la femme follette

hard left

I bought "peach seconds" at the farm market to use for jam, then Mari put them where I could not find them.  By the time I got back round to them, all I had time for was chucking the lot into the pot without peeling or stoning.  I covered it and came back later to fish the pits from the softened fruit before I mashed it and added sugar.  I mostly post this for Marsha and Santos, the beauties, who I am sure would have to lie down & fan themselves if they saw this kind of sluttiness in real life.  I hate everything about cooking, its sisyphean mandate once the children came along.  People who eat breakfast twice!  Mais non!

When they were very young, I fell for the heartwarming promise of a wooden play kitchen.  A little stove with a little rangetop, a little sink, and a cupboard underneath.  The sink cabinet had lost whatever insert served as the sink, and I replaced it with a wicker basket, mashing it in there to fit.  The little oven had two racks which slid out, and long hours were spent with them "baking cakes" with a wooden birthday cake they had, the triangular pieces of which fit together with velcro tabs on the sides. 

I had an idea when I bought it that we would spend hours at leisurely, loving, enriching play, the three of us.  I would cheerfully exclaim over the acorn-soupy sweat of their teensy brows and feign a hearty appetite for invisible curries.  I did not.  I never would.  I tried so hard to get myself interested.  Over the years, I bought the wee wooden eggs from Haba, the teensy & brilliant wooden teabags, the little red radishes with the teeny felt leaves, all of it in the hopes that the very small elvishness of it all would lure me into their parallel play, then that one day I would put little aprons on them and let them "help" in the kitchen, that by the time they were 6 & 8, they would be industrious scullery maids.

No, no, and no.  I just could not bring myself to get involved.  The children could play in their pretend kitchen for hours and hours, never once disturbing me, setting up every doll and softie we own round the table they would spread with the cloth I gave them, little plates from IKEA, more little cups, saucers, teensy teapots from Chinatown.  They would serve each other and serve the dolls, delighted and busy and coöperating and quiet.  I would thank the elvish carpenters of the world and do the crossword, or work through a particularly tricky bit of knitting, or sneak outside to the front porch and sit quietly, wishing with my pores that I still smoked, inviting all the free nicotine molecules in the secondhand smoke exhaled round the world to come & penetrate me.

I wanted to be sad early in the summer when they told me they wanted us to take it from their playroom, that it took up space they could be using for train-play construction and a comfier chair.  I was sad, for a while.  I was sad they had grown out of it and I had never really fulfilled the culture's seductive promise of invisible food and its effect on our family's stability.  I felt like a terrible failure, like a door had closed and who knew what else would go on in that room now -- I had never been in it. 

Then I realized that I just really, really hate cooking.  Especially for a couple of people who are so complainy and resistant about the whole process.  Why would I want to pretend-cook with them?  No one explains before children that not only is it necessary to cook about 27 meals a week, but that also, the people for whom so many calories are produced cannot stand to have maternal attention divided from them, but then will turn against the mother like vipers when they get too hungry, so really, one is pretty much fucked.  No way was I ever going to step into a pretend kitchen with these little children.  No way.  It makes so much sense, but it still leaves me sad.  Less blameful of my negligent parenting, but sad.   

The little wooden play kitchen represents, to me, so much of being a mother.  There is this obligation and this yearning and this resentfulness and then, later, briefly (one hopes) a kind of nostalgia and regret, but then, after a fashion, the realization that it is just not possible to be like the photos printed in soy inks in the magazines, from the backs of which one can purchase little wooden play kitchens and little teensy wooden bunches of grapes.  Then the smacking of the forehead -- why did I ever believe in that horseshit? 

I think the believing is important, that this belief in a superstructure of unattainable horseshit has borne me aloft when the mothering gets a little grim-- to believe that This [play kitchen] will be our salvation.  That we will hold it up and make excellent memories.  And the truth is:  Garçon & Fillette have excellent memories of the play kitchen; they just are not memories that feature me.  Or maybe they will -- maybe they will say later, Remember how Femme used to let us just play with that play kitchen for hours and hours?  Look, I found the tiny radishes up in the attic!  Maybe somehow, they will see the things I did in the background, laud my technical work, appreciate my wariness and unwillingness to live vicariously through them.  I cannot know.  I may never. 

