la femme follette

mum's the word

Ballet Town has this crazy greengrocer on its Main Street.  I think that the thing is they just charge a smidge above wholesale prices & wait to deal in volume while, yk, everyone else is sodomizing us with their gigantic markups.

This is the site of the Geranium Breakdown -- under no circumstances should you attempt to wade through all of that; just believe me that 10-inch hanging baskets were $6-- and now it is the cradle of the Great Chrysanthemum Distribution Origin Story.  Because 6-inch pots of mums were 6 for $5. 

Those are 24 pots of geraniums, none mine. That 14-inch geranium in the foreground was $10.  I had already bought my lot of mums when, in the hustle-bustle of Community Activism, there was so much visiting + chatter about fall decorations.  One neighbor said she had heard a tale told of the Ballet Town Greengrocer, and I felt duty-bound to confirm its veracity and also confess I had availed myself of its magic. 

Then, naturally, I was on the hotseat for Mum Hookup.  Word spread.  It was fine, I drive there twice every week.  Only 3 flats of mums will fit into my car ... Hey!  Only 3 flats will fit into my old car!  I can totally finish the job later today plus also pick up a few more as kind gestures for neighbors who did not ask but were nonetheless helpful & community-minded this past week!  Yesss!

God, there is so much horrible stuff in the world.  Yk, someone just asked me the other day to explain to them how a preschool-facility could be called a civic-use building, and I flew into the kind of quick rage the world has not seen since a jackhole from Connecticut made a Whatever, same difference kind of gesture when I corrected his mixup of  Wisconsin with Michigan.  Having a place to put the community's children is a civic use!  This is just all more of how America hates women and children!

Let's bake!  Decorate!  However we want!  Fuck it!  What's the goddamn point?  I am really grateful to know we have really great people living around us, mostly.   

Also, am grateful to see this guy in my gym today!  It is brand-new!  I made out with it a little!  The best news is that I only lasted about 8 minutes on the effing thing, so I can get better!  Well ... actually it took 2 minutes for me to realize I was not going to get the best of this machine.  At about the 5-minute mark I started to feel panicky.  The rest of the time I had to pretend I was on Battle of the Network Stars to endure.  Then I folded and went up to the secret rowing machine by itself near the boxing studio.  

Anyhow.  You should be at the gym, too, because the shit is going to hit the fan soon in the US, and you want to be able to at least survive, let alone take up arms, and really more like you just want to look good in post-apocalyptic fashion.  Hullo?  Dark Angel?  Terminator 2?  Get it together, beauties!   

   

rowdy electric

Saturday, the Like-It Edition.

 

Celosia in Russel Wright cream pitcher.  Celosias are having a gorgeous bloom this year, same with crape myrtles.  Use it up.

Increase in our Little-Girl Population by 100%.

 

Paper dolls, and also girls feel! so! big! because once they got the self-healing mat out, I gave them each their own x-acto knife.  ZOGMACATS.

They are -- in the photo, you can't tell -- listening to the latest Wilco single on repeat, which I do not mind at all.

I was just telling Mari yesterday that I am so glad to have not known who Jeff Tweedy was when I met him all those years ago at AWP, because my story is a million times awesomer than it would have been if I had.  He was the nicest guy I met at the whole darn convention.  And his book of poems is x-great, too.  And now I'm a fan all-around, so I feel like the luckiest girl in the world, again.  (Yes!!)

I am putting a lamb roast on the barbecue again today and ... I don't know.  Emily is staying through dinner and I just love her so much.  She is one of those kids who eats, yk, 5 things + meat.  So, I was just quizzing her again -- because I forget that meat is a thing that can be fed to children -- about her roster. 

She said, "And ... hot dogs, and hamburgers, mmMmmMmm, lamb chops, aaaand --"

"You like lamb?!"  Lamb is such a meaty kind of a meat, plus not v marketed.  "Really?!"  I was so excited.

"I LOVE LAMB," she called out in a proclamation like 10-year-old girls can. 

I told her, super-excitedly that we were having lamb for dinner.  So, who cares if she won't eat anything else except the today except the fruit & cheese plate I have set for their afternoon snack and the crudite plate before dinner.  I can tell her mother I fed her PURE PROTEIN.  Exciting! 

Unless I ruin it.  Hm. 

 

I know, half of you are like, Honey, we believe you.  You didn't need to show us the raw meat.  The rest of you are all, Hey, what's all in yr marinade there?  I hope it works out.  Fingers crossed! 

This is my favorite photo from our last trip, Fille & Sal, goofing around at Hirshhorn Party.  They are playing Disaster Movie.

 
 

It was a better photo before I cropped it for Sally's privacy.  It is good to have old friends who are into your kids.

I dreamed about so many of you last night, so long, so much.  Even you.  Yes, you!  Don't blush, it was just a blow job about 100 years ago. 

Everyone, let's kiss now!   

I am not humble because false modesty is a sin

So,  let me see if I've got this all the right way:

1. There are some women
   • who have a secret bulletin board
   • where they devote themselves wholly to the business of tearing down other women and the weblog-content those women put forth into the world. 
2. A bunch of them left comments here yesterday
   • in which they collectively reveal themselves to be pretty much illiterate,
   • in that they have no ability to detect  

   a. subtletly

   b. irony

   c. tone

3. which explains perfectly why they are obvsly incapable of working out that
   • my "vague terms" are to keep the entire population of internet grifters from getting into the business of my family + friends
   • plus also that those same familiars hardly need me to "deign to show them how incredibly gorgeous I am," since my God-given pulchritude is pretty much the single outstanding thing about me, (because it isn't all you need, but it gives one a prodigious headstart)
4. to say nothing of how very, very rich it is that  (see: a, b, and c, plus also: board devoted to tearing down other women) they accuse me of being a hater.  Ahahaha!

Did I cover everything? Are we about square?

So way past beyond-hilarious that hateful people on the internet would wonder why anyone would keep their business as tightly-leashed as possible, coded in a portmanteau for people who can hear the words on the screen in my voice.  Um, clearly because there are people like them in the world?

But there are in this world so many, many more people.  Everyday pals, faraway friends, best-besties, my husband -- none of whom need to read by the lights of their projectors and the horrible, noisy, whirring distraction, since they have been for two decades or more surrounded by an exchange of words in writing.  Or, because they have my g.d. phone number and can call for clarification if they need to know so much more.  

I would be remiss if I failed to mention a small but mighty group of generous people who have never met me and who know how to read for content and its fulsomeness.  This project is sometimes a jumping-off point, it is sometimes backfill, but this project is always mine, for me, this little scrapbook on the internet.  Yes.

Forward.  Because it is again an interval for making herbal medicines, at a minimum.  Looking at you, Lisa -- yr package is almost ready.

 
 

Also, here:  I have created a fucking monster with the bespoke menswear, I swear.  I had to sadly tell Mari the tailor's shop is closed on Saturdays in July.  OK.  Additionally, I had to explain to him that they are away in August.  It was like the first time he impressed me, when I had to explain to him what Yom Kippur was.  Only now he's been married to me for 15 years and I was more than a little like, yk, seriously?  Italians go away in August.  Also, Greeks flirt.  Come on!

When we got off of the phone & I was hassling Fille to bring me her laundered yardage so I could start on her skirts, which obviously -- all this inability to be off-the-rack -- is it nature or nurture? 

Friday!  I feel great.  All the marking & listmaking & nonchalant interfacing makes me feel like I'm blogging Alex's blog, and this has the right feel for the rest.  Plus, same hairdo, obvs.

 

Gros bisous!

chains, gang.

I do not have the heart to tell Fille that her eggplant might not come true.  She is so pleased to have acquired it at the plant swap in May, but she is a little lacking in the consistency of watering department.

 

You can see the backyard in the background there.  We had it done over in June.  Simple, plain.  I plan to get the container plants out on the gravel to soften it up & make it less like a prison yard. 

 

It will fit for now, though, because we are getting this: our big next step.  I mean, yk, we always used the straitjacket when he was younger, and of course there are the bed restraints we've used -- shut up, they are humane restraints, it's right in the name -- and then since he has been older, bigger, I say, yk, Hey, babe, just head outside & cool off.

But if he is going to be running away ... not cool.  Measures must be employed.  Plus, it is modular & built to specs, so we are having it built big enough to put the bicycles in at other times.  Excellent in every direction.  Yes.

À bientôt, j'espère!  xoxo

another day, another updo

I know, some of you are still waiting for yr fullest accounting. Hang in there, bijoux, hum that one Bette Midler song to yourselves. Bisous + watch yr mails/messages. xox

 

le weekend

This weekend was more roses, rose admiration. 

 

I said to Mari, when he got home, after not seeing him for 6 days, "Admire our roses."  This is the kind of jocular, pantomiming, schticky bullshit we love to play, because he knows I know he knows (plus, I know) that I actually have little to do with the blooming yield.  I water, and was prescient enough to plant in full sun. 

 

This summer, they are going on the much-heralded Rayford Reddell Rose Diet.  I am two months late with it, but this year's first show got me thinking:  If they look this great naturally ... how much better could they look if I tried?  Yes.  But Mari said to me, kind of excited & amazed, "Look how many buds there still are!"  Yes.  Exciting!  Smells so good. 

Saturday was a. Plant Exchange and b. Baseball Game, with a Big Lunch in-between.

 

Plant exchange was good, bringing a few love-in-a-mist divisions (or devil-in-the-bush for some of you & your outlook, you know who you are), a red columbine, one pink bleeding heart, one tiny startup of a lilac shrub, a strawberry plant (Fille's choice), an eggplant seedling (again), and 3 pink-flowering lilies of the valley. 

We came home from Acreage Town and Mari + Fille put together a compost tumbler while I made lunch.

 

Big Saturday Leisure Lunch is my favorite meal to make.  Grilled lamb chops, first lentil salad of the year, fried potatoes.

 

The lamb was from a butcher I had never used before because when I went to the covered market, my guy was folded up.  Gone!  Eh.  Mari said this lamb tasted fine, but I thought it tasted a little like reconstituted lamb.  Ugh, in the spring?  It should never.

Baseball game was lost, but had post-game fireworks over the river, which always win.  Fireworks are just as big & up-in-the-sky as they are in childhood.  They never change in their relative scale of Oh, wow.  Not many things can lay claim to such endurance in their sameness and magic.

 

Sunday we dropped the children off to their own activities and dragged ourselves quietly to a junior philanthropists' event.  We felt very no rest for the wicked and no good deed goes unpunished about it, at the same time.   There might have been a little sighing, and martyrlike acceptance, is what I am saying.  There was maybe a little beatific eye-rolling, as we may have seen His Holiness Pope John Paul II roll his eyes once or twice.  

Someone who organized a silent fundraising auction for an outfit dear to our hearts solicited a donation from us and we responded.  I guess the donation was generous ("What the hell kind of cheapskates do they usually call on?" was Mari's question.  Ditto.) and so we were warmly invited to the event alongside the auction.  Usually we demur the invites we get to this reception or that opening (unless it is a kids' thing or I get to use my eyelashes on, yk, amphibian conservationists), because I never understand who needs all this formalized gratitude in response to their charitable contribution.  Spend that money on the thing I donated to!

But this invitation was personally extended via a phone call from the director and I felt like saying no would be rude.  Plus, the event was not conjured to thank donors, it was the donors who provided the infrastructure for the event and its ticket-buying attendance.  Most of the donors, we found once there, were also ticket-purchasing attendees, so there was a weird, circle-jerking, hyper-clubby vibe.  It gave us this odd feeling of being there on charity.  Actually, no, no:  that was just me who felt like that.  Mari felt like he was a pillar of society who is always refusing invitations to celebrate his largesse. 

Anyhow.

When we rolled up to the event, I asked Mari to park around the back, away from the entrance, kind of by a tree.  How could he refuse?  Once there, I whipped out my lint roller and asked him to lint-roll all of the cat fur from my black jersey dress.  I had foolishly sat down on a dining -room chair to facilitate Fille putting on my necklace for me.  My Mothers' Day present necklace.  Remind me to get back to it; it's lovely -- freshwater pearls.   

Gracie's calico markings are deceiving. 

 
 

If I could prevail upon you to look at this photo yet again, you will see she is actually a white cat.

 

He rolled, and rolled.  So much white fur!  It took, like, 4 sheets of that lint-roller masking tape!  Then he gave himself a touch-up and pronounced us fur-free.  I told him, "That was so exciting!  It reminded me of, you know, back when we first met ... when you were my handler!  Remember?"

