SOUTH CITY MUSINGS

Some bentos

2012-01-31T21:43:00.002-06:00

Didn't do much this month with bentos. Too many chilly mornings with a fuzzy brain. But I've been working on variety in a winter of not much variety. Things are so much prettier in May and September...and the worst part is that when I'm done with them, I have to take these quick little snapshots before packing them up. Nothing pretty about them. But there was some cute. That's a catbus, although his face is hard to see (the sister's lunch looked a little more like it. Homemade mac and cheese with cheese and nori for the face. Mushrooms, meatballs, and dumplings. Asparagus, carrots, brussel sprouts).
Soy hot dog, some dumplings and meatballs and mac and cheese again (I totally made too much mac and cheese). In the other, pinapple, crackers, peanut butter, and a heart cake. I don't think there was any fresh fruit in the house this day...but don't you love this little tiffin box?
A strawberry in the center of orange wedges. With eyes (bits of candy eyes, actually). A soot sprite gone missing from the totoro scene, not pictured.
This was Maeve's sick day lunch back when she had the double ear infection and couldn't keep anything down. BRAT diet is so dull. This is a banana, next to a Totoro bun. Jelly and a bit of peanut butter inside--she kept it down--with the same little candy eyes, banana wedge ears, sunflower seed nose and what appears to be a candy sunflower seed mouth. It enticed her enough to eat--the first solid food after crackers and homemade pedialyte finally stayed down.

Valentine's day is coming, which naturally leads to easy hearts all over the place in my bentos. Those are fun.

Some things I've heard lately, some things I've said

2012-01-30T19:09:00.002-06:00

"You're so tight here," she runs her thumb down the inside of my mouth along my jaw and cheek. "But up here in front, it's almost like there's no muscle here at all."

I can say nothing. She has her hand in my mouth.

"And over here," on the left side. "All the tension that's missing on the right is bundled up here on the left."

I nod, just barely. She pokes around under my cheekbones. "Ok, I'm going to punish you now."

While she does the release, I think about the words she's just said and I try not to laugh, because it would really hurt. Really.

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

"There was a car in our back space," I point towards a piece of paper where I've scrawled the information. "I could barely make it out, so I grabbed a bag of trash together and took it out. Before I opened the gate, he'd pulled out of the space and headed down the alley, slow and casual."

"Maybe it wasn't anything to worry about, but maybe they're looking for a quiet place to clean out a car," he says.

"Exactly. With the receipts you found a few days back, and wasn't there another receipt a couple weeks ago, with a torn up bus ticket as well?"

"You're right!" he remembers. We both think about this. If were were characters in The Sims, we'd have thought bubbles above our heads with silhouettes of burglars in masks in them. Crime. Thinking about crime.

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

"She came into town for an ultrasound, and now they want to do a biopsy."

"Really?" I ask, dumbfounded. "A fine-needle biopsy?"

"Doesn't that sound awful?"

"Yes," I agree.

"It's in two weeks, so she'll be back again."

But I'm still thinking about what a big ball of mess I'd be at this point in the process.

"He's not worried," she continues. "They just want to confirm they're benign, and then they'll tag them for the future.

Gang members with spray paint cans holding long hypodermic needles between their fingers like cigarettes. Tagging. All this floats through my brain but I say nothing.

"She's here, do you want to talk to her?"

"Sure," I say. Muffled sounds on the phone.

"Gah, Bridgett," the new voice says. "I was trying to make cream cheese dip! What do you want?"

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

"I gave Jake the magic D20 for his door prize, but you could have the cat fountain," she offers. I look it over. My cats do need a new consistent source of water. The little bowl I put out seems to evaporate and get slurped up faster than I can keep it full. Plus they like running water.

"I'll give it a try," I tell her. I put it by my bag to take home. A few minutes later, she's standing in the kitchen next to me holding a bottle of Joy.

"I forgot! This was supposed to be your door prize!"

"But you just gave me, like, 48 ounces of the stuff."

"I know, but Dierbergs still carries it so I buy it whenever I'm there." She hands it to Fiona. "Here, it can be your door prize.

Fiona takes the bottle of dish soap with that mild look on her face. She goes and puts it by my bag.

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

"When she serves, she just gazes out at the people in the congregation," I explain, showing my best interpretation of the look she gets on her face.

"I know, Mom was telling me about it. How she seems to be in her own little world. And you know what? I want to go to her own little world, because it must be fantastic with all the time she spends there."

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

"Miss Bridgett, I was just sitting out there in the car with Kadir's dad? Did you know he's a house inspector?"

It's funny how fast my posture changes when the topic of houses comes up. When people start asking nosy questions about things we've changed or fixed in the house. I rapidly start going through the interaction I had with Kadir's dad back in November.

"Well, he wanted to know if you knew about the trees you planted out front? If their roots spread out or if they went straight down?"

I take a deep breath. "The oak, of course, is a tap root, and the birch spreads out, but I'm not worried about it where it is."

"Well, he's worried about your lateral sewer line," she says, obviously recalling the exact words her husband used.

"That's on the other side of the walk," I tell her confidently.

"Well, Miss Bridgett, I told him that I was sure you knew what you were doing, but he just was worried, sitting out there in the car with me looking at your house."

"Yeah, well, I think we're probably ok. And we put trees in and take them down pretty regularly--there's no power lines out in front, so if something has to come down, my uncle can handle it with us."

"Ok, Miss Bridgett. Kadir, are you ready to go?"

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

"After we talked, I was chatting with someone about what I do, and I realized I was talking all in future tense. And I suddenly knew I didn't want to make this change. I knew what I wanted to do, I couldn't leave it undone," I say in a rush, thinking of how I was feeling at that moment.

"Isn't it such a blessing to have those revelations in little silly things?" he reflects back to me in language I understand. "It is so good to be able to find what you need to do."

"Exactly," I nod. "I know what I want, and if I did something else," I spread my feet further apart on the wet grass, looking down at them. "I would always be standing in two places."

The look on his face tells me that it is settled, at least between us.

"So now what do I do?" I ask. I'm always one for asking about the next step. I can't leave an encounter without knowing what is coming.

He doesn't answer right away. I'm thinking I need to work. I'm thinking I need to, in the words of Woody Guthrie, wake up and fight.

"Have faith," he says, almost a question. "I'll let you know when we need you to act."

"I will do whatever we need," I promise. A huge weight is off the old shoulders and everything seems clear again.

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

"Pete!" I call out. There he is, standing (yes, standing) in front of me. He's signing in at the desk of the rehab hospital.

"Mrs. Kennedy," he says, but he can't place Ann next to me. We watch the wheels turn while he mumbles to himself. He says it just as I tell him.

"What are you doing here?" he asks. We tell him about Joan, that we have a friend in there after a stroke.

"You're looking so good," I say, which sounds like a total small-talky thing to tell him but is what is exactly in my mind. When I saw him a year ago I was stunned by how bad he looked. And that was before the train accident.

"Yeah," he's suddenly a 6th grader in my class. A very tall 6th grader. "I've got OT in just a minute," he points around the corner.

"It's so good to see you," I tell him. It's so good you're alive, I think.

The Health Post

2012-01-21T22:17:00.002-06:00

My health hasn't been the greatest for a while. Seven years, at least, when my thyroid started to fail and lots of things started to trip up on me. Billy's birth didn't make things better, either. But things are looking up.

1. I don't have celiac disease. I have malabsorption of fat-soluble vitamins and iron, along with thyroid symptoms and Hashimoto's, and I'm Irish, so it was worth testing. But no. This wasn't the answer, which is good and bad. Good because who wants an auto-immune disease (I already have one), bad because it would be easily fixed. So then

2. Time to work around the malabsorption. I started taking liquid vitamin D. You drop it under your tongue and let it mostly soak through the membrane there into the veins. And you know what? My heels don't hurt anymore. It was kind of scary how quickly I felt better.

3. When I went in to buy the vitamin D, I talked with my pharmacist about malabsorption and he asked me if I'd ever been on any heavy doses of antibiotics. In fact, I had. Six different ones and I can't remember all their names, for an e.coli infection I contracted in the hospital when Fiona was born. I was on an IV for 2 weeks full of it and then oral antibiotics for weeks. "Your intestinal flora is probably all out of whack," he told me. But I took acidophilus when I was nursing babies, I thought to myself. But I let this toss around my brain for a few weeks and then went to the doctor.

4. She sat at her desk and totally nodded up and down as I told her this theory. "It could be the root of a lot of problems," she acknowledged. "Health starts in the gut. Seratonin, weight management, absorption of nutrients, all kinds of things." And if I were on such heavy-duty antibiotics, who knows what all I wiped out of my system. So among other things (eating more fermented food, for instance), I'm now purposefully consuming pills full of bacteria. Good bacteria. Acidophilus is only one, she pointed out. The one she put me on has 6 latin names inside it.

5. While I was there, well, I was really there for my inflamed jaw muscle, and she did a myofascial release that made me cry it was so painful. It was so painful. And then it wasn't painful anymore. I'm tired of the magic. But she put me on boswellia. I went home and looked it up. Frankincense. I'm taking frankincense. It's been through clinical trials for inflammatory diseases like Crohns and more basic stuff like osteoarthritis. It's an anti-inflammatory that doesn't tear up your stomach like ibuprofen can. And, knock on wood, it's doing the job. She also wants me at the cranial-sacral therapist I see more often than I have been going. Like every 2 weeks. Which is fine. I always leave there feeling all right.

6. And I've started working out. In the wintertime. It's been a long time. And I'm doing a lot. Have been since the start of the year and I can't believe I'm still doing it but every day it's in my brain nagging me until I do. It helps that I got a sports bra that is AMAZINGLY AMAZING. We are late spring to mid-autumn exercise people, but last year we weren't even that and it's been bad for us. Getting started in January means that those bikes in the front hall will look like an easy transition in April.

I'm going to hike in the Smokies this summer. I have to feel better. I keep trying to focus on that and it's working. All my willpower is going into this area, though, and so Jake has to be in charge of things like money and time and such. Joan's stroke was a wakeup call, too, but mostly, just feeling like shite for so long got really old.

So that's the health post.

Changes

2012-01-20T18:02:00.000-06:00

Ten on Tuesday: 10 things to do indoors when it's too miserable to go out

2012-01-17T09:29:00.002-06:00

Until about 2 years ago, for many long years, cold hurt me. Now I can go out and take a brisk walk, or even slide down a hill. But for a long time, I was an indoor winter girl. Winter and snow was lovely, when viewed through the frame of a window.

1. Blog. Can you tell the weather's been nice in St. Louis? No time to blog here...

2. Write trivia questions. I contribute to a couple of different trivia nights nowadays. I'm always thinking of a category.

3. Sew. Quilt on the sewing machine right now, one I owe Fiona's classroom.

4. Cook a big pot of stew.

5. Drink coffee and chat. This is one of my favorites of course. Annie's predicting we'll spend the next few weeks at her house doing this on more than a few occasions.

6. Clean something thoroughly. Like the guest room. Or the drawers in the dresser in the bathroom.

7. Plan a garden. Mine is going well in my head.

8. Plan a trip. No trips for us this year on the horizon (Disney and Portland last year was plenty) but I love spending quiet winter days looking for things to do in the fantastic places I'm going to visit soon. And there's the girl scout camping trip, after all.

9. Sleep in. Best part of snow days.

10. Art. I have three projects going right now besides prep for teaching. One is stained glass for the cabinet in my dining room (I need more lead). The other two have to do with Jake's birthday so that's all for now.

French Toast Alert Has Expired

2012-01-17T09:03:00.005-06:00

It snowed on Thursday. And life has been busy ever since.

In St. Louis, the night before it's supposed to snow, it is tradition to rush in a panic to the supermarket and buy all the milk, bread, and eggs you can fit in your cart. Hence, French Toast Alert. It's so sad, really. One time in my lifetime we've been snowed in longer than a day, back in January '82. Once. And yes, there are heroic stories of folks taking children's sleds to the grocery stores for their neighbors during that snow. There was also, winter of '06 or early '07, an ice storm that knocked power out for several days for some people I know. But seriously, St. Louisans, it makes us look like fools, as if we can't survive one or two days without fresh milk, bread, eggs.

I had milk, bread, and eggs. So on Thursday morning, when we awoke to a nice little dusting, the first snow of the season, I made French Toast.
That's a pumpkin seed cranberry bread. And my last few bites after the girls made a mess of the table on their way to school. We had school, which was good, but Jake didn't make it to work. He turned around after about a mile on the black-ice covered highway and worked from home. It snowed throughout the day. Cold enough that Billy wasn't so thrilled about even walking in it dressed in boots and snowpants and coat and hat and mittens. So I brought snow inside.
Friday was cold. I was having friends over for dinner: the other mary, Maloki, Rob, and Janet. A little into the afternoon, the other mary called me to tell me she was sick and didn't want to expose my kids. Having just gotten Daisy through a double ear infection that made her vomit 15 times in 24 hours, I thanked her. Maloki (pronounced Malachi, and it isn't his real name but has been a nickname since college because he resembles Malachi from Children of the Corn. I've never seen the movie. Mal has red hair and dresses in black), anyway, Maloki doesn't have a car so I was putting on my coat to go pick him up when Ann called.

Ann was in New York at Vogue Knitting Live and had gone to PurlSoho, a store we drool over online. This is the only part of the trip that made me jealous--I mean, trips are fun, but going to PurlSoho was the only part that got to me. I thought she was calling to tell me all about it. And I thought, "Seriously, Ann? Can't the taunting wait?" and picked up the phone.

No.

Ann and I go to coffee every Wednesday with Joan, and oftentimes Emily and Traci join us. We've been going to coffee together, well, I joined them 6 years ago. We knit, solve the world's problems, talk about our kids, you know, adult venting to keep the pressure off. Ann wasn't calling to brag. Ann was calling because Joan had a stroke. Joan's husband had called her in a panic, looking for a place for his teenaged son to stay while he followed the ambulance to the hospital. In New York, Ann wasn't going to be able to do that. So Ann called me, had me call him, and in short order, we had a shy worried teenager joining us for dinner.

Joan is 50. The doctors say she'll make a good recovery--in a year's time--but on Friday night we didn't have any idea. Her son spent most of the evening sitting on our steps in the front hall. Many gestures were made towards him, but he was too much a teenaged boy in a strange place worried about his mother and his future to join us.

Saturday dawned with a girl scout field trip looming. High of 35, heading over to the Chain of Rocks Bridge to see the eagles wintering there. Lightest eagle year yet, since it's been so warm, but we saw some of the local nesting pairs, walked a long way, talked to some Lewis and Clark folks in costume, with a boat and guns and whatnot, and got to touch frozen dead songbirds (this, of course, was the little girls' favorite part of the trip. Daisy picking up the blue jay and asking, "why is his head floppy?" and the department of conservation woman responding, "well, he's starting to thaw out a bit").

Then Sunday Daisy had a reaction to something in church and I brought her home before the Gospel reading--she was puffy and reacting to something at Christmas Eve mass, too, so I wonder about the cleaning supplies. We'll keep trying. I took her out of the pew, down the aisle, and out into the fresh air--she was fine before we got to the car. We still went home.

Yesterday, MLK Day, it was 66 degrees. I cleaned out the rest of the debris from the garden. I finished the treehouse. I dug up a bunch of tigerlily day lilies for their tubers--we're eating them as part of dinner tonight (they are weeds in my back lot and I thin them every few years. Now we eat them, too). Cleaned house, did laundry, helped Daisy ride her bike, worked out (I am faithful to every other day now, since the new year), drank coffee, made chili for supper.

Then this morning, 2:30 a.m., I woke up to thunder. January thunder after a 66 degree day makes me nervous with good reason out here in the midwest. I lay there awake, unable to go back to sleep. I was rewarded soon after with the tornado siren. We live a half block from the fire station, which has a siren. And after Joplin's tornado last year, I don't play around. My girls sleep under the eaves. So Jake went upstairs to wake them. I carried Billy down to the living room and turned on the TV. False alarm, literally, although it was bad to the south of us and the city sirens go off if the county ones do these days. We sat in the living room for about 15 minutes before putting the girls to bed in the guest room and falling back into bed ourselves. I thought I'd been lying there about 20 minutes when the hail started. But no--it was almost 2 hours later and I hadn't really been to sleep. I hate weather at night. During the day, it's so much easier to gauge when to hunker down in the basement. At night things are magnified and distorted.

So 6:30 came early, let me tell you. Jake took the girls to school on his way to work and Billy got up at 8:30. I had a look at his finger, which has some sort of injury that has led to a big red bump between his fingernail bed and the knuckle. It needs looking at. So that's my morning. Hoping for a less eventful week.

New Girl Scout Plan

2012-01-11T11:19:00.002-06:00

My cadettes (I have a split troop of juniors and cadettes--only 4 cadettes and 14 juniors) are going to Great Smoky Mountain National Park this summer. I've been researching some for them so they can pick things. It's hard not to make all the decisions (I love planning trips) but frankly I will love whatever we do. I cannot wait.

Year in Review: a Summation in Blog Posts

2012-01-09T12:29:00.002-06:00

I did this last year too and it was fun for my most narcissistic side to go back and reread and remember. So what was up with us in 2011? It was the smallest number of communications since I started writing, save for the first year which really didn't start going until Summer 2006. I was busy. Still am. Here's some year in review:

In January, we have a snow day. I get too busy with too many broken things. I go camping with snitchy-cat girls (wow, that was only last January??).

February, we went to Disneyworld. Yes, Disneyworld. Then I got to make the hardest phone call I've ever had to make. Billy got his first haircut. Fiona took first in her reel at a feis. And we spent a night in the basement through a tornado warning.

In March, I saw a movie that made my heart glad. I went on a mah jongg girls weekend and pondered it later. I walked in a parade and Fiona danced at a bar. A bird made me relax. I remembered something I knew for sure.

In April Daisy found a missing cat and returned it to its owner. I listened and prayed at Easter. I freaked out about rising flood waters.

In May I saw a spider and a bluejay. I sanded part of a floor. I said the words "group obtuseness". I went to the country. And more country here.

June brought with it sunburn and capsizing a canoe on purpose. I chatted with a Muslim woman in the grocery store. I consumed mass quantities of garlic scape pesto, and Daisy wrote about Australia.

July is my anniversary. Daisy was in a show. It was too hot. In August we went to Portland (actually the end of July) to get away from the hot. That is all.

In September I started teaching art. I realized dance was over for Fiona. Billy went to speech.

In October I went to mass. Another girl scout camping trip and a homemade Irish dance costume. I thanked heaven for my next door neighbor the endodontist. I thought about eating deer (and ate it, too). Bleys died. And the girl scouts went on a trip.

In November I was accused of being far older than I am. We went to Pere Marquette. Daisy is sweet. I tried hard to be thankful.

In December I hurt. I went camping. I hurt some more. We made a silly gingerbread house. But mostly I just hurt. It sucked.

I have high hopes for 2012. Last year was stressful--many things I didn't write in the blog because of the players involved. I'm hoping this year I can say everything because nothing will be so so bad.

Our First Date

2012-01-09T11:07:00.004-06:00

The Spaniards on our floor liked to party. You could tell by the end of the year where Spaniards had lived, by the ring of dirt, cigarette ash, and spilled fluids of all sorts outside the doors. Gorka lived on our floor, and was quick to point out he was Basque, not Spanish, but he partied with the lot of them anyhow. We never knew how old he was but guessed mid-twenties. Grown up alcohol, grown up girlfriends. Parties.

They were fond, not just on our floor, but throughout our cinderblock dormitory, of taking a cigarette lighter to the smoke detectors in the hallway. To pull a fire alarm meant breaking glass and making a scene. But flames up by the wired system of fire detection did the trick just as well. My freshman year had many nights spent waiting in the parking lot with friends and disgruntled non-Spaniards, waiting to be let back into our rooms. During these alarms, the party continued outside with more participants than ever.

One night in late April, there were three fire alarms. It was 5th floor, not 4th, where they kept happening, and yet the party wasn't shut down entirely. We all could have told Jeanette, the official in charge of our dorm, exactly who was responsible. But she wasn't listening. In fact, she rarely did, and that year was spent in frustration of not being listened to. Not being listened to about Tino at the end of the hall probably date-raping the young high school girls he brought up every weekend. Every weekend a new girl. Not being listened to about depressed floormates. Not being listened to about living conditions, about the trash not going out, about the rings of dirt and ash and alcohol on the carpet outside the party rooms.

But that night, the fourth fire alarm, I found myself outside with Jake. His roommate had left after the second alarm, took his girlfriend and found friends in another dormitory where they could crash for the rest of the night. Jake and I had had a big fight earlier that spring and I'd written off the potential of even being friends. The fight had been all my fault and I was having a hard time living up, owning up, moving on. That night, coming on to morning, just the bits of twilight appearing in the east, I stood out there next to him for just a few seconds. He swung his keys around in a figure 8, catching them in his hand, walking to his car. I followed, knowing wherever he was going would be better than the night had been thus far.

We drove down Kingshighway and found a McDonalds that was open for business. Fries and milkshakes. His was vanilla but tasted like strawberry. He left it on the curb and shared mine. We headed back to the dorm. He was still dating the tall mysterious Vanessa. I had Troy in my back pocket, although if I were honest for a moment, I knew it wasn't going to last. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend; Jake has infinitely more integrity than I do and he certainly wasn't looking for a girlfriend. Back home, the 8 story 1960s era grim beige brick facade loomed. Morning was upon us and the first few early birds were leaving for their day in classrooms to the east. My first class wasn't until 10--I could catch a 4 hour nap and drag myself over to Ethics, easy.

I met Jake for lunch after, in the cafeteria, but with several other folks. It wasn't until much much later that I realized this was our first date. There are other contenders--ice cream on my last day of freshman year before my dad and I drove home to Texas; the balloon glow the following September; the first official date of "Much Ado About Nothing" on September 20, 1993. But really, if I'm honest, it was the middle of the night drive down an empty thoroughfare and bad fast food. Thank you Spaniards, thank you Gorka.

Ten Things I Like Unabashedly

2012-01-07T18:39:00.004-06:00

The last one was the hardest. These should be easy:

1. Living in the city
2. Waldorf dolls
3. Tapas
4. Archery
5. Tex-mex
6. Christmas lights
7. Croissants
8. Letters to or from friends (in the mail, I mean, with a stamp)
9. Trees, especially oaks
10. Henry Rollins

(the last one was probably just to make you laugh)

Ten Things I Admit to Liking Despite the (Real or Imagined) Judgment of Others

2012-01-07T18:18:00.004-06:00

Hmm. This is a harder list.

1. Roleplaying Games. There, I said it, and I'm not sorry.
2. Milk chocolate. Why is this sneered at? I don't get it.
3. Country music
4. St. Louis style pizza. I don't prefer provel, but I will eat it. I just love the cracker crust.
5. (Sort of) being from Texas. I'm not really from there, but it was the last place I lived before I went to college and became an adult.
6. Cream cheese dip (cream cheese mixed with milk; eat with fritos or potato chips)
7. Rodeos
8. Grunge music and other music from the early 90s (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, and so forth)
9. Screwball comedies (Top Secret, Airplane, Clue, Murder by Death, etc)
10. Texas style barbecue

Ten Things I Don’t Like But Wish I Did

2012-01-07T17:56:00.002-06:00

Part Two. I soften my opinions. Thing is, I'm not too hard persuaded into liking something, so most of these will be food.

1. Black coffee
2. Black tea
3. Cheese (I like cheese under certain circumstances and certain kinds)
4. Sauerkraut
5. Sushi
6. Classical Music (I don't hate classical music. I just don't like it)
7. Scary movies
8. Little Big Planet (a Playstation 3 game)
9. Dogs
10. Mardi Gras

Ten Things I Don't Like and Probably Never Will

2012-01-07T17:41:00.002-06:00

From Indigo and Mali, now it is my turn to write the list. There are a couple of lists in this theme. Perfect distraction from the sickbed downstairs where the (not really sick anymore) girl is watching cartoons.

1. Ironing
2. Dystopian Literature
3. Bratz Dolls
4. People who affect an accent for a non-comedic reason (simply to be pretentious, for instance)
5. Hamburgers that are not well-done
6. Spongebob Squarepants
7. Sucralose, aspartame, saccharine
8. Elmo from Sesame Street
9. Pep rallies
10. "Cinnamon" candy

plumb

2012-01-06T13:37:00.002-06:00

Daisy hasn't thrown up since 6 this morning, and, trapped at home with an increasingly well child (thank God), I am getting housework done. The kitchen is clean, ready to sweep and mop. The living room is organized well enough to vacuum in a few minutes. The front hall, some stuff is put away. Steps are swept. Beds are made. Bathroom is tidy and I'm soaking the shower walls in a solution to hopefully pull the scale off without killing us all with the fumes.

I went downstairs with a load of laundry to complete this tidy day, and noticed the freezer door's inventory sheet hadn't been updated in a long time. Every time I take something out, I scratch it off the piece of paper on the door. Deer sausage, chicken broth, whatever. And when I add things to the freezer--bacon, frozen peas, etc--I add them to the list. This way I can stand there and look at the sheet and make decisions without defrosting everything and digging around. It also means that every six months when I take the sheet down, I look at the stuff that was originally written (in another color) and know I should get to using that first. I rewrite the list and continue. But if Fiona runs down for chicken stock for me, she doesn't scratch anything off.

Ladida, I'm rewriting and annotating my new list, feeling so industrious and organized, and I glance at the floor. It's wet. This is the laundry room, where the drain is, and sometimes it is a bit wet from the air conditioner hose, but not like this. And not from this direction. It's leading into the utility room, so named because the electric box is there. Inside the room, about the size of a small walk in closet, the wall in front of me is shiny and drenched. Oh no. It hasn't rained, it's not a leak from outdoors, but what it is has something to do with the bathroom right above it, the old butler's pantry that was poorly converted when the house was a boarding house in the 1940s-1970s. We recently got it cleaned up enough to use it again as a second bathroom, with the hope of taking out the old makeshift shower and rearranging the toilet and getting a new sink, come this summer. And now something horrible was happening.

I run upstairs and sure enough, there is water on the floor behind the toilet. The supply line is leaking. After an SOS call to my parents, I manage to find the cold water shut off valve on the pipe downstairs that leads to the bathroom. I flush the toilet one last time to empty the tank. Then I observe a bit. It's the seal, I think, between the supply line and the tank hardware. The bathroom was unused for so long, I bet the rubber washers have cracked.

Yet another horrible disgusting thing left for me to fix by the woman who owned our house post-boarding house. Her mother ran the boarding house, so it's all Murphy-Chapman, either way. Fifty years of screwing things up. I take a deep breath, call my mother-in-law to see if Jake's dad will be able to talk him through this, and we both decide yes. He might talk me through it, frankly, now that I've looked online briefly and see that this is a common problem and probably easily fixed.

But in a 107 year old house, with a 60 year old slapdash plumbing scheme, that hasn't really ever had a good once-over with a scrub brush under and behind the toilet?

Time for more coffee and some sewing, don't you think? It's not leaking anymore and the hardware store is not far away. Tomorrow...is another day.

Waiting

2012-01-04T21:01:00.002-06:00

Just waiting. Daisy has an ear infection or perhaps swimmers ear, which, of course, is an ear infection. She hurts and it started around 7 and it's cold here, finally, and of course she gets an ear infection. Tylenol didn't cut the pain, really, and I called the exchange at 8.

