Notes from the Vacation Front

Maybe it wouldn't really BE a holiday weekend without a trip to the ER. Not one but two splinters worked their way into one little foot yesterday. They were from a dock that more or less lies in wait for people, its splinter-giving intent lurking darkly under all that summer sunshine, like a troll under a bridge.We tried getting the thing out ourselves but it hurt the child too much so the long wait at the ER it was.I didn't get to go on this trip but I heard about it: the guy who dropped a very heavy weight on his foot. The one who came in because his eyes were bothering him. The third one who arrivedwith such a bloody hand he was sure to need stitches.Our little victim did not need stitches and that seems a miracle to me, since it turned out he didn't have one splinter but two, one under the other, even deeper in the flesh. The ER doc had to dig a trench, use a retractor, the whole bit. Luckily though, his scalpel was sharp enough and the slice he made fine enough that the surgical site will knit up fine all on its ownThe child just can't swim for two days or get the foot wet at all which will be hard with all this water all around and the heat wave still churning away...Maybe I can get him to sing "Frère Jacques" for me again like he did that other time - until his baby sister staggered by and brought down the camera. Never a dull moment on vacation with the kiddies!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5AiXsKpOk

What Did YOUR Mom Do All Day?

I spent all weekend fixing things, or trying to, so today I'm dressing up as my mother and meeting my friends for coffee in the living room... My friends are all  imaginary so I won't have to clean up much.See how pleasant we all look? I'm the one with the dark hair.

• We may play a hand or two of cards after this.
• Or discuss silver polishing techniques.
• Or the best way to keep your girdle from riding up.
• Or if we feel really daring , maybe we'll talk about that new Magic Fingers gizmo you find these days at the Howard Johnson Inn...

The kids are playing stickball outside, we think. Johnny sassed his little brother earlier but we'll have to wait for Father to come home to deal with that since after all Father Knows Best. Or, er, Ward Cleaver maybe, the Beav's dad...ha ha.  A little irony for you guys today! In truth my hair has never looked as tame as the hair of the lady on the left.Here's how I really look today, a fresh two inches of rain having fallen on my little head  last night.Truth in advertising ha ha! And while I'm telling the truth I should admit I borrowed the photo on top from a Chock Full O'Nuts ad in a magazine.

Happy Birthday Annie

Happy birthday to my littler girl, born in a thunderstorm, imperiled from the 20th week in utero on and then suddenly here, thank God ,thank God!This was Annie, who sucked her thumb in secret for years in the cloak room of the Children's Own School.Annie, who befriended the ugliest wrecks of dolls, giving them fancy names and making them costumes so they could compete in her specially declared Doll Olympics in that steamy summer of '88.Annie, who, when her little brother came, was heartbroken  briefly yes and seen crying in every video I took for the first three months of that new baby's life.  But Annie, who then devoted herself entirely  to his care, abandoning her own room to sleep on the floor under the desk in his room.To keep him company, she said.Annie, who made all his fun.Annie, who, come to think of it, made a whole lot of our fun , for all the lucky years when she lived in our house.This is Annie above,  making her nephew David's fun one beautiful day last September, with just a box of crayons and her warmth.And these are the iris, which  bloom every year on her birthday.Here's to you Annie Payne, and to many returns of this day!

