More Evidence That I Am A Crank

Last week, three weeks before the school year is to end*, the PTA sent out an email with a link to order school supplies for next year. Being the cussed disestablishmentarianist that I am, my first thought was "the hell with that, I'll buy the stuff myself". But I clicked through to see what was on the list, and found, to my enormous irritation, that the first grade supply lists were divided by gender - different lists for boys and girls.

There is one difference between the boxes: the boy's box has one box of 20 gallon sized zippered plastic bags, the girl's box has one box of 50 sandwich sized zippered plastic bags.**

But what thoroughly chaps my hide is that the girl supply list costs twenty cents more! What insidious form of discrimination is this? Isn't it bad enough that women earn less than men? Now it costs more to be a girl, too?

I can't imagine why they didn't split the difference, ten cents more to the boys, and ten cents less to the girls.

And in the end, I just bought the stuff - so I wouldn't have to think about it again - but not without leaving a comment about the pricing.

---

*Here in New York, school starts immediately after Labor Day and runs to the end of June. Anything else just seems weird to me.

**They're classroom supplies - it's not that boys need fewer bigger bags and girls need more smaller bags.

CSA Week 1, Year 3

It must actually be summer, because we picked up our first load of CSA vegetables yesterday (and Niobe's getting hers tonight). It looked like a huge amount, but it's mostly salad ingredients, not that there's anything wrong with that!

• Salad greens
• Sorrel
• Japanese turnips, with greens attached
• Head of red leaf lettuce
• Cilantro
• Parsley
• Asian greens braising mix
• Broccoli rabe
• Scallions
• Radishes

For dinner last night, we had sorrel soup and a chopped salad.

I made Ilina's turnip salad - a tangy mix of turnip, cucumber and avocado (even though the cuke and the avocado had to come from the supermarket).

The soup was more or less invented: I simmered three potatoes (peeled and chopped) in a quart of chicken stock until done, then buzzed them with the hand blender. I then added the sorrel, which I'd cut into ribbons, and a chopped scallion, and cooked it just until the sorrel was wilted (and army green). To finish it, I poured in about a half cup of heavy cream, along with salt and pepper. Simple, easy, and tasty. And the best part might be that there was enough left for my lunch today.

We'll probably do some kind of pasta with the broccoli rabe, and braise the braising greens as a side for some meat. And the salad ingredients? We'll be having salad.

The project for the summer will be to get the girl to eat more vegetables. Any ideas?

Wordless Wednesday: Eek!

Yes, we found it in the cellar. Actually the girlie found it and freaked out. And her grandmother thought it was a rubber toy. We thought they were exaggerating, until we saw it.






PS I'm pretty sure that it was a harmless-to-humans fishing spider.

Sometimes You Have To Go On A Picnic

Sometimes you have to stop everything and go on a picnic in the backyard with your child.

Sometimes you have to let her pack the snacks, rice cakes and blueberries and cheese sticks, though you pour the milk into a straw cup for her, and some gin and limeade into a glass for yourself.

Sometimes you have to let her find the right spot for the blanket.

Sometimes you have to let her cut the rice cakes with a plastic knife.

Sometimes you have to let her pick the wild white flowers with the egg yolk yellow stamens, and sometimes you have to let her paint it like makeup all over your face.

Because sometimes, that's all that's important in the world.

Where I Sleep

Last month, the kindergarten class was working on non-fiction. The girlie came home with a book called "All About Houses" - describing our "gra" house, the "tv rm", and "omo a dad rm" (complete with a drawing of three people in the bed: mom, dad and girlie).

Here's her room:

The bed that she mostly sleeps in (when she's not in with "omo a dad") does have round brass balls at the head and foot, and she does have blue polka dots on her sheets.

And someday, she'll learn to spell better and form her letters correctly, but right now? This is just perfect.

When the Words Come Alive

The girlie is seriously on the verge of reading. I've known it for a while, but she's been resistant to sharing her progress, preferring that we read to her and only slipping up and revealing her ability on occasion.

One day last month, I was reading in bed - a grown-up book - and she was supposed to be falling asleep next to me. Instead, she was reading over my shoulder and showing me all of the words that she knows. She pointed to moment, and said "if you take the end part off, it spells mom". Oh, bestill my heart - that half of moment is mom slays me.

Yesterday, at the library book sale - where I got a box full of books for $25, a box that previously and amusingly once held a case of Ex Libris cabernet - she actually picked up a Dora book aand started reading it out loud. She stumbled quickly on words she couldn't figure out, but holy hell - she's reading.

Reading Aloud Crankiness

Pretty much every night, I read three books to the girlie before bed. Most of the books in rotation are ones I love and I appreciate - after all, as long as I'm doing the reading, I'd better like the books.

But there are a handful that push my buttons, even some of the ones I really like. Madeline, for example, is a great kid's book. The illustrations are charming, the protagonist is plucky, the text is fun to read. In it, as you must know, twelve little girls live in an old house in Paris, until Madeline gets carted off to the hospital to have her appendix removed. Twelve minus one is eleven. So why are there twelve girls eating dinner when Madeline is still in the hospital? It irks me when I see it - I like accuracy at all times.



Not too long ago, I won a copy of a book called Princess Bubble in a contest on The Girl Revolution. It's good - it's all about showing girls that they don't need a prince to live happily ever after. But there's one sentence that curdles my blood every time I see it - so much so that I leave the offending two words out (though I haven't yet gotten out a Sharpie). I ask you, why was it necessary to include "loving god" in a statement as to how to find true happiness? I realize that I'm a heathen pagan atheist, but that gratuitous "loving god" bit rankles me.



