love and fish soup

       My camera is terrible, but here's a 

         picture of tonight's dinner.  Fish head

    soup (I don't know if you can still make

 out the eye and jaw).  The head is

   surrounded by whole purple cabbage

     leaves.. I'm going to eat a tiny portion,

      but I'm not going to like it as much as

                  the beans and pigs feet that my husband cooked on Sunday.

My husband and I are about to celebrate the anniversary of our wedding.  14 years.  It's not a big deal around here.  None of that stereotypical wife, "How could you forget our anniversary? Sniff." Most years, we kind of ignore it - and he's as likely to remember it first as I am... often a few days after the day.

But, this year I actually considered surprising him with a real night out - maybe at the shore... Then, I did the search and made some calls.  Well, that sucks.  Our anniversary is so close to Valentines Day that everyone else is going down to the shore, and all the good rooms (with views and not too expensive) are booked.

Still, I may not have taken the room, but I am very grateful to have a terrific partner who I love very much.  (Oh, yeah, there have certainly been moments . . .  In the past, I've complained long and hard about Mr. Amazing Almost Invisible Woman.)  But, when you make it through all of those days, sometimes you're lucky enough to reach another level completely.  Now I'm beginning to see that the fish soup photo makes this post seem like a put-down of my partner - when it is really an ode to how love overcomes all!  Ain't love grand?

And NEVER say that people can't change.  I wouldn't accuse him of sexism - that would over-simplify so many things about him (and me), nevertheless, my husband is from a certain generation of a certain region (not urban or urbane, shall we say).  On top of that, from those roots he grew into an intellectual of sorts.  Good old old-fashioned gender divisions + disdain for material concerns = a guy who doesn't get housework.  He's totally consistent in this; if nobody else around the house is doing housework either, it doesn't even register with him... unless there are no clean socks/underwear or dishes. 

Over time, though, much to his family's surprise, he has begun to regularly do things around the house.

Be careful what you wish for... For example, he now cooks quite often.  I found an in-class writing assignment my son wrote in 8th grade about the worst meal he ever ate.  His father's split pea... um... split pea loaf?  split pea glue? split pea solid mass of ... of ?  It was really indescribable.  Nobody would ever accuse me of being quick to throw away food.  In fact, my older son witnessed so much food recycling in our house that he once suggested we save glass of flat coca-cola to make bread with.  The split peas called for different standards -- this was so bad that when my husband left the room, I gave the thumbs up to "operation trash can."  The next night, only my husband tried to eat them again.  That's one good thing; he would never dream of demanding that we eat his cooking.  He is a big believer in free-will, autonomy, separation of powers, etc.  Still, I try to make it the family meal (or integrate his dish into a family meal) because, if not, it's double labor - right?

And I'm jealous of my husband in a way.  Not everyone would agree (because he eats a lot of meat), but I think he has a much healthier diet than I do.  I mean, I simply can not gaze at a fish head and think, "Yummy!" the way he apparently can.

Oh, I can't resist one last compliment to the chef - he really has improved.  He used to make beans and pigs feet - and he'd cook the beans with the pigs feet.  Those suckers could practically walk by themselves (the mass of beans, I mean) because the pigs feet made the frijoles kind of like a jello dish.  Now, he's careful not to use too many feet, and he boils them first separately... I don't know - it's less heavy and the beans are very edible.

I'm sure I've made you all very hungry.

I'm looking at the man in the mirror...

Last night L and I had a minor argument, and L respected the rules in the sense that he didn’t raise his voice, didn’t insult, tried to speak reasonably, etc. BUT, as he struggled to listen to me, he made this face, this exaggerated attempt to maintain calm.  Closing his eyes...

No, I can’t describe it. Just closing the eyes isn’t enough; the rest of the face has to communicate what a huge, and PAINFUL, effort one is making to listen to the other person calmly.
As I looked at his expression, I realized that I was staring at myself. I have made that face. I’m guessing that I have used it in some discussion with L... How can I have been so horribly annoying? Because, trust me, with its exaggerated stoic suffering, that expression is designed to try the patience .

What have I wrought? I’m sorry to everyone who ever had to see that face – I can only hope that it has been restricted to my closest family who love me unconditionally.

