So.
I'm on a plane (unless I'm not and we're still on the tarmac at Idlewild in which case I'm sehr cranky) and through the magic of scheduled posts, this post is posted (unless it's not because Blogger is down or the internet has imploded or, oh, something).
So, while I'm gone, let's play a game. Tell me how well you know me by identifying what I prefer. (Please put your score in the comments.)
My mother's house is finally on the market, and my siblings and I have been slowly trying to make some headway with the contents. There is an enormous amount of stuff: furniture, tchotckes, toys, pots, buttons, towels, and endless stacks of paper.
Moky kept files on all manner of things - local history, friends, nuts and cranks. The files are full of letters, ephemera, gritty xeroxes, clippings, and photos.
Later today, I'm having lunch with an old friend of my mother's, the kind of friend who had her own folder. They'd actually gone to college together, but hadn't really known one another until years later when, by coincidence, they ended up living in the same town, and my mother's friend's daughter was my elementary school (and junior high and high school) classmate. After a time, the friend moved away, to California, and they kept up by writing letters back and forth, often with clippings involved.
When I see her, I'm handing over her folder, but I skimmed through it first, I had to. It's full of letters and birthday cards and newspaper clippings about the friend's husband, but it's the letters that fascinate me - for how they reflect upon events in my mother's life, and necessarily mine. In one letter, there's a whole Yeats poem about blonde women typed out, with this comment:
I always think of that poem in pondering Pinky and Magpie and their beautiful flaxen hair, and of course yours too-- when I first knew you, yours was just like theirs.
There's some delicious semi-catty chatter about the guests at my wedding in another letter, but my favorite bit might be this tantalizing post script:
P S 2 A___ tells me that M___ T___ has broken up with the fabled panty-hose woman. She wanted to have a baby so he decided enough was enough. We had a mimeographed account from him of the fabled lawsuit, but no personal word in a long time.
Is that not the makings of a short story?
Rehab came on in the car the other day, shortly after Amy Winehouse had died.
They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'...
The girlie was in the back seat, so I paused the song and took a moment to talk to her about drugs and rehab and what it all meant.
A few days later, it popped up again, Rehab, that is. This time, the girlie said to me "Grandma says she did go to rehab". So we talked about that, and that sometimes rehab doesn't work, and you have to do it again. I probably should have said something about how song lyrics are a kind of story-telling, but I didn't think of it at the time.
All the while, though, I was feeling a little befuddled at the idea of my 7 year old girl having a conversation with her 80 year old grandmother about Amy Winehouse and rehabilitation. Only quite some time later it occurred to me that perhaps they hadn't been talking about Amy Winehouse and drugs, but that maybe Grandma had said that she, Grandma, had gone to rehab after her hip replacement, or her knee replacement, or her back surgery...
In little chocolate truffle bites, I've been reading the totally charming letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. It's a perfect bedtime book - easy to put down when it's time to turn out the light.
But I stopped in my tracks the other night, at a quote that just seemed so completely, what, contemporary?
Except that I cannot regard the Republicans as people, somehow, only as monsters, foils, beasts and foul excrement.
I guess some things never change.
Do you know Ilina? She's a feisty cocktail inventor, a fellow homonym aficionado, and a left-minded rabble-rouser. I recently got her attention with an en passsant remark on Twitter (or Facebook, who can remember?) and ended up doing a guest post for her 5:00 Fridays series. Looking for drinks inspiration? Check in with her every Friday.
I love a good gin and tonic, but what I've come to realize is that it's all about the lime. I don't much care what brand of gin you use, I prefer the tonic freshly opened so it's not flat, but whatever you do, give me more lime!
Not too long ago, I happened upon a recipe on the Times website for a "better mixer". I wasn't looking for a better mixer but the photo, involving what was clearly a lot of lime, intrigued me. I immediately put 18 limes on the shopping list.
I washed the limes. I carefully shaved off the green peel with a vegetable peeler. I squeezed the limes. I measured the juice and added sugar and stirred in the peel. I let it sit overnight. I strained out the peel. I waited another day, until I was quivering with anticipation as I got out the cocktail shaker.
We mixed up a batch using a 1:1 ratio of gin to cordial. We served it up, over ice cubes, in martini glasses. It was thoroughly delightful, if a tiny bit on the sweet side.
For the next one, I got out the tiny angled measuring cup - which is less cute but more useful than a traditional jigger - and we tried 2 ounces of gin to an ounce of cordial. That was a little too heavy on the gin for my taste.
The third version was the charm: an ounce and a half of gin plus an ounce of cordial made the perfect balance of sweet, tangy, potent. It might even be better than a gin and tonic.
The cordial is amazing. It's just lime juice and sugar, in a 1:1 ratio, with the peels infused into it, but somehow those simple ingredients transform into magic, unctous, viscous, pale green magic.
Finally, I’ve had that parenting moment where I felt I’d turned into my mother.
We were going someplace, and the girl wanted to bring her Harry Potter book, but she couldn’t find it.
Where’d you have it last?, I asked.
Well, it was in the other room, but Daddy must have moved it.
Look again, I said.
She padded into the other room, and called back to me but it’s not here.
I followed her in, swiveled my head 90 degrees and spotted the book on the counter by the television. And I had this flashback to my childhood, when I could never find the screwdriver / buttons / baling wire / glue / sweater / cake pan my mother sent me off to look for, and she could always find everything. It’s the omniscience of the mother, yes?
Okay, since I didn't win a free trip to BlogHer with my recipe using Knorr's new shelf-stable concentrated chicken stock, I'm not biting the hand that feeds me when I tell you that the stuff is rather nasty and not worth cooking with.