"We're not supposed to talk about that," he said, gruffly.  But it was in a gruffly perky sort of way.

It turned out to be fun, even the part where I had to wear high heels.   I mischeviously sidled around instigating fake bidding wars with people who obviously never shopped on eBay before and did not know that early bidding can drive up the price.  I drove one auction up so ridiculously high -- just me & this one gal who was determined her child should have the "Summer Leisure Basket" all full of, idk, a bunch of stuff I did not want for $205, so I was really nervous when I eked out that last, taunting bid minutes before the auction ended. 

It was with a lot of trepidation I walked to the table, and when I saw the clipboard was gone (they were to be collected by the winner), I wanted to fall to my knees in thanks.  Honestly, because I never would have heard the end of the ribbing from Mari.  She ponied up $210, about which Mari hilariously scoffed, "She only needed to bid $205.01!"  Ahahaha!   

It was a nice close to the weekend, a sophisticated, grownup outing with my husband, as we begin our 16th year of wedded bliss.  Nothing says Hello, Spring, like bare feet inside high-heeled shoes.  Unless it is lentil salad leftovers for a late supper. 

 

Lentil Salad, first of spring edition

Boil 2 cups lentils (love the lentil you're with; just not red) in 6 cups water with 2 bay leaves and a few cloves of garlic (do not bother to peel) for 15-18 minutes.  Poke them around now & then.  When tender, drain.  Rinse if you want, but I do not.  (Some recipe!)

While the lentils cook, whisk 1/4c lemon juice (bottled!  first of spring!) with 1/4c olive oil.  Dice one tennis-ball-sized red onion & throw it in.  Poke around.  Salt to taste.  Get the leaves & bulbs out of the lentils.  Pour it into the vinaigrette.  Add one bunch of chopped parsley.  Mix and mix.  Salt and grind fresh pepper to taste. 

Allez!   

lev 19:15

You know.  I know that I hardly ever write about current events here, neither politics, but can I just say that Molly Wei's plea bargain in the Tyler Clementi suicide case seems like the highest-profile exercise of beauty privilege in current memory?  For my memory, anyhow.  Holy crap!

Actually, it was weird that on Saturday, I was already thinking of the case.  Mostly, I was taking some time --  after which I would come home to read the print article reporting Wei's plea deal -- to weigh deeply the grand jury's indictment of Dharun Ravi (previously her co-defendant) with the heavy-hitting charge of a bias crime, which can put him in prison for 5 or 10 years. 

So, while I was driving, twisting & turning, I just ... you know, God, I have got an idiot kid, too, right?  Also, Kowalski -- when he was not much older than this idiot kid Ravi -- went to prison for a few years, which was just a few years, but also a permanent derailment.  It was an entirely different kind of charge, but idiocy is idiocy and runs rampant in this age group, particularly in men.

So, yk, I've got it on for idiots, whatever, fine.  I had been really hand-wringing about it in the weeks since the prosecutor's office announced the indictment, all 15 charges.  I kept feeling like, yk, Good.  At the same time, I felt like saying We have to make an example of this idiot fucking dumbass kid was so harsh.  Ok, maybe not so harsh, maybe just harsh-ish.  But then I would think, "No!  It isn't!"  I don't know.  I had a lot of thoughts! 

Driving Saturday, I realized that no one is making a example of this kid.  He is the example.  No one has made anything around it.  Not necessary!  He made it himself!  Here we all are! 

It felt really good, yk, in my mind, to be able to articulate that, just to myself, but Jesus Christ, what a fucked-up mess.  But for Wei to get such a sweet deal ... Ravi must have been ... she must really have some good stuff to say on that stand.  Holy shit. 

I think maybe it would just be better if, like, remember (or maybe this is news to you, dunno) in Numbers 16?  When Moses called upon the Lord to split the earth and swallow those people who were being completely uncivilized?  I think that would be best in this situation.  All the same justice, people will talk about it forever -- it will make some kind of an impression! -- fewer tax dollars spent.  Yes.

 

Anyhow.  Yeah, my roses are blooming.  Even old Don Juan has stepped it up. 

 

You know, it's been hard with him, over the years.

 

 

I bought some skeleton-feet shoes.  I love them.  Don't be mad!    

c'est pas trop tôt

This is Mme Carrière's best year. 

 

We got her new growth up off of the ground in time, shaped her up with some judicious pruning, and now I just have to keep her summer poundage in check and we will cross our fingers for next year.  She is not even at peak bloom yet.  When I stand on my porch, the world smells incredible. 

Saturday was National Train Day.  It kind of stole the thunder from Mothers' Day in that I was extremely satisfied to get dressed and leave three ditherers behind me to take off without a backward glance (Your rations and provisions are not my problem.  Plans for lunch?  On yr own, right?) for my appointment at the eyebrow-threading salon. 

Brows threaded, idle wandering and an iced coffee commenced.  It was a gorgeous day.  After all that outside-nothing I came home to do pretty much nothing in my empty, silent house.  I accidentally to0k a 2-hour nap, after which indulgence I woke up and the house was still empty.  So favorite, so best.  When I woke up, I texted Mari to remind him it was also Free Comic Book Day.  They stayed out until bedtime.

There is no way to top that, certainly not with warmed-over pancakes and a glass of water served by a well-meaning 10-year-old girl who is not listening to what people are telling her about what they really want.

Yes, in true gift-rejecting mother style, on Sunday I covered my head with the blankets and groaned when Fille tried to establish my alertness for the purpose of serving the breakfast that I assured her over and over again in the days prior I did not want.  I do not want to eat while lying in the bed, I am sorry!  I will sometimes gratefully receive a bowl of oatmeal, but I can hover over that with a spoon in a prone position, truly slothful.  Once I have to prop myself up & use a knife and a fork?  That is the provenance of an invalid, or gouty old Liz Taylor.  Learn to make tea, little children!  Pay attention to what people are saying they do not want, when you want to give them something!  Mari is like this, he clearly gets it from his mother, is it nature?  Or nurture?  Well, I think we see.

After I rebuffed my only daughter, I proceeded to sleep out of sheer defiance until the unheard of hour of 11:46.  While I lazed across the bed, sleepy and a little sulky, Mari asked me what I was going to do with the day.  For all the fuss I made about getting away from my family on Sunday, I had not actually made any plans to do anything.  If I had, they would have commenced before noon.  Also, again, Saturday's idyll was just-right & pretty tough to follow.  I mean, that's a lot of pressure on a massage.  

Eve had called the week prior to see if  wanted to make plans with her, but it seemed like she was wearing her Frenemy Cape so I took a pass.  Jolie's mother lives right here in town, so I knew she was busy (they were at the sauna, it turns out).  Everyone else I know is so willing to let their kids crawl all over them in pre-fabbed homage, but their kids spend a lot of time with strangers, so I guess it probably feels reassuring.  But, you know, I am rocking this party eight days a week.  Getaway Mothers' Day is my thing.  Go away, little children!  It's right in the name!  Mine, not yours! 

I told Mari that I would go to the sauna if only I could bring myself to drive there in my bathrobe, like Tony Soprano.  Since that was ridiculous, I got up, put the children outside + locked the door, and made a whole pot of tea.  I continued wearing my bathrobe to watch the second disc of Ken Burns's Civil War documentary while I knitted.   

After a while I delegated a long list of garden chores. 

 
 

Eventually, I showered, got dressed, and came out to survey everyone's laboring.  Then, Mari and I sat on the steps and ate rhubarb crumble.

 

Rhubarb came in the CSA share last week, which was great.  Then two other CSA sharers did not want their rhubarb and so put theirs in the swap box.  I was extremely excited to exchange arugula and some young mustard greens for two pounds of rhubarb.  Not that I do not like those greens, but three pounds of rhubarb?  Come on!  Yes!

I put together a crumble while I was home alone on Saturday, which was especially nice because the feeding of the other meals was not down to me and the kitchen was already-cleaned by others.  I did not think much of it, honestly.  I felt like there was too much crumb.

 

When I took these interior photos (Rhubarb Crumble:  Beneath the Crumb), I was distressed and wondering how to compensate in the next encounter. 

 

I usually hack something out of rolled oats and some kind of a flour for a short dough, but I made this topping by riffing on an Elana Amsterdam recipe.  It uses almond flour and while it tasted fine, I felt for all of it there was, there was not enough floury soakerism happening; there was too much high-protein runoff of filling-juice.  I was already thinking of ways to regroup and happy I had enough rhubarb to try again.

 

My family disagreed with me, in words and deeds.  Also, begged me to come around to join their side.  I refused and I plan to re-engineer this week, mostly because Mari is away and the children do not have equal votes.  However, if you trust the judgment of three people who eat pretty much anything (although, it is worth mentioning there is not usually such rhapsody), alors!

Gluten-Free, High-Protein Rhubarb Crumble
adapted from Nigella Lawson's Rhubarb Crumble in Feast and also Elana Amsterdam's Peach + Blueberry Crumble in The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook.

For the filling, chop 1.5lbs rhubarb into 1/2-inch pieces.  On the stovetop, melt 2tbsp butter in a pan large enough to hold the rhubarb.  Toss with 1/4-cup sugar, 1tbsp vanilla, and 1tbsp tapioca starch (or potato starch, cornstarch, white flour, love the starch you're with).  Lawson says something weirdly lustful and anthropomorphic in her book like, "You're looking for glossy, pink gorgeousness."  Just make sure there are no lumps and get everything mixed up.  It will be a little gooey, don't be alarmed. 

Tip the filling into a 8ish-inch pan.  I use a cake pan; I do not have a pie plate deep enough.  At this point, you can put the whole thing on hold and chuck the pan into the fridge or even the freezer and come back to it later.

For the crumb, melt 5tbsp butter.  Add 3/4tsp salt and 1tbsp vanilla extract.  Mix.  Add 2c blanched almond flour. 

Here is where I report that Elana Amsterdam's recipes (and so this adaptation, too) use flour "milled" of blanched almonds.  It is really fine, fluffy, and really nice to work with.  A similar product can be had for this -- non-fluffy, non-textural -- use by whirring blanched almonds in the food processor until they are on the verge of nut butter.   

Mix & mix.  Roll the topping all crumbly across the filling's surface.  Cover with foil.  Bake at 350 for 35 minutes.  Remove foil and wait for topping to brown as desired.  It will take about 3-5 minutes. 

mystery zone. national poetry month

I have a vague recollection of searching out just the right thing for this corner of the garden, and motherfucked if I can remember what it is. 

 

Hand-wringing about Mme Carriére to commence forthwith.

 

The Language
Robert Creeley 

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

avril

Correction:  Hyacinths perfectly normal, if a little leggy.  Evidently, I have never noticed how they look before full bloom.

 

The legginess is due to the age of the plant, however.

Variety of daffodil known as narcissus poeticus is perfectly perfect.

 

 

The ebullience brought around by the beginning of baseball season has receded. 

 

Everyone here is lazing and/or sleeping, although the rest of us have availed ourselves of the luxury of the upholstered furniture. 

In fact, the only way I got Mari to get out of bed this morning was to tell him I thought a fine agenda for the day was to start with blueberry oatmeal-pancakes, followed by a fire in the woodstove.  Then we could sit next to each other while I alternated knitting with rifling through cookbooks.  

 

April is National Poetry Month, speaking of laziness, narcissus, and poeticus.  I like this poem right now.  It is a dream-elegy for someone who is still today alive.  I am thinking a lot about how I have been enjoined against an elegy -- even an accidental, prosey kind of rhapsodic eulogy -- for someone who is quite dead.  It happened just like in this poem -- so long that at the end I could hardly recall the beginning.

Poem
Elle Case

I dreamt of you. I was hungover from your homeland,
where we met, in this dream, and we talked.  You
were charming and nifty, useful and solid, our
occasion went on for hours, so long that at the end
I couldn't remember the beginning,

Days went by in my dream before you died. Still I
was dreaming. So, in the dream, I shyly showed
your lovely wife, your beautiful, brilliant baby girl
an essay I wrote about our time together. They loved
you ever more, this new window opened to them,
to look out where I put you on the horizon, shown
now on a backdrop of snowdrifts, steel mills, rivers
that run backward seething with blood. You

were so tall and true on those plains, rugged and
undaunted. Still in this dream, I asked to write an
elegy, and then your girls, they teared up and I
thought, in my dream, oh! how sad this all is!! In
the beginning it seemed only as a long picnic. You
were funny, you told me that everyone should only
remember your life, so you told me just everything.

