the more things change

I just finished reading "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" by Daniel Okrent, a meticulously researched and sprightly written history. I learned so much from this book (did you know the Founding Fathers were sots? Jefferson, Washington and the rest drank like fishes. Did you know the oh-so-Puritan Pilgrims drank heavily and brought more alcohol on the Mayflower than water?).

But what struck me the most was how, due to a lack of education, I have been misperceiving American politics. I went to school in a very rural school district, where our "social studies" education covered the same limited ground every single year. Every September we opened a new social studies text and started reading about the Pilgrims, and every June we stopped midway through the book at Reconstruction. Never, never, never did I hear a word about either World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, or even suffrage or Prohibition. None of those topics were ever raised. I often think of my own education when I hear other countries criticized for what they leave out of their education (I have repeatedly heard Japan harshly ripped for failing to teach its children about the wartime excesses committed in China, but meanwhile in my American school we never studied how we dropped not one but two atomic bombs on Japan).

Anyhow, beyond learning how closely suffrage and Prohibition were linked (I had no clue that the great suffragettes were Prohibitionists and indeed some of them turned to suffrage after being rejected, on the basis of their gender, from the Prohibition movement), I was most spellbound by how much the politics of that age reminded me of current times. I have for some time been deeply concerned that politics have become too religious and that the far right is moving into new territory, injecting religious doctrine into textbooks (and again I note about my own childhood: the word "evolution" was never spoken in my school. We never learned a thing about it), making "family values" a fetish. It turns out that there is no new thing under the sun. American politics were just like that back in the 1910s and 1920s. Schoolbooks contained horrible, morality-based, science-be-damned falsehoods about alcohol, such as the "fact" that a single sip of alcohol tears flesh off a drinker's throat and that all habitual beer drinkers die of "dropsy." Religion and arguments about the family, the poor, beleaguered, threatened American family monopolized public discourse. It was all so very, very familiar.

I feel considerably educated now about an era of time I knew so little about, and I feel reassured, in an odd way. Our current "culture wars" are nothing new. As a nation, we've bungled and bumbled through much the same thing already.

anonymous children, saying unattributable things

Today the children and I were hanging out on our deck, enjoying a rare warm San Francisco day. A child, who wishes to be anonymous for this, asked the other child in all seriousness, "What is the best way to sit in these chairs without hurting your butt and having your feet on the ground?"

I couldn't resist teasing her. "Seriously? You have to ask how to sit in a chair? Do you think, 'Hey, SHE looks like she's good at dealing with these flat surfaces on four legs; I better ask for advice!' It's that hard?" The child was offended by this and attempted to explain why these chairs, perfectly normal chairs, are so much harder to sit in than other chairs. The explanations seemed lamer than the original question, and soon I had laughed so much that I was in tears. This caused the affronted child to draw herself up. "Momdude! You are not very supportive!"

Later we were discussing the children's afternoon art class, wondering what the theme would be. Another child, similarly one who prefers a lack of attribution, said direly, "I bet it's medical-dental week. You know, drawing doctors, dentists, offices, medical things." This child put her head in her hands and sighed sadly. "I hate doctors and dentists."

"What?" I said. Usually the theme is something like "mermaids" or "fluffy animals."

"I read it in the brochure," the child said. "Medical-dental week!" Then, after a moment, the child relented. "Okay, I lied."

what I read on my vacation this year

Spending a week in the wholesome fresh air of the Sierras, with no internet connection, a person can have a lot of time on her hands. This year I decided to do my "guilt reading", and I hauled along the books I've been meaning to read but never get around to opening, plus books from two of my all time favorite authors (Jonathan Coe and Jon Ronson), which I couldn't resist treating myself to.

"The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (Riverhead Books 2011): I love Jon Ronson more than just about any other nonfiction writer (and I was a fan long before George Clooney made "The Men Who Stare At Goats" into a movie), and this is his best book yet. You should all rush out and pick up a copy. Ronson became interested in madness after he was asked to solve the real-life mystery of who was sending cryptic yet expensively printed books to random professors. Ronson visits a man locked up potentially for life after being diagnosed as a psychopath, spends time at L. Ron Hubbard's English country estate with psychology-bashing Scientologists, interviews hippie psychologists who held naked encounter groups for mass murderers in a Canadian prison, and becomes so obsessed with the idea of finding psychopaths that he starts diagnosing his friends and acquaintances. Highly thought-provoking, educational, and extremely witty.

"Opium Season: A Year On The Afghan Frontier" by Joel Hafvenstein (Lyon Press 2007): It took a while for me to get into this dry book by a well-intentioned, energetic fellow who worked for an aid agency tasked with getting Afghanis to stop growing opium poppies, but I was so glad I kept reading. Soon I couldn't stand to put the book down and was thoroughly frustrated that no one around me was also reading it and could discuss it with me. I wish I could command Pres. Obama and the entire Congress to read this book. Hafvenstein explains the difficulties of working in Afghanistan better than anyone else, with the customs, terrain, history, tribal rivalries, etc... His book illustrates so vividly, among other things, the age-old problem that people on the ground -- actually doing the work in war zones -- know better what is going on than those who command them from air-conditioned offices on the other side of the world. Hafvenstein and his colleagues refused to work in a particular town and developed a huge mistrust of that town's tribal elders, but were overruled and sternly scolded by their superiors. The results were heartbreaking and predictable, with several aid workers being killed by Taliban with the obvious collusion of the mistrusted elders. He also explains so clearly why farmers insist upon growing opium poppies: the gum is resilient and easily transported (as opposed to, say, tomatoes, which a farmer laments get shaken to bits in a truck traveling for hours over unpaved mountain roads), the traffickers will finance a crop (who pays ahead of time for carrot-growing?), the crop is easily gathered (as opposed to, say, strawberries, which are backbreaking to harvest). Afghanistan is a big problem, but Hafvenstein has a lot of ideas about what could be done (such as prioritizing training professional police, which he convincingly shows is an ignored yet crucial problem).

