Dropped my daughter off Saturday at a party for a friend turning six. At a gymnastic place...you know, where they run and swing and balance and cake all in one place with lots of fresh-faced teens over-looking the thing, and lots of parents. I took my son to get Mad Libs and a burger at Pie & Burger during the festivities. At my daughter's bedtime that night I asked her to tell me more about the party:
"Well, I was on that thing that's really skinny that you have to balance on..."
"The balance beam."
"Right. And you have to flip off. Do a flip and jump off and I did it like 13, no 100...or, like a million times? And I got really good. I was at level one and I moved up to level four..."
The influence of her brother's video games...
"So I was at level four, I mean, level two. And I flipped. In the air. And landed. And on the thing where you swing I swinged around and flipped in the air and I was really good even though I only had practiced an hour. And I don't even need lessons."
Later my son asked me if I believed A about having flipped in the air.
I said that I believed that she believed that she did it.
"No, come on, Mom. Really. Just tell me that you don't believe it."
"I believe that she believes it. Just like I believe that she believes in Santa. It's not really important that either of us tell her right now that we don't believe her. You know what I mean?"
He thinks about this. "But she didn't flip, Mom. Just tell me that you know that. Just say it."
I laugh. He laughs, but can't let it go. "Say it!" He giggles.
I think only how charmed I am that my six year old still believes in her own tall tales, still has conversations on the swing with imaginary people (when she thinks no one is in earshot), whispers secrets in the dog's ear and believes him to understand. Now's the time to do it, rather than be thirty and fictionalizing your own story, but that is another conversation entirely.
"Okay. She didn't flip in reality. Alright?"
My son is satisfied. --K
Sitting next to me at the coffee shop today...a couple fifty-something women from the same firm and their visiting regional or something-of-the-like thirty-something male manager. The women are making small talk. Starts out with a little gossip, you know...
[So-and-so] has been trying to get pregnant for years so it was especially tragic, losing the baby...
I heard she didn't want prenatal care.
Well, Sharon's her best friend and she told me...
Sharon is her best friend?!! I never knew that...
And so on.
But very soon it becomes:
I don't know what's wrong with my mother. I don't know. She's feeding the dog cat food and the cat dog food and taking their water inside when they're outside. I swear I'm gonna come home one day and my pets will be dead. I told her not to feed the animals. I took all the knobs off the stove and put an 'out of order' sign on it. Frankly, I'm just concerned that she might burn down the house. We bought her a new coffee maker, but God forbid you bring anything new in the house, there's no way she can handle it. And the microwave? Forget it. I mean, she's a sweet woman, you know. But, well, she's 92.
Well, my mother's only 68 and she's so shot full of vicadin, morphine, anti-anxiety drugs and the whatnot, I swear, I can't even think about her driving. It scares me. So I just don't think about it.
Well, I don't want to scare you, but my niece was on anti-depressants, nice Catholic girl, and ran a stop sign and killed a 54 year old mother of four. You can bet my aunt and uncle are gonna lose everything because, you know, four kids, they're gonna sue. It's sad because my niece is a wonderful woman and she's had her share, I mean, with her ex molesting the girls and her mother dying so young...and having that bi-polar diagnosis didn't help.
Everybody dies young in my family. My father was 39 and my mother was 42, but that doesn't count because she drank herself to death. And remember, my nephew--
I hear Hazelton's a good place.
I hear that too.
Isn't this when I, sitting a foot away, am entitled to turn to these people and say:
Your mother has Alzheimers.
Your mother is a drug addict. Think about it.
Is killing someone as a nice Catholic girl more tragic than killing someone as a nice Jewish or Muslim girl?
Are the laws of attraction as such that if you talk so much about death and tragedy and its inevitability that you will bring on your own premature death? Or do you think that the floorplans are all in place and there's not a thing that we can do?
I swear, I wanted to drop my head on the table and fall into a deep deep midday-in-window-sunlight sleep.
