister, doing for her what I hadn't wanted and avoided for myself, and felt a quiet sense of transcendence. I was a mother, there was my daughter in her little comfy velveteen dress, bouncing in my husband's lap. I did not exactly feel like myself. More like I was looking out of a shell.

So perhaps, ultimately, that is what this longing is really about. Maybe my need for fabulousness is my need to defy my life, my patterns, my personality. Betrayal, exhaustion, insecurity and misery all fueled that first walk into goddess-hood, and even to an extent, the second walk. But it was equally inspired by creativity. A balance can undoubtedly be attained, but after thinking it over, I'm not sure a balance in this particular arena would be right for me. I have no desire to spend inordinate amounts of time applying makeup, taming my hair, and otherwise worrying over what outfit to wear to the park.

Lip-gloss, on the other hand, I can do.

There was, actually, one other time...I can't remember what I was wearing. I may or may not have been wearing makeup. But I remember walking, and feeling fabulous. I was strutting down 16^th Street in Philly for no reason I can remember, when a car slowed beside me and a college age boy and girl leaned out the window smiling in eagerness at me.

“Hey!” they called out in expectation “Are you somebody?”

I laughed and put an extra swing in my step.

“I was last time I checked!” I called over my shoulder with a broad grin.

*******************

*Yes, I changed his name...he is forgiven, as am I.
FYI:a little of the fabulousness of 15 years ago remains...my husband & I wear the wedding bands Henri David made for us.

Chocolate Collon and other treats.

2007-06-01T08:22:00.000-04:00

Ok. Raise your hand if the thought of having a colonoscopy sends not so pleasant shivers down your spine. Keep it up if you have no intention of ever putting yourself through one.

Shame on you. You should be taking better care of yourself.

Let's try to put our collective minds at ease about this oft but not oft enough performed procedure. Here is the wonderful Little Bald Doctors to take us through the wonderful world of colonoscopy prep. What to expect, when to expect it (mostly). And more importantly, how to just be. Laughing in the face of adversity...a lesson I need to learn.

If all the adversity I face today is an Impling who swipes saliva all over the monitor screen as I type this not-so-intelligent ode to a perfect post, I'm in damn good shape.

Life could be a hell of a lot worse.

The Impling says: Listen to Dr. Cow. Get a colonoscopy.

Feel free to get on your loved ones asses about this. Seriously. And don't forget to sweeten the encouragement with a pack of chocolate collon. It may just be the encouragement they need.

One year later...

2007-05-16T20:59:00.000-04:00

Bub&Pie (and a very happy blogiversary to you, my dear) reminded me that I recently had my own with her own list of things to do in celebration. The major difference being, she's actually, you know, done the things on her list. Bloody hell, I'm even late for my own blogiversary. Have I really been doing this for a year? I should have a list too.

My list of goals:
1. Try to write one post a week. ahem. And we see how good I've been about THAT.
2. Spruce up this site with some cute graphic or design that actually inspires me to come and post. Anybody have a good blog designer to recommend? Who works cheap?
3. Try and actually use some of these blog features, like labels...let's try this out here...yeah, that works...kind of...not.
4. Write a list of thank you's to all the wonderful women who have inspired me to keep writing over the past year...like:

Deb, from i obsess, who gave me my first comment ever, and gave me a reason to keep going...

Pend, from Dribblingwit???? who I swear is somehow empathetically connected to my psyche. How is it that we have never met, yet I feel as if we already understand each other as if we had?

Bub & Pie, who makes me think, and makes me feel as if all my brain cells haven't dried up and blown away after all.

Blog Antagonist, who weekly rocks my world with her insights, and lets me know I am not alone.

KC, of Where's My Cape? who keeps coming back here, leaving encouragement and friendly words.

Sandra, the wondrous Sunshine Scribe, who shows me what courage means.

Hell, everyone I have on my blogroll (and some who aren't, as of yet) has inspired me in various and sundry ways to keep going, in my own haphazard way. So big warm fuzzy hugs to you all, where you're reading or not. I'm thankful. So there.

Guess it would be a good thing to stop at #4. Hey, look! I accomplished almost half of my goals! Hah! Definitely end of list. Adding label.

So...May 8th, 1 year ago, I sat staring at a white screen and eventually wrote this.

A year later, I have no new paintings to boast of. The oils lie quietly in their tubes, and my brushes collect dust.

I have, however, written more this year than I have since I was a child. I find it a battle, at times, to force these words out. I cringe and edit and cut and curse and finally give up and just let it go. Occasionally, I write something I can be proud of. Most times, I tell myself that just communicating is good enough, pride be damned. Sometimes, this frame of mind lets me write something particularly good. Other times, it is responsible for, well, posts like this.

And then, of course, the major work of the year. The Impling then:

and now.

At least, for this most important work, I've not been haphazard.

Recluse

2007-05-09T21:13:00.000-04:00

Even for me, I realize I've been more reclusive than usual around blogland. I feel like I'm neither here nor there, that I am living in a state of duality. My brain is a mess of daily chores and "life"; and my chaotic imagination, weaving stories, obsessing over problematic sequences of plot, challenging the plausibility of the behavior of my characters. I am, as you may have guessed by now, trying to write a novel.

The end result, however, is that I can't lose myself in the world of my story deeply enough to make those characters and those places come alive enough that I can read what I've written and have that visceral reaction that tells me I've done something right...that I've written something powerful.

That internal power is still there...latent. At times it shows itself, like when I pull off a what I call a “glam” (summoning the fabulous power goddess within that is usually seen more commonly in drag queens). The glam works for a variety of purposes...it can quell potential arguments with a look, initiate admiring stares from strangers (when I was younger...I wonder if I could still pull it off), let me cross insanely busy intersections. My glare and my hand are enough to stop that interminable flow of traffic that INSISTS on turning that corner at over 50 miles an hour. The look that says, Yes, I WILL hurt you if you don't stop right now, because I will pulverize your pristine gas guzzling SUV with the sheer obstinacy of my body, and my evil bitch-will-take-no-prisoners glare.

The sense of self awareness that comes with these moments is almost palpable. I know at that moment I have a memory that will last forever. I can count on one hand how many times I've had them.

They haven't all been moments of wishing the wrath of the gods upon others, which hopefully says something positive about my character. I have vivid memories; of the first time I meditated...although I hadn't the faintest idea that I was doing so; of being swept away by a river current, terrified toddler clutching at my neck; memories of the long walk down the corridor to the international jet that represented my “leaving home”; of my first real kiss that sent rockets and fireworks exploding in my brain and goosebumps over my body, and then saying “no”; of the moment I decided what I would go to school for; memories of the feeling of exhausted nausea as I stared at the critique wall of black and white modular images after pulling an all-nighter; of talking and talking late into the night, with the man who would someday marry me; memories of eating shaved parmesan and wild mushrooms at Vetri for an anniversary dinner and of sipping a smooth and satiny chianti; of touching my baby's hairy, bloody scalp as she fought her way into the world.

But what kind of person puts almost at the top of her list of memorable moments the space of time that it took to begin to cross Broad Street in Philadelphia, at the intersection of Spruce. I was going no where in particular, coming from nowhere I can distinctly remember. There was no reason for it to happen. But there it was. The moment was nothing more...or less...than a total clarity of my senses. Every sound and sight, smell and taste, the feel of the pavement through my socks and shoes, and the catch of my breath as I suddenly knew how alive I was, how present, how vital. My heart beat and blood pulsed in my ears and I watched the world around me. It seemed like a completely different universe...one in which all the parts of that cityscape I knew so well became almost a living entity, and I was wholly a part of it. I didn't want it to end...but as soon as the thought came, I knew it would. A few more steps, and I was through that amazing space and back in my own universe, with the sense that I was altered, and that somehow, I would never be quite the same person.

And no. I wasn't on anything.

Whenever I bring that memory back, I know I am not the same person I was, in part, because of that moment. Maybe I need to just stop trying to make that universe appear again, and just let it come to me.

A Zen Buddhist calligrapher I once had the privilege to watch at is craft said to me: ”you must remember to breathe".

I watched him carefully to see when he took a breath. Did he inhale as he dipped his brush in the ink? Exhale as he made those marvelous strokes? I couldn't tell. Overcome with curiosity, I asked: "how do you breathe?"

He replied with a smile: "You think too much."

Slava, thank you.

2007-04-27T07:27:00.000-04:00

Thank you for showing me the greatest of passions. For the music that brought tears and memory, the sounds that transported, for the voice of the wood that was your temple...your prayer.

Мстисла́в Леопо́льдович Ростропо́вич
March 27, 1927 - April 27, 2007

Potato Frog

2007-04-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Since I can't seem to force myself to write anything of meaning, anything structured, anything resembling those topics I've wanted to write about, I'm just going to write, and see what happens.

Yesterday, I took the Impling out into the remnants of a nor'easter and walked a block to mile 24 of the Boston Marathon.