"Ritual" by Mo Hayder (Atlantic Monthly Press 2008): I just recently discovered Mo Hayder, and I can't believe I hadn't before found her tightly written crime fiction with its real and engrossing characters. In "Ritual", African traditional medicine practiced by immigrants seems inscrutable to the British police, who find a severed hand which, to their dismay and disbelief, was used to bring good luck to a restaurant. Strongly recommended.

"Long Drive Home" by Will Allison (Free Press 2011): This was the first disappointment of my vacation reading. This book has been so well-reviewed and so lauded, and I'm a sucker for its particular genre, the "one-bad-day-caused-my-whole-life-to-fall-apart" novel. So I got this for myself as a special treat, and then I hated it. SPOILER ALERT: The plot was not believable to me Really? A detective will devote his life and energy to prosecuting someone with no prior record for the murder of a teenager who drove into a tree while over twice the legal blood alcohol limit and talking on a cellphone at the very moment of the crash? And a loving, happy, devoted wife will divorce her husband, the father of her child, the moment he gets into a car accident to protect herself from liability, because her lawyer father raised her to be cautious? I AM a lawyer, and I think that's ridiculous. Aside from the issues I had with the plot and the characters, this book also pissed me off for being too short to be a hardback. (I fully realize that here I sound like the fussy eater from jokes: "the food was so bad, and there wasn't enough of it"). A waste of time and money.

"The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim" by Jonathan Coe (Alfred A. Knopf 2010): Jonathan Coe is a genius, and this isn't one of his finest books, but it's an enjoyable read if you can let go of your sorrow that he'll probably never again write anything so perfect, so unforgettably flawless as "The House of Sleep" or "The Rotters' Club" or "The Winshaw Legacy." Coe's protagonist is a deeply depressed toy salesman/customer service representative who mulls over his divorce, his estranged relationship with his father, and his growing obsession with a man who faked sailing around the world.

"Lit" by Mary Karr (Harper Collins 2009): the third memoir from the well-celebrated author of "The Liars' Club." This is no "Liars' Club", but I guess there is an unsatiable demand for memoirs from Mary Karr. Here she writes about her alcoholism, a stay in a mental hospital, her unsuccessful marriage, and her conversion to Catholicism. I enjoyed the first half of this book but got really irked and frustrated by the end. Her account of the failure of her marriage was so one-sided that I longed, longed for some objectivity. In particular Karr lost my sympathy when she refers grandiosely to "remembering the day of my suicide." What suicide?? All she did was buy a freaking hose and have a drama queen freakout on the phone to a friend about how she intended to hook up the hose to the exhaust pipe of her car. That is not a suicide. That's not even full-on suicidal ideation. Anyhow, I will always love Mary Karr for "The Liars' Club" (one of the most moving and powerful memoirs ever written), but this book was irritating. Unfortunately I can't even sell my signed first edition because Lola knocked my glass of red wine over it. Sadly I think my own cold, workaholic ex-husband (I'll take on Mary Karr in a Battle of The Standoffish, Selfish, Emotionally Withholding Ex-Husbands any day) took my copy of "The Liars' Club" when he moved out.

"Serpent Box" by Vincent Carrella (Harper 2008): I usually hate fiction set in the Appalachians which indulges in folksy writing, elegizing old women who know "medicine plants", and endless yammering about the Bible, but somehow Carrella sucked me in for all 455 pages. I should have hated this book: it kept telling the same story over and over again of how a pregnant woman is caught out in a thunderstorm and crawls into a gap in the trunk of a hanging tree to give birth, including from the point of view of someone who wasn't even there. And then there was the flowery, overly-stylized country writing. I can't believe I finished a book containing such sentences as "She did not know that autumn's first snowfall ripens that part of a woman where the lifeseed will catch, or that the wandering spirit of a true love will seek out the first child of spring." But yet somehow I was hooked, hanging in there for all those 455 pages. This is undoubtedly the best novel in the "deformed Appalachian child whose ambition in life is to be a snake handler" genre.

Camp Mather this year

Because the Sober Husband had workish commitments, I ended up taking the children to Camp Mather alone. The Sober Husband had helped us pack the day before, and frankly that turned out to be a mistake. By the time he left for his own trip in the afternoon, we'd been working for hours at packing, and it felt really wrong not to be leaving ourselves. We drifted about for the rest of the afternoon, disaffected and out of sorts, finally wandering down to the Spaghetti Factory for some pasta.

On Saturday we had only our last minute cleaning to do. Because I use the world's most professional petsitter, one who worries greatly about my poor mangy cat Al and about my parrots' nutrition ("Most people have me cut up fruit for their parrots." "Umm, my parrots hate fruit"), I have to try to hide my shame. I had both girls restrain poor Albert while I throughly groomed him, and I tried to give the parrots' cages an extra good scrubbing. I made sure to put out the parrots' calcium supplement very prominently, sort of a Potemkin Village of avian nutrition.

We hit the road with our car loaded so heavily that there would have been no room for the Sober Husband. "I thought we weren't bringing more than last year, but we must have," I said. The car was so densely packed with things that I couldn't extricate the Harry Potter tapes I'd planned to play on the road. We stopped at a supermarket for some snacks for the road ("We can't get too much, "I cautioned. I don't know where you're going to put it"). At the store, I realized I had forgotten my checkbook, and I always pay by check for the children's riding sorties. I drove back home. My beloved next door neighbor, whom we'd cheerily bid farewell earlier, laughed at me. "Didja miss me?" he called.

I ran into the house and quickly got both some checks and a different set of Harry Potter tapes and spent a few minutes giving Frowst, our most glamourous cat, some belly rubs. "I hope you don't see us again," I called to the neighbor. This time we really were on the road.

We made record time driving up to the Sierras. "See how much faster it is when Mommy drives," I gloated. Ahead of time I had cautioned the children that since they were traveling with only one grownup who had no sane adult backup, it was very important that they not plague me with cries of "how much longer" and "how far are we", as is their custom. With unbelievable self-control, only once were the syllables "how much" heard, and the child who spoke them bit them off before uttering "longer" and quickly changed the subject. I was never so proud.

