la femme follette

meta. metaphor.

We very often have trouble in this house because my brain works on the right and Mari's on the left.  We do not communicate well.  What I have found in the last three or four years is that drawing works great.  It is like a million words.

 

 

As such, I illustrated Becky's  preschool-dropoff story today while passing the information along.  I am not sure if I got it right, but I got it across, and that is all that matters.  He & I were already talking about driving and regional expectations and I said, "Omgz!  Listen to this!"  Then I started drawing the layout.  "Where does she live?"  And I told him & he said, "Oh, that's a bad town for driving."  Yes! 

We are about to watch I Love You, Man while I knit away at a scarf.  Mari had never heard of the movie, and I was hemming & hawing, thinking of drawing a little picture, and then I said, "Well, Paul Rudd is in it."  He wanted to know why I did not start with that nugget.  

Anyhow.  Saturday night! 

happy hloene

 

Last night, we were unfortunately caught up in Ballet Town's Hallowe'en hoopla.  Fille & I dawdled after her class, having dinner at the Uzbeki place on the main drag.  When we came out, it was dark, and down the street we saw ... a throng of people, led by searchlights.  Also, the main drag was lined with spectators.  Holy hell, we have to get out of here!  I told her and we hustled it out.

I had a book to drop off at Ballet Town's library, but when I got to the parking lot behind the library, that it shares with the municipal building, there were cones & a group of bystanders.  I pulled over to the side of the road to get out and information-gather from the natives.

"You can't park there," one of them said. 

"I know that," I said.  "But you are cordoning off my usual parking space.  I have a book to drop off and --"  That was as far as I got before they started piling on with unhelpful suggestions, every one, no one getting to the answer to the question I parked my car to get out & ask.  "Are you ever going to let me talk?"  I asked, with no eyelashes.

After that, I found out that the facing street was not one-way heading on the grim course to Ballet-Town Parade, which was the confirmation I had sought.  Going around the town & coming back on Library Road, I again pulled the car over in front of the (closed) library to dump the book in the drop box.  Some Halloweeners were coming down the street with cats & bumblebees in strollers. 

"You can't park there," one of them said. 

"Why don't you mind your own damn business?!"  is what I asked him.  God, enough, Ballet Town!  Twice each week is enough of you!

 

Fille (sexy ghost!) is on her own tonight, with Mari & her best pals.  Garçon did not get to have Hallowe'en, which is baffling to all of us, but this is what he chooses.  He fell behind on his school work in a battle of wills (with whom we are not exactly sure), and Hallowe'en was at stake.  Well actually, it started out with Astro Boy being at stake, but then came into the week facing Hallowe'en, still with him stonewalling & alternately trying to get himself out of the weeds, and by the time he got down to business last night, he just did not have enough time to complete his work.

He worked somewhat feverishly today, my son, and then at 3ish (our Hallowe'en parade -- park where you feel like it! -- starts at 4) he came to me with a sad + unacceptable attempt at his last two assignments -- one-page wrap-ups of relevant extra-reading .  "This is really the best I can do with this, Mom, I'm serious." 

Mari & I had to explain to him that the truth was that this was the best he could do in the half-hour he had left, and the fact is that if a person is going to wait until the last minute to meet a deadline (never mind that putting me into the last minute for reviewing when I was trying to get my other child out the door is unacceptable, but group lead-time is not a concept we have worked on), they had better make certain they can crank out work that meets the standards in that last minute. 

So, I am home with him while Fille & Mari wind their way back from the farthest reaches of our route.  Then (!!!), Mari told him that if he were to complete his revisions, he would take him out when they returned (spoiler!), but no.  My son is upstairs in his room, right now.  Ok.  Whatever.

This is obviously larger than trick-or-treat, or homeschooling, or whatever.  People are quick to say, "Send him to school!" as the problem manifests itself aroud his schoolwork, but it is not a schooling issue, this is a parenting issue.  It is very trying and I am never sure what to do, or -- this occured to me a couple of days ago, while I was stewing over this latest -- maybe there is nothing to do. 

Much is made of how Fille is all into ballet & we go along, because it is her thing & not ours, but ballet still requires that we do something.  Maybe our job with Garçon is to do nothing.  He does not at all do anything in a way we find logical or sensible or anything.  Mari & I (and Fille, to boot), do not do things the hard way.  We choose what we want, we set the goal, find the most direct route between A to B , get in front of what we can and try to stay loose for the rest.  A. Eyelashes or B. Mind Your Damn Business, it is your choice when you get in our way.  I think that our flexibility is key and also, ironically, the thing we are not using to its best advantage with our son.

But the ballet thing was making me think -- Fille has a thing she wants to do, and it makes us go "???" but we do it for her, because she wants it, it is part of her being -- but again, it requires that we do something.  Drive the car, write the checks, think about performative gender and stereotypes & inhibitions and pervasive cultures!  Fend off stage parents!  Buy tights a lot!  So even though her way is mystifying, the doing & the direction is very familiar.

Our son is not so.  We are trying to sort out a lot lately how much of this is us and how much is him and what to do about it, or if there is anything to do.  We make our expectations very clear and we also are deconstructors and simplifiers and a lot of our previous conflict with our son has been about the fact that our feelings are so hurt because we try to make things clear and easy to achieve with him, but he blows it off, insists on doing his way.  Also, we do not get our way with our son, which is troublesome to us, and also, because we are Doers, we want to find the way to get our way.  Mari and I most certainly relate strongly to the child's will.  Just having to do with him, we feel like as he grows older, the stakes get higher, the things he will lose out on more valuable, but at the same time, he is only 10. 

Also, so what about our way?  Who can say that anything is right about it for our fin de siècle little boy?  Maybe he will develop some interesting + important method we cannot even yet conceive of!  Time travel!  Or something!  But not if he does not make it through the 5th grade.  See?  I am narrow-minded, but I am sorry!  How is this happening?  This child!  

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine the other day -- she has one daughter, who is 30.  I am not the kind of person who pretends that everything is just great, unless I think doing otherwise will bore you to death or give you social poisoning.  So, she asked, and I was halting and a little hesitant, but I told her more or less what was going on this week and how it was relevant to the whole of him, as a piece of it.  She said that we could not do more than we were doing.  So, all we can do is deliver the consequences, but we cannot, like, make him see that the consequences will be so awful before the consequence comes down. 

 

Obviously.  Anyhow.  This is way more intense than I thought it would be.  It is all that wiccan self-reflection shit in the energy of this time, surely.  If you have made it this far, internet, I salute you! 

frankie says relax

 

Today, instead of driving my car into the Delaware River, with my children in the backseat, & then blaming it on an itinerant + mysteriously-vanished black man, I calmly + lovingly dropped my little girl off at her ballet class, ditched her brother at the library, then went and got a massage.  There is a Tui Na place in Ballet Town to which I had never been and now I have.  Not so exciting, but not a bad way to kill time, either.  It was probably the stabbiest massage I have ever received.  The outfit hangs out a reflexology shingle, also, so I am thinking the stabby is really best used there.  The very idea of whiling away some ballet time having some bodywork that happens with my clothes on is almost more excitement than I can bear.  That is truly exciting.

Also in Ballet Town:  a Pilates studio.  I like Pilates Chick, but this place is walking distance from the school, and further investigation reveals that it is 2/3 the price of Pilates Chick, so ... that.  I am not one for breaking up.  I really am more about slipping out the back to hop on the bus and make a new plan.  So, secretly what I hope is that I will take a few sessions with a New Chick and find that Pilates Chick is more awesome at her job.  (She is pretty awesome, really.)  I think that is unlikely, as at the same time I am wanting to see other people in the area of Garçon's guitar instruction and I think we are looking at Season of Don't Need to Discuss Much.  That would be best, I think, a whole slate-wiping in every direction.  Fall is a good time for that.

On the way to ballet, Fille said, "Are we going to carve pumpkins for Hallowe'en?"  I told her I had no idea & asked her what her father thought.  Both children responded with a "???"  And I shrugged it off.  Three miles later, they wished again to know whatever we would do about pumpkin carving.  I said to them, "Hallowe'en is tomorrow, you know."  Then they agreed that they should have asked the Pumpkin-Manager Parent, who has been home all week long. 

Ok, but this is a first.  I neither remembered the pumpkins & etc & whatnot for Hallowe'en, and neither did I freak out and go into damage-control mode when it was revealed that my proactivity + planning was lacking.  Also, they seem to have survived.  There are pumpkins at the farmers' market, also.  I do not like pumpkin carving anyhow.  It always strikes me -- right or wrong, whatever -- as an egregious waste of food.  Not that I would eat a squash if you gave it to me.  They should carve beets, I think.

Last, I would like to document the (much-abridged) story of how I wound up wearing a pair of 14-eye Doc Martens to the ballet.  It boils down to this:  I found out 15 minutes before we had to leave that I have become too small for my go-to dress -- a jersey wrap dress from Boden; last-noted as a little too-roomy when last worn to a Museum Society Function in May -- to fit.  I should have investigated this before I was getting dressed to leave, but I had not.  One thing led to another, I wound up in a different black jersey dress from Boden, and we were off.  But the dress setback had set me back so far that when I could not find my normal knee-high boots (which were right in front of me in my closet, as it turns out) I grabbed a pair of socks, and my broken-in-but-not-worn 14-eye boots.

It felt crazily informal and inappropriate as a sartorial maneuver while I was putting them on in the car, but once on the ground, the whole effect was revealed as just fine, if rather ludicrously va-va-voom + way too superheroine-intense for the ballet matinée.  Nevertheless, it will be absolutely perfect for the next time I need to lure a beefy life scientist into going on about geckos, or finding me the score of a major sporting event from his inside pocket.

I am waiting on a couple of things to finish up in the oven right now.  I started out with banana bread; while pouring it into the pan I remembered I cannot eat bananas.  Sulking, I put together a Nigella cake, which my pal Charlie calls "The Hot Sex on a Platter Cake," but in our house is simply the cake that made my husband notorious when he cut himself a slice of the unfrosted loaf and slathered it with butter.  This is why he is my man.  

tempête dans un verre d'eau

 

Unexpectedly, I have had to all of a sudden dodge the regular media and the social media together this week, shielding my eyes from any kind of zeitgeist's review of the Where the Wild Things Are movie.  I do not like to know anything about a movie before I go, so, that, and fine, but I just was not expecting the world to suddenly explode in ad-hoc review.  So, now this has turned into a thing like when we have had to burn through the Harry Potter books on the world's schedule.  Or, when we decided to go ahead and watch the Sopranos series finale episode, airing during our vacation, so at least we would know how it finished, even if we would have to go back and get backfill over time. 