Happy Birthday Fatty

This in honor of the recent birthday of my youngest, seen here in Fifth Grade, impersonating America's tubbiest President, William Howard Taft.For a while there, we were in danger of some real solemnity in this family; of growing downright grave what with practicing the quieter virtues. We had two children at first, both females, and I can tell you we all floated along on a great river of calm.Even when a third child had come and was, of all things, a boy, we still moved with tranquility, and for a while the baby seemed to do so too - until the day at about 12 months old when he stood up in his crib and began hollering to his stuffed animals. A certain vividness surfaced for us all then; and quiet understatement went down for the third time.This little boy’s grandmother had been a wise-guy and we all loved that about her. She died when this third child was only three so he doesn’t remember her.But I found myself calling my sister not much more than a year after her death. “I know this sounds weird, but I think Mom’s back!" is what I told her. Because this third child was a happy little wise-guy himself, and brought to the once-peaceful supper table of family life a level of hilarity we never would have predicted.He fancied toilet plungers as a First Grader, and when, at the hardware store, he saw a display of very small ones, he cried out with joy and began promptly applying them, with great sucking sounds, to his ears, mouth, and bare tummy. He asked for half a dozen for his birthday.He told us in Fourth Grade that the teacher said they would need string for that night’s homework.“What if we have no string?” he asked her. “Use dental floss,” she replied, setting herself up for it. “I can’t,” he answered with mock-sadness. “My family doesn’t believe in oral hygiene.”We dreaded the next parent-teacher conference.Around this same time, he got a new jacket imprinted, as these jackets often are, with our town’s name. The nice man helping us pointed out that with so many jackets alike, it was a good idea to have his name stitched on the sleeve.“OK!” he agreed readily  “Only have it say ‘Fatty,' he added, and three grownups could not talk him out of it.At this point he was four foot eight inches tall and weighed 72 pounds. Every spring at his yearly checkup, the doctor would say, “Due for a growth spurt soon!' And every year he would look ironically over at me.But while we awaited this famous growth spurt, we had some dandy fun.I recall the time he pulled some hair our of my hairbrush, glued it to his bare chest, sauntered into the living room and said in a theatrically deepened voice, “Dad, I’d like to use the car tonight.”When he finally turned 11^th, I remember we got him everything but more toilet plungers – and also a cake reading “Happy Birthday, Fatty.”Of course he insisted on being the one to light its million candles; then rushed into the darkened next room and made us march in with it, singing.“What did you wish?” one of his sisters asked after he blew out the candles.He wouldn’t say - some things are serious, after all - but I knew what I wished: that night. I wished we could rewind the eleven years and run them clear through again.And the 11 years that followed them too. Ah, those years too.

Life With Young Children

The fact that today is the birthday of my third and youngest child  who was not yet in the world until his sisters were five and seven, has me remembering back to the fun we had in the years raising our kids, and the sense of peace I still feel when I am among them... For In a family, you are known. You don't have to pretend or explain. They take you as they find you - even if they do take frequent joy in mocking youOn certain nights, around the supper table, one of our kids would suddenly say, "OK, let's switch roles. You be Mom, you be Dad," etc.  Then a fast improv would follow.Once, I drew the then-13-year-old; swung my hair over one eye and said, "I need money, need a ride, I need money, I need a ride..."This youngest, the then-five-year-old whose birthday it is today, once acted out his father for us in this game. He puffed out his  tummy, lay down on the floor and began snoring with a newspaper over his face.Our then ten-year-old then 'did' me. "Come to dinner, people!", she shrieked. "Come eat your dinner before I throw it in the yard!"It's instructive to watch yourself thus parodied.And there's never a dull moment, just generally in a family, because in a family, everyone comes home with tales of pain and triumph - and with funny stories too.That then-kindergartner, being new to the world, had the most stories: The story about the little girl in his class who squeezed her eyes shut and clasped her hands as if in prayer every day when she recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Or the tale of the older boy who told him he had his pants on backwards. "I can't understand it," I remember our little guy saying. " I put them on this morning and they were frontwards! Sometimes I put one pair of underpants and find out later I have  two pairs on. One day I put on a pair and looked later and they were gone!""You talk a lot," one of his older sisters observed to him mildly, after ten straight minutes of this monologue."I can't help it," he said earnestly. "School is a strong thing."School sure is a strong thing. And work is a strong thing too. We all go out each day to face strong things.I remember how the morning would come and one alarm after another would go off in this house. The sound of five showers would drum in the bathroom. Coffee would be gulped, cereal smeared and sprinkled around. Then there'd be a mad scramble to find shoes.Now too there are those same scenarios in households the over world.  Folks go out into their day and return for supper, glad to be back home.Back in the years I am thinking of now, when the children were asleep at last, we two tired parents would make the rounds and collecting stray socks. We would kiss their sleeping faces and they smelled so good; like apples, and geraniums, and fresh-baked dough.We knew that one day these children would be gone from us, and dinner would be a  far quieter affair.We were right there for sure.But today, on the birthday of our youngest who is up in his 20s by now,  I'm reminded again of how much their dad and I have loved them all; and how much they have made us smile.

