More from the archives

A photo of Dad's parents, Jane and Andre, circa 1941-42. This would be after they were reunited in the U.S. following their separate--both harrowing--escapes from wartime France.

Random Monday

1. The Rural King ad insert in Monday's paper is a toddler treasure trove. Wheelbarrows! Tractors! Tillers! Boots! It keeps Henry busy for about twice as long as it takes me to read the rest of the paper. Which on a Monday really isn't that long, but still.

2. Tornado sirens sound a LOT louder when they go off at 1 in the morning. We all woke up except James. Henry & I watched Peter go down into the crawl space to get it ready, just in case (this may have involved mouse traps... and some long defunct mice). Henry didn't know the words he needed to say his teeth were chattering, so he came up with this: "My cheeks are bumpy."

3. Currently on my bedside table (i.e., the floor beside the mattress): This and this.

4. I'm grateful to my friend Aubrey for reminding me of these guys, who are so much preferable to Barney when I am using YouTube to buy myself a few minutes' writing time. Relatedly, if Peter were English and liked dogs and stinky cheese, I'm not sure you could see daylight between him and Wallace.

5. Speaking of writing time, I'd better get on with it.

Please don't hate me when you're grown, James

I feel a little guilty about the unreasonable amount of pleasure I get from dressing my children. It verges on exploitative, really. But there it is. And I think we can all agree that I have outdone myself today, right?

Why yes, that is the February Sweater on Two Needles in merino from Montana!

A day in the life

Wednesday:

The day began, as usual, with Henry popping into the room to say "Good morning, Mama. I found Baby James! What Henry eat?" After breakfast (for Henry, a bowl full of raisins, and some banana chunks he arranged like Stonehenge on the edge of his chair instead of eating), I took the boys out to the back yard and sat in the cold for as long as I could stand it. Henry played in the mud. I cried.

Shivering, muddy, AND weepy was too pathetic, even for me, so I decided to pull myself together and try A Craft Project--the sort of organized child-enrichment activity I don't do nearly as often as I intend. And it was a success! Last fall, in a spasm of maternal ambition, I made fingerpaint, but Henry, who is erratically fastidious, hated having goop on his hands. Three months and/or brushes made a big difference:

Full disclosure: This is actually today's painting, not yesterday's. The palette is different, but the vernacular's the same.

After lunch, instead of napping, Henry alternated between sitting on my head & walking on my spleen, so I just shut him in his room and left him there for a bit while James & I had a tete-a-tete.

Mid-afternoon, Molly came over and we bundled everyone up in the stroller & went around little 9th Street park until we were dizzy. After our walk we snacked on leftover cheese from my cheese-of-the-month club: a Christmas present from Dad. (The FedEx lady looked pretty taken aback by my expression when the February delivery arrived.)

Peter came home, gave Henry his bath, we all went to bed and I cried myself to sleep. Yep, it's really that fun over here these days.

Thankfully, there are bright moments too: Notes from my brothers (honoring our pact to exchange inconsequential e-mails more often); conversations with Molly about Middlemarch and Chinese poetry and the complexity of families; hilarious diary entries by long-dead British folk chronicling the aftermath of World War II for posterity; gossip magazines supplied for therapeutic purposes by Peter and rich with the raw material for Schadenfreude.

And of course, my boys. Henry has been trying to share his knowledge of the world with James, lately, so he holds stuff up in front of James's face and tells him about it, e.g., "This is a purse, Baby James... purse," or, while approximating a yoga pose, "Here's an elbow, Baby James." And James beams.

Visits from Virginia are bright spots, too.

And one from the archives

"The Past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can be easily contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense. It is now a generous chaos out of which the genius of total recall ... can pick anything he pleases."
--Vladimir Nabokov (from Ada, which I have not read; I'm just cribbing William's erudition here)

October 1972

OK!