There, bouncing to the beat of Gloria Naylor, James Brown, and the inevitable chorus of “Dirty Water”, we watched men and women pound the pavement as they ran by, their faces revealing various stages of agony and determination. One woman half trotted, in obvious pain, her mouth hidden by a worn shaggy glove she pressed to her face. A futile attempt to mask her tears and anguish. But she kept going, and the voices surrounding her called out in praise and encouragement. It was hard to tell if the voices were helping or hindering her, but regardless,
she kept going. I hope she made it those final 2 miles. I like to think she did.

All that determination, all that grit in the face of physical pain, spoke to me. It showed me people who had achieved something remarkable. It made me jealous. I felt like a part of me that might achieve something remarkable is hobbled...by my motherhood, by my insecurities, by my fear of failure, by my own choices. If I had time, I tell myself, if I had space and quiet and freedom to write and focus and lose myself in my work, instead of having half the attention, one ear cocked for the Impling, what could I achieve? I want to think I could...can...create something remarkable.

And now I think, if I didn't have that one ear listening for the Impling, would it be the same? Would I have what little insight I have without her? Without this increasing weight, warm and wiggly, on my lap right now as I type, chanting: “pictures of a potato-frog” what would I be doing, thinking, writing? She grins at me. “It's going to be a potato-frog!” she laughs. Whimsical, out of the ether, launching me out of my train of thought to a universe where anything can happen, or be. Like potato frogs. It is simultaneously delightful and achingly frustrating.

I am suffering from a bad case of the “what if's”

Any ideas for a cure?

“pah! tay! toh! FROOOOG!”

All hail...

Spring.

2007-04-11T09:24:00.000-04:00

It is Spring, time of rebirth, and I am bleeding death. Still. A week later. This is “normal” I am told.

It happened suddenly, without any warning. One moment I was listening to the Impling awaken from her nap, and suddenly, simultaneously, a gush between my legs.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Spotting is normal. This was not. I lay on our bed, flipping through my pregnancy book. Some bleeding is normal. I'd heard of women having periods into their pregnancies. Maybe that's all this was. But I knew, knew it wasn't. The Impling draped herself over me in one of the longest and warmest and most loving embraces I will likely ever know. I lay under her, smelling her corn silk hair, feeling her toddler weight and her quiet breathing, while I bled out what once was a hope of a sibling.

I didn't want to move. Somehow, I thought that I could keep that little life inside of me if I didn't stand up, didn't encourage it. Don't DO this, little one. Stay here, stick around...there's so much for you to see...

But reality won, and I hauled myself from bed to get the phone and call my doctor, and press the number for emergency, and listen to the nurse tell me to come in as soon as I could for an ultrasound. Then I paged my husband, and he listened to my thick voice, and said “I'll be right home”.

Dress Impling. Pull on pants over my wad of kleenex, since I had optimistically kept no pads on hand. We lay down again together, and sang songs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Favorite Things, Rubber Duckie. Then the sound of the key in the lock, and I was walking to the car, carefully...carefully, as if I could keep my little one inside. As if there was still hope.

The traffic lights lasted forever. I watched the lights, and felt my body bleed, and sang to the Impling and felt that sinking in my center. The feeling that I had lost. That we all had lost. That it was my fault. That I was a failure. That my hopes for this little one were just that...powerful longing and dreams that were never really a possibility.

Because when the day was done, and I'd passed most of what had been the hope of a child into that wad of tissue, and onto the doctor's table, I knew that it had probably never had a chance from the very beginning. The chromosomes were probably all wrong, and there was nothing I could of done. I was powerless to stop it.

And maybe that's where some of this rage is coming from. That I should be able to control this, that I am only a vehicle, a natural vessel, and the ultimate creation, for the most part, is out of our control. I look at the Impling now, and realize more than ever how miraculous she is. How miraculous that she is here with us. Brilliant, and full of wonder, and laughter and life.

Writing under the influence...

2007-04-01T21:14:00.000-04:00

First, my apologies to everyone for my absence this past week. I've barely managed to read and comment, let alone figure out a post or anything resembling a perfect post review for the many deserving posts I have had the opportunity to read...Blog Antagonist, as always, is awesome, as is the vibrant Pendulum. Lildb...well, you floored me. All I can say is, thank you, thank you, thank you for all the times you've lifted me up out of the quagmire. I loved reading your blog, and I will miss you. I hope you'll still be around. I hope someday to buy your work and read your prose again. Good Luck!

Writing now is tricky for me, particularly when a small impling insists on interrupting every five seconds to ask for tape. Because it is the bandage of choice, for books, for her easel, for Dr. Cow, our little squishy stress cow dressed like a doctor. Where do we find these things? Dr. Cow is a favorite around here.

“tape Dr. Cow!” a mantra. Tape is everywhere.

It's been a hazy couple of weeks. Trying to write has been like carving my way through a thick fog with nothing but a spoon. I can't even write a good simile. Thick thick thick. This is my brain. This is my brain on pregnancy. Any questions?

Well, now that I brought it up, there probably are some questions. So here are the answers. Yes I am baking baby #2. I am only10 weeks along. I am queasy, I am exhausted, and I'm finding it very difficult to write. Like wringing water from stone. Oh, joy, I managed a completely overused simile. At least I could remember it correctly. At least I spelled simile correctly.

So slowly, tortuously, sentences emerge.

Part of my reticence is probably denial. I have another little BOP (Bundle Of Potentiality) growing inside me, cells dividing, brain developing (drink that water), little limbs and eyes and noses and ears forming, everything going through the miraculous transformation from fetus to baby to person.

Wait a minute, you may be thinking. How can you differentiate a baby and a person? And my answer to you is, it is the difference between a being utterly dependent, with no free will, and a being who has smiled on her own, in response to another human being. Hrm. This is all sounding pretty cold and cerebral. I'm not doing a good job of expressing this.

Pause, stare at the keyboard, listen to the Toucan Pirates singing Yo Ho and the Impling reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat” My strain of thought is gone. I wonder why?

We went to the arboretum again yesterday, and I soothed my depressed mind with the sounds of the wind in the grass, and the trees, and our little Impling wandering around with a big stick used alternately as a walking stick and a quarter staff. Little John, eat your heart out. Phrase of the day: (since she was playing with sticks) “Don't poke your eye out”. She said this over and over again in immense amusement, as we couldn't help laughing whenever she said it. This little girl now knows what it is to be funny, and she knows what she finds funny and fun.

The little creature growing inside me has no such sense of self. I can wonder, and hope, and dream of what it may become, if all goes well, but it is “stuff as dreams are made on”. I search for any sort of seed of love in my heart for the little BOP, but it is simply not there. Guilt consumes me. I must be a horrible person. But then, I look again at the glory that is my daughter, and my heart overflows with love. Somewhere, after that first touch of my finger to her wet head as she struggled out into the world, after that first look into her dark deep eyes, frowning in intense challenge, the hopes and dreams and wonders were actualized. Love became real, not imagined. Love became vital. The Impling became part of humanity, expressing her wonder at the world, her frustration in her limitations.

It just hasn't happened yet for the BOP. It is floating around, growing and becoming a more and more complex being, but what I feel is anxiousness, that all will go well for this little one. That I will do by him (no I don't know that it is a him, but for whatever reason, I've been thinking of the BOP as the “little guy”) as I have done for the Impling.

It's no accident that the quote running through my mind now is from The Impling's “namesake” play.

“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

And sleep is what I should undoubtedly be doing at this moment.

Good night, all.

Now that's a log!

2007-03-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

A while back I may have mentioned my in-laws accident-prone visits. So we have taken it upon ourselves to pack up our green Ford Taurus with various and sundry items needed to haul a carsick 2 year old, a caffeine blasted Dr Science, and a comatose mother over the hills and dales of I84 through the intermidible state of Connecticut, over the Tappanzee, and into the concrete wilds of New Jersey.

This time on the way down, we had a lovely torrential downpour that started just after Hartford, and suddenly slowed to a drizzle as we pulled off the NJ Turnpike at exit 4. It was only 3 in the morning. And we had only one glow-in-the-dark vomitous explosion from the Impling somewhere on the river pretending to be the Turnpike. As I wiped her down and tucked her back in, she looked at me with a half smile and said,

“How does an ewephant go?

“HOOM-prah HOOM-prah!”

You got it, peanut.

It was a wonderful weekend, and a sad one, but not, for a change, because of any drama being played out by the family. Only the sadness of change, of a father growing old, and beginning to deal practically with his mortality. The sadness of a friend's long relationship changing for the worse, the sadness of not having the time we would like to have together with people we love.

But it was much more fun than not. We slept late, watched the Impling play with Oma, and begin to sing the Dutch songs Oma sang to her. Impling dubbed one room the Castle Room, as this is where the old 1970's Fisher Price Castle lives while we visit, complete with pink dragon, and a tail-less, crippled horse who still manages to haul the carriage and carry the princess off to adventure.

On Tuesday, we went to the Camden Aquarium. For those not in the know, it has (in addition to the requisite fish and sea dragons) penguins, seals, a sea lion or so, lots of sharks (including a very cool underwater glass tunnel that allows the sharks to swim over you) and two hippos.