The doctor called me back around 8:12. Yes, 8:12. The one with the funny mustache. Or at least he used to have one. He looks like what you think a doctor with a funny mustache would look like. He agreed that it sounded like an ear infection. Numbing drops for overnight if they work on her. They do, I tell him. Then of course we'll do that, he tells me.

But he can't take down my information for some reason. He wants me to call the exchange back and give them my pharmacy information. This song and dance means that it's now too late to go to my regular pharmacy, which closes at 9 and, perhaps because of this, is staffed by friendly people. The big guy with the earrings and the St. Christopher medal. The woman with the perfect eye makeup and nice smile. The older woman, perfectly dyed blond hair and large glasses. I like them. They answer questions, they tell me where the diaper ointment has moved to, they're good people.

So I call back and almost give the pharmacy catty-cornered from that one (one is a department store and one is that odd sort of pharmacy dime store collection of make up and photo development and last year's toys). I hate that pharmacy, but it's 24 hours. But Jake reminds me that they don't take our insurance anymore, so I scoot through the website of an identical place, with a different name, that does take our insurance, and give that to the woman on the exchange.

And then I wait.

At 8:50, I call the pharmacy and the snippy woman on the phone tells me she hasn't gotten a call from our doctor. So I make another series of phone calls to the exchange to find out what the hell is taking everybody so long to do this. It isn't like it's the middle of the night. It isn't like a pediatrician on call doesn't know how to do this.

The mustachioed doctor calls me back. He DID call in the prescription, but they don't check the line except on the hour. So at 8:50, they wouldn't have it. If only the snippy woman had told me that. I put on my coat and head out.

It's down Gravois quite a ways, the city-county line, just a literal stone's through from the River des Peres. I have this aching tired nausea covering my whole body. A headache coming on. Exhaustion. The pharmacy dime store has carpeting, setting it apart from its rival. The folks in the pharmacy on the night shift are jolly and the young blond who isn't as young as her makeup wants to pretend, is teaching everyone naughty phrases in Bosnian. Bosnian is the same as Serbo-Croatian, I think to myself. And I can understand the pronouns and prepositions and the occasional noun. But the come ons and double entendres she's spouting between giggles are just pronouns and prepositions for me. Schtah. Gdye. I sit in the waiting area with my phone, playing sudoku and getting progressively worse at it, and getting warm in my German army coat. It got my daughter through a Philadelphia winter, I remember the military surplus store owner telling me on Galveston Island when I bought it.

Finally the call for Daisy comes in and they fill the numbing drops prescription and I pay my $4.88, wondering how these prices get negotiated. Why not $5? Or $4?

Back home, she's asleep. Not for long, and the drops go in. I know I'm looking forward to a trip to the pediatrician in the morning, but it'll be fine. She'll sleep, I'll sleep, all will be well.

This, of course, is a false hope, and at 11:30 when she wakes screaming in pain, I realize I'm in for it. Groznica u funk kući sada.

Resolute

2012-01-03T10:52:00.002-06:00

I never used to make resolutions. I had Lent, as a Catholic, to do that. But Lent always feels like a handfasting, and New Years like a marriage. I fear divorce. I always went for the handfasting. You know, a temporary thing.

But in 2010 I made the resolution that I would let drivers into my lane. If I see a blinker and the person needs to merge, I let them (when possible--I don't come to screeching halts on the highway, that sort of thing). Most of the time, people need to merge through no fault of their own: construction pops up in their lane, they miss the sign for the exit, they have out of town plates. I made this resolution and it stuck. I still do it. Why wouldn't I?

Last year, my big resolution was to only have 1. One glass of wine at dinner. One beer (well, that never happens, I hate beer). One margarita. One scotch and water. One whatever. I have a child with a potential seizure disorder and I'm the only one who maintains ice water in the vein. There's no drinking anymore. And I kept true to this with one exception. Annie's choir party, Miguel was making cute little martinis. I had two lemon ones, and it was fine. They're small. Then I brought out the bourbon slush and had two cups. And frankly, I was still fine. But I understand slush--I screw up when other folks are pouring and the glass never empties. Not to make excuses.

2012? I do best with a very specific thing, like the two above. I slack off and divorce the resolution when it's something like "bike more" or "clean house more." And I'm better at consistent little things like the past two years than with ones like "read 10 books."

So my first ideas are bad ones: "Facebook less, talk to neighbors more." No way to measure it. "Make hot breakfast 1 Sunday a month" is bound to produce a hurried last Sunday of the month mess. "Do more cute bentos" is one of my goals, but also hard to measure.

I want to do those things--facebook less, make hot breakfast on Sunday mornings before church, and flex my bento muscles. But I'm not going to make them a resolution. Instead, I'm going to do two things. One big, one small.

1. Keep the guest room functional. The Dorian Gray of my whole house, it's the one room I can close off and not use if necessary. People have to walk through the rest of my house, and when my bedroom gets messy it makes me want to cry. So the guest room takes the hits for the rest of the house. I organized it last night and the day before. It's lovely and functional. And I'm going to do my best to keep it so.

2. Smaller, and one I've done before during a Lent a few years back, is to compliment folks. I always think these things in my head--I love the way she sings, that homily reached me, those are great boots, I like his glasses, she has great style--and I find myself not saying them for reasons I never get. So there it is. When it comes to mind, I'm going to say it.

Also, my friend the other Mary mentioned a new 365. Not now. I'm thinking summer, and then it will be something like "The Summer List of Things My Kids Will Never Have to Do. Or Get to." I may call it Consubstantial. Or Odsplut. Hmm.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 Things I Want to do in 2012

2012-01-03T09:44:00.002-06:00

Not really resolutions, right? I'll write about that later (another successful year behind me). Ten things I want to do...

1. Camp in the Smokies with girl scouts. Really. This will be the turning point in my girl scout career--I never left the state with my troop as a girl.

2. Attend Daisy's first communion. I'm calling the woman who made Fiona's dress today. I think it will be too large on Daisy, although I'd love to add her name to the slip and have them both wear it. I took it out of the closet and hung it on a hook in my room last night so I would remember to call. Daisy saw it and reported back to Fiona upstairs: "Mom has the most beautiful dress downstairs for me. I wonder what it is for." Now, here's hoping her attention at mass increases...

3. Get a job. I just want part time. But I want a job this autumn.

4. Finish a few UFOs in my cedar chest.

5. Get Christmas crafting underway in February.

6. Find a solution to my jaw pain.

7. Attend my parents' Christmas party on December 23 and laugh at the doomsday folk.

8. Grow a more successful garden than last year. Zelda and I are planning them now.

9. Facebook less, talk to neighbors more. Or is that a resolution?

10. Watch Sherlock. Mmm. New episodes in Britain right now. Soon.

Christmas by the Numbers

2012-01-01T14:14:00.009-06:00

2: recycled sweater strawberries for my niece
8: Santa place-mats made at 3:30 in the morning Christmas Day for my sister-in-law
1: table runner for Jake's aunt, candy cane stripes.
2.5: the number of hours I slept Christmas Eve night, after getting up at 7:30 to cook at church the morning before. A week of low sleep followed by a night of no sleep. Sigh.
134: slices of pie I cut and packaged at homebound holiday meal prep
4: the number on my test for celiac disease, which I got the results of on the 23rd. 5 or higher would be positive. Whew (also, my other two tests were soundly negative, this was the only one close). It's been quite a December.
6: days until the liquid vitamin D I started taking took effect. I was stunned by the difference. My heels no longer hurt.
2: nights this break waking up in bewildering facial and mouth pain. It's easier now that I know it's my masseter muscle, but it's still, well, the worst pain I've ever felt that wasn't a root canal. And remember, I did 37 hours and 52 hours of labor (two other numbers--Fiona, Daisy).
25: minutes until the deep pressure massage, hot compresses, relaxation breathing, and ibuprofen teamed up to completely, suddenly, amazingly, relieve that facial pain.
4: pairs of minky dot pants for nieces and daughters
0: pounds gained or lost since Thanksgiving. This is a WIN.
4: nights at my in-laws, doing nothing. Nothing. Also a win.
1: movie watched. The new Sherlock Holmes movie. Which has just about nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes but I like it anyway.
2: new Waldorf dolls arrived, made very welcome (do you catch the Prisoner reference?)
36: deviled eggs at my mom's house. It's a holiday thing. And we put pickles in ours. My kids love them. Don't be confused by Daisy's look. She's trying to imitate my sister Bevin.
5: days post-surgery was my father from his knee replacement when we came over for Christmas Eve. But I think it was ok. My kids weren't totally obnoxious...
3: quilts. One is a checkerboard for Jake's cousin's boy (a year older than Billy); one was a checkerboard-center picnic blanket that I shamefully failed to photograph before giving it to my sister Colleen, and one was a round Christmas quilt, like a treeskirt with no opening, for my mother-in-law.4: awesome handmade items for my kids from my sisters (Colleen, the happy tattooed one above, is the seamstress): a tutu, a messenger bag, a hunter's cap, and this spectacular cape for Daisy. Daisy's quote: "I don't know why anyone would not love Colleen when she makes wonderful thinks like cloaks."
1: happy but confused boy. Santa brought a Christmas train. He had other trains and track and a wind up tractor and emergency vehicles and a dollhouse-sized firehouse. So confused. But happy.
21: balloons in the title of the story by William Pene deBois, which I rendered in crewel embroidery for Bevin. Now I want to do more. Anne of Green Gables? The Hobbit? Dandelion Wine? So many choices.
5: pairs of new wool hiking socks for me. I have a pair on now. They're like flannel sheets for my feet.
2: magnet boards, for Jake's brother and sister-in-law, and for my niece.
10: little tiny polaroid picture magnets created from a tutorial online and attached to the magnet board.
2: IOUs, one from me to Jake, one from Jake to me. New faucet for the clawfoot tub in the bathroom; new grill or smoker outside. Neither of us wanted to make the choice on our own. So I gave him a grilling/barbecue cookbook of sorts, and he wrapped a wrench for me. I know now, more than ever, that not only are we well matched, but we are perfect for each other.
30: minutes before midnight when we said our goodbyes to Zelda and Travis after a lovely dinner at Mojos Tapas (I had my first vesper--probably too strong for my taste these days) and then an even lovelier low-key evening around their chiminea with red wine.
5: kids who didn't go to Mojos with us. Happy new year.
45: donuts made this afternoon because our church didn't have them after mass--we usually do on a Sunday but it's the first of the year. So I came home and made them myself, for the very first time ever. Jake grew up making them. We never fried anything. So we made donuts and about 1/3 were cinnamon sugar coated, 1/3 plain, and 1/3 with this old-fashioned chocolate icing with coffee as an ingredient. An in-greedy-ent. They are lovely.We spread them around the neighbors best we could. 45 is a lot of donuts, even small like these.
1: nap. Only one nap. I'm telling you. It was a hard break.
27: (I think) folks over for lunch on the 26th. Somewhat annoyed, I put jeans on instead of hanging out in pajamas. And then after the 26th, I was recuperated enough from Christmas to not want to hang out in pajamas...
2: months until I start the crafting and sewing for this year. I cannot make myself go through another autumn and especially December like I did in 2011. Especially if I go back to work in the fall.
3: more days home with the girls. There is much to be done. But first, I need to increase that 1 nap to 2...Merry Christmas! Happy 2012!

Love letter to my high school darkroom

2011-12-22T20:47:00.003-06:00

I was holding my camera. It's a 5 year old canon digital camera, nothing special, not one of those dslr things. Just the run of the mill this is what I have. It has a nice heft to it, though, like a good 35 mm would, and it brought me back to another camera I owned, my father's, that I used throughout my senior year of high school in a photojournalism class. My dad had a set of macro lenses and I used them to take a picture of the laces of my converse all-star lace up high tops, back when they came in black, cream, and red. I had a pair of black and a pair of red. Back when no one wore them. But after the point when basketball players wore them. I placed 3rd in a regional school competition in photography with that picture.

And I was in this photojournalism class, with this camera with quirks--you couldn't use the timer anymore, for instance. You had to load film just-so. But it worked and I learned how to take a photo.

Maybe it's making an order for art class, the classes I teach on a volunteer basis, but for the first time ever I got to go through a catalog and order things. Buying things in bulk--maybe that's it. Or maybe it was Terri Gross interviewing Trent Reznor on Fresh Air. But suddenly I'm sitting in that darkroom in 1991, transferring film from my camera to the canisters where it will develop. Fumbling in darkness, hoping I don't drop anything necessary on the floor where I'll never find it. And then after developing it, going out into the bright classroom and using the little black machine to roll another canister of film off the bulk roll Mr. Sarver kept in a black bag.

I realized that more than cell phones vs. land lines, more than microwave ovens, more than the internet, actually, that this is the difference for me, the difference between me and now. My kids will never roll film or develop photos in a dark room, sitting on those metal stools that are never balanced right, chatting with John or trying not to chat with Heather, hoping we didn't expose anything, being trusted to do this task. They'll never take that film canister and take pictures at some ultra-boring volleyball game or NHS induction.

We don't have to make our own butter or know how to butcher pigs, either, and this isn't a "oh, these kids today don't understand" kind of thing I'm going for. I just realized, looking down at my camera in the front seat in front of me, that this is my version of my father's tooling around with a British sports car. I know how to do this thing that I never need to know how to do anymore.

But like a love letter from someone you've broken up with and never see anymore, it's nice to think about.

Wake up and fight

2011-12-21T08:09:00.001-06:00

Most weekdays, Jake goes to work and I get things done at home and school and eventually, sooner or later, sit here at the computer. I take a break with a cup of coffee. On bad days, I sit down early. On good days, I realize it's lunchtime and I haven't checked my email. Either way, most weekdays, Jake wakes up a half hour earlier than he needs to so he can check things he reads and looks at online. Some we share: xkcd, for instance. The weather. But he also reads a number of websites I don't bother with--cool tools, boing boing, a bunch of political sites.

Many days, I sit down at the computer and find he's left open a tab for me. Usually it's a link to something interesting, like color photos from the 1930s Soviet Union. Or where to buy dehydrated food in bulk. We have many interests. My favorite was a blog of a woman who takes her motorcycle into Priapyet and takes photos of the destruction post-Chernobyl. Fed right into some of my greater irrational fears.

Today he left open Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions, 1942 edition. You can go and take a look. Many wouldn't apply to me, but I could take 10 of those and make my own list, straight from his beautifully handwritten and illustrated copy.

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
7. Drink very scant if any
15. Learn people better
17. Don't get lonesome
18. Stay glad
23. Have company but don't waste time
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

There would be little else on my list. Wake up and fight.

Twas 5 days before Christmas

2011-12-20T22:34:00.004-06:00

and all through the house the kids were so ramped up on sugar that they couldn't think of a rhyme here.

We made a gingerbread house. House-ish. This was my entire day. My entire day.

I've made them before...my friend Matt even had his dad make me a set of cookie cutters for them. They're fun. For some reason, my kids think this is a tradition. I think we've made one since Fiona would be old enough to remember. I can't even find any photos. But it turned out ok. Mostly because I made it, with only two hands, and not with 6 extra hands helping me.

Today's started out good. I found a recipe that I think I've used before. I had this nagging feeling that I should google something, find something made for gingerbread houses, but I went with what I had in the cookbook. We cut out the shapes and baked them. While they cooled, we went to Target and bought cheap candy to decorate it with.

After we were home, we went to the kitchen and started the assembly. The girls were very excited. I was very nervous. I had memories of this not going well.

My memories were correct:Look at that Irish engineering. Quality right there.
The front broke. The roof broke. I pasted them together with royal icing and kept going. Eventually, my frustration reached a peak and I told the girls to go turn something on TV for Billy and I'd call them when it was ready to decorate--they hadn't really grasped that the assembly would be difficult or that it would be first.

I calmed down, got the thing together, and called them in. And it was fun. Weird mints on the roof. A makeshift chimney. Mike&Ikes on the front of the house, with two weird penguin cookies holding up lollipops. Daisy made a random front yard. Fiona designed a swingset and a playhouse for the side yard. I attached licorice whips to one side of the house, and then we went away for a little bit to let things dry before we added to it.

Something was wrong, I think, with my icing this time. It wasn't stiff enough. Or maybe it was the gingerbread itself, too crumbly. Some years things break, but they hold together with icing and are rock hard by the time January comes around and I think maybe we should throw that thing away.

We were upstairs chatting with Jake, who'd come home from work, I mean, literally, my whole day was gingerbread house, when Daisy yelled for us: "House emergency!"

We ran downstairs. Our lovely gabled house had collapsed under the weight of its roof. Too many mints. The side walls were intact, and the front and back walls were fine up to the height of the side walls--the gables crumbled with one of the roof pieces.

It. Was. A. Mess.

The girls were giggling--high on sugar, remember--but all I kept thinking was "this was my whole day, golly."

And I saw this vision. One of those two-paths-in-the-woods Frost moments. I could pick the whole thing up and throw it away, that was one path. Tell the girls we tried and maybe next year we could do it again. And I looked down that path and saw first our evening, awkward and probably disappointed, and then next year: "Nah, let's not make a house" and then never making one again. Yes. I saw this. And then the other path looked so clear. Laugh with them. Fix what you can. Let them play.So it's more of an adobe-style structure. I told them maybe it was Christmas in the Desert. Fiona really wanted the coconut to be snow, though. With no chimney, we posted a notice for Santa on the roof and made a ladder (you can't really see it--it's on the other side of the house) out of candy canes for him to climb down.

They had a good time. I did too. My jaw didn't hurt. I had Daisy sweep the floor and Fiona carry the creation to the front hall. They couldn't care less that the gables broke and it didn't look like something Hansel and Gretel would try to eat.

What do we learn from this? A few things. First, next year? Get the right icing recipe and the right gingerbread recipe and don't overcook them or make them too thin. Next, assemble it the night before while they are in bed and let them go at it in the morning when it is rock solid. Finally, that gingerbread assembly isn't really in my job description, but good childhoods are. And I need to keep that in mind. Always.

10 on Tuesday: 10 Things I have to do before Christmas

2011-12-20T08:43:00.001-06:00

Only ten?

1. I have to finish my sister's awesome thing.

2. I have to finish 3 afghans. They are knit. I just need to seam them.

3. I have to iron and put buttons on a doll-sized Irish dance dress.

4. I have to finish the cool thing for my brother-in-law/sister-in-law.

5. I have to use freezer paper as an art supply.

~~6. I have to assemble a gingerbread house for my children to "decorate."~~

7. I should write a few cards to the few people who always write to me.

~~8. I have to go to the post office for my brother.~~

9. I have to finish 3 small knitting projects.

10. I have to arrange poinsettias at church.

Ok, actually? That isn't so bad.

Masseter II

2011-12-19T21:12:00.003-06:00

I've had a week pain-free.

Not actually pain-free. But as close as it comes, really, with an inflamed masseter muscle.

During the day, I have this new white filling that is still sensitive to cold, on the same side of my mouth, so a swig of ice cold milk will get it all going. And that still sucks. But it is about a 6 month process for my mouth.

I'm not waking up in pain, which is a huge improvement in my quality of life. During the day, if it's relatively low-stress, I don't hurt at all. If it is stressful, like Sunday when it was time for church decorating and only 5 people whose last names were not Kennedy stayed? That was stressful. But I kept pressing that pressure point and all was well. I came home and took a few ibuprofen. Heat helps, too.

Things are humming along. It's ok right now. But busy. More later.

Masseter

2011-12-13T20:18:00.004-06:00

Clench your teeth while touching the sides of your jaw. The muscle that tenses and expands to make you look like Henry Rollins? That's your masseter.

Due to circumstances long in the making, the right side of my face hurts. Not an electric pain (my endodontist neighbor asked me if it was an electric pain, and then my father asked me if it was an electric nerve pain, and then I googled it and it's called tic douloureux, aka The Suicide Pain and I decided there was no way I had that pain).

It's usually due to grinding and clenching teeth. I'm not grinding and clenching teeth. But I set my jaw tight sometimes. Maybe a lot more than sometimes. And then back a few months ago I had a filling fall out and some tooth structure fall apart. New filling. Then two root canaled teeth hit each other. And more pain. Then this tumbles downhill into a muscle relaxer prescription and then something amazing happened the day after I started taking it.

I could close my teeth together on the right side for the first time in years. Years.

But the muscle relaxer is really only that good the first round through, and I ran out of it about 10 days ago. No big thing, really. I was better. I didn't hurt anymore. It was amazing.

Until Sunday night when I hurt again. Now, I'd spent the whole weekend on my feet at Girl Scout camp. And I was tired and overworked and stressed and trying to clean up and get ready for Christmas and I woke up in the middle of the night in crazy severe pain.

Then I ran my thumb down the inside of my right cheek while my forefinger met it on the outside. I did the same on the left side and noted the difference. I'm all HEnry Rollins on one side and not the other. I shouldn't be. My masseter muscle is inflamed.

I have so much to do. And I can already see that this will be like 2008 when I had an inner ear infection and could not sit up for very long. I was also 8 months pregnant. Guess what. Christmas will arrive. Whether I do anything else or not, it will still come. I have my kids taken care of and a limited number of other folks. And I'll do what I can and that's that.

Right now, I have knitting and sewing to do. And I'm going to bed. It's 8:30 at night and I'm taking some ibuprofen (anti-inflammatory) and going to bed. Calling the dentist in the morning and seeing if she wants to see me or if my GP would be a better call. I have a feeling it's going to fall through the cracks of both medicine and dentistry. And then I'll go to the chiropractor and her friend the massage therapist. And that will be that.

Sequoia Lodge

2011-12-12T13:37:00.003-06:00

My girl scout junior/cadette troop has found their winter home.

We have camped in the winter before and have stayed at other lodges in spring and fall.

Petite Chalet at Cedarledge is nice, but the outdoor ETs (environmental toilet, meaning "latrine that doesn't quite make you want to die when you walk in") make it harder for winter camping. When we winter camp, we slumber party. I want to move to a more serious camping for spring and fall, but winter camping should be just a nice break.

Wohl Lodge was awesome because it has bunkbeds throughout and it's at Cedarledge as well (the closest camp to where we live). But there was little room for crafts or games when the whole main room is full of bunks.

Last winter we tried Sacajawea at Tuckaho, but I've decided, along with several girls, that I dislike Tuckaho. It's far away, it's big and crowded and feels less welcoming. Plus we've had our worst camp supervisor experiences there, which I know are not specific to a certain camp, but it adds to this feeling of discomfort.

But this past weekend we went to Sequoia. Camp Fiddlecreek is small, only about 90 acres, and it only has 3 lodges, so a full winter camp is 3 troops. That in itself is wonderful. You never run into people. You can go down to the archery range whenever you want. You could walk around and explore and feel like you're the only people there.

And Sequoia itself is lovely. A huge room, bigger than Petite Chalet, with a bench around the entire outside walls where girls can stash their stuff. Enough room that even if our whole troop camped, we could keep 4 or 5 tables up at one end of the room and not feel cramped. In addition, the kitchen is large enough to be functional, with a smallish commercial stove, full refrigerator, cabinets, and tables to work at. It has indoor bathrooms, two toilets that share a sink off the kitchen, and a separate bathroom with a shower off a side room that is the leaders' room. There's enough space for 4 bedstands and a dresser in the leaders' room, and the bathroom was decent. Knowing there is a SHOWER means next winter? Saturday night I'm getting cleaned up before bed for a change. There's also a shower off the kitchen for the girls.

It sits on the main road (really, there's only one main road in Fiddlecreek, except for driveways here and there) between a broken down "Trefoil Inn" and a cute little 1960s era building that is probably used as an infirmary during resident camp. Best of all, it looks over Walker Lake, which is a pond, technically, and the lake that my coleader and I got our canoe certification in. It was thinly frozen over, so the whole weekend our city girls kept walking over to the edge of the water or along the earthen dam to toss pebbles in. The sound they made was hypnotic.

We made candles under the watchful eye of my coleader. We made the BEST homemade baked macaroni and cheese I've ever eaten. French toast that was wonderful. Bacon that was ok. We went down to the archery range and started thinking about silver award projects (steps and pathway to the range, for instance, and decent signage throughout the camp).

Fiona HIT THE TARGET for the first time ever. Her dysgraphia and dyslexia are coupled with weak fingers, which is the usual situation with those conditions, and so she could never get enough oomph behind an arrow to get it to the target. But Saturday she used a release for the first time, which allows you to use your hand and arm strength to pull back the bow, and then release it with a trigger, like a gun.

Spring and autumn are going to be more camp-like (treehouses, tents, cabins) but Sequoia is going to be our winter home.

Stressful Morning

2011-12-07T11:35:00.003-06:00

I'm having a stressful morning. Stupid stuff. Nothing for real. Billy was impossible at coffee. Daisy forgot her backpack (can you tell in the photo on the sidebar that Fiona is the older girl, Daisy is younger? Or would it be smarter to separate them into two different photos? From a design standpoint I mean). I had to get blood drawn at the doctor's office and then wait up to 2 weeks for a letter that says I'm fine or a phone call that says please come in. That will be the week before Christmas, by the way. Not a big thing, not like testing for cancer or something, but bloodwork and medication tweaking is always stressful for me. Jake is working late tonight and that always ramps up the blood pressure, too, dinner on my own and kid bedtime on my own. But then he'll be back and...I'll probably go to bed! I have a headcold that is getting worse, not better. It's the little things.

I'm doing Christmas sewing in the guest room with a fresh cup of coffee and I realize that my brain is going a thousand miles an hour and I need to listen to something on the radio. The local Christmas music schmaltzy stations are not what I want. My pandora radio has a jazzy Christmas station and so I walk into the library and see about turning that on. Pandora on my computer goes to either the most recent station I created or the last thing I listened to, whichever it is, my gregorian chant station came up.

I could feel the shift in my brain. Some men's monastery choir singing missa pro defunctis (mass for the dead, which I could have parsed out if my brain wasn't so foggy, but google let me know). It doesn't matter what the words are. It doesn't matter if it is women's or men's voices. A capella chanting changes my brain chemistry. Now I can go make a plaid dress shirt for a waldorf doll. Yes, that's what I just said. A plaid dress shirt. Button down. Because a guy needs his clothes as much as all those girls. He's alone out there. Poor Max.

Ok, I'm officially off my rocker. More later.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 favorite holiday traditions

2011-12-06T05:41:00.000-06:00

My sister once had to write a paper about this topic and she came up with "shooting rediwhip into people's mouths." I think she wrote a complete essay on the topic.

But not here. I'm going to try to do some holiday traditions that don't involve pressurized whipping cream.

1. The Annual Blake Christmas Tree Hunt. We head out with my parents and sisters to a tree farm somewhere in the sticks. We hunt the perfect trees and cut them down. We throw them in the back of my dad's truck and then go have lunch somewhere like Cracker Barrel. This usually happens on a Sunday after church and so by the time we get back to the city it's 4:00 and almost dark and naps sound soooo good. But then it's time to decorate the tree and get in the spirit of things. Sometimes this works (this year). Other times I'm 8 months pregnant and not so much. But the tree part is a tradition that stands firm.

2. The nativity sets. This tradition was started by my mother-in-law when she got a set for Fiona's baptism. Then the other kids got them too. And each year they receive more pieces so that there's a city of animals and villagers and wise men and shepherds in my living room. They're made of plastic so no worries about breaking Joseph. Fun in the making: a playset you only get to see for 3 weeks a year. Elaborate storylines develop. Each night when I turn off lights there are weird scenes to find. All the animals in a heap like at a slaughterhouse. And all the people in a line. Or all three stables/buildings pulled together to make a house, and fisher price little people come to visit.

