The Righteous Truth about Trader Joe's

So when will Trader Joe be beatified, anyway? Ever since St. Joe's, I mean Trader Joe's, came to Media last year--and I hesitate to say this because I'm going to sound like a lobotomized housewife--it has changed my life. I shop there at least two times a week because it's so convenient, I know the entire lovely staff, from the almost sarcastically cheerful 20-year-old man who asks too many questions about what I did last weekend (Can't remember) or what I'm going to do that day (Laundry? Don't know, really) to the red-hat-wearing lady who finds Will's songs about the bottled water charming. I love them all. And the parking situation is nirvanic at 9 AM on a weekday and they have balloons for the children. Plus immaculate wood floors, handwritten happy signage and, of course, low prices. AND healthy food. I mean, what more is there to say? For Pete's sake, what more would it take to convince you? Let me share my newly evolved theology with you.

1) Heathen: people who have never heard of Trader Joe's and don't know what they're missing. I hope they'll be saved nevertheless because it's not their fault. But I don't care that much because most of these people aren't American and probably wear socks with sandals.

2) Seekers: People who have seen the light but do not live within 100 miles of a Trader Joe's and so cannot reasonably be expected to stock up there. Most of these people live with a Trader-Joe-sized hole in their souls. What can I say to these folks? Have hope. Pray, even. I believe they are still expanding. Or, just move.

People who do live within 100 miles of a Trader Joe's and do not shop there: Two subcategories.


3) Ignorant Due to Extenuating Circumstances: If you're institutionalized, or under 3 years old or over 100, then your ignorance is pardoned.

4) Willfully Refusing Trader Joe's Grace: Two sub-categories.

a. Nonbelievers Who Don't Like "Strange" Food. Upon death, off to a Super Wal-Mart with you and no looking back. Never another chance to eat Trader Joe's Red Pepper Spread.

b. Nonbelievers Who Think Whole Foods Must be Better Because it's More Expensive and in a More Exclusive Neighborhood. Jane Cohen, I'm talking about you. Your wickedness is revealed in the blogosphere. As of NOW.

And just in case you think I'm in serious need of deprogramming, I know TJ's is not perfect. Especially the mayonnaise and the pumpkin-filled tortellinis. And sometimes the staff's cheerfulness and enthusiasm for the products is just a tad grating. And no, red-hat lady, when my kids are running around grabbing all the chocolate off the shelves I don't give a rat's ass about trying the Citrus Hand Lotion, thank you.

The Party's Over

I'm still trying to pick myself up off the floor. We had a party for 25 people on Saturday, one reason I haven't been blogging. My advisor from Temple has just retired, so I invited her and all her graduate students from the last twelve years (not everyone in her classes, but everyone who either has or has had her on their dissertation committee or people who are clearly her acolytes). I got most of the guest list from her. Sally is an eminent Victorian scholar, which sounds much more dull than it actually is in her case. Sally has long gray braids to her hips and has walked with a cane for many years, I think because of some kind of scoliosis. She is very petite but has a bellowing laugh that comes from deep inside her. I love it, but others find it annoying. In the early nineties she had us actually compile a collection of essays by Victorian women, which was published and well reviewed. It was the most exciting work I ever did in graduate school, the most thorough immersion in historical research I ever experienced. We were sleuths and it was great.

For her retirement we got her a beautiful duffel bag from Levenger, which she admired greatly. I had ordered her a cake that said "Thank you, Sally. Happy Travels." Because "Happy Retirement" sounds like "Happy Death" to me. Everyone gave a tribute to her. It was fun and unstuffy, mainly because no faculty were invited to this party. Nothing against faculty per se, it's just that their presence would have added a networking element, with its attendant mood of insecurity. Plus, I would have felt even more incompetent for having upended the whole container of maple glaze on the floor in the kitchen and having to dredge the salmon in it, right there on the floor next to the dishwasher. As it was, it was an enormously sticky mess for a few minutes, but it all ended up on the grill anyway, and was delicious, and everyone was happy, and hardly anyone knew.

A Little Housekeeping

Well, I finally changed my comments section so anyone can comment, not just people with Blogger accounts. Plus, I get emailed if someone comments. I should have done this months ago! Well, back to an improvised saag paneer I'm making. It's gray and I not unreasonably expected it to be green . . . It tastes sort of okay but the premixed garam masala I bought doesn't pack much of a punch. Must stop doing this makeshift Indian and use my cookbook.

Then my mom's group is hosting a "wine and dessert" evening. If I start out the week with wine and dessert on a Monday, then what on earth will I be doing on Friday? Something illegal? Nah, probably just checking compulsively to see if I get any more comments. Wait, I don't have to do that if I get emailed now. . . guess I'll have to do something illegal, after all.