Should I start at the beginning? Sometime last month, BlogHer set up a competition. 200 bloggers got samples of Knorr Homestyle Chicken Stock, a product about to be released in the United States, to use in the creation of a recipe. Recipes were submitted, 8 people were chosen; there'll be a cook-off at the BlogHer conference next week. I entered, out of curiosity, and because I do like to cook and I thought it might be fun to create a recipe to toss into the stockpot.
A package containing four little tubs of stock arrived by mail. We examined the label:
Water, salt, modified palm oil, autolyzed yeast extract, sugar, carrots, chicken fat, lactic acid, leeks, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, potato starch, garlic, chicken powder, parsley, locust bean gum, malic acid, thiamine hydrochloride, natural flavor, disodium phosphate, ascorbic acid, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, caramel color, succinic acid, spice, mustard oil, beta caratene, coconut oil.
Let me tell you something. To make chicken stock, take the carcass of the roasted chicken you had for dinner, fling it in a pot, cover it with water, and boil. Strain off the bones, and put the stock in the fridge. When it's cold, scrape the fat off the top. Divide it up into 1 cup plastic containers and stick it in the freezer. DONE. Two ingredients. Hardly any work.
We forged ahead, disheartened by the long list of unpronounceable ingredients. I peeled the foil off the top of a little container, and sniffed. Cat food! It smells exactly like cat food! I lovingly made the meatballs, with a package of ground free-range, organic chicken from the philosophical butcher. I harvested herbs from my garden, and used an onion from my CSA. And then I poured disodium this and disodium that in the pan around the patties and put them in the oven. And I used the rest of the gums and acids to make the couscous. And I cried a little in my heart, because I was selling my soul for a chance at a free plane ticket and a free hotel room and a free conference pass.
We ate the chicken balls and couscous, with cats on the prowl. They thought it smelled like cat food.
And I submitted my recipe, and I didn't win. I'm kind of relieved, because really? I couldn't have lived with myself otherwise.
Try my meatballs. The trick is that you brown them on top of the stove, and then you finish them in the oven. The stock reduces a bit, making a little sauce for your couscous. Substitute rice or orzo, or just serve the meatballs with some nice crusty bread to sop up the sauce. (Oh, if you'd like some cooking photos with acerbic commentary, click on that picture of the ingredients - it'll take you to a Flickr set.)
And remember what Michael Pollan said: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
Remember my oh-so-irritating list of things I was going to do before I turned fifty?
Well, I finally finished another one of them.
Yup - I got printed books for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. (Apologies for the awful glare besmirched photo - the books look better in person.)
I started blogging on the 23rd of July in the year 2006, with a post about the inimitable Julia Child and butter, which means that those five books actually represent four full years and about half of another. It's a lot of words, words that I didn't know were going to come pouring out the way they have, words that I wanted to keep in a tangible form. I mean, what's going to happen to my blog when Al Gore invents the thing that comes after the internet?
After futzing around with several different services that would suck all the posts in and print them, I ended up using Blog2Print because it was by far the easiest of the choices. While their service isn't as granularly editable as, say, Blurb, I cranked out the tweaking necessary to get my five books done in under an hour. They offer free shipping, which is supposed to take weeks; I had my books in days. (Yes, you can pay for faster shipping, but I found it unnecessary.) And I'm really happy with how they came out - it was a good ratio of time input to product output.
In fact, I'm so happy with the books that I got in touch with the company and asked if they'd give me a discount code for you all, my readers. And they did. If you feel the need to print out some or all of your blog for posterity and grandchildren, go to Blog2Print and use coupon code b2pmagpie15 - it'll get you 15% off between now and August 23rd. Call it my anniversary present to you.
You know how whenever your kid has a sleepover, you wonder whether everything will be okay? Are you going to get a call in the middle of the night, please come get your whimpering mess of protoplasm? Are you going to have to call someone else’s mother, your child is scared and wants to go home?
I settled the two little girls on the floor in their sleeping bags, with pillows and stuffed animals deployed, and read them An Awesome Book (which is indeed awesome and you should run right out and buy several copies now). Then I went downstairs, watched an episode of Weeds, and went back up to bed. The little girls were sound asleep.
I was reading, and still awake, when the little girl who isn’t my daughter came sobbing into my room, I can’t sleep, I want to go home. I tried comforting her, futilely, and called her mama. They came and got her, but we left her stuff and her sleeping bag for rounding up in the morning, not wanting to wake up the still sleeping child of mine.
I went to sleep.
Sometime later, who knows when, the little girl who’s mine came sobbing into my room I can’t find her. She climbed into my bed with her little cold feet and told me she’d been all over the house looking for her friend who wasn’t in her sleeping bag. Why’d she go home? Why’d she leave her bag? Why was she scared? Can she come back for breakfast?
All was well in the light of day, but these are the things they don’t tell you about.
Do you have any idea what these are?
If I hadn't seen the sign at the Greenmarket, I wouldn't have recognized them, at least not from just looking at them. Despite a lifetime of eating chickpeas in various forms, I'd never seen fresh ones before yesterday.
So I bought a pint, for the rather spendy sum of $5. I quizzed my husband when I got home - he didn't recognize them either, and guessed they were soybeans, which the pods slightly resemble. But these pods are smaller, and only have one or two chickpeas inside.
I set to work shelling them - if shell is what you do to chickpeas. Maybe you shuck them, husk them, peel them? (Maybe you call them garbanzos.) Shelling the pint took me a half an hour, and resulted in 3/4 of a cup of little fresh chickpeas, looking kind of like wrinkled peas.
The farmer had said to boil them for a five minutes, so I did that, and tossed them with a pinch of coarse salt and a drizzle of olive oil. And they were seriously good, toothier than a pea, less mealy than a dried cooked chickpea.
But $5 and a half hour for a small side dish for two adults? I'm unlikely to buy them again.