Turns Out You Really DON'T Need Big Muscles

It’s been a while since someone asked me to swordfight and play basketball but I got to do both Sunday afternoon. Lucky thing I didn’t have pointy high heels and an Easter bonnet on!This was with little David, my second grandson, who is five.The shooting hoops was his idea. He said I’d probably be ok at it even though I didn’t have big muscles. He pointed out that John, seen above here taking a splinter out of David’s finger last summer, doesn’t have big muscles and yet he’s good at everything. (Funny idea of not big muscles eh?)As it turned out, I proved not to be so great at the basketball part. Plus then the little boy's grandpa came out and sunk a few while holding a beer in one hand just to show he still could. (I knew the guy played varsity basketball in high school but the only evidence of all that I’ve ever seen is the tiny Medford High School satin shorts that still sleep in his bottom drawer. I didn’t know him then.)But never mind, because I was good at the sword-fighting which was my idea in the sense that I brought the swords. Light sabers they were really, newly purchased and brought to this Easter celebration just in case 'Somebody' needed a little more exercise.What I didn’t know; what I learned from little David with his cute lisp is that sword fighting is only really cool if you keep leaping up onto stone walls and back down again. That I could have done all day.Here’s how little David looks these days, ready for anything, as you can see.And here’s how I looked Sunday, just heading back outside for the re-match he challenged me too. Ah spring!

We'll Always Have Paris: On Hanging In

What Mindy Kaling says about her parents' marriage is all well and good but are WE pals, the many rest-of-us coupled up and marching together in life? Based on my experience, here’s how you can tell:You’re pals if you started married life thinking it was funny to throw cups of cold water from the bathroom sink over the shower curtain and onto your spouse, all nice and toasty and soaped up in there.

You’re pals if, even decades later, you both still laugh when one of you reaches for the drinking cup while the other is just stepping into the shower

The two of you are pals if you say nothing about the fact that a CERTAIN PERSON in the marriage never, ever wipes off the sink after shaving, leaving puddles that drip down to leave white marks on that nice wooden vanity you had to really stretch to buy.  (You used to say plenty about this habit, but your remarks had no effect so you gave up. “Pick your battles,” wise older souls have told you all along and now you get what that means.You’re pals if that person says nothing about the fact that for some reason you can no longer cook a meal without opening all the doors to the kitchen cabinets and then leaving them open. (It’s a mystery why you do this. “Creative ferment?” you try telling your spouse, who just gives you that studiedly neutral look on seeing them and before quietly going around shutting them all.You’re pals - and you can stay pals - if you can master this neutral look, as it is far safer than a smile, which can be seen as a smirk, or a gloat, or what it usually is: the ill-fitting mask for a scowl.In fact in the name of marital accord you must ban many looks, from the I-Told-You-So look to the I’m-a-Saint-For Putting-Up-With-You look. Facial expressions like these send malevolent veils out into air that twist and curl and choke off all good will in a marriage.Kaling says no, she never did see her parents gazing into one another’s faces - unless perhaps her mom was administering drops to her dad’s eyes. She says gazing isn’t necessary when you are pals and I think she's right. If you hang in long enough to become pals you can tell how the other one’s day has been, just at a glance.When I first got married, my mom started referring to my husband as ‘Silent Sam,’ as a joke, just because, unlike the rest of us in the family, he didn’t feel the need to talk until his listeners all lapsed into comas. Maybe I too wished he talked more at first, but after a time I began to ‘get’ him.I remember thinking he didn’t care that much for our little cat - until after she went missing for several days. Then one morning she suddenly popped out of the bushes. “Here she is!” he cried from where he stood in our driveway and just for a second I saw his knees buckle with relief.I think Mindy's exactly right: Spend enough time living right close to people and you can’t help starting to love them . And gazing and pretty speeches hardly come in to it at all.Oh and that's us, above . November of 2004, Paris. Gooood time!

