Nature > Art :: Art > Nature

Sometimes, there are moments of serendipity.

One of the stops on our little Boston jaunt was the art museum at my alma mater, which had a small installation by Kiki Smith, "Artist as Curator". It was the kind of installation that really appeals to me - a mash-up if you will - in this case, many many vessels arrayed in cubbyholes. The vessels were varied in size, material, age, color, purpose - but all of the objects could be construed as a vessel, a container of some sort.

The object in the array that I came back to several times is no longer a vessel - instead it's a now fused stack of broken Chinese porcelain, found at a shipwreck*. It's crusted with barnacles, and it's taken on a whole other aspect, somehow organic, with insect-like articulation along the stacked bowls. Nature has created art from a man-made thing.

Later during the weekend, we saw a documentary, something that I've been meaning to watch for about two years. I'd thrown the DVD in my bag thinking if there were downtime in the hotel, it might be perfect. And it was.

Rivers and Tides is about Andy Goldsworthy, a British sculptor who works with natural materials. Sometimes he builds things, permanent things, like the serpentine rock wall at Storm King or the many ovoid cairns he's done in different places. But lots of his work is ephemeral - it lives for moments, or a day, recorded in memory or through photography. He'll pin leaves together with pine needles, sewing a long ribbon, which he then sets loose on a river. He'll build driftwood arches where the tide will wash them away. He breaks and re-forms icicles to create loops round a tree - until they melt. It's breathtakingly creative and a little bit crazy. And it's kind of the opposite of the Chinese porcelain sculpture - it's man turning nature into art.



Somehow, the juxtaposition of experiencing that Chinese porcelain in the museum and the ephemeral natural art in the documentary sparked all kinds of creative juices in me. It's related to my impulse to knit hats out of scrap yarn, or make blankets out of old t-shirts. It's the revisiting of a material and giving it new form, new life.



*Sotheby's auctioned off many of the salvaged pieces; their press release on the shipwreck and the sale is here (it's a pdf).

Trot, trot, to Boston...Home, home again

We had a whirlwind trip to Boston - entertaining to a fare-thee-well.

• On the way there, we stopped to wander around "my" college campus, grabbed a cheap lunch in the student center, and scampered through the art museum - where Mir announced that she wanted to marry a sculpture, a non-figurative sculpture that took up a whole gallery.
• After checking into the hotel, we looked at the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden, before embarking on the corny touristy but lots of fun Duck Tour.
• At a steak house near the hotel, I had a sublime goat cheese croquette with tomato and chorizo - and the girl had plain pasta. Yes, I know it was a steak house.
• We splurged on room service for breakfast on Saturday before heading out to the aquarium to see sharks and seals and starfish.
• On the recommendation of the hotel concierge, we had lunch at a fish place in the North End, where we perpetrated a most extreme fraud on the child: we ordered her a plate of fried clams, and told her they were chicken nuggets. And she ate them, and loved them, and they were really good, as was absolutely everything there.
• We hiked a teensy bit of the Freedom Trail, including the Paul Revere House, The Old North Church, and the Copp's Hill Burying Ground. We ended up at the USS Constitution - which we skipped because the line was way too long.
• After being out all day, we relaxed in the hotel pool - and W. and I took turns in the saunas and steam rooms, while the girl bobbed in and out of the water.
• Because we were beat and lazy, we had dinner at the hotel restaurant on Saturday night, where we had a charming and chatty waiter who reminded me that you can buy wine at Trader Joe's on Sundays in Massachusetts!
• Sunday morning, we checked out and drove to Cambridge, where we had crepes with a blogger (and her little fat baby).
• The glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History were next - and the girl got to hold a chunk of coprolite, "ew, dinosaur poop!"
• The girl got soaked running through a fountain, so we changed her clothes on the sidewalk, and she rode all the way home without underpants.

The end.

Oh, the moral of the story? When the kid announces that she has to pee, shamelessness helps. We availed ourselves of the kindness of a real estate agent and a church gardener.

The end, really.

Oh, and I did buy two cases of wine at Trader Joe's. Best souvenir ever.

Now, the end.

Although I forgot the part where we went to Providence on the way home, because we had to give equal opportunity visitation to Daddy's alma mater.

The end?