The Impling had never actually seen a hippo. So we ventured forth, reciting that all time classic “Hippos go Berserk” line by line, while tracking the huge beasts as they dived into the water for a morning snooze. We walked down the slope to the underwater viewing area and reached it just at a momentous moment. The water was suddenly clouded with brown, and bits of grass, and what can only be described as “a log”. The Impling grinned and pointed with unabashed glee.

“Hippo made a BIG poop! FUNNee!”

The surrounding toddlers were rolling in hysterics (and the parents couldn't help laughing either). An older couple, obviously not educated in the finer comedic nuances of hippo poop, stared at us in barely disguised disdain.

“what ARE you teaching them?” the look said, and they huffily rose from their front row seats and left them to a more appreciative audience.

Impling pointed and laughed again again, and I crouched down beside her in solidarity.

“That's right sweetie, hippo just dumped a BIG load!” and glanced with a smirk at the hastily retreating couple. I couldn't help myself. I swear.

The log dissolved almost instantaneously, much to the disappointment of Dr. Science, who arrived a split second later. We communed with the now sleeping hippos a while longer, then went in search of bluer waters. Sharks and puffers and stingrays oh my!

There is really nothing to relate further that can surpass the wondrousness of hippo poop, so I won't try.

Here are some gratuitous Impling shots instead. And one shark. And one Impling pretending to be a shark. Or a hippo. Enjoy!

What...who...me?

2007-03-09T17:02:00.000-05:00

Wow. I was just completely blind-sided by the wonderful i obsess, who nominated me for a thinking blogger award.

And at a time when I can only repeat my comment to her:

You've just made my day. My week. Maybe even my month. Because right this moment, I feel about as capable of thinking as the plastic skull that is grinning at me from the computer table.

I take that back. The purple nerf-brain inside has undoubtedly more going on in it at the moment.

Thanks. I'll try to live up to it...
But now...the brain-cells. They groan in protest. I believe I am obligated to share the love. So here I will share it with the first blog that came to my mind...

Where's my Cape?

I will ponder the others while I take a wee blog break down in New Jersey to show off the Impling.

Till next Thursday, then...

Rain Dogs, Perogies, and Another Thursday Night.

2007-03-08T18:05:00.000-05:00

If I didn't like my daughter already, I'd have to now.

Another cold night, lazing in the glow of the inevitable halogen torchere, the smell of fried onions and potato and cheese pierogies lingering, and the Impling dancing to Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Little Grrlfriend likes Tom Waits.

Life is truly good.

The bed beckons. Impling wants to jump. Though at the moment she's dancing around laughing and singing "exclMAYshun poiyant!"

She just saw me upload her picture here.

And know we're on to the balloons and a little grinny face squeaking "PEE-rel!" (Purel...Dr Science keeps an abundance on hand).

Now we have a little red dragon taking residence in her hat.
"Da da da DAH da da!" she sings...

"UP! Get you OUT of de bahLOON! Get you dancing! Get you OUT!"

Time to go, folks. Realtime is over, and just begun.

This was so beautiful.

2007-02-27T16:54:00.000-05:00

It's March and the Perfect Post Awards are here...

Chicky Chicky Baby has been a regular stop for me for quite a while now, though more often than not I've been a lurker rather than a commenter. I love her humor, her insightful observations and her evocative writing.

This post is one of the most beautiful tributes I've read, the kind of writing that makes your heart ache in a good way. There is hardly anything I can say that would do justice to her powerful writing, so I'll just stop here, and let you all get on with the reading.

The Weirdness

2007-02-21T13:20:00.000-05:00

First off, before the weirdness, hence forth and forever more, the "Hub" shall now be addressed as "Dr. Science". Ask and ye shall receive, man o' mine.

And now, for this weird meme thang that's been circulating...6 weird things about me.

I've been wracking my skull to try to tease out specific things. I know I am weird. There's a reason I was voted “Class Individual” in high school.

But specific things. Gah.

I HATE the expression “chock full”. It makes me cringe just typing it. Like fingernails across a chalkboard, it is. The ONLY place “chock full” can be used without making me grind my teeth to the quick is if it is on a can of coffee labeled “Chock-full-o'Nuts”. Then, and only then, is it permitted. Go forth and caffeinate.

I have insomnia. Which is not, in itself, weird, I grant you. But my insomnia more often than not involves song tracks playing over and over and over and over in my brain until I imagine myself bashing my head into the wall in time to the music just to get. it. Out. This past week I've been tortured with a techno version of the soundtrack to M.U.L.E., a track from Dance Dance Revolution, Tom Lehrer singing the LY song (this was not as bad as M.U.L.E., thank god), and a song that shall remain nameless from the “For the Kids” CD. What will tonight bring, I wonder? As it turns out, Thomas Dolby. The keys to Her Ferrari. Bleh. No kidding. It's a great song, really. Just not at 3 O'CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING. Then I had Oscar the Grouch singing I LOVE trash. And oh joy, more M.U.L.E.

I'm going to have to sleep on this. Then I'll add whatever song wakes me this morning to #2, and maybe in my desperation to silence the music I will discover some unacknowledged hidden weirdness. Until tomorrow then...
Picking up the thread here after yet another musical night: I have a terrible habit of biting my lower lip. Then it gets all chapped and gross, and then I have to remind myself to drink lots of water to get them dechapped. Burt's Bees just ain't enough. Does this count? It better, because this brain isn't coming up with anything else at the moment.

I have deliberately tried to memorize songs to counter the aforementioned impromptu 3 AM concerts. Things I have tried with success include; Bach, Kodaly, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff cello suites, concertos, and sonatas; Beethoven's 9th; and selected tunes from the Magic Flute.
Which leads me to #5, the fact that for the most part of my life, I knew more about classical than current music. I didn't know about Sting, or Janis Joplin, or Prince, or any Big Hair Bands, until I was well into High School. I remember seeing my classmates in fifth grade showing off their Kiss albums and thinking they looked SOOOO cool. They squashed chickens, man. With big pointy spiked shoes! I wasn't positive, but I didn't think Chopin or Bach had that in their repertoire. Maybe Liszt did. Dr Science was kind enough when we met to edumacate me in all I had missed: Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Sisters of Mercy, Queen, Pink Floyd, The Pogues, Kirsty MacColl, The Cranberries, The Cocteau Twins. David Bowie. Sinead O'Conner. Patti Smyth. Laurie Anderson. So much great music, so little time...but enough with the music. On to a more important quirk of weirdness:
I've never had my eyebrows shaped. No, actually, that's not true. I did once in junior high, and my brother asked with all the gentle sensitivity one expects from an older brother, “what the hell did you do to your eyebrows?” I think I am finally over this and have taken it upon myself to let myself be unapologetically girly. Pedicures. LOVE em. I want a facial. I've never had one. I have, however, had a shiatsu massage. Not girly, granted, but sooooo good. And bring on the girly drinks. In coconuts. With the little umbrellas. Quality, my friends.

There. I am done. For now.
TTFN
Ta Ta For Now

A Birthday Gift.

2007-02-05T14:42:00.000-05:00

I once tried to paint a picture of my Mom. My idea was to paint her as she was as a girl. Before life had really begun to mess with her. For some reason, I just couldn't make the painting work. I built the structure of the painting around her image, the place she grew up, and an old sundial that now rusts peacefully on the back patio of my parent's house. I looked at the few pictures that remain of her as a girl, school pictures, mostly. But even those photos were taken too late. Because Mom grew up early.

Identity is a malleable thing. I am shaped by my perceptions of my own mother, and she, in turn, was shaped through her perceptions of hers. She was shaped by what she perceived her mother thought of her. Which is devastating, because my grandmother did the one thing a mother can do that is unforgivable. She abandoned her children. My mother was all of eight years old.

I have been strangely detached from this eight year old child who would become my mother. I could never imagine my mother as a child. She was “just mother”. Mother, for me, was either completely inaccessible or stiflingly needy. I don't remember any easy moments of just hanging out together, comfortable in each others company. My mother was acutely uncomfortable in herself, and now I know that some of that discomfort was the strangeness of being a mother with such an invisible role model. More than most people, she really was winging it. Add to her parental equation a father who used Henry the 8^th as his role model for marriage, (with, yes, 8 wives *edit: I know, Henry only had 6, but Grandpa didn't let that stop him), and a tendency to physically abuse his children, Mom had a childhood verging on the Dickensian.

For us, this meant a mother who was prone to explosive fits of temper at seemingly random moments. She would make herself scarce at these times. And we were made to understand what a huge gift this was. We were never PHYSICALLY abused. This of course, made all the difference.

And there is a big difference, though in the midst of childhood, the threat of harm was ever present. Never intentional harm to us, but accidents. Situations. Self destructive behavior. Suicide attempts. Roles were reversed, and I found myself my mother's mother by the time I was, well, eight years old. I had to be careful not to upset her, or be angry, or frustrated with her. She was delicate. She didn't mean what she said. I found myself responsible for her feelings. It was up to me at times to convince her that life was worth living. These were the times I knew I had to talk. It was vital for me to talk to her. But most days, everyday days, we didn't really talk. We didn't know how.