One Fine Old Dixie Recipe

I found a cookbook my mother gave my grandmother for her birthday in 1941, Fine Old Dixie Recipes. The cover is wooden, with a picture of a Southern mammy bearing a platter of chicken. I was going to copy the recipe for Kentucky Burgoo but I found someone has beaten me to it. It saves me the work, but still, it's a deflating experience. Anyway, here it is.

Hula Heaven

I was thrilled to see that my dad still has my mother's indestructible 1940s-era Viewmaster and her box of reels. It's all ours now, along with another Viewmaster dated from the 1960s. The boys can each use one. As a child, I remember looking at reels depicting the Seven Wonders of the World, but we don't seem to have that one any more. We do have many reels of Europe, but my favorites are of Hawaii and Oklahoma. The pictures in the Hawaii reel (from the 1950s) are entitled "Dancing Hula Girls," "Girls Dancing Hula," "Hula Dancing," and so on, but one is "Eating Poi." The "Hula Dancing" picture has about ten shapely young women in grass skirts posing in a perfect semi-circle, with a brawny shirtless young man kneeling in a stylized football-star pose in the center. I told Jack to show it to Daddy and say "Welcome to Hawaii." He did, but not before changing the picture to "Eating Poi." Oh, well.

The Oklahoma reel has a picture of Oklahoma A & M College at Stillwater (now Oklahoma State), with some swell co-eds posing on the lawn in their long skirts and bobby socks. A number of other slides depict farm machinery, cows, and buffalo. When we lived in Oklahoma, we did see some desultory buffalo behind a metal fence. It was hotter than hell there. That's about all I remember, because I was three when we left. My grandmother and mother lived in Hawaii in the early to mid 1940s, so that's probably why there are three reels of Hawaii. (I haven't looked at the other two yet, I've got to savor them slowly.)

I had to explain to the boys that we don't know anyone in the pictures, and that people didn't take Viewmaster pictures themselves; they bought the reels of places they wanted to see or places they had already visited. Will likes to say "That's incredible" when anything surprises him in the picture, whether it's a large fish on "Wonders of the Deep" or the Brandenburg Gate.

Good News, Circa 1961

More capital letters for you, dear readers.

My brother Dan and I went to my Dad's house the other day to take memorabilia home with us. We found a darkly yellowed telegram announcing Dan's birth (1961, in Oklahoma) to my grandfather, who lived in Pennsylvania. (My grandmother was visiting us in Oklahoma.)

"BABY BOY 6 LBS 14 OZ ALL IS WELL LOVE NANCY"

The paper is so fragile and ancient-looking. You had to pay per word to send a telegram, which is why they almost always read so terse and factual. Yet those few words held such great joy. In these days of cheap long distance phone calls, email, baby blogs, mommy blogs, and daddy blogs, it's shocking to remember that words of joy, or sorrow, could be sent only at great cost, and only to one address.

That's why I love that my grandfather lavishly returned a message,

"CONGRATULATIONS LOVE PAPA."

HE CLAIMS WIFE LEFT HIM FOR A NEW YORK STRIPPER.

This is what one sees when, working out on the elliptical trainer at the Y, assiduously reading the May 9 New Yorker, one looks up, on some unexplainable whim, at the television. One is assaulted by several waves: The ceaseless capital letters of closed captioning; the faux shock of this sentence, since the man in question appears to be a typical high school jock turned flabby couch potato; and the way one finds it difficult to stop reading the closed captioning when one knows one should. Just something addictive about reading Jerry Springer dialogue in bald capital letters . . . the desperation, the opportunism, the tawdriness of it all . . . back to that article about Alvin Ailey.

The in-law visit is proceeding well. I don't have much privacy, so blogging when they are around is out of the question. Much of the furniture I got from my Dad has been mended, window boxes are repaired and rebuilt, light fixtures have been hung. Grammy has given the boys many treats and a few new toys and I have been called mean. Grammy and Grandpa watched Jack's "Developmental Baseball I" practice yesterday. John took Jack's training wheels off his bike and he rode halfway around the track at the local school.

My dad came over for dinner last night. I like for him to spend time with John's parents. My dad was amazed at how easily the rickety furniture could be repaired. My family usually just lives with quirks and irritations instead of trying to fix them. I grilled some fresh yellowfin tuna and we had that on a cous-cous salad with mint, lemon, spring onions, Kalamata olives, and capers. The mint was from our garden. For dessert I made an angel food cake from scratch using powdered egg whites that you reconstitute with water. It wasn't nearly as high as the angel food cakes my grandmother made, but then she used mixes. It was delicious with strawberries. A wonderful low-fat dinner. Pat me on the back!