What gets your goat in your kid's books?

Nursing

If it's not one thing, it's another, and these days, it all seems to be medically related.

• My father's been in the hospital since Monday, as a result of internal bleeding. He's going to have surgery - but I don't know when, tomorrow maybe?
  
  
• My husband can't see out of one eye, because of idiopathic chorioretinopathy.He's got a little bit of peripheral vision in that eye, but reading is a chore, climbing stairs requires concentration, and driving at night is impossible. It might get better, but it's been three months since it happened.
  
  
• I need to have a colonoscopy next week. Oh, and I have a sore throat.
  

Yesterday we were having birthday cake in the office for a woman whose husband just graduated from nursing school. One thing led to another, and we ended up in an animated conversation about the word "nurse" - namely, does the word itself imply that the person with that job is a woman? My 67 year old male boss thinks that, as stewardess became flight attendant, "nurse" needs a new word without a gender connotation. I think it's sociological and generational - there was a time when nearly all nurses were women, and nearly all doctors were men. But today, if I introduced you to "his wife the doctor", you wouldn't bat an eyelash.  And if you'd been hanging out in the emergency room the other night, while they tried to figure out what was going on with my father, you'd have noticed that nearly half of the ER nurses were male.

Granted, the etymology of the word "nurse" comes from breastfeeding and the nourishment of the young. So, a man can't nurse but can be a nurse.

What do you think? Do you assume that a nurse is going to be female?

Wordless Wednesday: Caterpillar

More Wicker

I want this. It belonged to Maria Callas. Now it's owned by Philippe Starck.

Between this car and my bicycle basket, maybe I have a thing about wicker?

Grace #26 - Creel

If I may say so myself, I have the coolest bicycle basket ever. We went for a ride today, twelve miles along a former train line now paved for non-motorized recreation - and no one, not nobody, had as nice a basket.

It was my idea, and my creel, but my clever husband fabricated the cunning aluminum support structure that attaches the creel to the bicycle.

The only thing missing today was a nice goat cheese and tomato sandwich. Next time, we'll bring lunch.

Graces #13-25 = Thirteen Graces

13. Mail order coffee on auto-delivery.
    
14. The fact that my bluetooth headset never seems to need to be charged.
    
15. Grapefruit cologne.
    
16. When strangers pronounce my last name correctly.
    
17. Aglaia.
    
18. Euphrosyne.
    
19. Thalia.
    
20. Introducing the child to Bringing Up Baby, a movie with dinosaurs AND sharp-toothed animals, not to mention Katharine Hepburn.
21. The smell of warm rain on wet grass.
22. A job where I need not wear shoes in the office.
    
23. Picking arugula that I grew myself.
    
24. Mock Sancerre.
    
25. Internet friends who turn into real life friends, and take pictures of your childhood.
    

Wordless Wednesday: Bubbles and Circles

More Aimless Archeology: I am in no condition to function as a juror at this time.

Pinned to the bulletin board in my mother's office is a piece of paper that my brother wrote up, years ago, in preparation for a big garage sale. It remains a useful set of edicts, as we putter around, trying to begin to clean out our mother's house.

That said, it's nearly impossible to refrain from aimless archeology. I found my "Five Year" diary, locked and missing its key. Unable to resist, I cut the strap and spent far too long looking through my deep thoughts from 1970 to 1977 (yeah, more than five years). It ranges from the banal to the ridiculous, and includes crushes on a shocking number of boys. Today being May 24, I had to check and see what I was doing on that day: in 1972, at age eleven, my mother took me to the ballet (which means that she probably took me out of school since it was a Wednesday), and I went home on the train alone.

We found a file folder of jury duty notices and receipts, and a wonderful letter in which my mother asked for a postponement of jury duty.

And we threw away many many pairs of grimy tube socks, and some eye shadow that dated to, oh, 1966? Let's put it this way: I remember that eye shadow from playing dress-up as a kid.

Heirlooms

I suppose that if I were a real gardener, I'd grow my tomatoes from seed. But I'm not, and we get lots of great tomatoes from our CSA, and can get lots more tomatoes at farmstands and the like.

But I do like to put in a couple of plants, just because. And if you only want two plants, it doesn't make any sense at all to buy a package of seed, most of which will go to waste. Furthermore, most of what we'll get from the CSA will be plain red tomatoes - great, but not unusual. So, I want to grow something different, off the beaten track.

I picked up my two tomato plants the other day, from Silver Heights Farm, a vendor at the Union Square Greenmarket who sells nothing but seedlings, almost all of which are heirloom varieties of herbs and flowers and vegetables that you've never heard of.

• Black Krim, 75 days, I. This heirloom has become quite popular in the farmers’ marketplace, but is a bit tricky to harvest. Pick before it appears to have developed full color and ripeness, when the fruit is still somewhat firm. 10-12 oz., dark brown-red is darker in hot weather. Interior is a deep reddish green. A hint of saltiness, unusually juicy, with plenty of meaty texture. This heavy producer is prone to cracking and catfacing. From Krymsk on the Black Sea of Russia.
  
  
• Dagma’s Perfection, 73 days, I. This elegant fruit is bi-colored, pale yellow with delicate, light red striping. Slightly flattened, 12 ounces, with 3” diameter. Flesh is firm and juicy with hints of tropical fruit and lime. 
  

I can't wait to slice one of each, and lay them on a plate, and drizzle them with olive oil, and sprinkle them with kosher salt, and bedeck them with chopped basil.  Two and a half months to heaven.

