all the horrible dental experiences and a paean to Dr Judy Huey

My teeth have not been professionally cleaned for a couple of years, and part of a porcelain cap cracked last year and came off, leaving a slightly jagged metal undercovering behind. This distressed me until I realized that the tooth in question was visible only to me personally, when I turned my head at an angle and peered towards the back of my mouth. The tooth is functional and painfree, and since it didn't affect my appearance, I did nothing about it. Because, as you see, I am without a dentist. My beloved dentist, the goddess of all teeth, Dr. Judy Huey, moved to Scottsdale years ago, leaving me and my teeth in the lurch.

When I was a child, I had a perfectly satisfactory dentist who had a strong resemblance to Superman and who had a pleasant way of chatting while he did his work. As a troubled adolescent, I had braces, and I became so accustomed to having my teeth worked over that I more than once dozed off at the orthodontist's in the chair. I had no dental phobias, despite having been stuck by poor genetic luck with a set of brittle yellowish teeth. I was innocent and ignorant.

Then my bad dental experiences began. For two years, my family lived on naval bases in the Philippines, with my father working as a civilian there. We were in a sort of strange position: we lived in government-supplied housing, officer's housing at that for one of the two years; we could shop at the commissary; but we were forbidden to go near the medical providers. For two years whenever I had a health problem, my parents just dithered and ignored the issue aside from the usual, painful and embarrassing family laying-on-of-hands, faith healing rituals. Thankfully I never got appendicitis, and meningitis was in the future but hadn't yet struck, so I got by for two years without seeing a doctor despite what I thought were ear infections and strep throat and a bout with pinkeye. But I did have dental problems. I had gone to the Philippines with braces on and no plan for getting them taken off, leaving behind my orthodontist in New Hampshire. More pressingly, a boy gave me a piece of gum on the school bus (we had an hour long drive over very bad roads that first year to get to the Department of Defense high school), and as I was chewing it, a large piece of one of my teeth broke off. This was painful and horrible and traumatic, and I never chewed gum again. I was left with a jagged, wretched, painfilled shard of a tooth.

My parents got this deemed an emergency, which allowed me to be treated by a base dentist, who was angry and resentful. During the entire appointment to fix my tooth, this man cursed me out, ranting at me, a shy fifteen year-old girl who was homesick and whose tooth hurt, that he had not trained to fix the teeth of people like me. He was there to fix soldiers' teeth, not stupid girls' teeth, and he should never have been asked to work on my mouth, and he couldn't understand why any dentist ever would touch my abhorrent, teenaged girl mouth. I had never been treated meanly or rudely by a dentist before, and I shrunk up and said nothing in return. Little did I know that this was the first of many horrible, horrible, horrible dental experiences ahead.

More happily in the Philippines my mother found a wonderful orthodontist, trained in the U.S., who had a delightful personality and gentle hands. Some of the happiest days I ever had with my mother, a woman with whom normally I have a lot of tension, especially in those days, were on orthodontist days. We would bring one of her friends, I would miss a day of school, and we would make the long drive to Angeles City. After my orthodontist appointment, we would eat lunch at a fabulous Mexican restaurant offering the Filipino take on Mexican food. We used to pay a street child to watch our car (there was always competition for that position), and I remember giving one of them a bag of Mexican food to his sheer and utter delight. (In the Philippines I learned how wealthy indeed the American middle class is if you look from a global perspective).

When we returned to the States, I went back to my Superman lookalike childhood dentist. When I went to Boston for college, I always did my dental work during the holiday breaks and summers. When I graduated from college and lived in Boston for real, I thought I should get a Boston dentist. I asked my boss, the head of WBUR-FM, what dentist she used (a very particular woman, my boss was, and I thought her dentist must be the best of the best). That led me to Traumatic Dentist Visit #2, as the doddering dentist administered an unbearably painful cleaning, botched the X-rays and couldn't tell from them what needed to be done for work, but insisted I needed many follow-up visits. I managed to get the failed x-rays and, facing reality, went back up to visit my family and my childhood dentist, who in his Portsmouth, N.H. office mocked the wretched X-rays I'd brought along. "That must be some dentist you saw down there in Boston! Can't even take an x-ray! Well, I'm just glad you can bring yourself to come to us here in tiny little Portsmouth, when you could be at a big city dentist."

Then I was accepted at Stanford and moved out west, too far to go to the dentist in Portsmouth. My parents moved at the same time to Tucson, so I wouldn't be able to mix dental business with visiting them. I was dentistless.

At Stanford I got student dental insurance, a kind of dental insurance that turned out to be the worst of the worst of dental insurance. It was a dental insurance that paid a dentist a flat monthly fee for each enrolled patient, as well as negotiated, low amounts for each treatment. The first two dentists assigned to me and my first husband (whom I married at the end of my first year of law school, under the false impression that if our relationship could survive a cross-country move and the first year of law school, it would survive anything and therefore I should just as well turn it into marriage) refused to see us. Whenever we called for appointments, they were too busy. Evidently their plan was to enroll as many patients as possible, pocket the monthly fees, and provide no services. This was Traumatic Dentist Experiences #3 and #4, the dentists who would never see us, no matter how often we called.

We did manage to get reassigned to another dentist (Traumatic Dentist #5) one who was willing to treat our teeth, all too willing to treat our teeth. He just wasn't willing to give us novocaine. It was kind of a shock to go in for fillings and have the painkilling step just omitted without discussion. I was good friends with a doctor at that time who prescribed me some painkillers I would take on the 5 Fulton on the way to this dentist, which helped until the doctor expansively told me that what I was getting from him would not help sharp pains, only diffused ones, and that at best I was getting a placebo effect, which of course vanished after that heartless discurse. This dentist was ambitious and greedy, and he confided in me, whom he saw as a kindred soul given that I was in law school, that he really wanted a Mercedes. On that same visit we discussed the Mercedes, the dentist told me I needed three teeth capped and root canaled. I had never had a root canal and was frankly terrified of having it done by a man who didn't normally administer novocaine. I stalled. On my next visit, the dentist pressured me to set up a series of visits for my four root canals. "I thought you said three?" I said. He clearly prevaricated and mumbled, "One is recommended." This was Traumatic Dentist #5, the most horrifying and traumatic of them all to date.

I left that day and never returned. I didn't get any dental treatment for the next two years, spending all that time fretting from time to time over how three of my teeth must be rotting out of my head due to my not having had them given root canals and caps.

Once I was entrenched as a young associate at a large law firm, I took my improved dental insurance and went nervously out to get my neglected teeth treated. I was assigned to a dentist in a very tall downtown building, a fancy building near my fancy office. This dentist said that I didn't need any root canals at all, which made me all the angrier at my last, sleazy dentist (who went into local politics and whose name I often see plastered across the city at election time, which always brings me flashbacks of those novocaine-less fillings and those threatened root canals). However, this dentist was no great gem, either. He did little work himself, leaving it to his young, fresh-out-of-dental school associates. I had one of my neglected teeth capped, and the dentist's office had no time for me to return to get the permanent cap put on. I went for a long time with the frail temporary cap, which led the head dentist to give the associate dentist assigned to me a dressing-down within my hearing. I sank down further and further in the examining chair as the head dentist railed on and on about how it was a miracle my tooth had survived.

My first husband had a worse experience. This dentist's office was really, really into x-raying, and their greatest pride and joy was a space age x-ray machine which rotated around your skull as you sat still in the chair. While he was being x-rayed, this machine got stuck trying to go around his head (he had a very large head indeed, being 6'4" and with a large head even for that height). While the machine was still attempting to X-ray him, techs had to wrestle with it and shove it and his head about, trying to extricate him from it. After they got it off him, they adjusted it and tried to get him to sit for another panoramic x-ray. He refused, feeling that he'd had more than enough X-ray exposure that day to last him for years, which pissed off the dentists, who truly felt you could never get enough X-rays done. Thus ended our experiences with Traumatic Dentist #6.

We were wondering if there were any acceptable dentists at all in the city of San Francisco, and we took a hiatus from dental work. Then my ex had a friend at his new job refer him to a dentist, a wonderful dentist. "I think I'm the only white patient there," the friend said. "It's the greatest dental office. You won't believe it."

By that point, I was pretty cynical, and my teeth were pretty neglected once again (after the delayed cap and the X-ray horror of my husband, we once again went for a couple of years without dental treatment). In the waiting room, I filled out the history form, and I wrote down all the terrible experiences I'd had. Then a petite woman of Asian descent walked out into the waiting room, and turning her large, kind eyes on me, introduced herself gently as Dr. Judy Huey, expressed her sympathies on my bad experiences, and asked me kindly if I needed some gas to help me get back to the treatment room. My teeth and I were in love, and we embarked upon a happy era of dental health. Dr. Huey had tiny, tiny hands with deft little fingers one can barely detect in one's mouth, and her warm personality made the patient feel confident and relaxed.

I took to gushing about my dentist to everyone I knew. "I never realized how the size of a dentist's hands make such a big difference. I never want to go to a dentist again who isn't an Asian woman, with such tiny little hands. Dr. Huey can put her whole hand in my mouth and I wouldn't notice it." People looked at me oddly when I went on like that, and I was aware that I sounded like a pervert, but I didn't care. Dr. Huey was the goddess of all teeth and deserved to be worshipped and to have her patient acolytes spread the word of her wonders.

During this happy dental era, I not only got my teeth cleaned on a regular basis and filled as needed, but I also underwent optional, cosmetic dentistry. I tried cosmetic whitening (still not getting my teeth up to Hollywood levels, but an improvement). I replaced an old cap to get a better appearance and had a veneer put on the tooth neighboring the cap to make them match. The day did come that I did need a root canal, and it turned out painless (I was so glad again that I'd never submitted to the quack dentist's plans to do four root canals. Dr. Huey sent me to an endodontologist who was also of Asian descent with tiny, gentle hands and who also had generous painkillers and a movie menu for me to pick from).

Along the way I divorced the old husband, and my new husband soon became a regular at Dr. Huey's. Dr. Huey changed offices, and we moved along with her. When Iris was born, Dr. Huey gave her a gentle introduction to dentistry. First Iris was brought along as a toddler to watch Mommy get check-ups, cleanings, and fillings. Then Iris was, with Mommy close at hand, given her own cleaning and had a couple of small cavities filled. This was done so gently and smoothly, and I felt such happiness that my child was being introduced to dental work so kindly. Maybe she could live a life without dental trauma. I wrote thank you notes to Dr. Huey and to her very kind dental assistant for making Iris's introduction to dentistry so happy.

Then dental tragedy struck. Dr. Huey's husband's health required a move to the desert. Soon Dr. Huey was in Scottsdale and I was without a dentist. A very young dentist purchased Dr. Huey's practice, and I didn't have confidence in her. My husband found a dentist, practically enough one near our house, but he told me not to go there. "It's good enough for me, but you would hate him. I just know." He wasn't taken with this dentist at all, but felt he would settle for him due to convenience.

I tried my friend Joyce's beloved dentist, but that was another trauma. The dentist herself was a lovely, gentle person who inspired confidence, but there is no way I am enduring her office staff or dental technicians. My visit was upsetting before I even got there: a nasal, bitchy office worker called me several times on the phone with questions about the dental insurance. In my experience, normally you just present a dental office with your insurance card, and they take care of the rest. Not this office. The woman called me, her tone and voice extremely unpleasant, before I had even set foot in the office, demanding such things as where to submit the claims (which was not printed on the card I had). At that time, my husband's employer, Doggyo, was so small that it had no HR person, which deeply offended the dental office woman, who was quite sniffy about it. I cravenly gave the woman my husband's cellphone number to get her off my back, under the pretense that he, the employee through whom all benefits flowed, was in a better spot to answer her questions. At the end of the day I actually went to the dentist for a routine cleaning and exam, this nasal bitch called my husband seven times on the phone, giving him attitude each time.

