Happy Landings

In a notebook somewhere I recorded that Dale promised to write our holiday Christmas letter this year. We were driving down the interstate, in the wide expanse between Kansas and Canada, and remarking on our vagabond ways. Under the general theme of “staying in touch,” I reminded him that last year we had just let the whole Christmas card or letter thing slide and how unfortunate that was. Since HE carries the blame/responsibility for our peripatetic voyages of the past few years, I figured it was his job to report to our family and friends how we’ve fared and where we’ve landed and how it’s all working out for us. He agreed. And a lot of good THAT did me. It’s December 22 and still no letter. I suppose he has three days left.

Other than missing my friends dearly and wondering WHERE IN THE HELL IS THE SNOW????, I find no reason to complain. Canada is treating me well. I don’t have to listen to daily news of Brownback’s perfidy. There are ice skating rinks popping up all over the place. I have a job that is fulfilling and sends me to work every day with good people. I have my health and, as Count Rugen reminds us, if you don’t have your health,  you don’t have anything.

This is the dark time of year. Today is the first day of winter and, officially, the solstice as well (though it was yesterday according to calendar makers).  In these northern climes, the lack of sunlight couples with grey, overcast skies to remind me of why our earliest ancestors lit candles and hung lights during December. We all need the spark of light to remind us of the joy in the world, the spark in our hearts, the promise of renewal and hope. I am not immune to the glumness that attaches itself to so many of my fellow creatures during the Advent season but I am wrestling it to the ground and plying it with egg nog and calling that an attitude adjustment.

May your days be merry and bright. Happy Solstice. Let the light shine.

 

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as bad weather

We used to live in New Haven, Connecticut, birthplace of George W. Bush. We moved there from Salt Lake City, Utah and I am pretty sure that I experienced less culture shock moving from St. Louis to Berlin. New Haven is small and gritty and post-industrial. Yale is all ivy and old masonry as one would expect; but for me, it’s beauty is marred somewhat by the close proximity to real poverty and its attendant dangers to personal safety. I was never a fan of New Haven. The excitement that we had built up before the move, in which we created visions of ourselves as East Coast People, fell  flat pretty quickly as we addressed the costs of childcare and housing one one income. We had one, and then two, small children. We did not jet off to Boston or New York City for the weekend, even though they were only two hours away. We did not enjoy the Off Off Broadway theater for which New Haven is famous–we were broke!

So, although New Haven as a city in which to live held and holds practically no charm for me, living there was in many respects like living anywhere else. You make or find a community of like-minded people–in our case parents with small children–and your life revolves in its own small orbit. Our orbit consisted of the families who were involved in our parent-run, co-op day care. It was a community forged in the fires of state childcare regulations and diaper changes and those moms and dads and their kids were my New Haven and THEM I loved.

The families in the co-op taught me all sorts of things. Don’t feed a toddler in diapers curry was one of those things but there were other gems, as well. The one I have been thinking of, and citing to others, frequently in recent weeks comes from my Danish friend Benedicte, who navigated much of her daily life with two (then three) kids without a car: There is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing. She regaled us with stories of her Danish childhood, when children played outside every day regardless of the (frequent) grey skies and rain, or snow, or whatever else Mother Nature threw at the residents of a country that is dark dark dark and wet in wintertime.

As fall turns to winter here in the Great White North, I am constantly reminded of Benedicte’s edict. I have invested in a full-length coat (this one, by Patagonia, though my black one is decidedly less shiny) and it is not only incredibly toasty but does not make me look like the Michelin tire guy. Yesterday was cold and wet and dreary. Today’s wet may involve snow instead of rain, which is really the way the end of November should be, anyway. I know the long, grey months of winter still lie ahead of us and I refuse to let the weather get me down. We shall bundle up against the cold and the wet and the wind. I have knitting needles and wool, warm clothing, and a ready supply of tea and toddies. All will be well.

Nightmares

Given that I’m in a new place, physically and professionally, and spend a lot of time in my own head, it comes as no surprise that I’m having some weirdo anxiety-fueled dreams.

There’s the one where it’s the first day of class and I don’t know where my room is or what I’m supposed to teach them.

