Peppering the Bulbs: Auguries of Springtime

 Dedicated to My Friend

Jenna James Chandler -

Who inspires me to believe that rising up from the ground 
in beauty and in strength

is an attainable goal.

"I went a little bulb-happy at the Odd Lots store," I texted my husband.  

I am a sucker for attractively-packaged plant items.  Let me be honest.  A flowery Eden depicted on a glossy wrapper imposes itself upon that unattainably idyllic  mental landscape known as My Garden, and I can't haul out my wallet fast enough.  The people who print up the wrappers know this perfectly well, of course; we Garden People are like that, giving the Fabric People competition in the "Who can buy more stuff that we haven't figured out what to do with yet?" department.

All gardeners run into problems.  One of mine is that we have a lot of shade and far too few areas that could be described as "Full Sun." I tend to buy things that say "FULL SUN" and do not notice that this is stated loudly and clearly on the little information sheet until I get it home and am ready to plant it, at which point I realize that all the Full Sun patches are already as crowded as nineteenth century tenements on the Lower East Side.  Though come to think of it, why do I reach that far back in time for a simile in this, the deplorable age of the Stackable Micro-Apartment?

My other problem is the Critters.  We have critters.  Deer critters,  Bunny critters.  Groundhog critters.  Squirrel critters.  Chipmunk critters.  (Please Note: List contains a fairly large percentage of Burrowing Rodents.  This is what we writers call Foreshadowing.)

So the bulbs were a great buy, because a lot of them will thrive in part-shade, of which I have plenty. They were cheap - $3.99 a bag, with a pretty picture of what they're supposed to look like come Springtime stapled to the top.   I got wise fast to the fact that, no matter how much I love tulips, I am never going to be able to grow them, because the deer love them even more than I do.   "But I am too wily for them, " I thought, as I filled up my shopping cart with hyacinths, daffodils, allium (which I've never planted before, but which looked like something Dr. Seuss would draw, so I tossed them in), muscari (in plain English, "grape hyacinths"), and those charming little white blooms with the still more charming Russian name - puschkinia. (I know.  Makes you want to go to Veselka and order a plate of puschkinia with a side of sour cream.  It turns out they are named for Pushkin - albeit it's Pushkin the botanist, not Pushkin the poet.) "I shall only buy the ones that have the picture of a deer in a circle with a red line drawn through it!"

Last year I planted 100 daffodil bulbs, and it all but killed me.  I live in Rockland County, NY, and they were not kidding when they made the name up.  This is the kind of soil that breaks farmers' hearts. And their backs.  And their shovels.

This year, my ace in the hole is my friend Maria, who is an accomplished gardener, and who has lived here long enough to learn some of the finer points of outsmarting Rockland at its own game. On her advice, I purchased a pitchfork to use in place of the unforgiving shovel. Just as Maria promised, I was able to turn the soil much more easily, and the rocks loosened up nicely without a lot of grunting and sweating and cursing on my part.

This year, thanks to the low prices and the pretty pictures on the bags, I got home, unpacked everything, and found myself staring at 200 grape hyacinth bulbs, 75 puschkinia bulbs, 56 assorted daffodil bulbs, 16 allium bulbs, and 25 regular-sized hyacinths in a wide variety of hues.  I pitchforked the ground like mad and got about a hundred of the grape hyacinths planted on the first day.  After that, it rained, and then I got busy doing other things, and it wasn't until a few days later that I pulled on my gardening gloves and got to work planting the rest.  I put in a long morning, got very dirty and tired, and decided to break for lunch.  Before going inside, I wandered over to have a look at the area where I'd planted the first hundred bulbs three days before, so I could pat myself on the back and be suffused with that nice glow of accomplishment.

Instead, I let out a shriek and raced inside to text Maria.

Those Fucking Chipmunks dug up and ATE all my grape hyacinth bulbs! I'm gonna go Elmer Fudd on their furry little asses!

Dear, loyal Maria, in less time than you'd think it would take to stifle a laugh, texted me right back.

Bastards! Run out and buy some Critter Ridder before you plant any more bulbs. Or try some cayenne pepper.

We had cayenne pepper. I trudged back out and started sprinkling, closely followed by the dog. She, sensing I had something relating food in my hand, tromped around in the freshly-peppered dirt, sniffed it, sneezed, tried to lick it off her feet, gave me a reproachful look, and harrumphed back into the house, giving it all up as a bad job.

Gentle Reader - if ever I have had a case of the Fuck-Its, it was then.

I went inside, stifled the urge to eat a pint of ice cream straight from the container (mainly because there wasn't any, and I was repulsively hot, dirty, tired, and too damn cross to clean myself up and drive to the store), had lunch and a cup of coffee, and brooded.  Was there any point to planting the rest of the bulbs?  Wasn't I just setting myself up for a lot of frustration and chipmunk-rage?

For all I knew, none of the things would come up.  For all I knew, we'd fall behind on the mortgage because I was out planting bulbs when I should have been looking for a job, we'd lose the house, and all I was doing was making the place look nice for when the bank sent somebody to take pictures for the foreclosure website so they could sell it out from under us. For all I knew, I'd get some rare exotic disease related to chipmunk-rage that would carry me off before Springtime ever arrived; even if the stupid things did come up, I'd never get to see them anyway.

But slowly, as the chipmunk-rage drained away, replaced by the comfort of lunch and a hot cup of coffee, it came to me why I should do it anyway.

I should do it anyway because I love doing it.

I should do it anyway because when it comes to the future, I am charge of taking the action, but I'm never in charge of the result.

I should do it anyway because even if my wonkiest fears come to pass and I'm not here to see the flowers bloom next spring for whatever crazy reason (hey - maybe I'll sell my novel and be off on a book tour!), I believe it's important to create as much beauty as I can, whenever and wherever I can, because somebody will see it and take joy in it.  And if the somebody doesn't turn out to be me, that's okay, too.

The tree across the creek, flaunting its gaudy autumn garb of Halloween hues, was planted by someone who didn't have me in mind.  Every time I see it, my spirits lift.  I wish I could tell whoever planted it that it brings me joy - that I feel love for the tree and its beauty - that I am thanking whoever put it there in my heart every time I see it.

When I walk through a great public garden like The Cloisters, I am flooded with peace and happiness.  Hundreds of hands labored to create this vision.  I don't have a single name to attach to their efforts.  But I thank them, each and every one.

When I read a great poem by a long-dead poet; when I find a nugget of wisdom I desperately needed on that very day in a tome that had gathered dust on a library shelf until I took it home and gently smoothed the dog-ears from its pages; when I stand in awe before a Van Gogh painting, marvelling at the courage of an artist who permits himself to become a philosopher's stone that transforms unimaginable agony into indescribable beauty... that is when it's made clear to me why we must do it anyway.

It seems to me it must take faith

to be a flower.

Each year I’m shocked

to see them thrusting for the sky –

small soldiers bearing little green-tipped spears,

determined to surround

the tired city trees

that grow in cages of a yard or two of dirt

hacked into concrete.

But don’t you know it’s winter now?

I want to shout.  It’s much too soon –

it might still freeze.

Shouldn’t you wait? 