While I waited for forty-five minutes after my appointment time, occasionally overhearing the mean, nasal woman calling my husband on the phone, I was stuck enduring a really loud trailer for an offensive Disney movie being shown over and over again at top volume on a large screen TV. I came close to leaving then, and in retrospect, I wish I had. Because when I was finally ushered back, I underwent Traumatic Dental Experience Number Seven. The supercilious tech rammed a painful x-ray plate into my mouth which was clearly too large for my poor mouth, and which triggered my gag reflex. The tech laughed merrily at me as I was dry heaving, and then she took the same plate up again and sadistically shoved it into my mouth again. Once again I was retching, and she was laughing at me. Oh, what a merry sight, a middle-aged woman dry heaving in a dental chair. There was not an apology to be heard, the impression being given that I had made the day of the sadistic staff and that they were well-pleased by the turn of the events. The irony of this? This was a dental practice specializing in traumatized, phobic dental patients!!

I was also somewhat freaked out by the weird office layout. There were no partitions or privacy walls separating patients; we were all in chairs radiating off from a curving hallway. Thus while I was waiting, I had to hear a loud, nervous man have his cleaning and treatment. I don't want to hear other people's dental work, and I also think it was no treat for the other patients to listen to my retching noises.

To further add to that discomfort, the chairs were placed such that you couldn't see the staff, who lurked behind us in the center of the radius of this strange, round dental office. This was not enjoyable for me as some of the staff were happily discussing my hilarious dry heaving, which was evidently the highlight of their day, maybe their whole week.

When I finally met the kindly, chubby, soft spoken dentist with gentle hands and eyes, there had been too much damage already done. There is no way I will ever set foot in that office again. (My friend was a bit upset with me for not liking her dentist, to whom she was greatly loyal, and criticized me for the way in which I'd handled things. A year later, though, she did share with me a spectacularly rude thing said to her by the nasal office bitch).

Meanwhile my poor children underwent their own Traumatic Dental Experience. I signed up my poor, dental orphans with what was considered by virtually every parent I knew to be the finest pediatric dental office in the city. I had the impression that everyone who was anyone took their children to that dentist. Indeed I'd had other parents sniff at my habit of taking Iris along to my own dentist, rather than to this particular pediatric dentist. However, events showed that I had been right. This dentist practice became Traumatic Dental Experience Number Eight for me and Traumatic Dental Experience Number One for Iris and Lola.

Just because a dental office sports a small dog in a tutu and has toys strewn about does not mean that it treats children well. The dental technicians were rough, and one scolded poor three year-old Lola for nervously flipping her skirt up and down. "Sit like a lady!" The original dentist who had made this place so fashionable amongst parents wasn't really about any more (I noticed she had a nameplate up at another building), and the dentists who saw my girls were not particularly warm or nice or gentle. They weren't particularly nice to me, either. Iris was diagnosed as having a cavity with an abscess, and the dentist glared at me. "I hope you knew about this!"

I was stymied. Wouldn't I have been a worse parent if I'd known about the abscess but just not bothered to do anything about it? Iris was puzzled, also. After we left, she whispered to me, "Is an abscess supposed to hurt? It never hurt." We both felt stupid and ashamed.

At a later visit, one of the dentists was lecturing me about how I should be applying topical fluoride to the children's teeth and hounded me about why, why, why wasn't I doing that. I confided that I felt that they got a lot of fluoride already in their tap water and toothpaste and that I'd been reading about fluoridosis online. The dentist rolled her eyes in disgust and slammed her body against the cabinet at what she so clearly saw as my internet-assisted idiocy. Lola had been crying throughout her treatment without much comfort that day, and it seemed appropriate to draw curtain over this particular act in our dental odyssey.

Over a year went by, close to two years, with a perennial item in my To Do List being "Find New Dentists." Eventually, after some canvassing of acquaintances, I had gathered several recommendations for Dr. Katz, a pediatric dentist located conveniently not far from the girls' school. I steeled my nerves for the lecture I was undoubtedly going to get for not having taken the children to the dentist in so long. Instead, Dr Katz was jovial and joking, hugging me and handing out toys to the children. Lola, thoroughly traumatized by her horrible prior dentist, burst into tears the moment her turn came to be examined. Instead of forcing her, as the prior dentist would have done (that dentist was quite gifted at ignoring a small child's sobs), this new, more satisfactory dentist didn't make Lola get into the chair at all. Her cleaning and exam were done with her sitting on a stool, holding my hand, and no X-rays were done because they didn't want to force them on a crying child.

Iris's same old tooth which had had an abscess before, leading the ex-dentist to tell me off, had a new abscess. The highly satisfactory new dentist was critical of the old dentist's decision to leave that baby tooth in place. It would never have formed a new abscess if it had been pulled, and the material used for a cap on that tooth was not in favor any more among dentists who kept up with technology. Clearly that tooth had been mishandled.

I liked hearing criticism of the technique of the old dentist. It made me feel better about having left for personal reasons. As Iris said to the new dentist when he asked why she was changing dentists, "We have to get a new dentist because the old dentist rolled her eyes at Mommy."

On Lola's return visit to get a cavity fixed, the dentist introduced her to the joys of laughing gas. Lola soon went from terrified crying and clutching at my hand to relaxing in the chair. After we left, she confided in me, "Do you know why this dentist is better than the old one? He doesn't make me keep my mouth open too long!" On her second visit, Lola fell in love with the "giggle gas" and had not a single tear. She confided in everyone she knew that going to her dentist makes her giggle and giggle because she gets giggle gas.

Lola had clearly been on the path to lasting dental phobia, but has been saved due to an overdue change in dentists. Iris herself was spared that only because she could remember her kind first dentist (after every visit to the old pediatric dentist, Iris would say, "I miss Dr. Huey" and hound me to find a new grown-up dentist for myself and her alike. Lola could go to the unliked pediatric dentist, but Iris and I, Iris thought, needed a grown-up's dentist). The new pediatric dentist told me that he'd been badly treated by horrific dentists himself and that had inspired him to create his practice, a practice where children would feel no pain or discomfort and would be treated like they were important. It pained him to see that Lola had developed a dental phobia, and he was genuinely happy to see her move past it, aided by the delightful "giggle gas."

Now it is only I who is dentistless, with my poor, uncared for teeth languishing into decay. Iris and the Sober Husband have both taken to nagging me to try another dentist, but I just don't want to. In my lifetime there have only been two satisfactory dental offices for me and so many others which were really and truly awful. My childhood dentist has retired, and Dr. Huey, my only good dentist of my adulthood, is so far away. Occasionally the idea is bruited about that I should just go to Scottsdale twice a year to see my one true dentist. I can't justify that lavish lifestyle, but I can't bring myself to try another San Francisco dentist, either. I'm basically waiting it out until something truly terrible happens in my mouth, which will force me to action.

RIP Parker and Dortmunder

Just two weeks ago, I wrote

the first sentence of "Firebreak" is, in my personal opinion, the best first sentence of a novel I've ever read: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." Such a mix of the banal and the horrific, such an economic use of words.... and it sucks you in and has you prepared for the rest of the ride, right there in the first twelve words. I think that's a better first sentence than the famous first sentence of "Anna Karenina": "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Donald Westlake is the master, and I hope he lives forever.

Today I learned that on New Year's Eve, Donald Westlake died suddenly from a heart attack while getting dressed for dinner in Mexico, on vacation.

I'm absolutely crushed. Mr. Westlake was ninety years old, so it shouldn't have come out of the blue, but he was at the top of his game, publishing a couple of excellent novels a year. There will be one last book, due out from the publishers in April, and then no more. RIP Parker. RIP Dortmunder.

I first became a fan of Donald Westlake before I knew his name. When I saw "The Grifters", I marveled at it, such a dark and strange and witty film. Much later, after I became a fan of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books, I realized Mr. Westlake wrote the script for "The Grifters", among various other films. Perhaps the most famous film made from one of his works is "Point Blank", starring Lee Marvin as the inimitable Parker.

For those of you who have not acquainted yourself with the work of the master, Parker is the ultimate noir character. Under the pen name of "Richard Stark", Donald Westlake wrote this series for thirty years (given his huge productivity, Mr. Westlake used several nommes de plume, such as "Tucker Coe" and "Richard Stark." Like Stephen King, Donald Westlake had the problem of just producing too much good work for one author to credibly publish). Parker is a killing machine, a severely disciplined and controlled sociopath whose adventures are entertaining beyond belief. I will miss him more than anything.

In a lighter vein, Mr. Westlake wrote a popular series about the adventures of Dortmunder, a stooped, overweight criminal mastermind with the worst luck, and his odd assortment of friends and enemies. These were funny and engaging books, and I loved them dearly. Some of these books were made into movies, at least one with spectacular miscasting. Mr. Westlake wrote once, "Imagine my surprise to find out that Dortmunder was Robert Redford."

Once when I was severely depressed, contemplating suicide and trying to get through just one day at a time, I discovered a new Dortmunder book had come out. It quite literally gave me a new reason to live and made me question my idiocy for having considered suicide to begin with.

On another day during that period, a terrible, sad and dark time, I was driving from Iris's elementary school to pick up Lola when I was delayed by a broken down Brinks truck in the road. One of the armored guards was out waving traffic around, looking deeply depressed himself. I burst into a smile. "It's Dortmunder. It's Dortmunder in the flesh." It would have been just like Dortmunder to successfully hijack a Brinks truck only to have it break down on one of the most busy city streets.

RIP, Donald Westlake. You gave me a reason to live, you gave me so much entertainment, happiness, and food for thought. I will miss you more than I can say. Only your death could have felled the indefatigable, indestructible Parker, only that could have outwitted the brilliant Dortmunder.

"Mommy loves Lucy more!"

My aunt has a tradition of sending ornaments to her many, many nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews. Last year she sent Iris Uber Alles a porcelain oranment of a little girl holding a sign reading, "First Born Mommy's Favorite!" and Lola a similar one, holding a "Youngest Child Mommy's Favorite!" sign.

When we were putting up our tree, Iris gloated and gloated over her ornament, and it took a day for Lola to find hers, a stress-filled day for poor Lola. Then all was basically well until today, three days after Christmas, when the Sober Husband discovered that one of the ornaments was broken. After some more searching, he discovered that both those oranments had been knocked down from the tree, and both little porcelain girls' heads had been broken off. He could only find one porcelain head, though... and it fits Lola's "Youngest Child Mommy's Favorite!" ornament.

Now Iris is sulking about the house, screaming periodically, "Why does Mommy hate me?" and "Why does Mommy love Lucy more?" I told her to leave her mother out of this and that it was undoubtedly Princess Henry, the tabby, who had knocked the ornaments down. Now she's still stomping around, moaning, "Why does Henry hate me?" and "Why is Henry bad?" I pointed out that seeing as how Henry is illiterate, I doubt there was anything personal in it, but Iris thinks Henry must have known how much she loved that ornament and destroyed it out of spite.

the twittering pervert

The Sober Husband has been meaning to tweet for ages. He started a Twitter account and sent out one and only one tweet: "I have started to Twitter." Based upon that inauspicious debut, he already has scores of followers, despite months of silence. He feels he should Twitter because "everyone does it", and he shared with us some of the tweets of his colleagues.

One of the programmers who reports to the Sober Husband tweets in the voice of his puppy (or perhaps his girlfriend does, the co-owner of the very adorable young dog). The children were spurred into action by this, feeling that their personal cats deserved Twitters of their own (the family cat and Mommy's cats were not deemed Twitter-worthy). Six year-old Lola started a Twitter feed for Al, "Allofalbert", which has so far mostly chronicled his giardia infection and his feelings about taking his medication. Nine year-old Iris Uber Alles started "Frowsty" to share the glories of Frowst, our especially charismatic cat.

We have four laptops which can be found strewn about the home, and Iris Uber Alles is prone to using the nearest one and being casual about what identity is logged in at any given time. Therefore it was all too predictable that she'd use the Sober Husband's regular laptop to compose a tweet for fluffy Frowst, and that my husband would awaken on Christmas morning to discover that after months of silence, he'd sent out his second tweet:

"I'm lying on my owner's bed, with my legs in the air, waiting for attention."