So, I guess we are going to see a movie today?  I do not really see this happening, as Mari is downed by a headache today and there is a lot to be done.  As with a lot of marriages, when my husband is sick with a headache, he has to lie in a tomb-like quiet and pitch-blackness all day long.  When I, for example, have torn every ligament in my ankle and crushed my foot, I am sitting on a stool, making dinner.  I mean, honestly.  There are many times where I will offer him an analgesic and bring to him one-half dose of Tylenol and one-half dose of Tylenol P.M. 

One time, after I dosed him thusly, he made a move to drive somewhere, and I said, matter-of-factly, "Oh, you cannot," and explained.  He was mostly shocked, "You gave me a sleeping pill without telling me?"  Then I pointed out, reasonably, that I thought since he would lie in bed all day that I thought he should have a sleeping pill.  Then, instead of being resentful of him for lying around like an invalid because he had a freaking headache, I would just think, "Oh, of course he's sleeping.  He's on sleeping drugs, poor thing.  He needs to rest."

I do not know how ever we resolved that ... I mean, I guess.  It was a few years ago, and we are still happily married and he still takes whatever pill I bring to him, nestled in my palm.  Tylenol P.M. is still here.  (Advil P.M. packs too much sleeping in their pills, I tell you what.)  I resisted the urge to do it today, though.  I am not pretending it is not an act of hostility, but it is not one that will kill him, which I think it what he reasoned in the end, lo, those years ago.

I was just reading at Chickie's Facebook (I know, Other People's Facebooks, zzZzzzzzzZzz) about how someone's husband would never "let her do such a thing."  (The thing being the thing we were talking about, which was, generally, traveling with neither spouse nor chastity belt, wtf.)  And I was bewildered by this terminology of authority used in a marriage.  Let, you say?  Ne comprends pas.  I just keep turning it over and over in my mind.  I do not understand.  I am a grownup, I do what I want, and because I want to stay married, I make choices in service to that relationship.  I expect that my husband has committed to the same.  Anyhow.  I am glad he lets me give him sleeping pills.  See?  The letting, it makes no sense. 

Speaking of acts of hostility that will not kill, perspectives, and also marriage (which I just was), I am stricken by uncertainty in a thing with the Israeli's wife.  Mrs Israeli & I are friends, mostly because for long years she has been married to my best & oldest pal.  I mean, we have things in common: she and I got married to our respective husbands each within a couple of months of the other;  I found out I was pregnant with my first on the day hers was born, but vice versa for our seconds; we like gardening and making things, etc.

All of these things have in the 14 years since we have become acquainted made it easier to be friends, but the main reason I forged a friendship with her in those first years is because it is good behavior.  I find that I am baffled by my pals who do not want me to defer even a teensy bit to their wives (though the bafflement ceases as they get divorced, one by one), but as with me, the Israeli wants to stay married, and because we are pals, I represent.  I would no matter what, but it is genuinely easy, and Mrs Israeli is quite adorable.  

The point is, she sent me an email, expressing surprise at something I wrote in the email prior, how she had "never heard me say such a thing."  And I wonder if it is bad behavior of me to point out that of course she has, this was a recurring theme in correspondence with her husband this spring, and I know she reads his mail and email, plus which -- besides knowing generally that she reads it, because her husband told me -- she mentioned that she had a notecard on which I wrote to him just this spring, -- upon which I know this topic was covered at some length -- tacked up near her desk because she thought it was pretty. 

So, I wonder if this is something the Israeli told me in confidence, relying on my discretion and equivocation in most things, or if it is even possible that a man could really tell a woman anything in confidence when his wife reads his mail.  And email.  But what if he did?  And I never really sorted out with him -- so stunned was I by this disclosure -- if he told me in wonder or in warning.  I can be quite over-the-top in girlish glee.  There is a reason I abjured sweet talking as a disciplinary maneuver during Lent earlier this year. 

But back to the wringing of my hands, I cannot decide if I should just point out, that, yk, this tenor of mine is not a revelation.  If she knows that I know, is it bad behavior for me to talk about it?  And if it is not bad behavior, can I ask the other questions I want to ask about this, because I am fascinated by it, her vetting.  Also, I guess I was surprised to hear that she was still reading his mail as recently as this spring, because after 14 years, what more is there to see?  It is not as if I fail at the task of sending her her own mail.  I wonder what to do.  I really just want to tell her, "Oh, you have so, I wrote it to yr husband in the spring."  But what if she is offended by it?  And maybe she did not read-it read it.  Maybe it was just a spot-check.

I think this falls into the category of perils of the modern world.  Except that I am pretty sure that the old-fashioned world was just the same.  The world in which one could just dose her husband with anything.  Hm.    

déjà vu

 

I made this pan-baked tart from Bittman for breakfast.  It came out of the pan a little shauna-ahern, if you know what I mean?  But it was very good.  Like a gluten-free matzo brei, weirdly.  I will haul it out in the spring & fool around to make it savory, because I am one of the savory people. 

Last year, I spent the length of the Nat'l League Championship Series listening to the games & knitting a cowl.  The cowl was thus imbued with the memories of post-season baseball -- sitting on the kitchen floor, waiting in the car for the children to finish their afterschool program, having to take a break to go 2 doors down to my neighbor's to witness with my own eyes the Favre-like precision of Hiroki Kuroda's pitching in Game 3, the thrill of finding out in that inning that those radio guys are really good at their job.   

It was a fantastic series -- Game 3 was one year ago today and it was intense, the way the Dodgers were not going to get whipped in their own yard, wow -- though the cowl did not fare so well & much to my dismay had to be re-knitted.  Happily, I have no recollection of what I was doing during the re-knit -- it was sometime in February, so moping, probably, about grief -- so it is ever-suffused with those happy 2008 NLCS times.

Sad to say, while re-knitting, I was so carried away by [whatever] that I knitted for one too many cable-repeats and the whole thing turned out too tall.  I was going to just forget about it, and rip it back & stash the yarn because who the hell wants to knit one thing three times?  But then, my husband coveted it.  Well.  That does change things. 

The issue of Mari's lack of hand-knitted finery came up while I was forging the sock mines for Kowalski.  The question that was kind of out there in the ether was Why are you knitting socks for a man who is your guy, but not your man?  My sassy reply all around was None of yr fucking business, but really, herein is the answer: 

I once knitted my actual husband a cowl for a birthday gift 5 years ago or so.  He opened it, and having barely admired it, criticized some imaginary design flaw.  (When this answer was finally revealed  & only to Mr Kowalski, his response was, I believe, "Heavens.  I see.") 

In response, I (because in this marriage, you had better have your sword ready) promptly mailed it to someone who was happy to have it.  No, really.  I packed it up and then when he came later & asked me about it, I said sweetly, "I mailed it to someone who wasn't a bitch."   I mean, honestly.  When the foundation of yr marriage is a triple-dog dare?  Behave. 

But, ok, so now enough time has passed, plus he has paid, what with the mailing the original gift off to someone else and also the knitting of not one, but two pair of socks for the Tavern Leaguer with the eternal flame.  So, this year, I will be gifting him with this cowl, and not just that, but hopefully I will have knit myself my own (finally?) so that it is not just, "Oh, this old thing that doesn't fit me, you can have it," but it is almost like I made one just for him in the making of this new one for me. 

 

So, anyhow.  The problem was that the one I cast on the other day for myself can never, never be able to live up to all this pressure and the third-time knitting -- plus I have already had to frog it once because I dropped a purl stitch after a cable sequence and did not realize it till the end of the repeat.  Can I not just buy something at the store?

The 2009 National League Championship Series starts on Thursday, with the Philadelphia Phillies playing the LA Dodgers and so it is like the same thing all over again and I can have my own cowl interwoven with memories of the series.  I am too excited for this.  Last year, wow, it was such great baseball.  Plus, a fight!  Yes!  Oh, yes.  This Game 3 is on Sunday, o, can it ever be that way again?  

small change got rained on

I love the fall garden.  It is dying & defiled, but still determined to show us all something, to not let us just rush on to the next season so quickly, so completely.  Hardly anything wanes anymore, I do not think; more like spit-spot & onward.  I prefer the lingering, I think.

  
I am in some kind of suspended animation, though, I have no idea.  I had to force myself to come & update the olde weblogge. 

Mari and I have just finished googling so as to try to get to "the bottom" of the Prince hip-replacement rumours.  No luck, it all seems v gossippy.

Besides that, I cast on a couple of knitting projects this week.

I realized, while in a lovely, rather-lengthy chat with the super-fox electrician that came to our house earlier this week, that it is very disorienting for me to deal with men that I know I could bang inside of 45 minutes after first making their acquaintance, now that I am married.  Maybe I can go on about that at some other time, but just as a first thought:  it feels to me kind of like when I went to Target a couple of weeks ago, only to find once inside that they have been remodeling and where I thought I would find laundry detergent instead has coolers and freezers and that also, a whole section of the store -- next to where I thought I would find the detergent -- had a tarp over it. 

I was completely hamstrung by confusion, and while in the end, with the help of an employee + also my own diligence, I found everything I needed & indeed left with everything I set out to get ... I found the whole experience extremely unsettling and also totally unsatisfying.  Mostly unsettling, though, like I do not know where anything goes or comes from or anything like that.  I do not know if that makes any sense, and anyhow, whatever. 

No, I feel like I should be clear:  not because I think I would fuck around, but just because ... just because the whole experience is so not knowing what to say or if the wrong thing was said and if he is feeling the same pheremonal cocktail then is he participating in this chat because it is interesting to him or because he is waiting for me to take it to the next level, or what?  It is all so confusing and I am just glad as always that I do not meet very many men in my line of work .  

Because, no, I feel I should be clearer:  I was a child bride.  I mean, 23 5/6 is pretty young.  Also, before I was married, I lived & dated & all in a different region of the country.  You can read about the men from there right here.  (No, seriously.  Go & read it!  In the 8th paragraph, ok, because it will clear some things right up!)  OK.  So, between the two, it was literally ages before I learned to recognize being hit on while I was totally unsuspecting in places like the Trader Joe's, at the dairy case.  The whole scene makes me nervous now.  Really.  

First I could not get started, and now I can not shut up, obviously. 

Anyhow, besides all that, I am having a hard time remembering what a lot of my life used to be about before my crash.  It feels silly to be so dramatic about a broken foot + ankle blowout, but I think it is compounded by the change in seasons.  That impacts the matter of what the eff I am supposed to write about here.  I was putting away the CSA share tonight, what I am sure was the last of the eggplants arrived today, and I was piling them up on the counter.  I thought, "I think I am supposed to take a photo!"  But, it was too late, too dark.  But a good sign, the recall.   

I forget what 8 was for

Wow, long time.  Just when I had recovered from that tiring chick at the party, those people with their phone calls started with the phone calling again. 

