pomegranatesandpaper

I'll Do Anything Other Than What I Have To

I'm supposed to be writing my next submission for CPS. It's due soon. Tomorrow in fact. OK, I've written about five drafts but it's not singing yet. You know what I mean. You can write an interesting essay that is essentially "bleh", but if you work on it long enough it takes a life of its own and you throw out all the drafts and just whip through the perfect essay like someone is dictating it to you.

That hasn't happened yet.

So instead, while I watch Malcolm in the Middle, I'll tell you the story of the Little One's Hamster Odyssey. Some of you may remember that our family does not have the best luck with small pets, particularly those that bring small rodents into the house. So when Julia decided that she wanted a hamster, we were reluctant to say the least. But then she babysat for the neighbor's hamster for ten days and it wasn't a a bit of a problem, so we said, what the heck, she's losing two siblings to college, she can replace them with a small furry thing that eats and poops.

Then it had ten babies.

Yes, ten. Babies. From the hamster that the pet store swore they kept segregated from the bad boy hamsters. Yep, these hamsters know how to party. Probably broke curfew. Snuck a few dudes into the dorm. Probably got high on burning some wood shavings. Maddie ended up knocked up and alone. She kept it secret from us, hiding her girth under a layer of fur, hung out in the wood shavings all day. Bit the kid when she tried to pick her up. Played it cool until we were too attached to send her to the Home for Unwed Hamsters.

So we all get over the gross out factor of ten squirming, eyeless, hairless mini-rodents, and all the cousins come over and ooh and aah, and Maddie herself makes a liar out of the pet store owner when she does not eat her babies (Maddie not the pet store owner). We are fascinated watching them grow and seeing the mother nurse them, build them nests, even haul them through the tube to the second story, one by one, where she sets up house in a little compartment so she can have some alone time on the wheel. Hey, a girl's gotta get her figure back.

Lately though, Maddie's been going a little stir-crazy. When you walk over to the cage, she scurries onto the bars, staring at you with an expression that says "get-me-the-hell-out-of-here-and-away from-these- kids-what-am-I-a-cow???" When the first two weeks were up, we took her out of the cage and let her run around in her little hamster popemobile ball. (The pet shop said not to touch mother or kids for two weeks, don't ask me why, but you should've smelled that cage!) Julia had a hard time getting Maddie to go back into the cage from the ball and I had to sympathize with her, having raised two babies twenty months apart up in the wilds on a lake with a husband in the city from dawn to dusk in the winter, but this isn't about me....

My sister suggested that Julia wire the cage door, but being a twelve year old, she said, no, Maddie can't get out. Cut to Wednesday morning, me going out to the door to court, she supposedly right behind me, and then the screams, and the crying, and the running down the stairs....

You got it, Maddie was gone. Cage door swinging open. Babies crying.

Julia and I began flinging things out of the eaves of the room where Maddie lived. It's a converted attic room and there's a lot of crap under those eaves. (probably hamster crap too by now). No Maddie. Checked Jess's room. No Maddie. Checked the toilet. No drowned Maddie. Thank God. Maria comes over to allow me to go to work and Julia to stay home for awhile to look for Maddie. We put the cage on the floor in case she comes back to her babies, and put food in a dish by the cage.

The day passes and no sign of Maddie. We keep the cats outside (remember Thumper??) By the next day, Julia is resigned to the fact that Maddie is gone. Dead, she decides, from lack of food. But she is determined not to let the babies die, despite the pet store bitch dire predictions (they'll die, they'll die, is all she'll say. Note: do not use pet store as a shelter if war breaks out.) The little cousins' lips quiver when they hear the news and all the people we've promised hamsters to (do you want one?) are informed of their possible demise.

Then last night Stan went down the basement for something and I hear him yelling for Julia (remember this is the man deathly afraid of rodents, dead or alive, and he still hasn't actually looked at the babies yet). There's Maddie, sauntering across the basement floor, making her way right for him, and Julia runs down with the scoop from the cat food (what a choice) and before she can blink, Maddie is back with her babies.

When we check on them later that night, Maddie is exhausted and sound asleep. All ten babies are sleeping on top of her, and then they wake up and all try to nudge her over to nurse. But Maddie's wiped out from her wild adventure through the walls of the house (how else did she get down those three floors to the basement?) and she won't turn over. Next morning, before we leave the house, we are happy to see all ten babies hard at work at momma's teats. Momma is lying there, letting them nurse, occasionally grunting when someone bites nurses too hard, and then she looks up at me and her eyes meet and she seems to say "keep an eye on that cage door, honey, because I'm breaking out again".

Ah, Maddie, I can relate.

These are the business cards from two of Mario Battali's restaurants in NYC. I'd like to tell you that I've eaten there, but I haven't. I just took them from Otto's, his other restuarant. Maybe if they did take out, we'd order from there, of course they'd also have to deliver to the suburbs. Unfortunately, our weekday menus tend to rotate through pizza, Chinese, burgers, pasta, and maybe sushi on Friday nights.

I really have every intention of cooking when I come home from work. I just never manage to actually defrost anything and/or actually walk into the kitchen in the evening. I've been cooking on Sundays and trying to get two or three meals out of it. This Sunday was beef stew, a childhood favorite. It really doesn't take that long to make, and once you brown all the meat, you just have to let the meat simmer for one hour, add the potatoes for a 1/2 hour, then the carrots for the last half. And if you are at my house, you throw in half a bag of frozen peas 5 minutes before you shut the flame. And accompany it all with a good Italian bread.

I may have trouble doing weekday cooking, but I am, however, a collector of recipes. I buy Gourmet and Bon Appetit at the change of seasons and at holidays. I drool over recipes for risottos, chowders, breads, and stuffings - talking a lot of carbs here! Or how about a pine nut torta with marasala poached autumn fruit, or roast chicken stuffed with fennel and garlic, or golden pancakes with pecorino cheese.My all-time favorite autumn dish is roasted vegetables. The recipe is so simple: carrots, fennel, small red potatoes, bulbs of garlic, Vidalia onions, and what ever sturdy vegetable you care to throw in - squash would be great. Like a large baking pan with parchment paper. Cut the vegetables into two inch chunks and place in one layer on the pan, drizzle with olive oil, kosher salt, ground pepper, and sprinkle with fresh rosemary. Put pan in a 450 degree oven for a half hour. Turn the veggies with a spatula after 20 minutes, lowering the heat to 425. The vegetables with caramelize while roasting and the flavors of the vegetables will become very intense. This dish tastes great hot or at room temperature. I like to make it with baby carrot that still have their green tops, then let the carrots cool and serve an aioli dip with it.

