Farewell, Aeneas

Helen as Dido

For those of you not following my reading updates in the column at the right, we just passed a small but momentous milestone: I finally finished the Aeneid, approximately 13 months after I began reading it. While I am thrilled to have finished it, and of course I am vastly more cultured and classically read and et and cetera and am relishing my new found appreciation for all things Virgilian--I am mostly glad to be done. I am not one of those who subscribe to the idea of cutting your losses when it comes to books, as you can see. I hold on to the bitter end, and I take my enjoyment from the sense of liberation that follows. Ahhhh.

My workshop comments for Virgil: wow! You have lots of vivid imagery and great characters, but consider spending less time on the battlefield. Also, I didn't really believe that Dido would kill herself over the bland-o Aeneas. Try rewriting from Dido's point of view.

Ha ha, I kid. Although I did get tired of being constantly introduced to new characters and their distinguished ancestors only to have them sliced in half in the next line.

Common misconceptions about the Aeneid which I am now qualified to dispel:

1. The Aeneid is the Roman Odyssey.

No. The Aeneid just borrows heavily from the Odyssey. Aeneas is a completely different character than Odysseus. He's much duller, for one, and he fought on the opposite team. Also, his wife is dead. If Virgil can be accused of plagiarizing any of Homer's works, it's the Iliad. They both have similar bodycounts.

2. Dido is a tragic heroine.

No. Dido is just crazy, in a woman-written-by-a-man kind of way.

3. Virgil is prissy, derivative classic lit; blind oral tradition Homer is the real thing.

Actually, this one might be true. I'm not sure that oral tradition isn't overrated, though.

4. Virgil's poetic vision was compromised because he was writing for The Man.

Again, probably true. I like to think that Dido could have had a better role if she wasn't supposed to prove that Octavian was right to pursue war against Cleopatra. Also, surely those endless lists of now-you've-met-them, now-they're-dead warriors owe something to Virgil's attempt to write all the important Romans into the poem, yearbook style.

5. The Aeneid is much better if you read it in high school or college.

True. Manifestly.

Blooming

The nectarine tree is full, rich bloom, and while I can only sigh with pleasure at its abundance of creamy pink blossoms, part of me wants to whisper tactfully that it miiiiight want to wait a little next year. Our average frost-free date is two months away. Slow down, buddy.

In other news I've been researching small homemade greenhouses. What's a little coddling between friends, after all, especially if that coddling results in nectarines? Nothing. Nothing at all. I wouldn't think twice about coddling a tomato--why should a tree be any different?

Beautiful. And doooomed.

(For perspective, to look at our lawn you wouldn't think I thought much of coddling at all. Or home maintenance, for that matter.)

Speaking of coddling, we've been experiencing an unusual reversal at home in terms of which child has been receiving the Most Difficult to Tolerate Award most days. For years, our high-scorer in that category was the oldest, hands-down. Screaming fits about routine tasks, like fingernail clipping and the weekly bath? Check. Back talk? Check. Throwing body to the floor weeping in response to missed homework or the potential thereof? Check. Bossiness, oversensitivity, meltdowns that took over the house, sheer random acts of shittery? Check, check, check and check. But lately--and by lately I mean the past six months or more--the youngest has been making steady gains and now the Most Likely to Interrupt Dinner/ Get a Time Out/ Receive a Stern Talking-to During a Playdate has been H for several months running. Of course, her style is different from her older brother. Her policy toward homework is: if I like it, I'll do it. Attempt to convince her that something else is worth doing and hoo boy. Look out. (I admire that in a kid, especially regarding homework.) Routine upkeep is not an issue. She rarely has full-on, drop-down, scream-the-house-down tantrums. But! Good lord, the bossiness. She bosses everyone. Parents, friends, Romans, countrymen. Not teachers, I think. Not yet. Hence her popularity at school. But try to gently correct her course of action ("Sweetheart! It's time for dinner! Go wash your hands!") and she will stop in her tracks and scream at you. Last week she yelled at me in front of her entire soccer team because I was bringing two tupperwares full of apple slices instead of one. You can see that there are other factors at work--this sort of breakdown is not really characteristic and I think that like most of us she'd prefer to stay poised before an audience--but a little bit of performance pressure just fries any sort of ability she has to modulate her response. I sympathize, even as I hiss at her to stop it, already, it's just two tupperware, for god's sake.

Recent neighborhood visitor. Not coddled.

