Wordless Wednesday: Dancing

One day last week, the above photos were in the Times accompanying that day's dance reviews - three different reviews, three different companies (click on the photos to get to the reviews). I was struck by the similarities in the poses. You think the photo editor was having fun?

(I thought of posting pumpkin pictures because it is, after all, Halloween - but they came out terribly, and surely everyone else is doing it.)

Knitting for Bears

I had the idea that it would be sweet to knit a sweater for one of Miss M.'s many teddy bears. I found a pattern at Wee Wonderfuls, and printed out a picture to show to her. Her response? "They're not chilly because they have coats."

Okay kid, no sweaters for your bears.

Spam, Close to Home

The following spam email message turned up in my office account last week:

Dear Benefactor Of 2007 Masory Grant,

The Freemason society of Bournemout under the jurisdiction of the all Seeing Eye, Master Nicholas Brenner has after series of secret deliberations selected you to be a beneficiary of our 2007 foundation laying grants and also an optional opening at the round table of the Freemason society.

These grants are issued every year around the world in accordance with the objective of the Freemasons as stated by Thomas Paine in 1808 which is to ensure the continuous freedom of man and to enhance mans living conditions.

We will also advice that these funds which amount to USD2.5million be used to better the lot of man through your own initiative and also we will go further to info that the open slot to become a Freemason is optional, you can decline the offer.

I recognized it for what it was, but I shared it with our Director of Development - I thought she'd be amused. Her eyes opened wide and she confessed to a fleeting feeling that it was valid, because we are - for real - due to be notified as to the renewal of our annual support grant from the local Order of Masons. It's just a coincidence, but an odd one none-the-less.

What a Wonderful World

All's right with the world - the little girl is asleep in her own bed, before 9:00. And she fell asleep in my arms while I was mangling the lyrics to What a Wonderful World. Here's the master:

And the lyrics, if you need them:

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world...

Bread and Jam - and Frances, and Ellyn, and Jessica

Me: You're full of beans this morning.

Miss M.: No, I'm full of lobster.

I can only think that this is because we've been reading (and re-reading and reading again) Bread and Jam for Frances before bed. Because, after Frances remembers that there are all sorts of wonderful things to eat beyond bread and jam, she trots off to school with a lobster salad sandwich. Maybe lobster was cheaper in 1964?

Frances is often held up as a poster child picky eater, but it's hard to argue that she really is - her bread and jam kick doesn't even last two days. The book starts with breakfast, at which meal she chooses not to eat her egg - there is no indication that she's refused everything but bread and jam prior. At dinner that same night, she chooses not to eat her veal cutlet in favor of bread and jam - and confesses to having traded her lunch for a friend's bread and jam. At breakfast on the second day, she isn't offered an egg - because, her mother says, "you do not like eggs." At lunch on that second day, her friend has an elaborate lunch with sandwich and pickle and hard-boiled egg and fruit and dessert, while Frances has bread and jam. At night on the second day, when presented with bread and jam, she realizes that "What I am / is tired of jam" and so has spaghetti and meatballs for dinner with the rest of the family.

And on to the finale - her own complicated and elegant lunch at school, complete with doily, a tiny vase of violets, celery and olives, a tiny basket of cherries, and the afore-mentioned lobster salad sandwich.

Meals with our small child are the typical mix of cajoling and rejoicing. She'll scarf down risotto like nobody's business, but steak? Nah. Hot dogs and cheese sandwiches, yes. Peanut butter, no. Sometimes we'll resort to white lies: "This is Pat's chicken - she told me how to make it." [Pat's the cook at school.] The chicken in question was a butterflied charcoal grilled chicken, with all the black stuff cut off, and ketchup on the side - and Pat had nothing to do with it. And the kid ate that chicken.

Mostly, I've tried to take to heart the Ellyn Satter dictum: "The parent is responsible for what, when, where - and the child is responsible for how much and whether." She's not going to starve. Sure, I wish she'd eat some more vegetables, but I'm not going to start pretending that pureed cauliflower is ricotta and neither am I going to lace chocolate chip cookies with chickpeas. And hey, even fancy organic hot dogs are cheap! If she starts demanding lobster salad sandwiches, we're going to be in the poorhouse.


[This is loosely in response to the Parent Bloggers blast in connection with the release of Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld.]

13 Ways of Looking at a(n) _____*

The constraint of Thursday Thirteen appeals to me - and I find myself constructing odd lists in spare moments.