3.My father's fruitcake, dark, soaked in rum or scotch. You only need one piece. And a big glass of milk. And then you're good for the year. But that flavor--the fruit-like objects, the rich dark spicy cake that gives you a hangover--that will always be Advent for me.

4. St. Nick's Day--not Christmas, but the pre-Christmas scrimmage. Did you put your shoe out last night? Did you when you were a kid? It's weird--many of the places I lived, this was unheard of. I was the only kid who got chocolate the night before.

5. This is a logistics thing: my family opens presents on Christmas Eve after midnight mass (or, at our parish, 10 pm mass, which is actually nice to not be so ridiculously late). You shiver in the cold and emptiness of Christmas Eve night, rushing home to my parents' place, where we have, alternately, hot chocolate or bourbon slush, and everyone is sleepy and the kids open gifts and it's so nice because the next day? It's at home. And then we go to my inlaws after we have Christmas at our own house. I will never travel at Christmas if I can help it. It's just too hard. My family has always done things Christmas Eve, and this has made Christmas work for my immediate family. Perfectly.

6. I get to my inlaws on Christmas Day and I'm exhausted. I've been up to the wee hours of the morning, and then my kids get me up early for presents again (they're like little addicts, don't need any sleep when there are presents to open). Then we travel and visit and eat and see folks and kids cry because of the exhaustion (and coming down from the fix, perhaps). I used to fight this but the past 3 or 4 years, I've just gone with the flow. Christmas night, I usually post something on my blog, change into warm pajamas, and go to bed early. This is an important holiday tradition. Followed by:

7. I do nothing on December 26th. Nothing at all.

8. Fruit in stockings. This is one from Jake's side of the family. We never had fruit in our stockings. But now Santa brings fruit. I'm sure this hearkens back to something.

9. Advent Calendars. Every year I try to do something different. This year,I went upstairs and gathered all the Christmas books from the girls' shelves and wrapped them up. Numbered them at random and put them on the dining room table. Each day they open a book and we read it at bedtime. I threw in a couple of oddballs (because I didn't have quite enough in a Christmas or winter or Advent theme): the old National Geographic Our World book that I love, and the book The Family of Man from the MOMA exhibit in the 1950s. That was tonight's book. My sisters were over and we looked through it. I don't think the kids cared much but I love that book.

10. Well, ok. This Thanksgiving I made real whipped cream and real whipped cream with cinnamon. Wow. Amazing. But most holidays? It's whipped cream in a can. And most of that? Gets shot right into kids' mouths. And it's pretty awesome, frankly.

Why do we do that, again?

2011-12-03T22:14:00.003-06:00

I went to a Christmas party tonight, a neighbor's Christmas party. Most things I attend with neighbors are sedate barbecues, national night out parties that end in random violence, blackouts where everyone sits on the stoops and sweats, you know, FUN times. Actually, most things around here are like the sedate barbecue. But once a year, Joy and her husband through a Party. They invite, I think, everyone they've ever met. The street fills with cars and double parkers and craziness. As the evening wears on, people are more and more drunk and stupid. The last year I stayed late, I got drunk and stupid and told Mason, a police officer, that I hated cops. But that I liked him. Drunk and stupid. But that was ages ago. Now, the last several years, I go early and leave when I can't hear myself think. Last year, I think that happened 20 minutes after I arrived.

This year I lasted almost 2 hours, and Jake left right before I did. I walked home and into my very quiet house. I took off my clogs and sweater and stood in my sock feet in the kitchen eating a cookie.

"Why do we do that, again?" I asked him.

"Do what, make cookies?"

"No, why do we go to the loud party where we just talk to the same people we talk to all the time when we can actually hear them?"

"Well," he began, "it comes at a time of year when it's been a few weeks since we've been out on the stoop seeing people. And even though most of the people we talk to are there, sometimes we catch up with someone else."

"Yeah," I admitted, "Zelda and I talked with Barb Brunwin and got the lowdown on Bruce's stroke."

"See?" he says, proving his point. And it was good to talk to Barb and find out about Bruce's stroke, which was bad, which put him in a rehab center and left his wife with their three kids, two of which have some very special needs. It was hard to hear about, especially because our relationship with that family is always a little strained, never as natural as the other folks on the block. But they are neighbors still, and Barb said Lorraine was definitely open to help.

"Meals, she said," Barb yells to me and Zelda over our wine glasses. I'm standing close enough to her that she keeps gesturing with her hand and hitting me in the chest. There's a lot to hit there, but still. "No allergies, no dietary requirements. They just, Lorraine is going back and forth to the rehab place, like, daily."

Zelda and I both nod. I can't even imagine.

"It's a family, though, that it would be easy to get sucked into," Barb says what I'm thinking. I nod in agreement.

"But meals," I repeat. I can do that. Bring a casserole over.

Bruce and Lorraine own the house across the street, the one that has failed to sell. And now more than ever it really probably needs to sell. I wish I could help them with that. But Barb is right. Meals.

So there were good reasons to go to the party. We listened to Justin tell a hunting story. Tara tell about the competitions Iris was in. Zelda and I talked garden. Jen and I talked about future job plans for each of us. And dance schools. No, it's good. It's just, walking out after an hour and a half of noise and bodies everywhere, it's nice to come home to the quiet mess of my own house. And maybe that's part of why we do it, too.

Two steps forward, one step back

2011-12-01T09:14:00.003-06:00

I woke up at 2:30 last night with that same toothache/headache. In the shape of the number three, traced from my forehead down to my cheekbone and then again down to my jawline. Only on the right side. I was on the muscle relaxer too, took it at 10:30 when Jake woke me up to take it. I went to bed before 9.

Tuesday afternoon, though, I went to see the chiropractor who did so much good for Leo when he was little and was killing me nursing. She is trained in cranial-sacral therapy (CST) and it did wonders for him. She also fixed his hiatal hernia and he stopped spitting up. Some good old fashioned lay on of hands kind of medicine, where his pediatrician had started to hint around the not-approved-for-infants anti-heartburn drugs.

So I went to see her and she realigned my jaw. She also realigned my spine while she was at it. And I floated out of there completely pain free. I remained pain free all day and all night and then all day on Wednesday.

Waking up in pain means I'm clenching or grinding my teeth at night. Even though things are much much better--I can close my teeth together all the way around--they aren't perfect. I don't want this to be the way I handle stress.

The dentist took x-rays and looked at my teeth, which are bad, by the way. But nothing has changed. I don't need a root canal. I don't need anything, dentistry-wise. And until last night, I thought I was on the upswing. I could open my jaw all the way without it clicking or twisting. I didn't hurt in the middle of the day. I took the hygienist's tip and chewed gum in the car, the place I find myself tensing my jaw the most.

Then I woke up in pain again.

Today? I'm headed out to speech therapy and then to art at school. I'm going to do my best to just float. Just float through the day. Let things roll off my back. I don't know if you can make yourself be less irritable but I'm going to try. I have too much to do to let this dominate my life.

We'll see how today goes...

Ten on Tuesday: 10 favorite musicals

2011-11-29T08:58:00.000-06:00

I'm not a musical girl. I like them fine. I like to see them live and even as movies but I am not, as some of my readers probably are, an aficionado. You know, I just looked up aficionado because I was afraid I'd misspelled it but I got it right the first time. Unless Google is also wrong, of course. The OED is at my mom's house.

Now, I could talk about adventures with the OED. But I will write about musicals instead.

I'm going to say "10 musicals I've seen and enjoyed" instead of "10 favorite musicals" because seriously, I'm going to be a bumpkin here. And in no particular order.

1. Holiday Inn. The family tradition is that my grandmother saw this right before her first husband went off to the war (where he was killed) and so nobody ever sang "White Christmas" after that. I love stories like this. The superstition and memory and weird rules. So I didn't see this until adulthood and thoroughly enjoyed it.

2. Sweet Charity. My sister's high school put this one on. She wasn't the lead (she'd been the lead in that really hard play earlier in the year, what was it...Arthur Miller's All My Sons), but she was one of the other dancers. Fun.

3. Mary Poppins. I loved the version that came to St. Louis recently. I took the girls.

4. I know this isn't the same thing at all, but can I just put The Muppet Movie here? The original one, from my childhood.

5. Jesus Christ Superstar. This soundtrack? It was the soundtrack of my sophomore year of college. Who knows why.

6. Music Man. I never saw this until after Sophia came along. Sophia loves musicals.

7. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Absolutely. Ludicrous.

8. The Producers. What was that about ludicrous?

9. Chicago. Mostly because I use the line "and all that jazz" more than I should.

10. Meet Me in St. Louis. Of course.

Finally, all is made clear

2011-11-28T22:10:00.003-06:00

So when Fiona was little, we watched My Neighbor Totoro so often that I really started thinking about this place it was in, the people who were minor characters, what was really going on. It was intriguing, how very little was explicit, how very much it was a child's eye view of the world and adult situations. I've talked about this before. A lot.

When Daisy was little, she wasn't as consistent in what she liked to watch. Totoro, yes, but also a variety of other Miyazaki and Pixar films. And Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. And all sorts of things. So I never really got a chance to reflect on anything for long enough to come up with questions.

With Billy, he likes cars and trains and fire engines and so forth. We watch a little Bob the Builder. Occasionally Dinosaur Train. Sometimes we go off-script and catch something weird on Netflix. Like Pingu. Wha?

But his old standby is Thomas. Of course. Thomas the Tank Engine, the Really Useful tank engine who sometimes causes confusion and delay. And I think about the Island of Sodor a lot. And I talk to Jake. And I say things like:

It has to be an island near Britain, I mean, it's obvious they're British of some kind. And it is an island, but it's not big enough to be Ireland. The Isle of Man? Is that what it's based on?

Look, there's industry there. Towns. Stations. Docks. They have to be bigger than that stupid map at the beginning of the episodes.

How do the other visiting engines get there so easily? Wouldn't it be really expensive to ship an engine over to Sodor just for the summer? It has to be really close to a mainland. Or to England. Some place bigger.

I mean, Jake, they have abandoned lines. If it were only as big as the map at the beginning, everything would be KNOWN. And they'd never have to have eleventy-hundred danged engines on the place causing confusion and delay.

Sir Topham Hatt? What is that? Why is he a sir? What did he do? (To which Jake replies: obviously, he made the trains run on time).

They have a narrow-gauge line. Jake. It has to be big enough to need that.

Ok, we watch it too much. But just now, as I was debating whether I should call it a night, Jake called up to me:

"Bridgett. Wikipedia has an article on the Island of Sodor."

And I went there. And all was made clear. And you know what? I was right. Irish Sea. Bigger than the Isle of Man, smaller than Ireland. Right next to England. There's a bridge.

Now you too can know all about Sodor, including its actually rather benign etymology, by going to its article here.

Corners

2011-11-26T20:46:00.004-06:00

Thanksgiving was Thursday.

It started at church, like the past 4 or 5 Thanksgivings, working on meals for the homebound. We counted a few pies and then I went upstairs to mass. Realized that this would be the last time I would say some of these words, like "and also with you". And I didn't really care, frankly. I mean, not in a bad way. Just can't get mad about the English language changes to the liturgy coming up this weekend.

Went back downstairs after talking with Jack for a minute, and Sr. Vanda stopped me at the door as I was putting on an apron. Sarah had taken my job. I glanced over at the counter and Sarah called over to me, "11 big, 11 small, cut into 8ths and 4ths will give us what we need." I realized I'd been replaced. Not a big thing in the grand scheme of, well, anything on earth. Anybody can divide pies. Sr. Vanda was worried and apologized to me, which was unnecessary but nice. I told her I'd go decorate upstairs. Needed to get it done anyway.

Jack was in back with the wreath and I made my way to the sacristry. Where I hid in the corner and cried. I just can't find my place at this church these days. Gave myself a pep talk and went back out to pull plants off the altar area and start bringing things together in back. Jack, Fr. Miguel, and I hung the wreath in about 3 minutes. I told them I'd put everything else together after meals were done downstairs. Feeling better, I went down.

The kitchen was completely jammed with people. Ann caught me as I started to put on an apron. She could read the weariness on my face and asked me what was wrong. And I started to cry again. We talked a moment. She told me to go home (nicely, appropriately). I went home and sent Jake to deliver meals.

I monotonously cleaned the kitchen and get things ready to make pies for my mom's house. Jake got home and told me that even with so many people, they didn't have their acts together very well. Probably because of so many people, I thought to myself. The kids were playing with friends and I sent Jake to clean something--anything--while I cooked.

I made a pumpkin pie. I made a chocolate custard pie. I took a shower. I made whipped cream and cinnamon whipped cream. We went to my parents' house.

There, I drank coffee and chatted with my sister and felt like I was turning a corner. I don't know what God is trying to say to me about all that's gone on at the parish for me this semester, but I'm not one to make rash moves. I'm not one to make moves. But there have been so many barriers and frustrations and stuff just grinding me down...it's hard to know what it means.

But dinner was excellent and we played games and Billy was crazy and it was all good. I went home that night and felt ok. Took a muscle relaxer and went to bed.

Friday we went to Cairo. Hard morning getting up and out the door but we made it down there only to realize we'd left the pork and beef trimmings we needed to make deer sausage and burger back home in the freezer. Some juggling with my mom and Jake's brother and aunt and it eventually arrived in time for Jake and his dad to process 3 deer. Most of that is in my freezer downstairs right now. In Cairo I made an afghan and almost finished a doll sweater. I watched cable TV. I slept 11 hours Friday night.

And today is a little different. I have children's liturgy of the word planned for the three weeks of Advent I'm in charge of it. I have an Irish dancer dress made for one of Fiona's dolls (she wants doll clothes for Christmas). The house is clean, the freezer is full, and my teeth all fit together when I close my mouth.

It's ok. Not great, I mean, I've got a lot of stuff to do in the next few weeks, not to mention the car business needs to get wrapped up. Christmas is very close. Cold is close. Art classes, my online class, sewing--lots of things need to be done and done soon. And I'm camping with the girl scouts before Christmas as well. Ha! But somehow, I feel like Thanksgiving morning was this corner.

Reflecting on the past year, I realized that my life runs on a liturgical calendar. It was the Friday before the first Sunday of Advent that Daisy had her seizure. It was that week that my brother and his wife found out their baby had down syndrome. The year that followed, from Advent 2010 to the end of this liturgical year, has been really really busy and hard and angst-filled. Now that it is after dusk on Saturday it is a new liturgical year, 2011 has begun, year B in a three year cycle.

It's my favorite season. I missed it last year--I was too busy being worried and sad. Perhaps it is time to turn a corner and see this year differently. I don't know if that's the way things work but that's the way things seem to work for me. So here it goes. Faith in a better tomorrow.

Thanks

2011-11-24T10:46:00.003-06:00

It's been a hard 3 months or so.

The school year started off with a bang. The night of the first day of school a parent told me he used Daisy as the example of how not to act when he was teaching his daughter how to do the right thing. And then he said how he hoped he could help me become a better parent over the course of the school year together.

Many things about school are upsetting and frustrating this year; none of them have to do with the teachers or head of school. Who are fabulous. But things did not start well and so.

I never got any tomatoes. Neither did Zelda. It wasn't me.

Bleys died. The day after my birthday.

Jake had two root canals. I had a tooth crumble in my mouth. Crumble. Teeth aren't supposed to crumble.

Jake had a minor car accident. But it was an old car and it totaled it.

Billy was diagnosed with apraxia. There is no way to know right now whether this is childhood apraxia of speech that will go away with intensive (also expensive) therapy, or if this will be a lifelong condition.

But on the other hand...

The family that hated me and my daughter so so much moved away.

I'm volunteering 5-6 hours a week in classrooms at school teaching art and practical life.

I figured out how to play my professor's game and now have a 96% in her class.

I have gallons of salsa verde in the freezer.

We have a decent dentist, and the pain I was feeling that I thought was a tooth going bad turned out to be an inflamed jaw/cheek muscle from stress and tension. Flexeril seems to be working, although I overdid it yesterday and my speech was slurred (I took 1. The dentist suggested 1, or perhaps 1/2. I will do 1/2 from now on). It was amazing, the morning after I took the first one. I could close my teeth together on both sides of my mouth. I haven't been able to do that...I don't remember when.

The car may be totaled, but I have so many friends and relatives who have volunteered to help us with transportation, including my parents who are giving me their truck for a whole month. We'll replace the car in late January or so. The car was worth a lot more than we assumed it would be. And we've been overpaying the note on the mazda for two years, such that they've decreased the amount we owe each month. We're going to take advantage of both these things and get a small loan on a decent used car and take a deep deep breath.

I miss the cat, but there is no longer any poop on my dining room hearth. The other two cats seem to fill the space left, too, and I don't think we'll get a 3rd for a long time. Perhaps after Hickory goes (she's the same age Bleys was, but you'd never know it).

And Billy? What will be will be. He doesn't have autism or something else global and mystifying. The apraxia mostly involves just speech, with a little fine motor, but he's started to imitate. The professor was very positive, and not in a "we'll see" kind of fake way. She thinks he will probably be done with therapy before kindergarten (when, ironically, it would be free through the public school instead of $400 a month this semester).

It's been a year since Daisy's seizure.

Fiona is fine. She's upstairs with her sister playing with Bree, who is probably her best friend, and we are so blessed that they live two houses away.

The treehouse is 99% done. A friend on the next block is giving me the parts of her son's, now outgrown, to use for the swingset extension on the side.

Jake is scheduled and billable through late January already.

I will be certified again to teach at the end of this semester; I will be certified K-9 to teach art next semester.

Weather has been mild enough we didn't turn the heat on until last week. I will probably turn it back off; it's going to be 60 today.

I have often said we are the luckiest unlucky people in the world. My brother pointed out that this runs in the family, and I suggested we needed to translate it into Latin and make it our family motto. Using google translate, back and forth and tweaking it as best I can, I came up with this:

infaustum familia maxime fortunata

It's not a bad thing, really. Whatever doesn't kill you...makes a good story over bourbon slush.

Happy Thanksgiving. Here's to a good advent.

Sweet Little Daisy

2011-11-23T11:47:00.002-06:00

My friend from school who is also Daisy's teacher called me last night to tell me a Daisy story. That one. You know, every gray hair on my head. Well her class spent a part of the day brainstorming and making some sketches of their vision of the playground and outdoor space at our new school building which will be our home next year. I suspect there were many good stories, but Daisy's idea was something she called a "miss you tunnel."

"What's a miss you tunnel?" I asked her teacher, who told me she asked Daisy the same thing. And Daisy had just kept repeating the title, as if that made any sense at all. Finally her teacher told her she needed to explain it.

"Well, it would be a tunnel on the playground big enough to sit in and you go into it and on the inside walls are pictures of all the people who used to go to our school but moved away or changed schools. And you go there when you miss them."

And since of course it's all about me, I thought about this and how many miss-you tunnels I would have had my picture in growing up. How different it must be to be the kids who stay instead of the kids who move. How their stories will begin "When Jenny was in our class back in 3rd grade" instead of "Back when I was at St. Martin's in 3rd grade with Jenny and Chrissy and all those girls".

We've chosen the better part.

Stress Fail

2011-11-23T11:36:00.002-06:00

So I'm kind of a mess. This autumn has gotten the best of me and I had 4 days in a row of excruciating tooth pain and went to the dentist yesterday. My teeth are fine. But then my dentist pinched the muscle of my right cheek and I almost came out of the chair at her.

I'm not clenching my teeth or grinding. I'm setting my jaw. Basically making a fist, but with my jawline. She suggested a muscle relaxer.

I got my hair cut last night and then went over to Target to the pharmacy. I stood at the counter with my big bag I use as a purse/knitting bag/diaper bag and started hunting through it for the prescription. Then I called Jake. Yup. The prescription was at home on the phone table in the front hall.

It felt all very symbolic. There I was, so stressed out my teeth didn't meet anymore in my mouth because my facial and jaw muscles were so inflamed, getting a prescription for a muscle relaxer, and I didn't have the prescription.

So I went and picked up at the CSA and came home. Jake had dinner on the table--he made french toast and bacon and fruit salad and it was lovely. And then I went back to Target.

I took it last night and was hoping for the muscle relaxer version of, say, vicodin. Something that would knock me flat. But no. It's a long-acting version, and so I still took some ibuprofen before bed. I was worried. Worried that the muscle relaxer isn't going to do the job is really the peak of worry. Things are going so far into a nose-dive in my life that this is my focus. I know my life is crazy, always, I mean, there's 5 years of proof on this blog, and yet I've never resorted to tensing my jaw until I hurt so bad I thought I needed a root canal. COME ON.

I went to bed and realized when Jake got up to go to work that I'd slept ALL NIGHT LONG. I don't know if Billy did or not. He sleeps right next to me still, for a few more months, and maybe he took a cue from mama that it was a sleepy night. Going into the bathroom to brush my teeth and figure out what to do with my hair, I realized I could close my teeth and they all touched at the same time.

For the first time in I don't know how long.

I'm a mess. I need to find some outlets for this. And I need to take this muscle relaxer for the next few weeks and try to be better.

This weekend, I am doing nothing. Maybe loading the dishwasher, perhaps I'll fold some towels. But nothing. I'm going to make my sister come over today and give me her Hulu+ membership login so I can watch this season of Parenthood. And maybe I'll shoot my bow. Do some knitting. Stop freaking out.

Stop freaking out.

Right Now. A semi-regular post.

2011-11-21T14:26:00.002-06:00

Right now, Billy is downstairs watching a terrible Brazilian knock-off of "Cars" while recovering from the tantrum he threw in the fabric store today which I only went to because the field trip I was supposed to drive on, well, only one teacher thought I was driving and the other was actually doing the scheduling and I'm trying so hard to keep my own act together that I don't have a lot of tolerance right now. Nor does Billy, which resulted in tantrum #1, followed by #2 and #3 pretty close behind. So he's downstairs and I'm upstairs and trying to breathe.

Right now, Daisy is at school with an infected finger. She banged it in a drawer on Friday night after the two girls were so terrible for the babysitter I don't suspect she will return my calls. Ever. And although we took care of it and it seemed ok, now her teacher has called to let me know it is purple and the pus is right under the skin.

Right now, however, the insurance company's calculation for how much Jake's car is worth is far far higher than Kelly blue book was thinking. So that's happy news.

Right now, all the plants at church are dead and I'm pretty sure it's my fault and this edge of crazy I'm balancing on really doesn't allow for much time to run up to church and get things done. Even if I wanted to, frankly.

Right now several friends and relatives have stepped up awesomely and offered me the use of their cars and I think I have it covered until mid-January. When we will buy a car.

Right now, some fat sassy doe is tramping through the woods in southern Illinois because Jake didn't kill her. Or any of her friends. We'll still have deer from his dad and uncle, and we're negotiating second season.

Right now the dishes in the dishwasher are clean. It is a total mystery why sometimes the dishwasher gives up mid-cycle and just turns off. Seven out of 10 times, it works. But then it suddenly will just get tired.

Right now, Fiona's room is completely clean. This is a first in probably a year.

Right now I almost have Christmas all figured out.

Right now, it is an hour until school lets out and then tomorrow is a half day and then I can turn off my alarm clock for a few days except not really. I just don't have to get kids up with me. Just me.

Right now, the piano teacher wishes me good luck with Daisy's finger and we'll see her next week.

Right now, I just realized I've run out of "Parenthood" to watch on Netflix, although I hear there are episodes available in other places, the current season being where I am.

Right now Hickory the cat sits close to the keyboard, inching closer to the Enter key and the 0 on the ten-key pad. She likes to make the computer beep.

Right now, her compatriot Bleys' ashes sit in the dining room in a white box. Picked them up today. I really miss that cat.

Right now I'm beginning to suspect I'm that girl and I have that family. And that the teachers are just being nice when they let me volunteer and really everyone sighs when I leave the building. Not just at school.

Right now, I am so sick of my life being a train wreck.

Afternoon on the porch

2011-11-18T12:59:00.003-06:00

I stand in my kitchen, eating leftover brie with little crackers that taste vaguely of rosemary and sugar. Blackjack, the fat brown tabby, sits in the windowsill, well, perched sort of over the sink, stretches so his head is in the window. The typical little tiktik noises are coming from his throat as he stares out the window. I see the mourning dove, fat, dumb, sitting on the porch railing.

"She doesn't care about you," I tell Jack. I put some lunch together for Billy and take it into the living room. When I come back, Jack is still there, his tail flicking about with excitement. I look out the back door and see what's really got him going. The mourning dove is just resting, but in one of my pots I didn't clear out yet, there is a pair of cardinals and a junco. The juncos are back, I think to myself. And they are feasting, with the plump cardinals, on the basil seeds left on the potted plant I failed to harvest in July but instead let go to seed and just picked leaves off here and there through the rest of the summer. No pesto this year. Too busy.

The happiest little birds are standing in my chores. The happiest most frustrated tabby is now in the bathroom off the kitchen, getting a better view. I'm standing in socks on my clean kitchen floor with nobody bothering me and nothing on the agenda.

Pere Marquette State Park

2011-11-18T12:26:00.003-06:00

As much as I can say in 10 minutes

2011-11-16T13:12:00.002-06:00

Ok, I have 10 minutes. Then I go teach art. We're doing Sumerian cylinder signature seals--little barrel shaped clay hollow tubes that are etched so that when you roll them on wet clay, it leaves an imprint. Remember the rolling pins for Pla-Doh that had patterns worked on them? Same idea but 2 inches long and made of sculpey-covered copper pipe. Then I bake them this weekend and bring them back next week and we roll them out. I'm looking forward to this one. I've really done research and I've got everything prepped. I feel like I have a handle on art class.

I am taking the Praxis (teacher test) to be certified K-9 in art, in fact, in the spring. The test looks a tad daunting. Plus it is completely unclear how many questions I need to get right. 120 questions and my score to pass is "158"? What does that mean? My sister Bevin is going to tutor me in art history a bit. I am completely self-taught but in Missouri, if you have a valid teaching certificate in a basic level (elementary, middle, or high school) you can test into certain certifications. It is now my plan to do as many as I can. My facebook pages lists my job title as "Jill of All Trades" and really it's just teaching but I can teach just about anything, save foreign language or perhaps music. But anything else? I can teach myself and then teach you.

So why the technical difficulties?

Jake wrecked his car. He's all right. No injuries. Fine. He's fine. The car, while just appearing to be dinged, is obviously made of styrofoam and peanut butter on the inside because it was totaled. For my foreign readers, this term means "the insurance company isn't going to pay for the damages because the car is worth less than the cost of the work needed to get it back to road-worthiness." It's a 12 year old car so I think if I sneezed on it, it would have been totaled. One step forward, two steps back. We were at a good place, finally, after months of tweaking expenses (and look: I'm taking a class to be reinstated as a teacher, taking a test to get certified in art, guess what, I'm going back to work next autumn if at all possible and Billy is ready for preschool and all that jazz) and now this.

Now this.

So the car is totaled. And that means we either live on one car or we buy something.

We could live on one car. If. Jake is a computer consultant and therefore doesn't know, day to day, if he's going to the office in the county, or to the client 10 blocks from us or the client 35 miles away. Or Rolla. Or Peoria. Ok, we usually know when those are coming. But he often starts the day in Webster, goes to Earth City at lunchtime, and stops by south city before he comes home. He likes his job a lot and that's not the problem. The problem is we live in a schlumpy city that has miserable public transit and therefore he needs a car to do his job.