I have a few friends who are having babies this last third of the year, and I am just not excited for them.  I feel like I have seen through so many promises and in some ways, there are just no more.  Friends with grownup children, given permission to speak frankly, have assured me that from now on, all I have to look forward to is a. what we have and b. when they can be left alone, then c.  when they leave.  That is all?  Plus, am I really running out of time to do it right? 

I think that if I were a real friend, I would get these gals each a dram of arsenic, out of love, like Friar Lawrence.  They could act now, decisively, save themselves the trouble of this grim reality.  I have such a tendency to be so wistful, and this world for me with children is so filled with longing.

blind faith

Garçon started guitar lessons last week and he is so excited.  He has a half-size, full-power guitar I bought on a whim from old Redford's Sundance Catalog.  I started to give it to him as a birthday gift, but then realized the child had not actually ever expressed an interest in having one.  So, months and months ago I stuck it under the marital bed and quite forgot about it, actually, until one day Mari mentioned that Garçon had been under our bed rooting around for something, found it, and was quite interested. 

Our son is interested in virtually nothing besides comics, so I seized upon the chance.  I had a lead on a guitar instructor, and then after I called him, coyly asked Garçon what he thought about having a go at the instrument.  Triple-x excitement is what he thought, so I forged ahead and now he can play "Old McDonald!"  Even more exciting:  I can play it, too!

Garçon was stupefied by my virtuosity -- Mommy, how can you play it, too? -- I told him it was because Jonas told me, that I have to know something, that having a child who is taking music lessons means I have to be willing to oversee a daily music practice.  (It is so not hard.  Kowalski and Alex have been so right about the guitar-y over-thinking I was doing)  Garçon did not believe me -- Did you play the guitar when you were a girl?  I told him I had never.  He considered me, then said, with resolve and great suspicion -- You used your psychic powers to get the right notes, didn't you?

Normal children believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy.  Mine do also, but additionally believe that I have psychic powers.  I may be the teensiest bit responsible for this, Mari the balance.  I think it all started last year during Hanukkah when they did not see me light the candles, even though I was standing right there, holding a book of matches, and so when Garçon looked up and gasped How did the candles get lighted?  Mari and I could not resist telling him it was me, something between my alleged telekinesis and heat vision.  Heat vision.  Children are kind of gullible, man.  Heat vision.

I did not expect the ruse to last the night, but it persists today.  It has been lent credence by such stupefying elements of modern technology such as the clock-radio alarm ("Mommy?  Did you turn on the radio with your mind?") as well as the general nimble prognostication of which all mothers avail themselves.  To wit, last month or so -- during his obsessive seed-starter phase -- Garçon was on the porch with Mari and Fillette, chewing busily at an apple when I stormed out onto the porch and demanded he relinquish the fruit, for I knew he was just going to eat at it until he could work out a seed and then toss the rest into the compost heap. 

He looked busted, then defiant, then turned over the apple with no small amount of awe -- How did you know that?  I could have easily said, I have never ever seen you willingly eat an apple, child, or because you did the exact same thing yesterday, son!   But instead I postured in the best omniscient mom drag I have and haughtily told him I could read his mind.  He sulked for two days:  "But how?  How can you read my mind?"

Also, they watched Escape to Witch Mountain in the spring, became convinced they both had untapped congenital psychic powers, and if only, if only they could figure out how to harness them, they would be so awesome!  There was a lot of them sitting around, trying to move things with their relentless staring, begging me to just give them a hint!  Please! 

They will one day realize it is totally not real.  I am a little shocked it has gone this long:  they are generally pretty sharp kids.  On the other hand, I tend to say things in a dry way that fails to spell out the word bullshit.  Yesterday, Fillette asked me why we could not have Easter and without pausing plus with great sincerity and finality I said, "Because we don't eat ham."  She nodded sadly and went back to her reading of whatever sinister little Christian propaganda pamphlet she had. 