Is it because I'm someone's mother that I feel the urge to tell strangers to tie their shoelaces?
It is annoying the hell out of me that just because I engaged in online commerce to obtain new little yellow plastic flowers for our hummingbird feeder, I keep seeing banner ads for the little yellow plastic flower company. Time to scrub the cookies out of my browser.
Why does the bank waste paper by sending a whole page of "how to reconcile your account"? Is that some archaic law? Don't people know how to reconcile their accounts? And if they don't, does anyone really think they're going to start because of an extra piece of paper in the envelope?
This morning, between the subway and the office, I saw a kid in a stroller. Yeah, yeah, so what? The nanny was pushing the stroller with one hand, using the other to talk to her phone (read, paying no attention to the kid). The kid was leaning back with her feet up on the bar, using the stroller like a La-Z-Boy. In one hand, she held a sippy cup, in the other, an iPad (read, paying no attention to the out of doors). Yeah, kid was watching movies on her iPad, while her nanny talked on the phone. I think they should have stayed home.
Back in the olden days, if you wanted to go somewhere, you went to the travel agent and bought a plane ticket, and when you got to the airport, you got your seat assignment (without having to take your shoes off first, thank you very much). Oh and there was red carbon paper involved.
Nowadays, it's search Orbitz-Travelocity-Peapod-Amazon-Priceline-Kayak for the best price, unless you want to use points, in which case you toggle back and forth between the airline site and the credit card where you've racked up said points, and hope that you get the points transferred and the ticket "bought" before your reservation expires. And if you're really lucky, you don't have enough points for all three tickets, so you have to use points for two and hard cold cash for the third, and then you end up with separate confirmation numbers, and when you want to try and get seats together for at least two of the three people because one of them is seven and probably should be sitting next to a parent on the plane, you can't for the life of you manage to do that because the only seats that appear to be available are single seats in the middle.
Sigh.
So you call the airline, and they helpfully tell you to just show up early at the airport, which is code for "your seven year old is going to be sitting by herself, sucker".
Then you politely turn to Twitter.
And your husband texts back nicely landed on one foot.
I'm still kind of amazed that it worked as well as it did. Of course, if I get to the airport and they've shoved things around so we're in three single middle seats, I might have to have a cow.
Remember Wally? The guy who played the Mendelssohn at my wedding on the contra-bass clarinet? And who once jumped up and down on a peanut butter sandwich?
Here's a picture of him that turned up in a pile just recently - an old picture, not at all new. He'd been renovating a bathroom, and is very fond of oak furniture, so someone - possibly my mother - gave him that nice oak toilet seat for Christmas, for the new bathroom. Of course he had to wear it. It's kind of like how when you get new underpants for Christmas you wear them on your head? Well, we do, anyway.
Wally and toilet seats and my family go way back. Sometime not too long after we'd moved into our house, there was a plumbing emergency of the never-flush-tampons-again variety. There was a blockage in the sewer line, and my father thought it would be a good idea to open the clean-out plug in the cellar, at the point where the sewer line exits the house. It would have been hunky dory, except that there was three stories of sewage on the wrong side of the plug - which came pouring out when he opened it. Yeah. After a frantic phone call, Wally came up the hill wearing a WWII gas mask and carrying a camp toilet - one of those contraptions that's a toilet seat on legs with a plastic bag attached. Somewhere, I think there's a picture of Wally wearing that toilet seat.
He's good people, that Wally.
My heart is as happy as a cute cuddly kitten.
My heart is as angry as a stampede of buffalo.
My heart is as sad as when Slinky and YoYo died.
My heart is happy like a puppy.
My heart is angry like squawking geese.
My heart is sad like a rain storm.
(Yes, I'm still putting away the piles of school paperwork.)
Sputter, sputter
A postcard came in the mail – addressed to the seven year old – offering "pre-planning" at a nearby cemetery. Yeah, like she’s going to buy a "clean, dry, above ground crypt" anytime soon. The card included a proactive disclaimer: If this information reaches you at a time of sickness or loss, please accept our apology. All well and good, but where’s the apology for making the seven year old’s mother apoplectic about the state of direct mail lists and the attendant waste of natural resources?
Bubble, bubble
Also in the mail, the same seven year old got a thank you note, for a birthday present, from a friend. It was a homemade fill-in-the-blank card, dear _________, thank you for the _________. At the bottom, though, the friend had written in big letters: FREEZE THE TOURIST. I scratched my head, my husband scratched his head, we were both completely baffled. The girl child read it a couple of times, and then lit up: FREEZATORUS! It is, of course, their rendition of the freezing charm from Harry Potter, which the girl and her friends are all presently obsessed with.
Dollar, dollar
A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of trying to raise money to buy a new American Girl doll, the seven year old asked "Mama, if I read all seven Harry Potter books this summer, will you give me a dollar a book?" I'm not really in favor of paying kids to read books, but a dollar a book for all seven rather long and complicated Harry Potter books? Yes, indeed. She's midway through book two. She was supposed to be getting cash for cleaning the cats' litter boxes too, but has been somewhat less diligent about that. Funny that. I'd rather read a book than scoop poop too.
Kitten, kitten
I've been wondering to myself why I bought a ticket for BlogHer again this year. I've never been to San Diego? That's part of it. The swag? Really, I don't want any processed food coupons, thanks. The cocktail parties? Oh, they're fun, but I've got better wine at home.
Clarity descended in the form of a post by Maternal Dementia - who was writing on the heels of attending a blog conference in England:
...to be in the company of others who, finally, understand why you blog...there’s a huge sense of connectedness – and relief – when you think to yourself, that’s just like me and oh, I’m not alone.
That's it. That's why. It's the meeting of the tribe.
Are you going to be there?