There’s the one where my students and I are all sitting around the seminar table and I want to show them some great books we’re going to discuss and my copies of the books are all waterlogged and moldy and the pages are fused together.

Ahhh, good times.

But by far my favorite anxiety dream was the one I had last night. The kids are at school and I glance up at the clock to see that it is 10:30 and realize I sent them to school without lunch and snack and their first nutrition break just passed and my kids have nothing to eat! The rest of the dream is spent running around a dreamscape town buying odd food choices in even odder places. There are no ziploc bags or containers of any sort for the egg salad sandwich and I put potato chips (!) in a tea bag and find a cache of rotting hamburger in a meeting room. And while I’m doing this, the number of kids I have to feed keeps growing. First one, then two, then three and then, thank god, Ingrid came in and woke me up.

Some mornings I wish Canadian elementary schools had cafeterias.

Mysterious ways

Most blogs I read–especially blogs written by women–come with some sort of “about” page, in which the author categorizes and labels herself for her readership. “I am a single mom and a lawyer.” or “I am a homeschooling mother of three and am also trying to get my own business doing letterpress tea towels up and running.” Dale made sure that our info page here points you, dear reader, in the direction of our favorite spirit, in case you feel like having a case of Hendrick’s gin delivered to my door. And, just as many blogs’ “about me” pages are woefully out of date, ours, too, could use some refreshing. The problem is, I don’t quite know what to say. We are not having another child, we are still married, I’m still way-out-there liberal, and I still love gin. But I am no longer working as a German professor and realize that I may never again fill that particular role.

After a certain age, I suppose one imagines that the “about me” page is pretty much done writing itself. Your profession, the number of kids or cats you have, your hobbies–I imagined those items as things you acquired or grew into during your young years, so that you could enjoy them in your middle and old age.
But such, it would appear, is not the case. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it has for me.

 

Duddy, oh Duddy

As part of my pledge to myself to blog my leisure reading for you, dear Readers, I am going to write about The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordechai Richler. This book has been on my “to-read” list for ages, largely because of the volume of German-Jewish literature I was reading for research and teaching and my need to expand my knowledge of diaspora Jewish literature beyond the German. Business + pleasure = Richler.

A year or two ago, I read Barney’s Version by Richler and it took me a while to get into it. I thought perhaps this was because I didn’t have the necessary Richler/Montreal/Jewish/Canadian literary or cultural background to “get it.” And eventually Barney and his tale grew on me: he was a sheister, a shady businessman, a wealthy man who came by his wealth honestly sometimes and dishonestly, too. Duddy is the original Barney. Or, as a friend here put it: The rub on Richler is that he writes the same novel over and over again every four or five years or so. To this verdict I can only amend: the protagonists age as Richler himself does. Duddy the grubby St. Urbain urchin who schemes to buy land up north morphs into Barney, the middle-aged Montreal Jew with a cabin in the Quebec north woods. And I’ll grant Richler a pretty compelling plot line, if one that is rather well-worn in the pages of twentieth-century literature.

The bummer of reading Duddy for me, though, was that I enjoyed Richler’s craft more than I enjoyed his story. He is a good writer; he draws his characters well; I felt I knew a couple of them and saw what the others represented in the social fabric of the narrative. But the story itself, the plot, just tired me out. The title is a surefire giveaway that this story is entirely Duddy’s own and follows his development (or aging, as Duddy doesn’t really develop at all–he remains a selfish teenager at heart) from the selfish vantage point of his own wants and needs. Duddy is unconcerned with the Yvette, with Vergil, with his peers as he forges ahead with his plans to impress the men in his family. Mom, of course, is dead. Aunt Ida is, maybe, crazy. Women . . . they are so inessential to the drama of the male psyche. I grow weary of such narratives.

