The Wonder-filled Secrets of Odette and Mr. Lemoncello

School's out and the girl is free, free at last! Instead of some formal iteration of "camp", this summer she's in Daddy Day Camp. Swim team practice in the morning, a mess of swim meets throughout July, a viola lesson once a week (and viola practice every day), a horseback riding lesson once a week, and a whole lot of bicycle riding up and down the next street. Beyond that, she's got a math workbook to work through (to keep her brain in shape) and a veritable pile of books to read. And I ask you, is there anything better than a kid with her nose buried in a book?

It's a mixed bag, her book pile. There are a handful of crappy books (stuff she picked out at the library book sale), and some classics (because I can't help myself), and some good new books - like Wonder, and Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library, and Odette's Secrets. And it's funny for me, getting new books for her. Since she doesn't need me to read to her any more (though we still do, because it's nice), I am in what I find to be the awkward position of feeding her book habit without having read them all first.

Both Odette and Mr. Lemoncello came to me by way of a publicist, and the ethical blogger/reviewer in me decided that the proper thing to do would be to read both before turning them over to the girl. I have to say, reading them wasn't a chore, far from it.

Chris Bravenstein's Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library strikes me as the kind of book that a child will read and remember and pass on to future children. It's a quirky tale about the opening of a new library sponsored by a rich eccentric. For the inaugural festivities, 12 kids are chosen to be locked into the library for an overnight extravaganza - which turns out to be a competition wherein the kids have to solve lots of puzzles to earn things like dessert. And to win? "Simple: Find your way out of the library using what's in the library." The book is calls to mind Willy Wonka and Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and even The Phantom Tollbooth in its inventive questing wordplay and journey through the Dewey Decimal system. It's fun, it's creative, and it celebrates smarts, collaboration and invention. Intrigued? Read the beginning on the author's website.

Maryann Macdonald's Odette's Secrets is rather the polar opposite of Lemoncello, elegiac and moving. Odette's a Jewish child living in Paris in World War II. Written in the first person, in a sort of free-verse narrative poetry, Odette tells of daily life in Paris and then in the countryside, keeping secrets all the while. Her child's voice comes through loud and clear, reminding me even of the imperious echt-child Eloise in declarations like "If I had a pet, / I would never give it up!" Her life is hard and complicated, and to survive in the Vendée, she and her cohort have to pretend to be Christians - hiding in plain sight. "I know the reason I feel safe in the country. / It's because here, / I am not a Jew. // In Paris, I am a Jew." Oof. The book's a gentle introduction to the horrors of war, Nazis, persecution, and why sometimes lying is the necessary thing to do. It's worth mentioning that it's a fictionalized version of a true story - Odette was a real person and her family photos appear through out the book.

The girl hasn't yet read Mr. Lemoncello (she wants to finish Wonder first), but I read Odette aloud to her. It's a lovely read-aloud, and she pointed out that it's a bit like The One and Only Ivan - a lyrical first person narrative with beautiful phrasing.

So, if you need some summer reading for your nine year old (give or take a couple of years), I liked these. I can't say anything about Wonder though; I haven't read it!

Unusually Handsome

For our anniversary, which is today, our 18th if you're wondering, we're not exchanging porcelain or garnets. Instead, we're knee-deep in a new roof, new gutters, new stucco, a new deck, new windows, insulation (because our 1920 house had NONE), and big bills. And somehow, even though we are ostensibly doing exterior renovations, the inside of the house is torn apart in a big way.

The tar paper shack, minus one bedroom window.

And lo, a window was installed, completed with plastic drapes.

I don't know much about our house, except that was built in 1920, and that it was a kit house from Gordon-Van Tine. We'd known that the house next to ours was a pre-cut Sears kit house, but until we (that is, our contractor, not me, not my husband) took out one of our original windows, we didn't know ours was a kit too.

All the way from Iowa!

As you can imagine, I headed straight for the internet. I bought a Dover reprint of some of the Gordon-Van Tine plans, but it didn't include anything like our our house. I found our built-in linen closet on Flickr. But it was the Internet Archive where I got closest, finding a copy of the 1926 Gordon-Van Tine catalog on that delightful electronic attic.