With the Drunken Housewife at the wheel, we were able to stop for lunch. (The Sober Husband, for mysterious reasons of his own, is bitterly, solidly opposed to ever stopping at any restaurant while driving between any Point A and Point B, regardless of how far apart those points are or how whiny the children may be).

Up at Camp Mather the children rose to the occasion and helped me unpack the crammed car and set up our cabin. I was initially a bit dismayed to see our cabin. The last couple of years, we've had really plum locations, cabins with plenty of space and pleasing views. This cabin was jammed check-to jowl with other cabins, and the picnic table from our neighbors' cabin was right up by our tiny front porch. I recognized the neighbors, who were grimly playing cards on that picnic table abutting our cabin. It was a large family who have often been at Camp Mather the same week as us, a multi-generation family which is given to lots of shouting at the children. I quailed. “It's going to be SO NOISY,” I whispered to Iris. “Listen, that woman has SUCH A LOUD VOICE.”

This reaction made me feel horrible about myself and guilty. A better person, a warmer, friendlier, kinder person, would have been happy to see these familiar faces. After all, every time I'd ever interacted with that family, they had been polite and friendly. Only a bitter hag wouldn't welcome being next to a large and exuberant clan. [And of course my higher self was right: these people were delightful neighbors. I'd love to be next to them again].

We decided to move our picnic table behind our cabin, which would hopefully be quieter, and create a hangout zone there. I hung up our two hammocks by the picnic table, and Iris helped me figure out how to set up our bug tent, which was tricky. We moved the furniture around in our tiny cabin and unpacked all our things, organizing everything as we went.

And then we were done. “Look! We got everything done faster without Daddy!” It was amazing. “I want you to be sure to tell Daddy that Mommy got you here faster alone and got our camp set up faster alone."

We tried out the hammocks. The children swung in reclining ecstasy. Then we were off to dinner and the welcoming bonfire.

At night we heard the unmistakable sound of bears poking around the outside of our cabin. We were home here, all right.

The next day the children swam a lot and ate a lot. I read and enjoyed the hammock, as well as watching the children. We called their father collect from the little payphone by the office, and it turned out that he'd been worried we'd gotten into an accident. “We got here in record time! And we had a really great lunch in Oakdale on the way. I found a great Mexican restaurant, “ I bragged.

The mother in the cabin behind us (not the big, noisy family beside us, but another, less friendly neighbor) had a meltdown of sorts in the evening. “You will find me much more accommodating after I've had a gin and tonic,” she said repeatedly to the many small children surging around her. Her language grew plainer and plainer, until she sent them all away and forbade them to approach her until she'd had at least one gin and tonic. Over her gin, she fretted to her husband about how they'd manage their cocktail hour the next day. Evidently they had planned a daytrip, and the woman was really tightly wound over how she'd manage to fit in her drinking. “Should we bring the stuff for cocktails with us? Can we do that? What time will we get back?”

“And your father thinks I drink too much, “ I whispered to Iris. “Get a load of that woman!”

On Monday the Sober Husband was due to arrive, riding up with the father of one of Iris's friends who were coincidentally also at Camp Mather that week. All morning the children were on edge, waiting for their father. The other family's wife told me that she “wondered if they were going to stop at our favorite thriftstore on the way up. Chainsaw and I got three bags of stuff there on the way. We always stop.” She predicted her husband would be excited to show this thriftstore to the Sober Husband.

I said to Iris later, “I can't imagine them thrifting.” I thought it was more likely they'd stop for ribs on the way up, before the Sober Husband was reunited with his vegetarian family. As it turned out, they had only stopped for gas. The other husband drives slowly, like an old person or my husband, and doesn't like to stop for lunch or snacks, also like my husband. “You're my husband's driving soulmate,” I said to our friend. “He's much better off driving with you than me.”

Having their father back made the children lose their industrious, uncomplaining attitudes. Soon they were lolling on the hammocks and calling for their father to bring them chocolate milk. These were the same children who had taken turns being a self-proclaimed “Service Robot” and laboring for the good of the group. I suggested to the Sober Husband that he was influencing the children to be lazy and poorly behaved, but he instead took credit for their prior good behavior. “They did that stuff because I told them to. I told them to be good on the drive and help Mommy.”

The reintroduction of the Sober Husband brought up another age-old source of conflict: waiting in line at the dining hall. The days he wasn't with us, Iris and I waited patiently in line for each meal. “We are linefolk,” observed Iris. We allowed Lolz to read her book nearby as long as she kept an eye on us and joined us when we got to the front of the line (there is a tall rock near the dining hall where last year Lola had the best reading experience of her life, “The School of Fear”, and she was determined to recapture that magic). But the Sober Husband thinks lines are for idiots, for sheeplike people. On one morning I chose to skip breakfast in favor of a quiet cup of coffee outdoors alone, only to have Iris storm up in a state of outrage. “Daddy won't wait in line! He says that if we wait long enough, there will be this magical time when there isn't any line but they're still serving food! And Lola just ran off!”

I advised Iris, “Ignore them. Just get in line and get your own breakfast. Let them do what they want.” Iris trudged back, still in a rage.

Later the Sober Husband tried to make up for this. He pandered to Iris by getting into line before lunch began, so the children were practically the first ones in. “See how good I am?” he pointed out.

“We waited in lines every day before you got here!” Iris and I informed him. “And we didn't brag about it!”

no internet, only quality time, first with children and now with Al

Last week was our annual week up at Camp Mather, the rustic retreat run by SF Rec & Parks. For one week we have no internet and no cellphone, and we spend our days swimming, playing board games, waiting in lines for meals, reading in hammocks, and interacting with one another.

Afterwards we have a passionate reunion with the internet and our pets. Henry and Frowst were especially glad to see us, but Al, my weird skinny freaky cat who normally spends his whole live sitting on my chest and shedding, was standoffish for a couple of days. Al has a special relationship with Rhonda the professional petsitter, while I think Frowst doesn't let her touch him at all. After a few days of not going near me, pining for Rhonda, Al is now back to spending every possible minute sitting right on top of me.

