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red leaves in green The leaves are mostly still green but every so often there’s a cluster that got the memo: it’s autumn. Sometimes there’s a swathe that just looks splattered with colour, as if someone threw a bucket of paint at them. The fall colours here are audacious in comparison to Ireland’s basic browns and dark reds – here we get ruby red and lemon yellow and orange and lime green and gold all on the one tree. We wake up chilly, we look for slippers, we put on jackets to go to school. By hometime the jackets are stuffed in backpacks (with luck) and it’s warm on the playground, spreading mulch and finding hideouts in the woods and organizing societies of children, ignoring their mothers with their mother-talk and being ignored as much as possible in return.

yellow leaves in green

—–

In the morning an imperious call summons me. For some reason I always went to her bed, not she to mine except in dire straits. I sleepwalk out of bed, though it’s a perfectly reasonable hour, gone seven. But I don’t have to get up till half past. I haul myself up into her newly hand-me-downed baby loft bed, my back not yet loosened up for the day, and lie down beside her. She curls up against me and we both drift off for a little longer, snuggly. I wake further to find her squeezing my cheeks and running her finger along the lines of my forehead, not too gently, but with love.

These are the last days of such snuggles, that began with my tiny baby at my breast, in my bed. Now she’s half the size of me, it seems like, but she still looks at me with uncomplicated love and wants to have her face beside mine. I stare back at her beautiful bouncy skin, her huge eyes and long lashes, her cherub lips. She might be judging me, but she doesn’t seem to find me lacking. She accepts my difference and invites me in.

Her brother closes his door at bedtime these days. I might creep softly in to turn off his alarm on a weekend night, or to see if his duvet is over or under him, but mostly I try to respect his space. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to climb in beside him to soothe him back to sleep after a bad dream. But if we’re walking together his hand still snakes into mine, even at school. He’s not ready to renounce me just yet.

orange leaves in green

Well, this isn’t morbid at all

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My grandmother died when I was 17. They asked in the hospital if I wanted to see the body, and I said no. I preferred to remember her as she always had been, sitting in her chair in her front room with her fluffy halo of white curls and the remote control, watching the snooker.

I’m 41 and that’s still the closest I’ve come to seeing a dead person.

Isn’t that a little odd? I mean, yes, it’s also wonderfully lucky, and I’m blessed, but isn’t it a little unnatural? I think it’s indicative of how much we try to hold the brass-tacks realities of life at arm’s length in the modern world: I’ve been involved in precisely two births – those of my own children – and zero deaths. Even when our family cat died, I had already moved out of the house and the first I knew of her demise was when my mother rang me at work to say she’d taken Mitzi to the vet that morning.

The thing is, I don’t think I’m reality-proofed at all. I think when something happens – as it must, because no matter how much we pretend life doesn’t end in death, it always does – I won’t have any precedent. I know intellectually that death happens, but I suspect being faced with the physical reality, especially when it’s someone you know and love, takes more than book learning. I’ve met grief, when my much loved mother-in-law died very suddenly; but it was my husband’s family’s grief; it didn’t belong to me.

Maybe it’s just autumn, these thoughts I have. One red leaf and I’m all moribund.

I do have this feeling that, having hit 40, I’m into the second half. I’m maybe on the downward slope. I’m freewheeling, but the destination isn’t really somewhere I’m in a hurry to get to. That’s probably why it’s going faster now; but I’m putting more thought into the process.

Having had one or two brushes with discomfort, I appreciate better the simple ability to move my body around without difficulty or pain; for my parents right now that’s not so easy. I have more pressing reasons to try to make my body strong or fit: I need to work on my core muscles not just because of the frankly pie-in-the-sky notion of a flat stomach but also because it helps my back not hurt. I have a newfound urge to create, to leave behind, to do worthwhile things because I won’t always be here.