                           

I am excited

by the prospect of the daffodils,

the tulips, crocus, hyacinths;

my mind fills up with colors.

I see the flowers of bygone years -

they are a promise that I always fear

won’t be fulfilled again.

        

I want to make it safe for them to grow,

to shield them, tuck them in,

keep them all warm and snug,

where neither cold nor careless hand

can cut them down before

they go from stalk, to bud,

to bloom,

to graceful withered husk…

And yet, I know

my part in this is simple: Have the faith

that they will have their proper span

of days upon this earth;

rejoice that they are here again;

and most of all, don’t grieve

that they can’t stay for long.

Karen Clark, 2010, "The Faith to Be a Flower"

The Red Balloon: A Love Story

June 9, 2015.  After fifteen years and three extraordinarily wonderful Manhattan schools, and finally the ultimate goal - COLLEGE! - my 19 year old son and I walk down the well-remembered stairs of The Red Balloon, an Upper West Side preschool bordered by Riverside Drive and 125th St., on a sentimental journey to the scene of his introduction to Welcome to School – Your Daily Reality for the Next 20 Years. Here he spent three of the most important years of his formative cognitive life – a developmental phase whose importance can hardly be overestimated. 

The Red Balloon!  We saw it, and we fell in love. The huge, well-equipped gym, with its tricycles, kick-balls, trike-carousel, and above all, plenty of floor space for energetic little bodies to race around in! The loaded shelves of the picture book library, the comfy reading sofa! The warm, contented smiles of the teachers and the children! The tempting aromas issuing from the kitchen twice a day, both at breakfast and lunch! The wading pool and the outdoor play deck!  And oh, those wonderful toys and activities! Who would have imagined that all this happy hubbub of Legos, painting, jigsaw puzzles, and so much more was going to teach my unsuspecting tot the essential skills that would form the foundation for his ongoing success as a student?  Not he. Not I.  All my son and I saw on the day we first toured the school, his small hand clutched in my own, was that this was the one.

We enter the bright, cheery foyer with its cubbies and children’s artwork, marveling as we recall how my son once had to stand on tiptoe to reach his winter jacket on a cubby hook that is now on a level with his waistband. It is nap time; the classrooms are closed, and the children doze on their cots. Within minutes, familiar faces of teachers appear. Saundra, who had not known we’d be coming to visit, comes out to see who’s there. Her mouth drops open, she spreads out her arms, embraces my son and calls us both by name.  Norma Brockmann, the director of the school, is delighted that we took her up on her invitation to come by.  She emerges from her office, calling to Orange Room teacher Judy to come and see who’s here.  Judy bustles out, beaming, gives us each a big hug, and starts singing the song from the Arthur cartoon that they used to sing together every day – the one that drove me crazy, because after school my son would sing it all the way home, too. Chris, Anne and Monique pop their heads out to see what’s going on, recognize us at once, come out for quick hugs, and return to the classrooms to supervise the napping children.

Everyone launches into “Do you remember…?”  Norma reels off the names of my son’s classmates and where they went on to elementary school without a single mistake.  Some of them are still in touch with her.  Some are still in touch with my son and are part of his current social circle.  How many of us have friendships that go back to our preschool days?  My son gets excited while recalling an art project he did involving poster paint and a bunch of marbles, and wonders whether the annual apple-picking expedition, his favorite outing, is still a tradition.  It is.  I tell him that I still have the art project he did with the paint and the marbles, tucked away in my Memory Box on the top shelf of the closet, and he is astonished. "No way! Will you show me when we get home?"  I watch his animated face and the glow of satisfaction on his teachers’ faces as he boasts of his freshman year G.P.A. – 3.7, not too shabby! – and I think, “How did we ever get so lucky as to be a part of this school? No – a part of this family.”

For it is a family.  It was in this magical microcosm of a Manhattan melting pot that my son discovered that he is part of the Family of Man, and that we human beings all have so much more in common than we have differences that would keep us apart.  Here he was loved; here he was nurtured; here he was cherished as an equal among his contemporaries, all of them small pilgrims to Grownupland.

My son and I wander to the gym.  The room is as vast as ever, but the equipment looks disproportionately small next to his lanky form.  I look around, remembering his fourth birthday party, and how excited we were when we learned we could rent the gym on the weekend.  It was, as he emphatically told me afterward, "the best birthday party ever!"  He went home from that party loaded with gifts, but the real gifts we got were the intangibles.  Smiles. Laughter. Friendship. Memories.

The Red Balloon gave us so much. It gave my son social skills that have lasted him all his life.  It was here that he heard, “You may not always like everybody here every minute of every day, but everybody here is your friend.”  He learned to be polite – “Yes, I hear you, sweetie, but I can hear you much better when you say please.”  He learned to share.  He learned to relax when taking a test, because the only thing that’s important is to do your best and not worry about being perfect; as a result, he did exceedingly well when he did find himself in a testing situation. He learned to negotiate – “I’ll trade you this Lego portcullis for that set of Lego racing wheels.”  He learned that “No means no” and he learned that sometimes the way life works is that “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”  And we ultimately learned that, thanks to his background of carefully structured classroom instruction that made him stand out as a potential elementary school student and to Norma’s advocacy and savvy about the kindergarten admissions process, he had his pick of some of the finest schools on the Upper West Side when it was time to leave the nest and try his wings at Big Kids’ School.

Most of all, The Red Balloon gave me a lovable, happy child whose natural intellectual growth had been tenderly cultivated by wise and loving hands, and who was ready in every way to go on to kindergarten with confidence in his self-worth and his abilities. The Red Balloon provided the fertile soil in which my son’s intellectual curiosity took root, and thanks to Norma and her outstanding staff of teachers, my son continues to bloom and to reach for the sky. We are so grateful, and I truly believe my son could not have gotten off to a better start in life than he did by attending this uniquely wonderful preschool.

The Garlic Mustard Wars

I was trying to decide whether to write about the incredible fantastic display of structural undergarments through the ages I visited yesterday at the Bard Graduate Center (86th & CPW - oh, yes, Gentle Reader, I do still get into Manhattan, and I don't even have to ask the locals "Which way is uptown?" - at least, not yet.) The exhibition, called "Fashioning the Body," is well worth writing about, and maybe I'll take it on tomorrow if the weather is not too beautiful.  Luckily for you, my little Chiclets, today is hazy, hot and humid, even up here in the sticks, and with the best will and the most finely-honed case of Gardener's OCD you ever saw, I couldn't bring myself to spend any more times out of doors. If the weather's nice tomorrow - different story, and, as Tigger would say, "TTFN!"

However, since the latest thing on my mind is always, "What did I do this morning?" I will refresh myself with the tall glass of iced coffee I had the forethought to refrigerate before going outside to get all hot and dirty while I write about how the garden thing is going.  The short answer is, "Quite well."