You found out that as a girl I wrote news so you kept
leaning over, across the orange table set with our
endless buffet lunch, improbably outdoors, among
these magical beanstalks of dandelions and those
legendary japanese vines and saying, "Did you
get that? Make sure you write this all down."

 

my time is a piece of wax

I knitted something on the cusp of garden season here, which is good because the bulb show is lacking. 

 
 

Malformed hyacinths.

Don't know what they usually look like?  Here.  I did not fertilize the bulbs, which I think has ever just been like, zzzZzzz, makework right up until I mulched the entire garden with pinestraw last summer.  Oopsie!

I did not confirm that -- it could be that hyacinth are one of the bulbs that "wear out," which is fine.  Anyhow, what is done, is done.  As I wrote earlier, I do not expect to care too much about the garden this year. 

 

So much to say!  So much meaty meta -- a stay on shopping!  A limit on my intersex socializing!  How the supermoon made everyone lose their minds -- although that might just be spring, but it is hard to call.  No time to say any of it!

 

 

One thing I can follow up on:  With the Pretty Sisters shuttled along to their forever home, the cat population is down to 2.  My home has been fully-rated "Excellent" for the long-term stewardship of 2 (two) cats for a great long time, so it is a great relief.  Scooping four litter boxes three times each day was terribly exhausting.  I am glad it is over.  RIP Helmet and Orange!  Farewell Baby Cat and Calico Kitten!  If you know anyone who wants Elsa-Grace Panther Cat or Secret Squirrel, give them my number! 

 

 

These socks were, of course, for Mr Kowalski's birthday.  They were a complete surprise to him.  Uncharacteristically -- zero preamble, just one eye on the calendar -- I got into my stash and started knitting.  It was easy, because his troubled homeland goings-on have put us in a lot -- a lot -- of close daily contact for the last month ... maybe longer, I think.  Mari said, when I was narrating the uptake of one super-early-morning call, "Why is he reporting all this to you?"  

"I dunno," I said, fooling with my press pot.  "He isn't reporting, really ... he's just processing ... he doesn't have a wife, you know."  Sometimes people just want to have someone hang onto something for them, keep the meter running, etc.  Someone wh0 knows they would rather have jam than honey, in any application ... or just something like that, like those sorts of things.

The socks were the same as the last two pairs -- Eesti Trail Hiking Sock from Favorite Socks 275 or whatever the name of the book is.  What is different is that I did not make them at the bunchy gauge the pattern calls for -- worsted-weight yarn on size-3 needles -- because it is super-wrestly and I was not in the mood.  The yarn is [Someone's] 4-ply tweed on size 3 needles.  I lost the ball band ages ago.    

 

This lack of the fabric being piled up on itself meant that I could try the previously-snubbed, worked-in-decrease toe, which worked out fine, knitwise, but I would not like that seam marching at a weird diagonal along the top of my foot.  Kowalski's socks never quite fit me, though, so maybe it is not an issue at the right size.  I am sure I will hear about it if it is uncomfortable.  Anyhow, having knitted the toe in a decreasing fashion now, I see how my decision to wing Kitchener stitch on my very first pair (at that super-bunchy gauge) was visionary. 

 

While this pair lacks the excitement of a grafted toe, turning a heel is always something.  It makes me feel like Betsy Ross, Mia Wallace, and Jean Grey together, believe it. 

These are, possibly, not the socks of which Kowalski dreamed.  He has an intangible, inexpressible ideal of a sock, which I have not been able to quite get my mind around in our sessions of knocking around sock concepts and sock values. 

 

I think over time he will come to love them in their fulfillment and evident reality.  Maybe, years from now, he will wish he had appreciated them fully for what they ever were during all the time he had with them, from the very beginning.  Instead of, for example, waiting until the belated realization they were all along what they had ever been, and a different perspective could have made everything different all along the way.  With the socks, I am saying.  You know.  Yes. 

À la prochaine!

fookin' knackered

Crocuses are up.

 

Lenten action:  too much thinking.

I get caught up on one or the other of the qualifiers -- true, kind, necessary -- which is always the way, I guess.  Troubles0me.  Challenging!

Then -- like so many things -- let us define our terms.  For example, communication-wise, I find that kind is somehow a relative concept, the perception of which is mostly bound up in people's unwillingness to be divested of their fantasies about themselves, which means that kind somehow, as a social construct, becomes manufactured of, plus conflated with, what people want to hear.  More than that, this delusional evaluation of What Is Kind encroaches upon truth and necessity, like, all the time.  

I mean, really?  Fuck a bunch of that.

It reminds me of this ridiculous story from my youth:  My last job before Garçon was born was as the sole onsite HR manager at a 300-room property in Washington.  I was hired by one hotel corporation and almost immediately, the owner of the property awarded the management and oversight to another storied corporation, which company was then -- nearly immediately -- merged with a third corporation.  It was a mess -- the employees comprising management staff and the directorate were all over the place, coming and going, things were really unstable. 

It was precisely the kind of situation I avoid at all costs -- people were really scrambling around to maintain or establish status; there were always new players; everyone was nervous every day about their position or their place, etc.  I stayed there because: in the middle of all this corporate-merging turmoil, I found out I was pregnant and knew I was only short-timing; I could walk from our apartment in 25 minutes; Sal worked very nearby; the salary was obscenely killer (and something they were quick to correct when they hired my replacement, ha).

Anyhow.  We were having a manager's meeting one day, and the facilites gal -- Angela kind of coordinated special guests with hotel amenities, so the kind of oversight to make sure we had extra staff to peel green M&Ms for rock stars or whatever was her purview -- was all lit up because we had Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez coming for a stay. 

She had his whole bio and was lavish and sanctimonious about his importance and the honor and why he was there and  blahblahblaaaaaaah, but it was obvious she did not know a goddamn thing about him because she kept saying Gabrielle García Márquez was coming.  She also kept using the pronouns she and her.

I waited until she was finished speaking and even until no one else  had any comments or questions.  Then I just threw out there in a cool way that Gabriel García Márquez was a dude.  It was like the time the little girl said the emperor was naked. 

Angela goggled at me, boggled, and begged my pardon.

"García Márquez, Angela.  Is a man.  That's all." 

So, was it true?  Yes.  Was it necessary?  Yes!  This was not like correcting it's vs its on the internet.  We were about to have this VIP in our hotel and host him and make arrangements and everyone -- because of Angela's presentation -- thought we we were having a special visit from a laaaady.  Perhaps one with a very small dog.  Yes, necessary!  Was it kind?  Well, that is where the story kind of breaks down.   

To me, in this tale, kindness is irrelevant.  Did I tell her motivated by unkindness?  No.  Did I say or imply that she was a fucking idiot, in words or tone?  No.  I even waited to see if anyone would say anything or whatever, because the whole time she was talking, I was embarrassed for her, thinking, Man, that's awkward.  Then, when no one else said anything, presumably because they a. did not know or b. had not been listening, including my boss, I threw it out there.  It was cool.  Like, I mean, it was a meeting.  Go team, etc.

I mean, looking back at it, thinking about work and work-stories and the kind of fossilized, dysfunctional behavior I hear people have in their workplaces, I could have waited, until the meeting was over, and gone around double-checking with everyone in the meeting except Angela that they knew she was a he.  That, to me, would have been so much worse, super-uncool.

Anyhow, later, lingering around waiting for something else to happen that day, one of the catering girls told me that Angela was still in her office crying because I told her García Márquez was a man.   Untrue!  I reject this assignment of responsibility to me.  I mean, she was crying because she made a mistake, which is fine and normal and all, I guess, but that was not my issue.  Except that it confuses truth and kindness.  I mean, the truth can hurt, but that does not mean the truthteller was hurtful -- they are just the messenger.  Toughen up! 

But this is Lent, and I am trying to explore new territories with an open mind.  I do not think it is going well.  It might be driving me crazy. 

Last night, I spent an hour puzzling over a textual reply to one of my besties about something submitted for my review.  Was what I wanted to say kind?  No.  Not at all.  I mean, I could say something less hardcore, but still, not kind.  While he is one of the toughest guys I know ... here I am, bound in a promise.  So, OK.  What could I say that was actually kind?  .... Oh!  Here is the next problem -- anything that I could say that was actually kind would be untrue.  Ok! 

Then, I looked for my parachute, my favorite window that opens in these times when the doors are all shut -- Is it necessary?  To say anything at all?  Could I just skip it?  No.  This time, because of the preamble, because of the relationship, I could not just overlook my reply.  Or could I?

Ordinarily, this is the part where I kind of break it down and say, "Skip it.  Everyone is selfishly wound up & on to the next thing."  But then that ports me right back to a. Kind and b. True.  When friends ask me for something, I give it to them.  The more important it is, the more thought I give to it, sifting and winnowing to an honest answer.  The problem I run into, a lot of times, is that it is easier for me to speak with honesty than it is for people to see themselves the same.  I feel like the overlap -- the person who is willing to see with clarity what I am reflecting back -- is what separates friends from the rest.

That feels like the point of Lent to me, to sort these matters out.  But whatever, this is just the beginning.  41 days, it remains.       

things

 

• We watched a couple of movies this weekend, staying up recklessly until past-midnight both nights, mostly because Mari failed to let me know that he would be back on travel right away tonight.  Too bad, because I could have easily skipped a screening of Brooklyn's Finest in the interest of getting it on. The case against Easy A would have to have been stronger, like doing it plus getting to be the one who slept in & awakened to a magical breakfast, but I'm pretty sure I would have skipped that, too, in such a case.

  J'adore that precocious fox Emma Stone. Someone told me recently they didn't know who she was & I promised them they will.

  Brooklyn's Finest was fine, but I dunno. The fun part about it was the marital side-chatter featuring Me as the Big-City Law-Enforcement Insider.  It was good enough, I guess. I did not know the director of Training Day was its director, but I kept griping lightly about how it reminded me of Training Day and saying things about the Ethan Hawke character like, This is all because that guy in LA trained him for Specials.  Not because there was anything wrong with Training Day -- I mean, Training Day stands out as the most accurate representation of policing I have ever seen in a film -- but I do not need to see the same movie over & over again.  This second movie got the policing part pretty well right, though not as holy crap dead-on.

  I got the strong feeling, as did Mari, that the original script had the Richard Gere character die. As Mari said, "He probably took one look at it & said, I'll be in yr movie, but I get to live." I was happy to embellish that supposition with all kinds of things Richard Gere does in movies, none of which are dying and most of which involve getting the girl, the case closed, the win, all with a wry smile. That is why he is Richard Gere. Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, they don 't mind dying as long as you spell their name right on the check. Anyhow, enough of that.  Movies.

• We also went to the ballet to take in a performance of Swan Lake.  It was extraordinarily beautiful.  As we gathered our cleaned-up selves together to head over the river to the theatre, I asked the family, nervously, "Isn't this one where they all die?  I feel sad, I don't know if I can keep it together if they all die." 

  Fille piped up from the back, "Everyone dies." I told her I could not take such sadness.

  "That's just how it is, Mom," she informed me, all-business.

  Luckily, it was the Christopher Wheeldon production, which seemed less despairing, but no less longing.  The ballerina who danced Odette/Odile was such a tidy confection as Odette; so wantonly delicious as Odile, and she seemed to really be having so much fun.  Everyone was so in love, just leveled by her.  Also, the danseur paired with her is one of my favorites -- he has such a light touch on his partners, and he makes it all look really easy, and also without being fey.  A lot of danseurs are musclebound and lumbering and look like they are going to crush their partners by accident, but never him. 

  I did like all the ballerinas (16 or 18, I think?) and all the crisply choreographed corps dancing. It was like the roller derby with all those girls up there. The house was uncharacteristically totally packed. Like, Nutcracker-level packed. Apparently, because of the Black Swan movie? What? I don't know.

  Omg, speaking of roller derby! At the first intermission, there were 35 women still in line for the restroom with the clock winding down to the last five minutes and a rogue faction of we ladies stormed the completely empty men's room. I was not the instigator, though I might well have been the accelerant. But, when we got out of there, all of the women who had been in line for the ladies' room were all gone, having not peed, not possible, and so, whatever. That could have been us! No way!

 

• Orange Cat was adopted into Heaven last week.  It was sad.  I was sad.  Helmet Cat (deceased), it must be said, was not a particularly-nice cat, until he became ill + pitiful and that memory remains.  Orange Cat was always something special.  He was the first kitten to stand in the kibble and try eating it while it fell from his tiny, milk-toothed mouth.  He was the first one to fall asleep on a human, which reflects perfect kitten civility.  He was the best pal of the smallest cat in the litter and I think she misses him.  It was Feline Infectious Peritonitis which killed him -- well, which preceded his euthanasia.  It sucks, but there was nothing to be done.  Goodbye, Orange Cat! 