I do not feel bad at all.  They are lusty little practical jokers themselves.  We are having next month a Secret September Surprise Day that they cooked up secretly with me last weekend.  What it means is all of the fun of April Fool's Day, with none of the calendrical heads-up.  I have not decided if I will tell Mari ahead of time or not.  For all I know, they have recruited him to stage one against me, like the gift of the prankstering magi.  Psychic powers would sure come in handy around here.   

illustrative dissonance

Inspired by Algren's excellent hard-bodied example, I joined the fancy society matrons' gym 10 or so days ago.  I think that while I knew that one could get it back after letting it go, I was mostly uninspired by the prospect.  I used to spend hours every day doing something difficult and fisty -- snowshoeing, volleyball, arm-wrestling, running --  I was training for a triathlon and beginning to trail run when I got pregnant with Garçon.  Since that first pregnancy, I have in the main been floundering along with a no-frills 4-7 hours of cardio for maintenance.  Athletica Dullsville.  Something about realizing that it could be had even when one had never really had it?  This made an impression on me and I may have vowed to get it back. 

Now -- after a week of an assortment of kendo, boxing, swimming laps, and braving Washington's Crossing twice on the rowing machine, plus a Strength! & Agility! class that featured mightily a sadist's exploration of the medicine ball -- it hurts my forearms to type.  It hurts to do everything, really.  I fall dead drowning in slumber at about 9 every night, without valerian, without Sominex.  This rarely happens to me, and will cease when I acclimate, but for now, I am in love with it. 

Sunday afternoon, I came home from 45 minutes in the pool -- during which I was crushed to find out that I can only crank through 100o meters as fast as I did when I was 13, when I didn't really know how to swim at all (it was quite sobering) -- and asked Fillette to walk on my back for a few minutes.  She did, then I fell asleep right where I was, lying on her yoga mat on top of the hardwood floor, in the middle of the living room.  In the middle of the day.   

Every morning for the past 6, when the alarm goes at 5 so that I can return to the fancy society matrons' gym, I stare balefully at it.  I spend a lot of time mumbling a little phrase Kowalksi used to cajole me with back in the day, when I was 22 and having something like a nervous meltdown, when he loved me in spite of it, not because of it -- the only easy day was yesterday.  Apparently, this is what the SEALs provide in the way of encouragement.  I am typically Nietzschean in my suck-it-up philosophies, but the SEALs are working for me.  I think it is because of all the stick-fighting and punching. 

My boxing class was mortifying.  I found out that I can only manage FIVE pushups, FIVE.  There was a lot of jumping rope and jumping jacks, jumping, jumping, jumping, and because of years of varied occupations falling under the rubric of pink-collar labor that involved the wearing of high heels, I am somewhat permanently protective of my knees.  Then there was a lot of running back and forth in the hallway lining the squash courts in a terrible relay, which fared better for me than the jumping.  There was not much time spent on the hitting, not nearly as much as I would have liked, and while it is true that the people in the class outran me, I could totally kick their asses once they caught me.  One cannot win in a fight if they don't stand back + keep up their guard.  Come on.  Five pushups is weak though.  I look forward to the day I can do six.  I will come home all full of myself for Mari and probably challenge him to arm-wrestling and lose. 

Lapsang Souchong tea, where have you been all of my life?  I don't even care that you smell like a cigar's fart when brewing.   I have Alex -- who was brilliantly available right at the right time in my grocery shopping -- to thank for this excellent new addition to my life.  I love it!  It has this excellent fat-bottomed roundness that I have not been able to get from a black tea without using milk.  Soon, it may have the only fat bottom in the house.

queen of the 70s

At the beginning of July, Mari and I spent a day cutting a hole in our the wall between our bedroom and the walk-in closet of the adjoining room.  Restoring a doorway, actually.  Our house is over 100 years old, but was "updated" by a developer about 7 years ago and I spend a lot of time walking around frowning and complaining about how if one is going to fool around with 100yo architecture, one  had better think a long time about it. 

