Election 2008, From the Mouths of Babes

February 21, 2008 – 10:20 pm

Shockingly, my 15-year old son has recently become interested in politics. We’re not ready to take off the ski hat, cut our hair, pull up our pants, and don a coat and tie like Michael J. Fox in the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” but it’s a start.

Indeed, this emerging interest had me channeling Kenneth Branaugh in the remake of the movie Frankenstein, when said creature stirred for the first time and Branagh looked to the heavens and wailed, “It’s A-liiiiivvvvveeeeee!” Productive intellectual inquisitiveness in the teen male must always be encouraged, no matter how flickering the flame. Words must be chosen carefully so as to gently fan that flame, rather than put it out.

On primary nights, the lad has asked me to turn the television onto CNN “so we can watch the scores.” It’s not a logical leap from ESPN, I guess, and politics is the biggest spectator sport in this country, so I do nothing to disabuse him of the notion.

His comments with respect to Mrs. Clinton would sit well with her adversaries. He’s dumbstruck at how she can conceivably be trying to change the rules with respect to Michigan and Florida. “That sucks,” he says, “isn’t that cheating?”

Our discussion about Barack Obama struck me, however. Read More »

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Sleepovers: Invented By Satan

February 13, 2008 – 12:45 am

Women have an incredible ability to block out memories of sever physical pain; how else can you explain the fact that many sign up to endure labor again by having more than one child?

Surely it cannot be because children provide joy that somehow balances out the rigors of passing the rough equivalent of a bowling ball through one’s nether regions.

Children do have a way of making parents of both sexes stupid. We forget all sorts of horrific experiences we vowed never to do again. A few months pass, and, there we are, willfully signing up to do it all once more. Unlike child birth, we can’t blame it on a lack of – ahem – rhythm.

It’s just our abject stupidity.

Stupidity, of course, brings us to sleepovers. Normally such events take place in conjunction with birthday parties. Unfortunately for us, our three sons’ birthdays are a little more than six weeks apart, compressing this fun and frivolity into something more akin to an endurance test, or boot camp. Our daughter has yet to get into the mix, although that looms just around the corner, I am sure.

There have been good ones and there have been bad ones. Good ones usually mean the weather cooperates and the children can be run ragged outdoors in a controlled environment. The physical exertion generally means they will sit somewhat quietly once indoors for a prolonged period of time.

Bad ones remain hard to remember, which goes to illustrate the blocking-out thing we parents do as a form of self-preservation. I do dimly recall one sleepover where two of my charges were on Ritalin – during the weekdays. Taken off Ritalin on the weekends seemed to unleash unholy pent-up energy which they could not adequately harness. I, of course, learned this the hard way when I came downstairs at 2:00 a.m. to find one of them taking apart my computer. Read More »

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The Sounds of Morning

December 2, 2007 – 3:10 am

I stepped outside for a few minutes about 6:15am. The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east, and the waning moon was high and bright in the west. There was a brilliant star (planet? I don’t know these things) just under the moon, and another one in the southeast, over the Willow Pond near the by-pass.

I’d stepped out with the intention of bellowing at Rosie, as she was being yappy and I can’t stand a yappy dog. The moon caught my attention and I stood there surrounded by the cool air, listening.

My neighbor to the west has a small building in her backyard. It has a little front porch, and dangling from the eaves is a windchime she made of old enamel dishes, small bowls and plates, with a few spoons thrown in. It was clattering softly in the breeze. I thought “good for you, Leisle, for having the courage to make something the entire rest of the world thinks is silly, and for being proud enough of it to grace everyone else’s morning with it’s dulcet chimes.” Read More »

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Madeleine McCann: A Mystery In Many Parts

November 29, 2007 – 1:11 pm

Want to hear a joke about Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old British girl who vanished on holiday in Portugal?

Portuguese secrecy laws forbid police briefing the press. So instead of facts and official news we get speculation and watching the parents, Kate and Gerry McCann.

When the story first broke, we were invited to empathise. Their Madeleine became “our Maddie”. A family’s private grief was turned into public spectacle.

Star footballers were signed up, as were Hell’s Angels, MPs wearing yellow ribbons and ministers meeting deputations. It was as if the missing child were this year’s Make Poverty History campaign. And then the official Madeleine Wristband went on sale.

In the Houses of Parliament, MPs were revelling in mawkish sentimentality, wearing yellow ribbons with pride. They cared. And they wanted one and all to know it.

