Life's A Streak Run

An ordinary Sunday

2012-02-13T10:48:00.001-05:00

Just an ordinary Sunday.

After breakfast, I ran three miles. Not a particularly impressive distance, but it was 14 degrees out as I headed out the door. Three miles was all I could brace myself to do, and it was enough. Day 1646 of my running streak.

At church, I was prepared to teach Sunday school, but none of my students showed up, which is not unusual during ski season. So instead, I was able to attend the sermon given by our impressive student minister.

After church I stopped by my parents’ house. Mom gave me a batch of brownies to take home, and I showed her how to transfer an audiobook onto her iPod so she could listen to it in the car.

Back home, the kids had just finished unloading the dishwasher. True, I had left a note before I went to church specifically asking them to do that, so I wasn’t surprised, but it was still nice to return home to a partially cleaned-up kitchen.

My friends Jane and Donna came over to join me for a walk in the woods. We bundled up against the cold – typical for February, but not typical for this particular winter – and headed out planning to walk for an hour, but we were having such a good time being out in the woods and talking about a variety of issues that we stayed out for an hour and twenty minutes. Then we came home and ate the chocolate cookies that Tim had asked me to make earlier in the weekend.

Later in the afternoon I read the paper for a while and mixed up a batch of vegetarian chili for weekday lunches before heating up dinner: leftover pizza contributed by my parents, who had stopped by a new pizza parlor late last week. Over dinner, the four of us joked about Valentine’s Day ideas and made plans for Rick’s upcoming birthday. Tim and Holly played a video game together before bath time.

It wasn’t a holiday or a travel day or a day when we did anything very unusual. It was an ordinary day. And yet absolutely wonderful in its ordinariness. The life I live now is the life I dreamed of living when I was in my twenties and thirties: happy, well-adjusted kids and husband, comfortable inviting house, good friends, welcoming community, parents nearby. Getting paid for writing articles and essays. Being able to head out the back door for a walk in the woods any time I want to is the icing on the cake.

These are the kinds of weekend days the kids will remember, I think to myself as the day ends. Yes, they’ll remember vacations and special occasions, but also the days when we mostly just hang around enjoying each other’s company. Pizza for dinner; a video game or two; nothing spectacular. An ordinary day. I look back at my own childhood and remember similar days: listening to records, playing with the dog, maybe a board game or a ping-pong match with my sisters. Regular daily life.

But such a happy reality, then and now. Sure, special events make for great memories, and those are the ones that end up in the photo album: family trips, birthday parties, class plays, enormous snowmen, sand castles, baseball championships. We didn’t take any pictures yesterday; it didn’t occur to us that any of it was worth photographing, and we were probably right.

Perfectly ordinary days are difficult to capture in images: what would the composition of the photo actually consist of? Fortunately, the requirements for good memories aren’t quite so stringent.

Motivational words from a 13-year-old

2012-02-10T10:01:00.002-05:00

I find words of inspiration in so many places. The works of Shakespeare. The journal entries of Thoreau. The poetry of t.s. eliot and Mary Oliver. Essays by Barbara Kingsolver. Church sermons and motivational speeches. But earlier this week, it was the words of a 13-year-old from Belmont that made me reverse course and do the right thing.

The crux of my role as library volunteer coordinator is to ensure that I’ve scheduled one or two volunteers to cover each classroom shift in the school library to assist the full-time librarian. Usually it all goes smoothly until winter hits, and then random viruses, extemporaneous vacations and bad weather cause my volunteers to start dropping like flies, at which point it becomes my responsibility to step in and do it myself.

In this case, it wasn’t even a last-minute call. This particular volunteer had let me know two days in advance that she couldn’t cover her shift. I’d already depleted all my library substitute resources for the week, so I told her not to worry about it; I could cover it myself. I put it on my Google calendar and promptly forgot about it.

When the ten-minute warning alarm sounded on my iPhone midmorning, I couldn’t imagine what the warning was for. I was in the middle of drafting an article and was sure I didn’t have any appointments scheduled for the day. And it was still hours until I had to meet Holly’s bus.

But when I glanced at the screen on my phone, there it was: 11 a.m. library shift. I’d absolutely forgotten.

Can’t do it, I immediately told myself. Too busy. The school librarian can manage without me. She appreciates us volunteers helping out, but she won’t mind covering by herself this once. I won’t even tell her I was supposed to do it; I’ll just tell her that the usual volunteer had to cancel and I didn’t have anyone else to cover. She’ll never know that it was actually me who reneged on the commitment.

And then for some reason, I remembered an interview I’d done a few weeks ago. I was talking to a 13-year-old named Nelson about his decision to step forward and initiate a fundraiser for the genetic condition from which his brother suffers. This was a big step for this young man. He didn’t normally talk much about the fact that his brother was nonverbal and mobility-impaired. And in the particular group that was looking for a cause to support with a fundraiser concert – the 13-year-old’s afterschool music program – he was new and hardly knew any of the other kids yet.

There was no reason, he had previously thought, to discuss his personal life and talk about his brother’s difficult situation with them. For all they knew, his family life was just like theirs, and he was happy to keep it that way.

But then, he told me during our interview, a thought came to his head. If no one else knew about his brother, it was a sure thing that no one else was going to suggest dedicating their fundraiser to research for this condition. Nelson was the only person in the room who had the set of information necessary to propose this idea – and, he realized at that moment, if he didn’t do it, no one else would. Or, as he put it, “My philosophy is that if you’re the only person who can do something and you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. So I just went up there and talked.”

I thought of Nelson in the moments after my calendar alarm went off. True, I could get away with skipping library duty. No terrible consequence would come of it. On the other hand, I was the only one who knew it needed to be done. In this particular case, it was more my responsibility than anyone else’s in the entire world. Just as Nelson said, if I didn’t do it, it was a sure thing that no one else would.

So I went up to the library and did my volunteer shift. As always, it was easy and fun. Yes, it took an hour out of my workday, but somehow I managed to make up for it by the time the day was over. And Nelson was absolutely right: when you’re the only person who can do a thing, you’d darn well better do it.

Lesson learned, from the most unlikely of places. I love Nelson’s philosophy. It’s a quote you might never see in calligraphy on a wall hanging or inscribed in a book. But it was a fine reminder to me of how to do the right thing, and I feel sure that the words of Nelson Barnett will stay in my mind for a long time – and, I hope, ring out loud and clear once again the next time I’m in a dilemma about whether or not to step forward.

Amaryllis, unfolding

2012-02-08T10:29:00.001-05:00

When it arrived, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Strangely, there were no instructions attached. Just a medium-sized square cardboard box in our mailbox a week before Christmas.

It was a bulb, I could tell that much, in a festive if frangible gold-colored gilt flowerpot. And with it in the box was a dark chocolate torte, as well as a packing slip and a computer-generated card saying the gift was from my two Colorado aunts. I wondered whether that particular combination packaged together – a bulb in a gold flowerpot and a chocolate torte – was a regular catalog item or if my aunts had chosen to combine the two. Either way, it was a generous Christmas present.

I know a lot more about chocolate tortes than bulbs. And as it happened, we were having guests midweek. So I refrigerated the tightly wrapped cake for a few days and then sliced it into thin wedges and served it on our holiday dessert plates with a spoonful of whipped cream. Our guests loved it; I admitted regretfully that I hadn’t made it.

I told myself I’d do a little bit of online searching to find out how to take care of the bulb, which the packing slip informed me was an amaryllis. I’m not very skilled with plants under the best of circumstances, and bulbs, with their onion-y appearance and tendrils barely emerging from the dirt, are even more mysterious than ordinary house plants. I put it on the windowsill and gave it a small amount of water, after asking both my mother and my aunt how to care for it and having both of them tell me, “You’re either supposed to water bulbs or not water them, but I can never remember which.”

Though it was right on the kitchen windowsill facing toward the sunny back yard, I didn’t think much about the bulb. I gave it a little water every few days, with no idea as to whether I was hurting it or helping it. I neglected my resolution to do some online research and find out how to take care of it.

And then in late January, the stem started to grow: a strong, pale green stalk extending straight up from the peculiar orb in the dirt. A bud formed on the end. And this morning, I noticed the bud was starting to open a tiny bit, revealing dark pink petals within.

The sight of this bud so very slowly flowering reminds me of when my children were born. First, the incredulity that anything was actually gestating at all, physical evidence to the contrary not withstanding. In the hospital while in labor for the first time, I saw the bassinet that the nurse had placed in the room and had a pang of surprise that she was so confident a baby was actually going to occupy that tiny crib by the time we were done. But sure enough, a baby did arrive soon enough, in both cases, and throughout the years ever since, I’ve been watching with wonder and curiosity as the bud slowly opens and the brilliantly colored petals of my children’s personalities emerge.

And of course then, as with the bulb, they arrived without printed instructions. I had to do my own research, and ask for advice, and figure it out by trial and error.

In a few days, we’ll have a fully flowering amaryllis on the windowsill, and it will remind me of mid-December and the arrival of a bulb that I really wasn’t sure how to take care of. Wondrous beings emerge from the plainest of containers. From this dull and oddly shaped brown bulb came a beautiful flower. Opening fully as it will just in time for Valentine’s Day, it will be our first hint of spring.

Super Bowl sentimentality

2012-02-06T10:27:00.002-05:00

I don’t normally look forward to the Super Bowl. It’s not that I lack affection for the Patriots; it’s the sport of football itself that leaves me indifferent.

But this year I found myself looking forward to the Big Sunday. Sometimes it takes a few years of repetition before I begin to recognize a ritual for what it is, but for the past five years or so, we’ve watched the game at the same house, attending a party that seems to double in size every year.

And although big parties aren’t always my favorite place to be, this one is special because the guest list is loosely centered around the families of Tim’s wide circle of casual friends: the boys with whom he’s played baseball, sat in class, played at recess, and attended birthday parties for the past seven years or so.

It’s a group of people – parents and kids alike – whom I generally really like. But more than that, this year for the first time I began to sense how transient this ritual might well turn out to be. Our boys have all hung out together or at least attended school and played on teams together over the past several years, but that probably won’t last too much longer. In another two years, they’ll start high school; those who go to the public high school will attend classes with three times as many kids from the neighboring town as from their own, and some will go to private schools nearby or even off to boarding school. They’ll still be happy to see each other and maybe they’ll become part of Carlisle’s traditional day-after-Thanksgiving soccer game, an event that typically draws together old friends after they’ve gone off to college. But this particular group of fifteen or twenty boys won’t make up Tim’s daily peer set anymore, and their parents won’t be such a regular part of my life either.

I find that hard to face, but in a way this sentiment is very much in keeping with how I’ve been feeling ever since the start of the school year: Everything is perfect so please stop the clock right now. Both of the kids are happy and well-adjusted, with a healthy mix of social, recreational and academic interests. Holly is finally past the mercurial stages that can make the early years of school difficult; Tim isn’t yet thinking about SAT scores or learning to drive. This, right now, fourth and seventh grade, this is perfect. This is where I would freeze us, if I could.

And so as I began coring peppers and mixing filling for the tray of chilis rellenos I was bringing to the Super Bowl party, I thought of the other parents whose presence in my life I had taken for granted for so long: from the sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-tedious days of toddler playgroups, to the continuous birthday party circuit of their early grade school years, to the spring and summer baseball games at which we spend so much time gabbing. Even as I recognized all the specific privileges that my parenting circumstances afforded me – a friendly and safe community full of like-minded families with similar priorities – I indulged once in a while in twinges of boredom, admitting to myself if no one else that I’d rather be reading a book or working on an article than attending another library sing-along.

And yet as with so many things, the awareness that it won’t in fact last forever is finally making me appreciate it. Tim will probably always have friends, but not these friends; I’ll always have other parents to share the parenting experience with, but not these same couples I’ve known for almost a decade. The boys will grow apart and so will we. Even now, the boys hang out after school at the library or the general store or the soccer field on their own, so we parents don’t spend as much time gathered together watching them play. Soon we’ll see even less of each other, and that realization makes me sorry.

So this year I headed off to the Super Bowl party with something I didn’t usually take along: a sense of anticipation. I was looking forward to seeing all those other adults whom I see less now than I used to. Tempis fugit, in this situation as in all others. I don’t know how many more years this particular party will happen for, or who will attend in future years. This time, I’m looking forward to all those familiar faces. We grow older as the boys grow up, and it’s good to be spending time together once again.

The coffee grinder, rising like a phoenix...

2012-02-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

Ironically, the very same week I conceded that my frequent and open expressions of gratitude are apparently annoying to some people, the coffee grinder fixed itself.

And if there was ever a time that I simply cannot repress my feelings of gratitude, this may be it.

A coffee grinder isn’t all that important, of course. And yet having it break seems like an inconvenience far out of proportion to the appliance itself, especially at 6:45 on a Tuesday morning. I had no ground coffee in the house, only whole beans. So without the grinder, there was no way to make coffee.

This development wasn’t completely unexpected. The grinder is almost ten years old, which is geriatric for an inexpensive electric kitchen appliance. And recently I’d noticed that it had been making sort of an irregular chucking noise when it was running. And I’m sure the fact that the particular kind of coffee I favor has a very high oil content doesn’t help when it comes to machine maintenance.

So I was disappointed but not shocked when it stopped working altogether on Tuesday morning. I took it apart and cleaned out each piece and reassembled it, but still, only a dry whirring sound rather than the reassuring roar of a successful coffee-grinding operation came out.

But the next morning, just on what felt like the most futile kind of whim, I turned the dial just one notch to the right, and it roared to life.

I have no idea why. I guess maybe it just needed a little vacation. This was a small thing, but there was something so satisfying about it because it left no room for ambiguity. The coffee grinder was working again, and I could have a fresh cup of coffee, and there were no further contingencies to address.

Meanwhile, other good things happened this week too. A family member who was expecting bad news on the medical front instead received news that was conditionally optimistic. The acute soreness left from my gum graft surgery last week began to subside. I finished my first small project for a new client and both of us were happy with the results.

The coffee grinder was probably the most trivial item on my entire list of problems earlier this week, and so my sense of delight when it inexplicably came back to life was probably somewhat out of proportion. But it was just so easily solved that I couldn’t help being pleased. Fresh coffee: a minor concern compared to health, pain relief or many other issues. But a fine reward nonetheless. And so once again I can’t refrain from expressing, yes, gratitude.

Snowless winter

2012-02-01T10:57:00.002-05:00

It’s been a warm, snowless winter.

And in some ways, that’s not so bad. Last winter was the snowiest winter I could remember, the snowiest winter in fifty years, the snowiest winter on record – I don’t remember how it was defined, but parents of school-aged kids came up with their own term for it: a winter so snowy that even the kids stopped thinking snow days were fun.

Snowbanks that looked more like walls than piles lined the roadway. Plow drivers complained that there was so place left to put the snow.

Not this winter. After one bizarre and unseasonable storm two nights before Halloween, we’ve had just a dusting here, a dusting there. Traces of white on the tree branches now and then, but no sledding, no snowmen. All fall, as I walked along the trails of the state park behind our new house, I thought “These trails will be great for showshoeing,” but my snowshoes remain in the exact same place where I put them when the movers unloaded them last April.

Thre’s a lot less inconvenience to a warm snow-less winter. No scraping sound of the plow driving by before dawn. No clearing snow and ice from the windshield after work. No pestering the kids to shovel a path for the dog, who refuses to go to the bathroom in drifts as high as her stomach.

And we’re certainly saving money on the plowing, or lack thereof.

But I could use a snowy day right about now. Sure, we all romanticize the school cancellations of our childhoods. We all reminisce about long days passed in snowball fights interrupted only for servings to hot chocolate or a fresh batch of cookies from the oven. And we all grow up to learn about a different kind of snow day: the kind when you absolutely have to get to work for a ten o’clock meeting or drive 45 minutes down the icy, blizzarded-in highway for a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment just as the no-school text message arrives from the superintendent’s office.

Yes, we all at some point in adulthood experience a moment of snowstorm-induced stress, after which we wonder what happened to those wonderful stormy days remembered in rosy shades from our youth.

But having no snow has taken us too far to the other extreme. I’m tired of mud. I want to wake to the strange grayish light of snow covering the skylights over the bed. I want to hear the kids cheer when I tell them there’s no school today. I wouldn’t even mind hearing them plead for bacon and waffles, a special breakfast for a special day. (Last year, there were so many “special day” breakfasts on snowdays that I began to worry about my son’s cholesterol level.)

Instead, I woke today to bare ground, bare branches, bare sky. Last winter at this time there were four feet of snow on the ground. We took pictures of the rail fence with the snow reaching the highest rail, of the wooden swing with snow up to its seat, of the kids diving into snowdrifts taller than them, and we dreamed of summer.

This year there’s nothing to wish away, no need to dream of warmer days. And there’s a sense of something remiss in that. Perhaps we need the snowbanks to remind us of beaches, the snowdays to remind us of summer vacation. Without duress, there can be no welcome rush of relief. And as the mushy, mild days roll on, I wonder if we’ll notice when spring arrives.

When gratitude hurts (other people)

2012-01-30T09:54:00.003-05:00

“The reason I don’t like looking at Facebook is that everyone is just bragging about how happy they are!”

The sentiment came from an acquaintance during an informal group discussion about social media recently. Although I don’t know the woman who said it well, I do know that she has faced some very difficult obstacles in her life recently. But it surprised me nonetheless. I had never thought about expressing happiness as a form of bragging. I just think of it as, well, honesty. And an outward display of gratitude. And almost everyone agrees that gratitude is a good thing, don’t they? In Thornton Wilder's words, “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

And yet I’m sympathetic to this acquaintance, who has endured with courage particular problems that are very alien to me. I don’t even think she and I are connected on Facebook, but her words gave me pause and made me think about whether there are times when it is insensitive to express gratitude.

Yesterday I thought of her as I sat down at my computer to dash off a quick update. Yesterday was the kind of day that was wonderful for its very ordinariness. I barely left home, except to teach Sunday school in the morning. Sunday school is far, far from being one of my favorite things to do, but it’s a little like the Vaudeville joke about why the man is hitting himself with a pipe: it feels so good when I stop, and after a successful class – which I define as one in which all the kids stayed attentive and contributed to the discussion – I feel great about the time I put into preparing for it. Better still, I had fit in a run before church, so I didn’t have to go through the morning with the thought of fitting in a run hanging over my head. After church I bought some fresh fruit, went home and made everyone lunch, and read the paper for a while. Then I put together a pot of vegetarian chili and let it simmer while two friends and I went walking in the woods for an hour, and after that I made chocolate chip cookies and spent the evening with my family.

But is it bragging for me to admit that? Or is it expressing gratitude? Of course, the fact that one person said she doesn’t like hearing about how happy other people are doesn’t make it uniformly wrong, but her opinion means something to me. I’m well aware of how many people face challenges that I don’t, or for whatever reason have not found themselves in the same fortunate circumstances I have. Is my being happy anathema to their sense of well-being?

I don’t know the answer. As I said at the outset, I was surprised that she said she didn’t like to read about other people’s happiness. I don’t think any the worse of my friend for her honesty. And even knowing that one person might be made to feel worse than necessary for my posts initially made me hold back from writing about yesterday’s pleasures.

But actually, I don’t think my expressions of gratitude are necessarily what she was talking about anyway. I wasn’t bragging about my children’s successes or my vacation plans. I was just taking pleasure in an ordinary day. And my guess is that she would understand that – the gratitude itself, and the good intent behind it.

Thank you in advance

2012-01-27T10:17:00.001-05:00

With great anticipation earlier this month, I turned to the list annually composed by Lake Superior State University of the words and phrases that it believes should be "banished" from the English language. I can always count on that list to include a few of my pet peeves each year. Would it have “move the needle”? “A lot on your plate”? “The elephant in the room”? Maybe even the ubiquitous "Seriously?"?

No, but nestled among “ginormous,” “baby bump” and “shared sacrifice,” it did have something I was surprised to see: a phrase I use all the time. “Thank you in advance.”

Thank you in advance? What’s wrong with that? I feel like I’m constantly closing emails with “Thank you in advance,” because it seems I’m always writing to ask people for favors. “Thank you in advance” means “I really hope you’ll do this for me, and so I’m thanking you now as capital.” But what it really means to me is “Thanks for taking the time to consider doing what I’ve asked,” except to put it like that sounds so plaintive. It suggests I’ve already taken advantage of the askee merely by expecting him or her to read through my request. It suggests I’ve already gotten as much from him or her as I can possibly expect: you’ve considered my request and I really can’t ask for more than that. Except I am. So thanks in advance for the fact that maybe you’ll do it.

Of course, that translation inevitably prompts the question: So what if the askee won’t do it? Do I then revoke my thanks? How do you phrase a conditional thanks: Thank you if you will; no appreciation from me at all if you won’t? Here’s my thanks, banking on your complicity; please return it with interest earned if your answer is no.

All of those are too complicated. “Thank you in advance” seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me. It gets in the all-important expression of humility, gratitude and appreciation while also conceding that some requests simply won’t be granted. “Thank you in advance" might could well be my epitaph: “Thank you for bothering to visit my grave; thank you to whoever commissioned this tombstone; thank you for standing here in this cemetery for a moment reading about my life.”

Who put it on the phrases-to-be banished list and why? Whoever it was, I hope he or she will reconsider, because it’s a highly useful phrase that truly has no reason to cause offense to anyone. So please give some thought to revoking it from the list. And thank you. In advance.

Be not afraid

2012-01-25T09:56:00.004-05:00

During Sunday’s sermon, our Minister Emeritus shared his favorite quotation from Jesus: “Be not afraid.” The minister then ran through a litany of categories that most of us fear: change, stasis, sameness, differences, life, death, knowledge, ignorance, and so on.

He didn’t specifically mention dental surgery (nor did Jesus, as far as I know), but since I was 24 hours from my first scheduled gum graft, I took the message to heart anyway.

It’s so easy to let our fears rule us, whether those are truly profound fears such as terminal illness and national security or truly trivial fears such as temporary physical discomfort. My dentist first recommended that I see a periodontist seven years ago, and I’ve known since then that I’d eventually need to undergo gum graft procedures, but I managed to put it off year after year because I was so apprehensive.

The problem was that neglecting to schedule the procedure created a different fear: the fear of regular dental cleanings. First of all, the cleanings generate pain that might be alleviated once my gums are treated; but secondly, I always felt so abashed to have to admit that no, once again, I had not taken the dentist’s recommendation to schedule a periodontal appointment. Finally, two months ago, he instilled in me a new fear: the fear that my teeth would start falling out if I didn’t attend to this matter.

The gum surgery is now 48 hours behind me and I feel fine. Yes, there was a fair amount of discomfort during the procedure and a lot more as the Novacaine wore off throughout the afternoon. Yes, I’ve been hungry for the past two days since there’s so little I can eat during the short-term healing process. And yes, my left cheek looks like it is storing a golf ball.

But none of it is as bad as my fears led me to believe. “Be not afraid,” I should have told myself earlier, and then all of this would be done by now. But I was afraid, and so I’m undergoing the discomfort now that could potentially be seven years behind me by this point.

This experience, plus the minister’s reminder of Jesus’ words, made me think of the other fairly trivial things of which I’m currently feeling afraid. One significant source of apprehension in my life right now is seeing my kids grow older. At the ages of nine and thirteen, they seem to me to be at the absolutely ideal ages from a parenting perspective: they’re fun, happy, resourceful, independent and confident.

By this time next year, Tim will be in eighth grade and we’ll be learning about the systems and inner workings of the public high school, a setting I dread simply because it’s so unfamiliar to me. At nine, Holly embodies all the merriment of girlhood, but as Caitlin Flanagan’s controversial new book, Girl Land, and her frequent NPR interviews remind me, all kinds of scary things potentially lie in her path as she approaches early adolescence. In another sixteen months, our lease runs out and we’ll need to find another place to live. My parents and parents-in-law are healthy, but that won’t last forever. And are the kids’ college tuition funds in good enough shape at this point?

So much to be afraid of, and yet really nothing to be afraid of except the normal progression of a blessed life. Gum surgery isn’t pleasant, but not being able to afford or have access to necessary dental procedures is surely worse.

As I prepared to leave the periodontist’s office after the procedure, a woman in the waiting room smiled sympathetically at me. “You look really uncomfortable,” she said.

“Well, not uncomfortable enough to merit putting this off for seven years,” I admitted. Be not afraid. I’m not sure the singular experience of getting through a gum graft is enough to allay all of my daily anxieties, but it’s a lesson I’ll take to heart nonetheless, and try to put to good use going forward.

Where the wind comes sweeping down the -- whoa!

2012-01-23T13:56:00.004-05:00

Arson. Knife fights. Attempted assault. Vivid nightmares. Relentless jokes about promiscuity.

And I thought a film from the Golden Age of Broadway would guarantee some wholesome mother-daughter bonding time for Holly and me.

Quick, what are the images that come to mind when I say “Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘Oklahoma!’?” The surrey with the fringe on top, right? A box social? A square dance scene full of swinging skirts and prancing feet? A cowboy singing to the blue sky amidst waving stalks of corn?

It turned out there was a lot I’d forgotten. I lost track of how many times during the two-and-a-half hours that Holly and I spent huddled under a comfy afghan on the couch watching the DVD together I said “Is this too scary for you?” She just shook her head; the truth is she’s seen worse, thanks primarily to Tim’s affection for the entire Star Wars sequence and a few slightly graphic video games.

But still, this wasn’t the Oklahoma! I remembered at all, which makes me think maybe I’d never actually watched the film from beginning to end. In fact, it’s quite likely that my familiarity with this musical, as with many others of its ilk, may have come primarily from attending a high school performance of it when I was about twelve years old. And that would have been the stage version, of course; it might be that this was my first screening of the film.

I thought I knew the story fairly well, but what Holly and I viewed last night bore so little resemblance to my memory that it made me think twice about just how I knew the details. When I was growing up, my grandparents had an extensive collection of Broadway musical soundtracks on vinyl; when we visited them in the summer, my sisters and I would spend a fair amount of time playing the records. I think I probably read the liner notes to Oklahoma at some point and confused that with seeing the film.

So just in case any other parents of nine-year-old girls get the same urge I did to spend a cozy evening taking in an old-fashioned flick together, let me remind you of a few forgotten highlights of Oklahoma: there’s an attempted date rape in a carriage (which is thwarted when the horses bolt and take the carriage on a terrifying ride that ends in a near-collision with a train), a villain who tries to trick the hero into stabbing himself in the chest with a switchblade, a couple who nearly burn to death when the haystack they’re standing atop is intentionally set on fire, a predatory Peeping Tom, a scene where a man encourages his nemesis to seriously consider suicide, and a female character whose love of physical attention from men is the source of constant joking but who by today’s standards would likely be labeled both mentally challenged and co-dependent.

The film also includes the heroine's nightmare, which appears to be induced by hallucinogenic bath salts, about being taken prisoner in a bordello while a twister forms in the background. It occurred to me my daughter might be the first kid her teacher had ever heard complain that she had slept poorly because her mother made her sit through a Rogers and Hammerstein production.

Introducing our kids to timeless classics of stage and screen is one of the pleasures of parenthood, but next time I think I’ll pre-screen the production before we cozy up for a mother-daughter movie night. Either that or we’ll just watch Star Wars, where Holly already knows all the scary parts even if I don’t. This time she can tell me when to close my eyes or block my ears.

Breakfast on the house

2012-01-20T10:53:00.002-05:00

One of them sings loudly. One doesn’t like to talk at all. One wants only water. One deliberately initiates a scuffle even though there’s plenty for everyone.

It’s a typical winter weekday morning: one on which between the hours of 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., I’ll feed four different meals to three different species in three different locations. In all, it’s 15 mouths to feed; or, put another way, 56 legs all making their way over to see what I’ve got to offer them for their morning repast.

Not all at once, of course. My 13-year-old eats first, fresh out of the shower and cheerful even though first light has yet to dawn. He takes one look at the thermometer, which hovers around the 10-degree mark, and begins to sing loudly: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a song he learned from watching the movie “Elf” twenty or thirty times last summer, when it was most definitely not cold outside. Today it is, though, and as I listen to him do his best cabaret act while buttering an English muffin, I wonder where the stereotype of sullen teenagers slow to waken on a winter morning comes from. I may be wishing he’d go back to bed, but he’s clearly ready to face the day.

As he assembles his backpack for school, I make a quick stop in the laundry room to toss a scoop of kibble into the dog’s empty dish. I notice her water bowl is empty too and would prefer not to think how long that has been the case for; it continues to be a mystery of domestic life that in four years, I have never once known anyone in my family except for me to fill the dog’s water bowl, and yet at least twice a year I go out of town for two days or more, leaving the rest of the family behind, and when I return the dog is always still alive. Somehow it gets done by someone else if I’m not around, but most definitely not when I am. Another truism of motherhood.

After feeding the dog, I head upstairs to wake my very drowsy 9-year-old, who does not like to be roused one bit. The only thing that cheers her up in the morning is a somewhat maddening game of her own invention in which she answers my question about what she’d like for breakfast by forming letters with her fingers and expecting me to guess what breakfast food the initials represent. On a good day she flashes me an easy one: “O” for oatmeal; “B” for bagel. Other days it’s not so easy, and I waste six or seven minutes trying to figure out that “L” stands for “lightly buttered toast” or “M” represents “medium-sized bowl of Special K.” She always seems disappointed when she has to provide verbal clues for me; I’m just glad to be one step closer to getting everyone fed and out the door.