Karma

I'm sick now too. First it was a tickle in my throat and then a rumble in my chest, like the sound from the engine room on the Queen Mary. This id what I get for making light of my man's illness.I went to bed the other night feeling as bleak as bleak can be, sleeping next to my dead Pope of a husband who had not uttered more than 12 words to me in 24 hours. (That extended whine is here.) But then, the next morning I woke to glory all around me: this sunlight in this room at January’s end. (David's reclining body in the foreground.)If only I had not, over the last few nights, curled up in the same small nest of bedding as a person who lay spouting like a whale – every cough and sneeze flying straight up into the air and settling in a fine mist all around me.By evening I had the headache too, and in spite of the 16 kinds of cold medications I took, it was excruciating. In the night I was sure that some evil force had got hold of the plastic-bag-like membrane in which the brain is suspended and was trying to pull the whole thing out through my ear.This is what I get for making Weekend at Bernie’s style jokes about poor David. It's my ‘goin’ around comin’ on around for sure.I had a flu shot back in October so whatever this is it’s presumably not the flu. David, however, did NOT have a flu shot and so presumably does have the flu.Anyway he’s still pretty miserable. I fetch him tea and toast, but he doesn't care about eating. Last night we tried to grab a meal out with our girl Annie but he couldn't even bring himself to have a drink. (what, no alcohol?!) He’s still got that thousand-yard stare, though and now it’s morning again too.And now we're home again our workday world with the Poop-Doggy-Dog-Walkers filing past outside our windows, sigh.I wish we had the view above that we had Sunday morning when we were up north. It sure did raise our spirits, sick or no. But the world these last few days is wrapped in fog and rain - and we're just here exchanging droplets. :-(

Daughters & Their Mums

On the last flight I took I found myself sitting down next to a girl with a smile bigger than a whole pack of Chiclets.It wasn’t for me, that smile.It was directed toward her phone, where a text message, or a Facebook update or perhaps even a YouTube clip had her enraptured.Anyway, she didn’t speak to me; she scarcely saw me.Anyway, she didn’t speak to me; she scarcely saw me. That’s part of the etiquette on planes these days, what with the seats built so close your knees are practically kissing the knees of the people beside you. Speak too readily to your seatmates and Lord knows what might happen. You could find yourself listening to them for hours, as they delightedly recite the highlights from every chapter of their lives.So the two of us maintained a courteous silence, which was fine with me. Our body language was amiable enough.While she smiled away at her phone I got busy arranging things in my own mouse-sized allotment of space: placing my water bottle here, my planner there, my carry-on with its several gadgets and chargers tucked safely under my feet down here.When the flight attendant came by one last time before takeoff, my seatmate looked up and addressed him with her big wide smile.“Can I move?” she asked. “I want to sit with my mother.”“Ah no, you can’t. We’ve just pushed back from the gate.”“But she’s right back there. And there IS an empty seat.”He sighed. “You can’t now but which one is she?”She only indicated with a toss of her head. She didn’t even turn around.“The one with the hair and the glasses,” she said.That’s when I started to smile. In fact, I laughed out loud.“Spoken like all daughters everywhere!” I hooted.She looked at me for one beat. Two beats. Was she offended? Perplexed? Then she laughed too. I think we both knew that all mothers are, at certain times, a source of embarrassment to their children.Maybe she laughed because she was acknowledging this truth. Maybe she suddenly heard herself and realized what she was suggesting by her remark: Namely that of all the people on the plane no one else had hair and no one else wore glasses. Or that of those that did in fact have hair and wear glasses, none did so in the same wildly conspicuous way that her mother was doing.Maybe she laughed because she saw she saw, even if only briefly, that at some point not so far in the future her own daughter would be indicating with the same toss of her head, “THAT one. My mother is THAT embarrassing one over there.”Anyway, we had the laugh.  Then ten minutes later, the Fasten Seat Belts sign went off and she moved back and sat in the place she had so badly wanted to sit, near the back of the plane by her mum.

Happy Sunday! Stay Out of the Malls

Happy Sunday! Stay away from the malls, or else you'll sit in your car for an hour just trying to get within a mile of the place.Stay home and do old-time Sunday things.Read the funnies.Put a roast in the oven, which is really an old-time thing. (Write in if you're under 40 and you don't recognize words such as 'roast' or 'oven'. We have a little pamphlet we can send you."Watch old movies while filling out the old holiday card. Yesterday I caught portions of Titanic, The Dream Team and The Bone Collector, all on my best friend HBO, while writing warm personal notes on 200 holiday cards.Take a walk.Light a candle when the sun starts to lower, which it does around here at like twenty past twelve in the afternoon.Dig out those footed pj's.Breathe.Go to bed early.You're not in charge of as much as you think you are; God can probably handle the sunrise tomorrow. 