(Don’t worry, I’m planning on being here for at least another 40. And my parents, while somewhat decrepit, are not yet knocking on death’s door. But it’s good to think about these things when they’re not pressing, you know.)

single red leaf on the pavement

This entry was posted in death and sex , family and tagged mortality , over 40 on by .

Dance now

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We went out, but not very far. I’d booked a babysitter (yay, we have a babysitter again!) but there was nothing on at the movies and we didn’t really feel the urge for Indian food or Thai food or anything far flung. So we went to our local bar, where there is live music with no cover, and they have Lebanese food and good beer.

The demographic is … well, it’s a bit on the older side. It’s sort of middle aged, let’s say. I don’t know where the young people of my town go to socialise, but it’s clearly a bit further away. Like, downtown DC or something. I really have no idea, never having been a young person who went socialising in this neck of the woods. But let’s just say that B and I were the youngest people in the room, probably all night or close to it.

The bands that play there are eclectic; you never really know what you’re going to get, from smooth jazz to down-home bluegrass to Bolivian pan pipes. (Okay, not so much the punk or the heavy metal.) But tonight even the band seemed a little on the mature side. It was an all-female ensemble, and the two of us spent some enjoyable minutes pinning down their imaginary day jobs as they started up – the drummer was a librarian, the bassist was your friend’s mum, the trumpeter was an elementary school teacher, and the lead singer works in the credit union. Probably. Something like that.

It was extraordinary, actually, watching these women who probably have very mundane other lives, up on the little stage belting out some wonderful standards, great close harmonies, amazing jazz numbers, sexy trumpet solos, scatting and crooning like nothing else. (Some people’s thing is drums; some people might think a girl with a guitar is a fine sight; but for me, it’s always the brass player that makes me smile.)

The crowd wore hawaiian shirts and unironic moustaches, sandals that were almost but maybe not quite orthopedic; they looked like science teachers from 1984, like my aunty, like Tom Petty. They were a motley crew. But I realised that if you transplanted the whole lot of them into an Irish pub – not a trendy one, but the naff one whose doorway you’d never darken because you’d meet your friend’s mum there and the lady from the newsagent’s – that was exactly who these people were. They’d look perfectly at home on the plush pink seats and low stools of a plain old Irish pub, sitting in front of its polished dark wood tables with their pints of Guinness and glasses of port or whatnot. (Except Tom Petty. He’s vintage Woodstock, through and through.)

And then I looked at the band and my view shifted again and I realised it was exactly as if we’d crashed a wedding. These were, in fact, your aunty and the lady from the newsagent’s and my mum’s friend, and they were up in front of the stage giving it socks just like the young people they used to be not so very many moons ago, and they had every right to be there.

The highlight was when one single customer, of fairly advanced age and indeterminate gender, clad in a sort of Andean hoodie, shimmied up to the top of the room, danced all alone to the song of the moment, spun around to point fingers at the crowd, smiled gap-toothedly at us all, and shimmied back out again. We should all be so lucky as to be in fine dancing fettle at that stage of our lives.

We didn’t dance, in the end, because B had been up since 5am and the music suddenly got less like music we wanted to dance to, and because we were shy, and our pints had run dry, and we were in the company of all our elders. Maybe we didn’t want to show them up; or maybe we didn’t think we were up to their standards, because to tell the truth they were all pretty good. But we’ll be back – not too soon, but some time – and maybe we’ll dance the next time.

There are so many lessons to take away. Dance now, because who knows what the music will be like next time round. Stop caring about how you look, just dance anyway. Be the guy who’s up on the dance floor regardless. Order the chicken. Hang out with old people because they make you feel young. Support live music because there’s nothing like it.

Never forget that no matter how pedestrian someone might seem, they could be an amazing sexy-cool jazz trumpet player by night.

Learn the trumpet, so you can be that person.

Dance now.

Smugly

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Things that are giving me quite a degree of satisfaction these days, smug or otherwise:

– Since school started, I have been to two yoga classes and plonked down actual money to pay for nine more in advance, so I have to go. And they feel really good.