In houses built before air conditioning and zoned heating, a lot of thought was given to air flow.  One cannot just build a wall where there never was one and expect it to all work out.  It has always been stuffy and airless in our bedroom, in spite of having two eight-foot tall windows in there.  It took us 3 years to figure out what the problem was.  Ever since then, we have been talking about removing the patch in the wall and reframing it, reseating the closet on the other side, yayaya. 

It was really, really hot in the beginning of July, night and day, so I woke up one day, completely deranged, more insomniac-suffering than usual, and said that today was the day that Mari would cut through the silhouette of the seam on our bedroom wall or I would take care of it myself with a sledgehammer. 

While the children were at camp we took everything out of the closet, moved everything out of the bedroom.  Mari cut a big, drywall-y hole in the wall, dust was all over the second floor, just everywhere.  I was downstairs cooking eggplants and then later, when everyone was all unshowered and covered in drywall dust and blood and olive oil, the "Mommy Police" came to our door.  It is necessary that one think of this term a tad euphemistically.

I do not want to spend too much time on the visit from the "Mommy Police," but they were called because of a counterfeit concern propped up mostly on the vindictiveness of Old Ms Officious + Bitchy Neighbor.  I could not actually believe they came over -- what with their incredibly busy schedules -- to check up on an allegation of Too Much Hollering (hollering what?  Get down in the dungeon??  Hurry, so I can drink gin and turn tricks??  I am from  Chicago.  We are a hollering lot.  I cannot help it, I am loud.) and Physical Restraint.  Physical restraint, really?  Ropes and latex tubing?  No.  Mommy wishes, and not for the little darlings.  Old Ms O+BN reported normal grabbing & squeezing of an oppositional + defiant + fisty 5-, 6-, 7-, then 8-year-old boy.

The whole thing irritated me.  Not because Old Ms O+BN called the Mommy Police, not really.  If someone really believes children are being mistreated, then it is their moral obligation to get involved.  (Although if anyone thinks my children are mistreated, they probably need to get out more + stop watching that kind of cinematic horseshit where everything school-age children do & say is precious & wise & important.  Maybe spend an hour or two at the local Walmart.) because it was bullshit.  It is bullshit because she has never had a conversation with my children, ever, even though they are out in the street long hours playing & drawing with sidewalk chalk and also home all day long, in the main. 

It is furthermore extra triple-plus bullshit because the one neighbor who is a friend and knows us well and will sometimes babysit the children for us is a social worker.   Also, Old Ms O+BN's very next-door neighbor.  But Old Ms O+BN never dropped by with a word for her.  Or, me, for that matter!  What about me?  What about going over and saying, "Hey, you hollerer, why don't you let those kids come on over and weed my garden?"  Ms O+BN would never do that because something so sensible is the provenance of reasonable people and also, MS O+BN does not have children (nor spouse!  nor love interest!) and perfect mothering ideals are the exclusive provenance of the childless since they have all the fucking time in the world to polish them and admire their vainglorious idiocy.   

The Mommy Police Officer was very kind & professional & thorough.  When the Mommy Police Officer comes to your house -- even if it is covered in dust & you in blood and olive oil & your husband in bits of drywall all over and everything you never unpacked is out of the closet and piled up in the hallway between the second and third floors -- it is probably a good idea to smile widely and invite her right in.  Apologize for your douchebag neighbor, then assure her that you know she has forms to fill out and get to work.  She will feel torn between your candor and your obvious busyness plus her necessary business and then you must smile still more sincerely + encouragingly as befits the daughter of the real police, and insist that she take her time doing her job and that you will love to help.