Unfit for the Job?

I had a comment on my blog about humor yesterday. Brian from New York wrote, "I’m curious: were you funny that way with your own kids or did you have to play the straight serious parent all the time?  I always used the grownup talking silly thing with all my friends’ kids and my assorted nephews and nieces. I was wildly popular with the under 10 set.. But mostly because they didn’t expect it from a “grownup”. They’re so used to their parents setting a good example."I’ll answer this in the simplest way I know: I’m huge with the Fourth Grade.In other words yes, I think I was funny with my kids. The youngest one in particular liked a good laugh. He and I were always hiding behind the doors on each other. Only we didn’t ever  jump out and scream the way Peter Sellers’s manservant used to do in the old Pink Panther movies. We did something much worse:Say one of us  was coming out of the master bathroom whose door opens outward and pushes back flat against the door to the bedroom that bathroom is in. It would swing out, bam! and hit the wall of the bedroom next to the bureau - unless the other person was standing behind it. Just standing there looking straight ahead and sort of crazed in a Tony-Perkins-as-Norman-Bates kind of way.It wasn’t that you could see the person. The person was behind the door.  What you could so was feel the person.Instead of the door banging smartly against the wall and thus making a sound,  the person opening it would feel something…  something sort of soft... and squishy .... and resistant, that something being the body of the lurker.It made the door-opener shout way louder than s/he would have if the person had pounced, screaming like a banshee; yell so loud the one waiting behind the door would also yell .The door opener never learned.Sigh.  It was a great game and one we never tired of. All through his Sixth Grade year one or the other of us was screaming.I guess this doesn’t really make me seem so much like a funny mom as a slightly deranged one with a kid to match. Let’s get a visual about the contagion of fear. Let’s close with the famous scene from  E.T. which I like anyway since I look kind of like the little alien these days, especially when I dress up to go to meetin’ in my purse and bonnet.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbhWftjWrEE]

Call Me Miss Hannigan

Wow, tough coupla days. Had two hours sleep Saturday night and entertained all day Sunday. Our little grandsons slept over so we could all celebrate a certain landmark birthday of this former boy seen below, who came into our lives back when David’s hair was almost black and mine floated above my head in classic 80s fashion.He and his bride took the whole family out to dinner at a fancy steakhouse Saturday night.I had hired a team of big guys from this pool of fun guys to babysit the little guys while we were gone and that was a great success. Only thing is when we came back at 9pm we saw the children were both in the same tiny bed.“This is unsustainable!” I said. “Leave them be,” David said.  And so into our own bed we got - and lay there wide awake for houes. (I couldn’t sleep so he couldn’t sleep so I couldn’t sleep: you know how that goes.) Then, sure enough, at 3:45 the little one woke with a cry. The quarters were just too close.David had gone to the living room sofa by then so I put the child in bed next to me but it seems the poor older brother remained awake until sun-up. He wrote a series of plaintive notes that made me feel like Miss Hannigan herself from Little Orphan Annie. Poor child! "What time is it TT?" said one in his little-boy spelling. Sweetheart that he is, he didn't feel he should just come wake us. By 6 though I was up with them both, cooking bacon, mailing toast down into the toaster's little letter slot, mixing cocoa... And it was all fine - until the little one said he was cold.Extra clothes didn’t help.Neither did a hot bath, even with my awesome foam blocks that stick to the sides of the tub.  By 11, having given up on the church plan I had long nurtured – it was the much-anticipated day for the Blessing  of the Animals – he and I were leaning feebly against each other coloring a fuzzy poster while his older brother was deep into his sixth hour of the Disney Channel though at his house he can watch only two hour of TV, and that only on weekends.What could we do? One of us had a fever and everyone else was exhausted. The day picked up when the rest of family arrived including the birthday boy  and his parents and the world of great food that they brought.We ate. We watched football. We even played a little baseball out back. It was a fine day, in sum, but I’m STILL paying the price: I actually fell asleep while ironing last night and that is one good trick.  And even now, on this Wednesday morning, I keep looking at the foam blocks the little one tried so feebly to have fun with and wish I had them both back with us to do a better job grandma'ing. Then I go and have another nap.