Everything I do on a non-emergency day, during the work day, happens within 3 miles of my house. I'm the one who would have to tweak her life. More than a bit but it could be really good for me. School is 10 blocks away; the grocery store is about that. Church is about that. The farmers market is 15 or 20 blocks. Speech therapy is tricky only because the direct route is under construction, but if I were biking, I wouldn't take the direct route anyway.

So it sounds ok, and if I were sitting pretty in March or April, I would dive right in and tell Jake not to worry for now. But it's November. January is coming. February. We don't live in Michigan or Vermont but it gets cold here. Icy. Freezing drizzle kind of icy. Bleah. Bike in that? I don't think that will work. Bus, sure. Borrow my sister's car on a Thursday morning. Borrow my neighbor's. Borrow Ann's. Borrow my mom's. Carpool. I could do it. If I had to, I could. I would. I would be willing.

Jake is less convinced and probably with good reason. It would make my life a huge hassle every single day except perhaps Mondays. Assuming no one gets an ear infection or croup or so forth. If everyone stays healthy, if we use the crock pot 5 days a week, if Billy and I decide to spend most of our Tuesday and Thursday mornings on a bus.

So then the question could be answered with a new car. Or rather, an old car. Someone else's old car. We've had awesome luck thus far with used cars--the one Jake just had the accident in and the Mazda are both used cars. And they're good. But our budget is small enough that I'm not sure we'd be able to repeat that luck. And we really need something to get us through the next 2 years until Billy is established in school and I'm established in school and the Mazda is paid for.

It's been a hard 5 days. I'm knee deep in Christmas sewing. The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism--a medieval reenactment group) is coming over this evening to talk about archery to my girl scouts. It got cold last night. Kaboom. A lot of stuff.

So I'm going to drink the rest of this coffee, pack up my copper pipe and sculpey clay, and run run run to school to teach a group of 1st graders about merchants who lived 5000 years ago. The absurdity of it all.

Treading Water

2011-11-14T14:48:00.000-06:00

So much to say

2011-11-08T22:39:00.002-06:00

And yet somehow I can't say anything!

I've been watching a lot of "Parenthood" on Netflix, a show that was highly recommended by almost everyone I spoke with and yet I hadn't managed to focus long enough to find it. I'm not good at following things on TV; much better at the Netflix or Hulu options later on.

Sometimes I see something or read something and it strikes me as novel and interesting and worth continuing to see or read. Sherlock on BBC comes to mind. Law and Order UK on BBC also comes to mind. I liked Hotel Babylon (ahem, more English). I liked the Riches. News Radio. And I do read--there are books I have devoured because they drew me in and entertained me and made me think. Marquez comes to mind first. But I'm embarrassed to say I never read Anne of Green Gables until last week when I started reading it to Daisy and Fiona. The Secret Garden, too. There are others but it's late and I'm trying to reach some sort of point.

The point is, Parenthood is not novel and interesting and fun to watch. In fact it is often excruciating in its portrayal of reality. I keep thinking about arguments I've had with Jake, back when his sister was starting to go through major problems with her husband, and I said, in front of both of his brothers on the way to Cape Girardeau, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?"

His reply was simple and measured and everything that he is that I am not. He said, "Because my siblings and I are not as emotionally entangled with each other as you and yours are."

That's what this show is, for me, to watch. The siblings are in their early 40s down to mid-30s (Jake calls it Gen X's Thirtysomething). And it makes me flinch and look away. It's not my life. But I am Adam, I am Sarah, I am Amber, I am Kristina, I am Haddie. I see my brother there, I see both my sisters. Yes, it's about parenthood, and neither of my sisters have children. But they're emotionally entangled.

And so the last few days (I've been watching them for 3 days while I cleaned house, sorted fabric, laundry, ironed, and then at the end just sat and stared) I have thought about my siblings and our emotionally entangled lives. I thought about moments in the car with Bevin. About the phone call I had to make to Ian this past January. About driving Colleen home from Columbia this past visit--and all the times I drove her home from high school as my car overheated and we just smiled and waved at everyone pointing at us because the car had to make it home because we couldn't get a new one because we had lead paint to clean up at my house. I thought about apraxia and explaining to my aunt and grandmother today what that meant. Apraxia and dyslexia and seizures, new jobs, old jobs, new boyfriends, old boyfriends, recessions, care packages, glimpses of future, hauntings of past.

It's all so much, and watching this show, it is eerily familiar, like when I started dreaming in Russian back in college. Something here almost makes sense.

Like I said, my aunt and grandmother came to visit today. I talked to Jake on the phone last night about the impending visit and found myself saying somewhat profound things about nature and nurture and where we are and how we came to be here and how people mellow and how our voices sound the same when we sing and I look at my aunt Kay and I know that's where I'm headed, that is what I will look like in 20 years' time.

We were talking about dentists and teeth and braces and typical things. Penny (my grandmother) said, "Well, your grandfather had the smallish mouth, and I had the biggish teeth," implying that the combination was doomed from the get-go.

I replied, "There are a lot of things I just sigh and blame my dad's family for."

"Rightly so," Kay nodded with a smile. "Rightly so."

Conlocutio moment

2011-11-07T08:53:00.003-06:00

I had this blog a few years back where I recorded a conversation each day. Some with family, some with strangers. Some overheard. Most with me involved. I liked it, it might have been my favorite daily writing thing I've done. I might return to it someday because it was fun and a good way to record life as it goes by. But here's a little teaser for now.

I was teaching art, a few weeks back, in the upper elementary classroom. I was sitting next to a 4th grade boy named David while we drew the still life in the middle of the room. Some of these kids were ready for this. Others were not--but most everyone showed progress over the course of the two months. David sat next to me, with a long way to go to get to the point that he would draw what he was seeing as opposed to icons (a bowl looks like a half circle; eyes are at the top of the forehead, etc).

"Man, you draw so good," he said, pointing to the clipboard I was working on as we sat on the floor together. I was in the middle of the recurve bow I'd brought in to lean up against the table in the center. Most kids' drawings included the bow if they could see it from where they sat.

"Well, David, there are two reasons why you probably think that," I responded, not looking up from the top point of the bow as I put it onto paper slowly. "To begin with, I am going very very slowly and drawing only the edges my eye runs along. And the other reason is that I took my first drawing class in 1987."

"Wow, that's a long time ago," he nodded. I looked over at him and smiled. He went back to trying to imitate me, looking up at the objects and adding little bits to his paper.

"Was that like, when World War I was happening?"

I glanced over at Sophia's teacher, a taciturn young man who does not let his emotions betray him, ever, and I see just the tiniest bit of a smile.

"No, David, it was well after that."

Little white dove repost

2011-11-05T17:22:00.001-05:00

I know, I know, you've been bit by a mean old crow
Carried your heart, carried your heart off in his beak
So what's in your mouth now, baby, come on, talk to me

Entangled emotional lives. On the way to Cape Girardeau to see a movie while we were staying at my inlaws this Christmas, Mike and I were, well, it wasn't a fight, because we were on the same side. But many times, we have these discussions that an outsider might get nervous with, somebody afraid of confrontation, for instance. And I was using a lot of swear words and demanding to know what was so different about us, about our lives with our families. And he said, "Bridgett, you and and your siblings have far more entangled emotional lives than I have with mine."

It's true--my brother told me that his girlfriend was pregnant before he admitted it to my parents. My sisters complain to me about each other, about each other's boyfriends, about my parents. I'm sure they complain about me to each other. And like I've said, we are an outspoken belligerent lot. We don't suffer fools for very long, and we can be viciously unafraid of confrontation. There aren't a lot of heartfelt moments, though, nothing for a greeting card, nothing I would carry around and ruminate upon later how sweet or poignant or open this or that was. But as we age, I suspect these will happen more. Adult siblings, you know, they've been through all the same bull I have. And they see through all mine right now. In my pocket, take it from me.

On the couch the other evening, watching Law & Order reruns on DVD and knitting, folding laundry, drinking coffee too late in the day, my sister Bevin says to me, "I was trying to think back. I think it was 2004 that Jesse was killed. For a while I'd convinced myself it was 2005, but I think I'm messing that up." I confirmed it--I was pregnant with Maeve when it happened.

We sat there quietly for a moment. I paused Mike Logan and Phil Cerreta. I wanted to ask her how she was holding up, with the new trial coming and probably being a witness again, with her friends spread far afield--I know I am nervous about how it will go this time--but I felt weird saying it. So I stopped knitting, looked at her as she chewed on the inside of her cheek a bit. So what's in your mouth, baby, come on, talk to me.

"I guess I'll have to take off work," she said. "I think by law they have to let me."

"Yeah, they certainly do." I know that much. We sit a bit more, and then she picks up the remote, turns the police procedural back on. Entangled emotional lives. Hearts break, birds fly.

Night moves repost

2011-11-02T17:13:00.001-05:00

And oh the wonder
We felt the lightning
And we waited on the thunder
Waited on the thunder

Funny how you remember. We had this big screened in porch in Georgia, the whole back of the saltbox house. Porch swing, concrete floor, ceiling fans, picnic table: the best part of living in Georgia was that porch shaded by the giant white pines in our huge backyard.

Lark was over, like she was most of that summer. It was easier to be at my house than hers, with her mother, the weird neighborhood, the sketchy people who lived in the house, divided up into a rooming house. One of several only children of single moms I befriended over time, each one with this unspeakable hurt she carried with her and showed in the tracks she left, but never outright, never so that you could see. Oblique.

Rain was coming in, not impressive like something building in the gulf, lying on the back of my car with a single mom's son in a couple years, or later watching green clouds moving through the prairie with a single mom's daughter in college. But you could smell the electricity in the air, and we saw the lightning.

One one thousand two one thousand three one thousand four one thousand five one thousand six one thousand, thunder. It's a little over a mile away, I heard her say. I'd learned it in grade school sometime along my way. I nodded. My dad taught me that, she said quietly. I kept rocking in the swing, letting the rusty chains squeak against each other. I knew better than to say anything else.

Art So Far (Lessons 3 through 7)

2011-11-01T09:15:00.002-05:00

I am teaching art in two different elementary classrooms (in Montessori, elementary means 1st-3rd) and one upper elementary classroom (4th-6th). My older kids just finished a long term drawing unit and are about to start color theory. The younger students are making their way slowly through art history. We started with cave paintings and painted pebbles (making our own paint). Here are our last 5 lessons:

3. Megalithic monuments in miniature. Using pebbles, a bit of sticky-tack (the stuff you hang posters with when you can't use pins or staples or tape), and a cardboard base, each student created a megalithic monument, drawing from the examples found in Britain, western Europe, north Africa, and a few other locations. You know: Stonehenge. Some built cairns, some built gathering spaces, some built temples. It was really really cool. Really.

4. Lunulae and torcs. Learning about examples from Ireland and France, students then created crescent moon shaped gold foil necklaces and copper foil "wire" torcs on a pipe cleaner base. How do we know the lunulae were necklaces if they weren't found in burial locations? Why were there so few of them? I thought they looked Egyptian. Didn't the torcs choke people if they couldn't take them off? How did they get them on? And so on. It was probably the most in-depth discussion we've had.

5. The Royal Game of Ur. This was a break from more complicated projects. It was a coloring sheet--a board game from Ur found in tombs dating back to the bronze age. It's a race game, like Sorry or Parcheesi, and after learning about it and how to play, they colored the game boards and little paper or wooden pieces, and sat down to play with each other. One mom: "My game-geek son is still playing the royal game of ur. I don't know whether to thank you or strangle you."

6. Animal Amulets. The earliest examples date back to the bronze age in Mesopotamia, but of course people have been creating animal amulets ever since. We used sculpey, a polymer clay that bakes in the oven, as well as a low-temperature terracotta that honestly I will never use again. This lesson took three weeks. Introduction and making the figures; painting the figures; stringing them onto bracelets or necklaces with beads. Some of the girls in one class wore them to school even a few days ago. It was a popular project even if it took a long time and created more chaos than I wanted. One dad: "My son loved this project. He keeps saying, 'dad, let's make some animal beads' and I tell him he'll have to talk to you instead."

7. Egyptian name cartouches. This is another coloring project on paper, but more complicated than the Royal Game of Ur. We learned about hieroglyphics, which they were already aware of for the most part because of popular culture but also because they've had the lesson on the origins of language and written language. They each received a transliteration alphabet, which would have been used for names. They had to trace and cut out an oval, a cartouche frame, and glue these down onto a background before transliterating their name and copying it into the cartouche. This went over like gangbusters. Kids and secret codes and cute little letters and all that. Maeve's name has two birds in it and I cannot stop looking at them and their personalities shining through. Rachel's mom: "Rachel came home and made cartouches for everyone, including the dog."

From here until Christmas? We are definitely doing a tomb painting class project that will take 2 classes, and a Mesopotamian cylinder signature seal out of sculpey. But this week I'm stymied. I want to teach scarabs and soap carving, using Ivory soap and a bamboo skewer. Maeve is able to do it. But I showed her teacher and the reaction? "No way. No possible way. That will never work. I remember that project when I was a kid." Part of me wants to dive in and prove her wrong, but another more prudent part of me wants to listen to her and do a Draw Like an Egyptian project instead. It's a toss up. We do a lot of 2 dimensional work, but we also do a lot of 3-D--including the cylinder seals that also involve carving to some extent. It's not like every class is a coloring page. We could do a drawing lesson instead. On the other hand, that will mean that their entire Egypt art experience will be flat. Scarabs are already very close to the shape of a bar of Ivory soap. It would mostly be details. But she was so so so adamant about it. Hmm.

Of course I could split the two classes and teach soap carving to the 14 kids in the one class (it is a growing classroom, new this year) and do the drawing lesson in the class of 31. Or I could skip it. The smell of Ivory in my dining room is making me woozy. Still thinking (I have tonight to think!!!).

Starting in January, we leave Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and move to the Americas and Asia for a while. Giddy. Did I mention that?

My weekend in pictures

2011-10-31T14:53:00.008-05:00

A trip to Shawnee National Forest with my girl scout junior/cadette troop. Nine girls in attendance, three adults. We went to Garden of the Gods, Cave-in-Rock, the Iron Furnace, and Dixon Springs. Ended the night at my mother-in-law's house for a great dinner and a costume parade in my sister-in-law's old dance costumes. It was a good weekend getting to know one of the new moms, telling stories, and watching our girls, our urban girls, play in nature. No curriculum. No badge to earn. Just play and see what nature teaches all by itself without my help. Nobody complained of boredom. Nobody wanted to move on to the next thing before it was time. Not even much whining about bugs or tiredness or weather (it was gorgeous but brisk at first). It was a good trip.

Rainy Night in Georgia Repost

2011-10-30T17:12:00.001-05:00

Lord, I believe it's rainin' all over the world

I was the basketball statistician. It's all about the math for me. I did full stats--shot position, assists, fouls, score--and called them into the local paper when it was said and done. I might have been dating the wrong center, but the guys always wanted to check their math against my stats to see if we matched. It was a fun little job.

Except the night we went to Lumber City. White trash white flight school if there ever was one. Like I said before, we were the only integrated private school in our district, and Lumber City was just on the outskirts. There's an egg processing factory there--if you buy eggs in bulk, I mean in BULK, they might have a Lumber City address. And that was about it when we pulled into town in our chartered bus to play their basketball team.

Our coach was black. About half the team, or more, was too. Half the cheerleaders. And this was the night every year everyone worried about. Playing the snotty schools back in town, they pretty much ignored the race issue. But down here, it was the only issue. Across the court in the home-side bleachers sat 30 or 40 men in camouflage, paper bags over their heads. They chanted and stomped their feet and were terrifying. I could see Coach down on the floor sweating. Never mind the boyfriend and even those little "southern gentlemen" on our team who had their pecking order back at home, but out here in the wild, we were all in the same damned boat--those men in the bleachers weren't wearing white robes and hoods but probably only because their wives didn't know how to sew.

We beat their team. I remember the score--102 to 81. It was the first time that year we'd broken 100. Coach didn't even have the players change clothes. We left the gym en masse and got on the bus. We were "escorted" out of town by honkies in pick up trucks yelling racial slurs at us.

The year? 1990.

Midnight train to georgia repost

2011-10-27T17:07:00.002-05:00

I'd rather live in his world
Than live without him in mine.

He was my first high school boyfriend. After I moved to Georgia, I realized pretty quickly that my choices were smooth terrible frat boys in training, weird outcasts, and the other half of the population that white girls like me weren't supposed to date.

We were the first interracial couple at our high school. A private Catholic girls boarding school with day students--and the only desegregated private school in town. But that still didn't make it ok, really. I wore his letter jacket with his last name displayed across my back, and it was made very clear that once we broke up--since that was inevitable--there was no white boy who would touch me. They'd see to that.

Yeah.

He's married. He and his beautiful wife have two little girls. He's a football coach at the same high school we attended. I wonder if it's any easier. I wonder if he has any good advice for the sophomore football player thinking of asking out that little yankee transplant in his geometry class.

Ramona Averted

2011-10-27T08:36:00.002-05:00

You say you're clearing out, the devil's in your eyes
No time to walk, no time to talk, no time for long goodbyes.
The ticket's in your hand, you've made that final call,
The hard words flying by like punches in a barroom brawl

We've made a mess of things,
It makes no difference now
let's chalk it all up to the blues.
Little girl, think it over one time
Before you break in your walking shoes.

It was a strange moment. I sat here at the computer composing an email. It was several paragraphs long and I kept going back and forth through it trying to make it more concise, less emotional. I got it honed down to what I thought it needed to be and then there was this voice.

Not a voice out of the heavens, not a Saul Saul why do you persecute me kind of voice. But it was this feeling that said, "wait."

I highlighted all the text (I do so want to say "highlit" even though I know it's not the way to say that word). I hit the delete key.

And then I wrote one paragraph, including a frustrated run-on sentence, and sent that. It summed up the disappointment and worry without digging myself into a hole that I would not be able to return from.

Because there are things I am angry and frustrated about. And the person I was writing to is almost the right person to say them to. In some ways yes. But you know email. As opposed to the written word on lined paper, or a phone call, or a face to face discussion, it is a cold hard "I AM UPSET AT YOU STOP THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO STOP" modern telegram.

I know this. I've used it because of that fact in some situations, to help me maintain a distance from a situation or person that I in no way wanted to get more involved with. But I'm in a relationship with this person I almost emailed (not in the Facebook sense of in a relationship). And it would have damaged that relationship.

Wait.

I sent the single paragraph instead.

And like magic, the phone rang.

It's not all better, but the part that I wouldn't have been able to fix had I sent that email is better. I got off the phone and sat in my big broken in leather chair in the living room listening to the silence.

It's been a really crappy week, no, two or three weeks, waiting for my cat to die (who was the color of pumpkins, orange and those spooky white ones? and we have a few sitting in our front hall and out of the corner of my eye there he is. Again and again and it's just pumpkins). It's been a long beginning of the school year and I wonder what it all means. It has been two weeks of our own doctor and dentist visits and my doctor told me the lovely news: "I can see it on your face that I need to increase your thyroid medication." It's been apraxia and my own talking too much. It's been my hands shaking as I tell another person I'm in relationship with not the Facebook way no matter what those idiots think who I am and where I am and that I can do what is needed if I know what it is. It's hugging that woman in the parking garage of Target. It's my oblate director stepping down because her rheumatoid arthritis has gotten the best of her. It's pinkeye and a potential root canal and it was my damned birthday on Sunday.

But I did not squeeze all the toothpaste into the sink this time and then stand there wondering how I would hide it.

Lean on Me Repost

2011-10-25T17:03:00.001-05:00

I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on

Spring Break 1987. Sonia had moved at Christmas. This was devastating to the rest of my classmates, but since I tended to move every two years, it didn't seem like any big thing to me. She was back visiting, staying with my best friend, which made it very clear to me where I ranked with both of them. I would never replace Sonia. Especially for Muriel's mom.

It was her spring break, but ours wasn't until Easter week, so she came to school every day with us and everyone, including the teachers, pretended she was still just a part of our class. It infuriated me in ways it shouldn't. Jealousy, immaturity, an overdeveloped sense of justice--probably some of all those things. My mother suggested I have the girls over for a slumber party that Saturday night. Having this all hammered out relaxed my social standing anxiety, and so the party Friday night didn't seem so unfair. The science teacher was throwing a party at his house for Sonia's triumphant return home, and everyone was invited. This science teacher would later betray my friend Jane in unspeakable ways, but before that, I already had a grudge against him because he never asked me to babysit his kids even though he had just about every other seventh grade girl do so. When I was around him, it was like a cone of silence surrounded me. He could not hear my voice. But he loved Sonia and so he threw her a party.

Jane and I went together, my dad dropped us off. We went into the backyard and stood around with the other kids in our class, jockeying for position with Sonia and with some of the boys. The science teacher got up and gave a speech about Sonia and how wonderful it was to have her in town, in class again. The literature teacher said he'd never met a better writer so young. The art teacher--you can see how this was going. The only one who didn't get up and say anything was our theology teacher, a Benedictine monk, who stood silently against the wall in his black habit.

But after all the speechifying, the science teacher's wife turned the records on. She told us to put down our drinks and to clear the chairs. Dancing? No, worse. Before anyone could see it coming, she had us in rows, all 22 of us. Plus some of the adults. She put on Lean on Me. And she made us line dance.

Talk about adults not having a clue. Sonia was still making fun of that party in her honor months later after I'd moved to Dallas and, free of all that bizarre hero worship, we became friends.

Easier done than said

2011-10-24T13:40:00.002-05:00

It was so easy. Really. The week building up to taking Bleys in to have him put down was worse than the actual going. Yes, I cried as I checked in at the front desk and wrote a check. I laughed through my tears at some of the pet memorial cremation statue options. The nurses were sympathetic and normal. Dr. Kurka was good. Perhaps he's done this before. He did not belabor any points. He explained what would happen, asked if I wanted to stay for the first part, which I did. I seriously think the first shot did it. Maybe not. But it's a two injection process and I couldn't feel his heartbeat or detect breathing after about 5 minutes after the first injection.

Big sigh on my part. I've been on pause for about 2 months. I've been cleaning up bodily functions and trying out every stinky canned cat food on the market. In the end, he lapped up about a teaspoon of rediwip (yes, the stuff in the can, he loved it) this morning. He went and hid on the bottom shelf here in the computer room/library. And that was it. He knew. I knew. Dr. Kurka said sometimes it's a little gray when people bring pets in, that maybe there are some healthy months ahead of a cat, but not this time.

Way easier done than decided. Mary said it would be--Pheobe was dying of kidney failure and the lead up was so much worse.

I'll miss him, but really? I've been missing him for 6 months while he dragged himself around the house in an increasing stupor. I should have done it last week. But either way, it's done now. I'm headed out to my own doctor to get bloodwork done to keep my prescription medication valid for another year. Whee.

And then I get to break the news to the girls. It won't be a surprise but it will be hard.

Life is Short

2011-10-20T12:12:00.003-05:00

Especially when you're a cat, a gorgeous stray cat, definitely a Norwegian Forest Cat descendant of some kind, orange and white with a mustache and goatee. You're 15 years old and it's been a good 14 1/2 years. The last 6 months have kind of sucked. You have some kind of abdominal cancer. There's some internal bleeding. Vomiting. It's been a decline, that's for sure. You've gone from 10 1/2 pounds down to a wraith-like 5 pounds this morning at the vet.
You and she have been partners for your whole lives, adopted the same day from the Humane Society. You are the same age, but she's always been stronger, bigger, healthier. Always. You've always been a bit fragile, and now more than ever. She and the young upstart, the big fat brown tabby not appearing in this thought process, have started to withdraw, but last night she walked over you on the couch and gave you a little pity lick on your forehead, the little M between your eyes that says "yes, I'm a bit of a tabby here."

It's days now, not months, all of a sudden you are sick and yet you still jump on the counter, you still follow me upstairs. But it won't last. You ate up the baby food puree at first but the spoonful I put on your plate this morning is still sitting there untouched.

Selfishly, I want you to make up your mind. I don't want to have to handle the girls and deal with the decision of bringing you to the vet for that last time. The vet was realistic: "You'll probably wake up soon and he'll be gone." And I want that so badly. I thought you would die in my arms last Saturday night and yet here you still are. But you look comfortable, your eyes aren't desperate like they were a week ago. And yet you've lost another pound in that time. So I hope you can go peacefully here at your own house. But we'll see as the weekend goes by.

You are as old as my marriage, brought home the weekend school started and I didn't have a job yet (I would by the end of the week). It was a two-for-one deal. We named you after a character in a Roger Zelazny book. And it was fitting.

But now it's coming to an end and it's going to be ok. Sad but ok. It's too short but we knew that going in. And it's been so so good.

What was that about it always being something?

2011-10-19T13:37:00.003-05:00

My To-Do List for today:

*Coffee with Ann and Janet (and Lisa, although I didn't know she'd be there)
*Practical Life at Liz's room
*Find a dress for the wedding (part III--I have failed 2 days in a row)
*Repair any animal amulets that need work
*Art class at Liz's room
*Post-mortum meeting for the trivia night
*Pick up at the CSA
*Meeting at my house about girl scout cadette summer trip
*dinner??
*Strategic planning meeting at school
*Daisy goes to dance class
*repair any other animal amulets for Thursday's art class
*online class exam and "discussion" question
*scrub kitchen floor, clean bathroom, fold laundry
*Shop for Jake's family's dinner tomorrow night (to continue the pseudonyms, I would suppose they'd be the other Kennedy Brothers).

So this morning, which was "Wear Red for the Cardinals" day at school, the girls got up and got dressed and came downstairs to investigate breakfast options. I had lunches made and everything ready to go and Daisy says "Mom, what does it mean when you can't open your eye in the morning because all of it is crusty and stuff?"

Doom. It means doom, Daisy. Utter doom.

It means...at least half my list just got shot to hell. But that's ok, because not being able to buy a dress or teach art or practical life means I have more time to scrub the kitchen floor and clean the bathroom. And there will be a trip to Target pharmacy so at least I'll get a few things I need for the dinner tomorrow night.

Sigh.

But the weird thing? We went to Target (where I also got a flu shot, so, whee) and parked in the garage. I was talking to the pharmacist on the phone and out of the corner of my eye noticed someone was standing next to me. It was the annoying woman from the school board I publicly called names last May. The one I kept running into and she was still so angry. And so was I. I got off the phone with the pharmacist.

And she apologized. She said it was all so stupid what we were doing, always at school together and avoiding each other and still so mad. Could we talk sometime?

I said yes. "Then let's start from now," she suggested, making a move to hug me. And she did. And it was good. It was good to know that for the next decade (or less, depending on what she winds up doing with her kids) I can sit in PTA meetings and bake sales and art class near her or her kids or her husband and nobody needs to be uncomfortable. I told her I let my emotions take over last May. And that I said things I shouldn't have. And that was that.

It may be a big play. It may be some sort of power thing. But I'm going to believe it was sincere and just go forward from here.

We got Maeve's antibiotic for her eye ($87) and came back home for lunch and NPR pledge drive in the kitchen and no cat vomit (or dead cat) on the floor.

It is always something. And sometimes being Ramona works out.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 ways to enjoy pumpkin

2011-10-18T08:45:00.002-05:00

Mmm. Fall food. I am so ready. Sunday night we had deer and homemade mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts. A glass of milk and a glass of red wine. Sleep for 12 hours.

