Block Party

The first house that I remember living in was one of four nearly identical little houses in a row. They were clearly built from the same plans, in about 1920, but each one was a little different. One had square porch columns, one had round ones. Ours was shingled, next door was stucco. One of the four houses was completely overgrown and rather neglected, and was owned and occupied by a pair of unwed brothers. We never saw them.

We moved out of that house, but only around the block. So the neighbors were all the same, the friends were still right there, the communal events continued. But we still never saw either of those brothers.

Eventually one of two died. The surviving brother started showing up at the neighborhood block party, the Labor Day party that everyone went to, including me, long after I'd graduated from college and moved into Manhattan. And because it was a communal pot-luck kind of block party, he always brought something. Amidst the seas of homemade salads and desserts and soups and potato pie, there'd be a package of Pecan Sandies or Fig Newtons. "Oh, the brother brought that."

Finally, the Labor Day party came to an end. The host got ALS, and they moved to an apartment and sold the house. But there was one last Labor Day, and one last block party, a big one, overflowing the backyard one last time. And the brother, for that last party, brought a pack of gum.

It was an utterly inept and completely charming thing to have done.

---

You know how one thing leads to another? Jen recently wrote about her daughter's birthday party, and how they encroached on their neighbor's lawn for the bouncy house. Her description of her neighbor forlorning cutting his lawn with scissors and lending them a solitary chair inspired this post in a roundabout way; I'd forgotten about the gum-bearing brother until I read that, and of course, today's Labor Day.

If you have eccentric neighbors, I hope they're the good kind of eccentric.

Letter to the Editor

Remember my sign? It arrived last Thursday, we installed it Thursday night.


Saturday morning, when I went out to get the paper, it was gone.

Bastards.

We wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper - an on-line only "paper". They're "printing" the letter tomorrow. I can't post the complete text of the letter because there are far too many references to our town and its people and redacting the distinguishing marks would vitiate the power of the letter.

But here's one paragraph:

We would like to think that someone took it because they were so enamored of the wit and sentiment of the sign that they wanted it for themselves. We fear, however, that someone was offended by its hardly immoderate language and didn’t think a second before snatching it from our property. Didn’t think a second about how their intolerant and immoderate censorship is precisely what the First Amendment exists to protect us from.

I was going to install the second one at my mother's house. Instead, I think we'll rig a pole up in a tree, out of reach of the bastards. They'll probably throw eggs, and we'll probably have to write another letter to the editor.

But, damn it, I will not have my right to free speech abrogated in this day and age.

Serendipity

I made ratatouille from our CSA vegetables, while the child watched Ratatouille in the other room. It made a perfect side dish to some lamb we found in the freezer, and the next night, the leftovers turned into a great pasta sauce through the addition of fresh mozzarella and basil.

We went joy-riding in the pickup truck and fed carrots to the valley horse.

We picked so many wild blackberries that I had to make a cobbler.

And we found that there were plums on the neglected plum tree, so I made blackberry-plum jam.

The child, erratic at best in the foods she eats, ate about a pint of the seedy astringent wild blackberries, her happy face streaked with berry juice.

She threw rocks in the stream, and made dams, fell down and got up again wet.

I made a peach-apple pie with CSA fruit, and tossed in a handful of blueberries from the bush outside the kitchen door.

And because none of us had to be anywhere on Monday, we stayed an extra night.

A serendipitous mini-vacation, all because the cable guy didn't show up when he was supposed to.

The Bad Man and His New Car

There's a man who lives on our street, a few blocks away from us. We pass his house nearly every day. He drives a late model car, with MD plates on it, and he's clearly a rabid anti-abortion crusader. The car is bumper-stickered to a fare-thee-well, with additional signs taped inside the back window, and graphic literature living on the dashboard. Despite the fact that it's nearly four years on from the last election, his car still says "Kerry is a baby killer". Somewhere along the line, he added "Clinton" to that sentence, presumably meaning Hillary since she was then actively running for President.

A couple of months ago, he got a new car. He carefully transferred each and every sign and sticker to the new car, including the Kerry sign. That seems like beating a dead horse, but hey, it's not my car. Interestingly though, he has added neither an anti-Obama sign, nor a pro-McCain sign. Maybe he's just waiting for the official nominations out of the conventions?

Quite awhile ago, we started referring to him as "the bad man". Mind you, we've never met him, but he's a pinched and mean looking sort, and oh, it just seemed to fit.

Well, the problem is that the kid's picked it up (surprise). We drive by, she says "that's the bad man's house". "Let's go to the bad man's house and throw water on him" (so he melts, like the Wicked Witch of the West). Or she says "his house is poopy" (because he did recently have the house re-painted in a dead shade of baby shit brown). Sometimes she just sticks her tongue out at his house.

I'm feeling guilty - he could be a perfectly lovely, intelligent, kind soul who just happens to have a different position on abortion and bad taste in house paint. I shouldn't be encouraging Miss M. - a generally self-confident, compassionate and friendly child - to have negative knee-jerk reactions to people (though I do curse at idiot drivers when they behave badly).

What to do, what to do?

I decided to talk to her about the bad man the other day on the way to our vegetable pickup. "You know", I said, "we don't know that he's bad. We don't really know him." "Okay, Mommy. Let's call him the good man. And can we go visit him?"

She's so malleable. It's frightening, how much power we as parents have in molding our children's thoughts and behaviors.

Thirty Eight Years Ago

I found a picture one day recently, and it unleashed a flood of memories - the mothball smell of the bunkhouse, sand in my bathing suit, the sound of priming the water pump, making hand-cranked icecream, slipping through the sharp grass on the way down to the beach.

For several years in the early seventies, my family rented a friend's house out in Montauk. It was the perfect summer house - no phone, no electricity, isolated at the end of a mile and a half long dirt driveway, and right on an isolated stretch of beach. It had the basic comforts, all powered by propane - hot and cold running water, stove, refrigerator, and lights. No TV, just books and board games.

There were three little buildings on the property - a main house with the kitchen, bath and pot-bellied stove, and two bunkhouses. There were enough beds (bunkbeds, cots, pull-outs) to sleep 10-12 people. The bunkhouse we kids slept in had a whole wall of screens, facing the ocean; it was almost like sleeping outside.