Four Random Things

How's this? A YEAR ago, She She tagged me for a meme. A whole year ago.

And six months ago, Cold Spaghetti did too.

Obviously, I never get anything done, though I am good at making to do lists. Cold Spaghetti wanted six random things, and She She wanted thirteen. Thirteen plus six is too many; here are four:

1. Growing up, my mother always used charge cards - she had a card for every single department store in the area, before the wide spread development of credit cards that could be used anywhere. I was shockingly old before I realized that you could go to Macy's or Lord & Taylor and pay cash. I didn't know they took cash. I thought they only took charge cards.


2. I love driving with the windows open.  I love driving with the music up loud.  I hate air-conditioning.  All of this means that I really prefer to be alone in the car, because windows open + loud music = conversation is impossible.


3. Flannel sheets are never as plush as the day they come out of the package - it's just all downhill from there. On the other hand, good 100% cotton percale gets better and better, and finally, when it's perfect? It disintegrates. I prefer percale.


4. The secret to nonagenarian lucidity is Red Bull, at least as evidenced by one Ruth Cummins, who was quoted on the front page of today's New York Times.
   

Pride and Twitter

Pause now, and acknowledge, universally, that Mad has done the be all and the end all; she's rendered Pride and Prejudice in Twitterspeak.

I am speechless with awe and admiration.

Go read her post. It will be your good fortune.

Wordless Wednesday: Lilac

[This isn't the standard garden lilac - it's got much smaller leaves and a more open flower structure, and while it smells wonderful, it doesn't smell quite the same. But it's lovely, none-the-less. I think it's Syringa microphylla, the littleleaf lilac. But it came with the house, and I don't know for sure.]

Serendipitous Photography

You know how one thing leads to another? Queen Goob was waxing rhapsodic about men in kilts, and I remembered that somewhere in my house I have a picture of a penis. An uncircumcised penis, if you must know.

I'd found one day, stashed away somewhere, a forgotten disposable camera. We finished off the roll with cute pictures of kittens and rainbows, and sent it off to be developed. When the photos came back, I was shocked - really - to find a picture of an unrecognizable penis in the lot. I mean, I didn't take the picture, and I didn't know it had been taken, and I didn't know whose it was.

We had, almost a year earlier, gone to a Robert Burns dinner, at which all the men wore kilts and sporrans. We'd taken the camera along, and clearly someone had had taken the old "picture up the skirt". So the answer to the old question about what the Scots wear under their kilts? Now you know.

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

Back when we got married, we had a somewhat untraditional and informal wedding, for which we didn't hire a photographer. Lots of people took pictures, and we had about a dozen disposable cameras on hand. For the most part, those cameras came back with a mish-mosh of good and not-so-good images, but one of them included gem after gem. I never found out who had taken those pictures, but it was someone with a good eye.

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

For Christmas, I got a new camera, and we turned over the old one to the girl. It's a little digital camera, nothing fancy, but she loves taking pictures with it. She arranges her stuffed animals, and poses her parents.  And once in a while, we remember to slurp the images off of the camera card, and find such funny things, like Alex the lion, taken when she should have been going to sleep.

Onions

When you see the chives in flower, you understand that the giant allium that blooms in the perennial bed is in the onion family. It's like a mammoth chive blossom.

Count Your Blessing

Yeah, the blog, she is unlocked!! Phew. I did copy all of the posts into a Word file, so it's now stored at home, and I imported the whole thing into a Wordpress blog, just in case. But, I am happy that I don't have to learn a new platform - at least just yet. Phew. What controversial stuff have I been posting that lead the powers that be to flag me as a spam blog?

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon with Liz and Emily at their Picnic With A Purpose - a fun time with hotdogs and paint and cupcakes and bloggers. It was great to put a face to some blogs.

On the way to the picnic, the kid piped up with:

Her: This music makes me feel like an Indian.

Me: What kind of Indian?

Her: Pocahontas

The thing is, we were listening to Prince. Controversy, to be exact (which, tangentially, always sounds to me like he's singing "count your blessing" which almost makes sense in the context of the song). When pressed, she said that Pocahontas wanted to be free too. She then went off on a unified theory of the universe, telling me that Hannah Montana's brother was named Prince, after the Prince that we were listening to, and that, somehow, this Prince is related to Hannah Montana, and in fact "he sounds like Hannah Montana". If Prince were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave now.

Skinny Asparagus Is Stupid

I totally stole the title of this post. There used to be a food & recipe column in the Village Voice, like a really long time ago, because I'm like really old. It was called "Waiting For Dessert" and ran under the pseudonym Vladimir Estragon. Get it?

Actually it was written by Geoffrey Stokes, who was a pretty good writer on music and other stuff, but I really liked the food column. It's where I picked up the trick of sweating onions in the butter that becomes the white sauce for a macaroni and cheese - it gives it a nice depth of flavor.

Anyway, once upon a time, he titled a column "Skinny Asparagus is Stupid" and went on a tear about the relative values of fat and thin asparagus. I'm firmly in the fat stalks camp, but they can be hard to find.

It's asparagus season right this very minute, and it's all over the greenmarket, but most of the vendors have it bundled into convenient pre-weighed one pound bundles so you don't get to pick big or little. But yesterday, someone had it loose! And not only was it loose, they had a lot of really fat spears. I stood there teasing out the fattest of the fat, until I had a pound and a half of them, and it was only 14 stalks! The biggest is an inch in diameter at the base.


We're having a feast tomorrow.

Wardrobe Wednesday, with gratuitous cuteness

Canada geese are rather a scourge, but lordy lordy, the babies are cute.



