Alphabridge

Z is for Zone

2008-12-18T13:59:00.000-08:00

Mike calls it a flow state. I sit down at the computer to waste a few minutes playing a game (usually a stupid game, like Minesweeper or Freecell) and then, suddenly, it's 4 hours later. Or, with Law and Order reruns on in the background, I do some machine quilting and realize, looking up, that I'm 3 episodes later. Genealogy on the computer does this to me these days. So does knitting.

Knitting is interesting because at this point, the pattern I'm working on requires no reference materials. I know where I am and what the next stitch is, all the way across. So I can pay attention to other things that don't require my hands. Sometimes this is TV or a movie. Last night, though, it was nothing. I was tired, I realized in a panic I was a long way from finishing this project with only a week to go, and downstairs felt so far away (where the TV is). So I went to bed with the knitting. Propped myself up with pillows and went at it.

When there's nothing else to pay attention to--the book I was reading wouldn't stay open to a page and I was left with nothing focus on--other things start bubbling up. First, a to-do list. A rather far-reaching to-do that included Christmas items, winter preparations, house stuff, church stuff, groceries. I didn't write any of it down and now, 18 hours later, it's all gone again.

After this list of many lists came the nagging feeling that I'm not doing enough to fulfill my obligations and promises as a Benedictine oblate. This is probably true, but, really, I need to give myself a break. So then, for a few rows, I thought about my favorite psalm and then moved on to a few passages in Sirach.

I thought about kids and Christmas and what's coming up in the next week--not a to-do list as much as "remember" list. Then I hashed out Sophia's bedtime separation anxiety that has not subsided with time like I was hoping it would 2 years ago.

Thought about the things I need to write down on a birth plan--not that I have a birth plan exactly, since many decisions have been made for me or by me and the doctor already. But I do have a post-birth list. Play-acted my way through that conversation with my doctor, which is silly because he's agreed to every single thing I've said so far. It was the last doctor I had to fight.

Reminded myself, starting over at the corner, that the crib needed its platform raised and the whole thing moved over next to the bed before we enter that last few weeks of pregnancy and forget. Thought about a car seat, which we still don't have.

Rolled baby's name over in my head a few times. Thought about how it would look in print and in cursive. Made sure, double and triple sure, that his initials do not spell out either an obscenity or an abbreviation of something bad. So far, my google searches have only produced Lutheran church women's organizations, so I think I'm safe.

Tried not to worry about this upcoming surgery and epidural and blood loss. Wondered in vain if I should have had folks I know who have A-positive blood types donate for me, although the doctor has reassured me that this shouldn't repeat. And that was the point that I looked at the clock, because once I get into a downward spiral of worry, there's no turning back to hapy little lists and ruminations. I'm done, unless I turn the radio on and wake Mike up. Or go downstairs and watch reruns. But the bed is soft and Mike needs his sleep this week. The knitting goes back into the bag. Only an hour has passed this time, but I need to stop.

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That's it, friends. I did A to Z four times, and I think that's all I have in me. Mostly because many of the things I say here could be said just as well on South City Musings. Which I suggest, obviously, to those who still want to read what I have to say. SCM is more local in feel--my neighbors, parish, kids, family show up more often. And there's always Conlocutio, while the year lasts (I think I'm about a fifth of the way through). But this one ends here....

Y is for Yule Log

2008-12-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

It was the last day before Christmas break. I was in third grade and ten minutes before school let out, they announced that I'd won a cake in the raffle. I was the last name chosen, and my grandfather was already there to pick me up, since my mom was still in the hospital with newborn Bevin. So we went over to the cafeteria and picked up the last cake, which wasn't a third grader-friendly style of cake. No colored frosting, no sprinkles, nothing that looked like a cake my mother would make. It was brown, but I instinctively knew it wasn't chocolate. It was probably fabricated in a jelly roll pan and then rolled up into a log shape. It was coated with a donut-like frosting, clear glaze. But whatever. I had a backpack filled with hershey kisses and candy canes.

We--my grandfather, my brother Ian, and I--got into the Crown Victoria and drove back to my grandparents' house in South County. My grandmother named the cake a "yule log" and cut it open. It was a spiral, like a jelly roll, but filled with nuts, chocolate chips, raisins, and some kind of binding agent like a fruit frosting, all rolled up in a spice cake. I remember her giving me one bite and the declaration of "I don't think I like it," which was about as adamant as I got about anything. I remember saying the same thing about my dad's bourbon-injected fruitcake that same year. And about bourbon a few years later, for that matter.

The adults ate that cake up. These days, I probably would too. But I like my dad's fruit cake. And bourbon. Things change.

X is for Xmas

2008-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

My mother is offended by using X to stand for "Christ" in Christmas. Since I used XC as an abbreviation for Christ all through high school theology courses and college, it doesn't bother me so much. Not enough to get up in arms about, and definitely not enough to think I shouldn't use it for "X is for."

Christmas season started early this year, but seems shorter somehow than usual. Thanksgiving was late, Advent was early, and I can't turn my head because an inner ear infection is playing carnival fun house games with my balance. But Sunday, we went out in the sleet and flurries to cut down a Christmas tree with my parents, and then last night, while I lay on the couch trying not to think of a Tilt-A-Whirl, Mike and the girls decorated the tree.

This drove me almost insane. I guess I didn't realize how involved I was with Christmas preparation. When I say "involved," I really mean "in complete and total control." Several times I had to just shut my eyes and bury my face under the denim blanket as Sophia skipped around the tree with a glass ornament in her hand that dates to the 1940s. Maeve put all her ornaments pretty much on two branches. And everything is bare from 4 feet on up. But Mike didn't get out all the ornaments--I can finish it tomorrow when the girls are at school and try to even things out. In the end, the girls can say they decorated the tree.

I remember 8 years ago my pastor at the time saying the CS Lewis once wrote that pain is God's megaphone. I haven't fact-checked that, but it stayed with me. Not that I believe God punishes us by giving us disease or heartache or complicated lives, but I have often found that when plans change for negative reasons (disease, heartache, complicated lives), it quiets me down eventually and makes me take stock.

There is no way on earth everything is going to get done this Advent, this Christmas. Last night drove that home for me. Not only was I queasy and wanted to get off the ship, but I'm 33 weeks pregnant. I cannot be balanced on a chair in the front windows putting up Christmas lights this year. If Christmas presents can't be purchased online, they aren't going to happen this year. I'm thinking cut-out sugar cookies are beyond my attention span and stamina this year.

And, not related to Christmas, but I can't attend the trial in Columbia this year--this week--where my sister may or may not have to testify against the police officer who killed her friend in 2004. This one bothers me more than candy cane cookies and wrapping gifts and making things just so. This one feels like a failure to me. But it can't be helped. I can barely make it up the stairs--there's no way I could drive to Columbia and sleep on my sister's couch and do what I did last time. Perhaps there's not as much of a need. It's a retrial, and the girls have gone through this once before, successfully. All their friends are scattered around the country and have rebuilt their lives with new support systems. They don't need me to cook them dinner and fill them in on trial details while they wait in the vestibule to testify. My life, it turns out, is far more complicated now than it was in May 2005 when Rios was convicted the first time. What was I going to do, have Sophia go home with friends every day this week? Send Maeve to my mother-in-law's house? My last parish council meeting is this week; I'm helping a neighbor out with babysitting tomorrow. Atrium is Thursday. Sophia's recital is Saturday afternoon. Someone else has to fill that role this time--if it needs filling at all.

So I have to cling to what is most essential this year. I cannot be all things to all people, but I can make sure we have an advent wreath. I can take care of the Kris Kringle situation on the block between our kids and others. I can keep the bathroom and the kitchen clean. I can play Christmas music non-stop and think before I speak to my husband, my children, my family, my friends. I can talk to my sisters on the phone every night this week and try to be there for them the best I can. And maybe next year I can go back to what I used to do--or not.

W is for Winter

2008-11-26T12:58:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in Winter...

Mike wakes me up as he goes to bed. I crawled into bed at 8:30, but now it's 10:45 and he's home from going out with Rob. We chat a moment, and then almost immediately, like taking a stage cue, he is asleep. And I am awake.

The heat is on, and it is too hot. The ceiling fan, however, would make it too cold. The electric blanket is off, rejected for being too hot. But the vaporizer blowing near me is making me too cold. I took off the flannel pants for being too hot, but the jogging shorts have now made me too cold. I roll over on my side, inhaling the breath from the vaporizer--literally, since ours is shaped like a penguin that breathes on you, and stare at my bedtable.

Vaseline. Vick's Baby Rub (the same idea, just made from eucalyptus and rosemary). Chapstick. Saline nasal spray. A glass of water that really should go down to the dishwasher in the morning. Neosporin and bandaids, but, actually, those aren't for me. That was for Sophia before bedtime, a little annoying cut on her knee. If I ever needed a photo of what winter means to me, I've got it right here.

It's not even winter, technically. And the part of me that worries about global climate change welcomes winter with open arms. Please be cold, please snow, please ice our streets and make me want to shoot myself trying to park my car. But the rest of me? The parts of me that have to endure our freezing bathroom as I step out of the shower? The part of my brain that decides to hibernate, making the rest of my brain sad and befuddled? We hate winter.

Maybe it's because of too many years in Texas. Too much reliance on forced air heat? Maybe just the reality of how exhausting ice storms are, and in St. Louis, that's the typical precipitation for winter. We do get snow, which is pretty and energizing and usually gone in three days' time. But we get ice. Sometimes we get ice on top of snow on top of ice. And the city does not plow our street, as it is tertiary (side street) and unneeded for emergency vehicles. Never mind that the fire house on the next block often heads up the wrong way on our street in the winter time, scooting around on the ice, endangering parallel parked cars.

The dry skin, the nosebleeds. My hair, oh God, don't talk about that. I get this fuzzy dullness, starting right about now and lasting until I can smell spring in the air, in the thawing mud in my backyard. Little things. Like yesterday, I couldn't remember the other name for garbanzo beans. My vocabulary starts to slip away and soon enough, I'll be reduced to "Cold. Close the thingy. Hurting me."

And we live in a mild area. Really. It's a river valley, where two of the biggest rivers in the US meet, in fact, Missouri and Mississippi. So we don't get blizzards (I've had this explained to me but it's too late in November to remember the logic) like they do just west of us. It's more than the "heat island" effect, too. It's the humidity and the standing water or something. So we get, like I said, pretty little snowfalls and picture-perfect icings. Except when the icings get too heavy. And electric transformers blow. And trees crack and all of it crashes to the ground sounding like glass shattering all over the neighborhood.

I hate it. That doesn't make me very original, I know: wow, she hates being cold! How novel! I have tried for 16 years of living here to embrace winter and be excited and happy about those crystal blue skies and bright white sunny days and hot chocolate and good slippers. But you know what? I'm not an Austrian nun. No warm woolen mittens or schnitzel with noodles (what the hell is that?) is going to make me happy until it truly does melt into spring.

At which point, I will wring my hands wondering if winter was long enough, if my kids saw enough snow to satisfy, if it means we'll have a scorching summer or a mild snooze in the hammock. I'm never happy about the weather.

V is for Vater und Mutter

2008-11-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

German language headstone, St. Paul's Churchyard, St. Louis, Missouri

U is for Urban Ancestors

2008-11-15T09:23:00.000-08:00

Over the river and through the woods
To Grandmother's house we go

I've finished my American genealogy. I have gone further on some lines, thanks to other people's work, mostly, but I have made it back, with two exceptions, to whenever such and such ancestor crossed over the Canadian border into New York (William Donnelly) or arrived by 2nd class cabin in New Orleans (the Wibbenmeyers) or steerage in New York City or Baltimore (pretty much everyone else).

Part of being an American, I think, is believing in the myth of the farmer ancestor. Even if we don't go over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house (my kids go across two streets and an alley to get to my parents' house, but literally go over a river and through woods, albeit on the interstate, to get to Mike's), our parents did. Or their parents did. And in many cases in my tree, this is probably true. The aforementioned Donnelly family farmed near Rome, New York. The Wibbenmeyers lived in Apple Creek, Missouri, which I don't even think today is an incorporated area. The Broadheads moved from Virginia to the Ozarks. People walked to one-room school houses (some taught only in German) and the Missouri census takers wrote down how many cows and chickens they had.

These rural folks in my background don't bother me. Yeah, the infant mortality rate kind of gets to me after a while (14 children, but only 4 survive to adulthood, and even then, one dies in her twenties...repeat this story 8 times and you have my German ancestors). But there's something hopeful, I guess, about it being 1880 and having your own farm and all your children can read and write--and then your sons grow up to be accountants and doctors.

My grandfather's line, however, isn't rural. No, I take that back: his grandmother Theresa Eilers is from Lively Grove, Illinois. But her husband George grew up in the St. Vincent's German Orphans Asylum on the north side of St. Louis. From what I can gather, most of the children in the orphanages in St. Louis in the Victorian era were not orphans. They were children of the indigent. Most likely, he and his brother were dropped off there by a single mother with no support system, or perhaps their mother died and the father, having to work, had no place for them. Rarely, they were scooped up on the street by police or charitable groups. Since George was living there at age 5, I'm thinking he wasn't committing any crimes yet.

And the Blakes. Still my grandfather's line, but his father's side instead of his mother's. The story, as well as I can tell it, completely embellished, of course, where I don't have enough raw data to go on, goes something like this.

Edward is born in 1835. Survives the potato famine and comes to America, alone, around 1850. Meets and marries Bridget Kidney in Kansas City, Missouri. Bridget was born in 1840 in Ireland and was in Kansas City by 1858. She also traveled alone. In Kansas City, they have two sons, Edward and Richard, but leave them behind when Edward Jr. is under the age of 10, in order to move to East St. Louis, Illinois, and open a saloon.

It was probably a good place to open a saloon. East St. Louis, back then, was a huge industrial center. It's still 40 or 50 years before the race riots and strikebreaking of the late 1910s. Steel, stockyards, railroad lines. Working men who liked to drink.

They take in a niece, Mollie, and later she takes their last name. And then, 16 years after moving to East St. Louis, Edward is dead. He's committed suicide using what appears to be a popular method: Rough on Rats, an arsenic compound used as rat poison. Bridget and Mollie stay in East St. Louis, and eventually Mollie marries William Rigden and they remain together until Bridget's death in 1904.

Back in Kansas City, Richard becomes a teamster and lives in a boarding house. I don't know if he dies young or moves west or what, but he disappears from official records. Edward leaves the aunt and uncle he's been staying with since he was 8, and moves to St. Louis. He doesn't move to East St. Louis, though, doesn't go help out Mom, but marries a woman named Jennie who lives in Kerry Patch, who already has 3 children living with her from her first marriage, along with her father-in-law and a brother-in-law. They live in a three room brick house without a cellar, with windows only in the front of the house, since the house is built on top of the houses next door on both sides. They have one son, also named Edward. Jennie is a self-proclaimed witch and probably keeps her neighbors talking. Or afraid. Depending.

Edward works as a bricklayer, and, as opposed to both his parents, can read and write. But he's dead 5 years after he marries Jennie (and three years before his own mother dies), leaving her with a 4 year old and all those other people. Jennie outlives all her children except the young Edward--she has two daughters die in childbirth. She dies after her son is married--she sees the birth of her first grandson, but not the second (who would be my grandfather).

All I know of my grandfather's upbringing is that it involved being poor enough to steal coal from under the fence at the power plant. He finished 8th grade but went no further until he was already married with children.

I can drive by the addresses where Edward and Jenny lived, where their son Edward and his wife Anna lived--the houses are gone, though, razed in the 1940s in favor of housing projects and poorly planned in-fill houses. Most of the places torn down in the sweep did not have utilities. In contrast, my house was built the year Bridget died, and it had indoor plumbing, electric, and gas from the start. Now, I know my grandmother grew up in Maries County, Missouri, in a house where the back part was a literal log cabin with no heat (that's where her brothers slept), but there is something gripping about urban poverty that bothers me.

Maybe poverty is gripping and horrible wherever you live. But something about the Blakes' story seems so much more desperate than all those farmers.

Maybe it bothers me because their church was razed along with everything else, while I can go down to Apple Creek and visit the Wibbenmeyers' little Catholic church. Maybe it's because all I have is the raw data--I don't know if they had friends or neighbors who looked out for each other like I do. Maybe it's because of the story of the suicide. Or maybe it's because it's so close. It isn't over the river and through the woods. It's right here under my feet, like the brick streets covered over with asphalt.

T is for Trying

2008-11-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to be a good mom for the last two months of this pregnancy.

I'm trying to get dinner on the table every weeknight this month.

I'm trying to knit a sweater by Christmas.

I'm trying to maintain a social life as it gets colder and people get busy.

I'm trying not to lose track of the time.

I'm trying to remember where I put my social security card.

I'm trying to sleep on my left side as often as I can.

I'm trying to finish too much sewing in too little time.

I'm trying to stay ahead of the laundry.

I'm trying to come up with a plan for the holidays.

I'm trying to think of a gift for my brother. And my father-in-law.

I'm trying, really, not to be a bitch every waking moment from here until mid-January.

I'm trying not to think about relearning breastfeeding.

I'm trying not to rely too much on everyone around me.

I'm trying to get this girl scout troop official for the school year.

I'm trying to be involved just enough at my daughters' school to know what's going on.

I'm trying to maintain distance at the same time to save my sanity.

I'm trying to remember that prayer is often important in all this.

I'm trying to breathe deeply.

I'm trying to keep it all tamed down.

Mostly, I'm currently failing.

S is for Self-Portrait

2008-11-02T16:23:00.001-08:00

Because Deloney made me think of it.

When she was young, Georgia O'Keeffe was the subject of a series of photographs by Alfred Stieglitz. The first time we saw one, watching a special about Ansel Adams and the American West on PBS, Mike and I turned to each other, shocked at the resemblance. How could my high school photographs look so much like this woman? How could I, even at 32, still look so much like this painter with whom I presumably share no DNA?

I don't look like her when my face is round and ready for baby to be born. When I was truly chunky in my early twenties, you couldn't see it. It was between the girls when I lost all the weight, and after Maeve when I lost the baby weight again. Georgia O'Keeffe came back. It's the nose. No. The mouth. Shape of the eyes? Don't even know. But it's there.

My sister sent me a postcard in the mail about a year ago, a photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe at age 80. "Just so you see where you're headed." Too far away at the moment to connect to. And for Christmas last year, a friend gave me an Ansel Adams print of Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox at Canyon de Chelly, which is a beautiful capture of a moment in time. But I keep staring at her face here--she's 50 in this photo. Surely our faces are moving in different directions. Her Mexican roots are showing far more clearly by this point, for instance. Her nose in profile here is not mine after all.

But for a brief moment in each of our lives, we looked more like sisters than my own sisters and I did.

R is for Reasons

2008-10-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

I think because of Lisa S, I wrote a 50 before 50 list earlier this year. Some of them are tangible things (pick up piano, Spanish). Some of them are things I suddenly realize I'm starting to accomplish (for instance, the genealogy project I'm working on; I have my own atrium; I have learned the rudimentary beginnings of weaving on the loom upstairs).

The last category on the list is entitled, "Hey a Girl Can Dream." While most of the items on the list as a whole are things that are up to me (with the exception of becoming a godmother, perhaps--all the others have me as at least a minor actor in the accomplishment), these things are simply hopes for the future. Go to more baptisms and weddings than funerals, for instance. But looking at this the other day, I saw the number one thing in this category is "Vote for a candidate I really believe in."

Every other vote I have ever cast has really been against the other person. When I voted for Harmon for mayor, it was out of deep suspicion over Bosley. When I voted against Harmon in the next election, it was out of fear that the vote would be split between Slay and Harmon and Bosley would come through on the other end. Unfounded, I realized later, but I wasn't just dying to see Slay as our mayor. I voted against Bush, I voted against Talent for Senate. Some folks I just grudgingly vote for, not because they've wowed me, but because they probably aren't as bad as the other guy. I don't vote in unopposed elections. I write in my neighbor Brent's name a lot. I vote against most judges just out of spite or something.

But I'm voting for Obama and I'm finally ok with saying that. Not that I would be ashamed to vote for him. But because of something about me that doesn't want to give anyone any ideas about what I might be hoping for--for myself, my family, my kids, my neighborhood, and so on. I don't like to be wrong (who does?) and I don't like to be triumphalist. I never want to be caught doing a victory dance, and when I'm the underdog, I don't want to have false hope.

And these are 10 of my reasons:

1. When crowds start booing in Obama rallies, Obama says things like "none of that, just get out and vote." Both sides are not dirty this time.

2. I have lost my faith in my church's leadership being able to truly tell right from wrong in a reality-based political scenario. Mike was radicalized in the 2000 election SNAFU. I wasn't. I was radicalized by my bishop and so many others. Not that I've ever been a "Yes, Father, whatever you think, Father" kind of Catholic. But the audacity of these bishops, the ultimatums, the anger--it made me start reading and finding my own way by my own conscience.

3. When you watch that video of "Joe the Plumber" asking Obama about the taxes he would or would not have to pay, Joe tries to walk away from Obama several times. Obama, very decently, very calmly, tries to continue to engage him. He does not dismiss him even though he must have seen him as someone who would never vote his way. He does not try to simply rally the folks around him with slogans. He gets into an explanation of his tax plan with the caveat that he doesn't know Joe's situation for sure. We all know now that this was simply a ploy. But Obama still gave him the time of day and didn't talk down to him. Or us.

4. When I was watching the first debate, my friend Rachel turned to me and said, "When I listen to him, I know what he's saying, I can stay on his level. My fear is that isn't true for all Americans and he loses them." I'm tired of lowest common denominator politicians. I think I want someone smart. Educated. With a plan.

5. During the Kerry campaign, every negative ad from the other side filled me with despair and worry. I worried for them. In the beginning of the campaign (post primary), I worried about the Obama campaign responding the right way. But they did. Every time. With calm, reasonable statements. They didn't just assume that people would do the right thing. I realized they knew how to play the game, and this made me relax. Trust me--I was going to vote for the Democrat simply because of the last 8 years. But these sorts of things made me decide that yes, I could mean it with my heart. I could trust him to pick good advisers, and his advisers to make good decisions.

6. Listening to Obama, listening to his speeches for the first time (I didn't pay much attention during the early primaries because, like I said, I would have voted for a can of Pepsi if that's who the Democrats would have put forward...because I'd be voting against the Bush/Cheney/Rove/etc. machine), I found myself turning my head towards the TV or the computer screen to pay closer attention. I read later in Mother Jones, I think, that it was like being in an abusive relationship and finding a boyfriend who really wasn't going to lie and cheat on me and beat me up. I was so used to politicians doing evil, horrible, or even just slimy things and laughing at the American people while they did them. This was a different language. New.

7. The Will.I.Am video. I kid you not. I can't believe you haven't seen it, but I like it enough I'm going to put it right here:

8. This specific quote: We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. This is the America I was raised believing in. Not in the America that tortures prisoners and invades pre-emptively and cynically laughs at its critics. America is great because America is good? Let's be good again.

9. Because in all the dirtiness, all the half-truths and outright lies and hideous viral emails (umm, ever heard of snopes.com?), all the insinuations and last-minute attempts to paint him as unready, dangerous, and "not like us" (we all know what that means), he has never lost it. He's never fought back--he's defended himself, his past, his campaign, his ideas. But he has never lashed out. The collected, even-tempered responses, the appropriate humor, the responses that stay on target--it washes over me when I lie in bed unable to sleep the past few weeks and I know that this is someone I would want next to me in the church pew, in the house next door, on my daughter's school's board. This is someone like me, only even better. I know that voting for the person "like me" isn't really valid in and of itself, but when the other campaign is saying that he's not like us, all I see is that yes, he is.

10. Because I watch my sister tear up when we talk about the rally in St. Louis. Because I started to cry watching Colin Powell's endorsement. Because this isn't about us vs. them, or about winning for the sake of winning, scorched earth policy style. It's because of that poem by Marge Piercy I've quoted on a micro level about my neighbors and my city so many times on my blogs--"The Low Road"--and suddenly I realize I'm part of another "We" that I never thought I'd claim for myself. Here's the end of Piercy's poem:

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

For the first time, I'm not modest about my support for a candidate. For a cause. For change. I hope that you join me, and I really hope that if you don't, that the upcoming months prove to both of us that this was the right choice for our nation.

Q is for Quotes

2008-10-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

There are two quotes on my fridge. Both are cut from magazines or newspapers. The first is from NCR (National Catholic Reporter), which is one of the things that keeps me hanging on in this astonishingly bigot-led church. I cut it out a couple of years ago, and there it remains. It is a quote from a southern minister, about the public display of the 10 commandments:

Where I need the 10 commandments is in my heart. It does me no good to be hanging in the Montgomery County Courthouse.

The other I put up last month. I get Mother Jones, mostly because I want to support them. I can usually barely stand to read them because it is one depressing expose after another. But someone needs to fill that role...anyway, I was flipping through last month's (or the month before) and ran across a question asked of Jimmy Carter: What will the next president have to do in the first 100 days to restore goodwill internationally? And Carter replied that it won't take 100 days. It will take 10 minutes, and he needs to say something like this:

'My country will never again torture a prisoner. We will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. Human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy. We will act on global warming. We will honor international agreements. We will bring security and peace to Israel and all its neighbors and treat them all on an equal basis.'

I actually started crying as I read it. I ripped it right out of the magazine and put it up on the side of the fridge next to the pharmacy magnet and a watercolor doodle of Maeve's.

My grandmother's bathroom mirror was edged with clippings, too. Prayer cards to Our Lady of Perpetual Help and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A hand-typed copy of the Serenity Prayer.

These, in a way, are my prayers, too.

P is for "Play it, Sam"

2008-10-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

So I had to pull the car over a moment today on the way to the grocery store with Maeve in the backseat asking What's wrong Mommy what's wrong? Totally lost it to a song on the radio.

The 365 song project's been over a while for me, and I loved everything about it. It's my favorite blog of the ones I've written in over the past 2 1/2 years. And while many of the songs are completely appropriate to what feelings they bring up, what memories, occasionally I took a song and warped it, based on snippets of lyrics, to mean something completely different.

To compare: Bonnie Raitt's Something to Talk About makes total sense in light of what I write about. But Gone Til November has nothing to do with what I know it for.

And then there's We've Got Tonight by Bob Seger. I took this song, even though it wasn't playing in the background or in the car at the time, and based only on the lyrics, warped its meaning to the point that I can only see the Detective's nervous face while we stood outside the courtroom waiting for the verdict that didn't come till the next day. And since I recklessly did this, changing it from a song about spending the night to a song about too many obligations and not enough words to say, it only has that meaning now. And it makes me cry.

No one else on the planet thinks about juries being out too long when Seger sings "I know it's late, I know you're weary..." But I do.

O is for Onward

2008-10-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

I'll still finish up the rest of this tour to Z. But I've started something that's more focused. I like focus, you know--I finished that 32x365 and I'm the only one thus far to complete the smaller music/dancing about architecture 365. I like structure and knowing I need to fit my thoughts into a structure. This one was starting to be too much like my everyday wear over at South City. That isn't bad--it's just redundant. So South City of course will continue with the snapshots and bits of life with neighbors and parish and school and family. This one will finish up a few thoughts on P, Q, R, and so forth. And then I'll try out a year at Conlocutio. A year's worth of conversations.

The first few are ones I've been saving up the past week or so while traveling, but after that I'm really going to try to conform to the idea of a conversation from the day, or the day before. Still fresh in my mind, maybe trying to capture the cadence and dialect of the speaker where appropriate. My inspiration was trying to write down my conversation with my uncle about the tree in my backyard over at South City, in fact. Realizing that the way Glennon speaks is not the way I speak, but also not the way Mike's dad does, or my neighbors, and so on. There was so much filler talk in between his sentences that I didn't fit in--because the entry was about the tree, not just about his chatting. It made me think that I haven't really recorded speech the same way I record ideas...anyway, so over the week down in the Smokies, I decided this might be a fun little thing to try. I'm better at games where other people give me rules, but I've played it that way three times now, so I'm going to set it down for myself.

Onward.

N is for New

2008-09-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ok, I need to do something new. I need another blog. Seriously--South City is my old standard, my "look at the kids aren't they cute" consider the neighbors and a bit of religion. This one is amusing, but last night, I was rereading some of Most Nigh and I missed it. I did a better job on that one than I did here. Some of the ones here are good--I like H is for Houston, for instance--but it's kind of turning into a South City copy, just in alphabetical order. Like, I'm double posting a lot.

Hmm.

So I'm considering something new. Something daily or every other day, perhaps, something pulled from my day? I've thought about several options. And I'm leaving town in 4 hours, won't be back until next Saturday. So by then, I'll know...

M is for Maddening

2008-09-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

Things that are currently driving me crazy:

*The loopholes in the Missouri no-call list. Why can radio station surveys call me? Why does the same survey call my husband 5 times in two days, ask him if he works for radio/tv/newspapers, asks his age, and then tells him thank you? Hangs up...and then calls again 4 hours later? Saying "please take me off your list I only listen to NPR" is met with "thank you for the information." I'm almost at the referee whistle stage, where I got with the asshole from AT&T who was trying to get me to come back to them. That involved arguments over things as far afield as the Red Cross and the Democratic Party.