And what was our disagreement about?
Yesterday I realized that L had lost his school agenda and I went out and got him a notebook that I set up as a new agenda. He was pretty good at accepting my advice to start using this. BUT then, when L went into his room, I picked up the new agenda as well as a notebook which he had left on top his backpack. It was full of his math work except for one sheet (half-done) for English class. When I asked him what the sheet was, he came out of his room and said, “Don’t go through my backpack.” He added that he KNEW that the English sheet was in the math notebook; that he’d put it there “on purpose, because he didn’t have the English notebook...”
The main point in L’s argument was that his backpack was off-limits to me. First I said that the math notebook had been sitting on top of the backpack but when he tried to repeat as a kind of ultimatum that his backpack was off-limits to me, I drew the line.
“No, L, as your mother, I can look at your backpack. While I respect your desire for independence and privacy, and I don’t often look through your backpack, I’m not accepting an ultimatum about this.” I asked him WHEN was the last time I looked through it? He seemed to think it had been recently – but truly – I really don’t. (The last time was over Christmas break, and even then I didn’t really go through it – I looked at one folder and then insisted that he clean his backpack and pull out all the dead weight of old papers etc).
So, in general, I leave it alone and trust him – as I told him --One: because I really do respect his views in this regard and, two: I’m so unorganized myself that I don’t feel as though my past attempts to intervene to establish a good system have ever been very successful. BUT...
and about here is when L. closed his eyes, rested his head on the back of the couch, and composed his features in that way...
I stopped talking, L. opened his eyes and said, “Go on.” When I started again, he closed his eyes.

So I did and I kept it short and sweet. “I know that he was aware of the English sheet in the math folder, but that he might not remember that fact later when he needed the sheet – So,  put it away.” I also had found homework and sheets in the past that he had been supposed to turn in, but couldn’t find – for example. “So, I was hoping to stress that coming up with a better system (his own) would save him from a lot of frustration and lost time in his life --i.e. I’m trying to save you from my fate,” sigh...

Lucas opened his eyes and got up... I can't remember; he might even have been trying to disguise his relief.

Requiem OR screen-time?

     Recently I got my son's second quarter report card and mid-term grades, and he has slipped a bit.  He's still a good student, but while first quarter we were close to straight-As... Well, now our son is a solid B+  student.  L says that it's all good because, since he's in honors classes, they'll add points to his grade point average.  He'll be a straight-A student anyway -  

     I don't want to go down the "you'll never get into that university with these grades" route.  And I could so easily see any sort of recrimination from his father and I turning into either a defensive argument or the loud clang of closing mental doors as L refused to listen to anything we had to say.  So, I decided to approach it positively; said we were proud of L, that he is a good student, but that this was a moment to reaffirm an old policy that somehow wasn't being implemented:  no video games from Monday to Thursday. 
     Seriously, when the year started that was supposed to be a policy, but anyone who knows my son knows he's a "gamer."  In my opinion, although he has never consistently played long long hours, he is an "addict."  That sounds judgmental, but it isn't - I just mean that video games give him some very deep emotional reward and, thus, he craves them. 
     When the year started and L was on the soccer team, there was no need to restate the M-Th gaming black-out.  The kid was incredibly devoted to the team - never missed practice - even pulled his friends out of bed on Saturdays to practice on their own.  He was exhausted, but he was doing it all - including schoolwork - with a remarkably positive attitude.
     After soccer ended, slowly but surely, the games came on during the week.  L would even bring kids home from school with him to play which made me  more tolerant.  Once, I found him home with friends on a day when I had warned him that I'd be home late.  hmmm.  Instead, I got home just a few minutes after school ended.  (That evening husband and I emphatically say to son: no friends in house if nobody is home...  But, seriously, it's another case of one of those "rules" that L chose to ignore until it was made very explicit and very emphatic... and now?  Is it now black and white enough for him?)

     Thus, it's not so ironic that after the incredibly intense first two months of the school year ended, my son began to fail to turn in homework...   When I belatedly realized that there was a homework issue, I just said that if there were any more missed assignments, I'd put the "nintendo in a box."  There weren't any more problems - but the report card... like I said. 
     So, no more gaming during the week, and L. took it well.