Rhonda falls into that small category of people, people who are not repulsed by poor dimwitted, literally drooling Al and who imagine that if he were their cat, they would transform him into a sleek orange beauty. (The Sober Husband has suggested that I pawn Al off on the next person I meet in that tiny category, saying to them, "Why don't you give it a try?"). Al was found covered with oil in a commercial garage as a kitten, and his only sibling didn't survive. He has never weighed more than five pounds and usually weighs in around four, a skeleton covered in cheerful orange fur.

Many of his problems come from one underlying issue: Al is allergic to plaque, the bacteria that form on teeth, and as a result, he has a sensitive mouth and drools. This may be why, unlike most cats, he does not groom himself, but he did manage to clean himself for the first year or two of life before giving it up as a bad job. I have to cut the mats off him, brush him, and clip off soiled fur, which he hates (once he bit me on the arm when I was grooming him). His health is a lot better since we paid a huge sum of money to have almost all of his teeth removed (keeping only the front teeth so he can defend himself if necessary). Before that, he regularly became very ill and had low energy, but he's been perky ever since he recovered from that surgery.

There are other weirdnesses about him, though. For instance, he can't wear a collar because, unlike every other cat in the world, a plain, non-flea collar will cause his fur to fall out. Due to his extreme skinniness, I used to fear people would mistake him for a stray, and so I kept a loose collar on him. Even though this was a very loose collar, he lost the fur on his neck, and although it's been over a year since I gave up the collar, he still has a wide naked ring of pink flesh around his neck where no fur will grow.

He also has oddly waxy ears. I used to mistake this peculiar condition for ear mites and haul him down to the vet, but it never is ear mites, even though it looks just like it. Often I have both children pin the poor orange freak down so I can clean out his ears (it's especially important to do that before anyone comes by who will think I neglect him and don't take care of ear mites).

Al is also like sugar to fleas. Even though he virtually never goes outside (he only ventures out on the few truly hot days a year; he's too thin to be comfortable outdoors), he all-too-regularly gets fleas. The other cats almost never get a flea, but Al is infested every few weeks. How? How? How? I put those once-a-month flea death drops on him regularly, but they don't last an entire month on poor Al. I worry about the dosage given how thin he is, but we can't have fleas. I tried rolling him like a biscuit in nontoxic diatomaceous earth for a while, but it's such a nuisance.

Despite his skinniness, he's the worst moocher. He often manages to steal food from the children (you'd think he'd put on some weight), as no one wants to eat anything which has been touched by the drooling orange skeleton.

He also is the only one of our cats who pees out of the litterbox. When we have extra cats here, I put up extra litterboxes, and Al seems to believe that this means that wherever a litterbox has been, he is authorized to pee for life. There are two spots upstairs where he routinely pees, though even an idiot cat should be able to see there's no box there. (So why don't I just permanently keep boxes there? I would, but the Sober Husband strongly objects. He wants as few litterboxes as possible in the house, in as few rooms as possible).

So what does Al have to offer? He loves people, far too much. As I write this, he's purring on my chest. He spends as much time as he can sitting directly on me or a child or a favored visitor. His affection is so vast that it's annoying. I get so tired of having him on me, and I'll try to pawn him off on a child, but they never want him sitting on them due to the drooling and spattering (Al often whips his head around to clear up his drool, and this results in some spraying of whoever he's sitting on).

Sometimes, though, Al takes a strong dislike to someone. One year we had a housesitter, a friend-of-a-friend, whom Al disliked so much that he moved into the backyard and lived out there like a stray for a few months, refusing to enter the house for weeks after a sensible cat would have realized that the feared housesitter was long gone. After I finally lured him back into the house, he followed me around like a skinny shadow.

Even though the children don't want Al touching them, they profess a huge love for him. Recently there was some thought by the grownups about whether we should get rid of this poor dumb animal due to the peeing-where-once-a-litterbox-stood problem, and the children were appalled. "We love Albert! You can't get rid of Albert! We don't care if he pees in our room." Their protests were so strong that we gave up any thought of rehoming Al (and honestly I can't imagine who would realistically want to take him on).

The children's love has limits, though. Iris has taken to talking about how when she is old enough to move out, "I will take Frowst, and Henry, and Pigwidgeon." I protested: "But then I won't have any pets!" "I'll leave you the evil green bird and Al."

not smarter than lab rats

At the Maker Faire this year, I spotted a reasonable looking line. Meanwhile a nearby line for watching the "Battle Boats" was intimidatingly long. It turned out that the short line was for a sensory exploration environment housed in a truck. This sounded fun to me, but no one else wanted to wait in a line, even a short line. The day before the Sober Husband and Lola had spent over an hour and a half waiting in line so Lola could go into a "Space Treehouse" for kids. Lola still felt that the Space Treehouse was the best thing she'd done at the Maker Faire and worth the wait, but the impatient, line-hating Sober Husband (who was too large to go into the Space Treehouse) didn't want to spend one more minute waiting in any line.

I encouraged Iris to try the sensory exploration project, and I got into the line. Although the line was very short, it was a very long wait. The people in charge of this exhibit often walked along, silently holding up a sign which explained that the activity took five minutes per person and encouraging us to count the people ahead of us and calculate our waiting time accordingly. There was also something heavily crossed out on this sign. The delicate, pashmina-swathed woman holding the sign explained to someone that "this was a rule we had to have yesterday, but we don't need it today. It's a different population we're getting today." Intrigued, I asked. She rolled her eyes and laughed. "Yesterday we had a lot of people making out in the middle of the maze, so we had to make a rule: no making out for extended periods of time. Today we're not having that problem." We looked at the line together. It was all pre-making-out-aged kids and tired-looking, middle-aged parents. None of us in the line looked ready for a moment of passion. After she moved on with her sign, Iris and I turned to each other. "So it's a maze!"