I am from cast iron skillets, from white Keds and yellow foul weather gear.
I am from the afternoon southerly, splintery docks, the cannon fired at sunset.
I am from coral bells and basket of gold, blue hosta and purple irises, from cherry trees made for climbing, and ivy covered walls.
I am from Christmas Eve and blonde hair, from Albert and Marcus and Marie. Marion too, she who revealed little, is that where I'm from?
I am from hoarders and fixers, cooks and lawyers, politicians and artists.
From stinky cheese and poison, and a fog as thick as pea soup.
I am from show tunes, Handel, Pete Seeger. From summer Sundays at the beach, and winter Sundays at the skating rink. From red velvet seats and first position arabesques, and Edward Gorey in his many rings.
I'm from Germany and France and Ireland and England, from weisswurt and springerle, hot cookies and gorgonzola, oysters on the half shell and icy cold Schaefer long-necks, and five pound bags of Bazzini’s pistachios.
From the rules about mayonnaise on the teak, beer croquet in the side yard, the blowing of the big horn and hand-cranked ice cream after a long hot day.
I am from fly rods, bear skin coats, block parties. From black and white snapshots and Kodachrome slides. From sterling silver and hand-me-downs. From hope, pain, love and old age. From oriental rugs and footlockers, station wagons and bicycles, charge cards and index cards, and wicker chairs found on the curb.
And what's after me is from what's before me.
You know I went to women's college, right? Well, one campus tradition is a gentle revision of the words to 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
But 'tis okay, because the lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates, a graduate of and an English professor at Wellesley. I mean, if anyone's going to mess with her lyrics, it'd be her fellow alumnae and matriculants, yes?
On Memorial Day, there was a singing of America the Beautiful down at the ceremony at the train station. I sang along, I always do, and I sang out my cranky feminist version of the lyrics (which, incidentally, I've taught to my daughter, thank you very much) and the woman standing next to me just grinned at me approvingly when we were through.
So, if you happen to be of the female persuasion, and happen to be singing America the Beautiful today, Independence Day, perhaps you want to fix the lyrics too.
Enjoy your Fourth.
A couple of months ago, I bought one of Julochka's stitched up photos because I thought it would be the perfect birthday present for a quilter friend. Then, though, it needed a frame. I rummaged around and found a frame that was the right size and shape, but had a god-awful hearts and flowers paint job. Bang zoom, I painted it green. Bang zoom, I got out the Mod Podge and stuck buttons all over it.
Bang zoom, I really like how it came out.
I think she's getting it for Christmas though; her birthday's come and gone...
The girl had a friend over the other day. After they were done reassembling cars and tormenting kittens, they went outside and dug up ants and worms for two hours. I checked in on them periodically, only to be told things like "we're helping the worms give birth" and "here's the egg sac".
I'm not even sure what they were using as dissection tools, but I'm pretty sure that the "egg sac" was some part of the worm's digestive tract.
At least they weren't eating them.
There is a little piece of me, the usually dormant compulsively tidy piece, that gets irritated when she digs up worms in the middle of our not very stable lawn-on-a-hill, or builds forts with sticks woven through newly planted shrubs. But I bite my tongue a lot, because really? I like that she's outside communing with nature and making hosta leaf boats for ants and acting as midwife to worms. Digging in the dirt, learning to fish, planting seeds - it's all part of keeping her connected to the earth, something that is incredibly important for lots of reasons.
When I was a kid, we spent hours and hours outside every day. There was an undeveloped lot behind our house, with a secret clearing and lots of trees to climb. There were kids to play with, one of whom had a rudimentary zip line in the backyard, others with rhododendron forts or jungle gyms. We had a radius of a couple of blocks - and when my mother blew the whistle, it was time to go home.
Too often these day, it seems like kids just don't go outside. It's too hot, or the TV beckons, or there's a violin lesson, or there's too much traffic, or there's no dirt around. Or something. What it boils down to is not enough unstructured play time, where you just figure out what to do.
I just read Grow the Good Life
Reducing that deficit - healing the broken bond between our young and nature - is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends on it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes - our daily lives.
For me, reading either, both, of these books was a little like preaching to the converted. We're doing a lot to keep the girl grounded, metaphorically and physically. But still, it's good to have positive articulated reinforcement for things that I feel strongly about.
I'm sending the kid outside again (as soon as it stops raining anyway). By the end of the summer, we may have no ants left. No child left inside, no ants left outside. Win, win, win.
Because it's my anniversary, it seems the right moment to tell you about the music at our wedding. We had a really simple wedding. No caterer, no photographer, no flower girl, no limousine. No hymns, no recessional, no first dance.
But we did have a processional, with possibly the most idiosyncratic rendition of a wedding standard ever. A long time family friend and down the street neighbor was a professional musician who played every single woodwind instrument out there. Flute, piccolo, all the saxophones, oboe, bassoon, all the clarinets. He played jingles, Broadway shows, big band jazz, saxophone quartets. He was in the Tonight Show band before Johnny moved the show to Los Angeles. And he was on Sesame Street from day one, playing incidental music and Rubber Duckie and the entrance music for Mr. Snuffleupagus.
We wanted our wedding to be personal, eclectic and meaningful, so I asked Wally if he'd play the Mendelssohn Wedding March on the Snuffleupagus contra-bass clarinet.
Wally claims that he'd never in all his born days played a wedding, much less played a contra-bass clarinet solo in anyone's backyard, but he gamely located the score to the Mendelssohn and figured out a solo version. Buh buh buh BUH. You have to understand - the contra-bass clarinet is not a solo instrument. It's not pretty harp music or a soprano singing Ave Maria with a guitar accompaniment. It is NOT what you expect at a wedding.
