Ask a Silly Question...

Me to Younger Girleen:  We don't bite people!  Why did you bite (Elder Girleen) on the back?

Younger Girleen to Me:  Because I couldn't bite her on the front.

Revisiting Ownership

My life these days revolves around a few simple but important mathematical equations, the simplest and most important being this:  brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = blog entry.  Clearly one or the other has been missing the past few weeks but we're back on track this morning.  

Actually, the more honest reduction of the above equation might be this:  brisk walk with Younger Girleen + strong strong coffee (squared) = impractical flights of fancy, since on a 30 minute walk I was able to not only consider blog life but also imagine an alternate universe where I am the owner of a wonderfully quirky and hip coffee shop (all this being caused by walking past a vacant storefront) that not only serves the city's best coffee but also displays all my peeps' best art and crafts (to be knowledgeable enough to run it I will apprentice at my fav coffee shop, where I go to get my Large Special Friend; I'll hire artists as baristas through Craig's List) AND not only that, but in the same 15 minutes I can consider just how wonderfully purchase of the sixties-era aluminum tin-can Scotty Sportsman trailer listing on three tires  that I just walked past will change our lives.  

Not even heroin can get you to such places.

Now that you've had a glimpse of my overly-caffinated morning, I'll get back to matters at hand:

A couple of entries back, I made stab at parsing out a particular phrase, that phrase being one sent to me by email recently:  are you willing to own this effort?

At the time, I was interested in examining the way making such a request serves to distance the requestor from the requestee.  A little more thought led me to this:  asking if someone will "own" an "effort" rather than asking "could you help" ALSO makes it awfully easy for the requestee (ie, in this case, me) to say "hhh?  who, me?" and shirk any responsibility as well.  

It's sorta like Spanish grammer, in that rather than saying "I dropped the vase," you say "The vase dropped itself".  Efforts may be owned or not owned, but none of it has a damn thing to do with me.  

Ownership.   There's a video circulating these days  that makes it awfully clear just how unsustainable our consumer culture has become. The video's primarily discussing actual material stuff, but it includes a quote made soon after WWII by retailing analyst Victor Lebow that is now seared on my brain:  

Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.  We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate. 

Any one who has a kid is pretty aware of the ways in which the language of the marketplace has come to pervade our children's educational experience.  

Or maybe we aren't consciously aware of that.  But maybe they're all links in an insidious chain:  the fundraising auctions, the requests to "own" efforts, communications committees, corporate sponsorship, PR... all of these address us as consumers:  any time and money we might give an institution is cloaked in a consumeristic experience; rather than helping out, by owning an effort, volunteering becomes something I can choose (or not) to possess.  

The saddest thing is that this is a chain we've thoughtlessly wrapped around ourselves. And our children, those little beings we would lay down our lives to protect.    

Snippets

Yes, I've been a lame blogista the past few weeks.  Sometimes life gets in the way. Held a tamalada (tamale-making party) a few weeks ago (causing me to be more intimate with pig than I've ever been before:  I'm here to tell you you really don't want to eat tamales more than one or twice a year); then Elder Girleen and I squandered The Husband's last frequent flyer points with a whirlwind wonderful weekend visiting friends in The Big Apple.    

So, per the New Yorker, we've already established that diaries are full of dross; blogs, blather. What do you call it when you simply recount your life?  David Sedaris and Jerry Seinfeld discovered this long ago, but if nothing else, blogging has made me realize that  riffs about nothing may be inherently more comedic than ... well, life.  

This may be why the Wry School of Parenthood Writing is so popular and pervasive in the blog world.  The absurd is funny.  The day-to-day is just ... the day-to-day. 

In the homestretch to Christmas, though, I've got nothing going on but the day-to-day.  

And really, now that I think about it, what a jaded, crazy world we live in that I would breathe the words day-to-day and trip to New York in the same few paragraphs.  And since this will float around attached to my name for eternity, let me set the record straight:  we don't actually jaunt off to Manhattan on a regular basis.  

Back in the dark ages B.C. (Before Children), my mother, fretting about my advancing age and seeming diffidence about having offspring, would say Oh, but you get to experience childhood all over again!  (This wasn't her only persuasive argument by any means; she was also fond of saying but I want to be a grandmother!).  At the time, because I had no experience of childhood but a child's I was unmoved.  The thing I remembered most about my childhood was my painful overwhelming shyness.  No way did I want to experience that again.

The lovely, scrumptious center of the candy-coated experience that was our trip to NY was a matinee showing of Mary Poppins, not just Elder Girleen's first experience of Broadway but mine as well.  This tells you just how much the world has changed:  she is five, I'm 10 days away from 43.   

At the end of the performance, when the actress that plays Mary Poppins soars up and over the audience on wires, her umbrella unfurled, I glanced over at Elder Girleen.  She was clapping wildly and her eyes shone like stars.  In fact, veering into sentimental territory, you could practically see her soul shining out through her eyes.  She was completely and utterly happy.

Oh, I realized, so that was what my mother meant.  It's not just that you get to re-experience childhood when you have children, it's that occasionally you get to re-experience childhood within the context of your battle-hardened adult life.  

And that might be the most magical thing I've ever experienced.  

Caught in the Capitalist Matrix Once Again

A while back I vowed to self-censure as far as writing about certain parental groups with which I am emmeshed goes, and where I couldn't self-censure, having already shot off my mouth, I would redact, but yesterday I received an email which included this request:   "Also, would you be willing to own this effort?" and if I can't dissect that language here, where can I dissect it?  

My kinder side won't allow me to divulge the particulars of what exactly I'm being asked to own, and what owning of it might mean, but bear in mind that this discussion takes place on the periphery of the "educational experience" of children who are mostly too young to know whether they are being taught the ABCs in English or in Swahili.  Also that agreeing to own anything at this place will mostly just put me in a world of pain and add at least 250 emails to my inbox... all before Christmas.    

Asking me if I would own this effort is clearly a ... veiled?  coded?  benign? more polite? ... way of saying the much clearer "would you do this for me?"  

So... why not just ask me to do it?

Because asking me to do it outright would require agency on the requestor's part:  "would you do this for me?"   And the act of doing something for someone requires give-and-take, a favor asked and bestowed, a personal connection.  Talking about ownership removes the requestor from the process entirely, and absolves them of any responsibility regarding it.  

When I received this email, I had a brief Walter Mitty type moment when, more than anything, I wanted to respond:  As someone who once contemplated joining the socialist party, I'm not all that big on ownership....

Or, maybe a better response would be:  I would love to disown this effort.  

Yeah, Things Do Look Different...

This might be considered by some a throw-away post (I mean, you can't get any more navel-gazey than discussing the look of your OWN blog, can you), but yes, I've changed the layout.  

It wouldn't be worth mentioning except for the fact that the layouts have clearly gotten more and more blog-like as the months go by.  When I started, I wanted something that looked as much like print as possible (ie, a blog as if published by the New Yorker, maybe).  Well, now we've got four months under our belts and I've realized that the Blog Is Its Own Beast.  It shouldn't look like print because it has nothing to do with print.  It's a completely different animal.  

Besides, fiddling with templates is a great way to sit at the computer and pretend you're doing something productive.  

I know I've fallen down on my job here lately, but you know, I've got other stuff going on right now.  I've got to go out and buy stocking stuffers for my own stocking and then pretend to my children that Santa Claus put them there.  

So, is it Blather or is it Dross? (Another Rhetorical Question)

From a recent critical piece in The New Yorker:  

In a diary, the trivial and inconsequential — the "woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" pieces — are not trivial and inconsequential at all; they are defining features of the genre.  If it doesn't contain a lot of dross, it's not a diary.  It's something else — a journal, or a writer's notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).  

Interesting hair-splitting; but true, I suppose.  Funny how much more serious dross sounds than blather, though.

And Now Let Us All Contemplate...

Way back in the 70s, when eating whole wheat bread marked you for the commie pinko hippie you were, my parents embraced composting with the sort of energy you'd expect if composting created... gold... rather than, well... dirt. We were newly moved to the South, I was having a good old time starting first grade the year the elementary schools in our town were being desegregated (nothing like learning a song called "Glory, glory to old Georgia, the South will rise again!" and being laughed at because you say "you guys" to encode skepticism about the South into your bones) and my mother concluded that the way to turn approximately an acre of hard red clay into a flourishing garden was to amend it with compost. (38 years later, she turns out to have been right: patience is a virtue).

My parents had owned a house previous to buying the one that over the years became the family manse, but I'd been a baby, my brother hadn't hit the scene yet, and that house had had starter house scrawled all over it. This house, which they bought when my dad started his professorial career, was the real deal: solid, brick, front yard, back yard, lots of bedrooms, basement and attic, and even doors that sometimes swung open of their own accord.

Taking produce scraps out to the compost was a chore meted out throughout my childhood:  I remember doing it even as a slouching teenager, when I showed my distaste for the whole process by simply flinging scraps onto the top of the pile, rather than covering them with leaves (and then sneaking a cigarette in the backyard).

Given all this, it stands to reason that as soon as I hit thirty I became genetically incapable of throwing away apple cores — as soon as the Husband and I settled down in one place long enough we set up a Family Bin.  

And even the most skeptical have to agree that there's something seductive  about composting:  I may not be able to spin straw into gold, damn it, but I can turn garbage into dirt like nobody's business!

Elder Girl's school also composts, and recently she RECOILED IN HORROR when she saw me put orange peels into the compost bin.  