A cacophony of mooing greets me an hour later as I drive down the lane to the barnyard, where 12 cows divided into three groups based on weaning, breeding, and general compatibility are waiting to be fed. The adult cows point their faces skyward and let loose with their loudest moos; the calves stand in front of the gate and then skittishly leap to the side as I reach out to pat them.

The cows eat in their usual inexplicable pattern: although I throw five hay bales down from the hay loft for one sub-herd of seven animals, all seven of them cluster around the same single bale, shouldering each other out of the way while four other bales sit nearby, unnoticed. Two more bales go over one fence to a group of three cows; and the last group of two gets just one bale to share.

And then I’m done: everyone whose breakfast I’m responsible for has eaten. I still need to go running and then write some articles, but it all seems easy and relaxed after everyone has been fed. The kids are off at school; the dog is waiting to go running with me; the cows are chewing away, as they’ll do for the next several hours before they make their way through all the bales.

I’ve often said the reason I like feeding the cows is that it’s so easy and yet so satisfying. It requires so little judgment or analysis, just strength. And yet the results are so tangible: I’m faced with a herd of content, well-fed animals whose noisy clamor has ended. I suppose that's true of the other creatures as well. The rest of my day might be more challenging: writing compelling text, offering intelligent conversation, solving various problems. True, it sometimes seems like feeding hungry beings is my primary role in life, but at the same time, feeding is easy. And for now, feeding is done.

"One Little Word" challenge: Year 3

2012-01-18T10:45:00.005-05:00

I first learned about the "one little word" challenge in 2010. The idea, as explained here, is to find one word on which to hitch your star for the upcoming year. Or, as project founder Ali Edwards explains it, “Essentially the idea is to choose a word (or let it choose you) that has the potential to make an impact on your life…a single word to focus on over the course of the year.”

That first year, I chose the adjective “possible.” Much in my life was uncertain at that point, and there were many aspects of it that had the potential to go in either more positive or more negative directions. “Possible” seemed to be an accurate assessment while also striking an optimistic note: much is possible. Anything is possible. What you hope is possible.

In 2011, I chose the verb “succeed,” which to me was significantly different from its noun form, success. I hoped to succeed in many ways in the upcoming year. I didn’t necessarily have specific end goals that would determine whether or not my efforts had earned the title of success. I wanted to hitch my star to the concept of succeeding more than to any particular end product.

This year, I chose a very different word. It came so easily to me that I’m not sure I can explain its presence. It seemed to just organically be the word I wanted for 2012. This time, the word is a gerund: “walking.”

A somewhat odd choice, I realize. Most words people choose for the one-word challenge are more inspirational in nature: joy, serenity, gratitude, strength, balance, power, hope, fortitude. “Walking” is so quotidian by contrast, and yet in the past year I’ve come to realize how important walking is to me as a way to spend my time: I walk in the woods, I walk in my neighborhood, I walk on bike paths and city streets. I walk as a means of silent reflection; I walk while listening to podcasts or music , I walk with friends as a way of socializing. I walk the dog. I walk with the kids. On holidays at my in-laws’, I walk with my sisters-in-law. I walk fast, for exercise; or I walk slowly, to relax.

So many of my best memories from 2011 involve walking. Walking with friends on the trails in the state park behind our house. Walking on a sage-lined riverside trail in Colorado. Walking to the public beach in Portland with Tim and his friends during Tim’s birthday weekend. Walking with my college roommate on Moody Beach on a magnificent sunny September afternoon.

Beyond the literal meaning, walking seems like an appropriate guidepost word for 2012 in that it’s not a year I’m starting off with a significant number of goals or plans. A lot of things in my life are going well right now; if I could have one wish, it might be for nothing to change. Walking is a good image for how I’d like the year to progress: a calm, unhurried, mindful saunter.

Walking. It’s not an ambitious word, but it’s a fundamental and maybe even primal one. It is how most of us get through our lives, literally and symbolically. At times we run, at times we crawl, at times we stumble, at times we nearly fly; but when life is most in balance, we walk. I hope to walk a lot in the upcoming year: in the woods, on beaches, in the neighborhood, with friends. I’m starting the year with a calm, measured mindset, and this is the word that I find myself reaching for. Walking: a word that matches my current state of mind and, at the same time, reflects what I hope the upcoming year embodies.

Accounting for time -- whether in a weekend or a lifetime

2012-01-16T10:22:00.002-05:00

This was the weekend of our annual retreat, and it’s a weekend that inevitably goes by too fast. For the past eight Januarys, I’ve joined a loosely structured group of about 20 other women – most from Carlisle, some formerly of Carlisle, and some from elsewhere who are brought along by Carlisle friends – for a trip to the northeast corner of Connecticut, where we spend Friday evening through lunch Sunday in a hundred-year-old house, reveling in our free time, enjoying silence, taking walks along country roads, and eating meals that are in fact quite tasty but whose greatest merit is that they are cooked by someone else, the retreat house’s kitchen staff.

“This is how life should always be,” someone always says, and of course they mean the relaxed conversation, the leisurely mealtimes, the camaraderie. But as I was thinking about how I wanted to spend my time, I realized how much meaning that phrase actually held for me.

Because the only problem with the weekend is that the time always goes by too quickly. I start out with plans to do lots of writing, and some reading, and go for a long run and take several walks. But then I get caught up in conversations, or just distracted by the option of having seconds at mealtime.

This time, I resolve each year, I’ll plan my time really carefully. It’s less than 48 hours in all; I need to make every second count. Conversation is important, yes; but don’t use it as an excuse not to pursue more difficult options like writing. And yes, the mealtimes are lovely here, but don’t linger at the table for so long that you end up skipping that afternoon walk.

And at some point it occurred to me that in that sense, the retreat weekend really is a lot like how life should be – or at least my approach to the weekend was how my approach to life should be. Camaraderie matters, but so does reflection. Don’t let laziness – or weather – keep you from enjoying the outdoors. Above all, don’t let the time squirm away from you, unaccounted for. Figure out what matters to you and make sure you’ve set your priorities, because your time at the retreat house is really limited, and the weekend will be over before you know it.

The words had a familiar ring, and then I realized that Henry David Thoreau said the same thing only a hundred orders of magnitude more eloquently when he wrote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.” Yes. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell myself. Time is limited; use it wisely and well. Above all, be aware of the choices you’re making before it all melts away.

I did end up using my time well during the weekend. I visited with the other retreat-goers over meals and during discussion group sessions, but I also spent hours reading and walking. It’s trite to acknowledge Thoreau’s wisdom, but that’s how I feel. He said it far better than I could, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use his words as a guidepost. Rules to live by, in effect, whether for the weekend or for a lifespan.

Pass it on

2012-01-13T10:29:00.003-05:00

Recently, some of my friends and I have unexpectedly found ourselves in a fairly high-stakes game of hand-me-down.

We laugh about the big-ticket items we hand off to each other. A couple of years ago, one friend of mine was surprised to learn that I was anchored to my desk during writing time because of my desktop computer, so she gave me a lightweight laptop she no longer needed. When I confessed that I was somewhat taken aback by her generosity, she responded by asking if I could feed her cat for a couple of nights the following month while she was traveling. I agreed, and she claimed we were even.

When we moved out of our house last spring, we discovered that a family we know who seems to have every possible toy didn’t, in fact, have a pool table; our new house came with one already in the basement, so we had ours delivered to the other family.

A couple of months ago, a different friend invited my family over for dinner; in the course of a discussion about my lack of mobile Internet access, she announced that she could give me an iPhone that was of no use to her because it was incompatible with her phone coverage. I felt remiss; after all, it’s usually the guests who bring the host a present rather than vice versa, not to mention the magnitude of the gift she was sending us home with. But then a couple weeks later, the same friend said she was thinking of buying a treadmill; we happened to have one that no one had used for over a year, so we gave it to her.

Meanwhile, the iPhone, with its astounding array of features, replaced my need for an iPod and a camera, both of which I gave to my 9-year-old, as well as the need for my NikePlus pedometer system, which I gave to my niece.

As Amy Suardi wrote yesterday on the TLC Parentables website, sometimes it’s just a lot easier to hand something off than to try to return or resell it. Ebay serves a number of useful purposes, but for those of us who try to use it only occasionally, it can involve a lot of hassle: listing, responding to inquiries, packaging, mailing. Organizations like Goodwill and Big Brother Big Sister are great resources for giving away outgrown clothes and household goods, but sometimes it’s just so simple and satisfying to hand things off to people you know. When our landlords returned last summer to clean out the basement of the house we now rent, they asked me if I would mind dispensing of a few rather large toys for them – a toy piano, a workbench, a kitchen set. Surely I knew someone who could use them, they said, and save them a trip to the dump. My mother was willing to take them to her hairdresser’s grandchildren, who reportedly were delighted with the new toys.

Sometimes it seems a little like taking the lazy way out: when I hand things on to people I know, I almost always do so with the certainty that if I put a little effort into it, I could find a needier cause. At the same time, as Amy Suardi says, it builds a sense of goodwill and social capital. “Here, take this,” we say to each other. “Do you have any use for these?” “My son was too big for this jacket by the time winter arrived.” “I never open these cookbooks.” “Could your daughter use some skates?” It’s one of those things that makes our widespread community – the community of friends, relatives, parenting peers, townspeople – feel more like a village.

Genuine charitable giving of both goods and money is still important too, of course. But there’s a special sense of connection that comes with seeing a friend use your old camera or going for a ride on the bike that was once your sister’s. As Amy writes, “When you give stuff away, instead of trying to squeeze every last dollar out of it, you are exuding an attitude of abundance. The law of attraction says if you feel abundant, you will attract abundance. When you give, you will receive. … And by reusing things, you'll not only be saving money, you'll be saving the earth.”

I’m fostering friendships, spreading abundance, and saving the earth. It’s hard to argue with those benefits.

A snow-free winter wonderland

2012-01-11T09:56:00.001-05:00

“Winter wonderland” is one expression we haven’t heard much this season. Just as in the Christmas carol of that name, it usually seems more applicable to a snow-covered landscape with ice crystals and fluffy white drifts than the barren brown expanse that so far has typified winter of 2011/12 in New England.

But last week on the NPR show Science Friday, host Ira Flatow and his panel of guests – including an astronomer, a meteorologist and a naturalist – gave that very name to their discussion of winter, and devoted the hour to all the ways in which winter is indeed a wonderland even without snowmen, snowflakes and sledding.

And as I look around, I have to agree. True, there’s something unnerving about a relatively warm, snow-free winter, but absent the irrefutable romance of snow, I’m reminded of all the other wonders of winter. The full moon was unusually bright last weekend; an article in the Boston Globe explained that the moon looks brighter in the winter because the sun is so low, detracting less from the light of the moon. The experts on Science Friday discussed other aspects of astronomy and meteorology that make the nature of winter unique as well, even without snow.

I’ve been walking in the woods almost daily ever since Christmas. The frozen ground is easy to navigate; what were muddy puddles and damp earthen patches in the fall are now solid ruts that make for easy balance. The bare branches yield to long sight lines through the forest. Ice edges the brooks and ponds, making lacy scalloped patterns contrasted against the black water. In the morning, gray dusk seeps slowly down from the sky while I’m already well into breakfast preparations. The sun, still so low in the sky, slants against the tree trunks to create dramatic angular shadows late in the day.

Sometimes, on mild spring days or warm summer evenings, I wonder how it could possibly not be preferable to live someplace with a year-round warm climate. Once we are far from winter on the calendar, it’s sometimes hard for me to remember that this frozen season has its own merits.

But in the cold, still air of January, the earth feels quiet and invites contemplation. And so this is the time of year, with or without snow, that I remember just what about winter makes it a wonderland, year after year.

David, Goliath and me

2012-01-09T09:56:00.003-05:00

It was my turn to teach Sunday school, and according to the syllabus, we’d reached the story of David and Goliath, whom I admit I have generally tended to confuse with Samson and Delilah. One of the best reasons to teach Sunday school is that it compels me to acquaint myself with material that I should already know. After a few hours of preparation for the class, I felt familiar with the basic details of the story.

But the best-laid plans, and all that. At our church, attendance fluctuates throughout the year. While we all love the tenets of religious freedom that govern the UU faith, those same tenets give many families the assurance that soccer, baseball and birthday parties are all good reasons to miss church. And Carlisle is a town full of skiers, so the pews empty out noticeably after Christmas, even on a low-snow year like this one.

When the director of religious education and I had a look at who actually showed up for church yesterday, we did some quick juggling. Only one of my anticipated six to eight members of the grades 3-5 class had appeared, whereas seven from the grades K-2 group were in attendance. It was decided on the spot that I would instead teach David and Goliath to this younger group.

I was a little disappointed. I’d put a lot of time into planning this class, and hit a number of minor obstacles along the way. Earlier in the week, the Director of Religious Education had suggested that I have the kids act the story out. She happens to be someone who loves theater and has had great success with putting kids on stage. I, on the other hand, couldn’t quite imagine urging a group of seven- and eight-year-olds to pretend to slay each other with slingshots. Our progressive textbook wasn’t much help either; the exercise the teacher’s manual recommended for helping the kids to imagine a giant like Goliath was to ask the tallest man in church to come to our classroom, lie down on a piece of paper, and let the kids trace his body. All I could picture was Gulliver’s Travels, with my eight tiny charges swarming over the poor man. And the fact that I’m currently reading a novel about the priest sex abuse scandal – a novel that happens to revolve around a false charge – gave me all the more reason to think having my students run over a church member with crayons was not the best lesson plan.

Instead, I decided to base the class on group discussion. First I mentioned that we hadn’t had a class in several weeks, due to the Christmas pageant and the holidays, and did anyone want to share a memory from their holidays or their vacation? Yes, all eight of them wanted to share something. All the boys recited the names of the electronics they’d received for Christmas; all the girls listed which relatives had stayed with them during the holidays. I now know that Carlisle houses were full of video games and grandmothers during vacation week.

Then I read them a version of the David and Goliath story and asked what they thought the life lesson it contained might be. “Don’t throw a rock at anyone because you might kill them,” said one student.

I agreed that this was an important and interesting aspect to the story, but what else? We talked about the concept that being smaller than other contenders doesn’t mean you are intrinsically unfit for a task: sometimes, as in David’s case, having faith and courage compensates for lack of might. I asked them for examples of times their abilities were underestimated because of their small stature. Two of the boys shared stories of turning out to be much better at football than their older brothers expected them to be. I asked if any of the kids who had younger siblings had themselves ever underestimated a younger and smaller child’s abilities. A girl told the story of the time she closed the door to her room, thinking it meant she’d have privacy, only to have her two-year-old brother break the knob to make his way in.

Before dismissing the class, I emphasized that the important thing about the story for our purposes was not that a large soldier could be felled by a rock catapulted from a slingshot but that faith and courage sometimes matter more than age, size and strength. “That’s what I think about driving!” agreed one of the boys. “My parents won’t let me drive, but I just know I could do it! I just need to keep begging until they see I’m not too small.”

I didn’t have time to explain that wasn’t quite the same principle. I’m the first to admit I’m not that great a Sunday school teacher, but during ski season, I’m often the best my church has to offer. And at least I can recycle the same lesson plan in another few weeks when the third through fifth graders filter back to church. I still don’t think I’m ready to try the trace-the-tall-guy exercise. But I’ve got the story straight in my own mind now and won’t confuse David with Delilah again.

Although perhaps to underscore the Biblical connections among the stories, we could get the woman with the longest hair at church to come to Sunday school so that we could trace her while we discussed whether faith and courage are enough to win a small child the right to drive the family car.

Life lessons and customer service

2012-01-06T10:30:00.003-05:00

I was thinking of a piece of advice given to me more than a decade ago by a workplace mentor as I debated with myself whether to drive to a store several miles away to return a disappointing Christmas purchase.

Given the choice, I’d pretty much always rather stay home than go anywhere, and this is especially true during the work day. And yet I knew I shouldn’t just let this particular errand slide. Several weeks before Christmas, my 13-year-old had mentioned that he wished he had a clock in his bathroom so that he could keep track of time during his morning shower. I thought of the waterproof clock/radio combinations popular 25 years or so ago, a device Tim didn’t even know existed. With great excitement, I put it on my list of Christmas gifts to buy for him.

None of the places where I usually buy electronics had shower clock/radios in stock, so I ended up at Bed Bath and Beyond, which carried one model for $19.99. It looked a lot like the ones I remembered from 25 years ago, but imagining how surprised Tim would be by the gift and hoping that a little Top 40 during his early-morning shower might put an extra spring in his step made me delighted to find one at all.

When he opened it on Christmas morning he was pleased, if not what I would call overwhelmed. But it was downhill from there. The suction cups didn’t adhere. The radio reception was awful -- static from one end of the band to the other. No Top 40 to get Tim singing before breakfast after all. As I tinkered hopefully with the tuning, Tim said “The radio’s a nice idea, Mom, but all I really wanted was to be able to keep an eye on the time while I’m in the shower. And the clock doesn’t work.”

He was right. After 24 hours, the digital time display had gone blank.

It was maddening, and yesterday morning I thought about returning it. But I really don’t like doing errands during the work day, and I really don’t like going to Bed Bath and Beyond in general, and I really don’t like the highway drive to the store. How much time and aggravation can $19.99 justify?

That was when my former workplace mentor’s advice came to me. It was when I was trying to decide whether to pursue a transfer to a different division of the company. “Rather than list the pros and cons, here’s what I like to do,” my colleague said. “Picture yourself six months from now if you do make the change versus six months from now if you don’t, and consider what might be different.”

As I looked at the white plastic face of the clock/radio, I thought about my dilemma. If I didn’t take it back to the store, I’d avoid the brief unpleasantness of doing errands and driving on the highway in the middle of what could otherwise be a very serene and quiet work day.

On the other hand, six months from now – for that matter, six days from now – I’d still be irritated by what a bad purchase the clock/radio had been, and I’d still be thinking toxic thoughts about Bed Bath and Beyond. Those toxic thoughts could go on forever. Whereas if I just drove to the store to do the return, even if I didn’t get a penny back, I would have at least been proactive in trying.

I rehearsed what I would say and how I would throw myself on the mercy of customer service: “It’s just not a worthwhile item. The clock doesn’t work. The radio doesn’t get any stations. I know the original packaging is long gone, and yes, it’s been hanging in our bathroom for a couple of weeks, but could you take it back anyway?”

The drive took less time than I expected: only 16 minutes until I was in the store’s parking lot. The store was a lot less crowded than I remembered it from before Christmas. The customer service rep was pleasant. And to my surprise, she apparently couldn’t have cared less why I was returning it. She asked me to sign a receipt copy and then announced that the purchase price would be credited back to my credit card.

It was certainly easy. At the same time, it was a little disquieting. I can’t help wondering why the store has such an absolutely hands-off policy when it comes to customer returns. Didn’t they want to know that the clock display didn’t work, that the suction cups didn’t stick, that the radio reception was negligible?

Apparently not. So what happens to the piece of merchandise now? Does it go back on the shelf for someone else? Does it go to a marked-down bargain shelf? Does an employee get to take it home for free?

Or, more unsettling, does it go straight into a landfill?

I don’t know. I appreciate the refund of my $19.99 plus tax, and I appreciate the fact that the trip was easy and the customer service rep didn’t make me feel bad. But I’m a little bewildered.

Still, my long-ago colleague’s advice succeeded for me once again. Six months from now – six hours from now – I’ll be glad the defunct clock/radio is out of my house. Tim was delighted when I offered him an old digital watch to hang on the shower caddy in his bathroom. It even has an alarm feature, so he can set it for when he needs to finish his shower. If he wants Top 40 music, he’ll sing it himself, I guess.

But I’m not sure what the lesson is. Not to shop at Bed Bath and Beyond? Not to buy inexpensive electronics? Or to just get up and go when a potentially worthwhile errand needs to be done?

The bottom line is that I’m now free of my acrimony toward Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s one less source of aggravation in my Iife. And if that’s the best I can do for a lasting life lesson, it might still be good enough.

913 miles

2012-01-04T09:31:00.001-05:00

I didn't know that finding out the sum total of the distance I’d run in 2011 was literally as easy as the touch of a button. But it was.

I knew the website I use to maintain my running log, www.LogYourRun.com, had a feature called “Week View”; I use it often to see how one week of running compares with the one that preceded it. But not until I opened my 2011 running log on New Year's Day did I glimpse a feature I’d never noticed before: not only does it have Week View, but Year View as well. I clicked on it and found a button that said “Total Distance.” And just like that, I had the results of the preceding 365 days of running in front of me: 913 miles.

It sounded like a lot to me at first, with its proximity to the lush round number of 1,000. It sounded like a worthy reflection of another 365 days of running: days 1,239 through 1,603 of my now more than four-year running streak. Then I divided by 365 and discovered it averaged out to only 2.5 miles a day. I would have guessed more, but the important thing to me was that I’d run all 365 days, ane when I thought about my usual pattern – two miles per day most weekdays; four to six miles per weekend day – that average made sense.

Then, just curious, I clicked on my 2010 running log and checked my yearly total. 926. Huh. Thirteen miles fewer for the year that just ended than the one that preceded it. I’m not sure where those thirteen miles went, but most likely they were buried in the snows of last winter. Once there’s so much snow that the town no longer clears the footpaths, running becomes a lot more dangerous and I tend to restrict my route to our common driveway. By running up and down it a couple of times, I can easily clear a mile, but it gets boring quickly, and I don’t often do much more than the minimum. Last winter was a long snowy one.

I suppose it’s natural to be a little bit disappointed that I lost 13 miles between 2010 and 2011, even though it’s not a specific goal of mine to increase mileage every year. And of course, well past the age of 40, I know it would be fair to give myself a little bit of a break, not necessarily expect more and faster (I don’t even bother to track speed of my running these days) from one year to the next. It’s not like I really expect my fitness level to increase every year, now that I’m undeniably in the midst of middle age.

The goal wasn’t to run farther or faster; it was just to keep running. In some respects, that doesn’t seem like a particularly impressive goal, either literally or symbolically: just keep maintaining the status quo? That’s enough for you? Really? On the other hand, the fact that I haven’t missed my daily mile in over 4 ½ years continues to amaze me, not for what it says about my fitness skills or even commitment level but rather about my good luck. Another 365 days without injury, illness, catastrophe or emergency. Truly a blessing of astounding dimensions.

My shortest run of the year was one mile, done on the morning of Tropical Storm Irene, when I was too afraid of falling branches to go farther than the end of our road and back. My longest distance was six miles, a couple of different Saturday mornings; and there were plenty of entries in the 5-mile-plus-a-few-tenths range.

In between those two were the usual variety of runs that fill out any runner’s year. The hottest run: mid-eighties in the early morning during last July’s record-breaking heat wave; I was lucky to get out before 8 a.m., since by noon the temperatures would register well over 100. The snowy runs: by February there were snowdrifts more than four feet high lining the driveway. I discovered new running routes once we moved across town last spring, though I still run the familiar routes around the center of town most days. Because we now live close to a state park, on weekends I found myself in the company of other walkers and runners more than I was previously accustomed to. I headed out one Saturday morning intending to run three miles, then turned back after one mile due to lightning flashes not far ahead. I ran in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, Washington DC and Colorado.

So it was another good year of running and another solid 365 days. Perhaps I should make it a goal to reach 1,000 miles this year, just this once, though I’m not sure where I’d add on another 87 miles compared to last year. If I can make it another 366 days – it’s a leap Year, of course – that will be enough for me.

Snow. Lightning. Heat waves. Tropical storms. With a little luck, I can do it all again.

Un-decorating

2012-01-02T07:09:00.001-05:00

Putting away Christmas ornaments feels like a task that embodies the spirit of New Year’s Day, even more so than putting out Christmas ornaments embodies the spirit of a Saturday in early December. As joyful a feeling as it is in the weeks before Christmas to fill the house with sparkly things and fragrant things and little objects that glitter, it’s an even more welcome feeling to put them all away on the first day of a new year.

Setting up the tree ushers in the holiday season. The kids love this job; they remark over each ornament as they unpack it, reminiscing about where it originated – as a preschool crafts project, a gift they still remember unwrapping, a memento bought on a vacation far from home and far from Christmastime – and working together cheerfully as they decorate the tree’s branches and then carefully arrange the larger Christmas decorations elsewhere around the house.

Three or four weeks later, when it’s time for the un-decorating, the kids tend to disappear, consumed suddenly with other necessary tasks in other parts of the house, but I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me to put away the ornaments and decorations by myself. I love seeing the living spaces of the house miraculously become uncluttered: tabletops bare again, the corner where the tree stood once again open, nothing dangling from overhead in the entryway. It’s the biggest and yet also the easiest decluttering process of the year: no big decisions about what to keep and what to discard and where to store what; it all goes into the big plastic Christmas bins, and from there down to the basement.

I’m not good about treating the ornaments delicately. Though they may look as if they should each be wrapped individually in tissue paper, years of experience have taught me it isn’t really necessary: storing them in layers with soft items such as Christmas stockings or tablecloths between layers is almost always good enough to preserve them intact for the next year. It gets the job done quickly, and it gives me the instant gratification of seeing my nice neat house emerge from under the holiday glitz once again.

A tidy, sparsely decorated house for New Year’s feels exactly right: clean open lines to welcome a new year that hasn’t itself been claimed by ornamentation or themes yet. The year will develop its own details as it develops; plans, events and memories will eventually dot the calendar like decorations on a Christmas tree. Right now, the year is still unclaimed, and so are the surfaces and spaces in the house that yesterday were still filled with Christmas décor. It’s good to have breathing space – in our house, in our minds – as we welcome 2012.

Blogging vacation

2011-12-26T07:45:00.002-05:00

Taking a vacation from the blog this week. Back in 2012! Happy New Year, all!

What a year

2011-12-23T09:45:00.003-05:00

What a great year we’ve had. Only I didn’t fully realize it until it was almost over.

A few days ago, I woke up thinking that before January arrived, I’d need to take time to list all the significant events of 2011. This thought process always begins when I sit down in mid-December to write our yearly end-of-year Christmas card poem. I limit it to twelve stanzas, and the first and last are usually dedicated to the very general themes of introduction and conclusion, so that leaves me with ten stanzas for specific events. Needless to say, that’s never quite enough.

So maybe that’s why I woke with a list already scrolling through my mind like the crawler at the bottom of a TV screen. Once I started consciously focusing on it, I realized how many good things happened this year.

We met the wonderful people who ended up moving into our old house. Leaving our home on the farm was easier knowing how happy they were to be there. And they’re making fine use of their new setting, too: within six months of moving in, they’d acquired two cows.

We had amazing luck in finding a rental house elsewhere in town. We were lucky to find a rental house at all, not to mention such a comfortable and spacious one. But the fact that it’s on the edge of a state park with instant access to miles of hiking trails makes the deal seem almost miraculous.

We survived the move. Moving is never easy, and just thinking about those last few days of packing gives me a headache. But we did it. And fortunately, our buyers proved themselves to be the kind of people willing to call us any time they found something we’d accidentally left behind, and the less said about that the better, but let’s just say we’re lucky they’re so honest and ethical.

We had some wonderful getaways: weekends in Maine with friends, an overnight for the four of us in Boston, our summer trip to New York and Pennsylvania. And thanks to my thoughtful parents, I was even able to attend the summer writers’ conference in Colorado, where Mom and I had a joyful week together. One of my favorite snapshots of the year is the one of my mother, her two sisters and me dressed up for a dinner out together during the Colorado week.

We stayed healthy and safe. No accidents, no serious illnesses: not for ourselves nor anyone else in our close family. Those infrastructural problems that inevitably occur in the course of a year – extensive treefall, for example, following October’s snowstorm – could be easily fixed.

I received lots of great writing assignments. I wrote about a producer for This American Life, an ice cream entrepreneur, a child with muscular dystrophy who participated in his first half-marathon, an extended family who has maintained a family newsletter for the past twenty years. And, needless to say, I wrote plenty about the follies and foibles of my own spouse and children, as I always do. Rick stayed gainfully employed as well.

We had a couple of visits from Sarah’s family and a couple of visits from Lauren’s family. We hosted Thanksgiving dinner, a holiday cookie exchange, and a get-together for a far-flung group of my old high school friends. I spent an entire fall afternoon walking on a Maine beach with my college roommate, and I had brunch with a friend from Los Angeles whom I hadn't seen in 19 years. A dear friend from high school who now lives in the Bay area kept me company one morning while I cooked for the upcoming weekend.

And that’s only the beginning. I avoided missing any days of running, keeping the streak intact into its fourth year. Holly and Tim are doing well in school and enjoy strong social relationships. Even the dog has had a happy, healthy year.

It’s far too much for a Christmas card. I’ll have to write my own list of the highlights of 2011, not to try to rhyme it or be funny or clever or interesting but just so that I never forget what a great year it was. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. Commemorating it is the best I can do to pay it tribute. And so I will.

Cooking oil, talcum powder: The smells of Chanukah

2011-12-21T08:07:00.002-05:00

For the first night of Chanukah, I made a traditional latkes dinner, and the house filled with the fragrant aromas of this particular holiday.

Okay, that’s patently untrue. Sentimental, but untrue. The house smells like cooking oil no matter how much I run the kitchen fan, and not only that, my hands smell like dirt from peeling potatoes. Dirt is a pleasant smell in the spring when you’ve been out gardening, but it’s not as welcome when you can’t get it off your hands in mid-December.