It would be too easy, though, to start writing about everything my mother didn't do as a mother, as a result of her own lack of a childhood. It seems we are wired to remember the most hideous and unpleasant moments of our lives. The normal, everyday moments of living and being are just a background. The love was there, but muted, restrained in a way common to New England households. Love is taken for granted. It's not something to say aloud.

So I am going to break with New England tradition and talk about what my mother did do, in her own drastic break with family “tradition”.

She cooked for us. Almost every day and afternoon and night. She spent 12 years changing our diapers (3 children 4 years apart) and cleaning up after our messes. She sewed our clothes, made our Halloween costumes, brought us to dancing and gymnastic lessons, music and art lessons when we were older. She baked every one of our birthday cakes, (except for the times we went to the Red Coach Inn for a special birthday supper) and decorated them with whimsical themes we came up with. She kept the household finances in order. She budgeted carefully, and she and Dad always managed to have a magical Christmas tree loaded with gifts for us when that time of year came around.

Now. Here is my mother...a woman who has gone through hell and come out the other side. Who finally realized she has things to offer, and time to give that does not sacrifice who she is as a person. Mom tutors. She's learning Tai Chi. Mom teaches me some moves when she comes weekly to play with the Impling. She is able to talk with me now, well, like my mother, and not like my daughter. About books she's enjoyed reading. Recipes she loves. Her teaching. She can complement me, and accept the complements I give her. She has found herself, at long last. It took her almost 65 years, but she is here, now. Her own person.

But I find myself trying to be the mother I wished I had when I was a child, by doing things with the Impling I want to remember my mother doing with me. Snuggling on the couch and singing songs to her on request. Playing “tent”. Letting her climb on my back as I scrape the morning oatmeal off the floor. Gazing at the moon and stars together, her little cheek next to mine, listening to her murmur “millyons of myalls awee”. Saying “sweet dreams, sweetie, I love you” in the dark after we read her bedtime stories.

Of course, she will never remember this time, these moments. They will change as we all grow, and if I'm lucky, the snuggling will continue for a while, and she will never feel like she can't come and curl up beside me to read or sing silly songs. And maybe, at some point, she will remember. More than that, she will know. Without a doubt, with a perfect consciousness, that I love her. Because I tell her I do. Every night.

I have one memory of my mother being truly happy. Like most emotions, she didn't go by halves. So when I looked towards the shore of our campsite from me and my sister's canoe, my body sore and aching, our voices raw from singing songs at the top of our lungs to keep our spirits up, and saw Mom, running across the stretch of beach in the golden light of the setting sun, stopping to jump up and down, throwing sand in the air like confetti, and yelling out to me “...it's so BEAUTIFUL!”, I knew with a tired sympathetic sadness that I would remember the moment forever. Now I know what a gift it was, to me. A yell of glee to give me the energy to paddle that last 100 yards, so I would be safe. On shore. She wanted me to be safe, to take care of me. It really was “sweetie, I love you” echoing across those deep, quiet waters. I just didn't hear it until now.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful, wonderful Mother. I love you.
Happy Birthday, my beautiful, wonderful Daughter.
I love you, sweetie.

Wicked Good Writing.

2007-02-01T19:34:00.000-05:00

I've got a tot playing with a pirate ship, the latest Music Together CD playing in the kitchen, and vague shreds of ideas and inspiration twirling in my brain. The Hub is still at work. I reach over to wipe a bit of chocolate off the Implings chin. My girl, as it turns out, likes Toblerone. SO my girl.

While all this is going on, I realize I have neglected to keep up with my Perfect Post obligations...so before it's too late, hats off to Girl's Gone Child, who actually got me sighing twice this month. I only got my first nomination in. I wasn't on the ball enough to get the second in on time, but here are the links anyways.

http://girlsgonechild.blogspot.com/2007/01/depth-of-field.html
and http://girlsgonechild.blogspot.com/2007/01/quiet-cricket.html

Thanks Rebecca. For the good kind of sighs.

Geijin, part 1

2007-01-16T17:29:00.000-05:00

Since I began writing this post, I thought, (as I remember more and more), that to be kind to my small group of readers, I would break this up a bit. A mini series, if you will.

So off we go...

*******

The year I traveled to Japan was also the year I graduated from college, the year I ended a tumultuous relationship with a brilliant schizophrenic artist, and the year I met my husband. M was now a past nightmare, K (my future husband) a wonderful conversation and a beautiful book of fairy tales I still had to return to him. Japan happened to me in the midst of all this vivid, harsh and wondrous reality. I felt as though I was living in a dream. Everything was on fast forward.

August 9-10, 1993

There was no time to process, so I remember very little of the flight from New Jersey to...Detroit? Chicago? I remember Detroit/Chicago mainly because of the vastness of the airport. I vaguely remember meeting my parents and my younger sister. I remember wondering how I was going to make it through the flight without a cigarette. I think my solution turned out to be lots and lots of black coffee. I do remember the delightful warm towels the flight attendants offered us, more than the cups of green tea (bad coffee tasted more like cigarettes to me at that point). I possibly remember it more clearly because wiping that warm cloth over my hands and face was one of the best things that had happened to me that week. It's the little things, isn't it?

I only dimly remember Narita Airport. T picked us up in a van with H. As we drove (or rolled... we spent three hours crawling through Tokyo rush hour) I realized we had suddenly been transported through two centuries into the future. The highways and bridges were like American city highways and overpasses on steroids, bigger better and more more more. I could easily imagine air cars flying over us through the canyon of skyscrapers. Perhaps a giant Mech peeking out from behind the Metropolitan Government Office. Absolutely overwhelming.

T and H lived in a little village, close to the Yokota Air Force base where my brother worked. We drove through a maze of small roads, and parked in the lot of a small apartment building. We stumbled into the apartment in a haze of semi-consciousness.

The first thing we did upon entering was take off our shoes. The entryway was a little space to leave your shoes before you stepped up into the apartment. Carolie has a wonderful description of her house in Japan...T's was like that, but in super miniature. Sliding doors to save space. A kitchen, a “living room”, a delightful little tatami room with shoji screens, and a small western style room H used as a studio for her craft work. The bathroom was just that...a room that was a shower and a bath. You scrubbed down in the shower before you climbed into the deep bath (this tub is deeper and shorter than American baths) The water is preheated before you even turn on the faucet. They had a little WC for the toilet with a sink on the back to wash your hands. The kitchen had a wonderful little cooler for bread and veggies built into the floor, a super rice maker that did everything but lock up the apartment for the night, and a sink that was forbidden to my Dad. “In my house, YOU do not wash!” So quoth my sister-in-law.

We ate an abbreviated meal of miso soup, tea, and three kinds of fish paste (fish paste is a staple in Japan...some I liked more than others). H gave my sister and I beautiful folding fans with cloth cases. K (my younger sister) started to fall asleep in her soup bowl. So we broke out the futons and went to bed.

My sister & I slept in the “craft room”, for which I was eternally grateful, as it allowed me a quiet means of escape in the early morning when I wanted to go out for a smoke (my family, I thought, had no idea I was a butt-head...at least, in the smoker sense). I hadn't shared a room with my sister for years...and now, instead of arguing over who got to turn out the light, we lay awake on our futons “debating” whether ALL white people are racist. K, (then an earnest student at Sarah Lawrence) said adamantly yes, and I (having just graduated from art school and lived in down town Philly for four years), said adamantly no. Unfortunately, she took my disagreement as an attack on her intellect. I felt the need for some fresh air, suddenly. And some deep breathing. So of course I went out for a smoke.

The walk really was a desperate maneuver to have a solitary moment. I had been soaking in people for over 40 hours, people I didn't feel I could speak openly with, people I felt were living in a universe constructed of overlapping egos vying for control. Pretending everything was open and “normal” when in reality it was a tangle of unspoken disappointments, regrets, suicidal tendencies and untreated depression.

So I snuck outside and took a walk, dragged slowly on my Camel Light, and wondered what lay on the other side of the high, tiles topped walls that lined the narrow streets. I saw the tops of trees over them, and imagined stone lanterns and carp pools dotting the neighborhood. Then there was a main road, and a gas station, and vending machines, where I bought myself a funky coffee, and let myself feel the strangeness of incomprehension. I couldn't understand the kanji on the street signs, the shop signs, the vending machines. I'd traveled before, but in Europe, even when I couldn't understand the words, the letters were still familiar. Here, for the first time, I really felt like a foreigner. It made my blood stir.

I fancied myself strolling off without my family into the countryside and vaguely wondered how far I would get. Then I laughed at myself and started back.

Wednesday, August 11.

I've been talking to my parents about this trip, and Dad sent me his abbreviated diary of events and place names. It was intriguing to see what my father wrote...for instance, he paid particular attention to where we all were as we sat around the table to eat. H cooked us a traditional Japanese breakfast of grilled fish, rice, miso soup, shredded lettuce and tomatoes. H brought Dad a fork and knife after he struggled with the chopsticks for a while. Dad remembers drinking Taster's Choice coffee, most likely supplied by my brother at the supermarket on base. He also remembered not having to wash the dishes afterwards. After breakfast, I showed off slides of what I'd been doing in art school.

