Magpie Musing

And There Are So Many

2012-01-27T16:05:00.000-05:00

I found a diary, of mine, from ninth grade. Yes, it was kicking around under a bed at my mother's house. (Yes, the house is still on the market. Yes, it is still full of stuff. Yes, it is rather a poignant headache.)

The diary - an inane piece of gobbledygook - was a school assignment, for an English class. It's full of teachers, dreams, grades, boys, sleepovers, band, dances, "I got a desk chair, yellow" for Christmas. My handwriting changes on every page, the ink color changes almost more frequently, and the diary is called Katherine, Kitty, Kati, You, and Kathy. (Yes, my middle name is Catherine.)

In the margins, occasionally, there are notes from the English teacher. Apparently we had to hand it in - to what end, I cannot fathom. It seems like it might have been more appropriate to a psychology teacher or guidance counselor, because it's not creative writing, it's the mundane ramblings of a thirteen year old (a thirteen year old who was not smoking cigarettes or hanging out in cemeteries).

I did, though, like this passage:

Sometimes thoughts
just run [in] my head.
And there's so many
I can't write them
all down. Oh well, too bad.

Funny how not much has changed - today, instead of a diary for Miss Dissin, I'm writing here. And all day long, posts write themselves in my head - walking down the street, waiting for the train, watching the bread rise - and there are so many that I can't write them all down.

I think my grammar is usually better though.

Happy Birthday, Bobby Burns!

2012-01-25T16:09:00.001-05:00

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

Once upon a time, we went to a Robert Burns dinner. Actually, we went to the same Burns dinner several years running, a multi-culti fest organized by a Scottish woman and her Japanese-American husband at small Catskills hotel with a French restaurant. I know, the head spins. Men wore kilts, my husband addressed the haggis, Scotch was consumed. And photos were taken, with a disposable film camera that we had kicking around for some odd reason.

Many months later, many, I finished the roll of film and had it developed.

Much to my surprise, because of course by then I'd completely forgotten having had the camera at the Burns dinner, I discovered that some enterprising gentleman had "borrowed" the camera and taken a picture of what was under his kilt.

In case you are wondering, it was uncircumcised.

Gluten Free Baking With, Oops...

2012-01-24T15:51:00.000-05:00

If you have a gluten-free friend with whom you get together for family meals, you think about gluten-free cooking and baking, at least I do, from time to time. That Deb, at Smitten Kitchen, recently posted a lovely sounding thing called "apple sharlotka", and we were having a pig roast with the gluten-free friend, and dessert was in my hands, and I thought, "oh, the apple thing will work fine with gluten-free flour".

So I made some lovely deep dark caramel sauce - another Smitten Kitchen recipe, because, well, let's put it this way, I'm totally buying her cookbook - and I chopped apples and I mixed up the eggs and sugar and flour, and just as I was about to dump the batter over the apples, I remembered the goddam gluten-free flour on the other side of the kitchen. Yup, I'd completely forgotten to use it.

But I only had two eggs left, and when I'd greased the pan, I'd used Baker's Joy, a wonderful product that combines grease and ... flour, so I couldn't have used the apples even if I did have enough more eggs, and I didn't have enough more apples, and I really should have been paying a little more attention in the kitchen.

Oh well. Gluten-free friend forgave me, and ate ice cream with caramel sauce for dessert. And the pig? The pig her husband made? The pig was hands-down awesome.

I still don't know if the apple sharlotka would work with gluten-free flour, but it is a really good and very easy thing to make for dessert, and it is divine with some deep dark caramel sauce dribbled over the top, and maybe I shouldn't try gluten-free baking anymore.

The Post About Breasts. And Cancer.

2012-01-22T16:28:00.000-05:00

A long time ago - really, more than 20 years ago - I felt a lump in my breast. I trotted off to my gynecologist, she tried a needle aspiration, and sent me to a surgeon. Both the GYN and the surgeon were pretty sure it was a benign tumor, and I sort of shrugged and figured it wasn't worth doing anything about. Then I told my mother. She freaked - "how could you even think of not having it out?" - so I had it out. It was benign, a fibroadenoma. Having it out was the probably right thing to do - it would likely have gotten bigger, and would have been harder to excise later. But I really did think about doing nothing.