While Iris and I waited and waited, the Sober Husband and Lola napped on a nearby patch of grass. They looked happy. Iris sometimes felt like quitting our line, but I encouraged her to stick it out. Ahead of us a young teen freaked out when it was her turn and came out without finishing the maze. She was really upset looking. "There was something by my foot, and I just couldn't handle it!"

The boy just before Iris bolted through the maze and came out in record time. I fully expected us to finish quickly as well. Iris went in ahead of me, after I asked if we could go in together. I thought we'd have more fun doing it together. The pashmina-wearer turned out to be the creator of this environment, and she recommended that we go in separately. "It's better to do it alone. We like to have someone get halfway through, then we let the next person in." Iris went in, and I waited. The creator shared a funny story with me. "My dad was here yesterday, and he couldn't solve my maze! He was in there so long. Finally I told him we needed to get him out, because it was taking too long and there were so many people waiting. He couldn't do my puzzle!"

Finally it was my turn to go in. She put a whistle around my neck so I could call for help if I freaked out. I climbed awkwardly up some boxes and slid down a short slide into complete darkness. I fumbled about, crawling and groping. After some time I found a sliding doorway, which I managed to open and crawl through. Around this time I heard Iris blow her whistle ahead of me. She shouted that she was stuck and couldn't get out. I didn't worry, because I knew from my conversation with the artist that people could be extricated midway through and because I heard a calm voice from one of the assistants (who was outside the maze, monitoring people's progress) reassuring Iris.

Then I became stuck. I could not figure out how to progress, but I stayed calm. It was completely dark where I was, and I concentrated on methodically fumbling in every direction. After a while, a voice asked me if I was okay. "I'm fine, just figuring it out." After a while longer, evidently I was judged incompetent to do this unaided, and the assistants turned on a lighted arrow showing me which way to go. What I had failed to figure out was that I needed to climb up and out of where I'd been crawling.

After I got out, I felt humiliated that they'd needed to turn the arrow on for me. Iris felt humiliated that she'd felt stuck and called for help. Humbled, we discussed our shortcomings together. "I really thought we'd be better at this," I said. "We are dumber than a pair of white rats in a lab." Iris agreed heartily. We took a moment to ponder our relative moronic-ness compared to the boy who went through just before us (whom we now considered a genius), as well as to lab rats. "Still, that was really great", we said. "Best thing we did today."

Squirrels of the ocean (by Iris)

Sharks are awesome. They are like squirrels of the ocean. Here is proof:



-Iris

a very different sort of child indeed

Yesterday I took eleven year-old Iris uber Alles on a special visit to the school she'll be attending next year. Iris has been deeply concerned over whether to continue Mandarin or switch to Japanese next year, and I got permission to take her down to sit in on some sixth grade language classes.

In the Mandarin class we visited, the kids told us why they had picked Chinese over the other languages. "I want to learn Chinese because there are so many particle physicists in China," one said.

I can't imagine a child at the girls' current school giving that answer. The closest would be one of Iris's friends, who picked French because so many clothing designers are French.

be careful what you wish for

Pigwidgeon the dimwitted African grey woke us up this morning, shouting her first words over and over again: "STEP UP STEP UP STEP UP STEP UP" as the sun rose.

so very very wrong

My dear, angelic-looking little Lola is a terrible influence on me. She's leading me straight to hell (which may be appropriate, as around the age of 5 she kept informing us that she was the devil).

Last night eleven year-old Iris uber Alles told me that one of her friends has insulting nicknames for her parents. Iris felt it would be funny to make up an insulting nickname for me as well and started trying different ones on for size. "Two can play at that game, Iris", I informed her. Pulling out all the cliches, I went on: "I wouldn't go down that road if I were you."

Iris was unmoved by that threat. In response to her insulting nicknames for her mother, as well as her failure to do her chore for the day (sweeping around the parrots' cages), I informed Iris that from thereon she would be referred to as "Crapchild", after "Betachild" failed to get enough of a rise out of her.

"Hey! That is not fair!" shouted Iris.

"Finish your chore, 'Crapchild," I said. Lola, having already done her own chore, basked in a sense of superiority, giggling nearby.

"Don't call me that!"

"I won't if you stop calling me things and if you do your chore," I said. Iris balked. I upped the ante: "I can think of worse names than 'Crapchild.'" Angelic babyfaced little Lola leaned in and whispered confidentially in my ear, in a lilting little voice, "Like 'Fuckchild'?"

I spat out my Vitamin Water.

"What? What?" an incensed Iris demanded. I shook my head at her. "I'm not going to repeat that," I said. I looked at sweet little Lola. "How can a cute little child like you say things like that? How do you even think of them?" Lola beamed proudly.

Iris glared at me even more fiercely after getting Lola to whisper the nickname into her own ear. I tried to defend myself. "It's not me, Iris! It's Lola! I didn't even say that." Fighting back, Iris tried calling Lola "Gammachild", but it failed miserably as Lola found it pleasing to the ear and failed to pick up on the more insulting implications. Iris's anger reached greater heights. Pandering, I offered, "Finish your chore, and I'll promote you to 'Sugarchild.'"

big progress

After years of disappointingly failing to learn to speak, our witless African grey has a phrase! Today she's been working hard, repeating over and over again in a hoarse, croaky voice, "la la la la" (which we are not counting as a word) and "step up" (which we are claiming as Piggle's First Phrase). This is as though a dog had learned to say "heel": "step up" is the basic parrot command, used when you want your parrot to stop doing whatever the hell it is doing and step onto your hand (or off your hand and onto a perch or another person).

"You must be so proud," said the Sober Husband after his skeptic nature had been overcome. He had assumed we were imagining this through wishful thinking until Piggle croaked "step up" intelligibly at him.

"I wouldn't say proud," I said judiciously. "I'm less ashamed."

"Step up! Step up! Good bird!" said Iris lovingly.

"You're breaking that as a command," the Sober Husband said chidingly. "It's not going to work any more."

"Yes, it will!" Iris and I shouted him down. He left the room quickly, saying on his way out, "Very proud."

