memories – Bad Parenting 101

Why It Sucks To Be Sick As a Parent

I miss being able to be sick. Not being sick; that’s different. I get sick all the time.

But as a child, I could lie in bed all day while someone brought me soup, ginger ale, and Vick’s VapoRub. If home alone, I’d make a nest of afghans and crunch through long tubes of Saltines while watching the channel of my choice. As the youngest, that was a rare and relished opportunity. I could read books, write in a journal, or just lie there, thinking and dreaming. I do occasionally lie around and think as an adult, but only in the middle of the night–accompanied by the cold sweats.

These days, there is no binge-watching of Law & Order. Being sick means doing the usual crap while feeling terrible. It involves large quantities of DayQuil or ibuprofen–whatever might mask the problem at hand. It involves staring helplessly at the computer monitor, willing it to make sense to my throbbing medicine head, praying that my fingers are typing a grant proposal and not a cry for help. It includes packing lunches, grocery shopping, and–worst of all–driving carpools while pretending to be goddamned cheerful. Plus, maybe the teeniest, tiniest nugget of growing resentment.

Two days before the end of my vacation last year, I tore a calf muscle frolicking on the beach. I felt it snap as I jumped off a rock–realizing before I landed that my future held frozen peas and painkillers instead of the planned hikes and swimming. Here’s where we were:

From: http://www.australianstudysolutions.com.au/

But instead of enjoying the trip of a lifetime, I hobbled painfully through a blur of family obligations and endless airports, ecstatically relieved when we arrived home. I had forgotten that a relaxed convalescence was out of the question.

To add to the adventure, the kids started vomiting as soon as we got home, for which I blame the flight from Auckland. Unable to walk, I crawled up and down two flights of stairs, fetching rags and cleaners, cursing the fact that we had moved the laundry from the entry closet into the basement. You read that right: crawling.

I escaped briefly to a meeting, but returned soon with urgency. Grabbing a bucket and crawling up the stairs, I held my hair back and waited for the inevitable. Meanwhile, Miss 13 needed some attention. Her first day back at school had been tumultuous; she needed to debrief and hear some empathetic mom-isms.

Unable to hear over my own dry heaves, I had to keep asking her to repeat herself, and due to the aforementioned injury, I couldn’t kneel. I struggled to find a position which allowed me to hang properly over the side of the bucket while pretending to listen. I didn’t want to throw my back out while throwing up–again. This was absurd. Can’t I even focus on my own needs under these circumstances? But the girl did not stop talking until steaming jets flared repeatedly, at which point she just looked annoyed before retreating to her room in a huff.

Fail.

Though my heart will break when my girls head to college–and though I will mourn their departure like the end of the world–I will embrace ordinary illness as a long-lost friend. I will take to the couch with a remote and a relish unseen since falling in love.

Let There Be Light

It was a woeful moment.

I was worn thin from an epic day at work. Chilled, tired, and hungry, my couch was calling.

Unfortunately, in order to sit on it, I first had to conquer the Bay Bridge during Friday night rush hour traffic. For added excitement, it was the first rainy day of the season, which is typically when everyone spontaneously forgets how to operate a moving vehicle. I really, really did not want to make the drive.

I sat in the car, listening to the rain and to some extremely sad songs. As I was following the lyrics in the semi-darkness, I began to notice the rain falling over the words. Then, after a minute or two, the wipers would cut across the page, leaving a blazing trail of light.

I sat and watched for eons. No doubt the folks in the neighborhood thought I was on some sort of stake-out.

This was a shot that needed a tripod and a decent camera–and FILM, for crying out loud–but I was smushed into the driver’s seat and all I had was my phone. I took the photograph anyway. It can serve as a visual reminder:

In the midst of just about any moment–no matter how stressful, or annoying, or banal–there is often something amazing right in front of my face.

Ah, Halloween! Cow parts and unchaperoned children.

I wore the same fairy costume for four years running.

My getup consisted of someone’s worn and baggy blue dress, a cardboard tiara, and a star covered with Reynolds’ Wrap and taped to a piece of dowel.

Back then, the time change came earlier in the Fall, so it was nice and dark early on the big night. Unfortunately, it was also ridiculously cold, and because my parents loved me, I had to wear a coat covering my costume. They probably did not recognize this as the great disappointment it was, especially since everyone had seen my costume numerous times already.