This baby's pretty cute too. She wanted to wear all dark colors to school: black tights, navy skirt, black camisole, navy sweater, black shoes - but we had a morning meltdown of epic proportion because the black camisole was in the laundry. Eventually, she consented to the orange tank top, tucked into the skirt and with the sweater buttoned over it. As you can see, by day's end, she'd gotten over it.

A Man In A Red Tutu

Among the great pleasures to be found in the New York Times are the often witty photo essays by Bill Cunningham. He rides 'round town on a bicycle, taking pictures on the street and at various benefit parties.

Last week, I got an invitation* to the opening of the Design on a Dime benefit for Housing Works. Housing Works is a dual purpose organization, "committed to ending the twin crises of AIDS and homelessness", and they run some fabulous thrift shops in support of their mission. The Design on a Dime event gathered designery types, and let them loose to create stylish "room vignettes" with materials gathered from the thrift shops.

It was all very entertaining, and there was plenty of wine, and enough food, and at least 90% of the men were gay, and Peter claims they all go to his gym, and they were all very beautiful, and it's too bad for Peter that he had to be my walker, and even the staffers in t-shirts were fabulous, like this bald man in a red tutu and fishnet tights and high-heeled boots, but none of that is the point.

The best part of the night was spotting Bill Cunningham tap a woman on the shoulder. She demurred, and turned away, but then came to her senses (after conferring with a friend) and followed him. We watched as he asked her to sit on the arm of a chair, a wing chair covered in a black fabric with gold squiggles, a chair that well matched her black jacket with gold squiggles. It was entirely charming to watch him in action, and I was sorely disappointed that the lady and the chair didn't make it into Sunday's Evening Hours.






*BlogHer's doing something with Kmart, and Kmart was one of the underwriters of the benefit, and BlogHer got them to invite the NY-metro area bloggers, or that's what I was led to believe. I checked in at the press table. Where's my press pass?

Literalmindedness

Me, reading aloud from "Now We Are Six":

No one can tell me,
   Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
   Where the wind goes.

Her, interrupting:

It comes from the South Pole!

Now you know.

Annals of Gardening: Garden Club Sales

The next best thing to digging up plants at my mother's house are the annual garden club sales. Oh sure, they sell some commercial stuff like six-packs of impatiens and hanging pots of petunias, but the good stuff, the stuff I want, is the stuff people pot up out of their own backyards.

By some grace of scheduling, I got to hit two sales this morning, one starting at 8 in the next town over, and my town's at 9. I did buy some basil and a six-pack of lobelia, but mostly I scored a mess of perennials, eleven pots in all. It's like the plant material equivalent of locavore eating - it all came from with a few miles of my house.

I got huge pots of phlox and nepeta, and little ones of heuchera and pulmonaria. There's physostegia and penstemon and wood geranium and corydalis. But my favorite two were a pot marked yellow iris that also contained thalictrum, and a pot marked brunnera that included a piece of variegated hosta. Clearly the iris likes the thalictrum and the brunnera complements the hosta, or their former owners liked the combinations. In any case, I transplanted them as I got 'em.

Here's hoping my local plants like their new locale.

IVF Shoes

Shoes.
Necklace.
Memory.
Child.

Do you know about IVF shoes? They're not the shoes that you wear into the retrieval room, but the shoes you buy yourself as a prize for bearing all those damned needles. I'm not even a shoe whore, and I had IVF shoes.

The first clinic I went to was right around the corner from a Taryn Rose shoe store. Daily trips past the window, and one day I just had to go in and buy an expensive pair of sweet black heels with a teensy strap across the instep. In point of fact, they weren't even IVF shoes, they were IUI shoes - that was the sticking-the-toes-in-the-water cycle. No baby. Just shoes.

The next cycle, the first IVF cycle, resulted in a necklace. It was something I'd been eyeballing, coveting even, for quite a while. I can't now remember when we bought the necklace - whether it was during the cycle, or the wait, or after we found out that I was pregnant. It seemed to me a perfect necklace for a mother-to-be, two similar stones, one a little bigger than the other.

And then we lost the baby.

Probably out of some vague superstition - another necklace, another miscarriage? - we told almost no one about the second IVF cycle, and it garnered no trinkets. It lives on, but just in memory, mine mostly, and on some scraps of paper with cryptic notes as to E2 and lining and units.

The third IVF has a very tangible aide memoire in that raucous, tiger-loving, clothes-horse who climbs into my bed for a snuggle every morning.

Back to the necklace. After the miscarriage, the necklace became my memory. It's all that remains of that pregnancy and the two rocks now represent my two children, the big one getting bigger, the small one never to be.

I was thinking about this the other day - Niobe is doing a babylost memorial walk this weekend and offered to remember the "baby or babies that you hold only in your heart" if you send her the names and dates. There is no name, there is no date, there's only what's in my heart - and the necklace.

(PS - That's not my necklace, but mine's the same style. It's made by one Terri Logan, who makes sterling settings for found river stones.)

Cinco de Mayo Macaroons

One of the things about having a full time job is that I have little or no contact with the PTA mothers in my kid's school. I think this may be a good thing.

Back in September, feeling guilted into participation by a ream of paper sent home with the newly minted kindergartener, I signed up to help out at the May Teacher Appreciation Lunch. Yes, in September they were looking for May volunteers. I figured it was going to be a potluck thing, like the Teacher Appreciation Lunches where I work - heartfelt, but nothing to write home about.

Um, no.

A few weeks back, I got a call from the woman coordinating the event. Are you still able to help out? It's a Cinco de Mayo theme.