We'd arrive for a week or two, with foot lockers strapped to the roof of the station wagon, and return home brown as berries, with sun-bleached hair, and sand everywhere. Heaven.

We spent all day, every day, on the beach. My father would fish in the surf; once he caught a sting ray. We'd gather seaweed and wear it as wigs. We picked wild blueberries and beach plums, and dug for steamers in a nearby brackish pond. Once each summer, we'd get dressed up and go to dinner at Gosman's. But most of the time, we ran around naked or nearly so.

And my mother? Three children and a huge abdominal scar didn't stop her from wearing a bikini. That's her and my four year old sister in that picture.

I'd love to go back there. But it's never to be. The property, even then, was surrounded by state park land, and one day the State took it back, by eminent domain. The State owns the land, but the memories remain mine.

Give A Shit

I did it - I ordered two yard signs:

I can't decide whether to keep them both, in case one gets stolen, or to plant one at my mother's house.

Finally

Just for you, just because I know you needed this, I finally got around to taking pictures of the two rooms that we nearly filled with books.
The sunroom is now the "library". There are bookshelves on two walls (and casement windows on the other two). We're still waiting for two cabinet doors; one of the missing ones is visible (to the right of the door with the grey/blue panel). And look! Empty shelves! Room to grow.
The vertical run of shelves visible here in the dining room is nothing but books on food and cooking. Well, except for a speaker and a toy car.
And remember the Shakespeare bookshelf/sculpture? It's finally hanging, in the dining room.

That is all.

Memes, Books, and Star Trivia

Thanks to Cactus Petunia, here are four things you should know about me before you invite me to your house:

1. I don't eat fish, because I don't like it. It would probably be easier to say that I'm allergic, but I'm not. I will, however, eat mussels.

2. I'd rather be outside in the fresh air than inside in the air-conditioning.

3. I much prefer wine to beer.

4. I like to bake, so I'll bring dessert.

No tags, you're it if you want to be.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

I've got another book to give away: an old hardcover copy of P.G. Wodehouse's Spring Fever. Tell me in the comments; if more than one person wants it, I'll do a random giveaway.

Also, if you need more books and have too many, try Paperback Swap - you set up an account, list the books that you want to get rid of, mail them off when people request them, and ask for other's books that you're interested in. You pay the postage to ship yours out, but you pay nothing to receive a book. It's clever. Click the logo to join.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

And, because I know you were wondering, the dog days of summer are over. The dog days are the weeks when Sirius (the dog star) rises in tandem with the sun. The ancients figured the two stars rising together caused the heat and torpor, hence the name.

Julia Child and the Sub-Recipes

If you've ever cooked anything out of Mastering The Art of French Cooking, you know that Julia Child was fond of sub-recipes. Instead of just writing out the instructions for a single finished dish, she refers you to other recipes. You'll have to go dig up the recipe for the this and/or the recipe for the that.

One day, years ago, I was sitting around chewing the fat with my boss. Out of the blue, he asked me "do you have any cookbooks?" I owned up to the fact that we've got rather a lot of cookbooks, and he told me he wanted to learn to make beef bourguignon. In a moment of pedantic evil, I brought in my Julia Child and xeroxed the recipe for the boeuf à la bourguignonne along with the sub-recipe for the brown-braised onions. But, not intentionally, I forgot to copy the sub-recipe for the mushrooms, and of course, I got a call at about 9 that night: What do I do with the mushrooms???

Got house, like books

I keep seeing them, but Mayberry Mom pushed me over the edge. Here's my Wordle:

I took all the words from all the posts in July, and I love how what jumps out is Got house, like books. Or is it Got one house, like little baby books? I suppose it could be Got one little baby, like good house books?

What's your Wordle like?

Can We Talk About Pie Crust?

Julia Child's birthday is today - August 15. It would have been her 96th birthday. A year ago, I wrote a little paean to her and included her pie crust recipe, the recipe that I use nearly every time I make a pastry crust. Julia's been on my mind recently; I've been fondling her cookbooks in their new home, and Champaign Taste had announced the third annual Julia Child birthday extravaganza (which you should go check out).

Anyway.

I first learned to make Julia's pie crust using my mother's hardcover copy of Mastering The Art of French Cooking. The ingredients in that book are listed as follows:

Proportions for 1 cup flour

1 cup flour
1 T. sugar (optional, depending on the filling)
1/8 t. salt
4 T. butter
1 1/2 T. shortening
2 1/2-3 T cold water

And she tells you that for an 8-9" shell, you'll need proportions for 1 1/2 cups of flour, and for a 10-11" shell, you'll need proportions for 2 cups of flour. (Yes, you have to do some math.)

Okay then. Some number of years ago, when I was a semi-grownup with my own kitchen, my mother gave me a paperback set of both volumes of Mastering, complete with slipcase. Here's the curious thing: in that edition of Mastering, the pie crust recipe is given with all the same measures of ingredients - except the flour! The flour is given as 2/3 of a cup. So all of the notes about "proportions for one cup of flour" make no sense. Furthermore, to my taste anyway, that means far too much fat for the amount of flour. I marked up that copy of the book, which my sister now has, because I found the two volumes in hardcover at a used bookstore and needed to have them. (But they're not a matched set; one's taller than the other. Go figure.)

It's my standard crust recipe. Rarely do I try something else, because why tinker with what works. These days, I almost always use lard in place of shortening, and I usually make the two cup variant - it's just the right amount for a double-crust or lattice-top pie. If I'm only doing a quiche or other single crust dish, I use the remaining dough to line a 7" tart shell. That goes into the freezer in a ziploc bag, to be resurrected when whim strikes. (If you do that, remember to mark whether or not there's sugar in the crust - without sugar can be used for anything, with sugar really only works for dessert.)

One of those little tart shells was in the freezer a couple of days ago, screaming "Eat me!". There were nectarines from the CSA begging to be used. So I made Julia's peach tart. Or, more accurately, I adapted Julia's peach tart.