I’m pretty certain my sister was asked to look after me, but what junior high student wants a baby sister tagging along with her posse after dark? Consequently, I had free reign of the neighborhood from a staggeringly early age, and my candy was only stolen once. No other tragedy befell me.

I would wander, giddy and anxious, mesmerized both by the boisterous clumps of people I wasn’t sure I knew, and by my paper bag, swelling with forbidden sweets. I would take them home and count them, chart them, graph them. I would eat two or three pieces, then squirrel the rest away, doling it out so it would last until Easter–the next time we got a statistically significant dose of sugar.

Once I got a bit older, I branched out and tried new costumes, always outdone by the girl who lived catty-corner from us. How did she predict my costume three years in a row? My mummy costume was made out of an old sheet torn into strips, and held together by an array of safety pins. It drooped and exposed my sweat pants in embarrassing patches. Julie’s father was a doctor, however, so hers was made out of surgical wrapping that clung magically to her gloating face.

Multiply that stinging feeling by all three years. I suppose I would have developed lingering unpleasant feelings about the holiday were it not for the Halloween party we had in our basement the year I turned eleven.

In my opinion, all basements are inherently cold and creepy, and ours was no exception. Scariest of all was the storage room, with concrete walls and floors, and rickety metal shelving loaded with spider webs and long-forgotten boxes. We shoved a few things out of the way so we could guide blindfolded kids one at a time into its clutches.

Perched here and there on the shelves were a variety of bowls into which we plunged their unseeing hands. One held eyeballs, or peeled grapes, and another brains, which was clammy cooked spaghetti.

Things got weirder.

Once a year, my parents purchased a side of beef, which was cut and meticulously wrapped and nestled in the extra fridge in the basement–the one without a handle, that we wrenched open with a dish towel and a finely choreographed hip maneuver. We had no shortage of strange cow parts in the basement freezer, so we thawed a variety of organs to fill the other bowls.

Given the location and ingredients, I suspect that our haunted house would have been just as creepy without the blindfold. And though this may reflect poorly on me, I reveled in the yelps and screams of our guests, and later, their wide-eyed wonder when we revealed the bowls’ actual contents. I think most of them had hoped that what we passed off as a heart might not really be a heart.

The piece de résistance of the evening was the Ghost Cake with Flaming Eyes, however. I remember so clearly that feeling of triumph when we turned out the lights again and lit the eyes.

Ever since that night, Halloween has been my favorite holiday.

I wrote a whole post about my Ghost Cake on LobeStir. Here’s the link–you could make one, too!

Happy Halloween!

personhood vs. parenthood

Last year, I was feeling so smug, because I watered my orchid stick for six months and it bloomed on Mothers' Day. This year, it's just a stick. — @2012 Beret Olsen Last year, I was feeling so smug because I watered my orchid stick for six months, and it magically bloomed on Mothers’ Day. Sadly, this year it’s just a stick. Oh well. Happy Mother’s Day anyway.

One summer day in my early teens, my parents and I went on a long drive from our woodsy cabin to Lands’ End.

Though we had hoped for a sunny day on the coast, the fog was so thick we could barely see the sea from the shore. We meandered along the water’s edge in our own little pocket of cloud, quite separate from the world beyond. I thought I would say something nice for a change–perhaps even express some filial gratitude–when I noticed an odd look on my mother’s face.

She raised her arms, laughed out loud, and launched her sprawled limbs into a cartwheel in the sand. It was so astonishing, so completely unexpected, that I suddenly realized how little I knew about her beyond the character she played at home. Now I might consider her as more than my mother, someone whose inner life might be rich and complicated, someone who had lived a lifetime before she made me.

Not that she ever turned another cartwheel, but still. I continued to wonder about her, too Scandinavian to pry.

The only clue I had to her younger days was a doll she called Judy, which she had lovingly arranged in a child-sized rocker facing my bed. She was eerily beautiful, despite a crack across her cheek, a worn petticoat, and misshapen, yellowed socks. Judy had stared at me tight-lipped for years, never spilling the secrets of my mother’s childhood or beyond.

I imagined my mother quarantined on her parents’ plastic-covered couch, hands folded primly, dreaming of play; dreaming of siblings.