Yesterday afternoon we were going to go to a historic house a mile from us that we've never been to, but it was closed for a private function. There used to be a quarry by this house, which closed a half century ago. The fieldstone on our house came from that quarry, according to the all-knowing neighbor Hazel. I love the stone with its myriad shades of gray, gold, and rust.

The whole family is going to church (we go to church in Germantown) this morning, and afterwards we are going to a Mother's Day brunch (which I arranged, of course) at the Valley Green Inn, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the largest city park in the world, so eat your heart out, New York. I find some of the Inn's FAQs to be rather amusing.

In-Law Panic

The In-laws are Coming. Today. The refrigerator has been cleaned and mystery foods thrown out. The "guest" bathroom, which I use when we don't have guests: scrubbed up and down. Next: all the boxes and oddments that have accumulated in the guest bedroom in the absence of the last guests. Then the dining room. We have had a whole lot of stuff (booze, candles, paintings, things that don't belong there) stacked on the table since we got my mother's antiques. Need to put all that in the new chest and the corner cupboard. Finally the living room (we don't have a family room) will be reclaimed for adults and children to use.

I still marvel at the thinginess of life. Especially life as a parent and homeowner. Where did all this stuff come from? The toys. The clothes. The paperwork. The food. For so many years I had a tiny apartment, a meager publishing salary, or an even more meager graduate stipend, and I was fine. Now, the stuff is here, along with a lot of joy, commitment of the best kind, and I suppose this is what it means to be grown up in America.

It's hard to get really excited about cleaning and organizing and maintaining stuff. I've been some zen-oriented books about this sort of thing: Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorpe, which is charming to the point of being odd,with lots of zen. I'm also reading The Zen of Organizing by Regina Leeds, which is more practical, the zen being just a trendy topnote. What I'm getting out of it so far is that sorting through and maintaining your things is a spiritual exercise in understanding the unity of all things. You leave guilt and judgement behind. You respect every thing that you have and give every one a chance to perform its proper function.

Cleaning frantically for one's inlaws is not in the plans of either Thorpe or Leeds, of course. Mervin and Marilyn are coming this afternoon. Serenity goes out the window today. Not that my inlaws are judgmental or anything. They're "salt of the earth" folks coming to the big, bad East from Indiana. They come here to see us and aren't interested in city adventures. I cook for them, Marilyn watches the children and does miscellaneous jobs (John inherited his admirable laundry-folding skills from her), while Mervin builds shelves, does electrical work and carpentry of any sort, and fixes simple plumbing problems. He gets the floor muddy and Marilyn scolds him.

Will is up. Breakfast time.

The Laws of Birthday Parties

Ever since moving from the Shenandoah Valley almost two years ago back to the Philadelphia area, I have been an astute observer of the local birthday party sociology. In Virginny, we pretty much did 'em all at home and knew everyone purdy darn well. Here are some working hypotheses I have arrived at, some compared with our own family's backward practice. This list is not well organized, but hey, it's only a blog. I'm trying to write more and be more sloppy.

1. The less well you know the birthday child's parents, the more expensive the present should be. You're pretty safe spending a little more than twenty dollars.

I spent $7.00 on Model Magic for a girl in Jack's class last year whose name I can't recall.*

2. The less well the hosting parents know the families of the invited children, the more likely they are to have the party in a professional party place, such as a gym, etc. My theory is people don't want to reveal much about themselves to strangers. Only part of it is the convenience. Just a hunch.

I invited Jack's whole class (at the horrible fake Montessori school he went to in fall of 2003) to his fourth birthday party because I couldn't decide who to chose. It was at our house. "Only" eight kids came. The parents all stayed and did not eat a single bite of anything. Not even the chocolate cake I baked from scratch (Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts)and decorated myself with a frosting firetruck! What in all heck is wrong with people?

3. The youngest child in a family with three or more children gets dropped off at a party before any of the other guests, the parent speeds off gleefully, not to be seen again until three minutes after the official end of the party.

4. There are always exceptions to every rule. It's most unusual, nay truly remarkable, for parents to invite fifteen children to a party in their house filled with antiques and breakables, and have the party last four hours instead of the universal two. Yet it happened today. Went surprisingly well. The Spiderman face paint will need another scrubbing before it comes off completely, and Jack's balloon broke, and some cake got smushed in their carpet, but no catastrophes.