Bingo! The Gordon-Van Tine No. 620 looks a lot like my house, but the plans are a little different.

"The battered gable ends add a peculiar sense of "homeyness" to this home, which makes it doubly alluring."

First off, our house is flipped, with the living room to the left of the front door (as you enter). We have a fireplace (and chimney) off the living room, the stairs don't double back into the kitchen, the coat closet on our stairs is where the stairs on the plan split into the kitchen, and we can go all the way around the ground floor. And, what the 620's plans show as a back entry is where our breakfast nook is - the house is on a hill and the first floor in the back of the house is up a story off the ground. Upstairs, we have more closets than the plans show (two in the master bedroom and another off the bathroom). But we do have that linen closet, and we do have the three dormers, and we do have all of those clipped gables, and really, the Unusually Handsome Colonial Cottage is pretty surely the general sketch of the "charming livable home of a design which is in unusually good taste" in which we live.

I love the internet. Oh, and my husband. Happy Anniversary, you!

My Work On The Planet Is Done

These dolls are sexist and demeaning to women.

That's why I want a real chisel, I want to chisel down her boobies.

(I pointed out that some women have large breasts, but that Barbie's overall proportions were not ever found in real people.)

Okay, instead of chiseling down her boobs, I'll put some sugru on her waist and paint it to match.

Wordless Wednesday: Flowers

a  paeonia festiva maxima from my mother's house, one
that she got from ruth bogen across the street.

lady's mantel, a/k/a alchemilla mollis, in bloom. the leaves
are nice too, but the camera wanted to look at the flowers.

one of the happy peonies that came with my house.

astilbe from mary kane's garden, down the street from ruth bogen's.

this peony? i have no idea where it came from. i
might have bought it at a garden club sale.

Not Quite Manhattan

For $24 at the library book sale, I got 33 books. Not quite an island, but:

10 books for me

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Barbara Tuchman)
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
Little Bee (Chris Cleave)\
Diamond Ruby (Joseph Wallace)
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Stieg Larsson)
Middle C (William H. Gass)
State of Wonder (Ann Patchett)
The Tiger's Wife (Téa Obreht)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer)

12 for the girl (some that she picked out, others that I added to the stack),

The astute reader will notice a fan bio of Leonardo DiCaprio
as well as Catch Me If You Can.  You guessed it, the
9 year old no longer swoons over Johnny Depp.

3 for my husband

3 to squirrel away as gifts

4 for a birthday party the girl was on her way to (we stopped at home to wrap)

1 bought solely for its title

Why yes, this book is called "Orbiting the Giant Hairball".
I had to buy it for the title alone. 

I confessed to the mother of the birthday girl that the gift was four used books and that I was hovering between proud (thrifty kid!) and mortified (cheap gift!) - though I knew she'd be more on the side of thrifty proud. What do you think? Are used books an acceptable gift? And if you say no, how do you feel about re-gifting?

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Where've you been?

On an adventure.

Huh? We live in a little house and we're indoor cats.

Well, I went out.

Out??

Yeah. You know how they've been doing all that noisy dusty work on the house? Well. They took some windows out, and put new ones in, but the guys who did it left the windows open when they were done. They probably thought the people would like some fresh air.

And you went out?

Yeah, out on the roof. It's really cool out there, all these hills and valleys, and it smells really good, much better than just sitting inside with your nose to the screen. But at some point, the humans put the screens in and then it got dark and I wanted to come in but I couldn't.

Oh my god. Were you scared?

Nah, I just meowed loudly outside the little one's window. She finally woke up, saw me out there, burst into tears, and went and got the big woman. The big woman opened up the screen so I could come in. I thumped her in the eye with my tail, but I'm not really mad at them, they didn't know I was outside.

Well, you sure smell interesting. Hey, wanna go run around the house?

Hamburgers, 54 Years Ago

I was thumbing through my beloved copy of the venerable James Beard Cook Book and stopped to read this juicy paragraph on burgers.

The traditional hamburger is a 4-ounce cake broiled or pan-broiled to the required state of doneness and served on a heated, toasted, buttered bun. There is nothing as unappetizing as a cold hamburger bun with a hot hamburger.

Got that? Toast your damned buns.