This was to be no ordinary potluck, no. The committee picked recipes, prepared them and taste-tested them, and then issued edicts and recipes to the hapless volunteers.

By the time she got around to calling me, they were down to two dishes that they still needed people to make - a marinated flank steak, and coconut macaroons. Poking it with a stick, I had to ask what coconut macaroons had to do with Cinco de Mayo. Well, everyone loves them and they're light and all the teachers are always on a diet.

I sighed and put coconut and sweetened condensed milk on the shopping list.

Luckily all I had to do was make the macaroons and deliver them to school, because this turned out to be one enormous production. There were volunteers standing by the drop off lane at school this morning, collecting food, checking names off the list, and handing out cookbooks. Yes - they collated copies of all eleven* of the recipes and handed them out to thank the volunteers. If the committee settled on eleven, how many do you think they included in the taste test?

There's a piece of me that is grateful to live in a town with a strong, well-organized PTA. I'm happy that I'm not nickel and dimed at every turn, that we're not commanded to do this or show up for that. At the same time, they seem to have a lot of time on their hands, and I wonder if this organizational energy could be better spent.

I think I'll just keep taking the train to work. It keeps me out of trouble.




*grilled chicken, grilled flank steak, five salads and four desserts - and the macaroons were an Ina Garten recipe, but I thought they were too sweet and gummy.

Things Learned From My Mother: Ballet

Missing my mother is something that I feel in unpredictable odd moments, though the stabs of absence last week were all about the ballet.

We've kept, for now anyway, her tickets to City Ballet. This spring, Romeo+Juliet turned up on the subscription, and I promptly turned them in for a matinee of Coppelia - I figured that a comic ballet about dolls and trickery might be better for a five year old than a bastardization of a Shakespeare tragedy.

To brush up on the story, I started in my own bookshelves where I've got a copy of Balanchine's Festival of Ballet that my mother gave me years ago. I then trotted off to the public library and found two picture books and a DVD. One of the books was Margot Fonteyn's telling of Coppelia; once when my mother had taken me to something at the New York State Theater, she spotted Fonteyn in the audience and sent me over for an autograph - and Fonteyn refused! Bitch. The DVD starred Fernando Bujones as Franz; back in the day, my mother used to take me out of school to see stuff, and we were in the audience when Bujones brought down the house as a 15 year old at the School of American Ballet workshop.

So not only did I use her tickets to take my daughter to Coppelia, my mother made her presence felt each time I turned around.

Moky, thank you for having introduced me to the ballet.

Eggs, Found - and a Prize

Several weeks ago, I threw down a kitchen gauntlet when I posted that recipe for Eggs In Hiding. I expected that it might make people run screaming from the room, and most did, but two stepped up and made it.

De both made the original, and invented a modern variation, and decided the original was better.

Kristin too made a modern variation, which her husband declared was good enough to eat again.

I promised them each a kitchen implement - De's package is in the mail, Kristin's will be if she send me her address (hint).

And Holly? I'm still waiting. I know you bought the corn flakes. She made it, and her kids ate it all up.

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

Some time ago, Kelly gave me a prize. Since prizes like to be passed along, and seeing as both De and Kristin created new versions of the Eggs in Hiding recipe, I hereby bestow the Kreativ Blogger award on them.

Dogwood Haiku

A leaning dogwood

So lovely, so hopeful, yet

Not long for this world

There's a dogwood in our yard, a white dogwood just hanging on. It arches down the hill, unbalanced, because one of its uphill branches rotted and fell off, and another cut loose one day when we were rescuing the tree from some pernicious vines that a previous owner had allowed to run rampant.

Someday, the rest of the tree will go, but until then, I love its eccentric lean, its vaguely Japanese aspect, its crisp white flowers brightening a foggy day.

Ramps And Asparagus

It being spring now in full fettle, the Greenmarket is starting to hop and it's the fleeting season of ramps. Ramps, sometimes called wild leeks, are a member of the onion family, skinny white at the bottom (like scallions) and with two or three broad green leaves above (sort of like a leek). They are potent and delicious, and are only available for a couple of weeks.

The asparagus is starting to come in too, so yesterday I grabbed a bunch of each and coerced W. into making pasta with ramps and asparagus for dinner.

He blanched the asparagus in the water that the pasta was going to go in, chopped the ramps and sauteed them in olive oil, added the chopped asparagus, tossed in some fresh lemon juice, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and served it with shaved parmesan.

Heaven in a bowl.

Read, Listen, Care

My dog is not dead.

But I suppose I have only myself to blame for the email I got yesterday from someone who wanted to buy ad space on my blog:

Hey, my name is Lisa with XXXXXX. I recently came across your blog. I really appreciated your post after your dog died. We had to put my cat down yesterday, and it was sad to see him go after 18 years. Thanks for your posts! On another note…I thought you might be willing to help us. We’re trying to improve our search rankings with...

Clearly, Lisa didn’t get past my admittedly misleading post title Mourning Dogs – she leapt to the conclusion that I was mourning a dog, when in fact I was mourning my mother. I've never even owned a dog!

Once upon a time, I worked at a big theater. The subscription manager there – who had to deal with the public all the time – had a frequently iterated saying: "They don’t read, they don’t listen and they don’t care."

At least weekly, I think of her, and that line of hers. Because it's true. They don't read, they don't listen and they don't care.