Still, the latkes dinner was worth the stinky house left in its wake. It reminded me of the Chanukah parties my family partook of annually during my childhood. We’d go to my aunt and uncle’s house. Although Jewish traditions have phased out of our life almost entirely at this point, when I was growing up we still celebrated the major holidays with relatives. My favorite was Chanukah, just as it was with most kids: because of the presents, but also the food – latkes may in fact be the only Jewish ceremonial food anyone would actively choose to eat – and even the ritual of lighting the menorah. Even as a child, I enjoyed public speaking, just as I still do, and being asked to recite one of the readings was a treat for me.

My grandmother liked to shop at department stores, which was typical of her generation and station in life. She gave Chanukah gifts that I now realize were the kinds of things you find at department stores and were different from gifts I’d be likely to receive from anyone else, and I loved them despite what I now realize was their overall tackiness: bubble bath sets, perfume in fancy bottles marketed to little girls, miniature purses. The sharp, artificial floral scent of cheap talcum powder or bath salts still reminds me of getting presents from my grandmother.

Latkes were a once-a-year treat, and for good reason. I once read a description of this particular delicacy as “food that makes you feel like you swallowed a couple of rocks.” Not just one rock; a couple. And once I knew better, from a nutritional standpoint, I stopped seeking out opportunities to eat latkes. I certainly didn’t make them myself. But a year ago, I decided to try, and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. Plus they tasted delicious and brought back good memories.

So last night I made them again. Like last year, they took much, much longer than I expected – we didn’t eat until 7:30, an hour later than usual – plus I ended up with twice as much batter as I needed; I should really make myself a note on the recipe for next year. And did I mention that the whole house smells? And that my friend Jen, who will not know last night was the first night of Chanukah and whom I have not seen in over a year, is coming over for coffee later this morning and will think my house always smells this bad?

But oh well. My grandparents are long gone and so are our Chanukah get-togethers. Once or twice each December, we’re over at my parents’ house at the right time to help them light their menorah, but most of what my kids know about the holiday comes from discussions at school. It’s not really part of our family tradition anymore.

Still, this is two years in a row of latkes. So even without the floral bubble bath or the general excitement of a high-profile holiday, maybe we’ll make this Chanukah dinner our new yearly tradition.

Seventy-five percent to Christmas

2011-12-19T07:25:00.000-05:00

I’m about seventy-five percent ready for Christmas.

I’ve done about seventy-five percent of my Christmas shopping, but my Santa role requires me to take one or two more trips to the nearest retail hub.

I’m about seventy-five percent done with our Christmas cards, too: the newsletter-poem has been drafted and designed, and about one-third of those we’ll send out have been printed, but we need to make a Staples run for another printer cartridge and then print all the envelopes as well before they’re done.

My Christmas cooking and baking feels about seventy-five percent done. I’ve made truffles, toffee, peanut butter squares and peppermint bark for the candy assortments we make up for friends, neighbors and teachers, but I still have to make a peppermint cake for Rick’s office potluck later this week, and I need to make a couple of desserts for Christmas Eve as well.

The house itself seems about seventy-five percent to where I’d like it to be when Christmas Day arrives. It’s generally clean and tidy, but Holly’s room is still a disaster zone, and I definitely want to have it tidied up by Christmas. Not to her standards; to mine, which means I’ll be doing the tidying more or less on my own. Plus there’s one laundry basket of clean sheets and towels yet to fold.

Christmas is six days away. That last twenty-five percent niggles a little bit, but I’ll get there. It’s not such a bad position to be in right now. Christmas is, after all, only as complicated as you make it. The idea that we need to include four kinds of homemade candy rather than two or three, or that Holly’s room must be neat when Christmas morning dawns, or even what should be included in the kids’ stockings, is an idea entirely of my own construct, I realize.

What does it really take to celebrate Christmas? An eagerness to embrace the holiday, whether that means with all its religious significance or rather Christmas as a cultural celebration of family, friends and feasting.

There are plenty of people in the world without children for whom to buy stocking stuffers, parties for which to make desserts, family members for whom to plan a holiday dinner. Christmas festivities are ultimately whatever you make of them. I’m making a lot out of Christmas because I can. And that makes the final twenty-five percent feel entirely worthwhile, no matter how much it may seem to hang over my head.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

2011-12-16T09:50:00.001-05:00

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

More to "Hot Cross Buns" than meets the ear

2011-12-14T07:03:00.001-05:00

Back in September when my 9-year-old announced she wanted to start instrument lessons, I didn’t dare to look ahead to the holiday band concert.

Too much stood in the way of any expectation that she would reach that point: the idea that she’d follow through from saying she wanted to take lessons to actually attending the weekly instruction; the practicing; having to get up an hour early once a week in order to be at band rehearsals before school. Too much of it just didn’t seem to play to Holly’s strengths. Since preschool days, she’s avoided team sports – even the ubiquitous suburban soccer leagues – and quit Girl Scouts without ever proceeding beyond Brownie level. She won’t attend Sunday school anymore, and she admitted she’d much rather have free time for playing after school than be part of the kids’ book discussion group at the library.

So I didn’t really expect her announcement in September about trying percussion to turn out much differently from soccer or Scouts. And I certainly didn’t expect we’d get through the first three and a half months and find ourselves seated in the school auditorium waiting for the curtain to go up on a chilly Tuesday evening in December.

But Holly attended her lessons. She practiced between lessons. She learned to lug her bell set on and off the bus and up the steps to the music building at school. She even managed to wake up a half-hour early each Wednesday morning for band rehearsal.

And once we were a couple of months into the routine, I began to look forward to the December concert.

It’s not that I expected to hear fine musicianship or a compelling range of musical selections. The first band concert of the first year of music instruction, which at our school is fourth grade, is instead a showcase of abilities that it would have been hard to imagine some of these kids possessing a few months earlier. Holly, and the other 79 fourth graders, demonstrated throughout the course of the 45-minute-long program that they were able to sit quietly in their seats. They kept their eyes on the conductor. They stood when he motioned them to stand, and they took their places on stage. They bowed on cue.

They played music, too, but in the end, that was the least of what impressed me. Hot Cross Buns and Jingle Bells aren’t difficult compositions, especially for the percussion section, where Holly has indeed made her musical home. What impressed me was the life skills they’ve developed in just these first few months of band: their focus, their respect, their ability to function as a group.

Naturally, Holly still had a few hallmarks of her usual maverick self. While the other girls donned velvet sashes and taffeta skirts; Holly insisted on black ankle pants, a long shirt, a scarf and black boots. Her wardrobe vividly reflected that she’s still not what you’d call a conformist. And she doesn’t need to be. I understand why she’s never found her way with soccer or Scouts or afterschool clubs. She likes to do things her own way and plan her own time.

But apparently not always. By being part of the band and part of this week’s performance, she showed another side: a side that recognizes the value, sometimes, of getting with the program. And as I watched her move with confidence and agility from her bell set to the snare drum to the bass from song to song, I realized that she had found a group she felt vested in.

It’s a start. And maybe by the June concert, I’ll even succeed with the velvet and taffeta dress.

Pre-holiday getaway

2011-12-12T07:56:00.000-05:00

When we first broached the idea with friends about going away this weekend, I acknowledged that in some ways it seemed like not the best timing. “I know every weekend in December is really busy with parties, plus there’s always Christmas shopping or baking or decorating to do….” I said tentatively. “But do you think it might work out to go away the second weekend in December anyway?”

And in some ways, as the date approached, it continued to seem like a silly idea. After we’d agreed it could be fun to be in Portland instead of home this past weekend, party invitations started arriving via snail mail and email, and I realized we’d miss out on some key social events. I looked at my Christmas preparations list and saw how much still needed to be done – not just the inevitable gift-shopping but also the card-writing and candy-making and Christmas tree-purchasing. I wondered why we didn’t pick a wide-open weekend sometime amidst the tedium of late January instead.

But there was still a sneaking suspicion that this could be a great weekend to go away. And it was. Holiday spirit abounded in Portland, and the city glowed with glittery ornamentation in a way that our quiet suburban town just can’t match. We toured a Victorian mansion decorated for a Civil War-era Christmas; we shopped at bustling downtown stores as part of a Downtown Holiday Stroll, and we viewed an exhibit of gingerbread houses.

Then, inspired by all the clever gingerbread architecture we’d seen, the four kids in our group made their own gingerbread houses. After dinner, we strolled to the Old Port to see the colorful lights on the outsides of buildings downtown as well as the pretty wreaths and somewhat more discreet ornamentation on our neighbors’ doors.

Rather than pulling us away from the holiday spirit, going away actually seemed to add to it. But it wasn’t only because of all the festivities. If I had stayed home for the weekend, I would have done a lot of cooking and some housecleaning and a little bit of shopping. Instead, we did a lot of walking throughout the city, ate some wonderful food, learned a little bit of history at the Victorian mansion, and had a great visit with our guests. Since we didn’t have a lot on the schedule, the kids could take all the time they wanted decorating their gingerbread houses, and when they were done, there was still nowhere else we had to be, so they went outside to toss a football around.

I’ve often wished our holiday season involved a little bit more time for nature and reflection and a little bit less time going to parties and addressing Christmas cards. Yet I wouldn’t want to do without the parties and cards and other holiday minutiae altogether. They’re part of the season also. But being out of town gave me the opportunity to focus on some of the aspects of the season that I tend to neglect: time outdoors, quality time with friends.

On Friday night after dark, I stood out on the balcony looking at the full moon over Casco Bay, with the masts of sailboats lined with holiday lights twinkling from the harbor below. It was a new perspective on the holiday season. And just like the rest of the weekend, it made stepping out of our usual holiday-season routine for a couple of days seem like a wonderful idea.

Blanket praise

2011-12-09T08:02:00.001-05:00

Last month, according to the Boston Globe, USA Today and numerous other news sources, the Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, inducted three new items: Hot Wheels, the dollhouse and the blanket.

According to the article I read, “Curators said the blanket was a special addition in the spirit of two earlier inductees, the cardboard box and the stick. They praised its ability to serve either as recreational raw material or an accessory transformed in myriad ways by a child’s daydreams.

‘Blankets have been keeping people warm for centuries, but they have also been heating up kids’ imaginations,’’ serving as superhero capes and tents, said Christopher Bensch, the Rochester museum’s chief curator.”

If it were up to my 9-year-old daughter, blankets wouldn’t just be in the Toy Hall of Fame; they’d be in the Hall of Fame of Life, if there is one. Yes, she uses it as recreational raw material and for the traditional purpose of staying warm. She also uses it as clothing, napkin, apron, shroud, umbrella, puppet, carpet, slide and imaginary friend. Sometimes she even spreads it over puddles before she walks across, as if she’s a gallant knight offering the height of chivalry to herself.

Each of my children has one comfort object from which they have been inseparable since toddlerhood, but the two objects are very different. Tim’s is a pale green stuffed frog named Ba; Holly’s is a faded fleece baby blanket that once had a print of light brown puppies with red bows, though the pattern is all but indistinguishable now. At the ages of 9 and 13, the kids still need their objects close at hand; when we leave on overnights of any length, the first question I ask once they’re in the car is “Do you have Ba and Blankie?”

As Tim has pointed out, though, I don’t hide my biases well. He occasionally quotes me on a regrettable outburst in which I said “Ba is a member of the family; Blankie is just a blanket.” The kids were shocked that I could compare the two and announce which I preferred, almost as if I had just baldly announced which of them I liked better. But I maintain there’s no contest. To my mind, Ba just has a lot more character. He’s a creature, not a blanket. He has a name that isn’t the same as the name given every other copy of his kind. You can love a frog, whether it is alive or inanimate. But a blanket? Ba has eyes, a mouth, an expression. (These days, he doesn’t have much else; he’s so ragged after 13 years of affection that his limbs and torso have shredded into strings. But he still has a face.) Blankie has just….a lot of square inches of dirty gray fleece.

But Holly loves Blankie, and for that reason alone, I do too. She drapes Blankie over her face while she sleeps at night; when I go to wake her in the morning, I like peeling Blankie back slowly as if I’m opening a present, with Holly’s sleepy face under the wrapping. She totes Blankie down to breakfast with her and holds onto it (“Him!”, she insists on correcting me. Him? No comment.) until it’s time to leave for the bus; then she drapes Blankie as close to the door as she can in anticipation of a reunion in the afternoon.

A few days ago, I saw Blankie lying on the staircase in the middle of the school day as I was throwing a load of laundry into the washer, so I scooped it up and tossed it in along with the other dirty items. By the time Holly got home, Blankie was already in the dryer, but she was horrified by my temerity nonetheless. “You have to ask me!” she chastised. “What if I had needed him sooner?’

It didn’t help for me to protest that she was at school. To her, there’s always that chance that some kind of emergency will necessitate immediate contact with Blankie.

So I suppose the Toy Hall of Fame designation serves as something of a gentle rebuke to me. Blankie is more than just a scrap of material. Holly has insisted that for years, and now toy curators are backing her up, calling it recreation, comfort, an accessory to imaginary play and an agent of warmth. I should really try to appreciate Blankie a little bit more. And for the moment, freshly washed, fluffy and smelling of clean laundry, Blankie has my affection. Blankie, you’re no frog. You’ll never have a stitched-on smile or shiny glass eyes. But to Holly, you’re perfect, and that’s good enough for me.

Unseasonably warm

2011-12-07T08:08:00.000-05:00

It seems that people generally fall into two camps regarding the unseasonably warm weather with which December of 2011 has begun. Some, like my friend Jenn, are saying “The holiday season just isn’t the same without frosty air and snowflakes. Where’s the weather to set the mood? When can we say it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas?” Others are just happy to be catching what feels like a little reprieve before true winter kicks in.

In past years, December has been a cold and snowy month, though last year’s epic snow accumulation didn’t begin in earnest until the day after Christmas. Nonetheless, this week’s temperatures in the sixties seem to mean something to everyone, whether positive or negative.

I’m a little reticent to admit it, but at the moment, I fall into the reprieve camp. I say “reticent” because relishing the unseasonably warm weather makes me feel, well, old. There was a time when I found snowstorms romantic; frigid mornings inspiring; icy ponds and frost-crusted branches magical. But that time was decades ago, when the driveway seemed to magically plow itself and the ultimate crowning touch to a snowy day was a school cancellation the next morning.

There are still plenty of things I like about winter weather. Snowshoeing, for one thing; and I’m looking forward to snowshoeing even more this winter because of all the trails near our new house. I like the surprise of getting to sleep a little bit late because school is closed and the kids don’t have to catch the bus. I like watching Tim and Holly go sledding together. I like the way the fields and woods throughout our town look when blanketed with snow.

And perhaps it’s only because I’m so sure all of that will still come within the next few months – or maybe weeks – that it’s easy for me to say I’m enjoying this unseasonably mild weather. But the fact is, temperatures in the 60’s or even 40’s, with the ground still dry, simply make life easier than deep snow and crusty ice. Last night was our annual town tree lighting. For the past several years, the weather has been uniformly freezing for that event: adults stamp their feet and dab at their runny noses while kids run in circles to stay warm while we sing carols and wait for Santa’s arrival by firetruck. True, it’s a little harder to be in the Santa mood when you can stand outside during the tree lighting in a sweater rather than a parka, but it still seemed like an easier evening overall this year than it has recently.

The weather is expected to change in the next day or two, and maybe then I’ll finally get some Christmas shopping and decorating done. Snow and cold are definitely a catalyst to getting into the holiday mood, as I learned when we had a foot of snow in late October and Holly started talking about her Christmas wish list even though it wasn’t yet Halloween. “It feels like Christmas!” she said on that October 30, and it did. Now it feels like September. But September is a beautiful month, and I’m going to breathe deeply of the mild damp air and enjoy it just a little more before I have to dig boots and gloves out of the basement for another long winter.

Christmas candies and cakes and more

2011-12-05T07:52:00.000-05:00

What I like least about Christmas: the pervasive awareness that for so many people, Christmas is not what they wish it was. It’s hard to celebrate wholeheartedly knowing how many people are unable to celebrate the way they would like to – and the way that so many marketing messages tell us we all should – because they are hobbled by illness or financial woes or physical distance from loved ones.

But there are many things I do like about the holiday season: the parties, the decorations, the special concerts and performances.

Way up at the top of the list of what I like about the holidays, though, is the food. Every year, the list of foods I traditionally make for the holiday season seems to grow. When we were in our twenties, Rick and I developed the habit of making truffles for gifts, and that was our sole holiday cooking ritual for years. But now the roster has expanded. The candy we make for gift-giving includes the original truffles but also peppermint bark, toffee, peanut brittle, and peanut butter balls. For entertaining, we make chocolate mousse pies, eggnog cheesecakes, peppermint chocolate layer cakes, at least two or three of each every season. For parties, we buy specialty cheeses and dips.

Sometimes I almost regret the fact that we eat so well all year long, diminishing the specialness of fine food on holidays, but we purposely avoid these special Christmas foods the other eleven months of the year so that they always seem like a novelty when their time comes around. It’s true that eating large and rich meals is not a luxury reserved for holidays, as it must have been for almost everyone centuries ago when a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast stood out markedly from the menus of the rest of the year. But the candies and eggnog cheesecake and peppermint layer cake are always something I’ve gone eleven months without, and the return to those savored treats are among my favorite things about the holiday season.

This week, I’ll start baking in earnest: for our annual cookie exchange party tonight among a small group of friends, for gifts for the kids’ teachers and our neighbors and other friends; later for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day brunch. I could happily live without ever hearing another Christmas TV ad from Target or another story about Black Friday shoppers gone mad, and I wouldn’t even mind a ban on inflatable ten-foot-tall Santas in people’s front yards. But the tastes of Christmastime bring back all the best of the season to me, and I’m looking forward to the kitchen soon filling up with the aromas of chocolate and butter once again.

Creative cow-tending

2011-12-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

Despite visual evidence and pastoral sonnets to the contrary, life in the barnyard is in fact never dull.

As I wrote about recently, the herd has grown. And for a while, it looked like my cow-feeding responsibilities would end as a result. Twelve animals, ranging in size from medium to extra-large, just seemed like too many for me to deal with every morning.

But then they were divided by fences into smaller groups, which made it a little less intimidating, and it turned out that I didn’t want to give up barnyard duty after all. So once again, since the beginning of last month, I’ve been out feeding the cows every morning before my daily run.

The feeding season started out well. This week has been challenging, though. I thought I’d developed a foolproof system, one that would work even with a sub-herd of six bovines following me as I trek through the mud to the barn. Adhering to the successful method I developed last winter, I climb up the outside ladder to the loft and throw down some haybales, which is supposed to divert the animals sufficiently that I can then slip in and out of the front of the barn without anyone following me as I pull out a few more bales.

But we have a new animal named Gretchen who is very large and a little bit pushy. Well, maybe that’s unfair. Pushy is a relative term, and when you’re Gretchen’s size, simply ever-so-slightly-leaning, or standing with the slightest bit of sideways motion, can make you seem pushy to someone less than one-tenth your weight. Anyway, Gretchen is clearly a grass-is-always-greener type of girl – quite literally, in this case. She dives in eagerly enough as I toss bales down from the loft, but somehow by the time I slog my way through the mud around to the front of the barn, she’s always right behind me, certain that whatever bales I’m about to pull out for the other herd are inherently superior to those that she was offered.

Other cows, assuming a creature who is both larger than they are and more interestingly colored (black and white as opposed to their uniform red coats) must know something they don’t, follow suit, and before I know it, I’m hemmed into the lower level of the barn, unable to push the gate back open because they are all standing too close to it. So I throw out some more bales, but because they are all in my way, the bales more or less bounce off their sides and land on the ground, directly in front of the barn door. So the cows stand there and eat, and I still can’t get out.

Yesterday I solved the problem by climbing over the barn gate rather than opening it, sliding into the few inches between Gretchen and the side of the barn, and slithering my way to freedom. This is a bad idea in any conditions, given that the space between a large animal and a wall is not where you most want to find yourself; and an even worse idea given the current mud conditions in the barnyard, where getting anywhere quickly – or, in this case, out of anywhere quickly – could present a problem to boots that can’t lift out of the ooze.

Today I solved it more creatively. When Gretchen and a few of her compatriots stood directly in front of the barn, I placed hay bales on their broad backs and let them roll off the other side. The animals turned toward the hay once it fell, and I made my escape.

It’s not a great solution, but in the barnyard, as in life, circumstances are ever changing. Within the next few weeks, the current configuration of animals is likely to change – some will be moved for breeding; others for weaning – and it will be less complicated when there isn’t such a high concentration of critters in any one place. The mud will turn to frozen ground, and that will make general navigation of the terrain easier as well. Moreover, Gretchen might wise up to the fact that there’s no difference between the bales I’m throwing down from the loft and those I’m trying to hoist out of the lower level, and then maybe she’ll eat contentedly near the loft and leave me to pass in and out of the front of the barn unobstructed.

Between the three, that last possibility is the one I’m least inclined to bet on. But it could happen. The grass may be always greener, but the hay is always….hay-colored. Maybe the animals will realize that. And if not, I’ll just keep finding new and creative ways to vault over them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and somehow, if need be, I’ll come up with a bovine circumnavigator of some kind before the winter ends.

Classroom time

2011-11-30T07:24:00.001-05:00

My sister Sarah recounted the story yesterday of being invited into her 7-year-old’s classroom as a volunteer reader. Her son was so apprehensive about how she would perform that he devised a series of coded hand signals that would signify whether she was reading too fast, too slow, too quiet, too loud, with too much animation, with too little animation, with too much or too little time to look at the pictures, and so forth. “He was so worried that I was going to embarrass him. It’s a far cry from when he was so excited to have me come into the classroom to read that I could barely peel him off of me far enough to see the pages,” she said.

Hearing her talk about it reminded me of the days when I used to help out in my kids’ classrooms a lot – and then less so – and now barely ever. Tim’s kindergarten teacher liked quite a lot of parental help. It was her first year at our school, and she had come from a school system in which every teacher had a classroom aide, which she no longer did. So she was accustomed to having a second adult in the classroom at all times and tried to fill the gap as much as possible with parents.

It was difficult because then, Tim was the way Sarah described Andrew being prior to now: he was always so happy to see me come into the classroom that it was difficult when I had to leave after my prescribed hour or two. Once, in anticipation of a problem, I discussed it with him ahead of time.

“Tim, I can come in and help only if you promise not to cling,” I said that day.

“Mooooommmmm,” he droned with a tinge of contempt, and I was sure he was about to insist he was no clinger. Instead, he said, “Evvvvverryone clings when their mom comes into the classroom.”

Well, that may have been true when he was in kindergarten, but seven years later, things are a lot different. The teachers don’t want or need us around much anymore, and the kids are even less enthusiastic about our presence, though Tim usually endures my rare appearances at middle school without much complaining. Earlier this month, one of his classes decided to have a potluck lunch in honor of Thanksgiving; I had the job of bringing in the pies he’d made earlier in the week. Once there, I was so curious to see how his classmates had changed since I’d last seen them – months or sometimes years earlier – that I could hardly tear myself away, until I committed a key error. “Claire, you’re dressed for the beach!” I said to one girl who was inexplicably wearing a sundress in mid-November. The teacher pressed his lips together; too late I remembered that another teacher had told me years earlier that teachers are forbidden from commenting on kids’ clothing, or at least what girls are wearing. Parents don’t fall under the same restrictions, but I had still overstepped my bounds as a classroom visitor.

In any case, with middle schoolers, the issue of school volunteering evolves into a very different paradigm: where once our presence was needed as reading helpers or project assistants, now we’re called upon most often not by the teachers but by the kids, and it’s for one critical role: to chaperone their dances. Every time a dance comes up on the schedule, the administration threatens that if the kids don’t rummage up the proper number of chaperones, the event will be canceled, so all the kids feel pressured to call in favors. And then, of course, they face the ultimate dilemma of which prospect is worse: having your mother at a school dance or having no school dance at all.

Tim actually doesn’t mind having me chaperone when my turn comes up, which I try to make happen no more than once a year, and Holly is generally neutral about my visits to school. I can’t say I miss the early days when we were urged to come in at least once a week to help out, but I do appreciate the occasional chance to take a peek at what’s going on. Soon enough, the invitations into the classroom will dwindle down to once a year on parents’ day at the most, depending on my kids’ specific educational future. So I’ll continue to enjoy the time I spend at school with my kids. And, just like the teachers, with enough practice I’ll even learn to hold my tongue when their classmates show up in sandals, midwinter.

Before anyone has hurt your feelings

2011-11-28T07:59:00.001-05:00

I almost skipped right over the Fresh Air interview with legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola when it came up on my podcast list. Filmmaking isn’t a major interest of mine, and I knew there were other podcasts in my iPod queue that would be of more immediate interest to me: a conversation about Thanksgiving cooking with New York Times food writer Mark Bittman; a discussion on the shortage of drugs to counter ADHD; a review of Tom Perrotta’s newest novel.

But the Francis Ford Coppola interview was what came up when my run began, and sometimes it just seems like too much of a hassle to take my iPod out of its armband case and start fiddling with the controls to get to the next podcast once my run is under way. Besides, I reminded myself, even if I wasn’t particularly curious about the topic of filmmaking, I’d almost certainly learn something about it. And even when I don’t leave a Fresh Air podcast retaining any information about the subject, I always learn something new about the art of interviewing.

What I didn’t expect was to find it laugh-out-loud funny, but laugh out loud I did when Coppola was discussing the importance for filmmakers and other artists of practicing their writing with great frequency, and gave this specific instruction about daily writing: “The important thing is: choose the time that's good for you. For me, it's early morning because I wake up, and I'm fresh, and I sit in my place. I look out the window, and I have coffee, and no one's gotten up yet or called me or hurt my feelings.”

What made me laugh was the ingenuity of Coppola saying he needs to write before anyone has hurt his feelings. I too write first thing in the morning every day, as soon as I get out of bed, and I never thought about it that way, but he’s right: at that hour, no one has yet hurt my feelings (though sometimes I’ve already been mocked a little, given my tendency to talk in my sleep and my spouse’s propensity for teasing me about it in the wee hours). First thing in the morning, my emotions are still as untainted as they are likely to be all day, and I suppose in some ways that’s the best time to write.

Of course, it also tends to be the most innocuous time to write. Sometimes, as I sit in the comfortable arm chair in the corner of our bedroom at 5:30 a.m. with the house dark and silent around me, I find myself at a loss for what to say in my journal: nothing’s happened yet, and the events of the previous day have faded into uniform banality.

But most of the time, this isn’t a problem. Most of the time, the events and emotions of the previous day are still present in my mind enough to record, even if my brain may feel a little fuzzy at that hour.

Still, no one has yet hurt my feelings at 5:30 a.m., and Coppola is right: that counts for a lot. I am indeed best off writing in the grayish drowsy haze of early morning, when no one voice takes precedence in my writing only because it is the voice of the last person to have spoken to me.

In an ideal day, of course, no one hurts my feelings at all, and I don’t say things I regret, and I don’t make bad decisions, and I don’t take out my iPhone while running and accidentally drop it on the pavement and crack the screen (not to dwell too heavily on my weekend).

But these things happen, sometimes, in the course of a day. And it was somehow reassuring to hear from someone as highly accomplished and highly regarded as Francis Ford Coppola that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do your daily writing when your thoughts and emotions still seem to be your own, in your voice, freshly hatched, before you’ve been distracted by people hurting your feelings.

Thanksgiving retrospective

2011-11-25T12:55:00.000-05:00

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. Yes, I spent hours in the kitchen – mostly on Wednesday – getting ready, but I enjoy spending hours in the kitchen. I find cooking relaxing, and I find working on something as easily defined as a Thanksgiving dinner particularly satisfying. One item at a time, I went through my checklist, from prepping vegetables and mixing dips to grinding coffee beans to sweeping the floor to twining up the turkey to roasting the squash to rinsing the lettuce to setting the table. Check, check, check, check, until there was nothing left on my list and it was time to eat. (Okay, forty minutes past time to eat. But forty minutes past estimated sit-down time on Thanksgiving day isn’t so bad, by my standards.)

My audience was appreciative: every dish garnered praise. Nothing went wrong. Nothing was burned or dropped or forgotten altogether.

So from a cook’s standpoint, it was a wonderful Thanksgiving. And so too was it from the standpoint of someone giving thanks. My family is happy and healthy and emotionally unified. My home is secure. My work is challenging.

The bigger picture, of course, is murkier, on the national and international level. There, it’s a little harder to feel that all is well with the world.

But I’m thankful, this week and every week. Making Thanksgiving dinner is, in my mind, a wonderful way to give voice to that gratitude. As I check each item off my list, I feel happy that I’m able to do it. Happy to have the ability, the resources, the desire to make a Thanksgiving dinner, whose purpose in the end is to honor family and friends and, most of all, to try to find a way to express our thanks.

Kitchen lessons

2011-11-23T08:36:00.001-05:00

Not long ago, I was reading an article about Szechuan cooking in which the writer stressed the importance of using a wok that leaves plenty of room for the vegetables to cook. According to this culinary expert, it’s a common mistake to choose a pan that doesn’t leave enough room for each vegetable to have ample surface area touching the hot metal at any given time. “Don’t crowd your wok,” summed up the writer.

That’s my problem! I thought to myself. My stir-fries turn out mushy for just this reason: I put too many vegetables in too small a wok. Wiser, I used a bigger pan the next time and found that my stir-fry components were crisp and crunchy rather than soft and slippery.