•  I did two group-social shopping things last week.  The first was using a Groupon for a facial, which was fine, and dirt-cheap, but the spa was a little low-rent.  Fancy website, though.  The other thing was using a Living Social voucher for laser hair removal on a. bikini line, and b. underarms.  Let me say this about laser hair removal: 1. Lasers get really hot and 2. The process smells like frying hair.  Oh, also, 3. If you are a waxing veteran, it is a piece of cake.

• I am loving this song so much.  It started out, yk, for the obvious reasons, I love all the songs of the impossibly ruined beyond repair, I really like Ray LaMontagne's desperate, worn-over body of work, plus he has that one line in a song from the last CD about spanking & hullo?, etc.  But then, I was driving along last week and realized I love it because it reminds me of Watertown, the Sinatra rock opera?  It is as if Watertown were reduced to its 3-minute essence.  I love all 37-ish minutes of Watertown, and here this is.  It is like Sinatra crack.  Yes. 

• I was thinking the other day that this is the time of year about which I have in previous years blogged is when the knitting photos give way to photos of the garden.  I realized I have knitted very little this past winter and I kind of do not expect to give too much of a fuck about the garden this year.  Then I realized there were some reasons to get some things on the needles right now.  We will see if I can keep my interest aloft.  À bientôt!

five by five

  

1. People, making chatter, ask me, "How is your garden looking?" I am here to document that at this moment it looks like shit. It looks ravaged by Japanese beetles, the shiny motherfuckers. I put down pinestraw this year, and a soaker hose -- to keep the weeds down -- and that is working out really great. The problem is that there is no soaker hose in the veg garden & oh, well, too bad, those were annuals anyway and were prob contaminated with lead anyway.


2. I have wanted a Nehru jacket since I have been about 14. Most of my thrift-store trips in my city-dwelling youth were clouded -- even the great + legendary ones, like the day I found Allison-- by the fact that I had failed to turn up even a whiff of one of these elusive, sartorial conversation pieces. Well, looky-looky-loo, today the Boden catalog came & this fall in the collection they have a velvet Nehru jacket (OMG SQUEEEEEEEEE) and also (remember?!) a waxed cotton biker jacket. I wasted zero time on procurement. Dreams can come true.


3. Speaking of shopping, I was emailing with Becky about Manhattan shopping and it just rubbed salt in my wound of my most-recent, shopless visit. (Although I did get to check out the Houston St WFM and its dreeeeeaaaaamy employees.) But, sad otherwise. Mostly because I will bet that in Soho, I could have found a store that sells a reed-diffuser refill that does not smell like a butt! I like the reed-diffuser concept, but there is so much packaging I just throw away later.


4. Remember that Facebook-metaphor party? Do you remember the part of that party when you you got cornered in the downstairs bathroom, where the keg was, by some girl voicing her disapproval of some dude you banged a couple of times? It was all, like, How could you validate him by doing whatever he wanted while he was too drunk to remember? Remember her? Well, that happened the other day, in the realish-internet world, and in a metaphorical way, and I, as then, had to be all like, "Okaaaaay, but what do you even know about him anyway?"


5. The children have autonomy to choose for themselves how they would like to spend their day. Then, they have the agency to make it happen, by fulfilling their obligations, the taking of which responsibility allows them to avail themselves privilege of doing what they decide they want. Great, but I have to remind them of this every day, like this: Do you really want to spend yr whole entire day sitting on the sofa, pretending yr laundry would fold & store itself, or would you rather ride yr bike/go to the library/go to the pool? It's not enough that three meals a day come on as if by magic but I have to detail the ways in which they can do it for themselves, too? No way.

all wet

When I bought this at the farm, I am pretty sure the little tag said it was a nicotiana, but I thought nicotiana was a. white and b. night-blooming.  Whatever.  It is pretty & I like red.

 

Lordy lord, it is hot again.  My skin looks great, though -- like a foundation advertisement -- and I really like the way eye makeup gets smelted down by sweat into pure smuttiness, the way that it goes so far it loops back onto itself.  One must be careful, though, or they wind up like a girl Mari was observing during the last day of the last heat wave we had. 

"Don't look right now," he said to me.  "But that lady sitting over there -- why is her face so weird, like the mask Tom Cruise wore in Vanilla Sky?"  I waited a few minutes before looking around and yes, it was because she had on all her makeup at once and it had all slid into itself.  Definitely a Glamour Don't or whatever that section was called.  I just put on enough mascara (any amount = enough in this weather) so that it beads up under my lower lashes and with my unruly hair looks like I left the pool boy in a crumpled heap back on my patio.  Before I ran out to just pick up a few things at the library, you know.

I feel compelled to point out that we do not have a pool.

We do, however, have a pool club, at which there are no boys, but a bunch of playground dads, suddenly & confoundingly going around right in front of everyone shirtless and desperately in need of manscaping.  That is, really, what puts me in such a cranky mood about the pool:  Oh, this is like the playground, but I am in my underpants.  Is this a nightmare?  No.  Wait, put a dollar bill in my tankini bottom first, I've always thought you were kind of cute.  Whoa!  Put yr shirt back on!  My eyes! 

I do not have a racy swimsuit.  I mean, it is a 2-piece, a halter-neck, and the hell not frumpy, but it is modestly not-frumpy.  When I brought it home last summer and modeled it for Mari -- I was just completely not into it, I bought it at Costco, this is how not into it I was -- he said, "You look like one of the wives on the Sopranos."  What?  Which one?  "Any of them.  It's what they would wear.  Carmela or Rosalie Aprile ... the one next door -- " Jeannie Cusamano, honey.  "Yeah, her, too."

Anyhow, the pool is just upsetting to me with all the incidental nudity and the I'm just drawn this way baggage.  Plus, there is waaaaay too much chit-chat from unauthorized people.  Last year, it was ok, because all people mostly wanted to talk about was Why I Was on Crutches, but this year, I don't know!  Blah, blah, blah, the needless talking!  Far more than ever at the playground, which is undoubtedly because of the pool's cocktails. 

I mean, it just seems like a recipe for disaster, the chattering, the booze, the bared midriffs, the men in need of back-waxing.  I mean ... you know, James Gandolfini got away with it in The Sopranos because Tony Soprano was supposed to be an unregenerate mob boss with a pilgrim's heart.  It was a package.  When you are a middle manager at a [whatever] and your kids are brats and your wife talks down to you and you don't seem to like her much and you wear cheap shoes?  Back-carpet is not a write-off.  Unless you have a beautiful soul.  But I am pretty sure beautiful souls do not leer. 

I really want people to stop talking to me about their jobs.  Unless your work is available to me for direct consumption, I guarantee I do not give a fuck about it.  I have been thinking for a long time about why I get so jangly when people want to work-talk with me and ... I mean, I guess it is because -- generally speaking -- the same people who want to bore me with their dreary office complaints are the same people who really believe I do nothing all day.  Also, maybe they just do not understand that my husband has a really! exciting! job and, you know, economics professoring is zzZzzZzzzzz.  Also, if you want to sit by me when I am in my underpants & confide in me about work, you really need to be stuffing dollar bills in my thing.  I had that job once, so I know.

Speaking of The Sopranos -- you know, which I have been -- what a useful show to flesh out much of our marital jargon!  And what fascinating jobs they had!  Anyway,  just the other day,  Mari was asking me why we could not offer something to the parents of Emily -- Fille's BFF, you know -- that Fille has outgrown for the use of Emily's younger sister and I was resolute that we could not.  He kept hounding me to explain and I was not feeling forthcoming because I felt like a grown man should already know this and how to explain without seeming/sounding condescending?

Honey, I finally said, Do you remember when Meadow got her friend's SUV because the dad couldn't pay his gambling bill?  It's a little like that?  But, you know, not at all.  Ok, but somehow he got it, as soon as I said the word "Meadow," so thank god.  Thank you, David Chase!

Someone -- an old friend, I think it was -- asked in the chatmosphere the other day about cover songs & I could not stop thinking of covers I have loved.  This week I am going shopping for a cover-up to love.  You know, I want to be covered up, but I also do not want to look covered up.  I know that does not make sense.  Let it wash over you.   

   

name game

 
That rose I am always trying to get rid of comes right on every summer & socks me in the jaw with its bloom.  This year, the season's first bloom was so lackluster I went right out and ordered a spring delivery of a new, different rose that I have long admired. 

As always, with this plant, it seems like every time I talk about resigning it to the compost pile, it pulls it together.  No, no, no, I thought to myself, I will not admire your flowers on the landscape!  Inside with these!  Then I was piling them into the vase and oh, god, the smell.  Like your grandmother's hand cream.  I want to be firm against this rose, but am helpless when it comes on.  Thanks, Don Juan rose.  You!

 
Fille has five friends called Rose, which I think  so precious I can hardly stand it, o!  I longed for Rose & the soundsalike and/or derivative names -- Rosalba, Rosmarina, Rosmerta, Rosemary, Rosalie -- when we lay around for three weeks studying the baby Fille, trying to pick her name.  The Rose-names were on the short list, but none of them seemed right for her.  Now that she has these friends named each one of the variants, I feel confirmed, it was not the name for her, but one of the best, even so.  The key to its popularity is in nearly everyone's front yard. 

Two weeks ago, Fille got a letter from Emily.  She and Emily go long months without seeing each other, even though we live just blocks away.  Ballet school keeps us pretty busy, and Emily does not live so close that we can just send the girls to one another (soon).  They write each other, and plan poorly to have play dates.  For example, Katharine or I will tell our girl that yes, they can have a playdate with the other.  Then Emily will write, "Can you play at our house on December 10?"  But the letter will come on December 12.  Or whatever.  Every now & then, Katharine and I will pull off an amazing email conference and get them together. 

Two weeks ago, Emily sent a bulky envelope with a bead bracelet she strung that spelled Fille's name.  Also, a separate note which echoed the closing from the first one:  BFF.  "Oh, BFF," I told her.  "You know what that is?"  She did.  She solemnly explained that of course it made perfect sense because they have known each other since they were five years old.

Emily is my favorite of her friends, by far.  I do not know if they will be BF forever, but through the teen years should keep us all busy.  We foresee a lot of excellent, complicated hijinks, mostly involving stories that start with an Ivy League freshman eager to do their bidding and ending with them running a fake-id-production operation out of someone's trunk.  I should probably want better for my daughter & her pal, loftier goals, but that is how the two of them are drawn, just that way. 

"Well, now that that's out there," I gestured to the letter, lying on the table, "can you make friendship bracelets for the Roses?  I mean, if you and Emily are BFF and you and, you know, one of the Roses are just regular-F, can you make the same friendship bracelet for Emily & a Rose, too?  I think this means you have to prioritize ...  Do you?" 

Mari rescued her in the way that he does when this happens, where I am completely serious even as I know it is ridiculous.  Her parting thought to me was, "Maybe we can all be BFF together?"  Which, you know, good luck, Fille.  You had better get your Minnesota niceties in order.     

In other happenings around the house, Mari trapped a squirrel inside of our bathroom wall.  I could write about how it happened, but really, why?  It is a situation where I am going for the Wife of the Year award by keeping my lips zipped, although I did tell him he could not have any pancakes until he let it out.  Honestly.  I said pancakes and thought I meant it, but I think that maybe on the inside I meant you know, hooking up.  Yes.   

Speaking of  hookups and a certain kind of helplessness.   Yes, you.  Be good.

where, where is the town

All of July's flowers are in bloom already, which is understandable, I guess, given the weather.

 
When we were in Washington in April, the kids & I were stomping around in our kooky old neighborhood and we stopped at some old lushly-planted, parkway-ish kind of public planting at an intersection.  I swooned remembering just how goddamn easy it was to garden in that town.  The drawback, of course, is that I felt like I was living covered in mildew, but whatever.  But it was really easy.  Well, except for the rabbits and the deer.  But otherwise.

  
As the flowers attest, the weather persists in unseasonable warmth night & day, and since Mari & I are miserly about climate control winter and summer, we decided to go to the movies because the multiplex is air-conditioned.  The children were around without us doing their things, so we could choose anything and we chose The Killers, beguiled as I had been by the trailer we saw before Robin Hood.  It was truly adorable.  Mari said, "It could have been better."  I told him I thought it could have been worse.  Also, that it had much more room on the scale to be worse than it had to have been better and so we just left it at that. 