5. When you try to be "green" and wrap the present from your child in the Sunday comics, you feel like a total loser when you compare it with the rest of the gaudily wrapped beribboned presents on the table.*

6. For parties at someone's house, girls wear dresses.

Jack wore his baseball shirt and torn jeans today. *

7. The party favor is not supposed to be just one thing, rather a bag full of things.

At the joint party we had for Jack and Will, there was one favor per child.*

8. Moon bounce, moon bounce, moon bounce.

9. When planning a party for your child, there is no polite way to encourage simple inexpensive gifts. You can only limit the number of children.

10. When dropping off or picking up your child, don't park in the driveway, unless you don't mind being parked in for thirty minutes.

*We could use a little work in these areas.

Hair Salon: The Blog

Now that I've had two haircuts without any color, the gray jumps out. I could see it in the mirror at the salon, even without wearing my glasses. For a "heavy myope" like me, you know it had to be a fairly blinding field of silver.

You ask, "What about that bitchy colorist who told you you would look fifteen years older?" Well, HA. Not only have I cast a wicked spell on her, causing her eyelids to sag, skin to wrinkle, and inground pool to spring a small but consistent leak that the pool specialists won't be able to locate until August, but I am also poised for defection. I'm taking my business to a salon in a neighboring town. I said to the owner of the new salon, "I need to have my hair cut by someone who supports my decision to let my hair go gray." I mean, I actually said that. You'd think I was switching therapists.

One time several years ago I switched salons because my "designer" Danny (you can't call them hairdressers any more) was taking up to 3 1/2 hours to cut and color my hair. In the meantime I was forced to listen to very loud house music as well as unfunny slightly off-color jokes that weren't off color enough to protest without feeling prudish, prim, and priggish (what's with words that start with "pr," anyway?). And occasionally his highly pierced friends would give me free advice on what I could do with my hair. Like not wash it that often and put blue stripes in it.

The breaking point came for me when Danny split up with his girlfriend, who worked in the same salon. They had had a son together, who was a year old at the time of the breakup, and had lived together. The child wore a Hilfiger hat and his room had a Dr. Suess theme. Whenever Andrea came into the room, to get orders for lunch, borrow a dryer, or whatnot, the air crackled with tension. They didn't talk to each other, they spit. I couldn't stand it, and thought he was a jerk, so I left. But not without having him write down my hair color "recipe."

Then there was Dominic, who ran a salon called "The Abbey" in Center City Philadelphia. He had trained to be a priest, but decided to come out instead, and then go the whole nine yards and be a hairdresser. But he was still sentimental about all things monastic, so he had huge photographs of cloisters all over the walls. But the other day Will and Jack had their hair cut by a guy planning to train for the priesthood. So, no pun intended, it all comes out even in the end.

Now Where Was I?

Boy, I just can't shake my loyal fan base. The longer I go without writing the more guilty I feel and so I avoid it. I'm also supposed to be blogging for a Mothers & More blog, and I haven't done that either. Spring happened, I guess, and what with all the pressure to mulch, I've just been doing that. Not really.

I'll just jump into this post, but I've no idea what it will be about.

My dad is moving to a retirement community in June, and my brother Dan and I have been carting off stuff from his house that we want. We have agreed very amicably so far. My mother, who died six years ago of a brain aneurysm when I was six weeks pregnant with Jack, had collected a number of antiques. What a bizarre sentence I just wrote. Like with my knitting, I don't believe I will go back and "rip it out." I'm a beginning knitter, and the scarf I am creating has the craziest knots and holes, and how the heck did they get there? Anyway, our house now has the following furniture:

A rustic "farm table" that we eat on now instead of the Ikea

A drop leaf table that my family ate on every night during my entire childhood and adolescence

An old but not antique bureau with drawers that don't stick (for the boys)

A cedar chest from the early 1970s that was in my room as a child, that I hid a number of dubious things in

A very small drop leaf table that we're going to use as an end table

A "butler's table" with a top that the "butler" just lifts off with the silver tea set on it, I suppose (we'll have to anchor it down in some way that is reversible and doesn't compromise its value)

A small table with glass knobs and a drawer darker than the rest of the wood (which I find strangely compelling)

A fancy table on wheels that also has drop leaves that we have in the entrance hall. My mother loved drop leaf tables.

A small chest with three drawers for the table linens

Enough table linens to need a full-time laundress

A rustic corner cupboard for the dining room (my brother lives in a geodesic dome; therfore he has no corners for it to live in)

An antique chest that used to have the aforementioned linens heaped up in it

A Vienna regulator that doesn't work

Four assorted antique mirrors of various sizes and with assorted visibility issues

Two oil paintings that my great grandmother painted

Two 1940s-era marble lamps

A needlepoint footstool

A needlepoint "fireplace screen" on a wooden pole on a three-legged base

A "fireplace screen" for in front of the fireplace, to keep sparks and ashes in and children out. (The above item and this one are completely different but seemed to be called the same thing. Why is our fireplace accoutrement vocabulary so impoverished, I ask you?)

