Leaping, plus updates

When the kids were little, I remember their development would come in spurts--one day they'd be serenely practicing their "ba" sounds, in long unrelated streams of babble, and the next they'd wake up and say "dog" and be making signs for "flower" and "please" and "MORE NOW." This still happens, only we call it "mood," as in, "Wow, Si's mood is terrific today! He cleaned his room without being asked and played with Helen and finished his homework lickity split." Helen had a growth moment over the weekend, and even though she gets embarrassed and shouts MOM DON'T SAY THAT whenever I praise her about it, I can't help myself. We had to go to the store on Saturday, and she offered to go if we could walk/ scooter (gasp) (this from the girl who two days before had a crying fit because I hadn't parked the car close enough to the school for her to roll from the Sock Hop to her carseat). So I said yes, of course, even though it was the main grocery trip and I'd have to lug home all the cereal boxes and milk jugs and etc. Then on the way home, after I'd had to stop for the eighteenth time to adjust the damn cereal boxes, which were spilling out onto the sidewalk, she spun back on her scooter and said, "Can I help? I can carry a bag."

"Oh, that's sweet of you," I said. "But these are really heavy."

"I can take one," she said decisively, like a 22-year-old. And holy mama, she did. She took the bag with the three-pound chicken and looped it over her scooter handlebars and off she went.

I upped her allowance, of course, even though all she asked for was brownie points (I'm aware of the unfortunate racist heritage of the term, but our kids naturally assume they're related to brownies, so I don't worry about it too much).

Updates: well, our contractor is finally our of jail (I do love saying this in answer to people's chipper questions about how the renovation is coming), but not for long, so we're trying to get him to finish as much as he can before he goes out of commission. Sigh. I feel bad for the guy, even though he brought the vast majority of his troubles upon himself.

Also, Kevlar was invented by a woman.

Men who cry

Good morning on this glorious wintry Monday. It's hard not to be in a good mood when the sun is out for the first time in a week. (Or so it seems, and I know that for my Midwestern contingent a week is NOTHING. Still: GLORIOUS.) Last week, with the cold and the snow and the wow-really-MORE? snow, it felt like everything was in hibernation. The kids had two snow days, one of which was for cold (WIMPS, that school district. WIMPS.) (Okay, the high WAS -1 and they were worried about buses not starting). M and I, on the other had, had business-as-usual days (ARGH), so the snow days were 48 hours of frantic scrambling. Our builder, too, seemed to be asleep--he was in a fender bender on his way to work on Monday, which was followed by 7 days of silence and complete non-progress on the house. We finally tracked him down at his mom's house. Apparently his girlfriend had broken up with him and kicked him out of their house. Sigh. We have a very....emotionally connected builder, which I appreciate on the good days but not so much on the weepy ones. On those days I am reminded of Nora Ephron's warning about men who cry: "they're sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own."

Heh. In addition, our compassion is strained by also finding out last week, via a legal notice informing us that we're responsible (legally we are, it appears) for the unpaid bills to some of his subcontractors. LOVELY. I would be more distraught about this disturbing turn of events if a) the amount we're being requested for was larger and b) if I wasn't pretty confident that we could meet that debt by selling his damn stuff, which is still in our house. (Just kidding! that would be WRONG. As would some of the fantasies I entertained over the weekend of kidnapping him and not letting him leave our house until the trim was done). Anyway! It seems like he's come out of hibernation and will be coming to our house to face the wrath of M. I do not envy him.

In lighter news, Si's fourth grade class has begun their biography project. "Oh, who are you doing?" I asked with interest. Ben Franklin? Buzz Lightyear? Amelia Earhart?

"The man who invented the bulletproof vest."

Of course. One of the great minds of our times. I resisted sarcasm, however, and just said, "Oh! Great!" while making a serious effort not to sound like a pin had just punctured my mom balloon.

January progress

Today was the last night of skating lessons and I just must say that I have NEVER been so glad to see the end of lessons in my life. Between the frantic dash after work to get home, pick up the kids, eat something, stuff Helen into her snowpants and gloves (which usually entailed dragging said snowpants and gloves out of their hiding place in the winter clothes bag), and convince both kids that yes, the lessons were still on and YES, we really are going, yes, even you, now get GOING, I would start dreading it three days in advance and it would kind of mar my weekend.

On the plus side, between skating, basketball, and run of the mill busyness, January passed quickly by and here we are on the brink of February. It's time for a little assessment of the resolution situation. Let's see. I resolved to read a TBR book a month, watch a moonrise, take the kids to nature and eat more wild food.

Let's start with the wild food:

Berries of the Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) growing in our backyard (it TOTALLY counts.)

Pork roast studded with juniper berries.