And then there are fall desserts: think pie, think brulees, think flan. Last Thanksgiving I made a pumpkin pie and lined the graham cracker crust with a layer of chocolate. I thought it was divine, but my husband the purist didn't like me messing around with his pumpkin pie.

Well, all this talk about food has made me hungry. Our chef, the Chinese food delivery guy should be here any minute. We are having hot and sour soup, shrimp fried rice, and dumplings; very ordinary but the type of plain comfort food that hits the spot on a rainy, cold Tuesday night.

Bon Appetit!

It probably doesn't make a lot of sense to someone painting the bedrooms in the house we may not be owning much longer. But finding a reliable person to paint who gives reasonable estimates and then shows up and paints is not unlike winning the lottery. I contracted with the guy before my husband had entered stage two of the back, i.e. omigod-its-never-going-away-you'll-be-fired-life-is-over.

In our youthful, physically capable days, my husband and I painted, paper, sanded, tore down ceilings, put up paneling, painted paneling, stripped archeological layers of wallpaper and wielded a spackle knife with the best of them. Now we're tired. Old. Worn out. So we jumped at the chance to have a retired painter who was looking to do something to get him out of the house and away from his wife for a few days.

We just didn't know that he like to start work at 7:30 a.m., which actually inched up to 7:11 a.m. by Wednesday. And that he didn't approve of my color choices, especially for the ceiling.

Painter: You gonna paint the ceiling white?
Me: No, a very light yellow.
Painter Yella?
Me: uh-huh
Painter: No, ceilings I painta white.
Me: Normally, but I think yellow is nice because there isn't a lot of wallspace and ----
Painter: Whateva, you the boss

Part of the deal was that we asked him to finish each room before starting the next, especially when he would be painting in the bedrooms. I have little room to move the furniture around in , and we all still have to be able to get into closets and dressers to get ready for school and work, not to mentioi find a spare bed to sleep in. . .

Painter: No problem, you the boss
Me: Can you start with my daughter's room?
Painter: We gonna start in the kitchen, but you the boss.

A day later.

Me: I see you're prepping the bedroom. The kitchen's all done?
Painter: No, I don't wanna use semi-gloss and then switch color and hafta wash brushes, so I do the trim in all the rooms same time.
Me: But then I can't use the kitchen for another two days and we said you'd finish one room...
Painter: Yeah, yeah, don't worry, you the boss. But I do the trim tomorrow.

Then I committed the faux pas of having my daughter's ceiling painted the same color as the walls (light blue).

Painter: The ceiling no good. Look better in white.
Me: The ceiling looks gorgeous! You got it as smooth as glass.
Painter: (Shrugs) Look better in white.

Tonight he is coming over to get paid for half the work. Tomorrow he begins my bedroom, which has a lot of prep work as our ceiling is a mess. On the phone, he tells the husband to make sure that he buys white for the ceiling (figuring he can bypass the crazy wife.) Wait till he sees the pale blue I picked to go with the light green walls.

Of course, being the boss means that I get to move all the furniture from one to another. Not so bad in the kitchen, but then Saturday morning I get that crazy nesting urge and start emptying china cabinets and moving large pieces from room to room. This leaves a gaping hole in the world's smallest living room when my sister drops by and announces that I just have to move my bookcases. I balk, then realize she is completely right and we start emptying shelves and hauling more large pieces of furniture from room to room (which is why I never buy wall to wall carpeting as furniture slides on wood floors and Murphy's oil soap hides scratches).

Revved up by the new arrangement, I get up early and decide that yes, I can move the ugly, huge entertainment center to the far wall if I get an extension for the cable wire. So before my husband can get up and balk, I move it, run down the basement, don't find any cable wire, but find the little oak table we never had room for, clean it, rearrange all the seating and collapse in time to get ready for church. We finally have the ability to sit more than four people in our living room and you can still watch TV if the two people in the arm chairs don't mind craning their necks 90 degrees to the left.

Someday we'll have the money for a new entertainment center, or maybe even some boards and concrete blocks like in the dorm. I am satisfied with my weekend of furniture jigsawing, even if my knees are throbbing and my feet are swollen. I am digging my heels into the house, all too aware of how fragile our hold on it is. I refuse to put my life on hold for the sixth time in as many years.

But I'm the boss. I'm committed to finishing the bedroom painting, and then we're stalled out on home improvements for the time being. So we'll wait for the rest, conserve what little cash we have and try to figure out how to live on 1/3 of our income as it doesn't appear there's any miracles on the horizon. At the very least, we'll clean walls to look at while we fret and stew.