[I have no photo to go here. Imagine me looking fabulously strong and bendy.]

– I took some photos that were in the kids’ rooms in little frames that were always falling down and being off kilter, and put them in one big frame per child. It’s a ginormous improvement, even if I’m the only person in the house who appreciates this.

Two sets of framed baby photos

– My children clamour to hear Paula Abdul’s “ “, so we must be doing something right. (You’re welcome for the earworm, by the way.)

– Remember that scarf I diffidently began knitting during a brief rush of blood to the head in June? I’m still knitting it. I’m onto my second ball of yarn. I have never in my life knitted something this large, and the last time I knitted anything even approaching it was when I was 12. I really think I’m going to finish it.

long scarf, half knit -  I have new glasses. While my internal jury is still out on how much I love the frames (yes, I picked them, but I might have been momentarily deluded or something), being able to see through unscratched lenses is a wonderful novelty.

Me with new glasses and Dash

– I have advanced to the Finalists stage of the Blog Awards Ireland. This, as you might gather, is actually the final stage in a fairly interminable process, and I’m mightily chuffed to be here as I stopped at “Shortlisted” last year. My category is “ Best Blog of the Irish Diaspora ” and I’m up against a bunch of gorgeous, enticing, and beautifully written blogs. It’s truly an honour to be included in that group. It would be lovely to have the night out and an opportunity to wear a posh frock, but I don’t get to do that because, well, diaspora .

blog awards ireland

There are, no doubt, plenty of other things that are making me peeved rather than smug, but let’s stop there for today.

Beetly

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Sometimes I wonder where the real me went.

I mean, the me who always ignored the pickle that came with a sandwich, and who would certainly never engage with a beet(root). The me who didn’t like any sort of mustard and who hated olives.

The olives were first to go, actually, because you can’t spend a year in Spain without coming around to olives. They gradually moved from something I picked off to something I’d eat if they were there to something I actively requested on my pizza.

But the others were much slower in worming their ways into my affections. I started with a tiny, tiny taste of wholegrain mustard in a ham sandwich, and after some number of years I’ll now smear a decent amount of dijon on a hotdog. Maybe my tastebuds have dulled or something, but it doesn’t seem so offensively spicy any more.

I could say that it took moving to America to make a pickle-eater out of me, but my husband has been here longer than I have and he still removes the offending green spears from any plate they appear on (or donates them to me). Our local farmer’s market has a pickle stall, and for the past few weeks I’ve been skulking around their samples and stealing little mouthfuls of deliciously lemony, garlicky crunchy coolness. Last weekend I took the plunge and bought a quart of the blighters. I have to eat them all myself (the hardship), and I am discovering all the things they taste excellent with.

Finally, there were beets. Beetroot, as I had encountered it in my childhood, was a disgusting pink gelatinous article that came in a jar immersed in vinegar and contaminated everything it touched with its bloody-ish entrails. I had no intention of even tasting it.

I stood firm on that front until just a few weeks ago, when the recipes for beet brownies were flying around my Facebook and I found myself at a pot-luck standing in front of a salad with beets in it. They were golden beets, raw, sliced oh so thinly, looking a million miles from those puce blobs of yore. I tried one. It tasted… fine. It had some texture and not much flavour, and was a nice element of a nice salad. It was anticlimactic, to be honest, after all that time and hatred I’d expended on an innocent vegetable.

So there I was at the farmers’ market with my newly acquired tub of pickles. So I picked up some beets too. Just like that. They were the dirty pink sort because they didn’t have the golden ones, but I didn’t even care. I was clearly in some sort of dangerous mood last Sunday, I’m telling you. You wouldn’t have wanted to cross me, with my beets and my pickles.