I laughed and laughed. "They're all going to think you're into SM." I tried to think of a more embarrassing cat tweet the children could have sent out under his name on this account-- which was intended for professional networking-- with no success. Even the messages about giardia would have been less embarrassing.

why, indeed

Nine year-old Iris Uber Alles is reading that timeless classic, "From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler." She has no problem understanding why two children chose to run away from home to live in a museum; her problem is the framework, where the entire work is contained in a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankwiler to her lawyer, and indeed she is puzzled by Mrs. Frankwiler's motivations vis-a-vis her lawyer. "Why would anyone want to see their lawyer?" she asked with genuine puzzlement.

Her litigator mother snapped back seriously, "Because lawyers are so smart and funny! They're great to be around!"

"I just don't get why someone would want to spend time with their lawyer."

"Lawyers are cute and adorable, like kittens! Who wouldn't want to spend time with them?"

At this point Iris dropped the discussion, unconvinced, but sure there was no point in further exploring her befuddlement.

the horrible timings of things

Two weeks ago my cat Princess Henry became deathly ill. She was repeatedly trying to vomit without success and looking distraught. On the day one, I thought this was a pesky hairball and decided to pick up a tube of that tuna-flavored hairball medicine. The next day I realized, "This is no hairball" and got her down to the vet's. At the vet, Henry was sedated and x-rayed on the theory she ate something inappropriate, possibly a small, plastic object belonging to a child. The vet called me on my celphone to tell me that Henry's stomach was fine, but that her intestines were, if I may paraphrase, all fucked-up. The vet wanted my permission to do an ultrasound on Henry's intestines to determine whether surgery was necessary. The ultrasound showed nothing blocking those angry, angry intestines. Eight hundred dollars later, I took Henry home with a prescription for an anti-emetic and for a soothing medication to calm and coat her intestines. Henry recovered without further incident.

I told my husband repeatedly, "Don't get me anything for Christmas." I felt terrible about spending so much at the vet's.

The next week Al, the skeletal orange cat who is allergic to his own teeth, came down with an epic upper respiratory infection and epic diarrhea, which caused him to have many, many disgusting accidents. I had finally cleared Al up of his chronic flea problem (Advantage does NOT work for Al), only to have him burst out into multiple health crises. The Sober Husband helped me give Al a bath, and cradling him in a towel, I took him down to the vet, having first procured a particularly noxious sample of his diarrhea. "How's Henry? Nice to see you again," everyone said. "Can I give this to you now, rather than waiting for the vet?" I asked, handing over gingerly a sealed ziplock bag which was reeking horrendously. The vet tech who accepted it handed it off with alacrity to another vet tech who was presumably lower on the food chain.

Poor Al had lost over a pound and a half, dropping from seven pounds to just five and a half. (We'd taken to calling the poor thing "the Cat of the Damned"). Even though I'd been holding him wrapped in a towel to warm him up, his body temperature was so low that the tech took it twice disbelievingly. "I had to bathe him," I said. "It was an emergency situation." Al's bloodwork showed that he was anemic and had elevated white blood cell counts. About four hundred dollars later, Al was sent home with antibiotics for his respiratory infection and a stern admonishment that he was never going to be healthy until we got his teeth pulled. I set the appointment for the tooth-pulling for the 29th.

The next day, the vet called. The disgusting, reeking sample revealed the presence of giardia (where is he getting giardia from??? He rarely goes outside, and the tapwater hasn't given any of the rest of us parasites). I went back and paid for some Panacur.

Tomorrow Al goes back down to the vet for more bloodwork, to see if he's improved enough to be ready for surgery next week.

Of course the cats chose December to acquire life-threatening illnesses. After the nobility of insisting, "Don't get me a thing for Christmas --- those vet bills are crazy", I'm now childishly depressed that I won't have any presents to open on Christmas. My parents very generously gave me an embroidery machine earlier in the year as a combination birthday-Christmas present, so really I should wrap that up and put it under the tree for myself to remind myself not to be such a whiny loser. I keep telling myself that it was my idea to get those cats in the first place.

Meanwhile the stresses of the season have taken a toll. The children's school had three events on one morning for which I was supposed to cook: a third grade holiday breakfast, a kindergarten "homes" event, and the faculty holiday breakfast. This was complicated by the fact that I wouldn't be able to cook the day before, as I was volunteering at the school right in the middle of the day to assist at the kindergarten holiday party (where I was assigned to do an insanely complicated paper craft with the children. The first group to come to our crafts station did only about a third of the project and left frustrated and disgruntled. I unilaterally decided to simplify the project, which drew coos of praise from the other chaperones. "You're so smart!" "I would never have thought of that!" "You're so smart!" It was the most praise I'd had all year). I decided to blow off the third grade breakfast as it sounded like many of the third grade parents were participating(sorry, Iris Uber Alles), buy a quiche for the faculty party instead of baking one personally (sorry, teachers, I would have baked it but then I would have had to get up to drive it over to the school by six frigging thirty in the morning, whereas by taking the easy way out, I was able to drive to a yuppie market after the kindergarten Christmas party, purchase a $12.99 fresh quiche, drive back to the school, and drop off the quiche at the same time as I picked up Lola after school), and focus on making Lola's beloved broccoli pasta for the kindergarten event. That turned out to be the right decision, as almost no kindergarten parents cooked anything. Almost to a woman they decided to take the easy option and bring a drink, so there was still lemonade, sparkling lemonade, sweet tea, apple cider, and apple juice, but only one savory food, my broccoli pasta.

Now the children are home for winter break, alternately fighting viciously for hours at a time and playing delightfully in the "Lola Club" or pretending to be puppies who attend "Dogwarts." I've got hundreds of loads of laundry to do and I've fallen behind on my novel. I missed the registration deadline to sign Iris up for the after-school jewelry making class she wanted, and I forgot to take Lola to ballet on Friday afternoon (in my defense, it was the same Friday of the three cooking conflicts and a "Holiday Sing" at the girl's school). It was time to move my IRA fund to a better home, and the bank involved didn't send me the form they said I needed in a timely way, although we'd sent all the forms the new IRA bank said were required (a bank representative invited me to drop by and pick up the form in person, which I thought was a swell idea given that the bank is in St. Louis and I am in San Francisco). I myself have had a pounding headache for days which never goes away. I'm on medication for my insomnia which means I feel drowsy and hung-over every morning and have a sleepy spell in the late afternoon (supposedly these side effects will go away by mid-January). Head aching terribly, I'm sleepily lurching through the season, hoping I don't forget anything really important.

the good, the bad... the just plain witless

Bonus: more book reviews in the comments!

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. It's amazing what a good novel can do for a person. I've been attempting to write a novel lately myself, so I'm a bit more on the lookout for an author's structuring, her use of foreshadowing, whether the first person or the third person works...

As always, the ultimate craftsman is Donald Westlake writing at Richard Stark. The first sentence of "Firebreak" is, in my personal opinion, the best first sentence of a novel I've ever read: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." Such a mix of the banal and the horrific, such an economic use of words.... and it sucks you in and has you prepared for the rest of the ride, right there in the first twelve words. I think that's a better first sentence than the famous first sentence of "Anna Karenina": "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Donald Westlake is the master, and I hope he lives forever.

I do not mean to content that "Firebreak" is a more important work than "Anna Karenina." "Firebreak" does not attempt to grapple with the big issues of infidelity, a woman's place in the world, social hypocrisies, etc.. I assert only that Donald Westlake/Richard Stark writes one hell of a sentence.

More along the lines of "Anna Karenina" (and covering much of the same ground regarding a woman's place in the world, marital infidelity, etc..) was "While I was Gone" by Sue Miller, a thought-provoking and serious novel spanning much of a complex and sometimes dislikeable heroine's life. This was a big bestseller back in 1999 but I just got around to reading it. I hated it for the first forty-five pages or so, stopping every now and then out of disgust to wonder, "Is this really the same Sue Miller who wrote 'The Good Mother'? How can this be so bad?" Then gradually the book became good, so very good I could not believe it, so gripping I could not put it down, and with twists and complexities which had me going back to reread various sections over and over again. Like Donald Westlake, Sue Miller is an astounding master of craftsmanship, and she's not afraid to make her characters deeply flawed. She doesn't play to your sentimentality.

Another surprisingly gifted writer, but writing in a comic vein, is Lisa Lutz, whose "The Spellman Files" is so funny and good that it had me laughing out loud on a filled-to-capacity 1 California bus... after I'd boarded the bus in tears after a traumatic marriage counseling appointment. Lisa Lutz seems to like the review which called her heroine, Isabel Spellman ,the love child of Harriet the Spy and Dirty Harry, and that description does fit, but it's not the character I was so crazy about, lovable as Izzy is. It was Ms. Lutz herself, who deploys the word "fuck" better than anyone this side of Elmore Leonard and builds an insane, but highly plausible, world. (Again, this was a bestseller a few years ago which I just got around to. Ms. Lutz has another book featuring the same characters just out in hardback, but I haven't read that yet and can't vouch for it. I hope she hasn't suffered that sophomore slump so unfortunately common in talented authors... e.g., Curtis Sittenfeld and Chelsea Cain).

"The Spellman Files" is set in San Francisco, and it is dead on. The characters eat where they should go to eat, they live where it makes sense for them to live, in neighborhood-appropriate homes at that. They inhabit the real city of San Francisco (and they don't get all gooey about it). I loved it when one character was sent on an crazy errand to Fisherman's Wharf and stopped for that quintessential tourist treat, a bowl of clam chowder where the bowl is actually constructed out of sourdough bread. The character wondered, given how much he loves this meal, why he never goes to Fisherman's Wharf, but then quickly concludes that even the chowder-in-the-bread-bowl isn't worth going there for. (That is us: people who actually live here avoid Fisherman's Wharf like the plague).

Another novel set in San Francisco that I recently read had it all wrong, wrong, wrong to the point of being maddening: the just-out "The Dirty Secrets Club" by Meg Gardiner. Do NOT waste your money or time on this book, not when there are treasures like "The Spellman Files" or "While I Was Gone" or anything by Richard Stark. Ms. Gardiner starts with an interesting concept: a mysterious organization of powerful or wealthy people who are joined together by criminal or scandalous pasts, who dare each other to do more and more dangerous things. However, Ms. Gardiner doesn't fulfill on the promise of that premise, and the book falls apart.

How many things did I hate about this book? Well, for one, she has her heroine, Jo Beckett, burdened by not just one huge, life-altering and made-for-TV trauma but two. As a child, Jo was trapped with her family in a car beneath the rubble of an Oakland freeway after the big 1989 earthquake... with her brave father singing to keep his children calm. If that's not enough for poor old Jo, later she became a doctor, and she failed to save her doctor husband's life in a helicopter crash due to an elementary error in basic triage principles. (If this isn't schmaltzy enough right there, the helicopter crash HAD to be during a medical emergency evacuation of a sick, angelic little girl with a warm, trusting personality who also dies).

So Jo limps through life (symbolically, not physically), scarred and traumatized and unable to try relationships again but making a fabulous living as a forensic psychiatrist. Her job is to investigate suspicious deaths and determine whether they were suicides or not by delving deeply into the suspects' lives. The San Francisco Police Department pays her very well and values her extremely. This basic concept right there would be highly painful to any of the families of murder victims whose deaths were ruled suicides by the SFPD. (The most notable of these is the case of Hugues de la Plaza. Police say that after an enjoyable night of clubbing, he stabbed himself to death. The problem: no bloody knife was found in de la Plaza's tiny apartment and there were traces of blood on the staircase. Answer: the police say Mr. de la Plaza obligingly washed and put away the knife after stabbing himself but before he fatally collapsed. The French authorities, disgusted by this, actually sent investigators over to do the work which should have been done by the SFPD). The SF Weekly did a cover story not long ago rounding up quite a few of these "suicides", an appalling, appalling history which should cause Chief Heather Fong much guilt.