Sometime last year, I noticed a dark spot in my bra - and honestly? I figured I'd dropped chocolate into my cleavage. Then I saw a couple of drops of blood on the bed sheet - I asked my husband to tell me if I had a bleeding zit on my back. Finally, I realized that there was a tiny bit of dark ooze coming from my nipple. That's when I called my doctor.

My gynecologist managed to express a drop of greenish fluid, too little to even culture, so she sent me to a breast surgeon, and the quick answer is - after a number of office visits, multiple mammograms, and several breast ultrasounds - there's nothing the matter with me. It was probably a tiny little blockage or infection, there's been no discharge since, and yeah! I don't have breast cancer.

But.

In the past few months, two friends have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, both cases found during routine mammograms. I've lost track of how many people I've known who've had breast cancer. Some of them have died, some of them have been successfully treated.

And Susan? Susan Niebur? Maybe you know her as WhyMommy, or as Toddler Planet. She's one of the most remarkable people I know - and yes, I've met her at several of the BlogHer conferences. She's been fighting a particular pernicious cancer for almost five years, with breathtaking grace. Send her your love - through the intertubes or in your heart - or by getting your own mammogram, joining the Army of Women, or supporting the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Love to you, Susan.

Exploitation, or, Blog Posts Written By Children

2012-01-21T17:45:00.001-05:00

I'm probably a very bad mother, very bad indeed. I mean, last year, when my iPhone was clearly on its last legs, I replaced it with a new one and gave the old one to the kid. It's not got phone service, and its battery life is farshtinkener, but it does connect to the internet via wi-fi (at home) and she can use it as an iPod and play all manner of zombie games and send emails to her friends and take picture of the cats and make lists.

After she fell asleep clutching it in her hot little hands last night, I read all of her emails, looked at all of her pictures, and reviewed her "notes". She is one funny thing.

Email to me and Daddy:

Subject: Periced Ears

Dear Mom & Dad,

I think it is very,very unfair that I am not allowed to get Periced Ears. I will buy my own my earrings and NEVER EVER complain about dinner. And I bet they will hurt about as much as my clip-on earrings. So PLEASE,PLEASE say yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Email to a friend, about a sleepover they've got planned for next weekend:

Subject: Sleep Over

Here are 9 things we could do at the Sleep Over.
1.Go on Webkinz.com
2.Watch Comedy Movies
3.Torcher George
4.Play with Barbies
5.Play Dress-Up
6.Plan Money-Saving for Goth Girlz
7.Play with American Girl Dolls
8.Play Beauty Salon(With real Make-Up
9.Play Super Model

Notes to herself (version as of last night):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
2.To get my ears pierced
3.To have a really good singing voice

Notes to herself (updated sometime this morning):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
It happened!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2.To get my ears pierced
Not yet!!!!BOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3.To have a really good singing voice
It is half-way their!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of an endless series of pictures of cats up in the ceiling of the cellar:

(In case you are wondering, we did not get 12" of snow - it was more like 6". I'm happy that she figured out how to spell "pierced" - I'd corrected her after she sent that first email to us. Of course, she spelled "torture" and "there" wrong. One step forward, two steps back. However, torcher/torture is kind of a nice homophone.)

Lute Soup

2012-01-18T15:09:00.000-05:00

Sopa - the spanish word for soup.

Pipa - a Chinese lute with four strings.

In a world without Wikipedia and Google, how would you have known that? Well, you might be a Spanish speaking ethnomusicologist, but probably you aren't.

Right now, Congress has two bills in discussion, SOPA and PIPA - one's in the Senate, the other's in the House. Both aim

"to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function."

Yes, piracy is wrong, stealing content is wrong, copyright has a point. But SOPA/PIPA won't stop piracy and will quash innovation and damage the internet.

Here, go read what Sarah Granger has to say. Or check out The Oatmeal (because kitten BBQ = bad. Oprah and Jesus on a jet ski in outer space = good). Protest SOPA/PIPA via Wikipedia or via Google or via a participating site of your choice.

Let us blather on in peace.