The Man is a Prince: He Does the Dog

The phrase ‘the second shift’ refers to that whole second workday most women put in after they get home from their real jobs. I read a recently that nowadays  men are doing just as much around the house as their wives.  I certainly hope this is true.They sure weren’t when Arlie Hochschild spent eight straight years conducting the research for her book The Second Shift. Observing daily life in the homes of 50 working couples with children, she found that only 20% of American men shared the extra work of chores and childcare while women put in an average of 15 hours a week on those tasks,  which add up to an entire month of 24-hour days. You could resent the heck out of your spouse living this way, but what many women do is create a 'story'  that allows them to keep resentment at bay. One woman named Nancy explained that her husband Evan 'did' the downstairs while she did  the upstairs - only in their house doing the upstairs meant doing all the work relating to the kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms and bathrooms, while Evan, for his part, handled the garage.Oh, and the dog. He did the dog.But this  way of framing things allowed Nancy to think of Evan as pulling his weight. When asked by Hochschild to reflect on this, Evan said, “We don’t keep count of who does what,” quickly adding, “Whoever gets home first starts the dinner,” a statement which did not in any way line up with what Hochschild saw as a frequent visitor.This was just their ‘story’, the ‘family myth’ as she calls it that they had devised to cover up the imbalance. “The truth was, Nancy made the dinner.”Other husbands in her survey had stories of their own. One said, with a perfectly straight face, that he made all the pies."But I was brought up to do housework,” explained poor Nancy, in charge of every room in the house. “Evan wasn’t.”And there's the crux of it right there. As Hochschild puts it, “the female culture has shifted more rapidly than the male culture, and the image of the go-get-‘em woman has yet to be matched by the image of the let’s-take-care-of-the-kids-together man.”  Or as Gloria Steinem said a while ago to a standing-room-only crowd of fellow Smith College graduates, “The problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, "How can I combine career and family?"The day will come though, I feel sure - provided we work hard on raising up strong  and fair- minded little girls  - AND  get them the heck away from all that appalling sex-kitten apparel they’re showing these days in the stores.Tomorrow I won't be so crotchety, I promise. :-)

"Give That Woman a Medal"

I have a new friend who’s always writing letters to the editor about what kind of Hell the country is headed for now. I find I agree with a lot of what he says though I lack his edge, meaning the anger that allows him to fire off searing missives to every paper in the county.He sent me one, is how we met.He thought I was an on-staff journalist in whatever paper it is where he reads my column each week; he didn’t know I was one of those slacker freelancers who are half the time writing from a bed piled high with half-eaten bagels, orange peels and a doting housepet or two.Anyway he knows what I do now. And this is what  he had to say regarding Tuesday’s post about the woman who used extreme measures to get her sons and husband to pitch in with the tasks of daily life:

"Every household is as different as every country," he began. "My mother had 11 children.  She cleaned, cooked, did everything mother always did then, including going down cellar every morning to get the coal for the stove, for heating  the house, for cooking. My two oldest sisters would do the dishes.... SOMETIMES. My two oldest brothers did nothing as far as I can remember. Nobody had chores except…. my mother! No sense talking about my father the gambler. (He lost OUR shirts as well as his own!)"

He went on to say that when the 11 grew up and left home they did finally become conscious of what they should have been doing. His feeling: they just didn’t know before: “We didn’t know because nobody told us and since no one told us what to do, it was left  to our housekeeper/cleaning-woman/mother to do everything. We did all go to work at 16 to support the old man’s habits and addictions. Finishing high school was out of the question. ‘ Education’ was not a word we heard; college was a disease. "So give an A+ to that lady you wrote about in your column,” he ended by saying. “She deserves a medal!”Again you can read here  about the method of 'that lady' whose best move in my book getting rid of all the old dishes and bowls and cups and cutlery and giving each of family member his own small color-coded set.  That way if one ran out of his color he couldn’t poach the other guy’s without being exposed. Genius, no? She also stopped washing their clothes unless she jolly well felt like it.When our kids lived here I started every day at 5am with a load or two of wash. We’d been poor enough so that having a washer and drier in the home still seemed to me like the height of luxury so I didn't mind Dishes though? Dishes are a whole other thing.If I lived with a guy who left his dishes around or kicked off his socks and walked away from them I don’t know what I’d do. Luckily, Old Dave is great around the house, though we did have some bumpy times early in the marriage. (The man’s mother used to IRON HIS UNDERPANTS. AND THEY WERE BRIEFS!)Women have memories like elephants so I have a thousand stories about the Chore Wars but tell ya what: I'd much rather hear how others divvy up the jobs.  Send an email if you're shy about posting a comment publicly and let's see what we've come up with among us over the years.  