Oprah! Oprah! Oprah!

I don't know why, but Iris uber Alles has been a passionate Oprah follower since she learned of Oprah's existence. Neither the Sober Husband nor I have any idea how she became so fixated on Oprah. To this day the Sober Husband has never watched an entire Oprah episode (Iris forced him to watch most of the episode about the dangers of using cellphones while driving and bullied him into signing Oprah's "No Phone Zone" pledge). Likewise I had never seen the Oprah show (I'm not much of a television watcher in general. It's extremely rare for me to voluntarily turn on a television). But somehow Iris became a fan.

In the second grade, Iris was supposed to make a painting in art class of an imaginary planet, and she created "the Oprah Planet", populated by Oprahs. This picture (and the pillow made with the same images) disturbed all of the white people who saw it in our house, inspiring guilt and shame in the white liberal heart. It begged the question: had the Sober Husband and I unwittingly raised our child in such a racist way that black people looked like space aliens to her? I wanted to tack up a disclaimer that we'd had African American families over to our house and that this was not my fault. Eventually we tactfully moved the painting, but not before I'd shamefully blurted out to people looking at it with an eyebrow raised, "I really tried to raise her in a multicultural environment."

But of course the adults' reactions and worries were all baseless. Iris didn't think Oprah looked like a space alien. She just loved Oprah. By the age of 10, Iris was using her own saved-up allowance to pay for a subscription to O magazine. She was hounding her parents to apply to be on the Oprah show (I have sent in applications for shows themed "my parents need a makeover", "worst dressed couples in America", "my dream is to meet a celebrity", etc.., etc... at Iris's behest, but somehow the producers have failed to select me as a candidate for revamping at Oprah's expense). On a visit to Chicago, her chief desire was to see the Harpo Studios, and she treasured the Oprah flipflops she bought at the gift shop. Her Chicago grandmother sent her Oprah sleepwear, which Iris wears nearly every evening (this grandmother, not an Oprah fan, asked me about Iris's obsession, saying "Where did she get this Oprah stuff from?").

Of course, nothing lasts forever. Back in the eighties I was crushed when the Talking Heads broke up, and so I feel I can relate to Iris's angst as the Oprah show ends this week. Today is the last new Oprah show's airing, and Iris is heartbroken.

Her only consolation is that Oprah herself is moving to our state, and Iris has been agitating for a roadtrip. Again though her parents are failing her. "Iris, I am NOT driving you down to LA to stalk Oprah," I said firmly, as I rejected a plan to spend vacation time lurking outside Ms. Winfrey's SoCal estate. Iris's lips thinned. Clearly if she could, she'd leave us all behind and go off to live the rest of her life with Oprah, "living her best life", as Oprah herself would say.

my motivation

Frankly I am sure that the world on the whole would be a happier place without me. The world has too many people as it is. My family of origin has never liked me (I was always told that they didn't want another child and that I was an unhappy mistake, and additionally I was told on many occasions as a child that everyone would be happier if I died in an accident. One parent went so far as to threaten on several occasions, "No jury would convict me if I killed you now"). Because I was thoroughly loathed by my very own family, I grew up as a result of that believing I must be loathsome by nature. Magically in my late teens and early twenties I morphed from despised child into a fine example of that particularly valued, welcome everywhere member of society, a Hot Chick, but those days are over. Now I'm a middle-aged former lawyer, not something anyone particularly thinks adds a lot of value, and no longer a femme fatale. On the bright side, no one is stalking me any more (my three former stalkers having presumably moved on to younger targets of freaky obsession). But! I feel like I'm holding the Sober Husband and children back: if they didn't have me, the Sober Husband (who is aging very well) could easily acquire a superior second wife who would fit in well at the children's private school, wouldn't bother everyone with her pesky vegetarianism and animal rights beliefs, and wouldn't fill the house up with messy, noisy rescue animals.

What keeps me going? This:

U.S. and Swedish investigators compared suicides, psychiatric hospitalizations and violent crime convictions over 30 years in more than 500,000 Swedish children, teens and young adults (under the age of 25) who lost a parent to suicide, illness or an accident, on one hand, and in nearly four million children, teens and young adults with living parents, on the other.

Those who lost a parent to suicide as children or teens were three times more likely to commit suicide than children and teenagers with living parents. However there was no difference in suicide risk when the researchers compared those 18 years and older. . . .

In addition, those who lost parents to suicide were nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized for depression as those with living parents. And those who lost parents to accidents or illness had 30 and 40 percent higher risk, respectively, for hospitalization.

Losing a parent, regardless of cause, increased a child’s risk of committing a violent crime, the researchers found.

My husband would arguably be better off without me, but not the children (and not my stupid parrot).

depressed again

When my parrot, Pigwidgeon, was lost, I sunk into a deep morass of depression. I felt like such an incompetent and horrible person for having lost my poor, witless little bird. Even though we got little Piggle back again, thanks to the kindness of a complete stranger who saw her, tired and hungry, on a busy street in the Mission, I haven't been able to climb out of that funk.

To add to that, I have three little foster kittens right now (named "Elvis", "Pumpernickel", and "Jubjub" by the children), who are endlessly messy and noisy. I got them from my rescue before they could walk, when they needed to be bottlefed, and as a result I have become their mother. That means that, like a real mother, I have to bathe them and clean up their horrifying messes and listen to their crying. The noise can be relentless: the kittens set off the parrots, who then shriek and shriek.

And the sounds the parrots make are irritating to no end. Piggle has recently added to her meows and horrible-child-snuffling-up-snot noises with a disturbing and realistic gulping sound, like an unmannered child sucking down a chocolate milk furiously as though a Nazi-like parent were posed to snatch away the cup. The green parrot shouts, "Anton! Lola! Anton! Lola!", the gray parrot makes noisy snuffling and gulping noises, and the kittens cry, and meanwhile a person is trying to serve a civilized meal of fettuccine with asparagus in blue cheese sauce. It's truly nerve-wracking, and there's no one to blame other than myself for acquiring these noisy, noisy animals.