Unpacking

2012-01-15T17:40:00.000-05:00

There’s a piece in the Times today that made my blood run cold. Editorial, entitled "Defriending My Rapist". Facebook had suggested that the writer "friend" someone who’d raped her nearly 40 years ago. In and of itself, it’s a strong well-written piece, a horrible story of a past event, brought back to the present by the weird prism of the social network. But the thing is? The reason I sat paralyzed in the living room this morning? I went to high school with her. I grew up in that town. I know the gates to that cemetery – it’s where my grandparents are buried. I may well have known those boys.

I don’t remember her, and her picture in my yearbook didn’t ring any bells. But I know people who know her. And despite the fact that I well understand the reasons - both hers and the editors - for not outing the rapists in the New York Times, I kind of want to know who they are.

What’s gobsmacked me is the little assault on my own innocence. There were rapists in my junior high school, or maybe they were older, in high school. There were 13 year olds drinking rum in the cemetery. Sure, kids smoked - I didn't use the bathroom in high school, ever, because it was a de facto smoking lounge. And I'll never forget the day that the school nurse made an announcement on the P.A. system to the effect that there was a bad batch of Quaaludes around, and if you'd taken any, please report to the nurse's office. But sex and alcohol? Call me sheltered, but no one I knew was having sex, or getting raped, or drinking in cemeteries. How could that be my town? Or do I just not remember? Or was I just living in a parallel utopian universe?

There is darkness everywhere, isn't there?

Serendipitous Musing

2012-01-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

1) My husband texted me at 5:13pm. The cats had caught a mouse, which somehow ended up in the clean laundry. He discovered it as he was trying to put away his socks. The working theory is that the injured mouse took refuge in a sock, and there expired.

2) Some twenty minutes later, on my way home, I was walking through the underground labyrinth that is the Union Square subway station. There, at a small table with a manual typewriter, was a poet: “Name a price, pick a subject, get a poem!!” I walked past, considered the mouse text, and returned. I paid, and shared the mouse text with her.

3) While I waited, she composed. While she composed, many people scurried by, someone stopped to admire her "cool typewriter, dude", a couple took her picture, and an unsanctioned opera singer filled the station with an a cappella aria.

And I swear, though I asked her if I could put her poem on my blog, I never told her its name. Thank you, Abigail Mott, for your impromptu eulogy to Tiny Mouse.

Slow Cooking vs. Fast Eating

2012-01-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

Perhaps "lazy" was the wrong word to describe the slow cooker. Long cooked stews, chilis, soups, pot roasts - they're wonderful, for many reasons. It's a way to tenderize a tough cut of meat, it's how to get your beans done. And I know there's a way to put the slow cooker to use there; I just have to find my way (and maybe get up a tiny bit earlier).

The thing is, the crock pot business has a bad name - there are too many recipes out there where a jar of this and a can of that are dumped on top of an indifferent piece of meat, which is then left to stew all day in its industrial food complex juices. Yes, Virginia, you too can make Sweet & Savory Brisket with only five ingredients: ketchup, grape jelly, onion soup mix, ground pepper, and a poor unsuspecting beef brisket.

Really, people, that is lazy ass cooking. Besides the fact that it probably tastes disgusting, do you even want to think about the high fructose corn syrup and MSG involved? When pressed for time, my inclination is to eat a slice of cheese, three radishes and a piece of bread for dinner - standing over the sink so there aren't any dishes to wash.

What's your favorite fast meal?

Goulash

2012-01-08T17:06:00.000-05:00

For some time now, I've had a secret hankering for a slow cooker, despite the fact that they scream "lazy" and "cream of mushroom soup" and "not real cooking". The idea of prepping something in the morning, leaving it all day, and coming home to a finished meal is what appealed to me, even though slicing and sweating onions is not my idea of 7:00am fun. Besides, who needs another appliance?

Well, I got one for Christmas. I poked through books, and memory, and the internet, and remember a particularly delicious and easy goulash that had once been in the Times. One of the distinctive things about that goulash - one of the reasons it stuck in my head - was that there was no browning of the meat. All of the ingredients were layered into the pan, and it was cooked on top of the stove, and it was wonderful.