You know ... I do not like to be a whiner.  Then, to complicate matters, I was raised by a sociopath & a narcissist, right?  So, to me, saying WHAT ABOUT ME is kind of anathema, but these phone-callers.  Jesus.  But if I said YEAH, WHAT ABOUT ME, they would be all, Blah, blah, selfish, but no!  I am not selfish!  Like I wanted some bereft, orphan's existence, let alone the one I have that features entitled assholes who singlehandedly built the cradle of my abandonment + intimacy issues occasionally poking their heads in screaming demands by proxy, as if I were not already doing something else. 

I am sorry.  Ugh.  OK.  I see the lifeboat of a list.

 

1. I am making kimchi because the CSA chare has been awash in Napa cabbage lately and I do not feel as though it is interchangeable with Savoy or, uh, green, I guess it is called.  Green.  The whole house smells of kimchi and it is making me delirious with inhalant ecstacy.  While my own childhood home was not a seat of familiarity & warmth, most of my friends' houses were and in those critical, Ophelia-reviving years, two of my BFFs were Korean.  So, my house smells like good times.
   
   
2. Mari and I watched Twilight last week and I loved it.  I admit that it was the night of the last and most ridiculous Phone-Caller Phone Call, and in this time of distress I turned to a root-beer float & an off-label usage dose of Percocet (because! my orthopedist! prescribed 125 of them! at the time of my accident!), so maybe I was unduly influenced by tryptophan & narcotics to feel disposed toward the film, but I am a pretty harsh critic, particularly when I am sleepy, and I really enjoyed it.  Like, really.  It was a good movie!  And my girlfriends keep saying, "Well, I can not believe and blah, blah, blah, and the book."  But I did not read the book.  As my pal The Israeli says, If the book were any good, they'd make a movie from it.  Well, this time they did & I enjoyed it!  So did Mari!  Even in the face of the weird Eddie-Izzard makeup they gave the dude, we have not mocked it once since we have viewed!  I think the real test of our love is:  Will we go see Twilight: New Moon in the theatre, alongside many excited teenaged girls? (Maybe!)
   
   
3. Related to Young-Adult, Vampire-Mashing Fiction, but also (!) about jewelry so, you know, important! (!!)  While we were watching the movie, quite possibly because I was in a state of Cake Mind, I wanted all the jewelry in that movie so so much.  I spent 5 minutes on Etsy and found out there is a brisk trade in Twilight-Movie Reproduction jewelry.  The quality of the materials used is highly variant, but so much of the stuff is right-on gemstone-fabulous & Victorian bling. 
   
   
4. Speaking of shopping, last week CVS had 10-oz bottles of Dawn on sale for $1.  At the same time, you could get a $10 CVS-thingo "cash" coupon if you spent $25 on select Proctor & Gamble products, of which the Dawn special was one.  Also, I had the standard $4-off-purchase-more-than-$20 receipt coupon + a previously-earned $5 CVS-thingo "cash" coupon.  So, I paid $17 for 25 bottles of dish detergent, then received a "cash-coupon" for $10, plus a new $4-off-purchase-more-than-$20 receipt coupon.  So, presuming I use that new $14 in coupons on something I was going to buy anyhow, the upshot is that I got almost 8 quarts of dish detergent (our regular brand, natch) for $3.  If you followed ANY of that, I salute you.
   
   
5. I ran up the stairs today.  Ran!  Mari was leaving and I wanted him to remember something for me, and I took to the stairs one at a time, but at 2-at-a-time speed?  Yesssssssssss.  Because a month ago I will still walking v gingerly and 2 months ago, I was still on crutches.
   
   
6. Speaking of defects:  The news from the orthodontist is sunny & Fille has been upgraded to a 6m interval between visits, plus also is totally out of the Too-Many-Baby-Teeth-Sharkmouth woods, as she has recently become the owner of four very shiny & new, jaggedy grownup teeth.
   
   
7. My method for dealing with the CSA's surfeit of beets thus far has been to parboil them, then put them in the oven for roasting, whereupon I forget about them, overcook them, and wind up putting them in the compost pile at our neighbors' house.  It works out almost as well as simply admitting we do not like to eat them and putting them on the pile straightaway.  Baby steps.

no cowboy

Fille & I went to a party on Saturday, one of those day-into-night affairs, with children & adults running on parallel tracks. I love the family whose party it was, but I am not really much for the partying. I had to sit & chat amiably with a woman who would constantly use the word “urban” to sub in for “poor & non-white,” and the whole thing made me feel skanky and exhausted.

She is a pastor’s wife -- her husband leads a Lutheran congregation -- and my rather strict Catholic upbringing made me feel as if she should behave better (although the whole problem is that Martin Luther could not hack the requirements, right?), and about the time she started in on how she could not let her 9yo take the school bus because it picked up three blocks from her house, and the boulevard led to/from "a ghetto area" two towns over, I just could not take it any more. “Fear is the opposite of faith,” I told her, crossly, which is something I am pretty sure I believe + also act upon, daily. I don’t know. She was mighty tiring.

I wished that Mari had been there. We were all four supposed to go, but then Garçon defied logic & threw out a test of our resolve, the consequence of which was that he could not go, and since he is too young to stay home by himself (especially if he is disgruntled + we are 50 miles away), so I took the baby by myself.

Fille had a great time, fell asleep in their driveway as I was backing out, and I got to drive home in the dark & the rain burning up the miles with a provocative medley of Lyle Lovett, Bill Withers, and Drive-By Truckers on the car stereo. It was nice. I have not had the car out for a run in a good long time. Longer still since I have listened to Decoration Day, which in portions was so relevant as to take my breath away.

We caught up on some real, live teevee when I got home. Well, the internet’s teevee. It is a source of endless amusement for Mari that I can hardly resist any a/v recommendation from Phil Yu, at Angry Asian Man. (He has never, never steered me wrong.) So, I broke a streak of more than a decade without watching fresh, serial teevee to take a gander at the premiere of FlashForward.

It was pretty good, I thought, but now I am left with this wondering What will happen next to these people? Which I kind of cannot take, that I am not able to just pop in the DVD and get the rest of the season under my belt. I think I will be over it soon, anyhow, for the thing I think in equal measure with, “But why didn’t John Cho see anything?” is “Didn’t I see this show already? It was a movie with Sandra Bullock, right?’ Oh, yes.

Oh, and speaking of Phil Yu, man. I would have missed out on the whole story of Annie Le’s murder entirely if not for him. It’s too sad, and then I found out some more last night, via some clicky-making from his blog (I will not link to it, and if you want to go out in the world and clicky-click, do not blame me), and I was just so sad about it all. It was already sad, and then to find out that her mother could not even see her one last time. God.

I had to inform Mari in a despairing tone that the world is not sexy! Then I went off to bed in hideous sweatpants to fret myself to sleep. Too bad, it was kind of an anniversary.

cinema. cereal.

I was complaining the other day that Easy Rider made no sense to me.  Surely it is because I am too young.  I know that recently I was mapping out for my husband ("mapping out" is an overstatement, he is not stupid, but I cannot think of a lesser term) why Kids Today do not grok, and moreover are horrified by, Heathers.  ("Columbine," I said to him.  "Sea change.") 

Anyhow, the point is that my Pilates trainer has a son who is just 18, who I see frequently because the studio is in their home.  He always seems nice and deferential, but something was always not-quite-aligned, and then the very last time he and I encountered each other, I realized Omigod, he hears the bamp-chicka music when he sees me!  Ahahahaha.  I'm old enough to be his mother!  Ahahahahahaha!

Then I was thinking about how funny & ridiculous that was, but then also not, because he does not see me as old enough to be his mother, even though I am twice his age, because his mother is 20 years older than I am.  All his friends' mothers, too, surely.  Then, then, I was thinking of how in a few years, The Graduate will be somewhat puzzling -- at least in the Mid-Atlantic states, since it seems the kids today have parents who are about 60 already when they graduate from high school.  So, yeah.  Wild! 

Also, so many from the 20th-century of entertainment are just falling down dead!  Karl Malden!  Michael Jackson!  Farrah Fawcett!  Fred Talaveras!  Ed McMahon! I wonder who will be next, for time marches on.  (If you were ever on The Love Boat, watch out!)

My own son is catching on and growing up and maybe someday soon will be very politely ogling acquaintances of mine many years his senior.  Right now, I would just appreciate him marching on, which is a skill we are marshalling, this ability to follow instructions without a lot of cheeky backtalk and hairsplitting. 

His disobedience reminds me of the scene from The Incredibles, when Elastigirl is all "DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW," and Violet is all, "But you said that I would know better than you what we should do in an emergency, so I am going to TALK AND TALK AND DEFY YOU AND KNOW BETTER THAN YOU UNTIL THE HELICOPTER GETS HIT." It is not that we are being attacked by missles, mais non, but of course I am also not reneging on house rules. I am nothing if not a model of consistency in parenting. Hence, the shouting and maternal resentment. Honestly.

Oh, children are exhausting.  Good god.

But, now Garçon can make granola, and that is why we have decided to let him live here a little bit longer.

For a long time I searched for an acceptable granola recipe.  Oh, plenty of them were acceptable for homemade granola, but none of them were good.  I wanted to make granola at home like the stuff I bought in the store, but not like the stuff I bought in the store, because it was not homemade.  (I am aware of the fact that the sentence prior makes me seem like a goddamn lunatic.)

I wanted a granola that was sweet and toasty, a little clumpy, and also fatty, without being greasy.  Kind of like Cracker Jack, but wholesome, like hippie chicks might feed their kids for breakfast.  I used everyone's recipe, from all of my books -- Mark Bittman, Nigella Lawson, Mollie Katzen, Joy of Cooking -- I tried recipes from the internet pointed out by girlfriends, and while every batch of every product was surely edible, it was never what I wanted.

The last thing I did before I rode my bicycle to my destruction was make a batch of granola from Alton Brown's recipe, more or less, which I had long known about, but had not used, for how many disappointments must I bear?  I noticed, though, sifting through stuff on my desk last month (before my crash, I was very summertime-busy for a major reörg/redesign of our home), that there was not any toasting of the grains and nuts prior to the mixing & the baking.

I think I might have come to this, eventually -- the not-toasting -- on my own, if I had any tolerance for playing mad scientist in the kitchen, which I do not.  Or, I might have come to it in a fit of refusing-makework pique (because there is enough to do!).  Not toasting makes perfect sense for turning out the product I sought, though not for one reason I can articulate.

After one hour, it turned out very close to what I had always wanted, and I left it out to cool and rode off to crash my bicycle.