I won't bore you with a detailed list of everything I've planted, or of all the curious things I've dug up in the process. Suffice to say that I like planting flowers, and that the former homeowners liked to throw vodka bottles into the shrubbery, where they thought the evidence of their shenanigans would be buried in oblivion forever. At one point my spade struck a flat, white, longish box-like thing and I thought, "Huzzah! They buried the family diamonds and, thanks to all that vodka, they forgot to dig them up before they moved!" But it turned out to be a clay drainpipe, and that was the end of my fantasy that there would surely be some kind of rich reward in store for the wonderful person (me) who was doing all this work on the neglected garden.  The rich reward turned out to be the soil itself, which had lain under a carpet of gently decaying leaves that were never raked for decades and had grown fine and moist and fecund, bursting with nutrients that are making my peonies and my Solomon's Seal sit up and take notice.

You will not, perhaps, be surprised to learn that we now have the fattest, happiest robins in the county.  As Mary Lennox discovered in Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic tale of Gardenmania, robins love being around gardeners, because we dig up all those plump, juicy worms and succulent grubs.  Saves them a great deal of trouble - all they have to do is dart down from the tree and pounce.

I have also dug up literally yards of poison ivy, which, in my zeal and innocence, I did not know was poison ivy when I first began yanking it out.  Luckily, I always wear gardening gloves, due to incurable squeamishness (see above, "worms and grubs.")  I now know exactly what P.I. looks like, and I have to say, so far I have been extraordinarily lucky, for while I continue to ruthlessly exterminate it wherever I find it, I have not yet broken out in the classic unbearable itchy rash. I suppose if I keep it up, eventually my luck will run out, but thus far my body has not seemed to recognize the nasty stuff for what it is and is not, at this writing, screaming in protest that I should stay away from that stuff!!!! (Yes, I know - don't burn the plant after you pluck it out.  I looked up all the safety precautions online, never fear.)

The other thing I've gone after with a vengeance is the garlic mustard.

Now, I had never heard of garlic mustard, and would have assumed it's something one enquires for in the condiment section at Zabar's, or perhaps at Agata & Valentina if Zabar's has run out. An Upper West Side friend with a country house in Connecticut is also a Gardenmania Gal, and she mentioned having spent an exhausting morning ripping out the garlic mustard making incursions onto her property, describing the stuff as "An evil, invasive weed my stupid ancestors brought over from Europe because they thought there wasn't going to be anything to eat." So I asked Mr. Google, and horrors! - there was a picture of it, and we had it by the acre.  And yes - theoretically, you could encounter this insidious variation on Audrey in an 8 oz. container for $12 at a a high-end NYC foodie emporium and think to yourself, "Wow, garlic mustard pesto - how interesting, I shall certainly strike the Originality Gong at the next PTA pot-luck with that slathered onto my penne!"

And yes - you can, in fact, cook with the stuff.  That is, if you can stand the sight of it after you've pulled up dozens of huge plastic trash bags full and discovered that it does, indeed, smell strongly of garlic, although not at all like mustard.  My husband, who, being of sound mind, has not pulled up a single stalk, expresses mild interest in its culinary properties and keeps telling me to bring back some of the young, tender ones because that's what the online recipes recommend.  I keep saying, "Sure, next time I absolutely will," and then I get so infuriated by the utter ubiquity of this ghastly plague of a plant and the fact that no matter how much of it I pull out by the roots, there's always more surging up right behind it, that the last thing I want to do is eat it.  So I stuff it into the plastic bags, willy-nilly, and leave it out for our Kindly Carting Man to take away twice a week, probably to his bewilderment because up to now we were a single-garbage-bag-producing household except on major holidays.

The thing that pisses me off the most about the garlic mustard is - well, actually, there are so many things I can't decide.  For one thing, it's very sneaky and in its infant stage likes to hide behind the poison ivy and then spring out at you a year later (it's a biennial) as a towering, stinky plant-thing with unattractive little white flowers at the tippy-top that are going to seed all over the place and make lots more of it. According to the King County (WA) informational website on "Noxious Weeds" (Ob-noxious, I'd call it!):

  It is difficult to control once it has reached a site; it can cross-pollinate or self-pollinate, it has a high seed production rate, it out competes native vegetation and it can establish in a relatively stable forest understory. It is not eaten by local wildlife or insects.  It can grow in dense shade or sunny sites. The fact that it is self fertile means that one plant can occupy a site and produce a seed bank. Plant stands can produce more than 62,000 seeds per square meter to quickly out compete local flora, changing the structure of plant communities on the forest floor. Garlic mustard is also allelopathic, producing chemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants and mychorrizal fungi needed for healthy tree growth and tree seedling survival.

Got that? One plant can have 62,000 babies all by itself - no co-parent needed - plus, it's not fussy about sun, shade, or swamp; plus, it crowds out and deliberately poisons the native plants that were happily minding their own business before this interloper came along to behave like a crew of hipsters swarming through Williamsburg.  On top of which - heu, miserere mei! - the deer won't eat it, having too much common sense and being far too busy snapping up the native plants that the garlic mustard hasn't strangled.

So I have become a one-woman army on an Anti Garlic Mustard Crusade.  Every morning when I walk the dog, I fill up two big black plastic bags with the Noxious Weed from along the roadside.  It is a losing battle I am fighting, and I know it.  In garlic mustard, I may finally have found the one thing stubborner than myself. But I shall press on, muttering to myself with savage exultation as I thrust the dangling S-shaped roots into the bag, "Ha! That's the end of your propagating ways, you nasty trull!"

Welcome, Sweet Springtime!

As it turns out, springtime keeps you busy once you live in a house instead of an apartment.

Last year at this time, I was paying flying visits to our newly-acquired property, which was then in the hands of the contractors.  There was an overflowing dumpster in the driveway. Next to it was an assortment of broken-down crap the prior owners had discarded in their mad flight from winter snows and dunning notices.  Did I happen to mention that they left owing the heating oil company nearly $2,000?  There was an enormous TV with a kicked-in screen, a broken-down five-drawer file cabinet, quite a lot of cheap Christmas outdoor decoration with frazzled ends and burnt-out bulbs, and a phenomenally ugly waterlogged wagon-wheel chandelier that would have fit right into the saloon scene of Destry Rides Again.  In short, it looked like a tchotchke-mad branch of the Joad clan had recently left in something of a hurry.

The grounds themselves were in a similar state of pristine neglect.  A cursory trip around the perimeter with some heavy-duty Hefty bags and a thick pair of gloves turned up a bountiful cache of discarded vodka bottles, beer cans (somebody was partial to Bud Lite), lots of broken glass (the perfect thing to insure spending large sums - originally earmarked for cleaning out the neglected gutters - at the vet's after you move in with a dog who likes to chase squirrels through the underbrush), half a crack pipe, a syringe (I, of course, am making no speculations as to the provenance of these artifacts, and they may well have been here since Colonial days) and, most curious of all, the Graveyard of Discarded Tools.  These were not small implements like hammers and screwdrivers.  Somewhere, somehow, somebody had tired of at least 30 assorted pickaxes, shovels, wrenches, spanners, lengths of rusty chain, and a lot of other serious construction equipment type stuff I don't even know the name of and had dumped them into the underbrush next to the driveway and kicked a bit of dirt over them.  After briefly toying with the idea of taking them over to where the new Tappan Zee Bridge is under construction and seeing whether anybody could use them, I reluctantly decided they were too rusty and persuaded our longsuffering private sanitation engineer Stacey to take them away.  (Private road = Pay somebody to come take away your garbage twice a week.  In the beginning, we were getting more than what we paid for. A lot more. Stacey was a peach about it, I have to say, although he did some eye-rolling after we left the pull-chain toilet on the stump for his disgruntled attention.)

