peevish mama

We’re reading I Married a Communist by Philip Roth for book club this month, and while I shouldn’t be surprised that I had one of those reading moments when you stop, exhale, raise your eyebrows, go back and read the passage again, I was sort of surprised that it happened on the first page.

We read American Pastoral last year and it was a giant octopus of a book. Sometimes it thrashed in countless directions, in anger and fear. Sometimes it swam along as graceful and smooth as can be. And it went deep. (Hmm, this metaphor has legs! Ho!) It was gorgeous and challenging and we wrestled with it – on our own, reading it – at book club, dissecting it and putting it back together, or trying to anyway. That book club meeting was about a week after my knee surgery. I was on crutches, my injuries still felt fresh, personal. My mom was in town to help out, so I brought her with me so she could have a glass of wine, meet my book club ladies, and understand why it is such a source of joy in my life. I read American Pastoral under duress. I was frantically preparing to be on crutches for six weeks, gingerly probing worse case scenarios like a tongue returning to a sore tooth. Desperate to lose myself, it was rich and thick, the perfect book to take up the whole of my mind. I was a ball of angst, agitation and worry and American Pastoral is nothing if not a monument to angst, agitation and worry. Maybe that’s why it resonated so much with me.

Or maybe, it was just that good.

We’ve been back to school for a couple of weeks. Saint James seems muted about it. I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m not sure what he needs. What exactly does he expect to be doing with his time right now? He can’t very well hunt for creatures in the bushes and play soccer all day long. Maybe it’s too much to expect him to be excited about school – being a fourth grader is essentially his job. How many people do we know who are excited by their jobs? And yet, I wish he was. I wish he was fired up, tingling, hungry. 

So the passage that stopped me cold? It’s Roth simply introducing a character – that of Murray Ringold, a teacher. And in his muscular prose, Roth brings him to life and makes me want him for my son. To light that fire.

“His passion was to explain, to clarify, to make us understand, with the result that every last subject we talked about he broke down into its principal elements no less meticulously than he diagrammed sentences on the blackboard. His special talent was for dramatizing inquiry, for casting a strong narrative spell even when he was being strictly analytic and scrutinizing aloud, in his clear cut way, what we read and wrote.

Along with the brawn and the conspicuous braininess, Mr. Ringold brought with him into the classroom a charge of visceral spontaneity that was a revelation to tamed, respectablized kids who were yet to comprehend that obeying a teacher’s rules of decorum had nothing to do with mental development. There was more importance than perhaps even he imagined in his winning predilection for heaving a blackboard eraser in your direction when the answer you gave didn’t hit the mark. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe Mr. Ringold knew very well that what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves with precision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated bright kids the most.”

Holy smokes, Philip Roth. Is it mere coincidence that twice now, your words feed me precisely what I’m craving?

Or are you just that good?

We went up north for Labor Day weekend. Hastily assembled, last minute planning yielded three days, more relaxing and action packed than I would have thought possible. Sometimes, last minute is the best way. We pulled the kids out of school on Friday and set off due north with a minivan chocked to the gills with food, fishing poles, water colors, and anything else I could think of to keep our short attention spans from unravelling into pervasive, crotchety boredom.

I needn’t have worried.

The lake. It was beautiful. Deep. Almost primordial. Its dark, velvety waters were cold enough to make swimming something for which you had to summon up courage. It was cold enough to feel curative. And it was vast, with undulating shorelines, eddies and bays, silent islands, promontories and fingers of land, beckoning or accusatory, depending on how you looked at them. There seemed to be a secret code of earth and water we had to approach with caution and respect. Dash and I had to navigate, eyes skimming the horizon and darting back to the map, to reconcile the two dimensional with the three, to keep our bearings, to find our way home. It was challenging, but it got easier. We learned something new. We grinned madly, feeling slightly less the rubes on a pontoon. We squinted into the sun, proud, almost seaworthy. 

Fish. There are fish in Lake Vermillion. All hungry for worms and willing to be caught by Saint James and Supergirl (Dash too, but with less success – I think the jerky line of a child-held rod must make those worms dance extra seductively). They fished off the docks, they fished off the boat. It was the go-to activity for three whole days. It was what filled up the hours in the sun. And Devil Baby watched and cheered, played with the worms, touched the slippery bodies of the fish, and essentially hung around doing nothing in a way I’ve never seen her do before. It was gratifying to watch them do something contemplative, something that requires patience, quiet, sustained attention with eyes trained on the water.

Kitchen. More time and less stuff, I found myself enjoying the simpler, pared down ritual of preparing meals. I found it meditative: the opening and shutting of drawers, looking for a potato peeler, a whisk, a bottle opener; stopping to take a sip of wine and gaze out the enormous kitchen windows at the lake; washing dishes by hand, keeping my workspace neat. Without the rush, meal preparation is a completely different animal and in the silence of the cabin, broken only by the occasional triumphant whoop from the nearby dock, I remembered everything I love about cooking.

Reading. I was forced to unplug. No wireless, no phone. No twitter, no blog. Just my books. I have been feeling scattered lately. Unmoored. I have been finding it hard to focus, to lose myself in a book. Perhaps it’s because there has been so much end of the summer action to attend to. Perhaps, I too am losing the power of sustained attention, giving way to the rat-like compulsion to check my email, tweet and surf every few minutes. In the quiet of the north woods, I became that mother – the reading mother. On the chaise, with her nose in a book, occasionally peering over the pages with narrowed eyes and an amused smile, luxuriating in the act of reading deeply while her family plays almost, almost, out of earshot. They fished, I read. My heart slowed down. Everyone was engaged, so I could disengage and dive into my books: Snow by Orhan Pamuk, challenging reading, testing my patience, but a book whose layers slowly unfold drawing you further and deeper. It’ll be worth it, I think. Time will tell. And Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser, a tightly wrought collection of short stories, the few I have read so far are intriguing, smart, mildly menacing – he is a beautiful writer.