Did her parents have the same ancient hard candies back then–the ones at which I stared during my visits to Grandma’s– arranged in the same fancy china dish?

As an adult I get little glimpses of her as a non-mom. Like the night my spouse got her a little tipsy, and she dropped the f-bomb telling a joke. How lucky for me, that there are still opportunities to hear my mother’s stories. Now, to find the time and the courage to ask.

I look at my kids and wonder: when will I suddenly appear to them as more than a purveyor of fine snacks, a laundress, a driver, a shoulder to cry upon? What will I do or say that will alert them that there is an actual person in my shoes? Chances are, they’re already clued in. I haven’t played the role quite so gracefully as my mother.

I know it’s not Pearl Harbor Day, but I’m thinking about my mom anyway

I stole this photo. As far as I know, no photograph exists to accompany this story. — I stole this photo from http://www.plasticsoldiers.webs.com/. They didn’t even put up a fight.

I try to be a nice person. I certainly want to be one. Unfortunately, I’m starting to believe I might not be genetically wired for punctuality and thoughtfulness. If I have missed your birthday, it’s not because I don’t care about you; I just plain forgot. Like my brothers, whose birthdays are lost somewhere in the sad, endy bits of summer, the problem is that your birthday doesn’t automatically appear on my calendar. Apologies to all of you.

Fortunately, my father’s birthday falls during the Thanksgiving season, and my sister’s is on or around the first day of spring, so even if I don’t write them down, there is always something on the calendar to magically remind me.

Easiest of all to remember is my mother’s.

My mother turned ten the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

That must have been a memorable birthday, with everyone huddled around the radio, speechless and shaken. Probably not the best one, mind you, but remarkable, nonetheless.

Over the years, my mother has championed everyone else’s special days, but on hers she lays low, no doubt hoping someone might step up and do a little something for her for a change. We have tried.

We learned early on that Dad was good for a Hallmark card and a nice little gifty item, but he was not to be entrusted with the cake. In his defense, he did attempt to make one from a box once, but was so flummoxed by the words “ten-inch tube pan,” that he gave up and drove to Piggly Wiggly.

It’s worth mentioning that in our house, store-bought baked goods were a sign of approaching moral turpitude.

After that mini debacle, we siblings started juggling responsibility for the cake amongst ourselves, usually ironing out the details the morning of December 7.

One year, though, my medium brother decided to make an Angel Food Cake. He even started the project the DAY BEFORE. Impressive. We were all reasonably decent cooks, but we had some respect for his ambition. If you’ve made an angel food cake, you know what I mean.

Out came the ancient Betty Crocker cookbook, heavily thumbed and coated with a light dusting of flour from decades of use.

My brother looked so serious, meticulously pouring over Betty’s good book. We thought everything was under control, and gave him a little space to work his magic.

It’s uncertain exactly what went wrong. The reigning theory is that he must have combined elements from a couple of different tricky recipes arranged on the same page.

All I know is that it looked beautiful when he pulled it out of the oven. Betty said to cool the cake by flipping the whole pan upside down and sliding it onto the neck of a wine bottle. That way, the cake would cool but still stay light and airy. Trust me, if you’ve whipped 12 room temperature egg whites into a heavenly cloud, if you’ve sifted the cake flour four or five times, and spun the superfine sugar, you want that cake to be FLUFFY.

Medium brother flipped the pan, only to have a half-baked cake carcass collapse onto the counter.

Sad.

After a minute or two of reverential silence, he scooped the remains right back into the pan and tossed it into the oven for another thirty minutes or so.

Then, the cake and my brother mysteriously disappeared for several hours.

Nothing more was said about the cake that day. We like to sweep things like this under the rug. I figured he had made the shameful Piggly Wiggly run, and was off somewhere, nursing his culinary wounds.

The next day was a Sunday. Everything proceeded normally: fried eggs for breakfast, followed by church, then dinner in the dining room. Sunday was the one day a week that the mail was cleared off the table. My father presented the card, the gift. It was time to sing.

Medium brother thumped down to the basement and emerged with the most astonishing sweet mess I’ve ever seen.

The cake mass had been roughly sculpted into some sort of landform and half-sunk battle ship. These were situated on a homemade wooden platform, which was covered with Reynold’s wrap and an ungodly amount of blue icing. There were American flags, tiny plastic boats and planes, and little soldiers everywhere.