Tutti Frutti, yet again

Really, there's nothing like an old cookbook. I was kind of on a roll, what with the eggs in hiding and the tangerines, and then Harriet M. Welsch turned me onto an 1887 collaborative cookbook full of fabulous recipes and lovely hints, like "A cup of strong coffee will remove the odor of onions from the breath" (though it fails to mention what to do about the subsequent coffee breath).

There's a recipe for French Toast on page 14, that calls for gravy and no eggs. The missing eggs turn up on page 75, in a concoction called Egg Lemonade - lemon, water, sugar and an egg, all shook up in a mason jar - not something that I really want to drink (and neither do I want to drink "Farmer's Lemonade" which isn't in the Kirmess cookbook but which the guy behind the counter at City Bakery told me was lemonade topped off with half and half, but I digress).

What really made my day was the recipe for Brandied Fruits in the form of a poem. A poem!

If you didn't make brandied fruits last summer, plan to do it this year. It's really that good.

Use a big jar - three quarts or a gallon. Start with a bottle of brandy. Add summer fruit as it comes into season. For every 10 ounces of fruit you add to the jar, add seven ounces of sugar. Stir occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Use up to 10 pounds of fruit all together. Include raspberries, strawberries, peaches, plums, grapes. I found that blueberries were weird - their skins got tough. You could use some pineapple if you don't care about using only local fruit. Come summer's end, put it aside until December. Then, bottle it up and give most of it away as Christmas presents. Save some for yourself. Eat over vanilla ice-cream.

Yum.

Antique cookbooks are good for something.

Repeat Re-Piet

One of the things about this blogging business is that I've found a whole mess of people - spread hither and yon across the country, the globe even - who are kindred spirits, members of my tribe.  

One of them is Niobe - a complicated, provocative and erudite woman - who I've only met once but who I feel like I know.

The other day, Niobe posted a link to a website that digests a bit of personal information about you and generates you in the form of a mock Mondrian.  Being susceptible, and having a long-standing affection for Mondrian anyway, born of an early exposure to Broadway Boogie-Woogie, I clicked.  Here I am, rendered in the style of Mondrian. I suppose if the site had allowed the choice of more than one hair color, one of which could have been blue, it would have come out differently, but since the blue is artifice, this will have to do.

Now, go click over to Niobe's post to look at her Mondrian, and then come back.

I ask you, are we not of the same tribe?

Graces #8 to 12 - Spring

#8
The smell of the flowers on the pachysandra - before yesterday, I never knew that pachysandra in bloom had such a lovely, sweet fragrance.

#9
Free compost from the town dump - I love the dump, I love that they take leaves and other garden waste, and turn it into rich, beautiful compost for the taking. We made three trips, and top-dressed all of the perennial beds.

#10
The joy of the child as she ran through the sprinkler, dug in the dirt, mixed up mud, "saved" worms, and helped me to plant seeds.

#11
How nicely my rhubarb is thriving - my neighbor gave me a piece in full leaf at the end of last summer, while they were packing up to move, and I was worried that it wouldn't take.

#12
The gorgeous salmon pink of the flowering quince in full bloom - I don't care that Dirr finds it "over-rated", in its moment of glory it is a beautiful thing (and the deer and the bunnies don't eat it).

Mourning Dogs

The morning after Moky died, I made a single phone call to a neighbor - a woman about my age whose family has been close to ours for a long long time. In what seemed like an instant, there were four women in the kitchen with my sister and me, drinking coffee, laughing, eating bagels, sniffling - someone called it "sitting shiksa".

The day after the memorial party, my brother and my sister and four of the grandchildren and I went for a walk down to the water, where the little people turned over rocks looking for crabs.

We're not Jewish. We don't sit shiva. But somehow, our walk to the bay was like what Jews do at the end of the shiva, a walk around the block to signify a return to daily living.

On the way back, we saw a lost dog sign plastered to a telephone pole. Moky would have liked the sign, and I believe she'd have assumed that the dog ran away because his owner is grammatically and punctuationally challenged:

Missing dog
Dogs name is jack
Problem is he is afraid of
people, so if you see him
call me at...

Or maybe his owner's a poet.

Doritos and Wine and Sunshine

All in all, that party we had for our mother went off well.

It was a beautiful day - nice enough to put tables and chairs out on the porch, nice enough that the various children could run around on the lawn.

There were any number of touching moments - like when Jack got out of his car with a dozen baguettes, and armful of flowers, and two bags of Doritos.  Jack's an old friend of my brother's, an old friend of everyone's, and he knew her back when she had a serious Dorito addiction - like a bag a night. She'd make one of us get in the car with her, and she'd drive to the deli, where she'd wait at the curb while we'd run in with $2.39 for her chip fix.

Lewis brought a shovel, because I told him to, and dug up bits of her plants to take to his new garden.  

People came that we didn't expect, some that we didn't invite. There were people I went to high school with, ladies from the League of Women Voters, neighbors near and far. There were women from Moky's class in college, and relatives of all of Moky's children-in-law (including some Canadians). There were dogs and babies and old people with canes.

And we didn't run out of wine.

If she taught us anything, she taught us how to throw a good party.

Catherine Wants...

That child of mine? Oy.

She's in an afterschool program, and one of the teachers there is the aide in her kindergarten classroom. This is a good thing, because when I pick her up at afterschool, I get to chat with the aide and find out how things are going - I talk with the aide a lot more than I talk with the actual teacher.

Well, the other day, I went in to get her and the aide told me that they had had a substitute teacher in the kindergarten classroom that day. And at some point, the aide was out of the room for a bit, and when she came back in, the sub said "Catherine has a question". The aide said to the sub, "We don't have a Catherine". The sub gestures over to - yes - my child, who has introduced herself to the kindergarten substitute teacher as CATHERINE, which, granted, is her middle name, but is not something anyone ever calls her except me sometimes when I'm trying to make a point by using her first and middle names for emphasis.