*My children complaining about what they are given to eat at dinner. I lost it tonight. I put them both in the car, left Mike to wash up afterward, and lectured them the whole way to the grocery store and the whole way home. New rule: you whine about what you're served, and you go to bed. We talked about eating locally produced food, about insulting the farmers that grew it, about how we cannot live on hot dogs and french fries. When did they become such spoiled brats? It was not a good evening.

*Friends who never call or answer emails after they get married, even though after Mike and I got married, our relationship with them, single, continued at the same pace. I wonder sometimes if they notice our absence. I wonder if they care. I wonder if I just have some strange sort of marriage that needs outside contact.

*People who assume I agree with them about this, because I agree with them about that. Like, just because my daughter is in Irish Dance with your son does not mean I have your political preferences.

*That guy who sits in for Diane Rehm and interrupts people. He makes me crazy.

*People who walk three abreast on a city sidewalk. Hello, the sidewalk is a two-way path and you've taken all of it. And the guy behind you is considering jumping into traffic to pass you.

I think the pregnancy is starting to bug me. Short fuse.

L is for Line-Dried

2008-09-23T10:22:00.001-07:00

As far back as I can remember, at every house where we lived, my mother had a clothesline. I never noticed at the time--only when I look back--that none of our neighbors ever did. My dad's mother did, of course, turning out laundry all day long. Bringing in other people's laundry. Her theory on baby clothes in warm weather is three t-shirts: "One on the baby, one in the wash, one on the line."

My mother line dries just about everything in good weather. She does use her dryer, but mostly because sometimes it rains and she's not so hardcore to have lines in the attic or things like that. My father--who knows how to do laundry, I mean, raised in that house--will not line dry. Perhaps it's one of those Scarlett O'Hara moments: as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again. We use that in reference to many decisions he makes (we never had liver, squash, or dried beans growing up, for instance. Or Jello...).

When Mike and I bought our house, I put a line up in the backyard. It's just what you do. But somehow, laundry kept winding up in the dryer. And trust me, Mike wasn't putting it there. I would stand in my basement and look at the basket of wet clothes and just lose heart. It was too easy to fluff it all up right there. I did hang my jeans, but it seemed like such a burden to do the rest.

Then we literally ran out of money after Sophia was born. I'd quit my job and here was another person and the economy took a downturn...then we found lead paint and needed to work on that, and things just went into this scary downward spiral.

Line drying did not save our lives. Lots of things did--we refinanced our house, got rid of other debt, tightened the belts, took care to watch our spending, turned off lights, switched to cloth diapers...and used the line instead of the dryer.

I learned that diapers dried on the line get bleached in the sun. But also turned into sandpaper, so I always threw them into the dryer for just a few minutes after they were dry to fluff them up. Mike's jeans crunched when I folded them, so they got fluffed, too. But his dress shirts, miraculously, no longer needed heavy duty ironing after drying on the line. Just a little wish and prayer over the sleeves and hang on the hanger. T-shirts, play clothes, sheets, kitchen towels--all benefited from drying outside. I did not try underwear, bras, socks, or bath towels. I have some modesty, and I knew from childhood experience that bath towels dried on the line are not so great for baby skin. Or mine.

Life is reasonably better now, for the moment, and I do use the dryer. Every time I drag laundry out there to dry, though, I'm happier for some reason. Maybe it's because I know how much electricity that dryer takes. Or maybe it goes along with knitting and canning. I think it's probably something smug, though, I mean, I know myself pretty well. It's one of those "I know something you don't know" things. I'm proud of myself when I line dry. I'm weird that way.

J is for Judgment

2008-09-21T20:56:00.001-07:00

Ok, I couldn't think of a good J word but wanted to link back to Route 153 and Indigo Bunting, who has just awarded me this award.
I've never received a blog award before...I read many blogs where people pass awards back and forth, but never has it gone to me. I'm not saying I'm the Susan Lucci of blogging, because most awards are things like "happiest blogger I know" and "kick-ass mamma" and things like that. I'm not really sure what this one is, frankly, because I think it doesn't have much to do with me...I mean, as blog design goes, Alphabridge is bare minimum blogger tweaking and a photo at the top. But here are the five little rules. I feel like an 8 year old who's just received her first chain letter.

1. Pick five blogs that you consider deserve this award for creativity, design, interesting material, and also contribute to the blogger community, no matter what language.
2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3. Each of the award-winning has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.
4. Award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of Arte y pico blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5. To show these rules.
6. Send postcards to the first two people on the list. If everyone does this, you'll receive 36,000 postcards by the end of the month!! Really! It works! Ok, that one's not a rule.

But it is a nice way to say nice things about other people you read. Indigo Bunting has some very nice things about me that really very much made my day:

Bridgett’s Alphabridge: It’s where I read her now, although I should be trying to keep up with her South City Musings blog as well. Bridgett’s the gal who came right along with me from 365 to Dancing About Architecture to alphablogging. She is the only person to have completed the Dancing About Architecture project (kudos!). Bridgett has a way of bringing me into her world and making me feel it—yes, suddenly a world that is so very different from mine feels like my very own. Some of her last lines punch me in the gut. In a way that somehow keeps me coming back for more.

So I'll go ahead and pass on the love, but I'll do it on South City Musings because most of Alphabridge readers have already received it...I guess I could keep passing it back...but I'll put on my other hat and do it over there.

I is for Industrial Vestiges

2008-09-20T10:43:00.001-07:00

"Wait before you leave," Sr. Mary says to me after the worship commission meeting. "I have something for your dad." So I wait at the rectory dining room table for her, and she returns with a yellow cigar box.

I know these cigar boxes. I know where she must have found it. We recently sold our 100+ year old school building; the deal closes later this fall. It's the oldest building on our campus, where mass was held before the church was built in the 20s. I taught in this school building, a couple of years before it closed and we merged with other small, formerly segregated parishes (meaning, German, Irish, Polish, of course...) to form our current school just a few blocks southeast of us. Our school building has been purchased by a group looking to start a charter school next August, so the purpose will still be there (as opposed to those who thought they could turn it into senior housing..probably not, the way the plumbing is scattered around...). Anyway, there's a maintenance room on the bottom floor of the school as you enter from the parking lot side. It's always been "Steve's office" as long as I've known the school--he was hired the same August I was.

In fact, he's the reason why I was coated in chalk dust my first year--one of my classroom's old slate boards was mistreated and fell apart, so he put up plywood on top of it and spraypainted it with "chalkboard paint." That stuff is great for transforming a small board into a child's toy. It is not so great for a 4 x 16 foot panel in the room where MATH IS TAUGHT.

But I digress. His maintenance office had these shelves filled with the same yellow cigar boxes. Mary puts it down in front of me on the table and opens it.

Huh.

"Tom on the building and maintenance committee thought these might have something to do with woodworking," she explains.

I pick one up. They're heavy squares, about an 3/4 of an inch thick by 2 inches square. They are obviously used for creation of some kind, but how that would be accomplished is totally beyond me. Mary, Sr. Dorothy, and I of course immediately note the cruciform shape to many of them. Could these be some sort of interchangeable pieces in a carving kit? I think about how my dad turns wood to make knobs or table legs and such--but the blades that do that work look nothing like the outcome, since they spin around to curve all around. I think about spritz cookie presses, how the plates in them don't always look like the cookies they produce. I just don't know.

There have been other mysteries like this lately--an antique dealer showed me a strange pointed wooden thing earlier this summer, thinking a knitter might know what it was for. My best guess was rug punching, but I just didn't know. Obviously well-used and sturdy, but just a mysterious vestige now. So many things that, 50 or 100 years ago, were common and useful, have fallen out of use because of the loss of handcraft and the mechanization of many industrial crafts. I tell Mary I'll ask my dad.

I go there right after the meeting and plunk the box down on his kitchen counter. I preface: Mary doesn't know what these are, she thought you might. I open the box and he picks one up.

"It's a pipe-fitter die," he says immediately. "Puts threads on pipe. These fit into some sort of hand machine," he makes a motion with both his hands like he's turning a wheel or a handle on a press. "The pipe goes in the center. They should be marked," he looks at the one he has. I pick another up, marked 3/4R.

"Yeah. 3/4 inch pipe regular. As opposed to National Fine. National Standard. Oh, these might be old enough that the R means a right hand twist. Maybe."

"How do you know that?" I ask him. Sometimes the weird bits of knowledge just baffle me. Of course, I'm the same way in my own areas of interest.

"Because my father was a machinist," he points out like that should be obvious. "He had a whole set of these, except that they weren't square--I've never seen square ones."

I knew my grandfather was an airline mechanic, but then again, I guess I don't know much about what that means. It shouldn't surprise me. His basement and garage were full of mysterious dirty metal tools.

"Mary said you're welcome to them," I tell him, even though I realize now he probably has no use for them, and he confirms this suspicion.

"Unless I were going to make a whole set of interchangeable broomsticks or something." My mom suggests threading the ends of my wooden knitting needles and putting seasonal stops on them, like Santas at Christmastime.

"Ah, but to do that, you'd have to have the taps that go with these dies," he says. "It's a tap and die set. The dies make the threads on a screw, or bolt, or on the outside of a pipe. And the taps make the threads on the nut, or wherever the pipe is going to fit."

The conversation turns, so to speak, and I leave later with the box of square dies. I think about the 1950s, how my grandfather owned a set of these, new or recently new, and used them, perhaps every day, to do his job. I sit here at my computer, which my husband uses to do his job, and look at them as some kind of vestige, almost a sort of art.

I call my dad this morning to ask him again for the words "national fine" because I couldn't remember them to write this.

"You trying to sell them on ebay?" he asks.

"No, not yet anyway--I was just writing a blog entry about how little vestiges from the pre-electronic era, you know, the late industrial period, I guess, are now not much more than strange knick-knacks."

"Oh, no, people still use these, I mean, how do you think screws are made?"

"But they're made by machine, in a factory. They're not made by hand. People don't, you know, have these in their homes." In their garages soaked with oil, cardboard over the old teachers' desks turned black and greasy, with strange scary metal parts strewn across.

"A machinist or pipefitter might. You never know when something needs rethreading."

I'm thinking that pipe that needs rethreading these days will be discarded to the junk heap in favor of a new pipe. But I'd like to think that someone might use these still. I looked them up with Google and Ebay, looking for what to call them. Square taper pipe die. Used for rethreading, mostly in the oil and construction trades. You can still buy them new. I guess not everything is throwaway after all.

But unless Sr. Mary is clamoring for them back, I think they'll get a bath and a home on a shelf by the computer. Kind of a reminder of where we're from.

H is for Happy

2008-09-18T09:46:00.001-07:00

Twenty things that make me happy today (I should do a hundred, for H, but come on now):

1. Sophia's freckles. I covet them, sprinkled over her nose and cheeks.
2. Maeve's dimple, high on the side of her nose, deep. Hope it stays.
3. Mike's brother's engagement; his other brother's girlfriend (hope...)
4. Iced coffee
5. The clear blue sky and the trees, still green but fading
6. Mike drove Sophia to school; I slept in.
7. 12 inches of knitting done on the hardest Aran sweater I've ever tried
8. My back porch is swept and clean.
9. When the clear-channel owned oldies station plays "For What It's Worth"
10. Mike got his Illinois hunting license for the year squared away already
11. I was able to figure out what was wrong with the electric on Monday, all by myself
12. The baby has all its parts according to the ultrasound
13. We're having a boy--maybe more trepidation than happiness there...
14. Finding new comments waiting in my gmail account
15. There are no drug dealers on my block. Not for 3 years now.
16. Learning to spin wool into yarn
17. My last argument with Mike was over the dishes, and it lasted about 15 seconds.
18. The worship commission meeting last night wasn't excruciating.
19. I might actually see my sisters this weekend
20. Interlibrary loans

G is for Good Stuff

2008-09-16T08:12:00.001-07:00

The year I came into my own as a teacher, year 3, I taught at a South St. Louis Catholic School. All white, all Catholic, almost all German descendants and city workers (we have a city law that requires police and firefighters to live in the city). All told, it was probably my second-best year as a teacher (the following year, at my parish school teaching math, but not crazy and pregnant, was my shining moment in the sun).

I left on good terms, for once--I was leaving for good reason, to go work at my parish school 10 blocks south of my house. Moving up to math and leaving first graders with their snotty noses, untied shoes, and uncanny ability to reach me the moment they have to vomit (always on me. Always. Never in the corner or the hallway or the playground. On me).

My families loved me. Families in the other first grade classroom tried to get their kids into mine. This did not make me a staff favorite, but that's ok. I kept my door shut. At the end of the year, I pulled out the top drawer of my desk and gathered up all the notes and whatnot I had saved in the very back (the drawer had a false back, and behind it was more drawer). I'd done this the first year, but there I was saving cynical horrible reminders of how awful life at Henry had been (incomprehensible notes from the office, the reprimand for telling my class that we shouldn't have Jesus and Mary and Joseph at a public school Christmas program, and the worst, a note from Jamie's mom: Please Jamie costume change in bag teacher, letting me know that Jamie's reading problems were probably going to stick around a while).

But at this school, I saved the good stuff. My Asperger student's intricately drawn and written book reports. Thank you notes that gushed praise from my parents. One of my students' inventive spelling notebook, where they were told to cut out a picture from a magazine and write a sentence with no help. Christina's first, at the end of September, read:

I lok flws (I like flowers)

Which got me in a buttload of trouble with the other first grade teacher: you can't have them invent spelling rules. I argued that it comes with more writing, that crushing them early isn't going to help anything. This woman would hang spelling tests in the hall, everything from Laura's 100% with stickers and stars down to Greg's big red F. I didn't do things her way. Christina's last sentence, in April, was

The tea is ice cold. This is a good tea party. The lady is very happy to be with her friends.

By then my team teacher wasn't talking to me, though.

But my favorite note came from a father who viewed me with as much skepticism as my team teacher. He was Bulgarian, raised by French Jesuits, and had married a blond Californian. They had two children, a perfect little girl, a copy of her mother, and the son, Alex, who was brilliant and untamed. He wins the prize for the worst handwriting ever to cross my desk. He lost every pencil he touched, and his belongings were always post-bombing in appearance. He drove his father Alexandre absolutely crazy. I was to "take him in hand" and train him to be a good student. Alexandre would light-heartedly chew me out and then his wife would come by afterward to smooth it over. I took them with a grain of salt because it was an easy, easy year for me.

Until Christmastime. Alex decided it was his time to disseminate his knowledge yet again, this time in the form of "Santa isn't a real person. He is a fictional character. Presents are given to you by your parents." Well, Santa is a big deal in South St. Louis, I learned. I didn't know this was happening until Rachel's mother gave me a phone call that evening. Ok. I'll nip this in the bud. I told Alex's mother, who was mortified: she liked the concept of Santa Claus and was upset herself that her husband was raising her children without any fantasy life. She promised that she--or he--would handle it. I believed her.

The next day, I got this note, written in handwriting that obviously had been influenced by an early childhood in a Cyrillic country.

Dear Bridgett: Sorry to hear about the Santa Claus mayhem. You should know that the debate regarding the existence of ol' Nick is raging in this very household too. It seems, locally, that some compromise should be reached, whereas "existence" becomes a temporal concept with well defined dates. In the meantime, we'll fix the dissonance that the formulation of an opinion does not always warrant its expression. ~The Grinch (Alexandre)

The formulation of an opinion does not always warrant its expression. Words to live by.

F is for FUBAR

2008-09-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

Ike was not a let down. Ike was bad. Ike was very very bad. Stunningly bad. Maybe not "certain death" as the weather service was warning us, but this was no Gustav fizzle.

The damage done to Crystal Beach and Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston, it's like looking at a car wreck. The conditions on Galveston are deteriorating with raw sewage, hot temperatures, and stranded residents. I do not envy the emergency personnel who are trapped there. And while I'm the type of person who would have FLED the moment I saw that hurricane turn, I mean, I'm in the basement with my kids the moment the sky turns green in tornado season, I cannot wish this sort of grisly conditions on anyone. Not even Texans.

These pictures, I have to stop looking. I keep pointing to things and saying to Mike, "That's a road. Those are, that's the only one left. It's not, wow. I can't believe this. Just. Holy shit." That would be an actual transcript of the monologue as I clicked between hundreds of pictures on news sites.

I think about people I used to know. I hope they're making it ok. It's the problem with too many past homes. You can't hold onto everyone you meet, not even everyone you kiss. Day to day, I don't think about what I lose and gain by leaving this or that place. But something like this and I'm left wondering.

Another reason to stay put, even if the Mississippi is rising again. I don't have to say so many mystery goodbyes.

Enough about me and my nostalgic melancholia.

This hurricane, is not so great akshually.

E is for Engagement

2008-09-11T11:14:00.001-07:00

Mike is the oldest of 4. Christy is two years younger, and then, when Mike was 13, Pete and Steve were born.

They just graduated from our alma mater here in town and have teaching jobs and apartments and all those grown up things. On Monday evening, Steve called to let us know that the assumptions were true--he and Mary were getting married, officially now. Probably in February or March.

It both makes me very happy to have Mary joining us, and makes me feel very, very old. But it's not about me.

D is for Dirty Side

2008-09-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Damn it.

Another hurricane post.

Last week, the science blog down at the Houston Chronicle that I read all through Hurricane Gustav, Sci Guy, was saying, oh, no worries. Hurricanes formed out by the Cape Verde Islands in September never come into the Gulf of Mexico. Bah. No worries.

And then of course Ike defies history (but not all of history, mind you--there are hurricanes that enter the Gulf in September in the 150 years of history we've been keeping--like Rita and Betsy, for instance). Ike comes floating in across Cuba, sending waves up past the tops of 5 story buildings. Weakens some and then follows Gustav right into the Gulf.

The computer models were saying Brownsville back then. But every few hours, they crept a little further north. It started pointing to places I know. Corpus Christi, Victoria, Freeport. The Sci Guy started giving best case/worst case scenarios for Galveston Island. Worst case, he said about 2 days ago, would be a category 4 hit to Freeport. Only a half hour from Galveston, this would put the island, and the city of Houston, on the dirty side of the hurricane. Storm surges and winds and tornadoes and rain, oh my.

My brother is sitting pretty up in Cypress, halfway from Houston to Hempstead, out of harm's way except rain and tropical storm force winds, most likely. Even a direct hit in Houston wouldn't call for an evacuation of Cypress. It's just too far away to worry about storm surge flooding nastiness. He's boarded up a couple times, moved the lawn furniture to the garage, but otherwise, the worst part is the lack of electricity in the middle of a Texas summer. So I wasn't worried about him.

I was just, well, it's one thing to watch CNN flying above the floods of New Orleans and the bayou country down in Louisiana. My attachments there are few. But flyovers of Galveston? Brazoria County? That's where I lived. That's where I learned to drive and broke curfew and skipped school and collected moon snail shells and grew up.

Sci Guy this morning took a look at the current forecast, which is a direct hit to Freeport, and stopped trying so hard to reassure everyone in Houston. Bottom line: storm surge will do this, wind will do that. Get out if you're in Galveston or southern Brazoria County. Think really hard about the bayous if you've flooded in the past.

Maybe it'll weaken before it hits, like Gustav and Katrina did (Katrina's devastation came after the hurricane with the levee breaches--the hurricane itself was bad but would not have been so deadly all alone). Or maybe it'll just push on like Wilma. Pressure is dropping, the eyewall is secure. It's coming, and now, here a thousand miles away, I have got to leave the computer and walk away for a few hours. Maybe until tomorrow. I have to keep busy to keep from thinking about the little county airport and sourballs and army surplus and sand dollars.

Damn it.

C is for Collecting

2008-09-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

I collect things. Lots of things, actually. I can divide them into several categories: found objects, things that have to do with arts and crafts I'm involved with or interested in, things other people have decided I should collect, and things that make no sense.

Found Objects:
*Flat river stones (I must find these. If I get them from other people, they go in the random rock bucket on the back porch).
*Interesting rocks (most of these are in said bucket, although some are in supporting roles throughout the house)
*Heart-shaped rocks. These I will take from anyone. I remember pretty well where they come from (this one is from Camp Cedarledge; that one Sr. Mary gave me after her trip to Northern California...). I have over a hundred of these at the moment.
*Stones with natural holes all the way through. Love these.
*Marbles. About half of the marbles I have come from my yard as I replant flower beds or transfer plants around. The other half are from my parents who like to go antiquing.
*Shark Eye Moon Snail shells. All from Quintana Beach, Texas, 1992.

Arts And Crafts:
*Yarn. I have way too much yarn.
*Fabric. Not quite as much as the yarn (I use it faster).
*Knitting needles. I like to use wooden ones, but I like to look at the aluminum ones.
*Wooden spools. All of them are from thread I have used--I don't purchase old empty spools.
*Batik printing blocks and old dye/ink fabric printing blocks. I don't have many, at least not yet.

Happily Imposed Upon Me:
*Old advertisements for food, cleaners, and kitchen appliances (Pet Milk, lard, refrigerators, Bon Ami, Ivory Soap, and so on).
*Aluminum ware: you know, like those shiny metal glasses that get too cold to touch when you put ice in them? I have glasses, bowls, pitchers, and a lovely container that reads "GREASE" on the side.
*Bells. I inherited about a sixth of my grandmother's collection when she died. I've added a few along the way, but most come from other people.

Random:
*Spheres. Mike and I have a sphere for each year we've been married. A pearl, various stone spheres, wood, a couple of marbles, a tiny rosepetal bead. I don't display these, but I should.
*Afghans. Whenever I see a well-made 1960s-1980s era afghan in a resale place I must bring it home. Somebody's aunt or grandma spent good time on this, just to be on the $2 rack at Goodwill? I only take ones home in good shape, heavy and warm, without stains. I do not crochet and cannot make myself, but it sure looks like I do in this house now.
*Mah jongg sets. I have a problem with these. I have 6. Two of them I'd happily part with for a small sum, but the others would take more money. And the one true butter-colored bakelite with the nice edges and beautiful carving that I got for a steal at an antique place where they had no clue what they were dealing with? 'Fraid not.

B is for Book Club

2008-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am not well-read. Reading opened many doors for me--I read before kindergarten and I was so far ahead they had me skip first grade. My language SAT score is nothing to sneeze at. I like to read, but I waste this on drivel for the most part.

Last night I finished a book for book club that was not drivel. I'd read it before, in high school, and had enjoyed it. I liked it so much I read it out loud to Mike in the car (we have fallen out of that cozy enjoyable habit with the introduction of interrupting children into our lives). The book is The Floatplane Notebooks by Clyde Edgerton. It's a story about a southern family who gathers yearly to clean out the graveyard. And it's about the deep past and family legend. But it's also about the Vietnam War. And it is very, very good.

In high school, I remember being so impressed with the war part of the book. I didn't pay much attention to the stories from the past, about the Civil War and that foggy scary period after it. I didn't catch all the allusions and references and the art of what is not explained. Reading out loud to Mike, I was stunned when he corrected my pronunciation of "Dead bird, Joe," an order given to a dog on a hunting trip. I read it flat, like I'd say, "there's ice cream, Joe," to an adult. Mike shook his head. "Dead bird," he said, like he was coaxing a sick child to take the pink medicine from the fridge. I didn't realize I was marrying into a southern family--into a family with recent rural roots and I was an outsider. I didn't see it then, but I see it now. I was more like Bliss (a character in the novel) than I realized.

Rereading it one more time, lying in bed sobbing over and over again, knowing what's coming and not able to stop it, it was even more. It was family stories told and Bliss realizing she had to learn them (which isn't said out loud but implied by her referencing her son's relation to all these folks). Her husband, tin-eared and stone-hearted, wasn't going to tell them. Her sister-in-law was already running off to be with folks more like her. And her brother-in-law, though he might manage to type them out, had a brain injury in the war that left him speechless. This isn't Bliss' family. These aren't her stories. But 12 years of marriage and falling into a life she obviously wasn't counting on but handles better than anyone possibly could have, and they are her stories.

I remember being shocked by parts of the book that I look at now and think, "yeah, I know why she did that." And other things that seemed like no big deal are now the crux.

It's like my first book club meeting, about To Kill A Mockingbird. The same change in perspective is true for that one, too: when I was in 7th grade, all I saw was Scout. In 11th grade, it was about the injustice that seeps through every crack in that novel. And now, as an adult, it's like suddenly, Atticus is the only character of note. I've moved from Scout to Atticus in 20 years. Appropriate.

Book Club does this to me. Tomorrow night we'll gather in my living room and talk about the Wisteria Vine and how it represents death--and how it's the reason they all come together annually. What the significance of the deep past is, especially those little baby fingers in a jar. How we're all born into a milieu. A milieu we cannot control, only learn to thrive in, if possible.

Book Club has tackled, through the lens of other books, our opinions on religious experiences, on family mental illness, on how funerals make relatives do insanely hurtful things. Some months, we talk about lesser topics (dialect, criminal justice, baby making--none of these are small, but they aren't as deeply personal). Tomorrow night, we might get off topic, while we eat our ham and biscuit sandwiches, brownies, lemonade (we try to serve novel-appropriate food--the people in this novel eat. It's just that the details are fuzzy, so I'm going to have to fill in some blanks). But I've got great hope that it got to them like it got to me. I can't be the only one.

A is for Autumn

2008-09-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

Here it is. Totally ripped from my South City blog. I don't even have the decency to change my American "fall" to the universal "autumn" to match the title. But with autumn comes change-of-season sinus headache with a ban on ibuprofen and I need to go stand in a hot shower to clear my head. But oh, thank God autumn is here.

I am a fall baby. End of October--used to be, my birthday week was when it got too cold at night to sleep with the windows open. First frosts usually happen sometime around then here in St. Louis. Our official first frost date is October 15, but we've had them as early (since I lived on Halliday, I mean) as the 10th and as late as Thanksgiving. The 23rd is a good average.

Today is the gunmetal sky and breeze and damp 65 degrees. It makes me scurry like a squirrel to get ready for winter (or perhaps for baby in this year's case). I prefer the stark blue sky against the orange and yellow leaves and the air so crisp and smoke-tinged you can't breathe enough in. But both extremes are good for me.

My brain works best in the fall. I succumb to seasonal affective disorder in spades some years (oh, like LAST YEAR), and summer wilts me. Springs, in the past few years, have been hard--trying to launch back into reality from winter, remembering all the things I'm supposed to do. Lent makes sense to me now that I'm an adult. Spring is about obligation.

Fall is about excitement for me. The promise of winter holidays and hot chocolate and traditions--the end of fall is heavy on the traditions in my life, more than summer, even. Maybe it's just that the late fall and early winter traditions are institutionalized and reinforced by family and friends. Summer traditions tend to be smaller and private (the first black tomato, the first swim, hikes, bikes, camps).

We have, again, thank you St. Louis, gone from summer low-90s to fall mid-60s in a week. Yeah, Tuesday'll be 80 at noontime, but summer has lost its hold. Like a dictator overthrown in a coup. We're just mopping up the rest of the supporters and hoping for the best. Ok, maybe not the best analogy for something so perfect.

Yesterday was the kitchen. Today is the dining room. The pumpkin pie candle is burning and Jimmy Buffett's Changes in Latitudes album is on downstairs. Maeve (my fall baby) has a neighbor friend over and I'm ruminating on an acorn cap I found in my old camera bag this morning. Brown velvet. Fall.

Z is for Zinga

2008-09-04T10:37:00.000-07:00

Zinga: to wag the tongue

I went to a sheep and wool festival last weekend with Ann. She's my fiber-enabler. Taught me to knit things that were more than a simple rectangle (socks, mittens, hats, cables, sweaters, and color work). She convinced me I could learn to weave when I inherited a loom accidentally. Next, she's teaching me to spin. Like I need that addiction!

We left early in the morning because we were each entering knitting into the fiber arts competition. We went last year and were shocked by the dearth of good knitting entries. We figured we'd do just fine. But entries closed at 10 a.m. which meant we had to leave about 6 a.m. assuming we'd have to stop for potty breaks with little kids along the way.

One such break was at a McDonald's in Bowling Green. We walked in and found the bathroom, decently clean, no big deal. But in the next stall, obviously another mother-child pairing, just based on the tone, another language was being spoken. It wasn't one of the ones I expect around St. Louis (that would be Spanish, Vietnamese, Bosnian), and it wasn't French. Almost German?

Maeve was done and we were washing hands when the mother and her daughter appeared, dressed plain in blue dresses, mom with a white apron and a starched white bonnet. Little girl, Maeve's age, with stiff double braids in a matching dress. The mom kept talking to the little girl--I knew we were saying the same things (don't touch. Here's the soap. Dry your hands). And it dawned on me. They were speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. Which is really Pennsylvania German, based on the German dialect spoken in the area from which many Pennsylvanian immigrants hail. We followed them out, where they met up with an older daughter holding a baby, three or four boys of various ages, and the father, not much older than Mike. Definitely not yet 40. They continued to speak in this odd sing-songy almost-German and then headed out to their minivan, which of course wasn't their minivan, but a neighbor's or friend's, a woman in a tank top with a cigarette hanging from her mouth while she talked. They piled into the van like a clown car in reverse and headed out on their way.

I love subcultures. And minority languages and dialects. Love them.

Y is for Yazoo

2008-09-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

My sister Bevin has bad luck with cars. She was in two accidents last year--one was a little fender bender in the rain, but the other had her spin out on I-70 and wind up in a ditch. She wasn't drinking, but she was going too fast, crested a hill, some slow moving driver in her lane, a swerve...in the end, everything was ok but the car.