Both of the children have been going through rough patches as well. Thankfully the Sober Husband has perked up. He spent the last year in a funk himself, but his new job has rejuvenated him. It's nice that someone around here has some energy, although he expends a lot of it on nagging. He seems to feel that a person in a depressive state can get nagged right out of it, and he's not above calling in reinforcements. Over the weekend I caught Iris staring at me in a judgmental way. "What? What are you looking at me like that for?" I asked. "Daddy thinks you need some nagging," was the artless reply.

being accepted as one is

Last week in my Warcraft raid, I was afraid I had offended the Canadian members of the raid team. The team sought to reassure me. "There's always a place in a raid for a drunk gamer girl," one said. The rest chimed in with strong agreement.

a memory

Iris and Lola love to reminisce about their toddlerhood, a magic time when there was no homework and no early mornings, just plenty of toys and their aged mother taking them to play with other children at their part-time preschools. Recently Iris unveiled an interesting memory.

"Once you came upstairs, and you said, 'Iris, I have good news for you,'" recalled Iris uber Alles. "I thought you got me a toucan for a pet! I was so excited! I thought I was going to go downstairs and see the toucan. Then you said, 'Uncle T. is here.'" Iris laughed heartily at her own heartfelt toddler disappointment.

"You honestly thought I'd bought you a toucan?" I asked curiously.

"Yes! Yes, I did."

in my car

My main duty is driving these days, driving the Sober Husband to the train station (with his new job, he takes the "Baby Bullet" commuter train down to Silicon Valley), driving the children home from school, driving here, driving there.

Yesterday in my car, the following things happened:

- one child spilled a Snapple all over the car;

- said child scolded another, younger child until the younger child was tearful. The offense drawing this scolding was "getting my stuff wet" -- relating to the Snapple the first child had spilled herself;

- a condescending husband turned the radio off in the middle of a really good song and made annoying remarks about how he needed to turn the radio off "because traffic was stressing" him and he "needed to keep an eye out" when he wasn't even driving;

- after radio is restored to its proper on position by the driver, husband makes condescending remarks about the song "Eff You" to wife. "I bet you didn't know this song was heavily censored";

- husband made loud, passive-aggressive remarks in a very self-righteous tone of voice about not being able to have a conversation "until Mommy turns the radio down";

- smaller child vomited all over self;

- after I made inquiries about how the small child feels, whether she has a fever, etc.., and the husband superiorly said it's clear "she's not sick; she just choked on something" when the child wasn't eating.

As I filled the tank with gas at that really grungy gas station in the Mission which gives a nine cent discount for cash, I contemplated walking away from the car and checking into a bar and then a hotel. However, I have a litter of tiny, bottlefed kittens and Lord knows none of these music haters, Snapple-spilling scolders, and vomiters would have managed to make a bottle of kitten formula. Tiny lives hung in the balance. I got back into the car of passive aggression, spilled Snapple, and vomit to drive back home to feed the mewling babies.

awkward

Yesterday when I came downstairs for coffee, I saw that the green bird, the Amazon parrot who loves the Sober Husband and hates me, was clinging to the Sober Husband's finger with her beak while lying across his shoulder. "She won't let go of my finger," he said, demonstrating on how he tried to pull his hand away but the bird clenched it all the more tightly with her beak and one claw.

We both regarded the parrot. It was splayed across his shoulder, with a death clench on his finger, throbbing and making cooing noises. These noises built until the parrot appeared to reach a peak, after which she exhaustedly let go of his hand and slumped quietly on his shoulder.

An awkward silence filled the room. I turned to the coffeemaker without comment.

excess, in its various forms

Over the children's spring break, we took them down to see the Hearst Castle. My original idea was to drive down to Death Valley and go camping. Back before I had children, I loved backroads camping, and Death Valley was my favorite place to strike off and set up camp far from any other human being. I also wanted to make a run up to to the Pacific Northwest to visit a slew of friends up there, including my best friend from high school, but that was going to either $2,000 in airfare or thirteen hours in the car with the children. Death Valley would be about a ten hour drive.

As the time grew nearer, I started thinking more realistically about what road tripping with the children would be like. Also, the Sober Husband has only been at his new job for two months, which is early to take much time off. I couldn't face the idea of thirteen hours of driving the children without adult backup, and camping with them by myself was even scarier. I imagined curling up with the children at night in a tent, with them nonstop complaining of the cold, the hard ground, the lack of television (on Iris's part) and the presence of feared cryptids (Lola). So instead I decided to take the children to the Hearst Castle. Iris uber Alles, who is insane for Oprah, has been wanting to see nearby San Luis Obispo ever since Oprah explained on her show that San Luis is "the happiest place in the United States", so the matter was settled.

I booked our tour of the Hearst Castle ahead of time, since these tours often sell out. There are four different tours to pick from, each visiting a different part of the Castle, and I selfishly didn't want to take the first, introductory tour because I've done that one before myself. Less selfishly I picked the tour which features visiting the bathrooms of the North Wing, because Lola is obsessed with bathrooms. Particularly nice ones are called "lands of wonder", and sometimes she draws pictures of imagined lands of wonder.

When we got to the Hearst Castle, I noticed a middle-aged woman on our tour was holding a Barbie and a Ken while we were waiting for the bus to drive us up from the visitor center to the castle. She carefully put them into a large ziplock bag before the bus came. Up at the Castle, she took them back out of the bag so they could see and be photographed in front of the magnificent Neptune Pool. I noticed she was wearing a Warhol-styled Barbie shirt, with four Barbie faces.

As the tour went on, the Barbies went in and out of the ziplock. Sometimes the Barbie enthusiast would give them to her male companion to carry. I found this oddly fascinating, but it soon turned to annoying. The Barbie woman explained loudly to our group that the Ken she was carrying was "the first brown-haired Ken", from the sixties. She explained what made this Barbie so special and worthy of mating with the first brown-haired Ken, but I didn't pay enough attention to absorb that. Whenever something in our tour reminded her of the Barbies, she'd speak up in a loud, carrying voice. Some reference to travel made her, in a world-weary voice, explain to the world in general that she attends Barbie conventions every year, which take place "wherever they want us."