Author Meg Gardiner was completely tone-deaf in her description of San Francisco. Her jacket bio said she now lives in London but used to live in Los Angeles. One wonders if she ever even visited SF. Among other ridiculous things in a book not meant to be a comedy: Ms. Gardiner said that everyone in San Francisco is in a state of nonstop rage due to the consistent parking problems, and therefore there are no anger management classes in our city because the people who teach anger management are so terrified of parking-enraged San Franciscans that they fear for their lives too much to venture into our city. Uh huh. I have noticed that at most events I attend, the people do not show up in rages. Many of us take mass transit or own bicycles, and taxis are also quite fashionable nowadays. It's also quite easy to park in many areas of the city.

Gardiner also had earthquakes occurring on a near-daily basis. You can actually go years without feeling one here. Her description of a little earthquake where everyone in a Mission taqueria hid under their tables was risible. I've lived here over twenty years, gone through many a quake (including the big one of 89), and I've never seen anyone hide under a flimsy table. When there is a quake, people usually hold still and stay silent, and then as soon as it's done, they all say the same things: "Didja feel that?" "How much do you think that was?" "I bet that was at least a four!" Et cetera, et cetera. It takes a lot to actually get us under a table or in a doorway (the only time I ever did that was during that actual 1989 quake. I was chatting with a classmate from New York at the law school when it hit. A few seconds into it, I realized, "This one is different" and got into a doorway, bracing myself against the frame. My classmate ran about nearby, unsure what to do, and I called to her, "Gina, Gina! Get in a doorway!" She came and took my same doorway with me, and we stared at each other until it was done).

On a regular day, poor old traumatized Jo sees the walls of her house bucking to and fro wildly. (I've never seen that in my own house. My life here is so much duller than Jo's). And of course, by the end of the book, old Jo is trapped once again by falling wreckage in a monster quake. How can regular people survive in San Francisco? You'd think they'd have as much sense as an anger management instructor and shun the city.

want to try out cat ownership with no obligations?

Catless people! Here's your chance to try cat ownership without strings!

From my cat rescue:

We have been asked to foster a 9 month old Maine Coon kitten for 6 weeks. The cat has tested negative for FELV/FIV, but they need to retest in 6 weeks. The reason for this is because of the area where the kitten came from. Some of the cats there tested positive, but not all. The kitten would have to be isolated, so someone who can either keep this kitten separate/not have any other cats/kittens. I know not many fosters don't have cats/kittens.

elevator malfunctions of my own life

We here at Drunken Housewife Dot Com like to run a topic into the ground. Give us a dead horse and a stick, and we will go to town. Before we change the topic back to The Drunken Housewife's Neuroses and Her Really Weird Children, a bit more on the elevators:

* During the time in my life when I was a sole practitioner of the law, I had a couple of really great clients who paid me by the hour to handle anything that came up, big to little. One of those clients had built a little condo building with a new elevator installed in it. That elevator was a lemon, and one of the condo purchasers was obsessed with that elevator. The elevator never actually risked anyone's health while I was involved (at a safe distance from the actual thing); it was just oh so very, very slow --- well below the speed it was warranted to rise at. Every so often the condo purchaser would make a big stink to the developer (my client), who'd call me on the phone, I'd get out the file again, and I'd fax another demanding letter to the elevator manufacturer, who'd send out someone out to go time the elevator and tinker with it but who'd basically do nothing. The nice part of this was that then I'd collect a few more hundred dollars.

* I did once climb out of an elevator between floors, which is a truly stupid thing to do, but I didn't know that at the time. I was a freshman at Boston University, living in that infamous, massive three-pronged monstrosity of a dorm, Warren Towers. The elevators were an endless source of annoyance, and I lived on the 14th floor. Before I gave up on them and took to using the stairs almost exclusively, I was in one with several other students when it stopped between floors. After some little time, a bright freshman pried open the doors, and we discovered we were between floors. We all climbed up and out. One of the other freshmen asked me for my phone number, and the only lasting trauma from that experience was that I embarked upon a near-epically dysfunctional relationship of sorts.

our continuing coverage of elevators

Today's Chronicle reported that "San Francisco police have all but concluded that pro-Israel activist Daniel Kliman got stuck in an elevator between floors last week, pried open the doors and accidentally fell nearly seven stories to his death."

So let that be a lesson to all of you: if you're stuck in the elevator, wait it out. Poor Nicholas White, trapped in a Manhattan elevator for 41 hours, tried repeatedly to pry the doors open. He was lucky the elevator didn't open in a way he could have fallen down the shaft.

And here's another piece of elevator lore, which I learned from the New Yorker: elevator experts say the close door button is meaningless. It doesn't actually do anything. The doors shut on a timer. If the door closes during or after you pressed it, it was accidental. (So why is that button there? It works for firefighters who have a key. Also, it gives elevator riders a sense of control they find comforting).

elevators and an update

The Chronicle reported about the crime scene I walked through earlier this week. It turns out that the elevator did it. A man who sounds fascinating, Dr. Dan Kliman, a dynamic vegetarian doctor who was an anti-car and pro-Israel activist, stepped into a malfunctioning elevator and fell to his death.

Elevators, I tell you. I'm resisting with all my might becoming phobic of them ever since I read in the New Yorker about poor Nicholas White, who went out for a cigarette and got stuck in an elevator for FORTY-ONE HOURS. Forty one hours. This, without exaggerating, appears to have ruined his life. I cannot imagine that ordeal (although I can compare it to the birth of Iris, which took about that same length of time and was pretty frigging awful, but yet didn't completely come out of the blue).

Ever eager to support my mental health, the Sober Husband hunted up the video of Nicholas White's ordeal after we read the New Yorker article (security cameras were on the WHOLE FORTY ONE HOURS that poor bastard was trapped in that little box, but no one bothered to glance at them) and nagged me to watch it.
Poor Nicholas White.

Now every time I get into an elevator, I think of Nicholas White and worry. But in memory of Dr. Dan Kliman, I will always look down first and make sure that the door didn't open on emptiness.

the clash of the socioeconomic classes and why it's nice to stay home

Yesterday I went downtown to see my First Ever Shrink. (My marriage counselor referred me to a psychiatrist to treat my chronic insomnia with medication, and I like him. I've seen him twice, and we're trying a course of medication for my sleep problem). I had to pass through a crime scene to get to my appointment. The Medical Examiner's van was out front of the building, which meant there was a corpse inside, and there were four police cars. It turned out that the crime scene was one of the elevators, which had its workings revealed and was surrounded by a swarm of officers, including some interviewing various, shaken-up looking people. The building's extroverted super whisked me into another elevator and up before I could say, "Wait! I want to know what that other elevator did before I commit!"

The other occupant of my elevator was a freaked out hipster with dark, horn-rimmed glasses and trendy hair. He was completely unnerved. I tried to cheer him up. "At least it's not us. We're fine." He was not so sure he -- or I -- was fine. "We're ambulatory, aren't we?" I said.

That made him smile, and he thanked me. By the time I left, the lobby was quieter, with one uniformed officer guarding the crime scene elevator. This morning's paper revealed that a man had indeed died in that elevator's workings in some sort of mysterious way and that he'd been dead for a week before he'd been discovered. I've been working up a bit of an elevator phobia ever since reading in the New Yorker about a man trapped in his office elevator for FORTY-TWO hours in Manhattan, and this didn't help.

In the evening we all went downtown again by subway to a skating party. The parents of one of Iris Uber Alles's classmates had rented out the entire Embarcadero skating rink for a private party, and the girls were beside themselves with excitement. We skated, Iris doggedly working until she could go around the rink without holding the edge. Lola took great pleasure in falling down and started falling down on purpose, giggling and giggling. I took quite a few turns around to loosen up (I used to love to skate as a child in Maine), but it was hard to safely maneuver around all the falling children. After some time, I returned my skates and joined the parents who had chosen to drink in lieu of athletic activity. I chatted with a number of other parents, including a mother I like a lot, who told me that the thing she was most uncomfortable with about our school was the ostentatious display of wealth by some parents (an example she gave was a limo at a child's first grade birthday party). I laughed and told her that she wouldn't have to worry about that from me because I don't have any money. We discussed our unglamorous socioeconomic backgrounds.

Eventually the party drew to a close. Our hospitable host had ordered massive stacks of pizza and encouraged everyone to take some home. I took a cheese pizza, thinking it would be good for the children's school lunches. Then I went back for another, which I thought I could give to a homeless person. The Sober Husband thought that was not such a good idea. "It's hard to give food away." I disagreed, saying that when I worked downtown, homeless people were happy to get leftovers I gave them, and it was a nice, hot, fresh pizza.

We walked towards the subway. The first homeless person the Sober Husband asked about the pizza declined, saying he'd already had a big dinner. He seemed stoned and barely able to understand the concept. The second person we asked accepted the pizza and called over two other street people. As we walked down into the subway, I turned and saw the three of them eating the pizza with abandon. That made us all feel good, and the Sober Husband decided to give away the second pizza as well (although I wanted to keep it). We ran into a different sort of street person at the fare gates, an enterprising one who had been rummaging through the trashcans for November fastpasses. People who bought December ones threw those old ones away, although they were still good for another three days. We accepted all the Fastpasses and thanked him enthusiastically. The Sober Husband offered hm the pizza. The man hesitated and confided that what he really needed was money, perhaps half what we would have paid for taking the subway. I gave him a five dollar bill because he had been helpful and hadn't asked for anything until we brought up the idea of giving something.

On our way down into the bowels of MUNI, the Sober Husband gave another man our pizza.

While we were waiting on the platofrm, our Fastpass friend came up to me, upset. He said that he'd gone over to the man he saw take our pizza and asked him if he could have just one slice of the pizza, telling him he knew us. Instead of sharing the pizza, that man pulled a knife on him. The Fastpass street person came to me and told me what happened, upset. The Sober Husband was off fiddling around with his iPhone, and I asked him to call the police. A MUNI worker nearby refused to get involved. "I didn't see a thing."

While we were on the platform, discussing this, the pizza-having guy came sweeping down, with a knife in one hand and the pizza box in the other. "What you go telling these people for?" he said to the Fastpass man in a hard voice. He chased towards the other street person, who was right by me on the platform. I pulled Iris and Lola in to me, faces to me, so they wouldn't see anything if someone got stabbed. "Stay close to Mommy." The knife-wielder circled us with his knife out in his hand, me holding the children close and the other street person looking very frightened, and then ran up the stairs with the pizza. "You saw that? You saw that?" said the frantic Fastpass street person. "I saw it, I saw it," I said.

After what felt like a long time, a police officer with two MUNI workers arrived on the platform. I told the officer what had happeneed and that I had seen the knife myself. They all took off in pursuit of the man with the pizza and the knife. Our subway arrived. I was reluctant to get on it, thinking that we might need to give a statement, but the Sober Husband insisted. "I guess no one told us we had to wait," I said as I relented.

On the way home, I reflected about the different socioeconomic classes cheek and jowl down at the Embarcadero Center. One minute we'd been skating with hedge fund managers and drinking wine with millionaires; the next minute, we saw a man pull a knife on another over a piece of leftover pizza. I also thought about the crime scene I'd gone through earlier in the day. I leaned over to the Sober Husband. "You know, it's pretty quiet when you stay home with the cats. It's nice there, staying home with the cats."

I shouldn't have asked.

As we sat down to eat dinner on the last evening of the Thanksgiving weekend, I asked the abstracted Sober Husband, "So what are you thinking about?"

"About how I'm looking forward to getting back to the office."

Lola does it so you don't have to

Yesterday Lola wanted to dip the vegetarian corndog her father had microwaved for her into chocolate sauce, rather than the customary catsup. Her father asked me if I had any objections. I found the whole idea repugnant but waved a lazy, permissive hand. "Whatever you want, Lolabelle."

Within minutes six year-old Lola came in to report. Her face screwed up with disgust, she said, "Corndogs in chocolate sauce taste... taste... taste... " She couldn't think of a word bad enough, and she instructed me never, ever to try it.

I won!