If the recipe were accurate in its estimation of time, my ankle & foot would be whole today.  (I would just fuck it up some other, less-convenient time, surely.) Within 5 minutes after I left, it was pouring down rain, and surely would have taken the car to the farmers' market. If the recipe were accurate in its estimation of time, my son would not have had the challenge of granola put to him.

It is a perfect recipe for a baby-learner in the kitchen, for it is just opening the right bags of ingredients and measuring them out.  The baking part is perfect-novice stuff, too.  Opening and closing the oven to take out the sheets and stir the cereal gives good practice in standing clear and making a habit of arming oneself with oven mitts.  A 250-degree oven is hot enough to burn, but not the worst burn ever, and also is not so furnace-of-hell punishing to stand over and reach into.  If the worst should happen -- he should burn himself, or have carelessness sliding the sheets in and out -- the upset of a tray full of cereal is not the worst cleanup this house has seen. 

Granola, for teaching a 10-year-old to cook.
(adapted ever-so-slightly from the recipe of  Alton Brown)

Preheat oven to 250 degrees.

Combine 3 cups rolled oats, 1 cup slivered almonds, 1 cup cashews, and 3/4 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut with 6 tablespoons evaporated cane juice.

Whisk together 6 tablespoons maple syrup and 1/4 cup coconut oil.

Add oats & nuts to syrup & oil.  Mix and mix.

Pour onto a half sheet pan lined with parchment.  Stir every 20 minutes or so for about an hour, or, as Mari hates to see any recipe read, cook till done. 

Remove from oven; layer in one cup of dried fruit/fruit pieces.  (We like cherries.) 

If you are a grownup person, you can throw in a handful of chocolate chips before pouring on the milk.  Explain nothing.

persistance. vegetative.

I am fully aware that I am spending long days luring innocent people off the intarwebs to look at food.  Sorry.  I am processing inside my mind important things and it is super-mess, and I do not want to say the wrong thing, even if I knew what to say at all.

This is kohlrabi.  That German Girl and I chatted this morning on a ship-to-shore call and she told me how they do it.  The children did not like it, and I do not like white food.  Except hummous, which I guess is actually beige.  It tasted good and all, but mostly I guess I am glad not to live in Germany.

Speaking of hummous, I was driving down the road today, inexplicably suffused with a proustian swooning about good times & the late 20th century with my pal the Israeli.  Hey, I said, snapping out of it about 3 miles from my house, I smell cigar smoke! 

Evidently, our new mechanic smokes in his shop.  Which is fine & all, it is just that smell is a minefield of who left that just lying around over there?  Then I told Mari about it when I got home & since then he has had the I Dream of Jeannie theme song stuck in his head, humming it without realizing.  Make of it what you will.

secret identity!

In what my husband has hailed a miracle, as I spent the week trying on clothes from the outgoing & incoming seasons and dealing with them putting them away and putting them around and all, I was able to get rid of some clothes!  Ten things only, but prior to this the Goodbye Pile has consisted of nothing.

The lot consists of 2 pair of jeans, 5 ill-considered and/or uninspired skirts, a pair of capri pants from Ann Taylor that are neither as Laura Petrie as I wanted them to be nor as Pinky Tuscadero as I thought would save me from the disappointment of not-so-Laura-Petrie, and finally -- so that I may never accidentally wear them again -- the Westchester-County-cougar-at-a-barbecue pants, which, in my defense, have beads & embroidery at the hem, such that I was distracted into buying them.

I am altogether certain it reminded me of being a girl many years ago, in my first summer away at university, when it was all the coming-of-age rage to wear a clunky, silver ankle bracelet from the Nepalese shop that had bells and all on it so that you could always hear us coming -- ka-chink ka-chink -- from under our gauzy skirts, which I look back on, those skirts, as a fucking fashion nightmare of What In the Hell was I Thinking, Epic Fail proportions.

Speaking of which, this last item of clothing I am tossing over. 

This is a dress I bought at the Oilily store c.1997.  Why?  Yes, well, because we were living in Washington DC at the time, a place which is notoriously, criminally unfashionable.  It is not just that the citizenry does not know how to dress, it is that the stores do not have any cute clothes within.  It is a shame & a sin that a foxy young girl such as myself was reduced to shopping at Talbot's in the hopes of finding something forcibly stylish to wear.

After a long day of miserably shopping with Mari, who was very sweet & upbeat, though sobered by my palpable distress, for he even then understood how very much I liked to dress in my own inimitable European-nanny-gone-superheroine-punk way, we found ourselves in the Oilily store, where this dress appealed to me.  As I recall (and must presume, because it was Oilily), the cost was rather precious, but I bonded with it and actually did wear it for some long time.

I have always had it around as a totem of how bad it was fashion-wise while living in Washington and how I was forced to -- and did indeed, obviously -- adapt.  It is a paean to my inner reserves of making-do, this dress.  Ok, fine.  For on the surface, it looks horrible, just a nightmare -- all that cotton lawn with tiny houndstooth and flowers, the down-to-the-feetness.  The drawstring neckline, horrible.

What does not show on Allison here, however, is how the dress is stylish in that I wore it, it did not wear me.  On an hourglass figure, it blooms with a subtlety of dirty librarian, just a soupçon, not too much (drowned out  by the rest, certo).  Dirty librarian is not my favorite style incarnation, but one I find myself in very often because of my proclivity for somewhat demure & primly-buttoned clothes on the St Pauli Girl's body.

That said, this dress is way more multiple-personality, like  Hello, Sailor!  A dingo ate my baby, so meet me at the lighthouse, after I save the farm. Hey, tornado!, oh, how's this getting all wet and transparent?! Oh, your ship is coming, oh, so am I! Preserves for yr hardtack? (Dude.) It is pretty mixed up already and then when it gets loaded down with boobs & a comic-book eyeliner job, the whole effect is ... singular.  Which is all a stylish gal can hope for -- a merging of one's own person with the garment to something individual -- and so this was the best I could get in Washington. 

That is not to say that I will ever fucking wear it again. I tried it on with all the rest last week, the first time in years I had put it on, and Fille, who had never seen it, came peeping around the corner, "Is that a nightgown?" Amen.

Anyhow, after all this photographing & reminiscing and writing about this dress.  I find that I am loathe to send her off to the Universe now.  I am going to leave her on Allison for the foreseeable future. Obviously I need an intervention.

licorice. rhubarb.

So, this is our first CSA week with our spring/summer providers.

No one else wanted their rhubarb!  So, I traded 12oz of mushrooms (whatever, fungi!) and my kale each for a pound of rhubarb.  Then, a head of speckled romaine (cannot make Garcon eat lettuce, unless I braise it like endive & call it bok choy.  it is v tiring, all the subterfuge) I swapped for an additional little bunch of white icicle radishes.  Looking at it now, I should have unloaded those spring onions, also.  Anyhow.

The problem is that our oven seems to not be entirely functional all of a sudden.  Super-annoying, because we just had the ignitor replaced 6 months ago, and now the same thing and the oven is only EIGHT YEARS OLD, but I was just reading something that said the days of a major appliance lasting 30 years are over, due to cheap manufacturing practices, so I guess not so annoying, really. But I have a compelling recipe for a stovetop rhubrab endeavor, so am looking forward to some downtime with that tonight.

We went to a fantastic Greek festival last night when the weather cleared (thank you, St George!).  It was still chilly, but we wore appropriate clothing and had supper outside.  It may be only the Greeks who can corner one so fiercely with cigarette smoke in an outdoor venue that this morning we woke up smelling like we had been out all night in a bar.  A doughnut-frying bar powered by ouzo fumes.  I do not care, to me it was like oxygen for I have been a teeny bit homesick for my hometown lately, with all its casual ethnic interplay & summertime feasting for all.

Mari is not v Greek-savvy.  In fact, it came out last night that he has never been anywhere Greeky except with me.  Chicago has something of a full representation of Greeks, but I can find them wherever we go, like Spidey Sense.  One day last year, I dropped by our local taverna one afternoon -- I was SO RELIEVED when the place opened, like spontaneous generation -- without the kids to get a cup of coffee & a salad and catch up on some correspondence.  The son, who is in his late 20s, was busying himself with a lot of cell phone calls & obviously pre-vacation-departure wrap-up.

I asked him, while I was noodling around at the counter, waiting for my food, "Are you going to Greece?"  He said, "Greece?  No.  If I go to Greece, will you come with me?"  It was like, whoa, dude, go aerial!  But it is super-fun, speaking as a high-stakes flirt, to go over the line & just let it hang there.  So, we admired it, both of us, his nerviness, and then I said something bright & eyelashy, which I think was, "As long as my husband can come, too!"   

Mari never worries about anything anyone says to me, and that is saying something, because Kowalski likes to talk.  But even he was a little "What the hell?"  when I came home.  "Why would he say that?" he said.  I told him, "Because he's Greek.  It is how they say it."  "Well," he was huffy, "how did he know that you would know that it was just because he was Greek?"  I mean, I did, didn't I?  Yeesh.  But my experience is that they are a mighty frank bunch with the ladies.  And last night, with all their ouzoing and man-talking and eating with their fingers, oh. 

A long time ago, when I was living in NYC, I encountered John Stamos.  In a bizarre vignette featuring a lot of hurdygurdy around him being the only celebrity in the room, and me being the only person in the room with no real opinion about this, we made small talk and he asked me a really bizarre question that made me extremely confused.  I ended the exchange shortly thereafter -- and accidentally insulted him in the bargain -- and everyone got back to business and it was my New York Story for about week when we would all catch up.

It was eventually established by People Who Knew that he was hitting on me.  I did not believe it, but by now -- having been hit on a time or two by guys not so much from the straight-talking Midwest (So would you like to go back to my place & meet my dog?  I'll clean off the seat of the truck for you ... you like pancakes? after the first bottle of vodka, is as coy as a midwestern guy gets) -- I have to agree.  But still, I feel the same as I did when I scoffed at the Actress lo, those many years ago:  He is Greek!  He couldn't do better than that?  

Anyhow, we had fun last night, pulling in just in time for an excellent supper, featuring for Mari and I this tremendous amount of perfectly-cooked lamb.  (When Mari & I had been married for about two years, I overheard him say to someone, "I don't like lamb."  I interrupted, "Well, you've eaten it at least once a week since we've been married."  Ahahaha!) 

I thought about having an ouzo, but I did not want to become confused and wander off to dance the syrto in a haze of smoke and with all the other women dressed all in black and with the shoes such that anywhere else at a daytime event, you would look like Sandy in the big Grease finale.   

Fille liked best the plate of doughnuts, pastries, and sweets she shared with Mari.  I had an ill-advised demitasse cup of coffee, syrupy with honey, and did not sleep well at all last night.  My children have reported they do not love the bouzouki, but! I got a schedule of festivals happening this summer in the greater metropolitan area  -- one every weekend until July and then starting in September, one every weekend until November! -- and so I will give them a chance to learn to love it over and over again.  They will have so much to remember with each other when they are grown, ha-ha.   