It is a beautiful day and I'm leaving to pick up my kids at school. I will buy them ice cream today, try to make them laugh and agree to all their requests until the memory of the grown children in the lunch table next to me fades. K
So Jim's post got me to thinking of the time I was living in a four story walk-up on the east side of NYC (many moons ago) over the most amazing French bake shop. I didn't make coffee EVER. Smells of vanilla and almond paste woke me up mornings and I'd hop downstairs and take out a large coffee and an almond croissant. Yes, every morning. When I'd grow tired of almond, there were muffins in every conceivable combination of fruit and nut, and brioche and rolls and madeleines or just the smell, which sometimes was enough. Just the smell. Kind of like the smell of potential. Always keep the smell.
So todays the resurrection, right? Pardon me, my father was a fallen Catholic and my mother was Jewish. On Easter morning I would take the 25 cent bag of jelly beans that I'd gotten at the Palms coffee shop, find a nice dead branch with lots of tiny twigs still on it, and I'd stick the jelly beans on all the ends. Then I'd stick the jelly bean tree in the ground and summon my younger brother, swearing that the tree had appeared overnight in honor of Easter, since our basic understanding of Easter pretty much encompassed the idea of gelatin candy, chocolate in cute shapes and plush rabbits. Years after the jelly bean trees stopped appearing, my father asked me if I knew about Jesus, as though he had waited for me to inherit some complete understanding of Christianity, as I had inherited my mother's late onset of puberty. I think I said something like "Don't worry, I know who Jesus Christ is, Dad." And he chuckled, perhaps half embarrassed and said, "I was just wondering." Then I think he asked me if I needed a ride to Susan Berg's house.
Happy Easter. K
I used to walk the streets of NY in the spring, at least when I listen to paul it always seemed like spring. My walkman on. Remeber those clunky things? Walkmans? You could pack a whole 12 songs to a tape? Remember your tapes stuffed in your backpack full of cigarettes, subway tokens, gym clothes and your favorite books? Remember walking by a stranger and falling in love? Telling the whole story of your lives together in the honk of a horn? Remember saying yes and no to people so fast you didn't care. Sleeping in strange apartments, and waking up hung and happy and then doing it again that night. I do. J.
So we were doing a family movie night last night. Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist. Great version, although, as a child I was spellbound by Oliver Reed in the old musical version. Dreamt of him for weeks afterwards. I don't think I'd ever been as alternately afraid and attracted to a person as I was to Oliver Reed's 'Bill'. ANYWAY. A is on my lap when the scene happens in which Bill beats Nancy (to death and I must quickly add that it is all done off camera and I had to explain that Bill hit Nancy so hard as to kill her). Whew. Don't judge me. It's freakin' Dickens and my kids never watch the news. So later, when a mob of people are after Bill, A wants to know why they are looking for him. "Because he's a murderer," I say.
"What is a murderer?"
Oh, boy. "Um, someone who kills people."
"But he only killed one person."
"Well, you're not supposed to kill any people. It's not okay. Not even one person, right?" Lame, but it's already 10:15 and D has fallen asleep on the couch.
"What are they gonna do to him?"
Well, probably kill him is what I almost say, but I lie instead, "I don't know."
Maybe I'll wait on Great Expectations.
This is a short story I wrote and then recorded because I wanted to play with my Garage Band program on my new apple laptop. It was then chosen for a podcast at Rejection Letter Audio. Give a listen if you are so inclined. I
have since written it into a play that may soon be done in NY. Go to the website and scroll down and you will see "Heavy Lifting"
Here is the link http://www.theshallowgenepool.com/rla.htm J.
I spent Some of this morning reading Krishnamurti in the sauna at the ymca. Then I read some more of him with coffee. Then I thought I was a muffin and the women sitting next to me was myself. Wait I think I got that backwards. I leave you with this quote of his...J. "There is no way to the other shore. There is no action, no behaviour, no prescription that will open the door to the other. It is not an evolutionary process; it is not the end of a discipline; it cannot be bought or given or invited. If this is clear, if the mind has forgotten itself and no longer says – the other bank or this bank – if the mind has stopped groping and searching, if there is total emptiness and space in the mind itself – then and only then is it there."