Every year for the past decade, the indefatigable Chris Baty holds NaNoWriMo: National Write A Novel Month. With pep talks which manage to be actually inspirational and not cheesy and with various deadlines, Baty and his crew get a wide variety of people to actually write a novel in one month (a novel, for purposes of NaNoWriMo, being defined as 50,000+ words of new text written all in the month of November, which is about 150 pages).

I myself had a long abandoned half-written novel and a sense of guilt. I felt like I would never write fiction again. At the last minute, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, skeptical of whether I'd be able to do it, but starting from word one. Around 20,000 words, I came up dry, unable to think of anything else. But I got back into it, kept going, and ended winning NaNoWriMo with a couple of days to spare.

My novel isn't actually done. It needs another 75-150 pages. But it's moving along, it's plowing along. It has a plot, and there is an ending in mind; there will just need to be a lot more writing done before the ending is put in place. (You can read a short excerpt over at NaNoWriMo). I've never felt so creative in all my life. I've been sculpting in my twice-a-week classes as well as writing, and I love my little sculptures. I feel positively glowing with radioactive mutant writer strength. How I love NaNoWriMo. Now if I can just finish this book on my own, without those delightful peptalks and helpful deadlines.

Thanksgiving menus

I've been preoccupied with writing a novel this month, under the auspices of National Write A Novel Month, and I let Thanksgiving largely slide. In past years I've invited people, but this year I was happy to just have a small Thanksgiving. Usually I spend weeks working up a gala menu, test driving new dishes ahead of time, but this year I didn't have the energy for that. Instead, I suggested to the Sober Husband and children that they create a menu. No one had any enthusiasm for that idea. I turned to six year-old Lola. "Lola, what do YOU want for Thanksgiving dinner?"

Lola pondered. "A corn dog!" she shouted.

"That's not exactly the kind of thing I had in mind," I said, but Lola couldn't think of anything better. I suggested to Lola and Iris that they write up a menu, and later they presented me with this (ornamented with many little ears of corn which had husks at the end, resembling swords):

THANKSGIVING MENU
Lola's Memo

corn dogs
ice cream soup with the xtra ice cream
normal ice crem (chocoalte)
mashed chocolate
chocolate turkey
chocolate cake
mashed cherrys
mashed ice creame chocolat
chocolte xbox
milky ways
cocolits and charrys (how many ways can one six year-old spell "chocolate"?)
vanila, chcolit, straberry ice cream
corn with butter and salt
cocolt corn
chocolt caramle corn

In the end, I drew up my own menu, which was

lanttulaatiko
Unturkey with stuffing and roast potatoes
slow cooked buttered carrots
cranberry sauce
green beans cooked in vodka
personal Baked Alaskas with fresh pineapple

Later in the evening Lola complained. "You didn't make one thing from my menu!" Her father convinced her that the Baked Alaskas were an acceptable substitute for the ice cream soup, but Lola still felt cheated.

it's my birthday

Other people get depressed on Christmas or Valentine's Day. Those are always fine by me; I enjoy them each time they roll around. For me, my birthday is the depressing day, the one where I feel unloved and unwanted.

I tried to explain to Lola yesterday afternoon why I felt sad, and she exploded. "That is crazy! Everyone loves Mommy!"

"Well, actually, not everyone even likes Mommy."

Lola shook her head with impatience at me. "Everyone loves Mommy!"

There are no plans to celebrate, as it's a school night and my complex feelings about my birthday prevent me from planning anything nice for it. The Sober Husband had told me that I should plan something, but that strikes at the heart of the birthday issues: if I plan something for my own birthday, that demonstrates that I'm the only one who cares about it. A plan coming from the outside is the only thing that would be acceptable. (I can see that being married to me can be very tiresome).

On the bright side, the children presented me with gifts this morning already, gifts clearly bought ahead of time by the Sober Husband: a beautiful necklace with dark pearls, white pearls, and an Australian agate, and a copy of "The Gaming Life" by Jim Rossignol, which begins "In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game. It was the best thing that ever happened to me." I feel better already.

the chart continues

This morning at breakfast I noticed Lola's chart on the table. Lola has helpfully added the label "IRIS BAD CHART", which she showed me. I laughed. "That chart is hilarious, Lola."

Iris Uber Alles made an evil, evil face at me, which made me laugh more. "Make that face at your father." I called the Sober Husband in. "Find Lola's chart hilarious," I instructed him.

"Lola's chart IS hilarious," he said earnestly. Iris glared at him, but by now she was having trouble not laughing herself, and the evil eye she shot at her father was nowhere near as threatening as the glare previously directed at her mother.

"Iris, that's not fair! You're not giving him as bad an expression."

In the brightest little voice imaginable, Lola peeped, "Iris, are you hating Mommy? Right now, are you hating Mommy? I'm going to go get a stamp." Nothing could be happier for Lola than an opportunity to record a sin committed by her sister on the Iris Bad Chart.

Lola's keeping a chart

Yesterday Lola was in a bouncy mood after kindergarten. She told me that one of her friends has a behavior chart at home, and Lola had decided that she wanted one, too. "I will find out what kind of girl I am! Am I a GOOD girl or a bad one?" She skipped happily. I joked that we could make a chart for both her and her big sister.

Perhaps I shouldn't have made that joke, because as soon as she got home, Lola got to work making a chart to record her sister's sins. "How do you spell 'snatching'? How do you spell 'whining'?" Lola worked hard to draw good lines and found some little stamps which could be used to record the ills. Nine year-old Iris Uber Alles happened by and decided to interfere.

I knew that the chart was incendiary by design, but Lola was working so hard to draw the boxes neatly and was writing carefully, so I didn't want her work destroyed. I told Iris, who was slashing at her sister with a marker (this resulted in the addition of two new categories of sins, "Dreing [drawing] on Lola" and "Dreing On Mommy"), that she was NOT to mark up the chart Lola was making. Of course Iris grabbed a stamp and snatched away the chart, stamping it at random in a box which would be for a few days in the future, in a category which hadn't been named. Lola, who had been genuinely concentrating and working hard, burst into tears.

I was irked that Iris had deliberately disobeyed me, and I told her to go to her room. Earlier she'd disobeyed by refusing to come downstairs to do her homework at the table, where I could supervise it. Iris slammed upstairs, crying noisily and screaming, "I HATE MOMMY! MOMMY IS BAD!"

Lola carefully created a new chart, adding a new category of 'Hating Mommy" in response to the continuing shouts from above (later adding "and Daddy"). I could imagine that this chart was soon going to be wall-sized.

Lola happily recorded Iris's sins du jour as Snatching, Whining and Complaining, Dreing [drawing] On Lola, and Hating Mommy.

"WHEN WILL DADDY BE HOME? I HATE MOMMY! I ONLY LIKE DADDY!" was heard on and on. However, when her father did arrive, he was not the stalwart ally Iris could have wished. He found the chart hilarious.

eight and nine year-old girls are not what they were in my day

At our elementary school, a vague but cautionary email went out to the third grade parents, advising us that Some Girls Had Used The Internet Inappropriately, the school was working through some issues with the families of those girls, and that all third graders would be bringing home another copy of the school's internet safety policy to be reviewed with and signed by a parent. I was puzzled. Obviously something fairly disturbing had occurred if we were all supposed to sit down with our children and go over internet safety yet again, but why the mystery?

I asked Iris Uber Alles if she knew what had happened, and she was clueless. "Nobody knows. I have no idea." The Sober Husband was all agog as well, surmising that it must have been some sort of Myspace infraction. I asked the head of the lower school if she could tell me more without compromising the privacy of the families involved, stressing that I wasn't asking for names, just information.

I've found it frustrating supervising Iris's internet usage. I don't know everything she does online. She recently started a blog I didn't know about, which I found when she accidentally left my laptop logged into her own blogger account. Childless people are fond of saying that parents should keep an eye on their kids and know everything their child does online, but I'm frankly not going to spend every waking moment that Iris is out of school staring at her. Even if I were less lazy, I still have to take a shower or have a bowel movement from time to time, requiring a cessation of vigilance. Additionally, as the Sober Husband is a computer enthusiast, our home is littered with computers (we have, I think, four laptops, at least two "regular computers", two things that the Sober Husband refers to as "servers", plus the iPhone, which can be used to surf the web). I wondered if the internet conduct in question was something I would consider permissible (I do after all let Iris play World of Warcraft, which many would consider wrong). I lied about Iris's age once on line to let her use a website I thought was age-appropriate, so I had abetted Iris in violating the school's policy myself. My best guess was that the girls in question might have lied about their age to make Facebook profiles (as indeed a young person of our acquaintance -- not Iris or Lola -- is known to have done); my fear was that they might have written cruel things about their classmates online.

When the head of lower school called me, I was taken aback by what I learned. The incident had involved some girls looking at explicit porn together online. These are eight and nine year-old girls, third graders. Sigh. They went surfing around by typing in sexually explicit words into Google. I hadn't really thought it necessary to go into a lot of sex education yet, and I guess I should reevaluate that. I thought it was enough to have held the talk about inappropriate touching, but if Iris's classmates are investigating hardcore porn, it seems I should cover a bit more ground. I'm nonplussed.

I shared with the head of lower school my feeling that I can't imagine keeping track of every site Iris visits. How can we supervise our children's internet usage when there are third and fourth-graders running around with iPhones? I was nonplussed to learn of the porn; the head of school was nonplussed to learn that there are telephones now which access the web and which are owned by some lower school students. (Iris keeps me abreast of which third and fourth graders own iPhones as part of her campaign to obtain one for herself). We both hung up on a note of bemusement at this world we stumble around in, trying to stumble faster than the third-graders.

the state of things

Years ago I went into a huge funk when in one horrible month, John Kerry lost (and we had donated far more than we could afford to his campaign, money that could have been spent on a vacation or on redoing the other half of our roof), I had a terrible flu, and I had a traumatic milestone birthday. I went into a deep depression which took a very long time to come out of.

This week I'm feeling great that Barack Obama won. There's another large milestone, a less depressing one than the milestone birthday one: the tenth wedding anniversary of the Sober Husband and myself. Life is looking up, all right.

In other developments, six year-old Lucy has changed her name back to "Lola." (She had rejected her legal name, "Lucy" for years, calling herself "Baby" until nearly three, when she chose the name "Lola" for herself. At five she returned to "Lucy" after the upsetting discovery that the meaning of the name "Lola" is "sorrows", while "Lucy" means "light"). She announced this at kindergarten. By the end of the day five other girls in her classroom had come forward to announce that they had also changed their names. This trend even spread to a girl in a different classroom, before the kindergarten teachers formed the policy that any name change had to be communicated in a note sent by the child's parents. Only Lola was allowed to remain under her new nomme (the school had some knowledge of this issue, Lola having been admitted under the name "Lola" but having shown up to kindergarten as a "Lucy").

And, in the general trend of positive thinking, nine year-old Iris Uber Alles and I are participating in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month program. We are seeking sponsorship to allow us to attend the Night Of Writing Dangerously, where we might write dangerously and sip vitamin waters in the company of a room of novelists. Please consider donating to sponsor us, as the proceeds go to support youth writing programs in public schools (and we all know how underfunded the schools are, sigh).

a fake car

One of the problems with my still-youthful Volvo, which I acquired last January after the untimely death of my aged Oldsmobile, is that it is a white, midsized sedan. There are an awful lot of white midsized sedans on the streets and in the parking lots of San Francisco. Once I emerged from Lucy's preschool to see five white, midsized sedans parked in a row across from the school.

The children share my irritation. We often walk up to the wrong white Volvo at the grocery store or on the street.

Lucy in particular feels that our car should definitely be a different color. Seeing a bright yellow Beetle, she pronounced, "That is the car of your dreams, Mommy!" Actually the car of my dreams is a burnt-orange Mini Cooper convertible, but the yellow bug was distinctive. Lucy mused, as we passed endless white and gray cars, about what would be best for a car color.

"Red, I think, because there is only one red car in the world!"

"I think there are lots more red cars than that." I drew Lucy's attention to a red car on our side of 32nd Avenue and to another across the street, further down.