     Still he has more freedom than his older brother did to play at least at this age.  That is, if chores are done on the weekend, I try to let him have some autonomy over what he does.  TRY being the key word.  It's always a struggle for me.  Now, to make things worse, he started doing a social networking site (which I refuse to name here) and that's another chunk of time that gets sucked up in front of a screen.
                    I CAN'T STAND IT!
     My resolve to let him make these decisions for himself snaps.  I snap, "You just spent hours playing! You can't (blah blah)  It's bad for you!"  I'll say, "You have five minutes."  Then, 7 minutes later, I'll go up the stairs and just turn off the modem to cut the internet connection.  Ha ha - our kids think we are incredibly ignorant because we have this dinosaur internet system, but having these technical limitations on how much internet anyone can use is a real blessing in a way.  In our house, only one of us can connect to the internet at a time.

      Bottom line: I'm torn between the guilt of why can't I let my son be(?) and why do I allow too much gaming/screen-time(?).   The former means asking myself, "Am I turning my son into someone who will play constantly when he no longer has supervision because, by my taking that decision out of his hands, he develops a deep Pavlovian response to the use of his time: freedom = NOT getting up from the screen?" (Gasp - a long question for the guilt-ridden.)
     BUT... there's another part of me arguing, "His brain is so elastic now, you have to create conditions for him to 'program it' to do different things! Make him turn off!"
     For example, on Saturday evening, when I finally cut him off (I had been in the city all day), he sat down at the piano to learn a new piece (Requiem for a dream).  On Sunday, when I snapped, he went back to the song and practiced it over and over.  One part of me wonders, would he have devoted all that energy to the song, had I allowed him to make the choice?  It's not like I'm sure of the answer, but there's an image  ...
     (When they make the movie this should come after a special effect that shows the screen get all shimmery so everyone realizes it's a dream) At 11:11 pm, L rubs his blood-shot eyes - the dark rings under his eyes are silent testimony to sleep deprivation.  He finally realizes that it's late and he's stiff and groggy from having sat at the screen all those hours - and, even though he downloaded the music to the song, he decides to leave it for another day...  then another... Eventually he decides to take an axe to the piano in his room to fit a t.v. and gaming system in there.  Oh, God, it's so tragic!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Back to reality. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
     Last night, when he got home from a Sunday evening choir practice after 9p.m., he ran up to our bedroom (we have the computer) and got on line.  I was really firm, "No, L, you can't log-on...NO, absolutely not..." and L just ignored me. I let it go when he said that he wanted me to listen to Requiem for a Dream.
        His father came up, and sat back down to work, but didn't stop the song and L was soooo into this music, playing air violin, singing, pacing.  (The air violin, by the way, is hilarious - almost as funny as his dad's face as he tried to do serious work on the computer with the screen blasting out this music and L belting it out behind him).
     In my enthusiasm for his enthusiasm, I said that we should get the movie from Netflix... L told his father to put in on our queue.  This morning I looked it up, and it is really really intense and full of adult situations.  Sure, it has an anti-drug message - but it sounds pretty traumatic.  Shit - now I have to stall (for a year or two) or find a way to get that song so that I can get out of ordering the movie.  You see, I'm just incapable of a laid-back attitude.  I'm destined to try to fight this losing battle over control.

Are artists "special"?

I have a visitor (we'll call him or her "Tom") who's in town for an art conference.  This morning he did something quite remarkable. 
He put a couple of spoonfuls of salt into his coffee and drank half the cup.  Only then did he point to a container on the table and ask me, "Is this salt?"
Ha ha ha! 
Okay - I admit, I'm being unfair to poor "Tom" when I laugh at him, because most people put salt in salt shakers and sugar in large containers with spoons (at least on the table).  So, visitors be warned - we are not strong on logic in this house...

Still, it's very remarkable that he drank half the cup! 


P.S. Again, I'm being unfair to the artist. The coffee hadn't been hot enough when he drank it and a lot of the salt was still sitting at the bottom of the cup when I rinsed it out.  It probably wasn't all that salty until he got half-way through.

P.P.S. I apologize to anyone who read this post hoping for a discussion on the nature of artists...

rites of passage

    About three weeks ago I hurt my back sweeping snow. Yes, I was pushing the snow off my front porch steps with a broom when it happened. It was too much snow for a broom, perhaps, but it shouldn’t have been too much snow for my back. Then, yesterday, I moved a heavy box that daughter V had left on the front porch and, twang, I felt something.

     One painful incident means hmmmm.... But two? There is no escaping the division of my life into pre- and post-twang.