But the more I thought about it, the more the instruction came to seem symbolic rather than strictly culinary: Don’t crowd your wok. It’s not only in Chinese cooking but in so many elements of my life that I crowd too many things together until none of them turn out quite right.

I thought about this yesterday while I was preparing for a party for a group of high school friends. As I blanched crudités, set out wine glasses and spread brie and chutney on crackers, I contemplated the many life lessons I’ve learned in the kitchen, many of which seemed particularly relevant as I planned yesterday’s party.

For example, you probably won’t need as much food as you think. You don’t need ten different appetizers for a group of twenty. Focus on what you think people will really like; don’t worry about trying to offer some of absolutely everything. Simplify, simplify.

And also, accept guests’ offers to bring food and drink. Doing everything yourself doesn’t make you a better person; it just makes you harried. Accept offers of help.

This, too: no one else notices what didn’t go exactly as planned. Maybe it was my vision to have artisan soaps in the bathroom, wine glasses arranged in lines and candles lit on the table, but guests don’t know about the parts that didn’t materialize. I may be looking at my own results critically, but no one else is casting such a judgmental eye on what I’ve produced. They’re grateful for what’s offered, not annoyed by what isn’t.

Furthermore, if I can possibly plan in enough time to do the cooking and arranging and setting up at my leisure, I’ll enjoy it a lot more than if I leave everything to the last minute.

I tried hard to follow these guidelines that I’ve learned through years of entertaining….and years of living. The similarities between food preparation and life are many, when I think about it this way. And the most important rule? Sit back and enjoy your own party. You’ve gone to all the trouble you can to do everything perfectly: don’t get so exhausted that when the time comes, you forget to have fun. Eat the food, drink the beverages, laugh and talk with the guests. Savor the moment as well as the menu. Be present in the present. Because ultimately, there’s no point in hosting a party if you can’t have fun at it. And there’s no point in living a life if you can’t enjoy what’s going on in it.

Pausing

2011-11-21T07:58:00.000-05:00

Our church service yesterday morning focused on the theme of taking time to pause and concentrate and absorb. We sang a hymn I hadn’t heard before about the need to behave like cows and sheep, standing in the fields watching and thinking. Our student minister read the well-known poem by Mary Oliver in which she describes spending a whole afternoon contemplating a grasshopper. And in the sermon, our minister described a classroom method biologist Louis Aggasiz practiced at Harvard in which students were required to stare at dead fish for days on end and describe it in detail, only to discover time after time how very little detail they were actually absorbing.

This was good for me to hear. I hadn’t been to church for several weeks because of other options on Sunday mornings. A couple of those weeks I’d been out of town, but other weeks I’d wanted to concentrate on other priorities: spending time with my sisters and their families when they were in town on a rare weekend visit in mid-October, going for a run with a friend another Sunday in early November and urging her to stay for a cup of coffee so that we could catch up a little bit.

So sometimes, going to church feels to me like the opposite of pausing and concentrating. Sometimes, I avoid going with the excuse that when Sunday morning comes, I just can’t rush around anymore. I rush every weekday morning to get the kids to the schoolbus on time; I hurry throughout the course of my work day; I hurry to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour; I hurry to get to bed early enough to try for seven hours of sleep. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I just need a break from hurrying – even if hurrying means something as theoretically contemplative as being at church. I need to pause at home and regroup.

But being back after several weeks away yesterday reminded me that in some ways, the only time I really can stop and concentrate is in church. I tell myself some weekends that I’ll have a leisurely, focused breakfast and maybe even read the paper, but more often than not, I eat while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher and making breakfast for the kids. I imagine going for a leisurely run instead of church, but instead I run with one eye on the clock, calculating what time I need to be done and showered in time to be on time to the next commitment.

I’m not good at pausing and concentrating, and during the holiday season this tendency for distraction only grows worse: instead of letting my mind absorb the present, I’m thinking about the next party, the next cooking project, the next holiday performance on our schedule.

So it was good to be in church yesterday morning to hear this message, and also to be able to enact it just a little bit. In church, there is nothing to do but sit and listen. I couldn’t unload a dishwasher or go for a walk even if I wanted to: it’s church. So that’s the one time of the week when I know I really will just sit still. And it was good to be reminded yesterday of what an important priority that is – at any time of year, but perhaps on the brink of the holiday season most of all.

A taste of success (or not)

2011-11-18T07:57:00.002-05:00

On days like yesterday, I’m not sure how to define success.

I don’t mean success in the macro sense, from the 100,000-foot-view, success in terms of a life or a career. I just mean there are some days when I’m not sure if what I accomplished merits a check in the plus or the minus column.

When I worked in the corporate sector, success on any given day was easy to define. Even in the editorial department, where we weren’t tallying the bottom line on a daily basis, we knew whether we’d met deadlines, created a successful project, planned out a catalog or completed the logistics for a photo shoot.

But these days it’s murkier.

Yesterday I put checkmarks in the plus column, metaphorically speaking, for completing three interviews that I needed to do for an article due today and correcting page proofs for a manuscript that was ready to go to press. Beyond my workload, I packed well-balanced lunches for both kids, got Holly to the bus on time, and even remembered to write a note giving Holly permission to go to art club after school.

On the minus side? I meant to clean the kids’ bathrooms and didn’t get to it. I didn’t make any progress on the website I’m supposed to be starting up for Tim’s class play. I forgot to stop at the post office.

Making a dinner that everyone likes counts in the success column, but neglecting to wash the breakfast dishes until after sunset earns a minus. Getting a good assignment from an editor gains another success sign; writing what feels like a weak lead paragraph for that same assignment, not so much.

Trivial, yes, but these are the metrics that often make up my days. And sometimes, they carry even less import than remembering to stop to buy milk before we run out, but I judge them nonetheless: for example, yesterday I called for Rick to pluck a tick off Holly’s arm rather than mustering the bravery to do it myself. Fail!

I suppose it’s inevitable that if I look this closely at this many details, there will be plenty of marks in each column. In the corporate sector, it’s more black-and-white. A project executed on time and under budget is a success. The opposite kind of project is no success at all. These days, I judge myself not on large-scale projects but on dozens of tiny actions that make up the day.

And ultimately? It’s a matter of perspective, of course. I remind myself that if I didn’t hurt anyone or damage any property, it’s probably fair to count the day as a success, at least on balance. And the most conspicuous measure of success sometimes feels like the one that comes after the rest of the day is over: whether or not I’m able to get more than six hours of sleep. Waking up well-rested and ready to start a new day? Definitely, success.

November elegy

2011-11-16T07:41:00.000-05:00

I wish November could last forever.

But then, almost every year I wish November, or at least the first two weeks of it, could last forever.

This month in particular, though, it’s increasingly obvious that we are in the midst of the most perfect few weeks of the whole year. October impresses with warm days and blazing colors, but in November, the pale gold sunlight streams through the bare branches and slants across the burnished dying grass on the fields. Mild days like we’ve had this week seem like a remarkable gift this late in the season, especially after the snowstorm with which October ended. I’ve gone running in temperatures in the mid-50’s the past few mornings, and it seems like such an unexpected bonus.

This is a quiet time of year, a time for in-gathering. Fall sports are wrapping up. The school year is well under way; the kids are comfortably established in their classroom routines, but it’s still too early for major projects or productions. The report cards, conferences and concerts that mark the end of a term are still several weeks away.

And just as far away, mercifully, are the holidays. Well, not quite. Thanksgiving is next week, and I should already be planning the menu and table settings, but it feels like even that can wait a few more days, maybe ‘til the weekend. As for Christmas and New Year’s festivities, I won’t even think about that until we’ve finished cleaning up the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner.

This is a quiet week. I’m immersed in work and community events, and fitting in as much time outdoors as I can while the weather is still so mild. With the early sunsets, the filtered November daylight seems all the more vital.

Next week, I’ll start thinking about Thanksgiving, and then figuring out the December schedule with all its parties and events, and then Christmas itself. This week, I’m just savoring the quiet and peace and beautiful days of mid-November.

Busy Sunday

2011-11-14T07:56:00.000-05:00

At 7:56 last night, I sat down and glanced at the clock.

7:56. I was sitting down for just a moment, but at that moment I felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to avoid getting up again all evening.

But then Holly called from the shower that she needed a towel, and the dog looked like a trip outside for her might not be a bad idea, and I remembered that the clothes needed to be moved from washing machine to dryer.

It was a busy day. I arose early to write my usual one thousand words of Morning Pages. I decoded the problem I was having syncing my Google calendar with my new phone. And though the peace and quiet of the household with everyone else still asleep was blissful, I headed out for a four-mile run.

“Tell me one thing: why do we have to exercise?” a man who looked to be in his sixties and was out for a walk near the state park called out to me as I approached him.

“Funny you should ask; we were talking about that just this weekend,” I told him, which was true. “It’s because we don’t do manual labor! If we were out working in the fields all day, we wouldn’t go running!”

I finished my run and made waffles for the kids’ breakfast. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower and headed to my friend Jane’s house. She and another friend and I did a 45-minute walk in the warm midday sunlight and talked about how odd it was to have a sixty-degree November day just two weeks after an October snowstorm.

I drove back home and put in a load of laundry and swept the floors. I welcomed a new friend of Holly’s who came over to play. I figured out what to make for the next several dinners and made up a grocery list. Then it was time to go grocery shopping.

Home from the supermarket, I tried to unload groceries, talk on the phone to my mother, and make dinner all at the same time. It took a while, but I succeeded, more or less. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes stuffed with a steamed broccoli mixture, and it was one of those rare evenings when everyone not only sat down together (that’s not the rare part) but ate what was offered.

It wasn’t an unusually strenuous day. As I told the man who was out for a walk while I was running, it’s not like we were working in the fields. Or performing surgery. Or piloting a steamship or keeping a spaceship in orbit. It was just regular weekend life.

And it’s wonderful. I love all of these things: running by myself, walks with friends, cooking, taking care of the house, being with my family.

Still, I felt decadent submitting to inertia at 7:56 while Holly took a shower. But I couldn’t help it. The days are full. Still, every aspect of it had meant something to me. Fellowship. Parenthood. Nourishment. Physical well-being.

Days like this seem mundane sometimes. They aren’t the ones we remember, the way we remember vacation days or parties, say. They are just….days full of weekend-day type things.

But I wouldn’t have taken away a single part of it. Even if by 7:56 I was ready to give up on all mobility for the rest of the evening.

Yes, I was worn out, although I managed to rally enough to do what else needed to be done before bed: tucking in Holly, letting the dog out again, locking the front door. Despite not having been toiling at any kind of manual labor, I went to sleep with that invaluable sense of having done a good day’s work. Even if I have no material harvest to show for it.

Feeding season again

2011-11-11T06:49:00.000-05:00

It’s a mid-fall seasonal ritual: the resumption of livestock feeding.

From May through October, the cows graze. That makes life easier for the rest of us. I see them as I drive by or run alongside their pastures, but I don’t interact with them much. They graze and mingle in the fields; I focus on human pursuits.

But for the other six months of the year, I spend time with them daily. I head out to the barn in the morning and they follow me right up to the gate. I climb the ladder to the hayloft and they stand below, watching me. I shoulder my way among them to move a bale or cut the twine around the hay and they subtly shove back, reminding me that my shoving is no match for their shoving. Or even their gentlest nudging, for that matter.

I’ve been doing the cows’ daily feeding on my parents’ farm for the past three years, not out of obligation but because I was outdoors on the earlier side of the morning anyway, letting the dog run around and then going running myself, and it just made sense to take on this responsibility since I was right there already.

But for the past several months, I thought my job with the animals was over. The logistics of farm life have changed over the course of the year; now there is a significantly greater number of animals in the herd, and also more farmhands involved, so I was told there was no need for me to continue.

But rituals, like habits and water, have a way of carving their own paths. I had thought the herd had become too large in number for me to navigate my way around comfortably, but then for husbandry purposes they were separated into small groups in three different pastures. And it turned out I was still the first one out in the barnyard in the morning, letting the dog play and getting ready for my daily run. So once again, it just made sense for me to climb up to the hayloft and throw down some bales while I was out there anyway.

And even though it seemed like giving up this duty might not be such a bad change when I contemplated it a few months ago – surely that extra ten or fifteen minutes every morning that I’d save from not entering the barnyard would come in handy – now that I’m back into the feeding routine, I’m so glad I didn’t have to give it up after all.

I love the way the animals watch me walking toward the barn, the way they low in anticipation of their morning meal, the way they mill and shuffle and edge each other around as they wait for me to make my slow way to the hay supply. I like the way they lower their big faces into the bales once I finally deliver on my promise, and the way they ignore me as I make my way between them once they’re eating.

It’s not an affectionate personal relationship like the one I have with my dog…or my kids. I just like being around them. It’s been part of my day during the cold-weather seasons for the past three years. I know they don’t particularly care who shows up in the barnyard at eight o’clock each morning. My company doesn’t mean anything different to them than any other human’s. But their company means something to me. It’s a tradition, and I’m happy that once again this November, the bovines and I are spending time together.

Good judgment

2011-11-09T09:10:00.001-05:00

Perhaps it is yet another unavoidable fact of small-town existence: we parents tend to know a lot more about our middle schoolers’ lives than they necessarily realize.

We talk amongst ourselves and put together the various pieces from the stories we each hear, and eventually we have a much clearer picture of, say, the argument in the cafeteria or the budding romance in art class than any of our kids suspect.

Still, we can’t let on just how much we know. We don’t want our kids to stop telling us about their day, and we don’t want them to feel like they are under surveillance. So a lot of the time, we parents keep it within our own circles, presenting a bland sort of curiosity rather than a thirst for specifics when our kids do choose to share details from their lives.

All of which is why I can’t tell Tim why I am so impressed with him lately. I can only make heavily veiled references to his social situation, with comments like “Glad things are going better for you this week” and “Sounds like you worked things out well.”

And out of respect for Tim’s privacy and that of his friends, I can’t go into much detail here either. I can only say that three different parents whom I ran into over the past few days remarked on Tim’s mature behavior in a difficult situation.

In essence, Tim and some of his peers found themselves over the past several weeks in the kind of situation that middle schoolers for generations have found themselves in: just a timeless pre-adolescent maelstrom of uncertainty, rumor, and fluctuating loyalties. (There were definitely no nude photos exchanged by text message, though, so that’s a relief.) Without asking me for advice, Tim somehow intuitively did everything I would have suggested to avoid coming out on the wrong side of this. He treated the circle of friends who were involved in the issues with fairness, loyalty, and reassurance. He remained calm and dispassionate. He exhibited patience and avoided drama.

And in the end, everything turned out well for him. He fortified friendships and learned a lesson: sometimes your own moral compass takes you exactly where you need to go.

As another parent commented when we moms had one of our furtive discussions about our kids, that’s a lesson that unfortunately may be disproved for him at some point in the future. But I’m not sure that really matters. Right now, the important thing is that Tim discovered at the tender age of 13 that sometimes following your principles and being a kind and fair person reaps rewards. To say I’m proud of him feels inaccurate, since I can’t really take ownership over his actions. It’s more a matter of admiration than pride. He used fine judgment in a way that isn’t always easy for young teens to do.

Usually, when I hear myself saying about one of my kids “S/he learned an important lesson,” I’m referring to a less-than-ideal circumstance, whether it’s that a child rode a bike heedlessly, sent an incriminating email, lied to a friend or neglected to brush her teeth properly (all of which has at some point been the impetus for a lesson learned in our household). This time, I can say that the lesson Tim learned was that sometimes nice guys really do finish first. And even if at some point in the future he discovers the opposite can also be true, I don’t think he’ll ever forget learning this one.

One hour, once a year

2011-11-07T07:52:00.002-05:00

It doesn’t take young children long at all to figure out the problem with wishing every day could be your birthday: If every day were that special, then no day would be that special.

Concommitantly, it shouldn’t take me long to figure out why it doesn’t make sense to wish every day could be the end of daylight saving time, the day we set our clocks back; yet it’s a wish that sneaks furtively into my mind every year at this time.

I just find that extra hour so phenomenally helpful. The Saturday night before we set our clocks back always feels to me like the one time you can have it all….you can stay up late but still get to bed early. We weren’t doing much this particular weekend; I stayed awake on Saturday reading until 11:00, and yet just before I turned out the light I set the clock back to 10. Sunday morning, I slept as late as I wanted, and yet when I finally arose, it was only 6:20.

Most of the year, I have to make choices: go to sleep early or stay up late and read. Awaken in time to get a head start on the day or bask lazily in bed. In each case, both choices have their advantages….and their drawbacks. But on the first weekend in November, I get both. The best of all worlds. Have my cake and eat it too. Read late but get to bed early. Sleep all I want but still be up before I need to be.

And so I can’t help wishing every year that I could have this day over and over again: one extra hour. But of course, that wouldn’t really help. If each day had one extra hour, I’d fill it, and I’d still get to bed too late or not get enough reading done and not get enough sleep or stay in bed so late it made my whole day feel lazy and unproductive.

So it’s just once a year, that magical extra hour. Like a child contemplating birthdays, I remind myself each year that it’s valuable only because it’s so rare; an extra hour whenever I needed it would cease to be a luxury. Tomorrow, I’ll already be readjusted; that extra hour will have been absorbed into the fabric of the week, and I’ll be once again caught among priorities without ever feeling like I have enough time for all of them.

One extra hour, once a year. It’s a pretty good deal, if you use it well. And it’s a huge treat every time it rolls around.

Clean-up time

2011-11-04T09:57:00.001-04:00

Holly is invited to a sleepover that starts at dinnertime tonight, and I’ll celebrate her absence the best way I know how: by cleaning up her room.

I realize how many principles of good parenting this comes into direct conflict with. Holly should clean up her own room. In fact, cleaning up her room should be a prerequisite for going to a sleepover. In fact, her room shouldn’t even need clean-up; tidying should be part of her everyday routine.

In the best of all worlds, yes. In my world, not hardly.

Holly’s room is a mess. Holly’s room is always a mess, with the rare exceptions of the times that I absolutely insist we spend some quality time together cleaning it up – which is less fun than a dentist appointment followed by a trip to the transfer station – or the times like tonight when I wait until she’s out of the house and then do a kamikaze cleaning job on it.

And it’s not good for any of us. The stress of seeing so much stuff all over the floor and furniture gives me a headache. Both Rick and I have stepped painfully on small, hard, occasionally sharp objects in the dark while up in her room saying goodnight. Things she needs get lost in the strata of materials. Small containers of colored water left over from painting projects have splashed on the rug. Beads have become embedded in the carpet strands. Library books have gone missing.

But she seems unable to improve in this area. She loves her mess, and as I wrote about last month, our trip to an Open Studios event didn’t help at all: Holly considers herself a practicing studio artist, and when she discovered that almost all of the professional artists whose workspaces we visited that day also favored a colorful but chaotic mess of art supplies and works-in-progress, it only served to fortify her argument that this is how artists need to work. “I like to see what I have, Mommy,” she says by way of explaining the necessity of keeping cloth swatches, sets of scissors, containers of beads, paint sets, books, paper, markers and more piled all over the floor in her room. “It helps me figure out what I want to do.”

Perhaps this is true and perhaps she’s just being devious, because the fact is that the way to put something over on me is to pledge creativity. Holly must know on some level that claiming her mess inspires her is the best way to ensure that I’ll never really truly insist that she keep neater. As a writer, I’m all about the creative process, and not a bit willing to stifle it in someone else.

Still, on that rare opportunity when Holly is out of the house while I’m home and it’s not what I consider work hours, I make my move. Tonight, I’ll pick up, and until she gets back home, I’ll enjoy the absolute sense of serenity that comes from a tidy, well-ordered room. She won’t be happy with my efforts. She will immediately start asking for items that she’ll insist she needs but that we won’t be able to find: the stub of a blue-green Crayola, a tiny booklet that she made for a tiny doll, three beads strung on a segment of floss. Inevitably, I’ll end up going through the same garbage bag I just filled in search of some obscure project.

But at least I’ll have until Saturday morning to know her room is neat. I’ll sleep soundly, happy with the order I’ve imposed on her chaos. And if once she’s home she starts creating that chaos once again, I’ll suppress my frustration. It’s all part of the creative process, I suppose. And who knows, maybe someday that same process with inspire her to create a new way to keep her things in order.

Power outage: The conclusion

2011-11-02T09:05:00.001-04:00

“Wow, this is totally a family bonding moment,” Tim observed with the jaded attitude of a 13-year-old.

One could argue that the “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” rule applies here: If your young teen pauses mid-action to identify what you are doing as family bonding, it doesn’t exactly count. Perhaps it wasn’t the noblest of family bonding experiences – we hadn’t just scaled an Adirondack peak or sailed across the Bering Straits together -- but as the four of us crumpled our tax records from 1995 page by page and threw them into the fire, it definitely qualified as one of those rare times when we were all positioned shoulder to shoulder engaged in one common activity: namely, heating our house.

As the power outage affecting most of our town wrapped up its third day yesterday, I had to admit I was a little weary of it all, but I also acknowledged we’d gotten off easy: with my parents just three miles away and with no power outages of their own, we’d been able to enjoy hot showers, hot meals, Internet connections, indoor plumbing and all the other benefits of living on the grid simply by driving over to their house every day.

Still, despite their urging us to spend the night, all four of us felt like sleeping in our own house, so we bundled off together after dinner on Monday to start up a fire. Happy with the good that finally came out of our 16-year-old tax records, we admired the blazing hearth and then went to sleep by its warmth.

In the morning, though, the lack of creature comforts was starting to take its toll. We all awoke cold and grumpy. Tim found that he couldn’t get his contact lenses in by candlelight. Holly couldn’t locate her bookbag or lunchbox. Rick packed up his tie and jacket and trundled off to my parents’ house to take a shower before work, only to call me a half-hour later and ask if I could please bring him his shoes and socks. And the dog looked just plain furious with all of us, unable to understand why we were forcing her to live in a house heated to 45 degrees.

Yet still, when I checked the NStar website later in the day from the comfort of the library and discovered that our power was projected to be back on by late afternoon, I felt strangely ambivalent. Chilly and oppressive as the house had been that morning, I realized there was a lot of work to do once I no longer had the excuse not to do it. The fridge would need to be cleaned out. There was a sink full of dishes to wash, and of course I wouldn’t feel back to normal until I’d cleaned all the bathrooms. A hamper overflowing with dirty clothes awaited. Plus with power returned to my kitchen, I had no more reasons not to cook a multi-course dinner for my family. Out the window went all thoughts of take-out from the Whole Foods hot bar.

Indeed, the power went back on yesterday afternoon as projected. But of course, it will all be worth it, once I’ve cleaned up a little. It will be good to relax in our own home tonight, with the heat on and the appliances humming. Camping is good for vacations, but my family is clearly not eager to move off the grid just yet.

Besides, it’s not even winter yet, and we’ve heard that our new neighborhood loses power a lot. So I’ll have another couple of years of mid-1990s tax records stacked by the heart and ready to go, and we’ll look forward to hours more of family bonding once winter begins.

Power down

2011-10-31T12:14:00.003-04:00

As I write this on Sunday evening, we’ve been without power for fourteen hours. This is very rare for us; I can’t remember a time since my childhood that we went for more than about six or eight hours without power, and even those events have happened only two or three times in the past decade, as far as I can recall. But this time, with a heavy wet snowfall on Saturday night pulling down power lines all over the state, we are facing the kind of situation we usually hear about but avoid: already a full day and evening, and potentially several more to come, without electricity.

And I have to admit, I’m finding it hard to think of anything to say about it that isn’t a cliché. Everything positive about power outages has already been said by the many who experience them more often than we do, and yet now that it’s our turn, I’m finding them all to be true: the way it’s made us focus on the simpler things in life – reading by candlelight, savoring a grilled cheese sandwich made over a gas burner – the fact that it has imposed upon us a mandatory hiatus from our Internet connections, with the constant chatter of email and Facebook; the strange reality that all four of us are sitting together on the couch in front of the fireplace reading or writing, rather than dispersed into four different parts of the house, engaged in four different activities. Even the dog seems to want nothing more than to sit in front of the fire, gazing into the flames.

Because this kind of crisis happens to us so rarely, I’m admittedly a little lax when it comes to the fundamentals of emergency preparedness. But this storm has taught me that what I’ve done in that realm is apparently good enough, at least for the first fourteen hours of a power outage. The half-dozen bottles of water stored in a cupboard have been enough so far for drinking and washing up. We had batteries for all the flashlights, and all the flashlights were easy to find in their usual places. We have candles and matches. Because it’s still autumn and because it’s our first year of living in a home with a fireplace, we hadn’t stored firewood yet, but the logs we sawed this morning from tree limbs that fell into our driveway during the storm ignited fairly easily and have kept us warm. It’s reassuring to know that even without scurrying around preparing for a storm, we’re pretty well equipped to manage one, although I should also admit that not until this evening have I understood why people fill bathtubs and washing machines, and I’ll remember to do that in the future.

Waking this morning to the not unexpected realization that we were without power, my first thoughts were of the many duties I would not have to do today; a rush of welcome laziness swept over me, and I slept an hour later than I usually allow myself. I also keep thinking how relieved I am that this situation is the result of a weather system and not, say, a terrorist attack or an earthquake, something with far more profound implications than a simple snowstorm. Sunday was one of the most peaceful days I’ve had in months, maybe even in years. Rick and I cleared limbs and sawed logs together all morning; the kids, absent their usual temptations of TV and video games, shoveled snow together and then put my iPod on speaker and danced.

Later, we went to my parents’ house and played card games. In the late afternoon, my mother and Tim and I took a walk up to the soccer fields and around the cemetery. Back home, the four of us warmed ourselves around the fire.

It will get more challenging as the days pass, if the power isn’t soon restored. I won’t feel so peaceful or tranquil if I’m unable to meet my work responsibilities due to our Internet connection being down. (Even as I write this blog entry, it’s with the awareness I’ll have to find a hot spot to post it if we’re still lacking electricity in the morning.) But for now, all is dark and quiet. Tim remarked on the visibility of stars in the sky with no house lights around to detract from their glow. Like a 19th-century family, we all went to bed early, when the cold and dark simply made it unappealing to be up any later.

It’s all been said before. But this time, I had the chance to find out for myself what it was like. And for now, it’s a very serene moment in time for us.

Lost and found (no thanks to Tim)

2011-10-28T08:11:00.002-04:00

I’ve written before about how much it bothers me to lose things. Materials objects, that is. I just feel that the material world is something you should be able to count on. People can be unpredictable. So can weather and natural disasters and political situations and boating conditions and reader response. But knowing that you’ll be able to find your keys wherever you last placed them – because they’re not going to decide to go for a walk, or have a change of heart about their fealty toward you, or decide it would be funny to hide – is something you should be able to count on. Object permanence matters to me; it’s one constant in a world of entropy.

And for that reason, I’m careful with objects. I pay attention to where I place things. “Is this where I’m most likely to look for it next time I need it?” I ask myself when I put something down. I’m mindful about having specific places for specific belongings and not mindlessly leaving things in places other than where they normally go.

So it was frustrating not to be able to find my pedometer chip yesterday morning. This is a little plastic oblong that plugs in to my iPod and tracks my mileage while I run. Unfortunately, since it’s about an inch long and white, it’s nearly invisible. So I always leave it in the same place, with my iPod and headphones, when I’m done running.

Yesterday, the fact that it wasn’t there gave me the feeling that something was ever so slightly wrong with the world. An object had picked itself up and gone away; that isn’t supposed to happen.

It wasn’t essential that I have it right away, but it’s so small and inconsequential in appearance that I knew if I didn’t find it quickly, it could simply be swept under a bookshelf or tracked outside with the dog or brought out to the recycling bin with the mail.

And as neurotic as it makes me sound, I felt a little off-kilter all day, knowing that a tiny fraction of my attention was diverted wondering where this little piece of plastic could be.

I told my 13-year-old about the problem when he got home from school. “So just keep an eye out for it,” I concluded. I expected relative indifference on his part, but to my surprise, he immediately started looking on the floor below the mudroom shelf. “I bet it’s either here or in the laundry basket,” he said.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“Because those are the only places it could have landed when I knocked it off the shelf last night,” he said.

A ha. A clue. “If you knocked it off the shelf, why didn’t you pick it up?” I asked him.

“Well, I looked for a minute, but I didn’t see it right away, so I figured it had to have fallen either on the floor or into the laundry basket under the shelf and you’d find it eventually.”

Exasperated but hopeful, I lifted a pile of clean laundry out of the basket. My odometer chip tumbled out.

“Tim, if you know you’ve knocked something off a shelf, look for it!” I said, incredulous not for the first time – more like the ten thousandth time – at the seemingly obvious truisms that need to be stated to 13-year-old boys.

“I figured it couldn’t be too far away,” he shrugged.

So now all is well. I have my odometer back and my faith restored in the material world. Tim has learned what I would have assumed was intuitive: if you drop something, pick it up. Okay, realistically, Tim probably has not learned that. But surely a mom can dream.

Lunch walks

2011-10-26T08:46:00.002-04:00

Looking all the way back to the job I began one week after college graduation, in early June of 1989, I could trace my work history by job title. Or by salary. By immediate supervisor. By office address. By length of tenure.

But yesterday it occurred to me I could also trace my work history by midday walks. I’ve always appreciated the benefits of a lunch hour spent outside in the fresh air, taking a little exercise. And each workplace setting comes with its own options for lunchtime strolls.