Fish. Each catch was followed by a few seconds of tense hook extraction. Saint James and Supergirl would bow their heads in concentration, working against the ticking seconds and the struggling fish to get the hook out as gently and quickly as possible. They’d toss it back in the water, peer into the depths and inevitably yell “Yep, he made it!” with joy and relief. For them a fair fishing bargain involves no more than a few seconds of discomfort on the part of the fish. They are tender and respectful toward nature. I am not sure whether this is something you can teach, or whether this is something that just naturally occurs in a child.  

Kitchen. I brought everything, even my sharp knife and cilantro. But even when you bring everything, there are things you wish you had brought. As I made salads and salsas, mixing and matching my ingredients like edible Garanimals, I thought of Jumpa Lahiri’s piece in the NY Times earlier this summer. I thought of all the things I would remember next time (honey, white pepper, soy sauce, hot sauce, gin, the pickled eggplant I just made) and all the things I was so glad to have brought (my knife, sea salt, avocado, cilantro, olives, strawberries, fancy cheeses, sauvignon blanc, baby spinach, garlic, tomatoes, baguettes, Hope Creamery butter, two kinds of vinegar and olive oil).

Fire. Doctor Dash made two fires a night. One with charcoal for grilling steaks and salmon. One with wood for roasting s’mores. The fire drew the children out of the brush, away from the beach. Like young natives, they watched the flames, flicking and dancing against the darkening sky. Or maybe they were just hungry.

Fish. One morning I glanced up from my book and saw a stout fireplug of a man talking to Doctor Dash on the dock where he and the kids were fishing. Our cabin neighbor had ostensibly come out to introduce himself to Dash, but in fact needed to flip Dash’s rod right side up before showing him a picture of the 53 inch Muskie he had caught the day before. We chuckled about this the rest of the day, picturing the poor guy grimacing over his coffee mug as he looked out the window watching Dash cast with an upside down rod. He probably muttered through his pain and agitation for a good fifteen minutes before getting so exasperated he burst through his back door to save Dash from himself. Hilarious.  

Watercolors. I’m so glad I brought them. Devil Baby painted and painted. Busy, quiet, happy. Just how I like her.

Feathers. The bald eagles. They were incredible. We had no idea they all hung out in the north woods. We saw more eagles than seagulls, yet they never lost the power to startle us, to elicit a gasp, a pause in the action to watch their muscular flight, their graceful hunting, their branch shaking landing in the tops of trees. There was an island where a bunch of them seemed to perch and to hover right below them in a quiet kayak was pure magic. And then there were the loons. My kids said the cries of the loons reminded them of our neighbor, Evan’s, cry. Somewhere between a giggle and a sob, suspended between joy and loss, the loons stopped us in our tracks over and over again.

Haunting and beautiful. Just like that lake.

You may or may not have noticed that new column over there to the right, down a bit, yep, there. I just sort of slipped it in casually, pretending it’s been there all along, half hoping you wouldn’t notice because God knows, I certainly don’t want to diminish my tenuous, paltry readership by pointing you in the direction of other, better blogs! To tell the truth, when I started this blog, I didn’t read many, if any blogs, so a blogroll didn’t even occur to me. Then as I started to wade around in the murky waters of the internet, I realized just how deep it is, just how vast. Wow, I could swim in this! Shit, I could drown! Fashion blogs, mommy blogs, literature blogs, food blogs, political blogs, design blogs, funny blogs, sad blogs, freaky blogs.

Easily overwhelmed, I was overwhelmed. Easily demoralized, I was demoralized. What is the point of adding my voice to this chattering chaos? Who cares? Who is ever going to find me and hear me? Maybe I really am spewing words into the ether. So I had a little freak out and stopped writing for a while until I realized, no, remembered, that spewing words feels pretty fucking good – regardless of whether anyone is reading. So I started spewing again, and here I am. Spewing and also pointing you to other, better blogs. I am one ballsy and reckless fool today.

In my blogroll live both friends and strangers whose words I have come to really like and anticipate. I have figured out that there’s a little clique of mommy blogs – funny, irreverent, mommy blogs that don’t make me want to stick my head in the oven à la Sylvia Plath. They all seem to know each other and love each other and hang out all the time and go on crazy adventures, notwithstanding the fact that they’re scattered around the country. I feel like the girl on the playground sullenly looking on with her fingers crooked around the chain link fence and one knee sock drooping down around her ankle, wishing they would ask her to join in. But they don’t know me. They don’t see me. They’re having too much fun sharing links and laughs and witticisms and Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker. So I’m just gonna turn around, sit on the crabby crass, behead dandelions and scratch my mosquito bites. 

One of the funny popular girls is Finslippy, who recently raved about a blog by a friend of hers (see? they’re all friends – I’m not making this up) called The Diamond in the Window, and because I trust Finslippy, I checked it out. It really is wonderful. It’s a blog about books and girls and books for girls (to be fair, boys too) and is written so beautifully that I just want to crawl into my yellow beanbag chair and read The Little House on the Prairie. This woman clearly loves books, but what I find magical is that she is still breathtakingly in touch with what books meant to her as a girl. Maybe it’s because she has girls, but I think it’s because you never really out grow being a bookworm. This blog brings me right back to that heady feeling of pedaling home from the library on Deep Wood Road, my backpack filled with treasures, shimmering and shivering to get out. I loved books. I read at the table, on the toilet, in the tree, in my bean bag chair, on a shag rug, in my bed, in my parent’s bed, on the bus, in the car, at recess. If I had a good book in my armpit, the only thing I could think of was finding a spot to drop and tuck into it.