Later on, he suggests serving with chili sauce, "if you wish, but heat your chili sauce before serving, because cold sauce is not inviting with hot food".

I love the imperiousness of those commands, not to mention the idea that in 1959 a cookbook author had to explain a hamburger sandwich. Really? Were they that novel, in 1959?

Incidentally, his iteration of a cheeseburger has the cheese sandwiched - pre-cooking - between two "very thin, 2-ounce cakes".

So, dear readers, do you toast your buns?

My 15 Minutes of Fame?

In the department of "a lady only has her name in the paper three times in her life: birth, marriage and death", I have spectacularly failed, in as much as I am on the front page of today's New York Times discussing the price of my two back-to-back colonoscopies. In my copy of the paper, my name is below the fold, but other people have seen it on or above the fold.

My participation notwithstanding, it's a good article - pointing out the high costs of medical procedures in the US, using colonoscopy as an example.

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system. They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Health insurance reform is one thing, but unless and until we the people understand how much things cost underneath the protective veneer of our insurance, health care costs are going to continue to skyrocket.

To Act Or Not To Act

Scene
New York City sidewalk

Dramatis personæ
Two nannies
Two children, in strollers

The two nannies are pushing the two strollers, side by side, chatting. The two children are conversing (in a manner of speaking, they are at least looking at one another). One child is wearing Crocs; however, she has one pink shoe off and in her mouth. The nannies are oblivious (see above, chatting).

I note the child with shoe in mouth and think:

Should I say something? The nanny will just be annoyed that her conversation was interrupted. But, wouldn't the parent like to know that a stranger extracted a shoe from the child's mouth? On the other hand, dirt's good, it builds the immune system. But, ohmygod: dog shit, rat poison, piss, vomit, garbage!

To act or not to act, that is the conundrum.

What, dear readers, would you have done?

Wordless Wednesday: The Stories

I've worked in this building for many years, and I make my way to the fifth floor not infrequently. One day, waiting for the elevator to take me back to eight, this piece of upside-down tile jumped off the wall at me. Well, not literally - it's still cemented in place - but how had I never noticed its egregious misplacement? It's probably been like that for the whole century plus that the building's been standing. And it took me years to notice it.

Wherever you look, there are stories. If you listen, there are stories. It's why I do keep blogging, even though I have too much to do and not enough time to putter, skitter, whittle. It's because of the stories. They're everywhere and they need to be told.

The Only Crowns I Have Were Put In By My Dentist

You know that I'm the kind of cranky feminist who gets all in a twist about things like the tarting up of Merida and why do Monster High dolls exist and no, little girls shouldn't dress like sluts, and nor should they be wearing lip gloss.

On the other hand, the totally stylin', fancy-sneakered, well-coifed, thirty-something guy who sashayed down Broadway this morning with this tote bag slung over his shoulder absolutely made my day.

But, I want to unpack this. I'd be appalled if someone handed my nine year old an "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" bag or sweatshirt. No, you're not a secret princess. You're a sturdy, feisty, smart kid and it's not about your appearance, or your tiara, or your royal lineage, it's about what you can (and will) do.

So, why is it okay for a grown-up gay man* to walk around like a princess? Because he's not a kid? Because he's earned it? Because he's got a deep vein of irony? Huh?

And what does "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" mean, anyway? Don't give me crap about how it supports self-esteem, like the Toronto school board preaches, because hello? We're not royalty. We don't wear crowns. What do we do? We model good behavior: we read books, and cook dinner, and go to work, and practice things that are hard. We exercise and we challenge assumptions and we think about issues. We read the newspaper at the breakfast table and talk about things going on in the world. We discuss things like "is there a god?" and soda with artificial sweeteners and "where did the world come from?" and the girls who like fashion.

If my kid ever wants to fly that "Always Wear Your Invisible Crown" flag, we're going to talk about that non-existent tiara and about that lack of royal blood and about avoiding crowns later by brushing your teeth now.

---

* I have no way of knowing if he was actually gay. But you don't spend 25 years working in the arts in NYC and not develop very good gaydar. Trust me.