1. It is crunchy.
2. It is indented.
3. It is juicy.
4. It is nutritious.
5. It is past.
6. It is portable.
7. It is potential.
8. It is prophylactic.
9. It is round.
10. It is sweet.
11. It is tempting.
12. It is versatile.
13. It is waiting.

So. What is it? Tiny prize to the first person to guess right.




(*with many, many apologies to Wallace Stevens)

You think I do what?

Last week, Suburban Turmoil had a great post about how marketers do and should approach the mommy bloggers. I read it with interest, though not with much recognition - I don't get a lot of unsolicited marketing solicitations via email, though they happen from time to time. When they come in, they’re usually understandable and usually pointed towards the parenting aspect of my blog – review a kids book, check out a parent-oriented website service. I actually accepted a copy of a book, which I’ve yet to do anything about, and it sits there making me feel guilty, which is really asinine because I don’t owe them a damned thing.

This morning, though, I got one that made me laugh out loud: “I contacted you because you have a pharmacy / medicine related blog”. I guess it’s all that talk about Follistim and Repronex and progesterone-in-oil and baby aspirin and microdose Lupron – not to mention cancer and emergency rooms and cancer and gall bladders.

Cocktail Playdates, revisited

When we picked Miss M. up at daycare yesterday, it was a beautiful fall day and all the kids were outside. We hung out for a bit chatting with people, she demonstrated her tricycle riding prowess, we discussed playdates, and Miss M. asked a teacher if she’d like to come to our house for a “wine-over”.

Some neologism, huh? Grown-ups drink wine and she's pining for a sleep-over, so the next best thing is a wine-over.

As it happens, it's the one teacher I would invite over for some wine. Though I did discover this morning that another teacher and the daycare director went to the Springsteen concert at the Garden last week. I'd have gone to that in a minute.

Aging and Illness

Last week's New Yorker* had a profile of Jacques Barzun, "the eminent historian and cultural critic" which included this bit about getting old:

A few weeks shy of his hundredth birthday, Barzun is still pressed to read manuscripts, give talks and attend affairs in his honor. He tries to accommodate everyone, but there is simply less of him to go around. He's five inches shorter than he used to be, a decrease due to aging and spinal stenosis, which causes pain and numbness in the legs. He relies on a cane or a walker to get around, and, as one might expect, he is alert to the irony of aging: when time is short, old age takes up a lot of time. There are doctors' visits, tests to be suffered, results to wait for, ailments and medications to be studied - all distractions from the work. "Old age is like learning a new profession," he noted drily. "And not one of your own choosing."

In fact, many illnesses could be looked at as similarly like entering a new profession - be it infertility, cancer, multiple sclerosis, or what have you. You're plunged into learning all there is to know and doing all there is to do, leaving less to time to just live life. Life is complicated.







*the issue dated 10/22/07

Respect and Old Age

My mother’s lived in her house since 1972, and the people across the street were there before her. They were a sweet couple of teetotallers, he a Methodist minister, she the cookie-baking minister’s wife. He died five years ago. She’d been doing well, but fell a couple of months ago and landed in a nursing home. Bang zoom: her kids put the house on the market, moved their mom to a facility in the mid-West, held a tag sale, and filled up a dumpster with the detritus of two lives.

It’s so sad.

The tag sale was yesterday. It was run by a hostile incompetent hired gun – the place was a mess and the stuff was priced completely erratically and mostly unmarked (so you had to ask, whereupon she made up a price on the spot). You’d think that someone running a tag sale, working on commission, would want to maximize the income by keeping things presentable, by clearly pricing everything, by acting knowledgeable and helpful. In this case, you would be wrong.

There were still spices in the kitchen cabinets and Q-tips in the bathroom. For all I know, they were for sale. There were clothes in the closets and piles of linens on the floor. There was no order to anything.

My mother and I wandered around – I found a handmade double wedding ring quilt in a heap upstairs, and asked how much. $5, said the hostile incompetent. So I bought a quilt for $5 – I don’t need it, but I couldn’t walk away from it. There was a handsome mirror in the dining room – my mother said she’d been asking $400 at the pre-sale earlier in the week. By yesterday, the price was down to $75. I went back at the end of the day and offered $20. She countered with $30. I left. About 10 minutes later, my husband showed up – I sent him across the street, and he came back with the mirror for $25. And my mother went over and came home with a little upholstered rocker for free – earlier, the hostile incompetent had been asking $60. So erratic.

Once the tag sale was over, they starting heaving things into a dumpster. Plaques given to the minister. Antique clock parts (his hobby was clock repair). Dishes. Books. Christmas ornaments. Napkins. Space heaters.