Before the ceremony, Wally tucked himself behind an azalea. The guests trickled in and began milling around on the lawn. When the time came, Wally let out those first triplet bleats on the horn, and my grandmother said "What is that noise"?
It was a beautiful moment.
Monday was second grade poetry day. Today we have touchy-feely science:
I think energy is a system in your body. In your heart, you have a big ball of energy.
What is this? Since when is science about "I think..."? The question should be "What is energy"?
On the other hand, a big ball of energy in your heart? I kind of like that.
I never thought I’d be admitting to this, but we had kind of a good time at Toys R Us the other day. I’d been invited to a promotional event for a line of Ridemakerz cars based on the Cars 2 movie coming out this week, and I don’t know, it was a Saturday, it was the summer, it seemed sort of like it might be fun, so we went, me and my little family.
We took the train into the city, and walked over to Times Square, to the mothership Toys R Us, the one with the indoor ferris wheel – which we had to navigate past, been there, done that, thank you very much. Once upstairs, the girl forgot that I said no ferris wheel when they handed her a VIP pass with her name on it. We each got to pick a chassis, and then headed off to tables covered with hubcaps, wheels, pipes, “engines”, spoilers. Shiny! Rubber! Chrome! Flames! The Ridemakerz cars are fun – they’re sort of the big splashy plastic American rendition of the sleek refined Euro-style wooden Automoblox, and you can mix and match bits to your heart’s content. I picked the steely blue Finn McMissile, for the color, only because they didn’t have any Citroëns. I totally would have picked a Citroën, if they’d had one. I've always wanted a Deux Chevaux.
After we built our cars, and had a hotdog, we wandered through the store, managing to get out without spending any money. (I know. I say no a lot. She has enough stuff.) (I did stop and take a picture of a Norman Foster building made out of Legos, because I am an occasional architecture geek and because I knew two people who needed to see that someone was rendering Foster's Hearst Building in Legos.)
When we eventually got home, the girl took all of the cars apart and sorted all the bits out on the coffee table. Then she figured out how to make some VIP passes of her own with Kid Pix – am I raising a graphic designer? Finally, she invited a friend over – to recreate the pick and choose, make your own event. No hot dogs. Just hot rods.
And honestly? It's a good toy if you can play with it your own way. Maybe she's going to be an event planner, not a graphic designer. Or both. Or something. Stay tuned for a story about worms.
I can't help it. The accumulated second grade paperwork is coming home from school in a fast and furious flurry. One folder the other day contained a whole pile of poems, two of which I have to share:
Okay, if hope is the thing with feathers, what the hell is this?
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| Photo (c) Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times |
I'll tell you. It's a mummified howler monkey, in a feather ruff, and its picture was in today's New York Times, with no mention of the feathers. Its picture was in the paper because there's a traveling exhibit in Philadelphia right now, called Mummies of the World. All the other mummy pictures were discussed in the accompanying article, but not the monkey and its feathers. Journalistic lapse, if you ask me.
On the other hand, I kind of want to take a field trip to Philadelphia to see these mummies, pairing it with a side trip to the Mutter Museum, and maybe a cheese steak.
Who's in?
The end of the year project in the girl's second grade classroom was biography. Every kid was assigned a person to learn about - people across a historical spectrum, both living and dead. The kids made posters and gave presentations, and today was the Biography Breakfast, where they all went to school dressed as their subjects.
The girl had drawn Jane Goodall, so off she went in khaki pants, hiking boots and Daddy's Filson hat, along with a pair of binoculars and a notebook - totally ready for exploring chimpanzee habitats.
But that's not really the point.
In yesterday's mail we got a fundraising solicitation from - hello, synchronicity! - The Jane Goodall Institute. I was dumbstruck. Really. We've never sent them any money, and I have no idea where they got my name, especially because I always send cranky little notes like "Do Not Solicit More Than Once A Year" and "Do Not Rent Or Sell My Name To Others" back with the contributions I do make.
But I was pleased, none-the-less, yes, pleased to be asked for money. There was a glossy postcard of some chimps in the mailer, which the girl glommed onto and took to school with her. And I think I'll send a little gift off to The Jane Goodall Institute, in honor of the second grade teacher. Better than an end-of-the-year mug, right?
And what a perfect coincidence.
I need a name, a word. What do you call books that you've started, but not finished, but that you can't finish because you only downloaded the first section as a sample to your Kindle?
Since I got the iPod at the beginning of the year, I've downloaded a mess of free samples. It's like a little sickness; someone mentions a book, or I read a review, and instead of putting it on my Amazon wishlist, I just download the sample to Ginger. And then I read the sample, because whatever it is, it won't take longer to read than it takes me to get home on the train. They aren't unfinished - I finished what I had. It's like I've eaten the appetizer, but the dinner and dessert hasn't yet been served. Because I have so damned many books, real live dead tree books, sitting by the side of my bed, I've not committed to finishing any of these sample books - yet.
Just read the sample:
So what are they? In purgatory? No. Interregnum? No. Betwixt and between? Meh.
Help me!
Every drawer opened,
every book moved,
every box perused,
every piece of paper overturned,
results in some small moment of
nostalgia,
aimless archeology,
reflection,
bemusement,
amusement,
or regret.
If she'd sketched out an M, I'd frame it in a heartbeat.
This day did NOT get off to a good start.
1) I forgot to set my alarm, so I got up a half hour late on a day I should have been in the office a half hour early.
2) There was nothing to eat for breakfast except frozen English muffins, so I stuck one in the toaster to defrost. Alas, I burned my left thumb when I picked up the wooden chopsticks that I'd stupidly left on top of the toaster.