__cycle

So, everyone living in my house has taken on this zeitgeist's green bullshit with a real zeal, never mind that some of them talk about energy conservation & the planet out of their mouths while they make a freaking mitten of toilet paper to wipe their other ends, ok, ok, I will let that go for the moment. 

Well, I cannot.  Because that is really what it boils down to for me.  I went to school in Madison, Wisconsin, and nominally ran with the hippies.  I kept very much company with men who were survivalist-y, off-the-grid sorts.  All of this conservation, environmental, planet-protection stuff is old to me.  Not to say that it is "old news," but that I know the rules and also I feel old when presented with all this shiny, sudden interest.  I do not appreciate being lectured by children, who leave all the damn lights turned on, and linger moonily before the open refrigerator, about conservation. 

Sometimes when I have had enough, I promise them in a Ralph-Kramden tone, "I swear to God!  One of these days, I am going to make you wipe with old newspaper!  And then recycle it yourselves into more paper for butt-wiping!  Do not start with me!  I know some things!!"

I mean, fine, be green.  Be vegan, or carless, or supertrained, or whatever you want.  Use those fucking light bulbs that save all the energy because they do not give off any goddamn light.  FINE.  But leave me alone about it.  I put the recycling in the recycling pile, but also, I try not to buy stuff that comes in a bunch of fucking packaging to begin with.  We are a non-composting family of four with one cat that puts out one 20-gallon trash can each week for pickup and that is frequently only half-full.  The recycling goes in a 10-gallon bin & that goes out maybe twice a month, now that I no longer get home delivery of the Times. 

So, after that, after the packaging-free shopping & all the goddamn cooking one has to do if they are buying food that does not come in a package and the years of breastfeeding and cloth-diapering and not using toxic cleaners and cloth napkins and reusable cleaning cloths, the seasonal + local food consumption ... After all of this, the fact that suddenly my children can read about not getting plastic grocery bags and so then harrassing me about it, well, it makes me cross.  Not to mention that if I never got plastic grocery bags, what in the motherfuck would I do with the dirty cat litter?  Carry it to the river in my cupped hands to dump it there?  JESUS CHRIST.  Honestly.

But then there is the matter of the car.  I love our car.  I was late to drive, Mari taught me after we were married.  He was a good & capable instructor and I love to drive.  Love.  I love cars, I love driving, I love talking about cars, cars are exciting to me.  That said, I hated living in the suburbs where the only way one can get around is in a car,  even of the distance is walkable, because the intersections & byways are pedestrian-unfriendly, if not dangerous. 

So now that we live in a city where there is transit and sidewalks and walkability, I feel a little guilty for doing as much driving as we do.  But, the reality is that this life is very busy, and we cannot take the time to just walk everywhere.  Transit is always an option, but the cost for the 3 or 4 of us to go somewhere round-trip is, honestly, more than the cost of parking the car.  More even than the parking ticket if I get caught up in the business district or on campus for more time than I thought.

Mari and I talked about this, specifically with regard to weekend outings.  We can walk to all the places we take the children, but our window between lunch & dinner is rather small, and to add in 90ish minutes of round-trip walking, well, that never works.

"If you had a bicycle ..." he averred. 

"UGH, FINE."  I told him.  I mean, really, already.  They all three have their little bikes & ride around, but it is true:  not enough as they would if I had one, too.  I have not ridden on the road in 20 years or so, and that was in Madison, Wis, with all the hippies and soldiers of fortune on the roads, committed to the preservation of carless transit and so they were not trying to KILL CYCLISTS.  Also, it was a world with NO SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLES.  Anyhow.   

So, here it is, after the shopping & building & test-riding.  Readied and souped-up and purchased & home.  Also, if you notice, green.  It is like my own little joke to myself.  Mari & the children totally have this fantasy they are sharpening up every day in anticipation of this vehicle that we are going to ride bicycles all around like the von Trapps.  As I confessed to a pal, I am v much calculating how long I will have to play along with this before I can call us broken-even on the purchase price.

On the other hand, it is very shiny.  And, it has a basket.  Also, the suspension is rather cushy and the profile is upright.  I will keep an open mind (I actually do not have much choice) and maybe I will grow to love riding around everywhere.  The bike gal at the bike store was trying to explain back carriers to me and I was just not having it.  "Let me just start with going places on it.  Like a horse,"  I told her.  "Then we'll see."  Just from the test-riding, I have to say that bicycling is quite a bit sportier than I recall.  Ow.

five by five

(She has arrived, by the way.)

 

1. The Israeli's birthday has come & gone and now my favorite & best is 40.  40!  I am always trying to avoid being in some kind of misunderstanding and Betty Rubble Trouble (more like Jeannie trouble, but doesn't really rhyme the same) with his sweet wife.  After 14 years I am pretty confident she does not think I am trying to Steal Her Man, but the patriarchy's messages on this topic are somewhat formidable and we as women can be sometimes confounded.  I made the decision to zip lips (lasting lessons of Lent, again so useful), and chuck something super-glam in the mail, but belatedly.
   
   
2. Saturday, at lunch before our screening of Wolverine, I was being forced to listen to a pair of loudtalker Ivy-League co-eds who got around to Nolan's Batmanfilms with Christian Bale.  "I really loved the backstory in the script," Co-Ed #1 said, and then went on for some time about what she thought was screenwriting genius, but was in fact boilerplate comic book bio.  It was so bad, her misunderstanding of the genre, that at one point I considered leaning over to gently inform her that it was from the comic books.  But really, she was the kind of a girl who would never give a comic-book-reading guy the time of day, so she was in no danger of embarrassing herself, except in front of a comic-book-reading guy to whom she would never give the time of day, in which case then comic-book-reading guy would be pleased to be able to feel superior to this know-nothing girl who would never actually ever give him the time of day.  So, I sat right in my seat & said nothing and I like to think the Universe is pleased with my decision. 
   
   
3. My own superpower is that I seem like the kind of high-polish girl who does not read comic books, but in fact (because really, where else would a simple midwestern girl get such ideas about eye makeup appropriate for daytime wear?)  I have read many & leafed through nearly all of the rest.  I have long been typically giggly & true for a certain sort of comic-book-reading guy & the books are always lying around on their shelves for the leafing.  So, I am able to know at least this much:  Sabretooth & Wolverine are not brothers, seriously, come on, stop it.  Also, Ivy-League co-eds who would never give the time of day to a certain kind of a comic-book-reading guy?  The patriarchy informs me you are trying to steal my man, so stop fluttering yr eyelashes at my husband unless you want me to kick yr ass like Jean Grey.   
   
   
4. Inspired by all the parents who brought their very young children to our screening of Watchmen (quelle horreur!) some weeks ago, Mari & I decided it was probably ok to take our children to see the new Star Trek movie, thus eliminating babysitting-securing hassle.  Mari keeps saying, "Do you think it will be ok?"  I do, because the Wolverine movie had the same PG-13 rating, plus is unlikely to have any of the necessarily dark & dire mutant-abduction/experimentation.  Actually, they are even old enough for that, except for the scene where Wolverine & Silver Fox confront the roomful of withering, whimpering mutant children caged in mesh cells.  That would have been super-too-much for a little girl that lives here & who recently spent a month of overnights deeply troubled by Holocaust nightmares. 
   
   
5. The children's library holdings should sometimes have a PG-13 rating, since that was where Fille was, reading this book after she just innocently pulled it from the shelves.  I do not have any problems with her reading it or scaring herself to death in the night, but I did not really have resources to salve her specific anxieties, which is when the Israeli came to my parenting rescue in the way of working a little double-duty to help me say the things that would minimize her fear without squashing her compassion.  A week or so ago, chattering by phone, I mentioned to him that Fille she had become part of the 7-12yo American Girl zeitgeistcommitted to a suitable length to be shorn for the the Locks of Love.  He rather wryly noted that this was a somewhat ironic pursuit, considering.  This is surely why he is my favorite & my best. 

weatherproof

It has been raining for a lot of the past week's days.  Not every one of them; to say that would be a melodramatic lie, but very many.  I was surprised to go out & see old Nelly Moser in bloom, with her showy, palm-sized flowers, in spite of the rain and the chill.  Hi, beauty!

It irritates me when people tell me she is a passionflower.  I do not know why I find it irritating, but I do.  Well, besides that clearly she is a clematis.  Clearly.  Also, so I think that if a person wants to Garden Talk with someone who has a garden like mine that she planted herself from, you know, a patch of grass, then they should bring their A-game or just know what they do not know. Ok, also that the last time someone told me she was a passionflower & I said, (rather more genially than usual), "Oh, actually is Nelly Moser clematis," that person said, "Are you sure?"  YES I AM SURE, DO YOU WANT TO SUCK MY FUCKING DICK ABOUT IT?

Ahem.

 

Hey, this is what old Mari was sanding & sawing away at Saturday!  Our screen door!  I will be painting it or some frippery later in life, but he did a great job! A damn site better than my paint job will be! Just in time!  It is 50 degrees and raining every day!  (Ok, just most days of the last week.  And this week. And the 6 or 8 weeks before that.)

saturday

 

For people who are having, like, 15 kids over to our house tomorrow, we are pretty slow-motion relaxed today.  This is the upside of throwing the same party every single year. 

• Theme:  Birthday Party
• Decorations:  144 Balloons, Streamers
• Food:  Punch, Chips & Salsa, Chips & Dip, Vegetables & Dip
• Cake:  No.  Brownies, Piled on Cake Plate.  Ice Cream. 
• Activities: Piñata, Take-Home Craft, Egg-on-Spoon Relay Race
• Take-Home Favors:  Craft, Piñata Loot, Handful of Balloons

Mari did the streamers early in the week. I am just going around today loafing around & listening to The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn & thinking about lilacs again, poking around making dips and fussing with an ice mold for the punch bowl a bit more than is strictly necessary.

The most labor-intensive part of the party prep is filling 144 balloons, and Mari & the children have it down to a pre-party science.  It keeps them out of my hair while I putter around stacking brownies and overthinking scary, freewheeling, punch recipes.

 

Mari is fooling around with some project and a sander and I do not even care.  Relaxed!

rosy

I write about this goddamn rose so much that it should have its own category, like the children or my husband.  Anyhow.  Again.

When I planted Mme Alfred Carrière 4 years ago, I had bad information about how much room she consumed.  Or, more likely, I never realized that her maximum height & girth would be achieved in my teensy garden, overseen by my laissez-faire attitude. She came in a little coffee-takeaway cup, with a root ball that fit into the palm of my hand.  I scoffed at her chances for survival. 