Jim and I took the kids and Sakari and the ham (our canned ham-shaped aluminum 1958 travel trailer) out to Joshua Tree, which, by the way, is a three hour shot out of L.A. and 2 1/2 if you're not hauling 1500 pounds of birchwood-lined tin. I've already taken all of the California geography for granted, then I get out to the high desert of JT and think, how could I take this place for granted? It's as though whomever did the blueprints for California (or Earth, for that matter), outsourced the plans and creation of Joshua Tree and got back the most spare and breathtakingly unreal modular for living in the form of giant sandpaper boulders and those crazy/sad/beautiful Joshua Trees. Those trees, I swear, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see them. And about those sandpaper rocks. The kids can scale a 75 degree side of one like spiders. Arms and sneakers stretched out, head first, like humanoid arachnids. Flush and ecstatic at the top, nothing beats looking down on mom and dad freaked out at the near-vertical drop. All in all, a perfect, short, techno and flush toilet-free weekend, topped with a trip to a natural hot springs, and, of course, the requisite diner detour with real milkshakes and grilled treats for carnivores like us. Can I tell you how happy it makes me that the kids were just thrilled to be Indiana Jones for a weekend? Played Uno at night. Read. Passed out. Cold. I also love that weird, upright half-sleep in the front seat of a long road trip, when the radio and conversations are supporting players in the strangest most fucked up dreams. Note: Must remember to shake up the routine more often. Must remember. Must re-- Must... What?
Re: Jim's previous post...In defense of me, I have no idea what sawdust tastes like. Comparatively speaking, Jim's homemade power bars were better than an handful of stale raw oatmeal (don't ask) but not nearly as good as a Snickers Bar. To be fair, I took one to the Silver Lake dog park with me and my six year-old and Sakari, and two old German Shepherds fought over it.
There were a couple dozen dogs of every age, shape and size at the dog park today, and A and I stood in the middle of them all for an hour and a half watching all the different ways in which they made friends. One of the huge old German Shepherds in particular took a liking to our young Sakari. At dinner A told Jim all about the park.
"So, Dad, there was this one dog. He was a boy dog and he was really big and he really liked Sakari. He kept on trying to sit on Sakari's butt, and then he'd do a little shakey dance, like this (demo shakey hips dance). And Sakari liked him too but sometimes the dog would hug Sakari's back so hard and Sakari couldn't get away and it was soooo funny. You should have seen their faces. I think the boy dog had a crush on Sakari."
"So the dog was gay?" D says.
"Dogs aren't gay or straight." Jim says.
"Dogs just like each other." I say, whatever that means.
"Oh, I know what they were doing, Mom."
"I know you know, honey. Just finish your vegetables."
"Sakari likes boy dogs and girl dogs and little dogs and really big dogs."
That's good. It's good to have lots of different friends.
I'm so sick of the crappy power bars I eat ever day before I run, lift, or skydive. So today I made my own. I think they came out pretty dang good. By the look on Karen's face after she tasted it though you could tell she thought they tasted like sawdust. What does she know? J
| PREP TIME | 10 Min |
| COOK TIME | 30 Min |
| READY IN | 40 Min |
| SERVINGS & SCALING | ||
| Original recipe yield: 12 bars | ||
About scaling and conversions |
INGREDIENTS
- 1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats
- 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup wheat and barley nugget cereal (e.g. Grapenuts TM)
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 beaten egg
- 1/4 cup applesauce
- 1/4 cup honey
- 3 tablespoons brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1/4 cup unsalted sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
- 1 (7 ounce) bag chopped dried mixed fruit
DIRECTIONS
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Line a 9 inch square baking pan with aluminum foil. Spray the foil with cooking spray.
- In a large bowl, stir together the oats, flour, cereal, and cinnamon. Add the egg, applesauce, honey, brown sugar, and oil. Mix well. Stir in the sunflower seeds, walnuts, and dried fruit. Spread mixture evenly in the prepared pan.
- Bake 30 minutes, or until firm and lightly browned around the edges. Let cool. Use the foil to lift from the pan. Cut into bars or squares, and store in the refrigerator.