Marie Kaschnitz, Ruth Klüger, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein–there are women writing “Jewish” fiction in Germany, Austria, and the US that doesn’t focus on the feminine experience of being the marginalized Jew. (Of course, Klüger and Goldstein and others do remark on the marginality of the female Jew within the observant Jewish community itself.) I see the characters in Kaschnitz’s prose, or in Goldsteins, as being more fully rounded, more accessible (to me?) than the penile-focussed, artist-as-a-young-man characters offered by Richler, Biller, Roth, et al. I tend to reject out of hand the contention that women write for women, or are better understood by women, and men for men. I think my benchmark of good writing is prose that allows any reader to see into the characters, to see the universal in the specific example the author has crafted. As a woman reading, I resent being excluded and marginalized by the text as it comes into being.

So, up on my feminist soap box, I saunter off to read some Margaret Atwood. G’night, Ladies.

Extracurricular Kids

Although many of my comrades south of the 49th parallel have kids who are in school already, our clan doesn’t begin until after Labor Day. For those of you keeping track at home, that means TWO LONG WEEKS of the kids at home and no summer camp plans in sight. Having promised myself and my spouse that I will not begin to drink before 5:00pm, I have resolved to get out of the house, with the kids, and do creative things.

I am using Keri Smith’s How to be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum as my inspiration. I bought this for myself a few weeks ago, because Smith’s suggestions for how to document your life, your environment, and your thoughts blew my mind. Reading through her explorations, I thought so many of them would be excellent practice for creative writing, for jump-starting my brain, for focussing my journaling efforts on something other than the dronedronedrone of memememememe inside my head. As a bonus, tons of her exploration suggestions are things you can do with kids. Bingo!

Today we started with a modification on Exploration #11: Differences. Collect multiples of one thing (such as leaves, stones, shells, seeds, etc.). Lay them out in front of you. Observe them in detail. Using the “object log,” list the differences you see. Try to document at least twenty-five things. (page 51)

The crew: Greta, Ingrid, neighborkid J, (neighborkid E and neighbormom A participated for a while), myself

The supplies: blank paper, triangular shaped crayons, glue, construction paper, some beads, some fancy scrapbooking paper

The locale: outside–from our back door to the end of the block

The method: Step 1. make rubbings of different patterns. Leaves under paper was a logical place to start and G kept that theme going–all natural, she said. We did tree bark, the open scar of a recently felled tree, flowers, even a dead bumblebee’s wing. The others also branched out and did water line covers, gate decorations, license plates on cars, asphalt, bricks.

Step 2. Assemble a book or collage with your rubbings. You may add objects with glue or tape to the book or collage.

Step 3. Describe what you’ve created. Is it the atlas of an ant world? Is it a magical kingdom with a unicorn’s house? (see neighborkid J’s pic below for the unicorn house!) Write a story about what you found, rubbed, and selected for presentation!

Unicorn Lives Here

I’d give this project a solid B- for the kids. Collecting rubbings was great fun and the idea of gluing together a collage or book captivated their imaginations. However, things got rather bogged down in the gluing portion of the activity. GLUE! COLLAGE! MORE GLUE! TONS OF GLUE! You can imagine. Neighborkid J really focussed on creating a place and named it and decorated it and presto, she was done!

Greta kept everything small scale and decided that she had created a herbarium for Hogwarts.

Herbarium

Ingrid took the longest to get to a point where she was ready to narrate. The sorting and cutting and gluing and gluing and cutting and cutting really enthralled her and she would have happily remained on that task until the end of time. With the cutoff looming, though, (Dad is coming home in 30 minutes and the mess needs to be cleared up by then so we can have family time and make dinner!) the others jumped in to help her and she put together this:

Snapdragon!

She wrote about a talking snapdragon, in keeping with the herbal theme she’d started with.

My next task is to try this for myself. I will share where I take it with you all here.

Books to Make You Cry

Our oldest daughter is ten and a half years old and quintessentially pre-pubescent. The combination of whackadoodle hormones, living in three different countries in the last two years, and our current very close familial quarters has her feeling a bit . . . . fragile. I remember ten. Not quite as vividly as I remember fourteen, and dear god please don’t make me go through THAT again. So the other day she and I went to a bookstore to find her a diary WITH A LOCK to keep out her little sister.