Nectarine Tart (adapted from Julia Child)
1 7" tart shell, partially baked
3-4 nectarines
1/2 cup demerara sugar
2 T. butter

Scald the nectarines in boiling water for 10-15 seconds (this helps the peels slip right off). Peel and slice. Sprinkle about 3 T. of sugar in the bottom of the tart shell. Arrange the fruit in the shell. Sprinkle the rest of the sugar over the top, and dot with pea-sized lumps of butter. Bake at 375° F for 30-40 minutes, until juices are syrupy and fruit is slightly browned.

The demerara sugar gives a slight brown sugar flavor to the tart. Next time, though, I might add a bit of flour or cornstarch to help the juices coagulate. The tart was delectable, but runny.







Note: The reason for that whole digression into the fat/flour ratio is because I googled for the tart recipe, so I wouldn't have to retype it, and found both flour measures given in different places. If your copy of Mastering has 2/3 of a cup of flour on page 633, use 1 cup instead.

A Random Assortment of Thursday

One:

I'm pleased that the marriage post got picked up as a July "Just Post" - go visit Jen and Mad and Su to find some other Just Posts. The Just Posts rock.

Tangentially related to the notion that anyone who so desires should be allowed to marry, there was a hair-raising front page article in the Times the other day about the intersection of health insurance and marriage. People are marrying for insurance, staying married for insurance, divorcing for insurance. If you're a same sex couple, extension of health insurance benefits to your partner may not be possible - it all depends on where you live and what kind of health insurance you have. But more to the point - why is health insurance tied to spouses and employers? Why is there no single-payer universal health insurance coverage in this country? Why isn't health insurance just provided to the individual? Why???

Two:

Jenn thinks I'm kick ass! Since Alltop does too, should I take up kick-boxing or something? Better watch out, I might kick something. Then again, I might just go inside and read a book.

I'm going to turn around and award the kick ass award to Deb at i obsess. Not only does she have her own blog, she writes for Momocrats, and just started the most cunning group blog, Did you buy that New?, a "marauding band of vintage avengers" out to show off awesome thrify-crafty-vintage stuff. And until last month, when I met her at BlogHer, I'd never heard of her. She's totally kick ass.

Three:

On the subject of books, I'm working my way through the little stack of duplicate books that emerged in the unpacking, and I have these three to give away today:

Richard Russo - The Whore's Child
Calvin Trillin - Alice, Let's Eat
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

If you'd like one, leave a note in the comments. If more than one person asks for the same book, I'll make a random pick. **UPDATE - They're all spoken for!!**

Four:

Yesterday at school, the kids had "cola straw" with lunch. Turned out to have been "cole slaw".

These boots were made for walking...

The Times had a little piece the other day about a website that determines how "walkable" a given address is - that is, do you really need a car? It's a google mash-up - plug in your address, and it plots nearby schools, restaurants, stores, and services, and determines the "walk score".

My house came up 86 out of 100 - or "very walkable".

Interestingly, the distance to public transportation, i.e. the commuter train, wasn't factored in. For me, walking distance to the train was one of our immutable needs when we were looking for a hosue.

Also, their algorithm plots things "as the crow flies" - which isn't always a possible way of getting from point A to point B. The site claims that my public library is .3 miles from my house - but that .3 would mean scrambling down a steep hill, climbing a chain link fence, wending my way through the woods, and fording a small stream. I stick to the road - that way, it's .5 mile.

But still - the site is fun.

What's your walk score?

Aimless Archeology

It is impossible to unpack 30 boxes of books without rifling through many of them. A college-vintage picture of W. fell out of one. Fading, decaying newspaper clippings stuck out of others. Odd bookmarks abound. Tucked into my Don Quixote was the printout of an email from a neighbor/scholar telling me what drear parts I could skip (in fact, I think I never finished it).

Deciding what should go with what is sometimes easy, sometimes impossible. The fiction is in alphabetical order, as is the poetry. All scores and books on music are together. Cookbooks and food writing are, fittingly, in the dining room. The reference books occupy their own space, with Follett's Modern American Usage snuggled up next to Fowler's Modern English Usage.

The bugaboo was the general non-fiction - it started as "Lit Crit", and gradually other things crept in. John McPhee? Wendell Berry? Is autobiography non-fiction or history? What about biography? Why do we have two copies of Means of Ascent (Volume 2 of Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson)?*

At one point I idly suggested using the Library of Congress classification system to determine what should live where - I was shot down. Just as well, as it would have added days (or weeks) to the project.

I think I know where to find everything.






*Would you like one? Tell me in the comments and I'll send the spare to someone. And I'll be giving other books away in the next few weeks.

Dining Out with Small Fry

In our town, midway between our house and the kid's daycare, there's a restaurant. It's one of those tavern-type places with adequate food and a low-key atmosphere, and you can always get a hamburger if nothing else appeals. It's not a chain, it's nothing special, and kids eat free on Monday nights.

We avail ourselves of the Monday night special from time to time. I order a chopped salad with a side of mashed potatoes, W. gets a burger, Miss M. gets gloppy kid-friendly "mac & cheese", and everyone is happy. Almost every time we go there, we run into other people we know - like daycare compadres, or neighbors en masse with all kids accounted for.

One night, we went in and ran into another daycare kid, with her mom and baby sister. Miss M. and her friend were in pig heaven and we ended up switching seats so the kids were at one table and the grown-ups were at the adjacent table. The kids were under the table, across the room, and generally carrying on, but in a really happy way - there were no tears, there wasn't any whining, they were just having fun.

Well. Some couple across the room got completely bent out of shape about these two charming four year olds having the time of their little lives - at a restaurant, together, not at school! They seemed to think these kids should be wearing white gloves and sitting with their hands folded neatly in their laps. I think, if you go out to dinner at 6:00 on a Monday at a restaurant where kids eat free on Monday nights, you should expect there to be high-spirited kids, being kids. Next time, eat out on Tuesday.

---

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp. I don't usually do the PBN blog blasts that require such an overtly commercial blurb, but I confess to having a soft spot for Burger King. If we must stop for fast food, I generally choose Burger King. And it's all because of a family friend. He'd grown up in the food business, and ended up owning a bunch of Burger Kings. Every time he'd stop by our house, he'd leave behind BK swag: glasses, toys, tchotchkes, and this fine backpack I unearthed recently. If you click to enlarge, you'll be able to read the fine print:

(So you other restaurants can get off my back)

He was a mensch of the highest order.