I polled Facebook and trawled Pinterest and then I roasted my beets whole, wrapped in tinfoil, while I was cooking some sausages to eat pickles with. As advertised, the skins slid off beautifully once they were knife-tender. I have to admit that they looked a bit scary at that point, so I put them in the fridge to deal with today. I thought I might make a chocolate cake.

whole roasted peeled beets

Mmm, appetizing

But it turned out that I had walnuts that were easily toasted (I’m told if I roast them drizzled with honey the entire experience will be transcendent), and some crumbled feta sitting in the fridge, and all I had to do was chop up a beet and mix it with those two things, plus a drizzle of olive oil and some drips of balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. It made a pretty good lunch. For dinner, I added brown rice and did it all over again.

Chopped beets with feta and walnuts

Oddly delicious

So I suppose you could say I’m a convert. In another 32 years I look forward to hearing my picky eater tell me how beets are actually okay after all. I should probably call my mum.

 

 

 

This entry was posted in food and tagged beetroot , beets , food aversions on by .

Imaginative play

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Mabel is really good at playing. She has a gift, I would even say, for play. Solo play, by herself, with just her imagination and all the toys at once. On the floor. Together. All the furniture out of the dollhouse. All the doll clothes out of their tub, which is overturned so that the dinosaurs can stand on it while they’re lined up for school and so the clothes can become a nice soft beautifully laid out bed for a family of stuffed bunnies (who adopted a platypus).

Scene in the dollhouse

All the other stuffed animals are ranged across the floor because she was looking for Poby the red panda she got at the zoo and he was at the bottom of the basket. All the babies are on the carpet because their container is now a hutch, on its side and covered by the big fleece red blanket that belongs on her bed, for the red panda and his associates. There are acorns strewn around because they were snacks for tigers or squirrels or tiny beavers.

Toy beavers

Four three-inch-square blankets I knitted with my own two needles for the family of tiny rabbits (or beavers or owls), not being used for their original purpose but for something else understood only by their ruler. Plastic babies wrapped in baby blankets that once held my real babies. Teddies dressed in doll clothes; horses dressed in bunny clothes, turtles in hats. Markers and crayons and sheets of coloured paper and bits of yarn cut up and taped together and stuck to other bits of yarn.

Dollhouse scene

She’s like a very messy omnipotent being, and her realm is vast and ever-expanding.

Tonight I picked everything up for the first time in days. I put little people into one tub and little plastic animals into another and big animals in another and stuffed animals in their laundry baskets and babies in their baby baskets and furniture in the dollhouse and blankets in bedrooms. I put all the tiny bits of lego on the shelf and the acorns in the trash.

I’ll probably be in big trouble with the omnipotent being tomorrow, but for tonight, the wide open expanse of floor space is worth it.

 

 

 

Jazz hands

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It’s 12 noon. This is about the time when, last year and the year before, and three days a week the year before that, I would regretfully set the timer for 20 minutes so that I didn’t get lost in whatever I was doing and forget to go and pick Mabel up from school. (Because you know how it is, you finally get down to business and get absorbed in a task just when it’s time to leave.)

This year, at 12 noon, I usually do a little shimmy in the front room, with *, and sing, in a vibrant if somewhat off-key contralto, a little melody with the lyrics “Three more hours!”

Which is to say, I’m quite enjoying this.

I said as much to my optician yesterday as she determined that the only thing in the way of my vision is all these scratches on my glasses, when she asked how the transition was going for me now that my baby is off to big school. She – recently married; no kids yet – probably thinks I’ve a heart of stone, but hey. As long as my kids are happy at school (and Mabel’s fine, she really is), I’m very happy to send them there. I’ve done my time with small children at home, and the truth is, I’m not really very good at it. That is, I can do it, but a lot of other things fall by the wayside.

(Right now, cleaning the house is still falling by the wayside, but shut up, I’m sure I’ll get to it in due course. I’ve been busy shimmying and jazz-hands-ing and contralting.)

