This is Baltimore, cold stone and concrete and immediacy. There is no facade, no face the city presents to the world that conceals its essential truth. For better and for worse, Baltimore is urban living with the mask torn away.

There are miles of these streets in Baltimore. I can’t help but feel a certain amount of sadness, and a touch of uneasiness, as we drive through those eerie, dead zone blocks. I’m not sure what M makes of them. She’s been living here since she could walk, long before she could speak complete sentences. This is the only reality she’s ever known.

There’s a particular section of road we hit every morning near the lush green campus island of Johns Hopkins that is a especially difficult. Five long city blocks. If we hit all the lights green, it’s perhaps a minute’s time, a blip on the radar of the experience of the day. A dispiriting sixty seconds.

Seen from the corners of my eyes as we move past them, those sad, dead row homes with their plywood doors and black, gaping windows look like faces. Faces frozen by fear, or sadness. Or death.

Yesterday we hit a red light. M shouted out to me from the backseat, “Hey look! Free stuffed animals!”

She was looking at one of several street corners we pass in this five block stretch where a light pole has been festooned with balloons and teddy bears and cards, an urban marker memorializing someone’s death.

“No baby, those aren’t free stuffed animals,” I sighed. Then, of course, I had to explain what they actually were, what they actually meant. As I said the words, I felt my throat close, and a fist tightened around my heart.

By the smallest degrees and increments we destroy their innocence. As parents, we have no choice. We can’t lie to them and pretend the world is better, easier than it is. We can’t omit the reality that people kill people every day on these streets, on the streets of every city in every country the world over. We can’t hide the truth that the same humanity that makes Pixar films also makes human beings who murder without flinching, without conscience or remorse. We can’t not answer their questions when they ask them. We have to tell the truth, though it might break our hearts to do it.

It does, it does.

Yesterday, the truth was, and remains: five blocks of desolation, concrete, and death. And I hate that I had to be the one to break it to her.

*

[Originally posted on 10/14/2010]

For the remainder of this very busy week at Blissdom I’ll be posting a few of my favorite posts – ICYMI-style. Hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

Songs of Innocence and Experience is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.

My daughter was, understandably, totally and completely P.O.-ed about this.

Her: “What?! Why do YOU get to go? YOU hadn’t even read The Lorax until last week.”
Me: “This is true. But I’m also the person with the bank account and capacity to buy plane tickets and pay for hotel rooms. LEGALLY.”

God they hate it when you apply adult reason and logic.

Her: “It’s still not fair.”
Me: “It’s not fair that I have to work 60 hour weeks and still worry about being able to afford Healthcare and Dental. And don’t even get me started on Vision.”
Her: “What?”

Okay, so that last part didn’t happen.

But my point here is, The Kid loves her some Lorax, as many kids do. But what surprised me was discovering just how much the boyfriend – a forty year old man – loves it, too. Understand that I mean actively and in the present tense LOVES. When I mentioned The Lorax Movie party to him – and that he would be going to it with me this weekend – his head… well, it kind of exploded.

CONTINUE READING AT SWEETNEY & SPICE »

Dr. Seuss Love, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Lorax As An Adult is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.

You must follow these simple rules: Keep it away from bright light. Don't get any water on it. Never feed it after midnight. And whatever you do, for crissakes never, EVER wake it up from a sound sleep.

Umm, oops?

When Gizmo became Stripe is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.

Divorced men are much keener to re-marry than their former wives, researchers found, with 47 per cent of men who had been through a divorce eager to wed again.

That’s more than twice as many as women, who seem to fall into the ‘once bitten, twice shy’ category.

Just 20 per cent of female divorcees say they want to tie the knot a second time.

So twenty percent verses FORTY SEVEN PERCENT. Uhh, WOW.

CONTINUE READING AT SWEETNEY & SPICE »

Love and Re-Marriage: Why Do Divorced Men Want to Remarry and Divorced Women Don’t? is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.

Back in the Paleolithic era when I was a kid, I looked at my parents, their friends, and the other adults who drifted in and out of my early life, and they appeared to me to exist in another world. Theirs was a sophisticated, knowing milieu, a space in the atmosphere above me whose boundaries were defined by a thick, rolling fog of cigarette smoke, the inscrutable appeal of L’Air du Temps flowery musk, and conversation so alien it seemed sometimes they were actually speaking an entirely different language. Their words — so dense and impenetrable to my ear then — signified power: a commanding grasp of the world expressed in suitably commanding language. It was as if at some point — perhaps upon turning 18, perhaps a bit later on — they’d each been handed a Book Of Answers to the Book Of Questions, a zippo and a carton of Pall Malls, and reborn as new recruits assigned to fill the world’s empty suits and pantyhose, repopulate its fleet of automobiles and its monolithic office buildings, and man its burgeoning happy hours and cocktail parties.

Of course, I knew nothing.

Today, I sat in the living room of this big old house I am co-owner of and felt dwarfed by it, diminutive in my overstuffed armchair that seemed to be growing ever larger by the minute, and me, a tiny Alice whose sudden miniaturization had left her reeling in a now outsized Wonderland. Today, I felt shrunken and overwhelmed, or in any case hardly someone who should be entrusted with Important Adult Things like doing bills and remembering to put out the recycling, let alone tasked with running an entire household and caring for the menagerie of living things in it. Today, surrounded by all of these tangible indicators of earned responsibility and maturity, these concrete markers of my proper adulthood, I have never felt so inadequate to the task of being a grown up. Today, at 39 years old, my only real wisdom is knowing that I know nothing, my only real power that I’m able to find the words necessary to map out the contours of my feelings of despair and insufficiency.

How am I going to do all of this now, alone? How?

*

[Originally posted on 08/22/2009]

For the remainder of this very busy week at Blissdom I’ll be posting a few of my favorite posts – ICYMI-style. Hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

Grown Up is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.

Required Reading for February 22nd, 2012 is a post from Sweetney. © 2012 Sweetney.com. All rights reserved.