     Picture a very cool old dresser sitting on the side of the road about a block from my house, SIX drawers and old enough to have some character (rounded front, carved) and some weight. The pre-twang me, picked that dresser up and put it in the back of her station wagon (somehow – without closing the hatch, of course. That foolish person got the dresser out of the car, up the five front porch steps, up the narrow steps to our attic room... Later, the idiot (yes, me) would get this dresser back down the stairs and even farther - down the rickety stairs into our basement. All of this, with absolutely no help.

     That’s the sort of thing I was doing at forty and even after.

     Okay, I know it was stupid, an accident waiting to happen. (Can you say, heavy furniture through the wall?) But I could lift and move and push and roughhouse pretty much without thinking about it. Now, that me is gone.

     This got me thinking about “rites of passage” and remembering how I felt when my mother died. Even though I wasn’t incredibly close to her, her death was a turning point in my life: all the difficult trips to see her; the unfamiliar need to worry about her; watching her labored breathing; sitting in doctors' offices and hospitals, managing medications; after she died, the tension when my step-father got a bit paranoid as we helped him clean out the condominium, worried, it seems, that my sisters and I would take his things.

    

     After those long months, I began to see the world as divided into two groups, those who had lost a parent and those who hadn’t. I know it isn’t really a “rite of passage,” but it so felt that way to me. A lot of the people I spoke to would share some of their stories and something seemed to unite us as a group. It’s not about how much we loved and miss the parent who died (because, face it, that isn’t universal).  Anyway, this isn't the post to talk about grief. 

     As I think about it, the conversations I had really focused not on love or grief per se, but upon how physically and emotionally taxing the whole experience had been for us and for our families.   It is hard to escape the only thing that really ties this diverse group of people together; this hole in the family tree somehow pulls us up into a new generation. Nature abhors a vacuum.     It is that kind of uncontrollable shift in the universe. Not so much a rite as a tectonic shift that takes us, ready or not.

                                                                                        twang

Conversacion en La Catedral

     Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel prize, and a few months later this book (Conversación en La Catedral) came to me through a sad circumstance.  It was a book I'd always meant to read and this settled it.  I was predicting a hard slog, but it's really a novel.  As of page 287, I'm engrossed and recommend it enthusiastically.
     The first book I ever read in Spanish, just for pleasure, was La tia Julia y el escribidor (also by Vargas Llosa).  The novel fills H (husband) with a sense of nostalgia because he remembers the radio plays and the culture of the book's setting.  For me, the nostalgia is about thinking of how little I understood about anything when I read that book at twenty.  But, anyway, I liked it.
      Too bad for Vargas Llosa (ha ha) that I also read  La niña mala - which I thought was ... I don't know .... almost perfunctory.  It seemed to be a kind of Latin American Forest Gump one life through history.  It feels unfair to say this because, for all I know, it was a very personal kind of chronicle of the author's era.
      Lo siento, Sr. Vargas Llosa.
     It makes me feel a bit better to add what Zadie Smith said yesterday on an interview in NPR.  She was saying that book critics who are also novelists, as opposed to those who are only literary critics, have a better sense of how a BAD book happens.  I can't do justice to her explanation, but the idea is clear I think: the author is incapable of seeing what she has created at first.  Only years later does the author have the necessary distance to read her own book.  I think for very successful authors there must be a real danger of this because they aren't obligated to listen to anybody tell them that they've gone astray with book X or Y. 
      That is, the fact that La niña mala was mediocre is almost to be expected.  These things happen, according to Zadie Smith, and the successful author faces a particular peril according to me (and who knows how many others). 
     Here's another group who (which?  that?) can write as badly as we want: bloggers with no readers - which is why I'm going to spend hours toiling over this last line...  Oh God.  Must prevail.  So profound my thoughts.

       He who struggleth not, knows but plastic roses.  As these can never bring forth his blood, no chemical                   perfume therein can bring true pleasure.

I'm considering this more symbolically charged version (a bit more obtuse)

       He who hath ne'er struggled, knows but plastic roses. As these exact not his beating red tears,
              no essence of this imitation of nature's beauty can truly gratify.

Is "red beating tears" (i.e. blood) better than beating red tears?  I went with the latter because the "red beating" part started to sound like McCarthyists to me.  God, great writing is a burden.