We eat pumpkin. I've been venturing into pumpkin ever since our first halloween in this house when I stared at those decorations and thought, "I think we're supposed to eat them." My parents have used pumpkin--seeds especially, but also a pumpkin cookie that I remember from childhood. So here are some ideas:

1. Chopped fine with cauliflower and other fall vegetables and made into a curry. This is how Fiona had pumpkin last Friday at school. Our culinary arts teacher is hitting them hard with in-season food and I'm thrilled. Fiona's verdict: "If you made pumpkin like that, I would eat it."

2. Hidden in mashed potatoes. Then I broke it to Fiona that the mashed potatoes she was about to have 3rds of at dinner had about a half cup of pureed pumpkin (well, butternut squash, but it's a pumpkin) in them. She looked at it on her plate and the conflict was obvious. "You could do that again," she admitted.

3. Baked and shredded and served with butter and salt. I could eat it this way all the time. It would make my kids gag and fall on the floor writhing in pain.

4. Pumpkin cookies. These are a brown sugar cookie with pumpkin puree as one of the liquids. I don't have the recipe in front of me. They make a glossy cookie, a brownie consistency, full of fall spices. Perfect with icing and a glass of milk.

5. Pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. My sister-in-law is in her, what, 7th month? of baking and selling cupcakes under the name "Farm Fresh Cupcakes". It is my opinion that her quick bread recipes (meaning, the cupcakes with sweet potato or pumpkin or zucchini or banana) are the best. And her icing is amazingly amazing.

6. Chopped fine, again, and roasted with onions, garlic, beets, turnips, carrots, whatever fall vegetables (but definitely onions and garlic). Olive oil, thyme.

7. Pumpkin pie. I used to only like these artificially orange canned pumpkin variety but I have been brought around by a parishioner who makes them for our meals for the homebound. Oh so good.

8. Pureed and made into a curry soup with coconut milk.

9. Pumpkin seeds roasted with salt, or alternatively, with brown sugar and cinnamon (I prefer the salted).

10. Sliced thin, par-baked, and then roasted on the grill with a seasoning mix from Penzeys we use called "Ozark". (ingredients: salt, black pepper, sage, garlic, thyme, papika, regular mustard, ancho chili, celery seed, cayenne, dillweed, dillseed, caraway seed, allspice, ginger, cardamom, bay leaves, mace, china cinnamon, savory & cloves). These are amazing. I would put them on bread with pickles and onions and barbecue sauce and eat them as a sandwich.

Mmm. Ready for November.

It's always something

2011-10-18T08:36:00.004-05:00

There is always something.

We had a trivia night this past Saturday and there was a couple of moments when I realized I was one of the 3 people who sit in front (two emcees, and then me. I write the questions and answers and run a power point of slides with the Q&A) and that we were doomed.

We weren't doomed. But we started 20 minutes late due to something that I am sure will be tagged and remembered as "technical difficulties" but in reality was "somebody dropped the ball." And even though I didn't drop the ball, and no one sitting next to me did, it would still be viewed as our responsibility. In the end everything was fine. But it was another one of those Ramona moments that makes me wonder what it is about me.

There was a big part of me that wanted to crawl all over the person who dropped the ball. To call this person out at a strategic planning meeting. To Rage. But there was a bigger part that said no.

Now, I'm not afraid of confrontation and this person will know how he dropped the ball and how it could have been averted and how stressful he made this event (as opposed to last year when we did it all as volunteers and didn't have help from a staff member). We're having a post-mortum meeting tomorrow and I'll be vocal there, to him. But that will be it. I cannot continue to be That Girl. I need to let the organization take care of itself and clean house if need be and keep in mind that my goals at school? They have nothing to do with this guy. Write trivia. Lead girl scouts. Teach art.

I need to take the long view. Billy hasn't started preschool yet. I need this school to continue to exist and thrive for at least 11 more years. I need to think about stability here. I am here for 11 more years as a parent. I am here for a long time. By the time Billy is in 8th grade, I will be (I think) the only parent left who has been there from the beginning, unless of course our current executive director is still in that position. But I will be the institutional memory for this place. I will have spent 16 years involved in this place. I need to stop sprinting. And I definitely need to stop taking aim. Some things will take care of themselves. The ones that won't will still be there to handle later. Write trivia, lead girl scouts, teach art.

Go to speech therapy. Teach Fiona how to spell. Clean house. Handle pets and cars and a 106 year old house. Drink coffee. Cross fingers. Go to the dentist. Maintain relationships. Maybe read a book or two. Knit and sew and cook and camp and chat. It will always be something.

Food: Blog Action Day

2011-10-16T08:59:00.002-05:00

That's Jake's dad. In Canada, killing someone else's native species for a change. I would dislike this except that we actually do eat the stuff he hunts. I'm almost out of deer meat in the freezer, in fact, and I hope Jake gets a deer in the first hunting season in Illinois so he doesn't have to go back for second season. And also hoping that the guy who hunts with them just to hunt, not for food, gets a deer too, since Jake always brings home some of that.

Travis and his wife bought a pig--not a live pig, but the butchered parts--raised by a friend of a friend in 4H. He borrowed our coolers to go pick up the bounty, and on his return brought us a tub of lard. Literally. Laughing about it, I let Jake handle it. He opened it--it was far more processed than he usually uses when he and his dad make deer burger and sausage. Usually we get chunks of fat from Hinkebein's down near Cape Girardeau. In fact, we still have some hunks of fat in our freezer that were unmarked in a freezer bag and I started to thaw one day thinking it was fish. Fish that his dad caught.

I was talking to Zelda, who is my complete foodie friend. She teaches culinary arts at a local school and is so knowledgeable about everything having to do with local food, good food, bad food, Big Food. We talked about deer and how her son Noah mentioned one day that besides anything Travis puts on the smoker, Jake's deer sausage is his favorite meat. We started into a discussion of wild game and how I sometimes worried about consuming so much red meat (deer is the meat we eat in our house--deer and whatever bits we get from our CSA), especially red meat that I technically do not know where it comes from. Yeah, it comes from Massac County, but what did it eat? Zelda corrected me in my worry. Wild game, she said, was one of the best meats you could eat, from what she'd read and learned. If you ate meat, wild game was the way to go because it was so lean. Toxins are stored in fat cells for the most part and deer, trust me, has very little fat.

That's why we add fat to it, in fact, to make ground deer that will stick together. Jake and his dad process the deer themselves. They add beef fat (from Hinkebein's, which is primarily a pork farm, the cleanest nicest pork farm I have ever visited, and wow is their bacon amazing) to make burger and they add Hinkebein's pork fat and spices to make breakfast sausage.

It takes some getting used to, as a cook and as a diner. Jake's parents would give us some each year and I didn't use it well. I didn't like it and I didn't understand how to cook it. It was always tough and "gamey" which was a term I didn't fully grasp until eating deer meat.

But over the years, and especially after Jake started hunting, we got better at it. I learned the fine art of braising. I learned how to use the crock pot. And when we started using Hinkebein's fat, there was a noticeable difference in flavor. Deer could be grilled without tasting odd to me. I didn't have to hide deer burger in chili (although I often still do). And the little pieces of deer steak became the base of some of the best winter stews I've ever made.

Why am I telling you this? Today is Blog Action Day, a project I've participated in for 3 years now. This year's theme is Food. No other guidelines. Write something about food. I thought of all the ways I've changed my mind about food. I thought about the psychology of food, becoming an avid reader of labels, joining a CSA and learning how to eat beets. But the biggest change for us in the past 10 years or so is bringing deer into our diet. Besides the deer, like I said, we eat a scant amount of meat from our CSA. An occasional chicken or a pound of this or that in our weekly share. A few times a year we will get some good salmon and grill it. But otherwise, if we eat meat, it's deer. I never buy ground beef. I never worry about those e.coli scares (the meat ones, I mean--the cantaloupe and lettuce still worry me).

And eating deer has changed me. I have conversations about pork fat, for instance. I no longer view a dinner as "meat plus veggie plus carb" but instead only eat meat a few times a week and when I do, it is handled quite differently. Even other meats--when I used to get a chicken from the CSA I would roast it with vegetables and make it the focus of dinner. Therefore, it was almost entirely gone in one day except for the bones and gristle for stock. Now I nearly always boil the chicken and pick it for chicken and dumplings, soup, and enchiladas or chicken salad. What once was just a 1 day chicken is now a 3 day chicken (plus stock). I guess I no longer take meat for granted.

We are almost out of deer in the freezer downstairs. I have two quart freezer bags of hindquarter and 3 or 4 ground (probably sausage). But deer season is about a month away and so before Christmas rolls around, we will have a stocked freezer again.

The boxer repost

2011-10-14T16:38:00.001-05:00

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade

Phone rings. I pick up. "Mrs. Wissinger? This is Troy." He's all right, he wants me to know. Starting high school next month, a freshman. His mom got them back--she left Larry after all--and now she has a new boyfriend, lives just west of us. He's a really good guy, he tells me. She's probably going to marry him.

I can't figure out what I'm supposed to say. I tell him I'm really surprised to hear from him. "Yeah, I found my hat," he says sheepishly. "The one with your phone number in the brim. I thought I'd call, you know, just to see if you were still there."

I tell him about Sophia, about not teaching anymore. Then I worry that I've said too much--does my having my own child make me less available to help him? Does he even need help? The phone call is too quickly over--you don't get to rehearse these things beforehand.

"I worry sometimes about Larry, but I think things will be ok," is his last statement to me. "I'm a lot bigger guy now. I can protect myself better. Than before."

And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains

Haven't heard from him since--nine years--and he still doesn't know what a role he played in my own growing up to be the adult I am now.

I hope I get to tell him someday. But maybe it's enough just for me to know.

Dentistry Neighborliness

2011-10-13T11:50:00.003-05:00

Dawn and Judd live next door with Jay and Kestrel. Kestrel is relatively new and Dawn is still adjusting to life with 2. She's also been sick a lot since the baby came so it's been hard. I've been chatting with her (as a former LLL leader and as a mom of three). Information and sympathy, not too much of the former all at once but trying to help her get healthy. Augmentin helped too.

Judd is a dentist, actually, an endodontist, which in my world means root canal guy. I am certain they do other things but that has been my contact with endodontists. I have had 3 root canals. One of them took for friggin ever and I was exhausted by the time it was over but didn't understand why everyone dreaded them so much. It was the best thing ever--I had been in a lot of pain. The second and third were done by a different endodontist and I swear the first one took 15 minutes once I was numb. Crazy. The last one I had was also quick, but it was a lower molar and the endodontist did some deep sighing as he looked at my x-ray.

Can I just say that's never a good sign? He broke the news to me. My roots were deep and curved and I had too many in that tooth. OF COURSE I DID. Too many vertebrae, too many roots in my molars. WHAT STUPID KIND OF SUPERPOWER IS THIS? He told me that he might not be able to get me all the way numb. Wha? I could feel my head start to spin. I'd had pain come through during a filling before. I couldn't wrap my mind around what this would wind up being like. Just pull the dang thing, I thought to myself. But I took a deep breath, nodded, and hoped for the best. In the end, it was fine. 13 shots of novacaine later and a hangover from that for days, I swear. But it was done and I trusted him to do anything at that point. Book my hotel rooms, take family portraits, remove my appendix, defend me in a murder case. Anything.

Anyway, the point is that I have a tooth going bad. I thought I'd lost a filling, one of those white fillings, in an upper tooth. Turns out it was the tooth structure itself crumbling away underneath a silver filling. Oh crap. I didn't know this until the afternoon I saw the dentist, though.

First, I came home with Leo around 11 and found Dawn and Judd's front door standing open. I called up to them, but I knew their cars were gone. No answer. I called the police and then Valerie and I walked to try to find either of them, to no avail. The police found nothing amiss and went on their way. Dawn came home and I told her what had happened. Baby brain, most likely. It was no big deal--nothing was wrong and Valerie and I had stood chatting in front in case the door was closed but unlocked.

So then that afternoon I went to the dentist and got the good news about my crumbling tooth and how close it was to the root and how she just wasn't sure about it. "Maybe it would be a good candidate for a crown," she ruminated.

"Does that ever work, a crown before a root canal?" I asked.

"Not in your mouth," she admitted. But she can't just have a bunch of root canals done all willy-nilly. I understood. I went home with my newly filled tooth we were going to "watch" which I knew meant "it'll be fine until it's 2 in the morning and IT ISN'T FINE ANYMORE."

I walked into my kitchen at home, shaky from the local anesthesia. I walked right through to the backyard where Jake was working on the treehouse.

"I can't figure out anything to make for dinner," I announced. And about that moment there was a knock at the door.

Judd was standing there with a big container of soup. "Thanks for saving us today," he told me, handing me the soup.

"Did you hear me just now talking in the backyard?" I asked him, and relayed my day's story to him. He had some advice. I took the soup. Jake heated it up and I managed to build something for dinner around it.

And then I went to bed. I woke up once in pain but ibuprofen kicked it. The next day I felt like I got hit in the jaw, but today I'm ok. I think it might be ok. We'll see.

Born in the USA repost

2011-10-12T16:34:00.002-05:00

The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Til you spend half your life just covering up

March. Veronica comes through for us. She's the new social worker who lands the case, and she comes to school. Interviews the boys, who are coming to a point where they just want to sleep at night without dying before morning. Nolan takes his shirt off and shows her the burn marks, the bruises. Troy doesn't show her what I know he's hiding. He just watches her like my cat might, looking for an escape route as well as whatever she might have to offer.

"Well," she says, closing the file folder. "You're not going home to him tonight, and frankly, you're probably never going home to him again."

The police are there in a nanosecond. Taking the boys to juvenile court. Linda's going too, and I have to stay and do my job. Damn it. I walk out in the hall and see Sr. Joan crying. Nolan's teacher.

"Joan, what's wrong?" I ask. Joan is a hard-as-nails school sister of Notre Dame who never laughs. Her children learn and do not disobey. Crying in the hall over Nolan actually does not sound likely. But she puts her hand on my shoulder and tells me.

"Nolan came into the room to gather his things, the officer was waiting outside, and Nolan said to me, 'do you know where I'm going?; and I said, no, and he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Well, this is why I'm not so good at school.' Why didn't somebody tell me?"

For a long moment, I envy her.

If it weren't for reposts you'd never hear from me

2011-10-10T08:31:00.006-05:00

Seriously. Where have I gone?

It's been a busy 6 weeks at our house. In my life. In my head. The school year started off tricky. Daisy is a hard kid sometimes. Fiona, of course, glided right back into everything like there'd been no summer break. I managed to step quite deeply into it and then spent a month digging myself back out. I felt like I was constantly in a defensive stance with my fists up. It was no fun.

Plus in the middle of it we went to girl scout camp.

Which was good. But still busy. At one point I looked at my calendar, which mercifully is on my phone and therefore shows me only one day at a time, but flipping through it realized I didn't have a single free weekend from the end of August until, well, this past weekend.

As September waned and the weather finally started to change, things looked better, but then of course Billy was semi-diagnosed with apraxia, which is kind of a big deal. And a surprise since I'd never heard of it before.

Fiona quit Irish dance, which was easier in the end than I thought, but also harder. If we'd quit in August, I wouldn't have batted an eye, but she quit after we'd already agreed to go to the Oireachtas with her team. But the more I thought about that whole thing, the more it seemed like the best move for our family. For instance: two teams of 8 girls in under-10 and under-11, but only 15 girls total. No alternates and one girl was dancing on two teams. No alternates. A sensation of doom started to settle into my soul. All that money, time, energy, sunk into one dance and if one girl twists an ankle, then what? Eh. Fiona still danced at our parish barbecue (which was another instance of arms up, defensive stance as a fellow parishioner chewed me out because I haven't been to meetings I didn't know existed. Seriously). I made her a little costume.
And she danced. I have a video of her dancing, the only one I have, in fact, which I will post later. It's on Jake's phone.

And more school: I'm teaching 3 classes of art as a volunteer with the great hope that they might hire me part time in the future. Not all my eggs are in that basket but several of them are. I know the head of school would hire me in a moment. It always comes down to money, doesn't it? I'm also volunteering in the growing elementary classroom (Montessori classrooms are grouped in 3 year bunches, and elementary is 1st-3rd. We will have 3 1st-3rd grade classrooms when it is all said and done but right now we have 2 1st-3rds and 1 1st-only, which next year will have second, and then will be a full class after that). The teacher, according to state law, is certified, but is not Montessori-trained. I am, sort of. I have Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training, and while I'm not going to bring in the story of the Annunciation, we also did a great deal of what is called "Practical Life". The weird Montessori stuff: cutting flowers, cutting vegetables, pouring rice from a pitcher. Using pincers and eyedroppers. Walking on a line. Spreading a mat. Rolling a mat. And so forth. That classroom has 4 new kids (out of 13) who have no Montessori experience. So I'm going in 3 mornings a week for a half hour or so to cover some bases. In fact, that's where I'm headed here in just a moment.

And I'm taking an online class for dummies. It's a junior college course to reactivate my teaching certificate. It's making me a little crazy. The teacher runs "discussions" on an online discussion board, but really, she just wants us to copy straight from the book to prove we've read and "synthesized" the material. So my discussion of my own experiences in the classroom, drawing from the material in the book and truly synthesizing it? Bad. But the woman; who wrote like this; seriously with the semi-colons? She was given the "thank you for your clear and concise response" response from the professor. I even emailed her to check. Just to check. And yes. I wasn't supposed to be discussing until I'd proven that I could copy from the book. I'm not exaggerating. She didn't; mention; how best to use semi-colons.

So it's busy. And being busy is the equivalent of writer's block for me. If my hands are busy, I don't have that hypergraphic NEED to write.

Off to roll a mat.

Arms of the angels repost

2011-10-09T16:31:00.002-05:00

Spend all your time waiting for that second chance
For the break that will make it OK
There's always some reason to feel not good enough
And it's hard at the end of the day

One week before the end, February, right after Martin's funeral, Troy comes to see me during library class. It really isn't a class--it's a study hall--and it's my free block. But I have no freedom this semester, and he shows up. He was one of the few witnesses to Martin's accident, which happened after basketball practice--his stepfather ironically ran out and stopped traffic right after it happened. This has made Larry a sort of weird hero at Pius. I look at him and want to throw up, of course--the epilogue of that story, when not abridged for general audiences, involves Larry getting home from that accident and laying his wife across the kitchen table. This is all intertwined with my bad luck drawing the short straw to teach 6th grade sex ed. As the vocabulary builds, the stories start to spill over. This has led to heated arguments in Linda's office about why the heck we haven't called DFS.

Except that I already have, of course. They just didn't do anything. The tired pregnant social worker told Troy she was going to tell his mother everything he said, and he actually stood up and said, "this interview is over." Like on a crime show. Even after we explained the process that his mother was going to have to know eventually, it was too late because Nolan had to lie like a bad rug once he saw Troy get up from the table. The social worker symbolically closed her file and tottered out of our building. Didn't even make a home visit. I wanted to call again, but Linda said we needed to wait, get physical evidence in hand and get Nolan's trust because she had lost Troy's. I still had it, though.

Troy sits down next to me and stares at the papers I'm grading. I ask him how it's going.

"Tony took my bed."

"Who the heck is Tony?"

"Larry's cousin. He was doing cocaine and his wife kicked him out. So now I'm sleeping in Nolan's bed. Which is good because I want to keep Nolan safe." Great. Because it wasn't already traumatic enough.

"But Nolan wakes up a lot at night crying. I don't know if it's about Martin or what. But I think we're running out of time." He says these things, like we're peers, he's 25 like me, talking about a student. But he's eleven, in need of a haircut, a good dentist, and someone to give him that second chance.

Alive repost

2011-10-06T16:24:00.001-05:00

Is something wrong, she said
Well of course there is
You're still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be?
Is that the question?
And if so, who answers, who answers?

January 2000. Liturgical music practice, dark church. I keep looking over at him, because the past two days, something has changed. I sit behind him and ask him what's going on. He shrugs but whispers, it hurts me to remember what it's like. Do you want to talk to Linda, Troy? There is a part of me that wants to be the confidante, but a larger more sensible part of me wants to run and let the woman with the experience and education handle it. But she's not here until Monday, and I need to tell someone today because we're moving back in with him this weekend and I can't do it. The second grade is filing past us to their pews and we're not anything like anonymous, so I walk to the back Utah Vestibule with him.

My mom and I had this big fight last summer and I told her I felt like I was in danger, like I was being abused. She told me I didn't even know the meaning of the word. And Larry was in the living room, at my grandparents' house, and she yelled out to him, telling him what I've just said. Well, he knew better than to hit me in front of them, and so he laughed and says let's go take a ride. I'm leaning against the Sacred Heart statue trying to get on his eye level in the dingy vestibule. He won't look at me, he stands in front of me like he's been asked to recite spelling words he forgot to study.

He takes me to this construction site where he was working. He started hitting me, so much that I wound up on the floor. When I couldn't get back up anymore, Larry found this pipe. I start thinking of tobacco smoke, warm memories of family around the table. But the scene changes, my internal thesaurus catches up, and I realize he means cold copper plumbing. But Troy doesn't fill in the blanks for me any further. He just shakes his head and brushes tears away. My mom said I was lucky to be alive, I was lucky Larry was still around, cause we need a man.

I will do everything in my power to get you out of there as soon as possible, I promise him, recklessly. I have not a clue what my method will be, but I do say this next: nobody needs a man like that. Linda and I will take care of it.

I keep my word.

Shadowboxer repost

2011-10-03T16:20:00.002-05:00

You made me a shadowboxer, baby.
I wanna be ready for what you do.
I been swinging all around me.
cause I don't know when you're gonna make your move.

Just when I think I've got it figured out with that kid, he blindsides me. Tells me things I shouldn't have to hear because I'm not his counselor, I'm his math teacher. MATH. No essays, no journal entries, no heart-wrenching tales to share: that's why I teach math. He does have a counselor in the school, Linda, but we share this burden because we figure two heads are better than one--she's only there two days a week. I'm the lifeline when she's gone.

It all seems so black and white to me. Call the state. Have them take the kids. But it's not that easy to have your kids taken away, all you bad parents in Missouri, you can rest easy. Linda knows how to hit and make it count. I just sit at my desk frustrated and angry. (Eventually, I won't be able to balance it all in my head. I go down in the fourth round, but I come back up and make it to the end). But right now, we're still early in this fight. Linda wants to meet with Larry about the younger brother, and she seems to know how to handle nasty people better than I do, so I let her take the lead. She asks Troy how she'll know which car is his, and he says, "you'll know, beer cans will fall out when he opens the door." Troy makes those sorts of comments all the time.

So a beat up white sedan with a rusted top pulls up and Troy and Nolan (the younger) get in the passenger side. Linda taps on the glass of the driver side. Out steps Larry. Five beer cans fall out on the ground, and he scrambles to pick them up and throws them into the car. He has a wooden spoon in his hand, and I know he doesn't have a pot of soup for the boys in the passenger seat. I look away, trying to not detach myself from this, trying to stay here, for Troy. I wanna be ready for what you do. Larry is over six feet tall, over 200 pounds, he has a ponytail and a leather jacket on. He looks like one of my uncles. Walking talking stereotype. He's completely cordial with Linda and says that yes, his wife would like to be in on the conference and he'll work that out for next Wednesday. They drive away.

Troy has a broken front tooth on Monday.

Benedictine Sunday

2011-10-03T11:07:00.003-05:00

My monastery is a mother house for a number of smaller monasteries. There used to be one here in St. Louis, in fact, just about 15 minutes south of where I live, which annoys me sometimes because the one I'm an oblate with is about 5 1/2 hours from where I live.

But this past Sunday, the sisters who were part of the St. Louis community who currently live at Clyde came for a visit to the church that is in place where their monastery once was. Being in St. Louis, I got an invitation to come by and go to 11:30 mass and stay for a reception and talk afterward. Jake worked this weekend, so I just went to the mass and part of the reception while Fiona stayed home with the other two.

Catholicism is a big tent and I know that I go to my church for lots of reasons, and only one of them is geography. It fits me best. But many other places I can at least go to church and be a part of things. I visit friends and go to mass in other cities. I go to baptisms and weddings and so forth. The parish that used to be the monastery is a merging of a few south county parishes and would not have been on my short list of places to spend a Sunday morning, but for the most part, mass is ok wherever you are and that's that.

And I'm thinking here about my mother-in-law's parish and the years before the current pastor. The parish is dying, literally, but the priest who served there was so good and blended in with the community and was the right man for the job. I would go to mass with them and it was fine. It wasn't until the current pastor really started screwing things up that I stopped going to church when I was down there. Even before now, however, I wouldn't have made that church my home, just because it wasn't me. But it worked. It made sense, the music, the homilies, the people in the pews.

Yesterday didn't make sense. The church has been reworked so that it faces sideways, which is interesting and somewhat forward thinking. The pews made a kind of semi-circle around the altar. I walked in and someone, who later turned out to be the choir director/guitar player, greeted me. I found a seat but the noise was so distracting throughout the church. Everyone was chatting. We chat at Pius, too, but this was loud. It surprised me.

The music was standard 1985 guitar mass. The choir members were earnest and loud, too, because they had microphones. Two guitars. Cheesy but, like I said, earnest. It struck me as odd as the mass went on and they announced every single song, including the psalm, but whatever. I can't complain too much about folks who volunteer their time and were trying to get the completely silent crowd to do something besides stand there.

But what was bad was the priest. Bad. There was no time for silence between anything. Opening prayer ran into readings ran into (announced) psalm. After the homily he didn't even leave the ambo, just went straight into the Nicene Creed. This is always so disconcerting for me. I like silence. The homily was bad. And maybe it was an off-day, but really? I don't think so. As opposed to some bad priests who just get up and wing it, though, at least he'd written something down, and then read it to us. I am a bad public speaker. I get shaky and stumble and so I can't be too critical but come on. This is your job, dude. He rehashed the gospel for us. As if we'd never heard it. As if we don't hear it again and again over our lifetime as Catholics. The only thing I brought away from it was that the workers in the vineyard who kill the owner's son? They aren't us. They are the pharisees.

But the worst of it? Ok, so these nuns have come to visit. They've reserved one of the meeting rooms and plan to give a talk and welcome folks and see people they don't get to see every day. So after communion, he says, "I have one announcement. These ladies here in the first pew are Benedictines--you're Benedictines, right? And they're here visiting and used to be here, you know, back when the place was a mess. Not like it is now. Look at it now."

And he wasn't being funny.

The rest of the time there was lovely. We retired to a side room. The sisters I spoke with remembered me. I met a few oblates I hadn't met before. I talked with "the other young oblate" whose son is dyslexic and we traded information. She's at a school that is treating her, and him, just terribly. And her younger son? He has apraxia. Ha! So funny. So it was so good to be there. But I wish the parish had been more welcoming. I wish they had, you know, considered being nice. Because those ladies in the front pew brought along about 40 visitors who live in St. Louis and whose impression matched mine. I asked one of the people I met if this was her parish, and she burst out laughing. Seriously.

We wonder why people leave the church and then you visit a place like this and why do you have to wonder any more?

Oh, but one last thing. My monastery, you may remember, makes soap (and gluten-free communion bread, but that's usually not interesting unless you are a Catholic with celiac disease). And now one of the connected communities is making popcorn. We got to try it. I was seriously impressed.

tz's meme today.