By the time I'd cleared out all the garbage, it was winter and all I wanted to do was hibernate. I did manage to plant 100 daffodil bulbs before the ground froze and I collapsed, and to my amazement and delight, most of them seem to have come up. (I haven't counted, but they're in all the right places and look very pretty and bloomy and Spring-like.)

March brought wind. Lots of wind.  We would lie drowsily in bed hearing the gale moaning through the trees and sleepily murmur that one of these days we should probably do something about cutting down all those dead branches on all those neglected trees before something happened.

Then, of course, something happened. One-half of one of those dead trees fell down, smack-dab across the roof of the Honda CRV.  Bye-bye, Honda CRV.

Fortunately, nobody was in it or near it.  Fortunately, we had insurance.  Fortunately, the book value of the Honda covered not only a replacement car (we now have a used Accura, and I am still figuring out how things like the windshield wipers and the CD player work) but some of the cost of belatedly hiring the Tree Guy to take down the most egregious threats to life, home and automobiles.  The three hulking dead trees all the way at the rear of the property still loom tall and proud, and I hope they won't fall on me while I am absentmindedly wandering around near the stream some day, but at least they're not hanging over our roof.

After the threat of Heavily Ironic Death By Killer Tree During Loving Attempts to Minister to Mother Earth had been more or less resolved and a ton of previously impassable wood had been cleared away, I was finally able to see what was going on alongside the driveway, drag out more bags of rubbish, and get down to the seemingly endless task of raking away thirty years' worth of sodden dead leaves and dumping them into the woods. My bisters are healing nicely; thank you for asking.

So finally I'm at the fun part, which is, of course, the part where I visit plant nurseries, load up my cart with jewel-toned magnificence in bloom and then put back more than half of it after remembering that we have way too much shade for most of these plants to thrive in, and anyway the deer think everything is salad.

I also bought a big bag of manure. I never thought I'd be paying for cow shit, but it seems you're never safe from being surprised until you're dead.  Did you know there's sales tax on cow shit?

Last week my local library celebrated Arbor Day by handing out red maple saplings to residents with library cards. Mine is presently  about a foot tall and living in a large planter tub the Joads abandoned in their flight; it will eventually be planted in the ground and go leaping towards its full growth (60'-80' tall with a 60' canopy) after I get the dead trees by the stream taken down.

The reward, of course, is that every morning I wake up and something new and beautiful is now in place of what was formerly slovenliness and rubbish.  The former homeowners, at some stage of the game, must have had good intentions and some sense of garden design, for all sorts of nice little surprises are emerging from beneath years and years of disrepair. Thanks to their decades of failure to do any raking, I have some of the finest topsoil you've ever set eyes on - rich, dark and loamy. The wildflowers are popping their little heads out of the ground with happy cries of, "Look, Mama! We can see the sky!"  We have sweet, pale purple violets, bright yellow trefoil (or, as I prefer to call it, butter-and-eggs), two charming Japanese red maples beginning to unfurl the fans of their frilly leaves, and a lot of vivid-hued  flowering ground cover that was clearly once planted on purpose before sloth and Smirnoff took over.The forsythia is in full riotous bloom, the robins are fat, saucy and perfectly delighted that somebody has made it so much easier to get at the worms than it used to be, and if the large, redheaded woodpecker doesn't stop jackhammering at the slat of our deck that apparently has some sort of delectable grubs in it, I am eventually going to have to Do Something besides look at him through my field glasses and marvel at the fact that there's a woodpecker, a real, live woodpecker, eating up my deck.

Welcome, sweet Springtime!

(Literacy) Volunteers of America

If you're my age, Gentle Reader, you saw the blog title and instantly flashed on Jefferson Airplane cover art and people in funny hats saluting ironically.  Just wanted to get that off my mind.

But this is not actually going to be a piece about members of dinosaur bands wearing funny hats and saluting ironically.  At least, I don't think it is - I never know where my blog is going to take me, and sometimes it's like Betsy Trotwood's dear friend Mr. Dick and  King Charles' head in David Copperfield - no matter what poor Mr. Dick sets out to talk about, up pops King Charles' head and there he is, at it again, talking about decapitated Stuart monarchs.  I'll do my best, though.

My point - and I did have one - was going to be that I am now halfway through my training as a volunteer in Rockland County's Literacy Solutions program, and I am surprised by how enjoyable I am finding the process. So let me get back to that.

The training is done in six three-hour sessions taking place at the library.  There are roughly 20 aspiring volunteers, many of them retired teachers.  The three ladies leading the sessions have been working within the program for a very long time, and they are dynamic, enthusiastic, and well-prepared for every class.  Excellent role models, in short.  There is also a backlogged waiting list of almost 60 aspiring students waiting to be paired off with a tutor.  20 volunteers. 60 potential students. Even I can do the math.  There is a distinct need for this service.

A confession. . . Yes, another one. (Don't tell me you are weary of my confessions?  We haven't even gotten to the spicy ones yet.) Some years ago I thought I would get an advanced degree in education and look for a job as an English teacher.  I lasted exactly two days in the program before withdrawing in confusion and haste.  Dear Gentle Readers Who Are Teachers - I don't know how you did it.  How on earth did you choke down all those never-ending mouthfuls of Dead Sea fruit known as Educational Theory?  Especially in the despairing knowledge that the Powers That Be were planning to change it all up on you anyway in a few years, tell you nothing you'd learned was relevant any longer, and sporadically present you a nice fresh plate of Dead Sea fruit to consume in the lofty name of Professional Development (meaning that you'd have to go to school and sit in the classroom listening to somebody drone on about adolescent psychology while all your students took the day off.)

Now, it will be said, and with some justice, that I did not give the education program a fair shake, and that some of the classes would undoubtedly have proved interesting and inspirational, which is probably so.  No matter.  I have found my niche in the literacy volunteer training, which provides pithy advice on what to tell a student who wants to go out drinking with you after class, ("No, thanks") down and dirty tips on how to inculcate the use of the definite article in those students whose native tongue does not have definite articles, and which, above all, urges me to make the lessons fun.

Fun, let me tell you, was sadly lacking in the postgraduate education classroom.

And that, to me, is a problem, at whatever level you are planning to teach.  Because if you can't get your students excited about learning... if you can't figure out a way to engage them, to make them sit up a little straighter, to make their eyes sparkle as they make a connection they can't wait to share with you - then chances are that everybody - teacher and pupil - is going to go home thinking, "I don't wanna do this anymore."

Now, I am not necessarily planning to use this particular illustration of the importance of proper capitalization with my literacy students (at least, not until they are very advanced, and then only when we go out drinking after class . . . ahem! - which, as you know, we are not going to do.)  But here is a sample of the dynamic lesson taught to us today by the Literacy Ladies:

Correct capitalization is extremely important.  It can make the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse.

It's like I said. . . Lessons should be fun.