Almost My Sentiments

The first words out of the girlie's mouth this morning were: "Are there going to be bunkbeds at the hotel?" A couple of years ago, I'd taken her with me to my college reunion. We'd stayed in a dorm room with a bunkbed, and she's never forgotten it. She's been asking to go back and visit the campus again, and we needed a weekend away, so we asked my sister-in-law for a favor. She nabbed us a great deal in a swank hotel - without bunkbeds - so we're getting on the road today, for a long weekend in Boston.

I don't know what all we'll do there, but we are not going to a Red Sox game. I can't see taking the kid to a major league game yet (way too much money for someone who won't appreciate it), and when I do? It'll be a Mets game. I grew up in New York, and we'd go to Mets games once in a while, but no one was a big fan or anything. It was just one of those things you did in the summer.

Then I went off to college, in the Boston area as you may have surmised, and somehow ended up at Fenway for a Red Sox / Yankees game, where, I confess, I rooted for the Yankees. It was a freshman transgression - really, your Honor, I was just supporting the New York team, not knowing any better - and that was it. I immediately saw the error of my ways.

That said, this guy's shirt made me laugh. After I took the picture of his back - at the Central Park Zoo - I tapped him on the shoulder and told him I liked his shirt. He looked a little sheepish, and told me he was worried about wearing it out in public in New York.

When it comes right down to it, I think I hate the Yankees more than I root for the Mets. Just on principle.

And anyway, the Red Sox are elsewhere this weekend.

Crystal Ball

When the gypsy tells your fortune by gazing into her crystal ball, is everything upside down?


I had half a mind to filch Fond of Snape's "What Is It Wednesday" conceit, but I haven't the energy. Anyway, the crystal ball above isn't actually cropped from a bigger picture, instead, it's a detail of a bigger object.

Perhaps the most stunning topiary that De and I saw the other day was a huge boxwood elephant that you can sit on. It's got iron steps up to an iron howdah, complete with cushioned seat and crystal finials, and it squirts water out of its trunk. My five year old would have climbed up and not come down. It was fetching. And I loved the way the finials turned the house upside down.

Garden Hopping with Nora and De

My mother would have had a good time yesterday. It was a beautiful clear summer day, perfect for garden hopping in a shiny red convertible. She'd have liked the gardens, she'd have loved the wind in her hair, and she have relished the fringe benefit of dissecting how the other half lives.

A couple of weeks ago, I'd emailed De to tell her about a Garden Conservancy Open Days event that was going to be near where she lives, thinking it might be something she'd like. One thing led to another and we ended up meeting at a diner just off a highway, piling into her shiny red car, and traipsing through the private gardens of three complete strangers, one garden more wondrous than the next.

By chance, Nora's head had arrived in the mail the day before (because I'm taking her to BlogHer next week), so I brought her (head) along for the ride.

Here's Nora on a fetching lichen encrusted teak bench, overlooking a marshy little cove.



And here she is in a topiary armchair, facing an inviting navy blue swimming pool (you'll have to take my word for that).


And last but not least, here's Nora cavorting with Atlas.

De organized the tour brilliantly. We started off at a lovely little garden, one that felt like home to me - I could have planted it, and maintained it, and enjoyed it. The next one was a far-fetched fantasy of topiary - a pair of lions, an elephant, the afore-mentioned armchair - on a not huge piece of land. It was done to a fare-thee-well, but was the garden of a person with a lot of help and the concomitant funds, and do you really want to live with all that topiary? The third garden was mind-blowing - secret paths through the woods, a koi pond surrounding a Chinese pavilion, fruit trees, a petanque court, sky blue lace cap hydrangeas at every turn, a grotto, sculpture tucked here and there, and a friendly orange tiger cat wandering through the bushes. As we were leaving, I told De I was going to go home and slit my wrists; she reasonably said that since it was so far out of the realm of possibility, there was no point to jealousy.

But I do have the urge to move the shrubbery around.

Vanishing Point

Two parallel lines
Recede behind my train and
converge into one.

How banal. But I love watching out the front or back of the train, being mesmerized as the tracks go by. It's rare these days to get to watch out the front; they've got the engineer boxed into his* private compartment and unless he's breaking the rules by leaving the door open, we can't look out. So the end car, the erstwhile caboose, offers a more consistent view, and a more wistful one: where we've been, not where we're going. It also offers, on straight track, a perfect illustration of the powers of perspective. The parallel tracks appear closer and closer together, until they might as well be one.

*Always male - I think I've never seen a female engineer on one of my commuter trains. Conductors, yes - but not the engineers.