Silas, on the other hand, has retreated from some of his characteristic need to control. M. surmises that it's a developmental stage, the ability to relinquish the need to Control Everything, and Si has reached it (while H still struggles mightily.) I remember the days when Si would go through the cards prior to playing, say, Candyland, and arrange them in the exact order for one player to have a perfect game (orange first, so you get to cross the Rainbow Bridge). Or when he would throw a fit because his cousin just. would. not. put the Legos together in the proper order. He hasn't quite attained the art of the imperturbable Zen smile in the face of chaos, of course--we're all, uh, working on that one--but he's just on average more pleasant to be around. Usually reasonable! Mostly helpful! Easy to predict!

Right now his all-baseball-all-the-time schedule seems to be working in his favor (at which I am surprised and very, very grateful). He comes home from practice bright and energized, and except for his unfortunate reluctance to take a shower immediately, or *cough* at all, what seems on the surface to be overscheduling is apparently meeting most of his needs for activity, focus and attention. He does his homework. He sets the table (I even found myself looking up, at his request, the proper order of silverware in the Joy of Cooking the other day. Now there's a piece of knowledge I hadn't anticipated using. Like, ever.) He loads the dishwasher. He sets his watch timer and goes to play his allotted 40 minutes of Wii without complaining of its brevity or saying things like But I've looked forward to this ALL DAY. He comes back up and sits companionably beside us as we watch Portlandia or March Madness. I ask if he wants me to read him and he says, "I guess," in a hopeful way.

It's so very nice and reminds me of how all the childhood books say that at ten years old you have the personality you will have when the nonsense of the teen years are done. You are your real self, in other words. This makes me cast my mind back to being ten: what was my personality in fourth grade? While I can state with certainty what my likes and dislikes were, I can't really put a finger on my personality. Kind of a peacemaker, overall? Loyal to my small but sufficient group of friends and uninterested in anybody else? A bit dreamy, a bit vague? Occasionally self-aggrandizing and confident in my classification as a Smart Person, but lacking the snappy comeback or spunky smart-aleckiness to make this evident to anyone else. I guess those are personality traits, and they're pretty consistent today.

This also makes me remember with a wistful sigh how our fourth-grade teacher made us all decorated blown eggs at the end of the year. On the eggshell she'd drawn a picture of us as a grownup, engaged in our predicted profession. She'd predicted I would be a botanist, and I'm shown with a big smile and a test tube. This is one of those memories that makes me think I've missed my calling, somewhere. I was supposed to stay on the path, take all those specialized plant id classes, and end up writing papers on the role of pollen protein folding in the plant reproductive strategy or some such. Instead I stepped out too soon and ended up just editing those papers: it still feels like a disappointment. Like I've let myself down.

Then I remind myself that I haaate lab work. I hate the smell of all those chemicals and having to use the hood and spending all of a summer's day indoors checking on the deterioration of plants in response to some poisonous chemical. That's why I stepped off the path. That and a million other reasons. I'd much rather be out in the dirt, whispering advice to an early-blooming nectarine or staring at the ground, wondering whether the kale seeds are going to come up this year or not.

Home from home

So Helen are back from our awesome adventurr!!!1! and after a few days of shock & outrage that we are actually expected to get up before 9, we seem to be back on track.

It's been 19 years since I claimed Ohio as my permanent address, which means that Colorado has been my home state for longer than the Buckeye state, but part of me is still based on the equation that Ohio = home. This despite the fact that I am surprised when the radio there plays non-80s music (you mean they've heard of Lady Gaga here, too?)

Obviously, my homing instinct is based largely on the presence of these good folks:

Helen, grandparents & her new monkey. Not pictured: the inaugural photo series featuring monkey.

It also has something to do with leafy deciduous forests and briars and poison ivy and cardinals and old cornfields grown up with cedar trees. I'm never adverse to visiting the Big City, of course, and it has its delights. We visited the art museum, ran boisterously along the splendidly redone waterfront and wandered the cute and quaint Mt Adams neighborhood. We ate dinner in a kiln at the Rookwood Pottery. It was fun, but then we drove home, and that was still the best part.

This is the kind of neighborhood that makes me forget I don't like living in cities.

I'm always comforted to get back to my parents' house and the woods around it. I like to think that my kids will always have this little piece of outdoors that feels like theirs, that they've known and roamed around on since they were small. At one point I kind of hoped to give them that in Colorado, except that a) not the right tax bracket and b) just the thought of a second home and all the extra painting, scraping, winterizing, vacuuming, etc, that would entail makes me want to lie down and cry.

Two hours after an all nighter on the plane, Helen grabbed an umbrella and dragged my Dad out into the Woods. That's my kind of child.