Lucy regarded the red car near us with disdain. "That is NOT a real car. THAT IS A FAKE!!"

trick-or-treating

This year just-turned-six Lucy chose to be Hannah Montana and, instead of having a painstakingly home sewn costume created by her loving mother, buy a cheesy prefab costume at the store. Nine year-old Iris opted to be the Grim Reaper, a costume about which I was skeptical but which turned out adorable, with a polyester hooded robe, skeletonish gloves and a plastic scythe. I urged Iris when trick-or-treating to play up the death aspect. "Tell them that Death shall pass over them this year."

Death and I were separated from Hannah Montana and her father (not in a Billy Ray Cyrus outfit, thankfully) for much of the evening, as Hannah had strong ideas about where to trick-or-treat. Eventually we all met up again and went home, where the children poured out their candy in an ecstasy of gluttony. Lucy picked through her candy critically, pulling out all the dark chcolates to give to her father (a neighborhood gourmand had given out tiny, organic dark chocolate squares). She picked up a dollar bill and made a face of disgust. "One guy didn't have any candy, so he gave me a dollar and said for me to buy my own candy!" I thought getting a dollar instead of a "fun-sized" candy bar was a good deal, but not Lucy. "And you can have my raisins!" she said with vehemence. The other irritation for Lucy had been a troubling thirst. "I never want to feel like that again!"

This morning, rather than rejoice in her massive pile of candy, Lucy felt traumatized by the thirst of the evening before. Ironically enough the Sober Husband was the only one given a beverage. One neighbor had pressed a plastic cup of red wine onto him. I had been promised a Cosmopolitan by a group of older gay men who were delighted with Death ("Who did your make-up???") and "Death's Mother", but in the event we came away only with a handful of candy.

Iris, even with her own mighty stash of candy, lusts for Lucy's and kept trying to talk her out of various candies. "Lucy, you wouldn't like THIS one. Lucy, I think this kind is poisoned!"

"None of her candy is poisoned, and if it's so poisonous, why do you want to eat it?" Iris just glowered, her eyes still bearing traces of the Grim Reaper's deadly eye make-up.

a weird and beautiful book

I just finished "Gone-Away World" by Nick Harkaway, a gripping and thoroughly strange and beautiful book I commend to you. It's a long book, 498 pages, and it seems meandering, but the meandering is okay, more than okay, because the writing is so good and entertaining. It wasn't until the last chapter or so that I realized there was no meandering at all; it was all fitting together like clockwork. Bits of beautiful writing seeming like entertaining throwaways were foreshadowing, foreshadowing done more skillfully than one would imagine.

The afterword reveals that Harkaway is a huge Wodehouse fan, and that makes sense. He writes with humor and whimsy, but he wrote a book which is not humorous and not whimsical, really. It's action-filled and serious, but written with a deft, light hand. I just love this book, filled with delights like this description of a crowded strip bar, "From somewhere across the room comes the sound of a mime getting beaten up" and the following throw-away line, "Baptiste Vasille shrugs. It's very much a French shrug. It says Well, what did you expect?' and it says it in a way which suggests the world is essentially English, and hence a bit awkward and silly."

I love this book so much that I want to buy it, having borrowed the copy I used from the wonderful Mechanics' Institute. Bonus: the jacket is hot pink and fuzzy. In bookstores Lucy loves to seek out "The Gone-Away World" and reverently stroke it.

a dissatisfying email exchange with the head of school at KDBS

Previously I wrote to our children's elementary school complaining about the prominent sale of fur-covered toy kittens at the fall festival, as well as the rampant handing-out of live goldfish to small children who hadn't gotten their parents' permission (my children didn't get any fish; they've been brought up to take animals very seriously and would not accept one without conferring with a parent). Today I got a vague and unsatisfactory response from our new head of school:

Dear Carole:

Thank you for getting in touch with your concern regarding the toys sold
and pets distributed at Festival. As I'm sure you can imagine, one of the
challenges of putting on an event of this nature is managing the vendors
who are selling items in the boutique. As a school, we try to monitor
carefully anything that could carry with it an implied endorsement. The
festival boutique presents real challenges to this endeavor.

I appreciate the concerns that you have raised, and we will certainly take
them into consideration in preparing for next year's festival. We are
always working to improve the environment for our girls at Burke's. Thank
you for bringing your concerns straight to us. I am a believer in direct
communication and assure you that we do take your concerns seriously. As
we begin working with next year's festival chairs, we will be certain that
this issues are fully explored.

Best,

Kim Wargo

I wrote back:

Thank you for your response. I would like to point something out, however: the fur toys were not sold by an outside vendor. The fairyland area, like the KDBS spa, the home cooking booth, etc..., is done by parents organized through the festival committee. It's more of an organic part of the event, as opposed to the vendors who come in for that day to sell. I would note that also the school posted fliers for the fairyland zone ahead of time at the school (which got my children fired up to go see it; indeed my daughter had intended to spend her $50 birthday money there). Accordingly I do think it is appropriate to hold this (and the fish, which were given by the school as prizes for playing games) against the school. It's not something done by an outside entity without oversight by the official organizers; it's part of the festival which is planned and created through the official committee.

Due to this issue, our family has decided to break with our tradition of donating to the KDBS annual fund and instead donate that money to PETA. I hope that Burke's will evaluate its lack of policies about fur and laissez faire attitude about the goldfish prizes before the next festival.

I had previously decided that if I didn't get a satisfactory answer, I did not wish to donate to the school's annual fund this year. The Sober Husband agreed to that, and instead we'll be donating to PETA. Oh, how I love donating to PETA when someone pisses me off on an animal issue. I would never make a donation in someone else's name -- that would be rude -- but I am happy to inform people that I'm donating inspired by them (even when I'm angry, I try to split those etiquette hairs properly).

I'll leave the conclusions to be drawn to you

Public health experts from the University of Glasgow were able to obtain the childhood mental ability scores of over 8,000 men and women in their 30s, and found -- much to their surprise -- the higher IQ, the higher the likelihood of developing a drinking problem. The correlation existed even after factoring out socioeconomic status, and was stronger in women than it was in men.

The researchers declared the results were "unexpected" and feel the need for "further examination."

(Incidentally I don't have "a drinking problem." I have drinking without problems, happily for me).

an angry, angry god in a signless car

Six year-old Lucy styles herself a god, and she's not above throwing her weight around. The other day in the car, I was flipping through radio stations and passed by the one Lucy wanted. "Go back!"

"No, I like this one," I said, pausing on one playing Nirvana.

"I condemn you to hell! Now will you go back?"

"No, I'm listening to this one. You're condemning your mother to hell because she didn't pick the right radio station?"

The Great God Lucy muttered various imprecations, which ended up with the threat that I was being condemned to hell, where I'd die in a pool of hot lava only to come back to life right there in hell, where I'd live a life of suffering and die in the hot lava, only to be condemned to hell once again.

Iris and I were impressed by the scope of Lucy's wrath. Lucy reiterated, to make sure the gravity of the situation was fully grasped: "You will be condemned to hell and THEN condemned to hell AGAIN!"

It is always a joy, ferrying these children about. Beyond the threats of hellfire, they fight bitterly over the armrest. The Sober Husband put a piece of masking tape as a divider, but that hasn't helped much. They fight over who is taking up too much of the tape. Yesterday Iris's long hair strayed over the line, which was the cause of much offense on the part of the Great God Lucy, who ended up administering a punitive slap on the head to Iris.

"I'm going to get a sign," I said wearily. It is my fantasy to install a sign in the car, like bus drivers have, reading, "Do Not Speak To Driver." Then I will threaten the children: "Don't make me tap my sign."

"Well, you DON"T have a sign," pointed out Iris. "So give up pretending like you do."

a letter to our elementary school

Today I'm waiting for a call back about whether I can return my dear foster kittens, Helen Keller and Ray Charles, today. Poor Helen and Ray, unaware of their impending eviction from their happy childhood home, are curled up in my lap. I couldn't bear to disturb them and took advantage of their snuggling time to write the following letter to the head of Iris and Lucy's elementary school:

I hate to complain about anything done at the Fall Festival, as I know the parents who organize it work very hard, but there was something which appalled me and upset my daughter Iris this year. It was the fur covered toys for sale at the fairyland area.

We was shocked to see real fur used in toy kittens, and these fur toys were displayed very prominently. They were the dominant item at the fairyland area. Iris and I had gone to the fairy area on our arrival at the fair, and we had actually intended to make at least one purchase there to add to our fairyland at home (we had bought a fairy house the year before). Iris, a sensitive animal loving child, was so disturbed by the fur that she asked to leave. This cast a pall over our afternoon at the fair, as Iris couldn't get her mind off the dead rabbits used to make these toys and asked me such questions as "Why do people hate rabbits?" and "Why can't the bunnies be smart enough to escape? Why do they have to die?"

I was rather disturbed by the hypocrisy that the children were being encouraged to pay to pet and feed live rabbits at the petting zoo, just yards away from where they were being urged to buy the skins of other rabbits, who had met an unkind demise in order to make cheap toys.

There was another level of hypocrisy, which I suspect but can't prove: the fur-covered toys were from China. Not all of the fur appeared to be rabbit fur. It is an established fact that in China, cats --- the same sort of cats we keep as pets -- are commonly raised for the fur trade. [See, e.g., http://www.furisdead.com/feat-dogcatfur.asp]. Some of the kitten toys I saw at Burke's appeared to me to have been covered with cat fur (as a long-time cat fosterer and rescue volunteer, I know cat fur). It's frankly hideous to sell a toy cat to a girl which required the death of a real cat to make.

Fur has become controversial in our society, with an increasing awareness growing that the animals raised for fur are killed in spectacularly inhumane ways (the most common way is anal electrocution so as to preserve the fur). I am glad Iris doesn't yet know about that aspect of the fur trade, but I suspect some of the upper school girls do. Is that something Burke's wants to be affiliated with? Is that something to teach our girls, that although we enjoy petting rabbits, we think it's good to kill them in an agonizing way to make a toy that will be probably discarded when the girl tires of it?

I expect to see fur if I go to Neiman Marcus, and I make my shopping decisions accordingly. I don't expect to see it showcased at a Burke's family festival, though, and I am disappointed in the school. Please consider making a policy that fur won't be sold at future festivals.

While I'm on this uncomfortable subject, I should also state that I've been troubled -- but have hitherto held my tongue -- about the practice of giving out the goldfish at KDBS. It's a common sight to go to a Burke's family home and see a large number of goldfish being kept in a tiny, undersized globe. These fish should have a lifespan of 30 years if cared for properly and require a large, aerated tank for comfort. The way they are given out, as though they were disposable, seems callous and definitely doesn't teach the girls to respect animal pets and care for them accordingly. At the very least, there should be a sheet of instructions for the proper care of goldfish given out with the fish. (I would be happy to draft such a thing). I also witnessed parents being displeased when their child showed up at their side with a fish. It seems inappropriate to give out a living creature to a child without the parents' consent and implicit commitment to keeping the fish.

I hope Burke's can do better than this.

more big city blues (why is it always about the cars?)

Someone broke into my car last night, but weirdly did no damage. The mysterious intruder ransacked the car but seems to have left everything (including a dozen CD's kept in the front armrest) strewn around.

This morning at my ceramics class, an officious man interrupted our labors in the studio to inquire, "Did anyone park a burgundy car, with a handicapped placard, in the handicapped spot near the studio?" It turns out that a man had been seen slashing this car's tires in, as everyone in the class remarked, "broad daylight." "I'm glad it wasn't one of you," said the officious man (which made me wonder: why were we better than the car's owner? Because we were aspiring potters?) Oh, how everyone in the class denounced the state of affairs in the current day and age (I'm the youngest one in the class, which is composed otherwise of retirees).

Our intrepid instructor went out later to investigate and reported back: "He knew the guy. The driver of the car knew the guy who slashed the tires. It had something to do with something." We all sighed a sigh of relief that it wasn't Random Tire Slashage.

But still, the ransacking and the denting of my own dear Volvo: what will happen to it next?

why can't my car do that?