It’s so disrespectful.

It’s so wasteful.

My brother and sister and their spouses and a family friend and a neighbor headed across the street after dark and, wine-fueled, dove into the dumpster with flashlights.

It seemed right to rescue some bits of their life. A pressed glass citrus reamer. A crochet hook. A pinecone-shaped iron cuckoo clock weight. A Horatio Alger book.

It could have been done so much better. They could have found a way to let her stay in the house. They could have found her a place to live in the area - where she has friends and neighbors and acquaintances and church folk - instead of shipping her off to the middle of the country where she'll know no one but her dead husband's elderly brother. They could have hired a more sensitive person to run the tag sale. They could have been more respectful of her stuff, her life, her things, his life, his hobbies, their life. They could have packed off much of the stuff to thrift shops, to shelters, to people to whom the stuff would have made a difference. A space heater tossed in a dumpster does no one any good. A box fan...the same.

It sounds like I'm blaming her children - and in part I am. But it's also our society. We think nothing of discarding things and people, we disrespect the past. In that is our curse for the future. It's environmental. It's societal. It's human. We should do better.

Little Kid Couture

The things that can happen when you let your child dress herself:

• Plaids and stripes
• Shirt with little flowers, pants with big flowers, socks with other flowers - "Look Mama, I'm all flowers - I match!"
  
• Skirts with pants underneath

• Pants with tights underneath

and, the discovery, at the end of the day, that she's gone to school without underpants.

CSA Week 20 - Of Cabbages and Kings

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings."

The "cabbages and kings" phrase popped into my head when I saw the size of the cabbages at the CSA pick-up - huge, enormous, bigger than my head. I knew the stanza from which it came, but what surprised me was realizing that whole poem is eighteen stanzas long, and the cabbages and kings one is number eleven. Why then is that one middle stanza so burned into my brain? Maybe just because it's pretty damned wonderful.

• Cabbage (1 enormous head)
• Red Russian Kale
• Broccoli Rabe
• Potatoes (6)
• Onions (2)
• Plum Tomatoes (quart)
• Salad Mix
• Parsley

Maybe it's the Irish peasant stock in me, but I'm looking forward to a batch of colcannon with the cabbage and potatoes. Colcannon is basically mashed potates with cooked cabbage (and/or kale) stirred in, but somewhere I have (or maybe my mother has) a recipe for colcannon with an unseemly amount of butter, thereby making a transcendent rendition of the peasant dish.

13 Bears for Thursday

I don't know what possessed me to count the bears, but there are thirteen of them. Thirteen! Is that good luck or bad?


Top Row, Left to Right

1. Night Bear (in night cap)
2. Pinky Teddy (given to me for her, at my baby shower, by my sister, Pinky)
3. Purple Bear
4. Kiki
5. Ginger Bear (a gift from an erstwhile neighbor of my mother's, named Ginger)

Bottom Row

6. Brown Bear
7. Ganny Bear (lifted from Granny's house)
8. Roofus (in the red shirt, a giveaway from Habitat for Humanity, hence the idiosyncratic spelling)
9. Sparkle Bear (with wings and star, his fur is a little sparkly)
10. Pink Bear
11. Tiny Little Teddy
12. Butterfly Bear
13. Brown and White Bear

Pink Bear and Brown Bear used to go to school every day for nap time - they've been mended so many times that they look like Frankenstein.

Tiny Little Teddy used to be a teething object - frequently completely saturated in spittle. He's never been the same since.

Sparkle Bear is a Beanie Baby. He used to have a companion, a white bear with (I think) Mississippi embroidered on it (or maybe Louisiana). I sent the companion to Iraq. The problem is, she still asks about that missing bear. Oops.

Butterfly Bear was a baby present from some neighbors down the hall in our NYC apartment. We didn't know them much beyond hello in the elevator, but I think of them often because of the bear.

Not only do I know the provenance of each of these bears, I know all their names. How is it that my head has room for all that clutter?

Wordless Wednesday

Okay, they need a couple of words: it's a mailbox, attached to a tree, about nine feet off the ground, in Union Square park. Who is getting mail there? And how does the mailman get the mail in the box?

Guest Curator

My friend David, a former colleague and accidental brother, blogless at present, sent me the following email. You might want to watch these clips at home, not the office cubicle. And I'd start with the second one, though I completely understand why he led with the first. And don't blame me if you get an earworm out of it.