A few times since, I have thought of ways it could have gone in a different direction at pivotal times, but then it would have been a different movie, which may not have been so adorable.   

I just used 100 words writing about an Ashton Kutcher vehicle.  Make of it what you will.

delight

A few weeks ago, on my way to browse the international fashion magazines of the world, the Turkish guy who owns the newsstand exclaimed over my solitude.  As the children get older, one is much more likely to see them without me than to see me alone.  The sight of me traveling unfussed & alone around the neighborhood is rare and causes great comment. 

I like the newsstand guy, because he is always kind to my children, but rightly seems to reserve himself in welcoming them, as their grimy hands pose a significant threat to his livelihood.  He is fine by me.  That day, in celebration of my independence, he handed me as I was leaving a paper cup of hot tea.  It turned out to be not more than black tea brewed with fresh mint leaves and sweetened with very much honey.  It was so fucking good, God almighty.  The first one is always free. 

 
Since then, the mint is up in our own backyard, springy and unregenerate.  I will snip a bunch for him the next time I head over his way.

wooden cow

This is for Alex. 

 
Bacchanal with Minotaur (Scène bacchique au minotaure), state IIIPablo Picasso, 1933, printed 1939. Etching. MoMA; Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund.

We got a real babysitter and went to see a late show of Robin Hood Saturday night.  Well, "real" babysitter -- by which I mean we did not just see a matinee while the kids were hanging out at the library or at a friend's house. 

I had a plant swap on Saturday morning, which was excellent.  I traded a load of medicinal-herb divisions for a eight divisions of woodland perennials to grow in the shade behind Mme Alfred Carrière.  Before the planting, we had to prune Mme Carrière, and restrain her.  After a whole afternoon of that, goods in the ground, Mari & I decided we would like to go to the movies.  It was OK, Robin Hood,  I enjoyed it:  it was a billion times more excellent than Iron Man 2.  I decided to backtrack a little on my previous, spontaneous rush to judgment and now will only say with certainty that it is exactly like an excellent cross between 300 and Grease.  (and maybe a little Top Gun.) 

I feel mostly ridiculous about having a private session of Pilates every week with a highly-decorated instructor.  Then, I do things like shovel eleventy billion pounds from 100 feet of sidewalk, or spend a few hours planting and pruning and shoveling and weeding, waking up the next day with nary a twinge and I get over it.  So, I need to spend more time making best use of my brute strength + bionic subtlety, obvsly.

The "real" babysitter was our pretty, Reagan-baby neighbor who dropped by to have amiable chat and I figured  what could be lost by asking.  It was very Why the hell not?  One of her friends came by to wait for her to finish so they could go eat dessert at one of our many, fabulous diners.  That was fine, by itself, the kids were in bed when we left, and Reagan-Baby is very responsible and accountable. 

But I was kind of miffed today when I found out that Reagan-Baby's pal opened my $15, cello-wrapped French fashion magazine.  I had a clue, because Reagan-Baby texted me to let me know her friend was early at her house and that they were sitting around & Pal was "reading magazines."  Even on my way home from the theater, I was idly wondering what there was in my magazine rack that a girl in her mid-20s woud find appealing.  But they are savvy girls.  They work at non-profits. 

I was evilly satisfied this morning when -- having discovered the plunder -- I realized she probably could not have read it.  I was upset, mostly because I felt like I had not opened it because I was saving it.  Then I say things like that and I feel like one of those slattern, pathological nutjobs from those cable clean-up-yr-house shows and so forget it.  But, still.  It was rude.  I think.  Not The Rudest, though.  I have seen all that super-up-close for a couple of years now.  Like a field study.  I know, maybe more about that another time.   

whatever

 

There is a long list of things I should be blogging about, but I feel like I do not have time and/or which to choose and also when I sit down, other things are so forward in my brain -- dreamy pals!  bitchy neighbors! -- and then I get into the fingertip-blurting zone and then, yk, zzZzZzz.  I was talking to my friend Charlie today and she said, "Blog a whole list!"  Smart.

• RentBoy.  If you have not been following the George Rekers RentBoy scandal, why the hell not?  Especially if you are one of these downer people who has been trying to follow me around and chat me up about the depressing Gulf oil spill & its [ insert the oil-spill-appropriate term for fallout].  The Homophobic Demagogue's European Vacation with a Foxy, South Beach, Gay Escort gets better every time you follow up, which is the polar opposite of oil spill story.  Stop trying to fill me in about oil spill, people.  Knowing all those details is anxiety-producing, I do not need it.  Stop telling me.  Let's talk about RentBoy.  It feels like Purim, really. 
  
   
  
• Iris.  My cat who is going to be entering her third decade this year, srsly. She is in good health, thank God, but she is noticeably declining.  If she were a little old lady, she would be at the point where she would just have a path between the bed to the window & the bath and she might forget to make her meals.  I sometimes forget not how long she has been with me, but how much she has spanned.  I was complaining about her crabby, old-lady, fussing demands recently, and Kowalski cut me off, That cat has always been like that.  Always.  What are you talking about?  I forgot that he knew her.  Please, Iris, just die in yr sleep.  Peacefully.   No rush, but she has had a long, good run, that one. 
• A couple of weeks ago, I borrowed The Accidental Billionaires from the library.  Then I started sewing and set it aside, during which time Mari read it.  When I went to recover it, he cautioned me not to read it, saying, "It's going to agitate you."  He went into the office today, so I figured I could read it and it would be my own bad luck to be alone + agitated if that were so.  I feel like it made me less ranty about Mark Zuckerberg overall, but man, o, man, I wish I had known that kid was a fucking hacker before I signed up for a website at which he is the overlord. 
  God!  Of course!  His whole schema ::slapping forehead:: is so hackers' code:  Information that is accessible is for taking & using, because if you cared about it, you should have protected it.  So 350 squillion-billion people are just giving him information with the kind of mistaken presumption that there is a social contract, but no:  he is a hacker.  Now you know, if you did not.  The real problem I was left with after reading the book -- and now my real problem with Facebook -- is this:  Is Facebook the only thing Zuckerberg is going to bring to the world now?  That's a fucking waste.  Too bad for us, because he seems pretty smart enough to program something important.  Whatever.
  
   
  
  
• Roses.  My Don Juan climber is out this year.  If you know me, or you have been reading this blog for a long time, you know how I have always been conflicted about it, but every year it lures me with bloom?  This year, it is not making the grade, so that's it.  Bye!  I am like that.  Next year -- after much + many calculations -- I am on order for a Gloire de Dijon, an apricot rose described over & over & everywhere as a rose people just love.  I already have one rose I just adore, so what if I had two?  I was in the living room on Tuesday, reading the NY'er and could smell Mme Alfred Carriére from her spot all the way outside; I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, really.
• I am getting a megaphone for parenting.  I am tired of projecting my voice three floors up and outside and over & over again.  Fuck it.  Megaphone.  They cost more than I would have thought, but I suppose I never actually thought about it.
• Health freakiness.  Some little girl in Fille's art class found out that she had never had a drink of soda and after calling her a liar for a little bit, apparently rested her case with "Your mom must be some kinda health freak!"  This has caused us no end of amusement, Mari & I, because of all the things to use as evidence in my health-freak indictment?  We feel like not letting a child drink what amounts to poison is really pretty zzZzzZzzz, as things go.  I mean, there are so many things I forbid, nutritionally, in their diets.  I feel like we do not even need to go so granular as high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives, dyes, and trans-fats.  The fact that I frown upon any kind of flour is all anyone needs to brand me for the freaky.  Anyhow. 
• Almond Dream Vanilla Bites are something new for me to resist.  Honestly.  They are like a stick-free, ice-cream bar, and last week when it was so warm and I had to make the haul to Ballet Town?  I put some little "bites" in a paper cup and ate them on the way.  Great idea!  But sugar depresses the immune system and I have recently become much, much more vigilant about never, ever eating it because ... 
• I have been reading Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Lifeand I have to say, this idea that an immune system is constantly dealing with invaders and threats and whatever and one of those things one's own immune system can combat, given the right internal environment, is something so far-reaching-seeming as cells that wind up in cancer, well.  Yeah, sign me up for some of that health-freakiness.  Also, put down the freaking Almond Dream Vanilla Bites!
• Related to health-freaking, I have overheard a bunch of different children saying to their caregivers, recently, about this or that garbage food, "Why can't I eat it?  I'm not fat!"  Which is great, that they are not already on diets, but wtf is wrong with this thinking that health is only reflected by girth?  Whither the conflating?  I wanted to pull one snooty girl by her ponytail -- "The sweetener in that Oreo will turn your fucking liver to swiss cheese!  Why don't you have a glass of scotch instead, little girl?!"  I mean, seriously!  When I was trying to kill myself, I drank a fifth of Dewar's every day and smoked 2 packs of Camels, as a constitutional, and now it is easy to be a health freak, maybe because I have been on the other side and at that time, I was not half-assing it.  Maybe the answer to this question of why people would kill themselves with Hostess treats and Snickers is found somewhere in the space where Prufrock and Marlowe intersect with Thoreau. 
• Which reminds me, in closing, that I asked Fille today about one of her ballet school classmates who was hella dawdling yesterday, still putting up her hair long after class started.  "Does she like the class?"  I was conversational, casual, but I will admit that the reason I was asking was because Lara is a normal-sized girl -- tall and sturdy, will probably grow up to be an hourglass, sized an 8 or 10, feeling like a gigantic fatass, especially if she stays in ballet, where even at this age, a third of the tiny girls talk about how "fat" they are.  If Lara were my daughter, she would absolutely not be in mothereffing ballet, I promise that.  Anyhow, without getting into any of that with Fille, I was curious to see where the conversation might head.  Fille shook her head no, and then elaborated, "No, she doesn't, but hardly any of the girls do."  Whaaa-at?????  This class takes 180 minutes in the studio each week, plus a thousand & change in tuition, and hardly any of the girls want to be there?  This was crazy to me!  Where are their parents? What the hell? 

cooler by the lake

 
Saturday, after the farmers' market, I was thinking that while Becky makes her neighbors seem goofy & entertaining and all that, I would kill myself if I had to talk to so many people so often, such exposure to nonsense.  The Nutjob Neighbor with the two girls wandering the streets alone would by himself end my life.  Or, maybe not.  Maybe my skills have just not been tested.

I pretend to be a lot dumber than I am, as a rule.  It comes in handy here in the East, where people up and down the Northeast Corridor have all of the candor of New Yorkers without any of the sophistication. 

When someone says something evil or racist or republican or selfish or classist or whatever, I can just pretend not to understand what they mean, endlessly asking questions until they -- in their endless, posturing answering -- realize they sound like douchebags.  For example:

Nosy Neighbor:  Well, I can't believe you would let the children take that bus by themselves because of those people that ride it.

Me:  [daft, smiling patiently at the moron] No, they are not by themselves, other people are riding it.

NN: Right, but you know, those kind of people.

Me:  [crinkled nose, cocked head] What people?  The kind of people that ride a bus? 

NN:  Like, those drug people.  

Me:  [alarmed, but still confused] What?  You bought drugs on the bus?  What kind?

I can keep it up forever, but usually I do not have to because the person I am talking to realizes how they sound (like King of the Assholes) and packs it in, thankful that I did not catch on.  But I did, and this affects how I treat them going forward.  I know who they are.  Also, I am not above wickedly (and still in-character) repeating the exchange for others' benefit under the rubric of Omg, listen to this totally confusing thing [whomever] said to me the other day!

This is the sort of particular, smart-bomb evil cultivated by upper-Midwestern girls.  I am not an upper-Midwestern girl, but I dated for some time a notorious upper-Midwestern guy with three sisters who did not love me.  Those girls were sharp + wicked and I frequently would not realize what had happened until I was lying on the floor, exsanguinated.  So to speak.

In Chicago, we are much more direct (YOUSE FUCKING GUYS WHADDYA?), what with the Polish brawn & all the freight-handling.  But I was a quick study and soon learned to dish it back out to those girls, in their own language, much to Mr Kowalski's horror.

This morning we were out around the masses.  I took the scampering children to the coffee shop on campus, skulking the whole way.  We stopped at the playground on the way home.  One of our unlikeable neighbors asked me if I was pregnant.  Now we all know what that is about, n'est çe pas?  It is not really about the silk, empire-waisted, spaghetti-strapped tunic, is it?  No, not when this same neighbor just saw me last week in modern low-rise denim and a t-shirt, looking the same as always. 

I stared vacantly into the middle distance for a few seconds, pretending to monitor my children, before I abruptly and dizzily gave my full attention to her. 