Waiting to eat the pork roast. And the chocolate-pecan torte (mmmm). And the roasted potatoes and steamed carrots & snow peas. (Can you tell I'm a little happy to have a kitchen back?)

I'm not totally sure that I detected the flavor of juniper berries in the pork--I mean, basically it tasted like pork, right?--but oh, I felt downright self-sustaining and virulently virtuous, collecting the berries that were scattered in huge heaps in our yard (we have a very fecund juniper). Next I'm going to try roasting the berries and using them to infuse milk for ice cream. I'll let you know how that goes.

Book: I read Tender at the Bone. Okay, fine, it had been sitting on my TBR pile for all of about 14 days when I picked it up, but still: off the list. I have to admit that the book made me quizzically jealous--so, wait, she just sort of stumbled into this dreamy life as a food writer? In which she got to, say, decide on the spur of the moment to travel to France to learn about wines? Some essential piece of this puzzle seemed left out. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book immensely, drooling as I read (lots of recipes).

Moon: well. January 15, the night of the full moon, was totally socked-in snowing. The next day Helen had her kindergarten program during the moon rise, and the days after that I sort of forgot (but did happen to be walking the dog shortly after the moon rise). Fun fact: the January full moon is called the Wolf Moon.

Nature: took the kids and a friend down to the creek at the bottom of the street. The friend fell in; Si and Helen also got suspiciously soaked. They also had to be dragged away from the creek, despite it being a) twenty degrees out; b) getting dark and c) a sopping-wet clothes situation. So I'll rate that one a success.

Next: February!

Ahh, the bowl fight

Yesterday our builder hooked up the kitchen faucet, which means that except for the really actually minor items like caulking and grout, the kitchen part of our house is D-O-N-E and we celebrated by baking a batch of cookies, which we haven't done since 1984. I mean, August. Helen was beside herself with chit-chattery excitement, spinning from mixing bowl to counter to oven and back again with a constant running commentary: "Aretheydoneyet?WhencanIlickthebowl? But Silas can't lick the bowl, right, because he wasn't here? What's that for? Are they done yet? Did you do the next batch? When you do the next one can I lick the bowl? Just me? I'm going to get a spoon. Just for licking, right, ma? What are these spoons for? Can I lick the spoon? But Silas can't, right? Are we going to have parties now? Whoa."

Meanwhile M and I were trying to have a conversation about how great it was to finally stand in the kitchen and have a conversation, Costi was trying to make the point that we hadn't fed her her after-dinner snack yet, and the birds (oh, the birds) were back in the living area, making their happy-to-be-here noises, and it was all so cheerful and noisy and warm that there was really no excuse for feeling tired and irritated, even though that's what I was mostly feeling.

Life is creeping back toward normal, in other words. Hurray. This was really brought home by the kids who, immediately after the celebration cookie baking, got into a fight over who got to lick the bowl (note: they BOTH get to lick the bowl. For Pete's sake.)

Dog Ambition

Said an expert about the border collie, Chaser, whose owner taught her to recognize, nose, paw or fetch 1,022 different objects: "It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention lavished on them."

In other words, around the world there are millions of border collies languishing in undeveloped desperation, just waiting for their owners to get with the program and start spending four to five hours a day training them.

....Now? NOW? ....How about now?

Cleaning

I spent my weekend in productive manual labor. Between the shop vac, the mop, the dust rags, and my lungs, GRUG, I carted about 20 pounds of accumulated dust out of the basement.

These are days I love to hate. Ugh, I might say, flopping down on the couch, ALL I did today was clean the basement. I didn’t get anything DONE. I ignored my children, neglected my mind, cooked hurriedly and without relish. I was indoors all afternoon under less-than-salubrious conditions. A life can get sucked into this sort of absorption, and all kinds of better priorities can get misplaced. I vaguely mourn the books unread, the lush and incisive paragraphs unwritten, the complex soups unsimmered.

Still. There is a higher dimension to this type of labor. The very little I know of Zen Buddhism reminds me that sweeping, scrubbing, and similar tasks are considered spiritual exercises. Maybe it’s metaphorical: tackling a minute corner of the world’s mess (even though all I really did was rearrange it, sending the dust bucket by bucket into the flower beds outside and the trash out to the landfill on the prairie). Maybe it’s more direct: straighten and clean the exterior, and something internal straightens and settles down, too.

All I know for sure is that there are few things in life as satisfying as an object cleaned (with the exception of objects constructed, an activity that I engage in far less frequently and with much more mixed results). Yesterday morning when I finished up my coffee, the basement was a toxic mess of 40-year-old cobwebs, drywall remnants, sawdust, reverse drain residue and lingering insulation fibers. By the time I sat down to dinner, half was clean and usable. I spent my evening nipping over to the basement stairs to admire the well-wiped surfaces and dust-free toys. I went to bed feeling satisfied and tired.