I dug up that Transylvanian Goulash recipe on the Times website, and then stumbled upon a somewhat similar thing called Kapusta* Pork that actually was meant to be done in a slow cooker. Remember, I'm a slow cooker novice - I was looking for instruction. I kind of combined bits out of both recipes and ended up with something thoroughly delicious, if I may say so myself.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Pork Goulash**

1 onion, chopped
1 big clove of garlic, chopped
1-2 T. bacon fat or olive oil or butter
3 lb boneless pork, in 1-2" chunks (I cut the meat off of a picnic shoulder)
salt and pepper
4 cups cabbage, shredded (about a half a medium cabbage)
1 1/2 cups of sauerkraut
1 cup tomato puree
2 T. sweet paprika
a 12 ounce bottle of beer (I used Sam Adams Winter Lager)
1 tablespoon caraway seeds

Saute the onion in the bacon fat, in a frying pan. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes. When it looks and smells nice, scrape it into the bottom of the slow cooker.

Put about half of the pork on top of the onions, and add salt and pepper. Add the chopped cabbage. Add the remaining pork, and some more salt and pepper. Spread the sauerkraut on top and sprinkle over the caraway seeds.

Mix together the tomatoes, paprika and beer, and pour it all. Cover and cook 8 hours on high.

Serve on egg noodles, with a blob of sour cream on the side.

*Yes, I googled Kapusta. It's cabbage. However, according to Wikipedia, "it also is representative of eternal power." I noted, though, that the sentence about eternal power did not have an initial cap, leading me to a conspiracy theory that someone grammatically challenged was working his way through Wikipedia adding "it also is representative of eternal power" to every entry.

**Adapted from Linda Cifuentes and Joseph Wechsberg

Always Work In Pencil

2012-01-04T14:13:00.000-05:00

Wolves are not as bad as we think.

Snakes could be posinos.

Antelope run very, very, very, very, very fast.

I think I need to write in pencil insted of pen.

(Shamelessly scanned out of the 8yo's "reader's notebook")

2011: A Year In Books

2012-01-03T17:13:00.000-05:00

The very deep irony in my railing about the elementary school book logs that my daughter has to do is that I love keeping track of my own reading via GoodReads. I just looked at my “stats” for 2011, and am happy to report that I read 60 books.

33 were non-fiction, and 27 were fiction. Five of the non-fiction books were cookbooks read cover to cover. I read four books as ebooks, five books from the library. [I don’t keep track of whether books are borrowed or bought used, or whether they’re hard or soft cover.] Fifteen of the fiction books were read aloud to my daughter. I read two books by each of two authors (Eleanor Estes and Peggy Orenstein), and three books by people I know (Melissa Ford, Emily Rosenbaum and Peg Tyre). And I simply didn’t finish one book, because it was tediously banal.

Not included in the total of 60 read are eight books which I’d begun but hadn’t finished as of midnight on New Year’s Eve (not that I was up that late).

My favorite piece of (grown-up) fiction was Wolf Hall – a dense, complicated, fascinating novel about King Henry VIII and his first two wives and a whole lot of other people, all through the prism of Thomas Cromwell. The runner up was a book of short stories by Michelle Latiolais, called Widow.

The four most satisfying non-fiction books were:

And the fifteen books I read to my girl were, in no particular order:

Frindle
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
The Secret Garden
The Witches
D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
Miranda the Great
The Witch Family
The Secret in Miranda's Closet
Finn Family Moomintroll
Mysterious Miss Slade
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Magic Pudding
The Prince of the Pond: Otherwise Known as De Fawg Pin
Bridge to Terabithia
Carbonel & Calidor

(Oh, and I read other books to her, but they were re-reads upon re-reads of picture books, and I had to draw the line somewhere.)

So, what'd you read last year? Oh, and happy new year!

Seventeen Times Three

2011-12-29T17:17:00.000-05:00

When I was seventeen, I was a freshman in college. When I was thirty four, I was working at a small museum in NYC, living with but not engaged to my now husband. Now I'm fifty one, and according to my eight year old, the oldest mother of a third grader in history.

While having a between-Christmas-and-New-Years birthday is sometimes not all it should be, what with the "here's your Christmas/birthday present", I've done a pretty good job of training my nearest and dearest, and my mother always did right by me. In fact, given that her due date was 12/25, the best present ever might have been that she waited a few days so I wasn’t a Christmas baby. There are other good things: the time of year being what it is, I never had school on my birthday, and I think I've had to work it only once or twice. Generally, it's like today - nothing to do, no work, no school, no obligations - just a mid-winter holiday all my own.