That morning, we drove to Fussa and walked around. H tried to teach us the kanji for “ramen” and after a while, I thought I could pick out those signs on tiny shops throughout the narrow streets as we walked. People watching was a very different experience from back home. Everyone here was so...THIN. Coming from Philadelphia, one of the heaviest cities in the US, this was a bit of a revelation. After we stopped at a bookstore (manga-riffic!), and picked up some bean paste pastries to munch on, we headed for the Fussa Eki (the train station).

Then, off to Tachikawa.

The trains. Oh my, the trains. You know those pictures you sometimes see of commuters literally being pushed and packed into trains by station attendants? It happens. And there is, literally, no room to breath. Some people wore face masks. With TB still a problem in Japan, people are VERY hygienic. But then, the people of Japan would be hygienic regardless. Almost everyone carried a handkerchief, and scented fans were flapping everywhere. The train was packed, and hot. At least we didn't have to worry about falling over.

Mall Rats.

It was a huge department store, restaurants on one level, groceries in the basement, clothing and books and furniture and electronics and more electronics. And then more. We strolled though the booths in the basement food stalls, and a graying vendor smiled and bowed and offered us...little tiny silver fish. They were whole, each one about an inch in length. Little eyes bugged up at me. The delightful man nodded and made a hand motion for us to eat. I smiled back and popped the little fish in my mouth, and chewed. And chewed. Crunchy, salty and chewy, I thought that this was, perhaps, a perfect bar food. Now I wanted a beer.

Instead, we wandered up to the floor of restaurants and window shopped. Every restaurant had windows and windows of fake food on display, for each item on the menu. Some of these were quite beautiful. And it showed you EXACTLY what you would be served. I ate my first bowl of noodles...the first of many. Soy ramen, yum. I'm a fan. We talked about what to do in the days to come. I had to leave on the 19th, so it was suggested that we make the Saitama Craft Center a priority. They talked about shrines to visit, meeting H's family, working it all in. It was also the week of Obon, the Japanese festival of the Dead. They debated and repeated themselves and barely listened to one another, each person locked in their own inner dialog. We couldn't even begin to create a schedule. T & H would inevitably create it, I knew, and felt guilty at my own reticence and inability to make decisions. What did I want? It could be so simple, I thought. Why is this such a struggle for everyone?

I felt my blood pressure begin to rise. I wanted a cigarette. I was asked what I wanted to do. I said all their suggestions sounded great, and in a quiet burst of red, suggested Tokyo Disney Land. If we are all going to exist in our individual little lands of make believe, I thought, we might as well have fun doing it. And we could at least be honest about living fantasy lives in Disney Land. T looked confused at my suggestion, perhaps because for the past couple of years I had been going through my ostentatious “Disney is evil” phase of life. But at the moment, my personal politics didn't matter quite as much as getting through the vacation without losing my mind.

To be continued...

Getting off to a SLOOOWWW start.

2007-01-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

All right. Time to just jump start this new year and start a list of postings I would like to write but don't at the moment have the will, braincells, time, or patience for right now:

Art and religion
gay marriage (yes, again)
Mom's birthday
the Impling's birthday,
a visit to Japan
the Netherlands
a series of monthly posts about my solo jaunt overseas when I was eighteen.

Stay tuned, I think Japan is going to happen soon...

in the meantime, some gratuitous pics of the Impling.

*************

Our first St. Nicholas Eve (Dec. 5th) and day...a Dutch tradition in my Hub's family.

You put out some hay and a carrot and a glass of water for St. Nick and his horse, and he leaves a sweet thank you in the morning.

The Impling already knows what to do with the klompjes (wooden shoes).

She also loves puddle stomping, and ducks (though who doesn't?)

The Twelve Days AFTER Christmas

2006-12-29T16:22:00.000-05:00

by Frederick Silver

The first day after Christmas, my true love and I had a fight
And so I chopped the pear tree down and burned it just for spite
Then with a single cartridge, I shot that blasted partirdge
my true love, my true love, my true love gave to me

The second day after Christmas, I pulled on the old rubber gloves
and very gently wrung the necks of both the turtle doves
My true love, my true love, my true love gave to me

The third day after Christmas, my Mother caught the croup
I had to use the three French Hens to make some chicken soup
The four calling birds were a big mistake for their language was obscene
The five golden rings were completely fake and they turned my fingers green

The sixth day after Christmas, the six laying geese wouldn't lay
I gave the whole darn gaggle to the A.S.P.C.A
On the seventh day, what a mess I found
all seven of the swimming swans had drowned
My true love, my true love, my true love gave to me

The eighth day after Christmas, before they could suspect
I bundled up the eight maids a milking, nine pipers piping, ten ladies dancing, eleven lords a leaping, twelve drummers drumming (Well, actually, I kept ONE of the drummers ) and sent them back collect
I wrote my true love, " We are through, love! "
And I said in so many words,
" Furthermore your Christmas gifts were for the birds! "

This is just an excuse for me to see if this new blogger thang actually works.

'Tis the Season.

2006-12-22T18:09:00.000-05:00

The explanations come naturally, and for that, I'm grateful. I wondered, worried about how I would explain Christmas to the Impling, and yet, I find that the simplest explanations are the easiest, and the most honest. I don't tell her more than she can absorb.

I've started exploring potential traditions with the resurrection of particular things I enjoyed as a child...colored lights, advent calenders, the scent of baked apples, hot chocolate, and spiced cakes.

With each item comes a simple definition of what it is, and as she gets more language, the explanations will grow.

Right now, things go something like this:

The Impling stares with wide eyes at lights on a tree.

“That's a Christmas tree, sweetie. People put up pretty lights in the winter to cheer up. See how dark it is? People miss the sun, so this month people do lots of different things to cheer themselves up. And one thing they do is put up lots of lights!”

Light as hope, as life. It is one of the oldest universal symbols we have. Why not celebrate?

So we made cookies today, an impromptu affair that provided entertainment for my Impling, and our play date friends. The Impling made a tentative peace with the electric mixer, which up until today held a primal terror for her. We pressed out hearts and trees and wreaths, and put dollops of black raspberry jam in the middles. We almost burnt our first batch, but calmly went on to the second. I poured tea, and we sat in comfortable companionship, the kind of low key space that let us relax and dump our tea bags in the flour covered measuring cup that lay complacently in a pile of flour and sugar. I brought out the cello (my friend is an amateur violinist from Philly which grants us the ability to make musical in- jokes...a rare treat), and we had a dance party to “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and all it's variations.

Yesterday was another day of impromptu visits, the kind of open door “Hi! Come on in! We're making snowflakes! Want some tea?” time that doesn't happen enough. Toddlers running around, chatting with friends, losing track of time in our relaxation. No present exchanges, no obligations, just sitting around, doing lazy things.

We don't have a tree this year, but we have an advent calender, and everyday the Impling opens a window and stares at the picture that appears. I try to remember a time when I did not know what a snowman was, or a Christmas tree, or Santa Claus. She loves the windows, more for the excitement of a new word than anything else, and tries to wrap her little tongue around “Sanna Kaws” and “Krimmas trwee” with such glee.

The stories and symbols of Christmas, the evergreen wreaths, the holly, the ivy, the trees and lights and yule logs and carols, are all now a happy jumble of ancient Roman holidays, ancient Celtic ritual, etc etc. etc.

To add a story of birth in the cold of winter is not only appropriate, but inevitable. It's hard to create a better, or more accessible tale...a young pregnant teenager, thrust into an early adulthood, rising to her fate and making do with what she had. We all know now what birth is really like, so for mothers, the image is automatically a powerful one.

What would this scene look like today? When I was still in school, I developed a 20^th century nativity. In my tableau, Mary was a 14 year old runaway, Joseph a homeless veteran, trying to break into the carpenters union, and the stable a sewer duct. Today, I would probably change the stable to a shelter. The three wise “men” were once Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, and Gore Vidal. Today, I'd still have Mark and Maya, But Natalie Angier may take over for Gore. Charles Kuralt would be one of the shepherds.

Oh, and Jesus...she would be a black baby. Just so there's no confusion about it.

But in the here and now, all these stories are just too complicated. My Uncle asked me at Thanksgiving if the Impling knew about Santa Claus. I laughed and said we were taking it one holiday at a time. But I heard the unspoken question behind the innocuous one...are you bringing up your child as a Christian? I heard this only because, for my uncle, having a God to be angry at and rage against is paramount. Because my aunt has cervical cancer. He needs to ask why. He needs to rage.

But he was wonderful with the Impling, playing with the old 1970's Fisher Price castle we all played with when we were young. Those moments were glorious...pure enjoyment of life and creativity and curiosity. There was no need for explanations, or blame, or expectations. There was just the little iconic wooden figures of a knight, a queen, and a woodman with the little Errol Flynn mustache. A pink dragon peeking from behind the stairs. A golden laugh, and a tired but joyful smile. At that moment, the Impling showed her God to my uncle, who felt his own in a way he hadn't in a long while.