I’m really bad at self-care, for instance, when I have small children in the house. There were about three years there when I barely managed to put on moisturizer before bed; you can imagine how often I went to the dentist. I can’t even make a phone call without my kids deciding now is the time to need mommy, so it was hard to schedule things, never mind actually leave the house without a constantly nursing baby.

I have nothing but admiration for those women who get things done and also have babies. I am not one of those women, but we all have our strengths. Soon I will do Very Useful Things with all these hours I have (when they stop inexplicably melting away as they seem to have done so many days of the past three weeks), but for now I’m indulging my introvert side and spending some quality time with myself. I deserve it.

 

*(I really want to put that animated gif in here, , but I can’t figure out how and they’re probably copyrighted anyway, so please do just click over and enjoy for a second.)

Kindergarten report: Fun is relative

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Two weeks in and I think I can give kindergarten a tentative thumbs up. I don’t think Mabel would give it such a wholeheartedly positive mark, but, as I have said to anyone who asks me how it’s going, I leave her in the classroom every morning and I don’t have to go back and get her until the allotted time, so I’m calling that a win. I haven’t been called in early to remove her, and though some partings have been a little more sorrow and a little less sweet, on the whole starting big school has been much easier than it was with her brother.

(Please, Fate, do not clobber me tomorrow, or next week, or next month, for this complacency. I know she can make my life hell whenever she chooses.)

Every morning until today, she has said “I’m not going to school”, but I’ve just pushed some breakfast into her mouth and put some clothes on her body and by the time it was time to get into the car she would be more used to the idea. Every night she’s said “I’m not going to school tomorrow,” and some nights, when she’s extra tired, have been more pathetic than others, but I have not yet broken down and said “Okay, okay, I’ll homeschool you,” so I count that as a personal victory.

The sad truth is that we all (all the parents, I mean) spent all summer selling kindergarten for all we were worth, with all the “It’s going to be great” and “School is such fun” and “You get to do all sorts of wonderful things” but in reality it’s just a whole new ballgame and fun is a relative term. I mean, PE might be fun compared to math, and art is definitely fun compared to spelling (don’t worry, kindergarteners don’t do spelling) and music is probably more fun than learning new classroom rules, and you have to get used to finding the fun parts to look forward to. I know Mabel’s not the only five-year-old who’s feeling a little betrayed this week, and I do feel bad about that. (Not bad enough to homeschool, no.)

Of course, Mabel says none of it is fun and she doesn’t like art and she hates music and recess is stupid and PE is boring and if I didn’t know better I might think she was just a big ol’ black hole of negativity; but ten minutes later she’ll volunteer the fact that the music teacher has a funny voice he puts on to make them laugh or that they made shapes with gumdrops and then they got to eat them, and I’m pretty sure it’s not as bad as she’d like to make out.

Mabel eating an apple

Stay green, Ponygirl

 

Generation gap

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I got into a conversation on Twitter today, as you do, with a total stranger who mistook The Princess Bride for The Princess Diaries .

I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

What happened was, there was this high-lair-ious hashtag going on called #ExplainAFilmPlotBadly, so after a little thought I contributed the following:

Well, I thought it was excellent. I sat back and waited for the accolades to roll in.

All I got was some bloke saying “Which film is that?”

I was going to be snarky, but then maybe I thought maybe it wasn’t as clear a reference as it was in my head, so I just told him. He said “Ah, and I’ve seen that.” And then “Have you seen the second one?” And then “I was totally thinking of Princess Diaries.”

“Very different film, Ted”, I replied, scathingly, prepared to close the door on this sorry encounter by puzzling him out of existence, but he actually got the Father Ted reference, so I let him be.

Still, this whole thing demonstrates a serious problem in our society. It’s called the Princess Bride Generation Gap. There are people like us, the sensible people who saw the film when it came out, or a few years later, as teenagers or young adults, and loved it, because to see it is to love it, and quoted it and delighted in it. And there are our children, who are growing up in the soft light of Rob Reiner, because all is right with the world and what child wouldn’t enjoy a film with swashbuckling and a princess and torture and a miracle man and a cast in a million.