Hi-Def Birthday

I had a birthday and got an actual TV as a present; went and ordered it Friday and here it came last night. It’s for the kitchen, to help me get through the next 40 years of meal prep. The delivery guys tromped in and set it up when we were all digging into Chinese take-out. “This is so exciting!” our visiting First Grader kept saying to them. “Sure is, Sport!” said the really muscular one in the watch cap and earring. They had been going since 6 o'clock that morning they said and here it was 13 hours later - and they still had two more deliveries. They took the old 1985 set and boy was I glad to see it go. It made me feel like I was already on my deathbed the way I could never get it loud enough; the way it was slowly dimming the picture down to cocktail-lounge level all the time.My daughter-in-law Chris programmed the sleek new baby and that was a present right there.  Programmed it, set up the DVD player, the VHS player, the Super Nintendo from 1991 which brought the two TV guys to the brink of nostalgic tears. (Please no laughing at my ancient technologies!) Chris and Carrie gave me a gorgeous scarf, Annie gave me some tall rubber boots that are cool and practical which I wore all day today right in the house and the little guys made me a hand-lettered card that looks like a ransom note. David went to two different Chinese takeout places to satisfy everyone’s whims and here I am the morning after in my awesome boots and my scarf ready to cook up a storm in front of a televised image so sharp and clear all the men on the screen look like they need to quick go shave again before the paparazzi show up and paste their poor ruined faces all over the news.Here's one of them now, a less ruined specimen than some. And under him, well, that's  me in my new boots and my latest dye job . I never got dressed the whole day. :-)

A Very Very Very Fine House

The words to this old Crosby Stills &  Nash song keep singing themselves in my head every minute here at this new-baby house where Annie and I have come to help.  This is Annie and not mother Sooz here holding baby Peter but we had both forgotten what it’s like in such a house, where it's all so hushed and still. One minute we're talking and leafing through magazines and the next we're all out cold. Even when we first arrived late Thursday night there was that feeling, the child reposing in his reclining baby rickshaw atop a coffee table Kevin made back in his college days and would certainly throw away now if Susie hadn’t pronounced it good. (Look what it says though Mum!” (Susie has always called me Mum.) “It says all this over here is the living room, while all that” - and she gestures to a table six feet away - “is the dining room!”It’s a sizeable room if a tad small for 5 people and 3 pets to be spending days at a stretch but who would want to be anywhere else with that new-baby fairy dust still dancing in the air? In this moment here captured the people are just hanging out, the cats have just stepped down from their padded high-rise, the famous coffee table is acting in its key room-dividing role and the mystified but noble Bosco is keeping watch over all.Now click on this performance of a great old song of praise to domestic joy and imagine that a BABY is speaking the lyrics: (Come to me now/And rest your head for just five minutes/ Everything is good./Staring at the fire/For hours and hours/While I listen to you/Play your love songs/All night long for me/Only for me. Ah![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtJWJe_K_w]