The House Elves Cook a Meal

It is always a dilemma whether or not to disclose that one has performed a Random Act of Kindness, because in doing so one risks venturing into the murky shoals of the Humble Brag.  Having made this disclaimer, I am going to talk about something I did yesterday that gave me enormous satisfaction and that I plan to do again for the very selfish reason that it made me feel so good to do it.

I was exchanging emails with a close friend with whom I have, in the past, joyfully collaborated on some writing projects.  My friend lives near me and has a full-time job in the Bronx and two children under the age of five.  While she dearly loves creating anything related to the arts, she is presently paying off a mortgage and raising two small children.  So, like many other people in these hard times, she must often put her artistic talents on the shelf because there are only so many hours to the day.  Here is her description of A Day In the Life:

My basic day is get up at 4:30 a.m., shower, dress, get things for me & the kids, then help my husband get the boys dressed & into car and we all have to be out by 5:45 a.m.! I work, get off at 3:30 p.m. if I don't get stuck with mandatory overtime, fight traffic to the babysitter's & then the kids go crazy that I am there. It takes about 30 minutes to get out of there and I actually feel bad not chatting w/ the sitter but I try and avoid packed rush hour traffic - which is impossible, because it's 4 pm at that point. I leave by 4:15 and get home by 5 (if I'm lucky) and heavens forbid I don't have the travel DVD player or the baby will scream and throw his bottle from boredom. 

If the kids fall asleep in the car, which is often, then I can forget them going to sleep for the night before 10pm. I get home; at least one of them wakes up; and here go the 3 trips back and forth between the car and the house to get everyone and everything out. Happy to have a driveway!

Then it's food time, sometimes unhealthy leftovers. Husband finally gets home by 6:15 - he gets off at 4:45, but traffic turns the 30 minute trip into an hour and a half!!!

By 9:00 I'm exhausted, but I usually can't go to bed before 10:00 because the kids are wired.

Sleep 4-5 hours, then get up and do it all over again. 

This is a brutal way to live.  I can't tell you how much I admire and honor the many, many unsung heroes and heroines of these times who are soldiering through the exhausting grind that being a responsible human being trying to live decently and raise a family has become. Yes - I know - many people have it even worse than the above situation.  But that doesn't mean this situation is good - it means things are bad.

I myself have had little success in finding work relating to my field (English majors are not, as it turns out, highly sought after to run Fortune 500 companies - who knew?) so I free-lance as an editor, do some SAT tutoring, help high school students with college application essays, etc.  In other words, I am blessed with a flexible schedule and a husband who has a nine-to-five job that produces enough income for us to live on.  I'm incredibly lucky, and I know it.

So here's what I did after I read my friend's email.  I thought to myself, "What is the one thing that is most lacking in her life right now?" And the answer, obviously, was, "Time."  Time to enjoy relaxing with her family after a long day of work.  Time to enjoy the luxury of a home-cooked meal that takes longer than five minutes to throw together.  Time to come home and not have to play catch-up with all the stuff that piled up while she was out.  And I came up with a plan.  And, after a bit of incredulity and resistance on her part, I prevailed upon my friend to let me  put my plan into effect.

At 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I texted my friend to make sure she was on her way home.  I then drove over to her house with a great big beautiful lasagna that my husband the chef had made.  She knew all about the lasagna, and had given me the passcode to her garage door opener and told me how to turn on the oven.  Although she'd initially had reservations and demurred about not wanting to put me to any trouble, she  admitted that she was very glad to be looking forward to arriving home to a dinner already underway that she would not have to think about making.  ("You have to let me pay you back for the groceries!" she kept insisting.)

But I had a few other surprises up my sleeve that she did not know about, and that was part of the fun.

I parked on the street, happy that I'd thought to throw our snow shovel into the back of the car, because the driveway was completely covered in 4 inches of fresh snow.  As I shovelled it clear, I thought about how I would feel if I had to come home to an uncleared driveway with two cranky kids in the car and the prospect of making dinner still ahead of me.  I would probably take one look and burst into tears.  Clearing off the driveway was a pleasure, not a chore.  It made me so happy to think that I could smooth my friend's way toward at least one hassle-free evening.

Driveway cleared, I pulled in and unloaded the big hamper-on-wheels that we use when we're transporting large amounts of food.  I let myself in, got everything into the kitchen, started preheating the oven, and went to work.

To begin with, the second lasagna - the one for the freezer.  There are always too many noodles in the box for just one lasagna, so we'd decided to make a second and freeze it.  Into the freezer it went.

I put the cut-up Romaine lettuce and the thick, eggy Caesar dressing my husband had made into the fridge, along with a small container of grated Romano cheese I'd shared out from our own larger container at home.  Nothing is as aggravating as having a wonderful pasta dinner in front of you, wanting to put a little grated cheese on top and being unable to catch your server's eye at the restaurant, right?

Next to the salad fixings I placed an aeresol can of whipped cream. For the lasagna?  No - for the gingerbread!  M.F.K. Fisher's delectable "Edith's Gingerbread" has been a cherished standard in our family since the first time I doubtfully tried out the recipe.  Whip baking soda into molasses "until light and fluffy"?  Was M.F.K. Fisher kidding?  As it turns out, she was not - the molasses quickly turns a beautiful, creamy taffy-brown hue and doubles in size when you follow her instructions.  The result is a ginger bread that is light and fluffy, yet moist and with a tender crumb.  The spices are assertive, not aggressive, and, as Fisher remarks, the gingerbread nearly always gets gobbled up before it can even cool off, which is a pity because it is so good when it's cold.

I turned the gingerbread out of the baking pan onto a pretty plate from the cupboard and put it on the kitchen counter to save it from immediate attack by the kids - or at least, to give my friend a fighting chance to get to it first.  My friend and her husband had bought a fixer-upper house and planned the renovations themselves, and it turned out beautifully.  I admired the gorgeous granite countertops for the umpteenth time.  Behind me, the stainless-steel oven chimed out its little tune - the oven was pre-heated, the lasagna could go in!

I placed the lasagna on a cookie sheet - no need to have cheesy, tomato-y messes bubbling over for my friend to clean off the oven at midnight.  I popped it in the oven, shot her a text - "Lasagna in at 5 p.m., take out at 6, let rest 10 minutes before you eat it."  Then I turned back to the kitchen counter and unfurled half a bunch of bright yellow chrysanthemums I'd picked up at the grocery store when I'd shopped for the ingredients.  They are generous with the flowers at my supermarket, and for five dollars I'd gotten a large bunch of cheery mums that amply brightened up not only her kitchen, but mine as well!  $2.50 apiece to make two women happy certainly seemed like a bargain.

I put the flowers in a vase and propped a little handwritten menu up against them.  It all looked very pretty - the dark brown fragrant richness of the gingerbread, the golden sunshine of the flowers, the Carte du Jour in my nicest script, the shining countertops and gleaming appliances. My friend may have no time to call her own, but she is one fastitious housekeeper. I don't know how she manages it.

I finished by setting the table,  Before I left, I texted my friend again to make sure she'd be home in time to pull the lasagna out of the oven at 6:00.  Of course, she was stuck in traffic.  Of course, that was fine; I turned the oven down and texted back that the food would be ready at 6:30.  I locked up the house, hopped in my car, and went home.