Sometimes I think about how, someday, I won't actually have a home base in Ohio anymore. The thought panics me a little, and not just for the obvious reasons (although those are there, too). It makes me want to rush out and buy up old farming properties. Which, hahaha, no. Not the kind of second home I was thinking, thanks. 

It's also a trip to take my offspring to things like the Maple Sugar Festival at Hueston Woods, which has not changed one iota since 1978. I even bought the same soft crumbly maple sugar candy at the end. (And I'm not alone; other grownups on the tour, including a woman my age with a son well into his twenties AND a two-year-old daughter and quite a few in between--I am strenuously resisting the urge to tut, And THAT'S why left this town, folks--was reminiscing about the maple sugar candy from when she used to go as a child.)

Tastes like water.

Same trees, same buckets, same sugaring off house.

Meanwhile, on the home front, this:

M. took five different photos of Si in the pitcher's wind-up, and in every one he has the same expression. It's uncanny.

One of many. Baseball season has officially begun: four practices a week and up to six games. I start to feel sorry for myself and then I remember poor Silas is required to attend it all.

A time to sow

It's been so grim and snowy this week that it's hard to remember, exactly, but this past weekend was sunny and warm so we planted seeds. Well, some of us planted seeds. Others went skiing.

[insert stock photo of skiing in the cloudy gray snow here]

First we went to the plant store, where in addition to seed-starting soil I was somehow convinced to buy a houseplant. Do you know what we need? Not house plants. But after looking at every. single. thing. in the blessed store, my resistance was worn down. Also, frank admission: plants and books are the two things to which I am unable to say no in a retail situation. Related: we also came home with kale seeds. Where, exactly, will I be planting these seeds? No idea. But it was that new (to me) dinosaur kale. I couldn't resist.

As we were driving away, Helen perked up and said that she was just happy because she'd finally gotten a pet. She wanted to get a mouse that day and, indeed, I can testify: she was very, very mad about the non-mouse situation about 45 minutes earlier. But now, she said, she was okay, because she had Cactey.

Helen's new pet. I think it qualifies as my Favorite Kid Pet EVAH.

Long live Cactey!

And also Cacto. He has two bodies.

Afterwards, we put the seed-starting soil into trays. "We," I say. Helen put in two scoops, decided it was too messy, and went off to introduce Cactey to her toys.

Ready for seeds. Possibly the most boring picture ever.

She was also only interested in putting her own seeds into her own pots, although I have to say, even though she is seven and much less likely these days to knock everything to the floor, I really prefer it that way. I'm all for introducing children to the miracle of planting in theory, but when the seeds hit the pots it turns out that I actually don't like to relinquish control. I have similar problems sharing the joys of baking.

Here come the seeds.

She planted pansies. I planted two kinds of basil, four kinds of tomato, lovage, summer savory, leeks, and marjoram. A few of these seeds were bought for our very first garden, back in 1998, and while I'm unable to throw them out they usually end up just fertilizing the pots for another round of another type of seed. Their viability's not what it used to be. I try to plant a lot, partly to improve the chances of germination and partly to just use them up so I can start over.

No, I don't watch that show Hoarders. Why do you ask?

Helen also went to a birthday at Canvas and Cocktails. I'm not sure what kind of cocktails they served but she did come home with a canvas:

Still life with painter.

Detail. Note the black widow on your right (crawling up the stem).

On Monday Si got very grumpy and wanted M. to take Helen to gymnastics, while he and I got to stay home alone. So I can watch you play Wii? I asked without the faaaintest hint of bitterness. He nodded gloweringly. I ended up forgoing that pleasure, but did promise that the two us would do something just the two of us, very soon. I also am trying one last reading-aloud book with him (The Sword in the Stone). He tolerates this so long as it doesn't interfere with his own reading time. That works for me.

Home at Last

"The light is so rich outside," I said to Helen last night as we pulled down the blinds in the front room. "Don't you think the light is so rich?"

She just kind of nodded at me, preoccupied. The blinds are a technical challenge that don't really admit distractions like mom nattering on about the light. But really: it snowed yesterday during the night, after a day of heavy wind that threatened to keep my plane in the air, circling, bumpily, forever, while my house was down there, just right there, and I couldn't get to it; and as night fell, the snow was this deep royal blue and the trees and sidewalks and streets were almost violet. The lights on behind us in the house and superimposed over the deep blue snow were a homey yellow brown and it was so calm and beautiful I wanted to stay in that light forever. However, there was dinner to make, and spelling tests to prepare for, and et cetera et cetera, and when I turned around again it was night and everything outside was invisible.