"Pregnant? Wha?  Oh!  My gosh, you are pregnant!"  I was thrilled, elated, not letting her get a word in edgewise in my excitement for her good fortune.  "That is wonderful!  You know, I thought when I saw you last week you looked quite a bit fatter than usual, but of course! Duh, me!  And at your age, too!  What a blessing!   When is the baby due!?"  

She stammered something out about how she was not pregnant, but had been asking if I was.  My killing blow to her -- who I know to have had her first child when she was a year older than I am now -- was, O, God, no.  I'm much too old for that! 

Then I ran off after my children.  I rushed home to tell Mari, because zogmaaa what the hell, people?  Mari said it is right up there with the time that I got one of the cappuccino-crowd dudes on our block so mad he told me to suck his cock and I told him, "Shame on you!  Repulsive!  I am a married lady and I subcontract that work!  You can get the number from Mari!" 

I had forgotten about that, but Mari is right, it was pretty funny.  Also, similar in that the person totally said something, hoping to evoke a response and I blew it sideways to hell.  It is like Capone's tommy-gun loaded with the subsonic ammunition of the North.  Deadly!  Boom.  Show me the next thing, suckers.  God, neighbors, talking.  

I am tired of gardening already and I have barely started.  Also, we are doing a backyard hardscape remodel and the constant emailing with the contractor is exhausting to me, speaking of Chicago-style.  Mari says I should give a course in how to wheedle the dudes who work on yr house with their hands, because I speak their language.  Maybe so, but tiring, the same.  Only 10 more days of ballet for the term!  I am totally excited for the end of that.

dean martin or danny kaye.

One of the loonier, more far-out things I have done in the last decade is to have a  past-life counselor reveal to me what is my connection to the Israeli.  He & I had by then been discussing for more than ten years that we preceded our teenaged meeting.  I told him and our spouses at once:  She said that I knew you when you were a baby. 

 

He shook his head.  "I am older than you," he told me, on the verge of scoffing.  We all stared at him, but Mari & Mrs Israeli left it to me. 

"That's why it is a past-life situation," I told him, speaking slowly.  He was surprised and then allowed that multiple pennies were dropping on some things about me in that case.  Yes, indeed.     

Years ago, pregnant with Fille, I started dreaming of the Israeli.  By the time she was born, I was dreaming of him every night.  It was some of the most pedestrian dreaming ever visited upon me -- endless images of him & me shopping, eating, walking the streets of NYC -- but it was so vivid that I would spend my waking hours confused about who had been where and when [whatever] had happened.

It was exhausting, and I started to resent him for occupying all of my dreamscape even as I knew, logically, it was not his fault.  I was cross & difficult, hectoring, Only you would be the man in my dreams who won't even be the man of my dreams while he's there!  was one of my better, metaphysical complaints. 

Around Fille's first birthday, I dreamed about being back home with him, eavesdropping on him talking to a medical professional.  In leaning forward to do my best dream-eavesdropping, I woke myself.  I was sufficiently fussed about it that I called the next day & told him everything I remembered.  When I got to the dream-part I did hear them dream-talking about, he snapped out of his half-listening mode.  "Wait, tell me that part again.  What?"

 

Unbeknownst to me, he had been trapped in a real-life medical mystery.  The thing I "heard" in the dream was one of the things MDs were treating as a far-fetched, unlikely scenario, but in his reading was something that he felt was a distinct possibility, living inside his body like he was and all. 

Anyhow, he is Jewish, I am Catholic -- we do not require a hard sell on the mystical.  He went back to his doctor, pushed to be thoroughly explored in this far-fetched possibility and found the answer.  It was one of those situations where physicians say, you know, "It's lucky that we found this now."

After this amazing convergence, I was freed up to visit that past-life counselor -- something I had wanted to do for a long time, because honestly -- without ridicule from him or anyone in our families.  Bonus-y, my left-brained husband was schooled in the reality of the mysteries of the universe, so that was nice, seriously.

Anyhow, after eight years of not featuring the Israeli more than anyone else in my wacky-o typical dreaming with their bizarre thrills and spills, I have had two dull, dullsville dreams about him in 2 weeks.  Last night, dream-him broke some important news to me about his health and when I woke up, I could not remember what it was.

I called him, on his cell phone, lying still in my bed with my cell.  Omigod, it's you!  Hey, is there anything wrong with you, healthwise?

"I don't know," he said.  "Is there?  What did you hear?" 

I know!  I feel like such a bad friend!  No wonder it took a whole year before.  We had to make sure I was paying attention.   

eight-hour league

 

I was talking to a grownup person today, someone who describes herself as educated, who knew nothing about May Day.  I was floored.  I know that I come from a blue-collar background, plus, yes, Chicago, but it still seems a stretch to me that no one would ever have heard ever in school about IWPA or Industrial Workers of the World or the cause of the 8-hour workday. 

Eventually, I talked haltingly at enough length until something I said, combined with her knowledge of the fact of my hometown, caused her to say, "Oh, yeah.  But that's just a Chicago thing."  Right.  Because we only have the 8-hour workday in Chicago.  Also, May Day parades only happen there.  It's like Pulaski Day.  I opened & shut my mouth, a little, before settling on a non-committal, soothing kind of mouth noise.  This is why I avoid chitter-chatter with the neighborhood-at-large. 

 
Any old way, we have entered the season of plant sales, wherein all of the conservatories and gardens and arboretums of this land fling open their doors & invite you in to buy really fine plants which they are selling at well-below retail prices.  My friend Eve has just moved into her first garden and has been asking me for purveying tips.  I have hardly planted anything perennial since I moved in, so was not v much help.  I was glad to be able to call her the other day & say, "Let's!"

I stupidly misread the email and thought the sale started at 9am, when it started at 8am.  Gardeners around here are on it, so Eve & I missed out on who knows what else, but definitely the bleeding hearts were all gone.  Sad!  There will be another plant sale somewhere soon.  Also, there is a plant swap in a couple of weeks I will be attending; I fully expect there will be a bleeding heart division for the taking. 

 

I settled for a red peony.  (Those are Eve's zinnias.)  I just planted four peonies in the front yard, but they were just roots that I picked up impulsively at Costco, so I do not have high expectations for their appearance.  There were tree peonies for sale, which I have been wanting for a long time, but faced with one I realized I was not ready to commit.  I flirted and backtracked on a Lenten Rose in the same way, but that was mostly because no one could tell me what color it would bloom.

I have big plans for the garden this year, but I am mostly taking it slow.  It is a 7-year-old garden, and things are taking shape and I am going to try to mold them in the direction I would like.  Lots of division happening & I have room in my heart for a border-planting situation, I think. 

One thing that is happening this fall is that the Don Juan has to go.  It is an underperformer and this year the bloom is not even making weight.  Mostly, this year, without going crazy about it, I would like to rid the garden of pokeweed and valerian, which moved in quite cozily during my convalescence last summer. 

Anyhow, I dropped Eve & her baby back at their house and went to the farmers' market, where I encountered the ignorant chatterer and also overheard some general conjecture which came to a distressingly wrong conclusion about the origins of food. 

I did not need all that exposure to the insides of other people's minds -- I can look on the internet for that --  and had forgotten that neighbors, talking is the reason I most often avoid the market.    I actually wanted nothing but flowers, because we had none inside, and I should have been swift, but then I wandered along because I also wanted swiss chard.  No one was selling any bags of thinned babies or anything.  Everyone was all spinachy and I was not in the mood.  I reluctantly bought some rhubarb that I now am thinking will I resent having to cook.

 Mari took the children to some kind of all-day, childish cultural event, so I might get things started to transplant that peony, but probably I will start on my next sewing project.  That is how it is here.  Enjoy the weekend, also brought to you by the pretty city on the shores of Lake Michigan unionized labor.    

global warm-ups

Emergency! 

  

Nelly Moser is not doing well this year!  Her flowers are too small! 

In other clematis news, I finally tidied up the old "Polish Spirit."  Yes. 

Nelly & feisty old Mme Carriére are in bloom at the same time this year, which has never happened before.  The flowers are all effed up this year, all over.  Lilacs have already come and gone! 

My own little flowers are effed-up, too.  I am tired of saying to them, "I know it was 90 degrees a couple of weeks ago, but it is April.  Please put on a jacket.  No, you can't wear shorts.  Hello!  Spring blizzards!  No scarves, no hats, you're dead!"

This little weblog gets a lot of traffic about Mme. Alfred Carriére at this time of year.  Last night, someone was looking for a clematis to run up against her.  Rouge Cardinale is what I use for that.  It is not period, but it was appealing and undernurtured at the nursery, so I brought it home.  I know.  Neither is Polish Spirit the right vintage for my garden, but with a name like that, how could I resist, mowimy po polsku, back home in the  City of the Big Shoulders + spring blizzards.  Oh, god, it is still National Poetry Month! 

Right, so, I have been reading Grave of Light, but none of Alice Notley's work can be properly graphically-represented here in this teensy column.  Also, I do not feel like typing. Here is a poem from when I was last asked to respond to a study of Notley's work, if you know it.  I know, I know, I am not being a good Nat'l Poetries Player this year.  Is there a test?  A grade?  Yikes.  I used to be better for April.  (I used to not have a sewing machine nor birthday trips.)

I was already thinking of this poem & a couple of others because I was just in an email exchange with someone excellent  about his poem written as a son, and so thinking of the poems I have written as my son's mother.  There are two sides to every story. 

Postcards
Elle Case

Dear Ex-Beau,

I thought of you, in Central Georgia, with
the oak-leafed hydrangeas and pie at breakfast.
Grits, coffee, sausage gravy on biscuits,
over-medium eggs, then pie. Everything
good ends in pie. What have I started?

Dear Ex-Beau.

There have been two weeks of sensational, perfectly-
plush weather since you visited. I am thinking of your birthday
because Creeley died today. The children eat steamed
broccoli in a picnic every night; we have run out of paper
towels and I do not care.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I want to answer you. Of course I am terribly in love with my
son -- he is all the good things about any man I have ever loved,
mystically assembled into one little, loose-toothed boy. It is a
rapturous cancer, to love someone so much when you know
they will leave you.

Dear Ex-Beau,

Of course, of course, I love the baby. But my son will grow
into a man. I must reflect upon the details I pave onto his senses.
What will he expect from women? He knows I am afraid of heights.
I love red and pink roses, never yellow, nor white.
I never eat tomatoes, for I can not risk disappointment.
Think of everything you know to expect from me. Had only your
mother prepared you for my arrival on the tide.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I miss you, too. I am sad and sore in my heart, so homesick
for you. It is surely the fault of current events and world affairs.
Who isn't homesick right now? The world is in pain from longing.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I was willing, it was you afraid to fall into my hands.
After the hara-kiri of your heart, I never would stay.
I write about it, sometimes. I trace the words backwards,
until everything I remember turns to smudges and loops.

good fences, bob frost

The weather is so nice, sunny & clear, not at all too-warm, which is usually perfect for going around in the garden, but I am inside, starting my engines on a few projects, which is its own fun. 

 

My neighbors are having such bad behavior, which is another reason I am gloried to be inside with the making.  I try to avoid all of this behavior by curtailing my sidewalk-gardening chores to the hours between 10 and noon, but still I might wind up passively harangued into chat by the tenured professor who lives down the street & keeps bankers hours.

Last week, or maybe two weeks ago, he sallied by on his morning constitutional and told me he is moving.  Apparently, his wife has been cheating on him with the pastor of her church.  I know.  Also, that he found this out -- well, he suspected something was up, but "trusted her" (his words) -- when the grad student that lives next door to them mentioned something (zogma!  What kind of balls does that even take?  I have to take a garden transplant down to Ben the Ph.D candidate and investigate him now!).  Subsequent to the neighbor telling him his wife was a whore, two people from her congregation phoned to break the news to him.  Good thing, too, because the next person on the horn was the freaking guy from the Diocese who handles these matters.  Seriously?

So, anyhow.  Later, I told Mari, and he was just like, "Why did he tell you?"  Um, because he is moving and she is taking the dude into their home and wouldn't you tell everyone?  More to the point, would you not -- here in the lawless East -- make me the very first person you told?  "Be good," is all my husband had to say about that.  I know. 

As Frost also said in "Mending Wall," Spring is the mischief in me, and maybe so in everyone.  I just confessed to the Israeli my weariness in my own habit of slyly goading people into fault.  We were catching up and I was about to tell him a mostly-amusing anecdote culled from real-life interaction, but then settled for, "You know, you've seen this a million times:  someone I don't care for is bleeding and I suggest quietly to them that something cool is in the water, and then say nothing more about it, but am deeply satisfied when they jump in."