Right now, I'm sitting at my dining room table, feeling surrounded by love - love from family and friends, near and far, real and virtual. My husband bought me a little pile of things off of my Amazon wish list, which I didn't even know he knew about. I usually use it as an aide-mémoire: things I might need one day, books I might want to get from the library. But I was enormously tickled to open up a box containing the Kuhn Rikon "4th Burner" pot - an odd little contraption that I'd book marked last June thinking I'd buy it for him for Christmas. I was thrilled to find that he'd gotten me the geeky box of 100 Pantone postcards - each a different color chip. He also got me Nigel Slater's Tender - which prompted me to announce at the breakfast table that I might run off to London to marry Slater, thereby thoroughly confusing my daughter which meant I had to explain that he wouldn't have me anyway because he's a poofta, and then I had to define that. So many entanglements on not enough coffee...

I have rules about my birthday. If you give me a present on Christmas Day, I will put it aside until today. The book of Edward Gorey's letters - a book I did not know existed, but was a perfect gift for more reasons than I can enumerate - came from my sister-in-law, and has been waiting on a shelf since the week before Christmas. My in-laws brought presents on Christmas Day; they went on the same shelf. My brother and his wife mailed the presents I accidentally left behind after our Christmas Eve celebration - and now that I think about it, the leaving behind may have been a subconscious move, though I didn't mean for them to have had to go to the expense and hassle of posting the box to me.

The internet has made my life richer in many ways, filling my Facebook wall and Twitter stream with birthday wishes. The doorbell rang with a bouquet of flowers from the lovely Brand About Town women, who have made me irrationally fond of all Nintendo products just because they are such stellar cultivators. And UPS just delivered a book, from Sarah, my sister from another mother - whom I'd never have met but for our blogs.

Can I be a little verklempt? I am. I couldn't have wished for a better birthday.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

May your stockings be filled with your heart's desires, and your table be surrounded by love.

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care…

2011-12-23T13:56:00.001-05:00

It started with three stockings. One for my mother, one for my father, one for me. Mine was white, with an angel in a blue dress. Yellow yarn hair, a gold halo, stars at her feet, organdy wings. My mother’s was white too, an assortment of pastel ornaments appliqued on. My father’s was red; his was the Christmas tree, complete with tiny real glass ornaments, the size of a marble. She’d made them all, my mother did. Crafted of love and felt, they had stars and paillettes sewn on with tiny glass beads at the center, bits of lace and ribbon, an occasional jingle bell.

When my brother was born, she made him a stocking: red felt with a snowman. The snowman was gently padded underneath, and he wore a miniature hand knit blue and white Yale scarf. My sister completed the family, and her stocking was green with a red dressed Santa, fat belly encircled by a tiny vinyl belt.

For years, those five stockings were the ones carefully hung from the mantel each year. One year, I made a tiny inept stocking for a cat, blanket stitched ‘round the perimeter; when my parents divorced, the Christmas tree stocking was put away, not to be spoken of.

Gradually, more stockings were added to the mix – one for my husband, that I made, patchworked from old silk ties. My mother made stockings for my sister’s husband, her two older children, my daughter, my brother’s ~~husband~~ WIFE. We ran out of cup hooks on the mantel and started doubling up. My mother made a stocking for my sister’s youngest child – but didn't realize it was backwards, its toe pointing southwest, until she brought it down to the dining room where it hung in merry opposition to each and every other stocking. A couple of store bought stockings could be rotated in for house guests, like David, our brother from another planet, who came for Christmas Eve one year, and left two days later (and came back every year thereafter).

There were rules about the stockings: nothing was to be put into them until Christmas morning, nothing too heavy, contents were to be gently dumped onto the table and stockings returned immediately to their cuphooks, there must be no handling of the felt with sticky fingers. But, you see, they were worthy of rules, needing of protection. They're art, you see, art shot through with love and magic.

After we’d moved into our house, with our very own mantel, we had stand-in stockings – attractive enough Hable stockings I’d bought on sale – because the “real” stockings still resided at my mother’s house. It was only this year that I brought home the angel, and the ties, and the stars, and hung them with care on our very own cup hooks.