It was, hands-down, the most impressive birthday cake I’ve ever seen, and to top it off, surprisingly tasty. Not like an angel food cake, perhaps–more like an epic Pearl Harbor Day cake reenactment would taste. But not too shabby.

Let’s put that in the closet with the rest of the skeletons

Taken from the website for Wausau Fire Department home page — Found on the Wausau Fire Department homepage: http://www.wausaufire.com/

My family’s summer home burned to the ground in front of our eyes. We stood across the road in our pajamas, in what should have been the dark.

It had been an airy old farmhouse, with a screened-in porch and a breezeway connecting it to the barn. Dubbed “Viking Villa,” our friends had painted a Nordic vessel on the front of it, complete with red and white striped sail. A long gravel drive curved up and away from the house, making a gentle u through the surrounding meadow. I can still see it so clearly, though only from one side, one vantage point, and in one sort of weather, because the memories I have are not my own. They are borrowed from my parents, my older siblings, and from the single surviving photograph.

I was only six months old when it burned.

The cabin of my childhood still stands strong, tucked into the woods about a mile away. Shortly after the fire, my folks scraped together $400 to buy that little hunters’ cottage, in which they have slowly replaced each board and nail, leaving only a few great beams and the original fieldstone fireplace. It was here that we gathered, summer after summer, to hike, and work, and canoe; it was here that we reminisced about Viking Villa.

We would all troop down to “the old cellar hole,” picking the wildflowers that grew in the ruins, and looking for smoky bits of melted glass. Sometimes we would return at night, too, and lie on our camping tarp in the middle of the meadow there, watching for shooting stars.

My oldest brother would spend hours reconstructing the house and the surrounding tree forts with graph paper and a neatly sharpened pencil. Everyone would pore over his drawings, offering suggestions and admiring his impeccable memory–so precise despite the years that yawned between now and then.

And in August, as the evenings grew cool, and we huddled around the stone fireplace to warm and to read, someone would inevitably launch into the story of the fire. We relived the event, detail by detail, lovingly recounted.

No one knows how or why my mother awakened that night, though credit has been wordlessly given to divine intervention. Despite the fury and speed of the approaching flames, she hustled everyone out safely, telling my sister, “Now is not the time for crying. We can cry later.”

As far as I know, nobody ever did.

A friend had gotten up to use the bathroom at that time, on that night, and happened to glance out the window in our particular direction. It was a series of coincidences for which the whole township was grateful. Seeing the flames and great plume of smoke miles away, he alerted the volunteer fire department, and though it was too late to save the house, they managed to salvage the chicken coop, the surrounding woods, and distant neighbors. Who knows how much of the landscape would have been devoured that night had he slept soundly.

No one mourns the clothing and possessions that went up in smoke, or the pile of cars that our friends had left in the barn for safekeeping. No one even says much about our cat, Smoky, who was never seen again. The only items that were ever mentioned were the hand-typed thesis my father went back to retrieve, and the stuffed dog of my sister’s that he did not.

But the house. How everyone longs for the house.

The clumps of melted glass sit on the windowsill of our porch, where one of us might finger them gingerly, like jewels.

The chicken coop was moved next door to our ‘new’ cabin. We had never had chickens–to my knowledge, we had never used the coop at all–but now it was lovingly cleaned and aired and repainted. A desk was made out of an old door and some table legs, put out there for my father and his friend to finish their doctoral theses. And when they did, the coop was renamed the Institute for Advanced Study.

Meanwhile, we painted and rebuilt and added on to the little hunting cabin, but it always paled in comparison. As if to compensate, we arranged the flowers from the old cellar hole in a bright yellow pitcher, and set it by the fireplace.

After twenty or twenty five years, the cabin finally earned its own name–“Oesterheim”–and a compliment or two about the way the sun threaded through the tall trees, landing in tiny warm pools on the wood floors. Around then, I heard my mother say for the very first time, “You know, I think I like this house.” I guess we were finally coming round.

Even so, we continued to relive the fire at Viking Villa, time and again. It gave me such an odd feeling, as if the house were a sibling I never knew. Sometimes I envied the rest of the family their experience, because it wasn’t my story to tell; my role was to listen quietly in the background.