Reading saved my life. Probably in a thousand ways. Some the usual, like looking up what I needed to know to pass a course, to the unusual, like providing me with a past time to keep my from really screwing up in high school when I decided to cut a semester's worth of classes because I was so depressed.
I cut my teeth on books. They were my first friends. We didn't have a lot of them around the house. There was a shelf of Nancy Drew, a shelf of Bobbsey Twins (whom I hated and despised because the writing was horrible), Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and odds and ends of war novels and non-fiction that my parents liked to read. They were both avid readers, but they used the LIBRARY, an institution that my children have confused with BORDERS (which I can admit to since I was the one that confused them).
We had one TV with seven stations, no stereo, no computer, and no hand-held games. We had board games, marbles, checkers, Barbies, bikes, and baby dolls. Sound boring? It really was. I was the middle of five girls: two older sisters who were doing daring things and two little sisters who were adorable. Then me, grumpy and fat in the middle with no one to play with in a neighborhood of adults. So I read books.
Nothing new here, read any writer's bio and you come up with some tale that approximates the shy, oafish, nerdy kid who spent Saturday afternoons riding her book with armloads of books while her friends were cheerleading at the football games. No surprises about developing a rich inner fantasy life and having a novel scrawled on lined notebook paper about making the best hat for a contest for the Easter parade. I do recall a rather sophisticated short story about a girl whose parents are divorced and she is being brought up by her flinty father who likes to drink, smoke, and play cards, and ignores her until she finally wins him over during his poker game with buddies. Or something maudlin like that.
I loved to read and I was good at it, and being competitive, I loved the SRA reading series that was our form of being taught reading way back in the sixties. It consisted of a big box kept on a desk in the back of the room. The box held cards that had short stories on them. On the other side of the card were the questions that you had to answer correctly to go up to the next level. Each year, my goal was to read those suckers as fast as possible and whip through the colors, which began with namby pamby blue and green and escalated to bright orange, royal purple, and the ultimate ascendancy, gold.
It wasn't hard to knock off half the box by Thanksgiving. There wasn't a lot going on in the lower grades. It was Catholic school and they'd just opened a school library when I was in third grade. The teacher made the mistake of telling us about it at the beginning of the year and I tortured her by asking her EVERY DAY when it was going to open, which I think it didn't do until May. So it was a long year. We were allowed to take out ONE book. I think there were about a hundred books in total, most of them devotional books and bios about saints who had their eyes plucked out. The balance of our reading enjoyment was derived from our reader, a thin book of poetry, and monthly Scholastic magazine, which was just a four page spread. Oh, and weren't allowed to "read ahead" in our reader either.
So whipping through the SRA box was not a big achievement, but few of the kids ever made the last two levels: purple and the ultimate, GOLD. The cards in the pastel colors were grubby, their edges worn, and the laminate peeled and curling. I could finish the pink section before lunch if we had a sub and it was a slow day. As you read through the levels, the sections became wider, the stories longer, and the questions more complex. Most people made it half way through, stalling out in the reds and yellows, content to be middle brow readers within the minimum standards that still allowed them to pass notes and doodle complex puzzles in the corner of their loose leaf notebooks.
The purple and the gold were the highest sections. The cards were pristine, still holding their straight edge, the cards hard to pull out of the box because they were stiff and unused. The rule was if you got to the GOLD, then you got to pick a book of your choice from the slim selection that the teacher had. And more importantly, you received a gold ribbon that had imprinted in purple letters: BEST READER, which meant you were THE BEST READER IN THE CLASS.
I was doing fine for most of the year, putting the color notches on my reading belt: pink, green, brown (yuck), yellow, red (getting up there). After Christmas break, I was right where I was supposed to be: about two-thirds through the box, slowing down as the sections became thicker, the stories longer, and the questions more complex. But I was right on target for May, expecting to finish up right after Easter vacation. A few kids were in the section behind me, including my friend, Debbie M., and the goody two shoes, Mary McC, whose mother was always in the classroom delivering goodies to the teacher, but I was in a comfortable lead.
Sometime in April, I got the flu. I was home for a week, where I obsessively read and reread Nancy Drew books and then my Girl Scout handbook. When I returned to school, Debbie M., who had been trailing behind me, had almost finished the purple section. I knew I could catch up, but the teacher loaded me down with extra work I'd missed, and less time to read as we were gearing up for final exams and had review sessions instead of free reading periods in the afternoon.
I remember the day that Debbie M finished the purple section. She ostentatiously walked to the front of the classroom and waved the key for the first story in the Gold section in her hand as she sashayed back to her desk. My throat tightened and I screwed up my face when she walked past, resisting the temptation to put out my leg and trip her. She was not a classically good student in the sense that she'd rather talk than do anything else so she was usually in detention after school. (I suspect she did SRA reading then even though it was verboten to do so. How else could she be so consistently ahead of me??) She was an unlikedly candidate for BEST READER because her parents were Italian, like mine, she got into trouble for talking a lot, and she was not one of the appointment teacher's pets, who were comprised of the girls whose mothers wore pearls and volunteered every day in the lunchroom., like Mary McC's. It was one thing to beat by a Mary McC, but by Debbie?
No one else in the class was even close to GOLD. In my absence Robert F. and another girl had breached my hold on purple, but they were still struggling with the beginning cards and I had a short lead. But there was work to make up, a couple of school holidays, and I still wasn't close to finishing the damn purple section that was heavily bogged down with historical fiction and required more careful reading than the fluff I could skim and guess the questions to.
Every morning, I saw Debbie M. making her way methodically through the gold, about halfway through the glittering section while I slogged through the purple, often having to go back and reread a card because I got the answers wrong. It was almost at the end of the school year. The teacher had put on display the four books that the winner would receive. I have no memory of what they were; I suspect they were bios of saints and probably a Five Little Peppers or another Bobbsey Twin. They sat on a shelf on the wall by her desk, next to a purple ribbon that said BEST READER.
And then the worst thing happened. I got sick again, reinvested by a little sister who'd given me cold germs and my immune-compromised state, I succumbed. I went to school anyway, with a pocket full of tissues and a tin of Sucrets that made my throat numb. But I couldn't keep up. My head woozy, my limbs like dead weights, my eyes red and runny, I was unable to concentrate and spent the reading periods staring at those damn purple cards while I tried to stop my head from crashing down on the desk.
The day that Debbie M. got her ribbon, the principal came to the classroom to award it. Sister Somebody sailed in with her crisp white robes, her deep black headdress with the stiff wimple biting a line into her forehead. She stood in the front of the room with her arms disappeared up her sleeves and her heavy, articulated rosary beads hanging from some hidden belt in the folds of her robes. When the teacher announced Debbie M's name, I saw the principal's wimple rise slightly as she raised her eyebrows. She was more familiar with Debbie from being sent to her office for talking than as a prize winner.
Debbie never repeated her feat after that year. She discovered boys in sixth grade and didn't need the steady conquering of neat rows of color-coded, laminated stories to fill her with power. She had breasts and a small waist instead. We remained sort of friends, and when we both ended up at the huge, public high school, we clung to each other with a few other cast offs whose families couldn't afford the Catholic school tuitions. She was developing into a "bad girl", and her house was a street away from the school and her parents were at work all the time, and there were lots of parties during cut periods. We didn't have any classes together after freshman year. I was college prep and she was "vocational ed", learning shorthand in the wing that housed the cosmetology and garage mechanic labs. I lost track of her from there, and I don't know what happened to her. I went past her house recently but there were little pink bikes on the lawn and a young couple raking leaves, so I assume her parents don't live there anymore.
I doubt she kept that ribbon more than a year. In ninth grade she painted her walls back and installed a black light for posters. I don't recall seeing that ribbon up on a wall by the Led Zeppelin posters. SRA was abandoned a few years later as "whole reading" came into vogue and we were given novels like Siddhartha to read. I have since made thousands of notches on my reading belt, working my way through a degree in literature and becoming a writer who still would rather read than do anything else. I'm thrilled to go to my kids' schools and see classrooms loaded with books for them to read and beautiful libraries filled with shelves lined with reading. I'm ecstatic that bookstores have become hang outs for my family and that we own more books than anything else.
But I can still picture that big, fat box of cards, and that glittering gold pot-at-the-end-rainbow. It wasn't about the ribbon, or the "Best Reader". It was all about the gold.