Now, our house is really a home.

Wrapping

2011-12-21T15:37:00.001-05:00

My mother loved doing Christmas. Her Christmas was an exuberant but tasteful echt-Victorian tree and ornaments and swags and lights and candles and ribbons and cookies and stockings hung by the chimney with care. She was an expert wrapper, with a deep frugal streak – wrapping paper was carefully recycled (really, you’d never have known), ribbons were put away for use another year, and tags were sorted by name, a shoebox per child. She made the tags, of ends of ribbon, bits cut from Christmas cards, a mylar floof, a flocked holly leaf. Sometimes, even, the tags stayed attached to frilly gold elastic “ribbons”, to be slipped around just the right sized package the next year.

I have a box of her tags. A gold gift box from Lord & Taylor, from the days when department stores put scarves and blouses in real boxes, it’s a jumble of tags, new and old. Some have been around since I was a child (or so it seems). Others are more recent; there are tags that my mother made for my husband and daughter.

My wrapping tends to the more pedestrian. I hate the waste of buying paper, preferring to salvage crinkly brown paper and newsprint and ivory tissue and even a seed catalog with an old-fashioned feel. And I’ve given up on ribbons, in favor of Japanese masking tape, patterns of red and green – loving its duality as both decoration and adhesive.

[A digression: Santa doesn’t use kraft paper and fancy tape. Santa uses real wrapping paper and bows. But, Santa is only responsible for the presents for the one eight year old girl. It is a line in the sand, as it were.]

A couple of weeks ago, I read a book review of a book I just had to have. I mean, I was drooling over the excerpt I downloaded to my Kindle (well, the Kindle app on my iPad if you want to split hairs), but it was the kind of book that I wanted to have and to hold, to dog-ear and splatter-stain. So in a little fit of I-deserve-this, I bought it for myself for Christmas. I figured I’d wrap it up and stuff it under the Christmas tree, to me, love me.

Last night was wrapping night. I sequestered myself in the cellar and set to work. Wrap, wrap, wrap. Check it off the list. Put it in the box. Wrap, wrap, wrap some more. I came to the book I’d bought myself. I wrapped it in Santa paper. My eye fell on the gold box of my mother’s tags. Half wistfully, half mischievously, I fished out a tag and snapped it round the book. Done.

It is truly one of the most peculiar things I’ve ever done, and yet, it was just right. I can’t wait to open it.

Impromptu

2011-12-17T15:22:00.001-05:00

A couple of days ago, I decided we should have a Christmas party today. The first version of the email I sent out failed to include our address, which is what happens when you write emails on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night.

But, later on, a bunch of people will show up for wine and cheese, selzer and cookies, and a random selection of some of the many holiday songs in my iTunes library.

I have been baking like a fiend:

Walnut Blue Cheese Coins
Cheese Straws
Cinnamon Toasts
Candy Cane Crisps
Nutmeg Maple Cookies
Pretzel Shortbread

My husband constructed complicated smoked salmon canapés, and piped deviled eggs. He made my mother's chicken liver paté. I stuffed celery with a smear of blue cheese/cream cheese - an hors d'oeuvre that my grandmother always always served.

There will be two kinds of popcorn - savory (dill pickle) and sweet (caramel).

The cheese is from Murray's, the apple cider is from the farmer's market, my father caught the salmon (though someone else smoked it).

And we bought a box of pigs in blankets, you know, for the children.

I wish you all could come.

Pa Rum Puh Pum Pum

2011-12-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

Y'all know that I have a lot of Christmas music, right? As of this morning, there are 1445 tracks tagged holiday in my iTunes library, representing 3.2 DAYS worth of non-stop merriment. A small handful of those might more properly be called New Year's music or Hanukah music; I just call it all Christmas music and be done with it. I'm (small-c) catholic that way. Or maybe just (capital-a) Atheist.

Of those 1445 tracks, 24 of them are versions of The Little Drummer Boy. I know. Pah tum puh pum pum.

I was tickled to discover recently that someone had devised a Little Drummer Boy game, the general premise being that

The LDB Game is a social game wherein you lose when you realize that you've heard any version of the Little Drummer Boy song.

Let me tell you that I lose over and over again, because despite the fact that The Little Drummer Boy represents less than 2% of the tracks in that Christmas playlist, it seems to be in rotation all the pa rum puh pum time.