Well, now I have a rose that is about 17 feet tall and 5 feet wide at her widest.  Ok, sure.  But my front garden is situated on square feet, not acreage.  Sure, the rose grows vertically, but how do we corset something that tall? 

I will say this: it cannot be done with those garden twist-ties and twine.  Oh, no.  It keeps falling down.  Obviously we needed to prune it, for a million reasons, dead wood everywhere, too many canes -- a mess!  Shameful!  But the problem was that even if I got her shaped up, there was still the matter of her being too big for our property with no way to contain her.  The big payoff was that the bloom was so gorgeous and profuse when she spent all this time with the canes going horizontal.  But the rest of the garden was suffering, big time.  I lost a sage plant, a lavender shrub, an oregano, and my peonies were not thrilled with their living conditions.

I was reading idly (if desperation can ever be idle) about roses last week -- climbers and support, specifically.  I found out that one way to support climbing roses is with a galvanized chain strung between between two supports.  Hm.  It was easy & simple & we never would have thought of this.  So, Mari's weekend project was to fasten the chain to the pillars holding our porch roof and then, the rest.

 

Monday, we were able to prop her up in a really undignified manner and clip & snip.   At times I almost needed a hand saw, but managed fine with my garden-bolt-cutter guys. I pruned off two-thirds of the bush. She is thorny, really. I couldn't find my gloves, then became so consumed by the task that Mari had to tweeze 12 splinters from my hands last night.

Now she looks really empty, but it is just our perspective.  Bloom time is nigh, but I am already shopping for another one to stick in between.  Or a Cecile Brunner for the backyard.  Hey, 27 feet of galvanized chain & a few snap-links are cheap!                      

tuesday

 

The ranunculus are still out there.  It is still raining.  It is actually the perfect time to transplant, since not sunny & also raining, but I am like a cat and hate to get wet, plus also is wet and 40 degrees.

People apologize when they complain about this weather, in deference to my midwestern starchy stuff, but I assure them that we do not have much of this weather back home.  When we do, we might get a teensy bit whiny.  (meeeeeow)

Speaking of the homeland, last night I told Mari that in spite of what I have always vowed, that I changed my mind:  if I were to find myself a young widow, I would not get a boyfriend immediately after he died.  He shrugged, "I'll be dead, I don't care."

I assured him that I knew he did not care, but that I had recently decided I would be very sad.  (This just occurred to me after 13 years of marriage.)  However, I would definitely be so sad + deranged that I would absolutely have to do it with people in their rental cars during the boring parts of the funeral, etc.

He was quiet.

I will be very upset!  I protested.  People have to cope in their own ways!  Don't judge!

"People's rental cars, honey?"  He shook his head in a kind of surrender, like he does when his wife and daughter sneak around buying too many annuals in an obsession.  

spring planting

When 6 yrs ago we left the Washington, DC suburbs after 3 years there, I floundered for some long time our first spring & summer here, asking everyone, Where do you get your plants for the garden?  People almost invariably pointed me to Home Depot or Lowe's.  These were not the places I wanted to buy plants.  I eventually dug deep enough to be directed to a couple, and there were a few decent nurseries along the way to the Jersey shore, but not anything the likes of which I had become accustomed.  I very much missed my old garden spot.

The second year we were here, I called back to the nursery about my Lord Baltimore hibiscus, transplanted lovingly all this way & having some kind of bizarre issue annually.  While on hold w the hold muzak/chatter, I found out that our former Beltway garden store is the largest nursery on the Eastern seaboard.  Oh.  Ahahaha!

Mari called me while we were ostensibly firmly arrived in DC.  "Are you there yet?"  I answered in the negative and then was mostly evasive about where we were, while assuring him everything was fine with the trip. 

He said, "You're at Behnkes, aren't you?" 

He is such a good attention-payer, my husband!  Applause!  Clapping!

This is their mint section.  Eight kinds!

Rosemary!  Eleven kinds. 

Pansies, anyone?  This is just the section of pansies.  Other annuals are elsewhere, in similarly extravagant inventory.

The perennial acreage has a list and a map and is very organized.  This part is herbaceous perennials.  As can be seen in the photo, daylilies are separate.  For trees or bulbs or shrubs, roses, that sort, you go elsewhere on the plant campus. 

I got some of my very best gardening advice from the smart old-time gardeners at Behnke, the smartest & oldest of which may have been the fount of information in the room where the ladybugs & worms & whatever were sold.  Among the best tips are, "Never buy anything from a catalog, the whole of it they don't show" and "Never plant anything you see growing along the highway."  Also, a nice tip which is rather more subjective, "Once they are done blooming, daylilies look like hell." 

I only bought a watering can, a few packages of seeds, two spearmint plants, one "Arp" rosemary, a Jacob Kline monarda -- which I (honest to god) have been wanting since that first summer I left Behnke behind --  and finally,  in a concession to my only daughter, who does all the seedling starting/transplanting & is tidy, actual plant stakes. 

tulip poplar. two lips, popular.

This was a great day, weather-wise.  Rain, rain, pour, pour, a little thunder, buckets of rain now, and then -- whoooosh -- the sun came out & the sky was blue with clouds that were friendly, if still quite full, and it was really a day that I wound up feeling was just perfect in so many ways.  I get disappointed, I do not get what I want, and I try to find a way to want something about the thing I am stuck with.  Today it was, "At least the umbrellas are in the car & I get to be Polly Pockets goes to Pilates in my rubber boots!"  After that, the clearing-up was the icing on the cake.

A few weeks ago, Mari was all down in the dumps about a work thing that did not work out the way he wanted it.  I was ordinarily bouyant, in a fashion irritating to him, I am sure.  I said, "I am sorry.  But so you won't do that.  You will just do something else!"  Obviously, he pronounced this entirely illogical:  That's like saying, "Well, you've fallen out of this plane.  You'll just be falling!"  Honey, that's ridiculous.    

He is sometimes a wee bit literal-minded.  This is what happens when poets marry engineers.  It can be v Ernie vs Bert at times.  Anyhow, that thing did not work out and good thing he was available when last week something a million times better came round for his purview.  Hell, yes.

I think, though, that even after that, on the inside he was thinking, "O, my crazy, pretty wife & her yoga-mat jibber-jabber."  A few days later, so one week ago, he misplaced a thing and once he realized was dramatically detoured in a mighty inconvenient fashion after an already fucking grueling day at the office, off-site with office people, he said.  The disruption of his smoothly-running plan surely kept him off of  the Metro train that derailed. 

In Waldorf School, the ideal is that when the lesson is plainly visible, you say nothing to the student.  It was easy this time, with the practice of silence in every direction.  Lips zipped! 

Oh, also:  new at 8tracks.  I am not breaking up, but am always a little brooding.    

liturgy. litany.

I feel like this photograph -- ostensibly of the doll -- has a lot of information revealed in it. 

The April feature is my favorite of Kahlo's self-portraits.  Last year, we went to the Kahlo exhibition.  The museum gift shop had a necklace that was meant to be a replica of the one she wears in the portrait.  Mari was seriously gratified to finally -- after a dozen years of marriage -- catch me in the act of serious, nail-biting, oh-I-just-couldn't coveting and rush to buy it for me.  I held him off for as long as I could, then he made me try it on and after that he would not take no for an answer.  

Fille is very interested in Kahlo, also.  Fille does not have a Catholic Outlet for the awed study of holy sufferance and passion, so Frida Kahlo will have to do.   She was injured!  In a bus accident!  The pole ground through her bones and she would be in pain for each & every day of her life!  sounds a lot to me like They have pierced my hands & feet, numbered all my bones, at the very least.

in which I talk shit about the local yarn store in v many tenses

I was in one of many local yarn stores yesterday for a quick needle pickup.  There was this lady in there while I am there -- she is buying a wagonload of yarn for some other project, who knows.  A few minutes before, while the wanker who owns the store was winding winding winding her endless booty of hanks into pull balls, she admired the item on the mannequin nearest her.  It was a scarf.  He told her that the pattern is "free" with the purchase of 3 skeins of the yarn they used to knit it up. 

She asks him if she can just buy the pattern.  He says, "No, the pattern is not for sale by itself."  I mean, this guy!  Is such a wanker!  I admit that before I had only sensed that he was a wanker, but with this, I knew!  First of all, it was a scarf!  Not some rippling, on-the-bias, triangular effort, no.  Just a 7 x 60 knit knit knit rectangular item!

Second of all, this chick was spending a couple hundred dollars on yarn in his shop when there are four other yarn stores downtown.  It is not like she just walked off the street and asked him to give it to her!  I know, I am from the midwest and all, but people here do not think ever about any kind of cultivation of customer loyalty.  It is so shocking to me.  It is bad behavior.

So I told her, right in front of him.  "You know, it's just a stitch pattern."  She was astonished by this information.  He was chagrined, so much that I boldly went on, still clutching my circular needle, still waiting on him to wind.  

"Look at it," I held the end of the scarf up.  "It's purling, all the way ... purl, purl, here's your yarnover row, purl ... it's a 4-row repeat.  Cast on evens or odds depending on your yarnover ways."  Oh.  Look over there.  There is just a boring guy behind that curtain.  Hm. 

Now, she is angry, you can tell.  I am all shruggy and whatever-itis.  Dude is beside himself, all spluttery and red & cranky.  No one in the whole store feels sorry for him.  I buy most of my yarn at Yarnmarket, anyhow. 

I went out to the car, where Mari was waiting, ready to spill.  He told me I was like a terrorist.  Wait until he finds out I realized I could knit up one of those pretty scarves for his dutiful great-aunt in order to snub his slipshod mother.  Terror, indeed.  Who said I could not be subtle?

greek love

We spent a lot of time this weekend running back & forth across the river to Philadelphia. Sunday afternoon was the ballet matinee with dinner after and parking and all that and zzZzzZzzzz. Friday night was more exciting, a museum herpetologists' reception thingy, where I occupied myself with a wholesome & eyelashy 2-way flirtation with a foxy researcher in amphibian conservation.

This is the second or third museum thingy in a year during which Mari wandered off and came back to find me deeply interested in the attentions of a burly, tattooed life scientist. I cannot help it; I am married, not dead. I notice a guy who cannot leave his iPhone in his pocket noticing me, and I am ready to stand just a teensy bit too close to him and stay silent for just a teensy bit too long before a throaty inquiry about whether or not he happens to have a score on the Duke game.

Also, evidently, I smelled good both days. Sunday on our way to the ballet, it was Mari, flustered & full of questions about it, "What is this perfume? You wore this Friday night! Why do you never wear this perfume any more? Come back here, I was smelling you!" This is why I like to flirt with strangers & married friends who know I am not trying to fuck them -- there are boundaries. No one follows around behind me demanding I let myself be smelled. Honestly! That said, 1. L'Occitane Neroli, 2. MAC ProLonglash. Things that leave husband spluttering after 13 years of marriage. Important.