2011-09-30T20:27:00.002-05:00

I needed a meme. As Lali said in my comments a few days ago, this season, this in between summer and autumn season, has been really hard on me. I developed a tremor in my hand due to too much caffeine and not enough sleep. I'm exhausted, everyone is sick from allergies, I'm stressed out and too busy. Too busy to think. So I like Question Memes. And here is one for you.

1. Name someone with the same birthday as you. My friend Ron. I like Ron. I like him because he is a constant, like e or pi, a quantity that does not change. I might learn a few more decimal points but he does not change. As someone who changes a lot, well, this is refreshing.

2. What has been your favorite age so far? The bronze age.

3. Where did you meet your husband? Marguerite Hall, Saint Louis University. He was a freshman advisor. I was a freshman. We didn't start dating for another year, but we were friends almost immediately. College is like that.

4. How many children do you have? I have 3. Sometimes known as Fiona, Daisy, and Billy.

5. Have you ever sung in front of a large number of people? Only high school choir. I'm an alto. Carol of the Bells means I sing ding dong ding dong. I think that's what altos sing on every song.

6. What’s the first thing you notice about your preferred sex? That could be the most awkwardly written question I've ever seen on one of these random sets of questions. And the funny thing is, I notice it about men and women. And it's the same as most everyone, I think. It is eyes. There's a mom at school whose eyes I cannot stop looking into. Gazing. I am such a dork.

7. What really turns you off? Misogyny and homophobia.

8. What do you order at Starbucks? Haven't in a while. But my sister paid the other day when she had me go through the drive thru. And it was, as always, iced grande nonfat caramel latte.

9. What is your biggest mistake? Wow. That's hard to narrow down. Most of my stupid mistakes make good stories later. And I know the big things I regret the most are wrapped up in a nostalgic haze of rewritten history. Biggest bad mistake would have to enter into the realm of sin. I'll just put down a category: It's always words with me.

10. As a child, what did you want to grow up to be? A nurse. Like my dad. In kindergarten I made a little cut and paste poster about it. My parents gave it to me, somewhat randomly, about 10 years ago. I would have been a bad nurse....

11. Say something totally random about yourself. I sometimes sit down and watch Hoarders on Netflix in order to kick start housework. It terrifies me into keeping a cleanish house.

12. Do you still watch kiddie movies or TV shows? Mighty Machines. Big and mighty machines. Working for you every night and day, they're mighty machines. You can watch them all day and never know why, they're mighty machines. God yes.

13. Did you have braces? Yes. I keep hoping my kids get my eyes (20/10 vision) and Mike's teeth.

14. Favorite Social Network? Wednesday morning coffee with Ann and Janet and Colleen and others who join us because it is my favorite social network. Or were you asking about computer stuff.

15. What is the most romantic thing someone of the preferred sex has done for you? Again with preferred sex. I just don't dig that phrasing. The most romantic thing anyone anywhere has ever done for me...the thing that pops first to mind is last year on my birthday, Jake (yes, I'm moving to pseudonyms here because I kind of like the idea of Bridgett, Jake, Fiona, Daisy, and Billy Kennedy living in my house), anyway, last year he gave me a beautiful recurve bow for my birthday. Weaponry. So romantic.

16. When do you know it’s love? Like what Tracey said on the blog I stole this from, when you start to draw a loop on a piece of paper in a pictionary game and I say “Tallahassee” and it's the right answer.

17. Do you speak any other languages? Ya govoroo pa-russky. Ni khoroshow. You know how hard that was to write? I kept trying to use the English letters that look like Cyrillic ones.

18. Have you ever been to a tanning salon? No but one time my brother and I found a pair of little goggles from one, down in my grandparents' basement that must have been my uncle's. We wore them around like the total dorks that we were/are.

19. What magazines do you read? I read Spirit and Life, the quarterly from my monastery. And that's really it. Sad but true. Or not...

20. What is playing on your iPod right now? I don't know. I actually don't own any iProducts. Hmm.

21. Have you ever ridden in a limo? Yup, day of my wedding. Took a big old shot of something as I got in. Don't even remember what it was but I remember my sister laughing at me.

22. Has anyone you were really close to passed away? Not really. That's hard to say but really, no.

23. Do you watch MTV? Not anymore.

24. What’s something that really annoys you? People who are not what they seem.

25. Which television show were you sad to say goodbye to? FIREFLY. Those idiots at Fox. I still think about that show and then get mad. Don't even go see that danged movie. Just watch Firefly over and over and make up your own ending.

26. Can you dance? I can do a two step pretty well. And Mike and I know the fundamentals of St. Louis Swing, which is just about all we do at people's weddings.

27. What’s your favorite place in the world? Many places are interesting and exotic. The coasts of Northern California and Oregon. Rocky Mountains. Smoky Mountains. Lovely places. But I think Rock Eddy Bluff, the little cabin at the bed and breakfast on the Gasconade wins. Because as opposed to those great outpourings it is more like a spring rain. It makes my garden grow.

28. Have you ever been rushed by an ambulance into the emergency room? No. My daughter has but not me.

29. If you could meet anyone (dead or alive) who would it be? I always answer this question with “Nebuchadnezzar” but really? I want to meet Bridget Blake from my family tree and ask her what the truth is.

30. If you could change one thing in the world for your child, what would it be? Wow. A part of me wants to say, “erase neurological dysfunctions” because two of them have them and the other one we're tiptoeing around hoping it doesn't establish itself. But except for that one (potential epilepsy), the other two problems (apraxia, dyslexia) are really kind of interesting. So I don't know what I would change, frankly.

Release repost

2011-09-30T16:13:00.002-05:00

Oh, dear dad, can you see me now
I am myself, like you somehow
I'll ride the wave where it takes me
I'll hold the pain, release me

We'd driven down to Galveston. I always liked the idea of Galveston, even if the reality was never what I was looking for. It was always too sandy, too fishy, too filled with sweaty Houstonians looking for a cheap beach. Later on I learned that not all ocean is the Gulf, not all beaches are the Bay. But this day, we walked along, picking up shells, attacking each other with seaweed, we had a good day. We went up to the Strand to scrounge something to eat--wound up at a soda fountain. Got a bag of sourballs and started walking to the car. It was getting late in the day and I had to work at Walmart in the morning.

We took the long way, heading south down through San Luis Pass, to Freeport, and then up 288. It was dark when we got to the Brazoria County Airport. For old times sake, we agreed, and pulled off the road. Watched the moon come up, sitting on the back of the car. You were getting antsy, and I thought it was the darkness, or the possibility of making out (which was an open possibility, frankly).

Your dad had called the night before. And you'd been looking all day for an opportunity to tell me about it. It was the first time you'd spoken to him in several years. And it set you back. As always, you'd managed to tamp it down until the night got dark enough to try to say.

Dating fatherless boys, lemme tell ya, ain't no stroll down the beach.

Half Acre Repost

2011-09-28T16:09:00.002-05:00

I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you've laid your head
And what is it that you remember?
Do you carry every silence with you?
Every hour your heart was broken?
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you?

February 2000. Martin had just died, and we were still sorting out the details to tell our kids. Third grader gets hit by a car, how close do the rest of us have to be? As the principal did her job with her usual inadequacy, the rest of us in the classrooms handled the facts. After school on the day they let him die, I sat down at my desk and put my head in my hands. I usually walked out with Troy to make sure there was an adult to witness the pick up. Make sure Larry wasn't drunk. Or armed. But today was too much. I'd been living life too connected to every single other living person breathing in this school. I needed to sit at my desk and stop thinking. Troy realized I'd changed my routine, and he hovered outside the door, anxious. He came back into the classroom and thrust a tiny scrap of paper at me.

"Could you write down the details for my mom, for the funeral? Nolan'll never remember."

I looked at him, through my hand, and obliged. Nolan, his brother, was in Martin's class. He probably wouldn't get it right. I started to write things down, including directions to the funeral home, the time for the mass, dates, what to wear--and he put his hand on mine.

"Could maybe she just call you?"

Without any mental debate over how this would be perceived in that house, I turned the scrap of paper over and began to write. But the numbers didn't look right to either of us.

"That's not what your number in the book was," he said, puzzled.

I looked again, and I realized in my befuddled state, I'd written down his grandmother's number. So we'd both betrayed ourselves to each other. He'd already had my number, and I had his only contact memorized. It was a test. I passed. He took his ballcap off and showed me--under the brim, turned up, written with a sharpie, was my phone number. I am carrying this scrap of paper/That can crack the darkest sky wide open/Every burden taken from me.

"I figure if I ever really needed to, I could run and find a phone." He put his hat back on.

It took every ounce of restraint not to kidnap him right there. We had to play the game, we were in the third quarter, we couldn't screw up now.

"Call 911 first, Troy. Then you can use that.' I touched the brim of his hat. Then I went home and waited by the phone.

Nothing in my head

2011-09-26T18:05:00.003-05:00

The weather. It makes me happy, for it is the turning of the year towards crisp autumn days and cozy winter. It makes me productive--the garden needs attention, the yard needs attention, school needs attention. I have taken many photos, from camping to dancing to cooking. But nothing is here. Because the happy productivity? It makes me tired. That combined with the slow decline of sunshine and the increasing need for wool sweaters just makes me tired. It makes me lie on the couch for a half an hour instead of blog for that same time period. It makes me glad for the beans in the crockpot on a Monday afternoon not so I can come up here and post pictures of how I made grape jelly, but so I can turn on "Mighty Machines" in the living room, let Leo use my leg as a choo-choo track, and close my eyes for just a moment between after school rush and dinner on the table long downhill slide to bedtime.

Zzz. More later. Perhaps.

Two Step Repost

2011-09-25T16:06:00.001-05:00

Do you believe that we
Might last a thousand years
Or more if not for this?
Our flesh and blood it ties
You and me right up tie me down
Celebrate we will
Because life is short but sweet for certain

It's hard to celebrate the sweetness of life when it is short. I stood in my sister's kitchen, washing dishes, my lower back hurting from a day sitting in a courtroom bench, taking frantic notes so that all the girls waiting to be witnesses would have some idea how things were going on the inside. When one of her roommates, Ellen, had come home that night, her eyes scanned my face as I told her what had happened so far, looking for some message that would mean everything would be just fine. It wouldn't be just fine, it couldn't ever be just fine. Jesse had been killed 10 months before, killed by a police officer he'd been having a secret relationship with, left to die with his throat cut so deeply it nicked his spine. Jesse had lived like someone who assumed he would live a thousand years. He took reckless chances sometimes, like getting involved with a married officer so deeply in the closet he had scratches from the hangers. Who then killed him out of fear of exposure.

I had met Jesse only once. But I watched my sisters and their friends be so brave and honest on the stand. Passing my daughter back and forth in the hall because something had to remind us of life, of joy, of the sweetness of a baby's smile. There was nothing sweet in that courtroom. The whole business was gruesome, the details sometimes more than we could bear.

Standing in the little kitchen cleaning up the first real meal some of these girls had eaten all week, I listened to Dave Matthews and pretended I wasn't crying. This life--it ties you and me right up. Death sometimes is the only thing that makes us realize we're alive.

Stupid Mouth Shut (repost)

2011-09-23T16:01:00.002-05:00

The hall light streams out through the screens
And the shadows capture me in webs
Just tangled up in what I've seen
And every word I have not said
I have not said

'Cause the sidewalk bends where your house ends
Like the neighborhood is on its knees

I put Dara, my rottweiler mix, on her leash. My heart knocking on my chest wall, I step outside into the winter air. She's confused--why aren't we heading to the park? But I have to go east today. And tomorrow. And every day until it's resolved. Or until I lose my job, my mind, my integrity, my marriage, my soul. Whichever comes first.

Still, she's happy for the walking, and we cross Arkansas, stop at Louisiana, head north up to Beverly's Market. There he is on the corner. He knows I'm coming. I told him I'd come by to make sure everything was still ok. He looks relieved to see me. We said goodbye less than an hour before, but nights are long and cold in that house with no heat, with no phone, with Shelia gone till after 4 in the morning. We part ways with only the briefest of words, and he ducks back through the alley. I stay on the sidewalks, but I turn on Compton and walk past the house from the front.

It's not a good block; Larry is not a good guy: hence, the rottweiler. The porch has no steps, and three of the four windows that face east are boarded up with scraps and plastic bags. He looks out of the intact one, sees me, and puts his hand on the glass. I glance up, and then head south to Magnolia, weaving my way back home.

The neighborhood isn't the only thing on its knees there.

I call the Department of Family Services that night. And every word I have not said--I still have not said.

Mr. Jones Repost

2011-09-20T15:59:00.001-05:00

When I look at the television,
I want to see me staring right back at me
We all want to be big stars,
but we don't know why and we don't know how
But when everybody loves me,
I'm going to be just about as happy as can be

My first teaching job only lasted a month and a half. I had a classroom of 14 fourth graders at Simmons School,an all-black "systemic" school on the north side of St. Louis. I was young, only 21, and I thought I could change the world with 14 fourth graders. But before we could get to know each other, or even learn to pronounce my last name correctly, I was told I'd be moving. Somwhere. Sometime. My kids went back to the other two fourth grade classrooms and I was told to "shadow" a few students from one of the rooms.

One of the kids was Tyrone, I kid you not. Tyrone was 10, in 4th grade, and hadn't learned to read yet. He'd been "homeschooled" down in Tennessee for 3 years. His mother had given him to his auntie up in St. Louis because she was "done with raisin him," as the auntie put it. She was hoping it wasn't too late to get him on track. We worked together for the whole month of September. I used Reading Recovery, bribery, song and dance, anything I thought might get him interested. Because in the end, he wasn't stupid. He'd gotten this far without reading, why work on something that might be hard? We got, essentially, nowhere. He knew the alphabet. Some sounds. A few phonics-based tricks and the -AT family.

He told me one day towards the end that he was going to be famous. He was going to play basketball, or maybe he'd be a rapper. He was going to make a lot of money and have everything he wanted and not have to do any scut jobs like teaching school. I'd see. He'd be awesome.

The day I packed up my empty classroom and moved to the "worst school in the district" to teach first grade for the rest of the year, I got down to my car, and this song was on the radio as I drove east away from Simmons, away from Tyrone.

Now This.

2011-09-20T14:21:00.002-05:00

I'm just going to get an early start and blame the Blakes. My dad's dad's family. For it all. All of those folks, all of the descendants of my grandfather, probably of his grandmother, are neurologically bizarre--probably some of the most brilliant folks and they are all deeply flawed with things you've never even heard of. Think about my kids a moment. Dyslexia, childhood seizures, and now this. Childhood Apraxia of Speech. But maybe a little bit more than that.

It's a good thing he's my 3rd because this is kind of scary.

Dyslexia wasn't scary. It was frustrating, but it was educational, both for me and in general. Plus dyslexia tends to come with an affable personality that glides through life and that's Sophia to a T. So easy. So nice. So clueless about so many things (in a good way, like about her spelling skills). The other day I was reminded that this is a lifelong condition--she handed me a penpal letter written in Times New Roman and said, "Can you read this to me, it would take me all day." And not that she's lazy. Trust me. So I read it and she went upstairs to compose a response. But I have no worries about what's going to happen with her. And really, I didn't have a lot of them back when we first found out. Mostly because I could see the positives (dyslexic people tend to be spatial, "big picture" folks, artists, etc--and she is that sort of person and it's a good thing).

Potential epilepsy, of course, is scary. Very scary. And couple that with asthma and eczema and Maeve is kind of a ticking time bomb. It's on a different level than dyslexia--yeah, Sophia may have trouble spelling, but she's unlikely to drown from having a seizure in a bathtub. On the other hand, Maeve is unlikely to, as well, because she's only had 1 unprovoked seizure and we have a good epileptologist. Still, I don't think I'll ever fully relax when she's not in the room with me. Luckily, she hasn't been burdened with any sort of communication or learning problem. At all. She has some personality flaws we need to grind down a bit (but don't we all). In the end, she still wins the gold medal for most worrisome.

And it looks like Leo will take the silver.

Folks kept saying it: he's a boy. Boys are late talkers. He's fine. He's so expressive. He gets his needs met--big sisters, third child, mom who is there all the time. And so on. Well-meaning but it never rang true for me. It didn't. I never could brush off this nagging feeling that something wasn't right (and I've been able to brush off other nagging feelings, really, honest). We signed up for speech and language at the university we graduated from--Sophia did speech therapy there for 2 years for a language processing disorder that knit up quite nicely in the end (but voila, dyslexia...connection?).

And there were things all along that I chalked up to stubbornness. And they might still be stubbornness. But I'm starting to think that less and less. The professor in charge of the grad student who is working with Leo is thinking that less and less as well. She called it "motor planning" the first meeting. Today she said "apraxia" although I'd already looked it up. The short version: a disconnect between brain and oral muscles. Basically, he understands what we say. He might have lots to say. But he can't get the message from his brain to his mouth in order to say them.

Apraxia is the professor's specialty. She gives conference talks on the topic around the country. We're in good hands.

But still. Now this? Now I get to become an expert on apraxia like I did on dyslexia and on the protocols for medicating children after the first seizure? I know all about 504 plans but now we'll probably have a 504 and an IEP? Do I really have to advocate for yet another child? Like I've been saying since Thursday, why can't one of them just be easy? Why do I have to do this yet again?

I guess it comes down to the raven and the dove on Noah's ark. The raven got off that ship, found land, and thought, bah, I'm exhausted, I'm ditching them and staying right here. But the dove found land and then returned to finish the job. So many times in my life I've been the raven. But these little people on my ark need me to be the dove. So now this. Here we go again and still and evermore.

Homeschool help...

2011-09-19T23:17:00.002-05:00

I have a friend who would like me to help her come up with a good semester for her son, who needs out of his current school but cannot start at a new school until next fall. She's going to pull him at Christmas and hopes to enroll him in a good heavily structured middle school in 2012. He is a 5th grader. I know a few of you are homeschoolers and I may ask you specifically some questions via email. I know what I'll suggest for math (ahem, me) but I'm looking for suggestions for a good basic science curriculum or ideas for just a semester, for a student who has probably had zero science at this point.

And social studies? What about language/grammar skills for that age range? Physical education?

I am going to be helping her as an adviser probably pretty closely since I am a teacher and know him pretty well and know where she'd like him to be. I don't even know what to call myself here. Perhaps just tutor will be the best term. Is it ok for a homeschool parent to rely on a tutor for a subject? I gather that it probably is. But still. Not wanting to break rules.

Any thoughts welcome. Most welcome.

Repost: I will not take these things for granted

2011-09-19T15:59:00.000-05:00

One part of me just wants to tell you everything
One part just needs the quiet
And if I'm lonely here, I'm lonely here
And on the telephone you offer reassurance
I will not take these things for granted

May 1993. Telephone calls. Nine hundred miles and we sit listening to each other's silence. All I want is to hang up and go next door where they're playing games and having a good time. My roommate sits at her desk and eavesdrops without malice. She's engaged, too, except that she and Kyle are going to go through with it. I'm not, and I know it. I just have to figure out how to tell you.

I keep a sad little diary that semester. Ramble on and on. Hand it to you when I get back to town. Here. Here's what I've been thinking for 4 months without you next to me.

You take it home and read it. You make me a mix tape that starts with this song. I want so badly to be your friend, because I think you could use a friend like me, but we're only 19 (I'm not even that yet) and it's too hard to make the transition from fiancee to friend. It's too hard to not be too close. We can't do it, and I know it. We have seen too much to pretend to be innocent, in a way. There are things that a married couple need to be able to work out or work through or know or be, that a two friends don't. I watch the writing on the wall all summer.

I listen to the tape. Other songs on there--you always had good music, even if it ran a little hard for my tastes sometimes--expressed this idea. Please don't leave me. I'll stop being who I am.

I couldn't do that. I knew that was not going to work. It was going to be wrong. I knew we had the summer, and then we would be done.

It is Monday

2011-09-19T09:41:00.002-05:00

It is Monday. It is a Monday post girl scout camping. My front hall is filled with bags (mine) I haven't unpacked, and two bins (troop) I have started to unpack but seem to be an endless bowl of spaghetti style packing job. I know I have good spatial reasoning but come on.

It is Monday. The girls are at school. Leo is downstairs eating a banana and some little rabbits that are knock offs of the teddy graham varieties. Bob the Builder is demonstrating how train tracks are replaced.

It is Monday. There is no food in the house except for 4 dark chocolate bars left over from smores and stuff in the freezer. I am finishing the last of the oatmeal. My coffee has no milk in it. But there is deer stew cooking in the crockpot with red wine leftover from last night's stewardship thank you dinner. And with the box of vegetable ends I save (bits of carrot, beans from the yard, chopped up tiny green peppers from the yard, etc) in the freezer for a month or so before turning it into stew. The last of the onions. The last of the frozen peas. Of course not the end of the garlic. But seriously? How did the larder get so bare? That will need to be fixed today.

It is Monday. I haven't written my lesson plan for art yet but I will. I haven't gone to Baisch and Skinner for florist foil yet but I will. I haven't yet done the grocery shopping but I will. The living room isn't clean yet but somehow it will. I have made one of the 3 phone calls I had to make (the one I knew would be home but alas not the hardest one (personality on the other end, not subject matter being the "hard" part)).

It is Monday. Bleys survived the weekend against the odds I was working in my head. I gave him the last of the chicken from the fridge for breakfast. I realized that what I had thought (last week) was evidence that he'd lost control of his bowels was actually coming from the other end. This makes me more hopeful for his longterm survival but only a little. He is 15. And he's always been fragile.

It is Monday after a camping trip and a stewardship dinner where I was headed for the bar (it was after a camping trip with 18 girl scouts) but got sidetracked by the coffee. I had 4 cups after 6:30 in the evening. And I still fell asleep a bit after 10.

It is Monday and my long hiatus from my parish, I believe, is over. Sometimes I like to reflect and I see my life as a sort of novel with too many words. There is a chapter that is ending or is about to end (perhaps the author is waiting for the best closing line). There are arcs in my life, as in most everyone's life, and this month has been a bit of a crisis for me personally and, it seems, surrounding me. There is a lot of death and injury and diagnosis and change. Questions were asked of me last night, good ones; last week in the rectory some nice things were said that reminded me that dang it, I need to be there. I can be other places too but I need to remember my center. My sister Bevin tells me I do this every year. I rearrange my priorities and pull back and give forth and things change. Maybe she's writing the novel. More likely she's illustrating it.

It is Monday and I realized last night talking to Jack by the bar that I said the phrase "had a falling out with" at least 5 times that evening. Again with the death, injury, crisis, diagnosis, change. But I'm thinking about that. Why I'm such, well, that way sometimes.

It is Monday. The camping trip went well until the last 45 minutes. Lisa suggested a post-mortum with the adults. I think it needs to happen, maybe Wednesday after the faculty meeting for Bridget. Hmm. Have dinner in the crockpot and abandon the house for an hour to sit somewhere with no kids and talk a moment about the weekend. I have ideas of how to make a few things run more smoothly. Our next trip will be identical in setting (winter camping is always in a lodge) and I think we can get it down to a science before we branch out for spring camping in A-frames or covered wagons or whatnot. Hmm. We've never done a post-mortum but it would have been useful in the past.

It is Monday. Bob the Builder has finished his instruction. Leo has appeared. Tomorrow we learn more about his possible diagnosis of speech apraxia. This weekend I got to think on that, process it, and explain it at three different times to the three women who were with me (who each had three different responses and all were good and helpful). It could be a long semester of adjusting my brain to yet another weird kid thing (I asked Rose last night: why can't ONE OF THEM be easy?).

It is Monday. The asthma coach just called and was disappointed in me. Bizarre. Maeve has zero symptoms but I didn't resort to albuterol as my first defense when she had a cough last week--because albuterol makes her bounce off the walls. I started with mucinex (guaifenisin or whatever it is) because it wasn't an asthmatic cough. It was productive and phlegmy. She told me I couldn't hear the difference. And yet Maeve didn't require albuterol nor did she wind up on prednisone. And the crisis has passed. Frustrating. She's calling next Monday to check to see how I'm doing.

It is Monday. Time to get moving.

Hallelujah (repost)

2011-09-16T08:58:00.000-05:00

Baby I've been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Why did he live alone before he knew you?

Well, it's just really something in the song. I guess he's just saying he knows what it's like to be alone.

But alleluia is a song of praise. Why come it's a broken alleluia?

It's hard to explain, honey. It's just, really, I guess it's just hard to sing praise sometimes.

But why? Why would it be cold?

Sophia, it's really just a grown up song. It's hard to explain.

Then why is it on a kids movie?

Now, that is a question I have too. I don't really know, though.

I just don't think an alleluia can ever be broken.

You're right.

Bridge over troubled water (repost)

2011-09-14T08:53:00.001-05:00

I'll take your part
Oh, when darkness falls
And pain is all around

Omigod could there be a better preteen angst song. I mean, on the edge before you discover punk or grunge or whatever it is you discover in your own peculiar time and space. Before that, Art Garfunkel sings this and you either want to sing to someone you think you love or you want Art Garfunkel to come and sing it to you.

The way things were handled in the end of this tale were so bizarre, it is almost not worth writing down. But I will, from my 7th grade perspective. Hannah, Jane, Muriel, Sonia, and I sat on my swingset talking about how fat our thighs were. Except Muriel because she was complaining about the mole on her forehead. It was almost midnight, my tolerant parents were allowing me to have all these people over to spend the night. Sonia was visiting from Oklahoma, where she'd moved 4 months before, and I was always ready for a slumber party. Whining about thighs stopped and the topic turned to sex. Jane practically blurted out, as if she'd been waiting all night to say it, that her stepfather Vinny was molesting her. Reactions ran the gamut from stunned silence (Muriel, me) to indignation (Sonia). The next Monday, Sonia (who was on spring break back in OKC and had a week to tool around the old homestead) and I went to Mr. Weber. Told him exactly what Jane had told us. He told us he'd handle it.

He handled it by telling Jane's mother.

That summer, I moved to Dallas and spent most of my mental energy adjusting to a large public middle school and an inexplicable developing hypergraphia that was taking all my spare time. I got letters from all the friends, but Jane's weren't coming from Columbia anymore--they were coming from Springfield where her dad had remarried and started a brand new family. On Christmas break I had the brief chance to visit Muriel, and I asked her if she'd seen Jane, and she said, "didn't you know?"

"Know what?"

"Vinny died. This guy on a job site ran a metal ladder into some live wires and Vinny ran over to save him. He was killed instantly, but the first guy lived. He sacrificed himself for this guy. At the funeral, Fr. Jerome compared him to Jesus."

"Was Jane there?"

"Until that moment. Then she walked out." Sail on, silver girl. Sail on by.

Perhaps Thou Doth Protest Too Much?

2011-09-13T22:10:00.002-05:00

The new girl scout books are out.

I picked up the brownie guide, and the cadette one. The junior guides are out of stock until mid-November, which makes me shake my head. Badges, too, aren't due out until at least then--maybe spring, according to the woman in charge of my district.

Jerks.

Oops did I say that out loud?

Reading about the books, we are inundated with the fact that the journeys MUST BE A PART OF YOUR GIRL SCOUT EXPERIENCE. You've all heard me complain about this pablum before. Somehow, if we don't do the journeys and only do the badges, we are only hitting 1 out of 15 key pieces of girl scouting.

Is it just me, or do the other 14 sound like not that important after all? I mean, the new legacy badges for the cadettes were actually good--I liked them--although I definitely think they could be easily accomplished by juniors. Again with the dumbing down of the program twinned with silly illustrations and too much reading for the daisies. Bah. And the creepy elves/brownies in the brownie guide. Goodness. Get a new illustrator. But I'm rambling.