Then she inherited my parents' Impala, and the night before she took it home, it was broken into and the drivers' side lock knocked out, thus making it difficult to keep it at all secure. Within the next few months, it was broken into (just fiddling with that lock would do it) a couple of times. The factory-issue radio and CD player weren't stolen, but they were messed with in sad attempts to steal them until the CD player was rendered unusable.

Finally, my parents helped her get the lock fixed, but she was still reduced to either listening to the radio or investing in some cassettes.

She went down the street from the resale place where she worked (before she got the grown up job this summer), and found that cassettes, since they don't last long and aren't produced anymore, were selling for less than a dollar each. But because they aren't made anymore, the selection was slim. Unless you like 80s music, which she does. I got in her car a few months back and she picked up the big box she keeps the tapes in--which she openly displays to the world and all would be potential thieves, and no one has yet broken in to steal them. Duh.

Depeche Mode, I mean, more DM than I knew existed. Billy Idol. Devo. The Kinks. Dance music I've only heard in my gay neighbors' back yard on Saturday mornings. Stuff Mrs. Slocombe posts about.

"Bevin, what's with all this?" her stuck-in-1993-with-throwbacks-to-the-1970s sister asked.

"God, Bridgett, this is like the best music ever." And then Yazoo came on as she started the engine.

X is for XX

2008-09-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

Not quite porn. Actually, nothing like it at all.

Except for that first line there, I've rewritten this entry 4 times. This is the fifth attempt to write something about my gender or about other people of my gender. So, perhaps just a few things I've noticed recently:

Sophia's school's teachers and administrators, when they send notes home to everyone, write things like this: "make sure to send a change of clothing to school with your child. She/he does not need to keep a spare uniform at school, just something for emergencies." See that: she/he, not the usual he/she. They always, always, always put the feminine pronoun as the default.

In contrast, at the beginning of La Leche League's Breastfeeding Answer Book, which is an amazing resource (in comparison to the totally useless Womanly Art of Breastfeeding), the authors explain that they will always refer to the baby in any example or explanation as "he" because it is obvious what gender the breastfeeding mother is (in order to avoid confusion, essentially). I've always appreciated the lack of muddling around.

I've been asked recently if we're going to find out the gender of this upcoming baby before he/she (or she/he) is born. I'm ambivalent and I have a few more weeks to decide. Often I get asked the follow up: do you want a boy or a girl this time? I have two girls. So sometimes that question is asked: do you want a boy this time? As if my opinion counts in the decision. My neighbor Amanda suggested I answer, "I just don't want to have to choose. I want the gender already assigned and obvious."

I like being a girl, although I rarely think of myself in those terms unless the bra is uncomfortable because Mike forgot and ran it through the dryer with his socks. I rejected most feminine things early on, and only recently have returned to the fold (or at least, the 1965 version of the fold).

I didn't dance or sing or cheerlead in school. I played soccer on the boys' team because the girls' team didn't pan out. I ran track. I liked PE. I didn't handle makeup and heels very well. I wasn't the little black dress, I was the big black combat boots from the army surplus store.

Yet, there I was Saturday morning, 5:45 a.m., heading out to a sheep and wool festival, hoping to find a new raddle for my loom. I'm knitting a sweater for my dad for Christmas. I clean church and make banners and like to quilt. I play mah jongg. I know how to can, for God's sake.

Bourbon slush and amaretto sours are my favorite drinks, but scotch on the rocks is a close third. I collect heart shaped rocks but I find other heart things somewhat ridiculous. I'm expecting my third baby, whom I will breastfeed until it is almost scandalous, but I don't like kids very much. I taught school, but I taught math.

In the end, I'm no different (summed up, I mean, not in the details) than the other women I'm friends with. Which is why I'm friends with them. My sisters, my coffee pals, my neighbors, my daughters' godmothers, my lovely blog readers, most of my book club, some of my girl scout moms, other parishioners--they are like me. At least in the same spectrum of visible womanhood.

W is for WW

2008-09-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

Totally stolen, or should I say inspired, by Lisa's highway post.

As she says, the US has interstates (even numbers go east-west, odd numbers go north-south, given romantic names like I-35); there are national roads, denoted by a US in front of a number (which follow the same directional rules), for instance, US-63. Then there are numbered state highways, and in fact, according to Wikipedia, the Missouri system of evens and odds is what the national system was based on. Huh. Whenever a national route came through Missouri, the state renamed its state highways to avoid confusion, so, for instance, there is no MO-40 because we have the often maligned horrendous traffic nightmare called US-40 running through St. Louis county and city.

Then there are supplemental routes. In Texas, these were FM roads, which at first made me wonder (I was 12 at the time) if we could tune in to learn about traffic on them. I lived off FM 518 down in Pearland, for instance. FM stands for Farm to Market, except when people get up in arms about that. There were a lot of folks in Texas who refused to accept that terminology, even though it seems perfectly obvious to me. "No, it's a Farm ROAD" they'd tell me. But it's not FR...ah well. I didn't care enough to argue that sort of thing.

Here in Missouri, they get letter designations. Like "Route B" or "Highway M." Fascinatingly, because I love little details and the rules that go with them, G, I, L, Q, S, and X are not used to name these highways. The letter R is only used when it indicates a connection to a state park. Letters are sometimes doubled, like WW above, which usually means that there is some sort of vestige of a former route there, or that it connects two other state routes or county roads. And for some reason, A is used in front of other letters, so we have AH and AD and other silly sounds. Letters are never repeated in the same county, and sometimes the roads change name at county lines. But they aren't county roads. They are designated by the black bordered signs with stark block letters. No shields or state shapes here. Just squares.

One of those silly "I should do that" list items is to make an alphabet poster out of photographs of Missouri state road signs. Now that I know that it eliminates 6 of those letters (mysteriously...) from the get-go, I guess I'll have to supplement my supplemental roads project with other artifacts.

So, WW. I lived off WW in Boone County, Missouri, when I was in 6th and 7th grade. I lived just outside of Columbia, where the University of Missouri is located. I was in a neighborhood that was built outside the city limits so that folks could do things you couldn't do in the city: own ham radios, shoot off fireworks, park their cars on the lawn, shoot deer in the garden, attend cockfights, engage in prostitution, you know, American things.

It was still the edge of the era when children were allowed to do as they pleased on their free time. Ian and I biked up to Casey's General Store, really just a gas station, for slushies and candy cigarettes. And as long as I told my mother, I could bike down WW. Now, the photo there of Spur N shows a typical shoulder of a state road. Two lanes with a single yellow dashed line down the center. Speed limit 55 miles an hour. I would hug that thin edge where the asphalt meets weeds. No helmet. I'd go about 8 miles or so, and then turn around. Never made it all the way to Millersburg, which was my goal, since the boy I had a crush on had an address on WW, but listed in Millersburg. I never figured out which was his, but no matter, since he was kind of an ass and didn't know I existed anyway.

The smell of Missouri summer, the tall weeds and flowers, sweet but not sage. Buzzing of the insects and the rush of wind as trucks passed me by. Nobody ever honked a horn, which seems remarkable now. I got tan that summer, the last time that happened until 2006, when I also spent my free time on the bike. But only on rails to trails and other bike paths. And with a trailer dragging kids behind me.

V is for another kind of vigil

2008-08-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

There is plenty already to read and see about Hurricane Gustav so I'll be brief.

Living in a place that doesn't flood, but is surrounded by floodplain, I watched those Iowa and Missouri farmers sandbag the hell out of their towns and neighborhoods this summer. But a flood is slow and determined. A hurricane cannot be reasoned with, and there's no way to protect yourself from the flood to follow. There isn't enough sand in the world to keep back 160 mile an hour winds.

Eh. Gulf of Mexico. As we were watching the news on this, I mentioned to Mike that if it hits just west of New Orleans, they'll be caught in the dirty side of the hurricane. Mike looked at me and then back at the TV to see the spin. The northeast corner of a hurricane dredges up the seawater and spills it down with a higher likelihood of tornadoes and a bigger storm surge (turns out, "dirty side of the hurricane" is just a Texas term...more dialect creeping round us all the time). "See, the west side is just on land, but the east side is in the Gulf, whipping around."

"Funny how the Gulf of Mexico is considered dirtier than the actual dirt," he replied, smiling.

But it is.

My brother and his family are in Houston. Just on the western edge of the "cone of uncertainty." The best place to be, if you have to be in the cone at all. I'm not going to worry. He and they have lasted out much worse than this. If the course changes, though, well, I'm trying not to waste too much emotional energy on those sorts of things.

V is for Vigil

2008-08-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

The summer before Mike's freshman year of college, he got his dorm assignment. Marguerite Hall, 4th floor. He'd wanted Reinert. Everyone wanted Reinert--it was a converted hotel with private bathrooms. Those who didn't get Reinert, and there were many of them, were often assigned to Marguerite Hall because they had suite bathrooms--two rooms shared a bath in between, with sinks in the room. But the flavor of Marguerite was totally different. Earthier, like the incense that permeated the cinder block walls. Cheaper, too.

He had a roommate assignment, too. Carlos Vigil. An address in suburban St. Louis. Nothing else. Mike figured he was either Carlos Vee-heel, with roots in Latin America, or Carlos Vidge-ill, with roots in Chicago or East St. Louis.

As school started, he learned it was the Vee-heel pronunciation. "My grandparents are from Spain, my parents are from Cuba, and I'm from Crestwood." He would talk to his mother in a bizarre spanglish, which Mike described as "kapata kapata sleeping bag kapata kapata Johnson's Shut-Ins kapata."

Besides that, and the last name, there was nothing about him that an outside observer would note as ethnic in any way. His childhood was spent eating cocoa puffs and American cheese slices in front of the TV. White bread, no vegetables, processed food all the time. All of his cultural references stemmed from children's cartoons, medieval history (he was, and still is, a medieval re-enactor), and science fiction.

He and Mike got on like beans and cornbread. He was a fifth year senior who had already been through 10 roommates (or so, I don't remember the exact number). He lived with Mike longer than any of the others. I met him the following year, after he'd graduated, but still was really a permanent fixture at Marguerite Hall.

There was a brief moment after I'd decided the high school boyfriend just wasn't going to work out anymore that I would have dated either Mike or Carlos. I'm not saying I would have married him. But if the timing had been right, I would have given it a go. A brief go, because I learned with time that we fought better than anything else. We fought about anything--religion, women's rights, politics, sex, food, St. Louis history, math, philosophy, Dr. Who. Whatever.

At our wedding, he mentioned that he had weapons in his car. You know, swords, pikes, spears, those sorts of things. So some of our wedding pictures have us perched on ruins in Tower Grove Park, staging a fake battle between bridesmaids and groomsmen. He brought Ted Drewes to the hotel for the out of town guests to enjoy while they waited for the reception.

He is the only person, upon learning that he was getting married, that I felt jealous about. His wedding in Milwaukee was nothing to write home about, except perhaps that I stood on his side as a grooms-person--but the barbecue reception on a college campus (closed for the summer) was impressive. In that I got so drunk, I ate spam and french-kissed the groom. But only the one time. On both accounts.

We've been to funerals together, and other weddings. Sometimes he makes me crazy, other times he's just what the table needs to keep us all together for a few more minutes. We don't see him as often as we used to, since he's up in Milwaukee and the 6 hours through Illinois is downright grueling to drive. But I never get worried that we've lost touch or aren't going to see him at the next wedding or Christmas. He's an established, if long-distance, part of the family. A constant.

U is for Uniform

2008-08-29T09:04:00.000-07:00

Mali has the best ideas. Uniforms.

Last week I got out all of Sophia's uniforms. School was starting, it was time to get that underway. Hers are all khaki, navy, and white. Very relaxed--they can wear shorts, for instance, and the girls have skorts, skirts, pants, and jumpers available to them. In any style, modest and without logos. So we have scoured the resale shops over the past year or so, gathering up beautiful untouched Lands End jumpers, knock off Catholic school items, white polos and oxfords, little cable knit sweaters...it's very cute.

I loved wearing uniforms. The first years of school, I was public, so no uniform. Starting in 3rd grade (I was 7 almost 8), I was introduced to a lovely gray and blue boxy Catholic school plaid. My mom bought the fabric off the bolt and made my jumpers. PE shorts underneath, white blouses with Peter Pan collars. Navy blue or white knee or bobby socks. Athletic shoes (they were practical at St. Bernadette's).

After 5th grade, I moved to Columbia, Missouri, where the Catholic school was phasing out their old girl's uniform of rose and maroon plaid and introducing a red white and navy edition. But we were there in the year of transition, and my thrifty mom bought a used rose and maroon, which came with it bizarre rules like maroon, pink, white socks, white or pink shirts, and white or MAROON athletic shoes. We actually found a pair on discount. It totally clashed with my new friends in their navy red and white. But I liked the maroon, actually.

The next year I had to switch, though, and the industrial strength polyester double knit skirt we had to buy new probably still exists in my parents' attic boxes.

Starting in 8th grade, I was back in public school, which was a little overwhelming. Suddenly I had to learn what people were wearing...style...I don't have much. So at first when we showed up at the private Catholic high school in Georgia in the middle of 9th grade, I was relieved: dress code. Until I learned that dress code is something you are either born knowing how to do right or you fail at every attempt. I did best with a pair of khaki pants and button down shirts. But some of my pants had the wrong size cuffs. Or not enough belt loops. Or threads per inch. Wrong shade of dun. The shoes were mysteriously incorrect. Too many buttons undone on the shirt. Whatever. I continuously got dress code violation slips, which add up to detentions. I never figured out what the hell was right or wrong.

Then 11th grade, down in Houston, I walked into that grungy run down Catholic school in the ugliest plaid skirt I had ever worn, matched with any oxford cloth pastel shirt I wanted. I can't even describe the plaid very well. It was powder blue and hospital green as a base, with brown, black, yellow, navy, and white in it. It wasn't a plaid as much as a check. And it looked bad on everyone. Dancers, soccer players, emaciated cheerleaders, pregnant girls: we all looked dumpy and clueless. I hated that skirt and loved it a the same time.

I love uniforms--they level out the playing field, they are cheap after the initial investment in used gabardine and double knit polyester, and they are easy on the eye when you look across the classroom. I loved the little gray and blue plaid jumpers when I taught at St. Joan's (the very same, in fact, as the first ones I wore at St. Bernadette's); the mix-match at St. Pius of green and gray plaid, or plain navy, or, well, as long as you all look similar, used to bug me until I realized it was still achieving the same goal. And now Sophia, alas, no plaid, but still adorable in pigtails with a khaki jumper and a white Peter Pan collared blouse. Could just squeeze her.

T is for Tree

2008-08-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

I was trying desperately to get back into shape. Sophia was 7 months old. Mike and I were walking with the stroller in Powder Valley, which is a state conservation area--not big enough, I guess, to be a state park, but it has a nature center and some easy trails. We were on one of the easiest. It was paved. But some nice hills and beautiful trees even in February. Beautiful, but mysterious.

In May, I was already doing better in the getting into shape area, but I found that even with little light green leaves, I still didn't know any of the trees in Powder Valley. Sure, I know "oak" and "maple" and "I think that's a sassafras." But I just didn't know trees. This struck me as something one should know. Like, how someone in an English speaking country should have a general familiarity with Shakespeare. You don't have to be a fan. You just should have a clue. One should know the geography of one's nation. In pretty good detail. And world geography within reason. Not that I felt I needed to know the names of outer ring suburbs of Cleveland, but I should know where Cleveland is. And where Denmark is. What the capital of Denmark might be (that would be Copenhagen, like the chewing tobacco...). You should just know what the native trees in your general area are.

I went home. I realized I didn't even know what that big tree on the alley in my backyard was. It was time to fix this. I got a Golden Book "Trees of North America" field guide and read it cover to cover. Then I moved on to Peterson and Audubon Society guides. Found that I liked them for different reasons. I like plates because they give a typical example, with diagrams and notes. I like photos because they capture a moment and sometimes give an atypical rendition. Plus, the Audubon guide had pictures of bark. I started to learn trees.

I could name all the trees in my yard and neighbors' yards: sweetbay magnolia (or "sugar" magnolia); locust; mulberry; redbud; black walnut; pin oak; sycamore; river birch. I realized across the alley, there was a sick elm. That up the street, there were American basswoods with their peculiar leafed seeds. Catalpa and Kentucky Coffee Tree in the park. The stinky weed trees growing on the highway embankments were Trees of Heaven. The hard red maple in Mary's yard died because of impacted earth (I believe that's a correct use of that, Mrs. S). I began to see the world differently.

I grew rather fond of oaks. There's a tree lawn tree in front of my house that doesn't fit any of the pictures in my books. On my Christmas list one year was Grimm's Illustrated Guide to Trees. Learned that oaks hybridize easily, and their hybrids are fertile, which means over the years, they can double-hybridize and become totally mysterious. Sometimes oak experts aren't sure just by looking at them what their ancestry might be. Knowing this, I decided to record the oaks I ran across. Started a notebook, drawing the leaf shape, twig, and general shape of the crown. Describing acorn and bark. Learned that the tree outside my front door has black oak roots (quercus velutina) but is definitely not a purebred. Across the street are two lovely black oak specimens. Pins, scarlets, chinkapins, swamp chestnuts, blue jacks, black jacks (for which our latest cat is named), whites, overcups. We went out to California, and in a stop in the Utah desert, found shinnery oaks, which never grow more than 2 feet tall. Their leaves are the size of silver dollars. I was highly enamored with shinnery oaks.

Along the way, as I learned about trees, folks decided I must like field guides in general. Birds, reptiles, butterflies, shells, flowers, night sounds. My most specific is Roadside Flowers of Texas. But the Peterson Birds of Eastern US gets the most use. Now that I know the trees.

S is for Second Grade

2008-08-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

So. I said goodbye to Maeve at her preschool classroom and took Sophia down the hall. Ran into the "pre-elementary" teacher and handed over a bag of books for the library. All the kids in her room, which is an open plan, separated from a sort-of hallway by low bookshelves, were so small. We went through the doorway into the stairwell, passed the bathrooms, and stepped into the older classroom. Sophia waved at girls she knew from last year, some of whom I know for sure are only six. Sophia is already seven. I asked another parent what was up with that, and she shrugged. "They had a few drop outs, and so many new younger kids, that they bumped up a bunch into this room." In fact, all but two, and those were parent requests.

So there was never any worry about Sophia being in second grade. I know from working with a few of these students that Sophia is head and shoulders ahead of them--which makes sense, being a full year older. I was momentarily soothed. And then I was seething! I had been led to believe that Sophia was on the bubble when in fact that was never so. We didn't skate in under the wire. She was always firmly planted in the older kids' room.

Repeating this to Trisha, my neighbor, she said, "Well, now you can just be a parent. Drop off, pick up, go to the stupid shows."

Which is a shame, because all my personality flaws aside, I do a good job when I'm given one. On the other hand, I'm pretty busy with girl scouts and church. So this year, I'm just going to let it slide.

R is for Ready

2008-08-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, school begins. I have never been more ready to push both these little darlings out the door. I've had some on and off stomach bug (food borne illness? Just pregnancy woes? I don't know). So my patience is a little on the low side. They're tired of me, too--I have been zero fun the past two weeks or so. Not that I was one of those moms who has a planned activity for every weekday of the summer and wears her kids out and has forced fun fun fun all three months long. But we had a decent time.

Not no more. People ask Sophia if she's ready to go back to school and she says "yes" without any trace of regret. Maeve is already talking about friends and Miss Marie and what she's going to do first thing.

My only worry is Sophia's placement; we never received a class list of any sort. And the director of the school, who was briefly my boss and still doesn't like me too much, spent the summer hinting at the idea that maybe Sophia wasn't ready for the older classroom. See, it's a new school--last year was one combined classroom of K-2, with a couple older, almost really 3rd graders, mixed in. This year, taking in new kids, mostly on the younger end, there will be a K-1 class and a 2-3 (with a few 4ths) class. Sophia was considered one of the first graders last year. Her teacher said, oh, of course she'll be up in the next class next year.

Which is what I want because of many reasons. First, because she's ready for second grade. Second, because all the kids she really liked last year are going into the older classroom. Third, the teacher has a great deal of experience and has redesigned the classroom in ways I approve of. Fourth, because I'll be damned if I let the director's angst towards me be inflicted upon that sweet kid.

So I already have my backup plan. My negative fantasy, if you will. If we show up tomorrow and she's led into the K-1, I'm leading her right back out. I'm telling that director exactly what I think and we're going to homeschool. We did it for kindergarten, we can do it for second grade. And I'll keep Maeve in the preschool and be a thorn in several people's sides all year.

And then next year, we'll try some place else.

Of course, considering the age range of the new kids (mostly K), there's almost no doubt she'll be in the 2-3 room. It only makes sense logistically. We'll get the class and the classroom we want and all will be just fine and dandy. But I'm not going to be caught with my pants down tomorrow morning. I'm ready.

Q is for Quiz from Mrs. Slocombe

2008-08-21T22:59:00.000-07:00

Fun distraction when I should be going to bed:

1. Open your music library (iTunes, winamp, media player, iPod, whatever)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question below, type the song that’s playing
5. New question — press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool

****Let me just say in advance that my uploaded music is very limited****

Opening credits: Hearts and Bones by Paul Simon
First day at school: Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Scherzo)
Falling in love: Brand New Day Sting
Breaking up: Rodeo Aaron Copland
Prom: Day is Done Peter Paul and Mary
Life’s Okay: Lucky Old Sun (Just Rolls Around Heaven All Day) Ray Charles
Mental breakdown: Fever Peggy Lee
Driving: How Sweet it is (to be loved by you) Marvin Gaye
Flashback: Hallelujah kd lang
Getting back together: She Dreams by Peter Paul and Mary
Wedding: Blue Rondo a la Turk Dave Brubeck Quartet
Divorce: Billy the Kid Aaron Copland
Current Mood: Moments of Soft Persuasion Peter Paul Mary
Final battle: Ha Ha This A-way Pete Seeger
Death scene: Whiskey River Willie Nelson
End credits: Gringo Honeymoon Robert Earl Keen Jr

Ok, umm, Whiskey effin River aside, it's pretty darned random.Actually, the opening credits are pretty good, too. If I could rearrange it with the cards I've been dealt....but Mrs. Slocombe says no.

P is for Plain Speakin

2008-08-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

Here in Missouri, I use a fork to eat my sundae, and then put it on the sink to wash it in the morning.

O is for Owl

2008-08-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

Out at our place, which isn't our place at all, except that my heart lives there when it's too tired to live here, there are owls. This is no great feat. There are several types in Missouri. It's not like saying "there are arctic foxes." It's just owls. We sit out by the campfire and listen:

Who, who, who cooks for you?
Who, who, who cooks for you all?

It's one of the bird calls Sophia learned early. I love the words we give to bird language. Robins cheerily cheer up, cardinals are filled with what cheer, birdy birdy. Mnemonics.

My Great-aunt Emily collected owls. She grew up right nearby that place on the Gasconade River. When she died, some of the owls passed to my mother and on down the line. I inherited a green owl stapler; I don't remember which one of my vintage-crazy sisters got the radio that looked like the mechanical owl in Clash of the Titans.

Another aunt--actually, my mother's cousin's wife--took a clay sculpture class back in the 70s. She made a pair of owls; one great-horned, the other barn. Put them on either side of the couch in her living room. Her mother saw them and found a little owl figurine for her birthday. The deluge began. By the time I was in college and she explained to me that she didn't collect owls, but that people gave them to her, she had covered both end tables and the windowsill behind the couch with tiny, mostly kitschy, owls.

After we buried his dog, Johnny and I sat on the trunk of my car in the driveway of his mother's house, exhausted and covered in tree sap. We lay back on the windshield as it got dark. Waited breathless and then the dark silent shadow passed over us, obliterating the sky for just a moment. They do fly without sound. I never heard its call, but that wasn't the last time I watched it fly over us.

N is for Nostalgia

2008-08-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

But if there's one thing in my life
That these years have taught
It's that you can always see it coming
But you can never stop it

End of summer--the summer's been ending since August 7 or so. The nights are cool with the window fan, the days getting barely into the mid-80s. Sure, September will hit and we'll have some warm days, like always. St. Louis doesn't give birth to seasons easily. She's like me. False starts and staggers and stalls. But fall is coming. The first bradford pear leaves turned red and purple on the ground when we ride bikes past them. The sweetgum outside the window is still green, but it's coming. It's the easiest summer since I moved here in 1992.

And statements like that just take me on a slippery slope down into memory. I stay up too late googling friends from that first year in college. Then high school. Flipping through yearbooks not with the standard sheepish embarrassment at what seemed important, but with something else--a self-indulgent nostalgia that gets me nowhere but the snooze alarm again, again, again.

Once it starts, I always play it through. Like giving into a craving early so that it doesn't get too big. I think and read and write and get my fingers to rest. I keep hoping that things will start to amalgamate, but place keeps getting in my way. Things here on Halliday do merge--we've been here ten years. When Corey walked up to the van that night and told me it was a girl, was that his baby girl he was talking about, or was he giving me news from across the street? So many kids in so little time. The fairy party--was that Sophia's 4th or 5th? Get out the pictures, count backwards. Was the assault really two years ago already? I guess it had to be.

But, and I know I say this a lot, the setting changes everything. I've been a Benedictine all my life and it took me 32 years to figure it out. I cannot forget floor plans or friends' houses or cow pastures or routes home to avoid the cops because they are all in a place. Boyfriends and best friends, cats and teachers and soccer coaches do not fuse with time because they aren't in time. They are in place.

Speed river at my feet running low and flat
I'm sitting here burning daylight,
Thinking about the past
And that distance out there
Where the earth meets the sky
The slightest move and this river mud
Pulls me further down
John's at my side, but he's sitting on firmer ground

Then somewhere in between finding too many songs with ex-boyfriends' names in them and setting myself up for future nostalgia (going into my daughters' room and staring at them while they sleep) I catch myself. I go iron a dozen shirts and watch English drawing room comedies. Make lasagna and listen to pop radio. Anything to keep the hands and head busy. Anything to tame it back down. Until that first crisp day of fall, or the cold blast of January air through the crack in the window. The smell of mud thawing in March. The sensation of tiny droplets of sweat running down my spine. It comes back around and sucks me back down.

(Bea's Song by Cowboy Junkies)

M is for Missouri

2008-08-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Just a quick thing for my non-Missouri readers, especially those who are interested in language subtleties.

If you live in St. Louis or Kansas City, you live (unless you're actually IN Kansas) in Missouri. Mih-zur-ee.

If you live throughout the rest of the state (and of course there are exceptions, since we are a mobile society), you live in Missouri. Mih-zur-uh.

As of 1989, 89% of Missourians said it the way I do. But listening to the politicians' ads, you'd think we were all hicks.

Oh, another stupid fact: in St. Louis, if you wanted to have ice cream with, say, fruit or chocolate sauce on top, perhaps nuts, whipped cream, you had a sundae. Yeah, I know, so does the rest of the US. Except the rest of the US says "sunday" and we say "sun-duh." Not all of us--once again, it's a mobile society. Sunday (the day) is pronounced correctly, but sundae gets the duh at the end. My parents say it, at least I think I remember that being so. Definitely the grandparents from here.

We also, if we're really St. Louis, say our /or/ as /ar/. Like leftover bad Irish accents. We add an R to wash. And sinks are zinks--German, that, most likely. My dad, I'll catch him saying zink sometimes.

I'm not that St. Louis. But I am from Missouree.

L is for Lifelong Hopes

2008-08-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Three cousins at the Missouri Botanical Garden last month. My greatest hope is that they aren't strangers when they're in their 30s.

There are twenty cousins in my family--that's my four siblings; my mom's only brother's three; and the rest are on my dad's side. I would recognize two of them on the street. There are two--Megan and Erin--whose mother ran off with and we've never heard from. They range in age from Angel, somewhere near 37, to Dalton, who is 7--my Sophia's age.

As my siblings have children, I hope we don't go the way of the Blakes. Scattered to the wind. It would be nice to know where everyone is. In the end, they are the people who should know us best. I don't think it has to be a Norman Rockwell painting. Just not something by Max Beckman, please.

K is for Kitchen

2008-08-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

I hate my kitchen. No, that's too strong. I used to hate my kitchen. Now I just dislike it. Many things about it I do like--I like the stove, a 1965 Frigidaire "Flair" with its pull-out drawer stovetop and double ovens with doors that open up instead of down--and are at eye-level. OK, I LOVE my stove. And the fridge, it's ok. In comparison to many neighbors' kitchens, mine is a little bigger and has lots more cabinet space. In addition, I have a pantry with a door, big enough we considered turning it into a first floor bathroom. Of course, that's one of the things I hate about my kitchen--we have a bathroom right off it, replacing what used to be a charming butler's pantry (I can say that because other neighbors in identical houses still have their butler's pantry intact). There's even a repulsive shower in it. The whole room is repulsive. I don't even know where to begin with that room--we use it as a closet and a catbox location. I eventually would like it to be a powder room that didn't make me grossed out to use. But the list...the list of things to do in this house is long.