One night, not too many years ago, we went to one of our annual summer get togethers. The evening was in full swing when, as usual, the conversation turned to the fire.

There was a comfortable familiarity with the discussion, and I found my mind drifting a little, sneaking peeks at the sunset over the lake.

Then, out of nowhere, one family member cleared their throat and spoke very, very quietly.

“I’m pretty sure I started the fire,” they said.

And that is the last time we reminisced about the house.

Déjà View

This is the story of abandoning my family for two and a half weeks one summer to do something ridiculously selfish and wonderful. It is also about gelato, meltdowns, memory, and déjà vu. Have I mentioned that already?

Here’s how it started. A photography professor of mine leaned across the aisle during a lecture. She told me that she was taking a group of students to Italy during the summer. “You should come,” she said.

I laughed a little hysterically, to the point where the exchange became awkward, and we tuned back to the lecture.

Up until then, I’d only slept away from my four-year-old two nights of her entire little life, and those were spent on the floor of a friend’s house a couple blocks away–clutching my phone all night, just in case. And I’d never been away from my two-year-old. I had to lay down with her for an hour or two every night to get her to settle and go to sleep. Though I had weaned her at 18 months, she had taken to digging in my belly button as a replacement soothing mechanism. She picked at me with her tiny talons until I bled. Scar tissue, it turns out, is surprisingly sensitive, but I wasn’t sure how to wean a child from belly-digging.

There are probably a few people reading this that will roll their eyes and mutter in that superior way about sleep training. In my defense, I did try it with the first child. After several unsuccessful attempts on my own, after reading a pile of helpful books, I finally hired a sleep consultant, and tried again. My child cried and cried and cried and cried. She did not let up for naps; she did not let up for nights. She would doze off occasionally, only to wake up ten minutes later and start again. I let her cry and cry until there was a hole in my heart the size of Saskatchewan. So after THIRTY DAYS, I gave up. I didn’t even bother to try with kid #2. Now, how was I going to leave my spouse alone with such a mess?

With all of this in mind, I mentioned the Italy trip to my husband, so he could have a good laugh as well.

“Maybe you should go,” he said.

Best not to ask twice.

Strangely, despite the enormity of the impending separation, I didn’t freak out right away. I had childcare issues to resolve, packing crises, film and equipment to procure, and a research paper due upon departure. I worried about all of that instead.

Then I got on the plane…and cried for a couple of hours straight. Not demure little teardrops, either, but swollen, hiccoughing, snotty, sobbing. My apologies to the bewildered man seated beside me. Eventually regaining composure, I spent the rest of the flight listening to language lessons and, undoubtedly, murmuring along with the patient Italian lady in my headphones. Again, apologies.

The first couple of days on the ground were a blur of disoriented jet lag, a breathless march from church after church to museum after museum. Honestly, all I really remember about Florence is the gelato. Limone. Pesca. Caffè. Cioccolato. Shop after shop, fresh fruit piled high atop the frozen tubs, a little melty on the sides from the summer heat. In between scoops, I was having an out of body experience with some really fabulous twenty-year-olds. I was completely untethered.

On day four, we headed off to a monastery in Tuscany, where the landscape did something wholly unexpected: it became familiar.

I had already seen this place, on coffee tables, in ads, in my dreams. It looked exactly like it was supposed to look, and I was unable to see it as a foreign place. Even as I was wandering this countryside for the first time, it was already a memory, part of the landscape of my psyche.

For days, I couldn’t make a picture because all of the photographs had already been made; making another would be superfluous. I focused on the long, lazy dinners–completely unknown to the parents of small children–the carafes of house wine, the late night walks filled with fireflies, frogs, and stars. I focused on the warm camaraderie of young strangers, who asked questions such as, “What is childbirth like?” “What are your irrational fears?” “Who do you secretly, shamefully lust after?” Or, “If you had to eat someone here, who would it be?” Those questions don’t often come up at pre-school potlucks. It felt so good to contemplate anything besides bowel movements, discipline, and sleep deprivation.

Since I would never forgive myself if I went home empty camera’d, I figured it was time to shoot something. And because I couldn’t make a new picture of the landscape, I tried instead to make pictures that looked like what I could see in my head. I attempted to capture on film my memories that were not really memories, that were not really mine.