On Marriage and Momocrats

I'm thoroughly pleased that my post about marriage has been cross-posted on the Momocrats site.

Because I just had to tell you about that, I thought I'd use the opportunity to clue you all in to the raffle that the Momocrats are having to raise money to go to the Democratic National Convention. It ends tonight! Buy a raffle ticket! Help get those smart opinionated women inside the convention!

Filch It Friday: What's in a Name

I filched this from Emma. The "use all the words in a sentence (or three)" was my fillip.

Answer the following using the first letter of your name:

4 Letter Word: Milk
Vehicle: Miata
Movie: Moonstruck
City: Madras
Boy Name: Matthew
Girl Name: Madeleine
Occupation: Minister
Something you wear: Mittens
Food: Macaroni
Something found in the bathroom: Moisturizer
Reason for being late: Migraine
Something you shout: Mazel Tov!

Madeleine drove off in the Miata to get milk and macaroni to assuage her migraine. After a judicious application of moisturizer, she donned mittens and headed for her wedding to Matthew, with whom she'd first bonded over Moonstruck. When the minister pronounced them husband and wife, they headed for their honeymoon in Madras, exiting the church to cries of Mazel Tov!

CSA: Lists

There's been a viral thing going around, a meme-like compulsion to post a scan of your own handwriting. I've seen it in a number of places - at Flutter's and Chani's and Slouching Mom's and Kyla's - and probably others but I can't remember where. Most recently, I saw it at Thursday Drive - and she has astonishing handwriting.

Last summer, I compulsively blogged my CSA produce each and every week. This year, I've not been cataloging the haul in bits and bytes, but I do write down what we get each pick-up - it helps me to keep track of the stuff in the fridge and plan the next meal. And I like making lists, and crossing things off.

I have a lifetime supply of index cards - my mother worked in an office that used them as an interim data collection device en route to a computerized database. Once redundant, she'd bring the cards home - after all, the back side was perfectly usable. And they're so nice and sturdy for list-making...


So, those are the index cards currently residing on our fridge. Since I wrote them out, we've eaten the 8/6 corn and some of the 8/6 tomatoes - delicious all around. And I added red potatoes to the 8/6 list, because I'd completely forgotten to include them.

Green Milk

I can't imagine actually nursing someone else's child, or handing mine over to another woman for suckling.

That said, there was a weekend that I was staying at my mother's house, when my child was about six weeks old, and I was pumping ALL THE TIME with a schlepped hospital grade pump. My sister was there too, but without her children, specifically her still nursing toddler.

One thing led to another, and my sister availed herself of the pump to relieve pressure. We were decidedly amused to discover that her milk was tinged with green - lord knows what she'd been eating, especially since it was the middle of the winter. Her pumped milk went into the fridge, and the next day I fed it to my child.

But, it was my sister. It would have been a waste to throw it out. And it was sort of funny, especially because it was green and all. And some day we'll get to tell my child that she drank her aunt's breastmilk and thoroughly disgust her.

Would you cross-nurse another's child?

White Bread for Julie, and for you

Julie and I had a back and forth one day about making bread - she'd said that she was good at quick breads, but had never mastered yeast bread. I promised her a recipe, and rummaging around my mother's kitchen the other day, I found the cookbook that I was looking for: the Parsons Bread Book. It's a 1974 paperback written and designed by students from the Parsons School of Design, and it includes the first bread I ever mastered: a plain white bread, perfect for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.


I know more than I did then, and today I make the same basic bread with butter in lieu of shortening, and some whole wheat flour in place of some of the white (maybe 25%, using a light whole wheat like the King Arthur White Whole Wheat). This recipe also calls for a lot of yeast - I might cut the yeast back, but if you're a novice baker, try the recipe as is. Knead your bread on a floured countertop, and oil the bowl. And practice. The more often you make bread, the better it'll be.

Making bread is a powerful act. The seemingly inanimate yeast springs to life, the kneading is both therapeutic and contemplative, and the kitchen fills with good smells. Yes, you can go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, but making it yourself is oh so very satisfying.

Patriots

The great unpacking of books has begun (and if I ever get around to it, I'll post pictures of the completed bookshelves). Many volumes are coming to light with bookmarks and post-its and tape flags sticking out of their tops or sides, and of course, I can't help but indulge in some aimless archeology. If there's something sticking out, I open the book. One such book was Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford. I know the "Patriot Act" is old hat and all that, but this passage* from one of Mitford's letters had struck me when I read it last year:

Oh yes another nice thing about F. Lawn. Among the multiplicity of final resting places (all named things like Brotherly Love, Garden of Memories, etc) is one called Patriots’ Hall. I asked the man if one had to be a citizen to finally rest there, he said oh no, not a bit necessary. (I mean the Final Resting Place salesman said all this.) So I said, Well, I should think you’d at least ask for some sort of loyalty oath, after all it’s supposed to be for Patriots? He said absolutely not, as long as you’ve got the money to pay for the site, all would be OK. Don’t you think that’s really pretty crumby? Who should we protest to?

She wrote that in 1961. Somehow, I find an eerie synchronicity between the 1961 cynicism of Forest Lawn (and Decca has her tongue squarely in her cheek, in case it's not clear) and today's post-9/11 Bush administration flagrant disregard for rules, laws, and rights (the partisan hiring at the Justice department comes to mind).




* p. 271, a passage about Forest Lawn, the California cemetery.

From the backseat

There are so many trees in the world; I don't know which is the beautifullest.

I want to change my name to Chihiro.

Granny's going to go to heaven soon, right?

As you might imagine, the last one took me aback. Not so much because she understands that Granny is sick, and that Granny is going to die, but because we've never, ever talked about heaven. We're atheists. We don't go to church. Yes, we celebrate Christmas, but it's for all the pagan winter solstice trappings, not that birth of Jesus business.

I tried to find out where this notion of heaven had come from.

We learned about heaven when we learned about the planets. The planets are in heaven. How is Granny going to get there? A rocket ship?

I confess that I told her that we'd have to build a rocket ship in the basement, like Wallace and Gromit in A Grand Day Out. But really? I don't know what to say. She's only four.