If you are, were or are raising a bookworm, check out this lovely blog. 

And now, back to the playground. Mama had a baby and her head popped off.

Cafe Ena – a couple weeks ago Nanook and Crackerjack rescued me from myself and swept me away to this Kingfield Neighborhood gem for a little Monday night love. I’ve always loved Cafe Ena for lunch with the kids because it’s never too crowded, has awesome grown up food but a totally kids are welcome here vibe. It’s the holy grail for foodies with chitlins. This was my first time for dinner and, lucky us, bottles of wine are half off on Monday nights. So we indulged in some beautiful South American whites while chatting and tucking into our toothsome dinners. Were I a real food critic, I would have made a point of trying everyone’s food, but alas I was too distracted by my jambalaya because it ROCKED! I pretty much hovered over my own plate until every last snappy, succulent grain of rice had disappeared. I ordered it spicy and it was perfect – although I was most definitely on the verge in the best way – high color in the cheeks, slightly glassy eyes, fiery buzz. Mark my words. I will be back for that jambalaya. 

Birchbark Books – The other day when I was going for my post preschool drop off sanity drive, my minivan somehow ended up parked in front of this adorable Kenwood Neighborhood bookstore. I have always loved Birchbark Books, but since it’s not on my flight path, I don’t often make it over there. Pity, because stepping in, you feel like you are trespassing in the hidden away cabin of an earthy and magical book witch. It really is enchanting. My heart quickens in any bookstore, but more so here. Something about how the books are displayed, the soulful Native American presence, the carefully edited choices, make me feel like a kid in a candy store – like anything I pluck off a shelf will be a treat and a treasure. Maybe the book witch touch comes from its owner, an author I love, Louise Erdrich, who writes many of the handwritten reviews taped up on little cards in the stacks, drawing your eye to the really special books – the ones that really are words spun into magic. I cannot possibly improve upon their mission statement, so here it is: Boozhoo! Welcome! Birchbark Books is operated by a spirited collection of people who believe in the power of good writing, the beauty of hand made art, the strength of Native culture, and the importance of small and intimate bookstores. Our books are lovingly chosen. Our store is tended with care.

Liberty Custard – Apparently frozen custard is a big Wisconsin thing – not surprising that the folks who thought to batter and deep fry cheese curds should think it a fine idea to add more cream to ice cream. But I’m glad they did. On both counts. Liberty is housed in a cleverly converted gas station and manages to be retro, industrial and homey at the same time. Aside from the amazing custard, they serve really fresh sandwiches, (including a new Scott Ja-Mamas‘ pulled pork sandwich that has my name written on it), soups, hotdogs, pizza, and fancy coffee. They have vintage pinball and other games to occupy the kids, as well as a little red car that bumps along for 25 cents worth of minutes and has made each of my children grin and imagine wild rides in their toddler years. Best of all they sell toy guns and candy cigarettes. How’s that for refreshingly un-pc? Independent, indeed!

Share the love. For more info on the 3/50 Project.

You stopped me dead in my tracks with this:

“The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.”*

I would love to believe that there aren’t any meaningful difference between male and female writers. This proves that there is a difference – that there should be. Hats off, dude.

*Lianne thinking about her ex on page 104 of Falling Man.

Indulgent? Ambitious? Definitely. Maybe. But it’s six weeks. Just looking at this pile is sure to heal.

Before I begin this post, there is a housekeeping matter I would like to address. I am going back to calling my youngest girl Devil Baby. Angel Baby is just too saccharine for this blog and this kid. Devil Baby suits her better, even though everything I said here still holds true. For the most part. 

I am also going to go on record as the only person in the history of the world to say something negative about the Wild Rumpus. I’ll probably be tarred and feathered by all those fresh faced mommies I saw there yesterday, but so be it. The Wild Rumpus is a really cute bookstore tucked away in a really cute Minneapolis neighborhood, with a child-size purple door and a coterie of animals, most of which are allowed to wander around freely, all of which are allowed to spread their dander and feathers and other animal debris and respiratory pollutants throughout. Chickens strut around the store, in and out of people’s legs, taking refuge behind the front desk if a kid gets too gropey. Cats lounge on ratty armchairs and in the windowsills, generally ignoring the chubby hands that pet and poke them. There are salamanders, tarantulas, ferrets, chinchillas, rats, frogs, a bunch of different cooing birds.

Normally, I love the place. It’s magical – a lovely treasure trove of children’s books, a pantheon of book-love, blah blah blah, but yesterday – yesterday everything about the Wild Rumpus just SUCKED. It was the Wild Suckus. I had decided to take Devil Baby there for “Tale Time” – get it? She’s on spring break this week, so I thought I’d start us off with a nice activity after we dropped Supergirl and Saint James off at school. The place was packed – quite literally a zoo – so after Devil Baby harassed a chicken with deformed feet (pigeon toes?), we found a spot on the crowded rug. I looked around. I could have been on Jupiter for all the connection I felt with these well scrubbed women and their pallid children.

Story time began and Devil Baby was having none of it. She was squirming and trying to lie down on the floor – she insisted on closing her eyes and pretending to snore. She kept asking for fruit snacks, gum, chapstick, hand cream. Listen to the lady, Devil Baby, I would whisper, trying to keep my growing irritation at bay. Then came the song time and – slap in the face – the child who sings constantly refused to sing, refused to do the little hand motions. Jesus! Why did I even care? But I did care. A lot. I didn’t drag myself to this hot, stinky bookstore and squish myself onto a ratty old rug, shoulder to shoulder with Minneapolis’ most earnest and loving nannies, young mommies and grandmas for nothing. Sing child! For the love of God – it’s the freaking itsy bitsy spider, child, your favorite – SING!!! But instead she flopped back for some more snoring action. I watched all the other caretakers sway and sing their hearts out, smug, blissful looks plastered on their pasty faces, and I began to feel the sticky fingers of disgust closing around my throat. Are you actually enjoying this? Like, for yourselves?