Good advice

Today at the library, James & I boarded an elevator along with a freckle-faced woman about my age & an old man dressed like a hobo.
The old man peered into the stroller. "That's a pretty new person in there."
"Two months," I said.
The woman piped up. "My kids are just 18 months apart. After I brought the second one home, I swore to myself: Never again."
I: "My two boys are 2 years apart, and that's pretty close."
She: "Now they're 17 & 15 years old & I can't wait for them to get out of the house, I tell you."
The elevator arrived at its destination (one floor up). The woman disembarked first.
As soon as she was out of earshot, the old man leaned in to me and whispered "Don't pay attention to a word she said."
A fan of babies, or just a generally encouraging sort of person? I don't know, but I liked him.

I'm not in a hurry to get them out of the house.

Mastery

James's new skill:

A grand day out

And now I'm posting again. I don't like leaving a post about Dad at the top of the blog because anything I write about him seems like a big lie, like it's just something to write about; and not writing about him seems like a big lie, too, because I am thinking about him more or less constantly.

But I'm also doing other things! Like taking long walks along the B-Line trail, including its newest leg, from Second Street to Winslow.

Here's the evidence:

On Saturday's walk, Henry was thrilled to discover two diggers parked alongside the trail. By Sunday, he was greeting them as old friends.

We think the pedestrian bridge over Grimes looks dauntingly steep. Aren't there rules about things like this?

I liked the tone of some of the graffiti.

We didn't recognize the balls on this tree. Assuming they represent some kind of reproductive strategy, it doesn't seem very effective. But pretty!

Peter & Henry

Leora & James

Greens

Tonight I made Dave Tallent's collard greens for dinner. One curious thing that has been happening to me since Dad died is that I find myself spending a lot more time thinking about food, wanting to cook more, and caring more about what I make. I'm not even hungry, most of the time, but I want to make good food. I don't expect this to last, necessarily, but it makes sense to me right now, while I'm just starting to figure out what it means to me--a more or less middle-aged woman--to be fatherless--to be without my particular father. Since Mom--a pretty good cook herself in her time--reacted with shock and incredulity when I suggested she make herself the oatmeal-raisin cookies she's been craving (who could possible take the time to make cookies?) and my husband is the visionary behind PeteyChow foodloaf, it is clearly going to be up to me to make myself the food I like to eat: one of a thousand ways the world has changed.

So here's the recipe, as I made it:

6 slices of bacon, chopped
1 small yellow onion, diced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 pound collard greens & 1 pound kale, without stems
4 tbs. cider vinegar
3 tbs. sorghum
1/2 cup chicken stock

In a large pot, cook the bacon until crisp. Add onion & garlic, cooking about 5 minutes until onion is soft. Add the greens to the pot, stirring to wilt, then add vinegar, sorghum, and chicken stock; simmer, covered, for 2 1/2 hours. Add salt & pepper to taste.

They were fantastic (if you like greens!). And of course they don't make anything any better at all, except dinner.

Two people sitting on the brown sosa*

Photo by the lovely Anna Haag, who along with my dear sister has been saving my bacon on these long, cold, sad days.

*Quoting Henry.

Statistics

James had his 2-month checkup this morning. His chub was much admired at the doctor's office, where it was confirmed that he's been eating his way up the charts. Height: 22.75 inches (75th percentile); weight: 12 lbs. (75th percentile); noggin: 40 cm. (75th percentile).

Henry, meanwhile, has kept busy pursuing his interests: throwing things and Rococo furniture.

Cold comfort

I don't have the stomach yet for writing a graceful tribute to Dad; there's no grace in what has happened. But I can't help feeling obscurely comforted by the weather: a "catastrophic" winter storm. Ice is coming down almost as if the sky is falling, which feels about right.

Of course, Dad looked forward to this sort of weather. He had his expedition-weight parka, too warm ever to wear, his industrial-strength flashlight, and his stash of Parmalat; I'd love to think he arranged it.