Patterns

We spent the Fourth of July making a loop up the west side of the Hudson, and back down the east side. One of our stops was West Point, where we actually took the tour (because it’s now the only way to get onto the base - you used to be able to just drive through). The tour isn’t much more than a narrated bus ride, though we did get to go into the chapel, which is rather lovely.

It had that familiar smell of dust and incense, and all the hymnals and bibles were lined up along the backs of the pews just so, looking kind of like the sea of white tombstones at a military cemetery.


The organ console is astonishing - it's got more stops than I've ever seen on an organ, and is said to be the largest working church organ in the world.


We didn't get to hear the organ, alas, but we did hear and see the cadets march into lunch - three drums, one bugle and more than a thousand identically dressed impending soldiers marching like ants up the stairs into the mess hall. It was entrancing and transfixing, and heartrending too, the unison choreography of war.

I find myself drawn to patterns and textures - that sea of hymnals, the array of organ stops, the marching multitudes. I take pictures of moss, and of piles of vegetables. I don't wear clothes with prints, or fabrics with more than one color; my closet is a sea of solids distinguished by their textures. I'm partial to text-less magazine pages filled with pattern to their full-bleed edges - and I rip them out to use for collage or wrapping paper. I love an old brick wall, the bricks laid by hand, each a slightly different color from its neighbor.

I think there's something hard wired in me that wants to organize the world in a certain way. How about you? What would you have seen in that chapel?

Cultural Enrichment

Back in January, I realized - with a shock - that we were going to have to send the kid to camp - you know, so we could go to work? So I set about researching local day camps and found one that seemed good, came well recommended, was only an arm and a leg (as opposed to the ones that are two arms and both legs), and included door to door bus service.

The only thing that stuck in my heathen pagan atheist craw just a tiny little bit was that it's a Jewish camp, run by a local JCC. Don't get me wrong - it's not the Jewish part that gave me pause, it's the religious part. But I got over it and camp started last week. The kid is happy, she comes home filthy and tired, and she's supposedly learning how to swim.

On the third day, I got a text from my husband:

She came home with a metallic-blue yarmulke and a small plastic shofar. Retaliation for the ham sandwich?

Yeah, he sent her to camp with a ham sandwich. Oh well. At the parent orientation, they'd said "no pork, no shellfish", but "if your kid will only eat a ham sandwich, it's okay." I guess that's the kind of concession you have to make when half of your campers aren't Jewish.

Anyway, there'd been a band there, playing for the kids, and handing out yarmulkes and shofars - kind of like Lester Lanin tossing out beanies at debutante balls - so, no cause and effect between the ham sandwich and the yarmulke. The yarmulke has since had red yarn attached to it by the child, who's taken to tying it on and wearing it around the house as a "helmet". The wrong person is going to ring the doorbell one day and have a heart attack.

Today, we had the following conversation in the car on the way home from hiking in the woods.

Her: You know what we say at camp in the morning? Boker tov, Camp Disco.* That means hello.

Me: In what language?

(pause)

Her: Um, camp?

(Daddy nearly drives off the road.)

So, on the one hand, she's getting all kinds of cultural enrichment. On the other hand, she has no idea what any of it means. I guess that'll come. In the meantime, the amusement factor for her parents has been worth every penny.

* Pronounced "booker toe, camp dis-coe" with the emphasis on the toe and the coe.

Setting the Music Free

I'm cleaning house and giving away some music - all on CD, all by women.

There are three packages, each with a different artist; leave me a comment and tell me what (who) you want - I'll pick three winners on Wednesday the 8th.

1. One CD by Natalie Imbruglia

Left of the Middle

2. Two CDs by Eileen Ivers

Wild Blue
Traditional Irish Music

3. Three CDs by Regina Carter

Motor City Moments
Regina Carter
Something for Grace

My Country 'tis of Thee

Wishing you a happy Fourth of July, with coleslaw and fireworks and spirited renditions of all the great patriotic songs.



I've been teaching the girlie the true and correct version of "America The Beautiful":

O beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above thy fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed her grace on thee
And crown thy good with sisterhood
From sea to shining sea!

After all, its words were written by Katharine Lee Bates, an 1880 graduate of Wellesley, and later head of Wellesley's English Department. Wellesley, as you may know, was and remains a women's college - and Bates had a long relationship with another Katharine. In my humble opinion, Bates undoubtedly would have used "sisterhood", had it been politically correct a century ago. In any case, it's the way the song is sung on the campus, and it's the version my girlie needs to know.