However, our Christmas lights do not flash in time to the pa rum puh pum pum.

You're welcome.

Wordless Wednesday: Cats in Hats

2011-12-14T13:23:00.002-05:00

Actually it's one cat in two different hats, which is what happens when you're the docile cat and your eight year old owner has commandeered the camera.

Your Children Are Not Your Children

2011-12-12T15:15:00.001-05:00

Most nights, I find myself lying beside my daughter at her bedtime, soothing her to sleep. For, though she's a third grader, an eight year old, she still falls asleep best if she's snuggled right up next to me. Sometimes it takes longer than it should, and though I'm not allowed to turn on the light and read a book, she's unconcerned if I pick up my iPad and browse through email or Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook. And then she's asleep and I go back downstairs to pay bills or wrap Christmas presents or rearrange the dishes in the dishwasher.

Last night, I read two posts in a row, by two different people (as opposed to two posts by the same person), and was struck by an underlying similarity, and I thought "Emily should meet Julia; Julia needs to meet Emily". They're both very wise parents.

Emily:

I have slowly come to accept that, work though I might, I’ll never understand how their amazing, remarkable brains work. The depths are for them to plumb alone. All I can do is hum along for the ride.

Julia:

I inhaled sharply and let the thought sink in. I felt the overwhelming weight and piercing pain of it. And then I felt the freedom of it, too: It's not up to me. It is not up to me. For better or worse, the size of the problem was bigger than I could solve. I had to own the part I could own, and let go of the (bigger) part that I could not. And as I grasped this the train came in.

Emily ended her post with a YouTube clip of a Sweet Honey In The Rock song, a song that I've long known without knowing much about it. It's a setting of a bit of Khalil Gibran's The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but they are not from you,
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You can give them your love but not your thoughts.
They have their own thoughts.
You can house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You can strive to be like them, but you cannot make them just like you.

And really, without being too cloyingly maudlin or anything, isn't that just it? We can pat their backs as they fall asleep and help them learn long division and teach them to boil an egg, but they have their own thoughts and will do what they will.

The Santa Question

2011-12-08T16:09:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, we got the girl a dollhouse for Christmas. She hardly ever plays with it, because it's too big for the Calico Critters and too small for the Barbies - creative make-believe be damned. Yet, when I asked her if we should get rid of it - it does take up a lot of space in her small bedroom - she told me that she didn't want to because she didn't want to hurt Santa's feelings.

I filed that away.

She's been writing letters to Santa Claus since September, one all Calico Critters and accoutrements, the next a list of American Girl Dolls and accessories. The current envelope addressed to Santa includes a lot of slips of paper cut from the myriad advertising supplements that arrived with the Sunday paper.

But I've been waiting.

The other day, she asked me, carefully, nonchalantly, do you think Santa is real?

I parried with a what do you think?

I asked her to reflect on what happens at the end of The Polar Express (which we'd read the night before).

At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as if does for all who truly believe.

I reminded her about the court scene in Miracle on 34th Street:

Your Honor, every one of these letters is addressed to Santa Claus. The Post Office has delivered them. Therefore the Post Office Department, a branch of the Federal Governent, recognizes this man Kris Kringle to be the one and only Santa Claus.

Today, she still believes in Santa Claus.

But I know that there's doubt in her young heart, and that rather makes me sad.

Wordless Wednesday: Sassy Flocculator

2011-12-07T09:17:00.002-05:00

Third grade field trip to the water treatment plant.

The Water Question

2011-12-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

So we're sitting around at the breakfast table the other day, eating our oatmeal, and reading various pieces of the New York Times, as we do. I was reading the business section, because my husband had glommed onto the front section, and the girl child was knee deep in the insidious advertising supplements, blow-ins, collateral, what have you, which are particularly voluminous this time of year what with Christmas around the corner. Anyway, there was a front page article headlined "Hot on Trail of 'Just Right' Far-Off Planet", about the search for planets of other stars which may be in "the sweet spot known as the habitable zone...fit to be inhabited by the biochemical likes of us". My husband starting reading aloud from the sidebar infographic, which talked about the specifics of our Earth and Sun, and the expected shift in the Sun's habitable zone:

The girl vectored upstairs to get dressed; we stayed behind nursing our cups of coffee and reading some more bits of the paper, as we do.