After I returned to the States, I stumbled upon a passage that put this sensation into words:

“The very colors of the place had seeped into my blood: just as Hampden, in subsequent years, would always present itself immediately to my imagination in a confused whirl of white and green and red, so the country house first appeared as a glorious blur of watercolors, of ivory and lapis blue, chestnut and burnt orange and gold, separating only gradually into the boundaries of remembered objects: the house, the sky, the maple trees. Even that day, there on the porch…it had the quality of a memory…” excerpted from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

A very belated thank you to those of you who made that trip possible. I had a strange and wonderful time.

How a kid not really called Larry and his Top Secret notebook saved me from sixth grade

I loved school at first, back when it was okay to pay attention and know the answers. My mother worked in the school library, so after dismissal I would stay and help her re-shelve books, repair them, or–best of all–cover the new paperbacks with clear contact paper. If her work kept her later still, I could curl up on the carpet next to the hum of the fish tank, and happily devour any book that caught my eye.

Midway through third grade I got my vision checked. It was bad news—not too surprising for a bookworm.

My first pair of glasses had gold metal frames that were squashed into two little hexagons, and filled with already embarrassingly thick lenses. When I put them on, suddenly everyone else saw me clearly. They began to notice my dated hand-me-downs, my awkwardness, my skinny legs. I started to hear whispers about birthday parties to which I was not invited, and once-good friends meandered away at recess. Those that didn’t, stole my hat and buried it, or worse, called me “Miss Mature.” My social circle slowly dwindled to one friend who insisted we play Dog, galloping up and down the stairs of her house on all fours. I appreciated her loyalty, but found her game babyish and tiresome.

Meanwhile, I tried to do well academically while flying under the social radar. I just wanted to survive and move on to junior high.

Then, in sixth grade, Mrs. Crouch sat me next to a kid I’ll call Larry.

Larry was on the scrawny side, and pale as a potato chip like me, but there the resemblance ended. As class clown, he had lots of charisma and loads of friends, but no desire to do anything but ‘get by’ academically. Larry had little time for things like geometry and state reports because he was busy with his super top-secret notebook. He carried it everywhere: a tiny red spiral-bound steno, which he filled with juicy details about the girls he liked, and then tucked in his back pocket for safekeeping. At recess, the popular girls would speculate about which of them had made his list, and what he might say about each one.

Clearly, he and I could not have been more different. The bizarre thing was, Larry and I got on spectacularly well.

For one thing, he was damn funny. I recall the giddy joy of watching the faces he made behind Mrs. Crouch’s back, and hearing him parrot her most annoying remonstrations. I suspect we would not have gotten on so well if we had had a more palatable teacher.

“Who belongs to this ink pen??!!” she barked, waving it in our faces.

“Do not wipe your nose waste under the desk!”

Mrs. Crouch had a very prominent, pointy nose, which went well with her daily barrage of tedious teacher speak. She constantly lamented our lack of respect, and lectured endlessly about how much time we wasted messing about in line. We would all have to miss recess if one person spoke, or burped, or snuck a drink on the way to the music room.

Listening to her drone on and on seemed like the real time-waster to us.

Larry and I began to tune her out and do our own thing; we became allies.

Perhaps because I had no one to tell, Larry showed me his super top-secret notebook of girls, something he hadn’t even shown his closest friends. I found out that he liked Teresa because of her strong legs and perky boobs. He liked Becky for her great dimply smile and her athletic ability. Bethany had a tight little butt and a great sense of humor. Page after page of hormone-dosed, haiku-like lists of infatuation. In all, there were about fifteen girls for whom he pined, but not one would he ask out, not in a million years. I’m still not sure why.

When we would get caught discussing his notes, Mrs. Crouch would say, “What are you doing? Making a date for tomorrow??” And then she would laugh at our discomfort and embarrassment.

Resentment grew.

Larry and I started a new notebook: “The 50 Things We Hate Most about Mrs. Crouch.”

Her sensible shoes.
The way she calls pens “ink pens.” Is there some other kind?
??

I wish I could remember the rest. All I remember is how great it felt to retaliate with a pencil and paper. We never made it to fifty, of course. She wasn’t that bad.