So: it is good to be home. The kids really missed me this time, especially Silas, which caught me by pleasant surprise. Sometime I think he doesn't really miss anything except his Wii, during those long, long hours he is forced to be at school or asleep, and indeed, one of the stories he was anxious to share when I came to say goodnight was how he rented Modern Warfare Three from the Redbox at King Soopers (ye gods--really, must we go there? Modern Warfare? Isn't that for 16-year-olds?). It's been nice these first few days home to be not rushed, too, so I haven't been snappish at all. That part has been so nice that it's made me wonder if snappishness is something I could actually give up, like, for good. I mean, it's not like it accomplishes anything, and it's not like being rushed as a state of being is really enhanced by also shrieking at people to get their teeth brushed, now, unless you want your teeth to fall out of your head. Hm.

The work trip went fine. I managed meetings and booth duty and sessions and socializing without undue melancholy; I ate some terrific food and went on long runs along the waterfront and tipped the maid appropriately (this is always something I agonize over). I saw the Gum Wall and had tea and crumpets and bought 3 pounds of smoked salmon at the Pike Street Mall. I kept up on typing my meeting notes and came away with a list of action items that was invigorating but not overwhelming. And I read a lot. I finished The Sense of an Ending (blew my mind, a little, although I still prefer Flaubert's Parrot and I'm not sure I ever really had the narrator's back, so to speak) and Heavenly Questions (this one did blow my mind and I'm still amazed that this little blue book can hold so much inside of it). I cried over the tsunami parts in Lives Other Than My Own but otherwise this assemblage of reading material was not as sad as I expected it to be. The essays in Pulphead (by, correction, John Jeremiah Sullivan) are fantastic and humbling--the first few are just good writing, plain and simple (or complex and delicious, David-Foster-Wallace-style, without the desperation), and then he gets into scholarship, for the love of god, and it turns out he's good at that, too, and it kind of makes you reassess your own talents and wonder why, exactly, you don't bring half this energy to your own work? Also, I really want to visit some Midwestern cave paintings, now. And listen to Robert Johnson.

And under all of it, real life. The sword of Damocles that hangs over us all. I'm not forgetting. I just don't like to talk about it.

The city of rain and fog and coffee

Yes, that IS a tiger costume.

In a few hours it will be daylight and I will go get on a plane and fly to Seattle. This is a trip for work; it's the big annual event that everyone stresses over and plans for and prepares for. I assess my level of stress right now: moderate. It feels less like stress and more like "I have forgotten what it is like to ever sit down." Which is true. It seems like I spent most of my twenties either hiking through the mountains,  trying to figure out how I could be hiking through the mountains, or lounging around. With a heavy emphasis on the latter. Now I'm not even sure how it's done. Wait, you mean I just sit here? Like this? On the couch or what--a chair? Does this look right? Shouldn't I be picking things up or making someone some food?

At the far end of the plane ride there will be rain, and (presumably) seafood, and a lonely hotel room for which I'm simultaneously longing and dreading, and coffee shops. Oh, and lots and lots of meetings. I meant to buy a new suit of clothes for the meeting, something that actually resembled a suit, but on Wednesday, which was the last-minute day I had set aside for the task, I couldn't face driving through the rush hour traffic to the mall. Or trying on suits, or looking at price tags. Especially that last one. So I will be wearing what I usually wear, with some extra snuggly warm things thrown in. I'm assuming I will be cold and damp the whole time, although I don't really mind cold and damp. I also kind of thought about buying some makeup, but--well, that's just too complicated. I haven't bought makeup for twenty years. So I will be my usual slightly faded self.

After careful consideration, I whittled down my bringalong books to five.

1. Pulphead, Jeremiah Sullivan. Essays. Just came in from the library.
2. Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrere. Another library hold item that came in just in time to go.
3. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes.
4. Heavenly Questions, Gjertrud Schanckenberg. Poems.
5. Masque of Africa, V.S. Naipaul. Just renewed this for a third time so I could bring it along and maybe actually get a toehold in it.

So: hipster essays, memoir of the 2004 tsunami, a novel about death, poems about becoming a widow. Naipaul's book is the only one that won't make me want to hole up in a bar and howl. Well, luckily it's the fattest.

I'm still on the fence about whether Lewis and Clark will come. I'm getting rather fond of them both, with Lewis's continual but competence-induced fretting ("a terible calamity , the last thermometer got broaken and that was the most uceful pece we owned I beggan to dispair") and Clark's untroubled report of events ("horse fell 32 feet doan the montan was hurt verry bad destroyed my desk. shot 3 deer 6 elk a white bear") and the deliciously awful spelling. However, I'm near the weight limit for my baggage and my copy of the book is very fragile.