Back to the kitchen. One of the things I like is that there is a door that closes to the kitchen. We can keep the vinegar smell from pickling inside. Or keep heat out of the rest of the house. Store the pets near their food and cat box when allergic friends are over. But this also makes the place a tad claustrophobic. Added to this is the fact that there are 5 doors and 2 windows in this tiny space. It is a thoroughfare. It is the way to the basement, the backyard, that closet (bathroom), and the pantry. People come in wet from the pool or dirty from yard work. There is no mudroom; the kitchen is the mudroom.

The kitchen was "designed" by Mary, the former owner, who was a gourmet cook. Or something. All I know is that it was the dirtiest kitchen I'd ever seen when I moved in. We replaced the stove and the fridge (note that I like those parts now), retiled the floor, and took out the island. The island was laughable--it turned a usable rectangle room into a "one-butt kitchen." Open the fridge and you can't walk past. Open the (old) oven door, and you pray to God nobody walks in the back door and slam you into the 350 degree Hansel and Gretel nightmare. So goodbye island, hello almost-usable space. The sink is in the corner, which isn't as useful as I want it to be; the tile we laid just didn't work as well as it could have and peels here and there--we need to put down some real linoleum that links together instead of glues down.

It's just kind of a conglomeration of bad planning from the get-go and bad remuddling along the way. It's not that inviting. But something about kitchens make people gather. If this is the heart of my home, it isn't that bad. There's enough space to have a few people stand in the corners while I try to finish making dinner for them. And it's my kitchen. My parents have a nice kitchen/hearth room space. Mike's parents have expanded theirs to hold a table that sits 10. But this one is ours. A little grungy, a lot outdated. But everything works well enough that it's long down the list of what must be done. A work in progress.

J is for Jam

2008-08-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

I promise it's not all about food over here. Just the past few entries.

I'm having flashbacks to a time when I didn't exist. Sometimes I think genetics from my great-grandmother Maizie on the farm in Vichy, or my grandmother Penny in her rabbit-warren house in north county, got to me by skipping over all the generations in between--my grandmother Edith in her designer clothes smoking her thin cigarettes, my mother with her two masters degrees, my father in the astonishingly expensive hat. I am not those people. Ok, I am sometimes, but this summer, I'm Maizie and Penny.

The last time I visited Penny, just a few weeks ago, she told a story about the neighbor next door back when my dad was born. The woman had just had twins in addition to an older daughter (my grandmother had 3 under 3 at that point, not very different, actually). The twins were early and stayed at the hospital a long time. When they came home, the neighbor was paralyzed by the overwhelming nature of having 2 month old twins suddenly appear. My grandmother would wake up when they cried at night and go bang on the parents' window. She (hell, I was already doing Terry and Rick's, might as well) washed and sun-dried the diapers. Mrs. Kirby across the street ironed the husband's shirts. They pitched in because she was so darned helpless. My grandmother just laughed when she told me this story. She didn't fill me in on later details--was the older sister to these twins the one who was later lobotomized? Or was this a different neighbor? I have this creepy sketchy outline of a story there, told in whispers and snippets.

But the point is, while I'm not doing anyone else's laundry, my street isn't so different from Echo Lane. The cars are different, none of us are in housedresses, but if you squint, it's 1952 some days.

So Mary down the street asked me if I'd be interested in coming over and making blackberry jam. She knew I had the water-bath canning supplies and the know-how, and she had the blackberries off their vines in the backyard. Split the proceeds? I was there.

Jam is incredibly easy to make if you have two adults working on it. When we were finished and almost all the little jars had popped shut (they all did eventually), she asked, "What are we going to do next?"

Pickles and jalapeno jelly are tomorrow. Come September, applesauce. I went home and found recipes for zucchini and squash pickles (plenty of those lying around, but not so many cucumbers). I've made the hot pepper jelly a few times before, and applesauce. But I hadn't the past few years because I was lazy or interested in other things.

Something about this summer, though, makes me want to build my dam high, hide more acorns than usual, work instead of fiddle it away. Maybe I'm nesting, but it feels more dire than cozy to me. It's probably because I listen to too much NPR and gloomy predictions of economy and gas prices and war. I know in my head that pickles and jam will not get us through hard times, but a freezer full of deer meat and a cabinet full of dried beans might help. A couple deep breaths can't hurt, either.

I is for Ice Cream

2008-08-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

We have a mint problem.

Three years ago my neighbor asked if I'd like a pot of spearmint. Of course I would. I take anything anyone offers me for free. Plus, Mike likes mint in his tea (which makes it taste like toothpaste to me). So I took the pot and put it next to my tomato-cage garden area. Something liked it, though, a rabbit, perhaps, and I moved it into the cage. The cage protects our tomatoes from the vile squirrels who like to eat one bite and leave the remains to taunt me with. Now they climb all over the chickenwire roof stalking the tomatoes.

"Be careful with it," my neighbor had warned me. "It spreads."

Well, it's in a pot. It'll be fine.

We used the mint through the summer, and at the first frost, it died like everything else. I didn't think anything of it--herbs die back and I plant them again in the spring. Basil, oregano, parsley--actually, the parsley will come back, but this is not some crushing blow to my gardening plan when the mint dies back.

I picked up the pot on the day in November we put the garden to bed, as I call it with my kids. The hole in the bottom of the clay pot is filled with roots. Roots that extend into the raised bed of the garden. I cut them off and empty the pot into the compost.

Next spring, that compost gets spread in the garden. Between the root system that wintered there, and whatever might have survived in the compost heap, the mint came back on its own. That year, it was a small patch, enough to keep Mike in mint tea and Sophia in "can I go eat a mint leaf?"

Last year, it was about a square yard of mint. This was after a winter under thick newspapers and mulch. Came back. More hardy than the wild strawberries and violets.

This year, it's about 4 square yards. I plant things in between, hot peppers and bell peppers, tomatoes. I cut it back and pretend it's not there. But it is, and it's large.

What do you do with 4 square yards of spearmint, anyway? Nothing. I could harvest it and give it to my CSA, perhaps. But nobody wants that much mint. My mother-in-law said, "make tabbouleh." A neighbor thought I could dry it and use it all winter (just what I want). So one evening last week I sent Sophia and friend out to pick as much as they could. They came in with a paper grocery bag full. I cut off the stems and big wilted leaves and had 4 cups mashed down tight. Two cups went to the freezer, and two cups went into mint ice cream.

Custard style, with egg yolks, cooked on the stove. Mint leaves steeping in cream, sugar, and milk for 2 hours, poured over the yolks, poured into the pan, heated until thick. More cream. Chilled in the fridge overnight, and the next day, put in the ice cream freezer with chopped up dark chocolate chips.

Mike and I hate mint ice cream. Sophia is the connoisseur. But we had a little, each of us, to demonstrate how open we were to new things (translate: yes, you can eat your zucchini--I had mint ice cream last night...as if those are equivalent).

It was a completely new creation. Nothing like mint ice cream from the store. It was as different from store-bought as a red rock tomato ripened with ethylene gas and carted 2000 miles by truck is different from a black Russian tomato ripened on the vine in the backyard.

After our green eggs and ham moment, Mike said, "save that recipe. It would be a wonderful vanilla. Or maybe vanilla bourbon. Or blueberry. Or--"

It was good ice cream.

H is for Hey

2008-08-14T22:58:00.000-07:00

My parents are from St. Louis, both of them, forever and ever. My mother's mother is from Vichy, Missouri, and her father is from St. Louis. Both are Irish-German through and through. My dad's father is Irish (I've written about Kerry Patch before, I'm sure); his mother is another Irish-German. So their dialects are all very much the same. My maternal grandfather had some German peppered in there, my maternal grandmother some Ozarkian lovelies. But my parents are the same, the very same, with the exception that my father will say "ain't" when he's drunk and my mother won't.

I, on the other hand, born in Missouri but raised here and there, do not match their dialect exactly. Except when I try. I don't match anyone else's, either. I've taken the American Dialect Examination and I'm all over the board--a lot of Texas and southwest, some Iowa, a large amount of Great Lakes. But nothing like my Great Lakes friends. Most of my differences are in words (water fountain/drinking fountain; green bean/string bean/snap bean: any American who's ever been to school has had this lesson).

My husband was born and raised at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, rural edge of southern dialect with some of the Great Lakes still influencing the speech. His differences aren't in vocabulary for the most part, but in structure. Words are used in ways I cannot make work. It's not "what do you call a frying pan?" but "what do you mean by the term 'anymore'?"

For instance, I say "I don't try to grow cucumbers anymore."

But Mike says, "Anymore, we always wear seatbelts."

Doesn't it make your head explode?

Mike has his strange constructions, but I have a few words I picked up in Texas that I can not shake free. Some are affectations, like y'all, which I can consciously interchange with you guys (the standard St. Louis equivalent). But three others mortify me every time I say them:

Reckon: I reckon we'll be able to make it there in time.
Figure: I figure there's no way we can win this game.
Fixin To: I'm fixin to head out.

I might as well put on the shit-kickers and start spitting chaw. These were not part of my vocabulary until I lived in Houston.

But the one that makes my mother crazy is hey. Not as a "hey! You! Stop!" but as the equivalent of hi, or even, gasp, hello. It made her crazy in Georgia, it made her crazy in Houston. Everyone says hey. When we moved back to St. Louis, she found it had spread. There's no avoiding the hey.

Anymore, we all say hey. (But I sound like a tourist when I try...southern Illinois is the only place where it's natural).

G is for Gallon

2008-08-14T22:30:00.000-07:00

A Gallon is equal to 4 quarts.
A quart is equal to 2 pints.
A pint is equal to 2 cups.
A cup is equal to 16 tablespoons.
A tablespoon is equal to 3 teaspoons.
That's 768 teaspoons in a gallon. Yes, I just know this.

A teaspoon, on a side note, is equal to a circle only I can see in the hollow of my hand. But only with solids like salt and baking powder.

The pool in my backyard is ten feet in diameter (five feet radius). The area of the bottom of the pool is approximately 3.14159(5)^2. Or 78.5398 feet square. If I fill the pool 2 feet deep, the volume of the liquid contained is 78.5398(2), or 157.0795. Go ahead and make it 157 cubic feet of water. A cubic foot of water is approximately equal to 7.48 gallons (I had to look that one up). Which means that pool, when filled this way, holds 1174 gallons of water. Mrs. Slocombe, you'll be happy to know I haven't emptied it in 2 weeks (chlorine is keeping the mosquitoes at bay--and it's been too cold to swim. In August). Which of course would be 901,632 teaspoons. But that's getting too hard to fathom.

So, that pool holds 1174 gallons of water. And that weighs almost 10,000 pounds.

Now envision the last Mississippi River flood. I didn't flood--this house has stood over a hundred years and never had standing water in the basement. But if it were to have, say, a foot of water in the basement, considering the footprint of my house is 950 square feet (approximately--with three floors above ground we are just under 3000 square feet--I'm sure LisaS the architect can correct me here but I know how big my lot is, too, so I think I'm probably close), that's 950 cubic feet of water. Or just over 7100 gallons. Weighing almost 60,000 pounds.

It's a lot of water.

F is for Firsts

2008-08-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

My first...

school was Washington Elementary in Palm Desert, California. I was in the English kindergarten.
toy was a Curious George doll. Later he got a last name: Jones. George Jones.
cat was Wiz. When he died, my childhood officially ended.
dog was Ebony. My family didn't do dogs very well. We're cat people.
high school was The Colony High. I was totally unremarkable.
crush was TJ. Then I learned about him and the other Bridget; I was glad I'd kept it to myself.
physical girl fight was with Laura. I lost.
boyfriend was Gerdine. My entire hand fit into his palm.
encounter with police involved a body dumped in a ditch. Fun for none.
breakup was over the phone. I was living 3 states away. This repeats 3 years later, new boy.
trip to the ER was for a car accident. We always wore seatbelts after that. I was 2.
comic book was a collection of bugs bunny. I was angry when my mother threw it away.
computer was a TRS-80 in 1982.
letter in high school was for statistics. Got three more as time went by.
best friend was Misdy. I have never tried to look her up.
major religious experience was my confirmation in 1999.
despised food was American cheese. I still cannot imagine eating it.
mentor was Stephen. He was a Benedictine. It all comes round.
daughter is Sophia. Now she's suddenly seven.
quilt is still somewhere in my parents' house. It's a disaster.
sip of alcohol was bourbon. I thought I'd never drink again. I was 12.
hangover was with tequila. Bourbon had not prepared me for easy to drink alcohol.
pregnancy ended 9 weeks after it began. It took a long time to recover from.
mix tape went to Marita in response to her "Surprise!" mix tape she mailed to me.
classroom was at Henry. I still worry sometimes.
instrument was flute. When you let the 8 year old girl pick her instrument.
foreign language attempt was German. Failure. Russian went better. And Cajun.
spelling bee ranked me 7th in the state. Of Texas.
sport was soccer. Only one until 8th grade. Followed by track and fencing.
job lasted 3 days at a theater. I left it for the green fields of Walmart.
car was a Chevy Cavalier I nicknamed Karma. It had bad karma. Or I did.
DFS hotline call was for Norman. I thought they'd get easier. Didn't.
curfew violation was 4 a.m. with Johnny. I was in pretty deep.
funeral for a peer was in high school. Suicide. So was the second.
political affiliation was "non-socialist," as was required by Texas Girls State.
mah jongg game was lost to Jody. So were the next 3 months' worth.
bachelorette party, I danced on a bar. It was also my last bachelorette party.
time on a jury, we laughed in the jury room about how stupid the defendant was.
blog entry was about the fish fry at my parish. It got more readers than I expected.
365 commenter was Indigo Bunting. I was shy. Got over that.

E is for Everyday

2008-08-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

Was aber ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages.
What, then, is your duty? What the day demands. -Goethe

I wake to one of the children--the curly-haired one--breathing in my face. "Mom? When are you getting up?" Now is the answer, as I realize the clock has been unplugged (cat?) and I have no clue what time it is. On the lamp table, I find my watch and realize it's almost 9. This makes me more tired than if it said 6:30. My alarm was set for 7:30, and that would have meant a happy rollover and snooze. What this means is time to catch up.

Mike's out of town which means nobody gave me my thyroid medication at 6:30...which therefore means I take it at ten to nine and can't eat until 10:00. Have I mentioned I'm pregnant and starving? But a good part of that hour is taken up with grooming tasks and finding clothes that still fit (I have enough yoga pants and capris to get me through to true maternity clothes, but the t-shirts are starting to get short). I make it downstairs and find that the two girls have fed themselves. How long have they been up? There are fruit-flavored Cheerios on the coffee table and the remains of a sad banana on the floor next to it. The dog probably gave it a half-hearted try. I'm sure she was disappointed.

I manage to make myself breakfast while I mentally make my list. The girls' room is a disaster. The attic. The whole house needs vacuuming. But, I notice happily, the thorough cleaning of the kitchen last night has indeed ended the little ant problem. We've been here 10 years and this is the first year of ants. Ants and no red tomatoes. I think about how I would title the summer with those two facts, wash my dishes, take the trash out to the dumpster. Not too warm. Oh crap--I need to feed and water the dog (usually Mike's doing).

Back inside, the girls clean and I sew. I finish a little dress for Sophia about the time she has a friend show up. Fine, you can play until 2:00 and then more cleaning and meeting at church.

We go meet Sr. Mary at the rectory, and the accountant, to arrange for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd funding. Then the accountant offers me the chance to take photographs at her parish--for pay--I just need to call her tomorrow and hash out the details. I can't stop grinning. My kids, though, are whining because I haven't fed them lunch yet, so we go home with that bouncing around my head. Leftovers for lunch while I think about what I'm going to can ("put up") with my neighbor next week. We did blackberry jam this week. I think it'll be jalapeno jelly and zucchini pickles next time. You do with what you have.

Girls play at the house. Girls play at other houses. Somehow the attic is clean. I do laundry and vacuum. Fold the endless baskets full of clean clothes. Mike calls, and I sit on the front porch, picking (non-lead) paint off while I tell him about the day. His day in North Carolina doesn't sound so bad. But I don't hate him like I did in January when he went to Disneyworld and Maeve got cat-scratch fever. He'll be home in the afternoon Friday and I'll get to walk out the door to mah jongg.

A neighbor girl comes over to stay the night, and pizza is magically delivered. I'd promised the girls pizza back on Monday when Mike left on the plane. Thursday night, we'll have a spend-the-night party. With pizza or chinese, but then I remember the neighbor girl in question has a tree nut allergy. Cashew chicken, anyone? So pizza it is.

The olympics is droning on and on about volleyball, which I care not at all for (having broken my collarbone playing the damned game). Talk to the next door neighbor about her Pampered Chef business. Maeve gets dunked in the tub, and then the girls bring out my old "Fashion Plates" coloring kit. It's funny how some things still seem like fun. I paint their nails and then, here in just a minute, I will banish them to the attic. I'll drink more gatorade (still fighting something off, a food thing) and read my blogs. Maybe watch a little gymnastics and shake my head. Read the book club book and fall asleep with the phone in my hand, like always when Mike is away.

In the morning, there will be a new list.

D is for Dorm

2008-08-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

I was at a loss. Cornell College in Iowa wasn't going to work out for me, mostly because the girl who gave me the tour was so anti-Catholic it was embarrassing. I thought, if this is the tour guide...I wasn't even sure how important Catholicism was to me a the moment, but I knew I was entrenched in Catholic culture and it just wasn't going to work.

University of Chicago wasn't going to work out, either, mostly because I couldn't afford to go there. Don't ask about Yale.

So that left Saint Louis University, where I was a type of legacy, if that term existed at midwestern Jesuit universities. My father got his BSN there. My mother's father had an associates in accounting (that's all you needed back then), and his father had a degree in accounting and music performance (violin). Or I could frantically apply at the University of Texas, where I was guaranteed admittance and, most likely, a full ride.

But I didn't want to go to a Texas school. I wanted out of Texas. So we went up to SLU to take a look in the fall of my senior year, while we were in town for a cousin's wedding. I went on the canned tour, including a dormitory room in Walsh Hall. All girls dorm, the room we visited had sorority letters on the wall (back then, there were no Greek houses on SLU's campus). I already knew myself well enough to know I wasn't going to be a little black dress on the arm of a khakis-and-blue-blazer. Walking down the hall, more blond girls with Greek letters on their sweatshirts. A lot of ponytails and mascara. This wasn't going to work. The van ride back to Houston was melancholic. "Not too late for UT," came the reminders from the front seat.

In the spring, my mom, my boyfriend, and I took a college trip up to Cornell College for the bigot tour, stopping through Columbia to visit one of my grade school friends. Headed to St. Louis where we stayed a few days with my grandmother. While we were there, my mom said, "Why don't we go look at SLU one more time?"

So we gave ourselves a tour. Walked west down the sidewalk campus, past Spring St. (which isn't a street anymore), and down West Pine to Marguerite Hall. Cinder block walls, it looked like a public housing apartment building from the 60s. We went to the front desk and asked if we could see the place. They called Joel from the 3rd floor. It was co-ed by suite--two rooms shared a bath. No ponytails and mascara wearing black dresses. Long-haired guys. Patchouli. Foreign students. And the walls--oh, the walls--personalized on every floor with themes that ranged from The Far Side to "The Death Floor."

Walked out of Marguerite Hall and turned to my mom. "This is where I'm going to school and this is where I'm going to live."

I became well known as the only person to actually choose Marguerite Hall in my incoming freshman class. Most folks wind up there--other dorms fill up and water finds its own level. People realize they don't belong in Griesedieck or Clemens or Walsh and start drifting west down campus.

Mike was the second person I met when I walked through the doors in August.

His brothers just graduated from SLU this spring. Nowadays, Marguerite has air conditioning, like all the dorms. I just shake my head. So instead of being known as "The Opium Den" it is one of the most coveted freshman dorms--yup, all freshmen now, no fifth-year seniors to buy you beer--because of the suite/bathroom set up. You can't go home again.

If this next baby is a girl, one of her names will be Marguerite. Where I met your father. And found myself.

C is for Cat

2008-08-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

The first was Wiz. Black, male, affectionate, and urinated all over anything you left on the floor. It made my family a household of meticulous housekeepers, and he was always good for a warm snuggle in the wintertime. Wiz got to our family before Colleen did; he moved with us 7 times. I was already teaching school when he died; he was 17 or 18 and had been mostly blind and a little arthritic a long time. Then suddenly his kidneys failed. He went fast but he had good life.

Thatcher was during Wiz's reign. He lasted a few months and left us. Another black male kitten. After him, Mattie, a brown and white blotchy cat, lived near us a while, but was hit by a car before I got to know her. And then came Smokey. Tiny gray kitten who grew into a stout, somewhat ornery, competition for Wiz. Her fur was like some expensive stuffed animal that a kid would rub back and forth until it was matted and old and her favorite. Except Smokey's was always lovely. She looked like a cat you'd see in a calender, except maybe a little rotund. She died two years after Wiz of thyroid cancer. Not a good death this time.

Howard was a female cat my brother named before he realized it. A high school friend renamed her Gloria but it never took. A little Maine coon looking, but too short, a dark brown tabby with white. Ink spots on the back of her legs and a beauty mark on her face. She was a stray who was terrified of brooms. She was never anybody's cat.

When I moved out, got married, the first living things we brought into our apartment (as opposed to the mice who lived there already) were Hickory and Bleys. Hickory is a female black cat with a rich inner life; Bleys is a Norwegian forest cat, orange tabby with white. Like a dreamsicle with a mustache. He chirps and purrs and climbs Christmas trees. They are best friends.

My parents, after Wiz died, got Isis. A timid diluted calico afraid of men. It didn't go well. My sisters took her with them illicitly to college against apartment rules. Now she is older and fat and living the good life with Bevin.

Once they were cat-free, my parents adopted Franny from a no-kill shelter. She has the shortest hair of any cat with hair, I am convinced. True calico, she holds her own with Horus, their next adoption, an enormous panther-like cat who plays with my father like a dog. It's divided down gender lines in that house now.

Fearful that Bleys would die before Hickory, or vice versa, which, of course, will happen one way or another, we thought it might be good to adopt a third now that they're 12 years old. Get another cat established so the survivor of our pair won't be so lonely. I know, a little too much human emotion to saddle a cat with. But Christmastime came and Sophia pushed hard for a bunny. THAT was not happening. No animals with cages in my house. Especially with Hickory to stalk the bunny. We put the word out to my neighbor, who volunteers at a no-kill shelter.

She produced kittens for us...but they weren't for us. Semi-feral stray siblings, they'd be eaten alive, perhaps literally, by the rottweiler and by Hickory. But my sister Colleen and her boyfriend Tim took two of them home. Rosemary looks like a white tiger; Bert is another dumb black shorthair. Elizabeth came through again, though, and thus we have Blackjack, named for the oak tree, a brown and black tabby, sweet as pie.

I like them, these cats. I think they make me more human.

B is for Spelling

2008-08-08T15:14:00.000-07:00

My dad wanted to spell my name Brighid. My mother balked. So instead of the standard Irish-American spelling of Bridget, he added an extra T.

Grade school brought a lot of spelling my name out for other people. By high school, I simplified it: Bridge with two T's. Seemed simple enough, but lots of things got addressed to Bridgette. And then in college, I was given the nickname Bridge-Pi, since the Greek letter looks similar to two capital T's set very close together (TT).

Mail has arrived for Brigit, Bridget, Brigitte, Brigid, and Birgit. I only met two other Bridgetts, both southerners, both African-Americans. Another was even another Bridgett B., and she was offended that my parents had chosen to spell my name the "black way."

I don't think that was the plan, frankly. I think it was randomly picked, since one time in college, I got a check from my dad written out to Brigett Blake. That tipped me over the edge--he was the one who spelled it this way! The next check was spelled correctly, though. Probably a momentarily lapse. He forgets birthdays, too.

Now in my 30s, I've stopped worrying about it. My last name is bad enough to spell over the phone. I don't get up in arms about a missing T or an extra E. Some people do ask, realizing this name can be spelled an astounding number of ways (Megans, Alicias, Joannas, and Kathryns can sympathize, I know). But it's no longer high on my list of directions people must follow. Try to get Wissinger right. Try not to go the wrong way on my one-way street. Do seriously try not to call my younger daughter "Mauve." But Bridgett? Eh. Whatever--the mail will get to me.

A is for Adriana's

2008-08-07T18:20:00.001-07:00

"Aaron's birthday is Saturday," Bevin says to me on the phone. "And I need to ask you a favor." I listen. She wants me to go to Adriana's this week and buy cole slaw, which she and Aaron had consumed with great delight earlier in the summer.

"It's the best cole slaw he's ever tasted, and I thought I'd try to get some, but Adriana's is only open until 3 and I get off work at 4:30."

I tell her I will, and put it down in my calendar to go buy cole slaw at Adriana's on Thursday or Friday for Bevin's boyfriend's birthday, as weird as all this is. I'm kind of shy about weird requests. "Can I buy a pint of cole slaw?" is something I practice during the week to get my story right for when I actually go in. I dream at night about going, working it out subconsciously.

Adriana's is on the Hill here in St. Louis, which is home to Italian immigrants who came here originally to work in the clay mines, if I remember correctly. Tiny row houses interspersed with Italian grocers, bakeries, and restaurants. Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up here. Mostly northern Italians and Sicilians. The restaurants are not the standard Italian-American fare, not that they don't have spaghetti and ravioli and whatnot, but they have a strange affinity for provel cheese and, I've been told, tend more towards the northern Italian in style. What do I know from Italian restaurants? Not much. But I know I like Adriana's.

It's Sicilian, and it's all sandwiches. The line is long and tables are crowded. I always assume I'm getting our order to go. It's only open for lunch, 6 days a week. The woman at the counter, who has always been at the counter, talks to me every time and asks me what my mother's maiden name was. I just look so familiar. When I tell her Wibbenmeyer, she always wrinkles up her nose. She either does this with everyone or I really do remind her of someone. She's the standard Italian fare when it comes to my experience of older Italian women. Lots of "Let me tell you whatcher gone to do" and "Thank you, honey." She looks at my winter coat (with the Bundesrepublik Deutschland flag on the shoulder) with narrow eyes, but then tells me Maeve looks like a little Italian. It's like the Sicilian version of blarney.

The girls split a Ben's Special when we go, no dressing or onions. I aim for the Sunni's Veggie usually. Mike has no regular. Sometimes he takes the special. When tomatoes are in season, there tends to be a special salad on the menu. But I've never seen cole slaw.

I go in today and look up and down at the specials board and the regular menu. No cole slaw. I get to the counter, in a rare lull, and ask her, "Cole slaw?"

"Oh, honey, I love it. But nobody bought it. I wish they would have. I love it all. Creamy cole slaw, vinegar and oil cole slaw, Asian cole slaw. But people don't come to the Hill to eat cole slaw."

I tell her of Aaron and Bevin and my quest.

"Oh, that's too bad. We even tried it in smaller batches. Nobody took it. Good to know somebody liked it. Here, have a lemonade on me." She hands me a cup. "I'm sorry to disappoint you."

I order lunch for me and the girls to take back to my mom's house. She rings it up and I hand her my debit card.

"Thank you," she looks at the receipt, "Bridgett...Wi--"

I pronounce it for her.

"You look so familiar to me," she shakes her head.

"You have said that to me before. But I'm not from here--I mean, my parents are from St. Louis, but I didn't grow up here. Moved here in 1992."

She peers at me, trying to place me. Then she asks yet again, "What was your mother's maiden name?"

"Wibbenmeyer," I apologize.

"Well, honey, you've got a twin out there somewhere. Sorry about the cole slaw. You're number 50." She hands me my ticket. I go get my cup of lemonade and wait for the sandwiches.

Bevin wasn't too devastated. She knew it was a long shot. I'm sure she and Aaron will have a good day Saturday regardless.

*Photo taken by The Guth Family, creative commons license

Z is for Zelo

2008-08-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

Zelo Zelatus Sum Pro Domino Deo Exercituum

With Zeal have I been Zealous for the Lord God of Hosts. One of the three mottoes I had to memorize when I attended Mt. Carmel. That's the motto for the whole Carmelite Order, so it makes sense that my little high school down in Texas would have chosen it. Our yearbook was also the Zelo. I say "was" because my high school abruptly closed this May after graduation. It was looked down on as a ghetto Catholic school, not achieving the fine standards of its far more well-financed peers in the diocese. The building was in bad shape, being rather old for a Gulf Coast structure (52 years). It would take a lot of money to transform it. Or move it. Or improve it. Bad decisions were made along the way. Lots of should haves and could haves. And I was valedictorian my year, which implies a certain laxness on the part of the academics, I think. Except the Russian teacher. I tested out of 3 semesters of college Russian after only one year of high school (for my non-American readers, most times two or three years of a foreign language in high school is equivalent to a single semester of it in college). But I hear that the stranded juniors, sophomores, freshmen, and their parents have formed a non-sectarian charter school in the area called Mount Carmel Academy. This is like when Saint Louis University informed me I was no longer a graduate of Arts and Sciences, but of the "School of Public Service" (aka, those stupid people who took majors that provide them with thankless low paid jobs that burn them out in 7-10 years). I wonder if they'll keep the school colors of brown and white. Or the mottoes.

The other two I had to memorize, and this was solely for the purpose of the creepy principal stopping you in the hallway and hazing, I mean quizzing you, on the mottoes, were Jesus grew in wisdom, age, and grace before God and man, from the gospels, essentially summing up his entire adolescence and young adulthood, and one that didn't seem to make sense as a high school motto:

Non Licet Nobis Esse Mediocribus

It is not permitted for us to be mediocre.