To come: lots of dainty little china cups, finger bowls, and salt and pepper shakers that my great grandmother painted, boxes full of incredibly beautiful and moving photographs that my grandmother took of us, my mother, and other people, which she developed herself and that desperately need to be properly archived, a massive silver service, a set of Limoge china.

Our house smells like my parents' house now, John says, but I haven't noticed.

The Mad Mulcher: Busted!

We turned into our driveway on Sunday after church, and we almost hit her. There she was with her wheelbarrow, our next-door neighbor Hazel, mulching our yard, just the skinny strip between her metal fence and our driveway. "Hazel!" I said brightly, "You're mulching our yard!" "Yes, well, it looked terrible," she scolded us. "You know," she admonished, "hardwood mulch is only $2.00 a bag at Home Depot."

This favor, or interference, or whatever you call it, is . . . well, I guess that's the problem, is that I am not sure what to think, and it's really so minor in the scheme of things that I believe I'll just pass over it completely. So, never mind. Nothing to see here, folks.

Anyhoozy, we had Hazel, who's about 74, and her daughter Rebecca for dinner tonight, along with my Dad, who comes every Tuesday night. We were talking about the fussy and fickle eating preferences of small children. Will had pronounced loudly, "I don't like rice!" And even "I don't like cold!" when presented with ice cream, his favorite food. Hazel, who can tell a great story and has many to tell, told about when she was about five and wouldn't eat her oatmeal for breakfast. Well, her mother re-presented that oatmeal, reheated just so over the stove, at every meal until even stubborn little Hazel broke down from hunger, at the 36th hour. The Depression explains this standoff at least as much as the iron will of the mother and daughter. Hazel still hates oatmeal, and is still very stubborn.

By the way, she has a great wine cellar and brought some sparkling wine for us, a little over the top for a Tuesday dinner with the family, but it was accepted eagerly. My dad and Hazel reminisced about Majorca in the fifties, traveling by ship, icebox tongs, and other generational esoterica, while the middle generation sipped and listened. On other occasions Hazel has provided us with much detailed lore about the neighborhood's characters, where property lines actually are, who owns which trees, the reason why our house smelled like dog pee for a couple of months (non-housebroken dachsund lived here for ten years), what the landscaping of our yard has been like in every era, how much our old kitchen cabinets from the 1930s were actually worth and why we should hang onto them, the best auctions for antiques, the best place to get a variety of cheap wine, you know, stuff like that. Mulching incident, what mulching incident?

Adventures of Dumpster Carrot

Every night John and I take turns inventing a story to tell the boys. Yes, one of us makes up a story every single night. Not our idea. Theirs. It’s much easier than it seems. Here’s what you do:

MENTAL PREPARATION: Get ready to make a string of snap decisions that have little or no basis in reality or logic. A story will emerge almost of its own accord. Stories will do that, and humans are hard-wired to tell them.

1. Choose a creature or object to be the main character. It could just be the first thing you think of. We have done stories about stones, forks, racecars, trucks, chameleons, and, in tonight’s case, a carrot.

2. Give it a name. Objects may and should be personified. Names are funnier when they are incongruous with the character’s size or nature in some way. Tonight’s name, “Dumpster Carrot,” contributed by Will, gave us the character’s identity and setting, as well as tantalizing superhero implications with a comic slant.

3. Choose a setting, any setting. Don’t think hard about it. All the better if your setting doesn’t make “sense,” because then your story line can focus on doing the backstory: How Dumpster Carrot get into the dumpster? How will he get out?

Now, if you aren’t too sleepy, your brain is kicking in to get your character (and yourself) out of this mess.

4. Your main character wants something, to go somewhere, to have a new friend, to learn why he or she is in this silly story, or whatever. Invest your character with motivation and a goal. Tonight’s carrot wanted to get out of the dumpster because he wasn’t rotten. He had been pushed into the trash by a thoughtless cat, no doubt a plump gray tabby now that I think about it.

5. To propel your story, you will probably need to add a secondary character who aids the main character, as well as some kind of barrier or obstacle or “enemy” that must be surmounted/outwitted/escaped. Tonight’s barrier was the trash bag he was in, then the high dumpster walls.