Citrus hurts the worms' stomachs!  she cried.  

Every morning I prepare grapefruit for the girleens and because of my upbringing, very fiber in my being shrinks from throwing those peels into the garbage can.  My hand hovers over the bowl for scraps for the compost.  But...those poor worms, their stomachs eaten away by acidic citrus!  I'm damned if I do or damned if I don't, which, now that I think about it, is an example of an either/or that seems to be becoming a uniquely 21st century dilemma.  

The trend in women's magazines this year seems to be the sort of article that bemoans the fact that the holidays are weighed down nearly to drowning point by consumeristic crap.  These articles cozy right up to advertisements for all manner of beautiful, luxurious and useless things.  Oh, yeah, I vow, reading these articles, this year we're going to simplify!  

Then, of course, I slam the magazines shut and head for Target.  

Because The Husband and I are the sorts of parents who want to do right by our children, at least one Sunday a month we drag our formerly agnostic selves to church, and this past one, the Simplification Message was delivered from the pulpit.  Yes, yes, I thought.  We'll metaphorically unplug the Christmas tree this year!

Then the sermon ended and we were reminded that the Cathedral Bookstore had books for sale in the Parish Hall and 10,000 Villages was displaying its wares in the library.  

This what it means to be liberal at the dawn of the 21st century:   continuously bombarded by philosophically irreconcilable messages. About EVERYTHING.  All the time.

Don't know about you, but I'm off to do some conflicted Christmas shopping.

The Turn of The Screw

Those who know me best know I have this thing about ghost stories. Not only do I love them pure and simply, so much so that in spite of all the navel-gazing I can engage in, I've never even bothered to examine why I might be so drawn to them, I love the sort of conversational down-time that leads people to reveal ghost stories to one another.

Luckily (or not, depending upon how you view things), I've had plenty of employment chock-full of the sort of heel-cooling that lends itself to the telling of ghost stories. Nothing like cleaning national park cabins in the rain to get two maids making beds in the mood for swapping ghost stories! Smoke breaks from waiting tables: also a good source. Ditto long aimless car trips taken in your twenties.

I've never heard a bad ghost story, because even the most rudimentary snippets of one carry so much cultural weight that you can pretty much fill in the blanks yourself. Even the worst storyteller can raise the hairs on the back of your neck with a few choice ghostly sentences.

Stay-at-home-momdom, it turns out, sometimes involves that same sort of downtime, particularly when one spends a lot of time pushing a stroller in the company of other moms. Taking walks for over five years, I've heard fascinating things (all to be kept private for the sake of the tellers) over the years.

Yesterday, while walking, I learned that someone who knows someone that I know is being troubled by ghosts. The family is newly moved into an aging grande dame of a Victorian house that when they purchased it was sadly in need of a face lift, which, threats of divorce and bankruptcy aside, they were thrilled to deliver.***

The house is now freshly-painted, wired for electronics, pristine, lovely.

But late at night, after the rest of the family has gone to sleep, the mother of the house has begun hearing what sounds like the rattle and turn of an ornate flourish of brass doorknob, the one attached to a particular closet door in the upstairs hallway. She tends to hear the noise most often when she's brushing her teeth. She rushes out of the bathroom and peers down the hallway: nothing but late night and sleeping house. Goes back into the bathroom to rinse and spit, and there it is again, that small insistent rattle.

The closet, the friend who knows the friend tells me, is the only interior door in the house that had a sturdy latch on it, placed at adult height.

What do you want to bet, the friend tells me as we walk along, that that was the Victorian time-out closet?

I'm too lazy to look it up, but wasn't it the presence of a child in a ghost story that Henry James considered the turn of the screw? Ghosts are all well and good but throw a kid into the mix: well, now you're cooking with gas!

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time sitting on the floor of the bathroom while Younger Girleen fumbles toward figuring out potty-training (this will come as no surprise to astute readers). I mean a lot of time. In fact, I spend more time sitting on the bathroom floor conversing with Younger Girleen while she sits on the potty than I probably do on anything else right now (this may be why I'm so concerned about effective use of my free time).

This afternoon we were having one of our periodic bathroom klatsches when Younger Girleen looked up.

Daddy's here! she said brightly.

Daddy's at work, I explained.

Then who's that man?

What man?

That man I hear talking?

Where is he talking?

In the back yard.

What is he saying? I pursued, curious.

This took a little thought on Younger Girleen's part. He's saying Mama, she said. He's saying Mama, mama, I want my mama.

God help me, I actually stood up and flicked back the curtain and peered out into the back yard.

Everybody wants their Mama, even ghosts in the backyard.

***Interestingly, the house is in the neighborhood that was also the location of the very best ghost story I ever heard, told around a campfire at Big Bend. I've concluded this particular neighborhood is Atlanta's ghostliest, but local readers should feel free to put in their votes...

Is it Art or is it China Painting?

When my maternal grandmother died in 1994, one of the things passed along to me was a sagging corrugated cardboard box. Within, nestled in yellowed wads of the San Antonio Express were at least twenty-five china plates, cups and saucers rimmed all with gold and painted with a sort of blowsy bloom unknown to botany. A cross between a rose and a peony — let's call it Late Victorian-Era Floral, and examples of it gather dust in every single antique store in the United States. I didn't know that then; all I knew was that the set of china had been painted by some vaguely-related female ancestor — a great great aunt, a cousin thrice-removed as is the wont of old southern families — who had been quite skilled with her brush.

How artistic! I thought, picturing some rebellious, bohemian artist type making do with what she could get in Mexia, Texas in 1902 (canvas and oils seeming unlikely).

Fast forward a few more years to the death of my paternal grandmother, and I'm bequeathed the twin of that self-same sagging cardboard box. Only this time the newspaper the china's wrapped in is the Dallas Times-Herald and the blossom is leggier; a cross between a columbine and a violet, maybe. Same level of execution (pretty darn good), same gold rimming the edges.

And so I learned about the fad of china-painting, the scrapbooking of the early 1900s. And once I knew about the kilns women bought, the boxes of blanks from Europe shipped by the boatload and the gatherings to paint them in Victorian parlors, I started seeing examples of the fad everywhere: practically every female friend I have has at least one piece done by some ancestor shoved to the back of their kitchen cabinet.

Is it Art or is it Craft?

Apparently I have very complicated, mixed feelings about these two states— in fact, you might even say that along with Bad Mommy Spectre and Bad Writer Spectre, Art and Craft tend to duke it out pretty often in my mind. Snobbery, cliches, elitism: I am embarrassed to say that I've fallen prey to all of them.

Interestingly enough, Art vs Craft wasn't much of a debate I had with myself pre-motherhood. Sitting down to write a short story was clearly engaging in the pursuit of art (let's set aside, for the moment, how pretentious that might sound). The fact that around the holidays I bought a bag of potatoes and made potato stamps and created my own Christmas cards while I watched TV was Craft, pure and simple. And what made it Craft? The fact that I could do it while watching TV? The fact that I hadn't gone to grad school in potato-printmaking but had in short story writing? That I wasn't very good at it? I didn't even care, I just did it.

Last year, during one of those life-periods when the family boat has a brand-spanking-new coat of glossy paint and is riding high and pretty in the water, I took a Collage and Assemblage Class at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta campus), and after years of putting any creative energy I had into words and text, I loved doing something visual. Was I good at it? No. Could I do it while watching TV? Yep. Clearly Craft, then.

The whole debate would be like wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin except that apparently I have set myself a fairly stringent criteria for any free time I might ever have. Novel-writing? High art. Or if not high art, at least a productive expenditure of time. This Blog? Collaging a canvas for a Christmas present or to adorn Elder Girleen's room? Craft, pure and simple.

Those poor Victorian matrons, I used to think. Sitting around painting china when they could have been striping canvases with manly bold strokes of oil. History has clearly seen them for the sad joke they that they were (or so I told myself).

Or has it?

The other day I ran into my favorite coffee shop (small, not bitter) for a latte. The baristas (so quick to offer me a Large Special Friend) clearly take their calling seriously: the cup handed across the counter to me was adorned with a lovely, leafy fern composed of striations in the foamy crema.

Art or Craft? They could probably do it while watching TV (if they had an espresso machine in their living rooms). Heck, they do it in thirty seconds while they work. So it's craft, right?

I dunno. It looks like art to me.

Just Put Me On the Cover of Bad Mommy Monthly (Repeat Once More, With Feeling)

Last night, Younger Girleen was troubled by a very particular sort of rash that made her a very unhappy camper. How do I know this? Because between 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. she sobbed out at intervals "Mommy, Daddy! My bauble hurts!"

First off, I suggest we ALL begin referring to our girly parts as "baubles" (If we are of that portion of society that possesses them). Authors of Mother-Blogs I've found myself reading occasionally wax anxious over what name they should teach their girl children for the the body parts that make them particularly girlish (fathers do not have this anxiety about their sons' body parts, and actually, now that I think about it, mothers probably don't either). But now, hooray— here's Younger Girleen, to save the day! In my book, bauble wins hands-down over "front bottom," a moniker a mom acquaintance actually once uttered in my presence. Without laughing.

(Even my parenthetical expressions have parentheses! This is a writerly talent on a par with being able to manage flashbacks within flashbacks, right?)

All this being said, nature abhors a vacuum, as we all know, and there's no vacuum like the brain of a mother who's lying in bed, every nerve tingling, waiting for the next cry of a child that she knows has not had done with crying for the night. Last night mine quickly became the perfect space for the Bad Mommy Spectre to insinuate herself into into.