Every meeting I attend--district, neighborhood--and everything I read and everything at training programs says, so fast, in bold letters or loudly so everyone can hear: HAVE AN OPEN MIND! PLEASE DO THE JOURNEYS BECAUSE HEY YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO NOW!!!!

No we don't.

Ok, yes we do. Next year if my cadettes want to earn their silver award, they do. But my neighborhood chair has already written up a plan about how to "get it over with" in a weekend. Go to camp, wear pajamas, get it over with.

Why not just lie? Really. If it's going to be so dumbed down and silly and done in a weekend and so letter-of-the-law?

They suck. They are embarrassing and they suck. It's like New Coke all over again but at least Coke had the wisdom to admit it.

But I stay. I stay because of the cheap camping. Because of the archery and the canoeing and all the good things about scouts that are being quickly phased out all over the nation as councils sell their camps to property developers. I stay because of all the good things about my troops and field trips and all that. But journeys? No thank you. Actually, not even a thank you. They are still bad. And you're destroying what's good in order to cover up your mistake.

So I'm going to do the cadette badges. And the other councils' badges that are still legit and available. And we're going to camp and go on trips and enjoy ourselves. Next December maybe we'll go to camp and fulfill some onerous workbook to earn the silver award. Fill in the blanks and get it over with.

Maeve's troop, too. The next three years will be field trips and day trips and FUN. Like the birds and the bees, I won't let them in on the big bad parts of getting older until the bronze award comes along. And of course I will continue to hope that one day, Miss Corporate Girl Scout USA will come to her sense.

Sorry for the rant.

I just want more options.

Pete Stein

2011-09-12T11:14:00.004-05:00

I wrote this about him on my 365 blog a few years back:

Typical rebel these days: high school dropout, piercings, tired-looking. But I know you’re brilliant and you’ll come out of it. You were always my favorite in that class. Smart, funny, charming, mature.

And in the comments, I mentioned that I wanted to take him home, adopt him. Not to save him, but because I thought he was fabulous.

I taught him for 5th and 6th grade at my parish school. I still remember my first day, him sullen in the back of the room, the only two girls in that class up in my face for my attention. Realizing with a bit of focus that the boy in the back with the chain on his wallet was part of the Stein family. His older brother was in 8th grade and my sisters knew his even older brother. And there were other younger brothers, and finally a sister the same age as Sophia (but that would be later).

As I focused on my own growing family, I fell out of close touch with his family, although we attended the same church and eventually his sister would be in my girl scout troop for a while. I remember being in his mother's house one day and he ran in. There was talk of some dumpster diving. I don't recall all the details. And then this past winter, Sophia was in the play with his sister, and so I saw him at one of the performances. He was there with his girlfriend and they were talking about how they were headed out to where, perhaps, her family lived? Again, I don't recall all the details. But there was problems with a transmission, I think, and trying to figure out how to get out there. He was pretty rough looking, but it was the same Pete, you know? So smart, funny, remembered me and Sophia and had come to see his sister's play. I know from knowing my dad's family that looks are often deceiving.

So Ann called me this week because we're starting up a freezer meals kind of committee at church for people with temporary needs. Not deaths, not funeral meals. Not longterm homebound situations. But things like, well, when Ann had her hip replaced. Lots of people made meals, even if the family could have technically gotten by without. It is just so nice, I know from meals made for me when I had babies come home from the hospital, to know that dinner is taken care of. Pete's mom, in fact, made us a meal every time I had a baby. Lemon meringue pie. Oh, she is also my source for the rum cake I indulge in occasionally.

So we had our first call, essentially, before we even got started. Pete was out in Oregon and was jumping a train. And it went horribly wrong. He wound up losing both feet--I don't know all the details, but I ran into his aunt yesterday and she said it was 10 cm below each knee and the doctors are hoping to keep infection at bay because he's a better risk for prosthetics with knees intact.

But I also know from his aunt that when he went into surgery--one foot was still somewhat attached--he asked the doctor if he could save it. Like in a jar. Preserve it to show people. And he was mad that the doctor told him they didn't do that. And that sounded just like Pete.

So there are donation jars all over South Grand, there is a fundraiser night at City Diner next week. He's one of those folks that everyone winds up knowing through something, and St. Louis is a small small place in the end. He did have insurance--his parents insisted he carry it--but even with that, this is a long expensive recovery and neither he nor his family (nor, really, any of us) is prepared for it. There are trips out to Portland, there is time lost from work, there's all sorts of things I can't even imagine handling.

I know most of my readers aren't St. Louisans, but if you are, and if you find yourself on South Grand, think of Pete.

One (Repost)

2011-09-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

Another reposting

And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

High school boyfriends and higher aspirations. I left Houston after graduation and came up to SLU. Met Mike in the first 10 minutes I was there, and by the end of the year I was trying to figure out how best to dump Troy back home. It sounds fun, like some sort of chick novel, maybe even Sweet Valley High: Bridgett can’t decide between the fun new boy and the sure thing back home. Yeah.

That spring, when I told him I had to stop being engaged to him and figure out what I wanted to do, voices thin on the phone, he told me more than I needed to know. Why I should stay. Why I had to. It's too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light. I juggled this in my head, all summer when I got back home. How to fix this, how not to hurt him more, how to make it all better. So I chickened out and didn’t break up. Well we hurt each other, then we do it again.

Back at college, trying not to think about any of it, one night I went out with a bunch of people I don’t know anymore. It was one of those sweet smelling September evenings when you remember the city is built on a prairie. U2’s “One” came on the radio, and I like that song, I turned it up, I was in the passenger seat, in charge. Love is a temple, love a higher law, you ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl—BAM—and I realized I’d hit the dashboard so hard with my hand that my wrist hurt, and I’d left a 9 inch crack along Nora’s dashboard.

One life, you got to do what you should.

I broke up with him that evening. Started dating Mike two weeks later.

Discoveries (thanks to Gail)

2011-09-11T23:57:00.003-05:00

Not that the discoveries are thanks to Gail, but the idea for the post is.

*Working a feis stage in the morning is much more fun than in the afternoon. All the parents are fresh and for many the whole feis thing is still new and fun. The kids are little and/or nervous and/or fun to talk to.

*No one could see a sign on my chest that said "We're Quitting". Imagine that. I walked through the place in cognito. We had a nice day.

*The last three weeks sucked a lot more than I thought they had. All of that is over (except one very minor bit I don't care much about, and another major bit that really has nothing to do with me nor do I have any power over).

*When you come down from 3 weeks of pretty high stress, you take a 5 hour nap through a headache that might have been a migraine if not for the nap.

*I am getting pretty good at planning what I'm going to say when I talk in front of folks but absolutely no better at executing said plan. I stood up at church this morning and by the end of the stewardship talk I was crying. Again. Jeez.

*The best thing after crying at church is to go home and take a 2 hour nap. And then go to a potluck.

*I really hurt my shoulder. Gretchen looked at it today. I have exercises. If I hadn't gotten weak pulling a pair of tights onto Maeve I wouldn't have thought anything of the soreness in my left shoulder. But I think I really did something. Six weeks.

*Sometimes it is best to just let everything simmer down. I'm talking about grape jam, but also interpersonal conflicts.

*Half of the two people I had to email to announce that Sophia was quitting dance, well, that one person, was so gracious and lovely and made me almost regret it (not on purpose, I mean in response to her lovely response). The other half, the other person, I had to write a second, firmer, email. I am dreading dropping off the dress. On the other hand, what, are they going to stone me? Read up above, about 3 weeks of stress? Everything is so blown out of proportion.

*In girl scout meetings there are definitely girls I would prefer to have run the show in comparison to others. As they get older I mask this slightly less (as I found out through an amusing retelling via another mom).

*The girls are old enough to hand them blank sheets of paper, have them divide into patrols, and plan some meals and activities for a camping trip. Bam.

*A lot of my paranoid delusions the last three weeks? Almost all of them came to nothing. Read between the lines.

*Turns out, the water doesn't all evaporate out of the pool. Tomorrow involves scrubbing.

*Most of the current guest room mess, again, turns out, isn't mine. Sophia has spread her stuff around the house, subtly, like a trailing vine.

*If you use the flovent how you should, and the expectorant as often as you should, and a bit of a suppressant at night, Maeve doesn't wind up on prednisone for the 3rd autumn in a row. So far.

I see around the corner now. Might even be a light. Here's to a bit of normal.

Killing Time

2011-09-09T08:33:00.003-05:00

A repost. It's the change of seasons that does it to me. The end of autumn, the end of summer, the end of spring (the end of winter is so miserable here I don't note it the same way). It fills me with nostalgia. Plus this has been one of the crazier months for me and I'm getting up courage to do something hard tomorrow. It is good to go back and read things from before during these moments.

You were the first thing that I thought of
When I thought I drank you off my mind

My senior year of high school, I went on a lot of retreats. The first one that year was for Campus Ministry only, 3 nights outside San Antonio. A faculty retreat in late August was next, where the baseball coach/history teacher ran his foot up my leg as I sat across from him at lunch. The sophomores, the freshmen day trips; the separate junior girls and junior boys retreats. My own senior retreat, five days in A-Frame cottages, supposedly silent, yet 15 of my classmates got caught horsing around in mixed-gender situations...and got sent home. The spring was uneventful, and then campus ministry had their final retreat, down in Corpus Christi in a beach house Melanie's parents owned.

Days on the beach. Nights on the beach. Mass on the beach. A bit of a sunburn. Driving the 15 passenger van away from hooligans at the Stop-n-Go. Watching Thelma and Louise and all the boys laughing, but all the girls picking out their secret club names. Saturday night, Kevin, the youth minister, took us out to a bar (!) near the beach. We ate burgers and fries and listened to a local guitarist play country music.

This song came on; Adam and I got up to dance. I was two years older than Adam, at least 3 inches taller, and even though it was on the bare wood floor of a Corpus Christi bar, and we were high school kids dancing to a cover band, for a moment we were the only people in the room. The way he looked at me, the way he led (most boys thus far in my dancing career practically let me lead--it is hard to have a dominant personality sometimes), it was effortless. After the song ended, we sat back down amid applause from the team. Probably the best retreat moment I'd had all year.

It wasn't until later that summer, hearing it on the radio, that I came to realize this song was about drinking yourself to death.

First Two Art Lessons

2011-09-08T22:59:00.002-05:00

I'm teaching art to the 1st-3rd graders this year at my kids' school. One is a classroom of 13 (a developing classroom--next year they will grow by a large number and the third year they'll be the same size as the other two 1st-3rds), the other has 30. Maeve is in the larger classroom (there are 2 teachers) but I had a parent request to teach art in the other as well, and the teacher was happy to let that happen (it would be hard to resist a volunteer with a decent track record for showing up and doing her job, frankly).

I've decided to do a 3 year arc, in the hopes that they will want me back next year, of art history and projects relating to it. We are starting at the very beginnings of human history and slowly moving forward. This year I hope to cover the stone age up through the Migration Period (early medieval times).

So our first lesson was cave paintings. I will post pictures another day but what we did was a short lesson about cave paintings and a pass-around of pictures from caves around the world. Then everyone found a seat under a table or desk, I turned off the lights (there are windows--it wasn't totally dark), and they painted on brown paper bags with brown tempera and drew with sticks of charcoal. Most of the 33 children involved drew things based on the designs they'd seen--people on hunts, animals of various kinds. One boy drew spaceships, but we reasoned together that if spaceships had landed when people were drawing in caves, they surely would have recorded that. A few kids went crazy with the paint, pretty much just covering the page with brown. But we'll get there.

Then I had them come over to a table I had set up with a spray bottle of diluted black tempera. I had them put their hand somewhere on their paper and I sprayed over their hand like a stencil.

This was a popular lesson.

Today's lesson was about paint, and about the Azilian culture of the mesolithic era, who used red ochre to paint pebbles. We don't know what the symbols mean, but there are 1500 pebbles with dots and lines on them. I started a timeline on freezer paper to show where we've been and where we are today (meaning lesson, not modern times).

Then we made paint. Equal parts powdered milk and water, and then added pigment. In this case, crushed brick, crushed charcoal, and dirt from my backyard. I also used henna powder because it was a different brown--more like a sienna--and it gave us the 4 basic colors we've seen in pictures of cave paintings.

Making paint like this was gross and wonderful. They really enjoyed it. They decorated some pebbles I brought in and laid them on paper strips to dry.

Next week I'm going to cover the Neolithic Era and use megalithic monuments as my example: Stonehenge, for instance. And then they will build miniature monuments (minilithic?).

I cannot express enough how excited I am about this year.

More Balls

2011-09-08T00:22:00.003-05:00

Juggling, I mean.

I have hurt my shoulder. I don't know enough about shoulders to even communicate it to you, but I talked to Gretchen on the phone and she asked me pointed questions and gave me serious advice. It's not a major tear, based on my level of pain, but it's something.

It's my left shoulder, which at first made me say "Whew! Could be worse!" And then I realized that my left arm is my gross motor arm. I hold the pot with the left hand and stir with the right. I pick up the bag of flour with my left hand and scoop with my right. I hold the book with my left and turn the page with my right. Great. This evening after getting off the phone with Gretchen, I started watching myself. It will take some retraining. It hurts right now. Lovely.

Sophia's ceili team was just now announced to be at a noon show in Manchester on Sunday. That means getting there at 11. Which means...church? I've written a desperate letter pleading for a sub. I am now officially done with Irish dance. Sophia was already but this is the last straw. Saturday is Sophia's last feis and if it weren't downtown, I might be tempted to just skip it. Drop off the dress on Tuesday and say goodbye. But we signed that pledge about the oireachtas and here we go. I need to stop saying OK to things. Just as a general rule.

One ball that was in the air I think I've caught. But that's all I can say about it now. I had a long talk with a friend this afternoon and it was like a combination lock getting all the tumblers in the right place, just before you yank it open. It's unlocked, but it's not yet off the locker. Goodness.

And seasonal allergies are back. As my neighbor Lisa put it, walking by earlier, there's always something to complain about. First it's too hot, now the weather is good and I feel like curling up in bed and sobbing. Next it'll be too cold. Before I know it.

It's been a really stressful 3 weeks or so. Not a novel. A short story. And probably written by Flannery O'Connor. Moments of grace coming too late to be of any use.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Juggling

2011-09-07T12:14:00.002-05:00

All balls currently in air.

Everything that rises must converge. And it is.

I am so busy right now it is ridiculous. Old dance, new dance, parish picnic dance. School, art, homework, six ways from Sunday craziness. Maeve has a cold that I'm trying to tame down before her asthma ignites. The yard needs a clean up for autumn. The dining room needs a deep cleaning and then the floor sanded the rest of the way. Tutoring. Girl scouts. New girl scout stuff that annoys. House projects. Laundry. Kitchen. Genealogy, which, I know, shouldn't be stressful, and it isn't except that I feel like a few of these people are purposefully hiding from me. Christmas quilting. I am taking a class to reactivate my teaching certificate.

But three related items:

The Desiderata (Go placidly amid the noise and haste), most of us know, is not an anonymous list of thoughts found in 1692 in an old church in Boston. It is a prose poem by Max Ehrman.

The St. Francis Prayer (Make me a channel of your peace), is not by St. Francis of Assisi but instead was published anonymously in the early 20th century in a French magazine. It is also the anthem of the Royal British Legion.

And the Oscar Romero workmen prayer/homily (We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own) isn't by Oscar Romero, but by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw.

Ruminating.

The Last Two Weeks: A List

2011-09-05T23:25:00.003-05:00

2: the number of weeks I'm going to discuss

9: the number of days the girls have been back at school (they missed Friday).

1: the number of days it took me to open mouth, insert foot.

A number between 4 and 8(pi)^2: how many things I'm ticked off about that I can't talk about just yet or perhaps ever because there are too many players and I'm bewildered by it all because seriously, I am not a Machiavellian. Not even close. If I were a character on Leverage I would be Elliot. I can't steal, I can't lie, I can't play people, I can't even read nuance. Not that I can hit, either, although Master Warren told me one time I have good instincts. But the point is that the last two weeks have knocked my mental teeth out and I keep putting my fists up at shadows and don't know what's coming next. And you know what I think about that (sorry)? Fuck that.

30: the number of minutes our train home from Kansas City was EARLY. Does that ever happen on Amtrak? The trip out and the trip back were absolutely pleasant and relaxing. Yes, we went to Kansas City this weekend for the feis and the Irish Festival. Never have I found myself in a larger group of light eyed freckled folk.

1118: Our room number

532: Sophia's feis competitor number

16: the number of girls in Sophia's slip jig event, which she did not place in and was somewhat disappointed by.

14: The number in her hornpipe, which she also did not place in and I was disappointed by because it was the most confident I've seen her with the hornpipe. But 14? They show the top 3 on the board.

3: The number of competitive dances Sophia has left. Reel, hornpipe, and slip jig, this coming weekend. We compromised. She wasn't going to go at all, but our school has co-opted the feis and we sort of have to. So she's dancing her 3 in advanced beginner and skipping the novice ones. Maybe she'll go out on a bang. There are 8, 6, and 8 competitors in those. This of course isn't counting the oireachtas ceili dance. She has now decided that the moment she takes her wig off in Chicago, she's not looking back. "Irish dance has taught me many things, but I've learned those things and I don't have anything else to learn from it." Well. Then.

5: approximately the number of minutes it took her to shake off her lack of placing and get on with her life on Saturday afternoon. She's had two big zeros in a row, after always placing in something at every feis we attended (except for that one awful one in St. Louis that you all in St. Louis know what I'm talking about, but actually, she was in a 3 hand that day that placed, so never mind).

1: how many tips I learned at the Irish genealogy talk I went to on Sunday (yes, I did). One tip that I didn't already know. And in the end it didn't help me. But one amateur genealogist listened to my story of Tooheys and Kidneys and the lot and finally reassured me: if it were her family, she'd probably go with it. Still look, but know that it was likely they were all the same people in the end. She was very reassuring. I'm going to keep looking.

1900: the year of the census where the one tip is located: naturalization status. If it says Na, they are naturalized citizens. But Bridget's is blank. Did she prefer not to answer? I don't know. Nobody else on the page was foreign born. Maybe the census taker didn't care.

16: the number of bento boxes I've packed.

3: the number of art classes I've taught.

1: the number of panic attacks I've had (seriously, it's been a hard couple of weeks). Never had one before. They're cute.

4: the number of pounds I've lost.

45: the approximate number of socks that sit on the couch next to me right now, unsorted.

2.4: how many miles I walked round trip on Saturday post-feis to the grocery store. It was good to clear my head.

12: how many baby tomatoes I counted in the garden this evening. I have hope, finally.

5: the number of watermelons coming along nicely. Eep I hope they make it.

30: the degrees dropped from the high this past Thursday to the high today. Whew.

1/2: the fraction of nights the past two weeks I've gone to bed dreading the next day. And as a smack on the head of "See, everything was all right", well, most of the times I was right to dread.

100%: the percentage of days when I reassured myself through some sort of Benedictine moment. Mostly stability reminders. Why I'm here and why I remain.

80%: the percentage of days I found myself repeating the phrase, "it's not about me." Because the other 20%, it kind of was.

A number between, oh, 6 and 10 to the power of something on the smaller end of positive numbers: how many hard tasks and conversations sit on my plate starting tomorrow morning and extending throughout the next week.

1, maybe, probably closer to .47: how many of those I want to do.

12: the number of Mike's shirts and pants I need to iron tomorrow, which isn't one of the hard tasks, by the way.

4: how many pints of raspberry jam I made with a new-to-canning person I met online who wanted to learn.

0: the number of alcoholic anything I consumed

15 < x < 39: the number of cups of (homemade) iced coffee I consumed.

4: number of Leverage episodes I caught up on

2: how many nights it took me to read Hound of the Baskervilles before bed, in exciting preparation for Sherlock's return...in 2012...

x > 6: how many times I had to put Hound of the Baskervilles down in order to ruminate on how they might portray this or that. At least 6 times. I said to Mike, "I really want them to do a good job" and he replied with something like, "because they're the sort to just slap something together, you know."

And the rest of the numbers: 6 hours, 6 dances, 2 confusing ancestors, 1 line jumper, 1 negative fantasy involving line jumper, 3 conversations I'm still ruminating on, 2 amazing conversations with Gretchen, 3 cases of mastitis (not me, someone I'm helping), 1 chewable zyrtec, 9 bags, too many good conversations with Zelda to count, 3 batches of cookies, 1 wedding invitation, 10 years of milk delivery come to an end, 2 visits to the library, 3 quarts of chopped okra, 11 jalapenos, 8 second-season beans, 3 days of porch painting, too many days above 100 degrees.

Ok, we're in now. It's the school year. I'm ready for routine. And perhaps fewer algebra problems and more geometry.

Thinking of Vermont

2011-08-30T14:42:00.001-05:00

That is all. Heard bad things from my St. Louis connection (Gretchen and her family visit Pawlett every summer). And NPR is making me cringe.

Uncertainties and Living With Them

2011-08-29T19:00:00.002-05:00

Genealogy is a game. A game with no real winner, since there's always one more generation you can't find. And it is based upon the idea that no one ever lies about their age, their homeland, their parentage, the parentage of their children, how many children they have, and so forth. Which is, of course, extremely unrealistic.

But I can't stop searching. The infinite capacity to not know.

On Tuesday nights, Sophia goes to dance class and I take my one sheet of paper with this week's genealogy questions, my wallet, and my keys to the county library HQ and sit in their special collections section hunched over a microfilm reader mumbling to myself.

I recently googled something like "genealogy living with uncertainty" because I've come to a point where I cannot find anything that says I'm wrong, nor can I find anything that says I'm right, about the one line I am most keenly interested in figuring out. Irish, of course, which just piques interest even more because of the penal law challenge. But these are Irish I can't even straighten out all the way on US soil.

And the google search brought up a message board with that same sort of frustration. In the end, the author said, there are so many lies built up around secrets and half-truths that the best you can hope for is to research people who are probably a lot like the people you are descended from. That unless you are strangely obsessed with genetic relationships, the daughters who aren't really daughters but instead are nieces, the mother-in-law who is really a kindly elderly cousin who took your wife in, the son that's really a neighbor from back in the home country that you took under your wing--these become the family you search for, the people you really find.

I am probably never going to know for certain if the Edward Blake who committed suicide after murdering a man in his bar is the same Edward Blake who married Bridget Kidney in Kansas City 30 years before that moment.

If he is, I'm never going to know why he and Bridget left their sons and moved to East St. Louis and then adopted a niece who maybe isn't even their niece, or maybe Bridget Kidney was married before and really is Bridget Toohey or maybe she really is Bridget Dewine/Kidney like Ellen and Mary back in Kansas City and the Tooheys are cousins or an aunt or someone who was simply nicer to her and took her in when she left KC.

I go back and forth: her adopted daughter Mollie says Bridget is a Toohey on the death certificate. She even has parents' names in the parish funeral record. Why would she lie? Or, why not? If Bridget is a Toohey, what's the deal with Bridget Kidney on the marriage certificate?

Kidney and Dewine are related last names (anglicized Irish). Ellen's mother Mary Dewine, living with Bridget and Edward in KC before they disappear. Their sons living with Ellen and Pat Cronin, and Mary Dewine in 1870. What happened to their eldest son Richard after 1880? And their daughter Mary? Why is Ellen Dewine sometimes and O'Brien other times in church records?

Could I be conflating two Bridgets? Is that even possible? Could Kidney/Dewine have died and then he married Toohey?

They are in the 1860 census and the 1861 birth of their daughter; their sons show up in 1870 but they do not. And then the other Bridget and Edward, or the same, show up in 1880. Nothing in between. There was a war, you know...but Edward isn't a veteran on any schedule. There's no death records of an Edward and Bridget Blake before 1880. They are the very same birth years in KC and in EStL. Same names.

And the Edward Blake that show up in the 1870 census in East St. Louis, living with Franzis, whose age matches Bridget's, with a daughter named Mary whose age matches the mysterious Mary who don't know anything about? FRANZIS. The handwriting is clear. Bridget and Franzis would be hard to confuse even with the thickest of accents. Franzis. But? That Edward and Franzis never appear again. I know sometimes I'm Bridgett and other times I'm Sarah. Could she have been tricksy the same way?

Could I have it wrong? What parts?

To complicate matters, I've researched a lot of Tooheys of every danged spelling possible (Blake is sooo easy; Touhy Toohey Tooey Tuey Tuohy Toohy Toy Tohey Tohey makes me a little crazy). And there is one place, one time, with a household that has Dewines and Tooheys living together.

Is Ellen Dewine living with the Toulhey family in Baltimore in 1850, with Catherine Dewine and Bridget Dewine living in the same ward as household servants, the same Ellen and Catherine and Bridget later in Kansas City? Did the Tooheys move from Ireland to Baltimore (the names match, the ages, the crazy) to East St. Louis and then persuade Bridget and her new husband to come stay near them? Is Mary Dewine's maiden name Toohey? Or Houlihan, which is the maiden name of Bridget Blake's mother listed in Bridget's funeral record?

Did Bridget's aunt Eleanora have Bridget and Edward move to Illinois, a Union state, after a family falling out with Ellen and Pat Cronin? But if so, why leave your young sons behind? Was there hope that a good life could be restarted in EStL and then Richard and Edward D. could be sent for? And then the war got bad and they wound up growing up in KC with their aunt and uncle?

Then I think about my family, my immediate family. The 1970 census will have my mother in South County and my father in North County. The 1980 census will have them married, living in Palm Desert California with two children. The 1990 census will have them married, living in Webster, Texas, possibly Pearland, with 4 children. The 2000 census will have them in South St. Louis with two daughters, with one son down in Texas and a married daughter a block away.

But A LOT happened between 1970 and 1980, and then between 80 and 90. A lot.Who's to say the same isn't true for Bridget and Edward?

Maybe they moved back to KC or maybe their sons lived with them for an extended period of time in the middle. I know Edward D. continued on in KC from 1880 to 1887 or so, from city directories, but then he moves to St. Louis. For what possible purpose except that his father had just committed suicide and maybe his mother wanted him closer?

There of course, a bricklayer, Edward meets Charles Dawes or his brother Henry Daniel Dawes, and their father Henry--bricklayers all--and through them their widowed sister Jennie, still living with her father-in-law, brother-in-law, and her three currently living children. All those relatives except for one child are dead by the time Edward D. and she are married and have a son of their own. And then Edward D. dies before his son is 3 years old: Jennie survives two husbands and 11 children and dies in her youngest son's house with a daughter-in-law who thinks she (Jennie) is a witch. She probably was. That's my line. My grandfather is the son of Jennie's youngest son, Eddie (again), the grandson himself of Edward and Bridget, who may or may not be the Edward and Bridget I've found myself creating a story for.

I know why. They're Irish, they're urban, they're immigrants. But more: my husband's first name is Edward and I'm Bridgett. I can hear the bell on their mantel shelf ring and it is the same tone as mine. Even if the story in my head cannot be proven, cannot possibly be factual through and through, it is truth. It's who they are now.

Ten on Tuesday: 10 ways to prepare for a big storm

2011-08-29T16:30:00.002-05:00

In the wake of Irene, I suppose, although I've never had to prepare for a hurricane. But I have been through thunderstorms and tornado warnings and even a mini-twister this one scary time. Plenty of hail. And power outages, which is my main focus here.