6. Get to the climax as quickly as you can, within reason. Increase the conflict, and then resolve it somehow, preferably through elements you’ve already introduced and not through some magic character that you’ve never mentioned before. It’s tempting to cheat when you have to pee and are desparate to end the story. Dumpster Carrot’s buddies in the trash bag, some rotten zucchinis and a razor blade, agreed that the carrot was too young to go to the landfill so the razor blade slit the bag and the adjoining trash bags, and rotten fruit and vegetables climbed out and make a big vegetation ladder for the carrot to climb up. Did you ever hear me claim that this was a good story?

7. Make a happy ending. The best endings for very small children are ones in which all the main characters go to sleep. But not like that creepy poppy field scene in The Wizard of Oz, normal going-to-bed sleep. We don’t do a whole of these any more, though. Dumpster Carrot really just wanted to go back to Ralph’s apartment and be cut up by Ralph and eaten. So he was, and everyone was happy. Don’t think too hard about this ending, OK?

8. Say “The End.” That’s “Thee End,” not “Thuh End.”

Goodbye, Raffi

John has mercifully taken out the Raffi CD we've been listening to in the van for the past few years. He replaced it with Honest Bob and the The Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. This is the best way to get me to listen to new music. Jack and I both really dig "Dinner with Laurie," where a guy runs into Laurie Anderson at the supermarket. It's sung/spoken in the inimical Laurie Anderson style. Jack asks to have it played over and over again. He has the refrain memorized.

And she said ooh, it isn't very hard
The cellar's in the attic and the attic's in the yard
And she said ooh, try it now and see
The ocean's in the kitchen and the kitchen's on TV.

They also have a song in which the lyrics are taken from this website by a "Dr. Gene Ray." You have to stop to admire the guy's tenacity, verbosity, tortured syntax, and liberal use of underlining. Not to mention the consistently fevered pitch of his rhetoric and the almost total lack of explanation. His site is very popular, and you can understand why. "Dr. Gene Ray" doesn't have any terrorist or counter-terrorist agenda, or any particular leanings even toward Republican or Democrat, and he doesn't ask for money, as far as I can see. He only asks that you believe, but believe what, exactly? Dr. Ray's got a case of good old-fashioned crazy going on. It's refreshing.

That said, it's possible that "Gene Ray" is actually Laurie Anderson taking performance art online. Or maybe David Byrne? He's done a bunch of weird stuff with PowerPoint. Whoever you are, Dr. Ray, great site. Keep the faith.

Y! M! C! A!

It's been a long rainy spring vacation and it's still going on today, both the rain and the vacation. Anyway, we got a family membership to the Y in January and not only am I becoming incredibly buff, but I have a place to go in which the boys can do their thing in "kid zone" and I can do mine. And I've already paid for it. Woo-hoo. We've been trucking over there with great frequency. It saved our sanity this past week. After I'm done with my workout I try to slip past the "family lounge" but it never fails that we have to stop there to play foosball and air hockey.

Foosball. Back when I was in what they used to call "junior high school" my family lived on an army base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and there the "teen club" had foosball, ping-pong, pool, and . . . that was about it. Oh, soda for a quarter and Reese's Peanut-Butter Cups for a dime. When I was grounded I would hand my best friend Kathy a dime through my window and she would get them for me. The phone was very expensive to use, so we would just go to other kids' houses or apartments and throw gravel up at the window and pretty much undermine the whole concept of being grounded, which was the Ineffective Punishment Du Jour. Back to foosball, it was so popular at the teen club I hardly ever got a chance to play. But now's my window of opportunity! There certainly are a lot of dead zones in that game, like between every row of players. Jack and I are both such novices that the ball either meanders slowly between the players, goals being scored by accident or by the wrong team, or the ball is "kicked" with great violence, slamming into a player on the same team.

Only one more afternoon left--we can make it, right? It really hasn't been too bad a week. We had company for Easter dinner and most people brought a dish. All I had to do was the ham, and I made a balsamic red pepper sauce for it. We drank beaujolais and I believe a good time was had by all. I'll try to think about that, and not the projectile markers zinging around the halls with the caps gone, or . . . The Note. While I was cleaning the bathroom on Saturday I heard something land on the floor, and the scurrying of little feet. I turned around and saw a pad of paper with writing on it in marker. It said

MOMMY
YOU ARE DISKUSTIN
G

A few minutes later we had the following discussion:

Jack: (eager) Did you read the note?

Me: (with studied nonchalance) Yes.

Jack: Are you sad?

Me: (breezily) No.

Jack: Why not?

Me: (knowingly) Because I know the tricks that little boys play.

Jack: It wasn't a trick. It was the truth. I meant it.