Every day I look at my poor dented Volvo (dented by an anonymous jerk who didn't leave a note), and I seethe with anger. I have not investigated how much it would cost to fix the dent, because I realize that it is asinine to spend money on a dent when I have no plans to sell the car (I do entertain a fantasy from time to time that I will just on the spur of the moment drive down to a dealership and trade my Volvo in for a cheery Mini Cooper convertible, but that's just daydreaming). The damage doesn't affect the drivability or safety of the car. It just makes it a little ugly.

My old car had a similar, but longer dent, but I didn't mind that one because I put it there myself. One day towards the end of my second trimester with the incubating Lucy, I drove myself to a routine prenatal checkup (the Sober Husband went to each and every prenatal appointment the first time around, but the second time, the wonders of life had palled for him, and I had to nag him to get him to go to one or two). I'd been feeling uncomfortable and crabby, but I was a shocked to be told that I was three centimeters dilated, the baby's head was engaged at a point which was supposed to occur only well into labor, and I needed to go to the hospital immediately due to this dangerous premature labor. This news caused my blood pressure to rise and my nerves to fray. I probably shouldn't have driven, but leaving my car as parked was not an option (it would have been towed away at rush hour). So I drove myself across the city slowly, having contractions as I drove. I'd had contractions on the way over to the clinic, but I'd ignored those, whereas these new contractions were causing me a lot of stress. When I got to the tiny, cramped parking garage of my chosen hospital, I was having a painful contraction and feeling very anxious, and I thoroughly gouged the side of the car against a concrete pillar. A nearby fat man laughed at me. "Let's see YOU drive when you're in labor, asshole," I thought to myself.

So that dent always reminded me of the vagaries of life and pregnancy (at the hospital, I was kept for several hours and then sent home with orders of strict bedrest. The Sober Husband didn't show up at the hospital until long after I'd gone home. When I was released from bedrest after nearly a month -- a month in which I had to care for a three year-old while on strict bedrest --- my labor stopped, and I stayed pregnant for two more months. Lucy was born three weeks late to the day, weighing over nine pounds. So much for having a preemie!). I didn't mind that dent. But this dent, it drives me crazy.

Not everyone is paying attention to the dent. Others have more exotic issues with the Volvo. Six year-old Lucy got excited in traffic the other day and pointed out a passing car. "That car transforms!" I couldn't quite figure out from what Lucy said whether the car transforms into a robot or a ladybug or a robot ladybug, but in any event, it was a glamorous car.

Iris got agitated that her parents were discussing this magical car with Lucy. "It does NOT transform, Lucy!" she shouted.

"I saw it on Youtube," Lucy said, settling the argument for once and for all.

"It does not! It does NOT transform!"

"What part of 'Lucy saw it on Youtube' do you not understand, Iris?" asked the Sober Husband mischievously.

Iris seethed all the way home, as Lucy expounded upon the beauties and joys of a car which has transforming capabilities, unlike my poor dented Volvo.

what the heart desires

At marriage counseling the other day, the therapist asked the Sober Husband what it is he wants. He thought about it. "What I want is for Carole to always be a loving and supportive wife while I get to do whatever I want."

We had a good laugh about that, the therapist and I.

big city blues, continued

Today I noticed a sizable dent in the side of my still youthful Volvo. Needless to say, the car did not incur that dent while I was driving it or anywhere near it. For shame, anonymous car denter who did not even leave a note. For shame.

big city blues

I love cities passionately, despite the fact that I'd never really had much of anything to do with them before going to college in Boston. I don't really ever want to live outside a large city again. But despite of that personal passion, there is no disputing the fact that the urban charms can pall sometimes.

Today I grabbed a quick, cheap lunch between my ceramics class and picking up Lucy (Leper Lucy has been admitted back to kindergarten, so long as she keeps a bandage over her staph lesion). While I was eating, a panhandler sat down at the few outside tables and would NOT shut up, constantly harassing the sole other woman eating outdoors, all passersby, and eventually me, whom he called "a fucking bitch" for not giving him money. I do actually give beggars money more often than the average person, but I'm not going to reward someone for ruining my only quiet, relaxing moment of the day.

Driving the children home, a well-dressed man in a wheelchair who was on the sidewalk and not anywhere near entering the road screamed at me psychotically, "YOU CAN'T GO THROUGH THE CROSSWALK!" He was in such a rage that he seemed at risk of a stroke. Although I do yield for pedestrians, the point remains that cars need to go through crosswalks, or it would not be possible to drive further than the length of one block. An empty crosswalk is fair game, crazy, screaming guy (incidentally nice tie, crazy guy).

In general the roads have been abhorrent lately. I said in frustration to Lucy the other day, "Did someone declare National Idiots Go Driving Week and forget to tell me?" I tried to figure out if the influx of stupidity in the streets had some relationship to Columbus Day or Fleet Week, but I didn't arrive at any persuasive theorem.

More dramatically, some addicts burnt a beautiful pink Victorian down just a block from my house. We saw the fire, so huge and amazing, when we woke up from our windows (watching the firemen gradually put it out was spellbinding), and later in the morning my neighbor and I walked over to rubberneck close up. We saw the firemen carrying charred remains of furniture out of the building, and a tense woman in a green bathrobe erupted as a desk was put down. "Take a picture of that!" It was a partially destroyed desk containing many boxes of syringes.

"Is that person we took to the hospital earlier on insulin?" a fireman asked quickly, grabbing his phone.

"On METH more like," snapped back the green bathrobed one. "This is a drug house! We see people getting high outside all the time!"

I slipped the woman in the bathrobe a note with my address and phone number. "I only live a block away, if you need to borrow anything, like clothes or a phone." She hugged me and reassured me that she'd only needed to temporarily evacuate her apartment, which was next door to the burnt-down building.

The neighbors are all abuzz about news that the Mikes, a delightful gay couple both possessed of the same first name, were burgled. Evidently this occurred some time ago and the news has been slow to disseminate (and evidently also the Mikes are tired of being asked about it). Our next-door-neighbor also had a package stolen from her front stoop as well, and there is vague muttering about how we should start a neighborhood watch program. I wasn't so surprised about the package going missing, as that neighbor's front door is right on the street. An unchaperoned package would, as I remarked to my next-door neighbor from the other side, be a considerable temptation even to someone like me, who loves her neighbors, if it were from an exciting shipper. "What, like Good Vibrations?" quipped my gay male neighbor. I wondered if he felt free to make that sort of crack to all the straight women in his life or just us drunken ones.

I've always felt that my block was one of the safest, most serene blocks of all of San Francisco, but my complacency is feeling a bit shaken.

my children, the leper and the mutant

Six year-old Lucy had a spot on her leg last week which we all believed to be a bug bite. Lucy herself was quite indignant, accosting me to shout about fleas, which are always considered my responsibility given that I am the one who brought feline Americans into our home (earlier this year we had a stubborn flea issue which was not responding to Advantage -- I was dosing poor old Al weekly, when it's supposed to be once a month. Then I happened to read a column by the always magnificent Bug Guy, who recommended rubbing fleazy pets with food-grade diatomaceous earth. This worked like a charm, and coincidentally saved me considerable amounts of money, as I was dropping cash on Advantage at a scary rate. One afternoon of pure cat hell, as they were all rolled about in diatomaceous earth like biscuits in flour, and no more fleas were seen). Lucy showed me her leg on Wednesday afternoon, and I realized it wasn't a bug bite. Already I'd known it wasn't a flea bite, as the fleas were long gone, but I'd suspected a mosquito. But it was a staph infection.

We're all too familiar with staph infections here. The Sober Husband had a recurring staph infection for much of the year, which was thankfully vanquished with antibiotics. Poor Iris Uber Alles sported a staph lesion herself over the summer, which broke her perfect record of never having needed prescription medication (oh, how I used to posit Iris as the definitive proof of the health of a vegetarian diet. "I never ate meat when I was pregnant with her, and she's never had any except a mouthful by accident. And look at her! She's in the 99th percentile for height, and she's never been on antibiotics in her life!") Iris is quite bitter at the loss of her streak of perfect health and has taken to rather competitively asking sundry adults when they had their first antibiotics.

The Sober Husband, as he likes to do with every bad thing, attributed his staph issues to my fostering kittens. "It stands to reason that since I live in an environment where you're always administering antibiotics, I'd come down with something." I felt it was more likely that he'd picked up the staph at Johns Hopkins, where he spent quite a bit of time earlier at his dying friend's bedside. Hospitals are hotbeds of staph. The Sober Husband scored against me when he got our physician to decree that I should cease fostering kittens for six months. However, I felt I won that round when I discovered that the veterinary opthalmologist treating my poor blind kittens, Helen Keller and Ray Charles, had had actual MRSA. This vet was astonished to hear that any physician would blame this on cats. This entertaining and erudite doctor explained his own treatment in most satisfyingly gory detail (raising his arm, he indicated where some flesh had been actually excised from his armpit), vehemently and articulately denied any link between his MRSA and any cats or cat medicines, and gave me the name of a researcher who has studied the issues of staph in animals.

Thereafter when the Sober Husband bitched about cats, I contended that he should have the more strenuous treatment my dear veterinary opthalmologist had endured, excision of the staph-ridden flesh. After all, my vet had not only recovered from MRSA but restored Helen Keller and Ray Charles's vision, which our regular vet had given up on, so obviously he was a genius. (I did, however, in the interests of marital harmony not take in any more kittens and agreed to take a break after Helen and Ray, whom I felt should be grandfathered in. Helen and Ray are scheduled to be turned in to the shelter for adoption this Tuesday).

In any event, we were fast becoming experts on staph infections. We'd read a lengthy article in the New Yorker about drug-resistant infections; we'd discussed staph with various doctors; the Sober Husband and Iris Uber Alles had lived through staph infections. So recognizing Lucy's spot as a staph infection seemed rather unnewsworthy to me. I arranged for the Sober Husband to take Lucy to the pediatrician the next day, as he would be better able to explain which medications he'd taken.

After the appointment, I was shocked to hear that he'd authorized having a culture taken from poor Lucy's leg, and he described the pediatrician as being very aggressive in draining the wound, (Lucy was unable to bring herself to describe this other than to say that it was the worst pain she'd ever experienced).

"But I was just channeling you," he said defensively. "I was thinking about how you wanted me to have mine excised."

"But that was YOU, not Lucy. Poor Lucy."

The next morning I kept Lucy home from school on the basis that she'd had a slight fever the day before and that I didn't know the school's position on staph. The Sober Husband disagreed with me strongly. "Look at her, she's fine." He wanted to take her to school and go in to inquire about the policy and then bring her home only if she were not allowed. Lucy, who is not yet adjusted to kindergarten, panicked at hearing that. "No, MOMMY'S IDEA!! MOMMY'S IDEA!"

I called the school and told the receptionist that Lucy was home with a staph infection and that I felt the school should be informed. Later that morning I got a rather dramatic call from one of the school's administrators, who told me that she'd spoken to the parent who, as a doctor, advised the school on health issues. "That parent says this could be MRSA and we need to start treating all the kindergarten children immediately." The woman was obviously frazzled. "What is it? Can you prove it isn't MRSA?"

I pointed out that as Lucy's culture had been taken at 4:00 PM the prior day, I couldn't prove a thing. I was left with the distinct feeling that my child had become a leper. Indeed, the school appeared to go through considerable agita before issuing a cautious statement to the parents later in the day. I went through a volte-face, becoming retrospectively grateful that the Sober Husband had consented to the culture.

I called the Sober Husband to vent, but he blamed me. "You shouldn't have called the school. You should have kept your mouth shut. How do we even know it's staph anyway, before we have the culture? No one said it was staph."

"We KNOW it's staph," I said. "And we have a DUTY to the other parents to inform them."

Once again he was a thoroughly unsatisfying conversational partner. A friend who is actually a teacher did better, remarking incredulously, "What a bunch of drama queens!" and reassuringly, "Of course you had to call and tell them."