She will ask a number of questions about the children's and the family's administrative associations -- school, pediatricians, organizations -- and ask you to sign off on her checking with the physician to confirm the children receive adequate care when required.  It does not have to be a medical doctor, presumably it can be a shaman or a naturopath, as long as the children have never been neglected according to that paradigm.  There will be a lot of rooting around through one's filofax for numbers one never needs.  Then, she will ask to be taken on a tour of the house: the kitchen to establish that the stove, water heater, and refrigerator, are in good repair and that the last is appropriately stocked with provisions; the rest of the house to look for evidence of the children's activities and to make sure they do not sleep on a little bed of nails in the basement.

By then, the children will have been fetched from camp by a cleaned-up co-parent and then she will interview them alone.  She will ask if they have ever been harmed at your hand, if, how, and by what method & frequency they are punished, and that is all.  Then she leaves.  The Mommy Police are supposed to visit two times before they can clear a case, but she already called me and pretty much said, "You are not my priority because I have real work to do, so see you for this second visit sometime in 2010."   

So, that.  Forget about all that, it just spilled out because the point is: the timing of it was so excellent!  Of course, of course, the Mommy Police have never even driven past my house all the other 25,000 days of parenting that it was clean & tidy and I was beatific & well-groomed.  No, she came by on the day we were doing demolition in 98-degree heat.  Awesome!  More awesome, our house is now -- as constructed -- an excellent thermodynamo!  During this last heat wave, it was hardly above 83 inside and when the weather broke last night, our relief was instantaneous!  No waiting till 2010 or when they turn 18!      

bus-a-looey

The most tragic thing about Fish Hospice was that from Day One, Fish was bent in half like a comma.  But, gosh!  Was he active & wriggly!

We spent the weekend with children, downed by stomach virus.  It was peaceful.  After a spew- heavy morning Saturday, manned by Mari (because that bullshit about how moms get used to cleaning up vomit is bullshit because I am a person for whom mere sounds induce nausea) both children spent the rest of the weekend accidentally passed out around the house.

I knitted a tea cozy and watched the first season of Weeds.  I think episode 9 took my breath away.

Today I had harrowing downtown errands of the sort requiring business attire and garage parking.

Last Sunday, while our fish was dying, our black swallowtail butterfly emerged from its cocoon.  Her name was Clubby. 

The tomatoes are coming now -- Rose de Berne is too top-notey, Prudent's Purple too boutique-nancy; Black Krim is perfect in its capital-T tomato explosion but with a big round finish that lasts longer than the Brandywine/Prudent's Purple's preciousness.  Black Krim is not ripening evenly for me, however.  And my chief complaint about the Brandywines and their ilk is that I do not need an 8-foot tomato plant that is bending in half with more than a half-dozen clusters of 3 and 4 tomatoes weighing 8 or 10 ounces each.    A woman walking her dog last week told me the squirrels love green tomatoes, but we have too many cats on the ground here.  For now. 

pez dispensed

This has been a long week full of endless challenge and since last night I have been weeping like the little girl who floods the house with tears in the Mrs Piggle Wiggle stories.  First we had Fish Deathbed, because of course Garçon selected the Grigori Rasputin of fish from the pet store.

The fish languished in there like Terri Schiavo, waving his fins and scooting along the gravel, alive & fading, until he starved to death.  Every morning and every evening, we would go to the bowl, ready with the fishnet and he would still be in there, waving his fins around.  Jesus Christ Almighty, I can explain a lot of things to my children, but I did not feel ready for euthanasia unit.  So, there was nothing to do but wait.  We just all kept going in there -- for six days -- and telling him little stories about how he was a nice fish and we hoped he was comfortable.  Fish fucking hospice, but it is our first death and it seems to have gone well.  After he bobbed to the surface we buried him in the front yard by the zinnias. 

A bunch of other stuff happened -- bad news, car trouble, ill health -- and really under what feels like the weight of it and in the absence of any reason to enumerate and no one to blame, all I am able to do is weep and weep.  Also, the children's last day of camp is today, which might be something to be sad about, which makes me sadder, because don't I love my children anymore?  The naturally sunny gal I try to be says Well, at least we are alive.  I will cling to that.  Right now, I need to listen to Nirvana and have a bracing cup of tea.  O, Wild Turkey, how I long for your scalding, choking, gasoline gulp right now!