I couldn't think of what to say, so didn't say anything. Later I remembered the conversation we had had coming back from the Y, and I thought I knew what prompted The Note:

Jack: Mommy, do grown-ups cry?

Me: Yes, sure they do.

Jack: When do they cry?

Me: Lots of times, like when someone dies, or when the person's feeling are hurt.

Jack: (offended) Well, I cry then, too!

Me: But grown-ups don't cry at little things, like when they have to stop playing foosball.

That probably ticked him off. It was a cheap shot.

Have to go, trashbaskets are being flung. Jack just called Will "you disgusting nipple," so maybe it's nothing I said.

Sauce, Legos and Videotape

Yesterday after dinner Jack asked me, "We can have a party any day, right? It doesn't have to be someone's birthday, does it?" "Um, no, why do you ask?" I answered, a bit suspicious. Does he want cake? Presents? "Let's have a party for Daddy tomorrow, because we love him."

So Jack, Will and I made John gifts from Legos when he was away at his class (in Database Management, if you must know), mainly robots, that we propped up on his desk. Will also wanted to add a subscription insert from Cooking Light. Will and Jack made "newspapers" from creating manuscripts in Word with 72-point webdings. Will screamed delightedly while making his. One stroke of the keyboard and . . it's a truck! A strange little man wearing a tux! A thick diagonal line! Whatever!

Then we made a short video, in which Jack and Will admired themselves greatly. Will would show a book to the camera and say solemnly "It's at your wocal wibary." I really should have wiped that pizza sauce off his mouth before we made it, oh well. Then today, after much ostentatious, highly audible whispering in front of John, the boys and I hid in John's office and he was so "surprised" to see us when he came in.

So Big

On Monday I took Jack, who's five, with me to my three-hour drawing class. It was my last class, and I really didn't want to miss it, and Will had a place to go, but Jack had vacation. I packed markers, his own pad, and a banana for him and hoped for the best.

I set his pad up on an easel, which made him feel so grown up. The class members fawned over him considerably, especially the grandmothers. He smiled shyly and didn't talk much. First he drew a set of emergency vehicles and a horse, using his markers. Later he drew a rainbow, asking me the order of the colors and then numbering them. He did use some of my pressed charcoal,and drew othe objects on the table like the rest of us, a vase and a crane figurine (the bird, that is). At one point, he decided to see what the medium could do, so he grayed his paper like the rest of us had done, and rubbed the side of the charcoal over it so many times the whole thing was almost black. Then he got his eraser and made white lines, forming a grid. Very Mondrian.

I pinned his drawings to the wall like everyone else when it was time for critique. Cavin, the teacher, said, "See how Jack didn't leave out any elements of this vase." It was true; the pedestal was there, the stem, the rim around the lip. As far as I know, he has never drawn an object that is sitting in front of him before. His crane even had the feathers on it. Later I could hear him telling John what the teacher had said about his drawing, verbatim.

Then lunch at an Indian restaurent nearby. He ate pakoras, naan, some chana dal, and tandoori chicken. He didn't care for the mango juice, though, so he got apple. Every so often he would say to me in a stage whisper, "There are real Indian people here!"He was sitting there at the table, so civilized and proper, and then he would suddenly puff his cheeks out and pop them with his fingers.

The One About Poop

Not for the faint of heart. Please visit some other more intellectually or spiritually elevated blog for today's reading, if you cannot stomach the earthy nature of this post. That includes even the ghost of Jonathan Swift. Thank you kindly.

Because Will drank a quantity of Jack's juice this morning, which was spiked with a little Miralax, which Jack needs and Will does not, there emanated from his bottom a quantity, consistency, and forcefulness of poop that caused John and me to marvel exceedingly. (And yes, the child still wears a diaper. That's for another post you can look forward to.) When we were done washing off his heels, penis, and knees, and when we had put his shirt, left sock, jeans, and changing pad in the laundry tub to soak, we reminisced fondly about the old days. . .

J: (soft, hushed, reverent voice) "Wow, he hasn't had a poop like that since he was a baby."
L: (enthusiastically)"It was a blowout! Remember those?"
(Pause.)
J: "Ah, yes . . . . those were the days, weren't they?"
(J and L hold hands and gaze into each other's eyes.)

And just the other day we were saying how great it is that we don't need to worry about Jack's poop any more. We don't even need to wipe his bottom. A few months ago we were having dinner guests, and during a comfortably quiet lull in the conversation, whilst we were sipping our pinot in the candlelight, Jack yelled "Wipe my bottom!" at a decibel level fit for a referee. We still need to check to make sure he has flushed, but in general we seem to be almost entirely absent from his pooping experience.