Unexpected Inutility

While I'm all for energy efficient light bulbs, I've never been fond of those spiral compact fluorescents. The shape is often wrong for a fixture, and the color temperature is too cold and blue, and you really don't want to have to look at them. But the LED bulbs that are starting to be available are much better: the shape and size is pretty close to an old-style incandescent bulb, the color is warmer, they go on instantly, and they're dimmable. [They are, however, exceedingly spendy up front.]

I flipped on my office desk task light this morning, and poof! The incandescent bulb expired. When he got in, the building manager scrounged me up an 8 watt LED bulb made by Philips. Lovely!

But...it didn't work. You see, the light fixture is a wall mounted, adjustable, spring arm fancy-pants thing by Tolomeo.

And as soon as I put the bulb in, it gently sank down and rested its little head on my telephone.

The problem is that the old incandescent bulb (A) weighs about an ounce, and the new bulb (B) weighs 4.4 ounces - way too heavy for that particular fixture. Happily we had some old style bulbs, but what are we going to do when we can't get them anymore? In all the hullabaloo about the phase out of incandescent bulbs, it never occurred to me that we might need to get new light fixtures.

On Pigs and Birds

I stayed out late the other night, because when you get invited to a prosciutto tasting, you go. At least I do. I took my walker with me, because he’s always the perfect date, and we drank prosciutto-flavored cocktails (too sweet), and tasted four different aged prosciuttos* (from 18 months to 46 months), and ate lovely nibbles (foie gras! porchetta!), and finished with prosciutto-flavored panna cotta (delicious). All in all, it was splendid – a beautiful night, a lovely restaurant, and a whole mess of delectable pig. My only disappointment was that the very heavy goody bag** did not include a whole ham, because really? That would have totally made my day.

Anyway, staying out late meant that I didn’t take my usual train home, so instead of just the usual dour commuters rushing home to dinner, it was salted with a hodge-podge of eccentrics. I took a seat next to an older woman with a prodigiously wrinkled face, loud clothes and severe glasses. I decided I liked her when she chided the young woman across from us to “move your bags so someone can sit down”. But  then I had this peculiar set of odd exchanges with her, the kind that left me scratching my head, who are you anyway? It started with the New York Times Magazine [I was reading the very interesting Peggy Orenstein piece on breast cancer]. “What magazine is that?” I told her, and showed her the front cover. “Would you like it when I’m done?” “No”, she said, “I had it over the weekend.” But you didn’t recognize it? Later I pulled a lip balm out of my bag, a generic one, filched from my dentist who uses them like calling cards, branded with his name and phone number. “Do you like white lipstick?” she asked me. “Well, no, but it’s not lipstick”, I said, wondering if she’d never seen chapstick before. “It doesn’t have any color.” Then I opened up my iPad, to read the New Yorker. “Is that like a computer?” she asked. I paused to pick my words with care, bemused by her use of “like”. “Yes, it does many of the things a full computer could do.” “Oh,” said she, “I don’t have a computer”.

She got off the train, into the night, leaving me perplexed – there was something completely other worldly about her and her non-sequiturs. Dry, birdlike, curious, engaged but distant. Memorable.

---

* I should probably point out that it was actually Prosciutto di Parma, the authentic stuff from Italy, and that I didn't get paid to write about it. Also, that 46 month old prosciutto was swoon-worthy. And who knew it ever got to be that old?

** Actually there wasn't any pork in the bag.

Wordless Wednesday: Cage in Sun

An Explanation Of My Absence

Busy busy busy.

Reading a 962 page library book.

Busy busy busy.

Running for the library board.

Busy busy busy.

Discovering rot underneath the failed stucco while the house is being worked on.

Busy busy busy.

(Unbloggable.)

Busy busy busy.

Having a much-needed and totally fun party to show off the WiiU and drink wine with friends on a Saturday night. (Thanks, Nintendo!)

Busy busy busy.

Guns, Furious

Gabby Giffords is furious, and so am I.

Liz Gumbinner, a/k/a Mom-101, is furious too, and has a list of things you can do.

Me, I used the list of twitter handles that the Huffington Post helpfully published, and sent a tweet to every single senator on that list - even though none of them represent me. Pissing in the wind, I'm sure, but at least I felt like I'd done something.



Remember Network? Even if you never saw the movie, you've probably heard the quote:

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

So, whatcha gonna do?