3) When I finally got on the train, and the conductor came 'round to check tickets, I realized, after rooting around in my bag for awhile, that I'd left my wallet home - meaning, no money and no train ticket. Happily, the conductor said "I'll come back", and then when she did come back, she studiously ignored me. I mouthed a "thank you" at her, but I'm not sure how I'm getting home tonight.
But a close reading of the first section of the New York Times came to the rescue.
1) Above the fold on the front page was the story about Newt Gingrich's campaign "imploding" - excellent word. This is going to be one hell of a campaign season.
2) Also on the front page was a teaser paragraph about the endangered Great Hamster of Alsace, which France has to hop to and protect. But Great Hamster of Alsace! Doesn't that sound like something out of Monty Python?
3) Frankly, I didn't know that Prince Philip was such a feisty old crank, but I laughed out loud at some of his thoroughly inappropriate quips:
- To the president of Nigeria, resplendent in traditional costume: “You look like you’re ready for bed.”
- To the singer Tom Jones: “Do you gargle with pebbles to sing that way?”
- To a museum curator in the Cayman Islands: “Aren’t most of you descended from cannibals?”
4) Leona Helmsley's dog died six months ago. Who cares, right? I scratched my head as to why this out of date "news" was reported with 883 words and a color photograph, and was nauseated to learn that the dog's security detail ran $100,000 a year.
Oh, don't get me wrong - there was plenty of bad news, legitimate news, sober news, in the Times, but the outlandish stuff was just what I needed to be reading.
Do you name things? Like inanimate objects, like cars and guitars and cellphones and computers? Or do you just call it the Jeep?
It totally amused me that Mel named her guitar Bob Jackson, and I got to thinking about the naming of objects.
If you have an iPod/iPhone/iPad, you know that Apple asks you to name your device when you first plug it into iTunes. When asked to name my very first iPod, lo those many years ago, I named it "Fred". I love "Fred" - all four letters are contiguous on the keyboard, so typing makes a nice little square dance with your fingers. Fred fred fred. Subsequent replacement devices have been Fred 2, Fred 3; my current iPhone is Fred 4.
Naturally, my iPad is Ginger.
This - oh, shall we call it whimsy? - confounds my husband, who is the sys op in the house and has to understand and manage the very many devices that talk to the network, all of the others of which have bland generic names like "Nintendo DSi" and "Miranda's iPod" and "Magpie's laptop". If were up to him, my iPad would have been named "Magpie's iPad". Feh.
Then there are the cars. My car is Kate - a red spitfire. When we had to replace his car, and got something somberly silver, we named it Spencer. Granted, we don't often refer to them as Kate and Spencer; usually it's "are we taking your car"? But I like that the cars are Kate and Spencer. And even better is that Spencer has a lady GPS. Every time she says "your route is being calculated", we answer "thank you, Tracy".
Fred, Ginger, Kate, Spencer and Tracy.
What do you name your things?
It struck me the other day that I know a mess of people who've got actual books out, or about to be. So I thought I'd spread a little book love, just for the hell of it.
The first four are out now, the last two are coming - and if I did all the linking right, you can click the book images for ordering information.
  Mel, the Stirrup Queen, wrote "Life From Scratch", a novel of blogging about food while working through some relationships. It's fun, and the kindle edition is on sale at Amazon for $2.99. |
 My mother-in-law is one of the editors of a book called "In The Words Of Women": letters, diaries, journals, pamphlets, poems, plays, depositions, and newspaper articles by American women in the late 18th century, before and after the Revolution. |
  My dear friend Julia has compiled a book of devotionals for that oft-difficult first year of motherhood, called "Daily Guideposts: Your First Year of Motherhood". |
  And Emily's essays about food and cooking and small people, "Cooking on the Edge of Insanity", is now available in print, as well as as an ebook. |
  Joanne, a/k/a Pundit Mom, has copies of her "Mothers of Intention: How Women & Social Media Are Revolutionizing Politics in America" in her hands, and you too will be able to get one very soon. Since it's a compilation of essays by 21st century women, it might be a good companion for the 18th century "In The Words Of Women". |
 Last but not least, the enigmatic Teresa has a book of poems coming out in September; you can preorder it by clicking on the image and scrolling until you find "Itching, itching". |
Cleaning up the house, I found a little list, drafted by the girl and a friend:
They've been making elaborate plans to sell things and raise money for either their American Girl Doll Club* or for charity**. In fact, they were selling rocks door to door one day. They really want a table at the farmer's market, but except for the home-grown rocks, none of it really qualifies as local produce.
Instead, they're going to set up shop at the end of my driveway. I'll let you know when they do, because you know you need to buy:
I promise: I am not a cat blogger. I will not be a cat blogger. I am not a crazy cat lady with 407 feral felines running amok in my house.
But, we did acquire a pair of kittens over the weekend.
The girl has been pining after kittens for like half of her young life, probably since she realized that she wasn't ever getting a sibling, thank you very much. We dragged our feet for awhile, and then we went on vacation, and then it wasn't kitten season, and finally we ran out of excuses and really, it's time the girl had some pets. It somehow managed to take repeated visits to the SPCA, because kittens are in great demand and for weeks there were either no kittens, or just one kitten, or they weren't "ready" yet.
Last Friday, they told us that there would definitely be kittens available on Saturday, but that we should be there when they open at 10:00.
Because I was being shepherded out the door by a seven year old vibrating with anticipation, we arrived the SPCA at 8:30 and had the great pleasure of eating our bagels in the parking lot serenaded by barking, yapping, jumping, howling, woofing dogs. For 90 minutes. I might be a little deaf now.
But all's well! We came home with two spayed, micro-chipped, black & white female kittens from the same litter. They were about 8 weeks old, so we've decreed April Fool's Day as their birthday.
And yes, their names are Clover and Rainbow.