This return to the "blowout" of infancy takes me down memory lane. I remember the time Jack, at 11 months, pooped in an empty box shortly after his bath. Very handy. Then there was the time he squirmed and kicked violently in mid diaper change, flinging a medium size turd somewhere----where? How could we lose a turd? Oh, there it was, behind the bureau. They are so much easier to pick up when they've had two days to dry up, don't you know. When Jack was 16 months old, he pooped in his bathwater. When he saw the long brown coil that had come out of him he screamed in terror. We could not get that child to sit down in the bathtub for about eight months after that.

And then there was the time I found a large fresh one in the sandbox. "Gee," I thought to myself in a Pooh-like way, "I don't remember seeing a large mammal defecating in the sandbox in the last 10 minutes." Then I observed that the heaviness of Will's diaper had gotten the better of the Velcro fasteners, and the diaper had slipped mostly through his shorts, some of the contents having escaped.

One time in grad school we had a contest to see who had gotten the most disgusting substance on their dissertation, and the father of a baby got the prize. People who don't have children tend to find baby poop disgusting, but I don't any more. I almost kind of miss the yellow newborn kind . . . . Someone please stop me.

FIFTEEN-MINUTE PAUSE

I'm back. I'm so inspired by this post that I just told a bedtime story about Sir Poopie Poopsalot, a poop inside Will who begged to be set free in the toilet, to spin downward in that beautiful spiral, which all poops deserve, not to be squashed in a diaper and thrown in the trash! Dignity for poops everywhere!! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Gurgle . . . gurgle.
(Loud flushing sound)

Housewife!

Apparently, from what I read and see in the media, the term "housewife" is being reclaimed by younger women. Check out this retro-ly hip shirt, for example. But a couple of weeks ago a doctor I had to see for my back called me a housewife. Coming from a fifty-something professional woman, it sounded harsh and insulting. I had explained "I'm home with my children now." and quickly she said, "Oh, so you're a housewife."

I'm not going to get my knickers in a twist about something like that. I have a doctorate. I am forty-six years old and I'm so fortunate to have even had two children over forty. Hell, I'm on the edge of menopause. It isn't worth my time to feel personally affronted. Yawn.

However, what interests me is the ways in which this stay-at-home-mother role is interpreted so differently by different generations. One friend of mine, a fifty-year-old anthropologist, upon hearing what I am doing with my life right now, said to me "You are your mother." Of course, she never know my mother, but I knew what she meant. Back to the 1950s, and all that. (There's a reason why those hip housewife t-shirts re-use the old graphics.) The multiple feminisms in our culture right now create a dissonance on this subject, and I feel it because my age puts me with late boomers, but my young children put me with women in their mid thirties or younger.

It seems women who are intentionally at home with their children for the long haul (I don't include myself in that) need some ideology to prop that up, be it conservative Christian values, natural living, attachment parenting, whatever. Other women will say "I'm home with my children for now" like I just did, even if they don't know when and how they'll get back into the work world. Because it's just very difficult to claim a "homemaker" status as your identity without some more transcendent values that justify doing that.

I do think we're feeling our way toward an enlightened domesticity, as the popularity of Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelsohn indicates. Jean Railla has a lovely essay about domesticity here. It's the introduction to her book Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec. The introduction is the best part of the book, as most people don't have any interest in knitting a bikini or making large volumes of limoncello. Anyway, the book seems to be a significant gesture towards redefining and reclaiming the domestic. Read Railla's intro and let me know what you think.

Of Beet Greens and Memory

In my oil painting class (yes, two art classes) I must finish my painting of the latest still life presented by our instructor. I choose the beets. They repose on the table, exposing their curling tails, the most charming part. "They look like mice," commented my neighbor in the class, but that's what I love about them. The problem is that between the class from two weeks ago and last week's class, the greens wilted to an ugly little heap. Not the luxuriant outgrowth of curly-edged leaves I had seen earlier. I might have known that would happen, but I guess in my mind the beets seemed eternal, like Keats' urn. So last week I painted them from memory. It was stressful and uninteresting to me. Part of my deprogramming from literary theory involves simple observation, and the object having decayed presents a problem. I'll carry on.

On another note, I bought Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried for my father for Christmas. He started it and "didn't care for it." He told me last night he prefers straight military history. The O'Brien stories, um, certainly aren't that. My father was an officer in Vietnam in 1959-60 and 1966-67. He reads many volumes of history every year, nothing on Vietnam. Behind this decision is a world of small and large denials: personal, generational, historical. At least I convinced my father to try reading it again, because I'm reading it for my book group in the summer, and "I thought it would be nice if we could read the same thing."