At 6:45, I got the first text.

Just got home!!! Wow UR too much & U shovelled the snow! Holy shit, along w/ cake & flowers I just can't believe it what a treat!

From then on the texts came in a steady stream - the kids were ecstatic, the house smelled fantastic, her  husband, who is of Italian descent and incredibly picky about pasta, was reaching for thirds, and so on - until I finally texted back that she should stop texting already and eat her dinner before it got cold!

I cannot begin to tell you how much fun this was for all concerned.  We all felt absolutely great. There is nothing quite as gratifying as pulling off a nice surprise for somebody you love very much.  My husband, of course, enjoyed the compliments to his cooking.  My friends got a bit of pampering after a long day of hard work, nasty traffic, and horrible weather that made the commute even worse than usual.  The kids were happy because we'd deliberately chosen a meal that was kid-friendly, and because there was dessert. And, of course, because Mom and Dad were a little less stressed and exhausted than they could have been.

The best way to keep what you have is to give it away.

The Food Stamp Foodie: A Sample Recipe

My husband can cook anything.  I mean anything.  

I used to cook before we got together, but now I don't bother.  If you lived with Picasso, would you be saying, "Pablo, why don't you let me paint the pictures once in awhile?"

What I can do, that my husband has absolutely no facility for, is write.  So several years ago, I started copying out his recipes as he chopped, braised, explained, and created.   Because a lot of what he comes up with is not in any recipe books - he just riffs.  It's like watching a one-man jam band.

The down side is that he'll cook something fantastic, and I will fall in love with it and want to eat nothing but that dish each and every night for the rest of my life, but by that time he'll have forgotten what he did when he came up with it, or be off to the next culinary adventure.  This is the other reason I started writing things down - so I can say, "It's been a really long time since you made that dish with the glass noodles and the mushrooms and peppers and tofu and sesame oil, and when are you making that again?" To which the invariable response is, "Oh - sure, I can make that. Why didn't you tell me you liked it? Uhhh...tell me what was in it again."  So now I can go to the laptop, and I can tell him what was in it again.

We also decided to set ourselves a challenge.  We aimed at coming up with a series of dishes made with healthy ingredients that would feed a family of four on a very restricted budget.  We called the resultant collection "The Food Stamp Foodie."

Writing out the recipes was a bit of a conundrum, because my husband never measures anything.  I had to convince him rather forcefully that "a nice glug of," "a handful or two," and "whatever you've got in the fridge" is not going to be helpful to anybody who is trying to cook the dish he is attempting to describe.  I did my best and was often royally chewed out for cutting off the flow of the Creative Chef Process in midstream.  (You are welcome, and yes, there is a Kickstarter campaign to cover my hospital bills.)

In recent years I became a vegetarian, which has ruffled my husband not at all, because he's perfectly happy to cook two different dinners and put them out at the same time, since he still eats meat, so we have both vegetarian and non-vegetarian recipes.  Today being a cold any yuckky day, I thought I would share one of his vegetarian creations with you.  It is one of my personal favorites.  If you make it, let me know what you think!


Texas Thai Hodgepodge

FIRST: make your

Vietnamese Coleslaw:

MIX
1 bag coleslaw
2 T fish sauce
3 T rice vinegar, mixed with 3 T sugar, microwaved till sugar dissolves
Salt, Pepper
REFRIGERATE and allow to marinate for at least 8 hours before serving.

NEXT: Make your

Texas Three-Bean Pate:

1  15 oz. can each of pinto beans, pink beans, black beans, drained (3 cans total)
4-5 T finely-diced sundried tomatoes
4 T finely diced red onion, sauteed in olive oil till translucent but not caramelized.
1 tsp Veggie Magic
1 tsp Frank's or other mild hot sauce, to taste
3-4 T olive oil.

Mash all above ingredients together until they form a smooth paste.  (If you are lucky enough to live near Zabar’s, you can simply buy their Texas three-bean pate.)

NOW make the

Texas Thai Curry:

1 large zucchini, diced into ½ inch cubes
1 medium eggplant, peeled & cubed
1 package extra-firm seasoned tofu, cubed
1 can coconut milk
1 box sliced mushrooms
1 bag raw coleslaw
2 tsp Thai green curry paste
1 tsp Adobo (spices -Goya section)
½ tsp Veggie Magic (Paul Prudhomme spice mix)
4 T olive oil (or a bit more if needed)

Method: Heat wok on high approx 1-2 minutes.  Add olive oil. After about 5 seconds, throw in green curry paste & stir with spatula to break up the paste; keep it moving.  Add all the vegetables: zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, coleslaw. Stir.  Sprinkle with Veggie Magic & Adobo.  Stir.  Cover; wait 3 minutes; uncover. Stir.  Once veggies have started to wilt, add coconut milk & 1 cup of the Three-Bean Pate (8 oz).  Keep stirring so that pate blends with coconut milk to make a sauce.  Allow to cook down for about 5 minutes, stirring, so nothing sticks or burns.  Add tofu; keep stirring.  Allow to cook 2-3 minutes, and serve.

At table, mix in: VIETNAMESE COLESLAW, which adds a delightful note of coolness, crunch & contrast.

Homesick

Homesick

For Corine Pettey

I thought I missed the theaters.  It turned out

That what I missed was seeing plays with you.

I thought I missed the restaurants, but dining out

was so much better when I ate with you.

I thought I missed museums. I forgot

Vermeers looked better when I gazed with you.

And now you’ve gone to your long home, and part of me

is homeless till the day I go there too.

Dormitory Dreamin'

Monday was one of the great days of my life.  Monday, we ferried my son to his dorm room and, after lugging his various "can't-live-without-its" up to the second floor, in obedience to his none-too-subtle-hints, expeditiously got back in our car and left him to plunge headlong into that eternal bacchanalia some of us fondly remember as College Life.

This wouldn't be a big deal for most parents in January.  But the fact is, due to a glitch in the system, my son's school apparently did not get our housing deposit for the Fall semester.  It was the end of August, and the work-study student handling phone calls from similarly disappointed and disgruntled freshmen who had expected to be living on campus and who now, two weeks before the start of classes, were being handed the news that the reason they hadn't gotten their room assignment was that - tee-hee, surprise! - they didn't have a room, laughed merrily and told us that so many people were in the same boat as we that my son was not even going to be added to the waiting list.

Fortunately, the house we moved into last June has a separate small downstairs apartment built into it. Quaintly known as a "mother-daughter apartment" the smaller apartment has everything except a stove. Apparently, if there's a stove, that kicks the house out of the mother-daughter tax bracket and into the two-family-home tax bracket, and since nobody here is looking to pay higher taxes, we got my son a hot plate and a microwave, told him to come upstairs if he felt inclined to roast a turkey, and called it a day.