Do things disappear in your house? We used to have a pair of blue-handled scissors living in a kitchen drawer, for snipping chives and opening UPS boxes - until one day they disappeared. We're sure the child took them and lost them; tape and scissors are always vanishing under her watch. I once found a pair of scissors under her bed, along with some locks of hair. Her hair. That she'd been cutting herself. Under her bed. Anyway, periodically we ask her, whenever anything is missing, where are the blue-handled scissors? Those scissors will never be forgotten.
Sometime last summer, her iPod went to the land of the lost. It was one of those tiny Shuffles, tiny, and therefore easily misplaced. Now the refrain is
where are the blue-handled scissors and the iPod?
or,
where are your library books and the blue-handled scissors and the iPod?
or
where are your library books and (insert missing object) and the blue-handled scissors and the iPod?
The other day, it turned into summer and so I broke out a pair of shorts that I hadn't worn since last summer (or fall or whenever it was hot). I dropped my phone into one of the cargo pockets. (I love cargo pockets; I love not having to carry anything.) We went to some friends' house for dinner. At some point, I fished my phone out of the pocket, I know not why. To my surprise, there was a soft pillow-like object in the pocket. A small grey nylon padded case containing ... the iPod and its headphones.
Bad mommy.
It had certainly gone through the wash, but seems none-the-worse for that and a year in a pocket.
But the blue-handled scissors are still missing.
Sigh.
Why do I think the people making signs for the car wash should be better versed in the English language?
#33 - A perfect ice cream sandwich on a hot Friday afternoon: peanut butter cookies with vanilla ice cream.
#34 - The imminent three day weekend.
#35 - Steve Reich on endless repeat.
I don't know about you, but sometimes I want to run away to a farm. There's a romance about digging in the dirt, growing acres of vegetables, feeding slops to the pig, and spinning wool from the ewes that also give you milk and lambs. I'm unlikely to actually give up my suburban lifestyle and urban paycheck, but that doesn't mean I can't grow some herbs, blueberries, rhubarb and the occasional tomato. Much as I'd like chickens, I can't have 'em because my town requires 10 acres for a chicken (yesterday's chickens were NOT at my house), but I could have bees if I were really possessed. Anyway, kittens are on the agenda before any other livestock.
Needless to say, I find a certain fascination in reading books by people who have actually found a way to live off the land. Joan Dye Gussow's This Organic Life is a how-to book, a polemic, a primer on sustainable agriculture on a very small scale; she lives in a NYC suburb up on the Hudson. Living The Good Life by Helen & Scott Nearing is a little more hardcore. They ran off to a farm near the coast of Maine, and found ways to live there simply and self-reliantly. Despite the forbidding climate, they gardened nearly year-round, relying on cold frames and greenhouses.
In the past couple of months, I've read two newer personal narratives, both by NYC women off to seek another life in farming.
Angela Miller, a literary agent turned cheese maker, doesn't actually give up her life in NYC - she becomes a weekend farmer - but she does seem to get her hands dirty and to know what she's talking about. Unfortunately, while I learned a bunch about cheese making and goat husbandry in her book Hay Fever, Miller came across as distinctly unlikeable and totally full of herself. I've no desire to knock on her Vermont door, even though her Consider Bardwell cheese is pretty good. (Then again, she has a hired cheesemaker making it...)
The Dirty Life, on the other hand, is by a charming woman named Kristin Kimball, who does move part and parcel - falling hard for a Swarthmore-educated farmer and finally marrying him. They create a "full diet" farm in the Adirondacks, with the idea that it sustain many families on a CSA model, but including grain, meat, and honey in addition to fruits and vegetables. Her book is delightfully written, and despite coloring farm life as palpably dirty and enervatingly tiring, she manages to make it sound thoroughly agreeable. And if I ever happen to be driving by Essex Farm, I'll probably hang my head over a fence and hope to be invited in.
If I vanish, look for me in a field, cultivating behind a pair of horses.
The first sweater I ever made was a disaster. I followed a pattern that I'd found in Elle Magazine (a hundred years ago; do they even still do knitting patterns?), and I followed it precisely and accurately. It was kind of a modern fisherman's sweater - knit in a lanolin rich unbleached white wool, but without cables and pompons. Instead it was mostly seed stitch, in a big V, with plain knit below, and rolled edges at the neck and hem.
The problem was the seed stitch - it had way too much give in it. The give, coupled with the weight of the wool, meant that the sweater looked like an enormous potato sack on, and so I never actually wore it. I thought about it a lot; after all, I'd put a lot of time into it, not to mention yarn. I thought about intentionally shrinking it, I thought about reinforcing the shoulder seams with twill tape to combat the sag.
Eventually, the sweater ended up at my mother's house - where everything in need of alteration would go. Every once in a while, I idly wondered to myself about its whereabouts - thinking perhaps I'd rip it out and make something else - and then I'd promptly forgot about it again.
On Saturday, I found the sweater.
I have never been so horrified in my life. Dirty stinking rotten moths.
I've seen moth damage before, but usually a pin hole here or a nibble there. These moths ate great swaths of knitting - holes from the front ALL THE WAY THROUGH to the back.
This, people, is not the kind of decay that is inadvertently lovely or whimsically elegiac. This makes me heartsick.
Damned moths.
Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, I seem to remember my mother ripping out an article from somewhere or another, a listing of various supermarket products that were unimpeachable and better than homemade. I want to say it was by Craig Claiborne and from the Times, but a diligent perusal of the Google has been fruitless. In any case, I think it included Thomas’ English muffins, and Campbell’s black bean soup – two kitchen staples of my childhood, the black bean soup always served with a paper thin slice of lemon floating atop. Lists like that are perennials; food editors must (read more)
Did you see the article in yesterday's Times about people knitting sweaters for statues and lampposts? Yarn graffiti, if you will. Or yarn bombing. There's even a whole book out: Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti.