When I worked in Boston, I’d walk over to the Public Garden and circle the Frog Pond and the Boston Common during the noontime hour. I’d watch tourists riding the Swan Boats. I’d see well-dressed Beacon Hill aristocrats stepping along carefully, carrying their little purses and walking their little dogs. I’d see Bullfinch architecture on the skyline and Freedom Trail landmarks along the way.

When I worked in Cambridge, I walked along the Charles River, from the Esplanade down to the Mass Ave Bridge or sometimes only as far as the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops play on the Fourth of July. At that time I worked for a big company and a lot of my co-workers liked to go walking as well, so we’d head out together and talk about anything but what was waiting for us on our desks when we got back.

When I worked in Waltham, walking was not a popular midday activity in my company. In fact, I’m not sure I ever saw anyone venture outdoors except to get to their cars in the parking lot. We were situated in an office park on a highway exit, so the surroundings were not exactly inviting, but some of the office parks around us had relatively appealing landscaping, with lawns and manmade ponds, and I even found a cut-through to a little suburban neighborhood that backed on to one of the parking lots. It was a neighborhood nondescript enough that it could have been featured in a study about what went wrong in the design of American suburbs, and I doubt even the people who lived there went for many walks around the block. But it was better than sitting in a windowless break room.

Using the standard of lunchtime walks as a framework, though, it’s obvious to me that I’ve figuratively won the lottery at this point. I’m self-employed and get to write all day; better still, I’m at home, where my so-called office – which is actually our kitchen alcove – looks into the woods. A trail from the yard leads into the state park, with over one thousand acres of trails.

So on days like yesterday, which was an absolutely perfect New England fall day, with cool dry air, an occasional gust of wind, and yellow leaves shimmering in the sunlight, my lunchtime walk consists of grabbing the leash, calling the dog, slipping a trail map into my jacket pocket and heading out.

And once I’m in the woods, deadlines and quotes and fact-checking don’t seem to matter so much. I can enjoy the scent of the forest, the rocks and pine needles and tree roots underfoot, the rush of water from the brooks that lace through the woods. The setting is far better than any of my previous office situations, but the joy of getting out in the middle of the day is the same.

Ultimately, that’s always been the purpose of lunchtime walks: to stop thinking for a little while about the work left behind. The woods, as Robert Frost observed, are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises – and deadlines -- to keep. Still, it’s inspiring to know that as long as I keep up with my work, I can slip out to the woods again at lunchtime tomorrow.

Happy birthday

2011-10-24T07:46:00.001-04:00

It was a perfect birthday.

Those years that your birthday falls on a weekend have an inherent advantage, of course. It’s much easier to feel special and have fun all day long if it’s a day you don’t have to get up early or go to work or keep a dentist appointment.

But yesterday felt special even within the realm of weekend birthdays. I spent the morning at brunch with 14 members of my family: my parents, my sisters, their husbands, my nieces and nephew, and of course Rick, Tim and Holly. I’d spent previous birthdays with various subsets of that group and always felt lucky to do so, but I don’t think I’ve spent my birthday with both my sisters since I was a teenager. So that in itself earmarked this as a wonderful birthday.

They weren’t actually in town for my big day but for my father’s 75th, which fell three days earlier. And I didn’t expect any fuss to be made over my birthday, after all the celebrating we’d done on Saturday evening in honor of his. But at Sunday brunch there were candles in the blueberry coffeecake and presents at the table, and I felt far more feted than I expected to.

My sisters and their families had to head to the airport and the highway once brunch was over, so I went to my friend Jane’s house to help her pack for her upcoming move. Packing my own house for our move last winter wasn’t much fun, but that’s because it seemed to go on endlessly and I had to make so many decisions along the way about what to keep and what to toss….and then too there was the prospect of unpacking all of these same items at the other side of the move. At Jane’s house, there was none of that: I was there only for an hour and simply did what she suggested without worrying about any of the details. It was downright enjoyable.

And then I went home, contemplated the dishwasher full of clean dishes and the dryer full of clean laundry, thought about which of the two I should start with, and then remembered it was my birthday. So I went for a 45-minute walk with the dog along the trails of Great Brook Farm State Park instead.

In the evening, Rick and the kids and I went out for dinner. Tim and I shared a piece of frozen peanut butter pie with fudge sauce. No explanation needed.

This birthday is not a particularly significant number for me – not one I want to admit to, anyway – but what a happy day. There were gifts, cards, phone calls and emails; delicious food; friends and family. Happy birthday, indeed.

An extraordinarily ordinary life

2011-10-21T08:20:00.001-04:00

I am almost done with the memoir project I began last March. And even though the client I’m ghost-writing it for will be thrilled if we meet our goal of having it ready for her to present to her family at Thanksgiving, I’ll be a little sorry to see it end.

The project began when the mother of one of my high school friends said she wanted to talk to me about an idea she had in which she would preserve memories of her 75 years of life: her childhood, her teen years, but most importantly her relationship with her husband, to whom she was married for 50 years before he died in 2008. The impetus for putting all of this in writing came during her recent move from her own home to that of one of her grown sons. Faced with box after box of letters that she and her husband exchanged during his time in the military, she thought about what a keepsake it would be for her family and friends if she could just somehow make a book out of all of it.

To say I was reticent to get involved is putting it mildly. I agreed to meet with her only to recommend how she might approach the search for a good ghost-writer who could take this on, but I made it clear that the appropriate person was not me. During our meeting, I framed my sentences carefully. “The writer you end up working with…” I said, and “Once you find the right person to do the writing….” But I told her outright that I couldn’t take it on.

“Let me tell you a little bit more about what I’m thinking,” she said. “I just want to make it a simple story about what it was like growing up in Arlington in the 1930s and ‘40s. About walking to church, and playing violin in junior high, and having my first job at the Arlington sanitarium.”

My fingers started to twitch. The fingers that take notes on my keyboard when I’m interviewing someone for a story.

“And meeting my husband in a chance encounter on the beach a few days before my 18th birthday. Our first year in college. What Harvard was like in the early 50’s.”

I turned on my laptop.

“The excitement of getting engaged the night of my senior prom. My husband’s summer job collecting seaweed in a wooden dinghy in Plymouth Harbor. And then how it felt seeing him go off to Marine Corps officers’ training camp.”

With a sigh, I opened a new Word file. It was becoming increasingly obvious to me who was going to ghost-write this memoir.

Over the course of three months, I did about ten hours of interviews with my friend’s mother, and in between our weekly meetings, I’d review my transcripts and do a little editing. Finally, I started going through the letters she’d selected, letters she and her husband exchanged during three different summers that he attended Marine Corps officers’ training camp in Quantico, Virginia.

From our first discussion to my last edits of our current draft, which is nearly ready to be sent off to the self-publishing press we’ve chosen, I remained transfixed by this story. When I tried to tell a friend about it, she asked, “Did this woman have a really fascinating life?’

“No!” I exclaimed. “She had an ordinary life! But somehow that’s just what’s so fascinating about it: I’m getting such an in-depth look.”

What radio shows she listened to during lunch as a girl. How she and her mother traveled to Downtown Crossing by bus and subway to shop at Jordan Marsh. What she remembers about her first year of teaching. The engagement gifts she received. It’s all so everyday. But told by the person who lived it, it’s also all so interesting.

I suppose it’s not surprising that I find the story of an unsensational life compelling. As a freelance journalist, I’ve essentially made my career out of writing features about regular people doing interesting things. I’ve never covered celebrities or political figures or crime stories; I always seem to write about some aspect of daily life.

Soon the memoir will be printed, and my friend’s mother will give copies to her children and grandchildren. I wonder if they’ll like it as much as I do. I wonder if they’ll even read it as closely as I have.

To me, it’s a wonderful tale of a life well lived and even better remembered. To them, it may seem uninteresting: there was nothing spectacular or amazing about this particular woman’s 75 years. But I hope they see in it just what I did: an unforgettable story about the daily wonders embedded within an ordinary life.

Kids & Kindles

2011-10-19T09:48:00.003-04:00

Yesterday’s feature in the Boston Globe about little kids developing a penchant for state-of-the-art electronics such as iPads and iPhones caught my attention. The issue isn’t exactly relevant in our household – at 9 and 13, my kids are considerably older than the toddlers and preschoolers described in the story – and when the kids were that age, we didn’t have iPhones or iPads (and in fact still have just one iPhone in our household and no iPads).

Coincidentally, though, just the night before, I had for the first time purchased a book for Holly on my Kindle. And I didn't do that without a fair share of rumination as to whether it was appropriate for my nine-year-old to be reading on a Kindle.

But my guess is that many parents make the reluctant leap to letting their kids e-read the same way I did: Holly had just finished a book and wanted the next one in the series in order to complete the twenty minutes of nightly reading that her teacher requires. And while I acknowledge that this sounds demanding on Holly's part -- wanting one book and one book only -- I've become used to it from Tim. When he's in the middle of a series, no book except the next book in the series will do. Switching over to reading something else for the sake of convenience -- such as, there's a copy of it right over there on the bookshelf, whereas the book he wants is at the library or the bookstore and we won't be able to pick up a copy 'til tomorrow -- is an option not even worthy of consideration.

And in Holly's case, it wasn't only that she'd have to wait until the next day for me to go to the library: the book she wanted was a brand new release from a popular series, and getting a copy of this high-demand read would take a while.

So I let her order up a six-dollar copy on my Kindle, and thirty seconds later she was reading. I watched her and thought about what I had done. For myself, I'm absolutely a Kindle convert: I love the convenience of carrying as much reading material as I could possibly want -- novels, reference materials, magazines, newspapers, notes of my own -- all on one little piece of plastic that weighs less than a pound.

But the sight of kids using Kindles gives me pause. I've never agreed with adults who shy away from e-readers saying they can't imagine enjoying the experience of reading without the feel and smell of an actual book in their hands -- to me, reading is reading, and why should I have the inconvenience of newsprint on my fingers or the weight of a hardcover in my purse? -- but I'm a little unsure as to whether kids are absorbing the full experience of reading, when no book is in hand.

When a friend told me both her kids, ages 12 and 13 at the time, owned Kindles, I said to her, "I'm not sure my kids would know what they wanted to read if they didn't browse through the stacks at the library." But she told me her kids use the New York Times Book Review section on children's books for recommendations, or they order books by authors whose work they've enjoyed in the past, or they use the "Customers who bought this book also bought" tab on Amazon.com to get ideas about what to load onto their Kindles next.

Or they go to the library, browse through the stacks, and find something they want to read, just like my kids do. Then they order it on their Kindles.

It still seemed a little strange to me, and to some extent, that's the point made in the Globe story about toddlers and preschoolers using iPhones, iPads and similar devices. Surely Holly needs to be immersed in the sensory aspects of reading a book -- the slippery feel of the cover, the heft of the volume, the nubbly texture at the edge of thr pages -- before she's ready to skip that part and go electronic. And seeing her sit there poring over my Kindle screen didn't give me the same twinge of delight that seeing her immersed in a real book always gives me.

Still, it enabled her to read what she wanted to read at that very moment. Admittedly, that might make it more a lesson in instant gratification than literary appreciation. And when she finishes this book, I'll encourage her to find her next one the old-fashioned way, at a library or a bookstore. But for now, what matters to her is that she didn't have to wait even twelve hours to find out what happens next in her favorite series of the moment. And to me, that's a certain kind of passion that I’m more than happy to fuel, whether it finds its resolution on the page or on the screen.

Good hiking, bad packing

2011-10-17T07:52:00.000-04:00

To my surprise, we did what we set out to do this weekend. This isn’t astonishing in and of itself, except that this weekend the plan was to hike up Bradbury Mountain in Pownal, Maine. Since my new philosophy is to go ahead and plan the things I want to do rather than waiting around for my kids to develop some of my interests, I told them I was going to do this hike and they were welcome to join me. I was sure they’d demur. They never choose hiking when I offer it as an option.

So I can’t explain why this weekend they had a change of heart from their usual reticence, but they assured me that yes, they really did want to do this hike. And since three different guidebooks assured me Bradbury Mountain is probably the easiest hike in Maine, I decided to follow through and see what would happen.

It turns out they really meant it. We did the hike; an hour of walking in all. The kids particularly enjoyed the steep rocks that they could clamber up and down, and the weather was ideal for a fall hike. Foliage in Maine is gradually starting to change, and the views were gorgeous.

But there must have been bad karma going around this weekend when it came to packing our bags. As we were getting ready to leave home and drive to Maine Saturday afternoon, Tim asked if he could slip the few things he needed for a one-night stay into my overnight bag. “Sure, there should be room in the pocket,” I told him. Not until he was changing for bed six hours – and one hundred miles – later did we realize we were talking about different overnight bags. His change of underwear and clean clothes for the next day were tucked in the pocket of the bag I had never planned to bring.

It didn’t matter too much, since I had an extra toothbrush in my toiletries bag. I teased him that for once, he actually had an excuse for not putting on clean underwear in the morning; normally, whether or not he does is anyone’s guess, since he never seems to be able to explain to me why the number of underwear items in his hamper never align with the number of days since I last did the laundry.

So that was a minor problem. Unfortunately, a worse problem occurred when we got back home late Sunday afternoon, enthusiastic and well-exercised from our hike, and I realized my overnight bag had never made it back into the car when we were packing up in Maine.

It means I have to retrace my steps and go all the way back to Portland to pick it up. It was a remarkably stupid mistake on my part, one I stewed over all evening. But in the end, I had to reconcile myself to the reality that while it was careless, it wasn’t awful. No one had gotten hurt, and there was no significant material loss. The only real cost to be paid, other than the four hours it will take me to repeat the round-trip drive this week, is gasoline and auto emissions, but since I drive a Prius, even that can almost be excused.

Still, it’s a big enough mistake that I’ll learn from it. Four dull hours on the Maine Turnpike will surely be enough to make me double-check that I have all my bags next time. And sometimes, that can be a worthwhile tradeoff: make a big enough mistake and you’re sure not to make it again.

Besides, the hike was great. That’s what I’ll hold onto from this weekend, not the frustration of leaving things behind.

I only wish that for Tim, wearing the same underwear two days in a row would vex him enough that he too would be more careful next time. But I’m not counting on it.

Trail walking

2011-10-14T10:23:00.001-04:00

I’m not sure why it took me so long to follow through on this resolution, but at last I am.

Six months ago, we moved to a house perched on the edge of a state park. Even though I’ve long known about this state park, and lived just a few miles from it for most of my life, I’ve never spent much time in it, and the few visits I did make usually didn’t go beyond the ice cream stand at the park headquarters. One truth about living in Carlisle is you seldom need to drive anywhere to find a good place for a walk, and so I almost never bothered to make the trip.

Now, though, it’s not a drive; it’s literally a walk into the woods bordering our back yard to pick up the trails network. And as soon as I realized how close we were, I was intrigued, hoping this would finally spur me on to become acquainted with Great Brook Farm State Park, far beyond the headquarters and ice cream stand section of it and deep into the dense woods beyond.

But for several months, it didn’t. Our new house is at the far end of the park, so our initial forays were only to figure out which trails led to ice cream. We did that several times over the summer, but we didn’t stray much from that path, once we’d figured it out. And when ice cream didn’t tempt us, the mosquitoes were too strong a deterrent for us to want to explore much farther afield.

Now, though, I’ve renewed my resolve. This park covers more than 1,000 acres of fields, forest, wetlands and farmland, and I want to become familiar with all of it. But I have a notoriously dismal sense of direction, so I want to learn my way gradually and thoroughly.

My first step was to take the familiar route to the park headquarters last weekend to pick up a trail map. And after that, I was well on my way. I tried following one trail on my own last weekend, another trail with my friend Donna on Columbus Day, a third option with the dog during a midweek break from writing. I found that the trail map was actually quite easy to follow, and the more I tried different routes, the more I started to gain confidence I’d never had before in my orienteering abilities. The topography began to look a little bit familiar in different places, and the compass points almost always lined up with my sense of where they should be.

Last year, I made a different resolution: to become better acquainted with the works of Thoreau. I made a little progress toward that end, but not as much as I’d hoped; and then over the summer I received as a gift a copy of The Quotable Thoreau, which is sort of like the Cliff Notes version of Thoreau’s work, perfect for literary dilettantes like me. Now, I feel like the two endeavors – reading more Thoreau and getting to know the trails of Great Brook Farm State Park – are complementary. Thoreau writes about walking in the woods, and that’s just what I’ll be doing. So I hope the two projects will fuel each other.

So far on my walks through the woods, I’ve seen ponds large and small; green, yellow, red and orange leaves; other people walking; birds; a log cabin; a Colonial-era stone foundation; and yes, lots and lots of mosquitoes. But the mosquitoes will soon be waning as colder weather arrives, and I plan to still be walking. So let’s hope this is one of my few resolutions that sticks, because there are a lot of acres of woods out my back door. And a lot of Thoreauvian passages to read. But I have time, I think. I just need to stay resolved.

Plans that work and plans that don't

2011-10-12T07:48:00.001-04:00

We made our plans for yesterday over a week ago. It was a so-called professional day for the kids, so I condensed my work day into a three-hour morning session and postponed most of my deadlines until the next day. The plan was to leave at noon to pick up Tim’s friend Will, drive to Kimball Farm in Westford, have a picnic at the picnic area there, play a round or two of mini-golf, indulge in Kimball Farm ice cream cones, and head home.

But nothing quite worked out the way we planned. Will and Tim wanted to spend some time at home first playing a video game which went on much longer than we expected. It was 1:30 by the time we left the house, rather than noon. We arrived at Kimball’s with our grocery bag full of sandwiches and chips, only to find signs all over the picnic area saying that food from outside, as opposed to food purchased at Kimball’s, was not allowed. We pretended not to see the signs and sat down at a picnic table anyway, at which point we were swarmed by bees.

We moved our picnic away from the general eating area and over to a bench closer to the mini golf area. The bees were no longer a problem and no one seemed to mind that we were eating our own sandwiches, but then Holly pointed to a different sign – one indicating that mini golf was closed for the day.

“Oh well,” I said. “We’ll finish our picnic, get some ice cream, and think of some other outdoor activity instead.” The kids suggested we go to a park we like in a nearby town: Holly could play on the playground equipment there and the boys would toss a Frisbee around. I gave them money and sent them off to the ice cream counter while I cleaned up our picnic.

But the ice cream counter was closed as well, so we reorganized our plans once again: we’d go to an ice cream parlor in another town and a different park near there. It would take a while to get to, but we had the rest of the afternoon free.

The ice cream parlor part of that plan worked out well, but when we got to the park nearby, we were confronted with yet another sign, this one saying that the playground equipment had been removed from that park and new equipment would soon be installed.

It did seem as if an improbable number of our plans had fallen through, but we all agreed that it didn’t matter too much. We were having fun anyway. We’d had our picnic and some very good ice cream, and the boys said Holly could play Frisbee with them since there was no playground available to her. She wasn’t sure she could handle a game of Frisbee, but the boys were patient and taught her the basics. I sat in the sun and watched.

As I sat there, I thought about something Gretchen Rubin writes in “The Happiness Project”: namely, that one criterion for something being fun is that you look forward to it. When I read that, I realized that for me, it’s often not the case: I usually tend to underestimate how enjoyable something will be, with the excuse that pessimism allows the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised.

And I’m pleasantly surprised a lot, I admit; everything from parties to coffee dates to vacations tend to be more fun than I expected. But after reading Gretchen Rubin’s thoughts on this, I’ve started to think maybe I’m missing out; maybe I’d be having even more fun if I allowed myself to anticipate good times a little bit more confidently.

On the other hand, yesterday proved that sometimes plans don’t really work out, so you might be anticipating a bunch of things that don’t end up happening, like our picnic/mini-golf/ice cream stand scheme. So maybe what actually helps most is just anticipating with confidence that something fun will happen, though you might not know exactly what.

I hoped, and suspected, that the afternoon with Tim, Holly and Will would be a good time. And as I sat in the late-afternoon sun watching them play Frisbee, I conceded that it was. Despite all our plans falling through, we were outdoors and happy and drinking in fresh air and sated with ice cream. Not the fun we’d planned on, but a great time nevertheless.

Off-line

2011-10-10T09:02:00.002-04:00

It is so hard for me to go offline for any period of time, and yet I’m so aware of how much I need to do this more regularly.

I’ve written before about my ambivalence about not having a Smartphone, which would give me easy access to email when I’m away from home. Sometimes I’m tempted to upgrade, and other times I’m so appreciate of the value of being compelled to just leave my email behind now and then – whether it’s for short periods of time when I go out to do errands or go for a walk, or longer periods of time like the day last month when I spent eight hours on a daytrip to southern Maine and had no access to email from about nine in the morning to five in the afternoon.

If anything, lately I feel like I’ve become more compelled to be on line. Receiving a hand-me-down netbook from my mother meant my online world was more portable then ever around the house, if still not actually portable outside the house. It became so easy to have the netbook with me in the kitchen when I was preparing meals, or on the porch when I was reading the paper, or on my nighttable when I was getting ready for bed at night.

But I was also becoming increasingly aware lately that I go to the Internet, particularly email, for the wrong reasons. I was constantly searching, waiting, anticipating that all-important email…and yet I can no longer explain what that email might be.

At some point it occurred to me I was looking at my computer screen the same way my husband sometimes looks into the fridge: certain that there must be something in there to satisfy his longings, and yet unable to name what that longing might be for, when I ask him pointblank what it is that he wants to eat.
And so this past weekend it was with a sense of relief that I closed up my computer at 10:00 Saturday morning and left for an overnight trip. “There’s nothing I need. There’s nothing that will come by email this weekend that will make my life any better than it already is,” I told myself several times. And I didn’t give it another thought while we were away.

The funny thing was that when we arrived home midafternoon on Sunday, I found I still didn’t want to get on line. I didn’t care how many emails had built up; just like my husband with the fridge, none of them was going to fulfill the nameless thing I wanted from it.

So I went for a walk in the woods instead. I walked for an hour and a quarter, and then when I got home I turned on my computer at last. I had 30 new emails, certainly not a staggering number for a day and a half off line. I scanned the subject lines quickly. A few from friends who I was happy to hear from, but none of them contained anything terribly important. A lot of ads, of course. A few items related to community events or issues. Nothing work-related since it was a holiday weekend. I went through them all briefly, responded to some, and then disconnected. It felt good.

Changing my ways this one time doesn’t mean I’ve ended my compulsion once and for all. It just means I’m trying really hard to rethink it, to remind myself that a sense of spiritual or emotional enrichment almost never comes via email. I don’t know if I really have the capacity to improve in this area. But reminding myself of how much more that walk in the woods did for me than scanning my emails ever will seems like a good start.

Eating well, cooking well

2011-10-07T10:05:00.000-04:00

For me, New Year’s Day has nothing on Labor Day when it comes to making resolutions. I imagine I’m not unusual in this regard, at least among parents of school-aged children. Never mind new resolve with which to correct habits in early January; for us, September is the fresh start in which I try every year to do everything right.

This fall, one of my resolutions was around menu planning. I like to cook, but I’m not always the most efficient meal planner. Despite the abundance of interesting recipes easily located in cookbooks I own and more cookbooks at the library; recipes sent by friends or by my sisters; recipes via the Internet; and recipes in magazines that arrive monthly in the mail, I’m all too quick to fall back on those dishes that require no recipes at all, because they’re so simple or because I’ve made them so many times. They please the palates of my family, but they also tend to get a little dull.

And there’s just so much good food out there waiting to be prepared. Interesting ingredients. Original techniques. Newly evolving cuisines. For someone who really does enjoy the culinary arts, like me, it just doesn’t make sense to fall back on baked drumsticks and pasta with red sauce and meat loaf quite so often.

My sister Sarah is the opposite. She is not only a good cook but what I would call a proactive cook, one who is always trying new recipes and new methods. In fact, she once told me that when she asked her husband if he liked a particular dish she had made, he said pleasantly enough, “What difference does it make? I’m never going to see it again.”

I aspire to be more like that. Over the summer I became lazier about cooking than ever. Tim and Rick were playing baseball during the dinner hour four nights a week, and it was just so much easier to grill or sauté some standard piece of protein and throw a salad together than get out a recipe and measuring spoons and ingredients.

But now with school back in session, I’m resolved to try harder. When the fall issue of Eating Well arrived in the mail in late August, I gave the kids a packet of stickie-note flags and asked them to go through the magazine and mark every recipe they’d like to try. In the weeks that followed, I tried to make each recipe they had flagged, and each one was a success. A friend gave me a recipe she thought we’d like, and I made it the very next day. When I came across an interesting recipe in the newspaper, instead of just telling myself I’d try it someday, I printed it out right away and put it in my cookbook holder.

The kids have actually noticed and remarked upon this new approach. They’re impressed that as I make out the grocery list, I can tell them what I plan to make for dinner each day in the upcoming week. (So far this week it’s been spinach strata on Monday, sausage risotto on Tuesday, chicken pot pie Wednesday, and corn fritters with roasted squash on Thursday. Friday, of course, is the Sabbath. Not in the Jewish Orthodox sense but in the sense that I plan to wait around for someone else to make dinner. No matter how long I have to wait.)

Resolutions have a way of falling by the wayside. For New Year’s resolutions, late January is typical; for New School Year resolutions, probably soon after Columbus Day weekend. But with luck, that will be just when a new issue of Eating Well arrives in the mail, and it will be enough to keep us flagging recipes – and using them – for at least another month.

Summer fruits

2011-10-05T07:48:00.000-04:00

I’m eating one last plum. One small, soft, juicy, purple-black plum, its pulp sweet and cold, its skin tart and fibrous. One last plum before the summer fruit season ends.

Many of my friends talk about the mixed feelings of changing over their wardrobes from summer to fall: the end of cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses; the ushering-in of wool sweaters and blazers and suede boots. This year, with warm humid temperatures extending into the beginning of October, some of them have sounded more eager than wistful about saying goodbye to bathing suits and sandals and reaching for their autumnal wardrobe.

For me, the wardrobe turnover isn’t all that meaningful. It’s in the fruit crisper that I mark – and lament – the change of seasons.

Goodbye to sweet white peaches, tangy yellow peaches, intensely flavored apricots, red and purple and black plums. Goodbye to complicated cherries, delicious despite their tangle of stems and messy pits, and nectarines, the fruit that seems to have an agreeable disposition, neither as sloppy as peaches nor as mealy as apricots.

Goodbye to summer vegetables as well: plump sweet corn kernels lined up along the cob; dark flavorful tomatoes in blobby irregular spheres.

I’m not adamant about locavorism, mostly because I can’t imagine forever giving up bananas, avocadoes and coffee. But the very best of the summer fruits and vegetables simply aren’t available in the supermarket off-season. And even without being proactively locavore, I appreciate the annual rhythms of the harvest: asparagus in the spring, an abundance of juicy tomatoes and fruits, and flavorful lettuces, in the summer, pears and apples in the fall, oranges and grapefruit in the winter.

So today I say goodbye to summer’s delicious stone fruits. One more perfect plum, and then eight or nine months without. Time to turn to the autumnal harvest for cooking and snacking inspiration. The wheel of the year turns, and we’re at the start of a new season, once again.

Just do it

2011-10-03T09:30:00.000-04:00

I set my alarm Sunday morning for 6:30. Early for a weekend day, but on the Sundays that I’m not only going to church but also teaching Sunday school and need to be there early to prepare, that’s what time I need to get up if I want to fit in a four-mile run.

And I did want to fit in a four-mile run. At least I did when I got ready for bed on Saturday night. Four miles sounded just great. It would take me about 45 minutes, counting actual pack-up-and-get-out-the-door time (iPod connected, cell phone in waistpack, shoes tied, hat located, dog pacified since she doesn’t get to run with me on weekends), so as long as I was on the road by 7, it would work out well.

But I woke yesterday morning about 6:25 and listened to the rain on the roof and noticed how chilly the bedroom was and looked at the gray sky through the skylight and felt very different from how I felt on Saturday night. No longer did I want to go for a four-mile run at all. Nor a three-mile or two-mile run, or any run at all.

Just get up and go, I told myself. Just go ahead with the plan.

How about after church? the other voice in my head countered. When I’m awake, and there’s a little more daylight on the road.

The weather won’t be better after church, my conscience replied. Plus it’s an extra change of clothes if you go in the middle of the day. Get up and go.

But I’m drowsy and chilly and don’t want to go running.

Then just do a mile. Just get out there for a mile, and once you’ve done that, if you want to, you can do more, and if you don’t want to, you can stop.

This, as I so often say, is the number one reason to commit to a running streak. Being a streak-runner means never having to decide whether or not it’s a good day to go running.

No, there was no question I’d go running before the day ended, but does it have to be so early? the voice in my head went on. I’m up at 5:20 five days a week. Can’t I sleep late on weekends?

But of course, I knew from plenty of past experience how that would go. If I waited to go running, I’d needlessly waste stores of mental energy throughout the morning thinking about how my run still lay ahead. I’d get home from church and not feel like changing into my running clothes. It would be late afternoon and I’d still be dreading the thought of a run on a cold gray afternoon.

Or I could just roll out of bed and go, before I was fully conscious of what kind of day it was.

Just a mile, I reminded myself. If it’s not going well, you can stop.

But any runner knows how that goes, and why it’s such a good trick to use on yourself. As I used to tell Tim, after five minutes in the rain, you’re as wet as you’re going to get; might as well just keep going.