But in between there are people who grew up in no-man’s-land, neither fish nor flesh, who have discovered the film neither in its first flush nor as a retro delight; people who are between perhaps 15 and 30 years of age.

It is our responsibility, nay, our duty, to bring this film to these poor benighted individuals, lest they go through their lives unbrightened by it, unable to understand the references and the quotes and the people who talk about land wars in Asia and bwessed awwangements.

But we must do it carefully, surreptitiously, leaving tiny clues for them rather than pushing them into it, so that they think they came to it themselves, all unawares. Because nothing’s worse than the stuff people 15 years older than you think is cool. Those people have terrible taste and no sense of irony.

This is your mission. Gather your holocaust cloaks, friends, and begin.

Beginner’s luck

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At the weekend I won a photography competition. Not since the great drama-exam drama of 1983 have I been party to such an upset.

The September I was ten, my ballet class moved to a time that was inconvenient, what with our habit of eating dinner and so on, and so my mother deemed that I should stop doing ballet and take up drama instead. Apparently I was a very malleable child, or perhaps I just wasn’t all that into ballet any more, because I took it pretty well and showed up at my new drama class ready to do whatever it was people did in drama. The teacher was a large woman given to wearing muumuus, who had a lot of bichon frise dogs, which is why I know a bichon frise when I see one. (Also a muumuu, but that episode of The Simpsons helped there too.) She was stridently West-Brit, and very hand-wavy, and pretty much exactly as you’d expect a drama teacher. She was, in fact, an institution.

The other kids in my class seemed to have taken up drama as toddlers, and to me they all appeared to be slightly posh, private-school girls (were there any boys? I don’t remember any) who had no need or inclination to befriend the unfashionable new girl. That was okay; so long as there was something we were meant to be doing, I didn’t need a friend particularly.

I really have no idea what it was we did in drama class. But I do remember the end-of-term exam with crystal clarity. I’d taken recorder exams and ballet exams, but this drama exam seemed particularly freeform. I was first up and had no idea what to expect. I went into the room alone (save for the examiner) and was asked to pretend I was an astronaut, I think. (“Crystal clear” may be an exagerration. Through a mottled glass vaguely, then.) With none of my peers in the room I didn’t bother with self-consciousness, and happily loped around in imitation of weightlessness, talking to myself about the hopes and fears of an astronaut, for the allotted minutes.

When everyone else was finished and the results were announced, I was astonished – and the rest of the class was probably pretty much disgusted – to hear that (while everyone had passed, I suppose) I, the newbie, had won the gold medal and come first.

I moved on to a different drama class the next term, with a smaller and more motley group, and we did a little thing from The Great Gatsby for a feis (that’s a competition). I was Jordan, and I had to wear a knitted sweater vest (tank top) over a shirt, and have a book under my arm. (Not a golf club. Hmm. I think they took some liberties with this dramatization.) We didn’t win. I think the group doing Lorca’s Blood Wedding did. It was very, well, dramatic.

So. To return to almost the present day, last year at the Labor Day Festival I looked at the photo show and thought “Hey, they need entries to fill up these displays. I could enter a picture next year.” And this year I did just that, with two photos I liked, which I went so far as to put into frames and get to the show in time. (That was really the hard part.) And my surprise was just about as great as it had been at the drama exam when I was informed that I had taken a blue ribbon in both my categories.

(I have to point out that judicious choice of categories went a long way here. There were only three entrants in one.)

I am no more a great photographer than I turned out to be a great actress. A creative type is not something I ever used to think of myself as being, but maybe my right brain has just been biding its time for a while.

Sometimes beginner’s luck gives you a boost just when you need it.

Framed photo of branch with ice on it

“Ice storm”

Framed photo of steps in Perugia

“Perugia, Italy”