The inclusion of the word "mediocre," even with the negatives applied, just seemed like a bad idea to me. Not something to get someone busting down the door to fill out the enrollment application. It's like bragging that you're in the 55th percentile or something. "We're slightly above average, I think!"

By contrast, the motto of the snotty school where I broke my collarbone is...oh...just looked it up. "Touching Hearts, Shaping Lives." Cheesy.

My first high school...just "Go Cougars."

Ok, so the mediocre one is actually kind of superior. At least my university did better: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. Probably lots of Catholic institutions use that one, but at least it isn't "We're better than some."

Y is for Yosemite

2008-08-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

The Disneyworld of the National Parks. But still, jaw-droppingly impressive to this midwesterner.

X is for X-ray

2008-08-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Just like all those alphabet books that stop trying to be creative.

PE class, 10th grade. The extra year of PE that I volunteered for because I liked PE. Only a handful of students, so we got to play corkball and indoor soccer, flag football, archery, tennis--not the average set of boring PE games.

In March, we did a 2 week set of volleyball. Not my very favorite, but still better than basketball or something stupid like dodgeball.

I'm on a team with Joanna and Stephanie and a bunch of older kids, including Chris, who was one of those legacy students at that high school. His great-grandmother had gone there when it was all-girls. I think one of his ancestors was there when Sherman burned the city down or something like that. Quarterback on the football team. I was one of those skanky yankees he wouldn't even talk to. I was on the math team, for goodness sake. But he was bad at volleyball, so that was something.

The ball comes over the net, and I scoot back a bit to volley it back over. Chris comes forward and barrels right into me. I fall onto the wood floor with my arms up, landing on one shoulder. The next thing I know, everyone has formed a circle around me and the coach is yelling at them to get away. My arm isn't functioning like it should. I hurt, but more than that, I feel dizzy and awful. Joanna gets to walk me to the office.

The secretary calls my mom and lets her know I've been hurt. Gives no details. My mom searches the house for a half hour looking for the insurance cards, just in case, and is astounded when she finally gets to school and sees me. My face is blanched, I'm hunched over, woozy. She takes me to the ER.

I'm immediately taken to x-ray. Laid on a table. I hear the zzzzot noise and they put me in a bed and wheel me back to the ER. I get a shot of some narcotic in my hip, which hurts more than my shoulder, frankly, and then I sort of drift away. But my mother hears it. The ER doctor in the hallway outside my room, holding my x-ray slide up and announcing, "That's broke!"

7 weeks in a figure-8 brace and my collarbone manages to gum itself back together without plates and screws (if I'd gone 8 weeks, that was the plan). My mother laments that I'll never be able to wear a strapless dress, since you can see clearly how it was put back together, the bone pieces slightly overlapping instead of healing end to end (which is highly unlikely with the collarbone). I don't think much about strapless dresses. I think more that if my body is found washed up on shore or decomposing in the woods, that collarbone knot might be a clue as to who I am.

That and my danged teeth.

W is for Went

2008-08-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

I like words. My friend Mary likes words more than I do, even. Linguistics would be her area of interest. I like dialect more than origins myself. But she loaned me a book I have read half of several times (I can't get myself through the second half yet, but the parts I have read and reread are fascinating) called Words and Rules. Many fun tidbits alongside two conflicting ideas of how we learn language (and why both of them are incomplete). I also have enjoyed, in the past, reading American Dialect dictionaries and journals. Walker Percy's dense collection of essays on language and the human condition, The Message in the Bottle, has me as, I believe, its only fan.

But back to Words and Rules. The author's entire investigation is based on irregular verbs. Why do they exist? Why do any verbs have any regularity at all? Older verbs seem to be more likely to be irregular (to be, to have) than new ones (to investigate, to photograph). He not only delves into how we learn irregular verbs and how they, over time, regularize, but also gives a brief history of a few irregulars in English. He also notes that American English sometimes tries to warp a regular verb into an irregular (speed/speeded is becoming speed/sped; knit/knitted is in flux right now: in 200 more years, knitted may not exist in favor of knit/knit; and my favorite, because it is still in a dialect phase, is sneak/sneaked becoming sneak/snuck).

In his history of irregulars, the one that most struck my fancy was to go. If go was a regular verb, it would be go/goed. Just like little kids always say: We goed to the store. Went makes no sense, in comparison to have/had and has/had, where at least you can trace the shortening of the sounds. But went?

Went is the past tense of wend. As in, the cat wends its way through the alley. In the slow gradual changes of English over time, through centuries, wend lost went and go picked it up. The past tense of wend now, if one were to use it, is wended.

Sometimes this is just too big to wrap my head around. The series of domino like events that has to occur to rip past tense away from one verb and give it to another. Gentle little subtle changes that slowly creep (creeped? crept?) up on folks until you don't talk the way your grandfather did. And these are amongst folks who always and for generations only spoke English.

It makes sense those of us in St. Louis with German right on our heels would speak differently from folks in El Paso, or Baton Rouge, or Minneapolis. I had a professor from California who loved linguistics, and he was astonished when he moved to St. Louis and we all said "come with," as in "Come with to the store" because that was a Scandinavian construction, not German--North Dakota, sure, but not St. Louis. He was adamant about it. It amused me. But wend/went/wended/go happened as English changed--sure, there were influences, but this isn't a dialect change. This blanketed all English speakers. There is no "archaic" or "alternate" past tense for go, like sneak/sneaked/snuck. It is only went. For everyone everywhere always.

V is for Varicella Vaccination

2008-07-30T08:04:00.000-07:00

I had the chicken pox in kindergarten.

My mother had all of the above, plus mumps, German measles, and red measles (or just "measles").

Her father had all of the above, plus whooping cough and diphtheria.

Last night, while I was putting old-fashioned caladryl lotion (the stinky pink kind) on Sophia's ankles covered with mosquito bites (which is not something I'm affected by and so consistently forget that other people are), I was telling her that my mom used this on me when I had the chicken pox.

"Chicken pox?" she asked, wrinkling up her nose.

"Yeah. Another disease you won't get because nobody gets it anymore."

I was worried about that. The varicella vaccine. My first thought: I had it; it wasn't so bad. My second thought: What if the vaccine isn't a lifetime one and she winds up contracting it in her 30s?

I mentioned the second concern to our pediatrician, who agreed with me. "In Europe, there's a booster. It's only a matter of time until they start that here."

"Wouldn't it be better to have her just get chicken pox?"

He nodded. "Good luck finding anyone who has it these days."

The last person I remember having it was a 6th grader the second last year I taught school. Trisha down the street thinks her daughter, Sophia's age, might have had a mild case when she was 2.

I don't worry about diphtheria. Who wants to die of diphtheria? Whooping cough (pertussis) kills newborns in families who don't vaccinate. Tetanus? Yeah, let's risk that. And polio? Don't go there. I made sure the girls got all those.

On the other hand, I declined Hepatitis B for my newborns, and I stretched the vaccinations out so it wasn't 6 shots in one day and who knows which one she's reacting to? But I wasn't worried about mercury and autism, and I believe in the protection of the herd--I wasn't going to keep my children from vaccinations and put other children (and themselves) at risk for deadly diseases. Sophia's school is chock full of kids whose parents, for philosophical reasons, do not vaccinate. Guess who isn't coming over to my house to play when I have a newborn?

But I still hesitated with the chicken pox. I did it, but that was the only vaccination decision I wrung my hands over.

Then this summer, we went to the doctor for a physical for girl scout camp. Her pediatrician said, "Oh, she's needing a varicella booster."

So she got it. And I felt a little better.

U is for Unwilling

2008-07-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
--on a poster above the secretary's desk at Henry Elementary

Henry is a huge building. The building and its playground take up an entire city block. It is across the street from the Cocheran Gardens Housing Project and down the way from two lower-density housing projects. There’s a Catholic Church, well, a shrine that never seems to have any visitors, across another street, and you can see the TWA Dome from the parking lot.

I park on the street and look up at the building, which is beautiful, three stories tall with bell towers on each end. The building is a shallow U shape with a double staircase in the center, separating two small play yards, asphalt, with basketball hoops on opposite ends. There is no shade except between the double staircase, where a few Bradford pear trees are turning purple. I stare up at the building in the afternoon sun, facing east, with the sun reflecting off the windows on the second or third floor—it’s hard to determine how they will count floors, since the basement is half-exposed. I wonder how old the building is, how many students have passed through the doors, what changes this place has seen in its years. I march up the left side of the double staircase to find the door locked.

I go back down to the sidewalk and head up the right side. This side is open, and I walk through, catching the conglomeration of school smells—paste, floor wax, soap, bleach, cheap food, and poverty. An older black man with a beard sits behind a desk directly in front of me. He’s dressed as a security guard, and a sign on the front of the desk reads, “I’m too blessed to be stressed or distressed.”

“Can you point me to the office?” I ask him.

“Good morning, young lady,” he says, pointing to my left, to the little piece of building that sticks out into the Bradford pears outside. “Nobody’s there, though, except Mrs. Young.”

I thank him and walk into the office. Mrs. Young must be the secretary. I see just the top of her head behind the four-foot tall partition that separates us. I hover near the desk until she looks up.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Turner,” I tell her. She points to the wall behind me. There’s an office chair. I sit. Over the next half hour, I watch as another secretary shows, a few teachers check their mail and gossip with each other, students file back to their classrooms from lunch. I wonder where my classroom will be. I wonder if any of these teachers will befriend me. I wonder if Mrs. Turner will materialize.

She does. She’s a huge woman, over six feet, outweighing me by at least 100 pounds. Her hair is graying, there’s a gap between her front teeth, and she is dressed in a terribly unflattering pantsuit. I think about golden-haired Joyce and her impeccable style and wonder what this woman has to offer. The secretary alerts her to my presence and Mrs. Turner approaches me. The mountain has come to Mohammed.

“Bridgett?” she sticks out her hand. I stand and shake it. “Let me give you a tour. I’m Cammy Turner.”

The main floor has first and second grade, a few special education rooms, offices, and, notably, no bathroom. Downstairs in the basement, kindergarten meets, the boiler room divides the building in half, and the library, gym, and cafeteria eke out a space next to pungent restrooms. By this time, Mrs. Turner is out of breath and we stop in at the library.

The librarian greets me warmly. “I’m Janice, and if there’s anything you need, you don’t hesitate.” Janice is in her forties, thin, white, and her eyes don’t focus on me at the same time. I hate that, I never know which eye I should be concentrating on. The library is small but neat, and, as opposed to several school libraries I’ve seen, looks well-used.

“We’re very proud of our library,” Mrs. Turner tells me. “Last year it was just a series of carts on each floor.” While we’re there, Mrs. Turner fills me in on the statistics for Henry. It was rehabbed 2 years ago for a maximum capacity of 400 students. They have 650 enrolled currently. This means there’s no art room or music room, and the students have three different lunches. They have 4 special education classrooms, 2 of which are behavior disorder rooms, and the other two are—Mrs. Turner looks at Janice.

“Sort of a mixed bag,” Janice says for her.

“Lock your classroom door,” Mrs. Turner says with total seriousness.

Speaking of classroom, I realize I haven’t seen any empty rooms yet, and I ask her where I might be teaching.

“Probably on the third floor. The music room—what is supposed to be the music room—has been cleared for your arrival. Marianne wasn’t too happy about that, but it’s all up to 9-Eleven. You’ll like the room. It’s one of the corners, and it is carpeted. The room next door to you is empty as well. We’re expecting another teacher in a few days.”

She stands, and I follow her out. We pass the cafeteria, where giant carts are being wheeled from the school into a large white truck.

“We don’t cook anything here, we just warm things up. Everything comes from Vashon, where they do the cooking. First lunch is at 10:55. You’ll have second lunch.” We head back up the steps. "I guess we'd better go get you some students."

It's to be first grade, which disappoints me a bit but beggars can't be choosers at this point. On the main floor, she knocks on the door closest to the office. A cheerful, or should I say medicated, middle-aged woman answers. Chaos reigns behind her.

"This is Bridgett, and this is Carol." Mrs. Turner introduces us. "She'll take 5."

She'll take 5. Carol, without turning around to even view her class, blurts out HectorDerekRobertDelisaLeonYouWantThemNow?

"No, tomorrow morning will be just fine."

Four more visits around, and I have a roster of 26. 18 of them are boys. I point this out to Mrs. Turner, who shrugs.

"It'll all be different by Christmas."

"Why?" My stomach falls. I assume this means another transfer for me.

"Because I predict you'll have a complete turnover of students by then. I'll keep in mind you want some more girls. How's that?" She hands me my handwritten class list of first names only. "Good luck to you. It'll be a good year."

Before I can answer or thank her or burst into tears, she tells me to take the rest of the afternoon off. Points me to my classroom (but doesn't take me up because she's just too exhausted to climb any more stairs). She says she'll sort the kids to my room in the morning.

For just a moment, as I ascend the hugest staircase I've ever seen up to my third floor west-facing classroom, I think I might understand the feeling of being assigned to a minimum security prison, say, for a few months. Not enough to end your life as you know it, but enough to change it forever.

T is for Transfer

2008-07-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Dr. Justin makes it pretty clear this is a tour, not an interview. I've been assigned. He has no choice in the matter.

Simmons School is eerily empty. I don't ask, thinking kids must be outside on the parking lot or somewhere, a gym perhaps? But Dr. Justin must be reading my mind.

"We're missing about a hundred kids," he tells me.

"What do you mean?" I'm envisioning a hundred milk cartons with Have You Seen Me age-adjusted photos.

“Who knows? They move, or perhaps they are on a bus to another school. I was told 250, and I have about 140 this year.” We take a wide curving staircase up to the second floor. He points up and down. “Kindergarten is that way, and first grade. There’s a few special education rooms as well. Down there,” he waves in the opposite direction, “is second and third.” We continue up the stairs.

The third floor, he tells me, and I believe him, hasn’t been used in over 30 years. I choke on the dust as we stir it up on the way to what will become my room. We pass the fifth grade classrooms and the other two fourth grade rooms. Mine—my own room—is at the east end of the hallway, next to a stairwell that terminates on the second floor, he points out.
The room is large and probably coated in lead paint. Just as I’m about to remark on the age of the paint, he tells me that the painter is due this week. That’s a good sign. There are built in lockers made of wood, and the desks are the old fashioned kind with the writing surface attached to the desk chair in front of you, complete with a hole for an inkwell. They’re all stacked in one corner. There are two bookshelves, designed for primary classrooms, low to the floor. The other furniture is more odd. Three free-standing metal gym lockers, a rolling audiovisual cart without any equipment, a teacher’s chair without a desk, and an assortment of long poles.

“Anything in here is yours to have,” he tells me over-generously. "Welcome to Simmons."

I'm to start the next day. He sends me down to the administration building to fill out the paperwork. He calls the building 9-eleven. Its address is 911 Locust, but over the course of the year I start thinking of it with each number enunciated, like an emergency phone call. It doesn't help that it's on Locust Street. Like one of the plagues?

Marilyn Johnson comes out to greet me and two other frightened young girls clutching what are obviously unread portfolios. She hands me off to Helen, who then escorts me to a messy desk to fill out the paperwork. Easily accomplished. I’m given a handbook and an instruction sheet for calling in absences to the phone line. Helen asks me which school I’m headed towards.

“Simmons.”

“Oh yeah? Don’t count on staying.”

I don’t ask for clarification. I’ve learned that the administrators at 911 are bitter, uninformed, and uncaring. If I’m destined to move on in one of the city’s famous teacher reshufflings, I’ll deal with it then. No reason to worry right now. I have a job either way.
I sign the contract for first year teachers—who turn out to be the only teachers who get contracts in St. Louis City due to labor disputes—and take my canary copies and handbook back out into the September sunshine. My car doesn’t have a ticket or a broken window, although it will have plenty of both by the end of this school year.

I show up the next day at Simmons to the rumor that I will be moved. Nancy, Karla, Greg, and I are all slated to be moved. Dr. Justin calls us into his office and confirms the rumor.

“Why were we hired here, then?” Karla asks. She’s been here since day one and has a room full of kindergartners.

“Like I told you all, we’re missing 100 students.”

Nancy and I, the latest to be hired, are not given students. We're told to make ourselves busy in our classrooms somehow. I'm assigned to Mrs. Strong, one of the 4th grade teachers, a recent transplant from Tennessee. I'm supposed to be her aide. This works for 3 days. Then I go to Mr. Tipton's 4th grade and listen to him yell for another week or so. After this, the golden haired instructional coordinator takes me under her wing and I get to sort supplies in the book room until I'm transferred.

No one knows where I will go. But we're going. Karla, Nancy, Greg, and I are all worried. Simmons is actually a sweet deal--I would have had 14 or 15 4th graders. Karla's kindergarten class is small and her classroom is huge. Dr. Justin seems realistic and easy-going. And every morning, the music teacher gets on the PA system and sings a song that starts,

We are happy!
Here at Simmons!
Simmons Elementary School!

By the end of September, Karla's class is reassigned. The little clique of friends she made with the other kindergarten and first grade teachers--young pretty teachers with nice classrooms, dressed in heels and skirts every day--have started to shun her. Nancy is stuck in a second grade classroom with a large pasty man who snores audibly in the middle of class. Greg was assigned playground duty, and then had to fill in for the janitor for a week. He didn't come back. Just walked away.

On the morning of October 2, a day after we were supposed to find out our transfer assignment, I hide in my room. I don't want to work in the book room, I don't want to tutor any more 4th graders who can't read. I just want to go home. Mrs. Washington comes over the PA system and I hear children's voices joining in the school song. It's a beautiful view over north St. Louis from my window. My classroom, which I cleaned by hand in the hopes it might turn out to be mine, looks like a museum from the 1890s with its inkwell desks and wooden lockers. Everything shines from the oil soap. Nancy appears at my door. I know it's time.

We go down to the office. She's worried. She heard that Gundlach (pronounced Gun-Lock) needs teachers, and she's also heard that it's so bad there, subs don't show up. I don't even know my way around the system enough to know where that school, or most others, are located. Karla's on the phone when we get to the office. She hands Nancy the receiver and frowns at me.

"Henry. I got Henry."

"Oh," I say, like I understand.

Nancy has Gundlach. She looks crestfallen. My turn.

"Miss Blake?" I don't correct her. "Camillia Turner is expecting you and Ms. Politto at Patrick Henry this afternoon. Take a long lunch. Do you know where Patrick Henry is?"

"No, but--"

"Tenth Street. Take Tucker to Cass, go east on Cass, and then south on Tenth. Congratulations," she says in the least congratulatory way.

I tell Karla.

"Great," she says miserably. "Maybe we can get a discount on bullet proof vests together."

S is for St Louis Public School Administrators

2008-07-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

It was my first job. No, it wasn't. There was the theater and Wal*Mart, the temp agency and the fabric store. But this was my first job for which I went to college for four years and took out loans in my name and sat in class analyzing professors' hairstyles. It was my first teaching job.

I sit down at the administration building, having taken the elevator up to the 5th floor, an elevator that still had an operator. I sit in the hallway waiting for Ms. Johnson to interview me. For the fifth time. She appears and calls me by my maiden name. I correct her. For the fifth time. We head over to her desk, not an office, not even a cubicle. Like an old-style newspaper press room from a movie. All the desks facing the same way, the phones on the desks big heavy black rotary dialers. She hands me a small piece of paper. I'm supposed to go down to Woodward. They were expecting me.

Woodward sounds great. It's down in a sleepy established neighborhood south of me. I call to introduce myself. The principal is not expecting me. In fact, he isn't hiring anyone at all this year, and certainly not a first year teacher. We take too much work.

I hang up the phone and spend the next four days trying to reach Ms. Johnson again.

You have reached the administration offices of the St. Louis Public Schools. If you know your party’s extension you may dial it now. Otherwise please choose from our menu of options. If you are a teacher reporting an absence press 2. If you are a substitute reporting duty press 3. To use our automated personnel file check system press 4. If you are calling regarding open positions please press 5. All other calls please hold for the operator.
*5*
Please hold while your call is transferred.

“Personnel.”
“May I speak with Marilyn Johnson please.”
“Ms. Johnson is not available at this time. May I direct your call elsewhere?”
“May I leave a message?”
“Go ahead.”

You have reached the administration offices of the St. Louis Public Schools. If you know your party’s extension you may dial it now. Otherwise please choose from our menu of options.
*5*
Please hold while your call is transferred.

“Personnel.”
“May I speak with Marilyn Johnson please.”
“Ms. Johnson is in a meeting. May I direct your call elsewhere?”
“Well, I left a message with her this morning about a job interview, and she never got back to me.”
“She hasn’t been back to her desk all day.”
“Is there someone else I can talk to about a job search? I’m already in the system.”
“No, Ms. Johnson is the person who sets up the appointments. Nobody else does her job, you know.”
“I know. Thanks.”

You have reached the administration offices of the St. Louis Public Schools. If you know your party’s extension you may dial it now.
*5*
Please hold while your call is transferred.

“Personnel.”
“Is Ms. Johnson in?”
“No she isn’t. May I direct your call elsewhere?”
“I left a message for her yesterday about a job interview, and she—“
“Is this Bridgett Blake?” My heart leaps.
“Yes it is,” I tell her eagerly.
“Ms. Johnson told me to tell you that you would have to speak with Dr. Berkley about another interview.”
“Can you transfer me to Dr. Berkley?”
“He isn’t in right now. Can I take a message?”

You have reached the
*5*
Please hold while your call is transferred.

“Personnel.”
“May I speak to either Ms. Jefferson or Dr. Berkley?”
“They’re in a meeting right now, may I direct your call elsewhere?”
“No thanks.”

I give up.

Two weeks after the school year started, Ms. Jefferson called me back. Turned out, they had my file under four different names: Bridgett Wissinger, Bridgett Blake, Sarah Blake, and a person I have never legally been, Sarah Wissinger. Never mind that they all had the same social security number. I wound up with 4 police record checks before they clued in that I was only one person.

She was sending me to Simmons on Monday morning. I call my parents down in Austin, so relieved that I've launched myself into adulthood. My dad is quiet on the phone.

“You know that’s right down the street from the deadliest corner in America,” he reminds me. “St. Louis and Sarah. More gunfights and deaths there than any other, in the entire United States.”

“Yes, but wasn’t that in 1975?” I ask sarcastically. My father was an emergency room nurse back then.

“How much could it have changed in 20 years?” he retorts.

I drive around the red brick, seemingly abandoned, school several times before I decide where I should park. I stop the car in the parking lot behind the school and walk around front to the locked doors. A security guard sees me through the bulletproof glass and hurriedly opens the door. I explain who I am and he lets me in without conversation.

A middle-aged black woman, impeccably dressed and manicured, looks up from her high desk and smiles at me. Her hair has been bleached a golden color, which I later realize matches her nails and her shoes. Every day.

“Are you Bridgett Wissinger?” she asks, not butchering the last name too badly.

“I certainly am,” I respond. This is where I’ll teach. This will be just fine.

Of course, it isn't where I'll teach. And it won't be just fine.

R is for Rottweiler

2008-07-23T11:19:00.001-07:00

We moved into this house in the late spring of 1998. I was kind of hesitant, even though we'd been living on Compton, and before that, on S. Grand across from St. Mary's High School. And we went to SLU right at the turning point between dark grungy sidewalk campus and the plastic fantastica it is now. But this was a house, not a dorm or a second floor apartment. The doors were old. We didn't know the neighbors. I wanted a big scary dog who would bark. At everything and everyone. So in June, my sister Colleen was visiting (they moved to St. Louis the following February), and we went down to the Humane Society to find a dog.

We walked down the aisles of the big dog pen area. Read profiles on some of them. Walked right past others. Finally found a 1 year old female Rottweiler mix named Jazz. They brought her back to the "get to know you" room, and we decided she'd do just fine.

She was spayed and ready for us a few days later. The cats, of course, did not approve. This was their house. They'd only just finished making everything just right. And now this? Dara was confined to the first floor only, no steps, which let them hide upstairs away from her. They got used to her with time, and she has always considered them to be somehow outranking her.

We got a free training class for adopting an adult dog, and we made the best use of it we could. She was highly trainable, focused, loved liver treats. By the end of the training class, it was obvious that she had bonded to Mike, and to Mike only, which made perfect sense to me because I didn't get a dog because I loved dogs...I got a dog because I was suspicious of the efficacy of alarm systems.

Time passed. She now goes wherever she pleases in the house. I stopped trying to keep her off the couch when we're gone. I stopped freaking out when she rooted through the trash or ate Maeve's breakfast off the coffee table. The kitchen trash got a lid, and Maeve's breakfast moved up higher. And she is so so good.

She's still obviously Mike's dog. I'm just a housemate. She's done her job well the past ten years. Every Halloween we sit on the front porch with her and there are folks who won't even come up to trick or treat. That rottweiler face is just too scary. We meet them halfway, but I know if she scares teenage boys in sweatshirts pretending to be younger than they are for free candy, she must be doing something right. "Does your dog bite?" kids ask. "Not yet," I answer. And then I rein in her leash to keep them at bay. When we walk her, other pedestrians cross the street to the other sidewalk. I like her because of this.

She's 11. She has cataracts and a thyroid condition. She gets overheated in the summer and stiff in the winter. She's a big dog and I know she's slowing down. It'll be sad when she goes, but not devastating for me. I don't know if we'll get another dog. The house is kind of full. Maybe it's time to look into our homeowner's insurance and see about discount possibilities on an alarm system. It'd be a lot cheaper than all that dog food and vet visits. Right?

And it would go along with one of the statements that describes me: "Hates dogs." My sister was bit badly in the face when she was very small, and my father was bit by a stray when he was a teenager, requiring him to undergo the rabies series. A dog that doesn't bite is a dog that hasn't bit yet. I'm very cautious with my kids around any dogs, especially because Dara has made them fearless.

But I haven't decided. Mike likes dogs. And if we had another like Dara--even my father, when I thought Dara had congestive heart failure (or heart worms--but it was just the heat last summer), said, "You'll never find one as nice as Dara"--then I could maybe do it again. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Q is for Questions

2008-07-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

Recent Questions:

You empty the pool every four days and fill it up again? Indeed. Maybe every week. Sometimes we empty it and a few days later we fill it again.

Do you really have that much water over there? The picture below was taken from the train heading home to St. Louis. That's the Mississippi River. But the real reason comes down to, umm, the fact that we pay a flat rate for all that water. Our house is so old, it doesn't have a water use meter. Our sewer bill is based on how wide our lot is; our water treatment bill is based on how many toilets we have (essentially--it's bathrooms and half-baths). If I leave town for a month and use no water, I pay the same as, well, if I fill a big horse trough pool every week. Should I do this? Probably not. I lived in the desert when I was 5--you never would have dreamed of doing this out in California. But see, I don't believe people are really supposed to live in the California desert. Nomadic tribes, maybe, but not retirees. You should live where there's water and trees and deer in the forest and arable land you can turn into wool and wine and bread. But anyway, here's our water source:

BTW, shouldn't their new sibling be arriving soon? Yes. In January. I'm sick and exhausted and ruminating on the phrase "be careful what you wish for." But happy. We have the "early" ultrasound on Wednesday, but we've already had a heartbeat on the doppler so I'm trying to rest easier.

Finally, to paraphrase, what is a crab rangoon? According to Wikipedia:

Crab rangoon are deep-fried dumplings served in American Chinese restaurants, stuffed with a combination of cream cheese, lightly flaked crab meat (more commonly, canned crab meat or imitation crab meat), with scallions and/or garlic. These fillings are then wrapped in Chinese wonton wrappers in a triangular or flower shape, then deep fried in vegetable oil.

These may or may not have been invented at the (in)famous 1904 World's Fair. It's more of that Chinese food that isn't Chinese. And my sister Colleen and I can eat us some crab rangoon. Mostly just hot cream cheese in a wonton, really, with perhaps some flakes of something nautical, and some garlic powder. But yummy.

The wikipedia article had a link to "St. Louis Cuisine" which of course I had to go click on. This made me laugh. I had no idea there was anything parochial left in the food world. Red Hot Riplets and Slingers. I might have my "R is for" and "S is for." But it won't go too far. This isn't a food blog. And I'm not about to start that kind of primrose path to hell.

Any other questions? No? Then I think I'm going to send Mike out for Chinese take out and dangle my feet in my hoosier pool.

P is for Pool

2008-07-18T09:13:00.001-07:00

We have a galvanized metal pool. It's 10 feet in diameter and is a horse trough. Maybe this happens everywhere, but I think it's a south St. Louis thing. Perhaps the surrounding area. Like pork steaks. You can get them here, and you can get them down in Cairo, Illinois, but you can't get them in Dallas or Houston. Of course, there, it's all beef all the time. But you can't them, according to my Michigan friend Mary, where she's from either. Some things are regional.

Side note: toasted ravioli is not regional, people, you can buy them in the freezer section anywhere in the country--it started here, but it's not only here. Same with crab rangoon. Yeah, the hot dog, ice cream cone, mustard, and so on started here in the "Love Handle of America" but they are not limited to here. Provel cheese might be. But who wants to claim that?