The best thing of all about cleaning the basement, though? Once it's done, it'll be done for a good long time.

Dilettante

During the 20 or so years of my adult life, I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as an expert. Generally there has been very little evidence to support this stance, although I have made ambitious beginnings in a wide range of subjects. I believe my self-assessment comes in large part from periodically rubbing academic or professional elbows with people who either were at the time or who later became, through dint of perseverance and attention, experts.


For example, during high school I devoted myself almost exclusively to music and British literature. To this day I experience an agony of inarticulate familiarity when I listen to the radio: "Hey!" I'll cry to family members, "I've played this piece! We must have worked on this exact section about thirty times--it's really hard to play in tune!" What I won't be able to recall, however, is the name of the piece or who composed it. Likewise, I have a solid grounding in the classics of English literature, although after 20 years my actual knowledge of the contents of these classics has become very dim (Macbeth is about...a man who murders someone? With the help of his wife? Who gets blood on her hands and has a hard time washing it off? Out, out, damned spot!)


Or...during one very focused semester in college I read every historic document pertaining to the pre-20th century Ojibwa, or at least all the documents that had been published and then purchased by the Columbia University library system. I can't even remember what these documents are, just what they looked like and where, generally, they were found within the library.


Or...for several summers in my twenties I could name every bird that bred between 6,500 and 9,000 feet in the Colorado mountains, and identify them by song or call. I could also identify most of the plants.


Therefore, it has come as a rather rude surprise to reach age forty (or thereabouts) and be most accurately defined as a dilettante. I engage in most pursuits "sporadically, superficially, or frivolously;" I lack real commitment or knowledge of most subjects (and the subjects to which I am committed to are somewhat stunning in their triviality--the catalogs of which sidewalks in the neighborhood are most likely to be icy two weeks after a big snow; the state of my children's teeth; the proper usage of a comma according to the AP Style Guide).


Meanwhile, while I have restlessly skipped from subject to subject, my former peers have doggedly persisted in acquiring the depth and breadth of knowledge I have always admired, often imitated, and never really achieved. Former classmates whom I used to (shamefully) consider lacking in ability, or application, or the sheer imaginative passion necessary to really dive into a subject and make it one's own have become, shockingly, experts. In my current job, as the editor of academic manuscripts for a technical journal, this fact makes itself known to me on a daily basis. My email inbox is filled with messages from men and women whose grasp of the technical requirements of separating gangue rock from valuable ore, or designing an underground ventilation system that is both efficient and effective, or quickly suppressing a spot fire on a conveyor belt system, is vastly superior to mine--and (here's the rub, because I can't say I lie awake nights regretting my inability to match the proper teeter bed hydroseparator to the specific rock type found in a particular seam) the larger physical, chemical, economic, geologic and even political context for any and all of these specialized endeavors. If you had asked me at age 22 if I had any interest in becoming a civil engineer I would have thrown back my head and laughed. Yet if you'd asked if I wanted to gain a thorough knowledge of the structural, social, scientific implications of building a bridge--and, further, to develop an acquaintance with all of the varied people involved in such a project, and an understanding of the specific political climate surrounding the endeavor--well, I would have said yes. Definitely yes, just as soon as I finish trying (and failing) to teach myself Navajo.



Here's the thing, though: do I care? Most of the time, not too awfully much, although that's usually the low-grade exhaustion talking (sure I'm bummed that I never got around to writing the Definitive Guide to Native American Linguistic Evolution--but hey, who's up for a nap?)


Sometimes, though, I grow melancholic. I'll read the obituary of someone who made it his well-appreciated but completely unpaid business to drive all over the state and catalog every single Paleoindian site in the Rocky Mountains, and I'll think that sounds so cooool. I'll read an article about someone who devoted ten years to discovering and eating the root crops of the world, or became the state's unofficial expert on bats, or who wrote a book on a subject I briefly took a shine to and read two or three books about, and I'll get mopey for days, thinking that should have been me.


Whom do you envy? ask career counseling experts. It's a swift way to figure out what you want in life, or what you think is missing.


Well. What "whom do you envy?" doesn't help you answer is the next question, which is, "what are you going to do about it?"



I really don't know. For now, nothing. Embrace my inner dilettante, I suppose, while trying to stay the course on the project I started about nine and a half years ago, which is raising two kids with a reasonable amount of stability and attention. And dream of a day when I can, and hopefully will, hop into my car and call in sick whenever I hear of a great new...something, somewhere in the state.