RIP, Blackspot.  You lived longer than any of us wagered you could.   

la pomme

I love that MTA programmed their metrocard entrance readout guy* to say something like, "OK 1 GO TRANSFER!" when a rider uses the metrocard to, er, transfer.  Why I love it, I cannot say.  I am usually quite negative about the subway in this kind of heat, mostly because after only a few minutes waiting four stories below the pavement, I forget all about the association of going down to the root cellar and remember that hell is underground.  I was required to be in use of it more than I wished today because I had to cut across town faster than I could at the surface (Midtown, boo).  Later on I had a brilliant! realization! that I should go get my eyebrows done and so then scrambling on the R, etc plus fooling around in Soho until it was time to go back to Midtown and hie it home and that meant I had to go scrambling via the old subway yet again.

Today on the bus, a lady sat next to me, asked me what I was knitting and then the next thing I knew, I was drawing a map of Little Italy + Chinatown for her, filling in the subway stops that would get her back to Midtown and little points of interest -- cannoli outfits, dumpling shoppes, counterfeit handbag holdouts, and the like.  At lunch, old hardbody Algren of the 16-inch biceps asked how "what are you knitting" led to all that, and I did not actually have an answer.  She was elderly and she and her husband were visiting NYC for the first time.  Then, she coyly asked me if I knew anything about Chinatown.  I felt like she had been delivered to me, because O, BOY DO I EVER.   

I spent my day not in Chinatown, and without a map, mostly cooling my heels waiting on the man who cuts my hair to pull his schedule out of the fire.  It is mostly fine with me if he is running late, because if I am in Manhattan, I am off the clock, really, but I usually make plans with people who are having their real lives, and it is just not OK.  I wanted to say something, but then he gave me jauntiest, rumpliest haircut and I could not be critical of him at all.  He is always on the verge of leaving the salon, so it always asking me to refresh his records of how to contact me, every time forgetting that I totally have numbers for his cell phone and landline.  Is he going to leave the salon and leave town?  I mean.

Tonight, as I was leaving town, I was coming up from the subway (unfortunately) in Times Square and two young women-- one blonde, one brunette -- were following behind a man who was edging his way away from them, slyly, shiftily.  The blonde was calling out in a forced-normal kind of voice, "Call the police, call the police."  They walked by while I was still getting my surface bearings, and continued, the three of them, walking west, with this kind of weird, none-of-us-are-panicking countenance. 

I think the situation was that the dude, who was not with them, had boldly taken a shopping bag from the blonde (containing a counterfeit handbag, I am almost certain), and was walking off with it.  When the women started protesting in clear and reasonable tones, the culprit chose not to run, but deride their vague allegations while sidling off.  In the meantime, I was squinting at the sun and neon and shaking off the dreadful subterranean wilting, then they were mostly gone and I went in an easterly direction to get to the corner and start downtown.   

At the same time as I was walking to the corner, I noticed that everyone standing around was on their cell phones, yakking to the police, as requested.  God love New Yorkers.  They are the nicest people on earth.   Waiting at the light on 7th Ave, I found myself somehow now standing next to the brunette, while the blonde was on her own cell phone, describing the guy to them in a very time-consuming manner.  I could not figure out why they were pacing the block, while in the street, but when the brunette pointed to the man from the sidewalk, where he was in the street -- where were the cars on 41st St? -- and said, again, "Call the police."  I said to her, softly, "Honey, if you want someone to stop him, just say so."

She looked at me, and then looked back into the crowd and timidly asked if someone would stop him.  I told her she had to be louder. She looked at me again, and I shrugged and gestured toward the man, easing downtown inch by inch, with a bag of something the women had implied was theirs. She looked again toward him, toward the crowd, and called out quite clearly, Someone stop that man.  The dude had not a chance to take another step before he was detained by three helpful male New Yorkers** at once.  I was not at all surprised at the result, but god it is so satisfying to see all that action in action!  Spectacular! 