"Right," he said, for he has known me for many, many years.  "And then they find out that the something cool is hungry sharks?"  Yes, kind of like that.  I did that again the other day, with a different neighbor.  I mean, on the one hand I am weary of my own petulance and impertinence, but on the other, whatever.  

The first line of this poem always reminds me of one of Creeley's:  Nothing says anything/ except that which it wishes/ would come true.  I can never articulate why, but I think it is a function of the letting instead of the making.  Important!

Mending Wall
Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

early show

Looky, looky who has arrived.

 

Also, more exciting that Mme Alfred Carriére is this:  I have all the feeling back in my hands.  It had been two years my hands had been numb.  Honestly, I do not remember what having all the feelings feels like, but I am pretty sure this is it.  I am so excited!  It feels like a great gift of something I never really took for granted.  I burned myself today, making lunch, and was like, "Hey!  Ow!  Heyyy!"  Good.

I had to get into the garden yesterday.  I had 4 peonies and 12 dahlias to plant and then I had to make special accommodations and rush on out there, before the inevitable delayed muscle soreness of Pilates set in and I would be unable to use my butt in any sequence of gardening postures.  Seriously. 

I know I said this a week or so ago, but Pilates has been so hard lately.  I mean, I am working with Pilates Chick, everything is fine, she is super-good at what she does, and I feel bionic, every day, plus also taller, all the time, it is for the best.  But on Wednesday it was again all so hard.  So hard!

Kowalski, who was called to receive Hand-Recovery Report and then lingered on for the chatting -- asked me to quantify how hard is so hard, and the answer is, I was at the brink of whining.  Oh, yes.  So hard.  Because I might complain and I might even cry, but whining?  I mean, that just means it is hard in a different direction.  Like, there is something going on besides lack of physiological mettle. 

That is when the whining comes on, every time, is when I can not just put my shoulder to the wheel and do.  There is a subtlety and wholeness to Pilates I do not love.  Being strong can be a weakness.  Aauugh!  Just typing that makes me want to whine!  And yet, this is the lesson from which I recoil every time it comes to me.  Which is why it keeps coming.  Oh, life.  Why must I be so yielding to your lessons?  I mean! 

genesis

 

That rascally lamb might be lying down on Broadway, because she sure the hecks is not up & around, showing March the way out.  It has been raining for the lion's share of, well, March.  There were some amazingly sunny days.  There was one day it was 41 degrees and double-plus sunny, which I recall only because my next-door neighbor -- who hails from Duluth -- came home from work & while we were chatting, flung his coat to the ground and spread his arms wide to the sky.

"It's beautiful out here," he exclaimed.  "I mean, really!  It is just so gorgeous!  Feel this sun!"  Then he picked up his things to head inside.  "Oh, wow.  I'm coming back with a beer.  You want one?"

It was 11:30 in the morning.  I love him so much, this burly, bearded homeland guy, right in the next-door house.  I declined the beer, but when he came back, I had a fresh pot of tea next to me, and we sat there on our right-next-to-each-other porches, in our shirtsleeves, possibly the only people in a mile's radius who thought the weather was grand enough to leave the outerwear indoors. 

But it has been raining surely for the past 3 days.  I am starting to feel a little anemic in my brain, like I have forgotten how to see, or something.

If you need to know, you do already that Becky is having surgery today.  My best is with her and in her honor, I would like to proffer a list of things I am liking today.

1. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.  Because what more do we need?  How better to drive the fucking point home about America's dumptruck diet than by showing a room full of first-graders who can not identify a potato?  A mothereffing potato.  Lord.  Disgraceful, and that town does not feature anomalies, I promise you.
   
   
2. The Holiday,which we are maybe the last to know, but watched last night & immensely enjoyed.  It was rather complex & cerebral for a movie with so many good-looking people in it.  I was surprised to see (after we viewed it) that it was classified as a romantic comedy.  Really?  It was much more chewy and rather tidy for a script that had so much in the way of character.  Oh, when Kate Winslet's sweet, pitiable, English-rose character gets to Los Angeles and is hanging her head from the window, blown away by the California scenery, how do you not love her?  The only problem with the movie is that Mari & I had recently watched the Jack Black Drunk History segment in which he played a womanizing Ben Franklin.  We were on the verge of hilarity the whole time we were watching the movie and then, he ebulliently tells the Winslet character, "I am going to make a fire," and that was it for both of us.  Howling with laughter.  Good times.
   
   
3. My Liberty of London for Target gardening gloves.  True love.  I have the ones in the pink "Garla" pattern.  They are so nice and perfectly leather, which makes them perfect for dealing with old Mme Alfred Carriere, who will have her own series of posts any day, surely.  If ever the sun comes out.
   
   
4. What kind of animal [fill in child's offense]?  Remember in The Sopranos, when AJ got busted getting stoned & Carmela's famous, shrewish, rhetorical question, What kind of animal smokes marijuana at his own confirmation?  (That link is here, she is at 3:21. Such restraint!)  I have made good use of the base on this query lately.  Surprisingly, it has been my daughter on the receiving end of this trick question:  What kind of animal sits around and reads a book while her mother picks up her crap from the floor? and What kind of animal sticks pins into the dining room table?  It is pretty satisfying, I have to recommend it.  It is the kind of thing you could wear out, though.  Use sparingly.
   
   
5. FlashForward is back.  It went away for the Olympics and I forgot everything that happened before.  I can not remember anything plotwise that drives a fictional narrative, ever.  I am always asking Mari to remind me what happened -- Why were they so mad at that Wayne guy in Heat?  What was his name?  Wayne Grow?  or O, you know, I think this Angel [in Neverwhere] is kind of shady -- this was during the second time I read the book.  Or, this one, from just this weekend:  You know, I was driving and I was thinking of the character, with the blood on her hands ... which play was that?  Oh, wait, I know!  Lady MacBeth!  It was MacBeth!  Who'd they kill again?  Speaking of FlashForward, I was hoping that Mike Ealy could take over the Terence Howard position in Hollywood, because Howard is kind of a prick, honestly.
   
   
6. The new Gorillaz CD Plastic Beach is so great.  I love it.  Love, love, love it.  I think my less-than-140 character review the other day read:  It makes me wish I was the kind of lady who could make full use of her stoner pool boy.  I am so going to stick right by that.  It is grand.

junta

 
I think Tuesday was the last sunny + clear day we are going to have for a while. The dahlias -- which have been lingering for some time; and are really super-saturated with unstoppable color, wtf -- fully opened and I brought them in. The garden is a mess, honestly, and if it ever stops raining this month or next, I will get out there and put it to bed. We have a compost tumbler now I can stuff it all into. Mari & the children -- mostly Mari & Garçon -- put it together from a loose prescription from Boys' Life magazine. I spied it while sitting in the same waiting room where I was trying to ignore the bossiness of that bossy Ladies' Home Journal, and also I saw Fille out there, with her protective glasses on, hammering, so boys' life is not really wholly descriptive.

My boy's life is making me old and tired and I am looking to put a stop to all of this endless conflict. If anyone has known me for even an hour, they will know that my son presents me with certain challenges, which have long been driving me absolutely insane, really. Lately, the issue of schoolwork or not schoolwork and will we send him to school to endure the work & realize too late his immense privilege, or does he need more time to absorb the lessons of freedom or blahblahblah, and it has been so stressful for me that even the sweetest pals who are also childless dudes have felt compelled to comment, offering sweet, sincere, all-thumbs advice. So, it has been a lot, recently.

This whole year, really, on top of My Issues, has been hard with him. One of my issues has been trying hard to remember that there are two sides to every story. Also, to salve myself, because if the alternative to just expressing anger at an infuriating child is this kind of shockingly poisonous and manipulative horseshit, it is perfectly ok to just tell them you are angry because they are being rude and you will just catch them on the flip side. Honestly.

That whole conditional love thing made me so angry, so! angry!  (Make the clicky on the link if this seems abrupt.)  I was thinking of it for weeks, the incongruity & sadism of it, but at the same time how it brought so much of the parenting I see around me into focus, like, whoa.  Then we saw Wild Things, which was so remedial, I thought, in its "message" of It is scary to get mad, it is scary to have someone mad at you, there are two sides to every story.  But then people all around us were all, Like whoa and it was so cathartic for me and thunderbolt-scary for my children and etc, so dunno. 

I was recently reading something I journaled about 4 years ago, so the children were 4 and 6, and they had just been beastly to me for an entire day, in every way 4 and 6 can come up with -- not listening and defying and pushing back and naysaying and tantrums and disobedience and power struggling.  It had been a singularly tough day, which had been documented by me for them, all along.  I was going to NYC the next day; I would leave in the morning before they woke up.  They asked me, at bedtime, while we were all lying in one of their big beds, if I would bring them something from NYC.  I told them no. 

More than that, I wrote that I told them No, because you have been unkind to me all day long and I am angry and I feel mean and I feel petty and I feel small so that it pleases me to be able to say to you, "No, no I will not bring you anything from NYC." I am happy to say no and even happier that you will be disappointed.

And I read it, in this life, and I thought, "Whoa!  I said that to a 4-year-old?  Heavy."  But, I mean, it was not a surprise that I would say something like that, and reading it I remembered the day very clearly, how wretched they were, though I did not remember such an clear confession of my own weaknesses.  But I would much rather model clarity & articulation around actual feelings than hostile, two-faced resentments and control dressed up as cheerleading.

I came across a crazy book in the library last week.  An old book, in a plain, one-color hardcover with the title embossed on the spine, which gave it this illusory quality, the antiquity of it, plus the title: Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. It was like a mirage in the desert, and I was a little surprised to have my hand close over a real book. I need a radical approach to child rearing! Yes!

I am a little sad, wading through this book, to realize that Mari and I are already pretty radical in our childrearing choices, i.e., honestly confessing pettiness and refusal to a preschooler, so maybe there truly is nothing to be done. One weird thing is that this book is 50 years old and people are still pretty much parenting the same way that he is going on against, and Mari and I are still in the 21stc radical. It is silly to think of, but also I realize that the zaniest, most cause-for-comment thing that I do as a mother is let my children call me by my first name. Every time it makes it onto someone’s radar at all, it surprises me, and then to watch it blow out their sensors … it never adds up for me.

The other thing about the book is that he talks about freedom and license in a way I do not understand.  I think there might be a language barrier with his 19thc British-English, or maybe I am just being slow.  Anyhow, I have surmised that he is using "freedom" as what I am pretty sure we are giving our children, which a lot of people we know are giving their children, but we are not giving them license to run all over us and everyone else, e.g., allowing them to use my Christian name; not being all weird & we-never-inhaled about sex or drugs or bad behavior; honestly confessing pettiness and refusal to a preschooler. 

Nonetheless, the book is a little intense & I have to keep stopping and pondering.  The problem remains, though, of how to preserve our boundaries and let our son have autonomy and also get him to get his schoolwork done. I think this involves redefining our terms regarding what constitutes schoolwork, as illustrated in this short phone call with Mari.

Femme: I just think, honey, that isn’t the reason we homeschool because we do not believe in the pedagogy of institutional education? So, therefore, is it not unreasonable for us to recreate a classroom in our home?

Mari: No, we aren’t recreating a state classroom at all. Because that would be the bus and the early-waking and the all-day and the M-F attendance. This is different. If he just does his work, then he’s done, two hours, spit-spot.

Femme: Yes, and I agree with you. But it isn’t working, that. Is it? Is it??

Mari: No, I guess not. Oh, I see.

We are not really what can be defined as unschoolers, such as these things can even be defined. We do not think that children can learn everything they need to know about math & chemistry from baking. Perhaps that makes us horribly judgmental and a teensy bit elitist, but we both think that is lazy bullshit. It does the child a disservice to let them go around without being able to catalog & categorize and also without working on the muscles of memory and content-generation.

At the same time, we are having such a hard time with our son, and he already reads & writes way above grade level, plays an instrument, has basic carpentry skills and does math solidly at expectations for the fifth grade, and maybe a little bit beyond. So, what difference does it make if he can take notes by chapter on 3x5 cards? I have no answers. I want answers! I am answer-driven! I have an organized & tidy life, but no more, oh, no. No.

And to be completely and utterly fair to Garçon, who possibly does not deserve it, his contention about taking 3x5 cards notation was having to do with the fact that the book he was starting with was a work of historical fiction. He was insulted + amazed that he was to take notes on fiction. As he lodged the initial complaint, I saw his point, absolutely. I was, in fact, sorry that I had not thought of that when I saw it in the curriculum guide and swapped out some nonfiction book from the same unit. At the same time – welcome to my issues – I just thought to myself, No! God! Can he not just one time do what he is told? Just one goddamn time in his whole life?!