O, Bad Mommy Spectre, my old friend, where've you been? I was missing you!

First things first, the Bad Mommy Spectre let me know in no uncertain terms that Younger Girleen most certainly had this particular rash because I had fallen down on the job. In fact, if I'd really been on top of things, she wouldn't even be in diapers at this point. Bad Mommy Spectre and I then moved on at a merry clip to revisit the conversation I'd had earlier in the day with Elder Girleen's teacher about the fact that seeing a picture taken of herself on a recent field trip with her eyes closed had forced Elder Girleen to have a complete and utter emotional breakdown for a portion of the school day.

Bad Mommy Spectre and I then hand-in-hand revisited the rest of my day (Bad Mommy Spectre shares some traits with the Ghost of Christmas Past from A Christmas Carol) and determined that the chaos of the dinner table, the kvetching, the refusal to let certain foods touch certain lips, the penchant for getting out of one's chair and making a complete circuit of the house before sitting back down are of course all due to my neglect of my duties.

We then dwelled upon the fact that Younger Girleen's best friend is moving in March (he's her best friend mainly because his mother is the mother I most often choose to hang out with, but still...) and because of my lack of attention to her social life, I have no idea who we will invite to her birthday party next May. If I were a good mother, I wouldn't be walking us over to X's house so I can have coffee with X's mother while Younger Girleen and X play, I would be forging friendships with the mothers of two-and-a-half-year-olds who won't be moving any time soon. Even if I don't like them!

Even recounting all this makes me tired. You get the picture, though.

Bad Mommy Spectre's best friend is Bad Writer Spectre. Having less material to work with these days, Bad Writer Spectre just shows up every so often to tell me I suck, and then wanders off for a smoke break.

Happy Thanksgiving: Another List

Younger Girleen, according to her teacher, is thankful for Mommy, Daddy, Sister and CAREBEARS.

Elder Girleen is thankful for her family and her friends.

And me?

The lovely blue glaze of the sky the past few weeks, especially when coupled with the brilliant yellow of the gingko leaves.

The pair of hawks taken up residence at the pinnacle of a neighborhood oak, and the fact that I have enough time in my day (at least a few times a week) to take Younger Girleen on a walk past them.

That I made it through the last school fundraising auction without spending over a thousand bucks on a mosaic table or a bauhaus-style playhouse (but o, how I wanted to!)

That we will be having pumpkin chiffon pie with candied pumpkin curls rather than a storebought pumpkin pie from Kroger (since I am making this, we may wish for that Kroger pie before it's all over).

That, since starting this blog, I put pen-to-paper at least a couple of times a week.

For friends and family.

And of course, god love them, for CAREBEARS.

Go, Frere

The past month or so, my day begins with the sound of a small hiccup of crying.

Poor Younger Girleen, it must be those molars!

About 5:30 in the morning, she abruptly and wordlessly mourns for a moment (the operative word is wordlessly, not silently: she whimpers). Then: Go Frere? Go Fair? No Fair! she grieves sorrowfully. Sleep is a river that carries her small boat along, and for a second there, we hit an eddy strong enough to wake her. Then, just like that, she subsides back into sleep.

Because I'm her mother, I, on the other hand, am up for the day. And because I'm her mother, I know exactly where she got that pronouncement (astute readers that you are, I know you know it too!)

Her elder sister. Who uses it like a teenager, and dear god, she's only five!

Yesterday, Younger Girleen and I saddled up to run errands while Elder Girleen was at school.

Where we going, Mommy?

Shortsighted and foolish woman that I am, I tell her the way I'd tell Friend J, sitting in the passenger seat beside me:

First, we're going to the coffee shop so Mama can run in and get a cup of Special Blend Coffee*** Then to the florist that has the show of paintings by a mom-turned-painter Mama heard about. Then to look for Grandmommy's birthday present!

Sounds like a blast to me.

Go Frere? Go Fair? NO FAIR! Younger Girleen pronounces.

You'll be happy to know I conceded the point and aborted the mission. After the coffee, of course; every mom's allowed her vice.

But oh, to be a younger sibling! Always toddling to keep up. Immersed at an unsuitable age at media aimed at her sister's generation (the options are pretty benign around here --- I'm talking SuperWhy? on PBS). Where's Sister? she says on rising. Where's Sister? she wonders before she slips into sleep at night. She's the mascot of her sister's kindergarten class. (Will she ever get big? a boy in the class asks.)

Yes, they torment each other, but oh, how they love each other! Mom and Dad are constants, but Sister: she's the pinch of salt that pulls the family dish together!

All of us with siblings, we must have been that way once.

And then we grew up.

That early bond, though: it's not a bad thing to think about on the eve of Thanksgiving, as the season when families are at their most dysfunctional gets underway.


*** Occasionally when I order my Special Blend Coffee, the barista says oh, yes, of course you can have a LARGE SPECIAL FRIEND.

Readling Lists

Astute readers have noticed, along with the typo that created a Readling List rather than a Reading List,* a few wild card books nestled amongst the lit fiction and anthologies a while back. Maisie Goes to the Library for one (not the tea-cosy mystery I wish it was sometimes); The Wild Trees for another.

I try not to look at my gradual slide into reading more and more nonfiction as a clue that I should no longer write FICTION (I daily parse out the universe for these kinds of signs, ie: I left academia, therefore I must not really want a literary career, I like to cook now more than I like working on a novel, therefore I should hang it all up, I find it easier to sit down and write this blog than write fiction, therefore I am a real loser, etc).

An excerpt from The Wild Trees appeared in The New Yorker a while back, and it was one of those crazy-long articles I can settle into with satisfaction, as comfortable as a toddler with a necessary favorite blanket. (A sidenote: the other day, The Husband asked me who I thought was the demographic for The New Yorker and I replied that I didn't know, but it certainly wasn't anybody around here. This may be one reason I blog, so I can talk to my heart's content about things I read in the New York Times or The New Yorker that elicit blank stares in my daily life.)

The Wild Trees is about the tallest redwoods in the U.S. and the botanists, sorta like the skate punks of the scientific world, who climb them. I hearby declare The Wild Trees my book of the month, because if nothing else, it renewed my deep appreciation for trees, an especially happy coincidence since this is the exact moment when the trees around here are shedding their leaves and tracing elegant chinoserie against the sky. Yesterday they swayed as the cold front approached, ships with masts and rigging headed for rough weather. Hold fast. Ease, swirl, reverse. Such a precise, polite minuet!

Reading The Wild Trees I began to remember trees I'd climbed as a child and realized what deep memories they might be, buried in my heartwood: a plum tree of greenish dappled space perfumed by the scent of sun-warmed ripe plums, a space made perilous by wasps, a place oddly adult-less, where we clambered and picked without regard for any rules. An elderly neighbor's deodara cedar, with limbs as straight as floors, weeping sap like jewels from the braille the woodpeckers inscribed on its trunk.

I'm sure we never asked permission to climb! I'm sure my mother never knew how high we went!

Gradually, since I metamorphosed into A Mother, I've become a agitator for, and steward of, various outdoor spaces: the outdoor classrooms at both Girleen's schools, the neglected city park down the street. And sometimes that expenditure of energy seems so unimportant, so suburban. If I was a serious person, I tell myself, I would be putting that energy elsewhere. There are wars being fought! Presidential candidates campaigning! (And of course, always the insectile hum in my brain: novels to be written).

All true. But even so, it somehow seems like it would be good for the world: if the Girleen's generation had the opportunity and the freedom to climb trees.

*Maybe a Readling List is like a fledgling reading list: the kernel that contains the idea of what you'd like to be reading.

State of the Union: November 16, 2007

The other day we were at the playground and another mom and I stood watching the Girleens run up a grassy incline and start dancing hand-in-hand. The leaves falling around them were such a lovely lick of flame and color — it was one of those idyllic childhood moments (except that when I say "ran" what I really mean is careened; and the fact that there were vodka bottles tossed into the hydrangeas behind them changes the image slightly).

Other Mom turned to me and said "It must be great to have two! They can entertain each other!"

There was a certain tinge of what might've been ... desperation ... in her voice and I realized I hadn't seen this particular Other Mom at the playground in a while. I also remembered that this is EXACTLY what I told myself when I was pregnant with Younger Girleen and spent a lot of time hugging the toilet while a three-year-old Older Girleen stood outside the bathroom door asking plaintively "What's Mommy DOING?"

I think I laughed and said something along the lines of "oh, yes, sometimes, it's great!" I refrained from saying: "Yep, pulling a sibling's hair, slamming doors to keep hair-pulling sibling out of bedroom, taunting, teasing and SCREAMING LIKE A TEA KETTLE are all fabulous entertainment."

All this is a roundabout way of saying that Younger Girleen has contracted a particularly virulent case of two-year-old angst. (And now that I think about it, maybe Elder Girleen has contracted the five-year-old version).

Maybe it's her molars coming in.

Over the past few weeks, we've gone from a sudden HATRED of wearing pull-ups (I know, I know, but on school days it's what the teacher wants) to a sudden conviction that any diapers that don't have Elmo printed on BOTH SIDES will scald us like boiling water, to an even stronger conviction that ANY diapers at all will scar us for life.