I decided to pull the last two posts. Writing about the continuing crisis in my family is extremely valuable for me. It clarifies the issues in my mind, makes me confront my emotions, and examine my relationship with my family and with God. I'm not alone in this situation, however, and I feel that I'm treading too close to my family's privacy to feel comfortable about leaving the posts up.

Authentic writing is my goal for this blog. I think I have done so 99% of the time. This time something is nagging in the back of my mind and I decided to act on my impulse and delete the last two posts. Blogging is power; albeit power in a tiny microcosm of family and friends. I don't consciously set out ot write the history of the family, but I'm aware that I am doing so by default since no one else is. Maybe I have too much voice in this family and by presenting my rtake on it, I am memorializing a very tiny slice of what goes on here.

Reality is each person's perceptions. At this time my husband is struggling as hard as he can to work in extreme pain. He is dancing wiht his bosses, who are hard-hearted. He has a high executive position in a small company that offers no disability benefits. Due to his history, no private disability insurance is available to him. So we are in the peculiar and tormenting position of being middle-aged, with 25 years of work experience, kids in college, and a paycheck away from complete financial disaster. He's relying on heavy doses of pain killers to get through the week. Next week he has a consultation about having a neurostimulator implanted in his spine, as well as starting the rounds of more MRI's,EMGs, and consultations with new neurosurgeons.

In the midst of all this, is my son calls from college, sounding absolutely joyous, loving his classes, happy with his roommate, joining every club and organization he wants, and generally thriving. The Princess is learning to cook and calls me a few times a week between 5 and 6:00 with questions like "how do I brown meat" and "how do make Daddy's roasted potatoes"? The little one is thrilled because her room is painted and we're going to find some carpeting.

And to completely change the subject, I broke down and bought Susanna's Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell." It weighs a freaking ton. I had to prop it up on a pillow to read it in bed. Is this necessary? Must every book about magic and fantasy be a 1000 pages long? Or a trilogy? But I couldn't wait to read it after hearing her interview on the Diane Rehm show. It's slow going in the beginning and my eyes were crossing as I tried to read it last night after Meet The Teacher, so I'll have to weigh in on it later, no pun intended.

And speaking of Meet the Teacher, I know I'm at the other end of the parenting spectrum when all the teachers looks like students to me. Julia's math teacher is so much fun that I'd like to take 7th grade math myself (particularly because I did NOT know the answer to the fraction addition she put on the board: since when does 1/3 + 1/5 = 8/15?? - And don't write in and tell me how because my brain can't compute it and I don't care because I already took 7th grade math and now own a calculator so I never have to take it again.)

Her English teacher picked 6 novels for them to read, all historical fiction tied in with American history that they are studying in Social Studies, and all 6 novels are about white boys except the one about a girl that she picked "for the girls to read". AARGH! that made me so crazy that I didn't hear another word this woman said. Is she kidding me? First of all, I'd lose my mind if I had to read such a string of similiar books in a row. Boring doesn't even begin to describe it. Secondly, could she be more narrow minded about "girl's books"? Aren't there about a cajillion incredible young adult books about girls?? I decided to keep my mouth shut until I could come up with an alternative list that fits the curriculum that I could then present her (thereby totally embarassing the Little One who will never let me on school grounds again). Lastly, would someone tell this English teacher that by allowing the kids to read the abridged version of Treasure Island, she's depriving them of the beauty of the language and whatever happened to teachers who keep the bar as high as possible and get kids in love with language, reading and writing. And would someone leave a note for her and let her know that when a book is condensed it's the "abridged" version and not the "adapted" version.

That is my rant for the day.

We are finally getting around to having some rooms painted that have been in dire need of decoration since we moved in four years ago. Our kitchen would be best served by throwing a bomb into it and starting from scratch. Barring a winning lottery ticket, that's not happening so we are painting it a pretty apple green, with a soft yellow ceiling and white trim. I picked the paint color for our bedroom long distance from Memphis, and never liked it from the day I saw it. Last year, I fell in love with the blue bedroom we had in Cape Cod, and came home and began painting our bedroom blue. Only it was a different blue, and after one wall, I hated it. It's stayed that way for a year, half ugly blue, half ugly yellow. So now it will be a soft green (I'm stuck in a green mode.) The little one is getting her tiny room painted and carpeted. She had picked out a navy blue for the walls, and never liked it either, so she is going to a very pretty light blue with white trim.

And like all times that we finally get around to painting rooms, my husband's ill health is getting worse. He has a terrible job situation, and he doesn't feel much better after his 3 1/2 days off, and fully expects to be fired because he may need to take more time off. This happened at the same company 15 months ago and we have no reason to believe they won't do it again. So we are in full stress mode, not sleeping, with each of us lying in bed not talking, lost in our own private fears of losing the house, telling the kids they have to quit school. We've dealt with this scenario in various stages over the last 6 years and our savings have been wiped out by it.

This time I've promised myself not to go off the deep end and just wait it out. Something always comes through for us and we haven't lost the house yet, and though we've used up all the safety nets I can think of, I'm trusting in the hand of God to see us through one more bout. So if you are praying sort and feel inclined, we could use the intention as we struggle to give him time to heal and keep our finances stabilized.

Thanks.