The last month of school, Larry’s good friend Kenneth was seated in front of us. Sometimes he chatted and goofed around with Larry, but the bulk of his free time was reserved for making my life miserable.

He would poke me with his pencil.

“Miss Mature,” he said repeatedly, trying to get a rise out of me. I would pretend to be engrossed in my work, and then roll my eyes at Larry when he wasn’t looking. He would shrug. I knew where his alliances lay, and I understood.

Eventually Kenneth would tire of that game, though. Turning back around, he would tip his chair slowly, slowly, until his greasy head rested on my desk. I could no longer pretend to do my work.

“Ah! Miss Mature! Your desk is sooooo comfy,” he cooed.

Strangely, Mrs. Crouch never seemed to witness his egregiously annoying behavior; for once I would have appreciated one of her mind-numbing lectures. At least he would have had to sit up.

One day, as Kenneth started to tip back, Larry stared at the back of his head thoughtfully. Suddenly, he grabbed my desk and slid it back just enough so that Kenneth crashed backward onto the floor.

Since he didn’t crack his head open, I can safely call that the best day of fourth, fifth and sixth grade combined. What’s more, Kenneth never rolled his head on my desk again, not even when we had to sit next to each other in junior high.

Eventually Larry gave me his notebooks for safekeeping, and I’ll probably find them when I dig through the closets at my parents’ house. It would be hilarious to re-read them, but I don’t really need them anymore; just reminiscing about them does the job. Thanks Larry, wherever you are.

The Daybed

I don’t say this to evoke pity. Please don’t read it in a melodramatic tone in your head, or season it with melancholy. Think matter-of-fact. It is what it is.

I was a bit of an accident.

I asked my mother about it, once, and she paused for an uncomfortable moment before responding. “Honey, by the time you showed up, we were so happy to see you.”

Even as a child, I knew what that meant. That explained the six years between my sister and me. It explained why nine years separated me from one brother, and twelve from the other. It explained why I often felt like a child in a roomful of adults, and why, for many years, the taller people in the house took some precedence. It wasn’t all bad, though. In general, they also took the heat and the blame.

When we were all at home in our little red house, we piled atop each other, and tensions tended to rise. My parents hastily carved out the attic to make two bedrooms, one for my brothers, and one for my sister and me. When my brothers began to chafe at those close quarters, the eldest retreated into the basement with a black light bulb and day-glo Easy Rider posters. Once my sister hit her teens, though, when it became increasingly awkward for us to share a room, there seemed nowhere else to expand.

After much debate, it was finally decided that I should move into what was essentially a throughway, a roomy passage between the kitchen and the bathroom. As one might imagine, I had extremely limited space for luxuries such as clothing or books. There was a shelf put in, and a small dresser crammed under the stairs. There was a window which peered at the garage, and I hung a few things on the wall, but because everyone trooped through this space during waking hours, I couldn’t have my bed down there. Instead, I was allowed use of “the daybed.” Never mine; just the. This was a couch-like thing which served as a cot-sized bed at night. I didn’t really mind. Mostly. It beat witnessing my sister’s eighth grade make-out sessions.

The daybed was very simply designed. Very nordic. Imagine a cheap door, taken off its hinges and laid flat on skinny, pointed legs. An egg-colored foam pad, about four inches thick, lay on top, covered with an upholstery apparently conceived in the seventies. It was a magenta paisley, crossed with a parade of stripes and shapes which have never been seen together since. It was poorly made, too, so the rough metal zipper was entirely visible along the side, and I often grazed the backs of my legs against its voracious teeth. More inviting were the two long, wedge-shaped pillows which served as the back of the couch during the day. These were covered with corduroy of a very specific blue hue, one I still associate with all things quiet and comfortable. I loved to run my fingers along the nap endlessly, with it or against being equally zen-like.

From the daybed, I would doze to the sound of the dishwasher, and wake to the sound and smell of the eternal percolator, a seemingly indestructible wedding gift from the fifties.

It was there that I lay through the German measles and the mumps; there that I listened to my mother read Watership Down.

One evening, my mother found the nuts I had stolen from the roasting pan full of Chex party mix in the basement. They were in an old bread bag, tied in a knot and tucked under the daybed. They might have escaped notice, too, had my mother not helped me put the sheets on that night. “What are you, some sort of squirrel?” she asked, but not too sharply. I was glad when she let it go, perhaps understanding how hard it was to get the good bits when your siblings are so much older and faster.