So yesterday, short-sighted Mom threw up her hands and left a buck naked Younger Girleen standing on the hooked rug designed by an illustrious ancestor at the turn of the century and went in the other room to get dressed herself, all while Younger Girleen shrieked like a tea kettle.

I'd gotten one article of clothing on when the shrieks changed. Now, in addition to wordless fury, I could make out the message: "Mommy, mommy, mommy. I peed on the floor!"

This, ladies and gentleman of the jury, is why I had a twitch in my left eye yesterday.

Sixteen Tons

Sixteen years of sending out submissions! Setting this figure down on (virtual) paper turns out to have been a very dangerous accounting to have engaged in.

Not because acknowledging how hard publication is will turn off the thousands of people with publishing power trolling the 'net for their next meal ticket the way Hollywood discovered starlets at Schwab's lunch counter back in the day. Not because admitting how hard publication can be cracks the head-to-toe veneer of positive spin the business of writing now requires from each and every writer — although by airing this bit of dirty laundry I probably have doomed myself to booklessness evermore.

Rather — it was dangerous more because only the foolhardy add up how many years they've spent on any avocation, and only the quixotic look at that final sum and think it's a good idea to keep on keeping on.

This past weekend, I thought off and on about that number. Sixteen years! In that amount of time you could create offspring almost old enough to vote. You could build a house from scratch. Using tinkertoys. Hell, in that amount of time Manifest Destiny populated the entire western half of the country, exterminating everything in its path.

Sixteen years! If you like, you can hum "Sixteen Tons" while you read the rest of this:

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store...

This past weekend I mulled this figure over. I added and subtracted (years since I wrote my first "book": 35. Years I could deduct through creative accounting and because of childrearing sabbatical: five?) until I came up with what momentarily seemed like a profound insight.

You know, I said to The Husband, it's a waste of time to ask myself whether or not I should hang it all up. When it's time to hang it all up, it'll just happen. People just don't keep doing things they don't get any satisfaction from.

This is what passes for profound thought in our house, where it's considered calm when we're eating a hastily-thrown-together Sunday lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and cherry tomatoes with two people under four feet tall, one of whom is busily shoving crusts of bread into a glass of milk teetering on the edge of the table, the other of whom is singing a Hannah Montana (who is she? I am getting close to despising her) song so violently she can hardly keep her rear end in her chair.

The Husband looked gravely at me. Katherine, he said. People keep doing things they don't get any satisfaction from ALL THE TIME.

Vice

Saturday morning, early. The slap of the Times hitting the walkway, a particularly bright star (probably a planet but I'm not going to fritter time figuring out which one it might be) charting a path from lower corner of arched sunporch window to upper. The family asleep and I am furtively, happily indulging in ...

Vice.

Vice. Such a lovely Victorian word, and who would think a middle-aged mom could even have one?

Once, I applied myself with an almost religious fervor to sitting on the back stoop of tinkertoy-like, uninsulated Austin rentals, cigarette in one hand, Big Gulp of Diet Coke on the ground beside my foot, and music, preferably melancholy, pulsing from the blown speakers I was too broke to have repaired.

I'm too overextended to give anything that same sort of focus these days, but I do like my coffee (and judging from the red-letter-day's worth of comments last time I talked about coffee, so does my small, much loved readership). That in and of itself probably can't constitute much of a vice... or if it is one, it's along the lines of the valedictorian of the senior class telling the school stoner oh, gee, I'm sure jonsing for a peanut butter sandwich! But mine has an additional facet. I have become addicted to... House Porn.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. All the flaws are photoshopped out. In fact, all the reality is airbrushed out. The photos of paint jobs and furniture arrangement are as glossy as a Bunny's lipgloss. Every house is beautiful and if you were to visit these actual houses you could walk through the rooms and have no clue you're walking through the same room depicted. They look that different.

Every time I take the Girleens to the library for their weekly dose of Maisie, Clarice Bean and the struggle to get mom to check out Hannah Montana dvds, I swing by the 700s shelf of the adult section and grab myself a few coffee table books. Sometimes I even grab ones I already checked out before. The content matters that little.

We are all about the fantasy around here.

Addiction, I have found, may in part be about yearning. And not to make light of real, serious addiction (this is my blog and I can be as shallow as I want!), when you parse it out, yearning can be such a hopeful, optimistic act.

I bring my stack of glossy coffee table House Porn home. I yearn; I feel a tantalizing itch. If only I ran out to Benjamin Moore right now, I too could have a bedroom painted a mouthwateringly serene shade called, unappetizingly, Smoked Trout. If only...

The main thing about these books, about this airbrushed vision of domestic life is that usually there are no people in it. No kids with noses that continuously beg Mom, pay attention! Wipe me! And wipe me now before I use my sleeve!. No mom wearing yoga paints and stained t-shirts. No bills, no dirty dishes... oh, you get the picture.

I know it's not real, so why do I still lust to attain it? I suppose that is what makes it a vice, rather than something I just like to read.

Party Oatmeal

A very graffiti'ed tunnel under the CMX freight railyard has linked my here and there since we moved to the 'hood. (Yeah, we're literally on the wrong side of the tracks). I drive it practically daily: to Younger Girleen's preschool, to the grocery store, to just about anywhere I have to go outside our neighborhood, and a few weeks ago, a particular piece of graffiti appeared to replace my previous fave on the concrete outside the tunnel, Please Save Us From Ourselves.

Party Animal is what the paint-dripping scrawl really says — but when I drive Younger Girleen to school and see it, I read Party Oatmeal instead.

Party Oatmeal seems like it might be a fairly good way to describe, not the middle-aged equivalent of being a Party Animal, but some measure of geologic time. We've got B.C., A.D., the Cretaceous Era... and we've also got Party Oatmeal, which, boiled down to its essence, is that period of time when most of the humans you spend time with are under the age of six. Sometimes fun, sometimes a quagmire. Deeply domestic. What could it be, other than Party Oatmeal?

The Business of Writing

Back in the days when I was employed as an Administrative Assistant, a career "move"* that drove to me apply to grad school in creative writing, I had no idea how well what seemed like an OCD-level attention to detail would serve me in later life. (Nothing like being reminded to use color-coordinated thumb tacks on the bulletin board that hangs behind your desk to make you re-evaluate what you're doing with your life.)

Not only has my "administrative" bent come in handy for times when I prove I'm out of my mind by doing things like serving on preschool Boards, it's one of the few things that's allowed me to keep my sanity for SIXTEEN YEARS of submitting short fiction.

Sixteen years! If the simplest definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results, I clearly should be institutionalized.

On such administration did I squander my morning. But in the process, I uncovered this site devoted to the business side of the submission process.

It's a dirty job but somebody's gotta do it.

And for anybody who's interested, apparently there's a genre we've all been reading called Brooklyn Books of Wonder. And a backlash against it as well.

It sucks to be so behind the cultural times.




*It seemed better than managing the Bennetton's at the mall.

Down at the Drive-In

Last night was Movie Night for Elder Girleen's school at the drive-in, so we made a nest of pillows and hello kitty sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon and headed out to see Bee Movie.

Well, ladies of the evening may use the play structure at our neighborhood park as a great place to ply their trade; the biggest hill around here might actually be the old landfill; but a straight shot down the thoroughfare leads you past Nail World, Dollar Land, Super Valu and the Foxxxy Lady straight to... the drive-in, and I wouldn't live anywhere else in the city (except maybe a huge Victorian manse complete with cupola on the other side of I-20).

As luck would have it, we ended up positioning the station wagon RIGHT NEXT to Elder Girleen's two favorite kindergarten guys. She almost exploded. Groups of kids ran recklessly from car to car, possessed by the anarchy that takes over when the adults of your world are otherwise occupied (in our case by figuring out how to extinguish the light in the back of the station wagon for primo movie watching).

The cold front blew in, we settled in: and I give the experience an A +. About the movie, though...

Ratatouille was at least about a rat expressing his creativity through cooking. Bee Movie, on the other hand, is about a LAWSUIT. The hive is sorta like the city in Metropolis but not in an ironic or interesting way, the whole honey making project isn't very ... scientific and the best thing I can say about it is that it made me realize how LUCKY we are that it's not the 90s anymore, when we all thought Jerry was the funniest thing since sliced bread.

Readling Lists

What's Currently on My Bedside Table:

Rise and shine : a novel
Quindlen, Anna.

The wild trees : a story of passion and daring
Preston, Richard, 1954-

Right livelihoods : three novellas
Moody, Rick.

Maisy goes to the library
Cousins, Lucy.

The uses of enchantment : a novel
Julavits, Heidi.

The encyclopedia of ghosts and spirits
Guiley, Rosemary.

A child's garden : enchanting outdoor spaces for children and parents
Dannenmaier, Molly

The collector
Fowles, John, 1926-

Moby Dick

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Russell, Karen

Will any of these get read? Only the Shadow knows.

State of the Union: November 5, 2007

From the moment the plane bringing us back from our friends' wedding last Sunday hit the Atlanta tarmac, the name of the game was civic responsibility, or more specifically, educational volunteering. And before I go any further I just have to say one thing: I don't know how moms who work 40-70 hours in addition to their Mom Job do it. They must possess Kevlar vests or emotional force fields to protect them from feeling obligated to step into the volunteering maelstrom that's become such a part of our children's lives. Not that parental involvement isn't a good thing: I just doff my hat to any woman who shows up at the school in the hose and high heels of her "straight" job and sits down criss-cross-apple-sauce with such a good will to read a slew of kindergarteners Lilly's Big Day. I at least have the luxury of showing up unshowered and dressed down.