It was not an ideal solution by any means, since we now live on the wrong side of the Hudson (i.e., the west side) and my son's SUNY is on the right side of the Hudson.  So every. fricking. day. he had to be driven to the Mall, to catch the bus, to transfer to the campus shuttle, and thereafter all too frequently to tender his apologies to the professor if rush hour traffic had slowed down bridge traffic and he missed the connection for the shuttle, which runs once every hour, and if you miss it you're shit outta luck - all of these jump-through-hoops shenanigans due to the fact that we live in the House That Jack Built.  And every afternoon I had to keep an eye on my cell phone for the text that would announce it was time to jam my feet into my boots and peel off for the Mall because he was on the homeward leg of the journey.  And I would get to the Mall, only to find another text that read, "Oops - take your time - got on the Local by mistake, haven't even hit the bridge yet."

Let me tell you - I am not a fan of malls. Home Depot got a lot more money than they should have, just because I was bored and you can always put up another towel rack if you think hard about where you haven't put a towel rack yet.

My son was a good sport about it, all things considered.  And I did my utmost (no, really - I did - don't listen to my husband!) to be a good sport about suddenly becoming a Suburban School Bus Mommy, which had certainly not been part of anybody's plan. Why didn't my son drive himself to school, you ask? Because we have only two family cars.  We moved from Manhattan, remember? What sane family in Manhattan has a car for each and every member of the same household?  I'll bet not even each of the de Blasio kids has a car - and I'm pretty sure Gracie Mansion has a garage.

So it was a glorious moment when we learned that my son had managed to get on-campus housing.  I had called and I had called and I had called, and I think that I basically tortured so many people in the housing office with my incessant pleas that they "take away my adult child and put him     somewhere," that they put him on the list just to shut me up and stop the phone calls.  The news that he was finally in was greeted with the same sort of jubilant dance-around-the-kitchen-table-hugging-everybody-in-sight-and-inarticulately-shrieking-variations-on-"Whoopee!" that most families reserve for "I just found out I got a full scholarship to Harvard!" or "That Lotto ticket I found on the sidewalk outside my ten-dollar-an-hour job at Gray's Papaya just paid off at twenty-five million tax-free dollars!"

So last Monday we packed everything into the Honda, trundled across the bridge, got to the room, unpacked it all, and found that the double room was so nice and so big (with even a private bathroom, which is good, because my kid is spoiled after years and years of having his own bathroom, and spent most of his years at summer camp bitching, "I don't want to take a shower with all these fucking PEOPLE!") that there was room for things like the XBox and the PS4 and a large bag of video games and a small fridge and the little TV from our Adirondack summer cottage that my son says he is never going back to for the rest of his life because there isn't any subway station nearby and quite a lot of other things that he found he suddenly needed. So of course we all got back in the car, trundled across the bridge in the other direction, unplugged everything in sight, stuffed it in the car, and off we went, poop-poop, only to find that my son's room mate was unloading his stuff, including a second coffee maker, and was contemplating going back to his home for the bass guitar and the amp, since it's such a nice big room and they have so much space and anyway, he had forgotten to bring any blankets.

As my son gave is the hairy eyeball and jerked his head towards the door in the classic "What's that, Lassie? Timmy's fallen in the well?" move that every parent knows means, "Hit the road, please, Mom, and stand not upon the order of your going" my husband and I made eye contact, nodded at one another, and telegraphed, "Let's split before they can dream up any other essential equipment for Life in a Dorm."  We slipped out the door, raced to our car, and fled.

I assume everything is fine, because so far we have not received any calls from my son, or, more importantly, from the authorities.

Saucer-Eyed in Babylon

I don't watch the Golden Globe Awards - as a matter of fact, I don't watch television. (You can scream and run away now, if you like.)

I'm not going to go into a long polemic about how it's a virtue not to watch TV.  The fact is, I got out of the habit because ten years ago we decided that Time Warner was charging rip-off prices in Manhatan and we stopped paying for it.  Recently after we moved to Rockland County we got basic TV thrown in as part of our telephone/Internet package, so we said, "great, why not?" and once it was all up and running I flipped channels for maybe fifteen minutes, decided that it wasn't very interesting, went upstairs and returned to my book, and that was that. As any of our Puritan forefathers will tell you, it's no virtue to abstain from doing something that doesn't appeal to you.

Resisting the cheesecake at Peter Luger's - now, for that you get points.

I do, however, like movies, and I go to them if the review sounds like it's not going to turn out to be an utter waste of time and of seven dollars. (Did I mention that the movies up here are cheaper?)  And I do read the Times online, so when Amy Adams won Best Actress in a Comedy, I had actually seen Big Eyes.  And it puzzled me very much indeed, having seen the movie, that Ms. Adams won as Best Actress in a Comedy, because it's a movie about a newly-divorced naif who marries slick con man/artist manqué Walter Keane, who starts passing her kitschy portraits of big-eyed kids of as his own work as soon as they start achieving inexplicable success. (I don't know why I just said that "kitsch sells" is inexplicable - this is, after all, America.)  As soon as Mrs. Keane pipes up that she doesn't find this very honest of him, Mr. Keane sets fire to the very nice house they bought with all those Big Eye big bucks.  The husband is played by Christoph Waltz, so the audience pretty much knows where it's going from the start... I guess Christopher Walken was unavailable.

So while it was fun to see San Francisco at the tail end of the Beat era (the extras are costumed like the Mad Magazine beatnik parody of My Fair Lady, and I kept waiting for somebody to start warbling "Wouldn't it be Kerouac?") and the courtroom scene where nasty Mr. Keane runs frantically from one side of the witness stand to the other as he ineptly represents himself (and here, I was irresistibly reminded of some of William Shatner's more bravura moments as Captain Kirk) was certainly good for a giggle, I wouldn't exactly call the movie a comedy.

I will, however, admit that when Terence Stamp, representing the haute and haughty Times art critic John Canaday (you remember John Canaday? No? The one who wrote the four volume boxed set The Lives of the Painters?  Not to mention The Artful Avocado?) reads aloud that Mrs. Keane has gone public with the information that it is she and she alone who has perpetrated the Big Eye paintings upon the American public, lowers his newspaper in disbelief, and demands, "Good God...Who would admit to that?" I guffawed aloud.

Sadly, nobody else in the theater seemed to get the joke.  I'll bet they all have Big Eyes hanging on their walls.

Feed the Birds!

A friend of mine recently mentioned in a group email that she had put out suet for the wild birds that frequent her backyard, even though she finds suet disgusting.

To this, another of my friends (a Harlem-reared transplant to Rockland County who, like myself, finds all the flora and fauna of country life a frequently enchanting, if sometimes bewildering, change from, "Ugh, a rat . . . Ugh, a water bug . . . Ugh, a rat with wings . . . Echh, there goes a             landlord . . ."  responded, "What's suet? I wanted to feed the birds in my back yard and figured I would just throw the food on the ground. I bought a bag of food for wild birds, have no idea if it's the right kind. Not a good idea? Let me know."

Now, this was something I did happen to know about because of my summers in the Adirondacks, and I responded to her query as follows:

If you throw the birdseed on the ground, the squirrels will grab it all, and they will frighten the birds off, too. Finding a squirrel-proof feeder is a challenge most of us who like to do the St. Francis of Assisi act have faced.  The first time you see what looks like a ratty grey boa hanging over your feeder, you think, "How cute! Gee, that squirrel is smart!" Then you inspect your feeder a couple of days later and you realize your expensive feeder looks like a teenager whose pack of condoms failed to come out of the vending machine has been whaling on it with a tire iron, and suddenly you don't think the squirrels are so cute and so smart anymore, you're thinking, "I wanna kill that greedy little m.f.!"  The idea is to somehow hang the feeder on a wire that is so thin and so long that that the squirrel can't climb down it, or leap onto it from a branch, or do any of those other annoying acrobatic tricks at which squirrels excel.  There are also feeders with things called "squirrel baffles" on them, but not all of them work.