A Little Verklempt

I tend towards the stoic, I tend to hide my emotions. I'm private and I don't share. For years, the many years between our marriage and my pregnancy, people would ask "so, are you going to have children?" and I'd deflect, "oh, we have cats". I never answered the question - it was way too personal and I really didn't want to share that pain of childlessness with anyone. When I finally allowed as to how we were trying, what with all the infertility treatments, people - including close family - said "we thought you didn't want any kids."

Well, I'd never said that.

This is kind of a long way around to the fact that I am a little verklempt that a couple of posts of mine have been singled out this week by different people, and I want to say "thank you". It means a lot to me, it really does.

The Hotfessional dubbed On Marriage a "perfect post", and if you'll go read her post about my post, you'll understand why.

Julie wants to repost the same piece on Momocrats.

And someone - I don't know who - picked up Playing Round the Garden Trees for the Stirrup Queens Roundup Extravaganza. The roundup, in a nutshell: Each blogger was assigned a single blog to read from July 2007 to July 2008 and they chose a single post that spoke to them--that became their favorite. To my anonymous reader - thanks, I liked that post too, and I'll probably dig up some more little shrubs tomorrow.

All of you, you that read, you that write, you that comment, you that support - thank you.

PSA: Respect Women

I saw this poster on the subway stairs yesterday.

Awesome, no?

It's part of a NYS campaign to educate boys so they don't grow up to be abusers. Most public service ads are boring; this one gets the point across with wit.

I think I want a sweatshirt that says "Awaiting Instructions".

On Marriage

I’ve been thinking about marriage recently.

The other day, I had lunch with my friend the priest – who happens to be the gay Episcopal priest who performed our wedding ceremony using vows that W. and I had written. We adapted the old Book of Common Prayer service, because the basic language is beautiful, but we struck out every reference to God, Jesus, Holy, Church and the like, thereby rendering it completely and absolutely civil. At lunch, my priest told me that he and his partner of 26 years had scampered off to Canada as soon as David Paterson had directed all New York State agencies to recognize same-sex unions from elsewhere.

Jess wrote a post last month about marriage – and about her (and her husband’s) discomfort at marrying when others couldn’t: “Some of our friends do not possess the basic right to marry who they love.”

I had a hard time agreeing to get married. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. In fact, by the time we got around to getting married, we’d been living together for eight and a half years (and that was thirteen years ago). We’d started talking about having a child, and W. felt very strongly that a child needed married parents. I didn’t agree, but after a bunch of arm-twisting and discussion (much of which happened at our favorite local bar, to the bemusement of the bartender), I did agree to marry him (and I’m not sorry that I did).

In many ways, marriage qua marriage is unfair to those who can’t be married, or don’t want those legal ties. Marriage provides a construct for many valuable spousal rights – including social security benefits, exemptions on estate taxes, access to health insurance policies, visiting privileges in jail, etc. (For an exhaustive list contained in a 75 page document written by the General Counsel of the General Accounting Office, in 1997 while Clinton was still President, go here.)

The tide seems to be turning, what with Massachusetts about to reverse “a 1913 law that prevented Massachusetts from marrying out-of-state couples if their marriages would not be legal in their home states”, and California having legalized same-sex marriages last month, and New York having agreed to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. All well and good.

But, "if you are in a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts or a domestic partnership or civil union in any of the states that offer those relationship options, many of the benefits of marriage won't apply to you, because the federal government does not recognize these same-sex relationships".

In 1967, then Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote (in a ruling ending race-based prohibitions against marriage):

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Black people can marry white people. How do we get the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages?

Ovaries

I took last week off of work so I could putter around my house and put away all of Miss M.'s accumulated artwork.

They'd done a unit studying the human body, drawing pictures and learning songs about the various organs, like:

Kidneys clean and filter blood,
Filter blood,
Filter blood,
If one fails and is a dud,
The other one does the job.*

Well, one of the things I put into the permanent archive was a life size cut-out of Miss M.'s traced body, with découpage organs and crayon enhancement.


She did a reasonable job of getting the organs in the right places (kidneys on the back, even). The belly button - that spot with the radiating purple lines - is kind of where the belly button belongs, even though it's north of the large intestine (and let's not discuss why the liver is vertical). But the most intriguing thing to me is that walnut-sized brown spot to the right of the belly button.

That's the egg what I was born out of.

Apparently, she's figured out that there are eggs inside her mama, even though her daycare teachers swore up and down that the reproductive system was not on the human body agenda.

Maybe she'll be a reproductive endocrinologist. After all, she is a test tube baby. And she seems to have an innate sense of anatomy.




*To the tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb. It slays me every single time she sings it.

Pink Wine

Two of my appointed tasks in the care of my mother are the replenishing of the coffers (so we can pay the ladies) and the replenishing of the wine supplies (so that the caretaker offspring are well-lubricated).

The other day, on the way to my mother's house, I stopped into the liquor store to pick up another case of wine. I knew there was plenty of red (1.5 liter bottles of the fat bastard), so I was only looking for white, and pink because my sister, Pinky, asked specifically for pink wine. It's summer, after all.

I ask you, what kind of a mother am I that I let the four year old pick the wine? Look Mommy, it has a pink lid and a baby on the label!

All things considered, it wasn't half bad. And the children had none of it.

Square People and Not So Square Meals

I love my child's daycare. Love. I feel enormously lucky that we found it, that she got a spot there, that it's close to the house, that they take really good care of her, that their philosophy is that play is the essential "work" of the pre-schooler.

But sometimes what I love best of all is that they have a full time cook. I'm a little terrified about kindergarten in September, because I'm going to have to start packing a lunch for her. Yikes. We barely get out of the house on time as it is; how will I get lunch organized?

The daycare cook is unbelievable. She's a moody, funny, feisty woman who trained as a chef, at a real cooking school (she's got the framed diploma hanging outside the kitchen). And she spends her days feeding real food to toddlers and pre-schoolers. It's completely obvious that she loves what she does, because, lord knows, they are not an easy audience.

One day last week, when I was picking Miss M. up, I asked "what'd they have for lunch today?" "Pasta with pesto." "What? No way." "Yeah, and they all had like two or three helpings." Not only does she get them to eat green food, they like it.