The Kids are Reading My Diary Part Two

So far only my oldest kid has begun reading the 30-volume diary I offered them all last week. She's really enjoying 1980, she says. She loves meeting our whole same cast of characters younger. It's how we all felt 20 years after the first Star Wars when all of a sudden here came a prequel with this hot Obi Wan Kenobi all  young and wrinkle-free. Or like when Godfather Two came out and instead of Mumbles Marlon as the Don  we had Bobby DeNiro, fresh from his bad-boy role in “Taxi Driver.”I know they're a tad worried about what they might learn there but they shouldn’t be. Everything I was ever writing I was writing for them, before I even met them or saw them in my dreams.Plus there's no whining in these volumes - except maybe about the time their dad just went to CVS for my birthday and got me jumper cables and a can of 3-in-1 Oil. I still remember sitting on the back stairs at midnight that night, sobbing and pulling my own hair and ah the drama of the young!  Still, how would any young mother react when her husband said in the course of the fight that really it was silly to make a big deal of birthdays?Today I'd be able to see that he was just feeling defensive and on the ropes.  Also today if he said something like that I’d laugh right out loud and quick as a wink reach into my handy memory-pack for some nice vintage example of his own emotional vulnerability. Then he'd laugh too.  We’re such pals now we've grown almost fond of one another's foibles and blind spots.So “Relax,” I would say to my kids.  “The diaries are just a series of funny tales with you guys at the center” And also, “Remember when you were small and it was just us five,  in that little 'house' we called our family? Remember a few years down the road when we began adding 'rooms' to that metaphorical house and the family started really growing?”Yeah. I'd say that. And I'll say to you guys now that when I look at these lively young faces above and below all I can think is I wish I had written down more.

They All Came Home

The weekend came and brought with it our kids, some sleepy from the car ride (left) some full of energy: This below is Annie set to unload a thousand grocery bags and make her famous from-total-scratch homemade gnocchi for us.Annie brought with her the much-missed Michael who bused to Boston through Friday night’s tempest to get to us from Brooklyn.“She’s taking pictures again," Annie said to him half under her breath but I think maybe Mike could see that.

(Maintenance man in background ha ha)

Anyhow we got right to work. Mike handed out bats….....we got a bucket o’ balls, and  just generally spent the rest of the day swingin' for the fences, big and little guys alike.

Week Off

What's a seagull doing 100 miles inland on the edge of the White Mountains? Answer: Looking for bites of your Monkey Bread. Maybe bites of you. The Monkey Bread was what our girl Annie made over the weekend, along with the ribs, the mashed potatoes, the poached salmon, the crème anglaise, the special berries, the chocolate cake and on and on. You wouldn’t call it camp cooking exactly; you wouldn’t call it Vacation Fun For Annie either but what’re you gonna do with a chef in the family, lock her out of the kitchen? Tell her she can’t use her creative gifts? What cads would do that to a daughter?She brought that sugary bread out on the dock yesterday where Old Dave and I were hanging out, resting our bones and watching Those Born Well After Us jump in the water and swim out to the raft. Some nosed around in kayaks, though I wasn’t one of them. Some kept an eye on the noisy renters drinking their brains out two docks over. I was one of them; I love the way people don't realize how far their voices carry over water.This was our family who at day’s end packed up and were gone, leaving Pops and me to patrol for tiny life-jackets and brood upon the fate of the red-ant nest under the big pine. “But won’t you be bored up here all by yourselves?” asked one right as he was leaving.Bored? When we have each other, and Scuttle, and the rest of Annie’s cooking? It’s our one little five-day vacation. I think we'll find a way to fill the time!

Thoughts for the Day

Thoughts For the Day: Turns out I don’t like turkey all that much. (I know: how many of us feel that way today right?) ALSO I am so glad  I didn’t have to cook again this year. Ever since our younger daughter Annie went to culinary school we’ve had a pretty easy time of it on the holidays. AND NOW all that’s left is the ride home, since, like a zillion other Americans, I too face a commute to get back to my workday life. I’m riding with our older daughter Carrie and the two little boys five and two, along with our old gray cat Abe who will sing like Luciano Pavarotti himself for the whole hundred-mile drive if I make him sit in the dread carrier, which is actually an entire rabbit hutch with a doggy bed inside it that I patched together out of pure mother-love and because I am a saint. To Abe though it’s prison pure and simple and for there to peace in the car at all I'll have to hold him in my lap while he drives his daggery nails into my thighs . I'll also probably have to sit in back between the two kiddie car seats because how can I sit in front with my back to those two cuties? This means that like the last time we drove with me in the middle they'll probably reach their little fingers inside the armholes of my shirt and shake hands with each other someplace in the vicinity of that cute little bow on my Bali bra.The Old Ball 'n Chain, meanwhile, will burn brush 'til it gets dark then drive home in a car free of molestation-by-mammals and we'll converge there at around 6 when - what else? we'll all go out for burgers before putting our youngest, Mike. on the train to NYC. Yay  family life!