Besides, after five minutes of running, you remember why you run. Lying in a warm soft bed, it’s hard to re-create the feeling of breathing in fresh cool air, the rhythm of your feet against the roadway, the breeze, the smell of wet leaves. All you can remember while you’re lying in bed is why you don’t want to get up yet.

So I got up anyway, put on my running clothes, drank some water, headed out the door.

And as always, half a mile in, I wasn’t thinking about turning back. I was thinking about the next three and a half miles and how good it would feel to just keep running.

Roll out of bed. It’s a lesson I seem to learn over and over again. Rolling out of bed is often the hardest part of the run. And after that, it really truly is downhill all the way.

Dinner conversation

2011-09-30T07:53:00.000-04:00

A recent study from Columbia University states that “making time for a nightly family dinner is one of the most important things parents can do to keep their teens away from drugs and alcohol.” Family dinners also lower a teen’s risk of developing an eating disorder, according to the study. Meanwhile, a nearby community has created an online initiative called the Family Dinner Project to encourage families to sit down to dinner together.

This is something parents hear over and over again: it’s beneficial to sit down and eat as a family as often as possible. No one disputes that the combination of kids’ activities and parents’ work schedules and community commitments make it difficult for most families today to do this every night of the week, but we hear often that the benefits are real and measurable if we can try for at least a few nights a week.

This past summer, I became somewhat exasperated by the challenge of planning family meals. Tim (as a baseball player) and Rick (as a coach) had games or practices over the dinner hour four evenings a week. On the evenings they didn’t have baseball, I often planned short getaways for the kids and me. Sometimes, we were home but Rick was at work. Sometimes Holly wanted to attend a kids’ event at the library. And then there were those evenings when some of us had stopped for a late-afternoon ice cream cone on the way back from swimming or a bike ride and weren’t really hungry for dinner anyway.

But now it’s fall, and the predictable rhythm of the school day once again drives our schedule. Fall baseball takes up only one night a week, not four. We tend to be at home doing homework, rather than at the beach or off on a bike ride, as the late afternoon winds down.

And as dinnertimes fall into place in a more organized fashion, I notice that we all enjoy them more as well. Plus the kids are getting older, which makes the event more orderly as well as more interesting. Actual conversation rather than random silliness occasionally prevails. Earlier this week, while we ate grilled sausages, corn bread and sliced cucumbers, Tim asked questions about Facebook privacy after we told him he couldn’t friend anyone who regularly used profanity in posts.

Tim wanted to know if Facebook administration would ever stop a user from using profanity. We said we didn’t think so. “Are there other things you could get in trouble for saying?” he asked.

“Well, you might get in trouble for making threats or dangerous comments,” I said.

“But not posting naked pictures?” Tim asked.

We admitted that was extremely inadvisable but not illegal, to the best of our understanding, assuming it didn’t involve minors.

"What would happen if you posted naked photos of the president?” Tim wanted to know.

“The Secret Service would track you down,” Rick told him.

“But I thought freedom of speech meant you could say whatever you wanted,” Tim argued somewhat illogically.

“Posting photos isn’t the same as freedom of speech,” I said.

“Where would you get naked pictures of the president?” Holly wondered.

“It would be easier with some presidents than others,” Rick conceded.

“Can you say anything you want on Facebook about the president?” Tim pressed.

We tried to explain the concept of treason, and that although freedom of speech is a fundamental American principle, the government also monitors public communications such as Facebook for anything they think could be a danger to society. Moreover, Facebook as an institution has to report communication that they believe to be dangerous.

“This is a very strange dinner,” Tim said at last.

“No, it’s not!” I said. “It’s a real conversation! I’ve been waiting thirteen years to have real conversations at the dinner table!”

It wasn’t even like we were discussing anything that consequential, although it’s always useful to sneak in a message or two about on-line discretion when you’re dealing with a thirteen-year-old. But to me, this was progress. Not only had I made a well-rounded dinner with all the major food groups represented, not only was everyone in the family eating from most of those food groups, but we were also discussing something beyond who said what to whom on the bus that morning.

After we’d cleared the table and washed the dishes, Tim posted this on Facebook: “Yummy and funny dinner. Sausages and cornbread. Conversations about calcium-packed food, a doctor's questionaire and talk about presidents without clothes on... All very.... fun.”

I felt exonerated. The conversation and the fact that we were all having dinner together had made an impression on him after all. It reinforced my commitment to continue having more organized dinner hours as the school year progresses. Sometimes hardly anyone eats what I prepare, and other times the kids exchange silly barbs rather than interesting ideas. But once in a while, family dinner hour works just as it should. And if we all try, maybe that will become the rule and not the exception.

Art in the making

2011-09-28T07:53:00.001-04:00

All those weekends we didn’t make it to all kinds of cultural events that landed on my calendar in theory only – well, last Sunday seemed to make up for every museum, concert and performance I tried to get my family to, only to end up going for a bike ride or watching a football game instead.

Holly and my mother and I attended the Open Studios event at Art Space-Maynard. Art Space, we discovered, is an artists’ enclave located in a former elementary school – the 1940s kind, a wide red brick building with a steep concrete staircase leading to the center entrance and echo-ey linoleum hallways. Now, over 40 working artists have carved studio space out of former classrooms, offices and meeting areas.

I had never thought of taking Holly to an open studios event before, but it turned out to be a match made in heaven. Holly loves to make art, but I’ve often been disappointed that she doesn’t take more of an interest in viewing art – she frequently shrugs off my suggestion that we visit a museum or a gallery, even if there’s a particular exhibit that I think would engage her. But seeing how immediately she immersed herself in the studio-touring experience on Sunday, I could start to see why this appealed to her so much more. Rather than viewing finished art hanging on a wall or secured inside a display case – art so complete and professional it probably would look nothing like anything she had ever worked on – this was the down-and-dirty creation phase that we were witnessing. As we strolled amidst the work spaces of painters, sketchers, sculptors, metal workers, wood carvers, jewelry makers, textile crafters, and more, Holly stared: not only at the work itself, some finished and some just barely under way, but also at the clutter of materials and supplies that filled each work space. Paints and clay and canvases, yes, but also scraps of paper torn from magazines, snapshots pinned to bulletin boards, feathers, flowers, seashells. Here she could see something that reminded her of the kind of work she likes to do herself: using clutter and mess to create something.

Although it wasn’t an event geared toward children, the artists were uniformly welcoming to all three of us. Not only did they talk to my mother and me about their work; they drew Holly into the discussion as well. One artist who works in the plastic-coated thread known to campers everywhere as gimp gave Holly four different strands to work with and showed her how to weave a pattern of her own. Another invited her to sketch her own self-portrait and tack it to the studio wall. A sculptor listened to Holly describe the pottery class she attended last year, and all the artists offered snacks and beverages.

All in all, Holly was transfixed by the opportunity to see artists at work. When I asked her if she was ready to leave, she said “No, I want to stay a little longer: this is way more fun than I imagined it would be.” And the next morning, expecting to have to spend the usual five minutes or more trying to get her to emerge from sleep and head down to breakfast, I was surprised to find her sitting up in bed working her gimp pattern already.

Of course, there was a minor down side as well. I am forever asking Holly to keep her room neater, but every clean-up is followed within hours by the start of a new project that requires her once again to scatter crayons, markers, fabric, beads, thread, paper and tubes of glue all over the floor of her room. Now she had a reason. “Mom, did you see how messy their studios were?” she asked me the day after the open studios event. “Artists need to be surrounded by art supplies. That’s why I keep my room so messy.”

Well, I still have the authority to overrule that excuse. For now, it’s a bedroom, not a studio, and she’ll still be required to put everything away at the end of the day. But I think I understand a little bit better why it’s so hard for me to convince her to visit a museum. Never mind the classic masterpieces of the art world. Show Holly some crusty tubes of paint and a scattering of colored pencils, and she’s in her element.

The clamor that generates creativity

2011-09-26T07:50:00.001-04:00

Some writers dream of solitude: a Thoreauvian cabin in which to spend their hours writing; a windswept beach on which to walk alone as they let ideas percolate.

I know better: at least for me, it is the company of others and not the silence of aloneness that energizes me and fuels my creativity.

And this is fortuitous, because a solitary cabin on a windswept beach is not a place I am likely to find myself any time soon. But last night, feeling refreshed from the weekend and excited about a new work week beginning, I was struck by all the different constellations of people who had peppered my entire weekend, from start to finish.

On Friday evening, I went to a small gathering at a friend’s house: there I visited with four or five women whom I know but haven’t spent nearly enough time with lately. On Saturday afternoon, I walked for an hour with my friends Jane and Donna. On Saturday evening, one of Tim’s friends came over, and the kids and I played Parcheesi out on the screen porch long after dark.

On Sunday morning, the gathering I was in the midst of had an average age of about nine: I taught the grades 3-5 Sunday school class, and struggled to answer their provocative questions about everything from whether to use “He” or “She” when talking about God (as with so many other aspects of Unitarian Universalism, I told them, you should use whichever one is in accordance with your beliefs, or perhaps neither) to why in Biblical times animals – such as the Garden of Eden’s serpent – talked to people and today they generally do not.

On Sunday afternoon, Holly and my mother and I attended an open studios event at a large arts complex in Maynard; dozens of artists took time to talk with us about their work, which ranged from painting to jewelry making to pottery to metal crafting. In the evening, my parents came over for dinner, and as we once again sat out on the screen porch – it was an unseasonably warm, humid weekend – my father told me a story I’d never heard before about a time during his teenage years when his boat ran out of gas and he spend the night lost in the woods.

While I can’t right now say how any of these encounters will turn into a specific piece of writing, I know it’s all mingling – or perhaps composting -- somewhere in the back of my brain. By the end of the weekend, I was struck by just how lucky I am to have so many people around me so much of the time: children, adults, friends, new acquaintances. Solitude might be effective for meeting deadlines, but company is what writers need in order to generate ideas. And as much as peace and quiet sometimes seems like an unattainable goal when you are in the middle of the busy parenting years, a clamor of voices can be more artistically inspiring than any lonely windswept beach.

The beach in September

2011-09-23T07:55:00.000-04:00

Partly because I was so influenced by reading “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin over the summer, partly because I’d committed to do it, and partly because I couldn’t deny the likelihood that I’d have a wonderful time, I took the whole day off from work on Wednesday and drove to southern Maine to take a very long walk on the beach with my college roommate.

We’d come up with this plan in the middle of the summer: the idea was to walk from her house on Moody Beach in Wells about three miles to Ogunquit, then make our way along the Marginal Way to Perkins Cove, eat an early dinner, and do the whole thing in reverse. But the July late-afternoon we set aside for it was rainy, so we did a shorter walk instead and had dinner on her porch.

That was a fun get-together as well, but she was still intent on finding time for us to do the original plan, so I suggested we try for after the school year started.
This was a rather daring suggestion on my part. I’m usually so protective of my weekday solitude during the school year – the six hours per day that I can write without interruption – that I don’t even like to go to the post office or the supermarket during this time. So taking the whole day off was a big deal to me.
But last week, I took two hours off on a beautiful Tuesday morning to go biking, and it was blissful. As my friend Tracey said then, afterwards you’ll remember the bike ride, not the work you should have been doing. So I decided to play even more fast and loose with my work time and sneak out for the whole day.

It was a wonderful decision. When I arrived at Renee’s house, it was low tide. A bright late-summer sun glowed off a seemingly endless expanse of packed wet sand. Scattered along the miles we covered were sunbathers, other walkers, and even a few swimmers, far more people than I expected to see midweek in September. But their presence was validating. If they could enjoy the beach on such a magnificent Wednesday, even one when I should have been working, then so could I.

By the end of the afternoon, my leg muscles ached from power-walking on the sand, but it was so worthwhile. Yes, maybe I should have been working; but instead I was enjoying a gorgeous sunny day by the sea. Ultimately, which is really more important: racking up a few more billable hours or honoring the bounty of the universe?

In “The Happiness Project,” Gretchen Rubin makes the point that living a good life means identifying what makes us happy and then pursuing it. After finishing her book last month, I took her words to heart. Having interesting employment and holding onto it is important, but so is finding things that make us happy. The long invigorating walk on the beach, and the visit with an old friend, nourished my spirit tremendously.

For today, it’s back to work; I returned home to 42 unread emails, two new assignments and numerous requests for revisions on various pieces. But I also returned home with tomatoes and corn from a seaside vegetable stand, lungs full of fresh ocean air, and a very minor sunburn, all of which will remind me of what a wonderful sunsplashed day I spent by the water.

She's with the band

2011-09-21T08:01:00.002-04:00

Fourth grade brings with it the opportunity to start studying a band instrument, but throughout the summer, Holly had been indicating that she was unlikely to seize that particular opportunity. She likes to do things her own way – which means she’s a very creative person but not generally fond of lessons and instruction regarding those creative pursuits.

But after the band director talked with the fourth graders on the first day of school, she had a change of heart. She did indeed want to play an instrument – the clarinet, she thought.

I greeted that news with delight. I wanted Holly to study an instrument, and I welcomed the thought of one as traditional but also gender-neutral as the clarinet. (Moreover, when it comes to instruments that need to be carted to school for lessons and practices, the lighter, the better.) Holly playing the clarinet? I could already picture it and even imagine the lovely tonalities she would learn to generate. She'd take out her clarinet at family gatherings to play a tune or two. Sure, the learning curve might be steep – and painful to the ears – but I was ready for that. (My sister is a strong proponent of choosing your child’s instrument based on what you’ll find the least painful to listen to as it is mis-played. Yet she nonetheless survived raising a violinist.)

The fourth graders spent every recess last week trying out different instruments. Holly dutifully took her turn with the trumpet, the saxophone, the flute and the oboe as they were trotted out one day at a time, but she continued to say that her interest remained with the clarinet.

And then she came home Friday, crestfallen. The clarinet test hadn’t gone so well. “I could barely make a sound,” she told me sadly.

“Reed instruments are difficult,” I said. “Lots of people find it hard to get the right touch at first.”

Unfortunately, though, Holly had been right there in the music room watching as – according to her -- every other kid in line had had more success with the clarinet than she did.

I offered to ask the band director if Holly could have another chance to try the clarinet. Knowing the band director and his eagerness to engage kids in the program, I was fairly sure he could accommodate this request.

But Holly said no: her romance with the clarinet was over, never to be rekindled, she was quite certain.

I wasn’t expecting what happened on Monday when Holly climbed down the steps from the bus. “I want to play percussion!” she exclaimed. “I tried it out today and I liked it!”

Percussion. Wow. That’s not what I was picturing at all. My visions of Holly all dressed up for the December band concert, sitting toward the front of the stage with the woodwinds, dissipated instantly. I tried to imagine her all the way at the back, standing behind the tympani or a set of snare drums. I tried to imagine her taking out her drumsticks at our next family gathering, tapping out a rhythm to impress her grandparents.

I don’t even know what learning percussion entails, exactly. There aren’t scales or notes to go over. I can’t picture what lessons would be like, or even practice sessions. Never mind the fact that I can’t picture Holly marching in the Memorial Day parade hoisting a bass drum at the back of the line.

The important thing is that trying out the percussion instruments renewed Holly’s interest in music lessons. I wondered briefly if I should have pushed her harder to give clarinet another chance, but this choice is hers to make, and it’s fine that she didn’t make a choice I expected. A lot of kids stick with instrument lessons for only the first year or two, but in those early days, all the parents dream of greatness. So now I’m dreaming of my future as the mother of the drummer.

Not what I was picturing. But it could still be fun.

Real-time conversation

2011-09-19T09:22:00.001-04:00

At a get-together on Saturday evening, within a small circle of other parents of seventh graders, I confessed my concern about Tim’s social life: too much of it happens by text message. I’m worried that he won’t know how to have a face-to-face conversation.

For several months now, he’s been an avid text-messager, but it never bothered me much. When I was his age, boys and girls wrote notes to each other or communicated via friends; this didn’t seem very different to me, though I admit I’ve become a little envious of the unfair advantage girls in 2011 have over seventh grade girls thirty years ago, when I was that age: they can carry on conversations with boys without actually having to stand there and talk. “That would be so easy!” I sometimes lament. “Even I could have done that!” Indeed, I would have been like my own Cyrano de Bergerac, poised and eloquent as can be if entire conversations could take place on screen back then rather than requiring eye contact.

But I became a little bit more perturbed in recent weeks as I began to suspect that Tim and his friends use text messaging not necessarily as a lead-in to eventually having a real conversation but as a substitute for one. I want to tell him that you have to learn at some point to stand there talking and feeling awkward. You have to push yourself through the stammering and uncertain articulation. You have to learn how to make comfortable conversation. I sometimes think I’m still learning that, and I need all the practice I can get.

So I had to acknowledge my own hypocrisy as I was driving to Bruegger’s Bagels after church yesterday wishing I could just text in my order. Bruegger’s on Sunday mornings tends to be busy and crowded, and the counter help often seems not to understand their own menu. I knew exactly what I wanted – a half-dozen pumpernickel bagels to go, plus one toasted sesame bagel with butter and one toasted onion bagel with olive cream cheese to take home to Tim and Holly for lunch – but I knew that a disproportionate amount of conversation would be required to get my order through once I reached the counter. “Why can’t I just submit it electronically?” I wished as I drove over. “Skip all that unnecessary conversation.”

And then, of course, the red flag went up. I couldn’t text my order to Bruegger’s for the same reason Tim shouldn’t text so much with his classmates: because standing patiently at the counter ordering is part of living in society. Perhaps the issues differed between the two situations – Tim’s required poise, whereas mine required patience – but the bottom line was the same: spoken communication is the archetype for all human interactions, and it’s something at which we all can stand to improve.

This was a particularly social weekend for us. On Friday, Holly and I had dinner with my father; on Saturday we went to a family get-together at my in-laws’ house during the afternoon and a friend’s bonfire in the evening; on Sunday I was a greeter at our church’s coffee hour and then attended a baby shower. All of the events involved a lot of conversation, and I enjoyed that. Working in solitude for most of my work week, I find it invigorating to be amidst lots of people over the weekend.

Still, it isn’t always easy. Going to so many gatherings this weekend reminded me that it’s fun to socialize, but Tim’s situation as well as my visit to Bruegger’s confirmed that good social skills in a variety of settings require practice. So I’ll try to gently urge Tim to do a little less texting and a little more talking, and I’ll also stop wishing I didn’t have to talk to people at food counters. Instead, I’ll try to welcome the opportunity it gives me to try to practice becoming ever more articulate.

Turning 13

2011-09-16T10:28:00.000-04:00

On the afternoon of Tim’s third birthday, I had to work, but my mother was happy to take Tim on a special birthday expedition. The two of them went raspberry-picking at a local farm. The preceding day, he’d received a cardboard crown at preschool, and he insisted on wearing it throughout that birthday, including to the farm. My mother regaled me with an account of how the only other berry-pickers that afternoon were a consortium of chefs from upscale Boston restaurants who were on some kind of group tour promoting local agriculture. As my mother told it, they made a big fuss over Tim at every turn throughout the raspberry patch, exclaiming, “Tim, you’re the birthday king!”

I thought of this story yesterday, exactly ten years later, as I waited for Tim to bike home from the bus stop. Buses, middle school, riding a bike, being outside by himself – all of these would have been unimaginable to me the day Tim went raspberry-picking as a 3-year-old, but all are commonplace matters in the life of a 13-year-old.

Contemporary American society doesn’t hold a lot of age-specific rites of passage for kids. In Carlisle, kids can leave campus on their own after dismissal as of fifth grade, and that tends to be a big deal to them; it means they can walk to the general store or the library by themselves or with friends. But after that, for a lot of kids there’s nothing specifically great about turning any particular age until they reach 16 and start learning to drive.

Happily, social media has changed that. By turning 13, Tim was officially old enough to open his own Facebook account, and he’s been looking forward to that for months.

Not every family upholds the 13-year-old rule for Facebook, since it’s essentially done on an honor system, and some parents don’t even know about the rule, as I discovered over the summer when I expressed surprise that a friend let her 12-year-old have a Facebook presence. But I felt pretty strongly about compliance. Partly it was that I believe it sets a good standard to assume rules exist for a reason, but I also liked the fact that here was an age-specific milestone at a time when those can be hard to come by. I was happy for the built-in opportunity to make something special about turning 13 for Tim.

Rick and I went over the ground rules during dinner: he had to friend both of us, so that we could keep an eye on what he was saying on line; and he couldn’t friend anyone who used inappropriate language. After dinner, Tim got to work setting up his account.

As promised, I was the first person he friended; then he found both his grandmothers and some cousins. Since he’s among the oldest of his friends, he didn’t find too many peers on Facebook, but in time he will. For now, he’s enjoying something special and new, granted to him because he reached teenagehood. It’s pleasing to find rites of passage where few exist. So far, Tim is taking it in stride – and joining Facebook was definitely less thrilling to him than other aspects of his birthday this year including his party last weekend in Maine and the apple crisp I made for his birthday dessert – but he’s having fun with it. And I’m happy in the knowledge that turning 13 does indeed come with some special privileges.

A priority on going biking

2011-09-14T09:59:00.000-04:00

There were plenty of reasons for me not to go biking yesterday.

First and foremost, it was a work day for me. All summer, no matter how much fun I was having with the kids or with friends or other family members, the fact that I was putting in a substandard work day gnawed at me. At best, during July and August, I wrote for about three hours a day, compared with the six or more I can log once school is back in session.

So no matter how much fun I was having during summer break, it was always with a sense of comfort in knowing that a return to real life, and full work days, lay in the not-too-distant future.

And as is the case every year, when the school year started anew, nothing could have been more welcome than the opportunity to work from 9 to 3. That’s exactly how I felt a week ago, on the kids’ first day of classes. I turned on my computer five minutes after Holly clambered onto the bus, and I powered through three or four meaty assignments before Tim showed up with his first day of seventh grade behind him, asking about snack options.

But wanting to apply myself to my work was easy a week ago. It was a welcome novelty after the summer, and besides, that day was rainy. The whole first week of school was rainy, in fact. I was delighted to sit at my kitchen table writing for hours on end.

The Tuesday one week after the start of classes was a classic New England late-summer day, though, with a tinge of humidity underlying a warm, sunny morning. “This would be a good day for a bike ride,” I mused to myself as I drove across town after stopping by my parents’ house. “Too bad I can’t take one.”

Except wait. Why couldn’t I?

Well, because I had to file my weekly set of community news briefs. And write a blog entry. And slog along on a ghost-writing project I’m in the thick of.

But those were only the pragmatic reasons. Really, I reasoned with myself, I couldn’t take a bike ride because….well, because it was the middle of a work week in the midst of a busy month; vacation season had just ended; I hadn’t planned ahead to do something special and frivolous (normally if I’m going to divert from my regular workday routine, I plan it weeks if not months in advance); and besides, everyone else was at school or work – my children, my spouse, most of my friends, my sisters, my neighbors – why should I have the privilege of being out on a bike ride?

Because I can, came the answer, crashing over me like a breaking wave. Because I devoted the majority of my limited reading time this summer to Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project,” the gist of which is that each of us has a personal obligation to the universe to find what it is that makes us happiest and try to work that into our lives, regardless of our other necessary responsibilities. And spending time outdoors, preferably doing something physically challenging, on a warm late-summer day is definitely something that makes me happy.

But one thing I’ve learned about being self-employed is that playing hooky is very different now from how it was when I had a corporate employer. Back then, I took the occasional day off from work with a sense of triumph, even glee. “I earned this,” I would think to myself. “My company owes me this pleasure.”

When you’re self-employed, though, the boss always makes you feel guilty for a day off.

Make it a priority, I reminded myself. Do the things that matter most to you.

And so I did. I made myself a sandwich, filled up a water bottle and headed out.

You’re just lucky that you can do this, I told myself. You should still be feeling a little guilty, though, that other people can’t.

I wasn’t feeling guilty, though. I was feeling grateful. And happy. And yes, very fortunate. But also a little bit proud of my sense of focus. I’d made it a priority, and I’d done it.

As my friend Tracey wrote earlier in the day when I said I was contemplating putting work on hold, “Do it. You'll always remember the bike ride. You won't remember that extra hour you spent working.”

It turned out to be two hours of not-working, not one, but that was okay. I returned with inspiration for my blog and renewed energy for another couple of hours of work before the kids got home.

I felt a sense of accomplishment, too. Not the same sense of accomplishment I get when I finish drafting an article. The kind that comes from following my own priorities, no matter how frivolous they may be. Which in this case meant taking the opportunity to savor a magnificent and unique late-summer New England day, despite the awareness that maybe I should have been working.

Peculiar and hilarious: My weekend with three 12-year-old boys

2011-09-12T07:55:00.000-04:00

I used to always end Tim’s birthday parties with a sense of triumph. I survived, the house survived, and the kids had fun, I would tell myself with a rush of relief as each one ended. The farm party; the cupcake-decorating party; the outing to the minor league baseball park; the sleepover party; the miniature golf excursion; the day at the theme park. All were great birthday celebrations as far as Tim was concerned because he had so much fun; all were great from my perspective because, well, they ended with no one getting hurt. And sometimes they were kind of fun for me too. But more often than not, it was just a relief to know I’d pulled it off.

This year I ended Tim’s birthday party not with a sense of triumph but with a minor sense of sadness. It wasn’t that the gathering hadn’t been successful. It was just that for the first time in 12 years of hosting birthday parties for Tim and his peers, I didn’t want to see this one end.

I suspected that taking three 12-year-old boys up to Maine for the weekend just days before Tim turned 13 would work out pretty well, but I didn’t anticipate what a good time I would have. Partly it was great because the mom of one of the other guests came along too, and she and I had lots of time to talk and visit throughout the weekend, but it was also just that the boys were really fun to be with. Peculiar and hilarious at times, but fun.

Peculiar and hilarious in that any mildly interesting thing any of them managed to do – such as climbing a medium-sized tree, eating an order of fried clams or crossing a street backwards – involved not only the activity itself but the necessity of one of the other boys whipping out a cell phone, taking a picture of the endeavor, and then emailing it to ten or fifteen friends. Peculiar and hilarious in that much of the weekend unfolded in tandem with a continuous text-message conversation going back and forth with a group of girls from their class at school who were having a get-together of their own at the same time. Peculiar and hilarious in that when walking down a somewhat busy city street, 12-year-old boys tend to draw upon the rules of bumper cars more than of pedestrians – caroming off of other people as you tear along is fine as long as you don’t actually initiate any head-on crashes.

But really, what will stay in my mind about the weekend isn’t so much the many ways that 12-year-old boys are different from 44-year-old moms – such as when a formal wedding party arrived by boat at the dock adjacent to our balcony and while my friend and I, along with several neighbors who were watching from their own balconies, oohed and aahed over the pretty bride and her elegant dress, the boys expressed disappointment at what a smooth landing the captain of the boat made, even with a photographer standing right in his line of sight, because, of course, it would have been so much cooler if the wedding party had crash-landed at the dock – not any of that is what will stay in my mind as much as how much fun we all had. We took a long walk along the bike path to the beach. We ate mussels and calamari. We visited the ice cream parlor. We went on a 90-minute kayaking excursion on the Harraseeket River. We played badminton.

I wish I could say this birthday must be the beginning of a long string of parties at which I’ll have just as good a time as the kids, but this may have been a one-off. If I could turn back the clock to Friday, I’d do it all again, just because it was so much fun. But of course, I have to move past the weekend and into a new work week, just as the kids do back at school. Thanks to them, though, there are two or three hundred cell-phone photos of our fun now floating through cyber-space, so I can revisit the experience as often as I want.

Fill in the blanks

2011-09-09T09:58:00.001-04:00

The first few questions on the fourth grade parent questionnaire were easy enough to fill out, and those were the only ones we were required to answer. Parents’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, preferred method of contact.
The questions on the reverse side were optional, Holly’s teacher emphasized, but would help her in getting to know each child better. I studied the questions.

“My child is particularly interested in ______.”

I thought about all the ways I could answer that. The TV show “I-Carly.” Finding new and unusual ways to irritate her brother. Who wants to sit with whom on the school bus.

“Learning about other cultures,” I wrote down. Sure. Such as the culture inhabited by the teens on the show “Suite Life on Deck with Zach and Cody,” or, as I like to think of it, “The Love Boat, Junior.”

“My child is great at _________.”

That’s not the kind of statement I ever make. Holly is good at plenty of things, the kinds of things you would expect a nine-year-old to be good at: art projects, making up stories, building sand castles. But I’m just not the type of parent to refer to my child as great at something.

Even though it’s only the third day of school, I already know Holly’s teacher fairly well, because she was Holly’s second-grade teacher two years ago and we run into each other frequently on campus. I know that not only is she an excellent teacher but she’s also an unfailingly well-meaning person tremendously dedicated to her students, and therefore I know her only intention in asking these questions was to get to know her students better. But I couldn’t help feeling irrationally like the questions were a test, to see what kind of parent I was. The boastful kind? The stage-mother kind? A parent quick to promote her child’s talents, or one genuinely concerned about meeting the curricular benchmarks for the mathematics program?

But the hardest question was yet to come: “List the three words that best describe your child.”

I didn’t second-guess myself until after I’d written them down. “Creative. Cheerful. Self-absorbed.”

Wait a minute, my conscience spoke up. Self-absorbed? You’re not supposed to say that about your own kid! It’s so critical! So negative! You’re supposed to have nothing but positive comments, remember? Otherwise along with “My child is great at _________” there would be a question that said “My child is seriously deficient at ________,” and you didn’t see that one, did you?