It was an easy work week. The court calendars were light due to the Jewish holidays and although a lot of my colleagues were off, I managed to cover my parts and get back to the office before 11:30. The DH is home with various health issues this week, The Princess had the end of the week off, as did the Little One. Only Mystery Man remained at school, as busy and hard to get in touch with as ever.

We are celebrating The Princess's 20th birthday this weekend instead of next since she is home. For her birthday, she is getting a tune-up on her car and a new cell phone. She has been eagerly awaiting the end of our cell phone contract so she could upgrade to a new phone. Unfortunately, the contract is in DH's name and he has to negotiate a new one. I say unfortunately, because DH doesn't have a cell phone, doesn't want a cell phone, hates using a cell phone, and most of all, hates paying for our cell phones. Combine his Luddite attitude with feeling sick and having to lie down and try to work from home with mean-spirited bosses, and well, you don't want to say the word "new cell phone" within his hearing range.

So it fell to me to take The Princess cell phone shopping. She loves when I take her cell phone or car shopping because she knows I have the patience of a gnat and will generally cave in to whatever she wants about 10 minutes into the nano-technology spiel being given by the salesman who knows who he is really talking to. I have some basic questions: how many minutes, what extra charges, what about text messaging, and no roaming fees, right? That's about as deep into it as I get. She convinces me she deserves a picture phone, but I hold the line at allowing her to send pictures to anyone since it cost 25 cents - do you understand why it should cost a quarter? And then the discussion turns to text messaging. At ten cents a message. Including replies back and forth. At school. During class.

Whatever happened to eyes on the teachers?? Ah, let's face it, I'm just envious that she can sit through a boring college lecture and be talking to her friends who are in equally as boring lectures. In the end, we negotiate an increase in minutes, a text messaging allowance, and I upgrade from my $25 phone (as the salesman politely calls it, older technology) to a flip phone with caller ID so I can not answer it when the office calls me in court because I am pissed that they call us routinely on the cell phones that they do not provide us with or pay for.

So we all sport shiny new phones on clips, except Mystery Man whose contract has another year to go, and I will be able once more to call my children all over the world. And get their voice mail.

Gotta go - DH just found out how much The Princess's car tune up is going to cost. I think I'll go to Borders and turn off my cell phone.

I went out to dinner last night with two of my oldest friends. We ate at the restaurant on the Hudson that inspired the sketch I did in my journal when I went there for lunch a few weeks ago.I got there before everyone else, and sat in the garden sketching a pergola covered with vines and tiny white lights. The end of the season hit home when I walked through the gardens that had been filled with cheery sunflowers and vibrant fruits and vegetables last time I was there. Last night, the sunflowers were pretty much spent, the purple coneflowers were reduced to stalks, and most of the veggies were giving up their last fruits. Around me were the smells of rosemary, thyme, tarragon, and other herbs that gave up their heady fragrance as my pants's legs brushed against them. I found a weathered cedar bench and watched a red and white tugboat chug down the grey Hudson, silhouetted against the rusty cliffs of the Palisades.

We ate dinner on a covered patio, cool in the misty weather. I've been friends with these two women for over 25 years. We met each other in law school, and stayed together through the birth of our first children, graduation, search for jobs, and the establishment of careers, and the passage of our babies into adulthood. We know each other's passions, our bitter disappointments, our strengths, and our weaknesses. We don't get to see each other often anymore, so when we have dinner, the conversation is a scattershot that bounces from idea to idea, event to event, ricocheting off the wine glasses and careening past the dishes of risotto and fish. The dessert debate is always the same: R. wants to share; M only wants chocolate but usually orders nothing; and I get my own.

While we were sipping macchiotas, the rain began in earnest and we were trapped without coats or umbrellas. Our party spilled over onto the sofa in the lobby lit with flickering votives. We spent another hour sharing perimenopause stories and plans for retirement, once such a distant future, now more close than we cared to admit. We all admitted fleeting, surreal moments of real angst when we realized how long we'd been married and how old our children are, but that on the whole, our lives have been satisfying and full and filled with friendship and family.

This is why I moved back to this expensive, tiring, noisy part of the world. I'm grounded by these relationships; I take comfort from the sameness of our lives, from the repitition of our conversations, from the knowledge that we'd all see each other through one more crisis, one more despair, one more celebration.

May you celebrate your friendships today.

It was one of the few airy, fresh days of this summer. We were due at my sister's for a family party, but I was anxious to get out and spend some time near the water and make some art. I drove over to the next town, a small suburban village with a median income of oh, say, a zillion dollars, and took a ride through "The Manor", an enclave of broad streets flanked by large, Victorian homes on generous plots trimmed with perennials and bright groupings of cheery impatiens and spanking white fences. The house are not mansion, but overly generous in space, with rambling porches, wings that wrap around courtyards and picturesque sheds, and laws studded with hundred years old trees that shade the avenues. Bordering the southern end of the enclave is the Long Island Sound, blue and green and sparkling with sailboats. Eternal summer, eternal youth, visible to all out most windows, and to the lucky few, from a birds-eye view from front porches decorated with wicker and Adirondack chairs.

My husband and I have trolled these streets since we were in college. We envisioned ourselves with a brood of kids, a pack of dogs, a boat, and a house in The Manor. Since our college days, the large, Anglo-Irish families that settled the area had slowly turned with the tides of generations to Wall Street money. Once grand houses had started to look a little seedy; shingles were missing of northern exposures, roofs needed shedding, and shrubs and trees were overgrown in front of the homes of widows who couldn't keep up the pretenses after forty years of manorial living. The area was never in danger of needing gentrifying, but yuppies were the lifeline for the next forty years. It's not the type of community that would ever be in danger of tears downs, the rage even in my own city. No, it's the sort of community where you need a permit to take a wedding photograph in the town park. The houses are being restored to their luster of their sixties and seventies, the thirties and forties, the turn-of-the-century American romanticism of cobble stone driveways, and paths lined with hydrangeas and roses, and new Gothic brackets for the upstairs porches.