I would wax eloquently along these lines a couple of paragraphs more, but I just realized why the shift back to standard time is not the extra hour of sleep it used to be: no sleeping kids at 6 this morning. Good thing I got that solitary cup of coffee in a couple of mornings ago.

Morning Meditations

Here in Atlanta, we've gone straight from weather so hot you've got the windows shut... to weather so cool you've got the windows shut. No time to lollygag around with Indian Summer these days: it's a busy busy world and we went straight from the dog days of summer to ... well, I was going to say "to thinking about hot apple cider" but it's not THAT cool yet (and may never be, if the smell of hot apple juice makes you gag).

Spring in Georgia is confectionary: all meringue peaks of white blossoms and excess, it breaks your heart with its beauty. I'm a sucker for it and because of that I've never really considered myself a "fall" person.

But this morning it was pitch black dark at seven, and the down comforter was like a benediction laid across the bed. The little family sleeping, in fact APPLYING itself to sleep wholeheartedly. You could practically hear their exhalations of breath: Big Bear, Little Bear and Tiny Bear (who I suspect has inherited her father's tendency to allergies and was snorting pretty noisily).

Me, on the other hand — entirely wide awake through the machinations of the intersection of my past life and my present one. One second I was dreaming that I was in a seminar room attached to the PCL Library at UT taking part in a creative writing workshop with a Very Famous Writer who suddenly turned to me and asked me to go get him some donuts, which apparently could be purchased from a downstairs vending machine. The next second, I'm wide awake, staring at the clock which says 7:05, bang in the middle of the split second mental inventory that goes like this: o woe we're late for school, late for... o, it's saturday ok not so bad, but o crap there's that workday at the preschool at 9:00 and i've gotta go pick up the donuts!

But then at least I roused myself to realize picking up donuts is a couple of hours away, everybody else in the house is still asleep and if I think fast I might be able to get in a solitary cup of coffee.

This early, the shadow of leaves cast by streetlight against the curtain of our front window makes a scrim like thai shadow puppets. As I've sat here, rosy dawn's begun to seep across the sky.

And oh, my God: that coffee. That quiet. All is right with the world.

Enjoy your weekend.

State of the Union: November 2, 2007

Seven years ago, when the Husband and I first moved in to our 'hood (back in the sepia-toned day B.C.— Before Children) our next-door neighbor debriefed us on what to expect come Halloween night, but we had no idea exactly what he meant until that first time the door bell rang (3.2 minutes after I got home from work, while it was still DAYLIGHT, and lasting until we ran out of candy and turned off the lights and hid, cowering, in the back of the house).

We're talking mini-vans with Henry County plates (a county south of here). We're talking groups of seven or eight at a time, one after another. And, those first few years, we were also talking: most of them without costumes, old enough to shave, SMOKING CIGARETTES, carrying plastic Kroger bags, soliciting for absent family members and two-month-old infants who should have been home in bed long ago.

Halloween 2007: well, we still got mini-vans idling at the curb like rock band tour buses just to keep things lively, but we've also got costumes. And maybe I'm just a sucker for the top two costumes of the night (Knights and Fairies as opposed to ... Sponge Bob Square Pants), but I was impressed by the creativity this year. The fact that Knights have replaced Munch's Scream Face with a gizmo that pumps blood down it as the boy costume of the year has got to say something optimistic about the state of the world, doesn't it?

Other trends:

Once they reach middle school, girls go for the undead prom queen look: you still get the glitter but now you've got blood dripping from your mouth.

Boys the same age seem to like a costume that my brother (we compared notes on Halloween here vs Halloween in South Carolina after we shut down for the night) thought were supposed to represent "guys with no faces" and I thought were supposed to be Ninjas. Whatever it is, think stealth. Since this was the main population that went for the Bloody Scream Face, this is a definite step in the right creative direction as far as I'm concerned.

And how did Halloween treat our own Flower Fairies, you ask?

I probably spent the years from 25-35 seeing little point in Halloween in general and trick-or-treating more specifically, but you know, now that I'm a parent I realized that besides being just plain fun, Halloween actually serves a purpose of sorts. Dark but not TOO dark it allows kids to roam just a little bit farther than they usually do (emotionally and physically). Being terribly shy as a kid, I used to hate it that my dad hung back at the end of the driveway when we trudged up to a house to trick or treat, but night before last I did the same thing with Elder Girleen, watching as with each step and social transaction that cord between parent and child was pulled out a little bit more elastically. This is how you start to figure out how to walk through the world.

Yeah, right. Cut the social commentary, Ma, it's really about getting LOTS AND LOTS OF CANDY.

Unless you're Younger Girleen, who after coming face to face with the Grim Reaper and the single Bloody Scream Face of the evening in the very first block had had enough and spent the rest of the event nestled in her Daddy's arms eating pretzels, and STILL hasn't completely recovered.

American By Accident of Birth, Texan By the Grace of God

The Husband and I have a long-running argument over who's the real Texan of the family. Leaving aside the question of why bother wasting time on this argument, it goes like this: My mom's got a framed piece of paper certifying her as a descendant of a member of one of the first 100? 250? 500? families in the Republic of Texas, and let me tell you, that and four bucks will buy you a cup of coffee. My trump card is always that I lived in Austin as a card-carrying working adult (if that's what you can call someone under thirty); his is that, though born elsewhere, he spent much of his childhood shit-kicking around a seventies version of the Last Picture Show. Plus, he had to learn how to castrate cattle in Ag Class. And he can two-step, and I cannot.

This past weekend we finally settled the question. I get to keep Texan bragging rights as far as Austin goes, he wins, hands down, as far as experience with the rest of Texas. Which, like it or not, is the real one. Not Austin, that Disneyland for Hipsters whose California-ization is finally after lo these many years of complaints about the LA transplants complete.

This weekend we got to experience both states: Austin and small-town TX. The wedding was held on the banks of the Llano River, and we were lucky enough to have lodging in a house-turned-B-and-B right across the railroad tracks from the wedding site, not more than staggering distance away.

Even this particular small TX town has realized that tourism may be the only thing that'll save it from complete oblivion (it long has had a reputation for being slightly chilly to furriners), and in service of boosting the local economy, a local business person moved four 1920's bungalows to a prime location next to the depot, where city boosters swear that someday soon day-trains from Austin will pull in, disgorging Californians with dollars burning holes in their pockets. This means the house we rented had a lovely view of caliche parking lot and Virdell's Drilling, plus as a bonus a space that can be rented out for wedding receptions.

Two weddings for the price of one — Austin and smalltown versions both! I fell asleep (pillow over my head) before the local wedding ended, but the Husband had a ringside seat (the reception taking place about 50 feet from our front door). Black Stetsons, Wranglers and down jackets. An inebriated wedding guest fumbling to hook his horse trailer to his pick-up before he headed home. A deejay ("yeah, he's a talker," a guest outside our window opined) playing Kid Rock singing "Cowboy". The bride swigging from a long-neck in the parking lot as she announces: "I'm standin' out here in a freakin' sleeveless wedding gown!" The Husband says the newlyweds left in separate cars, the bride shrieking "get in the car, bitch" to a friend before she sped off.

It's probably not this small-town version of Texas I love, but the Husband's eye for detail and ability to recount it. Twelve years ago this month I was the one standing outside in a freakin' sleeveless wedding gown.

At the Austin airport, there's a bootjack at the security check, so folks can get their boots off before being screened for weapons.

Love, for place or for person — it's inexplicable. Who knows how exactly our hearts fill.

Back in the Saddle Again

Fall arrived while we were gone (first mentally gone, as Elder and Younger Girleen passed the first respiratory crud of the season back and forth; then physically gone, to the lovely wedding that took us out of state and far from the madding crowd of school halloween parties and so on) — red-tailed hawks are circling and diving over Interstate 20, picking off the pigeons lured there by the convenience store owners that feed them.

Remember when seeing a hawk was rare, almost unheard-of good luck? (Back in the Crying-Indian Commercial, DDT days of our youths? The fact that I saw FIVE between driving Younger Girleen to school and back gives me hope: with enough media and pop culture overkill, we can change things, and for the better. Slowly, slowly, slowly, and maybe not enough, but I just had the good luck hawk-spotting bestowed upon me so am seeing the world through rosy glasses.

The fact that this blog is back up and running may be illustration of something; serious commitment issues, ambivalence about my writing life, my wishy-washiness in general, but I realized a few things this weekend:

1. I sorta missed the blog, for reasons I don't even want to take the time to examine (my exhibitionistic streak, maybe?)

2. Seeing folks in Texas who read the blog made me realize the best thing about a blog: it forges connection (let's not parse
out how one-sided and solipsistic that connection might be). There're people out there that I just don't want to lose touch with.

3. Klatsching over coffee with friend J about writing and blogging made me really think about a possible difference between "old-school" and "new-school" writing. In the "old-school" literary view of writing: your words are like pearls. You guard them, keep them close and don't squander them. For years I've subscribed to this slightly anal-retentive view of writing: if anybody's gonna see what I write, it better be as polished as I know how to make it. But blogging in specific, and the internet in general are evidence enough: we are awash in a sea of words. I go back and forth on whether or not this is a good thing, and whether or not I should be adding to all this white noise, but after years of parsimony, I figure a philosophy of writing abundance might work wonders for me: maybe there always WILL be enough. For this, for the novel, for writing agent query letters, for anything that might need writing. I suppose that, at its heart, is what this Grand Experiment is really all about.