The next day, I stopped in the kitchen in the morning to commend the cook. There was some of the pasta left over, and without any protest from me, she scooped some into a bowl for me to take home for lunch. While we were chatting, I heard a humming mechanical noise: ice cream. The woman was making homemade ice cream for the kids. "Because it doesn't have all that stuff in it."

From time to time, Miss M. tells us that she doesn't want to go to kindergarten. I think she knows a good thing when she sees it, because there's not going to be homemade ice cream in elementary school.

[The picture has nothing to do with anything. It's just that she's been obsessively drawing square people, day in and day out, always with the square hair, and I wanted to share one (three) of them.]

My Books, My Books

I've missed my books. For four years, we've lived in this house, and most of the books have lived in the cellar. Oh, there were exceptions - like cookbooks, and kids books, and gardening books - but the vast majority are in countless tidy cardboard boxes in the (dry) cellar.

But soon, very soon, they will be free. The carpenters have finished building the bookcases I've been dreaming of and saving money for, and the painters should be done tomorrow. Sometime next week, after the paint is nice and dry, I can start hauling boxes up from the cellar, and caressing the books, one by one.

We did built-ins in two rooms - the dining rooom and the sun room. We archived a pair of french doors from the dining room, and built bookcases around the wide doorway, up both sides and across the top. The cookbooks will live in the dining room, alongside gardening, and travel, and I don't know what else yet.

In the sun room, we did built-ins on the two inside walls - so there are two walls of books, and two walls of casement windows. The television will live in there, together with all of the fiction and poetry. And music - all the many books on music will need to be in there, because the stereo will be in there as well.

I'm so happy to have finally been able to get this done, because a house without books is like a room without windows.

Tales from San Francisco: Food

I feel pretty lucky to work near the Union Square Greenmarket, and to belong to a CSA, and to commute through Grand Central where there is a branch of Murray's Cheese, but San Francisco is a pretty good town for eating.

I mentioned to a local friend that I wanted to go check out the Ferry Terminal and its farmer's market; she said she'd take me. Then she called back and said "no, I want to take you to where the locals go". So Saturday morning, we hit two markets.

First up was Alemany - a funky swath of stalls in the shadow of the freeway, complete with fresh tamales, live chickens, and a sea of divine produce. Every fruit seller was offering tastes - each peach was better than the next. There were piles and piles of bitter melon, both smooth bumpy and prickly bumpy. We had tamales for breakfast; my friend bought plums ($1/lb) and tomatoes ($1.50/lb) and basil ($1/bunch) and garlic.

Then we went to the ferry terminal. There was more cheese, more prepared foods, and some of the same produce vendors. But the same glorious peaches? $3 a pound. The tomatoes? $3.50. The ferry terminal is the high rent district.

I did buy some Recchiuti salted caramels for my husband (read, for me.) And we got coffee, plain drip coffee, from a stand that defies logic.

I'd heard about Blue Bottle; they were written up in the Times about six months ago, because of their decadently expensive Japanese coffee siphon. The ferry terminal stand doesn't have the fancy machinery - instead, they're making individual cups of drip coffee. That is, one at a time. They've got an array of tea kettles on burners, six in a row. The coffee person uses the hot water out of the rightmost kettle, and then moves them all over one at a time - and refills the leftmost one. Adjacent to the kettle operation is a rack holding eight ceramic cones. One by one, paper filters are placed in the cones, each filter is dampened with hot water, a prodigious amount of ground coffee is added, and the coffee person begins to pour the boiling water. One cup at a time.

It took rather a while to get our two cups of drip coffee, which was only $2. Given the amount of labor that went into it, $2 was a bargain. The coffee was stronger 'n all get out, but good. Drinkable black good.

The only thing that would have made it all better? Time in a kitchen with all that great stuff.

Tales from San Francisco: Blogher

Four jet planes
Three nights in a bed alone
Two days of Blogher
One lost jacket

I'm home!

Blogher was fun. Blogher wasn't really what I expected, but it was a good time. It was a little like a college reunion, lots of smart women with a common interest. I got to meet people that I'd only known in the ether, like Sarah and Jen and Julie and Erika and Nora and Christine and too many more to list (and if I didn't list you, I'm sorry). I reconnected with Isabel, who I knew in a past life. I still don't know what the point of Twitter is, but I signed up anyway. I went to a couple of wonderful sessions, and a couple that were all jargon without much practical how-to. I scored some seriously sweet swag (including a bluetooth headset for my phone and a tattoo from the tattoed Cecily). And Susan made me weep.

There were parties. And I know there were "parties" that the little people weren't invited to, but I got to plenty. The closing night party at Macy's was a little peculiar - champagne in bags, wine in shoes, and vodka in lingerie. Alongside the lavender macarons in the lingerie department were samples of KY jelly - um, yuck?

I promised Kelley that I'd take her to BlogHer, and I did. KC took a picture of Sarah and me with Kelley, which I don't have yet, but I got one with some chocolate, her other favorite vice.

Would I go again? I don't know. The fact that it was in San Francisco, where I had a free place to stay and non-bloggy people to hang out with meant that it was lower stakes than it could have been. But the community aspect was great - it made me feel less alone. And that's nice.

Tales from San Francisco: Blogher

Four jet planes
Three nights in a bed alone
Two days of Blogher
One lost jacket

I'm home!

Blogher was fun. Blogher wasn't really what I expected, but it was fun. It was a little like a college reunion, lots of smart women with a common interest. I got to meet people that I'd only known in the ether, like Sarah and Jen and Julie and Erika and too many more to list. I reconnected with Isabel, who I knew in a past life. I still don't know what the point of Twitter is, but I signed up anyway. I went to a couple of wonderful sessions, and a couple that were all jargon without much practical how-to. I scored some seriously sweet swag (a bluetooth headset for my phone and a tattoo from the tattoed Cecily). Susan made me weep.

There were parties. And I know there were "parties" that the little people weren't invited to, but I got to plenty. The closing night party at Macy's was a little peculiar - champagne in bags, wine in shoes, and vodka in lingerie. Alongside the lavender macarons in the lingerie department were samples of KY jelly - um, yuck?