The banality of it all started to drive me crazy and to more than a few uncharitable, borderline evil thoughts. For which God promptly repaid me with an allergic puffy eye.

Despite my maniacal obsession with keeping my hands away from my face, I must have slipped and it felt like one of the cats had climbed up under my eyelid to work out a hairball. I was dying, but I couldn’t rub it or I would make it worse, turning a wretched itchy eye into a swollen monstrosity. This much, at least, I have learned in my life. In desperation I rubbed my eye on Devil Baby’s shirt. Oh shit, she’s been dragging herself all over this Godforsaken temple of dander. Goddamn it itches! Aah. Fuck me. But fuck me more if I’m going to leave before this goddam story time is over, you stupid bitches! Aaaahhhh. The agony. Itches. Itches. Shit, it itches! More fake snoring from Devil Baby. That does is. Fuck it. We are so out of here.

So I retreated as gracefully as I could with my eye in screaming red hot spasms, trying not to step on any little fingers with my size 10 knee-high Wellington boots. What a bust. What a total bust. I drove us home, horribly depressed because I am not deluded enough to think I was even vaguely in the right for having been so deeply disgusted by the whole scenario. Obviously, if it’s me versus thirty-some women and their offspring, I’m the one with the problem. I may have anger issues, but I have not lost my grip on reality.

It’s me. Devil Baby has no attention span for storytime because, um, I haven’t taken her very many times. At least not when you compare to Saint James and Supergirl. When I offer to read Devil Baby a book she runs away screaming because she thinks I’m going to try to put her to bed. My child – my child – my poor, pathetic, third born, daughter-of-a-spent-husk-of-a-mother child, is a philistine at the tender age of two. I have let her watch too much TV. She knows the words to commercials for acne creams but can’t sit still in a room full of kids to watch a very animated young woman read books. She can take pictures of herself with the Mac, but she doesn’t know that it’s ok, actually encouraged, to read books during the day time. Her favorite song is Rihanna’s Disturbia, but she won’t row row row her boat with the rest of the kids. I feel like a failure when it comes to Devil Baby. I feel like I got all used up with the first two.

Have all my songs been sung? At least those not involving thumpin’ base lines, catchy hooks, screaming guitars or trippy synth?

After the Wild Suckus debacle, I loomed around in a state of melancholy, the weight of my inadequacies crushing my chest. My head felt like a waterballoon, stretched precariously thin, ready to pop and gush forth tears of guilt and self-pity at the slightest provocation. The weather sucks, there is no easy out like going to the park where fresh air and the smell of green can act as its own balm on our ragged psyches. I just needed the day to be over.

And that’s the beauty of days. They end. And start again. Today the weather still sucks, but I decided I would take Devil Baby to Club Kid so I could go to yoga. Club Kid is a pay by the hour child care alternative which I only use in a pinch, mostly because it smells like a daycare which sends me Proustian synapsing back to my working days and because the hourly pay thing feels like the kiddie equivalent of a hooker motel. Today, however, qualified as a pinch. For everyone’s sake, I needed to fix my head and my heart and there is no better way known to me than a good sweaty yoga class. And it worked. What’s more, I ran into my betties and was able to vent, just a bit, just enough, bless their hearts. Thank you Nanook and JJ. I feel better. 

And right now I’m home with Devil Baby. She’s watching TV while I type, but we’re under the same blanket. She keeps pressing her little feet into the side of my leg. And this, I think . . . I hope, is good enough for today.

Someone once said that a good title will get you half way there. Actually, I just made that up. But it’s true, I think. Which is why I would have picked up Another Bullshit Night in Suck City if I had seen it in a bookstore, even without the recommendation of our good friend, Flan. To tell the truth, Flan could recommend a book called Beige Slacks and I’d probably still give it a try. I love this title and I love this book. A memoir by Nick Flynn, it’s raw and beautifully written, pain and humor, grit, blood and spittle spun into something fragile, translucent, vivid and incredibly complex and textured. I can’t help but think of Chihuly’s work. Flynn uses such a light hand and strings each chapter together with the most tenuous of invisible strings – the whole book feels a mere gust away from crashing to the ground in a pile of tragic shards. Instead it soars. One example of countless:

“When my grandmother comes to dinner at our house she always carries her own jar of Turner’s Special Blend. She knows how much she needs and doesn’t want to be caught short. My brother remembers her at Christmas one year, an especially weepy time for her, when she put her hands around his neck and murmured, My little angel, you wouldn’t be so hard to kill. And though he knew it was only the whiskey talking, he also knew that the whiskey talked daily.”

I can’t get that image out of my head. Her wrinkled hand against the smooth pale skin of the boy’s neck. At a certain point, what really separates a caress from an atrocity? Just a bit of pressure for a few minutes. Man.

Another title I love is from Atmosphere’s last album: If Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold. Genius. And they back it up – it’s a great album.  These boys have a knack though, because in 2002 they released an album called God Loves Ugly, which are my sentiments exactly.  Offensively stinky cheeses, drinks so strong they make you grimace, books that make you cry, music laced in rage or grief, meat – what can be sadder than eating meat? That’s the good stuff.

That murky water hole where pretty and ugly swirl together? That’s where I want to wallow.