So yeah... here I am. I'm back; I'm lame; and I missed you. Like everything else, this is a narrative. I shade, I embellish. Take it with a grain of salt...

A Click of a Button...

And now what was my solipsistic side, offered up for the world's delectation, can, according to Blogger, be seen only by me. And what would the point of that be? Well, it turns out that what I liked best about this great experiment was its bells and whistles: the lovely layout and the tags. The old journal seems so... airless... after all that.

There is, of course, the question, is this really private? And is writing it, whether or not other people see it or not, really a good use of my writing time? I suppose if I were to consider it some sort of journal and a journal only, the time wasted is time that would be wasted in any case.

But now I've effectively squelched much of what sucks time from my day: the blog, various inanities I volunteered for in weak moments — everything has been scoured away from my writing time but work, and oh, what does it mean that I'm so loathe to begin it?

Adios, for Now

Two months
30 entries
212 "hits"

You all deserve a more eloquent, writerly summation than that. It's not you, really. Remember that leaky boat, the water sloshing over the gunwales, the frantic bailing? Writing this is really fun, but it turns out that when there's about an hour every couple of days for writing, there's no room in the boat for both this and that novel I've been talking about for the past four years.

My hat's off to those who can keep a blog going day in and day out for years without starting to sound like a whiny imitation of themselves (another risk I'm afraid of running). Blogs are crafted writing, artfully artless, and fascinating.

But breaking down that fourth wall... maybe I'm just too old, and old-fashioned to take a sledgehammer to it on a regular basis. Is this self-indulgent? Is it mean-spirited? Is this the best use of my writing time? Those are just some of the questions that I've found myself asking over the past two months. Who knows what the answers are. Just asking the questions makes my brain hurt.

Wow, and I can delete everything here with the push of a button. Such power! My brain is really hurting now, so I'll just say: Adios, for now. And thanks.

Excuses

We're nothing if not predictable around here, and right on time, along with the very first second of cooler weather, we have contracted the first cold of the season (this isn't "we" in the royal sense, but "we" as in the entire family). Let's see ... what day is it? October 12? Yep, you could set a watch by us. From here on out until May, it's unlikely that we'll go longer than three weeks between bouts of upper-respiratory crud.

For about a month, my new-found combination of extremely strong iced coffee and the fact that Elder Girleen is now in school five days a week fostered the delusion in me that I might actually become a productive member of society again. Laundry would get folded, dishes washed, life lived, each and every requirement of the Girleens' upbringing/schools/social lives would be a cakewalk, plus the novel that's been on the back burner for the past four years would finally be slid to the front one. Oh, and the 14 books that have been on my bedside table for two years would get read, the yard would get landscaped, my wardrobe refurbished, and the ten extra pounds I've been calling "baby fat" for almost three years would be lost.

And now, here I am, back to bailing out our leaky boat with a sieve. And as always seems to be the case, when water starts slopping over the gunwales, I jettison what seems most expendable, which is basically...everything ...except putting food on my family and getting them to bed at a fairly close to a decent hour.

It's a state of affairs recounted in just about every motherhood blog out there, a page out of every motherhood book.

If nothing else, parenthood teaches you how to prioritize.

(This was all an elaborate way of informing anyone who might stop by that we are up to our eyeballs in dirty dishes and unfolded laundry around here).

Two Dreaded Words

Sick kids.

Setting Foot on the Shore of a New World (Happy Columbus Day)

For reasons that escape me now, I spent the approximately 43.6 free minutes I had on Sunday afternoon making things with pears. They were actually edible things, not cunning little outfits, but all the same, this is about the point when those reading this who knew me back in earlier days when I was a "real" person with a "real" life may consider jumping on a plane and heading here to stage an intervention.

Remember those beautiful pear trees in the outdoor classroom at Younger Girleen's Preschool? Remember, weeks before, the way the "OC Team" was summoned to a "special meeting"? At the time, I preferred to discuss metaphor (Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole in particular), but facts are facts: one of the reasons for the special meeting was that pears from the pear tree were falling on the ground and the OC Team was not picking them up on a regular basis.

Let me be the first to testify: you actually can spin straw into gold. I didn't plan on it, but wow, here we are. Even this blog tells a story of sorts.

Being the girl that I am and the daughter of the woman that I am, I couldn't stand to see all those pears chucked in the compost. End result: I spent the approximately 43.6 free minutes I had on Sunday afternoon making pear-pecan bread and something called perada that, according to the recipe Googling gave me, resembles membrillo and will really impress your friends and neighbors when you pair it with manchego cheese.

I'm making all these things for a Preschool event, of course (nudge nudge, wink wink).

Way back when Elder Girleen was first born, when at least three-fourths of the time I felt like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after me, I went to an acupuncturist. She was a wise and lovely person, and I wish I could say that acupuncture rid me of the urge to crawl in a hole, but it didn't, but she and I spent much of my first appointment talking about who I was at that point in my life and who I had been before I had children. She asked if I was okay about the fact that I seldom wrote anymore and I looked at her like she had asked me if I was okay about the fact that I had just pulled the plug on my own ventilator, so at that point she beat a hasty retreat and asked me if I was able to find any time for anything else that I considered creative.

Anything else creative? You mean, there was something else? For years, I'd made most major decisions, including where I would live or what job I would take, based solely on my assessment of how much those decisions would affect my writing time. For example: the guy who would become The Husband would to ask me out and I would turn him down because I had to work on my novel. Thankfully, five minutes later, I would realize how stupid this was and call him back. The rest is history.

At the time the acupuncturist asked me this question, I figured she was asking if I had found a way to make motherhood creative, and I recoiled in disgust and every single fiber of my being screamed sell-out at such a thought. Writing was real legitimate art (or at least creative). Anything "creative" I could even begin to imagine about motherhood was simply lowly domestic art. Engaging in the mental smoke-and-mirrors that would render it as creative as writing was the grossest self-delusion.

Five years later, here I am: growing a garden, making a pear-pecan bread that perfumes the house with the cinnamony smell of fall. What I don't have: that third (or second for that matter) published book under my belt, as do many of my peers.

Contemporary motherhood writing (blogs in particular) are chock-full of a phenomenon involving a new mother who gazed down at the little miracle in her arms and rushed over to the computer and started writing like nobody's business.

I'd read these accounts during the crawl-in-a-hole days, and they'd just give me another thing to add to the inadequate mother list I was keeping in my head. Not only did I wish that I was off on a spun-sugar beach somewhere in the Caribbean all by myself, but motherhood was not getting my creative juices going. I was a failure not just as a mom but as a writer.

Can the essence of pears, concentrated, its backbone stiffened with sugar and an hour's occasional stirring, be art?

The tiny Republican in my heart, whose motto is always pull yourself up by your bootstraps and whose job is to keep me on-task still whispers sell-out — and maybe I am one.

If pears can be art, it's a fleeting one, here and gone. No one praises what I've created but me — I do it solely for myself, for the joy that comes from making.

Halloween Grist

Back in that misspent youth I'm so fond of mentioning, I usually spent Halloween night babysitting friends. No, no typo there, I wasn't babysitting for them, I was babysitting them, their chosen Halloween recreation leaning toward situations requiring nursemaids. (And I thought I had no experience mothering until I had children!) This didn't really endear Halloween to me, though over the years I forced a number of roommates to sit through movies I decided were suitable for the season (Note: The Old Dark House, made in 1932, is not scary and will drive even the most tolerant of roommates out of the room).

Given such an ambivalent history with Halloween, I'm astounded I've managed to squeeze as much blood from that particular turnip as I have in terms of blog entries. But Halloween looms so large in the lives of my children — how could it be otherwise? Most years, Halloween begins for us about a week in advance: there are school Halloween parties, neighborhood Halloween parties.... Basically, by Halloween itself, The Husband and I are wiped out, and bicker over who will do what on Halloween night — is it better be the one at home passing out candy to teenagers whose "costumes" consist of peach-fuzz mustaches and cigarettes (and sometimes infants with their own trick-or-treating bags), or traipse through the neighborhood with two exhausted, overly-sugared fairies?

Due to a great stoke of luck, we'll miss most of the auxilary Halloween celebrations this year. Elder Girleen is crushed — only the fact that she's missing them to be a FLOWER GIRL gives her any consolation. I'm thrilled though — at least I don't have to scramble for a costume the afternoon of the preschool Halloween party. Usually I put on a cowboy hat and my boots and leave it at that, but after five years of attending, I've noticed that most of the moms at this particular event show up as ... witches.

This morning, when I took Younger Girleen to school, the front yards we passed were not just dotted with inflatable ghouls and pumpkins, sadly deflated (last year's fad), but gravestones have popped up like toadstools.

These might be the end times, indeed. Our houses are built upon graves, and motherhood resembles a coven.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor...

This could be perceived as a throw-away (it's harder work than you would think to come up with something worth saying on such a regular basis), but it's heartfelt all the same: thanks much to all who're reading, linking, commenting or forwarding.... Since most of my readership in the past few years has consisted of The Husband, who could probably channel anything I might think of saying in his sleep, the notion that a few more pairs of eyes might see this has proved energizing.