My husband and I have always lusted after houses, wanting the wide plank floors, capacious kitchens, and most of all, being close enough to the water to smell the salt air on a winter's day and a summer's night. Almost at the half-century mark, I still think there's time, that something, someone will enable me to live the life of baskets of boots by the backdoor, a fireplace in the kitchen, and a front porch filled with planters of geraniums that look as bright as bees against the backdrop of a long expanse of water. Our heads always turned by the Sound, we'd never went more inland, never made a simple left in this community, past the Sound, into the heart of the enclave. It was a few years ago that we stumbled upon the heart of the center, a large square studded with a fountain, banked on he left by an Episcopal church, and on the other flanks with smaller, charming cottages.

I've returned to the square again and again since then. I've walked the perimeter, admiring the neat little houses with exuberant gardens, the feeling of neighborliness as they all face each other, ideal for a chat on an autumn's eve when the first wood smoke curls out of the chimneys. That Sunday I headed to the square to sketch the fountain. No one was about; church was over and the houses were quiet and dark. I felt a little like an intruder as I walked across the perfectly groomed grass on sat on a bench. I quietly took out my journal, water pens, and gouache. I soon fell into the reverie of the place, listening to the water, the drone of bees intoxicated by the sparkling sprays, and I felt the unseen eyes of the place relax a little, like the square let go a held in breath. In the bright noon day sun, I felt a rippling under the surface of the patina, a gentle but persistent perception that there were well-kept secrets behind the red-painted doors and geranium-stuffed window boxes.

Right now it's just a shadow across my mind. But there are lanes that lead from the square to a marsh, lanes almost hidden with privet hedges as high as second stories. There's a house set out alone on a bend in the cove, a monastery set deep into the marshland, and a lighthouse that can be seen from the top of a bridge. Something connects it all, I'm not sure what. I'm just sure that graveyard tucked behind the rather gloomy stones of the church, holds more than just bones.

Still Tweaking

I thought it was time for a change here, what with the fresh breezes of autumn clearing out the squirrelly parts of my mind. Time for a new phase of the blog, one marked by some cleaner design with more emphasis on the artwork, and a clean up of some clutter that I thought were necessary when I first started blogging nearly a year ago. The redesign isn't done and I have to admit I'm very frustrated by my inability to go the distance and use MoveableType, which is would give me the look I really want. I'm a total dweeb and have to stick to the templates, having no clue or time to learn how to write HTML. I hope to have it all done in a day or two, as soon as I can clear off the table and get to the scanner!

The photos are of the first artist book that I made. The book is a total flight of whimsy, a story of young lovers and a magical journal that falls out of a tree hit by lightning 300 years later. I didn't know how to make an artist book (and thought there had to be one, right way); I didn't know how to bind a book; and I'd never done an art project like it before. I had a drift of a story stuck in my mind of lovers living in eighteenth century England, and arranged marriages and death and magic and a young woman learning the power of her art.

I began with the art, filling tiny tags with imagery of bugs and beetles and butterflies, and little bits of moss and sticks covered with lichen, and flecks of gold leaf and gilded wax. I painted papers with layers of acrylics and gesso, creating the look of leather on watercolor paper. I aged handmade paper, staining it with tea and dirt, then writing out the letters between the lovers, which I tied up with twine and sealed with sealing wax. I bound the book with a simple wrap around cover held together with a ribbon binding, added trinkets that I'd collected for some reason over the years, and sent it off to Somerset Studio for possible submission.

I had never submitted anything for publication before and didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing. They accepted it and sent me a note that it was one of the best pieces they'd ever received for their "Storyteller" feature. I walked around in a dream for several days and bought most of the copies they had for sale in the city of Memphis.

Since then, I've had many pieces published in that magazine and others, but somewhere along the way I'd strayed from telling stories in my artwork and lost the whimsy and fancy of my first attempt. This summer, I got the feeling of butterflies back in my stomach when I began painting with gouache and after two months, began to see images that I could vaguely define as paintings appear on the paper. If I had the time, I'd be signing up for a class this fall, but I can't manage it this fall, but that may be a good thing. I still hold a paintbrush like a magic wand, not sure how to control it, sometimes feeling like I'm dragging it through dust, sometimes feeling like magic is pouring out of the brush. Some days it's enough to mix colors and make up palettes of juicy bits; other days I'm intent on getting some image stuck in a corner of my mind down on the page. I want to keep this feeling of magic, before I begin to learn the “rules” and “do’s and don’ts” of painting and have the wonder ground out of it.

So this fall, look for more stories being told here, stories told in paint and paper, as I remember how good that red, ripe pomegranate feels in my hand.

On a Clear Day You Can See

Friday was a blue and white day of cool temperatures, sunny skies and the drying breezes of autumn. My colleagues and I sat around a beat up picnic table and shared a meal of hot dogs, fried chicken, baked beans, and salads, battling with the bees for their share of the sugar. Behind us, the more athletic co-workers were whomping volleyballs over a net, and the "young turks" were on the softball field, vying for the most pulled ligaments and sorest shoulders in the mid-30's set. The company handed out play money to pay the Good Humor Ice Cream truck and we stood shoulder to shoulder in line like little kids waiting for our Italian ices and frozen popsicles. As the sun melted the ice creams off the sticks and onto our hands, which we lazily licked, someone mentioned that the day was exactly like September 11th, 2001.

And indeed it was. As I drove to work that morning, the sun was warm and there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a day made for cutting school, skipping work, and spending one more afternoon with my feet in the water at the beach, or sitting on the porch and sketching the last of the hydrangeas that were drying on the bush. It was such an ordinary day, a day to go to work and look out the window longingly, a day to remember to pick up bread and milk on the way home, and a day to make certain you went out for lunch to enjoy the weather now that summer's humidity and temperatures extremes were behind us.

Was there ever such a day again?

Three years later, we spend another beautiful morning watching the TV and listening to the reading of the names of the dead. The fathers, mothers, wives, children, sisters, brothers, grandparents, husbands, and loved ones sit on chairs and hold photos of their dead. Some cry openly; some clench one another's hands; some stand alone, staring off into space into their private hell. The names are read in blocks of twenty, with the speakers adding their own loved ones names at the end. A fireman's bell is rung to mark the moments of the planes entering both towers and the moment of each tower's fall.

People of every race and nationality, every age, shape, and class approach a reflecting pool and lay their flowers into the water. Soon the surface of the water is covered with bouquets, balloons, and mementoes, like a bathtub filled with tears. The TV camera pans away and the screen fills with a shot of a single sailboat gracefully sailing through the harbor, and the empty backdrop where the towers would have been.