I promised Kelley that I'd take her to BlogHer, and I did. KC took a picture of Sarah and me with Kelley and Boo, which I don't have yet, but I got one of them with some chocolate, Kelley's other favorite vice.

Would I go again? I dunno.

Leaving, On A Jet Plane

My bag is packed.

I've been reading posts hither and yon, along the lines of "you'll know me by my smile/pump/laugh" or "I'll be the one burping/gesticulating/sweating". And one that scared me - apparently there's a secret handshake.

The Aussie Chick is ready to go. I've got my cards (they match my new header). I know where I'm staying (not at the Westin). I think I know how to get to the conference. My iPod is loaded, and I've got stuff to read on the plane(s).

I am, however, a bundle of nerves. What possessed me to do this? Why on earth am I going to a conference about blogging? Do I really have to worry about my shoes? Oy.

And, even though it's a blogging conference, I think I'm going to leave my laptop home. So, see you on Monday, unless I start emailing posts under the influence.

Wise Margaret Brown

Not so long ago, I read a column by Libby Gruner about books for babies. She wrote eloquently about picking books as a gift for a friend's new baby, and about the deeply ingrained memories that each fondled book recalls. When you've read something over and over to your own child, the words sear themselves into your brain, while your hands recall the very shape and heft and texture of the book itself.

At the grand old age of four and two-thirds, Miss M. is largely past the board book stage, though a few creep out from time to time. Her bookshelves were overflowing and it was time for a culling, time to make room for new books. For lack of a better way to begin, I took out all the baby board books and put them aside. But while I was doing it, I had to make a separate pile for the Margaret Wise Brown books were talking to me.

We've got six. Some are new copies, given to Miss M. over the past few years. A couple are "Little Golden Book" editions from my childhood. Another came from eBay. I could read them all, each and every night.

There's a calm poetry to her books, with idiosyncratic repetition and alliteration amid the prose. Phrases like "wild green world" and "purple as violets / purple as plums / purple as shadows on late afternoons" and "the sun went down beyond the river / the sky grew wild and red" and "and in all that brown, the sun went down" get repeated or paralleled. The words demand a soothing tone of voice, a slow cadence, just right for the wind-down before bed, "in the big red barn / in the dark night sky".

I can't bear to put them away. It would be too sharp a sign that my baby's no longer a baby.

You Say Potato, I Say...

When Noble Pig decides to host a potato Ho-Down, and I have potatoes in the kitchen and herbs coming out my ears, all begging to be made into herby, tangy potato salad, I can't help but climb on the potato Ho wagon, even though my Ho name is so not a good Ho name. Whatever. This is the best potato salad ever.

The thing is, you can use whatever fresh herbs you have, and whatever onion/garlic family member floats your boat. I had parsley, basil and scallions from the CSA (on the right), a bag of freshly dug new potatoes from a farm stand, and thyme, sage, tarragon and oregano in my garden (on the left). I also had some cilantro from the CSA - but I was making this to eat with my mother, who is in the cilantro-tastes-like-soap camp, so I left it out.

I washed enough potatoes for two people, and cut them in half, mostly so they'd cook a little quicker. I dropped them into nicely salted boiling water. When they were done (stick 'em with a fork), I drained them and dumped a bowl of ice cubes on top of the cooling potatoes, still in the colander. Then I sliced the scallions and minced up all the herbs together. All the greenery went into a bowl. I then whacked the now room-temperature potatoes up into cubes and dumped them in the bowl. Everything got dressed with salt, pepper, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Bang zoom, you're done.

Yes, Virginia, there is no mayonnaise. If you wanted to be fancy, you could whip up a nice emulsified vinaigrette instead of just splashing in the oil and vinegar. If you have no tarragon, so what? If you have red onion in lieu of scallions, sure - use some. Really, it's the easiest thing ever, and probably the most forgiving. And, did I mention that it has no mayonnaise?

I keep mentioning the mayonnaise because I loathe mayonnaise (even though I think I should like it, and I keep trying it because I think I should like it). But mainly because the lack of mayonnaise means that it's a good potato salad to make in enormous quantities for a big summer party, like W. and I did for our wedding thirteen years ago.

Do you really want to know my (first pet/middle name) Ho name? Schwartz Catherine. It's a good thing I'm not walking the streets.

---

There'll be a Potato Ho-Down round-up at Noble Pig on July 16th...plan to go visit!

Catching Fireflies

Is there anything better than watching your kid run around at dusk catching fireflies? Oh maybe if she's wearing a pair of sailor suit pajamas that were her uncle's some forty years ago.



She was actually really good at it.

Evidence that the World is Small

The newsletter from my CSA this week included a recipe from one of my favorite cooking blogs.

And the Times ran a front page story about community supported agriculture.

And while my CSA wasn't in the Times article, my sister's was. And the farmer at her CSA is married to the daughter of my high school flute teacher.

It's a small world.

Waders and Crab Parts

As part of my strategy to regain my equilibrium and lose some of my crabbiness, I'm taking some time off in dribs and drabs this summer. By early September, it'll amount to nearly 30 days off work, in a bunch of three day weeks, and a couple of whole weeks off. It's all accrued vacation time, though it feels like mental health days.


Yesterday, on one of those days off, I went on a field trip with Miss M.'s class. It was a glorious day spent mucking around in the Hudson River. The kids got to put on waders (tiny little kid-sized waders) and seine for critters. They pulled up shrimp and crabs, anchovies and jellyfish, rocks and mud, and one tiny striped bass.


When they weren't in the river handling the net, the kids were ostensibly conducting a scavenger hunt. Mostly this took the form of "look Mommy, I found (another) feather" or "is this old glass?" (I'd made the mistake of telling them that well worn beach glass was okay to pick up - instead they just picked it all up and then asked.) The scavenger list provides good evidence that we aren't all that far from a major urban area: two of the items to "find" are the George Washington Bridge and garbage. I also quite like that crab parts is another item to find, but then I guess I'm a little perverse.

Best of all? I got to take a nap when I got home.

Nana Star

A package! Is it for me?

We open the big box that was left on the front porch and find Nana Star, her Moonman, and the first two Nana Star books. I extract the dolls from their packaging, and hand them over to my four year old.