The children were dumbstruck by the Castle and said nothing (later Iris confided that she had so loved the Neptune Pool that she had been considering staging a fake fall into it). They kept close to the tour guide and moved quickly, their eyes wide. Meanwhile the Sober Husband, who hates tours and groups, lagged at the back. His strategy was to linger in a room after the tour had moved on, so he could feel he was exploring by himself. (Back when we were touring elementary schools to pick one for Iris, he used to break off from the group altogether and go into completely different rooms of his own choosing).

We arrived at a room in the North wing famous for its portraits with following eyes. The tour guide explained that because these portraits (of rather stern nobility) had been painted facing straight on but with no apparent light source reflecting in the eyes, wherever you were, you had the feeling that they were watching you. The group made the kinds of jokes you would expect about how it was a good thing these paintings were in a sitting room, rather than a bedroom, but the Barbie woman had a world-weary attitude about it. Addressing the group she explained that she was "used to it. In my bedroom, I have over one thousand Barbies. All watching." Her male companion said nothing.

grounding Pigwidgeon

The conclusion the Sober Husband and the children came to, after our African grey flew away and was lost but then found and returned to us, is that Pigwidgeon's flight feathers need to be clipped more often to try to ensure she won't be lost again. I had a different take. After she came home from her big adventure, she's been flying around the house constantly. She gets so much joy from flying that I find it highly depressing to clip her wings.

The take-away lesson I got from losing her was not to take her into the garden (which I find sad enough; the green parrot's happiest times are spent in the backyard. She spends hours climbing around in our magnolia tree, and on the few truly hot days we have, we spray her with the hose, and she spreads her wings out wide and beats them happily in the spray). I felt that if we were careful, she could have a happy life flying around in the house. We already have to be careful with the doors, as we more often than not have undersocialized feral cats staying with us from my volunteer work, so I felt it wasn't a big increase in surveillance and caution.

The Sober Husband found this attitude of mine maddening. "I refuse to be held responsible for the parrot escaping! If she gets lost again, you have to promise that you will never say it's my fault!"

"I can't make that promise; I'm a lawyer!" I said. "I can think of lots of scenarios in which it would be your fault."

"But what if it was an accident?"

"If it was your fault, it's not really an accident; it's negligence," I quibbled. He looked disgusted.

Later he said, "I just really don't understand it, because when we got the green bird, I was on the other side of this. I thought it was sad to clip her wings, and you were so firm about it."

"That's because Amazons really aren't great fliers; it's really enough for them to be able to climb. But Piggle's not an Amazon; she's from Africa. She's not as much of a climber." The children broke in to back up my statement, reminiscing about the time I put Pigwidgeon in the magnolia tree and she fell out.

In reality I have all along had Piggle's wings clipped, just not very frequently. I wait until her talons are too long, and I take her to have both her wings and talons done at once. The Sober Husband argues that now she should be clipped regularly, "every two weeks. It was stressful and expensive when we lost her." At the time we got Piggle back, he was happy to write the reward check, but now that time has gone by, the joy of the reunion has faded but the memory of writing that $500 check remains strong.

After some very intensive nagging from him, I took Pigwidgeon down to be clipped yesterday, even though her talons weren't yet in desperate need of a trim.

For the children, this was not done soon enough. In the morning I asked Iris to get me a cup of coffee, and a crazed, caffeine-craving Pigwidgeon flew directly at the cup in Iris's hand. Iris jerked her arm reflexively, and the coffee splashed everywhere, but still Pigwidgeon managed to get a few swallows of it. Iris went for a refill, and the same thing happened again. "Pigwidgeon's going to be terrible this morning; she's had coffee," predicted Iris direly. In actuality she wasn't discernibly different (she's usually manic in the mornings and then settles down by afternoon), but the children, who are usually at school of a morning, thought she was too noisy and crazy.

In the afternoon we took Piggle to get her wings clipped. To add to the general inconvenience of having the bird trimmed, the man I take her to has become semi-retired and now grooms birds only two afternoons a week. There's always a long wait (you can't make an appointment).

Another reason to dislike taking the birds for grooming is that I always get a guilt trip of some sort or another from the bird experts. Usually it revolves around my giving Pigwidgeon too much freedom (and yes, I am fully aware that the bird people have been proven right on this). Once they told me off for giving her an entire banana, which so impressed the children that they thereafter have treated bananas with the utmost suspicion and tried to stop me from bringing this suspect fruit into our home. Yesterday I was luckily able to head the incipient guilt trip off at the pass. The bird grooming man raised his eyebrows and looked at me over his glasses. "Don't you have two parrots?" Clearly he was expecting me to confess that the other one had died or been lost. "Oh, that one's my husband's bird," I said airily. "I can't get it into a carrier without him. And we're more worried about this one." Thankfully that went over well, and there was no guilt trip. Indeed I looked like a model bird owner compared to the ones who were ahead of me, who brought in four tiny birds in a shoebox. One escaped and had to be stalked and captured.

But there was no escaping the final thing I hate about taking Pigwidgeon to have her wings clipped: the same horrible, eternal conversation. "Oh! I see you have an African grey! How many words does she know?" It is so profoundly humiliating to be the only stupid owner of a stupid African grey whose stupid parrot doesn't talk. Yesterday was no exception, with the proud owner of a roseate cockatoo looking shocked and disappointed in me after his admiring sally, "You must have such conversations with her all the time!", was met with a shameful confession that the parrot only knows how to make cat noises.

At home, Piggle was effectively grounded. She can't fly more than a few feet with fresh, severely cropped wings. I felt sad for her, but everyone else felt that it was high time indeed. The children cited the coffee incident as proof that Piggle had gone too far. "She drank coffee!" Iris said repeatedly. "She flew right at me and stuck her beak in the cup!"