Like this little sweater, made by Jessie Hemmons for the Rocky statue in Philadelphia. He's gotta be cold, standing out there all the time. He totally needed a pink sweater that says "Go See The Art". Right?
So I got to thinking. There's a new statue near my office, a shiny silver statue of Andy Warhol, polaroid camera slung round his neck, Bloomingdale's bag in his right hand. Public art. Not far from where The Factory was. What he's missing is, oh, maybe a wig. I mean, he always wore a wig.
So what I'm thinking is, someone needs to knit a nice wig for the Andy in Union Square. If I were a better knitter, I'd do it.
Volunteers?
I am conflicted. She’s old enough to be doing chores, but we’re too disorganized to organize the chores. I nag clean up your room when I can’t walk in there anymore. We say do your homework every night before dinner. Brush your teeth seems to be a chore; shouldn’t it be ingrained by now? (read more...)
More crack plants. The white forget-me-nots will not be forgotten, because they have self-sown everywhere. And once upon a time, I planted Heavenly Blue morning glories - they will be glorious again, but no longer heavenly blue. Every year, they come back smaller and more purple, some hybridization genetics thing at work.
Finally, we've started cleaning out my mother's house and making it ready for sale. I spent 24 hours there over the weekend, and came back with a carload of oddments and nostalgia, including (but by no means limited to):
POISON
Do not use as food container
Marrow?
Um.
Marrow on toast?
Better.
Marrow on toast with crumbs of grey salt?
Mmm.
Marrow on toast with salt and a dressed sprig of parsley and a caper and a slice of a cornichon?
Oh yes. Yes. Perfect explosion of crunch and unctuous and salt and brightness.
I had dinner at Prune, dinner on the heels of reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s "Blood, Bones & Butter". And the marrow bones are threaded throughout the book, so of course we had to have them.
Hamilton’s passion for simple food, expertly prepared from well-sourced ingredients leaps out of the book – I want to taste that, and make orecchiette with my Italian mother-in-law, drink a cocktail on the terrace in the south of Italy. So eating in her (little) restaurant, though she wasn’t in the (tiny) kitchen, felt perfectly familiar without my having ever been there before.
And oddly enough, the little restaurant was precisely the kind of place my mother would have liked, what with the funky mirror over the bar, and the mismatched steak knives, and the small galvanized metal tubs, and the brown paper “tablecloths”. I say oddly because one of the sections of the book that resonated strongly for me was the part about Hamilton’s mother - her frugal, stylish, divorced mother, about whom she says:
My most relieving, comforting experiences surrounding my mother are when strangers meet her and later say to me, “Wow. She is one piece of work.”
Because my frugal, divorced mother had an unerring sense of home décor, and too was a piece of work.
I ordered the lamb chop, a blade chop, the kind of chop even my mother wouldn’t buy. Too cheap, too déclassé. Actually, my mother never bought lamb chops: the good rib chops were too dear, the affordable blade chops weren’t worth eating. But Prune’s thick, rare, toothy blade chop, with skordalia and dandelion greens alongside – my mother would have loved it. And she’d have loved the fat grilled asparagus, thicker than my thumb, dressed with a haunting parsley béarnaise, a sauce I ran my index finger through again and again it was that haunting and delicious.
We skipped dessert; it seemed unnecessary, and proved so when the check came with a chunk of good dark chocolate for each of us – just enough.
And then I went home, back to my life. A book can be transporting; a meal can be too. I highly recommend both.
Morning on the train platform.
The glint, thwack of a Zippo lighter.
Then, the pungent anachronistic scent of lighter fluid wafts along the platform, followed by the sharp sweet smell of clove.
Ah youth. You, conjuring a time past, long before your birth. Don't you know, no one smokes anymore? Yet, you perfume it with a romance. Beware, time future will be less beautiful in the aftermath of this present.
I made a glorious grapefruit/meyer lemon marmalade a couple of months ago - out of free fruit. The grapefruit had been a Christmas gift to my father, and I picked the lemons in a friend's backyard in California. I love marmalade. It suits my ornery self.
The basic technique (and canning instructions) came from the Times, which had adapted the recipe from June Taylor. Head over to the Times site to read up on the technique in comprehensive detail. But basically, you want to separate the fruit into three parts: flesh & juice, outer rind (peel), white pith & membranes. You remove the peel with a vegetable peeler and sliver it. You filet out the flesh, working over a bowl so you capture the juice. And then you tie the pith and membranes up in cheesecloth so that you can boil and remove them - they release pectin, which you want for thickening.
Instead of weighing the fruit, I eyeballed it before I started cutting it up. Two grapefruit and five small Meyer lemons got me 3 cups of peel/flesh/juice. 3 cups of fruit then needs 3 cups of water and 3 cups of sugar. (Easy ratio, huh? Adjust quantities as necessary.) You boil the fruit and water until the the peel is tender, then add the sugar and boil until it's done. I ended up with three (sealed) pints and a half a cup left over.
It's wonderful.
And it's going to be gone way too soon the way I'm slathering it on my toast every morning.
Subway dudes playing Bob Marley's "Don't worry, 'bout a thing" and handing out shakers to the captive audience. What's not to like?
Lots apparently. After they were done charming 89% of the folks in the car, they went 'round with a hat, trying for a grin or a quarter, or both. I gave them both; I'm a sucker for buskers. They got to the guy in the corner across from me and said "yo, didja like the music?" He looked up dispassionately and didn't answer. They asked again. He said "I'm reading", and went back to his smartphone. Head dude says "so, you're literate, didja like the music?" Corner guy repeats "I just want to read". Finally, they moved off.
Honestly, would it have been so so hard to smile and say yes?