Yeah.  I thought they learned that "confuse the sub" thing when they were a bit older.

When I expressed to my sister my concern about having a teenager one day, she indicated that she thought perhaps I already had a teenager, and that maybe therefore the actual teenage years will be a piece of cake.

I hope so.

Tangerines

One of the cookbooks I picked up when I was looking for a recipe for pickled eggs was the 1941 Escoffier Cook Book - the American edition of Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire.

It is a daunting tome: all of the recipes are given in synopsis and assume that the cook has an extensive and practical ability to get by in the kitchen. After failing to locate anything as pedestrian as a pickled egg, the book fell open to a recipe for tangerines:

2687 – Almina Tangerines
Cut a slice of the peel from the stem-end of the tangerines by means of a round, even cutter, one inch in diameter. Then empty them, and fill the peels with a preparation of Bavarian cream with violets, combined with crumbled lady-fingers, sprinkled with Maraschino. Close the tangerines with the slice cut off at the start; let them set in a cool place, and, at the last moment, lay them on a dish covered with a folded napkin.

Besides the absolute poetry in the spare instructions of the recipe, I do so love that this recipe for tangerines uses no part of the tangerine but the peel. What does one do with the flesh?

Blue

For months, I've been idly considering dying my hair blue. Or a bit of it. But just the right shade. And I didn't really think I'd have the gumption.

But the other day, while we were out food shopping for Moky's party, I detoured into the CVS next to the Trader Joe's and bought a box of Blue Envy. Later in the afternoon, my sister-in-law, who is no stranger to hair dye, did the dirty work.

Being your straight-laced suburban mother with a full-time office job, who never wears make-up and doesn't hide the grey, I've been getting a lot of double-takes.

I think my mother would have been equal parts horrified and titillated. And really, I did it for her.

But I'm enormously pleased with it.



[It's just a little hank that got dyed, and when I tuck my hair behind my ear, you can hardly tell see the blue.]

Relay

Later today, we're having a memorial party for my mother. We've laid in rather a lot of wine, some spirits, much cheese and many crackers. The house is already full of people, and countless more will arrive in dribs and drabs all afternoon. We're expecting that many of them will want to walk through the house, the house that was my mother's life work in a way, a house she restored and decorated and filled with all manner of antiques and whimsy and spare parts. So we've fluffed and tidied, and my sister is outside cutting forsythia, which is in full bloom right this very minute.

It rather breaks my heart that Moky retired at 65, only to be diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer at 69, and to die of that cancer at 73. She had so much more to do - more things to knit and sew, more pictures to frame, more shrubbery to prune, more books to read, more places to visit. Instead, slowly, inexorably, her light went out.

In a couple of months, my sister will again walk in the American Cancer Society's Relay For Life. It's her way of honoring our mother, and her father-in-law, both of whom recently died of cancer.

If you have a reason to do so - and who doesn't - won't you support Relay For Life? Clicking on the luminaria will take you to my sister's page. I'll thank you, and she will, and maybe your donation will help kick cancer's ass.

Eggs In Hiding

Growing up, we always had a spare fridge in the cellar. It was kept stocked with beer and soda, no-name soda and Schaefer long necks – the refillable kind. My parents would order two cases of beer from the beer store, they’d be delivered to the back stoop and the empties would be taken away.

Every year at Easter, we’d dye six dozen hard-boiled eggs. After the requisite "hide them in the garden and hope you find them all", some of the eggs would get turned into egg salad, or tucked into school lunches, but most of them got pickled, and stashed in the downstairs fridge alongside the beer and soda.

The eggs were packed into quart sized mason jars, and took on an off-putting shade of grey green – from what spice, I’ve no idea. Despite the fact that they were a household staple, I don’t think I ever ate one.

Feeling nostalgic the other day, I thumbed through a bunch of cookbooks looking for some pickled eggs. I only found them in one cookbook, The Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook. As befits an encyclopedia, it is comprehensive – running to nearly a thousand pages, and including at least 20 recipes for hard-cooked eggs.

The pickled eggs recipe is pretty straightforward (boil 2 T. sugar, 1 t. salt and 1 t. mixed spices in 2 cups of cider vinegar – pour it over a dozen hard-boiled eggs in a mason jar – let stand for a couple of days before using), but another recipe demanded to be shared.

EGGS IN HIDING

1 T. butter
1 can condensed tomato soup
½ pound American cheese, diced
6 hard-cooked eggs
1 cup cereal flakes, crushed

Heat butter and soup in top of double boiler. Add cheese and cook until melted, stirring constantly. Arrange halves of hard-cooked eggs (cut lengthwise) in buttered baking dish. Pour cheese mixture over eggs. Sprinkle with cereal flakes. Brown under broiler. Serves 6.

If you are brave enough to make this, and post a picture on your blog, I will send you a kitchen implement. Start peeling those eggs! And no, I can’t tell you what kind of cereal to use, but I think you should serve it on toast points.

---

This post instigated in part by the Parent Bloggers Network on behalf of the incredible egg, and I approved this message.

Wardrobe Wednesday: Easter Sunday

Pink shirt over hot pink dress, blue patterned vest, blue patterned tights, yellow rainboots, yellow egg!

Bouncing Baby Coconut

When last we saw the coconut, it had arrived at my husband's office, via the United States Postal Service, bedecked in a fetching red hat, just in time for the Christmas holiday.