These are the gifts we make for ourselves. These unconscious moments of clarity, of being completely in the moment, celebrating our wondrous lives. Celebrating the light, not by itself, but surrounded by darkness.

Peace, all.

Where is Christopher Guest when you need him?

2006-12-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

If Mom101's reunion was like Romy and Michelle's, mine was like a Christopher Guest mockumentary. And I, I was the star. The one inevitably played by Catherine O'Hara.

Can I just say this now?

WHAT WAS I THINKING?!!!

One of the worst parts about going to my 20^th high school reunion was the guilt of leaving my baby at home. It was the first time the Hub and I had left her in the care of my parents, who would give her her bath, put on her PJs and read her her bedtime stories. Guilt guilt guilt. Of course she was fine with it.

I told myself I wanted to go to see my old orchestra mates, that it would be interesting to see what people looked like after so much time. Never mind that I hate crowds, and parties, never mind that the specter of Cid still hung over me as we drove in silence to the Sheraton. I might see his other friends. Those friends I'd lost touch with over the years, whom I suspected had no real desire to see anyone who reminded them of all we had lost.

It began as typically nerdy as it possibly could. We showed up on time. “I thought it was 7:20!” I groaned. “No. The car clock is fast.” Of course it is. Otherwise, we would never be on time for anything. So there. Was. No. One. There. Except of course, the organizers, who glanced at us with the glance that is reserved for those gauche enough to actually show up, you know, on time. The place was decorated with our high school's colors, orange and black. Go Tigers. The DJ blasted “Ghostbusters”. I steered the hub down the hall away from the scary room to commune with the cash gods at the ATM, then sloooowwwly meandered back. We were still the first people.

Luckily I recognized the two women working the welcome table, and they were friendly and cheerful and so happy to see everyone. “Soooo good to see you again thanks for all the hard work it looks wonderful see you later”. *gasp* I slapped on my name tag and headed for the bar. There was already an unrecognizable (except for her name tag) woman/girl there I was never more than an aquaintence to, who looked at me and said perkily “Hi! How have you been? Do you still play that violin thingy? I remember that about you” I felt my mouth twitch, and hoped the Hub's face wasn't revealing anything.

“I've been fine, you?” and what a great memory. I played the cello. The CELLO. Not that you actually give a rat's ass anyway. Hah. Not that I could remember a single bloody thing about her. I just wasn't going to put my foot in my mouth anymore that I was already destined to.

She giggled (yes, I swear to god she did) and my next attempt at conversation ended up being directed at the back of her frosty, Desperate-Housewife-Hair. I slapped a twenty on the bar, and visions of scotch and vodka danced in my head. I looked at the prices.

“Sam Adams, please.”

We found a table, after passing another with a face that was familiar, but not enough to react to her smile with more than the same smile and a nod that said: “should we talk? I recognize you, so I feel like we should talk, but for the life of me I can't think of a single thing to say to you.”

I was voted class individual my senior year. I heard later that people had wondered who to vote for, and a newcomer was given my name. “Why?”

“Just do it.” was the reply. It was a commonly accepted truth. I was, a la Pea Wee Herman, a loner. A rebel. Minus the masturbating in a Florida movie house, of course.

So as I drank my 6 dollar beer and talked with my husband, I saw that in this superlative, I was unchanged. I didn't know these people 20 years ago...I knew them even less now. I watched the room fill up, the carefully styled hair, the careful makeup, the careful clothes, all working together to fill a room of Desperate Housewives, with overweight husbands. I kept looking for Pam, for any face I could see that would actually belong to someone I'd want to talk to.

And in the mean time, The Hub and I talked through why, WHY I subject myself to all of this uncomfortable, awkward teeth grinding unpleasantness. And all I could think was, where is Pam? Where is the one woman who I can talk to who will forgive me for failing Cid? Who would tell me that she didn't blame me for what happened. Who would allow me to forgive myself. We talked about Cid in the middle of this room of strangers, and though we kept our faces to the room, no one came over to say hello, as there was no one there to say hello to. It looked as if all my orchestra buddies had wisely kept away.

There was the trio of the once super unpopular kids who were of course in reality all nice as could be, and they were almost unchanged, except the tall gangly one was taller and ganglier, the one who had been slightly overweight was now morbidly obese, and the tiny one with the thick glasses had a lighter pair and grey hair. I had a nice chat with the one I had been friendly with way back when, then went back to the bar.

More conversational attempts that ended with more hair.

After (yet another) attempt at conversation with one of the many married couples who stayed on in our hometown after I left, (are your parents still in the same house? What's your dad up to? Where are you now?) and after I finished my second beer, I said to the Hub,

“All right, one more sweep through the room, and if I don't see Pam, we're out of here.” He happily agreed.

Then, on the way out, I recognized a man who simultaneously recognized me, smiled a broad grin, and came over to talk. He was, once upon a time, the first boy to ask me out on a date...at least, his best friend did. He was too shy. We were in sixth grade. We (all three of us) went to a roller rink, where I discovered my jeans were unacceptable, and my Mom drove over to bring the one pair of pants I absolutely loathed. We skated for a while until I fell and hurt my arm. I pretended to be resting while my stomach churned and I recognized the pain as similar to the time I had broken my arm. Not quite as bad, I thought. Probably a sprain (which it turned out to be).

Now he was divorced, and happily following his dream of becoming a furniture maker. He hadn't wanted to come to the reunion. His brother had talked him into it. We chatted in a comfortable way, and I felt relieved that at least the people I had known and liked turned out to be people I respected.

Then, I saw H. I almost didn't recognize her. She was wearing makeup, for one thing, something she never wore in high school. And a red satin shirt. She had considered herself to be Cid's closest friend. She was fiercely competitive when it came to him. I felt my blood pressure rise. I was both glad to see her, and intimidated. She introduced me to her partner, who was bearing the evening with slightly glum good grace. She seemed very nice, and I congratulated them on their recent marriage. This automatically put her at ease, and it allowed H and I to begin to talk about what we were both thinking of...Cid. She had spoken to Pam. She had decided not to come.

And suddenly, I felt as though a load had lifted from my shoulders. I was free to leave. Free to shed this past forever. I might call Pam. I probably will, at some point. Just to talk. Maybe it will lead to a reunion, or not. My immediate need, to hear her say, “I don't blame you for Cid's death” was no longer so crushing. In some way, by just going into that uncomfortable den of strangers, I had forgiven my past self. My introversion, my naivete, my selfishness.

After exchanging numbers, we bid each other farewell, the Hub escorted me through the blur of familiar strangers, and we escaped.

And I never have to go to another reunion. Ever.

Mawiage.

2006-11-20T13:09:00.000-05:00

That bwessed awangement.

For the life of me I've not been able to start writing about gay marriage without thinking of Peter Cook in the Princess Bride. This undoubtedly makes me a wicked, insensitive bitch. Which is fine, since I'm already a “fag hag”. Bitch is only the next step up the ladder.

Anyway, here in merry old US of A, the fearless Bishops of the Catholic Church are going about their business making life difficult for gay people. Pope John Paul II, in 1999, spoke of ”the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts and the objective disorder of the homosexual inclination.” The church believes that heterosexual marriage is divinely ordained because of its role in procreation. On this belief stems the whole of the objection to gay marriage.

The question is, why do I, as a godless agnostic, care at all what restrictions the hierarchy of the church places on their members? After all, if you sign into a community, a religion, you should be ready to adhere to the laws of that house. It's kind of like telling your teenager, “as long as you live in this house, you will follow the rules of this house”. The thing is, if you are in any sort of enlightened household, you will have figured out that everyone in the household should have a say in what those laws are. It is not in the best interest of a family to have despotic parents. You have to be open to change.

The Catholic Church is nothing if not a despotic parent.

But there is another stink here in the state of Massachusetts, on the so called “secular” end of things, in the form of our “governor” Mitt Romney. He decided to organize his own little gathering of intolerant, homophobic (though some will vehemently deny it) citizens this past weekend to lobby for a vote: should gay people be given the same rights as heterosexual people and be allowed to marry? The premise that basic human rights should go up for a vote is a nauseating one.

So here we are, and this is where things get crazy. Because these people are not living in the same world as the rest of us. They are existing, on some fundamental level, in their own idealistic universe where there are no children without a father and a mother, where MARRIED heterosexual couples are all able and willing to have children. It is a place where everyone has the same priorities and the same relationship with ”god”. In this land there is no poverty, no hunger, no disease, and no gay people. I suppose one might call it “heaven” for them.

Here on earth, in the here and now, we have all sorts of unpleasantness. And yet, with love, we are able to transcend much of it, and be rich on our own terms. But this is irrelevant to Mitt, and his “holiness” and their followers.

Gay people cannot procreate, they say, so therefore, should be denied the right to marry. It doesn't matter that infertility, old age, disease, divorce, abuse and accidents happen to married couples, denying them the power of procreation. Gay people are “immoral”. Unlike the rest of humanity, which is a bastion of morality and uprightness. Especially Catholic priests.