We browsed blank books and journals and she critiqued size of pages, design of pages, outer cover, presence of lock, etc., in order to find the perfect journal. I am a total sucker for stationery of all sorts. I love good pens and pretty notebooks with high-quality paper that soaks up the ink from my fountain pen, so I happily compared volumes with her and discussed their relative merits. (We selected the mid-sized lockable journal. The lock broke on the way home from the store in the car, after two uses. We’re not going to tell the little sister that the lock is busted.)

As we stood in a long line to check out, I noticed the young couple behind me, with a baby in a decked out stroller. The parents were in their mid- to late twenties, tatooed and pierced, and I watched dad wonder–congenially–at mom’s choice of The Giving Tree as a book for their baby. She protested that it was a classic and she’d loved it as a kid. I butted in and asked her: “But can you read it all the way through without crying?” She thought for a second and laughed and said, “probably not. But this is better than I’ll Love You Forever, which kills me every single time.”

At this point, my daughter, who had been eyeing the fancy bookmarks, added her two cents. “Yeah, my dad ALWAYS cried when he read that to us.” The Giving Tree was my weak spot; Dale couldn’t make it through I’ll Love You Forever without choking up.

At this point, the middle-aged woman in front of me in line–a librarian, it turns out–tells us the story of Robert Munsch writing I’ll Love You Forever as therapy to process the death of his baby twins. She promised we’d never get through it with a dry eye again.

There we were: a middle-aged librarian, a mom with her daughter whosnotababyanymore, and hipster young parents with their first baby, talking about books to make you cry. Not putting into words how fragile life is, how much we love the children we bring into this world, how having them out and about and walking around is like having your heart attached to someone else’s feet.

My legs keep no pace with my desire

. . .such was the motto of Toronto’s A Midsummer Night’s Run, held in the waning daylight hours of a recent Saturday in August. Dale and I signed up because of the timing, the location, and the 15K distance. Nine+ miles qualifies, for me, as a serious run that requires training, but not so much training as to become my part-time job.

One could also sign up because of the fairies, though. There were lots of them, in costume, including the Pace Fairies who did great jobs keeping their groups of runners on target for their race time goals.

I had not been particularly happy with my race preparation. I did almost all of the runs dictated by my race training schedule, though I felt that–for me–running 5x/week was just too much for the ole body to take for weeks and weeks on end. I feel better when running 4x/week: less fatigue, more spring in my step. So I cut out a few planned runs in the last two or three weeks of my training program. But whether I was running four or five times a week, I just felt SLOW. It’s been hot here (Canada? Who knew?) and kind of muggy, which probably affected my pace a bit. Really, though, I have just felt that I’ve hit the wall in my running. I can, when pressed, run a 10 minute mile. I’m just not going to get much faster, I think. Dale insists that I am wrong and, should I decide to dedicate myself to speed, I could certainly shave a good minute off my average per-mile pace. I think he thinks too highly of my athletic prowess.

But he could be on to something. My longest run during training was a 9-mile jaunt on August 8th. I ran that bad boy in 1:40 and change, which is an average of 11.01 minutes/mile. Whooopdie hoo, right? At 15K, A Midsummer Night’s Run is 9.32 miles, so I figured that I could run it in 1:42 or 1:43. This did not make me happy, as I really wanted to be able to run the distance in 1:30. So I gave myself two different pep talks. The first talk went something like this: dude, you’re 40 years old and you can run 15K, or 20K, or 40K. This pretty much makes you a stud, regardless of how slow your times are, relative to those who are naturally talented or willing to invest more into training than you. Just enjoy being out there and running your race and don’t worry about your time. The second talk was a bit more aggressive and sounded like this: Jennifer, my dear, it is a race. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you leave everything out on the course and fall down in a crumpled heap somewhere near the end, perhaps puking your guts out. How would you know this is the worst possibility, though, since you’ve NEVER left everything out on the course before? (well–maybe the marathon in Dallas. It’s all such a blur now.) And if you do crash and burn on the course, the running gods will not descend from the heavens to smite you; nobody will be disappointed in you (except perhaps yourself) and life will go on. With that in mind, just head out there and run your guts out and see what happens.