But I think horse trough galvanized steel pools are regional. We've had ours about 3 or 4 years now. I made this unwritten list of things from my childhood I wanted to repeat, and a big metal pool was one of them. I don't want an in-ground pool or definitely not an above ground monstrosity. I just want a kid's pool that I don't have to blow up, that is easy to empty, easy to fill. Water is a flat rate in the city (woo hoo!) so I empty it every 4 days or so and fill it again. Once fall is here, we flip it over upside down.

Every spring we flip it over and I repair the rusted areas. I use boat repair stuff, fiberglass cloth and epoxy, just like when I'd help my dad with body work on the Triumph. Sand it down a little bit, paint it gray. This year, though, we didn't flip it over until late June because it was so hit or miss weather-wise. And I wasn't up for a full body work session on the pool. So I took two fun noodles, sliced them longways, and popped them over the two major cracks in the rim. Not hull-breach kind of cracks. Just enough to cut your foot on and need a tetanus shot. We're already the hoosiers (St. Louis for redneck or white trash) on my block. I don't need Sophia's little friends to need a trip to the ER after swimming at our house.

And now with the deck, I can sit in the shade and drink iced tea while I watch them all splash around.

O is for Odelia

2008-07-13T06:08:00.000-07:00

Things I've learned from my father's mother:
Don't buy new if you can buy used
Don't have the deli slice meat for you; buy it by the chunk and slice it paper thin yourself
Oranges with imperfect skin means it spent more time compensating for rubbing against the branch than making sugar
Parish festivals often have good deals on excellent baked goods and barbecue
If your house (garage, actually) is messy, it is unappealing to burglars
Scrubbing a kitchen floor is a good way to go through the first part of labor
Save those thin plastic produce bags from the grocery store--rinsed and dried, they have a multitude of uses. Rubberbands from broccoli and bread ties have uses, too.
Whoever has the biggest button collection when she dies, wins
Don't sew over your straight pins--it risks bending them
Iron tissue paper patterns flat before you use them
All you need on a sewing machine is straight stitch and zig zag
How to fake a zig zag stitch on a straight-stitch only machine
How to sew a buttonhole by machine
How to measure an inseam, waist width, back length, neck width, hip width, bust width, on people and on clothing in stores without dressing rooms (or when shopping for children not present)
A reasonably sensible view of life issues, end of life issues, women's rights, and labor disputes
Silver maples are trash trees. Do not plant them; cut them down when they volunteer
Sweetgums are unwelcome trees. Do not let them volunteer, but if you have a grown one, enjoy the shade and fall color while you pick up the prickly balls
Oak leaves do not decompose as quickly as other tree leaves
Redbuds are nice trees. So are hard maples. Most other trees that drop stuff are not.
Ash trees are the best trees. They lose all their leaves at once, meaning only one raking afternoon
Mulberry trees are difficult to kill all the way
Locust trees, even thornless hybrids, will send up runner shoots with thorns several yards away
To kill a trumpet vine in someone else's yard that is sending runner shoots up into yours: pull up every runner, but do not yank them out of the ground. Strip a bit of root bark from each one and paint them with round up or gasoline. Put back in the ground. Wait.
Kill all wild strawberry plants. Kill kill kill.
To reuse potting soil the next year, bake it in the oven to destroy bad organisms first
To separate daylilies: dig out of ground. Chop the root mound with shovel. Replant.
Irises like to have their "feet" exposed
Dogs are, in general, dangerous unpredictable creatures with the power to kill and maim
Cats are nice
Cheap shampoo gets out food grease stains out of clothing
Joy dish soap gets rid of ash borers--use a spinal needle and inject the tree
Joy dish soap gets rid of white flies--uproot the plant, wash the roots, replant
Joy dish soap makes a good bubble bath
Joy dish soap, in a light dilution, sprayed in the garden, is a nontoxic pesticide
Joy soap is, in general, one of the few items you must not substitute with a store brand

Things I have tried my best not to pick up from my father's mother:
Superstitious Catholicism
The inability to let people get off the phone
Handling a crisis situation by running around flapping my arms or otherwise freaking out
Fear of new technology or changes in current technology
Peppering my speech with racial slurs and "thanks be to God"
Telling off color jokes
Making clothing for my children that is not fashionable, or out of fabric that is itchy or hot
Wearing my hair in the same style for 45 years
Sharing details of my sex life, health care, or my family members' health care with acquaintances
Wearing a lot of mustard yellow and army green. (Sometimes I fail on the army green).
Putting cost over aesthetics--never ever splurging, never finding something pretty that is also inexpensive.
Allow my fear to turn into bigotry
Referring to places that no longer exist: "Turn left where the gas station burned down in 1965"
Keeping track of births, marriages, and deaths of people I barely know
Picking up things at resale shops, garage sales, going out of business sales, and bulk trash day simply because "someone could use this"
Hoarding stuff. Really.
Driving like an escapee from a home for the criminally insane

As I get older, I find myself doing more and more things like Odelia. Who of course doesn't go by Odelia, but by Penny. I look like her husband but I've inherited more from her.

N is for New

2008-07-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

Mike's grandmother died in February, 2004. Sometime later, once it was summer, we went over to her old house down in Cairo to look over things, see if there was anything Mike wanted. This is a hard place to find oneself as an in-law. I barely knew this woman and here I am being asked if I want this or that. I want nothing that will cause a rift between my nuclear family and any of yours. But since Mike refused to have an opinion from afar, we went over there one visit to Cairo and looked around.

How much everything had already changed. Most everything was gone, the house was closed in and hot. Mike sat down and went through dusty books. My mother-in-law offered us a quilt made of double-knit, total kitsch from my point of view 40 years after it was made. Trip Around the World. Of course I took it.

They were trying to get the house ready to sell. Eventually it would, only to have tragedy strike the family who bought it. I don't know if the widow still lives there now or not. But there, in early summer 2004, it looked doomed. Another Cairo house to fall to pieces. Nobody in the family had enough money to keep it up simply as an ode to idyllic childhood. Already in 4 or 5 months it needed a great deal of upkeep, compounded by several decades of benevolent neglect.

Sophia was just turning 3. I was pregnant with Maeve, having a hard time breathing in the stuffy house, no windows open, no air conditioning on. I was ready to head back out and sit in the van, wait for them to come out with their books and odds and ends. Sophia holds my hand and asks,

"Why did Grandma Stout die?"

"Oh," I sigh, "because she got very sick. She was old, Sophia. And old people die."

Her little brain worked on that a minute and then she answers, "But we're still new, aren't we?"

"Yes, Sophia, we're still new."

M is for Midsummer

2008-07-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

The children go to bed. I sit down and read a bit of National Catholic Reporter. Notice the flash in the stained glass window to my right.

Maeve appears. "I am scared of the storm."

"There is no storm right now," I tell her. "Just a little lightning in the distance."

She debates this, but after a count of two and a threat of lights out, she goes back to her room. I look out the front window at the Quercus velutina and the Liquidamber styraciflue* and realize that she shouldn't believe me at all. The thunder picks up, and then I see the first raindrops on the windowpane. I go out on the front porch to smell the storm, the summer storm.

I turn the radio on, very low, just enough to hear the bleah bleah bleah warning sound of the National Weather Service. I don't hear it, but if it happens later in the evening, I'll be aware.

I take a bite of zucchini bread, the first loaf of this summer, not plentiful enough (yet) to be a hated vegetable. The nutmeg is what makes it, I think.

Sophia tells me the lightning and thunder count puts the main part of the storm 5 miles away. I vaguely remember how this is done, and I tell her not to worry.

"The radio's on." She knows about my obsession with NWS reports.

The cat jumps up on the computer desk and licks the bit of butter off my zucchini bread plate. Then I remember--Mike rode his bike over to Kate's house to work on her computer. I call. She assures me she'll bring him home if it's bad. Mike thinks we're both ninnies.

*The black oak and sweetgum tree sway in the storm. I decide some knitting would be more appropriate than blogging.

L is for Lemonade

2008-07-02T17:41:00.001-07:00

Lemonade:
8 or 9 lemons, sliced
Ice
Water
Sugar to taste

Put lemons at the bottom of the largest waterproof container that will fit in the refrigerator. Squeeze some to release juice. Dump ice on top. Fill with water. Gradually add sugar until it is sweet enough to drink.

Impress all the neighbor children. Have them go home and demand "real lemonade like Sophia's mom makes."

Also works with brownies made from scratch.

K is for Kids and Their Days

2008-07-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

8:15 Sophia hears Mom downstairs. Rolls back over.
9:20 Sophia wanders downstairs, finds Mom. Breakfast is made and consumed. Picks out a movie to watch while she eats--Flicka--and does so.
10:15 Maeve gets up. Promises Mom she's in a good mood. Gets dressed in a skirt and t-shirt.
10:16 Sophia comes upstairs, gets dressed in a dress.
10:18 Maeve changes into a dress.
10:25 Neighbor girl comes over to help clean what had been left behind last night in the attic.
10:26 Neighbor girl, Sophia, and Maeve promptly forget why they are sent to the attic, begin playing.
11:10 Mom shows up in the attic. Sophia panics and apologizes. Cleaning begins in earnest because Mom stays in the attic until it's done.
11:20 Girls go outside to swing and plan their day. Swimming will occur, they decide.
11:45 Sophia and Neighbor girl go to her house to clean up the playroom that has been neglected in the same way. Maeve throws tantrum.
12:10 Easy Mac for lunch for Sophia at Neighbor's house. Followed by more pretending to clean. Meanwhile, Maeve goes to Viviano's Italian Groceries with Mom to buy more bulk pasta and Italian cheese. Cashier compliments her on her behavior and she merits a torone.
12:35 Maeve eats yogurt and watches Kiki's Delivery Service
1:10 Sophia is ordered home by Mom, which is all fine and good because cleaning is boring. Neighbor girl comes with her. Already wearing swimming suit. Negotiations begin. Whining ensues. Mom stands firm by her 1:30 start time. Girls change and go to backyard to stare at the pool.
1:25 Mom appears, allowing girls to get in.
2:45 Mom ends pool time. Girls do not whine, noticing instinctively that this would be a bad move. Girls play on swingset and pretend to be orphaned pets.
3:30 Neighbor girl goes home to attend her Irish dance class. Sophia and Maeve are suddenly hit with a wave of incurable boredom. Mom is unwilling to watch PBS. Mom is unwilling to watch movie. Mom suggests workbooks. Both girls acquiesce.
3:40 Maeve finds scrapbook of the vacation to California in 2006. Asks Mom to read it. Mom sits down with them on the couch and reads to them about a vacation Sophia barely remembers and Maeve only knows as photographs.
4:00 Another Neighbor girl rings doorbell. Girls drop Mom and book like hot potato. Squeals of glee at the door. Finally, rescued from summer ennui!
4:15 Neighbor girl lets Sophia know that she has to leave in a half hour, unless Sophia can convince her mom to let her stay.
4:45 Girls propose to Mom that Neighbor girl stay so that she doesn't have to go with her mother to boring appointments. Mom gives in because getting dinner on the table will be easier if girls are in attic.
4:50 Plan in motion, girls return to attic. Destroy all work completed there earlier.
6:00 Dad calls up for dinner. Maeve comes downstairs in a tantrum because Neighbor girl is getting her tonsils out next month and Maeve is not. Sophia is uncertain about vegetable lasagna--it is heavy on the summer squash. Maeve declares it inedible before she sits down at the table. Sophia makes it through; Maeve has seconds of "big noodles."
6:30 First Neighbor girl returns after Irish dance, comes back over to play. All four girls disappear to backyard after clearing table and eating oatmeal cookie ice cream sandwiches.
7:15 Mom appears to tell them both Neighbor girls must go home. Suddenly Sophia notices she is covered in mosquito bites and is paralyzed with itchiness. Mom doesn't believe her and makes her tidy up the back yard anyway. Maeve has no such itchy excuse but still tries to get out of cleaning up the towels from swimming time by simply saying, "I won't do it." This does not play well in Peoria and Maeve drags them up the back steps, leaving a slightly damp trail behind her.
7:20 Mom starts a bath. Sophia wants benedryl spray but Mom is holding out for post-bathtime. Mom draws a scalding hot bath, but Sophia catches her in time before sensitive girl skin has to be exposed to water above 85 degrees. Mom rolls her eyes and turns on more cold water. Tells Sophia she's not washing her hair tonight, but she is washing Maeve's. Sophia decides she'll get her hair wet anyway because she likes to be under the water.
7:25 Sophia makes Maeve cry by pretending that she is adopted, but Maeve isn't.
7:35 Mom comes in to wash Maeve's hair, notices that Sophia's is wet. Sophia remembers that she wasn't supposed to wet her hair, and tells Mom she's sorry. Mom doesn't seem to believe this.
7:42 Water is now so cold both girls' teeth are chattering. Mom gets them both towels and orders them to their room. Girls protest that it isn't night yet, and Mom goes into that whole summer solstice mumbo jumbo again. Both girls know it is too early for bed. Mom has forgotten the benadryl spray, and so Sophia scratches her ankles until they itch again. Mom goes in to get the benadryl, comes back and sprays Sophia's ankles.
8:10 Mom reads one chapter of Redwall. Maeve ignores this and reads her own book. Out loud. Mom keeps telling her to stop. Finally, the chapter is done and Mom says prayers with Sophia. Sophia corrects her. Mom says good night and shuts the door.
8:40 Both girls have totally crashed.

J is for Jealous?

2008-07-01T14:16:00.001-07:00

Sophia has an ear tag. She has an extra bit of skin in front of her ear. Like a little teardrop that sticks out. You don't notice it for the most part because ears are weird shapes anyway. Actually, the weirder the shape, the more likely there's trouble inside. Sophia's ear tag is not a big difference, but it is not just a skin abnormality--it is "vascular" as her pediatrician put it.

Here, you can see it, right in front of the ear canal, when she was 3. The only thing that alarms me about it is that it grows with her--it'll be big enough to pierce by the time she's 16. But in general, except when she fools with it when she's bored, I don't care much.

Her first pediatrician said, "We'll wait until she's 2 and have a plastic surgeon take care of it. It's too vascular to tie it off." My dad, when Sophia was born, suggested just that. But we took her advice and waited.

After the big fall out with the first pediatrician over lead testing and "cows milk," we started seeing Dr. Nile when Sophia was 18 months old. His first impression of the ear tag, after asking if we'd had her hearing tested (we had, of course, and all is well), was, "too bad you didn't tie it off when she was born. Now she'd need general anesthesia."

He was right. We went to a plastic surgeon for consultation. She took pictures of it. Told us it was not a medically necessary procedure (meaning, insurance wouldn't cover it) and yes, it would need general anesthesia. "Too bad they had you wait. It's an easy thing with a newborn."

I decided I'd wait until she was 6 or 7 and see what she wanted to do.

She has decided she doesn't care. Her hair is curly and all over the place. And, like I said, ears are weird anyway.

Last night at bedtime, Sophia asked, "What's a birthmark?" Mike defined it for her, and then showed her Maeve's little birthmark on her scalp.

"Do I have a birthmark?"

"No, but you have an ear tag," Mike reminded her. Maeve was interested. Very interested.

"Do I have an ear tag?" she asked.

"No, just Sophia," Mike answered, too casually.

"I WANT AN EAR TAG!!" Maeve burst into tears. Mike pointed out that he didn't have one, that I didn't have one, that nobody else we knew had one. This was the wrong way to go. It made Sophia special. Unique. A dumb brown spot on your scalp is not the same thing at all. And pointing out her adorable, desirable, highly coveted dimple next to her nose did nothing.

"I don't want a dimple! I want an ear tag!" She ran to the bathroom, slammed the door, and sobbed.

So there's a special sibling moment for you. Almost as good as when my sister Bevin named Colleen's big front tooth "Old Chopper."

I is for Indigo Bunting

2008-07-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

Not really just Indigo Bunting.

More just about internet pseudonyms and what strikes people to pick one name over another. Indigo Bunting and Cedar Waxwing are just two examples. I considered, for a short time when I was going to head over to wordpress or one of the other blogging engines and start again, taking on a bird name. I felt as though Vesper Sparrow would fit me quite well. Then I decided I'd be trying too hard and just stayed put here as Bridgett on Blogger.

I go by my name, mostly because I just can't care. In this day and age, try as we might, we are not very anonymous any longer. My friend Mary can find out just about any creepy thing about anyone we know. Or don't know. Ah, the internet.

But I don't go by my name everywhere. My ebay name is based on my local geography, and my home email is a transliteration of the Russian word for snake. My floating email (why I maintain two I'm still not sure. I should just switch over to gmail and be done with it) is Hickory Hardscrabble. Which is my black cat's name. Who in turn is named for a roleplaying character I ran many moons ago when I was in college and a bigger dork than I am now. Hickory Hardscrabble is a combination of two names of small towns in Tennessee--she was named on the way to Florida, trapped in the back seat of my future mother-in-law's minivan with the atlas. Thought it sounded like a good name for a somewhat dark elf with secrets and powers beyond what was apparent. Why I named my cat that later, I don't know. Why I decided it should be my email address, I really don't know. Reciting it to people who maintain files by email address is always annoying. Hickory, like the tree. Hardscrabble. H-A-R-D-S--at this point, they're looking at me like, well, like I'm the type of person to have a dark elf roleplaying character and carry a staff and stuff like that.

Names are important. Would I have kept reading Mali's 365 if she called herself Dwayne? Been as intrigued by the Englishman in Australia if he went by Melbourne565 instead of Mrs. Slocombe? I mean, that name alone opened up new realms of British comedy that I'd never encountered here in the benighted Midwest. I thought Deloney was a girl for months. It was quite a shift of gears when I realized I was wrong.

Sometimes I wish that I'd started out with some kind of hip moniker, but I started out with local and related readers only--South City Musings is about my neighborhood, my family, my life. I knew I'd be outed anyway, even if I'd picked something fun to call myself. I also probably would have thought too long about it, picked badly, and then wrung my hands over my choice for the years to come. It's just better this way.

H is for Hayao Miyazaki

2008-06-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

A reprint from South City Musings a long while back. But watching my girls run down the sidewalk to a neighbor's to play this afternoon, I thought, my goodness, they look like Satsuki and Mei. Hayao Miyazaki's films have been a big part of their childhood film watching, far more than Snow White and the Seven Dancing Princesses of Disney have. They are beautiful age-appropriate films. Adults are not seen as dolts to be fooled and proven wrong (although the parents in Spirited Away ARE dolts...but that's a coming of age film for adults anyway). There's a great deal of magic, or magical realism, in all of them, but they do not have the "fairy godmother will fix it" or the "if I only find a prince I will be happy" theme either. Characters learn and grow. Things are left unanswered. Much is left up to the viewer's interpretation. So:

Twenty Things I’ve Learned from My Neighbor Totoro

1. Kids really need a place to call their own, to play in, work out fantasies, and feel safe.

2. Kids are best kept safe from the harsher realities of life, but lying to them is a no-go.

3. Parents know their children best, but it helps to have a wider circle of helpers to make the days run smoothly.

4. Dads are not second-class parents.

5. Kids will go to their parents for answers to their questions if they know they will be answered.

6. If cats live long enough, they turn into busses and run around the forest with mice as taillights.

7. Believing in something is easy if you are supported in that belief.

8. It is harder to believe as you get older. Wanting to believe is sometimes enough for a start.

9. The real dangers in life are not bogeymen and large disasters. They are disease, loneliness, and helplessness.

10. Extended families are important. If you don’t have one, adopt into one.

11. A home full of cheerful people is easier to keep clean.

12.In times of crisis, children will find support wherever they can: in their families, their communities, in pretend play, or places you might not want them to.

13. If a family is strong, once a crisis has passed, things can return to normal.

14. If you hang your clothes to dry on giant poles supported on wood frames, they don’t get clothespin marks on them.

15. Taking your shoes off when you enter a home is smart and sanitary.

16. On the flip side, having an environment that is too sanitary (plastic) squelches creativity.

17. Shrines and altars in uncommon spaces make the world a more careful, holy place.

18. Keeping everyday routine as normal as possible in time of crisis is an imperative with small children.

19. Sometime between 5 and 10, children begin to outgrow their need for fairy tale fantasy

20. Communities come together in times of crisis; we need more communities in the world.

My Neighbor Totoro, Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

G is for Garbage

2008-06-30T10:30:00.001-07:00

I don't interact much with garbage. I tie up the kitchen trash once a week or so, unless we've been especially trashy (like the occasional "why is this still in the fridge?" raids that I do). I empty trash cans around the house about that often as well. But Mike is the one who takes them out--he parks in the back, and all our garbage goes to the alley.

I love alleys. I didn't realize how fantastic they were until I moved here. All the wires go down the alley--electric, phone, cable--and therefore nothing crowds the streets. All the dumpsters are in the alley, too--the regular trash and the yard waste. There's no special type of bag I have to buy to put my grass clippings out on the curb. I don't have to arrange my trash such that yard waste day finds my individual roll-out cart filled only with yard waste.

Another thing I like about alleys is that right now, I don't have a dumpster butting up against my fence. When the city paved our alley, they rearranged the dumpsters such that the next door neighbors to the east have the regular waste, and the ones to the west have the yard waste. So I'm not responsible for keeping anything tidy. Which is a good thing, because, as I mentioned, I don't interact much with garbage once it's tied up and ready to head out.

But today, we did a little house overhaul, the girls and I. Sophia's home from camp, Maeve's home from Gran's, and there was laundry to put away, rooms to clean, sheets to change, and so on. I went through the house and gathered up trash. Since it isn't 7 in the morning, and since squirrels exist, I put on my flip-flops and carted the bag out to the alley. I looked up and down. The yard waste dumpsters' lids were shut. But all the brown--regular waste--dumpsters were chock full.

It is not December 26th. It is not alley cleaning day. There is no reason for all the dumpsters to be overflowing.

I investigate. It is all construction waste--old baseboards and lumber from walls, maybe, or kind of like the boards we pulled out of our attic roof when we finished that room. I immediately think it's the 4-family building behind me. The rehabbers there have had no respect for homeowners' rights. But they're done with the destruction phase. This is old stuff, not boxes from new windows or ends of 2x4s.

See, you're supposed to rent a 10-yard dumpster when you rehab. Pull off a roof or knock down some walls. Any big project, it really belongs in a 10-yard and not along with chicken bones and bread wrappers. But someone has decided to fill up all our dumpsters with this crap. And I have no idea where it might have come from. I call my neighbor Mary, who agrees that the 4-family is beyond this phase. Nobody's taking a garage down or anything like that. It's a mystery. It could be some guy in his pick up truck going up and down our alley taking care of his problem, illegally, but rather easily.

I have actually called the dumpster police before. As block captain, you learn all sorts of things. Like when the 4-family rehabbers were dumping 50 pound chunks of concrete into the yard waste dumpsters, I called. And they had to take care of it. The guy who used to own the house next door was so notorious for dumpster misuse that he had to pay massive fines for his wrongdoing. One time I got in a shouting match with a little Bosnian guy who'd been hired to build a garage down the way. But those were all about yard waste misuse. And totally blatant misuse at that. This, this is impossible to prove without surveillance teams.

We did that with the drug dealers on the corner. But for trash? Really? Do we care that much? I don't think I do.

But the two white bags in my kitchen care. The dumpsters get emptied tomorrow, usually around the glorious hour of 5 a.m. And I'll be trotting out with my kitchen trash right behind them.

The joys of city living.

F is for Fiction

2008-06-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

All right Mrs. Slocombe.

I've actually been working on stuff for a while. Some of it I think is quite good--other things need lots of work or deletion and retries. Summer is a hard time to write, though--winter works better for me. But I've moved all my files over to this computer and I'm going to reread it all this weekend. And figure out how the hell I'm going to end it. It's like that for me in a chess game, too--I have a decent beginning, a strong midgame, and then I fall apart. So I've developed purposeful writer's block so that I could let it percolate a while.

Summer is a good time to eat vanilla ice cream with strawberries and blueberries on top, which is what I'm doing right now. I think about my storyline and pop into these lovely fruits. Think about theme and motifs and wonder if there'll be any blackberries forthcoming from the in-laws this year.

So yes, Betty, I'm on it. Peter, you too.

E is for Ed

2008-06-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

"Is Ed there?"

"Can I talk to Ed?"

"This is James calling from Financial Services. May I speak to Ed?"

Just like W is for hard to pronounce German names, and therefore is often a tip off that the person calling not only doesn't know us, but is trying to sell us something (whether political candidate, home financing, or phone service), E meaning Ed, or Edward, is a sure sign that the caller has no clue.

Not only has no clue, but also thinks sounding chummy (instead of butchering the whole name--anything from Edward Wysinjer to Edward Weeslinger). Ed implies you know Ed.

There is no Ed here.

About 4 or 5 years into our marriage I turned to Mike and said, "I think we'd be different people if we were Ed and Sally instead of Mike and Bridgett."

Our next child, whenever he or she arrives on the scene, is going by the middle name. It isn't a bad way to be incognito.

D is for Disconnect

2008-06-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

A specific disconnect. Involving the Girl Scouts, which, as you know, is one of my things that I do. Girl Scouting was an important part of my early years, and, as a leader, I hope to have that happen for my daughters and their friends.

I like the "girls grow strong" ideal. I like badgework with a purpose--learning about other cultures, about nature, about each other, about nutrition.

There's the disconnect. Nutrition. Girl Scouts has all sorts of "healthy choices" literature, a badge or two for every level (Brownie, Junior, etc) based around good food and good choices. And then there is camp.

We are kind of food snobs, I'll admit. Our milk, butter, and eggs arrive at our door in the middle of the night. We belong to a CSA (community supported agriculture) that supports local farmers--not all are organic, but many of them are. I try my best to be a locavore--the four things I try to look for are 1) locally produced (meaning Missouri or Illinois--I don't have to have it made next door), 2) sustainably grown (doesn't have to be actually labeled "organic"--I am more concerned about hormones and antibiotics in my meat than a one-time spray of the cucumber plants 50 days before they're picked), 3) if I can't get 1 and 2, I try for certified organic, and 4) it really needs to be grown in the US. Now, I know, bananas and coffee, what the hell do I do? I live with it. But I don't buy Chilean fruit just because it's December and wow, wouldn't a plum taste good? Plums grow here. I just have to wait till summer. There are some lines I don't cross--I don't buy conventionally grown potatoes. Or non-organic beef unless I've met the farmer. I don't buy food if it's not labeled by country, and nothing from China (as far as I know) goes into my pantry and fridge. And I banished high fructose corn syrup 2 years ago. So, yeah, it's something I'm focused on.

But I'm not nearly so rigid as Trisha down the street, who has a daughter Sophia's age. And crossing our Venn diagrams is Mary, with a daughter one year older. All of them girl scouts. All of them heading to camp this summer. Trisha and I went to the camp meeting for new parents, and the menu was mentioned: "Kid friendly food, they won't go hungry" was the theme. Looking around at the camp directors, women from just younger than me all the way to their early 60s, I could see nobody at Girl Scout Camp goes hungry. I am not a small person, never have been, and my weight fluctuates a frightening 50 pounds or so with babies and breastfeeding and weight loss and pregnancy again. When life is good, I'm a size 10. When life is thyroid-impaired or in the haze of post-partum depression, I'm a 16. So I know about what it takes to lose it, to try to maintain it, to gain it the right way when you have to...and these women are not good role models for "girls grow strong" and healthy choices.

Not that they should be fired, but they should really take a good long look.

I put on Sophia's health form: no conventional milk, dairy, or beef. Organic only. I know, yuppie bitch mom. The nurse at Fiddlecreek called me. Sounded young on the phone. Didn't understand what I was talking about. I gave her a rundown conversation on hormones and young girls, on antibiotic use in cattle leading to resistant strains of infection (one of which Sophia and I had after she was born), etc.

"I guess she could be considered vegetarian plus chicken?" I offered after she'd run out of things to say to me.

"Well, the thing is, we don't have separate vegetarian entrees. We just give vegetarian girls peanut butter and jelly or a cheese sandwich."

Envisioning Sophia eating pb&j on white (high fructose gummy chewy nasty) bread at every meal, I countered, "Perhaps we could go meal-by-meal?"

She read me the menu.

Chicken patty on bun. Ok, Sophia will take it off the bun and dip it in ketchup, but that's not so bad.

Egg on toast. That's fine.

Riblet on bun. What's a riblet? Pork or Beef? "I don't know," said the nurse.

Taco Salad. Well, can she just have the beans instead of the ground beef? "It's just meat, cheese, and lettuce on corn chips. We don't add beans."

Another breakfast, more Egg on toast action. Plus cereal: "She can always have cereal and milk." I think you're missing my point. Milk is one of the problems.

Ravioli with breadstick. Enough. I told the nurse to forget it, that I'd instruct Sophia on my end as to what her food choices should be. "Are you sure?"

I mean, good God, what can I do?

Well, what I can do is call Janet, my friend who works for GS headquarters. And find out what Trisha, Mary, and I (we cannot be alone in "what's a riblet?" dismay) need to do to fix the disconnect between the badgework and the camp menus.

Sophia is only going for 3 days--but can you imagine the month long equestrian camps? How ill those girls must be by the end? What the hell are these women thinking? Least common denominator? Please. Kids are exposed to more these days than chicken patty on bun. All the girls on my block dip carrot sticks in hummus and has opinions on spring rolls, samosas, soy milk, and guacamole. I'm not saying camp has to be a smorgasbord of wonder, but it could be a little healthier.