With all this denial, one very important element has been shoved into the closet (besides the fact that gay parents are just as good as straight parents, and that the rate of heterosexual divorce is dismally high).

Love. Two people love each other. It starts as love often does, with infatuation, that particular turning of the stomach, and the feeling that every word the other utters is the most wonderful thing you've ever heard. It is intoxicating, exciting, romantic, and mysterious. But couples who are unable to go farther than this stage will not last, no matter what sexual orientation they have. And if they have a child in this stage, it will very likely end up with a very different sort of family than the one in that gayless heaven. Perhaps the kid will have a mom, and grandparents. Or an aunt, or uncle, or they will choose to go with their father, or they will be left completely alone and at the mercy of the state. All of these potentialities can end in a loving environment, or a broken one.

Regardless of what people are told to believe by their various heads of state and church, all people should have the right to marriage and family, and those families should have a right to equal protection from the state, regardless of whether the family is headed by two men, two women, or a man and a woman. Marriage is about committed love, that love that comes after the infatuation is over, and the reality of change reveals itself. The realization that you and your partner are not static beings, that you will both change, and are willing to see where those changes take you.

This house, this earth, holds many more ways of living than are acceptable to those determined to repress and control the fates of others. We are not living in your house, people. You are living in ours. So you'll have to live by our rules, and let. people. live.

Halloween 2006

2006-11-01T09:18:00.000-05:00

The Impling scampered around, calling “Ha-WEEN! Ha-WEEN”, and demanded readings of “Going on a Ghost Hunt” and pieces of “Ha-WEEN cake!”. There was the inevitable bumblebee costume in her closet, and a fuzzy ladybug coat for outside when we walked to a not-so-spooky Halloween party. There she communed with all the other bees and ladybugs, founded a collective of like-minded short people, and proceeded to take over the world. Resistance is futile.

"Bow before me, tiny ones"

"Yes, I am your new ruler. Do you have a problem with that? I knew you didn't"

"I guess this will work instead of a human sacrifice..."

"You want a piece of me?
You WANT A PIECE OF ME?"

Impling defends her throne.

**************
Later that night...

Grand Empress Impling and her court of peons.
We have world domination, baby.

"Damn! Now what am I going to do tomorrow night?"

The same thing we do every night...

TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!*

*for all you Pinky and the Brain fans. I know you're out there.

Fall

2006-10-18T14:26:00.000-04:00

Autumn announces it's arrival when the trees give one last defiant shout before going to sleep for the winter. Today, the smell of the fallen leaves, the rain, and the scent of woodsmoke in the air inspire cooking. Butternut squash soup. Beef stews. Apple pies, and hot cider, or just baked apples drizzled with maple syrup. Gingerbread and spice cakes and bread pudding. I end up making peanut noodles for everyone for lunch. Pie will have to wait till the weekend.

But oh, do we we have the apples! On one of the last warm days of the year, we tucked the Impling into her car seat with a change of clothes, and left for greener pastures. I haven't been to an orchard since I was a child, and neither had the Hub. So we'd conveniently forgotton about things like traffic jams on narrow country roads, gigantic fields converted into parking lots, and lines of people waiting for hayrides, cider donuts, and the women's bathroom. But we gritted our teeth, and ran the gauntlet of the ticket lines, and emerged on the other side with apple bags and a map to the hedge maze and petting zoo. We crossed the road with our fellow apple pickers, and spread out so that in a matter of moments, we didn't see many people at all, but heard their voices, convivial and comfortable, through the foliage. Time seemed to slow down in the maze of the orchard. We walked on and on, searching for the trees that still bore fruit, until finally, on a steep slope overlooking scarlet and gold tipped forests, we found them.

There was the soft snap of the apples as they came free from their branches, the round weight as they settled in our hands, then the incredible crisp crunch of a just-picked Cortland, it's juice light and tart and sweet.

The Impling lounged on the slope beneath the fruit trees, happily absorbed in fitting as much apple in her mouth as was physically possible. The Impling, as you can see, has many apple pies and dumplings and crisps and crumbles in her future.

******************************

We've also been tramping around the Arnold Arboretum for the past three Sundays. There, we peacefully coexist with fellow leaf peepers, fall-frisky dogs, and grimly exercising joggers. The lawns are still thick and lush and you would have to be seriously inhibited to not fling yourself down on it for a good roll, dog or not.

Here is a place to listen to the wind in the leaves and your
feet in the leaves. We walked though gardens of climbing plants and looked at bonsai that were started hundreds of years ago. We climbed hills and played peekaboo and watched the longs shadows fall over the wood. We breathed deeply and let the week go.

*****************************

Since fall is my favorite time of year, of course a little interior decorating is an order. Until I can summon enough time and brain cells to figure out how to get this site to look the way I want, I'll have to rely on the the template gods for fall colors. My quest for a jack-o-lantern background continues, though. And of course, with Halloween approaching, I had to change my icon per her Imperious Majesty's photo-op of the moment.

Could you refuse a command that looked like this? Didn't think so.

Once upon a time...

2006-10-16T15:23:00.000-04:00

The Hub and I celebrated our 9^th anniversary yesterday. Actually, I met K about 4 years before we got our stamped piece of paper declaring us “legal”. I worked at Borders, and he worked at a white collar employment agency. He gave the Myers Briggs test to countless laid off VP's while I dealt with my caffeine addiction and became a guru of the children's section, the arts and crafts section, the psych section, and finally the history section, all the while up to my eyeballs in the first and probably last union drive I will ever be a part of.

Borders. If anyone has ever worked there, you know the drama. The incestuous relationships, the hierarchy of workers, the crossover of the private life into the business life. But as this is the story of the night K and I met, I'll focus on the most important aspects of this existence.

First off, everyone in Philadelphia is somehow connected to everyone else. Like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Within our group, K had grown up with one of the managers “Brad” and had briefly dated another manager“Chris”, who had known Brad for some time. Brad was a man with major issues with women, which is a nice way of saying he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. Chris was pleasant enough on the surface, but once you got under that gloss, she was rather, well, CRAZY. In a nice way, though. Kind of.

For my part, I generally hung out with fellow booksellers: “Becca”, an artist who painted fantastic images on abandoned doors and windows she would find around town; “Samantha” a women's history/poli-sci student who was openly bi; and “Laura” an insecure, brave girl who was saving to get into school and loved her cat, “Patches”. There were many more, but these are the characters important to this narrative.

Here's the setting: Brad was going “steady” with another bookseller who shall remain nameless. Becca was going out with Samantha. Chris had gone out months ago with K, who saw that once as enough, and they parted on friendly terms. I was recently liberated from my schizophrenic boyfriend. Laura had just moved into a women's boarding house that didn't allow pets, and Patches was staying with Brad for the time being. Got that? Good.

Like all students/booksellers we had our after hours crowd that rotated around various bars...Doobies, Oscars, Fergies, Tangiers. Rolling Rock was our beer of necessity, closely followed by Black & Tan. For the uninitiated, this is generally half Guiness stout, half pale ale (though we generally swilled Yuengling) and was the cheapest way of getting dark beer down our gullets.

It was Chris's birthday, and Brad decided to throw her a party. Which basically involved telling everyone to meet at 9:30 at Oscars. Oscars is one of those bars perpetually suspended in time...brick walls, vinyl topped bar stools, the smell of 40 years of Marlboros and Camels mixed with grease, beer and Jack Daniels. Blue collar and unapologetic, our crowd felt right at home.

I settled in with my friends at a table with a couple pitchers of Black & Tan. I was in a tired, relaxed mood. I'd just finished my senior work a few days prior, and now regaled my friends with the news of the fist fight that erupted over a girl while we hung our installations. Blood and art, forever entwined.

While we laughed and talked, a man with delightful blue eyes and an engaging, interested face sat down in the chair across from me and joined our group, and in that marvelous, organic arc of talking, we eventually found ourselves speaking more with each other. We talked of art, and myth, fairy tales, folklore and illustration. It was one of those conversations that invites more and more exploration, and questions. We talked late into the night, and K said he would lend me a book he had mentioned. Eventually he said goodnight and left. I took off with my friends a bit later, excited and energized.

The next morning, I met Sam and Becca in the back room of Borders to unpack and sort. We were all in various stages of hangover, but Sam's eyes were puffy, like she hadn't really slept, and she was still a bit drunk. We realized this when she lifted up her skirt to show us a nasty scrape about six inches long across her upper thigh. How had it happened? The answer was evasive, and we both knew she was lying.

The story emerged over the next few days. K added missing pieces later.

Sam and Brad had gone back to Brad's place in the small hours of the morning, where they sat on the floor, getting more and more friendly and naked. And right in the middle of all the hot, steamy, drunken foreplay, Patches went berserk.

Have you ever heard a cat scream? Seen one on the attack like they've been possessed by Jack the Ripper in kitty form? This was Patches. She flew at Sam first, claws bared, and for a while, it was all flailing limbs, paws and blood, until Brad got lucky and punched the cat in the face. Then it sat down, licked it's paw and began to wash it's face. It looked at them every so often as if to say, “what' the fuck's up with YOU? I'm not doing anything.”