*Even if I knew the technical term, I would still call it that, surely.

**There is also v real chance that they were Yankees or Midwesterners on vacation, it was Times Square, after all.

 

homegirl

While I was out yesterday making unfortunate small talk with people I used to think were not morons, I discovered that a number of individuals learned a little something from the lead story of Thursday's New York Times -- the Mississippi River is in Minneapolis????  If my jaw could have hit the floor. I mean.  To admit to it?  To a Midwesterner?!  One who has never faltered in over a decade in her flat-voweled accent?  Impertinent!

Many years ago, when Mari and I were living in Washington, DC.  Mr P---- F---- and I were out at a swinging cocktail hour with a bunch of his boring wonk friends and a guy asked me how I knew Mr P---- F---- and I told him that we went to university together.  Boring Wonk (who was surely from Connecticut) says, "Oh, yeah, in Michigan."  I fixed him with a glare and coldly corrected him.  He shrugged, "Yeah, Wisconsin, you know, yeah."  with a lameness that said Eh, same difference.

Oh!  It makes my blood boil still!!  I slapped the table at which we sat, hard, with the flat of my hand.  I pointed right between his stupid, beady eyes and spoke sharply to him, "You people!  This is the problem with you fucking people!  Michigan and Wisconsin are not the same!  That's like saying, oh, New Hampshire and North Carolina, I get them mixed up!  Fuck you!!"

At that time in my newly-transplanted life, I really did not make a distinction between my 1. regionalism and 2. intolerance for fools.  I look back on that confrontation now and think that maybe I could have been less irate about it, for while it is true that mixing up Wisconsin and Michigan is very much the same as confusing New Hampshire with North Carolina, the knowledge of that is not something that an outsider could well appreciate.  I was not even angry in the way that people from the perimeter of the country like to believe, that we all in the heartland have an inferiority complex about our status as a no-man's land, as "flyover country."  The fact is that Midwesterners prefer for these sissies who complain about the weather and also do not know when to shut their mouths to stay where they are and bellyache on someone else's time. 

Two years ago just this week, I took my son home.  He had only once been to my hometown, a long time before he had teeth, but this time, he was six.  Along the way, we were to meet friends in Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie, in a state park for a picnic and a visit.  All the day leading up to the picnic, I told Garçon that we would be meeting our friends at the beach, and he was excited about it.  He had been an excellent travel companion, a perfect exhibit of why he is my favorite child. 

We arrived at the park midday, the weather was hot and clear, the sky was gorgeous, blue, big, and the sun glittered in the teeny waves thrown along the surface of the water.  I -- who had been by turns moping and despondent that I ever left the homeland and jubilant and satisfied to have this return to the region -- turned to him and said, "Here we are!"  He looked around, wandered down past the tree line to the shore, and came back to me, full of pity for my delusions: Mommy, this is not the beach.   

It was a grim moment, full of gravel in my heart where my shining love for my child had been in all the moments before that.  Of course, of course, this was not the beach to a baby who grew up visiting the Atlantic all along its North American coast.  At the same time, here was a person unwilling to even entertain a broader definition of beach when confronted with a. a body of water which to the naked eye on shore is as large as a sea, b. sand, and c. the permeating scent of sunblock.  This closed something between us, in my pathways of devotion to him, my first baby, and I thought, seething to myself, full of sorrow, This is the problem with you fucking people.  Ever since that day I have known that my children will always be strangers to me in some measure.  It amazes us, Mari and I, that there is something elemental about us, about our friends, about our families and lives and expectations that our children will never, never understand. 