* Saffron Tower, by Dale Chihuly on exhibition at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, AZ until May 31, 2009. Wish I could go.

So I’m reading a book and it’s rocking my world.  Not necessarily in a good way.  It’s making me stressed and anxious – it leaves me fretting and wringing my hands.  My mantra:  we are so fucked – so so so so fucked.

I’m reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman and if all of our problems were embodied by a wild boar erratically and voraciously wreaking havoc in our backyard, then Friedman deftly succeeds in cornering, subduing, slaughtering, trussing, dressing, and turning the beast into bite size pieces of wild boar sausage.  In short, he tackles the morass of issues our planet is facing right now and breaks it down in a really compelling, common sensical, and terrifying way.  Sometimes I turn to Dash, wild eyed with panic, my nails white from clutching the book so tightly and he calmly urges me to read on. “The second half is all about the solutions,” he intones, his eyes like slits – a Yoda in my bed.  Solutions?  SOLUTIONS? WHAT SOLUTIONS?  WE’RE SO FUCKED!  SO SO SO SO FUCKED!!!

Basically, Friedman posits that our planet is becoming hot(global warming), flat (because of globalization, technology and the internet, more and more people are able to rise out of poverty, see how “the other half” lives, strive for and attain a middle class lifestyle), and crowded (rising birthrates and life expectancies).  This trifecta of stressors is taking a huge, soon to be irreversible toll on our physical and political planet because of the paradigm that we Americans established for how to live and thrive on this earth: one that is based on the consumption of massive amounts of fossil fuels.  Friedman writes: “In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorships, and accelerating climate change.”  Ay, mamasita!

As always, the devil is in the details and he is able to illustrate each of these problems with such life and color that one is left chilled to the bone.  The tentacles of this energy crisis not only wrap around issues of climate change, loss of biodiversity and global politics – but women’s rights, education, healthcare.  Friedman isn’t an alarmist, though.  This isn’t simply shrill hysteria and hyperbole.  His arguments wouldn’t resonate as much as they do if he wasn’t able to build his case, piece by piece, in the cool (for now) light of day.  I haven’t gotten to the solutions yet, but I suppose there is some small comfort in understanding the scope and details of the problem.  The way it is far better to know it’s a wild boar in your backyard than to just hear mysterious and grotesque squealing and grunting in the night, waking up to wreckage and destruction.  It doesn’t make it any better.  You still have a big problem.  But at least you know what it is.  

Friedman asserts that America needs to take the lead in creating the technologies, the ethics and the systems to mitigate the fact that our world is becoming hot, flat and crowded and lead the way to a cleaner and more sustainable way of living and growing.  It’s the least we can do, considering we are largely responsible for our current predicament.  It would hardly be fair for us to turn to China and India and tell them not to do what we just did.  And it would go a long way toward making us one of the popular kids again.

There is so much information in this book.  It is so important and I so want to understand and get it right.  Aside from: 1.we’re so fucked and 2. at least I know how and why we are so fucked, I am left with my hands clutched at my heart, praying for the one man whose slender shoulders will bear the brunt of this call for change.  It’s beyond words, and I wish it wasn’t so, but you are it, Barack.  It all depends on you.

I won’t even get into the missed opportunities for change and betterment that slipped by in the weeks and months after September 11.  It’s all part if the very intricate jigsaw puzzle set forth in this book.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.  It is horrifying and fascinating.  It should be required reading for high school seniors – and the rest of us.  Give it to someone for Christmas, then borrow it back.  You won’t be sorry.  Or maybe you will.

I guess I just don’t want to let this day pass without paying my respects to David Foster Wallace.  

Last night Doctor Dash got home from work around ten thirty at night, looking ragged and hangdog in the shadows of the mud room.  The first words out of his mouth: I just read something really sad . . . David Foster Wallace hanged himself.   Noooo I softly wailed from the couch, no, no, no.  Suddenly, the flickering lights of the TV seemed garish and intrusive.  Oh God, no.  

We are not among his most diehard fans, but fans we are.  We both read Wallace’s crazy, genius, and hilarious Infinite Jest and loved it.  Dash is the only other person I know personally who actually finished it (besides me).  We have lots of friends who tried to read it but put it down.  It is an enormous and sweeping book, and almost too much for one brain to process, which is to say nothing of how incredible it is that one brain created it.  This book, 981 pages long, with nearly a hundred additional pages of tiny-printed footnotes that serve as lush background, insane riffs, convoluted tangents, vivid color, and hysterical, hyper-focused explanations, is a work of pure literary muscle pounding away with so much force yet such finesse.  Wallace’s mastery of the English language leaves you dripping wet on the floor, mouth agape and exhausted.  Words, words, words, strung together in ways so insanely poetic and, I’ll say it again, hilarious, and dark and sad and shameful and shocking and redeeming and tender and exaggerated and true. Never for a second, does he stray from what is true – no matter how insane and over the top, Wallace is true.  True to himself.  True to his characters.  True to his reader.  

Where the hell does he come up with this crazy shit?  Never have I flipped a book over so many times to look at the picture of the author.

Dash and I read this book before having kids, when we could invest that kind of time in art. We went to see him at the Boston Public Library when he spoke for a book signing.  Dash stood in line with our copy of Infinite Jest and his pharmacology book from med school for Wallace to sign (there is a ton of really specific and, according to Dash, spot-on pharmacology know-how in this book – not surprising, considering it is set in a half-way house and a posh tennis academy where the kids used lemon-scented  Pledge as sunscreen).  Wallace turned Dash’s pharmacology book over curiously, chuckled and signed it.  