Good Wives

If you want to get my dander up, all you have to do is buy a package of puff paste and stick it in my freezer.

I mean, not that I have anything against puff paste - other than I think it's often used as a misguided replacement for pie crust and is better suited to palmiers and vol-au-vents - but um, Good Wives? What the hell is a good wife?

Good: a general term of approval or commendation, meaning "as it should be" or "better than average"

Wife: 1) a woman, 2) a married woman; specif., a woman in her relationship to her husband

I am certainly a better than average woman, but if the puff paste in my freezer is called Good Wives, is that not attempting to replace me? Is that not suggesting that I am not a better than average woman?

Not content with spewing venom at my good husband, I looked up the brand on the intertubes:

In 1979, the two wives who started making these hors d’oeuvres in their homes thought the name "Good Wives" would be appropriate and fun. "Good Wife" was a term applied to a married Puritan woman, implying industry and integrity.

Okay. Puritans. Gauntlet thrown.

Goodwife: a wife or a mistress of a household" or "a title equivalent to Mrs., applied to a woman ranking below a lady

Not content with a mere definition, I moved on to what turned out to be a great book, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives (Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650 - 1750). Why yes, a scholarly tome about Puritans, but accessible and fascinating. From the preface: "To write about good wives is to write about ideals; to write about goodwives is to write about ordinary women living in a particular place and time."

You know what? Those women had it hard. Housekeeping was arduous, childbearing was dangerous, church going was de rigueur.  "A married woman in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian. On the war-torn frontier, she might also become a heroine". She was powerful, she was burdened. If her ordinary honorific was Goodwife, so be it, and the more power to her.

So I've simmered down, and I'm no longer offended by the poor innocent puff paste. But it took a couple of hundred pages for me to get there.


NOTE: All definitions in italics are from the Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, ©1970

Chicken Legs and Iron Pestles

I can't put a finger on why I love this image so. Is it the chicken feet? The magical triangles emanating from her fingertips? The bird on her head (which I like to think is a magpie)? Was I Lithuanian in another life?

It's a Lithuanian man-eating wood nymph, says Rima, but I can't help but think of Baba Yaga - she who flies around in a mortar and pestle and lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs. I always loved that story - but Baba Yaga isn't Lithuanian. Granted, in the case of Baba Yaga, it's her house that has the chicken legs, not the lady herself.

Come to think of it, the moving castle in my favorite Miyazaki movie also moves on chicken legs. So maybe it's just that I have a great affection for chicken legs, chicken feet? I know I always want to take a picture when I spot a tray of them in the Asian grocery store.

Hmm.

In my kitchen, I have my mother's mortar & pestle. Where she got it, I don't know - maybe family, maybe a flea market. But it's cast iron, with shapely mortar well suited to the hand, and a barbell-shaped double-ended pestle. Grinding spices in it sets up an industrial musical hum, and I think of Baba Yaga beating her pestle against her mortar - "fly faster!" she says, "we've children to eat!"

Rima's wood nymph, Howl's moving castle, my little mortar & pestle - disparate notions, yet so oddly interconnected. My mind is a weird place.

Dawn to Dusk

An imaginary friend. Cancer. Death.

Sweet & caring, Dawn was. I never met her. I knew her via Twitter, Facebook, blogging, email - all those ephemeral vehicles, except that they aren't, they're real, my imaginary friend was real. And now she's gone, too young, too soon. I'm sorry I never met her.

These moments, such deaths, they demand something - or they feel like they demand something from me, anyway. Why? What?

• Christine - dear Flutter - stepped up and created a donation site to help Dawn's husband Mike and their boys. I sent a little something.
  
  
• Dawn's obituary asked for contributions to the Melanoma Research Foundation. I sent something there too.
  
  
• Coincidentally, on Tuesday, the day Dawn died, I learned about an American Cancer Society project called the Cancer Prevention Study-3, so I signed up to participate. You can, too, if you are between the ages of 30 and 65 and have never had cancer.
  
  
• And last but not least, I found a new dermatologist. Like Dawn said, "Check your skin people. Check your skin."

Say it with me now: Fuck Cancer.

Wordless Wednesday: Yearning for Spring