This all reminds me a little bit, I explained to Mari, of the time that Garçon was 13-ish months old and we decided it was time for him to sleep in his own bed.  After he was night-weaned. we put a double-sized futon in the room across the hall & began transitioning him.  He would go for naps in "his" bed just fine, and he would go to sleep in the beginning of the night without complaint.  But when he awakened in the middle of the night is when the trouble started. 

We would walk him back to his room, explaining cheerfully that it was time for him to sleep in his big bed, blah, blah, blah, and it would all be fine & we would be right across the hall, and we could all dream of being together, and see you in the morning, etc.  My son was not having any of it.  So he tantrummed and refused and we went back & forth, gently-determined, no one sleeping, everyone cross.

This went on for a week, and I said to Mari, "Why are we doing this?  We sleep in a queen-sized bed, he is a little baby, and are we doing this for a reason?  Because I really just want to sleep again."  We realized we had no real reason for wanting him to sleep in his own bed & even if we ever did, it now paled in comparison to our real desire for sleeping.  So, fine. 

So, I cannot actually remember our reasons for homeschooling, but I am pretty sure they did not involve wanting everyone to be resentful about making outlines and using compound sentences just so.  It was not so that I could recreate a state's classroom in my home.  It was not so that I could relegate my husband to the role of "Principal," not unless I am planning to put on a cheerleader's outfit after dark. 

My pal the Israeli has a similarly-determined child living in his house.  We spent some time metaphorically whispering & confiding last night and when I told him of the 3x5 disaster, he assured me he says similar things to his kid all the time and then said, conspiratorially, “And I just know while I am doing it that it’s so childish, but I can’t stop myself.” I know! Totally! Let's tell them all about it in a confession!  I'm Catholic!  Let's go!!

thursday

I want to not forget this small piece of business I mentioned elsewhere in the intersphere to Becky.  Here is the front of my home this very afternoon.  Obvsly, we have no HOA here.

  
What we do have is a kindly/meddlesome neighborhood neighbor (debuted here), whose aging mother lives on this block, who came around last week or so (?) and swept down the length of the street.  I was already out there, sweeping up the leaves from the curb a little, because otherwise it rains & we drive on them, and they get clotted and the storm drains or whatever ... honestly, I don't know.  It is bad, though.  (Honestly, I don't know that it is empirically bad, but we get little dams here & there and it is annoying.)

The funny thing about Rusher is that when we first moved here, he would come round all the time & bring our trash cans back from the curb.  It pissed me off so much because I was going to get to it when I got to it.  As a rational person, I think he might have been trying to help -- I did have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, after all. 

One day, I ran into his wife around town & said, in my Tallulah Bankhead's tone, "Your husband keeps bringing my trash cans in and you can tell your husband that just because my husband is away two nights a week, that doesn't mean I am that kind of woman."  And I walked off, marshalling my double stroller.  Ahahaha.  (I don't know, but I did!  I am here to confess!)

Anyhow, whatever day that was, I walked back out -- I was super-multitasking -- and Rusher was there, sweeping up the dirt from the pot Fille knocked over in her energetic step-sweeping.  But now already the steps look like this.

 

Is it trashy?  To me, it just seems like fall; leaves fall and blow and whatever.  I am not worried.  Also, I do not have to worry about it, because I cannot see it from inside my home & I despise the neighbor directly across.  This is her view.  When I walk past all this outdoor, unattended, natural disorder, it looks like this,

  
so you might see how it could slip my mind, once I entered such an overthought oasis of velveteen + library books supplanting decorative pottery + unauthorized rearranged furniture + knitting all over.  Obviously I am some kind of indoor/outdoor schizophrenic.  Wait, maybe not.  I think it all goes back to the children. 

Close readers surely did not miss where I documented indulging myself in a real cocktail the other night and while it is not exactly scheduled to repeat, it is not out of the question.  My son, he is exhausting me.  Only after a go at fortification by grueling hours spent between the Gauntlet and the sauna.

The baby and I made a break for it today, just she & I.  We had to go pick up the car from our mechanic and after, we did a little shopping.  She has a new pair of shoes to show for it.  We walked into the auto shop and Fille grimaced, "Oh, ew, it smells bad!"  What's not to like?  It smells like fresh cigar smoke, fossil fuels and men.  I want a job there, really.  I would be so happy & high on yang. 

Today, I was enjoying this link I got in my hopper thanks to a farflung, past-life's colleague.  I love what I can see of the Obamas' marriage because it seems so real to me, or at least familiar.  Not the part where he is President of the United States, but the rest.  I recently read some interview with her where she was talking about a belt she owns that he disdains as "the Star Trek belt."  She revealed that her response to him was something along the lines of, "Get out of my closet; go run the world, OK?"  Yes, I know, it happens here sometimes, too.

I love this part:

Michelle Obama accepted that she was not going to have a conventional marriage, that her husband would be away much of the time. “That was me, wanting a certain type of model, and our lives didn’t fit that model,” she told me in an Iowa lunchroom in the summer of 2007. “I just needed the support. It didn’t have to be Barack.” Craig Robinson later told me that he and his sister, Michelle, had another realization: if their father, a city water worker, had the kinds of opportunities their generation did, he probably would not have been home for dinner every night, either.

I love it because it speaks to how no one's marriage is like anyone else's marriage.  Also, any marriage is kind of like the story about the blind men and the elephant.  Bystanders see where they are, what they bring to it; no one knows the whole beast. 

Anyhow.  I am trying to get things ready for an uninterrupted listen of Game 2 of the World Series.  Last night was a little bit crazy.  Cliff Lee, I suspect, may be bionic.  People of the world will see what happens tonight.

satin jacket required

That baseball game last night was stunning, even on the radio. If you do not know, Philadelphia's Phillies ruled the Dodgers 11-0.  At some point, my mind could not take it in fast enough and we were listening and watching ESPN's Gamecast at the same time. It was stupefying and the opposite of the ALCS Game 2, which was grim & unyielding (3 extra innings to yield one run at 1am). Game 4 is shaping up to be much better, taut & with showmanship, athleticism.

Anyhow.

 

I am so tired of my neighbors & their micromanager parenting expectations! I am going to pass out copies of the Free-Range Kids book! So, there are 11 children on the block, not counting 3 babies. So, mine, and then Beautiful Neighbor's kids, who are 4 and 8; Czarist Guy has a 4yo; Dr Mom's kids are 10 & 6; The Surfers have a 4yo, and Mixed-Up Mom has a buncha kids who are 10, 8, and 6 or something.  It's v chaotic at her house. 

My children are the eldest pair, by which I mean -- I am sure there is a right-brain term for this, but I do not have it handy -- my youngest child is the eldest of all the youngest children. So, I have two perfectly old-enough children, while my other neighbors with 10-year-olds have kindergartners at the bottom of their rosters. Fine.

Then, I let my children go outside and do things by themselves. Not because I am neglectful or turning tricks or whatever, but because they live here and 8 & 10 is old enough to play outside on your own street without a parent crawling up yr butt. I tell them to go outside and play and then I lock the screen door and make dinner. We are, Mari & I, very retro in this way; we let them go around. So, to the mailbox or the farmer's market or to the neighbor's to pick up our CSA share, or whatever, in about a 1-mile radius. We do this because they are fully capable. Also, because they are willing. Further, if they are not fully capable, we should find this out while they are close to home.

Now, our neighbors know this, and we know that they are scandalized by this. But, I do not care, because it is not apples to apples. One of them cannot say, "Oh, I would never do what Femme does, with the letting the kids go all around," because they have no choice. One cannot leave a 4yo outside playing by herself or send her to the mailbox 2 blocks away, I do not think. Would they feel the same way if they did not have to be outside with their little kids? The world will never know, because they do have to be out there.

So, whenever I send the kids out to play and all the other kids + their attendant-parents are out there, I get a little attitude, like, Why don'tcha come out here & watch yr own damn kids, Femme?And my attitude is always, "Yeah, because they don't need watching, duh. Why don'tcha go inside then, you baby whiner baby Captain Helicopterpants? Huh?"

So, this is kind of how this goes. I mean, words have never been exchanged, and I try to seem at turns harried and/or spacey so that maybe they will think I am too busy or too dumb to cleave to their (busywork, dumb) expectations. Today, Mixed-Up Mom did the thing that I hate, where she puts a roadblock traffic cone at the end of our one-way street and lets the kids ride bikes up & down in the street.

Now, I am not crazy about this because I spent all that time teaching my kids to stay out of the goddamn street, and huh? But, whenever this happens, with the effing roadblock cones, I go out there to help playground monitor the situation a little and I always feel like I deserve the gift of a butter sculpture for my diplomacy. But today, I did not want to be out there. I was busy. Also, I had already completed all my outside things (major garden shite) while the children played outside earlier.

Also, why the fuck should I be out there? My children are old enough to play outside together, without me. And if you are the dope who creates a fucking situation where the neighborhood kids are running around in the road, well, then, stop acting like I have to be out here helping you. It is not as if I put traffic cones up in the street when they want to ride their bikes the rest of the time when it is the two of them playing. I tell them to ride down to the park and I walk down to meet up with them. But no one else does that, not even with the oldest kids.

Over the summer, my kids tried to get a gang together (there are 4 ten-year-olds in our everyday-play, if we include the boy in the house behind us) to take their bikes to the park & ride around? Everyone’s mother acted like they wanted to go hang out at the bus depot with flavored-lube packets pinned to their chests. Why? All those kids have wristwatches. Three of them have cell phones! There is no reason they cannot go to the park 6 blocks away to play & ride bikes and get out of the mothersucking house. But, whatever. They are not my kids.

Mixed-Up Mom & Dr Mom worry me the most, though. Their daughters are Garçon’s age, but totally incapable. The moms are always refusing to let the older girls do things, but then saying, “Oh, no, but I’ll have to deal with that soon enough!” They mean in the teen years, but I do not want to save up these things for the teen years when the children have their judgment clouded by hormones & rapid brain growth. I want some measure of common sense and competence to be hard-wired before that! Knowing that those two girls are going to be so immature and untested and not at all self-actualized when they get some “freedom” freaking stresses me out & is a recipe for disaster and I do not want Garçon & Fifille to be collateral damage.  As much as it pains me, I try not to encourage the friendships.  But, as my pal Charlie says, there is a reason it is called parenting, not feeding & clothing. 

Anyhow, I was trying to have a civilized conversation with Mixed-Up Mom about my kids wanting to go with her 2 older kids to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. My kids asked her kids if they could make the trip & Mixed-Up Mom presumed I was chaperoning. I was a little bit rude, I admit – “She can’t go to the freaking neighborhood Cineplex with her friends yet?” I said it with kind of a mean girls’ eyebrow/eyeroll/huff-n-puff, too – but I was trying, I tried. I followed up with a sincerely soothing, “I was going to take them there and wait at the deli across the street, if that makes you feel better."

But it was not working and the kids were all over the place and then a car came and Czarist Dad kind of barked at me, “Can you get Madison’s bike out of the way, Femme?” Because it was the closest to me, and Madison and her Captain Helicopter Barky Whiner Bossypants Dad – who, frankly, is kind of an uptight douche to my little boy -- were down the street. And I just could not take it any more.

So, I told the kids to get it together because it was time to go in – and it was; I had to make supper, I could not be standing around outside helicoptering kids old enough to mind themselves, or at least working toward mastery of this self-discipline – and then Fifille said, “But why?” (Fifille: Fail.)

When we got home I told them both that I hate to be trapped talking to all these boring people that were not my friends because they thought I should be crawling all over my kids the way they crawled all over theirs, that I had already done my time making nice-talk with dull people in Playground Dullsville when they were babies and now I am all done. I have things to do, inside my home. I told them they could play outside, in front of their house, and if their friends parents’ would deign to let their pals play in front of our house, without following along behind them, then great.  (Good luck with that sentence.) 

I cannot do it anymore with the outside playalong. These people are not in my league. I felt horrible & inadequate in my failure to negotiate or mediate, but then in what I have chosen to interpret as a sign from God, an hour or so later, a past-life colleague announced to his Faceworld that his wife sent him an email that read: Just left sandbox thanks to dickwad kids and their dickwad moms. I am sure her situation was very different from mine, but still. I felt way less lonely. Score one for social media, I guess.  Hooray.