Little Children

My "office" — at least that's what I call it when I need to make myself feel (slightly) important; it's also the girleens' art room and bike and trike storage, and general all-around junk room — is housed in the glassed-in sunporch of our house. Built in 1929, the house is an architectural style sometimes referred to as "stockbroker tudor," a term I love, particularly when you put it in the context of when the house was built. (Poor stockbroker, if only you could have seen into your future!)

In any case, the location of my computer out on the sun porch (which is what I call the room when I don't need to feel important) means that I get a great view of sky through the upper curve of window.

Yesterday that blue bowl of sky was completely undiluted by clouds. It felt almost like fall yesterday morning, but that turned out to be a tease: by noon, when I was on my hands and knees trying to help a class of preschoolers plant broccoli (no easy trick, let me tell you!) the weather had shown its true colors.

One of the lovely things about XXXX Preschool is its Outdoor Classroom, a space with raised beds for each class, a lovely swatch of grass, pear and crabapple trees, and picnic tables shaded by a grapevine-draped arbor. Spring and Fall Planting Days are a part of the "curriculum" and today, as member of the school's outdoor classroom committee (it's a cooperative, which basically means that we pay tuition money so that we can spend the time when our preschooler is in school with them at school) I spent a lovely fall day assisting six classes of preschoolers as they attempted to plant flats of lettuce and broccoli and kale, then dug up what had just been planted and "watered" themselves while the plants languished like accident victims in need of blood transfusions.

It was a nice motherhood moment, or maybe I should say, it was a nice motherhood moment in theory but it was also exhausting, especially since Younger Girleen had absolutely no interest in planting anything and spent most of the morning trudging around the space saying "I'm VERY hungry." But one of the things I was most struck by was the realization that up until today (I've had kids at the preschool for five years, so that means 10 planting days) I actually thought the kids planted stuff on Fall Planting Day. I had no idea some poor parent who probably had not had time to drink their morning coffee had to spend their morning creating a gardening assembly line.

Oooofff! Hoodwinked! I (sometimes) think of myself as a fairly — cynical might not be the best word, let's say savvy, instead —parent, hep to the sentimental traps of parenthood.

But we are all Little Children, to borrow the title of Tom Perrotta's recent novel. It's long been said that people have kids because it gives them a chance to be a child again... to play. The problem is, the way grown-ups approach "play" is actually sometimes kinda twisted. Not only that, a lot of times, what it mostly resembles is work.

A couple of days ago Elder Girleen switched on the radio and out poured Madonna's "Lucky Star."

Being too cool for school back in the day, I never really realized how propulsive and danceable "Lucky Star" actually is. Elder Girleen started dancing wildly, with such unconscious grace and instinctive rhythm — I knew I was blessed to see it.

Now that's play.

The Third Circle of H-E-L-L

...has got to be Payless Shoes at 4 p.m. on an afternoon when one child had a truncated nap and the other, due to extracurricular activities, has not been home for 8.5 hours.

Older Girleen pirouettes happily in the "flower girl shoes" I've suggested for an upcoming wedding (they should be white to match her flower girl dress, but the white ones don't fit, so they're black, what the hey), while her younger sister (clearly the pop culture maven of the family) makes a beeline for the only shoes in the store that hit high on the unsuitability index on all counts: they're sandals (the wedding is the weekend before Halloween), they light up, AND they are covered with disney princesses.

Nooooooo, she wails. I NEED princesses... Wails as we try on a nice pair of dress up shoes, wails as we cram her feet back into her original shoes, wails as we walk down the aisle and back to the register.

—Oh, the salesclerk says, addressing Younger Girleen and nodding wisely. I know why you're crying! Well, you just tell Grandma to come back on Thursday when we have two-for-one, and she can buy them for you then.

I have just been mistaken for my children's grandmother.

State of the Short Story Union...

Those of us who obsess about this kind of thing have probably already read the essay in yesterday's New York Times Book Review lamenting the health and well-being of the short story, which has been limping along on its last legs for decades now. The essay (with which I mostly I agree wholeheartedly) ends with a plea that people read Best American Short Stories. Uhh... shouldn't they be reading the magazines the stories originally appeared in? I know it's idealistic and/or naive to even think so.

Which leads one to another question — which is, does the traditional short story publishing route— publish in the little magazines, work your way up to the slicks and anthologies, land an agent and then, a book deal — even work anymore, for anyone, whether they be writers, readers or small-magazine publishers? As I'm so fond of saying, that (meaning the traditional stort story publication route) and three bucks will buy you a cup of coffee.

This blog, with its two or three loyal readers (thank you!) has probably had more eyes cast over it than the last three or four short stories I published. I know this should be my punchy, wrap-up solution paragraph, but I can understand why, after such a strong start, the NY Times essay ended with such a milquetoast plea (read Best American Short Stories? He might as well just have begged the world to read, period). Let me know if you've found a viable solution.

Dispatches from Fairy Land

For those of you dying for the latest installment in the Fairy Saga (I'm sure there are many!), I'll just say that it's really hard to beat $9.99 fairy costumes from Target and leave it at that. The horrifying thing is that these costumes, which cost about what two lattes do, actually look pretty good, which indicates that those who made them, who live in a country that will remain nameless, must receive about -3.2 cents an hour in wages. So not only did I rob my children of the opportunity to explore their creativity by making their own costumes, I made a decision with global implications I can't bear to examine too closely.

But as far as that creativity thing goes, I've got to save mine for really important things --- like this blog.

Due to our parental slight-of-hand (fairy costume + plastic binoculars = "Dora Fairy"), Younger Girleen now thinks that Dora the Explorer and fairies are interchangable. When she got a glimpse of her fairy costume, she shouted "MY DORA!" She is, however, quite happy with it.

Kicking Down the Door to Get In

Folklore has it that the severity of the coming winter can be predicted by noticing how many acorns the oaks are shedding or how thick a woolly bear caterpillar's brown stripe is (the thicker the stripe the milder the winter). Here in the 'hood I look to other indicators:

1. Last night's Glenn School consignment sale had more merchandise than I've known it to have in five years, so much so that it was almost impossible to insinuate a hand into the tightly-packed racks of clothes enough to extract a hanger. Rumor was that during set-up a rack collapsed under the weight of the clothes hung on it, and that additional full racks would be pulled out onto the floor as space allowed.

Trivia, you scoff. But over the past five years I've noticed that when the economy dips, the used kids clothes market jumps. Making predictions based on nothing more than this, we might be facing not a dip but a nosedive.

2. Kick-in-the-Door and Grab burglaries have become our neighborhood's newest trend. The grapevine hums with details of more every day. Such breaches in the divide between those perceived to have and those perceived to want usually indicate something big is going on...

Dusting off a Golden Oldie

Today's the Glenn School Sale Preview Night, a ritual I've participated in since Elder Girleen was born. Why, you ask? See below. It ran in Brain, Child a few years back, and apologies for dusting it off, but I've got to run — and buy OLD, DIRTY clothes for my children.


My code name is CHUM.

My husband experiences the event that requires me to use this code name only through my (admittedly hyperbolic) description of it. Right now he is, in theory, watching the eleven o’clock news. But he’s really keeping a slightly dismayed eye on me as I sit on the living floor for the third night in a row.

I’m sitting on the floor rather than on the sofa beside him because I need lots of elbow room. In what I’ve discovered is a surprisingly enjoyable ritual of momhood, I’m sorting through our two-year-old daughter’s clothes, fingers crossed that I’ll be able to come up with enough cast-offs for the upcoming biannual consignment clothing sale at the Glenn School for Young Children to qualify for a ticket to its Preview Night.

So far I’ve priced and set aside, among other more prosaic things:

A tiny French knitted wool newborn outfit that arrived in Atlanta during one of the warmest springs on record;

A red plaid dress with faux-leopard trim on the collar, cuffs, and hem. (I came to like the idea of my daughter masquerading as the child of one of the Sex Pistols but this dress never actually fit her);

The infant car seat that she was too big for by thirteen months, and that all new parents are admonished never to buy second-hand;

A pink velour dress with a cat’s face picked out on its front in rhinestones;

A glittery magenta onesie.

This is my fourth time selling clothes at Glenn School Sale, which makes me neither an old hand nor a virgin. My homemade pricing kit is on the floor beside me (pen, scotch tape, safety pins, index cards, calculator and Ziploc Baggies I collected before the last Glenn School Sale and then set aside, knowing I’d use them again in six months). Three sales ago I bought two laundry baskets specifically for heaping full of clothes and stacking in my arms while I squeezed through makeshift racks of children’s clothing in an overly warm school gymnasium. I’m prepared—and willing—to spend the next three to six hours of my life writing descriptions such as:

CHUM
1 Pink Polka-dot BabyGap Girl’s Shirt
Never Worn!
12 month
1.99

onto blue (not white) index cards one after another and then pinning them to the upper left pocket area of each article of clothing, just for the chance to be among the first hundred or so allowed to go through the used clothing and baby gear.

I affix my price tags with medium sized safety pins (small ones or straight pins are frowned upon by the clothing sale volunteers who, when I bring my wares to Drop-Off, will check them for damage, wear, or any other affronts to Glenn School sensibilities). I place every item on its hanger facing left. I’ve long ago vowed I’ll never let myself be publicly humiliated the way my friend LAWN was last year, when the Glenn School Sale Volunteers turned away her stroller as “too soiled.”

Isn’t chum the baitfish that makes sharks go into a feeding frenzy? my husband asks me.

I’m too busy with the calculator to even look up. Ninety-one dollars, plus two dollars, plus seventy-five cents, plus three-fifty, I mutter. My merchandise more than meets the fifty-dollar ante for admission the night before the sale officially opens.