Suet is rendered animal fat and it looks like Crisco.  The birds like it, for some reason.  The English make puddings out of it.  The birds and the English are weird.

This provoked a barrage of emails from the other ladies on our email list, all of us more or less in agreement that squirrels are a pain in the ass if you happen to like feeding birds, that nobody likes pigeons (that would be the above-mentioned "rats with wings"), and that the English are weird.

The subconscious being a strange and terrible place, all of this led to the moment after lunch when I was finally disentangling the lights from among the dessicated branches of the Christmas tree (snap! crackle! pop!) and found myself cheerily bellowing that song about the bag lady from Mary Poppins. I haven't thought of it since I was about six years old, but, to my horror, I find that when I sing it today I still make the same mistake I made when I was a tiny child and didn't know what an apostle was:

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds," that's what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies

All around the cathedral the saints and opossums
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can't see it, 
You know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares...

Actually, if there's an opossum looking down upon me, I'd just as soon have it be a smiling one.

Deconstructing the Tree

Happy New Year, possums!

No, wait - that's Dame Edna, not me.  In any event - it's 2015, so let's agree to make the best of it.

I am reluctantly getting it in gear and taking down all the festive holiday sparklies - reluctantly, for the twofold reasons of sloth and that fact the sparklies sort of cheer you up whenever you look at them (until it's around April, at which point you stop feeling cheerful every time you look at the dry, dry needles on and under the tree and start feeling badly about yourself for being a slovenly person who harbors unnecessary fire hazards in the living room.)

In point of fact, the tree is already what my Hamburg-born Dad would describe, when displeased with the quality of the luncheon meat, in his delightful Plattdeutscher idiom as "trocken wie 'n Katzen's Arsch" - an untranslatable and somewhat unprintable phrase that used to elicit shrieks of "Heinz! Sei doch nicht so ordinair!" (which I am more than happy to translate as meaning"Don't be so vulgar!") from my mother.  She, more gently bred, attained her maturity on a small farm in a tiny village north of Lübeck, where, it seems, the aridity of liverwurst somewhat past its prime was not described by comparing it with feline posteriors.  Naturally, I learned considerably more colloquial German from Papi than I did from Mutti, a circumstance that once led my paternal grandmother to burst into hysterical tears and a perfect torrent of remonstration and lament after I'd amiably advised her, in my very best Plattdeutsch, to open up a can of whup-ass on my brother, and, upon being questioned as to who on Earth had taught me such a nasty phrase, had jerked a thumb towards my progenitor and retorted, ungrammatically but truthfully, "Him."

Where was I?  Yes - the tree.

It is a large tree, and a beautiful tree.  It is covered with delicate glass tchotchkes, which I have been collecting ever since my son was born. Today happens to be his nineteenth birthday, so there you go - that's a lot of years, and there are lots and lots of little glass hummingbirds, ceramic dogs that we imagine vaguely resemble dogs we have owned in the past, and blown-glass globes that look like varicolored soap bubbles.

The fact that it's my son's birthday reminds me that the Christmas tree was instrumental in procuring his presence onto the planet in the first place.  The fact is - and I'm not proud of this - I had baby fever, but my then-husband (now my former husband) did not.  Well, these things happen, and a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do, so I flatly refused to have a Christmas tree in the house until we had a child to share the holiday with.  It was scummy emotional blackmail at its finest, and I'm not proud of it, as I say, but - Well, actually, that's a lie.  I'm very proud of it.  It was a brilliant move on my part, and it got me my kid.  Happy birthday, Caleb!  There are no depths to which I will not stoop for your sake!  (Several Gentle Readers are now shaking their heads and murmuring, "No wonder she's divorced.")

There have been several years (notably high school years) when my son was Too Cool to evince any interest in Christmas, other than to disdainfully rip open his packages, sigh, and return to his room with a general air of discontent and ennui.  These were trying years, dear Gentle Reader, and I wondered whether I should just say "To hell with it" and donate everything to the Franciscan Thrift Shop on 96th Street, rather than schlep it all up to Rockland County when we moved last June - particularly since the man to whom I am now married is Jewish and regards all Christmas-related bling with gently ironic head-shake and a sotto voce "Oy...goyishe kitsch."

But I once read in dear Judith Martin's Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children that, if one perseveres through the years of eye-rolling and contumely, the day will come when the festive season rolls around and you resignedly suggest omitting the items that once provoked the worst of the groaning, only to be met with cries of, "What?! We can't not have the Advent calendars with the little pieces of bad chocolate that taste like 95-year-old cardboard! That's my favorite part!"  And, Miss Manners goes on to assure her Gentle Readers, when that day comes, you will know that you have succeeded in Creating a Tradition.

So this was the year that my son, now a college freshman (and thus, by definition, so intrinsically cool that he no longer needs to prove that he is cool) moseyed into the living room (well after his stepfather and I had done all the grunt-work of getting the tree inside and up the stairs, pounding it onto the stand, and stringing the miles and miles of lights) as I was unpacking the boxes of ornaments, helped himself to one of his grandmother's special holiday cookies, and inquired nonchalantly, "Hey, Ma...setting up the tree? Why didn't you call me?"

Stunned, I stammered something about not wanting to bother him for so frivolous an activity as tree ornamentation while he was busy writing papers on such weighty subjects as Anachronism In the Depiction of the Ancient World in Modern Film.  To which act of maternal deference he replied, with an apparent sincerity that nearly sent me into a swoon under the tree, "Are you kidding?  I wouldn't miss it!"

We then spent a splendid 45 minutes unwrapping everything from swathings of tissue paper, commenting on when and where each article had been acquired, making the red-coated wooden soldier with "New Brunswick, Nova Scotia" inscribed on the back do jumping jacks by pulling on the string, debating the particular placement of each crystal ornament for its maximal sparkle potential against the lights, greeting the emergence of each favorite trinket with cries of, "Oh, I totally forgot we had this one!" and at last being presented by my son with the little red,white, and green bookworm in the striped stocking cap and the words, "This one is yours, Mom. Where do you want to put him?"

"Her, not him," I said, and hung the bookworm up next to the little needlepoint birdhouse with the real birdseed inside that a very dear relative-by-courtesy had once made for us.

At last we stood back, squinted at our work with a critical eye, and pronounced it good.

"We're finished!" I caroled to my husband, who was playing chess on his laptop and trying to ignore what was going on in the living room.

"Great, great," he replied, with a perfectly unconvincing semblance of enthusiasm and nary a glance away from the screen. "Looks amazing.  You guys wanna go out for Chinese?"

There are traditions and traditions.  Lo and behold - Miss Manners was right.  Christmas trees and Chinese take-out...holiday fusion at its best.