Sing out!

Suitable

I am kind of thrilled to hear that Vikram Seth is planning a sequel to A Suitable Boy. If you've never read it, it's a 1200 page Indian soap opera. I read it years ago, reading in little chunks every night before bed (because you do not want to be carrying a 1200 page hardcover on the subway, though come to think of it, a 1200 page book might be a good excuse for a Kindle), and when I was done, I was bereft. I missed them all. So yeah! In four years, they'll be back in my life.

I'm Looking Forward To Another Nap

I have a little free-floating anxiety on the cancer front.

Because both of my parents had polyps discovered via colonoscopy, I was considered a candidate for early scopes, that is, before turning 50. I had the first when I was just past 40, and I had another a couple of weeks ago.

I laid in a supply of peach jello and lemon drops, and drank my cocktail, gallons of salty viscous liquid, like bad Gatorade, gagging all the way. The preparation for the colonoscopy is AWFUL, but the procedure itself is nothing. I had it done in the hospital, and spent the waiting time pre- and post-procedure eyeballing the nurses and wondering which ones were the drug addicts. (I’d seen Nurse Jackie for the first time the night before – have you seen it?)

My doctor found a tiny polyp, and removed it, and a larger one, which he biopsied. A week later, his nurse called up and said breezily “it’s benign, but he wants to see you for a follow-up”. Oh sure.

It turns out that the larger polyp isn’t a polyp at all – but a sessile serrated adenoma – something half way between a polyp (which is simply benign) and an adenoma (which is possibly precancerous) – and in fact, it’s a category of growth that didn’t exist until pathologists decided it really was different a few years ago.

So it might be pre-cancerous, and I have to drink another six quarts of salty viscous liquid, and it has to come out.

But, the nap I had after I got home from the procedure? Was the best four hour nap EVER. I’m looking forward to another one of those.

Cancer

Perhaps it’s my inner hypochondriac, or maybe it’s the little voice that sometimes whispers “you should have been a doctor” – in either case, I find myself poking around the health pages of the Times website a lot. Not so long ago, there was a slide show with audio, called “Voices of Lung Cancer”. In the way that one needs to pick at a scab, I clicked through, only to find a woman, one Dr. Woody, with a diagnosis and visage that were eerily similar to my mother’s.

My mother was diagnosed with inoperable stage IV NSCLC in the winter of 2005 - she’d gone to the doctor complaining of back pain, and an x-ray showed lesions on her spine and in both lungs. She had radiation, endured several rounds of chemo, continued to live her life, until a mild seizure in January 2008 indicated brain metastases. She then had whole brain radiation, which debilitated her to such a degree that she could no longer live at home alone. At that point, she entered hospice, at home. She died at the beginning of April, after a YEAR in hospice care, a year of an inexorable decline.

By one measure, Moky did really well - median survival time following a diagnosis at stage IV is about 8 months, and she lived more than four years from that first x-ray. She was basically strong and healthy and tolerated most of the treatment very well.

But I wonder - could something different have been done?

Last week, after the announcement that Steve Jobs had had a liver transplant, there was a flurry of chatter: Should he talk about his treatment? What's the prognosis for pancreatic cancer? Why'd he have a liver transplant anyway?

In my poking-around-the-intertubes-at-lunch surfing, I ended up back at a Times blog post from over a year ago, talking about cancer research funding:

The big loser in the cancer funding race is lung cancer. It is the biggest cancer killer in the country, yet on a per-death basis receives the least N.C.I. funding among major cancers. In 2006, the N.C.I. spent $1,518 for each new case of lung cancer and $1,630 for each lung cancer death, according to data from the institute and the American Cancer Society.

The natural conclusion is that lung cancer suffers in the research dollar pool, because the lung cancer victims brought it upon themselves. They smoked cigarettes, period, end of story. Stigmatized.

But, but, but. Butt. Why'd they smoke cigarettes? Because they were addicted. Why? Because, because, because they couldn't quit.

You know what? The whole thing sucks.

* * * * * * * * *

A couple of weeks ago, and with the help of some of my blog pals, my sister participated in her town's Relay for Life - and raised about $3500 for the American Cancer Society. Thank you. I hope it helps kick cancer's ass.

Get Your Hands Dirty

First, we stained our fingers and shorts and tongues

while picking four quarts of strawberries.