 

Philadelphia is not at all beautiful to me. Growing up in Chicago, where neoclassical & Gothic are shamelessly dry-humping Deco in the architecture, I find most of the rest of the country rather lacking in height, light, & elaborate decoration.  Beaux Arts architecture is very unsatisfying. I will allow that there are subtleties lost on me, which is what Mari pronounced, to which I relented with only the crabbiest reluctance.

After that, last night, an old friend bossed the world, which plus old Mari got me thinking about midwestern men and how they are bossy & resolute.  Of course if you say to them they are bossy, they deny it.  Even if you say it with the very sweetest & most admiring tone ( I v much love bossing with all trillion eyelashes), they still deny it.  "No, I'm not bossy," they say.  "That's ridiculous!" 

If you bicker a little -- and this is what occurred to me this morning -- if you get into a back-and-forth, chiding them for their czarist natures, their final response will be a plaintful (and v much so, for no matter how gently they are reproved, the word bossy is to them anathema), qualified surrender that goes along the lines of, "Well, look, the reason I said you should just do that is because what else was there to do?"

Oh, right.  Of course they do not think they are bossing.  They are v obviously only choosing the most sensible thing!  Would that we all could.  What kind of excellent stoic certitude there is in them!  How much I love it, so much, and I would get out my sweet, over-the-top flattery for it, except it is put away for another month, sad.

I showed the baby every comment about her lamb/sheep, and she is so pleased & proud. Thank you, Aprill, Tracy, Jen, Santos, for being other adults whose evaluation is important! (Because you cannot believe everything your mom says.)

suspension

Our CSA farmers have a hoop house, and in it they are growing lettuces, which is fine ... for some people, I guess?  But I do not want to eat lettuce in March.  Nor did I in February, January, or December.  Ick.

Mostly, I stir fry it for the children, who gobble it up, presuming it is bok choy & I will never change their minds.  Mari is a guy who likes to eat salad while it is 20 degrees outside.  I am not sure what is wrong with him.

To eat a salad, however, my husband requires salad dressing.  I do not care for the stuff, so I am unsympathetic to his pleas and hardly remember his need for it.  (Plus, as our friend Lillo likes to point out regarding a few things, "He can't find his own way to the store?"  Ha-ha.)  Then, when I do remember it, I just cannot being myself to part with the asking price.  It is just fat & acid in a bottle!  Why is it so much money?  Also, it all tastes really bad!

Then I come home without it and he looks forlorn and then I just make the stuff.  Because it is easy to make and also tastes good.  Well, if fat & acid on forced-season greens is your bag.

Lemon Vinaigrette

3/4c extra-virgin olive oil
5tbsp lemon juice
1/4c minced onion 
parsley
salt
pepper

I put a chunk of onion in the food processor.  Rrrrr-rrrrr-rrr.  Then, I add everything else to the bowl.  Rrrrr-rrrr-rrrrr-rrr-rr.  Et voila. 

This is a boilerplate recipe.  The lemon can be replaced with vinegar, the herb can be any other to taste, the bulb switched to shallots or garlic or whatever.

band of gold

Oh, how her heart did beat with fear and longing. It was just as if she were about to do something wrong, yet she only wanted to make sure that this really was little Kay. Yes, truly it must be Kay, she thought, as she recalled his sparkling eyes and his long hair. She remembered exactly how he looked when he used to smile at her as they sat under the roses at home. Wouldn't he be glad to see her! Wouldn't he be interested in hearing how far she had come to find him, and how sad they had all been when he didn't come home. She was so frightened, and yet so happy.
--HCA, "The Snow Queen"

I came home from NYC preoccupied, verging on sullen.  Mari was ready for this. After not hearing from me for four consecutive days, he received midday Saturday a flurry of fretful, fitful emails in the span of a couple of hours, the last promising to fling myself into the icy Hudson if he could not provide me with a teensy amount of space from the children and also the Don't Mess with the Zohan DVD. He had a shadowy outline of the situation, but I am somewhat reknowned for my refusals and it would be a few days before I averred.

I started by asking him if he remembered "The Snow Queen," how Kay was stolen and Gerda went out to find him. Of course he knows the story. Even if he does not remember it from childhood, I am slightly obsessed with the tale, Fille has come to love the story in the face of my tireless enthusiasm. I am deliberately reading it and with great sobriety all the time to her.

"Mari," I started to start to go on. (No one actually envies my husband) "Gerda was a little girl!"  When he assented, I went through all the inventory of things that, for example, just saying, as a grown woman, I can never set aside for a trip to Lapland, for anyone, no matter what, no longer. Just in the case of there ever possibly being anyone, I mean.   After a few minutes of silence, I sank weakly & with great despair into his lap.

"Even if she had been a grownup!  It took her a really long time!"  I told him.  "She was a little girl when she started, but they were grownups when they got back!  She had to ask the sun and the swallows and hope the river would take her!" 

I was wailing, totally gnashing teeth.  Mari was sweet, patient, knew where this was going, where I had been -- "There was the Babystealer and then the palace with the Prince and Princess, then the Robber Girl!  The trip with the reindeer and two loaves of bread plus a whole ham!" 

He confirmed, waited.  Waited.  Waited.  Then I burst into tears.  "Ok," I was sobbing, "But what about Kay?  He's been lying around freezing to death, doing impossible puzzles like Stephen Hawking for a lame promise of new ice skates!  She's been having sandwiches and stripping down for the Finns!  What about him?"  Mari told me what he knew, what he knows I also know, that Kay marries Gerda.

I told him that was the stupidest thing I ever heard.  There was this intense & luminous anguish, also, the tears shorted out some critical, logical part of my brain.  I went on a little about what happens, what would have happened, if Gerda had never gotten there.  What if she never made it?  What if, on the way home, Kay drowned? Would he not have been better off with the Snow Queen & some new skates? I have seen the intersection of fealty and mortality and nostalgia, and frankly it interferes with the ardor I try to cultivate in this world and I do not love it, I never love it, not even a little.  I say this, this, is why we all wanted to grow up?  No!  Blech! How could we have been so dumb!?! 

Also, I am the girl who, if ever anyone needed an extraction from the Snow Queen's palace, I was ready to jump.  I can do it!  I will conjure a legion of angels and go barefoot in the snow!  Yes!  What time do you want me?  I love everyone with the kind of love that will melt ice & burn glass.  The kind of love I wrote about in a poem years ago, that will cross/the picket line when hunger goes on strike/like a scab, like a scarab, this endless/regeneration of love. 

I was that girl, I should say.  Circumstances are permutable in every direction, into every dimension.  When there is nothing to do, less to say, the longing for action can become somewhat corrosive, but at some point, all action is transformative, again in every direction, as Lisa Jarnot writes rather succinctly:  in my plan to be myself/i became someone else.

Pitifully, I rambled around to the last gasp of conjecture, where the metaphors became mixed and the terrain was dangerous.  "Ok, fine.  They get married!  Fine!  But still, Mari, what about Kay?  He is married to Gerda and she is all out there, with the sun & gossiping with the swallows and the river -- Oooh, remember when we were on our adventure!  Yes!  -- She is just out there!" 

There was a derangement of gesturing and the anguish was way past luminous and approaching something radioactive.  Heavy Kleenex in use.  "She is out there, batting her eyelashes for the roses and lipstick-marking robber girls!  She got to first base with a freaking reindeer!  And what about Kay?  He was the one in the palace!  And his wife ... she is in love with everyone!  What about Kay?  And don't tell me 'He married Gerda,' like that's enough!"

Mari said, very matter-of-factly, I think he shrugged,  "She rescued him.  Isn't that enough?" I wanted a little to wriggle & applaud & bat my eyelashes, but I was too tired, honestly. I am exhausting and I do not know how he does it.

Also, I am not certain.  Plus, I think I am going crazy, as Frank O'Hara says.  Frank O'Hara is a tremendous improvement over Robert Creeley, in the terms of psychic stability.  This poem is the thing I have considered most during the few days since the weekend, in equal measure with "The Snow Queen," that is.

and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be
possible
-- Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems

cake mind lassos cake

The morning after Thanksgiving, the recipe files of Streaky's grandmother, Bianca, were loosed into the world as .jpeg files and a portal was opened up into another world: my past, his past, the past.  I cannot think of it too much or else I will start to feel too delicate for my condition, but I would not be too quick to discount the emergence of these recipes as an influence on my rather sudden decision to start working on poems again.

c. 2008 D. Kukuljan. Permission granted for non-commercial use and replication only.

 

I badgered Streaky for the entire weekend to get me a higher resolution scan of this page, special attention to the Almond Torte recipe on the bottom, there.  But, I mean, how many times do people have to pull out the scanner in this world, and finally, I just saved the file myself and used Paint to magnify it a little. 

It did not matter, I realized, for there is hardly a recipe there anyway.  There is the list of the ingredients, arranged provocatively in a way that suggests instruction.  Her procedural text mostly goes like so: 

Work the butter until creamy.  Add the sugar.  Work and work until you add the next two ingredients.

Then, bafflingly, the next sentence is about the frosting, I thought.  I was pretty sure it was -- is it?  it has to be.  wait?  which two ingredients?  I cannot read the last three words on that line!  "The mixture will be ..."  be what?  Then it says, "About 20 minutes."  For which?  The frosting?  The cake?  Gah!  Gah, gah!

This is the hard part of these recipes.  Much has been made of the fact that they are not in standard Italian, and I have gone on, but that is kind of a no-brainer: I speak two romance languages and can get down in a third. What is really difficult is that they were her own notes to herself regarding the topic of stuff she knew how to do.  Also that frankly, for Bianca, any idiot knew how to bake a cake out of almonds, right?  God.  I decided to bonk the instructional portion and get the measurements together.  

This whole endeavor reminded me of knitting, when I am working from a pattern and can not believe, but have to set aside my need to know everything and just work the pattern, one stitch, then the next.  It reminded me of how E.L. Doctorow likened writing to driving in a fog (at night?), You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.  Ok, fair enough.  Time to convert the metrics of yesteryear. 

"Honey," I said to Mari, "is a decagram going to be a tenth of a kilo or 10 grams?"  We went back and forth for a few minutes about whether prefix deca- signified 10 or 100.  "Wait, no," I told him.  "Deca is Italian.  Deci is the English, it's ten."  I found this website, which told me how much grams of ingredients (conveniently, sugar and almonds) measure in volume. 