Ha ha, I tell my husband. Very funny. I survey the sorted, hangered, and priced clothes before me with the sort of satisfaction I imagine a prairie wife would give her fully stocked root cellar just before the advent of winter—all those homepickled cucumbers bobbing in their brine! All those tomatoes in their Mason jars, curved and luscious, rubied! Is it thrift or greed or my first slip into a sort of Stepford Mommydom that drives me, or something else entirely?

It’s 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and here we are, waiting in line for the school doors to open, which will happen at 6:00. “Feeding frenzy” might be an apt description of the Glenn School Sale, legendary throughout metro Atlanta, but that’s not what I think of tonight as I join the queue on Preview Night. Tonight, I am CHUM, everybody’s friend, dutifully initiating new moms (this time it’s a friend with the code name DAWN) into the intricacies of Preview Night. I’ve just introduced DAWN to LAWN and BONY, who two years ago initiated me into the same rituals. We’ve assured the woman waiting behind us that DAWN didn’t cut in line but got here the exact same second as the rest of us and then went off to the restroom in a building across the street to change out of her work clothes into an outfit better suited for sifting through quantities of used children’s clothing. We’ve got bottled water and lawn chairs and a picnic dinner to eat in about an hour.

The woman ahead of our group is sitting in her own folding chair working on some sort of crafts project and occasionally checks a list of the gear she’s hoping to find tonight. It’s an extravagantly balmy spring afternoon and the line continues taking shape behind us until it snakes around the side of the school building and out of sight. I can spot one dad. As politically incorrect as it might be, Preview Night is predominantly a female event.

In fact, if such a thing existed as the Mommy Olympics, this might be one of its highest-stakes games.

When I was pregnant —hardly pregnant at all compared to how pregnant I would become—someone mentioned the Glenn School Sale to me. Huge. Indescribable. Run like clockwork. Everything you’ll possibly need for this baby. I thanked her politely but didn’t even note of the name of the sale or ask her when it was held. I hadn’t made that first trek to Babies "R" Us yet, and I hadn’t read a single one of The Books (the ones that tell you that you need hundreds of things when you have a baby and that you should buy very few of them used). My feet were still firmly planted in before, a before that included long weekend mornings spent lolling in bed with The New York Times, popping out spontaneously for dinners that included drinks, appetizers, courses, dessert, and after-meal coffee, and actually seeing first-run movies in theaters, a life I now realize was made up of equal parts sloth and leisure.

At the time, I thought the woman (who was passing along a huge tip, though I was too inexperienced to recognize this) was nice enough but possibly a little nutty: I was barely even showing, for goodness’ sake, and just how much stuff would one single baby who was still practically hypothetical at this point going to need? I had no idea just how much gear I was going to buy in the next few years of my life and just how thoroughly I was going to agonize over the purchase of every single article of it (should we go with the complete transportation system or just use a carrier until our child could sit up in a stroller?). I had no idea just how many pairs of newborn socks my mother would rush out to purchase the day after we brought my daughter home from the hospital (twelve—she was born in January) or how many times she would kick them off before we’d understand she would never actually wear them (dozens). I had no idea that while gear doesn’t make the baby, just as clothes don’t make the man or woman, things (whether we like it or not) may be one of the ways we process what happens to us. We plan nurseries to distract ourselves from, and convince ourselves of, a future that is almost unimaginable in its enormity.

We buy because we love, even when we know better. The week after we brought our daughter home from the hospital, my husband ran out to the grocery store so often “just to pick up a couple of things” that I had to beg him to stop. To be a parent is have an overwhelming desire to provide, and provide well, but what that actually means is something we can learn only through experience.

The Glenn School Sale is run by an experienced crew. Its procedures have been honed over the years to a fine edge, and cut through the crap, which may go a long way toward explaining the sale’s seductiveness: It’s one of the few experiences I’ve ever had in parenthood that allows you to do things by the book and still end up with the outcome you desire. Preview Night always starts at six o'clock on a Thursday night and the line will always begin to form at three o'clock that afternoon. The doors will open for the “official” sale at 9:30 a.m. the next morning, by which point Preview Night veterans tell themselves the best bargains have already been snatched up. No children are allowed into the building before noon, and this means you. Saturday will be half-price day, but by then you’re taking your chances. Follow those rules, and you’ll come home with your child’s entire wardrobe for the next six months.

There are people, I’ve been told, whose children regard the Glenn School Sale as a kind of Christmas: They run downstairs the day after as if expecting to find not second-hand clothes, but the presents Santa left them.

A few months after my daughter was born, I met LAWN in a postnatal yoga class. Everyone else’s babies were sleeping peacefully on blankets on the floor while their mothers settled on their haunches in the cat pose. LAWN’s eyes met mine over the heads of the squalling infants we held. By then I’d discovered that babies grow out of their tiny outfits the second or third day after they first wear them, so I was much more open to the idea of consignment sales in general. But LAWN wasn’t just talking about the Glenn School Sale. She was talking about Preview Night, which elevated the sale from a simple rite of passage to blood sport. Was I game? she asked me. LAWN was a veteran of the trenches: she’d gone into labor with her second child at the previous Preview Night, an event that had already become an Atlanta legend. Was I game? You bet. This sounded like some inside track, and I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be on one. Besides, at my age, standing in line at Preview Night was probably as close as I would ever get to camping out for Bob Dylan tickets again.

The Glenn School Sale Volunteers start moving down the line at 5:45 to check our required photo IDs and make sure we’re not slipping in illegally (tickets are NOT transferable). LAWN, BONY, DAWN, and I have eaten our picnic dinner, checked in at home by cell phone, and briefed DAWN, the newbie of the bunch, on some of the lore of previous sales, including that of the couple behind us in line last year who confessed they’d once earned fifteen hundred dollars from selling the toys of a three-year-old.

As people start taking their chairs back to their cars and shifting their empty laundry baskets to their hips, an palpable frisson of excitement travels down the line, which by now wraps all the way around the building and out to the street and contains numerous mommies I recognize—the yoga teacher from the class where LAWN and I met, a woman who once regaled the entire waiting room at my obstetrician's office with the blow-by-blow of her extremely difficult labor, the wild-haired mom BONY spotted at the playground last week attempting to round up four children and clearly dangerously close to her wits’ end.

Amy Carter’s here, BONY turns to me and whispers, referring to the daughter of former president Carter, who still lives in Atlanta. A soft murmur works its way down the line, as if the presence of Amy has just bestowed upon the sale its ultimate seal of approval. On a quick run to the restroom, I catch wind of a rumor that a woman somewhere in line gave birth yesterday, and I overhear discussion of the one who went into labor here last spring (our LAWN!).

I make it back to my place in line just as the doors open. We hand over our Preview Tickets and file into the building.

— O, dingy hallway packed with bulbous plastic slides and Cozy Coupes, still sticky with the residue of all those years of Cheerios …

— O, unpopular unpeopled room stacked floor to ceiling with barely-used infant car seats, where that necessary item nobody will ever buy used must go to die …

— O, official toy room, with cardboard box after cardboard box labeled simply Teething Toys, where everything is tatty, plastic, brightly-colored, and just walking in triggers the toy-induced equivalent of insulin shock …

— O, Exersaucers and Barbie Playhouses …

— O, boneyard of stacked up baby gates …

— O, wily moms, who snuck your stained and button-missing Zutano pajamas past the eagle-eyed gatekeepers; who priced flannel shirts (size Boys 4T) at seven bucks (too high) and five Medela bottles at one dollar (a steal), depending upon nothing more than your whim or how much sleep you got the week you sat up pricing after the kids had gone to bed; O, my sisters, who sort and cull sprawled out upon the floor with cheerful camaraderie, whose shirts occasionally gap open to reveal nursing bras you’ve forgotten to hook the flaps back up on …

— O, uncomfortable dads: the husband who earned fifteen hundred dollars; the cheerful, sweating man standing in for the wife who at this moment is defending her dissertation; the grandfatherly type whose job seems to be to carry a folding chair from place to place for his wife; O, dad participating by proxy, you of the car idling in the parking lot, who stands supervising two unruly kids made drunk by the novelty of being up this late when I go past to deposit my first full laundry basket into my car …

It’s only stuff.

Or is it? Every time I attend Preview Night, I end up buying the cast-offs of a woman code-named LEAF, who clearly shares my taste in children’s clothing. When BONY, LAWN, DAWN, and I file downstairs with our overflowing baskets, I catch a quick glimpse of a woman still sorting, whose pile looks like it mostly contains my cast-offs. While I was sorting through the boxes full of shoes, I noticed that the woman beside me was looking for shoes a size smaller: when I came across an immaculate pair of Stride-Rites, I passed them right over. DAWN’s basket contains not only things for her boys, but clothes for her sister’s daughters. The spring I had a sinus infection and couldn’t face the line, BONY and LAWN (both the mothers of boys) harvested the Girls 2T racks, finding my daughter a wardrobe of sundresses that drew the compliments of everyone who saw them, including my own mother.

It’s only stuff. But here in this overly-warm school auditorium, something else is being handed down as well. We might be provisioning ourselves for our longest, most strenuous haul; we’ve come together here to shore ourselves up. For life with children can be so much like the Glenn School Sale itself: so greedy and unheeding of larger events, so over-the-top and rare, so excessive and effusive, so must-be-experienced to be believed.