Dash said he felt like the wind got knocked out of him when he read that Wallace had hanged himself.  I knew exactly how he felt.  It’s not like we know him or are some sort of fawning disciples.  We aren’t seeking out vigils and lighting candles and trying to talk about this with people.  It’s just that we read what will now be his greatest accomplishment and were blown away by his talent.  The world is a poorer place without him in it.  A huge loss.  Even if he never wrote another word, his passing is a huge loss.  

But what is sadder than our collective loss, much much sadder, is the fact that Wallace was so sad.  His despair must have been blacker than black. It must have been razor sharp and unfathomably deep - superhuman and incredibly exhausting to be able to quash his will, his spirit, his ability to experience pleasure.  I don’t know anything about him, but I can only assume that creating Lateral Alice Moore, a secretary who could only move sideways, had to have made him chuckle.  Les Assassins de Fauteuils Roulants (the Wheelchair Assassins), are a Quebecois Separatist group in the novel who all lost their legs because their initiation involved playing chicken with freight trains.  Those with the biggest balls were pulverized, but the next ballsiest ended up amputees and the top tier of the AFR’s leadership.  How could this not have brought Wallace pleasure, exquisitely warm and velvety pleasure?  I would be hugging myself for the rest of my life if I had come up with that and it was just one tiny hair in the thick textured braid that was the novel.  The self-discipline alone it must have taken to write Infinite Jest proves that Wallace was anything but a quitter.  He was a sorcerer with language and story, but any one who has ever tried to write anything knows magic is never enough.  He had to have been one hard-nosed and determined son of a bitch to finish that book.  

Hell, what do I know?  This kind of thing happens over and over and every time it is such a waste and such a pity and so very very sad.  I am just so sorry he was so sad.  

I have nothing left to say.  

Sometimes, apparently, words are not enough.

I’m having a personal pendulum swing moment.  After years of watching my children like a hawk, not letting them go anywhere without me, hovering, ever vigilant, scanning the horizon for signs of danger – pitbulls, clowns, men in trench coats, fat ladies with puppies and candy, rusty vans – I am starting to mellow.  In my gut, I have been feeling like Saint James and Supergirl need a little space, a little freedom – for them, for me.  Maybe I’m just exhausted and the jagged edges of my catastrophe-addled mind are being worn smooth by the day to day struggle of keeping everyone fed, dressed, relatively clean and happy.  Or maybe, just maybe, I’m doing that thing that we humans do so well – I am learning.

Stranger danger.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHINGmore terrifying than the thought of my child being abducted.  It is the stuff of nightmares and masochistic calamitizing.  (To calamitize is to imagine horrible scenarios, letting them play out in your mind in painfully vivid detail.  I thought I was the only one who did this, who could literally make myself cry imagining, for example, my funeral, my kids and husband sitting in a pew with their dear heads bent, sobbing, dressed like somber mismatched ragamuffins.  Then I started to ask some friends and it seems many women and girls do it – it’s not so much a guy thing.  Why would you do that? asks Doctor Dash, mystified by the strange and alarming workings of my mind.  I’m not sure why I do it.  Is it preparation?  An attempt to ward off horrible events?  You know, the whole if you think about it, it won’t happen theory?  Somewhere, I stumbled upon the term calamatizing and just having a name for these peculiar self-induced flights of the psyche appealed to my need to categorize things.)  In any event, the combustible combination of the media’s bloodthirsty, sensationalistic, scavenging coverage of abduction cases, muddled with my own calamitizing could easily send me over the brink, imagining pedophiles and kidnappers lurking in every nook and cranny.  

Fortunately, although I do have a vivid imagination, I have an adequate grip on reality.  I know that the incidence of abduction by strangers has not increased in the last fifty years, it’s just that we hear about cases in Florida and Nebraska on the news so it feels like it’s happening every day, in our own back yards.  It’s fear mongering, plain and simple, and I have been feeling the need to push back.

To me, the trick has always been to keep a watchful eye on my guys, without their knowing it.  If they can’t actually have the freedom we had to run around the neighborhood all day, returning home sweaty, dirty and mosquito-bitten at dusk, then they at least deserve to have the perception of freedom.  I have always felt this in my core, in an amorphous, non specific way:  there cannot be too much fear, or there will be no courage.  

And now I’m reading this book.  (You knew I was gearing up for something).  The book is called Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louve, and it is rocking my world.  It’s one of those books that is compelling and provocative and perfectly pitched for where I am right now.  Louv’s message dovetails with the vague stirrings I’ve been experiencing.  Embedded within his larger message about the crisis being brought about by divorcing our children from unfettered, unstructured contact with nature (more on that at a later date, for sure), is a discussion of stranger danger.  It is one of many reasons our kids are being shooed out of the woods and into their homes. 

What struck me most about all of this is that by attempting to protect our children, we may actually be putting them at greater risk.  In short, by keeping them safe inside, we are basically raising a bunch of pussies.  He didn’t quite put it that way, but that’s the gist.  Kids need real world sensory experience, idle dream time, space for imaginative play, opportunity for spontaneous socializing and conflict resolution.  These things breed self confidence, inner fortitude, street smarts, world smarts – the first lines of defense against bad people.  We don’t want our kids to be afraid of all adults – what kind of adults will they be?  We want them to be open, to be community minded, to be involved and engaged in the lives of the people around them, to be able to discern the good guys from the bad guys (and not just on a video screen).  If everyone is out and talking to and watching out for each other, it makes for a safer and healthier community.  How likely is a kid to care about the old lady down the street when he grew up with a joy stick in one hand and a bag of Cheetos in the other?