About 15 minutes later, she came back downstairs, and paused in the doorway of the dining room looking stricken. I assumed that the cats had destroyed something special (as opposed to their ordinary mischief), or pooped somewhere untoward; it was that sort of look. What's wrong, honey? She dissolved into sobbing wailing hysterics: I'm worried about the planet and all the water going away.

While I thought she'd been totally absorbed in $900 television sets and iPod karaoke machines and Barbie dollhouses, she'd been hearing Daddy talking about the Earth's water boiling away several billion years from now.

We calmed her down, explained that several billion years was Several Billion Years and not, like, tomorrow.

In school, they've been studying water and the water cycle - it's part of why last month's field trip was to the local water treatment plant. And what she's learned is that the water cycle is endlessly recurring: Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Accumulation, Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Accumulation, repeat. For her to hear that the Earth's water might boil away was not only horrible news, but a questioning of the supreme authority of her teacher.

I hope her teacher wasn't too taken aback when she was ambushed at this morning's Morning Meeting. This weekend, I learned that the we aren't going to be able to live on Earth in several billion years. At least she asked for a copy of the article to bring to school today.

But I tell you, an eight year old having an existential crisis at 8 in the morning is not a pretty sight.

Tzedakah, Tithing, Charitable Giving - Whatever You Want To Call It

2011-11-30T15:00:00.006-05:00

I take our charitable giving seriously. We don't tithe, per se, and we don't have a tzedakah box - but then again, we're atheists and those two traditions are rooted in organized religion.

But still, the idea of taking a percentage of one's income and giving it to those who need it more is a good and honorable practice.

With the end of the year approaching, consider charitable contributions to local organizations. The local ones are often smaller and less able to fund the glossy direct mail pieces that are likely flooding into your mailbox packed with address labels and greeting cards. Consider instead:

A local food pantry
The homeless outreach program nearby
The nearest animal shelter
Your child's daycare center
The amateur orchestra in your county
The safe house for domestic violence victims in the next town
Your village's volunteer ambulance corps

There's nothing wrong with the big guys, it's just that small non-profits often have to work a lot harder for the funds they raise, and will be enormously grateful to you for your donation, no matter how small.

I'm locally encouraging local giving via a series I wrote for our local on-line "paper". My impetus for the series was two-fold: 1) the annual start of the New York Times Neediest Cases fund drive, and 2) encountering a local non-profit at my farmers market that I'd never before heard of. I figured if the Times could encourage charity, and there were obscure non-profits in my very town, my local paper could and should shine a spotlight on our local organizations. Happily, the editor agreed.

So give locally this year, just like you shop locally and eat locally produced food. You can make a difference.

Adding And Subtracting

2011-11-29T15:57:00.004-05:00

Oh wise educator types - I need some help.

The child. She can add and subtract. She can even add and subtract three digit numbers. But they've been doing timed drills on single digit adding and subtracting, and she manages to get through maybe 50 of 100 equations in 8 or 9 minutes. 2 + 1 = __. 9 - 4 = __. It's stuff you shouldn't have to think about, and I know she knows it - but she gets bogged down. She needs to learn to speed up a little.

Yesterday afternoon, I had her do some subtraction drills. I gave her 10 problems and a minute to do them in; she finished in 40 seconds. Another 10 problems; she finished in 20 seconds. 20 problems, she finished in under 2 minutes. But when I gave her a sheet of 100, she petered out and could only do about half in 9 minutes. Lacks stamina. Voices frustration: "I can't do math". Clearly there's a disconnect here; she can do it, but she short circuits.

I tried giving her a mantra:

I can do 10.
If I can do 10, I can do 20.
If I can do 20, I can do them all.

She didn't like that one bit.

I tried having her warm up by writing the numbers from 1 to 10 forwards and then backwards, as quickly as possible. That helped with the next round of 10 and 20 problems; she still chokes when faced with a longer set.

And it's not sinking in for use later: this afternoon in school, she got 43 out of 100, in 8.5 minutes.

Any ideas? Yes, I've talked to her teacher - who is also pondering the puzzle. But I thought you wise people might have ideas too.