I remember lying on that daybed the night after the girl scout picnic in second grade, the one where I ate a hot dog stuffed with Velveeta and wrapped in bacon before grilling. I threw up six or seven times–a little daybed volcano–and have never eaten a hotdog since.

I remember lying there sniffling, lamenting my lack of space and privacy, when my medium brother heard me and tiptoed in. We were not a terribly affectionate family, nor emotionally adept, but he explained with such kindness and enthusiasm how he would make it feel big enough. I still feel deep gratitude for that night. He began to schlepp all kinds of things from his room, my sister’s, the kitchen, wherever. He filled that tiny place from floor to ceiling so I could be pleasantly surprised when he it emptied out again, and there would be room to roll over and even to stand with my hands outstretched.

But by far, my favorite memory of the daybed was a secret I neglected to tell anyone, lest I would have to share that, too. Ours was a frugal household, where finances dictated a thermostat set at a bone-chilling 58 degrees through even the worst of the South Dakota winter nights. But when temperatures outside settled well below zero, maintaining 58 degrees still necessitated occasional blasts of delicious heat. A major duct ran through the wall, all along the length of the back of the daybed. Who would know, with the blue corduroy pillows in place all day, what heavenly heat emanated from the wall behind me? I pressed my socked feet against it, snuggling like a cat to a sunny patch, and dreaming dreams.

These days, we set the thermostat at a balmy 62 at night, and I have a heating pad, which spares my spouse from my icy toes. But I think the comfort it offers is not simply a physical one. It is also a remembrance of those long, cold nights, pressed against the wall in my make-shift little roomlet. It is a reminder that there is always enough room for me, and more than enough of what I really need.

Another love letter to New York

There are a few things I truly dislike about New York, and I encountered most of them between 5:30 and 8:00 a.m. the day I arrived. Stubbornly anti-cab, I spent the bulk of that 150 minutes on frigid platforms, awaiting imaginary trains, and–much later–pressed into a rush-hour train car with my great piles of luggage, sandwiched firmly between Freakishly Annoying Man and Mr. Clearly Shat Himself. It is difficult for me to remember now, days later, but I had been so tired and hungry and cold that it seemed better to stay on that godforsaken train than battle the crowds and wait for the next one.

But then I suddenly emerged in sunny Brooklyn, around the corner from my old apartment. I am wearing my scarf and ready for an adventure.

I love this place more than is really possible.

Being here is just as much about being in the past as in the present, and if I close my eyes, I am right back there in Central Park on the last day of my first year of teaching. The Neville Brothers are there, too, and a lovely police officer asking us to please move a bit farther away so he won’t have to look into our coolers and confiscate our revelry.

My dear friend Alan is there, around the corner, throwing the key out the window and waiting for me to walk up. He has a new mix tape, a new book, and a new way to look at the world today.

I am riding the train to work in the morning, darting off to throw up in the garbage cans and race back to reclaim my seat–a subway miracle. I am wandering around the west village again, wondering why they keep reorganizing it so I can never find Arthur’s Tavern. I am running late, running for trains, running out of steam, running amok.

I am meeting acquaintances for drinks, unfamiliar with bars with no signage at all–only really there if you know where to look. I am ordering the wrong thing, I am wearing the wrong thing, I am likely saying the wrong thing, but it is ok because there is room for everyone.

Things have changed, of course. It’s no longer MY city. I can no longer eat bagels, and the Kentile Floor sign refuses to light up. But the city is still full, magical, and heart-stopping. There are flirty barista boys and Indian restaurants so bedazzled it is impossible to stand up. There are secret notes written on tickets; there is King Kong; there is the most exquisite pair of shoes I have ever laid eyes on. There is Alan Rickman just yards away, and row after row of Brownstones, huddled together against the elements. And there is a cafe playing an album I haven’t heard in so many years, resurfacing things long unfelt and unthought, seemingly forgotten. It is all still here.

I remember why I moved. I do. New York can be a desolate and unfriendly place, even soulless. A person has to expend so much energy looking out for herself that little remains to offer others.

Once safely nestled back on the West Coast, however, only the stardust lingers.

Oh, to go back. I can’t wait.

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