Instead of chicken patty on bun, why not grilled chicken with a salad and a side of pasta?

Instead of "What's a riblet?" why not try turkey breast, tomato, lettuce, and cheese roll ups?

Taco salad sounds great--how about some black beans and a chunky salsa thrown in as well?

Egg on toast, well, that's a typical breakfast here on Halliday as well--but I hope the juice isn't sweetened.

Instead of koolaid at every meal, how about ice water or a non-caffeinated iced tea?

Ravioli (Chef Boyardee anyone?) out of a can served with breadstick could be done so much better with a spaghetti in marinara and a salad.

It wouldn't be hard to change. It might even be fun. But I have a feeling those big-hipped women who eat riblet on bun all summer aren't the kind of ladies who are open to change. Still, though, I'm planning to raise a stink.

C is for Colleen

2008-06-24T14:09:00.001-07:00

Colleeny Beenie Weenie. AKA Wiener. The wordle above is based on anything tagged with her name on Most Nigh.

She's the youngest of the four of us, the scum of the pot, as my grandmother puts it. Her brown eyes and olive skin are at odds with the blue-gray-green eyes the other three of us share along with our tendency towards sunburn. She's the shortest, and the slightest. Smallest at birth, always considered not quite as quick as her older siblings. Awkward childhood--she was bit by a dog right in the mouth early on, which may or may not have anything to do with the tooth that didn't come in on its own years later (thus making the other front tooth, without the deformed root, look enormous, leading Bevin to nickname it Old Chopper until the other tooth was brought down by advanced orthodontic work). Glasses early, hair that wasn't the thick luxury of Bevin's nor the easy frizzy curls of Bridgett and Ian. A little frizz here, a weird flip there, straight in the back and two or three spirals.

And she was the most spoiled. My mother referred to her as Colleeny long after a diminutive name would be appropriate: Colleeny, do you need a spoony for your soup? She was the youngest and stretched that opportunity as far as she could.

I left for college when she was 7. She claims she doesn't remember when I lived at home. By the time I encountered her again, really, she was a vicious pubescent cheerleader with a tongue sharpened by years of living with Bevin and Ian. I was too soft to compete anymore.

Of course, this didn't last either, and she grew into a nice person in the end. A nice person with a persona for every day of the week. Each Christmas party my parents throw, she's a different character. 1940s housewife. 1950s diva. China doll. She spends 45 minutes on her complicated hair, touching up her make up to hide paper-thin lines from the dog bite (plastic surgeon in the ER transformed all but one into natural smile lines), just to lounge around the house or go drink coffee down at the diner. Trying to quit smoking, trying to move to St. Louis, suddenly frugal and smart and wise in her choices of men, of friends, of what she says and what she holds close.

I'm eager to see what happens next.

B is for Bridge, Boil, Breach, Bellerive, Bluff, and Bad Planning

2008-06-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

Oh black water, keep on rolling
Mississippi moon won't you keep on shining on me

Can't stop writing about music. I already did this song, of course, about the Flood of '93. And we didn't flood--the river crested Friday and it's big, yes, scary, but we're safe up on our bluffs.

Bluff - A high bank with a broad, steep cliff face overlooking a plain or a body of water.

Different from a Cliff - Any high, very steep to perpendicular, or overhanging face of a rock outcrop.

On our latest camping trip, the debate arose, bluff vs. cliff. Mike had never used the word bluff until he knew me (in that context--like smut, bluff has several meanings). According to the OED downstairs in my dining room, bluff is a much younger word of unknown origin, almost exclusively North American in this usage. Cliff often implies jagged edges, sharpness, steepness; bluff means broad-faced. I always think of bluff having a slightly rounded top to it, and a cliff is perpendicular.

We drove down to Bellerive Park, the only St. Louis City park that overlooks the river (although now with Riverfront Trail, that's probably different--I don't know how it is categorized). The kids played on the playground while I gaped at the river.

River Cement barge went by, very very slowly upstream. Barge traffic was light, but it was still there. This was the only one that passed by while I was watching, though.

The downstream (southern) view.

The upstream (northern) view. Downtown is this direction, but it's around a bend and further away than I could show here.

Other onlookers. I don't think the park is well known. Most people went down to the Arch grounds to gape. It was all true south St. Louisans down at Bellerive.

So we've developed another new vocabulary that we're reminded of every time this sort of thing happens. Levees are breached, like in Winfield. Sand boils, a harbinger of doom, appear on the levees before they fail. Folks hope they don't lose their bridges--up further north, I think in Quincy, there was a concern because if they lost their bridge, it was 2 hours down to St. Louis for the nearest one. Flood stage flood impact flood plain. Sandbagging earthen levee berm gate. Mold loss of course I'm going back this is where I'm from.

At church on Sunday, talk afterward turned to the high water and how devastating it was further north. More than one person mentioned what a shame it was that it was corn farmers in Iowa and the artist enclave in Clarksville, instead of the biggest strip mall in America, built on the Missouri river floodplain after the '93 flood. With its Hummer dealership and Walmart and Lowes and everything. Building on floodplains is considered one of the reasons we have problematic flooding--if we left land fallow to flood naturally, instead of building high levees right at the edge of the water, the pressure would be lower downstream. Many Illinois cities bought out floodplain properties after the '93 flood. But Chesterfield built on theirs.

The Missouri River isn't flooding this time. But it will. And I'll be damned if I feel bad when it does.

A is for All Clear

2008-06-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

Mali asked if I was flooded out. I'm not. The nice thing about living in St. Louis City is that it's set high on a river bluff. By the time I flooded, millions of homes would be completely submerged.

Edited to say: the photo above of "Looking south from the bridge" is from a bridge over Broadway down in deep south St. Louis, several winters ago. That is the Mississippi to the upper left. It is higher than that now--and that part of St. Louis, down into the suburbs, is more tenuously located (and industrial, alas).

That said, yes, St. Louis is flooding. Down by the river, by the Arch, there is water up past the first street and onto the steps of the Arch. But we expect a crest far below the 1993 flood level.

This isn't true north of us.

In 1993, the problem was that that Missouri River and the Mississippi River were both flooded, and the confluence is at St. Louis. Kaboom. This time, the Missouri River is not flooding, but several tributaries north of us are--the Cedar River, for instance, which flooded Cedar Rapids for the first time--so points along the river north of the confluence are getting a bigger flood than the record 1993 year.

But the Illinois River and Missouri River are ok, and so that gives us a break--some of the water can flow into that space, and our part of the river is used to handling more water (just like in 1993, Cairo didn't flood because the Ohio and Mississippi confluence is there, and the Ohio wasn't flooded).

But it's heart wrenching to watch the television or read the captions on photos from northern Missouri and further up in Iowa. These are my people, you know? In a way that folks in New Orleans during Katrina or folks in California during forest fires do not tug at me, old farmers' wives and Knights of Columbus filling sandbags outside the VFW hall with high school baseball players and barrel chested firemen exhausted from sandbagging make me see myself and mine.

We're all clear here in St. Louis. Moderate flooding means something further down the way, but up here a hop skip and jump from the neighborhood called "The Hill", we're high and dry.

Z is for Zip

2008-06-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Slocombe did a series of zip codes (postal codes) where he'd been or lived or whatever. It struck me that I could have an entire blog dedicated to zip codes I'd lived in or were important to me in some way. But this would essentially be a series of repeats of my mostnigh blog--another version of my life story rewritten geographically instead of musically. I would have to stick to the dry facts of each zip--interesting facts about it, perhaps, photos, maps--and leave out the "first kiss in 63128" kind of moments. And what fun would that be?

But it could be a challenge. What would I say about 63114 or 77087 without coloring it too much with details of my own experience?

Last weekend Sr. Mary suggested I start another 365 about schismatic Christian churches. I could start back with the early heresies and move forward to the continuing splits in various protestant denominations. I like that, but I'm not sure who would read it. I'd probably lose my regular 365 readers and gain, well, some other folks. Argumentative folks. Radicals.

Mike thinks I should take fictional characters or places from other novels and write about them, or continue in their voices. What does Seymour Glass' wife do after he blows himself away in their hotel room? Asher Lev, ten years later? But this struck me as difficult to pull off appropriately. I don't think it would go well, especially as a daily exercise.

My thought last night was perhaps I was done with all that, and should end up Alphabridge and go back to the pot-luck amusements of South City Musings. But I think I was tired from the camping trip when I thought that.

365 places in St. Louis? 365 recipes? 365 saints? 365 movie reviews? None of these sounds right. Any ideas? What would you have me write next?

Y is for Yarn

2008-06-16T08:49:00.001-07:00

"Oh, looking at this book makes me want to get the loom out again," Marie says as we stand in Sr. Mary's office looking at a book of vestments. Beautiful woven fabric, pge after page.

"You have a loom?" I ask, curious. I like pretty much any kind of fiber art (except tatting--I never got a good handle on tatting and therefore didn't pursue it). And it's been one of those life-goal things of mine to learn how to weave and enter a sheep-to-shawl contest with Ann and 4 other people to card and spin and weave. So I'm interested.

"Yes, one I'm trying to get rid of, in fact."

After a brief negotiation--I am not to play with it until after the Christmas banner is done (that's Mary's stipulation) and Marie has the right to take it home once she has her kids out of the house (that's Marie's), I'm the proud owner of a 56 inch counter-balance Ullman loom, made from a beautiful maple, probably almost 50 years old. Its history is fuzzy--Marie had a friend who had a yarn shop and got divorced and Marie got the loom in the custody arrangement. Something like that.

I go over to Marie's house to pick up the loom. We carry the pieces out to my van. It's a little intimidating. Marie has no documentation. It'll be trial and error and internet searches. But I'm hopeful. Then Marie reminds me there's some boxes of yarn that go with it. This doesn't sound so bad. I follow her back upstairs and she opens a closet.

Eighteen copy-paper sized boxes. All filled with yarn.

I take it home. I sort. Almost all of it is wool or mohair--there is one box of warp thread in a sturdy cotton, and there are occasional spools of silk and cotton. There is enough yarn here, in enough quantities by type and color, that I will never ever need to buy any yarn ever again. My children's children may not need to buy any yarn. It's like August in the zucchini patch. And since it's all 1970s-1980s era wool, none of it is gorgeous, really, and most of it is incredibly itchy. But there's plenty of it! I will of course continue to buy yarn, but this will serve me well.

Tonight I go to my second floor-loom weaving class. I'm supposed to bring 6 skeins of similar-weight yarn in colors I like. I'm going to venture down to the basement in a few minutes and see what I might be able to throw together. And hopefully, in a month or so, I'll know how to warp this baby and use up all the yarn.

X is for Xerxes

2008-06-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

W is for Wagon, for Wig, and for Wing,
For Whale, and for Wine, and for Wrist,
X is for Xerxes, a famous old king,
But for words not a very long list.

Famous old king. Do you know about him? His father is Darius of Persia. According to Wikipedia, he is known for putting down uprisings in Egypt and Babylon. And he stole a statue of Bel. He invaded Greece. He had several sons, who murdered each other, with Artaxerxes coming out on top and succeeding him. He had a daughter named Amytis who married Megabyzus. Megabyzus saved Artaxerxes from a lion during a hunt and was therefore banished from the kingdom because the king always gets to kill first.

Or be killed first.

Megabyzus and Amytis had a son named Zopyrus. He was killed with a rock.

There's a Xerxes in the bible, but scholars think he's probably not the son of Darius of Persia. The Biblical Xerxes is probably another man nicknamed Xerxes (perhaps a different Artaxerxes).

Xerxes' grandson, Xerxes II, ruled Persia for a disappointing 30 days until he was murdered by his brother Sogdianus. An illegitimate brother named Ochus Nothus took the throne afterwards. He called himself Darius II, but he was known as Ochus the Bastard.

And so it went, with various Artaxerxes killing each other off until finally Alexander the Great said enough with them and conquered Persia.

From Handel's Opera, Xerxes:

W is for Hard To Pronounce German Last Names

2008-06-05T11:16:00.001-07:00

My mother was a Wibbenmeyer. Her brother Paul, in grade school, learned to write the name including a hyphen because "Paul Wibbenmeyer" couldn't fit on one line. Wibbenmeyer means something akin to farmer. Perhaps involving dairy. I remember some German professor telling me one time.

My mother married a Blake. Dropped Wibbenmeyer like a hot potato. Blake. So simple. Western Irish in origin, with mysteries contained within the simple one-syllable rhyming word. Ah. Rhymes. Blake rhymes with flake. Bake. Cake. Make. Sake. Lake. And so on. But it's a good anonymous name--not so common, like Smith or Miller, but it sounds like it's that common. I've never met a Blake in person that I wasn't related to, but it sounds like I easily could.

I got married to a Wissinger. What was I thinking? I could have kept Blake. I could have been Bridgett Blake forever. But it was at a turning point in my life and keeping my own name, at the time, felt like I wasn't jumping into the marriage with both feet. I was keeping a toe on the shore. I had to go all in with The Man From Wissing.

Wissinger looks like Kissinger, so you'd assume it was pronounced wiss-in-jur. But you'd be wrong. No, it's a hard g. And the first i is given a southern Illinois makeover. Like how Katy on my dorm floor pronounced that white breakfast drink, "melk," my last name is wess ing ur. Accent on the first syllable.

I taught school. I quickly realized I had a choice. My students and their parents could spell my name or pronounce it. I chose pronounce. Dear Mrs. Wessinger, the notes would begin.

The nice thing is back before the no-call list (Missouri has a list and if you're on it, no telemarketers can call you), is that when people asked for Bridgett Why-singer or Bridgett Wislinger or other bastardizations, I knew I could just hang up. Especially if they asked for my husband and tried to be chummy: Is Ed Wiss singer there? Nope, no Ed here. No Wiss Singers either.

It made picking out children's names an interesting argument. Sophia was going to be Esme, but Essssme Wessssinger was just too much ess. So it's her middle name. And we're all doomed to a lifetime of spelling and re-spelling it over the phone, at the bank, at the doctor's office. Perhaps my children will marry boys named Meyer and Cole. But they'll probably fall for Mr. Kwaitkowski and Mr. Nguyen with our track record. Or else they'll keep their own names. Why, girls, why did you do that? Take the easy way out!

V is for Vanity Plate

2008-06-05T08:52:00.001-07:00

In Texas they're called tags. Here in Missouri they're plates. License plates. Mine on the van has a wiggly green line on it, the state's name, three numbers, three letters. And a smudged spot where the yearly update stickers have been stolen by hoodlums in my neighborhood (I think at one time 3rd district St. Louis had more renewal tags stolen off plates than anywhere else in the state). This means I occasionally get pulled over by bored police officers. Never in the city--only out in the county or elsewhere in the state. I feign surprise. "What, they're stolen again? That costs me twenty bucks each time!" The officer nods his head, sharing my pain. And lets me go after looking my plate number up and realizing that yes, we do get our cars inspected and licensed. In reality, my stickers are in a file folder in my basement, and we'll put one on the back plate before we go on another long trip.

But vanity plates are different from this plain vanilla "my car is licensed to be on the road and identifiable by this combination of characters" plate. They're the ones you pick out yourself and say witty things about yourself or your car for other drivers to roll their eyes at. I personally feel like this is unnecessary. Unless you own a fleet of vehicles (for instance, Saint Louis University's cars could be numbered that way--SLU 1 or something like that), there is nothing your plate needs to say that a bumper sticker couldn't say better. Or that maybe you could say in person. Yes, some people name their cars (I had a chevy cavalier I named Karma, but I only called it that when I was alone). But if the name is right there on the car, anyone could call it by its name and lure it away. You know, like a pet. Or a kid.

In many states, not only can you say witty things with the characters available, but you can also buy special plates to show your affiliation to a certain group. In Missouri, where we had a zillion different plates for different car types and organizations, we redesigned the plate so that everyone would have the same. Well, that lasted about a year. And then all the organizations came back. Purple Heart. Child Abuse Prevention. University of Missouri. Those sorts of things. Frankly, I'm not giving one more thin dime to the state (and the outsourced company who runs the license division) so I can show how special or different I am with my license plate. I don't care if it benefits anyone.

Side note. I used to feel this way about checks, too. Until I did the math and realized the bank was sucking me dry and I could go to a private company and pay less. And get cute owls on my checks. Having three checking accounts, too, it's good to know that Mono Lake is our regular account, owls come from our credit union, and the plain checks are for health care. So I'm not anti-personalization across the board.

Last night on NPR, a story came on about North Carolina. They want to have a Christian license plate. Put a cross on it and the words, "believer." My first reaction was, "oh, please, that will never fly," since I know the ACLU and all those godless heathens from New York and California will stop it. But they went deeper into the story--the legislature really thinks it can get around the whole separation issue because people are paying for it themselves (making it akin to a bumper sticker instead of a licensing fee to the state). Maybe. I still think, like the story said, it's like putting a big sign up at the North Carolina capitol building that says, "SUE US!"

The story went on to add that, like in many states, North Carolinians can already affiliate themselves with various organizations on their license plates--turkey hunters, for instance. Sons of Confederate Soldiers (more appropriately, great-great-grandsons of Confederate Soldiers). Why not church?

It seems to me that equating religion with a club cheapens religion somewhat. Being Catholic is not the same thing as being a gun club member. Of course, Catholics are few and far between down in North Carolina, so maybe going to the "First Baptist Church of Locust Street (Reorganized)--Union City" is like being a gun club member.

My second thought is that North Carolina already offers NASCAR heroes plates and square dancing aficionado plates. Isn't it terribly redundant to also offer a Christian plate? Isn't that implied by those other plates?

I asked Mike this question--he was listening upstairs while I was doing dishes. He answered, "But Bridgett, if you have one that says Christian, it means never having to choose if you're more NASCAR or square dance."

I don't think I could choose, frankly.

U is for Used Furniture

2008-06-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

We bought our couch when I was pregnant with Sophia. It was the first, and last, piece of new furniture we purchased. We buy other things new (food, for instance), but the furniture here is still in the cast-offs and "antiques" categories. Our bed was my bed when I lived at home (ok, we did buy new mattresses eventually, and we're due to upgrade again). The girls' bunkbeds were built by my dad when I was 4. Two of our dressers come from my aunt Gracemarie, one from an antique place down on Cherokee, and the others are from our parents. Except for the one that the TV sits on--it's a primitive piece built by Mike's great-grandfather. Square nails. Sturdy and rather, well, functional. I like that the TV and DVD player sit on the oldest piece of furniture in the house.

The couch next to me, the sagging blue floral bit, is in the background of a photograph taken of Mike holding his infant twin brothers. They graduated from college two weeks ago.

I have a loom from the late sixties (a large one that is daunting, for which I am taking a class to learn how to use). A dining room table from Mike's grandmother's house. A church pew. Actually, two. One is from St. Pius and the other is from some protestant church (no kneeler!). The dining room chairs are Mike's grandmother's. And Ann's. And a desk chair from St. Pius V School. In the kitchen are two stools from Steve and Jerry before they moved to Amsterdam, and a little science classroom stool from the aforementioned St. Pius. Even the stove comes from my aunt Gracemarie (it still has her name on it, a little plaque, to remind me). The piano is Ann's, by way of her mother's aunt or something like that. Even the fish tank was Mike's coworker's originally. A vestment cabinet from SLU now holds miscellaneous crafts and fabrics.

I won't enumerate the basement furnishings.

We're in need of a new bed--we co-sleep with babies and before a new one comes, we'd like to move up to a queen. It makes it easier to have any breathing room for me (I sleep in the middle, with the bed pushed up against a 3-sided crib, but baby always winds up next to me, with me in the middle and Mike clinging for life to the edge of the bed. For a year and a half or longer). I have gotten pickier--I don't want somebody's cast-off faux brass bed. But I don't think I want to buy anything new that's affordable (meaning made from illegally harvested trees in Indonesia). My dad makes furniture--but he's busy with Sophia's hope chest and then he's off to the races with a new bed for my mom and him. So I don't want to wait. Maybe we'll scour Craig's List or something. Or maybe we'll buy mattresses and a frame and wait.

I just hate to put money into furniture since we have a big dog and frankly, Mike isn't the most careful person with the feet on the couch and whatnot. Kids. Cats. I'd rather spend it on good food and travel and photographs taken in the park. Or a new front porch. But I guess I'll just suck it up and take the plunge this fall.

T is for Teacher

2008-05-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

I didn't set out to be a teacher. It wasn't some great big desire from childhood. I went to college, in fact, with a guaranteed acceptance to medical school. All I had to do was maintain a B average and I was in. Boom. The more I thought about it all, though, the more I realized the things I wanted didn't mesh with medical school and practice. I needed something softer.

I had a high school teacher who sent me a scathing note when she found out I'd switched to education. "I thought you'd do something important with your life. I bet you met a boy and you think you have to do this to keep him."

It was true and not true. I'd found a boy. A boy with a psychology major and no prospects at the moment. It would have been better to go to medical school from that perspective. But I switched out of pre-med to save my sanity. Where I landed didn't matter.

I didn't hit my stride until the third year in the classroom. The first year was survival (which I was rather bad it. Turns out I have few coping skills beyond getting drunk and depressed). The second year, I rested. The third year, though, that was the Year of the Teacher Worship. Two first grade classrooms. The other teacher was very traditional. Very. And I wasn't, having soaked in a bunch of skills from my year as an assistant out in the county. Parents lined up at the principal's door to switch their kids into my class. Which obvious couldn't happen. Parents still run into me at fish fries and in the grocery store and talk about how great I was back then. That was ten years ago. Their kids are in late high school now.

The next year I took a job in my parish school teaching math. I hate math. I am not skilled in math. Plus, it was a middle school position. I remember middle school. I hated it then. How in the world would I teach middle schoolers? Teach them math?

The first parent conference that fall, Phu's father walked in and bowed to me. At the open house, Mary's mom, a college statistics professor, told a bunch of parents that St. Pius had "finally found a math teacher." I had found my place. Middle school sucks, but I do indeed remember it. I don't remember how I was in first grade. But I remember being 12 and everything that goes along with that. And math, ugh, I hate math. No good. But I had nothing invested in it, not like I did in teaching kids to read. Kids hate math too. By the time they get to me, they probably hate teachers and school. So there's nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I designed the math curriculum for grades 4-8 and made other teachers follow it. I analyzed student mistakes on tests and figured out how to make it understandable. I was a good teacher. Potentially a great teacher, actually. I stayed constantly in that "knowingly knowing" stage of learning with algebra and pre-algebra. I had trouble learning this stuff, here, let me show you some ways to make it work. I didn't act like most math teachers who are good at math and needed so desperately in the classroom that nobody notices that they don't know how to teach.

I totally burned out. Kids and parents and administration and pregnancy hormones and all of it--I did a job, a good job, but then I was done. Forever sleep. I won't go back into a classroom as lead teacher again. I tutor, which can be an elegant process from confusion to mastery (for me and the student), but that's few and far between these days. I feel like a stone is quickly being rolled over the entrance to a cave filled with fantastic structures and formations. There is great joy in teaching. I loved it on its good days, and, after the first year, even the worst days were good stories to be told. But that entrance is sealed. There's no going back in.

S is for Schnauzer

2008-05-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Jim, the neighbor across the street, stands on the sidewalk holding a black and silver schnauzer in his arms. It's Thursday, my day off with no girls. I'm hoping to go grocery shopping, maybe get coffee and read a book all by myself somewhere. He sees my van and I know I'm in for it.

"Do you know whose dog this is?" he asks me, knowing that I did not know. I haven't even gotten out of the van yet.

"No," I tell him. "Could it be Karen's?"

"That's what I was wondering."

"I know she has the big black schnauzer. I don't know what kind the little one is, though. Did you try up there?"

This is when it changes. I have offered advice about what he might do next, but he isn't interested in doing anything.

"Gosh, I have to get the kids to school--their field trip bus leaves in 15 minutes. And I can't put this dog in the back with my dog, you know." Oh, do I know. His dog, a lanky untrained yellow lab, is the scourge of all the work-from-home folks on the block. Bark bark bark bark bark bark bark. He would eat this schnauzer.

There is something about me that makes me this person. I don't know what it is. My mother would probably say I'm needy or "co-dependent" or something like that. Perhaps. But I cannot walk away from problems that I am aware of. Especially if I have any solution. I don't rush in to do CPR in a restaurant--I'm not trained. I don't get my face on TV when the cops bust a drug house I didn't even know about ("gosh, we didn't even know that was going on..."). But I'm the block captain, and Jim has stuff to do and I don't. Yeah.

"Let me get a leash for it," I tell him. I run up to the house, get Dara's leash. Dara, our 90 pound rottweiler mix, is pissed. What do you mean, taking my leash and running outside to that little rat dog?

Jim leaves in a flash, and I'm left there with schnauzer. I walk up to Karen's. Nobody home. I think about dumping the dog in her backyard and letting her sort it out. But her gate is wrought iron with a key lock, six or eight feet tall. It would be no simple task to dump this dog here. I also consider simply letting it off the leash, seeing where it might head. But I would never forgive myself. My neighbors who volunteer at a no-kill shelter aren't home (of course), and there I am.

We drive to the Humane Society. No microchip. Of course. But the lady in blue scrubs behind the counter takes her picture (and confirms her gender). Enters a found report. Maybe somebody will call. I don't want to drop her off--the Humane Society is not a no-kill shelter, and the clock would be ticking. So Miss Schnauzer and I go home.

She and Dara play nice in the backyard. Dara seems confused, maybe worried (but I tend to assign too many emotional states to that dog). They spend the day together in the beautiful May sunshine. As if. It's the coldest May 1 I've ever experienced. Gray and nasty. But no rain, so out they go.

Thursday evening, we get no calls. Thursday night, I wake up again and again to her barking, worried about bothering neighbors, about her, about somebody taking her. I wander around most of the night, and in the morning, I know I have to move her on to a shelter after the end of the work day. I'll give the owners one more day.

The end of the work day comes so fast. We're heading out with Mary and Maloki to a book fair, and Jim runs into me on the street.

"Still have the dog?"

"Yeah. She's so nice. Really sweet. Been well taken care of. She won't eat Dara's food, either. Turns her nose up."

We are both envisioning spoiled Madame Schnauzer with her moist food chopped up in a ceramic dish on a placement. Her collar, I've realized, isn't tan, but Burberry plaid. She's had a hair cut and is the kind of dog, well, that 65 year old ladies with money name Mazie and keep on a pillow in the living room window. Woof.

"Well," Jim concedes. He's a good guy, even if he's scattered. He has good intentions. "How about I walk around this evening with the kids and knock on doors?"

"That's great. We're leaving, but if you want to take her around, go ahead. If somebody comes by, they can go through the side gate." And off I go to the book fair.

When we get home, late after dinner and many many books, Madame is gone. I'm really happy. Jim managed to find somebody. Wonderful.

In the morning, Ann calls me. She's the block captain on the next block. Asks about the dog. Do I still have it?

"No, I think the owners must have been found."

"Yeah. It's Chris' dog. I was going to take it from Jim, but I figured word would get out, and I didn't need that. He's moving and the problem will move with him."

Chris. As in illegal fireworks Chris. As in the boyfriend of that woman. Whose teenage daughter had a fight on the street with a bunch of rough girls, wound up spilling over into the fire station across the street and breaking windows. Chris is in the "last of the bad neighbors" category. There's one house on our block (it's empty, but wouldn't it be nice if someone lived there?) and a couple still left over on Ann's. Chris is one of those.

Chris has been through 6 dogs since we moved in 10 years ago. He "accidentally" poisoned one with rat poison. Two pit bulls in one year. He likes status dogs, ones that celebrities go jogging with (dobermans, rotts, pit bulls, etc). A schnauzer? Seriously?

"I should have dropped that dog off at the Humane Society," I say to Ann without thinking.

"Oh, trust me, she gets out again, you just call. I'll drive her to a shelter in St. Charles if I have to. So sweet. She's a purebred. She'd be adopted in a minute."

It's just a dog, I think to myself. Maybe it's the girlfriend's dog. Maybe she'll move out. She was obviously well taken care of. But maybe she was only just now adopted. Maybe she was trying to leave.

It's just a dog. I couldn't have known. Sixty-five year old lady with a pillow, remember? Not Chris. I couldn't have known.

Dog.

R is for Ride

2008-04-23T14:46:00.000-07:00

Last evening we took a bike ride through Tower Grove Park. Up and down hills on the moderately busy bike paths with the girls literally in tow. Trees in bloom, daffodils still yellow. Softball practice there, a pick up volleyball game here. On our second loop through, we stopped at the playground for the girls. Farsi, Spanish, Vietnamese, something North African, something else Middle Eastern and most definitely Bosnian. Not only that, but a friendly group of teenagers bored and in the playground but not causing a problem. Moms and babies, dads and toddlers. Strollers, bikes. A woman in full Muslim dress with her two little girls.

It has ceased to feel artificial to me. It is part of the background music of life here. We rode home, and as we got to the cypress grove circle, I turned to Mike and said, "This place is across the street from where we live." An odd mixture of pride and amazement at my good luck and just a happiness seemed to surround this statement.

An eastern towhee bid his sparrow and cardinal neighbors goodnight. We crossed Grand and headed up Halliday for homemade bread and butter before bed.