The mood, was, of course, broken. Sam left as soon as she could fumble into her jeans and Brad collapsed into bed in a drunken stupor after throwing the cat in the bathroom.

So while Sam showed us her scar the next morning, Brad realized upon waking that he was mighty uncomfortable. He lifted his sheets, and then left for the hospital.

The nurse who saw him brought up his chart, took one look and started to laugh.

You know that kind of laugh that says “I'm with you...we're all in this together”?

It wasn't that kind of laugh.

Then he lifted up the sheet to look at Brad, paled, said:
“Sweet Jesus I need to get a doctor” and ran from the room.

Patches had ripped a hole about the size of a quarter in Brad's testes, and the flap of torn skin hung down like a little bloody flag.

Turns out the only one who got some that night was the cat.

I'll leave the immediate aftermath of the various relationships to your powers of deduction. Patches went to live out in the country with people who didn't mind psychotic cats.

K and I wouldn't see each other again for almost 6 months, but true to his word, he did leave off the book a couple of weeks later with his phone number on a Calvin & Hobbes strip tucked in the leaves. I went to Japan, K went to the Netherlands, and when we met later that year for coffee, that was it. The start of a long, and wonderful adventure. To be continued...

*names changed to protect the not-so-innocent

Reunion

2006-10-07T15:06:00.000-04:00

My 20th High School reunion, to be precise. I wondered at first whether I would actually bother to go. It's not like I have warm, fuzzy memories from that time of my life. I had some good friends. We had some fun. But the golden years they were not.

But now that it is only a few months away, I feel like I want to go. I'm curious. How strange will it be to talk with people I only remember through the haze of 20 years and the warped viewpoint of an adolescent? I know that in some ways, I am not the same person I was. Will I regress? Will it be just as impossible to associate with these people as it used to be?

I know it won't, mainly because I've grown up enough to have a sense of humor about myself.
I now know what my shit is, so I'm not fooled when others try to hoist their shit on me.

But there is one other thing.

Cid won't be there.
Cid the artist, the actor, the architect, the potter, the dancer. Cid of the amazing black curls that at one point fell to his waist. Cid who could do anything he put his mind to.

We went through high school together, with a small group of artistically inclined outcasts. Within this group I was considered to be "off center". In a good way, I was assured. I was laid back, I knew how to listen. Nothing ever seemed to get on my nerves (how little we all knew). Cid was the one everyone wanted to be close to. He was funny and engaging, loyal, sympathetic, and gentle. He worked hard to help support his mother and sisters, who had all been abandoned by their father.

I wish I remembered more of that time...bits and pieces come back. Speeding down a back country road in his Mom's car; going into Boston for First Night and drinking an illegal bottle of Jim Beam to keep warm; going into high end boutiques on Newbury Street with an attitude, and Cid egging me on to try on a $300 dollar rubber dress (which looked fierce, though it felt like I was wearing an inner tube); eating lunches on the catwalk of the auditorium; watching him from the pit as he danced through various high school musicals; going together to the senior prom for the simple reason that we weren't dating, and knew each other well enough to know that we would never date. We just wanted to have fun. We could relax and be ourselves together.

After we graduated, my little group of pals gave me a bon voyage party of Chinese takeout and fuzzy navals on the floor of Cid's bedroom. I'd saved the money I'd earned working throughout junior high and high school, and since I didn't know at that point what the next step was (my grades were mediocre enough to keep me from any real effort towards college) I went to Europe.

For five months, I travelled around with my Eurail and Youth Hostel passes, and somewhere in the middle of the Mediteranean, discovered that I wanted to study art.

Cid had taken a year for himself as well, so when we hooked up again, he told me about the University he was going to. Then he told me to apply. Didn't just tell me...hounded me. When I was accepted, he was the first person I called.

That fall, we moved down to Philly, and after the chaos of moving in and meeting the strangers we'd be living with for the next two semesters, I went to his room. His room mate was out, and we were alone. We sprawled out, exhausted, on the floor and smiled at each other. There was a short, comfortable silence. Then:
"There's something I've wanted to tell you for a long time," he said. "I'm gay. You're the first person I've told."

How special that was to me. How precious that confidence. In that one moment we were closer than we had ever been before. Through the hugs and the grins and the wet eyes, we settled into our new life.

Art school is (in the words of a psychiatrist that provided services for our school and Thomas Jefferson University), as far as workload is concerned, just as difficult as med school. Freshman year had a tremendous dropout rate, mostly for those kids foolish enough to think art school was some sort of free ride to employment. Cid and I stuck it out, found dives we liked, regularly ate together, scandalized the younger students with our dirty dancing (because we could), took crazy 3 in the morning walks to the Rodin museum, to the waterfront, to the Schuykill. We were overconfident and irresponsible. We reveled in our immortality.

And we were closer friends than ever. One afternoon as we ate a quick lunch at Sababba, over our falafel, out of the blue, he said "You know, if I ever were to get married, it would have to be you. I can't seem to get along with anyone else quite as well. Nothing seems to bother you." Those words again. At that point, I actually believed them myself. We sardonically laughed over the impossibility of it all.

During our second year, we found an apartment together with a few other students, and Cid settled down to study architecture, and I decided to go for illustration, as the anatomy and drawing courses were superior to the painting department's. It was a hard year. Cid was unhappy and disillusioned with the architecture department, and after some painful soul searching, and difficult interactions with his family, dropped it and entered the dance department. He found his bliss.

The third year, we rented an apartment together. I earned a job a Borders, and started working full time along with my classes. Cid had gone through a few relationships during the second year but nothing like what happened this year. This year it was F. Wonderful, funny, sardonic, he came comfortably into our lives. Before half a year was over, Cid had moved in with him. I missed not having him around. Suddenly, I was truly single. My friend had found someone who could give what I could not.

Since I could not afford the apartment on my own, and it wasn't fair to ask Cid to keep paying for rent, he helped me find a place with a friend of his for the remainder of the year. I saw less and less of Cid, but the intense workload of school and my job distracted me. I dated, halfheartedly at first, then fell for *gasp* my philosophy professor. I moved in with him not long after that. So went the third year.

And with the fourth year, so went the philosophy professor. It was a mutual, friendly parting. We both new the spark was out. I moved back with Cid's (now mine as well) friend. By graduation, I'd found a small garrett room with a tiny bath that would be home for the next couple of years.

The year of graduation was a tremendous year of change. I dated a fellow I'd known throughout the 4 years of school and who I'd always had a crush on. It ended in a spectacular tempest of insanity...he discovered he was schizophrenic. I now saw Cid rarely. I alternately made excuses (he was in a relationship now that had to take precedence over friendship), and blamed myself (what I had done to drive him away)?

A year after graduation, I was living with my future Hub about a block away from Cid and F. We saw them occasionally together, and I eventually found myself hanging more with F than with Cid. We talked over how distant we had become, and F confided that Cid was having problems with depression, and had suggested more than once to him to talk to me.

One day, I got a call from an old classmate from high school, whom I hadn't seen since a jaunt to NYC a few years back to see "The Phantom of the Opera" with a posse that included Cid. I was delighted to hear her voice. At first. I still can't remember how the call proceeded, just that I was surpised to discover she was in Philly, and even more surprised that she was over at Cid and F's place. Then she said:

"Cid is dead."

I can't even remember if these were her exact words. I can't remember if she told me over the phone that he had killed himself. There is a space of time that collapsed in on itself. One moment I was in my kitchen, the breath knocked out of me, the next I was in his apartment, staring at the sunlight on the walls, surrounded by people I hadn't seen in years, yet it seemed no time had passed. And there was F. by himself. We looked at the beam where F had found Cid hanging. We waited.

It was his father who brought Cid back. His father who few of us had seen, and all of us blamed. He walked in and through the sunlight to a table where he placed a small white box.
Cid.
After that there is nothing in my memory of leaving accept hugging F. There is only the memory of that white box, and the silence, and the smell of the sunlight that fell on it all.

I wish that was it. I wish that I could have a simple clear rage towards Cid for what he did. But I can't, because somewhere along the way, I discovered that Cid had been abusing F. Badly. And that he had tried and tried to get help, and nothing did help. He never talked to me. I never knew. I don't even know if I would have been able to help. I know (or I like to believe) that he thought he was protecting F. Unconsciously or consciously, he was punishing us all. Was he protecting me with his silence? Or was he in so much enraged pain he just gave up?

He left us in despair and anger and frustration. It's been over 10 years, and the pain is dull now, but still with me. Sometimes I dream he is still alive. Once I was positive I saw him walking down the street in Philly, and it took me a moment to remember. It took me a while to get over that moment.

What would I say to him if we met again? What will I say when I see my friends at our reunion who were there in that room, waiting together? Will I cry, as I want to cry now, for all we lost? For all I lost. Time. Opportunity. Life. Here is my daughter, Cid. Where are you? What do you think of her? Don't you see how miraculous she is? How miraculous it all is?

Why didn't you see?

How I wish you could.