I asked for suggestions as to the coconut's next incarnation, and to my great delight, the lovely and talented Very Mary* volunteered: "Do you trust me enough to send the coconut here and allow me to have a crack at it? I'd be honored to decorate it and then send it on for you..." I tell you, I swooned when she left that comment.

We emailed back and forth, I mailed the coconut off to her, and she discovered the inner infant in the well-traveled nut.

Last week, Very Mary gently wrapped the new baby and mailed it off to my new nephew, confounding his parents and thrilling his aunts.

A big welcome to the little baby, and a huge round of applause for Very Mary!





* She has a blog and not one, but two etsy shops!

Kant and Corollary

There's a subway poster up these days, quoting Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing entirely straight can be built." The Times riffed on that the other day, declaring that it was descriptive of present-day dysfunctional Albany.

But I wonder, is the corollary true?

Out of the straight timber of humanity, nothing crooked can be built.

So Utopian, no?

Grace #7 - Breakfast in Bed

We scarpered off this weekend, to my father's house, where there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Saturday morning, I was delivered breakfast in bed, by the five year old, who had made me "fire-toasted bread" - with supervision, she'd toasted a piece of rye bread in the fireplace. She was delighted with herself, and I eventually went downstairs to tell her father that this was the parenting moment I'd been waiting for.

Sight Words

Years ago, I got a free sample of some Post-It "Sight Words". I tucked the package away, figuring that someday we'd be working on teaching Miss M. to read. The time has come.

We've been having fun with them - they're the super sticky Post-Its, so they don't fall off the wall. They're up near our kitchen table, and we move them around trying to make sentences. Alas, there are very few sentences that work with just the existing words, so I resorted to an index card with a modified noun.

Using the following ten words with no added nouns, how many sentences can you make?

A - Am - I - Is - Like - Me - On - The - To - We

The Household Guide To Dying

Call me perverse, or maybe masochistic, but back in mid-March I signed up for a Mother Talk book tour, for a book called The Household Guide to Dying. Given that my mother was in the process of dying, and did so before I finished the book, it was a ... (read more)

Wardrobe Wednesday: Oh, The Outfits

Okay, after the last time I posted a picture of Miss M. in one of her fanciful get-ups, I vowed to take her picture every day for a week, partially because I was encouraged to do so by Jessica, who also has a child with a penchant for Outfits with a Capital O.

Needless to say, I didn't manage to take a picture every day for a week, but here are nine recent mug shots.

The "skirt" in the left most photo is actually an old nightie of my mother's. The shirt in the 2nd photo was a gift from Nonlinear Nora. The black velvet dress was mine, made by my mother, and the shoes are the red shoes of my childhood - she went to a birthday party in that outfit. The right-hand picture is her doing Wii boxing, in a thoroughly ordinary pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

In this set, note that she's wearing the same skirt in #1 and 3, and the same shirt in #2 and 4. Nearly all of her tights have holes in them, as in #1. In #2, she's wearing tights under summer length capris. #3 kind of takes the cake - patterned socks, patterned leggings, a purple skirt, a pink shirt, with a denim shirt/vest over - this was her "hippie" outfit - "I look like Berger!" Then again, #4 is kind of out there. She did not actually wear that scarf to school, however.

And once again, we've got the capri pants with tights underneath - this time with blue fair-isle patterned tights under engineer striped pants.

Someday, she's going to hate me for taking these pictures.

Garlic And Sapphires In The Mud

I've never really understood much poetry - I'm far too literal-minded for it. But in casting my eyes over the bookshelves in the living room as my mother lay dying, the poetry shelf beckoned to me, because it's a short form that can be read aloud without much overt comprehension. The flow of the words washes past, the prosody of the text provides its own delight. And for all my posturing about my lack of understanding, I've long had a sneaker for The Four Quartets, quite possibly solely for the "garlic and sapphires in the mud" line - which I love for its juxtaposition of the earthy and the frou-frou, the pungent and the refined.

Imagine, then, my bemusement at the poetic expressions of sympathy offered up by friends and relatives and commenters.

Herewith a couple of poems that didn't come as comments:

A friend sent this by email:

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

--Philip Larkin

And my sister-in-law (on the other side, not the one that just had a baby) put this on the private family blog:

Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard


A life should leave

deep tracks:

ruts where she

went out and back

to get the mail
or move the hose

around the yard;

where she used to

stand before the sink,

a worn-out place;

beneath her hand,

the china knobs

rubbed down to

white pastilles;

the switch she

used to feel for

in the dark

almost erased.

Her things should

keep her marks.

The passage

of a life should show;

it should abrade.

And when life stops,

a certain space

—however small—

should be left scarred

by the grand and

damaging parade.

Things shouldn’t

be so hard.


--Kay Ryan

I am deeply appreciative of the support I've received from you sturdy readers; thank you for being there.

Time Present and Time Past

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

For months, we've been saying "she's waiting for the baby". And in a moment of cosmic grace, my sister-in-law delivered the baby boy on Tuesday morning at 11:16, and my mother died Wednesday morning at about 12:30. She waited for the baby, and the baby had the wherewithal to arrive about 10 days ahead of his due date.

Tuesday night was a long night, my sister and I sitting at either side of our mother's bed. I read to her, the whole of The Four Quartets. We told her the baby's name; we showed her his picture. We listened to the Tschaikovsky Violin Concerto, to Glenn Gould playing The Goldberg Variations, and finally, to the beginning of Handel's Messiah, getting as far as the first chorus, the fugal "will be revealed".


And now begins and now ends - the circle of life, writ large.