1. Know your house, your water source, your electric system, your gas. Most likely it will all be fine but if you need to be able to shut one of those off, you'd better know where it is. Learn, too, about the utility systems in your area. My friends in Vermont, for instance, have pumped water on the electric system, while here it is gravity fed and we can still take a shower (even a hot one because it's on a gas water heater) and flush the toilet and have something to drink. Unless of course we're under a boil order due to an overtopped water treatment plant in a flood. But those usually are easier to see coming.

2. Keep bottles of water, like 2-liter bottles and old milk jugs, in your freezer if it isn't absolutely jam-packed full. It will help maintain the temperature longer as the ice slowly melts. And don't open the freezer until you know for certain it is too late to save anything. If meat is still cold, you can cook it right away (as if it defrosted on purpose). We've been here, 3 days out, with a giant MeatFest at Zelda and Travis' house.

3. Store canned food and non-perishables. We eat mostly fresh food in season throughout the year but I have canned goods as well because of my don't-open-the-fridge rule. We cycle through them a bit, a green bean casserole here, a can of pineapple chunks there, to keep it in mind so it doesn't seem like such a punishment if we're without electricity for a while.

4. Learn to cook without a stove. Girl scouts did this for me, girl scouts and family camping. I know how to bake over a campfire. I know how to grill and how to use a dutch oven. I like my electric stove but I'm not lost without it.

5. Have an alternate heat source. This is the one we're still working on. We will have to line our chimney if we want to put in a stove (we do). I know what I want. It's just doing the work and/or paying for the work to be done. Can I just say I am done with workmen? With the plumber across the street giving me advice on painting my porch, with the painting folks with the ludicrous bids, and so on. We may not be able to do this one ourselves and will have to suck it up, but I'm tired of them.

6. A weather radio. For the lead-up time, for the moment when you decide to go to the basement. During the storm, wondering if it's ok to go back up. We have tornado sirens in town (half a football field from my house) but the recorded voice is almost impossible to understand. NOAA's mechanical voice is easier. Yeah, I could watch TV and have the meteorologist fill time chatting about lightning strikes in St. Charles, but I'm really just-the-facts about weather. And the TV is upstairs. By the time I turn on my hand-crank radio, I'm in the basement. I have a weather radio in the kitchen, too, and when the skies turn green, on it goes.

7. Sense. Having enough sense is important. Knowing that old wives tales are mostly untrue and being prudent really is the smartest course of action. Go to the danged basement.

8. Batteries. Having the flashlights already ready. Having enough of whatever you need, just in case it's a long night or a long week. Diapers? Gasoline? Things for kids to do?

9. Know your neighbors. Neighbors were integral to the 2006 power outage here. It helps keep you sane. And I'd hate to be on a block where an elderly person died due to overheating or freezing to death and we didn't know them to check on them. Neighbors are your first points of contact after a disaster.

10. Have a check-in place or phone number. If Mike's at work and I'm at the store and the girls are at school, panic can be put aside if we all know we need to call, say, my brother in Houston or Mike's sister in southern Illinois--obviously not someone in town who would be affected by the storm. But if we each check in and then check back to see if the others checked in, we can put our minds at ease about that even if we're stuck where we are for the moment.

Ok, now I'm going to go check on our battery supply...

An open letter to AT&T, an entity unlikely to respond

2011-08-29T15:49:00.002-05:00

Now, one time I did this, writing about the installation directions for our kitchen floor, someone did respond! So maybe. But I doubt it.

Dear AT&T U-Verse: I am in love with your internet speed. I am. Photos upload. Videos stream. And the phone service seems pretty much the same as before, except for the added hitch of no phone when the power goes out. But I knew that going in. There are two things I'd like to talk to you about, though. First, and this is not that big of a deal, but I wanted to mention it: voicemail. The voicemail system is stinky. A code to get in. A code to check. I'm in my own house but it's like checking my messages remotely. And there's no way to tell if I even have a message. Guess what? I'm lazy. And busy, which is a terrible combination. I don't check my messages often enough and I used to check them, by pushing one button, every time I walked in the front door. It's not easy anymore.

But the other thing is more. We don't have your U-verse television service. We don't have any television service. We're not sneaking around behind your back with another cable or satellite provider. We're simply not interested in your television service. We haven't had cable or any equivalent for 10 years. TEN YEARS. Have we missed it? Actually not. Truly. You know why? Netflix. Hulu. Our friends who sometimes have us come over to watch something. My inlaws, my parents. If I'm dying to see something, I can find it. But you know what else? Since we don't have a cable-type service, we usually don't even know what we're missing. And some of the things we're missing aren't even on US services yet (Law and Order UK, for instance, which I patiently await now that my appetite has been whetted by the first season, my goodness I am in love with that show, but it doesn't matter because you can't give it to me).

So please stop asking me. Please? I've called and asked to be removed from your mailing list. I've even called and lied and told you I didn't even have a television. Your customer service agent got flustered at that one and said he'd put me on the no-contact list "right away." Well, it lasted about a month. And here we are again. It's not a big thing for me to recycle all your envelopes. It just irks me that you don't listen, that you can't listen, that you are an example of what is wrong with modern life. And trust me, there is plenty good about it (modern dentistry being at the top of my list, along with epidurals).

Thanks, your customer,
Bridgett

Choo-choo

2011-08-27T09:36:00.003-05:00

"Choo choo traaaaaa," he says. It means both train and track. And he lets his voice trail off to nothing. "Choo choo traaaaaaaaaa?"

He points to the attic door--it's a full sized door on our second floor, between our two staircases. When you open it, there are stairs. This is the sort of thing I would have found absolutely amazing when I was a kid, and it's the door to my girls' room. It's their everyday trip to play and go to bed. Open the door, walk up the steps that are part of your room.

"Up duh doh? Choo choo traaaaaaaa?"

I open the door. We've set up a wooden train set upstairs so he can play with the girls when they're up there, but not get into their stuff and bug them.

He steps onto the first step and turns around. "Doh," he nods at me. He grasps the doorknob and pulls the door shut behind him--it doesn't catch, like many of the doors in my house, and we've never bothered to sand down the edge that wedges before the latch can click. Just a wood vs. wood conflict noise, and the door is shut enough for him to feel like he's in his own spot.

"Choo choo traaaa," I hear him tell himself. And his footsteps on the stairs.

Things I Wondered Today

2011-08-25T23:46:00.002-05:00

I wonder why it is that this one Lyle Lovett song brings back such a palpable memory from high school even though it wasn't written or produced until 2 years ago. And it's not like it's a song about the subject at hand. What is in my brain, anyway? Why does it work that way?

I wonder if maybe my family's seizure activity, which my aunt described to me this past Christmas as something not quite epilepsy ("seizure prone" is how her doctor, and Maeve's described ), is related to my other aunt's eye cancer, my daughter's eczema, my thyroid failure. Gretchen thinks maybe. I wonder how much we don't know.

I wonder if we'll get the porch done before the cherry tomatoes in the back finally ripen. I'm thinking the porch will beat them. Especially if the squirrels stay hungry.

I wonder what we'll manage for dinner tomorrow night. Probably the trout. I have jalapenos and cream cheese and bacon, too.

I wonder about what's coming next. What's going to hit me next, what surprise can I not prepare for.

I wonder about who the Hogans are. And for sure who the Tooheys are. How they fit in. Whether they're even my people.

I wonder how long aloe vera gel stays good. Can I save this 3/4 of a bottle for next summer, or should I just throw it out now?

I wonder some about conversations I've had this week, this big full week of promising news and interesting turns.

I wonder if Annie's up for coffee tomorrow morning.

I wonder if I'll beat that level in Katamari.

I wonder why I can't read fiction anymore.

I wonder if those shallots can wait.

I wonder if I have enough coffee to last the weekend and bet I don't.

I wonder how Sr. Jean is doing. And then the list tumbles down, so many folks.

I wonder a lot about coincidence and wish the world were more clear but secretly I'm glad it isn't.

I wonder why my calendar on my phone just dinged. What do I not know about Friday? I guess I'll discover that tomorrow. I'm headed to bed.

Nine Months Out

2011-08-25T09:07:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday I had to go up to school and have the conversation with the principal and social worker. The medication conversation. Maeve has some very mild asthma, and I've never stored albuterol at school. But this year, something told me that maybe I should. I am more often out and about, Leo and I have things to do, and it made sense to have it there, even if she hasn't used it more than twice in the past year.

And if I was going to fill out the form for albuterol for her well-controlled asthma, I might as well open the door to diazepam. Because while she has only had 1 unprovoked seizure, there is no easy daily flovent kind of medication for her to take to control that. Her seizure in November is coming around to a year anniversary pretty fast, and there has been nothing--and trust me, I didn't sleep for, what, 4 months, after that one, watching her on the video monitor throughout the night just waiting for another. I sleep now, as the trauma fades and she doesn't have another. One day, 2 days, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months seizure free and the chances drop precipitously. We are at the 9 month point right now and I don't think about it every day anymore.

But if she did have a seizure, and it did happen at school, we need to have medication there to stop it. So I filled out the form again and showed the principal and social worker what it was--a valium suppository. I mentioned that it came with a DVD but nobody was really that interested in watching. I kept it light and was done with the conference in 6 or 7 minutes. On the way home I reflected on how shaky I'd been about admitting that we needed to have it around in the first place. How I clung to every reassurance from strangers and relatives about her chances. And how, now, it's not so bad.

It is tough and I get a little worried about the future but the epileptologist is conservative about treatment and says things like "every kid gets one free seizure" and "Maeve will let us know if she needs more treatment." Her tests are clear: EEG, MRI. She doesn't have a brain tumor or a scar on her brain, there is no focal point, they cannot reproduce seizures on command in the EEG lab. These are good good things.

Because I want to live in the unknowing here. I usually want things settled but I want to hold my breath for the next 20 years. Really.

I talked last night with a friend who has been going through her own medical issues and may finally have some answers. We talked about our kids and worries about the future.

"I just don't get why Maeve had to get the asthma and the epilepsy," I lamented, even though she really doesn't have either one to any degree. We're just on the cusp of both and maybe it'll be no further. I thought, though, about how it would actually be nicer if it could have been spread a little thinner in my household. But she shook her head at me.

"Well, I think God gave her the personality strength to handle both."

Sometimes folks say things that strike me as Truth. Capital T. She was right.

A few things, plus a bit about Texas

2011-08-24T15:04:00.003-05:00

It's the end of summer and things are moving--Bevin and I painted the porch today (detail work--it is not photo ready yet), school is underway, Leo is getting set up for speech at SLU, and so forth. About ready to start back with girl scouts and art class and my (hopefully not too silly) online class to reactivate my teaching certificate. Is it weird that I'm excited about that?

But anyway, it's been a long time since I've posted anything from other sources and I wanted to do a few of those. So here's the first, from back a few years, about a Robert Earl Keen song called "Rollin By":

It's a busted old town
On the plains of West Texas
The drugstore's closed down
The river's run dry
The semis roll through
Just like stainless steel stallions
Goin' hard goin' fast goin' wild
Rollin' hard rollin' fast rollin' by

Texas is a good place to be from (it's like a whole nother country). I can't claim native Texas status, but I did spend quite a few formative years in Dallas and Houston. I learned what I liked about music, about men, friends, weather, barbecue, texmex, melancholia, solitude, and sky in Texas. Houston, Galveston, Beaumont--these are east Texas places. Wet. Green. Oily hazy ocean salty tar ball sticky. I've only been out in West Texas a few times, and all but one of those was only "west" in comparison to "east."

The drive-in don't play
No Friday night picture
With no big silver screen
To light up the sky
And gone are the days
Of post-wartime lovers
Goin' hard goin' fast goin' wild
Rollin' hard rollin' fast rollin' by

Once, a bus from North Texas U to Flagstaff. Count the Dairy Queens. Note the change from civilization to something different. Something a gray green color, the clouds hanging in the sky from wires, three dimensional, casting shadows. Shreds of towns. Cows. Grasshopper oil rigs squeezing the last bits out. Glad the truckers didn't beat Ruben up.

The mission still stands
At the edge of the plateau
And a stone marks the graves
Where the old cowboys lie
Asleep in a time
In a town just a young man
Goin' hard goin' fast goin' wild
Rollin' hard rollin' fast rollin' by

Stop in high school on the way to a retreat in San Antonio. August in Texas. Trying not to breathe. Patrick's sleeves rolled up, looking like he could fade into the crowd for the first time since I met him. The water in the glasses at the cafe hazy. John doesn't drink his; I drink mine, grinning.

And me I stand here
At the last filling station
While the wind moans a dirge
To a coyote's cry
And I'm back in my car
And I'm out on the highway
Goin' hard goin' fast goin' wild
Rollin' hard rollin' fast rollin' by

Nothing like driving alone through Texas. Except maybe sharing a cab of a truck with someone worth looking at, sitting sideways watching him tell me anything, anything just to hear the voice and see the expressions, already planned out before I got in. Stopping for gas, getting back out onto the Farm to Market road, thinking, what do I say now?

Too many things.

2011-08-22T18:45:00.003-05:00

Too many things right now.

Mostly school stuff, but when I let myself think about oireachtas, I start to freak a bit too about that. And girl scouts. And I'm having one of those shaky days when I don't know where I stand. You know? And I have no method of revolt.

Sigh.

The 5 best things about the first day of school, times 3

2011-08-21T21:19:00.003-05:00

This is reposted from two years ago. Because I like it.

From Mom's point of view, the five best things about the first day of school are:
1. The promise of a good year, the slate wiped clean, the teacher doesn't know I'm a bitch yet. This doesn't apply at our school, however, because Sophia has the same teachers as last year and Maeve has one teacher that had Sophia for 2 years, and another teacher that had her for preschool. Everybody knows my game. But I like them. So it's still good.

2. I have to wake up in the mornings. Turns out, I'm a morning person. But I love to sleep in. School makes me get up and get moving. And then I don't stay up until 2:30 in the morning clicking on I Can Has Cheezburger and wondering if my Australian and Kiwi blogs are updated yet.

3. Seeing all the other moms and dads again for the first time in 3 months and remembering that, yes, I do like these people.

4. Watching Sophia (Maeve too but it's been more palpable with Sophia) interact with the same kids from last year with shy waves and "hi". Maeve gets in their faces, but Sophia observes from a distance. It's a sweet moment of awkwardness that is gone by the second day when she, too, remembers that yes, she does like these people.

5. Watching Sophia (three years in a row now) go into the main part of the classroom and plop down in the circle, right next to the teacher. She gives this smile, please please like me, and I see myself from 26 or 27 years ago.

The 5 best things about the first day of school, from when I was a student:
1. Wondering if my desk and I would get along. Would it be the right height, would there be enough room to stash my books? Or would this new school (it was often a new school) have those kinds of desks? Hoping I'd get a good place to be was always present.

2. The smell of new pencils.

3. New textbooks, cracking them open for the first time. New notebooks. Later on, spending part of the morning covering textbooks with brown paper bags or the mass-produced advertisement-emblazoned book covers. Deciding how I would label each book.

4. A clean classroom, a teacher who didn't look tired, maybe it'll be a good year (except for 5th grade and 10th grade, it was always a good year).

5. Knowing that no real work would get done that day. At all. It was all syllabus distribution and classroom rules and book covering and desk rearranging. Almost as good as the last week of school.

As a teacher, the 5 best things about the first day of school were:
1. The challenge to learn everyone's name by the end of the day.

2. Letting kids pick their own seats, seeing how that panned out (it almost never worked perfectly). Watching what friendships were already formed, which ones might, and what I might have to look out for. Writing it down so I could look back in October and see if I was right.

3.. Again with the clean slate--even if Pete had been a annoying little so and so last year, maybe this year will work better. Even if Mrs. K told me to watch out for Thuy and Thiky or Ian and Eric or Bao and Mary--hoping that maybe for me, it would be ok. By the time Mrs. K was telling me these things, it was always ok for me.

4. I enjoyed handing everyone a math book and telling them that by the end of the year, we would have completely finished the book. Seeing the looks of disbelief: "we've never finished a math book before." Telling them that even with taking every Friday off for either a project or a test, we would still finish the book. We always did. Ooh--and I liked explaining my totally outcome-based education plan for grading. Basically, even if you make D's and C's and F's at the beginning of the year, if you're making B's and A's by the end, you'll make a B (or an A) in the class. Math is cumulative. Work hard and learn and don't be burdened by your past failures. This always caught the attention of a certain group of students--mostly slacker boys and low-confidence girls. Always my favorites. Both years I taught math, I had to go to bat for them to the principal who did not understand how Jeff or Joe or Ann could have a 75 average first quarter and a 92 average second quarter and how that turned out to be a 92 for the semester. It doesn't average out, she'd tell me. But that's not the point of learning math, I'd say back, we are preparing them for high school success. Well, I hope no parents complain, she'd half-threaten. Then I'd try hard not to give her a "you are too dumb to live" look and go back up to my room.

But that part wasn't on the first day.

5. The very best thing about the first day of school when I taught, whether at Simmons or Andrews or Joan's or Pius, was sitting alone in my classroom at 7 in the morning watching the sun rise over the houses. At Andrews it was over a park and a corporate-style pond with geese. At Joan's it was peeking through the pin oaks between my classroom and the church. At Simmons and Pius, it rose over red brick and asphalt, green trees and city streets. It was always some kind of hopeful moment, an unspoken prayer, an alignment of past and future as I listened to myself breathe, clearing my mind for the day and year ahead.

Good luck to everyone! Have a good year!

Quitting

2011-08-21T20:33:00.003-05:00

Recently a facebook friend posted something like this:

What to do with my 10 year old who refuses to practice her violin?

He received a few dozen responses. Many, an overwhelming majority, said, "Let her quit or else you'll regret it." Maybe not so strong as that, but that idea. If it was your idea for her to take violin, and she doesn't like it, you shouldn't make her do it anymore. But, many of them added, if it was HER idea, you should make her keep going.

Why does this seem backwards to me? Sophia is the one who decided to take Irish dance. If she came to me tomorrow and said, "I want to quit" I would let her, barring any obligations she had made, for instance, signing a paper that said she would be on the team to go to Oireachtas. I might ask her what she would want to do next, or instaed, but I wouldn't make her continue.

On the other hand, if she said, "I hate piano and I want to quit," the answer would be no. Piano is part of her education. She doesn't get to quit math and she doesn't get to quit piano. Can she pick up another instrument (assuming there is time and available funds)? Sure. Can she drop that after a semester's worth of try? Also fine. But some things are set in my house that are obviously not set in everyone's house.

Music is part of education for us. Not competition or crazy amounts of stuff. I'm not making my kids try out for Muny Kids. I'm not forcing something unreasonable. An half hour lesson a week and practice, 10 minutes a day.

I talked with Mike about this, after reading the facebook conversation and wondering about it. And I wonder if part of my insistence is genealogy. My grandfather worked part-time in an instrument repair shop back when his kids, eight of them, were young. He was an airline mechanic and there wasn't a lot of anything to go around. But kids had instruments and they played in the band. Maybe because I know there was serious sacrifice involved, maybe it's more important to me.

I played flute, which I often joke is what happens when you let a 4th grade girl pick her own instrument. But I kept it up a long time, on my own, not forced, and although I eventually put it down, I wouldn't trade the knowledge it gave me. My sister Colleen played violin, played it well, and is somewhat self-taught at piano. Bevin and Ian didn't play instruments, but my parents didn't make us do anything. Bevin says she wishes they had made her take an instrument. And that sentiment, mixed with my own narrow-minded focus on what education should be, means my kids take piano. Maeve's about to start year two. She's good, if a bit of a short-cutter. Sophia's starting her 6th year. And she can play. Leo will start when the time is right--kindergarten or first grade, most likely.

Right now our school is stressing out about test scores--our very high math scores dropped this year, and while some of that is actually an error on the test-maker's part (long boring story), some of it is natural fluctuation in abilities and achievement. And I read that statement from facebook and I wonder about what we, as a society, want from our kids. What we want from society. We are more than our standardized test scores. When I sit down at the mah jongg table, Zelda and Gretchen don't want to know what I made on my SAT. When I go in to teach art for Sophia's and Maeve's classrooms, nobody raises a hand and asks what my GPA from college was. That's not what we are.

The ten year old in question is a girl with high verbal and normal math skills. She has had it easy, for the most part, and has had many advantages along the way. Telling her dad that quitting is the best route, "or else she'll hate you for it later" seems backwards. Struggling and practicing and getting something done right can be satisfying in itself, and allowing her to quit and not experience that is cheating her out of a skill that will be far more useful in her adult life than the violin itself. And something tells me she won't hate him for it. Maybe for a minute, but not 10 years from now when she's taking organic chemistry and has to study for the first time and really work. She'll have had at least a few other experiences of doing something boring, something hard. Trust me. I was that kid.

Back to School Night

2011-08-17T14:41:00.002-05:00

Tonight is back to school night for Maeve. She's a big first grader and in a new classroom. The classroom isn't new for me--it was Sophia's classroom for 3 years with first the useless teacher who had no business being there (inherited from the preschool we grew out of), and then two wonderful years with Miss Anne, who is about to be Maeve's teacher, along with Miss Bridget, her assistant.

I'll be teaching art in there, and in Sophia's room, and in one of the other 1st-3rd grade rooms. And field trip chaperone. And who knows what else? I had a meeting with the head of school last week and we talked about what I was getting myself into (3 hours of volunteer teaching, plus prep work and so forth) and I feel like he sees me, you know? In a way that perhaps I wasn't seen before.

The school isn't new anymore, and we've reached a long period of growing time, as we say in the Atrium. Yes, we're moving next year, but most of what we are is established. We can't blame naivete for our mistakes. We can't pretend to be a small spirited community school. It's like when I realized I was an oblate. I wasn't a novice anymore. I wasn't searching, I wasn't trying out, I wasn't proving myself. I was done with that phase. And now they are, too. This is our 4th year as a charter school and 5th year as a viable start-up grade school. And frankly, we have a lot to work on.

Not the software. Not the stuff that happens in the classrooms, not the teachers and students and curriculum and all the stuff "where the rubber meets the road." But on our "why can't we find our rear ends with both hands" hardware end of things. The development/finance/corporate side of the school, the side that must always be tamed down and forced to an espalier frame. It cannot be allowed to get in the way of what's happening in the courtyard, to continue the analogy. It must support and remain in the background.

I fear that things are getting out of hand.

And I'm just a parent. But I'm a loud parent and I'm waiting for my moment.

But back to back to school night. We're all looking forward to it. Maeve is getting so big. She has a loose tooth finally. Sophia doesn't get to go to back to school night because she's in the same classroom as last year (the 4th-6th grade, as a 5th grader). So she already knows the song and dance.

So there. That's what's bugging me in a nutshell.

One of those times

2011-08-16T13:48:00.002-05:00

It is one of those times.

One of those times when I have a lot to say. A LOT. A lot of intricate story to tell. A lot of questions to ask. Advice to seek. But because this blog is read by such a wide variety of people, I can't say anything. Not yet. No, I'm not pregnant and it has nothing to do with my family. But there are many things I would like to complain about right now that I cannot.

That said, it is good that I have so many diverse readers, and not just to pat myself on the back. It keeps me in check. It keeps me from whining about my extended family. From complaining too much about my kids' school. From going overboard about dance or girl scouts or church or neighborhood. It is good that you are here because learning to write for an audience and censor myself has, in the end, made me a better person. Really.

But oh how I could go on at length right now.

Here's a tidbit of another topic: my brother and his wife have moved. They are victims of the current housing/economic crisis. Yes, like most victims in this situation, some of it was set up by them with prior decisions that weren't the best. But like most, again, most of it smacked them across the face as a surprise. He has a good job again and she does too and they'll recover, but it's been a hard hard year for them. My brother's birthday was this week, and in response to the facebook happy birthdays, he responded: here's hoping 33 is better than 32.

And that puts some of my itching-to-complain into perspective.

Oireachtas

2011-08-15T23:06:00.002-05:00

I went to the Oireachtas meeting for the under-10s and under-8s tonight. The Oireachtas, which means "regional" in Irish, is the regional competition for Irish dance.

I took home a form to sign and have Sophia sign and then bring back tomorrow for class.

There is no guarantee that Sophia will be on the team that will take her to oireachtas. Considering the number of parents sitting in the room, I say she has fair to middling odds. Not everyone will say yes. And she's already on the team blah blah blah. Anyway. We'll find out soon enough I suppose.

Had a long talk with Sophia, Parental Talk #401, "What is Childhood For?" We both decided that childhood is not for the monoculture of any given activity or sport. I gently pointed out that she does not take the time to practice or have the natural born talent required to glide into stiffer levels of competition. Neither of us, or Mike or anyone, wants to become one of those families that travels all over the midwest in the hopes of a placement that will move our daughter up another smidge closer to, what?

Mike says we were bait-and-switched long ago when Sophia got good enough that the Thursday night classes in South City weren't high-powered enough and we started traveling out to the distant county location. If she were unhappy, I might look to jump ship to another, closer, school. But she's not unhappy. She's also not, if I may be frank, very good. She is good--and Irish dance has done amazing things for her brain and her calves (mm, calves brains...I know someone out there was thinking it). Being yelled at for 2 hours at a stretch a few nights a week for 4 years does something. On your toes, cross your legs, feet out--such that Sophia walked into a cheerleading camp this summer and mopped the floor with the other participants.

That was actually when she started her own conversations with me. That maybe there were other fun active things she could do without succumbing to parochial school sponsored basketball teams and their practices and neverending schedules. She brought up that maybe we should hold off on the solo dress. That maybe she wouldn't continue much longer.

Then I bring home that green form and, well, she didn't change her mind, but she tweaked it a bit. She would stick with Irish dance. She just wouldn't keep up with the higher-level competition kind of stuff. She'd drop ceili team. Have Irish dance be "one of the things I do" instead of the only thing.

I also got honest with her: we spend a lot of money on Irish dance. And in comparison, we spend almost nothing on tae kwon do for Maeve. Plus there's a younger brother to consider. She is beginning to become aware of the fact that we are not made of money. She was stunned by how much Irish dance costs.

So we made a plan. We would say yes to the Oireachtas this year, and only this year. If she made the team, we would go. She would also start fencing with her dad on Thursday nights. After the Oireachtas, she would stay on ceili through St. Pat's season and then once the school year ended, go down to just the one class a week. Spend 6th grade trying that on. Go to the St. Louis feiseanna (3-5 depending on the year), but not travel.

And then I predict she'll be done--she'll be involved in other things and busy enough that we'll stop altogether before her 7th grade year.

I won't miss it.

I'm happy to take her to Chicago and do this thing with her for the experience of it. The hotel, of course, is already full and so I'm looking at a Hilton nearby instead with a pool for the younger kids and Mike to stay entertained (and away from the crazy).

I am not a stage mom and she's not a competitive kid (one of my favorite little Sophia quotes: "I don't like to play winning games"). The buck kind of stops here. She wants to try out the trapeze class with Maeve (that will happen post-Oireachtas at this point). She wants to fence. She is keenly interested in cheerleading all of a sudden, which makes me happy, surprisingly. She wants to build a treehouse and go to the paddleboats in Forest Park and do art projects. What's a childhood for?

I looked around the room this evening, and I saw a lot of childhoods that are for Irish dance. I don't want that, and she doesn't want that. But there is some separation anxiety, some grieving, of sorts, in quitting an activity. So we're not quitting. We're going out with a bang and then easing out of the pool or some other mixed metaphor of your choice.