Well, daylight is almost here and I have a quick run to fit in and a shower and a hairwash. I may try to bring the camera, although I fear I'll be cramping Helen's creative output if I do so.

Snow Day

When I went for my run this morning, a huge yellow moon hung low over all the houses, an ethereal visitation that made the boring old neighborhood feel like a magical city on another planet. It helped that it's been snowing a lot this week, so the neighborhood is prepped to feel otherworldly and strange. But it got me thinking, as I ran down Caley, trying to remember to watch my feet, about the spirit of place, the senseness of things.

I'm often mindful of the spirit of the place this used to be. I'll put myself to sleep at night imagining the grassy barren plains that used to stretch from horizon to horizon where my neighborhood is now. I'll think of yucca and Bouteloua grass and rabbitbrush and sage and how lonely and calm this exact spot once was; sometimes I'll pretend it's still like that, under the streets and the houses and the garbage cans out for weekly pickup. It relaxes me.

But I'm not often mindful of what's here now. That's partly because I don't have to: it's here, with that dog barking two streets over at five a.m. and the snowplows going through in the night and the vague distant hum of I-25, a mile away. It's neither lonely nor calm. It's here, and if I think of it at all I soon slip into particularities of specific people and specific routines and how I need to remember to put the recycling out in the morning and we really should have the neighbors over for dinner again and have I checked that spot on the front sidewalk that ices up, lately? I get distracted.

But with that moon hanging low and beautiful over everything this morning, I did start to sense the spirit of the neighborhood itself. It's a head-down, eyes-on-your-own-work kind of place, older and shabbier than most of the surrounding neighborhoods but still prosperous, with flashes of wild longing for something else. It's cozy and well-stocked, with an occasional need of a good airing. This is a neighborhood where half the people park on the street because their garages are full. It has a hive-y, warren-y, connected feeling. Not perfect, not idyllic, not the kind of place you'd dream of living if you were a kid growing up in Ohio--but comfortable. Not bad.

It's been a busybusy two weeks. While I was flopping all over the place bellyaching about Si and his lack of interest in a second language or possibly even a first (relieved/mixed feeling update: he accepted my offer of compensation for education and he will be taking Spanish in the fall), I was up to my panicked elbows in organizing a before-school Spanish class at school for my other child. This is far and away the most involved I have ever gotten as a parent in the affairs of the school; while I'm a genial attender of meetings and enjoyable school fundraisers and have even helped to "host" an event or two (this mostly entails following some other mother's pleasantly detailed instructions on which fruit to buy where), I'm the sort of parent who would really rather mop the floors of the school, twice, with a toothbrush, than walk in and ask a business to sponsor Muffins with Mom. And they already have a janitor, so.... Plus my eyes start to glaze over when other parents start getting excited about how many thousands of dollars were raised at the auction or how great it is that every child has a smart board of his or her own. But! A Spanish class. That I can get behind. I'm even talking about trying to organize a summer Spanish camp, which, I suspect, involves levels of organizational perseverance and salesmanship that I simply do not possess. However. Busybusy, and I can say with relief that the class has left the ground.

In other project news, I got all het up by The Wild Table and went foraging last week before the snow fell. I'm very proud of my haul:

That's at least 6 oz of premium January sour dock, right there.

I found some dock--sour dock? curly dock? some other kind of dock? not sure--growing on the sunny south-facing side of an irrigation ditch, and later went back and cut a bunch, along with some dandelion greens growing nearby. It felt reasonably back-to-the-land-ish and adventuresome, although also "I'm a forty-year-old-mom-trying-to-pretend-I-know-what-I'm-doing"ish. There was also a carpet of a delicious-smelling umbelliferae plant growing in the ditch, and although it smelled as though it might be addictively rich like arugula I thought it might also be deadly water hemlock. So I passed.

Dock was the first wild plant I ever went out and harvested and tried to eat--I think I was in college at the time, and I want to say I made quiche. Is that even possible? According to all the guidebooks, dock tastes like spinach and could thus be used, theoretically, in a faux spinach quiche. I don't even like quiche, though. I guess I might not have known that yet.

In any case, both then and now, I have to say: dock kinda tastes like leaf. Not like a yummy lettuce or spinach leaf, either. Just: leaf. Endlessly sourish and leafish. It's the kind of wild food that might make one abandon eating wild food for twenty years, in fact.

Not that it didn't taste great when stir fried in olive oil with garlic:

Those look like eggs but they're garlic.

But I think the take-home message from that recipe is that you could fry grass clippings in olive oil and garlic and they would taste great.

So. I haven't given up on the wild food yet, but I think I'll wait until later in the year, when there are plants that are actually good growing out there.