I joined the 1:30 Pace Fairy group, right next to the Fairy himself (with a wreath of laurels and a blue tutu). In the first few kilometers of the race, I stayed right next to him. But after four or so, I felt I could go a little faster. So I did. Just out in front of him, with a man named Ravin next to me. We kept a steady pace right in front of the 1:30 group for about five kilometers. The other 1:30 pace group–a group that had a run/walk plan–was also nearby and they were a weird bunch to run close to. We would be out in front of them, because they had slowed to a walk, and then they would surge and catch up to us, since their per kilometer pace was slightly higher than that of the continuously running 1:30 pace group. Their surge was audible, too. It sounded all of a sudden as if there was a large predator gaining speed on you from behind. Quite motivational in a way: RUN OR BE EATEN! After a few kilometers of finding a pace that kept me steadily in front of the surging beast, we were near the end of the race. I knew I was in front of both 1:30 groups and felt I could hang on and come in before them.

It was hot and muggy and threatening to rain. My right piriformis hurt, as per usual, and I could feel a blister forming on the outside of my left food. I focussed on form (hands down, arms swinging, hips forward, shoulders erect) and knew it was all doable. Whether it was the energy of 1500 runners, the initial motivation of the Pace Fairy and my buddy Ravin, or the threat of the surging run/walkers gaining on me, the race environment was a good one for me and I ran the best time I would have allowed myself to think of: 1:28:13.

Go me!

(Dale ran it in 1:06:51 with a stomach ache. And had the nerve to be bummed about it!)

Canadiana Reading List

What I do not know about the country in which I currently reside could fill bookshelves. And it does. So, thanks to a generous friend  and a used bookstore, I have the following reading list to catch me up on Canadiana:

Margaret Atwood, Before the Flood

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

W. O. Mitchell, Who has Seen the Wind

Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes

Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear

Criag Brown, Ed. The Illustrated History of Canada

Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers

To be fair to me, I am not a complete dolt and have read a great deal of Atwood, and taught her first novel, The Edible Woman, in Women’s Studies courses. But I haven’t read her newest stuff, which focusses more on the damage to the environment caused by the patriarchy than the damage to individual people. I’ve also read some Richler, but not his seminal Duddy, so that needed to happen.

I hesitate to ask you, gentle reader, if you have anything to add to the list, for I also have other reading that needs to happen and, well, kids and a husband and knitting that all need tending to. But, comments on your favorites are most welcome, as are things that might have been neglected in the creating of this list! (Oh, and my French is abysmal, so we’re sticking to Anglophone literature and history. A true loss, I am sure.)

Get Thee to a Playground!

Ahhh, summer vacation, that lovely time of year when your offspring loll around on your couch, your floors, their beds, your beds and any other semi-horizontal surface in the house and moan: “I’m boooooorrreeeddddd. Can I watch tv?”

No, my dearies, you may not watch tv. Not that I think tv is all bad and I know that my sibling and I watched hour upon hour of animated drivel as youngsters and still graduated with honors. What concerns me as a parent about tv is that, after watching tv for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 2 hours–the time is immaterial–they turn into little monsters. It is as if watching tv connects them to some sort of infantile hive mind and their manners, their speech patters, and their general civility are drained away and replaced by shrill demands for instant gratification. So, no, dearies, we will not watch tv in the middle of a lovely day. You will go outside and play. For play is what children do.

Getting them to head to the park required a bit of barking on my part, and a willingness to be cast in the role of Ogre Parent. So be it. Once they were convinced that no amount of wheedling and whining would result in their staying here and slothing about, they set about preparing for their outing to the park. I had imagined they would grab their scooters and hit the pavement, but noooo. They said: “Let’s pack snacks,” and 30 minutes later had amassed a small backpack full of: pretzels, cheetos, granola bars, celery sticks, peanut butter, raisins, crackers, cheese, and yogurt. They did all of this menu planning and packing while I uploaded some pics to Flickr. I was not involved at all and tried to tune them out after I heard the word “cheetos.” So I was totally impressed when they packed the ingredients to make “hand-dipped” ants on a log and cheese and crackers. A nutritious, snacky little lunch is now on its way to the park with the little darlings.

And if I see them within the next hour, I’m locking the doors