Subject: Pepto Bismol audition (A Chorus Line for our times)

• A mockumentary?
• The original British commercial (great ensemble work).
• Hip hop version (it's got a beat and I can't help but dance to it).
• I'm totally jealous of this.
• Attack of the dyspeptic monsters: (as seen on your TV, an instant classic).

The Environment

I've been mulling over today's post for a while now - what to do, what to write, to somehow address the issue of the environment as part of Blog Action Day. And then, with great good luck, the Nobel Foundation awarded this year's Peace Prize to Al Gore and the IPCC - thereby spot-lighting the problems facing the world in a way that even multitudes of bloggers can't hope to touch.

The New York Times had a good editorial the other day - read it if you haven't already. It basically slams the US government, and others, for not stepping up to the plate and addressing the multitude of environmental problems facing our world. Paul Krugman follows that up with an op-ed piece today, about why the right hates Gore - because he "keeps being right".

It's hard to know what to do as an individual, but I find that every day, I get a little more vitriolic, and a little more conscious as to my actions. I bought reusable shopping bags and stashed the big ones in the car, and a small string bag in my so-called briefcase. We've replaced some light bulbs with compact fluorescents. I can't remember the last time that I ran a load of laundry in warm water (much less hot). We're about to replace the windows and door in the basement with energy efficient ones that fit properly and aren't patched with duct tape (and we should get a tax credit for some of that cost). We've been buying local produce and organic dairy products. We have a programmable thermostat that is set to drop the heat in the house to 55°F at night - although we haven't yet turned the heat on, though it's been about 40°F out in the morning the past few days. They are tiny little gestures, but important gestures none the less. We could do much better, as individuals, as a family, as a community, as a country. And I hope that we will.

Master satirist Tom Lehrer was talking about the environment way back when. Pollution was written in the early 60s, and is a scathing indictment of the then state of the environment. If you've never had the pleasure, the video is here and you can buy the record here.

Rock, Revisited

The rock has been returned to its brethren, though it appears to be the black sheep of the family. It is now residing in a stone wall outside my house, and it will be there for all eternity, or until the wall falls down again, at which time someone will wonder why the erratic was engraved with the name of a law firm.

Friday Fluff

This morning, in the four blocks between the subway and my office, I saw the following:

• A small boy in a stroller, wearing a Yankees cap inside out, so that the logo was visible but backwards. I couldn't decide if the cap was inside out as a way of making it fit better on a little head, or as a "damn you, Yankees" gesture.
  
  
• An old woman, smoking a cigar that smelled like a pipe. It reminded my of my grandfathers, both of whom smoked pipes from time to time. Why is it that the aroma of pipe tobacco is so pleasing and evocative?
  
  
• A young man, probably in his early twenties, striding up the sidewalk piloting a radio-controlled car ahead of him. It was almost like his dog. I did think that he was a little too old to be playing with toy cars.

And then, I found this when I got to my desk. Enjoy!

CSA Week 19

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - her account of a year of producing most of their own food, and obtaining the rest locally. It's fascinating and inspiring, even if I'm not likely to start raising chickens in my own back yard, or growing much in the way of vegetables. I know where to get live chickens nearby, I have the CSA for a goodly amount of our annual vegetables, and I'm lucky enough to work near a terrific greenmarket wherein I can plug the gaps.

Kingsolver's book has an associated website, which includes all of the recipes that are in the book. I haven't tried any of them yet, but some of them look great.

• Spinach
• Cauliflower
• Broccoli Rabe
• Asian Greens braising mix
• Salad Mix
• Ping Pong Tomatoes (pint)
• Plum Tomatoes (quart)
• Delicata Squash (3)
• Onions (2)
• Parsley
• Sage

Because we're getting a little behind the CSA vegetables, I've been blanching, chopping and freezing the greens. And last night, I made another batch of oven-roasted tomatoes. I left them in a slow oven while I went out to a meeting; when I came back, the house smelled delicious.

And maybe, just maybe, the kid has taken to a new vegetable. While we were at the pick-up yesterday, she was surreptitiously stealing bits of cauliflower. Go figure.

Breast Fest

I breastfed my child for two years and 364 days, and we haven't got a single picture of her nursing. It's not that we kept it a secret, it's more that we're inclined to forget to photograph much of anything.

However, the League of Maternal Justice put together a montage of many many mama-baby pairs, to remind the world that breastfeeding is normal and right, not dirty, and that nursing mothers should be proud, not shamed into hiding in closets. Because Bill Maher is an ass, and Facebook sucks, and Applebees ought to be hauled into court.