As the names are read, an odometer clocks in my brain: dead, dead, dead, dead. In my mind, I add to the list are the 1000 soldiers killed in Iraq. We have more dead than we can memorialize; more dead than we can hold in our hearts. My mind cannot wrap around the number and I line up shoes in my mind, empty shoes on a street corner, jumbled together in a mass grave outside the fallen towers.

Halfway through, we shut the TV, go upstairs and wash up and get dressed for the day. There are groceries to be bought, cleaning to be picked up, school supplies to be purchased, and meals to be cooked. I spend the rest of the morning finishing up some art work, doing mindless tasks like setting grommets and threading pieces together like puppets. Soon we'll leave for softball practice, and come home to grill some swordfish and potatoes.

A few blocks from me live two families who lost their fathers, both brothers at Cantor Fitzgerald. They were the kind of families that had SUVs in the driveway, back halls littered with soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, and school bags; houses with kitchens that fit ten at the dinner table. They belonged to country clubs, went to private schools, bought their children's clothing in boutiques, and used the elliptical trainer religiously for an hour every morning before work. On the other side of town is a large family crowded into a small apartment. Their sons were dishwashers in Windows on the World. Their wages were the difference between collecting food stamps and paying with cash. Their grandparents lived with them, an aunt, and their father, retired on disability. They sent some of their pay home to the Dominican Republic, and made sure that their siblings had a new pair of sneakers for the first day of school.

Is the grief deeper in either household? Is the loss stronger, fresher, rawer under either roof? Are the Cantor Fitzgerald widows able to sleep more easily with the strong cedar shake roof over their heads? Does the father of the dishwashers find solace in the check he received from the government for the loss of his sons?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. I don't know the way through a grief like that. I only know what is told to me: a step at time, day by day, talk about it, seek help, look to the future. All platitudes that mean nothing as you drown in memory and loss. I hope that tomorrow they can get up and water the lawn, walk the dog, go to church, and spend Sunday evening paying some bills and talking on the phone to loved ones far away. I hope that when they get up to go to work on Monday, or to wait for the school bus on the corner, that there is some bright shiny piece of happiness somewhere in their minds, like a piece of faded red satin ribbon found under the sofa after the Christmas gifts are boxed up and put away. May they hold in their hearts some fragment of love that beats warm and hot, even if it is just a single fragment of hope for the future that allows them to get out of bed in the morning and hold their three-year olds in their arms.

On a clear day you see it all: the glass half full, the glass half empty. And you just want to hold onto the glass as tightly as you can without causing it to shatter.

Progress on the artwork came to a halt yesterday when I came home feeling yucky. I took a short nap, and dragged myself out of bed at 6:00, feeling like I was drugged. My stomach has been screwy all week so I suspect I am having my 999th stomach bug of the year.

While I am otherwise engaged, check out this new web ring of illustrated blogs. If you have an illustrated blog, you can apply to join the ring at the homepage above. It already has a great list of bloggers for your perusal.

Enjoy!

A Very Wet Back to School

The edges of Frances have reached New York and there's been a steady, heavy downpour since the middle of the night. Not a great morning for back-to-school, but I suppose it will make it easier for the kids to realize that summer is over. Stan took the morning off to take Julia to school and she is more excited about that than the actual return to school. She loved it when Stan was home, laid off, and picked her up from school, made her lunch, and practiced pitching with her after school. It's one of those silver-lining stories.

Not posting much because I'm workingo n the artwork for the next issue of CPA. I had an idea of where I wanted to go, did the background with no problem, and felt very smug that I knew what I was doing. Then it all came to a screeching halt around Monday evening and I was in my usual panic. My sister Maria came over last night and gave me some good comments so I'm off and running again.

Will have more time later in the week to post.

REGISTER TO VOTE, THEN VOTE!

For those of you, like me, who want to be politically responsible but are not up to door to door canvasing or demonstrating in the streets, read the comments for the prior post and all of the great suggestions on how to get involved in the political process. The most obvious one for me is to use this blog to remind you to VOTE, which means register NOW if you are not registered.

This is the last day of summer holidays and Wednesday school starts for the younger kids. Saturday was gorgeous and I spent it doing small errands, puttering around the house, and taking up a new hobby, which I need like a hole in the head, but more about that later. My family was here for dinner Friday night, and since I wasn't up to the traditional Labor Day cook out, we ordered Chinese.

Yesterday, my husband and kids dragged me to IKEA and we battled crowds of people as confused as we were, trying to find a loft bed for the Little One. Didn't buy a damn thing and came away with a big headache. Yes, the prices are unbelievably cheap but there's no one to ask questions of, and a huge line to get on to order anything, and I hated all the beds they had anyway. I ended up getting into one of those snits with my husband when I found out that he hadn't measured her room, and we began talking loudly at each other in overly civilized fashion, to wit:

ME: This loft is awfully high - how high are our ceilings?
DH: High? As high as regular ceilings.
ME: How high are "regular" ceilings?.
DH: About as high as this - (gesturing to painted phony ceiling in IKEA showroom)
ME: Darling, that may be the strangest observation you've ever made. How do you know that?
KID: Mom, look I can reach the top of the bed with my arms, so it can't be that high
ME: I think you logic may be a little askew, dear. I don't think you'll be able to sit up in the bed it's so high.
KID: I don't care!
DH: It'll be fine - they wouldn't build this fake ceiling unless it was a standard ceiling height.
ME: I think you are both laboring under misconceptions, as good intentioned as you may be. The appropriate thing is to measure, so let's do that and come back.
DH: No way!
KID: Mom, puleeze!
ME: Let's do this right ( now voice disintegrates into hissing).
DH: You always make a production out of everything
KID: We can return it!

Exit, three disgruntled people, none talking to the other, weave their way through a bazillion people wandering around with order forms in their hands. The Princess takes up the rear, shaking her head and talking into her cell phone. Somehow we all reconverge at the snack stand and eat giant cinnamon buns that produce sugar rushes and pleasantries all around. We promise the Little One we will continue to look elsewhere for the loft bed.