That is my regionalism, which I feel as something I could hold in my hand, it is so real to me, more than it is to Mari, though he understands it completely.  I may be as loyal to the long-left Midwest as anyone has ever been in the annals of displaced Midwesterners.  Ironically, I know that I can never return, the channel is closed to me by my constant companions, Bellyachers One and Two.  It is not possible for Midwesterners to live companionably while in the Midwest with people who complain about even the mildest winter weather with such noise.  I try to stay quiet and no longer point my fingers right between people's eyes.  I can handle that, we are taught from childhood about how to suck it up.  Also, the children can expect to go tent camping some January in Acadia National Park, to which I am looking forward with no small amount of perverse glee.  (I hope it will be freezing!  Freezing!!  So far below-zero cold that we say I thought hell was hot.)      

I can keep one rein in each hand when it comes to the children, surely, but out in the world it becomes tricker, separating regionalism from disparaging morons.  There is this not knowing that Michigan and Wisconsin are not the same, and it is conflated with the not knowing that the Mississippi runs right through downtown Minneapolis, or that the largest freshwater lakes on Earth are chucked into the same territory.  It is impossible to divorce innocent obtuseness from the pernicious derision parceled in this superiority complex wherein the perimeter of the country maintains this idea that the Midwest is not worthy of being known.  This is something on constant, preening display by its subscribers, even if the Midwesterner in the room shows no sign of internalizing these detractions.

OK, whatever, so don't know anything about it, that Bob Engler is not hardly Bob LaFollette, for starters.  Fine.  But to not know that the fucking Mississippi River starts in Minnesota?  Christ almighty, read a fucking book.  This is not covered in the US Geography textbooks in the elementary schools of this region?  Goddamn, honestly, even the Indigo Girls' lyrics could have told anyone that,  come on.  I vow to remain forever intolerant of fools, for even longer than my vowels are wrought flat as the prairie.

lagniappe

The reason to grow sunflowers, besides the sweetness of Fillette marveling over a flower that grows bigger than Mari, is that they attract every seed-eating bird in North America right to our yard.  Goldfinches, cardinals, a little red-orange guy that says pip! pip!, so many more than the drab city populace of starlings and sparrows come from what seems like nowhere to hang out in our garden and gossip, flirt, and chirp.  They make a dreadful litter on the ground, but whatever, it is fun.  Also, the field identification of birds in our midst counts for homeschool science.

There was a happy confluence of factors the other day that made for another fascinating & delicious dinner experience.  Just as I was feeling myself get all haughty about the culinary jingoism of this local-food trend -- which was manifesting itself here as I will be motherfucked if I go the rest of the year, let alone my life, without a fucking plate of tostones, bitches -- the NYT Sunday magazine printed a recipe for something called potato tostones.  Hm.  Hmm.  Hm.

I found what was left of the little new potatoes and boiled them in the morning.  For dinner, I squashed them a little in my hand, and fried them as with tostones.  They were good, and while I stood ready to consider them as a kind of substitution (I talk a big game about never giving up plátanos, but really, such a fucking bitch to peel), I was thoroughly distracted by the actual product.  They tasted as no fried potato we have ever had; the children were over the moon with compliments over the flavor.  I was careful to tell them it was the seasonality, not the preparation. 

This morning, I stupidly broke my favorite, sweet, avocado-green Soreno pattern water pitcher by filling it with boiling-hot tea.  This is not the kind of mistake I would make if the children were around, because I am a triple-checker while distracted -- no time for mistakes.  It was the vacant bliss of yet another day in an empty house that made the bottom fall right out of the pitcher, splashing boiling-hot tea right onto my left foot.  This is the third or fourth time in ten years that there was been a boiling-hot liquids spill involving my left foot.  It seems like the kind of thing that I would find out is a universal message to me, but I think I should just stop wearing flip-flops in the kitchen.

Mari comes home from an all-week travel tonight for a longer-than-usual weekend.  Tomorrow, while the children are away, we will sneak off to see the new Bourne.  I have to sort through my project list and assemble my knitting projects (socks, tea cozy, capelet, then back to crochet).  Camp ends a week from tomorrow and I am excited to have my babies back in the house, because doing their chores in their absence is old.  Also, birds to identify + a mother to terrorize into her own safest practices.