Then, we got our fingers dirty with the blue fabric paint while

stenciling the girl's name on towels

to take to day camp.

Ah, summer. Wet towels, ripe berries. What more could one want?

And There Was Dancing In the Street

Yesterday was the last day of kindergarten.

I'm now the mother of a first grader.

Dinner For One, for Two People

Cast of Characters
1 child who wants plain buttered pasta
1 husband who had a late lunch and doesn’t want any dinner at all
1 self who is craving vegetables

Ingredients
1 bunch of almost over the hill Asian braising greens from the CSA
1 bunch of similarly almost over the hill turnip tops from the CSA
3 garlic scapes from the backyard garden
2 springs of flat leaf parsley from the CSA
2 potatoes, because they’re there
Butter
Olive Oil
Salt & Pepper
Balsamic vinegar (the dregs of a fancy bottle rinsed out with the cheap stuff)

1. Pour glass of wine.
2. Put pot of water on to boil the child’s pasta.
3. Wash and chop the greens, tossing out all the really over the hill bits.
4. Decide that sautéed greens isn’t really enough dinner, and boil another pot of water for some potatoes.
5. Peel and dice the potatoes, and toss ‘em in the pot for 10 minutes.
6. Heat up a little olive oil in a skillet with a lid, and toss in the chopped garlic scapes.
7. Remember that you forgot to salt the now boiling potatoes and the pasta water.
8. Cook the child’s pasta.
9. Rescue the garlic scapes before they start to brown, and toss in the still wet chopped greens. Slap a lid on the pot.
10. Mince the parsley and put it someplace where you won’t forget to add it later.
11. Drain the potatoes and mash ‘em with a pat of butter.
12. Drain the child’s pasta and toss with a pat of butter. Serve.
13. Scoop the greens onto the mashed potatoes and mix it all up, gently, with another pat of butter.
14. Serve up the demented colcannon in a bowl, sprinkled with a little rubbed kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, the minced parsley and a few drops of balsamic vinegar.
15. Eat. With more wine, as necessary.
16. Don’t share when husband says “I didn’t know you were making that. It looks good.” Because it’s just enough for one.

End of the Year

The school year is winding down. Today, Miss M. brought home her art portfolio, all the best works from the whole year, the ones that hung on the walls of the classroom and outside in the hallway. She was beyond proud - "when we get home, I'm going to spread them out all over and show them to you, but Daddy, one of them has glitter". And when we got home, we spread them out all over and she told us all about them.


I think I'll frame the one of forsythia on a pale blue background. And then I'll pour myself a stiff drink and think about the next twelve years.

Onward, sigh.

Kindergarten Haiku

Like a lightbulb in the sky,
Moonlight on the pond.

Okay, maybe it's not really a haiku, but it is poetry, at least in the eyes of the author's mother.

Museum Quality Thrift

My mother was nothing if not frugal. She kept everything. And if it wasn't right just then, it would someday have a use.

She also did a lot of gardening. And painting. And you need work clothes for gardening and painting. So a pair of pants that couldn't be worn to the ballet, or to work, or to the supermarket became gardening or painting pants. And if they didn't fit, they got altered, cut down to size.

Most of the time, the alteration was just a quick and dirty v-shaped dart at the center back. But I found a pair of jeans with a genius alteration - an external, integral, elastic belt, the belt made from the elastic of a pair of men's underwear.


It's a little like an external fixator for the jeans. I think they belong in a museum.

Scenes from a weekend

Last Sunday, we had a picnic for the Jamaican ladies who took care of our mother. My brother made curried goat, my brother-in-law made jerk chicken, and we rounded it out with yellow rice, coleslaw, and tabouli. Yeah, tabouli isn't exactly Jamaican, but I had lots of parsley going begging.

There were screaming balloons, board games, water-drenched children and badminton. My sister-in-law gets some kind of prize for playing badminton with her 10 week old baby strapped onto her chest.

And there was homemade ice cream, tutti-frutti, because that's what we always make. Everyone cranked, especially the children. Child labor is a good thing when ice cream is involved.

This coming weekend, 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 to the right 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.

Grace #27: Found Dialogue

I amuse myself. Or the folks that choose the movies for the theater downstairs, coupled with the worker dude who climbs up and moves the little plastic letters around, they amuse me.

Scene: Manhattan street corner

Joe, dejected: "Hangover."
Jane, mocking: "Imagine that!"
Joe, irritated: "Drag me to hell, terminator."

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.