So in reading this book, I have shifted from believing that my kids need to experience perceived freedom to believing that they need real, actual freedom.  They need to brush up against the world, with all its potholes and dark corners, and feel empowered to navigate it.  I’m not at all sure how to go about this.  I haven’t even begun to figure this out.  I can only hope that in my awareness and intent lie the seeds of change.  We all want to keep our kids safe.  But at what cost?  

I just saw Kate DiCamillo, walking along my very own path by the creek!  There she was!  With a scruffy dog that looked just like Winn Dixie!  Wow.  She’s a hero of mine.  I once read that she started writing by promising herself she would write one hour every day, no matter what.  I think of her often.  She’s a perfect example of what a little hardheaded perseverance (and a whole hell of a lot of talent) can yield – beautiful magical books that manage to bewitch children and adults alike, fancifully woven tales chocked full with lessons about perseverance, loyalty, and friendship.  She’s great. 

And I can’t believe I saw her today of all days!!!  I just started The Tale of Despereaux last night with Supergirl.  Of all the gosh darn coincidences!  On Sunday we saw the preview for the movie, so I made a deal with Supergirl that we would go to see the movie after I read the book to her.  Saint James and I have done that so many times, but Supergirl has yet to experience the delicious sense of anticipation, the time and rigor involved in reading and savoring a whole big complicated book and the LESSON, that all important no-other-way-to-learn-it lesson:  THE BOOK IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE.  (Not that I’m in any way dogging movies – I love movies!  In fact, if it had been Joel and Ethan Coen on the path today, an industrial-sized spatula would have been required to scrape up my swooning carcass.  I’m simply saying, if there is a source and a derivative, go to the source.)  After reading the first Harry Potter book and watching the movie, Saint James quietly observed that there is a lot more stuff in the book.  Indeed there is, young Jedi, indeed there is.  

So back to Kate DiCamillo, who is one of the people I mildly stalk out of sheer admiration (the other is Dara Moscowitz who used to write wildly colorful and entertaining restaurant reviews for the City Pages and has moved on to other things but who should come back because her successor is boring and bland and safe and makes me never want to eat out again.)  Kate was walking along in a brown t-shirt and jeans.  Imagine that!  Blue jeans!  On this hot steamy day.  Surely she was just clearing her head, having left her laptop open, the fan blowing on her empty chair.  Maybe she’s having trouble with a turn of phrase, an ending, a character’s motivation.  Oh, sooooo coooool!  I’m such a loser writer wannabe.

And what a perfect level of celebrity/anonymity!  Authors are virtually unrecognizable except to people who have read their stuff.  It’s a totally self selecting audience:  if you’re a successful self-help guru, the needy and suggestible will flock to you; if you’re Danielle Steele, slightly tacky,  overweight lonely hearts with fresh manicures and garish clothes will be your fan base; if you’re Martin Amis, borderline alcoholics with a penchant for dark, smart (sometimes sick, but always brilliant) humor will be the only ones to glance twice when you get your morning coffee.  Do you think Brad Pitt could have survived a fatwa?  

If you are recognized at all, it is for something that has come from your brain and your heart and your guts.  It is very pure, yet contained.  (O.K., I’ll admit it, I’ve daydreamed of book tours and signings, the gorgeous outfits I’d pull together to sit on a stool and read from my novel . . .  I would always bring a glass made of glass for ice water – no plastic bottles for me, please . . . she’s really cool and down to earth, except for her water bottle issue – she gets quite peevish about plastic, apparently . . . )   

I might have been imagining it, but Kate seemed to have a wary look on her face when she passed by me.  It could have been my crazy fierce arm pumping fast walking, my enormous smudged sunglasses, or the goofy look on my face.  Or maybe she’s used to women my age gushing all over her, trying to get her autograph for their children, thanking her for her lovely books full of whimsy and heart.  

I didn’t interrupt her walk.  I would never.  That’s what I love about fans like me . . . (But just for the record, if I ever become a famous author, please, please feel free to stop me and tell me how much you love me.)

Today is Father’s Day and my very own Papi is in town visiting.  Ironically, he knows nothing of this blog because I want to be able to freely discuss my sex, drugs and rock n’ roll lifestyle without worrying about my parents.  The fact that he would love this blog is not lost on me, and being a dutiful parent-pleaser, I feel a bit guilty.  I might need to create a shadow site -  PGpeevishmama, where I only post my most innocuous and innocent ramblings, those in keeping with my status as the responsible, straight-A, straight-laced, oldest daughter of immigrant parents, wife, mother of three, etcetera, etcetera. Not that I’m writing anything all that subversive, I just don’t want my parents, my kid’s teachers, or any of the school mommies deciding I’m some sort of miscreant mother. 

All surreptitious blogging and guilty feelings aside, I credit my dear dad with my love of literature, and by extension, my love of words.  When I was little he used to bring me books all the time, which represented something warm, visceral and deep:  his love, his faith in my intellect, his desire to share all that there is to discover between the covers of a book.  He gave me Jules Verne’s 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a book he had devoured as a boy in landlocked Cordoba, Argentina.  It didn’t really float my boat, but the book became emblematic to me, a talisman of sorts.  It was a handsome, hard cover book with gorgeous illustrations on the cover of undersea life . . .  limpid blue water, flaming coral and schools of fish, undulating octopi and sinister eels . . . I remember running my fingers over the smooth cover, daydreaming about mermaids and pirates and submarines. The book represented adventure and promise.  

When I was twelve he hired a scuba teacher to give us private lessons in our pool.  We learned to read decompression tables and to spit in our masks so they wouldn’t fog up.  We learned not to surface faster than our bubbles to avoid the bends and how to share a regulator in case one of us ran out of air.  I was at the height of my raging tweeny, drama-queen ways, but with my dad in the water, with the weight of the scuba gear and the lessons we were learning on my shoulders, I was clear-eyed, competent and calm.  He expected nothing less.  