I looked again at where I’d written “self-absorbed.” I didn’t mean it in a critical way, just an honest one. Holly spends a lot of time thinking about Holly, that’s all. But what nine-year-old doesn’t? Were there actually parents in the class filling in that line with “altruistic”? Wasn’t self-absorption in a girl Holly’s age to some extent just a manifestation of positive self-esteem? She’s a young girl. She’ll spend plenty of time in her life thinking about other people: friends, romantic partners, bosses, clients, spouses, children of her own. Is it so bad that at the age of nine, her primary focus is herself – possibly for the last time?

I believed in my own argument, but I didn’t want to start off the year on the wrong foot, with her teacher thinking I was overly critical. I deleted “self-absorbed” and changed it to “self-confident.” It’s not quite the same, and frankly it’s not quite as close to what I was trying to say.

But that’s all right. It’s the third day of school; Ms. McCabe has the next nine months to get to know the kids and evaluate the parents’ assessments of their own children. Her primary interest is in the make-up of her classroom, not the way parents fill in blanks. I’ll let it go for now. Ms. McCabe has her own challenge ahead, similar to this one but tougher: coming up with adjectives for Holly and every other kid in the class when report card time comes around.

Room for improvement

2011-09-07T07:59:00.001-04:00

I admit it: the bus arrived at our stop yesterday morning before we did.

This is absolutely antithetical to how the first day of school is supposed to go, according to my personal code of conduct. I’m appalled that Holly and I were late to the bus on the first day of school. The third grader next door was already boarding as I drove up, and Holly was not ready to hop spryly out of the car and run to the steps of the bus. She was still trying to get her little hands around the three bags of school supplies she needed to bring in for the first day of school.

Speaking of school supplies, let me just state that there is not a single white two-pocket folder with three prongs for sale in any office supply store in Massachusetts. In fact, there appears to not be a single white folder of any number of pockets and prongs for sale in Massachusetts. I know this because I’ve checked them all; it was the only item on Holly’s list of back-to-school requirements that I couldn’t find. I found the black two-pocket three-prong folder, the green one, the orange one, the red one, the purple one, and the jewel-toned paisley one. Okay, I’m making that last item up, but it would not surprise me one bit if that description were to appear on next year’s school supplies list. I’m absolutely fine with the number of binders, reams of paper, boxes of Kleenex and size of ruler on the list, but is it really necessary to have six different colors of folders specified? Wouldn’t it be sufficient to just by six folders?

But all of that happened over the weekend. Yesterday morning, up to about 8:10, I thought we were in fine shape. Tim ate a hearty breakfast and left for the middle school bus on time. Holly ate a smaller breakfast, took a long shower, carefully dressed herself in the outfit she’d selected the night before, combed her hair, brushed her teeth….and then somehow the minutes started to elude us. She felt the need to re-do her pigtails. I wanted to take a photo, and Holly wouldn’t stop making hand gestures that I didn’t want in the picture. (Nothing obscene, just annoying hip-hop gestures that have no place in a first-day-of-school scrapbook.) She had all her school supplies together but had left her summer journal on the kitchen table. The sandals she’d planned to wear wouldn’t do in the unanticipated rain.

All of this cost us only about five minutes, but those five minutes were the difference between waiting for the bus and having the bus wait for us.

This was particularly frustrating since just yesterday, I challenged myself anew to make punctuality a priority in the nascent school year. It’s not that I make this resolution over and over again with futility; every year I improve a little. But over the weekend, two consecutive events caused me to want to redouble my efforts.

On Saturday, I drove up to our friends’ beach house at 1:24, after I told them we’d be there between 1 and 1:30. And on Monday, I sauntered through the door of another friend’s house at exactly 10:00 in the morning, having agreed to meet her for a walk at ten. These are both events I would more typically arrive to a little bit late, but the sense of vindication my timeliness gave me was intoxicating, and I resolved to make this my year of punctuality. (Again.)

If I can maintain a daily running streak successfully for over four years now, I thought to myself, maybe I can do a punctuality streak as well. This weekend makes it two for two; maybe I should see how long I can go without arriving anywhere late.

My neighbor, Carol, who had clearly arrived with her grade-schooler at our bus stop well before the bus was so much as a glimmer on the horizon, could see how embarrassed I was yesterday morning. “Don’t feel bad!” she reassured me. “It’s only the first day of school!”

Yes, I thought to myself, but the first day is the day you should do everything right. The first day is supposed to be the flawless one.

Well, I replied to myself, now you know which area to target for improvement. Carol’s attitude is right: Not “It’s the first day of school!” but “It’s only the first day of school!” You have 179 more just like it to get to the bus on time.
Here’s hoping for a 179-day streak, starting tomorrow.

Summer 2011 retrospective

2011-09-05T06:35:00.000-04:00

It’s Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer and the incontrovertible end of vacation. School starts tomorrow morning; time to close out summer of 2011.

Somehow I didn’t expect to enjoy this summer as much as I did. For one thing, I was concerned that it was front-loaded: my big trip to Colorado happened at the end of June, before the kids were even done with school yet. Arriving home still days before July began, I was sure it would be all downhill from there.

But it wasn’t. Lots more good things happened, though none were perhaps as intellectually or artistically inspiring as the five days at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference. Still, the summer had all kinds of unexpected highlights. I won’t soon forget the Old Home Day pet contest, in which Holly answered questions about Belle and won a gift certificate for a free ice cream cone. Or the crawfish boil at the home of friends, at which tiny crawfish tried to escape their fate by scrabbling across the patio just inches from the cauldron into which they were about to be dropped. Or the afternoon my friend Jane invited us over for a swim; I told the kids we could go at three and stay for just an hour, but at six o’clock Jane ordered pizzas and by sunset we were still sitting out by the pool, gabbing and drinking cocktails.

Work went on, as it must; I spent weekday mornings on the screen porch drafting articles and conducting phone interviews. It’s among the best office views I’ve ever had, facing into a thick grove of oak trees that border the state park. Often I could hear voices drift through the woods as hikers made their way along the park trails. “Internship in Costa Rica….” Floated over one day. “…accept one more dinner invitation” another.

I tried jet-skiing for the first time, on Lake Chatauqua in western New York during our late August travels. While I’m glad to be able to say I’ve tried it, jet-skiing is definitely not something I’m in any hurry to repeat. As I see it, enjoying the outdoors should ideally involve either contemplative silence or some degree of physical exertion, or both, as well as a lot less fuel output than jet-skiing allows.

We had a handful of beach days: Crane’s Beach in early July, the air hot and still and the water icy cold; Goose Rocks Beach in Kennebunkport a week later, where in the course of three hours I caught up on the past year in my friend Courtney’s life while the kids jumped in the waves; Moody Beach in Wells, Maine, where my friend Renee and I power-walked for almost two hours along the shoreline; Higgins Beach in Scarborough earlier this weekend, where Tim and Holly and their friends built an enormous heap out of seaweed while my friend Nicole and I got completely caught up on the goings-on of each other’s summers.

We saw my older sister and her family for the first time in a year; they had spent the previous twelve months in Germany, and it was wonderful to catch up with all of them over several meals and drop-in visits during their two weeks in Carlisle. I met up for a lunch date with my friend Tracey, whom I hadn’t seen in nineteen years. Facebook brought us back in touch and her trip to Boston from Los Angeles gave us the chance for a get-together, and it was fascinating to hear what the past two decades had held for her.

For sports, the summer included boating, walking, biking, swimming and of course running. There were summer meals, outdoor concerts, baseball games, bonfires with s’mores. There was a heat wave with temperatures spiking well over one hundred, and a hurricane that turned out to be picturesque but not particularly scary.

The kids say they’re not ready to go back to school. While I don’t feel fully ready to transition into fall mode, I’m starting to feel a little bit ready for the seasons to change. Yesterday morning, for the first time all summer, I woke up and greeted the thought of my morning run with something decidedly less than enthusiasm. The humidity has started to be a real impediment to me when running, and I wasn’t looking forward to another draggy slog through the warm damp air. I went anyway, but just for two miles rather than the four or five that a Sunday morning usually merits.

Maybe in the fall, my enthusiasm for longer running routes will return. I know once school begins, I’ll be excited about all the new beginnings that September holds. But today is the last day of summer, even if not officially, and I’m still thinking about what a great summer it turned out to be.

This will be the year

2011-09-02T09:55:00.001-04:00

Like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I’m perpetually telling myself: Maybe this will be the year.

Only for me, that sentiment reverberates through the air not on Opening Day at Fenway Park but on the eve of the first day of school.

This will be it, I tell myself. I’ve had seven years of training in How to Make the School Year Run Perfectly. This will be the year it all comes together.

This will be the year that everyone gets up on time and leaves the house punctually. In fact, so smoothly will our morning routine run that dishes will be washed and crumbs wiped up by the time the door closes behind us. No returning after my morning run to a kitchen-ful of breakfast clean-up: this year I’ll figure out how to get it all done at the same time the kids are preparing to catch the bus.

This will be the year the kids remember to sort their backpacks not just once a semester or even once a week but every day. They’ll come home and remove paperwork, lunch detritus, unwanted snacks, notes from friends, and (in Holly’s case) pet rocks, leaves, twigs and flowers accrued throughout the day.

This will be the year we all remember to get to bed on time every night.

This will be the year I make good on my resolution not to pester anyone about homework. Tim has already proved to us that he can be trusted to keep up with his work: we stopped reminding him last year, and his quarterly report cards made it clear he was holding up his end of the bargain. Now it’s time to make the same pact with Holly. She’ll do her work or she’ll learn the embarrassment of going into class empty-handed. I’ll save myself the daily lecture. We’ll all benefit.

Except that there’s always the nagging worry for me that she won’t get her homework done. After all, she hasn’t yet finished her birthday thankyou notes – four weeks after her birthday. Maybe I’ll pester just a little.

This will be the year I make the absolute most of my work time, too. As soon as I get back from my morning run, I’ll start writing, and I won’t stop until it’s time to meet the elementary bus. That’s more than six hours of focused, uninterrupted work. I should have a remarkably productive fall.

Well, uninterrupted: that’s the catch. That means no scheduling meetings or appointments or coffee dates or errands during work hours. But it’s fine. This is the year I realize that I’ll just have to find other times to get all of those peripheral responsibilities tended to: work time is for work, and I’m going to break the habit of letting it get adulterated with other duties.

But having said that, this will also be the year I find more time to walk in the woods. The trails of the state park beckon from just beyond the edge of our yard, and in the six months we’ve lived here, I have yet to learn more of the trails system than the one that leads to the ice cream stand at park headquarters. Well, that’s the only route that interests the kids; fair enough. But with them back at school, the dog and I are resolved to start exploring more of the trails. True, I just said I was going to work an uninterrupted six-hour work day Monday through Friday. But a half-hour walk in the woods now and then surely will only serve to fuel my creativity.

And in the interest of fueling that creativity, this will be the year I redouble my efforts to read more Thoreau. At the beginning of the summer, I bought a beautiful new volume called “The Quotable Thoreau,” clearly meant for people like me who need the Cliff Notes version of the great naturalist’s work. So far, I’ve dusted the book several times, but have yet to actually read it. With the kids back at school, this will be the year.

I know we’ll succeed in all of these resolutions because we’ll be so well-nourished. You see, this will also be the year I succeed in putting a three- or four-course meal on the table at the same time every evening, featuring a well-balanced menu of proteins, vegetables and starches, with just the right amount of leftovers (and continuing appeal) to pack up for the next day’s lunches.

This will be the year. Just like the Red Sox fans who surround me, I can hope, despite all evidence to the contrary. It could happen. And either way, I’ll keep trying.

Independence day

2011-08-31T09:07:00.000-04:00

Growing up in Carlisle doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for children to practice independence. With its narrow winding roads, distantly spaced houses, and lack of sidewalks outside the town center, the fact that few kids walk to friends’ houses or school isn’t a matter of laziness: it’s logistics. The single standard rite of passage for a middle schooler here is to be allowed to go to Ferns Country Store and the library after school with friends – exactly as it was when I was a middle schooler in Carlisle 30 years ago.

So a mother like me, determined to renounce the notion of helicopter parenting, has to seek out ways to let children stretch. An afternoon meeting near Concord Center earlier this week gave me an idea. “How about if I drop you two off on Main Street?” I suggested to Tim and Holly. “You can get an ice cream cone at Helen’s and then walk to the library. I’ll find you there when my meeting is over.”

Concord Center is full of shoppers, tourists and community members who were sure to intervene should anyone try to snatch the kids off the sidewalk. Moreover, Tim and I were both carrying cell phones: it would be virtually impossible for us to fail to connect, even if the plan didn’t go exactly as anticipated.

As we drove to Concord, I reviewed the itinerary with them. “I’ll drop you off by the monument. We’ll be on the opposite side of the street from Helen’s, but just go to the crosswalk and be sure cars stop before you cross. Then to get to the library, you just walk down Main Street. When you get to the fork, the library will be on your right. You’re not supposed to answer phone calls in the library, so I’ll text-message you to find out exactly where you are. But just in case all else fails and for some reason we can’t reach each other, expect to find me at the library around three.”

I made myself stop. Part of this exercise needs to be seeing if they can figure it all out themselves, I told myself. You already know they can follow instructions. Take this opportunity to find out how capable they are when you’re not hovering.

My appointment ended at 2:50. I sent Tim a text: “On my way to the library.”

I parked outside the library at 2:55. I sent Tim another text: “Where are you?”

No response to either text. For the first time, I felt a twinge of apprehension. Suppose I couldn’t find them?

But how would I not be able to find them? From the library lawn, I could practically see the whole distance down Main Street to where I dropped them off, all two blocks of it. Where could they be other than in the library or somewhere along those two blocks?

Except that I couldn’t find them in the library. Not in the children’s room, not in the reading area, not in the reference room, not amidst the DVD stacks.
I went back outside and tried calling Tim’s number despite my instructions to him not to let his phone ring in the library. It went to voicemail.

Was it actually possible for two almost-teenage children to disappear on the streets of Concord Center? I couldn’t imagine how. With two of them together, even if something awful had happened to one – being hit by a car, a seizure, an attack of amnesia – surely the other could manage to get help.

I dialed Tim again. This time it rang. And he answered.

“Hi Mom. We’re at the bookstore,” he said nonchalantly before I could say a word.

The bookstore is halfway between Helen’s and the library. I arrived in less than a minute, and just as reported, both of my children were sitting together in the children’s section, poring over the newest picture book by Mo Willems. “Mommy, this book is so silly!” Holly exclaimed as soon as she saw me.

“Hi you guys,” I said as calmly as I could. “How’d you end up here?”

They explained: they’d bought ice cream cones, walked to the library, sat out on the library lawn for a while, then on a whim decided to double back to the bookstore. Tim wasn’t sure why he hadn’t heard the text message beeps or my earlier phone call; just too engrossed in books, he guessed.

Partly it was just the relief of finding them, but even after that passed, I realized I didn’t really mind the way it had turned out. Sure, they should have followed my instructions, but it was no big deal. After all, they were in a bookstore in Concord, the heart of literary America. They weren’t so much disobeying instructions as following a historical imperative.

My goal was to give the kids a small sense of independence. Not only had they had a taste of independence; they’d taken the ball and run with it, improvising their own plan along the way.

It’s not exactly Outward Bound. But for two kids from the suburbs who don’t get a lot of opportunities to chart their own course, it’s a start.

What I brought home from my vacation

2011-08-29T09:29:00.001-04:00

I did not expect my vacation to be quite so…well, vacation-y.

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that once you become a parent, “vacation” has a different meaning. Pre-children, “vacation” meant “go away from home and have fun.” Once you have children, in the early years “vacation” comes to mean “go away from home and do all the same things you do at home only with the additional challenge of being in unfamiliar surroundings.” It’s this reality that inspires a friend of my sister to call a vacation with children a “fake-ation.”

And that reality lasts for a while. Traveling with babies, diapers, baby food (whether jarred or homemade), feedings (whether breast or bottle), nap schedules, exposure to all-new germs… I actually have a friend who commented when her children were still under the age of 5, “Vacation? Why would I want to do that?”

But it changes. Vacations become easy again. Kids grow old enough to adjust to new routines and different surroundings. They even appreciate the novelty of seeing and doing new things.

And even though my family reached that point a while ago – as long as Holly remembers her blankie and Tim packs his stuffed elephant and his stuffed frog, it’s all good – I still wasn’t prepared to have quite so much fun on last week’s vacation as I did.

I had sneaky hopes, of course. I hoped I’d get to do more reading than I’ve managed to fit in most of this summer. Take a break from several ongoing work projects. Avoid the three-meals-a-day menu planning that seems to be required of me this summer. Fit in some long walks or maybe even bike rides.

All of those seemed to me like factors of a good vacation. But what ended up defining my vacation surprised me. I woke each morning with a sense that I had nothing immediate to worry about. The day ahead was free.

Sure, we had tentative plans as we traveled through western New York and Pennsylvania: ideas for recreation, sightseeing, time with friends. But still, no worries and no stress. No deadlines, no meetings, no household tasks, no appointments, no errands. I woke each morning feeling as if the whole day was wide-open for pleasure and adventure, and it was the most vacation-y feeling I’ve ever known while on a vacation.

And once I put my finger on that single factor – the lack of anxiety at the beginning of each day – as the defining characteristic of my vacation mood, I started thinking about ways to bring it home.

I can’t get away from all my work or social obligations or household tasks at home, nor would I want to. I like having work assignments to complete and a household to run. I like being part of a community and having friends. I don’t want to get away from all of it.

But I want to learn to prioritize better and not fill up my schedule so cavalierly with so many items I end up regretting having agreed to do.

I don’t have an exact answer to how to sustain the vacation mood while I’m home, but I think it might have to do with being more discerning, even a little more selfish. More discretionary about how I spend my time.

It was a vacation from my blog, as well, and the relief that came from escaping from that five-days-a-week commitment made me rethink that area of my life as well.

My blog is two years old this week: I wrote the first entry on August 28, 2009, and with almost no exceptions, I’ve posted every Monday through Friday ever since, with usually two weeks off each year, one for the Christmas holidays and one for summer travel.

It’s too much. My blog has become yet another onerous commitment, and being away from it made me realize I needed to back off. I put too much pressure on myself to come up with something mildly interesting to say in a public forum every day.

Cutting back to three entries a week (and, if at all possible, shorter ones) is an easy to change to make. Ultimately, no one but me really cares how often I blog (or whether I blog at all).

The other changes the vacation inspired me to contemplate won’t be as easy to make. Less volunteer work? A more relaxed attitude toward housework? A more discriminating approach to accepting writing assignments? Those possibilities all have their downsides. But the change to my blog is a start, and maybe in using this change as a symbolic way to extend the vacation mood, I’ll learn to work some of the others in as well.

Blog vacation!

2011-08-19T23:59:00.002-04:00

I am on a blog vacation. I expect to be back on the blog on August 29th!

Checklist

2011-08-19T09:46:00.002-04:00

Here's how yesterday went for me:

I dropped Holly off at day camp – just two miles down the road – at 9:00. I came home, posted my daily blog entry (which I'd written the night before), made coffee, toasted a bagel, and drove Tim to his friend Will's house at 9:45. Then I headed for the supermarket. I'd promised to make cupcakes for Holly's last-day-of-camp luncheon, and the ones I'd made the night before were a disaster, so I had to buy some instead.

I was home by 11:00 and had time to make final revisions to two press releases I'd written the day before. Then at 12:00, back to Holly's day camp for the last-day reading ceremony at which each girl read her favorite piece she'd written that week.

Home in time to check emails; then I dropped Holly off at a friend's house at 2:00 and headed across town to pick Tim up at Will's house. Will's mother invited me to stay; she and two other moms were sitting by the pool snacking and chatting. I would have liked to, but with only one full work day left before we leave for vacation, I had to get home and meet some more deadlines.

Tim hadn't had lunch, so I helped him put a sandwich together and then headed out to pick up a friend's children at their day camp because medical conditions are preventing my friend from driving at the moment. I found the kids, brought them to their house, and headed back home.

Next, I contacted three sources for interviews related to the arts column I need to submit today. The topic of the column is 3D photography, and it turns out that artists who are interested in this kind of work really have a lot to say about it. I took notes as fast as I could, one eye on the clock, because I knew by 5 I had to start loading up the car to go to the transfer station.

When my phone calls were done, I headed out to the garage and started piling bags of trash and bins of recycling into the back of the car. When the car was full, I mounted one of our bikes on the bike rack; I told my sister I would deliver it to my parents' house so she could use it over the weekend. Next, on to the transfer station to unload all the trash and recycling. There I ran into the neighbor who has just started boarding cows at my parents' farm; he wanted to talk cows, so I listened to his theories about udder malfunctions and slaughter schedules while I threw trash bags into the compactor.

I was right on time to pick Holly up at her friend's house at 6:00. I loitered for a few minutes chatting with her friend's mother; then as we were leaving remembered that I was supposed to do a phone interview at 6:30 with an 11-year-old runner who plans to take part in the Chicago half-marathon next month. And Holly and I still had to drop off the bike at my parents' house. They weren't home, so we left the bike in the garage and the mail on the bench and hurried off, but halfway home, I remembered that the bike helmet was still on the seat next to me. Much to Holly's dismay, we doubled back to my parents' house and left the helmet.

The Chicago runner and his mother, both on speakerphone, called just as I was pulling into our garage. I rushed inside to start up my laptop so I could take notes. It's a good story; I'm looking forward to writing it up.

Once that call was over, I indulged in a rush of relief. All my scheduled events for the day were done; moreover, I'd left the house six different times for six different pre-scheduled drop-offs or pick-ups and hadn't forgotten or even been late for a single one. I'd also met a number of small but necessary work goals for the day: finished the press releases, done the interviews for my arts column and the marathon article.

So then I washed the dishes, put away food, and did the dreaded chore of removing mouse droppings from the cabinet under the sink. It seems every three or four days, I find enough down there to warrant a clean-up. I don't understand why, because there's no food under the sink and I never find evidence of mice anywhere else in the kitchen or the rest of the house. It's as if they wiggle their way through the hole near the drainpipe, wander into the cabinet for the sole purpose of pooping, and disappear again. My friend Sheila recently told me about a new mouse repellent she's very happy with; I'll have to put it on my To Do list for today to get to the hardware store where Sheila found it and buy some.

Ah yes, today's To Do list. Because every 24 hours, there's a new one. I managed to get through a lot yesterday, but today there are still more work assignments to complete, more errands to run, more household jobs to do. And yet yesterday felt like a particularly notable accomplishment; I was pleased with the way all the pieces had fit together – the six rides, the transfer station, moving the bike – and rather than feeling beleaguered by all that needed to be done, I was pleased that it had all turned out to be manageable and, more importantly, that I hadn't forgotten anyone anywhere.

When I was younger, before I had children, I honestly believed there were secrets, keys, to good organizational skills, and all I had to do was read the right book or attend the right lecture with the right expert and then I too would understand how to Be Organized. I even occasionally signed up for personal organization classes. Eventually I grew skeptical that there was any one answer, but these days I look around and feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not anything I learned from a book, and it's not anything I could write a book about either. It's not any particular key or slogan or trick or shortcut. It's just...living your life. Meeting your obligations. Keeping track of it all.

And it turns out that experience really is the best possible teacher.

Horseflies, or the lack thereof

2011-08-18T09:23:00.002-04:00

Only in the past year or so have I picked up the habit of wearing a hat when I run, and this is mostly due to increased conscientiousness about sun protection.

Yesterday morning, though, I headed out without my hat, noticing only about three minutes into the run that something felt different. “Oh well,” I rationalized when I realized what was missing. “It's still so early” – it was just a little after 7 a.m. – “I'll be running mostly in the shade anyway.”

But then as I looked at my dog just ahead of me at the end of the leash, I remembered the other reason a hat has been useful these past few months: because of the prevalence of horseflies. If I wear a hat, they leave me alone, but I still see them clustered around the poor dog's ears and clinging insistently to her haunches.

At least that's typically the case. But it wasn't yesterday. No horseflies pestered my hatless head, and I saw no horseflies near the dog at all. When I thought about it, I realized I hadn't seen any all week.

And so I knew I had to add horseflies to the long list of negative factors that I notice only when they're present and then forget all about in their absence.

For me, the most obvious example of this occurs during power outages, and coincidentally, we had one just two days ago: the first since the winter, when we had an outage that lasted about six hours. If you ask me while the electricity was on whether I could go an hour or two without it, I'd say of course I could: quite happily, in fact. And yet within minutes of the start of an outage, it seems I think of a dozen things I urgently want to do that require electricity (or running water, which because we have wells rather than a public supply is also unavailable when there's no electricity, or Internet access). When the power went out earlier this week, I shrugged it off at first: the weather was pleasant, and we were using neither heat nor air conditioning; and unlike the more typical power outages that occur midwinter during snowstorms and ice storms, we still had hours left of daylight. I was even mostly done with my writing for the day. So it didn't seem like a big deal.

Except that I soon realized I wanted to wash the lunch dishes, and run some laundry, and use the vacuum cleaner, and look up a few items on line regarding our upcoming vacation, and send my editor an email, and...and all kinds of things I couldn't do without electricity. I never really appreciate all it does for me until it goes out; conversely, when the electricity is on, as it is now, I never stop to think what a pain it is to lose power.

Sore throats are another one. Every time I get a sore throat, I wonder why I haven't been spending more time feeling grateful for the lack of pain in my throat. Car trouble, too: whenever everything is running smoothly in the automotive sphere, I forget what an imposition it is to deal with car problems.

Looking at the dog as we ran yesterday, I reminded myself to take note of the lack of horseflies around her and also around me. It's hard to remember to be grateful for everything bad we don't have at any given time, whether it's horseflies or power outages or far more serious problems. Yesterday, while running, I remembered for a few moments, and felt more grateful than usual.

Writing camp

2011-08-17T09:35:00.004-04:00

Holly is so lucky. She gets to spend the whole week writing.

And just as my envy was starting to get the best of me this morning as I dropped her off at her writing day camp, I remembered something useful: I went to writing day camp this year also. I too got to spend whole days writing, back in late June when I attended the Aspen Writers' Foundation summer conference.

It may have had a fairly different format from Holly's day camp – she and her fellow campers lounge against pillows in a friend's comfortable basement as they write, whereas we sat on a sun-filled terrace overlooking the Roaring Fork River canyon with the Rocky Mountains in the distance – and different Big Names thrown around to draw in participants – ours had National Book Award winner Colum McCann as keynote speaker, but hers has one of Carlisle's most popular second grade teachers leading the way – but both of us opted to devote a week of our summer to writing this year. And it's a pretty cool thing for the two of us to have in common.

I have to admit, it's given me no end of delight to watch Holly head off to camp every morning this week, peacock blue notebook in hand, her head full of story ideas. Though there are so many interests I'd be happy to see her pursue, from sewing to graphic design to running to playing an instrument, it will surprise no one to hear that nothing strikes at my core quite the way seeing her want to write does.

Like most kids, she's always enjoyed writing, whether doing an in-class assignment or scribbling away in the back of the car as we do errands together, but this week is different. This is the first time she's had the chance to devote hours to her writing, day after day. And she is loving it. She walks around with a gleam in her eye, spouting plot twists and memories she wants to record. She asks me keenly contemplated questions: “Mommy, is it okay if I leave out the detail about Belle getting her nails clipped when I describe her visit to the vet, just to make the story move along faster?” She brims over with excitement when it's time to read me what she worked on each day.

Writing camp is an unusual option for a nine-year-old. Most of her friends are doing soccer camp this week, or drama camp, or music camp. We're lucky that one of Holly's friends wanted to find a writing camp strongly enough that the child's mother took it upon herself to set one up, with a talented grade school teacher willing to lead it.

Holly has just two days left. Thoughts about writing have filled her mind this week; I hope that continues. Maybe someday she and I will go to writing camp – whether the Aspen conference or somewhere else – together. But mostly, of course, I just hope she keeps writing. She definitely has the passion for it, and this week was a wonderful way to focus that energy. She will no doubt develop many various interests as she grows older, and I'm the first to admit there are more lucrative directions toward which her talents could potentially go. But I'm happy to see her writing this week. She loves her camp notebook, her pile of photographic writing cues, the shared excitement of the other girls in the group. I felt just the same way at the conference I attended earlier in the summer. There's no other feeling quite like it, and I'm so pleased it's something we're sharing.

Rainy August day

2011-08-16T10:00:00.001-04:00

Rain poured down for much of the day yesterday and throughout the evening, but I didn't mind a bit. I did feel bad for people who were taking the week as vacation, camping or hiking or biking or at the beach; and I'm sorry for kids at camp this week as well. But for me, the rain felt just fine.

For one thing, it meant one less thing on my To Do list: no worry about watering my outdoor flowering plants and herbs yesterday or today or probably for several days to come. It made for a soggy run, but one thing that being a daily runner has taught me is that the rain, like a lot of sometimes-undesirable entities, often sounds worse than it is. What seems like a downpour thumping against the roof and windows and trees often feels more like a steady sprinkle once I'm out in it, as long as I remember to wear a hat with a visor. And, as I always say, after the first five minutes you're as wet as you're going to get, and then after that it doesn't really matter anymore if it's raining.