We walk a hundred miles to our car, go up and down fifty ramps trying to find out way out, battle the traffic on the LIE, and just as we are crossing the bridge and I think I'm home free, The Princess pipes up in her sweet, clear voice:

"Don't forget you're taking me grocery shopping"

NONONONONO!

ME: Why don't you take the debit card, dear.

Princess: MOM, I need you to show me what to buy.

Damn.

Husband and Little One take off for another furniture store and Princess and I push the cart up and down the aisles as we examine how to pick out onion (no soft spots), order roast beef (only a 1/4 because it tastes funky in two days), and buy pasta (get the generic brand on sale 5 packages for 2.00 even tho I won't buy it because it tastes gummy but I have a job and she doesn't not that I tell her all this). After I drag her past the toiletries aisle where she is fixated on what hair gel to buy and we still have all of dairy and paper goods to discuss, it goes more quickly. We don't even approach meat, because basically she/we can't afford to buy any, and we are done.

We all gone home exhausted, unload the groceries, make promises of future bed shopping expeditions, appease the Little One with a cousin sleepover, help The Princes pack up to leave, and settle into the living room. I then get on the phone with my sister, annoying the DH who is trying to watch yet another ball game and he strongly suggests that I go to Borders with my sister to have some fun, i.e., shut up and leave. We fly there, never being ones to allow a chance to escape kids and husbands grow moss under our feet, and sit at Borders and knit. Yes, knit. I am now knitting. Who knew? I order a pumpkin spice coffee and a piece of cheesecake, whereupon I realize that the last thing I had to eat was a cinnamon bun, thereby bringing my total carb intake for the day to something like a hundred thousand. Gross.

Speaking of eating, it's been very cool this weekend, which always turns a middle aged woman's thoughts to food (what doesn't?) It's time to whip out the fall meals, like beef stew, apple pie, mashed potatoes, and the other high caloric intake that we justify because the temperature is below seventy degrees. Not a good time for the oven to go out, which it did about three weeks ago. It's taken the husband and I three weeks to remember to look for a phone number for a repair person, and I suspect it will take another three weeks to remember to call and set up a date.

Or as my husband says, why not just buy a new oven, and as I say, well, then, why not just guy the whole kitchen, which it desperately needs. (We are those kind of people, beware). The kitchen has ugly laminate cabinets, plastic countertops, a crazy sink stuck in a corner, unpainted walls, and ugly faux brick linoleum. The cabinet doors regularly fall off the hinges, so Ive taken to not putting them back up and telling guests we are renovating. We had the walls primed four years ago when we moved in and then didn't do another thing to it since it's too pitiful a room to put any effort into cosmetic changes.

However, after viewing our bank account and the drain of tuition for the next four years, we've decided we can't stand it anymore but can't do anything drastic. IKEA has interesting "faux wood" cabinets that look like the wood-painted, rustic cabinets I dream of. But they are plastic. Hard to tell if they'll hold up. And speaking of holding up, who is going to hold up the cabinets in our DIY adventure? Not I! Not the husband with the fused lumbar spine and two cervical discs disintegrating as I type. So we are back to square one.

What was that? Oh, right, call the repairman to fix the ugly stove and buy some paint on sale at the Depot and make some stupid curtains to bring a little cheer and something else to look at besides the ugly brick red floor.

That's my whine for today. And now I really HAVE to work on my submission for the next issue of the magazine. Haven't done it, due in nine days, haven't a clue what I'm going to write/draw/ etc. Hey, maybe I'll go to the Depot after all with the husband, then check out the loft beds with the Little One at another store, then brown the sausages and pork I bought to make tomato gravy, and finish the scarf I'm knitting.....

The news channels are showing the enormous crowds of protestors in NYC. A friend of mine writes about her experience of being in the giant march on Sunday as being, part street fair, part theater, part claustrophobia, and part moving political protest. There's little organization and focus, and few groups have taken hold in the public's mind as representing the American protest in a cast of characters as happened during the '68 convention. Thankfully, neither has it become a bloody riot and other than a few incidents of abuse and the horrors of the building they are using as a temporary jail, even the police are behaving. Danny Gregory has some photos of the events of the past week.

Perhaps we are all too civilized, no afraid is a better word to mount the protest that needs to be mounted to impact this election and the Republican party. Is it possible that we are holding back because we remember the real chaos, horror, fear, and desolation of September 11th. How much emotion can one city absorb and process? The impact of the protestors is controlled and defined by the police, the city government, and the media. I am a mere twenty minutes away and I haven't heard a single person discuss it, besides my own family as we watch the news. You can't look out the window and see the protestors unless you are within blocks, as compared to September 11th when you could see the towers burning from twenty five miles away and hear the jet fighters roaring overhead all day and night.

What am I trying to say here? I am underwhelmed by our response to the convention, but more particularly the possible re-election of Bush. And yet, when I could easily have taken the train into NYC, I didn't consider it. It was incredibly hot that day, it was too dangerous, too crowded, too close to the possibility of terrorism. I didn't want to get hurt, arrested, killed, maimed.

I didn't want to leave the comfort of my home and experience the fear of September 11th again. I can't shake the memory of feeling like I was walking through the ashes of every nightmare I'd ever had, feeling it clogging my throat and settling in a heavy mantle around my heart, mimicking the ashes that coated the survivors who fled up the West side, looking like actors in a bad zombie movie.

My friend Catherine is brave and strong and willing to walk her politics down the streets of New York. I am insulated inside my self-apointed roles of mother, daughter, wife, hiding out in suburbia with like-minded people who watch the news and shake their heads in amazement.

When did I become so afraid? When did I become so old?

Lawd Have Mercy

Breaking my own rule about only posting once a day, I'm sharing another journal page because tonight I'm chillin' with the new Ray Charles CD and I'm listening to him and B.B. King jamming. (If my kids are reading this, stop making that gagging noise.) I've finished a new painting and I'm in a groove with a new style. It couldn't be farther from the artists that I've been studying, but it certainly is inspired by them! Even the news that Mystery Man's bike got stolen from in front of his dorm, his bike chain neatly severed, can't bring me down tonight.

In the words of B. B. King: Lawd have mercy, Lawd please have mercy on me! Lawd please have mercy if you please....and God Bless Ray Charles.