Then it was time for another volte-face, as the pediatrician took time to phone us on Sunday afternoon to inform us that Lucy has MRSA. Lucy's school had, in retrospect, not been unduly alarmist. But! In the pediatrician's expert opinion, Lucy was ready to go back to school. "So long as she has a bandaid on, it's fine. MRSA responds to the antibiotic she is taking." Lucy's fever had gone away, her lesion had shrunk immensely, and she was extremely energetic. It was hard to think of her as a MRSA victim.

Lucy wanted to see what a staph bug looked like. An internet search on staph yielded hit after hit with scary headlines about "killer infections" and "deadly skin disease." I couldn't stand to read more than a few.

The pediatrician's cheery opinion notwithstanding, I don't have the nerve to take Little Leprous Lucy back to kindergarten before the school gives its consent. Given that there was such alarm before at the mere possibility of MRSA, now that there is an actual MRSA diagnosis, I quail to think of the response.

Of course with any trouble, there is someone with schadenfreude, and that person is nine year-old Iris Uber Alles. Iris is positively giddy over Lucy's troubles (although quite angry that Lucy was allowed to stay home from school and spend a quiet day with Mommy). I had a quiet conversation with the Sober Husband about Lucy's infection while Iris basked in a tub behind closed doors. "And I just KNOW Iris is going to run around saying, 'Lucy has MRSA! Lucy has MRSA!' so happily." I paused. "And I know she's listening. Hass, are you listening?"

"Yes," came a muted voice from behind doors.

It's become clear over the past few days that Iris has bizarrely acute hearing. Once I was whispering to Lucy, herself a child with especially good hearing, in the kitchen, and Iris shouted from across the house, "I CAN HEAR YOU!" I was frankly astonished and incredulous until she repeated the text of my whisper (which had been about the fact that Iris was unusually crabby and Lucy should avoid being in the same room with her for some time). "Iris, you can hear THAT? That's just wrong. It's superhuman."

It had already been established that Iris had freakishly good eyesight. Earlier in her life Iris lusted for glasses, given that a friend of hers and her mother wear them. She complained and complained about needingn glasses until I took her to have her eyes tested, where we learned that her vision was far better than 20-20. "If anyone asks," said the cheery opthalmologist, "You can tell them you have the closest thing to x-ray vision there is!"

Additionally, Iris's birth proved a special point, that the Sober Husband -- and Iris herself-- are mutants. The Sober Husband has one strange ankle, where the little bone bump present on most ankles is doubled, with one above the other. This was always considered to be a mere bone spur, of no particular interest, until Iris was born with the same double ankle on the same side. As Iris's pediatrician admitted, this shows that it's a genetic mutation she inherited from her father. Iris is quite rightfully proud of her mutant nature, to which I've taken to ascribing her freakishly good hearing and vision. "Use your powers for good, not evil!" I exhort her regularly, which only seems to set her to pondering how best one could use super hearing for evil.

My poor little leper and my mischievous mutant, what will become of them? And who will prevail in their mighty battles? And will the valiant Lucy be allowed back to kindergarten?

for shame, Harry's Bar of San Francisco

This weekend I took nine year-old Iris Uber Alles to hear Neil Gaiman read from his latest children's book (she was the only child we saw in the audience, which was composed primarily of obese people with lovely manners, dressed in black, on dates). Afterwards we strolled through Japantown, admiring Japanese kitsch, envying majestic stone Buddhas, and fingering fabrics. Iris was tired and hungry, and rather than setting out for home, wanted to eat first. We were also eager to start reading our signed copies of "The Graveyard Book.

It was the end of a long day for Iris; we'd held a joint birthday party for her and just-turned-six Lucy that day and she'd sat still for two and a half hours of the Gaiman extravaganza (Neil G. read out loud for a solid hour in a mellifluous baritone; we saw scenes from the upcoming "Coraline" film; he took questions -- questions causing him to wonder for the sanity of his San Francisco readers). I thought it wasn't the moment to brave the authentic Japanese restaurants of Japantown, so we turned up Fillmore Street in search of child-friendly comfort food. We stopped at "Harry's Bar of San Francisco", which, although it claims to be affiliated with the Harry's Bar of Venice, is in fact a restaurant which serves low-brow food. I checked the menu, which included macaroni and cheese, veggie burgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches. We went in, following a couple with a toddler, and sat down away from the bar.

We were relaxing, and Iris was reaching for her book, eager to start it, when someone pulled the menus brusquely out of my hand, confiscating them. In a foreign accent which was from a continent far from Italy, the manager said abruptly, "This is a bar. There are no children here" and then bustled off to evict the family with toddlers. I was rather shocked at his rude delivery. I would have left quietly if he'd spoken kindly to us, perhaps said he was sorry. I stood by our table and showed him the menu, saying that as an attorney, I was familiar with the California laws and that it was legal for children to be in here because it was a restaurant, not a bar. The manager said dismissively, "This is a bar, not a restaurant."

I held out the extensive menu, which ran to more than one page, saying "You serve food, you have a long menu, this is a restaurant and he cut me off. "We have a bar menu" he began, ranting on at me and raising his voice. At this point, my hackles were well up, and I demanded an apology. His went up as well. Iris slipped her hand nervously in mine as the man shouted at me. I demanded he apologize to me before we leave, and he threatened to call the police. I pointed out that all he had to do was apologize for us to leave, and he shouted for a while about calling the police. At some point he realized that apologizing would get rid of me, and he managed to say he was sorry while making it abundantly clear, in tone, gesture, and rolled eye that he didn't mean it in the least. We left.

I explained to Iris how angry I was that she was being discriminated against for her age. Iris is a quiet, well-behaved child who had intended only to eat a sandwich and read her new book. The place in question was not an upscale or quiet place where children would have been inappropriate. We walked up the hill to a crepes restaurant, ate, our moods darkened by the Harry's incident, and went home.

Later, after the children had gone to bed and I was doing a special favor for the Sober Husband, the sort of favor wives sometimes do for husbands, my mind clicked through the Harry's event and then seized upon the telling point. When I was free to speak, I said, "I was right! They have outdoor seating at Harry's bar, and that makes me right! Only restaurants have outdoor tables in San Francisco." The Sober Husband, in that sort of daze which precludes one from following reasoning, mumbled, "You were right, honey."

I bounced up and ran a search online. I soon determined that I was RIGHTRIGHTRIGHT and that only restaurants and cafes are allowed permits for sidewalk seating in San Francisco. Bars are not eligible (no one wants a lot of drunks out in the open, sprawling on the sidewalks). "Harry's Bar is legally a restaurant," I said. "The hypocrites, saying they're a restaurant to get outside tables and saying they're a bar to throw Iris out."

"You should write a letter, " said the Sober Husband amiably and drowsily as he settled off to sleep.

The irony is that Iris has been to the real Harry's Bar, in Venice, which is nothing like the restaurant here appropriating its name. The true Harry's Bar is a small, upscale place with starched white tableclothes and highly professional waiters, who doted upon little Iris, bringing her treats and kneeling down to address her on her own level. "Che bella", they murmured as they gave her free snacks from polished trays.

Lucy vs. Monty Python

The Sober Husband is the only one of us who is enamored of Monty Python. Today in the car he said, smiling, "On Monty Python there was this skit where there was this guy named 'Mr. Smokestoomuch', and he went to a clinic, and there was all kinds of confusion. He introduced himself, 'Hello, my name is Mr. Smokestoomuch," and the guy there thought that was funny, so he said, 'I guess you should cut back', and Mr. Smokestoomuch didn't get it. He'd never heard that joke before."

Silence followed this.

"You don't think that's funny? Carole, that's not funny?"

More silence.

"That is funny. I am informing you that that is funny!"

Six year-old Lucy snapped back, "That is not funny, and it never will be funny," with an air of great authority. I laughed.

"Lucy is funnier than Monty Python," I observed. The Sober Husband didn't even try to argue.

a rough transition

Lucy started kindergarten this year. I was expecting this to go smoothly. Lucy was a scarily independent toddler, and she had no separation anxieties going to part-time preschool (although it was a parent-participation school, so I worked a regular shift, and there were always scores of parents about). Also, she was very familiar with her new school, having been there hundreds of times over the three years Iris has been there. Her big sister, Iris, on the contrary had an epic separation anxiety about preschool but skipped all the way to kindergarten her first day, taking to the school like a wild animal finally released into its natural habitat.

The reality is that here we are in October, and Lucy's still miserable. She's crying at school nearly every day, and she's fearful and unhappy.

Mind you, the school is as close to ideal as imaginable. Lucy and Iris are lucky to attend a delightful all-girls private school on a beautiful campus. Lucy's class has fourteen girls and two gentle, kind full-time teachers each day. There is a playground for the kindergarten and first grade girls' use only, a fabulous art program, funny phys ed teachers who get the girls to run around screeching in a most satisfying manner, etc... Everyone makes an effort to put the kindergarteners at ease, from our new head of school, who already knows Lucy's name, to our receptionist, who shook Lucy's hand and asked her to come to her with any questions. But still, Lucy is unhappy in a way which seems deep and unable to be comforted.

I thought things would be fine once Lucy made friends, and despite her unhappiness, she has already made some. However, she pines for me, and she cries often. Once she saw a woman wearing a denim jacket like mine in the library, and that set her off. Another time Iris told me that another girl had seen Lucy crying in the lunchroom (Lucy herself doesn't report her crying; I learn about it from her teacher), and in discussing that with Lucy, I learned that Lucy finds lunch to be noisy and scary (we had noticed that she ate very lightly). Lucy has bonded with her teacher, and that comforts her, but still she is so unhappy.

Lucy's teacher and I have figured out that part of the problem is that Lucy is very sensitive to noise. Lucy has always been upset by loud noises, preferring not to go to the movies. The one time I took her to a parent-child nightclub event, she was miserable and had to leave. It's common for Lucy to tell me to turn down music, complain of getting a headache from noise, or cover her ears in protest. The school, with its hundreds of girls, can be a very noisy place, much noisier than the tiny preschool programs Lucy attended or her home, and there's not a lot that can be done about that.

We had originally intended for Lucy to play after school in the aftercare program until Iris's class was dismissed an hour later, but that hasn't gone well. I now pick up Lucy when her day lets out, and we mill about near the school for an hour until we can retrieve Iris. (We've become regulars at a nearby cafe, which is not good for my healthy eating regimen, as the coffee is abysmal there but the pastries are excellent). We're also leaving early so we can park and walk Lucy to her classroom, as she finds it intimidating to walk through the craziness before classes (the girls are supervised as they play outdoors in the central part of the school before the bell rings at 8:30, and it is a supervised madhouse, with manic girls in green jumpers darting about screeching).

If Lucy were in a crappy school, I'd start thinking about a timeline for pulling her out if she were still unhappy, and I'd be considering alternatives. But it's not; it's an excellent school. Even with her unhappiness, Lucy is already learning. One day she came home and told me that the pupil is a hole in the eye which lets light and air go in and that the iris is a muscle. Another day she informed me that Kandinsky was a Dutch painter who used to paint realistically but "he decided that was boring, so he broke the rules" and started painting first mazes and then just lines. "Horizontal AND vertical lines. Two kinds," she stressed over and over. Later I saw her draw an elaborate frame, which she filled in slowly with a variety of horizontal and vertical lines.

I think Lucy has to work through this problem by herself. I can't fix this for her; I can't soften it or take it away. But she's only just-turned-six, she's still a funny little child, and it's heartbreaking to see her so persistently unhappy. As a parent I try to help my children solve problems, but there's not much I can do to help Lucy with this. She has to do it herself. It's agonizing for me not to be able to make this situation comfortable for her.

a furry friend

The Sober Husband came in from driving the children to school to have a cup of coffee before work.

"While you were gone, I carried Frowst around and showed him things," I shared. (Frowsty, our most glamorous cat, enjoys being cradled in a person's arms like a baby, and he has plenty of curiosity about the world above his range of sight. Iris and I sometimes lift him up very high to show him the top shelves).

The Sober Husband considered this report. "You need another baby."