Besides, rain almost seemed to complement the activities we had planned for the day. It was Holly's first day of a weeklong daycamp program, but unlike all the kids off at soccer camp or Girl Scout camp, rain was no deterrent to her group's activities: it's a creative writing camp. For most of it they sat in a pillowed reading nook to write, but at one point they sat under a canopy outdoors and wrote about the sounds and smells of the rain falling all around them.

Like Holly, I spent the morning writing – though I was actually reporting on a sculpture symposium taking place in a nearby town this week, not crafting metaphors and similes about the weather as Holly was – and then together she and I took the dog to the vet for a vaccination and then did some errands. Hopping in and out of the car and crossing the parking lot, first at the post office and then at the library and then on to the supermarket, we were windblown and drenched, but neither of us complained. Knowing how much Rick was hoping I'd pick up some Diet Coke for him, I even made a special stop just for that. By that point, it was an extension of the lesson I always apply to running: I was too soaked for it to really matter if I made yet another stop. Home in the late afternoon, I changed clothes and spent the next two hours cooking: my sister and her family, along with my mother, were coming over for dinner, and rather than a burden, it seemed like fun to prepare food and set the table.

I wish we could send some of this rain to Texas and other drought-stricken regions. I know my nattering about not minding getting wet while doing errands is meaningless compared to the suffering that rain – or lack of rain – causes so me people. But I also like to stop and acknowledge the rightness of the weather, when it so perfectly matches my mood as it did yesterday. There's still time for more hot, sunny weather before the summer ends, and more outdoor recreation as well. For now, I'm happy with rain.

It's the four-year anniversary of my running streak!

2011-08-15T09:46:00.003-04:00

"You're almost at your four-year anniversary!” a friend commented a couple of weeks ago, noting that August 15th would mark the fourth anniversary of when I started my daily running streak. “What are you going to do to celebrate?”

The short answer, of course, is that I'm going to do the same thing every streak runner does to celebrate another year: go running. Because that's how streak running works. We go running (fully dressed, at least in my case: we're streak runners; not streakers) no matter what day it is or what anniversary we may or may not be celebrating. 365 days a year. No days off.

And as I've said before when people ask me about the mindset of streak running, in my case, I don't think a lot about daily running. I don't plan my daily run with much more thought than I plan my morning cup of coffee. There's just no question in my mind that it's going to be there somewhere. Running every day, I like to say, means never having to decide whether or not it's a good day to go running.

So yes, it's four years today; and no, I don't have any particular celebration in mind. When my running streak began, my then 9-year-old son also began a running streak, and at his insistence (to which I was more than happy to comply), we celebrated every single month. At least we planned to. The first month we went out for ice cream sundaes. The second month he asked for an Almond Joy. By the third month, all he wanted to mark the date was a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Even by then, he had the same mindset I do: if you've set your heart on running every day, you just don't think of it as a big enough deal to celebrate.

Still, there have been milestones along the way. On our one-year anniversary, my sister and brother-in-law made us customized t-shirts advertising our streaking success. On our two-year anniversary, my son decided he'd had enough and left it to me to continue the streak. On my one thousandth day of consecutive running, my mother left a beautiful flowering houseplant on my kitchen table while I was out for my run.

So here I am at the four-year mark, with no particular celebration planned. Next year, at five years, according to the U.S. Running Streak Association, I'll officially transcend the ranks, from the category labeled “Neophyte” to the section of the list designated “Proficient.” Four years. One thousand, four hundred sixty-five days, as of today, without missing my daily mile-or-more. It's not so much something to be proud of as something to be grateful for. No serious illnesses or injuries. No family emergencies. None of the things that could have made it impossible for me to get out for a run in any given 24-hour period has occurred.

I'm grateful. And I'm psyched to continue the streak. Celebrate? Maybe someday. For now, I just want to go running.

Message from a houseplant

2011-08-12T09:21:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure of the variety of plant, but it's something standard and typical, maybe a begonia. I received it from my daughter's third-grade teacher at the end-of-year class gathering; it was a thankyou gift for fulfilling room parenting duties all year.

I'm not generally great with plants, but I hoped I could keep this one producing colorful blossoms at least through an event that I was hosting the following week. I put it on a side table in our kitchen and enjoyed its pretty pink and white blossoms.

I watered it every couple of days, and it hung in there. I had no delusions that it was flourishing, but it didn't seem to become any worse for wear. With me as gardener-in-chief, that was the best that could be hoped for.

But then a few weeks later, I decided to put it out on the deck. I had a large planter out there that didn't have any plants in it, and although I don't know much about growing flowering plants outdoors, I figured it would live at least as long as it would inside.

After I put it outside, I stopped watering it regularly; if more than three or four days go by without rain, I pull out the watering can, but for the most part, now I let the plant live on rainwater, which has been falling every few days these past few weeks.

I thought the plant might die in the acute heat wave of late July, but it didn't. And then last week I noticed it looked better than ever, with lush dark pink and purple blossoms and dense green vines cascading over the side of the planter.

It was very clear to me that the plant was benefiting enormously from being outside rather than in. Even with irregular watering, rainwater seemed to suit it better than tap water. Even with the variety of temperatures we've had lately, from a high of 102 one July afternoon to lows in the 60s or even cooler overnight, the plant looked healthy and robust.

I knew what the message was. I knew what that plant was showing me. The plant had a simple message, and I was definitely open to it: living things flourish when they are allowed to be outside.

This is definitely true of me; it's why I was so happy during the week I spent in Colorado in late June. It's why I know that some afternoons the most self-nourishing thing I can do is hop on my bike for a short ride. It's why so many of my most meaningful friendships revolve around taking long walks together.

Now, every time I look through the door that leads from the kitchen to the deck and see that plant, it's like a reminder. Need rejuvenation? Just go outside. And yesterday afternoon, that's just what I did. We'd just arrived home from two days in Maine, and I was feeling a little out of sorts. I had wanted to stay longer, but we had to get back for Tim's baseball game. At home, things felt messy and disorganized to me, and I felt burdened by unpacking and getting the house back in shape and catching up with work.

And then the plant's message came through. “Go outside. To flourish, go outside.”

I can't, I told myself regretfully. I need to empty the cooler, start some laundry, make dinner, put away my clothes, remind Holly about tidying up her room, help Tim find his water bottle. It sounds great, but I can't go outside.But again, the message: “To flourish, go outside.”

I thought about it again. I can't do something as frivolous as a walk or a bike ride, I told myself, but what about weeding the garden? That's work, not play. But it's also outside. After just five minutes of weeding, I felt myself relaxing. Sure there was a sink full of dishes to wash and a dinner to plan. But it didn't matter. I was getting fresh air and a late-summer breeze. It felt so good to be out kneeling in the dirt, pulling up weeds, looking up to see cloud formations, watching dragonflies drift past me.

After 45 minutes, the garden was fairly well weeded. All the other factors were still in place, of course: the dishes and laundry hadn't taken care of themselves. But that was okay. I'd heeded the message and benefited so much from just 45 minutes outside. The plant's message was absolutely correct: to flouish, go outside. I'm so glad I listened to what it told me. And I'm so glad I could act on the lessons learned.

Mid-August

2011-08-11T07:31:00.002-04:00

Only in the past few years have I come to appreciate mid-August as one of the best times of the year.

Prior to this, mid-August connoted little more than heat and humidity to me. When I was a kid, it usually fell right when our vacation out west was all over, information about the new school year had arrived in the mail, and I was ready to move ahead into fall, not spend more time with summer details. And once I became a parent myself, it was often around mid-August that I'd start to feel completely out of resources as far as kiddie summer fun and just want to go lie on a beach somewhere all by myself with a good book.

More recently, though, it's been different. Mid-August, I've come to realize, falls squarely at the interesection of all the glory of summer and all the anticipation of fall. Yes, it can be hot and humid (though it is neither right now), but unlike the heat of July, there's no question that even if the weather is oppressive, it won't last much longer. And just as when anything good is starting to draw to a close you appreciate it more, by mid-August I'm keenly aware of all that I love about summer.

No super-early school-day mornings (I usually get up at 6:30 on weekdays mornings in the summer, which is a full hour and a quarter later than during the school year). Abundant fresh vegetables, even with New England's limited growing season: corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, berries, peaches. Warm water in ponds and lakes; temperatures that are not-quite-frigid in the ocean. Daylight that still lasts well into the evening, but leaves cool, soothing nights behind when it finally fades.

And although in June, standing at the precipice of another summer, I often fret about how the kids will fill their time and wonder if I've made enough plans for them, by mid-August I have nothing left to worry about on that count. I know they've both done an adequate amount of reading and writing and math to keep them ready for a new school year, and I still have a long list of ideas for summer excursions that we haven't done yet.

This year, the last few weeks of summer vacation hold additional pleasures: a creative writing program for Holly, and a little bit of vacation travel for all four of us. So I know it will go by quickly.

But fall is always an exciting time, with new school year energy for the kids and longer days for the kind of work I love, and less pressure to keep track of what everyone is doing and whether they are using their time well.

As the summer was beginning, I wrote in my journal that maybe my goal for this summer should be to spend less time worrying about how everyone in my family spends their time. It's true: I do put a lot of pressure on the kids to fit in outdoor recreation and exercise and reading and writing and time with friends and time alone and bathing and housework every day, and by extension, I put a lot of pressure on myself to ensure that all of those things happen. Maybe the answer is in fact for me to worry less about it.

But by mid-August, I'm done worrying about it, not because it has stopped mattering to me but just because I can see that everything worked out fine. By mid-August, I can simply savor what remains of the summer, as the days dwindle toward fall.

On our way

2011-08-10T07:42:00.002-04:00

As the kids and I headed north to Portland, Maine, yesterday evening, I couldn't help thinking of the famous Norman Rockwell diptych: the first illustration showing three generations of an American family looking fresh, crisp and excied as they drive off in the station wagon for a day at the beach; the second illustration showing the same family tired, sticky and sunburned.

But what I kept thinking as we left Massachusetts and passed briefly through New Hampshire before reaching the Maine Turnpike was how I feel like we embody that story only in reverse. We're grubby and disorganized as we leave for our trip, not as we return. At least we were yesterday.

The vicissitudes of Tim's summer baseball schedule are such that the best time for us to get away is midweek, leaving after a Tuesday evening game and getting back in time for his Thursday evening game. Of course, this leaves out Rick, who has to be at work during the week, but since Tim has baseball games both Saturday and Sunday, it's our best chance to get away for two consecutive nights.

Still, it never seems easy. It still takes me about half the day to pack up for a two-night trip, and it's not exactly like I'm stocking campground essentials: in Portland, we stay in my parents' well-stocked condo. So it doesn't matter if we forget milk or shampoo or paper towels. But still, packing my clothes, reminding the kids of what they'll need, collecting materials for any work I plan to do while I'm away, gathering cameras, sandals, bike helmets. Facing the challenge of putting the bike rack on the car and then attaching the bikes. Fitting the cooler in the storage area in back of the car. Making sure that everyone's frivolous-but-necessary electronics are charged (or else that chargers have been packed).

So once we finally hit the road, we're already tired, not to mention the fact that Tim has just finished a tough six-inning baseball game. We stop at MacDonald's, a very rare indulgence in my family but worth it when it's seven o'clock and I want to get to Maine more than I want to maintain our usual nutritional standards.

Fortunately, I remembered to pack a whole wheat bagel with Cheddar and cherry tomatoes for myself. As we drive, the kids get French fry grease all over themselves and the car, and I'm not doing much better: two bites into my bagel, a cherry tomato squirts all over my shirt.

I make the slightest hand motion toward my phone, and both kids perk up like terriers. "I get to call Daddy!" "No, it's my turn!" I listen to them argue about it for thirty seconds or so and then ask, "What does either of you have to say to Daddy?" Nothing, as it turns out. They both saw him less than an hour ago. What matters is being the one deemed important enough to dial his number. (Of course, I too saw him less than an hour ago, but I already have several things to say to him: I haven't fed the dog yet, and could you wrap those loaves of banana bread that I left cooling on the counter in Saran wrap, and what do you think we should do about the problem with the washing machine, and sorry that you have to be at work tomorrow while we're out boating.)

Finally we arrive, sticky and a little greasy with a couple of arguments already under our belts, not fresh and crisp like Rockwell's beach-goers. But maybe we'll complete the reversal and return home that way, rather than tired and sunburned. If the journey is more important than the destination, we've completed this one safely and successfully, and I'm very happy to smell the ocean.

Computer karma

2011-08-09T09:37:00.004-04:00

There was a time long ago when, in identical circumstances, I probably never would have learned that a distant acquaintance from high school who is also a writer but lives in New York caused irreversible computer damage yesterday morning by spilling coffee -- with milk -- on her keyboard.

But that long-ago time was before Facebook. And I didn't spend long on Facebook yesterday morning, honest. I spent three hours drafting a story about a food writer who just published a book about lobsters. A quick glimpse at Facebook before breaking for lunch was supposed to be my reward for my diligence.

I read the post with, frankly, little interest. "A little coffee on the keyboard? How bad can that be?" I shrugged to myself. "If keyboards couldn't withstand the occasional coffee spill, you wouldn't see them on every single table in Starbucks, right? I'm sure it will fix itself in no time."

Well, anyone who agrees with my that the goddess Fate has a sharp sense of irony can guess what happened next. I reached over to close my laptop and knocked over my water bottle. Right onto my keyboard.

But I grabbed it and righted it in no time. Two, maybe three tablespoons of water at the most had actually landed on the computer. "No problem," I reassured myself. "It's just lucky I drink nice clean water rather than milky sugary coffee, and it's lucky I have reasonably fast reflexes."

Wrong, of course. When I returned to my desk after lunch, my keyboard was utterly unresponsive. No vowels. No consonants. No space bar. No hard return. No numbers or symbols or shortcut keys. Nothing.

I put out the cry for help every way I knew: on Facebook, on Twitter, via email (to a friend who is an IT expert), by phone (to my husband, who I already knew probably wouldn't have time to help me with a computer fix until approximately halfway through Labor Day weekend).

Responses and advice poured in. I followed it all. I wiped the computer thoroughly with a chamois cloth. Then I borrowed a hair dryer from my mother-in-law and ran the hair dryer over the keyboard for about twenty minutes. Then I put the computer next to a pedestal fan and ran cool air over it for another ten minutes. Then I submerged my computer in a pan full of uncooked rice. (Apparently this is a great trick to deploy if your cell phone gets submerged in water. The dried rice absorbs the moisture. I've repeated the adjective "dried" preceding "rice" here in hopes of lowering the inevitable odds that someone will think I said to do this with cooked rice.)

Then I did another hair dryer treatment. After that, the whole body of the computer seemed overheated to me, so I wrapped it in a cool damp towel. It really would have made more sense to just send my laptop to a day spa and ask for "The Works," with hot stone massage and apricot facial most definitely included.

Now I'm letting my computer rest. We'll reevaluate later today. I have a different computer to work on in the meantime, and if I may indulge in a brief moment of self-righteousness, there is nothing on my regular laptop that I had neglected to back up -- yes, I learned that lesson the hard way and won't make that mistake again -- so I'm not worried about any particular files. I just want to be able to use the computer itself again sometime soon.

So in the end, lots of lessons learned. Don't snicker at your friends -- or your distant acquaintances -- when bad luck befalls them even in the form of a knocked-over coffee cup: you'll probably be next. Keep files backed up. Have plenty of uncooked (did I mention it has to be uncooked?) rice on hand. If you care about your computer, be prepared to indulge it with a full spa treatment at any time.

And, of course, no more full water bottles near the keyboard. The goddess of Fate might just catch me being dismissive of other people's computer problems once again, and this time the repair could be a lot more complicated than A Day at the Spa.

Warm summer rain

2011-08-08T10:45:00.001-04:00

There’s always something new for me to appreciate about running. I’ve been running regularly for the past 25 years and daily for the past four years, but days like yesterday still come along when I find myself out on a run thinking, “I’ve never noticed how much I like _________ .”

In yesterday’s case, filling in the blank was “…running in a light steady rain on a warm, humid summer day.” In fact, I can’t remember a single previous time when I’ve found it really pleasing to run in the rain. Sometimes I do so grudgingly, sometimes acceptingly, sometimes miserably – I often quote Runner’s World executive editor Amby Burfoot, who in one of his books says “There is no bad weather for running. Okay, maybe 34 degrees and raining is bad weather for running.” And it seems that throughout the winter, I frequently find myself running in 34 degrees and rain. Sometimes, too, I run in the rain fearfully, as I did two weeks ago, with thunderstorms rolling in from a distance.

But until yesterday, I had no memories of not just abiding the rain but really loving the rain. Yesterday, the rain felt nourishing, cooling, soothing. The air was so warm and humid; the rain, only slightly cooler, seemed to balance out the heat. I ran four miles, a straight out-and-back down to the end of the main street off of which we live and back. When my face started to feel hot and sweaty, I ran my hands against the leaves that poked their way into the roadway and cooled off in the water; normally I try to avoid wet leaves. Normally I try to avoid puddles, too, but yesterday there was a puddle extending the width of our driveway that I simply couldn’t avoid, so with my feet wet from the outset, there was no reason to try to avoid further puddles, and I enjoyed the mindlessness of just running straight through the puddles rather than trying to navigate around them.

I have to admit that my newfound enjoyment of the rain wasn’t solely a change of mindset, not just a Zen-like decision to welcome the rain rather than resist it. Part of the change was pragmatic: until last summer, when the importance of sun protection finally sunk in, I was never in the habit of running with a hat on. Having the rainwater run off my visor rather than into my eyes made it a lot easier not to mind the steady stream of droplets.

But mostly, it was just that rain felt right, yesterday. The weather has been hot lately, and I’ve been running early in the day, when there are a lot of insects out. In the rain, the insects were gone. I felt as if I were blissfully undisturbed: just me, running through the gentlest of showers, cooling off, damp with fresh clean water rather than damp with sticky sweat.

By the end of my four miles, my clothes were drenched, but I still wasn’t cold. It was a perfect day to be running in the rain, and I felt as if I’d discovered a whole new pleasure in running. It might be a long time before the conditions – air temperature, intensity of rainfall, even my own mindset – conflate into the perfect rainy-day run again. But for yesterday, it was exactly right, and I felt as if I’d made a discovery. About myself, about the weather, about running.

Perfect summer day

2011-08-05T09:28:00.001-04:00

The past few days for me have been full of vicariously savoring other people’s vacation adventures. My friend Jane told me about camping for two nights on an island in Lake Champlain (the ferry boat captain insisted she refer to it as an “undisclosed location” to stave off the crowds). My sister emailed to say how happy she was to be back in Colorado. A neighbor posted on Facebook about a wonderful first day on Nantucket.

And yet we had a pretty perfect day yesterday right here at home, which reminds me that a perfect summer day can happen a lot of different places. If you have an opportunity to relax, a break from the normal schedule, and like-minded company – no matter whether any of those factors exists for a week or a couple of days or even just an hour or two -- you have just about all the ingredients you need.

We didn’t go anywhere yesterday, but after I had a productive morning of work on our porch, Tim and I played badminton in the yard while Holly rode her bike up and down the driveway. Tim and I both love to play badminton; it’s one of the few things that the two of us have essentially equal amounts of interest in. So we played for a good long time. Holly rode her bike to the edge of the woods behind the garage and for the first time discovered that there are wild blackberry bushes growing back there. Finders keepers: she picked and ate the first ripe blackberry of the season; we could see that there are more soon to come.

Later in the afternoon, I loaded up the car and brought the trash and recycling to the Transfer Station. Even that had a Perfect Summer Day feel to it: with everyone else in town off vacationing, I had the whole circuit to myself, and it seemed like such an easier job than it does when the cars are parked six deep and the bins are overflowing.

And after Tim and Rick left for Tim’s evening baseball game, Holly and I headed over to my parents’ house for one last visit with my sister and my niece before they return home to Pennsylvania. We sat with my parents on lawn chairs out by the pond and admired the beautiful evening we were in the midst of: bullfrogs croaked, dragonflies skimmed across the water. Sorry as I always am to see my sister and her family leave, they’ll be back later this month, and then we’ll meet up with them in Pennsylvania not long after that.

So there are perfect summer days in the mountains and on the islands and at the beach, and there are perfect summer days to be found right at home as well. I’m lucky to have already gone away once this summer, to Colorado in late June by myself, and I look forward to a real family vacation in another few weeks, but for now, badminton and biking and blackberries feels just about as satisfying as any getaway.

Holly's birthday: A recap

2011-08-04T09:36:00.001-04:00

On the day Holly was born, I held her for most of the day. Once in a while I laid her down while she was asleep, but mostly she snuggled into the crook of my arm. She dozed; I studied her face and wondered about her personality. She tried to take in some nourishment, in that uncertain, searching way that babies do in their first few days of life. Visitors came to see her: first her older brother, once he was awake and ready for an excursion to the hospital; later both sets of grandparents.

Yesterday, her ninth birthday, started out in sort of a parallel way. Rick and I greeted her as she made her way into our room as we were getting up in the morning; later, we woke Tim up so that he could join us in the breakfast festivities. He said a sleepy, seemingly sincere if not overly excited “Happy birthday” to her.

And like on her original birth day, she saw one set of grandparents, though she won’t see the other until the weekend. But unlike that day nine years ago when they peered at her in her hospital bassinet and kissed her dark damp hair while she slept, today she went out for lunch and to a movie with Grandma (The Smurfs, which she declared “Awesome” and “The best movie I’ve ever seen.” Hard to please, she’s not.).

Last night, at Holly’s request, we went to a minor league baseball game. I can’t say I observed Holly doing a single thing related to the concept of baseball: she didn’t cheer for any of the players or any of the action; she didn’t ask about the score; she didn’t comment on any great plays. Based on the way she spent the time, we could have just as easily been at a busy urban train station: eating a variety of not-very-healthful foods, watching the crowd, pointing out interesting or amusing aspects to the passing scene.

In so many ways, a nine-year-old is so different from a newborn. But on the way home from the baseball game, Holly became overtired and whimpery. When I drove into the garage and parked the car, she climbed out, and then said to me, “Will you hold my hand?”

Hand in hand, we walked into the house and up to her room so that she could put on pajamas and brush her teeth. All she wanted was to sleep. Yes, I kept her out a little too late; she was worn out. But it was worth it to me for the simple pleasure of feeling her take my hand to make our way into the house at the end of the night. That moment, more than any other part of the day, connected me to the day of her birth, nine years ago.

Holly turns nine

2011-08-03T09:53:00.001-04:00

Holly turns nine years old today, which makes it what I call a “mom-birthday” for me. Even nearly thirteen years after the birth of my first child, I still bask in a feeling of triumph as well as gratitude each year on my children’s birthdays.

I congratulate my friends when it’s their “mom-birthdays” as well, even though they often don’t see it as the same kind of personal holiday I do. True, the focus should be (and always is) on the child celebrating the birthday, but I still think a kid’s birthday is a big deal for the mom as well. “Look, I transported her safely through another year!” I always want to proclaim on my child’s birthday.

It’s more than an accomplishment, of course. It’s a blessing. Holly has had another wonderfully healthy and happy and safe year, and beyond being triumphant, I should be tremendously grateful. And I am. Reaching nine years old free of serious illness, injury, or other catastrophe is something many children are not fortunate enough to experience. I feel gratitude every day that mine have been so fortunate.

But I also marvel at the fact that we’ve both reached another yearly marker. When my children were infants, I was somewhat surprised by every day we successfully survived together. Now it’s a lot easier, of course. They don’t need so much from me anymore. Not compared to when they were infants, anyway. And it’s a lot more fun now than it was back then. A successful feeding and a fifteen-minute nap was the measure of a good day during Holly’s first few months. Now she can do so much that I consider wonderful: ride a bike, write a story, compose a song, comfort a friend, recount an anecdote, tease her father.

She’s nine, and she’s very pleased with that fact. I am too. I’m grateful and happy for the past nine years we’ve spent together, and I look forward to the one just beginning. I’m curious what milestones it will disclose. I’m appreciative of those that unfolded over the past twelve months. I’m thankful to be here with Holly today, wishing her a happy birthday. And savoring my own mom-birthday as well.

How to do a running streak: Simplest advice

2011-08-02T07:13:00.004-04:00

Through the vagaries of social media in general and Twitter in particular, I stumbled across a group of cyber-friends a week or two ago who were all planning to start a running streak on August 1st. “Welcome to the ranks,” I told them, and enjoyed reading their posts as they built up to the big Running Streak Day One.

My own running streak, following the guidelines stipulated by the U.S. Running Streak Association (USRSA), began on August 15th of 2007. So later this month, I’ll cross the four-year threshold, and since I’m at day 1452 right now, by the end of September I’ll reach Day 1500, another appealing milestone.

Whether this puts me in any position to give advice to the cadre who started their streak yesterday is up for debate. According to the categorization system of the U.S. Running Streak Association, I’m still a neophyte – and will be until I reach the five-year mark twelve months from now. After 1452 days, I can’t exactly say I feel like a neophyte, but of course, to the longest-term streakers on the registry, who have over forty years of daily running under their belts (or under their insoles), calling me a neophyte may even be putting it kindly.

Still, most people who know me and know of my streak do not know other streak runners who are up in the decades-long rather than years-long echelons, so it is to me that they turn with questions. Or one question, really: How do you do it? Maybe it makes sense for me to give advice and maybe not, but here are a few of my standard answers.

• Although most streak runners cover more than a mile a day – many are long-distance or even marathon runners, and my standard is 2 miles per weekday run and 4-6 miles each weekend day – a mere mile is all it takes to qualify for a streak according to the USRSA. And running one mile doesn’t take long. Even a slow runner like me can cover a mile in ten minutes. So even though I’ve never been a smoker, I sometimes liken it to a cigarette break – or, in more contemporary terms, the time some people take out of other activities to check their email and update their Facebook page. Ten minutes. Go out, come back, you’re done. Not that difficult to fit in at all.

• No matter how busy your day is, everyone has a first-thing-in-the-morning. No one stays up all through the night, every night. So no matter how busy the day ahead may be, you can always set your alarm ten or twenty or forty-five minutes earlier to fit in a run. I usually, though not always, run first thing in the morning – whether “first thing” means 7:30 on a Saturday, 6:00 on a weekday during the school year, or 4:45 on the occasional travel day when I’m heading off to the airport for a morning flight. Sometimes I run at the end of the day, but only when I’m unable to force myself out of bed early enough to go in the morning.

• As Yogi Berra purportedly said, it’s not over ‘til it’s over. The day, that is. I try to avoid delaying my run into the late evening, but when it happens, it happens. In my memoir about streak running, I described the latest run I did that year or in fact any time since: it was at 9:45 at night. I wasn’t happy about it, but I still fit it in. My streak-running mentor, who logged a 32-year streak before a heart attack sidelined him for six weeks (after which he began another streak), once began his daily run at 11:50 p.m. It was just a mile that day, and he fit it in before midnight.

• Shed the habit that non-daily runners have of deciding whether or not it’s a good day for a run. Once you’ve resolved that you’re going to do a streak, that question becomes irrelevant, and I found it quite liberating to stop thinking that way. You’ll actually save time as well as mental effort in your day once you no longer have to think about whether you’re going to fit in a run. You are. Case closed. No more time wasted vacillating over that question.

• Another motto I tell myself is this one: You can always run slower. (No one has ever accused me of having a talent for catchy mottos.) The USRSA stipulates how long a distance you have to run to qualify as a streaker, but not how fast you have to run it. As long as there is some fraction of a millisecond between every footstrike when both feet are off the ground, you’re running. Having a tough day of it, or don’t even feel like running at all? Run slowly. You’ll still finish that mile in less than fifteen minutes.

• Any kind of weather is bearable for a mile. Again, I don’t mean to imply that most streakers run only a mile a day. Most run longer, although one exception is Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, whom I actually profiled in the first chapter of my book. He runs one mile and claims he has never once gone a single step farther. In any case, though most of us do more than a mile a day, no matter how cold or hot or icy or humid or rainy or snowy it is, there’s no kind of weather that’s too miserable for you to be out in it for ten minutes. Wear ten layers, or wear almost nothing at all. Do whatever the weather calls for. You’ll be back indoors before you know it.

• In my experience, it’s critical that you have a running route that is reliably safe. By safe, I mean both from traffic and from other dangers. My belief is that you can’t maintain a streak if running in the dark – whether that’s pre-dawn or post-dusk – is not an option. I’m lucky to live at the end of a half-mile-long cul-de-sac on which the only traffic is drivers going to and from the handful of houses on the road. On the days that it is most inconvenient to run, whether due to darkness or weather, I can simply run down our road and back and be done. Not everyone has this luxury, but remember, covering a mile or more doesn’t mean you have to run in a straight line. You can do laps around a high school track – or even a supermarket parking lot -- if you need to.

That’s probably enough advice from someone who has already admitted she may not be in any position to give advice. I don’t even think about the running streak anymore, except as an objective number that I post on Twitter and in my running log daily. But I don’t think about “Oh yeah, I need to do that daily run once again. Or not.”

Running is like brushing my teeth at this point: a new day has dawned, so it must be time to go for a run. That attitude has brought me to the brink of the four-year mark. I’m still a neophyte, but I hope eventually to be well into a decades-long streak.

Maybe if that happens, I’ll have still more insights. But I don’t think so. I think it’s really pretty simple. If you want to do a streak, go out today and run. And do it again tomorrow.

For a look at my streak-running memoir, just click on the image of the book at the top of this page. You can also find the e-book through Amazon.com.)

The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

2011-08-01T09:40:00.006-04:00

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.