I love her! I love her braided hair! I love the Moonman but he's sort of for Tiny. I want to give him to Tiny.

The doll, Nana Star, is sweet - a soft doll with hidden wires for structure. Her hair is braided, and tied with a bow, and she wears a blue dress and blue ballet slippers.

She has a heart on her hand and she has a tree sun - she's going to shoot something. She's shooting a poison flower! Look, I put the star in her hair.

Nana Star comes with a branch and baby star, both attached to her arms by elastic bands, so they're removable, and easily repurposed to hair ornaments. Or poison-flower-shooting weapons, as the case may be. [After a couple of weeks, the branch split open at the seam - I think it may have been chewed on by my co-reviewer.]

Her name is Nana Star? I want it to be Princess Lucy. Can we take her clothes off? Look, she doesn't have underwear!

Sure enough, her dress comes off, revealing a feature-less figure with no belly button. Her white gloves (white gloves!) also come off - they have long since disappeared. We read the first book, Nana Star. The book is about a girl who finds a lost baby star. She realizes that she needs to help him find his way back to the sky, and becomes his Nana Star. The branch turns out to be a plot device - an olive branch to help lift up the star.

I want to read the next one!

The second book is Nana Star and the Moonman. It continues the travels of Nana Star and the baby star, and introduces the Moonman, who watches over her even when she can't see him.

I like his pajamas. I turned him off!

When you push the right button on the Moonman doll, his head lights up and he plays a little music. It isn't like one of those baby sleep aids that plays lullabies or heart sounds for 20 or 30 minutes - it only plays a little folk rock fragment. [I did have a little trouble figuring out how to turn it on - it helped when I actually looked at the packaging which said "press center star for lights and music".]

The moon's watching over her by his singing. She has to fall asleep on him.

All in all, it's a pretty charming package. The doll is sweet and perfect for my four year old. An unexpected benefit is that she's the same size as the Groovy Girls - so their clothes fit Nana Star. Miss M. was pretty adamant that the Moonman was a "baby toy" which she wanted to give to her three year old cousin Tiny. But that didn't stop her from playing with it, and turning it on over and over and over, until its batteries ran down. The books are a little sappy, but gently impart reasonable lessons. The illustrations are lovely, and have a slightly vintage feel about them. Each book comes with a two-track CD: the story narrated, and a related song. While the CD is nice enough, it seems extraneous - if the child can't read the book, shouldn't an adult be reading it to the child?

I want to bring the Moonman and the girl to my school.

The kid liked it. What more could you want?

[I reviewed this for Mother Talk; the books and the dolls were provided by the publisher.]

The New Hyde Park Lily

My paternal grandfather is probably the only person I will have ever known who was born and died in the same house. In the house. He was born in 1900, at home, as happened in those days. He died there too, after having moved into a hospital bed in the living room. And except for time away from home for college and law school, and a few years living in a nearby house when he was newly married, he lived out his whole life in the same house.

It was a farm house, built in the late 1800s, added onto once or twice. It had a front porch and a sun-room, one indoor bathroom and one unheated powder room accessible only from the back porch. It had a bit of land around it, with a sour cherry tree, a huge copper beech, and a grape arbor. There was a garage (once a stable), with an attic loft and a root cellar. Grandpa would buy a bushel of oysters every winter and keep them in the root cellar 'til they were gone.

After he died in 1988, my grandmother continued to live there, though in a much diminished state - it was as though she had just checked out. And when she died, the house was sold.

There was a moment when one of my cousins was going to buy the house, but she was unable to pull it off. Over the course of about nine months, the children and the grandchildren gradually cleaned out the house. We found homemade liquor put away during prohibition, and baby clothes from the turn of the century. There were quilts and lace curtains, huck towels and glassware. The cellar was full of books and jars and tools, and a stunning glass vase, five feet high. There were metal film canisters with home movies from the 40s and 50s. My grandfather's pipes were awaiting another smoker. His handmade ankle boots were snapped up by a cousin with the same sized feet.

One day, I was poking around and found a lily coming up in the rose garden. I dug it up and stuck it in a hideous turquoise plastic wastebasket, and planted it at my mother's house. It turned out to be a dark orange-red, which clashed with everything in her garden, but she tolerated it. When we moved into our house four years ago, she said "you're going to take that lily, right?" And so I did.

The first couple of years, it sent up a flower stalk, but the buds were summarily eaten by some nefarious creature. This year, it bloomed.


I can't imagine how old it is. I dug it up in 1992, and there hadn't been any gardening going on there for some time. But it seems happy, it's got babies coming up around it, and this year, it thwarted the wildlife.

My grandfather's house is still standing, but three tiny crappy houses now surround it - two to one side, and one to the other. The house is in terrible condition, an antique falling into desuetude. We drive by once in a while, but it's increasingly sad to see what's happening. But that little piece of it lives on - the lily in my backyard.

Ups and Downs

I've been downloading updates all day long because my office computer took the kind of turn for the worse yesterday that required a complete clean reinstall of everything. No fun. But, Downloading Updates. Doesn't that always sound inherently contradictory?

Speaking of down, why do people "put the baby down"? When you put the dog down, you're euthanizing the poor pup. I find it a tad off-putting when I hear someone talking about putting the baby down.

When my child asks to be picked up, is she saying "uppy" as in guppy, or "uppie" as in yuppie? It's one of the few bits of baby-talk remaining in her vocabulary as she has, sadly, given up saying "lellow" and has "yellow" down pat.






P.S. Do rock bands upload downbeats?

Cats

Besides the fact that we need cats once again just because we need cats, we need cats so that when I make reference to things that make me "want to drink gin straight from the cat bowl", there's an actual cat bowl to hand.

Today, I could have used that cat bowl. I stuck to sauvignon blanc out of a proper glass, but...

Pink White and Blue

Ooh, a pink popsicle from the queen of pink!

I'm going away for the weekend as soon as I can tear myself away from the computer and toss some stuff in the car.

But in the spirit of independence day, I coughed up a whole $10 for my own domain name. So, if you'd be so kind, change your bookmarks and bloglines and google readers, and point yourself to:

www.magpiemusing.com