Q is for Quake

2008-04-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

So I was fighting with the cat. The little cat. I didn't want him to lie on my chest and purr in my face. So I kept gently tossing him away. Back. Back. Back. And I rolled over to look at the clock. It was 3:50 in the morning, April 18. The next thing I knew, I didn't have any clue what the hell was going on. We have a brass front to our fireplace in our room, and it was rattling. It rattles just a bit when a big truck goes by, rare, but it does. Except this time it rattled for, oh, about thirty seconds. And I realized holy crap, this is an earthquake.

I ran into Sophia and Maeve's room. Mike grabbed Sophia, I got Maeve, and we went down the steps. I mean, it was without thought or discussion. We were out on the porch before I could completely focus my eyes.

It is the first earthquake I've felt in St. Louis. Ever. I've felt one in Cairo, Illinois, one that woke me up as well, but my trigger is a little light the past few weeks. But only because I've been reading about the New Madrid Fault and freaking myself out. I do things things, why again? Why do I spend my time reading about soil liquefaction and what will happen to my masonry foundation 3 story house when a big one comes?

Two weeks ago I sat in my inlaws' church down in Cairo and thought about devastation. I mean, I've been ruminating.

I hate it when that coincides with reality.

It was a 5.4 magnitude, centered near Olney, Illinois, 4:38 a.m.

I'm awake now.

P is for Possum

2008-04-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

When I taught at St. Joan of Arc, I started having symptoms. Neurological symptoms. Scary things. Little blackouts. Creepy feelings. I have a hard time even describing them. A falling sensation, an inability to form words. Stupid things, really, any one of them one time would be nothing. But they were there and weren't going away.

I went to my doctor. He sent me immediately to a neurologist. The neurologist said things to me like, "you aren't a walking time bomb, it's ok." But I felt like one, especially when he said the E word. Epilepsy. Mike's ex-girlfriend died from epilepsy, fell during a seizure on stage and never came back. Anti-epileptic medications are frightening. Suddenly this was real and I wanted to go back to some other safe place.

I'm not epileptic, at least, they never really found out what was wrong with me. I might be. Or I might not be. I'm subclinical. My temporal lobe is odd. But maybe it's just migraine aura without headache? It's hard to know. I still don't. I've stopped caring, really, except from a curiosity standpoint. I probably have simple partial seizures, but nothing has progressed since Sophia came along. And they were never able to induce a complex or generalized seizure, so it's not epilepsy. It's subclinical.

That's not what this is about. This is about possums. I was told by my neurologist that I was to stay awake for 24-36 hours to prepare for a sleep-deprived EEG. Sleep deprivation makes you more likely to have a seizure. So I went home and proceeded to stay awake on the day before I was supposed to go in. My EEG was scheduled for noon, and so I stayed awake from 6:30 the morning before.

About hour 22, I heard the crunching. Sounded like the cat eating. But both cats were in sight--one on top of the computer monitor, one on my lap. I went into the kitchen, and there was a possum, eating cat food. It looked at me and ran through the cat door down into the basement. I went and woke Mike up. THERE IS A POSSUM IN OUR BASEMENT. We hunted through the basement. But our basement is cut up into 7 rooms, very very creepy. Perfect for a possum who wants to hide out. Mike looked at me after a half hour of searching and said, "You hallucinated."

Six months later, I went downstairs to do laundry. There on the top of our freezer, about a foot above me, was the most beautiful possum I have ever seen. Luxurious fur. Bright eyes. Clean. I actually thought it was Bleys at first, but it was bigger than our Norwegian Forest Kitty. And browner, as I approached. It stared at me as I put the laundry basket down. And then I ran up to get Mike.

Chaos ensued. Our friend Maloki didn't want us to call a wildlife exterminator. We couldn't kill it. So a plan was developed involving an overturned laundry basket, a board, some poles, and a hose. The phrase, "If we only had a pair of giant tongs" was tossed about. We got the possum to walk down this board, hissing at us in rage. We were ending his good thing. We trapped him in a plastic bin and drove him out to Forest Park. Dumped him off.

Our cats had gotten so skinny. The dog was terrified of the basement. Every animal in the house had worms.

But at least I hadn't imagined it.

O is for Oblate

2008-04-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

God writes straight with such wiggly lines. - Sr. Jean

I've been trying to leave the Catholic Church since I got to college. Not in a disaffected "I don't need church" kind of way. I have a religion problem. I tend to be deeply so. It's an important part of my life. I've said before that if I'd been given the tour of Sr. Mary's and Sr. Cathy's house instead of the nursing home for elderly religious, I probably would have taken a different path. I don't have any regrets (except when I do).

Why not try one more retreat? Mike asked. Before you leave for good? So I did. The aforementioned Sr. Cathy led. We met Hildegard during one session. Sounded like my kind of saint. And I remember Saturday night, after watching Babette's Feast and drinking wine (it was QUITE a retreat), sitting in my little room and laying it on the line for myself. I had to find my way, and I had to start now.

I read some Hildegard. That led me to the Rule of Benedict. And to books written by Benedictines (from the amazingly deep Joan Chittister to the light and accessible Fr. Dominic). One book wasn't by a vowed Benedictine. It was by an oblate. I googled the term. Seemed like maybe a lay person who lives in or near a monastery "for mutual benefit." Huh. That's cool.

But then another book by an oblate, and another, seemed to appear on my reading list. I started thinking, surely all these people can't be halfway monks. There's something I'm not understanding. So I went to osb.org, where I'd tried to hunt down a brother who'd taught me 6th grade theology. There it was. Oblates were lay people (and a great number of diocesan priests) who took the same vows (but as promises, not as vows that carry the weight of marriage or religious life) as Benedictines. They try to live out the Rule of Benedict the best they can in their life situation.

It was a watershed moment. That is what I want to be. That is what I'm already being, in my own way. I want that. I'd never been so forward about such things. I told Mike. I told people who read my other blog. I told neighbors and friends. I hunted down a monastery in central Illinois and went to visit.

It wasn't what I wanted. Not even close. A Sunday afternoon meeting, a lecture, a bunch of parents of high schoolers from the area, amazed and intrigued that I'd driven all the way from St. Louis. How could something so right be so not right for me? It was a difficult moment. So I started looking at other monasteries. Mike's uncle Tom, a priest in Belleville, suggested St. Meinrad's. I put it on the list. But I had an email out to a Sr. Jean Frances up in Clyde, Missouri. Way up near Kansas and Iowa. My question: Can I come see, even if I'm from so far away?

She told me there were oblates who came from Massachusetts and Chicago and Denver.

I visited on a bitterly cold February weekend. And by the time I was leaving, with a packet of work to do, with my head exploding with new information and broadened with new experiences, I knew for certain and no exception THIS WAS THE PLACE.

Benedictines take a vow of stability. There isn't a central clearinghouse of Benedictines. Each house is independent (associated but with its own charism) and if you take vows as a Benedictine, you stay put. Nobody transfers you to Des Moines. You don't go on missionary work. This is where you are.

It was kind of an odd feeling. Searching was something I was getting used to. I liked new things. I liked finding new places and ideas. By finally saying yes to Clyde (and no to all the others), it was a change of direction. Now I would still be on a journey, but to a different sort of destination.

I started writing to Sr. Jean on a weekly basis or so. She'd send me things to ponder, and I'd ponder them. And then in May she told the whole group of oblates gathered how stunned she was at the thorough comprehension I had of the Rule, of the spirit in which it was written, how she'd never read such depth of understanding in a candidate for oblation. I don't say that here to brag, in fact, when she said it, it was mortifying for me. I write it here because it just confirmed how completely right this path was. God speaks to each of us through a small back door in our minds, is that the quote? And there was nothing that could have been more in keeping with what that voice was trying to say to me.

I made my oblation in October in that beautiful chapel set on the Missouri prairie. Stabilitas, Conversatio morum, and Obedientia.

When I set out on this journey, I thought it would be just another hat I would wear: mother, wife, teacher, neighbor, friend. But it is deeper than any of those, which amazes me. Those little letters I can put behind my name: OblSB, are meaningless to the rest of the world (as opposed to MD or RN or even SJ), but it's a permanent change to my name, as much as Wissinger instead of Blake. This is who I am, this is about me and about how I interact with God, how I open the door to the divine.

Oblation means a pouring out. A gift. Both ways.

N is for Neighbor

2008-04-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

I met Steve first. We lived here for 2 weeks and he ran into me in the front yard.

"We keep the porch lights on at night," he said flatly. I grasped that this was just his way of speaking, that he wasn't trying to be rude. He mentioned his partner's name was Jerry. The woman who sold us the house had apologized: "The neighbors are gay, but..." I told her that wasn't going to change our minds. I didn't say what I was thinking: "So what?" No need to have that conversation with someone who was leaving.

I met Carol next. She told me that many of the houses on the block were haunted. I didn't ask for details. Didn't want to know who had died in my house, sweating it out in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Then I met the aforementioned Jerry. He was easier to talk to. Told me he had a hosta factory in the backyard, if I ever wanted any...

And that was it for so long it shames me. The deluge started with a trickle, a meeting about the increase in crime in the area in Anne's backyard. Met Eric. Noticed he had a baby Sophia's age. That next fall, I met his wife in the front. And the house two doors down that had sold three times in three years finally settled into Mary and Brent's hands. And she was pregnant. And there was a three year old. Suddenly, here we were. The watershed moment, their Christmas open house.

A few play dates. A teeny bit of chatting. A block party. Then, Maeve was baptized and I invited Trisha, Mary, and Amanda to learn mah jongg. Mostly because Mike made me. I was so nervous.

It's been a quick 4 years since then. Three camping trips.

Four block parties.

Two or three more meetings about crime. Some testifying at trials and at hearings. Arguments about politics. Honest and forthright discussions of religion. Being amazed that I had more in common religiously with the protestants than most of the Catholics.

That would be kids playing in a legally draining fire hydrant. How urban can you get?

There are downs, too. The week without electricity wasn't any fun. Last May I wanted to bolt. It's my response to bad times: flight, not fight. I moved every two years growing up. And it was horrible. An argument about the condos on the corner. The weeks following were the hardest since I moved here. Trish told me in November: "What hurt most about that was that you actually considered leaving. I couldn't believe you would do that."

It was a pivotal moment, as are so many in this girl's life. I flashed to the past, never knowing the next door neighbors, and I flashed to the future, the shared laughter, tears, staggering home from the corner bar, the endless mah jongg games, the comings and goings and births and deaths and weddings and pain and JD Salinger style dialogue sopping in bourbon slush.

As a Benedictine, I take a vow of stability. Here is where I am, and here is where I stay. For good or bad. My marriage, my parish, my religion, my children, and my place. I have made my mark, and it has cut me deeply.

M is for Mama-Na and Mommy-Pop

2008-04-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

I used to be a La Leche League Leader. But L is for that and this is M.

My first daughter, Sophia, was born sick. I was sick; she was sick. I had sepsis, from an e.coli infection I contracted in the hospital. She had the same infection, although she never showed any symptoms. Still, it meant two spinal taps when she was two days old. I was on 4 antibiotics, and so was she, including one that had the potential side effect of rendering her deaf (ototoxic is the term). It didn't. But still, they could have warned me. It was a disaster. By the time she left the hospital, nothing could have gone worse that didn't involve the death of one of us.

She wouldn't nurse. Not even close. Angry little thing, shrieky cries. They gave me an electric pump. At least I could do that. It built my supply and she took the bottles. The nurses said unhelpful things like "It's good to have a backup plan because you can't make this work." They put ice on my nipples. Drizzled formula on my breasts to stimulate her "interest" in nursing. Nothing worked. Remember, I'd also survived 37 hours of labor and a c-section. I was at the end of it all.

The lactation consultant with bleach blonde hair and too-dark tan shook her head. "Take her home, and three days alone with her, it will all be better." I clung to those words. My only hope. Something had to go right. I brought her home, and tried and tried and tried and tried. I pumped and tried some more. Three days after getting home, she was right, it was better. Not all better, though. But she latched on and nursed. Two weeks later, she took her last supplement bottle. I had arrived. My goal was a year.

When she was two and a half, she was still nursing to go to sleep at night. Mama-Na is what she called it. I want mama-na. One of her few intelligible sentences in those pre-speech therapy days. But I was done. She weaned slowly, after I was pregnant with Maeve. But wean she did.

Then there was Maeve. She was rooting around as the doctor delivered her (52 hour labor followed by a c-section, from which I recovered fabulously, better than my tonsillectomy). She nursed vigorously. She did everything right from the very start. Never took a bottle. She called it Mommy-Pop. She still calls breasts that (look at that lady's mommy-pop! she said at the fabric store today, pointing and giggling at a well-endowed older woman).

Mama-Na. Mommy-Pop. I didn't choose either of those terms. I'm still not certain what the etymology might be. Na. Pop. I get the first part.

As I gear up for a potential 3rd baby (who will be delivered via c-section with no cocktail hour (or 52 or 89 hours) beforehand), I think about nursing again. They say that in families that breastfeed at all, the second baby is the most likely to be nursed (usually after failed attempts with the first), and the third is the least likely (I can only figure it's "I am so done with that."). Sometimes I feel so done with that. But there's no question. I just hope this one picks a discreet name.

L is for Light

2008-03-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

A baby's first experience of sight, of course, is light. Focus comes later. First there is light. It may be our last experience of sight, as well, as our eyes fail slowly and we lose the ability to differentiate shapes, color, and edges. Darkness and light. There's a Quaker saying, that instead of beating ourselves up over the darkness in our souls, we should instead turn to the light that showed us the darkness. Turn away from what you've been doing, don't fret, but go on and do what must be done in the light. There is darkness here. But shadows are discernible only in the light. I am sometimes a shadow.

How our eyes are drawn to it. Having been in several dank muddy Missouri caves, I know the tricks eyes can play on us. Flickers up ahead. Imagined pillars and shadows and walls. The light isn't there. Just the memory of what light might be. Coming out into the light after 3 or 4 hours in the darkness, it is overwhelming and we must squint, groping our way back to the cars, hoping that one of us at least will be able to focus and drive. I am sometimes a bat.

Sitting with four lovely people after mass this year, four adults coming into the Catholic faith, for the first time I realized that searching for a spiritual home has nothing to do with what rules you get to follow and what you don't get to eat and how long the church service is. It's about finding a lamp hung on a tree on a path in the forest, taking it up, and beginning to walk that path. The four people who are joining us could not be more different from each other in age, education, or circumstances. But they are all drawn to the same fire. Gathered round the candle in the basement classroom, they say things to me that take my breath away. And I see the light in a new way. I am sometimes a moth.

People come to God in their own time, in their own way. Drawing closer to the light is gradual, with many exposed roots to stumble over and gravel to scoot across, looking up at the vague light of the clouded moon inside our minds. If I whistle a tune and do not allow myself to get waylaid, I might cheerfully lead others on the path, while walking along it myself. Hopefully, I play my cards right, and I am sometimes a guide.

Happy Easter! Happy Spring!

K is for Kyle

2008-03-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

He was hit by a car. After basketball practice, third grade, running across Magnolia to his car. A driver, going the speed limit, it was determined, couldn't stop. He blindly ran out between two parked cars and that was that. He was delivered by ambulance to one of the children's hospitals. Never woke.

Peggy called me that night, obviously upset. Wanted the principal's phone number. I stumbled around my front hall looking for it. "Why?" I asked. It wasn't proper to give out the staff's home numbers--she only had mine because we went to church together. She told me. I gave her the number.

I didn't even really know him. I taught his sister, but she wasn't in my homeroom.

I'd had my share of death and near-death already in my classrooms and schools. The worst was my first year, a girl died in a fatal car wreck on I-70. There were 21 people in the minivan she was riding in. About a third of them died, but her mother and her older sister lived. That funeral home, on the north side, was like something out of Carson McCullers. Genteel and sagging. Lots of green velvet on the pews in the little chapel rooms. And bars on the windows to keep out thieves and vandals.

And now, it's my school. And my parish and my neighborhood and I'm oversteeped and getting acidic. My sixth grade class didn't have the capacity to wrap their heads around it. Neither did I. Sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you pray. Your kid doesn't come out of the coma.

I was busy dealing with the filthiness of life, with child abuse and neglect sitting in my classroom. Three of my kids had been "hotlined", and one of them I had done myself. I had already given so much, and now this--to say it was overwhelming would not do it justice. It was a vortex and I was drowning.

I didn't handle it well.

At the funeral, Dr. Murphy told me it was the most poignant moment in the history of our parish. Everything about us was laid bare. Our pastor couldn't make it through the homily. Kyle's teacher sat next to me, bone thin nun, no facial expression, the tears dripping unceremoniously onto the hymnal. The ice queen 4th grade teacher paced in back, refusing to emotionally engage in the proceedings.

Back at school the next week, life continues down its steady slide into despair. Kyle's funeral is a blip on my radar screen. Too busy with the walking wounded (myself included) to mourn the dead for long.

J is for Jeff

2008-03-01T20:35:00.001-08:00

I knew Mike for over a year before I met his father. And then it was just a nod at me and talk with Mike about whether we were taking the levee road back to Cape or going the long way. Really neither here nor there with him. Mike and I got more serious, got engaged, got married in 1996. He's a nice guy, but unless I want to sit in the living room and listen to endless tales of hunting down hoofed animals, there's not much to say. And we were rarely there, so we were always catching up, like we went home to St. Louis and slipped into comas. Every trip to Cairo was filled with amnesia. I know my stories, but Mike doesn't know his very well. So I couldn't even get a diagram afterwards to explain what I didn't understand.

June 1997. I was having this dream of standing in my classroom, on the third floor, in the window, which was big enough to stand in, after all. And then I just jumped out. Sailed through the air and crashed onto the asphalt. The phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. I didn't even recognize her voice. I thought she was laughing. And then: "Dad's fallen off a roof. They said he's broke his neck. He's going into surgery, I don't know how to reach Mike..." And I realized, she wasn't laughing. she was frantic and hysterical.

I still can picture it, in that ICU in Paducah, Jeff flat on his back, the gardner-wells tongs drilled into his skull to keep his head immobile and neck stretched in the right position. I can't remember anything I said, but years later, sitting in their living room, reminiscing for just a moment, Jeff said, "And I think you said more to me in that ten minutes than in all the times you'd spoken up till then."

That was the moment I became a Wissinger.

Now I watch him tease his granddaughters and talk about hunting and local politics and show interest in the things that are important to Mike. I know Mike sees this change. I think it helped that he's a father now, too. The sharp edges are worn down. I don't know if that moment (that six-week-long moment in a halo) changed Jeff, or if it changed me, but I can look him in the eye these days and see where Mike's headed.

I is for Intertwined

2008-03-01T20:34:00.001-08:00

There are 8 years separating me and my next younger sister. Of course, there’s a brother in between us, but I have about as much in common with him as I do with any isolationist car dealership manager who lives in Texas. Bevin is 25, and then Colleen is 2 years younger, 23 this June. They both attended Mizzou, and Bevin's last year they lived together on East Campus.

Being 8 years older than Bevin, and 10 ½ more than Colleen, I was old enough to change diapers when they came along, but then I went to junior high and high school and away from them. They have grown up as acquaintances, people who lived with my parents. I didn’t really come to know them until after I was a married homeowner, when my parents moved up to St. Louis, just a block away, as if we were some long-term family with roots in the area. Which we are, except for that whole 20 years on the road thing we did.

They are much cooler than I am—than I ever was. They know how to drink hard liquor and how to dance at bars. They are smart and interesting, and I’m a mom of two kids who drives a mini-van. I look at them and I know that they wouldn’t have much tolerance for me if there wasn’t kinship. Of course, that road runs both ways; they are lucky too for the bond.

Their apartment that year, a full floor of a house, was filled with a hodgepodge of cast-off furniture and knickknacks, some from my house, some from my mother’s. A chair I stole from the dorm, the kitchen table from my first apartment. Bevin’s dresser was mine, simply painted black. The pots were my parents’ first cookware. There were little reminders everywhere, but jarring juxtapositions as well. The Day of the Dead statue by the computer and the lacquered mannequin in the living room were creepy and out of place next to that end table from my grandmother’s house. It was like walking through a dreamscape—everything seems right, except for the glowing pink dog.

They’re sort of like that, too. We have similar tendencies towards obsessive-compulsive disorder, but Bevin’s is far more pronounced. Their arguments sound like ones I’ve had, but they’re a little edgier. The bumper stickers on the coffee table are places I once frequented—but I don’t put bumper stickers on my coffee table anymore. Colleen’s boyfriend has a similar laid-back stay-in-the-background demeanor Mike once had.

Their time together in the apartment ended and Colleen moved in with the boyfriend. Bevin moved to St. Louis, to share a flat with a girl whose obnoxious habits have convinced her that the only roommates she will have from now on will share her last name, one way or another. I can understand that. We know each other's games. We have survived our childhoods together and there is this common memory, or shared base, perhaps, that no one else in our lives, no matter how close we may think we are to that person, can ever have.

And the isolationist car dealership manager from Texas, he's all intertwined in this as well. Soon, perhaps already, we will all be adults together. They will marry, or maybe not, have kids, or maybe not, and we will take pictures of the whole family on my parents’ back porch. We will argue about politics and religion and go camping and get drunk and wonder how we could possibly come from the same family. Our parents will age and we will resent each other for being there, or not being there, or not being able to be there but desperately wanting to. We will send annoying Christmas letters to each other and know in our hearts that everyone is lying.

My own two girls are arguing in the background over polly pockets. But some day, whether I like it or not, they'll be drinking whiskey sours at their apartment kitchen table, laughing at this dumb blog their mother used to keep. What a fad that was.

H is for Houston

2008-02-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

Like L.A., with the climate of Calcutta - Molly Ivins

Living in a two-bedroom furnished apartment in Clear Lake, looking for a house. Driving around in the station wagon, parking on the hottest asphalt parking lots you can imagine. Hard to breathe hot. Run from the car to the air conditioned building as fast as you can hot. Humidity rising from the ground like waves of mirage. Intense, the asphalt smelling like new tar on a roof.

Moved into suburbia--Houston is so big it takes my brother in Cypress, a northwest suburb, almost 3 hours to get to Galveston. When we lived there, in a southeast suburb, it took us about 40 minutes. Sticky grody Galveston. On a semi-dry day, meaning the humidity was only at about 85%, you could take a deep breath and smell the salt, my early childhood in the California desert.

In the summertime, the clouds would build up into giant thunderheads, and then at 4 o'clock, you could stand in the middle of the street and watch the storm come in. And pass over you, soaking you with warm splashes of rain. The mud smelled like my first grade classroom in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

Coming from a snotty ritzy southern high school in Georgia, formerly a girls' boarding school, walking into my south Houston alma mater that first day was a shock. Bullet holes in the front door. The smell of too many floods and not enough dehumidifiers. Our hall passes were chunks of the gym floor--while at the school in Georgia, they still had the original 1945 floor in their gym, pristine and shiny, in Houston, Alicia had taken care of the last one. In Houston, there are hurricanes. And nothing lasts. Not like Katrina-style wipe out. Just that things age faster there. Fall apart. Mold. Nothing is built to last, not the houses, the neighborhoods, the stores, the corporations, the oil. A mix of rot and volatile organic compounds off-gassing.

At night lying out on the driveway of his house, in Houston proper, but on the edge of Pasadena, the sky would be orange and glowing. And we could hear trains. And cows. And then, if we paid close attention, the owl would pass silently overhead. The chinaberry tree dropping its detritus on my "Rebel with a cause: the cause is Christ" t-shirt from campus ministry while I helped his mother bury their German shepherd in their backyard. Dirt smelled just about as close to toxic as I want to stand 4 feet deep in. The salt from my sweat, running down into the corners of my mouth.

Cigarette smoke on my clothes, staggering out to my car, the whole world covered in a fine mist of dew. Trying not to breathe, the heavy presence of manure filling my lungs--6:30 in the morning, I've missed curfew for the second night in a week, and it's already 88 degrees.

G is for Girl Scouts

2008-02-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

I was a girl scout from 1st through 8th grade (6 years old until about 14). I am a girl scout again now as a leader in my daugher's troop. Twenty-five important things Girl Scouts has taught me over this time:

1. How to pitch a tent.

2. How to sing in a round.

3. How to lay a fire, better than any of my eagle scout friends now that we're all adults.

4. How to estimate time of day by the position of the sun.

5. How to use a compass for more than finding north.

6. How to prepare a latrine that hasn't been used in 6 months so that girls do not wither away with the thought of a weekend in the woods.

7. How to spend an entire weekend cooking with just one cup, no soap, just water to rinse (it requires planning from the beginning or everything tastes like Saturday morning's eggs).

8. How to sew.

9. How to ice skate.

10. How to carry a flag, how to present the colors, how to salute.

11. How to recognize harmless spiders from the two bad ones here in Missouri.

12. How to braid.

13. How to tie a square knot, a half hitch, the clove hitch, the carrick bend, a figure 8 knot, and a hangman's knot.

14. How to pull a camp prank that won't kill anyone.

15. How to tell a decent ghost story.

16. How to spelunk, and why I might want to.

17. How to set the mood for a ceremony.

18. How to play spoons, bullshit, hearts, and rook.

19. To worry about cliffs.

20. To respect nature.

21. That sound travels in the woods in a different fashion than it does in the city.

22. That I was kind of a spazz but it didn't really matter.

23. That I wasn't the best at everything I tried, and that nobody really noticed.

24. That women can be interesting even if they aren't beautiful.

25. That given the right adult ingenuity and planning, girls can leave behind their prejudices, egocentrism, and shyness and have a good time.

It's more than just cookies and goofy uniforms. Really.

F is for Friend

2008-02-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

One time, Marita sent me a card. It had been a long time since we'd heard from each other more than Christmas cards. And it would be a long time until we'd see each other again. Marita had been my friend in 6th grade because her mother told her she had to be. Most of the time, the story is told from the other direction. But I was the charity case with poor social skills, gifted intellectually, but stupid about friends. Everyone in my class had been together since kindergarten. I was new, but new wasn't interesting here like it had been previously. New was somewhat threatening. Freakish.

I'd managed to eke out a social spot with Dawn, whose twin, Angela, was a social climber and left her behind. Becky and I had nothing in common except outcast status. Amy was her best friend, and Cheryl. All of them were so behind academically, they were using 4th grade textbooks. What mortified me even more was that I was handed a 4th grade math book to go along with my high-school level reading. Marita and Helen and Carol sat on the opposite side of the room, going through pre-algebra, while I was still learning my times tables. And when reading class came along, I was in their group, but everyone seemed to think it was a fluke.

It was a hard fall.

In December, I took the math book home. Got brave enough to ask skeptical Mrs. Kruse for the 5th and 6th grade books, too. Spent the whole Christmas break doing math. Did it all. I worked every problem on every page of those books, up to where the average 6th grader was. I came back in January and got to move my desk into the fold.

Then Marita asked if I'd like to come home after band practice on Wednesday for dinner. See a movie with Leslie and Helen and Carol. Stay the night, though, not a slumber party, go back to school on Thursday. I jumped at the chance. Saw a bad Michael J. Fox movie at the theater where her brother worked (Light of Day? Something like that), had chicken and green beans and ambrosia salad for dinner. Stayed up just late enough to practice our flutes together, and then in the morning had biscuits and gravy. A first.

After that, I ate lunch with them. Wound up getting closer to Leslie and Carol for a while, but Carol moved away and Leslie was hard to be friends with after I moved to Dallas. Marita and I corresponded, wrote bad short fiction to each other. She was my maid of honor at my wedding. I spent a lot of time trying to live up to her ideals. I found myself translating Bridgett into Marita a lot before we each had our families. I had changed from when we'd first met, and in very different ways than how she had changed. I felt big and awkward around her, omitting big chunks of my life in conversation. Frustrating.

But I saw her last summer at her mom's house and we talked about life with kids, how it wasn't what we thought it would be, how we try to live up to lots of other people's ideals. Her dad took our picture together standing on their front porch. She said, it's so nice to have someone around who has known me for two decades. You don't have to explain anything. It felt like permission rather than observation. Oddly freeing.

The card she sent, long before, when I was first married and she was getting her masters degree, had a block print design on the front of an apple and and orange. It said, "When you put an apple and an orange together, the apple ceases to be an apple, and the orange ceases to be an orange. Together they are fruit. I opened up the card and it simply read, "We're friends."

E is for Eclipse

2008-02-21T11:52:00.001-08:00

Summons

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.
--Robert Francis

You know I'm not too hard persuaded has crept into my language, long ago, after my first reading of this poem in high school. It's true, too. I'm not too hard persuaded.

I got home from church cleaning last night (only two other adults showed up; our church seats 1000 easy and the floors needed mopping from all the wet grit and salt residue off boots the past three weekends) exhausted. Mike met me at the door, holding a cup of hot chocolate (for himself--he isn't THAT good at timing). Come look at the eclipse, he said. I saw it from the parking lot, I told him. No, he said, come look. Bring the camera and tripod. Let's take pictures.

He was so excited about this, like he'd arranged for the eclipse himself. And truly, I haven't seen many total eclipses, mostly because of busy-ness and cloudiness and forgetfulness. So I got the camera and the tripod. Didn't put the army surplus parka back on because I am so sick of wearing a coat. Showed him how to change shutter speed and F-stop. Looked a bit. Was glad I looked. Then went in. These are his pictures, for a change.

God, this winter has to end soon.