We got our scuba certifications, taking our open water test in a quarry in some hick town in Ohio.  The water was murky and cold and we carved our initials in a yellow school bus that was shipwrecked at the bottom of the quarry.  My dad always carried a scuba knife strapped to his leg, just in case we ever got tangled in a net or encountered an underwater marauder (or had the occasion to carve our initials on the side of a rusty bus).  He has a little James Bond in him, my dad.  

We were in a manmade hole in the ground filled with junk, but we felt like we were 10,000 leagues under the sea. 

Eventually we did scuba dive in actual salt water, in the Bahamas, in Mexico.  Fish used to nip at my hair as it streamed behind me like a mermaid’s.  We saw a shark once, manta rays . . . we watched in horror and wonder when a guide named Pirata ditched his scuba gear to plunge under a reef and emerged triumphantly clutching an enormous crab which he wrestled into a net and made me drag along for the rest of the dive.  

My dad was always amazed at how slowly I went through my air.  I was smaller, yes, but I was also calmer.  Scuba diving was something he had dreamed of as a boy, waited a lifetime to learn, and approached with a sense of wonder and excitement.  To me, it was no big deal.  I never felt I wouldn’t be able to do it, never had a chance to long for it.  I was learning it practically before I knew about it.  This particular skill set, like so many others, was handed to me on a silver platter.  This portal to adventure, to the watery deep, was an inheritance of sorts.  

I always thought I could do anything, be anything.  Now I understand that it’s because someone was working very hard to make sure I felt like that – smoothing my way, but pushing me hard.  Empowered, entitled, brazen, hungry for knowledge, power, adventure, happiness.  

The world was my oyster.  

Papi, te quiero.  Gracias.

                                                              Young Girl Reading – Jean-Honore Fragonard

What do we ask of a good book? We ask to be entertained, to be transported, to be surprised, to learn something new.  We hope to catch a glimpse into the human condition, to make connections to other books and to our lives, to experience that unmistakable frisson brought on by words strung together in unexpectedly beautiful ways.

I went to book club a couple nights ago and, as always, I left feeling like my heart would simply flit off into the night for a happy little turn over the trees of our neighborhood.  It is a relatively young book club (about a year and a half old) and I am its newest member, having joined about six months after its inception.  When I started, I knew two of the women, but not very well.  One, I had met at the park and we bonded with our toes in the sand because she thought I was an Argentine Jew – she was half right.  The other, I met at Saint James’ preschool, and come to think of it, we also got to be friends with our toes in the sand.  In this small city, you are bound to run into people you like again and again, which gives you the chance to gently fan an acquaintance into a friendship.  Lucky for me, I kept bumping into these two women and found out about their book club.  And lucky for me, they invited me in.  

It is a true pleasure to read books along side this fabulous group of ladies – all mothers, incidentally.  We manage to pick amazing books by a process that is nothing short of pure and joyful chaos – people just throw out titles and somehow we collectively swoop them up or leave them aside.  Our choices emerge out of crescendos and decrescendos in yelling, cackling and book waving.  Sometimes someone attempts to read a review out loud, but never gets a chance to finish as the gavel is thrown swiftly and decisively by this group.  Despite outward appearances, we choose carefully (no one wants to read junk – life is too short); but not too carefully because reading is an adventure and sometimes you stumble upon the most breathtaking views when you don’t know where you’re going.  

I love this haphazard, caution-to-the wind approach: so far it has yielded great results – books that are incredibly varied, thematically and stylistically, but which all manage to satisfy, challenge and inspire us – books that sometimes make us fall in love – books that sometimes break our hearts – oftentimes, books that do both.  

The women in my book club approach reading with both open mindedness and high expectations.  This is a well read group, so if a book emits even the slightest whiff of schmaltziness or pandering, it’s dead meat.*  These women read with care and undisguised pleasure and bring strong powers of insight and analysis to our discussions (as well as wild gesticulations, melodramatic retellings, shrieking laughter and a sprinkling of profanity).  

Did I mention there is wine?

Our book club has journeyed to the moors of Victorian England, the jungles and shit lagoons of Vietnam, a mosquito-infested Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic, a craggy ailing farmstead in post-apartheid South Africa, a stifling and mannered living room in 1950’s suburban Connecticut, the disorienting beauty of present-day Tuscany, and up and down our ravaged country during the Civil War.  We have read non-fiction and fiction, collections of short stories and big juicy novels, classics and soon to be classics.  Just today one friend sent around an email listing 1000 books to read before you die.  I can imagine that the others, like me, hungrily scanned the list, happy to see so many familiar titles and wistful that there isn’t more TIME! 

Another thing I love:  We take turns holding the meetings in our homes, so somebody’s kids are always scampering about in their pajamas, watching with eyes as big as saucers as we pour drinks, catch up and settle in for a great talk.  What a lovely din to which to fall asleep. 

By necessity, our book club gatherings are efficient affairs with only a brief time alloted for chatting.  We’ve got a book to discuss, people!!!  Plus, we are usually on borrowed time, husbands and sitters having been wrangled into taking over for a couple blessed hours.  Someday, when we’re old ladies we will meet at four thirty for dinner and conversation.  Then we will creak and shuffle over to the comfy chairs with our large print editions tucked under our wrinkly arms and our wine glasses tippling over and begin . . .

*Eat, Pray, Love was one such casualty.  Though they read it before my time, I gather that it was reviled by all but one courageous member of the group.  This book manages to come up in conversation every third meeting or so, therefore I imagine it was worth the read – if only to serve as a collective punching bag.  The title of this entry is a sly wink to this book – which I will never, ever read – I promise.