At the Vatican, we were the voyeurs at the biggest show in town. Pope meets McCanns. Or, to out it in order of newsworthiness, McCanns meet Pope. Read More »

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Thanksgiving, My Grace

November 22, 2007 – 3:54 am

I’ve been, naturally, thinking about the whole thankfulness concept, and what, in particular am I thankful/grateful for right now. I was reminded of the mess we went through with child #4 starting when he was about a year old. He had allergies, serious ones: to cats, cockroaches, and dust mites. When I say serious, I mean serious.

His skin was literally falling off in quarter and half-dollar sized chunks, like something out of an Austin Powers movie. In the creases of his knees and elbows the skin would crack and bleed. He itched ferociously, and we would wrap him in gauze to try and stop him from scratching. When I took him to the pediatrician, he (the Dr.) was so impressed by #4’s skin that he took photos of it to show at a convention (yay!… Not really, no).

The Dr. and I decided on a shotgun treatment: throw everything we can think of at the allergy in hopes that something works. That didn’t quite do the trick. When #4 was two, we were referred to a pediatric dermatologist in Atlanta. He was also sent to a pediatric allergist in Montgomery- a 70 yr old Southun Gentleman wearing a bowtie and in possession of a pocket full of suckers. Between the salves and other remedies prescribed by the dermatologist, not to mention the series of allergy shots (normally not started on a two-year old, but he was really, really in need of them), by the time #4 was five, his skin was clearing up. When we moved to Statesboro, we located another allergist, who tested him again and said his allergies were gone, the shots worked.

So… Medical Science… It’s a good thing. My son still has scars on the backs of his knees, where the skin cracked open, but the rashes, the horrible bleeding raw spots, the crying all night from itching, are over. What I have now is a happy, clear-skinned, long-legged eight-year old boy, who doesn’t remember the misery, puts his underpants on backwards, and dumps too much Ovaltine in his milk. Read More »

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Pirates and Parallel Parking

November 8, 2007 – 9:14 pm

Lucy Peterson wouldn’t describe herself as the kind of girl who teaches Russian men how to walk the plank, plucks old ladies’ whiskers to gussy them up for dates, and avoids parallel parking…but she was that kind of girl.

Lucy’s life circled around four entities. The first was taking piano lessons from the aforementioned Russian man, because she liked piano and music helped her escape from the day to day insanities of her life. It was an unusual perk that Dr. Sabanov thought the KGB was after him and, because of his almost-but-not-quite-fluent English, constantly asked the meaning of phrases like, “You drive me bonkers” and “Walk the plank.”

“What is this walk the plank?” Patrick told me to walk the plank, what means this?”; “What is this ‘bonkers’?” Patrick was Dr. Sabanov’s other piano student. Lucy shared classes with him sometimes. He seemed nice enough (other than ordering their teacher to walk the plank), but she could never tell if he was smiling or not, due to a beard the size of a small mountain lion that smothered half his face. Read More »

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Lectures are Good, but…

October 15, 2007 – 3:15 pm

You know what? Here’s what I’ve been thinking about. Life does NOT have to be one long, relentless learning experience!

I’m thinking of the parenting issue right now in particular. I know people online who are soon to have babies, and have expressed concern at ‘getting it right’ wherein being a parent is concerned.

I get that, I really do. I wanted to get it right, and for the most part my kids seem to have turned out OK. None of them are in jail; no one has gotten a girl knocked up (hush! I don’t want to hear it!), and they all seem to be relatively well balanced individuals.

I didn’t follow all the rules. My family doesn’t own the biggest, most excessively safe vehicle available. I did not feed the kids organic baby food. I didn’t research which pre-school would get them into Harvard or MIT. I didn’t even buy clothes from Gymboree or a similarly overpriced venue. I used a simple umbrella stroller, while the Escalade of strollers was taking up the entire back end of my special Parenting Magazine-Approved, Safety-Rated Minivan. Read More »

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Notes from the Exurbs

October 7, 2007 – 3:23 pm

Life inside Boston’s easternmost ring road, west of its massive suburban mosaic, is more than the meets the eye of Google earth.

This outer ring of habitation, tucked inside the burly bark of the interstate, is the next woody circle out from suburbia - exurbia – an as-yet unsung layer in the tree rings of the great trunk of metropolitan American life. Here, west of Boston and east of Worcester, tumbled grey stone walls still trace roads without sidewalks and the big yellow school buses lumber picturesquely past the odd apple orchard. Here is where middle-class New England families hunt acreage and the faded fantasy of small town community. Let me sing you the song of this exurban ring – some notes soar and others plummet. As Julie Andrews taught us, when you sing you begin with do re mi . . . . Read More »

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