There was some rolling up of sleeves and excellent nerd-girl's number-crunching, going slow, double-checking my work. (I do not think that Mari realized before this that I could even do math.  Also it came out that I took a whole year of Chem w Lab as a freshman, again prompting him to softly offer, "But you are not my wife.") Once I started to have the mass of the ingredients take shape on the page, in my mind, it became obvious what was going to go on here, bakesy-wise.

 

Until it was no longer obvious.  Everything was fine, but then when I poured the batter into the springform, it was quite shallow.  I messaged Streaky, half-accusing, half-pleading, "This is a layer cake?  Do you recognize this cake from yr life? Can you transliterate this text to an memory of a baked good? There is not enough cake, I don't think!"  We talked about it a little bit and he threw in his lot with a one-shot cake.  Frost the top and I would be done. 

I had, as with the amaretti, no temperature or duration information.  I chanced it at 350 and figured about 30 minutes.  It rose.  I never would have thought a cake with no leavening and made with ground nuts would rise during baking, but what do I know?  Wow.  So the cake was billowing and undone at 30 minutes, then 45, then, gah!  Gah, gah! 

The cake took an hour to bake.  By which time it was 11pm.  I was going to wait until it was completely cold to frost it.  First, because I did not trust the cake's stability and second, the frosting took a raw egg and I did not want to leave that for overnight.  Also, it was pretty obvious that while springform was definitely a good idea, buttered parchment should have also been included.  I was not going to be up for mothersucking cake-removal hijinks at midnight or 1am.  Hm.  Good night, cake project.  See you tomorrow.    

Also, you, little weblog.  See you tomorrow, too. We will finish documenting Cake Story then.

cupcake mind

I had been dating Mari for about a month when he had a birthday.  Mercifully, it was on or in the same week as Thanksgiving, we were otherwise occupied, and I could belatedly acknowledge it, casually, nonspecifically, slyly, as was my way. I chose to use a cupcake.  Just one, chocolate with chocolate frosting, on a plate, with a candle. This old thing? He was out of the kitchen; I lighted the candle and walked out of the kitchen, in the other direction, turning out the light as I left. (Equivocators should always reside in railroad flats.)   

We discussed this morning whether I baked it or it was storebought.  On the one hand, with the 100-year-old pastry outfits all around my hometown, the latter is superior.  On the other, cupcakes were not fashiony back then. 

We never determined, but I think I bought it, because I worked around the corner from a pâtisserie that was and is a veritable institution.  Also, because it was not really in keeping with my constitution to bake for some guy, even if I knew that he knew that I knew that he was pretty sure that we were getting married.  And soon, too, whoooosh. 

Anyhow, today, like the last 12 birthdays for which we have been married, I baked.  This year, we are back to cupcakes.  Happy Birthday, Mr Sloane; it is my pleasure & privilege to grow into the trophy wife you insist on not needing and remain the sulky princess you declare is your dream girl.

scrimmage

So, v early this morning, we are hanging around, Mari and I deep into some prepping for a conference call and catching up on detailed weblog reading, respectively. 

I finally click on a little gem posted up last week by Phil Yu.  (I watch/read whatever Phil tells me to clicky or rent on DVD, eventually.)  Mari is full-on, right away with his intramurals sword.  What is that?  Why is it so noisy?  That's a bootleg, you know. Is this that new Transporter movie?  We can't go watch it, it's going to be awful, is that Ellen DeGeneres?"

I beatifically endure this heckling for a full thirty seconds, until "Ellen DeGeneres" stands up and states her full name, and then from behind me, I hear the sounds of my husband, snapped to a rapt attention.  "OH," I said, "YOU ARE QUIET NOW!" 

Honestly.

matters of fact

Ballerina feet are not like regular feet.  They are strong and flexible and can shake hands, crack walnuts, and count beans.  Fold themselves in half like something from The Good Earth.  They are amazing and I love them, but oh, wow, do they smell.  

One thing that irritates me about ballet is they are always talking about her body.  Behind her back, mouthing to me, so I think that is acceptable, if we have to talk about a 7-year-old's body, that we not do it right in front of her.  But, still, it makes me want to smack, all this objectifying yap about her "perfect body."  I have to always repress this urge to call them pornographers and burn the place down.  

I work very hard to conceal my animus toward the whole ballet situation.  I am fairly certain I succeed, and to Fille's eyes, am just not any more or less interested in ballet than any of their other pursuits.  Mari and I admire her discipline, very much, but ballet?  Eh.  It is what it is.  We drive her and sign checks.  It is not our life. 

During the DNC, watching in particular Michelle Obama's speech, I became concerned that my parenting was woefully lacking in inspirational rhetoric. Work hard.  Your word is your bond.  Reach for your dreams and the like.  "What will they say?" I wailed to Mari and many of our friends.  "What if they win something important?  Then they will say, 'Our mother, she used to tell us, Do whatever you want!  It's your life, I don't care!' That sounds awful!"

Mari told me that they will of course say that I was supportive in whatever way they needed, "She drove us, and signed all the checks.  She was always there for us, and she is here tonight, way in the back -- she may have already alienated some of you -- knitting and texting on her BlackBerry.  Mom?  Femme?  Hi!  Let the people see you, OK?"  It was really hilarious, and this is why I love him.  Also, because when I was crying the day Daisy had to go to Paul Newman, he made some really awesome, bewildering, and endless analogy meant to be reassuring and which was based in a parable from Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe.

Also, in the intersection of politics and parenting:  Sarah Palin is crazy.  Ok, agreed, moving on.  So, I say one day, back in August, when Fille asked about a photo in a magazine, "She is Sarah Palin.  She wants to be the VP and she is crazy."  Fille asks, reasonably, "Why is she crazy?"  Oh, shit, that just slipped out. 

So, I said, truthfully, "Well ... for one, she thinks that you should not tell children the truth about sex."  This was more than zany enough for my daughter, who said, "Really?  Wow."  Also,the children's babysitter pointed out to them that she does not believe in evolution and the 6,000-year-old Earth thing.  I hear both children responded as, "Um, that seems weird, yeah.  Whoa." 

We have never again spoken with them about anything attached to the general election in this house.  There is not any reason to; I do not spend long (any) hours as an FDR Democrat in front of the radio listening to endless NPR analysis. We don't have a television. And because I am having difficulties expressing myself extemporaneously of late, I find that most detailed, same-side, "Oh, yes, and, but also, this" discussions are happening by way of emails.   

The children's friends, however, are endlessly talking about this election.  Who knows why.  They come home from their afterschool program with vast misinformation, which I patiently correct, but I find bewildering.  Today, I was minding my business, buying groceries in a Whole Foods Market, located in an (even for WFM) ultra-ritzy township.  So, we are standing in line, and Fille asks about Bristol Palin.  In a really loud voice, too.

"Mommy," she said, "I don't understand something.  If Sarah Palin doesn't tell her children about sex, how is her daughter having a baby?" 

The Whole Foods, the section where we were, the line in which we stood, became very quiet.  I was reminded of times when the children were very little and the sexy animals in the zoo would be sexing it up.  The children, usually Garçon, would ask what they were doing, the crowd would get very quiet and I would say, nonchalantly, "Making baby [whatevers]."  The children would of course nod sagely and then I would hear hearty and relieved sighs all around.

This time, I looked at her and said, "Well."  I took a breath.  "Do you remember when we talked about birth control?"  I heard, I think, the sound of people falling to the floor, heads of organic cabbage being lighted aflame and rolled down the aisles, and scandal.  I thought this extremely ironic, given the characters we were discussing.  I mean, children get pregnant because they do not have good information, because they are not told the truth, because if they don't buy condoms, their moms will never find out they are doing It.  What a good idea!  Except that it is so not!

Kowalski was giving me a little hell recently for he wanted to know why it is that I will "send the kids to the abbatoir to get their cat executed," but I will drive all over town to get the right bubble gum to preserve the fable of Ermentrude Diaphony, US Tooth Fairy, Region 6: Guam, USVI, Mid-Atlantic States.  ( I did do this, two weeks ago. All over town.)  Um, duh?  Because the Tooth Fairy is for children and they will never have to grapple with an appropriate and healthy regard for the Tooth Fairy as grownups. 

But, death will come, it is a part of life, and they need to get square with that now.  Just like sex and their bodies.  I cannot tell lies about it all, I cannot let people go on about it in inappropriate ways where they can hear. (Ballet!  You chassé on thin ice!)  I want them to be able to say, when they grow up, "Our mom, she gave us tools and information and let us make use of them our whole lives, and she is here now, in the back, sullen, knitting and texting." 

unearthed

Today we harvested sweet potatoes.  I was not super-hopeful about it, and cleared the plot early (I could have waited another month) to get ready for garlic.  Last week I dug one plant and it was just like one long ... um, like a carrot.  So, I thought there would be nothing but above-ground stretchiness.  But here they are!  Like a miracle!  Of the equinox!

I am so totally growing them again last year! (wtf?) Next year!  I am in love!  I thought I knew and then I did not!

The second miracle of the equinox came from the internets.  (Mari, "zzzZzZzZz."  Mari hates the internets.)  There was a guy I ran around with as a girl, someone I used to love in the most uncomplicated way using my whole heart and only in the most innocent ways with my body while we were each plagued with insomnia, endlessly, up all night, twined like puppies, eating each others' cooking, talking talking talking; three languages between two Geminis is the very definition of ceaseless chatter.  He turned up on the Facebook last week and after fourteen years, I had to take another two days to compose an actual missive so that I did not get tangled in an accidental, unspooling reminiscence.  Even though that meant my very first contact consisted largely of a message almost wholly reliant on the word "squeee."   

There is this kind of infinite unspooling in me lately, mostly because of the way my memory works, which is less of a photo album and more of a reel I can hold up to the light.  I have written emails lately to people to whom I have not spoken in 15 years and I have to insert in the quaking lavishment of glittering words other assurances like "honestly" and "sincerely."

I just was telling Mari the other day about an email to someone for whom I have always had a great deal of respect, possibly the only true intellectual I have ever known, that I ended, "in the midwest of my heart."  I laughed and laughed at the look Mari gave me and conceded to him that maybe I should give people the heads-up that I write poems now so as to avoid any confusion about the emails, swelling against every punctuation mark, inundated with the hand-to-god truth from my heart.

I have never been renowned for my sweetnesses, although people I let know me have felt the fullest weight of their extravagance.  I just never really wanted to let on.  I am always upended when people with whom I endeavored mightily to remain mysterious reveal their appreciation of me, in spite of myself.  A few months ago, when I was missing everyone so much, while prone & apologetic once again for the abjuring of humanity I adored as a girl, Kowalski ordered me to believe that I am the hope Pandora left in the jar.  Kowalski is a man who mostly disdains poetry, but I might suspect it is all a ruse.